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Many people ask whether the MAGA movement can survive after President Donald Trump leaves office. It can, but only if his successors do what he did not: clearly define a set of principles that unite the movement’s various factions and point a direction for their common action. The influential populist think tank American Compass has just released an excellent document that does just that.
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That paper, “Reclaiming American Citizenship,” sets a revived sense of citizenship at the movement’s core. Compass’s definition of citizenship extends well beyond the simple acts of paying taxes, voting, and obeying the laws. It rejects that “thin, legalistic” view in favor of a “thick, reciprocal relationship that provide[s] the bedrock for the American republic and [gives] each citizen a real stake in its future.”
The idea that MAGA is essentially a desire to reclaim that reality will strike many readers as odd, if not wholly wrong. It runs directly counter to the view that elites left and right normally express. In their telling, MAGA adherents are resentful, misguided, and easily led (as the right-leaning elites say) or racist, bigoted, and hateful (the common view on the left).
But that’s never been true. In a 2016 National Review article published shortly after Trump clinched the GOP nomination, I argued that his voters were primarily motivated by a sense of citizenship and nationalism. That view, I contended, holds that “America is an entity that exists apart from voluntary arrangements of its residents, and that this entity obligates all of its members to act on behalf of all the other members. … It is a membership by birth in a body that demands things from everyone and in return protects and supports everyone.”
The Compass document agrees with and builds on the shared insight. It provides three elaborations on what that citizenship requires and promises: a common culture, a well-functioning market, and self-government.
A common culture, in Compass’s view, “rejects the cheap affirmation of all choices as equally virtuous and worthy of support, instead offering individuals well-defined paths down which they can successfully travel.” This means being proud of the U.S.’s past even while acknowledging its shortcomings and rejecting “divisive identity politics.” It’s easy to see how this provides the scaffolding under which current MAGA desires for an end to woke, DEI ideas, and their replacement with the recovery of equality under the law can fit.
A well-functioning market emphasizes people’s roles as producers, not only consumers, and “orients them toward meeting their own needs by serving the needs of others.” This principle explains why MAGA populists often want to restrict immigration and reorient trade to bring production back to American communities. It also explains why populists can be pro-market and pro-intervention simultaneously; the question is not one of government power per se, but one of the directions government power is exercised toward.
Self-government means “remind[ing] individuals that their fates are intertwined and they are all part of a project greater than themselves.” Americans, in this view, owe something to other Americans. They owe them self-reliance when they can do that — no free loading, whether the free-loading is done by welfare cheats or rich people and institutions creating rules to entrench and enrich themselves. They owe others protection and help to live dignified lives of their own choosing, which can mean a strong safety net and entitlement provisions along with enforcement of genuine civil rights law that treats all equally, rather than punishing supposed “privileges” held by a disfavored race or gender.
There is a lot of ground for disagreement about how to apply these principles in practice, but that’s the case with any political movement. Principles are different from ideology, as Ronald Reagan noted in his 1977 speech to CPAC. The former allows one to adapt to the real world, while the latter tries to force the real world to adapt to it. It’s commendable that Compass seeks to establish principles for a movement rather than ideological marching orders for a zombie army.
It’s also commendable that the Compass document roots the citizenship principle in America’s founding. It cites the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as guiding sources of this ideal. This helps to overcome the disturbing tendency on the Right of proclaiming either Christianity or an inchoate heritage seemingly untied to the founding documents as sources of national identity. Either of these identitarian approaches excludes large numbers of the public, many of whom are already MAGA voters and others of whom a politically viable populist majority needs to win.
Elites will not enjoy this document. The Left will hate the embrace of markets and patriotism. So-called democratic socialism wants a collective society in economics and values. It’s no accident that leading progressives from Woodrow Wilson through Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have used the language and metaphor of war to describe and rally support for the projects.
The libertarian-inclined Right will dislike it because of its recognition that there is such a thing as society. The libertarian impulse ultimately denies this in its contention that only individual choice carries moral and practical weight. Taken to its logical conclusion, as George Mason professor Bryan Caplan has done, it essentially denies the moral legitimacy of democracy itself as any collective decision by an electorate necessarily constrains individual choice.
Elites still hold the high ground in American life for two reasons. First, tens of millions of people share those views, giving them enough genuine political support to maintain a hold in democratic politics. Second, this foundation supports their overwhelming dominance of major institutions, allowing them to fend off current populist efforts to significantly — radically — transform the current system.
That power, however, cannot last forever without majority support. U.S. identity consists of many things, but it ultimately rests on our existence as a democratic government of, by, and for the people. That is what we celebrate on July 4 each year, and it is simply un-American to deny that.
This fact means that people cannot resist democratically elected majorities, cabined by the doctrine of individual rights and the procedural provisions of the Constitution. Other countries can change forms of government and retain their national coherence. The United States cannot: establish a genuine dictatorship and the entire moral foundation for the nation is undermined.
Institutions can resist a determined majority for only so long. A determined majority can undo bureaucracy’s power, defund institutions that persistently undermine public values, and restrain private economic power when it conflicts with the genuine public good. That is the lesson of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, and that is the path that conservative populists must take if they are serious about reclaiming American citizenship.
Ideas have consequences, as Richard Weaver once wrote. Trumpism, the MAGA-populist impulse, stems from the very American idea that all people are created equal, and that people’s self-government exists to ensure that equality in theory becomes equality properly understood in fact. That idea has been gaining ground, here and around the world, for the past decade. Expect it to continue to grow, and expect Compass’s magnificent articulation of that idea to be cited and drawn upon for years to come.
