ROGER PARTRIDGE: Still Admiring the Emperor’s New Clothes

Why loyalty outlasts the evidence

A year ago this week, my Quadrant column, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” – written before this Substack launched – asked a question that irritated more people than it persuaded: How could so many thoughtful conservatives, people who once championed limited government and constitutional norms, support a president whose actions so plainly contradicted those principles?

The answer drew on Jonathan Haidt’s research into moral psychology. Trump, the column argued, had tapped into something deeper than policy preference – loyalty, authority, sanctity – the moral foundations conservatives weight more heavily than liberals. Facts that contradicted the tribal narrative would be reinterpreted or dismissed. “Short-term pain for long-term gain,” supporters would say. Or: “He’s playing four-dimensional chess.”

The words were written before the next twelve months had run their test. The “Freedom day” tariffs, cited as the case study, was still unfolding at the time. Markets were plunging. Elon Musk had broken ranks over trade policy. Republican senators were speaking out. The question posed was whether reality could pierce the tribal bubble.

The answer, a year on, is: only partially, and only briefly. Republican approval of Trump, which stood at around 90 per cent when the original essay was written, has dipped but never broken – hovering in the mid-to-upper eighties through the tariff carnage, the Iran war, and everything in between.

The tariff retreat produced no sustained reconsideration. The pattern the essay described – cognitive dissonance resolved through rationalisation, policy failure reframed as a necessary sacrifice – has been confirmed rather than confounded.

What the essay perhaps underestimated was the durability of the tribal bond – even as the material costs mounted. It argued that “reality can occasionally pierce the bubble.” That was too optimistic. Reality has not so much pierced the bubble as bounced off it.

Part of the explanation lies in what conservatives can and cannot see. The war on woke is real, and Trump has fought it with a conviction that the mainstream centre-right lacked for years. Many conservatives can see that front of the battle clearly – the DEI capture of universities, the progressive takeover of institutions, the assault on traditional values.

What they seem unable or unwilling to see are the other dimensions of liberalism’s architecture that Trump is simultaneously dismantling: the rule of law, the separation of powers, free markets uncorrupted by cronyism, civil liberties, and the epistemic institutions on which open democratic debate depends. Nor, it seems, can they see that Trump’s foreign policy adventurism is undermining the very American interests the president’s America First movement claims to champion.

Tribal attention is not merely selective. It is structurally blind to threats that come from the same direction as the victories.

Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky adds a sharper edge to this picture. Humans are hard-wired for in-group and out-group distinctions. When tribal identity is activated, moral standards shift. We become more forgiving of our own side’s transgressions – and less able to see them clearly. This is not hypocrisy. It is how the mind works.

Consider the reaction when Trump posted an AI-generated image depicting himself as a Christ-like healer. Conservative Christians recoiled. “There is no context where this is acceptable,” one evangelical activist wrote. “God shall not be mocked,” said another.

Within days, the objection had vanished. The sanctity instinct – which Haidt identifies as central to conservative moral psychology – flickered and went dark. When loyalty and sanctity collide, loyalty wins.

The Iran war reveals a related dynamic. Years of rhetoric about invasion, carnage, and civilisational threat have primed supporters to accept extraordinary measures when danger feels acute. A regime-change war against 93 million people, launched without congressional authorisation, is reframed not as constitutional overreach but as necessary boldness. When survival seems at stake, constitutional constraint feels like a luxury. Supporters are not abandoning their principles. They are reordering them.

The constitutional picture is darker than the original column suggested, too. The Supreme Court’s ruling striking down Trump’s tariffs – a 6-3 decision joined by two of his own appointees – was a genuine act of institutional courage.

But the more telling story has been Congress. Republicans who spent decades invoking Madison and the separation of powers against Democratic presidents have found almost nothing to say about a war launched against a country of 93 million people without congressional authorisation.

Committee chairs declined to schedule hearings. Yet Trump’s own former White House counsel, Ty Cobb, publicly suggested the Cabinet should be considering the 25th Amendment. Republican senators expressed unease in private. In public, the silence was deafening. Congress was not simply bypassed on the Iran war. It has stood aside.

The palace is in a worse state than it looked a year ago. But loyalty and authority turn out to be stronger than evidence.

Victor Orbán's defeat in Hungary last Sunday is a reminder that the bubble is not indestructible – it eventually yields when the cost of living inside it becomes too high.

In the meantime, to American conservatives, the emperor’s clothes are still looking fine.

This essay is part of an ongoing series on liberalism, democracy, and the international order. Related writing in Persuasion, Quadrant, Quillette and on Plain Thinking is collected here.