I believe you are putting the cart before the horse. Yes, the things that are commonly believed among the MAGA crowd seem absurd. But we live in an era that is a credulous as the Middle Ages. Most of the idiocy that the far right buys into regards issues they have no understanding of. But it's not that different on the left, which espouses quite a few idiotic beliefs of its own. On both sides, most of it amounts to "Yay team!" Seriously--how many Americans of either party do you think could point to Ukraine on a globe? Or even Israel, Lebanon, Syria, or Iran? Or could tell you what a tariff is? It might seriously not be a two digit percentage. It might not be a two-digit percentage even on the left. The point is, the fury behind the mass support of the right wing revolutionaries who are now in charge isn't from any particular policies. It can't be--there are not enough Americans anymore who know or could explain what any of them are. Most Americans don't know how government works to the standards of the 8th grade fifty years ago. The fury is driven by profound class hatreds, and the fuel for that fire has been laid for fifty years by the Left. The idea that America is about race is polemical nonsense. Our "classless" society is exquisitely sensitive to class. There's literally nothing it cares about more. There is some real hatred of other races, as there always is, in every group, but 90% of "race" issues are in fact permutations of class sensitivities. Against that background, the left, in particular the media and the educational system, have been at at enormous pains to associate racist views in particular, but all homespun social conservatism, especially Evangelical Christianity, with being low class. Anyway, if you spend fifty years (say, from "All In The Family" till now) linking dog-whistles like "racist" to working class people, and then relentlessly call 2/3 of the country racist, well, why not just poke them with a sharp stick--they'd take it more kindly! Everyone forgets that the "Trump Base" was OUR base from Roosevelt through Carter. Those evil racists elected every single official responsible for the mass social justice movements: women's suffrage, the civil rights movement, the war on poverty, OSHA, and anti-child labor laws, just to name a few. They elected the people who put in place literally ever piece of socially progressive legislation of the 20th C. We lost them by relentlessly harping on calling pretty much everyone who isn't in the blue-state UMC a racist. That's the word that we've spend fifty years turning into a class insult. And in a hundred lesser ways, we go out of our way to make it clear that the working class isn't welcome on the left. It's just incredible folly. You belittle and scorn almost two thirds of the country for a couple of generations, and this is the whirlwind you reap. The terrifying thing is, we've gone equally out of our way to preach that men, in fact, masculinity itself is despicable. The left is totally blind to the scale of rage that soaking the educational system in this has created. It's terrifying to talk to the peers of my thirty-something, blue-state, college kid sons. Every one of them, by birth and education, should be a center-left liberal, yet every one of them, if pressed, is a Trump sympathizer if not an active supporter. And it's all driven by their profound feeling that the Democratic party despises their Y chromosome. Are they right? I don't know. It doesn't matter if they're right or if working class and LMC America are right that the left despises them. They believe it for a reason, and it's a gigantic political fact that we are willfully blind to. We're not in for four years of MAGA. We're in for a couple of generations of MAGA, yet the band plays on.