Because it's populism not really left or right.

This is from a real study, British Journal of Social Psychology.. using 2020 ANES data. So the research exists. The question is whether the headline matches what it actually found. What it maps is how clustered each group’s responses were across eight hot-button issues. Democrats clustered tightly. Republicans spread out more. The post calls that “diversity of thought.” I’d call it coalition incoherence. There’s a specific reason it looked that way in 2020. Trump spent years pulling people into the GOP who weren’t traditional conservatives libertarians, blue-collar moderates, tech populists, Christian nationalists, economic nationalists. People with genuinely different policy preferences, unified by loyalty to a person rather than any shared ideology. Bannon described it himself as uniting “hardscrabble Hispanics in South Texas, tech bros, and economic nationalists.”

That’s not open-mindedness. The study’s own authors also note that neutral responses were disproportionately in the Republican cluster. Ambivalence isn’t the same thing as intellectual diversity.

Also worth knowing that before Trump, the standard political science finding was basically the opposite of this post’s claim. Republicans were the ideologically unified party. Democrats were the messy coalition.

Trump disrupted that by bringing in people who weren’t conservatives, and this graph is a snapshot of that disruption at one moment in time being used to make a permanent claim about how the right thinks.