The MAGA inside

Janus is a two-faced god, and Janus worship is driving America

I think the “Big, Beautiful Bill” will pass. Not necessarily in the exact form the Senate has today, but largely intact. There are few hard ideologues willing to die on the hill of debt reduction when there’s so much money to be thrown to the proles in service of politics. So, yes, I think all of Elon Musk’s performative finger-down-my-throat online whinging is ultimately for show. We all know Musk would be plenty comfortable throwing a trillion dollars at a Mars colonization project, damn the national debt.

Photo: Flickr

The result of the whopping budget is that the United States will go further into debt, by up to $2.4 trillion, the Congressional Budget Office calculates. Those numbers are so unimaginable as to be etherial. The only way to realistically reduce our ballooning budget is to cut the kinds of services taxpayers—i.e. voters—can’t live without. Things like Social Security and other entitlements that we’ve been told to count to so we can live long, prosper, and retire to Florida MAGA boat parades.

Debt rating organizations like Moody’s will continue to warn us that it’s unsustainable, and will likely cut our credit rating further, making it more expensive for the government to pay its bills using borrowed money obtained through T-Bills. And that will drive the government to print more money, and at the same time raise interest rates for banks, which will have the dual-bad effects of making inflation worse and stagnate business that has to borrow to finance growth. Add tariffs to the toxic mix and people will be both jobless and unable to pay for things they need because of the rise in costs of staple items.

But the poor aren’t the voters politicians are looking for. The poor aren’t activists, or power players, or contributors to political campaigns. They are simply a good avatar for whatever issue the politicians decide will rake in more votes and money. So the Appalachian rust belt poor, suffering from fentanyl addiction, will be the stomping ground of MAGA Mexico-blamers, or those who blame the Haiti dog-dining crowd. And the inner-city People of Color will be the icon of the true-blue Democrats who traded their sanity for the fantasy of Joe Biden’s mental superpowers.

Neither side wants to kill a big, beautiful budget bursting at the seams with money for their constituencies. So I think it will pass.

But that’s not what I really want to talk about.

The problem I’ve always had with the woke, intersectional, progressive crowd is that they are focused on engineered outcomes. They don’t believe in personal liberty, creativity, or hard data, unless those things align with the engineered world they’ve cooked up and want to force everyone to live in. They eschew the messy human nature elements that make a liberal democratic republic, with rubber guardrails and high cliffs on beyond the shoulders, preferring to fantasize a utopian end if we would just ignore our own passions for their profit.

But now, MAGA has abandoned all pretense of correcting the left’s most heinous errors, and has taken up the same engineered outcomes, but for their own profit, not the enemy’s. They ignore the fact that their enemy really resembles them in all but the most superficial ways.

President Donald Trump doesn’t even bother to talk in code anymore. He has ordered his Justice Department to investigate former President Joe Biden and his aides, “whether certain individuals conspired to deceive the public about Biden's mental state and unconstitutionally exercise the authorities and responsibilities of the President.” Trump posted on Truth Social, his personal conflict-of-interest media, “With the exception of the RIGGED PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2020, THE AUTOPEN IS THE BIGGEST POLITICAL SCANDAL IN AMERICAN HISTORY!!!”

Some of the conspiracies MAGA promotes (with Trump’s nod) include things like Biden was executed in 2020 and replaced with body doubles, and the autopen was used to approve some dark committee’s decisions over Biden’s false signature. I know it’s ridiculous, but the autopen thing could end up taking court time, when it’s been upheld many times in the past. And who knows, it might end up becoming illegal in the future.

MAGA would seek to “undo” the past by making it illegitimate, while the other side would seek to “undo” the past by making it racist, or homophobic, or xenophobic, or genocidal, or a crime against Mother Earth. They are the same, relying on “woke” illumination of conspiracies within conspiracies by taking a red or blue bill, versus dealing with complicated issues and human frailties.

How dare either side invoke God. If God didn’t have unlimited grace for this age, he’d have brought out 10,000 angels to smite them.

You know what the big conspiracy, the secret of the left really is? Except for the color of their pill, they’ve got the MAGA inside. Instead of closing our borders to foreigners, they’d boycott entire nations for the errors of their ancestors, or for protecting themselves. They’d shutter corporations for not being sufficiently political, or praying to the left’s god of utopian outcomes. They’d manipulate data, obfuscate facts, and railroad dissenters for heresy. The left has been doing this for many decades.

And so has the reactionary right. The John Birch Society, McCarthyism, and the Red Scare have the same spirit of illiberalism and engineered outcomes as the woke intersectional progressive crowd. And MAGA combines the worst of both worlds.

In fact, I’d say the woke left no longer is the opposite of MAGA. Together, they form the uniparty, a political god that demands total supplication of its worshippers. If I had to put a historical name to that god, it would be Janus. Janus was the Roman god of beginnings, endings, transitions, and doorways. He is always shown with two faces. In our case, one is MAGA and the other is the woke progressive left. And Janus has been ruling our executive branch since about 2009, when Barack Obama swept into office with a messianic fervor.

Hope and change has the MAGA inside. But it’s always been Janus. As a spiritual man, I know Janus is just an idol, but I also know he isn’t just of human origin. Demons don’t live mortal lives, and the ones who inject the engineered utopian outcomes into our societies remember Roman times like they happened yesterday. They are very good at taking these ancient, crippled ideas and repackaging them in blue, red, or zebra-striped pills, ready for us to swallow.

Janus is on the throne of our nation right now, and those who bow to MAGA, or those who follow the woke left, but have the MAGA inside are simply supplicating before that god’s two faces. Why do the nations rage, asks the psalmist. I won’t delve further into the spiritual side of this.

The answer to our political problems is not to try to solve everything with one big, beautiful bill, or one big policy, or one big party, or one big anything. It’s to stop swallowing the pills that we’ve become addicted to, the political pills that tell us we can have our engineered reality, while others are punished for theirs.

I reject it all, and say that we must turn to love, true servanthood, truth (when we uncover it), and compassion. Overturn Janus, stop trusting in political engineering, and begin in your neighborhood, on your street, in your church, at your schools. If you don’t get what you want because politicians have decided to punish some invented monster, then do without, or make your own way.

But while we do that, know that the big, beautiful bills will continue to pass. The continual rewriting of history, and the swallowing of pills, and the engineering of futures will continue at an increasing pace. When it comes to everything but the core of your own beliefs, you’re going to have to pack your own grace. That was a phrase I once heard a missionary to Thailand tell me regarding bringing Christianity into a nation consumed by Theravada Buddhism.

Whether it’s Buddha, or Janus, or Thailand, or the United States, it’s all the same when we build idols to gods and then worship before what we’ve built. They’ve all got the MAGA inside.

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