DRAFT: A Very Peculiar Kind of Triumph of the Will Indeed
A draft for Project Syndicate: Did Trump win because key tranches of the electorate had a will to be misinformed, or because of Trump & his enablers' will to misinform them?...
A draft for Project Syndicate: Did Trump win because key tranches of the electorate had a will to be misinformed, or because of Trump & his enablers' will to misinform them?...
Fact: those with justified true beliefs about the state of issues like crime, inflation, immigration, and the state of the stock market overwhelmingly supported Harris.
So did Trump voters believe lies because Trump told them to, or were they Trump voters because they believed lies? And how do Republicans—for we Democrats cannot do it, as a key part of the structure of misinformation is that nothing we say can be believed—who want a better politics and a better future educate their masters on how to understand the world, and how to decide who to believe?
The graphic is from Ipsos, headlined: “Misinformed Views on Immigration, Crime, the Economy Correlated with Ballot Choice”. Potential voters who knew or guessed that violent crime was not at or near all-time highs broke for Harris by a 65%-point margin; those who were misinformed broke for Trump by a 26%-point margin. For those who truly thought that inflation had declined over the past year, the Harris margin was 53%-points, while those misinformed who thought inflation had not declined went for Trump by a 19%-point margin. Those who correctly knew that the stock market was at an an all-time high supported Harris by a 20%-point margin; those misinformed who did not know this had a 9%-point margin for Trump. Those woh truly knew that southern border-crossings had declined went for Harris by a 59%-point margin; those misinformed and thinking border crossings right now are relatively high broke for Trump by a 17%-point margin.
So we have our first key issue: (a) Do Trump voters say that violent crime rates are at all-time highs, that inflation in the United States has not declined since 2021, that the US stock market is down, and that border crossings are high are misinformed and say all these false things because they are Trump voters? (b) Or, alternatively, are they Trump voters because they believe all these false things and are very fearful for their country? And if it is (b), our second key issue is: why do they hold these false beliefs? Why has it been so easy to misinform them so much? And once we have an understanding of (b), then the next key question is: how do we inform voters of the state of the world—how do we replace the current misinformation ecosystem that has trapped their minds in a wilderness of mirrors, and turned our politics into a clown show?
At this point people who want to misinform you, dear gentle reader, and me will show up: There were lots of border crossings! There was a violent crime wave! (Even though it was one that started under Trump.) You cannot expect people to be up-to-date, but must understand that when people asked how things are respond with an answer that tells you how things have recently been, it is not fair to call them misinformed! Inflation was high (well, moderate)—the peak annual rate was 9% in the year ending June 2022 (but 3% in the year ending June 2023 and in the year ending June 2024; and 2.4% in the past year)! And people should be allowed some confusion when asked to speak econo-speak, for what they really meant was that prices had risen and had not come down!
They will be quiet on the stock market. It is very hard to avoid learning that the stock market these days is at or near record highs. The stock market is, after all, the thing that the media has decided is the way we keep score on the health of the economy. Thus we hear about the stock market in nearly every hourly news bite, and, recently, the phrase “record high” has entered our ears a lot.
And they will also be quiet when you probe their beliefs. I will grant those trying to misinform me that people might reasonably not know how fast things have recently changed and not distinguish between high prices and high inflation. But everyone by now knows that it is a big world in which there are always places where you can point cameras to find five examples of pretty much anything you can imagine. And everyone in America looks around and sees that in their neighborhood violent crime rates are about what it has been, their 401(k) or the 401(k)s of their friends who have them are doing well, that most of the people they know have jobs and are not having more trouble keeping income and outflow balanced than usual, and that they themselves have not seen Haitian immigrants in their neighborhood BBQing cats.
No. People are misinformed. The question is whether they are misinformed because they want to be misinformed—that when Trump asks them “who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” they enthusiastically want to believe him—or whether it has taken considerable work by bad actors plus considerable bad luck to get us to this state. If the answer to this question is that more than half of us have a deep need to be misinformed, than America and indeed human civilization is indeed in serious trouble. For then at least a key tranche of Trump voters are voting as they do because they want to be misinformed in a way that will give them permission to hate lots of their fellow citizens.
But if has taken a near-perfect storm of cynicism, bad luck, and malefaction to get us here, then there is, I think, considerable hope for the future. The bulk of Trump voters are then good-hearted people who think that, while they are by and large and for the most part doing OK, at lot of other people are in trouble and so things need to be fixed. And so they are voting for Trump more out of love than out of hate.
If so, then the task facing Americans who want a better politics and a better society is clear. Unfortunately for us Democrats, the task must be carried out by you Republicans. This is so because a key part of the structure of misinformation is that nothing we ever say can be believed. But for Republicans, they must now look at themselves, and take on the mission of Viscount Sherbrooke after the 1867 extension of the voting franchise in Britain: we—or, rather, you—must educate our masters.
Patchett, Arthur Onslow. 1893. Life and Letters of the Right Honourable Robert Lowe, Viscount Sherbrooke, G.C.B., D.C.L., Etc. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. <https://archive.org/details/lifeandlettersr00patcgoog>.
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I understand and share the strong need to believe that if only things could be *explained* better, if there had been better arguments, more clearly expressed information, some other intellectual move, then the outcome would have been different. That's the intellectual and moral world you (we) inhabit and aspire to.
But the fundamental flaw with this analysis is that there's no plausible way anybody (certainly not the enthusiastic subset of Trump's voters) is misinformed _about Trump_: his character, behavior, and ethics has been too visible for too long in ways that are too clear-cut. Any information- or policy-driven analysis of the outcome, or even explanations driven by nostalgia, feelings of rejection, etc, flounders against the reductio that
1) You cannot not know Trump at at least a surface level.
2) To vote for Trump you have to consider him a human being you can give power to over yourself and other people, regardless on your feelings about inflation or migration or anything else.
3) A majority did.
What makes the outcome of this election painful at a foundational level is that it disproves the idea that the aggregate US population has a basic moral threshold regarding internal violence, democratic institutions, a cogent view of reality, and so on. It forces us to an impossible conflict between an axiomatic commitment to Democracy and an equally axiomatic commitment to basic decency in public life. What happens when We The People chooses this with open eyes? Because whatever their opinion about policy issues, everybody knows Trump well enough that the basic moral decision about his suitability as a human being to be given power was there.
I'm not in the US, but of course US politics have a global impact, and here in Argentina we face a very similar situation. I believe the impulse to educate and argue with our fellow citizens is an honorable one that must be sustained as the only viable long-term solution, but in the shorter term we must navigate a morally tricky and spiritually exhausting path where we must simultaneously respect our commitments to democratic institutions (which many of our fellow citizens seem to only do contingently) while, to be frank, figure out how to punch above our current voting strength weight to constrain and influence policy.
It feels dirty, it feels immoral, it feels wrong, and we *know* that there's a version of that strategy that leads to much, much darker places: history is scarred by atrocities at the very least enabled by people who probably began by thinking and feeling the way I do. That's a path fraught with the temptation of "hard choices." But any political strategy that assumes that right now there's a basic ethical agreement with a comfortably large majority of the people we share our countries with fails, I believe, to adequately grasp reality.
Again, not that I don't understand and share the need to believe otherwise....
A very smart psychologist I know says it works like this:
1. Trump works like fortunetellers work. He says generic things, observes the response, and tunes his message. This allows listeners to project their dreams and needs on him.
2. The beliefs that follow are there to protect those aspirations and dreams. Trump is fond of saying things like "They want to silence me because they want to silence you". He never says "about what?" because there isn't one answer.
3. This puts us in the position of telling them things they don't want to hear, so they don't listen.
This is a stable structure. It is hard to crack. It does crack, but the process isn't a rational, reasoned one. It's an emotional one.
What needs to happen is grieving. Who doesn't go through life without setbacks and hurts? However, the process above interrupts and forestalls a normal grieving process.
No, I don't know how to do this at scale. I do know ways to push on this on a personal level, but it requires a solid personal connection.
@Brad
I understand and share the strong need to believe that if only things could be *explained* better, if there had been better arguments, more clearly expressed information, some other intellectual move, then the outcome would have been different. That's the intellectual and moral world you (we) inhabit and aspire to.
But the fundamental flaw with this analysis is that there's no plausible way anybody (certainly not the enthusiastic subset of Trump's voters) is misinformed _about Trump_: his character, behavior, and ethics has been too visible for too long in ways that are too clear-cut. Any information- or policy-driven analysis of the outcome, or even explanations driven by nostalgia, feelings of rejection, etc, flounders against the reductio that
1) You cannot not know Trump at at least a surface level.
2) To vote for Trump you have to consider him a human being you can give power to over yourself and other people, regardless on your feelings about inflation or migration or anything else.
3) A majority did.
What makes the outcome of this election painful at a foundational level is that it disproves the idea that the aggregate US population has a basic moral threshold regarding internal violence, democratic institutions, a cogent view of reality, and so on. It forces us to an impossible conflict between an axiomatic commitment to Democracy and an equally axiomatic commitment to basic decency in public life. What happens when We The People chooses this with open eyes? Because whatever their opinion about policy issues, everybody knows Trump well enough that the basic moral decision about his suitability as a human being to be given power was there.
I'm not in the US, but of course US politics have a global impact, and here in Argentina we face a very similar situation. I believe the impulse to educate and argue with our fellow citizens is an honorable one that must be sustained as the only viable long-term solution, but in the shorter term we must navigate a morally tricky and spiritually exhausting path where we must simultaneously respect our commitments to democratic institutions (which many of our fellow citizens seem to only do contingently) while, to be frank, figure out how to punch above our current voting strength weight to constrain and influence policy.
It feels dirty, it feels immoral, it feels wrong, and we *know* that there's a version of that strategy that leads to much, much darker places: history is scarred by atrocities at the very least enabled by people who probably began by thinking and feeling the way I do. That's a path fraught with the temptation of "hard choices." But any political strategy that assumes that right now there's a basic ethical agreement with a comfortably large majority of the people we share our countries with fails, I believe, to adequately grasp reality.
Again, not that I don't understand and share the need to believe otherwise....
A very smart psychologist I know says it works like this:
1. Trump works like fortunetellers work. He says generic things, observes the response, and tunes his message. This allows listeners to project their dreams and needs on him.
2. The beliefs that follow are there to protect those aspirations and dreams. Trump is fond of saying things like "They want to silence me because they want to silence you". He never says "about what?" because there isn't one answer.
3. This puts us in the position of telling them things they don't want to hear, so they don't listen.
This is a stable structure. It is hard to crack. It does crack, but the process isn't a rational, reasoned one. It's an emotional one.
What needs to happen is grieving. Who doesn't go through life without setbacks and hurts? However, the process above interrupts and forestalls a normal grieving process.
No, I don't know how to do this at scale. I do know ways to push on this on a personal level, but it requires a solid personal connection.