You want to know why all the savvy people -- every one of them -- were baffled and confused by the rise of Trump and MAGA, and still are?
Well, because I like you, I'll tell you. And I do this in the full knowledge that none of this secret intel will leak to the savvy people because the savvy people do not read Liberal blogs.
Ready?
Ok...but first we have do a thing. What the kids call a side-quest.
You love Westerns, right? Anyway, I do, so there we are.
So, Westerns. What defines a Western? Well, even if you're not a professional deconstructor of films, if you watch enough Westerns from every era, you can see clear themes and commonalities, some of which remain fairly constant across time, and others which change and morph into something else entirely.
For example, in early Westerns, the heroes and villains were mostly two-dimensional. Often literally White Hats versus Black Hats. Or White Hats versus The Savages. But over time this changes. For example, John Ford's landmark 1939 Western Stagecoach (The Canterbury Tales with Stetsons) is all about inverting social hierarchies, with John Wayne's Ringo Kid and Claire Trevor's Dallas characters -- the Outlaw and the Prostitute -- emerging as the heroes of the tale.
30 years later, in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, the recognizable tropes of the Western were mostly still there -- heroes, villains, hats, horses, guns, saloons, etc. -- but their meanings had all been scrambled. The villain was no longer the Savages or the Black Hats, it was the crippled railroad baron. The Black Hat gunslinger was now reduced to the status of a hireling: the henchman of capitalism.
To make the point absolutely clear -- that this was about the closing of the frontier and the end of the traditional Western -- Leone hired iconic American good guy actor Henry Fonda to play Frank, the murderous, amoral tool of capitalism.
And sticking with Once Upon a Time in the West for just one more minute, the opening scene does what all great opening scenes do: it sets the tone for the rest of the tale. In Fred Zinnemann's High Noon, the entire story is about a train that's due to arrive at...when? When? Don't go simple on me now, it's the title of the movie. Four bad men -- Frank Miller and his backup singers -- are due to arrive in town at noon and they are out for revenge. Everyone in town knows it, and as the fateful hour approaches (the director keeps the audience apprised of the time by placing clocks in nearly every scene) the townspeople slowly desert their sheriff, leaving him to face the four bad men all alone.
Then, at last, the clocks strike twelve.
Once Upon a Time in the West completely inverts this. Instead of an arrival by train being the event towards which all plot lines are moving, Once Upon a Time in the West starts with an arrival by train.
Instead of four bad men getting off the train and marching into town to hunt down the hero, three bad men are waiting at the train for the hero to arrive.
To drive home the point that this movie was to be the end of the Western, Leone originally wanted the stars of his Dollars Trilogy -- Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach -- to play the three gunmen. But they declined, so Leone cast Woody Strode, Jack Elam, and Al Mulock instead.
At this point I was going to go on a long thing about how awesome The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is, but this isn't a movie review post, and if you didn't already know how awesome The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is, well, I just feel sorry for you is all.
Obviously Once Upon a Time in the West wasn't the end of the Western genre, because the archetypes the genre developed are too sturdy and too firmly rooted in human nature to disappear. And so, every year or two, someone comes along to mix and match the same elements in different way. In Silverado you find a classic Western done very well, even ending in a gunfight in the street with the church behind our hero. In Lonesome Dove, a sweeping epic. In Quigley Down Under you get the Western in Australia. In No Country For Old Men, you get the Western in the West Texas of 1980 because the Coen brothers love Westerns.
Is Unforgiven a Western? Obviously. But is Firefly a Western? You bet. It's whatchacall a "neo-Western", but c'mon.
Is Justified? Damn right it is.
So what is all of this to do with Republicans and their MAGA headgear?
Well, since you asked, getting back to explaining why all the savvy people -- every one of them -- were baffled and confused by the rise of Trump and MAGA, and still are... don't go simple on me now, because it's the title of this post.
MAGA is not a set of policy beliefs or checked set of ideological boxes.
MAGA is a genre. MAGA is a vibe.
Which is why, when the savvy crowd sees Republican voters appear to casually and completely reverse what they swore were their bedrock beliefs (and then do it again... and again) the savvy crowd are flummoxed. They have no theory to fit the facts, because they had always taken as gospel that what Republican mopes say they believe on any given day was something akin the hammer throw at a track and field event: momentum is built up, then released, and the hammer follows a straight tangent line from the point of that release.
But Republican voters do not behave that way. At all. Because the policies they'll swear by on a Monday because Sean Hannity said so... and then drop like first period French on Wednesday because Sean Hannity said so...are just props. Just plot devices.
This is why MAGA mopes not only don't give a shit that Trump lies constantly, they're thrilled by it. Since, in the MAGA genre, everything is treated as a plot device that either advances the MAGA narrative, or threatens it, who cares whether an individual story elements is true or not?
Now for a quick bit of genre hopping.
You love Film Noir, right? Well anyway, I do, so here we are again. When Howard Hawks was filming The Big Sleep, his writing team couldn't figure out who killed the chauffeur, Owen Taylor. So Hawks fired off a telegram to the author of the original novel, Raymond Chandler, asking him to clarify. Here was their exchange.
Hawks: "Who killed the chauffeur?"
Chandler: "Dammit, I don't know either."
Even though the murder of Owen Taylor is central to the plot, Chandler didn't know or care who killed him because that wasn't the point of the novel. The Big Sleep is about atmosphere and characterization, not nailing down every detail, and since it didn't really matter who offed the chauffeur, Chandler didn't bother with it.
From the MAGA perspective, asking whether or not this is true...
... or this is true ...
Trump repeats false claims that children are undergoing transgender surgery during the school day
Trump’s remarks escalated conservatives’ claims that educators are “grooming” or “indoctrinating” children to become gay or transgender.
...or this is true ...
Trump: “It’s a tremendous difference... We’re going to get the drug prices down… Not 30 or 40 percent… No, we’re going to get them down 1,000 percent, 600 percent, 500 percent, 1,500 percent — numbers that are not even thought to be achievable… and it will be, you know, serious. It will be numbers that nobody can even imagine.”
... or the 10,000 other lies Trump has spewed are true is irrelevant.
As irrelevant as who killed Owen Taylor.
Because all those lies are just plot devices designed to advance the MAGA narrative.
Ergo understanding which way the MAGA mob will jump next is not (and never had been) a matter of sifting through the mountain of self-contradicting bullshit that constitutes MAGA dogma. This is what the savvy crowd always gets wrong.
Understanding the wild oscillations of MAGA dogma only makes sense when you understand the Republicans mythos being served by those lies: a mythos that long pre-dates the rise of Trump.
And it's really pretty simple. As simple as the earliest Westerns. Their world is a world of Black Hats and White Hats. They -- white Conservative Christian nationalists and their fellow travelers-- are the White Hats and pretty much everyone else are the Black Hats.
They're the real Americas. They are "righteous" in the original meaning of that word: just, upright, and in accord with divine law. And since, to MAGA, this is all self-evident -- that they and only they are properly aligned with God's moral order -- then it follows that whatever they feel to be true and good must be true and good.
Instead of "Cogito ergo sum" -- "I think therefore I am" -- the MAGA way is (pardon the rough Latin translation) "Sentio ergo est" -- "I feel therefore it is".
It's a pre-Enlightenment way of thinking, where faith doesn't merely beat facts all day long, but facts that conflict with the One True Faith are the darkest heresy. Something to be rooted out and destroyed.
For decades Conservative media and Republican politicians have been making fortunes and winning elections reinforcing this mythos by feeding the base an endless supply of Black Hats to hate and vote against. Liberals. Mouthy women. Brown people who don't know their place. Urbanites. The gays. Immigrants. Unions. Trans people. Pointy-headed intellectuals. Government employees. Hollywood. "Rootless cosmopolitans". Socialists. You know the drill.
And once the base came to accept as axiomatic that is was perpetually under siege by the Black Hats, everything became existential crisis. Deficits were an existential crisis...then they weren't...then they were again...then they weren't again. Every Democratic president was somehow illegitimate and also simultaneously a feckless weakling, a jackbooted tyrant and the Worst President in History.
Everything was a battle in a forever war for the survival of real America where the salvation of the nation was always hanging by a thread. And gradually, the fascist "blood and soil" language that has been thrown around on Hate Radio since the 1980s -- constantly framing the press as the "enemy of the people", slandering any opposition as deranged parasites, speaking of the nation as something that needed cleansing and purification -- filtered up from the base, where it was the common tongue, and into Conservative teevee, Republican political ads, Conservative think tanks and publications and Republican politicians.
And in that environment, what does it matter if what the Dear Leader says is true or not? What does it matter if what fascist state media says is true or not? Who cares if slander about eating the pets is racist bullshit? Who cares if trans people are no threat to anyone? The only thing that matters is the utility of the words coming out of the Dear Leader's mouth. And since us Black Hats are so dangerous -- "the face of pure evil" (Liz Cheney, 2019) -- any and all weapons and tactics are permitted.
Which is why we can carefully pack up all our facts -- our mountains of irrefutable facts stretching back decades -- and lay them aside for another day, or for when we talk among ourselves. Conservative media and Republican politicians worked very hard for many decades engineering a voting base for whom facts are irrelevant and anyone who tells them anything they don't want to hear is dismissed as treason and Fake News. This how Conservative media and Republican politicians paved a road for Donald Trump to win the White House.
Did lies about Obama's birth certificate feel true to the racist Republican base? Did lies about Somalis eating people's pets feel true to those same bigots 15 years later? Did lies about cafeteria castrations feed the MAGA moron's hysteria about trans people? Does the torrent of lies that Trump vomits out on a daily basis tickle MAGA's ganglia and reinforce their myths about apocalyptic struggle, heroism and destiny?
Yes. And in the end, to them, that's all that matters.
Because MAGA is not a set of policy beliefs or checked set of ideological boxes.
MAGA is a vibe. MAGA is a genre in which it's just Black Hats versus White Hats, all day long.
And all those lies are the necessary story elements that move the plot along.
