The Expansion of Irrationality in the MAGA Movement

The Age of Reason is dead and Republicans Killed it.

In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance. ~ Thomas Jefferson

I earned my GED in a federal prison in California in 1988. I was serving a two-year beef for trading five counterfeit bills for heroin. It was my first of five prison sentences, served in two states, The first in California and the other four in Arizona. For fifteen odd years I was in and out, in and out of prison for minimal charges like shoplifting and possession.     

A decade later I taught GED courses at the Winslow Complex. It was late 1990s, and classes were crowded because earning your high school diploma is mandatory in the Arizona Department of Corrections. Many inmates bitterly resented this, especially those with little schooling. Being in class all day prevented one from working on the yard, where even though the maximum pay was a mere fifty cents an hour, that is real money for those with none coming in.

What I discovered while teaching is that many believed themselves incapable of learning; that education was not for them. These were mostly persons of color, and I was able to convince a few of them otherwise. There were some, however, with zero interest. This was particularly ingrained in the white-boy persona. Being poor, illiterate, and redneck was something to be proud of. The word “peckerwood” or simply “wood” for short is a badge of honor among white supremacists and is a popular prison tatt.

What many fail to comprehend is that this country was founded on the tenets of the Enlightenment, which included reason and scientific empiricism; was indeed built on the principles of education by the highly educated. It’s common knowledge that few of the founders were bona fide peckerwoods, mimicking (or mocking if you prefer) both Trump and Vance, not to mention the greater part of Congressional Republicans.

Although I get it. Ironic self-expression. Like the N-word, turn the insult inside out. What I don’t get is so many taking it so literal, to the detriment of our nation. Republican populism might just as easily be called peckerwoodism, and nowhere is this more manifest than in the MAGA movement.

Trump, of course, did not invent this. White supremacy, especially in southern states, had and has little use for reason, let alone science. Even today, many evangelicals, undoubtedly Trump’s staunchest supporters, eschew basic concepts such as evolution and even, as we saw during the pandemic, modern medicine. On the latter, you can’t trust doctors only when you need them for, say, a triple bypass.

And on the former? It’s easier to be racist if one believes that racism exists; that we are not 99.9 percent biologically identical. In her book, “The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of lies,” Susan Jacoby examines the history of such wrong-headed thinking; “suffice to say that in a society based for so long on the planter aristocracy and a belief in the innate inferiority of blacks, there was little reason to provide decent public education for poor whites, much less blacks. Why bother, when just being white – even an illiterate white – made an inhabitant of the South superior to any black?” This is a core tenet of white supremacy and the foundation of irrationality.

She also, however, gets down to the roots of it. mentions how, during the Gilded age, the equivalent of today’s billionaires used pseudoscience like eugenics and Social Darwinism to convince white voters that not only were they superior to all POCs, but so too the wealthy were deserving of being the fittest. Working hungry for near slave wages, therefore, was natural. Innate. But not to worry. You will be rewarded eventually with pie in the sky.

This last references a song by Joe Hill, the founder of the Wobblies, and was taken up by another stalwart of the labor movement, Woody Guthrie, who sings,

You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

The song alludes to how preachers promised poor working people paradise in heaven for the toil they endure on earth. “The more harsh the circumstances of daily life, the more potent are the simple and universal emotional themes of struggle, sin, repentance, forgiveness, and redemption that form the core of evangelical fundamentalist religion,” affirms Jacoby. Again, emotion, fear or otherwise, overrules common sense. “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country [sic] that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Trump told a New Hampshire crowd last November.

I’m well aware, however, that the majority of evangelicals are in fact not white supremacists. But in their seemingly unflappable support for Trump, they surer thatn fuck are blatant appeasers of it.

Fareed Zakaria, in a recent column entitled “Harris is winning the all-important battle – of vibes,” offers a relatable explanation as to why so many Republicans are still voting for a man who continually apes such hate-laced rhetoric, even at the cost of their best interests: “In recent years… a growing body of scholarship has shown that people don’t tend to vote rationally, but rather use voting to express themselves in emotional, ideological and moral ways. This view of human behavior… sees elections as involving a great deal of intangible intuition and passion. Voters choose from the gut and then rationalize their choice, consciously or not. Kamala Harris’s campaign seems premised on this latter, intuition-based approach.”

Harris, Zakaria contends, has tapped into the same emotionalism that conservatives have been using, to great electoral effect, for over a century – with a single colossal difference; “Donald Trump and the Republicans have tended to be masters of the politics of emotion, emphasizing strength and evoking fear,” Zakaria continues. As shown above, Trump has become adept at stoking these tried-and-true fears; fear of the immigrant; fear of Muslims and other religions; fear of having their guns taken away, and most especially fear of the future if Harris wins.

By contrast, the Harris/Walz ticket is running on love of country, as Jennifer Rubin, Zakaria’s colleague at The Post, points out. In her (Subscriber-only Edition) newsletter entitled “What caught my eye,” she states: “Together, [Harris and Walz] … have projected optimism and love of America – ready to knock out the mean-spirited, angry and extreme opposition whose presidential nominee constantly denigrates America as a terrible place.”

The key to the success of the Harris/Walz ticket, therefore, is built on love, and not the doom and gloom, America-sucks-and-only-we-can-save-it cynicism of Trump and his ilk. “The expression ‘Republicans fall in line, Democrats fall in love’ aptly sums up the two parties’ presidential temperaments. But in this case, Democrats have done both,” asserts Rubin.

All of the above somewhat explains why so many self-proclaimed followers of Christ are so rabid for a man who in many respects is the exact opposite. Nor is it even slightly ambiguous. Trump positively reeks of sin, yet his base, against all reason, ignores this. In the article, “Jesus is their savior, Trump is their candidate,” by Peter Smith, one follower, Kimberly Vaughn of Florence, Kentucky, stated: “Trump supports Jesus, and without Jesus, America will fall.” This is totally contrary to the Enlightenment, the founders’ intent, and the wall of separation while not even touching upon Trump’s endless mendacity. 

Smith indeed builds upon this: “Trump’s rallies take on the symbols, rhetoric and agenda of Christian nationalism, which typically includes a belief that America was founded to be a Christian nation and seeks to privilege Christianity in public life.” This is simply a paraphrase of what Vaughn said above and is just as inaccurate. 

Another take is the op-ed “Trump has changed what it means to be evangelical,” in which Shadi Hamid gives a more salient reason for the existence of Trump’s religious base. “The transformation of American evangelicals has been a long time coming. In 1990, 40 percent of White evangelicals were Democrats. Today, this share is closer to 15 percent… This is the ground that Trump took up – a perfectly imperfect vessel for an uncertain age.” He states further that Hillary Clinton and the elite of the democratic party are partially to blame. Obama sought the votes of evangelicals by appealing to them directly. Clinton, however, chose not to, and since, Trump has happily feasted on the leftovers, to the detriment of Democrats as a whole.

And the end result, as Jacoby points out, is rampant unreason; “America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism.” Nor is there any form of ready solution in sight. How does one teach tens of millions of Americans to trade in their emotion for rational thought, especially those with no interest in doing so? Picture me back in an Arizona State prison vainly trying to teach critical reading and writing skills to a smattering of white supremacists.