A Cold Civil War

Back in high school when most of us studied the Civil War (usually briefly and superficially), it was hard to get our heads around the extent to which Americans held wildly different world-views. I remember my own inability to understand how so many Southerners (and not a few Northerners) fervently believed their skin color entitled them to own another human being.

At the time of the Civil War, a majority of people willing to defend the institution of slavery lived below the Mason-Dixon Line, a geographic reality that made it possible to take up arms against those who disagreed. Today, most of the divisions we face lack that geographic clarity. Although it’s true that we have Red States and Blue States, we also have bright blue cities in those Red States, and Blue States have pockets of rural Red voters. So our current Civil War–and I don’t think that is too strong a descriptor–is a “Cold War,” being fought primarily with propaganda, but threatening to erupt into assaults like the January 6th insurrection.

Most readers of this blog are well aware of the recent speech given by former General Michael Flynn, at an event for QAnon believers that featured other representatives of LaLaLand like Texas Representative Louis Gohmert.

As the New York Times reported,

Michael T. Flynn, a former national security adviser, suggested that a military coup was needed in the United States during a Memorial Day weekend conference organized by adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory, drawing criticism from political scientists, veterans, Democrats and a handful of prominent Republicans.

I don’t know how many of the Southerners who ultimately took up arms in America’s first Civil War actually believed in the core precepts of slavery and “the White Man’s burden,” but thanks to advances in polling and survey research, we have a fairly accurate understanding of the percentage of our fellow-Americans who claim to believe QAnon nonsense.

A recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core found that 14 percent of Americans, including about one in four Republicans, believed in three central tenets of the QAnon conspiracy theory: that the United States is being run by a cabal of Satanist pedophiles, that “American patriots may have to resort to violence” to get rid of that cabal, and that a “storm” will soon “restore the rightful leaders.”

In a robust democracy, fourteen percent of the population can be bat-shit crazy without endangering the Union–but we don’t have a robust democracy. As over one hundred political science scholars recently wrote, the attacks on voting underway in several states are transforming democratic decision-making into “political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections.” The scholars warn that “our entire democracy is now at risk.”

Ezra Klein recently reminded readers that Democrats face an unforgiving context:

Their coalition leans young, urban and diverse, while America’s turnout patterns and electoral geography favor the old, rural and white. According to FiveThirtyEight, Republicans hold a 3.5 point advantage in the Electoral College, a 5-point advantage in the Senate and a 2-point advantage in the House. Even after winning many more votes than Republicans in 2018 and 2020, they are at a 50-50 split in the Senate, and a bare 4-seat majority in the House. Odds are that they will lose the House and possibly the Senate in 2022.

This is the fundamental asymmetry of American politics right now: To hold national power, Democrats need to win voters who are right-of-center; Republicans do not need to win voters who are left-of-center. Even worse, Republicans control the election laws and redistricting processes in 23 states, while Democrats control 15. The ongoing effort by Texas Republicans to tilt the voting laws in their favor, even as national Republicans stonewall the For The People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, is testament to the consequences of that imbalance.

This is how a Cold Civil War is conducted. Although there may be scattered bloodshed a la January 6th, the actual battles–the coups favored by crackpots like Flynn and Gohmert and numerous other Republicans– are taking place in state-level legislative bodies where the will of the majority has been neutered by gerrymandering and on media platforms where facts are twisted or sacrificed to feed the appetites–and generate the rage– of angry  old White guys. 

What is really terrifying is the likelihood that this current iteration of Civil War will be won or lost with most Americans totally unaware that it is even being fought….

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The Great Replacement

A cousin forwarded this link to an interview conducted by Amanpour and Company with Professor Robert Pape. Pape heads up the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism at the University of Chicago, and he and his colleagues have been studying the profiles of the insurrectionists who stormed the United States Capitol on January 6th.

What they have found is–in a word–terrifying.

The demographics of that mob are strikingly different from what we might expect. Among other things, they came disproportionately from “blue” counties, where demographic change is most visible, and what they have in common is belief in the Big Lie and– even more troubling–  “the Great Replacement,” the conviction that minorities will soon “replace” and have more rights than White Americans unless they are (violently) resisted.

While the number of Americans currently willing to resist violently is relatively small, the number who believe in the Lie and Great Replacement–and who may eventually be persuaded that violence is warranted– is significant.

I can’t paraphrase or summarize what Dr. Pape and his researchers found–you absolutely need to click through and watch the segment. 

H/T to Yvonne, who forwarded this interview.

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Obama Nails It

Ezra Klein recently interviewed Barack Obama on his New York Times sponsored podcast, and as you might imagine, Obama had a number of intriguing things to say about the hardening of political polarization, the backlash spurred by efforts to come to terms with the country’s racial history, and the structural advantages Republicans enjoy thanks to the composition of the Senate and the Electoral College. But here was the observation–and the question that elicited it– that struck me as a “dead on” explanation of  American divisions right now.

Klein: In 2012, you won noncollege whites making less than $27,000 a year. Donald Trump then won them by more than 20 points. He kept them in 2020. What advice do you have to Democrats to bring educational polarization back down?

Obama: I actually think Joe Biden’s got good instincts on this. If you’re 45, and working in a blue collar job, and somebody is lecturing me about becoming a computer programmer, that feels like something got spit out of some think tank as opposed to how my real life is lived.

People knew I was left on issues like race, or gender equality, and L.G.B.T.Q. issues and so forth. But I think maybe the reason I was successful campaigning in downstate Illinois, or Iowa, or places like that is they never felt as if I was condemning them for not having gotten to the politically correct answer quick enough, or that somehow they were morally suspect because they had grown up with and believed more traditional values.

The challenge is when I started running in 2007-2008, it was still possible for me to go into a small town, in a disproportionately white conservative town in rural America, and get a fair hearing because people just hadn’t heard of me. They might say what kind of name is that? They might look at me and have a set of assumptions. But the filter just wasn’t that thick.

The prototypical example is I show up in a small town in Southern Illinois, which is closer to the South than it is to Chicago, both culturally as well as geographically. And usually, the local paper was owned by a modestly conservative, maybe even quite conservative usually, guy. He’d call me in. We’d have a cup of coffee. We’d have a conversation about tax policy, or trade, or whatever else he cared about. And at the end of it, usually I could expect some sort of story in the paper saying, well, we met with Obama. He seems like an intelligent young man. We don’t agree with him on much. He’s kind of liberal for our taste, but he had some interesting ideas. And you know, that was it.

So then I could go to the fish fry, or the V.F.W. hall, or all these other venues, and just talk to people. And they didn’t have any preconceptions about what I believed. They could just take me at face value. If I went into those same places now — or if any Democrat who’s campaigning goes in those places now — almost all news is from either Fox News, Sinclair news stations, talk radio, or some Facebook page. And trying to penetrate that is really difficult.

They didn’t have any preconceptions about what I believed. That’s what has changed–thanks largely, as Obama notes, to the rightwing media ecosystem.

Self-identified “conservatives” (whose definition of “conservative” is  increasingly limited to protecting White Christian privilege) think they know what “liberalism” is–it’s “woke” and supercilious, and its adherents are entitled globalists who sneer at them. Pointing out their misuse of terms like “socialist” or their misconceptions about “cancel culture” or their wildly inaccurate criticisms of Critical Race Theory only confirms that image.

The result is that the only coherent “policy” these folks exhibit is more an attitude than a position–they just want to “own the libs.” They just want to get a rise out of the people they believe are sneering at them. What is ironic is that the “libs” are overwhelmingly the ones counseling mutual understanding and recommending “reaching out”…but people who have internalized grievance have long since abandoned considering evidence contrary to those grievances.

The question, of course, is the same one I keep posing: What do we do? I will readily admit that–beyond working our tails off to keep these people out of power– I have no idea.

It’s clear that we are past the point where acting on well-meaning but tone-deaf pieties about “inviting dialogue” and trying to “understand their perspective” will ameliorate the resentment–or modify the racism that  in most cases has generated it.

I strongly recommend clicking through and reading the entire transcript. It’s depressing, but enlightening. (And no, it doesn’t answer my question…)

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True…And Very Sad.

Rick Wilson is one of the disillusioned Republicans who founded the Lincoln Project, and he recently opined about the devolution of the Grand Old Party. The Lincoln Project, as most of you are aware, was created by a group of long-time, well-respected strategists and operatives who had repeatedly been tapped for significant roles in high-profile Republican campaigns. The Project wasn’t composed of ordinary Republican voters who’d become disillusioned; it was the product of respected and savvy political professionals.

Wilson describes himself as an American political strategist, media consultant, and author. He’s produced televised political commercials for governors, U.S. Senate candidates, Super PACs, and corporations. (He’s also the author of the book Everything Trump Touches Dies.)

Wilson’s basic point in the rant that follows was that the GOP–far from being the party of Lincoln–is now the party of Marjorie Taylor Green, she of the “California fires were started by Jewish space lasers” and more recently “Being made to wear masks to battle the pandemic is just like what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust.”

Wilson’s takedown was heated and comprehensive, and I decided it was worth sharing in its entirety– so with apologies for the length of the quotation, here it is:

This woman is not an outlier. She is the core of the Republican Party. She is the heart and soul of the Republican Party. She is more important in the Republican Party ecosystem than Kevin McCarthy. He issued a pusillanimous, limp-dicked statement today about her finally after getting beat up for hours and hours on end, and I gotta tell you something: He does that because he wants to stay [minority leader]. And he knows that she is the future of the GOP. She is the core, the heart, the soul of what the Republican Party now stands for. It is idiotic, it is violently stupid. It hates experts, it hates authority, it hates science, it hates culture. It hates everything except their reflexive trolling of the rest of the country. She is a monstrous person. She is a person who I would not piss on her if she was on fire. She is a person who deserves all the public … shame you could possibly imagine. But here’s the thing: Kevin McCarthy will not take a single step to expel her from Congress. She is the heart and soul of the Republican Party today. She is exactly the center of it, she is what they have become, and everybody in the Republican Party who goes, ‘Oh, no, that’s not me,’ they only do it quietly. They won’t go out in her face and say, ‘Shut the hell up.’ They won’t go in her face and say, ‘You are a crude, anti-Semite clown.’ They won’t do that because they understand she is their future. She is the party as it is written today, she is the party as it is comprised today. I find her so repulsive and so disgusting that it is all I can do not to get myself thrown off social media by saying what I really feel about her.

Before you dismiss this diatribe as an overheated and exaggerated description of Greene’s influence, let me tell you about a recent incident in Nashvillle, Tennessee.

Hatwrks, a hat shop in Nashville, advertised an anti-vaccine yellow star patterned after those forced on Jews by Nazi Germany. Needless to say, that product has been met with considerable backlash; as a local rabbi told Nashville TV station WSMV, “Using the yellow star, or any holocaust imagery for anything, is a disservice to the memory of the six million Jews who were systematically murdered during the Holocaust.”

It boggles the mind that proprietors of any retail establishment would hear the ludicrous anti-Semitic ramblings of someone like Greene, and then produce a product endorsing her odious comparison. But then, it boggles the mind that a significant percentage of self-identified Republicans believe Donald Trump won an election that he lost decisively.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is obviously mentally ill, and she’s far from the only elected Republican to routinely manifest delusions and mental disorders. What is truly terrifying, however, is not the presence of a few mental cases–it is the accuracy of Rick Wilson’s accusation, and the fact that clinical insanity is arguably the central characteristic of a once-respectable political party.

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The Age Of Misinformation

Political scientists often study the characteristics and influence of those they dub “high information voters.” Although that cohort is relatively small, it accounts for a significant amount–probably a majority–of America’s political discourse.

Research has suggested that these more informed voters, who follow politics closely, are just as likely–perhaps even more likely– to exhibit confirmation bias as are Americans less invested in the daily political news. But their ability to spread both information and misinformation is far greater than it was before the Internet and the ubiquity of social media.

As Max Fisher recently wrote in a column for the New York Times, 

There’s a decent chance you’ve had at least one of these rumors, all false, relayed to you as fact recently: that President Biden plans to force Americans to eat less meat; that Virginia is eliminating advanced math in schools to advance racial equality; and that border officials are mass-purchasing copies of Vice President Kamala Harris’s book to hand out to refugee children.

All were amplified by partisan actors. But you’re just as likely, if not more so, to have heard it relayed from someone you know. And you may have noticed that these cycles of falsehood-fueled outrage keep recurring.

Fisher attributes this phenomenon to a number of factors, but especially to an aspect of identity politics; we live in an age where political identity has become central to the self-image held by many Americans.

Fisher cites research attributing the prevalence of misinformation to three main elements of our time. Perhaps the most important of the three is a social environment in which individuals feel the need for what he terms “in-grouping,” and I would call tribalism — identification with like-minded others  as a source of strength and (especially) superiority. As he says,

In times of perceived conflict or social change, we seek security in groups. And that makes us eager to consume information, true or not, that lets us see the world as a conflict putting our righteous ingroup against a nefarious outgroup.

 American political polarization promotes the sharing of disinformation. The hostility between Red and Blue America feeds a pervasive distrust, and when people are distrustful, they become much more prone to engage in and accept rumor and falsehood. Distrust also encourages people to see the world as “us versus them”– and that’s a world in which we are much more apt to believe information that bolsters “us” and denigrates “them.” We know that  individuals with more polarized views are more likely to believe falsehoods.

And of course, the emergence of high-profile political figures who prey on these tribal instincts exacerbates the situation.

Then there is the third factor — a shift to social media, which is a powerful outlet for composers of disinformation, a pervasive vector for misinformation itself and a multiplier of the other risk factors.

“Media has changed, the environment has changed, and that has a potentially big impact on our natural behavior,” said William J. Brady, a Yale University social psychologist.

“When you post things, you’re highly aware of the feedback that you get, the social feedback in terms of likes and shares,” Dr. Brady said. So when misinformation appeals to social impulses more than the truth does, it gets more attention online, which means people feel rewarded and encouraged for spreading it.

It isn’t surprising that people who get positive feedback when they post inflammatory or false statements are more likely to do so again–and again. In one particularly troubling analysis, researchers found that when a fact-check revealed that information in a post was wrong, the response of partisans wasn’t to revise their thinking or get upset with the purveyor of the lie.

Instead, it was to attack the fact checkers.

“The problem is that when we encounter opposing views in the age and context of social media, it’s not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone,” the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote in a much-circulated MIT Technology Review article. “It’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium. Online, we’re connected with our communities, and we seek approval from our like-minded peers. We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one.”

In an ecosystem where that sense of identity conflict is all-consuming, she wrote, “belonging is stronger than facts.”

We’re in a world of hurt…..

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