They’re done just like they were done after Nixon. And after Bush and W. And after Harding, Hoover, and Grant before them.
this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2026
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MAGA was just a symptom of the much larger disease of conservatism. The disease has metastasized and is long overdue for a permanent cure.
Don't believe conservatives when they pretend they are done. They are already regrouping. They will be back, and next time it will be much worse if we don't eliminate this disease while we have the chance.
The people who voted for Trump in 2024 are still around. The fact that enough of them got hurt badly enough in the wallet to turn against him this time around doesn't change the fact that they're capable of looking at Trump's first term and thinking "yeah, I'd like another helping of that". Even if the "MAGA" movement in particular guess by the wayside, something else will come along, just as MAGA replaced the tea party folk. We need to stay vigilant.
Remember when the Republicans thought they were so clever by making most of the Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamp cuts go into effect AFTER midterms. ?
Hoping people wouldn't realize how dirty they did them until it was too late.
I remember.
They knew. They knew then that their policies were going to be very unpopular with everyone. But they thought they could lie their way out of reality and hide the worst of it until after midterms.
But it didn't matter how many times trump said inflation was down. Groceries cheaper than ever. Gas the lowest it's ever been. Employment up.
Even most Republican people noticed he was lying about a few of those things. But many still didn't blame Republicans per se. Just Trump's war. Just that. Only that. So some still voted Republican.
Only die hard magas stayed on his side completely and refused to acknowledge any wrong doing by any Republican. ~ 30%
I really do worry about the firmness of that 30%, I think if liberal democracy wants to stay a 'thing' it will have to find a way to massage that number significantly lower.
So true. We need to handle conservatives as the deadly infestation they actually are.
If you swap the word "conservatives" with the word "immigrants" then you sound exactly like a maga.
Except that immigrants are the life blood and heart of our country and MAGA are actual nazis. So, reality does make a difference here.
If you remove a couple letters from your user name, then you sound exactly like Adolf Hitler. 🤣 Why would anyone take someone named Adolf Schmitler seriously?! 😆 JFC conservatives don't even try to hide who they are. Just cartoonishly pure evil.
"Im justified in calling for executions of groups of people, since my cause is pure and rightous so they deserve to die." Yeah ok buddy. Israeli's say that about Palestinians too you know.
And glad to see you can only focus on my username, since you have absolutely nothing else to say in defense of arguing for genocide. You're more like Hitler and maga than anyone here.
Every word uttered by a conservative is deception or manipulation. This truism applies to your latest comment.
Let's break down your comment and see if we can find a single honest statement within it...
You claim I called for executions of groups of people. Re-reading the thread reveals no such thing at all was said. So, you started your comment off with a lie. Then, you bring up Israel for some unknown reason as a response to your own lie. Strawman arguments are a form of deception, so that's another lie.
Then you claim to "be glad" about your next lie. You definitely are not glad about it, so I'll count that as a lie as well.
Your next lie is that my only statement of defense is to point out how your name celebrates Hitler. Re-reading the thread shows that I had points other than showing how you glorify Hitler with your name, so you've lied there as well.
Finally, you claim I am more like Maga and Hitler than anyone else in this thread. The fact that you argue in defense of conservatism behind a name that glorifies Hitler shows that to be a lie.
It seems every claim you made in your comment was a lie. In fact, it appears there was no honest statement to be found in your comment at all. This supports the truism above, that every word uttered by a conservative is deception or manipulation.
Allow me to predict your next lie in which you claim you are not a conservative, but rather a centrist. 🤣
You hide behind semantics then cry strawman. What do you do when you have an infestation besides exterminate it? The person you call is literally called an "exterminator".
You say everything out of a conservative is deception or manipulation, yet thats all you seem to do as well.
With every comment you only cement the fact you're not different than the very people you despise. You're only a different side.
Oh, are both sides the same? OK. Were both sides the same in 1860 as well?
Stick with that both-sides argument. I'm sure it'll work out well for the side that protects pedophiles, billionaires and bigots.
#DisownConservatives
I know that's your whole thing and we mostly agree in the broad strokes, but what keeps me up at night is the possibility that humans are generally just... 30% bastards? I still don't think it's true, but the possibility chills my blood because that's not a solvable problem within my ethical boundaries.
theauthoritarians.org
Bob Altemeyer started his psychology career studying regular everyday nazis while everyone else studied the nazi leadership. 30% of any given population is highly authoritarian, and this will always be true.
However, that doesn't mean authoritarians are automatically nazis. They're just people who:
- have a high degree of submission to established authority
- are highly aggressive in defense of that authority
- have a high degree of conventionalism
None of this is inherently nazi-adjacent. If the established authority is focused on a better world, authoritarians will be the first to pick up litter, help their neighbors, etc. because not doing so is "wrong". It's not that they're bastards, it's that they are easily controlled by people who score high on Social Dominance traits, and those people tend to be bastards. And are much rarer.
I actually wonder where the dude you're responding to would land on the authoritarianism scale. I suspect it is much higher than they think.
I'll respond to both of you here.
I have considered myself anti-authoritarian since I was a teenager in the 80's. I was a "punk" who associated with a group of people who called ourselves SHARPS or Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice. I cringe at how silly that sounds now as I type that out, but I think it illustrates where our hearts were at the time. We absolutely did not think it was silly at the time. It was a violent response to a problem we had with racist skinheads being absolutely everywhere we wanted to be. I think this ideology saved us from a much worse fate, because we really did turn the tables over time by becoming a very violent problem for the racist skinheads.
I am from the south, just outside of a major city, but this ideology/response actually started somewhere up north and just spread overnight to us through punk shows (where racist skinheads were kicking everyone's asses). My best friend at the time had his leg broken when he was attacked by skinheads outside of a club downtown one night, and that was the beginning for us. We were 14 when that happened, lying about our age and begging for rides from friends to get into punk shows. My group of friends would have become violent in response to the racists whether the SHARP ideology became available to us or not. Sadly, a couple of those friends grew up to become conservatives somehow. They are fucking dead to me and it hurts my soul to say that. But back then, we just absolutely overwhelmed the racists at shows and at school. We picked on them and bullied them every chance we could and when we could, we jumped them just as they jumped us before. It got to a point where they stopped showing up to punk shows entirely by the early 90's
Anyway, that's a lot of words to say I have always despised fascist bullies and I admit I may have a bit of a warped sense of what constitutes a "nazi". I have given this so much thought that I may be guilty of overthinking it all. But, in 2020, watching my conservative colleagues become complete dickbags, I felt all that rage coming back. That is when I think I began to see all conservatives as nazis. It seems extremely obvious to me that nazism in the 40's was just unchecked conservatism. Social distancing led me to retire from my career to just get away from conservatives. And things have only gotten worse with conservatism/nazism since then.
I have more to say, but this is already a really longwinded comment.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Fuck conservatives. They are all nazis in my book.
I've read Altemeyer's book, but I'd forgotten that his figure was also pretty much 30%. I hope the other fella is right, and all you need to get authoritarian personalities on the same page as us societally is to make sure leadership is thoroughly and vocally prosocial. In a society like that, I'd still hate conservatives and the religious right, but things would definitely feel more politically sustainable.
That said, billionaires are outspending for conservatives everywhere and mostly getting what they want from everyone who isn't a conservative, and capitalism makes that the likeliest outcome. The Nazis have to be fought from every direction, top-down and bottom-up - and yes, that means also punching sideways. I've tearfully shed a few dear friends who can't get with the program myself, and one who outright went insane with incel racist shit after too much 4chan. Each one of them does need to change and grow, but it's deluded to think they're our job to fix.
Even walked away from a friend of 20 years. I still have a pretty complete mental model of him in my brain. I haven't needed to talk to him to know what he'd say for years, and nothing I could think to say was changing his mind. So I gave up. Fuck conservatives, authoritarians, and billionaires forever.
So yeah, longwinded comment to say I basically agree, but I haven't given up all hope yet.
I'm sorry about your loss of friends. Your comment about knowing exactly what your friend of 20 years would say in any situation and realizing he cannot be saved really resonates with me.
I also hope the other commenter (and Altemeyer) are right, although I have not read the book. I have a glimmer of hope for us, particularly after seeing the results of the midterms. But the fact that we're having this conversation suggests we all know the fight is nowhere near done. Esoecially as long as billionaires exist.
Stay strong. You are not alone, as much as it may sometimes feel that way. The more people I talk openly with about these subjects, the more common experiences I find, even with people I would not have suspected felt similarly. All the advice to "find community" seems to be pretty accurate, albeit challenging.
Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians book is the one thing I would recommend to someone like yourself, they demystify the mindset of these people in a way that doesn't condone them or sugarcoat anything, but still manages to make them back into comprehensible human beings. The author's passed away but his site offers them for free, super recommend. I should reread them, apparently I haven't digested everything.
Unrelated tangent about another book in the same mental category for me (transformative, reframes some of my life's struggles in a way that makes it easier to process, clear and concise professional writing style) is Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. These two books had all the tools I need to begin to heal from the sorry predicament of being me, in this time and place. Maybe you'd feel the same? Pardon the random too-familiar sidebar.
Thank you for the excellent recommendations. I've been looking for a new line of books, and these sound like a good fit. It's hard for me to imagine forgiving any conservatives right now. I think my anger for these overt comic book villains makes it hard to see alternative views of them, but I'd love to find some glimmer of hope that there is a peaceful solution to all this.
More importantly, you can't really process things emotionally without understanding why they happened, if you're anything like me. Knowing why society is fucked helps me get to a better place mentally and - in my wildest dreams, puts me in a position to make any changes that leave the world better than I found it. By the same token, learning why I grew up too early and always felt emotionally lonely can hopefully help me raise my kid so he doesn't have that issue. These books help. <3
Someone should really define what "maga" even is.
So far, it is a word that sounds much like a baby-word ("maga" sounds like "googoo" and "gaagaa") and the movement seems to embody a set of people that adore a big-mouthed failson who was given a game show that gave gullible people the impression he's a bigly important businessman.
If you take donnie out of the equation, what do they even stand for? Racism, xenophobia, misogyny? Putting xtians on a pedestal and giving them special privileges? Sure. But that's pretty much the core of conservatism and always has been.
While we're at it, can they define "antifa"?
I really want to watch as the cobwebs fall off the cogs.
Cult of personality. Once that personality is gone, so will be MAGA.
Soaking of definitions: "conservatism", what is it? Do we have a definition that conservatives agree with?
I will enjoy watching MAGAs death spiral.
Watching the GOP blame all their failures as public servants in Trump is the most Trump thing ever. It's just scapegoats all the way down.
God I hope so, but I doubt it.