Greed, Power, Sadism

The MAGA Revolution

By G.J. Nelson

The second phase of MAGA is well underway. If the first term of Donald Trump was hobbled by the creaky legacy machinery of the republic—sound and fury signifying nothing—the second is one of unrestrained action. The brakes have come off and the MAGA revolution is hurtling ahead full bore.

We are witnessing an all-out assault on American civic institutions, rule of law, global trade, and basic human decency. This regime is the ludicrous culmination of decades of right-wing attacks on government, civil rights, internationalism, and pluralistic democracy.

MAGA believes they are on the cusp of total victory. Only their arrogance, shortsighted incompetence and modest pushback from what’s left of an independent judiciary are checking their mad dash to absolute power. It’s only a matter of time before they stop humoring judges.

With the failure of our system to contain their criminal enterprise, it will be up to the us—the American people—to decide if we’re going to stand up for decency, humanity and democracy or submit to the reactionary and dictatorial tide that seeks to bury what’s left of the republic.

We may cross the point of no return sooner rather than later, the time when small-d democratic resistance is no longer possible, and settle into a cynical, silent complicity as everything worth fighting for sinks into ruin and apathy wins the day.

Every American who believes a better world is possible has a moral choice to make. Will we be humane, thoughtful, compassionate? Will we treat others with decency and respect because of their intrinsic God-given value? Will we base our society on principles like justice, self-governance, and good-faith debate?

Or do we give into the dark side of America and embrace greed, bigotry and brutality? Do we let dog-eat-dog capitalism make societal decisions for us while democratic institutions crumble into dust? Do we accept repression and state violence employed against anyone who questions MAGA? Do we submit to the spiritual death of the republic?

It’s tempting to ignore the tumultuous news and turn inward, hoping that the moment will pass. But time will not save us. We can tune it all out if we want, escape into entertainment culture, ignore the victims, forget what it means to be a citizen. But one day each of us will have to make a real choice.

The Republic is Dead. Long Live the Republic?

There is one silver lining to all this. We finally see with open eyes what America has become. All the myths of exceptionalism—the land of opportunity, a nation of immigrants, champions of democracy and human rights on the global stage—have been violently upended.

Our republic has succumbed to a near-terminal disease of endless greed, lust for power, and a cruel hierarchical world view—the poisons that kill all democracies. The post-Cold War era is over, buried by two decades of fruitless wars, an insidious recession, and a barely contained pandemic. And now the worst of the 19th century is slithering back.

We see broken-down dreams from sea to shining sea. Grifters and snake oil salesmen, religious fanatics and charlatans, conspiracy theorists and armed thugs, corporate monopolists openly buying government access, technofascist “libertarians”, a seething manosphere who view women as chattel for breeding, and “don’t tread on me” individualists groveling for a tyrant’s favor.

We see inane lifestyle influencers on YouTube with trad wife hobby farms and pump-and-dump schemes, mercenaries creeping into criminal justice roles, rich doomsday preppers building luxury bunkers to wait out the end of the world, private equity buying up every bankable asset, venture capitalists plugging meme coins, and the mass dehumanization of whole populations.

All this has been aided and abetted by a corporate media that comes in two flavors: MAGA propaganda and “centrist” insiders fixated on increasing clicks, scared to death of seeming biased, skeptical of progress and reform, and far too credulous of the opinions of power and money.

Newspapers and cable news channels have helped normalize MAGA, sane washing its leaders, patting its followers on the back and chiding anyone criticizing it too harshly as “out of touch.” Before the election was even over, mainstream newspapers were already backing off from critical Trump coverage while repeating every lie Trump told in the campaign ad nauseum.

Social media—that great vacuum of personal data and destroyer of braincells—is now controlled almost in its entirety by tech barons who support MAGA. Incensed by regulations, federal investigations of their monopolistic practices and pressure to curb the toxic disinformation on their platforms, they’ve embraced the reactionary politics of the moment.

An open sewer of fabrications, conspiracy theories, violent racism, vomitous misogyny, and AI garbage flows freely online, poisoning the minds of a generation.

We see a Democratic party unable to act decisively to counter the MAGA regime, to call for collective action or protest or civil disobedience. They don’t have majorities, but they have the pulpits, organizational infrastructure, and media resources of a major political party. Unfortunately, they don’t have a unified rallying cry because their leadership doesn’t have any core moral beliefs.

(Note: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Bernie Sanders and other progressives have tried to create a cohesive counternarrative to MAGA, and liberal organizers can take some credit for the first large-scale protests.)

Liberals claim they value democratic institutions and federal agencies, but they aren’t very good at explaining why. Why should the federal government help people? Why should it protect the rights of minorities and marginalized people? Why should Americans stand up for immigrants? Why should we oppose unshackled executive power and partisan courts?

It’s not for the sake of tradition, decorum, checks and balances, or plain pragmatism (social stability). It’s because democracy is government by and for the people, not an elite cadre of billionaires. Every human being born in this world is precious and valuable and everyone is of equal worth. And if they don’t have rights, neither do you. If their lives are expendable, so is yours.

The imperfection of these United States isn’t the result of it being wimpy, emasculated, or weak—as Trump and his minions would suggest. It’s because we haven’t fully embraced what it means to be endowed by the creator with equality and inalienable rights. The US has forgotten that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are fundamental to American democracy.

We have given rich reactionaries the key to the castle, are they are now moving us at light speed towards further inequality, cruelty, hierarchy, stupidity and economic ruin. We’ve veered off the democratic road onto a strange detour of personalist authoritarianism.

Progress is never inevitable, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., and it’s precisely when you start to believe that it is that the great stone of history rolls back down the hill, crushing everything in its path. So here we are, at the end of all things. Or, maybe, the beginning of something better.

Greed, Power, Sadism

With all their inconsistency, stupidity and chaos, it can be hard for people who rationalize things for a living to pin down MAGA. But if we strip away the rhetoric of reclaiming past “greatness,” I think we can formulate a clear bumper sticker idea of what MAGA is: GREED, POWER, SADISM.

“Make America Great Again” means putting right-wing oligarchs and their servants in charge of everything, abusing power to boost their own egos and crush anyone who opposes them, and dehumanizing any group that doesn’t fit into their racial, sexual or economic hierarchy. Whether dealing with adversaries, activists, minorities, or other nations, it’s all stick and no carrot.

This evil is supported by a rogue’s gallery of warmed-over ideologues who offer similar ideas. Government doesn’t exist to serve the people or the public interest; its role is to assert political control over people and protect wealth from redistribution.

Donald Trump himself has the MAGA cult, the small core of true believers who regard him as a god king. Personal power is attained by unquestioningly serving his. If his whim is to cripple the global economy with pointless tariffs, so be it.

The oligarchs and tech barons have an anarcho-capitalist—or more accurately, techno-feudalist—notion that democratic checks on their power are obsolete and just get in the way of their revolutionary technologies and profit-seeking.

The Project 2025 thinktank apparatchiks are small government ideologues who believe in reducing the state to little more than a security apparatus that defends private property and little else, a “government small enough to drown in a bathtub.”

The Christian nationalists, “trad” Catholics, and evangelists want to build a fundamentalist order to control the bodies and sex lives of women and LGTBQ people. Many of their leaders, adherents of the prosperity gospel, also believe that God wants them to live rich and tax-free.

While this coalition is rife with contradictions, they all revel in the dehumanization of people. They forego humility and self-awareness for a constant stream of self-aggrandizement, lies, and egoist musing. They reject tolerant pluralism, partitioning every type of person into friend or enemy, winner or loser, creator or parasite.

Ideas like fair elections, human rights, free speech, due process, and public accountability are tolerated only insofar as they bring about the desired outcomes. MAGA is already dispensing with the lip service to these liberal democratic ideas, and it’s only a matter of time before they snuff out what’s left of the messy civic spirit that republics need to survive.

This is not just a failure of institutions or constitutional norms. It is a moral and spiritual collapse. And we’re running out of time to push back against the avalanche.

Greed Is (Not) Good

A democratic republic cannot run on vibes. We need shared civic values to thrive, concepts like collective responsibility, general welfare, public service, neighborliness, and civil society. Not the mindless pursuit of disruptive innovation, rampant materialism, and the accumulation of capital for its own sake.

The dissonance between capital and democracy has always been a part of American politics, but it is now the dominant chord. The stock market has become a quasi-religious oracle.

The United States of today is what happens when society fully bows before mammon, when the flood of money in politics and corporate think tanks overwhelm the walls of democratic governance. We’ve seen the monetization of people’s personal data, the dumbing down of legacy media to attract more clicks, and an endless parade of material culture in our popular artforms.

Our culture has primed us to accept the authority of these ostentatious, self-aggrandizing fakes. We’ve internalized their way of thinking about the world: a zero-sum game of winners and losers. If you aren’t rich or rich-adjacent, you’re a loser, and wearing the red hat is never going to change that.

Most of us are not rich but we want to be. And if wealth is how we measure intelligence and success, it’s only natural we would look to the one percent to save us. It’s why so many believe that a stunted manchild like Elon Musk was fit to decide which government programs should live or die.

This is what has made MAGA’s assault on government employees so easy to justify to their supporters. We are just atomized individuals engaged in endless conflict over wealth and resources. Serving the public for lower pay makes you a sucker, or a tax-stealing parasite.

Dedicating yourself to a life of helping other people is unfathomable to people like Trump. Leaders in the MAGA era aren’t meant to give of themselves, but aggressively take, even steal, what they want from others, and bully or cajole anyone in their way.

Sensing a change in political winds, a retinue of groveling Silicon Valley bosses kissed the royal ring at Trump’s inauguration, choosing to dispense with progressive pieties to protect their platforms and profits or because they’re now true believers.

Luminaries included Jeff Bezos of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Meta CEO and self-styled bro Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google. Not present was Marc Andreessen, cowriter of Oracle, investor, and Democrat-turned Trump donor. He glommed onto Trump partly because the president is bullish on AI and sketchy crypto schemes.

Also missing was PayPal and Palantir cofounder and noted right-wind donor, Peter Thiel. The man who paid to put JD Vance on the political map is one of the more pernicious and weird tech barons. A “Dark Enlightenment” acolyte, Thiel asserts that messy democracy should be replaced by rational tech monarchy to keep the little brains from interfering with technological progress.

This brings us back to South-African-born Elon Musk. Let’s start by dispensing of any notion that Musk is a brilliant genius or savior of humanity. He is most certainly not.

Musk didn’t discover penicillin or build a revolutionary new product. His great talent is for selling himself by making bold claims: we’ll be colonizing Mars in a few short years, self-driving cars and hyperloops will perfect transportation, Tesla’s AI will bring about a robotics revolution, we’re going to make the government more efficient. He’s a fantastic hype man for himself.

I’ll ignore his crude brand of juvenile racism, his awful jokes and cringy efforts to be liked, his creation of male “heirs” using women as breeders, his stunted gamer persona, his Hitler salute and far-right politics, his meddling in foreign elections, and his terrible truck. These idiocies are just the meme-ready quirks of a grotesquely wealthy person who lives almost entirely online.

If all Musk cared about was money, he’d be happy on the cover of Fortune Magazine. But his success has given him a Caesarian sense of self-worth, a belief in himself that borders on insanity. He’s the textbook case of a person who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, as unwise as he is unscrupulous.

Fundamentally, Musk doesn’t understand how the government is, or was, supposed to work—he sees the whole concept through his own self-serving filter. He doesn’t relate to people or care about how his ideas and actions might hurt them, both online and in his capacity as federal hatchet man.

He doesn’t sympathize with people who might rely on federal assistance to live. He doesn’t care about public employees. He does not consider for a moment the consequences of breaking the government. Any pain he causes us is for our own good; it just happens to advance his interests.

Musk doesn’t comprehend the work of experts. But he pretends to, running his mouth about things he doesn’t have the first clue about. He fancies himself an all-knowing visionary who can “fix” government and “stop fraud” despite knowing nothing about good governance or why these public institutions came about in the first place.

If he wasn’t fixing government, what exactly was he doing?

Musk’s first objective was to take an ax to agencies that dared limit him with taxes or unfavorable labor rulings and regulations, and to preclude any legal action against him. The second was to grant himself lucrative government contracts, circumventing any fair, competitive process. His third was to wreck other people’s lives to feed his own monstrous ego.

Musk isn’t alone. The entire cadre of tech billionaires who support Trump share this personalist, all-about-me approach. They’re smart, they’re rich, no one should force them to contribute to the collective good. They chafe at government oversight. They made their fortunes selling questionable technologies that traffic in other people’s personal data and monetize other people’s creativity.

They have bought into every line of hyperbole the fawning business press has fed them. They are “saviors of humanity” who don’t seem to care much about human beings. Their solutions don’t solve substantive problems—like poverty, hunger, inequality—but instead create conditions that further empower and enrich themselves, usually causing new problems along the way.

We are in the fourth decade of the online era. Some things are no doubt better—faster and more efficient—but have we made the United States or the world safer, kinder, freer, happier? Have any of the challenges this country faces been solved?

Climate change is the one true existential threat of our age that might be solved with technological innovation. But instead of a renewable energy revolution, our leaders are ramping up the burning of fossil fuels to feed AI and cryptocurrencies. If this is the future, it’s bleak.

The Power and the Glory

In this time of greed, nihilism and reactionary chaos, it may be tempting to look to faith to offer some comfort and moral direction. Unfortunately for us, most of the religious rhetoric we’re hearing is from decidedly un-Christlike evangelicals, trad Cath ideologues, and racist nationalists.

Christian leaders in this country who’ve embraced MAGA love putting on a show of how meaningful their lives are, how enriched and fulfilled they are by Christ’s everlasting love. They spend their days basking in material comfort while exhorting us to fear and repent and judging our private lives.

While waiting for the next world, they want the good things in this one: money and power. They have a shortcut: demonizing sexually active or single women, LGBTQ people, librarians peddling “pornographic” material (any book they don’t like), secular liberals, Muslims and other religious minorities, and even Catholics like Pope Francis who urge them to treat people with kindness.

They spew bigotry as easily as you can turn on a faucet. They don’t care about Jesus. And they don’t care about you. There’s a gaping absence in their hearts where love should be.

Capitalist greed is not only tolerated but endorsed through the prosperity gospel, which offers the idea that God rewards the worthy with wealth and prestige and punishes the wicked with poverty and failure (the meek shall not inherit the Earth). Humility and charity are optional. It’s Christianity warped by capitalist ideology into something that would make pagan Greeks blush with shame.

They’ve staked their version of Christianity to their support of a moldering grifter and his cronies who don’t believe in much of anything. One of our most visible trad Catholics is none other than the vice president. JD Vance converted because he liked the medieval trappings, authoritarian tendencies, and reactionary views of the old church.

And because he’s an autodidactic know-it-all, he believes that attending mass a few times and reading a handful of books by right-wing Catholics gives him the authority to take on Pope Francis and other well-meaning Catholics who have dedicated decades to ministry, service, and study to the church. This is the arrogance of America’s capitalist brand of Christianity in a nut shell.

MAGA Christians have worked to destroy public education and foist “school choice” (whatever parochial or charter school they tell you to attend) on parents whether they want it or not. Since COVID, they have preached against public health and life-saving vaccines, one of the greatest public health achievements of the modern age.

In their capacity as lawmakers, they have weakened child labor laws, slashed environmental and public safety rules, further militarized police departments, expanded the sentencing of minors as adults, and led crackdowns on immigrants that separated children from their parents.

The regime’s current assault on federal social safety programs will cause grievous harm to children, deny children with special needs access to crucial educational support, and increase preventable deaths from malnutrition, infectious disease, natal complications, and the wages of poverty.

MAGA Christians deny the gravest threat to future generations, environmental collapse. They believe our dominion over the earth means we can trash it, all other life, including the lives of our descendants, be damned. Judgement Day nears so why bother worrying about the planet?

If they’re right about the end times, they should be worried. A just God might look upon their actions in life harshly.

Organized Sadism

The way MAGA asserts power is through cruelty, directed against people lower on the pecking order. Every rung of society is a hierarchy of dehumanization. Anyone unlucky enough to be deemed an out group exists to humiliate, dominate or destroy.

Solidarity is impossible by design. If you want your allies close and your enemies divided, pitting them against each other is an age-old strategy. As long as they’re busy tearing each other down, they won’t look up. The far right knows that the left’s weakness is its factional nature and tendency to police ideological purity among members without regard to their own interests or objectives.

For MAGA, a person isn’t valuable because of their existence, their God-given rights, or the fact that like you and me they are human beings. It’s how they look or talk, their sexual organs, where they’re from, the pigment of their skin, the accidental details of their birth. They have no intrinsic value and exist to scapegoat and oppress. They are political playthings.

Trump and MAGA have mastered the art of picking vulnerable groups to vilify. We hear that immigrants are rapists and thieves. Blacks have lower IQs and live in urban warzones. Gay people are pederasts. Trans people are menacing women in bathrooms. Muslims are a fifth column seeking to undermine Christianity. The left hates America.

Immigrants are draining social services. Haitians are eating pets. Liberals are sex-traffickers and secret Marxists. Single women are destroying the family. Federal workers are foisting “woke” culture on the American public. Even MAGA officials who stray from the official line get called RINOs (Republicans in name only). The litany of denigrations goes on. It’s the core sermon of MAGA.

No person can feel truly good about this kind of politics because sadism is insatiable. You must constantly look for a new thrill even as the last hollow triumph fades. When sadists run out of victims, they turn on themselves.

When you deny whole categories of people their humanity, their dignity, their right to define themselves, when you treat them as disposable political pawns because of their physical or mental traits, you are murdering your own humanity. You are calling into question your own value as a human being. It’s an act of evil, an act of violence to yourself and others.

“Wait,” you may interject, “aren’t you dehumanizing MAGA?” Not at all. I see MAGA’s leadership as all too human, all too flawed. They have made a very human choice to hurt other people, including their own supporters who stand to gain little or nothing from it. Whatever the determining factors, evil is always a choice people make.

Immigrant Song

Foreigners, including undocumented immigrants, migrants, refugees, and even people legally residing and working in the US have become the go-to punching bags. Because their status ranges from illegal to contingent, they are highly vulnerable and hence easier to bully and brutalize.

Undocumented immigrants have been treated as non-people by MAGA (and too many other politicians) from the beginning. The same vulnerability that made them an ideal source of cheap labor is now the primary means of terrorizing them.

The regime has since expanded their targets to include legal visitors and residents who don’t meet MAGA’s ideal profile. Supporting Palestinian rights, having the wrong tattoos, crossing the border as a tourist, listening to the wrong cleric, committing a misdemeanor, or simply being a nonwhite person driving somewhere can be cause for detention and deportation.

Whatever you think about immigration, illegal or otherwise, it is repugnant to watch politicians and their social media toadies casting immigrants—not just men, but whole families—as enemy aliens. This has led to the deportation of friends, family and community members, the abuse of children, and shattered lives.

Human beings are being sent to overseas prisons and labor camps for made-up reasons, against judges’ orders, because of how they look and where they were born. Not content to simply deport their victims, they’ve made an authoritarian spectacle of parading them around for the cameras here and in El Salvador. How long before they do the same thing with their political enemies?

Race to the Bottom

For much of American history, a dominant major theme has been the superiority of white people, white men especially, to justify enslaving Africans and displacing indigenous people. This isn’t a “woke” claim. It’s a historic reality. Even after the abolition of slavery, segregation and white vigilante violence against Black people persisted until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

The success of that movement and its offshoots pushed many Democratic and Republican politicians toward policies to redress racial inequalities resulting from centuries of organized terror —guaranteed voting rights and representation, desegregation of schools and businesses, fair housing laws, workplace antidiscrimination laws, affirmative action, etc.

The overall efficacy of these policies is mixed, but progress was made. Slowly but surely, non-whites and women have taken their seats in positions of power and privilege. The far right has never been happy about this and has been working hard for nearly 60 years to undo this progress.

MAGA is now using constitutional amendments designed to protect minority communities to smear them as “diversity hires” and push them out. Why?

Because rich and powerful white men and many of their constituents don’t like seeing more minorities in well-paying jobs in business, academia or government. They have embraced the popular racist notion that white people are being discriminated against.

This claim is absurd on its face. Look at the average Fortune 500 executive, affluent professional, Chamber of Commerce member, investor, or large business owner. This is not a knock against white people, just an observation that they are still dominant in positions of affluence and power.

Instead of accepting that non-whites have worked hard to achieve their due, MAGA sees them as immediately suspect. The only exception MAGA makes is for nonwhite reactionaries, celebrities, and rich people who support them.

The fact-free foundational belief is that any non-white person or woman in a position of prestige or expertise is only there because of a handout. Some sad, overlooked, and highly qualified white man doesn’t have the job they deserve. They turned this myth into policy and broke the government.

The anti-DEI and critical race rhetoric have a been a non-stop noise machine for the last five years, the driving justification for sloppily slashing agency budgets and eliminating contracts based on the presence of key words. It is an engineered moral panic cooked up by party hack Christopher Rufo.

Supporting this is a slate of discredited theories about race and sex. Race realism, biotruths, great replacement theory, social Darwinism, IQ-based eugenics—you name it and it’s being talked up in a respectable publication somewhere. This is all nineteenth-century junk science given a fresh coat of sickly yellow paint.

Second Sex

Women have also made incredible strides over the last five decades, due mostly to their own efforts and hard-fought policy wins. Things have been far from perfect—wage gaps, glass ceilings, unfair social expectations—but the basic trajectory has arced toward gender equality.

Women have eclipsed men in higher education and now dominate certain career tracks. With more clout outside the home, they made overdue demands of male partners—that they treat them with respect and share equally in childcare and household duties. Women reasonably demanded consequences for abusers and rapists in the short-lived Me-Too moment.

MAGA has responded to all this with predictable hostility. Men are the real victims because women are succeeding where they’re failing. There have been many studies and conversations around why boys are falling behind and it’s a serious problem, but in the manosphere the whole issue has been boiled down to discrimination against men and emasculated boys refusing to dominate women.

Women, they argue, are entering male-dominated fields they aren’t “qualified” for such as programming and hard sciences, sidelining men. “Real” women, they assert, shouldn’t want to achieve independence or success; they should be confined to the home with the kids or working the trad wife lifestyle in the idyllic countryside.

The ideal woman is conventionally attractive, stands by her man no matter what, and polices other women who refuse to conform to the same ridiculous non-standard. Women should stifle their dreams to produce more heirs for their white husbands.

MAGA leaders like the Vice President, JD Vance, pathologize single women focused on career as unhappy and unfulfilled because their purpose in life is to produce children. Of course, they never assign men any real responsibility for being single. It’s cat ladies refusing to breed with them that’s the holdup.

In the world of MAGA, men should be tough, violent, and treat women as subservient. If men want women, they should just take them. “Grab them by the pussy” as Trump puts it. That the regime went out of its way to rescue noted manosphere rapist and sex trafficker Andrew Tate from Romanian authorities is a clear signal of their views on gender equality.

While men are told to take what they want, women have seen control over their own bodies seized by the religious right with draconian anti-abortion laws that stigmatize, humiliate, and harm pregnant women in red states, placing them in the crosshairs of far-right vigilantes. Maternity wards and OB-GYN teams have refused to treat pregnant women to avoid liability for miscarriages. Some mothers have died; others have been charged with murder.

While this drama has played out, right-wing Christians have doubled down on their opposition to contraceptives and sex education that help prevent pregnancies and abortion. Some prolife Christians have argued that low-income mothers should have access to financial assistance and other services but have remained silent as Elon Musk has cut off federal funds for such programs.

Queer Folk

While there are gay people involved in MAGA (Peter Thiel, for example), extreme homophobia is the norm. The ascent of MAGA has given the religious right an opportunity to turn back the clock on LGTBTQ rights.

With SCOTUS’ overturn of Roe v. Wade and ruling in favor of businesses discriminating against gay couples, conservatives see a state’s rights pathway for attacking federal LGBTQ protections. States like Idaho are working hard to roll back hard-won civil rights victories like marriage equality with the hope of a favorable SCOTUS ruling.

One grotesque aspect of this has been how the far right demonized and turned public support—even among liberals—against trans people. Christopher Rufo and other Republican cynics manufactured a new culture war outrage by picking on a very small minority that, due to its increased visibility could be packaged as a threatening new novelty.

MAGA and their allies have lied and exaggerated and endangered the lives of trans people. They’ve claimed trans women are male pederasts and rapists invading schools and women’s restrooms, gender reassignment treatments are mutilating children, parents are abusing their own kids by trying to help them, and librarians are grooming children with books for and about trans people.

A tiny minority have decided to live their lives openly, claim autonomy over their own bodies, express their identities—as people with human rights. But because they force the majority to reckon with uncomfortable questions about gender, they must be driven out of society.

Never mind their happiness or their humanity. Never mind that they have the same depth of feeling and intelligence as you and I. No, they must be policed into acting like everyone else, and if they refuse, bad things must happen.

Trump moved quickly to remove federal protections for trans people. Both kids and adults have been denied treatments that helped them live in their own bodies, trans people have been denied passports with their chosen gender, trans women inmates have been sent to fend for themselves in men’s prisons, and “unfeminine” women have been scrutinized for “male” features.

Too many of us have decided that because trans people are few, they are of no significance. But human worthiness is not derived from demographic breakdowns, and squeamishness is not sufficient grounds for erasing an entire population.

Revenge On the Nerds

Contempt for the professional class—lawyers, doctors and nurses, scientists, academics and specialists—has been a staple of right-wing politics for decades. MAGA have enshrined it as a sacred tenant of their cult.

Since desegregation, the right has waged war on public education. Their efforts to siphon resources from public schools to private and parochial schools are well documented. For them, the ideal public-school teacher is an underpaid, non-union babysitter whose sole political purpose is to be scapegoated for failures that inevitably arise when you slash education budgets.

During COVID, they were able to aim parental anger and frustration at teachers, who were expected to risk sickness and death to keep kids in school. In a bit of political jujitsu, MAGA were able redirect the rage at schoolboards and libraries with accusations of “woke” indoctrination and grooming.

This distaste for educators extends to higher education, where whole departments have been deemed left-wing indoctrination centers. It’s not just DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) programs MAGA are after; it’s any academic field that can challenge or undermine their claims.

As Trump has shown, their solution to academic freedom debates isn’t encouraging a wider range of views, but rather silencing voices that support any idea they don’t believe helps their cause or reinforces their power. This is why they’re dismantling the Education Department and letting states set their own standards; it’s why Trump is threatening federal funds for major universities.

MAGA doesn’t believe that education is about making more well-rounded citizens exposed to a wide range of ideas and perspectives, capable of making deliberative choices. It’s about producing a pliant and limited workforce, stripped of any ideas, soft skills or critical thinking that might cause them to question their employers or the economic pecking order.

Any topic or area of research that clashes with MAGA orthodoxy is treated as an existential threat to America. Not just the social sciences but also hard sciences that threaten the bottom lines of oil and gas companies. Climate scientists working to educate the public and stave off the worst effects of a changing climate are a favorite target of sinister conspiracy theories.

The regime has targeted public health and medical science, shutting down critical research and nixing programs that save lives. Since Covid, MAGA has railed against health officials, doctors, and nurses, accusing them of causing intentional harm during the pandemic with vaccines, masks and social distancing. They have opened the floodgates to quack medicine and miracle cures.

It’s hard to overstate the regime’s arrogance. To them, the hard work of building knowledge and proposing evidence-based solutions to problems is egghead shit. They believe their intuitive, or socialized, feelings and beliefs are more real and valid than any well-supported theory or empirical data.

It’s no mystery why these masters of the universe believe it. Many were born into lives of wealth and privilege, attended elite schools, and had near-automatic access to capital and resources necessary for generating more capital. They have rarely ever had their ideas tested, and people have said “yes” to them their whole lives. This has given them the illusion of mastery.

Witness Robert Kennedy, Jr., the wealthy crank who now runs the Department of Health and Human Services. His unfounded vaccine skepticism may doom millions of children and older adults to sickness and death from preventable disease. His unscientific calls to ban antidepressants like SSRIs may subject thousands of people to crippling mental pain.

He is a rich, out-of-touch narcissist who comes from political royalty. He has been given second, third and fourth chances for his entire life. It’s why an eccentric former junkie is still alive and in a position of unearned power. Living a life free of consequence, surrounded by yes men, he doesn’t have to ponder what he doesn’t know or how his ignorance might hurt other people.

People like RFK, Jr. can’t stand being questioned. When they and their most ardent followers see an expert who refutes or simply disagrees with them, the knives come out. The victim’s value to society is minimized, their motives questioned, their expertise discredited, and their lives threatened.

Labor Pains

For a movement that has relied on blue collar workers, MAGA enthroned has shown little or no interest in helping them, opportunistic support from major unions notwithstanding. They’re a “pro-labor” regime that wants to put to bed forever a labor movement that can demand better.

Trump claims his tariffs will resurrect manufacturing jobs, but his war on global trade has only made life harder for workers. Blanket tariffs against the rest of the world are having a deleterious effect on the US economy, which relies on international markets for importing goods and materials and exporting finished products. Prices are rising and economic retraction is inevitable.

Meanwhile, MAGA has gutted the National Labor Relations Board to weaken unions’ negotiation power and crush nascent efforts or organize. They have decimated agencies that enforce workplace safety, fair pay and anti-discrimination laws as well as corporate watchdogs charged with protecting economic competition and consumer rights.

MAGA’s contempt for everyday Americans is depressingly clear. When campaigning, they made a lot of promises about putting an end of Biden-era inflation and bringing consumer prices down. All lies. And now that prices continue to rise, they’ve changed their entire story: we must all struggle to live within our means while they carry out their glorious revolution.

It’s still striking to me how MAGA have sold themselves as champions of working-class and lower-class white people. All they offer are empty promises of future manufacturing jobs and trickle-down prosperity that will magically appear because of corporate tax cuts, tariffs and deregulation. No one in the regime has offered a plausible roadmap.

Never mind what working-class and underclass life is like in deep red states, where high poverty rates, rampant pollution, lower life expectancies, desiccated public schools, and a host of other issues gives the lie to any notion that unregulated and untaxed wealth creation trickles down.

A Fortress Built on Sand

We are early in the second Trump administration, and MAGA has already slashed and burned their way across most federal agencies, bulldozed institutional opposition, and detained and deported legal residents without due process. They have shattered the post-WWII international order, coddled dictators abroad, and turned former allies into adversaries overnight with crippling tariffs.

Given the tide of destruction and relatively muted pushback so far, it would be easy to overestimate MAGA’s grip on power. But their apparent might is a fortress built on sand, and they are far from unstoppable. They may govern like they have a popular mandate, but their majority is slight and tenuous. And as the popular revolt against Tesla shows, their rule is deeply resented.

Their “mandate” has led them to drop a bomb on the global economy with painfully high, near-universal tariffs. This will not bring back manufacturing because the US doesn’t have the resource base or domestic supply chains to rapidly reindustrialize the country. This is exactly the kind of stupid thing dictators do when they overestimate their grip on power.

MAGA is like a Hoberman sphere, outwardly impressive but full of dead space. Naked greed, lust for power and sadism are not meaningful ideas. You can destroy a democracy with them, but they cannot help you build anything good or worthwhile. A nihilistic vacuum might attract cultists and opportunists, but it cannot inspire nor unify a republic. Its banner is a blank canvass.

MAGA has no end game, no final vision of the country to justify what they’re doing. It’s all means and no ends because their unstated goal of making the country whiter, crueler, more stratified isn’t very appealing to most people.

MAGA underestimates you. They think you’re weak and stupid. They think you’re craven, self-serving, and spineless. Bullies, narcissists and authoritarians project all their worst traits onto their adversaries and victims. They are craven, self-serving, and spineless. They are weak and stupid.

They are cynical about human nature, seeing every person as either a master or a mark, but there are far more marks than masters in their ranks. They are insecure, desperate to prove themselves, and easily prodded into in saying and doing self-destructive things in a bid to seem confident and powerful. They’re as easily flattered and duped as their most diehard supporters.

Trump and his inner circle are fundamentally cowards. They will go at adversaries—real or imagined—when the other party is in a weaker position. That’s why they’ll never invade Canada despite tough talk but will shake down smaller countries like Ukraine. It’s why they target minorities domestically and flatter authoritarian superpowers abroad.

They are weak. Hiding beneath the veneer of power is a movement rife with contradictions, a confused collection of ideologies with overlapping goals. Only Trump’s cult of personality is holding it together. Without it, MAGA would fissure into warring factions tomorrow.

MAGA cannot maintain their grip through democratic means. This is why the right has spent so much time trying to take control of state elections; it’s why they’re overhauling federal elections oversight. But they will be opposed, and as outside opposition mounts and the global economy falls apart, the only way that MAGA will hold onto power is through increasingly repressive measures.

We know they are willing to use all tactics on the table to intimidate and shut down opposition: litigation, retaliatory investigations, doxxing, withholding funding, siccing their most uninhibited supporters on enemies, and leaning on law firms and media companies to stifle critical voices.

The regime has signaled its willingness to use state violence against rioters (a term slippery enough to use on nonviolent protesters), augmented with civilian paramilitaries acting above the law. The military has been evoked on more than one occasion as a possible solution to social unrest.

An Opportunity

The risk of failure is high for MAGA. They know that a return to the status quo of 25 years ago might see many of them imprisoned or ruined. Reverting to old norms would destroy them so they must keep advancing. There is no turning back for them—or for us. The damage is done.

But we must reject the doomer proposition that it’s all over, that American democracy is forever shattered. Instead, we should see the moment as an opportunity to rethink and redefine what a democratic republic can and should be. We must create a new moral vision powerful enough to cut through the noise and put MAGA on the defensive.

We must stop saying “yes” to them, stop complying with their dictatorial directives, stop accepting the idea that nothing can be done. We need to act as responsible citizens in a democratic republic and take back full ownership—in the statehouses, in the courts, in Washington, and on the streets.

If you don’t care what happens to yourself, at least think of the next generation, the children of today subject to a daily barrage of violent political fantasy, tribalism, and frankly immature and antisocial behavior from people who are supposed to be leaders and role models.

Whatever mischief the “adults” have gotten up to over the last dozen or so years, most of us have tried to instill in our children values like honesty, kindness, sharing, self-reflection, compromise, patience, sticking up to bullies, the value of learning and problem solving.

And yet MAGA’s leaders lie constantly, hoard wealth, double down on topics they know nothing about, take contrarian positions regardless of how ludicrous they are, bully and mock the weak and powerless, insult teachers and experts, and pass the buck whenever possible.

Is this the model you want to present to future generations?

What values will the children of today hold tomorrow, raised on a steady died of cruelty, naked greed and contempt for other people’s lives and welfare? How will rule by self-dealing thieves influence the life choices they make?

How will kids who don’t fit the racial and sexual hierarchy navigate a country that endlessly dehumanizes them? Will they or their children even understand what democracy is or comprehend the rights they have lost? Do you owe future generations clean water and air, a livable climate, access to health care and safety, a say over what kind of society they live in?

These questions are sincere and need to be answered. You owe it to your children, and you owe it to every other human being who must live with the decisions we make today.

MAGA can present themselves as fighting to make America great again, they can claim the mantle of the working class, they can call themselves champions of free speech, they can talk game about restoring religious morality. But none of it’s true. They’re thugs and thieves who just want wealth and power for themselves and their cult. They are the opposite of every good thing they say they are.

We need to see with clear eyes the grotesque and violent nature of MAGA, unwind the fantasy cocoon its dehumanizing propaganda has weaved around us. It’s time to stop projecting our wants and desires onto this empty screen and see it as people with a conscience. MAGA cannot be the future. It must be consigned to our past.

We must learn to love and respect ourselves enough to love and respect other people—regardless of differences. We must value our fellow citizens and equal participants in a democratic society. Basing our politics on misanthropic sadism, doomer cynicism, and schadenfreude is a hollow exercise that will only deepen our fall.

Now is the time to rise.