Your comment reminded me of Innuendo Studios' video series "The Alt-Right Playbook" — in particular, "There's Always a Bigger Fish". I feel like this really made something click for me about how conservatives think.

I think that conservatives often recognise the injustice they face, and I agree that many of them identify themselves as rightfully belonging to the tribe that's at the top of the pyramid — the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires". What I find more interesting though are the ones who seem like they'd be content to be exploited by the ultra-rich, as long as they can believe that it's a righteous kind of oppression, in which everyone is in their right place within the system. They seem like they'd be happy being trampled on by the people above them, as long as they can feel like they're fulfilling their purpose, and that their suffering is as a result of some natural order.

Of course, even though they may welcome being crushed by the ones above them, implicit within the sense of order they crave is the fact that they would not be on the bottom level of the pyramid. That is, they believe that in return for their suffering, they feel they are entitled to power over the people who they consider to be "rightfully" beneath them. Their anger at people who resist oppression often seems to be like "hey, I'm doing my part in being subservient to the people above me, but this only works if the people at the bottom get in their place". They seem to believe that letting oneself be crushed by those above you in the order of things is a noble fate — a stance that's easier to take if you're not on the very bottom of this order.

The core of this seems to be a deep, desperate belief that there is some intrinsic order to things, some arrangement of society that would make everything make sense. I can't say I don't sympathise with this; the world is complex and overwhelming, and things change so fast that I can't hope to keep up. It reminds me of some advice I read about how to write good characters in fiction — "what lie does your character tell themselves?". I think that this is their lie. It's what they feel they need to believe to make sense of their own suffering. I agree that in-group mentality is a huge part of how they respond to the world, but I think that the out-group is more than just people they perceive to be beneath them, but more like the people who challenge the lie that they tell themselves to cope.

Perhaps they have moments where they recognise the injustice of their own suffering, and then they look at how the systems that produce that are so much larger than they are, which makes them feel small and scared. I sympathise with this too, because I also think that the power that I have as an individual is laughably trivial. For me, that's why I find solace in solidarity, and in striving for intersectional progressiveness within my communities.

I wish that they could work with us to build something better. It is scary, but it's easier when you're not alone. It seems pretty lonely to be a conservative. Sometimes it feels like I care more for their own suffering than they do, because they either refuse to recognise the way the system is grinding them up, or they argue that actually it's a good thing. Conservatives can seem like they're driven by selfishness, but then they continually do things that directly harm themselves and people they care about. That propensity made a lot more sense when I understood the weird martyr complex they tend to build.

It's both. They share both the bias towards avoiding risk and the bias towards stratified social structures.

Tribalism is common to all political leanings though unless consciously suppressed.

But yes, American conservativatism is really broken and unwell.