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A NEW FAR-RIGHT AMERICAN PARTY?  
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John Feffer
July 9, 2025
Foreign Policy in Focus
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_ Elon Musk has disrupted Silicon Valley, the electric car industry,
and the U.S. government. His next target: democracy itself. _

Billionaire Elon Musk saluting while making a speech at the
post-inauguration celebration for President Donald Trump at the
Capital One Arena, January 2025, screen grab

 

There are always worse political figures waiting in the wings.

In Israel, for instance, Benjamin Netanyahu is a relative moderate
compared to some members of his cabinet, like Finance Minister Bezalel
Smotrich, who believes
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letting two million Palestinians die of hunger in Gaza is “justified
and moral.” In Russia, ultranationalists to the right of
Putin espouse racist and anti-immigrant views
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country’s Communist Party recently declared
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Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin was “a mistake.”

And then there’s Donald Trump, whom scholars consistently rank
as the worst president
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U.S. history. Even here, in a country of only two main parties and a
blanderizing political discourse, worse options abound. Imagine if
Trump’s successor actually believed in something other than his own
enrichment and self-aggrandizement? What if Trump is simply preparing
the ground for an authentically far-right leader to take over, someone
even more extreme than Vice President J.D. Vance or Sen. Tom Cotton
(R-AR)?

Elon Musk is prepared to use a lot of his considerable fortune to test
that proposition.

WHAT MUSK BELIEVES

It’s tempting to believe that Elon Musk decided to create a new
political party in a fit of pique because of his personal falling-out
with Donald Trump. In public, however, Musk links his decision to the
recent passage of Trump’s legislative package and the several
trillion dollars
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the measure will add to the national debt. After bonding with Trump
over eviscerating government, Musk was no doubt appalled to discover
that the president, in the end, turned out to a more conventional
tax-less-and-spend-more Republican.

Either way, Musk announced last week the creation of his new America
Party. The details of the party platform
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scant, as you might guess from a party created by tweet. Musk has
naturally emphasized “responsible spending,” debt reduction, and
deregulation. He has also added pro-gun and pro-crypto planks to his
expanding platform along with “free speech” and “pro-natalist”
positions.

These preferences might qualify the America Party as a typical
libertarian project—if it weren’t for Musk’s Nazi salute
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Trump’s inauguration, his support of the neo-Nazi party
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for Germany, and his fantastical accusations
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“genocide” against the South African government for its treatment
of white farmers. Not surprisingly, Musk entertains extreme views on
race, genetics, and demography. As _The Washington Post_ reports
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_He has warned that lower birth rates and immigration are diluting
American culture and the cultures of other majority-White and Asian
countries. “We should be very cautious about having some sort of
global mixing pot,” he said earlier this year. He has called
unchecked illegal immigration “civilizational suicide” and “an
invasion,” though he himself was working illegally, in violation of
his visa, after he deferred his enrollment in a Stanford University
graduate program to launch his career in the United States in the
1990s. He also warns that declining birth rates are leading to
“population collapse,” and, having fathered over a dozen children,
stresses the importance of “smart people” having more kids._

In his latest sign of malign intent, Musk removed controls from the
artificial intelligence component of his social media platform. The
newly unshackled Grok—named after a verb in Robert Heinlein’s
sci-fi novel _Stranger in a Strange Land_ that means a deep,
intuitive understanding—began to rant anti-Semitically
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As they say in Silicon Valley: garbage in, garbage out.

You might argue that it doesn’t really matter what Musk says or
does, given that his approval rating plummeted to 35 percent
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his tenure as DOGE-in-chief. Even his popularity among Republicans
has dropped
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78 percent in March to 62 percent after his break with Trump in June.

But Americans are political amnesiacs. The ravages of DOGE, the
insults traded with Trump: all of that could disappear down the memory
hole once Trump’s economic program starts to hurt the blue-collar
constituents that supported his 2024 candidacy. That’s when Musk
will likely dust off his earlier criticisms of the “big and
beautiful bill” and start promoting his new party in earnest.

BILLIONAIRES GONE WILD

Trump, a billionaire who has consistently overstated his assets and
his importance, proved that an idiot with a big bank account could buy
the presidency. Now along comes Elon Musk with even more money, a
bigger ego, and a comparable lack of shame.

Musk’s political trajectory resembles Trump’s in other respects as
well. They’re both supreme opportunists who have changed their
political views to suit the moment. Musk used to donate to both
Democrats and Republicans, considered the prospect of a Trump
presidency to be an “embarrassment,”
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believed in the importance of addressing climate change. He was always
something of a libertarian in his embrace of the free market, but
there was little indication in the early 2000s that he would veer off
into extremes.

If historian Jill Lepore is right, however, Musk is just returning to
his roots. His current views uncannily echo those of his grandfather,
J.N. Haldeman, who moved from Canada to apartheid South Africa where
his racist views were more the norm. She writes
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Haldeman, in the 1930s,

_joined the quasi-fascistic Technocracy movement, whose proponents
believed that scientists and engineers, rather than the people, should
rule. He became a leader of the movement in Canada, and, when it was
briefly outlawed, he was jailed, after which he became the national
chairman of what was then a notoriously antisemitic party called
Social Credit. In the nineteen-forties, he ran for office under its
banner, and lost. In 1950, two years after South Africa instituted
apartheid, he moved his family to Pretoria, where he became an
impassioned defender of the regime._

Like his grandfather, Musk escaped from his country of birth
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in this case a South Africa just then shrugging off the apartheid
system that had drawn J.N. Haldeman there. Eventually in Silicon
Valley, Musk found a like-minded community. He palled around with
Peter Thiel—and created PayPal together—before eventually falling
out over artificial intelligence. Thiel, too, has uber-libertarian
beliefs, as do other Silicon Valley disrupters like Marc Andreesen who
have shifted rightward. They all have a fondness for the latest avatar
of the Technocracy movement, Curtis Yarvin, himself a refugee from
saner realms of the political spectrum, who has waxed rhapsodic
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replacing a democratically elected president with a CEO-in-chief.

And that, perhaps, is the position that Musk imagines for himself. So
what if the Constitution forbids a foreign-born president? As Trump
has made clear, the Constitution too is ripe for disruption.

ANTICIPATING MUSK’S NEXT POLITICAL MOVE

Vladimir Putin was once a fairly conventional apparatchik before he
donned the costume of a Russian nationalist. Viktor Orban was an
ego-driven liberal before he found political opportunity in Hungary as
an illiberal autocrat. Elon Musk’s political evolution could be
compared to the trajectory of these two opportunists.

Elon Musk has indeed cultivated a relationship
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Putin over the last two years—after initially supporting Kyiv
following Russia’s 2022 invasion—and has floated pro-Russian peace
plans to end the conflict in Ukraine. Musk met with Orban at
Mar-a-Lago, along with Trump, and has tweeted support
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the Hungarian leader’s direction from time to time. But the
illiberalism of Putin and Orban is not really a model for Musk.

Instead, he has gravitated toward something even less palatable: the
Alternative fur Deutschland. The AfD, founded in 2013, built its base
on anti-immigrant sentiment, attracted extremists with its anti-Muslim
and anti-Semitic rhetoric, and capitalized on anti-elite anger
by railing against heat pumps
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Musk has framed his support of the AfD as a defense of “free
speech,” a familiar tactic of those who routinely engage in hate
speech. In an op-ed in the German _Welt am Sonntag_ newspaper that
was calculated to influence the German elections, Musk wrote
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only the AfD could save Germany by “ensuring that Germany does not
lose its identity in the pursuit of globalization.” This was a
particularly rich observation from one of the most powerful promoters
(and beneficiaries) of globalization.

Musk himself lost his earlier identity as a globalizer to become
today’s xenophobe. It’s a new type of “whitewashing” whereby
internationalism somehow loses its prefix in the laundering process.

The center, however, is not giving up so easily. Even as a larger
portion of the electorate is supporting the AfD, the German
establishment is mobilizing against the right-wing party. The
country’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution
determined in May that the AfD is an extremist organization. More
recently, the Social Democratic Party began the process
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banning the AfD, which requires that a qualifying group meet two
criteria: it must threaten Germany’s democratic order and it must be
sufficiently popular to pose such a risk. If, after a lengthy legal
process, the party is deemed unconstitutional, it is dissolved.

Obviously, such a process can’t dissolve public support for the
party’s positions. Currently the AfD is polling at 23 percent
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Christian Democrats (28 percent) but ahead of all other parties. For
the time being, these other parties are refusing to collaborate with
the AfD at a federal level, though there have been some cases of
collaboration at the subnational level. A ban—of a party or of
collaboration with that party—may be satisfying, but it doesn’t
address the reasons that the party is flourishing.

THE MUSK EFFECT

In the first flush of Brexit and Trump’s electoral victory in 2016,
Steve Bannon attempted to build a National International out of
far-right governments, parties, and movements. He largely failed. Now,
Elon Musk has stepped up to the plate, with his media platform and his
deep pockets.

As NBC reports
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_Musk has posted online in support of right-wing street demonstrations
in Brazil and Ireland. He has welcomed a new conservative prime
minister in New Zealand and expressed agreement with a nationalist
right-wing politician in the Netherlands. He’s met in person several
times with the right-wing leaders of Argentina and Italy. His social
media app X has complied with censorship requests from right-wing
leaders in India and Turkey._

As Bannon discovered, the obstacles are many to creating a far-right
network. Simply put, entities devoted to the politics of hate often
end up hating each other as well.

Musk faces numerous speed bumps at home as well to the creation of a
third party. The administrative hurdles are enormous, which is how the
Democrats and Republicans have managed to preserve their duopoly. “I
was on a Zoom call yesterday with people talking about this,” one
political analyst told
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New York Times_. “A lot of them predicted that he’s the kind of
person who, when he finds out how hard this is, he’ll give up.”

But Musk, like his Silicon Valley buddies, knows how to apply maximum
pressure to weak points in a system in order to make it crack. He has
promised to focus on just a few races where he might have the greatest
likelihood of winning. It’s the opposite of Trump, who was
interested only in building a vehicle for his own self-advancement.

Musk is far more dangerous. He actually has ideas. They’re terrible
ideas, to be sure. But they are motivating him to build something more
durable and, in the long term, potentially more disruptive.

It’s too terrifying a prospect to grok.

* Elon Musk
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* America Party
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* Third Parties
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