Introduction: War, day one.
Has anybody else noticed how some of their MAGA friends went pretty quiet over the last several days?
As I write this, we are two week’s into the Trump-Iran war. At the start of the war, my MAGA friends came out loud and proud. Posting on social media like madmen: confident, energized, even excited. They had several reasons ready to go. After listening to dozen reasons given by Trump, Rubio, and others, they grabbed the reason that best fit what they already believed. For some, it was regime change. For others, it was the old line: better to fight them over there than over here. For still others, it was about finally ending a tyranny that had lasted for decades.
But then the story got messier.
The quick, clean victory talk faded. It became clearer that the long-standing experts were right. Iran was prepared. Iran is dug in. This was never going to be some simple one-and-done strike. The war quickly started looking like exactly the kind of foreign entanglement MAGA says it opposes. That is when cognitive dissonance set in, a conflict of the mind between what people believed and what they were now seeing. The cheerleaders disappeared. No more celebrating. No more flood of certainty. Just silence.
That silence is what caught my attention.
It’s not really about MAGA, it’s about identity. This is what happens when our core identity is challenged. Some of our beliefs sit near the surface. They can bend, adjust, absorb. But who you are is tied to your core beliefs. And when those get challenged, people do not always argue. Sometimes they go quiet, and sometimes that silence means change.
This column is about MAGA, yes, but MAGA is just a useful current example. The deeper point matters more, and it applies to all of us.
What I want to unpack here are three ideas about worldview: core identity, existential conflict, and calibration under pressure.
1. Core identity and the outer rim.
First, understand this: your worldview includes your identity, and identity has a core. It also has an outer rim.
People do not hold their beliefs like loose change in a pocket. Some beliefs sit at the core. That is the deeper self, the part that feels most like who you really are. Those beliefs can evolve over time, but they usually do not bend easily. Other beliefs sit closer to the outer rim. Those are more flexible.
That matters in politics because political identity is rarely just about policy. It is about belonging, loyalty, and self-understanding. In 30 Philosophers, I describe identity as being shaped in part by the worldview a person embraces. I also point out that group identity works much the same way. A group’s shared beliefs and values shape how it interprets events. That is true in private life, and it is just as true in politics.
That is why silence can matter.
Sometimes silence is not agreement. It is not surrender either. Sometimes it is a person trying to figure out whether what is happening still fits who they believe they are. A person can defend an outer-rim belief fairly easily because it’s not who they are. Heck, change it. Who cares. But when something strikes the core, the response is often different. People hesitate. They go quiet. They avoid the subject. They buy time for the mind to catch up with the shock. And that, to me, is what some MAGA supporters are going through right now. Not all. But some.
They were told no more endless wars. No more neocon war mongering. No more stupid Middle Eastern wars that just creates more terrorists. No more dead Americans because elites, with no family skin in the game, want to play war games.
With the Trump-Iran war, they were told this would be sharp, limited, necessary, and over before the weekend. Then the justifications shifted, the conflict widened, and the old pattern started to show through. That kind of moment does not just challenge an opinion. It challenges a piece of identity.
Two camps become visible: pro-war and anti-war. You can see the pro-war neocons, like Lindsey Graham, happily defending the war with Iran. War is part his core identity for many reasons. You can also clearly see those that have “no more needless wars” as a core value. People like Rand Paul who consistently sticks to his core identity.
Ethics: Intent is not enough.
This is also where ethics has to step in. Good intent is not enough. Ethics is about intent, yes, but also about results. You can tell yourself a war is about freeing people. You can say it is about safety, deterrence, or even preventing something worse. But results matter. Consequences matter. And here the consequences are not abstract.
It is already clear that U.S. forces, our tax dollars, were used to strike a girls’ school in Minab, Iran. More than 150 girls were killed. As of this writing, the administration is delaying, denying, and hiding behind procedural language, but the basic moral point is clear. A catastrophic strike on children is not a side note. It is one of the defining realities of the war. It is an act that cannot hide behind slogans. Even if someone believes the war began with good intent, that good intent cannot bring back the dead. It cannot erase what followed from bad execution, bad assumptions, bad intelligence, and a reckless rush into conflict.
When civilians, especially children, are killed, the damage is not limited to the immediate horror. This is especially painful in a country where women’s freedom and education have so often been limited. How many of those girls might have grown up to help change the future of Iran? I write about Holistic Eudaimonia, the idea that our acts ripple into the void of the future. In a moment like this, the range of possible futures swings sharply. We move from the unknown positive potential of educated girls shaping tomorrow, to the much more predictable negative consequences of grief, anger, and radicalization. The political and cultural effects will spread outward for decades.
A strike like that does not weaken extremism the way its defenders imagine. More often, it feeds grievance, hardens core identity, deepens hatred, and unites people who otherwise disagree. Secular, religious, and nationalist Iranians, and ordinary families can suddenly find common ground in shared anger toward an outside power.
That is how terrorism gets new emotional fuel. That is how future violence recruits. The experts are in agreement, this is how terrorists are created. You do not have to romanticize the Iranian regime to understand that. You just have to understand human nature.
2. A political existential crisis.
I use that phrase carefully.
An existential crisis is not just stress. It is not just frustration. It is what happens when deeply held beliefs begin to break. In 30 Philosophers, I describe an existential crisis as the healthy process of challenging deeply held beliefs. Whether you move toward it through reflection and philosophy, or life throws it upon you, it is the moment when a person starts questioning purpose, values, and the structure of meaning itself. It can be painful, but it is also an opportunity for growth. The alternative is to drift toward the void.
That is why this moment feels deeper than ordinary disagreement.
Some MAGA supporters are likely asking themselves questions they do not want to ask out loud yet. Did I misread this movement? Did the movement shift, did I? Was “America First” always going to make room for this? How much contradiction can I absorb before I have to redraw the line? Those are not small questions. Those are identity questions.
Once politics reaches that level, people often do one of three things. They double down. They quietly drift. Or they pause and start rethinking everything.
3. Calibration under pressure.
This brings me to a deeper philosophical point: calibration.
Do people revise when the evidence changes, or do they cling harder because identity is now involved?
Truth and confidence are not the same thing. Reality is what it is. But our confidence in what we think is happening should rise or fall with the evidence. That is what calibration means. It means proportioning belief to constraint. It means letting reality push back on the story in your head.
That is harder than it sounds, because once identity gets involved, people do not just defend ideas. They defend themselves.
At the beginning of this war, many supporters sounded absolutely certain. The confidence was high right away. But then reality started pushing back. The story got messier. The conflict did not look as clean as promised.
That is the moment calibration is supposed to begin.
An honest person does not cling to the same level of confidence when the evidence changes. An honest person recalibrates. Confidence should track reality, not identity, not tribal loyalty, and not the emotional need for your side to always be right. When reality no longer fits the story, you adjust the story.
And that, I think, is part of what we are seeing now.
Every human being is tempted to confuse confidence with truth. Every human being is tempted to protect identity instead of revising belief. That is why this column is not really about MAGA. That movement is just the example in front of us. The deeper issue is human nature.
Use Case: Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly criticized the strikes on Iran and called them a betrayal of “America First” style promises. I would not say she “left MAGA.” That goes too far. But I would say she exposed a fault line inside it.
She put words to something many others likely felt but did not want to say. The movement had promised one thing and then moved in another direction. They were told no more Middle Eastern wars. They were told the Trump-Epstein files would be released. They were told Republicans would get rid of corruption and make groceries affordable. They were told the national debt mattered and would be lowered under Republicans. For people whose core commitment was anti-intervention, anti-neocon, anti-elite, or anti-endless-war, or even affordability, that created strain. And strain at the edge of a worldview is manageable.
Strain at the core is different.
Elections Matter: The next election.
In the end, it does not take a huge shift to change history. It only takes a small percentage in the middle. A few people becoming disillusioned. A few deciding to stay home. A few saying, no, this is not what I signed up for.
Low turnout on one side, high turnout on the other, even modest movement in the center, that is often enough to redirect the future. That is why this moment matters. Not because every MAGA voter is rethinking everything. But because some are. And sometimes history turns on the people who go quiet first.
Closing Thought: MAGA, not MAGA.
I focused on MAGA here, but this is not really a MAGA thing. It’s not even a political thing. It is a human thing.
All of us build identities around beliefs, values, loyalties, and stories about who we are. And when life hits those beliefs at the outer rim, we can usually adjust without too much pain. But when it hits the core, when it hits something tied to who we think we are, the moment feels different.
If you really believe in something, and its challenged with real evidence, what do you do? Do you shift? Do you absorb the contradiction? Do you bolt? Do you redraw the line?
So yes, if your MAGA friends were loud at the beginning of this war and now seem strangely silent, pay attention. Some are probably just waiting for the next talking point. But some may be wrestling with something deeper. And when the strain reaches the core, silence is sometimes the first sign that change has begun.