"An attack on liberty for the sake of power ..."

For those of us unmoved by the supposed attractions of the MAGA movement and its felonious leader, it's all too easy to keep coming back to the question: what's wrong with these people? Why do they recoil from the possibility of a more humane, more just, more diverse country for all of us in order to latch on to a con man?

As in most broad movements, there are certainly multiple individual answers. Greed is not the only one. I think conservative New York Times pundit David French, who has been ejected from that set for rejecting MAGA, sees an additional explanation all too clearly:

... So why are parts of the right so discontent? The answer lies in the difference between power and liberty. One of the most important stories of the last century — from the moment the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to state power in 1925, until the present day — is the way in which white Protestants lost power but gained liberty. Many millions are unhappy with the exchange.

Consider the state of the law a century ago. Until the expansion of the Bill of Rights (called “incorporation”) to apply to the states, if you controlled your state and wanted to destroy your enemies, you could oppress them to a remarkable degree. You could deprive them of free speech, you could deprive them of due process, you could force them to pray and read state-approved versions of the Bible.

The criminal justice system could be its own special form of hell. Indigent criminal defendants lacked lawyers, prison conditions were often brutal at a level that would shock the modern conscience, and local law enforcement officers had no real constitutional constraints on their ability to search American citizens and seize their property.

Powerful people often experience their power as a kind of freedom. A king can feel perfectly free to do what he wants, for example, but that’s not the same thing as liberty. Looked at properly, liberty is the doctrine that defies power. It’s liberty that enables us to exercise our rights. Think of the difference between power and liberty like this — power gives the powerful freedom of action. Liberty, by contrast, protects your freedom of action from the powerful.

At their core, right-wing attacks on the modern Constitution are an attack on liberty for the sake of power. An entire class of Americans looks back at decades past and has no memory (or pretends to have no memory) — of marginalization and oppression. They could do what they wanted, when they wanted and to whom they wanted.

Now they don’t have that same control. It’s not just that Catholics and Protestants have equal rights (a relatively recent development), it’s that Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Buddhists and atheists all approach the public square with the same liberties. Drag queens have the same free speech rights as pastors, and many Americans are livid as a result.

That last seems a fine, uncomfortable, contribution from a right wing Christian to Pride month! 

It's all too easy for me to see in French's description all too many local mid-American elites (like the kind I grew up around) who find MAGA so attractive.