Sympathy for the MAGAs?
Sorry not sorry
Jeffrey Denny
“Here’s Why We Shouldn’t Demean Trump Voters”
So goes the headline on New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s Aug. 31 op-ed. He argues,
[T]he liberal impulse has been to demonize anyone at all sympathetic to Donald Trump as a racist and bigot. This has been politically foolish, for it’s difficult to win votes from people you’re disparaging.
It has also seemed to me morally offensive, particularly when well-educated and successful elites are scorning disadvantaged, working-class Americans who have been left behind economically and socially and in many cases are dying young. They deserve empathy, not insults.
Ok, but:
- Democrats will never win MAGA votes;
- Democrats don’t need MAGA votes — they’re only 10–15% of voters; and most of all,
- MAGA voters are threatening our society, democracy and country by empowering Trump.
To be precise, MAGAs are letting well-educated, successful Republican elites use their Trump addiction to win tax, regulation and government cuts, i.e., more money.
We have to wonder if MAGAs are too blinded by ignorance, Fox, bigotry and/or racism to see they’re sawing off the limb they’re sitting on, since working-class whites take the vast majority of welfare (while certain that minorities do).
And regulations mostly protect disadvantaged, working-class Americans like MAGAs. Well-educated and successful Republican elites who fight regulations typically aren’t facing industrial toxins, workplace hazards, consumer scams, healthcare fails, tainted food or other dangers like MAGAs do.
Sure, we should empathize with foolishly self-destructive people.
But you have to be Jesus Henry Christ Almighty to send thoughts and prayers to people who purposely, gleefully, with bitter cynicism and vengeance in their hearts, abuse the GOP vote-rigged mobocracy to hurt all of us.
Even the Christian God — who MAGAs love the most — doesn’t have unlimited empathy, but tells His flock to leave the vengeance to Him. History shows that vengeance in human hands tends to backfire. (See the Confederate flag that MAGAs wave.)
And it’s super duper wicked hard to empathize with people who not only support and defend Trump’s sick behavior they would never abide from their kids, family or Democrats, and get a weird kick out of siccing him on the rest of us, but love him. Not for his policies, however beautiful and unknowable, but for disturbing emotional reasons:
— MAGAs love when he demonizes immigrants and calls for mass deportation even if it causes “a bloody story.”
— MAGAs love when he attacks decent people who happen to disagree with or tell the obvious truth about him.
— MAGAs love his sore-loser lies about his stolen election.
— MAGAs love his criminal behavior, the lying, cheating, stealing, screwing over business partners, investors and workers, abusing power and women, the higher the impeachable crimes and misdemeanors the more entertaining. As if Trump’s an outlaw hero like Billy the Kid (with a splash of Bernie Madoff and a dash of Harvey Weinstein). Meanwhile MAGAs fear and loathe criminals who aren’t rich and white like Trump.
— MAGAs love his bully-victim sociopathy they mimic on social media.
— Most of all, MAGAs love the Trump Reality Show. Like “The Real Housewives of New Jersey,” the worse he is, the more MAGAs love it.
As they take mean pleasure in triggering “the libs,” MAGAs claim the libs are meaner.
They claim a lot of dumb things. College makes you stupid. Truth you hate is lies. Violence is peace. DEI is racist. Guns make children safer. Climate science is a hoax because the well-educated and successful elite oil billionaires say so. Immigrants, who don’t belong in this nation of immigrants, are taking jobs — most too menial for MAGAs — as they work for the American Dream and maybe put their kids through college.
(No, MAGAs might say, I haven’t read Orwell’s “1984” lately or at all. It’s liberal propaganda. Besides, it happened 40 years ago.)
Meanwhile, well-educated and successful MAGA media elites scorn nonwhite disadvantaged, working-class Americans to feed racism, bigotry and rage addiction to fund their lavish vacation homes.
Imagine if any Democratic leader said and did anything close to Trump’s lawlessness, incitement and near daily stream of putrescence MAGAs gobble up like chili fries at Trump rallies. Nancy Pelosi ripping up his speech? Barack Obama mocking him for truther lies? Maxine Waters? AOC and The Squad? This is the worst Democrats can get? WEAK.
But if this is a race to bottom like NFL teams seeking first draft picks, then let’s give MAGAs their trophy and call a truce.
There are — and have always been — “disadvantaged, working-class Americans who have been left behind economically and socially.”
But most haven’t assumed the right to tear down the country because they’re miffed. Most times, like Dr. King in the civil rights battles, our best leaders tried to lift us up together.
The American story is all about hard times that tested who we are and inspired us to rise above. Not sit on our sofas in front of our bias-plying media blaming those who did us wrong, whether real, imagined or invented like dictators to divide and conquer. Like Hegel quipped, we learn nothing from history except that we learn nothing from history.
So when well-meaning liberals give MAGAs a pass for loving, goading and empowering Trump and his destruction, the condescension — poor dears don’t know any better — worsens the problem. Kristof heard plenty of this.
For instance, columnist Matt Bai writes that aside from the moral relativism, “the idea that the disadvantaged are less responsible for their moral decisions than the rest of us are”:
To say that Trump’s voters aren’t aware of these things, or don’t fully comprehend them, or are firmly in the grip of misinformation, is to say that they’re simply fools. And I’ve met way too many rural Americans to believe that. If they’re ignorant, then their ignorance, at this point, is willful.
So let’s not waste our empathy on MAGAs. Save it for plenty of other struggling working-class Americans who love our country too much to tear it down.
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer.
