In my last post, I argued that MAGA’s inhumanity will be their undoing. 

Here I want to extend that argument: MAGA’s white supremacist and misogynistic world view is the primary motivator of their inhumanity, and it is becoming a stone around their necks.

The phenomenon that MAGA derisively calls ‘wokeness’ is the understanding that reaching across barriers which were erected to treat people differently empowers and raises up everyone.  “Wokeness” rejects the defense of social privileges because privileges actually impoverish everyone–the privileged as well as on the oppressed. 

That is to say, while class, race, gender, nationality, sex, etc. privileges create powerful inequalities of access to wealth, power, education, health care, and education, the benefits that the privileged get come at a terrible cost: the loss of their understanding of the interconnectedness between people,  and the amazing gifts that come from embracing those who are deemed “different” in order to oppress them. And even further: they lose their capacity to love.

This understanding of the powerful benefits of diversity, of the inter-connection between people, is deeply humanizing.  And it precisely explains why MAGA’s rejection of wokeness is deeply dehumanizing. To MAGA, all that matters is being strong, and strength does not come from difference but from homogeny. They believe that individuals make it on their own, supported ‘by their own kind,’ in a dog-eat-dog world, and that those who are able to dominate others succeed. They view “wokeness” as a weapon used by ‘deep state’ elites to oppress whites, and to trap people of color in an administrative and legal system that only benefits a few minorities at the expense of many. 

MAGA wins people over to their belief system when people lose faith in the existing society’s ability to deliver a good life. As I have often written in other posts, MAGA’s success in 2016 and 2024 was in good part due to their willingness to call out the existing social order as bankrupt and immoral. But they chose to obscure the actual causes of social discontent (mainly hyper-inequality) and its solutions. Instead of focusing on the billionaires who created and benefited from neo-liberalism (and now from MAGA), they exaggerated the social stagnation experienced by white men, and blamed it on immigrants, people of color, women, and LGBTQI people, while ignoring the impact of grinding inequality on everyone. 

Unfortunately for MAGA, most Americans now live in areas where they regularly interact with diverse populations. Even small towns in red states now depend heavily on immigrant labor, and the very same white people who voted for Trump often count Latinos as their neighbors and even friends. When ICE raids a meatpacking plant in Nebraska or Mississippi, the whole community feels attacked; no one escapes the inhumanity of their actions. And as Minneapolis’ resistance showed, many non-political people, including many swing voters, felt compelled to do something when they see ICE’s terrorism brought down on their neighbors. 

In other words, the United States, like the rest of the developed world, is now a completely diverse nation. Multiculturalism is now broadly accepted (look at Bad Bunny’s Superbowl reception, even by people who could not understand a single word of his songs). 

MAGA is fighting a losing battle in its effort to put multiculturalism back in the bottle. It is true that some universities have shamefully retreated from their support for multi-culturalism and anti-racism, but this too shall pass. No matter how many people MAGA deports, their fantasy of giving birth to a white Christian nation is beyond outlandish: only people completely ignorant of history and sociology could possibly think that project might succeed. 

And so, MAGA will continue to attack immigrants, bemoan ‘white replacement,’ and trumpet what they call “country” values (a world that no longer exists even in rural areas). And the more they do this, the more their inhumanity will be exposed, and those who say no to their terrorism will continue to find strength and humanity in the multicultural reality that MAGA denies.