Leaving MAGA

 

Hatred is a false way of taking away the doubt and free-floating anxiety that covers the fragility of human existence. Any negative focus takes away existential angst by giving us a false place to stand, but the payoff is that it makes us feel both superior and in control. Hate settles the dust and ambiguity that none of us like. Hate is much more common, I am afraid and seems much more effective than love……Unless there is someone to hold and accompany us on these inner journey, much of humanity cannot go inside. Without such accompaniment, most of us will stay on the surface of our own lives. There, mean-spiritedness is the best boundary and protection from being bothered by others. But with such accompaniment we will find our souls and the One who lovingly dwells there.

Richard Rohr, Dancing in Stillness

After many years of soul searching and pain, Rich Logis made the difficult move to extricate himself from MAGA, a movement he likens to a cult and an addiction.  While he had doubts about MAGA for years, it took him several more years in MAGA before he had the courage to make his extraction. What made it so hard to leave was that MAGA was more than a political ideology.  For years he had suspected that the supposed “truths” he had been told about and by the MAGAsphere and Trump were in fact lies that fomented hate and vitriol against those who didn’t fit into the MAGA and was actually causing more pain to so many believers.  Leaving meant not only coming to terms with the lies, but even more difficult estrangement from what had become his only community of belonging.  

In a recent New Yorker interview, Logis asks us to consider the depth of trauma that runs through MAGA.  He saw it everywhere in people who were abused by family, spiritual leaders, jobs, who lived in communities bled dry from globalization and eviscerated by addictions, lack of healthcare, environmental poisoning and climate disaster. Rather than asking why people join MAGA, Logis says what we should be asking is “What happened to you?”   

In MAGA, Logis tells us, many abandoned, disenfranchised, dislocated people find belonging.  It is a belonging fueled by hating - the left, the queers, the immigrants, all others - a powerful coming together to scapegoat, blame, and attack those on the outside who are perceived to be causing so much harm.  Scapegoating, blaming “other” is a powerful antidote to the psychic woundedness of disenfranchisement, abuse, and abandonment.  Hate of other can cover over unendurable feelings worthless and bring us into the belonging that all humans long for. 

Who among us does not know hatred, jealousy, the desire for revenge?  Hate for others is a gut reaction to abuse easier to find than love when you have been wounded, betrayed, abandoned.  Learning how to love – the kind of love that crosses boundaries of differences, approaches being unconditional  -  is a long slow road.  None of us can learn this kind of love in isolation, without the compassion and mercy of others to help us along the way.  Because, this kind of love traverses the hard nearly impassable terrain of humility, frailty, vulnerability, and failure.  This is not the wispy romantic love of fairy tales, but the love that is kindled overtime with forgiveness and mercy, confusion, and so much misunderstanding before any understanding. We all need the mercy of others to walk this path and a whole community of support from family, friends, teachers, gurus, strangers, caregivers, the Divine. This is the kind of love we consent to over and over again to be in relationship with others who, like ourselves, may not always be so loveable. 

Providing a shame free compassionate offramp from MAGA might be a key strategy to consider so that we might begin to build and reclaim peace and justice in this land. Not everyone in MAGA is looking for an offramp, but for those who are, a bridge into a new belonging that acknowledges the trauma done to others – by the society we are all a part of – with mercy can be the beginning of a “big tent” revival of a social justice, no kings no oligarchs, spread the billionaire wealth movement this country needs.