MAGA

Created: 2024-01-05

>MAGA is the zero-sum concept in political form. What’s good for immigrants is bad for the American-born. What’s good for Black people is bad for whites. Trade deals are exploitation. Our NATO allies are out to screw us. Every day for Trump is an Us/Them dominance game.

>Zero-sum thinking is surging on the left as well. A generation of college students has been raised on the dogma that life is a contest between groups — oppressor versus oppressed, colonizers versus colonized.

>Vladimir Putin doesn’t seek to recapture Russian greatness by leading a nation that cures cancer or produces technological innovations; he seeks glory by conquering Ukraine: You lose, I win. Xi Jinping no longer talks of the U.S. and China as friendly competitors; he describes a world in which we are locked in a zero-sum war for supremacy: He wins, we lose. As my colleague Thomas Friedman has noted recently, Hamas could have turned Gaza into Dubai — a land of capitalism, growth and opportunity. But Hamas rejects the whole ethos of modern capitalism for a more primitive ethos: Jews die, we dominate

--David Brooks

''2024-01-05 10:52''

<details>
<summary><b>Click here to see the full text of an article by David Brooks that explains the power of MAGA and how we might challenge it.</b></summary>
<pre>

OPINION DAVID BROOKS What Democrats Need to Do Now July 18, 2024

In 2016, MAGA was just a slogan — or at best a spasm of resentments
and instincts about issues like immigration. Over the last eight
years, think tankers, activists and politicians have developed MAGA
into a worldview, a worldview that now transcends Donald Trump.

Across the Western world, right-wing parties have ceased to be
parties of the business elites and have become working-class parties.
MAGA is the worldview that accords with this shifting reality. It
has its roots in Andrew Jackson-style populism, but it is updated
and more comprehensive. It is the worldview that represents one
version of working-class interests and offers working-class voters
respect.

JD Vance is the embodiment and one of the developers of this worldview
— with his suspicion of corporate power, foreign entanglements,
free trade, cultural elites and high rates of immigration. In
Milwaukee this week, with Vance as Trump’s pick for vice president,
it became clear how thoroughly MAGA has replaced Reaganism as the
chief operating system of the Republican Party.

If Democrats want to beat MAGA, it’s not enough to say: Orange man
bad. Talking endlessly about Jan. 6 does no good. If Democrats hope
to win in the near future they have to take the MAGA worldview
seriously, and respectfully make the case, especially to working-class
voters, for something better.  At its best, what is MAGA, anyway?

Well, in any society, there is a legitimate tension between security
and dynamism. In a volatile world, MAGA offers people security. It
promises secure borders and secure neighborhoods. It offers protection
from globalization, from the creative destruction of modern capitalism.
It offers protection from an educated class that looks down on you
and indoctrinates your children in school. It offers you protection
from corporate predators. As Senator Josh Hawley argued in Compact
magazine this week, “The C-suite long ago sold out the United States,
shuttering factories in the homeland and gutting American jobs.”

To those who rightly feel buffeted by vast and destabilizing forces,
Trump emerges as a kind of Aaron Sorkin character: “You want me on
that wall. You need me on that wall.” He offers security so people
can get on with their lives.

Now, the problem with MAGA — and here is where the Democratic
opportunity lies — is that it emerges from a mode of consciousness
that is very different from the traditional American consciousness.

The American consciousness has traditionally been an abundance
consciousness. Successive waves of immigrants found a vast continent
of fertile fields and bustling cities. In 1910, Henry van Dyke, who
later became the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands and Luxembourg,
wrote a book called “The Spirit of America,” in which he observed
that “the Spirit of America is best known in Europe by one of its
qualities — energy.” In the 20th century, Luigi Barzini, an Italian
observer, argued that Americans have a zeal for continual
self-improvement, a “need tirelessly to tinker, improve everything
and everybody, never leave anything alone.”

Many foreign observers saw us, and we saw ourselves, as the dynamic
nation par excellence. We didn’t have a common past, but we dreamed
of a common future. Our sense of home was not rooted in blood-and-soil
nationalism; our home was something we were building together.
Through most of our history, we were not known for our profundity
or culture but for living at full throttle.  MAGA, on the other
hand, emerges from a scarcity consciousness, a zero-sum mentality:
If we let in tons of immigrants they will take all of our jobs; if
America gets browner, “they” will replace “us.” MAGA is based on a
series of victim stories: The elites are out to screw us. Our allies
are freeloading off us. Secular America is oppressing Christian
America.

Viewed from the traditional American abundance mind-set, MAGA looks
less like an American brand of conservatism and more like a European
brand of conservatism. It resembles all those generations of Russian
chauvinists who argued that the Russian masses embody all that is
good but they are threatened by aliens from the outside. MAGA looks
like a kind of right-wing Marxism, which assumes that class struggle
is the permanent defining feature of politics. MAGA is a fortress
mentality, but America has traditionally been defined by a pioneering
mentality. MAGA offers a strong shell, but not much in the way of
wings needed to soar.

If Democrats are to thrive, they need to tap into America’s dynamic
cultural roots and show how they can be applied to the 21st century.
It should be said that social dynamism is more complicated than it
appears at first blush. It’s not just getting on your Harley and
hitting the open road. It’s not really about rugged individualism
or the libertarian version of freedom as the absence of constraint.

My favorite definition of dynamism is adapted from the psychologist
John Bowlby: All of life is a series of daring explorations from a
secure base. If Democrats are to thrive, they need to offer people
a vision both of the secure base and of the daring explorations.
Here’s where they have a potentially good story to tell. Americans
can’t be secure if the world is in flames. That’s why America has
to be active abroad in places like Ukraine, keeping wolves like
Vladimir Putin at bay. Americans can’t be secure if the border is
in chaos. Popular support for continued immigration depends on a
sense that the government has things under control. Americans can’t
be secure if a single setback will send people to the depths of
crushing poverty. That’s why the social insurance programs that
Democrats largely built are so important.

But what Democrats really need to do, in my view, is to offer people
a vision of the daring explorations that await them. That’s where
the pessimistic post-Reagan Republicans can’t compete. American
dynamism was turbocharged by the construction of the transcontinental
railway, the creation of the land grant colleges, the G.I. Bill and
President Biden’s successful efforts to revive our industrial base
in the American Midwest.

Personally, I wish Democrats would spend less time on dumb, reactionary
policies like rent control. That reeks of panic in the Biden campaign.
I wish they would champion the abundance agenda that people like
Derek Thompson and my colleague Ezra Klein have been writing about.
We need to build things. Lots of new homes. Supersonic airplanes
and high-speed trains.

Democrats need to take on their teachers’ unions and commit to
dynamism in the field of education. They need to stand up to
protectionism, not join the stampede. Raising tariffs, as Trump
wants to do, would not only raise costs on American consumers; it
would also breed laziness and mediocrity within those sectors
cosseted from competition. Democrats need to throttle back the
regulators who have been given such free rein that they’ve stifled
innovation.

If Republicans are going to double down on class war rhetoric —
elites versus masses — Democrats need to get out of that business.
They need to tap back into the more traditional American aspiration:
We are not sentenced to a permanent class-riven future but can
create a fluid, mobile society.  The economist Michael Strain of
the American Enterprise Institute has offered a telling psychic
critique of MAGA economic thinking: “The economics of grievance is
ineffective, counterproductive and corrosive, eroding the foundations
of prosperity. Messages matter. Tell people that the system is
rigged, and they will aspire to less. Champion personal responsibility,
and they will lift their aspirations. Promoting an optimistic vision
of economic life can increase risk tolerance, ambition, effort and
dynamism.”

Strain is getting at the core point that aspiration is not like a
brick that just sits there. Aspiration is more like a flame that
can be fed or dampened. The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen
underlined the point a few years ago: “The problem is desire. We
need to *want* these things. The problem is inertia. We need to
want these things more than we want to prevent these things.”

In Milwaukee, I have heard a lot of patriotism, but it was the
patriotism of nostalgia, not the patriotism of hope. That leaves
an opening for the folks who gather in Chicago next month.

A version of this article appears in print on July 21, 2024, Section
SR, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Democrats
Need to Take MAGA Seriously. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper |
Subscribe

</pre>
</details>

Create new association:
MAGA