In March 2018, David Roberts wrote a piece in Vox bemoaning the state of the op-ed page of the New York Times; the main thrust being that these pages do not have enough diversity of opinion, but particularly, he stated that while it carries some conservatives, these authors do not reflect the madness of US conservative politics; they are “alienated from the animating force of US conservatism, which is Trumpism”1. One of the paragraphs that struck a chord with me was the following:
“So what motivates this swell of right-wing support for Trump? At this point, though many people on all sides still refuse to acknowledge it, the evidence is overwhelming: It was cultural backlash, against immigrants, minorities, uppity women, liberals, and all the other forces seen as dislodging traditional white men from their centrality in American culture.”1
It is also a backlash against science, one of the most important processes of the modern world, and which many MAGAts, including Trump, are clearly incapable of understanding. Those Project 2025 christofascists behind Trump are against science, as it conflicts with parts of their religious belief. The progress of science has made the realms occupied by religion progressively smaller, such that the god of the religious has become the god of the ever decreasing gaps. As someone jokingly said online, religion arose at a time when humans didn’t know where the sun went at night. Stephen Gould tried to explain that religion and science occupy “separate magisteria”2. This could be the case if the religious would stick to their own shrinking magisterium, but the silly buggers keep trying to deny some aspects of science, such as genetics, evolution, radioisotopic dating and sundry others. This has come into sharp focus with the idiocy of the Project 2025 damaging research such that there has been a brain drain of scientists leaving the US. This only makes the religious look ridiculous, and I suspect is one of their activities which is leading to the decline of religion around the world. It will also damage the US for decades to come.
It is also a backlash against education, which many MAGAts do not have, either because they were incapable or were denied the opportunity. While this may sound derogatory, it isn’t. I know many people who were probably capable of getting an education, but were denied the chance. Two of the latter were my parents. However, they didn’t resent those who had an education. In fact, I think they wondered what their life would have been like if they had an education, so they supported me enormously throughout mine. But I digress. I suspect the backlash against education is because the educated tend to be non-religious, and this makes the religious nervous. That is why they rail against ‘indoctrination’ in schools and universities, screaming about ‘cultural Marxism’3, another of their non-existent targets of hate, with which they befuddle the uneducated. As my father once said to me: ‘university has changed you; you don’t judge people by the way they look any more’. In the US, Trumpist politicians and their MAGAt followers, quite often judge people by the way they look, and quite commonly imprison them for being a bit browner than is acceptable for white supremacists.
Sources
‘Cultural Marxism’ was what the pre WWII German NSDAP used to rail against using the Frankfurt School as its target; nowadays ‘woke’.
Many in the US view the right according to the taxonomy of fossil fuel ‘free market’ Koch and anti-immigrant ‘great replacement’ Tanton Network attracting implicit support via fulcrum FoxNews; both have had long term presence in Anglosphere.
On the latter how? Targeting middle aged and older dominated by the ‘boomer bomb’ who are monocultural, less educated and less access to good media.
Also prone to disinformation, radicalisation, collective narcissism and pensioner populism; see Brexit, Trump, Australia the indigenous Voice No campaign and similar in Canada, with Atlas Koch and Tanton Networks in background.