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.