DEI/CRT vs. MAGA: The Acronym Civil War

Donald Trump's Attorney General Bill Barr famously stood up to him after the 2020 election when the former President was proclaiming widespread voting fraud, telling him to his face that what he was saying was "BS".  Barr went on to write a book a year later documenting his highly critical response to the final weeks of Trump's Presidency leading up to January 6th, and was lauded by his former political critics as a profile in courage for drawing a line in the sand in indulging Trump's threat to democracy.  Nonetheless, when pressed on if he'd vote for Trump again if he was the Republican nominee in 2024, Barr said that he would.  As unfit as he believed Trump to be for the office, Barr insisted that he believes that "the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic Party".

Shortly after this astonishing statement, Bill Maher interviewed Barr and asked him what could possibly be more troubling about the "progressive agenda" than the guy who tried to usurp the results of a democratically held election.  Barr's response:  "What happens in our country on a daily basis makes the McCarthy era look like child's play".  Barr submitted that the threat to democracy is not limited exclusively to the running of elections, and that everything else is downstream from public discourse that's under attack by the gatekeepers of the modern left, who are of course aligned with the Democratic Party.

As it applies to this year's Presidential election, I'm curious how many voters out there resemble former Attorney General Barr.  We're generally conditioned to believe that there are only two kinds of voters in America:  those who adore Donald Trump and would lay down their lives for him, and those who despise him to their core.  But what about people like Barr who concede that Donald Trump is temperamentally dangerous and definitively ill-suited for the office of the Presidency, but will still hold their nose and vote for him because they see an even bigger threat to American ideals coming from Trump's alternative?  This gets at something deeper than the usual caricature of a Trump skeptic who still votes for him--that of a selfish miser who just wants to see his taxes stay low--and the number of people who fit this profile will probably determine the 2024 election outcome.

Whoever wins in November, it'll almost certainly be a game of inches amidst an electorate that is simultaneously evenly divided yet in a perpetual state of rapid realignment.  And while a divided and/or realigning electorate is nothing new, the stakes seem much more existential today based on the breadth of the culture war that Bill Barr spelled out, and whether one agrees or disagrees with Barr's conclusion, it's hard not to recognize the diametrically opposed end zones on the playing field.

Over the course of the 2010s, the energy on the left became increasingly directed toward cleansing historical injustices.  This manifested itself in a number of ways that became tangible by the time the 2016 election came around, but after Donald Trump became President, social justice advocates and their cynical sometimes-allies in the corporate boardroom doubled down and then doubled down again on their expansion-pack list of cultural grievances, and on excoriating those who disagreed with them as bigots.  It's hard to say completely whether the original election of Donald Trump was a backlash to the early stages of the "woke revolution", but it's very hard to deny that voters who've cast ballots for Republicans since then have done so mostly because they share Bill Barr's perception of a political establishment determined to use whatever force may be necessary to either silence their critics or coerce them into fealty and conformity.

And unfortunately, I can't dismiss or shrug off their concerns.  Foot soldiers of the left have pushed things ridiculously far in the last decade, bulldozing into effect codified policies of intolerance masquerading as tolerance in nearly every public space and bestowing fear of ruinous reprisal for those who challenge them or who have ever made mistakes in the past.  Working-class Americans, predictably, began to see the left as a direct and menacing threat to their livelihood, and with a little help from conservative media and far too many trigger-happy elected officials with D's next to their name, connected the dots of what they'd long seen as the party of the working person to the party that constantly lectures them about their white privilege and wouldn't hesitate to render them unemployable if they wore blackface to a Halloween party in 1984 or if they'd slapped a woman's ass in a bar in 1984.

As "cancel culture" became a meme during Trump's first term, the "MAGA" logo on their red hats took on a somewhat evolved meaning.  If it had primarily represented rebuilding the lost manufacturing base and cracking down on illegal border entry from Latin countries in 2016, by 2020 and beyond "MAGA" has became more of a primal scream by a large and mostly downscale demographic of Americans who have calculated, and not incorrectly, that their liberty and the pursuit of happiness is being sacrificed on the altar of reparation because of the sins of their fathers.  And as it turns out, blood guilt is not  particularly saleable as a political platform to millions of voters who want elected officials to empathize with their concerns rather than foment a culture even more strife with risk predicated on events that occurred before they were born.  The prospect of passing along this culture of blood guilt shaming to their children and grandchildren only further raises the stakes in the eyes of those who feel they're playing defense in a war waged against them.

Not only has this dynamic helped make these voters vulnerable to the festering grievance agenda of an autocratic madman, it's made them sympathetic to his proclamations of state persecution at the hands of the very people they see as having silenced themselves.  Add in the echo chamber of algorithmically selected modern media constantly reinforcing a single toxic narrative with little to no counterpoint and you get the equivalent of a rebel army willing to enter the U.S. Capitol through force to exact vengeance on those they believe to be responsible for their vanishing autonomy over their own lives.  The civil war has become so rigid that millions of people on the MAGA side have waged a boycott over Bud Light beer based on a promotional campaign that they thought was a hat tip to wearers of the opposing cultural jersey, driving Bud Light's sales down by nearly 30%.  A fever that burns this hot is unlikely to cool anytime soon, and raises the frightening question of what lengths they would go to on behalf of torching the enemy's base camp to the ground in this de facto wartime footing.

I'm in no way defending the scores of millions of Americans who remain members of the MAGA fraternity, but it doesn't exactly take a degree in psychology to understand that a backlash this ferocious was inevitable.  And the more too-cute-by-half rejoinders about "critical race theory not being taught in public schools" that contradict either their lived experiences or the examples they continually see on their algorithmically derived media sources, the deeper they will dig their heels in for a cold civil war that, ironically, is in large part being driven by a refusal to let go of the fallout from the official civil war a century and a half ago.

And so it will march on into this November's election and beyond.....a political left that fancies itself as forward-looking but refuses to quit looking back when it comes to deducing the source of inequity....and a political right that wants to go back to an idealized America they once knew and doesn't want to be held accountable for the past that they wish to revere without context.  

Regardless of the 2024 election outcome, who will win this civil war?  It's hard to say for sure because the contours of the culture war constantly evolve in directions that few see coming, but if educational attainment continues to be the primary fault line, then the left is likely in big trouble, not just because there are more people without college degrees than with college degrees, but because the price tag of college degrees has become so inflated that today's generation of young people are eschewing college attendance as less integral to their future by rather astonishing double-digit margins compared to a generation ago.  And perhaps in the biggest irony of all, the primary reason behind the inflation of college degrees that's driving so many young people away from higher education is the expense related to hiring the ever-rising slate of administrators needed to enact and enforce the very undermining of discourse that's driving the acronym civil war in the first place.