badlatitude
Super Anarchist
- 31,205
- 5,977
Seven or so years on, what does MAGA mean now? And what have Trump and his movement accomplished? By any humane, reasonable or moral standards, nothing worth doing, or in any way "great." They pushed American democracy to the brink of chaos. They normalized right-wing political violence, culminating (for now) in the Jan 6 coup attempt and attack on the Capitol. They strove to reverse the civil rights and human rights progress of the 20th and 21st centuries in America.
They elevated conspiracism, anti-intellectualism, a rejection of empirical reality and science, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, misogyny and hostile sexism, and a total disregard for the rule of law. America's global reputation as an "indispensable nation" and the world's greatest democracy (which was already damaged) was permanently stained by the Age of Trump. At least a million people died in America because of how the Trump regime and the Republican Party willfully sabotaged public health and relief efforts in response to the COVID pandemic.
"It's a kind of toxic nostalgia. Make America Great Again — calling back to the past is certainly a big part of the appeal of that slogan. It means rolling back the clock on everything from Roe v. Wade and the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act to [some time they imagine] when America was great. But it's become so much more than that. MAGA is now a kind of expression of identity. It's an expression of loyalty to Donald Trump and it's a commitment to a particular political style, a kind of own-the-libs politics that has become so prevalent on the right. ... Anything is possible, and then you can continue to push the envelope, particularly when it comes to rolling back democratic institutions and processes. If you're MAGA, you believe that what happened at the Capitol wasn't an insurrection, and in fact that the people who precipitated that attack are being held as political prisoners. There is a whole set of beliefs about politics about democracy, American history and Donald Trump that are loaded into MAGA as a label."
Ultimately, MAGA is an identity, a belief system, a lifestyle and a form of religious politics and cult behavior. It manifests a particular type of white racial logic based upon distortions, outright lies and fantasies of a perfect, nearly all-white and profoundly Christian America, virtually free of social and political discord. Of course no such America ever existed.
https://www.salon.com/2022/10/05/wh...movement-longs-for-an-america-that-never-was/
They elevated conspiracism, anti-intellectualism, a rejection of empirical reality and science, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, misogyny and hostile sexism, and a total disregard for the rule of law. America's global reputation as an "indispensable nation" and the world's greatest democracy (which was already damaged) was permanently stained by the Age of Trump. At least a million people died in America because of how the Trump regime and the Republican Party willfully sabotaged public health and relief efforts in response to the COVID pandemic.
"It's a kind of toxic nostalgia. Make America Great Again — calling back to the past is certainly a big part of the appeal of that slogan. It means rolling back the clock on everything from Roe v. Wade and the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act to [some time they imagine] when America was great. But it's become so much more than that. MAGA is now a kind of expression of identity. It's an expression of loyalty to Donald Trump and it's a commitment to a particular political style, a kind of own-the-libs politics that has become so prevalent on the right. ... Anything is possible, and then you can continue to push the envelope, particularly when it comes to rolling back democratic institutions and processes. If you're MAGA, you believe that what happened at the Capitol wasn't an insurrection, and in fact that the people who precipitated that attack are being held as political prisoners. There is a whole set of beliefs about politics about democracy, American history and Donald Trump that are loaded into MAGA as a label."
Ultimately, MAGA is an identity, a belief system, a lifestyle and a form of religious politics and cult behavior. It manifests a particular type of white racial logic based upon distortions, outright lies and fantasies of a perfect, nearly all-white and profoundly Christian America, virtually free of social and political discord. Of course no such America ever existed.
https://www.salon.com/2022/10/05/wh...movement-longs-for-an-america-that-never-was/
