Elon Musk’s MAGA-world feud with Steve Bannon is probably best understood as 50 percent theater. Intentionally or otherwise, it distracts media attention from more substantive areas of the impressively dire Trump Reloaded agenda, while fueling the undying liberal faith that, somehow or other and sooner or later, the MAGA movement will collapse of its own contradictions and some dimly imagined new era of normalcy will emerge.
That particular variety of nostalgia for the good old days of neoliberalism — for “that hopey-changey stuff,” in the immortal phrase of Sarah Palin — is an especially humiliating center-left failure, one that has been immeasurably helpful to Musk and Bannon’s campaigns of conquest. But I think the other 50 percent of the MAGA realm’s internal conflict, the part that reflects genuine and serious disagreement over ideological visions and political outcomes, is important too, and has global consequences well beyond the scope of the Trump presidency.
You’ve probably seen the headlines that flowed from a technical dispute over immigration visas for high-skilled tech workers: Bannon called Musk “a truly evil guy” and an advocate of “techno-feudalism on a global scale,” whose caste of “oligarchs” is alien to the true MAGA spirit. In an interview with an Italian newspaper published on Jan. 8, Bannon made a promise he undoubtedly now regrets: “I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day.” To put it mildly, that did not happen. By the time NPR’s Steve Inskeep interviewed Bannon on Jan. 17, his tone had shifted dramatically. He avoided any direct or personal criticism of Musk and praised the X owner for supporting Trump, while insisting there was “a fundamental chasm” between them in terms of how they view government.
Now that we’re several days into Trump’s second term, with the Project 2025-inspired “shock and awe” onslaught well underway, U.S. political media has largely forgotten that both Musk and Bannon see all the world as their stage, and the MAGAsphere as just one arena of combat (though admittedly a central one). Earlier in January, we were treated to the spectacle of Musk abruptly injecting himself into European right-wing politics, a zone where Bannon has tried to play Svengali for the last seven or eight years, with mixed results.
Both men clearly perceive the possibility of a rising far-right tide — call it “national conservatism,” call it the F-word, call it whatever you like — that will sweep away the decaying ramparts of the liberal-democratic world order. But their visions of what can or should arise from the ruins, although partially and temporarily aligned, are actually quite different.
If it makes you feel better about all this, we can skip ahead to the spoiler alert: Neither of these dudes will get what they want, because nobody’s version of political utopia — the thousand-year Reich, the “end of history,” the withering-away of the state — ever survives contact with actual history. But yeah, in the meantime things could get ugly.
Musk waded into Euro-politics with all the misbegotten confidence of a person who has gotten obscenely rich on exploiting other people’s ideas without quite having any of his own. He trolled British Prime Minister Keir Starmer — who faces plenty of real problems, many of his own creation — with a decade-old sexual abuse scandal that Starmer may or may not have mishandled, retweeting far-right calls for King Charles to dissolve Parliament and call a new election. That kind of fantasy gets certain people hot and bothered: Maybe we can get rid of democracy just by saying so! But just to clear that up: Yeah, it’s still called the United Kingdom, but that doesn’t mean the king can actually do stuff like that on his own.
Musk also picked a fight with Nigel Farage of the U.K. Reform Party, Britain’s closest thing to a Trump analogue, over a minor doctrinal dispute that isn’t worth exploring here. That was nothing more or less than a power play, or an announcement that there was a new sheriff in town: Farage isn’t going anywhere, having finally won his post-Brexit far-right movement a handful of seats in Parliament, but his version of racist or “ethnocentric” nationalism is much closer to Bannon’s ideal than to Musk’s dudealicious, currency-lubricated libertarianism.
Musk seems to be echoing many of the European far right’s most noxious anti-immigrant talking points at the same time as he tries to airbrush or update the movement’s image. Farage may strike Musk as too old-school for the 2020s, with his dandyish pinstriped suits and pseudo-posh mannerisms; he comes off less like an Edwardian Anglo aristocrat than like a caricature of one as played by Benny Hill.
Let’s note that Musk has also held high-profile kissyface photo-ops with French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and on Jan. 9 made international headlines by hosting a 74-minute interview on X with Alice Weidel, co-leader of Alternative for Germany or AfD, the far-right party often accused of being fash-flavored or Nazi-curious. Details matter, and the fact that all three of these figureheads of the new European right are women (and conventionally photogenic blonde women, at that) is no coincidence: Musk perceives the propaganda value of such semiotics, I suspect, in a way Steve Bannon absolutely does not.
It’s not remotely surprising that the Old World’s new-wave right-wingers are eager to cultivate relationships with the world’s richest man. Dark money, in the Yank sense of that term, plays virtually no role in European electoral campaigns, which tend to be tightly controlled, brief in duration and mostly financed by the state. It’s not clear how much Musk can do to hack that problem with his bottomless piles of cash, but he’s definitely going to try. In the NPR interview cited above, Bannon himself said that Musk’s money could be a continental game changer that destroys “centrist government”:
He brings the two tactical nuclear weapons of modern politics. He brings unlimited cash, and he brings a social media platform that he can bind or loosen.
The more important unanswered questions, however, may concern exactly what Faustian bargain Europe’s far right is making in aligning with Musk, and whether the differences between his techno-libertarianism and Bannon’s retro-macho, supposed working-class populism are purely superficial or more fundamental.
As I suggested earlier, the analytical task here is to tread carefully between the twin temptations of unwarranted optimism and hopeless cynicism. No, the Musk-Bannon split is not going to expose the fatal flaws of the Trumpian coalition and bring the whole edifice crashing down. On the other hand, Musk’s apparent ascendancy, and Bannon’s apparent eclipse, pose problems that far-right politics cannot easily solve.
American media punditry has almost entirely avoided these substantive issues in favor of the usual war-room melodramatics, veering from initial takes that Musk’s role in Trump’s inner circle was as a hapless wannabe to portraying him (as in a recent New Yorker cover illustration) as the president-in-fact or power behind the throne. It took a European philosopher now working in Asia — Slavoj Žižek, in a column for the Korean daily Hankyoreh — to offer a genuinely nuanced analysis of the Musk-Bannon split and its consequences. (As far as I know, his article has not appeared in the West.)
Žižek is a provocateur par excellence, and may horrify some readers by describing Trump as a “liberal,” although he immediately clarifies that: only in the 19th-century sense of “allowing corporations to operate outside state control” and, in the current context, granting “much more freedom to the new digital feudal masters.” Although I’ve never found the “fascism” debate especially fruitful, Žižek argues that the term doesn’t fit Trump’s bizarre alliance. In true fascism, everyone and everything is subservient to the party: “What is happening now in the U.S. — techno-feudal masters directly occupying high government positions — is unimaginable in fascism.”
But Žižek’s most significant point is that in the long run, the MAGAfied new right cannot accommodate both the “digital-corporate” master class and the Bannonite “populists who pretend to speak for ordinary workers.” If the latter finally grow disillusioned (admittedly a big if), that creates a difficult but crucial opening for the left. There can be no “pact between Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders,” he writes, but
a key element of the left’s strategy should be to ruthlessly exploit divisions in the enemy camp and fight to get Bannon followers to their side. To cut a long story short, there is no victory of the left without the broad alliance of all anti-establishment forces. One should never forget that our true enemy is the global capitalist establishment and not the new populist right which is merely a reaction to its impasses.
Žižek is not suggesting, as in old-fashioned Marxist doctrine, that this will inevitably happen or that some awakening of “class consciousness” will finally convert right-wing populists to a more virtuous path. The outcome, he writes, “depends on political struggle, not on ‘objective’ socio-economic processes.” He does, however, suggest that without forging new alliances, “the left will simply disappear from the map,” as has virtually occurred in much of Europe.
Ultimately, Žižek argues that Trump’s “’impossible’ coalition” of “feudal masters” and “exploited workers” cannot stand, and that the “ideological tension” between libertarianism and authoritarianism within “the two aspects of Trumpian politics” cannot be resolved:
[T]he corporate feudal masters present themselves as radical liberals, they advocate the use of mass media free from restrictions imposed by the state (the actual result of this freedom is, as we have already seen, the freedom of digital masters to control their digital feudal domain), while the self-declared partisans of ordinary people are deeply authoritarian, they advocate stronger state control over political and cultural life, banning phenomena they consider subversive — LGBT+ pressures, leftist protest movements.
As political analysis, that strikes me as inescapably correct — but it may have more relevance to how events unfold in Europe over the next decade or so than to the current crisis in the United States. It isn’t likely or even plausible that Musk and Bannon, separately or together, can overturn liberal democracy anywhere and everywhere, although they can do a hell of a lot to damage it. But on this side of the ocean, in God’s most favored nation, conditions are different: As long as Donald Trump is with us, his followers will willingly swallow all contradictions, all forms of hypocrisy, all outrageous lies and all kinds of pain.
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