Tag Archives: MAGA

The Roots Of MAGA

Regular readers of this blog have already encountered my analysis of the MAGA cult: white people–mostly but not entirely male– terrified of losing social dominance, and deeply disoriented by a modern world in which ambiguities and “shades of gray” threaten to overwhelm the “faith-based” verities they cling to.

These are the same people who supported Hitler in the 1930s, and support other autocrats today–and the rest of us are in danger of losing America to these limited and terrified folks if we don’t understand the roots of their movement. A recent Substack essay from The Rational League mined the available research and confirmed much of my thesis. (In the quotes below, I’ve omitted the copious citations–to access them, you should click through.)

It began:

It was never about taxes or trade or immigration, at least not in the ways its supporters claim. It was about fear. About losing status. About the aching dread that the world no longer bends to you. And when power begins to slip, the mind scrambles to make sense of its new fragility. That’s when people reach not for reason, but for revenge.

As the research demonstrates, our divisions are not political –they are far deeper and more primal. The essay quotes studies that explain “what happens when large groups of people feel their dominance is being eclipsed, by demographic shifts, cultural liberalization, economic globalization, and the slow unraveling of myths that once placed them at the top of the social food chain.” In such environments, “facts become irrelevant. The mind will do what it must to protect the self. And it will vote for whomever promises to punish the world for changing.”

Support for Donald Trump, and the movement that continues to orbit him, is not best explained by ideology. It is better understood as a reaction to psychological discomfort. A fusion of fear, status anxiety, and identity protection. It draws power from ressentiment, not reason. From feelings of insulted entitlement, not informed civic interest. Trump didn’t awaken this current, he merely performed it better than anyone else .

This is not speculation. It is the clear consensus of two decades of psychological, neurological, and political science research. What follows is not just a condemnation of MAGA’s authoritarian drift, but a forensic examination of how it thrives, in the mind, in culture, and in power.

The research tells us that fear is situational–a “psychological accelerant that turns political disagreement into existential warfare.” When people feel threatened, when they find themselves living in a world they no longer understand, they respond by demanding order and obedience, and the punishment of those who refuse to obey. Fear, the academic literature tells us, isn’t just a side effect of MAGA– it’s the selling point. Trump’s message was simple: “the world is dangerous, but I will protect you, and hurt the people you fear.”

MAGA cultists believe that society is under siege. In numerous studies, MAGA folks have scored high for Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA), defined as “submission to strong leaders, aggression toward deviant groups, and strict adherence to tradition. The more threatened people feel, the more they long for control, hierarchy, and retribution, all things Trump promised in spades.”

Trump’s followers are not irrational. They are reacting, often viscerally, to a perceived collapse of the world they knew. Crime is down, but they feel unsafe. Immigration enriches the economy, but they feel invaded. Diversity increases opportunity, but they feel erased. Trump doesn’t need to solve these problems. He just needs to affirm that they exist, and promise to punish whoever caused them.

In other words, status anxiety is what motivates the MAGA base–fear of irrelevance. The MAGA base consists of those who once felt socially dominant and now feel displaced. Trump promises to put them back on top.

The essay is lengthy and well worth reading in its entirety. It cites the copious scholarship that explains the authoritarian phenomenon and the danger it poses to democracy.

This isn’t just a movement of bad ideas. It’s a movement of deeply felt insecurity, fused to a political figure who offers vengeance, not vision. And in that fusion, the need for power replaces the desire for truth. The need to dominate replaces the value of liberty. The need to feel morally superior replaces the capacity for self-reflection….

The threat is not just Donald Trump. The threat is the psychological scaffolding that made him possible, and that will remain long after he is gone, unless we dismantle it at its source.

Unfortunately, this informative essay doesn’t tell us how to go about “dismantling it at its source.”

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The Brain Drain

Yesterday, I warned about the ferocity of the administration’s war on knowledge, and the incredible damage Trump and MAGA are doing to America’s long dominance in science and technology.

Lest you think I was over-reacting, allow me to share some recent headlines.

Foreign universities hope to lure scientists from the US after Trump research cuts | AP News
The World Is Wooing U.S. Researchers Shunned by Trump – The New York Times
International students see fewer pathways to US careers under Trump
“‘A fear campaign.’ Students around the world are shocked, scared and saddened by US visa pause” — CNN
“America’s Coming Brain Drain: Trump’s War on Universities Could Kill U.S. Innovation” — Foreign Affairs
‘Major brain drain’: Researchers eye exit from Trump’s America; “In the halls of US universities and research labs, one question has become increasingly common as President Donald Trump tightens his grip on the field: whether to move abroad.” — AFP
“US brain drain: the scientists seeking jobs abroad amid Trump’s assault on research: Five US-based researchers tell Nature why they are exploring career opportunities overseas.” — Nature
The Economist warns: “America is in danger of experiencing an academic brain drain”.

(Links to each of these reports is available at the primary link.)

According to the Economist,

Springer Nature publishes Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal. It also runs a much-used jobs board for academics. In the first three months of the year applications by researchers based in America for jobs in other countries were up by 32% compared with the same period in 2024.

In March Nature itself conducted a poll of more than 1,200 researchers at American institutions, of whom 75% said they were thinking of leaving (though disgruntled academics were probably more likely to respond to the poll than satisfied ones).

And just as American researchers eye the exit, foreigners are becoming more reluctant to move in. Springer Nature’s data suggests applications by non-American candidates for American research jobs have fallen by around 25% compared with the same period last year.

As any sentient observer might have predicted, MAGA’s war on knowledge is a win for China, which is offering big salaries to entice disaffected knowledge-workers to relocate there.

According to an essay in the Washington Post, the administration’s inability to understand the consequences of its actions is based in large part on its lack of historical knowledge.  In “Houston, J.D. Vance has a problem,” Mark Lasswell reports that Vance “barely grasps the history of the U.S. space program.”

Last week, Newsmax interviewer Greg Kelly took a break from slathering Vance with praise to delicately broach the possibility of a “brain drain” from American universities if researchers decamp for more hospitable institutions overseas. The White House, as you might have heard, is working energetically to dissolve arrangements between several research universities and the government that for the past century helped make the United States the most powerful and innovative country in the world.

“I’ve heard a lot of the criticisms, the fear, that we’re going to have a brain drain,” the voluble vice president told Kelly. “If you go back to the ’50s and ’60s, the American space program, the program that was the first to put a human being on the surface of the moon, was built by American citizens, some German and Jewish scientists who had come over during World War II, but mostly by American citizens who had built an incredible space program with American talent. This idea that American citizens don’t have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants and professors to do these things, I just reject that.”

As Lasswell sardonically notes, “Vance seems to think a defunded brainiac who happens to be an American citizen is going to tell a recruiter from Aix-Marseille University, “You can keep Provence. I’d rather work on nanotechnology in my garage. U-S-A!”

The actual history of America’s space program–and scientific dominance–is rather different from Vance’s version. After the war, both the United States and the Soviet Union recruited German and Austrian scientists, engineers and technicians. (Without, as the essay notes, being too picky about their Nazi connections. I enthusiastically recommend Tom Lehrer’s “take” on Von Braun...) In the mid-1950s, they created the U.S. space program. “Von Braun and his many, many colleagues were instrumental to U.S. space supremacy — and, according to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, most of them became naturalized citizens in 1954 or 1955.” 

We may not have been picky about their politics, but we did understand–once upon a time–that a nation’s health and wealth depend upon its respect–and support– for empirical knowledge. 

MAGA=Morons Are Gutting America….. 

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The Would-Be King

Phil Gulley is a Quaker pastor in Indiana and a clear-eyed observer of the human condition. Quakers value peace, integrity, community, and stewardship of the Earth–values that our mad would-be king disdains and desecrates. Phil recently shared an essay in which he described the multiple ways in which Trump and his MAGA base offend Quaker, American and human values, and he graciously allowed me to share it. It’s below. (He also has a Substack, for those of us who follow him.)

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A Criminal Syndicate

         Have you ever met someone who reminded you of someone else? When I first heard Pete Buttigieg, I was reminded of Richard Lugar, another well-spoken, intelligent Hoosier. When I met my wife, she reminded me of Katharine Hepburn, with whom she shared a classy, no-nonsense manner. I’m sure my rugged good looks reminded her of Spencer Tracy. When Donald Trump emerged on the political scene, I felt a spark of recognition. I know that man from somewhere else, I told myself. Then I remembered. Donald Trump reminds me of Tony Soprano. Both are swaggering bullies. Both are vicious, violent, and rapacious criminals, heading up criminal syndicates. Except one is fictional and one is not.

         There is no such thing as a Trump Administration. There is a Trump Syndicate, a crime family, a consortium of thugs, underlings, felons, and grifters, purporting to be public servants while carrying out a global campaign of theft, pilfering America’s treasury, peddling access to the Mobster-in-Chief, Donald Trump, while gutting the very agencies that would hold them accountable to the rule of law.

         Theirs is a master class in fraud, unparalleled in American history. The foxes are guarding the henhouse, which by the end of his term will be gutted. A democracy almost 250 years in the making has been stripped bare in one bleak and wintry season. The collective effort of twelve generations of Americans has been decimated by Hair Hitler and his Brownshirts. This is what I grieve the most, that tens of millions of Americans voted for a man who’d made no secret of his disdain for decency and duty. All his life, he has been the poster child of decadence—greedy, grasping, uncaring, and corrupt. He has never had a friend, only servile bootlickers collecting the crumbs that slip through his tiny hands, selling their souls for thirty pieces of silver. They, like he, merit a Judas death—abandoned and ashamed—their names a curse on the lips of history.

         He ventures from the White House only long enough to plunder, gathering jet planes and sweetheart deals from the sponsors of global terrorism, peddling his cryptocoins, favoring those who purchase them, tyrannizing those who don’t. Like all crime bosses, it is himself he is serving and no one else, so he will leave the presidency far richer than he entered it. His is a transactional presidency, our shared public treasure rummaged at fire-sale prices to his cronies.

         Anyone who dares protest is called out on middle-of-the-night tweets—Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, colleges, professors, foreign presidents with the audacity to stand against tyranny, Mexico, Canada, and liberals. What an honor it would be to be singled out for attack by Donald Trump, to be labeled an enemy of his brutish ignorance. If we are known by the company we keep, we are also known by the company we find so repulsive we would dedicate our lives to resisting it. If he is naming his enemies, number me among them. I detest everything about him and all he represents−fascism, meanness, ignorance, and cruelty.

         Like all mob bosses, to remain in his good favor requires an envelope of cash slipped into his silken pocket. His goons rise each morning and go forth, strong-arming America, threatening, intimidating, collecting the daily take, promising safety to those who comply and ruination to those who refuse.  Now we are separating the men from the boys, and shame on the boys, shame on those who buckle under, the law firms and tech bros, whose donations fund this Thief-of-State. With billions of dollars at their disposal, with teams of lawyers at their beck and call, they tremble in fear of this strutting bully and what he might tweet about them. Their spinelessness is not only appalling, but traitorous. A pox upon them all.

         Washington and Lincoln have their memorials, but there will be no such marker for Trump. Should one be erected, it will be torn down by those who cannot bear to see such a man saluted. There won’t be enough tomatoes in the world to register history’s disgust, nor enough guards to safekeep his marker. He should enjoy the braying accolades he is receiving now, since his future will lack the faintest note of praise.

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The Victim Card

Along with the dread I feel with every Trumpian assault on the Constitution and rule of law is a constant, nagging question: how can the MAGA base ignore the threats to their own liberties and livelihoods? How can they look at this pathetic, corrupt,  mentally-ill man and his bizarre collection of incompetents and conspiracy theorists and say “Yes! Those are the people I want in charge of the economy and country?”

I’m not the only person who has mulled over that question, and–while there is never one simple answer to a complicated reality–I’m pretty sure that grievance (along with a healthy dose of ignorance) is a major factor. By “grievance,” of course, I mean the extensive racism encouraged by the Christian Nationalists who constantly play the victim card.

White Christian Nationalists are constantly told by their leaders and pastors that this country was supposed to be theirs by right–that America was supposed to be a Christian nation. Not just any Christians, of course–White male fundamentalist Christians. MAGA’s devotion to Trump is rooted in his permission to hate those “others” who have infringed upon their rights, upon his obvious agreement that equal treatment for Brown and Black folks, Jews, Muslims  and “uppity” women constitutes discrimination against White Christian males and simply cannot be tolerated.

What the MAGA base supports is the administration’s frantic efforts to stamp out DEI and purge official websites of evidence that non-Christian, non-White, non-male individuals have served the country with distinction. MAGA applauds the replacement of competent minority folks with embarrassing and grossly unfit Whites. It cheers the assaults on education, and especially Trump’s attacks on the universities that turn out those hated and increasingly diverse “elites.”

The irony is visible to anyone not in the cult. The aggrieved Whites who used to complain that women and minorities were “playing the victim card” are the ones now playing victim. 

A recent article in The New Republic gives the game away, reporting on the first meeting of Trump’s “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias in the Federal Government.” As the article noted,

Those attending didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that no evidence of such widespread bias exists. That’s because they weren’t there to solve a problem but to create one. The Task Force claimed to be standing up for “religious liberty,” but its real goal is to amplify the persecution complex of the Trump administration’s Christian nationalist allies and base—and then to use groundless claims of religious discrimination as the basis for the suppression of dissent.

Lest we miss the real purpose of this charade, an incident the following week illuminated the fact that–as the article put it–“the Trump administration has zero interest in promoting “religious liberty.”

As the Reverend William Barber and other faith leaders opposed to Republican budget cuts gathered to pray at the Capitol Rotunda, they were swiftly surrounded by Capitol Police officers, one wearing a “crime scene” vest. The press was expelled from the building, and the pastors were arrested.

You would think that a Task Force concerned with anti-Christian bias would take an interest. But the administration appears to have nothing to say. The problem for the Reverend Barber and his fellow pastors is that they would seem to be the wrong kind of Christians. Right-wing pastor Sean Feucht has “filled the US Capitol Rotunda with worship time and time again for the last 4 years,” in his own words, and yet he has never been arrested or detained. He, apparently, is the right kind of Christian.

As most sentient Americans know–and as the article pointed out– attacks on Christians in the U.S. are infrequent– unlike attacks on other religious groups. Assaults on Jews, Muslims, and Sikhs have always been far more numerous, and their incidence has climbed dramatically during the Trump years. “The Task Force’s exclusive focus on Christian victims exposes its rhetoric about defending “religious liberty” as transparently insincere.”

As the essay points out, for members of the MAGA cult, “anti-Christian bias” is indistinguishable from efforts to protect individual rights against discrimination by people who identify as Christian. In other words, efforts to prevent these particular “Christians” from discriminating against people of whom they disapprove is labeled anti-Christian bias. To MAGA, “religious freedom” now means “privilege for conservative Christians alone, including the freedom to harass or discriminate.”

Equality before the law is seen as anti-Christian.

When Christian Nationalists are prevented from dictating the terms of the civic culture, they consider themselves victims. And so long as Trump feeds their perceptions of victimhood, so long as he supports their theocratic aspirations, nothing will shake their loyalty.

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The “Naughty” List

Santa Claus isn’t the only one who is keeping a list of “who is naughty and who is nice.” Charlie Sykes recently brought some limited order out of the chaos of Trump’s first months–a real service, since most of us have been beaten down by the daily firehose of assaults on decency, the Constitution and the rule of law–the tactic Steve Bannon has called “flooding the zone with shit.”

Sykes assembled his list in order to criticize Chuck Schumer, who has finally graduated from sending “stern letters” and moved to block Trump appointees. Sykes asks “What took you so long? Why didn’t you act when”…and then he provides his list of Trumpian assaults that should have prompted active blowback when they occurred.

Granted, Sykes’ list isn’t comprehensive, so intensely has the zone been flooded, but here are the acts that he says should have triggered action from Schumer when they occurred:

  •  blanket pardons for Jan. 6 rioters, including those who assaulted police officers.
  • his purge of the FBI, targeting agents who had investigated his own misconduct.
  • suspending enforcement of the foreign bribery ban.
  • calling for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against him.
  • firing the head of the Office of Special Counsel who protects whistleblowers.
  • firing the head of the Office of Government Ethics.
  • firing the prosecutors who worked on Capitol riot investigations.
  • slashing the office that prosecutes misconduct by public officials.
  • dropping charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in return for Adams agreement to work with ICE — a move that led to the resignation of the acting SDNY U.S. attorney and several other federal prosecutors.
  • Trump’s refusal to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. — stating that he could, but wasn’t going to.
  • Trump’s suggestion to the president of El Salvador that he would send “homegrown” criminals — American citizens — to his notorious prison.
  •  Trump’s executive orders targeting individuals who had criticized him — including Chris Krebs, who had challenged his 2020 election lies.
  • stripping the security clearances of law firms who had challenged him. 
  • Trump’s threats to strip licenses from media critics.
  • allowing Elon Musk’s team to access sensitive and protected taxpayer information.
  • when his top aides were caught chatting about military action on Signal.
  • firing six National Security Council officials on advice from far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer.
  • refusing to rule out the use of military force to seize Greenland. 
  • Trump’s purge of top generals, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
  • sending masked agents to seize people on the streets.
  • arresting international students for little more than for writing op-eds.
  • when White House aide Stephen Miller said that administration was considering suspending habeas corpus.

Sykes list–which I would emphasize is far from comprehensive–was generated as Americans learned of Qatar’s offer of a “gift”–a plane described as a “palace in the sky.”  The offer was, as Sykes says, “a very visible symbol of Trump’s susceptibility to corruption.” But–as he also reminds us– we have seen countless other examples.

Sen. Chris Murphy, for example, has been banging the drum about Trump’s potential $TRUMP crypto conflict of interest for months. “My hair has been on fire about the meme coin from day one,” Murphy told The Washington Post. “That is a level of corruption that is just absolutely stunning. It was already the most corrupt thing a president has ever done in the history of the United States.”

What didn’t make Syke’s list is the Trump administration’s effort to neuter the other two branches of government.

Under the Constitution, Congress and the courts are “co-equal” with the Executive branch, but Trump and MAGA have bullied the Republicans in Congress into submission. (Given that the GOP is currently in the majority, Democrats have been left with limited options for resistance–a good reason to put those options to maximum use.)

Unlike Congress, the courts–at least, the lower federal courts–have fulfilled their Constitutional role. They have ruled for the plaintiffs in virtually every case challenging Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional actions–but while Trump has given lip service to obeying those rulings, he continues to ignore a number of them. At the same time, he has increased his threats against judges who dare to rule against him, and MAGA thugs (Trump’s “brownshirts”) have taken to issuing threats against the judiciary and their families.

We the People need to leave a large civic lump of coal in the Trump stocking. Sooner rather than later.

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