MAGA doesn't build

Instead of a "Fourth Turning", we got a backward-looking, destructive regime.

Photo by Chandler Cruttenden on Unsplash

During the Biden years, there seemed to be an emerging bipartisan consensus that America needed to build more. On the left, you had the rise of industrial policy — Biden literally called the initial version of the Inflation Reduction Act the “Build Back Better” bill — and the nationalization of the YIMBY movement. On the right, you had Marc Andreessen writing an essay called “It’s Time to Build” — basically advocating that the government get out of the way of the private sector — and you also had a bunch of people starting defense tech companies. The bipartisanship even made it into legislation — Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the CHIPS Act were both passed with significant Republican support.

To document the spirit of the times, I wrote two “roundup” posts — one in 2022, the other in 2024:

A New Industrialist roundup

New Industrialist Roundup 2024

This enthusiasm for rebuilding America came in the wake of two destructive crises — the financial crisis and Great Recession of 2008-11, and the Covid shock of 2020. I would argue that it was also a response to the social unrest of the 2010s, which pitted Americans against their neighbors in a destructive, bitter status conflict. I think the idea of rebuilding America had bipartisan appeal in part because it felt like an alternative to focusing on intractable cultural differences — a way of moving up and forward, instead of left or right.

All of this seemed to fulfill the predictions of the 1997 book The Fourth Turning, in which William Strauss and Neil Howe predicted that a crisis would lead to a general awakening in the 2020s in which the generation that we now call Gen Z would build new national institutions and usher in a new spirit of community and collective effort.

The Biden administration was, at best, an imperfect avatar of this national impulse. Although it had some promising successes, the progressive instinct for proceduralism and the influence of entrenched special interests hobbled many of its initiatives. And socially, America remained bitter and divided — contra to the predictions of Strauss and Howe, the ebbing of unrest was due more to exhaustion than to the victory of one side. We were building chip factories, but we weren’t yet building a shared national culture or functional community institutions.

When Trump was elected last year, there was a brief moment when some people thought the Fourth Turning was back on track. Trump’s margin of victory was slim, but he did win the popular vote and all the swing states. And the big shift of minority voters toward Trump seemed to promise a way out of the 2010s social division — a new conservative consensus that crossed racial lines. Trump had also added Elon Musk to his team, and the country’s most successful industrialist was promising to make government run more efficiently. Defense tech entrepreneurs were posting American flags on X, and there was also some hope that a wave of deregulation would unleash private-sector energies that Biden had struggled to harness.

Half a year later, it’s apparent that this is not what’s going to happen. We have now seen what the MAGA movement has planned for America, and it’s pure destruction.

First, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency turned out to be entirely an ideological purge rather than an attempt to make the government run more efficiently. Promises of trillions of dollars in savings dwindled to a mere $160 billion (and will likely dwindle even further), as Elon’s squad of young tech workers rediscovered the fact that the U.S. government is already a pretty bare-bones operation. Meanwhile the effort will cost an estimated $135 billion, basically eliminating all of the savings. And although not everything it’s doing is counterproductive, DOGE will probably leave a lasting negative impact on American state capacity.

“State capacity” may sound like an abstract term, so here’s a concrete example. In response to Trump’s tariffs, China has put export controls on rare earths — minerals that are necessary to make semiconductors, magnets, and many other crucial components of modern electronics. Most rare earths are mined and refined in China. This is not an insurmountable obstacle — when China did the same to Japan, Japan simply mined a bunch of rare earths on its own instead. The U.S. could do that, and the Trump administration has said it would like to do it. However, the arm of the U.S. government responsible for making loans to get those mines started — the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office — has just had 60% of its staff cut by DOGE. This could end up severely delaying or even crippling America’s ability to escape from under the thumb of China’s export controls.

Compared to what might have been, this is a tragedy. Musk, whose singular talent for building large-scale manufacturing operations would have made him the perfect secretary of defense or manufacturing czar, instead merely became a less effective echo of Trump — a shouting culture warrior whose overriding goal was simply to rid America of the memes he doesn’t like. He is now stepping back from politics after Tesla began to suffer stock price and sales declines, and after his personal popularity took an enormous hit.

Nor has Trump’s ideological purge been limited to DOGE. Worried that DEI and other progressive ideologies have permeated America’s scientific establishment, the administration is gouging science funding and getting rid of key personnel needed to keep America’s research engines humming:

What happens when we gut federal science funding?

The attack on the scientific establishment is already causing an exodus of researchers from the U.S., which comes in addition to Trump’s unwelcoming attitude toward foreign students and researchers.

As for infrastructure, Trump has ordered a halt to the disbursement of funding from the bipartisan infrastructure act passed under Biden. This may also have an ideological angle, since many of those projects were related to green energy.

If Trump’s administration were only harming the government’s ability to build things, we might chalk it up to the overzealousness of conservative ideology. But Trump is also leveraging government power to make it harder for the U.S. private sector to build.

For example, Texas — a conservative state with laissez-faire land use policies and a pro-business attitude — has emerged as the leader in renewable energy construction, outpacing California and everyone else in building solar, wind, battery storage, and transmission. But Trump has halted most government permitting for renewable energy, even on privately owned land. Along with tariffs, this government interference is making it very difficult for Texas’ businesses to build the energy they want to build.

But the most important barrier that Trump is throwing up in front of the private sector is — of course — his tariffs. Although Trump and his advisors seem to believe that tariffs encourage U.S. manufacturing, the truth is that a regime of broad tariffs on most products from most of America’s trading partners is a recipe for deindustrialization. Already, factory orders and shipments are collapsing as a result of Trump’s import taxes (and the uncertainty they create):

Source: Heather Long

U.S. manufacturers are saying that they plan to delay capital spending plans, because of the difficulty of sourcing imported components and materials. Factory layoffs are accelerating.

The U.S. housing market — one of the main engines of American prosperity and growth — is also set to suffer from the tariffs. Tariffs raise the cost of the imported materials used to build houses. They will also probably raise mortgage rates (or at least prevent them from falling), thanks to capital flight from U.S. bonds that forces interest rates higher. And of course, economic uncertainty and the risk of recession weigh on homebuilding as well. Already, home sales are suffering.

This is not to say that everything Trump’s administration has done is inimical to the rebuilding of America; nothing is ever black and white. Trump has fast-tracked oil and gas permitting, which may cancel out a bit of the harm that his tariffs are doing to the fossil fuel industry (which depends a lot on imported components and immigrant labor). And Trump has made a few promising changes to how NEPA is administered; although these won’t have much of an effect soon, they could lead to more important changes down the line.

Overall, though, the Trump administration’s cuts to state capacity, science, and permitting, and most of all the massive ideologically-driven blunder of tariffs, are making it overwhelmingly likely that Trump’s second term will see much of the rebuilding of America slow down or grind to a halt.

This is not a function of conservative ideology. Conservatism builds things — private businesses, unencumbered by the state, build tons of houses, factories, energy, and so on. Red states have been making regulatory changes that make it easier to create housing and energy. Conservatism certainly tends to underrate the importance of state capacity and public infrastructure, but overall it manages to get a lot done — as we’ve seen in Texas and other red states:

Blue states don't build. Red states do.

MAGA, however, is fundamentally not a conservative movement. Its ideology is fundamentally isolationist rather than libertarian — cutting America off from dependency on foreign workers and foreign products is seen as the overriding goal, even if this ends up making the country poorer and more stagnant. When private companies want to build things using imported components or immigrant labor, conservatism lets them do so; MAGA does not.

The purpose of MAGA’s isolationism is fundamentally a destructive one. Modern America’s prosperity is built on globalization — before Trump, our fabulous wealth stemmed largely from the fact that the U.S. occupied a pole position in a worldwide network of supply chains, financial arrangements, and flows of human capital. MAGA ideology says that this globalization is a net negative. It believes (incorrectly) that trade deficits make a country poorer, and it believes that immigration is eroding the foundations of Western civilization. The “greatness” that the G in MAGA refers to is the cultural greatness that America supposedly enjoyed before we supposedly sacrificed it on the altar of material prosperity.

But in terms of culture, too, MAGA has built nothing of note. As I wrote in an essay last month, MAGA culture is even more atomized and deracinated than the “woke” progressive culture it despises:

Trump’s movement has been around for a decade now, and in all that time it has built absolutely nothing. There is no Trump Youth League. There are no Trump community centers or neighborhood Trump associations or Trump business clubs. Nor are Trump supporters flocking to traditional religion; Christianity has stopped declining since the pandemic, but both Christian affiliation and church attendance remain well below their levels at the turn of the century…

In Trump’s first term, the attempts at organized civic participation on the Right were almost laughably paltry. A few hundred Proud Boys got together and went to brawl with antifa in the streets of Berkeley and Portland. There were a handful of smallish right-wing anti-lockdown protests in 2020. About two thousand people rioted on January 6th — mostly people in their 40s and 50s. And none of these ever crystallized into long-term grassroots organizations of the type that were the norm in the 1950s…

And in Trump’s second term so far? Nothing. Even the rally numbers are way down. National conservatives who might have gone out to meet each other in 2017 are hunkering at home alone in their living rooms, swiping back and forth between X and OnlyFans and DraftKings, pumping their fists in the air as they read about how Elon Musk and his band of computer nerds are firing people or Trump is cutting off aid to Ukraine.

People who hoped that Trump’s ascendance would herald a nationwide right-wing cultural flourishing have had those hopes dashed.¹

In fact, Trump’s second term looks to be even less constructive than his first. Trump came into office in 2017 talking about how he was going to build a “big, beautiful wall” between the U.S. and Mexico. He tried to get Foxconn to build a factory in Wisconsin. Both of those initiatives were mostly unsuccessful. But Trump did cut the corporate tax, which encouraged the private sector to invest a bit more. He did a nontrivial amount of deregulation. And he did Operation Warp Speed, the most impressive feat of American state capacity in decades.

All of that is a memory now. Although Trump and his people still insist that tariffs will lead to a U.S. manufacturing revival, they’ve mostly abandoned the pretense that MAGA is a constructive project; instead, they’re entirely focused on purging and smashing the pieces of the country they don’t like. Trump 2.0 is animated by the idea that foreign dependence, foreign ideas, and woke ideology have infiltrated huge swathes of America’s economy and institutions. Its basic approach is to burn down or substantially degrade any piece of America that it believes to be contaminated by those forces.

It’s not a construction project; it’s a sterilization operation.

In this respect, MAGA is most similar to the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin — the leader Trump most admires, and whom he has made the greatest effort to court. Putin seized control of an existing system — a Russia whose institutions had almost entirely been built by the Soviets. He then used this system to consolidate ideological and political control, to eliminate rivals, and to launch campaigns against his foreign enemies (mostly East European countries who defied Russian control).

But during all this time, Putin did little to build up the Russian nation. Industry withered, replaced by imports from Europe. The scientific and engineering prowess that the Soviets had nurtured evaporated. Russia was run like a giant gas station, with oil and gas revenues fueling its wars and lining the pockets of its oligarchs. Right now, Russia is doing a decent job building artillery shells and drones for its war effort in Ukraine, but its overall military production remains anemic, and much of what it’s doing is just refurbishing the vast but dwindling legacy of Soviet armaments.

Like Putin, Trump has seized control of a system that other people built, and ordered that system to go destroy his enemies. But in economic terms, this approach is likely to be even less successful for MAGA than it was for Russia; whereas Putin lifted Russia out of its post-Soviet chaos on a wave of oil revenue, Trump inherited a far more complex and far more efficient economy that will only suffer from tariffs. And unlike Putin, who made a determined, focused, sustained effort to revive Russian power, Trump is lashing out haphazardly and displaying very little competence.

Things are thus looking very bad for proponents of the Strauss-Howe “Fourth Turning” thesis. If America did get a generation intent on building new national institutions, it was the Millennials, who tried to build a new progressive America in 2014-2021. The country eventually rejected most of that vision, and Trump 2.0 represents the rejection. But rejecting, smashing, purging, and destroying seems to be all that MAGA is good for; there is no new right-wing America on the horizon.

Our great national rebuilding is going to have to wait a while.

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1. I know some people like to draw analogies between MAGA and the Nazi movement in 1930’s Germany, but while Trump is certainly an authoritarian, the Nazis actually tried to build a new fascist civilization. Hitler built the Autobahn, Volkswagen, and many other pieces of infrastructure and industry. The Nazis also filled their society with social and cultural institutions — the Hitler Youth, the German Faith Movement, Strength Through Joy, and countless others in every walk of life. MAGA has none of that — no roads, no factories, no grand projects, no civic organizations, no clubs, no religion, no anything. This is, of course, not a criticism of Trump. I am glad he’s not like Hitler; a MAGA movement that built a totalitarian apparatus of state control would be far more fearsome.