MAGA on the Beach Redux

On an encounter with enraged Trumpers - and the difficult road ahead for a society in which conspiracies, extremist iconography, and political violence have become ubiquitous

A quick note before we get started: I apologize for the lighter and more irregular publishing schedule in the month of July. I have been traveling in Europe for the past few weeks. This trip has been part vacation, part trying to handle a family health situation while also navigating the recovery from my own (somewhat serious) health scare in the spring. I simply had to reduce the workload on this trip, even though it quickly proved impossible to take a proper break from American politics. I will be back in the States next week and will return to a normal routine for the newsletter. That also means audio versions of the pieces will return – I still want this to be a regular feature going forward, but it simply wasn’t feasible, mostly for technical reasons, to record voiceovers while we have been traveling. I also plan on revisiting some of the events of the summer on which I haven’t yet had a chance to chime in (An assassination attempt! JD Vance! The MAGA convention! Democrats are finally on the offensive against rightwing weirdos!). You may take that as either a promise or a threat… Thank you for your patience!

We are experiencing a truly extreme moment in U.S. history. The past few weeks have been relentlessly intense and felt, at times, overwhelming. It’s only been five weeks since the first Presidential Debate that now, surely and somewhat bizarrely, might be regarded as one of the more consequential events in recent American politics. One month ago, the Supreme Court declared the president – and Donald Trump, specifically – basically immune from criminal prosecution, thereby not only making it entirely unlikely that Trump will be held accountable for past crimes, but also preemptively endorsing whatever the next rightwing regime might be up to. It’s not even been three weeks since Trump escaped an assassination attempt that had many journalistic commentators reflexively – and foolishly – declare that “everything had changed.” As it turned out, the country moved on from this event within a week. Because on July 21, Joe Biden announced his decision to drop out of the presidential race and endorsed Kamala Harris, which completely upended the election campaign… And that’s just the cliff notes – before even mentioning some of the not-so-minor plot points like Donald Trump presenting rightwing extremist JD Vance as his VP pick, signaling how completely the Republican Party has been taken over by a MAGA movement that no longer feels the need to seek any compromises with more traditional conservative elites; and the Republican National Convention openly embracing an aggressive blood-and-soil ethno-nationalism and lust for authoritarian control without even the pretensions of “conservatism” in a more traditional understanding.  

The news cycle has been absolutely exhausting. There is a political cartoon by David Sipress that was first published in the 1990s but captures this feeling of having to deal with a constant onslaught of anxiety-inducing political news so precisely that it rose to fame in the Trump era. Two people, with a glum look on their faces, walk alongside each other, when one says: “My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane.” Don’t we all feel that way right now.

I say that even though I have observed most of the frenzy from afar, since we have been traveling in Europe the past month. It’s caused a weirdly dissonant feeling, almost disorienting, to be so far removed from the events – geographically, but also in the sense that my primary daytime occupation over here has either been building sandcastles with my kids or dealing with family health issues. But in the year 2024, there is simply no escaping the mental toll of having to live through the escalating conflict over whether or not America should continue on the path towards multiracial, pluralistic democracy.

The frenetic pace of American politics is itself a sign of crisis. In a stable, functioning democracy, citizens would not have to constantly grapple with the potential demise of the Republic or invest significant mental resources into compartmentalizing and ignoring the political surroundings in order to get on with their everyday burdens and responsibilities.

I am acutely aware that I am ill-equipped to provide respite from the political conflict. I was tempted to go off script and write, just once, about something that is not politics, something fun (in a better world, I would have spent the month of July delivering dispatches from the Tour de France, an event with which I have been obsessed for literally as long as I can remember). But I hesitate to stray from the mission of this newsletter, which is to explore the past and present of the struggle over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in America, with a focus on those forces and ideas that have always existed in opposition to the project of egalitarianism.

This piece is no exception: While it isn’t directly about Trump, it deals with the ubiquity of MAGA across American life and the pervasive conspiratorialism on the Right; while it doesn’t tackle the 2024 election explicitly, it concerns the deeply pathological political culture in which the election will be held. In fact, this piece fits the moment because at its core, it offers a reflection on the impossibility of escaping the political conflict – and a plea for American society to address the spread and rapid normalization of extremist iconography, fascistic symbols, and violent rhetoric as an urgent threat to democracy.

I actually wrote about my run-in with MAGA on the beach before, in one of the earliest essays for Democracy Americana. Over the past few weeks, I have been thinking about this encounter a lot – precisely because my experience here in Europe has hammered home how uniquely and outlandishly American it was. I believe this is an opportune time to revisit the story of how, two years ago, in August 2022, during our family vacation at an overly expensive sea resort on the New Jersey coast, I rather unexpectedly clashed with MAGA America.

While chasing seagulls with my two little boys – almost five and almost two years old at the time, respectively –, we ran into two elderly ladies who, at first, were delighted at the sight of the exuberant little humans. As they stopped to tell me how adorable my kids were, things started off with some pleasant small talk. But within just moments, one of the ladies launched into a tirade about the impending doom of the Republic and rattled off one rightwing conspiracy theory after another. She was particularly alarmed about encroaching government tyranny: Outraged about the FBI having “raided” Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago in Florida just a few days earlier, and utterly convinced that the IRS was about to unleash 87,000 new agents – which she seemed to imagine as a heavily armed special ops force – on her and her fellow supporters of “President Trump” (she kept saying “President Trump” as opposed to “Biden,” just Biden, or “the Clintons”).

87,000 IRS agents, out to destroy the lives and livelihoods of real Americans. That was not a random number. In the summer of 2022, leading Republicans often railed against “the Democrats’ new army of 87,000 IRS agents” – which rightwingers often took quite literally: Armed agents, a proper tax army, will come after American patriots! As the Inflation Reduction Act was passing the Senate, slightly different versions of this paranoid story were shared across the Right, Tucker Carlson and the rest of the rightwing propaganda machine went all in, and white power militants and fascistic groups were putting out recruitment videos: Heavily armed IRS agents are coming to raid our homes – gotta get ready to defend yourselves and all you hold dear in this world!

The story had quite a bit of staying power in the rightwing imagination. In his first speech as Speaker of the House, the night he was finally elected in January 2023, Kevin McCarthy (remember him? That feels like an eternity ago!) proudly announced, to thunderous applause from his caucus: “I know the night is late, but when we come back, our very first bill will repeal the funding for 87,000 new IRS agents.”

McCarthy kept his word. The first legislation Republicans passed in the House after winning the majority in the 2022 midterms was to repeal funding, over $70 billion, for the IRS, basically cutting all the resources Biden provided in the Inflation Reduction Act from the summer. To make sure those 87,000 new IRS agents would never haunt and harass American patriots.

It was further evidence of how much the Republican Party was untethered from empirical reality. Because no one was ever planning to hire those 87,000 new agents in the first place. The idea that the IRS was about to more than double its personnel had been widely debunked over, and over, and over again. The additional funding in the Inflation Reduction Act was intended to strengthen the IRS’s enforcement capabilities, especially the capability to audit wealthy people, which simply is more difficult, takes longer, is therefore more expensive. It would mostly replace funding Republicans had previously cut, allow the IRS to revert some of the dramatic decline in the number of full-time employees over the past decade, and compensate for staff retiring over the next ten years. This was also going to raise revenue significantly. The Right, however, did not care about those facts.

Which brings us back to my beach encounter with the rightwing base version of this conspiracy theory. For context: It was the morning of August 11, 2022, the second to last day of our summer vacation. Our time at the Jersey Shore, unfortunately, coincided with some monumental events in American politics. The Inflation Reduction Act had passed the Senate on August 7; on August 8, the FBI had searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago to secure the classified documents they knew were in his possession. All the usual caveats regarding anecdotal evidence apply; unfortunately, though, I believe this personal story is still alarmingly instructive.

Like I said, the encounter started with some unsuspicious small talk. About life in general and vacationing with two little kids in particular. “Where are you from? You sound Australian,” one of the ladies said; “I wish,” I replied, “but no, I’m German.” (I’ve been to Australia once and people generally seemed far more relaxed than in any other place I have visited, which, without doing any research to confirm, I am putting down to most of the population living in immediate proximity to the beach; also, I love the Aussie accent and therefore took the lady mistakenly placing me Down Under as a compliment.)

She was ecstatic to hear I was German and told me about her many trips to Germany with her husband, how they had lived over there while he was on a Fulbright scholarship. “We are both academics,” she emphasized – something that was obviously important to her identity. “Did you come here on vacation from Germany?” – No, we live in DC, moved over to the States in early 2021. “What is it you do?” - I’m a historian. - “Oh, you certainly chose a historic moment to come to this country! We live in interesting times!”

At that point, the conversation could have gone in a number of different directions. I often get versions of “You chose an interesting time” when I mention that I study U.S. politics and that we have recently moved across the Atlantic to set up a new life in the States. Usually, it is meant to express support and empathy, as in: I guess that means you don’t get much of a break from the Trumpian craziness…

That’s not how this particular conversation went, however. The next thing the lady said was: “I hope you’re teaching your students the Fourth amendment!” – “The Fourth amendment?” I must have replied. I admit it took me a moment to connect the dots. And by the time I did, it was already too late. The elderly lady who had been delighted at the sight of my babies chasing seagulls just minutes earlier was now going off: about the “illegal raid” (on Mar-a-Lago), what an outrage it was, how the country was doomed unless patriots stood up to defend it.

I should have just walked away right at that moment. Why didn’t I? Maybe because of the vestiges of the “respect your elders” dogma that (unfortunately) played such a crucial role in my upbringing; mostly because I’m just really bad at handling social conflict. Instead of turning around and fleeing, I reflexively mentioned something about equality before the law, probable cause, a judge signing off on the warrant… In return, I received a crash course in rightwing conspiratorial talking points and how they relate to each other. “It was that Epstein judge, did you know that?” the lady said with that “I’m about to open your eyes to what’s really going on” messianic zeal that conspiratorial thinkers often display. The Clintons, by the way, “stole furniture worth tens of thousands from the White House, did you know that?” A crime far worse than taking “some documents that belong to him anyway,” apparently. “Why should he have to give back his letters just because some archivist wants them.” And, anyway, they “invaded his private home,” the now very animated lady continued, “even Melania’s chambers, can you imagine?” That actually made me chuckle, which earned me a nasty look. Melania’s chambers. Hm. I tried to build some sort of bridge, I think, maybe lighten the mood, by saying: “Well, if I was hiding evidence, I would certainly try to make it disappear amidst the chaos in the kids’ bedroom!” But she wasn’t having any of it. “Why are they going after him, and not Hunter Biden?” – “Hunter Biden?” I heard myself say, reflexively, “We’re talking about the former president. Has Hunter Biden ever held public office?” She gave me the whole “Joe did his bidding!” spiel.

Then it got more personal. “You are from Germany,” she said, in a way that expressed both frustration and disappointment, “you should know about Hitler and Mussolini, you should be outraged!” I foolishly allowed myself to think: Oh, if we’re talking history, I’m on firm ground, I can handle that: “If you are concerned about the rise of fascism, you’re looking at the wrong side.” That remark made her really angry. “Ah, you only say that because you’re from Germany, and you don’t know what’s going on here…” (I guess my being German cut both ways for her: You know from your own history! But you don’t know a thing!)

And that’s when she dropped the IRS bomb: “They are arming IRS agents as we speak – they are coming to our houses, they are going to raid our homes, taking away everything!” I must admit I had never heard of this specific conspiracy theory. I was baffled. “Come on now…” was all I could muster. That set off her final tirade: “Ah, you’re one of those people, you’re just consuming liberal propaganda, reading from the magic laptop all day…” Two years have passed, and I still have no idea what the “magic laptop” is supposed to be.

She was actually yelling at me by that point. On the beach. I basically froze. Thankfully, her friend, who had been visibly uncomfortable the whole time (while still nodding along with everything the MAGA lady threw at me), chimed in: “I think we should probably go this way, and you should go that way.” And so, we did.

To recap what I know about her profile: She was an elderly white person, with an academic background, widely traveled, had lived overseas, and, it can be assumed, reasonably wealthy. I’ve spent a fair bit of time reflecting on what, if anything, is to be taken away from this encounter:

1) She obviously didn’t fit the ideal of the economically anxious, left-behind by the evil forces of globalism Trump voter, nor the stereotype of the conspiratorially inclined fringe. These pervasive myths never held up to empirical scrutiny. No one should be surprised that this person not only voted Republican (duh), but was fiercely loyal to Trump, specifically.

2) What this “conversation” put into stark relief for me was that the idea of “keeping politics out of it,” of deliberately preserving and creating non-political spaces in which we can all come together harmoniously, is simply not plausible. Coming off this crazy July and with three months to go until the 2024 election, such ideas seem laughable. This person was fully politicized. Consumed by politics. Her interaction with a complete stranger, on the beach, turned to the most contentious political issues within a few minutes. And she hadn’t been provoked by some “woke” activists making it all about their “identity politics” – it was all on this resentful, fearful senior citizen.

3) Similarly, there just is no “meeting in the middle,” no “finding common ground” with such people. For her, I was the enemy – even though we met in the least threatening setting imaginable: She encountered me as the father of a five-year-old who was chasing sea gulls on the beach and a two-year-old who was adorably trying to keep up with his big brother. We even *did* start off with some common ground: her time in Germany, life in academia, most of all: kids! And yet, none of that mattered. Because none of that makes the very real conflict at the heart of the political situation go away. This person wasn’t interested in debate, or hearing a different perspective, or building bridges, or compromise. She wasn’t even willing to just ignore politics. The only thing she would have accepted from me was compliance and submission. There was no truce to be had.

4) I am continuously amazed (as in: terrified) by the effectiveness of the rightwing information / propaganda machine. This elderly lady had all her talking points ready; it was like someone had briefed her on what the unified response to the FBI “raid” on Mar-a-Lago and the tyrannical Biden legislation was going to be. And she delivered. She became part of a larger machine. Republican officials and political commentators like legal scholar / conservative pundit Jonathan Turley were constantly flooding the discourse with all the same talking points (previous presidents stole furniture!), employing the same strategies of obstruction. Instantaneously, everywhere.

5) Probably the most concerning aspect of all: The depth and extent of the Right’s radicalization. This “Armed IRS is coming for you” message was shared by both fascistic militants and this elderly lady who should have been enjoying her time on the beach without a care for the world. The extremism has fully spread to the “respectable” spheres. That doesn’t mean this lady was herself a member of a violent militia, or that she was about to join the armed revolt. It does mean, however, that she was doing her part to popularize, normalize, legitimize extremist ideology. It also means that we are not dealing with fringe phenomena. This IRS thing appeared more or less simultaneously in far-right online circles and in the well-respected communities of “upstanding,” educated, wealthy senior citizens. No matter where, exactly, such extremist conspiratorial theories originate: They are immediately picked up by the rightwing propaganda machine and transported by leading conservatives and Republican elected officials. While there are different levels and layers of radicalism on the Right, there is no clear line of demarcation between the Trumpian “fringe” and the center of conservative politics and social life. It is, at best, a permeable membrane – as it always has been.

6) As much as this encounter demonstrated the reach and power of rightwing propaganda, I maintain that a paradigm that locates the greatest threat to democracy in “mis-/disinformation” is fails to grasp what really happened here. The idea that this lady started from a place of being fully on board with egalitarian democracy and equality before the law only to get dragged into the conspiratorial swamp because she was being poisoned by mis-/disinformation is not at all convincing. The media and information diet of this person that evidently consisted of far-right media only certainly didn’t help. But I find it much more plausible to assume that she gravitated towards those conspiracies because they aligned with and legitimized her view of society and her own rightful place in it: at the top, unbothered by the undeserving mob; and because they confirmed and fueled her paranoid perceptions of the “leftist” enemy coming for her, and, by extension, all upstanding “real American” patriots like her, wanting to take away what had been, in her mind, always been rightfully hers.

7) Here was the rightwing permission structure on full display. How are people who consider themselves “upstanding” citizens, who would probably describe their political views as “conservative” (as in: not radical, but focused on preserving what they deem moral and good), and definitely would not regard themselves “extremists” giving themselves permission to embrace a conspiratorial radicalism that aligns them with the white supremacist fringe and to indulge in the kind of militancy that should be anathema for “principled” conservatives and upright citizens alike? Well, if the other side really were preparing to send out armed IRS hit squads, would there be anything - very much including the use of political violence - *not* justified in the struggle against such despotic forces? Once you have convinced yourself and/or your supporters that the other side is scheming to deprive you of what is rightfully yours and, should you resist, take your very lives, any measure you take, regardless of how radical, is justified as an inevitable act of (preemptive) self-defense.

8) I remember vividly how, in the days after the encounter, I kept replaying the conversation in my mind, and I was constantly catching myself trying to figure out what I could have / should have said: better arguments, more evidence, different tone… But that wasn’t just pointless, it was also self-defeating. The problem is not just that this particular person obviously wasn’t going to be moved by empirical evidence or by pointing out flaws and inconsistencies in what she was claiming. The very idea that the political conflict is ultimately about better arguments is misleading. It’s one of the fallacies of which many educated liberals and lefties – like me! – apparently can’t fully let go. But a fallacy it remains: There was no persuading that person, not by saying the right thing or in the right tone. Because it’s not a contest of ideas. People like me would love it to be a competition of who has the better arguments. Because that’s the kind of struggle with which we feel comfortable, that we – naively, arrogantly – believe we can win. But it’s not the kind of conflict in which we find ourselves. Better to accept and grapple with that.

9) The reason why I’ve been thinking about this encounter from two years ago so much over the past few weeks is that I *didn’t* have to worry about coming into conflict with the MAGA crowd this year. Because we spend the month of July in Europe, we got a break from being personally confronted with the American Right metastasizing extremism around every corner. While the confrontation at the Jersey Shore stood out by how personal it got, in many ways, there was nothing out of the ordinary about it. Just life in America. Such encounters are certainly less likely – though far from impossible – if you live in a deep blue enclave like Washington, DC. But one never has to go far before an openly militant and explicitly aggressive form of rightwing extremism stares you right in the face. Over the past few years, I have driven behind pick-up trucks plastered with the Punisher logo, the Spartan helmet, and lots of other fascistic symbols countless times; in the summer of 2021, our campground in rural Maine was surrounded by farmhouses flying “Stop the Steal” flags; at a diner in Luray, Virginia, during a trip to Shenandoah Valley in April 2023, I had to explain to my sister, who was visiting from Germany, why my mood changed when I realized that the nearest table was occupied by two people wearing t-shirts sporting the “Make Leftists Disappear Again” slogan and the silhouette of a helicopter, a reference to the practice of “disappearing” dissidents by throwing them out of aircraft that was pioneered by the military dictatorships in Argentina and Chile in the 1970s; my sister rightfully reacted with a mixture of outrage and bewilderment to the fact that people casually wore shirts in public that basically proclaimed “Let’s kill some leftist enemies here in America, like Pinochet did.” And waiting in line at a very popular ice cream place in Ogunquit, Maine last summer, my older son noticed that I was tensing up when I realized we had a “God, Guns, and Country” t-shirt guy in front of us and a “Don’t tread on me” dude behind us.

Being confronted with this stuff is exhausting – even for me as a hetero cis white man who is far down the list of people these extremist ideologies conceptualize as the enemy. I am fully aware that I am unlikely to draw these rightwingers’ ire as I am not immediately recognizable as one of those “Un-American” Others they so passionately despise. More often than not, they’ll treat me just fine. So many others do not share my privilege.

The ubiquity of militant iconography and extremist slogans is not a manifestation of robust free speech, but a sign of a democratic crisis and a deeply pathological political culture. If a democracy that deserves the label is to emerge out of this current mess, America will need to establish societal boundaries against the public display of violence, the open embrace of militancy, the casual spouting of extremist ideology and conspiratorial nonsense. A country in which it is regarded as socially acceptable behavior to wear a t-shirt to the airport with which you pledge to either kill or banish a good portion of your fellow citizens and fellow airplane passengers is not a nation in which democracy will be sustainable.

Let’s not be naïve: Such boundaries, even if they were to be rigorously enforced, would not end the political conflict. The underlying struggle over status and power is real, with tremendous material stakes – it won’t be solved by symbolics. The people wearing such extremist gear on their Saturday morning family visit to the National Zoo won’t change their idea of the “natural” societal order just because they have to clear out part of their wardrobe. But such boundaries matter nonetheless. They are meaningful as bulwarks against the further normalization of extremism and violence.

We should also consider this kind of rhetoric, the public display of these slogans and symbols as a form of harassment, threat, and violence. It is directed at everyone who doesn’t conform to the rightwing ideology of who belongs in “real America,” anyone who dares to deviate from the reactionary ideal of white Christian patriarchal domination, all those whose very existence is regarded by the extremist Right as an unacceptable provocation. Rightwingers have aggressively taken to the streets, the town halls, and the beaches. They are trying to dominate the public square, and we mustn’t let them. They understand that pluralistic democracy depends on all people feeling safe in the public square. If they don’t, because it is ruled by intimidation, threats of violence, and displays of aggression, they won’t be able to participate as equal citizens. As a result, democratic political culture perishes – just what the extremists on the Right desire.