Why MAGA Worships Losers

After a football game, students at the winning school wear their team’s jersey to class on Monday.

After a loss, the jerseys stay in the closet.

After a win, students say “we won.” After a loss, they say “they lost.”

Nobody teaches this behavior. Nobody announces a dress code based on the score.

It just happens automatically.

Across every campus, in every sport, in every season.

People attach themselves to winners and detach from losers.

And they do it without realizing they’re doing it.

In 1976, psychologist Robert Cialdini at Arizona State University published a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that gave this behavior a name. He called it basking in reflected glory. BIRGing.

Cialdini and his colleagues monitored students at seven major universities with prominent football programs, including Arizona State, Ohio State, Notre Dame, and USC. They counted how many students wore school-identifying apparel on the Monday after a Saturday game. The result was consistent across every campus. Students were significantly more likely to wear their school’s gear after a win than after a loss.

In a second experiment, Cialdini called students on the phone after a game and asked them to describe the result. After victories, students overwhelmingly said “we won.” After losses, they said “they lost.” The pronoun shift was automatic. Students claimed ownership of success and disowned failure without being aware they were doing it.

But the third experiment revealed something deeper. Before asking students about the game, Cialdini gave some of them a fake test and told them they had failed. Those students BIRGed harder. They were even more likely to claim the team’s success after their own self-esteem had been damaged. The association with a winner wasn’t just about pride. It was about repair. The worse a person felt about themselves, the more urgently they needed to attach themselves to someone else’s success.

Basking and Blasting

In 1980, Cialdini and his colleague Kenneth Richardson at Arizona State published a follow-up study that went further. They gave university students a visible public failure on a creativity test, then measured how those students described their own university and a rival school.

After experiencing failure, students did two things. They inflated the quality of their own university. And they attacked the quality of the rival. Cialdini called the first behavior basking. He called the second blasting.

Both behaviors served the same function. When a person’s self-image is damaged, they don’t just reach for something positive to stand next to. They also reach for something negative to stand above. The combination restores the balance. You feel less like a failure when the people around you appear successful, and the people you’re competing with appear weak.

This is not a quirk. It is a strategy. An automatic, unconscious strategy that the brain deploys whenever it detects a threat to the person’s self-concept. And the bigger the threat, the harder the brain works to find something to bask in and something to blast.

Cutting Off Reflected Failure

The mirror image of BIRGing is what researchers later called CORFing: Cutting Off Reflected Failure. When a team loses, fans distance themselves. They stop wearing the jersey. They stop saying “we.” They stop posting. They don’t want the stain of someone else’s failure touching their identity.

CORFing is a protective mechanism. BIRGing is an enhancement mechanism. Together, they form a system for managing self-esteem through external associations. You pull close to winners and push away from losers, and the entire process is designed to make you feel better about yourself without actually doing anything.

This is the system running inside every person who attaches their identity to a political figure, a brand, a church, or a movement. It is the same system whether you’re wearing a jersey on Monday morning or wearing a red hat at a rally. The mechanics are identical. The only thing that changes is what you’re basking in.

The MAGA Inversion

Cialdini’s research assumed that people would naturally seek out winners to bask in. A successful football team. A famous alumnus. A prestigious institution. The entire framework depends on the glory being real. You bask in reflected glory because the source actually has glory to reflect.

But what happens when the glory won’t have you?

Real experts don’t associate with the MAGA movement. Accomplished scientists, economists, constitutional scholars, foreign policy professionals, they are not lining up to validate conspiracy theories about stolen elections and microchipped vaccines. The most respected voices in virtually every field have either publicly opposed the movement or quietly distanced themselves from it.

This creates a problem for people who need to bask. If the sources of real accomplishment won’t let you stand next to them, you can’t use BIRGing the way it was designed. You can’t attach yourself to genuine success because genuine success has actively CORFed you. It has cut you off.

So the movement does something else. It builds its own heroes out of people who failed at everything else.

A college dropout who couldn’t get into West Point becomes a political genius. A man who went bankrupt six times becomes the greatest businessman alive. A tech executive who can’t pass a basic general knowledge quiz becomes the smartest man in the world. A man who was arrested for human trafficking becomes a model of masculinity.

These figures are not chosen in spite of their mediocrity. They are chosen because of it. Every fraud who becomes famous sends a message to every other fraud watching: you don’t need to earn anything. You don’t need