This month something different: a contribution towards understanding why the appeal of selfishness grips so many people so fiercely
~ Louis Further ~
Right-wing beliefs are ultimately attempts to rationalise and justify selfishness. Fascism, ‘conservatism’, US Republicanism—call them what you will: the differences are essentially procedural. “My needs matter. Yours don’t”. But in order to explain much of what motivates those in the MAGA cult it’s necessary to understand the state which precedes selfishness. That is the primacy of the self devoid of empathy.
Members of the MAGA cult thrive on the stark clarity of its identity and their adherence to it… badges, merchandise, flags, clothing. This applies less to other (far right) systems imposed on majorities in most other polities and other shades of élite, hierarchical, coercive political opinion—notably the Democrats in the US. But they too take what’s useful in selfishness.
For that self (or selves) to be distinct first there have to be ‘others’, who are not the self. Secondly there has to be a qualitative comparison between the two entities. This drive to compare may originate in the psychology of their childhood wounds, in ongoing brainwashing, in fear, in ignorance, insecurity and so on. For cult members’ biographies (individual or collective) to make sense no two (or more) things can (co-)exist without being compared.
Once the apparent ‘need’ to compare is admitted, it becomes inevitable and compelling. This adherence to the dogma of comparison for those in the MAGA cult often bypasses assertions of perceived ‘right’ vs ‘wrong’, ‘good’ vs ‘bad’. The very act of comparison (between races, sexes, classes, ideas of society etc) replaces rational analysis. Defining superiority-inferiority becomes an end in itself. This is much more than pragmatism: justifying selfishness and oppression becomes its own goal.
Objectivity, tolerance, compassion, caring, empathising are all irrelevant and play no part in advancing such agendas as those which Trump/MAGA is now imposing on the US. The self (individual of collective) is the sole arbiter of such qualities as ‘strength’, ‘ruthlessness’, ‘bullying determination’; so they are more readily adopted when compared with such perceived opposites as ‘weakness’, being ‘soft on crime’ than for their innate qualities. If those in this camp subjected their perceived need to come out on top to logical or rational analysis, they would fail. So a spurious teleological element is (unconsciously) introduced: a wilful conviction that “history is on our side; we have the untrammelled right to impose”.
This sense of historical inevitability both has its genesis in, and reinforces and encourages, the millenarian streak with which current US foreign ‘policy’ has been shot through at least since the élite upped its ‘war on terror’ a generation ago. It grew more harshly with the anti-Muslim fanaticism propagated by George W. Bush after the events of September 11 2001. It can still be found in establishment antisemitism and the Islamophobia of Trump and his fellow cultists.
The need to capture, torture, and kill the ‘bomb-carrying Middle Easterner’ around every corner is readily satisfied by the élite’s assertion of white-male-American superiority over everyone else. Even when the hunts produce spurious results—or none—someone has to be punished. The same thing is happening now as ICE kidnaps and traffics many who fail to look ‘white’—in comparison with everyone else, especially the hunters.
Such binary ‘decisions’ (“I belong. You don’t”) are endpoints. It’s easy to bask in the approbation which they receive—in propaganda outlets and legislative echo-chambers. After all, again, the ‘superior self’ is sole arbiter of what to subscribe to.
Circular Logic
Belief (as opposed to reason) also has its own circular justification. This is hardly surprising when you recall that fascism is a system which seeks to ‘solve’ a problem which it has itself created. Once the primacy—and so the perceived necessity—of binary comparisons has been accepted (as it is in fascist beliefs), then condemnation of the other is even more compelling and convincing to the likes of the MAGA/Trump cult: non-whites are undesirable because they are criminals (not even remotely true, of course). This means that they are criminals because they are non-white. Analogously “We whites are better than ‘illegal aliens’ because… we are not ‘illegal aliens’”.
This horse-before-cart assertion of white superiority (currently, with ICE, towards all LatinX communities) uses such circular logic: “We kidnap them because they are immigrants. If they get kidnapped, they must deserve it because they are immigrants who have been kidnapped”.
This is analogous to much back-and-forth, tit-for-tat threads on social media when attempts are made to denigrate all opinion which the right lumps together as ‘liberal’: “You are bad because you are socialist; but the reason why you hold socialist views is that you are ‘bad’; and—while we’re at it—you’re bad because you do not belong to or with us”. Then “‘Liberals’ (socialists) are bad and evil because they believe in taking away what we’ve striven so hard to accumulate; therefore believing in equality is bad because it’s what bad people like you socialists believe in”!
But this is where it gets even more frightening: the immediacy of accepting and acting on selfishness also makes a nuisance of both facts and nuance. Who needs facts when what individuals say must always be right because it would be a breach of my freedom to stifle that.
Once fascist dogma has (successfully) rendered decisions based on falsity and false ‘logic’ acceptable, popular even, the need to examine phenomena such as climate collapse and the efficacy of vaccines against verifiable facts is removed.
The mere act of pronouncing on these issues is sufficient for what’s said to appear true to those who want it to be true. To hold a ‘position’ is itself a valid and worthy end.
What’s more, fascist belief is both immature and simplistic. So it’s all too easy, for example, to justify climate denial by saying “Well, I can’t see evidence of the collapse that all of you keep saying is upon us; so it doesn’t exist.”
Similarly, the White House issues reports almost daily about ‘necessary’ actions against immigrants and to combat crime, the rates of which are not rising. The unsophisticated fascist system accepts them at face value because to do otherwise would run counter to its anti-intellectual stances. Facts mean less than dogma.
It seems likely that many cult members probably do know that much of what the cult stands for is based on sand. But shame and hero worship (the psychological aspect again) and the pressure to adhere are so far eclipsing any chance of their revising their views.
Photos: Los Angeles, June 2025 via Corazónegro Cerbatanero on Facebook