MAGA and the Politics of Identity
Why identity politics thrives in collapse—and how MAGA turned it upside down
More and more I see people displaying their identity like a brand—on caps, shirts, tattoos, bumper stickers. Belonging is marketed, packaged, and worn. Politics has followed the same path. A movement like MAGA thrives not only on grievance but on symbols that turn allegiance into a commodity. The red hat isn’t just apparel—it’s ritual. It’s a passport into a community and a declaration of who does not belong.
Identity politics is usually treated as a slogan—something to dismiss as divisive or defend as necessary. That framing misses the point. Identity politics isn’t simply a matter of ideology; it’s a way people organize when institutions no longer protect them, when promises of equality break down, and when belonging itself comes into question. It grows out of lived experience—race, gender, sexuality, religion—not as abstractions but as the everyday realities where injury and resistance take shape.
Because it arises in the gaps of civic life, identity politics always does two things at once. It names injustice and demands recognition, but it also marks boundaries, shapes members, and signals who belongs. Some identities are inherited, others built, all of them defined in relation to others. In a democracy, people juggle many memberships. They are never free of tension, but those tensions are part of the political process itself.
When governments retreat—when deregulation and privatization strip away protections—identity often becomes the only anchor left. Abandoned communities, whether segregated neighborhoods, polluted towns, or criminalized groups, fall back on identity as the means to organize and survive. What begins as necessity can become the only language available.
MAGA makes use of that same structure but inverts it. Donald Trump did not invent identity politics; he adapted its grammar to suit dominant groups. White, Christian, rural, and male identities are recast as if they were threatened minorities. Movements like Black Lives Matter are labeled un-American. Feminism is reframed as hostility to men. Immigrant advocacy becomes invasion. Each reversal works by taking discomfort and recoding it as grievance.
This is where MAGA’s identity politics differs from the struggles it mimics. Black or immigrant movements press for inclusion and protection. MAGA claims that inclusion itself is persecution. The billionaire who profits from deregulation is cast as the scorned outsider. Evangelicals, despite their dominance, now speak as if cornered—minority in spirit, not in numbers. The rural voter is held up not as one bloc among many, but as the only “real American.”
By borrowing the form of identity politics, MAGA builds a culture of grievance. Its purpose is not to expand belonging but to restrict it. The rollback of rights is justified as restoration. State withdrawal from schools, health care, or environmental protection is cast as balance rather than abandonment. Suppression of voters or protesters becomes defense of democracy rather than its erosion.
MAGA’s identity politics does not appear out of thin air. It grows from older traditions of white identity politics that stretch from Reconstruction through Jim Crow to the Southern Strategy. Those histories form the backdrop. What matters in the present is the terrain in which they revive. Decades of deregulation, privatization, and the hollowing out of public goods have stripped many communities of protection. In that vacuum, identity becomes the only reliable anchor. What begins as grievance becomes the grammar of politics itself.
Religion and ritual give that grammar form. White evangelical nationalism supplies a sacred vocabulary, recasting political defeat as spiritual persecution. MAGA rallies function as liturgy—repetitive, theatrical, binding followers into a shared sense of belonging. The red hat works like a vestment. The chants? Less slogan, more spell. These performances do more than entertain. They turn grievance into solidarity, grievance into faith, grievance into power.
This is not only a partisan strategy. It is a cultural one. MAGA turns the language of identity into a weapon for shrinking the civic body. Teachers, scientists, journalists, and activists are named as enemies not because they hold power, but because they represent alternative standards of truth and belonging. Each attack narrows the circle of citizenship, redefining who counts and who does not.
Seen this way, MAGA is not an exception to American history but part of it. The politics of grievance it draws on have deep roots in movements that dressed exclusion in the language of protection—whether in the post-Reconstruction South or during earlier cycles of nativist backlash. What has changed is the scale and the media environment, which amplify grievance into a constant spectacle of identity and threat.
Identity politics, then, is not the cause of division but the symptom of a civic fabric pulled apart. MAGA thrives in those torn seams, turning identity into grievance and grievance into power. What disappears in the process is not only tolerance or civility, but the possibility of a shared public life. It is the politics of abandonment: of communities, of institutions, and finally of democracy itself.
The lesson is not that identity must be rejected, but that civic belonging must be rebuilt. Renewal begins where protection is restored and exclusion gives way to participation—when the institutions people rely on are not hollowed out but made trustworthy again. Without that repair, the collapse deepens. With it, identity can return to being one part of democratic life rather than its weapon of destruction. If we fail to rebuild belonging, grievance will remain the only citizenship left.
Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.
Belew, Kathleen. Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018.
Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming.” Public Culture 12, no. 2 (2000): 291–343.
Farmer, Paul. “On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below.” Daedalus 125, no. 1 (1996): 261–283.
Greenhouse, Carol J. “Nationalizing the Local: Policing, Identity Politics, and the State.” Social Justice 27, no. 3 (2000): 20–34.
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
Parker, Christopher Sebastian, and Rachel M. Blum. “Exploring the Motivations of the MAGA Movement.” In The MAGA Movement: Authoritarian Populism and American Democracy, 191–206. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197794937.003.0008.
Robbins, Joel. “Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture: Belief, Time, and the Anthropology of Christianity.” Current Anthropology 48, no. 1 (2007): 5–38.
Sharlet, Jeff. The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. New York: W. W. Norton, 2023.
Stewart, Katherine. The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019.
