MAGA's Collective Reactivity

A Secular Buddhist Perspective

Starting on the evening of last November 5, as the state by state presidential election counts were coming in and pointing to the inevitability of Donald Trump’s election to a second term, I have been taking note on a daily basis of how much more of a reactive person I’ve become. These days, feelings of fear, anger, sorrow, and hopelessness are never far from my conscious awareness – and always ready to make their presence fully felt as I learn of each new outrageous speech or action coming from Trump or one of his minions.

The more closely I’ve been monitoring my own reactivity as an individual person, the more I’ve become aware of the reactivity on display in so many of my friends and fellow secular Buddhists, as we share our concerns and our feelings with each other during these tumultuous times. It would seem that we, as a group of people so gravely concerned about the current threats against democracy, are experiencing a sort of “collective reactivity” in response to living under the Trump regime.

And lately I’ve begun to wonder about another group of people – those members of the populist MAGA movement that voted Trump back into power last November. I wonder if, prior to the election, they had been living in a vastly different sort of “collective reactivity” to what they perceived as threats to their country under the Biden administration.

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.” 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 in which the second truth 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 task (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 moment.

In other words, reactivity is always present simply as the result of our being alive.

Reactivity as a group phenomenon

In the same way that all of us individually 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 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 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 experienced 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 finally entering 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 6, 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 speech and actions coming from the Trump regime 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 circulated among the crowds at selected Trump rallies or mingled with 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 at feeling 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 really the point.

The point is simply to recognize that MAGA supporters have their own sense of collective reactivity, just as we all do. We can use that recognition as a lens through which to view them, gain some insight into how they’ve come to embrace the MAGA worldview, and use that insight to find ways of communicating meaningfully with them.

The first step in communicating effectively with MAGA supporters involves attaining an accurate understanding of both their and our own collective reactivity. Our collective future depends on our ability to find effective ways to communicate with each other.