28-02-2025
‘Money, Lies, and God' looks at the creation of MAGA's ‘grass roots'
In the wake of Donald Trump's victory, there has been much anguished discussion among the commentariat about the supposed change in the cultural winds. 'Trump's cultural victory has lapped his political victory,' wrote the New York Times's Ezra Klein in a recent op-ed. 'The election was close, but the vibes have been a rout.'
Other (and in my opinion, savvier) commentators have homed in on a subtler point. In their view, what matters is not that the content of the vibes has changed — if there even is such a thing as a vibe — but that there has been a significant shift in focus, away from the gritty business of politics and to the vagaries of feelings. Our era 'favors 'vibe' and 'mood' over anything conceptual,' journalist John Ganz wrote in a prescient Substack post nearly three years ago. I can think of no better characterization of the curiously anti-political politics of a president who makes a show of his populism even as he empowers the world's richest man to gut the social safety net.
But how did we go so fully from policy to performance, from strategy to symbolism? The libidinal energy of a Trump rally is flashy, but it obscures the decades of unsexy organizing and politicking that made the frenzy possible. As journalist Katherine Stewart writes in her new book, 'Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy,' 'a stadium crowded with resentments would not add up to a political program without a tremendous amount of financial and organizational support.' In other words, the vibes don't shift themselves: It takes a lot of politics to render politics obsolete.
Much of 'Money, Lies, and God' is an attempt to debunk the myth that Trumpism is an organic movement, a product of a spontaneous outburst of disaffection. Take the case of Moms for Liberty, one of the most powerful groups in the MAGA universe. Although its founders are in the habit of pretending that they are just 'three conventional suburban moms,' Stewart writes, 'the Moms had high-level connections to the Florida GOP from the beginning.' Indeed, one of the group's nominally relatable founders is married to the former chairman of the Republican Party of Florida. Nor are the various parents recruited by Moms for Liberty entirely free agents. Though they often act as if they simply happened upon books with LGBTQ characters in school and public libraries, they have in fact been trained by websites like The Kitchen Table Activist, which teaches 'conservative activists how to identify books they label as pornography and get them banned from their school district.'
The movement that 'Money, Lies, and God' chronicles, then, is antidemocratic in two senses: in its aims, naturally, but also in its methods. The ascendant American right is not solely a reflection of preexisting popular sentiment but also a factory for producing outrage. As Stewart puts it, with a touch more restraint, 'This is a leadership-driven movement, not merely a social phenomenon.'
'Money, Lies, and God' is a bit of a grab bag. It does not advance an argument or defend a thesis so much as it takes readers on a whirlwind tour of the contemporary right. We encounter wealthy patrons, among them heirs to the Pepsi fortune who fund an organization 'intended to mobilize pastors at conservative churches in swing states to bring out the pro-Trump Republican vote'; we meet intellectuals who helped to lay the philosophical foundations of the MAGA movement, such as the Silicon Valley blogger who argued that the country should be run like a start-up (with a CEO like a king), and academics affiliated with the far-right Claremont Institute, home of some of the earliest alarmists to complain about the 'administrative state.' We are not even spared the company of celebrity pastors like Sean Feucht, who campaigned for far-right Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and who rages against vaccination on X.
There is not much in 'Money, Lies, and God' that will surprise news obsessives, connoisseurs of conservatism, or fans of the excellent and illuminating podcast 'Know Your Enemy,' which delves into the history and intellectual underpinnings of conservatism. Still, Stewart succeeds in weaving the disparate threads together, and the result is an informative if discursive primer on the pathologies and paranoias of the coalition governing our country.
Yet there are drawbacks to an approach that focuses so prominently on the movement's elites. It is true that Trumpism is, to some extent, the brainchild of an expansive network of think tanks and billionaire funders, not an expression of unmediated public will. But what political program is really any different? Whenever disparate dissatisfactions coalesce into a movement, it is because rigorous organizing has bound them together. Even if public support for Trump was hard-earned, partly even manufactured, it was ultimately earned. The president has amassed die-hard supporters among everyday Americans, not all of whom are dupes — and the grievances so effectively channeled by groups like Moms for Liberty have long been simmering. Stewart, by training her gaze on the movers, shakers and billionaires, risks suggesting that workaday Trump supporters are mere pawns in the hands of the powerful, that they do not have agency or political reasons of their own. Two things, however, can be true at once: Trumpism would not have been possible without decades of groundwork and billions in donations, and Trumpism is a movement that has come to instill and thereby reflect widespread and genuinely held sentiments, however unsavory.
Indeed, precisely because the right is so good at winning constituents over, the left can learn from its tactics. For one thing, conservatives have spent years developing an extensive organizational structure, often exploiting the apparatus of Evangelicalism. Christian nationalism is a particularly useful ideology in part because religious institutions are well-suited to mobilization. In an increasingly atomized society, churches are some of the last remaining bastions of community, and their hierarchical format leaves their members uniquely susceptible to pressure and persuasion. As Stewart writes, pastors have 'millions of churchgoers at their disposal every Sunday.'
Perhaps more important, the right has an admirably strong stomach for uncomfortable coalitions. 'Moderates, liberals, and progressives can learn something here from the right,' Stewart wisely observes. 'Their tent includes lots of people who really should not be getting along with one another.' On the left, it is not uncommon to see Marxists of even slightly different persuasions at one another's throats, conversations devolving into fusillades of recrimination. The right suffers from few such hang-ups.
Stewart's book follows what she calls 'a rowdy mix of personalities: 'apostles' of Jesus, atheistic billionaires, reactionary Catholic theologians, pseudo-Platonic intellectuals, woman-hating opponents of 'the gynocracy,' high-powered evangelical networkers, Jewish devotees of Ayn Rand, pronatalists preoccupied with a dearth of (white) babies, covid truthers, and battalions of 'spirit warriors.'' These factions have different and frequently conflicting agendas. They want 'things that cannot go together — like 'small government' and also a government big enough to control the most private acts in which people engage; like the total deregulation of corporate monopolies and also a better deal for the workforce.' Yet they managed to come together, at least long enough to install Trump in office again.
Mercifully, now that it is time to govern, cracks in the coalition are already beginning to form. The traditionalists and anti-tech humanists cannot fail to be disgusted by the machinations of techno-utopians from Silicon Valley; Stephen K. Bannon recently called Elon Musk a 'parasitic illegal immigrant.' At some point, the populists will come to blows with the billionaires. As these feuds tear the right apart, one can only hope that the left will muster some much-needed solidarity. If we survive this era intact, there will be plenty of time for the Marxists to try to make peace among themselves. For now, only together can we wrest culture back from the ethereal haze of vibes and return it to the proper realm of politics: material reality.
Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post and the author of 'All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess.'
Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy
By Katherine Stewart.
Bloomsbury. 338 pp. $29.99
