Outside the Beltway

MAGA didn’t come from nowhere

The roots of MAGA run deep, through places like my old home.

Kingdaddy · Thursday, March 14, 2024 · 16 comments

When I was a teen, as soon as I received my driver’s license — a critical rite of passage anywhere, but especially in Southern California — I was out the door. After school, I often spent time at the glorious Huntington Beach Library, which was chock full of great books. (A collection of essays and short stories, such as “Billy Budd,” which addressed the big questions of moral philosophy was a particularly cherished find.) At the library, I’d do my homework, find something interesting to read, and figure out where to go next. Often, that was the excellent Balboa Theater in Newport Beach, which ran a rapidly changing, highly eclectic sample of movies that became the basis of my early film education beyond what was on TV. Or I might just make a late visit to the beach, wet my feet in the ocean, and then head home.

Earlier this week, I was shocked, but not surprised, that the Huntington Beach Library is the latest Kulturkampf battleground. It’s a minor skirmish, compared to, say, Ron DeSantis’ war on vaccination, saying “gay” in schools, and the Disney Corporation. But for me, it’s personal. The Huntington Beach mayor and majority of city council members are very right-wing, and they’ve ordered the library to move “sexually explicit” material from the children’s section to a special, guarded collection. What explicit material was already in the children’s section, you may ask? Here are some examples:

• “Bunk 9’s Guide to Growing up”
• “Human Reproduction and Development”
• “It’s Perfectly Normal”
• “On Your Mark, Get Set, Grow!”
• “Once Upon a Potty”
• “Own Your Period”
• “Puberty is Gross but Also Really Awesome”
• “Sex Is a Funny Word”
• “The Book of Blood”
• “The Care and Keeping of You”
• “The Girl’s Body Book”

Obviously, telling a girl what to expect when her period starts is not what we normally mean by “sexually explicit.” Nor is a book about potty training. Sweeping these books, and others, in the city council’s dragnet is a natural outcome of the vagueness of the edict:

In the bright, ample children’s section, librarians began their review by flipping through books on shelves dedicated to the human body, health and puberty.

The librarians debated whether to move certain books, like one, a science book, with an illustration of a nude male body showing the muscular system, and another with a page full of photos, one of which showed the top half of a female toddler in a bathtub. The former stayed on the shelf; the latter got moved.

They also decided to remove a book that had information about miscarriages, though it had no accompanying photos.

Huntington Beach’s city council isn’t concerned with making fine distinctions among educational content on one side of an imagine fence, and titillation and pornography on the other. If it were, it would have done more than refer the librarians to Wikipedia for a definition of “sexually explicit.” Nor is this campaign merely an effort to err on the side of caution, when it comes to tender young minds.

Instead, the children’s section of the Huntington Beach Public Library is part of a larger campaign:

In the past year alone, the council — which is technically nonpartisan like all local bodies in the state — has championed a laundry list of MAGA priorities: It barred the Pride flag from flying on city property, banned mask and vaccine mandates, established a panel to review children’s library books for sexual content, and condemned President Biden’s immigration policies.

Huntington Beach, as you might remember, was the site of some of the loudest protests against masking. It has become a magnet for MAGA believers like the four members of the city council and the mayor, who are pushing these initiatives. They share the same MAGA revulsion for a world changing around them:

“We’re living in a state that’s not welcoming to us; conservative values are not really welcomed,” said Gracey Van Der Mark, Huntington Beach’s mayor and one of the council’s four Republicans. “We just want a safe space for people who share our values. And why shouldn’t we have that?”

Orange County has undergone a striking shift in the last couple of decades. It was once not only a deeply conservative part of the state, but also ground zero for both politicized Christian evangelicalism and Goldwater-style right-wing politics. (For an excellent account of the Goldwater-style Republicanism in Orange County history, see Lisa McGirr’s Suburban Warriors.) In the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, voters elected Congressional representatives like John Schmitz, a member of the John Birch Society, Bob “B-1” Dornan, and Dana Rohrbacher.

The political situation has changed. With other demographic shifts, the county has become more purple than deep red. As a result, the Bircher or Bircher-ish Republicans have had less success: for example, Democratic opponents beat both Dornan and Rohrbacher. This has only heighten the sense of their former supporters as being under political, demographic, and economic siege, and made them willing to transfer their votes to people like the mayor of Huntington Beach and its MAGA majority on the city council.

Right wing extremism, including its most violent strains, flowers in regions undergoing these types of changes. But this worldview didn’t just spring into existence ex nihilo, several years ago..

Growing up in Orange County, I saw in real time the genesis of a triumphalist Christian evangelicalism, given solid form in places like the Crystal Cathedral and Melodyland. I also saw it become rapidly politicized. Long ago, some evangelicals were making false claims about how the United States was founded as a Christian nation.

The antipathy to people not of the Caucasian persuasion isn’t new, either. While immigrants were always accepted as a fact of life to some degree (for example, immigrant labor was the basis of the orange-producing farms that gave the county its name), sudden increases in immigrant populations, such as the influx of Vietnamese refugees from the fall of South Vietnam, created a strong backlash. Complaints about signs in unfamiliar languages, such as Vietnamese and Korean, were regular features of life in Orange County. So were nasty jokes about Central American refugees, using derogatory terms I prefer not to repeat.

Gays and lesbians (LGBTQ+ wasn’t an acronym yet) were also unwelcome, at least for some Orange County residents. The gay community center a few blocks from our home was vandalized. At a lunch held at the home of a donor to a local institution of higher education, one of the hosts casually said, “I don’t understand why the gays want all these special privileges.” (I was compelled to point out that being treated the same as everyone else was hardly “special.”) Anxieties about gay and lesbian “recruitment” was also commonplace.

Other precursors of MAGA also existed in Orange County. As I mentioned earlier, Bircherism was stronger in Orange County than many other parts of the state, and certainly the country. Bircherism brought with it a conspiratorial mindset. On a couple of occasions, someone recommended that I read None Dare Call It Conspiracy to get the real story of how a power elite controlled everything in America, behind the scenes. Even before the Satanic Panic, which largely turned on the axis of the McMartin Preschool fiasco, I encountered a few people who thought that Satanists were also hiding in the shadows, not just in Washington, DC, but in places like Newport Beach.

These proto-MAGA sentiments never had ambitions beyond Orange County. They appeared in editorials in the Orange County Register, the platforms of local politicians, the interactions with minority groups, and yes, occasional concerns about the content of the public library. Orange County politics remained, more or less, exactly that, the warp of weave of life in a famously right-wing county, and not even necessarily representative of what many Republican voters preferred.

That was only mildly comforting to me, when I was an adolescent and young adult living there. I always feared that these right-wing forces could take a much darker turn, the same off-ramp to catastrophe that other countries had mistakenly followed. Twenty or thirty years ago, people like the city council members and mayor of Huntington Beach would have been dismissed as somewhat comical, mostly innocuous characters, just another byproduct of life in Orange County. Today, there are part of something larger, and vastly more dangerous.

No longer are Christian Dominionist opinions confined to kooks like the Reverend Gene Scott, a staple of late-night TV in Southern California. Today, a broad swath of Republican voters believe that the Bible, or at least their reading of it, should be the law of the land.

No longer are anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-anyone-not-like-us opinions limited to the occasional fringe candidate, or local TV blowhards like Wally George. Today, these forms of bigotry are mainstream opinions for many elected officials, and the regular output of major media figures like Tucker Carlson.

No longer are deranged conspiracy theories rarely encountered, and usually of limited duration and impact. (Though I say that not to minimize the considerable damage that the Satanic Panic did.) Today, they’re part of a sizeable, sustained political movement, QAnon, that deifies Donald Trump as a savior against a sinister cabal of Satanic, liberal pedophiles. And that’s just one conspiracy theory among many, part of a nexus of belief in sinister forces in a secret war against the common, decent folk.

Huntington Beach is now roughly half of America. What used to be local is now national.

There are middle chapters in this story that I can’t cover in a single blog post. For example, a critical development in the decades since I was in high school was the rise of talk radio, then the rise Fox News, then the rise social media, as increasingly powerful media for connecting people of similar feelings beyond the bounds of their city or county, telling them that they were right to be afraid and outraged, and providing them with a kaleidoscope of targets for their rage. Another development was the increasing anti-pluralist and nascently authoritarian messages transmitted through these channels. But again, these are topics too large for one post.

At best, what I can accomplish here is pointing out that MAGA has deep roots in modern American history. All those recurring interviews with Trump voters asking where did they come from, and why do they believe these things, have always missed the point. The interviewees don’t have much new to tell us, since their sentiments, in a more primitive and limited form, have always been around.

What has changed? These opinions grew into something vastly bigger, more vigorous, more intertwined, and more destructive. The fringe, extremist politics of places like Orange County evolved into the rampaging, insatiable MAGA megafauna of our perilous age.

The next time I visit Orange County, I’d love to visit the Huntington Beach main library, but it will be a bittersweet pilgrimage.