The Racist Ideology Behind MAGA — and the Inevitable Backlash
By Tom Kagy | 04 Aug, 2025

Opportunists looking to make hay by playing the MAGA racist card can expect a lifetime's reckoning for themselves and for their families.

MAGA supporters comprise a ragtag assortment whose core comprises dyed-in-the-wool racists, businesspeople who seek advantage in cultivating ties with Trump and his cronies, and paranoid xenophobes convinced that immigrants are behind their persistent difficulties in life.  

At the moment they feel secure in the belief of indefinite MAGA ascendency.

What people like that don't understand is that they are stigmatizing themselves at an age when the United States has no choice but to keep moving toward the future or face permanent decline into third-world status.  Why?  Because we face intensifying competition from China, Japan, S. Korea, Germany, the UK, France, the Netherlands, India, Canada and a slew of other nations developing unique strengths in future technologies.  

Examples of those technologies include AI, of course, but also robotics, biotech, quantum computing, nuclear energy, aerospace, semiconductors, batteries and shipbuilding which is essential for defense and trade.  Falling behind in any of those technologies could become an insurmountable vulnerability in competing for a place among the leading economies of the next decade and beyond.  

Despite current US leadership in many of those fields, a place among the winners isn't assured, especially given the recent rampant destruction of the US brand as a bastion of liberty and a global safe haven socially and economically.

So why is a continued MAGA ascendence inimical to continued US leadership?

The primary reason is that our technological leadership can only be sustained by a large, steady influx of the most talented foreign STEM talent.  Not just STEM talent, mind you, but talented STEM talent, the kind that's limited in number.  That's the reason, for example, that Mark Zuckerberg has been offering literally billions of dollars to recruit a dozen talented AI researchers, among whom most are Chinese or India.

The US simply doesn't produce enough such talent even to maintain our current level of technology, much less make advances to keep up with other nations that, proportionately, produce higher levels of STEM talent.  We need a minimum of a half million talented STEM workers from abroad to come and live and work here to sustain our current place in the world.  Most of that talent can only come from two places: China and India.  

In other words, the US depends on a steady and very large influx of immigrants not only to work in tech but also to support their families with an appealing lifestyle.  So every foreign STEM worker must be accompanied by at least four times their number in spouses, relatives, restaurant workers and others needed to provide the level of cultural support needed to make life attractive for those STEM workers.  

If the MAGA mindset were somehow to persist in US policies for even another few years, many of the necessary immigrants will choose to go elsewhere, just as many foreign travelers have already begun shunning Trumpland for fear of being mistreated the way a number of foreign students in elite US universities have been under Trump's deeply racist policies, not to mention hundreds of thousands of migrants.  Few talented foreigners would choose to live in a society structured to treat them as second-class human beings not even deserving of equal protection under the law.

So the choice is rather stark: continue with MAGA-based demagoguery and decline into a third-world nation barely able to feed itself, especially given the glaring shortage of sufficient farm and construction workers, or dump Trump and others of his ilk and try to reboot the America the world once knew as the society that upholds the principles of liberty, equality and opportunity for all so as to continue drawing the most talented immigrants.  Had the US suffered even a decade's worth of MAGA-style policies in the recent past, we would already have become a fetid backwater not only to be avoided by immigrants but to be abandoned by Americans with skills valued elsewhere.

When the inevitable reversion to the real America takes place, as is likely in the next election, what will become of MAGA supporters?  They will be permanently branded as racists, xenophobes and sycophants.  For how long?  For some idea, look at how Trump's bosom buddy Laura Loomer is digging through decades of social media posts by government officials for signs they had once been mockers and detractors of Trump.  

The same level of scrutiny can be expected toward MAGA people.  Most good Americans don't want to hire, work for, befriend or associate with racists and xenophobes as they are the true un-Americans, with no memory of their own immigrant roots.