Musa
al-Gharbi
It’s time to tell the truth about the big lie
‘Fortunately for all of us, these dire predictions are
almost certainly overblown.’
Thu 27 Jan 2022 10.20 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/27/no-america-is-not-on-the-cusp-of-a-civil-war
According
to a number of polls and surveys, significant majorities of Republican-aligned
voters seem to believe the big lie that Trump was the rightful winner of the
2020 US presidential election and, consequently, the Biden administration is illegitimate.
Taking
these data at face value, a growing chorus insists that we’re living in a
“post-truth” era, where members of one political party, the Republican party,
can no longer tell facts from falsehood. As a result of the Republican party
becoming unmoored from reality, the narratives typically continue, America is
drifting headlong into a fascist takeover or a civil war.
Fortunately
for all of us, these dire predictions are almost certainly overblown. We are
not living in a “post-truth” world. We are not on the brink of a civil war. The
perception that we are is almost purely an artifact of people taking poll and
survey data at face value despite overwhelming evidence that we probably
shouldn’t.
For
instance, in the wake of the 2016 election, Trump claimed to have had higher
turnout at his inauguration than Barack Obama did. Subsequent polls and surveys
presented people with pictures of Obama and Trump’s inauguration crowds and
asked which was bigger. Republicans consistently identified the visibly smaller
(Trump) crowd as being larger than the other. A narrative quickly emerged that
Trump supporters literally couldn’t identify the correct answer; they were so
brainwashed that they actually believed that the obviously smaller crowd was,
in fact, larger.
Of course,
a far more obvious and empirically plausible explanation is that respondents
knew perfectly well what the correct answer was. However, they also had a sense
of how that answer would be used in the media (“Even Trump’s supporters don’t
believe his nonsense!”), so they simply declined to give pollsters the response
they seemed to be looking for.
As a matter
of fact, respondents regularly troll researchers in polling and surveys –
especially when they are asked whether or not they subscribe to absurd or
fringe beliefs, such as birtherism (a conspiracy that held that Barack Obama
was born outside of the US and was legally ineligible to serve as president of
the United States).
However,
many academics and pundits do not seem to be in on the joke. Instead,
post-2016, a consensus quickly emerged from credulous readings of polls and
surveys that America is facing an epidemic of “fake news”, which was leading
people to believe things that were obviously false, and to vote for unsavory
political candidates. Some of the initial studies on this topic were blatantly
prejudicial in their design; other widely shared studies were ultimately
retracted.
As more
reliable data began to emerge, it turned out that, contrary to the initial
hysteria, “fake news” stories were viewed by a relatively small number of
voters, and infrequently at that. Most of those served pro-Trump or
anti-Clinton “fake news” by social media sites already seemed firmly committed
to voting for Trump, or intractably resolved against voting for Clinton (which
is why the algorithms served them this niche content to begin with). That is,
“fake news” is unlikely to have changed many, if any, votes. It is not a
plausible explanation for the 2016 electoral outcome nor Trump’s support more
broadly.
Even people
who share “fake news” stories typically never read (or even click on) them.
That is, people are not sharing the content because they read the stories, grew
convinced of their factual accuracy, and are genuinely trying to inform others.
Instead, people typically share these stories based on their headlines, for a
whole host of social reasons, while recognizing them to be of questionable
accuracy (see here, here, here, here and here for more on this).
It should
not be surprising, then, that correcting misinformation seems to have virtually
no effect on political preferences or voting behavior; misperceptions are
generally not driving political alignments to begin with – nor are they driving
political polarization.
Contrary to
narratives that have grown especially ubiquitous in recent years, Americans are
actually not very far apart in terms of most empirical facts. We do not live in
separate realities. Instead, people begin to polarize on their public positions
on factual matters only after those issues have become politicized. And even
then, polarized answers on polls and surveys often fail to reflect
participants’ genuine views. Indeed, when respondents are provided with
incentives to answer questions accurately (instead of engaging in partisan
cheerleading), the difference between Democrats and Republicans on factual
matters often collapses.
In other
cases, apparent disagreements about factual matters often turn out to be, at
bottom, debates about how various facts are framed and interpreted, or disputes
about the policies that are held to flow from the facts. That is, even in cases
of genuine disagreement, there is typically less dispute about the facts
themselves than about what the facts mean – morally or practically speaking.
All said,
measuring misperceptions is a fraught enterprise – even when it comes to banal
and politically uncontested facts. Attempting to draw inferences about
“incorrect” views on matters tied political, moral and/or identity struggles is
a far more complicated endeavor. These are not data that lend themselves to
being taken at face value.
Similar
realities hold for the data that purportedly show we’re on the brink of a new
civil war.
There is
strong evidence that many of the surveys and polls indicating support for, or
openness towards, political violence hugely overstate actual levels of support
in the American public. Likewise, data that purport to show high levels of
partisan vitriol may be misleading.
In general,
behaviors are often a stronger indicator than attitudinal data for
understanding how sincere or committed people are to a cause or idea. The
number of people who are willing to rhetorically endorse some extraordinary
belief tends to be much, much higher than the subset who meaningfully behave as
if that claim is true. The number of people who profess commitment to some
cause tends to be much, much higher than the share who are willing to make
sacrifices or life adjustments in order to advance that cause.
The big lie
is no exception. Both the low levels of turnout and the relatively low levels
of violence are extraordinary if we take the polls and surveys at face value.
Event
organizers were expecting, “hundreds of thousands, if not millions” to take
part in the January 6 uprising. This would be reasonable to expect in a world
where tens of millions of Americans literally believed that an apparently
high-stakes election was stolen out from under them. Even if just 1% of those
who purportedly believe in the big lie had bothered to show up, the
demonstrations would have been hundreds of thousands strong. Instead, they only
mustered 2,500 participants (according to US government estimates).
The lack of
casualties was also striking, even when one considers injuries and indirect
fatalities. After all, the former president also enjoyed strong support among
people who are armed and formally trained in combat, such as active duty and
veteran military and law enforcement. A large number of other Trump supporters
participate in militias, or are private gun owners.
Yet most
January 6 participants did not bring firearms, and those who were armed did not
discharge their weapons – not even in the heat of the violence that broke out.
The only person shot in the entire uprising, Ashli Babbitt, was killed by a law
enforcement officer. In fact, Babbitt was actually the only homicide to occur
on that day.
Two other
rioters died from heart problems, another from a drug overdose. Police officer
Brian Sicknick died from strokes on 7 January; the medical examiner ultimately
concluded that this was unrelated to any injuries sustained during January 6.
In the months that followed, four other police officers would perish by
suicide. All said, then, a total of nine deaths have been associated with the
events of January 6 (directly or indirectly). Not one person, however, was
actually killed by the rioters. Nor is a single bullet alleged to have been
fired by the rioters, despite many participants allegedly possessing guns.
In a world
where 74 million voted for Trump, and more than two-thirds of these (ie more
than 50 million people, roughly one out of every five adults in the US)
actually believed that the other party had illegally seized power and now plan
to use that power to harm people like themselves, the events of January 6 would
likely have played out much, much differently.
Indeed, had
even the 2,500 people who assembled on the Capitol arrived armed to the hilt,
with a plan to seize power by force, committed to violence as “needed” to
achieve their goals – things would have gone much, much differently.
Instead,
most participants showed up expecting Trump would provide them with definitive
evidence for his claims of electoral malfeasance, and then unveil some master
plan to take the country back. This didn’t happen. Those gathered seemed to
have no idea what to do after that. Most of what followed was spontaneous, not
planned. Even when they breached the Capitol, most had no information about the
layout of the building, little knowledge about the proceedings they were
ostensibly striving to disrupt, and no clear agenda of what to do once they got
inside.
There was a
small number, dozens perhaps, who showed up to the Capitol with a clear intent
to forcibly overturn the election – who equipped themselves for violence,
researched the congressional proceedings and the layout of the building,
developed and executed a plan, etc. These are behaviors consistent with a
sincere belief in the big lie, and a strong commitment to doing something
“about” it.
Yet,
critically, even these actors were operating independently of Trump, motivated in
part by frustration with the former president’s apparent inaction. In their
telling, Trump himself wasn’t acting like he believed his own rhetoric. There
was no urgency. There was no “fire”. There was no focus. There was no plan. The
Oath Keepers hoped to engage in a radical act that would push the president to
actually behave as if the election was stolen and the republic was on the line.
As their leader (currently arrested on sedition charges) put it:
“All I see
Trump doing is complaining. I see no intent by him to do anything. So the
patriots are taking it into their own hands. They’ve had enough. We’re going to
defend the president, the duly elected president, and we call on him to do what
needs to be done to save our country.”
Of course,
even tiny numbers of genuine extremists like these can be extremely
destabilizing under the right circumstances. Had Oath Keepers breached the
Capitol instead of being repelled (even as Q-Shaman, Confederate Flag Guy et al
wandered the building aimlessly) … January 6 could have played out much
differently.
Nonetheless,
there is a huge difference in talking about identifying and disrupting small
numbers of highly committed individuals willing to engage in revolutionary
political violence v tens of millions of Americans genuinely believing the
election was fraudulent and being open to violence as a means of rectifying the
situation. Those are very different problems. Orders of magnitude different.
The good
news is that the second problem, the tens-of-millions-of-Americans problem, is
not real. It is an artifact of politicized polling design and survey responses,
followed by overly credulous interpretations of those results by academics and
pundits who are committed to a narrative that half the electorate is evil,
ignorant, stupid, deranged and otherwise dangerous.
In fact,
rather than January 6 serving as a prelude to a civil war, the US saw lower
levels of death from political violence in 2021 than in any other year since
the turn of the century. Even as violent crime approached record highs across
much of the country, fatalities from political violence dropped. This is not an
outcome that seems consistent with large and growing shares of the population
supposedly leaning towards settling the culture wars with bullets instead of
ballots. This turn of events does not seem consistent with the notion that tens
of millions of Americans – including large numbers of military, law enforcement
and militia members – literally believe the presidency was stolen, elections
can no longer be trusted, and the fate of the country is on the line.
Indeed, far
from giving up on elections, Republican voters are reveling in the prospect of
taking back one or both chambers of Congress at the end of this year; they are
eagerly awaiting the midterms (likely for good reason).
In truth,
most Republican voters likely don’t believe in the big lie. But many would
nonetheless profess to believe it in polls and surveys – just as they’d support
politicians who make similar professions (according to one estimate, Republican
candidates who embrace the big lie enjoy a 6 percentage point electoral boost
as compared to Republicans who publicly affirm the 2020 electoral results).
Within
contemporary rightwing circles, a rhetorical embrace of the big lie is
perceived as an act of defiance against prevailing elites. It is recognized as
a surefire means to “trigger” people on the other team. A demonstrated
willingness to endure blowback (from Democrats, media, academics, social media
companies et al) for publicly striking this “defiant” position is interpreted
as evidence of solidarity with, and commitment to, “the people” instead of
special interests; it’s taken as a sign that one is not beholden to “the
Establishment” and its rules. That is, the big lie seems to be more about
social posturing than making sincere truth claims.
For many
reasons, this situation is also far from ideal. But it’s a very different (and
much smaller) problem than partisans actually inhabiting different epistemic
worlds and lurching towards a civil war. Glass half full.
Musa
al-Gharbi is a Paul F Lazarsfeld fellow in sociology at Columbia University
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