The idea of building a wall to keep out Those Others at the border is not just its own policy goal, but a ready-made metaphor for most of MAGA's culture panic reaction.
Build a wall around the minds of people (especially young people), because if we can insure that they never see, hear, read about, or are touched by Certain Ideas then they will grow to be clean and pure and just the way we want them to be.
The wall is built for brute force and fear. We must not allow them to see a certain view of the world, but we do not fight it with reason or argument, with persuasion or discussion. We don't meet that Other View and grapple with it. No, we must build a wall to hold it back, to block it out, to anticipate and search for every little crack through which it might creep. They use the wall because they rely on brute force to suppress those other views, and they do it because of fear. Just a taste, a touch, a look would somehow pollute the young, pollute the culture, seduce generations away from the One True View of the world and our country.
I've known MAGA types my whole life. In religious circles I call the followers of the Tiny God, a God so weak and helpless that He must be protected from disbelievers, from people who do not worship Him properly. He needs the support of human laws, human government, because if He were not soi protected and wreathed in human-made bubble wrap, he would be blown away on the wind. These are the folks who believe the Creator of all that is, the great I Am, the Being who made all and sees from end to end of the great sweep of time and eternity and the universe itself, vast and unknowable-- that God will be seriously threatened if Americans in 2024 vote for the wrong person to occupy a seat in the House of Representatives. That God waits to see if the right person will be elected to an office of secular, earthly government.
That's the kind of fragility we're talking about. Is their Truth so weak that nobody must be allowed to challenge it, that they have no way to answer opponents except to shut them up. Their view of what is Right and True is absolutely and unassailable, except they live in constant fear of having it assailed. And so, a wall. To keep out people with the wrong beliefs, the wrong culture, the wrong background, the wrong ideas about gender, and if not keep them out, at least force them to keep their wrongness to themselves.
This is not an automatic feature of conservatism. Conservatives can absolutely be those folks who watch what appears to them to be dumbassery, call it dumbassery, and stand in opposition to it, patiently waiting to watch it play out, secure in the knowledge that dumbassery always falls apart, always fails to hold up against actual truth and facts and reality. Even when it builds a wall to keep all those things out.
Unfortunately, building the wall comes with extra problems, extra destruction, anguish from grinding human bones to make mortar. And the terrible strain of denying what's out there, of maintaining your view of reality in defiance of the evidence.
Yes, it all goes hand in hand with grasping for power, but power for what? Power to silence the banging of time and tide and reality and the growling beast reminding you that you are dust, that in another blink or two you will be dust again, with nothing left behind but the pieces of a wall and the imprint of your boots on too many necks. It's not wealth and power for joy-- do any of these MAGA wall builders look joyful? How can they be when they are exhausted by the daily efforts to maintain the wall? How can they rest when that hammering rings in their ears every hour of the day and night?
It is one thing to try to build a society up, to try to build the edifices and structures and supports that cause it to more closely resemble the ideal you envision by harnessing the heart and passion and love and bright rising humanity and, yes, even holiness that can lift it up into something a little more shining. It is another thing to try to mold that society by trying to keep all those human and divine forces from being able to act on it. It is one thing to try to bring all the pieces of a society together to create something awesome, and quite another thing to try to subjugate them and wall them up, to say "Only I can create here, and the first thing I will create is a wall that blocks all ideas and wills but my own."
There is no human system of government that cannot be twisted into an ugly and dehumanizing state, and none that cannot be turned to foster all the great beauty that humans are capable of, but certainly some systems tend more naturally one way or another.
We can talk and argue at great length about values and morals and ethics, but some days I can see it simplified to a two-part question-- what are you trying to build, and how are you trying to build it?
Are you trying to build a garden that flourishes and grows and delights in all manner of living things that also grow and flourish, doing it by cultivating and nourishing and lifting up, or are you intent on building a wall to keep out all the parts of the world you don't like so that some sad, meagre little creature can gather power without ever being challenged by anything scary from outside that wall.
That wall-free garden is never going to be all fluffy bunnies and kum-bay-yah circles. Life is rich and complicated and sometimes hard and often contentious. But building a wall to keep away everything that bothers you is never a solution; it's anti-life and anti-human. It's destined to fail, and to sow chaos and destruction as it collapses.
We are in an age of wall-builders, which makes it both harder and imperative that we not build our schools according to their specifications. It's a lousy way to educate young humans. We have to do better. Poke holes in the wall, and bring the world in through every tiny crack.
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