MAGA Uses Words They Don’t Understand

There is a specific type of person who will tell you with complete confidence that socialism is destroying America but, cannot tell you what socialism is. Not in a vague, hand-wavy way. In a literal, recorded-on-camera, asked-four-times-and-still-couldn’t-answer way. This is not a failure of education or a failure of access to information. It is a measurable psychological phenomenon with decades of research behind it, and the explanation is less about politics than it is about personality. In 1990, psychologist Delroy Paulhus at the University of British Columbia developed what he called the Over-Claiming Questionnaire. The design was deceptively simple. Participants were given a long list of items across a range of knowledge domains and asked to rate how familiar they were with each one. Mixed into the list were items that did not exist. Fake names. Invented concepts. Events that never happened. The test was not measuring what people knew. It was measuring what people were willing to claim they knew, including things that were impossible to know because they were not real. The results were consistent across multiple studies conducted over the next two decades. Certain people reliably claimed familiarity with the fake items. They were not guessing randomly or hedging their guesses. They were stating, with confidence, that they were familiar with things that had been fabricated specifically to catch them. And when Paulhus examined which personality traits predicted this behavior, one trait stood above the rest. **Narcissism.** Not clinical narcissistic personality disorder in every case, but subclinical narcissistic traits as measured by standard personality instruments. This connection was significant and replicated across studies. **People who scored higher in narcissism were significantly more likely to claim knowledge they did not have.** The relationship held even when controlling for actual intelligence, meaning this was not simply a matter of smart people knowing more and occasionally overestimating. This was a personality-driven inflation of self-assessed knowledge that operated independently of how much someone actually knew. **Why Narcissistic People Overclaim** Understanding the mechanism behind overclaiming requires understanding what knowledge represents to a narcissistic person. For most people, not knowing something is a neutral event. It carries no emotional weight. You encounter a term you have never heard, you acknowledge the gap, and you either look it up or move on. The gap does not say anything about your value as a person. For someone with narcissistic traits, that same gap is experienced as a threat. Narcissistic self-esteem is not built on a stable internal foundation. It is built on the continuous external performance of competence, intelligence, and superiority. Every interaction is, on some level, an audition. And in that audition, not knowing something is not just uncomfortable. It is dangerous. Because if you do not know something, you are not the smartest person in the room. And if you are not the smartest person in the room, the entire self-image you have constructed begins to wobble. Paulhus and his colleague Peter Harms, in their 2004 follow-up research, found that overclaiming was specifically tied to what they called self-enhancement bias, a pattern of inflating one’s own qualities to maintain a favorable self-image. The overclaiming was not happening at a conscious, deliberate level for most participants. They were not strategically lying about what they knew. Their self-enhancement bias was operating automatically, filling in knowledge gaps before the person even registered them as gaps. The subjective experience, as far as the overclaimer was concerned, was not deception. It was genuine belief. They really did think they knew these things. Their personality would not let them feel otherwise. This is a critical distinction because it explains something that baffles many observers of political discourse. When that man on camera was asked to define socialism and clearly could not, the common assumption is that he was caught in a lie. But the research suggests something more unsettling. He may have genuinely believed he knew what socialism meant right up until the moment he was asked to produce the definition. The knowledge felt real to him. It was there in his head as a feeling of familiarity, a sense of confidence, a certainty that he understood this thing. What was not there was any actual content. The feeling of knowing had been generated by his narcissistic self-image. The knowledge itself had never been acquired. **What Happens at the Moment of Exposure** The most behaviorally interesting part of overclaiming is not the claim itself. It is what happens at the exact moment the overclaimer is forced to confront the fact that they do not actually know what they claimed to know. Paulhus’s research focused primarily on measuring the tendency to overclaim, not on documenting the behavioral response to exposure. But the broader narcissism literature, particularly the work of Brad Bushman at Ohio State University on narcissistic aggression, provides a clear and well-documented picture. In 2009, Bushman and his colleagues published research showing that narcissistic individuals respond to ego threats with significantly elevated levels of aggression compared to non-narcissistic individuals. The key finding was specificity. Narcissistic people did not show generally higher levels of aggression across all situations. They showed higher aggression specifically in response to ego threats, situations where their self-image was challenged or undermined. The aggression was not a personality baseline. It was a defense mechanism triggered by exposure. This maps precisely onto the behavior that plays out in political videos every day. A person confidently states a political position using terminology they cannot define. Someone asks them to define it. The request to define the term is, in psychological terms, an ego threat. It forces the narcissistic person into a situation where the only honest response, “I don’t know what that word means,” is the one response their personality structure cannot tolerate. So instead of answering, they escalate. They raise their voice. They talk over the person asking. They attack the question itself as stupid or irrelevant. They reframe their inability to answer as a choice not to answer, as if the question is beneath them. The line “I don’t need to go into big words or whatever” is a textbook example of what clinicians call narcissistic reframing. In one sentence, the speaker converts “I cannot answer your question” into “I am choosing not to answer your question because the question is beneath me.” The ignorance becomes a performance of toughness. The inability becomes a refusal. And the person asking the question is repositioned as the one with the problem. **The Political Scale of the Problem** Overclaiming as Paulhus studied it was an individual personality phenomenon measured in laboratory conditions. What American politics has produced over the past decade is something the research did not anticipate: a mass-scale version of the same behavior, reinforced by media ecosystems that reward confident assertion and punish nuance, curiosity, or the admission of uncertainty. The words that dominate conservative political rhetoric, socialism, communism, Marxism, fascism, critical race theory, are not being used as concepts with definitions. They are being used as sounds with emotional associations. The word “socialism” in a MAGA context does not refer to collective ownership of the means of production or any of the other definitional frameworks that political scientists would recognize. It refers to a feeling. The feeling is something like “the thing the bad people want.” That feeling was acquired through repetition in media, not through engagement with the concept. And because the feeling is real, the person experiencing it genuinely believes they understand the concept. They can feel that they understand it. They just cannot explain it. This is overclaiming at industrial scale. Millions of people walking around with confident feelings about terms they have never investigated, repeating those terms to each other in environments where everyone else is doing the same thing, and becoming aggressive when anyone from outside that environment asks them to slow down and say what the words actually mean. The aggression is not incidental. It is structural. It is the only available response when the entire political identity is built on terminology that has never been defined by the people using it. Paulhus’s original insight was that narcissism makes people claim knowledge they do not have. What the political environment has added is a community of shared overclaiming, where everyone is claiming the same unexamined knowledge, and the social pressure to maintain the claim is enormous. In that environment, the person who asks “what does that word mean” is not just threatening one person’s ego. They are threatening the collective agreement that nobody in the room needs to know what the words mean as long as everyone keeps saying them with confidence. The anger is the sound that agreement makes when someone breaks it. Sources: Paulhus, D. L. & Bruce, M. N. (1990). The Over-Claiming Questionnaire. Unpublished measure, University of British Columbia. Paulhus, D. L. & Harms, P. D. (2004). Measuring cognitive ability with the over-claiming technique. *Intelligence*, 32(3), 297-314. Paulhus, D. L., Harms, P. D., Bruce, M. N., & Lysy, D. C. (2003). The over-claiming technique: Measuring self-enhancement independent of ability. *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology*, 84(4), 890-904. Bushman, B. J. & Baumeister, R. F. (1998). Threatened egotism, narcissism, self-esteem, and direct and displaced aggression: Does self-love or self-hate lead to violence? *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology*, 75(1), 219-229. This is a public episode. 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