Preface

This report is for practitioners, funders, researchers, policymakers and other stakeholders who are interested in rebuilding the fabric of American public and political life. Specifically, we aim to explore how conservative Americans relate to democracy in the present moment, and understand why some have become open to political actions that others might perceive as deviating from longstanding democratic norms. This research builds on findings in the report "Understanding Evolving Republican Attitudes Toward Democracy," published by the SNF Agora Institute and Public Agenda, exploring attitudes towards democratic institutions among conservative populations in the US.

Existing accounts of this phenomenon tend to frame these conservatives as expressly anti-democratic. But that framing often lacks grounding in conservatives' first-person perspectives, creating a gap between existing accounts and lived experience. To address that gap, this study provides empirical insight into how conservatives themselves perceive, understand, and navigate politics and civic life today, including how they relate to democracy in general, as well as specific, democratic institutions, and norms. It is also worth stating explicitly that we do not believe that openness or support for what we will refer to as 'democratic norm deviation' throughout this report is unique to conservatives, and we encourage similar inquiry into these dynamics across the broader political spectrum.

The goal of this report is not to learn how to persuade conservatives to relate differently to democracy, or to drive an alternative agenda within conservative communities. We aim to offer and inspire practical implications for actors seeking to bridge political divides and engage Americans across the political spectrum on their own terms, improve and build trust in public institutions, and support pro-social civic engagement across contemporary America.

About the ethnographic approach

This study relies on ethnographic research sustained immersion in people's homes, lives, and communities through extensive interviews, observations, participation, and relationship-building. Where much democracy research documents what people say they believe, ethnography examines how and why political worldviews take shape within the full context of daily experiences, relationships, and social environments.

The in-person nature of this work was critical. Site access was negotiated through direct outreach, community referrals, and local contacts in each county who helped identify participants and signal that researchers could be trusted. While initial online outreach to find willing participants in these communities yielded some guarded and even hostile responses, community members and participants alike became particularly open and reflective when researchers showed up in person, in their communities, and spent two to three weeks on the ground. The research team comprised a gay German American man, a Pakistani American man, an Asian American man, and (briefly) a White American woman based out of New York City and Copenhagen. All were explicit outsiders to the communities they studied in terms of geography, political culture, and in most cases race, religion, and background. Despite this, the commitment to sustained, face-to-face engagement allowed trust to develop in ways that would not have been possible remotely. This type of rapport-building is foundational to ethnographic research.

The ethnographic stance requires sustained curiosity and a commitment to deeply understanding people on their own terms. Our role as researchers is one of translation: to convey how independent and what some might see as "competing" beliefs make sense within the context of people's lives. Rather than claiming objectivity, the account we put forth is one of multi-subjectivity bringing together multiple perspectives and layers of context to build a fuller understanding. This attempt to understand and translate is neither endorsement nor condemnation of any political position. But we would argue that it is a prerequisite for any sort of connection and problem-solving across widening divides.

Ethnographic research operates differently than large-scale quantitative methods. The sample is small by design, and the approach is adaptive to the specific research participant and their context, rather than standardized across them. Whereas quantitative work measures prevalence of beliefs, ethnography's purpose is generative: to develop grounded theory and uncover new patterns and logics. The findings detailed in this report are patterns observed in a small, analytically diverse sample. We encourage follow-up research with larger samples to further explore how widely these patterns hold, how and why they vary across different populations, and where they break down. The hope is that the grounded theory we offer here lends greater precision and efficacy to further exploration.

STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEWS

Before going into the field, we conducted ten interviews with stakeholders ranging from election clerks to conservative influencers, scholars to on-the-ground political organizers. Multiple of these stakeholders were from the sites of our ethnographic fieldwork. The objective of these stakeholder interviews was to inform and frame the research, and ensure resulting insights and recommendations meaningfully engage with existing assumptions, frameworks, and discourse among experts in the field. Through these interviews, we explored existing hypotheses about drivers of support for democratic norm deviation and identified knowledge gaps to fill, among other topics. We are grateful to the stakeholders interviewed for sharing their time and perspectives.

LITERATURE REVIEW

We also conducted a comprehensive literature review, covering a wide variety of relevant themes. The goal was to ensure this research builds on existing knowledge of conservative ideologies, trust in institutions, and relationships to democracy. In addition to synthesizing established findings, the review assisted in mapping out the range of competing theories for shifts in attitudes towards democracy and gaps in existing scholarship.

RESEARCH APPROACH & METHODS

The ethnographic research was conducted in February 2026, roughly thirteen months into President Trump's second administration. In the weeks surrounding our research, ICE enforcement operations were underway across the country, the government entered its second shutdown of 2026, tensions were escalating towards a war in the Middle East, and the Epstein files had recently been released, becoming an active topic in participants' media diets and private conversations. There were also important SCOTUS rulings on tariffs and the State of the Union address. The pace of political activity gave researchers much to process live with participants, and meant that participants' views were often being activated and tested in real time.

The research had multiple components:

01. Preliminary deep dive surveys. Before meeting with participants, we sent them a brief questionnaire asking them to rank their trust levels across different American democratic institutions. This was used to ground follow-up conversation during the in-home visits.

02. In-home semi-structured interview and observation. Each of the 21 primary respondents participated in four- to ten- hour ethnographic 'deep dives' mostly in their homes, but also at local establishments and workplaces.

03. Conversations with 'secondaries.' One to two secondary respondents from each primary respondent's social ecology joined for at least one hour of each interview. Secondary respondents were recruited through each primary respondent and represented a range of relationships: partners, close friends, family members, and colleagues who knew the primary respondent well and spent meaningful time with them around politics. The role of these secondaries was to offer a second perspective on the primary respondent (corroborating, complicating, or contextualizing what they told us), and to provide a live window into the relationships within which political views form, hold, and sometimes shift. On the whole, secondary respondents skewed toward agreement with their primary counterparts, reflecting the social sorting visible across all three communities. But not always; some pushed back or nuanced our primary participants' views. This variation was productive: it surfaced the relational negotiations through which political identity is actively maintained, contested, and sometimes revised a dimension individual interviews alone would have missed.

04. Digital diaries. In the days before each interview, respondents completed a multi-day digital diary, responding to daily prompts with text, images, and short observations. These digital diaries documented the specific news sources and stories participants were interacting with and consuming, and gauged impressions of them. The diaries gave researchers a running record of how participants encounter political and civic life in ordinary contexts - the news they shared, the arguments they had, and the institutions they interacted with.

05. Community observations. The research team spent 2-3 weeks in each research site, embedding in local life and attending community events and gatherings. These observations were intended to situate individual attitudes within broader social, cultural, and institutional contexts. This included: Public facing civic meetings, such as a county library board meeting; Church services across a range of Christian denominations (e.g., Evangelical, Baptist, Methodist) and congregation sizes; Regularly scheduled meetings, dinners, and breakfasts among local political organizations, whose members included elected officials, public servants, and community leaders; Community service activities that participants regularly attended or facilitated; Community-specific events including a cattle sale, running club, a gun show; Informal "hangouts" among participants and the friends and family with whom they most talk politics; Visits to local 'watering holes' where politics and civic life get discussed, incl. local bars, coffee shops, and diners; Drive-arounds with some participants in which they highlighted community sites, landmarks, and landscapes that play a role in shaping their political beliefs.

WHERE WE WENT AND WHY

We selected three counties as fieldwork sites, chosen for analytical diversity rather than statistical representativeness. They were selected to maximize variation across dimensions likely to shape how democracy is experienced: geography, economic structure, religious tradition, and the proximity to / density of physical touchpoints with public institutions.

We selected counties as our organizing unit for two reasons. First, the county is the right scale for ethnographic work: small enough that people share considerable civic infrastructure (e.g., courts, health departments, libraries, etc.) but large enough to contain real internal variation across participants' lived experiences and day-to-day infrastructure (e.g., neighborhoods and church congregations). Second, counties are a common unit around which local political activity organizes in the United States. Consistent with this, many of the conflicts that activated participants in each site, such as Ottawa Impact's takeover of the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners, Campbell County's library board controversy, and Greenville County's growth politics, took place at the county-level.

THE THREE FIELDWORK SITES WERE:

Campbell County, Wyoming (Gillette area). Known as the Energy Capital of the Nation, and home to the Powder River Basin coal fields that produce roughly 40% of American coal, 87% of Campbell County voted for Trump in 2024. The county has also seen the rise of the Freedom Caucus. Anti-government ideology coexists with structural dependence on federal land policy and energy markets. Visiting Campbell County let us study conservative distrust in a place where self-reliance is less ideology than infrastructure, and where federal energy policy has become a material fact of life.

Ottawa County, Michigan (Holland/Grand Haven area). Historically Michigan's most Republican county, Ottawa County has a deep Dutch Reformed tradition, a mixed economy of manufacturing, agriculture, and tourism, and a recent county government upheaval organized around the "Ottawa Impact" coalition. It remains heavily Republican (59% voted for Trump in 2024), but with persistent Democratic pockets and a fast-growing population. Ottawa County let us study conservatism in a place where institutional conflict is fresh, faith is central, and the question of what counts as "real" conservatism is actively and sometimes bitterly contested.

Greenville County, South Carolina. South Carolina's most populous county and the economic hub of the "Upstate" region of the state, Greenville has grown dramatically since the 1990s. Home to Bob Jones University and a large evangelical community, it is a site where the church provides civic infrastructure that often takes precedence over formal democratic institutions. Rapid growth has brought new residents (transplants) and new prosperity, while longtime residents describe being priced out of a community they helped build. We selected Greenville to understand how conservatives navigate democracy in a context shaped by Southern traditions, strong Christian culture, multiracial community dynamics, rapid economic transformation, and tensions between newcomers and longtime residents.

Several terms in this report carry meanings specific to its purposes. Some differ from their common usage. We define them here before they appear in the text.

Democracy/Democratic: Unless otherwise noted, we use "democracy" and "democratic" to refer broadly to any form of government where political power is vested directly or indirectly in the people through competitive elections. However, among our participants, the term is contested, and its meaning is contextual. Many prefer "constitutional republic" to "democracy" for reasons discussed further in Chapter II. We use both terms descriptively throughout the report without endorsing any particular definition of what democracy requires. While democracy has become partisan-coded in many contexts, we intend all of these descriptors to be neutral.

Norm deviation: Actions that push against or cross the conventional limits of democratic participation: challenging institutional authority through extra-legal channels, supporting leaders who bypass conventional checks and balances, or endorsing actions that democratic practitioners would classify as violations of procedural norms. Our participants largely do not see these actions as outside the bounds of legitimate democratic behavior. Often in civil society this is referred to as "democratic norm-breaking." We are using "norm-deviating" in pursuit of more neutral terminology. While conservative populations are the focus of this research, we do not believe norm deviation is unique to conservatives, and recognize that there are many on the left of the political spectrum who support (and participate in) norm deviation.

Conservative: "Conservative," "Republican," and "Trump voter" are related but not interchangeable terms. "Conservative" typically describes an ideological orientation, whereas "Republican" describes a partisan affiliation. In this document, we use "conservative" to refer to our participants (see section above on "How we recruited participants" for more detail on how they self-identify, their voting behavior, and their responses to recruitment screening questions). As such, the term refers primarily to self-identification (as either a conservative, Republican, or both) and self-described voting behavior and not an ideology throughout this document. We explore ideology and issue positions ethnographically to understand the diversity that exists under the labels of conservative and Republican.

The moral foundation: The value system we found our participants use to evaluate political, civic, and institutional questions. It is organized around four pillars Faith, Family, Freedom, and Place and is described in depth in Chapter II. While the weighting and texture of each pillar varies from one community and individual to the next, the foundation reflects patterns observed across the ethnographic data.

The three-tier mental model: The way we found our participants understand democracy: their moral foundation at the base (Tier One), formal democratic institutions and processes in the middle (Tier Two), and informal democratic norms at the top (Tier Three).

Sacred institutions: Democratic institutions that participants believe to be direct embodiments of their core principles of good governance, and thus inviolable. On the whole, participants don't believe that there are many left.

Corrupted institutions: Democratic institutions that participants believe to have abandoned (or are working against) the core principles of good governance (detailed in Chapter II), but can be opted out of and are therefore avoidable.

Hostile institutions: Democratic institutions that participants believe have both abandoned those governance principles and are unavoidable meaning that citizens cannot opt out of or choose alternatives to them. An institution can be seen as corrupted without being hostile.

Actor critics: The segment of participants who see democratic crises primarily as problems of bad actors in otherwise sound institutions. Generally these participants believe elections can fix said crises.

System critics: The segment of participants who see democratic crises as structural: democratic institutions themselves have drifted from their constitutional design. Generally these participants believe elections alone cannot fix said crises.

Foundation defenders: The segment of participants who see democratic crises as civilizational: the moral foundation itself is under existential threat. The problem extends all the way down to tier one of the three-tiered mental model of democracy.

The Central Argument

Conservative Americans are not anti-democratic. They hold deep, sincere commitments to democratic ideals — to elections, to the rule of law, to freedom of expression, to constitutional government. But these commitments are filtered through a moral framework — what we call the moral foundation — that differs substantially from the liberal democratic framework dominant in elite institutions.

When conservatives appear to support anti-democratic behavior, it is typically because they have concluded that democratic norms are already being violated by their opponents — and that defensive action is justified.

How This Report Is Organized

Chapter I — Relationships to Democracy. Documents how conservative Americans understand and relate to democracy, including the three-tier mental model.

Chapter II — The Conservative Moral Foundation. Describes the four pillars (Faith, Family, Freedom, Place) and how they shape political interpretation.

Chapter III — The Great Decoupling. Analyzes the three channels through which conservatives feel increasingly estranged from mainstream institutions.

Chapter IV — A Segmentation for Conservatives' Tolerance for Norm Deviation. Presents a three-part typology: Actor Critics, System Critics, and Foundation Defenders.

Chapter V — Potential Implications and Further Research. Offers strategic frameworks for stakeholders seeking to engage with conservative communities.

The conservatives we met share a moral framework that precedes and judges all other aspects of life, including democracy itself. It is organized around four pillars: Faith, Family, Freedom, and Place. The relative importance of these pillars varies across participants, with Faith often being particularly dominant. In our participants' view, these pillars constitute the core of a good and moral life. Democratic institutions, processes, and norms are evaluated against this moral foundation rather than abstract theories of how democracy should work. Institutions that they believe serve this moral foundation earn trust; those that they believe threaten it lose trust. This framework is distinct though complementary to Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory. Haidt describes the how of moral reasoning, identifying six psychological building blocks: Care, Fairness, Liberty, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. He finds that liberals tend to draw primarily on care and fairness, while conservatives draw more evenly across all six foundations, with particular weight on loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Our four pillars describe what conservatives hold sacred, i.e. the domains (Faith, Family, Freedom, Place) to which mechanisms like loyalty, authority, and sanctity attach.

This moral framework is visible in how participants talk about and describe themselves. Matthew (40s, SC), a community leader and veteran advocate, describes himself as a Christian first, a conservative second, and a Republican third. His faith, he says, "would trump the conservative and Republican, because it filters everything else."

This moral foundation is also enshrined in the material culture of participants' lives, highlighting how aesthetics and lifestyle choices reinforce belief and identity on a daily basis. Trump signs and party paraphernalia were rare inside participants' homes. Instead, what fills their spaces are crosses, prayer charts, family photographs, scripture on reclaimed wood, hunting trophies, and images of the communities people were born into. Hannah (late 20s, MI) had stickers all over her laptop, including a leopard-print cross, a map of Michigan made into the shape of a machine gun, and one with history's bloodiest dictators extolling the virtues of gun control. Linda (late 30s, SC) has a whiteboard on her fridge that reads "be courteous, be aware, be reasonable" a family motto that she says doubles as her political framework. In Maria's (60s, MI) apartment, a single shelf arranges a cross at the apex, an American flag beneath it, and religious books as the foundation a visual hierarchy that enacts her conviction that civic life is downstream from God.

Television and radio do the same work. The TV shows Yellowstone and Landman center multigenerational families defending their land against outside forces; country and Christian music cover themes such as truth, God, rural community, and freedom. Taken together, these constitute a daily, ambient reinforcement of participants' moral foundation.

Faith

For most participants, Faith is the foundational pillar of their moral foundation. They hold God as the ultimate authority and lone source of a single, objective truth sitting above the Constitution, democratic consensus, and public opinion. Rights, in the view of many of our participants, are not granted by the government; the government merely recognizes rights that are already God-given.

Reggie (late 20s, SC) explained this clearly and calmly, conveying his conviction as a man of deep faith: "The only objective truth is God's Word, and I stand on it, because there was no moral law before God. The first recorded law was from God's word. All ethics originate from scripture." Patricia (50s, SC), an eighth-generation Greenvillian, traces this idea directly to the country's founding. She expressed to us, urgently, "Our framers Thomas Jefferson specifically said this style of government only operates well within a faith-based community. When you remove faith and faith-thinking people operating within those systems, you got a problem. Mayday!"

For these participants, legitimate authority flows downward from God rather than upward from popular will. This is most readily captured by transgender politics, which surfaced for many of our participants as a direct violation of the Faith pillar: an assault on what they believe to be God's objective truth that there are only two genders. Meanwhile, democratic processes, outcomes, and norms that they believe contradict divine order carry limited moral weight regardless of their formal legitimacy. For Maria (60s, MI), the primacy of faith had material consequences on her party affiliation. She remembers the 2012 DNC as the moment she knew she would never vote Democrat again - specifically, she recalls Antonio Villaraigosa choosing not to open the convention with a prayer. The precise memory is somewhat off: the actual controversy centered on God being removed from the draft party platform, with a contentious floor vote (marked by audible booing) to restore it. But her emotional read of the moment holds: "The Dems have denied God. That's how I interpreted that."

Multiple participants in our study told stories of the church having a profound impact on their lives. For Kyle (mid 20s, WY) and Sam (early 30s, MI), it offered a path to responsibility, belonging, and purpose at moments when they had none: Kyle found moral grounding in the church after a period of anger, isolation, and unresolved trauma; Sam broke from depression and over-drinking after a near-drowning at the edge of a lake, and discovering through faith that "all that anxiety, depression, all that pressure in my life just kind of fizzled away." Sarah (mid 30s, WY) credits the church with rescuing her family from hardship when she was ten feeding her, housing her, accepting her, and surrounding her with people who treated her with dignity for the first time. Her story is the most precise illustration of the trust and loyalty many of our participants hold in the church, and the impact this can have on politics. At eighteen, she told her boyfriend's parents she might vote for Obama: "He cares for people, like, my mom's a single mom. We grew up poor. He wants the best for us." Her future in-laws didn't argue. They listened, and asked: "Who did care for you? Who brought you out of poverty?" Sarah's answer was not the federal government it was her church community. "It was literally the hands and feet of Christ." In the years that followed, every public institution she encountered schools, hospitals, the federal government failed to replicate what the church had given her as a child. She has been a firm conservative ever since, steadily moving further right with time. When researchers attended Sarah's church with her, they saw how the church continues to provide a meaningful sense of community, with Sarah spending nearly half of the two-hour visit greeting friends and neighbors.

A small minority (3 of our participants) hold faith more loosely. Just one, Eric (40s, MI), says he wouldn't identify as religious at all. For these participants, Family and Freedom carry the weight that Faith does for more religiously-driven participants.

Family

The second pillar, Family, flows directly from faith for most participants. They hold that there is a natural social order a set of concentric obligations in which the nuclear family is the basic unit of society, and responsibility radiates outward from there: from self, to family, to church and neighbor, and only lastly to the state. They see the protection of unborn life and parents' rights to govern their children's education as non-negotiable moral convictions rather than policy positions.

Core to this pillar is the idea that providing for and protecting one's own (whether that's children, household, community, or simply one's self) is an obligation, not a preference. Dependence on institutions to do what you should do yourself is, in this framework, a form of moral failure.

For parents, this imperative is most visible in decisions about children's education and health. Sarah (mid 30s, WY) homeschools her children. This is a choice rooted in what she witnessed during her own teaching career: fifth graders "having sex... drug problems... kids cutting in class and showing their arms off after they come out of the bathroom." Today, Sarah has dedicated an entire room of her house to homeschool her children filled with books, musical instruments, a computer, and toys she picked out to create a values-aligned learning environment. Similarly, after years of her young son's seizures going undiagnosed by neurologists, Sarah has leaned into the world of MAHA (Make American Healthy Again), investigating his symptoms on social media and making significant changes to the family's diet and health practices over the last five years based on what she's learned from influencers and other moms online. She says her son's seizures have drastically improved since she identified what she believes is a likely glutathione deficiency, which she believes is triggered or worsened by Tylenol, red food dye, and chlorine. Her kitchen - stocked with peptide containers, bone broth packets, other homeopathic supplements, and the number for a local chiropractor reflects this shift towards self-directed care informed from outside traditional healthcare institutions.

Per the concentric obligations mentioned above, self-reliance is only part of this Family pillar. Social responsibility is also a genuine moral obligation but with limits, given the moral imperative to first provide for and protect one's own. Just as important is who takes on this responsibility: when community members do need help, that responsibility belongs to the church and neighborhood, not government programs that displace the relationships they were meant to support.

Louise (late 20s, WY), a homeschooling mother, articulates this as a theological structure. She believes there are different spheres of influence, from God to family to church to government, each with its proper role. "The problem that I see with some politics is they take the government and they try to put it in place of God... that then puts everything else out of whack." She sees her church's giving as both more effective and more meaningful than state redistribution. "Not only does it mean more, but there is more to go around than if it goes to the government." When her furnace broke in a blizzard, two neighbors came to fix it without being asked. For Louise, that moment exemplified the ideal model: a system of mutual aid rooted in proximity and shared values.

For Reggie (late 20s, SC), the nuclear family is sacred because he has seen loved ones suffer when it breaks down. His half-brother is facing several years in prison and his half-sister cycles through homeless shelters, which Reggie attributes to their father being largely absent from their lives. Reggie's own father forged a high school diploma to get work, held three jobs through a temp agency, and stayed present for him: "My father was always in my life and I couldn't say the same for everybody in [my community]." Rachel, Reggie's wife, frames what he is protecting in theological terms: "One is trying to hold to the original design that God had in place, which is the nuclear family - right, like one man one woman and procreating because those are blessings from the Lord." Within this nuclear family framework, Reggie tries to be the man and father he believes his family needs: he wakes at 4am for devotional time before anyone else is up, plans to homeschool their young daughter, and consumes podcasts and e-books that center familial-Christian themes - "Courageous Parenting," "Raising Godly Boys," and "The Journey of a Christian Dad." Reggie's social responsibility extends outward, too: on Wednesday nights he runs youth ministry, in his words "filling in for homes that don't have parents." But government welfare, in his view, actively corrodes the family structure he so values creating a financial incentive for women to stay single rather than married, and substituting dependency for self-determination. Though Reggie believes it's acceptable to, for example, use food stamps temporarily and in a crisis, he views any sort of long-term dependence on welfare programs as a trap, and a form of political control: "You're kind of letting them make you, depending on [the government] so they can get what they want out of you."

Freedom

The third pillar is Freedom. Freedom, as most participants see it, is the individual's right to be left alone: in body, family, property, faith, and thought, without institutional and state interference. At its core is a commitment to personal sovereignty: participants believe they not only have the right, but a moral duty to be "truth-seekers." This means doing their own research, maintaining skepticism of formal institutions, and contradicting mainstream consensus when the evidence warrants it. Having the courage to think independently, rather than defer to experts, is itself experienced as an expression of freedom.

Beyond cognition, the body is perceived by participants as one of Freedom's most intimate domains. If the government can mandate what goes into it or what it does in public spaces, there is, in their view, no principled limit on what else it can mandate. This logic was especially salient in responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Liz (mid 30s, MI), a former social worker and stay-at-home mom, makes the connection explicit. "My body, my choice, you know? I just find it to be like a kind of opposite and upside down world sometimes. The vaccine helps you and protects you. If I don't get it, aren't you still protected?"

This orientation toward bodily autonomy has extended into skepticism surrounding public health and food institutions, espoused most directly by the MAHA movement. Participants increasingly see US food and health institutions (such as the FDA and USDA) as failing to protect them from food-based harms, and are taking matters into their own hands. Maria (60s, MI) read ingredient labels aloud during our interview. "If you can't read the first five ingredients, it's fake," she says. Liz's (mid 30s, MI) kitchen follows the same logic: Ezekiel brand bread on the counter, a cayenne-ginger-turmeric shot in the fridge. Sam's (early 30s, MI) kitchen runs on grass-fed beef, locally roasted coffee, and no seed oils. For many of our participants, institutional distrust is reinforced day-to-day via empirical scrutiny of their own and their family's exposure to potential harms. Freedom, meanwhile, is asserted through alternate consumption choices a domain that often feels more legible to participants than government institutions. Liz struggles to say what the Senate does, but she knows what's in Ezekiel brand bread.

Hannah, (late 20s, MI), traces her distrust of mainstream medicine tied to her wider distrust of institutions back to childhood. Watching her father nearly die of heart failure in second grade led her to pore over peer-reviewed nutrition studies in her early teens. But when she suggested healthier school lunch options to her principal, he told her he agreed but had no power to change it. She eventually rejected mainstream medicine altogether in adulthood after a holistic doctor solved with lifestyle modifications what a conventional doctor said could only be managed with medication.

Sam (early 30s, MI) and his wife, who identify as "big fans of [Health Secretary] RFK [Robert F. Kennedy]," have opted out of traditional insurance in favor of a Christian health cooperative: "We don't have traditional healthcare... we essentially have a monthly premium and our money goes in the pot," paying $350 per month combined versus $700 per person under the government insurance marketplace. The savings are real, but this choice is also an assertion of freedom from an insurance market Sam views as corrupt.

For Hannah, gun ownership is the most literal expression of Freedom. She holds the Second Amendment as the right that protects all others, and views its purpose as explicitly to give citizens the ability to resist state overreach: "The Second Amendment is designed for the intention to prevent a tyrannical government." She has turned that conviction into a career, working first as a firearm salesperson before building her own firearms instruction practice, focused on educating younger generations about the Second Amendment.

How this pillar is held varies across the study. For some, freedom from government mandates on individual behavior is the dominant pillar of their moral foundation. They value individual sovereignty and the government staying entirely out of their personal lives. Jordan (early 30s, MI), who turned down his COVID stimulus check and three weeks of unemployment after a recent layoff on the same principle, holds a strict line against accepting government funds: "Nope, never will. I do not want money from the government." Ben's (mid 20s, WY) home is a testament to his autonomy sitting on an acre of land, powered by its own propane tank, and with a photograph of Sitting Bull, who Ben says he admires for taking a stand against government interference in his life, holding a rifle in the living room.

For Eric (40s, MI), who identifies as gay, freedom from cultural coercion and excess is just as sacred. This is strongly informed by his family history: his mother's family fled a communist regime when she was five, losing their businesses and all of their possessions. Government agents even tried to take his young mother's earrings at the airport. His grandmother equated the entire Democratic Party with communism calling Jimmy Carter a communist and Eric has extended this thinking to contemporary figures like AOC. For Eric, the defining feature of communism isn't economic it's the removal of individual freedom through collective imposition, by state or by culture; by that logic, any felt coercion of cultural norms is a step toward a regime like the one his mother fled. "I don't think you should shove anything down anybody's throat, even gay," he says applying the same principle to Pride that he applies to vaccine requirements. In a card-sorting exercise on democratic norm deviation, he placed Pride alongside January 6th as, in his mind, equivalent examples of cultural spectacle and self-expression gone too far: "We could put Pride in here, too. We could put January 6th [next] to Pride... Yes, I see it as equivalent."

For Kathy (70s, SC) freedom is something "invisible, like a fish lives in water" - so ambient and God-given she barely needs to name it, until something punctures it. In her view, COVID did this not just through government overreach, but through the way ordinary Americans became enforcers of federal control, assuming license to police one another over what she felt were overblown anxieties. "I just wasn't that freaked out about it... I just didn't think that my life depended on it." Kathy tells the story of going to a Trader Joe's while in Colorado during lockdown. The sidewalk outside was stenciled with pairs of feet six feet apart. When Kathy stepped off her mark, the stranger next to her immediately confronted her "She almost had a meltdown" and in doing so, came close enough to Kathy that it set her up for a dry rejoinder: "Oh, please do not come any closer to me."

For other participants, the claim to freedom is more bounded: they believe that within the family sphere what their children read, learn, eat, and are exposed to parents hold authority, not institutions. Library books, school curricula, employer policies, and environmental toxins that override that judgment are, in their view, intruding into a domain that does not belong to them. For Maria (60s, MI) and Edgar (early 20s, SC), the pillar functions differently. They talk about freedom, but their core concern is moral order, and freedom is only worth protecting insofar as it serves this. They are willing to use government power to restrict freedoms they consider morally corrosive and antagonistic to their core pillar: Faith.

Place

The fourth and final pillar, Place, is the conviction that one belongs to a specific community, land, or founding inheritance that cannot be legitimately taken, sold, or remade by forces that didn't build it. It operates at two levels: the local community, landscape, and economy; and a national connection to the country's founders as kindred people who worked the land and governed themselves, whose legacy now feels like it is slipping away for many of our participants.

Connection to land and nature was a core tenet for some, particularly in Wyoming. Elaine (50s, WY), a rancher whose spread sits under multiple federal jurisdictions, noted, "You'll see a lot of ranchers that don't go to church. They call this [their ranch] their church." Rather than religious symbolism, Elaine's home is filled with art and artifacts commemorating "ranching life," with silhouettes of rodeo riders, paintings of cowboys, and furniture made of wrought iron and rustic wood adorning her house. Sarah (mid 30s, WY) lives in a more suburban setting within Campbell County, but her home is similarly filled with references to the land, and she is deliberate about her family living in a way that reflects and honors their rural surroundings. She began paying attention to local politics during the pandemic, over a chicken ordinance prohibiting residents within city limits from keeping chickens. With fertilizer missing from store shelves and eggs in scarce supply, the rule struck Sarah as a faulty application of urban policies onto a rural context. Today, the chicken ordinance has been overturned due to local activism, and her family sources all of their eggs from a chicken coop in their backyard. The ideal of neighborhood-scale self-sufficiency travels beyond Wyoming, even when the connection to land itself is less strongly held. Hannah (late 20s, MI), a firearms instructor in Ottawa County, shares the vision "If a couple houses on the block had gardens in their backyard, you'd have enough produce for the entire neighborhood" - though for her it remains more aspiration than practice.

The pillar also helps explain attitudes toward wealthy transplants, undocumented immigrants, national associations, and federal agencies alike. In participants' framework, the place local or national - belongs to those who built it, endured its hardships, and accepted its obligations.

Kathy (70s, SC), who left Atlanta after being priced out, now watches the same dynamic arrive in Greenville. She spent fifteen minutes describing all of the things that she loves about Greenville: the walkability, the Swamp Rabbit Trail, Paris Mountain Park, the restaurants, and the genteel Southern character. But "in ten years," she laments, "Greenville will be Atlanta... A lot of people will not be happy with that... A lot of people in Greenville think we're already full... I understand that I was one of those people that contributed to that." She pauses for a moment, recognizing the irony in her words that one might consider her to be among the same type of gentrifying transplant that she resents. "In 10 years, it'll probably feel less like home... but I'll probably be dead by then."

For many participants, the change is not just cultural but financial. Jordan (early 30s, MI), a tradesman whose grandfather built the house he grew up in, describes the housing market flatly: "You're paying $400,000 on a house that's worth $150,000." He cannot afford to buy a house there anymore, and traces part of the cause to investors: "There are some people who own five houses... they own them to rent them... you're not able to buy them because somebody is making money off of it." Patricia (50s, SC) describes her resentment towards newcomers from blue cities who move into Greenville and push agendas that serve their interests rather than the community's.

"This is not the library I grew up in," Patricia tells us from inside the main Hughes branch of the Greenville Public Library. The Hughes branch is bigger and bolder than what stood there before, a proper selling point for a city that has remade itself around a decades-long downtown revitalization; Patricia recognizes that it's a beautiful upgrade. But mostly, she sees the library as a symbol of a transformation she not only paid for with her tax dollars, that has brought with it the displacement of long-term Black and Hispanic renters from downtown Greenville. Patricia directly links this displacement to the homelessness that now surrounds the library. "We've got a homelessness issue. You can walk around this library and see it and smell it."

This emphasis on belonging and rootedness may seem at odds with the growing role that transplants have come to play in conservative local and state politics over the last decade relocating from blue to red states in search of political and cultural alignment, and in cases like that of Campbell County, becoming among the most vocal participants in local party structures, school boards, and Freedom Caucus-aligned organizing. (See the "Community Contexts" section of Chapter IV for more on this.) Participants who support these candidates don't seem to have a principled way of rationalizing this; rather, they address it on a case-by-case basis. When asked how she reconciles the importance she places on local rootedness with her support for Wyoming Freedom Caucus members who moved in from out of state, for example, Sarah dispels this claim, pointing out that the representative in question's in-laws are from the area: "They homesteaded it years and years and years ago."

The Foundation in Practice

Aspirational, not behavioral: A candid reading of these four pillars and their application to ideas of government requires acknowledging that they describe an aspirational framework rather than a behavioral one. Participants rarely live them out perfectly, and some acknowledge this. Kyle, who identifies as a devout Christian and frames his entire worldview through faith, watched a viral video of an ICE agent taunting a protester "I love this. I would do this for free" - and when asked about it, doubled down: "It's funny, whatever, shock value." The same tension appears collectively: participants at a local gathering place in Campbell County described Wyoming legislators who publicly claim Christian identity while engaging in coordinated online harassment of political opponents "You guys all claim to be Christians, but you don't act like that."

This gap between aspiration and behavior is perhaps most visible in how participants talked about racial and religious minorities, and about gender. The Faith pillar produced a sincere commitment to treat all people as equal across nearly all participants many referenced Christian universalism and expressed genuine reverence for Martin Luther King Jr.'s "content of character" framing. The majority expressed skepticism toward racial redress reparations, DEI, and the premise of ongoing structural racism but consistently framed this as an expression of that same aspiration: a defense of colorblind meritocracy rather than a rejection of equality. In about a third of participants, however, the stated commitment sat in tension with how they talked about specific people and groups. This took different forms: primarily dismissive characterizations of public figures and racialized language or stereotypes. For example, one participant dismissed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as "a DEI hire as far as I'm concerned," using a derogatory nickname in doing so. Several participants also showed researchers anti-Muslim or anti-trans content they had circulated on social media. Participants commonly couched such content as irony, loosely-held belief, or as entertaining someone else's more extreme belief. These cases suggest that for at least a subset of participants, the universalism aspiration is most readily activated toward people experienced as part of the same moral community, and less consistently toward those perceived as outside of or threatening to it.

Weighted differently across participants: Our sample is far from monolithic. The four pillars - Faith, Family, Freedom, and Place are present across the sample, but they do not apply in exactly the same way for every participant. What gives each person's foundation its specific texture and hierarchy is the intersection of community context, information ecosystem, and direct institutional experience described in Chapter IV. Faith tends to be more load-bearing in communities where the church functions as genuine civic infrastructure. Freedom takes on particular intensity in Campbell County, where livelihoods depend on the right to extract natural resources from federal land: for Ben (mid 20s, WY), a former coal miner and Army veteran, his skepticism of federal government came from older miners who had watched their livelihoods be reshaped by energy policy cycles long before he ever stepped foot in a coal mine. Family anchors the moral foundation most urgently for participants who have watched institutions make decisions about their children and families that they believe are not those institutions' to make a grievance that sharpened acutely for many participants during COVID. Place is sharpest for those who have watched their communities change faster than they chose. The values and threats most present in a participant's information ecosystem also shape which pillars feel most urgent and most endangered. So do direct encounters with institutions, which convert abstract pillar commitments into lived conviction.

Taught, but also reinforced by personal experience: This moral foundation is learned explicitly and implicitly through church sermons, family conversations, and schools, as well as accumulated ambient culture. But some of the most emotionally and politically charged expressions of the moral foundation are often the result of broader ideological commitments coming together with specific lived experiences. For example, one participants' concern about graphic content in sex education books and novels located in the children's and middle school section of her local library - including a book she described as detailing a young girl's repeated sexual abuse is anchored in her own childhood trauma, and a related fear of overexposing her children. "When I read that book, it was traumatizing for me, because as someone who has been through something like that, seeing those images, or reading those words, it brings [those memories] up in my own mind." Another participant's strict pro-life position (no exceptions for rape or incest) rests on her sister-in-law being the child of a rape. For one man in our sample, his views against abortion crystallized after he and his girlfriend experienced a stillbirth, began IVF, and learned his insurance would not cover the IVF but would cover an abortion. A woman in our sample became steadfast on the importance of the Second Amendment proponent during her first marriage, facing a husband who "started to become aggressive and even a little bit physically violent." She drew the conclusion, "I should probably buy a gun and learn how to use it."

Holds major sorting power: Some of the views participants expressed around topics like abortion, LGBTQ+ issues, or recent ICE tactics (framed as enforcing rule of law) that exist in direct tension with the values Americans elsewhere on the political spectrum hold. For example, the majority of our participants were strongly opposed to abortion, and experience this as a core belief around which there is little room for negotiation. On gay marriage and LGBTQ+ issues, most participants said they accepted gay individuals, but drew increasingly firm lines around what they perceived as institutional promotion and children's exposure, with trans issues for minors approaching the same level of near-universal opposition as abortion. It warrants calling out explicitly that these topics hold major social sorting power, capable of dividing Americans into distinct and incompatible information ecosystems (see Chapter IV) and serving as dealbreakers for connection or compromise across political divides, thus driving affective polarization. This creates a fundamental tension for democracy practitioners with divergent beliefs: attempts to rebuild trust and connection both with conservative populations and across partisan divides will require acknowledgement of and respect for the conservative moral foundation yet core elements of this foundation may be experienced by progressives as incompatible with their own moral commitments.

What Good Government Looks Like

The moral foundation underpins five principles of legitimate government shared by our participants:

01. Government should be kept small: Large, distant institutions are wasteful, structurally prone to corruption, and detached from the communities they govern.

02. Power should be held close: Governance works best at the state or local level, and/or when it feels close and human through e.g. visible and accessible faces attached. This helps ensure that those making decisions can be held accountable to the people affected by them.

03. The Constitution should be treated as the binding standard: The Constitution is believed to have defined proper limits on government power, in addition to enshrining what participants see as key aspects of Freedom: rights, free speech, elections. Amendments and reinterpretations layered on top erode what was originally designed.

04. Government's domain is the protection of rights and the maintenance of order, not the provision of welfare or the shaping of culture: When it moves beyond that domain into administering care or regulating private behavior, it doesn't just fail to help; it's seen as actively encroaching and displacing the people and institutions that would be better suited to play a role. When it comes to welfare assistance, for example, the church knows who in the congregation is struggling and why. Care without this relational context is administration, and administration is not care.

05. Rule of law is a critical guardrail: The rule of law provides structure, stability, and clear boundaries that prevents chaos and the disintegration of America's society and morals. Rule of law is also viewed as supporting a core aspect of Haidt's moral foundation fairness particularly when it comes to topics like immigration. But this principle only holds for participants insofar as the laws themselves are seen as rooted in constitutional authority and moral legitimacy.

Each principle maps directly onto the pillars. Small government applies Faith and Freedom to institutions: a large state displaces God's authority and the individual autonomy Freedom requires. The desire for power to be kept close to the community applies Place to governance: Local people know their communities; federal bureaucracies don't. The Constitution as binding standard embodies the Freedom pillar: it enshrines individual rights and holds the founding inheritance as a living limit on institutional drift. Church and community as the safety net reflects Faith and Family: care belongs in relationships, in the proper order of spheres, not in administrative systems. Rule of law operates as the Freedom pillar's procedural floor: without it, neither individual liberty nor the moral order can hold. Participants apply these principles as a test to almost every democratic institution they encounter.

Still, the weight participants assign to each of these four pillars varies, and with it their ideas of good government. The sharpest tension in our sample exists between Faith-dominant participants who want the government to enforce moral order, and Freedom-dominant participants who distrust the government even when it is working in their direction. Edgar (early 20s, SC) for example, supports "a large, centralized government that is enforcing certain morals on a society. Because I think that ultimately there are things that are good for everybody." In practice, for him, this means the government restricting abortion, incentivizing nuclear family formation through pro-natalist policy, and treating Christianity as the proper moral foundation of American law. Ben (mid 20s, WY), in contrast, believes: "If that stuff goes too far, you can end up sort of infringing on other people's rights," before adding, "I really don't think there should be a whole lot of religion in policies." Ben smokes marijuana in Wyoming, where it remains illegal, as a matter of personal principle. When the conversation turned to conservative communities where religious values have shaped local enforcement people arrested for marijuana possession in Idaho, for example Ben responded with visible discomfort. His discomfort with perceived state overreach extends equally to the government enforcing Christian norms as it would to the government enforcing progressive cultural ones.

Sacred, Hostile, and Corrupted Institutions

These principles for good governance help explain participants' categorization of different institutions as Sacred, Hostile, or Corrupted. Before introducing their logic, it's worth noting that our participants do not, for the most part, distinguish between public institutions (government agencies, regulatory bodies) and private ones (corporations, media companies, pharmaceutical firms) when assessing whether an institution is trustworthy. They tend to associate institutions with power, money, scale, and distance much more so than any specific ownership type. For Elaine (50s, WY), "greasy palms" describes both congressional votes and pharmaceutical pricing. Jordan (early 30s, MI) is the notable exception his libertarian framework actively celebrates private enterprise and reserves distrust for government specifically.

Category	Institutions, e.g.,
Sacred	Supreme Court
Hostile	CDC/federal public health authorities, FBI/DOJ, IRS, Department of Education
Corrupted	Mainstream media, Science and academic “experts,” Elections (Corrupted in practice; Sacred in principle)

SACRED INSTITUTIONS
A sacred institution directly embodies the governance principles: small, rooted in rule of law, it feels 'close to the people' insofar as it is made up of recognizable humans who can be held accountable in the court of public opinion, constitutionally grounded, non-intrusive on family and community. The current Supreme Court is the clearest example for many participants - nine justices who together embody the idea of meritocracy, not a sprawling bureaucracy, deriving authority from the Constitution rather than current political will, each knowable as an individual accountable for specific decisions. Kyle says, "By the time you get to [the] Supreme Court, that is like the last line of defense. Most often they have somebody that earned their way in there... from what I've seen, it seems like the Supreme Court is usually pretty effective." That human-scale, personal accountability the sense that a small group of highly accomplished people with names and records are answerable for specific decisions, in contrast to, for example, the structural accountability of checks and balances is precisely what agencies like the EPA, the IRS, or even Congress are seen to lack. There are not many institutions that pass this test. The extent to which this trust in SCOTUS is conditional on composition or outcome-alignment warrants further exploration: for several participants, their trust in SCOTUS did hinge explicitly on composition, and a 6-3 liberal majority would likely dissolve the reverence quickly.

HOSTILE INSTITUTIONS
A hostile institution is one that is seen as using its authority against the moral foundation carrying coercive power into the most protected domains of daily life and does so in ways participants cannot escape. The CDC during COVID arrived in participants' bodies, their children's classrooms, and in their workplaces with mandates and no option to opt out. The Department of Education shapes curriculum in schools that children are legally required to attend. The FBI can open investigations, seize property, and destroy reputations. The IRS is among the most unambiguously hostile institutions brought up by our sample. Taxation is seen as coerced extraction from property with no exit a direct violation of the Freedom pillar's core promise that the government leaves you alone in what you've built. "The first two to three months of the year, you are working strictly for the government. That is infuriating," Patricia (50s, SC) tells us. The return she sees on that investment confirms that the extraction is not serving her: DOGE's exposés of government waste struck her as "mind numbing... infuriating... anger inducing." For Hannah (late 20s, MI), resisting this institution goes back to America's founding: "That's why we started a new country, right? It was like a 4% tax, and now the government's taking like 30% of our paycheck." The roads, she adds, are still full of potholes.

CORRUPTED (BUT NON-COERCIVE) INSTITUTIONS
Between sacred and hostile sits a third category: institutions that participants distrust but can choose to avoid. Mainstream media is one example. It is widely regarded as biased and detached from participants' foundational values, but participants can engage with alternative sources, avoid certain channels, and build selective information diets. Academic and scientific "experts" fall into this category as well, for many of the same reasons. Participants regard these institutions as corrupted, i.e. biased, agenda-driven, and untrustworthy, but ultimately less urgent to reform than hostile institutions because participation is optional.

How the Moral Foundation Squares with Trump Support

President Trump applies this sorting strategically positioning himself as attacking the institutions participants have identified as hostile, protecting the ones they regard as sacred, and persecuting those they see as corrupted. Understanding his appeal requires applying a different test than the one applied to institutions: it is not who he is, but how he protects the moral foundation.

As a person, most of our participants believe he fits the moral foundation imperfectly at best. Rarely did participants in our sample see Trump as morally infallible. Maria (60s, MI) came the closest of anyone in our sample: She has been watching Trump since she was 15 and claims, "He has never lied yet." However, most did not; even Maria, a few hours later, doubled back on her original claim, saying, "I do see him on TV selling his watches. So I don't know." Thomas (40s, SC) acknowledges Trump is "not very Christian" and that January 6th was "idiotic... stupid." Kathy (70s, SC), who has voted for him three times, says, "There are so many times that I just want to tell him, 'Shut up. You're not helping." Kyle (late 20s, WY) remarks, "Do I think Trump's all the time, great? No." He is also not, for most participants, a truth-teller in any conventional sense.

What Trump passes is a protector test, not a character test. When Trump was elected, Sarah's (mid 30s, WY) husband, a land surveyor, went from near-unemployment to being overwhelmed with work orders overnight the Place and Family pillars in the form of a paycheck. Trump's reversal of Biden-era restrictions on coal mining have made him nothing short of a hero in Campbell County Wyoming: when researchers attended a local "Governor's Listening Session" featuring a Q&A with Wyoming's Governor Mark Gordon, one woman took the microphone to describe how it "warmed her heart" to see coal mines operating as she flew into the Gillette airport. Similar protector sentiments surfaced in South Carolina. Thomas (40s, SC) credits Trump for being, in his mind, the only politician "saying yes to destroying these terrible criminal organizations," seeing cartels as a direct threat to Family and Place. Maria (60s, MI) sees Trump as a sort of holy contractor - "He came to do a job, he's going to do the job, and he's gonna split" and frames his dedication in almost vocational terms: "We know we can call him at 3 a.m. And he will be up." She also refers to his actions including the bombing of Syria, moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and advocating for a crackdown on insider trading as biblical fruits: "His fruits are what are proof."

This protector logic also helps explain how participants reconcile Trump's governance practices with the principles outlined earlier. On the surface, there is a contradiction: participants say they want small, local government bound by constitutional limits, yet they support a president who governs from Washington, has expanded executive power, and attacks rule of law institutions. But most participants do not see it this way. The governance principles describe an ideal state. Trump's aggressive use of federal power is justified as a necessary response to hostile institutions that have already violated their constitutional mandate. When the FBI investigates Trump, when the CDC mandates vaccines, when the Department of Education influences local curricula, participants believe these institutions have exceeded legitimate authority. Responding with equal force is not breaking the rules; it is defending the foundation the rules were meant to protect.

Whether this protector logic is about Trump specifically or about the presidency as a role is a question our data answers only partially, and warrants further exploration. Multiple participants describe the presidency as the only office with sufficient power to take on the federal institutions they regard as hostile. But unlike any other President, Trump has survived impeachments, indictments, and assassination attempts while continuing to fight a track record that serves to deepen some participants' trust in him specifically.

HOW IT APPLIES TO OTHER POLITICIANS

Many participants apply a similarly functional evaluation to other politicians, but focus more on perceived authenticity and consistency: Does what you do match what you claim, and do you hold that position when it costs you something? The asymmetry suggests participants draw a distinction, if only implicitly, between a protector (Trump) and a politician. A protector's job is to fight for the moral foundation. A politician's job is to govern on behalf of the moral foundation and in line with their promises, something participants verify through voting records and public behavior. For both, holding this position even when it comes at a personal cost earns trust.

Reggie (late 20s, SC) talks about this assessment in the context of politicians who invoke faith in the deeply religious communities of the Upstate to win votes: "People can play the part temporarily to get what they need... [but] actions speak louder than words."

Sarah (mid 30s, WY) keeps a phone album of her State Senator's voting record, assembled screenshot by screenshot from the state's legislative website the heartbeat bill, a mask and vaccine discrimination bill, medical prescriptions for off-label use. Sarah describes the Senator as well-liked in her community: his family is generous, his wife volunteers at the local Christian school, they attend a prominent church. When neighbors say they love him, she opens the album. "People will be like, 'Oh, I just love him' And I'm like, really? What do you love about him? And they'll be like, 'Oh, he goes to my church. He values life.' And then I'm like, 'then why did he vote like this?" Sarah applies this same 'practice what you preach' test to local Freedom Caucus politicians she knows personally, but because they pick up the phone to explain their choices when she calls, she often interprets their votes more charitably and with context in mind: "This actually gets me in trouble sometimes, because people are like, 'Well, you didn't know the language. I voted down that bill because it wasn't strong enough."

Louise (late 20s, WY) voted for a local Freedom Caucus candidate she openly disliked over a moderate she found more pleasant after she overheard the moderate candidate tell two different people opposite things about a library book controversy at a local ice cream social.

Clint (70s, MI) watched the Ottawa Impact county commissioners a far-right coalition that ran on a platform of local accountability and conservative governance take office and fail to uphold these principles: "They came into power and we had hopes that they would really do some great things, and they mucked it all up because they talked a good game. It was virtue signaling... they came in so rigid and ideological that it was our way or the highway and they just steamrolled their way through everything." The consequences were substantial: lawsuits, wrongful dismissal settlements, hundreds of thousands of dollars in county costs. This is the advice Clint now gives to candidates before they run: "Determine your non-negotiables before you run for public office. If you don't have any non-negotiables and you get elected, everything is negotiable and will be and you'll sell your soul to the highest bidder."

Matthew (40s, SC) has built his political trust through years of direct observation rather than stated positions. He works at a local nonprofit and notices which politicians actually show up. They cannot campaign there, but they can come and talk, which makes attendance a genuine signal rather than an opportunistic one. The officials who have shown up consistently, solved specific problems when called, and answered texts at short notice have earned his trust.

The four pillars and the institutional sorting that follows are the structure within which participants evaluate democratic institutions and norms. The same participant who holds genuine reverence for the Constitution and the Supreme Court can simultaneously support aggressive action against the FBI - not inconsistently, but by applying the same framework to two institutions that occupy different positions within it. The same logic explains why norm deviation that targets hostile institutions is not experienced by participants as a threat to democracy, and is sometimes even seen as a defense of it: the moral foundation precedes the system, and the system is only worth protecting insofar as it serves that foundation.

What this chapter has not yet explained is how the separation between the moral foundation and the democratic institutions meant to protect it became so acute. That process is the subject of the next chapter.

A Segmentation for Conservatives' Tolerance for Norm Deviation

Tolerance for democratic norm deviation varied across our sample. The most reliable predictor for a participant's tolerance for norm deviation was where they located the source of democratic failure: in the people running the system, in the system itself, or something deeper in American society.

Actor Critics locate democratic crisis in the people running the system. They believe the architecture of democracy is sound, but that the problem lies in human fallibility and corruption, and that voters can work through the system to fix these issues through civic pressure, accountability, and sound elections.

System Critics believe the architecture of democracy has drifted from its original purpose, or has been captured by interests it was built to check (e.g. corporate financial interests). They generally believe that elections alone cannot fix the problem. For them, the problem is structural.

Foundation Defenders believe the moral foundation Faith, Family, Freedom, Place is under an organized, existential attack. For these participants, normal democratic mechanisms have become illegitimate least, they are incapable not just political.

How we measured tolerance for norm deviation

In addition to extensive semi-structured interviews on the topic, we facilitated a structured scenario testing exercise with all of our participants to understand how these diagnoses translate into tolerance for norm deviation. Participants were asked to rate how justified they believed a deviation from specific democratic norms was on a five point scale, before describing their rationale and assessment of real-life events that (at least on some accounts) mirror the hypotheticals. The scenarios referenced norms including: accepting election outcomes; institutional forbearance; judicial independence; free press; no political violence; rule of law (equal application). These norms were selected because they represent the procedural foundations that democratic backsliding literature most frequently identifies as most essential to electoral democracy's self-maintenance, and because each has been visibly contested in recent American political life. This allowed us to ground the exercise in participants' experiences rather than purely abstract principle.

Crucially, none of our participants evaluate unprompted whether democratic norm deviations are justified. We identified four key reasons for this:

01. Assigning moral proxies: Participants often feel absolved of judging specific events if they have pre-determined that political leaders or media sources covering potentially norm deviating incidents share their values. When this is the case, they trust leaders to behave in a principled and law-abiding way, and for media sources to report on it accurately. This also extends to personal sources: when Trump appeared to be slow-walking the Epstein files something Kyle (mid 20s, WY) found troubling - Kyle's pastor, who serves as a major moral authority for him, provided a narrative framework of Trump's actions (framing them as a strategic, chess-like play to expose lower-level figures first) that resolved the tension before Kyle had to evaluate it himself.

02. Discrediting the messenger (amid affective polarization): On the flip side, a preestablished distrust of messengers who call out a political behavior as "norm deviation" predisposes participants against questioning whether a line was crossed. Because Steve (60s, WY) views any information the mainstream media and the Democratic Party put out as propaganda, any concern they raise about norm deviation is immediately disqualified for him. When asked for his thoughts on January 6th, he responds with just one word: "Hoax."

03. Lack of awareness: In an age of information overload and misinformation, respondents are sometimes unaware that political events that could qualify as norm deviation have happened. When we met with Jordan (early 30s, MI), for example, he'd missed that morning's news of the US bombing Iran without congressional approval. Other times, participants are too unfamiliar with the democratic norms themselves to judge whether any particular case qualifies as norm deviation. For example, Sarah (mid 30s, WY) realized during the scenario testing exercise that she'd misunderstood executive orders to be "just a suggestion."

04. A different view of what is normal: Crucially, some participants viewed the democratic norms we tested as less 'normal' or essential than the literature. For example, Jordan (30s, MI) told us that a "little rebellion now and then is a good thing" (echoing Thomas Jefferson). For him, rebellion doesn't constitute a violation of democratic norms. He believes that January 6th, while "stupid" and ultimately not something he supports, was a relatively normal expression of the democratic spirit: "The government should be a little bit afraid of us," he says.

How Norm Deviation is Justified

When participants do actively engage with the question of whether a specific norm deviation is justified, we heard four recurring justification arguments:

01. Bypass. Democratic norm deviation is justified when it overcomes structural inefficiencies baked into democratic processes. This argument views democratic processes as too slow and cumbersome to address the scale of urgent societal threats. All three segments are pre-disposed to this argument.

Sam (early 30s, MI) frames President Trump's executive overreach not as ideological preference, but as practical necessity: "I think they have to do that because Congress can't get anything done. It's like, what level of presidential powers can he leverage?" He develops this into a broader structural diagnosis: "If he needs a mechanism to do that, because Congress won't do it or can't do it for whatever reason, he's got to be able to do something." Clint (70s, MI) offers the most principled version of the same logic, anchored in national security: "In the age in which we live, when a nuclear war can start in a couple minutes, you can't restrict the president to congressional override on big issues when it might be a life-and-death matter."

02. Restore. Democratic norm deviation is justified when it restores democratic institutions to their founding constitutional design. All three segments are pre-disposed to this argument.

Steve (60s, WY) registers Trump as deviating from norms, but in a positive way. He frames him as a historical corrective analogous to the republic's most exceptional leaders: "People are used to business as usual, and yeah it's not the norm. Nobody in history has ever done this, except for Lincoln and Washington. That's because they were connected to our morals. You couldn't be a legislator back then unless you were believing in God."

03. Equalize. Democratic norm deviation is justified when it retaliates against "the other side" (which is often believed to have deviated from norms first), because it levels the playing field. System Critics and Foundation Defenders deploy this justification, less so Actor Critics who defer to standard democratic processes such as elections for political course correction.

Thomas (40s, SC) articulates the structural logic most clearly. Republicans have grown more aggressive, he acknowledges - but Democrats opened the door: "Republicans have gotten more comfortable with doing some of these more extreme measures, although Harry Reid and Democrats were the ones who eliminated the filibuster for judges... once it's done, once that door is open, it's open." Clint (70s, MI) deploys this logic through a series of parallel comparisons: Biden's classified documents versus Trump's, SWAT raids on Mar-a-Lago versus no raids on Democratic officials: "Joe Biden had been taking documents since he was a senator... He clearly broke the law. There was no midnight raid with a SWAT team in Joe Biden's house."

04. Protect. Norm deviation is justified when it protects the moral foundation that's under attack. Among the four justification mechanisms, the Protect argument is the most difficult to combat because it is most dominant among Foundation Defenders.

In a diary entry written between interviews, Maria (60s, MI) responds to a Fox News story about Columbia University barring Border Patrol from campus: "This confirms to me it's a takeover of western tradition and Christian thought." Her prescription: "With all the hate and discrimination on campuses I think we should pull fed funds from them quickly. They need to feel the pinch immediately. Teachers need to lose their jobs." Having determined that the Democratic Party has abandoned the moral foundation, Maria no longer believes normal civic constraints apply to any affiliated institutions.

The democratic institutions involved or at risk in a given scenario shape which norm deviation justification logic participants reach for, and can shift their default tolerance.

When the institution in question is considered sacred, democratic norm deviation is harder to justify. For example, Steve (60s, WY) has one of the highest tolerances for democratic norm deviation in this study, including openness to armed resistance. But when we asked him whether law enforcement should hold off on prosecuting a party member to protect the party, his answer was equally unequivocal: completely off the table. "I would be the first person in Campbell County - guaranteed - if Trump was part of the Epstein ring. Prosecute him, put him in jail or hang him. Corruption is corruption." Equal accountability under law, and the pillar of his moral foundation that it protects in this case (Family), are both so sacrosanct that he would support law-breaking (hanging) to protect it.

When the institution in question is hostile, participants often reach for the Restore argument, treating norm deviation as the process by which the system corrects itself. Matthew (40s, SC) opposes virtually every form of norm deviation. He is an Actor Critic who trusts the system to self-correct and has little patience for political actions that circumvent it. Yet, when we asked him whether a president would be justified in firing what the president deems politically motivated investigators, his answer was unequivocal: "Completely justified." This behavior did not register as norm deviation at all. For Matthew, the FBI is a hostile institution, and what observers might call norm deviation, he sees as norm restoration. If the investigators are politically motivated, removing them is the system restoring itself. "There are many examples out there... I believe most of the investigations were politically motivated."

Participant Bios

CAMPBELL COUNTY, WYOMING

Ben (mid 20s, WY) is a former miner and military veteran raised in Wyoming's energy country. His service deepened his distrust of federal institutions into a conviction that globalist forces control them, a worldview he describes as "semi-independent, radical right wing."

Elaine (50s, WY) is a rancher and business owner who has worked Wyoming's land for decades, and is one of the few participants in this study who holds faith loosely, locating her moral foundation in family and place instead.

Kyle (mid 20s, WY) is a gig worker raised in Wyoming. He voted Democrat in his early twenties before converting to Christianity in his mid-twenties, a turn that brought him firmly into the Republican fold. He now interprets politics through his faith community's teachings, including the belief that spiritual forces of darkness operate within the federal government.

Louise (late 20s, WY) is a homeschooling mother with a background in ministry who grew up in Wyoming and believes that modern politics is trying to insert government in the place of God. Her conservatism is rooted equally in her church and in the economic landscape of the county where she was raised.

Sarah (mid 30s, WY) is a homeschooling mother and local activist. She describes herself as a "platform Republican" and has increasingly aligned with her county's more conservative wing.

Shirley (mid 30s, WY) works in education and comes from a military family. Her father's service taught her from a young age that "whatever is going on in the news, they're covering it up for something bigger." The pandemic confirmed it for her. She now believes the loss of a shared Christian foundation has left Americans with "no common denominator anymore."

Steve (60s, WY) spent decades in the military before settling in Wyoming, where he built a small business that was later decimated by COVID lockdowns. He describes himself as a MAGA Republican whose faith and politics are, in his own words, "one and the same."

GREENVILLE COUNTY, SOUTH CAROLINA

Edgar (early 20s, SC) is a student born and raised in Greenville who began forming his political identity in his mid-teens. He describes himself as "conservative first, Republican second." His conservatism is defined less by what he wants to build than by what he wants to stop.

Kathy (70s, SC) is a former marketing professional and Greenville transplant who stepped away from her career earlier than expected and has not fully returned to the workforce since. She has called herself a "woke Republican" since the Clinton years, convinced that America has lost the shared moral foundation that once held it together.

Linda (late 30s, SC) is a former media professional who now works in financial services. Originally from the midwest, she has lived in Greenville for over two decades. She describes herself as conservative but not Republican, a distinction she has held her whole life.

Matthew (40s, SC) is a nonprofit leader who has spent his career cultivating relationships between communities and government. He describes himself as "Christian first, conservative second... who happens to be a Republican."

Patricia (50s, SC) is a multigenerational Greenvillian and business professional. She comes from a family with deep roots in state politics.

Reggie (late 20s, SC) is a youth and family pastor. Despite growing up in a family full of Democrats, he did not vote in 2020 before voting for Trump in 2024.

Thomas (40s, SC) is a real estate investor from rural South Carolina, deeply embedded in Greenville's GOP civic life, who comes from a family with a long tradition of military service and public involvement.

OTTAWA COUNTY, MICHIGAN

Clint (70s, MI) is a retired Michigan native and longtime civic volunteer who has called himself a "Catholic social conservative" his entire adult life and views the Constitution as "the bedrock of the type of government that we have."

Eric (40s, MI) is a business professional with international work experience who eventually settled in West Michigan. He is the only participant in this study who explicitly does not identify as religious.

Hannah (late 20s, MI) is a sales consultant born and raised in West Michigan with a background in firearms training. She worked on Republican campaigns in another state before becoming disillusioned with electoral politics.

Jordan (early 30s, MI) is a tradesman who has lived in West Michigan his whole life. He calls himself a "Rand Paul Republican" more libertarian than Republican at heart but registered Republican by pragmatic necessity.

Liz (mid 30s, MI) is a former social worker and current stay-at-home mom born and raised in West Michigan who described herself as a moderate for most of her adult life but supported Bernie Sanders. The pandemic's vaccine mandates were the turning point. She has called herself right-leaning and a Trump supporter since around 2022.

Maria (60s, MI) is a community educator and longtime West Michigan resident who voted Democrat her whole life before 2016 and now votes Republican, driven by a conviction that civic life is downstream from God. She is an active community organizer.

Sam (early 30s, MI) is a small business owner who voted for Bernie Sanders in college and Joe Biden in 2020 before becoming a "common sense" conservative after his state's pandemic lockdowns convinced him that the government had overreached.

Acknowledgment & Thanks

Matt Kay designed all of our reports.

Griot Recruit supported participant recruitment efforts.

The SNF Agora Institute and Robin Stone at The Hewlett Foundation funded this work.

The Institute for Humane Studies has played an integral role in helping us gather academic experts and industry practitioners around this work, from conception through circulation of the finished product.

Well over a dozen experts and advisors shared their thoughts and questions with us during project framing, design, drafting, and revisions. We are deeply grateful for their sharp eyes and minds, which bettered this work considerably.

Most importantly, we thank the research participants for welcoming us into their lives and homes, and for their time and candor on topics that can be extremely challenging to discuss openly in the US in 2026, let alone with strangers. We're grateful for the opportunity to hear and learn from your stories.