For years, I have tried to understand how and why so many of my family and friends, good and intelligent people, buy into the Trump-MAGA promise of quick and easy solutions to complex problems. I see why they believe the government has let them down and understand why they believe transgender athletes should not compete in women’s sports.
But after Trump’s disappointing first term, his encouragement of the J6 insurrection, and his convictions for sexual abuse and falsifying business records, I cannot understand why they elected him to a second term. And in this term, after pardoning the convicted insurrectionists and surrounding himself with lackies like Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth who are unsuited for their roles in government, he continues to support them.
Cognitive dissonance, the mental distress felt by people who hold two or more conflicting beliefs simultaneously, offers some insight. People naturally desire harmony in their lives. Those who celebrated Trump’s candidacy in the 2020 election were angered when the results were tallied. Their beliefs did not align with the facts.
To remove such discomfort, people react in different ways. They may reconcile their belief with opposing facts; may seek out only information that affirms their beliefs, a process known as Confirmation Bias, or they may rationalize, ignore, or misinterpret information that challenges their views, known as Belief Disconfirmation.
Dissonance can be triggered by religious and political views. To be sure, Democrats as well as Republicans can be affected but is more prevalent in today’s Republican Party. The GOP is dominated by Christian fundamentalists who have absolute faith in both Christian doctrine and Donald Trump.
Faith and reason built our great nation and they peacefully co-existed – until the 1970’s when we allowed the Christian fundamentalism of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to enter our politics. For Christian extremists, whose faith is absolute, facts are the enemy to their truth. Democrats do not have a similar allegiance to an individual or religious ideology.
Consider, for example, evolution. The evidence supporting Darwin’s theory is overwhelming. Science has shown conclusively that, through natural selection, humans evolved over a period of 300,000 years; the Earth was formed about 4.54 billion years ago, and human suffering is a consequence of natural causes.
Yet, Christian extremists cling to the biblical story of creation, which holds that the world is only 6,000 years old, that all of mankind descended from Adam and Eve, and that human suffering is God’s punishment for the original sin of eating a forbidden fruit.
Unable to reconcile those beliefs with known facts; they simply reject the evidence. This is Belief Disconfirmation.
This irrational stance that belief is more important than evidence has afflicted the Supreme Court. Cognitive dissonance was evidenced in Justice Samuel Alito’s anger with the Burger court’s logical decision in Roe v Wade. Alito took the unusual step of openly criticizing it saying Roe was “egregiously wrong.” In the Dobbs decision, he presumed that the facts underlying the Roe decision were irrelevant. To him, and the concurring justices, as well as all conservative Christians, the people’s belief trumped evidence. Overturning Roe, they left abortion, a matter of obvious national importance, up to the states, to be decided by popular vote.
Imagine a judge saying to the jury at the end of a murder trial, “The lack of evidence in this case doesn’t matter. If most of you believe the accused is guilty, he’s guilty.” Ridiculous as that sounds, it is the essence of Alito’s thinking.
Alito also based his decision on the fact that abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution. That is true, but then, the Constitution did not mention slavery either, until 1865 when the 13thAmendment was ratified.
Dissonance is also at the heart of the Republican crusade against our educational institutions. The philosophical foundation of liberal education is Humanism, which emphasizes critical thinking and ethical reasoning, human worth and instills the values of freedom, equality and democracy. More than professional training, liberal education prepares students for active citizenship. But fundamentalists in the Trump Administration, like Russ Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, who was a key author and architect of Project 2025, are uncomfortable with humanism’s teachings, which contradict their beliefs. Though masked as claims of antisemitism, this is one of the underlying reasons for the administration’s attacks on education.
The most concerning example of cognitive dissonance is the Republican adoration of Donald Trump, some claiming he was divinely ordained to lead America to greatness. But he has trampled on our Constitution by starting a war with Iran he been is unable to win, against people he cannot understand; he has instituted illegal tariffs, which, along with his war with Iran, have rekindled inflation; he has demolished the East Wing of our historic White House to suit his personal vanity; he has rebuffed our allies, romanced our enemies, and shown himself to be the most financially corrupt president in history. But these facts are spurned by his followers.
This is where abandoning reason in favor of absolute belief has taken us. Anxiety, driven by cognitive dissonance, appears to be a root cause.
America is the most important outcome of the Age of Reason and its Enlightenment philosophy. Our Constitution embodies Enlightenment principles. Two hundred and fifty years ago, the new nation rejected the idea that kings and popes were divinely ordained along with the throne-and-altar alliances that had ruled Western societies through fear. Under those early regimes, individuals accused of treason or heresy faced gruesome punishments including hanging, beheading or burning. The new republic broke from this tyranny, embracing universal, natural rights and prioritizing liberty and equality.
America reshaped Western culture by establishing a government based on the revolutionary concept of “We the People” – the belief that citizens, using reason and intellect, could build a better society. Breaking from entrenched traditions of oppression, the Founders engineered a republic that unlocked creative energy, talent, and ingenuity, allowing the nation to thrive for over 250 years. While its beginnings were profoundly flawed, the nation’s core principles of freedom, equality, and democracy guided its development and remain as vital today as they were in colonial times.
But confidence in The People has been undermined, especially in this era of Trumpism. Neither Congress nor the administration serves the common good. Instead, they pander to special interests, corporations, the wealthy, and Christian fundamentalism.
We are at a critical juncture. Should we continue down the present path, rule by We the People will be abandoned to an absolute belief in individuals and/or religion. Rather than making America great, it will set us back to a time before The Enlightenment, when human rights and opportunity were limited for all but the ruling class.
We can choose a better path, a return to democracy, where We the people control our destiny.
