This is the best explanation of MAGA I’ve ever seen, still true after 8-years. Read it. It’s important.
https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about
Articles like these place a lot of emphasis on the poor, rural members of MAGA, but there’s not as much focus on the middle and upper class suburban contingents. People with pristine oversized pickups that have never left a paved road or hauled anything besides a new TV. That coalition as a whole needs to be understood to explain the rise of MAGA.
Also, I don’t know anyone who talks about poor, rural folks like that article supposes, and I’ve spent my entire life in blue urban areas. That guy needs some new friends if his do. In my experience, they speak about poor rural and poor urban people the same way: either equally empathetically or equally condescendingly.
the middle and upper class suburban contingents
We can’t call these people out as it would alienated the suburban trash vote both parties need. Dunking on poors in politics is an American sport. Both sides do it because who cares… Losers lose!
The sad thing about that article though is that the spiked bat they picked out of desperation cares much less about them than the very people they aim their hated at. It’s one of the biggest reasons that people like me that think trump is the lowest of the low, truly a garbage human being, detest the entire GOP and every person that supports them - they continue to enable their actual destructive behavior.
It angers me to even see an article try to minimize the negative impact that is being imparted on our current and future generations. I understand that true elites are bad but you can’t both sides this shit. One side is trying to make lives better and one side revels in destroying our civil liberties that our founders and troops bled for, ignoring the fact that their guy who is Jesus 2.0 leads us back towards a monarchy/dictatorship.
Fuck that.
The electoral college needs to go and our FPTP voting system needs to go if we ever truly want to make change as a nation. Otherwise we will continue to be stuck in a pissing match with no victor, while the elites get fatter. The GOP needs to die, they have no platform and don’t stand for their ideals anymore - they’re not the same party that existed back in the 2000s
That was really a great read thanks for sharing that!
It was absolutely hilarious to get to the end not entirely realizing it and reading “You can pre-order Jason “David Wong” Pargin’s book Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick …” Lol
The future definitely deserves to be punched in the dick though.
Thanks for sharing!
That type of candidate my or may not have any coherent platform. Even more than for a normal politician, it’s about pandering to people’s identity. They also have the advantage that they can lie about what they’ve done, and then just cover those lies with more lies and misdirections if called out.
In normal times people aren’t totally fooled by that, but it has been working very well in the US (and to a degree Canada), lately.
They promised to be “not biden”, and lemmings ate the fish like dynamite.
See, that phrase didn’t make sense, but it doesn’t need to. Politics for these people isn’t about policy, or logic, or even country. It’s about “if I win, you lose, so fuck you!”.
And that’s how we got here.
Conservatives typically win by promising what they will not do vs. what they will do. (At least the true conservatives do. Not all Republicans are conservative though)
In some cases, they ran in districts that were already heavily Republican, often due to gerrymandering. They won because any Republican would have won.
If other Republicans ran in the primaries, they won the primary by exciting the primary voting base. Far fewer people vote in primaries, and they tend to be engaged in hype, and MAGA is all hype based propaganda based on fear and anger. That excites Republican primary voters.
The few that defeated incumbent Republicans did so through the hate and fear angle, because it works. It is a successful fascist playbook, as shown throughout history.
So basically they mostly won for the same reason Trump won in 2016, fascist propaganda stoking fear. They promised to solve all the problems they made up about the groups they blamed.
The whole Ohio immigrants eating pets is just the same thing, dialed up to 11.
This is also why you vote in the primary of the party with the candidates you like least.
If you view any candidate in party A as better than every candidate in party B, you need to vote in party B’s primary so the best candidate for you will make it to the general election. Then even if party A loses the general election you still get the candidate you like most from party B.
This was a key strategy for black people in the south to get the least racist Democrats into office. It’s basically ad hoc ranked choice voting and it reduces the power of extremists.
Depending on the state, one may not have that option.
Arizona has a ballot initiative this year to force open primaries if the party wants any state election funding assistance.
Of course all the parties are against it. Bipartisan disapproval for a citizen ballot initiative usually means it’s in the citizen’s interest.
Populism is fairly simple, you just parrot the following talking points:
The system isn’t working. I am fighting the system. Elect me and I’ll take the fight to them.
What isn’t working should be as vague as possible, so the voter believes it is the thing they’re angry about. When elected, the candidate should continue to complain about the system and crow about how hard they’re fighting for you, so you keep voting for them.
Unfortunately, this eventually leads to you actually passing legislation that makes everything much, much worse than it was. You can keep blaming the other side, but eventually, the jig is up.
Right: Things are shit because of the people who are already marginalized (letting us take advantage of pre-existing prejudice and targeting the people with the smallest platforms to push back against our narratives)
Left: Things are shit because the people at the top are fucking over all of us together
Center: Things aren’t shit
In the absence of a leftist narrative, the most fundamental Center vs Right disagreement is just whether or not things are shit. As things get shittier and shittier, the Center will keep losing strength to the Right.
Probably a dumb question but if I ran as a hateful republican and won a seat do you think after my first term is up I could retire a millionairre?
They promised to hurt the right people. The kind of people who will vote for them don’t follow up on voting records, they just watch pundits or read web news that reaffirms their point of view and feelings.
The reality is a small percent of the voting public actually vote in primaries and those who do, on the right especially, tend to be the most extreme variety.
I may be the only one but kind of makes me sad for people like that.
The same way all regime whores get into the office… Donor money and captured political process.
While plebs fighting culture wars, the parasite class is executing a class war!
Republicans got in bed with the Tea Party, pretended their opinions were legitimate, then found themselves being successfully primaried by the monster they legitimized.
They promise to punish the people republican voters don’t like (poor people, minorities, and “elites”). And then they fulfill the first two.
The real, possibly main answer is largely because many people, especially young people, do not vote in large enough numbers to stop them.
There’s also stuff like gerrymandering that help parties in power stay in power when they get to draw the district lines but I would argue that poor turnout is what makes the biggest difference.
They believe they are living in a godless country. Liberals are out to destroy America with their evil atheist ways. They believe liberals are destroying traditional family values. They believe liberals want open borders so all the immigrants will vote for them. They believe those immigrants are all gang members just waiting to kill God fearing Christians. They believe this is a Christian country. They believe abortion is murder. Finally, they believe Trump is the only one who can save the country.
Something like 63% of the US population identifies as Christian. That number is over 75% in Latin America.
If they really wanted more Christians, they’d welcome the immigrants. But that’s just an excuse to cover for the racism.
No, because brown Hispanics tend to be catholic. That’s the wrong Christian to a lot of the Bible belt
Citizens United. In 2001, corporations were suddenly allowed to donate an unlimited amount of money to political campaigns. Campaign donations were deemed a form of expression protected by the first ammendment. The entrenched far-right republicans were suddenly being outspent by even further right people from out of nowhere, unseating many of them. The game for both parties then became how much corporate donation can you attract, and for Republicans, they found the further right you go the more votes you get. So republican nominees could have standards or keep their job, not both. The ones that were the far-right were still professional legislators, genuinely believing conservativism is in society’s best interest, and many of them tried to resist, like McCain and Romney. The new far-right ones are professional shills in it for personal gain. The old ones who stuck around are greedy cowards who know better. The Republicans have slid right at lightspeed ever since Citizens United.
Hurt people. And yeah a lot of
