How Did This Happen?

The most common reaction to the Presidential election in 2024, besides depression and fear, is bewilderment - bewilderment at finding that truth doesn’t matter, reason and logic are irrelevant, and even that policy successes or failures have no discernible effect. This bewilderment exists because we still reflexively view the situation we are in as a political struggle over policy. This is a mistake, and the first consequence of this mistake is to believe in the first place that the election was a race at all. It was not a race. It was a reveal.

What it revealed is that we do not face a political party in the traditional sense, we face something analogous to a new religion, an ideological movement that in fact seeks to overthrow our nation. What motivates the adherents of this ideology are not policy positions, but faith: faith that only they are entitled to lead the nation, faith that they know what our nation should be, and faith that it has lost its way and must be destroyed, so that the right people - their people - can rebuild it the right way. This is why the shell of the former republican party, which these ideologues now occupy, had no policy platform: they do not believe in the rule of law, they believe in the rule of the righteous. They have faith, for instance, that whatever their leader does will be right. They have faith that their religious leaders could not lead them into error. They have faith that people they know to be good, who have accepted this ideology for whatever reason, could not support something that is bad.  

This new movement, which calls itself MAGA, is like most cults, fanatical ideologies and religions, rooted in grievance and feeds on criticism. This is why they are immune to facts and reason: the more outlandish, bizarre or visibly wrong their beliefs, the more criticism they receive. The more criticism they receive, the stronger they grow. This is how irrational beliefs defeat reason, and is plainly what we’ve seen happening over the last few years. This is why, when we point out that something they believe is factually wrong, it falls on deaf ears. They can only interpret statements of facts and reason that runs counter to their beliefs as criticism of them personally, as calling them stupid or ignorant, which they reject in the only way they know how - by believing them more. This is why, when the unlawful activities of their leader was prosecuted by our laws, they interpreted the application of the law itself as a persecution - not only of their leader or his actions, but again of them personally.

For these and other reasons, many analysts have identified this movement as a cult. They are not wrong, but to be clear we should probably call it by its correct name. A secular cult or religion engaged in national revolution is more precisely called Fanaticism. The most well-known example of this to Americans is the National Socialist party in Germany, which itself was not a political party at all, but a fanatical movement bent on ending German democracy, nullifying its history and remaking the nation in its own image. We use this example intentionally now, because we must - because the danger to our own nation’s government is now the same danger they posed to theirs: like MAGA, the NAZI movement only pretended to be motivated by public policy. Like MAGA, they legitimized their fanaticism through the electoral process, and like MAGA, the spread of their fanaticism piggybacked on existing religious communities - and in fact, the same religious communities. When Hitler was voted into power, more than 90% of all Germans belonged to the Christian religion, the majority of them Protestant. There is little doubt that their belief in their own righteousness, the grievances and imagined persecutions they nurtured among themselves, and Hitler’s promises to restore their power and authority in the nation by destroying their enemies, were their real motivations to lend their credibility to a movement that, in the end, would destroy a fledgling democracy and bring down the German nation.

It is worth examining this in a bit more detail, because this is the main difficulty many of us have had in correctly defining the MAGA movement: their leaders pretend that this is all politics as usual, that what motivates them is really public policy. What makes it even more difficult is that many who have joined the movement have convinced themselves they are engaged in policy struggles. But this is really just cover for their real motivations. Their talk of policy issues like inflation, the Southern border, the national debt or identity politics, are for the most part nothing more than lies on the part of their leaders, and excuses and rationalizations by their members. We know this, in large part, because clearly all of these policy issues could have been resolved through the normal political process. None of them require sweeping away the government that Americans themselves built over these long years of negotiation and compromise. The only thing that requires such extreme measures is the goal of nullifying our history and remaking the nation in their image. They don’t want to defeat their opposition, they want to eliminate it. They don’t want to lead our nation, they want to rule it.

To demonstrate this, let’s go into detail on just one issue, one of many examples of why we cannot accept that MAGA is engaged in partisan policy: the issue of inflation. How many people told pollsters and pundits that they were voting for Trump because of “Biden’s” inflation? Millions, right? But we all saw inflation happen in every country across the globe, all at the same time. And we watched the Biden administration attack the issue head on, bringing our inflation rate down faster than anyone else, until it became the lowest of any developed nation, where it was at the time of the election.

It is not that the issue of inflation could not have been argued in terms of policy. But what revealed that the issue was an excuse, not a motivation, is that they didn’t even try. None of them tried to explain how it could be that Biden caused inflation in India, or China, or in every other country on the planet. Nobody tried to explain why, even though ours came down faster than the rest, we should think Biden did a bad job on it anyway. There was no debate over any new policy to bring down inflation; indeed, nobody even offered one. They didn’t need to. It was enough to say “high prices, Biden bad.”

We heard several political strategists say that democrats’ problem was that they considered average Americans stupid. But they have that exactly backwards. It was these very strategists and pundits who considered average Americans stupid, by believing that they could not possibly understand something as simple as the fact that when something happens globally, it probably was not the result of the policy of any one nation’s government. It was in fact this very belief in their stupidity that obscured their view of what was really going on. But we know different, because we spoke with these average Americans. The same people who threw up their hands and said anything other than “prices high, Biden bad” was just more words, or partisan spin, or too confusing to understand, would at the same time go through the most remarkable twists of logic and nuance to explain why Trump wasn’t responsible for any of the things he did right in front of their eyes. These exact same people used elaborate narratives, for instance, to explain why Trump’s failure to issue a single tweet to stop the attack on our Capitol was really Nancy Pelosi’s fault.

These people weren’t stupid. They weren’t incapable of understanding nuance. They were simply very good at rationalizing. Rationalizing means they’d already accepted a conclusion, and were using the art of apologetics to hide their real motivations, both from themselves and from others. This is not what people debating public policy in good faith do. This is what fanatics do. This is why we can see clearly that we do not face a fight over policy. And if we want to defeat this ideology, as we must, we first need to accept and admit that policy positions cannot sway them. They are acting now on faith, in the firm grip of fanaticism. And in the history of the world, fanaticism has never been defeated by reason - or good policy.

There are many good writings describing the creation of fanatical movements and the beliefs that define this one in particular. We will not take the time to repeat them here. Nor is it our job to psychoanalyze the motivations of any given member of the movement, which themselves are as many and varied as the membership of any cult, religion or fanatical ideology. Some joined, for instance, specifically to oppose our nation or its laws, while others joined simply because they wanted to be accepted in their community. If we want to stand up for America and our history, our job is less to understand them than to oppose them. But we cannot do so effectively if we do not understand at least the broad strokes of how a fringe movement grew so large and politically powerful, quickly enough to overwhelm our nation.

For our purposes, we can break it down into two main steps: normalization and coercion.

The opening to take these steps was their success in using the apparatus of a traditional political party, allowing them from the outset to hide their extremism behind traditional party policies and values as previously understood, and confusing many lifelong republicans. The timing here was crucial. Trump had no record in politics and had not yet revealed his anti-American ideology. This, coupled with the normal cycle of Americans politics (the Presidency is rarely held by the same party longer than 8 years), catapulted him into the Presidency. Since our nation was understood as an unshakable edifice, and since the office itself was not at the time the ultimate power in the government that it has since become, many Americans felt that voting for him was not a huge risk.  They voted for what they thought were their normal policies, albeit with a ‘twist’, bolstered by the traditional belief that no party should hold the office for too long anyway. This gave MAGA the opportunity to reveal their ideology from a position of power, and to begin to normalize it for the nation from the highest office in the land.

So for the most part the normalization process occurred in this first Trump term of office. This was itself a two-step dance between the President and the propaganda channels already established and run by radical ideological leaders in the public sphere, coupled with widespread acceptance and even endorsement by the leadership of the Christian religion.  

The President did his part by launching a blitzkrieg of extremist views and anti-democratic actions, one after the other, while the propaganda channels - most importantly Fox, run by the Australian extremist Rupert Murdock - worked tirelessly to make them sound like normal, acceptable political positions. They repeatedly assured their viewers that those of us whose consciences were shocked - for example by Trump calling Neo-nazis who had just maimed and murdered people in the streets “very fine people”, while at the same time saying that traditional republicans who disagreed with him were “human scum” - were really just overreacting. The ideas or actions that could not be explained away were simply dropped and forgotten when the next extreme action was taken. The more extreme these ideas and actions became, the more extreme these media channels became in their accusations against democrats, as an attempt to distract and discredit them, to put them on the defensive, and again to make extreme positions sound normal. When the President’s approval of political violence led to comparisons with fascism, for example, Fox began to call democrats ‘fascists’ almost incessantly, so what was in reality stunned criticism of his shocking and unprecedented positions, would appear as just normal partisan sniping. In the end, there were no moderates left in their narrative: there were only MAGA republicans or radical liberals, with even traditional republicans derided as RINOs and defined as disloyal or secret radical liberals. Their pundits used false equivalence, whataboutism and cynicism, to make it all appear normal, assuring us over and over, for instance, that Trump was normal because all politicians are corrupt liars. Trump himself, on one rare occasion that he was forced to answer for what was plainly a lie to the public, explained it away with the simple statement “well, other people have lied too.” Nothing to see here.

Meanwhile, our Christian preachers, many of whose members expressed discomfort at the fact that this leader was known for his greed and immorality, and openly engaged in corruption and mendacity, essentially shrugged their shoulders and reassured their members that 'political' views were separate from the morals they preached from the pulpit. The most common rationalization we heard from these men at the time was “we did not elect a pope”.

This normalization process allowed millions of Christians to form a coalition with the most virulent anti-American ideologies in the nation, from Neo-nazi white supremacists to violent anti-government militia groups to Anarchists. This both diminished the power of traditional republicans - many of whom left the party and formed a significant part of the 81 million who defeated Trump in 2020 - and swelled the MAGA ranks, especially in rural areas of the nation, where lawless and anti-government groups tended to migrate and churches are plentiful. This both weakened and purified the party, and is why, even after Trump lost the 2020 election, he was still able to take over what remained of the apparatus of the old republican party.

The second step was coercion. This occurred mainly during the Biden presidency, where these rural areas, inundated now with adherents of the new religion, began to enforce their new ‘community values’ with ostracism. No longer able to duck their heads and keep their beliefs to themselves, people of conscience were now forced to either demonstrate their allegiance to the MAGA ideology or face real retaliation, in the ways that only small communities can do it. The new community leaders judged whether or not someone was ‘one of them’ primarily through the use of symbols, with citizens using MAGA hats, Trump yard signs, Trump flags, even “Let’s go Brandon” merchandise to demonstrate their loyalty, and make their lives easier.  

Americans who live in cities, where anonymity makes ostracism difficult, largely missed this entire process, adding to their bewilderment. They believed that the ubiquitous yard signs, flags and bumper stickers in small towns revealed active grassroots agreement with the movement, not realizing that people who didn’t use these symbols were ostracized, marked as ‘outsiders’, unable to take local leadership positions, didn’t get the limited jobs available, their children bullied in school, among many, many other things. MAGA ideologues used every means they could to make their lives there difficult, friendless and unpleasant, in an attempt to drive them out and ‘purify’ their communities. This is again much easier to do in small communities, where everyone knows everyone, and is one reason why these rural communities became so monolithic. It also explains why Biden, who brought more money, jobs and aid to rural communities than any President in modern history, was almost universally reviled there.

Meanwhile many of the Christian preachers - themselves subject to these new community requirements - changed their minds again. No longer agnostic about who their membership supported or voted for, they now had to endorse MAGA ideology from the pulpit. Many of those who did not were forced to leave their churches. Capitulating to this pressure, and again performing amazing feats of rationalization, many of the same preachers who had said for decades that the separation of church and state was necessary to protect the church from the state, now preached that there was in fact no separation of church and state, that the very idea was an affront to them and to God himself. Many of them, echoing the new radical ideology, even denied that America is a democracy at all. 

This process of coercion brought many of those who had left the party back into it, hat in hand and asking for forgiveness. Many of them became even more zealous than those who never left in the first place, because they needed to take extra steps to prove their loyalty to something they had once criticized. There is no more clear example of that than JD Vance, who initially recognized and publicly denounced Trump as a threat to America in no uncertain terms, and is now Trump’s own vice president. Many expressed surprise that a man who had so forcefully denounced MAGA would only a short time later be accepted by them as a leader in the movement, but he is in fact exactly what fanatical movements want: a man with no moral compass, who will do what he is told. The return of these republicans and former opponents occurred, then, without the loss of the coalition that existed at the end of Trump’s first term, bringing them enough numbers to return Trump to the Presidency, this time for the openly expressed purpose of tearing down our government, nullifying our history, and remaking America in their image.

The success of these processes or normalization and coercion depended on a myriad of reasons: ignorance of American values or our history, confusion, widespread propaganda, gullibility, the desire to belong, the inability to stand up to pressure, and many other factors. But in the end, there was nothing anyone could have done to defeat Trump. There is nothing Biden could have done, or Harris could have said, or any other candidate democrats could have chosen to run, that would have changed the results. This, again, is why the Presidential election of 2024 was not a race, but a reveal. What it revealed was not the failure of the opposing party, which we asked to fight a policy battle in an ideological war, but the extent to which this fanaticism, this ideological cancer, had metastasized in the nation. Trump was going to win regardless, because as we’ve said, fanaticism cannot be defeated with good policy, facts, logic, truth or reason.

It is for this reason that we need to stop blaming democrats for losing. All that does is blame the victim for the crime. When we attack Biden and Harris and everyone else, we are only using the language of the fanatics against them, amplifying and reinforcing the enemies of our nation. This is utterly self-defeating, and we need to stop. We need to recognize and admit what has been revealed.  We need to support those who are on our side already, including the democratic party itself, because fanaticism can only be defeated with solidarity, with the moral clarity, strength and resistance of those who know the truth, and for whom truth itself still matters.