Epistemica

Hannah Arendt discusses the distinction between the bourgeois and the citoyen and how this dichotomy helps explain the rise of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. In this context, the citoyen is a civically minded citizen of a liberal democracy, so one that promotes public good policies and supports individual freedoms. It is contrasted with the materialistic bourgeois. There are aspects of the citoyen that seem to reflect the freedom-loving, patriotic MAGA base. But there is certainly a bourgeois culture in MAGA land, even if such materialistic ideals are much, much more concentrated among the party elites. In many ways, Arendt’s distinction, here, seems to separate the MAGA base from the MAGA elites, including Trump himself.

In On Revolution, Arendt argues that modern capitalist society gradually replaced the active citizen, oriented to a shared public world, with the bourgeois subject, primarily concerned with private security, consumption, and property. The recognized historical shift altered the meaning of freedom itself. Freedom ceased to denote public action with others and came to mean private independence from interference, which remains a prominent way to view freedom in the U.S. today. From this perspective, the MAGA alliance between a wealthy, elitist leadership and a base of disproportionately white, non-college-educated voters in lower and lower-middle-income strata reveals a sort of manipulation of the MAGA base by the MAGA elites.

For Arendt, the citizen proper (i.e., a good citizen) is defined by public engagement, speech, and action in a shared space where individuals appear to one another and deliberate about common affairs. Freedom is inseparable from the public realm and is realized through participation in political action, not through retreat into privacy. In contrast, the bourgeois subject is preoccupied with economics, security, and the improvement of private well-being. Power and the purse are the primary drivers of the bourgeois. When the bourgeois orientation dominates, politics becomes a means to protect and advance private interests, rather than a sphere where citizens pursue a common world.

MAGA discourse is saturated with appeals to “freedom”: freedom from government regulation, from mask and vaccine mandates, from gun control, from “woke” corporations and bureaucrats, and from perceived interference by federal agencies. MAGA identifiers consistently describe themselves as defenders of liberty and opponents of tyranny and big government.  In Arendt’s terms, however, this is a strongly bourgeois conception of freedom. What is defended under the banner of liberty are primarily private immunities and privileges: the right to keep firearms, to avoid public health measures, to discriminate in commerce or schooling, or to shield one’s children from unwanted curricular content.

Moreover, the MAGA base often treats politics less as a forum for shared world-building and more as a battlefield for securing group advantages and protections. Studies of Trump voters show that core concerns include perceived cultural displacement, resentment toward “cosmopolitan” elites, and fear of loss of status for whites and Christians, more than programmatic engagement with institutional reform or long-term public goods (See The Symbolic Politics of Status in the MAGA Movement Koenig and Mendelberg).  The flavor of freedom at stake is frequently the freedom of a particular in-group to maintain inherited social hierarchies and cultural dominance with minimal interference, which is directly the politics of the bourgeois, even when the individuals involved are economically insecure or part of what is described as the white working class. Bourgeois and citoyen here mark orientations, not pure economic classes. A voter can live from precarious wages yet approach politics like a property-owner who wishes to fortify a private sphere against an alien and threatening public. In such a social character, the public realm is not experienced as a site of shared initiative and public happiness but as a hostile or burdensome field from which one seeks refuge.

MAGA Republicans are unusually willing to support authoritarian leaders and undemocratic measures. MAGA Republicans are more likely than other groups to endorse statements such as having a strong leader is more important than democracy and to support suspending Congress to allow a leader to solve problems without political interference (See the Wintemute et al. survey “Views of democracy and society and support for political violence in the USA“).

Here the Arendtian paradox comes into focus. A significant portion of the MAGA base defines itself as passionately committed to freedom, yet voluntarily transfers political agency to a singular leader and accepts erosions of institutional checks and civil liberties. If freedom is primarily understood as private non-interference for people like us, then the central political task becomes securing a power strong enough to defend that private domain against perceived enemies. A strong executive who promises to take care of it in one way or another, to punish opponents, and to neutralize the obstacles posed by courts, legislatures, and bureaucracies can be perceived as an instrument of freedom rather than as a threat to it, as long as his coercive capacities are directed outward.

Arendt warned that when the bourgeois conception of politics as an extension of the household and the market prevails, citizens lose their sense of responsibility for the constitutional order as a shared world. When that happens, they can (and will) welcome extraordinary measures, including emergency rule and violence, if these appear to protect their social position and material security. Today’s support from many MAGA adherents for aggressive policing, draconian immigration enforcement, restrictions on protest, and punitive measures against political opponents is a direct reflection of this. The freedom-loving subject endorses authoritarianism because he does not experience himself as a citizen among equals, but as a besieged private person who needs a powerful guardian.

The paradox of the MAGA base arises from a historically specific redefinition of freedom that Arendt traced from the revolutions of the eighteenth century to the crises of the twentieth. When freedom is detached from public action and equated with private enjoyment and exemption from obligation, democracy becomes vulnerable to movements that promise to defend our (highly exclusive) freedom by dismantling other people’s freedoms and by weakening the very institutions that sustain a shared political space.

MAGA’s constant invocation of liberty masks a double replacement. The bourgeois has replaced the citoyen as the typical subject of politics, and the leader has replaced the citizen body as the locus of public power. Authoritarianism follows, not despite professed love of freedom, but through a distorted understanding of freedom that has lost its connection to plurality, equality, and common world-building. The movement’s elitist leadership exploits such confusion, directing popular energies away from questions that might genuinely reconstitute a public realm in which citizens act together as equals. In addition to the now patently obvious lies of austerity and bringing prices down, the MAGA elite has convinced the MAGA base that any encroachment on their culturally coded privileges counts as tyranny, so that the curtailment of other people’s rights appears as an act of freedom rather than as a dismantling of the very conditions of citizenship.