Why MAGA Loves Stephen Miller

Every group has one. The guy who never played a sport, never won a fight, never had the room go quiet because he walked into it. The guy who was picked last for everything and spent his whole life building a personality out of the resentment that produced. The guy who figured out that if he couldn’t make people respect him, he could at least make them afraid of him, and decided that was close enough.

Stephen Miller is that guy. He has always been that guy. And the fact that millions of Americans looked at him and saw strength tells you everything about what those millions of Americans think strength actually looks like.

The Costume

In 2013, sociologist Robb Willer at the University of California, Berkeley published a study in the American Journal of Sociology that should be required reading for anyone trying to understand the MAGA movement’s leadership class. Willer tested what happens when men receive feedback suggesting their masculinity is below average. He called the finding the masculine overcompensation thesis.

The men whose masculinity was threatened didn’t shrug it off. They overcorrected. They became more aggressive. More hostile. More supportive of war and violence. More likely to express dominance-oriented political views. They didn’t become tougher. They performed toughness, loudly and conspicuously, the way a person who doesn’t know how to fight talks about fighting.

Willer found that the men with the highest testosterone levels showed the strongest overcompensation reaction. This is counterintuitive until you understand what it means. The men most invested in being seen as masculine were the most destabilized by any challenge to that image, and the most extreme in their attempts to repair it. The aggression wasn’t overflow from a surplus of toughness. It was panic from a deficit.

Stephen Miller’s entire public career is this finding in a suit. He didn’t grow up in a rough neighborhood. He didn’t serve in the military. He didn’t work construction or play football or do any of the things that would have given him a physical frame of reference for the aggression he performs. He grew up writing debate briefs in Santa Monica and picking fights in his college newspaper. He was a skinny kid who figured out that if he said mean things loudly enough and quickly enough, people would mistake the volume for authority.

The cruelty he later deployed at the federal level, the Muslim ban, the family separation policy, the systematic targeting of asylum seekers, none of it was designed to solve a problem. It was designed to project the image of a man who doesn’t flinch. Every press conference, every cable news appearance, every leaked memo was a performance calibrated to say: I am not the small person you think I am. Look at what I can do to people who can’t fight back.

That is not strength. That is a man who has been cosplaying strength his entire life and finally got access to real power, which he immediately used to hurt the most vulnerable people he could find, because vulnerable people can’t hit back, and hitting someone who can’t hit back is the only version of dominance available to a person who would lose every fair fight he ever walked into.

Willer’s research showed that masculine overcompensation isn’t rare. It’s common. It shows up in bars, in offices, in online arguments, and in political movements. But it shows up most visibly in men who have the least natural claim to the thing they’re performing. The loudest tough guy in the room is almost always the one who knows, somewhere underneath the performance, that he is not tough at all. And the performance has to be loud precisely because the reality underneath it is so quiet.

Lucas Bean Daily is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Two Ladders

In 2013, researchers Joey Cheng and Jessica Tracy at the University of British Columbia published a study demonstrating that there are two completely distinct pathways to the top of any social hierarchy. They called them dominance and prestige.

Prestige is earned. A person gains prestige by being genuinely skilled, knowledgeable, or accomplished. People follow a prestigious leader because they want to. They admire what the leader can do. They want to learn from them. The relationship is voluntary and built on respect.

Dominance is taken. A person gains dominance through intimidation, aggression, and the implicit or explicit threat of punishment. People follow a dominant leader because they’re afraid of what happens if they don’t. The relationship is coercive and built on fear.

Cheng and Tracy found that both strategies work. Both produce social rank. Both attract followers. But the followers are different, and the leaders are different. Prestigious leaders are liked. Dominant leaders are not. Prestigious leaders attract people who want to grow. Dominant leaders attract people who want to be safe. And when researchers tracked behavioral patterns, dominant individuals signaled their status through spatially expansive, aggressive postures and intimidating verbal styles, while prestigious individuals signaled through socially attractive behavior and generosity.

Miller never climbed the prestige ladder. He never had anything to climb it with. He didn’t build a company. He didn’t win elections. He didn’t produce scholarship or art or policy innovation that anyone admired. He had no skill that inspired voluntary followership. What he had was a willingness to be cruel in public, to say things that made people uncomfortable, and to target groups that couldn’t effectively defend themselves. That is the dominance ladder. And he climbed it the only way a person with no prestige can: by making people afraid.

The MAGA movement selected for dominance over prestig