The Vacancy of the MAGA Mind

The quiet relief of no longer having to think.

By brankospejs

Introduction - The Performance of Conviction

There are few spectacles more revealing of the modern mind than the ritual of certainty. The stage is crowded with the confident and the incurious, each declaiming his creed as if conviction itself were a credential. Here, in the theatre of grievance and belonging, the MAGA movement performs its great act: belief as performance, devotion without doubt.

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that bad faith is not ignorance but refusal, the deliberate act of pretending not to know what one knows, a kind of moral cowardice disguised as courage. In Anti-Semite and Jew, he described how the anti-Semite delights in his own absurdity; irrationality frees him from accountability. Absurdity is his weapon. It spares him the burden of coherence and lets him dominate the discussion simply by debasing it (Sartre, 1946). MAGA has learned the same trick. Its adherents revel in contradiction and wear it like a medal, defending the indefensible not to persuade, but to provoke. The lie becomes an oath, delusion a show of faith.

The scholar Casey Ryan Kelly calls this “the rhetoric of ressentiment,” a marketplace of humiliation and revenge that converts frustration into moral pride (Kelly, 2020). The MAGA devotee doesn’t argue for equality; he seeks vindication. Injury becomes virtue. Every correction feels like an assault, every fact an insult. His dignity depends on being wronged. He lives for the spectacle of grievance, bleeding in public and mistaking the attention for righteousness.

Benjamin Moffitt, writing on populism, observed that movements like these trade not in governance but in theatre, crisis as currency, chaos as applause (Moffitt, 2016). The rally becomes liturgy, the chant a creed, the leader both priest and showman. What binds the crowd isn’t a program but an atmosphere, a choreography of identity in which outrage poses as sincerity and noise passes for conviction.

This isn’t stupidity; it’s strategy. Defiance becomes a substitute for understanding, and the willingness to believe the absurd becomes the test of faith. Facts no longer measure truth but loyalty. Participation counts for more than thought; rhythm replaces reason. No one asks whether the stage is real, only that the show go on.

At its core lies a movement that knows it lies, yet believes the lie makes it whole, a politics of bad faith that dresses submission as strength and grievance as grace.

How MAGA Became a Political Identity

To grasp how politics turned into personality, one must see belief less as a position than as a shelter. The ordinary citizen, disoriented by change and wearied by complexity, seeks not understanding but something that feels solid beneath shifting ground. Authoritarian movements thrive on this ache for stability. They sell the comfort of belonging over the burden of comprehension, promising that loyalty can do the work of thought.

Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler traced this impulse through decades of American polarization. Their research shows that authoritarianism is less an ideology than a temperament, a need for sameness, predictability, and control (Hetherington & Weiler, 2009). When social change accelerates faster than one’s capacity to make sense of it, authoritarianism becomes a salve. It converts uncertainty into moral clarity, difference into danger, and pluralism into pathology. MAGA grew from that soil: a politics built not around conservatism, but the craving to command.

During Trump’s rise, Matthew MacWilliams (2016) spotted the pattern early. Loyalty was not predicted by class, education, or partisanship, but by authoritarian predisposition, the conviction that obedience is virtue and fear the proper compass of power. When democracy wobbles, the authoritarian mind doesn’t ask what went wrong, but who. The leader becomes the vessel through which disorder is washed clean. Trump’s vulgarity wasn’t a flaw to overlook but a credential. His crudeness testified to his authenticity, his deceit to his freedom from the polite hypocrisies of the “elite.” Each lie was a handshake, a shared trespass that bound follower to leader in defiance of fact.

Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris (2016) called this a cultural backlash, a revolt by those who felt displaced by feminism, diversity, and globalization. To them, Trump’s ascent was less an election than a restoration, a ritual of returning to lost hierarchies of race, gender, and faith. The rebellion was only theatrical; nostalgia wore the mask of revolt. MAGA’s genius was to sell regression as resistance. It offered the soothing illusion of a world that need never change, where loss could be reimagined as theft and decline as betrayal.

Over time, nostalgia hardened into creed. The studies of Agnieszka Golec de Zavala and colleagues (2019–2024) on collective narcissism reveal how wounded pride becomes moral fuel. A nation begins to mistake fragility for virtue, grievance for greatness. In this vision, America is not a powerful state but a misunderstood saint, betrayed, sabotaged, robbed of its sacred exception. Trump’s real talent was to transmute humiliation into holiness. To feel offended by the modern world became proof of moral worth; suffering became the price of membership.

This is how politics mutates into faith. The authoritarian temperament fuses with collective narcissism, creating a follower who cannot lose faith without losing self. If the leader lies, the lie becomes truth; to admit deceit would be to confess one’s own. The self dissolves into the symbol. The wound becomes the weapon.

At that point, the movement stops arguing and begins worshipping. Loyalty replaces logic; allegiance becomes identity. Politics ceases to be dialogue and turns into confession. The ballot, once an act of choice, becomes a ritual of devotion.

And like all fragile faiths, it must be renewed through hostility. The heretic must be found, the outsider named. Without an enemy, the congregation loses its purpose. MAGA’s creed, distilled to its essence, is unity through division and pride through grievance, a pageant of belonging that begins as theatre and ends as theology.

The Psychological Architecture of MAGA

Every authoritarian movement begins in temperament long before it finds doctrine. Its origins lie less in what people think than in how they respond to thinking, in the unease with ambiguity, the craving for order, and the suspicion of difference that make control feel like safety. MAGA, stripped of its banners and slogans, resembles less a political philosophy than a psychological design: a lattice of traits arranged to favor certainty over curiosity and vengeance over doubt.

Robert Altemeyer’s research on Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) identified three essential elements: submission to perceived authority, aggression toward permitted outgroups, and a compulsive conformity to norms dictated by power rather than conscience (Altemeyer, 1998). Karen Stenner (2005) refined this view, showing that authoritarianism is less a worldview than a reflex. It activates when diversity or uncertainty feels threatening. Her subjects were not sadists; they were simply unnerved by complexity. To them, sameness meant security, and difference foretold decay.

John Duckitt and Chris Sibley (2010) expanded this insight into a dual-process model. RWA is driven by a perception of danger, a conviction that civilization is forever on the brink and must be restrained by force. Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) arises from a sense of competition, the belief that hierarchy is nature’s design. Together they form the authoritarian pair: the fearful follower and the domineering leader. John Dean and Altemeyer (2020) later called them the “double-highs,” people who praise authority when it protects them and persecute it when it doesn’t. Trumpism is that dynamic turned into governance ,the predator and the prey combined in one moral organism.

Empirical work keeps mapping the pattern. Onraet and colleagues (2015) found that individuals with lower emotional intelligence often adopt prejudiced or ethnocentric views, less from cruelty than from incapacity to imagine the lives of others. Without emotional elasticity, social complexity becomes intolerable, and rigid hierarchy feels like relief. Osborne and collaborators (2023), building on Choma and Hodson, discovered a similar tendency among those with limited cognitive flexibility: ambiguity induces anxiety rather than curiosity.

Danny Osborne’s team (2023) drew these strands together into what might be called the authoritarian ecosystem, a self-sustaining loop of threat sensitivity, cognitive rigidity, moral absolutism, and identity fusion. In this ecosystem, fear masquerades as virtue, aggression as justice, and obedience as moral strength. The mind does not reason its way to belief; it reflexes its way there.

This is why MAGA cannot be dismantled through argument. It isn’t a debate to be won; it’s a design built to resist persuasion. Each beam of its architecture braces another: fear feeds dominance, purity justifies cruelty, cruelty reinforces belonging. Its moral chemistry reverses the natural order, compassion is weakness, ignorance authenticity, vengeance virtue.

The MAGA adherent isn’t persuaded; he’s produced, a psychological construct assembled from fear and grievance, maintained by outrage, and polished through repetition. His worldview offers what freedom never could: the relief of certainty, the permission to stop thinking.

How Traits Mold Beliefs and Justify Contradictions

Authoritarianism doesn’t just distort reality, it rebuilds it. Once fear becomes the grammar of thought, cruelty ceases to look like vice and starts to feel like duty. Feldman and Stenner (1997) showed that when those with authoritarian leanings sense threat, from crime, diversity, or dissent, they do not freeze. They obey. Threat gives them purpose. It reorders the moral circuit, turning submission into virtue and aggression into service. Protecting the in-group becomes the supreme good, even when it demands betraying everyone else.

MAGA feeds on contradiction. Its paradoxes are not accidents; they’re rituals. The “defenders of freedom” demand silence from dissenters. The “law and order” faithful applaud lawless power. The self-anointed “truth tellers” build their identity on the rejection of fact. These are not breakdowns of logic but ceremonies of loyalty. In a movement where obedience defines morality, evidence itself becomes heresy.

System justification theory helps explain this inversion. Jost and colleagues (2003) found that many will cling to an unjust hierarchy simply because it feels familiar. To the authoritarian temperament, suffering inside an old order is safer than uncertainty under a new one. Trump instinctively grasped this. He recast submission as pride. The obedient became the righteous; the powerful, the ordained. Inequality was no longer a flaw, it was proof that the world was still “in order.”

Collective narcissism gives this instinct emotional heat. Golec de Zavala and Keenan (2021) found that people who anchor their self-worth to a glorified vision of the nation are quick to endorse repression when that image feels threatened. Patriotism mutates into grievance, and hatred becomes a form of faith. The true believer measures loyalty not by what he protects but by whom he despises. To doubt the leader is treason; to harm the outsider is virtue.

The data bear this out. Matsunaga (2024) showed that right-wing populists are far more willing to justify political violence when they sense their group’s dominance slipping. For them, violence isn’t extremism, it’s restoration. The V-Dem Institute’s 2020 report observed the same on a global scale: where populist strongmen rise, democracy rarely dies in silence. It dies to applause. The crowd doesn’t mourn the republic; it celebrates its undoing.

Zhai’s (2024) study on collective narcissism and militarism reveals how this logic slips into myth. The more a people believe their nation inherently superior, the more they see aggression as virtue. In the MAGA imagination, domination is devotion. Military might, police brutality, even annihilation itself are recast as proofs of righteousness. When Trump calls for executing “traitors” or bombing “enemies,” his followers don’t hear cruelty, they hear confession. The violence absolves them.

The authoritarian mind does not collapse under contradiction; it feeds on it. Every inconsistency is reinterpreted as authenticity: only the corrupt care about consistency, only the coward hides behind proof. This is ressentiment turned theology, a faith where rage replaces reason and moral purity is measured by the damage done to one’s enemies.

MAGA endures every humiliation, every false prophecy, every proven lie because its purpose isn’t truth, it’s reaffirmation. Belief doesn’t crumble under evidence; it hardens. Each refutation becomes another test of loyalty. The more the world disproves them, the more certain they become that the world itself must be wrong.

The Authoritarian Epistemology – Always Right by Design

To grasp the MAGA mind is to enter a closed circuit of belief, a self-contained world where truth isn’t discovered but declared. Inside this moral architecture, facts exist as pledges of loyalty, not instruments of understanding. Error, in such a system, is not a matter of evidence but of allegiance. To be wrong is to be unfaithful.

John Jost’s decades of research on motivated cognition show how, under conditions of threat, reason becomes a shield rather than a searchlight (Jost, 2003; 2020). The authoritarian doesn’t think to understand but to stabilize the self. The aim is not accuracy, it’s equilibrium. Under that pressure, argument feels invasive, even sacrilegious. The MAGA believer’s certainty is less hubris than survival instinct. To admit error would be to lose one’s place in the only moral universe that still feels coherent.

Cass Sunstein (2017) called this information architecture the Daily Me, a world curated to eliminate contradiction. Algorithmic curation mimics divine design: every headline affirms the creed, every dissenting voice sounds like blasphemy. The result is a kind of epistemic nationalism, a border wall around perception itself. Reality is filtered, fact-checked by faith, and deported when inconvenient.

Kahne and Bowyer (2016) found that misinformation doesn’t persist because it persuades, but because it soothes. Falsehoods that affirm identity endure; truths that unsettle it vanish. Within MAGA’s moral economy, belief functions as currency, its value determined by loyalty rather than accuracy. The more heretical a claim sounds to “elites,” the more sacred it becomes. To debunk is to desecrate.

This helps explain the strange sincerity of the deluded. Graham and Yair (2023) showed that many who insist the 2020 election was stolen are not performing cynicism, they truly believe it. Their conviction survives contradiction because belief itself has become the proof of belonging. Doubt isn’t intellectual betrayal; it’s spiritual exile. The lie becomes communal prayer, recited not to inform but to belong.

Jost’s later synthesis (2022) frames this as epistemic closure under threat: once identity fuses with politics, motivated reasoning becomes a fortress. Being wrong ceases to be a cognitive failure and becomes a moral one. In that fortress, certainty feels like safety, and uncertainty feels like abandonment.

MAGA’s epistemology, then, is engineered to be self-sustaining. It doesn’t process contradiction, it metabolizes it. Every accusation turns outward, every failure reflects back as proof of persecution. “Fake news” means news that violates the creed. “Election interference” means being held accountable for one’s own sabotage. Belief no longer seeks to interpret the world but to sanctify it, repainting chaos as destiny.

What emerges is a theology of self-deception, a nation where flags replace facts, and loyalty becomes the last surviving truth. These citizens are not debating opponents; they’re defending a home. To lose an argument would be to lose the last place where their world still makes sense.

Experts on Everything, Masters of Nothing

There’s a peculiar genius in the way authoritarian populism turns ignorance into a credential. It recasts defiance as depth, suspicion as sophistication, and contempt for expertise as proof of independence. The MAGA movement, like every demagogic revival before it, has democratized delusion. It tells the unlearned that certainty is a substitute for knowledge, that instinct outranks evidence, that intuition is the highest form of intellect.

Bob Altemeyer and Bruce Hunsberger (2005) saw this coming long before Trump’s escalator descent. In their work on religious fundamentalism, they found that moral certainty often breeds the same arrogance as political extremism. The believer imagines himself an expert because conviction feels like revelation. MAGA simply swapped scripture for slogans. Its evangelists are secular prophets of grievance, armed not with insight but with search engines and rage.

Emotional poverty feeds the illusion. Onraet and colleagues (2015) showed that low emotional intelligence predicts rigidity and prejudice, not out of malice, but from the inability to tolerate nuance. For such minds, complexity feels like chaos. The blunt become the honest, and the cruel the clear. When these personalities encounter actual expertise, they experience it not as education but as insult. Thus the populist paradox: the louder the experts warn, the more their warnings prove the conspiracy.

Education, in theory, should erode this confidence of the uninformed. Carnevale et al. (2020) found that higher education often reduces authoritarian attitudes by expanding contact with difference and training the mind to live with ambiguity. Yet, as Osborne and colleagues (2023) observed, schooling does not cure the authoritarian impulse, it only gives it grammar. A college-educated authoritarian doesn’t reject expertise; he counterfeits it. He borrows the language of “research” and “critical thinking” to polish prejudice into reason. Intelligence without humility simply makes the fanatic articulate.

Cass Sunstein (2017) pinpointed the perfect incubator for this condition: social media. In that digital carnival, everyone’s an authority. Knowledge is no longer tested but traded, and truth competes for attention with conspiracy. In this marketplace of ego, authority is measured by applause. Thus the rise of the citizen-expert, the Facebook epidemiologist, the TikTok historian, the Twitter constitutional lawyer, each armed with fragments of truth and the swagger of revelation.

The Dunning–Kruger effect was once a cautionary tale; under MAGA, it became a creed. It turned ignorance into identity, transforming the limits of understanding into a moral frontier. To doubt oneself is weakness. To admit ignorance is betrayal. Every correction confirms the plot; every debunking deepens belief. The self-appointed experts of MAGA inhabit a world where being wrong loudly pays better than being right quietly.

But this is more than stupidity. It’s emotional triage. For the insecure, humility feels like humiliation; for the frightened, deference feels like surrender. Trumpism flatters those instincts by promising that passion counts more than proof. It’s a theology of self-validation, where arrogance masquerades as authenticity and ignorance is cherished precisely because it remains untouched by knowledge.

In this way, Trumpism performed a grim alchemy: it transmuted epistemic failure into emotional triumph. When the crowd chants “I know the truth,” they aren’t making a discovery, they’re making a declaration. Their error isn’t accidental; it’s structural. They are the architects of their own delusion, and they will go on insisting, with missionary conviction, that one day the world will bow to their misunderstanding.

What They Say vs. How They Think

George Orwell warned that political language exists to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. The genius of MAGA has been to baptize that principle in emotion. Every word in its catechism, freedom, truth, patriotism, has been drained of meaning and refilled with feeling. The slogans sound noble precisely because they are designed to anesthetize thought. Their purpose is not communication but consecration.

Benjamin Moffitt (2016) described populism as performative authenticity: a kind of political theater in which sincerity is measured by anger, not coherence. The populist does not persuade; he performs. His power comes not from being right, but from appearing real. Within MAGA’s ecosystem, that performance has replaced politics altogether. “Freedom” now means immunity from accountability. “Truth” is whatever issues from the leader’s mouth. “Patriotism” has become submission dressed up as devotion. The moral order has been flipped on its head, virtue transformed into propaganda by sheer repetition.

Casey Ryan Kelly (2020) calls this the rhetoric of ressentiment: a language of grievance that transmutes humiliation into righteousness. MAGA’s vocabulary of virtue is purely reactive. It exists to avenge, not to build. When a supporter speaks of “taking back our country,” it is less a plan for renewal than a plea for revenge. When they shout “truth,” they mean loyalty. When they demand “law,” they mean domination. Ressentiment turns injury into identity and cruelty into cleansing.

The psychology that sustains this inversion is collective narcissism. Golec de Zavala and her collaborators (2019–2024) show that those who tie their self-worth to a sanctified vision of their nation grow hypersensitive to the slightest insult. Their patriotism is really paranoia. Every challenge to the myth feels like an assault on the self. The MAGA believer no longer defends America as it is, but as a memory of what it was allowed to be, white, dominant, unrepentant. When Trump says, “They’re not after me, they’re after you,” he speaks with perfect psychological accuracy. The fusion is complete: his ego becomes their armor.

John Dean and Bob Altemeyer (2020) traced this same pattern in Trump’s moral psychology, which they called moral disengagement, the art of turning cruelty into virtue through the alchemy of intent. Detention camps become “security.” Censorship becomes “patriotism.” Violence becomes “defense.” Trumpism’s morality isn’t amoral; it’s conditional. Whatever serves the cause is righteous. Whatever threatens it is sin. Even empathy becomes suspect, a contaminant that dilutes the purity of rage.

What this rhetoric conceals is not ignorance but refusal, the deliberate rejection of reflection. Its language isn’t a bridge to meaning but a mirror of identity. “Freedom” is freedom from conscience. “Truth” means never having to be corrected. “Patriotism” is the right to be cruel without guilt. The vocabulary of virtue hides the grammar of fear.

And yet, to the faithful, these words feel sacred. They shimmer with moral certainty precisely because they reverse it. Authoritarian movements don’t steal democratic language; they drain it, leaving behind the husk of its symbols. What remains is a hollow creed, recited with the rhythm of prayer and the discipline of denial.

The Education Paradox – Degrees of Obedience

There’s a cherished superstition among liberals that education cures ignorance. Teach people enough, the story goes, and they’ll grow rational, tolerant, free. The twentieth century should have buried that myth. Some of the most erudite men in Europe built the camps; some of the most eloquent minds in America now defend cruelty as patriotism. Knowledge doesn’t inoculate against authoritarianism, it can just as easily feed it.

Carnevale and his colleagues (2020) found that education tends to reduce authoritarian attitudes, but only when learning rewards curiosity more than conformity. A diploma alone is morally neutral. The same intellect that can decode complexity can also rationalize oppression. A classroom that prizes obedience over doubt produces not citizens but functionaries, articulate servants of ideology dressed in academic robes.

Karen Stenner (2005) added a cruel precision to this paradox. Authoritarianism, she showed, isn’t a doctrine but a dormant disposition, activated by fear. Education can restrain it in calm times, but once the atmosphere thickens with threat, terrorism, protest, social unrest, even the well-schooled reach for authority. The intellect doesn’t dissolve the instinct for order; it refines it. The authoritarian engineer builds cleaner systems of exclusion; the authoritarian lawyer drafts more elegant decrees.

MAGA’s educated faithful demonstrate this refinement perfectly. They don’t shout; they reason. They come armed with data, credentials, and a deep sense of their own rationality. But beneath the polish lies tribal instinct. Intelligence without humility becomes a weapon of self-justification. The mind no longer asks, Is this true? but How can I prove I was right all along? The result is a literate form of dogma, credentialed fanaticism masquerading as insight.

Education, in this light, isn’t a vaccine against obedience but a host through which it mutates. Knowledge detached from self-doubt becomes theology by another name. It grants people the eloquence to defend their fears and the vocabulary to dignify their prejudices. When identity feels endangered, even intellect joins the mob. The mind becomes its own propaganda ministry, manufacturing meaning out of insecurity.

Perhaps the truest measure of enlightenment isn’t how much one knows but how easily one can say, I might be wrong. That sentence, modest, heretical, and free, marks the boundary authoritarianism cannot cross.

Conclusion – The Freedom They Fear

Freedom, properly understood, is terrifying. It demands the discipline of uncertainty, the courage to think without command, and the moral stamina to live without guarantees. It offers no hierarchy to hide behind, no savior to absolve one’s guilt. Small wonder so many would rather surrender it. The tragedy of MAGA is not that its followers are uninformed, but that they have chosen an easier salvation, to exchange the labor of freedom for the comfort of obedience.

Hannah Arendt (1951) called totalitarianism “organized loneliness.” It feeds not just on ignorance but on isolation, the private dread of those who can no longer tell truth from belonging. Into that void steps the authoritarian promise: Follow me, and you will never be alone again. The crowd becomes a surrogate for conscience; the leader, a substitute for thought. Within that collective warmth, doubt feels treasonous and cruelty communal. What Sartre called bad faith becomes social: an entire movement bound together by the deliberate refusal to know.

Karen Stenner (2005) showed that this dynamic springs not from doctrine but from fear. When difference feels like danger and pluralism like threat, the authoritarian impulse awakens. It promises purity, order, and moral clarity. MAGA perfected that promise. It told the anxious that freedom was chaos, that equality was theft, that compassion was weakness. It offered them relief from the vertigo of democracy, a politics of simplicity, hierarchy, and punishment. In that simplicity lay its seduction.

John Dean and Bob Altemeyer (2020) mapped the psychology of those who seek such relief: the authoritarian follower, uneasy with ambiguity, yearning for strong leaders and moral absolutes. For them, Trump’s contradictions were not failures but signs of strength, proof that he could transgress without consequence. In his impunity, they saw their deliverance. Submission felt like certainty; certainty masqueraded as truth.

The vacancy of the MAGA mind is not stupidity but surrender, the stillness that follows abdication, the hush that descends when thought itself is outsourced. They believe themselves liberated because they have been excused from doubt. They mistake the echo of command for the voice of conviction. Like all authoritarians, they have fled the burden of freedom and renamed their flight fidelity. This is QAnon’s Eucharist: eat the lie, drink the grievance, become the body politic. A communion of delusion, sanctified not by truth but by the shared ecstasy of submission.

The rest of us, condemned to liberty, enjoy no such refuge. We must endure the ache of uncertainty and the inconvenience of empathy. Those discomforts are the price of consciousness, the toll exacted for living in a world where truth cannot be decreed. To think freely is to risk loneliness; to speak honestly is to risk exile. Yet those risks are the only form of freedom worth defending.

And if there is consolation in this age of grievance, it is this: obedience never outlives the void it creates. The MAGA mind may fear freedom, but it cannot extinguish the human impulse toward it. Every time someone refuses to echo a lie, to kneel before power, or to mistake authority for truth, freedom stirs again, fragile, defiant, unfinished, but still alive.

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