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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is in full celebration mode after Donald Trump’s victory.
And she’s making declarations.
“The message that was shot across the bow is, guess what? The American people, the voters that voted for Trump overwhelmingly, they are MTG,” the Georgia Republican said during an appearance on Real America’s Voice. “MTG is not radical or extreme — she’s mainstream America.”
It may surprise you to read this, but I don’t totally disagree with Greene here. MAGA ideology — and all the racism, misogyny and other bigotry that comes with it — is mainstream, although I don’t know what took her so long to realize this. The fact that millions of Americans voted for it in 2016 and 2020 was more than enough evidence of its popularity.
But what Greene seems to be getting at is an idea I’ve been thinking about — and questioning — a lot lately when it comes to policy. Fundamentally, it’s an idea often promoted in media, and one that theoretically makes sense in a normal political context: that widespread support underscores a “mandate.” I understand why Greene, a MAGA loyalist, is making this argument. In fact, it’s one that Trump himself made on election night, claiming that “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.”
American chattel slavery was immensely popular among the (white) people who had the legal right to weigh in on the matter.
My MSNBC colleague Steve Benen wrote a great piece on the problems with Trump’s mandate claim, including the fact that many of the policies he ran on are quite unpopular. But to Greene’s point, even if they were popular, anyone concerned about civil and human rights shouldn’t acquiesce to an ideology or a political figure simply because a lot of people are supportive.
American chattel slavery was immensely popular among the (white) people who had the legal right to weigh in on the matter. Jim Crow policies and Nazism were also quite popular.
And you might expect Greene, who has said she visited the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp when she was 19, to know that popularity isn’t always a sign of prudent policy. The Auschwitz Museum’s website even explains why — in a way that sounds quite familiar:
The popularity of the Nazis therefore stemmed from an accurate reading of the public mood; the adoption of a program that combined a rather dissonant assortment of nationalist, socialist, and anti-Semitic slogans; and the fact that, in Adolf Hitler, the party had a charismatic leader.
So Greene is right that MAGA has become mainstream. But history tells us that popularity, in and of itself, doesn’t mean that an ideology must be accepted or respected as a set of principles to live by. Sometimes it’s just a sign that toxic views have metastasized.