The Atlantic tackles this question here.
Before I summarize their thoughts, you should know a little about Greene, besides the fact she represents a very red rural district in Northwest Georgia.
She’s rich. She and her (estranged) husband own a construction company started by her father. She ran for Congress touting her (dubious) chops as a businesswoman, promising “jobs, jobs, jobs,” a message that resonates in economically struggling small towns. (See profile here and story here.)
Now for The Atlantic article. Greene grew up in Forsyth County, Georgia; civil rights leader Hosea Williams called it “the most racist county in America.” An armed mob drove all the black residents out in 1912, and black people never returned. Visit the place today and locals don’t want to talk about its history, or mistreatment of black people in general. “All of which is to say that Marge Taylor’s worldview was shaped in a community artificially devoid of sociocultural conflict,” The Atlantic says.
She went to college, studied business, looked for a man, and got married. She didn’t like working in the family business, and was seldom there. She was a mom raising three kids in a gated community. It apparently wasn’t enough, because by her late 30s, “something in her had started to break.” She struck out “in search of something to call her own,” and became a CrossFit devotee, although that wouldn’t last.
She also ditched the Catholic church, because of the priest scandals, and joined a nondenominational church, but that didn’t last either. For a time, her life revolved around the gym. People there remembered her as a “nice” person, which made her popular; for her, the gym was an escape from business, home life, boredom, and her (apparently loveless) marriage. She had affairs with men she met at the gym, starting with a trainer. She also increasingly came unhinged, showing signs of a woman under severe stress.
Then, in 2016, along came Trump, although it wasn’t exactly an epiphany. He simply reminded her “of my dad.” The Atlantic says, “Greene’s political origin story was not unlike that of millions of other Trump supporters. Despite having never hinted at an interest in politics, she found herself suddenly beguiled by a feeling, a conviction ….”
Her political awakening was “sudden.” She began posting online about politics. Nothing special. The Atlantic says, “Greene’s posts, by the standards of the 2017 far-right blogosphere, were more or less the usual fare, nothing terribly new or uniquely provocative.” But people “liked that she was ordinary” which she saw as “a branding opportunity.” Soon, she was off to the races.
The Atlantic says, “The Republican base was in the market for a Marjorie Taylor Greene — a suburban woman who not only didn’t recoil from Trump but was full-throated MAGA.” And for her part, she discovered there’s a big market for conspiracy theories. After she latched onto QAnon, her “political profile achieved scale and velocity.” She became a phenomenon.
But when she visited Washington D.C., no one paid much attention to her. The Atlantic says, “Greene would later trace her decision to run for office to the frustration she felt during that trip” from that. The rest is history: Greene ran in a district where she’d never lived, voters there didn’t care, and she won.
Already someone who played fast and loose with facts, she quickly learned that “performance is enough” in politics. It seemed “politics might in fact be that easy — as long as you were angry, or at least good at acting like it, most people wouldn’t bother to look under the hood.”
Today, she “wields power much like Donald Trump, doing or saying the unthinkable because she knows that most of her colleagues wouldn’t dare jeopardize their own future to stop her.” A classic populist demagogue in the Trump mold.
In that position, “Whether Greene actually believes the things she says is by now almost beside the point. She has no choice but to be the person her followers think she is, because her power is contingent on theirs.”
There it is. She was an accident. She stumbled into this. She’s like a gold seeker who fell into a pit and found herself staring at the mother lode. In politics, rise can be fast and meteoric, if you find the right formula; Barack Obama jumped from state senator to U.S. president in four short years.
I don’t think Greene will ever be president. The majority of Americans are repulsed by her. Her destiny is to be a disruptor.
