Opinion | MAGA Is Based on Fear, Not Grounded in Reality
www.nytimes.com
And the fear needn’t reflect reality.

Yet such fantasies are now the common currency of politics on the American right. Remember the days when pundits solemnly declared that Trumpism was caused by economic anxiety? Well, despite a booming economy, there’s still plenty of justified anxiety out there, reflecting many people’s real struggles: America is still a nation riddled with inequality, insecurity and injustice. But the anxiety driving MAGA isn’t driven by reality. It is, instead, driven by dystopian visions unrelated to real experience.

That is, at this point, Republican political strategy depends largely on frightening voters who are personally doing relatively well not just according to official statistics but also by their own accounts, by telling them that terrible things are happening to other people.

    • Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social
      24·
      9 months ago

      They had another article today that effectively said “yes, the insurrection is made of insurrection.”

      Is it possible they fell into some kind of time warp, and are perceiving the universe at a slower rate than the rest of us?

      • silence7@slrpnk.netOP
        12·
        9 months ago

        It’s more that the NYT is studiously centrist and is getting to the point where it is OK for their left-of-center opinion writers to say this kind of thing

        • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
          45·
          9 months ago

          the NYT is studiously centrist

          More center-right to right wing. Just like the DNC leadership and strategists with which they’re joined at the hip.

        • Masterblaster@kbin.social
          119·
          9 months ago

          it’s BS for polite white NY society and it’s garbage. give my grimy seattle anarchist zines, pls. oh wait, that got taken over by the trans movement focused on gender terms or some BS that has nothing to do with victory.

          i remember when i believed in ppl.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
            4·
            9 months ago

            It’s not like trans people matter and they are being seriously oppressed right now or anything, am I right?

            Man… first it was the blacks, then it was the gays, now it’s the trans? Who are we supposed to care about next? Poor people? This is BS that has nothing to do with victory!

            • Masterblaster@kbin.social
              25·
              9 months ago

              ride that bandwagon to nowhere!

              edit: look, i get it. it’s another class of people conservatives hate and make their lives a living hell. well, guess what? they do that to all of us! get on the bus with the rest of us and let’s make way towards changing it. i’m just sick of focusing on a narrow segment of the population and losing sight of the big picture.

      • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
        42·
        9 months ago

        Ugh, it’s a Paul Krugman piece? He’s such a pro-corporate establishment hack 🤢

        Nobody should ever look to him for anything, much less timely analysis of what’s going on in the real world.

  • DBT@lemmy.world
    452·
    9 months ago

    Full disclosure: I’m going off the title alone in this comment. It’s late.

    That said: no fucking shit

    Fear mongering is kinda their thing. The illegal brown people are INVADING lol. The libs are DESTROYING our country…

    Look at how they are with their guns. Every time there’s another school shooting another GUNS SAVE LIVES bumper sticker is sold. “This was preventable, if only I, Rambo was there.” No. You wouldn’t have saved shit and you don’t need a gun to survive.

    The GOP and MAGA folks are nothing but scared pussies. Enough with this snowflake mentality.

    • dirthawker0@lemmy.world
      14·
      9 months ago

      The other aspect I believe plays into this is insecurity. They can’t accept brown & black people being equal, or LGBTQs being just as human as they. They can’t accept that some people don’t believe in the same God they do, or have the self confidence not to believe in any god at all. They are frightened by people making choices different from those they would make because it might mean their own choices are wrong. And they react by lashing out, trying to put “those people” back in the closet or into second class citizenship or labeling them as baby killers. They don’t have the self confidence to let others have the freedom to make their own decisions, run their own lives.

  • digeridoo@lemmy.ml
    29·
    9 months ago

    Fear and anger with absolutely no critical thought put into the issues. The two most primal feelings somebody can have.

  • SecretSauces@lemmy.world
    25·
    9 months ago

    For a group that talks shit about “snowflakes” always crying about everything, they sure like to cry about everything

  • Fades@lemmy.world
    221·
    9 months ago

    True but it doesn’t start nor end with maga. Republicans have been using fear mongering for a very long time

    • ZzyzxRoad@sh.itjust.works
      21·
      9 months ago

      Can we stop commenting this on every single political post? It just implies that the behavior in the article should be treated as normal by now. It’s not normal, no matter how common the media makes it seem.

  • btaf45@lemmy.world
    16·
    9 months ago

    Is there anybody left in the entire country who does not understand the fundamental reality that conservatives in general are people who like to be lied to?

    • bmeffer@lemmy.world
      12·
      9 months ago

      The thing is, they don’t know their being lied to. I think the big issue with many conservatives is that they are conditioned, basically from birth, to believe fantastical things as truth, without evidence. I.e. Bible stories as fact. Yes, Gabriel was swallowed by a whale. Of course Noah had all of the animals in the world on his boat. They learn to accept things at face value as long as it sounds good to them. This requires no critical thinking.

      This is how you get otherwise intelligent people who believe right wing myths like high school kids identifying as cats and requiring litter boxes. They will believe anything as long as it confirms their biases. Belief = truth. I believe it, therefore it is true. It’s this simple to them. You can present all the evidence in the world to counter any one of their ridiculous conspiracy theories, but they will never change. Because, to them, belief = truth.

      • GoofSchmoofer@lemmy.world
        6·
        9 months ago

        I’ve seen that with a very conservative former friend. They would send me reel after reel on Instagram of right wing talking heads discussing the “proof” they had that the coivd vaccine was deadly, “proof” that the human soul is placed in the egg at conception, and the LGBTQ+ people were really pedophiles.

        There seemed to be no sense that a 30 second, highly edited reel on instagram could be false. It was telling them what they wanted to hear. The part that annoyed me was that they thought they were debating there position in good faith with these reels. That if they sent enough of them to me I would just say “Wow! you’re right, that reel from Andrew Tate really opened my eyes!”

        We don’t talk any more and I hate that because we were really good friends until about 9 months ago.

      • KptnAutismus@lemmy.world
        51·
        9 months ago

        i was shocked when i found out that everyone was bitching about immigrants collecting all the welfare, even though they are prohibited from working for 9 months after entering germany.

        also many of them have no choice, who’s gonna employ someone who barely speaks english and not a lick of german? but no, mandatory education courses would cost money, we can’t do that.

        conservatives are lying rats who just feed off of the hate they’re spreading.

  • IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
    13·
    9 months ago

    No one ever addresses the fact that the same people driving the fear are the same people who own and control the country’s main media companies that blast the public day and night with propaganda.

  • gastationsushi@lemmy.world
    11·
    9 months ago

    They are in a cult and cults cannot exist without rigid hierarchy based on lies. If the cult the leader told his flock 2 + 2 = 5, that has utility the truth could never have. Cult members can repeat that lie to prove loyalty, the basis of a cult’s heirarchy.

    When a Trumper tells you a crazy statement like 2 + 2 = 5, don’t look at it like they are an idiot. They understand they are telling you something normal people would find outrageous and they are testing to see how you react.

    It’s almost funny to see corporate outlets like the NYT try an explain the GOP. Flat admitting half of the duopoly is in a cult and has been in a cult 40+ years does not mesh with the supposed meritocracy we live in. So these media narratives like to edge around the truth, never quite getting their because reality is a challenge to our corporate run system as well.

  • LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee
    10·
    9 months ago

    This sounds woefully inadequate in it’s understanding of this new incarnation of fascism. It works by fostering inequality based on a myth of an “essentialized identity”. Us vs them. So fear is just one of the tools.

    And a massive driver for this is the increasing wealth inequality and sinking quality of life and prospects of prosperity. Because the old systems of propaganda do not work anymore (which the journalist is a representative of) the system “responds” by using fascism because that still works. For many decades they lie and cheat and this creates the fertile ground.

    You can’t have working democracy without prosperity, security (!= constant wars) and education (!= decades of propaganda in consolidated mainstream media)