Several good items published today.
- We’re stuck in the Trump Loop because we can’t accept that sociopaths exist;
- Steven Pinker with data that says the country is *not* ‘dying’;
- Another piece about psychological “blind spots” and how to counter them;
- How Trump is better described, not as a fascist, but as a “demagogue”;
- How Trump lacks not only empathy, but sorrow;
- And: I predict the election will be so close that MAGA and Trump will claim Trump’s victory, and bad things will happen, worse than January 6th. I hope I’m wrong.
Beginning with yet another item about why so many people like Trump.
Slate, Steven Reisner, 29 Oct 2024: The Deep Psychological Reason We’re Stuck in This Feedback Loop With Donald Trump, subtitled “It’s been almost a decade, and yet it continues.”
To cut to the chase, Reisner’s answer is that people don’t realize that sociopaths actually exist, with an example of women who date men who turn out to be sociopaths.
That’s because people who are not sociopathic just can’t believe that pure sociopathy exists. They can recognize that they are being lied to, even being manipulated, but still they believe that somewhere inside the sociopath there is a human being like they are, perhaps a hurting soul gone astray. Psychologists, too, make this mistake, believing that sociopaths are not strategic but, rather, mentally ill, because they were traumatized in childhood. It’s extremely difficult for decent people to accept that there are some people who simply do not share their values about truth and basic human kindness. This is what the sociopath counts on.
This is why Democrats, he says, can’t believe “that someone could be so brazenly deceptive and selfish and get away with it. Over and over again.”
We are now at the eleventh hour. The Republicans, under the brilliant tutelage of Donald Trump, have become the Party of Sociopaths, and their aim is to relegate the Democrats to a Party of Hapless Neurotics. The fateful question is, will the Democrats and the mainstream press continue to waste their energy being shocked, or will they change their strategy? It all boils down to this: How will the American voter assess what is true?
And this paragraph struck me in particular:
For Republicans (and Fox News), truth no longer has anything to do with facts, or even reality. Truth has returned to its pre-enlightenment meaning; or, as Merriam-Webster puts it, its archaic meaning: “Fidelity, constancy.” To be true, in the medieval Trumpian world, is to be loyal and steadfast. It’s no longer about reason or even belief: It’s about faith. Freud had a word for this kind of primitive faith; he called it illusion. People crave a godlike father figure, Freud explained, especially when they feel threatened with the eruption of two dangers: “the crushingly superior force of nature … and the shortcomings of society which have made themselves painfully felt.” In the 21st century, facing severe social inequities just when nature seems most out of control, America is in exactly that vulnerable state. And so it shouldn’t actually surprise us that nearly half the country’s voters have rallied around a sociopathic strongman who promises protection in return for absolute fealty.
This of course echoes things I’ve been saying here for years: how conservatives value ideology over reality; how the religious value stories over facts. And as I’ve provisionally concluded, most people don’t *need* to acknowledge reality or understand facts; ideology and stories do just fine to bind tribes together and ensure the survival of the species. The problems come when denials of reality are imposed on others (as Republicans would do), and in particular when such denials render us unable to solve massive, existential problems (as Republicans would have us do). One more para from this piece:
The Democrats and the mainstream press completely miss the big picture; they think they can combat this alternative reality by zeroing in on Trump’s lies. “Fact checking” has become the self-soothing fantasy of a neurotic press—useless because the real issue is that Trump and his followers live in a completely separate reality. There is no fact-checking exercise that could get us to a common ground because in Trump’s reality, and the reality of nearly half the country, whatever helps the sociopath score points against the Democrats is the truth.
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In complete contrast is Steven Pinker, checking in once again about the nature of reality.
NY Times, guest essay by Steven Pinker, 29 Oct 2024: Trump Says the Country Is ‘Dying.’ The Data Says Otherwise.
He begins thus, with an essential point about the nature of news in the second para:
Narratives of national decline have intensified in recent years. Most prominent, of course, is Donald Trump’s vow to “make America great again,” in response to what he has called “a nation that is dying.” But there is also doomsaying on the far left, which sees a “late-stage capitalist hellscape” (to quote the journalist Taylor Lorenz) and is often resigned to voting in protest for a long-shot candidate or sitting out the election altogether.
The doomers can always find ammunition in the news. News, by its very nature, consists of things that happen, and it’s easier for things to go wrong suddenly — a war, a terrorist attack, a hurricane — than to go right suddenly. When things do go right, it usually means either that nothing happens (a country remains at peace, for example) or that improvements creep up a few percentage points every year and compound over time, transforming the world by stealth.
As a result, one can get the impression that the state of the world keeps getting worse when, in fact, it keeps getting better.
How to tell? Don’t rely on the kind of anecdotes the news feeds you.
An antidote is to look at trends. Actual data seldom tells a simple tale of disaster or triumph, but in this case, indicators of national well-being over recent decades suggest that the reports of our nation’s demise are greatly exaggerated, if not downright delusional.
Then he makes this point, that challenges something I floated just a couple days ago. (At the end of this post.)
Research shows that voters are typically more influenced by the state of the nation, as they understand it, than by the state of their own lives. This may seem counterintuitive, but it makes sense: Their lone vote is astronomically unlikely to affect their lives, so they treat it as an act of self-expression rather than self-interest. (Political scientists call this sociotropic voting.) And when it comes to understanding the state of the nation, voters consistently judge it to be in worse shape than they do their own neighborhoods and themselves. (Political scientists call this the optimism gap.)
Well, it’s been observed many times that people think the nation is going to hell, while their own circumstances are pretty good. But there might be people like that, and people that I speculated about too.
Pinker goes on to present actually, in graphics of long-term trends, to show how things have changed, and mostly gotten better, from one presidential term to the next. The economy; Poverty; Violent crime; Life expectancy; Happiness; Pollution; Women’s Rights; Democracy. Then concludes:
On the eve of this presidential election, the United States faces daunting problems. But that has been true on the eve of every election. As they say, the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory. When we take an objective look at how the country is doing and which way it has been going, we see that American life is not a hellscape of carnage and decline. What stands out is a resilient democracy that tends to recover from setbacks and make halting progress.
None of this progress happened by itself. In the natural course of events, things get worse, not better, as benevolent conditions give way to disorder, disease and the worst of human nature. Progress is the dividend of human beings recognizing problems and mustering their ingenuity and will to solve them.
Among the most important of these people are political leaders. We should choose the ones who assess the nation’s problems realistically, distinguishing genuine afflictions from anecdotes and rumors and who vow to learn from its successes and not repeat its mistakes.
But of course, by the first item, many people simply won’t believe “evidence”; they will cling to their tribal values.
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Another piece roughly on the same subject. But we’ve heard about these over and over. Anything new here?
LA Times, Geoffrey Cohen and Michael Schwalbe, 29 Oct 2024: Opinion: Voters with a ‘party-over-reality’ bias may play a decisive role in the election
Well *of course* it will. But the piece is actually about how all of us can fall prey to misinformation. Then they identify three “blind spots,” with suggestions about how to overcome them.
First, the party-over-reality bias. People believe things that align with their ideology, and reject stories that don’t. Second, smart people are just as susceptible; they are smarter at justifying what they want to believe is true. Third, that the problem can be solved by controlling misinformation. Yet our mental biases are as much a part of the problem.
What can be done? Intellectual humility; be open to the possibility you might be mistaken; cultivate community (outside of partisanship, they stress).
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Careful of using the f-word.
Washington Post, Eli Merritt, 29 Oct 2024: Opinion | There’s a better term for Trump than ‘fascist’, subtitled “He’s a demagogue.”
It is not wrong to identify fascist tendencies in Trump, such as ultranationalism, ethnocentrism, cronyism, persecution of internal enemies and comfort with violence. But these traits also qualify him for classification as a dictator, despot, autocrat and authoritarian.
So why single out “fascist,” an inflammatory charge conjuring images of 20th-century mass murderers?
A far better designation, one that sums up Trump with precision, is “demagogue.”
With examples from Aristotle and Alexander Hamilton. A modern definition of a demagogue is one
who obtains the support of the people through dishonesty, emotional manipulation, and the exploitation of social divisions; who targets the political elites, blaming them for everything that has gone wrong; and who tries to destroy institutions — legal, political, religious, social — and other sources of power that stand in their way.
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One more piece of the puzzle for today.
Salon, Lucian K. Triscutt IV, 29 Oct 2024: There is a great big hole in the surface of the Earth where a certain man’s heart should be, subtitled “Donald Trump lacks something even more basic to humanity than empathy. Where is his sorrow?”
About how he never apologizes. and reneges on promises.
Jeffrey Goldberg reported in The Atlantic that Trump reneged on a promise to help pay for the funeral of a Hispanic soldier murdered at Fort Sill. “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!” Trump reportedly told his chief of staff in a White House meeting. He then ordered that the funeral not be paid for. Trump denigrated dead soldiers at Arlington Cemetery. He refused to attend a memorial for soldiers killed in World War I, calling them “losers.”
It isn’t a question of his lack of empathy or his disrespect for the military and for soldiers killed in battle. The question is, where is his sorrow?
The answer is apparent. Donald Trump has no sorrow.
The capability to feel human sorrow, an emotion we now know is at least 17,000 years old, does not exist within the former president. The evidence is in his words. It is in his actions. By that evidence, the look on his face as he spews hate on the campaign trail is not human.
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I predict the election will be so close that MAGA and Trump will claim Trump’s victory, and bad things will happen, worse than January 6th.
