Originally a comment by Rev David Brindley on Ok ok we take it back.

An interesting article from Salon, “MAGA’s true believers don’t understand capitalism — Trump will teach them a hard lesson.”

The highlights

America is a nation at war with its mythologies.

For all the electoral postmortems about the desire for economic change, what’s unsurprisingly absent is what seems, to me, an obvious omission: an all-enveloping misunderstanding of American capitalism.

(…)

With due respect to the many Americans who voted for Donald Trump, their overwhelming sense of entitlement dwarfs that of the hard-working immigrants who cut their grass, scrub pots and pans in the restaurants they frequent, and care for their kids and elderly loved ones. Too many Americans have come to believe they are owed financial comfort and material abundance, not to mention eggs and gasoline at predictable prices.

Dare I say it, but this strikes me as the “… the pursuit of Happiness.” from the Declaration of Independence writ large. But rewritten for today’s world meaning less the pursuit and more the entitlement.

Jeremiads about grocery prices are now an acceptable element of political discourse and, per GOP logic, we have a right to complain about them. Feeding the hungry, though? That edges too close to pinko communism. But the point our fellow countrymen and women should grasp is that presidents, whoever they are, have very little control over inflation.

You know what my wife and I did when household costs became too onerous last year? We reduced our expenses, and adjusted our quality of life.

That’s, you know, fiscal conservatism: Tightening the belts, practicing austerity, living within our means, limiting debt. We didn’t literally pull ourselves up by the bootstraps or walk to school through the snow without shoes. But isn’t that the American mythos?

Looks an awful lot like our local politics, too. People demanding governments do something about things over which governments no longer have control. On this day in 1953 an Adelaide butcher was fined for selling mutton at a price higher than the maximum mandated under The Prices Act. When I moved to South Australia in the 1970s the state government mandated maximum prices for a schooner of beer, a meat pie, and a pair of jeans. Could anyone contemplate a return to those days?

So I’ll pose almost the same question nearly a decade later: What do Trump voters, and especially true believers in the MAGA community, of which I was once a full member, think capitalism is?

We legislate against some of the baser traits of our nature: incitement, theft, violence. Our laws aren’t entirely devoid of protections against avarice (such as antitrust regulations), but Americans, collectively and historically, have a high tolerance for greed.

There’s the mythology of capitalist meritocracy at work, which is still championed by many people who’ve been failed by both major political parties. Their concerns have been exploited and manipulated by Republicans who have traumatized them into believing that liberalism, rather than capitalism, is the source of their ills; that because of the evil policies of liberals, they keep working harder and harder but never seem to break even, much less get ahead.

This is the great lie that so many people, like those of iknklast’s family, and people we all know, have fallen for and wholeheartedly believe. If you want to get ahead, you just have to work harder. Isn’t that why there are so many billionaire cleaners?

The author, Rich Logis, is a former MAGAhat who has seen the naked emperor.