An "imaginary view" and a "correct belief" in the "binational" United States

In their article "These Disunited States" in the New York Review of Books (22 September 2022), Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson describe the United States as a "binational" country with "a deep and durable tension between a Christian white-supremacist ideology that evolved to justify slavery and a broad-based multiethnic resistance to it", adding that the "language used by the two sides to describe each other reflects a mutual loathing." But their summary of that language marks a key feature of that tension, an "imaginary view" vs. a "correct belief": "Trump’s base harbors an imaginary view of blue states", while Democrats "believe, correctly, that Republicans have entrenched a kind of minority rule." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 16 October 2022)