It’s Not About the Price of Eggs

It’s about the Cost of Liberal Failings.

This is a placeholder post, but, I hope you will eventually see, an important one. I am using it to preview what I hope many will understand to be a critical insight that we need to factor into all of our thinking, activism, and strategy about how to counter the crisis we are in.

The MAGA faithful don’t care about the price of eggs or of anything else.

The talk of a MAGA cult gets at the real heart of the problem we are facing: The MAGA millions care almost exclusively about the prophesy and promise of a return to a simpler life: one that revolves around faith, family, and clan.

That’s it. That’s the sum of it. That’s the essence of what is polarizing our country.

About 40 % of our people are just lost in the labyrinth of liberal modernity.

While we of the managerial and professional elite have done just fine, thank you very much, millions of Americans have tried and failed to ‘Make it in America.’

And it’s not only that the Neo-Liberal deck of cards has been stacked against the average person for decades.

It’s also that in liberal societies — and in American in particular, the eons-old primacy of family and clan has been usurped by work and civic and other institutional affiliations and responsibilities.

People who live in such ‘evolved’ liberal societies represent only about 5% of the world’s population.

Everyone else lives in cultures that haven’t changed much in millennia. They live in kinship-based cultures where you marry a cousin or a neighbor and live your life within a short walk of one or of another set of parents and relatives.

Most of the world lives and finds meaning and security in societies and cultures closer to that of the Taliban or to village life in Sudan than to that of the professional or administrative manager in a big city, or even to the unionized worker.

And this is true of tens of millions of our own countrymen and women. This is not just true of conservatives. Many liberals have moved into smaller and alternative communities where they tend small farms, pursue crafts, and such.

Think JD Vance and his increasingly insistent talk about the primacy of familial roots buried in a local graveyard going back to the founding of the country. This is not talk that has anything to do with America’s founding egalitarian values or the Constitution.

But, JD Vance is operating within a tradition that has to do with people who come to America and with their progeny who come into this world looking for the small spaces within which they can find and/or create refuges from the larger geopolitical or even local-political forces that lay claim to their blood, sweat, tears, taxes, and progeny.

Right now, for a variety of reasons, many of these people are extremely unhappy. They are done with liberal democracy. They want some of what has been enabled by liberal modernist tech and conveniences, but they want even more fervently very little of what modernism and liberalism does culturally and otherwise to separate and alienate them from what they believe are — and crave as — the basic human kinship relationships that define and sustain a secure and meaningful life.

These tens of millions of our fellow (mostly but not exclusively white) Americans have come to believe that Donald Trump can and will bring back this simpler version of life defined within ‘natural’ patrilineal/patriarchal norms and relationships. They truly believe that ‘Making it in America’ should be about, “It takes a village;” in something closer to what they believe is a ‘state of nature.’

They want what they imagine to be their kinship-centered villages back.

And they are fully convinced that this can — and perhaps must — be achieved by ‘redacting’ from our history and perhaps from our society itself, the impulses and ambitions of the tens of millions of the rest of us who have found some much greater measure of comfort and sustainability within the framework of cultural pluralism and democratic, self-actualizing values.

These are values that the rest of us believe the country has only episodically fought for and adopted over almost two centuries.

And this makes the likes of Peter Thiel and so many of his fellow billionaire oligarchs extremely excited. The Trump/MAGA millions want a return to simple, ‘traditional,’ kinship-centered life. The Thiel/DOGE/and other plutocrats want to deconstruct the liberal state and the elaborate guardrails liberalism has created to contain some of their most extreme and domineering ambitions.

These two forces — MAGA and the new, super-rich megalomaniacs — together could achieve the sort of far more simple, deregulated, worldly monarchical dominion that they believe they have earned and that is the best, most natural way for humans to live in society.

So, this makes for the basic issue:

How and whether we scions of liberal modernism can hope to contain a resurgent populist insurrection against liberal modernism that is backed by a cabal of post-industrial megalomaniacal billionaires with ambitions for national and global domination?

And they have already seized pretty much the entire apparatus of federal power.

Frankly, I don’t know exactly how to answer that question. That’s why this is a placeholder post. We need to figure this out. And soon.

Or else we will find ourselves trying to fight and live through a long, increasingly brutish period of sociopolitical turmoil.

More to come. Please, let’s discuss!

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Jon.