The Saffron-Robed American Nightmare
What Tibetan Buddhism sees when it looks at MAGA
By The Gonzo Poltergeist
May 27, 2025
A while back, when Pope Leo XIV was being inaugurated and MAGA still wasn’t quite sure whether to fear him, mock him, or try to sell him a gold-plated AR-15, we ran a piece called That New Pope Smell. Not long before, we wrote a piece called How JD Vance Killed the Pope—but that’s neither here nor there.
In the weeks since, it’s become clear that the MAGA hive mind made up their mind: he’s the enemy. We’ll return to that unfolding backlash—and why Leo might be MAGA’s spiritual kryptonite—in a future Dispatch.
But today, we head in another direction. East. Dharamsala, specifically. I was thinking about the Dalai Lama this weekend—specifically the way Tibetan Buddhists, even those imprisoned and tortured by the Chinese, somehow cultivated compassion for their captors. It made me think of us and our own situation with our own, eh, captors? And I began to try to ponder how it is we cultivate compassion for MAGA, and is that what we should be doing? If karma’s real, if rebirth is what happens—or in the Christian tradition, if there’s an afterlife—I’m guessing that it’s not going to go well for some of these folks.
Tibetan Buddhism—especially as practiced and articulated by the Dalai Lama—offers a profoundly different worldview from that embodied by MAGA politics. So what does Tibetan Buddhism actually teach? What worldview would look at the last ten or so years of American political life—and not reach for rage, but for mercy?
A few core tenets offer a lens. Not an excuse. A lens:
- Compassion (karuṇā): Action rooted in concern for the suffering of others. Deporting longtime residents, gutting foreign aid, and building walls are acts born of fear and ignorance—not compassion.
- Interdependence (pratītyasamutpāda): All beings are connected. The borders we worship are illusions. The pain we export will find its way home.
- Non-attachment: MAGA is a shrine to clinging—to grievance, identity, money, status, power, borders. From a Buddhist perspective, it’s not just a political movement. It’s spiritual entrapment.
- Right Speech / Right Action (Eightfold Path): The lies, the cruelty, the performance of domination—none of it passes through the gates of right conduct. It’s not even close.
As we don’t have direct comments from the Dalai Lama on the topic of MAGA, we must extrapolate from other comments he has made about other oppressors. The Dalai Lama often speaks of compassion not as approval or weakness, but as a recognition of shared suffering and ignorance. When he speaks about the Chinese guards who tortured monks and desecrated monasteries, and still expresses compassion for them as prisoners of their own hatred, it’s staggering. It’s also aspirational.
From a Tibetan Buddhist perspective, cruelty doesn’t just harm the target. It corrodes the soul of the perpetrator. And when fear hardens into identity, when power is used to wound rather than protect, the karmic cost is real.
The Dalai Lama has said it plainly:
“Walls are not the solution to human problems.”
“Refugees should be treated with compassion and humanity.”
Yes, he once noted that Europe may not be able to absorb every migrant. That was likely an astute economic and cultural observation, born of long life and realism. But the message has never changed: Do no harm. Act from moral clarity. Don’t let fear masquerade as principle. Compassion, in this tradition, isn’t soft or weak. It’s not approval. It’s spiritual discipline.
Grievance becomes habit, then identity: The more MAGA types cling to rage, entitlement, and delusion, the more they sever themselves from connection and peace. From a Buddhist lens, they are literally widening their own samsaric trap.
The Bodhisattva Dilemma: If you could reach into the burning house and drag one of them out—knowing they might punch you in the face—would you? Would you try again tomorrow?
So yes, they could be viewed as agents of harm—and as beings destroying themselves in the process.
“They are doing bad things, but they are not bad people. This is how I keep compassion in my heart.”
“I try to see what is behind their anger or fear. Most of the time, it is confusion, or suffering that they do not understand.”
— His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
That doesn’t mean you don’t fight them. Buddhism isn’t passive. The Dalai Lama supported armed resistance at one point, and speaks openly about confronting injustice. But his moral clarity always includes compassion as an anchor—not a surrender.
And maybe that’s the answer—what is the karmic cost of our current administration? The world has certainly seen worse. But the question remains: what is the cost not just for the victims of this era, but for the people orchestrating it? And then, what’s the karmic cost for the ones cheering for deportations, the ones sneering at aid, the ones running toward vengeance and calling it strength?
I mentioned this idea, what you are reading, to my uncle—Guillaume Spengler, a Presbyterian pastor with a long and varied career, and a different perspective. He immediately brought up Stockholm Syndrome and said that he’d recently given a sermon that shared a different and sterner tone. But I’ll let him speak for himself, and he’ll be contributing tomorrow’s piece, “America’s Bastille Day,” tomorrow and we’re very lucky to have him.
These topics are the kinds of ideas that reasonable people can disagree on. What is compassion, really, in the face of manipulation and harm? What’s the line between moral clarity and spiritual naivete? And how do the Dalai Lama—or Guillaume Spengler, for that matter—see Trump and his MAGA sycophants, not just as political actors, but as human beings—fellow travelers?
For Tibetan Buddhists, the answer is clarity without cruelty.
See the harm. Oppose the lie. Don’t become it.
Karmic compassion doesn’t mean letting them off the hook. It means grieving their self-inflicted collapse even as you oppose them fiercely.
Filed from the base of a half-demolished meditation retreat, somewhere between samsara and Santa Fe.
