Show Notes
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.
This has happened before. It looked exactly the same. In the months after the fall of Nazi Germany, something remarkable happened. The Nazis disappeared. Not into hiding. Into denial. Across the occupied zones, Allied forces encountered a population in which, suddenly, nobody had ever been a Nazi. Nobody had supported the regime. Nobody had cheered at the rallies. Nobody had turned in their neighbors. The denazification tribunals established by the Allied powers categorized former participants into five groups, from major offenders to exonerated persons. The category that swallowed the vast majority of the German population was Mitläufer: fellow travelers. Passive followers. People who went along with it but didn’t really mean it. People who were just following orders, just keeping their heads down, just trying to survive. In 1946, the German writer Luise Rinser, who had herself been arrested under the Nazi regime, wrote a letter responding to Hermann Hesse’s criticisms of postwar Germany. Her assessment was devastating. “Nobody did it,” she wrote. “Everyone wants to be de-Nazified.” She found it despicable that people were claiming to have been mere passive followers, as if that were something to be proud of rather than ashamed of. “Better an evil, real Nazi, driven by the Devil, than a mere passive follower,” she wrote. “What lack of pride and insight.” Rinser saw something that most political analysts then and now tend to miss. The denial wasn’t a psychological phenomenon. It was a moral one. These people knew exactly what they had done. They had attended the rallies. They had displayed the flags. They had reported their neighbors. They had benefited from the regime. And when the regime fell, they didn’t experience sudden clarity about what they had supported. They experienced sudden fear about what supporting it was going to cost them. The psychology didn’t change. The incentives did.
The totalitarian ego. Social psychologist Anthony Greenwald at the University of Washington published a landmark paper in 1980 describing what he called the totalitarian ego. Greenwald argued that the self operates like a totalitarian regime’s propaganda ministry: it ruthlessly destroys information that threatens its positive self-image and rewrites personal history from the standpoint of the victor. But Greenwald made an important distinction. A totalitarian dictator rewrites history to deceive future generations. The totalitarian ego rewrites history to deceive itself. The goal isn’t to fool other people. The goal is to maintain a version of yourself that you can live with. And the mechanism is automatic, continuous, and largely invisible to the person doing it. This is the layer the video companion deliberately cuts through. The script says they’re just lying. And that’s true. But the Substack can hold a more uncomfortab
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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.
Every parent who has ever caught a child doing something wrong has heard the same defense. “But I didn’t get in trouble for it.” The child does not argue that the action was right or that the action was justified. The child’s entire moral framework rests on a single variable: did punishment follow? If the answer is no, the child concludes the action was acceptable. This reasoning is normal in a seven-year-old. It is evidence of a brain that has not yet developed the capacity for abstract moral thought. The child will grow out of it, given adequate development, socialization and guidance. Most children do grow out of it. Some adults never do. In 1958, psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg began the research that would produce the most influential model of moral development in the history of psychology. Working from his doctoral thesis at the University of Chicago, Kohlberg interviewed 72 boys between the ages of 10 and 16, presenting them with moral dilemmas and analyzing the reasoning behind their answers. He was not interested in what they decided. He was interested in how they decided. The structure of their reasoning, not its conclusions, was the object of study. What emerged from that research was a six-stage model of moral development organized into three levels, each representing a fundamentally different relationship between the individual and the concept of right and wrong.