“What’s the problem with xenophobic nationalism? Don’t you think that’s better for Americans in general?”
“I think you’re making my argument for me.”
I almost made it to the hour mark. For close to sixty (long) minutes, I allowed my blood pressure to fizzle and pop before I had to turn the damned thing off. I simply couldn’t endure the latest release in the popular “SURROUNDED” debate series, produced by the viral video factory Jubilee Media, in full. At ninety minutes, that video features the liberal commentator Sam Seder debating twenty young conservatives. It did not go well for them.
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Full disclosure: Sam is a longtime friend so I’m biased. My bias, however, isn’t towards him. It’s towards, ironically, a conservative vision of America which still believes that representative democracy remains the best form of government yet devised. Further, it’s a bias towards the specific words Gouverneur Morris chose to begin the preamble to our Constitution: “We, the People, in order to build a more perfect Union…”
It’s a remarkable word with which to establish a nation: “We.”
All of us, these American people, coming together to enter a compact dedicated to continual improvement, a more perfect Union. That notion, the promise of a common good, is the fundamental divide between my vision and that of the current administration. Ironically again, it’s a difference of faith.
Time and again in the video, the young conservatives platformed in the video expressed a lack of faith in that pluralistic society. They have no faith in our institutions. They have no faith in science. They have no faith in Americans who do share their religious beliefs to determine the best course of action for their own lives.
There’s no point in combing through the conservatives’ claims; they were almost all incorrect, as fact-checked by Jubilee during the video. But, contrary to the t-shirts, the MAGA worldview is not informed by facts but by feelings. They feel that Social Security is a disaster despite the fact that, as Sam pointed out, it keeps 2/3 of our senior citizens out of poverty. They feel that gender-affirming care for minors is, as one said, “a huge problem” despite the fact that, as Sam correctly stated, a miniscule number of children actually receive such care.
The reason there’s no point in identifying where they misunderstand—or ignore—facts is because the MAGA worldview is immune to them. No, DEI initiatives cannot be a tax credit for government agencies because government agencies do not pay taxes. Yes, vaccines work. Yes, climate change is real and man-made. But none of that matters because their bias is of the confirmation variety.
What we’re dealing with, instead, is a wholesale dismissal of data because, as Stephen Colbert once famously said, “Reality has a liberal bias.”
I’m not trying to dunk on the conservatives who participated; Sam already did that. (And so have the many, many memes.) Rather, I’m trying to make the point that these conservative influencers were selected, presumably, because they represent the averagely-informed MAGA voter—or at least the average, attention-hungry MAGA voter—and yet are flatly wrong about almost everything.
Although there were moments when Sam threw his opponents a bone, none of the conservatives conceded a single point back to him—because they’ve internalized the most important lesson for all the aspiring Jordan Petersons and Candace Owens out there: it doesn’t matter if you’re wrong so long as you are confidently wrong. And oh boy are they confident.
When a debater states that she believes “the liberal world order needs to be overthrown completely and Christian nationalism is a good alternative,” we’re not in Kansas anymore. (Actually, Sam made the point that the kind of austere government spending MAGA fans favor was tried in Kansas back in 2012. It was a disaster, leading the state’s conservative legislature to abandon the experiment a few years later.)
How to reach these people—let alone find commonalities, or build community? I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s even possible to reach them. They almost certainly feel the same way about people like me, although the difference between us is I have reality on my side.
I reached out to Sam to see what his take was on the question. “I doubt these folks are totally representative of everyone who voted for Trump, I certainly hope not,” he told me. “There’s no reasoning with White nationalists or religious theocrats, but in arguing with them, I think you can make those who don’t fall into those camps understand who they are empowering when they vote for Trump.”
“We, the People” rests on a foundation I used to believe was unshakeable. That foundation is the American idea that we, all of us, are stronger because of our differences. It is, in fact, those differences that define America. Where we come together is in our pursuit of that more perfect union. How? By identifying that which binds us, otherwise known as the common good. MAGA rejects the traditional American project and, in doing so, rejects America.
