In the minds of a great many Americans, we’re now on the precipice of a revolution or civil war.

It’s not coincidental that virtually by definition, participating in this kind of activity enables people to feel they’re doing something significant—and by implication, feel they’re significant.

What else has brought us to this strange and ominous juncture?

I doubt that many people on either the left or the right would dispute that, for better or worse, Donald Trump has played a major role in our current polarization.

Large segments of the electorate perceive him as leading a movement to bring down people he portrays as elites, and thereby restore a sense of mattering to people who feel they and their values been overlooked and “dissed.”

He’s pledged to achieve this:

• Via the military and economic power of their country, made strong again under his stewardship

• Through purging the government, media, and academia of  “elites” (by which he actually means people adhering to values originating in the Woodstock era, when people in his base and their more traditional values began to feel noticeably belittled).

DJT presents himself as someone much like his base, having likewise been unacceptably put down by elites, only with one key difference:  having enough money and the clout it brings to fight back effectively on their behalf.

However, the forces that put Trump in the White House did not appear out of the blue when he announced his first presidential candidacy.  He built his movement on top of already-existing Republican priorities and agendas.  

A key one of these was “Don’t take away my guns!” (i.e., “Don’t try to strip me of one of the last remaining things that enable me to feel like someone who’s not to be trifled with”—or to put it a different way, someone significant).

The MAGA movement has also been powered by numerous other developments that have been broadly overlooked up to this point.  These involve ways that our world:

• Has morphed into a celebritocracy, under which only a micron-thin slice of the population whose images appear on vast numbers of glowing screens are treated as “somebodies”


• Sees the rest of the populace’s primary role as consumers (who are catered to extensively, but rarely accorded true dignity), and overlooks their role as producers (normally more reliable sources of self-worth, but in today’s mega-corporations, reduced to ever-smaller and less significant tasks)


• Replaces direct, personal experiences of the world with virtualized ones


• Most significantly of all, shifts everyone’s primary frame of reference to a realm so gargantuan that it’s impossible for more than an infinitesimally tiny subset of us to feel we have a meaningful place in it.

It’s time for us to decide what to do about this transformation.  Multiple options are available to us.

The ones least likely to do us any good are:

• Dismissing all MAGA people as simply racist, sexist, stupid, crazy, and/or outright evil


• Uncritically accepting the proposition that our current troubles arise entirely from former Woodstock adherents who have somehow transformed themselves from gentle pacifist stoners into sinister plotters of global domination and child sexual abuse.