Why MAGA?

 

Why MAGA?

 Much of the discussion of America’s political disaster has to do with the character of Donald Trump, and that is an endlessly fascinating topic. Even more fascinating, I think, is the question of why so many people support him. He won two elections (not three as he claims) and even at the low point of his popularity, now, polls show him with the support of 30% to 40% of the electorate. This in spite of the fact that he is at the very least unbalanced, and that many of his policies, including tariffs and the war, harm his followers, as well as the rest of us. What is going on?

 Many people have tried to explain it. There has been an explosion of academic studies—theoretical, qualitative and statistical—showing how white, non-college-educated voters have shifted radically over a generation from the Democratic to the Republican Party. The shift began well before Trump came on the political scene, but when he arrived he embodied it. I think the explanations for the shift fall in three broad categories: 

1.     Cultural resentment

2.     Racism

3.     Income distribution

 They are all valid, and they overlap.

 Cultural resentment.

 An early, influential statement of this position was contained in Thomas Frank’s 2005 What’s the Matter with Kansas? Written long before the Trump regime, it predicted accurately the MAGA movement that followed.

 Frank was interested in why the people of Kansas, with some of the lowest incomes in the country, supported the Republican Party which in turn supported the interests of big business, not the interests of the disadvantaged.

The answer, Frank claimed, had nothing to do with economic disadvantage, and everything to do with cultural resentment. To the good people of Kansas, the Democratic Party stood for abortion, filth on TV, environmental restrictions, mind-altering drugs, atheism, feminism and other policies that violated the values on which their society rested. The Republican Party, in contrast, stood for old-fashioned American values, like hard work, patriotism, the church, anti-communism and the sanctity of marriage.

 This was no small matter. The Kansans saw their culture slipping away from them, and they took a stand with the Republicans to block the slippage.

 The sentiment is captured in Merle Haggard’s song, “Okie from Muskogee:”

 We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee

We don't take our trips on LSD

We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street

'Cause we like livin' right, and bein' free

I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee

A place where even squares can have a ball

We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse

And white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all

The song might have been intended ironically—who knows?—but it tapped into the spirit of the time.

 An important sub-section of the cultural-resentment theme is fundamentalist Christianity. Both Catholic and Protestant fundamentalists see themselves as threatened in an increasingly secular country, and they strangely view Donald Trump as a barrier against secularism.

 More than two decades after Frank’s book appeared, we can see now that what he described is one of the foundations of the MAGA movement. It doesn’t matter that Trump is a corrupt, amoral, sociopathic billionaire; what matters is that he is seen as leading the battle against cultural collapse.

 Racism

 African slavery, and the racism that was embedded in it, are America’s original sin. Slavery was ended by the Union’s victory in the Civil War, but not racism. After the war, the era of Reconstruction lasted only a short time, and the white South was soon free to institute its murderous regime of Jim Crow. The racism was not confined to the south; most northern whites opposed slavery, but after the war they did not welcome Black people as friends and neighbors. Jim Crow lasted for a hundred years after the end of the war, until the victories of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

 Those victories were important, but they were incomplete. Part of the problem was that the Civil Rights Movement fractured in competing philosophies of non-violence and inclusion versus black power, and part was that the country’s attention and resources were consumed in the disastrous Vietnam War. The country never became unified in the way that Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed of. Perhaps the victories could never have been complete because racism was so much a foundation of the culture.

 In the years since the Civil Rights Movement, racism has been complicated and intensified by non-Anglo immigration. In the 1960s, Anglos were 90% of the US population; now they are 60% and headed for a minority. This is another reason why many old-timers feel their country is slipping away from them.

 I don’t want to make this too simple. Anglos are divided, to say the least, on the issue of race. Some non-Anglos are in the MAGA movement, supporting Trump and the Republican Party.

 But racism is fundamental to MAGA. It is central, for example, to the anti-immigration stance. Trump could not have been clearer about this when he wished aloud for more immigrants from Norway, and fewer from the “shithole” countries of the world.

 MAGA would not be MAGA without white racism.

 Income Distribution

 The political effects of the changing income distribution are partially hidden, but I think they may be the most important of all.

 We don’t have good data on income distribution before the Second World War, but for the period since then we do. We can measure who gets what in terms of both income and wealth. [Income is what comes in; wealth is what you have.] They both show the same picture. In the three decades between the end of the war and about 1975, the gap between the rich and the poor narrowed, and the poverty rate tumbled, not only in the US but in all the countries of the Western world. The “middle class” grew faster than either the rich or the poor. Then the situation reversed. In the half century between 1975 and now, the gap between the rich and the poor rose, and the middle class stopped expanding. A great deal more income and wealth were generated in that half-century, and almost all of it went to the people at the top. Some estimates show that the lower half of the American population enjoyed no increase at all in real income (after discounting for inflation).

 Among the many insightful reports on this change, I will mention two.

 The French economist Thomas Piketty’s masterful book, Capital in the 21^st Century, documents the transformation in the distribution of wealth in many countries, including the US. Piketty’s view is that the blame for the regressive change in the distribution of wealth lies not so much with right-wing political actors as with underlying economic and technological forces. I won’t go into his argument here (you should read the book), but will only say that if he is right, it will be difficult to turn the trend around. The only policy that he thinks would stand a chance would be a uniform, world-wide, progressive tax on wealth—and you know how likely that is.The sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land reports on a semi-rural white community in Louisiana. Her research occurred before the first Trump presidency, but it is clear that her informants would become MAGA supporters. They saw themselves as a column of people slowly climbing a mountain, and when they reached the top they would attain “the American dream.” Recently, however, their progress has been blocked. Why? Because unworthy people have illegitimately been plunked down in front of their column. Who? Minorities, women, immigrants. Representing all of them were the most unworthy of all, Barack and Michelle Obama.

 Hochschild’s story resonates with me. I have been following the data on income distribution and poverty for decades. I have been sure that such a marked change in the composition of the country must have major political consequences, but I have been uncertain what those consequences would be. I hoped that it would lead to a resurgence of the labor movement and the emergence of what some are calling democratic socialism. I am a partisan of Bernie Sanders and the squad. Well, the followers of Bernie Sanders and the squad have had somewhat of a rebirth. The larger political consequence of the rising gap between rich and poor is, however, the opposite. It is the expansion of right-wing populism, the MAGA movement, whose flag bearer is not Bernie Sanders but Donald Trump.

 In summary

 I said at the top that these explanations overlap, and they certainly do. In particular, if Frank is read as saying that cultural resentment is the only cause, he is wrong. Hochschild’s Louisiana respondents saw their blocked progress up the mountainside in economic terms, and their explanation of the blockage was largely racist. Simple explanations of social movements are almost always…too simple.

 It is important, however, to try to understand the basis of our current political catastrophe. I have no doubt it is a catastrophe. Even if the elections turn out better in the future, the damage will be lasting. If they don’t turn out better, we could be heading towards fascism. I think that the basis is a combination of cultural resentment, racism and a growing, unbridgeable gap between rich and poor.

 John Isbister

July 4, 2026