I have frequently cited research showing that racial resentment is the single most predictive element of a vote for Trump, and his administration has rewarded those voters with its efforts to elevate White “Christian” men and erase efforts at fairness and inclusion. They don’t even bother to hide their intentions anymore–J.D. Vance was recently quoted saying “You don’t have to apologize for being White anymore.”
Attributing Trump’s election to racism is fair, but insufficient. Despite Trump’s recent assertion that he “created” MAGA, America’s racism and misogyny are hardly new. The much harder question is “what sort of individual harbors these beliefs?
A recent, lengthy essay from The Rational League explored that question.
As the author noted, observers tend to dismiss bigotry as stupidity, malice, or moral collapse, but such explanations are intellectually lazy. “They flatter the observer while obscuring the phenomenon they claim to diagnose.” Such explanations also fail to explain the internal consistency of the MAGA movement, its ability to persist in the face of contradiction, the way it transforms norm violations into virtues, or why Its exposure to contrary evidence actually can harden belief rather than weaken it.
The essay does a deep dive into the psychological literature, and concludes that some people filter information through a different lens–one based upon “threat perception, authority preference, group identity, and moral reclassification.” In other words, they filter reality differently. The author says that MAGA folks’ worldview didn’t arise from madness, “but from a system that works, psychologically, emotionally, and politically, for those who inhabit it.”
What is that worldview, and where did it come from?
Long before a person encounters slogans, parties, or leaders, they acquire something more durable: a way of relating to uncertainty, authority, and threat.
Longitudinal research tracking individuals from infancy into adulthood shows that political orientation is shaped not only by what parents say, but by how they raise their children, and by how those children respond to the world around them. In Developmental Antecedents of Political Ideology, Fraley, Griffin, Belsky, and Roisman followed participants from birth to age eighteen and found that parents who endorsed more authoritarian child-rearing attitudes when their children were just one month old were significantly more likely to have children who later identified as conservative. Parents who endorsed more egalitarian and autonomy-supportive attitudes predicted the opposite outcome.
The scholarship suggests that children raised by parents who emphasized obedience, rule-following, and deference to authority are more likely to adopt political beliefs that emphasize those same principles. Furthermore, individual temperaments compound the effect. Children with higher levels of fearfulness in early childhood have been found to be more likely to identify as conservative in later years.
It isn’t just parenting style; as twin studies have demonstrated, there are also shared genetic influences. (Party identity isn’t inherited, but “threat sensitivity, need for order, and discomfort with ambiguity” are heritable traits that often find partisan and/or ideological expression.)
None of this implies inevitability. A child raised with strict norms does not automatically become authoritarian, just as a fearful temperament does not mandate political rigidity. What this research establishes is something subtler and more consequential: that some individuals enter adulthood with a heightened preference for order, stability, and authority as psychological goods. These preferences remain largely dormant until circumstances give them political meaning.
The scholarship shows that, in periods of social change–especially the growth of cultural pluralism– conservatives react with efforts to reduce uncertainty, restore order, and defend existing social structures. They have a preference for “certainty over ambiguity and security over openness.” As the author notes, “Order must be imposed, and dominance must be maintained.”
This is where collective narcissism comes in.
Collective narcissism is described as an emotional investment in an inflated image of one’s ingroup. Its function is psychological, not ideological, and It
transforms threat into insult. Disagreement becomes betrayal. Constraint becomes humiliation. Because the ingroup’s greatness is experienced as both exceptional and insufficiently recognized, any challenge, real or imagined, demands retaliation. The leader who promises restoration, recognition, and vengeance is no longer merely persuasive; they become necessary.
As the essay notes, the left is not immune to bias, groupthink, or moral error. MAGA, however, represents a particular configuration of psychological traits, “activated by threat, reinforced by grievance, and stabilized by identity, that is not mirrored on the left at comparable scale or intensity.”
The danger of the MAGA lens is not that it abandons reason, but that it applies reason in service of a closed moral system, one capable of justifying coercion as protection, exclusion as fairness, and domination as restoration once the conditions are met.
There is much more, and I strongly recommend reading the entire linked essay.
I wonder how much of this MAGA-type profile arrived with Columbus along with sugar cane, slavery and smallpox.
Certainly America’s 3 1/2 centuries of slavery established a pretty solid definition for white peoples’ superiority – culture wide. The introduction of morality into that established mass behavior certainly upset that particular applecart. This morality war culminated in the Civil War that killed nearly 3/4 million white people for the sole reason supporting southern economics.
Then, of course, there was the utterly botched attempts at reconstruction and the resentment took on a more varied existence. Yankee carpetbaggers swarmed the devastated south to exploit what was left for their own good. They hired the freed black people to do the work for less than they would pay a white man … or woman. Since so many of the white males of the South were killed during the war, all that were left to run for office were BLACK men. How’s that for a 1 – 2 punch for white resentment?
MAGA and its racism is just the latest iteration of that inherent cultural resentment. And it wasn’t limited to the South. Black people escaped and migrated to the North for jobs accepting less pay than white people. White resentment flourished in the North too, but not, I guess as overtly. Fewer lynchings … except in places like Indiana, the headquarters of the KKK hate machine.
Vance’s idiotic statement reflects the intellectual dwarfism of the movement. If intellectual sloth is at fault on one side, and underdeveloped intellect operating the other, we can presume that the battle of race and resentment is being conducted by stupid people.
I read a post from Paul Krugman. It was a transcript of an interview with Heather Cox Richardson. In part it touched on the “infrastructure” built by the right to exploit certain people, most likely these future “conservatives”, starting in the 1970’s with the “Powell Memo”. It outlined an idea to create influence in the public sphere. The eventual result are “think tanks” that aren’t really think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and eventually Faux News etc.
They also touched on the origins of the Republican anti-government shift. They noted the break with New Deal policy support stopped with the passage of the civil rights acts and most new government policies were then formulated to help everyone and not just primarily white people. So racism is rooted deeply into the former party of Lincoln.
“The danger of the MAGA lens is not that it abandons reason, but that it applies reason in service of a closed moral system, one capable of justifying coercion as protection, exclusion as fairness, and domination as restoration once the conditions are met.”
In her book Women Rowing North (2019) Dr. Mary Pipher writes, “Time and moral imagination are the great healers of the human psyche.” It’s in the chapter called “The Long View” (p. 239 of hardcover edition).
I’ve spent many hours over the past five years contemplating moral imagination—what it is and how to cultivate it. This quote about a closed moral system reinforces my belief that moral imagination is the way out of patriarchal white christian nationals and the most viable path toward healing.
Thanks for the posting.
In a word, MAGA’s are peasants.
To keep the peasant mentality thriving, education vouchers were introduced in states like Indiana and Ohio.
Trump knows he would never lead a military unit into battle. He has visited Arlington enough to see how many officers died in combat from “friendly fire”. The survival rate of authority dependent behavior on steroids in military combat is dismal and very telling.
It’s interesting to me that we spend so much more time identifying the problem than we do examining how we fix it. We’ve known since the beginning of the MAGA movement that it was inherently racist and misogynist. Now we apparently know why. The only thing that we lack is a strategy for dealing with it. It’s not going to disappear, even if we get a blue tsunami in November.
How do we convince the right wing’s base that racism isn’t going to accomplish anything good? How do we dissuade them of the single driving impulse they clearly understand?
BTW @ Laurie … a most compelling post that invites further discussion. My post earned me a pink slip for a shakedown from Shiela. “Authority dependent behavior on steroids” is not an evidence based clinical diagnosis and Arlington does not reveal “friendly fire” as cause of combatant death only to be found by further research from the combat unit’s record. Laurie, your moral imagination observation more compelling to civil solutions.
Yeah Peggy!
The scholarship suggests that children raised by parents who emphasized obedience, rule-following, and deference to authority are more likely to adopt political beliefs that emphasize those same principles. Furthermore, individual temperaments compound the effect. Children with higher levels of fearfulness in early childhood have been found to be more likely to identify as conservative in later years.
Certainly describes my upbringing! Only taken me 70 years to recover.
Its difficult to imagine people not gravitating to this with the amount of corruption. Whats going on in Minnesota? $18 billion in fraud?
https://youtu.be/b-X6bXC1X3g?si=fOmAoT5AdpAK_EDX
And the path out was moral introspection! Fortunately, I was raised by parents who deeply respected true Christian teachings like the real Golden Rule, not the one practiced by the current occupant of the White House. Eventually it led me to examine the effects of various policy choices made by politicians from the perspective of Jesus teaching, “Even as you do unto the least of these, so you do unto me!” Are the policies decent (respectable), or are they cruel? Look at the policies that the Republican Party pushes:
Not raising the minimum wage – cruel
Cutting SNAP – Cruel
Cutting Medicaid – Cruel
Restricting child care – Cruel
Deportations – Cruel
“Teach your children well….” – consider the values that Gens XYZ live and pass on…
Peggy,
Great question!
The challenge is that most MAGAs are identified with the MAGA group, just like people call themselves Christians but have never been to church or have any idea what Jesus preached. Once your ego attaches to an identity outside itself, it isn’t easy to address.
I am guessing the next several generations will outgrow the racism part of MAGA’s mentality. I mean, JD Vance is married to a brown woman from India, and his kids are mixed. Does his wife believe that white people are superior? LOL
Seems the old authoritarian stances are relaxing as we evolve toward more of a world/universal viewpoint. Some of the Maga coalition are circling the wagons and digging in, but they are not the majority of Americans.
Analyzing and diagnosing what the problems are accurately seem to be half the battle. Effective solutions and protective resistance can be maximized when based on the facts and causes of the inappropriate authoritarianism. The no nothing cabinet and department heads of the trump regime are incompetent in carrying out effectively the business of government and only hold their positions out of fealty to trump. True authority is more having a working command over the subject matter and the ability to bring about positive results that are fair and just.
Who is Shiela?
First, realize that MAGA voters are not enough to elect a Trumpian government.
Democrats have to deal with the non-MAGA Trump voters first by addressing their issues so that the government can be repaired.
Second, while it may seem like we spend too much time analyzing the problem, and not enough in finding solutions, to be effective, you really need to understand what you are trying to fix. Otherwise, your solutions may be way off the mark.
As for solutions, we may be ready to work on those now, although some of this research points back to Fromm’s 1941 ‘Escape from Freedom’ – the desire for certainty.
We do know that social norms used to keep the bigotry down. We ignored dog whistled and sane-washed Trump. Both were bad ideas.
We do know that “exposure to the other” helps.
Laurie hit on an important target, “moral imagination”. I don’t remember where I first came across the phrase “lack of moral imagination”, but I found it both compelling — and smug sounding. I think it is real and perhaps at the basis of Rawls Theory of Justice. I would love to see research on how we build moral imagination in our population.
A huge number of people entered the country well after the Civil War, most seeking refuge or opportunity not available in their home countries. Were the conditions that drove them here such that tribal, religious and/or class identity were already firmly embedded in them before they got here? Were they less fearful, felt safer within the social networks that they brought with them? Were they most likely to trust their own group members, regardless of obvious flaws, than those outside the group that they had experienced through generations as not trustworthy ever, but, in fact, murderously untrustworthy?
I have always believed that hate is taught, learned and reinforced around the kitchen table and church social halls. When viewed through the eyes of immigrants who bring their own learned bias, this country had its own racial and class hierarchy well established in recognizable forms when they arrive.
The attacks on education, especially history, is the well established response of those in power to resist integrating the group with members whose origins are not only different but suspect. Vouchers are poisonous and intended to kill off the invasive ideas, reinforce bias, entitlement and superiority.
JDV telling us that we never have to apologize for being white, assumes that all whites are responsible for oppression and suppression by a small powerful group of white men. I never apologize but recognize that my white skin gave and still gives me privilege that I have never earned and likely even saw. It is my aim to identify that inequality. How to insure that equality before the law expands to the culture is a harder task.
RESIST.
Sheila Kennedy’s post explains MAGA and, adds explanation for the puzzling fact that men and women who are Black and, women of all colors remain in the Church that has a long history of discrimination against them.
Watching Sunny Hostin on The View, reading Althea Butler (MS Now) and, the site of Black Catholic Messenger, we find three Black Catholics who find grievous fault in Republicans. Sunny chastises Anna Navarro for espousing the view of Democrats while continuing to self-identify as GOP. Well, how about the members of an organization that spends millions against rights for women and LGBTQ and that spends against the democratic form of US government? Today’s blog post provides insight, the pay-off for the three, is it the “inflated image of the group (Catholics)”?
Quid pro quo deals, for example, a promise of eternal life and a roster of meditation rituals/mantras In return for turning a blind eye to the bishops and the Vatican’s bigotry e.g. Charlie Kirk compared to St. Paul, warrants review?
How does a person live with him/herself knowing women are denied abortion because of their church’s influence when a woman is 13 times more likely to die as a result of pregnancy than abortion?
Great post as usual. However, in the comments there is at least one falsehood of propaganda. The comment by John S has a link to a YouTube video (Youtube is a huge propaganda promoter) which talks about Somalians in Minnesota committing massive fraud. The most massive fraud going on right now is happening in DC as is the racism targeting Somalians, especially Rep Ilhan Omar. I hope that the link and comment by John S is taken down. Thank you.
I have a lot of family and relatives that are hard MAGA college educated and yet none were enlightened, expanded their horizons or could never make a connection to the real world we live in, and my observations of all of them is that can never break the engrained life of being brought up with hate, mistrust, suspicions and deep engrained feelings of superiority’s and someone to look down of no matter their economic strata and many are quite wealthy.
They were made that way from the line they were small children.