Well, We All Are Going To Die: The MAGA Culture of Death

Joni Ernst's statements are reflection of where MAGA is taking us

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Last Friday, Iowa senator Joni Ernst hosted a town hall in Butler County. These affairs are usually pretty useless. There aren’t a lot of victories to be had in them, which is why there are less and less of them as things worsen, outside of avoiding saying something demonstrably and upsettingly stupid. And Ernst most definitely failed in that respect.

Reacting to an audience member shouting “people are going to die” regarding Medicaid cuts, Ernst uttered one of the all-time worst town hall replies in history: “Well, we all are going to die.”

Ernst somehow made it worse, posting a video to social media of her taking a casual stroll through a graveyard and patronizingly “apologizing” to her constituents for thinking they knew that every human being would eventually perish from the Earth. “For those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life,” she continued, “I encourage you to embrace my lord and savior Jesus Christ.”

For people like myself who both study politics and are also fascinated by the befuddingly strange moments, this was a jackpot. It’s up there with Christine O’Donnell’s “I’m Not A Witch” 2010 campaign ad in that regard. But this is more than an inept politician sticking their foot in their mouth. It is, intentional or not, emblematic of what MAGA, the Republican Party, and the United States of America have become.

What is being solidified is a culture that normalizes suffering and untimely death, an environment of dehumanization and unnecessary suffering. This started well before Ernst walked onstage and grabbed her microphone. It is the consequence of what has been brewing for the past half century and has roots that go much, much deeper.

As the Trump Administration painstakingly rips every last cent out of programs designed to protect Americans from being poisoned, unnecessarily killed by natural disasters, preyed upon by the wealthy, or struck down by preventable diseases, we must take note of how these unthinkable decisions are being made. Conservative estimates for how many people will die because of cuts to a program like USAID are in the hundreds of thousands, and there’s no telling how many Americans will perish as programs are slashed. It is indefensible. But, behind every political project, particularly those that are destructive and inhumane, is a vast collection of ideologies, worldviews, and narratives that make it possible.

Underneath it all is a fairly simple set of drivers. From the end of the Second World War, when America was ascendent, to the economic crisis of the late-1970’s, the prominence of New Deal programs was linked to an environment where growth was assured. There was abundance, to borrow a phrase, and so the consensus revolved around how the government should best make people’s lives better. When stagflation hit and that growth was interrupted, the essence changed. Neoliberalism prioritized the financial and political wellbeing of the wealthiest individuals and corporations, setting off decades of austerity that saw these programs gutted. Now, following a half century of cuts, we have arrived at this point, where it isn’t even necessary to pretend the government gives a shit if you live or die or if there is even a skeleton of a system of support left.

Ideologies provide cover. With the Right, it is a mixture of religious and secular narratives that make this brutality possible. In the evangelical world, the answer is quite simple. Looking back at the feudal era, which authoritarians are desperate to return to, life for everyone besides the ruling class was short and excruciating. This meant the religious story revolved around promising peasants that, even though this world was cruel and backbreaking, if they behaved and were compliant, their rewards lay in a glorious afterlife in a utopian heaven. In America there have been traces of that, but in the ascendent era it has been largely replaced by the prosperity gospel, which has emphasized getting your rewards while living. (You can read more about this in my book The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis and trace how the shift into liberalism and capitalism led to a change in this worldview that’s now being undone.)

This has been brewing for awhile, and it shouldn’t surprise us that an open embrace of untimely death and omnipresent suffering has come to the forefront. After all, our experience during the brunt of the COVID pandemic made it abundantly clear. “Essential workers” were openly sacrified in order to keep the capitalist machine running. In stunning moments of clarity and honesty, Republican politicians like Lieutenant Governor of Texas Dan Patrick got on national television and argued that senior citizens should “take a chance” on their survival “in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren.” Patrick stated his own willingness to die to keep capitalism rolling, saying, “I’m all in.”

But you don’t just get there. It’s built on a foundation of dehumanization, the kind that festers between the lines of living in a system where healthcare is designed for profit over treatment and prevention, where mass incarceration is ignored as the indictment that it is, where the poor are routinely left to suffer and die, and where exploitation of people around the world, including their wholesale murder, is the price of doing business.

The Democratic Party has long given lipservice to valuing life and wanting to make a difference, delivering pleasing speeches with opinion-tested rhetoric written by some of the most talented writers and strategists, but the reason it rings hollow now is because it was always hollow to begin with. Patrick’s astounding statement is just the unvarnished truth of how this system works and has worked. It must continue on, regardless of what happens to people, and the truly astounding part is that he simply said the quiet part outloud. Since the dawning of Neoliberalism, what is essential is that the system continues on with limited impediments. Not what happens to us. We are expendable.

This shift is simply embracing what is needed for what happens next to come to fruition. It is the dawning of an era of open revilement for human life. Because Neoliberalism needs authoritarianism to survive and evolve, we’re being pushed into a cycle of devaluement. This means individuals being disappeared and thrust into hellish dystopian prisons. This means a surveillance system that bears down on all of us every moment of our lives. And, eventually, it will mean people being cut down in the full view of the public and, over time, a full and total embrace of eugenics.

The tech oligarchical class is already flirting with these things, promoting not just rampant breeding by “the elites,” but also a desire to control populations and reproduction. It is a crypto-eugenic moment we’re living in. There are hints, nudges, winks, but when the time is right and the environment is set, we will be introduced with overt eugenics programs, just as America saw in the early 20th century when industrialists were already preparing to partner with Fascists in destroying liberal democracy.

A return to this moment also means an end to research into life-saving medicines and technologies, undermining weather forecasting, disease prevention, and programs to ensure food and water and air safety, because the choice is simple: either allow the wealthy to get wealthier or invest in the betterment of all.

And that, to the wealth and oligarchical classes, simply isn’t a choice.

This is an abomination and the only way to legitimize it is to prepare the country to accept needless death and suffering as a “natural” condition. Authoritarian movements are death cults that gradually and then quickly normalize the unthinkable. Their emergence is tied to what systems require, and, unfortunately, it now requires death.

The antidote to all of this lies in moving away from the currents and trends. In rejecting a culture where those who are left behind by these systems are “deserving” of their fates and whatever happens to them. In seeing brutality in our streets, our neighborhoods, and around the world, and recognizing that violence visited upon any of us is violence visited on us all. That is what is required to start changing the political paradigm, including the ravages of Neoliberal austerity that greased the skids for us to arrive at this moment.

We have accepted this for too long. We have stood by as people around the world starved or were herded into authoritarianism on our behalf. As people were incarcerated and brutalized. As people were kept from lifesaving treatments and kept prisoner in lives of quiet desperation. We deserve better. Everyone deserves much, much better.