MAGA is Dead. What’s next for White Culture?

In the early aughts at my small midwestern Bible college, our Sociology professor broke us into groups. Our task was relatively simple: define your culture. The room functioned as both a lecture hall and the choir room. We sat on risers in rows of those folding chairs with the collapsing desk on the right. My memory of this scene plays out from the door, though I was definitely in one of those groups. I know I was there because it was a defining moment for me. I still recall the visceral fear of realizing that, apart from a few holiday traditions, I didn’t really have a sense of my own cultural identity.

My middle class family of four originated in a small suburb of Detroit. In elementary school, we moved out to the country. My dad worked two jobs and made good money. When my brother and I were a little older, my mom went back to work. I was big into youth group. My brother played in the band and ran track. You could place the outline of my life around the story of 80% of my classmates, and it would have fit.

As I got older, I thought of myself as fiscally conservative but socially liberal. I went to church on Sunday and voted every four years. College and career kept me in a relatively small professional circle. I had the chance to do some teaching and public speaking. I was situationally well-known, but chronically underemployed. I had done my best to take the cookie cutter of my youth and draw within the lines. Why do I feel so completely disconnected?

The term “white culture” (what I’ll call the white American monoculture) is a lie any way you look at it. America is a nation of immigrants. In order to establish our manipulation over that, white Americans created a race-based class structure. “White culture” was renamed “American culture” so that whites could benefit from everyone's American dreams. We planted a flag and set the bar for what it meant to be “American,” and we expected every other identity group to assimilate.

This presupposes both that any other group had the same proclivity for cultural divestment whites exhibit and that any group that we oppressed would be willing to join their oppressor's culture. To solve for the latter, we have spent the rest of American history scrubbing the records or managing PR on our previous atrocities. This attempted great annulment is glaringly inconsistent at the institutional level (Jim Crow), but it is insidiously accepted in our day-to-day lives (gestures around vaguely). How angry is “white culture” that a Puerto Rican is headlining the Super Bowl instead of an American? Whiteness has tried so hard to separate itself from its colonizing roots that we leave the very idea of our ancestors on the shores.

As a blank canvas is oft to want, the white identity has been colorfully co-opted by fascism, neo-nazism, and Christian nationalism. This degradation is so thorough that I struggle to point to any one thing as an actual white cultural touchstone. I identify as co-opted very intentionally here. White people have to admit that we are in on the grift. We emptied ourselves of community, leaving any sense of culture undefined. All this in order to profit from the subjugation of every group bold enough to have an identity. Allowing that boundaryless amoeba of a culture to slither into whatever shape it needs to is part of the bargain, stains, scars, and all.

In the place of intentional culture, those stains serve as our brand guide. Red hats. Parenting vlogs. Neofascist politics. Unseasoned vegetables. Book bans. Klan hoods.

But it's November 2025. It feels like white Americans may finally be reaching our inflection points. The blatant corruption and racism from the second Trump administration (featuring other noted white celebrities like John Roberts, Stephen Miller, Mike Johnson, Kristi Noem, and Elon Musk) has broken through the noise. The Informational Autocracy is destabilizing. The average white person is figuring out that they are being lied to. We voted for the racism and the greed, but not if it was going to cost US anything. Where are my clutching pearls? These leopards surely aren’t still hungry.

Being without an intentional culture, whiteness has also been proportionally under-prepared to respond. I know that I spent the first several months of the Trump regime in shock, calling my senators and representatives every day to get someone to do something. When it became clear that wasn’t going to work by itself, I started looking around for local organizations in my small Michigan town. How do you even start that search? “Social justice volunteer opportunities for out of touch white people?”

To get even more fundamental, I started trying to reach out to my friends to see how they were organized or volunteering. It turns out I don’t have that many friends. The few friends I do have seemed to be in the same situation I am: a few people seen semi-regularly, but they spend most of their lives at work, managing their families, or sleeping before heading back to work. Don’t get me wrong, the privilege of whiteness to be distracted by work that pays the bills is real. It is, shamefully, what I was aiming my life toward a year ago.

But underneath it all, there’s no “there” there. We un-defined our culture so that we could reap all the benefits and pay none of the price. But when you push through the pillow-soft shape, it just keeps folding in on itself; a white hole of vague platitudes and mass-produced wall art. But enough of us are being fed through the wood-chipper of capitalism now that even the facade has crumbled. I reach out for help only to find myself smack-dab in the center of the 40 acres I traded my culture and your lives for.

It's not much better these days for the diehard, on-purpose MAGAts. The power of the authoritarian lies in the belief of the people that he can and will do the things he says. Now that the GOP has seen that the emperor has no clothes on (in that photo with the underage girl), the “coalition” is crumbling. The unified support needed for this sort of mass corruption is gone. MAGA as a brand is falling with a bullet. If it dies completely (fingers crossed) white culture, rightfully, will be left holding the bag. What the hell have we let ourselves become? What have we let our greed and selfishness be whipped up into? How does white culture move forward?

Frankly? I hope it doesn't.

There has never been a single unified white culture, and there intentionally shouldn’t be. America definitionally cannot have a single prevailing monoculture. We are too large of a country with too diverse of geography, both physical and social, to be united in a single voice. Our pluralist-by-design country requires a radical re-understanding of ourselves. I don't know what that looks like. But I know that it won't come from the social intelligentsia, or the DNC, or some podcaster. It will come from each of us being in conversation with our neighbors to re-form our own communities.

Co-cultures are the new monocultures. If you think about the welfare of the “average American” before you think about the welfare of your next door neighbor, you are America-ing wrong. That's too divorced from the lived reality around you. If you, like me, are so truly divested from a cultural epicenter that you identify as singularly “American”... you need to figure out who you are and what you stand for.

If you don’t, history will repeat itself in our name.