by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Let me be clear, that going to one small MAGA rally in DC does not an expert on the subject make. But it was my first MAGA rally and it made a big impression on me. Then I talked to a relative who is conservative-but-not-MAGA and something occurred to me.
One reason why it’s so fucking hard to deal with MAGA is at its core, it’s identity politics for white people, but you can’t bring that up because they get all defensive and think you’re calling them, personally, racist. What’s more, they don’t even believe in systemic racism — period — so you can’t even bring that up.
Throw in the two sides no longer having a shared reality and, well, you have the makings of a pretty unstable country. And I honestly don’t know how this particular situation fixes itself peacefully. We have about 20 years before the dead hand of demographics finally whittles away at the core of the Republican Party — old people.
What’s more, it’s possible that as brown people grow more “white,” that their natural Catholic conservatism will kick in and, well, we turn into an autocracy no matter what. That could just be our fate now — the United States, on a macro level, is going to become an honest-to-God autocracy in my lifetime.
I can’t predict the future. I have no idea what is going to happen.
