Over the last decade, the Republican Party has moved further to the right, becoming more authoritarian than most conservative parties across the Atlantic, according to a study conducted by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg. Even as the so-called “New Right” gains dominance in every branch of the U.S. government, however, it faces increasing internal tensions over its political direction.
Key factions in the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) coalition that defeated Kamala Harris last November feel disenfranchised and angry today. What some have called the “MAGA civil war” may not seem significant, but as the afterglow of victory fades and economic turmoil sets in, the rift indicates a vulnerability within Trump’s personality cult at the top of the Republican Party. Trumpism has shifted from populism to techno-oligarchy and back in convulsive maneuvers so dramatic that even the political theorist Corey Robin, author of “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump,” who called Trump “almost the complete opposite of fascism” in 2020, has recently pronounced himself “shaken out of my skepticism.”
The so-called “MAGA civil war” boils down to a rivalry between the populist and techno-oligarchic factions of Trump’s coalition, but is complicated by internal dissension within and against the New Right. Just as the Republican Party fought itself to a standstill during the 1960s in factional disputes between the “trads and rads” — traditionalists committed to virtue and libertarians committed to freedom — today’s GOP finds itself split between Elon Musk’s techno-oligarchs and Steve Bannon’s populist Traditionalists. The two factions overlap somewhat with their GOP predecessors. Musk’s side embraces unconventional lifestyles mixed with a cultish belief in capitalism; Bannon’s capital “T” Traditionalists make a more religious, populist appeal to values-based “middle-American radicals.” While some crossover exists between the two factions, what Bannon calls their “huge, almost unbridgeable differences” are such that compromise remains exceedingly difficult.
Such challenges are here already with Trump’s tariff regime and its discontents. The architect of MAGA protectionism, Peter Navarro, is a longtime ally of Steve Bannon. Among Navarro’s biggest detractors is Musk, who called the White House trade tsar a “moron” who is “dumber than a sack of bricks.” On a larger scale, members of the American Enterprise Institute, widely viewed as an “establishment conservative” think tank, lambasted the tariff schedule as “rigged” and amateurish, while Stephen Moore of the more-Trumpy, right-wing Heritage Foundation declared, “Don’t panic, investors! … Trumponomics drives growth.” According to an Ipsos poll, the tariffs risk alienating around a quarter of Republicans and are unpopular with independents.
But the expanding differences go far deeper than trade and immigration, extending to questions of sovereignty, executive theory and the will of the people.
Amid vigorous legal challenges and mass protests against the administration’s sudden and wide-ranging efforts, the competition between political cultures and their respective interests poses sharp challenges for MAGA’s uncertain future. Musk remains the most controversial figure amid the divisions and chaos of Trump’s first months. As seen during a much-publicized confrontation between Musk and Trump’s Cabinet on the morning of March 9, Musk’s ambiguous role heading up the task force known as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) clashes with the jealously guarded roles of prominent Republicans like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. Although Musk and Rubio have since arrived at an awkward public detente, the public backlash against the former suggests deeper problems for the Trump administration that may be tied to its own flagging popularity. Indeed, Musk’s odd auxiliary role in the federal government signifies a kind of “parallel state” operating between the lines of the constitutional superstructure — an interstitial, quasi-libertarian network of technologists developing their own elitist hierarchies, currencies like Musk’s favorite Dogecoin and paramilitary competencies within and outside of the federal government. One manifestation of this parallel state was the emergence and lionization of organized vigilante groups that targeted protesters during the unrest that followed the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020. While a number of such vigilante groups originated, like Dogecoin, as tongue-in-cheek larks, their deadly serious portent became obvious in cases like the killings in Kenosha, Wisconsin, by Kyle Rittenhouse during August of that year.
According to a Navigator Research poll, the most important stigma around Musk remains his role as a tech CEO. For many voters, the concept of the big tech CEO connotes economic and political power detached from public accountability. CEOs pulling down billions of dollars while avoiding taxes are sponsoring research into elitist visions of lifespan enhancement and, in Musk’s words, the possibility of “a symbiosis with artificial intelligence.” Such desires seem far removed from the everyday struggles that define “kitchen table issues,” and conservatives typically view them as belonging to a world of jet-setting social engineers aligned with the “liberal elites” of the World Economic Forum. Musk’s unpopularity, and the perception that he was attempting to buy an election, did not help his $21 million effort to defeat Susan Crawford, the liberal candidate in the April 2 Wisconsin Supreme Court race. An Associated Press headline declared it a “big loss for Elon Musk.”
Enter Musk’s most determined opponents. Nobody has relished Musk’s tumbles more than Traditionalist chieftain Bannon, who gleefully commented on his “War Room” podcast that Musk “had his wings clipped” when Trump seemed to rein in DOGE. Asked at a “little tech” summit put on by the tech company Y Combinator whether Musk’s loss in Wisconsin would sideline him in Trump’s coalition, Bannon responded: “Are you assuming that someone who spent $20 million and wears a cheesehead on a stage and bounces around is humiliated?” Despite Bannon’s small victories, it remains difficult to ignore the declining power of the populist MAGA base that he helped build, which the Trump administration appears to have jettisoned like a rocket thruster on a doomed starcraft.
It’s a tremendous irony that Trump’s political star began to rise amid the Ron Paul-driven economic libertarianism of the radical right Tea Party movement, which emerged as a response to federal bailouts of the finance sector in the aftermath of the 2008 economic recession. After all, Trump’s protectionist tariffs have plummeted global stock markets and earned the scorn of Paul’s son Rand. During his noted August 2015 campaign speech in Mobile, Alabama — just before an audience member belted out a laudatory “White Power!” — Trump called himself a “free trader.” He also said he would implement a 35% tariff on Mexico. Trump’s positions and rhetoric don’t need coherence; they just need adherents. The same can be said of his coalition. The key to understanding current divisions in MAGA is to consider the recent rise of the New Right within this labile and contradictory ideological framework.
Led by Bannon, the Traditionalists manifest the original MAGA coalition’s most powerful base, and exacting revenge on liberals to placate their grievances remains their unifying principle. Rising to prominence as the editor of the news site Breitbart, Bannon was among the first conservative leaders to embrace and promote both proud populism and the ascendant “alt-right” movement, considered by experts to be a fascist coalition. In this role, Bannon nurtured a far-right synthesis of white nationalism and Christian nationalism and a diffuse, right-wing activist movement that was spread across the country and included increasingly interconnected fascist organizations clinging to an esoteric European “identitarianism,” which calls for solidarity on the basis of white European identity. An early supporter of Trump’s 2015-2016 presidential campaign, Bannon transitioned from running a hard-right news site to the position of Trump’s chief strategist, drawing the fringes onto the main stage of the Republican Party.
The alt-right movement that Bannon mainstreamed brought together a loose coalition of fascists, quasi-academic racists, Traditionalists, “neoreactionaries” who hate liberalism, “identitarians” and “white tribalists” hoping to develop a nativist movement during the 2010s. Stemming from opposition to neoconservative hegemony within the Republican Party, the syncretic collection of cranks and violent extremists fell apart after its leader Richard Spencer celebrated Trump’s 2016 election by declaring, “Hail Victory,” while throwing up a “Roman salute” to an ecstatic audience that followed suit. Hobbled by humiliation, the alt-right ultimately collapsed after one of its adherents murdered the left-wing activist Heather Heyer in a vehicular ramming incident in the violent aftermath of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Partially filling the void left by the alt-right, the “QAnon” conspiracy theory movement emerged to rescue Trump’s personality cult. Yet as its vague prophecies of Trump’s victory over the “deep state” foundered, QAnon’s far-right clout began to wane. What appears today as Trump’s ideological cohort is quite removed from his original, populist coalition, as exhibited by the semantic pivot from Bannon’s preferred “national populist” terminology to “national conservatism” (or “NatCon”).
During the presidency of Joe Biden, new configurations of NatCon groups began to coalesce from the detritus of the alt-right, drawing on the gravitational pull of the self-described “neoreactionaries” and their valuable support from Silicon Valley figures like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. This “New Right” took on the mantle of revolt against conventional conservatism, waging a struggle against liberal democracy in favor of a “postliberal” worldview. Combining libertarian support for small government with technological futurism, the New Right disavowed liberal democracy tout court, preferring instead the version of “illiberal democracy” popularized by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban or something potentially more authoritarian, like military dictatorship or monarchism. Populism continued to play a role, albeit weakened, within a coalition increasingly defined by techno-oligarchy.
Institutions and individuals who pursued and channeled the “New Right” trend figure prominently in Trump’s administration, including his vice president, the proudly postliberal JD Vance. Its outlets include the Claremont Institute, online journals like IM—1776 and American Reformer, Passage Publishing and assorted podcasts and social media influencers across various platforms. There have been various attempts to define the New Right tendency. Libertarian Nikos Sotirakopoulos describes it as contrarian “tribalism,” which could alternately be called “hyper-groupism.” One might alternatively note its focus on male supremacism alongside general opposition to “establishment conservatives” for their compromises with liberal institutions. In this, the New Right tends to take an activist approach to dismantling institutions that promote social equality.
The New Right is markedly different from the old Trump coalition because its key neoreactionary techno-oligarchs are directly at odds with the populists who defined early Trumpism. That’s important, considering the hegemonic competition between Musk’s people and Bannonites that creates conflict within the distinct composition of the present Trump presidency. Bannon’s populism created an opening for extremist ideologies to give MAGA its sharp edge, but now Bannon is finding that this might be a double-edged sword.
Delving into the New Right’s theories, particularly around the executive branch and the nature of its power, sheds important light on the ongoing conflict between the factions, old and new, within it.
Since the New Right is defined — by leaders like Chris Rufo, the vanguard of the fight against critical race theory and “wokeness” on college campuses — through its opposition to liberalism and what it calls “establishment conservatism,” its conceptualization of liberalism becomes paramount to its ideology. Political theorist Patrick Deneen, author of “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future” (2023), argues that “gentry liberals” of the “managerial ruling class” govern the U.S. from “new medieval citadels” in fear of “the people” — the working class, who are driven by populism toward the “common good.” This division between liberalism and populism represents a “Cold Civil War” in which the “power elite” use “woke capitalism” to deconstruct “the natural family” through “forced imposition of radical expressivism,” whereas conservatism “begins with the primacy of the family.” Deneen merges a left-wing critique of capitalism with a rejection of the “primacy of the individual,” and his goal is “alignment of the elite and the people” through a mixed constitution based on an ethic more communitarian than egalitarian. This postliberal idea relies on a “new elite” driven by “aristopopulism” — what he calls a “mixing of the high and the low.”
Many thinkers in the pro-Trump camp believe that the failures of liberalism have thrust the U.S. into the flailing throes of a collapsing republic, potentially creating the need for a kind of exceptional dictatorship, or Caesar figure. In the parlance of Trump’s current head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russel Vought, during the current “post-constitutional” period, in which constitutional rule has disintegrated, a “radical constitutionalist” effort is necessary to consolidate power for the presidency through a “unitary executive.” Unitary executive theory is nothing new. One can return to Nixon’s maxim, “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” However, in a recent book chapter provocatively titled, “Is the President a King?,” political scientist Graham G. Dodds notes that if Trump tried unitary executive theory during his first term, he failed. Arguably, it is from the experience of that failed effort that Trumpists derived the lesson that populism can only take them so far — to make really sweeping changes, the leader cannot be beholden to the people.
Michael Anton, currently the director of the Policy Planning Staff in the U.S. State Department, has been ambivalent regarding whether or not the president is a king, arguing that the decline of the republic may necessitate a “red Caesar” — a Republican Caesar — to impose his will on the state through a dictatorship and overcome the period of crisis.
Anton’s idea of Caesarism as “authoritarian one-man rule partially legitimized by necessity” has gained support from commentators like self-described “warlord” Charles Haywood and Curtis Yarvin, a monarchist exponent of the intellectual tendency known as the “Dark Enlightenment.” The fundamental notion is that the President may be a king because the presidential powers outlined in the Constitution render him a de facto Caesar or Bonaparte. The line can be neatly summarized in Trump’s own February social media post bearing the Napoleonic quotation, “He who saves the country does not violate any law.”
Listening to Yarvin and Haywood interviewed in May 2021 by a somewhat skeptical Anton on the Claremont Institute podcast suggests that their ambitions are backed by rather sunny estimates of the level of tranquility in the Roman Empire. In a declaration that would surprise any historian of Ancient Rome, Yarvin declared Caesarism “so stable” that “people forgot about the whole class conflict in Rome.”
A more cogent assessment of Caesarism might observe that, far from instilling “calm,” the empire spent fewer years in stability than it did in periods of deep turmoil — like the crisis of the third century, during which the Romans suffered under two dozen Caesars over a period of five decades. It would be difficult to argue that many of these Caesars were averse to censoriousness, conformity or lasciviousness. “The people never forgot — we just tend to focus only on telling and repeating the same histories from above,” the classicist Sarah E. Bond, author of “Strike: Labor, Unions and Resistance in the Roman Empire” (2025), told New Lines.
The discussion between Yarvin and Anton ended with the former envisioning a Jan. 6 event with 2 million Trump supporters, controlled “like a joystick” by a Trump app, surrounding federal buildings and supported by armband-wearing police (armbands appear to be one of his fixations). All this for what he calls “absolute executive supremacy” — something that does not square with Deneen’s “bottom-up” postliberalism as a bulwark of traditions against techno-oligarchic elites. Whereas Deneen argues for an expansion of Congress to embrace a more representative system, others on the New Right argue for consolidation of political power behind a personalist chief executive. (Deneen declined a request for comment from New Lines.)
Yarvin’s strategy for implementing Caesarism resembles Trump’s first months. He has attempted to rule through the declaration of national emergencies, issuing about as many during his first 100 days as the entire Biden administration. The Trump camp also promotes its actions as licensed by a kind of sweeping mandate obtained through his electoral plurality, disregarding his narrow victory (he won the popular vote by a mere 1.5%) and the recent polls that show his dwindling favorability. And New Right figures closely associated with the administration closely echo Yarvin’s talking points.
Yarvin’s repetition to Anton of the New Right argument that “Trump should declare himself the living constitution” would later be echoed from the rostra at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) event in February by far-right operator Jack Posobiec, who declared, “Trump is the living embodiment of the American Constitution.” Posobiec’s restatement of this axiom would not be particularly consequential had he not been invited on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s controversial trip to Europe or joined Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on a trip to Ukraine. Even Musk has identified Trump as the manifestation of the “people’s will,” indicating that his actions cannot be challenged.
Trump is the de facto monarch, the manifestation of the will of the people, the living, postliberal constitution — not according to an outside movement with dubious links to the president but in the view of leading figures in and around the White House, including the richest man in the world. Yet the center of New Right aristopopulism cannot hold, attacked as it is from within and outside.
The fissures between the center-right and the New Right opened during the closing days of 2024 as Traditionalists began to rankle at the incoming Trump administration’s inclusion of Indian Americans in high-level posts. Trump picked Vivek Ramaswamy to co-lead DOGE with Musk and named tech entrepreneur Sriram Krishnan as AI adviser. An Indian-born U.S. citizen who called for removing country quotas on green card applicants, Krishnan drew fire on Musk’s social media site X from right-wingers insisting on curbing all immigration.
As racists on the far right began to attack Krishnan and Ramaswamy, in particular, Musk and other tech-sector leaders declared their support for the scientists and engineers who migrate to the U.S. on H-1B visas. “I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend,” Musk declared, erasing his opponents’ blue check marks (the symbols of “verification” that once brought an air of credibility on the social media app). Traditionalists like Bannon could only oblige Musk’s call to arms. Calling the three-year, renewable H-1B visa program a “scam,” in spite of the way it benefits U.S.-born workers by offering greater opportunities for advancement and collaboration, Bannon used the opportunity to rally supporters in a scramble for clout. What ensued was a vast, racist social media reaction reminiscent of the most febrile online campaigns since “Gamergate” emerged to stalk and harass female journalists for calling out misogyny in the video game industry in 2014. “This is a zero-sum game in which it is not enough for one side to win,” Bannon told his audience. “The other must lose.”
The rivalry between Bannon and Musk only deepened. A long-time acolyte of the occult as taught by Greco-Armenian spiritualist Georgij Ivanovic Gurdziev, Bannon advocates a form of national populism that locates what he calls “Judeo-Christian values” at the foundation of the U.S. For this reason, the capital “T” in Traditionalist indicates something more than a person who favors old traditions and rituals; it represents a deep spiritual faith in esoteric truths about the nature of time and the universe.
Bannon believes that Musk’s utopian ideas undermine this national core, ultimately becoming dystopian. In a recent New York Times interview, Bannon insisted that Musk, while an excellent engineer, is “most aggressive about Homo sapiens 1.0 and Homo sapiens 2.0.” Bannon insisted that techno-oligarchs like Musk advocate an “accelerationist” agenda involving human enhancements that will foster a fusion between humans and technology known as “the singularity.” This fusion would present each individual with an existential crisis, pitting their desire to live as a natural human being against their desire to part ways with the intention of God in order to fly, Icarus-like, into solar singularity.
Bannon rejects Musk and the leading group of reactionary tech billionaires, including Andreessen, as “completely atheistic, 11-year-old boys that are kinda science fiction, Dungeons & Dragons guys,” adding, “We’ve turned the nation over to them, and yes, I’m going to fight it every fucking step of the way.” Convinced that Musk’s ideology “is taking us back a millennium to feudalism,” Bannon believes that the rise of tech CEOs in the Republican Party represents a kind of invasion from the opposite side. “They’re all lefties,” he told the interviewer.
Yet in the leadup to CPAC, Bannon took to his War Room podcast to call for more cuts from DOGE while also warning that “a lot of MAGA is on Medicaid.” In this way, the division between individualistic tech elites and populist Traditionalists imposes itself at the level of policy, where the latter support a robust social safety net and the former considers Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” that must be eliminated. Adding to the fracture, Bannon denounced the budgetary Continuing Resolution as “Joe Biden’s budget,” arguing that “President Trump essentially, I think, is being hoodwinked.” The beef became so intense that Trump even attempted to intervene, asking Bannon to stop the attacks on Musk.
Bannon’s own Hitler salute during CPAC, center-stage on Feb. 20, could be seen as another gladiatorial riposte against Musk’s inauguration performance. That salute came with a price, leading Jordan Bardella, now head of the French far-right National Rally party, to cancel his own appearance at the conservative conference. Bardella’s withdrawal came just as he appeared to take steps away from populism, reflecting privately on the fact that “What is very interesting about [Trump] is his ability to reconcile popular voting with a form of economic elite … to reconcile the vote of the people with that of the entrepreneurial elite.”
Musk’s support for the far-right party Alternative for Germany, which Bardella treats with a degree of coldness, has been accompanied by the billionaire’s blitz against European Union internet regulations. What started as a controversy over visas might continue to compromise the kind of European far-right coalition for which Bannon has long labored. A week after CPAC, Bannon’s performance seemed to yield few results, with a Trump adviser telling Politico that Musk was “here to stay.”
Yet such assessments appear to have been premature.
Despite the attempts of Traditionalists and techno-oligarchs to one-up each other’s radicalism, splits exist even within the Traditionalists going to war over H-1B. Russian far-right Traditionalist Aleksandr Dugin, for example, has described Trump’s Silicon Valley workers as “the deeper state,” which “allowed Trump to win.” According to Dugin, “resistance from the deep state was relatively easy to overcome” in 2024 because “one segment of it (the high-tech sector and certain factions within the security and intelligence communities) had already been ideologically reformed according to the principles of the ‘Dark Enlightenment.’” As fractures grow within fractures, the New Right’s intellectual discourses move further from the national mood.
The reality remains that Trump’s voter coalition does not solely comprise intellectuals or online gamers. It consists, among others, of suburbanites who wanted prices to go down. What’s on their mind is less reactionary intellectualism and more sky-high egg prices along with serious talk of economic recession in the midst of Trump’s tariff agenda (on top of his overarching foreign policy reversals). Hence the ongoing New Right debates between “Trad and Rad,” and outstanding centrist criticisms of both, simply don’t resonate on a cultural level with the public.
After a disastrous March 10 interview with Larry Kudlow on FOX Business, in which Musk set his sights on “entitlements” like Social Security and Medicaid, the internecine conflict on the right erupted with even greater incandescence. “It’s no longer simmering resistance, people are fucking furious,” one anonymous Republican operative told investigative journalist Tara Palmeri. “Medicaid is not just for Black people in the ghetto, these are our voters.” The Republican operative’s approach to health care collides with the libertarian tendency to shred all entitlements, while echoing the long tradition of conservative disdain for racial inclusion in social welfare programs dating back to Article VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Two days later, Trump’s public performance of buying a Tesla from Musk on the White House lawn amid sliding stock prices garnered mixed reviews of the administration’s priorities. Late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel spoke for many when he mocked “the idea that we all now have to dig deep to help the richest man in the world … sell cars.” It is not clear if the display was tied to Musk’s offering of $100 million to Trump’s America PAC, but the strange Trump-Tesla advertisement only made clearer the significant division between the billionaire buddies and the rest of us. Just over a week later, news broke that Musk would review the Pentagon’s war plans pertaining to China. During a Cabinet meeting a few days later, Trump reportedly indicated a transition for Musk out of the executive branch, and Musk’s association with the recent loss in Wisconsin increased the pressure. The feeling appeared mutual after the implementation of new tariffs during the first week of April, which Musk sharply criticized.
Under Reagan and “establishment conservatives,” the libertarian side tended to win out within the GOP, while it was the Democrats who attempted to restrain sweeping cuts. The populists are stronger now, and the Democrats less effective, given the Republican trifecta. As populist MAGA reckons with the prospect of scaled-back entitlements, the crisis of representation between everyday Republicans and the New Right indicates a challenge for the far right’s intellectual class.
Local and state politicians understand MAGA’s cultural and political divisions and how they relate to their constituents intuitively, leading to at least one defection. Utah state Sen. Daniel Thatcher abandoned the Republican Party for venture capitalist Andrew Yang’s Forward Party on March 7, stating that the Beehive State’s legislature had “gone away from the people.” It seems that the more lawmakers focus on executive supremacy, the more the grassroots feel left behind.
The following week, Kentucky U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie went against Vance’s efforts to bring his party into line, voting against the Continuing Resolution, which averted a government shutdown, for the same reason presented by Bannon before CPAC. Trump fired back on Truth Social that Massie “should be primaried, and I will lead the charge against him. He’s just another grandstander, who’s too much trouble and not worth the fight.”
Yet the strength of Trump’s threats remains uncertain, given that the stunning dissent Republican politicians have faced at town hall meetings has led to a party-wide moratorium on such constituent consultations. Rather than face the growing gaps between the public and both Republican politicians and New Right intellectuals, House Speaker Mike Johnson lashed out against Jewish philanthropist George Soros (a frequent target of antisemitic conspiracy theories) as a purported ringleader of “professional protesters.”
By April, Trump’s economic approval rating had sagged to 43%, a nadir for his second term, making Republican resistance to constituent criticism seem more like the kind of self-referential circle that typifies radical groups no longer capable of adapting to changing social conditions.
Beyond economic issues, ICE’s recent detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder and former Columbia University student, for engaging in protest against Israel’s actions in Gaza, has caused widespread consternation among civil libertarians. Even the right-wing provocateur Ann Coulter declared, “There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport, but unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the First Amendment?” Coulter may still support mass deportations, but her questioning of Trump’s actions hints at a small but important community within religious conservative movements discomfited by “big government” repression against individual liberty.
It is possible that people like Coulter simply smell blood at this point. A week after he faced a chorus of boos at the Kennedy Center, JD Vance’s favorability numbers, according to the Washington Monthly, were “perhaps worse than any new vice president in the history of polling.” Even New Right accounts on X began sharing unflattering memes of Vance — all fun and games, perhaps, but indicative of his vulnerability as Trump’s number two.
As friction increases around the Trump administration’s civil liberties violations and budgetary priorities, Trump and his New Right affiliates face a fork in the road. For Yarvin, the distinction lies in the fact that populism depends on a vast sea of voters who consider themselves masters of their own lives, whereas Caesarism depends on a loyal following willing to sacrifice its freedom, even if it means a harder life. Returning to populism would mean making Trump beholden to the people. With anxious stock markets, Trump and company soon may be forced to test the discipline of a confused and downhearted constituency, especially if economic hardship sets in for the long haul.
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