The Art of Losing: Why MAGA Can’t Quit Defeat (and Doesn’t Want to)

From Confederate cosplay to culture-war tantrums, the psychology behind America’s loudest losers explains why victory is never the goal.

Some news stories slide right past you, barely making a dent. Then there are the ones that make you put down your phone, lean in, and start asking questions you know won’t let you go until you dig for answers.

That was me the other night, watching Roland Martin Unfiltered while half-thinking about something else. Roland was covering a vote out of Midland, Texas, where the school board, by a narrow 4-3 margin, decided to put “Lee” back on Legacy High School, restoring the name to honor Robert E. Lee — a man who led a war against the United States and lost. I froze mid-scroll. Why in 2025 is anyone still fighting to honor a man whose only real contribution to American history was being on the wrong side of it? The historian in me rolled my eyes. The political psychologist in me — the part that can’t just shrug and say “people are weird” — wanted to know the wiring behind it. I can’t leave it at “people have opinions.” I want to know the pathology.

Any kind of psychologist will tell you there’s a psychological framework to describe anything and everything. So I went to work. Pulled some of my old textbooks off the shelf, the ones with pages warped from years of notes and caffeine pills, flipped through the margins I’d scribbled during grad school, cross-checked with newer research. Because if people are clinging this hard to a symbol of defeat, there’s a reason — and history and politics alone can’t explain it.

After my deep dive, the conclusion I came to goes deeper than what some psychologists chalk up to things like looking at the past through rose-colored lenses or plain old nostalgia bias. No, I’ve come to believe these folks genuinely enjoy losing. They treat defeat like a comfort food — reheated over and over, never mind that it’s congealed into something barely edible. Losing gives them purpose, gives them a grievance to clutch like a favorite blanket. And once you see it that way, you realize they’re not just bad at winning — they’ve built an entire personality around making sure it never actually happens.

One of the first things that jumps out when you start connecting the dots is how often this pattern leads back to Donald Trump. Which is already strange because Trump was born in Queens, New York — the Union. The side that actually won the war. His father’s side is German, his mother’s side Ulster-Scots — the Scotch-Irish who helped build New York and shaped early America in outsized ways. These were settlers, founders, winners. I’m not here to polish the Trump family crest, but the record shows his people were on the winning side of America’s bloodiest conflict. And yet he chooses to wrap himself in the imagery of men who ended their legacy in surrender. It’s like bragging that your great-grandfather came in dead last at the Boston Marathon but, boy, did he have the nicest shoes.

Losing doesn’t just become part of the deal for MAGA — it is the deal. In psychology this is often called victimhood identity, where people begin to see themselves as perpetual victims of life, defining their entire self-image through the lens of being wronged. They come to expect mistreatment, distrust attempts to help, and use grievances as proof of their own righteousness. That’s why Trump can never just win cleanly — he has to make it a mythical landslide stolen by the “deep state,” because if he simply wins, the grievance-based identity collapses.

Layered into that is the contrarian mindset. You know the type — everyone has that one friend who has to disagree with everything, not because they’ve thought it through, but because their identity is wrapped up in opposition. My MAGA acquaintance is like that: if you ask him why he supports the movement, he can’t give a concrete answer. He’ll just start rattling off disconnected complaints—“woke indoctrination,” “globalists,” “cultural Marxism”—with no context, no follow-up, and no plan. It’s not about what he believes; it’s about making sure he’s on the opposite side of whatever you’re on. It’s conflict for conflict’s sake, and when you mix that reflexive opposition with a deeply ingrained victim identity, you get a worldview where losing isn’t a problem — it’s the whole point.

Layered onto that is something called glorification of martyrdom — romanticizing sacrifice and loss as inherently noble, even when they accomplish nothing. Once you glorify the loss itself, the outcome becomes irrelevant. The Civil War isn’t remembered as a bloody, pointless rebellion that collapsed; it’s recast as a heroic last stand. The statues aren’t about historical literacy; they’re altars to a story in which defeat proves righteousness. If the statues come down, the tangible symbols of “our eternal struggle” come down with them — and that’s an existential threat to an identity built on keeping the wound open.

Then there’s moral masochism — the odd comfort people get from seeing themselves as the ones who endure suffering at the hands of their enemies. You can see it in the melodrama of Benny Johnson, who stood in the White House press room not long ago and declared Washington, D.C., a “kill box” and “lawless hellscape,” calling for neighborhoods to be “emptied” and “bulldozed.” In reality, violent crime was at a 30-year low. But facts don’t feed the brand; suffering does. And let’s be honest — this little fantasy of bulldozers and forced displacement isn’t some random urban renewal thought experiment. It’s steeped in the same racialized “clean-up” language that’s been used for decades to justify pushing Black communities out of sight. Johnson’s vision for D.C. just happens to align with a long American tradition of declaring majority-Black neighborhoods “unsafe,” then using that as a pretext to destroy them — from 1950s “urban renewal” projects that flattened thriving Black business districts, to post-Katrina gentrification in New Orleans.

Statistically, Johnson’s claim collapses under the slightest scrutiny. Homicides in D.C. have fallen dramatically since the early ’90s, and crime overall is nowhere near the apocalyptic levels his soundbites suggest. But accuracy doesn’t get him clicks, and it certainly doesn’t give him the dopamine hit of imagining himself as the lone hero standing against the chaos. Painting D.C. as a war zone isn’t about public safety; it’s about the high that comes from being “under siege.” Or in Johnson’s case, it’s about playing HOA president to an imaginary gated community where the gates keep out everyone who doesn’t look like they just stepped out of a Young Republicans mixer.

All of this sits on top of an external locus of control — the belief that everything bad happens because of someone else. Nothing is ever the result of their own bad choices or failed leadership. The Confederacy didn’t lose because it built its economy on slavery and overestimated its military; it lost because the North had more resources. Trump doesn’t lose elections because of his rhetoric or policies; he loses because of “cheating,” “the media,” or “corrupt officials.” It’s a worldview where the story always ends with “we were robbed,” never “we blew it.”

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And this mindset isn’t confined to politics — it’s alive and well in the manosphere, a sprawling online ecosystem of male influencers, podcasts, and self-styled “alpha” gurus who’ve convinced a generation of men that the bad personal stuff in their lives is the fault of feminism, “wokeness,” and a supposedly soft society. Can’t get a date? It’s because “women only like punks now,” not because of how you act, what you say, or whether you treat women like people instead of props. Struggling at work? That’s because “diversity hires” took your spot, not because you’ve coasted for years without improving your skills. The manosphere thrives on telling its audience that they’re losing not because of who they are or what they do, but because the culture is out to get them. It’s the same psychological infrastructure that props up MAGA’s Confederate cosplay — a refusal to take ownership for failure, dressed up as a grand battle against imaginary oppressors. In both arenas, the appeal is intoxicating: you can lose over and over again, but never have to admit it’s your fault.

Once you know what to look for, you see these frameworks everywhere. Take CNN’s Scott Jennings. Sitting on a panel recently, he defended Confederate monuments by claiming that the same people who criticized Trump’s Smithsonian review were the ones who “cheered” when monuments came down in 2020. I’ve written before about how ridiculous it is for CNN to present his talking points as serious analysis. They’re not. They’re grievance cosplay for a national audience. And to Abby Phillip, who ends up hosting him on that panel, I hope the check CNN sets is worth it — because all they’re doing is giving a prime-time platform to reheated Confederate cosplay in a blazer.

Or Doug Wilson, the Christian nationalist pastor amplified by Pete Hegseth. This punk-ass preacher’s “platform” is a greatest hits album of authoritarian insecurity: repeal the 19th Amendment, give voting rights only to male heads of households, criminalize homosexuality, and, for good measure, whitewash slavery as fostering “mutual intimacy.” There’s no critical thought behind any of this — it’s grievance theater dressed up as divine mandate. Wilson’s vision is the kind of dystopia where the country’s cultural apex is God’s Not Dead and Left Behind, and you can almost hear the bootleg Kirk Cameron DVDs clattering into the church gift shop.

And let’s remember — these people already scored a massive “win” with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade and gutted federal abortion protections. By their own measure, they got exactly what they’d been demanding for decades. Did that slow them down? Of course not. Because it’s never been about achieving goals; it’s about keeping the grievance machine running. Wins get pocketed and then weaponized as proof they can take even more. Today it’s abortion rights, tomorrow it’s contraception, next week it’s dismantling no-fault divorce — theocratic creep with no off switch.

Here’s the thing: there’s an actual psychology behind following rules. People can accept consequences when they see them as proportionate and grounded in an agreed social contract. If someone’s going 80 in a 60 mph zone, they might think the ticket sucks, but deep down they know, I was speeding, so I have to deal with it. But if that same person gets pulled out of their car, beaten with a nightstick, and hauled off to jail for the same offense, that’s when society starts to break down. The punishment stops fitting the crime, and the rules stop feeling legitimate. In my own classroom, students might grumble if I assign them a 20-page paper due at the end of the semester — they’ll hate me for it, but they also know, hey, it’s college. But if I dropped seven different 20-page papers on them and made them all due at the end of the week? Every last one of them would be marching up to the dean’s office before they even opened Microsoft Word. That’s how ridiculous what Wilson is asking for is — it’s an authoritarian “syllabus” designed not to create order, but to make rebellion inevitable.

History is littered with the carcasses of hostile religious takeovers gone wrong. The Salem Witch Trials collapsed under their own hysteria and tore communities apart. The Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan turned a functioning society into a pariah state and a humanitarian disaster. Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution promised moral renewal and delivered decades of repression, unrest, and violent crackdowns that still haven’t ended. None of these regimes created lasting stability; all of them bred fear, resentment, and, eventually, chaos.

That’s because history shows us that when you try to force an entire population into one narrow religious mold, you don’t get utopia — you get unrest, and unrest eventually slides into anarchy. The social contract shreds when people feel they have no stake in the system and no recourse within it. Wilson’s blueprint isn’t a governance plan; it’s a countdown clock to civic breakdown. And the most telling part? He has to know it. Because if, by some nightmare scenario, his whole agenda became law, he’d lose the constant fight that gives him relevance. The impossibility is the point. It keeps him and his followers in the sweet spot of perpetual opposition — always the victim, always the martyr, always losing, even while they hold power.

Put it all together and the throughline is hard to miss. Trump’s Confederate cosplay instead of embracing his actual winning-side heritage? That’s victimhood identity, reinforced by glorifying the martyrdom of a lost cause. Jennings’ monument defense? External locus of control dressed up for cable news. Benny Johnson’s D.C. apocalypse? Moral masochism in a tailored suit. Doug Wilson’s fantasy laws? A case study in setting impossible goals so you never have to leave the comfort of the fight.

And this is the piece people often miss: These folks don’t actually want to win in any lasting, final sense. Winning ends the story. It forces you to govern, to deliver results, to be accountable — and that leaves you open to being judged on performance rather than purity. They want crises. They need enemies. If you handed them everything they’ve been screaming for tomorrow, by Friday they’d have a new list of grievances and a new group to blame for their unhappiness.

I write all of this to say the battle with these forces is never going to end. It will always be something with these clowns — a new culture war, a new invented crisis, a new scapegoat to keep the outrage alive. The point is to tire the rest of us out, to keep the reasonable and rational too exhausted to push back. And that’s why the psychology behind all of this matters. When you understand the wiring — the victimhood identity, the glorification of martyrdom, the moral masochism, the contrarian reflex, the external locus of control — you understand why even when they win, to them it might as well be losing. Because in their minds, there is no finish line. The loss is the story, and the story is the brand. That’s why they embrace losers so much: it’s not a bug in the system, it’s the operating system itself.

And the knockout truth? You can’t “defeat” people whose entire worldview depends on being defeated — you can only outlast them, outthink them, and refuse to let their eternal losing drag the rest of us down with them.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political science professor who teaches at California State University Fullerton. He is the author of the upcoming book, Political Illiteracy: Learning the Wrong Lessons. Read the original column here.