Trump Supporters Have Rage and Think It's Righteousness

There is something you notice if you watch MAGA long enough.The anger never stops.It does not matter what the issue is. Immigration. Elections. Schools. Drag shows. Grocery prices. The anger is always there, always at the same intensity, always looking for a new target.And it never gets resolved.Because it was never about any of those things.The ResearchPsychologists Zachary Rothschild at Bowdoin College and Lucas Keefer at the University of Southern Mississippi spent years studying moral outrage.What they found contradicted the conventional wisdom.Most people assume that when someone expresses outrage about a moral issue they genuinely care about that issue. That the anger is connected to the injustice. That if the injustice were resolved the anger would go away.Rothschild and Keefer found that is often not what is happening at all.They found that outrage is frequently self-serving. That people express rage at external targets not because they are motivated by justice but because the rage temporarily relieves their own feelings of guilt and shame.They called this defensive outrage.The mechanism works like this. When a person feels guilty about something, that guilt creates a direct threat to their sense of being a moral person. Rather than dealing with the source of the guilt, they redirect the feeling outward. They find something or someone to be outraged about. And in that moment of outrage, the guilt temporarily lifts. They feel righteous instead of ashamed. They feel like they are on the right side of something.The anger is real.The righteousness is not.What They Are Actually Guilty AboutHere is the part that gets uncomfortable.MAGA supporters are not, for the most part, bad people who woke up one day and decided to hate immigrants or scream at school board meetings.Most of them are people whose lives did not turn out the way they expected.Their job got automated. Their town got left behind. Their kids moved to a city and stopped calling. Their wages stagnated while everything got more expensive. The status they thought was coming never arrived.They feel like losers. And feeling like a loser creates guilt and shame that is almost impossible to sit with. Because admitting your life did not turn out the way you planned means confronting the possibility that you had something to do with it.That is an unbearable thought for most people.So instead of looking inward, they look outward.And they find a target.Immigrants took their jobs. Liberals destroyed their culture. The elites rigged the system against them. The targets change but the rage stays exactly the same because the rage was never about the targets. It was about the guilt underneath them.What Trump Did With ThisTrump did not create this dynamic. Rothschild and Keefer’s research predates his political career. Defensive outrage is a documented feature of human psychology that has existed as long as guilt has.What Trump did was recognize it and weaponize it at a scale no American politician had attempted before.He understood that his base did not need solutions. They needed targets. He understood that the rage felt good, that it felt righteous, that it gave people who felt invisible and worthless a sense of power and moral standing.So he gave them an endless supply of enemies.Immigrants. Muslims. Black Lives Matter. Antifa. The deep state. The media. The Democrats. The globalists. The elites. The groomers. The woke.The list never ends because it was never meant to end. An endless supply of targets means an endless supply of outrage. And an endless supply of outrage means his base never has to stop and look at their own lives.That is not leadership.That is exploitation.Why This MattersUnderstanding defensive outrage does not mean excusing the behavior it produces.MAGA supporters have supported a man who tried to overthrow the government, called for violence at his rallies, and spent a decade pointing them at new targets so they never have to look at themselves.They chose to follow him. That choice has consequences and costs and it should.But understanding why they are so rage filled matters because it tells you something important.The rage will not stop when Trump is gone.It will find a new target. Because the guilt underneath it is still there. The lives that did not turn out the way they expected are still there. The shame is still there.Trump did not create broken people.He just found them.And handed them someone to blame.SourcesRothschild, Z.K., & Keefer, L.A. (2017). A cleansing fire: Moral outrage alleviates guilt and buffers threats to one’s moral identity. Motivation and Emotion, 41(2), 209–229.Rothschild, Z.K., & Keefer, L.A. (2018). Righteous or self-righteous anger? Justice sensitivity moderates defensive outrage at a third-party harm-doer. European Journal of Social Psychology, 48(4), 507–522. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe