Context
America is at a major turning point about whether our experiment in self-governance will either continue to succeed for the foreseeable future or revert to the mean or norm, ending in some form of failure. The historical norm is most people living most of the time under various forms of tyranny, oppression, bigotry and corruption. The existence of modern democracies with citizens enjoying a non-trivial degree of wealth and power since the mid-1800s is far from the historical mean or norm. The likelihood of America’s near-term fate of continuing success or democratic collapse and failure ought to become pretty clear within the next ~2½ years. How the 2026 midterm elections play out could show the likely outcome if failure is in the cards. Continuing success is likely to take longer to project with reasonable confidence.
Democracy is rare – source
Online American pro-democracy politics as a hobby
Given the rarity of democracy, the importance of the US in world affairs and the human capacity to self-annihilate or at least collapse modern civilization, dealing with politics in some fashion is a reasonable thing to spend some free time with. Being grounded in all aspects of human cognitive biology and social behavior, politics is absolutely fascinating.
Being a hobby, there’s no external pressure for it to accomplish anything. Some people engage in online politics as trolls. Trolling can be seen as a politics-related hobby. Trolls like to provoke emotional reactions like anger or resentment for personal fun, self-satisfaction or even virtue signaling to like minded people. They engage in bad faith, with little to no concern for truth or whatever wreckage they leave in their wake. They happily do their troll hobby regardless of adverse consequences to anyone or anything else.
Other people engage with online politics in good faith to try to make things better as they see the concept of “better”. Most of them hope that their efforts can help at least a little. And for most good-faith operators there probably is some satisfaction in at least trying to engage, even if there’s no way to know what impact that may have.
What can reasonably be done, if anything?
Decades of radical right propaganda-demagoguery has deeply polarized American society. For tens of millions of Americans, it has normalized lies, deceit, bigotry, authoritarianism, corruption, and crackpot reasoning and rhetoric. To be fair, the left vs right difference is a matter of asymmetry, not an absolute. Some radical and non-radical left propaganda-demagoguery has polarized some on the left. Affective polarization, i.e., mutual dislike and distrust between Democratic and Republican self-identities, is significant.
Given the deep polarization and distrust, what can one reasonably hope to accomplish doing online politics in defense of democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties? For most people, little to nothing that’s tangible can reasonably be expected. But that’s fine for a hobby. There is no demand or requirement for any tangible or positive outcome.
But for people of good will acting in good faith, there are some things worth knowing. Social science makes clear that trolls and other closed-minded operators usually cannot be convinced of anything they have mental or social barriers against believing in. Their minds change on their own terms, for their own reasons. Externally presented facts, robust truths and sound, good faith reasoning that are inconvenient are usually not persuasive. For people with closed minds, mental factors such as self-identity, group or tribe loyalties, moral values and inherent biases are what controls beliefs and behaviors.
So what can be done, if anything, to better align-one’s politics hobby with current polarized American political and social reality? Welp, a realistic objective is to understand that a recitation of facts or a clear rationale will not cut through an identity-based falsehood or flawed reasoning. Instead, one can try to convey truth in a minimally painful way for open-minded people. Human beings have evolved mechanisms to evade inconvenient truths, particularly when truth conflicts with self identity or social belonging.
For example, try to separate facts from what might be humiliating identity threats. It means: when discussing political claims, distinguish between evidence about what people or institutions have done and language that others may hear as an attack on their personal worth, group status, or moral identity. A statement can be factually true but framed in a way that makes its target feel shamed or insulted. That tends to cause defensiveness and make careful evaluation of the evidence less likely or impossible.
Also, one can (1) try to emphasize shared values before presenting disputed or inconvenient evidence, and (2) point out emotional manipulation, scapegoating, unfalsifiable claims, and logic flaws such as ad hominem attacks, and false dilemma and straw man deflections. Those tactics tend to reduce perceptions of insult or threat to people who are in disagreement. In short, try to make friends or at least neutrals out of people you disagree with. If they see you as an enemy or insulting, they are much less likely to give your evidence and reasoning fair consideration.
Q: Are trolls and others who operate in bad faith worth the cognitive effort and emotional cost of trying to deal with respectfully or in good faith, e.g., when the cognitive load to deal with bad faith is much higher than the cognitive load needed to spew it?
Bad faith operators have a huge advantage
Info links:
Democracy — data about the rise of modern democracies
In most countries, democracy is a recent achievement. Dictatorship is far from a distant memory
Cultural Cognition and Public Policy — Our point isn’t that citizens behave duplicitously when they consider and debate such issues [abortion, environmental policy, etc.]. Rather, our argument is that cultural commitments operate as a kind of heuristic [mental shortcut] in the rational processing of information on public policy matters. ….. The people they trust, naturally, are the ones who share their values—and who as a result of this same dynamic and others are predisposed to a particular view. As a result, even citizens who earnestly consider empirical policy issues in an open-minded and wholly instrumental way will align themselves into warring cultural factions. ….. The key to debiasing here is to frame empirical information in terms that make assent to it compatible with, rather than antagonistic to, the commitments of individuals of diverse cultural persuasions. (emphasis added — it’s easier said than done)
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