INTERPRETING MAGA VERBIAGE
A continuing essay series examining the conflation of politics and religion.
"Stop Him!" by Jeff Gates, www.chamomileteaparty.com, is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 [Note: The ₽ throughout the poster is the currency symbol for the Russian ruble.]
During this past summer in mid-July I came across an interesting phrase being used by MAGA conservatives. The phrase “Do you know what time it is?” led me to my first discovery of Project 2025, and consequently my first genuinely organized short piece of writing here within my Substack newsletter which was titled ““An intellectual case for Trumpism” An Alarming Need to Know Situation.” From that point on I began to search throughout the WWW looking for any and all information I could find about the things that I had encountered that weekend, all the while I kept writing occasionally about whatever might be on my mind at any given time albeit in a somewhat casual and unorganized manner.
Then along came November 1 which is when I wrote my first truly focused and organized longer piece of writing for my subscribers to read, “MAGA Mike & The Heritage Foundation, and Christian Nationalism Two Sides of the Same Coin held together by the bigotry, greed, and zealotry of Project 2025.” By this point in time I had read countless scores of webpages and had browsed through innumerable websites and things started to come together for me in my own mind about just what exactly was taking place in the conservative/MAGA Bizarro world and I realized that it was time for me to get serious with my writing work if I was to have any effective impact on helping my readers also understand the underlying causes of our country’s cold civil war. Some more pieces were written as I got into my writing groove and November 11 saw the publishing of “The puzzle of America’s MAGA problem” which is where I drew attention to the epic complexity of conservative networking efforts to recreate America into a permanent conservative society.
The writings continued and I developed a new sub-series that would be helpful for readers who wanted to be able to access authoritative, credible, reliable, and useful websites for their own explorations and research for combating the scourge of MAGA-conservatism, these networking spotlights would serve a dual purpose of focusing on a single individual, subject, or topic within MAGA while also introducing readers to the useful websites that have served me so well in learning and discovering much of what I have learned and shared with my readers, these pieces are presented in the sub-series titled “UNTANGLING THE MAGA REBELLION NETWORK” and have proven to be very popular.
In my more recent writings I am halfway through a four part essay in which I vivisect a piece of writing steeped in sophism crafted by the president of the Heritage Foundation wherein he attempts to rationalize for his average-minded conservative readers a hypocritical defense of America’s founding history in such a way as to demonize liberal values and their proponents and encourages his conservative readers into “"DRAWING A LINE IN THE SAND".”
And last, but perhaps most seriously of all, my most recent pieces have focused on my new found awareness of an organized movement known as the “Convention of States Action” which I have discerned is a very real distillation of nearly all that is MAGA-Conservative and presents one of the most dangerous of efforts being engaged in by those who “Know what time it is.”
Jonathan Chait a self-professed “liberal hawk”1 wrote a brief piece this past November for the New York magazine’s Intelligencer section that discusses the MAGA jargon “Do you know what time it is?” and its “sinister implications.” It is a short piece of approximately 730+ words that packs an important lesson together about the implications and perspectives of MAGA proponents and their end goals. I will certainly be making use of it in part three of “Drawing a Line in the Sand” as it most definitely helps to contribute to a greater understanding of the cold civil war that MAGA-Conservatives have forced upon all of America.
Below are three short excerpts followed by a link to their source article, I highly recommend taking a few moments to read it and contemplating some of the questions its author poses.
A conservative who knows what time it is recognizes that the left is poised to permanently seize power, and that the old rules of politics (following the traditional norms of liberal democracy) no longer apply in the face of this emergency.
The lingo has gained wide — though, crucially, far from universal — usage within the conservative movement. It is used by post-liberals to distinguish themselves from traditional conservatives. A conservative who does not know “what time it is” still believes the old rules of American politics apply, and that conservatives can still gain power through the traditional methods used by Reagan, Bush et al.
What is most telling is that the discourse knowing-what-time-it-is lacks any defined limits. I have read numerous columns about the meaning of knowing what time it is, and they universally fail to state what it does not permit: street-fighting paramilitary groups? Trying to seize power after losing (another) election? Throwing political dissidents out of helicopters?2
As I have written before and here repeat there has never before been a more perilous time in our country’s history than this current period in which America is in genuine danger of becoming transformed into an illiberal democracy that will for all effective purposes become a Fascist governed society that will devolve with a frighteningly surreal descent into an apartheid state of bigotry, hypocrisy, misogyny, nationalism, patriarchy, and religionism, etcetera, to extreme measures in all these areas and more.
Please as you are able to by all means share and discuss all these kinds of things far and wide and make your family, friends, neighbors, and communities aware of the danger that is lurking within our own borders from our very own fellow-citizens and their chosen political leaders and congresspersons.
Robert J. Rei, December 7, 2023
"There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self." -Aldous Huxley
"The Yoke's On You, Krauthammer” Jonathan Chait, March 17, 2010, The New Republic, https://newrepublic.com/article/73799/the-yokes-you-krauthammer
“The Authoritarian Right’s Code-Phrase: ‘Do You Know What Time It Is?’ The sinister implications of a piece of jargon.” Jonathan Chait, November 3, 2023, New York Magazine, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/11/o-you-know-what-time-it-is-post-liberal-conservative-authoritarian-code-phrase-trump.html
Desire to submit
Robert, that is the frightening part.
Is it a need to feel power, that they feel has been lost. Almost a messianic adulation to someone or thing, that will bring back that feeling.
Even more frightening is that throughout history, there seems to be a need to blame someone or group to blame, retribution is required.
Excellent discussion Robert.
There’s an interesting statement by ‘jsfox’ in the comments to the New York Magazine article:
“From a recent survey done by Morning Consult
* A scale measuring propensity toward right-wing authoritarian tendencies found right-leaning Americans scored higher than their counterparts in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.
* 26% of the U.S. population qualified as highly right-wing authoritarian, Morning Consult research found, twice the share of the No. 2 countries, Canada and Australia.
* The beliefs that voter fraud decided the 2020 election, that Capitol rioters were doing more to protect than undermine the government and that masks and vaccines are not pivotal to stopping COVID-19 were similarly prevalent among right-leaning Americans and those that scored high for right-wing authoritarianism.”
Although the full Morning Consult article and survey (1) from June 28, 2021 is paywalled, a Washington Post opinion piece by Jennifer Rubin from a day later, June 29 (2) is not and gives significant insight into the content and summaries of the survey.
(1). https://pro.morningconsult.com/trend-setters/global-right-wing-authoritarian-test
(2). https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/29/truth-about-gop-they-prefer-authoritarianism-democracy/
Wikipedia gives similar discussion and results, inferring the Wiki editors took freely from and/or are one and the same as the Morning Consult authors.
The WaPo opinion piece has some key and not surprising take aways:
“This means that a large percentage of Republicans — that is, tens of millions of Americans — embrace an authoritarianism defined “as the desire to submit to some authority, aggression that is directed against whomever the authority says should be targeted and a desire to have everybody follow the norms and social conventions that the authority says should be followed.” This inclination to follow a demagogue and to reject democratic values is more pronounced than in other Western democracies.”
“The most authoritarian-inclined Americans tend to be over age 45, live in rural areas and don’t have a college degree. This is the profile of the GOP base, not coincidentally. It follows that many authoritarian-minded Americans are willing to abide by the cult of former president Donald Trump and reject rational analysis. They burrow within right-wing media, refusing to confront facts and views that contradict their philosophy.”
What this all means is the violence and methods of January 6 should not be taken as a one-off anomaly. Other essays and opinion pieces have also discussed a 25 percent plus of Americans feel extreme measures, including violence and civil war might be necessary to correct what they see as America’s ills.
These are indeed scary and perilous times.