It increasingly appears to be the case that some MAGA Republicans desire to replace American democracy with autocracy. President Joe Biden’s “Soul of America” speech forcefully called them out. Those individuals notwithstanding, around the rest of the MAGA world and in many other Republican circles, reactions to Biden’s speech have been predictably angry. These responses hinder if not shut down the serious bipartisan discussion about the future of democracy Biden was inviting Americans to join.
While some political commentators hoped Biden would approach the rising crisis in a less assertive way, he did take great pains to differentiate Republicans in general from the extremist MAGA crowd. Still, mainstream Republicans claim they heard Biden indict all Republicans. They know Biden wasn’t targeting establishment Republicans, and their umbrage is mostly fake. They made a calculated but dangerous political decision: By expressing faux disdain about Biden’s speech, these Republicans believe they can maintain their standing with their MAGA base even though, in private, most of them reject autocracy while recognizing the dangers of the anti-democratic forces Biden decried.
These Republicans’ outrage was partisan in nature and, in terms of protecting democracy, unhelpful.
Meanwhile, the reaction of many MAGA members, who consider themselves loyal, patriotic, Christian Americans, is mainly psychological and identity-based. Likely, it is a function of the dissonance they experience when their perceptions of themselves clash with former President Donald Trump’s disloyal, undemocratic and un-Christian behavior and with their own efforts to defend him. Biden revealed this contradiction in his speech, thus evoking moral outrage.
MAGA followers rationalize away the dissonance when they selectively expose themselves to only self-confirming information, indignantly impugn sources of information such as the Biden administration or anyone who doesn’t adore Trump, convince themselves that democracy no longer serves their interests and so alternative anti-democratic measures must be taken, or that Trump’s failings are not on a par with the threats posed by Democrats.
These rationalizations are easier than challenging core MAGA beliefs, which would be required in any objective evaluation of Trump and MAGA beliefs about him. An objective assessment such as this, and of the sort Biden has touted, risks the possibility that MAGA supporters will come to see themselves as acting in ways that threaten democracy, therefore threatening their self-identity, intensifying dissonance and triggering the rationalizations.
The terrible irony is that these rationalizations, which protect the MAGA identity, only perpetuate some of the very hostile behaviors Biden denounced and threaten to undermine the political order MAGA supporters claim to be upholding. For example, at the Jan. 6 insurrection, many MAGA members rationalized their violence against democratically elected officials and the Capitol Police there to protect them by claiming MAGA violence was patriotic.
At a more recent MAGA rally in Pennsylvania after Biden’s speech, participants taunted the president with cruel and hate-filled vitriol. Over time, such behavior has done untold harm to our democracy — in the first case, by engaging in political violence and in the second, by coarsening the way in which shared problems are democratically resolved.
More generally, MAGA followers claim to have had their feelings hurt by what they deem is Biden’s harsh and critical assessment of the violent, vicious and polarizing behaviors in which they were and have been so eagerly engaged. While most Americans reasonably wonder how supposedly peaceable, democratic and Christian fellow Americans can behave this way, the rationalizations of MAGA followers protect them from the dissonance such hypocrisy normally causes.
What can be done to alter these nonrational belief systems? It is unlikely any public speech delivered by Biden or other political leaders will change the core beliefs of MAGA members. For some, even a public confession by Trump would probably be rationalized: “The deep state forced him to admit to things he did not do” or “The things he did, he did for us.”
Moreover, given the complex intermingling of belief systems and self-identity, changing core beliefs so they are more in accord with what most other reasonable Americans believe about Trump can be achieved only through a long-term process of cognitive restructuring.
Since MAGA members are likely to see such cognitive therapy and all other interventions as threats to their core beliefs and to their personal identities, expecting these individuals to change is mostly wishful thinking.
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ABOUT THE WRITERS
Richard Cherwitz is an emeritus Ernest A. Sharpe Centennial professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication and founding director of the university’s Intellectual Entrepreneurship Consortium. Kenneth Zagacki is a communication professor at North Carolina State University and was a doctoral advisee of Cherwitz.
