And the Rise of the MAGA Meta-Narrative
05.01.26
It’s easy to imagine those mind-flaying moments when the good people of our planet have loathed the duplicity and hypocrisy of progressive America.
I accompanied many of them live as an international newsman.
One of them was that sunny day in October of 2011 when I tried to comprehend, along with my audience, the sheer savagery of Muammar Gaddafi’s torture and slaughter by a baying mob.
“If that’s the justice of the international rules-based order,” I told myself, “the sooner it’s replaced, the better.”
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/23/gaddafi-last-words-begged-mercy
When I heard Venezuela’s Maduro was in US custody, I was expecting to see similar images. To say I was pleasantly surprised to see he and his wife were treated humanely gives me hope in the new America struggling to be born.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/05/nicolas-maduro-venezuela-new-york-court
Today’s American political rupture can be understood in the context of these two starkly contrasting images.
In the Obama-era image from 2011, we see the bleeding face of the western-backed dictator Muammar Gaddafi—beaten, publicly abused, and killed by a mob after a NATO intervention that left thousands dead and the nation shattered until this day. Post-Obama Libya is now home to slave markets and warlords.
Who can forget when Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, celebrated on camera Gaddafi’s vicious murder with the words: “We came, we saw, he died.”
The second image, the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, appears from a diametrically opposed universe.
Maduro has not fled, a bombed-out civilian center, he’s not been left to a vengeful lynch mob, and he’s not been publicly tortured and executed like Gaddafi.
Instead, we were taken alive, removed with his wife, read his rights to a fair trial, and escorted with dignity to a public trial in New York City.
Whether one accepts every factual claim surrounding the latter operation is almost secondary.
What matters is the moral contrast being asserted by those in power.
These two images are now functioning as symbols of two competing civilizational orders.
IN ONE IMAGE: A NEW ORDER IS BORN
The Gadaffi horror show represents the late-stage “rules-based international order“: regime change without responsibility, spectacle without justice, violence without law.
The Maduro arrest, in MAGA’s telling, represents something deliberately different—“white-hat America,” cowboy justice restrained by law, a power that subdues without annihilating.
This contrast is not cosmetic. It marks the opening move of a new political meta-narrative.
The Collapse of the Progressive Story
Every durable political order rests on a narrative worthy of repetition and celebration.
For half a century, the progressive story dominated the West: democracy as unquestionable legitimacy, migration as moral good, global governance as enlightened necessity, and equality enforced by administrative power rather than shared obligation.
That story no longer persuades.
Across the United States and Europe, citizens experience not democracy but managed outcomes, not equality but dual legal systems, not solidarity but oligarchy protected by abstraction.
Borders exist selectively. Laws apply to the governed, not the governing. Migration is moralized while wages collapse, communities fracture, and trafficking networks flourish.
This is not confined to America. It is a Western condition.
The MAGA movement does not merely oppose these progressive policies.
It seeks to invalidate the legitimacy of the progressive narrative itself—to show that what was sold as moral progress produced corruption, instability, war, and dispossession.
Elections, Migration, and the End of Democratic Sacralization
The first pillar under attack is the sacralization of elections.
Since the end of the Cold War, electoral procedures have been treated not as systems requiring constant verification, but as moral talismans.
Simopl to question them is to be declared illegitimate.
MAGA thinkers—led publicly by Donald Trump—have insisted that election systems, technologies, and administrative frameworks are fallible, capturable, and political.
The purpose of this insistence is larger than any single contest: it is to collapse the idea that democracy confers automatic moral authority regardless of process integrity.
Once elections lose their sacramental status, a second pillar begins to crack: mass migration as moral inevitability.
Within the MAGA meta-narrative, migration is reinterpreted not as a neutral humanitarian flow but as a political technology—a long-term mechanism for reshaping electorates and entrenching permanent governing coalitions.
Historical precedents from the 1920s, the post-1965 U.S. transformation, and contemporary Europe are invoked to argue that immigration policy has been weaponized to bypass democratic consent.
This argument increasingly intersects with critiques offered by figures such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has attacked institutional capture, pharmaceutical-government collusion, and technocratic rule insulated from accountability.
The convergence is not ideological unity. It is shared recognition of systemic abuse.
The Death of the Rules-Based International Order
The third pillar to fall is the so-called rules-based international order itself.
In theory, this order promised peace, stability, and prosperity through global norms enforced by American power.
In practice, it produced selective enforcement, endless proxy wars, cartelized industries, and tolerance—if not facilitation—of human trafficking and modern slavery.
The death of Gaddafi is now reinterpreted as the iconic crime of that order: a sovereign leader destroyed without trial, justice replaced by spectacle, responsibility dissolved into bureaucratic anonymity. That killing did not stabilize Libya. It shattered it.
By contrast, the MAGA meta-narrative holds up the claimed treatment of Maduro as evidence—again, in its own framing—that order does not require annihilation.
Arrest over assassination. Trial over spectacle. Force restrained by purpose.
It is Christian Order in its expression as opposed to Secular Lawlessness.
The new MAGA meta-narrative invites judgment by fruits.
A Hemispheric Vision: Order Without Empire
What replaces the globalist model is not isolation, but re-regionalization.
The emerging MAGA vision imagines the United States as a hemispheric anchor—from the Arctic and Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, from the North Pole to the South Pole—a protected civilizational zone in which nations develop along their own cultural and political lines, free from mass demographic engineering and transnational coercion.
This is not empire.
It is containment of chaos outside its own ordered civilizational space.
In this vision, America is no longer beholden to:
- China-first elites
- Israel-first foreign lobbies
- global capital detached from national loyalty
It is accountable first to its own citizens, and secondarily to stable, lawful neighbors.
This is why the Maduro–Gaddafi contrast matters.
It is not Venezuela or Libya that is decisive. It is the moral grammar of power.
The End of Cultural Relativism
At its deepest level, this is the end of cultural relativism as a governing creed.
The progressive consensus insisted that all cultures, systems, and outcomes were morally equivalent so long as they flew the banner of democracy or humanitarianism.
The MAGA meta-narrative rejects that premise.
It insists that order can be judged, that systems can be weighed by their fruits, and that justice requires hierarchy, borders, and restraint.
This is why the movement draws support far beyond traditional conservatism. It speaks to workers, dissidents, former liberals, and communities exhausted by abstraction.
It offers a story where law matters again, where power is answerable, where sovereignty is not a sin.
A Meta-Narrative Judged by Its Fruits
Whether the MAGA meta-narrative ultimately succeeds will depend not on rhetoric, but on results.
The New America invites scrutiny. It invites comparison.
The fruit of the old order, one of secular lawlessness, was Libya.
The promised fruit of the new order is trial instead of lynching, borders instead of chaos, citizens instead of abstractions.
For a civilization that has lived through decades of corruption, oligarchy, broken borders, and unequal law, that promise is powerful enough to unite factions once thought irreconcilable.
This is not a partisan realignment.
It is the emergence of a new political meta-narrative capable of uniting divergent political factions.
And like all such narratives, it will stand—or fall—by what it builds.
Endnotes
- The Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership (multiple editions), on sovereignty, administrative overreach, and institutional capture.
- Donald Trump, speeches and statements (2016–2024) on election integrity and national sovereignty.
- Robert F. Kennedy Jr., public addresses on regulatory capture, pharmaceutical power, and technocratic governance.
- Claremont Institute, essays on constitutional legitimacy and post-Cold War order.
- American Mind, analyses of globalism, migration, and democratic erosion.
- NATO intervention records and contemporaneous media statements surrounding the 2011 Libya campaign and the death of Muammar Gaddafi.
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Brian Thomas 
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