Conservatism is hierarchy. Conservatism is hierarchy as a theory-of-everything. The modern ideology originates with confused French revolutionaries saying ‘well somebody’s got to be king.’ To those people, the problem with monarchy was deciding who got to be the wise ruler over all and who got to do backbreaking labor… not the existence of absolute power or crushingly severe inequality.

This tribalism is how humans think, by default. It’s an instinct from the ancestral environment. Your tribe was good because it’s your tribe, and your tribal leaders must be right about nearly everything or else they wouldn’t be leaders, and this worked okay for about a hundred thousand years. Occasionally civilizations would be utterly destroyed, or get really into blood sacrifices, but on average it was a low-effort way to understand a confusing world.

Expressions of this stick out in advanced societies, on account of how we’ve examined our bullshit and answered most old questions, so there’s no excuse for trusting your local witch-doctor over medical science. Text and recorded media also let the average layman spot inconsistency, hypocrisy, and outright bullshit. So when someone’s just changing their opinion to maintain allegiance, and picking arguments to excuse whatever their betters told them, you can tell. It is visibly distinct from being swayed by evidence or rhetoric. It’s the behavior that makes people go ‘how can they X when yesterday they Y?’ or ‘well if they want Z they missed obvious opportunity N’ when the obvious answer is that they’re just lying. Their stated ideals are ad-hoc justifications. They are performing ingroup loyalty. They picked a conclusion based solely on interpersonal trust, and if the same guy says the opposite tomorrow, they’ll parrot that instead.

Reality is a team sport, to some people.

I dare anyone to tell me that’s not exactly what’s going on in the Republican party today. We have The Idiot declaring he can declassify documents with his mind, as if “abuse of power” is a contradiction. We have people defending all the crimes he committed in full public view, as if due process is only a ritual that legitimizes some knee-jerk partisan attack. The House speaker torpedoed a bipartisan deal to keep the government running because he’d rather hold federal employees hostage than let a faction of his party work with icky nasty smelly Democrats, with their cooties. My state’s governor is at war with facts about historical racism, as if his ingroup’s ancestors being awful is a personal attack on everyone who looks like him.

Their only defense against this is to pretend everyone does it. Sorry, that makes it sound like they know better and they’re being wrong on purpose. Rather: they do not defend this worldview, because they do not believe there’s anything else. They think everyone’s doing what they’re doing. “Both sides,” says one side. So when COVID recommendations went from obsessive hand-washing to wearing a mask, they figure that’s identical to saying ‘it’s a hoax!’ and ‘eat horse dewormer!’ in the same paragraph. And if we got to impeach The Idiot then they get to impeach Biden, because that’s only fair. And if Charles Darwin secretly recanted on his deathbed, poof, a century of evolutionary biology doesn’t count.

Forums to the left of alt-right crazytown tend to be open because we’d desperately love to think these folks have some consistent set of claims that we can work with and compromise on. We keep asking each other what they really believe. But conservatives do not believe things. Conservatives believe people. And as that tribal worldview crumbles on contact with the harsh realities of economics, infectious disease, social science, climate change, et very cetera, their choices dwindle. They can stay open, fumble their way through how they think debate works, and get dunked on by anyone with object permanence. Or: they can circle the wagons. Cut out skeptics. Silence criticism. Enforce trust exercises. Do some purity tests. Maintain ingroup cohesion at all costs, because of course, ingroup loyalty is what’s important. Ingroup loyalty is the only thing that matters.

This is the same dynamic as a cult. There’s no coincidence. Cults do cult stuff in service to some supreme leader, whose arbitrary and capricious decisions must be accepted regardless of how they are questioned. If the new truth sounds like contradictory nonsense, it is each devotee’s job to “study it out” and decide how nuh-uh.

That’s really difficult to maintain when outsiders can point out the obvious, because they’re not suppressing doubt to protect their fragile social standing.