Magic Blood, Magic Dirt, and the Party That Never Says Sorry

Elon Musk spent the Fourth of July telling the internet he's "wised up" on classical liberalism, which is a hell of a way to celebrate the 250th birthday of the country that made him rich. For the uninitiated, "classical liberalism" is just political-science-speak for the actual American founding, the rights-based, consent-of-the-governed experiment that Musk decided, on America's own birthday, was for suckers. When a guy who wrote science fiction about "makers" and "takers" tells the richest man alive that universal suffrage leads to universal suffering, and the richest man alive says "yep, checks out," you're not looking at a gaffe. You're looking at the quiet part getting louder.

David French wrote a genuinely sharp piece in the Times (gift link) about this , tracing Musk's little epiphany back through Peter Thiel's decade-old declaration that freedom and democracy aren't actually compatible, through Stephen Miller calling the birthright citizenship ruling a threat of "national self-obliteration," and landing on the actual thesis: a big chunk of the populist right no longer believes in the American creed. They believe in American blood.

"I have wised up." — Elon Musk, July 4, 2026

That's the frame French builds, and it's a good one. Birthright citizenship isn't just a policy fight, it's a referendum on whether America is an idea you can join or a bloodline you're born into. JD Vance has already told you which one he prefers, arguing people whose ancestors fought the Civil War have more claim to the country than people who "say they don't belong." That's not a dog whistle. That's a bullhorn with a Yale Law pedigree.

Here's my one quibble with French, and it's not small: the man spends six sections cataloging the anti-American right and maybe half a sentence acknowledging that his own political tribe spent a decade (or three) calling Democrats, immigrants, and basically anyone left of Susan Collins an existential threat to the country. French did the work of leaving that world behind, credit where it's due. But you don't get to write the definitive essay on "the right's dangerous slide into believing half the country isn't really American" without copping to the fact that his party and his actions built the on-ramp. A little more contrition would've made this a great piece instead of just a good one.

The Comment Section Was Better Than Usual

I will give him credit, French actually engages his commenters, which is rare enough to be worth noting on its own. Top of the thread, someone going by Biker made the obvious point: the Democratic Party is too broken and too toxic in the heartland to be the thing that kills MAGA. It'll take a Republican movement to do that, and whoever leads it better not try to drag the party back to Romney-style economics, because that's what got us here in the first place.

French's answer was basically: correct, MAGA doesn't die until it's defeated inside the GOP itself[1], because as long as it controls one of two major parties, it's never more than one election cycle from power. Fine. True, even. But French also copped to still having warm feelings for Romney Republicanism, which is where I want to push past both of them.

Was Romney the Cause, Not Just the Failed Cure?

Here's the question nobody in that exchange asked out loud: what if milquetoast, country-club, low-tax-high-tariff-on-your-feelings Romney Republicanism wasn't just powerless to stop MAGA? What if it built MAGA?

Because that's the more honest read. The donor-class GOP spent three decades selling a working class electorate a bill of goods, free trade with no adjustment plan, financialization dressed up as opportunity, entitlement-trimming as the answer to wage stagnation, while quietly writing off nearly half the country as people who see themselves as victims entitled to government cheese. That's not an accident of messaging. That's the actual governing content of the party Trump hijacked. The China shock research ties import-driven regional collapse directly to the radicalization that followed in those same zip codes, and that collapse happened on Romney-wing free-trade orthodoxy, not MAGA's.

The donor class wasn't blindsided. They were riding a tiger they were sure they could steer, using cultural resentment as a delivery mechanism for tax cuts and deregulation, going back at least to Lee Atwater cheerfully explaining in 1981 how you go from saying the slur out loud to saying "states' rights" once the terms get abstract enough to be deniable. The strategy worked exactly as designed for thirty-plus years. Then talk radio became Fox became the open internet became X, and every disintermediation step cut the party's institutional layer a little further out of the loop. By 2015 the base didn't need Reince Priebus's permission to hear the message anymore. Trump went direct. The tiger didn't get stronger. The leash got shorter, one media cycle at a time, until it snapped in the Republican primary and Jeb Bush's $150 million super PAC discovered that institutional GOP muscle memory could not, in fact, buy back control of the thing it built.

So yeah, French is right that MAGA only dies inside the GOP. But the "Republican movement" that eventually does it can't be Romney 2.0 with better vibes, because Romney 1.0 is one of the reasons we're here. You don't cure the fever by going back to the thing that gave you the fever, just with a nicer bedside manner.

1 - Yeah, I am digging into writing this. It is something that is factual, and something that has long bothered me about the Never Trump crew, as they seem to believe that the Democrats are going to save their bacon.