IdeaLog

The anthropology of MAGA

Posted on June 25, 2025

The MAGA worldview isn’t just political—it’s emotional, symbolic, and tribal. If we want to defend democracy, we need to understand what we’re really up against.

That is a direct quote from “Understanding MAGA: A Worldview, Not a Wedge Issue,” by anthropologist James B. Greenberg. There is an excellent and somewhat overwhelming series of essays by Professor Greenberg on Substack here and on Facebook here.

He explains:

Many Americans today are struggling to make sense of the worldview that animates MAGA Republicans—not just their votes, but the lens through which they interpret nearly everything. What may look like a tangle of contradictions—demanding liberty while restricting rights, preaching patriotism while threatening democracy, claiming victimhood while wielding power—often forms a coherent narrative of betrayal, loss, and promised redemption. It names culprits, offers meaning, and vows to reverse decline.

At the heart of this worldview lies a potent story: America has been stolen. Not by a foreign enemy, but from within—by liberal elites, immigrants, globalists, and bureaucrats who, in this account, hijacked the nation from its rightful stewards. What’s being “taken” isn’t just institutional power, but a deeper sense of racial, cultural, and gendered entitlement—whiteness as default, masculinity as order, Christianity as moral compass. This is more than nostalgia for a mythic past. It’s a political theology of grievance that explains empty towns, shattered livelihoods, and the loss of social status—and then offers a redeemer.

What emerges isn’t an ideology in the traditional sense, but a political cosmology—a system of belief that organizes identity, resentment, and belonging. Institutions are reimagined as enemies. Schools become battlegrounds. Journalists are cast as propagandists. Even science is suspect—not for its method, but for its authority. Belief overrides evidence, and contradictions confirm, rather than disprove, the scale of the conspiracy. This isn’t just distrust—it’s epistemic secession, made possible by an ecosystem of media and messaging designed to replace inquiry with affirmation.

There’s a lot more that you can and should read for yourself.

In order to fight MAGA, we have to understand it. And yet, while this series of essays explains what individuals should do when talking to MAGA followers, it does not explain what to do politically.

We need to win the 2025 elections, especially Virginia, and we need to win back the U.S. House in 2026. We are not going to win back MAGA followers by then, but we can beat them at the margins by turning out our voters and swinging to our side a narrow band of low-information persuadables.

The best we can take from Professor Greenberg, in the short term, is some negative advice. We cannot persuade MAGA voters with facts and figures because they’re voting on identity, not policy. We can persuade MAGA voters with values, but it is a long, difficult and uncertain process. Our best chance in the short term is with people who don’t have a strong emotional connection with MAGA, the ones who were persuaded to vote for Trump or stay away from the polls based solely on disinformation. But that’s millions of Americans.