A lot of people who don’t want to see Trump reelected are arguing about what we should do, and that’s great. It’s a complicated situation, and we should argue.
There are, however, three big problems with how those arguments are going right now. First, there is the assumption that the answer is, and always has been, obvious, and the Dems have been ignoring the obvious answer out of a combination of cupidity and stupidity. Second, there is the entirely false dominant model of politics being a zero-sum between two points on a continuum (extreme left v. extreme right), so that any move is toward the center (and away from an extreme) or vice versa. We need to stop talking and thinking about politics that way.
The third problem is, I think, that many (most?) of the arguments aren’t grounded in the really interesting empirical research out there about voting practices—people have a tendency to assume that everyone thinks about citizenship in the same way they do. So, for instance, if they tend to vote on the basis of policy, they think that everyone else does too. But, what if not everyone does vote on the basis of policy? Then we can’t get people to vote differently by putting forward different policies.
Many people do vote on the basis of policy. But not everyone; in fact, not most people. There is no one way that people vote, and so there is no one obvious solution. Figuring out what to do to get people to vote differently means being as accurate as possible as to how people decide to vote. And they don’t vote in a way that is easily mapped onto the left/right binary (or continuum).
The problem is that people don’t just vote for different people or parties—people think about how to vote in wildly different ways. There are, loosely, eight factors in how people vote, with those factors mattering more or less for different people, different elections, and different candidates. The factors are:
- sheer in-group loyalty;
- charismatic leadership (identification–they believe a political leader is like them or really gets them);
- their immediate well-being (so they vote against the President if things are going badly for them and with the President if things are going well);
- last minute information;
- a “throw the bums out” mentality (aka “protest” vote);
- voting against the out-group;
- policy.
The empirical research doesn’t show a neat and simple picture, and so I can’t give a short summary of it or a simple statement of what our true solution is. I’d just be repeating the first error above.
Here are some things I’ve been reading that have deeply changed my understanding of voting habits in the US—that caused me to stop thinking that our problems could be solved through nominating fewer or more people anywhere on the false continuum (we need to stop arguing about whether to elect progressives or centrists—that assumes that people care about policies, and not enough people do) or that we need to have a more coherent policy agenda (same problem as the previous). I think that arguments about what to do should be more informed by readings like these (I’ve tried to find short summaries of each of the arguments—hence the links):
Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President, Kathleen Hall Jamieson
Jamieson cites studies, Mueller’s indictments, and a multitude of sources to show that the Russians did engage in considerable hacking, trolling, sock-puppeting, and generally gaming of social media in order to mislead, misinform, and distract voters with the ultimate goal of ensuring that last-minute voters and potential Dem voters mistrusted HRC.
Extremism, J.M. Berger
This non-partisan book builds on notions of in- and out-group mobilization to distinguish between normal and extreme versions of a political philosophy. I intend to use it in my rhetoric and racism class.
How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Two political scientists argue that Trump is following the playbook for how authoritarians displace democracy.
How Partisan Media Polarize America, Matthew Levendusky
This book is an empirical study of partisan media, comparing Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly, showing that both rely on fear- and hate-mongering about the out-group more than they promote in-group policies (or even political figures). While not a “both sides are just as bad” argument, it does have good data and analysis that makes it non-partisan. This is the book, I think, that shows how the vexed and entangled political lives that people actually live get reduced into us v. them.
Ideology in America, Christopher Ellis and James Stimson
Like the Mason book (below), it argues that policy arguments get trumped by identification. It points out how very rich and complicated our actual political beliefs are, with emphasis on the behavior of voters who cut across conventional groupings. They show various things that are important, such as that people who are unhappy with how “the government” behaves vote GOP, even if the policies they dislike were promoted and voted in by the GOP.
The Rationalizing Voter, Milton Lodge and Charles Taber
This is the book with all the data about how people actually reason about politics (at least in the short term). They show that it isn’t emotional v. logical (the conventional understanding of rational/irrational) but what other people in cognitive science call System I (intuition) versus System II (metacognition). They are fatalistic about political reasoning of voters, but I think their data doesn’t merit that fatalism.
Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs About How Government Should Work, John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse
They are completely persuasive that many Americans reject the basic premises of democracy–that finding the correct solution is complicated, that people have legitimately different interests, that good solutions are never ideal–that people hold the President responsible for things like weather, sharks, and the current situation of the economy. They’re pretty fatalistic about voting, moreso than I think their data merits.
Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, Lilliana Mason
Another empirically-grounded description of how the mosaic of political beliefs became a false binary of identity.