Show Notes
Why Right-Wing Baby Boomers Chose Fascism Over Their Own Families Your parents chose a political movement over you. They chose a man they have never met over the child they raised. They chose Fox News over Thanksgiving. They chose conspiracy theories over their grandchildren. And when you set a boundary, when you asked them to stop, when you told them the way they raised you wasn’t normal, they didn’t listen. They called you brainwashed and voted for a system that would punish you for growing up. This is not about all Baby Boomers. There are great parents in that generation. Empathetic people. People who are close with their kids and believe in growing old gracefully surrounded by people who love them. This is about the ones who chose Trump over their own families. The ones who were toxic before Trump showed up and got worse once he gave them permission. The ones who demand empathy they refuse to give, respect they haven’t earned, and loyalty they destroyed by their own behavior. This is about the other ones. The ones who chose a political movement over their own children. The ones who were toxic before Trump showed up and got worse once he gave them permission. The ones who cut off their daughters for voting differently and their sons for going to therapy. The ones who demand empathy they refuse to give, respect they haven’t earned, and loyalty they destroyed by their own behavior. The question is not why these people support Trump. The question is what was already broken inside them that made Trump the inevitable answer. Eight separate fields of psychological research converge on the same picture, and when you see them together the pattern becomes impossible to deny. There are eight psychological reasons this happened. None of them are political.
The Void They Retired Into The first piece of the puzzle is developmental. In 1950, psychologist Erik Erikson at Harvard University mapped the eight stages of human psychological development across the entire lifespan. The final adult stage, which Erikson placed in late middle age and beyond, is the conflict between generativity and stagnation. Generativity is the need to contribute something meaningful to the next generation. It is the drive to mentor, to build, to leave something behind that matters. Erikson showed that people who successfully navigate this stage find purpose in helping others grow. They become elders in the real sense: sources of wisdom, stability, and guidance. Stagnation is what happens when a person fails this stage. They stop contributing. They stop growing. They collapse inward and become obsessed with themselves because there is nothing else left. Erikson found that people who fail the generativity stage don’t just feel useless. They feel invisible. And invisible people become desperate. In America, identity is tied to production. You are what you do. Your job is your worth. Your title is your relevance. Then you retire. And the thing that told the world who you were disappears. For a person who successfully navigated generativity, retirement is a transition. For a person who failed it, retirement is an identity collapse. Right-wing boomers retired into a country that didn’t need them anymore. Their expertise was outdated. Their careers were over. Their kids were grown and living independently. Nobody was asking for their guidance. Nobody was waiting on their opinion. The void that Erikson described opened up, and something had to fill it. MAGA filled it. Not with purpose. Not with contribution. Not with the generative acts that Erikson showed are necessary for psychological health in late life. With rage, grievance, and the feeling that somebody, somewhere, was finally paying attention to them again.
The Wound That Never Heals The second piece explains why retirement triggered rage instead of reflection. In 1975, psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg at Cornell University Medical College published his foundational research on pathological narcissism. Kernberg spen
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There is a particular kind of man who shows up to political rallies in body armor he bought online, drives a truck that has never hauled anything, and screams about strength while falling apart the moment someone disagrees with him. He is not hard to spot. He is the loudest person in any room he enters. He is also, according to decades of research, the most frightened. The video that accompanies this piece covers sociologist Robb Willer’s research on masculine overcompensation: the finding that men whose masculinity is threatened respond with exaggerated displays of dominance, aggression, and toughness. The effect is consistent and measurable. It shows up in attitudes toward war, attitudes toward gay people, and even in what kind of car a man wants to buy. But the research goes much deeper than one study, and the implications stretch far beyond a rally.
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.