We're in a Babylonian Captivity

And if you're a MAGA supporter, that's on you

I honestly don't know if I'll live to see the end of the Babylonian Captivity into which MAGA has driven this nation. Given the exuberant enthusiasm and/or cowardly acquiescence of too many politicians and bureaucrats—and that includes six of the nine SCOTUS' justices—as well as the third of the population that’s rabidly MAGA, the odds are that fascism will be around for a while.

But I really do believe that history's arc bends towards justice. There will come a day when MAGA big shot players and BillyBob preachers as well as your average red-hat-wearing John and Jane Does will be harshly condemned as the betrayers of decency they are. They'll be reviled by future generations. Their memory will be kept alive as a warning about what can happen when wickedness and stupidity overtake the land.

Please don't recommend to me a game that I see indulged in all too frequently. Don't tell me that privately MAGAists are loving parents and grandparents, good neighbors, righteous church goers, and so on—just “real good people” once you “get to know them.” Nonsense. We've seen the brutal consequences of that kind of moral compartmentalization in authoritarian movements again and again and again. SS officers, Hutu murderers, KGB goons, KKK morons: decent individuals at home, devil spawn when driving victims into gas chambers, wielding machetes, shooting enemies of the state in the back of the neck, or lynching blacks.

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once famously tried to argue (in Moral Man and Immoral Society, a book I once admired) that individuals are basically decent when behaving as private actors but can become corrupt when immersing themselves in a herd-mentality movement. Bullshit. If you join a multitude of gorgers at the Devil's Banquet, it's because you always had a taste for what's being served, no matter how “lovingly” you come across at home or in church.

To enthusiastically defend cruel and ultimately stupid practices and policies—lawless deportations, extortion, retribution, favoring the rich at the expense of everyone else, judicial corruption, persecution of the intelligentsia, cult of personality, slashing basic human rights and entitlements, chronic duplicity and deception, institutional bullying, gender oppression, journalistic intimidation, and so on—while at the same time pretending to be a good person just doesn't wash.

So if you’re a “loving” parent, grandparent, church goer, etc. who nonetheless supports MAGA, here’s the deal. Either you're willfully ignorant of the cruelty and injustice your guys are perpetrating, in which case you're culpable and supremely stupid, in the Bonhoefferian sense; or you're genuinely ignorant, in which case, given the abundance of available evidence, you're equally culpable for not paying attention; or you pretend that your hands are clean while still supporting MAGA, in which case you're culpable and hypocritical; or you’re forthrightly indifferent to human suffering, in which case something is so seriously broken in your moral sensibilities that I don’t even have a word for it.

But in all honesty, if the rest of us stand by and watch the steady erosion of decency and do nothing but wring our hands, we’re culpable too. MAGA, like all fascisms, thrives on creating a climate of fear on the one hand and numbness on the other. We look at all the big and petty acts of retribution that befall critics, and we grow anxious about our own safety if we too speak up and act out. Or when confronted by one outrage after another—and it’s been ten long years by now—we grow weary and despairingly passive.

Those future generations that will revile MAGAists? They’ll be looking back at us, too. If we do nothing, their gaze—the gaze of our descendents—will be one of bewilderment and contempt. And we’ll deserve it.

That arc does curve towards justice. But it needs some help.

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