The Unholy Trio of Thinkers at the Heart of MAGA
Carl Schmitt, Antonio Gramsci and Samuel Francis each dreamed of destroying classical liberalism. That’s becoming a reality.
Schmitt, Gramsci and Francis are under the hat.
Photographer: Daniel Torok/The White House via Getty Images
Carl Schmitt, Antonio Gramsci and Samuel Francis are an ill-assorted trio. Schmitt was the Nazi Party’s favorite legal scholar. Gramsci was a leading Marxist intellectual imprisoned by Mussolini. Francis was a maverick intellectual who spent his life hanging around on the fringes of power in Washington in the Reagan-Bush-Clinton era.
But they are all united by their fierce contempt for liberalism. Dangerous minds in various guises, they have assumed a new importance in the MAGA era. If you want to understand the full significance of MAGA, not just as a collection of arbitrary political paroxysms but as a coherent episode in the history of the West, then you need to engage with these three dangerous minds.