The first midterm elections since the establishment honeypot setup that ended Trump’s presidency are upon us. Now the MAGA movement faces a crisis – in the original sense of a trial or a test.
Can it survive the shift from two-party presidential politics to put up effective dissent against the de facto one-party system?
The biggest hurdle former president Trump’s supporters must overcome isn’t election fraud, deep state surveillance, or even demographic winter. Instead, it’s the contradiction that now occupies the heart of its ethos.
A commanding majority of Trump’s supporters are convinced the last election was stolen. They warned that letting such fraud stand would amount to a coup. It now seems a distant memory, but large numbers of them toured the country in the months following Trump’s loss, urging republican lawmakers to audit the suspect results. Republican officials, being the Generals to the dems’ Globetrotters, sat on their hands.
For a while, it looked as if the MAGA crowd had learned the right lesson from their supposed representatives’ betrayal. Encouraged by many of the same influencers who’d spearheaded Stop the Steal, Georgia republicans stayed home in droves from the 2021 senate runoff race. As a result, a couple of insider trading GOP establishment hacks were shown the door. And Mitch McConnell was sent a message that his party might want to consider keeping a promise now and then if it wanted its base’s votes.
A year later, the social media goldfish brain effect has done its evil work. Everyone has forgotten the hard lessons learned from the last elections. Republicans are promising new forever wars and corporate tax breaks in what can only be called an attempt to throw the midterms. Meanwhile, cockeyed MAGApedes are beating the bushes for votes in what they’re calling the MoSt iMpOrTaNt eLeCtIoN EvAr!
To someone who’s old enough to remember the last 20 Most Important Elections Ever™ seeing Gen Zeds zooming around rehashing Rush Limbaugh’s old calls to action is as bitter as it is comical.
Back in the 90s, political junkies could be forgiven for saying that voting harder was the solution. The Blue Team and the Red Team still maintained the illusion of being opposition parties, not high and low echelons of the same regime. The last election dispelled that illusion, and the only ones who don’t see it are those who don’t want to.
Hence the MAGA paradox: If the last election was stolen, a coup took place. If a coup happened, the people who seized power are now running the elections. So trying to vote them out of office amounts to asking mutinous despots to please give up the only leverage that keeps them from life in prison or worse. If tyrants bowed to the will of the people, they wouldn’t be tyrants.
In short, Trump’s supporters are embracing the same self-negating meme they rightly roasted the dems for after Trump left office.
That contradiction extends to US voting as a whole. Stop the Steal and the current midterm campaigns are based on the premise that election outcomes matter. That understanding is what gave dissident activism such urgency last year. But if the beneficiaries of national-scale voter fraud can be voted out, then the big steal had no major effect on future elections after all. On the other hand, if Stop the Steal’s forecasts of doom were right, the regime cannot be voted out, so elections don’t matter.
It’s here that faithful Catholics face a dilemma. Because the Catechism and the USCCB both assert the duty to vote as a moral obligation.
How to resolve that paradox? The Magisterium’s guidelines themselves give us the clues to untie this Gordian knot.
First, as She Who Thinks in Centuries, the Church has been known to lag behind current events when offering practical guidance. That’s not to question any theological or moral dogma. It is to point out that the hierarchy’s instruction on how to apply inerrant doctrine has a tendency to lag behind the rapidly changing social milieu.
That just means we need to nail ourselves to the wood of our desks and do our homework.
The first clue is the hierarchy’s stated reason for asserting a duty to vote. It’s the true statement that Catholics should submit to legitimate authority out of responsibility for the common good. So the efficacy of voting to demonstrate just submission to authentic officials and obtain the common good is the context in which the moral duty to vote is binding.
Recent history has given us ample reason to doubt that either condition is now in force. First and foremost, voters have only a negligible ability to secure the common good through voting. You don’t even need to prove election fraud to make that conclusion. We have the data.
But if those in power currently hold office as the result of a coup, there goes the legitimate authority criterion.
Now, that isn’t to tell people not to vote. The contradictions discussed above pertain mostly to the national level. Local officials have far more contact with, and a much bigger effect on, the average citizen than the federal government does. It’s been said that your county sheriff is the one elected authority with the greatest direct impact on your daily life. So I plan to vote local and encourage you to do the same.
But make sure you do your diligence to ensure you’re not voting for anyone who supports some form of grave intrinsic evil. “Vote” comes from the Latin for “will”, so casting a vote for a candidate constitutes at least remote formal cooperation with his platform.
Tl; dr: Don’t give votes or money to people who hate you.
