Donald Trump’s America is a scary place in significant part thanks to an unholy alliance of MAGA devotees who don’t believe in science and see intellectuals as public enemy number one, and a gaggle of Silicon Valley militarists who think that they’re the smartest people in the room, if not the universe. Add in white Christian nationalists who abuse religious precepts to sow hatred and division and you have the foundations of the political base that elected Donald Trump (twice!). And worse yet, those groupings are likely to be with us long after our current president has gone off to that great cheeseburger stand in the sky.

Still, it’s worth reflecting on whether such an odd coalition of allies can survive without Donald Trump, or even with a president whose policies have become so harmful and irrational that they’re doing severe human and economic damage even to his most loyal supporters (not to mention the rest of us). And it’s also worth considering whether the pillars of the MAGA movement can manage to stick together in the ever-grimmer Trumpian years to come, not to speak of the post-Trumpian ones, or whether the rest of us can organize a powerful, humane alternative to his politics of hatred and division that could transform this country and the world.

The Know-Nothings Meet the Know-It-Alls

As a start, we have the latter-day “Know Nothings,” a term borrowed from a 19th century political movement. It’s not that members of that group literally know nothing. Some of them are quite skilled in their given professions and astute at assessing certain kinds of situations. Some are intelligent but woefully misguided. Trump supporter and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, for example, is a brain surgeon.

Members of the anti-science crowd are also often very good at communicating their messages, however wrongheaded or offensive they may be. The problem isn’t that they can’t take in information; it’s that they are distinctly anti-knowledge when it comes to, among other things, separating compelling conspiracy theories from well-documented facts.

Rather than DEI programs that stop at raising tough questions about America’s long history of systematic discrimination, what’s needed are programs that truly change people’s lives by creating better-paying jobs and affordable, quality healthcare for all.

The results of their ingrained antagonism toward basic knowledge are profound, making them a threat to public health and democratic practices. After all, we now live in a country where millions of people are against vaccinating their children to prevent potentially deadly diseases and don’t believe that perhaps the gravest threat to continuing life on this planet—climate change—is caused, or even influenced, by human activity or perhaps is even happening at all.

The dangerous delusions of Trump Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., now have the stamp of government approval and the power of the US government behind them. There is no way to estimate how many people have already fallen sick or even died unnecessarily due to the implementation of his crackpot theories, but the numbers will undoubtedly be significant. The American Public Health Association captured the grim mood of our moment perfectly in an April 2025 press release entitled “Secretary Kennedy and His Policies Are a Danger to the Public Health.”

On a different spiritual plane, tens of millions of Americans believe in the rapture—the notion that they and their kind will be called up to heaven in the end days, while the rest of us will be left behind, presumably to burn in hell (but not a climate-change version of the same). A 2022 Pew poll found that 39% of Americans believe “we are in the end times.” Already! And such a belief, of course, has an impact on how or even whether one wants to devote time and energy to fixing problems here on Earth.

Such an amalgam of opponents of science and skeptics about basic reality bears a distinct resemblance to the “Know Nothing” movement of the 19th century that thrived on anti-immigrant sentiments and half-baked conspiracy theories.

The anti-intellectual faction on the right has been propagandized for decades to believe that the biggest obstacle to a better life for them and their families isn’t the predatory corporations hollowing out our economy and manipulating our democracy, but a group of liberal intellectuals clustered on both coasts who allegedly want to replace this country’s bedrock beliefs with a set of “politically correct” prescriptions about how they should live their lives, especially when it comes to DEI or diversity, equity, and inclusion. In such a rendering of reality, that “new class” is seen as sapping the country’s strength and undermining the basic values that would make America great (again!).

The use of that “new class” as a political epithet emerged from the neoconservative movement of the 1960s and 1970s, as Andrew Hartman has explained at his blog on American intellectual history:

Out of their political repositioning in the late 1960s and 1970s, neoconservatives developed a critical theory (co-opted from anti-Stalinist thinking) about a so-called "new class" of intellectuals, broadly defined to include all professionals tasked with manipulating language—although more narrowly applied to humanists and social scientists. Members of this "new class," so the theory went, had turned their backs on the society to which they owed their high-ranking status.

However, the current Trumpian war on DEI should be considered an extension of a longstanding conservative effort to distract Americans from the real sources of their problems by promoting a politics of division and hatred. Mainstream accounts of the drive to eradicate concerns about diversity, equity, and inclusion from public life rarely point out that fighting DEI can fairly be characterized as fighting to make racism, misogyny, and anti-gay and anti-trans discrimination ever more acceptable in the sort of open, unapologetic fashion that prevailed before the modern-day civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights movements gained strength.

The crusade—and it’s nothing less than that—against DEI needs to be called out for what it is, not treated as some sort of skirmish over language. And rather than DEI programs that stop at raising tough questions about America’s long history of systematic discrimination, what’s needed are programs that truly change people’s lives by creating better-paying jobs and affordable, quality healthcare for all, regardless of race, gender, class status, or faith. Getting there will, however, require a flowering of faith of another kind—not religious faith, but faith that we can construct an accountable government that serves the public interest, rather than, as in the present age of Donald Trump, the interests of corporations and inhumane ideologues.

Silicon Valley Saviors

In contrast to the “know nothing” faction of the political right in America is the “know it all” faction—Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Elon Musk, and Palmer Luckey. They view themselves not just as business executives cashing in on the latest trend, but as superior beings who should be running the planet. They promise better living through technology and, as new age militarists, see robotic weapons as the future of warfare. But the idea that such new technologies will inevitably change our lives for the better or protect us from the worst has, at best, a mixed record. It depends, of course, on just who is using such technologies and for what purpose.

In addition to owning companies that create new systems grounded in artificial intelligence and machine learning, the new age militarists are angling to shape our foreign policy, our federal budget, and the future of our democracy. They literally want to become masters of the universe by figuring out how to live forever and promote the colonization of space. They dream of video games in which, as Palmer Luckey put it, “If you die in the game, you die in real life.”

To say that Thiel, Musk, Palmer Luckey, Alex Karp, and their financiers like Marc........

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