A guy boarded my train this morning about halfway into the city. I’d guess he was around sixty—older than me, but not much. I’m tempted to describe him as “grizzled” but that’s only because he had the leathery skin of some who’s spent a lot of their life outdoors and a beard of variegated yellow, silver, and gray. He was wearing nice jeans and sensible outerwear. Given the way men dress in Denmark, he might have been the director of a marketing bureau or a forklift driver down at the docks.
It’s a very early train with a sparse but eclectic mix of passengers. Mostly it’s office workers and manual laborers starting their days, along with a few harried couples or families heading for the airport to catch an early flight. Now and then we’re joined by an aromatic barfly on his woozy way home. The first two categories—the working stiffs (including this moron)—don’t vary much from day to day. I know most of the people I’m likely to encounter on my morning commute by sight. I know where they like to sit, just as they know my preferred spot. Some of us acknowledge each other with silent nods, but mostly we just ignore each other.
A new stranger boarding our train therefore offers some welcome novelty: where’s he or she going to sit? What’s the person who normally takes that seat two stops down the line going to do?
(I should mention that as we get closer to the city and the train begins to fill up, the cast of characters expands geometrically and the observations I’ve just described no longer apply.)
The guy this morning chose a seat directly facing me, which is the only reason I was able to describe him with any detail at all. I said he might have been the director of a marketing bureau or a forklift driver, but I’m confident he was neither of those things because on his head sat the strangest thing I’ve ever seen on a human head in greater Copenhagen: a bright red cap emblazoned with yellow lettering that spelled out: Make America Great Again.
I was startled.
Was that even legal in Denmark?
If the train cops came meandering through to check our tickets, as they almost always do, would they have to escort him off the train? Would he be fined? Cuffed? Tased?
Were any of my co-commuters going to rise to the provocation and address him directly? Maybe restrain him until the authorities could be summoned?
I started giggling aloud just imagining the possibilities.
… until I began thinking what a strange thing it was for things to have reached the point where I was having such thoughts at all. That sobered me right the hell up.
A MAGA cap shouldn’t be any more provocative than an Obama hat. The slogan “Make America Great Again” should be no more provocative than “Hope and Change” or “I’m With Her” or “No Malarkey.”
In actual metaphysical fact, Trump logos and slogans and are not more provocative than Obama or Biden logos and slogans merch. I don’t mean they’re not provocative, only that they’re exactly the same level of provocation, whatever you think that is. They’re categorically identical. They’re just political tokens for major American political candidates.
At least they should be. But the 2016 Clinton campaign was, against all expectation, floundering so badly that it decided the best defense was a good offense: tired of defending their candidate’s very serious legal problems, the Clinton campaign simply announced that Donald Trump was an illegitimate candidate and most likely a Russian stooge. (If you can’t beat ‘em, slime ‘em.)
The Democratic party ate that right up, and then the American establishment media ate it right up, and ultimately it became one of those things that the fine people everywhere simply knew. The proof of this is in that if you didn’t simply know how awful and dangerous Donald Trump was, you were ipso facto not one of the fine people.
The Republican “NeverTrumpers” were (and remain) just moral and intellectual cowards who couldn’t bear the thought of not being considered fine by all the really fine people.
In an open marketplace of ideas, of course, conservatives could have just flipped this kind of idiocy right back at Democrats. But they couldn’t, and they can’t, because there is no longer an open marketplace of ideas.
You either believe the right ideas, like all the fine people, or you’re some kind of neanderthal barbarian unfit for civil society. You must accept whatever the UN says about the climate as gospel; you must acknowledge male pregnancy; you must applaud “women of the year” with XY chromosomes; you must let your daughters compete against other people’s sons in women’s sports; you must support drag shows for kindergarteners; you must see racism everywhere it isn’t and be blind to it where it’s most openly declared. You must accept the government’s right to inject you with experimental drugs. You must believe only what your Democratic lords and masters tell you, even when the things they tell you contradict things they previously told you. You must allow the very definitions of words to change depending on the political needs of the Democratic Party.
If you can do all that, you can keep your job and your home and your bank account and your friends will know they can trust you. You can continue posting on social media and you won’t have to worry about being swept up in a dragnet of political subversives.
It sounds like a lot of work, but all you really need to do is close your eyes and think of nothing.
It’s easy to wear an Obama cap or a Biden tee-shirt because it asks nothing of you. Quite the contrary: it’s a kind of talisman that grants its wearer immunity from suspicion by fine people.
It says, “I’m no threat.”
It says, “I do as I’m told.”
It might irritate or annoy conservatives, but nobody cares what they think.
It takes balls to wear a MAGA hat because it invites hostility from fine people. It’s not a provocation because of anything intrinsic about the MAGA “movement,” but because the left decided to classify their political adversaries as inherently provocative. To declare yourself at all sympathetic to American conservatism, or Republicans, or (God forbid) Donald Trump is to declare yourself beyond the pale.
The President of the United States has slandered “MAGA” fifty ways to Sunday—even having gone so far as to declare them a “clear and present danger”—and none of the fine people contradicted him, so there you go.
The fine people have declared it thus, their will be done, amen.
I should have liked to have shaken the hand of the guy who boarded my train this morning. I would have liked to let him know that even though I’m not on the Trump train myself at the moment, I’m 100% on board the movement, and even if I wasn’t I’d still understand and appreciate the brave defiance wearing such a hat in Copenhagen represented.
But of course I couldn’t, because those of us on the 6:05 don’t speak to one another. That would be beyond the pale.
Besides, you know what those MAGA people are like.