I was disappointed with Thomas B. Edsall’s latest New York Times offering, promising to explain why hardcore Trump supporters continue to believe that the election was stolen from him. It starts out well enough:
Just who believes the claim that Trump won in 2020 and that the election was stolen from him? Who are these tens of millions of Americans and what draws them into this web of delusion?
Three sources provided The Times with survey data: The University of Massachusetts-Amherst Poll; P.R.R.I. (the Public Religion Research Institute); and Reuters-Ipsos. With minor exceptions, the data from all three polls is similar.
Alexander Theodoridis, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts, summed it up:
About 35 percent of Americans believed in April that Biden’s victory was illegitimate, with another 6 percent saying they are not sure. What can we say about the Americans who do not think Biden’s victory was legitimate? Compared to the overall voting-age population, they are disproportionately white, Republican, older, less educated, more conservative, and more religious (particularly more Protestant and more likely to describe themselves as born again).
After that it quickly descends into a variant on what I think of as the “when I believe irrational or unreasonable things it’s fine but those with whom I disagree believe irrational or unreasonable things it’s vile” school of opinion writing. The formal name for it is “special pleading” and it’s a fallacy.
My own explanation is that they have an extreme distrust of government institutions. That isn’t assuaged by judicial decisions disagreeing with them, lack of actual evidence, browbeating, or accusations of authoritarianism.
My own naïve strategy for convincing them would be to exert substantial efforts to making government institutions more transparent and trustworthy but I guess that’s just me. Somewhere I picked up the notion that persuasion and confidence-building exercises are better than vitriol. I don’t know where.
It is selective mistrust. When a Republican is POTUS they trust govt. They trust their state govt, their schools. They trusted the police when they were torturing people and shooting black people. They trusted Medicare when there was talk about changing it. Remember those signs saying keep your govt hands off my Medicare?
They dont trust govt when a Dem is POTUS. They dont trust schools they think are liberal. They dont trust medicine when it offends them (though they pile into the hospital and take up ICU beds like everyone else when they get sick). Now they dont like the police since the police had the audacity to break up their invasion of the capitol.
This is tribal. There arent many principles at stake. If the tribal leaders decide that something is bad they all fall in line.
“Somewhere I picked up the notion that persuasion and confidence-building exercises are better than vitriol.”
The medical community has tried that extensively. Thousands of individual docs have spoken to people with no effect. We have put up with abuse from these people and their families and still take care of them. Vitriol doesnt help but lets not pretend that reason, compassion and understanding or appeals to data will make much difference.
Steve