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MAGA is not a solution. MAGA is a symptom.
Everyone cowers from modern complexity, preferring the comfort of totalizing and simple narratives. This is not unique to MAGA as a political movement or a culture. The feeling has only gotten worse as the complexity of modern society appears to scale infinitely without limit.
Everyone spills reams and reams and reams of ink about this and that and invents crackpot explanations one after the other to avoid looking at the elephant: that the world (America) changed, (American) society appears to be getting worse, we (Americans) remember it being better, and that we (Americans) would rather go back to before it changed. Of course, Americans only care about Americans, that is their remit. The idea that significant changes happened outside America that had nothing to do with America with massive knock-on effects for Americans is like mentioning to them that their lives are shitty, there is an opioid epidemic, and they are being bombed with illegal immigrants because Mexico has a real gang, drug, and corruption problem. They don't give a shit about Mexico, and they didn't give a shit about Mexico even before there was an opioid epidemic.
None of that has anything to do with the core impulse: things are getting worse and we want them to get better. In lieu of anything to blame, the easy target is the sweeping social and cultural changes across and pushed by culturally dominant, powerful and increasingly aligned branches of American society and government.
Structuring a society around family is how you end up with open tribal wars - maybe you should take a peek at history and the long lines about civil wars of familial succession. Let's not forget that, assuming you're talking about American families, the state has spent decades atomizing the family down to its bare parts. Reversing this is not an effort that can be measured in years, even if the desperate flailing around efforts to fix TFR promises to be maladaptive in quite literal terms.
I'm as much a fan of Chesterton and his fence as anyone else here, but holy shit, guys, the thousands of straws grasped at to MAGAsplain X or Y from both sides of the political fence make me tired just reading them. Somehow "things changed for the worse and we want it to stop" is something a large portion of talking heads have difficulty with. I can at least grok those whose salaries depend on not understanding this fact.
It surprisingly hasn't gotten much press coverage, but opioid overdose deaths in the US are actually down substantially over the last two years. I'll treat it as good news, personally, but I have seen "we ran out of prone-to-addiction folks" mentioned as a possible cause.
Nothing really surprising about the lack of press coverage -- it would straightforwardly help Trump and Republicans.
I suspect part of it is that new lockdown-inspired addicts have either died off or dried up. Might not explain it all because the uptick started before COVID.
I think that might be part of it, but the first year of real decline was the last of Biden's term. I don't know that 2025 full numbers are out yet.
There's provisional numbers out to August 2025, though.
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