Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Licence to hate
When your car is winding down the last bends from the scenic Blue Ridge Mountains into the northwest corner of Georgia you would not suspect that the people populating this gentle landscape have voted three times for the most rabid Congresswomen in the US-House of Representatives. When you continue driving into Dalton, which proudly calls itself the “Carpet Capital of the World” you can’t believe that this respectable city and its pleasant surroundings hold enough resentment and anger of their citizens to send a mad conspiracy theorist to Washington D.C. who keeps calling for violent action against Democrats and other opponents of the MAGA movement. This story is about how somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene could emerge victorious from the 14th Congressional District in Georgia between the border to Tennessee and the suburbs of Atlanta - and how she is being seen from a place like the city of Dalton.
With Marjorie Taylor Greene, short MTG, the traditionally Republican district is now represented by a 50-year-old mother of three whose claim to life achievements was to have inherited a construction firm from her father and to have run the CrossFit gym in nearby Alpharetta before her political career began by stumbling into the far-right blogosphere. Soon she was subscribing to the QAnon conspiracy theory that the world is controlled by a network of satanic paedophiles funded by George Soros.
Presenting herself on social media as pro-gun, pro-white men, pro-life ultra-Christian, anti-Muslim and antisemitic her political career took off with the support of Trumpian Republicans in the House when she eliminated her moderate rivals in the primaries. Since then she has won Georgia’s 14th District in 2020, 2022 and 2024. “The Republican base was in the market for Marjorie Taylor Greene – a suburban woman who not only didn’t recoil from Trump but was full-throated MAGA,” explained the magazine “The Atlantic” her political success in 2022. During the last election campaign, she declared: “Democrats want Republicans dead, and they’ve already started the killings.” Today in Washington, D.C., MTG leads the House Subcommittee overseeing Elon Musk’s DOGE unit for government efficiency. She is so MAGA that she will criticize her beloved President from the right if he only gives in an inch on his most outrageous promises. So much for her political career.
But who were the 243.446 people (64.37%) in this Congressional District and the 25.767 citizens (66 %) of Whitfield County including the city of Dalton who voted last November for such an extremist candidate? Sharon, who works in the educational sector and would better not give her real name, has some ideas. “In this deeply conservative part of Georgia”, she starts, “it is people for whom the world is moving too quickly, who do not want progress or more Hispanics moving in, people who see their own history destroyed when confederate statues are being removed from the city to the battlefield sites”.
On social media Sharon observes that people find somebody who breaks the status quo “quite entertaining - the shock value feeding their rage”. “It’s like MTG is giving them permission to being openly hateful”. Sharon remembers when the citizens of Dalton were still welcoming Hispanics who during the 90s had been recruited in Mexico to work in the region’s carpet factories. Now on facebook, she sees people from her community “just being incredibly racist”.
What conservative authors have long decried and what the US Census Bureau has predicted for the year 2044, namely that the non-Hispanic white population in the US would fall below 50%, has already happened in Dalton and Whitfield County. Today 54 % of the city’s 35.000 inhabitants are Hispanics.
When the carpet producers saw for how little the seasonal labourers from Central America would work in local agriculture they started recruiting Latinos for the floor-covering industry. When today 80% of the world’s flooring is being produced in the 300+ carpet factories of the area, this economic success is mainly due to the import of cheap labor. It has also produced a batch of white billionaires.
At the banks and in the shopwindows of Dalton you see bilingual signs and when you leave the town center crossing Interstate 52 the auto garages, repair shops and restaurants start carrying Hispanic names. Few people in Dalton dispute that these Latino families of workers, small businesspeople, proud homeowners and lawyers are well integrated. There are no signs of open conflict, but for some citizens this productive influx still seems to have been too much.
What could the local members of Whitfield County Democratic Party do to regain this Congressional seat? To answer this question Mary, Sheryl, Debbie and Dan have agreed to meet at Dalton’s modern Arts Guild Center center next to the spacious and well stocked Public Library. They regularly protest with their Anti-Trump billboards in front of MTG’s local office against the hate and violence their political opponent spews out.
Dan who works as a manager for a recycling company can explain well what has happened nationally to the Republican Party over the years. He tells you how since the times of Ronald Reagan “the “architects of the great Southern Strategy captured the religious sentiment”; that “God has become an automaton and is no longer the loving god”; that abortion played a big role; and that a black President made things worse for the Democrats and let people’s minds finally flip. “So racist democrats became racist Republicans”. They feel they government has bypassed them and that the trickle-down economy has not worked since the cost of buying a house has gone through the roof. In Marjory Taylor Green, Dan says, “they have found a leader who hates the people they hate”.
But Mary and Sheryl still don’t really understand what has happened to their local community. The vote for MTG, Mary says, “does not fit in with the way we live and the people we meet at social gatherings”. But the conservative messaging about the Democrats as been consistently bad, Dan throws in, and people believe that narrative. “We Democrats”, says one of them, “have become part of ‘The Other’”.
Just the week we meet the regular poll of the “Atlanta Journal Constitution” shows just 35% of registered Georgia voters have a favorable view of the Democratic Party after Trump swept the state in his return to power. Even one-third of liberal voters have a negative perception of the party. “A rebellion from the very people expected to champion its vision”, the paper comments the Democrat’s worst poll results ever.
What can Democratic activists do at the local level against the national trend and the political dynamics in their state? They list many things: focus on municipal elections; recruit better candidates for the public service commission and school boards; raise money for re-election of the Democratic Senator in 2026. Engage in voter protection and safeguard the election process against Republican manipulation; look for the people who didn’t vote; and finally, reach out to the Latino population.
If my own attempts to speak to Hispanics in Dalton is any guide, the latter will be a difficult task, because I tried and mostly failed. The three Hispanic youths in the city center have just arrived from California a few months ago and have never heard of Marjorie Taylor Greene. Carla who is serving sausages at a barbeque stand of a Hispanic Law firm promising immigration advice will not really say if she knows what MTG is about, after having come here from El Salvador 17 years ago.
Finally, at the local baseball ground in Rollins Park we find the diverse and integrated setting our Democratic activists had talked about. White, black and Latino kids playing baseball in front of their onlooking parents in a totally peaceful and casual atmosphere. The scene looks like an advert for the dreamscape of a multicultural America. Only that nobody from the Hispanic side wants to talk about Trump, MTG or politics. It seems that the price for successful integration is total absenteeism from the political sphere. As long as this holds the Democrats in Dalton have no chance whatsoever.
Later that evening in the “Dalton Brewery” we meet an old white guy ready to talk about politics and Marjorie Taylor Greene. He is retired but still has to work three days a week to make ends meet. With the small draft beer in front of him at 6.45 Dollars you understand why. And MTG? “She is batshit crazy” he says, “but I voted for her.” And when you ask him why, his answer is probably the most resonating message of Donald Trump’s decade-long domination of the media sphere: “Because the Democrats were giving all that money away”. Any Trump voter will know what he means.