“I Just Don’t Want My Daughter To Marry One”

"very good people on both sides"

Ex-MAGA activist tries to explain away racism of Trump's base: 'Mostly good people' https://t.co/w5psjH016M

— Raw Story (@RawStory) January 15, 2024

There is more at work here than just "MAGA voters are racist." Most with whom I once congregated and broke bread were not. I won’t label white racial hysteria on the right as “complicated,” but those suffering from white panic are often unaware that the conclusions they’ve drawn are largely molded by those deliberately sowing racial discord. This sowing has occurred since Day One of our nation.

Pretty sure they were/are racists. I’ll explain why in a minute. I want to hear more from you, first.

Our species is change-adverse, generally speaking. Anxiety about America’s dwindling white population does not necessarily mean those who are anxious are racists or white supremacists. Furthermore, our species also tends to perceive change as happening more rapidly than it actually occurs in reality.

See? It’s not racism! It’s just fear for “America’s dwindling white population”! Nothing racist about that!

Wait! It gets better!

MAGA voters are overwhelmingly white, and are well aware that America will become a majority-minority nation within the next few decades, if not sooner, given our historically low birth rates and decreasing life expectancy, the latter virtually unique among developed nations. Politicians and pundits whom the MAGA community follow have traumatized their followers to conclude that the imminent minority status of white people also means they will become a marginalized group.

Yeah, MAGA is just a victim of their leaders. Poor innocents, it’s not their fault. 

Though I cannot know what is in the hearts of the MAGA movement’s political trauma merchants and elected leaders, including Nikki Haley, I doubt they actually believe most (if any) of what they say. As if on autopilot, Haley regurgitated the revisionist-history talking points of the cult of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. It is often said that history is written by the victors, but this is not quite accurate when it comes to American teachings about the Civil War. That war’s losers, and its Lost Cause mythologizers, continue to influence our perception 160 years later, as evidenced by Haley's answers.

See? MAGA )and Nikki Haley) can’t help it! We don’t know what’s in their hearts, and you can’t blame them for what’s in their mouths.👄 

Because they have been traumatized, and made desperate and panicky, many MAGA voters — who are mostly good people, and had some valid reasons for supporting Trump — don't see the contradiction about race that is directly in front of them. In my conversations with fellow MAGA members, I don't recall any that dismissed the abhorrence of slavery. There was, however, considerable apprehension about the increase in national conversations about anti-Black racism begotten by the election of Barack Obama and then by George Floyd's murder.

MAGA can’t be racist, because they don’t want to repeal the 13th Amendment!  Small blessings, huh? It’s also not their fault that Barack Obama was elected, or George Floyd killed. In the words of the Waco Kid: “These are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new west. You know, morons.”

Helpless morons who aren’t responsible for who they listen to:

The MAGA creed proclaims that Black people have long since achieved equal rights, but rationalizes that America’s “culture” and “values” — code phrases for a system in which white heterosexual Christians hold virtually all positions of power and influence, political or otherwise — are irreversibly disappearing. This is the contradiction MAGA members can’t see, because they are emotionally, morally, spiritually and financially invested in a mythological America of yesteryear — the supposed apogee of our greatness — and it is immensely difficult for them to see that they have been manipulated into racial desperation and panic. 

It doesn’t help that much of our national press may never recover from the shock of missing the grassroots support for Trump in 2016, and so we get endless apologias for Trump, along with a delusional, obsessive media yearning to save the GOP from Trump. (The right wing’s “liberal media” myth has provided an enormous return on investment.)

The “grassroots” didn’t support Trump in spite of his racism, and if not for the electoral college (and the general rejection of Hillary, who still won the popular vote), “economic anxiety” would never have put him in the White House. And once again, MAGA is not responsible for being MAGA. They were manipulated, you can’t blame them!

Racism is as deeply embedded in American culture as “free speech” and “land of the free”* (*offer not available to non-white males and women).  Racism is the default mode of America, and it has bigger all to do with economic anxiety. If you are “apprehensi[ve] about the increase in national conversations about anti-Black racism begotten by the election of Barack Obama and then by George Floyd's murder,” and “are emotionally, morally, spiritually and financially invested in a mythological America of yesteryear,” you may already be a racist.  No misleading needed.

I accept that I’m a product of my culture, and that means I’m a racist. Pretty sure Nikki Haley is, too. Safe bet, anyway. Only by facing the truth, can the truth set you free.

If Martin Luther King Jr. had simply recognized that southern whites were motivated more by economic anxiety than by racial animus, the civil rights movement could have been much less politically divisive.

— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) January 16, 2024