As the MAGA-land crackup gets worse, a few voices plead for sanity

As the MAGA-land crackup gets worse, a few voices plead for sanity

Opinion by 

Greg Sargent

Columnist

Today at 11:15 a.m. EDT

With the right-wing media rabidly agitating to keep Afghan refugees out of our country, the Wall Street Journal editorial board has weighed in with a new call for sanity. The Journal’s editorial calls for resettling refugees here on the grounds that conservative principles require it — and, in so doing, captures a bigger story about our fraught political moment.

“It isn’t conservative to betray a promise to those who fought for us,” the Journal opines, pointing out that many of these refugees worked alongside the United States in Afghanistan. Noting that they’re fleeing the theocratic extremism we fought against, the editorial concludes:

Conservatives claim to believe in American exceptionalism, and they once took pride in welcoming exiles from authoritarian lands. They still court the votes of Cuban, Venezuelan, Korean and Vietnamese immigrants — all as American as anyone. Afghans who fought with us deserve no less.

This gets at something essential about our politics. On multiple fronts, as the MAGA movement sinks deeper into conspiracy theories, hostility to democracy, fondness for authoritarianism, bloodthirsty hatred of legitimate political opposition, ethno-nationalist cruelty, seething contempt for basic public health measures, and deific devotion to Donald Trump, a few voices are vainly trying to reach MAGA devotees with appeals to conservative principles.

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But this is a hopeless endeavor. Which highlights how powerful the pull of those MAGA impulses has grown — and how vulnerable the conservative movement has proved to getting hacked by those impulses, in part because of the tendencies of the movement itself.

‘An insult to the movement’

Consider Arizona. With the sham “audit” of 2020 votes nearing completion, a principled Republican election official has issued an extraordinary call for sanity.

“I will keep fighting for conservatism," the Republican official, Stephen Richer, writes, “but I won’t lie about the election.”

After reminding readers of the conservative movement’s history of “intellectual giants,” Richer insists that allowing the grifters behind the Arizona “audit” to carry the day “would be an insult to the movement.”

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But the entire point of the “audit” is instrumental: It’s designed to concertedly cast doubt on the election system as a test run at manufacturing pretexts for overturning hated outcomes later. Conservative-sounding appeals to respect for rules and procedure cannot reorient that mission, which is designed to replace truth and proceduralism with propaganda and lawlessness.

MAGA and masks

Or what about anti-mask fervor? Some right-leaning writers have tried to dispel this with an appeal to conservative principles. As Megan McArdle says, the idea of self-restraint designed to avoid impinging on the space (or health) of others has a long conservative pedigree.

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“For years, conservatives have explained that public health efforts are a legitimate exercise of government power,” McArdle notes.

Obviously, principled conservatives might question the scope or effectiveness of this or that particular covid-combating mandate. But MAGA-land has crossed over to another place entirely.

MAGA true believers have invested anti-mask sentiment with a kind of higher significance. They attack all mandates as tyrannical by definition — but selectively, applying this almost exclusively to mandates involving covid, which have taken on anti-totemic power.

Indeed, as many have noted — see Paul Krugman and David Graham — the MAGA movement now opposes anti-covid mandates in direct contradiction to conservative principles, showing contempt for local control over schools and the right of individuals to run private businesses as they see fit.

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One might argue that the idea that constraints can be freedom-enhancing has deep conservative roots (and liberal roots of a different sort). That applies here, too — observing checks now might defeat the pandemic and restore normalcy in freedom of movement. But as Max Boot notes, it’s hard to see how such appeals can penetrate the mania we’re seeing.

‘The conservative entertainment complex’

Geoff Kabaservice, author of a history of the decline of GOP moderation, notes that conservatism has often fallen prey to infestation by radical elements. Conservative gatekeepers haven’t policed the boundaries of extremism, and conservatism’s own preoccupations have at times blended effortlessly into toxic forms of radicalism, Kabaservice notes.

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All of this is particularly visible with the rise of MAGA’s takeover of “the modern conservative entertainment complex,” says Kabaservice, a senior researcher at the Niskanen Center. “They hijacked the conservative movement.”

The debate over Afghan refugees captures these tensions. We need to expand a program that extends special visas to Afghans who worked for or on behalf of the U.S. government and expand other avenues for bringing them here.

The conservative case for doing this is obvious, as the Journal editorial shows. But appeals to anti-authoritarianism and honor among allies who fought side by side are weak as straw amid the pull of the MAGA vortex, which features naked performative cruelty toward Afghan refugees and Fox News personalities spreading conspiracy theories that President Biden allowed Afghanistan to collapse to replace U.S. voters with them.

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The lines are blurry. Many (though not all) Republicans have long supported immigration restrictionism and haven’t been too troubled by ethno-nationalist appeals, but haven’t gone as far as the MAGA movement now has.

Similarly, many Republicans oppose public health measures on anti-“big government” grounds; many backed Trump’s lies about the election; and many would have rejoiced if he had stolen it. But not all invest covid-denial and the stolen-election myth with religious significance.

Yet in many ways, MAGAism has obliterated those boundaries, with little resistance from within conservatism itself, Kabaservice notes.

“By my lights, these people are not conservative,” Kabaservice tells me. “But these people are undeniably what the conservative movement is now.”