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Treating MAGA as an epidemic disease
(www.salon.com)
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this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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What are the solutions though? I don't think this descent stops until the MAGA crowd gets most of what they want and realize it sucks ass to live that way which is going to come with a lot of pain for everyone. They're clearly not willing or able to learn from history, think through policies without experiencing the negative consequences personally, or distinguish reality from propaganda and/or wishful thinking. What options for resolution does that leave us with?
The only thing I can see that might work is fighting them off until enough of the old folks in their camp die and hoping the younger crowd doesn't follow in their footsteps. That's not a particularly appealing plan but I'm not sure what else is on the table.
That's where we're headed, sure. What we need is someone to explain (a) the forces at play at some deeper level, and (b) tell us how we fix it.
That's why this is a disappointing article: The headline proposes an interesting idea - treat the Trump/MAGA mental illness as a disease - and then immediately forgets about it. We deal with diseases all the time, and even if mental disease is a challenge to diagnose and treat, it's a great framework! Studies may be able to show most MAGA disease vectors are people with X, Y and Z verifiable, objective psychological disorders or features. They may theorize that if we treat those disorders, we can save those people from this type of self-harm (which is what MAGA is at this point). That's a fantastic concept! Similar to the far too unexplored concept of treating this as a cult deprogramming. If we work the problem maybe we can come up with a solution that doesn't involve fascism winning, or us all killing each other in a civil war.
Instead, it's just "this is bad...really bad." Ok, thank you Mr. WHO epidemiologist.
(I know, I'm not helping either - but I'm not smart enough in epidemiology, or cult deprogramming. Comment posting is my therapy, nothing more.)
I’m vaguely hopeful that continuing to lose at the ballot box will de-motivate them enough for this current frothing at the mouth to die out.