Lost In the Kingdom of Kitsch
Kitsch, addiction, and the emotional architecture of MAGA
https://cybelecanterel.substack.com/p/lost-in-the-kingdom-of-kitsch
The cultural aesthetic of MAGA is as instantly recognizable as it is idiosyncratic: red hats, golden crosses, genre-laden realist memes, and endless flags. But why? Why the plastic patriotism, the sentimental religiosity, when the core ideology has so little to do with either actual Christianity or actual American history?
A short answer: the aesthetic is kitsch. MAGA kitsch. Christo-fascist kitsch. And kitsch is not incidental— it’s the scaffolding that props up the movement’s values and delivers its psychic charge. It’s the addictive element that manages followers’ anxiety and fear of change; the glue that solidifies their group identity.
Art critic Clement Greenberg, in 1939 (another important year for kitsch), defined it as artifacts of mass culture based on “vicarious experience” and “faked sensations.” Its representations are shallow and stereotypical, yet emotionally intense, pulling from a reservoir of shared cultural archetypes and reproducing them in emotionally blunt, instantly recognizable forms. Milan Kundera sharpened it further: “Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit…a folding screen set up to curtain off death.”
Philosopher Tomas Kulka, in his book Kitsch and Art, adds three rules to the definition:
Kitsch depicts objects or themes that are highly charged with stock emotions.
The objects or themes depicted by kitsch are instantly and effortlessly identifiable.
Kitsch does not substantially enrich our associations relating to the depicted objects or themes.
If art is ambiguity and evocation, kitsch is certainty and prescription. Art asks. Kitsch does exactly what it says on the tin.
Think of kitsch as an anxiety management technology: it rejects ambiguity, nuance, and difference— precisely the qualities in life that create emotional friction and require the ability to manage discomfort. Instead, it offers emotional clarity: stock images, stock emotions, stock answers.
This clarity is addictive.
Neuroscience has shown that emotionally charged experiences, whether joy or outrage, activate the brain’s mesolimbic dopamine system, the circuitry that underlies motivation and reward. Intense emotional arousal spikes dopamine (the craving, seeking circuit), reinforcing the behavior that triggered the spike, regardless of whether the emotion is positive or negative. This is why engaging with outrage on social media, or the spectacle of a rally, can feel compulsive: the brain learns to crave and seek out similar experiences.
At the same time, collective rituals like chanting, singing, and waving symbols boost oxytocin, the neuropeptide that strengthens in-group trust and bonding. Oxytocin doesn’t just produce “warm fuzzies”— it sharpens the divide between in-group and out-group, amplifying hostility toward outsiders, and reinforcing personal boundary collapse with insiders.
The addictive power of kitsch isn’t just neurological. Research in political psychology shows that conservatism is consistently associated with heightened needs for order, structure, cognitive closure, and with discomfort in the face of ambiguity. Layered onto this is experiential avoidance— the tendency to suppress or flee from unpleasant internal states. Psychologists Luigi Leone and Antonio Chirumbolo found that higher levels of experiential avoidance were positively correlated with right-wing authoritarianism and conservative attitudes. People who cannot tolerate inner conflict, uncertainty, or discomfort are more likely to gravitate toward rigid belief systems that promise clarity and order.
Kitsch, in this light, functions as a psychological narcotic. Its sentimental symbols and emotional spectacles allow adherents to bypass discomfort, suppress nuance, and substitute stock images for lived complexity. The dopamine/oxytocin loop provides the chemical reinforcement; experiential avoidance supplies the cognitive vulnerability. Together, they create an almost closed system: a worldview in which difficult realities are screened out and replaced with emotionally gratifying fictions.
This helps explain why kitsch-dominated worldviews are so sticky. As education policy scholar Catherine Lugg puts it, “Kitsch is art that engages the emotions and deliberately ignores the intellect, a form of cultural anesthesia”. Kitsch provides a behavioral shortcut around discomfort and ambiguity, rewarding avoidance with a hit of certainty. And once that loop is entrenched, critical faculties are dampened and the individual is caught in a cycle of craving and release.
Social theorist Theodor Adorno saw this dynamic coming long before psychology and neuroscience confirmed it. In The Authoritarian Personality, he and his collaborators described the rigid, conventional, ambiguity-intolerant mindset that gravitated toward fascism. Such individuals, they argued, defended against inner conflict by projecting it outward, seeking comfort in authority and uniformity. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Max Horkheimer diagnosed how the “culture industry” fed this structure by mass-producing kitsch-like cultural goods that gratified emotions while discouraging critical thought. What contemporary neuroscience calls dopamine reinforcement and what psychologists call experiential avoidance, Adorno had already described as cultural anesthesia—a narcotic cycle that keeps people transfixed, gratified, and politically pliant.
Kitsch is the lingua franca of consumer capitalism. From chain restaurants to Disney’s Epcot, consumerism attempts to create novelty without friction, a craving for more of what we already know. The only ambiguity permitted in this system is the gap between what we have bought and what we could buy. Marketing collapses this gap into identity itself: who we are versus who we could be if only we purchased the missing pieces.
Fascism works the same psychological seam: it exploits the gap between what its followers feel— anxiety, rejection, fear of change and difference— and what it promises they could feel: enmeshment, boundary collapse, and the regression to a womb-like belonging…forever. The spectacle of rallies, the flood of symbols, the orchestrated chants: all are kitsch rituals engineered to simultaneously collapse the boundaries of the group inside, and to close the walls against the groups outside. The logic of the loop: stoke anxiety and fear, then relieve it through group spectacle and performance, ad infinitum.
Donald Trump embodies kitsch with almost comic literalness. His gaudy towers dripping with faux-gold interiors and ersatz Versailles styling are simulacra of wealth rather than wealth itself. His hand gestures, oversized signatures, and stagecraft with planes and flags— all attempt to jackhammer consumerist “success” into the cultural consciousness.
For his followers, this aesthetic works like a drug. The gold-plated spectacle delivers the dopamine thrill of status and the oxytocin warmth of validation. To people who feel disempowered, Trump offers a transfusion of counterfeit power: his “success” is fake enough to be accessible, but insistent enough to feel real. Writer James Howard Kunstler described the experience of being inside Trump’s now-bankrupt Taj Mahal casino in the early ‘90s:
Kitsch transforms Trump into an emotional commodity: the product people buy, over and over, to feel powerful and relevant in a world that makes them feel powerless and forgotten.
Though Trump instinctively speaks this language, he did not invent it. American history is littered with racialized, kitsched-up narratives designed to sanitize structural violence into consumable archetypes. The “welfare queen,” the “illegal alien,” the “problem child,” the immigrant anglicized into acceptability— all are kitsch figures, caricatures instantly recognizable, emotionally loaded, stripped of complexity.
From the Republic’s early assimilation myths, through the New Deal’s sanitized portrayals of the “worthy poor,” to Reagan and Clinton’s demolition of welfare via the “undeserving poor,” American politics has leaned on kitsch to paper over contradictions. These symbolic figures are players in what Kundera called the “dictatorship of the heart”: images that everyone recognizes, that induce feelings before thought, and that enforce conformity by punishing difference.
MAGA inherits this lineage wholesale and remixes it. Its imagery— saintly founding fathers, hard-hatted, muscular white workers, sentimentalized Anglo-Protestant nuclear families— exists not to describe shared reality but to overwrite it with emotional shorthand. Pluralism, negotiation, and change are swapped out for stock images of dominance and homogeneity. The past is imagined as pure, the present as unbearable, and the future as redeemable only through exclusion.
This is why MAGA Christianity is not Christianity in any meaningful sense. It is kitsch Christianity: emotionally loaded symbols stripped of theological depth and deployed as an anxiety management system. Crosses, slogans, patriotic hymns, and nostalgic fantasies offer an endless buffet of anesthetizing “hits.” If only every deviant, dissenter, or difference could be subordinated or eliminated, then unease would disappear. But this is an impossible fiction—one concealed by the true beneficiaries of the system: those already at the top of the hierarchy. The wealthy and powerful require a loyal base transfixed by spectacle, hooked on its chemical rush, mobilized against phantoms in order to consolidate their own position.
The psychology of authoritarianism predisposes those intolerant of ambiguity to seek certainty; experiential avoidance drives them to flee discomfort into rigid dogmas; dopamine and oxytocin loops reinforce the cycle with chemical urgency. As philosopher Walter Benjamin warned, kitsch fashions its figures “in the interior.” It does not merely surround us; it colonizes us. In MAGA kitsch, the emotional lies have become lived truth, and the addictive loop itself has become the politics. Kitsch provides the medium, history supplies the symbols, and Trump embodies the spectacle.
Trump and MAGA are thus not an aberration but a culmination—an avatar of the patterns woven into the fabric of the American psyche. They have, in various incarnations, been with us from the beginning, and are unlikely to fade away no matter how much scrubbing we do. When the next reckoning comes, we must take into account the systemic aspects that continue to support its appeal. Inequality, psychology, and addictive cycles play instrumental roles in who falls to fascist kitsch and who is resistant to it.
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