take the sides or the party line being pushed onto us

That hits on something that has become so clear to me lately as a fundamental mechanism of control.

Almost all of us define ourselves as a collection of attributes: Democrat, firefighter, consumer, American, Red Sox fan, Person of Color, whatever. We wear these "identifications" like little merit badges on a sash that we use to signal others. And there's no doubt we think of these as "merit" badges, because no one "shamefully confesses" they're really a minarchist.

"They" know this and the mechanism of control is attaching tiny little strings to these badges to pull us around. That is, They simply declare that as a "good" fill-in-the-blank, you "should" do-thus-and-so. If you don't or you disagree, you're bad and should ashamed of yourself. They magically bridge the is-ought distinction and no one ever seems to see any of this happening.

Every once in a while we see someone removing one of these merit badges and freeing themselves. The one we see frequently now is when a black person declares they're a Trump supporter. They're accused of being a race traitor, of course, but without that merit badge and that tiny string, that person's attitude becomes, "I couldn't give a fuck what you think."