Thread by @leashless

MAGA is not about white supremacy.

It's much, much worse than that. We confuse all bad things on the far right with racism and Nazism. MAGA is not these things.

MAGA is *nostalgia for pasts that never existed*.

MAGA is the dream of the mythological America that never was.

https://twitter.com/Hopey_70/status/1255524689788776448

MAGA is rooted in myths of at least six different "golden ages": the Revolution, the Confederacy, the 1920s, WW2, the 1950s, and the 1990s.

Groups with allegiances to all of these myths are coming together.

They use the old Republican trick of not talking about differences.

The last Republican Reformation was the Tripod: Christian, Corporate and Constitutional conservatives held their noses and worked together on areas of mutual interest.

This new right wing Grand Alliance is bigger, broader, and even more dangerous because it is rooted in old lies

What people read as racism is nostalgia for the prosperity that slavery brought the South.

How do we know? A black person carrying a rifle and wearing a MAGA hat will experience little to no racism other than occasional careless ignorance. They certainly won't see racial hatred.

Each group in the MAGA alliance has its own pet lies: "slavery was better than being left in Africa" or "people were happy in the 1950s"

The 1950s was the age of self medication as an entire generation of American servicemen with PTSD barely held it together on 3 martini lunches

The agreement between a group of people not to challenge eachother's lies is a signifier the group is capable of doing evil things.

"Just following orders" grows out of this mindset.

kwqc.com/content/news/W…

MAGA has the capacity for great evil because of its ability to lie.

What MAGA provides is a sort of membership club: "if you agree not to challenge us on our lies, we won't challenge you on yours."

Global warming is a hoax, not taxing billionaires helps the poor, affirmative action is racism etc.

The whole platform is made from overlapping lies

Each group in the MAGA pact brings its own lies to the grand alliance, lies for them to defend.

But there is no underlying world model into which all these pieces fit. It's not a philosophy or a perspective. It's a pact: a social operating system based on denial of the truth.

Any group with a bad lie they want to defend can join the MAGA pact by showing willingness to defend the pact lies. Let me stress this is not an ideology. YOU CAN'T ATTACK IT BY POINTING OUT INCONSISTENCIES.

Nobody in the pact thinks it is consistent: it is not a world model.

The US lost in Iraq because they acted like were fighting a government. They could not conceive the enemy was anarchic.

Similarly, model-and-ideology people lose when trying to fight MAGA.

MAGA people *know* MAGA is made of lies. They don't care: they're all in it together.

Ironically, to beat MAGA, you have to cross one of 3 bridges:

1) a single ideological container into which all progressive causes fit

2) a "MAGA of the Left" built on lies

3) an "agree to disagree" and we will sort it out once we take power approach

I'll examine each in turn

The single ideological container is "Progressive Transhumanism." The benefits of technology must be equally shared by all. The purpose of the global economy is to progress and safeguard life on earth.

A pan-species future-oriented democratic socialism: "The Culture" meets Sweden

That's basically Beto O'Rourke takes over the Democratic party and remakes it in Elon Musk's image, folding in Al Gore and the Netroots movement from 2008 into a grand alliance.

It's not that unlikely: Silicon Valley is getting pretty desperate, might open wallets.

That's basically Beto O'Rourke takes over the Democratic party and remakes it in Elon Musk's image, folding in Al Gore and the Netroots movement from 2008 into a grand alliance.

It's not that unlikely: Silicon Valley is getting pretty desperate, might open wallets soon.

The "MAGA of the Left" is already started, but is pathetic. Any one of you can point at half a dozen utter absurdities being screamed about by one faction or another, my favorite being anti-civilization green activists who espouse policies which would kill billions of people.

This leaves "agree to disagree" - everybody works together for now, but once we take power, we'll sort it all out when the time comes to make legislation.

That was broadly the approach of the UK labour party. That did not go so well for Corbyn. The party fell apart on tactics.

In this framing, you need a pact build on implementing truths which have not been widely accepted yet: global warming is real, technology is the dominant force in society, scarcity is largely made by bad politics

High tech bread and circuses meets the Entrepreneurial State model

Unfortunately I don't see anybody that vision could coalesce around, except Elon Musk, and he's under so much pressure from carrying 1) solar panels, 2) batteries, 3) electric cars, 4) rocket ships, 5) Starlink global satellite internet, and 6) direct neural interface

He's busy.

I want to note how improbable it looks that progressives can get up this hill

That's where Greta Thunberg comes in. She, or the next two dozen inspired by her, or the 40,000 inspired by them, are the people most likely to solve this problem

They're born in broken post-scarcity

Being able to see infinite wealth squandered on obscene short term goals while people are starving in the streets is the hallmark experience of the young.

They know we could have and should have fixed it, but we collectively dropped the ball after 9/11, leaving a wasteland.

To make it fly, you need an intergenerational alliance: wise 60s radicals and progressives, generation x bureaucratic implementers and lawyers, and 23 year old kids who understand what the technology *could do* for society, if only old people would get out of the way.

#NewPACT

Older people cannot see the present. They can only see the present filtered through the past. I'm only 48 and it's seriously catching up with me. It's very difficult to see the world as it is rather than as a continuation of the world that I knew when I was young.

1990s optimism

If you want to build a world where the young can thrive, you better ask them what they want.

It's a very serious challenge to build a new model which will hold together up the inevitable multiple intersecting exponential curves of the 21st century.

Now imagine planning for kids

Say you're 23 years old today, and you're sure you want two or three kids: your basic sense of self is as a parent.

What do you *do* to make this goal real, given how bad the long term future looks?

Two options: denial (MAGA), or fix the future

We need a "fix the future" party

That's the core challenge: a "fix the future" party looks very different to a "fix the present" party.

You have to defer fixing paper cuts in the present if you want to fix annihilation in the future. It's an exercise in politica delayed gratification.

China and one child, say.

And that's where we are: 23 year old kids need us to divert resources away from pointless status-based consumption games in the present, towards stabilizing the ecosystem so they don't have to watch their *kids* starve on a desert world as global warming annihilates agriculture.

Compared to what the future is going to throw at us, covid isn't even a speed bump. In places like New Zealand and Vietnam they did scientifically reasonable things and had practically no deaths.

That's how handling global warming should look. Sensible people do rational things.