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The Great American MAGA Novel

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Clarissa

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Wouldn’t it be great if there were a MAGA novel? Real literature, big ideas, deep philosophical stuff, a devastating story, characters that grab you by the heart. A true American epic that would show why the fire burns so hot at the core of the right-wing revolution.

Well, I have good news. That novel exists.

I also have bad news. You can’t read it because it wasn’t written in English.

The novel I’m talking about is titled An Island for Whites and its author is Mikhail Veller. He is a very well-known Russian-language writer. He is also very MAGA. Obviously, he doesn’t live in Russia anymore because he’s considered a foreign agent there. The novel came out in 2022. It’s 900 pages long, and it tries to answer the question of why the Western civilization is self-destructing with great determination.

As I read the novel, it became clear why nothing like it can be written in English. There are no longer words, sentence structures or similar depths of honesty. Maybe one day they’ll come back but for now the title of the great American MAGA novel goes to An Island for Whites.

7 responses to “The Great American MAGA Novel”

  1. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    Off-topic, remember that helicopter crash in washington that killed 64 people and the extraordinary lengths they went to protect the identity of the pilot? Turns out it was DEI incompetence.

    “Quit mansplainng!”

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I’m shocked, stunned and very surprised. Not.

      This is the most bizarre human experiment imaginable. And the funny thing is, unlike the previous large-scale human experiments, it doesn’t have a noble goal. It doesn’t try to achieve anything worthwhile. Yet so many people have embraced it.

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  2. mitchellporter Avatar
    mitchellporter

    I found some excerpts online. I can see that it ranges over a lot of personalities and topics central to MAGA and more generally to an American conservative populist view of history and modernity, but there wasn’t enough to see how it fits together as narrative (the website hosting the excerpts described it as a “meta-novel”).

    Veller himself seems to be the kind of writer who is also a character in real life, e.g. growing up all over the USSR as his military father gets transferred around (I assume a lot of American military families could relate to that!), and then in his 20s going on to work in a host of odd jobs, again all over the USSR.

    It makes me realize again that I don’t understand much about how the economy worked in the USSR, e.g. something as simple as filling jobs. The contemporary western welfare states are full of employment agencies, and classes on how to sell yourself to employers, and so on. How would a drifter or a restless soul like young Weller, even look for work? Were vacancies advertised somehow? “Shepherd Wanted, Inquire Within”? (I suppose I could ask similar questions about the West before the 20th century!)

    His wiki biographies (I looked him up in several languages) describe him as having a peculiar cyclic transhumanist cosmic philosophy, in which energy from the big bang creates life, intelligence, and finally posthumans who create a new big bang. He’s far from unique among writers in voicing cosmic evolutionary speculations – Poe and Bernard Shaw both did so – but it’s interesting that he takes it seriously enough to e.g. give lectures about it.

    I asked ChatGPT to suggest some pro-MAGA novels. The list was a bit erratic (e.g. containing a few erroneous or completely “hallucinated” entries), but most of them were political thrillers in which you have guerrilla warfare against destructive progressive rule.

    I think for a real comparative study, one would also want to look at Tom Clancy’s novels, which are the prototype of a whole action genre in which patriotic spies and soldiers, and reluctant politicians, fight some terrorist or geopolitical menace. Those books are generally pro-conservative, but in a way more suited to the Reagan 1980s and the Clinton 1990s. The expansion of progressivism in power paves the way for this more radical literature of outright separatism and civil war, like Kurt Schlichter’s “People’s Republic” or William Lind’s “Victoria” (to mention two prominent examples suggested by the AI).

    On the other hand, I suspect Veller’s real peers would be Europeans like Houellebecq or Raspail (Camp of the Saints) or Renaud Camus.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Thank you for this thoughtful essay. I never read Veller before because I avoid Russian-language literature, so I don’t know how he used to write. But this novel is definitely in the tradition of Houellebecq and Raspail but with a great sense of humor. Houellebecq, to me, is not funny, and Raspail is serious like a heart attack. This novel, on the other hand, is hilarious. I’m reading a chapter about a visit that Bernie Sanders, who won the 2016 election, makes to a Lubavitch rabbi to find out why his very sincere efforts to make everything better led to a collapse of civilization and civil war. It’s really funny.

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  3. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    OT: Massive and I mean MASSIVE blackout in Spain, and Portugal and parts of France…

    Whole Spanish rail system is at a standstill and airports are closed I think…

    Cause unknown….

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    1. cliff arroyo Avatar
      cliff arroyo

      OT: More on the blackout ‘apagón’

      https://www.elmundo.es/economia/2025/04/28/680f5cd11ee97cbdb61b7820-directo.html

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      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        Thank you for posting this! It’s the last weekend of the academic year, and I’d never find out anything if people don’t leave links here.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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