politics

Look, at the root of this is that you're fundamentally dealing with authoritarians. You can define that in two different ways for this context and they're both correct.

1. A belief that the state inflicting harm (physical, fiscal, mental, or otherwise) on a person or group of people as a means of accomplishing political goals is acceptable.

2. A belief that it's preferable to collect political power into the hands of a 'chosen few', whose political will is absolute or nearly so.

This is part of why so many frustrated Bernie people jumped ship to Trump, imo. The real desire here is for a benevolent (to them) dictator who can assume full power, snap their fingers, "fix" everything without having to "deal with the bullshit", and then everything will be great. For me, a millennial who became politically aware shortly after 9/11, this is a tremendous tone shift. In the oughts, if you suggested that the US was flawed or needed work in any way, you'd immediately get brow beaten for being unpatriotic scum and fiercely corrected that "we are the best country on earth". Fast forward eight years and it's "make America great again", because in eight years we somehow lost all of our glory as the greatest country on earth. In reality, imo, the "greatest country on earth" schlock was half jingoism, half denialism, and almost all before the great recession kicked everyone's ass. That is, I don't think the people saying it really believed it as much as they were invoking it as a kind of talisman to protect their ego or idea of the US.

I think it's beyond denying anymore that the US has some big fucking problems, and that's partly why the denialism has gone away. Everyone wants to fix it; yes, even the MAGAs imagine a future America where everyone lives happy and healthy, even if their path for getting there is unhinged. I think a lot of MAGAs actually know that these problems aren't easy to fix, which is why they want a benevolent dictator to step over "all the bullshit", the problem is that they don't realize where the difficulty in solving these issues is coming from. They think that a lot of the "bullshit" is the government DMV-izing everything from medicine to education to the military, and making the implementation of solutions impossible, and to be fair, that's a non-zero factor. What I think they don't realize is that our government has been functionally captured or hobbled at nearly every turn by wealthy groups or individuals that aren't really representative of or interested in the general public welfare. They don't realize that we've built a new economy that's monetized problem management instead of problem solving. That's why if the government needs to install Raytheon brand cameras in everyone's toilet and subcontract to Amazon to monitor the feeds (lol, what deficit?), that bill gets passed in ten minutes flat, but anything that actually helps anybody seems to be dead on arrival.

They've lost faith in our republic, and rightly so; it's done precious little to inspire any in the 20 years I've been paying attention. So, they're ready to choose their benevolent dictator in everything but name to come and just fix everything. I think the thing that they really believe about Trump is that he can destroy the republic, because the republic is something that deserves to die (in their view). They're ready to give Christian Nationalism a chance, to see if the HOA of religiosity really can fix America (spoiler alert). Obviously, it won't, but by the point that reality dawns on MAGA, the fuckheads purposely trying to erode our democracy for their own personal gain will already be too deeply engrained in the system and in control of the reaper drones to do anything about it.

To be honest, it seems to me like this is a really strong signal for socialists and communists to try and start making some inroads. People are desperate for something different, and the only people that seem to have been successful at getting themselves out there are the fascists. No matter what, though, the fundamental truth here is that everybody knows that the US is in a bad fucking way and anyone claiming otherwise is probably lying and doing it for the wrong reasons. What we're seeing here is a deeply misguided attempt to reckon with that truth.