Why MAGA Are the Children of Marx

In 1985, I had lunch with a man named Sam Francis in the Washington Times cafeteria.
Few readers today would know the name.
But to the intellectual architects of the Make America Great Again movement, Francis is a prophet.

That meal was uncomfortable. There was something dark about him —
a conviction that made my reformist conservatism feel naïve.
At the time, I couldn’t imagine that his way of thinking would conquer my side of politics — and mine would wither.

He didn’t win because he was racist, though he was.
He won because he was a revolutionary , and I was merely a conservative.
He wanted to burn everything down; I wanted to fix it.
In the end, the arsonists took over.

Francis’s ideas were reactionary in content but revolutionary in form.
He understood that his real allies were not Edmund Burke or William F. Buckley —
but Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Antonio Gramsci.

For half a century, leftist revolutionary thought seeped into Western culture.
Gramsci called it the spontaneous philosophy of the age.
Now, MAGA has turned that philosophy against its authors.

The movement that claims to destroy the Left uses the Left’s own tools.
They took the grammar of postmodernism, critical theory, identity politics, and cultural hegemony —
and forged them into a populist weapon.

Postmodernism claimed that “truth” is a narrative written by power.
Donald Trump turned that insight into political method.
His adviser Kellyanne Conway called them alternative facts.
Rudy Giuliani said, “Truth isn’t truth.”
And with that, truth itself became power’s echo.

In 1999, left-wing activists shut down the WTO meeting in Seattle to protest globalization.
Two decades later, Trump revived their battle cry —
only with tariffs and border walls instead of unions and solidarity.
“Protect the worker” had become “America First.”

Lenin believed a vanguard could destroy a corrupt system from within.
Steve Bannon once admitted the resemblance:

The technique survived the ideology.
MAGA’s cultural warriors, from Bannon to Christopher Rufo,
use Lenin’s playbook — seize the narrative, smash the institutions,
then rule the ruins.

Sociologist C. Wright Mills once wrote of the “power elite.”
Berkeley’s Peter Dale Scott coined the “Deep State.”
These were critiques of capitalism’s hidden machinery.
MAGA borrowed them wholesale — stripped of theory, filled with conspiracy.
Every institution — the press, the courts, the universities — became suspect.
Neutrality itself became the enemy.

The Left said that social identity shapes consciousness.
MAGA flipped the logic.
Now, it is white, Christian conservatives who claim victimhood.
The “oppressed class” are evangelicals and rural men;
the “oppressor” is academia, Hollywood, and NPR.
Identity politics, it turned out, works even better when you’re the majority.

Antonio Gramsci argued that culture is the battlefield of politics.
Sam Francis quoted him directly:

That became the Bannon-Rufo doctrine —
to fight from within universities, media, and cultural institutions.
Hence Trump’s war on “the administrative state,” public broadcasting, and the Kennedy Center.
Culture first, politics later.

From Duchamp’s urinal to Serrano’s Piss Christ ,
the avant-garde sought to épater le bourgeois — to shock the middle class.
Today, MAGA’s meme culture plays the same game:
Holocaust jokes, racist “edginess,” and gleeful cruelty disguised as irony.
What once mocked bourgeois morality now mocks morality itself.

The Left invented cancel culture as moral enforcement;
the Right reinvented it as moral revenge.
Now, words like “diversity,” “gender,” and “trauma”
are taboo in conservative media.
Both sides police language —
and in that silence, anger thrives.

MAGA inherited the Left’s nihilistic tools but not its utopian goals.
It knows how to deconstruct — not to build.
The Left, meanwhile, lost the ability to inspire.

Trump didn’t create the fire.
He simply stole the matches.

MAGA isn’t an American anomaly; it’s a cultural inversion.
It’s what happens when deconstruction outlives its creators —
when critique becomes creed,
and the hunger to destroy replaces the courage to reform.

The Left’s intellectual arsenal has been looted.
The Right now wields it without shame —
not for justice, but for domination.

1. Rebuild the moral language of construction , not reaction.
2. Recover self-critique without self-erasure.
3. Make liberalism creative again — not just procedural, but visionary.

Until then, the culture war remains a contest of demolition experts.

• “MAGA isn’t Marxist — it’s racial revenge dressed as revolution.” — New York
• “They didn’t read Derrida; they read Facebook.” — California
• “There’s nothing revolutionary about nostalgia.” — Toronto
• “Brooks sees symmetry where there’s asymmetry: one side stormed the Capitol.” — Washington D.C.
• “Still, he’s right about one thing: the Left lost the language of purpose.” — Chicago