The MAGA Factional Splits

The Borderer’s Conflict with the Puritans and the Distressed Cavaliers

The current ruling political coalition, closely identified with the MAGA movement, is profoundly influenced by the enduring cultural template of the Borderlanders (or Backcountry settlers) active today as the “Woke Right”.

This cultural foundation is defined by a distinct philosophy of governance and liberty, which creates deep, inherent tension when allied with factions rooted in the Puritan and Cavalier folkways.

The Borderlander Core: Natural Liberty and the Populist Strain

At the heart of this coalition is the tradition carried from the North British borders to the American Appalachian Backcountry between 1717 and 1775.

These Borderlanders prized Natural Liberty, defined as radical personal autonomy and a militant aversion to institutional constraint.

This base supplies the movement’s populist, anti-establishment vigor.

They distrust fixed, complex schemes of governance and bureaucratic institutions, favoring instead a model of charismatic, direct personal leadership.

This tradition views social order through the lens of retributive justice (lex talionis), where authority rests primarily on personal strength and the fierce maintenance of individual sovereignty.

The Borderlander culture historically supports leaders, such as Andrew Jackson, who demanded extreme personal loyalty and were seen as champions of the common person against distant, sophisticated elites.

This cultural DNA is suspicious of any power structure, whether moral or aristocratic, that threatens their coveted “elbow room”.

The Puritan settlers of New England and the Borderers who settled the Appalachian Backcountry, despite being defined by sharply contrasting cultural systems, shared several fundamental characteristics rooted in their common British Protestant background, particularly their connection to Calvinistic theology.

Shared Characteristics

1. Calvinistic Roots and Theological Influences:

Both groups were profoundly influenced by the broader Calvinistic movement within British Protestantism, although they manifested these beliefs in highly different ways:

• Puritans (New England): The Puritans were staunch Calvinists, embracing the strict Five Points of Calvinism, which included doctrines such as total depravity and limited atonement.

Their system was formalized as Calvinist Congregationalism.

• Borderers (Backcountry): Many Borderers who came from Scotland and northern Ireland tended to be Presbyterian, and Presbyterianism itself is a form of Calvinist theology.

Presbyterianism’s theology was Calvinist, and its worship centered on preaching and conversion.

Even English Borderers who were Anglican often leaned toward New Light Christianity, which was an evangelical form of Christianity and often involved the reformed religion.

• The Concept of Depravity: Both cultures were exposed to the idea, explicit in Calvinism, of the depravity of humankind or the “natural corruption”.

For Puritans, this led to the explicit purpose of child-rearing as the “breaking of the will” in children, who were believed to be born with a “sinful nature”.

2. Commitment to Literacy and the Word (Though Differently Valued):

Both cultures placed high importance on the Bible, defining themselves as people of the Book.

• Puritans: The Puritans were intensely a “people of the book”.

Their faith was founded entirely on the Bible, and they believed every authentic word of Scripture was literal truth.

This commitment led to a strong ethic of learning and high rates of literacy.

• Borderers: Though their folkways were generally oral, they were also defined by a deep religious interest and were described as a “stock that studied outward piety and inward purity,” being well acquainted with the Scriptures and strict observers of the Sabbath.

In the Backcountry, families often carried the Bible and used military metaphors in their sermons, indicative of a militant faith.

3. Resistance to Established Church Authority:

Both groups developed a strong, if differently expressed, antipathy toward the established Anglican Church structure:

• Puritans: They were English Calvinists who sought to “purify” the Church of England from what they saw as Roman Catholic elements.

The “great flight” to Massachusetts was driven by their opposition to King Charles I and Archbishop William Laud, who suppressed their teachings.

• Borderers: They exhibited a settled hostility to the established church.

Many Scottish and Irish Presbyterians had a “particular aversion to curates,” whom they called “hirelings”.

They preferred spontaneous outdoor worship, such as “field meetings” or “Holy Fairs,” rather than formal services led by established Anglican clergy.

4. Intense Sense of Community Identity and Exclusivity:

Both traditions developed strong internal social bonds and viewed outsiders with suspicion, leading to highly defined community boundaries:

• Puritans: They sought “order as organic unity”, a oneness of the spirit that did not readily admit internal differences.

They formed a close-knit cultural elite connected by schools and frequent intermarriage.

Their community enforced its borders by imposing strict laws against the entry of “masterless men,” the poor, and “convicted felons”.

• Borderers: They placed extreme importance on blood relationships, forming clans, and valued fidelity to family above loyalty to the crown.

They were profoundly xenophobic, viewing anyone from a neighboring district as a “‘foreigner’”.

Their communities used customs like “hating out” to enforce social exclusion against those who deviated from cultural norms.

5. Experience as Refugees from Persecution:

Both major migrations were driven by a sense of flight from intolerable conditions or oppression in Great Britain:

• Puritans: Their movement (1629–1640) was a “great flight” from economic depression, epidemic disease, and persecution during the “eleven years’ tyranny”.
• Borderers: They were refugees from oppression in North Britain (such as high rents and political pacification).

The Borderers who came to America often included a “double-distilled selection of some of the most disorderly inhabitants of a deeply disordered land,” who had been forcibly resettled from the Scottish-English border region to Ireland and then banished again to the colonies.

While the Puritan response to their Calvinist faith was to establish ordered liberty through institutional control and moral regulation, the Borderer response, rooted in their border history, was to prioritize natural liberty through individual autonomy and fierce anti-institutionalism.

Their common foundation was a militant, Protestant, and often Calvinistic drive, resulting in tight-knit, fiercely exclusive communities dedicated to upholding a moral code they believed was divinely sanctioned, even if they disagreed on how to enforce it.

The Puritan Split: Moral Order vs. Personal Autonomy

The first major fault line within MAGA runs between the Borderlander base or “Woke Right” and the faction tracing its lineage to the New England Puritans (who migrated between 1629 and 1640).

This Puritan-derived wing carries the Moralistic Political Culture, viewing government as a necessary and positive instrument.

For the modern Moralist faction, the goal is the construction of a righteous social order, a desire rooted in the founders’ aim to build a “Bible Commonwealth” or a “Christian nation”.

They champion Ordered Liberty, where freedom is meaningful only when exercised within the bounds of collective moral consensus and spiritual law.

This impulse manifests today as Evangelical Nationalism, seeking to seize state power to shape government and society according to strict evangelical values, such as regulating social and moral conduct.

Historically, this tradition enforced strict laws against private behaviors like idleness or drunkenness.

The Borderlander, however, views this Moralistic drive as an unacceptable foreign intrusion.

The fundamental conflict is:

1. The Puritan/Moralist: Seeks to impose collective order and regulate behavior to achieve unity, demanding moral constraint.
2. The Borderlander/Populist: Demands absolute autonomy and rejects any new form of institutional, moral, or collective restraint, viewing high taxes and learned authorities, such as “college-calls,” with deep contempt.

The Borderlander feels freedom means the right to live unsupervised, while the Moralist believes true freedom requires supervision to prevent sin.

This clash means that the Moralist's efforts to regulate private life in pursuit of a godly society are inherently resisted by the movement’s core, which values personal liberty above collective sanctity.

The opposition between Puritan Christian Zionism and Borderer isolationism illustrates a fundamental conflict in American political culture, contrasting a mandate for moral, global intervention with a demand for radical individual autonomy and self-reliance.

The Puritan Narrative: The Moral Mandate for Intervention

The origins of Christian Zionist support for Israel trace back to the first great wave of English-speaking immigrants, the Puritans who settled Massachusetts (1629–1640).

This community established a Moralistic Political Culture centered on Ordered Liberty, defining freedom as the community’s ability to serve a collective moral consensus.

Government, in this view, is a positive instrument necessary to create a “City upon a Hill” and advance the public good, requiring complex and active governance.

This moralistic impulse institutionalized itself through Christian Zionism, which provides a prophetic mandate for unqualified foreign policy support of Israel.

The movement gained massive authority through the circulation of the Scofield Reference Bible (1909), whose study notes were printed as if they were coequal with Scripture.

This framework established the belief that the Jewish “return” to Palestine was a divine mandate.

This theology subordinates Jesus’s ethical teachings (such as “love your neighbor”) to Old Testament narratives of tribal warfare and exclusive territorial claims, thereby sanctifying a settler-colonial project in Palestine.

The interpretation gained immense legitimacy through the endorsement of Oxford University Press, which helped align religion and empire by framing imperial policy (like the Balfour Declaration) as fulfilling God’s will.

For this cultural tradition, support for Israel is not a strategic choice but a sacred duty, justifying the dispossession of indigenous communities as the will of God.

This support has become the number one issue with the “Woke Right”.

The Borderer Narrative: Isolationism and Autonomy

In stark opposition, the fourth great wave of immigrants, the North British Borderers who settled the Appalachian Backcountry (1717–1775), cultivated a deep-seated suspicion of all external constraint.

Their folkway centered on Natural Liberty, defined as radical personal autonomy and a preference for “elbow room”.

They were refugees from oppression who carried an indelible memory of exploitation, leading to a profound hostility to institutional control.

The Borderers prized self-determination and viewed governmental order not as a unifying principle, but as a system of retributive justice (lex talionis), demanding that individuals settle disputes themselves rather than relying on centralized courts or external authority.

This tradition fosters an ingrained anti-institutionalism and skepticism toward governance that requires strong central power, high taxes, or moral legislation.

This anti-institutional impulse translates directly into a stance of isolationism.

Foreign entanglements, moral crusades, or expensive overseas interventions (such as supporting a foreign state like Israel) are fundamentally rejected because they demand complexity, central authority, and collective constraint, which the Borderer tradition views as a threat to their treasured individual independence.

The “Woke Right” prioritizes avoiding external control over fulfilling any global mission, preferring to avoid engagement rather than pursue improvement.

The Puritans’ collective imperative to actively intervene globally to fulfill a moral and prophetic divine plan clashes with the Borderers’ fiercely decentralized resistance to any form of collective political action, especially those costly, morally driven crusades overseas that threaten individual autonomy.

The Cavalier Split: Aristocratic Hierarchy vs. Radical Egalitarianism

The second critical MAGA split exists between the Borderlander base and the faction inheriting the Cavalier Traditionalistic Political Culture, established in Virginia between 1642 and 1675.

The Cavalier faction champions Hegemonic Liberty, defining freedom as the right of the elite (the “gentlemen”) to command and exercise dominion over others.

Governance, for them, is about maintaining the existing social hierarchy and the status quo.

They expect and demand deference to established gentry and seniority, a deference that was historically enforced toward “elder-patriarchs”.

This hierarchical system is structurally prone to highly personalized rule, often described as Sultanistic Authoritarianism, where power can be arbitrarily appropriated by the leader.

A Sultanistic Authoritarianism regime is defined as one based on personal rulership where the leader exercises power without restraint at his own discretion, unencumbered by formal rules, ideology, or tradition.

Their core connection lies in three shared principles:

1. The Primacy of Dominion and Unrestrained Personal Rule

The foundation of the Cavalier folkway was the principle of Hegemonic Liberty, defined as a hegemonic condition of dominion over others coupled with dominion over oneself.

This liberty was explicitly understood as the power to rule, and not to be overruled by others.

Rule as a Birthright:

For the Virginia elite, freedom was considered the special birthright of free-born Englishmen, a kind of rank and privilege that entitled them to rule less fortunate people.

Arbitrary Authority:

This assertion of absolute dominion provides the cultural legitimacy for the exercise of arbitrary power, which is the hallmark of Sultanistic Authoritarianism, a form of highly arbitrary personal rule.

The Cavalier elite, such as Governor Sir William Berkeley, ruled with a strong sense of tyranny and firm determination to create a Royalist utopia dominated by ideals of honor and hierarchy.

The system was geared toward maintaining the existing social order and the status quo, reserving political power solely for the elite.

Patrimonialism:

The hierarchical idea of order established by the Cavaliers, which deferred to the paternal figure of the elder patriarch, was rooted in Royalist political thought where paternal and regal power were linked (“the eldest in every house is King”).

This concept of personalized rule and dependence (patrimonialism) is structurally similar to Sultanistic Authoritarianism.

2. Fusion of Public Authority and Private Gain

A central characteristic of a Sultanistic Authoritarianism regime is the fusion between the public treasury and the private wealth of the ruler.

The country is treated essentially as the ruler’s huge domain, and power is exercised for the essentially private ends of the ruler and his collaborators.

The Cavalier system laid the groundwork for this dynamic:

Offices as Property:

In colonial Virginia, the gentlemen oligarchs who ran the county courts and vestries (the leading local institutions) regarded their offices as a species of property that they passed on to one another.

The concept of independence for the gentleman was synonymous with freedom from labor, achieved only by maintaining the hegemony necessary to control others.

The Sovereign Plantation:

Foreign visitors noted that in Virginia, “there are no lords, but each is sovereign on his own plantation”.

Scaling this sense of absolute sovereignty from the plantation (where masters exercised violence against servants, slaves, and women to maintain distance and hierarchy) to the level of the state naturally leads toward a system where public authority is treated as a private resource for the ruling elite, mirroring the Sultanistic Authoritarianism style.

3. Lack of Institutional or Ideological Restraint

Sultanistic Authoritarian regimes are distinguished by their lack of ideological goals for the society and their reliance on personal, arbitrary decisions rather than a commitment to a detailed, elaborate ideology.

Focus on Status Quo over Ideology:

The Cavalier-derived Traditionalistic Political Culture views government as necessary primarily to maintain the existing social order or the status quo.

This contrasts sharply with the Puritan tradition (Moralistic Culture), which demanded an elaborate ideology (Ordered Liberty) to achieve a utopian “City upon a Hill”.

The Traditionalistic approach, seeking merely to preserve hierarchy, does not require the utopian ideological complexity of totalitarian systems.

Disdain for Mobilization:

Sultanistic Authoritarianism avoids the mobilization of the population in a mass single party.

The Traditionalistic culture similarly limits political participation, reserving leadership for elites.

Virginia’s power structure, government by court and vestry, was less active and complex than the town meeting system of New England, and levels of public spending were low.

Hegemonic liberty provided the cultural justification, the ideology of rank and right to dominate, combined with the hierarchical and patrimonial structure of Virginia society, created a system highly susceptible to the arbitrary personal rulership and private appropriation of power that characterizes a Sultanistic Authoritarianism regime.

The Borderlander populist rejects this aristocratic structure outright:

1. The Cavalier/Traditionalist: Demands deference to rank and social superiority.
2. The Borderlander/Populist: Views pride as deeply invested in equality of esteem and boasts of refusing to display deference to their perceived “superiors”.

This core tendency, rooted in ancient grievances of rack-renting and oppression by elites, is defined by a tradition of “retrospective radicalism”.

While both Cavalier and Borderlander elements are often conservative, their definitions of legitimate authority are antithetical.

The Borderlander may accept a powerful leader (the charismatic strongman in the mold of Andrew Jackson), yet fundamentally rejects the principle of inheritable aristocratic rule advocated by the Cavalier faction.

The Cavalier wing desires power to legitimize their social status, while the Borderlander wing desires power to violently dismantle the very establishment that maintains that status.

The Borderlander core provides the indispensable, furious energy, but its intrinsic rejection of institutional control means that it is simultaneously at war with the Moralist demand for collective control and the Cavalier demand for elite control.

The populist base, represented by the Woke Right, seeking to make the nation “great again” by embracing Natural Liberty, finds itself constantly chafing against the necessary internal compromises required by its Puritan and Cavalier allies who insist on imposing forms of Ordered or Hegemonic constraint.

To learn more about the factions, read Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer.

To learn more about Sultanistic Authoritarian regimes, read Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes by Juan J. Linz.