Why MAGA Loves Hurting Experts: Why We Vote

Somewhere in America right now, a man with a badge and a flashlight is making someone walk a straight line on the side of the road.

The driver isn’t drunk. The cop knows the driver isn’t drunk.

But the cop has the authority to make it happen, and the driver doesn’t have the authority to refuse.

So the driver walks the line, touches his nose, stands on one foot in front of passing traffic, and hopes the man with the badge gets bored before things get worse.

That interaction has nothing to do with public safety. It is a man who barely passed an exam using the one piece of authority he has in this world to humiliate a stranger who drives a nicer car. It is not a failure of the system. For certain people, it is the entire point of having the badge.

In 1994, researcher Blake Ashforth at Concordia University in Montreal published a study in Human Relations that gave this behavior a clinical name. He called it petty tyranny: the tendency to lord one’s power over others.

Ashforth wasn’t studying dictators or heads of state. He was studying middle managers, supervisors, small-authority figures in ordinary organizations. People with limited power over a limited number of people. His research identified six specific behaviors that defined the petty tyrant: arbitrariness and self-aggrandizement, belittling subordinates, lack of consideration for others, a forcing style of conflict resolution, discouraging initiative, and the non-contingent use of punishment. In plain language: making up rules as you go, humiliating the people underneath you, refusing to listen, crushing anyone who tries to solve a problem on their own, and punishing people not because they did something wrong but because it feels good.

Ashforth’s model proposed that petty tyranny isn’t about having too much power. It is about the collision between a small amount of power and a specific kind of person. The key variable is the leader’s beliefs about themselves. People with low self-esteem find the seductive qualities of power especially attractive. They feel less constrained from using power in socially harmful ways. The badge, the title, the corner of authority they’ve been given becomes the only domain in their life where they matter. And so they squeeze every drop of control out of it, because everywhere else they are nobody.

The Vicious Circle

What made Ashforth’s 1994 model especially useful was his identification of a feedback loop. Petty tyranny doesn’t just damage subordinates. It sustains itself.

When a petty tyrant belittles someone, the subordinate’s self-esteem drops. Their performance declines. Their initiative disappears. They stop pushing back. They stop offering ideas. They become passive. And the petty tyrant interprets that passivity as evidence that the subordinates are incompetent and need more control. So the tyranny increases. The subordinates become more helpless. The tyrant becomes more convinced that force is necessary. The cycle doesn’t correct itself because the tyrant is getting exactly what they want: a room full of people who are afraid to challenge them.

In a 1997 follow-up study at Arizona State University, Ashforth tested this model empirically with 63 sets of managers and subordinates. The results confirmed the pattern. Petty tyranny caused low self-esteem, poor performance, reduced cohesiveness within work teams, high frustration, stress, helplessness, and work alienation among the people being managed. The subordinates didn’t perform badly because they were bad workers. They performed badly because the management style was designed to crush them.

Ashforth also connected petty tyranny to the broader literature on the authoritarian personality. The petty tyrant shares psychological DNA with the authoritarian follower identified by researchers going back to the 1950s. The same insecurity, the same need for rigid control, the same intolerance for ambiguity, the same compulsion to punish anyone who questions the hierarchy. The only difference is scale. The authoritarian personality in a position of national power produces fascism. The authoritarian personality in a position of minor power produces the petty tyrant.

The Appeal of Unearned Authority

The standard theory of political leadership assumes that people want qualified leaders. Voters evaluate candidates on competence, experience, policy knowledge, and temperament. The most prepared candidate wins because the electorate is rational enough to recognize who is best suited for the job.

Ashforth’s research destroys that assumption for a significant portion of the electorate. If petty tyranny is driven by low self-esteem, and if people with low self-esteem find the seductive qualities of power particularly attractive, then there is a large population of voters who don’t want a qualified president at all. A qualified president reminds them of every boss who knew more than they did, every teacher who corrected them, every expert who made them feel small. A qualified president is a mirror that reflects their own inadequacy.

An unqualified president does the opposite. An unqualified man exercising authority over the most qualified people in the country is the fantasy of every person who has spent their life resenting the people who were better than them. Trump doesn’t govern. He lords. He humiliates generals on television. He fires scientists for contradicting him. He calls federal judges names. He punishes career professionals for doing their jobs correctly. That isn’t a failure of governance. For his supporters, it is the entire product.

The DUI stop analogy isn’t a metaphor. It is a structural description of what MAGA voters are paying for. They are watching a man who went bankrupt six times boss around people who spent decades earning their seats. And they love it for the same reason the ins