A MAGA Schism

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, December 27, 2024

 

I got a late Christmas present last night in the form of “MAGA Civil War!”

 

Now, let me say upfront, I think talk of “MAGA Civil War!” is surely overblown, even when accounting for poetic license. But it was fun and interesting in all sorts of ways. What actually transpired was a particularly boisterous, and at times typically ugly, Twitter fight over skilled immigration and American culture. Axios has a good and sparse summary of the brouhaha. But here’s the gist: Activist Laura Loomer threw a hissy fit over Donald Trump’s selection of Sriram Krishnan, an Indian American immigrant and successful tech bro, to be his senior policy adviser on artificial intelligence. Krishnan’s sin, for some, is being an Indian immigrant in the first place. But for most it’s that he’s favored loosening up rules on H1B visas for skilled immigrants. For a certain faction of MAGA types, this is a betrayal of MAGAism. Let’s call this faction the nationalists—though it’s a loose label and I’m sure there are self-described nationalists who think it’s vital that we bring in more skilled immigrants for our 21^st century competition with China. 

 

Up against the nationalists is Team DOGE, led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Again, it’s a shorthand. I’m sure there are DOGE fans who believe we should gut the H-1B visa program. In fact, one could be forgiven for thinking Ramaswamy was one of them given that when he was running for president he vowed to “gut” the program he used 29 times when he was a CEO of a pharmaceutical company. That’s the thing about Vivek: He never fails to tell his target audience what it wants to hear. But now that his target audience isn’t primary voters but Elon Musk, the Count Dracula to his Renfield, he’s saying something a bit different. 

 

Ramaswamy came in from the top rope to declare in a tweet that the real problem was American culture itself. “The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over ‘native’ Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH: Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.”

 

He added, “A culture that venerates Cory from ‘Boy Meets World,’ or Zach & Slater over Screech in ‘Saved by the Bell,’ or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in ‘Family Matters,’ will not produce the best engineers.”

 

Ramaswamy says we need a culture that produces more “movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of ‘Friends.’ More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin.’ More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall.’”

 

Now, I’m perfectly happy to concede there are grains of truth here, but given that it’s Ramaswamy talking, we shouldn’t be surprised that there are boulders of BS, too. First of all, I think it’s funny that he has the names of these characters at his fingertips while also insisting that these shows are toxic. It’s sort of like an anti-porn crusader who can talk your ear off about the poor lighting in On Golden Blonde or the implausible plot points in Edward Penis-Hands.

 

More to the point, huh? 

 

The idea that but for Saved by the Bell and Boy Meets World we’d have more top-flight engineers is really quite silly. I mean, these tropes are a hell of a lot older than the 1990s, and America has produced a lot of excellence. James Dean was cool, the Nutty Professor wasn’t. Mark Twain’s heroes often mocked “book learning.” “Egghead” was a pejorative in common use for the generation that put a man on the moon. And, by the way, Big Bang Theory did more to lionize nerd culture than any TV show since Star Trek. I mean, the series culminated in the main character winning the Nobel Prize for physics. All the Professor from Gilligan’s Island did was invent a rudimentary telephone with coconut halves and some twine. 

 

I think it’s telling that Ramaswamy lays the blame on a handful of sitcoms and not at all on, say, TikTok, Twitter, or Instagram. Seems to me that these things fit his theory far better than some old reruns. The culture of social media is far more destructive to excellence than some bourgeois family sitcoms. It’s not Urkel’s fault that many college kids can’t read books anymore. Or to be more exact, the fact that kids have stunted attention spans has a lot more to do with TikTok and Instagram than some show most of them have never seen. But the social media companies are part of the faction he’s standing up for. They can’t be part of the problem, so let’s throw Screech under the bus. 

 

American culture isn’t the (main) problem.

 

I say this as someone who really admires the immigrant work ethic and who believes passionately that immigrants offer countless economic and cultural benefits to our society. But the insinuation that Americans lack a strong work ethic is just ignorant. Americans work harder, longer, and more productively than pretty much any rich nation, China included. 

 

Now, at the extreme right end of the distribution, it’s the case that American society isn’t producing enough engineers to meet the demand of the tech industry. But one reason that foreign-born engineers are more attractive is that foreign-born engineers are poorer and willing to be paid less than their native-born counterparts. I don’t think it’s as simple as that, but it’s simply the case that that’s a factor. And the same holds true for a lot of unskilled and less-skilled labor. Native-born Americans are perfectly able to pick fruit, clean bathrooms, and drive Ubers—even the ones who thought Screech was hilarious and that Zach and Slater were cool. They just don’t want to be paid the going rate for a lot of those jobs while people desperate to come here are. 

 

That desperation to come here is the best rebuttal to Ramaswamy’s claim that American culture is the problem because it doesn’t value excellence. American culture is literally the reason all of those immigrants want to come here, because those immigrants understand better than native Americans that Americans are willing to pay for excellence. Ramawamy’s definition of excellence is deliberately narrow and tailored to the kind of workers his master thinks are essential. But the Haitian workers in Springfield, Ohio, are just as dedicated to professional excellence. Yet the Silicon Valley bros were okay with calling them cat-eaters because they can’t use warehouse or auto parts laborers. Heck, some of them would be happy to automate those jobs out of existence.

 

The Department of Globalist Efficiency.

 

And that’s one of the things I think is so hilarious about this feud. For at least a decade a lot of folks on the right have been denouncing globalism as if Davos was really a secret meeting of Hydra. According to some nationalists, the globalists want to “replace” white Americans, censor the phrase “Merry Christmas,” and make you eat bugs. The DOGErs glommed onto this populist hysteria for political access. But beneath the surface—and I mean just beneath the surface—it turns out they’re globalists. They do all manner of business with China while at the same time insisting that if they don’t have unfettered access to global labor markets, China will beat us in the race to win … something. Whatever the DOGErs believe about tariffs for widgets and washing machines, they reject protectionism for computer programmers. From their vantage point, they support free trade for high-end workers.

 

They just can’t put it that way. So they insist that their free trade for specialized labor position is really a nationalist, America-first, priority. Borrowing from Barack Obama and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, Ramaswamy in his diatribe on Twitter trotted out hoary clichés about “Sputnick” moments:

 

“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.

 

This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken [sic] from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.

 

“Sputnik moment” is globalist, neoliberal, and even neoconservative code for Cold War-style nationalism. Our enemy is beating us! We need to all come together and spend metric buttloads of money not to let them win! Tom Friedman—idiotically—wanted green tech to be the new race of the 21st century (though the subsidies and policies that argument gave birth to helped Elon Musk become the world’s richest man, so there is that).

 

Ramaswamy can’t say unfettered, skilled immigration is good for multinational corporations and the gross domestic product—which it is—so he falls back on great power competition with China as the justification for precisely the exact policies the globalist fat cats want. Again, I’m not saying his preferred policies are necessarily wrong; I’m good with a more expansive policy on skilled immigration (and I generally like automation). I’m saying the arguments he’s offering are dishonest and hypocritical, particularly for a devotee of MAGA economics. 

 

And I think it’s hilarious that the MAGA nationalists immediately recognized the sales pitch for what it is. On the policy front I’m more sympathetic to DOGErs, but what’s so delicious about this is how it illuminates the internal contradictions of the Trump coalition. All winning political coalitions have internal conflicts, so there’s nothing new there. But Trump’s coalition is very small compared to, say, Obama’s, Reagan’s, LBJ’s, Eisenhower’s, and especially FDR’s. When you have a very large coalition, you can afford to piss off one faction while promising to take care of it down the road. Trump has much less wiggle room.

 

The most tangible illustration of this is the two-seat majority in the House. If 30, or even three, Republicans agree with the Loomer crowd, it’s hard to see how Trump makes up for that with Democratic votes. 

 

My point isn’t that this divide will be the undoing of Trump or anything like that. He can probably finesse his way out of this particular “MAGA Civil War.” And this isn’t necessarily the most important fault line—it’s just the first of many. To govern is to choose. When campaigning you can promise everything and anything to everybody. But when you’re setting policy, one group wins and another loses. And it’s going to be particularly popcorn-worthy watching Vice President-elect J.D. Vance try to stay the Golden Boy for both the winners and the losers while never disagreeing with Trump (or Musk).

 

From where I sit, this is just another chapter in the long story of people convincing themselves that Trump is wholly on their side only to discover he’s not and never will be. Since these aren’t my monkeys and this is not my circus, I’m happy to watch them all duke it out. 

 

The vindication of the establishment.

 

But I will say there’s an exquisite irony here. 

 

The idea that there are competing interests over immigration policy is an utterly banal observation for people who’ve followed immigration fights for the last half-century (or 200 years). At places like National Review and other bastions of the old conservative “establishment,” serious people tried to balance these competing interests. Books, reports, studies, and conferences on immigration policy have punctuated these debates going back to the Clinton administration and Barbara Jordan’s commission on immigration reform. But the populists—both the nationalists and the billionaire DOGErs surfing the populist tide—had such contempt for the eggheads and the “corrupt” establishment they were happy to indulge and encourage cheap demagoguery, insisting that everybody who came before them was stupid and that all the solutions are obvious and easy. 

 

And by “this stuff” I don’t just mean immigration. I mean two things: foreign and domestic policy. 

 

When Trump ran for president the first time, he insisted that it would be “so easy” to fix health care (just get rid of the lines between states!). Then by his second month in office he announced, “Nobody knew health care policy could be so complicated.” Actually, virtually everybody who knew anything about health care policy knew how complicated it was. Similarly, the Russia-Ukraine war could be settled in a day, according to candidate Trump in 2023. I expect in 2025 we’ll hear about how nobody knew how complicated any settlement would be. It reminds me of when Bart Simpson ran for class president. He said of his opponent, “He says, there are no easy answers! I say, he’s not looking hard enough!”

 

The joke’s not on Trump, of course. His promises served their intended purpose: getting him in the White House. The joke is on the people who believed him.