The MAGA Interpreter Pool: Why Conservatism Needs It, and Why It’s Not Going Away

This paper proposes that the MAGA movement operates as a "pooled interpreter", a collective narrative engine that offloads emotional regulation and coherence maintenance from the individual brain to a shared ideological system. Drawing from Gazzaniga's interpreter module, the Safe State Hypothesis, and recent findings on belief network interdependence, the paper argues that MAGA functions less as a political ideology and more as a distributed emotional homeostasis system. It emerges from the intersection of threat-sensitive conservative neuropsychology and a media environment optimized for destabilization. This model offers a unifying explanation for MAGA's resilience, radicalization dynamics, and resistance to factual persuasion, reframing political behavior through the lens of affective neuroscience and cognitive coherence.