MAGA Conservatives Are Terrified of the Future

As pundits and political handicappers rallied to size up the impact of Donald Trump’s signature tax-and-spending bill, one of its defining features eluded them: The legislation graced with the taunting moniker “One Big Beautiful Bill” was in almost every respect a retread. Not just in that it rolls out unmerited tax cuts uniquely unsuited to prevailing economic conditions as a snake-oil panacea. In almost all of its provisions, the massive bill codified the disposition summed up in the Trump movement’s slogan “Make America Great Again”: a basic phobia of the future.

It bears noting that MAGA is itself a retread—a directive that Trump cribbed from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. The postwar conservative movement has always been a decisive break with America’s past, disowning the familiar image of the country as a frontier-­driven agent of progress, dispensing massive outlays of resources to promote ambitious initiatives like the New Deal, the Marshall Plan, and the space program. True to that backward-spooling sentiment, the Trump spending plan eviscerates key federal efforts to confront pressing challenges of the future. Where the noted postwar conservative thinker William F. Buckley Jr. announced his ambition to stand athwart history and yell “Stop!,” the Trump movement has done him one better by pulling a lever and reversing course.

Consider, for example, the greatest future-­facing challenge before the planet: the existential threat of irreversible climate change. Trump’s bill eliminates the critical subsidies to solar and wind power that the Biden administration had won when the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 became the most far-reaching climate measure that any Western country has ever passed. In place of the desperately needed innovations Biden’s bill would have encouraged, the new bill restores the leasing of federal lands for oil, gas, and coal production. A report from Princeton University’s ZERO Lab and Evolved Energy Research calculates that by 2035, this reversion to traditional dirty energy sources will boost US carbon emissions by more than 1 billion tons—an increase of 20 to 25 percent over the totals projected under the Biden-era policies.

Then there are the bill’s deeply regressive reversals of social spending—$1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid alone, as well as steep reductions in spending for health coverage under the Affordable Care Act and critical income supports such as SNAP. MAGA defenders of this cruel brand of social predation had trouble squaring it with the simultaneous extension of historic giveaways to the highest earners. They were left reviving the hoariest bootstrap exhortations to the non-wealthy, claiming that Medicaid work requirements, for example, will spur Americans to achieve great individual success. (Never mind that the vast majority of Medicaid recipients already work.) Faced with the material consequences of its own shoddy policymaking, the MAGA right has retreated further into the past, reprising a brand of discredited social mythology that crested in the late 19th century.

Meanwhile, the bill also declares economic war on one of the more reliable channels of social mobility in modern America: an affordable college education. It eliminates the Grad PLUS program, established in 2006, which lets lower-income students in graduate programs and professional schools use federal loans to cover the full cost of tuition. Under­graduate federal loans that parents can take out on behalf of their child are now capped at $20,000 per year, with an aggregate limit of $65,000—a pittance in the face of spiraling college costs, and again a burden that will fall disproportionately on students from lower-income backgrounds.

These rollbacks are part of the debilitating horror that right-wing dogmatists experience before the workings of secular and skeptical inquiry—the prospect that the ownership of their children (and hence control of the future) will be wrenched from their grasp.

The spending bill’s draconian cuts are but a distilled version of the MAGA movement’s broader future-phobia. The administration’s authoritarian and increasingly unpopular mass deportation campaign seeks to conjure a principally white Anglophone workforce out of the ether, because that’s how ghouls like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller—along with Trump himself—envision a “real America” restored to its full and natural sovereignty.

The same goes for Trump’s bedrock confidence that a restored tariffs regime—an outmoded economic palliative that also peaked in the 19th century—will magically revive American manufacturing when the country’s transformation into a service-based economy is well-nigh complete. The administration’s assaults on diversity programs, campus free speech, and public K-12 education all bespeak the same bid to conjure up an imagined community of uncomplicated, white-dominated institutional life—and to fiercely repudiate any program or initiative that acknowledges the country’s actually existing multiethnic makeup and multicultural future.

It was a fitting grace note to the spending bill’s passage that, just a few days later, a leak from the White House confirmed earlier reports that the Trump administration is set to impose brutal cuts to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—the signature program of New Frontier liberalism. Trump then named Sean Duffy—the hack reality-TV star he’d appointed, to disastrous effect, to head the Department of Transportation—as NASA’s interim director, after realizing that his previous nominee to the post, the tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, was a close confrere of Trump’s excommunicated former “first friend” Elon Musk and an occasional Democratic donor to boot. It was a perfect MAGA set piece: a petty ideological purge that delivered control of publicly funded space exploration to a minor TV celebrity who’s afraid of riding the New York subway.

When Trump’s insurgent 2016 campaign still looked to be a long-shot bid, his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton offered a typically anemic and unpersuasive rejoinder to his pet slogan, contending smugly that “America is already great.” Now that we are living through the implementation of the full MAGA agenda, it’s clear that her campaign would have been better off cribbing its riposte from the country’s first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln: “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”