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Americans who find Donald Trump to be unfit and unqualified to be President of the United States struggle to understand how anyone can believes he is.

It is, of course, a conflict of values. Understanding why that is the case might help us better understand the true nature of that conflict and just how serious it is.

Values are those qualities of life we believe are important both to us and to society as a whole, and because we have many values, we prioritize them, usually based on the kind of values they are.

There are three basic types of values: (1) intrinsic values such as love, kindness, compassion that are their own reward; (2) practical values, such as responsibility and efficiency, that are necessary for success in whatever we’re doing; and (3) sacred values like loyalty to one’s country, respect for the rule of law, settling disputes without threat or violence, respect for others, telling the truth, that serve as the foundation of a cohesive society. 

As individuals we live by all three types of values, but the first two – intrinsic and practical – affect us more on an individual level while the impact of sacred values is more on the whole of society.

Sacred values serve as a kind of glue that holds people together and allows them to get along enough to get things done, to live in peace, and to prosper as a group.

Conflict arises in a nation in those times when a significant minority no longer affirms shared sacred values as their highest priority, and the larger the number for whom that is the case, the worse the conflict.

The Civil War is the historic example of our country reaching the point where sacred values were rejected by a large enough faction to cause open conflict and eventually war itself.

I can imagine a father in Boston, Massachusetts in 1860 talking about the impending war around the dinner table saying, “I cannot understand how those southern rebels believe it is right to own another person,” while at the same time a father sitting around the dinner table in Richmond, Virginia saying, “I cannot believe those damn Yankees think they have a right to tell us how to live.”

Both sides believed that the divide was so deep that war was the only way to determine who would prevail.

We are at a similar place today because for the first time since the Civil War a large segment of Americans no longer consider the kind of sacred values that hold us together as a country to be a top priority. 

It’s not that MAGA Republicans don’t hold to sacred values as the rest of us do, only that they are less important to them than their personal grievances they believe are caused by social changes that have made life harder for them (Affirmative Action, gay rights, gay marriage, transgender rights, immigration, Title IX, etc.).

This is why they want to elect political leaders and secure Supreme Court justices who are willing to turn back the clock by undoing those social changes. And the only person they believe can and will do that as president is Donald Trump. No one else.

Given the kind of man Trump is and the threat he poses to our democracy, the rest of us don’t understand how they could possibly support him. They respond by saying they care about personal character, too, and are as patriotic as anyone, but bringing back the America of the past they liked is more important.

It’s a classic case of a conflict in values that get embodied in the rules, rights, and laws by which all of us should live.

Put simply, then, the reason MAGA voters are difficult to understand is because we don’t share their values and priorities nor do they share ours, which in turn means they want rules, restriction of rights, and laws we don’t.

The deeper their emotional investment is in what they believe, the more they engage in what Steven Novella (The Skeptic’s Guide To The Universe) says is the logical fallacy of “motivated reasoning,” the bias process of defending what they already believe is true by accepting anything that confirms it and rejecting everything that doesn’t.

Those of us on the other side do the same thing so we talk past one another. Common ground is not possible because the conflict in values is too profound and too intense, which means defeating the other side is the only solution to the conflict, just as it was at the beginning of the Civil War.  

This time, thank God, who wins will be determined at the ballot box instead of on the battle field. But the outcome could not be more serious, just as it was in the 1860s..  

Had the South won the War, the independent states of America would have likely survived, but the United States of America would not have, leaving us a divided country with the conflict in values between slave states and free states more entrenched than before.

No doubt American history would have been a very different story to tell.

The stakes are not all that different this time around, only we have not reached the point of actual war (though we had a sign of it on January 6, 2021).

Settling the conflict at the ballot box, though, means the outcome of the election will decide much more than who is president and who controls the Senate and the House.

Because at the moment Americans are divided over what kind of values they want to live by, who gets elected will determine which values prevail, just as was the case when the North defeated the South. 

Joe Biden was exactly right when he said in 2020 that we were in a struggle for the soul of America, only I am confident neither he nor anyone else knew at the time that it would take four more years for the final outcome of that war to be determined. 

So here we are, a divided people approaching an historic moment when we will once again end the conflict over the values that will guide our nation into the future.

Our decision will be an unequivocal statement of the values by which we want to live, values that will represent the past filled with discrimination, inequality, and injustice, or values that will represent our desire to become a more perfect union. 

It really is 1865 all over again.