After 2016, America fell in love with a comforting idea that we could heal our divisions through psychology. Studies proved deep conversations change minds. Researchers found self-affirmation exercises that reduced partisan animosity. Books promised scripts for thanksgiving dinner with your racist uncle. If MAGA was psychological, we could fix it with psychological tools. No messy structural reforms needed. Just the right workshop, the right app, and watch the fever break.
There's just one problem. It's not working. And the research itself tells us why it never could have worked.
For many MAGA supporters, their political identity makes perfect sense given what they're being told is happening. A white worker whose factory closed 20 years ago is told it just moved to Mexico yesterday. A religious conservative who still sees 'In God We Trust' on every dollar bill is told Christians are under attack.
MAGA identity provides something that no amount of fact-checking can replace. It offers community in atomized towns, meaning in economically devastated regions, pride for people who feel disdained, power for those who feel powerless, and simple enemies to explain complex problems.
The enemies are always shifting but still specific enough to hate, whether it's migrants taking jobs that don't exist, trans people threatening children who were never in danger, cities burning that never burned, elections being stolen that weren't stolen.
Psychology papers frame this as "identity-protective cognition" as if it's a bug in human reasoning. But protecting one's identity and status is a feature, not a bug. MAGA emerges not from bad thinking but because it offers its adherents something they value more than factual accuracy: a story where they're the heroes and their failures are someone else's fault.
Once you understand what MAGA provides, the failure of psychological interventions becomes obvious. Consider deep canvassing, the most celebrated depolarization success story. In 2016, researchers Broockman and Kalla showed that a 10-minute conversation could create lasting change in attitudes about transgender people. The intervention was remarkably effective at the individual level. But with 74 million Trump voters in 2024, and assuming generously that one in five conversations changes a mind, you'd need 61.7 million hours of conversations. With 10,000 full-time canvassers, that's three years of doing nothing else.
There's another problem that doesn't make it into the headlines. Every successful intervention study relies on volunteers. The people who show up to dialogue workshops are, by definition, people open to dialogue. They're not MAGA true believers. The people who most need to be reached are sharing QAnon theories on Facebook, listening to Steve Bannon six hours a day, or organizing militias. They aren't signing up for university studies on reducing prejudice.
Even when interventions work, participants return to a media ecosystem designed to undo any progress. Fox News pushes replacement theory in primetime while talk radio hosts call Democrats satanic pedophiles. YouTube algorithms lead viewers from Joe Rogan to Alex Jones. Trump's Truth Social posts maintain an alternate reality.
One study found that Fox News viewing alone accounts for a significant portion of partisan gap growth. This ecosystem wasn't built overnight and won't be dismantled by workshop conversations.
Contact theory, one of psychology's most robust findings, tells us that interaction reduces prejudice. But it requires actual contact, and MAGA America has sorted itself geographically, and online, in ways that make contact increasingly impossible. Eighty percent of counties were landslides in 2024. The reddest counties have gotten redder since 2020. MAGA believers increasingly cluster in spaces where they're the overwhelming majority. Online spaces are even more segregated than the physical ones.
Meanwhile, too many powerful institutions profit from MAGA's continuation. Fox News has lost viewers when moderated. Republican politicians would lose primaries if they challenged Trump. Grifters from Mike Lindell to random YouTube channels make millions from the movement. Social media platforms thrive on controversy. The entire ecosystem depends on keeping the base activated and angry.
There's no profit in deradicalization.
Even if we could overcome all these obstacles, the structural barriers remain. Primaries reward extremism, gerrymandered districts protect radicals, the Senate amplifies rural power, and extremist lifetime judicial appointments are now locked in for a generation.
What the psychological research actually says about de-MAGA-fying America comes down to a few hard truths. Individual minds can be changed, but only through intensive, personalized intervention that doesn't scale. Specific beliefs can be corrected, but identity remains intact. Contact reduces prejudice, but MAGA Americans have engineered their lives to prevent contact. Media literacy helps, but not enough to overcome an entire alternate information ecosystem. Some people leave the movement, usually due to personal experiences, not interventions.
Some want to treat MAGA as a cognitive error that just requires the right messaging. But history suggests it’s a symptom of deeper structural conflicts that can't only be legislated away.
At this point, it's worth acknowledging that we aren't just dealing with the indoctrinated; we're also dealing with the indoctrinators.
At the top are the string-pullers who are actually evil. Tucker Carlson's texts showed he knows it’s all lies when he spouts hateful rhetoric. Stephen Miller clearly has deep hatred in him. Christopher Rufo manufactured the CRT panic on purpose. These are monsters, not misguided citizens.
Below them are the complicit propagators who pick up the dog whistles and amplify them. These are the influencers who are in on the joke, pastors weaponizing faith for profit, local politicians lying about schools for power. They generally also consciously chose to be evil.
Then the fighters and true believers: Proud Boys, January 6th rioters, people threatening school boards. They've graduated from victims to perpetrators and seem to enjoy themselves.
Finally, the regular indoctrinated folks. These include the wife going along with her husband, the rural worker whose whole community is MAGA so he assumes it's reality, kids being marched through Trump rallies singing about gay people burning in hell, and the isolated grandma’s on Facebook.
We need to stop looking at lab studies and start looking at history. How did fascism actually fall in Spain, Portugal, and Greece? What happened to Nazi supporters after 1945? How did the Confederacy lose militarily but win culturally for a century, and what does that tell us about MAGA's potential persistence regardless of electoral defeats? What can we learn from Modi's India, Erdogan's Turkey, and Orban's Hungary about what partial MAGA victory looks like? How did the New Deal actually defuse American fascism in the 1930s through material change rather than attitude adjustment?
The psychology research tells us how to change individual minds when we need to know how to defeat movements.
There's no therapeutic intervention for MAGA.
If you found this analysis valuable, please subscribe for more evidence-based examinations of our political moment. While this piece explores why psychological approaches can't scale to address MAGA, my previous articles tackle what might actually work: building parallel institutions, protecting democratic infrastructure at the local level, and creating economic alternatives to the grievance economy. There are plenty of available strategies grounded in historical precedent rather than wishful thinking. The path forward will be found in understanding how movements actually win, lose, and endure.
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"There's no profit in deradicalization." That's it right there. Money. The leaders of the MAGA movement make buckets of money off of keeping their people angry and feeling victimized. They'll never stop as long as it's profitable.
They need to feel the consequences if the fever is going to break. Let the red states fail.