Why Populist Movements Like Maga Are Doomed to Eat Their Own

Donald Trump's MAGA coalition cracked open this week as Steve Bannon, former White House strategist and self-styled populist revolutionary, launched a blistering attack against Elon Musk. In an interview with Italy's Corriere della Sera, Bannon branded Musk "truly evil" and vowed to excommunicate him from MAGA's inner circle by inauguration day. The catalyst? Musk's continued support for H-1B visas is a program that allows American companies to hire skilled foreign workers, and it is one that Musk's own companies, Tesla and SpaceX, heavily utilize.

The Bannon-Musk feud exemplifies a deeper tension that has always lurked beneath MAGA's surface: the movement's attempts to reconcile disparate groups of the aggrieved, the opportunists, the grifters, the ideologues, and the economists. In this case, it's the incongruent groups of Silicon Valley techno-capitalism and heartland populism. Think of it as trying to stuff both a Tesla Cybertruck and a Ford F-150 into the same garage – something's got to give.

On one side you have the tech billionaires: Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks. They see MAGA as a vehicle for their techno-libertarian dreams—a way to break free from progressive orthodoxy and bureaucratic restraint. Their vision of America's future looks like a vaporware whitepaper: decentralized, meritocratic, and built on the premise that innovation trumps regulation. Let the best code win.

The populist wing, led by figures like Bannon, wants something altogether different. Their America is more Youngstown than Palo Alto, more assembly line than algorithm. When Bannon attacks Musk's "techno-feudalism," he's not throwing around buzzwords. He's articulating a fundamental fear that the tech elite's version of "America First" looks suspiciously like "Silicon Valley First."

What makes this coalition particularly unstable is that both sides believe they're using the other. The tech billionaires see MAGA's populist energy as a battering ram against progressive regulation and social pressure. The populists see tech money as rocket fuel for their political revolution. But can you fund a populist movement with billionaire dollars without compromising its anti-elite message? Or, as the Romans might have asked, who watches the venture capitalists?

Meanwhile, Trump himself plays a delicate balancing act. His natural inclination might be toward the Musks of the world – fellow billionaires who speak the language of deals and dominance. But his political success depends on the Bannons – the ideologues who transform his personal grievances into political doctrine. Trump's genius, if you can call it that, has been his ability to convince both sides that he's ultimately with them. But as the movement matures and the contradictions sharpen, can even Trump keep this ideological circus under the same tent?

Political movements built on shared opposition rather than shared values tend to fracture once they gain power. The French Revolution devoured its children as Jacobins turned on Girondins. The Tea Party splintered between fiscal conservatives and cultural warriors. Occupy Wall Street collapsed under the weight of competing progressive visions.

The American Populist Party of the 1890s split over whether to fusion with the Democrats. The New Left of the 1960s splintered between pragmatists and revolutionaries. More recently, the Tea Party movement discovered that being against the establishment is easier than agreeing on what should replace it.

MAGA's strange bedfellows are following a well-worn historical path. What's different about MAGA's coalition crisis is the role of modern technology – both as a subject of dispute and as an accelerant of conflict. Social media platforms allow internal disagreements to become public spectacles instantly. The same tools that helped build the movement now threaten to tear it apart. Every tweet is a potential landmine, and every podcast is a possible point of schism.

MAGA's tensions have spawned ideological paradoxes that defy conventional alignments. Populist influencers now promote meme stocks, "America First" advocates champion foreign-born billionaires and the base, comprised mainly of working-class voters worked into a lather about economic displacement, diversity and immigration, finds itself allied with billionaire technocrats who profit from globalization.

Elon Musk personifies this contradiction – positioning himself as a populist champion while his business empire depends on H-1B visas and international supply chains. The result resembles an attempt at a grand unified theory where fundamental equations refuse to balance, producing a movement simultaneously opposed to and dependent on the systems it claims to fight.

Will the tech wing build its own political movement, one more openly aligned with its Silicon Valley values? Will the populists find new allies in unexpected places? Or will Trump, the ultimate political entrepreneur, find another way to rebrand and repackage these contradictions into something his base can swallow?

In the meantime, we're left with Steve Bannon, former Goldman Sachs banker turned populist tribune, attacking Elon Musk, an immigrant entrepreneur turned MAGA icon, over who truly represents the soul of a movement that claims to speak for the common man. If there's a better metaphor for the political contradictions of our age, it's hard to find it.