as has been pointed out in other threads, no they did not help elect him. They did nothing to stop him from being elected, but it is different from actively voting for him. You could just as easily argue that not voting for Trump was effectively a vote for Harris. And whatever you think a non-voters moral culpability is, they are certainly not MAGA.
You may think there is no moral difference in those two actions. I would argue otherwise but it is actually irrelevant to the issue at hand, i.e. whether your friend has turned MAGA. Someone who stands by without acting is not MAGA.
I agree with this. Unless there is other evidence of MAGAness beyond what was presented in the OP (which there very well may be), any definition of “going MAGA” that would be necessitated by this post would also be necessitated by their not having voted for Harris in the previous election. In both cases its just an example of willful blindness combined with an “it can’t happen here” attitude. I could easily see these sentiments made by someone on the center left who while they may dislike Trump can’t bring themselves to believe that we are in any danger of tyranny.
If they cheered Trump birthday parade, vocally support for DOGE dismantling the government, or Trumps defying the courts to send legal residents to a Salvadorian gulag, then I would say they are full MAGA, otherwise I would put them in the category of merely woefully naive.
As has been said in other threads, your choices were fascism or not fascism. If you did not actively work for not fascism, you helped fascism happen.
If any difference exists, I would argue it does not, it is an excedingly minor one Just how is standing by and let evil happen when you know that to stop it you just have to vote Harris- a vote that is private, different from committing the evil yourself?
Again, Harris was-at worst- a politician you disagree with. Trump ran on a platform of hatred. I and plenty of others warned that he was a fascist and could be the end of democracy.
Again, the diffrence is? If you stand by and let evil happen while you have the power to safely act, you are guilty of all the evil you let happen. That is not just my opinion. It is one of the basic principles of Judaism.
Repeating this does not make it true. If you’d like, I can find the Elie Wiesel quote on how inaction always helps the oppressor and never the oppressed.
BUT- I do see your point that Bob and Stephanie may not be aware that they are supporting Trump. Again, Bob called the No Kings protests “nonsense” and suggested that they had been secretly financed by some shadowy political group. He not only insisted that Trump could never become king. He said that anybody who believed Trump could actually become king had no faith in the Constitution or founding documents of our country, and that they were a “timid bunny” ‘motivared by fear’.
In Niemoller’s (sorry I don’t know how to do the umlaut) poem, the narrator is not a Nazi or a member of the gestapo. He just sits there, doing and saying nothing until it is too late. Bob and Stephanie are NOT just sitting by quietly. They are insulting resistance and denying that fascism is happening or could ever happen here. The end result is the same. When they come for Bob and Stephanie, it will be too late for them to wake up.
This whole subject is making my head spin now. Almost all of my “OG” friends, like people i grew with since childhood, are politically conservative.
Oddly, but i pray, tellingly, NONE of my Hillbilly friends are openly MAGA. NONE.
I know it seems grim, and that all these folks embracing this fascism now. I still hold out hope that they will see this administration as the scary “THEM” they’ve all been prepping for, and revolt.
MAGA are active supporters and cheerleaders for Trump and his policies. Your friends have not done this. Ergo, they are not MAGA. So, the answer to your question is, absent additional information, “no, your friend has not turned MAGA.” You seem to have already made up your mind to sever your friendship with them. That is fine, and you can justify it any way you want, but they are not MAGA based on what you have described.
You shouldn’t lose friends unless they do unfriendly things.
Once again, simply restating your position in different words does not make it true.
That makes no sense. I am not perfect and without flaws. I do not expect my friends to be perfect and without flaws. There is a long list of things that will make me cut somebody out of my life that have nothing to do with the way they treat me personally. OTTOMH, if a friend has been a gret pal for years and then turns out have been abusing his wife, that person is out of my life.
Just my own opinion and not everyone will see it my way, which is fine, but I can (usually) separate people’s voting behaviors and their overall character. I know people will say that what/who they vote for defines them. I respectfully disagree (in most cases).
That doesn’t mean that I don’t have lines that can be crossed. I can be friends with a MAGA who says ‘We need to do something about the surge at the border’. But if that same friend starts dropping really racially-tinged comments and starts ‘othering’, we’re not going to have much to talk about.
I think MAGA is an ignorance problem, a Fox News and algorithm problem. Unfortunately, it does have real-world consequence that all of us suffer.
I had no problem doing that before the Republican party became the servants of Trump. If you voted Trump, you either support his many hatreds, you don’t care who gets hurt as long as the leopard does not eat your face, or you were too stupid to beilieve Trump when he showed you who he is, or to see any of the very clear and obvious warning signs.
If you support Trump’s war on LGBTQ+ rights, I do not want you as my friend. The same is true if you support his various forms of racism. If you don’t care that other people will be hurt, I do not want you as my friend. If you are too stupid to realize that yes Trump is that full of hate and very dangerous, I do not want you as my friend.
These are not normal circumstances. Politics used to be a difference in opinions. Now, it is a difference in morals.
You left a few of the positions of the first party out like deport all Latinos, citizens or not, deny habeas corpus for those they’re annoyed with, destroy trade and military relationships with close allies, defunding not only basic science research but practical applications of it such as NOAA, granting a bunch of hopped up chimps unrestrained access to IRS and SSA databases, ending birthright citizenship, killing hundreds of thousands of African children by starving them to death, dismantling the Department of Education, and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords, to name but a few.
Getting fired for misgendering a nonbinary teenager, even if it were true, seems pretty benign in comparison.
Update-
My beloved was on a weekend trip for her birthday these past two days. (I could not go because I tested positive for Covid last week) I had sent her a messge on Facebook with a description of Bob’s post and a link. Between various activities and feeling sick herself, she only clicked on the link when she got home tonight.
Either Bob deleted the post, or he set it so that neither I or my beloved can see it. Most likely, he deleted it.
This does not make me happy. If you say stupid, horrible and hateful things you either need to issue a long and detailed aplogy admitting that you were wrong and exactly why your were wrong OR you need to have some guts and stand behind the stupid, horrible and hateful things you said.
If I meet a stranger at a gathering and they begin to say something bigotted, I lose most of the respect they may have earned before that point. If when challenged, they apologize and say ‘I didn’t mean any offense’ or something similar, I lose all remaining respect.
Again, if you are a bigot, at least have the guts to be one openly.
I guess it depends on why you want to ‘cancel’ a friend. If your mental health is better for it, and if that’s the only way, well, okay.
I have MAGA friends and family and we’ve talked through a lot of other things that have nothing to do with politics. Things that are deep and meaningful. The door is also open to occasionally check in and talk about how their little MAGA experiment’s going, and I am seeing signs in some (certainly not all) that there’s buyer’s remorse.
Don’t tell us, tell Bob. Directly.
As I said, there are plenty of reasons to cut somebody out of my life. For most of my life, politics was not a good reason.
Trump changed things. Trump is evil. Again, if you support Trump-
You actively support evil
or
You don’t care so long as he is evil to other people
or
You are so stupid and unwilling to see the truth, you didn’t believe him when he repeatedly showed how evil he was while running against Harris.
Any of the above mean, I do not want you as my friend.
I will. It just happened. I am trying to figure out exactly what to say and how to say it. I don’t know for certain why he deleted the post. I still doubt very much this friendship can be saved. If I just come in raging and confrontational, it will definitely end.
Is this meaningfully true in a moral sense, or is this what someone who sat out the election wants to tell themselves so they can also tell themselves that they are, for whatever definition you want, “a good person” and not to blame for what happens? Especially that last sentence.
Like, if I linked an article about someone who died following an accident in which nobody rendered aid or called 911, and I implied I thought those bystanders were culpable, I think you would not tell me
no they did not kill him. They did nothing to stop him from being killed, but it is different from actively killing him. You could just as easily argue that not getting involved was effectively not hitting him with a car.
I appreciate this is a fine line, because I don’t as such think you’re wrong in saying:
And maybe @DocCathode is semantically wrong in describing their friend as “turning MAGA” absent further evidence than just sitting out the election, and “being MAGA” is materially worse than being a passive enabler. But I don’t think that premise implies the earlier one.
(And honestly I would also argue they’ve supplied that evidence in further posts so it’s kind of a moot point)
This is exactly right.
My mother — a Trump supporter — tries to wriggle away from negative judgment by appealing to the old saw, “it’s just politics.” As I’ve said at least a couple of times previously, people like this see political allegiance as akin to sports fandom. They sit in a privileged position where, as far as they can tell, they don’t suffer significant consequences one way or another regardless of who’s in power. For generations, the major mainstream policy questions in the U.S. have been considered largely settled, with just a little nibbling around the edges to distinguish the parties. Social security good, foreign policy hawkish but not too hawkish, tax policies oriented to favor investment in order to drive the economy, pollution bad but we can put up with a little of it as long as it’s “over there” somewhere, yada yada yada. The political landscape was fairly stable, by and large, and people like my mother saw very little difference in her life from administration to administration, beyond the rhetoric. (I am consciously choosing to disregard the naivete inherent in this view, that variations in administrative policy can have massive positive and negative effects for people on the margins. This is my mother’s POV, remember.) So she was comfortable in the GOP camp, because she liked what they were saying and never bothered to connect it to what they were actually doing, just out of view of her own life. Just as it doesn’t matter, materially speaking, who this year’s World Series champion might be, it similarly didn’t matter to her, in any practical sense, who sat in the White House. That’s the mindset behind her “just politics” excuse — it was as illogical to her to take genuine offense at someone’s party loyalty as it would be to become angry about someone wearing a cap in support of an NFL team.
She’s the definition of a low-information voter, because, again, in her experience and from her perspective, information is irrelevant. She sits in the middle of her multi-acre red-state ranch, she hunts and fishes with her husband, and she literally doesn’t know anything. It’s not a Fox News bubble, either. She doesn’t watch TV news. She doesn’t watch TV at all, or read the paper, or take in current events beyond what she gleans in casual conversation with friends. Those people are probably sucking at the Fox teat, which explains some of the weird shit she spouts off, but I know from firsthand experience that she’s not a direct consumer of that poison.
It’s unfortunate, but I’ve had to keep her at arm’s length for the last few years, because she tries to float the it’s just politics excuse, and I’m simply not having it.
“It’s just politics” is a valid statement if everyone is operating from a common set of facts and is oriented approximately in the same moral direction. Let’s say the downtown library is having trouble managing its collection and serving its patrons because the building is several decades old, and we’re having a discussion about how to solve that problem. The chamber of commerce, with a parallel interest in serving the downtown core, proposes a levy that will pay to demolish the old library and reconstruct a new one in its place. A neighborhoods organization suggests, as an alternative, that the various satellite branches could be better supported in the short term, distributing the central collection to take the pressure off and thus buying time to fully consider the various options for solving the issue with the central library.
That is “just politics.” The debate can be strenuous, perhaps even occasionally acrimonious — but everyone agrees on the principle that the library system has value and serves a purpose. We just have different ideas about how to manage it. We offer different solutions, and we use the political process to win support for our favored solution and to attack the competition.
Now? We’re in a world where one side is pleading for the very existence of libraries as a fundamental pillar in a healthy democracy, while the other side will claim libraries are “woke” and say we should terminate the library system altogether and convert the buildings into reeducation prisons for trans kids, or some other equally grotesquely insane and hateful proposal.
That’s not just politics. That’s the discourse in a country where a major fraction of the population has become completely unmoored from human conscience and is vehemently arguing to advocate pure anger and grievance and destruction.
I believe those people have no place in a functioning democracy. I do not have the power to eliminate them from the world. But I do have the power to eliminate them from my life.
And so should we all.
I can’t help but think, at this point, that you value the friendship more than they do.
Thank you. This is it exactly.
I don’t know. You may well be right on this. That would also be a terrible thing to learn about them.