The Unconscious Roots of MAGA Rage: Why Winning Feels Like Losing
- Elizabeth Halligan
- Sep 18
- 6 min read
Updated: Sep 23
I saw a video of Joy Reid today talking through why MAGA members are still so angry, even when they got everything they wanted. And a summary of her assessment was that MAGA is mad that everyone doesn’t love them for the world they built, and that there are more people united in their repudiation of Christian Nationalism than there are for it.
But there’s a deeper layer to this. We continue to stare at the symptoms while misdiagnosing the actual disease. I want to talk about the root of it all.
So again just for clarity, the question echoing across social media and news panels is a surface-level one:
“MAGA got everything they wanted — the Supreme Court, the judges, the policy agendas, a dominant grip on the narrative. Why are they angrier than ever before?”
The answer isn’t found on a ballot or in a policy paper. It’s found in the body, in the bloodline, and in the unconscious stories we inherit but never question. This isn’t a political problem. It’s a psychospiritual one. It is the sound of unintegrated, ancestral trauma meeting a world that can no longer hide it.
The Illusion of External Victory
On paper, the movement’s victories are undeniable. They have:
Reshaped the federal judiciary.
Solidified control of key government agencies.
Successfully mainstreamed once-fringe cultural narratives.
Achieved significant legislative and policy wins.
Yet, the rage intensifies. The rhetoric grows more violent, the conspiracies more elaborate, the victimhood more acute. This is the first clue that we are not dealing with a rational political movement operating on a spectrum of wins and losses. We are witnessing a trauma response.
The surface-level explanation — that they want cultural obedience and love — is based on the symptoms and not the root. It’s not admiration they seek; it’s coherence.
They’ve externalized their inner world of fear, fragmentation, and unresolved pain into the political realm, believing that control would finally bring the internal stability and coherence they crave. But a win in the external world cannot resolve an internal war. The void remains, and the mirror they’ve built now reflects back a world as rigid, fearful, and loveless as the collective unconscious mind they haven’t integrated.
In short, they are angry because of refusing to integrate feedback, so they stay locked in an old trauma loop doomed to collapse in on itself.
Let’s look further at this.
Reality as an Externalized Construct
To understand this, we must first accept a radical premise: reality is not something that happens to us; it is constructed through us. Every institution, every “thing “ that we deem holds value, every truth we assume is inherent to our shared reality — they are all literally externalized constructs of the human mind.
Our beliefs, our unconscious biases, our inherited traumas — they are not just personal quirks. They are the architects of our shared world. We project our inner landscape onto the canvas of society, and what we see reflected back is not ever an objective, external truth, but rather, is a collective story.
The MAGA movement didn’t just win an election, the judiciary, and the legislative branches; they successfully externalized their inner world. They built a fortress of policy and rhetoric that mirrors their psychological state: one of paranoia, repression, rigid hierarchy, punishment, and a desperate need for control. And now, they are forced to live inside it. The rage we see is the agony of a psyche confronting its own reflection and recoiling in horror. They hate the world they built, but they cannot admit they are its architects. So they blame everyone else.
The Deep Root: Epigenetic and Ancestral Trauma
So where does this deep, seemingly bottomless well of pain come from? The answer lies not in the past four years, but in the past four hundred.
Epigenetics is the study of how lived experience and trauma can alter gene expression — and how those changes can be passed down to subsequent generations. Usually, specifc experiences of trauma are passed on for about 2–3 generations. Trauma isn’t just a story, then. It’s a biological inheritance.
It’s important to understand that trauma is not just created by being a victim and survivor of violence. The person who commits violence is also traumatized by their own violent acts. How is that? Because reality is a feedback loop. When a person commits violence or oppresses another, they are sending feedback to their own brain that says, “it is not safe to be a human, it is not safe to be in the body, and people like me are the reason why.” This is trauma. So how does a brain cope with this self-inflicted trauma? The same way any traumatized brain does: dissociation, delusion, externalized anger and rage. Anything to keep the brain from turning inward, feeling and greiving the atrocities and acts of the past. Because accountability is pain and must be felt through in the body.
In the American context, particularly within the strains of culture that birthed this movement, this manifests as a legacy of:
Unmourned Loss and Violence: The genocide of Indigenous peoples and the trauma of chattel slavery are not just historical events. They are living, energetic wounds in the national psyche, passed down through generations of perpetrators and bystanders.
Religious Absolutism: A theology often wielded not for spiritual connection, but as a tool for justification, guilt suppression, and establishing a myth of chosen-ness to avoid the shame of conquest.
Suppressed Grief: A cultural mandate to “move on” and “be strong,” severing entire lineages from the healthy processing of pain, fear, and vulnerability.
This pain did not disappear. It was silenced, buried alive. It went underground — into the body, into family systems, into cultural norms. It became the unconscious fuel for a narrative of exceptionalism, manifest destiny, and rigid us-vs-them thinking. These myths were not signs of strength; they were fortresses built around a wound.
The Jungian Loop: When Fate is Unconscious Pain
Carl Jung’s famous dictum cuts to the heart of the matter: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
They believe they are fighting liberals, immigrants, and “wokeism.” In truth, they are fighting their own ghosts. They believe they are defending a country. In reality, they are defending a story that never allowed them to grieve.
Their rage is not a strategic choice. It is a symptom. It is the sound of the unconscious shadow, desperate to be integrated, but instead being projected outward at an ever-increasing volume. They are trapped in a feedback loop of their own creation, mistaking their prison for the world.
Why They Can’t Simply Stop
The “choice” to behave differently isn’t available right now. Epigenetic trauma sets thresholds for stress, shame, and self-protection so high that change feels like annihilation to the brain, specifically the amygdala.
Healing requires:
Confronting violence and complicity in the lineage.
Feeling through inherited shame and guilt.
Dismantling egoic identities built atop control and imagined purity.
Finally grieving what was never mourned.
To the traumatized system, this is unthinkable. Familiar pain feels safer than the risk of unfamiliar grief. The stress response rewired by trauma is self-protective — it chooses the familiar hell of rage and conflict over the unknown release of integration.
This is not a failing of just will — it’s a literal biological/neurological loop. Until felt, trauma repeats and repeats, projected outward until the pain of sameness finally exceeds the fear of change.
This is the ultimate root of self-sabotage: the unconscious choice to perpetuate a familiar hell rather than risk the journey toward an uncertain peace. The brain repeats the pattern precisely so you can finally see it — and exit it. But first, you have to be willing to look. This is why people often will not change until the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of change. That is what the trauma loop accomplishes. This is the precipice at which they currently stand.
The Path Through the Mirror
The way forward then is not political strategy. No law, debate, or policy can force this healing. What’s needed is coherence and compassionate mirroring:
Building families and communities capable of saying, “you are not your ancestors’ pain.”
Naming the wound with love strong enough not to become it.
Holding the line until the system dares to mourn, grieve, and integrate.
What you see in MAGA rage is not a policy fight. It’s the visible edge of inherited trauma, still invisble to them, looping until someone has the courage to look inward, feel, and break the cycle.
This is not naïveté. It is the hardest and most necessary work. As every system approaches the threshold where change is finally less frightening than stasis, healing becomes possible. Societies, like bodies, must grieve in order to grow. What role will we play in it?
For Further Reading:
The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery by Brianna Wiest: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-mountain-is-you-brianna-wiest/1141829837
It Didn’t Start With You by Mark Wolynn: https://markwolynn.com/it-didnt-start-with-you/
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk: https://www.besselvanderkolk.com/resources/the-body-keeps-the-score
“Epigenetic Modifications in Stress Response Genes Associated With Intergenerational Trauma”https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6857662/
“Intergenerational transmission of trauma effects”https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6127768/
“Epigenetic signatures of intergenerational exposure to violence in humans”https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-89818-z
“How Parents’ Trauma Leaves Biological Traces in Children”https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-parents-rsquo-trauma-leaves-biological-traces-in-children/
“How trauma’s effects can pass from generation to generation”https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01433-y
“Can the legacy of trauma be passed down the generations?”https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenetics
“Parents’ emotional trauma may change their children’s biology”https://www.science.org/content/article/parents-emotional-trauma-may-change-their-children-s-biology-studies-mice-show-how
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