E.G.

Kevin Vallier says that the American right is now a "strange blend" of three things:

(1) Techno-optimism, exemplified by Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor and Trumpist, who thinks that "the forces of creative destruction, if appropriately organized, are on balance a good thing for humanity, and that one can generally count on technological advances to be good for humanity. Disruption creates more than it destroys, progress requires radical acceleration, and talent must flow freely across borders. Stagnation is death. Only technology can solve humanity’s greatest problems."

(2) Catholic post-liberalism, a variety of political Catholicism which has grown weary of operating within the constraints of liberal society and holds that "there is something fundamentally wrong with the American liberal order and that it has to be replaced."

(3) Populism, the central idea of which is that "the majority of the population is fundamentally good and their interests conflict with those of a corrupt elite. Populists have stressed nationalism, trade protection, immigration restrictions, and a focus on the struggles of the American working class, particularly in the Rust Belt regions."

Vallier says these three things are in tension with one another. The tensions are of two sorts.

First, he says there are economic tensions between techno-optimism and populism. The techno-optimists want to deregulate AI, for example. But AI might replace human workers, dampening working-class wages, which seems pretty non-populist.

And second, he says there are tensions between techno-optimist philosophical anthropology and Catholic philosophical anthropology. On the one hand, according to Catholics,

we are spirit-matter: embodied souls whose aim is to be united with God and other human beings in love forever. We’re incomplete without the spiritual dimension. The assumption is that there is a fixed human nature that tends to manifest itself over time. … For any Catholic, the human person is a compound of soul and body, forming a single entity that Aristotle called a hylomorphic unity of soul and body. God created and ordered your spiritual nature, and your biological nature is part of your nature, fixed and immutable. Together, they combine to make a human person.

On the other hand, the Silicon Valley techno-optimist 

views the person as a digital program. They dream about gaining the ability to upload from one’s body into the cloud.

Vallier sums up:

These new alliances are unstable, incorporating many deeply conflicting influences. Unsurprisingly, we would see some ruptures when the influences genuinely conflict. It is hard to adopt both postliberalism and techno-optimism simultaneously, especially in a populist moment.

The current conflicts are only the beginning. As AI advances, along with social change, the tensions between these camps will only expand. What will the right do? Will it embrace creative destruction, protectionism, or postliberal “First Things”? The right cannot have it all. The synthesis will not hold.

I hope that MAGA collapses. I believe that it will collapse soon. I also believe that MAGA is incoherent. On these points, I do not believe I disagree with Vallier.

But I believe Vallier overestimates the extent to which an intellectual system needs to be coherent in order to persist and thrive. I do not think it is reasonable to hope that MAGA's incoherence will be what causes its collapse. MAGA is not the sort of thing that needs to be coherent in order to serve its purposes. 

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Many long-lasting, long-prevailing intellectual systems contain major internal tensions and even outright contradictions. Catholicism, and Christianity broadly, are themselves examples of intellectual systems that manage to combine conflicting ideas into a single package that billions of people have no difficulty embracing.

I grant that, when Catholicism is combined with techno-optimism and populism, this may produce new forms of incoherence not present in Catholicism in isolation. It remains the case that, in adding techno-optimism and populism to Catholicism, one does not thereby shift from a coherent worldview to an incoherent one.

And it seems to me that fully coherent intellectual systems might generally be at a disadvantage when it comes to gaining widespread allegiance. I'll mention two separable reasons why coherence might be limiting.

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In Breaking the Spell, a book that I think has been treated somewhat unfairly, Dennett sketches one of the ways that incoherent doctrines can attract people. Briefly: Incoherence creates mystery, and people are attracted to mystery. He writes:

If hellfire is the stick, mystery is the carrot. The propositions to be believed ought to be baffling! … Not just counterintuitive, …, but downright unintelligible. Prosaic assertions have no bite, and moreover they are too readily checked for accuracy. For a truly awesome and mind-teasing proposition, there is nothing that beats a paradox eagerly avowed. [In "Viruses of the Mind,"] Dawkins drew attention to what we might call the inflation of credal athleticism, the boast that my faith is so strong that I can mentally embrace a bigger paradox than you can.

Vallier is right that there is a tension between the Catholic idea that we are soul-body compounds and the techno-optimist idea that we are uploadable digital programs. But there are also similar levels of tension within many ancient Catholic ideas, such as transubstantiation and the Trinity. Such tensions can be features rather than bugs if the faithful receive them as mysteries.

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Here is a further point. If you want large numbers of people to embrace your system of ideas, then you need to have something for everybody (or at least something for many people). And you might have a hard time with that if you are committed to making sure that everything in your system fits together.

If MAGA were to jettison any of the three planks that Vallier identifies, it might become more coherent, but it would have less to offer to the various constituencies who are each attracted to those planks.

Redesigning MAGA for greater coherence would be like redesigning the menu of a restaurant so that every dish can be enjoyed in combination with every other dish.

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I do not deny that incoherence can doom social-political movements like MAGA. My main claim here is that, when it comes to the real-world success or failure of such movements, incoherence isn't always counterproductive, and coherence is sometimes counterproductive. 

In general, if your movement endorses P and Q, where P and Q are in tension with one another (such that: P makes Q unlikely; or P, with the addition of plausible auxiliary assumptions, entails not-Q; or, in the most extreme case, P in isolation entails not-Q), this can be bad for your movement if (though, I think, not only if) the following two conditions obtain:

(I) The tension is conspicuous: People who like P can usually see that P is in tension with Q and/or people who like Q can see that Q is in tension with P. 

Note that this condition does not always obtain, for the straightforward reason that people are far from logically omniscient.

(II) The tension is experienced as disgusting rather delicious: People who see the tension between P and Q generally see that tension as a repellant defect of your system, rather than a tantalizing mystery.

I think the Catholic doctrines I mentioned above—the Trinity and transubstantiation—show that, even when a tension is conspicuous, it's not always experienced as disgusting rather than delicious. That said, there are no doubt tensions that do drive people away, or strike people as being in clear need of resolution. This might be a matter of aesthetic judgment, or it might be something more.

I suppose it is still unclear whether these conditions will obtain in the case of MAGA. My guess is that the conspicuousness condition, at least, does not obtain.