ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 09 JUNE 2025
The conflict between Elon Musk and Donald Trump goes deeper than government policy. I think Musk already knows this. It’s easy to dismiss big politicians as hacks; as masks for unprincipled political maneuvering for the sake of profit and power, but if Musk’s political incompetence shows anything, it’s real ideology. Musk is absolutely not a politician. He is a man with big ideas and wants to do whatever he can to put those big ideas in action. You may not agree with what he believes in, I surely don’t, but I believe he genuinely cares. As for Trump, he is absolutely a politician: a needed unconventional break from political malaise to keep the machine oiled. Trump, if he believes in anything, believes in very little. So, throughout the course of this article, Trump will not be tackled by his personal ideology, but rather the ideology he has been astroturfed to represent.
I should make it clear that although Musk is the most popular of his faction of the Right, he is not exemplary of the entirety of it. In fact, he is a very milquetoast personality within it.
There is a specter haunting the Right: the specter of boomers. In all seriousness though, the Conservative Right has been the most powerful faction of right-wing politics, just as the Great Society Left has dominated the post-60’s Left. The Right, as a political tendency, was founded and forged by the Conservative Right, and historically, the Conservative Right has been considered the Right. It’s a tendency based primarily in nostalgia and reaction. Trump himself very distinctly represents an ideology of nostalgia; of going back (“Make America Great Again”).
The Conservative Right is distinctly without vision, which is why they are so incompetent as a political tendency. They have done nothing with their throne but concede to modernity again and again, which makes them the perfect punching bag of the Left, only having to vary how hard they punch every now and then. It’s often said that history moves leftward, and the Conservative Right seems to be the enabler of it with their sheer impotence (if you view the issue purely in the realm of politics).
Ultimately, it is the ideology of nostalgia, embodied by the cartoonish American-ness of Donald Trump, a blonde, overweight, asshole businessman. However, it’s now a very specific nostalgia for the Cold War. The U.S. misses the Soviet Union, in a way. The Conservative Right misses that big ideological rival to fuel their rhetoric and resistance to the flow of history. Thankfully, they have the Chinese superpower now, which Trump obviously has not ignored. The dirty commies of the Orient, the sons of the Soviet Union, can now be the alien to unite the West against, and it’s easier this time, because they’re not European. And just like the Soviet Union, the Far-Left can’t even decide if they like China or not.
Nostalgia is unabashedly riddled through the ideology of Trump, with his promises to bring back manufacturing, to revive American competency on the world stage, to destroy the decadence of modernity, and even the proposed “Great American State Fair”. The Conservative Right wants Reagan back and Trump wants to be him, but now with the Sisyphusian task of restoring the conditions that allowed America to be “great”. It’s not a fascistic palingenesis as some on the Left may want it to be, but a desperate clawing at the sand against the tides, to hold onto that memory of America. They understand this: America is dying, which is why they’re now going so hard and radical. What they don’t understand is this: America will die. The long American century is fizzling out; we don’t live in the same world that made and maintained America as it’s known. However, one tendency of the Right does seem to understand this fact.
“Right-wing progressivism” has already been taken as the label of some internet political tendency (which does actually fit into this category), so I suppose I will call this the… Progressive Right!
The Progressive Right’s establishment as a real political force came in the 1920’s, with the rise of Italian Fascism. As Benito Mussolini himself wrote in The Doctrine of Fascism:
The Fascist State is, however, a unique and original creation. It is not reactionary but revolutionary, for it anticipates the solution of certain universal problems which have been raised elsewhere, in the political field by the splitting up of parties, the usurpation of power by parliaments, the irresponsibility of assemblies; in the economic field by the increasingly numerous and important functions discharged by trade unions and trade associations with their disputes and ententes, affecting both capital and labor; in the ethical field by the need felt for order, discipline, obedience to the moral dictates of patriotism.
Fascism was the first potent attempt at a rejection of the strictly reactionary Conservative Right, influenced by the First World War and the apparent ineffectiveness of the conservatives to combat communism and societal decay. While the conservative reminisces of the old days, the Fascist embraces the dangerous future, and the transformation of society. The Progressive Right still encompasses many Neo-Fascists, but has also garnered a diverse palette of forward-thinking right-wing ideologies.
As I said before, Elon Musk is of the milquetoast Progressive Right. Forward-thinking, but at least compared to the rest of the Progressive Right, a moderate[1]. Where the Progressive Right shines with radicality is the rising tendencies within it, many reserved for dingy corners of the internet, but some garnering real political potential, most notably Curtis Yarvin’s Neoreactionaries. A cousin of said ideology is also beginning to gain traction: the Effective-Accelerationists. This new dissident tendency of the Right embodies more the principles of economic rightism (capitalism) rather than cultural rightism, overtly and covertly, and modernize cultural rightism rather than reminiscing about the 1950’s. Many in this tendency can’t even reminisce about that time. The modern Progressive Right is being forged in the Conservative Right’s worst nightmare. Western Civilization, and the foundations that have kept it alive, are being torn apart to an extent that it can no longer be ignored, and the new generations are growing up in a world of crisis. While the old men of the Conservative Right can rescind into their mind palaces, with walls built from nostalgia, the Progressive Right either refuses to, or literally cannot. It then makes sense why Musk belongs to this tendency, since he only moved to the United States well past her “golden age”.
I’m not a right-winger, or at least I don’t identify myself as such. I don’t identify myself as left-wing either. However, I can safely say that if the Right wants any stake in the future, it has to forget about the Cold War. And with the issue of newer generations growing up in modernity, and inheriting the ideological mantle, it becomes less strategic advice, and more an inevitability. The Democrats will win in 2028. The boomers will die. The nostalgia for Great America will fade. The post-modern age will fully petrify and become the cultural order. In some senses, it’s already happened. Now all that’s left is the future.
1.
When a man dressed as Stalin walks on stage and reads off the Democratic Party platform, you wouldn’t exactly call him a communist.