(This post was intended for politics@lemmy.world, but as it seems they don’t allow text posts, I’m posting it here)
This post will likely not go over well with everyone and some people may not agree with the premise of the question. Mods please remove if not allowed.
I am curious if the MAGA-esque approach to politics is new for the US, or if there have been other examples of similar political movements which may be considered “cult-like”. To better define what I mean, here are some examples:
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Large amounts of signs bearing a candidate’s name being shown by single individuals (e.g. big trucks covered in Trump signs everywhere)
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Use of a candidate name over the US flag
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Use of a kind of supporter uniform (e.g. the red MAGA hat)
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The “alternative facts” of MAGA, where debate can be impossible because supporters believe anyone who is a detractor must be lying
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In some cases, voter intimidation or coercion from staunch supporters
It seems to me that some of this is new but I’d love to hear other thoughts. I have heard and seen many relatively obvious parallels to German politics in the 20s-40s, but I’m specifically wondering if anything similar has ever been seen in the US before.
As a non-US person, it blows my fucking mind how frequently y’all haul out a goddamn Ouija board to channel the founding fathers on any issue. What would George Washington think about ChatGPT? Uh probably that it comes out of a box possessed by the a demon and then he’d ask if you owned a comfort girl he could borrow for the night? What a valuable exercise. Much wow.
Spaceman pointing a gun at other Spaceman “wait it’s all a cult?”
It helps to realize that most of the people “defending” the Constitution have literally never read it, and they even admit that.
Like religion, “God” is whatever the TV (and radio) people say that He is - he’s so strong, he’s so precious, he rides around shirtless on horseback and wrestles bears, literally barehanded, and so forth.
Such people don’t care one bit what the founding fathers have to say - heck, they don’t even listen to Trump Himself when he said to take the vaccine (which he invented ofc). On the other hand, May The Founding Fathers Be Praised (and other chants that sound nice).
https://theonion.com/area-man-passionate-defender-of-what-he-imagines-consti-1819571149/
I feel like you also have people who’ve read it enough to understand that a rewriting of the Constitution would lead to them losing power. The deification of the Founding Fathers makes the Constitution a sacred document and you don’t change sacred documents.
Which is funny because the Founding Fathers understood that the Constitution shouldn’t be a sacred document. While this is the only base law the USA has had in two centuries, this was the third base law for the overall country they lived in within their lifetimes.
Hence the cognitive dissonance yeah, though those looking to (ab)use the document can still make it work for them even while maintaining the fiction that “we didn’t change it”.
One example is the recent SCOTUS ruling that iirc allows a sitting President to assassinate their political opponents if they so choose, publicly and openly, and yet the conservatives who pushed for and made that happen are still (atm) calling the USA as a “democracy” rather than a totalitarian regime. Meanwhile, the liberal side doesn’t even bother with advocating for a platform any longer and instead focuses purely on attacking their opponent and shoring up the appearance of their own (independently of any specifics I mean) - a recent development for them (in the degree to which it is enacted, if not quite entirely), though conservatives have been doing that since at least Ron Desantis lost to Trump.
In short, “facts don’t matter”, to so very many these days, whereas what does is matters of presentation - tone of voice, who you know, how much money is backing you, etc. We see this all up and down the scale - in people trying to be famous on YouTube/Insta/Tiktok/etc., in the stock market, daddy’s nephew getting the cushy VP job at the office, and the very presidency itself, as well as most of (all of the entrenched) Senators, Representatives, judges, and most other things down in-between. Our society has forgotten the past struggles that gave the people of the past reasons to avoid certain things - e.g. actual literal full-on Nazi-ism - therefore we will now commence repeating them, our only hope to learn from firsthand experience what we refused to learn from reading books and listening to those who were actually there. i.e. we won’t take time to listen, bc we are too busy speaking.
Oh yes. As a US person it blows my mind as well. We have an unhealthy fear of changing the Constitution, despite its many amendments. Of course that also precludes changing portions of it that were clearly designed under different pretenses than currently exist (e.g. 2A, but that’s a whole can of worms I’m just tired of opening at this point).
The main issue there in my view isn’t actually the Constitution but the sheer division at every decision. Nothing can be changed anywhere if people can’t even agree on the same facts anymore. It ultimately means the US is at a constant government standstill. Fun times.
In many ways we now feel like two different countries. The blue country with dense populations centered around either coast, and the red country with sparser population in the middle.
the “change” republicans want is to tear the whole thing down and turn it into a dictatorship
Which is exactly what their beloved Founding Fathers™ were trying to prevent.
What’s even sillier is that they don’t even respect his views and it doesn’t change anything. He strongly opposed to a two-party system, yet here we are.