Someone Has to Carry What the In-Group Cannot Bear to Feel

The psychology behind MAGA and how authoritarian movements export their distress

Photo by Miguel Ángel Sanz on Unsplash

The easy explanation is that people inside authoritarian movements must be uniquely cruel, uniquely immoral, or somehow beyond ordinary comprehension. That explanation is too comfortable. It lets the rest of us off the hook, and it obscures the more unsettling truth.

Many people drawn to movements like MAGA or Moms for Liberty do not experience themselves as abandoning morality. They experience themselves as defending something precious. Safety. Children. Order. Decency. Community. Innocence. They do not feel value-less. They feel morally righteous.

That is the thing that is genuinely hard to sit with. The question is not simply how people can participate in harm. It is how they can do so while still feeling good about themselves.

The problem is rarely the absence of morality. It is that morality can be reorganized — quietly, gradually — into a framework where harm gets recoded as virtue.

Authoritarian movements do not merely justify harm. They invert it. The group wielding power comes to experience itself as embattled. The group being targeted is recast as dangerous, manipulative, invasive, or oppressive. In that inversion, punishment feels like protection, domination feels like self-defense, and the perpetrator can continue to experience themselves as the victim.

What one person sees as exclusion, another sees as protection. What one person sees as censorship, another sees as safeguarding. What one person sees as cruelty, another sees as the courage to do what is necessary. Even the roles of victim and perpetrator begin to invert. The person imposing harm experiences themselves as under siege. The person being harmed is recast as the real threat. The moral map has not disappeared. It has been redrawn.

This is why condemnation from the outside so often fails to land. If a movement has become the place where people locate their goodness, criticism is not received as critique. It is received as an attack on their integrity. The hero of this story depends entirely on which side of it you’re standing on.

Authoritarian movements do not become powerful merely by spreading ideas. They become powerful because they meet emotional and psychological needs in ways that feel immediate, stabilizing, and deeply relieving.

They offer clarity where there is confusion. Belonging where there is alienation. Certainty where there is complexity. They offer an identity people can step into and a script that tells them who is good, who is dangerous, and what must be defended.

For people who feel overwhelmed, humiliated, displaced, or unmoored, that is enormous. The movement reduces the world to something legible. It transforms diffuse anxiety into concrete threat. It tells people that their discomfort has a cause, that their fear has an object, and that their side has a mission.

The simplicity is not accidental. It is part of the seduction.

That is what makes these movements adhesive. They do not function only as a political force. They function as a home.

Once the movement becomes the place where a person finds belonging, orientation, and reassurance, dissent stops feeling like intellectual disagreement and becomes exile.

That exile can feel enormous. To question the movement may mean risking community, identity, coherence, status, and innocence all at once. It can mean becoming unintelligible to the people who once made your world feel solid. Losing not just your social place, but your moral place.

And that is where something more serious happens. Morality itself begins to be outsourced.

Instead of wrestling inwardly with whether something is right, a person begins to rely on the group to determine what goodness is. If the group says this is protection, it must be protection. If the group says these people are dangerous, they must be dangerous. If the group says dissent is betrayal, then doubt itself begins to feel shameful.

What disappears is not morality. It is moral authorship. The burden of ethical discernment is handed upward and outward. That surrender can feel like relief — it removes ambiguity, it simplifies the world — but it also means a person can slowly lose access to their own judgment while still feeling deeply, even fiercely, moral.

This is also why new information so often fails to reach people.

We tend to assume that if the evidence is strong enough, belief will follow. But when belief is fused with belonging, identity, innocence, and psychological shelter, contradictory information does not arrive as neutral data. It arrives as a threat.

To truly absorb it might mean admitting harm, grieving a false innocence, reinterpreting years of one’s own actions, and risking expulsion from the community that has provided meaning and coherence.

That does not feel like a simple correction. It feels like annihilation.

So people defend harder. They rationalize. They reinterpret. They double down. Not always because they are stupid or malicious, but because the cost of updating is existential. The movement is no longer what they believe. It has become part of who they are.

The fact that insiders do not experience themselves as harmful does not make the harm disappear. It simply relocates it.

Discomfort tends to trickle downward. The group preserves its internal coherence by displacing anxiety, contradiction, shame, and aggression onto whoever is least protected. The outsider carries what the insider cannot bear to feel.

That outsider might be a dissenter, a minority, a queer child, a teacher, an immigrant, a whistleblower, a parent who refuses the script — anyone cast as the destabilizing element. Their suffering serves a function. It keeps the in-group feeling coherent, innocent, and safe.

The distress does not disappear. It gets exported. The insider remains emotionally regulated because the outsider absorbs the cost.

This is the hardest part, because it unsettles the fantasy that authoritarianism belongs only to bad people somewhere else.

No society is immune. Not because every society harbors hidden cruelty, but because every society is made of people with ordinary needs and ordinary vulnerabilities. Good people make these movements. Loving people. Principled people. Frightened people. People who want to protect their children and feel safe and belong somewhere and stop carrying so much ambiguity alone.

Authoritarianism is not an alien force that descends on the inhuman. It is a recurring human possibility. It emerges wherever basic needs — for safety, for certainty, for belonging, for moral clarity — get met through hierarchy, fear, exclusion, and surrendered responsibility.

The danger is not that people stop being human. The danger is that something deeply human becomes available for capture.

If we want to understand why people become entrenched in these movements, we have to stop asking only how they can be so blind. The more difficult question is what the movement is giving them that they do not know how to live without.

Because that is often where the entrenchment lives. Not in evil. Not in some cartoon absence of conscience. But in the deeply human longing to feel safe, good, certain, and held.

The tragedy is not that these needs exist. The tragedy is how easily they can be organized into systems where harm feels moral, where dissent feels like exile, and where the suffering of outsiders becomes the price of keeping insiders comfortable.

That is why these movements feel like home.

And that is why they are so dangerous.

Megan M. American Horse is a compliance-driven product and systems strategist, writer, and analyst whose work explores coercive control, institutional harm, power, and the hidden structures that shape human behavior.