Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxqin1 | Hacker News Reader

I get the BLM, people everywhere want equality. But why MAGA? What feeling/emotion drives support for that outside the US?

View on HN

Rejection of BLM and SJW ideals. Desire for equality of opportunity over equality of outcome. Much of the world is much less left leaning than the united states. Not that all of the united states is left leaning overall, but a lot of very important institutions, such as universities, education, and traditional media are.

"Much of the world is much less left leaning than the united states."

And much of the world is more left-leaning than the US.

For example: Many parts of Europe and South America, China, India... all places where socialism is not a dirty word, and where they actually have viable communist/marxist parties even.

Unfortunately, being economically on the left hasn't prevented some of these places from being susceptible to the cancers of xenophobia, nationalism, and racism, adherents of which would find Trump quite appealing.

the left wing in the US is markedly different from traditional left wing politics. Traditional left politics are about class and capitalism (being fundamentally derived from Marx), the mainstream US left seems almost entirely derived from intersectional feminism and critical theory. I'm aware that the US does also have traditional left-wingers like Bernie Sanders, but most of the attention goes to the intersectional form.

Indeed. Western European leftism of recent decades has largely been the legacy of May 1968 (and its failure). What is noteworthy about the ideological debates of May 1968 is what they were not about: no interest in trans rights – even gay liberation and a new wave of feminism were only dawning at the time – and racial conflicts were not understood in the same way as they currently are in the USA. Thus not only does American leftwing politics have a distinctive set of concerns, but it is even imported into Europe as a new kind of leftwing politics different from the old. (And it is a bit surreal to see the occasional suggestion that people dedicated to the May 1968 ideals are "fascist", when that whole movement saw itself as a battle against fascism.)

Why would Japan "reject BLM," a political movement concerned with American police brutality against African Americans?

For that matter, why would a collectivist country with deep ideals of social conformity and politeness (to the point that it's baked into their language) reject "SJW" ideals? What would "SJW" even mean in Japan?

BLM as an organization (as opposed to the more nebulous BLM popular movement as a general desire to end police violence) has been vocal about trans rights, for instance. People in other countries who oppose trans rights might therefore see BLM as an ideological opponent. I can’t speak about Japan, but BLM is certainly discussed as a bearer of inimical ideas among some Europeans.

Because it's just a vehicle. It uses hyperbole to try to sell a pre-existing social and economic agenda.

> Much of the world is much less left leaning than the united states.

The US ain't "left-leaning" though. The left in the US is almost right elsewhere.

I would guess the anti-globalist sentiment of MAGA is shared by people throughout the world who prefer local control.

The CCP has been on a "make China great again" campaign since the 1990s which is were Trump got it from.

The phrase "MAGA" became a marker of Trump affiliation. That in turn made it odious to people on the other side of the polarized political spectrum (few Americans have a problem with the literal idea of improving the USA, of course, but in human language signifiers can become associated with signifieds beyond their supposed literal meaning).

Then, when some people sympathetic to Trump internationally saw that MAGA hats were 1) a marker of the "Trump tribe", and 2) annoying to their perceived ideological opponents, they too took them up. Thus things like QAnon and MAGA spread memetically to some of the protests seen in the last few years in Europe.

I would say net migration increases of unskilled and uneducated populations into developed nations is a common thread whether it affects a country directly/indirectly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com