The New MAGA

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As long as there is a large segment of Americans whose world view is based exclusively on misplaced primal anger, movements that successfully harness, weaponize, re-direct and claim to represent this anger will continue to lead in US politics for decades to come. This is my unfortunate assessment, which probably counteracts the popular view that MAGA is imploding. MAGA isn’t over. It will simply mutate, possibly into something even worse. Because when people realise that they’ve been lied to, they don’t necessarily look for the truth. They simply search for the next most convenient lie to believe in. Unfortunately for them, there are people out there whose very full-time profession is to create these lies.

It is not that MAGA anger wasn’t ever justified. For hundreds of years America’s working class was exploited by the most ruthless capitalist model on the planet: work, consume, get sick, die. Every American should be angry that their country spends trillions on guns that could have gone to universal healthcare. Every American should be angry that both the red and blue political classes lobby on behalf of the same exact corporations that make money out of sickness, poison the country with the most highly processed food in the world, and enslave people into the most workaholic culture that has ever existed.

MAGA was born out of a healthy Tea Party anti-systemic reaction that went unhealthy very quickly. Because rather than directing American anti-systemic anger towards the corrupt political system in its entirety, MAGA taught Americans to hate their fellow voters instead. They taught red voters that the reason for the corrupt Deep State was not the cross-party Deep State itself, but fellow Americans. MAGA was the biggest re-direction of hatred ever perpetrated in America: rather than hating the CEOs, oligarchs and career broliticians from both parties who brought the Bible Belt into economic destitution in the first place, MAGA were told to direct their rightful anger towards invisible threats: another person’s race, sexual orientation, religion or other identity. It was a classic plot dusted out of the most popular pages of the fascist playbook.

So, what will the MAGAs do now as they begin to find out that their anti-system leader was part of the system all along? We are about to see another huge misdirection of anger.

Most MAGAs will simply write off the whole Trump era and move on to become good old plain Republicans with no extra labels. You can take the Trump out of the MAGA, but you can’t take out the racism and conservativism that are part of the signature fingerprint of the red demographic. So, for those of you who thought MAGA would go blue, you’ll be disappointed. The Republican party doesn’t simply represent racism and bigotry. It represents one of the most ancient and powerful political narratives: blame. Ex-MAGA will continue to seek catharsis in the quick-and-easy primal mental shortcuts that blame, hatred and bigotry provide, rather than visualise the society-for-all-no-matter-who-you-are that Democrats gaslighted America with for decades, until Trump called their bluff.

Right now, NO ONE is campaigning for an America for all, because there’s no one to sponsor this America. Blame and hatred will continue to rake in sponsors for the next election, and the next one, unless…a significant portion of Americans from both sides realise that they’ve been lied to by everyone. And that they are stronger together rather than divided across income, racial and religious lines by those who have been profiting from these very divisions all this time.

This newsletter is my main income. It is FREE to subscribe to, but made possible by the generosity of paid members. If you’d like to support my work please consider a paid subscription.

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