Just to give you some context: I'm Black, my family is Black, and my uncle was the pastor of a church. It was an evangelical Presbyterian church that was very racially diverse. We had White people, Black people, Asian people, interracial couples, and so on. So, on the surface, it seemed fairly liberal, right?
The church had a lot of Trump supporters, but it also had a lot of Black members, including my uncle, who hated Donald Trump and still do. They didn't like Trump, didn't like the Republican Party, and generally voted Democrat.
To be specific, our youth group was small—only eight teenagers, four of whom were brothers. We were all people of color. One of the church members, however, was a hardcore Republican and MAGA supporter. He invited me and some of the other kids to come paint his fence one day, but my aunt told my mom she didn't want me going over there because of his politics. There was even some friction within the church because some members supported Trump, while the anti-Trump members strongly disliked those who voted for him.
However, here's what confuses me: almost every single one of the anti-Trump members—outside of me and maybe two other people—was extremely homophobic and transphobic. They were also all strongly pro-life. They hated abortion and viewed it as "murder." One kid in the church literally said, "Gay people deserve to be hurt."
So they held very socially conservative views, yet they didn't support the Republican Party and hated Trump. Why is that? Why would someone hate MAGA while basically agreeing with many of the same social positions? Why would they call themselves liberals or Democrats? My uncle literally said he was a liberal who votes Democrat, yet he's extremely pro-life. How can that be?
I'll ask the same question about the other side. Look at Brad Polumbo—he's gay, supports LGBTQ+ rights, and has spoken out against racism and homophobia, yet he's still right-wing and supports the Republican Party. The same goes for Arielle Scarcella, who's a lesbian, and Blair White, who's a trans woman and probably the most famous example. I don't think Blair is necessarily transphobic, but she supports Trump and identifies as Republican.
So why does this happen? Why do some people identify with a political party even when they disagree with that party on major issues? And why do some people reject a party despite agreeing with many of its core positions?
You've just thought about it more deeply than most of these people combined.
I'm sorry you're self aware. Drugs will help with the pain, but can make the underlying problem worse. Philosophy may seem tempting, but don't-it will make the problem worse.
Edit:
If you want a less dismissive but very tired slightly high answer: we like to think we're conscious higher beings who function on logic and imagination and individual will and all these other strong forces that emerge from within us.
And we can be. All those things are possible. They happen. But generally we're not, and whether by structural pressures confected by centuries of authoritarianism or some evolutional quirk or the fact the warming climate has been starving all our brains of oxygen for over a century; we tend to avoid thinking when possible.
So there's identity pressures and social pressures best compared to running parts of your computer's operating system off the cloud and millennia of innovation in abstraction and groupthink to keep anyone from ever having to think or form opinions for themselves.
They don't make sense. They're not trying to. They do not bend towards justice. They don't even know what that is and trying to tell them would be a kind of attack.