Who Would Do this?

In large part MAGA are not evil. They can't be can they?

In every country there are a number of people who support essentially Fascist ideas. That is, dominance of some sort of “In” group who control the remainder to their benefit. I believe that this is invariably a minority of people in large part because this is an immoral position and most people are fundamentally moral. That said, Fascist ideas do take root in dictatorships since the dictators can use them to justify their control. In some circumstances, democracies have been “fooled” into voting Fascist. For instance, the election of one famous Chancellor didn’t go well. But to be fair that was not supposed to be the most powerful office in the government. The only democracy that I can think of that has knowingly actually voted itself directly into Fascism is the current U.S.A. How did this happen? Who voted for them?

This is admittedly an armchair analysis to determine the make up of MAGA support. I think that "right wing Authoritarians" (RWA) are the core group. In most western populations measurements show that about 10-15% of the population are RWA. In the U.S. this is nearly double that at 25%. I would argue that is likely due to the large number of evangelical Christians. The RWA group has been measured through surveys but all percentages from here on are guesses.

You can probably add to the RWA group another 10% who are evangelicals who are not Authoritarian but have been told by their Minister's to vote republican and just do it. There is possibly another 10% who are racists but don't fall into the previous groups as Authoritarians or evangelicals. So that gets my guesses to 45%. Where did the other 6-7% come from? My guess is Qanon. There are more than 7% Qanon adherents in the U.S. but there is a large overlap with evangelicals. So these are my guesses for the make up of the people who have "taken over" the Republican Party.

Is this a group of “evil” people? 50% of the population? I think the answer has to be “no”. I cannot believe that 50% of any population are inherently evil. Are they misled? Well yes it two different senses of the word. The Evangelicals are led (manipulated you might say) intentionally and incorrectly while the Qanon movement believes misleading conspiracies and lies. Even the RWA thinkers are just lazy and perhaps too scared to take responsibility for themselves. Perhaps only the racists are really “evil”.

Are they "True Americans"? By definition yes. But possibly not people that the rest of the American population are especially proud of. Conservative views are obviously fine and should be part of the thinking that makes up public policy. But Fascism is not the same thing. The good news for conservatives in America is that they have two conservative parties so they can easily feel at home with the current Democratic Party who are way more conservative than Nixon's Republicans... and arguably more conservative than the Reaganites. Let’s hope enough of them change to make it possible for the “not MAGA Party” to prevail in whatever biased election the MAGAs allow in 2026 and 2028.