What will the MAGA movement be like without Trump, come whatever point he is removed from the picture?

It is an important question because it is exactly what we will be facing going forward. If we think that simply doing away with Trump is going to solve America’s problems, then a sobering look at the philosophical and ideological structure undergirding his movement should give real pause.

It is more than just Naziism 2.0 or fascist. That’s the simple and inadequate explanation. Just like the nation’s reaction to Sputnik in the 1950s, it is going to take a massive socio-cultural redo to fix the problems that have been festering for many, many years.

OK, here’s a stab at what we’re looking at in 2026 terms. Take the ideological bent of Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, whose Palantir company is on the verge of rewiring the entire internal security systems of the U.S. defense establishment.

Thiel spent years of his childhood in Swakopmund, a deeply Nazi German-infused resort town on the west coast of southern Africa in Namibia, where “Heil Hitler” is still a normal form of greeting among the town’s 25,000 residents. 

Since attending Stanford University Thiel has become a protege of the overtly anti-democratic views of Curtis Guy Yarvin, known by the pen name Menclus Moldbug, a far-right political blogger and software developer. Yarvin is known, along with Nick Land, for founding the anti-democratic philosophical movement known as the Dark Enlightenment, or the “neo-reactionary movement.” He is also aligned with the “pick up artists” movement of white males begun back in the 1960s focused on honing skills in the art of seduction.

The fact of Thiel’s close relationship with the late convicted sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, documented in myriad ways by email exchanges exposed in many of the Epstein files released by the Justice Department, may be connected to this “art of the seduction” movement and takes on even greater significance when the fact of Thiel’s homosexuality is taken into account.

But the Epstein story is not my primary concern here. Much more important is the ideological underpinnings of the MAGA movement that we will still be having to take on when Trump is gone.

Of particular interest to me is the relationship of Yarvin, Land and Thiel’s ideas to the philosophical systems developed by the late French philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault, according to Google Scholar, has far more citations on the Internet than any other philosopher. He’s known as a highly influential proponent of postmodernist thought.

Now, postmodernism is where the idea that there is no such thing as objective reality comes from (a big part of MAGA advocacy). It allows for promulgating the assertion that any election which you did not win was fixed, objective data be damned.

The scholastic world falsely labels Foucault as a leftist. He was a Nazi leftist, because his radical views wrote out of history the role of any motives for human behavior other than the pursuits of power and pleasure. Notions such as, heaven forbid!, love, brotherhood or solidarity are considered mere naive adolescent misguidances.

That power and pleasure are the only real players in human behavior is now taken as such a given in modern thought that it is hardly even noticed now. It led to the framework that Yarvin has used for his rightwing, anti-democratic thinking. It came from Foucault.

When, in San Francisco, I was advancing my own theories to build the post-Stonewall LGBT movement in the 1970s into a constructive non-conformist way of shaping a positive social future overall, little did I know then that my main adversary was lecturing to thousands of students across the bay at U.C. Berkeley, Mr. Foucault.

He was advancing power-pleasure theories applied to sexual behavior, advocating the idea that the only thing really “new” about gay liberation was the sexual act of fisting, leading to a proliferation of that behavior in the gay bathhouses in San Francisco, which apparently he was also personally frequenting almost every night.