In February 2025, researchers at the University of Amsterdam published a study in Social Science & Medicine that should have rewritten every conversation about why people join the far right. They tracked over 40,000 people across nine countries, with data spanning fifteen years. They controlled for income, education, immigration attitudes, and political ideology. They wanted to know what actually predicts whether someone will support the populist radical right.
The answer wasn’t immigration. It wasn’t economics. It wasn’t religion.
It was loneliness.
Lonelier individuals were consistently more likely to support radical right movements, with the association holding across all fifteen years of Dutch data and appearing across multiple European countries. The researchers noted that the effect sizes were comparable to the known health correlates of loneliness, meaning that the connection between loneliness and far-right support was statistically as meaningful as the connection between loneliness and heart disease, high blood pressure, and depression.
A 2021 RAND Corporation study of former extremists and their families confirmed this from the other direction. Half of the former extremists surveyed said feelings of marginalization drove them toward radicalization, with most citing isolation and loneliness specifically. Individuals reported that the social benefits of joining extremist organizations, the friendship, the camaraderie, the sense of finally belonging somewhere, were among the most powerful forces keeping them in.
These people didn’t join a movement because they were convinced by policy arguments. They joined because someone finally made them feel like they weren’t alone. And that tells us more about what MAGA actually is than any analysis of tariffs or border policy ever could.
The factory that produces lonely men.
The script that accompanies this piece makes a claim that deserves a deeper examination: conservative culture is to blame for the loneliness epidemic in its own base. The research supports this more directly than most people realize.
Ron Levant, a former president of the American Psychological Association, spent decades studying how traditional masculine socialization affects emotional functioning in men. His research, conducted across multiple studies and institutions, identified a pattern he called normative male alexithymia. Alexithymia is the clinical term for difficulty identifying and describing one’s own emotions. Levant’s argument was that traditional masculine socialization doesn’t just discourage men from expressing emotions. It actively degrades their ability to recognize what they’re feeling in the first place.
In a 2014 study published in Psychology of Men and Masculinity, Levant and his colleagues demonstrated that the mechanism behind normative male alexithymia is suppression, not repression or dissociation. This distinction matters. Repression and dissociation are unconscious. Suppression is conscious. These men are actively, deliberately pushing their emotions down because they have been taught that feeling them is weakness. And the research showed that men who scored highest on masculine norm conformity showed the greatest deficits in processing emotions related to vulnerability and attachment, which are the exact emotions required to build and maintain close relationships.
A 2025 study published in Sex Roles extended this model further, testing 740 men across the United States and United Kingdom. The researchers found that three specific masculine norms were most strongly associated with emotional dysfunction: emotional control, self-reliance, and primacy of work. These norms predicted higher alexithymia, which predicted greater difficulty regulating emotions, which predicted higher rates of depression and anxiety. The pathway was sequential and measurable. Traditional masculinity teaches emotional suppression. Emotional suppression produces alexithymia. Alexithymia produces emotional dysregulation. Emotional dysregulation produces misery.
And critically, 2024 research highlighted that conforming to traditional masculine norms increases men’s vulnerability to loneliness and social disconnection. The pipeline isn’t theoretical. It’s empirical. Conservative culture teaches men to suppress. Suppression degrades their ability to connect. The inability to connect produces loneliness. And loneliness, as the Amsterdam researchers showed, is one of the strongest predictors of far-right radicalization.
Conservative culture doesn’t just fail to prevent loneliness in men. It manufactures it.
What loneliness actually does to the brain.
To understand why lonely people are vulnerable to movements like MAGA, you have to understand what loneliness does neurologically. The Amsterdam researchers theorized that loneliness has a physiologically dysregulating impact on the nervous system that facilitates greater susceptibility to radical right parties. That’s academic language for something much simpler and much worse.
Chronic loneliness puts the nervous system into a state of persistent threat detection. The brain of a chronically lonely person is scanning for danger at all times. It processes neutral social information as potentially hostile. It interprets ambiguity as threat. It experiences the world as fundamentally unsafe.
This is not a character flaw. It’s a neurological response to prolonged social isolation. The brain adapts to isolation the same way it adapts to any chronic stressor: by becoming hypervigilant. And a hypervigilant brain is exactly the kind of brain that is receptive to a political message built on threat. They’re coming for your jobs. They’re replacing you. They want to destroy your way of life. The enemies are everywhere.
A person with healthy social connections hears that message and filters it through the perspectives of the people around them. A lonely person hears it and has no filter. No one to check the claim against. No one to say “that sounds extreme.” No competing social input at all. Just the message, and a nervous system that was already primed to believe the world is dangerous.
MAGA as the loneliness cure that makes everything worse.
The RAND study found that former extremists consistently reported social benefits as one of the main reasons they stayed in extremist organizations. Friendship. Camaraderie. A sense of belonging. The feeling that someone finally gave a damn about them.
This is what Trump and the MAGA movement provide. Not policy. Not governance. Not even coherent ideology. Belonging. When Trump says “we” and “us” and “our movement,” a lonely person doesn’t hear a political speech. They hear the first invitation they’ve received in years. The rallies aren’t political events. They’re the only social gathering some of these people attend. The online communities aren’t policy forums. They’re the only place some of these people feel recognized.
And this is where the trap closes. Because the belonging MAGA offers is conditional. It requires an enemy. You belong because they don’t. You’re us because they’re them. The warmth of the group is inseparable from the hatred of the outgroup. And a lonely person who finally found somewhere they belong isn’t going to question the hatred, because questioning the hatred risks losing the belonging. And they can’t lose the belonging. It’s the only thing they have.
So the loneliness that conservative culture created gets temporarily relieved by a movement that conservative culture produced. But the relief is fake. It’s not real connection. It’s shared hostility. It’s not intimacy. It’s tribalism. And the distinction matters, because tribalism doesn’t actually cure loneliness. It masks it. The underlying isolation, the inability to be vulnerable, the alexithymia, the emotional suppression, all of it remains untouched. The man who couldn’t open up to his wife or his friends before MAGA still can’t. He just has a rally to go to now.
Why therapy is the real threat to the movement.
This is the part that conservative culture will never admit. Therapy is the single greatest threat to the MAGA pipeline. Not fact-checking. Not counter-messaging. Not better candidates. Therapy.
Because therapy does exactly what the movement cannot afford its members to do. It teaches emotional awareness. It builds vocabulary for feelings. It makes vulnerability safe instead of shameful. It connects people to themselves and then to others through genuine intimacy rather than shared hatred. Every man who goes to therapy and learns to identify his emotions, process his pain, and build real connections is a man who no longer needs MAGA to feel like he belongs somewhere.
Conservative culture knows this. That’s why therapy is stigmatized in conservative communities. That’s why “man up” and “suck it up” and “feelings are for women” aren’t just cultural cliches. They’re load-bearing walls. They hold the entire structure in place. If conservative men started going to therapy in large numbers, started developing emotional literacy, started building genuine intimate friendships, the loneliness pipeline would dry up. And with it, much of the movement’s recruiting power.
The MAGA movement doesn’t need its members to be happy. It needs them to be desperate. And desperate people don’t go to therapy. They go to rallies. They go to comment sections. They go to the only place that will take them without asking them to change. And that place will never ask them to change, because their pain is the product.
The loneliness is the point.
The Amsterdam study measured something that most political analysis refuses to take seriously. MAGA is not a political movement held together by ideology. It is a social phenomenon held together by loneliness. The ideology is the price of admission. The belonging is the product.
Strip away the flags, the rallies, the slogans, and the rage, and what you find underneath is millions of people who were taught from birth that needing others is weakness, that emotions are dangerous, and that asking for help is failure. They followed those rules. They suppressed everything. They toughed it out. And they ended up completely alone, with no tools to process their pain, no language to describe what they feel, and no one to talk to because decades of performative strength convinced everyone around them that they were fine.
They weren’t fine. They were desperate. And desperate people will follow anyone who makes them feel like they finally belong somewhere. Even if belonging requires hating half the country. Even if the warmth is fake. Even if the cure is worse than the disease.
Conservative culture created the loneliness. Trump exploited it. And the men caught in the middle are paying for both with what’s left of their lives.
Sources
University of Amsterdam (2025). Loneliness is positively associated with populist radical right support. Social Science & Medicine, 366, 117676.
Brown, R.A., Helmus, T.C., Ramchand, R., Palimaru, A.I., Weilant, S., Rhoades, A.L., & Hiatt, L. (2021). Violent Extremism in America: Interviews with Former Extremists and Their Families on Radicalization and Deradicalization. RAND Corporation.
Levant, R.F., Allen, P.A., & Lien, M.C. (2014). Alexithymia in Men: How and When Do Emotional Processing Deficiencies Occur? Psychology of Men and Masculinity, 15(3), 324-334.
Levant, R.F. (2011). Research in the Psychology of Men and Masculinity Using the Gender Role Strain Paradigm as a Framework. American Psychologist, 66, 765-776.
Internalizing Symptoms in Men: The Role of Masculine Norms, Alexithymia, and Emotion Regulation (2025). Sex Roles.
Twenge, J.M. & Campbell, W.K. (2009). The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. Free Press.
