Bear with me. Why did you pick the side you picked? Is it because it's the conservative side? Who is the "us"? I don't think we should have any expectation that we're the side that contains truth, and thay they're just poopy. It's not the side that determines what's true. It's the measuring and researching and drawning conclusions from all that which makes the conclusions, what I'd call model-driven. If you've picked the side you're on in a given domain, because of the side itself you have side, not a model.
Having a side means you short-circuit whatever internal model you've built of how reality works. I think everyone has a model of reality. Some are more or less accurate than others. Maybe call it a worldview. It's the intuitions, knowledge about the world, critical thinking, reasoning, experience, and so on. And people use this to evaluate information. But not always. Instead of making sense of inputs using the model, you just short circuit the model and go straight to predetermined conclusions based on the side.
For example, if you're a never-trumper, the conclusion is always predictably anti-trump, without regard to knowable facts or circumstances. And we kinda test this on each other when we disagree. We try changing inputs that should reasonably change the outcome if the opponent is running a reasonable model. If the opponent's conclusions are still the the predicted ones, we think the person is running a side. Of course not in that language. We call it bias. Never-trumpers don't generally use their model of reality to make decisions about Trump, they've already decided to take the anti-trump point of view.
This doesn't just work like that on the left. Consider always-trumpers. They tend to have already decided that no matter the inputs they have a predictable answer to every question about trump. Regardless of any inputs it's always a pro-trump outcome, as much as any never-trumper conclusion is always anti-trump.
I wouldn't say it's accurate to think that the left always has a side and that we should expect the right to always have a model. Individuals on the left and right have both. And you can usually tell when they're running just a side. You can accurately predict their conclusions in a given domain of issues by knowing nothing more than which side they're already on.
In other words, conservatives are humans too and have the same instincts as anyone else. We're groupish, too. We're biased too. We take shortcuts to arrive at the conclusions we want, too. We like to pick our arguments according to our identity just like people on the left do. As much as we like to say that we think, and they feel is not as true as we'd like it to be.
I don't think people rejoice when their beliefs are confirmed even at the expense of someone's suffering. I don't think it's a celebration of the suffering, it's a celebration of the confirmation. The more I think about it, the less I think it's disgusting. It's just people being human. It's instincts that we'd probably be better off overriding.
