The following would sound paranoid if it hadn't been so openly discussed
by the leaders of the conservative movement in real time. At the risk
of slightly oversimplifying, during the flush years of the Reagan
administration, these leaders came up with a multipart plan to address
the challenge of maintaining power in America while pursuing policies
that lacked majority support.
The plan included devoting
resources to high value-to-cost races such as midterms and statehouses,
gerrymandering and voter suppression, dominance of and greater freedom
to use campaign money, a highly disciplined carrot and stick approach to
the establishment media that played shrewdly on its weaknesses and
biases, and a massive social engineering experiment.
The pundit
class has always had a problem with acknowledging and honestly
addressing the various aspects of this plan, but it is the last element
which indicates the largest blind spot. Commentators and more
embarrassingly even some political scientists have pushed a string of
theories that don't come close to fitting the facts with at least one
requiring that West Virginia be re-assigned to the Confederacy.
All
of this flailing around might be excusable if there were not an obvious
explanation that almost perfectly describes the data. At least on a
high level, all you need to ask yourself is who got the treatment?
Yes,
there are certainly complications and complexities that need to be
addressed. We need to talk about why certain people respond better. We
need to look at the various channels and mechanisms beyond media
including Astroturfing and the corruption of many of the leaders of the
evangelical movement (particularly those espousing prosperity gospel).
We need to acknowledge that this is not a clean experiment and that
there are multiple levels of selection effects to contend with.
Those
details, while important, are secondary. For now, the point we need to
focus on is that there is a remarkably strong correspondence between
conservative media reaching critical mass and an area going deep red,
pro-Trump.
Unquestionably, the causal arrows run both ways here
and we should approach some of the more subtle questions with caution,
but the highly simplified model – – conservative propaganda and
disinformation are the primary drivers of the rise of the reactionary
right – – does an extraordinarily good job in explaining the last decade
and the reluctance of many commentators and researchers to embrace it
is itself a social phenomenon worth studying.
We have hit this idea in passing a few times in the past (particularly
when discussing the Ponzi threshold), but I don't believe we've ever
done a post on it. While there's nothing especially radical about the
idea (it shows up in discussions of risk fairly frequently), it is
different enough to require a conscious shift in thinking and, under
certain circumstances, it can have radically different implications.
Most of the time, we tend to think of rational behavior in terms of
optimizing expected values, but it is sometimes useful to think in terms
of maximizing the probability of being above or below a certain
threshold. Consider the somewhat overly dramatic example of a man told
that he will be killed by a loan shark if he doesn't have $5000 by the
end of the day. In this case, putting all of his money on a long shot at
the track might well be his most rational option.
You can almost certainly think of less extreme cases where you have used
the same approach, trying to figure out the best way to ensure you had
at least a certain amount of money in your checking account or had set
aside enough for a mortgage payment.
Often, these two ways of thinking about rational behavior are
interchangeable, but not always. Our degenerate gambler is one example,
and I've previously argued that overvalued companies like Uber or
Netflix are another, the one I've been thinking about a lot recently is
the Republican Party and its relationship with Trump.
Without going into too much detail (these are subjects for future
posts), one of the three or four major components of the conservative
movement's strategy was a social engineering experiment designed to
create a loyal and highly motivated base. The initiative worked fairly
well for a while, but with the rise of the tea party and then the Trump
wing, the leaders of the movement lost control of the faction they had
created. (Have we done a post positing the innate instability of the
Straussian model and other systems based on disinformation? I've lost
track.)
In 2016, the Republican Party had put itself in the strange position of
having what should have been their most reliable core voters fanatically
loyal to someone completely indifferent to the interests of the party,
someone who was capable of and temperamentally inclined to bringing the
whole damn building down it forced out. Since then, I would argue that
the best way of understanding the choices of those Republicans not deep
in the cult of personality is to think of them optimizing against a
shifting threshold.
Trump's 2016 victory was only possible because a number of things lined
up exactly right, many of which were dependent on the complacency of
Democratic voters, the press, and the political establishment. Repeating
this victory in 2020 without the advantage of surprise would require
Trump to have exceeded expectations and started to win over
non-supporters. Even early in 2017, this seemed unlikely, so most
establishment Republicans started optimizing for a soft landing, hoping
to hold the house in 2018 while minimizing the damage from 2020. They
did everything they could to delay investigations into Trump scandals,
attempted to surround him with "grown-ups," and presented a unified
front while taking advantage of what was likely to be there last time at
the trough for a while.
Even shortly before the midterms, it became apparent that a soft landing
was unlikely and the threshold shifted to hard landing. The idea of
expanding on the Trump base was largely abandoned as were any attempts
to restrain the president. The objective now was to maintain enough of a
foundation to rebuild up on after things collapsed.
With recent events, particularly the shutdown, the threshold shifted
again to party viability. Arguably the primary stated objective of the
conservative movement has always been finding a way to maintain control
in a democracy while promoting unpopular positions. This inevitably
results in running on thinner and thinner margins. The current
configuration of the movement has to make every vote count. This gives
any significant faction of the base the power to cost the party any or
all elections for the foreseeable future.
It is not at all clear how the GOP would fill the hole left by a
defection of the anti-immigrant wing or of those voters who are
personally committed to Trump regardless of policy. Having these two
groups suddenly and unexpectedly at odds with each other (they had long
appeared inseparable) is tremendously worrisome for Republicans, but
even a unified base can't compensate for sufficiently unpopular
policies. Another shutdown or the declaration of a state of emergency
both appear to have the potential to damage the party's prospects not
just in 2020 but in the following midterms and perhaps even 2024.
So far, the changes in optimal strategy associated with the shifting
thresholds have been fairly subtle, but if the threshold drops below
party viability, things get very different very quickly. We could and
probably should frame this in terms of stag hunts and Nash equilibria
but you don't need to know anything about game theory to understand that
when a substantial number of people in and around the Republican Party
establishment stop acting under the assumption that there will continue
to be a Republican Party, then almost every other assumption we make
about the way the party functions goes out the window.
Just to be clear, I'm not making predictions about what the chaos will
look like; I'm saying you can't make predictions about it. A year from
now we are likely to be in completely uncharted water and any pundit or
analyst who makes confident data-based pronouncements about what will or
won't happen is likely to lose a great deal of credibility.
Picking up from our
previous post
about approaching the rise of the Trump voter in terms of a social
engineering experiment, one of the best indicators of epicyclic thinking
is that each adjustment helps explain only one isolated aspect of the
situation. In contrast, when introducing a good framework or mental
model, most of what we see should suddenly make more sense. This applies
not only to what happens but to how it happens.
With that in
mind, let's talk about something that has been largely absent from the
various think pieces on the subject but which has great explanatory
power and which rises naturally from the social engineering framing:
catharsis/emotional release.
If we start with the compound
hypothesis that conservative movement propaganda and disinformation has
driven a significant portion of the population (let's call it 20 to 40%
just to have a ballpark) into a highly unpleasant state of stress and
cognitive dissonance and that these people gravitate toward and reward
anyone who relieves this emotional tension, either through message,
affect, or language.
Consider affect for a moment. From the standpoint of someone who has
spent the past few years or even decades hearing a relentless gusher of
stories about welfare cheats and foreign criminals and persecution of
Christians and countless other threats and outrages, a politician like
Mitt Romney seems so bizarrely out of touch as to suggest collaboration
or some form of mental illness.
For people in the treatment group, politicians like Trump and members of
the tea party provide an enormous sense of emotional release because
finally the leaders of the party are saying what the subjects see as
appropriate things in an appropriate manner. For the most part this
seems to be because this new crop of politicians also received the
treatment.
I don't want to get too caught up in the finer distinctions between
catharsis, emotional release, relief of stress, etc. What matters is
that the conservative movement has spent more than a quarter century
using distorted news and disinformation to cultivate a base motivated by
anxiety bordering on panic and anger bordering on rage. It is easy to
see why the leaders believed that having a base this motivated and
hostile to the opposition would be to their advantage. It is not so easy
to see why they believed they could control it indefinitely.
