What's missing/awry/disturbing about people's lives that MAGA/hard-right populism is so attractive?

Great Debates
21

As others have said, there are countless reasons and everyone is different. But just to cite my mother as an example, who is quite hard MAGA, it’s because she has an unusually intense self-righteous streak. She HAS to feed her ego complex that the world is evil and heinous, and that she is one of the righteous heroines fighting against the great evil. She would actually feel disappointed and let-down if the world weren’t as evil as she imagines. I’ve seen enough of her evangelical-charismatic Christian circle to know that she’s rubbing shoulders with a whole lot of other religious folks who feel this same need to feel special, like they are the dam that holds back the tidal flood of evil. (Many of whom are non-white MAGA folks.)

Oddly enough, she shares a similar sentiment/emotion to some progressives in this regard. It’s just that in her particular instance, her self-righteous streak made her MAGA instead of far-left.

22

I lived for a while in NW Indiana. The whitest place I’ve ever lived. I found it hard to believe how racist so many people were, as they saw essentially no non-white people in their daily lives. And this was 15 years ago, when social media was nothing compared to today.

Back in W’s time, I was confused at my daughter’s FIL’s support for W. To my mind, W’s policies seemed to directly worsen the FIL’s situation as a white, blue collar, middle aged guy.

I think to a large extent, it comes down to a feeling that the social order they were accustomed to is changing. I think many white, christian, middle class people do not appreciate the tremendous advantages they historically benefitted from. Yes, Fox and social media inflates such fears. But I do not think it unrealistic for white christians to feel their relatively privileged position is changing. I suspect some such people are unable to appreciate that the only reason they had certain benefits is that such benefits were denied to others.

Personally, I’m getting more and more intolerant of religion - which I think supports some degree of bigotry.

Apologies if this is a hijack - if so, I could start another thread. But what I’ve been wondering lately is who in power - either in the R party, businesspersons, wealthy persons - supports Trump’s policies and why? It astounds me that EVERY R Congress critter is willing to abdicate their authority. Is that solely for a continued seat in Congress? In business, who is profiting from Trump’s immigration efforts? Who benefits from what seems to me an intentional effort to lessen US influence worldwide? Who benefits from kowtowing to Putin?

I recall reading a persuasive essay during W’s time that said pretty much every move he made made sense if you interpreted it as intended to make wealthy people wealthier. I guess the stock market and the wealth of the very top percent of 1% would support that. But why do so many other influential people support the greed of this relatively small # of people?

23

Building on the “white privilege” angle:

They feel – and not unjustifiably – that they (and their ancestors) worked hard to achieve what they have. They have been told, by the right-wing media, that people who talk about white privilege are actually saying “no, you didn’t actually earn that, you got it only because you’re white.”

When you’ve been indoctrinated in that thinking, you see the concept of white privilege as insulting, especially if you are someone who does work hard, and doesn’t necessarily have a lot of money. “How dare you tell me that I’m privileged! I’m struggling to make ends meet.”

And, relatedly, they aren’t able to see that, by dint of being white (as well as being male and Christian, in many cases), that they do have a leg up, even if they don’t perceive it that way. They can’t believe that doors are closed to people who aren’t like them, and if they see a person of color who is struggling, it’s always because “they’re lazy, they aren’t willing to put in the work.”

24

It’s several different things. Some of it (25%?) is just hatred of Democrats. I’ve got a neighbor who says right out that Yeah, Trump is crazy/a moron/evil/ demented/ etcetera but he hates all Democrats because they’re committed to socialism and communism and he’s not about to see his hard-earned etcetera turned over to lazy people so he’s going to vote against all Democrats forever.

Parts of it (another 20%?) are just dissatisfied with life, malcontents who buy into conspiracies (like “All your problems are caused by left-wing lunatics”). You cite divorcees—I have a cousin from a generally well-educated, liberal family who went through a horrific divorce, and he decided that he got a bad deal because the judge favored women over men so he channels his misogyny into his voting choices, and Trump offers him the illusion of everything reverting to a sunnier time when judges favor men over women.

Some of it (35%?) is rich people viewing his economic policies being in their favor. They may even concede that he doesn’t actually have any coherent economic policies, just ones that favor DJT personally, but that means they also favor other rich people so they’re in favor of him, not viewing the long-range policies as things that matter, just their wealth over the short run.

Some of it (20%) is one-issue fanatics, like pro-Israel voters or anti-abortion voters who think he supports their one issue. I know a woman whose only question literally is “Is he good for the Jews?” and she thinks Trump is, because he says he is. Some of these are simply racists—that’s their one issue: “Is Trump in favor of white people?” (Answer: yes he is, and he’ll tell you so.)

Some are low-information voters, (10%) people too dumb or too misinformed to be granted voting privileges, except that there is no threshold for how informed you need to be to vote. Some of these, I’m sure, vote D instead of R because they don’t know the difference, but even half of the Low-Info vote is a lot.

Some are just disruptors, (5%?), those who want the status quo shaken up just because it’s fun to watch. Some disruptors are probably pyromaniacs, child molesters, and other sociopaths.

The total, you may have noticed, is more than 100% because it’s probable that there is a little overlap (rich racists, low-info malcontents, and so on) but I think these groups are mostly separate and are coming from entirely different places. Also I’m not so good with addition.

25

Whereas the so-called urban liberal elites they despise are largely descended from 50s dads who worked as doctors and lawyers and professors.

26

TBF, a lot of left discourse does have a pretty strong undercurrent of that sort of thing, as if a white man’s achievements are somehow less because he’s white and male. I’m not even anti DEI/Woke, and I’ve felt that a lot of the time online and around here.

What I’ve always heard from relatives and people growing up (the 90s and before) is that the Democratic party isn’t looking out for us, they’re busy looking out for all the marginalized groups, and pushing stuff like environmental regulations that are going to cost us money/give us less. And they’re all rich liberals from New England or California or POC who don’t care about you.

Then in the 90s, all that Rush Limbaugh negative noise about how they were actively working against “us” got layered on, and people started viewing who you vote for as more of an moral decision than merely a pragmatic one, and for some reason got wound into people’s identities.

That last one about identity seems more important to me for some reason; I don’t remember people being concerned with politics as if it was college football, and with the fervency of Alabama fans, but for their political party.

27

With my mom, I think it’s just fear (like others have already said). She is absolutely convinced that Biden was a terrible president and evil, and thus all Democrats are terrible and evil. I don’t know that prior to my dad getting roped in to Fox News that she gave one thought to the president.

My dad was quite racist and homophobic, and we got into a lot of fights about it. He also was a person who was solidly middle-class, thanks to his hard work at Ford. He had very little knowledge of how the world actually works. He walked in to Ford when he was 17 and got a job and retired by 60 with a huge pension. Not to say that he didn’t work his ass off and made sacrifices but he didn’t understand that that’s not a thing anymore.

Dad passed in 2023 and mom kept consuming the same media he did. Fox news, local news, and the local talk radio station. So even though dad’s ugly influence is gone, she still hears angry old white people yelling on the radio every day, and watches Fox News.

I was talking to my niece the other day about the Melania movie and mom interjected that I have “TDS” (Trump Derangement Syndrome). We were talking about the case of Savanah Guthrie’s mom and my mom said “She’s 60 miles from the border. Someone came across the border and kidnapped her.”

I don’t dare delve into what she actually thinks and what she hears, because I’m her caregiver and if I really knew I’d never speak to her again and I can’t do that. But the snippets I do end up hearing from her has me sure that she is scared because someone else told her to be.

28

I agree with pretty much everything said so far, and I want to expand on this point/question. This is coming from a short video that I saw a couple weeks ago. I think it was on Facebook, but it may have originally been posted on TikTok or YouTube, and I can’t find it, so I’m paraphrasing. The gist is, they see that the social order they were accustomed to is changing, and there is the “if you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression” aspect to it for sure. More so, they worry about their lifestyle, preferences, media, social norms, religion, etc. becoming not the majority, not the mainstream. The problem is they define themselves as being normal. They don’t want to be not-normal, because they remember how they treated people who were not normal.

29

It’s not just people without a college education. We’ve seen the hollowing out of the middle class since the 1970s. Guaranteed pensions replaced by 401K plans. Unions dismantled by Republican administrations. Technology replacing entry-level jobs, and the remaining entry-level jobs not leading to advancement.

Trump’s message, at heart, is to scapegoat all the “others” who’ve been depriving hard-working Americans of good jobs for all those years, and promise - with precious little thought behind it - that’s he’ll bring back manufacturing, make health care affordable, bring in so much money from tariffs that we’ll be rolling in dough, and cut all those nameless, faceless, productivity-sapping bureaucrats that exist only to tie us up in red tape.

The fact that most of those “others” happen to be brown or black is just a bonus to him and the red meat part of his followers.

30

Its Right wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation

People who feel they are the ‘default’ americans (white, christian, patriarchs, native born, cishet) feel they are the default Americans and entitled to rule.

America is rapidly becoming more multicultural and secular.

The % of Americans who are white is going down
The % of Americans who are chrsitian is going down
Feminism is growing rapidly
The immigrant population is going up
Alternative lifestyles like LGBT are going up

This makes the ‘default’ americans feel they are losing control over power. Also they are terrified that once they are the minority, that they will be treated the same way that they treat minorities when they are in power. They are terrified they’ll be treated the same way they treat black people, women, muslims, etc when white christians are the minority.

In 1970 about 81% of Americans identified as white christians. Its currently around 40%, and among Gen Z only about 27% identify as white christians.

People high in RWA also feel the world is a dangerous place full of dangerous out-groups (muslim terrorists, latino gang members, black people in the inner city, sexually predatory transgender women, etc). They feel they need a strong military, a strong police and large amounts of guns in civilian hands to keep society safe. They see the left as defunding the police, weakening the military and passing gun control, making them helpless in a dangerous world.

Also people on the right side of the political spectrum more strongly support the concept of a behavioral immune system. To them diversity isn’t just a novelty, its an infection or sickness in the social body that is going to weaken social cohesion and cause social collapse.

Donald Trump is their great white hope of bringing America back to the 1950s when white christian men ruled and everyone else stayed in second place.

Donald Trump can rape as many children as he wants, as long as he says whites are better than POC, men are better than women, christians are better than every other belief, etc Trump will continue to have a basement support of 30-40% of the country.

31

True, but there are 2 criticisms of that.

THere is a massive education gap in voting where college educated people vote about 40 points to the left of high school educated people. But this gap only applies to white people. I dont’ think there is an education gap among blacks, latinos, etc. A black person with a doctorate is about as likely to vote republican as a black person with a high school diploma.

Also when you control for bigotry, the education gap among whites disappears. Basically high school educated whites are more bigoted than college educated whites, which is why they vote republican more.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/11/16/the-education-gap-among-whites-this-year-wasnt-about-education-it-was-about-race/

Also among white people, even when you control for income, the college educated whites vote about 30-40 points to the left of high school educated whites.

As a society we dont want to admit that this is who we are in 2026, so we keep coming up with convoluted arguments to avoid facing the truth of who America is.

32

Hard disagree with this (agree with you).
AI is just going to further solidify people’s bubbles, and insulate them from any factual knowledge that might dislodge them.

People are voting against their interests (eg. rural farmers screwed over by Trump, workers who just got laid off by billionaire owned corporations) largely because they are consuming mass amounts of easily digested propaganda from their media bubbles.

These media bubbles are increasingly non-written word, which appeals to the poorly educated who have substandard reading levels.

They are told repeatedly that whole cities are burning to the ground due to “liberals”, that illegals are simultaneously stealing jobs and leeching off welfare, and that they are eating cats and dogs. They KNOW that those liberal enclaves (where they have never been) are literal hell-holes of crime and disgusting behavior. They KNOW that people like them are good, virtuous upstanding citizens, and the MAGA’s just want to make everything great again.

They’ve been told this over and over and over again until it forms a core part of their identity. They have been fully, completely indoctrinated with this, and cannot change.

33

I can understand that feeling, but I’m not sure I perceive the same thing. First off, I think it would be incorrect to claim that white peoples’ ancestors (for the most part) did not work hard for what they achieved. However, I feel many white Americans of European descent lose track of 2 things:

1. It is really hard to ignore the advantage pretty much ANY white person had over pretty much ANY non-white. Not only slaves, but also any number of “waves” of immigrants. Simple example, Asians to build the railroads. But I perceive that many conservatives DO ignore that.

  1. It is really easy for “white” Americans to fail to acknowledge that their ancestors were immigrants as well. They just had the advantage of immigrating earlier. Americans have a long history of discriminating against the most recent wave. In the past, immigrants of European ethnicity had an easier job of assimilating. Or they could simply move west. Change your name, lose the accent, and your next generation is simply another white American mutt. Final wrinkle - my perception - which I’m not sure is corect, is that prior waves of immigrants made more of an effort to assimilate. I’m not sure if current immigrants assimilate more or less - or if it is visible factors such as skin color and possible religious/ethnic attire/practices that makes them appear to assimilate less.
34

I think it’s difficult for a lot of people to consider just how wide a net the MAGA movement cast, enabling it to attract such a large number of people. Yes, MAGA does attract the bigots, but it’s also attracted a lot of other people who were dissatisfied with how things were working out for them. You don’t get a popular authoritarian unless a lot of people are very, very unhappy.

A few years back, I read something about a high percentage of Trump supporters having experienced either significant financial difficulties, including bankruptcies, and/or having (non-criminal) difficulties with the government.

35

Any explanation of Trump’s support is going to be incomplete without noting that a huge number of racial-minority voters supported him - to the point where even decent normal candidates like Bush, McCain and Romney couldn’t hold a candle to his 2024 turnout among those demographics.

Trump got 15 percent of the black vote, for instance - almost unheard of for a Republican. Bush, McCain, Romney were all in the 3-9 percent range. This is something that can’t be handwaved away as “MAGA is just white-supremacist.”

36

When you and all your kith and kin have been privileged for generations, fairness feels like oppression. They are terrified of what will happen if they and their children have to compete in a truly free market. Add to that the fact that in the USA during the same years that fairness has increased, the wages/cost of living ratio has decreased significantly. What is now considered to be a good salary (say $120-150 thousand) has the equivalent buying power of the minimum wage in 1970.

For people who do not understand economics (which includes most college grads) that correlation looks causative. They know they cannot win in a fight against the corporations, so they wage war against the people they can win against - the poor, the minorities, the disabled, and otherwise challenged. Humans are pattern spotters and risk reducers, we seldom pick a fight we can’t win. That’s why it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between fools and heroes.

37

On top of this, there are a lot of liberals who think that Democrats should get votes by default, just because of how awful Trump is. They think that the Ds can let economic issues go unsolved, households hurting financially, but that voters will still push the button for the D candidate just because Trump is fascist.

Whereas, on the contrary, the Nazis came to power in Germany right on the heels of inflation that was so severe that you needed a whole wheelbarrow full of marks just to buy a loaf of bread. Trump, like Hitler, attracts the votes of the desperate.

38

That’s one way of looking at it. But it’s not like bigotry is some independent variable here. It is highly influenced by education. White people are easily able to be ignorant about bigotry if they are not curious enough to learn about it, while people of color (and other minorities) are not.

In order to actually become educated, you have to be open to the concept of new ideas, and accept that you will believe things that are wrong.

39

I mean, the same is true of the R side. It’s not like they’ve done anything to help. The D side actually does try to push things through, in fact. They just don’t succeed in a government that can’t operate due to a lack of a super majority.

The thing with Hitler is that, well, he actually did do something about the massive unemployment. He didn’t shut down government programs. He created more to give jobs and such. Sure, under the surface, the economy wasn’t actually great, but he at least made it appear to be better. The appeal of fascism is that it at least appears to get things done.

40

We can see that it’s ROOTED in racism and it all comes back to that but it seems that the new wave of Republican voters are VERY good at burying their heads in the sand about what policies and practices come along with the few policies and practices they agree with.

They have chipped away at every single issue to get all of the single-issue people into their tent. People I know who love guns who never thought about abortion before are anti-abortion because they were roped into politics via guns and were told “also we’re anti-abortion here.” People I know who were no way religious before got roped in on some other issue and suddenly they’re going to church. Are you slightly mad that all of the faces at your local Wal Mart are brown? Good now you’re with us. You also love guns, hate other religions, are anti-abortion and think Democrats are evil. Also did you know trans people existed? No? Well they do and you also hate them too.

My mom asked me one time how it came to be that she and I grew so far apart politically. I was caught off guard and did NOT want to get into it. I said uhm, I love people and want the best for all people. She said “I love people too.” And then we sort of stared at each other, thinking the other to be crazy, and we just dropped it.