What if this anger is rooted not in a refusal to know, but in a history of not being heard?

James Greenberg

The MAGA movement isn't just about Trump. It's about rejection—of expertise, institutions, education, science, government. Democrats often interpret this as ignorance or manipulation, the result of disinformation or cultural backlash. But there's another way to understand it, one that anthropology and years of applied research have made difficult to ignore.

What if this anger is rooted not in a refusal to know, but in a history of not being heard?

Across rural, working-class, and marginalized communities, there's a long record of programs, policies, and reforms—often designed by professionals and launched with confidence—that arrived uninvited and left resentment in their wake. These were not abstract debates about truth or data. They were lived experiences of being overruled, bypassed, or told what was good for you by someone who never asked what you needed.

This didn't just happen in Washington. It happened on the ground, in counties, watersheds, school districts, tribal lands, farming cooperatives, and urban neighborhoods. And when you've been treated that way long enough, you start to distrust the entire system that produces these so-called solutions. That's the soil MAGA grew in.

This pattern isn't new. One of the most durable lessons from applied anthropology is that development efforts—whether abroad or at home—fail most often because they don't listen. They assume. They impose. They evaluate themselves on their own terms. And when people don't comply, the system blames them.

Consider the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone and the Northern Rockies. For biologists, it was a landmark achievement. But for many ranchers, it was a federal imposition—made without consultation, disruptive to their livelihoods, symbolic of a deeper loss of control. Cooperation eroded. Poaching rose. The wolves were real, but they became proxies for something else: decisions made by others in the name of a common good that didn't feel common at all.

You see the same dynamic in coastal fisheries, where conservation zones were drawn without input from local fishers, many of whom carried generations of knowledge about tides, migration patterns, and sustainability. They were treated not as stewards, but as risks to be managed. Resistance followed.

In the Midwest, conservation programs promote buffer zones and no-till practices. But many of them are designed without regard for tenancy patterns, equipment costs, or crop insurance structures. To many farmers, they read as prescriptions from people who've never been on a tractor. Participation is low not because the goals are wrong, but because the process is. Again, no one asked.

In cities like Detroit and Los Angeles, tree-planting campaigns and green infrastructure projects often arrive in neighborhoods that have faced decades of neglect. But residents quickly recognize that these programs aren't always for them—they're signals to real estate developers and planning commissions. Beautification isn't benign when it's followed by eviction notices.

These efforts may look different on paper, but they follow the same template: solutions designed in absentia, community knowledge devalued, local adaptations dismissed as noncompliance. When people deviate, it's called a problem. When programs fail, the blame rarely travels up.

And there's a deeper issue at work. It's not just a failure to listen—it's a refusal to recognize other forms of knowledge. What gets counted as expertise is shaped by institutions that credential, formalize, and standardize. A logger's seasonal sense of snowfall and thaw, a mother's knowledge of neighborhood safety, a farmworker's observations of soil change—none of these pass as "data." But that doesn't make them wrong. It makes them inconvenient.

This isn't just a design flaw. It serves power. When only formal expertise is valid, institutions get to define the problem and its solution. Those on the receiving end are not collaborators. They're implementation targets.

The consequences are everywhere now: widespread institutional distrust, a rejection of science and public health, school boards turned into battlegrounds, government viewed not just with skepticism but contempt. Trump tapped into that. He didn't invent it—he exploited it. The rage that animates MAGA isn't just cultural. It's rooted in long histories of exclusion from decision-making, especially when the decisions were made in the name of progress.

And yet, there are other ways to work. In the 1990s, I was one of the principal investigators for a research project that came to be known as the Funds of Knowledge approach [1]. It began with a simple question: What if, instead of seeing working-class, immigrant, and minority families as lacking what schools need, we asked what they already know?

What we found wasn't deficit. It was abundance. Through labor, migration, language, caregiving, and survival, these families had developed deep practical knowledge that schools had failed to recognize. We brought teachers into homes—not to assess, but to learn. One brought a student's father, an auto mechanic, into the classroom to show how compression ratios and conversions work. The math lesson came alive. The family's knowledge wasn't a supplement. It became the curriculum.

This wasn't charity. It was pedagogy rooted in respect. It changed how teachers saw their students. And it changed how families saw the school—not as a distant authority, but as something they had a stake in.

That kind of work isn't limited to education. It can apply anywhere. Conservation, health, infrastructure, climate adaptation—every field that touches people's lives needs to ask not just what we want to accomplish, but who needs to be part of the conversation from the beginning.

Because when people are excluded, they don't forget. And when someone finally comes along who says, "They've lied to you, ignored you, used you," that story lands. Even when it's false, it lands.

This is the part many progressives still miss. You can't counter authoritarian populism with fact sheets and better branding. You can't fix the trust gap with another rollout. You have to build relationships, redistribute authority, and start by acknowledging the ways institutions have failed—not just materially, but relationally.

Democracy is not sustained by procedures. It lives or dies by whether people believe the system sees them, values them, listens to them. If they don't believe that, they will turn elsewhere. And they have.

We're not going to repair the damage until we stop treating listening as symbolic and start treating it as foundational. Otherwise, we'll keep handing the microphone to those who claim to speak for the unheard, even when all they offer is grievance.

Endnotes

[1] Greenberg, James B., Luis C. Moll, and Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez. "Community Knowledge and Classroom Practice: Bridging Funds of Knowledge with Pedagogy." In Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms, edited by Norma González, Luis C. Moll, and Cathy Amanti, 115–132. New York: Routledge, 2005.
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