I wanted to love MAGA Communism. When the movement emerged on X in 2022, it ruffled all the right feathers. It sought to meet working-class people where they were, channelling their frustrations while simultaneously dismantling the Left-wing establishment.
Predictably, the Left derided MAGA Communists as “dangerous” and, of course, “fascist”. But when everything is fascist, it’s hard to take that epithet seriously. Indeed, if they’d bothered to look closer, the movement’s progressive critics may have learned something. For in reality, MAGA Communism is only a more forceful and meme-ified version of the modern Left. If it’s on the path to Fascism, it’s only because the rest of the Left lit the way.
MAGA Communism is led by a pair of the 20-something American political activists Haz Al-Din (often referred to as “Haz”) and Jackson Hinkle. Hinkle began his political career as a teenage environmentalist, praised by Teen Vogue and Reader’s Digest in 2017 as among the most inspirational young people working to “save the earth”. Within five years, however, he was describing himself as a “Maoist” and denouncing environmentalism as “anti-human” on his now banned YouTube channel. While Hinkle’s politics smack of controversy-courting and opportunism (he’s known for praising Vladimir Putin and Ali Khamenei), Haz is the more intellectual of the two although he shares similar political fandoms. His voluminous internet output includes several hundred tweet-treatises on why the ideas of Martin Heidegger and Russian ideologue Aleksandr Dugin provide the necessary foundations of Marxism and, thus for Haz, MAGA Communism. While MAGA Communism is allegedly rooted in Marxism, Haz asserts that the latter is absent in contemporary Leftism.
The movement consists mainly of niche agitations on social media, live streams and blogs which rail against imperialism and Zionism. Hinkle, in particular, has ridden the wave of anti-Israel sentiment after October 7. “Drop a like if you’re an American who SUPPORTS HAMAS,” he tweeted in May to his 2.7 million followers.
So far so Leftish. But unlike the Left, they are anti-identity politics, fervently pro-Russia and see the rise of Trump not as a sign of Fascism reborn, but as a unique opportunity to reawaken American communism. They are adamant, however, that this does not amount to support for the magnate-turned-politician. While Hinkle blamed the “deep state” for Trump’s recent assassination attempt and said he was “praying for President Trump’s full recovery”, it’s really Trump’s supporters who they’re excited about. For Haz, the rise of MAGA in 2015-2016 “marks an irreversible point in the rise of a new form of popular sovereignty in America — which American Communist politics will be rebuilt out of”. From a Left that long ago abandoned the working class for cultural issues and feigned kindness, their rejection of identity politics, gravitation towards MAGA and proclivity for edgy slogans like “FEMINISM IS CANCER” elicits horror. But dig a little deeper and things get murky.
Haz’s love affair with Dugin and Heidegger as intellectual torchbearers of Marxism hints at a much deeper affinity between both camps than either is perhaps willing to realise. At first glance, the ideas of these philosophers would seem far removed from the contemporary Left. According to Haz, Heidegger, who “finally initiated the revolution” to “emancipate the Western mind”, fuels “paranoia” amongst the Left due to the fact that he is “nearly equally infamous for [his] affiliation to German Nazism”. Instead, according to Haz’s account, the modern Left and wokeness are indebted to liberalism that stems from the Enlightenment. “Modern Western thinking doubts absolutely everything about society, even the definition of gender,” he writes. Such philosophical scepticism was upheld as an ideal during the Enlightenment.
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