The Meaning of Musk's Nazi Salute

How the right uses History to confuse us even further

Yesterday, President Trump was sworn in, again. It really goes to show how much the right has figured out how to control History in their own completely irrational but successful way; both at the level of narrative—America will be great Again, Again, Again!—as well as reality itself, where all the liberal institutions meant to be the bulwark against reactionary retreats into the past are themselves completely adrift in our posthistorical present. Much of the confusion and fear over the resurgence of the GOP into leadership today stems from a basic inability to understand this fact about their project. We liberals (and yes, this includes the left, we like to think of ourselves outside that project, but if we were only so lucky) know it is absurd to think one can recreate the political economic and social conditions of a bygone, romanticized era. We point out all the incoherence and inconsistencies in such a naive belief, but then all of a sudden one of them comes around and not only tells us that they don’t care about those criticisms but that their relative incoherence is precisely what will give the right’s project the discursive power it needs. Trump is president again—something we didn’t think we would ever see in 2017, and something we thought we’d never see again in 2021, but now here we are again in 2017 returning back to our posthistorical stupor like a dog to vomit.

If you watched the inauguration on television—why?—or followed it on social media, you surely saw the moment where Elon Musk, head of the government’s new DOGE office set to complete the project of neoliberalism (aha! a contradiction! sure would hate to be him right now!), threw up a Nazi salute after a rambling speech to nowhere. Much like the TV events of 2017, this sent liberals and the left to panic, demanding the alarm bells start ringing from on high. Here there was visible evidence that Musk, and by extension the right, are actual Nazis. We can tell because Nazis are the ones who do this salute, and everyone knows that you aren’t supposed to do this in public lest people think you are a Nazi. Musk doing this so brazenly in front of the TV cameras, then, is evidence that he now feels emboldened enough to take off the Mask and announce to the world that yes! It’s been true all along. I am a NAZI!

I think this is a misreading of what happened in this moment; the proliferation of clickbait articles in the wake is evidence we are right back in the Pee Tape Universe of early 2017 that found its next savior in the figure of Robert Mueller. I have a deep frustration with well meaning comrades and liberals who try and provide critical analyses of the right mostly based out of dominant seminar-room theories of culture that are utterly incomprehensible to most people. The truth of those theoretical abstractions—that yes, Western modernity is a racist imperial project designed to extract value out of marginalized Others before disposing of them—doesn’t always help us understand what these people, today, right now, think they are doing and how they understand their project. If you spend time watching MSNBC and hear from figures like Heather Cox Richardson that fascism is back, and it’s when the bad men want to have a big government, you’re going to miss why their project has been so successful. If you spend time on Twitter/X/TikTok applying Wikipedia level summaries of Aimé Césaire to a Charlie Kirk podcast, then I hate to say it but you are playing directly into their hands and mostly convincing yourself of your own moral and intellectual superiority while someone else actually spends time changing the world to fit their vision.

Musk’s Nazi salute is the logical endpoint of postmodern conservatism’s discursive logics. The right is fully aware of the crisis of historical thinking diagnosed by Fredric Jameson or even Baudrillard that liberals don’t like hearing about, or, think describes our situation simply as When There Is TV. Jameson tells us that the key cultural crisis of our time is that we are unable to think historically to such an extent that we avoid the pratfalls of conspiracy or endless cycles of interpretive analysis we learned in grad school, and that this keeps us trapped in a perpetual present from which we cannot find the exit. Today, liberal culture is still stuck in this post-historical prison he described as

…a new historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach.¹

Since 2016, liberals have, for the most part, become aware of this problem. But they can’t quite name it, because they don’t understand its causes. I once got into it with a lawyer type who overheard my conversation with a colleague at a bar in Cambridge about how bad things could get if inflation picked up under Biden’s presidency. He interrupted us with something like “you must be one of those economic anxiety guys!” and told me that the real problem was they don’t teach civics in school anymore (I swear I’m not making this up, I know I sound like one of those people on Twitter who make up profound conversations with their six year old children, but it really happened. I think about this guy all the time now). But he was right in a way. Inflation was not remotely like it was in Weimar Germany; a constitutive problem in our digitally networked society is our increasing loss of knowledge about how the world actually works in place of algorithms that feed us what we want to hear. But are the people upset about inflation aware of that historical incongruity? Of course not!

Liberals and many leftists after Trump took it upon themselves to solve this crisis of historical knowledge by teaching everyone high school civics classes again, thinking this would solve the problem. Rachel Maddow explained to MSNBC’s audience every night that what was happening with the bad orange man was just like when the Communists did us dirty; it’s like it was Back Then again. After Musks’ salute, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, someone who is paid to be an authoritative expert on fascism, explained that her expertise in the issue allowed her to see that someone making their arm look like the people in Triumph of the Will just might have something to do with Nazism. Egads! If you put it that way! Even leftists who like to make fun of liberals for doing this stuff go on social media and tell us they have secret abilities to decode fascism that normies can’t understand, because they lack true historical knowledge of knowing that this thing looks like that thing. But what liberals and many leftists can’t see is that the right is not playing the same game we are. They know we are living in a post-historical moment, and they use this to their advantage. Our inability to place ourselves in history causes us on the left to grasp for history (it’s just like Weimar again, CPAC hid a secret othala rune in their stage design to release Dark Nazi Energy because they couldn’t hold it in any longer). The right’s awareness that history is over, and that we are the ones trying to find it again, presents them the golden opportunity to render history the plaything that postmodern aesthetics already has.

Still from Nate Hochman’s weird Nazi video that got him fired from the DeSantis campaign

If you tell some liberals that you spend time looking at right wing social media they will tell you you shouldn’t drive yourself crazy, because that stuff is evil and gross, and like the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks, it might pull you into the darkness by proxy or something like this. I think that sentiment is thankfully losing its sway as more of us are realizing we gotta deal with what’s coming, but it remains true that many on the left are today utterly ill-equipped to understand how the right has taken media and semiotic logics in new directions during their last decade of near complete exile from dominant and legitimate cultural production (outside Fox News of course). Today liberals believe in all that History stuff again, even if they are grasping at lazy metaphors in the process. But the right doesn’t believe in history, and importantly, they know they can use it to do whatever they want with.

When Musk throws up a Nazi salute, he’s not signaling to some secret underground group of Nazis that it’s finally their time. Remember when KrangTNelson joked that Antifa supersoldiers were coming to behead small business owners on national TV? It was obviously a joke signaling the right’s hysterics over what amounted to a few anarchists wearing black costumes breaking Starbucks windows. The right does the same thing, and for the same purpose! All of us are caught in the logics of a history turned into simulacra, our enemies the only ones who take us seriously, in degraded attempts to make sense of a future in which the only thinkable outcome is The Bad Guys running the world into mutual ruin. We are all caught up in the contradictions of this; the right just runs with it.

Musk’s politics of course do not insulate him from such historical comparisons. Many have pointed out he is a white South African who comes from a family that has long traded in far right Nazi-adjacent thinking. But this is all a game to Elon, and the right. They know we think everyone from Stephen Miller (actual Nazi) to some Trump guy in a truck in a mill town uncomfortable with the casting in commercials these days (not a Nazi) are all Nazis. They know we are afraid that they are going to come into power and turn it into Nazi Germany again; and to this they say good! You actually believe in all this History shit?!?! You actually think you understand what we are doing here based on some pretentious booksmart nonsense? Here you go! Look at this! *throws up sieg heil* how do you like that?

Musk’s Nazi salute is less an actual Nazi salute to the reign of the fifth reich finally freed once again. It is part of a broader move on the right to poke at liberalism’s attempt to rehistoricize in postmodernism, knowing full well that if we ever actually figured out how to rehistoricize our present they would be screwed. They know it triggers those of us who are actually trying to seek History again, causing us to get all invested in interpreting signs of signs of signs rather than deal with the project that is unfolding to take control of a collapsing American capitalism in a world system pivoting on its axis. They say: We can act like Nazis not because we are all secret Nazis in the official underground Nazi club, but rather, because we are free to play with History that YOU have deemed inappropriate in your era of total cultural dominance. They are playing with norms, poking and prodding in much the same way that progressive attacks on modern progress emerged in art during the 1960s and 70s.

What’s terrifying about this situation is not that Musk is a Nazi (see the replies to my tweet that started this idea, many of which essentially amount to “nuh uh”). Rather, it is that through their superior understanding of the logics of posthistorical cultural production, they actually are bringing History back, despite being fully unaware that signs under postmodernism aren’t as empty as Baudrillard once suggested. This is what Nietzsche meant by the eternal return, not some metaphysical presence that animates the present through a will to reincarnation, but rather that we as a species are very good at falling back into similar patterns when historical conditions are not transcended or overcome, our social contradictions unresolved. Musk’s Nazi salute doesn’t confirm the Nazi thesis, but his ironic appropriation of a new way to trigger the libs produces meaning they will not be able to control, and which augers a future that could be even darker than it was last time. As Jameson told us in 1991,

…it is only consequent to reject moralizing condemnations of the postmodern and of its essential triviality when juxtaposed against the Utopian “high seriousness” of the great modernisms: judgements one finds on both the Left and on the radical Right. And no doubt the logic of the simulacrum, with its transformation of older realities into television images, does more than merely replicate the logic of late capitalism; it reinforces and intensifies it.²

1. Postmodernism, 25

2. Ibid, 46