Whose values are those?
Power is a drug. An addictive one, potentially. Like other medications, it can heal, soothe, and harm if misused. From the first time a two-year-old says, “I want to do it myself,” or starts acting out or running away from parents to taste some personal freedom, they are expressing a human need for autonomy, for control.
Power is so visceral that it’s why I resist the impulse simply to brand as racism the reactionary views and actions of people who feel threatened by changing demographics and cultural norms. It’s not that racial animus is not a component. It’s that skin color is too convenient a shorthand for sizing up a crowd and knowing who’s who in the pecking order. IIRC (someone will correct me), one of Cyril Northcote Parkinson’s lesser known “laws,” allowed one to identify the most important person in a ballroom because they’d be found at a certain grid point at t+n minutes from the start of the event. And knowing that would be of interest why? Power.
Filmmaker Lynne Sachs has a short film at The New York Times about the crackdown on abortion access across the country since the Dobbs decision. “These folks who are in power, they have no interest in solutions,” declares the under-narrative running beneath the video. “It’s really just about control.”
People with it want to hang onto it. People addicted to it may not even know it until what little power they have is threatened by independent women (forever the prime target in slasher films), by immigrants, by people of color, and by religious, sexual, or lifestyle nonconformity. And, brother, is MAGA America threatened.
Stephanie McCrummen, a staff writer at The Atlantic, looks at MAGA, the Next Generation. Attending a Trump rally in Racine, Wisconsin, she found young adults who were in elementary school when Trump was first elected. They’ve been steeped in MAGA culture.
The right views culture as something to control, a war for dominance to win. The need for chest-thumping, flag-bedecked displays of patriotism comes not as much from love of country as a demand for control. Trump’s adoption of “Make America Great Again” was always about restoration of control to those threatened by sharing it with people they considered lessers. Just as the Redeemer movement post-Reconstruction was about re-securing white domination to the South after emancipation.
Where once, religious conservatives felt they represented a special set of values, Christian ones, American ones, that entitled them to rule dominate the culture as their birthright, now all that has been discarded. Consider the slogans McCrummen saw on display.
An older man in an I’M VOTING FOR THE FELON tee shirt listened to her conversation with an 18-year-old.
“It’s so good to see you girls,” said a white-haired woman wearing a FUCK BIDEN hat.
Recruiting the young into movements is how they build, McCrummen writes. “[L]ights, screens, music, and the emotional appeal of righteous belonging” is part of the program:
That kind of production has remained the essence of Trump rallies such as the one in Racine. And it has been the year-round specialty of Turning Point USA, the right-wing youth organization whose recent “People’s Convention” in Detroit was a carnival of swirling lights and booming music, with sponsors including the Association of Mature American Citizens—the MAGA version of the AARP. That event drew a crowd of young attendees who cheered 70-year-old Steve Bannon as he yelled “Victory or death!,” and 78-year-old Trump as he spoke of “the largest deportation operation in American history,” and two young men in sunglasses who walked onstage and unfurled a red flag that read WHITE BOY SUMMER, a white-supremacist slogan.
Jordan Lazier, 19, had come with his grandparents. His first presidential vote would be for Trump.
“I remember when he was elected, I just liked him,” he said, recalling how his mother felt similarly. “I just knew he was better than Hillary; I couldn’t tell you how.”
“You’re a smart kid,” his grandmother said. “Don’t forget about the evil versus good.”
“Good versus evil,” Jordan repeated, looking at her. “I know about satanic stuff most Democrats are into. Republicans talk about worshipping Jesus Christ, and Democrats worship the government.”
“We listen to a lot of prophets, and we understand Bohemian Grove,” his grandmother said, referring to some bleak corner of the QAnon conspiracy.
Behind her, a veteran rallygoer was explaining something called the Rattle Trap conspiracy to a newcomer who was saying, “There’s so much out there I don’t know about.”
Conspiracy theories are all about insider knowledge and false sense of power brings to the powerless. Once, Jesus gave them that sense. Not now.
Trumpers are teaching their children well.
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