Let me save you some time (so you don’t have to read this) – “Sorry not sorry kinda about our fear…I mean you’re afraid I’m not afraid – none of us are. Cut the track. America!” Scroll on past. It’s just more of my trying to find some heart, wounded or otherwise, in all the hair and teeth.
No? You’re not busy? Alright…
Whatever my politics, this gives me no I-told-you-so pleasure. There is nothing satisfying about watching fear turn into despair and despair turn into blame, especially after so much pain has already been pushed outward, weaponized, and spent, including war.
No one is immune to the seduction of a tribe that turns confusion into certainty and fear into belonging. Humans, man…
MAGA did not rise out of nowhere, and it was never just policy in a red hat. It came together because a lot of people had been living for years with the feeling that the ground under them was shifting, that the institutions above them were either lying or laughing, and that whatever old script they had for manhood, work, belonging, country, and the future no longer matched the world in front of them.
Into that confusion came something cozier than policy and meaner than comfort. It said: you are not crazy, you are not weak, you were actually cheated, your losses are real, your enemies exist and are ready to take over, and here is the guy who will say so without flinching. Might also dance a little. That does more than persuade people, it gathers them and gives frightened crowd the relief of hearing their private dread spoken aloud in public by someone who does not look ashamed of it. *cue dance
Fear is too hard to deal with internally, far simpler to give it a villainous face and a crowd pointing in the same direction. A shared enemy and a dash of panic starts feeling like brotherhood; people can feel brave when they’re unified by a common fear, and after a while they stop being able to tell the difference. The brain chemistry behind that is how radicalization happens. Science!
Tell people what their fear means, and you’ve taken the first negotiation step toward telling them what to think. A little mantra for their grievance, merch table. Branded bibles BOGO.
Which is why the infighting now feels less shocking than inevitable. If a movement is held together by grievance, loyalty, restoration, and one central interpreter of reality, then the moment the promises stop fitting neatly together, the old uncertainty comes back inside the house. Once that doubt gets inside a tribe, the tribe does what tribes do: it looks for betrayal, purity, succession, and for somebody to blame. For a newer and more faithful version of the old spell. Tribes gonna tribe.
That does not make MAGA uniquely evil. It makes it recognizably human, which is almost worse because now the rest of us have to admit we are looking at a machine built out of familiar parts.
The deeper problem is that the chasm which helped create all this is still there. Men feel isolated, historically a bad recipe; lonely people distrusting institutions flocking to the funhouse mirror of an internet and calling it a community. The movement that once gathered all that fear into one identity is simply less able to keep its own contradictions buried.
So the better question may not be why MAGA is fighting itself now, but what in this country is still broken enough that millions of people needed that kind of movement in the first place, what is still broken enough that even as it splinters, the pangs underneath haven’t subsided?
The machine didn’t give me my Kit-Kat.
If the wound is still there then this is just practice for next time.
That part should scare all of us.
Be good to each other.