This isn’t it. I was raised conservative in a red state. People are aware of the Nazis, they can explain how to use critical thinking and why critical thinking is important, and they even have awareness that racism and oppression by wealthy elites of politically powerless poor folk is a problem. How can they reach conclusions that disregard everything I just mentioned? The same way that many lawyers and professors become right-wing despite their education and fact-finding skills.

They have faith that the ideas they have based their worldview on are correct and work backwards from that conclusion. Whatever their motivation for uncritical belief of some fundamental premise doesn’t matter because their whole ego and sense of self is tied up with those concepts being true. They don’t have political conversations, just opportunities to re-assert some cliche perhaps dressed up by some poetic philosophical language so that other who happen to identify with those beliefs will know that they’re on the correct side. Cognitive dissonance is so pronounced they would almost always avoid it entirely rather than work through it at a certain point. Some I’ve spoken to are aware that their philosophy is full of contradictions, so their defense is to consider it normal to have contradictory beliefsand demonstrate this by pointing them out from other partisan hacks. They didn’t reason themselves into their beliefs, reason is only to find a credible way their beliefs are correct.