The Intellectual Foundations of MAGA
... The narrative is widespread and clear. Republican voters, MAGA voters in particular, are universally stigmatized by America’s mainstream thought leaders as uneducated rubes. As Obama once famously sneered, they are “clinging to their guns and religion.”...
All of this is utterly false. There is a coherent intellectual and moral basis for the MAGA agenda, and there is basic agreement among MAGA Republicans over not only the broad themes but also many of the policy details that define that agenda...
Immigration policy is an obvious example where the MAGA position - restoring control of who enters the nation and basing legal immigration on merit - has a clarity that is completely lacking in the current de facto policy. Since Biden took office, nearly 8 million people have illegally crossed into America from Mexico...
The MAGA position is both humane and realistic. It is impossible to admit everyone into the United States who wants to live here. There are an estimated 700 million people in the world who live in extreme poverty. An estimated 2 billion people live in conflict zones. Just allowing 10 percent of these people into the United States would nearly double our population....
Examining what defines MAGA politics must include foreign wars...
A final, fundamental pillar of MAGA concerns environmentalist extremism, which, even more than mass immigration, has crippled the ability of most Americans to afford a decent standard of living. Energy independence and cheap energy have been abandoned to be replaced with "renewable”"wind and solar energy projects that degrade thousands of square miles from upstate New York to the California coast...
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