MAGA is a Support Group for Weak People

There is a pattern that shows up in the research on authoritarianism that almost nobody talks about publicly. Not because it is hidden. Because it is uncomfortable. The people who fill megachurches on Sundays and the people who fill MAGA rallies on weeknights are, in disproportionate numbers, the same people. Not metaphorically. Psychometrically. They score the same on the same instruments, hold the same cluster of personality traits, and respond to the same structural incentives. Both institutions offer the same product, packaged differently but functionally identical: status and power distributed on the basis of loyalty, not competence. What Altemeyer Actually Measured Bob Altemeyer was a social psychologist at the University of Manitoba who spent his entire career studying a single question: what kind of person submits to authoritarian leaders, and why? In 1981, he published *Right-Wing Authoritarianism*, introducing the RWA scale, a psychometric instrument that measures three interlocking traits. He called them the Big Three. The first is authoritarian submission. This is not ordinary respect for authority. It is a blanket willingness to defer to whoever the individual perceives as a legitimate authority, and to accept their claims without scrutiny, even when those claims conflict with observable reality. High scorers on this trait will tell you that people should obey authority in virtually all circumstances. When given moral dilemmas, they default to “the law is the law” regardless of the situation. They do not evaluate whether an authority figure is competent, honest, or acting in good faith. They evaluate whether that figure occupies a position they recognize as legitimate. If so, they comply. The second is authoritarian aggression. This is a willingness to punish, condemn, or attack people that the authority figure has identified as threats or deviants. The aggression is not indiscriminate. It is directed. High scorers do not attack people in general. They attack whoever the leader points at. And they do so with a sense of moral righteousness, because the leader has told them the target deserves it. Altemeyer noted that authoritarian followers prefer to aggress when the odds are heavily in their favor. They are not courageous. They attack in groups, when they have numbers, or when they have institutional backing. They avoid anything approaching a fair fight. The third is conventionalism. This is an intense attachment to traditional social norms and a hostility toward anyone perceived as violating them. High scorers want everyone to live the way they live. They view deviation from their norms not as difference but as moral failure. They see the world in categories of “normal” and “deviant,” and they want deviance punished. These three traits form a self-reinforcing loop. You submit to the authority. You attack whoever the authority tells you to attack. And you demand that everyone conform to the norms the authority endorses. Submission fuels aggression. Aggression enforces conventionalism. Conventionalism justifies submission. Altemeyer tested this cluster across thousands of subjects over four decades. His results were remarkably stable. The personality profile he identified in the early 1980s predicted the same behaviors in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. It predicted support for punitive policing, opposition to civil rights, endorsement of government surveillance, hostility toward immigrants, and consistent support for leaders who promised order through dominance. He published updated findings in 1988, 1996, and again in his free online book *The Authoritarians* in 2006. And then, with John Dean, in *Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers* in 2020, he applied his scale directly to the MAGA movement and found exactly what his data had been predicting for four decades. The Dominators and the Followers Altemeyer’s framework has two halves, and most people only know the first. The authoritarian followers are the base. They are the submissive crowd. They want someone above them telling them what to do and someone below them to punish. They score high on the RWA scale. But Altemeyer also studied the leaders. He called them social dominators. These are the people who want to be submitted to. They score high on a different instrument, the Social Dominance Orientation scale, originally developed by Felicia Pratto and Jim Sidanius. Social dominators are characterized by a desire for personal power, a willingness to manipulate and deceive, low empathy, and opposition to equality. They see the world as a hierarchy and they want to be at the top. The two types need each other. Social dominators need a compliant base that will follow instructions without asking questions. Authoritarian followers need a leader who will tell them who to blame and who to punish. The relationship is parasitic but stable. The leader lies. The followers believe. The leader points. The followers attack. Neither side examines the arrangement because both sides are getting what they need. Then there are the Double Highs. These are the rare individuals who score high on both scales. They possess the cold, calculating ambition of the social dominator and the aggressive, punitive conventionalism of the authoritarian follower. In Altemeyer’s own words, they are the most dangerous people his research has identified. In simulation exercises with university students, Double Highs seized control of their groups, engaged in nuclear blackmail, made themselves wealthy through deception, and allowed billions of simulated people to die. Altemeyer repeatedly compared the personality profile of Double Highs to historical fascist leaders. The MAGA movement is a textbook instance of this dynamic. The leader is a social dominator. The base is composed overwhelmingly of authoritarian followers. And the movement produces Double Highs at every level of its hierarchy, from Congress to county commissions to school boards, people who combine the leader’s willingness to lie with the follower’s willingness to punish. The Megachurch Pipeline One of Altemeyer’s most consistent findings, repeated across decades of data, is the overlap between religious fundamentalism and right-wing authoritarianism. It is not a subtle correlation. It is one of the strongest relationships in his entire body of work. Religious fundamentalists consistently scored the highest on the RWA scale. Higher than political conservatives who were not religious. Higher than regular churchgoers who attended mainline denominations. The fundamentalist believer, the one who holds that there is one literal truth and their leader has access to it, is the person Altemeyer’s instrument was practically designed to detect. The structure of fundamentalist religion rewards and reinforces every trait Altemeyer spent 40 years measuring. You submit to the pastor. You enforce the congregation’s norms. You punish or exclude anyone who deviates. The institution does not require you to think independently, question authority, or tolerate difference. It requires you to obey, conform, and police. The megachurch model amplifies this. A megachurch is not a community in the traditional sense. It is a hierarchy that distributes titles, access, and social status based on loyalty. A 22-year-old with no degree, no training, and no credentials can become a youth pastor because they showed up, pledged allegiance, and told the senior pastor what he wanted to hear. They get a title. They get a microphone. They get unsupervised access to other people’s children. Not because they demonstrated competence or character, but because they demonstrated loyalty. The pattern of abuse that has come out of these institutions is what happens when you hand power to people based on obedience instead of qualification. Altemeyer’s research explains why. The same personality that craves external authority and punishes deviance is the same personality that, when given power, uses it to control and exploit rather than serve. The submission was never about humility. It was about finding a system that would hand them status they could not earn on their own. MAGA operates on the same model. You don’t need credentials. You don’t need expertise. You don’t need a track record of service or accomplishment. You need to wear the hat, say the words, and attack whoever the leader attacks. In return, you get to feel like you matter. You get to feel like you are part of something powerful. You get to look down on immigrants, on educated people, on anyone who represents the world that made you feel small. The movement hands you moral authority over millions of people and asks nothing in return except loyalty. What Happens When Power Is Given, Not Earned Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at UC Berkeley, has spent over 20 years studying what happens to people when they are given power. His research, compiled in *The Power Paradox*, documents a consistent pattern. When people gain power through prosocial behavior, through empathy, generosity, and competence, they tend to lose the very traits that earned them that power. They become less empathetic, less attentive to others, more impulsive, and more likely to act in their own self-interest. Keltner’s lab calls this the Cookie Monster effect. Give someone power, even randomly, and they start taking more than their share. If earned power produces this effect, unearned power accelerates it. When a person is handed authority they did not build, they skip the phase where empathy and competence are required. They go straight to the entitlement. There is no reservoir of prosocial behavior to draw down. There is only the title and the permission it grants. This is what the MAGA voter is doing when they tell an immigrant to go home. They have no power in their actual lives. They did not build anything. They did not earn the authority to decide who belongs in this country and who does not. But the movement handed them that authority for free, and they are using it the way Keltner’s research predicts. Not to help. Not to build. To punish. The born-again Christian lecturing strangers about morality while cheating on his wife. The small-town council member who failed out of school and now votes to ban books. The rally attendee screaming about law and order while wearing a shirt that celebrates January 6th. None of these people earned the moral authority they are exercising. It was given to them by a system that requires nothing but allegiance. The Architecture Altemeyer didn’t use the word “weak.” But his data describes a personality profile that cannot function without external structure. Authoritarian followers do not generate their own values, their own identity, or their own sense of purpose. They adopt whatever the authority provides. They do not evaluate claims on their merits. They evaluate claims on their source. If the leader said it, it is true. If the leader changed his position, the new position is true. The old position is forgotten. Not because the follower is lying. Because the follower’s beliefs are not internally generated. They are downloaded from above and can be overwritten at any time. This is what Altemeyer measured for 40 years. Not stupidity. Dependency. A psychological architecture in which the self is incomplete without an authority to submit to and an enemy to attack. Take away the leader and the enemy, and what remains is not a person with independent convictions. What remains is a person looking for the next leader and the next enemy. The megachurch provides the structure. MAGA provides the structure. The structure is always the same. Someone at the top who tells you what is true. Someone at the bottom for you to punish. And a title, a hat, a badge, or a bumper sticker that tells the world you belong to something bigger than the life you actually built. It was never a political philosophy or a policy agenda or a vision for the country. It was a support group for people who need someone to tell them they matter, because they have not found a way to show it on their own. **Sources** Robert Altemeyer, *Right-Wing Authoritarianism* (University of Manitoba Press, 1981) Robert Altemeyer, *Enemies of Freedom: Understanding Right-Wing Authoritarianism* (Jossey-Bass, 1988) Robert Altemeyer, *The Authoritarian Specter* (Harvard University Press, 1996) Robert Altemeyer, *The Authoritarians* (self-published, 2006) Bob Altemeyer and John Dean, *Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers* (Melville House, 2020) Felicia Pratto, Jim Sidanius, Lisa Stallworth, and Bertram Malle, “Social Dominance Orientation: A Personality Variable Predicting Social and Political Attitudes,” *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology*, Vol. 67, No. 4 (1994) Dacher Keltner, *The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence* (Penguin Press, 2016) Robert Altemeyer and Bruce Hunsberger, “Authoritarianism, Religious Fundamentalism, Quest, and Prejudice,” *The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion*, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1992) Bruce Hunsberger, “Religion and Prejudice: The Role of Religious Fundamentalism, Quest, and Right-Wing Authoritarianism,” *Journal of Social Issues*, Vol. 51, No. 2 (1995) This is a public episode. 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