Show Notes
There is a way to measure how simply or complexly a person thinks. Not what they think. Not whether they are right or wrong. How their brain processes information. Whether it can hold one idea at a time or several. Whether it sees the world in two categories or twenty. Whether it can sit with a contradiction or needs to crush one side of it before the thinking can continue. Psychologists have been measuring this for over fifty years. And the results, applied to political extremism, are as clear as anything in the research literature. What Suedfeld Measured Peter Suedfeld, Dean Emeritus of Graduate Studies and Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, spent over three decades developing and applying a measurement system for the structural complexity of human thought. His work spanned more than 300 published studies across political psychology, crisis decision-making, leadership under stress, and extremism. The system he developed measures something called integrative complexity. It operates on a scale from 1 to 7, and it captures two distinct cognitive operations. The first is differentiation. This is the ability to recognize that a problem has more than one dimension. That a situation can be viewed from more than one perspective. That two things can both be true at the same time even if they seem to contradict each other. A person scoring low on differentiation sees every issue as having one side. One cause. One answer. A person scoring high on differentiation sees multiple dimensions operating simultaneously. The second is integration. This is the ability to draw connections between those different dimensions. To see how competing perspectives relate to each other. To build a framework that accounts for complexity rather than flattening it. Integration is the higher-order operation. You cannot integrate perspectives you never differentiated in the first place. A score of 1 means the person sees only one dimension and draws no connections. Everything is black or white. Good or bad. Us or them. A score of 7 means the person sees multiple dimensions and draws sophisticated connections between them. They can hold contradictions, tolerate ambiguity, and construct frameworks that account for competing truths. Suedfeld found, consistently, across decades of research and hundreds of analyses, that political extremists score the lowest on integrative complexity. This is not a finding about one party or one ideology. It applies to extremists on both ends of the political spectrum. But the application to the modern American right is devastating, because the MAGA movement has turned low integrative complexity into an identity. What Low Complexity Looks Like A person operating at level 1 integrative complexity processes the world the way a child processes the world before the age of eleven. One cause. One villain. One answer. No middle ground. No gray area. No possibility that the opposing side has a point. Every issue is sorted into exactly two categories: for us or against us. Immigrants are destroying the country. Not some immigration policies create economic tradeoffs that affect different communities in different ways. Immigrants are destroying the country. The media is the enemy of the people. Not some media outlets have institutional biases that should be critically evaluated. The media is the enemy. The election was stolen. Not the electoral system has weaknesses that should be addressed through institutional reform. It was stolen. These are level 1 statements. One dimension. No differentiation. No integration. No complexity of any kind. A ten-year-old could process them. And that is the point. Why They Are Proud of It This is where the MAGA movement does something that Suedfeld’s research framework was not designed to anticipate. They have turned cognitive simplicity into a virtue. They call it common sense. They call it cutting through the b******t. They call it telling it like it is. They call it b
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There’s a familiar ritual that happens every time an authoritarian movement begins to collapse. The supporters disappear. Not physically. Psychologically. They scrub the evidence, rewrite the timeline, and emerge on the other side with a story they’ve rehearsed just enough to almost believe. “I never really supported him.” “I just voted against the Democrats.” “I don’t talk about politics anymore.” This is happening right now across America. The yard signs are coming down. The hats are going into drawers. The Facebook posts are being deleted. And millions of people who spent a decade loudly and publicly cheering for cruelty are quietly trying to exit the building before someone turns the lights on. The companion video to this piece says what needs to be said plainly: they’re not confused. They’re lying. They know what they did. They know what they defended. And they’re trying to erase the evidence before accountability arrives. This Substack examines why that matters, why it won’t work this time, and what history tells us about populations that try to pretend they were never part of the thing they spent years supporting.
Most political analysis starts with policy. Voters chose this candidate because of the economy, immigration, healthcare, taxes. And for most voters in most elections, that’s probably true. But Donald Trump is not most candidates. And the question that keeps surfacing isn’t why people agree with him. It’s why they love him more every time he does something cruel. The mockery. The insults. The attacks on disabled reporters, Gold Star families, and women. Behavior that would end any other political career has somehow become the foundation of his. In 2021, psychologist Matthew Yalch at Palo Alto University published a study in PLOS ONE titled “Dimensions of pathological narcissism and intention to vote for Donald Trump.” And what he found should make everyone uncomfortable, including the people it describes.
In February 2025, researchers at the University of Amsterdam published a study in Social Science & Medicine that should have rewritten every conversation about why people join the far right. They tracked over 40,000 people across nine countries, with data spanning fifteen years. They controlled for income, education, immigration attitudes, and political ideology. They wanted to know what actually predicts whether someone will support the populist radical right. The answer wasn’t immigration. It wasn’t economics. It wasn’t religion. It was loneliness. Lonelier individuals were consistently more likely to support radical right movements, with the association holding across all fifteen years of Dutch data and appearing across multiple European countries. The researchers noted that the effect sizes were comparable to the known health correlates of loneliness, meaning that the connection between loneliness and far-right support was statistically as meaningful as the connection between loneliness and heart disease, high blood pressure, and depression. A 2021 RAND Corporation study of former extremists and their families confirmed this from the other direction. Half of the former extremists surveyed said feelings of marginalization drove them toward radicalization, with most citing isolation and loneliness specifically. Individuals reported that the social benefits of joining extremist organizations, the friendship, the camaraderie, the sense of finally belonging somewhere, were among the most powerful forces keeping them in. These people didn’t join a movement because they were convinced by policy arguments. They joined because someone finally made them feel like they weren’t alone. And that tells us more about what MAGA actually is than any analysis of tariffs or border policy ever could.
A woman stood up at a political rally and asked a sitting congressman to create a federal law that would force her adult daughter to let her see her grandchildren. Not a therapy session. Not a family mediator. Not a phone call to her daughter asking what went wrong. A federal law. That single moment contains more psychology than most textbooks. Because what she revealed, in front of cameras and a cheering crowd, wasn’t a grandmother’s heartbreak. It was a narcissist’s playbook when someone finally tells them no. How a boundary becomes a theft. In 2002, psychologist Roy Baumeister at Case Western Reserve University published a theory that combined two existing psychological frameworks into something new. The first was narcissism, the personality structure built around an inflated self-image that requires constant validation. The second was psychological reactance, a concept developed by Jack Brehm at the University of Kansas in 1966, which describes the motivational state people enter when they perceive their freedom as restricted. Brehm found that when people believe a choice or behavior has been taken from them, they experience an intense drive to restore it, often wanting the restricted option more than they did before it was restricted. Baumeister’s insight was that narcissism supercharges reactance. When an ordinary person encounters a boundary, they may be disappointed, but they can process it. When a narcissist encounters a boundary, they don’t experience disappointment. They experience theft. The boundary isn’t perceived as another person’s valid choice. It’s perceived as something that belongs to them being taken away. And they feel entitled to take it back by whatever means necessary. Baumeister called it narcissistic reactance. This grandmother didn’t process her daughter’s boundary as a painful but legitimate decision by an autonomous adult. She processed it as her property being stolen. Those grandchildren aren’t people her daughter is protecting. In her mind, they are hers. Access to them is her right. And no one, not even their own mother, gets to take what’s hers.
There is a specific kind of frustration that comes from watching something fall apart in exactly the way someone told you it would. Not vaguely. Not in broad metaphorical strokes. In order. Step by step. With the stages so clearly defined that anyone paying attention can call the next one before it happens. Plato had that frustration 2,400 years ago. He lived through it. He watched the Athenian democracy, the most advanced political experiment in the ancient world, turn on itself. He watched it execute Socrates, his teacher, arguably the sharpest mind in the city, for the crime of asking uncomfortable questions. And instead of moving on, Plato spent the rest of his life trying to explain how a society capable of producing genius could also be stupid enough to kill it. The result was The Republic. And while most of the book covers justice, education, and the nature of reality, Book Eight is something different entirely. Book Eight is a manual. It is Plato at his most concrete, walking through the specific sequence of events that takes a functioning democracy and turns it into a dictatorship. Not in abstract terms. In stages. With causes, mechanisms, and outcomes laid out in an order that has repeated across civilizations for two millennia.