Whence Came the MAGA?

Finding Our Way Back to an Aspirational America

To understand where we are situated on this bleak November day, I must convey some history and some analysis. As putrid as Trump and the MAGA are, they did not spring fully fledged from the mind of the American right wing. But where did they come from, and how does that tie-in to the recent general election?

The question of how the twin failures of Democrats contributed to the current crisis is not the topic of this essay. These failures fall into two separate areas, policy, and perception. I will write on those topics in the future. My interest here is in showing that even without actual rigging of the 2024 election it the MAGA party cheated their way in. I don't need election tampering to explain it. Nor did they need, necessarily, to break any laws.

When considering American electoral politics, it is important to understand that it is primarily aspirational. Anything close to free and fair elections were only the norm for a golden sliver of time between 1965 and 2010. Before the clamor ensues, allow me to clarify. For the first 90 years of our history, only landed MEN could vote. Perhaps free, but certainly not fair. Male Jews got the nod at some point in the mid-19th century, but actual laws varied by state. The founders, hounded by the slave power, adopted an electoral college system that makes no sense and gives a great deal of power to a few low population states. That in itself is neither free nor fair.

In 1865 the 15th amendment ostensibly gave the vote to Black men, but they faced poll taxes, literacy tests, and fear of violence. Women and others were still disenfranchised. In 1920 women got the vote but were expected to vote with their husbands. Voting was not secret. And other groups of color were still disenfranchised.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act of that year, signed into law by Lyndon Baines Johnson got us as close as we ever were to free and fair elections. This protective umbrella helped a lot but was not a panacea. It did not prohibit gerrymandering. For years the lines have been redrawn repeatedly, shifting the balance ever more to the white and Republican. But never giving a clear picture of the people's will.

The years between 1965 and the late 70s were as close as we ever came to truly free and fair elections. The arc during the 1960s era, which truly began in the mid-1960s and ended during the Carter administration, did see the arc bending towards justice. It was before the complete commodification of the Hippies. The ideals of the youth were in fashion. We elected a peanut farmer who put solar panels on the White House roof. The 1st amendment protected the press and the fairness doctrine kept the press honest. The safety net was firmly in place and the middle class was strong.

And, in the dark heart of the Republican party, now ruled entirely by oligarchs, a plan was forming. They don't want big swaths of "lesser" citizens voting. They don't want a strong middle class.

They had wanted to roll back FDR's new deal since the ink was dry. The Democrats, high on the fall of Richard Nixon and full of virtue, were not paying much attention. In comes Ronald Reagan, the destroyer. And now I get to the seeds of the MAGA, and an explanation for the power of the minority, enough to throw two elections. More than two if we count the 2000 and 2004, which we should.

For various reasons, it looked like Ronnie had a mandate. And whether he did or not, he, and more likely certain key ideologues, wielded the presidency like a blunt force weapon. They got rid of the fairness doctrine. They defanged the unions. The imposed the debunked and utterly unfair trickle-down on the population and began to kill the middle class. The gerrymandering got worse and the courts, more "conservative". Though I hardly think that is the correct word for it.

The crown jewel of the new race to the bottom may have been the dumbing down of the general population, using the public school system. When my parents were in school, the grade school curriculum would be high school level today. When the Boomers were in the lower grades, there was a civics class. There was at least some emphasis on critical thinking. None of this survived. Turning an ignorant electorate towards unAmerican values such as fascism is not that hard. Especially if the press is free to lie and there is no certain source of reliably truthful information. If students are now "customers" there is no real duty to educate them at all.

To vote in this country, you must be of age and a citizen. That is all. There is absolutely no intelligence requirement. You don't have to understand the choices or the issues. And now, there is no "truth". This, for the ruling class, is the next best thing to having voting restricted to land-owning males.

There have always been oligarchs, and they have always had too much power, but during the age of the New Deal and the Great Society, they had been held in check. The greatest service Ronald Reagan performed for the corporate oligarchy was moving the Overton Window sharply to the right. These people, the architects of the "Reagan Revolution" were not out and out fascists. They knew that the Democrats would be in power again. They were not planning to do what, much later, DJT tried to do. The transfer of power would be uneventful.

They did not need to do anything so obvious. The Overton shift was the poison pill, and the Democrats swallowed it whole. Bill Clinton was, and could only be, Republican Light. When I write about the Democrats, I will go into this. For now, it is important only as it relates to the GOP capture of the working class by the ruling class, dressed up in overalls and throwing back a Coors.

With a board set up like this, the MAGA were inevitable. When the SCOTUS ruled in Citizens United in 2010 and gutted the 1965 voters rights act in 2013, the die was cast.

Then came 2020, and a nation reeling from four years of severe misrule, a year of mass death in the pandemic, and a complete collapse of the economy leaving even the relatively healthy at risk. Biden's win was not surprising. Nor was the challenge to it from the MAGA faithful. Our reaction to "Stop the Steal" however, was a beautifully laid trap.

This is hard to parse. It requires some deep analysis but think about this: It was not asking the question that was the problem. We, the people, MUST be able to question election results. Mistakes are possible. No person or machine is infallible. If we can't question, we are prey animals. The bar for conviction should be very high. Just as in a criminal case, it should be "beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty". Because election rigging is, indeed, a serious crime, tantamount to treason.

The problem is that after several recounts, which they got and we won't, and 60 lawsuits, it was found that the results of the 2020 election were sound, and Joe Biden won. That should have ended it. But it did not. The MAGA latched on and made claims that were crazier and crazier. In doing so, they tainted the idea of QUESTIONING results at all. And that was the point.

This goes one level deeper. There were legitimate issues with 2020. All of them involving severe voter suppression by red states. It did not work. I don't believe the ruling oligarchs wanted it to. They knew they couldn't get 2020 and were already looking to 2024. They wanted a crazed MAGA, the more violent the better.

They knew that the Democrats would be forced into the untenable position of insisting against clear evidence that our elections are free, fair, and beyond reproach. But that has never been entirely true and is less true now than any time since Jim Crow.

Bad actors do not need to rig in order to cheat. When a weak Senate, ostensibly controlled by Democrats, failed to pass the NEW voter's rights act of 2021 failed to pass, this was an inevitable result. The reasons for the MAGA "win" are overdetermined. A venal corporate press, untethered to facts and bent on normalizing an unfit, dangerous candidate and a policy blueprint that the majority of Americans would find repugnant if they had been given the information needed to evaluate it. Dark money in the billions, all OK after Citizens United. Voter suppression at levels unseen in 100 years. Passing the Voting Rights Bill would have ended all of that, but the Senate has been rendered insensate.

And, the crowning jewel, an electorate so under-educated many have never read a book and have zero reasoning skills.

This is why I don't need physical or cyber tampering to cry foul. Was there tampering? We will never know. We don't need it to make the charge. The result is over-determined and they need not have broken any laws. The issue is the election laws themselves, the press, and the educational system that used to be the guardrails and are now gone.

There is a large gray area between "entirely corrupt" and "fair and square. This election was far from fair and square. That is why a great many Democrats are questioning the results. They are just not thinking it through. We need to let go of the recount, which will never happen, and concentrate on the forms of malfeasance which are open to obeservation and proveable.

But what if Kamala Harris had "won"? And why did I use quotes?

Because if what most of us thought was going to happen had happened, there is no doubt there would have been zero cheating by Democrats. The win would be squeaky clean, just as in 2020. In fact, Harris would have to overcome all the conditions described above and still win. Her win in the election would be beyond reproach.

The quotes are because she would then have to govern, in an environment containing all the elements noted above. The MAGA would still exist, now in full grievance mode. The unfair voting laws, the venal simpering press, the lack of education, the oligarchs and their already cemented control over the levers of power. Add to all that a Republican Congress, a disgraced and corrupt SCOTUS still in power, busily granting rights to the executive while gutting our rights as citizens. And Donald Trump still at large, frothing up random violence and festering lies.

Even if she won, she would have lost, unless and until the underlying cancer is cut in its entirety from the body politic. And that is our most pressing task in the coming years if we are ever to continue our aspirational America and put the arc back on the path towards justice.