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When Betrayal Feels Like Patriotism: What January 6 Reveals About Political Identity

People do not have to believe they are betraying their country in order to act against its democratic institutions. They may sincerely believe that they are defending the nation, preserving its Constitution, protecting its citizens, or remaining faithful to principles that established institutions have abandoned. This produces one of the more troubling paradoxes of political behavior: patriotic conviction and conduct that undermines constitutional government can exist within the same person at the same time.

The January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol provides an unusually well-documented modern example through which to examine this paradox. The important question is not simply why people might attack political institutions, but how some people can come to understand actions against those institutions as acts of loyalty. Social psychology, political psychology, and scholarship on historical memory suggest several mechanisms through which this transformation can occur, including identity fusion, perceptions of existential threat, motivated reasoning, and the reinterpretation of national history.

None of these mechanisms establishes that a particular political belief is pathological, nor can psychological research determine whether an individual is patriotic. They instead help explain how sincere people can reconcile conduct that others regard as profoundly disloyal with a self-conception based upon loyalty to the country.

Identity Can Shift From Country to Leader

One useful concept is identity fusion, which describes an unusually strong sense of psychological union between an individual's personal identity and another person or group. Unlike ordinary identification with a political party or social group, identity fusion can involve a particularly intense sense that the personal self and the group or leader share a common essence, making threats against the object of identification feel deeply personal.

François Alexi Martel, Philip Moniz, Ashwini Ashokkumar, and William B. Swann Jr. examined this phenomenon in research conducted around the January 6 attack. Their study found that, among Trump supporters in their sample, stronger identity fusion with Donald Trump predicted greater perception of Democrats as an existential threat to the American way of life, while greater perceived threat in turn predicted stronger endorsement of authoritarian actions against Democrats. The researchers did not find an analogous relationship among Biden supporters in their study. (Martel et al., 2025)

One of the study's most interesting findings, however, involved identification with the country rather than identification with a political leader. Among Trump supporters and, to a lesser extent, Biden supporters, stronger fusion with the United States predicted lower perceptions of opposing-party members as an existential threat and lower endorsement of authoritarian actions against them. In other words, intense psychological identification with a political leader and intense identification with the United States did not produce equivalent relationships with the attitudes the researchers measured. (Martel et al., 2025)

That distinction is particularly important when considering how conduct directed against democratic institutions can be experienced as patriotic. If a political leader or movement becomes psychologically associated with the nation itself, opposition to the leader may begin to feel like opposition to the country, while institutions that constrain the leader can be interpreted as institutions that obstruct the national interest. Under such circumstances, the person does not necessarily become less certain of his patriotism as his actions become more extreme; he may become more certain of it.

When Political Opponents Become Existential Threats

Democratic government ordinarily depends upon a distinction between an opponent and an enemy. Political opponents may advocate policies we dislike, defeat candidates we support, control institutions we distrust, or hold values fundamentally different from our own, but they nevertheless remain legitimate participants in the same political system.

That distinction becomes more difficult to preserve when political disagreement is transformed into a struggle for national survival. Once an opposing political group is perceived as an existential threat, ordinary democratic restraints can acquire very different meanings. Compromise can be interpreted as capitulation, electoral defeat as national catastrophe, an unfavorable judicial decision as evidence of institutional corruption, and procedural restraints as impediments preventing necessary action.

The Martel study is relevant precisely because perceived existential threat served as an important intermediate variable between fusion with Trump and support for authoritarian actions among Trump supporters in the research. The authors did not claim that identity fusion by itself caused the January 6 attack, nor does their research justify assigning the same psychological motivations to every participant. Their findings instead identify statistical relationships among identity, perceptions of threat, and support for authoritarian political behavior in the populations they studied.

The distinction is essential because social-scientific explanations should not become retrospective diagnoses of thousands of individuals. The research is more useful when understood as evidence for a general mechanism: if someone becomes convinced that ordinary politics has ceased to be ordinary because the survival of the country itself is at stake, actions that previously seemed unacceptable can be reinterpreted as necessary responses to an emergency.

Motivated Reasoning Can Protect Political Identity

Identity alone does not explain how people maintain such beliefs when confronted with contradictory information. The literature on motivated reasoning offers another part of the explanation.

Political scientists commonly distinguish between accuracy goals, in which people attempt to reach conclusions that minimize error on the basis of available information, and directional goals, in which reasoning is influenced by a desire to protect existing beliefs, identities, or preferred conclusions. Importantly, motivated reasoning does not necessarily involve conscious deception. A person can sincerely evaluate evidence while nevertheless processing that evidence in ways influenced by commitments the person is strongly motivated to preserve.

This mechanism can become particularly consequential when political identity is involved. Evidence that threatens an important political belief may simultaneously threaten a person's understanding of his group, his judgment, his previous decisions, and even his moral identity. Accepting contradictory evidence can therefore carry psychological costs that extend well beyond changing one's opinion about a single factual question.

Under those circumstances, reinterpretation may become easier than revision. If an institution rejects a claim, the institution can be regarded as compromised; if courts repeatedly reject it, the courts can be interpreted as part of the problem; if government officials dispute it, those officials can be treated as participants in the threat; and if journalists challenge it, their objections can become evidence of coordinated opposition. A sufficiently flexible explanatory framework can therefore absorb contradictory evidence instead of being weakened by it.

The result is a political worldview with an unusual defensive property: evidence against the worldview can sometimes be incorporated as evidence that the threat is larger than previously believed.

1776 Can Mean Two Very Different Things

Psychological processes are only part of the explanation because political action takes place within stories that people tell about their nations. In the United States, few stories possess greater symbolic power than the American Revolution.

Olivia Ianniccheri examined this dimension of January 6 in a 2026 article in Amerikastudien / American Studies. Drawing upon Signal group chats and social-media material released by the January 6 Select Committee, she analyzed how participants and groups associated with the attack, including the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, invoked 1776 and the American Revolution. Ianniccheri argues that this rhetoric allowed participants to portray themselves not as enemies of the American political tradition, but as descendants of the revolutionaries who founded it and as participants in a continuing revolutionary struggle. (Ianniccheri, 2026)

The significance of this historical framing extends beyond January 6 because the American political tradition contains two powerful ideas that can exist in considerable tension. The Revolution provides a foundational narrative in which resistance to illegitimate authority is heroic, while the Constitution provides a foundational framework through which legitimate political authority is established and constrained.

Both belong to the American tradition, but invoking the first against the second creates a difficult question: who determines when constitutional government has become sufficiently illegitimate that resistance to it should be understood as fidelity to the nation's founding principles?

The answer matters because people contemplating political violence do not need to resolve that question impartially. They need only become convinced that their circumstances resemble the heroic historical precedent rather than the unlawful rebellion.

Historical memory can therefore do more than provide imagery. It can provide a moral vocabulary through which conduct is interpreted. A person who imagines himself standing in the tradition of 1776 is unlikely to experience his actions in the same way as someone who understands himself to be attacking a constitutional government.

The Ideal Country Can Replace the Actual Country

These psychological and historical mechanisms lead to a deeper philosophical question: What exactly is the object of patriotic loyalty?

A country can mean its territory, its population, its government, its Constitution, its political institutions, its historical traditions, its ideals, or some combination of these. Under ordinary circumstances, these different objects of attachment overlap sufficiently that the distinctions may attract little attention. During periods of intense political conflict, however, they can separate dramatically.

A citizen may conclude that the existing government has betrayed the Constitution, while another may decide that constitutional procedures themselves are preventing realization of the nation's true principles. Someone may believe that elected officials no longer represent the “real” people, while someone else may conclude that important institutions have been captured by interests hostile to the country.

At that point, an idealized country can begin to compete psychologically with the country as it actually exists. The individual may remain intensely loyal to “America,” but America increasingly refers to a moral and political conception existing in the individual's mind rather than to the complicated constitutional society populated by fellow citizens who possess equal claims upon it.

Once the actual country and the imagined authentic country become sufficiently separated, conduct directed against existing institutions becomes easier to reconcile with patriotic self-understanding. A person can attack one while sincerely believing he is defending the other.

Sincerity Does Not Resolve the Question

This is why sincerity, although important for understanding motivation, is an inadequate test of patriotism or political legitimacy. Someone who says, “I did it because I love my country,” may be giving a completely accurate description of his emotional state, but that statement does not establish that his factual beliefs were correct, that his interpretation of constitutional principles was sound, that his actions benefited the country, or that his conduct was lawful.

The distinction also helps explain why dangerous political movements do not necessarily require large numbers of people who consciously understand themselves as malicious. Participants may regard extraordinary conduct as morally justified precisely because they have constructed, or accepted, an interpretive framework in which extraordinary conduct has become a moral obligation.

Indeed, sincere conviction can sometimes make restraint more difficult rather than easier. Someone pursuing ordinary self-interest can negotiate when the price becomes too high, but someone who believes the survival of the country is at stake may regard compromise itself as immoral.

This does not mean that strong political conviction is inherently dangerous, nor that claims of national emergency are necessarily false. Nations sometimes face genuine emergencies, governments sometimes act unlawfully, institutions sometimes fail, and citizens sometimes have legitimate reasons to resist government action. The problem is that the subjective feeling of certainty cannot by itself distinguish those circumstances from situations in which people have incorrectly convinced themselves that an extraordinary threat exists.

Constitutional Procedures Address a Psychological Problem They Cannot Eliminate

Psychology can help explain how people arrive at these convictions, but psychology cannot determine which political beliefs citizens ought to hold. Nor can a constitutional democracy depend upon citizens becoming perfectly rational, dispassionate observers of political life.

People will continue to form strong identities, favor some interpretations of events over others, disagree profoundly about national values, and occasionally become convinced that their opponents threaten everything important to them. A durable political system must therefore operate among people as they actually are rather than among idealized citizens free of cognitive bias and group attachment.

Constitutional procedures serve, among other purposes, as mechanisms for managing disagreement without requiring agreement about who represents the “real” nation. Elections can be lost without permanently excluding the losers from political life; unfavorable court decisions can be challenged through established processes; laws can be changed; constitutions can be amended; governments can be replaced; and political opponents can govern without acquiring ownership of the country itself.

This may be one of the most consequential distinctions between patriotism directed toward a constitutional society and loyalty directed toward a particular leader, movement, party, or historical moment. A constitutional country is necessarily larger than any of them because it includes citizens who profoundly disagree about what the country should become.

The lesson suggested by the research surrounding January 6 is therefore more complicated than the observation that people sometimes do extreme things while invoking patriotism. The more consequential possibility is that political identity, perceived existential threat, motivated reasoning, and historical narratives can combine to make extraordinary conduct appear not merely permissible but necessary to people who sincerely believe themselves to be defending their country.

The danger, in other words, does not always begin when people stop believing in patriotism.

Sometimes it begins with certainty about what patriotism requires.

References

Ianniccheri, O. (2026). “1776 Returns”: Reactive memories of a revolutionary past in the January 6 insurrection. Amerikastudien / American Studies, 71(2), 293–310.

Martel, F. A., Moniz, P., Ashokkumar, A., & Swann, W. B., Jr. (2025). Identity fusion and support for political authoritarianism: Lessons from the U.S. insurrection of 2021. Political Psychology, 46(1), 129–143. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12979

Redlawsk, D. P., & Lau, R. R. (2020). Motivated reasoning and political decision making. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics.

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