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I know what I am saying sounds nonsensical at first. But I am referring to a group of Communists who unironically support Trump. This movement and way of thought was established by the YouTuber Haz and Jackson Hinkle.
For me it's questionable of this type of paternalistic socialism and why on earth they support Trump?
I wouldn't recommend that video link. It comes across as someone really trying to be philosophical, despite being stoned. Just sayin'.
To the question... Look, Trumpism isn't an intellectual movement. It has no core philosophy, no stable goals, and no real direction. It doesn't stand for anything; it merely embodies a devotion to Trump-as-savior. It has that cultish quality where the leader says stuff that no one actually understands, and then everyone pours a lot of effort into interpreting those words as wisdom (because, you know, the leader must be wise). It's perfectly possible to envision Trumpism as a form of communism. Just listen to Trump's frequent assertions that he is the greatest thing that ever happened to the working class, while ignoring other (more inconvenient) Trump claims, and Trump can start to look a lot like Lenin. C'est la vie...
Nor would Trump care, incidentally. If this MAGA-C thing came to Trump's attention, he would surely label them as the 'Good Communists', solely because they give him adulation. Bad gurus don't actually care what their followers believe, so long as their followers show firm devotion. Trump would just let his followers duke out their inconsistent beliefs, and then approve of the winners solely because they won.
TLDR: the basis seems to be a deep admiration for Russia, China, Syria, etc. And how state authority works over there, which both of these guys say is deeply rooted in popular support. And something about the liberal=socialist (in their view) global elites, which are opposing the US becoming a great [in their view] country like those. MAGA is seen as a better alternative on the path to communism, either directly in terms of value-sharing, or through some kind of accelerationism. (Haz, at least, has also claimed to be a "libertarian Stalinist".) There seems to be a connection with Duginism as well, although I only found Haz explicitly talking about that, although Hinkle apparently being more successful in social media has some appearances with Russian (and US) top TV figures.
According to The Majority Report, the term is connected with Jackson Hinkle, a self-declared communist, who explained on OAN that many goals of MAGA are aligned with his like "stopping [the subsidization of] monopolies", "end big tech", "end big pharma", "end big agriculture", "more prosperity for average Americans" etc. So far, I'd rate it as a populist program.
And then says something about "patriotic education in this country", "end open borders", so more like a nationalist & xenophobic populism. Then rants against the "green fascist push". At which point it's hard to see anything other than a pure MAGA program.
Anyhow, later on he complains that there are too many globalists left in the MAGA movement, so that seems to be his ultimate angle for calling himself a (MAGA) communist. (He specifically names John Bolton and Mike Pompeo as such undesirables.)
And then claims that:
Communists in America don't support the eradication of private property, or anything like that. What we support is [...] more businesses for the people until we reach a point when we have economic prosperity for all.
He does not explicitly connect it with the Marxist concept of superabundance, but perhaps one might read that in what he's saying. (See also "Fully Automated Luxury Communism".)
And if I'm to poke a little fun at his overall synthesis position, it kinda coincides with Condi Rice's "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Populism, Nativism, Isolationism, and Protectionism".
As for Haz al-Din, TBH at times he seems to be more into subtle trolling than something else, e.g. how he gets Trump rally attendees to agree with him that Chinese president Xi is fighting the deep state. Likewise it's a bit hard to take serious his simple dichotomy of "global socialism" vs "MAGA communism", when he includes Putin and Xi in the latter. OTOH some his other points appear somewhat more genuine reflections on where a communist should stand in the US two-party politics:
What matters is that MAGA reintroduces class struggle to American politics—not only because the MAGA movement draws its support base mainly from the working class, but “because class struggle in politics, as Lenin pointed out, means the introduction of Clausewitzian enmity in politics.”
This, says Al-Din, means recognizing that “the primary contradiction in American politics is between MAGA and the status quo. … Partisanship has made its definite return in the United States solely in the MAGA movement, which has again reintroduced real political enmity and distinction to the belly of the globalist beast itself.” The point is not what Trump says, but what he means to people. And when people fly the Trump flag, what they’re saying is: “Fuck the World Economic Forum, fuck Big Tech, fuck Big Pharma, fuck the status quo.”
American communists, Al-Din argues, are therefore faced with a stark choice: They can either remain within the safe space of ideologically consistent but politically irrelevant echo chambers, or they can choose to engage with the real political contradictions of contemporary America. They can join leftists in demonizing MAGA supporters as inherently racist, xenophobic, and so on, which effectively means siding with the status quo, or they can sacrifice ideological purity and side with the only mass working-class and anti-establishment movement that currently exists in America. There is no middle path.
N.B. Haz Al-Din has apparently become a bit popular in Russia too; an interview with him was apparently published by the somewhat obscure RCWP-CPSU. It seems the point they liked about him is that he
labels the agenda of the Democratic Party as “hitlerian”.
Also, one of his recent clips [on Russia] ends with "if you are a communist you have an obligation to support Russia"; he claims that communism essentially continues in an advanced form in Russia, or something like that. (Doesn't quite call it Putin-communism or Z-communism, but we might joke he's proposing that too. This "advanced" form of communism seems to be really Duginism, which is really just fascism according to its critics. Haz instead argues that Dugin uses the word "fascism" incorrectly to describe his own ideas. I'm not sure how true of a rendition of Dugin CPUSA does, but according to them "Dugin says that in the 21st century there is no “left” and “right,” only those who oppose the status quo and those who support it. [...] What he actually does is claim that his Fourth Political Theory is made up of the best parts of Communism and fascism, cobbled together to wage war on liberalism." Which reads a lot like what Haz is saying, with minor substitutions, like "globalist beast" instead of liberalism etc. FWTW, another source seem to directly quote Dugin: "Dugin asserts they can build “a conscious cooperation of the radical Left-wingers and the New Right [...]”.)
N.B. And yeah, Hinkle claimed on the Tucker Carlson show that "Joe Biden is plunging us in a fascist state and is taking cues from what dictator Zelensky is doing in Ukraine". Checking out Hinkle's latest videos he seems oddly interested in the "short and grim" life of Ukrainians, and touts the Russian victory in Bakhmut (which he calls the Wagner liberation thereof) etc. Another of his videos is titled "Syria DEFEATS Western Imperialists"--an interesting adoption of the Trumpian style to the Assadist agenda. (That video is full of clips of "Assad, man of the people".)
Also Hinkle had an appearance with Vladimir Soloviev, to whom he expressed his admiration. Hinkle says in that show that as a direct descendant of a Mayflower immigrant he has immense appreciation for what Russia is doing in Ukraine.
So, who knows? Fifty years from now we might learn that "MAGA communism" was brainstormed in some office in Moscow. After all, there have been leaked documents that Moscow is interested in promoting a Die Linke - AfD alliance in Germany--documents which Moscow denies are genuine.
FWTW Hinkle credits Haz with the term/idea.
Regarding the [super]abundance of small businesses, I'm not sure to what extent Hinkle shares this vision, but at least in the Chinese version of MAGA communism that Haz admires, the state promotes small businesses because those cannot threaten the state like big ones can (i.e. by becoming alternative power bases). And in any case, if the latter do that, the [Chinese] state doesn't negotiate with them, but just smashes them, which according to Haz is what prevents a ruling class from developing in China. Haz doesn't see the CCP as a ruling class itself, but rather as the expression of the "volonté générale" of the people, who get good apartments in return. (I could joke that everyone gets their smallbiz of making [party-supportive, of course] social media videos from their apartment.)
Some commentators have also linked it with the idea/tactic of accelerationism. In fact, some discussing this have also pointed out that Slavoj Žižek also endorsed Trump in 2016 for somewhat similar reasons, quoting his favoring Maoist saying: "there is disorder under the heaven -- the situation is excellent".
I'm not really inclined to carefully watch/listen an hour of Haz Al-Din, but according to a summary of another (long) video he posted, and in which I randomly clicked in a few places on the timeline, he thinks that dialectics dictate one shouldn't care about any typical [moderate] leftist issues like minimal wage and so forth. This isn't too unlike Marx's rejection of social democracy etc. Haz explicitly says CPUSA fundamentally betrayed Leninism for being compromising. Haz rejects any form of regulation because that "strengthens the existing state", preventing the ultimate revolution. He even says "socialists are pussies." So, yeah, accelerationism. He also coined another syncretism there: "libertarian Stalinism"; he says that a Stalinist state (which he sees as desirable) is more likely to emerge from the private sector, nowadays, because of big (and bigger) corporations. And that "proletarian dictatorship" is just that--one giant corporation taking over everything. He also says the Communist Party of China is more like Space X or another big corporation. (I'm getting some late Nick Land vibes there.)
Both Hinkle and Haz aggree that Xi has widespread popular support in China and that China is a "full process democracy". Both agree that China (finally) cancelling zero-Covid in December 2022 is ultimate proof that China is more democratic than Canada.
In a much more rambling video Haz calls for Venezuela to get nuclear weapons and become "apocalyptic tankies", because the regular tankies have "capitulated to liberalism entirely". He has a vision of a "mecha warlord era" for America somehow leading to the China 2098 project. "Antifa are DSA cops are we are going to have street battles with them." Etc., etc.
Somewhat related, I was curious if Dugin is correctly rendered by those critics, so here are some longer quotes from his 2012 book:
the logic of world liberalism and globalisation pulls us into the abyss of postmodern dissolution and virtuality. [...] Liberalism is an absolute evil; [...] Only a global crusade against the US, the West, globalisation, and their political-ideological expression, liberalism, is capable of becoming an adequate response.
[...]
Another question is the structure of a possible anti-globalist and anti-imperialist front and its participants. I think that we should include in it all forces that struggle against the West, the United States, against liberal democracy, and against modernity and postmodernity.
The common enemy is the necessary instance for all kinds of political alliances. This means Muslim and Christians, Russians and Chinese, both Leftists and Rightists, the Hindus and Jews who challenge the present state of affairs, globalisation and American imperialism. They are thus all virtually friends and allies. Let our ideals, be different, but we have in common one very strong feature: hatred of the present social reality. Our ideals that differ are potential ones (in potentia). But the challenge we are dealing with is actual (in actu). That is the basis for a new alliance. All who share a negative analysis of globalisation, Westernisation and postmodernisation should coordinate their effort in the creation of a new strategy of resistance to the omnipresent evil.
[...]
Politically, we have here an interesting basis for the conscious cooperation of the radical Left-winger and the New Right, as well as with religious and other anti-modern movements [...] The only thing that we insist on in creating such a pact of cooperation is to put aside anti-Communist, as well as anti-fascist, prejudices. These prejudices are the instruments in the hand of the liberals and globalists with which they keep their enemies divided. So we should strongly reject anti-Communism as well as anti-fascism. Both of them are counter-revolutionary tools in the hands of the global elite.
Being a populist is analogous to running a 2 dollar store: you need lots of merchandise (policies), each item appealing some of the punters. There is no need for them to harmonize. Before you get into office, a vote is a vote.
Consider the fact that there were left wing Nazis as well as right wingers; the Night of the Long Knives didn't occur until after Hitler took office, when he could afford to shed some supporters (and rationalize his stock). There were left wing and right wing Peronists; if you are saying there are left wing Trumpistas, that is no surprise.
I did not watch the YouTube video, but I can definitely answer the question seeking the basis of Conservative-communists or something of that kind. Ted Wringly commented "I can find to MAGACommunist is less than a year old (Vice magazine), and the whole thing seems fairly high on the 'troll' index".
Let us assume for a moment they exist, regardless of how fringe they may be. I can easily associate all pro-Russia conservatives in the US as communists or neo-communists, who wouldn't necessarily be MAGA Trump supporters. This includes Tucker Carlson, a full-fledged Russia supporter, and all those popular Twitter conservatives who bash Zelensky, and indirectly show their support for communist Russia.
The big pharma and tech giants also act under the philosophy of communism, while taking advantage of the open capitalism of the US. We can call such groups to have taken a 360 degree turn to look like communists while outwardly supporting freedom. It may be an oligopolistic communism.
Take for example the existence of black Nazis (Kanye West, Hebrew Israelites, etc.). Their Nazis is not a pro-white supremacism, rather based on hatred of the Hebrews. The same way, Tucker Carlson's communism is more caused by his rebellion to American socialists than a positive love for communism.
What exactly is the question? Is it, why would American "communists" support Trump?
It's almost certainly because, whatever else he is, Trump is a serious opponent of the global order of capitalist liberals.
We are entering pre-revolutionary times in which political radicals stop fussing about their various political destinations or ideological fine points, and instead adopt as their main shared objective the destruction of the existing order at all costs.
The liberals often talk about a political circle in which far-left and far-right elements eventually meet at the extremes. There's evidence of this in Nazi Germany, for example.
In fact what the liberals are describing primarily is a process by which they become so unpopular, unrepresentative, and democratically unresponsive, and reduce the military and economic strength of their nations so severely (as happened with Britain at the conclusion of the 19th century, and Germany in the aftermath of WW1), that eventually they succeed in uniting diverse opponents on the left and right, on the common agenda of destroying liberal capitalism.
The average American worker hasn't had a payrise for over 50 years, and populations everywhere under the control of capitalist liberals are experiencing a sustained crisis in reproduction on par with the traditional effects of wartime or famine (but with no overt war, or cause of famine, and no sign that the effect is transient).
It shouldn't be seen as surprising in these circumstances that the perception increasingly is that a serious fight for survival is already underway, and minds everywhere are becoming concentrated on breaking the existing regime.
