I’m optimistic about the near future even though I’m about to tell you that I do not think we will escape the present MAGA degeneracy without a cataclysm. But first, Abraham Lincoln*.
Prior to his election, political and religious figures all over the South not only railed against him, but also spoke in the most vehement terms about the moral goodness of slavery. He was elected with less than 40% of the total vote. He was burned in effigy three days before his first Inauguration. He had to enter Washington covertly after a conspiracy was uncovered to assassinate him in Baltimore. After his murder, many newspapers in the south spoke of his death as morally justified, as an event for which to be thankful, as the retribution of a just god. All of this after 750,000 Civil War deaths.
As awful as MAGA is now, this hateful spewing brew of cruelty and stupidity, I do not think we are in pre-Civil War territory. Over 1000 arrests have been made of J6 thugs. Trump will stand trial in NYC for one element of his corruption and is likely to face additional charges in Georgia and at the federal level. Fox News has been stripped of all legitimacy by the Dominion lawsuit and their trial is going to be worse in revealing their moral depravity. The Republican Party has fully embraced the Trump/MAGA cult and Marjorie Taylor Greene has become its most visible spokesperson. They have nothing to offer except bile and culture war poison. A consistent majority of Americans have rejected this man and this path.
Whatever metaphor best describes this MAGA wave – an infection and high fever, a mass psychosis, a zombie-like choice to embrace viciousness and give up all thinking – I doubt it can survive without Trump, the master showman and figure of adoration. He is 76 and fading and beset on all sides. This is not to say he cannot win again, but so much would have to fall just right for that to occur.
However, this kind of mass hatred of democracy, of Democrats, of cities, of books and Jews and blacks and ‘aliens’ and of opposition of any kind will have a point of explosion, a cataclysmic event, a blood sacrifice. On one level the Greeks understood tragedy as a spiral from which none of the characters escaped until blood had been shed and catharsis achieved. The ongoing mass slaughter of children in school shootings has not been sufficient to shock enough citizens into moral repulsion. It will have to be something more, and it will come when it is too late to avoid it. Aeschylus understood: “What atonement is there for blood spilt upon the earth?” Nothing for the blood that has been shed, but I think goodness will arise in response, and then something might be done to change and bring us back from the brink.
*And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by Jon Meacham
