Can MAGA Hold Together?

In this preview from the latest “Signal Sitdown” podcast with Bradley Devlin, Michael Knowles discusses how the MAGA coalition can stay together despite all the infighting on the right. The full interview premieres on The Daily Signal’s YouTube page at 6:30 a.m. EST on May 7.

Bradley Devlin: And yet there’s this shift in the American lexicon that’s happened, I guess, over the last 100 years. I hate attributing everything to the progressives. Don’t get me wrong. Many bad things can be attributed to the progressives. Yes. But they’re not responsible for every single social evil that we face right now. 

Michael Knowles: Right.  

Devlin: But this really does kind of start with Woodrow Wilson, where politics in the American lexicon becomes a dirty word, whereas politics, according to the Western tradition, was the good thing.  

Knowles: Yes.  

Devlin: That was the good thing as opposed to mob rule, as opposed to perverted democracies, perverted aristocracies, oligarchies, things of that nature. 

And so, I think you have to recover politics properly understood in order to get there. And so often I see on the right is a full-on rejection of politics for principle. Right? You see this all the time on social media everywhere, that, well, my principles forbid me from working with or building a coalition with somebody. 

And it can be something rather serious, right? There are fences on the island where we need to protect those fences and make sure that we keep those unsavory characters out. But these issues are super petty. It’s like, I reject a 25% tariff on EU automobiles—rather than the 15% tariff. Like, that’s the type of level that we’re dealing with when we say ‘my principles forbid me from working with you!’

How do we go about shedding the right of this idea that politics is a dirty word?  

Knowles: Well, I think you’ve gotten right to the heart of the matter, and it requires a restoration of the classical view of politics over the myriad errors that have set in, not just since the 1960s or not even since the 1910s, but that have set in since, I don’t know, the 16th century, the 17th century at the latest. 

And the thinker that I come back to as, to immediately abstract it all the way out into the realm of theory, is Michael Oakeshott.  

Devlin: You are a podcaster. This is okay. You’re not in the— 

Knowles: Yeah, I get a pass, right? And I think Michael Oakeshott, the 20th-century British political philosopher, gives us a good sense of this. 

In his essay “Rationalism in Politics,” he says that ideology is to be eschewed by the conservative because he defines ideology as the formalized abridgment of the supposed substratum of rational truth contained in the tradition. A delightfully flowery way of describing this, but it bears repeating. 

The formalized abridgment of the supposed substratum of rational truth, only rational truth contained within the tradition. And he says that’s not what we do. At that point, you have such a thin understanding of the world. This is the manifesto of the liberal or the leftist that fits in five bullet points on the back of a napkin. 

But you don’t want that. In a different essay, “On Being Conservative,” Oakeshott says that to be conservative is to prefer the actual to the possible, to prefer present laughter ultimately to utopian bliss. It’s a practical inclination, and that works for me. 

So a lot of these debates that have broken out among the podcasters, one, involve, you know, you fired me from this job 10 years ago, and you said this mean thing about me on some other podcast. Like, a lot of it really is petty.  

Inasmuch as it involves ideas, which I’m happy to debate, I delight in debating ideas, but a lot of that debate is taking place at too abstract, too high a level. 

So one will say, well, this person is advancing, this podcaster is advancing through some nebulous means. I don’t know how. Through his microphone and magic, he is advancing a postliberal integralist paleoconservative, and that is completely unacceptable. I will never dine with this person because I, you see, am a pure libertarian neo-paleoconservative, who in the arrangement of Frank Meyer, but only from 1963, not 1965. 

And you just say, can you—what are we talking about? What are we talking about?  

Devlin: And that is actually what presents the real challenge, is for people at home who are watching this all play out, they think to themselves, the sky is falling. The sky is falling. 

Now, I might be a little bit more black-pilled than you are on some of this stuff, because you’ve recently been touring the country doing speeches with TPUSA and YAF, and you said this experience has kind of been white-pilling, that there’s still a lot of really good youth energy—for as much as we talk about how young men in particular who swung heavily toward Trump in 2024 might be—not swinging back to the left, but not as enthusiastic about showing up for the midterms or in 2028.  

Knowles: No, I was just in Idaho. It was with TPUSA. TPUSA decided to continue Charlie [Kirk]’s tour, and coincidentally, I was the first person to do that. 

Charlie and I were supposed to do an event together at the University of Minnesota 12 days after he died, and they asked if I would come out and sub in on his radio show, because they still had the radio show when he was killed. You know, the show must go on, I guess. 

They were getting a bunch of his friends to sub in for weeks afterward, and I show up there days later, and they asked me, hey, are you going to do that event in Minneapolis? 

I said, guys, this is entirely up to you. It’s totally your thing. If you want me to do it, I will do it. I’ll do it alone with an empty chair. If you don’t want to do it, it’s your call. It’s your event. You make the decision. I don’t want to weigh in on it. 

And they said, we think you should do it, which was obviously the right answer. Very much in the spirit of Charlie. And so we did that.  

It was a good event up there. This was right in the wake of it. People were still quite traumatized. It was clear at that point that the left was celebrating Charlie’s death. 

So we finished that one out, and then TPUSA decided to continue the tour. 

I was a little worried, because the thing about assassinations is that they work, and no one wanted to acknowledge that. Everyone said, oh, well, you’ve struck Charlie down, and we’re devastated, but we’re going to come back 10 times stronger. And it’s like Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, and that’s copium. 

That’s actually not how it works. Assassinations do hurt people. That’s why people keep doing them. 

I was a little concerned. The left also has been very aggressive in terms of reserving seats and then not showing up, or showing up and then leaving in the first 10 minutes. I’ve dealt with these tactics for 10 years now in my own tours. 

So there was a real fear. 

There were kerfuffles when the administration was helping them out. But anyway, [Matt] Walsh and I show up in Idaho, totally packed house, maximum capacity, very big venue, and then more than 1,000 people were turned away at the door. 

Devlin: Yeah, you didn’t even know that many people lived in Idaho. 

Knowles: Truly. It was just amazing. Some of the guys were following my car out of the venue. I was doing an event afterward at a cigar lounge, of course, and they were just stopping by the car as I got out and saying, “Hey, can you sign the hat? Can you sign this? Can we talk about this?” 

But it was really great. It was really white-pilling. The questions in the room were great. I was waiting for it to be all sorts of inside baseball personality podcast nonsense like we were just discussing. 

How could you work for that dastardly Ben Shapiro? Why won’t you denounce the evil Tucker Carlson? All of this kind of meta-political stuff. It really wasn’t that at all. 

It was people asking what to do now, how to deal with the Iran war, which is controversial among the wonk class, the right-wing think tanks, and many rank-and-file conservatives, what to do about the economy. 

We had one little kid show up, mention that he wanted to become a priest, and Walsh decided to grill him on it. Very Matt Walsh thing to do. He said, “Why do you want to be a priest?” And the kid said, “I think God is calling me,” which is the pitch-perfect answer. 

You had people debating matters of theology, and it was just really substantive, really good, a very positive event. 

And I thought, okay, I’m now reaffirmed in my previously held belief that I was doubting, that there is a distinction between Twitter and real life. There’s overlap, but there is a distinction. 

And even to your point, that it’s not just affecting the podcast class, that’s true. It’s all over society. 

But it occurred to me that 20 years ago, you say, what kind of Republican are you? Someone would say, I’m a John McCain Republican. I’m a Ron Paul Republican. 

Sixty years ago, what kind of Republican are you? I’m a Barry Goldwater conservative. No, I’m a Rockefeller Republican. It was always referring to actual politicians who created public policy. 

Now if you ask, you’re much more likely to get the answer, well, I’m a Ben Shapiro conservative, or I’m a Tucker Carlson conservative. 

In other words, it now appears that the tail is wagging the dog, that the political media are really in the driver’s seat of prominence over the conservative politicians. 

Which I guess is fine by me, because I’m in that class, so I’m fine to be the belle of the ball. But in a proper political order, that would not be the case. 

You would have more of a focus on the real. 

In some ways, the sociologist Jean Baudrillard has become very popular in certain corners of the right. The man who promotes society of hyperreality. wrote a famous book about how the Gulf War didn’t really happen. It was just a sort of illusory phenomenon on television. 

Delightful writer if you’re into plausibly right-wing postmodernism. He’s a delightful writer. 

But his idea that you kind of abstract and concentrate something so far away that it’s almost unrecognizable from the source material, I think that’s where we’ve gotten with politics. 

And so you have to bring those things back together, or we will become frivolous. We will become superfluous. And the upshot of that will be that the left will actually do the governing, and we will all lose.