Alternate title: America was supposed to be better than this.
- Perhaps MAGA is about making America *simpler* again; perhaps what we’re seeing is a rejection of the complexity of the modern world;
- Why is it Americans love watching crime shows?
- Franklin Foer on how Trump’s class enemy is the intelligentsia;
- How the Trump administration classifies immigrants as dead;
- How MAGA/DOGE is not Christian, but xenophobically tribal;
- How Trump threatens anyone who dissents;
- More about the State Department’s witch-hunt against anti-Christian bias;
- Yet if they have to rely on Prayer Warriors, the rest of us have nothing to worry about.
Perhaps, I’m thinking, MAGA is really about making America *simple* again. That’s the conservative project: remove ambiguities, reduce everything to binaries, our side good everyone else bad, and so on. That’s the motive for MAGA and DOGE. The Nichols insight is (as I would put it) that our minds are wired for the danger-fraught ancestral environment, and so we feel ill-at-ease in the relatively safe modern environment. Another piece of evidence: how TV shows (in America at least) are still dominated by crime and calamity. There are far more spectacular violent events on TV shows than happen in real life. Why do people crave watching them? Because for most of us modern life is too safe, and thus boring, and that primitive mindset needs stimulation.
Another way of putting this is: the world has gotten more complex, both as once isolated peoples have come into contact necessarily creating a global society, and as technology has become so complex no one can understand it all, there’s a rejection of all these things in favor of a simpler life. If I don’t understand it, it can’t be important, so fire ’em all, says DOGE. Which is to say: perhaps as a species humanity as reached a conceptual ceiling. Most of us simply cannot comprehend the kinds of things that would enable us to become a truly global, and then multi-planetary, species. No matter how much the few very smart of us can accomplish, there will always be religious and social zealots who would tear that progress down.
The classic science fiction authors saw this — Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein. I can think of specific examples. And the later ones, who’ve taken this split for granted. Perhaps science fiction has been self-indulgent, for nearly a century, in thinking that the drags on progress can be overcome. But maybe they can’t.
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Thus.
The Atlantic, Franklin Foer, 13 Apr 2025: Trump Has Found His Class Enemy, subtitled “The president unleashes a Marxist theory of power—but against knowledge workers, not billionaires.”
Even the educated mind, or perhaps especially the educated mind, is skilled at deflecting harsh realities. That’s why so many white-shoe lawyers have failed to publicly support their colleagues in firms that President Donald Trump has targeted. It’s why universities have barely fought him in court, even as he has butchered their funding. Law partners and university presidents like to talk their way out of problems, and they apparently believe that they can ultimately evade the fate that befalls those who resist Trump. They assume that he merely craves gestures of submission—and that once obeisance has been paid, he will move on to his next target.
The evidence is clear: Trump wants to bring back big factories, with their factory workers, to America as it was a century ago. He thinks American can seal itself off from the rest of the world, and consume only things built in America, never mind economic or supply issues. And his plan to do this is… extremely simple-minded. His MAGA followers who support him are… simple-minded. (Every state grows bananas! said one MAGA-ite, on Fb, shrugging off tariff threats on produce.)
That, however, underestimates the social revolution that the Trump administration is trying to unleash. Its goal isn’t just to shatter a few institutions. It intends to crush the power and authority of whole professions, to severely weaken, if not purge, a social class.
The target of the administration’s campaign is a stratum of society that’s sometimes called the professional managerial class, or the PMC, although there’s not one universal moniker that MAGA applies to the group it is now crushing. That group includes society’s knowledge workers, its cognitive elite, the winners of the tournament that is the American meritocracy. It covers not only lawyers, university administrators, and professors, but also consultants, investment bankers, scientists, journalists, and other white-collar workers who have prospered in the information age. Back in the 1990s, as the group began to emerge in its current form, the liberal economics commentator Robert Reich hailed its members as “symbolic analysts”—people who identify and solve problems by thinking through ideas rather than via physical labor. A decade later, the urbanist Richard Florida put forth an even more triumphalist term: the “creative class.” That is, its members had the academic training to master the complexities of a globalized economy, the intellectual skills to conquer the digital world.
Life was so much simpler, and easier, when we knew less, and lived by our religions and ideologies.
Not so long ago, the upper-middle-class Americans who exemplify the PMC would have filled the ranks of both parties. But beginning in the 1990s, professionals began migrating in large numbers to the Democrats. Many affluent people with a cosmopolitan outlook were repelled by the GOP’s social stances and drawn to the economic moderation of politicians such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
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These people are despicable.
Washington Post, 12 Apr 2025: Trump administration overrode Social Security staff to list immigrants as dead, subtitled “A senior executive who objected was marched out of his office and put on leave, while earlier warnings about the agency’s deaths database were ignored.”
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The MAGA/DOGE movement is not Christian. It is xenophobically tribal.
Salon, Serene Jones, 13 Apr 2025: And then Jesus said, “America First”, subtitled “How would Jesus have responded if one of the most powerful nations in the world decided to cut off aid?”
Long before Jesus ever knew of the existence of America, as he wandered through different lands preaching the word of God, he proclaimed, “America First!”
At least, this is what right-wing Christian forces want you to believe. In one breath, they claim to be guided by their core faith values. But in the next breath, these same voices purport that we need to prioritize Americans and forget about people in other countries.
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Totalitarian? Dictatorship? Fascist? Orwellian? I’m not sure which words apply anymore. But this is not good, and it’s not about freedom or liberty.
CNN analysis by Zachary B. Wolfe, 12 Apr 2025: Trump’s retribution sends a chilling message to dissenters
Donald Trump’s White House has a threatening message for anyone who might even be perceived to disagree with the president: Don’t. Or else.
The rest is details and examples.
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Similarly. Wrong-thinkers will be severely punished!
Hemant Mehta, Friendly Atheist, 12 Apr 2025: See something, snitch something: The State Department’s “anti-Christian bias” witch hunt begins, subtitled “Under Republican leadership, Christians are the only ones worth protecting”
It’s not as if this kind of thing hasn’t happened before, in many cultures throughout history. It’s that America was supposed to be better than this.
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On the other hand, if they really think prayer will accomplish anything, the rest of us have nothing to worry about. This is just evidence of their zeal, and irrationality.
Right Wing Watch, Peter Montgomery, 11 Apr 2025: Paula White’s Prayer Warriors Target Supreme Court and Federal Judges
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I have one more long piece by Adam Grant that I’ll look at tomorrow.
