This essay is featured in our Winter 2025 issue, Trump’s Return. Subscribe now to get a copy.

The lineup at Donald Trump’s second inaugural was a veritable billionaire’s row, with the heaviest hitters of Big Tech out in full force. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and incoming head of Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, treated the crowd to what sure seemed to be a Nazi salute. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple CEO Tim Cook stood near him as Trump was sworn in. Meanwhile Vivek Ramaswamy, initially tapped as Musk’s partner at DOGE and now reportedly being pushed out of the Trump world altogether, stood near the back.

The ferocity of the H-1B visa spat exposed serious cracks in MAGA world—Big Tech on one side, white nationalists on the other.

The new tech right has taken advantage of the moment to lambast its cultural enemies. Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan’s podcast days before the inauguration to complain about his overly woke workforce, lament that society has been “neutered,” insist that companies need more “masculine energy,” and defend his decision to abolish fact checking and hate speech management on Facebook and Instagram. Along with more stalwart tech right luminaries Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, Zuckerberg and Bezos have spent the better part of the interregnum between the election and the inauguration shamelessly flattering Trump. This was surely done not just to keep federal dollars flowing to their businesses—for all the talk of Silicon Valley’s libertarian ethos, Big Tech has always heavily relied on government contracts and subsidies—but also because Trump is, for all intents and purposes, one of them: a billionaire who, insofar as he can be said to have real political views at all, believes in the untrammeled power of the boss.

So why has fellow billionaire Ramaswamy been sidelined, despite serving as one of Trump’s biggest backers and surrogates last year in the wake of his own failed presidential run? The day after Christmas, he waded into a social media firestorm over the H-1B visa system, tweeting that American culture has “venerated mediocrity over excellence” and celebrates the “jock over the valedictorian.” That’s why, he said, Big Tech must bring in workers from overseas. Unsurprisingly, the subtext—that native-born American workers are lazy, mediocre, and entitled—drew considerable opprobrium from other elements of Trump’s coalition. The nativist “America First” base, with a nontrivial number of avowed white nationalists in its ranks, is not the most receptive audience for a Thomas Friedman–style “The World Is Flat” lecture about American workers falling short against Indian and Chinese labor.

Far-right influencer Laura Loomer, who prompted the whole visa meltdown by criticizing Trump’s appointment of Sriram Krishnan as AI czar, spent the better part of a week tearing into Ramaswamy and other defenders of the program—including Musk (who wrote that he would “go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend”) and eventually Trump himself (who called it a “great program”). This was the first major public split in MAGA world since Trump’s election, and its ferocity raises questions about the durability of the coalition. What do these fractures portend? Can MAGA survive in power?


Given the mishmash of various interests, there is certainly potential for enduring crackups. The crude Kremlinology of inaugural seating seems to indicate that not only do Big Tech’s tycoons consider Trump’s win their doing, but that Trump himself seems to feel similarly—and yet Musk had no qualms publicly criticizing Trump’s “Stargate” AI venture the day it was announced. At the same time, the nativist and white nationalist right has long been a stable of fervent Trump support, a faction to whom he and his surrogates actively cater. The brazen and undisguised racism toward Haitian immigrants; the campaign’s capstone rally at Madison Square Garden in October, featuring disturbing speeches from Tucker Carlson and the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe; and, of course, the proposals to deport up to 15 million people from the United States—all are testament to the strength of this prong in the Trump coalition.

There are also other, less pronounced interests in the mix. Organized labor can hardly be considered to be a key constituency on the right, but Teamsters president Sean O’Brien’s refusal to endorse Harris—and his speech at the Republican National Convention in July—did manage to wring the nomination of Congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer for head of the Department of Labor. (In 2023 she was one of only three Republicans in the House to cosponsor the proposed Protecting the Right to Organize Act.) These concessions to the conservative wing of labor are at odds with Silicon Valley; the Teamsters have invested a considerable amount of time, energy, and resources in organizing Amazon warehouses, and Big Tech has made no secret of its hostility to unionization efforts. Then there are other industrial interests in Trump’s coalition—he made a point of praising American manufacturing in his inaugural address, pledging to “revoke the electric vehicle mandate” (despite Musk owning the most highly valued electric vehicle manufacturing company in the world), and of course he retains the traditional support of Republicans from Wall Street.

How did these various groups become part of a big(ish)-tent coalition in the first place? The answer is “woke.”

During the Cold War, anticommunism served as the glue that held conflicting elements of the right together. The populist and conspiracist John Birch Society, the traditionalists in the Southern Agrarian school, the renegade ex-Trotskyists in the National Review orbit, and the libertarian cultists around Ayn Rand all shared a fundamental opposition to communism, both at home and abroad. The whole point of conservative “fusionism” was to combine the traditionalism and social conservatism of the old Burkean right (and its descendants in twentieth-century Protestant and Catholic thought) with market capitalism to oppose communism. “Communism” itself was a slippery term for this set, often bearing little relation to the realities of the Soviet Union or Communist China—or, for that matter, what left-wing radicals in the United States preached or practiced. Rather, the word was a catch-all specter that could variously connote the ravages of state planning, the anarchism of street protests, or the godlessness of modern secular society—not an empty vessel, exactly, but a foil and common enemy against which a political coalition of often diametrically opposed interests could congeal.

Anti-“wokeness” has done the work that anticommunism did for the old conservative fusionism—but it is now effectively spent.

“Wokeness” has done the same work for various right-wing factions in the 2020s, providing a way to classify and delegitimize all sorts of actors. Don’t like immigrants? It’s woke leftists who want to open the borders! Don’t like not being able to say racist and sexist slurs at work? It’s the fault of the wokes! Don’t like some of the directions organized labor has taken, especially under the leadership of Shawn Fain? It’s because the UAW has been taken over by woke grad students! As the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo—one of this strategy’s principal architects—has made explicit, anti-wokeness became the essential element in a right-wing war of position: an easy way to signal a whole host of political, educational, and class views, to recruit a heterogeneous coalition beyond the traditional base of the GOP, and to stoke infighting among liberals and the left.

The problem for this strategy going forward is that anti-wokeness as a political force is now effectively spent. For one thing, there’s likely to be less widespread rhetoric of the sort that the right might so successfully tar and feather as “woke.” Those parts of the left that weren’t already opposed to corporate-friendly identity politics from the get-go broke with it years ago; the Democratic establishment appears to have turned decisively against it as well, embracing the specious claims of centrist pundits like Matt Yglesias, Adam Jentleson, and Jonathan Chait that Democratic concessions to “the groups”—progressive advocacy organizations composed of highly educated multicultural elites—are the main reason for Kamala Harris’s defeat. And now the right itself has ridden the wave of anti-woke panic into power over all three branches of government. Without the common enemy of “wokeness” (however real or imagined) binding various factions together, we can expect more fissures.

That is not to say it’s all going to fall apart on a dime. Ramaswamy, for his part, may not be permanently exiled, despite the white nationalist outcry; Trump has proposed that he serve out J. D. Vance’s Senate term in Ohio. Besides, the tech right’s ideology—its eugenicist thinking, its defense of elite power and privilege, and its just-so stories about the power of entrepreneurship and capitalism—resonates with Trump’s deeply ingrained beliefs about himself as a “winner.” A few years ago John Ganz somewhat cheekily proposed a dichotomy between “nerd fascism” and “jock fascism”—the weird Silicon Valley engineers re-upping race and IQ science versus the id of the average American cop and petit bourgeois business owner. Trump appealed to both factions while himself remaining quintessentially a jock, but Vance’s ascendancy signals growing power for a nerd-jock synthesis.

Though the details of Vance’s biography are now well known, the influence of Yale Law School professor Amy Chua on his career cannot be overstated. Most famous for her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Chua encouraged Vance to write his breakthrough memoir Hillbilly Elegy. She also coauthored—with her husband, fellow Yale Law School professor Jed Rubenfeld—the 2014 book The Triple Package, which offered a cultural explanation for certain ethnic groups’ successes in America. The book gave the patina of elite academic respectability to the preexisting attitudes of much of the new (and ethnically diverse) tech right elite; as sociologist Steve Steinberg wrote in these pages, it was a tool designed to “provide indispensable legitimacy for social class hierarchy.” Of course, cultural pathology has been the preferred conservative explanation for Black poverty dating back to the Moynihan report; Chua and Rubenfeld were tapping an oft-used well. What was novel in the 2010s was that the kind of argument they made began to be deployed by the right against the group it had traditionally defended: poor whites. Kevin Williamson wrote an influential National Review cover story in 2016 using this precise language, and three months later it was elaborated as the primary thesis of Vance’s memoir.

It was a short step from here to Silicon Valley, where Vance moved after two years in law to work as a venture capitalist, including a stint at Thiel’s firm. But since embracing MAGAism after 2020 he has shifted his rhetoric. His speech at the RNC last year was full of paeans to the American working class, and he led the way during the campaign with the most bigoted rhetoric about Haitian immigrants. At the same time, he has notably been silent about H-1B visas and Ramaswamy’s tweets. There are certainly elements of sheer opportunism here, but if there is going to be a synthesis between the tech right and America First, Vance will likely be its linchpin.

Some signs of what this might look like are already taking shape in a kind of delicate balancing act: throw a bone to the tech right here (say, H-1B visas), then to America First nationalists there. The latter may be the junior partner in this dance—and how long this can go on remains to be seen—but it’s not going to lose every time. On the first two days of his new administration Trump issued a flurry of executive orders—many not simply red meat for Trump’s base, like renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” but also real policy victories for the America First right, including several on immigration. Another such win is the confirmation of former Fox News personality Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. Hegseth is obviously an unhinged monster—he has been credibly accused of multiple sexual assaults—but more significantly, he is a fixture in far-right political circles. Not unlike Vance, he has some intellectual bonafides, writing his senior thesis at Princeton in 2003 on “Modern Presidential Rhetoric and the Cold War Context” supervised by Patrick Deneen, one of the most prominent postliberal thinkers on the Catholic right (whom Vance, himself a Catholic convert, has also cited as an influence).

Hegseth’s own politics are probably best described as Christian nationalist, an ideology ultimately derived from the fascistic forms of Protestantism pioneered by figures like Gerald L. K. Smith in the 1930s and 1940s. His installment as head of the Department of Defense—the largest executive department in terms of both budget and personnel, and the very heart of global empire—is a sign that Trump’s support for the America First side of his coalition still matters politically.


All of which leads us to the fascism question. Sociologist Dylan Riley has argued that Trumpism could not be considered meaningfully fascistic—at least in the Marxist sense of the term—because it lacked certain essential features of twentieth-century fascism, above all the foil of a powerful and well-organized left threatening political revolution in a period of structural crisis. While Riley’s arguments can be critiqued on their own terms—historian Joseph Fronczak counters that “the left” only became recognizable through anti-fascism in the 1920s and 1930s—they also fail to account for the political strength of left-wing protest movements in the 2010s.

With political opposition to MAGAism at its organizational and cultural nadir, Trump may simply have no need for the fascist extra.

The fact that Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo failed to fundamentally change American political economy, end or significantly curtail the carceral state, and usher in a durable and expansive sea change against misogyny and sexual violence should not blind us to the reality that left protest movements really were substantively setting the cultural and political agenda during the first Trump administration. There really were tens of thousands—if not hundreds of thousands—of people engaged in radical political action during the George Floyd uprisings. And there really were countless liberals in a variety of social institutions, from business to corporate media to the academy, who responded to these movements with a welter of rhetoric and initiatives—including an intensification of administrative diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. In short, the right’s hysteria about DEI—and before DEI “critical race theory,” and before critical race theory “cultural Marxism”—did have some basis in reality, which is to say that for a time a particular form of liberal identity politics really did exert meaningful power throughout American culture.

This is not at all to say that the Democrats have been a revolutionary political force. The point is that a cultural revolution of sorts did take place in American social life, and all this was absolutely terrifying to the right. It is no coincidence that the Proud Boys emerged as the de facto street-fighting wing of MAGA during the first Trump administration—engaging in long-running street battles with organized left-wing protesters in Portland, winning Trump’s endorsement during one of the 2020 presidential debates, and participating in the January 6 coup attempt. Nor is it a coincidence that the United States saw a spate of white nationalist mass shootings during Trump’s first term, or for that matter that right-wing vigilantes—Kyle Rittenhouse most prominently—were feted as heroes for fighting back against lawless radicalism. Biden rode into office on a wave of outrage at all this, but under his administration Democrats squandered the radical potential of the protest moment, capturing an elite form of the identity politics groundswell and failing to deliver transformative change. Unsurprisingly, Harris’s electoral strategy—offering, besides a strong message on abortion, little more than empty rhetoric against an avowedly “existential” threat—disaffected and demobilized both liberals and the left, whose turnout plummeted in November.

Resistance liberalism was thus at last decisively revealed to be a politically bankrupt ideology, incapable of achieving its foundational goal: keeping Trump out of the White House. In 2016, Trump’s surprise victory in the Electoral College—combined with his loss of the popular vote by nearly 3 million—sparked spontaneous protests and a flurry of organizing among liberals. The predominant mood among them today is quite different: bitter resignation, if not outright obedience. Many ordinary citizens are organizing, especially at local levels, but there have been no mass protests comparable to those of four years ago. And various liberal institutions have already signaled their capitulation to the new order. Establishment voices like MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski—who were calling Trump a fascist and comparing him to Hitler just two months ago—are now patting themselves on the back for ensuring an orderly transition of power. Meanwhile, the left’s only serious threat to liberal political hegemony was effectively defanged with Bernie Sanders’s defeat in the 2020 Democratic primary.

Two factors now stand in the way of 2016/2017 Popular Front–style mobilization. One is that this time Trump won the popular vote (though just shy of winning a majority); no one can dispute that he was the legitimate choice of the American people in a free and fair election. The other is Gaza. Israel/Palestine has long been a wedge between liberals and leftists—the Women’s March, the largest organized protest movement in American history, was effectively dissolved because of infighting over this issue—but the salience and intensity has escalated exponentially since the October 7 attacks and Israel’s subsequent genocidal campaign. The left already mobilized its (relatively feeble) strength in 2024 in protest against the Biden administration’s unconditional support for Israel; not only were its demands ignored, but liberal administrators at colleges and universities around the country—as well as Democratic elected officials—sent in riot cops to beat student and faculty protesters. Forging an anti-Trump popular coalition between a deflated and demoralized liberalism and a left that has spent the better part of a year on the receiving end of liberal repression is, at least at the moment, effectively impossible.

With political opposition to MAGAism at its organizational and cultural nadir, there is simply no need in 2025 for the fascist extra that Riley said was missing. The greatest fear of institutional liberalism in the 2010s was that Trump would be “normalized,” which meant effectively that the movement he stands for would be deemed politically legitimate and absorbed into the apparatus of the American state without opposition or protest. That has now happened. And that means the Proud Boys are now superfluous. The mass pardons of the January 6 insurrectionists, while odious, are unlikely to catalyze a new wave of organized paramilitarism. When the forces of capital come to the inauguration to bend the knee to the new political order, and the wealthiest man in the world can casually toss off a Nazi salute to a cheering crowd, the street fighters are no longer necessary.

Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.