President Donald Trump’s base of support may soon fracture into two competing far-right factions, according to one expert.
The Wall Street Journal’s Joshua Chaffin and Zusha Elinson reported Friday that two camps within the MAGA world are emerging and will likely battle for supremacy during Trump’s second term. They wrote that on one side are “tech bros racing to create a new future,” with Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk as the quintessential example. On the other side are “conservative Catholics who yearn for an imagined past,” like Vice President JD Vance, who seek to upend the liberal establishment and return America to a “bygone era.”
According to Chaffin and Elinson, the “dark prince” of the tech wing of MAGA is Curtis Yarvin — a pro-feudalist writer who has called for democracy to be replaced with a monarch who would rule the United States like a CEO leads a tech company. And the conservative Catholic faction upholds ideologies like that championed by University of Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen.
Catholic theologian David Deane told the Journal that Deneen’s 2023 book “Regime Change” offered a prediction that the second Trump administration would put a torch to traditionally liberal institutions like universities, the media and the nonprofit sector. Deane opined that the ultimate goals of both factions are very different despite Trump managing to corral them under one tent.
“At some stage a civil war is coming to the Trump movement,” Deane said. “And I think Musk and Vance will be on two very different sides of that civil war.”
The Journal noted that during an appearance at Harvard University, Yarvin expanded on his view that democracy was “bunk” and defended his call for America to have a king unaccountable by law who could be free to impose reforms without Constitutional constraints. And he notably made a dig at modern conservative icon Christopher Rufo — who led the 2021 push against “critical race theory” and spearheaded the effort to oust former Harvard President Claudine Gay — as a “grifter.”
Deneen, for his part, has unleashed on the technocratic wing of the far right, deriding them as out-of-touch elites who “like nice restaurants.” While speaking at the 2021 National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, Deneen said MAGA-aligned tech billionaires espouse “an ideology of rapine and plunder — the stripping of wealth from a ship that they are sinking while busily stocking the lifeboats until the last moment when they will be able to cut loose.”