Tag Archives: MAGA

Those “Indoctrination” Charges

In a recent New York Times essay, Jamelle Bouie considered the accusation–increasingly leveled by the Right–that educators (especially but not exclusively at the university level) “indoctrinate” students.

When I first stumbled across that accusation, I found it ludicrous. As any professor will confirm, teachers are lucky to “indoctrinate” students sufficiently to get them to read the course syllabus. Like so many of the loony-tunes beliefs that have currency on the MAGA Right, this one is prompted by the conviction that no one could really disagree with their perspectives, so if many younger Americans reject their world-view, that rejection must be due to pernicious activity by those hated “libruls.”

As Bouie notes, they’re paranoid. He began his essay with examples:

According to Tim Sheehy, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Montana, young people have been “indoctrinated” on the issue of abortion.

“Young people, listen up, they’ve been indoctrinated for too long. We don’t even try to talk to them anymore,” Sheehy said at an event last year.

This idea that young voters have been indoctrinated — or even brainwashed — to reject Republicans and conservative ideas has significant purchase on the political right. Last month, responding to suggestions that institutions were controlled by left-wing ideologues, Dan Crenshaw, the pugilistic Republican congressman from Texas, declared that “the Left” had “turned higher education into a tool for indoctrination, rather than education,” and that “the Right needs to fight back” and “challenge the ideological chokehold on education” lest “woke elites” keep “pushing irrational leftist ideas.”

And last year, Elon Musk told his more than 100 million followers on X that “parents don’t realize the Soviet level of indoctrination that their children are receiving in elite high schools & colleges!”

As Bouie concedes, ordinary Americans often worry that, as their children find friends and have experiences outside the home, they will adopt ideas that differ from those with which they’ve been raised. But as he says, that is not what we have here. “What we have here, coming from these conservative and Republican voices, is the paranoid assertion that the nation’s institutions of higher education are engaged in a long-running effort to indoctrinate students and extinguish conservatism.”

After all, the ideological defection of one’s children couldn’t possibly be attributable to their encounters with reality. It must be a result of nefarious “grooming” and “indoctrination.” As Bouie points out,

To start, a vast majority of young people attending institutions of higher education in the United States are not enrolled in elite colleges and universities. They are not even enrolled in competitive or selective institutions. Instead, most college kids attend less selective schools where the most popular degree programs are ones like business or nursing or communications — not the ever-shrinking number of humanities majors blamed for the supposed indoctrination of young people….

If, as the latest youth poll from the Harvard Institute of Politics suggests, most young people in the United States reject the Republican Party’s views on abortion or climate change or health care or gun regulation, it’s less because they’ve been indoctrinated to oppose ideological conservatism and more because, like all voters, they have come to certain conclusions about the world based on their experience of it. A young woman looking ahead to her future doesn’t have to be brainwashed to decide that she wants the right to decide when and whether to have a child. A young man with memories of school shootings on the news and shooter drills at school doesn’t need to be indoctrinated to decide that he wants more gun control.

These students haven’t been indoctrinated; they’ve encountered reality–facts, evidence and experiences at odds with the beliefs of the cult. As Bouie says, “It’s the same with any group of voters. That’s just the way democracy works.”

But Republicans have made “democracy” a dirty word. And they seem to have given up on persuasion in favor of trying to win power through the brute-force exploitation of the political system. Why win over voters when you can gerrymander your party into a permanent legislative majority? Why try to persuade voters to reject a referendum you disagree with when you can try instead to change the rules and kill the referendum before it can get on the ballot? Why aim to win a broad national majority when you can win — or try to snatch — a narrow victory in the swing states?

Why consider the possibility that you might be wrong about climate change denial, or the government’s right to force a woman to give birth?

In the real world, professors lack the ability to indoctrinate, Jews don’t have space lasers, and liberals don’t control the weather.

The kids are just sane.

Comments

President Vance?

Those of us who have been obsessively following the political campaigns have been struck by Trump’s increasingly precipitous mental decline.  In just the past week, he has turned in truly bizarre performances. At a rally, he stopped taking questions and stood for 39 minutes silently “dancing” to music from what was evidently a playlist; in interviews, he refused to answer questions, instead going wildly off-subject, lobbing insults and demeaning journalists at the Wall Street Journal.

With less than three weeks left until November 5th, we seem to be in a race to see whether Trump’s meltdown will be too complete–and too impossible for even MAGA to ignore– before the election, or whether America will risk the unthinkable by electing him and then waking up to the reality that we’ve really elected JD Vance.

Heather Cox Richardson has focused upon that prospect, noting that–even if Trump wasn’t so obviously losing it–he’s 78 years old. The likelihood of a senile 78-year-old serving a full term is, to be charitable, low.

Trump’s issues make it likely that a second Trump presidency would really mean a J.D. Vance presidency, even if Trump nominally remains in office.

Currently an Ohio senator, J.D. Vance is just 39, and if voters put Trump into the White House, Vance will be one of the most inexperienced vice presidents in our history. He has held an elected office for just 18 months, winning the office thanks to the backing of entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who first employed Vance, then invested in his venture capital firm, and then contributed an unprecedented $15 million to his Senate campaign.

Vance and Thiel make common cause with others who are open about their determination to dismantle the federal government. Although different groups came to that mission from different places, they are sometimes collectively called a “New Right” (although at least one scholar has questioned just how new it really is). Some of the thinkers both Vance and Thiel follow, notably dystopian blogger Curtis Yarvin, argue that America’s democratic institutions have created a society that is, as James Pogue put it in a 2022 Vanity Fair article, “at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning.” Such a system must be pulled to pieces.

Richardson described several other “tech bros” who subscribe to that world-view and support both Trump and Project 2025, which–to use academic language–“operationalizes” it. It is a worldview and a plan that JD Vance wholeheartedly endorses.

Like Thiel, Vance has spoken extensively about the need to destroy the U.S. government, but while Thiel emphasizes the potential of a technological future unencumbered by democratic baggage, Vance emphasizes what he sees as the decadence of today’s America and the need to address that decadence by purging the government of secular leaders. A 2019 convert to right-wing Catholicism, Vance said he was attracted to the religion in part because he wanted to see the Republican Party use the government to work for what he considers the common good by imposing laws that would enforce his version of morality.

Vance would continue the Right’s war on education; Richardson notes that Vance has called American universities “the enemy.” But there’s much more.

Vance wants to dismantle the secular state. He wants to replace that state with a Christian nationalism that enforces what he considers traditional values: an end to immigration—hence the lies about the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio—and an end to LGBTQ+ rights. He supports abortion bans and the establishment of a patriarchy in which women function as wives and mothers even if it means staying in abusive marriages.

The available evidence suggests that MAGA folks are far less supportive of Vance than they are of Trump, despite (or perhaps due to) the fact that Vance is a far more articulate communicator of their Project 2025 worldview. I wonder how many of them will knowingly vote for a Vance presidency– assuming they are capable of recognizing that probability.

I also wonder how MAGA voters are processing Trump’s increasingly public deterioration. How are they explaining away the bizarre comments about sharks and the “great” Hannibal Lecter, and Trump’s own “beautiful body?” Do they worry about the fact that every economist–liberal or conservative–says Trump’s love-affair with tariffs would tank the economy, increase inflation and impose a huge tax on American families?

Or does their loyalty to Faux News and its clones protect them from even hearing about these things?

And most obsessively of all, I wonder how many of these fearful, angry, and irrational people are there–and how many will vote?

Comments

Do Republicans Hate Cities, Or Just Those Who Inhabit Them?

My husband and I live in the downtown core of Indianapolis, having downsized from a previous home in a nearby historic district. We are urban folks who love being able to walk to the grocery, the dentist, the bank and multiple restaurants and bars.

A recent report from Indianapolis Downtown suggests we’re not alone–our downtown’s residential population has grown nearly 50% since 2010, to almost 30,000, more than 50 new businesses have opened since last year, and $9.5 billion in development is in the works. Despite the fears and misconceptions of suburban and rural folks, crime downtown decreased 34% in the past year, and downtown is the safest district in Marion County. We were only 5% of all crime in the county.

Obviously, not everyone shares our love for urban living, and that’s fine–to each his own. What isn’t fine is the current Republican war on cities and those of us who choose to live in them.

Donald Trump portrays city neighborhoods as feral places, deranged by Democrats. “The crime is so out of control in our country,” Trump charged at a Michigan campaign stop during the recent Democratic National Convention. “The top 25 [cities] almost all are run by Democrats and they have very similar policies. It’s just insane. But you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped. … We have these cities that are great cities where people are afraid to live in America.”

This is, of course, a ludicrous caricature, as numerous bread-fetching city dwellers could attest. Yet to understand the significance of this seething anti-cities rhetoric — both its political potency and the unique opportunity it presents for Democrats — requires a brief look at a deep-seated tension in how conservatives have talked about urban areas across recent decades.

The article noted that the GOP conservative wing has run against cities for years, with an animus rooted in nativism and religion. Initially, they appealed to Protestant voters by attacking heavily Catholic cities as sites of “popery, demon rum, and corrupt Irish politicians.” Later, Nixon appealed to white voters by focusing on urban crime and civil uprisings.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, leading conservative politicians and intellectuals modified Nixon’s rhetoric, adding elements aimed at corralling new urban and urban-adjacent Republican voters. During his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan explicitly placed the social functions played by local neighborhoods at the heart of his urban commentary. Tender odes to the beauties of the human-scale city neighborhood — paired with condemnation of government programs for undermining community self-help capacities — infused national GOP communications output. Crucially, this often lent the party’s outreach efforts a pro-urban veneer. Propelled partly by this neighborhoods appeal, Reagan attracted key support from traditionally Democratic “white-ethnic” inhabitants of older city and suburban areas.

Donald Trump and MAGA have returned to the earlier portrayal of urban areas as dangerous hellholes that endanger an  “American Dream” anchored in (White) suburban and rural America.

The central metaphor Trump uses when talking about cities is “war.” Normally, war occurs between sovereign nations. For Trump, however, the war is within our nation. War requires two sides that are clearly differentiated and physically distinct. For Trump, the two sides are cities and suburbs. In the cities, as Trump tells it, you will find one of America’s enemies: foreigners who presumably look different from native-born Americans. They have infiltrated urban neighborhoods, in his telling, fueling a conflict between alien cities and native suburbs.

This rhetoric depends on racism and xenophobia for its effectiveness. For that matter, Trump’s entire appeal–and MAGA’s philosophy (if one can call fear and hatred a philosophy)– is firmly rooted in racism.

Trump uses terms such as “living hell,” “total decay,” “violent mayhem,” and “a disaster” to describe cities. Cities are foreign outposts within American society. In this view, the hordes of “illegal aliens” invading the southern border have taken over city neighborhoods.

These attacks aren’t simply wildly inaccurate and hateful, they are evidence of MAGA’s pathological racism.

A few days ago, I suggested that Americans are engaged in a “cold” Civil War, and that it is being fought over essentially the same issue as the last one–whether people who aren’t White Christian males are entitled to be seen as human beings who deserve equal civic status with the White guys. The rhetoric employed by Trump–and increasingly by other Republicans–underscores that observation. 

A vote for Trump and those who support him is a vote to return to the Confederacy. I hope Harris is right when she says “we’re not going back”

Comments

Question And Answer

In a recent column for the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson asks THE question: how on earth is this election close?

The choice between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump should not be a tough call. Harris is a former prosecutor; Trump, a felon. Harris gives campaign speeches about her civic values; Trump rants endlessly about his personal grievances, interrupting himself with asides about sharks and Hannibal Lecter. Harris has outlined a detailed set of policy proposals for the economy; Trump nonsensically offers tariffs as a panacea, describing this fantasy in terms that make it clear he doesn’t understand how tariffs work.

Also, Harris never whipped thousands of supporters into a frenzy and sent them off to the Capitol, where they smashed their way into the citadel of our democracy, injuring scores of police officers and threatening to hang the vice president, in an attempt to overturn the result of a free and fair election. Trump did.

This is the conundrum that drives most rational people crazy. Even without January 6th, 32 felonies, multiple sexual assaults and the horrified testimonies of people who worked in Trump’s administration, who listens to the childish rants of a mentally-disturbed man with a third-grade vocabulary and thinks, “Yep, that’s the guy who should have charge of the nuclear codes.”? Who wants this ignorant name-calling bully to be a role model for America’s children?

How can this election possibly be close?

Robinson suggests some possibilities. First, Kamala Harris is a woman, and many Americans harbor a deep-seated misogyny. He notes that Trump desperately wants to have a fight over gender and race–and that Trump and Vance  “are trying hard to win the votes of men who equate manhood with cartoonish machismo — men who somehow feel that their status and prospects are threatened because they are men.”

Another reason might be that the 71 million people who voted for Trump in 2020 are loathe to admit that they backed a loser, let alone an embarrassing buffoon utterly unfit for office. (Large numbers of these voters, after all, still believe the “Big Lie.”)

And Robinson notes that Trump does best among uneducated Whites–the demographic most responsive to his vicious demagoguery on immigration — “the lies he keeps telling about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs, for example.” He constantly tells working-class Whites that immigration is a threat to their jobs and communities. As Robinson says, those tribal appeals aren’t likely to win over many new voters, but will likely motivate turnout of his base.

Still, though, how does any of this overcome Trump’s manifest unfitness? How does any of it erase his pathetic performance in the debate? How does it nullify the fact that he awaits sentencing by a New York judge after 34 guilty verdicts in a criminal trial? If the answer is buried somewhere in some poll, I can’t find it.

I have wrestled with the question Robinson poses, and I consistently return to one answer: the “through” line in Robinson’s analysis is bigotry. Racism. A yearning for patriarchy. A simmering hatred of the Other.

Robinson identifies anti-woman, anti-immigrant strands of what we have come to identify as White Supremacy or White Christian Nationalism, but–at least in this essay– he fails to connect the dots, fails to call out the intense White grievance that lies at the heart of the MAGA movement.

When Trump won (barely–and only in the antiquated Electoral College), a number of pundits attributed economic motives to his voters. Research has soundly debunked that assumption; numerous studies confirm the association of “racial resentment” with support for Trump and MAGA. I have previously quoted my youngest son’s observation that there are two kinds of people who vote for Trump–and only two kinds–those who share his racism, and those for whom his racism isn’t disqualifying.

Beginning with that first campaign, Trump jettisoned “dog whistles” in favor of explicitly hateful, racist rhetoric. He asserted that there are “very fine people” who chant “Jews shall not replace us.” He tried to keep Muslims from coming into the country. He said Black immigrants came from “shithole” countries (unlike those nice White folks from Norway…) His supporters want to roll back gay rights, and they persistently wage war on trans children.

This election isn’t about the economy, or national security, or other policies. It’s about culture war.

His MAGA supporters agree with the only clear message Trump has delivered: making America great again requires taking America back to a time when White Christian heterosexual males were in charge, and the rest of us were second class citizens.

This election is close because too many voters share that worldview. The rest of us had better turn out.

Comments

Will Endorsements Matter?

In traditional election cycles, endorsements–generally issued by newspapers–rarely moved votes. The endorsements this year are very different, but whether they will change any votes is unclear. Trump’s MAGA base is firmly insulated from reality–they seem to occupy a different country, where up is down and wet is dry. It isn’t just accusations about immigrants eating dogs and cats–they believe Trump’s claims that crime is up and the economy is tanking, despite the fact that data shows crime plummeting and the American economy flourishing. They might just as well be on another planet.

Because Trump voters occupy an alternate reality, the avalanche of endorsements of Harris/Walz probably won’t pry MAGA votes away. But we can hope that the unprecedented nature of those endorsements will generate registrations and turnout by rational folks who might not otherwise go to the polls. (That certainly is the hoped-for result of celebrity endorsements from super-stars like Taylor Swift.)

What has set this year’s endorsements apart isn’t just the unprecedented number of them, but the political identities and bona fides of the endorsers. (Example: Evangelicals for Harris–really!) Recently, four hundred economists endorsed Harris, warning that the election “is a choice between inequity, economic injustice, and uncertainty with Donald Trump or prosperity, opportunity, and stability with Kamala Harris, a choice between the past and the future.” The other day, seven hundred national security figures announced their endorsement of the Democratic ticket. They were later joined by General Stanley McChrystal.

The sheer number of Republican endorsers–not just the “Never Trumpers”– is staggering.

It isn’t simply high visibility people like Liz and Dick Cheney. Every day we encounter headlines like “State Republican party chairs endorse Kamala Harris for president.” In addition to the Republicans who spoke at the Democratic convention, a group of more than 200 who worked for former Presidents George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Sen. Mitt Romney and the late Sen. John McCain signed onto a letter supporting the Democratic nominee.

A recently launched “Republicans for Harris” is steadily growing.

Perhaps the most striking of all was a New York Times recent compilation of opinions of Donald J. Trump from “those who know him best”–members of Trump’s own administration, and “friends” who’ve known him for many years. As the introduction to those quotations put it,

Dozens of people who know him well, including the 91 listed here, have raised alarms about his character and fitness for office — his family and friends, world leaders and business associates, his fellow conservatives and his political appointees — even though they had nothing to gain from doing so. Some have even spoken out at the expense of their own careers or political interests.

The New York Times editorial board has made its case that Mr. Trump is unfit to lead. But the strongest case against him may come from his own people. For those Americans who are still tempted to return him to the presidency or to not vote in November, it is worth considering the assessment of Mr. Trump by those who have seen him up close.

Those opinions followed, and they are scathing. I encourage you to click through and read them.

The sheer number of economic, military and governmental experts–both Republicans and Democrats–who are warning against another Trump administration ought to be dispositive, but it clearly isn’t making inroads into MAGA fidelity, and I think there are two main reasons.

The first–and most frequently noted–is the similarity of MAGA Republicanism to a cult. In large part, MAGA folks have drunk the Kool-Aid. For whatever reason, some people are susceptible to the Jim Jones and Donald Trumps of the world, and fact-based arguments are irrelevant to them. Their devotion to the cult leader fills some sort of psychic need that the rest of us don’t share and can’t understand.

The second reason is less well understood, but I think it’s important.

Much has been made of the growing division between educated and uneducated voters. Education is absolutely not the same thing as intelligence, but folks who never learned how government works, or what the Constitution requires, are much more likely to believe, for example, that the government can simply round up and deport millions of immigrants (not to mention failing to understand the effect that would have on America’s economy if it were possible). They believe Trump when he says other countries will pay for his proposed tariffs–despite the fact that anyone who took Econ 101 knows tariffs are a tax on Americans. Etc.

The first group will simply ignore facts. The second rejects expertise as offensive elitism.

The reality-based community needs to turn out in force.

Comments