guestpost by wonkie
I’ve been thinking. There’s a lot of discussion on Bluesky of the “Dems don’t fight” type. The Democratic party is at a low point in opinion polling, probably because of the image of Dems as not fighters. There’s a feeling that the times demand a different sort of rhetoric from Democrats.
I’ve also been thinking about how to talk to MAGAS and MAGA adjacents.
I think it’s worth exploring how to communicate with MAGAs because, even when King Pussygrabber strokes out on the toilet at three in the morning, we won’t be over the madness. We will still have the MAGA voters, the Republican party’s commitment to the election tactics of Othering and engineered polarization, and the extensive well-funded Republican hate/fear propaganda bubble (Faux, etc) which, for many people, substitutes for news and shapes their voting behavior.
So my question is: Are MAGAs born or made? Yes, I know the dichotomy doesn’t exist in nature because the human experience is too messy for that. However, I do think there are people who are more toward the born side while others are made, and I think it may make a difference in how we pull people out of the fear/hate propaganda bubble and reduce the engineered polarization.
By born, I mean those people who seem to have an innate predisposition for “othering”. Goebbels used what he called “the thrill of horror” to appeal to these people. So did Caroline Calloway when she wrote materials for Charlie Kirk. Turning Point USA Writer Says It’s “Designed To Scare People” Boogeyman stories have been a staple of Republican political discourse for decades, “The War on Christmas” being a comparatively innocuous example compared to the current “Portland is on fire! Antifa is terrorizing the city!!!” There seems to be people who just fall for this shit naturally. Maybe the opportunity to be thrilled with the horror at the Other makes their life seem like a heroic fight against evil—and all from the safety of their couch. All they have to do is watch Faux and feel the thrill!
Caroline Calloway, the young woman in the link above, seems to be more of a “made” person. She grew up in a religious conservative family and was recruited into Saint Charlie of Free Speech for Conservatives Only (TPUSA. Dare I compare them to the Red Guard? There are similarities) at 17. Her role was to write hate literature designed to give that thrill of horror of the Other–meaning Black men and Democrats—to young white people.
Sadly for Turning Point, they lost their propagandist when she went to college and studied poli sci. Exposed to the wider world and some reality therapy, Caroline had a “crisis of faith”, left TPUSA, and is no longer a conservative.
How did that happen? In her case, learning about systems of governance and experiencing people outside of the framework of her upbringing, combined with her ability to examine herself and to change, led her to recognize that her deepest values lay outside the bubble of conservatism as she experienced it. She valued fairness, freedom of speech for everyone, the common good, civility, empathy. She didn’t learn those values at college; she already had them before she got there. Her change came when she realized that Charlie Kirk, TPUSA, and the Republican party all exist in contradiction to those values. That left the door open for her to walk out of the bubble and toward the Democrats.
This, of course, is why Kirk’s organization targets universities. He, and the heirs of his hate propaganda business, aren’t interested in free speech and are only secondarily interested in recruitment of young people. Their goal is to prevent anyone who grew up in the bubble from escaping through exposure to life outside the bubble while at a university. Hence, Kirk’s watch list of professors to be driven out of their jobs for thought crimes. And the beat goes on: Rutgers professor known as ‘Dr Antifa’ shares plans to relocate to Europe.
I don’t think it really matters that much if Trump is around to be the Dear Leader of MAGA or not. When he is gone, there will still be a whole Republican party that enabled him to the max and the hate/fear propaganda bubble will still be poisoning our political discourse.
So how do we communicate to break through the bubble? I don’t know what will work, but I know what doesn’t work: the traditional Democratic approach of being politely reasonable in discussion of policy based on the polite pretense that Congressional Republicans are capable of acting in good faith and the traditional “rise above them” response to Republican slanders, while outsourcing the more bluntly truthful discussion to Raw Story. The conventional “wisdom” was that Dems should appear moderate and reasonable to retain credibility with the MSM and pundits like David Brooks.
The result is a milquetoast speaking style where the content of the remarks is obscured by professorial language and a passionless affect. Schumer does this all the time.
Fuck that shit.
When someone needs to be told to fuck off then tell them to fuck the hell off.
I think we need to communicate moral outrage and patriotism forcefully while openly attacking Republican tactics. Start the Truth and Reconciliation with loud, clear, unequivocal truths about the Republican party leaders’ behavior and actions. Expose them. Contradict them. Mock them. Attack them.
It feels to me like Tim Walz was on the right track with his line about weirdness. (How ‘Republicans Are Weird’ Caught Fire Thanks to Tim Walz) There was a lot of concern trolling about that from the msm and some Dems about that. Oh no, no, no, Democrats must be polite and rise above etc. Plus there was Republican outrage. (Democratic party’s ‘Trump is weird’ strategy rattles Republicans) But I believe that when Dems say things that trigger an attack of hysterics on the part of Republicans, then they have probably hit a nerve and should repeat whatever they said louder. The decision to drop the “They’re weird” attack was, I think, a mistake.
More of this, please:
Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said, “Healthcare for illegal aliens” is the new “immigrants are eating cats and dogs in Springfield. The Republican Playbook is simple: make up a baseless lie, repeat it every chance you get, hope and pray that everyone blames Democrats for the crisis you created. Republicans don’t want to govern. They want to rule.”
He doesn’t politely explain a Dem POV—he calls Republican politicians racist liars, exposes their bad faith, and clearly explains their malicious trickery. He asserts the bare truth in terms that anyone can understand.
Or this: Pritzker warns against Trump sending troops to Illinois in raging speech:
‘Jackbooted thugs’ Over the top talk? Nope: An ICE agent rammed a woman’s car, shouted abuse at her and shot her—and then lied about who rammed who. There’s a video! There’s also a video of ICE agents murdering an immigrant and don’t forget the helicopter raid on an apartment building and the zip tied children. We need to call things by their real names—no toning down for the sake of appearing moderate. Stop worrying about pleasing the NYT editors and Politico. Put the truth out there, bluntly.
Or this: ICE Barbie (Kristi Noem Triggered by Man in Chicken Suit on Portland Trip). I like the characterization of Neom as a humorless poseur who shouts about antifa terrorists when she sees a man in a chicken costume. Mockery is a good tool for exposing bad faith.
The “kitchen table issues” are moral issues and should be talked about that way. “Lives are at stake. Republicans need to fund health care. Their plan is immoral.” (cf Facebook)
Will this jar the “born” people to abandon the Republican hate/fear propaganda? I don’t know. There’s a subset of the Republican base that gets a vicarious thrill out of what they see as displays of power. If there is any way to communicate with them, it will have to be by displaying power back at Republican leaders. Besides, it’s a moral imperative to stand up to thugs and bullies. Can Democrats jar people like Caroline into a recognition that their good values are contradicted by the patterns of behavior shown by most Republican leaders and organizations? Maybe. There are Republican voters who value fairness; have respect for the law; dislike bullies and thugs; don’t want government of, by and for the superrich; and don’t want to be aligned with unconstitutional behavior. The Republican leaders have engaged in false advertising about their entirely imaginary moral superiority for decades while Democrats talked about policy on the assumption that policy was understood to arise from values. It’s way past time for Democrats to claim morality LOUDLY AND OVERTLY and to put issues into a moral framework. Do that, and the Carolines of our society will have a way out of the fear/hate propaganda bubble.
I think we need to give the Overton Window of acceptable discourse a good hard yank in the direction of Dems being bad asses when it comes to word choice and phrasing. We’ve endured decades of Republican engaging in slanderous lying while Dems held themselves and were held by the media to a higher standard. I think we need to remain truthful, but polite? Moderate in tone? Fuck that shit.
Someday, hopefully, we’ll go through a truth and reconciliation phase. Let’s get that started by shouting the truths out loudly and clearly
I put this as a comment so as not to distract. The post is wonkie’s, but the image of a spade is what I found at Amazon.
I’m grateful for her guestpost and want to encourage others if they have something they want to say. I think I have demonstrated that posts don’t need to be airtight. Just send them over the transom to libjpn@gmail.com.
Some might wonder what would happen if a submission came in that I and the powers behind the screen (Russell, janiem and wj) were vehemently opposed to. Well, we can burn that bridge when we come to it. So give it a try, what do you have to lose?
I actually agree with pretty much all of this, particularly with describing openly what much of the R/Trumpian project really does to ordinary people. I think it’s particularly effective to expose the lies, call them lies, and provide clear proof. The fact that, on the shutdown, D messages on the loss of health care are cutting through is a good example. It seems obvious to me that the finer points of progressive ideological concerns do not cut through to the electorate, or move the Overton window (except in the wrong direction).
Thank you, JP. As for messaging, the people of Portland are doing it right; the image of ICE teargassing a silly inflatable dinosaur is not what Cruelty Barbie and King Pussygrabber want. The NYT noticed and had an article to the effect that “Portland responds to ICE with whimsy” and this morning’s Wall Street Journal, under the headline “What’s really going on in Portland” details out from police logs that answer is “Not much at all.” Maybe Walz has the smartest approach of all: “These people are nuts.”
I don’t think it really matters that much if Trump is around to be the Dear Leader of MAGA or not. When he is gone, there will still be a whole Republican party that enabled him to the max and the hate/fear propaganda bubble will still be poisoning our political discourse.
I think it will matter. Here’s why.
My distinct impression is that the vast majority of MAGAs are made, not born. For those that are born, they can get their dopamine hit from lots of places. They did pre-Trump and they will again when he’s gone.
As for those who are made, Trump matters because he is, par excellence, a con man; a salesman for the radical right. Nobody else that they’ve got can hold a candle to him. When he’s gone, there isn’t anyone with a real chance of picking up the baton. (Lots who are convinced they can. But none who anybody else thinks can pull it off.)
The thing about the enablers is that they are, at heart, followers. No doubt they would like to keep the whole fear/hate coalition going. But I don’t think they can pull it off. The folks around Trump are actually four or five groups with very different agendas, united only by their recognition that they can use Trump to move those agendas forward. And their increasing desperation as MAGAland fragments will only make it fragment faster.
The thing to remember about those groups is that their various agendas are seriously unpopular. Even with the other groups. Without Trump as a useful umbrella to (sort of) unite them, they will crumble.
The problem for those who want to roll on after Trump is the same one that has historically faced autocrats: how to guarantee the succession. The traditional approach, from monarchs throughout history to Kim Il Sung, is to go with the founder’s children — genetics as legitimacy. But Trump’s children are jokes. And Trump’s ego won’t tolerate anybody else stealing his limelight to build a post-Trump coalition ahead of time. And there’s really nobody else who can effectively unite them.
As for the question of how to jar the “made” ones back to reality, a few may jump ship as reality (economy tanking, etc.) starts to hit home. But for the rest, I think that, unfortunately, the best that can be done is to prepare the ground for the day when he passes from the scene. Then, but probably only then, can they be brought to see their objections to those who would follow after.
All of which is not to csay that the Democrats couldn’t use a charismatic leader (or several) of their own. But so far, nobody has risen significantly above the throng.
I’m pretty much happy to talk to anybody about whatever, but I more or less insist on sticking to reality. If folks insist on doubling down on stuff that is simply factually wrong, I excuse myself from the conversation.
What I take away from most of my fairly limited collection of conversations with MAGAs is that they feel threatened. They are afraid. I don’t really understand why, and the reasons are probably different for different people. That is what I’d really like to talk to them about, but it’s hard to steer the conversation in that direction.
Nobody likes to admit they’re basically just afraid.
I was at a local ICE office yesterday for a protest and noticed that they’ve begun putting badging and insignia on their vehicles. Some of them, anyway, some are still unmarked.
One of the slogans on the vehicles reads “Defending the homeland”. And it just kind of made me laugh. Defending the homeland from the guy who mows your lawn? Your waiter? The woman taking care of your grandmother in the nursing home? The people picking lettuce?
What’s the threat?
The Stephen Millers Kristi Noems and Kash Patels of the world understand and work on that sense of threat by making absurd claims. 5% of the population of Chicago are violent antifa extremists! Tren de Agua has taken over downtown Portland!
It’s risible, but it resonates with people who are already afraid. I want to understand why they’re afraid. But it’s hard to get the conversation to that point.
There’s also the whole nativist / nationalist streak in American history and in our national character. It’s been there from the get. The early English folks looked down on and were suspicious of the German immigrants. Then both were suspicious of the Irish. Then all of them were suspicious of the eastern and southern Europeans. Then the Hispanics. Everybody hated the Chinese until pretty recently. And everybody has always had issues with black people, who have been here longer than almost everyone else, and mostly had no choice about being here in the first place.
The endless argument about who is a “real American”.
I’m still trying to understand WTF people are on about when they talk about “western civilization”, which of course is yet another thing that is always on the verge of being subsumed by the latest wave of People Who Are Not Like Us.
It’s all fear. Toxic, destructive fear.
I would like to talk to MAGAs about what the hell it is they are afraid of. What is that they think is going to happen. What precious thing are they going to lose.
I’m not sure how to get to that conversation. I sure as hell am tired to debating with them about crap like whether the Haitians are eating their pets, or whether blacks are roaming the streets looking for white people to assault. Or whether ICE are engaged in nightly hand to hand combat with the armies of antifa.
What’s going on is too fraught right now to waste time on bullshit.
I wonder if a useful approach might be to ask, not why they are afraid, but why they are concerned.
For a lot of people, admitting to being afraid is shameful. (And, for some men, an attack on their manhood.). But there’s nothing wrong with being concerned. It might be a way to get the conversation to the place you want it to go. Without getting the reflexive rejection of the whole thing.
Just a thought.
It’s a long time since I read The Fire Next Time, but I just saw somewhere this quotation from it, which resonated:
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain”
I think contemplating that makes certain kinds of people very afraid.
Not just pain of whatever they have suffered either, GftNC. They also have to give up the narrative justification that gave that suffering purpose, and they have to take on the additional sting of shame for having embraced that hate. That’s a lot to swallow.
People will do a lot of shameful things in order to avoid feeling shame.
“So, Democrats have three words for this: no fucking way. It’s literally life or death. We will not let Republicans blow up our health care system.”
THANK YOU CHUCK!!!!!!
About giving up hate and experiencing pain instead. I don’t think MAGAs are in pain any more than the usual for middle class Americans. I don’t think that’s why they like to hate. The concept of MAGAs as these poor sad people who have been left behind, the Forgotten Americans, working class and ignored by Dems, struggling to get by etc is mostly wrong. MAGAs tend to be better off than Dems, more likely to own homes as opposed to renting and are mostly middle class, They are over represented in government. Their lack of any real grievances is what makes them so appalling. Demographics & Group Affinities – Panel Study of the MAGA Movement The only thing they would lose if they gave up hating is their goddawful snobbery about being superior to everyone else and the entertainment they get from the thrill of horror as they armchair hero their lives away in front of the TV>
We should call Trump and his collaborators what they are. I learn that he’s been hosting an “anti-antifa roundtable”. To support that the contention that “antifa” is an actual organization, one speaker announced that “Antifa is real. Antifa has been around in various iterations for almost a hundred years in some instances going back to the Weimar Republic in Germany.”
So that’s clear, they’re proudly against the opponents of fascism. “Anti-antifascist” is a clumsy way of expressing what they actually are – pro-fascist.
These people are evil. But – I want to write that in big letters – half the voting population of the USA votes for them. I don’t believe – I’m not willing to believe – that half the voters are evil. We need to talk to them respectfully and sympathetically. We’ve all been taken in at some time by liars: it’s our side’s job to point out the lies, not to judge the liars’ victims.
I wonder if a useful approach might be to ask, not why they are afraid, but why they are concerned.
An excellent suggestion, and one I will use.
To wonkie’s point about MAGAs being no more forgotten or neglected than anyone else – that seems correct to me, but I’m not sure it matters if their sense of threat or concern makes sense. Or even whether it’s sincere, or just a justification for less sympathetic reasons.
It’s a place to start that isn’t focused on fingerpointing. I’m prone to that, as well as to the “go piss up a rope” response. Those aren’t that constructive, so I’m looking for other approaches.
To me MAGA just seems like an expression of stuff that’s always been in our national character. Nativism, xenophobia, white (especially Anglo) hegemony. Endless arguments about who gets to be a “real” American. I don’t think it will ever go away, really. The name will change but the sensibility has always been part of the mix.
I just want to return to the day when “the Paranoid Style” was not seen as something to aspire to and embrace.
I don’t believe – I’m not willing to believe – that half the voters are evil. We need to talk to them respectfully and sympathetically. We’ve all been taken in at some time by liars: it’s our side’s job to point out the lies, not to judge the liars’ victims. [Emphasis added]
I think this is another piece of the puzzle when trying to break thru. Be up front about having been bamboozled ourselves. Just to avoid the suggestion that “we’re smart enough to have seen thru it, but you re so dumb you got conned.” It helps if you’ve got an example of where you got taken in initially. And if it’s something that they can see thru, all the better. (Perhaps “when I was in school, socialism looked attractive. Took me a while to see that it wasn’t workable in the real world.” Even if you still do think it is workable, it can be a useful example.)
My natural impulses don’t always tend toward kindness, but I made a rational decision at some point that I should try to be kind because it seems to be the best way to live, both for the people around me and myself. (That’s not to say I don’t regularly fail at it, but it’s still a goal I strive for.)
That said, it can be complicated. You aren’t being kind to someone when you allow someone else to be unkind that person if you’re in a position to do something about it. You also can’t be kind to one person when someone else will suffer for it, at least when that suffering outweighs the kindness.
How can I (or anyone) be kind to someone who is MAGA? That’s generally complicated because the MAGA movement is largely unkind. What I’m talking about here is something other than, say, helping someone who is broken down on the side of the road if they have a tRump bumper sticker. I do mean how you interact where politics is involved somehow.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s not possible. To take it to an extreme, how could you be kind to tRump, himself? I write his name “tRump.” It doesn’t really affect him because he’s almost certainly never going to see it, but it still isn’t kind, right? Am I failing, or is he not deserving of kindness?
This post was about how Dem pols should talk and I firmly believe they should be VERY LOUD AND HARSH IN THEIR CRITICISMS of the R party. Use the F word. Actually, both of them.
However, I don’t think they should say anything about MAGAs and should talk to them. The goal must be to defuse the polarization.
As for me, I have MAGA friends and acquaintances and no desire to hurt their feelings. However, I also think that I’m not going to be complicit. At all. So, I post stuff on FB that flat out contradicts a lot of MAGA beliefs. For example, I posted an article about Saint Charlie of Free Speech for Conservatives Only and how people who criticized him have been attacked. At least one of my FB friends loves Kirk.
We still seem to be friends.
One thing that I have found effective in teaching is that the moments when I am being critical of something are always more powerful for the class when I can find a way to tell them from the perspective of “we,” rather than “I,” and when that narrative incorporates how “I” learned to view the problem through a perspective that helps put “us” back in a position with more agency to address “our” problem.
That, and starting with questions and listening rather than with advice and instructions seem to be the magic mix.
Bob Altemeyer’s work is less well known than it should be. His research was primarily about authoritarian followers, that is, the people who follow authoritarian leaders. He was warning about the direction the United States was headed in 2006, long before Trump. You can read his last book at this link: https://theauthoritarians.org/
I have no idea how this will copy across (in the original there are loads of links – hopefully here in blue – and images etc which I think have not copied) and I have certainly gathered that Ian Leslie is not everybody here’s cup of tea. But although I don’t know how much of this is completely right, I found it interesting. I have italicised the part that particularly interested me, and bolded the portion of that which is something I have been aware of for a long time. Years ago I used to call this phenomenon “cluster of attitudes”, and not only is it infuriating, and misleading, it is IMO really lazy.
How Moderates Win In a Hostile Environment
Ian Leslie
Oct 11
Paid
It has not gone unremarked that Americans with different political views distrust and dislike one another. This is usually framed as a 50:50 division between supporters of the two main parties: two vast armies, fighting for entirely different values and policies, facing off in a cold civil war. Look under the surface, however, and something more complex is going on.
First of all, it’s not true that the America’s population can be easily divided into ideological camps, and while such questions are much debated among political scientists, there’s a good case that Americans overall haven’t become more extreme or rigid in their views. What’s happened is that America’s political culture has been poisoned by a minority of ideologues on either side.
Ideologues, in the sense used by political scientists, are voters who have consistent beliefs, organised into recognisable patterns. If you know they’re against immigration, you can predict they’re also anti-abortion and pro-gun. Non-ideologues either have no strong views on politics, or they have strong opinions which don’t follow a standard template.
Although the number of ideologues has been growing (they’ve doubled over the last twenty years) they still represent only about a fifth of voters. Most Americans aren’t as structured in their views and don’t easily fit into Democrat or Republican boxes. Many of them are ambivalent about the most divisive issues, like abortion. Plenty of them have a mix of liberal and conservative positions.
Ideologues have disproportionate influence and power, however. They shout the loudest and generate the most political content. They’re also the ones funding and running political parties. (Politicians are more ideologically consistent than most voters, partly because they have to be to get ahead but also because many of them are predisposed to be).
Another reason that ideologues matter so much is that they exhibit more anger, distrust and hostility towards the other side – and those feelings are contagious. While most voters don’t share the political fervour of this minority, they have absorbed their animosity. Voters who identified as Democrat or Republican didn’t used to have strong feelings about those who leaned the other way – it was just politics, after all – but they do now. “Affective polarisation” has increased and spread throughout the population.
High levels of negative feelings about those on the other side have become normal. This is true even among independents. Most independents lean toward one party or the other. Between 1994 and 2018 those with “very unfavourable opinions” of the other side increased from 8% to 37% among Democratic leaners, and from 15% to 39% among Republican leaners.
In short, ideological polarisation is a minority pursuit, but affective polarisation is a national pastime. Most voters don’t actually have very strong views on economic or social policy and couldn’t necessarily point you to major differences in the parties’ platforms, but they have a strong feeling that the other side is wrong and bad. They don’t care much about politics but they know who they don’t like.
In Britain, things are a little different. Whenever I hear people say British politics is “polarised” I wince a little. To polarise means to divide into two opposing groups. The term is lifted from America, where nearly everyone votes for one of two parties, and it doesn’t make sense here.
In fact the salient feature of British politics in the last few years has been a decline in the popularity of both main parties and a fragmentation of the vote. Our slightly milder but still fractious political debate takes place between a series of cultural-political clusters which don’t line up neatly with institutional affiliations. There’s more than one way to cut the cultural cake but More In Common’s typology is a useful one (numbers here).
Parties aiming for a parliamentary majority need to straddle different clusters, which is far from impossible. Without America’s party binary, British voting patterns are inherently more fluid. The differences between most voters are not necessarily wide: most Reform voters favour same-sex marriage, for instance, and are vaguely in favour of diversity, even if they want immigration to come down (the latter being true of most voters). I hear a lot of politicians and pundits urging Keir Starmer to focus on his “natural” voters rather than on those tempted by Reform, but that would represent a tragic failure of ambition. Nigel Farage certainly doesn’t accept that he can’t win over left-leaning voters.
There is a sense of pessimism among centrist commentators – a feeling that British voters are both irretrievably atomised and radicalised. I’m not convinced by this. Pollsters who spend a lot of time doing focus groups tend to over-estimate the extent to which people care about politics, and also how miserable and angry voters are. Focus groups are socially awkward events, and one of the main ways British people bond with each other is by having a good moan.
My guess is that, as in the US, a substantial minority of hardliners on left and right generate most of the public anger and animosity, which breeds a listless but pervasive distrust and cynicism among voters at large. (More of the hardline anger comes from the right than the left – see the “Dissenting Disruptors” in More In Common’s framework, a very frustrated, verging-on-anarchist group of voters which now constitutes nearly a fifth of the electorate.)
In America and Britain ideologically driven voters are in the minority but on the rise, and they have an outsized democratic impact. America, in particular, places a lot of power in the hands of ideologues, via the presidential nomination process. The Republican Party was famously radicalised by Trump, and the Democratic electorate is a lot more left-wing than it was when Joe Biden won the nomination.
We might even say that the future of democracy depends on these voters. So it’s worth taking a closer look at how they behave. I found this new paper on disagreement among ideologues very interesting. It’s by a political scientist, Tadeas Cely, who studies America’s political polarisation. Cely adopts the definition of “ideology” coined by the godfather of modern political science, Philip Converse: “a system of explicit and unequivocal political beliefs”. Ideologues are people who are politically sophisticated enough to know, in Converse’s phrase, “what goes with what”, and stick to the pattern of beliefs that they share with their cohort.
Cely ran a survey of a couple of thousand American voters in which he presented them with the opinions of a hypothetical voter on controversial political issues (like immigration and gun control). The hypothetical voters was either liberal, conservative, a mild centrist, or someone with an unusual mix of strongly held views – a “messy” belief system. The respondents were classified in the same way, according to the firmness and consistency of their policy positions.
After viewing the hypothetical voter’s opinions, respondents were asked to rate how warmly they felt about this person, using a hundred point “thermometer” scale. Cely found that disagreement between ideologues produces more animosity than other disagreements. Not just a bit more – way more. When two ideologues clash, they hate each other about three times more intensely than after disagreeing with people with equally strong but “messy”, non-patterned beliefs, and four times more than with mild-mannered centrists.
Cely’s analysis of how animosity gets triggered is fascinating. In a second survey, he used the same model and told participants that their fictional interlocutor held views on two additional issues (student debt and Gaza ceasefire) without saying what those views were. What he found is that those “unrevealed” opinions increased the hostility of the disagreement. Why? Because the ideologues “filled in the blanks”. After having seen the person’s view on abortion, they just knew what this person would say about Gaza. And it made them furious.
We might put it like this: disagreement between ideologues is metonymic. The part stands in for the whole. As soon I know one of your beliefs, I know all of them. More than that, I know what kind of person you are: you’re somebody I hate.
In a sense the whole political environment now operates metonymically. With so much competition for eyeballs, the amount of attention voters spare for politics is smaller than ever, so they make thin slice judgements based on content produced by ideologues on their own side – content which highlights the most outrageous and objectionable ideologues from the other side. Voters extrapolate from the worst to the whole.
If you’re non-ideological, moderate politician, you need to be able to speak to the ideologues on your side.¹ They’re a growing group of voters, overrepresented in the centres of power, who set the tone of the wider debate because of how noisy they are and how intensely they dislike the other side.
But if you only speak to the ideologues, you get trapped inside the ideologue’s rigid belief system, which makes it harder to reach the non-ideological majority. You’d also be faking it, which is quite easy to spot. The trick is to adopt enough of the pattern to avoid being denounced as a traitor by your own side, while adopting one or two elements beyond it which show that you’re not a captive of it.
Pattern-disruption is important both to be noticed in the first place – given that voters are predictive processors with scarce attention for politics who simply screen out familiar patterns – and to prove that the politician is their own person rather than a robot controlled by his or her party or faction. Most voters have ‘messy’ sets of beliefs and they respond to politicians who mirror them in that sense.
This is not to be confused with putting together a ragbag of positions based on whatever policies do well in polling. Ambitious politicians need a set of positions that are internally coherent, grounded in a story about how the country needs to change (beyond ‘get the other guy/party out’). But it can’t be a matching set; it has to be new or surprising in some way.
I’m not suggesting anyone emulate Trump’s brazenly offensive manner or authoritarianism, which have done so much to toxify American politics. But consider how his unlikely success in 2016 was based on a pattern-breaking combination of policy positions: strongly anti-immigration, opposed to foreign wars, pro tax-cuts, pro-Medicare. Consequently he was regarded by voters as less conservative than most Republican candidates, and more moderate than his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Or recall Boris Johnson’s greatest political victory. He won the 2019 general election by mixing cultural authoritarianism (Get Brexit Done) with economic interventionism (”levelling up”). That broke the expected patterns and knocked down the Red Wall. Johnson and Trump were very different in style, even if they often get lumped together but it’s important to note that successful politicians practice strategic pattern-disruption at the level of tone as well as policy.
For instance, a moderate politician might not want to present as moderate. “Moderation” by itself doesn’t make noise, and at worst, it signals complacency and weakness. (If Josh Shapiro, the popular and moderate governor of Pennsylvania, wants to win the 2028 nomination, he will have to lean into his inner Bernie.) But pure “radicalism” keeps you in the ideologue box. A “combative moderate” uses the rhetorical intensity of ideologue wing to moderate ends. Hence the current incarnation of Gavin Newsom.
Zohran Mamdani is a pattern-breaker. Progressives often come across as stern and scolding; Mamdani is relaxed, funny, a good listener. He is a radical leftist who wears a smart, some might say conservative, suit and tie. His wire-crossing may end up extending to more than style or personality; it will be interesting to see if he ends up adopting a politically heterogeneous, ‘messy’ mix of policies once in office, as Ken Livingstone, similar in some ways, did in his first, successful term as London mayor.
It is probable that the share of ideologues in the electorate will continue to grow, as social media makes political discourse ever more algorithmic and ever more angry. Politics may eventually become a clash of armies with rigid, unyielding, static positions. But we’re not there yet, and we probably won’t be for quite a while. It is still possible for imaginative politicians to disrupt established patterns and create new ones, and plenty of space for them to do so in the middle ground. What they can’t afford to be is predictable.
I have just copied something quite long, which is “awaiting approval”. I don’t know why – maybe the length.
OK, my comment which was “awaiting approval” has now disappeared, so it looks like it didn’t gain approval. If so, lj, I think it’s important to know why, so I (and everybody else) can avoid such a failure in the future. If it was the length, at the old site all I would have had to do was split it into two comments, so if that were confirmed I could act accordingly.
@GftNC, your long comment went into the spam folder. I’ll leave it up to the real editors to fish it out.
The initial “awaiting approval” is because there are more than two links. Why WordPress classifies something as spam is a mystery, they don’t reveal how it works.
Meanwhile, the NYT editorial board at least tells it like it is. Too bad the Rs have so bought into the fake news/MSM lie that they think they can safely ignore it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/opinion/letitia-james-indictment-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.sk8.XvAr.7ewQlq_sNfRI&smid=url-share
I’ve gone ahead and pulled the comment out of spam. Right now, 3 links is the threshold, and yours had a bunch more than that, but if it has 3 or more, it should hold it in a moderation queue, though yours was classified as spam, possibly because it had 10+ links. This can be a problem with copy and paste from articles that have multiple embedded links because those will just transfer over.
Akismet uses aldorithms to figure out what is or is not spam, and will change those, especially after there is some sort of spam surge, but they don’t say what the algorithms are and I think they are constantly shifting.
Also, there is the time difference. I’m in bed when a lot of discussion gets going, so it’s going to be about 6 or 7 hours before I can do anything, if I notice. When Typepad did this, I had the spam folder open so I could free comments when they popped up, but yours is the first to have done that. Fortunately, I don’t think we have the problem that we had with typepad where comments would get lost, so people would repost them. Generally, if you don’t see something, it did get to the blog, so a quick note reminding me rather than multiple reposts is best.
With the Leslie article, it might be better as a front page post. I know that there is an expectation of adding some additional information, but that is a self imposed expectation that has arisen rather than something that has to be there. If you want to do that, send it to my email (libjpn@gmail) and I’ll put it up.
The Portland Frog.
We’ve been talking about communication to reduce polarization and fight fascism. I think that at this moment in time, the smartest communicator I know of is the Portland Frog.
Why? Because he exposed the Trump admin as lying crisis actors and he did it in a way that is easy to understand, accessible to the non-political citizen, and catchy enough to get the attention of the MSM.
What’s going on with the Portland Frog standing off against ICE?
Among Portland Protests, It’s Frogs and Sharks and Bears, Oh My! – The New York Times
I raised the question of whether MAGAs were born or made. I think that the comment about authoritarian personality types is very relevant: There are people who are natural born followers of a leader who is perceived to be strong. They care less about where they might be led than they do for the comfort of feeling that someone big and mean is in charge and will keep them safe.
No one is a natural born follower of a leader who is an idiot.
Republican influencers are trying hard to convince the MAGAs that King Pussygrabber and Cruelty Barbie are defending us against an existential threat. The longer Portland activists can keep things silly, the harder it will be to keep up the lying.
Protest frogs vs. MAGA media influencers: the info war over ICE in Portland and Chicago
I am concerned about the upcoming No Kings Day. I am concerned about the leftwing wannabe heroes who do stupid and destructive things like blocking traffic, setting fires, and throwing things. If those jerks aren’t Republicans, then they should be because that’s who they’re helping. I hope the Portland Frog inspires people all over the US to make the NO Kings Day event be a day of silliness, music, and fun. Fuck Fascists with fun!
I’ll be down in Olympia WA where protests are always like that.
Best wishes to you all wherever you go and stay safe
Aha, got it, thanks lj and Michael. I wasn’t even sure the links would copy over, and the graphs, tables etc didn’t, but at least I’ll know what to look out for in the future. I haven’t abandoned the idea of front page posts, lj, but a) this seemed appropriate to put in this thread, and b) I’m wary of there being too many new posts because I’ve always found the meandering, semi-discursive nature of our long threads one of the most appealing aspects of ObWi – like a bunch of friends sitting around chewing the fat.
Ok, I forgot that the comments now read in an opposite direction, so a lot has been posted since I started writing this (in spurts, given my crazy schedule). That link by GftNC was particularly interesting, especially the description of how limited the ideologues really are on either side. So the following didn’t take all of that into account.
“I think it’s worth exploring how to communicate with MAGAs because, even when King Pussygrabber strokes out on the toilet at three in the morning, we won’t be over the madness. We will still have the MAGA voters, the Republican party’s commitment to the election tactics of Othering and engineered polarization, and the extensive well-funded Republican hate/fear propaganda bubble (Faux, etc) which, for many people, substitutes for news and shapes their voting behavior.”
Well, with respect, I probably wouldn’t start like this. Criticizing a side for “othering” by what seems to be to be “othering” of another sort isn’t a winning proposition. And dialing up the rhetoric to 11 isn’t likely to do any good either. And claiming the other side “lies” when the issues are often nuanced only makes each side more entrenched. You could substitute in MSNBC for Faux, Democrat for Republican, woke Democrats for MAGA, and post this on a right-wing site and it would fit right in. And that, IMHO, is the problem.
I’d say the first thing to do is to try to understand the other side. And not the talking heads on TV, but real people of good faith. Why did so many vote for Trump? What policies were behind that decision? Or what was it about Biden/Harris that voters didn’t find attractive? You can argue that the election was lost by not being loud enough, or confrontational enough, or tough enough, but I think that misses the mark.
IMHO, a lot of people that voted for Trump/Vance were not anywhere close to the cartoonish MAGA voter you describe. There were so many reasons to vote for or not vote for Trump, just as there were so many reasons to vote for or not vote for Harris. And many of those reasons deserve respect. To claim otherwise is to have blinders on. You can hate a position, but hating the person holding that position is an entirely different matter.
Take just one former Democrat, Bill Ackman, and his voiced reasons for voting for Trump over Harris.
https://x.com/BillAckman/status/1844802469680873747
I chose him simply because he has a list handy that I read some time ago. I may not agree with all of his reasons (and you won’t either) but I think his reasons deserve respect on the whole. And this is his list. I think there are several more that could be added, but IMO, numbers 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 22, 24 , 28, 31, 33 were quite resonant with those that voted for Trump (not necessarily in that order). Ackman was not “born” or “made” in the sense you describe.
I am deliberately not responding to the specific examples in your post, Wonkie (i.e. Calloway, Walz, healthcare truth, Portland). I just didn’t want you to think those arguments were lost on me. I can acknowledge some validity in what you say. I just didn’t want any differences I have to detract from the tenor of my response.
1) Immigration. Immigration was higher in Trump’s first term than in Bidens. Ackman is wrong.
2) Trump in his first term showed himself to be indifferent to the national debt. Ackman is wrong.
7) The USA has been a net fossil fuel exporter since 2019. Ackman is wrong.
I could go on – there are very few valid points. Yes, it’s important to understand why people voted for Trump. But what this tells me about the other side is that influential people on it are unconcerned with reality. I hope that most of the electorate thinks otherwise.
First, bc, thank you for chiming in. I always appreciate what you have to say, if only to keep myself honest.
Some of the stuff on Ackman’s list make sense to me (immigration), some seem motivated more by a specific agenda of Ackman’s (Israel / Gaza), some seem to ignore a broader context (withdrawal from Afghanistan, inflation). And for Ackman, specifically, as for much of the technorati, my sense is that a significant factor for him and them is “I want to do cool tech stuff and the feds won’t get out of my way!”.
But many or most are legitimate concerns, even if they either aren’t concerns of mine personally, or I land in a different place than Ackman does regarding them.
My question for Ackman, and for supporters of Trump generally, is less “Why did you vote for him?” and more “Why are you still supporting him?”.
Why are they still supporting him? Ackman I understand, Trump is gonna give the tech bros free rein. Ackman’s gonna have fun and make a lot of money.
But I don’t get rank and file MAGA. As far as I can tell, they’re getting screwed. And yet, they love him.
I understand the reasoning that the best vote-winning arguments are ones which appeal to voters’ legitimate self-interest. But there are other things which must be said loud and often:
What Pro Bono said.
By my iights, this administration is doing damage to this country that will take generations, literally generations, to repair. Some of it may never be repaired.
If that prompts the “it all sucks anyway, just tear it down” response, I’d say that is profoundly nihilistic. And, I doubt the folks saying that are really gonna want to live in a world where it’s “all torn down”.
BIllionaires and centi-billionaires excepted. They have, as the colloquial expression goes, fuck you money. They’ll be fine no matter what.
I’d add to Pro Bono’s list the decline in our standing internationally, and the consequences *for everybody in the world*, not to exclude us, that are gonna follow on from that.
Trump has, in nine months, pissed away what took 80 years to build. Who is going to trust this country after this mess? Foreign relations at this point are devolving into pure transactional scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours deal making.
Give me a shiny plane and I’ll let you build a base in Idaho. It ain’t show friends, it’s show business. Right? That’s where we are headed, or perhaps already are. It’s not a good basis for anything like national security.
The administration is deeply and thoroughly corrupt, and they are corrupting the country.
*what this tells me about the other side is that influential people on it are unconcerned with reality.*
I wonder about that. Is it that they are unconcerned with reality? Or are they (at least many of them) just as caught up in the alternate reality as any Faux News viewer?
Certainly there are some there who will ignore anything that looks like an inconvenient fact. Not to mention those who are simply delusional. But the (mis)information bubble there is both very real and very pervasive.