The time of living selfishly

MAGAs (they're all MAGAs now) had the far better side of the American civic/social contract they just killed. It ran on the unselfishness and sacrifice of libs and women. The next one won't.

I resigned from my Kiwanis Club of 21 years on the day after the election — not because of any individual club members. I always enjoyed that my club contained many people who see the world differently than I do. I could both hold my own and collaborate with them within our civic space — as anyone who ever shared the club with me would attest, I suspect.

I would never break off a relationship with an individual person over an election, even one as gross and farcical as this one.

Indeed, it’s hard for me to envision fully breaking off a relationship with anyone ever. I always leave room open for honorable or genuinely apologetic (if necessary) reconciliation. I never want anyone to have the power of my hatred. No one has that power over me today, I assure you. Indeed, one victorious MAGA “friend” recently ended our “friendship” in a rage rather than answer a legitimate, respectful question about forced birth’s impact on the women I love. That’s not winning; and that’s never gonna be me.

A dying institution of a dead civic contract

Rather, I resigned from the Lakeland Kiwanis Club because it is a dying institution built more than 100 years ago to serve a long-dying civic structure and contract that our MAGA “friends” and neighbors and family members finally killed for good on Tuesday.

When I joined Lakeland Kiwanis many years ago, it had roughly 200 members. Today, 25 show up to most meetings. Full disclosure: my own attendance in last two months has been bad.

At the time of my resignation, I had a fairly significant role in the club: the chair of both the scholarship committee and the K-Kids Club at Crystal Lake Elementary, both of which I enjoyed very much.

But here’s a reality check about both of those roles: in the last decade, at least one of our scholarship winners was the child of an undocumented immigrant who became salutatorian of Kathleen High School. Wherever she is now, armed men are preparing to hunt her down and “send her back” to a country she has never known. They are doing this with the blessing of the same club who applauded this young woman when they shared a room with her. This successful, delightful young woman is thoroughly Americanized. You would not know unless she told you — or unless you had access to her personal DACA information — that she has family origins anywhere but Lakeland.

Moreover, if you know anything about the families who attend Crystal Lake Elementary, you know how likely it is that Grady Judd’s deputies will be sticking guns in some of those K-Kids’ children’s faces as they search their homes to try to catch and deport their parents.

As the chair of the Lakeland Kiwanis Club’s Scholarship and K-Kids program, I would be helping sand off the rough edges of that reality so the few active club members we still have left don’t have to think about it. I would be helping them see the fun parts only. I would prefer they see pictures of the guns in young people’s faces if I can get them. (In fairness, Trump’s new border czar is now saying, “Mass deportation? What’s that?” — so who knows?)

In any event, I don’t plan to waste another second of my life sanding off anyone’s rough edges for them or propping up anything for the sake of a civic bargain or personal peace that no longer exists.

I would much rather work to create a new civic bargain, one which does not depend on libs (and especially women) to sustain it with extreme forbearance and selfless suffering. That’s a much better way to spend my public time and energy.

MAGA is not an ideology; it’s a deadbeat personality

I have far less vulnerability to MAGA than the children of Crystal Lake Elementary. But MAGA has still defined my adult life — since I was 23. (MAGA has always been with us; and it always will.)

Because a weak and useless MAGA bro was unwilling to live up to even the most basic responsibilities of being a man, I was able to adopt my two older children and live up to my responsibilities of being their father. This was after my wife spent a couple years living up to mother and father responsibilities simultaneously in a love and awe-inspiring way.

This is not to say I became some great parent. I have made many mistakes and failed many times. But my wife and I were there, as very young adults, doing the work of moral responsibility as best we could. And we still are.

While I am personally grateful for the life purpose this MAGA’s weakness and selfishness gave me, I know that I also enabled this useless MAGA man, who went on to create other children he would not take responsibility for, morally or financially. As a father, he’s just like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, except that he didn’t have the inherited capital to buy himself out of the actual work of raising his kids. My wife and I had to buy him out for our own self-interest — and that of our kids. But we couldn’t protect society from him.

This MAGA eventually became a fairly highly paid U.S. Military IT contractor, as I understand it — banking government cash he should have spending on his biological progeny. So this MAGA piece of shit benefitted profoundly from my basic manhood. I relieved him of financial and moral burdens. I paid the bill so he could go on demonstrating how little manhood he possesses, which is the MAGA way.

Above all, Trump declares that boys should be deadbeats, morally and financially. His one truly great life talent is to always leave somebody else holding the bill for his uselessness. “Christians” raising a generation of boys who actively aspire to that level of deadbeat power is the #1 catastrophe our country faces, in my opinion. If America faces decline; that’s why. The median woman is up for the challenge of the future; the median man is not, from what I can see.

Indeed, my heart aches for what Christian dads are unleashing on their MAGA daughters with all these shitty Rogan boys. The type of thing will land far harder on the daily lives of MAGA daughters and Christian girls than it will libs. This is their dating pool.

Living with and/or fixing that is entirely on them, not us, my dear libs.

The best we libs can do for now is limit our direct public exposure to the personal consequences of MAGA weakness, protect each other, and rub MAGA uselessness in people’s face when it serves to reduce their power.

We also need to start using our enormous, largely untapped, social and economic private power — as relatives, friends, employees, citizens — as ruthlessly and transactionally as MAGAs used their vote.

Indeed, although we never thought of him enough to think of it this way, the most resounding personal man-to-man and woman-to-man defeat of my family’s own defining MAGA piece of shit is that our daughter has married a man who is the opposite of him. Rogan’s America is not producing many boys like my son-in-law today; so we feel pretty fortunate.

Define your MAGA relationships as transactionally as MAGAs do

So many libs have a similarly defining life relationship with a MAGA (or more).

Indeed, I would say we libs all have a MAGA (or more) in our lives either not living up to family/friendship responsibilities or forcing us to eat their shitty behavior silently for the sake of a larger peace — or both.

MAGA depends on libs — especially on the care of women in all its forms — far, far more than libs depend on MAGA to get through the day.

And that is power that we have not used.

That is the power around which we can build a new civic contract if we’re willing to use it. And why wouldn’t we be? Our MAGA friends, family, and fellow citizens have just told us there is no peace or civic bargain to preserve. It’s worth turning the country into a dictatorship to tell us that. They explained to us clearly on Tuesday that all the matters to them is what they imagine to be their own power. We should take them at their word and meet them where they are, on our terms.

Again, personally, I am lucky here.

My extended family, for whom I care the most deeply, does not contain MAGAs, suffer their behavior easily, or suffer from them. When we get together on Thanksgiving, we do not argue or simmer in silent resentment. We love. MAGAs are welcome if they come as family guests. But they damn sure behave in our presence.

The one important MAGA-adjacent presence in my life is moving in the right direction — largely because of some very blunt reality checks that come with actual adulthood, not MAGA bro fantasies of how life works.

Beyond family, I have many pleasant MAGA relationships. They are pleasant because I define them.

I do not try to convince anyone of anything. I tell them the truth without mercy; and they decide how to react to it. With the exception of my one now ex-friend, to whom I’ve always been very kind, who was not strong enough to answer a basic question, they all come back to me, on my terms — again and again. Why? I’m not really sure. But I think mostly it’s because they know I’m honest — and they’re rather desperate for a perverse kind of approval that I withhold. Or, they very tangibly need my help when they find my particular skills useful, as my ex-friend often did.

In the end, I treat MAGAs the way they treat other people; and they sort of love me for it. It’s weird, but true. So I would urge all libs to:

• Stop providing the social, emotional, economic safety net for any MAGA in your life. This is hard, I know. We libs are conditioned to take on thankless responsibilities MAGA creates. We have to stop.

• Reorient your MAGA relationships around equality and honesty. Give no ground to them. Make them decide what to do with that.

• Leave nothing unsaid. Spare no truth for the sake of a peace they killed. Holding it in for their sake or anyone else’s is the most destructive personal harm I can imagine.

• Do not let them extort grace from you.

Taking that approach to each other is the only way, in my opinion, to win a truce with people bent on our abstract destruction, who simultaneously crave our visceral affirmation.

It’s not just OK to be selfish with the MAGAs in our lives — it is imperative. It’s the best — perhaps only — way to actually help the people most vulnerable to MAGA — which, in many cases, is MAGA itself.

It’s the capital, stupid

I’m going to get into this in a future article; but there are three basic dimensions through which the outcome of the power distribution story in a nominally democratic society gets determined:

1. Citizenship/identity/tribe

2. Economic fluctuation

3. Capital ownership

(War plays out across all three.)

In America, we have thoroughly conflated #2 and #3 into a single dimension called “the economy.” But they are not, in any way, the same.

Capital ownership is way more defining for how any individual experiences “the economy” than “the economy” is. And most capital ownership is inherited, not made. When people feel the hardship of an economic fluctuation like the post-COVID inflation, they are actually feeling the hardship of owning no capital to cushion or develop them.

I actually benefitted from inflationary wage pressure during the Biden administration because I own some capital and live within my means. I’m also good at good at my job. I do not apologize for that fact or for my experience; but I recognize how rare it is.

Capital ownership disparity has been the defining issue of America for years and years and years — probably for the full life of the country. It is the prime driver of citizenship/identity/tribe in political storytelling. “Working class” today mostly means you possess very little private capital with which to withstand economic fluctuation or develop yourself and your kids upward in American socio-economic life.

Even though my wife and I work very very hard, we are not “working class.” We have some capital, both earned and inherited. In fact, many libs do. We have bought our way out of multiple problems that other people can’t.

Moreover, I belong, through accident of birth, to the dominant American tribe.

There are many signs already — in addition to Trump and Elon’s explicit pre-election promises of economic hardship — that Trump plans to betray the “working class” portion of his base (his real base has never been “working class”) by making everything more expensive and looting whatever capital the MAGA working class has access to (Medicare and Social Security, for example, are capital. Public schools that provide free child care for working class people and education are capital.)

How the MAGA “working class” experiences this betrayal — which is likely to benefit me in a narrow personal way (or at least harm me less than most) — will determine the near-term American future. An addled Trump has made unkeepable narrative promises to oligarchs and single mothers alike. He cannot possibly reconcile them. And he’s gonna chose the oligarchs when it comes down to it — because that’s who lurks around him with knives and who he respects as superior predators.

You had it pretty good, MAGA bros

People forget that Barack Obama did not get himself elected with all his generational political talent and charisma. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney elected him with six years of grinding, stupid, offensive war and a total economic collapse at the end of their term. Without that, Obama would have lost. He definitely have lost in 2004. W’s 2000 to 2004 term was objectively worse for America than Trump’s — at least until he tried to overturn an election he lost with a lynch mob.

In 2016, Trump quite skillfully used American capital disparity and majority tribal identity to ride into office on Obama’s pretty good “economy.” Then COVID hit before anybody had any economic hardship they could specifically associate with him. COVID sucked; but people got to experience a certain degree of capital protection from “the economy.” Child poverty bascially disappeared for a moment because government got rid of it.

Trump used identity and capital disparity again in 2024, with the added benefit of inflation in the economic fluctuation narrative, which could be associated with Biden. It doesn’t matter that Biden managed the American experience with inflation more skillfully, humanely, and successfully than any other country’s leader managed his or her country’s inflation. Inflation sucked everywhere on the planet. But it sucked less here.

However, the American “working class” — MAGA and lib alike — owns no real capital, public or private, other than public schools and Obamacare/Medicaid.

In the last 18 months, working class economic gains under Biden far outstripped the declining impacts of inflation. But they still haven’t measurably transformed the capital reality. No economic fluctuation, by itself, will ever do that.

Trump is much older now, more addled. He seems far higher on his own supply. This time around, Trump and Elon have promised to both immediately destroy Biden’s pretty good, working-class-focused economy and loot whatever bits of public capital people have access to that would cushion that destruction — at the same time. That’s literally what they said they’re gonna do. I report; you decide. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If that happens, millions of MAGA bros all over the country who can’t manage or support themselves will cry to Jordan Peterson and come begging the responsible lib women in their lives (who they resent) to take care of them like the weak boys they are.

Libs (and especially women), who have been the prime source of unofficial private capital for the MAGA working class forever, should have a very clear answer this time:

Thoughts and prayers, son. Now go call Trump or Elon.

Maybe then they’ll realize how good they had it under civic contract they just killed.