New York Times columnist Paul Krugman asks, “when was the last time Republicans accepted a politically inconvenient fact?”

The latest prompt for this perennial grievance is the performative anxiety expressed by Republican elected officials who refuse to acknowledge (or are simply silent on) Joe Biden’s victory at the polls. These Republicans know better, Krugman rightly notes. But that’s just the author’s latest gripe about the GOP. From the lethality of the coronavirus, to climate change, to the Clinton family, to unsound predictions about the potential for Obamacare to bring about disaster—Republicans, he claims, are uniquely besotted with conspiratorial thinking.

We need not dwell on the specifics in Krugman’s indictment because the Times columnist isn’t making an argument about the particulars. His supposition is that right-leaning Americans are particularly susceptible to delusions of the sort that exist only to reinforce their own virtue and confirm their opponents’ wickedness. That’s quite a claim from someone who a mere six months ago was compelled to apologize for floating a conspiracy theory of his own.

In the shy paranoiac’s inimitable fashion, Krugman was just asking questions when he posited the theory that the U.S. unemployment rate declined sharply in May from a record mid-pandemic high because the data were flawed. “Not fraudulent,” he asserted. Just “haywire.” Upon further review, Krugman admitted he was probably wrong and apologized for “any suggestion that a highly professional agency might have been corrupted.” But Krugman didn’t suggest that. It is a revealing admission that his thinking when he made the offending claim was far more conspiratorial than he let on.

What could have led the columnist to such an evidence-free assumption? One that confirmed his political priors about his adversaries’ capacity for malevolence and mendacity? And why would he confess to believing that this conspiracy theory was an act of premeditated duplicity when that’s not what he initially wrote—just what he thought he had to write to maintain the confidence of his colleagues and readers? The answer is that Krugman is, in fact, a human being, and the foibles he is identifying in Republicans are universal in nature.

To reiterate the point, because it bears repeating, we can be sure that elected Republicans who know how elections work and are privy to state-level data know Trump legitimately lost. They are acting in bad faith when they suggest anything to the contrary. But we cannot be sure of the extent to which rank-and-file Republican voters are also engaged in motivated reasoning when they nod along with the “Kraken” conspirators. As Krugman’s colleague, Times analyst Emily Badger observed last week, it is “incredibly hard to separate sincere belief from wishful thinking from what political scientists call partisan cheerleading.” In other words, what partisans say they believe and what they really think are often two distinct things, particularly when the latter conflicts with the former.

This behavior is not exclusive to Republicans. As late as 2018, according to polling conducted by YouGov, a staggering two-thirds of all surveyed Democrats thought Russia “tampered with vote tallies on Election Day to help” Donald Trump win the 2016 election. There is no evidence for such a thing, but it was a tantalizing theory that absolved Democrats of their inconceivable failures during the 2016 campaign. If that mass delusion represents an existential threat to the American civic compact (a claim many make about the GOP’s stubborn refusal to accept Biden’s victory), that consternation wasn’t on display at the time. And at the national and state level (particularly, in places like Georgia, where Democrats have held fast to the evidence-free claim that the governor had stollen his office), Democrats returned to the polls in record numbers to participate in democracy.

The temptation to believe the worst about your adversaries isn’t new and Democrats are just as liable in that regard. In 2006, for example, one survey found that over half of Democratic respondents believed that it was “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that George W. Bush’s administration “either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks.” Six-out-of-ten Democrats told pollsters in 2017 that they believed “others were involved” in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. As recently as August of this year, confidence in the safety and efficacy of an FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine plummeted among Democrats as elected officials like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris entertained the unsupported notion that Donald Trump was intimately involved in its development.

The New York Times has occasionally dedicated itself over the course of the Trump era to busting the left’s preferred conspiracy theories. Some of the hypotheses shared by prominent Democrats involved the notion that Trump owed his victory to “voter fraud,” that the right infiltrated demonstrations on college campuses to instigate violence and pin it on Democrats, and that the “travel ban” targeting predominantly Muslim nations was a “trial balloon for a coup d’état against the United States.” MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell both broadcast and tweeted the claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin orchestrated a 2017 massacre of Syrian civilians using chemical weapons to help Trump and distract the public from the president’s ties to the Kremlin. And for much of the 45th president’s tenure, the too-online progressive community was primed to expect the president’s imminent arrest—by what agency, we can only speculate—for various crimes against the United States.

These conspiracy theories aren’t so much believable as they are useful. They’re comfort blankets that explain the world around their adherents in terms that make events more explicable and, as a bonus, absolve them of responsibility for their adverse circumstances. If Republicans are presently more predisposed toward conspiratorial thinking, it’s at least partly attributable to the fact that a longtime conspiracy theorist leads their party. But their underlying condition is not a Republican affliction alone, and this phenomenon isn’t limited to politics. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say they believe in bigfoot and the Illuminati. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to admit they believe in aliens and chemtrails. If he were consistent, Krugman might indict Democrats, too, for languishing in the “era of post-truth politics.” But as with some modern GOP voters, subscribing to these unsubstantiated beliefs does not mean that Democrats are singularly blinkered and irredeemably malign. It means that they are human, imperfect though that condition may be.