Saved By The Bigots ?

I saw a Guardian article appear on my phone's news feed, "No, America is not on the brink of civil war". Googling this to provide the link for this post, I immediately found another article, also in the Guardian, "The next US civil war is already here". I suppose if we follow the usual guidance that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, we could only say the next American civil war will happen at some point. Which isn't very helpful.

The article saying the war is already here is nothing special, it assumes all the standard narratives of polarisation, a descent into fascism, etc. The article saying it's not going to happen is much more interesting. It has some valuable points, but I think ultimately it's far too optimistic.

Let's start with the good points :

In general, behaviours are often a stronger indicator than attitudinal data for understanding how sincere or committed people are to a cause or idea. The number of people who are willing to rhetorically endorse some extraordinary belief tends to be much, much higher than the subset who meaningfully behave as if that claim is true. The number of people who profess commitment to some cause tends to be much, much higher than the share who are willing to make sacrifices or life adjustments in order to advance that cause.

This links back to the idea of armchair bigots : people who won't lift a finger to prevent fascist atrocities, who will vote for despots and might even attend the odd rally, but won't actually instigate anything themselves. Some of them might volunteer to join the despot's militia, but very few indeed will actually pro-actively go around setting up said militias. At some deep level, for all that they profess otherwise, the vast majority of people like being told what to do. They like having a framework in which to operate, a step-by-step system to follow. Few indeed want to be involved with setting up that system in the first place. Hardly anyone likes writing instruction manuals.

In a sense, people are a lot like wildebeest - once one jumps into the crocodile-infested river, off they all go, but it's very rare to want to be the first one in.

With this in mind the author's other points can be interpreted with far less rose-tinted glasses. I strongly agree that people do profess different views in polls than they actually hold. But this means they're perfectly comfortable with being perceived as holding those views. And, crucially, the big ugly elephant in the room is the guy they voted for. The classic quote, "I know he lies, but I believe him anyway"* would seem to apply. They were quite happy to vote for someone who endorses all manner of actually incoherent, self-contradictory lunacy. 

* I heard something similar on the radio the other day regarding Boris breaking lockdown rules : "he shouldn't do that, but it won't change my vote." I cannot understand people who want people in charge of them who repeatedly demonstrate themselves to be untrustworthy. I just don't get it.

So while perhaps the following may well be true :

In a world where 74 million voted for Trump, and more than two-thirds of these (i.e. more than 50 million people, roughly one out of every five adults in the US) actually believed that the other party had illegally seized power and now plan to use that power to harm people like themselves, the events of January 6 would likely have played out much, much differently.

Indeed, had even the 2,500 people who assembled on the Capitol arrived armed to the hilt, with a plan to seize power by force, committed to violence as “needed” to achieve their goals – things would have gone much, much differently.

...we probably shouldn't read too much into it. Recall Trump's speech afterwards where he gave a speech almost as if he were held at gunpoint asking the coup attempt (for that is what it was) to end. Is there anybody who seriously thinks that if the election had, somehow, been overturned, then vast numbers of Republican voters would have assembled for a counter-coup ? Is there anyone who could envisage Trump himself standing down ?

Of course not. The majority of voters may or may not really believe in a stolen election, but that hardly matters. They are quite clearly willing to go along with the claim to get what they want. They do behave as if the beliefs were true when other people act on them. So I am not in the least persuaded by the author's other claims :

We are not living in a “post-truth” world. We are not on the brink of a civil war. The perception that we are is almost purely an artifact of people taking poll and survey data at face value despite overwhelming evidence that we probably shouldn’t.

A consensus quickly emerged from credulous readings of polls and surveys that America is facing an epidemic of “fake news”, which was leading people to believe things that were obviously false, and to vote for unsavoury political candidates...   

It turned out that, contrary to the initial hysteria, “fake news” stories were viewed by a relatively small number of voters, and infrequently at that. Most of those served pro-Trump or anti-Clinton “fake news” by social media sites already seemed firmly committed to voting for Trump, or intractably resolved against voting for Clinton (which is why the algorithms served them this niche content to begin with). That is, “fake news” is unlikely to have changed many, if any, votes. It is not a plausible explanation for the 2016 electoral outcome nor Trump’s support more broadly.

Two words : Fox News. Labelling "fake news" as only the online Alex Jones stuff is a catastrophic mistake. That's even leaving aside the claim that fake news didn't reach many people, which I'm anyway wary of.

Contrary to narratives that have grown especially ubiquitous in recent years, Americans are actually not very far apart in terms of most empirical facts. We do not live in separate realities. Instead, people begin to polarize on their public positions on factual matters only after those issues have become politicized. And even then, polarized answers on polls and surveys often fail to reflect participants’ genuine views. 

Back across the pond, there are huge numbers of people convinced that Brexit is somehow a good thing despite this being in manifest, glaring contradiction to the facts. Likewise there are still people convinced that Trump was a good president. It doesn't matter which specific claims they believe and which they reject - that's irrelevant. The problem is they believe in some aspect, some sufficient element of the grand narrative. They believe in it enough to vote for a man whose words are literally less intelligent than predictive text messaging. The specific beliefs are nowhere near as important as the overall feeling.

All you need to overturn a democracy is enough people willing to do nothing. It doesn't matter how many card-carrying fascists you have provided everyone else is willing to tolerate the hardcore being in charge. Pushing into the details, really trying to tease out of people that actually yeah, Trump's inauguration crowd was smaller than Obama's, is pointless folly. We're in a post-truth world precisely because even when you can get these people to admit they're wrong, it doesn't change anything. They still want things even when shown they're in contradiction to the facts. Strangely, the author does seem to understand this, but reaches entirely the wrong conclusion :

It should not be surprising, then, that correcting misinformation seems to have virtually no effect on political preferences or voting behaviour; misperceptions are generally not driving political alignments to begin with – nor are they driving political polarization.

Correcting any individual belief won't help because this doesn't change the sentiment. But it is absolutely necessary to stem the tide of lies because they are what provoke the all-important feelings in the first place. It is not any individual misconception that drives political beliefs - that's a crazy prospect - it's the overall flow. So I agree that America probably isn't on the verge of a civil war, but I think it's foolhardy in the extreme to say that it's democracy isn't in real peril. 

The author is right to point out that polling data may not reflect real beliefs, but I think he may have fallen into a behaviouristic fallacy that people will act in neat accordance with their perceived truths. The problem is that people are part rational, part irrational, and also part just plain lazy. And I for one wouldn't recommend relying on laziness to save democracy.