Normalize This
We keep assuming the MAGA era will end soon, one way or another. But why?
During a recent episode of his podcast, after about an hour’s worth of talk about the 2024 presidential election with the long-time Democratic Party operative and party intellectual Simon Rosenberg, Ezra Klein said something that, as soon as I heard it, I immediately knew I’d use for this post, because it gets at something deeper that’s been gnawing at me over the past few months.
After asking Rosenberg whether he’d considered the downsides to embracing what Rosenberg’s called the “anti-MAGA majority” — a coalition that relies more on suburban, affluent, and educated voters than has traditionally been the Democratic Party’s base — only for Rosenberg to respond that he rejected “this notion that the Democratic Party is sort of in trouble or losing,” Klein upped the ante.
Granted, this anti-MAGA coalition won in 2018, 2020, and 2022; but what if, Klein pushed, your ambition for the party was bigger than “just” winning the next few elections? Democrats won in 2018, 2020, and 2022, but none of those victories were wipeouts like 1984 or 2010. What if your goal was to build a coalition so broad and sturdy that it could win the kind of blowout victories that would “vanquish MAGA?”
“Well,” Rosenberg replied, somewhat evasively, “let’s see what happens in 2024.”
The Unvanquished
The more I thought about it, the more I wondered about Klein’s question.
To begin with, MAGA can’t be “vanquish[ed]” or “destroy[ed],” at least not any more than human beings can be perfected or controlled. It’s a politics in which the cruelty is the point, and cruelty is part of the human condition. There is a Genghis Khan quote that is probably apocryphal but has endured because it gets at a basic yet uncomfortable truth about the human condition: “The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see those dear to them bathed in tears…”
Beyond that, MAGA — insofar as it has substance beyond owning the libs — is, at its most abstract, a defense of hierarchy. As a nationalist (rather than patriotic) enterprise, it is axiomatically dedicated to the idea that one land, one people, one culture, one nation, and ultimately one country is superior to the rest. MAGA is a self-conscious rejection of the idea of human equality, which it mocks as “woke” neurosis, a species of political correctness. Its creed is not “America, First Among Equals,” but rather America First.
That exaltation and defense of hierarchy, too, is something that seems hardwired in human beings, or at least deep-seated enough to transcend cultures and generations. That’s not going to be “vanquished” or “destroyed,” either, any more than we’ll be able to annihilate anger, envy, gluttony, or pride.
The Future Is History
To give Klein the credit he deserves, though, I’m going to assume he means something less metaphysical and more along the lines of something Rosenberg said at one point during their conversation: “I think we’re going to win this election by high single digits and make this election a clear repudiation of MAGA, which will, hopefully, start to loosen [its] dark grip on the Republican Party.”
Rosenberg is alluding to one of the few unwritten rules of American politics that Trump has not broken, at least not yet. That rule holds that each of the two major parties will only tolerate so much losing before a decisive portion of their coalition demands a change in direction.
But that “rule” hasn’t always been true in US politics. There were multiple eras in the 19th century when, on the presidential level, one of the two major parties played the Washington Generals to the other party’s Harlem Globetrotters. So why is this hypothetical dynamic, in which a major party will simply not accept losing, so widely assumed to be something between a law of politics and a truism? I think it has something to do with the era when today’s pundits came of age.
Every subculture has its own history, and perhaps most especially its own history of the recent past. For most extremely online Democrats who started following politics before the Obama Administration, the history of the recent past goes something like this:
After holding the White House for 28 of the 40 years separating 1932 and 1972, the Civil Rights Movement caused the New Deal coalition forged by FDR to collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions.
In some ways, this process started as early as during the Second World War, but the point of no return occurred in the late 1960s.
Richard Nixon was the first Republican candidate for president to successfully pick up the pieces, but his opportunism was more than canceled-out by his propensity for self-destruction.
Following the Carter interregnum, Ronald Reagan continued Nixon’s work; thanks in part to “Reagan Democrats,” he cruises in 1980 and 1984.
It is not until the late 1980s, however, when the Reagan coalition delivers the presidency to his deeply uncharismatic successor, that Democrats decide they want to stop losing more than they fear the compromises winning will require.
Cue Bill Clinton.
At one point during his conversation with Klein, Rosenberg referred to this prehistory of the Democratic Party while defending the overall vitality of the party today: “[T]he Democratic Party in the late ’80s and early ’90s was getting wiped out at the presidential level,” he argued. “And the reason that the New Democrats came about was to reverse that and was to create a competitive national party again.”
I think Rosenberg made this point for at least two reasons. First, self-interest (duh); he’s worked with the Clintons since the early ‘90s and is defending a party coalition he probably sees as, to some extent, part of his legacy. Second, and more interestingly, he made the point because he hopes that if Trump loses in 2024, Republicans will react like the Democrats did in 1988. Maybe, in other words, the prehistory bullet-pointed above will kinda-sorta repeat.
If you take a step back, you can see that it’s not so different from Klein’s hypothetical of a victory so smashing that it can “vanquish” MAGA from the mainstream of US politics. The only real difference is that Rosenberg is focused on hitting some still-unknown quantity of victories — hence his insistence that 2018, 2020, and 2022 be understood as three-straight MAGA losses — rather than a blowout so resonant that Republicans decides to ditch MAGA and find their Clinton.
What If Tho?
Here’s my question: What if that’s not how any of this works, not anymore?
Despite their seeming disagreement, what if the underlying assumption shared by both Klein and Rosenberg — namely, that the Republican Party will only tolerate losing presidential elections for so long — is incorrect?
If Trump’s hold over the party is akin to a warlord’s iron dominion over a failed state, how would losing (again) change anything? It goes without saying that he’d insist — as he usually starts doing before the election is over — that the outcome was illegitimate. There will be no moment when he says, “You got me!” He will never concede. He will continue to rage. He’ll file for the 2028 campaign as soon as legally possible. The Big Lie will live on.
What if the Republican Party of 2024, quite unlike the Democratic Party of 1988, is no longer a broad coalition with a “big tent” mentality? What if, after spending nearly 10 years as the leaders of the Republican Party, Donald Trump and his family have purged its official apparatuses of anyone inclined to cross him?
Do you remember Ronna McDaniel’s maiden name? Did you know she’s (reportedly) heading for the guillotine all the same?
What if data analysts Lakshya Jain and Armin Thomas, writing in the New York Times recently, are correct when the say that Trump “now controls the Republican Party by virtually every conceivable measure,” and “Mr. Trump’s wing is, by a comfortable margin, the largest and most dominant force in his party”? Many of our most powerful institutions — the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Presidency (via the Electoral College) — have endured quite happily under systems of minority rule. Why not the GOP itself?
What if, in other words, all of this is the new normal?
MAGA Is Dead, Long Live MAGA!
About a week after I listened to the Rosenberg interview, Klein published a column for the Times that, it seemed to me, encapsulated a lot of the anxieties and uncertainties he expressed to Rosenberg during their conversation. At one point, almost as an aside, Klein touches on my question about whether we assume too much that the future will be different.
“At some point, both Biden and Trump will pass from the scene,” he writes, before concluding:
For now, Trump still stalks the Republic, uniting the normally fractious Democrats against his challenge. For now, the Democratic Party can perhaps be the party of both those who want transformational change and those who fear it. But for how long?
If I believed that After Trump, US politics and society would revert to something that looked more like life Before Trump (except now everyone looks like Tim Cook in his $5000 goggles, I guess?) then I would also concern myself about the anti-MAGA coalition’s internal contradictions. But do we really think one man has that much influence? How, then, do we explain Viktor Orban in Hungary, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Javier Milei in Argentina, or Narendra Modi in India?
Yes, Trump enjoys a uniquely fervid cult of personality; but the pro-Trump voters who now call themselves MAGA were MAGA before they called themselves pro-Trump.
They were the ones whose rage made those final McCain-Palin rallies so nasty; they were the ones who thrilled to Glenn Beck’s chalkboard-centric conspiracies, and who formed Tea Party groups all across the nation; they were the ones who rallied to Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain, so desperate were they to support someone whose very candidacy was a “fuck you” to the system. Someone like Donald Trump.
Sure, these voters’ devotion to Trump is on a whole different level than their enthusiasm for Palin, Bachmann, or Cain; and yes, Trump’s celebrity means he has the kind of “name recognition” that goes far beyond his proto-MAGA ancestors’ wildest dreams. But the cast of characters who comprise the MAGA-verse is wide, and politics geeks can already list a half-dozen names of distinctly MAGA Republicans who are eager to define the After Trump era — from your various Trump offspring to your Tucker Carlsons, your J.D. Vances, and your Kari Lakes.
Normalize This
Thus arrives the final (and, usually, least compelling) part of an essay like this, the moment when I try to answer what is ostensibly the question — namely, What Is To Be Done?
Well, in this case, and at the risk of showing my age by dropping a #Slatepitch, I’d say that if this is indeed the new normal, then the best course of action for all of us in the anti-MAGA coalition is to take one of the most popular meme-creeds of this era — “this is not normal” — and reverse it. This, we should remind ourselves and each other, is the new normal. And we should do this for two reasons.
First, because it’s true. Second, because if we don’t, we are going to burn out. I don’t often agree with Jonathan Chait — and I think his new piece for New York is overly pessimistic, as well as overly concerned with blaming the pending doom on the activist left — but he’s right to note, as he laments the apparent fracturing of the Biden coalition, that “it is not the president who is exhausted; it is us.”
That is not incidental, either. That is part of the strategy that MAGA, and every other neofascist movement like it, relies on to win. It’s a strategy perfected by the Kremlin but whose most eloquent proponent is Steve Bannon, the former Trump advisor who infamously said that his response to negative coverage of MAGA was “to flood the zone with shit” and let a combination of cynicism and exhaustion do its enervating work. If you’re MAGA, you hope that if you keep the shit flooding and hold your minority together long enough, the majority that opposes you will collapse from internal disagreements, organizational fatigue, and fatalistic apathy.
So, instead of worrying about how the Democratic Party will survive if it hitches its wagon to an anti-MAGA coalition that may dissolve if Donald Trump is no longer on the scene, perhaps we should think about how we can still move the country forward even if this is the new normal. That may be our only choice.