Nasty, brutish and short
MAGA Republicans offer nothing but cynicism, cruelty and fear. We need to bring hope
When Ron De Santis flew asylum seekers from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard by way of Florida, to “own the libs,” Liberals rightly condemned the stunt for its “performative cruelty.” The cruelty is clear enough, but why perform it at all? After all, he went to a great amount of trouble to demonstrate that he could abuse a disliked group of people with no power to abuse him back, (or so he thought. Events may prove otherwise) If you want to understand the MAGA grand unified theory of government and society, look no further.
When De Santis isn’t tormenting asylum seekers, or going hat in hand to obtain federal aid for a disaster that looks more and more like Old Testament retribution every day, he’s trying to ban any school curriculum that validates the existence of LGBTQ+ people, or in any way references social-emotional learning, a teaching modality grounded in the alarming idea that students are part of a school community and should treat each other decently. One of De Santis’ constituents, a woman in Collier County, Florida named Gayle Repetto seemed to agree. and expressed her dislike of golden rule-adjacent leaning thus:
““Math doesn’t have anything to do with respect for others, community culture, how we can work together,”
While this would surprise the many people in Social Science fields who regularly perform data analysis on those very things, its bloody-minded rejection of common decency shouldn’t surprise us. Just consider the words of this MAGA mom holding forth at Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s “Commitment to America” rollout:
"Critical race theory; diversity, equity, and inclusion; gender identity ... anti-bullying programs ... These are all Marxist-style programs targeting our children."
Yes, she really said “anti-bullying:” like it was a bad thing.
These parents and De Santis seem to be objecting to the idea that you shouldn’t behave like a complete asshole. It’s as if they have distilled the benefits of being in the authoritarian’s favored group down to being allowed abuse the less-fortunate. It’s as if an airline advertised bragged that it was making air travel ‘great’ by offering selected coach passengers the same inefficient boarding, cramped seats and micro dosed snack packages as before but let them scream all the abuse they wanted at a small group seated on milk crates in the back.
Target: Common Decency
Somehow the old-fashioned notion of getting along with others and not bullying or browbeating them into doing things your way has become controversial. Look at all the MAGA types who accuse anyone acting decently of “virtue signaling,” while praising those who voice their worst impulses for “telling it like it is.” When some people start treating neighborliness, old fashioned good manners and the goddamn golden rule as dangerous ideologies, things are headed in a bad direction.
Old-school authoritarian regimes sold utopias built on a foundation of other people’s suffering, but always pushed the idea that all the targeting and abuse would serve some ultimate higher purpose. Stalin promised a worker’s paradise with tractors and wheat sheaves enough for everyone, Hitler, a roomy and architecturally intimidating thousand year Reich built atop the graves of slavic Üntermenschen, and Mussolini, the poorly reanimated corpse of Imperial Rome slouching towards Ethiopia. In cash and prizes terms the favored group would reap modernist apartment blocks, autobahns, and new colonies whose former residents knew who was boss. Like all authoritarian utopias, it was a place where the human spirit went to die, but still, it was a place.
The Bleak Non-Promise of MAGA Fascism
MAGA doesn’t even offer that. The sum and total of MAGA public works is a largely unbuilt border wall The best prospectus that MAGA world can sell is one in which a group of angry old white people gets a government that punishes its enemies, sells out our democratic institutions for ready cash, and then loses interest in the game. In MAGA world, only crappy and selfish impulses are judged authentic which makes it a dismal place indeed. Their picture of an America that’s “great again” is insular, suspicious and hostile to the very kinds of innovations that put countries in leadership roles. In its threadbare vision of the future America is a place where angry old white people rule, punish their enemies, and act out their most selfish impulses to their shriveled hearts’ content. Is it any wonder that aside from some personality-disordered incels, few young people want part of such a world.
There is a Better Way
Faced with a world view so crushingly cynical and negative, we need to remind people that there is a better way to live. So when we’re attacking MAGA fascism, we need to remind people that we are working on a different kind of world—one where everyone has a place, everyone matters and deserves decent treatment. It’s a place with a basic level of trust, where you don’t have to keep looking over your shoulder at who’s ripping you off. It’s a place where lawyered-up corporations don’t get to poison the water supplies of ordinary people, and big banks can’t charge you new fees for any reason or no reason. It’s a world where kindness and decency matter because Democrats know societies need those soft virtues just as much as people do.
We need to paint compelling pictures of the abundant and optimistic world we want to build and contrast it with the crabbed, bigoted and fearful world MAGA needs you to believe is the only option. The vision we need to sell isn’t a set of policy proposals or whitepapers. It’s a clear, heart-stirring vision of a better world that it’s in our power to create. And oh boy, could we ever use one right now.
Fantastic essay.