You, like many liberals, fail to understand conservatism. Your basic problem is here:

to harbor so much unaddressed cognitive dissonance

what if there was no cognitive dissonance

Try that on. What if conservatives think conservatively because they have no problems with cognitive dissonance? What would the causes of that be? What would the outcomes be?

From a psychological - rather than rhetorical - standpoint, cognitive dissonance is an unpleasant physical sensation caused by two or more ideas that are in conflict. Cognitive dissonance, from a psychological standpoint, is relieved by discarding one or the other of the ideas. This in turn causes a backlash effect whereby the afflicted loses affinity for the entire sphere of ideas adjacent to the conflict.

Liberals say "cognitive dissonance" a lot because liberals require a consistent worldview. For example, it is very hard for liberals to appreciate that Dick Cheney legitimately had the country's best intentions in mind when he pushed for the invasion of Iraq because liberals have enough affinity for other people in other countries that invasion requires a threshold of evil. Liberals have difficulty seeing good in the TSA or CBP because liberals see the evils perpetrated by both organizations against others. Liberals require a consistent logical framework they can explain to themselves and explain to others. "I am good, I want good, those who govern in my name must also be good because if they do evil, I am responsible for evil."

Conservatives are utterly unmoved by cognitive dissonance because conservatives do not require a consistent worldview. They require loyalty and consistency. Liberals constantly fret about whether liberals are doing evil - conservatives take, as a base condition, that conservatives cannot be evil. If a conservative does it, it is good.

Not that they don't have doubts? But "doubt" is not the base condition the way it is with liberals. This is why conservative defenses against cognitive dissonance are so lightweight - they don't need to be any firmer. The "caravan" does not need to be actual if there are pictures that can support the idea of a caravan. George W Bush may have only won the 2000 election by 538 votes but he won. Liberals can't say there was zero voter fraud of any kind whatsoever in the 2020 election, therefore there was widespread voter fraud.

This is the principle reason all the ex-republicans - the Lincoln Project, Joe Walsh, George Conway, etc - whinge about like a bunch of goddamn ex-mormons. Conservatives aren't immune from cognitive dissonance, it just takes a lot more of a push to get them to question a worldview whose central tenet is "leadership is always correct."

This is also the principle reason the Republicans spent 2015 and 2016 decrying Trump from the rooftops and 2017-2022 licking his boots: it's not about what's done, it's about who does it.

That, by the way, is the simplest definition of fascism, as pointed out by Hannah Arendt, as described by Mussolini: unity over ideology. Mussolini didn't go all the way to L'etat, c'est moi but he implied it. Arendt defined fascism as belief in the individual over belief in the idea. I've read two or three people argue in print that Republican fascism started at Nixon - a Republican political establishment would freely argue that the President is not above the law; a fascist political establishment would argue that the President is the law. Which, incidentally, is William Barr's guiding legal theory. Only reason he got out of there is his thinking is "the president is in charge" rather than "Donald Trump is in charge."

I keep harping on this: The strength of the Republican Party is directly proportional to the strength of Donald Trump. It will be that way until they pick a new leader. This is the fundamental political struggle of our time: will the Republicans find someone to rally around who believes in someone other than themselves? Will the Democrats (and let's be honest - the bureaucrats; I'm a big fan of the deep state) be able to paint Trump red enough that he piddles off into nothing?

You're right - it's a feature not a bug. But you persist in thinking about it in terms of "I think like this, therefore they're not thinking".

The Fed exists to keep businesses businessing. if you ask Wallerstein the country doesn't matter, what matters is the economic system - from a cultural perspective, modern American society extends back to the Dutch in like 1550, passes through English mercantilism and shifts to the United States around WWI. Strauss-Howe Generational Theory also counts generations back to 200 years before the founding of the United States. And that there represents a fundamental problem: in a capitalist system, it's the capital that matters. The Fed? The Fed is the interface between the money and the people who want to tear it all down in order to stop the cotton gins. Of course they gerrymander the shit out of the statistics.

And look - this is an important insight. The Republican Party has been the party of business since its inception in 1854. Missouri Compromise set a line north of which slavery was banned, south of which slavery was permitted. Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise because Northern industrialists knew industrialization had an edge over manual labor but not one over slave labor. Republicans came about to ban slavery everywhere not because it was immoral (not entirely because it was immoral) but because a slave economy will never make profits the way an industrialized economy will.

These are the same guys picking fights with Disney now.

Democrats grabbed the Civil Rights mantle in 1964 and lost the south. Republicans have been about wedge issues ever since. Eventually they would land on wedge issues so wedgy that not even Exxon Mobil can back 'em. We're lookin' at it, boyo. The Supreme Court wants to ban gays. 20% of GenZ identifies as LGBT. How's that gonna work out?

And I mean, you have to consider what "law" means to the privileged white. It means "thing I can be charged with if I fuck up, and then I'll have to hire a lawyer or something." Death penalty against abortion providers? Yeah there'll prolly be a show trial or two. It'll be the same culturally-poignant, legally-irrelevant misadventure as the Scopes Trial or Jammie Thomas. These things matter to liberals, they fucking don't to conservatives. This is why "owning the conservatives" isn't a thing - conservatives know that logical inconsistencies bug the shit out of liberals and don't bother conservatives in the slightest. Implications of overturning Roe? Liberals give a shit about that. Conservatives just know their team wins.

And that's literally all that matters.

Democrats, in their current incarnation, are never going to win. If you look at it, the Democratic Party is the party of rich white people who can tolerate poor people. The Republican Party is the party of rich white people who can't. Eventually, though, the poors rise up.

We're at an inflection point. The Democrats have been shown to be utterly ineffectual. Their past 40 years have amounted to nothing. The Republicans, on the other hand, have been shown to be too effectual. Their past 40 years have amounted to a massive cultural isolation and a business climate that's hostile to business. If you aren't Charles Koch you want a healthy EPA because they're the thing that levels the playing field between you and Charles Koch.

But we all fight the last war. So very few people are paying attention to what's going on because they're all preoccupied with what happened.