What is “Far-Right Leninist Multipolarity?”

If you’re going to explore the mind of the MAGA intellectual, you better be prepared to read carefully and think critically or you’ll get lost

the natural order of things meant men ruled over women, and whites and Aryans were above Black, Jewish, and Arab people.

What!?

James Pogue has a fascinating but troubling very long-form essay in Vanity Fair about reactionary foreign policy. Pogue had access to Steve Bannon among others, and a couple years ago wrote one of the better analyses of the Peter Thiel-funded “post-liberal” tech culture.

In this latest Vanity Fair piece, Pogue goes inside Washington at a moment when the NATO Summit and the National Conservatism (NatCon) conference were overlapping. He was one of the few writers to pick up on how these two opposing political constituencies—the libs and the fascists, to put it crudely—espoused competing analysis underneath their competing visions for the world.

Pogue’s journalistic findings are significant: We’re talking about a set of ideas that are being manufactured by right-wing elites who are trying to sit atop the MAGA movement—some of them even identify themselves as Leninists. At any rate, they’re fashioning arguments meant to appeal to MAGA’s two crucial interest groups: ethnonationalists and oligarchs.

And central to that MAGA-intellectual imaginary is the concept of multipolarity. It’s tied to not just military primacy but their view of capital-labor relations, domestic patriarchy, imperialism, and much more besides.

Their analysis—which imports a lot of left-anti-imperial critiques—threatens liberal internationalist ideals, yet, paradoxically, responds to the world in an even darker way than the national security state.

I hope you find time to read the analysis below because in many ways we’re talking about a total reshuffling in how an emerging faction of intellectuals thinks about the world.