Great. Point your students to the September 19, 2024 New York Times article by David French “What Liberals Miss About the MAGA Movement” where he opines that “one thing that liberals tend to miss about the MAGA movement is its underlying sense of community and its joy.” Lots of similar articles as well if you look for them.
"What Liberals Miss About the MAGA Movement
David French explores what keeps Trump’s followers hooked.
Sept. 19, 2024
David French, a Times Opinion columnist, believes that to understand MAGA, we have to understand the joy and sense of belonging that the movement bestows upon its adherents. In this episode, he explains why Donald Trump’s most outrageous statements — such as the lie that Haitian immigrants are eating pets — appeal to his followers’ “sense of gleeful transgression.”
David French: I live in a town called Franklin, Tenn., that is south of Nashville, and it’s a very red part of America. Most of my friends, a vast majority of my family, are all Trump supporters and have been Trump supporters from the beginning.
I first started writing about the MAGA movement in late 2015. Like a lot of people, I didn’t initially take Trump seriously, but very quickly, I realized this was very serious and he was absolutely resonating. And so, I began talking to friends, to relatives. Why? What is it about Donald Trump that appeals to you so much? And that conversation has never really stopped for nine years.
If you’re on the outside, your experience with MAGA is all of the anger projected outward. So you see MAGA as almost entirely an angry movement.
MAGA likes inflicting pain on its political enemies. It likes and enjoys creating these ridiculous and absurd memes. It loves to provoke people who are on the outside. It’s part of the joy of this MAGA movement that can include this extreme aggression online.
One of the reasons this has all been on my mind is that an online rumor, an online lie, actually, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were eating dogs and cats made it all the way to Donald Trump, and Donald Trump stated it very blatantly and explicitly in his presidential debate with Kamala Harris.
Audio clip of Donald Trump: In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.
French: That took this issue and put it front and center with the American people, creating an immense amount of anger, and sadly, on the ground in Springfield, Ohio, it created real danger for the legal Haitian immigrants who are there, as they began to receive threats, acts of intimidation. And this is particularly toxic because absolutely nothing fires up his base like immigration.
I knew that MAGA was going to take this torch and carry it as far as it possibly could. And they did it in that particular way that MAGA interacts with the larger world, with this sense of gleeful transgression. They have fun being outrageous. They have fun being provocative. They like to “trigger the libs.” What MAGA is very good at doing is turning around back to its own people and saying, “See, we struck a nerve.” They’ll use words like, “If you’re taking flack, it means you’re over the target.” And so they use the backlash almost as proof that they’ve hit a nerve and all of this just creates an endless process of doubling down.
And one thing that I think that liberals tend to miss about the MAGA movement is they miss its underlying sense of community and its joy. So there is a strong sense of belonging within MAGA and they have a great time being MAGA. If you’re on the outside, you see MAGA as almost entirely an angry movement. And so this idea that it’s also a lot of fun and fellowship, that is something you don’t see at all. But if you’re on the inside of it, is one of its most dominant characteristics."
More at this link (also audio):
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/19/opinion/liberals-trump-maga.html
