Listening to the puerile heckling and jeering of the MAGA caucus during the State of the Union Address, I was frustrated yet again about the reflexive discussion of our politics here in the US. The idea that President Biden represents "liberal" America while the cretins shouting at him in MAGA hats represent "conservative" America is so stupid as to cause anyone of moderate intelligence actual physical pain. There is nothing conservative about a movement that peddles conspiracy theories, denies the validity of free and fair elections, idolizes and abets a murderous Russian dictator, and passes laws premised on the idea that a frozen embryo has the same rights as the woman whose body produced it.
This very partial list of extreme implications of the MAGA agenda demonstrate that it does not conform to any bilateral model of American politics. A truly American politics is one in which both sides, while opposed, agree to coexist and share power. As President Biden said in the SOTU, "You can't love America only when you win."
MAGA, by contrast, pictures the world in starkly Manichean terms. Anyone who opposes MAGA is an enemy with whom no reconciliation or coexistence is possible, and who must not only be defeated but humiliated and subordinated (perhaps destroyed). That is why MAGA partisans feel entitled to shout at the President during the State of the Union Address, or to assault Congress while it was certifying the results of an election that the MAGA candidate had lost fair and square.
MAGA is thus not pursuing any set of goals that fall within a value system that can be called "American." It is seeking the dissolution of the American system as a whole. Their continuous evocation of 1776 is ironically apt, since the success of MAGA will effectively end the American experiment and start something new.
Why do MAGA voters want to end America? For all the hand-wringing and pontificating that pundits do about the need to "try to understand" MAGA partisans, their motives are not very complicated. They fall into three camps.
The first are religiously motivated voters who would like to make America a more "godly" nation (by, for example, outlawing reproductive freedom, ending marriage equality, mandating prayer in schools). For them, a nation that was less democratic yet more "godly" would be a worthwhile trade. Such voters have been present in the American political scene since colonial times.
Religiously motivated voters make up about half of the MAGA coalition. Another important constituency consists of economically disenfranchised citizens. These are people who, because their livelihood fell prey to the rapid and profound changes of the last 50 years (for example, the industry that supported the region in which they live collapsed due to technology or globalization), have seen their own fortunes fall even as the rest of the country (especially the wealthiest 1% of the rest of the country) has become richer. They are understandably angry, and in their anger are ready to tear down the system that they blame for their troubles.
Those two camps would not be enough to have won a national election, however. What put MAGA over the top was the third leg of the MAGA stool: racially motivated voters. These voters range from hard core racists such as Nick Fuentes, who has dined at Mar-a-Lago, to those who are horrified by overt bigotry but who were troubled by the election of Barack Obama for reasons they can't quite pin down.
This coalition can't be called "conservative." There is nothing conservative about the quest to destroy American democracy. Once democracy is gone, there will be precious little left to conserve, and precious little power left to MAGA voters for conserving anything (even the things that they purport to care about more than democracy itself).
What, then, is the opposite of MAGA? The answer is obvious. One does not have to be a Democrat or a liberal to understand the sheer folly of the MAGA agenda. Republicans as conservative as Liz Cheney can articulate it very clearly, and have done so in great detail. Anyone whose perspective and values falls within the normal range of American politics will stand in opposition to MAGA's goals. The opposite of a MAGA voter is thus a normal voter.
This can be underscored by applying the injunction to "try and understand MAGA voters" in reverse. If MAGA voters had any normal set of values, what onus would fall on them from a reasonable attempt to understand their opponents' perspective? If they looked at their leader and listened to his constant stream of vicious invective, sloppy gaffes, and sheer bizarre nonsense from the perspective of someone who did not agree with their politics, what would they naturally conclude? At the very least, it would be incumbent upon them to find a more effective spokesperson for their cause.
The fact that they would NEVER think that way, and in fact praise their Dear Leader even more lavishly as his performance becomes progressively more obscene, tells you all you need to know about the state of affairs. MAGA partisans can do nothing but troll their opponents because their world view admits no possibility of reasoned debate. In their eyes, we are irredeemably the enemy. We are evil. They do not have to deal with us in good faith, because as far as they are concerned we do not deserve such courtesy.
For MAGA voters to feel the way they do falls within their rights as Americans. We should not vilify or demonize them in the same way they do the rest of us, because to do so is to aid them in tearing America apart. But though we should not demonize them, neither should we treat their politics as normal.
Fortunately, the three wings of the MAGA coalition do not amount to even 40% of the American electorate. Even given the advantage they enjoy in the Electoral College, the MAGA camp will need to win millions of supporters from among undecided and independent voters. In that light, we should not allow the fiction that MAGA represents the "conservative" wing of American politics. The MAGA crowd are doomsday cultists, the rest of us, whether Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, are simply normal voters. Voting "normal" might sound boring, but the outcome is guaranteed to be better than what the doomsday cultists have on offer.
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