MAGA wants its Golden Age back

I would like to explore how, as Christians, we might understand and respond specifically to President Trump’s threats to make Canada the “51st state.” Do Christians have anything to offer here? As a country, and as Canadians, what would a healing response look like?

As a psychotherapist and social worker, I have an abiding interest in what makes for healthy relationships – not just in families but also in community settings. For years, I served as the Executive Director of the Shalem Mental Health Network, a community-based Christian mental health organization that began in Ontario. For decades, I’ve also been actively engaged in the pursuit of public justice and of constructive public policies, especially in the area of peacemaking (I currently serve as a Christian Reformed Church representative on the Management Committee of Project Ploughshares). In this, I have always been drawn to Abraham Kuyper’s “architectonic critique” of society, needed in order to find a “third way” through and beyond the polarizations of our time towards hope-filled approaches rooted in the Gospel. 

Are Trump’s threats to annex Canada real?

In my view, commentators who argue that President Trump’s threat to make Canada the “51st state” is merely a negotiation tactic overlook a vital factor.

That factor is that the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement has embraced an “ideology of identity” or nation. Now, MAGA is not a uniform movement. There are differences of degree within it. But the heart of MAGA, I believe, is its adherence to an ideology. 

Ideologies are societal energies of legitimation where the end justifies the means. Of course, safeguarding the identity of a person or group is a commendable, even essential, goal. But where the pursuit of that legitimate goal crosses the threshold into ideology is when the goal justifies the use of any and all means to achieve it. With ideology, a group of people absolutizes a societal end, legitimates the means needed to bring it about, creates a false enemy that must be destroyed, and recruits Messianic forces to implement the end. Pursuing the end or goal becomes all-important, giving meaning and purpose in life to its adherents. It takes on the quality, in other words, of a religious drive. And religious drives can move mountains. 

What is the end or goal that animates MAGA at this deep level? There are many spokespersons for MAGA; Stephen Bannon is one of them. In a revealing interview in The New York Times, he is very clear about end goals. Vice-President Vance has spoken in a similar vein. MAGA, says Bannon, seeks a return to the era of his father in the 1950s, where white working-class men played the central role, were key to the economy, and where Catholic faith was actively practiced. MAGA is pursuing the return of a “golden age” – a utopian 1950s vision of white male privilege – in response to recent problems. Working-class white men and their families, he says, were abandoned by the leaders of global capitalism; President Bush’s response to 9/11 was the foolhardy Iraq war, in which working-class men, but not sons of the “elites,” were sent to die; and President Obama rescued big banks and large companies during the 2008 crisis, but not millions of regular homeowners who lost their homes. The state’s apparatus (the “deep state”) carried out each of these actions and is thereby identified with this pattern of abandonment.

Legitimate grievances

Note here the soil from which MAGA has emerged. The abandonments outlined are real. If Christians want to help with healing those legitimate grievances, we will need to address the cost of living. The forces of global capitalism have left a significant number of people behind. Christians need to call for an economy of sharing and caring that will include everyone. We need to redefine our security architecture, so that wars are not places for men and women without privilege to fight in and die. And when an economic crisis happens, we will need to focus first and foremost on those who are most impoverished, even though they lack buying power (and thus the power to stimulate the economy). Amending the soil that brought about MAGA should be the first step in our response to President Trump’s threat.

Tomorrow we’ll publish Part II: How does the reality of ideology show up in President Trump’s threat to annex Canada?