This is important, and it explains the world better than any other insight I've come across:

Liberals operate on principle. Populists operate on affinity.

The fundamental argument of Jonathan Haidt, chicken fucker, is that a very small percentage of the world actually aligns and organizes based on logic. He makes this argument because he's a psychologist who did a fuckton of testing. He calls those who do "WEIRDs" - Western-Educated Industrial Rich & Democratic. The fundamental argument of Harari, Wallerstein, Ferguson and the Geopolitical Rationalists writ large is that "WEIRDs" dominate the earth because rationalism leads to capitalism leads to utter societal extinction by any culture that doesn't adapt to a world with constant innovation.

Wallerstein further argued that societies advance through liberalism but people within society advance through populism. There's a fundamental tension at play in capitalist society - cut-throat competition is what moves the ball and the best way to win that competition is to prevent anyone else from playing. This plays out in politics exactly as we're seeing: Bill Clinton, arch-neoliberal, was fond of saying "when people think, we win" while the 2020 Republican platform was literally "RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda."

So no. None of them actually believe this. Nobody actually believed that uppity women who didn't kowtow to the church were witches either but they burned them just the same. A fundamental feature of tribalism is it has no cognitive dissonance. It has no hypocrisy. Liberal Christians can talk about the philosophical meaning of the Holy Trinity but fundamentalist Christians know that if you don't accept the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit as one being you're a blasphemer, full stop. In general, the more conservative a religion, the more it depends on the edicts of holy leaders to guide the faithful. Islam, during its golden age, had the Quran, the Hadith and the Sunnah, where the Quran was the writings of Mohammed, the Hadith were first-person anecdotes about Mohammed and the Sunnah were scholarly interpretations of the Hadith and other errata. There was an entire class of clerics whose job it was to scry rules for living from what writings were available and give guidance as to how to improvise in a changing world. Wahabism? If it wasn't written by Mohammed or Ibn al'Wahab it's takfir.

It's really frustrating to see once you grasp it - liberals lose their goddamn minds about the hypocrisy within the Republican Party and steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that populists deploy hypocrisy as a weapon against liberals. They don't fucking care. They never fucking will. If they cared in the smallest, tiniest amount the cognitive dissonance would eject them from the party like a potato gun. But their fundamental tenet is "I'm with the Party" so they don't have to deal with that shit. It's great from a psychological standpoint, actually - if your team can do no wrong, you basically get to hand over all moral arguments to someone else. That's the basic value of religion if you think about it - you don't have to worry about how your choices affect other people because (1) you aren't making any choices (2) they aren't really people. The only thing you need to worry about is inter-tribal relations.

This is why there's such a dichotomy of opinion on Liz Cheney, by the way - yeah, she's Republican through and through but also, she betrayed her tribe. It's also why Kevin McCarthy is in such a spot - he had the job of presiding over the greatest schism American politics has ever seen. Over the past 60 years the Republican Party has gone from a civil-rights-leaning capitalist party of industrialists to legit, unabashed nativist fascism and anybody clever has figured out that if you have no principles to bank on you can't build a future within it. Unfortunately the past 60 years has attracted hordes of unabashed nativist fascists who understand that the only thing that matters is proximity to power.

There's no steady-state here. It cannot continue. Through the long lens of history, Donald Trump is the culmination of a crisis created by Reconstruction. What we end up with will be different. Better, I think. The WEIRDs always win, but not always immediately.