Why Liberals Don't Worship Politicians Like MAGA Cult Does

If you watched the video, you already know what identity fusion is and why it explains the difference between how liberals and MAGA supporters relate to politicians. This Substack goes deeper into the research, the childhood origins, and why millions of people handed their entire sense of self to a man who does not know their name.

William B. Swann Jr. is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2009, Swann and his colleagues Ángel Gómez, D. Conor Seyle, J. Francisco Morales, and Carmen Huici published a foundational paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology titled “Identity Fusion: The Interplay of Personal and Social Identities in Extreme Group Behavior.”

Swann defined identity fusion as a visceral sense of oneness with a group or leader in which the borders between the personal self and the group become porous and highly permeable. In plain language: fused people stop knowing where they end and the group begins.

Normal group identification is cognitive. You support a team. You vote for a party. You attend a church. But you know you are separate from these things. If the team loses you are disappointed but you are still you. If the party nominates someone you dislike you can criticize them. Your identity remains intact because it was never dependent on the group.

Identity fusion is different. When fusion happens the group or leader becomes an extension of the self. An attack on the leader is not a political disagreement. It is an attack on you personally. The leader’s wins feel like your wins. The leader’s losses feel like your losses. The leader’s humiliation feels like your humiliation. The boundary between self and other has dissolved.

Swann’s experiments demonstrated this in dramatic fashion. In several variations of the classic trolley dilemma, highly fused participants endorsed saving fellow group members by throwing themselves in front of a speeding locomotive. They were willing to die for the group. Not because they were ordered to. Because the group had become so deeply fused with their identity that saving the group felt the same as saving themselves.

A 2019 study by Jonas Kunst, John Dovidio, and Lotte Thomsen produced a finding that captures the entire difference between MAGA and liberals in a single data point.

They found that most Trump supporters were more loyal to Trump than to the Republican Party. They were fused with the leader, not the institution. Trump was the identity. The party was just the vehicle.

A separate study by Misch, Fergusson, and Dunham (2018) found the opposite pattern among Democrats. Clinton supporters reported higher fusion to the Democratic Party than to Clinton herself. They were fused with the institution and its values, as they reflect their values, not any individual leader.

If the leader does something wrong against their values, Democratic people instantly reject those people.

This is the structural difference the script describes. Liberals attach to values and institutions. Progressive people can criticize a leader because the leader is not the identity. The values are.

MAGA attaches to the man. The man is the identity. Criticize the man and you are attacking them personally. That is why every conversation with a MAGA supporter about Trump feels personal. Because it is to them.

Swann’s research found that identity fusion does not happen at random. It happens under specific psychological conditions.

The most important predictor of identity fusion is the strength of a person’s personal identity. People with a strong, stable, well-developed personal identity can belong to groups without losing themselves in them. They have a clear sense of who they are independent of any group membership. They can join, participate, contribute, and still walk away with their self intact.

People with a weak, unstable, or underdeveloped personal identity cannot. They do not have a clear sense of who they are on their own. The group fills that void. The leader fills that void. And once the void is filled the person cannot separate from the source without experiencing something that feels like psychological death.

This is why identity fusion is most common among people whose individual lives are not giving them what they need. When your career is not fulfilling. When your relationships are struggling. When you feel invisible, unimportant, and irrelevant. You have a void where a personal identity should be. And a leader who tells you that you are special, that you are a patriot, that you are part of something historic fills that void instantly.

Trump did not create the void. The void was already there. He just offered to fill it.

The void does not appear out of nowhere. It is built in childhood.

The majority of people who are susceptible to identity fusion grew up in environments that actively prevented the development of a strong personal identity.

Authoritarian households where questioning was punished. Children in these homes learn that the only safe move is to obey. They do not learn to question, explore, or develop their own beliefs. They learn that the person in charge is always right and that disagreeing is dangerous. That pattern does not disappear in adulthood. It just transfers to a new authority figure.

Churches where doubt was treated as sin. Children raised in fundamentalist religious environments learn that certainty is virtue and questioning is betrayal. They do not develop the ability to sit with ambiguity, evaluate evidence, or hold two competing ideas simultaneously. They learn that someone else has all the answers and their job is to believe.

Communities where emotional awareness was never modeled. In many conservative communities, therapy is seen as weakness. Vulnerability is shameful. Self-reflection is soft. Asking for help means you failed. Children raised in these environments never develop the internal tools needed to process their own emotions, evaluate their own behavior, or ask what they could do differently.

The result is a person who reaches adulthood without a stable internal sense of self. They do not know who they are independent of a group, a leader, or a belief system. They were never given the tools to build that. Looking inward is not an option because there is nothing there. Nobody ever helped them build it.

The only direction they know how to look is outward. And outward means finding someone else to tell them who they are and who to blame.

Conservative culture did something specific that makes this pattern self-reinforcing. It rebranded blame as strength and self-awareness as weakness.

Therapy is weakness because you are admitting something is wrong with you. But blaming immigrants is not weakness because you are fighting for your country.

Self-reflection is soft because you are questioning yourself. But blaming the deep state is not soft because you are seeing what others cannot.

Vulnerability is shameful because you are exposing yourself. But blaming liberals is not shameful because you are standing your ground.

The culture flipped the entire framework. Looking inward became cowardice. Pointing fingers became courage. Admitting you are the problem became weakness. Saying someone else is the problem became patriotism.

This is why MAGA supporters externalize everything. Not because they are incapable of self-awareness in some biological sense. Because every system they grew up in, the home, the church, the community, the culture, taught them that self-awareness is the enemy and blame is the virtue.

And then a politician arrived who validated that worldview completely. Trump never asks his supporters to reflect. He never asks them to grow. He never asks them to consider whether they might be wrong. He gives them someone to blame. Every single day. Immigrants. Liberals. The media. The deep state. The enemy is always external. The problem is always someone else. And for people who were raised to believe that looking inward is weakness, that message is not just appealing. It is the only message they know how to hear.

The Misch, Fergusson, and Dunham (2018) finding is not an accident. Liberals fuse with institutions and values rather than leaders for a structural reason, not a moral one.

Liberal culture, encourages the tools that prevent identity fusion. Therapy is normalized. Emotional awareness is valued.
Questioning authority is not just permitted but expected.

Education emphasizes critical thinking.

Self-reflection is treated as a sign of maturity, not weakness.

The result is that most liberals develop a personal identity that is strong enough to exist independently of any political figure. They can vote for a candidate and disagree with that candidate the next day because their sense of self does not depend on the candidate being right.

The candidate is a tool for their values, not the source of their identity.

This is not because liberals are inherently smarter or better. It is because the environments they grew up in were more likely to provide the psychological tools needed to build an independent self.

Education.

Emotional literacy.

Permission to question.

Permission to doubt.

Permission to change your mind without losing who you are.

MAGA supporters, did not grow up in those environments. They grew up in environments that punished every one of those behaviors.

And the result is a population of adults who never built a personal identity strong enough to stand on its own.

When a liberal loses an election they are disappointed and they move on with their lives.

When a MAGA supporter loses an election they storm the Capitol.

Because the liberal lost a politician.

The MAGA supporter lost themselves.

The difference between a liberal and a MAGA supporter is not intelligence. It is not education. It is not income. It is accountability.

When a liberal’s life is not working they look inward. They go to therapy. They change careers. They read a book. They ask what can I do differently. They take ownership of their problems and they work on them.

When a MAGA supporter’s life is not working they look outward. They blame immigrants. They blame the deep state. They blame elites. They blame liberals. They never once ask what they could do differently. And then they find a leader who tells them it is not their fault. And they fuse with him because he is the first person who ever told them someone else is to blame for their life.

The person who takes ownership of their problems does not need a savior. The person who blames everyone else does.

That is why liberals do not worship politicians. They do not need to. They have themselves.

That is why MAGA worships Trump. Conservative culture never gave them the tools to build their own identity. It told them therapy is weakness. Self-reflection is soft. Vulnerability is shameful. Blaming others is strength. So they never built a self. And a man on television offered to be one for them.

Without Trump, MAGA supporters are just lonely, uneducated, angry people sitting in a room with nothing to talk about and no one to blame.

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Swann, W. B., Jr., Gómez, 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.

Swann, W. B., Jr., Jetten, J., Gómez, A., Whitehouse, H., and Bastian, B. (2012). “When Group Membership Gets Personal: A Theory of Identity Fusion.” Psychological Review, 119(3), 441-456.

Swann, W. B., Jr., Klein, J. W., and Gómez, A. (2024). “Comprehensive Identity Fusion Theory (CIFT): New Insights and a Revised Theory.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 70, 275-332.

Kunst, J. R., Dovidio, J. F., and Thomsen, L. (2019). “Fusion with Political Leaders Predicts Willingness to Persecute Immigrants and Political Opponents.” Nature Human Behaviour, 3, 1180-1189.

Misch, A., Fergusson, G., and Dunham, Y. (2018). “Group Identification and Political Engagement Among Clinton and Trump Supporters.” Unpublished research cited in Swann et al. (2024).

Swann, W. B., Jr., Gómez, A., Dovidio, J. F., Hart, S., and Jetten, J. (2010). “Dying and Killing for One’s Group: Identity Fusion Moderates Responses to Intergroup Versions of the Trolley Problem.” Psychological Science, 21(8), 1176-1183.

Gómez, A., Brooks, M. L., Buhrmester, M. D., Vázquez, A., Jetten, J., and Swann, W. B., Jr. (2011). “On the Nature of Identity Fusion: Insights into the Construct and a New Measure.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(5), 918-933.

Buhrmester, M. D., and Swann, W. B., Jr. (2015). “Identity Fusion.” In Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University.

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Altemeyer, B. (1981). “Right-Wing Authoritarianism.” University of Manitoba Press.