A detailed look at why MAGA is here to stay

lol

What about Greyparrotabla?

😁

lol

We DO NOT HAVE TO buy from China.  America is seeking new trade relationships from other nations, particularly, Mexico.  If Mexico can produce cheap items OR buy the Chinese goods and have trucked into America, then the price do not have to increase all that much or at all.  

There are other trade options other than taking the tariff hit with China.  The Tariffs are a way to slow China's economy and bringing them to the negotiation table without having to flex any military muscles.  The only way we can complete this is to keep the government out of our trade deals, like Trump wants to do, so we can maintain world economic dominance.  Otherwise, Russia and China are starting to buddy up with the Brixit stuff which is pushing the US dollar out of popularity.

So you want to ban Chinese goods because they are cheap, but then you will seek products that are cheap from other countries?

Omg

Thats great news for anyone who doesnt understand how economy works.

preferably ones who don't want to nuke us to the planet core.

And not buying cheap chinese products will prevent China from nuking you.

It totally wont cause China to export to other countries and increase more in their wishing to nuke you or destroy you.

Based.

Its worthy to send Americans into poverty and deny US buisnesses of cheaper resources just so that China can redirect 10% of its export and grow more hostile to USA.

Trully, a mastermind you are!

Yesh you are! Yesh you are!

Based.

The transition of "MAGA" from a lazy campaign slogan recycled from the Reagan era to a descriptor for an entire wing of the Republican Party is fascinating, because it doesn't seem to clearly stand for anything that other Republicans don't, making it unclear how it could survive losing the one common denominator uniting them under the label (Trump).

My explanation would be that politics in America are a game of musical chairs. Parties will switch positions; for example, RFK would've been rather unambiguously a Democrat in the mid to late 20th century but now his views are more fashionable among Republicans. Or the GOP being anti-tariffs and pro-free trade before Trump, with Democrats like Sanders embodying the opposite vision, but now they've switched places. This naturally arises from the constant struggle to poach one demographic or another from the enemy camp, which produces tensions within the party that the other side can then exploit. One side gets a short-term advantage but a sort of equilibrium eventually takes hold, and at the end of this cycle neither party is quite the same as it was when it started. The Trump-era GOP is merely the latest iteration of partisan evolution in America.

As for why Trump specifically won in 2024, it'd be a mistake to think this is some historic moment that means the death knell for Democrats. Dems were gloating about Republican underperformance in the 2022 midterms and not so subtly making this same assumption about future Republican prospects, only for the tables to turn 2 years later. I'll say that in 2022, the typical middle class moderate who wants stability and instinctively dislikes extremism was most worried about Trump's behavior in the aftermath of 2020 and voted accordingly. Two years later, the over-the-top hysterical fearmongering from the media about Trump getting re-elected, and the unironic demand that all Republicans render their political goals and hopes of representation in the Federal Government subservient to the single-minded goal of defeating Trump and putting a hardcore progressive in the White House for 4 years or else they're voting for Hitler, struck them as more worrying and extreme than Trump himself, and the post-election meltdowns that I've read over the last 2 days were unlikely to make them regret their vote.

VP Harris faced a paradox: she couldn't simultaneously frame herself as a moderate (re: court that moderate vote) and participate in the fearmongering. But she didn't understand this, so she both tried to come across as a unifying figure with an amorphous, poorly articulated platform and blatantly called Trump a fascist just a few days before the election. In hindsight she should've picked one or the other.

It was the death knell for the democrats. I don't have time for detailed reasoning but from studying historical trends and seeing g the chess pieces moving. The democratic establishment is oddly copying up to Trump. So in 2028 you will literally have democrats saying how much more MAGA they ate than Ramaswamy or whoever wins the Republican nomination. 

That and inflation. Every Dem I've come across has obstinately downplayed how awful inflation has been for vast swaths of the voting public who haven't gotten major payraises in the last 4 years. They should've acknowledged the problem and focused their energies on blaming Trump/Republicans for it, instead of trying to gaslight tens of millions of Americans that their struggles aren't real. Instead, they effectively conceded the issue to their opponents, and that was one issue they couldn't afford to do this on.

Abortion bans are, unfortunately, unpopular, and so was Dobbs v. Jackson, but in practice the outrage stemming from this issue was only enough to win Democrats one election (the 2022 midterms). Republicans were never going to get enough House or Senate seats to pass a Federal abortion ban given the filibuster, and "only" 3 out of the 7 swing states in this election had abortion bans in effect of any kind. Of these, only one (Georgia) has a serious 6-week ban, with North Carolina's 12 weeks and Arizona's 15 weeks making abortion effectively still accessible for any woman who knows early on she doesn't want to be a mother. So the issue didn't personally affect enough women living in the right states to make a difference this time around.

It stands for anti-establishment republican. Or opposition to the deep state.

The only "non-MAGA" republicans are those too gullible to realize the institutions they're standing by are subverted. Not talking about Liz Cheney, she knew she was lying and conspired to suppress evidence. I mean those vanishingly few "never trumpers" or "Lincoln Project" (the ones who aren't pretending to be neo nazis with tiki torches).

I don't.

You mentioned the rise of Christianity but we don't have good data on how it spread, given how long ago this happened, how little surviving literary output the Roman Empire produced to say nothing of detailed census records, the fact that it was a relatively underground movement at the time, and that its jump from 5-10% of the population to the majority religion happened after Constantine legalized and favored it.

The vast bulk of Church Father writings are from the 3rd century or later, and surviving tracts against the Christians are far less numerous than those favorable accounts the Christians wrote about themselves. We have a vague sense of what the Romans accused them of - impropriety to the old gods, disloyalty to the Emperor, being Jews (I.e. part of the religion that perpetrated the genocidal Kitos War against their gentile neighbors), sexual immorality and cannibalism in their secretive religious rites, being ignorant and low class, etc. But these may be post-hoc justifications for disliking a group they already disliked; for instance, it's obvious to us now that early Communion was a harmless rite, the writings of Paul were quite sophisticated at times, the Christians had no affiliation with Jewish nationalist movements (who hated and persecuted them), and there were affluent Christians, evidenced by the existence of literate Church Fathers.

I should also mention sex. It probably made little difference to the average White male voter whether VP Harris was a man or a woman, as she didn't run a misandrist campaign that would've turned them off, but minority groups often have a machismo culture, and men from these groups might've been seriously reluctant to vote for a woman whatever her politics. But since minority groups are like half of the Democratic base, Harris couldn't afford to lose them. Trump won an astonishing 64% of the Native American vote, and a greater share of the Latino vote than he did in 2020, nearing 50%. My guess is, Native American and Latino men are disproportionately responsible for this outcome.

This is, obviously, not the only reason, since Hillary did fine with minorities in 2016. Perhaps her mix of high-level experience as former Secretary of State, and association with and "proper" feminine-coded loyalty to a powerful man (Bill Clinton), helped her overcome these hurdles.

Or Hispanics are overwhelmingly catholic and every ad Harris put on tv was about abortion.