MAGA is America’s third party

Gearing up to launch his new “America Party,” Elon Musk now speaks of a GOP-Democratic duopoly that has the country in its grip. But this system died ten years ago at the hands of Donald Trump: America’s first third party president. 

With a small band of misfit toys drawn from the world of Manhattan real estate Mr. Trump invaded an old and established party, replacing it with his own ideas and – in true cuckoo fashion – his own children. There is almost no intellectual continuity between the faction he now leads and the pre-2015 Republicans beyond a generic commitment to free markets and to law and order. There is not even much continuity in personnel: the young guns have all been scattered and the party’s five previous presidential nominees are all estranged or were so at their death.

The house doctrine of the GOP is now an alien and in retrospect odd credo with no real heirs. It combined family values with a marked indifference to the southern border; indeed it would often praise illegal migrants for their family values. There was also a civic cult of 1776 and a spirit of competitive obscurantism in which fidelity to the country’s founding document was the only test of policy. None of this survived the events of 2024.

MAGA is not simply a case of the GOP embracing populism, because the GOP had its own populist tradition: the Tea Party. The Tea Party, looked at in hindsight, was a souped-up version of movement Conservatism with the same rigmarole of fifes, drums, tricorne hats; the same fixation on the mysteries of the Founding – the border less so. In 2015-16 this tradition confronted MAGA in the shape of Ted Cruz and lost. The Tea Party used to give the GOP Establishment headaches but there was a recognizable line of descent from Goldwater, Reagan, and William F. Buckley. Trump was the first modern party leader for whom this pantheon meant nothing. With MAGA the link to the past finally breaks. 

This was a conquest rather than a wooing. Within Britain’s Conservative Party there was always a sizable Brexit faction and, later, a Boris faction. There was simply no analog to this within the GOP, which was hostile to Trump almost to a man and flailed against him for ten years. 

What Trumpism represents, obliquely, is the final victory of the Buchanan–Perot tendency in national life – not just intellectually but also in a more literal sense: Trump’s first run for the presidency was as a Reform candidate. Its old rival, movement Conservatism, is now extinct save for stragglers such as Rand Paul and Thomas Massie (even the latter’s opposition is plausibly grounded in being ‘more MAGA than MAGA’), and in eccentric sects like the Dispensationalists. Would it be too much of an exaggeration to call Trump a Reform president? He has changed none of his views since the 1980s; Marco Rubio, lost dauphin of the GOP, has changed all of them. 

Ironically the best hope that GOPism has lies with the very man who now denounces it. Itemize Elon Musk’s political beliefs and there’s an unmistakably retro feel. Like the old GOP Musk is a pro-migration social conservative; he frets about birth rates but once vowed to “go to war” to defend the H1B visa system. There’s the same sloppy eliding of the needs of particular businesses with the needs of the market. Having died a death everywhere else, the ideals of the old GOP may yet have a strange half-life in Musk’s America Party. For a movement that always had a perhaps overgenerous faith in the power of free-floating ideas, being transposed in this way would be a fitting fate.