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Sunday, June 8, 2025
Sunday, June 1, 2025
MAGA ESSAY
"MAGA was never about policy.
It was never about taxes or trade or immigration, at least not in the ways its supporters claim. It was about fear. About losing status. About the aching dread that the world no longer bends to you. And when power begins to slip, the mind scrambles to make sense of its new fragility. That's when people reach not for reason, but for revenge (Kelly, 2020; Golec de Zavala & Keenan, 2021).
This essay isn't about political disagreements. It's about something deeper and more primal. It's about what happens when large groups of people feel their dominance is being eclipsed, by demographic shifts, cultural liberalization, economic globalization, and the slow unraveling of myths that once placed them at the top of the social food chain (Mutz, 2018; Hetherington & Weiler, 2009). When that unraveling begins, facts become irrelevant. The mind will do what it must to protect the self. And it will vote for whomever promises to punish the world for changing.
Support for Donald Trump, and the movement that continues to orbit him, is not best explained by ideology. It is better understood as a reaction to psychological discomfort. A fusion of fear, status anxiety, and identity protection. It draws power from ressentiment, not reason (Kelly, 2020). From feelings of insulted entitlement, not informed civic interest. Trump didn't awaken this current, he merely performed it better than anyone else (Moffitt, 2016).
This is not speculation. It is the clear consensus of two decades of psychological, neurological, and political science research (Jost et al., 2003; Duckitt & Sibley, 2010; Adrián-Ventura et al., 2025). What follows is not just a condemnation of MAGA's authoritarian drift, but a forensic examination of how it thrives, in the mind, in culture, and in power.
Fear Is the Fuse
Fear is the psychological accelerant that turns political disagreement into existential warfare. The more people feel threatened, by crime, by immigration, by cultural change, by a world they no longer understand, the more they crave order, obedience, and punishment. And in the MAGA movement, fear isn't just a side effect. It's the selling point.
Authoritarianism, as decades of research show, is not a stable personality trait, it's situationally activated (Feldman & Stenner, 1997). People may live much of their lives without expressing authoritarian attitudes, but under perceived threat, especially threats to their group, those attitudes surge to the surface. The fear doesn't even have to be real. It just has to feel real, and MAGA thrives on that feeling.
Trump's rhetoric is a masterclass in fear amplification. From the moment he launched his campaign by branding Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals, to his constant drumbeat of 'American carnage,' Trump has framed modern life as a battlefield, casting his followers as both victims and soldiers. His message is simple: the world is dangerous, but I will protect you, and hurt the people you fear.
This taps directly into what Duckitt and Sibley (2010) identify as the 'dangerous worldview,' a belief that society is under siege by external threats and internal decay. This mindset predicts high scores on Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA), which includes submission to strong leaders, aggression toward deviant groups, and strict adherence to tradition. The more threatened people feel, the more they long for control, hierarchy, and retribution, all things Trump promised in spades.
Trump's followers are not irrational. They are reacting, often viscerally, to a perceived collapse of the world they knew. Crime is down, but they feel unsafe. Immigration enriches the economy, but they feel invaded. Diversity increases opportunity, but they feel erased. Trump doesn't need to solve these problems. He just needs to affirm that they exist, and promise to punish whoever caused them.
In this sense, MAGA isn't a political movement. It's a fear management system. And Trump, like many strongmen before him, positioned himself as the one man strong enough to restore order, not through justice, but through domination.
Status Anxiety and the Fear of Falling
If fear is the spark that ignites MAGA authoritarianism, status anxiety is the slow-burning fuel that keeps it alive. It's not the poor who make up the MAGA base, it's those who fear becoming poor, or more precisely, irrelevant. They aren't the most disenfranchised. They are those who once felt centered and now feel displaced. Trump didn't promise them prosperity. He promised to put them back on top.
Contrary to the popular narrative that Trump's rise was due to economic hardship, a landmark panel study by Diana Mutz (2018) found that perceived status threat, not financial strain, best predicted support for Trump. What troubled many voters wasn't job loss, it was the rising visibility and influence of women, immigrants, people of color, and global institutions. In short: the fear that 'people like me' are being replaced.
This reaction isn't new. Jost et al. (2003) describe conservatism as a coping mechanism for threat and uncertainty, especially when long-standing hierarchies are challenged. In MAGA's case, the threat isn't material, it's symbolic. The grievance isn't just economic displacement, it's cultural dethronement.
Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), a trait associated with support for hierarchy and group-based inequality, is particularly relevant here. Those high in SDO are more likely to support Trump and policies that reinforce dominant group status, from Muslim bans to border walls to attacks on affirmative action. These aren't disconnected policies; they're restorative gestures to reassert who belongs at the top.
Paulo Freire warned us about this dynamic. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he wrote: 'The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors.' MAGA reveals this mechanism in action. Those who once occupied the symbolic center, white, Christian, rural Americans, now feel culturally sidelined. And rather than build solidarity with others facing real oppression, they cling harder to the power they fear is slipping away.
This status anxiety gives rise to a resentful nostalgia, a desire not just to remember the past, but to return to a version of it where one's group was unquestionably dominant. Trump's 'Make America Great Again' isn't a policy proposal. It's a fantasy of restoration. And in a world where dominance feels harder to maintain, the illusion of superiority becomes more precious than the truth.
MAGA, then, is not about lifting oneself up. It's about pushing others down. It is the political embodiment of a group screaming, 'Don't forget who we were.'
Identity Protection Disguised as Liberation
At the core of MAGA ideology lies a paradox: it views itself as a liberation movement while demanding the power to dominate others. Its followers see themselves as brave truth-tellers, chipping away at corrupt institutions and societal decay. They rally against 'government overreach,' 'woke indoctrination,' and 'radical agendas.' But when you look at what they fight for, a different picture emerges, one of control, coercion, and cruelty in the name of freedom.
This is not accidental. It's identity protection at work, a psychological process where people will distort reality to defend their sense of who they are and what their group represents. When group identity is threatened, people engage in moral inversion: they redefine harm as virtue, aggression as defense, and oppression as liberty.
That's how banning any discussion of LGBTQ identity becomes an act of 'protecting children.'
That's how erasing trans identity becomes a 'defense of biological truth'
That's how forcing a brain-dead woman to give birth becomes a 'pro-life victory.'
This is not conservatism. It's reactive authoritarianism, a moral code built on punishing difference to preserve a fragile identity.
MAGA followers believe they are liberating America. But liberation, in their view, means eradicating whatever they perceive as a contagion — whether it's trans rights, immigrants, women's autonomy, or 'globalism.' They blame these groups for their sense of decline, projecting their struggles onto scapegoats. As a result, they embrace mechanisms of harm, legal, cultural, and rhetorical, while calling it justice.
This behavior is not ideological inconsistency; it's psychological compensation. Golec de Zavala's research on collective narcissism shows that when a group believes it is morally superior but underappreciated, it becomes aggressive. It demands recognition through dominance. That's why the MAGA movement lashes out, even while claiming victimhood. It sees opposition not as disagreement, but as existential persecution.
Freire warned us: 'The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor, adopt the oppressor's guidelines.' MAGA internalized a narrative that equates freedom with control, righteousness with revenge, and dissent with decay. Its identity depends on believing it is under siege, even when it holds power. And that siege mentality licenses any cruelty, so long as it is done in the name of 'taking our country back.'
The Rage That Feels Like Righteousness
What happens when people believe they've been robbed of power, dignity, or respect, and can never get it back through legitimate means? They don't just get angry. They marinate in resentment. They rewrite their moral universe to sanctify their pain. They begin to believe that vengeance is justice. In philosophy and psychology, this is known as ressentiment, and it fuels the emotional core of the MAGA movement.
Ressentiment is not just resentment. It is a condition in which the powerless recast their weakness as virtue, and their enemy's strength as evil. Rather than confront structural inequality, they cling to grievance, using it to explain every failure, every loss, every social shift. Trump didn't invent ressentiment, he simply gave it a microphone.
As Casey Ryan Kelly (2020) argues, Trump's rhetoric isn't just angry, it's theatrically wounded. He casts his followers not as aggressors, but as innocent victims who must be defended at all costs. Immigrants 'invade' the country. Liberals 'silence' them. Trans people 'confuse' children. Women who seek autonomy 'kill babies.' Everyone else is to blame, for everything. In Trump's world, pain isn't something to be overcome. It's something to weaponize.
This is why MAGA rallies don't just cheer policy, they cheer cruelty. They cheer when Trump mocks a disabled reporter. They cheer when he suggests shooting migrants. They cheer when he promises mass deportations, bans, and political retribution. These aren't anomalies. They're catharses. Moments where victimhood is avenged through symbolic dominance. It is ressentiment turned into spectacle.
This emotional logic explains MAGA's taste for conspiracy. If you believe you've been wronged but can't name a tangible cause, you reach for invisible enemies. The deep state. Globalists. Pedophile rings. Voting machines. COVID hoaxes. Critical race theory. These aren't just distractions, they're emotional stand-ins for unresolved grievance. The more baroque the accusation, the more satisfying the catharsis.
And it's why Trump's failures don't cost him support, they deepen it. Every indictment, every scandal, every truth is reframed as proof of persecution. His base doesn't abandon him when he lies or loses, they feel attacked through him. That's the dark genius of ressentiment: it binds people through shared victimhood, even as they cheer for authoritarian power.
MAGA, then, is not about restoration, it's about revenge. Not just policy backlash, but emotional vindication. It is the political expression of those who feel humiliated by a changing world, and want to make someone bleed for it.
Collective Narcissism and the Need to Humiliate Democracy
Most political movements seek representation. MAGA seeks restoration — not of democracy, but of status, control, and reverence. It doesn't simply want a seat at the table. It wants the table to bow. This desire stems not from strength, but from collective narcissism, the belief that one's group is exceptional and morally superior, but unfairly unrecognized.
Golec de Zavala's research defines collective narcissism as a group-level defense mechanism. It emerges when people feel their group is special but insufficiently respected by others. This fragile self-image leads not to cooperation, but to aggression. To maintain self-worth, they must constantly reaffirm dominance — not through competence or coexistence, but by humiliating those they blame for their fall from grace.
This is the psychology that drives MAGA's obsession with 'retribution.' It's why Trump calls political opponents 'vermin,' immigrants 'poison,' and the media 'enemies of the people.' It's why supporters cheer when dissent is punished, protestors are arrested, books are banned, and rights are stripped from others. These are not incidental side effects of a political program, they are the point. The group feels insulted. And someone must pay.
Collective narcissism is not patriotism. Patriotism feels secure enough to tolerate dissent. Collective narcissism is fragile, constantly scanning for disrespect and demanding submission. It cannot share power. It cannot tolerate difference. It sees democracy not as an agreement between equals, but as an obstacle to reclaiming a stolen crown.
And this is where the damage compounds. As MAGA asserts its narcissistic identity through coercion, banning speech, criminalizing gender, rewriting history, those actions, in turn, provoke criticism. But criticism is perceived not as accountability, but as further humiliation. The movement doubles down, becoming more extreme, more paranoid, more authoritarian. This is how democratic erosion begins: not with tanks in the street, but with a wounded ego given institutional power.
In this model, democracy isn't simply rejected. It's seen as a threat to the group's self-esteem. And once that happens, anti-democratic policies don't feel like overreach, they feel like therapy.
This is not just about Trump. And it's not just about America.
The political psychology that fuels MAGA, fear, status loss, collective narcissism, identity fusion, is now a global phenomenon. We are living through what researchers at the V-Dem Institute have called the Third Wave of Autocratization. Since the early 2000s, dozens of countries once considered stable democracies have begun to slide toward authoritarianism, not through military coups, but through elected leaders who subvert democracy from within.
And the United States, under Trump, was part of that slide.
V-Dem's 2021 report placed the U.S. among the countries experiencing significant democratic decline, alongside nations like Hungary, Turkey, Brazil, and India. These regimes share a pattern: they ascend to power by channeling collective grievance, then proceed to dismantle democratic institutions using democratic tools. Courts are packed. Media is attacked. Elections are delegitimized. Minorities are scapegoated. The opposition is criminalized. All under the banner of 'saving the nation.'
Sound familiar?
This is not hyperbole. It is measurable, documented, and widely acknowledged by political scientists across the ideological spectrum. Trump's administration repeatedly tested democratic boundaries, by attempting to overturn an election, by defying congressional subpoenas, by firing watchdogs, and by floating martial law. These are not normal behaviors in a democracy. They are textbook signs of democratic regression.
What makes modern autocratization so dangerous is that it is legalistic and performative. As Benjamin Moffitt (2016) notes, contemporary populists operate through political style: they construct permanent crisis, perform victimhood, and weaponize institutions against dissent. This makes their actions appear legitimate to their base, even as they hollow out the republic from within.
America is not immune. And Trump supporters are not uniquely authoritarian. What makes MAGA dangerous is not that its followers are inherently bad, it's that they've been swept up in a global movement that reframes domination as liberation, cruelty as patriotism, and constitutional erosion as restoration.
The more we pretend this is just a domestic partisan feud, the more we miss the scale of the crisis. The warning signs are not subtle anymore. They are screaming. And they match a global script already written elsewhere, often with tragic endings.
Minority Support and the Myth of Inclusion in Authoritarian Movements
A common MAGA talking point goes like this: 'We can't be racist, look at our minority supporters.' It's true that Donald Trump made gains among some Latino, Black, and Asian voters between 2016 and 2020. It's also true that some of those supporters are passionate, outspoken, and central to MAGA's media presence. But none of this proves what they think it proves.
Minority support for an authoritarian movement does not disprove its authoritarianism. Nor does it neutralize its racism. What it reflects, instead, is a complicated reality: that people of all racial backgrounds can support authoritarian ideas, but they don't do it for the same reasons, and they are not equally represented in that support.
According to Wolf et al. (2025), support for the MAGA agenda is tightly correlated with Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), two psychological dispositions that cut across race, but not equally. One of the most striking findings of their study is that women of color consistently exhibit the lowest levels of RWA, and no robust statistical relationship with MAGA support. In other words, they are the group most resistant to authoritarian appeals, a resistance shaped by having no structural advantage to protect.
But men of color are a different story. The study found that men of color, particularly Black and Latino men, show higher levels of RWA than their female counterparts, and in some cases, even more support for MAGA than white men and women. Why? The researchers suggest a powerful intersectional explanation: racial exclusion paired with patriarchal advantage creates a unique form of 'cross-pressured authoritarianism.' These men may not align with MAGA's racial politics, but they may be drawn to its masculinist authoritarianism, which offers symbolic power and control in a world where they otherwise feel politically sidelined.
This helps explain why some minority men align with a movement that otherwise targets their communities: it's not ideological coherence, it's status strategy. Trump's performance of hyper-masculine dominance appeals to those trying to assert relevance in a white-dominated, male-centric society. It's not a contradiction. It's survival.
But here's the danger: Representation during an authoritarian turn doesn't prove inclusion, it often provides cover. Authoritarian movements love outliers. They become shields against criticism. 'How can we be racist if we have Black supporters?' 'How can we be sexist if women defend our policies?' But the presence of marginalized individuals in a movement does not invalidate its oppressive goals. It often just masks them behind a veil of diversity.
Minority support should always be examined in context. As history shows, representation can coexist with repression. Nazi Germany had Jewish collaborators. Colonial regimes empowered local elites. Just because a few are elevated doesn't mean the whole is liberated.
So yes, some men of color support Trump. Some immigrant families love MAGA. But this does not mean the movement is equitable. It means authoritarianism is psychologically adaptable, intersectionally manipulative, and skilled at turning fear and hierarchy into solidarity, even among those it harms.
Conclusion: When Politics Becomes Psychology, Democracy Must Respond
We often talk about MAGA as if it were a political disagreement. As if it were about taxes, jobs, or policy platforms. But what the research shows, across neurology, psychology, and political science, is that MAGA is something deeper: an identity reaction to perceived loss. It is fear rebranded as freedom. It is status anxiety rebranded as tradition. It is authoritarian psychology wearing the skin of patriotism.
This isn't just a movement of bad ideas. It's a movement of deeply felt insecurity, fused to a political figure who offers vengeance, not vision. And in that fusion, the need for power replaces the desire for truth. The need to dominate replaces the value of liberty. The need to feel morally superior replaces the capacity for self-reflection.
That is how democracies decay: not in a sudden coup, but in a slow psychic erosion, where people trade tolerance for identity, and compassion for revenge. Where disagreement becomes betrayal, and elections become threats to the self.
This piece was not written to shame Trump supporters. It was written to understand them, because only with understanding can we begin to unwind the authoritarian trap they've fallen into. Many are not motivated by hate, but by fear. Not by ideology, but by grievance. And if we treat them only as bigots or fools, we abandon the very democratic values we claim to defend.
But understanding must not mean appeasement. Psychological need is not a license for cruelty. Collective narcissism is not an excuse for authoritarianism. There is no version of democracy where some must be erased so others can feel whole. Liberty does not require victims.
To preserve democracy, we must recognize the emotional engines that drive its enemies, and interrupt them before they harden into permanent machinery. That means resisting policies that punish. Calling out propaganda that scapegoats. And refusing to normalize a worldview that mistakes domination for dignity.
The threat is not just Donald Trump. The threat is the psychological scaffolding that made him possible, and that will remain long after he is gone, unless we dismantle it at its source."
- The Rational League
References
Golec de Zavala, A., & Keenan, O. (2021). Collective narcissism and the weakening of American democracy. Preprint. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/938vy
Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 339–375. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.129.3.339
Kelly, C. R. (2020). Donald J. Trump and the rhetoric of ressentiment. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 106(1), 2–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1698756:contentReference[oaicite:2]{index=2}
Moffitt, B. (2016). The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford University Press.
& D.C. Mutz, Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 115 (19) E4330-E4339, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1718155115 (2018).
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.
Hetherington, M. J., & Weiler, J. D. (2009). Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics. Cambridge University Press.
Wolf, M. J., & Wallace, S. J. (2025). Support for the MAGA Agenda: Race, Gender, and Authoritarianism. Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics.
Lührmann, A., & Lindberg, S. I. (2019). A third wave of autocratization is here: what is new about it? Democratization, 26(7), 1095–1113. https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2019.1582029
V-Dem Institute. (2021). Autocratization Turns Viral: Democracy Report 2021. University of Gothenburg. https://v-dem.net/media/publications/dr_2021.pdf
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It was never about taxes or trade or immigration, at least not in the ways its supporters claim. It was about fear. About losing status. About the aching dread that the world no longer bends to you. And when power begins to slip, the mind scrambles to make sense of its new fragility. That's when people reach not for reason, but for revenge (Kelly, 2020; Golec de Zavala & Keenan, 2021).
This essay isn't about political disagreements. It's about something deeper and more primal. It's about what happens when large groups of people feel their dominance is being eclipsed, by demographic shifts, cultural liberalization, economic globalization, and the slow unraveling of myths that once placed them at the top of the social food chain (Mutz, 2018; Hetherington & Weiler, 2009). When that unraveling begins, facts become irrelevant. The mind will do what it must to protect the self. And it will vote for whomever promises to punish the world for changing.
Support for Donald Trump, and the movement that continues to orbit him, is not best explained by ideology. It is better understood as a reaction to psychological discomfort. A fusion of fear, status anxiety, and identity protection. It draws power from ressentiment, not reason (Kelly, 2020). From feelings of insulted entitlement, not informed civic interest. Trump didn't awaken this current, he merely performed it better than anyone else (Moffitt, 2016).
This is not speculation. It is the clear consensus of two decades of psychological, neurological, and political science research (Jost et al., 2003; Duckitt & Sibley, 2010; Adrián-Ventura et al., 2025). What follows is not just a condemnation of MAGA's authoritarian drift, but a forensic examination of how it thrives, in the mind, in culture, and in power.
Fear Is the Fuse
Fear is the psychological accelerant that turns political disagreement into existential warfare. The more people feel threatened, by crime, by immigration, by cultural change, by a world they no longer understand, the more they crave order, obedience, and punishment. And in the MAGA movement, fear isn't just a side effect. It's the selling point.
Authoritarianism, as decades of research show, is not a stable personality trait, it's situationally activated (Feldman & Stenner, 1997). People may live much of their lives without expressing authoritarian attitudes, but under perceived threat, especially threats to their group, those attitudes surge to the surface. The fear doesn't even have to be real. It just has to feel real, and MAGA thrives on that feeling.
Trump's rhetoric is a masterclass in fear amplification. From the moment he launched his campaign by branding Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals, to his constant drumbeat of 'American carnage,' Trump has framed modern life as a battlefield, casting his followers as both victims and soldiers. His message is simple: the world is dangerous, but I will protect you, and hurt the people you fear.
This taps directly into what Duckitt and Sibley (2010) identify as the 'dangerous worldview,' a belief that society is under siege by external threats and internal decay. This mindset predicts high scores on Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA), which includes submission to strong leaders, aggression toward deviant groups, and strict adherence to tradition. The more threatened people feel, the more they long for control, hierarchy, and retribution, all things Trump promised in spades.
Trump's followers are not irrational. They are reacting, often viscerally, to a perceived collapse of the world they knew. Crime is down, but they feel unsafe. Immigration enriches the economy, but they feel invaded. Diversity increases opportunity, but they feel erased. Trump doesn't need to solve these problems. He just needs to affirm that they exist, and promise to punish whoever caused them.
In this sense, MAGA isn't a political movement. It's a fear management system. And Trump, like many strongmen before him, positioned himself as the one man strong enough to restore order, not through justice, but through domination.
Status Anxiety and the Fear of Falling
If fear is the spark that ignites MAGA authoritarianism, status anxiety is the slow-burning fuel that keeps it alive. It's not the poor who make up the MAGA base, it's those who fear becoming poor, or more precisely, irrelevant. They aren't the most disenfranchised. They are those who once felt centered and now feel displaced. Trump didn't promise them prosperity. He promised to put them back on top.
Contrary to the popular narrative that Trump's rise was due to economic hardship, a landmark panel study by Diana Mutz (2018) found that perceived status threat, not financial strain, best predicted support for Trump. What troubled many voters wasn't job loss, it was the rising visibility and influence of women, immigrants, people of color, and global institutions. In short: the fear that 'people like me' are being replaced.
This reaction isn't new. Jost et al. (2003) describe conservatism as a coping mechanism for threat and uncertainty, especially when long-standing hierarchies are challenged. In MAGA's case, the threat isn't material, it's symbolic. The grievance isn't just economic displacement, it's cultural dethronement.
Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), a trait associated with support for hierarchy and group-based inequality, is particularly relevant here. Those high in SDO are more likely to support Trump and policies that reinforce dominant group status, from Muslim bans to border walls to attacks on affirmative action. These aren't disconnected policies; they're restorative gestures to reassert who belongs at the top.
Paulo Freire warned us about this dynamic. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he wrote: 'The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors.' MAGA reveals this mechanism in action. Those who once occupied the symbolic center, white, Christian, rural Americans, now feel culturally sidelined. And rather than build solidarity with others facing real oppression, they cling harder to the power they fear is slipping away.
This status anxiety gives rise to a resentful nostalgia, a desire not just to remember the past, but to return to a version of it where one's group was unquestionably dominant. Trump's 'Make America Great Again' isn't a policy proposal. It's a fantasy of restoration. And in a world where dominance feels harder to maintain, the illusion of superiority becomes more precious than the truth.
MAGA, then, is not about lifting oneself up. It's about pushing others down. It is the political embodiment of a group screaming, 'Don't forget who we were.'
Identity Protection Disguised as Liberation
At the core of MAGA ideology lies a paradox: it views itself as a liberation movement while demanding the power to dominate others. Its followers see themselves as brave truth-tellers, chipping away at corrupt institutions and societal decay. They rally against 'government overreach,' 'woke indoctrination,' and 'radical agendas.' But when you look at what they fight for, a different picture emerges, one of control, coercion, and cruelty in the name of freedom.
This is not accidental. It's identity protection at work, a psychological process where people will distort reality to defend their sense of who they are and what their group represents. When group identity is threatened, people engage in moral inversion: they redefine harm as virtue, aggression as defense, and oppression as liberty.
That's how banning any discussion of LGBTQ identity becomes an act of 'protecting children.'
That's how erasing trans identity becomes a 'defense of biological truth'
That's how forcing a brain-dead woman to give birth becomes a 'pro-life victory.'
This is not conservatism. It's reactive authoritarianism, a moral code built on punishing difference to preserve a fragile identity.
MAGA followers believe they are liberating America. But liberation, in their view, means eradicating whatever they perceive as a contagion — whether it's trans rights, immigrants, women's autonomy, or 'globalism.' They blame these groups for their sense of decline, projecting their struggles onto scapegoats. As a result, they embrace mechanisms of harm, legal, cultural, and rhetorical, while calling it justice.
This behavior is not ideological inconsistency; it's psychological compensation. Golec de Zavala's research on collective narcissism shows that when a group believes it is morally superior but underappreciated, it becomes aggressive. It demands recognition through dominance. That's why the MAGA movement lashes out, even while claiming victimhood. It sees opposition not as disagreement, but as existential persecution.
Freire warned us: 'The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor, adopt the oppressor's guidelines.' MAGA internalized a narrative that equates freedom with control, righteousness with revenge, and dissent with decay. Its identity depends on believing it is under siege, even when it holds power. And that siege mentality licenses any cruelty, so long as it is done in the name of 'taking our country back.'
The Rage That Feels Like Righteousness
What happens when people believe they've been robbed of power, dignity, or respect, and can never get it back through legitimate means? They don't just get angry. They marinate in resentment. They rewrite their moral universe to sanctify their pain. They begin to believe that vengeance is justice. In philosophy and psychology, this is known as ressentiment, and it fuels the emotional core of the MAGA movement.
Ressentiment is not just resentment. It is a condition in which the powerless recast their weakness as virtue, and their enemy's strength as evil. Rather than confront structural inequality, they cling to grievance, using it to explain every failure, every loss, every social shift. Trump didn't invent ressentiment, he simply gave it a microphone.
As Casey Ryan Kelly (2020) argues, Trump's rhetoric isn't just angry, it's theatrically wounded. He casts his followers not as aggressors, but as innocent victims who must be defended at all costs. Immigrants 'invade' the country. Liberals 'silence' them. Trans people 'confuse' children. Women who seek autonomy 'kill babies.' Everyone else is to blame, for everything. In Trump's world, pain isn't something to be overcome. It's something to weaponize.
This is why MAGA rallies don't just cheer policy, they cheer cruelty. They cheer when Trump mocks a disabled reporter. They cheer when he suggests shooting migrants. They cheer when he promises mass deportations, bans, and political retribution. These aren't anomalies. They're catharses. Moments where victimhood is avenged through symbolic dominance. It is ressentiment turned into spectacle.
This emotional logic explains MAGA's taste for conspiracy. If you believe you've been wronged but can't name a tangible cause, you reach for invisible enemies. The deep state. Globalists. Pedophile rings. Voting machines. COVID hoaxes. Critical race theory. These aren't just distractions, they're emotional stand-ins for unresolved grievance. The more baroque the accusation, the more satisfying the catharsis.
And it's why Trump's failures don't cost him support, they deepen it. Every indictment, every scandal, every truth is reframed as proof of persecution. His base doesn't abandon him when he lies or loses, they feel attacked through him. That's the dark genius of ressentiment: it binds people through shared victimhood, even as they cheer for authoritarian power.
MAGA, then, is not about restoration, it's about revenge. Not just policy backlash, but emotional vindication. It is the political expression of those who feel humiliated by a changing world, and want to make someone bleed for it.
Collective Narcissism and the Need to Humiliate Democracy
Most political movements seek representation. MAGA seeks restoration — not of democracy, but of status, control, and reverence. It doesn't simply want a seat at the table. It wants the table to bow. This desire stems not from strength, but from collective narcissism, the belief that one's group is exceptional and morally superior, but unfairly unrecognized.
Golec de Zavala's research defines collective narcissism as a group-level defense mechanism. It emerges when people feel their group is special but insufficiently respected by others. This fragile self-image leads not to cooperation, but to aggression. To maintain self-worth, they must constantly reaffirm dominance — not through competence or coexistence, but by humiliating those they blame for their fall from grace.
This is the psychology that drives MAGA's obsession with 'retribution.' It's why Trump calls political opponents 'vermin,' immigrants 'poison,' and the media 'enemies of the people.' It's why supporters cheer when dissent is punished, protestors are arrested, books are banned, and rights are stripped from others. These are not incidental side effects of a political program, they are the point. The group feels insulted. And someone must pay.
Collective narcissism is not patriotism. Patriotism feels secure enough to tolerate dissent. Collective narcissism is fragile, constantly scanning for disrespect and demanding submission. It cannot share power. It cannot tolerate difference. It sees democracy not as an agreement between equals, but as an obstacle to reclaiming a stolen crown.
And this is where the damage compounds. As MAGA asserts its narcissistic identity through coercion, banning speech, criminalizing gender, rewriting history, those actions, in turn, provoke criticism. But criticism is perceived not as accountability, but as further humiliation. The movement doubles down, becoming more extreme, more paranoid, more authoritarian. This is how democratic erosion begins: not with tanks in the street, but with a wounded ego given institutional power.
In this model, democracy isn't simply rejected. It's seen as a threat to the group's self-esteem. And once that happens, anti-democratic policies don't feel like overreach, they feel like therapy.
This is not just about Trump. And it's not just about America.
The political psychology that fuels MAGA, fear, status loss, collective narcissism, identity fusion, is now a global phenomenon. We are living through what researchers at the V-Dem Institute have called the Third Wave of Autocratization. Since the early 2000s, dozens of countries once considered stable democracies have begun to slide toward authoritarianism, not through military coups, but through elected leaders who subvert democracy from within.
And the United States, under Trump, was part of that slide.
V-Dem's 2021 report placed the U.S. among the countries experiencing significant democratic decline, alongside nations like Hungary, Turkey, Brazil, and India. These regimes share a pattern: they ascend to power by channeling collective grievance, then proceed to dismantle democratic institutions using democratic tools. Courts are packed. Media is attacked. Elections are delegitimized. Minorities are scapegoated. The opposition is criminalized. All under the banner of 'saving the nation.'
Sound familiar?
This is not hyperbole. It is measurable, documented, and widely acknowledged by political scientists across the ideological spectrum. Trump's administration repeatedly tested democratic boundaries, by attempting to overturn an election, by defying congressional subpoenas, by firing watchdogs, and by floating martial law. These are not normal behaviors in a democracy. They are textbook signs of democratic regression.
What makes modern autocratization so dangerous is that it is legalistic and performative. As Benjamin Moffitt (2016) notes, contemporary populists operate through political style: they construct permanent crisis, perform victimhood, and weaponize institutions against dissent. This makes their actions appear legitimate to their base, even as they hollow out the republic from within.
America is not immune. And Trump supporters are not uniquely authoritarian. What makes MAGA dangerous is not that its followers are inherently bad, it's that they've been swept up in a global movement that reframes domination as liberation, cruelty as patriotism, and constitutional erosion as restoration.
The more we pretend this is just a domestic partisan feud, the more we miss the scale of the crisis. The warning signs are not subtle anymore. They are screaming. And they match a global script already written elsewhere, often with tragic endings.
Minority Support and the Myth of Inclusion in Authoritarian Movements
A common MAGA talking point goes like this: 'We can't be racist, look at our minority supporters.' It's true that Donald Trump made gains among some Latino, Black, and Asian voters between 2016 and 2020. It's also true that some of those supporters are passionate, outspoken, and central to MAGA's media presence. But none of this proves what they think it proves.
Minority support for an authoritarian movement does not disprove its authoritarianism. Nor does it neutralize its racism. What it reflects, instead, is a complicated reality: that people of all racial backgrounds can support authoritarian ideas, but they don't do it for the same reasons, and they are not equally represented in that support.
According to Wolf et al. (2025), support for the MAGA agenda is tightly correlated with Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), two psychological dispositions that cut across race, but not equally. One of the most striking findings of their study is that women of color consistently exhibit the lowest levels of RWA, and no robust statistical relationship with MAGA support. In other words, they are the group most resistant to authoritarian appeals, a resistance shaped by having no structural advantage to protect.
But men of color are a different story. The study found that men of color, particularly Black and Latino men, show higher levels of RWA than their female counterparts, and in some cases, even more support for MAGA than white men and women. Why? The researchers suggest a powerful intersectional explanation: racial exclusion paired with patriarchal advantage creates a unique form of 'cross-pressured authoritarianism.' These men may not align with MAGA's racial politics, but they may be drawn to its masculinist authoritarianism, which offers symbolic power and control in a world where they otherwise feel politically sidelined.
This helps explain why some minority men align with a movement that otherwise targets their communities: it's not ideological coherence, it's status strategy. Trump's performance of hyper-masculine dominance appeals to those trying to assert relevance in a white-dominated, male-centric society. It's not a contradiction. It's survival.
But here's the danger: Representation during an authoritarian turn doesn't prove inclusion, it often provides cover. Authoritarian movements love outliers. They become shields against criticism. 'How can we be racist if we have Black supporters?' 'How can we be sexist if women defend our policies?' But the presence of marginalized individuals in a movement does not invalidate its oppressive goals. It often just masks them behind a veil of diversity.
Minority support should always be examined in context. As history shows, representation can coexist with repression. Nazi Germany had Jewish collaborators. Colonial regimes empowered local elites. Just because a few are elevated doesn't mean the whole is liberated.
So yes, some men of color support Trump. Some immigrant families love MAGA. But this does not mean the movement is equitable. It means authoritarianism is psychologically adaptable, intersectionally manipulative, and skilled at turning fear and hierarchy into solidarity, even among those it harms.
Conclusion: When Politics Becomes Psychology, Democracy Must Respond
We often talk about MAGA as if it were a political disagreement. As if it were about taxes, jobs, or policy platforms. But what the research shows, across neurology, psychology, and political science, is that MAGA is something deeper: an identity reaction to perceived loss. It is fear rebranded as freedom. It is status anxiety rebranded as tradition. It is authoritarian psychology wearing the skin of patriotism.
This isn't just a movement of bad ideas. It's a movement of deeply felt insecurity, fused to a political figure who offers vengeance, not vision. And in that fusion, the need for power replaces the desire for truth. The need to dominate replaces the value of liberty. The need to feel morally superior replaces the capacity for self-reflection.
That is how democracies decay: not in a sudden coup, but in a slow psychic erosion, where people trade tolerance for identity, and compassion for revenge. Where disagreement becomes betrayal, and elections become threats to the self.
This piece was not written to shame Trump supporters. It was written to understand them, because only with understanding can we begin to unwind the authoritarian trap they've fallen into. Many are not motivated by hate, but by fear. Not by ideology, but by grievance. And if we treat them only as bigots or fools, we abandon the very democratic values we claim to defend.
But understanding must not mean appeasement. Psychological need is not a license for cruelty. Collective narcissism is not an excuse for authoritarianism. There is no version of democracy where some must be erased so others can feel whole. Liberty does not require victims.
To preserve democracy, we must recognize the emotional engines that drive its enemies, and interrupt them before they harden into permanent machinery. That means resisting policies that punish. Calling out propaganda that scapegoats. And refusing to normalize a worldview that mistakes domination for dignity.
The threat is not just Donald Trump. The threat is the psychological scaffolding that made him possible, and that will remain long after he is gone, unless we dismantle it at its source."
- The Rational League
References
Golec de Zavala, A., & Keenan, O. (2021). Collective narcissism and the weakening of American democracy. Preprint. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/938vy
Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 339–375. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.129.3.339
Kelly, C. R. (2020). Donald J. Trump and the rhetoric of ressentiment. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 106(1), 2–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1698756:contentReference[oaicite:2]{index=2}
Moffitt, B. (2016). The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford University Press.
& D.C. Mutz, Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 115 (19) E4330-E4339, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1718155115 (2018).
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.
Hetherington, M. J., & Weiler, J. D. (2009). Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics. Cambridge University Press.
Wolf, M. J., & Wallace, S. J. (2025). Support for the MAGA Agenda: Race, Gender, and Authoritarianism. Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics.
Lührmann, A., & Lindberg, S. I. (2019). A third wave of autocratization is here: what is new about it? Democratization, 26(7), 1095–1113. https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2019.1582029
V-Dem Institute. (2021). Autocratization Turns Viral: Democracy Report 2021. University of Gothenburg. https://v-dem.net/media/publications/dr_2021.pdf
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Sunday, May 11, 2025
I urge everyone to read this: How to Lose Democracy: A Brilliant Journalist’s Guide By Ece Temelkuran
I urge everyone to read this:
How to Lose Democracy: A Brilliant Journalist’s Guide What must Canadians and their new government fight to prevent? Ece Temelkuran explains in seven steps.
Andrew Nikiforuk 2 May 2025 The Tyee
In 2019, the Turkish journalist Ece Temelkuran described how citizens can forfeit a democracy to the charms of an authoritarian populist in just seven easy steps.
In her book How to Lose a Country, she compellingly compared the process of democratic disintegration to the shedding of icebergs the size of Delaware off the coast of Antarctica.
But few with powers to do something about it in Europe and North America paid attention.
They should have.
As a political columnist, Temelkuran occupied a front-row seat to the future as she watched Turkey’s strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan rise to power in 2002. He then systematically poisoned public discourse and weakened her own country’s institutions over two decades.
The same forces of right-wing populism then started to rip apart Hungary, Israel, Britain, France, South Korea, Canada and the United States — all following a distinct pattern.
Every democracy believes it is exceptional, Temelkuran wrote, until it isn’t.
Fascism, she added, was not a historical artifact but a living organism. Moreover, it was gaining strong appeal in an increasingly chaotic world that too often treated democracy as an empty spectator’s sport with abundant popcorn.
So, you ask, what are the steps?
Just how does a revolutionary populist transform from “a ridiculous figure to a seriously terrifying dictator, while corrupting a country’s entire society to its bones”?
The short version is that, first, an aspiring autocrat must create a movement of “real people.” This movement then erodes truth and reason with infantile, terrorist or plastic language that shreds facts and civic discourse. In the process the populist removes shame and mercy from all public discourse and reduces democracy to bad reality TV.
Then, once the autocrat achieves a narrow electoral victory, he or she undermines a democracy’s checks and balances with judicial and political reforms that centralize power and enrich oligarchs. The autocrat then disorients citizens with an ever-changing platform of change (Donald Trump calls it “flooding the zone”) while progressives laugh at the political circus. But no matter, the clown wins. And so the autocrat builds a postmodern state where people in the shadows come to lament, “This is not my country.”
That’s it. And we’ve seen some of this playbook tried in Canada.
MAGA maple syrup populist John Rustad nearly toppled B.C.’s NDP government by judiciously applying the beginning steps. The United Conservative Party led by Premier Danielle Smith has proven itself “an authoritarian force in Alberta,” carefully detailed by political scientist Jared Wesley. And demagogue Pierre Poilievre came within a few seats of making Canada over in ways that reflect Donald Trump’s United States.
There, it may be too late. Trump has completed the chaos machine and is now building a revolutionary society.
Before delving more deeply into some of Temelkuran’s observations, it’s important to note the essential preconditions for failure.
Certain historical forces predispose a democracy to walking the seven steps into the embrace of strongmen rule. They include a political class that has grown dangerously aloof and ignores rampant economic inequality. Add to that explosive mix a citizenry rattled by the wild horses of history: inflation, mass migration, pandemics and technological disruption.
Finally, a revolutionary tribe of counter-elites must emerge to inflame and channel the discontent. Fascism does not erupt in vigorous democracies; it can succeed only in debased ones where habits of self-reliance, responsibility, community, competence, initiative and social equality have been allowed to atrophy.
So once a nation’s smug elites have abandoned working people, divided the nation with culture wars and reduced the idea of democracy to a performance art without consequences, the ground is laid.
As Canada emerges from a close-fought federal election that turned on threats against the nation’s very sovereignty, the stakes are quite clear. So let’s walk through Temelkuran’s seven-step program for replacing democracy with autocracy.
1. Create a movement of ‘the real people’
The crusade begins with pissed-off ordinary folk. Burdened by grievances and indignities — such as those imposed by the COVID pandemic, inflation or an opioid crisis — the people clamour for respect.
From this base of real loss or suffering, the leader of the movement then manufactures extra-strength victimhood. Mexicans are overrunning the United States. Christians aren’t getting a fair shake. Immigrants have debased Germany. Muslims are oppressed in Turkey. No province has been ignored by Ottawa more than Alberta. Jewish George Soros has betrayed Hungary. And so on. Not surprisingly, the status quo dismisses embracers of these tropes to be deplorably weird emanations.
Notably, almost all these movements start in the hinterland where urban elites have typically shrugged at the casualties of progress.
The illiberal ruler of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, built his base on festering economic, social and energy issues in the countryside, where 40 per cent of the population still lives.
Erdoğan, Turkey’s powerful leader of 20 years, harvested his initial political support from the small towns of rural Anatolia.
Take Back Alberta, which catapulted Smith to power, fermented in the evangelical watering holes of central Alberta.
The extreme right-wing Alternative for Germany party emerged from rural areas with disposable incomes lower than the national average.
2. Throw away rational discourse and spank the naughty child
Once a populist has created a movement, the leader must disrupt reasonable discourse and charm followers with infantile language. This reduces citizens to the state of needy children and elevates the movement’s leaders into all-knowing mothers or fathers. With soothing and simple slogans (Axe the Tax, Vote for Change, Drain the Swamp) leaders can take a movement anywhere with the promises of fairy tales.
In Trump’s second presidential campaign, the Vladimir Putin apologist Tucker Carlson even compared Trump to an angry father who was going to discipline his children. “When Dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl, you’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.’”
Because fascism arises from human emotions of loss and despair, it has no patience for rational debate. Revolutionary populist leaders attack, attack and attack. They disparage the character of their adversary, appeal to ignorance, argue that something is true because people believe it, and openly celebrate absurdity. The historian Hannah Arendt noted that constant lying in political discourse is not about making people believe a lie but about “ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.”
The abandonment of reason shouldn’t surprise members of highly polarized societies, adds Temelkuran. It is but “a coherent consequence of the times we live in, and something that contaminates all of us, albeit in different ways.”
To own the narrative, populist leaders must also attack or denigrate the press while cultivating their own regime-friendly outlets. If a populist is not offending the mainstream media, then he or she is missing an opportunity to establish good communications with “the real people.”
A largely urban and well-educated media really hasn’t got a clue about how to deal with this unreason. Fact checking and correcting misinformation can’t really stop a tsunami of irrational waves of anger, warns Temelkuran. She compares such tactics to playing chess with a pigeon:
“The pigeon will just knock over all the pieces and shit on the board, then depart, proudly claiming victory and leaving the mess behind for you to clean up.”
Germany’s mighty press in the 1930s had no idea how to handle Hitler or the Nazis. “There is no law to prevent right-wing populist political language invading and destroying the public sphere,” writes Temelkuran.
3. Banish shame and mercy
Temelkuran argues that acceptance of highly organized, large-scale lies in a democracy simply requires “the normalization of shamelessness.”
She points her finger at the selling of the Iraq War and the emergence of reality TV. Programs like The Simple Life, The Apprentice and Survivor idolized shameless power mongers and banished mercy. Donald Trump, a convicted felon, rapist and snake oil salesman, epitomizes this coarse normalization.
Every so-called populist leader now breathes this odium like air. When Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, a former talk show host, recently shared the stage with right-wing influencer Ben Shapiro to raise funds for an NGO that supports Donald Trump, she shamelessly pretended that she was practising some kind of tariff diplomacy. Instead, she was actively undermining and betraying her own country.
4. Weaponize judicial and electoral reform
Once a revolutionary populist has achieved power, he or she tampers with the system to extend their power and crush their opponents. In Hungary Orbán rerigged the judiciary and electoral mechanisms to guarantee free but unfair elections. Smith is now doing the same in Alberta by rewriting laws that politicize municipal politics, curtail freedom of information rights and allow the wealthy to pour more dark money into elections.
5. Reshape the citizen
The illiberal state breeds the illiberal citizen drowned by a flood of ever-changing causes. A populist leader asks only three things: obedience, submission and rage. And so the illiberal citizen must not question the powerful one when he or she replaces civil servants and honest officials with quacks, party members and rent-seeking individuals. But the illiberal citizen must, on command, express rage against targets of the regime, whether they be Ottawa, transgender people or environmentalists. “People’s desire for a cause is satisfied by the authoritarian leader’s confidently told story,” writes Temelkuran.
6. Laugh away the horror
Here Temelkuran offers what may be a counterintuitive insight. Ever since Trump became a political force in 2016, much of the United States’ political class responded by treating Trumpism as an entertaining joke. Many progressives turned to the satirists Bill Maher and Jon Stewart to ease their anxiety and laugh at the orange dunce. (Hitler was dismissed as a grand buffoon and crank by the press too.)
In Canada, Danielle Smith has been characterized as a wackadoodle posing as someone serious. That seemed to be the main theme of the NDP’s failed election campaign against her.
But joking about the horror is a big mistake, writes Temelkuran. She calculates that the left wasted crucially valuable time in Turkey “by reacting to right-wing populism with humour and sarcasm” and “trying to laugh away our fears.” The problem is that laughter can expose the ridiculous character of the throne holder but it cannot tip over the throne. Instead of laughing, citizens must respond with concerted actions that address the real roots of the malaise.
7. Build a different nation
As the laughter evaporates, every autocrat uses their power to build what they vow will be a new and great nation if not the greatest nation. In Hungary Orbán called his creation “an illiberal democracy.” In reality it operates as a mafia state enriching Orbán’s friends and relatives. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu fostered an illiberal apartheid state now guilty of genocide. In the United States Trump has refashioned a tired republic into a kleptocracy by ignoring the rule of law, giving more power to oligarchs and starting a global trade war.
Smith is now working on “freeing” Alberta from Confederation with a made-in-Alberta pension fund and an international border defended by her own police. She is even threatening secession. The electoral reform package she introduced this week is Trumpian in tone and impact.
In a 2024 TVO interview Temelkuran offered some pointed updates with humility. She said: Don’t be afraid to use the word “fascism.” This ever-evolving condition has re-emerged in our politics in truly modern and elastic clothes. Beware as the new fashion of fascism sometimes masquerades as merely another form of highly seductive political entertainment.
The brilliant Turkish journalist also said that she understands why privileged citizens might think they can ignore such nasty political developments and escape the natural disaster unfolding at their doorsteps.
But that would be a grave mistake, she warned, paraphrasing Pericles, the ancient general and politician who lived during the golden age of Athens. Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean the fascists and revolutionary nationalists will not take an interest in you.
Once the seven steps have been completed and your democracy looks like a melting ice sheet, “your individual life will become a difficult place to live.”
Temelkuran lived the tragedy. She now writes in exile from Germany, where populists have followed the same seven steps and now threaten to unravel that country’s democracy, too.
An updated version of ‘How to Lose a Country: The Seven Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship’ will be published in 2026.
Tuesday, May 6, 2025
BBC Radio 3 - Sunday Feature, Tango Goes East
Tango Goes East
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Wednesday, April 30, 2025
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