MAGA Time, And Why Some Liberals Like It

Fascism hijacks the ideology of progress

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The slogan Make America Great Again is generally discussed as a nostalgic return to a whiter, more bigoted past. As such, it functions as a conservative antithesis of liberalism’s orientation towards an ever more just and enlightened future. Kamala Harris’s slogan, “We are not going back” neatly summarized the fault lines—one party wants to go forward, one party does not.

The sharp division between MAGA yesterday and liberal tomorrow is a little too neat, though. Because while “Make America Great Again” touts a utopian past, it also looks towards a millenarian restitution; its yesterday is the basis for a tomorrow which is better than today. In that sense, MAGA is arguing not (just) that we should go backwards, but that we have actually gone sideways. The problem is that time has gone out of joint; someone has hijacked the rocket ship to the future and sent it off down a blind alley of chaos and despair. The goal is to recapture, not the past, per se, but the past’s trajectory—to set time back on track.

From this perspective, MAGA isn’t exactly a contrast with liberalism. Instead, it’s an adaptation, or subversion or a certain kind of fulfillment of liberal ideas of how politics function in time. That’s why you will sometimes see people who consider themselves liberal cosigning Trumpism. And it’s why if we’re going to beat the fascists, we need to rethink some liberal preconceptions about where we are now and where we’re going.

Journey to the past

Though it’s often memory-holed, liberal views of time in the past were inseparable from liberal investment in colonialism. Specifically, liberal discourses of progress were organized around the belief that the past was geographically present; to journey to the dark ages, all you had to do was get on a boat and sail to where there were dark people. For Europeans, the passage to Africa, or the Americas, or the Middle East, or the South Pacific, was not just measured in miles, but in centuries. Or as scholar John Rieder puts it, “the other’s present is the colonizer’s own past.”

Rieder makes his comment in a discussion of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. Wells staged the Martian invasion as a parallel to the European invasion of Tasmania; they were doing to us what we had done to them. The Martians in England (like the English in Tasmania) is “a kind of anachronism, an incongruous co-habitation of the same moment by people and artifacts of different times.” This, Rieder says, was a typical attitude derived from anthropological thinkers of the time. According to intellectual historian George Stocking, anthropologists in Wells’ day saw the Tasmanians as “living representatives of the early Stone Age” whose “extinction was simply a matter of…placing the Tasmanians back into the dead prehistoric world where they belonged.”

The anthropological hierarchy of time was a liberal, enlightened discourse, often tied explicitly to ideologies of progress and reform. John Stuart Mill infamously defended the subjugation of India on the grounds that the people there were “in an infantine, or a semi-barbarous state.”

Similarly, the kidnapping of indigenous children in North America was part of a (supposedly) civilizing project; native children were to be saved from their (supposedly) backwards cultures and brought into the present through liberal Christian intervention. This (supposed) progress was illustrated through before and after school photos, in which children who arrived at the school dusty, tired and wearing beads, long hair, and the clothes of their people were photographed a year or so later in Western clothes and short hair. These dramatic images were used to show donors how the school had miraculously dragged the children into the present. (The beatings, diseases, loneliness, cruelty and condescension the students experienced did not make it into the pictures.)

Per the liberal narrative of progress, we like to think that we’ve moves beyond this kind of simplistic racism. But have we? The 1979 film Apocalypse Now features a famous scene, lifted wholesale from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which the Viet Cong attack American soldiers with spears and arrows, staging a dramatic confrontation between the dim past and the invading present. Yet as Linh Dinh argues

The phoniness of this is breathtaking. The NVA and Viet Cong did not win a modern war with arrows and spears. But a scene from a 1901 book has to be shoehorned into a 1979 movie because of Coppola’s fascination with savages.

Conrad in 1901 was obsessed with the idea of the past existing in the colonized present. Coppola in 1979 was obsessed with the same thing. And how different are we? As I’ve written before, the velociraptors in the Jurassic Park series are often presented as crafty fighters skilled in jungle ambush. They call back to Vietnam War tropes, which means that the Viet Cong have moved back from the stone age all the way to the Cretaceous.

MAGA and the ideology of progress

You don’t need to go to the movies to see these past-is-present-over-there tropes deployed. They are a staple conceit of MAGA rhetoric and racism.

Trump himself, a la John Stuart Mill, constantly talks about immigrants and non-white people as representatives of an earlier, uglier, (supposedly) less advanced time. In 2019 he referred to Jewish Representatives Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff, and POC representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush as “Do Nothing Democratic Savages.” This year he said that Somali immigrants come from “the worst country in the world, backward.”

MAGA’s golden past is, then, golden because it is, paradoxically, more advanced than the present. For MAGA, the American past was the future because it was white and therefore of the enlightened tomorrow. The American present is filled with nonwhite people and has therefore devolved into the benighted past.

This thinking, again, resonates with the history of liberal progress narratives, and as such it appeals to a range of people who in various ways consider themselves to broadly be liberals. Zionists—including both right-wing Zionists and liberal Zionists, and for that matter left Zionists like W.E.B. Du Bois—find common ground in framing Palestinians as barbaric or backwards. Biden’s insistence that Israel is a democracy even as it went about committing genocide underlines the point; some nations and some people are seen as in the vanguard of history, preserving the liberal democratic tradition. Those people are, therefore, justified in exterminating (supposedly) less advanced people who (like the Tasmanians) are really already extinct if you think about it.

Ilan Wurman, a liberal law professor who has embraced vile anti-immigrant sentiment illuminates the common ground even more starkly. On social media he wrote a post that read in part:

1. It can take 1,000 years to develop habits of thought and culture that make liberal democracy and constitutional government possible.

2. You can’t import millions of people without assimilation *today* and expect them to share those important habits.

On the face of it this is nonsensical; no one lives for 1000 years, and no one inherits constitutional government in their genes. Everybody alive today is alive today; virtually all of them are aware of democratic principles and traditions. In fact, people who grow up under authoritarian regimes are not infrequently more passionate about democracy, freedom, and equality than those who grow up in the US (a nation that is in any case not exactly a healthy democracy at the moment.)

You don’t need logic when you have discourse, though. Wurman is simply channeling the views of lots of liberal racist when he says that the people over there live in a perpetual unenlightened past. We can maybe pull some of them into the light, but also maybe we have a responsibility to just move forward, kicking the muck of yesterday off our boots with more or less genocidal force and enthusiasm. For Wurman, it’s MAGA which recognizes the racial realities of progress, and so it’s MAGA which better embodies the liberal vision of a teleological temporality.

Better liberalism through nowness

Trump and John Stuart Mill and Joe Biden and Ilan Wurman all agree that the future and the past are spread out before them on the surface of the globe, and that the way forward is to impose the second on the first. We know where we’re going (forward!) and we know where we do not want to go (backward!). And so we know which people are the vanguard of civilization and which are detritus to ignore or obstacles to sweep aside.

If we actually want a better world for all, then, we need a different view of time and a different view of progress. No one people or place is or can be a vanguard of liberalism. We all live now. We all have to fight for freedom and equality and justice now or else we will fight for them never. Relegating certain people to the past does not protect or advance liberal or left ideas; it does not boost us into the future. It merely becomes an excuse to entrench the violence and the hierarchies of fascism.

The past does not exist on the globe. the past is past. We have not taken a detour in our progress, because there are no detours—what happens is what happened, and where we are is where we are. The people over there are not atavistic remnants of a lesser and more dangerous time. They are our neighbors, and we need their help to make a better world, just as they need ours. We need to dream of a better future right now. But we also need to recognize that that future is not embodied in any one person or any one group. Otherwise, we will just be making liberalism great again, in the worst possible way.