You voted, and the "red wave" that all the pundits saw coming, turned out to be a little more than a puddle.
Maybe some of you really do care about democracy. And maybe, just maybe, you realize that paying a little more for gas --and the food you buy-- is not quite as serious as having your freedom taken away.
Now comes the fun part. The right-wingnuts will start to turn on each other, as we all know that the malevolent narcissist living in South Florida had his ego seriously bruised. He has started already. He is now threatening to take his cult and their red hats and totally abandon the republican party.
I, for one, do not feel sorry for the republican establishment. This is what happens when you make a Faustian bargain; at some point you are sure to get burned.
Anyway, I recently read an article by Mark Greene (an incredible writer whom I just discovered), and it summed up the age of MAGA, and the madness that surrounds it, perfectly.
Here goes:
"The MAGA movement, based on aging white boomer victimhood is a bell curve. That bell curve has peaked for the simple reason that boomers, of which I am one, are dying off. We are the MAGA movement. How we got here is a combination of our own disconnection and the vulnerability which that created to decades of carefully crafted manipulation.
Boomers were wholly unprepared for the blunt manipulations of Fox News, in bundled cable of the 90s. White boomers never faced the great depression, or a world war, yet we were particularly susceptible to the idea that we were victims of hardships. In part because of the restless disconnection of our gated community lives we bought fragile white victimhood hook, line and sinker.\
After lifetimes of leaning into consumerism and mass consumption we boomers woke up to find ourselves angry and reactive to our own disconnection. Maybe a bigger SUV would help? Maybe a third marriage? That sense of disconnection was a warning, an inflection point. Some of us self reflected. Took stock. But many more of us doubled down on our nagging sense of victimhood.
“Whatever the fuck is wrong here, it must be someone else’s fault. Women. Immigrants. Black people.” And Fox News was there to lovingly encourage our blind entitlement. To sell us our own failed white fragility.
The MAGA bell curve peaked as we moved into retirement, staring blankly at our own mortality. Because we had bought into the decades long drumbeat of individualism sold to us by a GOP bent on eliminating social safety nets, we sought validation in class and status and so ended up without community.
Retirement is when a strange unnamed panic really set in for boomers. No longer able to rely on the stale connection of surface level workplace relationships, we were left sitting alone in our easy chairs staring at the Tucker Carlsons of the Fox News rabbit hole. Again, it was an inflection point for some of us.
Some boomers said, “Maybe this creeping anxiety is my fault. Maybe this disconnection from my kids, my community, from the world right outside my door is my fault.” Some of us went looking for basic human connection. We realized we had been tricked into choosing disconnection. But so many more of us just got angrier." [More here]
That sound you hear is a microphone dropping.
