🔗 Who Goes MAGA? | Techdirt:

It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation—the generation that grew up online, that learned to mistake engagement for truth, that confused being heard with being right. This is as true of suburban millennials as it is of rural boomers. It is the disease of the algorithmically poisoned.

Sometimes I think there are direct digital factors at work—a type of media consumption, a pattern of social validation, and a form of tribal identity that has produced a new kind of citizen with an imbalance in their nature. They have been fed rage and filled with grievances that are beyond their capacity to process rationally. They have been subjected to forms of propaganda that have released them from the constraints of empirical reality. Their emotions are vigorous. Their reasoning is childish. Their civic education has been almost completely neglected.

I think we cannot overemphasize enough the degree to which this sort of thing cuts across so many of the traditional categories we have used to think about how people view the world.

That’s why it is such a pernicious and toxic ideology.

it is also why there are no quick fixes, easy answers, or “one cool trick” ways of dealing with it. It’s not just education level, or social class, or economics. It’s a way of thinking about the world, and it has been allowed to fester and grow for decades.