I think this image portrays the angst all of us feel--on both sides of red/blue divide. We have seen something we thought could never happen in the U.S., an attempted coup d'etat. That it was rather incompetent does not negate what it was. It was an attempt to override our constitutional leader choosing processes. An intentionally violent attempt. An attempt encouraged with lies about pedophilia and cats voting.
Back in 2000 the Supreme Court effectively decided an election for us. Many thought that decision allowed Bush to steal the election from Gore. Be that as it may, there was no coup involved. Our constitutional processes were followed.
Acceptance of our constitutional processes is what holds our democracy together. Today however many people have another view. They think democracy is the will of the majority and that they and theirs are the majority. With that in mind they have been convinced that a fraudulent election removed their leader.
How can we understand the public support most Republican members of Congress show for that leader and his claim of a rigged election?
Speaking in my home town of Lincoln, Nebraska, William Jennings Bryan had the answer. He said in 1893: "It is useless to argue with a man whose opinion is based upon a personal or pecuniary interest".
H.L. Mencken explained the situation is a slightly different way: "never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced."
Members of Congress depend on voters for their jobs. Many Republicans depend on primary voters who are solid Trump supporters. At first it seemed good politics to help Trump tell his stories. Later after they had seriously compromised themselves, it merely seemed inevitable politics to continue that path.
What created the voters these members of Congress fear? Will these voters continue to be blinded by Trump’s I-am-the-one aura and to ignore his strongly dictatorial governing style?
Many of them will, but we can drastically reduce their number.
Yale university psychiatrist Bandy X Lee says the first step must be to reduce the country’s exposure to Trump. We have done that to an extent. He no longer has the media prerogative of a president and he has been removed from Twitter.
Some consider Twitter's action an abrogation of free speech. It is not. Twitter isn't government. Twitter isn't muzzling him. Twitter is a private company refusing to amplify him.
Favorable exposure has been reduced in another way. According to a 2017 article in the Columbia Journalism Review, New York Times coverage in the weeks running up to the 2016 election had "roughly four times as many Clinton-related sentences that described scandals as opposed to policies, whereas Trump-related sentences were one-and-a-half times as likely to be about policy as scandal." Other examples were also given of media coverage that while not in support of Trump actually helped him. That kind of coverage is gone now.
Still Trump is a master at getting attention and, being a narcissist extraordinaire, he no doubt wants to come back to power. The election fraud gambit didn't pay off, but he will think of another.
Moreover a glance at a few coup attempts from history gives us reason to think current conditions in the U.S. could provide Trump with some hooks to get people's attention.
Without claiming that Trump is another Hitler, I note that their tactics are eerily similar. And so it is not encouraging to note that Hitler attempted a coup d'etat in 1923 and was jailed for it. We all know how that turned out.
Consider too the French revolution. The French Revolution was more a mass uprising than a coup but it lead in short order to Napoleon who like Hitler started a major war.
Both Hitler’s coup attempt and the French Revolution were followed with a few years of miserable economic conditions and turmoil after which a strongman came to power. We also are in the middle of miserable conditions. Although our bad economy may not be as bad as those of Germany and France were, it is plenty bad. Almost 20 percent of American grocery shoppers have turned to some sort of free food distribution since the pandemic started.
When people have trouble staying fed and housed, they look for solutions. Not finding any they turn to a political savior. They need someone whom they can trust to know what to do. This explains how Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders could appeal to the same people. It is not their solutions that are important but their confidence in promoting them.
Here is how Bandy X Lee describes the problem: "A population may be predisposed to looking for a parental figure to take care of them in times of distress—or in cases of relative poverty, as in the U.S., which is more psychologically injurious than absolute poverty." In other words increasing inequality may be psychologically more devastating than abject poverty but either way people seek a political savior.
So economic recovery through vaccinations is not going to solve this problem. To provide some insurance against a new and even worse Trump administration we need to fix the inequality problem. The next would-be demagogue may be more competent than Trump.
Here is a cartoon showing how fascist demagogues handle the inequality problem.
To prevent this we need a real solution.
I am aware that many of you think our political problems are mostly caused by racism. I do not agree but there is no doubt that many whites at the bottom of the economic ladder think all African Americans are being given advantages over them. For these people the election of a black president and the attention given to the Black Lives Matter movement symbolizes their subjugation. There are strong emotions attached to their thinking about these symbols. When strong emotions are in control, reasoning has been shown the door. Although we cannot reason people away from this thinking, there a couple things we can do.
The first thing we can do is fix the economic ladder. Contented people do not think much about what is going on in the mansions or with the social welfare programs on the other side of town.
The second thing we can do is run a public campaign to teach a little elementary math. This campaign will not directly address racist resentment. Logic won't do that. But this campaign will destroy distorted logic that guides people down the road to resentment.
The campaign should talk about the difference between absolute numbers and ratios. Absolute numbers, that is to say numbers without any stated context, are useless. It is context that gives numbers meaning and it is ratios that put numbers in context.
For example the most recent data I can find shows the state of Alaska has put Covid-19 vaccinations into 183,831 arms whereas Massachusetts, where I live, has administered 1,143,430 shots.
Those are numbers without context. They need to be put into context before they have meaning. Contexts require ratios or equivalently percentages. (A ratio of 1/3 for example is approximately 33%.)
The context for 183,831 is the population of Alaska. If we divide 183,831 by the size of that population we see that Alaska has vaccinated 17% of its people. The context for 1,143,430 is the population of Massachusetts. If we divide 1,143,430 into the population of Massachusetts we see that Massachusetts has vaccinated 12% of its people.
Looking at the absolute numbers we think that Massachusetts is doing the better job of vaccinating. Looking at the ratios we see that Alaska is doing the better job.
We have all seen people drawing false conclusions from absolute numbers. We have even seen people using absolute numbers erroneously to draw correct conclusions. Our public discussions will be better off if we can stop this sort of thing. The subject isn't too complex for a media campaign.
What the campaign should not do is give examples from hot button issues. Doing that will fire up emotional resistance to what is simple mathematics. Let people apply what they have learned to hot button issues in their own time.
Black Lives Matter is such a hot button issue. For 2017 the absolute numbers show that there were 457 whites killed by police in the U.S. whereas there were only 223 blacks killed. Thinking in absolute terms we can ask: “Why talk about Black Lives Matter instead of White Lives Matter?”
People who have learned to think in terms of ratios are forced to consider what these numbers mean in terms of the black and white populations. The percentages are very small. Neither population has seen many police killings but comparing the two small numbers tells the story. The black population saw 0.0005142% of their number shot and killed by police whereas the white saw only 0.0001833% of their number shot and killed by police. That says the rate of killing of blacks was 5142/1833 or 2.8 times that of whites.
Said another way: blacks have much more reason to be concerned about being killed by police, a fact that is overlooked by people not taught to think in terms of ratios.
So here are my points. Our problems with political fringe groups arise in large part from two fixable societal problems
inequality
poor education
I don’t mean fixable in the sense of achieving perfection. Only that we can make things much better than they are now. You have had many chances to read about what we can do about inequality. I will end this with a bit about how we can fix education.
Too often our education is about what to think rather than how to think. Although the schools are the obvious place to fix this, we could do some of the fixing with media campaigns. A media campaign that provided a new noncontroversial example of why ratios are more informative than absolute numbers every week for 20 weeks would go a long way towards improving many of our public discussions.
If we want to cut back on alternate realities in our political discourse we need to address inequality and poor education. We can start doing those things in a meaningful way now.
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References
https://www.amazon.com/Profile-Nation-Trumps-Mind-Americas-ebook/dp/B08L6RGGYK/ref=sr_1_1
https://www.history.com/topics/germany/beer-hall-putsch
https://www.history.com/topics/france/french-revolution
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-global-distribution/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/