It's MAGA's problem now

It’s MAGA’s problem now
Living with the consequences imposed by a woefully uninformed electorate

By Kim Messick
Published January 14, 2025 5:30AM (EST)


(Salon) During the 2024 presidential campaign and after, a recurrent theme among the commentariat was that liberal Americans shouldn’t be, well, mean to Donald Trump supporters. This admonition applied to words as well as sticks and stones; there were just certain things liberals shouldn’t say to, or about, Trump’s familiars. Foremost among these was any hint that proposing to elect a man with 34 felony convictions who had attempted a coup might signal a shortage of smarts, at least when it comes to politics. This, apparently, would be a very not-nice thing to do.

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But then we have voters like the ones in this Times piece from early December. Asked for one word to describe Trump, their choices include “common sense,” “compassion,” and “patriotism.” Keep in mind that they are talking about a man who suggested ingesting bleach could help cure COVID, put migrant children in cages, and tried to steal an election. Later, a truck driver says that Trump “believes in Christ,” while a lacrosse coach tells us that he “runs this country like a business,” though he does allow that it’s “tough for some people to see that.” Yeah, I confess to getting hung up on small details like the eight trillion dollars Trump added to the national debt. As for Trump the apostle of Christ, well, this brings to mind the words of the Duke of Wellington: “If you can believe that, you can believe anything.

And this, in sum, is the problem. We’re not talking here about thinking that Mitt Romney’s views on marginal tax rates were incrementally better than Barack Obama’s, or, alternatively, that Ronald Reagan’s vigilance toward the Soviet Union was a better bet than Walter Mondale’s more dovish approach. These positions moved, more or less persuasively, within the space of rational discourse; perceptive, well-informed people could profitably debate them. But seeing Trump as a compassionate Christian, or as a brilliant businessman and avatar of common sense, signals an epistemic collapse so profound that it removes the opinion from the sphere of rationality and into that of pure, unfiltered credulity. There is simply no way for a person whose cognitive faculties are operating efficiently to hold these views.

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This fact explains an important mystery about our politics. About two-thirds of noncollege white voters supported Trump in 2024. About two-thirds of nonwhite noncollege voters supported Harris. If we assume that both groups experience roughly equal levels of economic distress, then we have an obvious question to answer: Why did they respond to it so differently in the voting booth? The answer, I’d say, is that they accept radically different explanations of that distress. Nonwhites mostly see themselves as oppressed by corporate power and racial bigotry, and they see the government as the only institution of sufficient scale to stand against these forces. Whites mostly see themselves as oppressed by corporate power and elite derision, and they see the government as complicit in both. Their only hope for dignity, they think, lies in an outsider, a strong man (and yes, it has to be a man), a smasher who will destroy a rotten system and resurrect the industrial glory of their fathers and grandfathers. The smokestacks will reignite, The Other will be tamed, and life, and America, will be great again. ...................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/01/14/its-magas-problem-now/