Beautifully written, and sums today's USA up pretty well, I'd say....
MAGA is just the ugly American turned into a state religion. Before the hats, it was the guy in cargo shorts at Charles de Gaulle, barking in English, furious the cheese has a name. Loud, incurious, spiritually upholstered, waddling through the world with bad sandals and worse assumptions. Trump franchised him and turned a private embarrassment into a governing identity.
MAGA is the ugly American handed a hall pass and a podium. A permission slip, a flag, a grievance vocabulary, and a TV landlord who taught him that ignorance is authenticity, cruelty is strength, and you humiliate first so nobody can humiliate you. Every rally teaches the same lesson: never learn, never doubt, never apologize. Just point at someone weaker and call it truth.
These people are cultural Neanderthals with Amazon accounts. They strip-mine culture. They hover at the edge of every art form, sneering at the people who actually build things. Their relationship to art is suspicion and complaint. A novel, a film, a syllabus, a drag show, a museum label, it all gets tossed into the same bucket: woke, decadent, corrupt, elitist, fake. If they cannot own it, they try to erase it.
That is why their “culture” always lands like a youth pastor film festival. The Daily Wire can crank out movies, rich creeps can underwrite propaganda channels, podcast cavemen can sell grievance hoodies, but anti-culture never becomes culture. Real culture needs curiosity, vulnerability, ambiguity, appetite, risk. MAGA treats all five like a virus. They want content that flatters.
Grievance is the only fuel in the MAGA tank. The movement has nothing to offer except punishment, revenge, and the fantasy of permanent domination. Their vision of freedom is the right to humiliate other people and never face a consequence for it. They cannot build a world. They can only vandalize one and market the wreckage as restoration. School libraries stripped, teachers hounded, public life turned into a crime scene, then they stand in the rubble and call it tradition.
The press spent years treating these people like some mystical diner oracle. Every reporter pilgrimage ended at the same Formica table, notebook open, nodding solemnly while a Fox-poisoned crank said something cruel or deranged as if it were folk wisdom. This was sold as listening to real America. It was customer service for a radicalized audience. They were overindulged.
MAGA loves to sob that liberals will not be their friends. Correct. We have standards. I am not splitting a bottle with anti-intellectual, woman-hating, book-banning, history-flattening people who think empathy is a psy-op and culture is a plot against them. Their hurt feelings about social exile are not my moral problem. You choose to live as a walking Facebook comments section, you eat alone.
Trump’s gift to them was absolution. He told every bitter mediocrity that their ignorance was wisdom, their ugliness was truth, their hatred was patriotism, and their failures were always somebody else’s theft. He took the shame they carried through airports and hotel lobbies and turned it into a badge. Embarrassment became a constituency. He gave them permission to never feel small again.
Now that pieces of MAGA are splintering, some people fantasize that these folks are drifting toward the Democrats. They are not. They are not coming to a party that believes books belong in schools and women are human. The best outcome is subtraction, not conversion. If some of them get bored, stay home, and yell at the TV instead of voting, that is a win. A non-voting fascist is one less live round in the chamber.
MAGA is the worst movement of my lifetime because there is nothing inside it worth saving. It is anti-culture, anti-curiosity, anti-woman, anti-truth, anti-democratic, and proud of every one of those positions. It took the most embarrassing parts of American life and made them feel noble. That is the whole achievement. A country’s loudest boors were told they were its soul, and we are still digging out from that lie.
www.theguardian.com
