MAGA Isn't Broken. This Is What It Was Built to Do.

The most dangerous thing about MAGA is that they mean it.

The Comfort of a Category

People do not cheer for cruelty; they cheer for the security they believe it provides. When a political movement applauds the deportation of refugees or the summary execution of suspects at sea, it is not witnessing a mass abandonment of moral instincts, but rather the successful redirection of them. This is the central story of the MAGA movement: a framework where justice, order, and violence have become indistinguishable. By examining decades of psychological research, it becomes clear that these actions are not individual moral failures. Instead, they are the predictable outputs of a psychological system, anchored by motivated reasoning and identity fusion, that is working exactly as designed.

The first thing that system requires is a way of reasoning that serves conclusions already reached rather than evidence openly examined. Ziva Kunda’s foundational work on motivated reasoning established that people do not evaluate information neutrally, they search their memory for beliefs and rules that support a desired conclusion, stopping when they have constructed something that feels sufficient (Kunda, 1990). The process feels like thinking. It produces something that feels like a verdict. But the destination was chosen before the journey began. Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, and Sulloway extended this insight across 88 samples in 12 countries, finding that conservative ideology in particular is organized around the management of uncertainty and threat, that what appears to be a principled stance on policy is, at the psychological level, a mechanism for reducing fear and restoring a sense of order (Jost et al., 2003). This does not mean conservative voters are uniquely irrational. It means that all political belief has motivational roots, and that the specific contours of right-wing authoritarianism make its followers especially responsive to perceived threats and especially likely to reach for existing hierarchies as a source of stability when those threats appear.

The second thing the system requires is a leader whose narrative can be absorbed as one’s own. Moniz and Swann tracked Trump supporters across three years using panel data and found something that should give everyone pause: the more personally fused a supporter was with Trump before the 2020 election, the more strongly they came to believe the election was stolen in the years that followed, independent of how much they disliked Democrats, and independent of their views on January 6th itself (Moniz & Swann, 2025). Accepting one lie did not exhaust their credulity. It expanded it. Supporters who internalized the stolen election narrative were subsequently more likely to dismiss Trump’s criminal charges as politically motivated and more supportive of his policy agenda across the board. The lie was not just believed. It served as a threshold, once crossed, it primed acceptance of everything that came after. This is why MAGA does not experience the broken promises as contradictions. The party that campaigned on deporting violent criminals and is now holding 73.6% of its ICE detainees without any criminal conviction whatsoever, 50,259 people as of February 2026, is not being caught in a lie by its own base (Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse [TRAC], 2026). Its base has fused its identity to the source of the narrative, which means the narrative functions less like a political claim and more like a personal memory.

These mechanisms, motivated reasoning and identity fusion, do not operate in isolation. They are the psychological infrastructure beneath every case this essay will examine. They explain how a movement can cheer the capture of Maduro and the deportation of his victims in the same breath. They explain how “DEI hire” can be deployed as a neutral observation about meritocracy when the research shows it functions as a denial of qualification on the basis of race. They explain how MAGA can invoke law and order to justify denying people the very due process those laws require, including Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which establishes that even where a death penalty exists, it may only follow a fair trial and may not be arbitrarily applied, while simultaneously applauding a government that has executed at least 87 people in international waters without trial, without charge, and without a single conviction, in a country whose own Constitution has never permitted a drug trafficking execution through its legal system (United Nations Human Rights Committee, 2019; Human Rights Watch, 2025). The examples are not the argument. They are the evidence. And the argument, that MAGA’s justification of cruelty is a psychological system, not a collection of individual moral failures, is one the research has already made.

How the Mind Builds Permission

The ideological flip-flop is the most visible feature of the current political moment, and also, in a certain sense, the least interesting one. MAGA ran on the promise that mass deportations would target violent criminals, gang members, cartel operatives, people who had committed crimes on American soil. The pitch was specific. The practice has been something else entirely. As of February 2026, 73.6 percent of all ICE detainees, 50,259 people out of 68,289, have no criminal conviction of any kind, with many of those who do convicted of nothing more than traffic violations (Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse [TRAC], 2026). The promise was criminality. The practice is indiscriminate. And yet the base, by and large, has absorbed this without visible distress. The question is not whether that is remarkable. It obviously is. The question is why it happens, and the research has a precise answer.

Ziva Kunda demonstrated that human reasoning does not, in the ordinary course of events, work from evidence outward to conclusions. It works from conclusions backward to evidence. People who want to believe something do not neutrally survey the available information, they search their memory for those beliefs and rules that could support the desired conclusion, stopping once they have constructed something plausible enough to feel like a verdict (Kunda, 1990). The objectivity of this process is, as Kunda put it, illusory: people do not realize they are accessing only a subset of their relevant knowledge, and that a different directional goal would have led them to access a completely different subset, and reached the opposite conclusion. This is not stupidity. It is the ordinary operation of a mind that has a stake in a particular outcome. Every mind has stakes. The difference, in the context of MAGA, is that the stakes have been tied to a person rather than a principle, and that person has been exceptionally prolific in his production of things to believe.

Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, and Sulloway, drawing on 88 samples across 12 countries and more than 22,000 individual cases, found that political conservatism as a system is organized primarily around the management of uncertainty and fear (Jost et al., 2003). The two core dimensions of conservative ideology, resistance to change and endorsement of inequality, are not arbitrary. They are psychologically coherent responses to a world perceived as threatening and unstable. When the environment feels dangerous, the research shows that authoritarian, hierarchy-enforcing orientations become more appealing not because people abandon reason, but because those orientations deliver something reason alone cannot: a sense of order, of knowing where things stand, of having the right people in charge and the threatening ones identified and contained. The promise of a wall, a deportation force, a crackdown, these are not merely policy positions. They are anxiety management delivered in the form of governance.

What Moniz and Swann added to this picture is what transforms it from interesting to disturbing. Using a three-wave panel study of Trump supporters tracked from November 2020 to March 2024, they found that the more personally fused a supporter’s identity was with Trump before the 2020 election, the more strongly their belief in the stolen election narrative grew in the years that followed, and this held even after controlling for how much those supporters disliked Democrats (Moniz & Swann, 2025). Fusion came first and primed belief, but belief then deepened fusion in return. Accepting the lie did not exhaust the supporters’ credulity; it expanded it. Those who had internalized the stolen election claim were subsequently more likely to dismiss Trump’s criminal charges as politically motivated and more likely to support his policy agenda without scrutiny. Accepting one piece of the narrative served as a threshold that, once crossed, pre-authorized the next. This is the mechanism that explains how a party can promise to deport violent criminals and then detain people who have never been convicted of anything, and its base will explain that, too, as the right thing to do. When your identity is fused with the source of the narrative, protecting the narrative and protecting the self become the same act. The mind does not experience that as capitulation. It experiences it as loyalty. And loyalty, unlike accuracy, is not constrained by the facts.

The Enemy Must Be Made

Consider the phrase “DEI hire.” It travels through political discourse as if it were an observation, a neutral description of someone who obtained a position through preference rather than merit. It is not an observation. It is a legitimizing myth, which is to say it is a story told about the social order that makes the social order feel natural, just, and deserved. Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto, in their foundational work on social dominance theory, defined legitimizing myths precisely: they are the values, beliefs, stereotypes, and ideologies that provide moral and intellectual justification for the social practices that distribute power within a social system (Sidanius & Pratto, 2001). Crucially, their power has nothing to do with whether they are true. What gives a legitimizing myth its grip is not its accuracy but the degree to which people accept it as right and just. The “DEI hire” label asserts, without any evidentiary basis, that minorities in positions of authority arrived there not through qualification but through preferential treatment, simultaneously demoting their achievement and suggesting that their absence from power is the natural state of things. A meta-analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examining more than 170,000 job applications across six Western countries, found that white applicants receive approximately 50 percent more callbacks than equally qualified non-white applicants (Quillian et al., 2023). The structure that DEI programs were designed to address existed long before DEI programs did. The “DEI hire” label does not describe a reality. It manufactures one, and it does so to make discrimination feel like fairness restored.

The same myth-making apparatus shows up wearing different clothes in every new context MAGA requires it. The executive order declaring that the United States government would recognize only two sexes, grounded in the language of “biological reality,” deploys scientific framing to lend principled cover to what is, in practice, the administrative erasure of transgender people. The framing is important: it is not enough to say transgender identities should not be recognized. The legitimizing myth must present that position as empirical rather than ideological, as the restoration of fact rather than the imposition of preference. This is how hierarchy-enhancing legitimizing myths function, in Sidanius and Pratto’s framework: they take what is fundamentally a power arrangement and dress it in the vocabulary of nature, science, or merit, making it very difficult to challenge without seeming to challenge reality itself (Sidanius & Pratto, 2001). John Duckitt’s research on the dual motivational bases of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation clarifies what is happening beneath the rhetoric: high RWA individuals are reliably hostile toward groups perceived as threatening the existing social order, while those high in SDO are hostile toward groups that challenge the existing hierarchy (Duckitt & Sibley, 2010). Transgender visibility, like minority authority, functions in this psychology as both a threat to social order and a challenge to hierarchy, and so it activates both mechanisms simultaneously.

The Venezuelan refugee case demonstrates the same apparatus at work, and it is worth being specific about what occurred. The U.S. government identified Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization and used that designation to justify mass deportations of Venezuelan nationals, including those who fled Venezuela precisely because of the Maduro regime’s brutality. The U.S. intelligence community assessed, with moderate confidence, that Tren de Aragua was not under the operational control of the Venezuelan government (Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 2025). The people being deported were, in many cases, survivors of the government the gang was allegedly allied with. The legitimizing myth collapsed the distinction between perpetrator and refugee, between the gang and the people fleeing it, and presented the entire Venezuelan population as a security threat requiring removal. Osborne, Milojev, and Sibley’s review in Nature Reviews Psychology documented that right-wing authoritarianism reliably predicts hostility toward groups categorized as dangerous, those perceived to threaten social cohesion, and that this hostility operates through threat perception as a mediating mechanism (Osborne et al., 2023). Once the category “dangerous Venezuelan” is established and accepted, the threat perception activates, the hostility follows, and individual circumstances become irrelevant.

Casey Ryan Kelly’s analysis of ressentiment as the rhetorical framework underlying Trump’s political appeal offers the final and perhaps most clarifying piece of this architecture. Kelly argues that ressentiment, distinct from ordinary resentment, is a condition in which rage and envy are sustained not by specific grievances that can be resolved, but by an ever-expanding list of enemies whose power and cunning can never be fully neutralized (Kelly, 2020). In the rhetoric of ressentiment, Trump must continually invent new tormentors and resurrect old ones, because the felt need for vengeance cannot be permitted to dissipate. The enemy list does not shrink because the system requires enemies. It required them before the caravan, before Tren de Aragua, before the “DEI hire,” and it will require new ones after all of these have served their purpose. The target changes. The apparatus stays constant. The myth is always, at bottom, the same myth: that there is a natural order, that something or someone is disrupting it, and that restoring it requires force directed at the right people.

Necessary Evil and the Suspension of Conscience

In March and April of 2025, the Trump administration flew 252 Venezuelan nationals to El Salvador’s CECOT maximum-security prison, a facility whose director greeted them on arrival by announcing that they had arrived in hell and would spend the rest of their lives there. Human Rights Watch and the regional human rights organization Cristosal spent months documenting what followed: systematic torture, daily beatings, sexual violence, and incommunicado detention that cut the men off entirely from lawyers and family (Human Rights Watch & Cristosal, 2025). Approximately half of those sent had no criminal record at all. Only three percent had been convicted of a violent or potentially violent offense in the United States. At least 62 were in the middle of active asylum proceedings and had already passed their initial credible fear screenings, giving them the legal right to a full immigration hearing before a judge. The administration labeled them Tren de Aragua terrorists regardless. MAGA celebrated the flights. The psychology of authoritarian aggression tells us exactly why this was always the predictable outcome.

Bob Altemeyer’s decades of research on right-wing authoritarianism identified two factors that consistently underlie what he called authoritarian aggression: fear and self-righteousness (Altemeyer, 1998). High RWA individuals perceive the world as genuinely dangerous, a place teetering on the edge of collapse from evil and violence, and this fear activates a readiness to harm that is then disinhibited by a profound sense of moral superiority. They believe themselves to be more upstanding, more righteous than those they are punishing. This combination, Altemeyer observed, produces what functions psychologically as sanctioned cruelty, people acting out fear-induced hostilities in the sincere belief they are doing God’s work on behalf of order and decency. When asked to play judge and sentence convicted criminals, high RWA individuals reliably deliver the harshest available punishments. They are, in Altemeyer’s language, readily willing to help the government persecute almost any group an authority designates as a threat (Altemeyer, 1998). The crucial word is “designates.” The designation does not need to be accurate. It needs only to be authoritative.

Stanley Feldman and Karen Stenner’s research on how threat interacts with authoritarian predispositions clarifies what happens when that designation arrives wrapped in political fear (Feldman & Stenner, 1997). Their key finding was not that threat causes authoritarianism but that it dramatically amplifies it among those who already carry authoritarian predispositions. Among people high in authoritarianism, perceived societal threat, particularly threat to the political and social order, as opposed to purely personal threat, produces significant increases in punitiveness, intolerance, and willingness to endorse aggressive state action. The administration understood this mechanism intuitively, even if not by name. Every press conference describing Venezuelan migrants as animals, every invocation of sliced and diced young women, every deployment of the phrase “invasion” to describe people showing up at a border crossing to request asylum, was a political threat activation. The audience it was designed to reach was not neutral. It already believed the world was dangerous. It simply needed authorities to confirm who, this time, was the danger.

Osborne, Milojev, and Sibley’s review of the authoritarian prejudice literature establishes the mechanism precisely: right-wing authoritarianism specifically predicts hostility toward groups categorized as dangerous, those perceived as threatening social cohesion and stability, and this effect is mediated by threat perception (Osborne et al., 2023). Faragó, Kende, and Krekó’s research on the justification of intergroup violence found that right-wing authoritarianism predicts willingness to endorse violence against designated threatening outgroups, beyond what general prejudice can account for (Faragó et al., 2019). The psychological chain is direct and documented: authority designates a group as threatening, threat perception is activated, RWA-based hostility follows, and the result is experienced not as cruelty but as protective action against genuine menace. The moral conviction is real. The factual basis for it is not.

Miku Matsunaga’s cross-national analysis of eighteen European democracies, drawing on European Values Survey data from more than 15,000 respondents, found that right-wing populists are significantly more likely than any other partisan group, including centre-right voters and non-voters, to endorse the justification of political violence in pursuit of political goals (Matsunaga, 2024). Centre-right voters and non-voters showed negative and statistically significant effects, meaning they were less likely than the baseline to justify political violence. Right-wing populists showed the largest positive effect in the study. It is a finding about voters, ordinary people who cast ballots for right-wing populist parties, and their comfort with the idea that violence can be a legitimate tool of political action. The administration’s characterization of peaceful protests against ICE operations as rebellion, and its deployment of National Guard units to those locations by June 2025, was not incidental to this psychology. It was continuous with it.

Casey Ryan Kelly’s analysis of ressentiment as the organizing emotional framework of Trump’s political rhetoric offers the final piece of the architecture (Kelly, 2020). In the logic of ressentiment, punishment is not a response to a specific offense. It is an ongoing condition, a framework that requires enemies and requires that those enemies be seen to suffer. Kelly observed that Trump’s revenge appeals work precisely by acclimating audiences to violence and relieving them of guilt associated with enjoying or participating in cruelty. Revenge, in this framework, does not need to accomplish anything. It does not need to solve a problem or reduce a threat. It is its own reward, which is why the administration’s legal justifications for the CECOT deportations could be demonstrably false and the base’s enthusiasm could remain entirely undimmed. The men on those planes were already designated. The punishment was already desired. The legal scaffolding was built afterward, to make it look like something else.

This matters for a specific reason: MAGA frequently invokes the law. When Trump and his allies celebrated the idea of drug smugglers dying without trial, they did so in the language of justice. When they sent 252 people to a torture prison, they called them terrorists. The law, however, says something precise. Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights establishes the right to life as a non-derogable right, meaning no emergency, no national security crisis, and no prior criminal record suspends the obligation to protect it (United Nations Human Rights Committee, 2019). No state of exception removes the requirement of due process before a person is deprived of either liberty or life. The United Nations Human Rights Council’s 2009 report on extrajudicial executions stated the principle directly: a state’s obligation to protect its citizens from criminal violence exists alongside, not as a replacement for, its obligation to protect the right to life of criminal suspects (United Nations Human Rights Council, 2009). The men sent to CECOT had not been convicted of terrorism. Most had not been convicted of anything. The law they were subjected to was not law. It was the psychology described in this section, wearing law’s clothes.

America First, Until It Wasn’t: Iran, the Designated Enemy, and the Logic That Turned on Itself

On the morning of February 28, 2026, a joint U.S.-Israeli strike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, in Iran’s southern Hormozgan province. The school was full. Iranian state media and multiple international outlets reported the death toll at over 100 children, with dozens more injured and rescue workers still pulling bodies from the rubble as of this writing (Al Jazeera, 2026; France 24, 2026; ABC News, 2026). The strike is not in dispute. A CENTCOM spokesman said the U.S. military would look into the reports. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was reported killed in a separate Israeli strike on his compound, a claim announced by Trump on Truth Social and confirmed by multiple Israeli officials, while Iranian state media maintained he had been moved to a secure location (Axios, 2026; CBS News, 2026). Iran launched retaliatory missile strikes at U.S. military bases across the Middle East. Eighty-nine Israelis are reported dead. MAGA is calling it a win.

The movement that ran on America First, on ending the forever wars that sent American soldiers home in flag-draped coffins, on protecting American communities from the drugs and violence of foreign criminals, on putting American lives above the geopolitical ambitions of globalist institutions, is celebrating a military operation that has placed U.S. bases under active missile fire with no exit strategy, no successor government waiting in the wings, and no plan for what comes next. The same emotional logic that cheered drug smugglers dying without trial because it would save American lives has now produced a situation in which American service members are being targeted in retaliatory strikes across the Middle East. The internal contradiction does not register, and Feldman and Stenner’s research tells us precisely why: authoritarianism is activated and amplified by threats to the political and social order, not by threats to personal well-being (Feldman & Stenner, 1997). Once Iran was designated the threat to order, the theocratic enemy, the nuclear menace, the sponsor of proxies, the psychological machinery took over. What happens to American lives in the aftermath is simply not part of the calculation. The designation came first. The consequences to the ingroup come later, if at all.

The celebration rests on a strategic claim, that removing Khamenei and destabilizing the Islamic Republic’s leadership structure will produce something better. That claim has no supporting evidence and considerable evidence against it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January 2026 that the future leadership of Iran is an open question and that no one knows what would take over (Council on Foreign Relations, 2026). That was before the strikes. The most immediately organized force in any post-Khamenei Iran is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, which analysts across the political spectrum have described as a state within a state, controlling major sectors of the Iranian economy, commanding its own ground forces, navy, air force, missile program, and intelligence apparatus, and operating entirely outside the authority of the president or parliament (Council on Foreign Relations, 2026; New Republic, 2025; Stimson Center, 2026). If the IRGC remains cohesive, and as of this writing there is no confirmed evidence of internal fracture, the most likely outcome of regime collapse is not democratic transition. It is a military government that retains the architecture of repression while stripping away its theological justification: a harder, more nakedly authoritarian system than the one the bombs were meant to destroy (Foreign Affairs, 2026; Hudson Institute, 2026). The Stimson Center’s analysis, published days before the strikes, concluded that Iran’s structural trajectory pointed toward the rise of a strongman, and that one could already hear the distant echo of heavy footsteps (Stimson Center, 2026). The United States has watched this specific film twice, in countries directly on Iran’s borders. The result in Iraq was a sectarian civil war and the conditions that produced ISIS. The result in Afghanistan was twenty years of occupation followed by the Taliban’s return to power within days of American withdrawal. Foreign Affairs noted the obvious inference that Iranians themselves have drawn: they have no desire for U.S.-led regime change because they have seen it fail along their own borders (Foreign Affairs, 2026).

The exiled opposition waiting to fill the vacuum is divided, organizationally hollow inside the country, and in several cases toxic to the populations it claims to represent. Reza Pahlavi, son of the deposed Shah, has symbolic name recognition and has spent nearly five decades in exile with no documented organizational infrastructure on the ground in Iran (Foreign Affairs, 2026). The National Council of Resistance of Iran, which presents itself as a ready governing alternative, is closely associated with the Mujahedin-e Khalq, the MEK, a group that fought alongside Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War and is regarded by large segments of the Iranian population with active contempt for precisely that reason (Fox News, 2026; Foreign Affairs, 2026). The reformist bloc, which represented the most plausible internal path to political liberalization, had already been systematically dismantled in the weeks before the strikes: prominent reformists arrested, leaders of the 2009 Green Movement still in detention after seventeen years, civil society organizations operating under the highest rate of state executions in nearly four decades, at least 1,500 in 2025 alone (House of Commons Library, 2026). The RAND Corporation identified the key variable as whether schisms develop inside the IRGC and security apparatus, because in a country where political outcomes follow whoever commands organized violence, everything else is commentary (RAND, 2026). No such schism has materialized.

There is also a principle at stake that the celebration makes invisible, and it deserves to be named plainly. The United States helped found the United Nations. It helped draft the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and the international legal architecture built after World War II specifically to establish that states do not resolve political disputes by bombing other countries and then expecting the targets to respond with diplomacy. The strikes on Iran were launched without a UN Security Council resolution and without a congressional declaration of war. If Iran had bombed a school in Texas because it found American foreign policy objectionable, the administration would call it an act of war demanding total response and would be correct to do so. The asymmetry, we may bomb you, but your retaliation is aggression, is not a legal argument. It is the legitimizing myth of American exceptionalism doing exactly what Sidanius and Pratto described: providing moral and intellectual justification for a distribution of force that the powerful find acceptable and the powerless are expected to absorb (Sidanius & Pratto, 2001). The nation is exceptional not because of its compassion, Kelly observed, but because of its extraordinary capacity to inflict pain on its enemies, tougher, rougher, above the burdensome rules that govern fair treatment (Kelly, 2020). A children’s school in Minab is what that logic produces when it gets access to an air force.

What MAGA cannot process, and what the psychology described throughout this essay predicts it will not process, is that the celebration of this strike is a celebration of consequences they have not yet fully received. The missiles hitting U.S. bases are a direct product of the operation being cheered. The power vacuum now opening in Tehran will be filled by whoever is most willing to use violence, and history suggests that person will not be a liberal democrat. The self-righteousness that Altemeyer identified as the disinhibiting force in authoritarian aggression does not pause to count the dead in the rubble (Altemeyer, 1998). It simply moves to the next target, sustaining what Kelly called the renewable reserve of anger and bitterness that warrants cruelty against an ever-growing list of national enemies (Kelly, 2020). The emotional accounting settled the moment the bombs fell. The strategic accounting, and the American lives that will be lost in it, has not yet begun.

On April 5, 2026, Trump told reporters at a White House press conference that Iran could be "taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night" (Times of Israel, 2026). On April 6, at a formal press conference, he announced: "We have a plan, because of the power of our military, where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o'clock tomorrow night, where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding, and never to be used again. I mean complete demolition" (NPR, 2026). On April 7, on Truth Social, he wrote: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again" (Amnesty International, 2026; Harvard Carr Center, 2026). The Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights called April 7 a date that will live in infamy. Amnesty International's secretary general described the statement as brazenly shredding core rules of international humanitarian law, with potentially catastrophic consequences for ninety million people. MAGA's response was to debate what "civilization" means in a sociological register. Posts appeared on forums arguing that civilizations are geopolitical entities, not populations, and that Trump was referring to the Islamic Republic as a governing structure rather than to the ninety million Iranians it governs. The intellectual effort was considerable. If Vladimir Putin had posted those identical words about Ukraine, "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” and followed them with detailed promises to destroy every power plant and bridge in four hours, MAGA would not have opened a sociology textbook. There would have been no definitional debate about what a civilization is. There would have been demands for military response to a genocidal threat. The difference is not in the words. The words are identical. The difference is who said them, and to whom they were directed. Altemeyer's research on authoritarian aggression identified exactly this mechanism: the hostility is not principled, it is activated by authority designation and directed at the authorized target, and it is experienced by those who hold it as righteous rather than selective (Altemeyer, 1998). The target determines whether the language registers as violence. This is the operating definition of tribal ethics.

The Consistent Inconsistency: What Appears to Be Hypocrisy Is Actually the System Working

The list of apparent contradictions is long enough to fill a pamphlet. The movement that ran on ending forever wars now celebrates the bombing of a girls’ school in Iran. The movement that promised to deport only violent criminals has detained 73.6 percent of ICE arrestees with no criminal conviction whatsoever (TRAC, 2026). The movement that cheered the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the dictator whose socialist government drove millions of Venezuelans from their country, turned around and cheered the deportation of those same Venezuelans to a Salvadoran torture prison. If you were measuring the movement against its stated promises, you would conclude that it had failed on virtually every one of them. But that framing misunderstands what the movement is actually measuring itself against.

Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, and Sulloway’s landmark meta-analysis of 88 studies and nearly 23,000 participants across twelve countries established that people are motivated to perceive existing social arrangements as fair, legitimate, justifiable, and perhaps even natural and inevitable (Jost et al., 2003). System justification, they argued, operates as a kind of cognitive maintenance function: it is not that people evaluate a policy on its merits and then decide whether to support it. It is that people experience a motivated pull toward believing that whatever is currently happening is correct, and then construct the reasoning that confirms it afterward. The prior promise functions as a benchmark only if the person is actually using promises as an evaluative standard. System justifiers are not. They are using the current arrangement as the standard, and the current arrangement is always, by definition, legitimate. What this means in practice is that the supporter who cheered “only criminals will be deported” in 2024 and who cheers the detention of asylum seekers in 2026 has not changed their values. Their values were never about criminality. Criminality was a legitimizing frame available at that moment. When it became operationally inconvenient, the frame was quietly retired and a new one, national security, invasion, infestation, took its place. The system justified each frame in sequence, and the person experienced no discontinuity because no discontinuity was perceived.

Federico and Golec de Zavala’s analysis of the 2016 presidential election identifies a psychological dynamic that explains something system justification theory alone cannot: why the inconsistency not only fails to cost Trump support, but why demonstrations of power actively generate it. Collective narcissism, defined as an inflated and unrealistic view of the national ingroup’s greatness contingent on external recognition, was a powerful predictor of votes for Trump and positive evaluations of Trump in 2016, even after controlling for other known predictors including authoritarianism, racial resentment, and economic dissatisfaction (Federico & Golec de Zavala, 2018). The Trump campaign emphasized an alleged loss of national greatness and called for its restoration, and since collective narcissism provides a unique motivation to support leaders who promise to restore national greatness, it predicted electoral support for Trump beyond what any other variable measured (Federico & Golec de Zavala, 2018). The critical word is “restore.” The collective narcissist is not evaluating policy outcomes. They are monitoring for evidence that the ingroup is being recognized, feared, and respected by outsiders. Every act of dominance, deportations, tariffs, bombing campaigns, contempt for international institutions, reads as confirmation that the nation is reasserting its proper place. Every act of restraint or diplomatic caution reads as humiliation, as evidence that the ingroup’s greatness is once again being insufficiently acknowledged.

This is why the bombing of Iran produces celebrations rather than strategic scrutiny. Golec de Zavala and colleagues’ research on collective narcissism and the weakening of American democracy found that collective narcissism is robustly associated with support for undemocratic leadership defined by strength and centralization of power, and that democratic systems involving incremental change through diverse group decisions are likely to be seen as ineffective by those who perceive their ingroup’s privilege as under threat (Golec de Zavala et al., 2021). A strong leader capable of doing what is needed to restore the nation’s proper place and external recognition is preferred, regardless of whether the method is legal, proportionate, or strategically coherent. The Iran strikes were not evaluated as a foreign policy decision by the movement’s base. They were evaluated as a display of dominance, and on that metric they scored perfectly. Children died, an adversary’s leadership was reportedly decapitated, and the United States demonstrated that it would act without asking anyone’s permission. To the collective narcissist, that is national greatness made visible. That it put American service members under missile fire is an inconvenience; that it violated international legal norms is irrelevant; that it produced no succession plan is simply not the question being asked.

MacWilliams’s research on authoritarian voters in the 2016 Republican primary found that authoritarians are rigid thinkers who perceive the world in black-and-white terms, obey authority, seek order, follow authoritarian leaders, and, once they have identified friend from foe, hold tight to their decision (MacWilliams, 2016). The implication for understanding apparent hypocrisy is direct: the authoritarian supporter is not tracking policy positions. They are tracking the friend-foe distinction and the authority signal. When Trump designated Mexican immigrants as the threat, the authoritarian base followed. When he designated Venezuelan refugees as the threat, the same base followed. When he designated Iran as the threat, the same base followed again. The content of the designation matters far less than the clarity of the designation and the authority of the designator. Moniz and Swann’s research on identity fusion and the 2020 election showed that accepting one narrative piece from a trusted authority made accepting the next easier, as each absorbed falsehood or reversal lowered the threshold for absorbing the following one (Moniz & Swann, 2025). The supporter who accepted that peaceful protesters in 2020 were domestic terrorists was already primed to accept that asylum seekers in 2025 were cartel soldiers. The supporter who accepted cartel soldiers in CECOT were getting what they deserved was already primed to accept that Iranian children near an IRGC base were acceptable losses.

What looks from the outside like hypocrisy is, from the inside, perfectly coherent. The operating system was never about criminals, or wars, or Maduro’s victims. It was always about hierarchy, who is above, who is below, who gets to punish, and who is required to absorb punishment quietly. Sidanius and Pratto’s social dominance framework describes legitimizing myths as the value systems and ideological beliefs that provide moral and intellectual justification for social practices that distribute social value within a society (Sidanius & Pratto, 2001). The myths rotate. The hierarchy does not. Deporting criminals maintained the hierarchy by removing a designated threat from below. Detaining asylum seekers maintains the same hierarchy by demonstrating that the state can reach anyone it chooses to classify as threatening. Bombing Iran maintains the same hierarchy by projecting power outward against a designated adversary. The specific target and the specific rationale are interchangeable. The underlying social logic, that certain people are owed punishment and the powerful are owed deference, remains fixed throughout. This isn’t hypocrisy failing to conceal itself. It’s the system working exactly as designed.

The Architecture Holds

The machine does not require new inputs. Every case examined in the preceding sections was a demonstration of the same psychological architecture operating on a designated target: Venezuelan refugees, transgender employees, Iranian schoolchildren, the concept of earned achievement in a workplace that promoted a Black colleague. The target rotates. The machinery does not. What the months since this essay was first written have produced is not a new argument but a new and more consequential target: the mechanism through which the base itself could push back on any of it. The vote.

On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, a 6-3 decision written by Justice Samuel Alito in which the conservative supermajority effectively converted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 from an effects-based protection into an intent-based one (Alito, J., Louisiana v. Callais, 2026). The practical meaning of that conversion is this: a state may now systematically dilute minority voting power without legal consequence, provided it can point to any race-neutral justification, partisan gerrymandering, incumbency protection, district continuity, for having done so. Justice Elena Kagan read her dissent from the bench, a rare act signaling the vehemence of her opposition, and stated the consequence plainly: under the Court’s new standard, a state can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power (Kagan, J., dissenting, Louisiana v. Callais, 2026). The decision did not come without context. In 2013, Shelby County v. Holder gutted Section 5 of the same statute, the preclearance mechanism that required states with histories of voter suppression to obtain federal approval before changing voting rules. Congress had reauthorized that provision after extensive study. The Court struck it anyway. Callais completes what Shelby County began: the two-part dismantlement of the primary federal statute protecting minority voting rights, executed over thirteen years, with MAGA celebrating each ruling as a restoration of equal protection (Nord et al., 2026).

The V-Dem Democracy Report 2026 identified free and fair elections as the last functioning institutional check remaining in the United States after courts were defied, inspectors general were fired, the career civil service was hollowed out, and research inconvenient to the administration was deleted from federal servers (Nord et al., 2026). The Callais ruling arrived as that check was already under coordinated pressure from multiple directions simultaneously. The SAVE Act, passed by the House in February 2026, would require documentary proof of citizenship — a passport or certified birth certificate — before completing voter registration, effectively eliminating online and mail registration methods used by most Americans. The Brennan Center for Justice and the University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement found that over 21 million Americans lack ready access to those documents (vote.org, 2026; Brennan Center for Justice, 2026). The demographic profile of those 21 million is not random. Nearly half of Black Americans under 30 lack identification with their current name and address. Many older Black Americans, born before the civil rights era, were never issued birth certificates at all (vote.org, 2026). The law is addressing a problem that does not exist in order to remove voters who do. Utah, in a Republican-led audit of over 2 million voter registrations, found one confirmed noncitizen registration and zero instances of noncitizen voting (Democracy Docket, 2026; Salt Lake Tribune, 2026). One. The SAVE Act’s architects were asked about this finding and proceeded anyway. Senator Mike Lee publicly connected the bill’s passage to Republican prospects in the 2026 midterms. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said its failure would become a campaign issue in the fall (Votebeat, 2026). They stated the purpose themselves.

Ohio and Texas simultaneously conducted voter roll purges in violation of the National Voter Registration Act’s 90-day prohibition on systematic removals before an election, using the federal SAVE database to flag potential noncitizens — a database described by Utah’s own Republican lieutenant governor as notoriously inaccurate, one that flagged her personally as a noncitizen because she was born overseas while her father served in the Air Force (Utah Policy, 2026). Independent investigation found the SAVE-based lists were wrong at least 81 percent of the time (Campaign Legal Center, 2026). The Campaign Legal Center sued Ohio in February 2026 and Texas in March 2026 over purge programs reliant on data producing errors at that rate. The purges continued. The Republican National Committee, meanwhile, deployed staff, poll watchers, and election observers to at least 17 states tied to competitive House and Senate races, with Trump describing the operation on Truth Social as bigger and stronger than the one deployed in 2024 (Rivas, 2026).

Jost and colleagues’ meta-analysis established that people are motivated to perceive existing social arrangements as fair, legitimate, justifiable, and perhaps even natural and inevitable, and that this motivation operates regardless of whether the arrangement is actually fair, and regardless of who is disadvantaged by it (Jost et al., 2003). The base that cheered the SAVE Act does not experience it as voter suppression. It experiences it as the restoration of integrity to a system it was told was already compromised by fraud that, in Utah’s comprehensive audit of two million voters, produced a single instance of ineligible registration by someone who never voted. The legitimizing myth, noncitizen voting is a crisis requiring immediate remedy, does not require factual support. It requires only sufficient repetition by a sufficiently authoritative source, and the motivated reasoning machinery does the rest, selecting the confirming evidence and discarding Utah’s results as insufficient (Kunda, 1990). The collective narcissism research of Federico and Golec de Zavala adds the final element: the base reads every act of institutional consolidation as evidence that the ingroup is reasserting its proper standing (Federico & Golec de Zavala, 2018). Callais is not experienced as the Court stripping minority communities of their voting rights. It is experienced as the Court restoring electoral processes to their proper, natural, color-blind state — which is precisely the language Alito deployed in the majority opinion, and precisely the language Trump used on Truth Social the day the ruling was handed down.

What the V-Dem report identified as the last check is now the target. The Voting Rights Act’s structural protections have been dismantled in two judicial moves over thirteen years. The infrastructure of voter purges operates on databases its own Republican administrators describe as inaccurate. The proof-of-citizenship requirement is engineered to fall hardest on demographic groups with documented difficulty accessing the required documents. An election observation army is deployed to the states where the House majority will be decided. Each of these mechanisms, examined individually, is defended by its architects as election security. Examined together, they describe a coordinated effort to determine the outcome of the next election before the votes are cast. The psychological architecture described throughout this essay, motivated reasoning that arrives at the desired conclusion regardless of the evidence, system justification that retroactively legitimates whatever arrangement currently serves the ingroup, legitimizing myths that provide principled vocabulary for outcomes that are neither principled nor accidental — does not require the base to understand what it is endorsing. It requires only its sincere investment in the frame it has been given. The frame is integrity. The target is the vote.

The pattern holds beyond the ballot. Since September 2, 2025, the United States military has conducted at least 23 lethal strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea and nearby Pacific waters under Operation Southern Spear, killing at least 87 people the Trump administration identified as narco-terrorists, without trial, without charges, without any legal process, and without the survivors of several strikes being permitted to speak to lawyers before being repatriated (Human Rights Watch, 2025; Wikipedia, Operation Southern Spear). The United States has never executed a single drug trafficker through its legal system. It has never done so because the Fifth Amendment prohibits the deprivation of life without due process of law, and no federal court would sustain such a sentence. The Constitution that MAGA invokes in every conversation about the prosecution of January 6 defendants is the same Constitution that makes state-sponsored drug trafficking executions categorically illegal on American soil. The difference is geography and designation. Move the target to international waters, apply the terrorism label, and the due process objection dissolves, not because the legal argument changed, but because the psychology did. Former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth stated publicly that Trump had admitted to ordering summary executions, describing what occurred as the crime of murder (Common Dreams, 2025). A University of Chicago law professor emeritus reached the same conclusion in formal legal analysis (Verdict, Justia, 2025). MAGA celebrated the strikes as the law-and-order presidency delivering on its promise. The $12 billion in military assistance extended to Israel during a campaign that three United Nations investigators formally described as meeting the legal definition of genocide, in which more than 50,000 people have been killed, the majority of them civilians, generates the same response: not violence, policy. These numbers do not appear in any dataset measuring political violence because they are not committed by individuals with a political grievance. They are committed by governments with a budget. The psychological architecture described throughout this essay predicts this outcome precisely. Sidanius and Pratto's social dominance framework establishes that group-based hierarchy is enforced not only through overt hostility but through the legitimizing myths that make enforcement feel like justice and restraint feel like weakness (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). When the authority designates a target, the SDO-driven mind does not ask whether the target deserved due process. It asks whether the target was above or below. Drug traffickers, Iranians, and Gazans are below. The question of whether the violence was proportionate, legal, or morally defensible does not follow because the hierarchy resolved it before the question could form.

Not Knowing They’re Doing It: The Clean Conscience of the Executioner.

The most tenacious defense in any conversation about race, hierarchy, and who gets targeted by state power is that the person offering the defense is not a racist. They believe in the law. They believe in merit. They believe in biological reality. They are defending fairness, not enforcing hierarchy. And in a significant number of cases, the person saying this is telling the truth about their own inner experience. The belief is sincere. That sincerity, however, is not exculpatory. It is the mechanism. Understanding how a person can genuinely hold prejudiced positions without experiencing themselves as prejudiced is not a courtesy extended to those positions. It is necessary for understanding how they persist, spread, and produce the political outcomes they produce.

Duckitt and Sibley’s dual process motivational model establishes that right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation predict prejudice through distinct psychological pathways, and that those pathways do not require conscious animus to operate (Duckitt & Sibley, 2010). The high RWA individual is not, in their own experience, motivated by hatred. They are motivated by the desire for collective security, stability, and social order, and the perception of the outgroup as socially threatening or deviant is what activates their hostility. The effects of RWA on outgroup dislike are specifically mediated by threat perception, not by explicit prejudice as such (Osborne et al., 2023). This is a distinction with enormous practical consequences. A person operating through RWA-based threat activation will experience their hostility toward a given group as a rational and proportionate response to genuine danger. They will describe it in the language of public safety, cultural preservation, or social cohesion. They will be, in their own accounting, defending something rather than attacking anyone. The hostility is real; the conscious malice is absent; the outcome for the targeted group is identical.

The SDO-driven path is somewhat different in character, though no less invisible to those who travel it. Social dominance orientation stems from the belief that the world is a competitive environment in which the strong prevail and the weak appropriately lose (Duckitt & Sibley, 2010). The high SDO individual experiences their support for hierarchy-maintaining policies not as prejudice but as realism, as a clear-eyed recognition of how the world actually works and who deserves what within it. They are not hostile to subordinate groups out of fear; they are indifferent to them out of competitive logic. The SDO effect on outgroup prejudice is mediated by perceived intergroup competition, not threat (Osborne et al., 2023). This produces a kind of contempt that its bearer does not recognize as moral in character at all. Dismissing DEI as the undeserved advancement of the less qualified, or opposing reparations on the grounds that present generations bear no responsibility for past arrangements, both feel like principled positions about fairness to those who hold them. Sidanius and Pratto describe exactly this dynamic: the Protestant work ethic, individual responsibility, and meritocracy function as hierarchy-enhancing legitimizing myths, beliefs that provide moral and intellectual justification for practices that distribute social value in ways that reproduce existing hierarchies, and they do so regardless of whether anyone involved understands them as performing that function (Sidanius & Pratto, 2001). The person arguing against affirmative action on equity grounds is not necessarily lying. They are, in Sidanius and Pratto’s framing, expressing a principle that is also an HE-LM, whether or not they know it.

The same mechanism applies with remarkable precision to the administration’s executive order on transgender identity, which declared that the federal government would recognize only two biological sexes. The framing deployed “biological reality” and women’s safety, the language of science and protection, to do work that Duckitt’s model identifies as characteristic of both RWA and SDO simultaneously. As established in earlier sections of this essay, high RWA individuals are hostile to groups perceived as deviant and threatening to social cohesion and tradition; high SDO individuals are hostile to groups perceived as challenging established hierarchy (Duckitt & Sibley, 2010). Transgender visibility activates both pathways because it challenges both a traditional norm and a long-standing hierarchy of social categories. The person who signs onto “biological reality” is not, in their own phenomenology, doing any of this. They are protecting women. They are defending science. They are restoring common sense. The legitimizing myth accomplishes its function precisely by providing a vocabulary that feels principled rather than hierarchical, one that its users can sincerely believe in, and that would lose its political utility the moment they stopped believing it. A nakedly stated preference for hierarchy commands no one. A legitimizing myth dressed in the language of nature, merit, or safety commands millions.

Jost and colleagues’ meta-analysis adds a dimension to this picture that makes it more disturbing rather than less. System justification theory establishes that people are motivated to perceive existing social arrangements as fair, legitimate, justifiable, and perhaps even natural and inevitable, and that this motivation operates across class and status lines (Jost et al., 2003). The strongest version of the hypothesis, documented empirically, is that under certain conditions members of disadvantaged groups will be even more motivated than members of advantaged groups to defend the arrangements that harm them, as the dissonance of believing oneself to be part of an unjust system is sufficiently uncomfortable that redoubling loyalty to that system is psychologically preferable to confronting the injustice (Jost et al., 2003). This is not false consciousness in the condescending Marxist sense of a duped proletariat incapable of perceiving their own interests. It is a motivated cognitive process in which the subjective sense that the system is fair and natural is itself produced by the need to believe it. The Black voter who opposes affirmative action on the grounds that people should succeed through merit alone, the working-class white man who supports the deportation of workers whose labor competes with his own while supporting the trade policies that eliminated his job, the woman who endorses the executive order that reduces her own legal protections in the name of protecting women, none of these are paradoxes. They are system justification working as designed, drawing on the same motivational grammar as the people at the top of the hierarchy it serves.

What this means, finally, is that the charge of racism tends to produce the least useful possible response precisely because it is the wrong frame for this psychology. The person who opposes DEI because they sincerely believe in merit is not lying. The person who supports mass deportations because they sincerely believe in the rule of law is not lying. The person who supports the Iran bombing because they sincerely believe in American security is not lying. They are operating within legitimizing myths that feel like values and within threat perceptions that feel like analysis, and those myths and perceptions were not invented by them but handed to them by a political environment that requires their sincere adoption to function. The point is not that these people are secretly aware of what they are doing. The point is that the system does not require their awareness. It requires only their sincerity.

Conclusion: This Has a Name

Consider what the research assembled in this essay actually describes when you hold all of it together in the same frame. A Venezuelan refugee who fled Nicolás Maduro’s socialist government is deported without due process to a Salvadoran torture prison, while the movement that captured Maduro cheers both events as victories. A trans federal employee is erased from government records under an executive order that frames the erasure as the protection of biological reality and women’s safety. A drug smuggler dies in a desert crossing without trial, and the crowd cheers what it understands to be a just outcome. A person of color promoted to a senior position is dismissed by colleagues as a DEI hire, their competence not evaluated but preemptively discarded by a myth that assigns unearned advantage to explain their presence. These are not four separate policy failures with four separate explanations. They are four outputs of the same machine, and the research has told us precisely how that machine works.

The machine begins with motivated reasoning: people reason toward conclusions they are already committed to, searching their memory for evidence that confirms rather than evaluates, constructing justifications backward from desired outcomes (Kunda, 1990). It is powered by the management of uncertainty and threat, which is the psychological engine Jost and colleagues documented across 88 studies in twelve countries, the engine that makes people reach for frameworks that promise order, clarity, and the reassurance that the hierarchy they inhabit is natural and legitimate (Jost et al., 2003). It is focused by right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation working through their distinct but convergent pathways: RWA directing hostility at groups coded as threatening to social cohesion and order, SDO directing contempt at groups coded as low-status and appropriately subordinate (Duckitt & Sibley, 2010). Its targets are manufactured by legitimizing myths, the doctrine of merit, the language of biological reality, the vocabulary of criminality and invasion, which provide moral and intellectual justification for practices that distribute punishment downward through the hierarchy without requiring their users to experience themselves as punishing anyone (Sidanius & Pratto, 2001). It is amplified under threat, so that every invocation of invasion, infestation, or existential danger activates the authoritarian predispositions that would otherwise remain latent, dramatically increasing punitiveness and intolerance among those already disposed toward them (Feldman & Stenner, 1997). It is bonded together by collective narcissism, which fuses personal identity with the ingroup’s image and with the leader who promises to restore the recognition that image deserves, making consistency irrelevant and dominance the only metric that matters (Federico & Golec de Zavala, 2018). And it is sustained by ressentiment, the emotional-moral framework in which victimhood and revenge are civic virtues, cruelty is constitutive rather than instrumental, and the thirst for vengeance never dissipates because it was never meant to (Kelly, 2020). The machine does not malfunction when it produces these outcomes. It produces them by design.

This is why calling it hypocrisy is too polite. Hypocrisy implies a standard the person is failing to meet. The research shows that the standard was never operative. The promise to deport only criminals was a legitimizing myth available at that moment; when it became operationally inconvenient, the system justification machinery replaced it seamlessly with a new one (Jost et al., 2003). Calling it a failure of education or information is too generous in a different direction. The people who support what is described in this essay are not, in the main, uninformed. They have processed the information through a motivated reasoning architecture that arrives at the same destination regardless of what information enters it, because the destination was determined by psychological need before the information arrived (Kunda, 1990). The Venezuelan man in CECOT, the trans employee with an erased personnel file, the child in Minab, none of them were failed by inadequate data. They were failed by a system that designated them, and by the psychological architecture that made the designation feel like justice to the people who endorsed it.

What the research names this, assembled together and honestly labeled, is authoritarian hierarchy maintenance: a persistent, cross-situational pattern in which group-based social hierarchy is established, enforced, and defended through the coordinated activities of both those at its top and those who identify with its values, using legitimizing myths to make the enforcement feel like fairness, using ressentiment to make the cruelty feel like righteousness, and using identity fusion with a dominant leader to make every contradiction feel like consistency (Sidanius & Pratto, 2001; Kelly, 2020; Moniz & Swann, 2025). The research does not diagnose individual voters as pathological. It describes a system that is working as it has always worked, that has worked this way in societies across history, and that requires no special evil from any of its participants, only their sincere investment in the beliefs it provides them, and their willingness to let authority designate who the enemy is this time. That sincerity is, as Section 6 established, the mechanism rather than its rebuttal.

There is a simpler way to say what the research has named at length. MAGA's position is not that violence is wrong. Its position is that violence is wrong when the wrong people commit it. When their government commits it, to drug traffickers in international waters, to Iranian civilians, to the population of Gaza, it is not violence anymore. It is policy. The word "policy" is doing the same work the word "integrity" does when applied to voter purges drawing on databases wrong eighty-one percent of the time. It is the legitimizing myth in its most compressed form: a single word that reclassifies what is happening so that the moral faculties that would otherwise engage simply do not activate. The person who supports the execution of drug suspects without trial in international waters while demanding due process for January 6 defendants is not a hypocrite in any meaningful sense. They are operating from a framework in which the relevant variable is not the act but the actor, not the violence but its direction. Tribal ethics, followed to their conclusion, have a documented historical destination. Every case study of democratic backsliding into authoritarian consolidation — Hungary, Turkey, Serbia, the Weimar Republic, runs through this mechanism: the gradual normalization of state violence against designated outgroups, cheered by a base that has been given a vocabulary making the cheering feel like justice. The V-Dem Democracy Report 2026 places the United States in the fourth position among the most severe stand-alone autocratizers in modern history, behind only Hungary, Serbia, and India, all countries that followed this route (Nord et al., 2026). The machine does not require that its participants understand what they are building. It requires only that they keep designating, and keep cheering, and keep finding new words for the same thing.

Osborne and colleagues’ review of the authoritarianism literature concludes that right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation predict annual within-person increases in generalized prejudice over time, not merely reflecting existing attitudes but producing new ones, year by year, as the social environment normalizes each prior increment (Osborne et al., 2023). The implication is that this does not plateau. The enemy list grows without end precisely because the psychological system that generates it requires enemies and cannot be satisfied by their punishment (Kelly, 2020). The drug smuggler deported yesterday creates the asylum seeker designated today and the Iranian schoolchild acceptable as collateral tomorrow. Each escalation is absorbed by a base whose threshold has been incrementally adjusted by every previous one, as Moniz and Swann’s research on identity fusion and misinformation demonstrated: each absorbed premise lowered the cost of absorbing the next (Moniz & Swann, 2025). The machine is not approaching a limit. It is approaching the condition it has always been designed to produce, which is a society organized around the permanent and renewable identification of those who do not belong, those who must be punished, and those who are owed deference, and the permanent and renewable suppression of the question of why.

The research has a name for this. We should use it.

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