MAGA Supporters Don’t Have a Sense of Self Without MAGA

Try this experiment.

Ask a liberal to describe who they are. Not what they believe. Who they are.

You’ll hear things like: I’m a dad. I coach my daughter’s soccer team. I like to cook. I’m learning guitar. I run a small business. I’m a husband. I’m a nerd about old movies.

Now ask a MAGA supporter the same question. Same words. “Tell me about yourself.”

And listen to what comes out.

I’m Pro-Life. I’m Second Amendment. I’m a Trump-supporting Christian. I’m a patriot. I’m anti-woke.

Every single word is a group. Not one word is about them as a person. Not a hobby. Not a skill. Not a passion. Not a relationship. Just a list of memberships.

The liberal gave you a person. The MAGA supporter gave you a uniform.

That difference is not an accident. It’s not a coincidence. It’s a documented pattern in human psychology that was first identified in the late 1970s by one of the most influential social psychologists of the twentieth century.

In 1979, psychologist Henri Tajfel at the University of Bristol, along with his colleague John Turner, published a theory that changed how researchers understand the relationship between the individual and the group. Tajfel, a Polish-born Jewish man who survived World War II by concealing his identity from German captors, had spent his career studying how group membership shapes human behavior. What he and Turner proposed was that every person’s sense of who they are, their self-concept, operates on two distinct layers.

The first layer is personal identity. That means you know who you are because of the things you’ve done, the things you care about, and the life you built on your own. Your interests, your skills, your relationships, the experiences that made you who you are independent of any group.

The second layer is social identity. That means you define yourself through the groups you belong to. Your political party. Your religion. Your nation. Your team.

Tajfel and Turner called it social identity theory.

Both layers exist in everyone. That’s normal. But the balance between them matters enormously. When someone has a strong personal identity, the group is something they participate in. It’s a part of their life, not the entirety of it. They can lose the group and still know who they are.

When someone has a weak personal identity, the group becomes the only thing holding them together. It becomes the self. Without it, there’s nothing there.

Before Tajfel published social identity theory, he had already demonstrated something unsettling about how easily group identity takes hold. In his earlier experiments at Bristol, known as the minimal group paradigm studies, Tajfel assigned schoolboys to completely arbitrary groups based on nothing more than which abstract painter they preferred, Klee or Kandinsky. The groups were meaningless. The boys didn’t know who else was in their group. There was no competition, no history, no reason to care. But when given the opportunity to distribute rewards, the boys consistently favored their own group over the other. Not because they had anything real in common. Simply because they had been told they were in a group.

That finding has been replicated hundreds of times. The human brain doesn’t need a real reason to attach to a group. It just needs to be told it belongs to one. And once that attachment forms, the group becomes worth defending, even at the expense of others.

Now apply that to people who had nothing to begin with.

MAGA supporters didn’t join a movement because they believed in a set of policies. Most of them can’t name a single policy with any depth or detail. They joined because the movement gave them something they never had on their own. An identity.

They had nothing going on in their lives. No accomplishments. No ambition. Nothing about themselves worth talking about. So they borrowed an identity. From MAGA. From the Bible. From Fox News. They put on the red hat and for the first time in their mediocre lives they finally felt like they mattered.

This isn’t speculation. In 2021, researcher Michael Hogg published a comprehensive review of what he calls uncertainty-identity theory, which builds directly on Tajfel’s framework. Hogg, working out of Claremont Graduate University, found that when people experience self-uncertainty, when they don’t have a clear sense of who they are or what their life means, they are drawn to groups that offer rigid, clearly defined identities. The more uncertain someone is about themselves, the more extreme the group they seek out. Hogg specifically found that self-uncertainty can motivate a strong preference for zealous identification with extremist groups, groups that offer populist ideology, conspiracy theories, and narratives of victimhood.

That is MAGA described in a single research finding.

The movement doesn’t attract people who know who they are. It attracts people who don’t. People who need the group to fill a hole that their own personality never could. People who need to be told what to think, who to hate, and what to call themselves, because they never figured any of that out on their own.

That’s why they fight so hard. They’re not defending ideas. They’re not defending policies. They’re defending the only identity they’ve ever had. Every argument about politics is actually an argument about their existence. Because without MAGA, without the group, without the red hat and the bumper stickers and the rallies, there’s no person left. Just an empty, angry nobody with nothing to show for their life.

That’s what the bumper stickers are. Twenty on one side of the truck telling you what groups they belong to. Twenty on the other side telling you what groups to hate. That’s not a personality. That’s a costume on a mannequin. It’s a person screaming “look at me” because they’ve never once had anyone’s attention based on who they actually are.

Researcher William Swann at the University of Texas at Austin has studied what happens when this process goes even further. In 2009, Swann and his colleagues published research on what they call identity fusion, a state where the boundary between the personal self and the group identity dissolves completely. When people become fused with a group, they don’t just identify with it. They become it. Their personal identity and their social identity become functionally the same thing. And fused individuals are willing to fight, sacrifice, and even die for the group, because an attack on the group is experienced as an attack on the self.

That’s the MAGA rally. That’s the January 6th defendant who threw away their career and their freedom for a man who doesn’t know their name. That’s the person who cuts off family members over a political argument. They’re not being dramatic. They’re experiencing an identity threat. Because the group is all they have.

Liberals don’t have this problem. Because someone in their life taught them who they were before a group had to tell them. Someone encouraged them to develop interests, build skills, form their own opinions, and figure out what they care about independent of any movement. That’s personal identity. That’s the thing MAGA supporters never built.

And that’s the part nobody talks about. This isn’t really about politics. It’s about people who never developed a self and found a group that gave them one for free. The politics are just the wrapping paper. Underneath it is a person who peaked in high school and never moved on, who never built anything they were proud of, and who discovered that putting on a red hat was easier than doing the work of becoming someone worth knowing.

MAGA supporters didn’t join a movement because they believed in something. They joined because they had nothing else. Because these are people who peaked in high school and never moved on.

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Tajfel, H. (1970). Experiments in intergroup discrimination. Scientific American, 223, 96-102.

Tajfel, H. and Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin and S. Worchel (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations (pp. 33-47). Brooks/Cole.

Hogg, M. A. (2021). Self-uncertainty and group identification: Consequences for social identity, group behavior, intergroup relations, and society. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 64, 263-316.

Swann, W. B., Gomez, A., Seyle, D. C., Morales, J. F., and Huici, C. (2009). Identity fusion: The interplay of personal and social identities in extreme group behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 995-1011.

Campbell, J. D., Trapnell, P. D., Heine, S. J., Katz, I. M., Lavallee, L. F., and Lehman, D. R. (1996). Self-concept clarity: Measurement, personality correlates, and cultural boundaries. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(1), 141-156.