Describing an aspect of moral courage or strength
Probably inadvertently, the editors of the NYT raised an critically important but ignored point in their editorial today, Trump Has Failed. Hold Him to Account: Today’s Democratic Party has plenty of flaws, including a disappointing failure to present a coherent agenda of its own. Nonetheless, Democrats offer the only alternative this year to the damage that Mr. Trump and his party have inflicted on the nation.
Well at least for me they raised the point, which is this: Why are Dems so Dog-awful at presenting a coherent agenda of its own? For years, some people of good will have been telling Dem elites in good faith that, for the most part, they are not articulating a coherent agenda of their own. Their messaging was and still is too ineffective.
Why? Arguably an important reason is that for many people facing threatening or unwelcome facts takes significant moral courage. Humans being human, we often we fall short and distort inconvenient reality into something it isn’t. Facing unwelcome facts and reasoning can take more moral courage than we sometimes bring to it. Facing unpleasant reality sometimes means admitting that someone we trusted misled us, questioning a belief central to our identity, or risking disapproval from people whose acceptance matters to us.
This is a moral issue, not a question of intelligence. When our political choices affect other people, which they usually do, we owe each other an honest effort to examine the evidence, even when we would rather not. That responsibility applies just as much to those of us making this argument. The standard is not agreement with me or anyone else. It is willingness to consider or reconsider when the fact or reasoning evidence reasonably warrants it.
Plenty of research documents how people protect favored beliefs and political loyalties. Those phenomena are real, not in dispute by experts. The moral argument here is that we all have a responsibility to resist that temptation when other people’s welfare and rights are at stake. True, the demagogues and liars bear more moral responsibility for their deceit and unwarranted manipulations, but average people are also involved. In general, most people with sufficient moral courage can handle bad news a better than people who cannot. That’s the basic assumption here, but it is strongly supported by research.
The bad news too many people cannot tolerate
What might the critically important but uncomfortable messages be? It might be that the party is over, and the bill is coming due. The truthful message the Dems need to assert but cannot articulate is just too unpleasant. The bad news is that Americans are facing a decreasing standard of living and high cost of living. Although there are economically plausible ways for an honest, pro-democracy government to improve ordinary people’s living standards and make necessities more affordable, doing that is politically impossible at present.
There is no convincing account of how to assemble and sustain the political power needed to apply policies that get at the heart of most of the discontent among average Americans. The central issue is distribution of wealth and power. Improving affordability requires changing who receives income, who bears costs, and who can extract payments from everyone else. That makes it politically difficult, but not economically impossible. Given the intense anti-government and anti-public interest sentiment that dominates radical right MAGA dogma, addressing cost of living for the masses is not politically possible. MAGA authoritarianism is in power and it works very hard to take wealth and power from the public and the public interest, while transferring it to elites and allied special interests.
Q1: Is it plausible that one of the main reasons, maybe the main reason, Dem messaging sucks so badly is that too many Americans cannot handle the very nasty truths that (1) the US is in economic, technological, commercial, fiscal, and social decline, and (2) sooner or later someone has to start paying gigantic overdue bills, e.g., (a) the $40+ trillion on the books federal debt, (b) the additional tens of trillions in unfunded (off the books) federal debt (bye-bye social security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.), (c) the coming hundreds of billions annually, maybe trillions, for costs of US support for global warming by deregulating or gutting pollution controls, (d) vast damage MAGA has caused critical US infrastructure, e.g., (i) basic and applied research, (ii) trashed alliances with former allies who are now economically and technologically distancing themselves from an untrustworthy and hostile US, (e) etc.?
Q2: Does this moral argument make sense to you? Political demagogues and deceivers wrong (morally violate) citizens by manipulating the information on which informed consent depends, but citizens also bear some responsibility to protect their own political agency (democratic rights and protections), and the agency of others, by making reasonable efforts to distinguish unpleasant truth from comforting falsehood.
Q3: Is it true that when citizens avoid accessible but uncomfortable evidence because it threatens identity, status, or group membership, they make themselves more available for political manipulation, and therefore because their resulting political decisions adversely affect other people, this is a moral failure, not just a matter of excusable ignorance?
Q4: If the US is in decline, is it plausible that the decline is significantly or mostly due to the fact that over the last ~50 years too much wealth and power have been taken from the public and the public interest and transferred to the elites and allied special interests?
Some info sources:
At Least Bias is Bipartisan: A Meta-Analytic Comparison of Partisan Bias in Liberals and Conservatives — This research indicates that the left and right have inherent biases. The unanswered question is how those biases influence perceptions of reality and reasoning in the different information ecosystems that much or most of the left and right usually experience. Here, the authors explicitly acknowledge that similar processing biases can coexist with unequal factual accuracy because one side’s media ecosystem supplies less accurate information. The result here is not evidence that the two sides have equally sound relationships with reality, only that the two sides have a similar degree of bias.
Differences in misinformation sharing can lead to politically asymmetric sanctions — Conservative users shared more unreliable news than liberal users across the datasets studied. That means neutral rules against misinformation on social media can penalize conservatives more without indicating political bias. People on both sides can favor information that supports their political loyalties. But that does not make the two sides equally accurate or their information sources equally honest. That is why I keep posting truth that’s inconvenient to some about significant MAGA propaganda, lies and slanders sources, e.g.,
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