People Trying to Quietly Quit MAGA

There’s a familiar ritual that happens every time an authoritarian movement begins to collapse. The supporters disappear. Not physically. Psychologically. They scrub the evidence, rewrite the timeline, and emerge on the other side with a story they’ve rehearsed just enough to almost believe.

“I never really supported him.”

“I just voted against the Democrats.”

“I don’t talk about politics anymore.”

This is happening right now across America. The yard signs are coming down. The hats are going into drawers. The Facebook posts are being deleted. And millions of people who spent a decade loudly and publicly cheering for cruelty are quietly trying to exit the building before someone turns the lights on.

The companion video to this piece says what needs to be said plainly: they’re not confused. They’re lying. They know what they did. They know what they defended. And they’re trying to erase the evidence before accountability arrives.

This Substack examines why that matters, why it won’t work this time, and what history tells us about populations that try to pretend they were never part of the thing they spent years supporting.

This has happened before. It looked exactly the same.

In the months after the fall of Nazi Germany, something remarkable happened. The Nazis disappeared. Not into hiding. Into denial. Across the occupied zones, Allied forces encountered a population in which, suddenly, nobody had ever been a Nazi. Nobody had supported the regime. Nobody had cheered at the rallies. Nobody had turned in their neighbors.

The denazification tribunals established by the Allied powers categorized former participants into five groups, from major offenders to exonerated persons. The category that swallowed the vast majority of the German population was Mitläufer: fellow travelers. Passive followers. People who went along with it but didn’t really mean it. People who were just following orders, just keeping their heads down, just trying to survive.

In 1946, the German writer Luise Rinser, who had herself been arrested under the Nazi regime, wrote a letter responding to Hermann Hesse’s criticisms of postwar Germany. Her assessment was devastating. “Nobody did it,” she wrote. “Everyone wants to be de-Nazified.” She found it despicable that people were claiming to have been mere passive followers, as if that were something to be proud of rather than ashamed of. “Better an evil, real Nazi, driven by the Devil, than a mere passive follower,” she wrote. “What lack of pride and insight.”

Rinser saw something that most political analysts then and now tend to miss. The denial wasn’t a psychological phenomenon. It was a moral one. These people knew exactly what they had done. They had attended the rallies. They had displayed the flags. They had reported their neighbors. They had benefited from the regime. And when the regime fell, they didn’t experience sudden clarity about what they had supported. They experienced sudden fear about what supporting it was going to cost them.

The psychology didn’t change. The incentives did.

The totalitarian ego.

Social psychologist Anthony Greenwald at the University of Washington published a landmark paper in 1980 describing what he called the totalitarian ego. Greenwald argued that the self operates like a totalitarian regime’s propaganda ministry: it ruthlessly destroys information that threatens its positive self-image and rewrites personal history from the standpoint of the victor.

But Greenwald made an important distinction. A totalitarian dictator rewrites history to deceive future generations. The totalitarian ego rewrites history to deceive itself. The goal isn’t to fool other people. The goal is to maintain a version of yourself that you can live with. And the mechanism is automatic, continuous, and largely invisible to the person doing it.

This is the layer the video companion deliberately cuts through. The script says they’re just lying. And that’s true. But the Substack can hold a more uncomfortable truth at the same time: they’re lying to us and they’re lying to themselves, and over time, the lie they tell themselves becomes harder to distinguish from what they actually remember.

Conway and Ross, in a 1984 study on self-serving memory distortion, showed that people routinely revise their memories of their own past beliefs to make those beliefs consistent with their current views. The researchers called it “getting what you want by revising what you had.” If you now believe Trump was a mistake, your memory helpfully adjusts to suggest you always had doubts. The yard sign you put up with enthusiasm in 2016 gets mentally reclassified as something you did reluctantly, under pressure, because your spouse wanted it, because you were really voting against Hillary.

None of that is true. But the totalitarian ego doesn’t care about truth. It cares about maintaining a livable self-image. And a person who cheered for cruelty for ten years needs a very aggressive propaganda ministry to keep that self-image intact.

But this is the part that should terrify them.

Every previous generation of people who tried to deny what they supported had one enormous advantage: the evidence was perishable. In postwar Germany, the rally photos could be buried. The party membership cards could be burned. The letters could be destroyed. The neighbors who saw you turn someone in could be pressured into silence. The physical evidence of complicity was finite, and destroying it was possible.

The MAGA generation has no such advantage. Every Facebook post, every tweet, every Instagram story, every YouTube comment, every TikTok reaction, every text message sent to every group chat is stored, screenshotted, cached, and archived in ways that no amount of deleting will fully erase. The internet doesn’t f