I would submit that societies are supposed to operate the same way. You need a degree of connection, of shared values, of shared assumptions, which would begin with basics like driving on the right, in America, and extend to things like the value of our Constitution, and an informed respect for our history, while fully admitting our many failings.
But when you have tens of millions of people chanting “Orange Man Bad”, in their gray minds and gray bodies, with their gray arms writing their gray words, you have what amounts to a seizure. You don’t have connection: you have binding. It is no longer a chain, but a steel rod. You have lost the ability to think, as a society, when this happens.
It may be the case that parts of the brain, returning to that metaphor, resist the seizure. But that seizure still affects everything. No part of the organism can ignore it, just as no part of our nation can really, truly, fully ignore the “Orange Man Bad” seizure we have been seeing with Trump Derangement Syndrome.
The problem is not just that they are wrong in their portraying him as evil, but that the flow of logic and difference into that part of our social order is no longer possible. It is comatose, with respect to all new information. That part of the brain has lost the ability to register new perceptions, to think new thoughts.
Someone might copy this argument and apply it to conservatives, but that will not make it true. It will merely be a new aspect of the “not thinking” which applies to their whole project, their whole conformitarian, totalitarian project.