MAGA's Collective Reactivity
Issue #4.2 ~ March 3rd, 2025
In the last issue, I took note of the reactivity that I’ve been experiencing as an individual since Trump’s election to a second term. I then went on to identify monitoring such personal reactivity as a critical intention to which I’m committing myself as we enter into this new era of reckless, if not lawless, authoritarianism.
In this issue, I want to examine reactivity as something that can occur across an entire group of people. My focus will be on one group in particular - the populist MAGA movement that voted Trump back into power last November.
Defining reactivity as an individual experience
First, we need to properly place the term “reactivity” within the secular Buddhist context from which it’s become such an important concept. To do so, it will be helpful to distinguish between how traditional western Buddhism considers suffering and how contemporary secular Buddhism looks at it.
Traditional western Buddhism, of course, rests firmly upon its core teaching of the “four noble truths” (placed in quotes to denote my strong reservation about referring to them as either “noble” or “truths” - perhaps a topic for some future issue). All four “truths” speak to the presence of suffering in human life, but for our purpose here we need only consider the first two of them: (1) There is suffering; and (2) The cause of suffering is clinging.
In contrast, many contemporary secular Buddhists prefer Stephen Batchelor’s reframing of these four “noble truths” as four ethical tasks. In his view, the first two tasks are: (1) Embrace life in its fullness, which involves embracing both suffering and happiness; and (2) Let go of the two types of reactivity that naturally arise in response to this embrace of life’s fullness - aversion, which is the individual’s reactive response of wanting their suffering to end; and clinging, which is the individual’s reactive response of wanting their happiness to last.
Two significant distinctions separate these vastly different views:
The traditional view is based upon a series of dogmatic assertions labeled as “truths”, with the implication that these “truths” should be held by anyone who professes to be a Buddhist. The secular view is based instead upon a series of ethical recommendations, designed not as doctrines to be believed, but as practices to be adopted, for the purpose of living more in accord with the Buddhist virtues of kindness, compassion, and generosity.
The “truths” model bears a backward-facing logic, whereby the second one points back to the first, in a not-very-persuasive attempt at explanation (there is suffering only because there is clinging). In contrast, the tasks model features a forward-looking logic, in which the first one (embracing life fully) naturally gives rise to the second (letting go of the harmful reactive responses of aversion and clinging that arise as a result of embracing life).
The critical point to be drawn from this second distinction is that, since we are all constantly engaged in (embracing?) life in one way or another, depending upon the particular circumstances in which we find ourselves at any given moment, we are all constantly coping (sometimes skillfully, sometimes not so skillfully) with the reactivity that is naturally arising in that given moment.
In other words, reactivity is always present, simply as the result of our being alive.
Expanding the definition of reactivity as a group phenomenon
In the same way that all of us as individuals experience reactions of either aversion or clinging in response to the varied events in our day-to-day lives, it seems reasonable to posit that, as members of particular groups and communities, we experience certain collective reactions of aversion or clinging in response to certain broad societal changes, depending upon whether such changes accord with, or diverge from, the norms and values inherent in those groups and communities to which we belong.
As an example, suppose for a moment that I consider myself from the perspective of my belonging to the group “progressive liberals”. Doing so, I find that I’m still keenly (and bittersweetly) aware of the intense sense of hope and joy that I clung to watching Barack Obama’s first inaugural address in January 2009. I shared this hopeful joy with my wife, with our (then) teenage children, and with our politically progressive friends. On a much larger scale, similar feelings of hope and joy were reported by almost every Democratic voter in the country. We were all, I submit, experiencing a sort of collective reactivity in response to Obama’s election - a collective clinging to the uplifting hope that our country was at last entering into a new post-racial and forward-looking period of its history.
Similarly, by virtue of continuing to be part of the progressive liberal community in the years since Obama’s presidency, I’ve experienced in fairly rapid succession the collective dismay at Trump’s succeeding Obama into the White House, collective repulsion at the insurrection staged upon the steps of the Capitol on January 6th of 2021, collective relief at Biden’s inauguration despite the near-success of that insurrection, collective hope at what falsely appeared to be an unstoppable surge of support for the Harris-Walz campaign last summer and fall, and now collective horror at the harmful words and actions coming from the Trump administration on a daily basis.
MAGA’s collective reactivity
This accounting of my own experiences of sharing in a collective reactivity was easy enough, from my insider’s perspective of the group “progressive liberals” experiencing that reactivity. While I think it’s safe for me to assert, based upon these personal experiences, that each and every one of us swims in a continuous stream of both individual and collective reactivity, it’s somewhat more of a risk for me, as an outsider in relation to the group “MAGA”, to attempt a description of what MAGA’s collective reactivity might actually feel like.
Aware of this risk, I will nonetheless venture a couple of guesses, based upon conversations I’ve had with two of my MAGA-embracing siblings, interviews I’ve seen with MAGA supporters on various news programs, and descriptions of the MAGA universe I’ve read by investigative journalists who have bravely dared either to circulate among the crowds at selected Trump rallies or to mingle with the congregants at various Christian nationalist churches.
Keeping in mind that these are second-hand hypotheses rather than first-hand reports, I will suppose that much of MAGA’s collective reactivity is of the aversion type. These could include reacting with hatred to what they perceive as the growing visibility and assertiveness of heretofore marginalized members of society, or with anger to what they consider to be the undeserved wealth and influence of the “coastal elites”, or with resentment to what they sense as their being disrespected and looked down upon by the “radical left”.
What’s the point of all this?
Again, these are just my personal musings as to what MAGA’s collective reactivity may look and feel like. How accurate they are (or aren’t) isn’t the point.
The point is simply to recognize that MAGA people have their own sense of collective reactivity, just as we all do. From there, we can perhaps use that recognition as a kind of lens through which to view them, and thereby gain some insight into how they’ve come to embrace the MAGA worldview, and then use that insight to find ways of communicating meaningfully with them.
Because, learning how to communicate effectively with the MAGA population is, I believe, absolutely essential for our collective future.
More on that in the next issue, when I’ll revisit the “two tasks” that I’ve been writing about for the past three years, and attempt to refashion them into more appropriate tools for us to make use of, as we navigate our way through this new and very alarming reality that we now find ourselves in.
“AfterWords”
I read this essay, which appeared in the New York Times on the day after Trump and Vance’s inhospitable and demeaning White House meeting with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with great interest. Its author uses an economic concept, “zero-sum thinking”, to suggest a way forward from the unhelpful “winner-loser” approach that the Trump administration seems to be taking not only toward Ukraine, but in fact toward the entire world. Without any reference to Buddhism, this article serves as a powerful endorsement of the Buddhist notion of the interdependence of all things … “This is what’s called zero-sum thinking — the belief that life is a battle over finite rewards where gains for one mean losses for another. And these days, that notion seems to be everywhere. [And] nowhere is the rise of our zero-sum era more pronounced than on the world stage, where President Trump has been demolishing decades of collaborative foreign policy with threats of protectionist tariffs and demands for Greenland, Gaza, the Panama Canal and mineral rights in Ukraine. Mr.Trump may not be alone in this. Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China have also displayed a zero-sum view of a world in which bigger powers get to do what they want while weaker ones suffer. All three leaders, no matter what they say, often behave as if power and prosperity were in short supply, leading inexorably to competition and confrontation. Until recently, the international order largely was built on a different idea — that interdependence and rules boost opportunities for all. It was aspirational, producing fourfold economic growth since the 1980s, and even nuclear disarmament treaties from superpowers.”
Excellent Tom! I particularly liked your afterword on so-called zero-sum thinking.
good to think about this Thanks