Working with the Contradictions of “Antiwar MAGA”

Questioning whether far-right opponents of *some* foreign wars are useful allies, useless, or simply controlled opposition for MAGA.

Matt Duss co-authored a laudable op-ed with Sohrab Ahmari, a conservative intellectual I’ve criticized in the past (and likely will in the future). Their common aim: Opposing war with Iran, as well as the resurgence of neoconservative hawks within the Trump administration.

In a previous era, I might’ve roasted Matt for a collab with Sohrab. Their political projects are mostly in conflict with each other.

But Sohrab is among the most articulate of the minority within the right who style themselves as opposed to war. And there’s something potentially useful in that as long as you keep its contradictions in view. Anyone who wants peace, democracy, or equality should be invested in correctly understanding when (and why) a supporter of MAGA opposes a specific expression of American militarism.

Partisanship As a Broken Template

There is no longer any meaningful sense in which we can consider the Democratic Party to be a standard-bearer for peace.¹ The reality is that the Democratic leadership makes sure that antiwar voices in the Party remain marginal and heavily policed from within.²

The Republican Party mirrors the Democratic Party in this respect, albeit in a funhouse sort of way. The GOP is barbaric in ways that don’t need to be repeated here, and yet it too has a vocal minority who have sometimes critiqued their own Party’s jingoism. Marjorie Taylor Greene (MTG), Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Matt Gaetz—these are conspiracy theory-addled, hate-filled people. Their preferred way of life relishes making others pay for their privilege; they oppose the world I seek. They would kill people I love.

And yet, those very MAGA heads have spoken out against US participation in Israel’s war against Iran. To wit, MTG blasted the war hawks in her own party on June 23 as follows:

My thoughts on bombing Iran. I don’t know anyone in America who has been the victim of a crime or killed by Iran, but I know many people who have been victims of crime committed by criminal illegal aliens or MURDERED by Cartel and Chinese fentanyl/drugs…

Neocon warmongers beat their drums of war and act like Billy badasses going to war in countries most Americans have never seen and can’t find on a map, but never find the courage to go to war against the actual terrorists who actually do kill Americans, invade our land, and make BILLIONS doing it day after day, year after year.

I’ve watched our country go to war in foreign lands for foreign causes on behalf of foreign interests for as long as I can remember…America is $37 TRILLION in debt and all of these foreign wars have cost Americans TRILLIONS AND TRILLIONS of dollars that never benefited any American. American troops have been killed and forever torn apart physically and mentally for regime change, foreign wars, and for military industrial base profits. I’m sick of it. I can easily say I support nuclear armed Israel’s right to defend themselves and also say at the same time I don’t want to fight or fund nuclear armed Israel’s wars.

This screed contains a whole lotta crazy, but it also makes several sane points. Notably quiet on the Iran war, by contrast, are Obama, Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris. And notably supportive of that same disastrous war in the making is the Democratic Party’s current leadership.

On issues of war and peace, then, a traditional understanding of partisan electoral politics no longer does us much good.

An Upshot to MAGA’s Contradiction

The notion of an antiwar MAGA is truly an oxymoron.

MAGA intellectuals tend to define their project as an ethnonationalist one on behalf of (or at least allied with and serving the interests of) the capitalist class. They explicitly assume security is a scarce resource that requires exclusion and social hierarchy, at home and abroad. Consequently, they have a strong preference for violence as a necessary recourse for their problems in most places and against most peoples.

But there are exceptions to their…way of the gun…that owe a great deal to the failings of America’s primacy grand strategy (which has been undergoing a crisis of elite social reproduction). I explored parts of this puzzle in a previous essay/post about the right-wing version of Generation GWOT—the reactionary, militarist direction that many disaffected veterans went after tasting two decades of failed warmaking. They still seek redemption in the American flag and military interventionism abroad, but they do so primarily by focusing on an outsized sense of the China threat and outright imperialism in the Western Hemisphere.

But the flip side of their selective imperialism is that it is selective—the GWOT years taught all of us veterans in particular that 1) the Middle East is a sinkhole for American power and 2) US troops in that region do more harm than good.

Nevertheless, the ranks of those carrying the sting of GWOT hangover on the right seem to be outnumbered within their own party:

So whereas Democratic elites are going out of their way to ignore their own voters on the Iran question, Republican elites supporting war with Iran are more or less in accord with their base. It’s the Sohrabs and Tucker Carlsons and MTGs who are outnumbered within their party.

And that’s the beautiful friction that ensued when Ted Cruz—an off-the-shelf neocon who might be the most sychophantic pro-Israel member of the US Senate—went on Tucker Carlson’s show to make his case for annihilating Iran:

Trump, not unlike Cosimo de’ Medici in Renaissance Italy, derives power from his positionality between competing political networks. In this case, Trump adjudicates between “antiwar” MAGA (who are more ideological zealots like Bannon) and pro-war MAGA (who are institutionally powerful and wealthy, like Fox News and the WSJ).

Unfortunately, the section of MAGA opposing war with Iran is totally feckless in the face of an imperial presidency that chooses the path of the pro-war MAGA constituency. None of the noise made by the Sohrab/Tucker Carlson crowd has made a bit of difference in US foreign policy so far. In the case of bombing Iran, they created a lot of media spectacle that ultimately defined the outer boundary of opposition to Trump, but that’s all. In that respect, you could be forgiven for reading them as nothing more than controlled opposition from within the Republican Party.

But I think their novelty is that they are laying claim to an (unearned) anti-war mantel for MAGA, and that creates counter-pressure against the most rabid hawks; a limited break from militarist groupthink.

It’s on that basis that GOP (but not quite MAGA) representative Thomas Massie and progressive representative Ro Khanna co-sponsored the Iran War Powers Resolution, which would prohibit US involvement in war with Iran. Did it get the necessary votes to stop war? No. The leadership of both parties are militant pro-Israel hawks vibing in their respective Axis-of-Evil echo chambers.

But as the political winds shift and the US national security state again acts in ways that make the world worse for the American people, this kind of practical cross-partisan collab is a potential pathway to staving off World War III.

That’s the context that makes the Duss-Ahmari collab interesting, and perhaps something more than two partisan pundits co-signing an op-ed in a dying billionaire-mouthpiece newspaper.

No Illusions, Know Your Limits

It’s important to stress how limited such a cross-partisan collab could/should be.

MTG, for example, doesn’t want the US fighting in Iran, but she doesn’t really care if Israel slaughters Iranians. What’s more, her social media timeline is filled with love for ICE, conspiracy theories about Antifa, condemnation of peaceful protests, and pure lies about the 2020 election being stolen (as recently as this week, and now supposedly with CCP help). She is fully MAGA, and fully onboard with its project of reactionary revolution—including violence!

Sohrab Ahmari is an interesting example in a different way. To be sure, I think Sohrab has earnest political views that are based on bad analysis.³ But he shares my view that war with Iran is folly, and perhaps racist. He supports some domestic pro-labor policies. And he’s criticized the anti-Muslim, racist, anti-communist hysteria of congressional members who are publicly lobbying for deporting New York City’s incumbent mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and stripping him of citizenship.

That’s more than even Democratic Party leadership is offering at the moment.

1. In writing this, part of me is hoping to neg the Democratic Party into embracing peace again, but it seems unlikely to work because the the party’s policies are downstream of corruption (which is bipartisan) and its particular foreign policy cadre.

2. This is the story of my own disaffection. I was literally policed out from being Democratic foreign policy cadre once I started to critique Biden (which was very early on).

3. Lest you think I’m glazing Sohrab, he wants a social order that would inevitably be repressive of women and minorities, anchored in a romantic, distorted image of mid-century American life. He opposes all manner of egalitarian identity politics, but has no problem with white Christian patriarchal identity politics. His worldview purports to be pro-worker but denies a global working class despite capitalism being a global force. And he misunderstands the role of manufacturing in political economy because he thinks neither dialectically nor in terms of uneven and combined development. The things he finds odious about reactionary politics are features, not bugs, of that politics.