Why MAGA is Filled With Really Lonely People

In February 2025, researchers at the University of Amsterdam published a study in Social Science & Medicine that should have rewritten every conversation about why people join the far right. They tracked over 40,000 people across nine countries, with data spanning fifteen years. They controlled for income, education, immigration attitudes, and political ideology. They wanted to know what actually predicts whether someone will support the populist radical right.

The answer wasn’t immigration. It wasn’t economics. It wasn’t religion.

It was loneliness.

Lonelier individuals were consistently more likely to support radical right movements, with the association holding across all fifteen years of Dutch data and appearing across multiple European countries. The researchers noted that the effect sizes were comparable to the known health correlates of loneliness, meaning that the connection between loneliness and far-right support was statistically as meaningful as the connection between loneliness and heart disease, high blood pressure, and depression.

A 2021 RAND Corporation study of former extremists and their families confirmed this from the other direction. Half of the former extremists surveyed said feelings of marginalization drove them toward radicalization, with most citing isolation and loneliness specifically. Individuals reported that the social benefits of joining extremist organizations, the friendship, the camaraderie, the sense of finally belonging somewhere, were among the most powerful forces keeping them in.

These people didn’t join a movement because they were convinced by policy arguments. They joined because someone finally made them feel like they weren’t alone. And that tells us more about what MAGA actually is than any analysis of tariffs or border policy ever could.

The factory that produces lonely men.

The script that accompanies this piece makes a claim that deserves a deeper examination: conservative culture is to blame for the loneliness epidemic in its own base. The research supports this more directly than most people realize.

Ron Levant, a former president of the American Psychological Association, spent decades studying how traditional masculine socialization affects emotional functioning in men. His research, conducted across multiple studies and institutions, identified a pattern he called normative male alexithymia. Alexithymia is the clinical term for difficulty identifying and describing one’s own emotions. Levant’s argument was that traditional masculine socialization doesn’t just discourage men from expressing emotions. It actively degrades their ability to recognize what they’re feeling in the first place.

In a 2014 study published in Psychology of Men and Masculinity, Levant and his colleagues demonstrated that the mechanism behind normative male alexithymia is suppression, not repression or dissociation. This distinction matters. Repression and dissociation are unconscious. Suppression is conscious. These men are actively, deliberately pushing their emotions down because they have been taught that feeling them is weakness. And the research showed that men who scored highest on masculine norm conformity showed the greatest deficits in processing emotions related to vulnerability and attachment, which are the exact emotions required to build and maintain close relationships.

A 2025 study published in Sex Roles extended this model further, testing 740 men across the United States and United Kingdom. The researchers found that three specific masculine norms were most strongly associated with emotional dysfunction: emotional control, self-reliance, and primacy of work. These norms predicted higher alexithymia, which predicted greater difficulty regulating emotions, which predicted higher rates of depression and anxiety. The pathway was sequential and measurable. Traditional masculinity teaches emotional suppression. Emotional suppression produces alexithymia. Alexithymia produces emotional dysregulation. Emotional dysregulation produces misery.

And critically, 2024 research highlighted that conforming to traditional masculine norms increases men’s vulnerability to loneliness and social disconnection. The pipeline isn’t theoretical. It’s empirical. Conservative culture teaches men to suppress. Suppression degrades their ability to connect. The inability to connect produces loneliness. And loneliness, as the Amsterdam researchers showed, is one of the strongest predictors of far-right radicalization.

Conservative culture doesn’t just fail to prevent loneliness in men. It manufactures it.

What loneliness actually does to the brain.

To understand why lonely people are vulnerable to movements like MAGA, you have to understand what loneliness does neurologically. The Amsterdam researchers theorized that loneliness has a physiologically dysregulating impact on the nervous system that facilitates greater susceptibility to radical right parties. That’s academic language for something much simpler and much worse.

Chronic loneliness puts the nervous system into a state of persistent threat detection. The brain of a chronically lonely person is scanning for danger at all times. It processes neutral social information as potentially hostile. It interprets ambiguity as threat. It experiences the world as fundamentally unsafe.

This is not a character flaw. It’s a neurological response to prolonged social isolation. The brain adapts to isolation the same way it adapts to any chronic stressor: by becoming hypervigilant. And a hypervigilant brain is exactly the kind of brain that is receptive to a political message built on threat. They’re coming for your jobs. They’re replacing you. They want to destroy your way of life. The enemies are everywhere.

A person with healthy social connections hears that message