MAGA has outdone Trump

The Gavin Newsom recall should have been a whole lot closer than it was. If you take a roughly fifty percent approval rating, a forty percent disapproval rating, and split the ten percent undecided, it should have been something like a 55/45 split to keep/recall Newsom. Instead, it went around 64-36. Even the people who didn't approve of the job he was doing were apparently more than a little vexxed at the thought of having Larry Elder as the next governor of California. It's a little hard to blame them, too. Elder is a Trump sycophant who, like many other media figures on the right, seems to make his money from hitting the talk show circuit and reciting the typical talking points about Biden and company.

Could the Republicans have won California? It's a good question, but I don't think it's going to be answered, because the Republicans do a great job of self-sabotage without appealing to the MAGA crowd. Elder became the front runner on the right because of that support, though he ironically probably lost support by saying that 2020 wasn't stolen from Trump. You either have to go all-in with your unhinged supporters or have to completely repudiate them. Trying to sleep in two beds at once means you're not going to score with either camp. A moderate Republican who embraced many of California's common social positions, combined with some common sense around reversing course on the long decline of California's cities, economies, tax base, and so on, would have probably been a slam dunk.

The problem with that sort of candidate is that they are not going to appeal to the MAGA Republicans, and in fact will be savaged by them if they don't at least give lip service to some of the MAGA talking points. If they give attention to the MAGA crowd, then they are going to be caught in that trap of being associated with lunatics like Sidney Powell and Alex Jones. So, in a divided nation, trying to run on the ticket of a divided party is a guaranteed loss. Of course, the usual lame bleatings about "voter fraud" will be trotted out. Let's face it - in a nation this size, with this many voters, there is bound to be some issues somewhere. Even if the amount of fraud was to be so gigantic that it could shift a percentage point or more, the fact is that even if you like a candidate, other people might not.

The emergence of a political cult like MAGA is really something unprecedented in a western nation that has a system of universal suffrage and a well-designed set of electoral laws that have worked pretty well for quite a while now. Some years ago, I described the Tea Party as modern-day Jacobins. While people didn't accept that thesis, because they concentrated on the superficial differences, the reality is that the people who drove the French Revolution came from the upper middle classes who had no real reason to revolt against the government and established order outside of ideological reasons. MAGA supporters are generally older, established in the middle class, often owning their own business, being successful in life, and so on. Their success was made possible within the very framework they want to tear down. In spite of the myth of individual grit, a lot of small businesses are built with the help of the government and taxpayers.

MAGA itself right now is not generally a violent political movement, but could that change down the road? I think the fact that you still see people driving around with Trump flags shows that people aren't ready to let go of things. If nothing more, it proves their political naivete, as they'd be otherwise busy trying to figure out where things with Trump went wrong and working to win elections in realistic ways instead of whispering about one conspiracy or another. The more you live in that echo chamber, though, the more you start to feel a little messianic and the unthinkable begins to feel more and more thinkable. The crowding out of differing opinions removes the opportunity for checks and balances on your thinking, and you get more gullible and easier to manipulate. It would take next to nothing to get a new conspiracy theory started, and has been proven out with the Q nonsense. Unfortunately, the "us or them" mindset is what does leave to political violence.

Next year are off-cycle Congressional races, and everyone will be looking to 2024 after that. It doesn't seem likely that tempers are going to cool much before then, especially since that economy is still faltering, people have no faith in government, the media exists to ramp up tensions, and covid is still a problem. It's in petri dishes like this that real extremism grows.