Who Goes MAGA?

Update: Lavin has deleted her essay. If I find out why I’ll post that information.

Thanks to commenter Karen for flagging Talia Lavin’s amusing and disturbing re-write of Dorothy Thompson’s classic 1941 essay “Who Goes Nazi?”

It’s very well done, and would be sobering to any decent person, even after one of Pete Hegseth’s three extra-strong G&T breakfasts. Naturally I found this passage particularly resonant:

Never ceasing to flash his white teeth in a grin or a loud hectoring speech is Mr. J, a brilliant professor of law in a well-tailored sport jacket. You may know the name of Mr. J, who frequently guests on podcasts. Ensconced in legal academia for years, he has long since abandoned having clients. For a time he told himself he luxuriated in the majesty of the law, and certainly he enjoyed aweing his young students. But he has recently, publicly, and provocatively begun to question the precedents of birthright citizenship. 

Within a year Mr. J will be drafted by the administration to create legal justifications for torture and deportation before sham courts, and will revel in it, because he has found that power is the purest intoxicant. He would roll in it if he could. He would bathe in it. He already, after one sip of in the form of a little fame for couching cruelty in Latin jargon, feels drunk on it. If MAGA were a minority movement without power, he would have no truck with it, but because he feels it has a mandate, because he sees it flexing his power, he is drawn to it irresistibly. Before this year, his peers were contemptuous of MAGA; now that they begin to show curiosity, he emulates them, then races ahead of them, and he will be used well by those who take up so adept a tool.

Mrs. G works at the same university, as a top administrator. She has already begun jettisoning diversity programs, rewriting LGBTQ policy, she has already called for a review of the university’s Title IX policies. She sent armed riot cops after genocide-protesting students, and the library wasn’t free of pepper-spray residue for a week. She is not, in herself, staunchly MAGA—or staunchly anything. If ever she was, it is long gone. Now she only feels the shifting sands under her feet, a panic at the potential loss of her personal prestige, and thus a driving need to move from quicksand to safety. She has many analogues, above all, in the nominal opposition party: they are already rebranding themselves and announcing their intentions to cooperate and capitulate. Their ambition is chiefly to save their own hides and hopefully get rich doing it.

Like them, Mrs. G does not care who she leaves behind; indeed, she feels that the more people she leaves to flail the safer she is. This is not necessarily true, but she is a weak reed easily bent, and thus her soul is mortgage to MAGA, whatever pallid ideology she may once have held. By the end of this year, several Black, gay, and/or female professors will have resigned, and she will write brief, regretful letters about it, and never think about them again.

The conclusion is simple and correct:

Who we were born to, who we choose to be on emerging from that chrysalis, what we love and who, these shape us. Nevertheless, who we are is always a choice: every indrawn breath is a choice, too. Nice people do not go MAGA, although people who are respectable and who are good at seeming nice go MAGA all the time. 

That’s what makes the game so fascinating, the game of who goes MAGA: who would choose to drink the poisoned chalice when pushed up against the wall—and who reaches for it with both hands. And why. 

An upbringing or a code, innate instinct, rough experience, empathy or politesse can draw us away from vulgarity and cruelty. Pride and fear, venal self-absorption, a desire for vengeance, cowardice, conformity, jealousy and loneliness can draw us into hate.