Christopher Hitchens warned us: 'The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.' MAGA follows no principle, only loyalty. It rewrites the rules not for justice, but for revenge.”
The diagnosis and etiology of authoritarianism in the MAGA movement seems correct to me. But if this is a social pathology (it becomes a threat only when loosed from the boundaries of the individual mind), what is the antidote/vaccine/therapy/whatever that can break the spell that it has cast over such a large fraction of our population? It’s helpful to know the underlying structure of authoritarianism, but how do we undermine those structures?
An inventive, if unlikely, scenario. The “air” which MAGA breathes is not the atmosphere, but the virtual world of right-wing media. We need some sort of algorithmic breakthrough that inserts every so often a whiff (to follow your metaphor) of something different. Something that begins to introduce the cognitive dissonance that may lead to disaffection with the whole MAGA worldview. But my algorithm and your aerosol are only dreams as of now.
Several questions I hope will be answered: (1) What social structures and environments produced (and unless they have changed, are still producing) people who are predisposed to authoritarianism? (2) What is the best way to deal with the MAGA cult right now? (3) How much of our population is infected with this virus, and what can we do to enlist those who are in the ideologically muddled middle in stanching the epidemic?
"MAGA doesn’t believe Trump’s lies because they’re convincing. They believe them because disbelieving would fracture the identity Trump helped construct."
What you're describing here and throughout your post is the construct of cult thought and behavior. Just because it's political does not mean it's some kind of complex ideological construct. It's cult behavior because cults don't care about what is true and what isn't. The cult leader tells them what to think and believe.
JD Vance said, “Being an American isn’t an idea.” But for most of us, America is a uniquely messianic country. There’s something in our national creed that is like John 3:16, "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." Only whosoever believes in Democracy and believes in our Constitution has the right to become an American.
Many conservatives do not believe this. Vance mentioned the number of relatives buried on American soil. Being an American isn’t something that belongs to US, not to be tossed away at WHOEVER. They want to power to grant the Status of full citizens at their discretion.
We see civil rights as universal. They see them as privileges that need to be earned, indeed protected from being STOLEN by people that do not share “Our Values.”
I bristle at the notion that MAGA are helplessly brainwashed, that they were just waiting to be Nazis all along. They are frightened, manipulated by the media that turns them into fear and adrenaline junkies. Fox News was the gateway drug. Trump is the Crack, the Meth, the Fentanyl so many of them are getting sucked into IRL.
theres nothing wrong with earned privileges in lieu of rights.
Very little should be just -given- away.
I'd even recommend a social ranking system: in lieu of capitalist meritocracy: with enhanced privileges earned through service.
But: thats where authoritarianism and I diverge: because i recommend privileges earned through altruistic piety; magnanimity; and duty/noblesse oblige.
For them...obedience and conformity are everything. Nihilistically.
Thank you for this excellent discussion and for once again explaining rationally what is going on. The comments below are likewise enlightening. Ever since Trump 2.0, we have been wracking our brains to understand how this happened. Now we have some ideas about how this authoritarian regime came to power. So now what?? Several readers are asking "What can we do?". I believe that it is extremely unlikely that the authoritarian takeover can be reversed. Read Peter Turchin's "End Times", or The Fourth Turning, An American Prophecy by William Strauss and Neil Howe. We still need to do something, but realistically it will likely take a generation or two for this to play out. We are rapidly becoming a stable "Managed Autocracy" in which The U.S. becomes an "American Hungary" for a generation — stable but repressive, with managed elections, cultural repression, and economic stagnation. Possibly there imay be a major Crisis or Collapse such as financial collapse, foreign war, internal elite rupture, or severe public health or environmental crisis that destabilizes the regime unexpectedly and permits the revival of American Democracy. In either case, those concerned about Democracy in America will need to work hard, stay vigilant, and be willing to make considerable sacrifices.
It will take a long time. We need to be patient.
Some other posts on this topic that may be of interest:
The Mark Twain quote is: "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." You suppose you know how the MAGA mind works. You suppose you know what is actually going on in the world. If you watch it or see it second hand, it was probably put there for a reason. Nothing is as it seems. Truth isn't relative but it does come with perspectives. Don't assume a restructuring wasn't warrented. Take our previous projection and think about where we might be in a few years. We can't continue to fabricate money from thin air. The reckoning isn't pretty. Everything is linked to the monetary system and to an insidious underworld.
with the punchline being that we are not born to be jerks... the world makes some people so... and hopefully we will someday figure it out how to reduce the number of jerks in the populace through better upbringing...
until then the only thing to do is to point out the inconsistencies and hope some people push through the cognitive dissonance
In that respect Trump is great as people will get to feel personally the effects of such policies... and get more easily disillusioned. Some people simply cannot process information if given to then through books/talks... some people have to experience it (poke an open flame despite what mother says) to grasp the outcomes... and MAGA is full of those
Thanks for the Hitchens quote; wish he were here today, leading the fight against MAGA with his wit and invective. He wouldn't be writing to persuade MAGA; he would be writing to persuade us: to remind us that MAGA is immune to persuasion via logic and reason for very reasons you discuss in your post (Hitchens was not a man to tolerate fools and fanatics). Hopefully, in the future, we can help hardcore Trumpers come to their senses. But for now, we just don't have the resources to effect such a huge psychological shift. The better bet is to put our resources into saving our democracy from MAGA rather than into saving MAGA from itself.
Hitchens is my inspiration for being so brutally rational, viewing the world through an unflinching, objective lens. MAGA supporters read my articles and call them biased, but they’re not. They’re brutally honest, grounded in decades of psychological and political research.
I recently joined a MAGA panel debate and couldn’t even finish half a sentence before being interrupted. One person finally offered me three uninterrupted minutes. I used that time to lay out the science, explaining why MAGA debates the way it does, why it discriminates, and why it so often supports authoritarianism.
The host’s response? He snapped: ‘How dare you say anything like that to us.’ It was the rhetorical equivalent of an alcoholic lashing out when forced to confront the mirror. This isn’t new research, it’s just that MAGA hates being predictable. They want to believe their ideas are original, but they aren’t. I bring something new; they recycle grievance and call it patriotism. What they defend are the ingredients of tyranny, served with a flag on top as garnish.
Whenever I have to engage MAGA, I look through these strategies suggested by Substacker Frontline Feminist. They remind me not to argue facts and logic, and they seem good strategies for addressing the underlying psychology of MAGA fanatics. https://frontlinefeminist.substack.com/p/the-progressives-guide-to-rejection
The diagnosis and etiology of authoritarianism in the MAGA movement seems correct to me. But if this is a social pathology (it becomes a threat only when loosed from the boundaries of the individual mind), what is the antidote/vaccine/therapy/whatever that can break the spell that it has cast over such a large fraction of our population? It’s helpful to know the underlying structure of authoritarianism, but how do we undermine those structures?
I recommend some sort of viral vector pharmaceutical mist that suppresses their amygdala.
So, some sort of valium/mdma/pentothal aerosol.
An inventive, if unlikely, scenario. The “air” which MAGA breathes is not the atmosphere, but the virtual world of right-wing media. We need some sort of algorithmic breakthrough that inserts every so often a whiff (to follow your metaphor) of something different. Something that begins to introduce the cognitive dissonance that may lead to disaffection with the whole MAGA worldview. But my algorithm and your aerosol are only dreams as of now.
But that flies in the face of the 1st Amendment.
only if mandated by the government
Some hippie chicks tried to put LSD in the white house and other DC coffee urns, in the 60s.
A fine idea, actually.
But how to supply 30 million Magas with strong psychedelics? 🤣🤣
Just dose the leaders: all their lemmings will fall in lockstep.
"Dewdddzzz. All hail the human soul, maaannn. Cuz its beautiful. You know? ...Fuckin far outtt."
-Karoline Leavitt at TBD Press Conference
Tom Homan: "First i handed all the ICE detainees a flower, man. As a blessing. Then i let em all go brah. Sense the Divine inside you, man."
Trump:
"Fuck dudes like, is that your penis, JD? Cuz, like, thats all i see man is one. huge. penis.
And its, like, aggro."
Several questions I hope will be answered: (1) What social structures and environments produced (and unless they have changed, are still producing) people who are predisposed to authoritarianism? (2) What is the best way to deal with the MAGA cult right now? (3) How much of our population is infected with this virus, and what can we do to enlist those who are in the ideologically muddled middle in stanching the epidemic?
1: Theyre born that way. So: isolate that gene and edit it out.
2: Vanquish them; imprison the leaders; re-educate the rest.
3: According to the academic journals i searched, roughly 1 out of 4
"MAGA doesn’t believe Trump’s lies because they’re convincing. They believe them because disbelieving would fracture the identity Trump helped construct."
What you're describing here and throughout your post is the construct of cult thought and behavior. Just because it's political does not mean it's some kind of complex ideological construct. It's cult behavior because cults don't care about what is true and what isn't. The cult leader tells them what to think and believe.
what happens when someones identity collapses?
Why would anyone fear it?
Buddhists talk constantly of ego death.
As a good thing.
JD Vance said, “Being an American isn’t an idea.” But for most of us, America is a uniquely messianic country. There’s something in our national creed that is like John 3:16, "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." Only whosoever believes in Democracy and believes in our Constitution has the right to become an American.
Many conservatives do not believe this. Vance mentioned the number of relatives buried on American soil. Being an American isn’t something that belongs to US, not to be tossed away at WHOEVER. They want to power to grant the Status of full citizens at their discretion.
We see civil rights as universal. They see them as privileges that need to be earned, indeed protected from being STOLEN by people that do not share “Our Values.”
I bristle at the notion that MAGA are helplessly brainwashed, that they were just waiting to be Nazis all along. They are frightened, manipulated by the media that turns them into fear and adrenaline junkies. Fox News was the gateway drug. Trump is the Crack, the Meth, the Fentanyl so many of them are getting sucked into IRL.
theres nothing wrong with earned privileges in lieu of rights.
Very little should be just -given- away.
I'd even recommend a social ranking system: in lieu of capitalist meritocracy: with enhanced privileges earned through service.
But: thats where authoritarianism and I diverge: because i recommend privileges earned through altruistic piety; magnanimity; and duty/noblesse oblige.
For them...obedience and conformity are everything. Nihilistically.
Thank you for this excellent discussion and for once again explaining rationally what is going on. The comments below are likewise enlightening. Ever since Trump 2.0, we have been wracking our brains to understand how this happened. Now we have some ideas about how this authoritarian regime came to power. So now what?? Several readers are asking "What can we do?". I believe that it is extremely unlikely that the authoritarian takeover can be reversed. Read Peter Turchin's "End Times", or The Fourth Turning, An American Prophecy by William Strauss and Neil Howe. We still need to do something, but realistically it will likely take a generation or two for this to play out. We are rapidly becoming a stable "Managed Autocracy" in which The U.S. becomes an "American Hungary" for a generation — stable but repressive, with managed elections, cultural repression, and economic stagnation. Possibly there imay be a major Crisis or Collapse such as financial collapse, foreign war, internal elite rupture, or severe public health or environmental crisis that destabilizes the regime unexpectedly and permits the revival of American Democracy. In either case, those concerned about Democracy in America will need to work hard, stay vigilant, and be willing to make considerable sacrifices.
It will take a long time. We need to be patient.
Some other posts on this topic that may be of interest:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-165585941
https://substack.com/home/post/p-165830031
https://substack.com/@scottcamazine/p-166066061
https://substack.com/home/post/p-166190614
The Mark Twain quote is: "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." You suppose you know how the MAGA mind works. You suppose you know what is actually going on in the world. If you watch it or see it second hand, it was probably put there for a reason. Nothing is as it seems. Truth isn't relative but it does come with perspectives. Don't assume a restructuring wasn't warrented. Take our previous projection and think about where we might be in a few years. We can't continue to fabricate money from thin air. The reckoning isn't pretty. Everything is linked to the monetary system and to an insidious underworld.
great read!
unfortunately, as you note, truth is the enemy... so you cant "fight" this with truth easily (as you also well present in the prior article https://therationalleague.substack.com/p/escaping-maga-the-psychology-of-undoing)
likely the best and only way is to repeatedly (ad-nauseum) correct the fallacies... but this tires out sane people too quickly
the institutions that would otherwise be tasked to present truth ad-nauseum are also the enemies of the state to be dismantled...
the vid on TED might also provide some insight into the topic
https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_liberals_and_conservatives
with the punchline being that we are not born to be jerks... the world makes some people so... and hopefully we will someday figure it out how to reduce the number of jerks in the populace through better upbringing...
until then the only thing to do is to point out the inconsistencies and hope some people push through the cognitive dissonance
https://youtu.be/hcmbATnQcMo
In that respect Trump is great as people will get to feel personally the effects of such policies... and get more easily disillusioned. Some people simply cannot process information if given to then through books/talks... some people have to experience it (poke an open flame despite what mother says) to grasp the outcomes... and MAGA is full of those
Thanks for the Hitchens quote; wish he were here today, leading the fight against MAGA with his wit and invective. He wouldn't be writing to persuade MAGA; he would be writing to persuade us: to remind us that MAGA is immune to persuasion via logic and reason for very reasons you discuss in your post (Hitchens was not a man to tolerate fools and fanatics). Hopefully, in the future, we can help hardcore Trumpers come to their senses. But for now, we just don't have the resources to effect such a huge psychological shift. The better bet is to put our resources into saving our democracy from MAGA rather than into saving MAGA from itself.
Hitchens is my inspiration for being so brutally rational, viewing the world through an unflinching, objective lens. MAGA supporters read my articles and call them biased, but they’re not. They’re brutally honest, grounded in decades of psychological and political research.
I recently joined a MAGA panel debate and couldn’t even finish half a sentence before being interrupted. One person finally offered me three uninterrupted minutes. I used that time to lay out the science, explaining why MAGA debates the way it does, why it discriminates, and why it so often supports authoritarianism.
The host’s response? He snapped: ‘How dare you say anything like that to us.’ It was the rhetorical equivalent of an alcoholic lashing out when forced to confront the mirror. This isn’t new research, it’s just that MAGA hates being predictable. They want to believe their ideas are original, but they aren’t. I bring something new; they recycle grievance and call it patriotism. What they defend are the ingredients of tyranny, served with a flag on top as garnish.
Whenever I have to engage MAGA, I look through these strategies suggested by Substacker Frontline Feminist. They remind me not to argue facts and logic, and they seem good strategies for addressing the underlying psychology of MAGA fanatics. https://frontlinefeminist.substack.com/p/the-progressives-guide-to-rejection