Americans are passionate about blame; casting it about, of course, but also desperately avoiding it. This is a relatively recent phenomenon, and it’s poison.

Take, for example, the results of a recent YouGov study of “conspiracy theories.” According to their findings, a full 52 percent of self-described Republicans (as well as 46 percent of independents) subscribe to the idea that “millions of illegal votes were cast in the election.” Likewise, 59 percent of Democrats (and another 35 percent of independents) buy into the notion that “Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President.”

These are staggering numbers. They are not explained by the advent of “fake news,” the influence of which research has shown was vastly overblown during the 2016 election cycle. The simplest explanation is the soundest: People just want to believe.

Partisan Democrats want to think that Hillary Clinton didn’t lose the election, but that it was stolen from her. Republican stalwarts are married to a ready-made excuse for why Donald Trump lost the race (as even he expected he would). It’s a pretext from which he seems incapable of retreating despite its diminishing utility.

As partisans geographically sort themselves into ideologically homogenous communities, Americans are increasingly likely to see their political affiliation as a central aspect of their identity. To take on blame is to smear the tribe, and so partisans erect psychological constructs to deflect it. This isn’t laudable, but they are only taking cues from their political leaders.

Hillary Clinton didn’t lose the election on her own, you see? She, too, blames FBI Director James Comey’s questionable judgment, Russian interference, myopic media commentators and debate moderators, and, of course, pervasive American misogyny. Barack Obama didn’t waltz back from his self-set “red line” in Syria, leaving that crisis to descend into a globally destabilizing cataclysm of historic proportions. The problem, rather, was that he wasn’t provided with “the tools” he needed to stabilize that region (read: blame Congress). But at least, “we tried.”

Donald Trump has perfected the art of buck-passing to no greater end than the preservation of his own self-image. When something goes wrong, like the bloody raid in Yemen, in which 14 civilians and a U.S. serviceman died, it’s the last administration’s fault or the military’s. The Trump administration didn’t hire Mike Flynn to serve as National Security Advisor despite his indiscretions and the ongoing federal investigation into his undisclosed financial relationship with the government of Turkey. You see, the Obama administration hired him first (before firing him).  Of course, Trump didn’t lose the popular vote. Those millions of illegal immigrants robbed him of his rightful victory.

Even before Donald Trump’s ascension to the White House, macrocosmic studies like John Judis’s The Populist Explosion and cultural examinations on an individual level (most famously, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy) explored a culture-wide resistance to accepting blame within the Trump coalition. Its constituents are wedded to the idea that exogenous conditions are responsible for their circumstances. Competition from abroad ruined their town. Cheap foreign labor keeps them on disability payments. Predatory pharmaceutical companies provide them with inexpensive and irresistible opiate escapism.

This abandonment of personal agency is not unique to the Trump voter, who insists he is hopelessly shackled to the nation’s rusting and decrepit old mill towns. “I think poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind,” declared Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson recently. He would know. Carson was raised in inner-city Detroit with a broken family and in severely impoverished circumstances. Through perseverance and studiousness, and the encouragement of his attentive mother, Carson overcame his circumstances and became a world-renowned neurosurgeon.

The mere suggestion, however, that poverty is not an insurmountable obstacle to personal advancement, given the right attitude, was denounced as downright heretical by the urbane liberals who the New York Times said constituted a “backlash” to his remarks.

“Next month, I’m going to tell my landlord that I paid my rent with positive thinking!” quipped former Hillary Clinton campaign operative Zerlina Maxwell. “Huh,” tweeted Dictionary.com’s social media team. “We say poverty is the condition of having little or no money, goods, or means of support.” “States of mind: Happy. Sad. New York,” chided New York Congresswoman Nita Lowry. “NOT a state of mind: Systemic poverty.”

That bit, “systemic,” as in the opposite of “localized” or “particular,” is important. It infers that poverty is a trap and that escape velocity is almost impossible to achieve. Poverty is as difficult to overcome in the inner city as it is in Appalachia. The first step is to reject docile resignation to one’s environmental conditions—however imposing they may be. Down the other path way lies depression and surrender.

Creating a preoccupation with blame-shifting justifies any number of moral compromises to avoid accountability and responsibility. Insisting that it isn’t your fault is how an American political party’s most prominent and trusted voices can rationalize an act of obviously heedless and manic violence conducted in the heat of the moment as not only justified but admirable. After all, the attacker was provoked, albeit indirectly, by the abuses of an entire industry to which the target of his attack belonged. Insisting “it’s not my fault” is also how someone comes to accept the bitter, vindictive concept of “social” or “historical justice.” It is the vehicle through which retribution for one’s unfortunate inheritance is meted out. Your circumstances are not your own, after all. Not entirely.

The disempowerment inherent in blame-shifting is liberating, in a way, but only in the manner that intoxicants are liberating. They don’t release you from responsibility, but they do make those obligations seem remote. If it’s someone else’s fault, it’s also someone else’s burden. This is not the ethos upon which the nation was built. Not one of us is blameless.