I promise you, it's not genetic failure... I'm probably whiter than they are (pasty, freckled, fishbelly white) and I'm their polar opposite in thought and deed. This is nurture, this is careful grooming and brainwashing, punishments that drove them into the arms of the MAGA machine. Braindead?
identity fusion
Everybody wants to feel like they belong somewhere.
this is a little beyond that, this is fusing one's identity with one's own so that an attack on whatever they've 'fused' with is like a personal attack patriotism makes more sense in that context too
fusing with a authority figure or entity* I mean
It does. Your best guess: what would make a MAGA suddenly see the hypocrisy? What kind of personal experience? (in general because, of course, we're all different. Would a religious experience do it?
oh they belong to the devil now.
But if they just have mashed potato brains formed into peaks, we SHOULD be able to flatten those mashed potato brains into something else... pools for gravy. It's a matter of creating the right place for the "water to run." It can't help run downhill and toward more water.