What's wrong with MAGA?

This morning I took a swing at the President's preposterous personal insecurity. Let's also take a swing at what ails MAGA, at what has some largish section of our population acting gaga about the Orange Charlatan.

Economic pundit and opinion-slinger Noah Smith thinks he knows:  

The MAGA right sees themselves, fundamentally, as defending Western Civilization against an internal enemy that seeks to destroy it through forced demographic change.

... MAGA believes that they must invest Trump with maximal executive power, in order to prosecute the struggle against the Great Replacement. If Trump has any checks on his power, they believe, then progressive-dominated institutions will drag his whole movement down and stymie it.

... Dictator-like power isn’t an end in and of itself for the MAGA folks. It’s a means to an end — the goal is to fight the Great Replacement. But they realize that increasing executive power to that degree will be difficult. Most Americans don’t want a dictator. Most Americans respect and value the judiciary’s check on executive power.

For some of these folks, clinging to Trump becomes something larger than an outsized response to an imagined threat. The monster they imagine -- the lies fed them by the Trump and oligarchic media machine -- all seems utterly real.

This goes part of the way toward explaining MAGA’s constant “war” language. Yes, they really do see their fight against the Great Replacement as the moral equivalent of war, and the consequences of defeat as being just as grave. But they also need the idea of war in order to legitimize their extreme actions to the public in general. America has historically been willing to allow presidents extremely expanded powers during times of total war — Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR being the prime examples. MAGA wants to convince America that immigration is the country’s next existential war.

But I suspect that MAGA folks are also trying to convince themselves. They were all raised to value American democracy, at least rhetorically. ...

What the rest of can't do is underestimate both the potency of MAGA feelings -- and also the potential strength of resistance to dictatorship in our society.

... the MAGA people are absolutely desperate. They believe the wolf is at their throat, and this is their last chance to save their civilization. So they are trying to talk themselves into being as ruthless as possible — into doing whatever it takes to defeat their enemies. 

I think a lot of the “war” talk is aimed internally — an exhortation by rightists to other rightists not to shy away from doing terrible things. They are saying “war” over and over because they’re trying to talk themselves into doing the kind of things they would do in an actual war. ... 

Smith has faith the American people won't go for MAGA's war.  

... if the right doesn’t take the W, and insists on escalating ad infinitum, it will awaken a sleeping dragon. The American public is quiescent now, exhausted from years of unrest and disgusted with political extremism in general.  

But if Trump becomes an honest-to-God dictator, expect that to change, and expect widespread popular resistance to materialize. Americans don’t like the left, but they also won’t surrender their democracy without a fight. 

I think it is accurate in these December 2025 days to think that Trump is acting as if he must escalate and make his "war" real  -- against Venezuela but also against the American people. So we will see, one way or another.

Noah Smith consistently writes about societal disruption from a posture of equanimity that I find repulsive. Real people get run over amid the changes and trajectories he describes-- especially immigrants, people of color, and anyone missing out on a technological future. That is, quite likely most of us. Smith seems dazzled by the potential vistas he can imagine. 

But that does not mean he is not insightful.