Think Future

08/21/2025

A question I get a lot behind the scenes here at Think Future Central is whether the MAGA faithful are beyond reason and persuasion, beyond saving, and/or are just stupid or evil. When forced, I always answer stupid rather than evil because it’s the kinder option. (Always choose the kinder option even if/when people don’t deserve it.)

The real answer, though, is that the MAGA faithful aren’t beyond saving; they’re just captive to a few specific core narratives about him and all their other beliefs and morals are secondary or beholden to those core, primary narratives.

Part of our current problem is that liberals (or at least Democrats) — because they argue from their own core narratives — completely fail to hit the MAGA faithful’s core narratives head-on. The result is two narrative warfare campaigns that completely miss each other in the dark.

• A quick example regarding approach: Liberals make rational arguments whereas he only makes emotional ones. Emotional arguments (fear) win most of the time. Image wins most of the time. But liberals don’t respect illusion; they respect facts. So they don’t speak to fear-motivated, fear-ful, fear-filled MAGA people at all and makes MAGA conclude liberals are clueless about the real dangers of the present day and thus aren’t trustworthy to listen to or elect.

So. What are the four core narratives? And how well are they holding up? And what could destroy them — and thus help deradicalize some of MAGA?

• Oh — I almost forgot, and this is going to become really relevant in just a minute: His base has always seemed/been around 40% of voters. It’s never dipped below 40% but it appears to be happening now — slowly.
• My own personal rule of thumb — which is a swag because I’ve never seen good numbers on it — is that half of that 40% of his base are people who believe in these four core narratives and the other 20% are just fascists. (A longtime finding of political scientists is that 20-30% of the members of any society are fascists or fascist-y or fascist-ish-tic. Again, fascist isn’t quite the right or fairest term but nothing rhymes with orange.) My point here is that his actual floor might be something like 20% rather than 40% if MAGA belief in one or more of the four core narratives about him falls apart.

Anyway, keep all that in mind as Rachel Maddow goes through some of Pew’s most recent polls.