I don't think that's what it's all about. For someone like my dad, a white male over 70, it's about racial grievance and the feeling that being white in America is under attack. It's also about white superiority over others. My dad is the least religious person you'll ever meet, so Christian Nationalism is far from his mind. He's a George Carlin when it comes to believing in God.
He wants whites to be recognized as superior beings in society. He read a book called the Bell Curve years ago and has used that book as evidence that whites, and specifically certain sects of Jewish people, are just smarter than blacks and brown-skinned Hispanic people. To him, it is a scientific, irrefutable fact that there are intellectual differences between blacks and whites.
He yearns for a time where blacks and whites live separate lives. Where schools, cultures, and daily lives were separate. He yearns for an America where you could go into polite society, the workplace, wherever and make jokes about Asians, Blacks, Jews, Muslims, etc. He also hates immigrants from the Central/South America, Mexico, the Middle East, Asia, and the Indo/Pakistan region. He believes that America is losing its heritage and standing in the world because of these people. He believes they are taking jobs from Americans and white people, driving down wages all the while.
He also hates woman and taking direction from woman. Woman are out to get him and ruin his life. Feminism has made it harder to get ahead as a man and has oppressed men's rights and standing in the world, all in the name of false equity in his mind.
To him, MAGA is about restoring white identity and a man's role in the world. He'll tell you he's a conservative and what not, but that's all bullshit. My dad doesn't have a pot to piss in after losing all his investments, savings, and home through multiple financial crashes since being bought out by his company in 1999. He literally lives off of Social Security, Medicare, and a part time job at a theater he works at. He's the last person that should be some strident fiscal conservative or libertarian.
When my father was a child he moved around a lot and ended up settling in Ecorse, MI. Ecorse was always a multi-racial working poor town with blacks, Hispanics, and whites all living in close quarters. My father and his two brothers were violently abused as children by their father and for a period of time, abandon by their mother after she left his dad. When he was 13 his dad threw him and his two brothers out of the house and they ended up going to Ecorse to live with their mom and sister. They lived poor as church mice in a two bedroom home.
After graduating high school in Ecorse my dad and his brothers were all drafted to fight in Vietnam. So after being abused and abandon as Children, they all had to go and kill for Uncle Sam in Vietnam. After Vietnam he went to work in the steel mills on Zugg Island and then got himself into the corporate world at AT&T once he got tired of working in the mills. He put himself through college at both UofM Dearborn and Wayne State. He spent 25+ years at AT&T until he was bought out when the company downsized during the dot com bubble era. From there, he would go onto lose his shirt financially and life savings through multiple economic downturns and stock market crashes.
My dad is a broken individual, who never got the help he needed from the horrific childhood he experienced. Abused by his father, abandon for a time by his mother to his abusive father, and asked to kill people in Vietnam. Those are life experiences that are hard to overcome and shape you into being a toxic and self destructive person. It's why my dad drinks, it's why he reads books like The Bell Curve to feel justified in his moral superiority, it's why he's racist, xenophobic, sexist, and more.
First and foremost, beyond his identity politics, he wants everyone to be equally miserable like he has been. I think for many in the MAGA community they are just miserable human beings and want others to feel the same way they do. So the hope and optimism of a Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, or Elizabeth Warren is a turnoff to them. Beyond being miserable, as I mentioned above, they want the whiteness of America restored, which to them is the Great Again part of MAGA. Having a woman, person of color, or someone of a different religion in power is a troubling sign that they are losing their grasp on what makes America, America. Again, you can talk to my dad about him being a small government conservative, but that's all bullshit. Misery loves company and so do racists. Intolerance, grievance, and misery are what really drive my dad towards the MAGA movement. I suspect it drives others as well.
For the record, I still have a great relationship with my dad and so does my sister. We argue about politics from time to time and he sends me stupid right-wing chain emails about current events or whatever and I just ignore and delete them. My father was good to me as a kid, when he wasn't drinking and yelling all the time. He could never bring himself to spank me or my sister as kids because he knew how much he hated it as a child. He is a far better father to us than he was husband to either of his ex-wives. That said, he's still who he is and wants America restored to some former glory it never really had.
I don't know if Cade is rattled or what, but I'm in favor of this. What can it hurt, you're getting blown out anyways and have no offense to speak of.
