MAGA cannot be defined by stupidity. Seventy-four million Americans are stupid? That makes no sense, but continuing to support the lunatic Trump also makes no sense – this abuser of women, destroyer of democracy, demonstrated liar, vile human being. How to explain this?
What makes no sense is this desire on the part of MAGA to smash everything – democracy, schools, libraries, the environment, the rights of women, the right to walk in public without having to worry about maniacs with guns mass killing innocents every day. The list is too long to continue and too dispiriting.
I don’t think most of MAGA sees Trump as supporting anything positive. They don’t expect him to improve their lives. There are no coherent policy initiatives associated with him. Not one. They only want one thing from him – they want him to smash things. They want everything they don’t like to be smashed, and I don’t think they can tell you why. It’s as if they had been waiting for years for some figure to arise who promised to unleash their hatreds and Trump was it, the vessel for their revenge against …. What? Cities, black people, migrants, teachers, rules? Even that is obscured.
MAGA applauds cruelty and makes jokes about the pain of others. It itches to bring back vigilantism – witness the right’s embrace of Kyle Rittenhouse and the choking death of Jordan Neely. There seems to be no bottom to what MAGA wants destroyed. To what purpose? Do they really believe their lives will be better if all their dreams come to pass – Trump reelected, public schools dissolved, regulations of every kind dismantled, the law used as a weapon against his enemies, oligarchs further enriched?
The psychosis or poison or infection or whatever metaphor applies has been driven down to the most elemental of democratic levels, to school board and township supervisor elections where fanatics are striving to smash things on the most basic levels of governance.
Pundits speak of the loss of white majorities in the US as the fear driving all of this. That seems too abstract. Democracy is under attack by demagogues in Poland, Italy, and Hungry. The UK is self-immolating because of the idiocy of Brexit.
Some kind of loss of faith in democratic governance as a whole seems to be taking place. The impetus behind MAGA is not an isolated phenomenon.
Trump himself is sui generis. There is no one like him in American history and no political movement as powerful and immoral as MAGA since the heyday of the KKK in 1920’s America.
In the US, it begins with Trump and then slides downhill to tens of millions of Americans who continue to support him and his stooges. The problem is with those who vote for him. Our neighbors. Our family members. Our colleagues at work.
The Republican party, which is wholly MAGA, has become what writer Dave Rothkopf calls the Party of “Fuck You”. Fuck You!! is “the motivation of its alienated voters, … its legislative strategy, … its views toward the laws and Constitution of the United States, …its reaction to morality and values, … its foreign policy mantra with our allies, … even its message to historians of the future.”*
In this way his voters have become incomprehensible; they can explain nothing of their beliefs beyond a few bumper sticker Trump rally talking points. They revert to whataboutism immediately when Trump’s terrible offenses are described. They seem to have lost all powers of self-reflection. It’s not that they cannot think. It is that they resolutely refuse to think. In their normal lives, they raise families, run businesses, go to church, watch football, run errands, live within normalcy. Then, mention Trump, and they become golems, subservient to Trump and Trumpism, defiantly mindless, capable of creating chaos and great harm, the creatures of a master whose most potent quality is the ability to foment hatred.
Hatred of groups creates its own form of reason. Its logic is mostly impenetrable because it is faith based and often family based. His believers make leaps of faith over evidence itself and the grotesque physical reality of Trump himself into an absolute: Trump hates them. I love Trump. I hate them.
Those who hate believe that the objects of their hatred are worthy of their hatred. Propaganda, anecdotes, and fear sustain that belief in the worth of their hatred. And how many times have we heard of generations of hatred festering in families. Love my family, hate its foes. Now, increasingly, it is internet based, the only family for many mass shooters.
However, such virulent group hatred is hard to sustain over time. Outside of a dictatorship with mass support (see early Nazi Germany, see most white communities in the deep South pre-civil Rights movement, etc.), it takes repeated acts of willpower to muster the energy to hate this minute, this afternoon, tomorrow, next week, next year. Trump is the most powerful engine for this hatred. He runs on that special American fuel of race hatred and an amorphous resentment of ‘libs’ or government, but he is the 396 cubic inch big block engine that revs all of it into screaming mode. When he dies, for only his death will quell that awful voice, maybe his curse breaks just enough for a tilt back toward less cruelty, more decency, more sense in the traditional definition of reason and good judgment.
That is a very slim hope.
*Rothkopf, Dave. “The GOP Is the Party of Fuck You.” The Daily Beast; May 12, 2023.
