MAGA as Nihilistic Rebellion

Camus nailed it: the goal is sheer destruction

“The will to power came to take the place of the will to justice, pretending at first to be identified with it.” Albert Camus, The Rebel¹

“I am your justice […] I am your retribution.” Donald Trump, CPAC, 4 March 2023²

Donald J. Trump, the nation’s agent of chaos for nearly a decade, seems poised to retake the White House in November. All the numbers are pointing in his direction. The MAGA true believers, for all their setbacks in the 2020 midterms, smell victory in the air.

Ever since Trump launched his movement in 2015, critics have tried to understand just what drives his followers. Some have concluded that MAGA is a cult whose members display a Stepford-Wife-like loyalty to Trump.³ Others observe that MAGA is at least a quasi-religion that offers disciples a messianic promise of fulfillment.⁴ Still others claim that MAGA is simply an American iteration of fascism.⁵

I think there’s merit in each of these suggestions. But I’ve come to the conclusion that the cultishness, faux-religiosity, and fascist tendencies of MAGA are epiphenominal. The core of MAGA is what philosopher Albert Camus called nihilistic rebellion. MAGAists may believe themselves to be people who hold deeply entrenched religious and political convictions. But in fact they don’t. They’re rudderless vessels, just as nihilistic as Trump is. They may claim and even believe otherwise. But if it looks and walks and quacks like a duck ….

Why else would they so enthusiastically and uncritically follow an empty vessel whose only consistency is to be inconsistent when it comes to policy and positions?

For example:

Trump is for criminally charging women who have abortions, but opposes a federal abortion ban. Trump defends antisemites—“There are some very fine people on both sides,” including thugs in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us!”—but assures American Jews he’s their best friend ever. Trump is the darling of white nationalists—“Stand back and stand by” he commands the Proud Boys—but dangles Tim Scott as a VP possibility and at a Bronx rally applauds two black rappers indicted on multiple charges. Trump solemnly holds a Bible up in front of a DC church but leads a lifestyle of sexual immorality, lies, financial malfeasance that would embarrass a sailor. Trump rails (properly, even if intemperately) against BLM riots but defends January 6 as a “lovefest.” Trump deplores impoverished “shithole” countries but exchanges “love letters” with a North Korean tyrant who bleeds his own people white.

Does his motley MAGA crowd of white nationalists, antisemites, white evangelicals, and even a goodly number of misguided blacks and old-fashioned GOPers declare “enough is enough” and walk away? Quite the contrary. The more Trump displays his cocky, narcissistic emptiness, they more they defend him. And that’s because they’re as empty as he is. Like him, they’re nihilists.

They not only repudiate in speech and deed transcendental values—compassion, forgiveness, generosity, and tolerance are clearly for chumps like libs and RINOS (and maybe Jesus?)—but don’t even accept objective norms of truth.

Kellyanne Conway infamously talked about “alternative facts” in her defiant “Meet the Press” interview (22 January 2017) and Trump can’t seem to string together five consecutive sentences without lying about something. (He, doubtlessly, would insist he’s practicing “truth hyperbole,” not deception. In his toxic Art of the Deal he justifies himself by claiming that “people want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.”⁶ )

MAGA rank-and-file members eagerly follow suit. They refuse to accept the reality that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, they uncritically swallow the most outlandish conspiracy fantasies churned out by the likes of FOX “News,” Breitbart, OAN, Newsmax, and Alex Jones—not to mention all the QAnon nonsense—and they don’t hesitate to intimidate or even threaten anyone who disagrees with them. There is no truth, and Trump is its prophet.

Pure nihilism. These people make Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin like like a tyro.

In The Rebel, Camus distinguishes between what he calls “positive” and “negative” or “nihilistic” rebellion.

Positive rebels reject the present, which they condemn as politically or socially oppressive, for the sake of their vision of a future of “love and fecundity” which allows humans to lead fulfilled lives.⁷ For them, all individuals, even those they see as oppressors, have an intrinsic worth that must be respected. Violence, while necessary, should never be undertaken lightly. In his play The Just Assassins, Camus dramatizes this position by portraying the assassins of Tsar Alexander II, Kaliayev and Dora, as so guilt-stricken over their deed—a deed they nonetheless think justifiable and even essential—that they feel the need to atone with their own lives. Camus says of them, “My admiration for my heroes, Kaliayev and Dora, is complete. […] Our world of today seems loathsome to us for the very reason that it is made by men who grant themselves the right to go beyond [any and all] limits.”⁸

Negative or nihilistic rebels, on the other hand, have no patience with talk about futures in which love and fecundity reign. In fact, they have no vision of the future at all, even though they frequently use rhetorical slogans—such as “Make America Great Again”—that suggest the contrary. They’re so consumed with “rancor” and “malice” that they find it difficult to leave an imagined past when (they think) times were good or an equally imagined present when (they think) everything is awful.⁹ The future doesn’t really exist for them. They’re too focused on their grievances, and on their vengeful desire to destroy everything against which they hold a grudge. Humans have no intrinsic worth; indeed, negative rebels view any person who disagrees with them as an utterly expendable obstacle. This dark urge to uproot and tear down, if it gains enough traction, can lead to a politically oppressive regime in which “everything is meaningless”—that is, truth vanishes as an objective reality—“and history is only written in themes of the hazards of force.”¹⁰

This describes MAGAists, and the man to whom they’ve pledged their loyalty, to a tee. I wish it didn’t, because then the rest of us might be able to have a conversation with them. We might discover some common ground, some shared bit of decency, howsoever slight, on which to build a reasonable and hopefully fruitful dialogue. But a nihilist is focused on destruction, not dialogue, vengeance rather than rapproachment. A nihilist, a true and tried MAGA loyalist, is interested only in exulting in the perpetual “rancor and malice” that gets him or her out of bed in the morning. To hate is to be.

That’s what the nation and the world is up against. To pretend otherwise, to fall back on the now hollow excuses for MAGA nihilism we liberals once trotted out—it’s poverty and social marginalization, not racism and hatred, that fuels MAGA discontent; it’s actually we who have driven them into Trump’s orbit; we must do better by them!—is lunacy. And it’s dangerous as hell.

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1. Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), p. 225.

2. “‘I am your retribution’: Trump rules supreme at CPAC as he relaunches bid for White House.” The Guardian, 4 March 2023.

3. See, for example, Peter Sagal, “The End Will Come for the Cult of MAGA.” The Atlantic (30 August 2023).

4. See, for example, Michael C. Bender, “The Church of Trump: How He’s Infusing Christianity into His Movement.” New York Times (1 April 2024).

5. See, for example, Christopher R. Browning, “A New Kind of Fascism.” The Atlantic (25 July 2023) or Robert Reich, “How Trump is Following Hitler’s Playbook.” YouTube (19 March 2024).

6. Donald J. Trump, Trump: The Art of the Deal (New York: Random House, 2015), p. 58.

7. Camus, The Rebel, p. 304.

8. Albert Camus, “Author’s Preface” in Caligula and Three Other Plays, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), p. x.

9. Camus, The Rebel, p. 305.

10. Ibid., p. 178.