Everyone with a blog is contractually obliged to write a post about the 2024 U.S. election result, here’s mine.
So that’s how it is.
There’s something kind of freeing about it: we’re in the bad timeline. The majority of U.S. citizens who got off their backside to vote wanted Donald Trump in the chair. Despite. (Or, in a non-trivial-but-unclear-%-of-cases, because.)
“He is a danger to democracy and the world” was true and far outweighed every other thing at stake, but it was apparently poor messaging.
“Inflation and immigrants are out of control” was apparently great messaging. It was also not true.
What we can learn from this is: when fascism is on the rise, it’s important not to say anything about it because it’s a turnoff? hmm doesn’t seem right.
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Social psychology is my area. I have enough expertise in it to know I don’t have any expertise in it. But here’s what I can say with some confidence:
With rare exceptions, human behaviour isn’t reasoned out from information.
But this doesn’t mean the information environment – Fox News as the background noise of an entire swathe of the U.S.A. – isn’t meaningful or influential. We are all surrounded by stories, and they are extremely powerful.
We remember stories that explain the emotions we feel when looking at our local situation.
We like the stories that make us feel good about our emotional reactions. We call these stories “important” and “true”.
We dislike the stories that make us feel bad about our emotional reactions. We call these ones “unimportant” or “lies”.
We like it when our neighbours agree with us about which stories are true and which ones are lies. We can repeat those stories a bunch, getting more assertive every time. It’s a way of validating our emotional reactions, and building an alliance with those who share the same feelings.
Fox News and similar are very good at circulating and repeating stories that validate a certain set of emotional reactions, and ridiculing stories that could undermine those emotions. That’s the whole game.
An entire generation has grown up in the bubble of these social norms. The specific stories have changed – a few years ago, the story about Trans people changed in a major way, for example – but the underlying emotions have not.
The information environment is really a normative environment. It’s an enormous permission machine, saying it’s okay to feel angry and afraid and disgusted, in fact it’s expected. All you need to do is look around you. You’re not alone.
The people who voted for President Trump, even the so-called “low-information voters”, know enough about what he is: the consensus choice for people who feel the same as they do.
And feelings don’t care about your facts.
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It is possible to shift social norms by transforming the information in an information environment, but it’s much easier to do so by transforming the emotions experienced by ordinary folks. Homosexual law changes didn’t arise from information, but from people meeting gay folks in their own lives and finding they were just ordinary folks. Different emotions at ground level changed the whole thing.
It’s bloody hard for a political campaign to shift either emotions or information. The media can, sometimes. Unfortunately 21st century journalism has decided that’s not its job. Easier to report on the horse race than to try and actively shift the profound misunderstandings held by one voting bloc about fundamentals like crime and the economy.
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It’s not good, is it. But before all is said and done, I reckon a few more Nazis are gonna get punched in the face.