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TRUMPISM IS A SMALL BUSINESS OWNER’S REVOLT  
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Chris Dite
April 16, 2024
Jacobin
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_ The MAGA movement changed its strategy after January 6, attempting
to seize control of the Republican Party from the bottom up. Finish
What We Started follows the Right’s long march through America’s
political institutions. _

Supporters at a campaign rally for Donald Trump on April 27, 2023, in
Manchester, New Hampshire, Spencer Platt / Getty Images

 

Review of _Finish What We Started: The Maga Movement’s Ground War to
End Democracy_ by Isaac Arnsdorf (Little, Brown and Company, 2024)

The Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement around Donald Trump has
proven far more successful at capturing both party institutions and
mainstream support than both its Tea Party predecessor and Bernie
Sanders’s “political revolution.” Why? That depends on who you
ask.

_Washington Post _reporter Isaac Arnsdorf attempts to partially
explain MAGA’s recent success in _Finish What We Started: The MAGA
Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy_. Arnsdorf’s book
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of the commentary on Trump in that it focuses squarely on the
organizational machinations and ideas of the wider layer that
gravitates to him.

_Finish What We Started_ follows a range of mostly low-level MAGA
figures as they try to make sense of what is happening in American
politics and intervene to influence it. The key focus here is the
“precinct strategy.” It’s a post-2020 blueprint to seize
administrative control of local Republican party branches, then
continue the process upward. The end goal is to make sure the 2024
election is won by Trump, no matter what happens on the day.

Arnsdorf keeps his editorializing to a minimum. He explains at the
outset that he chose to focus on relatively minor MAGA leaders “both
because they are representative of thousands, maybe millions more like
them, but also because they were in some ways exceptional.” Those
looking for gossip about Trump’s inner circle will be disappointed:
this is mostly a view of a changed party from the bottom up.

Arnsdorf’s book serves as a nice companion piece to Ryan Grim
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Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution_ (2023) or
Edward-Isaac Dovere
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_Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat
Trump_ (2021). All three center on the interactions between political
newcomers and party bureaucracies. The significance of these
encounters is that they have the power to further or foreclose certain
broader political possibilities.

All Power to the Precincts

The precinct strategy was dreamed up by an insurance lawyer from
Wisconsin named Dan Schultz. It’s pretty simple: stack the
precincts, get MAGA chairs elected, control the administrative
apparatus, purge anyone unsupportive, then refuse to acknowledge wins
for non-MAGA candidates.

Schultz’s origin story for the plan involves being hazed in military
academy and interrogating KGB agents while working in Army
Intelligence. Schultz dubiously claims that at a meeting of the
Minutemen Civil Defense Corps —  a neo-Nazi group terrorizing
people at the US-Mexico border — a young man got up and declared
that the real power in America lies with the Republican Party Precinct
Committee chairs.

Steve Bannon stumbled upon him in 2013 and Schultz began writing for
_Breitbart_. But it wasn’t until 2021, after Bannon began promoting
him on _War Room_, that Schultz’s content began to go viral online.
Disillusioned MAGA supporters, smarting from their embarrassment after
January 6, were open to new ideas. The precinct strategy offered a
nice avenue for all involved to avoid embarrassment, feel productive,
and engage in a bit of bloodletting.

The precinct strategy took off across America. It quickly becomes a
carnivalesque suburban Cultural Revolution. Sexagenarian MAGA-red
guards denounce long-standing precinct chairs as traitors. They begin
prosecutory speeches with _Merriam-Webster_ definitions of words like
“endorse,” purging RINOs (Republican In Name Only) real and
perceived with barely concealed libidinal delight. Even old folks’
homes become unlikely show trial venues.

Haves and Have-Nots

_Finish What We Started_ lets a range of MAGA diehards explain their
take on the causes of contemporary polarization and what is to be done
about it. But this is anticlimactic: most express little more than
vague fears and suspicions, and enthusiasm for the precinct strategy.

Bannon is the one genuinely famous MAGA figure who features
prominently, and he outlines the only developed theory (stolen in part
from Bernie Sanders supporter Thomas Frank). Bannon argues that the
fallout from 2008’s global financial crisis immiserated the working
class. “Haves” like the Koch brothers were for a time able to use
culture war issues to manipulate the “have-nots” into electoral
action that actually worsened the situation, but this trick has now
stopped working.

To call any of the organizers in the MAGA camp working-class is a
stretch. Every second character has started a weird business in the
course of their activism.

Bannon explains that the Republicans are now really two parties in
one: an elite party of big corporate interests and a working-class
party of social interests. These interests are irreconcilable. MAGA,
according to Bannon, is the working-class majority cohering en masse
in their natural place against the pro-trade liberalization
billionaires.

This is a generously focused recap: Arnsdorf also notes that
Bannon’s take includes mystical ideas about recurring historical
epochs, clash of civilizations nonsense, and snippets from 1950s mass
movement-focused pop psychology.

Bannon’s “analysis” reads superficially like a structural
explanation rooted in social antagonisms. This is intentional. Bannon
delights in shocking fellow conservatives by calling himself a
Leninist and is familiar enough with key terms to ape a class
analysis. This is a fairly transparent ploy: he fully admits here that
he thinks a layer of former Sanders supporters are recruitable to the
MAGA movement.

Death (Spiral) of a (Used Car) Salesman

Arnsdorf’s approach in _Finish What We Started _is to largely let
his subjects speak for themselves. This could be problematic,
particularly if they were all as smooth as Bannon. It would simply be
foolish to take such self-assessments at face value.

Fortunately, the rest of the cast inadvertently pokes holes in
Bannon’s account of the MAGA ascendancy. The sketches here are
certainly of people who see themselves as the little guy — or at
least on his side. But to call any of them working-class is a stretch.
Every second character has started a weird business (of somewhat
unclear purpose) in the course of their activism. These aren’t
exactly the gravediggers of capitalism trying to break their chains.
They’re more like funeral home owners offering discounts if you sign
up today.

These isolated lawyers, real estate brokers, financial advisors,
flag-shirt salesmen, event planners, and ad executives do seem
genuinely buoyed by the human connection involved in their MAGA
movement experiences. But they are absolutely not experiencing their
political awakening as a worker’s revolt. And why would they?
They’re all either general managers or proud owners of small- to
medium-sized businesses.

Their pretty constant discussion of how they’re going to be thrown
in concentration camps makes more sense the more you get to know them.
While they may not explain it exactly like this, theirs is a Taftian
worldview in which freedom clearly means their own unrestricted
prerogative as business owners to do as they please. They see
literally anything else as totalitarian.

The Unknown Future Rolls Toward Us

As the November election draws ever closer, political pundits are
falling over themselves to make predictions about what a second Donald
Trump presidency might look like. Some
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attempt to read the tea leaves of Trump’s rambling speeches. Others
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commentate Trump’s _Apprentice_-esque search for a vice president.
Still more
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search among Trump’s new, allegedly professionalized courtiers for
clues as to what moves the once and future MAGA king might make.

Arnsdorf has tried something different: a narrative-based sociological
study of an organizational strategy. There are certainly lots of
memorable vignettes. One of _Finish What You Started_’s main
characters declares that, while she doesn’t need the stress and
would rather be home watching _Yellowstone_,

she was never giving up on politics. Even when it meant long nights in
her windowless office at the Cobb GOP headquarters, with her signed
Marjorie Taylor Greene yard sign and her poster mapping out the
spiderweb connections between Karl Marx and Barack Obama, titled the
AGENDA GRINDING AMERICA DOWN.

Unfortunately, the sociological focus and the title are slightly at
odds. The precinct strategy is supposed to be a stepping stone to
getting Trump elected and then “finishing what we started.” But
most of the players involved in this story never even speculate about
what Trump might do when elected. Giving his ominous phrase the title
spot feels a little cheap.

Bannon offers the clearest suggestion about what the phrase might
mean: “Economic nationalism . . . the second term is going to be
ten-X more aggressive on the implementation of policy than the
first.” If this just means more tariffs designed to shore up profits
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and quick wins
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for Trump’s buddies
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in select US industries
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then the day-in and day-out efforts of some of the people featured
here could take on a slightly sad dimension.

Then again, these “infantrymen
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lumpenbourgeoisie” do spend an awful lot of time trying to swindle
each other on the side of their organizing efforts. Characters in
_Finish What You Started_ will disappear mid-action, only to appear
later and say they’ve dropped out of politics because their comrades
scammed them out of money. Perhaps Bannon is partly right: in
Trump’s big grift, the shopkeepers have found their natural home.

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Chris Dite is a teacher and union member.

* Small Business; US Capitol Riot; Donald Trump; Republican Party;
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