MAGA as a Status Movement: Identity, Grievance, and the Social Movement Dynamics of Status Politics

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Political Attitudes II (Table 19)

Abstract

This paper argues that the contemporary MAGA coalition is best understood not simply as an electoral constituency or ideological bloc, but as a social movement organized around status claims. While existing scholarship has emphasized racial resentment, white identity, and status threat in explaining support for Donald Trump, these approaches largely treat Trumpism as an outcome of attitudes. I instead apply social movement theory to analyze MAGA as a collective actor engaged in identity formation, grievance construction, and moral boundary work.

Drawing on five months of ethnographic fieldwork embedded in the 2020 Trump reelection campaign in northeastern Pennsylvania, supplemented by approximately seventy interviews, I show how participants experienced themselves as engaged in a moral struggle over dignity, recognition, and cultural centrality. In postindustrial “landscapes of despair,” economic stagnation and social dislocation were interpreted not as impersonal structural shifts but as evidence of betrayal by political and cultural elites. Identity entrepreneurs translated diffuse hardship into actionable grievance: “hard-working Americans” were cast as disrespected and displaced, while cosmopolitan elites were framed as corrupt antagonists. Race is central to this status politics but operates within a broader moral narrative. Participants frequently rejected accusations of racism while reframing racial inequality as the product of elite manipulation. Racial discourse thus functioned to defend in-group moral status, reverse stigma, and symbolically align white grievance with broader claims of injustice.

By treating MAGA as a social movement rather than merely a voting bloc, this paper highlights how collective identity, shared grievances, and emotionally charged status claims sustain mobilization beyond any single election. MAGA represents an organized effort to renegotiate American status hierarchies and restore moral recognition to identities perceived as culturally devalued.

Author

• biko koenig, Franklin and Marshall College