A Crisis of Meaning and Purpose: The Loneliest Movement
A Crisis of Meaning and Purpose Part II: MAGA, as an authoritarian movement, capitalizes on a deep sense of loneliness and fear
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On December 7th, 2015, I stood in the hull of the USS Yorktown in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina and listened as presidential contender Donald Trump addressed a crowd of adoring supporters. This was the night he announced a proposed ban on all Muslim immigration, which would come to pass a week into his first presidency with Executive Order 13769. That night, reading from a prepared statement, he declared, “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on!” The crowd exploded in rapturous cheering. The man standing next to me pumped his fist and screamed, “Fuck yeah! Fuuuuuuuck yeah!”
It was a jarring experience. I had been reporting from Trump rallies for months, but they were escalating quickly. The first few events were disturbing and the conversations I was having with supporters changed in ways I found more and more alarming. At first, there was a hesitant fascination with Trump. Attendees were interested, but wary. They weighed their options, telling me they were still considering rivals like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. In Mount Pleasant, something else was happening. What we would eventually come to understand as the MAGA Movement was taking hold.
Outside the carrier, I found protesters and supporters standing on opposite sides of a road and shouting at one another. Threats were starting to fly. One supporter pointed to a retired turret gun and joked to me that he wished it was operational so that he could use it on the protesters. There was a language developing. A familiarity among the faithful.
The fantasy of violence haunted me for weeks afterward because I knew, as I told an interviewer later, that what was gaining traction was a situation that would, before we reached its conclusion, undoubtedly spill blood. But what has since sat with me is another conversation I had inside the USS Yorktown, this one with a middle-aged woman decked out in Trump merchandise. In the middle of a chant for their hero, she turned to me with tears in her eyes. “Look at this!” she said, meaning the crowd. “I used to think I was all alone. Isn’t it great that we found our people?”
I saw this more and more with every rally. The supporters greeted each other as old friends. They spoke in shorthand about their political enemies and how villains like Hillary Clinton were going to spend the rest of their lives in prison or, and this became more common, executed for their crimes. Before, during, and after Trump’s remarks, they spurred each other on when they shouted. They celebrated each other’s cruelty until it became a booming chorus. Outside, strangers hugged one another.
It took awhile to understand. The first puzzle piece to slide into place was that, for all the complaining in the MAGA world about “safe spaces,” what they were seeking in one another was their own safe space. When I penned this op-ed for The New York Times, it was becoming clear that Trump, himself, was just a figure to gather around. The millions supporting had been waiting for something or someone to call them near. In the larger culture, they felt isolated. Judged. Marginalized, even as they enjoyed incredible privilege as white people in the United States. There was a feeling that saying or doing the “wrong” thing would have incredible consequences. Trump’s campaign, and to a larger extent these rallies and emerging culture, represented safety in numbers. They looked around and saw, despite what they had felt and heard and seen, they weren’t really alone.
The Authoritarian Spark
Despite what we have been told, authoritarianism does not spontaneously emerge. There are conditions that make it possible. For all of the talk of strength and aggression and might, the underlying motivation is fear and insecurity. Authoritarian energy never disappears, but when times are stable or the future seems bright, it will merely fester and find moments to break through. When things get tough and bleak, it floods the culture.
The ravages of the Neoliberal project and the coinciding decline of the American Empire laid the foundation for this movement. As capitalism isolated us, pitted us against one another, as it atomized society, self-serving motivations and relationships reined. Americans became more selfish. More self-involved. Family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, and strangers were opportunities at best and impediments at worst. The spoils of empire were numerous but shoddy. Americas were given cheap goods they didn’t need and protection from the oppressive violence the country spread around the world. Over time, it corroded our sense of self, our values, and the consequences of empire mounted and mounted.
When the deal broke and capitalism went into business for itself, Americans began to suffer. It grew nearly impossible to buy a home, jobs were more exploitative and tenuous, every facet of life was manipulated and squeezed by corporations, and the long-lasting effects of globalism in Middle America left large swathes of the country poor, hollowed out, and suffering.
This would not have been possible had our representative government not been completely corrupted and bought by the ascendant wealth class and burgeoning oligarchs. Trust in government consistently declined as the Neoliberal turn revealed that domestic problems would not be answered. Meanwhile, control over all facets of America life shifted to the wealthiest few and a handful of corporations.
Authoritarian energies emerge from a sense of powerlessness and a deep feeling that control has slipped beyond the individual. It is fostered by a feeling of humiliation, which is a side-effect of decline and, also, cultural change. The political Right, funded by the individuals and groups that took over the government and economy, serves as a conduit to take those frustrations, some of which are legitimate, and to twist them into a force beneficial to the wealth class. Rather than confronting the effects of capitalism, entrenched prejudices against minorities, women, and political enemies are stoked to distract from the very real material conditions.
The Demagogue as “Daddy”
Faced with a lack of control and a sense of diminishing power, the populace becomes activated, fearful, and shifts to a childlike state. All around them they see threats which feel insurmountable. What they want, what they believe they need, is a strong father figure to set the house right again.
The dictator is a stand-in for a disciplinarian father. Many of the MAGA faithful grew up in homes or churches where a patriarchal order reigned supreme, making sense of the world and providing the structure of their lives. These abusive environments and their restrictive rules pressure the individual to conform early. Whatever parts of themselves, whether it is their emotions or sexuality or beliefs, must be repressed lest they face anger or violence or excommunication. These repressed things do not go away, however, they fester and grow in power. The Right Wing individual learns to project their own self-loathing for feeling and believing these things onto the rest of the world, essentially warring with everyone else because they are at war with themselves.
This is why the Right is so rife with hypocrisy. They are on an endless and bloody crusade against the parts of the themselves they have learned to repress and hate, creating a continual and worsening cycle. This is the root of the anger. They learn to despise anyone who lives with an iota of freedom or expresses themselves more honestly, hence the unreasonable hatred of gay and trans people and women or cultural liberals. It isn’t enough to debate differences of opinion or hash it out through the legislative process, what is needed is a conquering of the culture, which is why we have seen a consistent rise in authoritarian acceptance.
The Right doesn’t want an elected leader, they need an authoritarian who will settle the matter once and for all. And this need only grows as it becomes clear that they are losing the battle with time, which accelerates charges that a society has become degenerate and decadent. Winning elections isn’t enough. Everyone must be pulled, kicking and screaming, into the patriarchal, authoritarian household where the rules are punitive weapons and the stand-in father has the final say.
Self-Destruction as a Matter of Faith
These movements are inherently self-destructive. Support for the dictator/father-figure, with its activated compulsion, has to turn against all logical and empirical data-backed ideas. What matters most is that all control is handed over to the figure, everything that challenges this notion must be discarded with prejudice.
Hence why science, progress, and any systems designed to actually help anyone besides the wealthy, are thrown aside and shredded with haste. All that is left is the main thrust of anger and self-righteousness as the internal war becomes external. The faithful are willing to hurt themselves and their children as long as their perceived enemies hurt as well. The organizing principle is to throw it all away as a matter of faith. In some ways, this resembles a child suffering a tantrum and, in a shocking display of anger, destroying the very things they love the most. There is no consideration for the future. There is no future beyond the outburst.
Fascist movements are obsessed with time but inherently antagonistic toward the future. They are willing to kill in order to shape the past - in exactly the same way the Right Wing individual contorts their experiences in the authoritarian household or community in order to create a pleasing fantasy - while controlling the present and exclaiming a belief in some fantastical future. This is how the progress of the 20th century is being dismantled while the adherents believe Trump is creating a “Golden Age,” which is just another version of the delusion of the Thousand-Year Reich. Here, the faltering fantasy of the American Dream or American Exceptionalism, having lost their power and gravity, are switched out for a new and convenient daydream: things having been fixed even as they are being destroyed.
These fantasies are short-lived and destructive. A principle of authoritarian rule is explosive violence, which must be perpetrated against those outside the country and within. This iteration came into focus with the War on Terror, which saw leadership carry out operations in nearly 80 countries around the world. It is no coincidence that the methods and tactics - including torture, rendition, and endless surveillance - found their way back to the homeland. As the authoritarian regime consolidates power, they will threaten neighbors and allies, creating conditions that could explode into self-destructive wars and alienating past and potential friends. Eventually, all that is left is continued harm and oppression, which hastens the decline that created the situation in the first place.
To put it another way, authoritarianism is a manic, illogical bender, a mass delusion that takes holds and contorts politics and reality itself. It cannot be sustained. It cannot progress. It can only destroy.
The Fascistic Bender
One of the most misunderstood aspects of MAGA is that Trump and the ecosystem of grifters around him have benefited from simply enabling their supporters. Regardless of objective reality, they are told they are winning, the world around them is improving, and that any problems originate from outside of themselves. As has been the case with the worsening problem of American narcissism in the age of Neoliberal capitalism, the message is potent: ask less of yourself and more of everyone else.
The roots of this are deep. The rise of Neoliberalism shifted all “first-world” culture toward self-obsession and sociopathic relationships, reframing others as takers and impediments to self-optimization. We see this in our culture, our entertainment, and in the self-help and new age arenas, which have predictably trended either apolitical or rightward, creating the foundation for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” scam.
Trump benefits not from asking more from his followers, but by enabling them to give less.
This enabling means rejecting a culture of consideration and empathy, which had become the cultural baseline over the past decade. Followers were told to ignore the parts of history that felt bad. They could discard anyone’s viewpoint that even differed slightly from theirs. They should make money and buy whatever they wanted without so much as worrying about the future. Existential problems like climate change and the decline of the American Empire could be dismissed. They gained a boozy unfreedom in exchange for unquestioning loyalty.
White people were promised renewed cultural dominance. Men were guaranteed a reassertion of patriarchal power, including efforts to chase women from the workplace and re-tilting of power in gender. Christians were easy targets as they had been raised in a religion that told them they were beset on all sides by satanic threats. Wealth class members, unconsciously terrified by the rise of the oligarchs, were given what they wanted most: an outlet for anger they had not been able to name.
Underneath it all was the American addiction to consumption. Neoliberal globalism had prepared people to have access to whatever they wanted at an affordable price. Slave labor around the world made it so. They could buttress their fantasies about themselves, reinforce their fantasy identities with shirts and hats and overpriced trucks and, especially, guns. Envisioning themselves as warriors and revolutionaries, the MAGA faithful armed themselves with weapons of war and, enabled by their favorite influencers and politicians and personalities, came to believe they were crusaders. The conspicuous consumption of the 1980’s, spearheaded by people like Trump himself, took a new turn. And, inevitably, Trump was there to sell them as much meaningless shit as they were willing to buy.
The Loneliest Movement
America is a profoundly lonely country. Neoliberalism has decimated our bonds, leaving us adrift. While many of us have worked to improve ourselves or search inward as to what has happened to us, the authoritarians simply refuse. The issue is everyone else and, in MAGA, as I had noticed within the rallies, they found others to feel alone with.
That phenomenon has been replicated in a parallel fashion online, which has both accelerated our loneliness and sold us a facsimile of belonging (more on this in Part III). In conspiracy theories MAGA believers have been given easily-accessible pseudo-explanations as to what has happened to their world, only for the perpetrators to be shifted to their political enemies rather than the individuals and corporations they pledge allegiance to. This has had a stunning effect on their actual relationships. Their families have been torn apart. Their marriages have ended. Their coworkers distanced themselves. Their rabid, incoherent rants and uncontrollable anger has isolated them further and made their associations within the movement that much more vital.
If you read this and it occurs to you that these dynamics reflect a cult atmosphere, that isn’t by accident. The process of indoctrination into an authoritarian movement is the same as a cult and their operations are almost identical. With each interaction and each moment of enmeshment, the MAGA individual finds themselves losing their tethers to reality and society as a whole, and the movement is ready to replace those tethers with binds that keep them obedient and subservient.
In the end, the MAGA supporter does not know themselves. Their process of growing up in authoritarian environments requires self-alienation through repression and consistent self-loathing. Their subordination to power structures becomes the only important part of their lives and, with time, they eventually replicate those same structures as they get older. They do not know what they want or what they need, only that they must continue surviving within these frameworks. Consumption, lust for power, and projected anger are the only things that offer temporary relief from a burning and unceasing discomfort. The reality they exist in is flooding over with contradictions that would bring the entire edifice down if there was even a moment of doubt and, so, they leave no room for doubt. They can instantaneously, like a victim of abuse, warp their own perception and override their own logic because their survival depends on it.
This would be terribly tragic if it were only isolated to the individual, but the material conditions of our moment, the uncertainty, the decline, the culture-wide feeling of powerlessness, allows these dysfunctions to metastasize into a larger movement under the control of the powerful and, inevitably, makes it the problem of the country and world at large. Our safety is compromised because of these unaddressed issues. Our future is in danger because of them. Anyone who has survived abusive or exploitative or dysfunctional environments can understand how this happens as we get drawn into cycles that feel inescapable and potentially deadly.
We cannot argue with cultists.
We cannot negotiate with cultists.
We cannot expect the cult to disband itself or experience some miraculous clarity.
Our politics are, at scale, a reflection of these individual and personal dynamics. We are in this crisis because of a series of cultural crises that have worsened a series of personal crises and they have erupted into a conflagration that threatens to destroy everything. Attempting to rationalize this or seek some sort of solution that focuses on Trump or a single election misses the much larger point. What we are dealing with here is an existential crisis that cannot be solved unless we address our material conditions and prioritize a massive sea-change regarding the systems that enabled and worsened this cycle, but also requires a spiritual revival of sorts that begins to solve our lack of meaning, purpose, and interdependence.
Great essay. I've personally found what you describe here as the truth. The future of this country looks dark, probably for decades, if not longer. I fear for our children and grandchildren.
Absolutely right.