I don't understand maga people.

@FoxyGoddess @Tastyfrzz You show considerable understanding towards these people.

I think the basic point you make - and I would support anyway - is that really such types are very frightened under all their bluster. Frightened to look beyond the herd, frightened to think they could improve themselves in some way.

I accept many are in situations very difficult to escape - poor or no employment available anywhere near them, poverty so they cannot move to a town with better prospects for them, bad role models including parents who were just as limited, drug dependency (including alcoholism), limited education, and so on.

Likely, their herd is of mutual support. If nothing else they know they are not alone. Propping up the bar in their little groups they think themselves happy together, but what deep unhappiness does their loud-mouthed behaviour hide? Is their slandering everyone else their easy way to avoid examining themselves?

FoxyQueen - you suggest therapy and that may help some of them, but of those who would want such help, could many of them afford it? Perhaps some form of mutual help circles might work but I do not know if any such exist. Somehow they need help to ask themselves, "What can I do to turn myself into a better, more courageous person?", but they need recognise themselves first, and that is very difficultt for anyone.

The overall titlel of the section is "UltraMAGA", but I don't think it's a political matter even if Republican Party ideology appeals to these people. It is a social matter; but one politicians of all parties must consider.

@ArishMell It is a deeply rooted social issue. The large number of them feel like they have been abandoned by the nation/world while not realizing they play the biggest part of being abandoned. If you don't want to swim with the crowd, the crowd leaves you. If you don't want to positively be in society, society doesn't want you. They are the meme of the guy riding a bike who puts a stick in the spokes at it moves, then complains about how the bike hurt him. They hurt themselves without taking accountability for their own actions that led to that.

I agree with you about the affordability of therapy. Honestly, availability is also a huge issue, particularly in rural areas. There is a 1.6 therapists per 1,000 people. That greatly lessens the farther out you get from a metro area. So yeah, it is extremely difficult for some to get the help they need, both financially and logistically.

But truthfully, the best start they could do themselves is to learn to take accountability over the easy way out. Hate is easy. Escaping into substances is easy. Blaming and scapegoating is easy. It requires no emotional or personal investment. Taking accountability is a strength that so many lack because it is hard. It is hard to admit culpability to one's own life and direction. It's hard to face that you are the one shooting yourself in the foot with your beliefs and opinions. It's hard to acknowledge that you are the reason you are miserable because you refuse to heal, become healthy and/or find other perspectives. It takes a form of work that is uncomfortable, it shatters the self as one knows it and requires us to be vulnerable to the hardest person to be that for, ourselves.

I am not always this compassionate towards them, mostly because they deliberately choose to live in willful ignorance. In this day and age, if you aren't exposing yourself to multiple ideas and thoughts to question your own, you are digging your head in the sand and ignoring reality. I loathe that behavior. It is the antithesis of what we are meant to do as people. We aren't meant to stagnate. We are meant to grow in all directions, including our own selves. By not doing that, one is being insultingly ignorant and I simply cannot abide that. It is an absolute waste of life.

@FoxyGoddess Thankyou for a very thoughtful and considered reply.

It's by no means an American problem although it would manifest itself in different ways in different countries. That's why I saw it in a more social than political light.

In Britain there was in the past a peculiar form of inverted snobbery by which anyone from a "working class" background risked sneers rather than respect from their home communities for breaking out of the mould. They would hear things like "university's not for the likes of us", or "got all those airs and graces", and similar. That was not from lack of work necessarily, as it was common in communities with plenty of work, although largely manual and much of it of fairly low skill and pay.


Some of that sneering was probably just jealousy, but in addressing hopelessness we may have to be bit judicious in our judgement.

I learnt that from something a teacher, now retired, told me a few years ago.

Her school was in one of the most deprived of former industrial cities in the North-East of England. The town had grown around steel-making and I think ship-building, needing very many skilled workers, but both now lost. The little new employment appearing in such places tends to be either high-grade "service industries" needing relatively small numbers of already highly-qualified staff, or coffee-bars and taxi-driving serving those money-traders, IT specialists and corporate-lawyers. Many local children were third-generation unemployed in their own families, and genuinely finding it extremely hard to see any way out.

Worse, so do their parents. One day, my friend told me, one such mother threatened her that if her son brought home any more homework she would burn the books. I have no idea what the woman thought that would achieve, but clearly she thought her son should not learn anything because there was no point.

How do you deal with attitudes like that?


I dislike that negativity, the wilful ignorance you highlight, the substance misuse (self-inflicted), the scapegoating, too.

Many people might be helped out of it, but it will only work if they want the help and want to improve their lot in life.

@ArishMell Sadly, it isn't jist an American problem. I know the UK and other nations have been hit by this plague. Again, it's because it is so much easier to hate, be angry and xenophobic than it is to be open-minded and understanding. As we get more global, we become less open and intelligent unless we make concerted efforts not to be. Again, that's work that can be frustrating and effects change. Lots of people are allergic to change while not wanting to understand why that change is not just necessary but will actually make life and existence better.

With the type of generational trauma, like you are talking about with the environmental degradation due to growing capitalism, it's hard, if not at times, impossible to get out of. You have to be extraordinary or determined to rise out. Having lived in poverty, it is hard! Everything takes your finances, saps yoir motivation and leads to despair. Just when you think you are making headway, something comes along to destroy that work, setting you back, sometimes to an even worse situation than before. That is how our current systems work under capitalism.

Most don't want to pay the taxes or do the work to ensure that everyone has equity. Not equality. That everyone has a home, food, water, medical, basic needs fulfilled so that they aren't constantly trying to keep their heads above water. That is the purpose of society. To make sure that those who are unable to succeed alone succeeds with numbers behind them. That we are meant to help, regardless of our relationship with others. And that help doesn't mean breaking yourself to help someone else. It means helping within your means, whether that's financial, emotional or physical.

After the 80's and 90's free fall grab for becoming rich, we have lost sight on how important others are to our lives. We changed our ways of thinking, digging into the Puritanical ideas that if we aren't working and successful, we are failures. That we alone determine our lot life, not how well we help everyone around us.

Our sense of community has completely degraded, as captialism wants. If we are relying on corporations for our survival and not each other, theyare successful. If we can create communities where everyone does their share based on their abilities, they free themselves from the consumer based success we have made important.

But that is really a tangent, though a part of the big picture. I think once people find they do have worth and value to a community, they start losing this hate, anger and xenophobia, discovering they do have worth and value in their own community that they helped build.