Staring into the Abyss of MAGA

Richard Hanania's Newsletter

When Richard Spencer (follow on X, Substack) asked me to appear on his podcast, I was a bit hesitant. Ever since our past relationship became public, I’ve wanted to forget my earlier writing career ever happened. Talking to Spencer again would just remind me and everyone else of a time in my life I’d rather ignore.

That said, I’ve been paying attention to his output, and I must say he’s become one of the sharpest critics out there of the American right. With my past, there’s no way I could justify shunning Richard for his own mistakes or shortcomings. The immediate threat of cancellation is no longer salient, and enough time has passed that I can reflect a little bit on my journey and the fact that I was part of something that wound up being pretty important, even if the ultimate product doesn’t reflect who I am now and was in many ways bad for society.

Plus, to be frank, I find Richard really interesting, and we’ve always gotten along well. As you’ll see, we had a lot of fun bonding over our shared contempt towards rightoids.

In the end, this was a conversation I wanted to have. So I said to hell with it. Here, I’m releasing the audio and video of my appearance on his Alexandria podcast from last week. We talk about the development of the non-mainstream right over the last decade and a half, how we’ve both changed, and our shared frustration with what the right has become. We discuss possible future paths of the Republican Party, whether there are any realistic and acceptable alternatives to liberalism, and what it means to recognize liberals as the side of serious people actually able to govern. Near the end, Richard asks me about how my views have shifted on Russia and Israel, and I take a few questions from the audience.

Perhaps most importantly, we get into our disagreements over the Costco Guys and how we should perceive them in the context of Nietzsche’s Last Man and Fukuyama’s idea of the End of History.

Richard and I are unique in that it is rare to find someone who truly understands how bad MAGA is but who is not a leftist, and even has some views one can classify as far right. The Trump cult is not a binary thing in my experience. It’s a spectrum, but to be right-leaning at all today almost requires one to be somewhere on it, for psychological and career-related reasons. To me, a Trump cultist is not just someone who buys his NFTs, but also the analyst who constantly degrades himself by making ridiculous arguments in order to excuse or justify his behavior. Among these are ideas like: he hasn’t committed illegal acts; there are any comparisons to be made between the attempted coup in 2020 and anything Democrats have done; and liberals are too hysterical in warning about the dangers of Trumpism.

If you care about ideas at all and have the least bit of intellectual honesty, you can’t say things like this. I don’t even care if you’re going to suck it up and support Trump anyway, or, like Richard, you tell people they should vote for Kamala. Our dignity as thinkers and human beings, along with my own intellectual curiosity and desire to understand the world, simply demand we speak plainly and truthfully about this man and what he represents.

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