At about 6:15 in this 7.5 minute monolog,[1] Bill Maher raises the issue of fear among republicans. He makes fun of it, but empirical evidence is solid that there is a major difference in how conservatives and liberals perceive fear. Fear is seen as far more easily evoked and more powerful in driving beliefs among conservatives. Some speakers at NRA meetings list the kinds of killers and murderers out there, such as campus killers, shopping mall killers, terrorist killers, church killers, and so forth, the fear that evokes is real and powerful.
The evidence is about equally as solid that the liberal mind tends not to react with much or any fear in similar situations. Liberals tend to see conservatives, as Maher put it "panicky, fear-based, babies."
The point here is the conservative vs liberal difference of mind on this is not an illusion. Whether liberals understand it or not, conservative fear is real, and when conservatives evoke fear, e.g., the immigrant caravan traveling through Mexico to the US border, many or most conservatives respond with real fear, and maybe also with more than a tinge of xenophobia or even a little racism. Both of the latter tend to evoke a range of emotions that roughly run from unease and anxiety to outright fear.
How liberals or anyone interested in politics should respond to that information, if they respond at all, is up for debate. One thing seems logical to infer. Making fun of conservative fears probably isn't going to help close the vast and increasingly bitter left vs right gap.
Footnote:
1. On a different issue, at about 2:40 in the monologue Maher raises the question of whether the MAGABomber from Florida could reasonably be called deplorable. That thought deserves some consideration.
B&B orig: 10/28/18
Wednesday, August 14, 2019
The Real Terrorist Threat in the US Today
Author: PD
The following is a sobering assessment of the changing face of domestic terrorism in the US which helps to put into perspective the traumatic events of recent days. It appeared in Foreign Affairs (online edition) on 10/30/18, and was written by national security analysts, Peter Bergen and David Sterman. It provides a useful snapshot of the state of domestic terror, the incompetent and inappropriate national security framework of the current administration, and the profound challenges that lie ahead if we want to stem the tide of the growing threat.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
On 9/11, 19 Arab hijackers trained in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan killed almost 3,000 people in the United States in a matter of hours. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history and has indelibly shaped Americans’ understanding of security and terrorism ever since.
Unfortunately, that understanding is increasingly out of step with reality. Jihadist organizations are no longer the main terrorist threat facing the country. Since 9/11, no foreign terrorist group has successfully conducted a deadly attack in the United States. The main terrorist problem in the United States today is one of individuals—usually with ready access to guns—radicalized by a diverse array of ideologies absorbed from the Internet.
The multilayered domestic threat was made tragically clear last week. A series of package bombs was sent to former U.S. President Barack Obama, the financier and philanthropist George Soros, and other critics of President Donald Trump. A racially motivated shooting at a grocery store in Kentucky, which killed two people, appears to have originated as a plan to attack a black church. And on Saturday, 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue were shot and killed by a man with an extensive history of expressing anti-Semitic and anti-refugee views on social media. The recent attacks show that the most glaring terrorist threat facing the United States today is primarily domestic in nature. Ubiquitous firearms, political polarization, images of the extensive apocalyptic violence tearing apart societies across the Middle East and North Africa, racism, and the rise of populism have combined with the power of online communications to drive up violence across the political spectrum.
Whether expressed in right-wing, left-wing, jihadist, or black nationalist ideological terms, today’s acts of political violence share a common lineage in the above mixture and together have resulted in almost 200 deaths since the 9/11 attacks. The death toll is even higher if one includes other deadly attacks with less traditionally political or clear motivations ranging from the new ideological misogyny of “incel” violence (incel being a term for a community of people who view themselves as involuntarily celibate and generally frame their perspective in ideological misogyny) to a spate of deadly school shootings. Addressing this threat will require a broad process of renewing U.S. society, a task far more difficult than disrupting a foreign terrorist organization’s operational capacity.
JIHADIST ORGANIZATIONS’ FAILURE In the years since 9/11, groups such as al Qaeda, the Islamic State (or ISIS), and the Pakistan Taliban have demonstrated scant capacity to carry out operations in the United States. The last time any of these groups came close to successfully conducting its own deadly operation on U.S. soil was in May 2010, when Pakistan Taliban–trained Faisal Shahzad tried and failed to set off a car bomb in New York City’s Times Square.
ISIS-trained terrorists never succeeded in mounting a lethal operation in the United States. In one instance, ISIS did directly communicate via encrypted apps with individuals to plan an attack in Garland, Texas, in 2015 at a cartoon contest to draw the Prophet Muhammad. But the two perpetrators, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi, were both U.S. citizens who never traveled to an ISIS training camp. Both were killed by a security guard at the contest venue before they could launch their attack.
Threats and concerns remain, of course, about the possibility of a foreign terrorist organization carrying out an attack on U.S. soil, but these are largely issues about managing a so-far-successful counterterrorism apparatus. Indeed, every lethal jihadist terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11 has been committed by a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident. This runs counter to how Trump conceptualizes the threat, given his focus on keeping putative foreign terrorists out of the country. Trump’s travel ban was a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist.
HOW THE NEW THREAT DIFFERS
Jihad is a part of the new terrorist threat, but not in the way that Trump and many others believe. The danger largely comes from attackers inspired by jihadist ideology but not trained by or in direct communication with foreign terrorist organizations. These attackers have killed 104 people in the United States since 9/11, according to New America, a research institution that tracks political violence. Three-quarters of those deaths and eight out of the 13 deadly jihadist attacks since 9/11 occurred after ISIS began a sophisticated online messaging effort in 2014. It is this pitch and power to inspire that’s responsible for all of the deadly attacks tied to ISIS in the United States, not the group’s training camps and military forces in Syria, Iraq, or other conflict zones.
Far-right terrorism, such as the spate of attacks last week—including violence motivated by racial, anti-government, and anti-abortion political views—has killed 86 people since 9/11, according to New America’s research. The new threat, however, is not limited to the far right. In June 2017, James Hodgkinson, an individual with strong anti-Trump views, shot and gravely injured Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the third-highest-ranked Republican in the House of Representatives. Individuals inspired by forms of black nationalist ideology have also killed eight people in two attacks over the past three years.
Meanwhile, attacks by perpetrators citing motivations that don’t quite fit traditional notions of political or terrorist ideology are also on the rise. In Toronto in April, Alek Minassian killed ten people in a vehicular ramming, having written of an “incel” rebellion. In a social media post, Minassian seemingly mimicked the form of pledges by ISIS attackers on Facebook. The United States saw an early case of this ideological misogyny when Elliot Rodger killed six people in 2014 near the University of California–Santa Barbara in a stabbing, shooting, and vehicular ramming attack, leaving a long manifesto. Minassian specifically referenced Rodger in his social media post.
MEETING THE CHALLENGE
Terrorism in the United States is still less common today than it was during the 1970s, when relatively organized groups and movements such as the Weather Underground carried out hundreds of bombings and hijackings. In 1975 alone, the Weather Underground claimed credit for 25 bombings. But that is not as comforting as it may at first seem. Many of the recent U.S. attacks have been the most lethal of their kind. The Pittsburgh shooting was the deadliest attack on Jews in American history, according to the Anti-Defamation League. The June 12, 2016, ISIS-inspired attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando by Queens-born Omar Mateen was the most lethal terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11.
Broader trends also raise the stakes. Trump has turned a blind eye to far-right terrorism, while some of his most prominent supporters such as Lou Dobbs and Ann Coulter have denied the existence of a right-wing threat. Right-wing media personalities and activists, including Candace Owens and even the president’s son Donald Trump, Jr., have peddled conspiracy theories regarding recent attacks. At the same time, politics, particularly on the right, is shifting into a more radical register. Recent public marches organized by the far right have resulted in violence, including the vehicular ramming that killed Heather Heyer during the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally last year.
This new terrorist threat cannot be addressed with an overwhelming focus on jihadist ideology. Nor will a travel ban address a threat rooted in domestic politics and the Internet’s conveyance of global issues into American homes. Instead, today’s terrorist threat requires effective law enforcement, a real discussion of the dangers of lax gun laws, policies to regulate the ways social media has helped spread violence, community resilience, and a reckoning with the forces driving U.S. and global politics increasingly toward radicalism.
Since 9/11, the U.S. government has been extraordinarily successful in disrupting foreign terrorist organizations’ ability to strike the United States. But the task of renewing and strengthening American society to face down the new terrorist threat could be even more difficult.
B&B orig: 10/30/18
The following is a sobering assessment of the changing face of domestic terrorism in the US which helps to put into perspective the traumatic events of recent days. It appeared in Foreign Affairs (online edition) on 10/30/18, and was written by national security analysts, Peter Bergen and David Sterman. It provides a useful snapshot of the state of domestic terror, the incompetent and inappropriate national security framework of the current administration, and the profound challenges that lie ahead if we want to stem the tide of the growing threat.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
On 9/11, 19 Arab hijackers trained in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan killed almost 3,000 people in the United States in a matter of hours. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history and has indelibly shaped Americans’ understanding of security and terrorism ever since.
Unfortunately, that understanding is increasingly out of step with reality. Jihadist organizations are no longer the main terrorist threat facing the country. Since 9/11, no foreign terrorist group has successfully conducted a deadly attack in the United States. The main terrorist problem in the United States today is one of individuals—usually with ready access to guns—radicalized by a diverse array of ideologies absorbed from the Internet.
The multilayered domestic threat was made tragically clear last week. A series of package bombs was sent to former U.S. President Barack Obama, the financier and philanthropist George Soros, and other critics of President Donald Trump. A racially motivated shooting at a grocery store in Kentucky, which killed two people, appears to have originated as a plan to attack a black church. And on Saturday, 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue were shot and killed by a man with an extensive history of expressing anti-Semitic and anti-refugee views on social media. The recent attacks show that the most glaring terrorist threat facing the United States today is primarily domestic in nature. Ubiquitous firearms, political polarization, images of the extensive apocalyptic violence tearing apart societies across the Middle East and North Africa, racism, and the rise of populism have combined with the power of online communications to drive up violence across the political spectrum.
Whether expressed in right-wing, left-wing, jihadist, or black nationalist ideological terms, today’s acts of political violence share a common lineage in the above mixture and together have resulted in almost 200 deaths since the 9/11 attacks. The death toll is even higher if one includes other deadly attacks with less traditionally political or clear motivations ranging from the new ideological misogyny of “incel” violence (incel being a term for a community of people who view themselves as involuntarily celibate and generally frame their perspective in ideological misogyny) to a spate of deadly school shootings. Addressing this threat will require a broad process of renewing U.S. society, a task far more difficult than disrupting a foreign terrorist organization’s operational capacity.
JIHADIST ORGANIZATIONS’ FAILURE In the years since 9/11, groups such as al Qaeda, the Islamic State (or ISIS), and the Pakistan Taliban have demonstrated scant capacity to carry out operations in the United States. The last time any of these groups came close to successfully conducting its own deadly operation on U.S. soil was in May 2010, when Pakistan Taliban–trained Faisal Shahzad tried and failed to set off a car bomb in New York City’s Times Square.
ISIS-trained terrorists never succeeded in mounting a lethal operation in the United States. In one instance, ISIS did directly communicate via encrypted apps with individuals to plan an attack in Garland, Texas, in 2015 at a cartoon contest to draw the Prophet Muhammad. But the two perpetrators, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi, were both U.S. citizens who never traveled to an ISIS training camp. Both were killed by a security guard at the contest venue before they could launch their attack.
Threats and concerns remain, of course, about the possibility of a foreign terrorist organization carrying out an attack on U.S. soil, but these are largely issues about managing a so-far-successful counterterrorism apparatus. Indeed, every lethal jihadist terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11 has been committed by a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident. This runs counter to how Trump conceptualizes the threat, given his focus on keeping putative foreign terrorists out of the country. Trump’s travel ban was a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist.
HOW THE NEW THREAT DIFFERS
Jihad is a part of the new terrorist threat, but not in the way that Trump and many others believe. The danger largely comes from attackers inspired by jihadist ideology but not trained by or in direct communication with foreign terrorist organizations. These attackers have killed 104 people in the United States since 9/11, according to New America, a research institution that tracks political violence. Three-quarters of those deaths and eight out of the 13 deadly jihadist attacks since 9/11 occurred after ISIS began a sophisticated online messaging effort in 2014. It is this pitch and power to inspire that’s responsible for all of the deadly attacks tied to ISIS in the United States, not the group’s training camps and military forces in Syria, Iraq, or other conflict zones.
Far-right terrorism, such as the spate of attacks last week—including violence motivated by racial, anti-government, and anti-abortion political views—has killed 86 people since 9/11, according to New America’s research. The new threat, however, is not limited to the far right. In June 2017, James Hodgkinson, an individual with strong anti-Trump views, shot and gravely injured Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the third-highest-ranked Republican in the House of Representatives. Individuals inspired by forms of black nationalist ideology have also killed eight people in two attacks over the past three years.
Meanwhile, attacks by perpetrators citing motivations that don’t quite fit traditional notions of political or terrorist ideology are also on the rise. In Toronto in April, Alek Minassian killed ten people in a vehicular ramming, having written of an “incel” rebellion. In a social media post, Minassian seemingly mimicked the form of pledges by ISIS attackers on Facebook. The United States saw an early case of this ideological misogyny when Elliot Rodger killed six people in 2014 near the University of California–Santa Barbara in a stabbing, shooting, and vehicular ramming attack, leaving a long manifesto. Minassian specifically referenced Rodger in his social media post.
MEETING THE CHALLENGE
Terrorism in the United States is still less common today than it was during the 1970s, when relatively organized groups and movements such as the Weather Underground carried out hundreds of bombings and hijackings. In 1975 alone, the Weather Underground claimed credit for 25 bombings. But that is not as comforting as it may at first seem. Many of the recent U.S. attacks have been the most lethal of their kind. The Pittsburgh shooting was the deadliest attack on Jews in American history, according to the Anti-Defamation League. The June 12, 2016, ISIS-inspired attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando by Queens-born Omar Mateen was the most lethal terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11.
Broader trends also raise the stakes. Trump has turned a blind eye to far-right terrorism, while some of his most prominent supporters such as Lou Dobbs and Ann Coulter have denied the existence of a right-wing threat. Right-wing media personalities and activists, including Candace Owens and even the president’s son Donald Trump, Jr., have peddled conspiracy theories regarding recent attacks. At the same time, politics, particularly on the right, is shifting into a more radical register. Recent public marches organized by the far right have resulted in violence, including the vehicular ramming that killed Heather Heyer during the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally last year.
This new terrorist threat cannot be addressed with an overwhelming focus on jihadist ideology. Nor will a travel ban address a threat rooted in domestic politics and the Internet’s conveyance of global issues into American homes. Instead, today’s terrorist threat requires effective law enforcement, a real discussion of the dangers of lax gun laws, policies to regulate the ways social media has helped spread violence, community resilience, and a reckoning with the forces driving U.S. and global politics increasingly toward radicalism.
Since 9/11, the U.S. government has been extraordinarily successful in disrupting foreign terrorist organizations’ ability to strike the United States. But the task of renewing and strengthening American society to face down the new terrorist threat could be even more difficult.
B&B orig: 10/30/18
What Political Psychology Is & Does
The 2013 book Political Psychology: Neuroscience, Genetics and Politics is a textbook for upper level college undergraduates. Written by political science professor George Marcus, the book describes what political psychology (PP) is and how it goes about gaining new knowledge. Among other things, the book links cognitive science and neuroscience with PP, and also gives some historical context for the origins of the discipline. The following is a brief summary of chapter 1, The Importance of Political Psychology.
The main concerns: Marcus points out that fundamental PP issues and concerns have been with the human species for millennia and that they are remarkably stable. He asserts that the two dominant concerns of PP are studying and trying to understand: • How people govern themselves individually and collectively; and
• How to live within the political structures that society builds.
Broadly speaking, the goal of inquiry into those two concerns is to “examine human nature to better understand the interplay of human nature and politics.”
Theory focus: Marcus describes four approaches or categories of study that encompass much of PP research. The broadest, ‘theory focus’, attempts to observe and understand aspects of human psychology that collectively lead to a comprehensive theory of human psychology. This focus looks for what is universal to the human species. An example is rational choice theory from economics research.
The independent vs dependent variable: The two main variables in an experiment are the independent and dependent variables. An independent variable is the variable that is changed or controlled in a scientific experiment to test the effects on the dependent variable. A dependent variable is the variable being tested and measured in a scientific experiment. The dependent variable is 'dependent' on the independent variable. As the experimenter changes the independent variable, the effect on the dependent variable is observed and recorded.
Problem or dependent variable focus: The ‘problem focus’ in PP looks at a dependent variable such as when people exhibit political tolerance compared to when they are intolerant. In the case of political tolerance, researchers measure tolerance in the face of an independent variable such as harsh (intolerant), neutral and empathetic (tolerant) political rhetoric. That allows researchers to see if different kinds of rhetoric correlate with (or maybe even cause) varying and/or different levels of tolerance.
In essence, the dependent variable is seen as ‘the problem’ or, maybe more accurately, an end result.
Solution or independent variable focus: In contrast to the problem or dependent variable focus, the ‘solution focus’ looks to see if there are previously unknown independent variables that correlate with or possibly cause phenomena such as political tolerance. Here, the focus shifts from the end result, i.e., the dependent variable, to the possibility of a previously unknown independent variable exerting influence on beliefs or behaviors.
Social dominance orientation (SDO) is a personality trait which predicts social and political attitudes, and is a widely used social psychological scale. SDO is seen as a measure of individual differences in levels of group-based discrimination; that is, it is a measure of an individual's preference for hierarchy within any social system and the domination over lower-status groups. It is a predisposition toward anti-egalitarianism within and between groups. The concept of SDO as a measurable individual difference is a product of social dominance theory.
Marcus cites a trait called social dominance orientation, as an example of a relatively new independent variable.[1] Regarding social dominance orientation, he comments that “some of us are very concerned with sustaining established hierarchies and order, whereas others are much less concerned and find greater importance in sustaining individual autonomy.”
About rationality: Marcus writes: “As citizens we develop habits of thought and stable preferences. We often defend them and those who articulate them on our behalf (political leaders, interest group spokespeople, columnists, and pundits). Notice that the discipline of political psychology, as other scientific disciplines, goes to considerable effort to set aside such established patterns of trust. Rather, as political psychologists, you are asked to set aside convictions and instead rely on rigorous reliance on evidence.”
Aristotle: Marcus points to Aristotle as having come up with a simple six category taxonomy of political regimes. The taxonomy is still used today, although variations are common, e.g., the US has been argued to be an oligarchy based on analysis of where the balance of political power resides and on how little influence public opinion has on policy at the federal level. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0f31211a6180787dea6f13cd9ea639811e95cda79833030b76bfd0651f50e41a.jpg Note that democracies can be virtuous or corrupt. Obviously, those are essentially contested concepts, and people will disagree over, for example whether president Obama’s time in office represented a period of virtuous or corrupt rule. The same applies to how people see president Trump’s time in office. An example: PP analysis of the role of threat in political tolerance: Marcus cites some of his own research on what threat in politics is and when it influences tolerance. Marcus included eight questions about sources of threat in a massive public opinion survey. The independent variable was threat and the dependent variable was tolerance. The eight questions constituted a problem focus experiment. The initial hypothesis was that all eight factors that could influence perceptions of threat in about the same way and all eight would correlate with or maybe cause decreasing tolerance.
The results were surprising: “We had expected the eight indicators to be equally good measures of one concept, Threat. Instead this result led us to revise our understanding of Threat, rather than a singular concept we now understand it as two concepts.; so different that we found the two concepts are not correlated at all. And, when we analyzed the data we found that how strongly people judged their disliked group had no impact at all on whether they would support the rights of that group to practice their rights: None at all. On the other hand, it was the second concept of threat, malevolence, that proved to be the single most important independent variable in explaining when people would be politically tolerant.”
Marcus found that if a disliked group was either strong or important, that made no difference in people’s tolerance. What set people off and triggers intolerance was groups that violate social norms. That made them appear to be malevolent. The six intolerance-inducing factors were groups characterized as unpredictable, untrustworthy, bad, dishonest, violent or dangerous.
Let that sink in for a moment or two. This point is very important. How does president Trump characterize his political opposition? He never calls democrats strong or important. He routinely characterizes democrats as some combination of untrustworthy, bad, dishonest, violent (‘mob rule’) and/or dangerous (‘mob rule’ again). That rhetorical cognitive-social strategy pushes five out of the six emotional-moral factors that Marcus showed could induce intolerance toward political opposition and out-groups that Trump creates by his rhetoric, e.g., murdering, rapist, drug dealing, illegal immigrants, or democrats in general.
Trump is the master of smashing political and social norms and there are excellent reasons for that. It whips up his base into an emotional, logic-deficient state of mind. PP provides another social science point of view from which to observe Trump and his fact- and logic-detached, immoral political tactics and rhetoric.
Footnote:
1. This 1994 paper describes SDO like this: “Social dominance orientation (SDO), one's degree of preference for inequality among social groups, is introduced. On the basis of social dominance theory, it is shown that (a) men are more social dominance-oriented than women, (b) high-SDO people seek hierarchy-enhancing professional roles and low-SDO people seek hierarchy-attenuating roles, (c) SDO was related to beliefs in a large number of social and political ideologies that support group-based hierarchy (e.g., meritocracy and racism) and to support for policies that have implications for intergroup relations (e.g., war, civil rights, and social programs), including new policies. SDO was distinguished from interpersonal dominance, conservatism, and authoritarianism. SDO was negatively correlated with empathy, tolerance, communality, and altruism.”
B&B orig: 11/1/18
The American Democracy: Some Thoughts
In an interview the Hidden Brain program that NPR broadcast a couple of weeks ago, Harvard history professor David Moss discussed his analysis of civil conflicts in the US. He studied about twenty instances of significant conflict and what effects they had on the American republic and its democratic progression.
In general, Moss found that the conflicts were productive in the sense that, despite intense partisan disagreements, American democracy was improved in some way or another. The fundamental glue that held democracy together was a belief by most people in the democratic ideal. Their disputes were not about American democracy, but about social or political issues. The only exception where the glue failed to hold was in dispute over slavery where the South was willing to defend that social institution even at the expense of dissolving the union.[1]
In general, Moss is optimistic about America’s political polarization. He pointed out that on many occasions in the past, many people felt the country was falling apart and would fail as a single nation. He called those false positives, i.e., it looks bad , but it really isn't, a common occurrence in the social sciences.
But what about the false negatives, where something seems more or less OK, but it turns out much worse? Hindsight can often spot these things, but even that is usually contested to some non-trivial degree or another.
So, what is the glue that holds Americans in political dispute together? Moss argues it is the belief among people in disagreement that even if their side loses a dispute, the people on the other side will do the right thing and govern reasonably well and reasonably fairly. Moss cites Gallup poll data: In the 1970s, 15% of Americans reported they had little or no confidence that the other side would govern well or fairly. Today that number is 43%. America’s social glue is much weaker now than it was 50 years ago. And given the harsh tone of rhetoric and presumably increasing polarization and intolerance, it seems rational to think the glue will weaken more in time.
What evidence is there for weakening social glue?: Although it is only one data point, the presidential greatness survey published in January of 2108 included its first assessment of president Trump for his first year in office. His ranking was last among all US presidents. The survey included this assessment about Trump’s polarizing presence:
“In the current polarized political climate, we thought it would be interesting to ask which presidents were considered by presidency experts to be the most polarizing. To do so, we asked respondents to identify up to five individual presidents they believed were the most polarizing, and then rank order them with the first president being the most polarizing, the second as next most polarizing, and so on. We then calculated how many times a president was identified as well as their average ranking.
Donald Trump is by far the most polarizing of the ranked presidents earning a 1.6 average (1 is a “most polarizing” ranking). Lincoln is the second most polarizing president of those presidents ranked. He earned a 2.5 ranking. This is close to Polk as the second most polarizing president at 2.6. Trump was ranked “most polarizing” by 95 respondents and second most polarizing by 20 respondents. For comparison, Lincoln, the second most polarizing president on average, received 20 “most polarizing” rankings and 15 second “most polarizing” rankings.
President Trump is ranked as the most polarized by all party identifiers. On average, Republicans view President Trump one full spot less polarizing than Democrats. Independents found President Trump the most polarizing president than either Democrats or Republicans and in general Independents rank President Trump as the most polarizing president of any modern president.”
Lincoln was highly polarizing because of his opposition to allowing slavery in the new states in the West. That led to civil war. But what is it that makes Trump so polarizing? Many or most Trump supporters might simply reject the data and point to Obama and Hillary Clinton as the current source of polarization. Personal experience with citing this survey had led at least some Trump supporters to instantly reject it out of hand as pure propaganda and/or partisan lies.
Assuming Trump supporters are wrong about this, what is it that Trump advocates? There is more than a little objective evidence to support a belief that he is racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, corrupt, unethical/immoral, a chronic liar/BSer, anti-democratic, a traitor, and an oligarch/despot.
But, what agenda or issue does that boil down to? In the case of president Lincoln, it was easy to spot the issue that tore America apart. In the case of Trump, the issue(s) seems amorphous. It isn't any one thing. It seems more about playing on a general sense of a combination of social, demographic and economic grievance and/or anger-fear-unease. Trump is clearly playing our emotions to tear us apart, but there just doesn't seem to be a unifying issue.
If that analysis is basically correct, it raises the question: Does there have to be a unifying issue and was the case with Lincoln and slavery? Can Trump tear America apart simply by being what he is, i.e., a highly skilled manipulator of reality, reason and emotions?
Hitler was a highly skilled manipulator of reality, reason and emotions, but at least there was deep economic pressure at work. One could see that as part of what brought Hitler to power. But that does not apply to the US at present. The economy is very good (if one ignores the debt, hidden costs, environmental danger, etc).
A second indicator of social glue strength: Professor Moss seemed to be basically optimistic that current social conflict is, maybe based on statistics alone, likely to be just more constructive conflict that won't amount to a hill of beans long the long run. Maybe that is right. False negatives are much more common than false positives, at least for this situation.
To assess the danger, Moss pointed to the level of trust in fellow citizens as an indicator of social health. But he also raised a second indicator, assessment of the frequency at which politicians and partisans ON YOUR OWN SIDE put party and/or partisanship above country. Now, that is a downright bizarre measure of social-democratic health -- it ignores human cognitive and social concerns. To see when your own side puts party above country, a person needs to adopt an anti-bias political ideology, morals, and mindset. Very few people apply that to politics. On this point, Moss is flat out naïve because most people (≥ ~95% ?) simply cannot do what Moss asks them to do.
The anti-bias view: Fortunately, this commentator does at least try to apply an anti-bias ideology, morals and mindset to politics. If one looks dispassionately at existing evidence about Trump’s mind and morals, there is objective evidence that he puts himself and to a less extent partisanship above country. One can argue that democrats are not perfect. They can put special interests with money before the public interest, with the tax code and democratic complicity in massive tax evasion, currently roughly $500 billion/year, being a prime example.
On balance, one can argue that many or most republican, populist and conservative politicians put party before country more often than democratic and liberal politicians. But whether that is true or not, what does it say about the long-term prospects for the American experiment? Moss’ second indicator of social glue just does not seem to be particularly helpful, at least under current conditions.
If that analysis is basically correct, are we in a period that will turn out to have been a false negative? At the moment, it does not feel that way and one indicator of social cohesion, trust in fellow citizens, is moving in the wrong direction. What the end result will be is likely an democratic oligarchy, tinged with Christian theocracy. Despotism-oligarchy, with or without democracy, seems to be a common fate of liberal democracies in general.[2] One question is, is the US democracy exceptional in this regard? And, is Trump a false positive? Looks like we going to find out in the next few years.
Footnotes:
1. Moss pointed out that Lincoln opposed expansion of slavery to the new states, and the South could not tolerate that, believing that a rough parity among slave and non-slave states was the only way to preserve their way of economic life. Defense of slavery as a social institution led to the civil war because no compromise was possible.
2. The New York Times on weaknesses of liberal democracies: “Maybe Brazil’s election, along with the rest of the populist trend, represents something more disruptive than a single wave with a single point of origin. Research suggests it exemplifies weaknesses and tensions inherent to liberal democracy itself — and that, in times of stress, can pull it apart.
When that happens, voters tend to reject that system in all but name and follow their most basic human instincts toward older styles of government: majoritarian, strong-fisted, us-versus-them rule.
It’s a pattern that might feel shocking or new in the West, but is all too familiar in Latin America, which has experienced several populist surges like the one that elevated Mr. Bolsonaro.
‘Most attempts at democracy end in a return to authoritarian rule,’ Jay Ulfelder, a political scientist, wrote in 2012 as elected populists in Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua rolled back rights in ways that look familiar today.”
B&B orig: 11/3/18
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