Another Trumper Fit
Sunday, October 9, 2022
I've given up. Resigned to the illogic of it.
I keep wanting to make sense of it. To understand; what policies do they want? What is it about
Trump that fulfills them? What are the goals?
But the answer to those questions assumes a certain amount of normal political logic that doesn't exist here. A recent column in The Atlantic by Tom Nichols finally served as a slap of reality - and it's terrifying in its implications.
"The MAGA movement cannot be placated, reasoned with, or politically accommodated in any way. There is nothing its adherents want—and nothing anyone can give them—beyond chaos and political destruction."
He noted that President Biden's speech on the MAGA threat outed them as anti-American:The MAGA movement, "has no functional compass and no set of actual preferences beyond a generalized resentment, a basket of gripes and grudges against others who the Trumpists think are looking down upon them or living better lives than they are. It is a movement composed of people who are economically comfortable and middle-class, who enjoy a relatively high standard of living, and yet who seethe with a sense that they have been done dirt, screwed over, betrayed—and they are determined to get revenge."
Revenge for what?? The hyped up delusions they're fed by social media fear mongers? What are the tangible "issues" they want addressed? Those that I've heard about either don't exist or are simply culture war fantasies.
"These citizens do not want a discussion or a compromise. They don’t even want to “win,” in any traditional political sense of that word. They want to vent anger over their lives—their personal problems, their haunted sense of inferiority, and their fears about social status—on other Americans, as vehemently as possible, even to the point of violence.
"How do any of us, and especially the president, engage with such a movement, when every discussion includes the belief that the only legitimate outcomes are ones in which the MAGA choice wins? Such an insistence is not civic or democratic in any way, and it is not amenable to resolution through the democratic process.
"The MAGA movement isn’t interested in politics, or policies, or compromises. It is interested in destruction and seeing others made as miserable as its followers are. MAGA is a movement of people who seem to be, in so many ways, deeply and profoundly unhappy, and suffering from an emptiness and anger deep in their spirit. There is no political solution for that."
What a tragedy.