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The Intellectual Foundations of MAGA

Republicans are dumb. They are easily led suckers, voting against their own best interests, manipulated by dangerous demagogues. This accusation is accepted as fact by most Democrat voters and is relentlessly reinforced by the media Democrats rely on. From MSNBC, Democratic strategist James Carville says Republicans “have a lot of stupid people that vote in their primaries.”  From New York Magazine, “Is DeSantis Just Not Dumb Enough for Republicans?” From Vanity Fair, “Is the Sheer Stupidity of Republican Politics Breaking Through?”

Even some conservative columnists can’t criticize the Democrats without taking a shot at those stupid Republicans. Daniel Henninger, writing for the Wall Street Journal, characterized national politics this year as “The Stupid Party vs. the Evil Party.” As for the leader of the Republican Party, we have this from The New Republic, “Trump Is an Extremely Dumb Fascist.” And as James Carville said, “When stupid people vote, you know who they nominate? Other stupid people.”

Rather than challenge the “stupid” stereotype, David Brooks, the New York Times’ thoroughly housebroken token conservative, has tried to contextualize it, recently stating on PBS Newshour that “this is a working class party,” referring to the Republican base in the Trump era.

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.”

The perception being marketed as a truism in America is that MAGA Republicans are at best incapable of supporting a coherent national political agenda and, at worst, are willfully supporting dangerous policies that will put an end to democracy in America.

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, entering the country with minimal screening across a border that has been thrown wide open. Cities are going bankrupt trying to support them with food, shelter, healthcare, and education. At the same time, drugs pour across the open border, a primary cause of over 110,000 drug overdose deaths in 2023.

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. That’s the reality.

What is humane is to control the border and strictly regulate admittance to the U.S. so that people around the world will stop trying to get here. Then they would no longer be victims of human trafficking or risk dying during their trek. At the same time, fewer Americans would die of drug overdoses. While vigorous debate might take place over how many immigrants the U.S. should admit legally, under MAGA policies, whoever did immigrate would have skills that America needs. The MAGA strategy would be to use immigration to enhance America’s economy, bringing in people who will adopt our traditions and create wealth and opportunity for all Americans. A strong America will retain the capacity to be a force for stability around the world, offering an inspiring example of success for other nations to emulate.

Trade policy is another fundamental plank of the MAGA agenda. And here, the “free trade” mantra has been taken too far by both parties. America’s manufacturing capacity has been hollowed out, leaving the nation dependent on imports for vital medicines, finished goods, strategic minerals, even computer chips. For decades, as American companies have moved operations offshore to escape overzealous regulations and find cheap labor, millions of Americans have lost good jobs.

In fear of MAGA trade policies, there is a howling chorus of neoliberals claiming “protectionist” mandates will crash the global economy. The problem with this claim is that the global economy is already in danger of crashing. Nations have built their economies on the basis of exports to the U.S., and they need to rebalance their economies to develop domestic markets. And to stimulate an economy stripped of good jobs, America is about to hit $35 trillion just in federal government debt, well in excess of the nation’s entire GDP. Adding state and local government debt and unfunded liabilities for Social Security, Medicare, and public sector pensions will easily vault the estimated total government debt in America to over $160 trillion. It can’t go on.

Restoring American manufacturing and reducing America’s trade deficit do not have to spell the end of free trade. But judicious use of tariffs, particularly on imported goods that are subsidized by their governments, and modifying the tax code to discourage American companies from divesting their American operations are elements of what MAGA adherents call fair trade. It can be free, but it also has to be fair. And again, if America doesn’t successfully navigate this rebalancing, the trade deficit and federal debt will crash the economy, dragging the world economy down with it.

One might at least consider the moral and intellectual worth of these economic arguments concerning trade and federal deficits, but not according to the Los Angeles Times. When MAGA Republicans dug in their heels over federal spending earlier this year, Jonah Goldberg, writing for the LA Times, said “the GOP’s stupidity and hypocrisy are showing.” But stupidity, Mr. Goldberg, is thinking that America’s debt binge can go on forever.

Examining what defines MAGA politics must include foreign wars. An illustrative example of how Americans are being trained to think was evident on CBS News last week, where in coverage of the war in Ukraine, the reporter displayed a map of Eastern Europe and said a Russian victory would “bring the Russians to NATO’s doorstep.”

For anyone slightly familiar with the last fifty years of European history, this remark is blatantly deceptive propaganda. In 1989, on the brink of its peaceful dissolution, the Soviet Union still controlled what was referred to as the Warsaw Pact, and the Central European borders of NATO stopped on the eastern frontier of West Germany and Austria. Yugoslavia and Finland were neutral. Since that time, NATO has expanded eastward to include Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia (formerly Czechoslovakia), Romania, Bulgaria, parts of the former Yugoslavia, and East Germany (reunited with Germany). Ukraine, which might have remained neutral, was never on “NATO’s doorstep.” The doorstep was moved east. Acknowledging this does not equate to Russophilia. But it’s a pertinent fact that belongs in any honest discussion of the war over there today.

It would be foolish to suggest that America should abandon foreign entanglements altogether. But just as with free trade vs. fair trade, there is a long way to travel between frequent, expensive interventions with a devastating cost in human lives and “isolationist” foreign policy. If it is realistic and prudent for the U.S. to maintain a strategic and technological military supremacy over other major nations, then wouldn’t that goal be better served by not squandering resources on countless, endless, unresolvable conflicts everywhere on earth?

Why was it necessary to invade Iraq? We had the regime all bottled up, with no-fly zones north and south. About all Iraq still had left back in 2003 was the military wherewithal to serve as an effective regional counterweight to Iran. That would come in handy just now. Does anyone think people in the Middle East are better off since the U.S. and its allies went in and removed Saddam Hussein in Iraq, or, for that matter, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya? The dead can’t answer. The living endure chaos and violence without end. Where is the moral worth in this outcome, or the brilliant strategy? The MAGA foreign policy would be to minimize foreign interventions, putting those resources instead into research and development to maintain a decisive technological edge. We cannot, and should not, try to do it all.

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. Equally impractical and oppressive are environmentalist-inspired restrictions on not just drilling but mining, logging, farming, ranching, new roads, freeways, and housing. Every essential in America is artificially in scarce supply, and this is the real reason for inflation. There’s no end in sight. The MAGA policy would be to deregulate all of these essential industries, forcing corporations to compete again on price, and to redirect public investment into practical infrastructure and away from costly “green” solutions that are neither green nor solutions.

There is a common thread in all of these mainstream, uniparty, establishment policies that MAGA threatens. Money. American corporations and American billionaires make more money when there is unrestricted immigration. It drives down wages. More people in America also means more shortages—particularly as long as the U.S. remains in the grip of extreme environmentalists. More people and less home building means higher prices, making home ownership out of reach for more Americans. But it creates a tremendous opportunity for corporate investors to buy up the nation’s housing stock and turn America into a nation of renters. And the scarcer that housing gets, the better their real estate investments perform.

So-called “free trade” is also an obvious moneymaker for America’s multinational corporations and globalist billionaires. Moving America’s industrial base into nations with cheap labor and minimal regulations is extremely profitable for the movers. But it destroys the workers it leaves behind. As for foreign wars, one of America’s most respected presidents, Dwight David Eisenhower, warned the nation in his farewell address as president of the “military industrial complex.” His warnings are more relevant than ever.

MAGA voters have been tagged as stupid, dangerous simpletons, ready to vote for politicians that will plunge America into a new dark age. To reinforce this smear, MAGA voters are depicted as intolerant bigots, and news reports focus on the polarizing issues of abortion, transgenderism, sexism, racism, and gun violence, to name just some of the big ones. On these issues as well, the MAGA perspective is rooted not only in intellectual coherence, but also in common sense. But these issues, while also of critical importance to our future, are also a distraction, chosen to trigger an emotional response that dominates the psyche. The real threat that MAGA poses to the establishment is financial, involving immigration, trade, war, and “environmentalism.”

In all four cases, the MAGA position is founded on a solid intellectual and moral foundation, aspiring to the optimal well-being of all Americans and ultimately to the benefit of everyone else in the world as well. MAGA Republicans are not dumb.

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About Edward Ring

Edward Ring is a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is also the director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. Ring is the author of Fixing California: Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism (2021) and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022).

Photo: An attendee wearing a MAGA hat waits before former US President Donald Trump speaks during a "Save America" rally in Conroe, Texas on January 29, 2022. (Photo by MARK FELIX/AFP /AFP via Getty Images)

Notable Replies

  1. Great article, couldn’t agree more. There is an underlying elitism in this country that fuels a lot of the sentiment that MAGA voters are dumb – educational snobbery. For decades, I have watched this tendency take root, the marginalization of people who actually build things by people who are parasites on the makers, summed up in the idea that ’ if they were smart, they would have office jobs’. I have seen it over & over again in my own life – the utter surprise that someone with advanced degrees, like myself, would rather make things than ride a desk. The idea that it is somehow shameful to work with your hands that is leading us into a critical shortage of labor in trades that are essential to modern life and an unsustainable level of debt for our young adults.

  2. Good piece, thanks. I struggle to understand why anyone would not want America to be great.

  3. Another excellent article by Mr. Ring. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

    But would like to make a couple points. First, although Republican voters are most certainly not stupid, the same cannot be said for their Republican representatives. And if stupid is not the most accurate description of Republican party and elected officials, craven, venal and utterly unprincipled would certainly be an accurate description.

    Second point is that “extremist environmentalist” is redundant. Today’s “environmentalist” is by definition extremist due to deeply held misanthropy and neo-Marxist beliefs. I prefer to use conservationist for all of us who respect and wish to protect the environment, but do so in a balanced and thoughtful way that considers human existence as a primary objective.

  4. Democrats know they will lose the election in November along the lines of the 1984 Reagan landslide (it would be worse, but their election fraud will put a stop to a rout). So, their braindead rhetoric is their way of working themselves into a righteous, frothing lather as only democrats can over what they plan to do about a Trump win. They, democrats (a political party, no less), will declare the election null and void to “protect our democracy against the dictator Trump.” They believe people will accept that there will be no more elections. Maybe these exceptionally smart people have also figured out that more than half the country will reorder the relationship in a way democrats (a political party) in their perch in DC will not like. And these red-state residents will do that as if they’ve been waiting to do it for four long years, which they will have been by then.

  5. Avatar for Alecto Alecto says:

    I agree with some of these points, but I fear even MAGA policies are subject to undefined terms like “merit-based immigration” which represents another slogan. What is that, specifically and what does it entail? Does it entail extraction migration, meaning the U.S. siphons off the “best and brightest” (which it turns out includes many, many fraudsters) from every foreign country? That might explain Trump’s reference to the state of sh*thole countries. Since Democrats love poor, ignorant, unskilled voters, why not change the Census wording from “people” to “citizens”? That might resolve the power agenda which partially accounts for the Democrat immigration blitz.

    One of the reasons “extraction migration” exists is the U.S. creation of F, M, J visas to import “students” to the U.S. who benefit from American taxpayer largesse. They are often a fiction, as once a foreign citizen gains a foothold through a visa, he never leaves, is never forced to leave, and can apply for jobs which naturally displaces a citizen and lowers wages. Hello Green Card! Goodbye America! Clearly every visa is an immigrant visa!

    The purpose of study visas was to lift up poor countries once those educated foreign students returned home. If being honest, many would admit “study” visas represent a failed policy which does not benefit American citizens. If any policy does not benefit current citizens, then it is a failed policy and ought to be changed.

    What irks me about Ring’s positions on both immigration and what he labels “extreme environmentalism” is the lack of any discussion about population numbers in toto. How many people can the U.S. accommodate and should it try to maximize its population. Why? Does “home ownership” translate into ugly, soulless tract homes stretching over the horizon built by Big Corporate? Many small homebuilders are pushed out of this industry because the biggies can leverage relationships and economies of scale and favorable regulations. What about water availability and quality (currently the majority of storm water runoff goes back into circulation without treatment), open land (Florida lost 365,000 acres of agricultural and open land from 2006-2019), and quality of life issues (traffic congestion, poor planning or failure to execute on land use plans)? What about infrastructure costs? I completely agree that home ownership, or more correctly, property ownership is the basis of liberty and individual rights, but it is and ought to be the sole province of citizens.

    A valiant effort that falls short of its mark.

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