MAGA is an ‘identity-centred’ political form - take it seriously
MAGA is usefully analysed less as a coherent ideology and more as an identity-centred political form.
We should take MAGA very seriously indeed. You might wonder why. It is the dominant political orientation of the current US government and of a significant fraction of the US population. Famously, Leon Trotsky allegedly said: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you”. Well, you might not be interested in MAGA, but MAGA is interested in you, and MAGA impacts you. The US National Security Strategy and National Defence Strategy are both clear about who the in-group and out-group members are. If you’re European or Canadian or whoever, then you’re in the out-group for sure.
Gerry Adams, formerly President of Sinn Fein, and allegedly IRA Army Council member once remarked when asked ‘what about the IRA?’ ‘They haven’t gone away, you know’. Well, notwithstanding the US Supreme Court decision, the tariffs on friendly nations haven’t gone away, nor have the threats to annex territory of a NATO ally. Nor have the visits to those who threaten the integrity of the EU gone away, nor the promises of US government funding for so-called ‘patriotic parties’ - but don’t assume this embrace will be reciprocated, as Janen Ganesh of the FT argues here.
And the Munich Security Conference speeches by VP Vance and SoS Rubio, while varying in their stridency and emollience, are directionally similar in their underlying thrust - Europe is in the out-group, it’s committing civilisational suicide, and all the other empirically-unmoored hyperbole decorating these kinds of speeches.
Start Here for the Cognitive Republic
What is going on? I think there’s an answer, and it’s an answer with universalist roots, drawing deep on underlying, all-too-human, cognitive, affective, and social processes.