MAGA Thinks The Performance of Being Smart Is Actually Being Smart

You’ve seen it happen in real time.

A Trump supporter walks into a debate, a comment section, a family conversation, or a live stream with total confidence. They say something that sounds like a position. It has the shape of an argument. It has the rhythm of someone who knows what they’re talking about. For about ten seconds, it could pass.

Then someone pushes back. Not even aggressively. Just a follow up question. Just a “can you explain what you mean by that.”

And it falls apart.

But here’s the part that makes your head spin. They don’t care. They don’t care that it fell apart. They don’t care that they were wrong. They don’t care that millions of people just watched them get humiliated on camera. They move on to the next talking point with the exact same confidence. They say “I don’t care” and mean it. Or they say “do your own research” as if that’s a rebuttal. Or they just get louder.

And you’re standing there thinking: how is this person not embarrassed? How do they just keep going?

Because being proven wrong only hurts if you were trying to be right. And they were never trying to be right.

In 1986, philosopher Harry Frankfurt at Princeton University published an essay that would eventually become one of the most important pieces of philosophical writing of the last fifty years. Originally published in the Raritan Quarterly Review, then expanded into a book by Princeton University Press in 2005, the essay introduced a formal distinction that most people have never heard but that explains nearly everything about how MAGA supporters communicate.

Frankfurt identified a category of dishonesty that is worse than lying.

A liar knows the truth and deliberately hides it. A liar cares about the truth, even if only as something to be avoided. A liar respects truth enough to work around it. A liar and a truth teller are playing the same game, just on opposite sides. Both of them acknowledge that truth matters.

What Frankfurt identified is a completely different category. A person who is indifferent to truth. A person for whom truth never enters the equation at all. Not because they’re hiding it. Not because they’re afraid of it. But because it was never part of their process to begin with.

Frankfurt called this indifference to truth, and he argued it is a greater enemy of truth than lies are. Because at least a lie can be caught. At least a lie operates within a framework where truth exists and matters. Indifference to truth operates outside that framework entirely. Truth is irrelevant. The question was never “is this true.” The question was always “does this sound good.”

Now apply that to every political conversation you’ve ever had with a Trump supporter.

They hear a talking point. They like how it sounds. They repeat it. If it turns out to be true, fine. If it turns out to be false, fine. It doesn’t matter. It was never about being right. It was about saying something with enough confidence that nobody pushes back. The performance of saying something smart is all they are looking for.

This is not speculation. In 2015, researcher Gordon Pennycook at the University of Waterloo published a landmark study in the journal Judgment and Decision Making that put Frankfurt’s philosophical concept to an empirical test. Pennycook and his colleagues created a series of randomly generated sentences filled with abstract buzzwords. Sentences that had the syntactic structure of something profound but were literally constructed without any concern for truth or meaning. Sentences like “wholeness quiets infinite phenomena” and “hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty.”

They showed these sentences to people and asked them to rate how profound they were.

And people did. They rated literal nonsense as genuinely profound.

But the study went further. Pennycook found that the people who were most receptive to these meaningless statements shared a consistent psychological profile. They scored lower on cognitive ability tests. They were less likely to engage in analytic thinking. They were more prone to conspiratorial ideation. And they were significantly more likely to hold religious and supernatural beliefs.

That last finding is the one that matters most for understanding MAGA.

The people who can’t tell the difference between something that sounds profound and something that is profound are the same people who are drawn to religious fundamentalism and political extremism. And the reason is the same in both arenas. They never learned to evaluate content. They only learned to evaluate performance.

For them, everything is a performance.

They only care about the performance, not the truth. They don’t understand that other people actually understand these concepts and this information on a very fundamental level. They think everyone is performing. They think the expert on the debate stage is just doing a better performance. They think the researcher, the journalist, the policy analyst, are all just performing competence the same way they are. Because the performance is all they see and care about.

That’s the part nobody talks about. MAGA supporters don’t just disagree with experts. They genuinely don’t understand that expertise is real. They think everyone is doing what they’re doing: repeating things they heard somewhere and hoping nobody asks a follow up question. The idea that someone actually understands the material, that someone did the reading, tested the idea, engaged with the counter arguments, and arrived at a position through years of study, doesn’t compute for them. Because they’ve never done it. So they don’t believe anyone else has either.

Pennycook and his colleague David Rand at MIT expanded this research in 2019 with a study published in the Journal of Personality. They found that the same people who rated randomly generated nonsense as profound were also significantly more likely to perceive fake news as accurate and less able to distinguish between real and fabricated news headlines. The connection was direct. If you can’t tell the difference between something that sounds meaningful and something that is meaningful, you can’t tell the difference between real news and fake news either. The cognitive failure is the same.

Where Did They Learn This? Church

So the question is where did they learn this. Where did they learn that performing understanding is the same thing as actually understanding.

And that’s why so many of these people are fundamentalist Christians.

It’s easier to perform.

Church is one of the most performative environments in American life. You don’t have to understand the Bible. You just have to say you believe it. You don’t have to live the values. You just have to show up on Sunday. You don’t have to grapple with the moral complexity of scripture. You just have to repeat the phrases, raise your hands at the right time, say amen when everyone else says amen, and perform belief loudly enough that nobody questions whether it’s real.

The whole system rewards performance over understanding. It trains people from childhood to mistake the act of saying something for the act of knowing something. It teaches them that conviction is the same thing as comprehension. That confidence is the same thing as competence. That if you say it loud enough and with enough certainty, it becomes true.

Pennycook’s own data supports this connection. His 2015 study found that b******t receptivity, the inability to distinguish between something that sounds profound and something that actually is profound, was directly correlated with religious belief. The people most susceptible to meaningless statements dressed up as wisdom were the same people most likely to hold strong religious convictions. Not because religion is inherently meaningless, but because the cognitive style that accepts performance as a substitute for substance is the same cognitive style that fundamentalist religion cultivates and rewards.

They learned this in church before they ever learned it in politics.

MAGA didn’t teach them to perform. It just gave them a new stage. The same people who spent decades performing belief in a pew are now performing knowledge on a debate stage. The venue changed. The cognitive style didn’t.

That’s why facts don’t work. You are presenting evidence to a person who does not process evidence. They process performances. And in their world, the louder, more confident performance wins. Truth is not a variable. Truth was never a variable.

Frankfurt warned about this. In the twentieth anniversary edition of his book, he added a postscript emphasizing that indifference to truth is extremely dangerous. Not because it produces wrong answers. But because it destroys the framework within which right and wrong answers are even possible. When enough people stop caring whether something is true and start caring only about how it sounds, you don’t get bad politics. You get the end of politics. You get a country where sixty million people will watch someone get destroyed in a debate and walk away thinking their side won. Because they were never watching a debate. They were watching a performance.

You can’t correct someone who is indifferent to truth. And you can’t reach someone who learned in childhood that repeating the right words is the same thing as understanding them.

Sources

Frankfurt, H. G. (1986). On b******t. Raritan Quarterly Review, 6(2).

Frankfurt, H. G. (2005). On B******t. Princeton University Press.

Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J. A., Barr, N., Koehler, D. J., and Fugelsang, J. A. (2015). On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound b******t. Judgment and Decision Making, 10(6), 549-563.

Pennycook, G. and Rand, D. G. (2020). Who falls for fake news? The roles of b******t receptivity, overclaiming, familiarity, and analytic thinking. Journal of Personality, 88(2), 185-200.