The Eclipse of MAGA

by Robert Spencer

America will not be made great again anytime soon. If ever.

The midterm elections have soundly rebuked President Donald Trump, returned control of the Senate and the House of Representatives to the Democrats, and given that party’s 2028 presidential candidate a solid early advantage. Leftist pundits are crowing that “the MAGA movement” is dead, and that is likely true. Not only has Trump’s initiative to restore American greatness fallen well short of its stated goals, but one thing is certain about the people under whose rule America will suffer for the foreseeable future: they will not make America great again. In fact, they will do just the opposite.

Many have observed that this election was a choice between continuing as a free republic or becoming a totalitarian socialist state and/or an Islamic republic. Many others, of course, dismissed such talk as campaign hyperbole, and it won’t happen all at once, but anyone who fails to recognize the hostility of the “progressives” to dissent and their determination to transform the nation into a one-party state are simply naïve or tragically uninformed.

There was the Biden administration’s efforts to silence, deplatform, and marginalize critics of its COVID mythology. And its bogus prosecutions of Trump and others on exaggerated or outright fabricated charges. Don’t forget also the Biden regime’s cruel persecution and imprisonment of ordinary Americans as “insurrectionists” who supposedly were going to bring down the entire United States government by the power of a shirtless guy wearing Viking horns, and its abortive establishment of a Disinformation Governance Board to police speech considered to be “disinformation” (such as Hunter Biden’s absolutely real and outrageously compromising laptop, which a gaggle of dishonest leftist intelligence operatives labeled disinformation in an attempt to remove it from Trump’s 2020 campaign arsenal).

All that and much more make it clear that the Democrat Party is not the guardian of “our democracy” as it claims; rather, it is a radically anti-democratic force that would destroy what remains of our actual republic and remain in power indefinitely, enforcing its will upon the American people by brute force.

Above all, the Democrat Party is anti-American. The clearest and most obvious indication of that fact is not so much its discrediting and destruction of the Make America Great Again movement, which it completed in Tuesday’s election, but in how it was done. Confronted with an opponent who declared that he was going to make America great again, a slogan that Bill Clinton had actually used without controversy during his first presidential campaign, the Democrats opted not to make the most obvious rejoinder: “Yes, we need to make America great again, and we have a better plan for doing so.”

If leading Democrats had said that, and repeated it frequently, in 2015 and 2016, when Trump’s presidential campaign was just getting going, they might have affirmed the idea that both parties loved America and wanted to see it secure and prosperous. They could even have insisted that America didn’t need to be made great again, because their rule had already made it so, although that one would have been harder to sustain after eight years of Obama’s corrosive and destructive presidency.

Instead, leftists sneered at the very idea that America even could be made great again. America was never great, they declared; it was always a pesthole of white supremacy, imperialism, colonialism, racism, oppression, and all manner of other evils, and it still was. They stigmatized the idea of making America great again to the extent that it became associated with all that and worse, as if someone wearing a MAGA hat was proclaiming himself to be an evil racist who opposed all that is good.

This effort was so successful that people for years now have hesitated to appear in public wearing a red MAGA hat, for fear that some leftist, drunk on propaganda and self-righteousness, would assault them, or worse. “Make America Great Again” ought to have been the most innocuous of slogans, and one that Americans at every point on the political spectrum could agree upon.

Instead, the MAGA movement is now dead. Those who hate America and everything it has been are firmly in power in Congress, and in two years will capture the presidency as well. The consequences of all this will be far-reaching, even to the point of making the free, open, and peaceful society in which we once lived a dim memory. All citizens of the United States should have taken it as a warning when one half of the body politic declared that restoring the nation’s greatness was a noxious and execrable idea. Or perhaps by the time that group constituted half of the electorate, it was already too late.

In any case, the twilight of what remains of that greatness is now upon us.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-eclipse-of-maga/