The MAGA movement will not be shamed by pointing out the basic features of a liberal pluralist democracy. They don't believe in any of it. They see it as a weakness, something that merely holds them back or slows their efforts to reshape their world.
I’m not sure if the penny will ever drop. It’s been clear for the past few years that Trump's base believes that rights-based democratic values do not serve their interests and so must be critically diminished.
I wrote a version of this thread on twitter over 4 years ago & noted that there seemed to be an inability to accept that there is a considerable political movement in the U.S. which is fundamentally anti-democratic. A burgeoning proto-fascism that is believed in as a way to achieve *shared* aims.
Has that denialism been shattered by the recent Supreme Court decision to grant sweeping immunity (retrospectively to Trump) and to future Presidents to do as they wish with no regard for the law under the pretext of 'official acts'? Time will tell.
Huxley: “Propaganda gives force and direction to [movements] of popular feeling and desire; but it does not do much to create those movements. The [propagandist] canalises an already existing stream." (1936)
So this is not and has never been a case of MAGA redhats being hoodwinked by actors/institutions they should be able to trust. That is a naive reading. They are willing followers of a movement which wants to hollow out and change these institutions of the state from the inside out.
This. I grew up in the religious/political fundamentalist right and I’ve spent years trying to explain to credulous liberals that it is *not a misunderstanding.*
The very existence of liberal democracy and human rights for all humans offends such people to their core. They have been here since at least the 1920's (See Butler, Smedley) and they have been slowed down but never truly stopped in pursuit of this project.
