- How Republicans are suddenly optimistic about the economy;
- David Brooks on how Trumpism reflects shifts in America’s basic morality;
- How Americans believe things about the rival party, especially Democrats, that simply aren’t true;
- Robert Reich’s personal sources of truth;
- And Big Think on how scientists are not conspiring in a Satanic plot to undermine religion.
You can look at the same thing and see different things depending on your inclination.
Washington Post, Annie Duke, 26 Nov 2024: Opinion | When beliefs trump facts, Thanksgiving becomes less fun, subtitled “What a sudden change in consumer sentiment says about us.”
With few exceptions, Republican and Democratic consumer sentiments have historically differed, though they’re working with the same fundamental data (inflation, job data, imports and exports, etc.). The trend persisted even during an event as uncertain and unprecedented as the coronavirus stock crash in March 2020.
But the two parties’ sentiments change when power changes hands. The same switch that occurred this year followed the 2016 election.
With a chart showing the dramatic shift.
Obviously, there was no seismic change in the actual economy between Election Day and the day after. Inflation didn’t all of a sudden skyrocket or plummet to zero. Unemployment didn’t shift up or down. Eggs and refrigerators cost the same on Wednesday as they did on Tuesday. But partisan perception did change — dramatically. Democrats were suddenly more pessimistic, and Republicans were just as suddenly more optimistic.
Jay Van Bavel, a psychology professor at NYU, offers an explanation, pointing to a phenomenon that he (along with colleague Andrea Pereira) calls the identity-based model of political belief. Study after study finds that people are motivated to view the world in a way that affirms important aspects of their identities.
When new information conflicts with our beliefs, we experience a discomfort known as cognitive dissonance. We would like to think that we are rational people who resolve the conflict objectively, changing our beliefs when the facts warrant it and holding firm when they don’t. We would like to think that, regardless of who won the election, our views of the present economy wouldn’t shift so drastically in the space of just a day.
Which is to say, the article goes on, we think in groupish or tribal ways. Our identity must be protected. It’s the same reason we don’t change our minds when confronted with new evidence.
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And those tribes do have very different identities.
NY Times, David Brooks, 28 Nov 2024: The Moral Challenge of Trumpism [gift link]
This is not a new observation either, but here Brooks lays the conservative program bare. And it’s quite at odds what either the Constitution or the Bible (NT) says.
He begins by admiring Mitt Romney, in contrast with how MAGA view Mitt Romney, according to one Noah Millman.
Millman’s underlying point is it’s not sufficient to say that Trump is leading a band of morally challenged people to power. It’s that Trumpism represents an alternative value system. The people I regard as upright and admirable MAGA regards as morally disgraceful, and the people I regard as corrupt and selfish MAGA regards as heroic.
The crucial distinction is that some of us have an institutional mind-set while the MAGA mind-set is anti-institutional.
In the former view, we are born into a world of institutions — families, schools, professions, the structures of our government. We are formed by these institutions. People develop good character as they live up to the standards of excellence passed down in their institutions — by displaying the civic virtues required by our Constitution, by living up to what it means to be a good teacher or nurse or, if they are Christians, by imitating the self-emptying love of Christ. Over the course of our lives, we inherit institutions, steward them and try to pass them along in better shape to the next generation. We know our institutions have flaws and need reform, but we regard them as fundamentally legitimate.
MAGA morality is likely to regard people like me as lemmings. We climbed our way up through the meritocracy by shape shifting ourselves into whatever teachers, bosses and the system wanted us to be. Worse, we serve and preserve systems that are fundamentally corrupt and illegitimate — the financial institutions that created the financial crisis, the health authorities who closed schools during Covid, the mainstream media and federal bureaucracy that has led the nation to ruin.
And.
In other words, MAGA represents a fundamental challenge not only to conventional politics but also to conventional morality. In his own Substack essay, Damon Linker gets to the point: “Trumpism is seeking to advance a revolutionary transvaluation of values by inverting the morality that undergirds both traditional conservatism and liberal institutionalism. In this inversion, norms and rules that counsel and enforce propriety, restraint and deference to institutional authority become vices, while flouting them become virtues.”
Concluding,
What kind of person do we want our children to become — reformers who honor their commitments to serve and change the institutions they love or performative arsonists who vow to burn it all down?
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Here’s yet another piece about how what most Americans perceive simply isn’t true. (Because they view reality through lenses of tribal values, I would say.)
The Atlantic, Stephen Hawkins and Daniel Yudkin, 28 Nov 2024: The Perception Gap That Explains American Politics, subtitled “Americans overwhelmingly—but, it turns out, mistakenly—believe that Democrats care more about advancing progressive social issues than widely shared economic ones.”
(As David Brin and others have pointed out, Americans agree, across party lines, on many more things than they realize. Politics, like TV news, focuses on the tiny minority of extreme disagreements.)
The piece opens by repeating the subtitle and then reporting the result of a poll about the priorities of all Americans — “cost of living/inflation” — and then how Republican and Democratic priorities are perceived.
Americans across the political spectrum are much better at assessing what Republicans care about than what Democrats care about.
To wit:
When asked about Republicans’ priorities, all major groups, including Democrats and independents, correctly identified that either inflation or the economy was among Republicans’ top three priorities.
By contrast, every single demographic group thought Democrats’ top priority was abortion, overestimating the importance of this issue by an average of 20 percentage points. (This included Democrats themselves, suggesting that they are somewhat out of touch even with what their fellow partisans care about.) Meanwhile, respondents underestimated the extent to which Democrats prioritize inflation and the economy, ranking those items fourth and ninth on their list of priorities, respectively.
By far the most notable way that Democrats are misperceived relates to what our survey referred to as “LGBT/ transgender policy.” Although this was not a major priority for Democratic voters in reality—it ranked 14th—our survey respondents listed it as Democrats’ second-highest priority. This effect was especially dramatic among Republicans—56 percent listed the issue among Democrats’ top three priorities, compared with just 8 percent who listed inflation—but nearly every major demographic group made a version of the same mistake.
Some have accused Democratic messaging as being the problem. But the problem is, the article claims, that the extreme right and left groups get more media attention than anyone else in the middle, and that skews peoples’ perceptions. (So again, a news media issue, though a quite different one that what conservatives accuse main stream media of.) There’s also the issue that partisan media overplays issues on the other side — e.g. the whole thing about Harris funding sex-change surgeries for prisoners, played up by Republican TV commercials, even though the actual policy affected only like 2 people.
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Shorter items:
Robert Reich, 29 Nov 2024: Where to find the truth?, subtitled “As we enter the darkness of the Trump regime, it’s more important than ever that we have access to the truth”
A profound question! I’ve mentioned potential answers here several times — *not* anything you read online; instead “mainstream” media sources that existed before the internet and which you have to pay for. Reich offers the sources he relies on, after some discussion of sins by the New York Times, Washington Post, Fox News, Truth Social and X (though their sins are vast orders of magnitudes apart), and concludes,
Here are the sources I currently rely on for the truth: The Guardian, Democracy Now, Business Insider, The New Yorker, The American Prospect, Americans for Tax Fairness, The Economic Policy Institute, The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, ProPublica, Labor Notes, The Lever, Popular Information, Heather Cox Richardson, and, of course, this Substack.
I confess I’m not familiar with most of these.
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Big Think, Jonny Thomson, 29 Nov 2024: Everyday Philosophy: “Are scientists involved in a Satanic plot to undermine religion?”, subtitled “How many scientists does it take to ruin a good conspiracy?”
Key Takeaways
• Welcome to Everyday Philosophy, the column where I use insights from the history of philosophy to help you navigate the daily dilemmas of modern life. • This week we look at the demographics of scientists worldwide and throughout history to ask whether scientists are deceiving us. • Along the way, we explore the origins of the European university and consider why it’s a hard question to answer.
This piece is fascinating because the writer reproduces, softeningly edited:
It says, “Satan is the deceiver of the whole world” in Revelations 12, and this has been verified by the observation that the atheists running science and education have convinced everyone of their lies. How is it that very intelligent people can’t see it?
My reaction is: it doesn’t take a conspiracy; the actual process of science, that investigates the real world, is undermining religious verities without any coordinated collusion. All the ancient religious books were written by people who had not actually investigated the real world. (And the Satan shtick is just another story to frighten you and make you behave, as if you were a child. Also, if you can demonstrate that science and education are lies, then point out their errors with verifiable evidence and/or argument, and become world famous.)
The columnist bends over backward to provide a temperate response.
It’s also clear that Michael’s question is a certain type of question — the type we get a lot at Big Think (as I’m sure any publication does): an angry, paranoid ramble, usually steeped in a noxious form of religion. Usually, I would delete these kinds of emails, but something about this one held me for a while. Michael doesn’t insult me. He doesn’t scream or superglue his caps lock down. It’s a question born of a belief — one born of his religion. So, why not? Let’s examine these claims. Let’s try to be “intelligent people” and examine the claim that atheists and/or Satan are running science and education.
His discussion is familiar, about religion, scientists, and conspiracies. My observation is that many many people steeped in their religion are never exposed to the ideas of science, or the histories of the world and the cosmos as deduced from centuries of observations, or they have been taught not to believe them, because they’re conspiracies of Satan! (They live in a cartoon world of good and evil.) Here’s how Thomson concludes:
So, Michael, here’s the answer: Yes, many scientists are atheists — more than the general population. And yes, scientists, like all humans, can be deceitful or led astray by bias. But is science engaged in a Satan-inspired conspiracy of deception? Probably not.
