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[Text/Ashley Frawley, translation/Guo Han of Observer.com]

I really want to give a thumbs up to MAGA (Make America Great Again) Communism. When this movement appeared on social media X in 2022, it made the American right furious. The MAGA communist movement hopes to connect with the working class everywhere, while channeling their disappointment, it is also dismantling the left-wing establishment.

Not surprisingly, the American left attacks MAGA communists as both “dangerous” and “fascist.” But in a society where anything can be labeled “fascist,” the term has lost its seriousness. In fact, if those progressive critics had deigned to study it, they might have gained new insights from the movement. In reality, MAGA communism is just a more militant, internet-memed modern version of the left-wing movement. If it is heading in the direction of fascism, it can only be because other left-wing forces have already gone ahead.

The initiators of MAGA communism are a pair of American political activists in their 20s, Haz Al-Din (nicknamed "Haz") and Jackson Hinkle. Hinkle first entered politics as an environmentalist in his teens and was described by American magazines Teen Vogue and Readers' Digest in 2017 as "one of the most inspiring young people committed to saving the earth."

Yet five years later, Hinkle called himself a “Maoist” and criticized environmentalism as “anti-human” on his later banned YouTube channel. Hinkle’s political approach is not without its own aggressive solicitation of controversy and opportunism (he is known for praising Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian cleric Ayatollah Ali Khamenei), while Haz is the more theoretical of the two, even though he shares a similar political fan base to Hinkle.

Hartz is very active on the internet, posting hundreds of “tweet screeds” explaining why he believes German philosopher Martin Heidegger and Russian scholar Alexander Dugin laid the necessary theoretical foundation for Marxism (and, according to Hartz’s logic, MAGA communism). Although MAGA communism’s theory is allegedly rooted in Marxism, Hartz asserts that Marxism is absent from contemporary leftism.

The main activities of the MAGA communist movement include small-scale denunciations of imperialism and Zionism on social media, live broadcasts and blog posts. Hinkel has particularly captured the anti-Israel sentiment since the outbreak of the Gaza war on October 7 last year. In May this year, he called on his 2.7 million followers on X: "If you are an American who supports Hamas, please like this tweet."

So far, everything looks very left-wing. But unlike the left-wing forces in the United States, MAGA communism opposes identity politics, enthusiastically supports Russia, and does not see the rise of Trump as a sign of the rebirth of fascism, but as a unique opportunity to reawaken American communism. But they emphasize that this does not mean that they support the businessman president.

While Hinkle blames the "deep state" for the assassination attempt on Trump and says he "prays for President Trump's speedy recovery," Trump's supporters are what excite the MAGA communist movement. Hartz believes that the rise of the "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) movement in 2015-2016 "marks an irreversible historical node, the birth of a new form of popular sovereignty in the United States - and American communist politics will be rebuilt on this basis."

For the American left, which long ago abandoned the working class and embraced cultural issues and fake good intentions, the MAGA communists' rejection of identity politics, their favor for MAGA groups, and their vitriolic slogans such as "Feminism is cancer" are creepy. But a deeper look reveals that things are not simple.

Hartz sees Dugin and Heidegger as torchbearers of Marxist theory, suggesting that the two camps are closer than they are willing to admit. At first glance, the ideas of these philosophers are far from the contemporary left. In Hartz's view, it was Heidegger who "ultimately launched the revolution that liberated Western thought", but Heidegger "has been branded with almost the same notoriety because of his attachment to Nazism", and has also contributed to the "paranoid delusions" of the Western left.

According to Hartz, the contemporary Western left and wokeism are rooted in liberalism that developed from the Enlightenment. “Contemporary Western thought, in short, is about questioning everything in society, even the definition of gender,” he writes. This philosophical skepticism was once the norm during the Enlightenment.

But this narrative overlooks the fact that the Western left long ago abandoned the universalism of the Enlightenment, believing it to be Eurocentric and racist. Richard Delgado, an American legal scholar and one of the founders of critical race theory, pointed out: "Enlightenment-style Western democracy is... the root cause of the subordination of black people. Racism and the Enlightenment are the same thing."

Today, the Western left, in its open opposition to the French Revolution and the associated Age of Enlightenment, has many similarities with the groups it labels “fascists.” More importantly (and perhaps embarrassingly for the Western left), its hatred of the French Revolution is identical to fascism as a historical phenomenon that sought to contain the mass social forces unleashed by the French Revolution.

In the process of transitioning from upholding liberal rationality to advocating authenticity, today's Western left should actually thank Heidegger more than Marx or the liberal tradition that gave birth to Marxism.

When French philosophers in the 1960s and 1970s sought to find an alternative to the Marxist tradition that Stalinism seemed to have falsified, Heidegger’s ideas were a key source of inspiration. His critique of Western philosophy as stripping the world of meaning laid the theoretical foundations for later thinkers in ecology, postmodernism, and postcolonialism.

Heidegger’s focus on authenticity and critique of modernity were attractive to a leftist seeking a deeper, more rooted form of existence to resist the superficiality of liberal capitalism. But this was also Heidegger’s reason for supporting Nazism, which he saw as having the power to restore Germans’ sense of being-in-the-world. Heidegger believed that the individual’s existential resolve could be harnessed to realize the historical destiny of the people (the Volk).

Likewise, the left increasingly rejects the inauthenticity, consumerism, and rootlessness of Western society and seeks to find an authentic subject in struggles abroad. Hinkel similarly says that what attracted him to Dugin was his celebration of Russian culture, which he saw as “the antidote to the decadent values ​​of the West.” For Hartz, the main contradiction in the world today is not between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, but between “those in power” and “the people.” He often uses the language of “soil,” tending to support movements in a country that are “built on soil and roots,” especially against the oppression of the people by “foreign” or “globalist” masters.

Like most leftists, MAGA communists are anti-Western and critical of liberalism and its accompanying individualism. They hope to practice an ontology based on community - to rethink man as a "being in community". Hartz believes that "Dugin's contribution to Marxism is necessary" because Dugin explicitly states that "the existence of a community is the premise of scientific socialism". In fact, one of Hartz's criticisms of Heidegger is that his concept of human beings, Dasein, retains too many individualistic possibilities. "Although Dasein is placed in an existing community, as an existing existential horizon, it can only obtain a true relationship with existence through the exercise of personal will."

Ironically, this puts Hartz in the same camp as the prominent feminist theorist Judith Butler, who said in true Heideggerian style during a 2021 debate: “We need a radical social ontology. In order to establish a radically different ethical and political concern, we need to rethink the self, its boundaries and its openness.”

Yet this rejection of individualism excludes what is most powerful about Marxism, and what is most powerful in overcoming the excesses of the modern left. One of the fundamental Marxist arguments is that if individuals are not free, then society cannot be free either. Unlike wokeism, which often argues that individual freedoms should be subordinated to the interests and aspirations of certain group identities, Marxism envisions a society in which everyone can flourish without being limited by race, class, or gender. In its critique of individualism, MAGA communism fails to understand a key principle of the philosophy it purports to expound.

What’s frustrating about MAGA communism is that it’s actually right about a lot of things. Its founders have slaughtered liberalism’s once-sacred cows, like the European Union, the proliferation of LGBTQ identities, and the coup against the Western left by the despised so-called “professional managerial class,” the class that is responsible for making communism unpopular in the West.

It is strange, therefore, that MAGA communists, in following thinkers like Heidegger and Dugin, have so willingly leapt into the same romantic and reactionary abyss that gave rise to fascism.

More and more Western leftists have chosen to jump into this abyss. They may have enough self-awareness to not be attracted by Dugin’s theory, but the Western left prefers to base its political propositions on the so-called authenticity of “others” - indigenous peoples and the growing “marginalized groups”, which coincides with Dugin’s criticism of Western liberal modernity. Dugin and MAGA communists are just brave enough to help people better recognize “others”.

Still, the attempt to find an authentic subject elsewhere is palpable. Today’s Western left is lost in a world that seems fake and alienated, but sees no hope of changing it, so it constantly seeks a connection with something “real.” As a result, MAGA communists, like some Western leftists, are immersed in their support for Hamas. “The fighters of the Qassam Brigades are true sons of the soil,” Haz writes. “Although it’s too late for the United States, at least there (Gaza) they can live out their ideals and drive out the rootless cosmopolitan oppressors.”

Such ideas, of course, are best buried in the 20th century. Indeed, even if one grants that beneath the scathing exterior of MAGA communists there is a fearless deliberation, it is clear that such fearlessness could lead to the most famous end of history. Providing connections to our deepest desires—such as spiritual re-enchantment or the so-called arbeit macht frei (“work brings freedom”)—can easily backfire. Even in the depths of the internet, such lessons should not be easily forgotten.

(Originally published on the British UnHerd website, original title: "Why the left hates MAGA Communism." Why the left hates MAGA Communism.)

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