Why Liberals Don't Worship Politicians Like MAGA Cult Does

If you watched the video, you already know what identity fusion is and why it explains the difference between how liberals and MAGA supporters relate to politicians. This Substack goes deeper into the research, the childhood origins, and why millions of people handed their entire sense of self to a man who does not know their name.

What Is Identity Fusion?

William B. Swann Jr. is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2009, Swann and his colleagues Ángel Gómez, D. Conor Seyle, J. Francisco Morales, and Carmen Huici published a foundational paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology titled “Identity Fusion: The Interplay of Personal and Social Identities in Extreme Group Behavior.”

Swann defined identity fusion as a visceral sense of oneness with a group or leader in which the borders between the personal self and the group become porous and highly permeable. In plain language: fused people stop knowing where they end and the group begins.

Normal group identification is cognitive. You support a team. You vote for a party. You attend a church. But you know you are separate from these things. If the team loses you are disappointed but you are still you. If the party nominates someone you dislike you can criticize them. Your identity remains intact because it was never dependent on the group.

Identity fusion is different. When fusion happens the group or leader becomes an extension of the self. An attack on the leader is not a political disagreement. It is an attack on you personally. The leader’s wins feel like your wins. The leader’s losses feel like your losses. The leader’s humiliation feels like your humiliation. The boundary between self and other has dissolved.

Swann’s experiments demonstrated this in dramatic fashion. In several variations of the classic trolley dilemma, highly fused participants endorsed saving fellow group members by throwing themselves in front of a speeding locomotive. They were willing to die for the group. Not because they were ordered to. Because the group had become so deeply fused with their identity that saving the group felt the same as saving themselves.

Trump Fusion vs Clinton Fusion

A 2019 study by Jonas Kunst, John Dovidio, and Lotte Thomsen produced a finding that captures the entire difference between MAGA and liberals in a single data point.

They found that most Trump supporters were more loyal to Trump than to the Republican Party. They were fused with the leader, not the institution. Trump was the identity. The party was just the vehicle.

A separate study by Misch, Fergusson, and Dunham (2018) found the opposite pattern among Democrats. Clinton supporters reported higher fusion to the Democratic Party than to Clinton herself. They were fused with the institution and its values, as they reflect their values, not any individual leader.

If the leader does something wrong against their values, Democratic people instantly reject those people.

This is the structural difference the script describes. Liberals attach to values and institutions. Progressive people can criticize a leader because the leader is not the identity. The values are.

MAGA attaches to the man. The man is the identity. Criticize the man and you are attacking them personally. That is why every conversation with a MAGA supporter about Trump feels personal. Because it is to them.

Why Fusion Happens

Swann’s research found that identity fusion does not happen at random. It happens under specific psychological conditions.

The most important predictor of identity fusion is the strength of a person’s personal identity. People with a strong, stable, well-developed personal identity can belong to groups without losing themselves in them. They have a clear sense of who they are independent of any group membership. They can join, participate, contribute, and still walk away with their self intact.

People with a weak, unstable, or underdeveloped personal identity cannot. They do not have a clear sense of who they are on their own. The group fills that void. The leader fills that void. And once the void is filled the person cannot separate from the source without experiencing something that feels like psychological death.

This is why identity fusion is most common among people whose individual lives are not giving them what they need. When your career is not fulfilling. When your relationships are struggling. When you feel invisible, unimportant, and irrelevant. You have a void where a personal identity should be. And a leader who tells you that you are special, that you are a patriot, that you are part of something historic fills that void instantly.

Trump did not create the void. The void was already there. He just offered to fill it.

Where the Void Comes From

The void does not appear out of nowhere. It is built in childhood.

The majority of people who are susceptible to identity fusion grew up in environments that actively prevented the development of a strong personal identity.

Authoritarian households where questioning was punished. Children in these homes learn that the only safe move is to obey. They do not learn to question, explore, or develop their own beliefs. They learn that the person in charge is always right and that disagreeing is dangerous. That pattern does not disappear in adulthood. It just transfers to a new authority figure.

Churches where doubt was treated as sin. Children raised in fundamentalist religious environments learn that certainty is virtue and questioning is betrayal. They do not develop the ability to sit with ambiguity, evaluate evidence, or hold two competing ideas simultaneously. They learn that someone else has all the answers and their job is to believe.

Communities where emotional awareness was never modeled. In many conserv