The willingness of conservatives to so quickly and drastically alter long-standing convictions should teach us something important, and it’s something that Trump knew from the beginning. What Trump guessed (correctly) was that among those who might vote for him, this election was not about political viewpoints, it was certainly not about policy, and it wasn’t even about the battle over “facts.” It was about doing whatever was necessary in service to the higher goal of stopping the “liberal agenda.”

This is also why so many conservatives didn’t (and don’t) seem to care about facts/evidence, and were unfazed by Trump’s constant lies, mistakes and embarrassments. Because their battle isn’t really about any of that, and it never was. This is about something entirely different than what many Democrats suppose. This is about a large group of people who believe that they are battling nefarious forces of evil (that’s us liberals by the way) for the very heart and soul of America.

In an electorate that has become so divided that we no longer even share the same view of reality, communication becomes extremely tricky. Trump knew just how to bridge that communication gap however, because he didn’t try to talk about policy or facts. Instead, he communicated to his supporters with their own paranoia, resentment and anger. There’s a reason Trump’s rallies were so angry and violent — did you think this was an accident?

A few days ago I posted a piece on Facebook about Trump’s “Great Wall.” In that post I proposed that Trump’s signature issue was always a tissue of lies; nothing more than another Trump campaign con. Among the dozens of comments that came in, one stood out for me. A Trump supporter essentially stated that even if this was true he didn’t care, and would still vote for Trump again “a thousand times” in order to make sure that Clinton didn’t get into the White House.

I do not think that this is an isolated view. Nor do I think it’s even mainly about Clinton. As those who have read my pieces already know, I have been convinced for some time that most of the conservative angst with Clinton was never really about Clinton herself so much as it was about what Clinton came to represent to them.

Of course there’s a lot of disagreement on our liberal side of the aisle about that. Analysts that we are, we look for reasons. Yet I cannot help but observe that, in regard to the conservative reaction to Clinton, the reasons found seem to often be more a reflection of what matters to the individual analyst than what probably matters to conservatives.

In other words, I sometimes think that liberals have become so focused on the puzzle pieces that we have lost sight of the puzzle itself. During the election, and afterwards, I have witnessed many progressives fixating on the specific pieces of the puzzle that matter most to them. For some that is racism. For others it’s misogyny. For others “fake news” and propaganda. For others, “economic resentment.” And to be clear, all of these are important. They are not all equivalent, but they all played a role. But they are puzzle pieces. They are not the final picture that forms once the pieces are put together.

My own view is that our inability to see the whole puzzle, the “big picture”, hindered our ability to understand what so many Trump voters were thinking, which in turn crippled out ability to communicate with them in any way that really mattered.

I think, in a manner much more significant than many (if not most) liberals are aware, that the ongoing resentment of “political correctness” and the “culture war” has had a profound impact on a very large slice of the American public. And if you haven’t heard about the “culture war” it’s probably because liberals don’t look at things this way, so even those liberals who are aware of it have never taken it very seriously.

But that has been a significant mistake on our part, because it is a very serious matter to conservatives, and has been for decades. From the viewpoint of more conservatives than you might imagine, the main liberal project is not civil rights or social justice. Rather, it’s the tyrannical enforcement of an extremist cultural, social and economic agenda upon an unwilling America. And yes, that is something that many millions of Americans actually believe.

Which is why this supposed culture war so often takes primacy for them over any standard set of Republican policy positions. It’s why they so often seem to care about winning more than what will happen once they do. Because they are not worried about what will happen after they win, and they are not worried about how accurate their sources are with the “facts,” and they are not even that worried about Russian interference in our elections.

They are worried about us.