They believe that their support of Trump is reasonable, and that it isn’t reasonable not to support him for two reasons (so to speak): 1) their media gives them “reasons” to support him; 2) their media gives them “reasons” to refuse to listen to anyone who disagrees.
And all of those “reasons” are unreasonable. The lowest bar for having a reasonable position is: you are open to persuasion on it, you’ve considered the best opposition arguments, and you hold all positions on the issue to the same standards of proof, civility, logic.
Trump supporters fail every single one of those standards. So, why don’t they notice that failure? There are several relevant factors. One is a misunderstanding about what it means to be reasonable (aka, the rational-irrational split). The second, and the point of this post, is that they’re inoculated against being reasonable about their support of Trump.
“Inoculation” is a metaphor that scholars of propaganda use for the strategy of getting people not to listen to non in-group arguments. [The in-group isn’t “the group in power” but “the group you’re in.”] If I am trying to vote for Chester, and I’m worried you might vote for Hubert, then I will—like exposing someone to cowpox so that their body rejects smallpox—try to train you to reject pro-Hubert arguments by misrepresenting them, nut-picking (equating Hubert with some unhinged or extreme critic of Chester), motivism (saying all critics of Chester are jealous, sad, or have bad motives), taking quotes out of context, or just plain lying about Hubert. If I’m successful, then, when confronted with strong arguments for Hubert and his policies, you’ll reject them without even listening.
I’ll give two examples. Trump supporters believe that the 2020 election was stolen, although the legal cases making that claim (including before Trump-appointed judges) have overwhelmingly lost, generally on the grounds that they have little to no merit or evidence. Trump supporters don’t know the outcome of these cases because their media doesn’t tell them. (Trump supporters open to a reasonable discussion about this can email me. They aren’t. They won’t.)
Second, your Trump supporting family and friends are probably completely supportive of anti-DEI policies, which they conflate with CRT. And the argument against CRT is an illogical argument by association. It runs like this: All concerns about inclusion are really CRT, and CRT can be associatively (not reasonably) related to some Marxists; therefore, if anyone indicates concerns about inclusion, they’re CRT, and, therefore, you shouldn’t listen to them—they’re Marxist.
Argument by association is unreasonable. The CRT argument has the same logic as: God is love; love is blind; Stevie Wonder is blind; therefore Stevie Wonder is God.
Or, more to the point, Nazis believed in the Great Replacement narrative; Tucker Carlson advocates the Great Replacement narrative; therefore, Tucker Carlson is a Nazi.
But Trump supporters only consider argument by association reasonable when it confirms what they believe. That isn’t reasonable. They might provide data that look like reasons, but their argument isn’t reasonable.
When inoculation works, and it often does, it means that you are trained to listen to people in terms of a binary—are they with me, or against me. If they give any sign of not being fully supportive of Chester, then they must support Hubert, and that makes them a squirrel-loving communist who probably kicks little dogs for fun. And that binary thinking goes to the very source—they only get information from sources that support Trump, so they don’t even know what the best opposition arguments are.
Trump media, pundits, and rhetors aren’t the only people to engage in inoculation. A lot of demagoguery does, all over the political and cultural spectrum.
Political parties and figures, advertisers, salespeople, even manipulative individuals engage in inoculation only because they know that they’re unlikely to persuade people if their audience gives a fair hearing to the various opposition positions and critics. Inoculation is not only unreasonable; it is a pragmatic admission that the entire case is unreasonable. If you have to lie to make your case, you have a bad case.
Was “inoculation” always so toxic, or is the difficulty compounded by the way life is set up today to make it harder to weed out? Is Trump’s shameless charisma a factor, or is it a property of demagoguery in your opinion and he is the demagogue of the hour?
Innoculation is very interesting. I take it as a social psychological process that can be simulated and is based on being a certain type of person in a certain type of situation.
I always thought it had more to do with Republican Psychology, their authoritarianism, their loyalty, their preference for the “truth” over mere facts. It is no different than the Republican Senators and Congressmen who declined to impeach Trump.
The idea being “Trump’s our leader and you stand by your man”
You’ve spent your career studying propaganda and inoculation. I think it is worthwhile to see how it gibes with my intuitions and what other scholars I’ve come across say, so thank you for your patience.
Hi Professor Roberts-Miller
My best guess blames susceptibility to propaganda on the stubborn inability to think clearly outside their immediate circumstances, so in a way they are like students at a planetarium who can’t picture outer space beyond two dimensional models- it’s a form of stupidity, and we suffer for their foolishness and stupidity.
Maybe I can put my theory in academic terms, but Trump is like the sea peoples of antiquity (and like all the bad emperors folded into one huge cheap package.