How MAGA was Dragged Into Supporting Regime Change Wars
Powerful vested interests will shape the political 'right' to be pro-war, no matter what
February 28, 2026 may yet go into history as the moment that marked the beginning of the end of the MAGA movement. By starting a war on Iran, and especially starting it the way he did (full 2003-Iraq style, including making it clear that he wants regime change), Trump had irreversibly betrayed one of MAGA’s biggest founding principles: no neocon-style regime change wars. If you have a good understanding of the MAGA base, you would know that the no new wars thing is very important to many of them. The fallout will be immense. Some leading MAGA intellectuals are already expressing their disappointment, to put it mildly. There is also the question of, if a movement leader can betray one of the most core beliefs of his movement, what credibility is left of both him and his movement? Trump really made a big gamble here, and one that he is very unlikely to get a good outcome out of.
But why did Trump choose to go to war? I think the answer is clear: powerful vested interests have pushed him into this. The vested interests that made Dubya go to war have also successfully transformed Trump into Dubya 2.0. The longer Trump has been either President or a Presidential candidate, the longer he has been surrounded by these interests, and removed from the actual mood of everyday people. The other reality we all need to acknowledge here is that the GOP is still the party with the more warhawks (something I’ve long maintained even though it was popular to say the opposite for a while).
I’ve also come to reluctantly accept that anti-wokeism, at least the kind orchestrated by rich and powerful media outlets, also seems to have something to do with all this. Back during last year’s ‘12 days war’, I couldn’t help but notice how most of the anti-woke media seemed to be on the hawkish side, even as most people in the real world across the political spectrum remained strongly anti-war. This pattern has unfortunately emerged again now that the full scale war has been launched, and I am no longer able to just brush it aside anymore. The MAGA icon Sohrab Ahmari also seems to have noticed this, saying that ‘the hawks... championed popular grievances with the inanities of the “peak-woke” moment and successfully married this to the same old agenda’. While Ahmari, if I understand him correctly, seems to think the warhawks simply used their platforms gained from anti-wokeism to re-normalize their unpopular agenda, I actually suspect there is something much more profound going on.
A fact that stands out in this context is, the MAGA movement as a whole has also undergone a similar transformation like Trump’s foreign policy: it looks much more like the Dubya-era Republican Party culturally nowadays, than like the MAGA movement of 2016. Now, I’ve never been a fan of MAGA (because I don’t like trade protectionism, the cult of personality, mass deportations, and many other things), but at the beginning, I thought it at least had some qualities that made it a lesser evil in some areas, compared to Dubya-era Republicans. Putting aside all its faults, 2016 MAGA was sort of humorous, pro-free speech, anti-authority to a large extent, very very anti-war, and largely non-religious. In contrast, 2026 MAGA is fearful, reactionary, pro-censorship, pro-authoritarian, mixes religion and politics regularly, and is increasingly being dragged along to support endless, needless wars, just like Dubya-era Republicans. For a change so dramatic to have happened, and in such a specific direction, there would have to have been some intervention from some rich and powerful forces. The vested interests that tried to transform MAGA into a pro-war movement have clearly tried to transform it in other ways too, making it look more similar to Dubya-era Republicans in both cases. My view is that this is not a coincidence: people are more likely to be pro-war under certain circumstances, or more specifically, when they are in certain mindsets. Being fearful and reactionary are clearly conducive to being pro-war, for example.
When you think about it, many of the Dubya-era cultural elements of the Republican Party, like the religious right, opposition to gay marriage, fear of LGBT influence on young people, worries about dilution or loss of traditional Western culture and the like, were essentially smuggled back into the MAGA right in the name of combating wokeness. I know this because while I’ve never been a supporter of MAGA, I’ve been quite involved in anti-woke circles for several years, and I had a front-row seat to the Republican culture war agenda takeover of the anti-woke discourse. (Remember that many anti-woke people are not MAGA, but essentially all MAGA people are anti-woke.) 2010s anti-wokeism started out as driven mainly by classical liberal values and concerns, and wanting to study the postmodern or ‘woke’ left in an objective manner, to understand why they were often at odds with our values. However, a lot of the ‘anti-woke media’ (which basically came out of nowhere but somehow suddenly became popular) kept pushing moral panics about topics that were strongly associated with woke-left activism, but not really aligned with our main concerns about free speech and classical liberalism. For example, the narrative about critical race theory (CRT) often focused on the idea that it was being taught in schools to ‘brainwash our kids’, rather than what CRT actually was, its history, or its illiberal implications. The narrative about gender and trans issues excessively focused on the two issues of sports and puberty blockers, while broad and ambiguous terms like ‘gender ideology’ combined non-postmodern ideas (e.g. trans identities are real and valid) with deeply ideological postmodern ideas (e.g. gender is a social construct) thus making real intellectual debate impossible. Overall, much of anti-woke media simply became propaganda mills for the Republican culture war agenda, with an increasingly pro-Trump slant, and devoid of any actually intellectually serious conversations about either the woke-left’s actual ideas, or classical liberal alternatives to wokeness. I suspect that the top-level actors involved were both trying to change the MAGA movement, and also bring the whole anti-woke movement into the MAGA tent at the same time.
I think the lesson is that powerful vested interests have an interest in keeping the ‘political right’ constantly fearful, reactionary, pro-authority, and ‘deeply religious’ but also replacing real religion with a politically influenced version. This is because this mindset is most conducive to being pro-war. You just have to look at what happened in 2003 to see it in action. Whether it be under someone like Dubya or someone like Trump, they are going to find a way to transform the ‘right’ into this mold, using their billions of dollars and their control of media platforms old and new. The end result is that the elites who control the ‘right’ get what they want, which is endless needless forever wars. (Also note that the ‘right’ is not really a naturally occurring entity, as I previously explained, hence the need to artificially ‘unite the right’ around culture wars and moral panics.) Think about it: if all non-left people suddenly became capable of independent thinking and rejected the propaganda, the elite-right would no longer have the base they can use to support their wars. (Note that I’m not saying that the left is capable of independent thinking, they are more like an actual hivemind, it’s just that they are not the targets of the elite-right generally, because the hivemind is more difficult to take over by external propaganda.)
This is why, as responsible ‘philosophically non-left’ intellectuals, even as we criticize the ‘woke left’ for all their faults, we also need to strongly resist the kind of cultural mindset being promoted by the elite-right. To do this successfully, we need to consistently reject the fearful, reactionary and tribalist mindset the elite-right wants us to adopt, and to be on the constant lookout for their attempts to inject this mindset into our discourse. I guess another thing would be to refuse to support politicians who embody or promote this mindset under any circumstances. Finally, we need to talk about what real classical liberal values, and yes, what real conservative values entail. Conservative doesn’t equal reactionary, and we need to scream this loud and clear. Recent events have made me come to the conclusion that to become reactionary is to eventually become pro-war. We must therefore not even descend one step down this rabbit hole.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Progressive Conservative Manifesto, the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series. She is also the author of her autobiography The TaraElla Story.
Basically, he is a war pig