Ten reasons why masochistic MAGA put up with costly, knavish treachery. Total denial? Religious injunction? Magic thinking? Wishful thinking? Guilt for backing an unspeakable loser?
A good friend and guest writer here, Severo Ornstein, emailed this puzzlement: It amazes me that his numbers don’t seem to be significantly falling. Too much of the public seems doggedly blind to reality. Severo’s essay explains a larger context, The MAGA Movement is Jonestown writ large, arguing “the reversion to primitivism” parallels “the rise of the MAGA movement. But even deluded cults, downplaying experience, self-interest and blatant reality, should in time react to getting conned by a wave of failures.
Thus today’s mystifying paradox: when hardcore MAGA elected Trump, they knowingly rewarded a manic transactionalist who always demands “winning” payoffs, however ego-driven or absurd “the deal.” No other principle or psychic driver applies: either intimidation pays off or Trump dumps it. So, why does MAGA now totally undermine its own transactional standards, irrationally loyal to a manipulative, dishonest, gun-toting creep who degrades their lives, betrays core promises, skews healthcare/food programs and purchasing power, promotes fools and crooks, crowned by an unwinnable war, doubling down to double losses?
What’s in it for MAGA marks to squander devotion, receiving only hardships and treachery? Why fund all those Trump hustles to get reamed by crooked meme-coins and cell phones ripoffs? Like the double sucker denying he’s been conned, MAGA says “thank you” after being fleeced. I get the original Faustian bargain, fantasizing a self-serving billionaire as mock messiah, but don’t abused lackeys in time realize who’s pocketing the billion dollar lottery and who gets the crummy booby prizes? Or are too many too far gone?
There must be underlining psychic payoffs that curb judgmental belligerents from revolting when repeatedly crushed with body blows—sans offset. Time to explain a baffling surface that reeks of masochism:
1) Cults rule their own worldview and vice versa. In a terrifying world, membership in anything that sounds good tops facing the abyss alone, unmoored. The Loudmouth-in-chief does bellow in sync, sharing contempt for reality (evidence, expertise, science, knowledge), gleeful pleasure in violence and vengeance, the paradoxical obligation to lie (not for truth but leverage, even survival) and an insane refusal to admit blunders, failures or busted promises. Blind to their own glaring contradictions, Rethugs voted out must be ripped off, victimized by massive, if extremely selective voting fraud that elevates popular MAGAs.
2) Doing nothing (but whining) is better than compromise with the devil: Hardcore MAGA, however they talk up outrage, are so offended by dirty, demonic politics that no slice is better than half a loaf. Thus extremist ends justify dishonest means: ludicrous conspiracies, silly hoaxes, dumb soundbites and symbolic belligerence. If you expect nothing from politics, who cares if a spineless Congress acquiesces to Rasputin? Though many admit they backed an immoral, impulse-driven president, that matters less than that he voices their frustration, paranoia and culture war folly. MAGA and Trump buy (the very unChristian) Roy Cohn agenda: whatever threatens, ambush first, cover up bad motives, then gloat you won the game. Lacking all principles, Trump happily mirrors MAGA obsessions: white superiority, wicked abortion, no gun control, and punishing “illegals” by breaking the law. Heartlessly, MAGA demands an emotional escape value and theatrical echo chamber, real-world deliverables be damned—trapped in its own no-apology dead-end.
3) The righteous minority must rule—or else. Like the Confederacy, MAGA cannot win over the majority so naturally that means their partisan minority deserves to rule, even run amuck. When the majority is “wrong,” no anti-democratic ploy is too extreme. Chicken littles who scream voting fraud are the only blatant criminals trying to corrupt elections. MAGA knows that when Trump and extremist thugs fall, their movement returns to the garbage heap of history, alongside disgraced, Confederate “lost causes.” A Trumpless MAGA is stripped of perceived dominance. The worst neofascist fears? Being invalidated and disgraced, exiled for pernicious, elitist reigns that never serve the majority and fail across the boards.
4) It don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got the bling (money, prestige, power, leverage). Have-nots find it much easier to declare self-victimization than upgrade skill-sets, move from low opportunity backwaters, or adapt to anxious, high change, high-tech times. Ditto, backing an angry president who lashes out arbitrarily, with lies and contradictions galore, satisfies an insatiable need to have THEIR presumed outrages paraded in public, as if magical thinking or lies ever resolve complex, related problems. MAGA theatrics R Us.
5) Solace in numbers: Desperate for membership in any seeming winning club that will have them, MAGA loyalists so value aligning with parallel “victims,” they elect grandstanders who echo their echo chamber. Low self-esteem MAGA IS desperate for badges, willingly enriching billionaires to link with perceived winners railing against court rejections they can’t abide or attacking made-up “enemies” with the curious moral and legal conviction to think they deserve protected rights, too. The grandstanding is endless: unenforceable abortion bans (for the affluent), harassing minuscule trans numbers, punishing, even murdering innocent and critically needed immigrants. Forget justice. civil rights, opportunity and diversity.
6) Racism and abortion bans never out of season, trumping family self-interest. From early on, WASP constituencies held non-white, non-Protestants in racial contempt, whether “savage” aboriginals, Africans forced into slavery, resident Hispanics, Catholics (Irish, southern Europeans), or Asians (first imported, then exiled). Religious abortion bans, a modern concoction not in the Bible or history, plus misogyny, not only violate hallowed church-state separation but allow evangelicals to dictate rules on (private) procreation.
7) Distrust of authority, especially science, bureaucratic and medical expertise (vaccines, pandemic solutions, tested therapies, basic research), transcends mounting policy blunders and defies healthcare advances that correlate with better cures, improved living conditions and freedom from fatal diseases.
8) Biased heterosexual focus that anoints the nuclear family, obeying obsolete Genesis, “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.” That not only pumps up the tribe and produces cheap child labor but delivers new souls to be saved (or damned). What overreaching tribe, especially driven by gung-ho, anything-goes brutality towards enemies, doesn’t need more believers, cannon fodder, voters, consumers and breeders?
9) Arrogant convictions, hyperbole, symbolism and theatrics that boost a cult’s public, even historic significance. Because they have no coherent, workable worldview, let alone evidence to justify extremism, cults rely on simplistic out-takes that fit today’s small-snippet media, bashing any complex mindsets that might answer complex challenges. Oversimplification wishes away both understanding and plausible responses to food shortages, population explosions, and global climate warming; belittling what isn’t understood as a “hoax” removes any duty to face dire impacts or potential mitigation. Surface is all.
10) Force reality to adhere to religion, not vice versa. If only unshakeable, faith alone systems inform all values and meaning, then legitimacy falls to religion and outdated Biblical fables incapable of invalidation. Then only trusted “experts” pass loaded litmus tests to become unimpeachable “saints.” If blind faith dictates the most reliable mindsets, then why not put dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden in a world 5000 years old? Throw in Christian fatalism, that life is suffering, and earthly politics pale next to pie-in-the-sky rewards. That’s how flat-earthers (and evolution deniers) reinforce their tunnel vision, the source and measure of their fabricated “reality.” It’s an un-virtuous circle that, like all cults, can’t be deposed, analyzed or amended. Thus does the Religion of Trumpism forever reinforce its own assumptions, biases and inviolate convictions.
In short, when delusional, angry folks desperately wish upon a (heavenly) star, only something “higher,” flooded with miraculous light, changes how a devoted cult acts or thinks. Democratic politics fails when all is defaulted to the next (alleged) life and so trivializes the corrupt world ready for Armageddon. Failed messiahs thus don’t have to do anything to improve conditions in this sphere, just sound as if they deserve to lead the flock, whether a Pied Piper, a false prophet or a vicious con man caring nothing about his cultist followers. Fantasy-driven cults that promise hope begin in despair and inevitably end up where they began.
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