-Theodor Reik
Author's note: This blog has been in hiberation for quite awhile. Since 2011, nearly 400,000 people have stopped by for whatever reason to read about parenting, endurance sports, transportation issues, etc.. I've been privately journaling with a fountain pen since the start of the year and find it's wonderful for brief mood-cataloging, but it's much harder to tease out longer and more complicated thoughts. So I'm dusting off the old "publication" button. In the midst of the swirling chaos that is the early days of the second Trump administration, I wanted to offer a brief analysis--critique--that I'm not seeing in the common dialogue. After all, I do have a degree in this topic. It only seems right that I put it to use.
I've had a couple of encounters since the Inauguration where I've directly confronted Trump supporters over facts that are easily researched and verified as false. One of these counterfactual rants finally made me boot a long-time acquaintance off my contact list this week. I also have family that I maintain minimal communication with over their alternative views. Mostly because I now believe that nothing productive can come from dialogue with someone who says the sky is green or the grass is blue or birds are robots sent to spy on us. None of those is true and we waste our breath trying to convince them otherwise. A person firmly dedicated to a worldview that's incorrect doesn't want to be corrected. It's not merely a small disagreement over tastes or preferences. These disagreements we're having tend to be about the nature of existence itself.
We're quickly learning that these disagreements over worldview have real consequences and real harms. The ability of rational people to ignore or downplay these negative outcomes is ending. Our country's very real predicament of ignorance--several varieties of ignorance, actually--is becoming something that oozes into average daily life for average Americans. The disagreements are infringing on others in a way that, classically speaking, should be ringing alarm bells.
Many are trying to assign intent behind the MAGA worldview. Greed. Power. Revenge. Sure, all of these. I wanted to address the psychology of MAGA on a larger scale though. Not trying to understand in order to persuade or sympathize, but trying to understand in order to comprehend the nature of what's being inflicted.
Trumpism is, firstly and above all, anti-modernity. It's reactionary in the way it views (particularly) American social changes over the last 80 years, post-WWII, as either harmful or disloyal to the height of American socio-political power. Trumpism is not "fundamentalist" or "traditionalist" in the sense of seeing all change as undesirable. It feels comfortable with recent technology, for instance. But it favors the undermining of social structures that we're familiar with in the contemporary era. Particularly, Trumpism devalues institutional guardrails put in place over the last several American generations to prevent backsliding into the previous cultural setup.
In the world of MAGA, everything becomes oppositional. They're especially sensitive to democratic institutions that they feel have betrayed the status quo ante. Yes, they're transphobic and racist and aggressively Christian, etc., but they reserve their greatest anger for the organizations and regulations that have been developed postwar to protect egalitarian social norms. Which is why they also go after feminism, voting rights, the Department of Education, aid organizations, environmentalism, and even science itself.
One of the oddities of MAGA love for a strongman authoritarian like Trump, however, is that it envisions the social changes it's opposing as top-down. In other words, it doesn't see American society as having irrevocably progressed in the postwar period. It insists--forcefully--that if it can get the reins of power it can reverse the culture. The problem, of course, for Trumpists is that the postwar changes in American culture have largely happened independently.* There was no single entity bringing about social changes in America during the 1950's-2025. It's been a series of movements, legal victories, incremental progress, and attitude shifts in the popular culture that cannot be undone by decree or even Congressional legislation.
The Trump administration and current Republican regime will face the end problem that a significant chunk of the American population is not interested in their revanchist agenda. But that truth does leave the nation in a huge pickle. The reverse is also true and a significant chunk of the American population is, in fact, interested in a revanchist agenda. It's setting up an ugly battle that leaves both sides dug in with no clear way out.
*One argument for intersectionality in recent times would say that these independent movements for equality--feminism, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, the sexual revolution, disability rights, neurodiversity recognition, etc.--all have overlap and relationships with each other because the underlying socio-political philosophy that birthed them is interconnected.