Egging it on? Or simply recognizing the consequences of said policies if they were to be implemented? If MAGA conservatism is simply unacceptable politically in the USA
MAGA conservatism as an intellectual position is one thing. What I believe many people are trying to prevent is a future of more January 6ths until they get their way and have completely destroyed the foundations of American democracy, like being able to lose at the ballot box even if you obviously don't like it (which no one says you have to in the first place, despite Trump et al.'s protestations that they're being prosecuted for their belief that they won the election, which is not true; you are legally allowed to believe in baseless conspiracy in the USA, and to tell people about it). If we can no longer have peaceful transfers of power because a bunch of people with grievances will show up at the capitol looking to murder public officials for doing their jobs, then obviously the country can't function. Most people, liberal and conservative alike, don't want to wake up one morning in the some kind of Mad Max-style post-apocalypse brought on by the fact that half of the country didn't get their way. Welcome to life, where that will happen pretty much continuously so long as we are a two-party system.
which I am told is a democracy, to the point where said people need to be deprogrammed and re-educated, what would you expect to be the response?
First of all, that's not going to happen. Nobody is really taking this seriously outside of the right-wing outrage factory. Nobody listened to or cared for what Hilary Clinton had to say enough to elect her in 2016 (popular vote notwithstanding, thanks to the Electoral College), and that's when she was the preferred political candidate of the DNC machine. Now she's just private citizen Hillary, so she will not be making policy via these one-off kinds of remarks, since the Clintons do not have any kind of stranglehold over Democratic politics these days, unlike Trump's relationship to what passes for Republican politics today.
Is the right going to harden against a perceived threat or go more soft? You're going to encourage a reaction and unless the will of people like Hilary Clinton is like Iron. That is they simply want to crush their enemies and will use any method at their disposal to do so. Which I wouldn't be surprised if they did mind you.
Of course it wouldn't surprise you. Again, you don't live here, so you don't know the internal dynamics, so this seems like a credible threat to you. I don't blame you for that (how would you know any better? I don't know the first thing about NZ politics, and that's despite having relatives who live there), but I just want to underline the difference at play here: Those who are against the continued legitimization of MAGA extremism have largely come to that position based on what has already happened thanks to the MAGA wing of the GOP (January 6th, the recent paralyzing of the House with the ousting of former speaker McCarthy, etc.), while those who are flipping out about the idea of 'reprogramming' MAGA people are doing so because Hilary Clinton gave her opinion on how things should go. She didn't amass a huge group of Democratic die-hards to gather outside a MAGA meeting place to force those inside to be taken in for 'reprogramming' or anything like that. I can certainly understand how the idea of being 'reprogrammed' wouldn't sit right with MAGA people (as it wouldn't sit right with me or virtually any other American were it coming from their political opponents, obviously, because again, political reprogramming is not something we're supposed to do in the USA), but in the rush to be scared about a not-at-all-happening hypothetical, let's not forget the
actually happening reality of political life in the country right now.
It's sort of like the fear on the other political side that Trump was unhinged enough to start a nuclear war with North Korea, because one of the things he and his NK counterpart had in common is a tendency to talk big in an attempt to intimidate political opponents, so there was a question as to how tensions could be reduced with two such strong personalities leading their respective countries. Well, even if that was the fear, and even if it seemed like there was plenty of reason for it, that's still not what actually happened, so it would be weird to use that fear -- again, however justified it may seem -- to make claims about what we need to do to avoid something that
already never came to pass. We don't need to entertain that, since that's not reality. Our position as a country would be greatly improved these days if people would stop using their fears about what the other side
could hypothetically be up to as a reason to preemptively further harden themselves against their 'enemies' when nothing has actually changed. No MAGA person is actually being taken in for 'reprogramming', no matter what Hillary Clinton would like to see happen. Hillary Clinton is not only not president or running for president, she's not anything else either. She's a lady with a famous name who used to work in government in various capacities. Maybe if she somehow ends up as the DNC choice candidate again (which won't happen; she's not even in the running this time around), then I will share in the alarm, but until then, this really is a tempest in a teapot.
Going further to the right isn't necessarily a bad thing mind you.
Says you. Some of us actually have to live here.