On July 4, the world’s richest man made an ominous declaration. To follow Elon Musk’s X feed is to peer into a dystopian reality where immigrants are murderous brutes, Black-on-white crime is endemic and the “makers” in America are under siege from the “takers,” the people who live merely as parasites off the productivity of others.
But on the 250th birthday of his adopted country, he did something that might seem surprising but is entirely consistent with his hateful, paranoid trajectory: He turned on the American founding. A science fiction author and X personality named Devon Eriksen wrote, “Elon, this is the moment where you’re supposed to wise up and abandon classical liberalism. If you let takers vote, they will not only take more and more, they will make it more and more rewarding to be a taker, and they will convert more and more makers into takers, forever.” “Universal suffrage leads to universal suffering,” he concluded.
“Classical liberalism,” for those not up on political terms of art, refers to the philosophy of the American founding, the creation of a rights-based republic of democratic rule restrained by constitutionally protected liberties. And what was Musk’s response to this direct assault on democracy and American liberty? “I have wised up,” he said.
I thought almost immediately of Peter Thiel, another wealthy right-wing mogul. . . . . all the way back in 2009, he wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
That’s why the founders created a government of limited powers restrained by, among other things, the Bill of Rights. But they also believed in the social contract theory of government, in the idea that governments gain their legitimacy from the consent of the governed.
Freedom and democracy aren’t incompatible; they’re inseparable.
Musk’s and Thiel’s views would be notable enough, especially given their extraordinary political influence on the right, but their views aren’t coming from nowhere. They’re rooted in a profound sense of pessimism and despair that is spreading throughout the right.
From the inception of the MAGA movement, it has attracted a cohort of explicitly postliberal academics and intellectuals. These are often people who believe that liberalism itself — the belief in a rights-based approach to democracy — is deeply and profoundly flawed.
America, they believe, is dying — if it’s not dead already — and they hate the nation it’s becoming. How many times, for example, have we heard President Trump say that “you won’t have a country anymore” if he loses or if his plans are thwarted? In his mind (and in the minds of millions of his supporters), the fate of the country always hangs in the balance.
When the Supreme Court issued its birthright citizenship decision last week, Stephen Miller, perhaps Trump’s most powerful adviser, said that the court read the Constitution to require “national self-obliteration” and added for good measure that the ruling was a “deep knife wound in the heart of the American republic.”
Sean Davis, the chief executive of The Federalist, a right-wing web magazine, responded to the ruling by suggesting a series of possible measures, including, incredibly enough, the “dissolution of the union” and the “sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry.”
And, of course, no summary of the right-wing reaction to the ruling would be complete without overt racism. A MAGA X user writing as I Am Leah wrote that “18 years from now, my kid’s votes will be canceled out by a third-world cockroach whose cockroach mom arrived here three minutes ago.”
Don’t think for a moment that the birthright citizenship ruling was any kind of tipping point. In fact, it was more or less business as usual. Darkness covers the right. On June 28 a podcaster and columnist for The Blaze, another right-wing outlet, wrote that the assassination of Charlie Kirk “should have started a literal civil war between red and blue America.”
Kirk’s assassination was an evil act, but the idea that it should have triggered civil war in this country is deranged.
The people above — who range from a sometime trillionaire to billionaires to government officials to journalists and pundits — aren’t exceptional on the populist right. They’re emblematic of a movement that, like Trump, is constantly arguing that this country is minutes away from midnight and that only the most extreme measures can yank America back from the brink of destruction.
Part of the rage seems to be rooted in a sense that MAGA came oh so close to winning. Miller told Fox News’s Jesse Watters, “The fact that it was 5-4 — so agonizingly close — just underscored that the legal community on the right and left has been so wrong for so many years, saying this was going to be a 9-0 ruling against President Trump.”
But that’s not quite right. Yes, there were only five unqualified votes for the constitutional status quo, but there were six total votes for birthright citizenship (Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that birthright citizenship was required by statute, not the Constitution), and Justice Neil Gorsuch’s dissent indicated that he was mainly concerned with citizenship for the children of temporary visitors.
The conservatism of my youth positioned itself in direct opposition to Communism in both its Soviet and its Chinese forms. Fascism (and everything like it) was dead, and no one wanted to revive it.
How wrong I was. Parts of the right still posture as patriots, but they have imagined a different kind of patriotism, one that loves the country but scorns its creed. They — like Musk on July 4 — reject the classical liberal founding or at least de-emphasize its importance compared with the ancestral lineage of its citizens.
Vance is making a version of the argument that a certain subset of Americans — sometimes called heritage Americans — enjoys a superior claim to American citizenship. At its most extreme ends, proponents of the idea have even assigned letter grades to your citizenship based on the length of your American family roots.
As my friend and former Dispatch colleague Jonah Goldberg wrote, this is a form of identity politics: “It literally grades individuals on a metric they have zero control over. It’s no different than assigning grades based on skin color, sex or height.”
And if America isn’t rooted in its creed — and if certain classes of citizens have a superior claim to their American identity than other citizens — then it is a short trip to believing that the American government exists to serve only the favored class, the “real Americans” who make up, say, the MAGA base.
In this formulation, true patriotism isn’t the preservation of the creed; it’s the preservation of the people. And once you see this distinction, MAGA’s entire governing philosophy makes infinitely more sense.
Why crack down so aggressively on immigration? Immigrants — especially those from the global south — are not and can never be part of the people. They’re the “invaders” whom progressives want to use to replace the “real” American electorate.
[B]irthright citizenship is especially noxious to the populist right. They scorn it as relying on magic dirt — the idea that there is something inherent in American soil that makes a person an American citizen.
Yet the same populists seem to believe in something like magic blood — that one’s lineage can make one superior. You can see it in the constant anger against immigrants. You can see it in the racism of constantly highlighting crimes committed by Black and brown people, citizens and immigrants alike.
I don’t want to denigrate the idea of respecting one’s ancestors. . . . . . I can be proud of where I came from without believing there’s anything magic about my blood. While I want to live up to the best parts of my ancestors’ example, they don’t make me any better as an American than my friend Leo, a Mexican immigrant, who served side by side with me in Iraq. The worth of my citizenship is judged by the value of my choices, not by the identity of my parents, much less that of my great-grandparents.
America doesn’t have magic dirt, and it certainly doesn’t have magic blood. But it does have a magic idea — the creed that declares “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The Declaration, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address — these are the proclamations that define who we are. They are the core of the American creed, and without that creed, America might retain its name, but it will not retain its nature.
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