Like most stupid things, the MAGA movement is here to stay. It will stay past Trump and will become its own thing until new joiners two hundred years from now won’t even know what MAGA means until they read the pamphlet about the elder god of the movement, Donald Jackson Trump.
But is this going to happen? There are clear indicators over the past few months in Trump’s own positions that MAGA, not Trump, is in the driving seat. Soon enough, young leadership will emerge to move forward with the movement, which has thus far managed to put some people in the Congress and take some people out of it. This delicious and intoxicating exercise of electoral power is hard to part ways with.
So, what is the future of this political entity, if you accept that it has a future at all? How do you think it will evolve or devolve over time?
MAGA may not out last Donald by very much. How long did the Tea Party really last? What these movements have done though is to keep moving the Republican party further from the middle.
I think MAGA will fade away without much fanfare after Trump passes.
There’s too strong a market for unkind and mean-spirited policies. This lack of empathy is, in my mind, the defining feature of MAGA types. Once the movement loses currency, its followers will find something else very quickly.
Heard a journalist say recently that a disturbingly large number of people seem to crave an authoritarian leader. I think those of us who find Trump’s form of populism simple-minded and appalling have a hard time believing that there are many, many people who look at his presidency and think, “Yeah, let’s have more of that.”
Way too many. And they’re not going away any time soon.
MAGA is just opportunistic branding for authoritarian rule by a white minority. It isn’t new with Trump and it isn’t going anywhere when he’s gone. It’ll just mutate into a new brand.
I’ll ask the OP what they think are the key tenets of “the MAGA movement”?
If we can’t agree on which beliefs, behaviors, and power centers constitute the movement and its guiding ideas, we’re all free to speculate about different stuff while talking past one another.
Armed with a common target we can have meaningful debates & prognostications. If not, not.
I’d say it’s the kind of people you see on TV behind Trump at his rallies. Those wearing t-shirts with ‘Women for Trump’ or ‘Bikers for Trump’ or ‘Tax Accountants for Trump’. The anti-science, anti-liberal folk who rally(ied) behind any cause Trump threw at them.
Without Trump, there would no MAGA movement. MAGA followers need a leader, and without Trump, I don’t know who would be able to fill those shoes. They may be ignorant cowards, but they will be fiercely loyal to Trump until he is no more.
MAGA is a strange coalition that will die of its own internal contradictions. You have academic free market conservatives mixed with populist working class people who don’t mind big government so long as it’s helping them. Then you have a bunch of athiests and bikers and such mixed in with religious farmers.
They are a coalition now because they have a common enemy and a figurehead to hold them together, but I predict that once Trump rides off into the sunset and COVID fades in memory, a lot of them will decide they don’t like each other much. The academic and Reagan types will probably rejoin the current never-Trumpers (except the Lincoln Project grifters), and the rump of the MAGA coalition will go back to populist working class issues and will be very ‘gettable’ by a moderate Democrat.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be a strong conservative coalition. It will just be different,
MAGA will last for a very long time. Hate is a very powerful force, it’s bigger than Trump. I think you all underestimate just how much conservatives hate liberals/others. Trump discovered that conservatives will do anything to “own the libs”. Anything. The next guy will do the same.
MAGA already has people vying to be Trump’s successor, putting out more bigoted policies (don’t say gay, anti-trans bills, etc). And at least some people do seem to be eating it up. And it does seem to be the direction that the Republicans are going for, trying to keep Trump’s rhetoric without Trump.
Problem is, Trump is sticking around to bust it all up. They can’t try to polish MAGA as long as he is around, making it about his inability to believe he lost. Keeping Trump associated with MAGA means that what damages Trump damages MAGA.
It seems the OP means either MAGA means “whatever Trump said today” or else it means “right wing populism.”
Pretty much by definition once Trump drops dead or loses interest, “what Trump said” won’t be a useful definition of the movement.
If we define “MAGA” as simply right-wing populism, that’s an eternal feature of every nation on earth. It’s impact on the containing society ebbs and flows based on the particular discontents of the underclass majority of the day and the relative charisma of their spokesman versus the spokesmen for other causes.
What’s different here & now is the degree to which it’s taken over control of the central narratives of our era. Driven IMO by two things: Trump’s highly effective personal showmanship, and the RW media grift-o-sphere that has realized that keeping the rubes perpetually in a lather can sell a lot of merch and collect a lot of eyeballs for advertisers and even more donations for their pet causes or PACS or fake charities.
It’s political activism for profit, not for ideology. And that IMO is indeed a true American innovation. One that will be very hard for us to slow down, much less stop. Between love of profits, love of innovation, and the First Amendment, stopping activism for profit is a tall order.
Think of MAGA like the Evangelical movement. Evangelicals aren’t united by theology, really, except in the negative (not Catholic, not Jewish, etc.). They share a lot of similarities of style and a broad sense of identity as such, and are a lot more about emotional connections to God and fellow Evangelicals than intellectual connections.
As such, the movement is prone to anti-intellectualism, and notoriously hard to define positively. I’m not making any statements about all Evangelicals or even criticizing the movement (though I’m not a fan), just describing.
MAGA-ism is just the political equivalent.
I don’t think it’s for white supremacy; I just think its nature appeals to white supremacists, active and latent, more than any other political movement does, and therefore it tends to attract and then reflect them.
As such, there’s going to be a MAGA wing to every group, including Democrats. Somebody is going to capitalize on it and try to capture their power. Right now, it’s the Republicans (e.g. De Santis). If one of them succeeds, that will bridge the movement from Trump to the new leader. If no one succeeds, the movement will fade from the spotlight and from power, but will be there to be tapped. I suspect that China, Russia, etc., will have observed how effective it is for their purposes, and work to keep it going.
I keep thinking of Arnold’s speech after the insurrection where he describes his childhood in Austria where men wracked by guilt came home from work every day and just started drinking. think in twenty years we’re going to have a bunch of young adults asking their parents and grandparents, “How in the hell did you guys not see through this guy? Why did you guys elect him?” And we’re going to see a lot of peopel wracked by guilt or otherwise ignoring that the did support Trump. I don’t think MAGAs will be around very long after Trump sheds his mortal coil.
