I woke up on November 9, 2016, genuinely confused.
Donald Trump had won. And I couldn’t shake one nagging question: How? Not as a political jab — but as someone genuinely curious about human behaviour. Here was a candidate with an almost comical mountain of baggage. Everything conventional wisdom said was disqualifying. And yet millions voted for him anyway, many while openly acknowledging his flaws.
The easy explanation was economics. Working-class anxiety. The forgotten man. I heard that story a lot. But it never quite sat right. Something deeper was going on. I just didn’t have the language for it until I started reading about identity.
Maslow’s Blind Spot
Abraham Maslow was brilliant. His hierarchy of needs — physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, self-actualisation — feels so intuitively right that we’ve built entire industries on it. But there’s a real problem with it: it completely misses the force of identity.
Technically, you could argue identity shows up in the model. Belonging is level 3. Esteem is level 4. But that’s precisely the issue — identity is scattered, treated as a secondary feature of other needs rather than as a primal force of its own.
Here’s what actually happens: people will sacrifice everything — safety, comfort, economic security, sometimes their literal survival — to protect their identity. A mother in a war-torn country endures a bombed-out apartment to protect her nation’s sense of self. A working-class voter backs a politician who will do nothing for their wallet because that politician promises to “restore” something they feel has been taken from them.
These choices break Maslow’s model. His theory says people prioritise safety and security before worrying about identity. But they don’t. Identity is a meta-need. It’s not just about having friends or feeling respected — it’s about who you are as a member of a group. And when that identity feels threatened, people will torch their own economic interests to defend it.
The Psychology Behind It
In the 1970s, psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner developed social identity theory. The core insight is elegantly simple: people draw a huge chunk of their self-esteem from the groups they belong to.
You’re not just an individual. You’re American, or Hindu, or working-class — and these memberships become part of you. When your group is threatened, you feel threatened. Personally. Viscerally.
Here’s where it gets important: identity doesn’t operate at full intensity all the time. It has to be made salient — brought to the foreground of your mind — to drive behaviour. And once it is, something almost automatic kicks in. You start favouring your in-group and distrusting outsiders. Researchers have shown this in labs: simply reminding people of their national identity makes them more nationalistic. Priming someone’s group identity measurably shifts their political preferences — not through argument, but through activation.
This is the mechanism politicians are actually pulling when they say “your people are under threat” or “we need to restore our greatness.” They’re not making a policy case. They’re making a group identity salient — and once that happens, the psychological response can quietly override rational calculation entirely.
Identity in the Wild: Three Cases
2016. Researchers who dug into the voting data found that white identity was the strongest predictor of Trump support — stronger than economic evaluation, stronger even than party affiliation. White voters who believed there was significant discrimination against their group were 25 percentage points more likely to vote for Trump. His campaign was literally built around identity restoration: Make America Great Again. Whether the threat to white identity was objectively real didn’t matter. Millions believed it was real, and they voted to defend it. Tellingly, Trump delivered on this symbolically even when he failed materially — and his base approval barely moved, because they weren’t voting for economic outcomes. They were voting for someone fighting for their people.
Ukraine — and Russia. By every rational calculation, Ukraine should have surrendered months into Russia’s invasion. Russia’s military superiority is overwhelming. The destruction has been apocalyptic. And yet a majority of Ukrainians — soldiers and civilians alike — support continuing to fight. Because Ukrainians don’t beleive that they are defending territory or economic interests- but defending the right to exist as a distinct people.
Get The Scholar Warrior’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Remember me for faster sign in
But look at the other side of the same war. Russians have absorbed devastating economic sanctions, the loss of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and a standard of living in freefall — and polling consistently shows majority support for continuing. Why? Because they see the conflict not as a territorial ambition but as an existential struggle: Russia and Russian civilisation are under siege from the West. NATO expansion, Western values, the supposed encirclement of the Russian world — these are portrayed as attacks on who Russians are. Once that idea took hold, the economic cost became almost irrelevant. You don’t do a cost-benefit analysis when your identity is on the line. And this is the psychological force driving Russian endurance.
Europe’s far-right. Parties running explicitly on identity restoration are pulling 20–40% of the vote across most European democracies. The pitch is direct: European identity is under threat. Christian culture is being erased by immigration and globalisation. We need to take our nations back. Many of their voters understand the economic cost — EU isolation, loss of structural funds, diplomatic friction. They vote for these parties anyway. Restoring their sense of cultural continuity has become more valuable to them than economic integration.
The Uncomfortable Historical Parallel
Germany post-WWI was a classic example of a collective identity crisis of historic proportions. The Treaty of Versailles wasn’t just an economic humiliation — it was a national one. German greatness, German pride, the entire sense of Germany’s place in the world, seemed to have been erased overnight.
Into that void rose a movement built on a single, intoxicating promise: I will restore German greatness. I will return the German people to their rightful place. Educated, middle-class Germans backed it in massive numbers despite understanding that its programme involved authoritarianism, violence, and likely war. They supported it because it offered something deeper than economic welfare — it offered to give them back who they were.
The chilling point is this: the same psychological mechanism that makes a Ukrainian willing to die for their country is the same one that made ordinary people willing to back a programme that led to their own destruction — and to history’s darkest atrocities.
Identity is psychologically powerful. But it is morally neutral. It can drive extraordinary courage or justify atrocity. The direction it goes depends entirely on the narratives constructed around it, and on whether communities have the capacity to resist manipulation.
What Do We Do With This?
Understanding identity politics won’t make it disappear. But it gives us something.
Accept that identity politics isn’t uniquely pathological. Everyone does it. The left mobilises around race, gender, and cultural justice. The right mobilises around national and religious identity. Both sides use the same psychological machinery. The question isn’t whether to engage in identity politics — it’s which identities you’re activating and toward what end.
Recognise that identity threats are often manufactured. Trump convinced Americans that white identity was threatened by immigration. Far-right European leaders convince voters that Christian culture is being erased. These narratives may be false or wildly exaggerated — but they’re potent because they tap a genuine human need. And once people believe in a threat, the belief becomes real in its consequences.
Understand the difference between civic and ethnic identity. A powerful national identity can be built on civic principles rather than on ethnicity or blood. That kind of identity can be inclusive. Ethnic nationalism, by contrast, always creates permanent outsiders. The question for democracies is whether they can build civic identities compelling enough to compete with ethnic nationalist narratives.
Where This Leaves Us
Trump won because he grasped something most analysts missed: identity politics is more powerful than policy politics. Europe’s far-right is surging because liberal centrists haven’t offered a compelling vision of who “we” are — and nationalists have rushed in to fill the void.
And we have to sit with this uncomfortable truth: the same psychological forces at work in all of these stories are the same ones that have, at their darkest, produced history’s worst atrocities. That’s not hyperbole. It’s history. The difference was never in the machinery — it was in the narratives activating it, and the institutions either enabling or constraining where it went.
Understanding this gives us one thing Maslow’s hierarchy never did: the ability to recognise when identity is being weaponised against us, and to think seriously about which identities we actually want to cultivate and defend.
That’s worth something.
