FAIR OBSERVER DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

Who Will Win the MAGA Wars: Ramaswamy vs Haley; Bannon vs Musk?

The Trump circus, with its clowns and wild animals, will be installed inside the Beltway next week for the next four years. Cultural and ideological economic conflict reigns within its ranks. In the background is the question: Has celebrity culture annihilated political culture in the US?
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Who Will Win the MAGA Wars

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January 15, 2025 04:14 EDT
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Following United States President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration next week, the Republican party should celebrate the dawn of a new golden age. The Make America Great Again (MAGA) party will now control the White House and both houses of Congress. It will even dominate the Supreme Court. It may seem odd, in such circumstances, that a multilevel civil war has already broken out within the party’s ranks.

In December, a joust took place involving two prominent Republicans of Indian descent, both former primary presidential candidates. The seasoned veteran, Nikki Haley, drew her weapon to challenge the young upstart, Vivek Ramaswamy, for expressing a clearly heretical view of US society. A second front of the Republican civil war has been opened more recently between Trump’s evil genius of 2016, Steve Bannon, and his latest (and wealthiest) Rasputin, Elon Musk.

The initial skirmish broke out when former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley lambasted Ramaswamy for daring to cast doubt on the infallibly sacred quality of US culture when he sought a sociological explanation for the penury of US-born engineers. The disagreement between Haley and Viraswamy, just like the war being waged by Bannon against Musk, turns around the policy regarding H-1B visas. This is clearly a sensitive topic for any member of a party that thrives by demonizing immigration as the root of all evil.

Viraswamy defended a visa policy that happens to have proved particularly advantageous to Indian engineers. For the first generation American, the culprit was no single person or party. It was US culture. He offered concrete examples: “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.” To Haley Vivek, this was impugning American exceptionalism.

Haley hastened to respond on X: “There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture.” If you’re looking for things that are “wrong,” look beyond the border, is what she literally responded. “All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

American Culture:

The culmination of human history, a perfectly-tuned system of social, economic and political practices believed to have been ordained by divine powers and mediated by a generation of exceptional political thinkers — the nation’s founders — with the aim of providing humanity with a blueprint for all successful future human societies.

Contextual note

Haley sees the fact that other people “want what we have” as the most persuasive reason for the US not letting them have any of it. It is imperative to believe and state publicly that US culture is beyond criticism. If Americans fail to affirm that fundamental truth, they risk doubting their constitutionally established right to regulate the affairs of the rest of the world. If Americans can be seen doubting this fundamental truth, just think about how much all those people who “want what we have” may also begin to doubt.

Ramaswamy, as a Republican, is the outlier here. The entire party has always embraced Haley’s logic, or rather, religious faith in the infallibility of US institutions and US culture. When protestors against the war in Vietnam called into question American imperial policy, Republicans shouted in unison: “Love it or leave it.” Criticism, in their worldview, is a sign of betrayal of a social contract that requires everyone to believe in its rectitude even when it makes blatant mistakes.

Vivek’s criticism is especially surprising given his enthusiastic endorsement of and loyalty to Trump, whose electoral success owes everything to a culture focused on celebrity worship. Trump has been elected president twice, not because of his intellectual skills or political acumen, but precisely because of two things: his wealth and his celebrity. The title of his iconic, long-running reality show was, after all, “Celebrity Apprentice.”

Even more perplexing, as a consequence of the visa controversy, is Bannon’s declaration of war against Musk. It may have more to do with the fact that Musk only recently maneuvered to identify himself as a right-wing MAGA Republican. In the past, he allowed most people to assume he was more likely aligned with the values of the Democrats. Bannon may resent him for being a MAGARINO: a MAGA Republican in Name Only.

Even more confusing is Bannon’s insistence on branding Musk a “racist” and a “truly evil guy.” His characterization is probably true, but does Bannon possess anti-racist credentials? Isn’t this the man who once offered the following advice to right-wing French businessmen: “Let them call you racist … Wear it as a badge of honor?” 

Historical note

Ramaswamy could have been more thorough in his criticism of US culture. The fascination with wealth and celebrity is so deeply embedded in the psyche of the average American that generations of social critics have highlighted the incoherence it generates and the danger it represents.

In his 1962 book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, Daniel Boorstin explained how the predominance in the media of “pseudo-events” distorts the public’s perception of both the topics in the news and the role of politicians. Boorstin anticipates by nearly two decades Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality in Simulacra and Simulation (1981). He also helpfully defines a celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness.” When Boorstin wrote the book, the media had turned John F. Kennedy’s White House into a studio for celebrity politics. By the time of Baudrillard’s contribution, the US had elected its first president whose image was that of a carefully crafted, essentially non-political Hollywood celebrity: Ronald Reagan. Kennedy was a career politician. Reagan was a glamorous actor in B movies.

In 1985, Richard Schickel’s Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity focused on the role the media plays in shaping public perceptions of fame by effectively commodifying both entertainers and politicians. He blames the media, including the news media, for elevating particular politicians to celebrity status. While such ideas may have seemed surprising 40 years ago, more and more of today’s political personalities, including Ramaswamy himself, have cultivated celebrity status and clearly owe their success to it. Trump is hardly unique, just more talented and unbridled than the others in his lifelong quest for celebrity.

More recently, authors such as Murray Milner Jr. (Celebrity Culture as a Status System, 2005) and Karen Sternheimer (Celebrity Culture and the American Dream: Stardom and Social Mobility, 2011) have analyzed the multiple facets of an increasingly pervasive celebrity culture that has effectively managed to turn campaigns that once featured political debate on real issues into media-managed, ritualized popularity contests between personalities whose discourse consists of oversimplified representations of any available political, social and economic issues chosen for amplification by the media. The oversimplification leaves those same politicians with a serious quandary as, once elected, they attempt to act on issues that they themselves have represented in such an unrealistic way that any action undertaken appears as a parody of an honestly broached political solution. Whether it’s a wall or a war, the same logic applies.

Trump’s “build the wall” still stands as the archetypal example of this quandary, though we have seen several “wag the dog” wars that conform to the model. And of course, it’s precisely Trump’s wall that has both prompted and cast a dark shadow over the debate between Ramaswamy and Haley on the one hand, and Musk and Bannon on the other.

In short, celebrity culture and the worship of wealth have removed the little bit of seriousness that once characterized political debate in the US. The result is comic and tragic at the same time. It has rendered incoherent both political parties. Can a party that once identified itself as the friend of the working class expect to maintain its traditional constituency when its governing elite identifies and fraternizes with a circle of billionaires and Hollywood stars? Likewise, the Republicans have had to abandon their identification with traditional conservative values to rally behind personalities that have established themselves not just as charismatic celebrities, but also as aggressive challengers of existing laws, customs and mores.

The Republicans’ traditional Wall Street wealth that sought to avoid the limelight and focus on controlled economic and financial performance is now complemented — but also contradicted — by Silicon Valley’s ostentatious greed and brazenly flaunted moral relativism. Can any leader, present or future, reconcile these opposing trends in each of the parties that have undermined their traditional cultural foundations?

Is there anyone with the celebrity power capable of carrying it off?

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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