What separates MAGA people from the others.
America is facing unprecedented times in that previous times when political points of view were so opposed, each group, as the present usage has it, each party living in its own silo, that it led to war. The Tories went to Canada after the American Revolution while the ex-Confederates remained in the South after the Civil War until in less than a generation they were able to gain control of the social structure of their states, Jim Crow the system that replaced slavery. Now, there is a great conflict between the party of order, the Democrats, who want regular constitutional procedures, and the party of disorder, significant leaders in the House Republicans as abetted or inspired by a significant part of the Republican Party base, who do not care about constitutional niceties but want to support their standard bearer, Donald Trump, who fomented a violent insurrection against the Constitution, to prevail again as President and do what he wills, which is to take revenge against all those who have opposed him. Although some Trump supporters contemplate a civil war, which is not likely to happen, even though the geographical divisions between tube two political persuasions line up closely to the same divisions that occurred during the civil war and it is not necessary for a civil war to be divided geographically in that the English Civil War was fought all over England and Scotland and did not have front lines. But the American military is so much in charge of the country despite the view that AR-15’s are a threat to a national army, which is what the Second Amendment is supposedly out to oppose, that this civil war is being conducted politically. The leading candidate for the Speaker of the House, the second in line to succeed a President, is Jim Jordan, who supported Trump in his failed coup d’etat, and Jordan is out to oust the current President on trumped up charges. How is it possible, in these trying times, to make sense of the opposition between the two parties and to craft a way to communicate between them so as to restore a sense of fidelity to the Constitution? Remember that even during McCarthyism, when the Far Right thought there were Commies everywhere while Democrats thought Commies few and largely powerless, both sides claimed allegiance to the Constitution even if irregular means might be needed to control the Commies. How to calm those members of the citizenry who are so outraged at the current state of political affairs that they will disregard the Constitution or supersede it? Or maybe just convince the moderate Republicans to realize how serious is the threat to the Constitution and will become states persons who overtly oppose the insurrectionists. Here are four ways to overcome the impasse, as if rhetoric and reasoning can make a difference.
The view that sees the greatest opposition between the two points of view is the one posed by Hillary Clinton, who thinks that her opposing camp needs to be reprogrammed so as to be rid of its brainwashing, a view which Fox News reported so as to present Hillary as outrageous. Hillary, however, has been consistent. Years ago, she regarded a part of her opponents as being “despicable and irredeemable”, perhaps because of the “Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi'' investigation which yielded nothing, or the rumors that she had Vince Foster executed, or the chants to lock her up because of her laptop secrets when these same people are not abashed by Trump mishandling secret information. There is no way to reach them except by cleansing their minds of those poisons, so deeply rooted as they are in their psyches. But that is a fanciful plan in that democracy requires respect for the opinions of the electorate and so requires persuasion to change minds rather than restructure the characters of the voters, which is what happens in totalitarian regimes. Stalinists thought that people opposed to him should be put in insane asylums, and I suppose Hillary is not in favor of that however hurtful those in opposition might be. Maybe only a conversion to her youthful Methodism when people engaged the Social Gospel.
A second plan, one less on character and more on argument, is to carefully craft a rejoinder to the accusations made by the MAGA party. Present the facts and concepts in an orderly and clear way so as to reveal their own point of view in the hope to persuade the other side of the rightness of their course. The American Revolution did that by declaring the Declaration of Independence where it sought to all who might see the concepts undergirding liberty as well as the particular frictions that led tube American colonies to separate themselves from Great Britain. In fact, that has been done by the Congressional Jan.6th Committee which provided in video and testimony exactly what was happening before at and around the Capital and it is difficult gto oppose those findings, the MAGA people largely disregarding the Jan. 6th Committee report and proving themselves no white paper or statement to argue and specify that the 2020 election had been rigged. There are only rumors that it happened when one might have expected that a conservative think tank would provide a definitive report if something like that happened. MAGA people don't care about evidence even if it is sure a rigged election happened. Another way in which MAGA people de;part from the Founding Fathers is that while those who signed the Declaration pledged their sacred honor to the cause, as did Confederates, whose own Constitution protected slavery without requiring any protection of slaves from abuse, and even the Chicago 7, in the trail after the demonstrations around the 19t68 Chicago Democratic Convention, never claimed that they were not part of the demonstrations but only that violence was perpetrated by the police, while those who stormed the Capital find excuses for themselves, such as that they were instructed to do so by Trump, as if they did not know storming the Capital was illegal. So there is an asymmetry between the Constitutionalists and the MAGA people in that the MAGA people do not want to offer in clear terms their point of view, to offer their alternative history. And so history cannot be used to convince the other side if one side doesn’t want to engage in history as the method of communication.
A third way to communicate between groups that are incommensurable rather than simply in opposition or even to negotiate and split the difference, is to engage in dialogue, which I take to mean, since Plato, is to allow into one’s own consciousness a consideration or point of view of another consciousness so as to modify one’s own consciousness and thereby take those other considerations seriously. But Plato meant mainly the inclusion of abstract alien ideas, such as mathematical ones or whether, as in “Parmenides”, whether every actual object had an ideal, which is a metaphysical issue. In the present case, MAGA’s insist on particular facts, such as that the 2020 election was rigged and the political belief that the fact of the rigged election justified the violence at the Capital without admitting it was an insurrection. Would dialogue mean giving into such facts and judgments? Facts are true or not and it is quibbling to agree in the name of concordance that there was only a little insurrection.
Moreover, the animus, as I gather, of the Maga supporters are not particular facts or concepts. They are followers of Trump. They treat him as a charismatic figure, the creator of truths rather than a standard of truth that he emulates. Jesus was charismatic because His magnetism transformed understanding and so it made sense to think salvation came only through Him rather than that His insights were part of the general evolution of thought in Palestine. Jesus was a character carefully crafted in the Gospels to be an opaque figure, mysterious, feather than what happens in a novel where facts indicate motives and other feelings and where people can unburden themselves of their own thoughts and ideas. When Jesus says ``Why hast thou forsaken me?”, it is just a glimpse into His soul, a problem rather than a revelation. Also, charismatic figures are not necessarily attractive . Hitler was no Aryan blonde and MAGA supporters of Trump are willing to take him warts and all, thinking his outraged anger is the heart of things. So we have to go beyond dialogue.
Rather than engage in dialogue to make sides commensurable by becoming passive and receptive of the other point of view, however much Socrates is also badgering his opponents, let us engage the sides try being assertive and provide a definition of what the inchoate other side says so as to comprehend what they might mean if they were more coherent and so raise the adversaries well enough so that they can be engaged and answered rather than being just fonts of ignorance, which I dare say applies to many Liberals as well as to MAGAists. Given the lack of evidence of a rigged election and given the denial of many that there was an insurrection, I would suggest that MAGAists would prefer that the election was rigged and the insurrection justified because there is something deeply rotten in America whereby rigging is rampant and the Constitution to be regarded as obsolete, suspending the First Amendment and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth, but not the Second as they take it to mean unlimited use of firearms when even the Heller case said only that extreme controls of arms cannot be curtailed.
What is the animus that guides them? One interpretation is that they think America has departed from ordinary life populated with normal people. That means outlandish claims that sex isn’t binary but a sliding scale, even if the number of uncertain sexual identities are so few that it is just an inevitable biological glitch and a problem that those few people have to manage as best they can. And there are black advocates who in the Forties would have been called “race men” who saw race as the key issue in everything even though nowadays having to declare microaggressions as significant evidence of racism, even MEGAists willing to concede that an integrated society was a good thing in that they are not opposed to Blacks being in Congress so long as there are not too many or militant members of those. Women are nowadays to be allowed to work but abortion is bad because it has the sleazy associations it had before Roe was decided. But that doesn’t compute as an explanation because the Edenic Fifties are a long time ago to restore and because there is no downward mobility in the present to agitate resentment against the status quo. So what are they talking about?
Another possibility is that there has been a cultural sea change whereby the default condition is that the government is to be met with cynicism rather than trust, as in the old days when Henry Fonda played the always wise President and that congress people were by and large considered honorable, as in “Born Yesterday” or “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”, an out and out crook thought of as a scandal rather than par for the course. But if that is the case, then we are in deep trouble because restoring the trust in government would be a burdensome and long term undertaking, abetted perhaps by more high school courses on civics, but probably only an event that galvanized the nation around it's better angels, like a foreign attack, though 9/11 did not heal it for more than a month before intersectional rivalries reemerged. I don't have a solution.