- Reconsidering the definition of MAGA, and how it relates to base human nature;
- Recalling the David Brooks essay from yesterday;
- Trump thinks an honest economic forecast is “unpatriotic”;
- A Christian boy band preaches to public school students, and denies it;
- How RFK Jr.’s battle against autism reveals simple-minded thinking;
- We’re all going to die anyway, says a Republican defending Medicaid cuts;
- How Trump makes the immigrant crisis worse by simply redefining legal immigrants into illegal ones;
- And about that Facebook guy Justin, who asks basic questions of people on the street who cannot answer.
So perhaps we can refine the working definition of MAGA. It’s coming clearer into focus, though it should have been obvious all along.
What MAGA folks are yearning for is a return to small town life where everyone is like they are, the same race, more or less the same religion. They don’t want to deal with people unlike themselves. And their working view of reality is comprised of myths from one holy book. They don’t want to be bothered with what people from other places tell them about how reality really works. Thus flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers and anti-intellectuals in general. And never mind the internal contradictions of their favorite holy book. They make it that much more useful.
MAGA is about loyalty to an authoritarian leader. They prattle about meritocracy, but don’t mean it for a moment; look at Trump’s cabinet. And it’s about purity of the tribe (of America Christian whites). Look at them flouting the law at every opportunity to get brown-skinned “foreigners” out of the country. It’s *so* obvious, that few state it that plainly. They regard the Constitution with veneration similar to that for their Bible, but don’t follow the principles of either; veneration doesn’t entail understanding. Both documents are just markers of tribal bonds. Icons to wave over the crowds.
So this is not, I think, strictly an American yearning. It’s American only to the extent that, by virtue of being an expansionist nation over the past few centuries, that has spread out across a largely empty continent (except for the natives, of course), they have recreated a small town, frontier existence that much the rest of the Western world had already been through, and settled down from.
It’s all about base human nature as evolved over a million years, and the way it struggles to live in the modern environment, which is so different from where that human nature arose.
The Brooks essay I linked yesterday goes into this in analogous detail. Which I’ll quote a bit more of.
If America is built around a universalist ideal, then there is no room for the kind of white identity politics that Trump and Stephen Miller practice every day. There is no room for the othering, zero-sum, us/them thinking, which is the only kind of thinking Trump is capable of. There’s no room for Trump’s immigration policy, which is hostile to Latin Americans but hospitable to the Afrikaners whose ancestors invented apartheid. There’s no room for Tucker Carlson’s replacement theory. …
And:
Last, there are at least two kinds of morality. There is a kind of morality based on universal moral ideals, and then there is tribal morality. Deneen and Vance say they don’t think people are motivated by abstractions. They might try reading the Bible. The Bible is built on abstractions: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The Sermon on the Mount contains a bunch of abstractions: blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the merciful. Believe it or not, down through the centuries, billions of people have dedicated their lives to these abstractions.
What Deneen and Vance said about men in combat is a manifestation of tribal morality. They take a sentiment that is noble in time of war — we take care of our own — and apply it in general to mean that we don’t have to take care of the starving children in Africa; we can be cruel to those we don’t like. Trumpism is a giant effort to narrow the circle of concern to people just like us.
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Trump, as we see daily, filters everything through a lens of loyalty.
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The economists do their thing and make projections of growth over coming years. They do this all the time.
JMG, 30 May 2025: Trump Rages Over “Unpatriotic” US Growth Forecast
“The Democrat inspired and ‘controlled’ Congressional Budget Office (CBO) purposefully gave us an EXTREMELY LOW level of Growth, 1.8% over 10 years. How ridiculous and unpatriotic is that!
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This big theme explains the self-righteousness of Christians too. Support for the tribe is more important than those wishy-washy ‘woke’ laws meant for other people.
Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 30 May 2025: A Christian boy band denies trying to win converts at a public elementary school assembly, subtitled “The Davidson County Schools superintendent says he was “hoodwinked” by the 3 Heath Brothers”
Members of a Christian boy band insist they didn’t preach to children during a daytime assembly at a public school even though the district’s superintendent and everything the band has ever said publicly suggest otherwise.
One side is clearly lying and it’s the one that believes you need God to be a moral person.
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Primitive thinking is simplistic thinking, as I’ve discussed time and again. To MAGA conservatives, the world is black and white, and every complex problem has a simple (simplex) answer.
Vox, Dylan Scott, 30 May 2025: RFK Jr. is looking in the wrong place for autism’s cause, subtitled “The autism commission is doomed to fail.”
“Genes don’t cause epidemics. You need an environmental toxin,” Kennedy said in April when announcing his department’s new autism research project. He argued that too much money had been put into genetic research — “a dead end,” in his words — and his project would be a correction to focus on environmental causes. “That’s where we’re going to find an answer.”
But according to many autism scientists I spoke to for this story, Kennedy is looking in exactly the wrong place.
Surely it’s been explained to him that there is no “epidemic” of autism. The rise in numbers of diagnoses is a matter of changing definitions and changing methods of diagnosis. The article goes on and on about them; nothing new. Conservatives think there is a simple answer for every problem; there isn’t.
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In Lakoff’s take, recall, progressives are about empathy and government as about protection and empowerment, while conservatism is about obedience and discipline (and not empathy).
This has been widely reported.
NY Times, 30 May 2025: Defending Medicaid Cuts, Ernst Tells Iowans, ‘We All Are Going to Die’, subtitled “Senator Joni Ernst’s flip response in an exchange with constituents about the effects of Trump’s domestic policy bill spread quickly online.”
The point being–? Why not spend *nothing* on health care and let everyone die as early as they would have millennia ago? That’s the traditional way.
This reminds me of some of the conservative response to the COVID crisis. Just let grandma die! So the rest of us don’t have to wear masks!
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Once again, MAGA is about white tribalism, white supremacy. “Alas, to Trump, every (non-White) immigrant is a threat.”
Washington Post, Catherine Rampell, 30 May 2025: Trump might become the most pro-illegal immigration president ever, subtitled “The president is rapidly turning legal immigrants into illegal ones.”
You might not have noticed it, but last week the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States surged by 350,000.
Don’t worry, an army of gangbangers and other criminals didn’t charge the border. Rather, President Donald Trump simply decided to turn 350,000 legal immigrants into illegal ones.
Trump has been fearmongering about an “invasion” of unauthorized immigrants for years. Since retaking the White House, he has attempted to manifest those fever dreams into reality through a “de-documentation” campaign. This is not an immigration agenda that targets criminals; it’s one that criminalizes immigrants who have followed the law, by stripping them of their existing visas and work permits.
The 350,000 people de-documented last week are Venezuelans who had permission to live and work in the United States — subject to screening and other conditions — under a program known as temporary protected status. TPS was created in 1990 to shield immigrants from countries experiencing war or other catastrophes that make it unsafe for them to return home.
Given the tribalistic thinking of base human nature… most of MAGA probably agrees that anything that can be done cleanse white settlements of brown people is worth doing. They may not even realize what their motivation; like Trump, they rationalize this by supposing all those brown people are criminals, despite all the evidence otherwise over decades.
And:
Alas, to Trump, every (non-White) immigrant is a threat. He first tried to cancel protections for Venezuelans in February, and last week the Supreme Court gave him the green light. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, called this development “the single largest mass-illegalization event in U.S. history.”
But racist whites from South Africa are welcome immigrants! Because they support Trump. Here we are again.
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I may have mentioned this Facebook guy before, without having a link. Here’s a link.
Facebook, Justin Interview
Justin is a guy who does live interviews in shopping malls, in Times Square, on city streets. He asks people questions with very obvious answers. Their answers are always wrong, and not trying to disabuse them, he always responds “yes!” The significance here is that so many people on the street can’t answer very basic questions. “How many states are there in the United States?” “In what country is the Great Wall of China?” “What language to people in Montana speak?”
It verges on cruelty, to expose these peoples’ ignorance (though they’re all anonymous). And I’m sure that Justin must do hundreds of such person-on-the-street interviews and selects only the very few that reveal their ignorance. So there’s a huge selection bias here. Still: why are there *any* such people? How did they glide through high school and get on in modern life without being aware of such basic things? “Who did we fight in the war of independence?” The lady in the supermarket suggests “…Vietnam?”
And these people vote.
