Growing Up MAGA

Before they had a brand.

Photo by Malte Schmidt on Unsplash

Sometimes I think about my last conversation with my grandma—not the one who died before I was born, the unapologetically racist one.

It was my second or third year teaching. She was talking to my dad, and he handed the phone to me. That was how I always talked to her. She never called me directly. She always called my dad, and he handed over the phone if I happened to be there. Then he handed the phone to my brother. Then he handed the phone to my mom, who wasn’t usually well enough to have a conversation.

My grandma didn’t wish me good luck with the semester. She just said she hoped I didn’t have “too many Blacks” in my class.

“Actually, I do,” I said. “And they’re some of the best students I’ve ever had.” That was pretty much the end of the conversation.

I handed the phone back to my dad.

A couple of years later, she died.

I missed her funeral.

There was no way I was taking a week off from teaching to travel halfway across the country, to my Trumplandia roots, to bid farewell to my unapologetically racist grandma, hang out with my MAGA uncles and cousins, and then spend the next two weeks playing catchup on grading.

My absence was noted.

A few years ago, my dad suggested I take another trip to see my uncles, who’ve gone even further down the MAGA hole, embracing all the conspiracy theories you read about online, including the ones about vaccines and weather machines. “Go spend a week with your conspiracy theorist uncle, who has at least one restraining order to his name for stalking, in the middle of the woods.”

“Take your family. It’ll be fun.”

Not happening…

The MAGA crowd loves talking about how misunderstood they are, that liberals develop caricatures of them that don’t live up to reality. Sociologists travel through Trumplandia, conducting interviews, trying to understand them on their own terms. But when you grow up in this, when you go to school with it, when you live with it day in and day out for decades, you know.

You get it.

Some of us on the left didn’t grow up left. We weren’t born and raised liberal. Our views aren’t an accident of geography.

We grew up MAGA.

We chose to adopt a different belief system. It was hard. We endured social stigma. We lost friends and family. We got written out of wills. We didn’t slide into liberalism because it was the path of least resistance.

We did it because we woke up.

In high school, my track coach sat down at my lunch table and asked me, in front of my friends, why I didn’t go to church. He mixed Biblical metaphors and analogies into his pep talks before every race. On the way to meets, my team debated who was worse, atheists or Satanists. They made fun of Jews and Mormons, then told them they were just kidding. They said it was immoral to hold a guy’s hand unless you’d been dating for at least three months. In college, my roommate and her friends bragged about owning liberals all the time. They just didn’t call it that yet. They freaked out when they found porn on their boyfriends’ computers.

My dad didn’t congratulate me for going into teaching. He said I was throwing my life away, that I’d never be able to support myself. It never occurred to him that he was enabling the system that underpaid teachers.

We understand MAGA very well. We understand that MAGA doesn’t go around spewing hate all the time. It’s not always on full display. Sometimes, it lives under layers of fake smiles and superficial politeness. It lives under sob stories. That doesn’t mean it’s not there, waiting to lash out.

Does MAGA have manners?

Sure, they do.

My first few weeks at a new school, practically every guy I met invited me to church. It was the only thing people did, apparently. They went to church on Sunday and Wednesday. Sometime after the last declined invitation, rumors started to spread about me. I was a devil worshipping slut.

When I was growing up, manners were extremely important to my family. My dad had several special conversations with my mom’s side of the family when we visited. He often pulled them aside and reminded them:

• Don’t use the N-word around kids.

• Don’t make fun of their accents.

• Spare the Jesus talk.

So they replaced the N-word with something else, but they still flashed their racism. When they splurged on Captain D’s, they talked about trying to go there “when more whites are working—you get better service.”

Yep, that kind of racism.

This was classic Alabama racism, and it was alive and well before Trump ever entered the chat. My mom’s side of the family was a real piece of work. They minimized the Trail of Tears, then took us down to the creek to look for arrowheads, in other words, the evidence they lived on stolen land. They still own a hundred acres, in the family since the middle of the 19th century, and it doesn’t take an historical genius to know who and where it came from.

My dad spent a lot of my childhood making fun of climate researchers. More than once, he called it a scam.

He laughed about it.

He still won’t recycle, not even glass or cardboard. He hasn’t voted once since I was born. He didn’t wear a seatbelt until his early 50s. You can’t blame ignorance. He has a degree in engineering. He knows how to code.

It doesn’t matter.

These days, my dad won’t condemn Trump. He says, “We had to do something about immigration.” He doesn’t want to talk about climate change. He doesn’t care about what’s going on with DOGE.

Neither does my brother.

Even though neither of them vote, they’re a classic example of voting against your interests. They don’t vote out of conscience. They don’t opt out of politics for any reason other than their own indifference. They honestly don’t care who’s running things. They believe it doesn’t affect them.

And yet, my dad lost at least a hundred thousand dollars to a broken healthcare system over my mom’s mental and physical illness. He paid astronomical bills to doctors who never returned his calls and complained when he nagged them for the results of tests he paid for. He spent years looking for the only longterm care facility in the state that would take a paranoid schizophrenic patient. He spent countless hours haggling with his insurance.

You know when they say if you don’t do politics, politics does you? Well, politics did my dad. It did him over and over.

He never did politics back.

When Barack Obama won the 2008 election, I got my dad an Obama ashtray for Christmas. He loved it, for the wrong reason. I thought it was funny that he would look at Obama every day for the next four years. He thought it was funny he would put his cigarettes out in Obama’s face.

My mom was full blooded MAGA. She listened to Rush Limbaugh in his early days. She told me all about the liberals and leftists trying to take over the country. She told me all about the welfare queens and minorities trying to ruin things. She warned me about hanging out with Black kids, Asian kids, Hispanic kids, Disabled kids. I did it anyway, and boy did it piss her off. She yelled at me. She threw things at me. She screamed at me. Then the silent treatment began.

Even as she succumbed to undiagnosed multiple sclerosis, she wedged herself into the couch and watched Bill O’Reilly while eating chocolate, drinking black coffee, and smoking cigarettes. Every time I came over, it was Fox News all the time. Never once did it occur to her that she was the one Republicans wanted to disappear from society and die in quiet agony. She did just that.

It’s a weird thing to mourn the life you never had with your schizophrenic MAGA mom. Even when she wasn’t talking about spies and space aliens, she was a rather hateful person. She was a bit unpleasant to be around. And while I can forgive her for all the nights and weekends in the ER, and all the abuse, how do you forgive the rest? My dad tried to convince me that somewhere in there was a loving mom, but all I ever saw was the hate, and that’s what I remember.

When my mom’s mental health collapsed, when she started threatening us in the middle of the night and turning over furniture, my MAGA relatives came to “help.” They stayed for one night, then left.

They scrammed.

It’s a little ironic when they send me messages through my dad, the only one who still talks to them, expressing feelings of abandonment. They wonder why I don’t show up for reunions and funerals anymore.

So, do I feel like I’m misrepresenting MAGA when I think about their unbelievably self-destructive death drives?

I don’t think so.

My dad doesn’t understand, or won’t admit, that Republican lawmakers in his state screwed us out of a fortune, by presiding over a broken healthcare system designed to exploit people like us. His solution to every problem like this one has been: work harder, save more, and ride it out.

My dad doesn’t identify as MAGA, but he’s MAGA adjacent. My in-laws don’t identify as MAGA either, but they still support Trump.

How does that work?

Here’s how:

My in-laws made fun of my spouse for going vegan. They “forgot” to cook food he could eat every Thanksgiving and every Christmas, but they still expected him to show up for family gatherings.

They want us to sit quietly while they complain about transgender athletes or defend sexual predators. They want to talk shit about poor people and their smartphone habits. In my case, they want me to sit quietly and listen to them wonder what on earth teachers do with all their time off.

Some of my relatives want to do it politely. They don’t want to identify with MAGA, because they don’t like how it looks. They need all of it to be sanitized and sane-washed first. Then they’re okay with it.

You could call it opinion laundering.

Newspapers are happy to do it.

But when you speak up, when you contradict your relatives at the table, suddenly you’re talking politics—and that’s rude.

Right?

Here in Trumplandia, our coworkers can talk about church every single day. They can talk about Jesus. They can talk about their spiritual beliefs. They can make fun of atheists and vegans. The minute you tell them you’re a vegan atheist, suddenly you’re the one who can’t shut up about it.

This is MAGA in its full glory.

So, when they come to you and say they’re not all like that, they’re just misunderstood, they just need you to listen to them, they’re full of it. They’re playing on your sympathies. They’re doing what MAGA has been doing since the 90s, before they were known as MAGA. They’re asking you to tolerate their intolerance, to respect their racism, to give their bigotry an audience. Are they capable of being polite long enough to trick someone into thinking they’re not filled with ignorance and hatred? Sure. Do they think they’re the villains?

Of course not.

My MAGA relatives bleed like every other human being. They have emotions. They have people they care about. They’ll tell you how they’re all trying to do the right thing in an imperfect world. They’re not one dimensional, but it only took that one MAGA dimension to destroy our future.

Didn’t it?

And while it’s true that Democrats have done a number of things that made it easier for MAGA to gain their current stronghold, none of it means we should suddenly start nodding in sympathy to MAGA’s plight. They didn’t have to fall for a con artist. They had plenty of other choices to make. I spent a lifetime trying to leave them alone, but they wouldn’t leave me alone.

My racist MAGA grandparents and uncles didn’t have financial problems. They didn’t struggle to pay a mortgage. They didn’t lose jobs. Nothing drove them toward hate. They were always like that, and they didn’t want to change.

The Gavin Newsom types act like there’s still something to learn from inviting Charlie Kirk or Steve Bannon to a podcast. Sociologists want to go on safari through Trump Country. Our corrupt mainstream news wants to act like maybe there’s some way to redeem MAGA. They want to find some little diamond of humanity in there so bad, and it’s striking how far they go out of their way to humanize creeps while dehumanizing so many other groups.

Like all the best villains, they think they’re the good guys. They think they’re the persecuted ones. They think they’re misunderstood. They want to chant for mass deportations, then they want you to listen to their problems.

Take it from someone who grew up MAGA.

There’s no redemption here.

Stop looking.