A political ideology with disbelief at its core

Disinformation has unmade the Republican Party, and with it the promise of democracy in America

Over the last month, I have been somewhat reassured about the well-being of our democracy by the various Republican civil servants who have resisted the president’s calls to throw out the results of the election and award him a second term. One of the most newsworthy co-partisan opponents of Presidents Trump’s efforts is Judge Stephanos Bibas of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, who threw out the campaign’s court cause in Philadelphia on Friday and wrote “Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy, [….] Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”

Bibas’s dedication to our democracy was reinforced by Republican election officials in Michigan, Arizona and Georgia who also denied Trump’s efforts. They serve as a reminder that loyalty to a political party only goes so far, at least with today’s degree of partisanship.

Yet for every official who fought off the attempted coup of our democracy, there seem to be tens of Republicans leaders who tolerated it and hundreds — or thousands — of Trump voters who outright supported it. That has left me both deeply unnerved about our democracy, as well as reflective on the psychology of the average Republican today.

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The average Republican today believes that Joe Biden illegitimately won the election — up to 88% of them, in fact, according to one poll. A supermajority does not believe that human activity contributes “a great deal” to climate change. And 41% believe that the QAnon network of conspiracy theories is “good” for the country (despite lacking evidence for most claims and being declared a domestic terror threat by the FBI). The Republican brain is, simply put, much more prone to rejecting reality — hard, observable truths on politics and the world.

This is not new. Academics have long documented a tendency for conservatives, especially those on the far-right, to adopt conspiratorial beliefs. That’s true both in America and abroad. There is something about belonging to the network of people who support far-right parties that also makes you more likely to believe things for which there is no evidence — or even evidence to the contrary. For a while, political scientists thought that being a member of the opposition political party explained it, but that is evidently not the case (see: the last 4 years in the United States).

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It is worth noting that a tendency to endorse conspiracy theories is not totally senseless. The world is a complex place, and sometimes the most rational explanations for things (eg, “oh, it’s just a coincidence”) are not so satisfying. Scholars talk about conspiracy believers as “intuitionists” or, in the political context, “feelings-first voters.” They judge reality not by the facts that they are presented with or the accepted narratives of why things are the way they are, but by what they feel, as that’s what is most easily acceptable to them.

There are some known correlates of conspiratorial thinking. Education and general trust (of government officials, mainly) are perhaps the most accepted. Scholars have also identified latent psychological traits that they call “paranoid ideation” and “distrust of officialdom” to explain our willingness to accept or reject QAnon. But they have also discovered a particularly “Paranoid Style” of politics among conservatives. Some of the better-known scholars of conspiracy theories this summer wrote that “conservatives in the United States were not only more likely than liberals to endorse specific conspiracy theories, but they were also more likely to espouse conspiratorial worldviews in general” and that “extreme conservatives were significantly more likely to engage in conspiratorial thinking than extreme liberals.”

At the end of their paper, the academics wrote:

… there are some troubling implications of the paranoid style for the stable functioning of liberal‐democratic societies—insofar as some level of political trust is required for citizens to share power with and consent to being governed by others with whom they disagree. Although these normative implications are beyond the scope of the present article, they are well worth considering.

In a separate paper on the subject in 2018, some other scholars wrote that:

When political polarization is high, it may be assumed that citizens will trust the government more when the chief executive shares their own political views. However, evidence is accumulating that important asymmetries may exist between liberals and conservatives (or Democrats and Republicans). We hypothesized that an asymmetry may exist when it comes to individuals’ willingness to trust the government when it is led by the “other side.” In an extensive analysis of several major datasets over a period of five decades, we find that in the United States, conservatives trust the government more than liberals when the president in office shares their own ideology. Furthermore, liberals are more willing to grant legitimacy to democratic governments led by conservatives than vice versa. A similar asymmetry applies to Republicans compared with Democrats. We discuss implications of this asymmetrical “president-in-power” effect for democratic functioning.

Sound familiar? We are seeing the effects of the increasing correlation between conspiratorial thinking and membership in right-leaning ideological groups today. At the end of their paper, the second set of academics asked:

How is it possible to guarantee democratic stability if trust in the government shifts substantially—and systematically—as a reaction to the chief executive in power?

The last few months have reinforced the troubling implications of this research, and probably led us to several negative answers to this question.

Recall that right-wing militias have attempted to kidnap the Democratic governors of Michigan and Virginia. Republicans voters have also threatened election officials with murder and arson if they did not give the election to Trump. I think this implies that we cannot, in fact, “guarantee democratic stability” in the current information environment.

Really, it seems to me that the entire mode of achieving democratic outcomes — deliberation — is impossible. If we cannot even agree on the basic facts of the world (in fact, most of us are not even having the same conversations about politics, regardless of whether they are reality-based) then there is no hope of really agreeing on solutions that satisfy our needs from the government.

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As I was writing this post, David Brooks published a similar piece in his New York Times column. He concluded with these remarks:

Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set. He and his media allies simply ignore the rules of the epistemic regime and have set up a rival trolling regime. The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source. Distrust and precarity, caused by economic, cultural and spiritual threat, are the source.

What to do? You can’t argue people out of paranoia. If you try to point out factual errors, you only entrench false belief. The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking. That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it. And second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.

Rebuilding trust is, obviously, the work of a generation.

That is a hopeful note to end on. And though I am not optimistic about our ability to save the polity from itself, I will echo that our only way to move forward is to do everything we can to try. Ultimately, that is our responsibility in a democratic society anyhow.

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That’s it for now. One note on programming: I hope you all had a relaxing holiday break this week. My partner and I cooked an ambitious Thanksgiving dinner for the two of us, explaining the lack of a post earlier this week. I am back to the regular schedule now.