Opinion | Why MAGA’s Bullying Will Fail

MAGA is going to learn something that the far left learned in the late 20-teens, moving in the early 2020s: that a lot of your success in online aggression and shaming and mobbing and attacking and intolerance is very temporary and illusory because the majority of people don’t like those kinds of tactics and they’re going to, over time, punish a side that they see as bullying people, as being extremely cruel and intolerant. And a lot of MAGA looks at some of the cancel culture heyday of the late 20-teens and says: Oh, we can do that, and we’ll do it better, and we’ll do it more effectively, and we’ll do it from the Oval Office down. But the pro-free speech position over the long term in American history is a very majority position. Any given individual moment, you might be cutting against the grain. But over time, the pro- free speech position is a majority American position. And I think MAGA is making a giant mistake in taking the old — the whole cancel culture discourse of 2019, 2020, and saying: Oh, we’ll just do this more, and more aggressively, and that’s going to work for us.