I totally buy this study. If you talk to conservatives, they very much feel like they're bigoted approaches are based in protecting the people who deserve to be protected.

The right-wing view is largely based in the idea that the left is trying to force people to do things that are harmful to them and others, and so the right-wing view is required to protect people from left-wing damage.

We could argue which of these two views is accurate, of course, which is very much what the world has been doing for the last three years and what we can do for some time to come. However, it's important to understand the right view from the right-wing perspective.

The thing you need to understand is that the average conservative thinks about themselves way more than they think about others. If something bad happens to everyone, they see it as a huge issue for themselves, and maybe a bit of an issue for other people, too. If something good happens to everyone, they see it as maybe a slight improvement for themselves, but probably a major windfall for other people.

This leads them to think that they've been slighted by everyone at every turn, and that they have to fight to take good things away from others and give them to themselves in order to regain "balance" based on their own totally unbalanced account of what happened. They think they're being fair, only because they have no ability to think objectively about their own experience at all.