A MAGA Left-Right Coalition?

On the day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday, the longtime left activist and pundit Cenk Uygur posted on X, “I’ve been trying to figure out why I’m more optimistic now than I was before the election, even though I was so against the guy who won. I know now. MAGA is not my mortal enemy (and neither is the extreme left).”

“My mortal enemy is the establishment. And they have been defeated!” Uygur declared.

The host of the progressive “Young Turks” program was obviously referring to President-elect Donald Trump, his victory and his movement. He also IDed the bipartisan Washington “establishment” as the true enemy, not necessarily Trump and his supporters.

Matt Gaetz, the MAGA devotee and former Republican congressman for Florida, retweeted Uygur’s post, along with this note of encouragement: “MAGA is not your enemy if you want to replace the mindless establishment with creative thinking, unburdened by the special interests which have ruined Washington.”

Gaetz added, “Cenk makes some good points here and people should welcome these types of coalitions in our era of political realignment.”

An “era of political realignment?” What, exactly, was Gaetz talking about?

Two days later, on Sunday, left-wing independent Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) posted on X, “Elon Musk is right.”

Musk is “right?” Bernie, of all people, really thought this? Do tell, O socialist maven of America.

“The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions,” Sanders wrote. “Last year, only 13 senators voted against the Military Industrial Complex and a defense budget full of waste and fraud.”

“That must change,” Sanders insisted.

Musk retweeted Sanders’ post approvingly. So did Gaetz, writing, “Welcome home, Bernie.”

Cutting Pentagon spending is certainly something where antiwar conservatives and progressives can come together.

The concept of populist conservatives aligning or cooperating with populist progressives on points where they agree is not new. In protesting war, militarism, defending basic civil liberties and opposing corporatism, the principled right and left have historically circled around to find common cause against a centrist right and left that often agitate for war, are keen on mass surveillance, censorship, overclassification, and serve, first and foremost, elites.

The American Conservative’s co-founder, Pat Buchanan, won the 1996 New Hampshire Republican presidential primary running on an antiwar and anti-corporatist platform that drew interest at the time from the left, who saw no such progressive agenda from the Democratic President Bill Clinton or the eventual establishment Republican nominee Bob Dole. During Buchanan’s independent presidential bid under the Reform Party in 2000, TAC’s contributing editor Bill Kaufmann called him “the only left-wing candidate” in the race. Four years later, Buchanan himself interviewed the veteran leftist and consumer advocate Ralph Nader for the magazine in 2004.

A decade later, in 2014, a year plus before the emergence of Donald Trump as a serious populist political force, Buchanan reviewed Nader’s book Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, in which he detailed how a left-right coalition had taken shape in response to the Iraq War. 

“In 2002, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry joined John McCain and George W. Bush in backing war on Iraq,” Buchanan noted. “Teddy Kennedy and Bernie Sanders stood with Ron Paul and the populist and libertarian right in opposing the war. The Mises Institute and The American Conservative were as one with The Nation in opposing this unprovoked and unnecessary war.”

He added, “The left-right coalition failed to stop the war, and we are living with the consequences in the Middle East, and in our veterans hospitals. As America’s most indefatigable political activist since he wrote Unsafe at Any Speed in 1965, Ralph is calling for ‘convergences’ of populist and libertarian conservatives and the left…”

Again, such a convergence of left and right, as Cenk Uygur, Bernie Sanders, and Matt Gaetz are flirting with, is not unprecedented.

Buchanan noted former Congressman Ron Paul’s stance against the war, which animated both his 2008 and 2012 populist presidential campaigns. Those White House runs coincided with both the Occupy Wall Street protests and Tea Party movement that often found agreement in targeting elites, whether in government or on Wall Street. Paul was not only stringently anti-war; he also attacked NAFTA and would even openly discuss the racist origins of the drug war, all positions that also attracted liberals.

This is basic but often overlooked or forgotten modern conservative and Republican history, but it is worth remembering at this moment.

Over a month out from the beginning of Trump’s second presidential term, he has a team and potential cabinet of former Democrats like Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard, whose agendas line up with many traditional liberal concerns. Thorough progressives like Cenk Uygur now see some light from a left-wing perspective in what might come from his administration, and it makes one wonder how many disenchanted leftists are out there with a similar outlook. Even a hard-left senator as high profile as Bernie Sanders agrees in principle with probable future Department of Government Efficiency leader Elon Musk that America’s military budget is just too much.

It seems as if there are two political sides in American politics currently that defy mere left and right. There are certainly diehard MAGA-acolytes who are less interested in the issues and most obsessed with Trump himself. Then there are their mirror images in the Democratic party, for whom no matter what positive results might come out of Trump’s second term, even if those results square with traditional liberal concerns, will never acknowledge any of it in their blind rage and hatred for the person and symbol of Donald Trump.

Both groups are fairly useless and hopeless. They are what they are. There’s just not much to work with there, in their mania and misery.

But there are also so many Americans, a likely majority, who might lean left or right, or perhaps somewhere in between, who genuinely want what’s best for the country and see the real problem is the people who have been in charge for so long.

For too long.

There is something to work with there. Uygur and Gaetz don’t have to be enemies in this environment. How many Republican voters who can get past “owning the libs” might find some solidarity on certain issues with some Democratic voters? How many leftists might be able to clear their heads of Trump Derangement Syndrome long enough to finally see that the best hope of avoiding the next war or reclassifying cannabis might come in the unexpected vehicle of a Trump White House?

In researching for this column, I came across a Chicago Tribune post from 1996 titled “Buchanan in Step with Mailer’s Ideas.”

“Mailer” being Norman Mailer, the notoriously left-wing author and activist, whose political career ran the gamut from protesting the Vietnam War to being endorsed by anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard in his 1969 Democratic bid for mayor of New York City.

Writing about himself in the third person, this line stuck out: “For years, Mailer, dreaming of a left-right coalition, had known it must start on the Right.”

It’s funny Norman Mailer would say this, because it might be starting now. If so, if it actually takes a fuller shape, it is definitely starting on the right.

A principled left-right coalition’s mortal enemy really is the current establishment. Cenk Uygur is spot on.

May they be defeated.