Momentarily, between the time I wrote this and the time I published it, the ever-present good girl in my head wavered, “Is it worth it? Is this the best choice?” Then I read about gleeful morons online cackling like lunatics, “Your body, my choice,” and Andrew Tate frothing at the mouth as he celebrates women’s loss of rights, and I knew—it is the only choice.

I was sitting in my doctor’s office last week thinking about #metoo and how vital it is to remember that just because the hashtag and the stories attached to it are no longer populating our feeds or dominating the news cycle doesn’t mean it’s in the rearview, doesn’t mean its relevance has diminished, doesn’t mean it has all been said, because we’ve just elected to hand over the most powerful position in our country to a convicted rapist—again. And this twisted reality that we’ve been tossed into demands that we resurrect the urgency of the conversation anew, that we expand it, that we dig in even deeper, and speak even louder.

It’s grueling to watch the pundits twist themselves into knots trying to unravel and explain how we find ourselves back in this unthinkable position. But really, it’s time to call a spade a spade and stop trying to come up with some rational explanation for a highly irrational result.

I have some thoughts. The first of which is the undeniably compelling component of belief. I would never pretend to be capable of unraveling the swath of Trump’s support, but belief is a thing I am painfully and intimately acquainted with.

Belief is enough.

Belief is more powerful than logic, reason, or even reality. It makes no difference what’s real or what is fact because when facts climb into the ring with belief, they are effortlessly pulverized by the confounding, all-encompassing, blinding nature of the conviction of it. It doesn’t matter what is right in front of you if you believe it isn’t there. It wouldn’t matter if Trump’s own children confirmed his misogyny. Such a confession would be dismissed as an internal familial feud. His wife could come forward—actually, no, not his wife—wives are the last ones that people believe, but Trump himself could admit to all of his atrocities (as he already has to some, including forcibly kissing and grabbing women, which is sexual assault and is a crime), and it wouldn’t make a dent in the belief.

When a person decides they will believe in a thing down to their very bones, it is usually because the substance of that thing that makes them feel seen, powerful, or vindicated and legitimized in some way. And when they throw their whole soul and being into it, nothing will shake it, and those things that they have assimilated as real into themselves morph into fact, not only “real” and “true” but actual. This way of being in the world renders a thing true (fact) simply because you believe it, and vice versa. Facts are irrelevant if you believe they are false. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. There is a giant gulf between truth and fact—there is no universal truth. There are facts, and then there is truth that is intimately tied to a person’s belief and, therefore, innately subjective.

Fact—according to Merriam Webster Dictionary: 1) something that has actual existence 2) a piece of information presented as having objective reality 3) the quality of being actual.

It’s essential to bear in mind that when belief is divorced from fact, it is because the person holding to the belief is comforted and empowered by it. No one could get away with saying that fire doesn’t burn. We’ve experienced, seen it, and accepted that it does. It is a fact. Fire burns things—there is no dispute. And yet, when it comes to a thing we don’t want to believe, facts are suddenly trivial? Even when the evidence is just as factual as the fire that burns?

Belief settles into the very fabric of one’s soul and swallows the identity, devouring it and commanding it. So, when the belief is challenged or proven false, it shatters the soul, siphons the lifeblood, and threatens the very identity of the believer, which deposits us seamlessly into the lap of identity politics.

Identity politics aren’t new. The fact that we are required to register as one party or the other, forced to adopt a label, whether we want to or not, to don a philosophy, pick up a banner, check a box, choose a tribe, all but guarantees that hard lines will be drawn. In the extreme, this choice demands a kind of loyalty to the tribe that we’ve seen play out over the past eight years as Republicans, one by one, have fallen into line behind Trump, no matter how objectionable they find the new party figurehead. Loyalty to a party, or in this case, a single person, rather than a country, is a very particular brand of loyalty that renders the country irrelevant, ensuring that the tribe is the only thing that matters. We all have that friend or collogue who brags about how the family has, and always will, vote republican, or someone else who touts the long line of democrats from which they’ve sprung, but the current atmosphere has taken identity politics to a whole new level as they have begun to run on the rocket fuel of cultism.

The nature of cults is to encourage and demand the abandonment of all other tribal ties in service to the cult and its leader alone. Anything to the contrary then becomes a sort of blasphemy, and loyalty to the cult cancels out loyalty to any other tribe. This extreme brand of identity politics makes us unaccountable to anyone who is not in our political tribe, even if they are in our familial tribe, or our professional tribe, or our scholarly tribe. We are forced to shrink ourselves to fit within those hard lines, to choose which tribe is more important and which we are willing to risk losing. We would do well to ask ourselves, is it really a win if the cost is hurting or losing the people who mean the most?

And then, to muddy the waters, nestled persistently within the macro of tribalism, is the microcosm of individualism upon which this country has been built. The—I do me, you do you, it’s not personal, it’s just politics—when what we’re actually doing is making choices informed by our individual bias that effect an entire nation.

Finally, I cannot sign off without mentioning the very real and very fanatical religious component of the electorate who are determined to turn our nation into a church state. Trump may be the antithesis of everything that Christianity is supposed to represent but he’s a means to an end and the hypocrisy of it all is so commonplace and so integrated into their fabric of existence as to be negligible. This group of people gave up the moral high ground long ago, selling their souls without a glance back. So desperate is their hunger to impose their particular set of beliefs on everyone that their actual beliefs have been reduced to nothing more than an insatiable thirst for absolute power—which, I promise you, has nothing to do with Jesus.

It makes me want to vomit.

So instead of all the handwringing and blaming the usual suspects of disconnection, elitism, the economy, disenchantment, and misinformation, why not ask how each contingent of Trump followers benefits from their belief? Because while all of those things have undoubtedly contributed, some of them, especially elitism, are tired horses that we’ve beaten to death. Meanwhile, the elephant in the room is the stark reality that women (and especially women of color) in this country are still second-class citizens and the idea of a woman in the ultimate position of power is more heretical than a male criminal. It has somehow become (or more likely, always was) more palatable to embrace misogyny, racism, and criminality in a man than have to admit that a woman is far more qualified and capable than he is.

The problem isn’t any of the usual suspects, not really. The problem is that there are enough people in our country that think that Trump’s repulsive brand of politics is perfectly acceptable. That horse is alive and thriving and tearing across our landscape trampling everything in its path, unleashing and legitimizing discrimination and hatred, granting the worst parts of our human nature permission to emerge. Not a week has passed and already a person dear to me had to sit through their dinner while over-hearing the neighboring table celebrate loudly and brashly, emboldened and secure in the victory, “Now that Trump is in office, our taxes are going to go down so much, and we can get rid of all these fucking gay flags and spinning things, and all these trans people can get out of the fucking country, and good riddance.”

It’s time to stop making excuses and whitewashing the facts, it’s time to call a spade a spade. It’s natural to want to make it about something profound and complex, but what if we just give ourselves permission to admit that it really boils down to misogyny, racism and sexism, not to mention the insatiable quest for absolute power? Yes, the frustration is real, the declarations of a broken system are true. The disconnect is in thinking that putting a fascist in charge will fix it.

I don’t know what happens next. How do you heal a broken nation? And in spite of it, even with all evidence to the contrary staring me in the face, I still want to believe that we are better than this.

And so, I wonder, how many voters, when it comes down to the nitty-gritty details, actually prescribe to the grotesque nature of Trump and his possie, and for how many is the choice determined by the confounding magnetism of identity politics and tribal loyalism?

I wonder what would happen if there were no parties at all, no labels, no boxes, just politicians and voters? Sadly, I doubt I will ever know. I cannot imagine that the system will change in my lifetime because it works too well for the people who it works for. I can dare to hope, but my rallying spirit is sapped just now.

I think I’ll just go bake some bread.