A good analysis of the jump in right-wing tech bro support for Trump and the fault lines that exist between the neoreactionary and MAGA movements.
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But despite its impact on the current Trump regime, neoreactionary politics is not MAGA politics, as the tagline to James Pogue’s 2022 Vanity Fair article noted. The key reason is that neoreaction is not populist. The movement to Make America Great Again, Trump’s political base, is a classic example of right-wing populism, i.e., a movement that combines calls to intensify oppression with twisted forms of anti-elitism. MAGA politics is about defending privilege and attacking those who are seen as threatening it from below, but it also feeds on people’s sense of disempowerment, of being beaten down by a few people on top, a belief that those in power have betrayed “we the people” and must be stripped of their positions.
Neoreactionaries, by contrast, believe firmly that elites should rule and “the people” (Nick Land’s “howling irrational mob”) should not. Since Trump first entered the 2016 presidential race, MAGA aimed to mobilize a mass movement to overturn the political establishment, liberal and conservative alike. This initiative included not just electoral campaigns but also broad-based organizing and physical protests that culminated in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol in hopes of overturning the 2020 election results by force. But neoreactionaries dismiss the whole idea of a popular uprising. As Yarvin wrote in June 2024, “Charlottesville [the 2017 Unite the Right rally] and January 6 were the last lame breaths of what John Adams called ‘mobocracy’ in America.” What Yarvin envisioned wasn’t a popular uprising, but rather to “hack” the system in order to break it.
https://threewayfight.org/the-doge-and-the-neoreactionaries/
