In fact I'd say that you're writing from a position of insight.
I personally believe that political rhetoric is just a surface manifestation of deep human psychology. People gravitate to the belief systems that fit with the way their minds work, whether it's religion or politics or economic theory, or any number of deeply-held beliefs.
One of my favorite subjects is primatology. I've expounded on it at great lengths in the past, and before too long I'm sure you'll have the opportunity to endure me doing it again (like, right now ;-)). But study of our primate cousins takes advantage of the opportunity to study an "other" who shares our common origin and shares much of our basic mental wiring. We can be more objective studying chimpanzees and gorillas than we can be about ourselves. All primates are social beings, and in the chimpanzee tribes we can observe a simplified form of the elaborate hierarchical social structures that we humans build. We can watch as the alpha males exert power directly, through force and intimidation; and we can observe the subtler uses of power in the parallel female power structure. We also get to observe how the weak manipulate the strong, and trade favors and loyalty for protection.
The thing about a hierarchy is that, except for the individuals at the very top and the very bottom, everyone is both an authority over those lower down, and a follower of those higher up. We're born knowing how to be both. Every human has an instinct to exert control over others, and an instinct to submit to someone more powerful. But up and down the hierarchy is the common thread of fear. We exert power in order to control our environment and keep the threats at bay; and we look to a stronger power to protect us from threats.
Out of this ancient dance of power comes the human patterns of power and manipulation. Alpha male humans not only exert power through direct dominance, they manipulate their followers with fear, and play on the instinct to submit to the Strong Man for protection. After World War II psychologists and sociologists studied how Hitler transformed Germany from a free society into a dictatorship, and they found a deep psychological mechanism that they labelled "authoritarian conservatism". (The label is unfortunate, because political Conservatives consistently mistake the state of mind denoted by lowercase "conservative" with their ideology of uppercase Conservatism; but they have little in common at the intellectual level, and intersect only at the deep psychological level.)
Hitler played upon this mechanism by instilling fear of outsiders and of the "aliens" within German society: Jews, Gypsies, "semitics" of all kinds, Communists, intellectuals, anyone who deviated from the norm that he defined. He neatly boxed in the German people between their fear of the others, and their fear of what would happen if they disobeyed Authority.
It's an illustrative irony that the other notable authoritarian conservative society of the 20th Century was the Soviet Union. Its ideology was the opposite of fascism, yet both societies operated according to the same ancient logic: Obey Authority, fear and hate the others; keep your head down and your nose clean and nothing too bad would happen to you.
In other words, it just took me several hundred words to agree with you when you wrote "It seems to me that, depending on our own deep seated issues that we are not even aware of unless we self examine, this is the determining factor of our beliefs." I can be long-winded at the drop of a hat!
I have a brother-in-law who's beyond RightWing extremism and has a foot in the land of militia thinking. He arrived there the way others have: He served in Special Forces in Vietnam, and later worked for years as a mercenary in places such as Zimbabwe. Yet, beneath his political beliefs is a man with honor and integrity and courage. I sleep better at night knowing that he's watching over my little sister and niece and nephew. It's what's under the surface rhetoric that really matters. Character matters, but we have to separate it from political blathering that trivializes character and turns it into just another rhetorical device. I'd trust my brother-in-law with my life, even if he is a political nutcase.
Between changing my granddaughters' diapers, and taking my 82 year old blind mother to the doctor...and various other tasks...I have contemplated this question quite extensively.
There's a quiet beauty in that, Martha. You're taking care of those who went before you and those who came after, in the great chain of life, and finding the time to ponder the meaning of it all. That's so fundamentally human, and when all the shouting and noise and fury is ground away, what remains is the diamond of that simple human truth.