Alternate title: America was supposed to be better than this.
- Perhaps MAGA is about making America *simpler* again; perhaps what we’re seeing is a rejection of the complexity of the modern world;
- Why is it Americans love watching crime shows?
- Franklin Foer on how Trump’s class enemy is the intelligentsia;
- How the Trump administration classifies immigrants as dead;
- How MAGA/DOGE is not Christian, but xenophobically tribal;
- How Trump threatens anyone who dissents;
- More about the State Department’s witch-hunt against anti-Christian bias;
- Yet if they have to rely on Prayer Warriors, the rest of us have nothing to worry about.
Perhaps, I’m thinking, MAGA is really about making America *simple* again. That’s the conservative project: remove ambiguities, reduce everything to binaries, our side good everyone else bad, and so on. That’s the motive for MAGA and DOGE. The Nichols insight is (as I would put it) that our minds are wired for the danger-fraught ancestral environment, and so we feel ill-at-ease in the relatively safe modern environment. Another piece of evidence: how TV shows (in America at least) are still dominated by crime and calamity. There are far more spectacular violent events on TV shows than happen in real life. Why do people crave watching them? Because for most of us modern life is too safe, and thus boring, and that primitive mindset needs stimulation.
