Solutions To Red America's Malaise Aren't Easy

The rise of MAGA and Trump is a frustrated reaction to the failure to status quo Republican and Democratic parties to better the core based of this movement's wants and desires. Trump has presented himself as an agent of change who will tear down the system and force it to start over, which sounds good to someone disgusted with the failure to the status quo to address his complaints.

The problem is that while Trump has empathized with them and their frustrations, the policies that he does have, while they amount to trying to do "something" about their woes, are awful as genuine policies and do nothing meaningful to solve their problems. Indeed, often, Trump's policies actively make things worse. They will lead to rampant inflation, a recession driven by fundamentals, and will undermine the clout and credibility of the United States on the world stage. He echoes their grievances but has no meaningful solutions to them.

The trouble is that the Democrats and Republicans have failed to crack the nuts that cause the discontents and circumstances that are driving the MAGA base, because the MAGA based misunderstands what is driving the circumstances they are unhappy about, and because there aren't easy solutions out there.

Going back isn't an option, because the circumstances that drove what made the "good old days" of the Baby Boom era a positive nostalgic memory can't be reproduced. To do that we'd have to destroy the rest of the developed world's industrial based in a war that spares our own manufacturing infrastructure, kill off or injure proportionately as many people as World War II did, disavow the technologies that made manufacturing more efficient, convince many tens of millions of women to throw away their degrees and their careers, and impose new, unconstitutional, South African or Jim Crow style apartheid  laws (or simply legalizing private racial discrimination). These aren't viable options.

Ending legal abortion, banning hormonal contraceptives, legalizing marital rape, legalizing sex discrimination, making it harder to get divorced, deporting ten million plus immigrants, cutting taxes for the rich and big corporations (both of whom were extremely heavily taxed in the "good old days"), imposing high tariffs, repealing health and safety regulations, and even empowering the unions that were a defining element of the economy in that era still won't have the desired effect, even if they are attempted.

Democrats have been trying for quite a long time, in the absence of any other clear solution, to take the path of trying to establish general, good government policies. And, this has helped. Democratic administrations have created vastly more jobs than Republicans, have experienced much more economic growth, have been more fiscally responsible in controlling deficits, have imposed taxes that have raised revenue without damaging the economy, has promoted free trade and relatively open immigration that has strengthened economic growth, has regulated serious externalities that were being generated by amoral big businesses, and have promoted the predictable, accountable rule of law. They have build international allies that positioned it as a world leader. They have held back backsliding from past productive accomplishments. They have curbed some of the worst excesses of intellectual property protections. They have nurtured new technologies that are necessary for our economy and our military to become stronger. They secured majority popular vote support for their agenda in all but a couple of elections since the 1990s.

Democrats would have liked to advance that agenda further, but the outdated U.S. political system and fierce opposition to their agenda from Republicans prevented them from making more dramatic changes.

And, Democrats aren't perfect either. The handled the issue of affirmative action in higher education poorly. They overstated what unions could do. They were slow to warm to reforming land use regulation and occupational licensing. They allowed unscientific fear to get in the way to a sensible nuclear power policy. They failed to address legitimate grievances from business about the incentives created by U.S. income tax laws. They caved to far to the oil and gas lobby. They were too slow to adopt sensible, fair criminal justice reforms and bought into the "war on drugs" for too long.

The Democrats didn't govern perfectly, but they did govern in good faith and generally speaking advanced the cause of good and just government. And, it isn't as if the Republicans did any better. Indeed, they were far worse at governing and that left everyone, including the MAGA base, worse off.

It also isn't as if the Democrats or Republicans are unique on the international stage in their fairly to address the true causes of the MAGA base's frustrations. Far right movements have surged across Europe, taking power in Hungary, making gains in Poland, and increasing their clout in France and Germany, for example. South Korea's gender divides make the U.S. split over gender issues look like a polite couple's therapy session.

The Europeans have built a much stronger social safety net, but this is just duct tape holding retraining the same underlying pressures from the economy prior to their wealth redistribution efforts. These Social Democratic measures still can't force companies in a market economy to use the labor of the large percentage of workers who don't have the knowledge and attitudes to fit their needs.

Ultimately, the most effective solution has been not affirmative policies, but something akin to Social Darwinism in a modern capitalist economy.

People are moving with their feet to leave rural and Rust Belt red counties, depopulating them in search of an eventual stable bottom. Men may not be doing so quite as quickly as women, but a lot fewer people are dropping out of high school and a lot more people are graduating from college, because compensation and unemployment data are clearly rewarding that. College students are choosing majors that the economy is rewarding. Poor and working class people and teen mothers are finally having far fewer kids. As people move to cities, fewer people find it useful to own guns. More and more people are leaving religion, especially younger generations, while older people who are ill adapted to modern economic circumstances are gradually leaving the work force and then, eventually dying.

Women are being more vigilant about using effective contraception and screening potential romantic partners, taking mail order abortion drugs when they get pregnant, and crossing state lines to get abortions to overcome red state abortion bans. MAGA men are finding themselves rejected on the dating and marriage scene.

Millennials and Generation Z are less religious, less racist, less xenophobic, less homophobic, less transphobic, less misogynistic, more committed to protecting the environment, and better educated, than the generations that came before them. We are still taking a hard line towards domestic violence offenders. They are also, of course, less white and more prone to enter into interracial relationships.

In other words, we a gradually purging a MAGA old guard which is briefly ascendant with a minimal majority coalition, and replacing it with a new, more moral younger generation. Just as scientific revolutions don't triumph until all of the pre-revolutionary scientists die, the backward ideas of the MAGA movement, however, understandable, may fade away, one obituary at a time, until it is small enough to be politically irrelevant again.

Trump and MAGA may be a step backwards, but slowly but surely, if they aren't too successful at pressing their agenda and ending democracy, this could be a last gasp rather than a long term trend and permanent reversal of progress.