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All the Way to Midnight
Boomers fueled the MAGA movement and now the bell curve is descending.
The MAGA movement, based on aging white conservative boomer victimhood is now a descending bell curve. Boomers, of which I am one, are dying off. Far too many of us (more than half) helped start and are still driving the MAGA movement. How we got here is a combination of our own disconnection, and the vulnerability that disconnection created to decades of carefully crafted political manipulation.
Boomers were wholly unprepared for the manipulations of Fox News in the universal bundled cable of the 90s. White boomers never faced the great depression, or a world war, yet we were particularly susceptible to the idea that we were victims of hardships. In part because of the restless disconnection of our gated community lives we bought fragile white victimhood hook, line and sinker.
After lifetimes of leaning into consumerism and mass consumption we boomers woke up to find ourselves angry and reactive to our own disconnection. Maybe a bigger SUV would help? Maybe a third marriage? That sense of disconnection was a warning, an inflection point. Some of us self reflected. Took stock.
But many more of us doubled down on our nagging sense of victimhood. “Whatever the fuck is wrong here, it must be someone else’s fault. Women. Immigrants. Black people.” And Fox News was there to lovingly encourage our blind entitlement. To sell us our own failed white fragility.
The MAGA bell curve peaked as we moved into retirement, staring blankly at our own mortality. Because we had bought into the decades long drumbeat of individualism sold to us by a GOP bent on eliminating social safety nets, we sought validation in class and status and so ended up without community.
Retirement is when a strange unnamed panic really set in for boomers. No longer able to rely on the stale connection of surface level workplace relationships, we were left sitting alone in our easy chairs staring at the Tucker Carlsons of the Fox News rabbit hole. Again, it was an inflection point for some of us.
Some boomers said, “Maybe this creeping anxiety is my fault. Maybe this disconnection from my kids, my community, from the world right outside my door is my…
