During Donald Trump’s first term as president, Steve Bannon provided the administration’s MAGA ideological blueprint. His reactionary brand of “America First” nationalism entailed stoking populist skepticism of technological progress, and centering American interests ahead of what he called the emerging “globalist technocracy.”
In an ironic twist, now the South African-born Silicon Valley tech billionaire Elon Musk — perhaps the purest embodiment of that globalist technocracy — has taken up MAGA’s ideological reins in the second Trump administration. While the MAGA faithful try to square the circles of nationalist-globalism and billionaire-populism, we all struggle to understand Musk’s techno-futuristic ideology, which has been labeled everything from “neo-reactionary” and “techno-fascism” to “techno-libertarianism” and “tech-bro Maoism.” From riding roughshod over laws and institutional checks on its power to radically dismantling fundamental institutions of American politics, it is clear that neo-MAGAism is unlike anything seen previously in American history.
