It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who, in a showdown, would go MAGA Republican. By now, I think I know the types. I have come to know them: the born authoritarians, the ones whom our polarized politics itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become part of that movement.
It is preposterous to think that they are divided by any simple demographic characteristics. While the movement draws heavily from one political party and certain white demographics, its appeal is not monolithic. I know lifelong Democrats who are drawn to its style and many conservatives who would recoil from it tomorrow if it shed its more extreme elements.
Some people have abandoned their former principles to climb the ranks in the new order. The movement is less about a set ideology and more about a particular mindset and attitude toward the world.
It is also, to an immense extent, the symptom of a generation—and a disposition—frustrated by cultural and economic shifts, feeling alienated in a changed America. This is as true of people in Ohio and Florida as it is of those in New York or California. It is the rallying point for the so-called “left behind.”
Sometimes I think there are direct sociological factors at work—a diet of partisan media, algorithmic feeds, and a culture of grievance which has produced a new kind of political being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed a constant stream of outrage and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his critical thinking to discipline.
He has been treated to forms of information that have released him from the inhibitions of consensus reality and institutional trust. His passions are vigorous. His analysis is simplistic. His sense of civic responsibility has been almost completely neglected.
At any rate, let us look round the room.
The gentleman standing beside the fireplace with an almost untouched glass of whiskey is Mr. A, a descendant of one of the old American families. He is an intellectual, an editor. He has a classical education, a sound and cultivated taste; he has not a touch of performative rancor in him; is full of humor and courtesy.
He was an independent, voted for McCain, then Obama, then Biden. He is modest, a staunch friend. He has never attracted any attention for political bravado. But I will put my hand in the fire that nothing on earth could ever make him a MAGA Republican. He would greatly dislike the conflict, but they could never convert him…. Why not?
Beside him stands Mr. B, a man of a similar class, graduate of the same Ivy League university, rich, a financier, a board member of several corporations, married to a well-known social figure. He is a good fellow and extremely popular in his circles. But if the movement were consolidating power, he would certainly align himself, and early. Why?… Why the one and not the other?
Mr. A has a life established according to a certain internal code. His quiet distinction and education have always assured him a position. He has never felt that his identity was under threat. He is, in his own mind, a free man.
I doubt whether ever in his life he has done anything that was truly against his conscience. This movement wouldn’t fit in with his standards, and he has never become accustomed to trading principle for belonging.
Mr. B has risen by virtue of connections, presentation, and being a good mixer. He has made compromises. His code is not deeply personal; it is that of his milieu—no worse, no better. He fits easily into whatever pattern is ascendant. That is his sole measure of value—success and access. The movement as a fringe protest would not attract him. As a movement attaining dominant power, it would.
The saturnine man over there is already a fellow-traveler. Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor kid from a rust-belt town, a scholarship student at elite universities where he took all the honors but was never truly accepted by the old-money set.
His gifts won him positions at white-shoe law firms and eventually a highly paid job as a corporate strategist. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but he’s never felt invited to the inner circle.
He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him—he despises, for instance, Mr. B—because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless work, men like B won by connections. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy.
Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. He is drawn to populist rhetoric because it weaponizes the resentment he feels, yet he would exempt himself from its targets.
Pity he has erased from his nature, and joy he has never known in his career. He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again look down on him. Not to be the rabble-rouser, but the hidden architect, pulling the strings of a movement fueled by the grievances he understands intimately.
Already, some talking heads on cable news are speaking his language—though they have never met him.
There he sits: he talks awkwardly rather than glibly; he is coldly courteous. He commands a distant respect. But he is a very dangerous man. Were he less calculating, he would be a mere troll. But he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high in such a regime. It would need men just like him—intellectual and ruthless.
But Mr. C is not a born foot soldier. He is the product of a system hypocritically preaching meritocracy while practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilistic pragmatism. He would feel a cold satisfaction seeing norms shattered.
I think young D over there is the only born acolyte in the room. Young D is the spoiled only son of wealthy parents. He has never been meaningfully held accountable. He spends his time seeing what he can get away with. He is constantly bailed out. He has been ruthless in his relationships. His life is spent in sensation-seeking and theatricality. He is utterly inconsiderate.
He is very good-looking, in a vacuous way, and inordinately vain. He would certainly fancy himself in the movement’s gear, wearing a hat or insignia that gave him a chance to swagger and demand deference.
Mrs. E would align as sure as you are born. That statement surprises you? Mrs. E seems so sweet, so clinging. She is. She has a martyr’s complex. She is married to a man who subtly belittles her. He is a prominent professional, and Mrs. E, who married him very young, has persuaded herself that he is a genius and that there is something spiritually superior in her utter lack of ego, in her doglike devotion.
She speaks disapprovingly of other “shrill” or insufficiently deferential women. Her husband, however, is bored with her. She neglects her own mind and is looking for a cause before which to pour her ecstatic self-abasement. She will thrill with righteous excitement to the first strongman who proclaims a return to “traditional” gender roles, offering her humiliation as a virtue.
On the other hand, Mrs. F would never go near it. She is the most popular woman in the room, handsome, gay, witty, and full of warm empathy. She had a successful career, married very happily, has a family, runs a business, is not rich, but has no money worries.
All men like her; she laughs with them all, and her husband is her partner. She has stood on her own feet since she was a child, she has built her own life, she would ornament any gathering, and her patriotism is rooted in a fierce, inclusive love for the country’s promise.
II
How about the caterer who is passing the drinks? I look at James with amused eyes. James is safe. James has worked for old-money families, considers the new populist elites tacky and unstable, and has a very good sense for “people of quality.” He serves the quiet editor with a friendly air of professional respect.
Sam, the college student helping serve tonight, is a product of public schools and works gigs like this to help pay his way through a state university, where he is studying computer science. He is a first-generation college student, though you’d never guess his background.
He gets straight A’s, thinks America is flawed but full of opportunity, and had a brief period of online leftism, but it was like the measles. He thinks the movement’s leaders are “grifters selling nostalgia for a past that never existed” and is baffled by their appeal. At this point, Sam shrugs and moves on with the tray.
Mr. G is a very intellectual young man who was once a prodigy. He has been concerned with abstract systems since adolescence and has one of those minds that can scintillatingly rationalize any position. I have known him for years and in that time have heard him enthusiastically explain libertarianism, socialism, neoreactionary thought, and everything else one can imagine.
Mr. G will never be a loyalist because he will never be anything but a critic of the critics. His brain operates apart from conviction. He will certainly be able, however, to explain and provide intellectual cover for the movement if it ever solidifies power. But Mr. G is always a “deviationist.”
When he engaged with socialism, he was a post-Marxist; when he talked of libertarianism, it was to suggest heterodox improvements. So we may be sure that Mr. G would be a MAGA ideologue with endless purse-lipped qualifications. He would certainly be dismissed by the core base as an unreliable egghead.
H is an historian and biographer. American of old stock, born and reared in the Midwest. He has been in love with the American experiment all his life. He can recite Thoreau and Whitman, and knows Jefferson’s and Madison’s writings inside out. He is a collector of early American art, lives in New England, and loathes performative politics. He has a ribald and earthy sense of humor, is unconventional, and values authenticity above all.
H has never doubted his own Americanness, but he defines it by its ideals, not its tribe. This is his country, and he knows its light and shadow. His secret conviction is that nobody who hasn’t wrestled with the full, contradictory text of American history can truly defend it in a crisis. He believes you must love the country enough to critique it.
But H is wrong in his exclusivity. There is one other person in the room who would fight alongside H for those ideals, and he is not even a native-born citizen. He is a young Venezuelan émigré whom I brought along.
The people in the room look at him rather askance because his politics are so fervent. He came from a wealthy family that lost everything to a corrupt, authoritarian regime. All his childhood friends back home became regime supporters—out of fear or opportunism. He escaped, pursued studies here, became a professor of political science, and is now a citizen.
He has devoured volumes of American history, believes in its foundational ideas with the passion of a convert, and is furious with Americans who take their democracy for granted or who toy with authoritarian shortcuts.
The people in the room think he is not a “real” American, but he understands the stakes of losing liberty better than almost any of them. He took a job once in a factory “to understand the real America.” He thinks his fellow citizens are wonderful but asleep. “Why don’t you see what is happening?” he wonders.
I grin bitterly to myself, thinking that in a real crisis, he might be viewed with suspicion, while Mr. B and Mr. G and Mrs. E would be rationalizing accommodation at all such parties as this one. “Of course I don’t like the rhetoric, but…”
Mr. J over there is a wealthy CEO. Mr. J is a very important man. He is immensely rich. He is intelligent and arrogant. He deplores “identity politics.” He believes the movement’s economic policies “should not be judged from the standpoint of its social rhetoric.” He thinks “business should be reserved on all political questions except taxes and regulation.” He considers Democrats “an enemy of enterprise.”
The saturnine Mr. C engages him in a flatteringly attentive conversation about deregulation. Mr. J agrees with Mr. C wholly. Mr. J is definitely attracted by Mr. C’s cold realism. He goes out of his way to get his card. “A very intelligent man,” he says later.
Mr. K contemplates the scene with sad humor. Mr. K is also successful, but in a different way. A writer from the South, he speaks with a drawl and knows America from a thousand angles. He inherited a family business, sold it, and now lives comfortably but modestly, observing the country.
He is a great friend of H, the historian. Like H, his roots are deep. He is quietly, deeply patriotic in a way that loves the land and the people, not just the flag. He is talking with the young Venezuelan. By and by, they are together—the New England historian, the Southern writer, the happy self-possessed woman, the Venezuelan émigré. They form a quiet circle of a different America.
Over on the other side are the others.
Mr. L has just come in. Mr. L is a lion these days. My hostess was thrilled to get him. L is a very powerful media personality. “My dear, he speaks for the heartland, but really he’s so sharp.”
L speaks for an imagined heartland and is just as fascinated by ratings and influence as my financier acquaintance Mr. B, and for the same reasons. L makes a fortune by channeling grievance, and has made a darned good thing for himself out of championing the “forgotten.” He has the highest ratings.
He agrees with the most powerful operators that it is the business of the strong to shape the narrative, and he has turned broadcasting into a compulsion engine for anger. L is one of the strongest natural-born amplifiers for the movement in this room. Mr. B regards him as a useful tool. Mr. B will fund his super PAC. L is already echoing the talking points of the think tanks B supports.
He has a cynic’s intelligence and an infallible instinct for the resonant fear. In private, he is all transactional calculation. No one has ever asked him about the civic cost of the division he merchandises.
III
It’s a macabre sort of fun, this parlor game of “Who Goes MAGA?” And it simplifies things—asking the question regarding specific personalities.
Kind, good, happy, secure, and internally integrated people never go for it. They may be the gentle philosopher, or Sam the state college student to whom this country still offers a ladder—you’ll never make authoritarians out of them.
But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the media tyrant, the social climber who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all align themselves with such a movement in a crisis.
Believe me, nice people—people with a core of decency that is stronger than their resentment or their fear—don’t go for it. Their party registration, their background, and their tax bracket are not the criterion. It is something in them.
Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they truly value—whether it is principle, or empathy, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern—are vulnerable.
Those who value belonging over truth, power over fairness, and vengeance over justice are susceptible. It’s an unsettling game. Try it at the next big party you go to.