loading . . . Why Intolerance and Extremism Happen (and how to protect democracy in a divided world) Hello, and welcome. I plan to take on some big questions, including:
* Why do some people spiral into extremism?
* Why does democracy seem perpetually on the brink?
* Why are we so divided?
* What can we do to protect democracy in a divided world?
To answer these questions, I’ve pulled insights from political psychologists, neuroscientists, American history, American constitutional history, the history of journalism, the history of misinformation, and what I’ve learned through my research and writing over the years.
This is long for a blog post. Maybe it’s really a short book. I asked it, “What do you want to be?” It hasn’t answered, so for now, it’s a blog post.
I made some changes throughout, which I believe make it more readable. I hope you find it helpful and interesting.
##### **To skip to the new parts,** **click here**
##### **Introduction to
Intolerance and Extremism**
In September 2024, I went to Chile for the national independence festivities and a family reunion for my husband and his siblings. While there, I learned something that surprised me: one of my in-laws — she’s 84, one of the sweetest people I know — admires Augusto Pinochet. She was firm in her views. I was warned not to talk politics with her, so I didn’t. But I talked to others who know her opinions.
I asked, “Does she know that Pinochet staged a military coup? Does she knew he overthrew a legitimately elected president? Does she know he installed himself as a brutal dictator?”
The answer was: “Yes, she knows all that. But she says he saved Chile from communism.” __
This is a woman who worked her whole life as a baker. She never had much money. She is kind to everyone. I struggled to reconcile her economic status and her sweet disposition with her support for a brutal dictator. To make sense of it, I dug deeper into Chilean history.
What I found were two competing narratives of the Pinochet story. Each side emphasizes different facts. According to Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, before Pinochet’s coup in 1973, Chileans were proud to have the most stable democracy in South America. (_How Democracies Die_ , p. 117.) Stanford political scientist Robert Packenham and historian William Ratliff, writing for the Hoover Institution, call that a “half-truth at best.”
So what actually happened? In a nutshell:
In 1970, Salvador Allende, co-founder of Chile’s Socialist Party, was elected president. Chile at the time had extreme income inequality — worse than in the U.S. today. After Allende was inaugurated, he set to work restructuring Chilean society along socialist lines. To redistribute income, his government authorized large wage increases and froze prices. The government acquired significant privately owned mining and manufacturing sectors and took control of large agricultural estates for use by peasant cooperatives. Allende’s government also took control of U.S.-owned copper companies in Chile, claiming that “excess profits” constituted payments. The Nixon administration was furious. Foreign investors lost confidence in Chile. The Chilean economy took a dive.
A shortage of basic commodities created a black market. Sporadic violence from the far left continued under Allende, contributing to the polarization and anxiety. People were braced for trouble. Packenham and Ratliff argue that Chile was “well on the road to self-destruction” by July of 1973.
Both things can be true:
* Before Pinochet, Chile had the most stable democracy in South America.
* Allende’s rapid changes destabilized the economy, fueling fear and igniting a right-wing backlash.
On September 11, 1973, with U.S. help, Pinochet launched a coup. Tanks rolled into Santiago, fighter jets bombed the presidential palace, and Allende was overthrown.
Pinochet then consolidated power. He dismantled Allende’s reforms, installed himself as dictator, and held on to power for nearly 20 years. During that time, about 28,000 people were arrested for opposing him, many were tortured, and roughly 3,200 were executed.
It seems to me that by all measures, this was brutal. People justified his brutality by arguing that Pinochet responded to a crisis and did what was necessary. His defenders say he was _saving the Constitution_ , but I could find credible source that claimed Pinochet followed the law. He was, according to his defenders, using illegal means to save the constitution.
Pinochet held on to support — and power — until 1988, when he lost a plebiscite: 55% voted against extending his rule. But 44% still supported him.
Now wouldn’t you expect Chileans to overwhelmingly reject a regime like that?
Pinochet held on to support — and power — until 1988, when he lost a plebiscite: 55% voted against extending his rule. But 44% still supported him.
That’s a reminder many people may find shocking: dictators often have real public support. They have defenders. Even now, obviously, Pinochet retains much support in Chile.
**Evil v. Cruelty**
In a 2015 interview, Chilean-American poet Marjorie Agosín said, “I think Pinochet has been proven to be an evil dictator in the eyes of most people in the world, and most people see Allende as a dreamer and even a visionary.” I had always assumed that was true. But, of course, “most people” does not mean “everyone.” Pinochet still has support.
Okay, so, was Pinochet evil?
Philosophers have long pondered the meaning and existence of evil. Medieval philosophers steeped in the Christian religion struggled to reconcile the idea of an all-powerful God with the existence of evil. There is also discussion among philosophers about whether we should even talk about evil. Some claim that evil was nothing more than a word for what we don’t understand. Others argue that “evil” is too often simply a slur against enemies.
I suggest that we use the word ‘cruel’ instead of ‘evil’ because ‘cruel’ doesn’t carry the connotation of a grand moral judgment. It has fewer theological implications. It doesn’t conjure the idea of supernatural or satanic forces. It’s also easier to establish.
Here is the _Oxford American Dictionary_ definition of cruelty:
“Behavior or actions that deliberately cause pain or distress to people or animals, done either by intention, indifference, or wanton neglect.”
Evil requires a particular intention or state of mind, whereas cruelty doesn’t. A small child who tortures an animal is being cruel. Whether the child is evil is a different question, and most likely the answer is no.
We still have to do some hair-splitting because a doctor setting a broken bone might deliberately inflict pain, but it’s obviously not cruel. On the other hand, criminal punishment is always cruel, but whether it is necessary can be argued. If you ask: Was Pinochet’s cruelty justified? Some people will argue yes and some people will argue no.
You could say that “evil” means “unjustified cruelty” which leaves open an argument about whether the cruelty was justified.
Since World War II, there has been renewed interest in the concept of evil as people have struggled to understand genocides, terrorist acts, and mass killings. One such person was Hannah Arendt, a German-Jewish philosopher and political theorist. She was arrested by the Nazis in 1933 for anti-Nazi activities and, shortly afterward, escaped to France. When the Nazis seized France, they were after her again, so she fled the United States. In 1961,_The_ _New Yorker _sent her to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a key architect of the Holocaust and organizer of the death camps.
Eichmann argued at his trial that he had simply been following orders. Arendt was struck by his complete moral indifference and his strict adherence to rules and regulatory order. For Arendt, he represented something more terrifying than an embodiment of Satan or supernatural evil forces. He represented what she called the _banality of evil_ – ordinary people acting from ordinary impulses like a desire for promotion or a belief that all rules must be obeyed, who nonetheless participate in actions that bring about mass death. In the book that resulted from her reporting of the trial, _Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil_ , she rejected the idea that evil is done by people who are depraved or possessed by demonic forces. She argued instead that evil is committed by people who don’t think critically or consider the moral implications of their actions.
Plato argued that democracy’s flaw is that too few people can think deeply about the complex issues inherent in politics**.** The same flaw obviously applies to other forms of government. Eichmann was not part of a democracy.
A German friend once told me this story. In the 1990s he was traveling in the former Soviet Union. Because so many people were still alive who remembered the Nazi invasion, he was accustomed to people feeling uncomfortable with him. Then one day someone took him aside and whispered, “I admire what Hitler tried to do.” My friend was shocked.
That brings us to this question: How do these dictators secure so much support? This brings me to demagogues. Dictators and would-be dictators are a subgroup of demagogues.)
Plato also believed that people were too susceptible to the siren call of a demagogue for democracy to be stable. The ancient Greeks gave us the word democracy. “Demos” means people, and “cracy” means to rule. They also gave us the word demagogue, which literally means a leader of the people, but has come to mean “a person, especially a political leader, who wins support by exciting the emotions of ordinary people rather than by presenting good or morally right ideas.”
Demagogues either take advantage of existing chaos or invent a problem and then offer a solution that (1) benefits them and (2) sets them up for the role of savior. Prof. Harold Hill in _The Music Man_ demonstrates. (You can watch the scene here.) Prof. Harold Hill tells the citizens of River City:
Friend, either you’re closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge
Or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster
Indicated by the presence of a pool table in your community.
Well, ya got trouble, my friend. . .
Harold Hill (spoiler: he’s not really a professor) then offers the solution: Buy what he is selling. Harold Hill follows the classic formula: Frightened people make bad decisions, so scare them. Arouse their fears. When people are frightened enough, they are more likely to follow a demagogue.
Eli Merritt, a political historian at Vanderbilt University, puts the matter more simply. Demagogues destroy democracies, he says. He calls this the “golden rule of democracies.”
It is the golden rule because democracy – by its very nature – allows for the rise of demagogues. To come to power, a demagogue requires certain conditions. To begin with, it must be possible for an ordinary person to come to power using legal means, and this can only happen in a democracy. In a monarchy, the succession is established by law. The most a demagogue can do is try to manipulate the king, but he can never be the king. This is why Hitler and Mussolini came to power in Europe after the ancient monarchies and empires broke down. Both came to power using legal means. Once in power, they set to work dismantling democratic institutions and consolidating power to become dictators.
A demagogue, to come to power, also requires freedom of speech. At the same time, democracy requires freedom of speech to thrive. People have to be free to critique their elected leaders as part of the process of deciding which leaders they want next – or whether they want to re-elect the current leaders. If you restrict speech so far that a demagogue cannot possibly arise, you will also remove the same freedom that allows democracy to thrive.
See the problem? You can’t silence ideas in a democracy, and that includes anti-democratic ideas. The only remedy is to teach the public to reject demagogues, which means enough people have to understand the dangers to keep a majority from falling under their spell.
**The Authoritarian Personality**
The question political psychologists ask is this: What makes certain people susceptible to the appeal of a demagogue? The second question is: Is there anything we can do to blunt the power and appeal of a dangerous demagogue while maintaining democratic institutions?
As with any interesting set of questions, it wasn’t long before scientists sought the answers.
The first researchers to investigate the question, “ _What about human beings allowed for such atrocities as the Nazi death camps?_ ” was a team at the University of California, Berkeley: Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford. The team member who became most widely known, Theodor Adorno, was a German sociologist and Marxist who fled Germany in 1934 when the Nazis targeted left-leaning scholars. Because of his background – and because the Nazi atrocities were widely known – it is no surprise that the team focused on what we might call right-wing authoritarianism. His work therefore had this particular bias.
The term “The Authoritarian Personality” comes from the title of the book the team published in 1950. The authoritarian personality describes people who fall in line behind an authoritarian leader. (The authors used the term “ _fascist_ ” because they were focused on authoritarianism on the right side of the political spectrum. The term “ _demagogues_ ” is broader and more accurate.)
To summarize, the authors concluded that people with this disposition are rigid thinkers who have difficulty with nuance. They have an “intolerance of ambiguity.” (p. 325). All of this adds up to an inability to process complex issues.
Doesn’t this sound like the way Hannah Arendt described Adolph Eichmann?
True innovators are often met with harsh criticism. This is partly because new ideas are unsettling, and partly because those who are first cannot have perfected their research methods. Those who are first often don’t have the perspective to separate their own biases from their modes of inquiry. The authors of _The Authoritarian Personality_ were innovators. Their ideas were unsettling. Their biases — focusing only on extremists on the right side of the political spectrum — were evident. But their book and the answers it suggested spawned an entire field of study that continues to the present. The phrase “the authoritarian personality” is widely used to describe a particular kind of person.
Political psychologist and behavioral economist Karen Stenner built on earlier research to develop a theory explaining how and why authoritarian movements arise. In doing so, she identifies the root causes of intolerance. Intolerance can take multiple forms. It can mean racism, which is deeply harmful. It can also show up as policing language — insisting that everyone use only the words that the “language police” deem acceptable — which can be annoying or feel like a personal attack.
Stenner’s research shows that the authoritarian personality exists on both sides of the political spectrum. A recent study she conducted found that roughly 39% of Americans identifying as Republicans are highly authoritarian, compared with about 22% of Democrats. She also cites this chart.
In her words, people with authoritarian dispositions are “more inclined to call themselves right-wing than left-wing but just barely.”
She reminds us that our distinction between “left” and “right” is “not a fundamental and enduring dimension of human psychology.” A person’s designation as “left-wing” or “right-wing” is unrelated to whether that person is predisposed to authoritarianism.
Her research led her to conclude that there are two critical determinants of authoritarianism. The first is the personality trait known as closed-mindedness. This is a tendency to avoid new experiences, ideas, or perspectives. The second determinant is best described as cognitive incapacity. They are, to use her phrase, “simpleminded avoiders of complexity.”
Stenner tells us that people with an authoritarian predisposition favor oneness and sameness over freedom and diversity. People with this disposition prefer sameness and uniformity. They want to minimize differences. This can include racial, religious, and political differences. Some authoritarians want everyone to hold the same beliefs. Others want all people to be of the same religion. One way or another, authoritarians want everyone to fall in line. To achieve this, they insist on boundaries, and they look for institutions and authority figures that will secure those boundaries.
In a nutshell, the authoritarian personality is a universal, mostly heritable predisposition rooted in a closed personality and cognitive inflexibility, which reduces one’s willingness and ability, respectively, to deal with complexity. Because it occurs naturally in about a third of the population, Stenner refers to being authoritarian as “another way to be human.”
On the other end of the spectrum are those who are non-authoritarian. These are people who value differences. They are accepting of people who are not like them. They are comfortable with diversity, which is a form of complexity. They don’t expect all people to think like them or be like them.
Because there is a gradation, and because left versus right are artificial constructions, the chart can be drawn like this:
**The Political Spectrum**
Remember: Any political spectrum or chart has limitations. People rarely fit neatly into one. They often hold mixed views. They may shift, depending on the issue. Political movements attract different kinds of people for different reasons. The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ can mean different things in different countries, and can carry different connotations too.” Still, labels are a useful shorthand—if we keep their limits in mind.
The political spectrum has traditionally been viewed as a line:
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that liberals and true conservatives see different threats, push in different directions, and protect different values. They balance each other. He likens this to a yin-yang relationship. As Karen Stenner puts it, “Societies seem to thrive when there’s a balanced mix of folks who monitor the boundaries and guard against the strange and unfamiliar, and others who seek out novelty and variety.” Without liberals, nothing would improve. Without conservatives, change might move too quickly and become destabilizing.
At the same time, liberals and conservatives have trouble understanding each other.
People often say the main difference between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives resist change, while liberals embrace it. Put simply, using Stenner’s term, conservatives prefer the status quo.”
Radicals and reactionaries, in contrast, want rapid change. They want to upset the applecart. Conservatives try to hold the applecart steady.
One factor that confuses the terminology is that “liberal” has been used as a slur so often that, in the minds of many, it has lost its original meaning.
Another confusing factor is that parties and movements that are not conservative often call themselves “conservative.” This could be because the party started as conservative and then shifted to the right. We are currently witnessing a global surge in right-wing movements. In the United States, we can see this in the rightward shift of the Republican Party:
Sahil Chinoy, who earned his doctorate at Harvard in economics, created this chart in 2019. I suspect the Republican Party has shifted farther to the right, while the Democratic Party has remained a center-left party. Some of this is in the eye of the beholder, of course. For someone whose economic ideas are on the far right, Democratic economic policies can look like communism.
“Conservative” suggests a cautious demeanor and a buttoned-down appearance. In fact, the farther a party moves from the center, the more it moves into extremism. A Trump supporter recently smiled at me and said approvingly, “Trump is a radical.” Trump wants rapid change. He is upsetting lots of applecarts, and he is doing so in as showy a manner as possible. That is not conservative. Using “conservative” in place of “far-right” is clever marketing.
**The Authoritarian Dynamic**
Stenner tells us that when the fears of those with authoritarian tendencies are not aroused, their authoritarian tendencies will lie dormant. However, when riled by a _normative threat_ – which is something that threatens sameness and order – they can show aggression toward out-groups. They become cruel and tolerate cruelty in others. Driven by fear, they are willing to trample rules.
Liberal democracies naturally expand and become more diverse. This creates a dynamic that is forever present in liberal democracies, resulting in what Stenner calls _an authoritarian dynamic_ , which works like this:
* Democracy naturally expands and becomes more diverse as outgroups are admitted.
* As democracy expands and becomes more diverse, those with authoritarian dispositions are susceptible to a leader who arouses their fears.
* Such a leader will inevitably arise.
* When the fears of those with authoritarian personalities are aroused, they can become cruel or justify cruelty.
To use the ancient Greek term, the leaders who trigger the fears of those with authoritarian personalities are demagogues.
As the world become more complex and diverse, people with authoritarian personalities recoil. Stenner attributes the current rise of far-right-wing extremist movements worldwide to the simple fact that the complexity of today’s world has exceeded the capacity of many people to tolerate it. Those who cannot tolerate the cacophony and complexity of today’s world become susceptible to leaders who arouse their fears and unleash their authoritarian tendencies, and – no surprise – such leaders _will_ arise to take
**Can Biologhy Explain our Politial Differences?**
A study published in Current Biology in April 2011 found that people who identify as liberals and people who identify as conservatives actually show measurable differences in their brains. Now, it’s important to remember — the study is based on self-identification. And terms like ‘left’ and ‘right’ are cultural labels. They’re ways we use to categorize ourselves. Anyway, MRI scans revealed that self-described conservative students had a larger amygdala than those who identified as liberals. The amygdala is an almond-shaped structure in our brains that becomes active during states of anxiety. The researchers concluded that self-described conservatives are more sensitive to perceived threats and therefore more cautious. Students who described themselves as liberal, in contrast, had more gray matter in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region of the brain that helps people cope with complexity.
It makes sense that the person who is more cautious and sensitive to threats would prefer the status quo.
The researchers stressed that their results don’t tell us whether these brain differences _cause_ a person to have particular political attitudes. They concluded that a person’s political views reflect a combination of genetic influences and environmental factors. The data, however, suggest a link between brain structure and the psychological mechanisms that lead people to their political inclinations.
Biology isn’t destiny because the brain can change due to external factors. This also makes sense, right? If you lift weights, the muscles in your arms will change. How much muscle you can build is limited by genetics. Psychologists refer to “thought loops” – repetitive thought patterns that can lead to cognitive rigidity. As I understand a thought loop, it is like exercising a muscle. Do it often enough and your brain will change in measurable ways.
When we moved from San Francisco to California’s central coast in 2013, we hired a contractor to replace a rotted back door to the garage. Once he understood that we had moved from San Francisco, he pegged me as a liberal and tried to goad me into an argument.
It didn’t work. He told me that he has guns and likes to sit on his front porch and shoot animals. I offered no response. He mocked Hillary Clinton. I smiled.
I pointed to the door that needed to be replaced – a glass, French-style door – and I told him that I wanted another just like it. He said that would be a terrible idea. I asked why, and he explained that it would be too easy for someone to break into a glass door. A door to the garage, he said, should be more secure.
I wasn’t worried. I said, “I don’t have anything in this garage worth stealing.”
His response: “A burglar won’t know that and will break the glass anyway to search.”
I shrugged and said, “Then I’ll just leave the door unlocked. That way the burglar won’t need to break it.”
He stared at me. I assume he was trying to figure out whether I was joking. What I was doing was goading him back. I also wanted a door with windows, and his fears seemed silly to me. Glass doors are a thing. Lots of people have doors with windows.
He was a large man who literally towered over me. I stood firm at my height of 60 inches. “I want a glass door,” I said. In fact, I had already selected the one I intended to buy.
I had recently read the article in _Current Biology_ and wondered if there was a connection between his fear of burglars and his political views. I also wondered if his need for guns was a result of his fears. At the same time, as a friend later pointed out, I was probably living up to his stereotype of a liberal foolish enough to leave doors – and maybe even borders – unlocked.
As Haidt suggests, maybe a liberal needs someone to remind her to lock the doors because dangers do exist.
**Ideological Thinking**
Leor Zmigrod, the author of _The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking_, is a political neuroscientist with an impressive resume. When she heard about young British girls drawn to Syria to join ISIS, a question tugged at her: Why were _these particular_ girls lured into extremism? Her book is the result of research into how people spiral into extremism. She concluded that, given variations in brain structure, some people are more susceptible to the lure of extremism than others.
She confirms that biology isn’t destiny. She explains how our brains can – through outside influences – become more prone to ideological thinking. She tell us that different people are born with different inclinations toward rigid thinking. Factors such as early indoctrination, fear of death, and panic can make a person more susceptible to ideological thinking. A person’s thinking can change over time, becoming more or less flexible depending on environmental factors.
Zmigrod describes ideological thinking as “the style of thinking characterized by rigid adherence to a dogma and a rigid social identity.” An ideology, she tells us, is a kind of narrative that tells a compelling story about the world. Not all stories, theories, or ideas are ideologies. An ideology offers an absolutist description of the world and prescribes how we should think, act, and interact with others. Within an ideology, nonconformity is intolerable. Deviation from the rules can lead to severe punishment or ostracism. An ideology demands rigid and ritualistic thinking. People in the grip of an ideology are less curious and less free.
The similarities between Zmigrod’s descriptions of ideological thinkers and Stenner’s description of those with authoritarian personalities are striking: those pulled into ideologies become rigid thinkers. They insist on conformity. They insist on absolutes. They are less open-minded.
When different researchers in different fields using different methods of inquiry come to the same conclusions, there is less chance that the conclusions are the result of bias or a flaw in their research methods. In other words, we can conclude that there is something going on with this whole brain-structure-and-politics thing.
All ideologies – Zmigrod tells us – share particular traits. For example, all ideologies seek a utopia. Stalinists and Leninists looked forward to an ideal world of economic equality. Nazis looked backward to a time when there was perfect order and what they believed was the “superior” race ruled.
Any idea or theory can become an ideology if it morphs into a rigid set of rules that grips the brain and essentially turns a person into a fanatic. Karl Marx, for example, advocated for freedom from oppression. He hated ideologies, which he believed were used by the ruling class to keep the working class in line. Then, in the hands of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, Marx’s philosophy became an ideology used to oppress others.
People who are in the grip of an ideology become fanatics. Zemigrod tells us that when a person is in the grip of an ideology, reverberations of that ideology can be measured in the brain, even when the person is not engaging with politics. In other words, the person’s brain actually changes.
Zmigrod’s research showed that those better able to resist ideological thinking have more flexible brains. She measured brain flexibility by observing, through experiments, who was able to switch from one set of rules to another. When the game changes, those with more flexible thinking were able to adapt.
People with inflexible brains tend to be intellectually arrogant. They rarely admit they are wrong. For that matter, they rarely think they are wrong. They don’t say, “On the other hand,” and see other viewpoints.
People with flexible brains, on the other hand, are intellectually humble. They can entertain the possibility that they may be wrong, and they can recognize when they are wrong. Such people are, by nature, freer. To quote Judge Learned Hand (yes, that really was his name):
The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women.
Bertrand Russell illustrated intellectual humility when he quipped that “I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.”
Being in the grip of an ideology is satisfying. A complicated world suddenly becomes simple and digestible. Everything makes sense. There are bad guys (our enemies) who are seeking to destroy everything we hold dear. There are good guys (our allies) with whom we stand shoulder-to-shoulder in solidarity.
Government, when viewed through an ideological lens, also becomes simplified. Forget those complicated civics lessons from your high school government class. If we can just gain control of the government and set things right, we will all live happily ever after in (pick one):
* A perfectly egalitarian democracy.
* A well-ordered society in which all people have personal freedom.
* Some other perfect world.
Here is how Zmigrod describes what happens as a person is drawn into ideological thinking:
“In a given community, everyone will be positioned at different starting points, but the environment they choose (or are forced into) will affect how rapidly the person will adopt the most extreme conclusions of an ideology . . . Once sucked into ideological logic and community, it becomes easier and easier to get drawn more deeply inward—and more difficult to come out.” (p. 201)
As the person spirals into ideological thinking, the brain is altered and becomes more accustomed to the ideological thinking. As the brain becomes accustomed to ideological thinking, the spiral becomes tighter, making it harder to get out. “The spiral,” Zmigod says, “reflects the interaction between a person’s dispositions and their ideological environment.”
Zmigrod’s research led her to conclude that the most flexible thinkers are those just to the left of center on the political spectrum. The least flexible thinkers exist at the extreme points of the political spectrum.
**Ideologies Soothe Existence Pain**
Existence pain – as you would expect – is the pain that comes from merely existing as a human. Existence pain includes our awareness of our mortality. It involves grappling with what can feel like the meaninglessness of life. It means fearing the loss of those we love. If we don’t have loved ones, it means grappling with our solitude. Existence pain means that knowing that what lies ahead – should we live long enough – is physical pain as our bodies break down. It means fearing the isolation that often accompanies old age. Existence pain includes grappling with the indifference of the universe. It means facing the possibility that there may not be a grand eternal plan.
In the words of psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom, “existence pain” is the “pain that is always there, whirring continuously just beneath the membrane of life.” It is knowing that “our deepest wants can never be fulfilled … a halt to aging, the return of vanished ones, eternal love, significance, for immortality itself.”
The First Noble Truth in Buddhist philosophy emphasizes that life is full of suffering.
An ideology may offer the promise of an afterlife. It may give life a purpose. It may offer the promise of a grand eternal plan. It may offer camaraderie. It soothes the pain of existence and gives meaning to our suffering.
A character in the Robertson Davies novel, _The Manticore –_ a Jungian analyst named Dr. Johanna von Haller – tells her patient this:
People spend their lives searching for ‘the purpose” of life, as though it had to be something beyond itself. But the purpose of a lion’s life is to be a lion.
A theme of _The_ _Manticore_ is that our purpose comes from within and is unique to each of us. But the idea that the purpose of a lion’s life is to be a lion suggests something else. It suggests that the purpose of a human being’s life is to be human. As I understand that, it means that the purpose of our life is to strive to become more _fully human._
And how do we do that?
One way is to turn to the artists. The demagogue riles us to hate and fear and makes us more brutal, simplistic, and less human and humane. Conversely, the true artist teaches us to embrace our complexity and become more humane.
The visual artist teaches us to see both beauty and pain. In an essay called _The Decay of Lying_, Oscar Wilde rejects the widely held argument that art imitates life. Instead, he suggests that life imitates art. He goes even further and argues that nature itself takes its cues from art.
You might say that the nineteenth-century landscape painter J.W.M. Turner taught us to see the beauty in sunsets.
Oscar Wilde suggests that the beauty in landscapes exists _because_ the artist taught us how to see it. Nature, he says, literally follows the landscape painter and takes her effects from the artist:
Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? To whom, if not their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river . . .
For what is Nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us. . .
At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them.
Yesterday evening Mrs. Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking at the glorious sky, as she called it. Of course I had to look at it. And what was it? It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period, with all the painter’s worst faults exaggerated and over-emphasized.
Of course, fogs and sunsets exist without a viewer, but the beauty is not there until someone sees it, and the artist shows us how to see it. Because nature is our own construction, nature does indeed take her effects from the artist.
In the 1980s, I attended a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The lecturer, a historian, was marveling at the fact that a group of medieval monks traveling through the Alps never once commented on – or even seemed to see – the glorious beauty of the landscape. Well, of course they didn’t see it. That was before the Romantic era landscape painters taught people to see the beauty in a wild and rugged landscape. Very likely, the monks saw only a dangerous, difficult-to-travel wilderness in which they might at any moment be attacked by animals. They were not wrong. It _was_ a dangerous wilderness. Nobody had taught them to also see the beauty.
Samuel Coleridge famously said, “I have a smack of Hamlet myself.” It’s possible many of us have a little Hamlet in us, which means Shakespeare taught us to see something in ourselves.
If we imitate literary figures and then, through the imitation, absorb some of those characteristics, isn’t life imitating art? The little girl obsessed with Disney princesses who wears her princess outfit and practices being special learns the lesson Sara Crewe learned in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s _The Little Princess:_ “I am a princess. All girls are!”
Life imitates art.
A classical tragedy can show how well-meaning human beings – through their actions or inactions – can create unnecessary pain and suffering. In other words, a classical tragedy can explore how people become cruel.
A play like _Antigone_ by the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles does exactly that. Here is the plot in a nutshell. Creon, the king, makes a law that Antigone, a citizen, knows is unjust. She disobeys the law because she would rather be a good person than a good citizen. Creon is determined to punish her because he insists that all order and civilization will break down if citizens don’t obey the law. He thinks he’s right to punish Antigone, but he becomes vengeful and cruel. In the end, he destroys himself and those he loves.
The German philosopher Hegel said that _Antigone_ was “one of the most sublime and in every respect the most excellent work of art of all time.” Hegel believed the play is about opposing moral claims. Creon claims justice requires punishing all people who break the law. Antigone claims that justice means doing what is right.
Among other things, _Antigone_ teaches us that important questions about power, government, law, and punishment defy easy answers. After absorbing _Antigone_ , we can see what is wrong with the law-and-order person who shakes his fist and shouts: “All lawbreakers must be punished, or rule of law will be destroyed!”
We can list the historical figures who, like Antigone, defied laws that they believed were unjust, beginning with the abolitionists who defied enslavement laws, Mandela went to prison because he opposed South Africa’s apartheid laws, and Mahatma Gandhi defied British colonial laws. My high school social science teacher enjoyed telling this story: Henry David Thoreau was imprisoned for refusing to pay his taxes because his taxes were supporting a government that permitted enslavement and was waging what he called an imperialistic war against Mexico. His friend Ralph Waldo Emerson visited him in jail and asked, “What are you doing in there?” Thoreau responded: “What are you doing out there?” (Evidently, the story isn’t true, but it was a good story.)
The artist helps us confront the complexity of life. Art can also show us we are not alone in our emotions. Among the most iconic of all paintings, _The Scream_ by Edvard Munch, captures nothing less than the cacophony, uncertainty, and anxiety of the modern age.
While wandering through an art gallery, I was struck by the work of French painter Stephanie Ledroit. With her permission, I will include some of her artwork here.
We are essentially social creatures, so we naturally fear isolation. The phrase “In the end we are all alone,” which has been attributed to various sources, therefore resonates.
Ledroit shows us that solitude can be a time of renewal, a time to look inward, a time of creativity, or a time to discover new things about ourselves. She uncovers the beauty that can be found in isolation. I asked her why she often paints children, and she said, Because they naturally slip into their own space.”
**The Artist v. The Demagogue**
The demagogue takes a complex world and simplifies it and leads people into rigid thinking. The artist teaches us to see beauty and helps us confront the complexity of life.
Almost all the arts use metaphor or symbol to some degree. Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford, tells us that among the qualities that are uniquely human is the ability to think in metaphor and symbols. When I taught college English, I always ended my lesson on metaphors and similes by writing on the board: _Metaphors Be With You_. At the time I thought I was offering a joke. In fact, I was offering sage advice for how to cultivate a habit of mind that grows accustomed to complexity and can withstand easy answers. I was also offering advice for how to become more human.
The more we practice embracing complexity – and the more we work on expanding our sympathies, however we choose to do it – like a gymnast stretching her muscles, the more flexible our thinking can become, and the better we are able to withstand ideological thinking.
That, I believe, is what Fyodor Dostoevsky meant when he said, “The world will be saved by beauty.”
**These are the Times
that Try Men’s Souls**
You’ve probably heard the phrase, ‘These are the times that try men’s souls.” That’s the famous opening line from the first pamphlet in a series Thomas Paine wrote, published in December of 1776. The series was called The American Crisis, and Paine signed it, ‘By the author of Common Sense.’
Now, think about the timing. The Continental Army had just been defeated, enlistments were running out, and—let’s be real— colonists were not simply fighting against a faraway king. They were challenging the dominant global superpower of the eighteenth century, which meant a good chance of being killed. Paine’s pamphlet was a rallying cry. It was meant to persuade and encourage the colonists to keep fighting the war.
In 1964, political scientist Murray J. Edelman said this:
“All times are ‘the times that try men’s souls.’ The age one lives in is always in crisis, and especially so since newspaper reading became common.”
Newspaper reading changed everything because suddenly people were informed of events outside their immediate experience. Edelman argues that because most political events are outside the immediate experience of most citizens, almost all political events are presented by means of symbols.
To illustrate Edelman’s idea, let’s take the example of the dwindling interest in the Revolutionary War at the end of 1776. Most Americans at the time were subsistence farmers or laborers.
Historian John Ferling, author of A Leap in the Dark, tells us that one of the main drivers in the Revolutionary War was the heavy-handed manner in which the British exerted control over the colonies, including finding ways to extract money from the colonists. In other words, colonists didn’t like being taxed by a faraway government. That’s why the Tea Party was a defining moment.
Much of the Continental Army’s rank and file soldiers were landless laborers and men from lower social strata who were drawn to enlist by bounties, pay, or land promises, but it also included a significant number of subsistence farmers. We can assume, therefore, that the price of tea did not affect their daily lives. Subsistence farmers probably don’t want to leave the fields that feed their families and risk their lives in a war just so someone they vote for will have a say in their tax bills, particularly if there is no guarantee that the bill will actually go down.
The farmer needed a reason worth dying for, and those reasons were given as abstractions like _Independence!_ and _Liberty!_
Edelman explains that “all times are the times that try men’s souls” because every political act terrifies someone while reassuring someone else. The McCarthy period of anti-communist campaigns in the early 1950s was terrifying to those who saw the government seeking out and punishing people for their political views as an abhorrent violation of civil liberties and the First Amendment. On the other hand, it was reassuring to those who were terrified of a Stalinist-style communist revolution, and who believed that aggressive action was necessary to prevent the spread of Communism.
To take another example, the campus protests of the 1960s were terrifying to those who viewed the protests as chaotic, lawless, and endangering what, for centuries, had been the American way of life. For such people, everything was topsy-turvy: White students marched with Black students. Women wore pants. Men grew their hair long. The birth control pill threatened to disrupt what people thought of as the stability of the American family. Young people were experimenting with drugs. The music was different and unsettling.
For others, the protests of the 1960s were part of a thrilling and liberating period of about 26 years that witnessed the end of legalized racial segregation, the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Immigration Act of 1965. I want to pause for a moment to reflect on the Immigration Act of 1965 and the long-term effects. The Act, among other things, abolished national-origin quota systems, which had previously favored white immigrants. As a result, over the coming decades, there was a profound shift in the nation’s demographics because of increased immigration from Asia, Latin America, and Africa. In other words, these pieces of legislation — the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Immigration Act — literally changed the face of America during the next few decades from mostly white to a more multicultural society. The immigration Act also led to economic growth because the workforce was more diverse and skilled.
That 26-year period — from the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in _Brown v. Board of Eduation_ ending legalized racial segregation until the election of Ronald Reagan — was a time of rapid change that some found exhilarating and others found terrifying. _It was the best of times, it was the worst of times —_ but not because good and bad existed together. It was the best of times and the worst of times because for some, it was the best of times. For others, it was the most unsettling of times.
**The Founding Conditions**
Earlier, I contrasted people who look forward to a better tomorrow with those who look backward and pine for a bygone era. To understand those who pine for a bygone era, we have to understand what Hungarian political scientist and former Minister of Human Capacities of Hungary, Bálint Magyar, called _the founding conditions_ and the _Democratic Big Bang._ The Democratic Big Bang is the event or series of events that established a democratic government. He says this: The founding conditions preceding the Democratic Big Bang have a “decisive role in the formation of the system.”
The American Democratic Big Bang is, of course, the Revolutionary War and the ratification of the Constitution. The Russian Democratic Big Bang, in contrast, occurred in the early 1990s when the former Soviet Union broke up. Preceding the Russian Democratic Big Bang was a communist dictatorship in which the Party controlled everything, including all the nation’s industries and resources. Before democracy had time to become firmly established in Russia, the people we now call the ruling oligarchs seized the nation’s resources and control of the central government. By 2012, Russia was once more a dictatorship.
In other words, within a few decades. Russian regressives pushed the nation all the way back to the founding conditions. Masha Gessen, in _How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia_ , argues that this was possible because, during the lengthy period of Soviet dictatorship, Russians developed habits and psychological states that conditioned them to authoritarianism. The founding conditions set the baseline.
In contrast to the Russian founding conditions, here are the conditions that preceded the American Democratic Big Bang:
* The colonies that formed the United States had functioning democratic institutions such as jury trials, local elected governments that managed the day-to-day business of the colonies, and constitutions that protected the rights of the colonists. The hitch was that the democratic institutions protected only the rights of white men — but there _were_ democratic institutions with a long history. If you don’t know about the Zenger trial and how deeply the right to free speech was in the founding mentality, click here and read all about it.
* There was a strict social hierarchy with white men at the top and Black women at the bottom. Slavery was part of that hierarchy. The assumption was later articulated by James Henry Hammond, a South Carolina Senator and wealthy enslaver, who said that every society has a hierarchy, and those at the bottom serve as “mudsills” to create the foundation or support. In other words, those at the bottom of the hierarchy labor for the benefit of those at the top.
* Women who were not enslaved had minimal rights.
* Approximately 98% of the population was Protestant.
* The nation was almost entirely rural. According to the Census Bureau, the percentage of the U.S. population in 1790 living in a city of 2,500 or more was 5.1%. At the time of the Revolutionary War, less than 4% of colonists lived in cities.
* Most power resided locally.
* Gun ownership was part of everyday life for white men in Colonial and early America**.** This was particularly true where there were fears of attacks by Native Americans or uprisings among the enslaved population. Gun laws restricted the rights of non-whites to carry guns. They didn’t want the Native Americans or those enslaved getting their hands on guns. Some areas had laws mandating that white men carry guns.
In other words, the founding conditions are: white Protestant men ruled a mostly rural nation that was almost entirely governed locally.
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times — depending on who you were. Thomas Jefferson had it pretty good.
Now compare the conditions today.
* Our Constitution states in the 14th Amendment that democratic institutions protect all people equally.
* Women have the full rights of citizenship and are in positions of leadership.
* The nation is no longer rural**.** As of 2022, approximately 80% of Americans lived in areas considered “urban” which is now defined as a city with more than 5,000 people.
* Protestants are no longer the majority. As of 2024, only 40% of Americans describe themselves as Protestant.
* In 2024, white voters made up 71% of the electorate. This is down from 95% during the 1950s. The percentage of white voters has been steadily dropping.
* We have gun control laws (well, a few.)
The thing to remember about these radical changes is that almost all of them have happened since the 1950s. That means there are Americans alive today who remember a nation ruled by white Protestant men.
When the most extreme American regressives want to take us back to a bygone era, the conditions they yearn for are those that preceded and immediately followed the Democratic Big Bang. Consider this definition of Christian Nationalism from _Christianity Today:_
Christian nationalism is the belief that “the American nation is defined by Christianity, and that the government should take active steps to keep it that way. America is defined by its ‘Anglo-Protestant’ past, and we will lose our identity and our freedom if we do not preserve our cultural identity.”
_Anglo_ , of course, means _white_. Notice the use of the words “freedom” and “we.”
When the Bill of Rights was drafted, at least six states had government-supported churches. The state governments of each of the thirteen states promoted the religion of their choice. Eleven of the thirteen states had religious qualifications for holding an office. South Carolina, for example, had a provision in its constitution about religion. The first sentence says this:
All persons and religious societies who acknowledge that there is one God, and a future state of rewards and punishments, and that God is publicly to be worshipped, shall be freely tolerated.
You will be not tolerated if you don’t agree that God is to be publicly worshipped. The second sentence says this:
The Christian Protestant religion shall be deemed, and is hereby constituted and declared to be, the established religion of this state. That all denominations of Christian Protestants in this State, demeaning themselves peaceably and faithfully, shall enjoy equal religious and civil privileges.
The founding conditions included a requirement that people worship in the approved manner. The First Amendment opens with what’s called the Establishment Clause:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
It was understood in 1791, when the Bill of Rights was ratified, that “Congress shall make no law” referred to the U.S. Congress. The Establishment Clause thus stated that the _federal_ government did not have the power to impose a religion on the nation. State governments, however, could do as they wished. It wasn’t until the mid-twentieth century that the United States Supreme Court held that the Establishment Clause applied to the states as well as the federal government. The decision was controversial and stirred a considerable amount of anger among some Christian groups.
When Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in 2004, wrote that the Establishment Clause was not intended to protect _individual rights_ , it was intended to protect _states’ rights_ , he was not wrong. The counterargument is that a lot has changed in 200 years — including the Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified after the Civil War and requires states to respect the rights of individuals. Moreover, many of us do not want to live in the eighteenth century.
The regressive view of American history is that something vital is being lost or destroyed. For regressives, history has been a gradual downward slope:
The progressive view, in contrast, looks like this:
The progressive view of American history is that the founders had some pretty good ideas: The idea of a government based on rule of law instead of the whim of a king, the idea of an independent judiciary, and a government that represents “we the people.” The problem, for progressives, is that the founders left out a lot of people. Most progressive forward pushes in American History were attempts to include more people.
Each push forward triggered a backlash.
**Rapid Changes Ignite Authoritarian Backlashes**
Radicals are generally categorized as looking forward to a future utopia. Reactionaries, in contrast, pine for the mythical good old days. “Make America Great Again” is a reactionary call to arms.
Both reactionaries and radicals are willing to break norms and rules to achieve their ends.
Radicals carried out the Russian and French Revolutions. What we learn is that the outcomes of revolutions are unpredictable, and often the result is not what the revolutionaries intended or wanted.
The goal of the French Revolution was to create a society based on reason and individual rights, with a government representing the will of the people. The utopian ideal included liberty, equality, and fraternity. In what we may consider a historical irony, within fifteen years of the French Revolution, the French had a dictator.
The best explanation I have read for how the French Revolutionaries ended up with a dictator is this: The rapid changes of the Revolution created instability and factionalism. Napoleon came to power by essentially making two promises: He promised stability _and_ he promised to carry forward the ideals of the Revolution. He appealed to those who wanted order, _and_ he appeased those who embraced the ideals of the Revolution, so he was able to pull together a large coalition. He did, in fact, take steps to equalize citizens. For example, it was Napoleon who decreed that Jewish citizens should have the full rights of citizenship. He also ruled as a dictator. Notice also that Napoleon the dictator could only happen after the monarchy was abolished. A dictator cannot arise in a monarchy.
The Russian Revolution was also carried out by radicals who looked forward to a better tomorrow. The goal of the Russian Revolution was to eliminate economic classes in order to eliminate economic oppression. It wasn’t long before the Russian Revolution went completely off the rails. While the revolutionaries managed to get rid of the czar, they ended up with a totalitarian state.
A Totalitarian government is defined as a government in which those in power have complete control and do not allow people freedom to oppose them.
The Russian Revolution, which was supposed to lead to a classless utopia, ended up a totalitarian government because Stalin tried to eliminate all opposition, and the only way to do that was to exert complete control over the population, and because people don’t like to be controlled that way, it required the use of force.
When you use force to eliminate all opposition, you end up in a totalitarian government.
Stalin and his supporters justified his use of force and totalitarian methods as necessary to bring about the perfect utopian vision of a classless society.
The inherent contradiction in using brutal violence against your own people to create a perfect society should have been obvious, but it wasn’t.
Aside: The world knows about the Nazi atrocities because photographers entered the death camps after they were liberated. We have seen the grotesque images. We read the memoirs and eyewitness accounts. Stalin, on the other hand – who is responsible for the death and suffering of millions – completely controlled the flow of information. The world doesn’t have pictures, so Stalin’s cruelty remains an abstraction, an impersonal statistic.
Just as the liberals and conservatives form a yin-yang relationship, reactionaries and radicals feed off each other. When right-wing demagogues want to arouse the fears of their supporters, they amplify left-wing rhetoric. Similarly, when left-wing demagogues want to arouse the fears of their supporters, they amplify right-wing rhetoric.
Because of these dynamics, the political spectrum is often illustrated as a horseshoe instead of a straight line. In fact, the horseshoe bends. The far left and the far right meet. They use the same methods. They have similar personality types. They’re just on different “sides.”
**Race and the Law**
Now I will show you how rapid changes in the United States have triggered authoritarian backlashes. I’ll start with race.
At the start of the Civil War, the South removed its representatives from Congress because they intended to leave the Union. When the war ended, Congress refused to readmit the former Confederates until they agreed to a few conditions. The conditions were that the former Confederate states ratify the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments — the Amendments known as the Civil War Amendments or Reconstruction Amendments. The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery or involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed (among other things) equal protection and equal rights for all people. The Fifteenth Amendment removed race as a barrier to voting.
The important point here is that the former Confederates did not agree willingly to these Amendments. These Amendments were literally forced on them.
For a brief time after the Civil War before the South regrouped and regained power, Black Americans enjoyed civil rights. Black men were elected to local offices. Then came the massive pushback, culminating in 1896, when the United States Supreme Court — which was largely sympathetic to the former Confederacy — ruled that racial segregation was legal under the Fourteenth Amendment. (I wrote about this in my biography of Thurgood Marshall.)
This ushered in the era of legalized racial segregation and widespread voter suppression. The goal was to keep white men in control.
Former Confederates also found ways to exploit the exception in the Thirteenth Amendment, which said that forced servitude was consitituional if the person was convicted in court. Law enforcement at the time was local with minimal constitutional restrictions, so Black men were charged with crimes and convicted on scant or nonexistent evidence by all-white juries. Sometimes the police, after arresting a Black man, would beat a confession out of him. Other times they bypassed the judicial process altogether, and the Black person was lynched. Once convicted, the men were put into chain gangs and forced to work.
Then, in the 1930s, Thurgood Marshall, Charles Hamilton Houston, and their team of NAACP lawyers organized and spent decades formulating and carrying out a legal strategy to end legalized racial segregation, protect voting rights, and secure rights for people accused of crimes. Their many achievements included:
* _Brown v. Board of Education_ (1954), which ended legalized racial segregation in the United States,
* _Smith v. Allwright_(1944), which secured important voting rights for Black Americans, and
* _Chambers v. Florida_(1940), which addressed the problem of police officers beating confessions out of defendants.
These decisions, particularly _Brown v. Board of Education,_ paved the way for the modern Civil Rights movement, which in turn made possible the modern women’s movement.
For 200 years, change was gradual. In the 1950s, racial segregation was still legal. There were places in the United States where in the 1950s where Black Americans were entirely cut off from White America. Job discrimination meant that Black Americans were largely confined to menial labor. Housing options were limited due to widespread discriminatory practices. Segregated schools meant that Black children often received an inferior education.
Then, over a period of about 25 years beginning with the Supreme Court’s decision in _Brown v. Board of Education_ declaring segregation in schools unconstitutional, rapid changes created an entirely new social structure.
**Laws Governing Women’s Dependence on Men**
At the time the United States was founded, there was a doctrine known as the Doctrine of Coverture. This lasted in the United States until well into the 19th century. Under this dotrine a woman had no legal identity apart from her husband. This meant, among other things, that a married woman could not be sued, could not enter into contracts, could not borrow money, and could not own property in her own name.
Then, after the Civil War, came the Fourteenth Amendment, which said this:
“. . . nor shall any state . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Women read the Fourteenth Amendment, saw the word “people,” and thought they should be included. One such woman was Myra Bradwell, born Myra Colby in 1831. Myra Bradwell wanted to be a lawyer. She submitted her application for a law license as required by law in Illinois. Her application contained the required court certificate attesting to her good character and the results of her examination, showing that she was qualified to practice law.
The Illinois Supreme Court denied her request for a law license because her status as a married woman would prevent her from practicing law. How, for example, could she sign legal agreements with her clients if she needed her husband’s permission each time she wanted to enter a contract?
Myra Bradwell challenged the decision. The Illinois Supreme Court issued its final response, relying on the fallback position that the Illinois legislature did not intend women to practice law, so the court had no authority to grant a law license to a woman.
Myra Bradwell brought her case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Her argument was a simple one. The Fourteenth Amendment plainly decreed that no state may deny any _person_ equal protection of the laws. She was a person. The Illinois law deprived her of equal protection by refusing to allow her to practice law on the basis of her gender. Therefore, the Illinois law violated the Constitution, and she must be permitted a law license.
The United States Supreme Court ruled against her, saying this:
That God designed the sexes to occupy different spheres of action, and that it belonged to men to make, apply, and execute the laws, was regarded as an almost axiomatic truth.
And this is from Justice Bradley’s widely-quoted concurrence:
Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy that belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. The Constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood. The harmony, not to say identity, of interest and views which belong, or should belong, to the family institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband.
Finally, from Justice Bradley:
The paramount destiny and mission of a woman is to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator. And the rules of civil society must be adapted to the general constitution of things, and cannot be based upon exceptional cases.
Because women were prevented from entering most professions and had limited means of earning a living, this whole situation meant that most women had to get married. Because divorce was almost impossible to obtain, and wife-beating was generally not considered a crime (see, for example, _State v. A.B. Rhodes_, 1886) women were effectively trapped. To borrow Susan B. Anthony’s words, “Woman’s sustenance is in the hands of men, and arbitrarily and unjustly he exercises his power over her.”
Change was slow and there were setbacks. Women in the 1950s, for example, had fewer job opportunities than women in the 1940s because, with so many men off fighting World War II, women were needed to keep the economy moving. When the men returned from the war, women were expected to return to the home. The 1950s, therefore, were more repressive than the 1940s.
Before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, women could be discriminated against in the job market based on their gender.
Before 1974, banks and credit card companies could — and often did — refuse credit cards to women, especially married women, unless they had a male co-signer. Then, in 1974 President Gerald Ford signed into law the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which prohibited banks and credit card companies from discriminating against applicants based on gender or marital status. Even then, discrimination continued due to loopholes.
Okay, so, from the nation’s funding until the mid-twentieth century, not much changed for women. They had to marry. They had trouble finding employment because they were expected to be housewives. Before the pill was widely available, the only real option for most women was to marry and have children.
Then, in a. brief period, everything changed.
The history of rape laws adds another element a man’s dominance over women.
**Laws Governing Rape**
Regressives and reactionaries often express what Dr. Sukhwant Dhaliwal and Professor Liz Kell of London Metropolitan University refer to as a nostalgic harkening back to the ‘golden days’ when men’s superiority was secure. For religious fundamentalists, that is exemplified by male headship of families.
The issue of male power over women versus women’s autonomy is best illustrated through the history of rape laws.
Throughout most of western history, rape was a property crime. An unmarried girl was her father’s property. A married woman was her husband’s property. If a virgin was raped, the property damage was to her father. If she was married, the damage was to her husband. If she wasn’t a virgin and wasn’t married, there was no crime (because the property was already damaged). A man couldn’t rape his wife (his own property) and rape of enslaved women wasn’t a crime. Attempted rape wasn’t a crime because there was no property damage.
Rape laws were generally intended to protect (white) men from false accusations. They were not intended to protect a woman from attack.
The social hierarchy determined how rape was treated. Black men were often convicted or lynched if accused by a white woman. White men were protected from rape prosecutions because, until the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century, women were not considered competent to testify in court. If the only witness to the crime was the victim, and the victim was a woman and the accused was a white man, there was no admissible evidence. Obviously, given the nature of the crime, the woman and the perpetrator are often the only people present.
Rape was seen as the natural result of human nature: Men were viewed as natural aggressors (“boys will be boys”). Because rape was seen as “human nature,” a woman was responsible for guarding the goods. If she was raped, it meant she failed. Her behavior was therefore taken into account: How was she dressed? Was she out alone? Did she scream or call for help? Did she put up enough resistance — even though most women cannot overpower a male attacker, and generally not without sustaining other injuries.
Susan Brownmiller, in a book called _Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape,_ sent shock waves when she argued that rape was not a natural result of human nature: it was a means of exerting patriarchal power. She said this: “Rape is the means by which all men keep all women in fear.” Essentially, she argued that all men, even those who would never rape a woman, benefited from all of this because women needed male protection. It added another layer to a woman’s need for a man. She needed someone to provide for her, and she needed someone to protect her.
As late as the 1970s, a defendant in a rape trial could present evidence that the woman had, in the past, engaged in sexual behavior. This was called the “sexual history” defense, which was based on these assumptions:
* She previously failed to guard the goods.
* The goods were already “damaged.”
* She was unchaste or immoral, which meant her word could not be trusted.
It wasn’t until the 1970s and 1980s—under pressure from women’s activists—that states enacted what are called “Rape Shield Laws.” These laws protect victims and prevent their sexual history from being used as a defense. Nonetheless, the ‘unchaste victim’ exception — based on the idea that if the woman was unchaste, the rape did no “damage” — survived in some states into the 1990s. Mississippi was the last state to remove the ‘unchaste victim’ exception in 1998.
As with the laws governing racial relations, for most of our history, things didn’t change much. Then, beginning with the modern women’s rights movement in the 1960s, the changes were rapid.
For women who enjoy bodily autonomy, the women’s movement ushered in the best of times. For a group that calls itself Incels, it was the worst of times.
Incels began as a benign online community in 1997 for people who had difficulty forming romantic relationships. The term, involuntary celibate, was first abbreviated to “invcel” and then became “incel.”
The founder of the website went by the name of Alana. After a few years, she became comfortable with her own bisexuality. She then turned the website over to someone she didn’t know very well. Over the next 14 years, the users radicalized into a group of vocal and angry men who resent the fact that women can — and do — say no. Today, Incel describes men who seek to undo gender equality. They complain loudly about their frustration that women are not available to them. Many members advocate coercion and rape.
They want to return to the time when women needed men, and girls who wandered alone in the woods were fair game.
A 2022 study published in the journal “Current Psychiatry Reports” and filed in the National Library of Medicine outlines some ideologies that tie incel communities together:
* an appearance-based hierarchy, in which how one looks is considered the most essential key to both sexual relationships and one’s place in society
* a belief in something called female “hypergamy,” which means too sexually selective and use their privilege and sexuality for social advancement above all else.
I love part. All this women’s lib business has given women the right to be very selective. In the old days, a man didn’t have to clean up. Women couldn’t be so picky.
Rapid changes will always feel to some people like something vital has been lost. In a sense, men _have_ lost something. It was also the prerogative of a wealthy man to have access to beautiful women. This was what Trump was alluding to in the famous Access Hollywood tape when he said:
Yeah that’s her with the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful… I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.”
And now, for an amusing aside. Before law school, when I taught college English, I received a memorable course evaluation from an angry student. The student accused me of “ruining a perfectly innocent fairy tale” because I told the class that _Little Red Riding Hood_ was a rape allegory. I said the story was a warning to girls not to wander off into the woods alone because they might not be so lucky as to be rescued by a good huntsman. I said it was a warning to girls about how they should behave and a reminder that they needed a male protector. The student evidently thought I was just a dirty-minded English instructor, but I stand by the rape-allegory interpretation. I mean, for goodness sake, when the big bad wolf attacks Red Riding Hood, he’s in Grandma’s _bed._ The wolf is obviously a metaphorical wolf and not a real wolf because a real wolf can’t say, “The better to see you with, my dear.” And tell me again the color of the girl’s hood?
Listen to this, and I think you’ll see that Sam the Sham agreed with me.
**Democracy is Disordered,
Chaotic, and Always in Danger**
Democracy is always in flux because progressives try to push forward while regressives push backward. The push-pull never ends because there will always be progressives and there will always be regressives and you cannot outlaw divergent ideas without becoming totalitarian and losing democracy.
We left off in the last section with this idea: Throughout much of our history, not much changed. Then, suddenly, beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, everything changed and the changes were rapid.
One reason progress was slow for 200 years is that, for most of our history, we have had a very conservative Supreme Court. If you don’t doubt that for most of our history, the Supreme Court has been extremely conservative, perhaps even reactionary, consider these cases:
_Dred Scott v. Sanford_ (1857): The majority held that “a negro, whose ancestors were imported into [the U.S.], and sold as slaves,” whether enslaved or free, could not be an American citizen and therefore did not have standing to sue in federal court. In addition, the Court held that “the special rights and immunities guaranteed to citizens do not apply to them.” The Court also added that enslaved persons were property under the Fifth Amendment and that any law that would deprive a slave owner of that property was unconstitutional.
It took a Civil War to undo that one.
In 1883, the Supreme Court effectively overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which prohibited racial discrimination in public accommodations like hotels, restaurants, and transportation. The Supreme Court in an 8-1 decision, held that Congress could not regulate private businesses, which helped usher in the Jim Crow era of legalized racial segregation.
_Plessy v. Ferguson_ (1896): The Supreme Court held that separate facilities do not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, thereby legalizing segregation on public transportation.
_Lochner v. New York_ (1905): The Supreme Court said that a law limiting bakery work hours to 10 per day was unconstitutional. The court found an implied “liberty of contract” in the Due Process Clause. In other words, the Court held that under the freedom to enter into contracts, if people were willing to work for pennies per day, the government had no authority to step in.
There was also the time the Supreme Court said the federal income tax was unconstitutional. We needed a Constitutional amendment to fix that one. And how about the time the Supreme Court upheld the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the time the Supreme Court said Georgia had the right to criminalize sexually active gay and lesbian relationships. The list goes on. Mostly, the Supreme Court has been conservative.
Arguably, we have had only one truly liberal Supreme Court in all of our history — the Warren Court of the 1950s and the 1960s, which gave us _Brown v. Board of Education_ and the Civil Rights movement, and the early Burger Court, which gave us _Roe v. Wade._ The liberal Warren Court happened partly because Franklin D. Roosevelt served 12 years in office and appointed a bunch of Justices. Five of the Warren Court justices were appointed by Roosevelt (Hugo Blac, Stanley Reed, Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglass, and Robert Jackson). The sixth, Sherman Minton, was appointed by Truman. Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren. To the horror of some and the delight of others, Warren, who appeared on paper to be a strong conservative, embraced liberal values once he donned his black robes.
As an aside, I’ll tell you that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who, before taking her place on the Supreme Court, spent her career changing the law to help women gain autonomy. She was happy with the result. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a lifelong advocate for women’s rights who, as an activist lawyer before becoming a Supreme Court Justice, did much to change the laws governing women. She agreed with the conclusion in _Roe v. Wade,_ but she believed the court used the wrong reasoning. She said the Court should have decided the case under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment instead of the idea that the Constitution contains an implied right to privacy. The first rule of statutory interpretation is that you cannot add words that are not there. And of course, the chief complaint of social conservatives is that the ruling in _Roe v. Wade_ rests on a precarious constitutional argument.
Conservatives accused the Supreme Court of making law instead of interpreting the law. For example, they argued that the Constitution says nothing at all about abortion or privacy rights, so how can the Constitution protect those rights? They argued that there is nothing in the Constitution that gives the federal government the power to tell private restaurants who they can serve. They accused these courts of “judicial activism,” by which they meant, “making up stuff that the drafters of the Constitution never intended.
In the 1970s, a theory of constitutional interpretation called originalism emerged in response to the liberal courts of the 1950s to the 1970s. Originalism holds that a law or legal text should be interpreted as it was intended by the original drafters. Now, this makes sense for law enforcement officers, who should always try to figure out the lawmaker’s intention because, under the separation of powers doctrine, the job of an enforcement officer is to carry out the legislative intent. On the other hand, interpreting the Constitution as originally intended enables regression because the Constitution was originally written by white Protestant men who deliberately left out everyone else.
To illustrate how the theory of originalism has been applied to the Second Amendment as a means for taking us backward, I will offer a history of the Second Amendment.
The Second Amendment was drafted by enslavers who were afraid that a strong federal government would disarm or outlaw local militias. This was important because local militias were necessary to enforce the plantation system. The discussion about the need for the Second Amendment began in the Virginia State House when Virginian leaders were debating whether to ratify the Constitution. The delegates were enslavers who were worried about whether the federal government would take away their guns. George Mason contemplated the fact that the new Constitution gave the federal government control over armies and militias:
“The militia may be here destroyed by that method which has been practised in other parts of the world before; that is, by rendering them useless by disarming them,” (Waldman, Michael. _The Second Amendment: A Biography_ , p. 38.)
Without armed militias to control the enslaved population, these men knew just what would happen.
Patrick Henry came right out and said what was on everyone’s mind. First, he said that locally controlled militias were their “ultimate safety.” He reminded the audience that slavery was ‘detested elsewhere’ and suggested that the federal government’s power to call up militias could be used to end slavery. (Yeah, this is the guy who said, ‘Give me Liberty or Give me Death.’ He meant liberty for himself. He didn’t mean for the people he enslaved.) He pointed out that the federal government could abolish slaver anytime by simply calling the states’ Black men into military service and then setting them free. Others agreed. (I wrote about all of this in more detail in my recent book on the Bill of Rights.)
The Second Amendment was drafted by James Madison, who attended this meeting. The Second Amendment says:
_A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed._
For most of our history, the phrase “a well regulated militia” was interpreted literally — the states and local governments could organize militias.
The NRA was founded in 1871 by Gen. George Wingate (a General in the Union Army) and Col. William C. Church, a journalist who volunteered to serve in the Union Army because they were appalled by the terrible marksmanship of Union soldiers. At the time, there was very little training for soldiers. Soldiers were expected to bring their own guns and come prepared to fight. Wingate and Church saw themselves as training and preparing future American soldiers. The NRA was thus founded as a gun safety and marksmanship training organization.
For the first century of the NRA’s existence, the organization was politically neutral, supporting both gun rights and certain gun safety regulations.
In the 1970s, as the Civil Rights movement gained momentum, the NRA underwent a significant ideological shift. In 1977, there was a power struggle within the NRA between the ‘old guard’ and a more radical faction. The power struggle erupted in what has been called the ‘Cincinnati Revolt.’ The NRA leadership was taken over by a group that advocated for unrestricted access to firearms. They advanced the idea that the Second Amendment protected an individual’s right to own guns, not just a collective right tied to militia service.
This idea has been adopted by modern militia movements. Modern militias believe the federal government has become unwieldy and tyrannical. They believe that, as a result of changing demographics in urban areas, the federal government no longer represents their interests. They embrace what has been called the insurrection theory of the Second Amendment, which says that the Second Amendment protects the unconditional right to bear arms for self-defense, and that includes defense against a tyrannical government. Thomas Jefferson once said that “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing.” The idea is that when governments become too tyrannical, people should rebel.
So yes, they believe that they have the right to armed resistance against the federal government if the federal government becomes tyrannical. Recall that the federal government was the driver in the major changes of the 1950s through the 1970s.
White power militias look at the changing demographics and put forward a theory called the “great replacement” or “white genocide,” theory, which holds that there is a deliberate plot to replace or diminish the power of white people in Western countries through non-white immigration. They are determined to fight against what they see as white genocide.
Meanwhile, as these militias were organizing, the new NRA leadership was busy doing grassroots organizing, including working to elect politicians who support the idea that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to own guns. By 2008, the Supreme had taken a sharp turn to the rights. Seven of the Justices had been appointed by Republicans. That was the year the Supreme Court decided the landmark case, _District of Columbia v. Heller._ Five of the conservative justices held that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess firearms. Here was the argument: In the eighteenth century, militia members were expected to provide their own guns. Therefore, the right for governments to form militias included the right for individuals to own guns. Of course, soldiers don’t provide their own guns anymore, but Scalia’s idea was that the Second Amendment had to be interpreted as intended by the eighteenth-century men who drafted it.
The way to get another liberal Supreme Court is to elect presidents who will nominate liberal justices and Senators who will confirm them. I know it’s not easy, but that’s the only way.
**Democracy versus Oligarchy**
Another driver in the cycle that keeps democracy in flux — and always in danger — is that democracy is always in danger of slipping into oligarchy.
Oligarchy: A situation in which a small group of people has control over a country, organization, or institution.
This idea Is from Heather Cox Richardson’s book, _How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America._ In this book she explains that democracy is always in danger of slipping into oligarchy because some people, when they acquire power, use their power to benefit themselves.
She explains that the United States has had two oligarchies, and we are currently slipping into a third. The first oligarchy existed during the plantation era, when 1% of the population—mostly large plantation owners—controlled 90% of the nation’s wealth and resources.
The second oligarchy was the age of robber barons. This oligarchy emerged after the Civil War, when influential members of the Republican Party—who had briefly held complete control of the federal government—adopted a policy known as laissez-faire economics or the free market economy. This theory holds that the economy works best when the government doesn’t interfere. Among other things, free market proponents in this era argued that personal liberty meant that if a worker agreed to work ten hours for a few pennies, it was none of the government’s business. They also argued that, because slavery was illegal, if employers offered bad working conditions, people would look for other jobs, so the market would take care of the problem. They believed that taxing businesses penalized them for high levels of production.
The result was an almost complete lack of regulations. There were no laws against insider trading, manipulating the stock market, or unethical banking practices. This period allowed intense economic growth and industrialization. It also allowed for widespread cheating. The absence of regulations allowed a relatively small group of industrialists to accumulate disproportionate wealth and power, bringing America into its second oligarchy.
To put it bluntly, it was a time when white men could do whatever they wanted. While the frontier was open, they could grab land. Given the rape laws in effect, they would grab women. Because there were no laws against cheating, they could grab wealth and power.
Then along came Franklin Delano Roosevelt with his New Deal, which introduced regulations and regulatory agencies. New Deal offered worker protections, a minimum wage, and a 40-hour work week. All of this helped solidify the middle class and reduce income inequality, laying the groundwork for further growth in the post-WWII era. At the same time, corporate malpractices became more difficult.
One result of the New Deal was the dramatic expansion of the size, complexity, and power of the federal government. When you add the Civil Rights legislation, you can see that a significant amount of power no longer resided locally. It now resided in a large, complex, sprawling federal government with hundreds of alphabet-soup agencies.
Then came the backlash from those who call themselves fiscal conservatives.
(As an aside, we can note that sometime around the 1970s, conservatives divided themselv.es into social conservatives and fiscal conservatives. The social conservatives objected to such things as desegregation and _Roe v. Wade._ Fiscal conservatives distinguished themselves. They had no issue with the social changes and wanted to distance themselves from these social movements. They were proponents of the free market and objected to the government regulating business and industry.)
Ronald Reagan and his concept of Reaganomics marked the beginning of a movement toward deregulation, supply-side economics, and tax cuts. While there were immediate benefits in market growth, there was long-term harm in economic inequality. Today, as a result, income inequality is reaching levels similar to those in the 1920s, and we are edging toward our third oligarchy.
Some people believe nature naturally forms a hierarchy. The strong and capable rise to the top. The weak need to be led. When the government attempts to boost the weak or the poor, they believe the government is helping the weak at the expense of the strong. Taxing the wealthy to pay for welfare strikes them as stealing from the rich to give to the poor. They believe the wealthy should be encouraged to donate to charities, but should not be forced to donate. This has been expressed in the recurring theme of the “makers” and “takers” theory. The idea is that the makers are those who produce, and the takers (who take what belongs to the makers) are, to use Ayn Rand’s word, “looters.”
**Regulated Capitalism is the Best Economic System,
But (most) Capitalists Don’t Want to be Regulated**
I’ll just go ahead and state this as a fact: Regulated capitalism is the best economic system. Regulated capitalism offers the benefits of capitalism: Innovation is fostered, economic growth is promoted, and opportunities expand. Wider choices are available to consumers. Regulated capitalism generally brings a higher standard of living.
Regulating capitalism creates more fairness, which increases the benefits of capitalism by preventing things like market manipulation, insider trading, false advertising, and worker exploitation. If cheating isn’t allowed, genuine innovation is encouraged. The prize then goes to true innovators instead of those who figure out how to manipulate and cheat others. Regulation allows for more freedom and opportunity because more people have the opportunity to participate.
The problem, of course, is that (most) capitalists fight against regulations. “We will make less profit, but the general population will benefit,” is, I assume, rarely the consensus of a corporate Board of Directors.
We thus have yet another driver in the push-pull dynamics. Capitalists want to eliminate regulations, even though regulations protect capitalism from its own potential excesses.
Another, related driver is that too much income inequality puts a strain on democracy by concentrating power in the hands of a few. This undermines equal access, while those with wealth resist giving up their privileged status. The pushback comes from two sources. First, obviously, people who are wealthy do not want to give up their wealth, and in fact, will fight hard to retain the privileges the wealth brings. People without wealth may also fear that if the government can take steps to reduce income inequality, their own savings may be in danger.
**Democracy is Chaotic and Disordered**
Even on a small, local scale, people push in different directions. If you don’t believe me, run for local office and try to get something done. It took my community years to get a much-needed traffic light. Yes, many voters opposed the traffic light, even though you could see with your own eyes that people waited for a break in the traffic and then darted across four lanes because they didn’t want to walk a mile and back to the nearest traffic light. (Can you guess which side of the traffic-light issue I was on?)
Whatever you suggest, no matter how sensible it seems to you, there will always be opposition. That’s why a large, complex, sprawling representative democracy like the United States, consisting of hundreds of separate jurisdictions — including bureaucracies to administer the regulations — looks like this:
As Professor Andriy Chirovsky said, “Democracy is messy. Authoritarianism is neat.” Some people cannot tolerate the complexity, the messiness, and the give and take of democracy. They long for order. They want all people to be the same.
Autocracies offer order. There is structure. People don’t pull in different directions because it isn’t permitted. Everyone knows their place. In an autocracy, you can feel reassured that others think as you do, and if they don’t, they keep their views to themselves. Autocracies look like this:
These are the same images I used in Part I to illustrate “this is the world” and “this is the world with your brain on ideology,” because for an autocracy to function, a controlling ideology is essential. Enough people must have an unshakable belief that the autocrat or monarch has divine rights, divine wisdom, or the unique power to save the nation—something that sets them apart from ordinary people.
People accept autocrats either because they want order and stability or because they don’t like what is happening, so they want an autocrat to take control and reverse what they don’t like. This is why autocrats, to come to power, either take advantage of existing chaos or create chaos, anxiety, and fear and present themselves as the solution.
For most people, life in an autocracy goes on: They get up in the morning, have their coffee, go to work, and take care of their families. The differences are that, in an autocracy, you don’t criticize the leader, you do what you are told to do, you believe (or pretend to believe) whatever you are told to believe, and you know that if you get into trouble, you cannot count on help from the government. People living in autocracies often avoid talking about politics altogether.
Here is the catch: Eventually, autocracies topple. A personalist dictatorship has a particular vulnerability: Uncertainty about the succession. In Russia, for example, nobody knows what will happen when Vladimir Putin dies. Personalist rulers often avoid designating a successor or creating a succession mechanism out of fear of losing control. They are afraid the successor will consolidate power while the personalist ruler is still alive. Not designating a successor keeps rivals uncertain and vying for the personalist ruler’s favor.
Monarchies and family dynasties are more stable because the heir is the monarch’s offspring, and the king can generally count on his own son or daughter not to bump him off to acquire power. Moreover, being the son or daughter of the king is lovely enough so that the heir is generally content to wait. Monarchy, however, has its own serious flaws. Suppose, for example, the king’s son is a nut case?
A representative democracy, in theory, creates a meritocracy because the voters can (though often do not) vote for the most competent leaders.
Part of what makes democracy messy and imperfect is that people are imperfect. James Madison wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” If we were angels, democracy would work perfectly – but then, we wouldn’t need a government in the first place.
**A Large, Sprawling, Diverse Multi-Cultural Democracy Is Always in Danger**
If you define democracy as a representative democracy in which all citizens have an equal voice, the United States has a stable history. However, if you understand the word “citizen” to include “all adult citizens,” you are talking about a different thing altogether. When you define democracy as including all adult citizens, you are talking about something that the United States didn’t even really try until the modern Civil Rights and women’s rights movement.
Many of the founders who called themselves “anti-Federalists” believed the lesson to glean from the ancient democracies of Greece and Rome was that democracy thrives best when citizens share a common climate and culture. This is why many of them believed power should remain local. Even then, democracy is difficult. As the saying goes, if you put two people in a room, you will get three opinions.
Existence pain includes knowing that our world is messy, imperfect, and in constant flux, and democracy is never easy. People overwhelmed by the messiness or unable to handle complexity may long for a leader who they believe can restore order. They want perfection, which leads them to seek an ideology to mask the pain of uncertainty.
Consider these messages:
* People are coming to take our jobs.
* People less qualified than we are taking our jobs, and it isn’t fair.
* The wholesome countryside of rural America is being corrupted.
* The cities are teeming with crime, immorality, and vices such as drug use.
* What is essentially American is being lost.
* We are being invaded by foreigners who want to change America into something else.
* We are governed by a faraway central government that is out of touch with our local values.
* We need to protect women’s sports.
* Trust science. There are only two genders.
In the hands of skilled demagogues, these kinds of messages, which play on fears that come from from rapid changes, can send a person into an ideological spiral.
Some people who respond to the above messages may have a vague feeling of unease, discomfort, or fear without understanding the source of those fears and anxieties. Things have moved too quickly, so they are uncomfortable. They don’t understand globalism. They may feel isolated. They may feel like something is missing. Life feels hard, and they look for someone to blame. They want easy answers to complex questions.
Even people who are mostly liberal can suddenly feel like “Okay, now things have gone too far.” There may be more people like that than we realize because they may be afraid to say how they feel.
Evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists tell us that our brains are poorly equipped to cope with globalization. Until recently in our evolutionary history, humans were concerned only with their immediate surroundings. The world was a simpler place. Humans knew that large predatory cats were dangerous, they knew that the neighboring group might make war on them, and they knew which berries were good to eat. Today, our lives are interconnected with people who live on the other side of the planet.
Put another way, our technology has outpaced our wisdom to manage it.
If life is hard, a person may look for someone to blame. Such people are vulnerable to the siren call of a demagogue. A person who cannot hold a job as a casual laborer may be taught to blame immigrants for taking his job. A man continually rejected by women can be taught to blame the changes that have made women independent.
And now I’ll offer lyrics from _South Pacific,_ a musical that tackled the issue of racism in 1949. Keep in mind, when you listen, that when this song was first played on Broadway, racial segregation was legal. The modern Civil Rights Movement was in the future.
There was much pressure on Rodgers and Hammerstein to remove the song because it was considered too controversial. James Michener, the author of the book on which the play was based, later recalled that Rodgers and Hammerstein “replied stubbornly that the number represented why they wanted to do the play, and that even if it meant failure of the production, it was going to stay in.” The song so offended some lawmakers that they introduced a bill to outlaw entertainment having “an underlying philosophy inspired by Moscow.” By that, they meant communist. And by that, they meant going against what they believed was essentially American.
It’s not born in you! It happens after you are born!
You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear.
You’ve got to be taught from year to year. . .
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
(Click here for the entire song)
The idea that you have to be carefully taught is exactly what the neuroscientists now tell us about how ideologies take root. A vulnerability may be inborn, but you’ve got to be carefully taught.
South Pacific is really all about racism. The singer of the song has fallen in love with a Tonkinese girl. Another character, Nurse Nellie Forbush, discovers that the man she has fallen in love with, Emile de Becque, fathered two mixed-race children. She recoils when she learns this. When Nellie leaves Emile, he is heartbroken and takes on a dangerous mission. In his absence, Nellie spends time with his children. Her prejudice is eased when she gets to know the children. People tend to be comfortable with what they know and feel familiar with. It is the new and different that can be frightening. In the end, of course, Nellie overcomes her prejudice.
The artist shows the way. Art, after all, is condensed life — it takes sprawling, messy experience and compresses it into a form that reveals something about us. _South Pacific_ is about how, eventually, what is different and alarming can become the new normal, and then may no longer be frightening.
### **Panic and Constant Outrage**
### **Weaken Democracy**
When my Gen-Z son saw the title of this section, he perked up and said, “That’s the whole point of _Star Wars_!” He explained, “The entire first half of _Star Wars_ is about how panic and outrage enabled the Chancellor to take control of the Senate and create the Empire.” Well, of course. We’ve seen that demagogues and would-be autocrats either create chaos or take advantage of existing chaos to seize power. They do this by inciting fear, pulling people into ideological spirals that harden their thinking and make them more easily led.
Demagogues and would-be autocrats, however, are not the only people who benefit from inciting panic and fear. There is big money to be made in peddling powerful emotions. Harold Hill, after all, wasn’t interested in power. He wanted to earn a quick buck. In the world of the Internet and social media, skillfully inciting or inflaming panic and outrage can bring an ordinary person wealth and fame.
And you are the target. Some take the bait — and it’s easy to do. Others tune out the noise and disengage from politics entirely, which, though easier, creates a new problem: Widespread apathy. The ideal response is to filter out the noise and engage with politics in a more productive way. But that’s not easy.
Demagogues are good at inciting panic. Panic is a sudden, intense reaction to a threat in the environment. It is a basic, primal emotion rooted in the evolutionary older parts of the brain and linked to survival and self-preservation. Panic triggers a fight-or-flight response. For most of our evolutionary history, we lived in proximity to predators. If a cave dweller were out gathering nuts and berries and heard a threatening noise, this would obviously not be the appropriate response:
Panic can serve a useful purpose. One evening, a raccoon came over our fence and got into a fight with our 12-pound terrier. I had about one second to respond. I dashed outside and shouted to startle the animals, which gave them a moment to separate. I then did something I would have never thought I could do. I picked up a plastic Adirondack chair and hurled it at the raccoon. I don’t know whether the chair hit him or just scared him, but while the chair was still bouncing on the patio, he scrambled over the fence and ran away.
The dog required a trip to the vet, stitches, and shots. Years later, I still tell the story in disbelief. “ _I threw a chair at a raccoon!”_ (I consider myself an animal rights activist and can make a decent argument that the raccoon has as much right to the land as I do.) I am also a very small human being. I was able to hurl that chair because I was in a panic and I didn’t have time to think about what I was doing. Panic and adrenaline saved the dog, who _should_ have selected flight over fight, but try explaining that to a terrier who probably thought _he_ saved the day.
Panic is useful in the face of immediate danger. But when it comes to political matters, we’re usually dealing with events beyond our direct experience. That’s why panic serves no good purpose in the political arena. More effective responses rely heavily on the rational and deliberate parts of the brain. Civilians of an occupied country cannot mount an effective resistance while in the throes of panic. An effective resistance requires a cool head and strategic planning. The leaders who have done the most to improve our world thought strategically – a feat impossible when panic takes over.
I’ve been receiving pleas for donations from a state governor whose name you all know, who assures me that if I don’t donate money **_now, now, now_** all will be lost. I don’t fault him for this. He’s raising money. That’s what politicians do. (And yeah, I give him money.)
Anger, like panic, is a primal emotion rooted in survival instincts. While panic triggers a fight-or-flight response, anger readies a person to confront danger head-on. Outrage does something more. Outrage brings in a sense of moral judgment and fairness. It involves more evolved parts of the brain associated with social interactions, moral reasoning, and concepts of justice. Outrage is more contagious and prolonged than anger. It has a group-oriented, public-facing nature, often aligning with collective calls for justice.
_Wait_ , you’re probably thinking, _aren’t calls for justice good for democracy?_
Calls for justice can be good for democracy, and outrage can lead to positive social reform. Outrage can also lead to revolution, violence, and the destruction of institutions. Unless the goal is to destroy an existing power structure or start an actual war, prolonged collective outrage is risky. As Harold Hill understood, people who are frightened tend to make bad decisions. When people are frightened enough, they are more likely to follow a demagogue. People who experience extended fear and outrage are at risk of going into ideological spirals. In addition, continual outrage, particularly when coming from multiple sources, creates chaos. It can turn people against each other and set up the kind of situation that demagogues and would-be dictators can use for their benefit.
One of the drivers of panic and outrage is the current information revolution.
**Information Revolutions Create Chaos**
The current information revolution is allowing misinformation, rage, and panic to be disseminated at dangerous levels, which creates another layer of chaos and complexity in an already complex world.
The first information revolution was the invention of the printing press. In 1455, after Gutenberg invented the printing press and published his first book, a Latin-language Bible, he reportedly said, “God’s word shall be carried far and wide.”
God’s word was not the only thing carried far and wide. Before the invention of the printing press, people got their news from town criers, who were appointed by local authorities. Their job was to announce new decrees, laws, and important events. Written letters were another source of news, but these were almost exclusively exchanged between scholars and members of the upper classes who had the leisure to write letters. Book ownership was limited to those with wealth. Written material disseminated to the public had to be painstakingly copied by hand. The average person was not confronted with written material on a large scale until the invention of the printing press.
Broadsides were papers printed on one side and distributed widely. Broadsides often contained important news and information, but just as often, they spread destructive lies and malicious gossip to a population untrained in evaluating the reliability of sources. Unsubstantiated rumors flew. Political unrest was fomented.
While the printing press didn’t cause the Protestant Reformation, it was the most important driver of it because it allowed the reformist ideas to be disseminated at an unprecedented speed and scale. People, swept up in the moment, took to the streets in anger. The Church, also, tended to respond too quickly and in too heavy-handed a manner. All this ignited sectarian violence and religious wars that fractured Europe for centuries.
Eventually, people learned to evaluate written sources. Once books and reputable publications became widely available, consumers of news came to understand that a broadside nailed to a tree very likely had less credibility than a book or publication by a respected scholar and publisher.
**Yellow Journalism**
In the late nineteenth century, news outlets were competing for readers. Publishers in need of readers discovered that sensational and rage-inducing material sold more newspapers and magazines, which gave rise to a style of news coverage known as Yellow Journalism. This new form of journalism emphasized sensationalism, bold headlines, and creative presentation over facts. William Randolph Hearst – the most well-known of the yellow journalists – allegedly said, “You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.” The selling of sensationalized news made William Randolph Hearst a wealthy man.
Yellow journalism reached its peak in 1898 after the United States deployed the USS Maine to Havana, in a show of U.S. military power. On February 15, 1898, an explosion sank the ship. The initial report from the Cuban colonial government, confirmed by witnesses, was that the explosion occurred onboard. Both William Randolph Hearst and his rival Joseph Pulitzer had been fueling anti-Spanish sentiment to sell newspapers. Following the sinking of the Maine, both Hearst and Pulitzer published inflammatory rumors, stirring public outrage with accusations of a Spanish plot to destroy the ship.
Eventually, a public reaction against Yellow Journalism prompted the rise of a new kind of reporting. The new form of reporting was serious and fact-based. Tabloids continued, but eventually they were relegated to racks at the supermarket and were widely known to be mostly – if not entirely – fiction. A long time ago, in what feels like another lifetime, I was a graduate student studying creative writing. (Yes, I have both a master’s in fiction writing and a law degree, which I know lends itself to jokes.) Anyway, I had a classmate who said he wanted to write for one of the supermarket tabloids because he thought they had the most creative fiction. I could never tell whether he was joking about this career ambition.)
From the 1940s until the 1980s, there were only a handful of mass-market media outlets. As a result, “media producers sought to appeal to as wide a swath of the American public as possible,” typically by offering viewers what NBC vice president Paul Klein called “the least objectionable programming.” (_Wrong_ , p. 172) Programming was neutral, calm, and factual. Broadcasts and major publications reached a large enough audience that no attempt was made to sensationalize the news. Sets were boring. Anchors like Walter Cronkite recited facts.
The three major broadcast networks – ABC, CBS, and NBC – were subsidized from commercial advertisements and the profits from highly rated prime-time dramas. The evening news was thus available to anyone with a television set. People in this era typically received their news once or twice a day, either through a morning or evening newspaper or via the evening broadcast. At the same time, large circulation and revenue from advertisers kept the price of newspapers low.
Consumers absorbed the day’s news and then went about their business.
Media reporting from the 1940s through the 1960s also fueled some of the rapid changes. Iconic images disseminated widely in the media include the body of Emmitt Till, a fourteen-year-old lynched in Mississippi. Another photograph captured Elizabeth Eckford, a 15-year-old taunted by an angry white mob as she attempted to attend Central High School after the high school was ordered to integrate following the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in _Brown v. Board of Education_.
The third image is from the March on Washington in 1963. It was the first nationally televised march. All three major networks – NBC, CBS, and ABC interrupted their regular programming to provide live, wall-to-wall coverage of the event. Photographs captured thousands of people peacefully assembled, demanding civil rights and justice for African Americans. The television coverage galvanized nationwide support for civil rights.
These images were seen by a great many people who had never fully considered civil rights issues. Suddenly, their sympathies—and yes, their outrage—were aroused. These images shocked the conscience of a significant portion of the population.
Although the goal was neutral reporting, social conservatives complained that their views were not being represented in the mainstream media. One key viewpoint of social conservatives, particularly among Southerners who resented being forced to integrate, was that the federal government should not interfere in the decisions of local school boards or private businesses. They argued that restaurant owners should have the right to decide who they wanted to serve. Another key viewpoint of the social conservatives was that local jurisdictions should retain control over law enforcement and education.
Given this, it may seem surprising that conservatives were responsible for abolishing the Fairness Doctrine, which required, among other things, that broadcast networks devote time to contrasting views on issues of public importance. However, the fiscal conservatives believed that producers should be allowed to include whatever they wished and should not be compelled to go against their judgment by federal regulations. In 1985, FCC chairman Mark S. Fowler, a lawyer who had served on Reagan’s campaign staff, released a report stating that the doctrine hurt the public interest and violated the free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. The idea was that broadcasters should be allowed to do what they please.
Recall from the Zenger Trial that free speech was one of the founding conditions.
The FCC’s report that the Fairness Doctrine violated the First Amendment was controversial, including among some conservatives, who argued that the Fairness Doctrine was the only thing that kept networks from lambasting Reagan’s economic policies. But the FCC panel voted to repeal the Fairness Doctrine. Congress, which was in the hands of Democrats, passed a bill to prevent this, but Reagan vetoed the bill. Reagan, like Fowler, believed that the Fairness Doctrine represented a form of control and censorship over what media outlets could do.
Less than one year after the Fairness Doctrine was repealed, Rush Limbaugh launched his radio show. Limbaugh presented himself as a conservative alternative to mainstream media. He was also an entertainer. In his words, “I happen to have great entertainment skills.” He was intentionally incendiary, making comments like these: “Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society,” and “Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?” Limbaugh soon amassed a large audience and earned tens of millions of dollars annually. At the peak of his career in the 1990s, he had an estimated 20 million listeners. In 2018, _Forbes_ listed his income as $84.5 million.
Much of Rush Limbaugh’s audience used his show as their primary source for news, marking the start of media fragmentation. Over the next forty years, media audiences continued fragmenting.
The fracturing of the media market accelerated in the late 1990s with the introduction of cable news networks: CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. Keeping in mind the limitations of political spectrums, I will refer to Fox News as targeting right-wing audiences and MSNBC as targeting left-wing audiences. These are known as partisan news shows. If we understand “news” to mean “factual” – or as close to factual as possible given that biases necessarily creep in – the label “partisan news” is a contradiction in terms.
Something like this happened before. During the _Partisan Press Era_ (1790s-1820s), the idea of journalistic objectivity did not exist. The Federalist Party controlled its own newspaper, while the Democratic-Republicans controlled a different newspaper. To stay informed, people read the newspaper from each party, contrasted the views, and decided where they stood.
The rise of cable news programs created a 24-hour news cycle, which meant lots of time to fill. Meanwhile, news itself had to be made profitable because cable news shows didn’t have revenue from successful sitcoms to subsidize news reporting. To generate revenue, cable news shows had to find a way to keep viewers glued to the screen. Sets became glitzy. Hosts became performers. To hold the attention of audiences, cable news introduced what political scientist and communications professor Dannagal Goldwaithe Young calls the _Partisan Pundit:_
The phenomenon of the “partisan pundit” is a useful television (especially cable) news routine that embraces the conflict frame while offering emotionally evocative performances of partisan identity. Pundits are talking heads who appear on the news not to “report” news but to talk about the news.
Cable news programs frequently assemble panels of pundits (for example, journalists, experts, and partisan commentators) who argue about the topic, tie that topic to broad themes in the culture war, and typically do so with the “in your face” interpersonal conflict style that increases viewer engagement while also increasing viewers’ hostility toward the other side. (p. 144.)
Young describes the characteristics of TV pundits like this:
Pundit panels are characterized by performances of intellectual arrogance or ‘I am not listening because I just want to show I’m right.’ Intellectual arrogance plays well on television, whereas intellectual humility does not. In fact, we rarely see intellectual humility modeled in our mediated political world. When we do, it’s from the occasional appearance of scientists—people trained to never prove things or remove themselves from doubt. They don’t speak in absolutes or forevers. They speak with caveats and conditions and often answer with “Time will tell” and “for now this seems to be the case. (p. 145)
Recall from Part I that _intellectual arrogance_ is one of the markers that distinguishes ideological thinkers from those with more flexible thinking. Those with intellectual humility are more flexible thinkers. The problem is that intellectual humility isn’t entertaining. “Give me a minute to think about that,” followed by a deep contemplative silence is boring. On the other hand, watching people argue and pound tables with their fists can be riveting.
Notice what is happening: As media markets fragment, outlets compete for viewers, and we have the rise of a new and improved form of Yellow Journalism.
Partisan pundits include a new category of show people: TV lawyers. Peter Arnella, a law professor emeritus (UCLA Law), who was also one of the first TV legal pundits for ABC news, wrote a piece that appeared in the _Chicago Legal Forum_ in 1998 called _“_ _The Perils of TV Legal Punditry_ _.”_ In it, he delivered a scathing account of how TV lawyers are entertainers who must “evoke strong emotions in the audience.” Arnella saw that outlets needed viewers, so they needed to provide content that would sustain readership and viewership. They therefore needed pundits willing to speculate and put forward gripping theories. Arnella later offered this _mea culpa_ (which I am quoting with his permission):
I worked for a major network in the 1990s. I started by commenting on high-profile Los Angeles criminal cases —Rodney King, McMartin, Menendez brothers, and OJ’s criminal/civil trials. I either attended these trials, or I closely observed them. The network wanted to expand my role by using me to comment on national high-profile criminal cases that I had not watched. These were cases where I could only rely on media accounts by lay journalists who did not understand the legal complexities involved. I took the work.
My reckoning came when impeachment charges were filed against President Clinton for lying about a sexual affair with one of his staff. A producer wanted me to debate Alan Dershowitz, my former teacher at Harvard Law School. Initially, I refused. I pointed out that, as a professor of criminal law, my expertise was not in our impeachment history, which meant I would be commenting as a private citizen. My producer replied, “Peter, our demographics show that our viewers see you as “a more objective academic with no particular political interest in the outcome of this process.”
To my regret, I did that interview. That was when I realized I had fallen prey to the seductive power of being anointed a “national expert” on all legal issues. Embarrassed by my decision to do that interview, I quit my ABC consulting position and returned to my real passion: teaching and writing about important and troubling criminal law issues.
When I started working for ABC News, I naively believed that I could educate the viewing audience about complex criminal law issues. What I learned is that TV legal commentary usually legitimates whatever TV producers view as the current audience consensus about some high-profile case. Instead of educating the public, far too much televised legal commentary simply serves as a mirror that reflects back to its particular audience what it already believes.
What Arnella describes is programming that confirms the pre-existing biases of the viewers, which neuroscientists tell us is both pleasurable and addictive. Information that confirms our beliefs can trigger the release of dopamine, the “feel-good” neurotransmitter. Having our biases confirmed feels good, so we want more.
Tufts University professors Sarah Sobieraj and Jeffrey Berry, authors of “ _The Outrage Industry: Public Opinion Media and the New Incivility,”_ explain that what they call the outrage industry – which includes cable news programs, political blogs, and talk radio – encourages “agent provocateurs,” a phenomena that was a nearly unthinkable risk in the era of the least objectionable programming. Rush Limbaugh was obviously not interested in attracting a wide audience. He was interested in captivating and keeping his niche audience, which was large enough to allow him to charge high rates to advertisers.
Professor Dannagal Goldwaithe Young cites this _New York Times_ piece about Fox News’ internal “minute-by-minute rating data.” This data, which records real-time audience ebb and flow, allowed Tucker Carlson, who hosted a nightly political talk show on Fox News from 2016 to 2023, to adjust his script as the show was in progress to get the most reaction from his audience.
A 2013 Pew Research Center study found that 85% of MSNBC’s programming was commentary or opinion. Fox News did better with 55% commentary or opinion and 45% factual reporting. CNN was more balanced, with 46% commentary and 54% factual reporting. The problem, of course, as confirmed in this Harvard Kennedy School / University of Illinois 2024 study, is that many Americans have a difficult time distinguishing fact from opinion. A great many Americans are getting opinions about the news, but think they are getting news. What they are getting are bias-confirming and rage-inducing performances.
See what is happening here? Consumers of news are being pummelled with rage-inducing material. Recall the discussion about the authoritarian personality from the first sections. When the fears of those with authoritarian tendencies are not aroused, their authoritarian tendencies will lie dormant. However, when riled, their authoritarian tendencies come out. Also, remember that factors such as fear and panic can make a person more susceptible to ideological thinking.
Not all commentators who appear on cable news deliver bias-confirming, emotionally evocative performances. That would be predictable and boring. There are balanced and thoughtful commentaries. Scholars are often invited onto the shows. Some regular commentators are thoughtful and measured. But it’s the emotionally laden performances that are most memorable. Neuroscience explains why. The amygdala, the emotion processor, becomes highly active during a rage-filled performance. This releases stress hormones like noradrenaline and glucocorticoids, which “tag” the experience as important for long-term storage. Calm, nuanced performances, on the other hand, fade because the brain treats them as less significant.
Popular cable news hosts achieve star status. In the words of Sobieraj and Berry, “Unlike a conventional news program, in which the news itself is central and anchors are often replaced, there would be no _Rachel Maddow Show_ without Rachel Maddow.” These hosts are not reporters. They do not break news. “Instead, they reinterpret, reframe, and unpack news from the headlines, political speeches, or claims made by other outrage hosts.”
News reporters earn about $60,000 per year. Rachel Maddow earns $25 million annually.
Dannagal Goldwaithe Young, in her book _Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive our Appetite for Misinformation_ ” explains how the current media environment is driving an appetite for conspiracy theories. She offers this definition of a conspiracy theory:
Conspiracy theories are allegations that remain unsubstantiated. They attempt to explain the ultimate causes of significant social and political events and circumstances with claims of secret plots by two or more powerful actors. They also assume that powerful people operating in the shadows are bad actors deliberately keeping the public in the dark. (p. 42)
Young humbly opens her book with a personal anecdote about how, when confronted with a situation that was confusing and incomprehensible, she immediately looked for a way to assign blame.
She describes how conspiracy theories evolve:
* People face a situation that is confusing or seems incomprehensible.
* They look for a way to assign blame.
* They grasp onto an easy-to-understand theory that assigns blame.
* The theory will be reinforced if people in their community and people they identify with (or look to as an authority) also hold the theory.
* Holding a conspiracy theory gives them a renewed sense of energy. Instead of feeling out of control, they have an explanation.
* Fueled by anger, they become defiant—but they have a direction. They feel they have agency. They can get behind a banner. They feel back in control.
Notice that a conspiracy theory doesn’t have to be unhinged. It simply needs to assign blame for a confusing situation. Young makes clear that conspiracy theories arise in both left-leaning and right-leaning media ecosystems.
Also, notice that conspiracy theories arise when people face a situation that is confusing or seems incomprehensible, and the modern world of globalism is incomprehensible to a lot of people. Our legal system has grown so complex that it is incomprehensible to most people. The complexity of the modern world, therefore, gives rise to conspiracy theories.
Sobieraj and Berry agree that outlets that target left-wing audiences and outlets that target right-wing audiences use the same tactics, but Sobieraj and Berry say this:
Our data indicate that the right uses decidedly more outrage speech than the left. Taken as a whole, liberal content is quite nasty in character, following the outrage model with accusations, conspiracy theories, and ridicule. Conservatives, however, are even nastier. (p. 42)
Right-wing media is better at all things outrage, including making money. Back when Rush Limbaugh was earning $59 million annually, liberal outrage manufacturers were only in the single-digit millions. My explanation is this chart:
The Republican Party has moved farther from the center than the Democratic Party and is thus better at all things involving outrage, including figuring out how to profit from it.
**Enter Stage Right, The Performance Master of Outrage: Donald Trump**
Trump is a product of the current media environment. Before running for president, he was a reality TV show host. He therefore understands how this all works. Among the things he understands is that the way to get more media coverage is to be as outrageous as possible. He pulls people into an outrage cycle that looks like this:
1. He does something outrageous that shocks or enrages his critics.
2. The same act thrills his supporters because it carries symbolic significance: The act, in some form lands a blow on the liberal establishment.
3. When his critics exhibit a strong reaction, his supporters feel an even greater thrill because he is proving he can take on the enemy. “Trump is a radical,” they say approvingly. “He is upsetting the applecart. He is fighting for us.”
4. Meanwhile, Trump keeps himself center stage and controls the conversation.
Trump enlarged the public appetite for news. People who, before Trump, had never followed the ups and downs of politics, tuned in and remained glued to their screens to see what outrageous thing he would do next.
In 2015, MSNBC had 132,000 prime-time viewers. Then Trump happened, and MSNBC experienced a bonanza. By 2020, MSNBC had a whopping 2.2 million viewers. Overnight, MSNBC cable news hosts became left-wing heroes. Their social media followings skyrocketed. Social media influencers who nobody had ever heard of before were born, spreading outrage over Trump’s latest, and quickly amassing large followings. New online media outlets were created to feed the sudden appetite for news. They didn’t break news; they aggregated news that someone else broke and reported. Some news outlets and accounts did nothing but offer minute-by-minute reporting of each outrageous thing Trump did or said.
This has been called the Trump Bump. Former CBS executive Les Moonves said this about Trump’s impact on ratings: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.
It was common in left-leaning circles to mock Trump’s word salads and indecorous behavior. He wrote in all caps on social media. He talked in circles. How, his critics wondered, did such a figure of absurdity become president?
In a book called _Demagogue for President_ : _The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump_ by Texas A&M University professor Jennifer Mercercia, who is decidedly not a Trump supporter, stood against the crowd of Trump-mockers and argued that Trump’s gaffes are not gaffes. She pointed out, for example, that he effectively uses a device known as _ad populum_ (“appeal to the crowd”) by deliberately positioning his lack of political correctness as genuineness. He positions speaking in a manner acceptable to the mainstream as being “scripted,” which he then equates with going along with corruption. The result is that the more outrageous his comments, the more “truthful” he appears to his supporters and the more they admire him.
Maybe, just maybe, Trump is fooling his critics who think he’s a fool.
#### **Part 6:
****Social Media Makes It Worse**
The Internet, which created the second major information revolution after the printing press, did more than simply facilitate the spread of misinformation and disinformation. It transformed how people communicate. In the words of Eli Parser, author of _The Filter Bubble,_ “The forces unleashed by the Internet are driving a radical transformation in who produces news and how they do it.” (p.
Because the cost of producing and distributing information is falling close to zero, people are deluged with choices of what to pay attention to. A person with a Substack account charging $5 per month per subscription can earn $10,000 per month with only two thousand subscribers. The only requirement is to write content that appeals to – and hooks – a few thousand people. Where once there was CBS, NBC, ABC, and major newspapers striving to reach as large an audience as possible, audiences are now broken down into numbers as small as a few thousand. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2024, about a quarter of all consumers of news got their news “often” from social media. An additional 24% get their news “sometimes” from social media. This encourages tailoring news and commentary to fit narrow tastes and specific demands.
Social media as a source of news has created a phenomenon known as ideological filter bubbles, which are built through algorithms. An internet algorithm draws on vast amounts of user data to predict and deliver the content each person is most likely to find engaging. The term “filter bubble” was first coined by Eli Pariser, in his 2011 book, _The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You._ ” He showed that when a person searches for information online, algorithms show users personalized content based on their online behavior, such as search history, location, and past clicks. This means that users are shown information that aligns with their existing beliefs and interests, thereby reinforcing those views.
The Pew Research Center has found that nearly all the content people see on social media is chosen, not by human editors, but rather by algorithms. On a social media platform, the algorithm will suggest other people to follow based on who the user already follows and the kind of content the user engages with. This is how people end up in ideological filter bubbles.
Ideological filter bubbles are highly efficient, conspiracy theory and rage-generating machines. It works like this:
1. Person A sees a Misleading Headline or a headline stating an opinion as if it is a fact.
2. Person A clicks on it, skims the article without reading closely, thereby missing the subtlety. The person clicks “like.”
3. The algorithm then shows Person A lots of like-minded partisans talking about the opinion given in the article as if it is a fact.
4. The algorithm shows the person a “Legal Expert” commenting approvingly on the Misleading Headline. The algorithm is smart enough to show a “legal expert” who shares Person A’s political views. (I have learned that every lawyer becomes a legal expert on social media. In real life, there are good lawyers, mediocre lawyers, and bad lawyers. On social media and cable news, all are “legal experts.”)
5. Person A is then persuaded that the Misleading Headline is true.
6. Over the coming days, weeks, months—or even longer—Members of Person A’s community continually reinforce her beliefs.
Person A, by herself, is simply a misinformed person. Multiply Person A by hundreds of thousands – or even millions – of people in an ideological filter bubble, and you have a situation.
In a 60 Minutes interview, Facebook whistleblower Haugen explained Facebook’s internal research found that “angry content” is more likely to receive engagement. She said that content producers and political parties are aware of this. In her testimony before Congress, she said that Facebook algorithms deliberately incentivize angry, polarizing content. Social media users who want to amass a large following in political filter bubbles learn quickly that content that either confirms the biases of their audiences or generates anger will bring them more engagement.
Social media algorithms create conflict by elevating material that promotes division and creates rage. _The Platformer_ learned that Twitter, under Musk’s leadership, maintains a list of around 35 VIP users whose accounts it monitors and offers increased visibility. The list includes:
* _Daily_ _Wire_founder and conservative commentator Ben Shapiro
* Pseudonymous conservative commentator @catturd2
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY
Ben Shapiro and @Catturd2 enrage the left. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez enrages the right. Elevating these users stimulates engagement by riling people. Getting people fighting is profitable because the revenue stream for X (formerly Twitter) is advertising.
There is a thing on X called _dunking_. The dunkee says something outrageous or painfully stupid. The dunker reposts the statement and dunks on it by adding a clever or snarky statement intended to highlight the outrageousness or stupidity of the statement. This works best if the dunkee is a public figure.
Both sides think they win a dunking contest. The dunker shows how clever he or she is, and the dunkee gets to be the star of a show entitled “Watch Me Trigger the Enemy.” The dunking game drives up partisanship and increases engagement.
The left-wing media ecosystem and the right-wing ecosystem have been erroneously called echo chambers. An echo chamber implies that people in each ecosystem are only exposed to views from their own side. In fact, audiences in each ecosystem are continually shown the views of the other side. After all, that’s what dunking is all about.
Zmigrod compares online political communities to life in a “tightly controlled propagandist state.” (p. 222.) She says this:
“Take a vulnerable mind—sensitive to negative information and threats, cognitively rigid, impulsive—and place this mind in an environment that selectively preys on these biases, and it becomes possible to understand why these spaces, though toxic for everyone, are especially toxic for people who are at baseline already psychologically vulnerable. The more technology obfuscates the source, truth, and reliability of images, texts, videos, and reports, the more likely it is that digital environments will be radicalizing spaces.” (p. 222)
The current incendiary media environment, which activates the authoritarian instincts of people while vilifying people on the other “side,” does something more sinister than simply exacerbating the polarization. Recall the words of Judge Learned Hand:
The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women.
People whose fears and rage are continually active in this manner become less free and less humane. They are being carefully taught to hate and fear.
**The Other Divide**
The authors of The Other Divide (2022), Yanna Krupnikov, a professor of political science and communication, and political scientist John Ryan, show that the main division in United States politics isn’t between the left and the right. It’s between a relatively small group of vocal hyper-partisans and the larger group who have elected to tune out the noise. Because vocal, deeply involved partisans attract disproportionate attention, this group wields an outsized influence on how Americans perceive politics.
Sobieraj and Berry divide Americans into three groups: The first group is uninvolved in politics. They pay no attention, and they generally don’t vote. The second group focuses on politics when something is important to them, and they vote. The third group – the vocal hyper-partisans, of course, vote. They also genuinely dislike rank-and-file members of the opposing party. Some members of the third group even wish ill on out-partisans. In contrast, people in the first and second groups may dislike the policies of some opposing party leaders, but they bear no ill will against people who vote for the opposing party.
Krupnikov and Ryan dispel the popular notion that the outrage industry is a result of polarization. They argue instead that the outrage industry arose because it was profitable. The outrage industry, however, has exacerbated the problem of polarization.
**My Social Media Adventure**
In 2018, when my social media adventure began, I knew nothing about algorithms, the outrage industry, the dangers of partisan punditry, or ideological filter bubbles. I was soon to get a crash course.
One of my earliest lessons was how easily we can be deceived online. Two anonymous accounts claiming to be lawyers had me believing for a while that they were, in fact, lawyers. They posted about legal matters and offered legal opinions. When I realized they were not lawyers, I confronted each of them privately. One soon deleted his account because he overreached, made absurd predictions, and imploded. The other is still online pretending to be a lawyer. Faking being a lawyer takes work because he has to read legal stuff and then comment on it. I figure he has been faking it so long now that he probably knows as much as some real lawyers.
I also saw firsthand how the sheer complexity of our legal system can give rise to conspiracy theories. My first “viral” thread on Twitter (back when it was Twitter) happened in September of 2018 when a few of my followers – in a panic – asked me about a case going to the United States Supreme Court, _Gamble v. U.S._ , which they insisted would expand Trump’s pardon powers and therefore undo the Special Counsel probe into the Russian election interference in the 2016 election.
As president, Trump already had the power to issue pardons for federal crimes, so I did some digging and read the briefing. The case had nothing whatsoever to do with the presidential pardon power or the Special Counsel investigation. The case was about a man in Alabama named Terance Martez Gamble who was convicted of possession of a firearm and sentenced to an Alabama prison. After he was convicted in state court, federal prosecutors sought to charge him with the same crime. He appealed, arguing that being tried and convicted for the same crime violated the Double Jeopardy clause of the U.S. Constitution, which states:
“. . . nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb. . .”
Unfortunately for Mr. Gamble, in 1959, the Supreme Court had affirmed something called the Dual Sovereignty Doctrine. This doctrine holds that because state and federal governments are separate jurisdictions, a person who violates both state and federal law can be charged in both.” Gamble was challenging the constitutionality of the Dual Sovereignty Doctrine and asking the Supreme Court to overturn it.
I could not understand how people leaped Terance Martez Gamble, challenging a double conviction in Alabama, to Trump escaping justice in the Special Counsel probe. I traced the confusion to an article in _The Atlantic_. The title was “ _A Supreme Court Case Could Liberate Trump to Pardon His Associates._ ” Notice the subtitle and accompanying image.
The image alone would make people think the case was about Donald Trump. The language in the subtitle, “could still have consequences” and “isn’t related to the Russia investigation,” should have been a clue that the connection was remote and the article contained speculation. The theory presented in the article was _if_ the dual sovereignty clause was abolished, and _if_ Trump was found to have committed a crime in connection with Russia’s attack on the 2016 election, and _if_ the crime could be charged in both federal and state court, and _if_ the feds went first, Trump could only be charged in federal court, and not both federal and state court. This would “expand” Trump’s pardon power because he could then pardon himself or his associates in the only jurisdiction where he could be charged.
There are a lot of “ifs” in the theory connecting the case to Trump. The “evidence” presented for why the case was really about Trump and not Mr. Gamble was that Republican Senator Orrin Hatch urged the Supreme Court, in an amicus brief, to overturn the Dual Sovereignty clause. The theory was that if a conservative Senator tried to influence the outcome, it must be good for Trump; therefore, it wasn’t really about Terrence Gamble serving two sentences. It was about Trump escaping justice.
The problem with that theory is that Republican Orrin Hatch was a longtime advocate of prison reform. The argument Hatch made in his amicus brief was that the Dual Sovereignty clause should be overturned because it infringed liberty and violated the Double Jeopardy Clause. Hatch made a decent argument. Is it really fair for someone to serve two sentences for the same crime? If each sentence, separately, was deemed by the respective legislatures to be appropriate for the crime, surely essentially doubling the punishment would be unjust.
As a result of the framing that _United States v. Gamble_ was about the pardon power, the case got a lot of attention. Other outlets picked up the framing of the story.
There is that word “could” again.
A celebrity who often spoke out against Trump hatched the theory that the Republicans were in a hurry to confirm Brett Kavanagh to the Supreme Court so that Kavanaugh could help Gamble win, which would allow Trump and pals to escape justice. Here is what she posted to her three million followers on Twitter:
This is why the GOP is so desperate to confirm Kavanaugh. So that they can all receive a get-out-of-jail free card once their myriad of criminal activities are revealed . . .like, say, allowing Russia to hack our elections.
I wrote a Twitter thread explaining why _Gamble v. United States_ wasn’t about the pardon power and why, even if there were crimes to charge Trump and his associates with, it was unlikely to impact the Special Counsel’s investigation. This of course did nothing to allay the panic, so I coauthored a piece for _Slate Magazine_ with Fordham law professor Jed Sugarman explaining the same thing. As you would expect, our article also did nothing to allay the panic. You cannot put out forest fires with a squirt gun.
As it turned out, Gamble lost and would have to face prosecution for the same crime in federal court. Brett Kavanaugh, along with five other Justices, voted to uphold the Dual Sovereignty Doctrine. In other words, Kavanagh didn’t vote the way (according to the going theory) would help Trump. That’s because it wasn’t about Trump. It was about Mr. Gamble and the dual sovereignty doctrine. Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Neil Gorsuch dissented. They agreed with Orrin Hatch that the Dual Sovereignty Doctrine was fundamentally unfair and undermined the Double Jeopardy Clause. For whatever it’s worth, I agree.
**Left-Wing Conspiracy Theories and Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories**
Now I’ll show you examples of left-wing and right-wing rage-media-generated conspiracy theories. I’ll randomly take all examples from the same week in March of 2024.
On March 25, 2024, we learned that an appellate court reduced Trump’s bond from $450 million to $175 million. The case was called _New York v. Trump_. A lower court in New York found Trump liable for inflating his net worth on financial statements over the course of a decade to secure better loans and insurance deals. Trump appealed. To postpone paying the penalty while the case was on appeal, he was required to post a bond. Trump told the court that he didn’t have the cash to cover $540 million. He said that securing that amount was a “practical impossibility.”
The bond is not intended to be a punishment. It is intended to prevent the winning party from executing the judgment while the appeal is pending. Several well-known pundits confirmed for cable audiences that what the court did when it reduced his bond amount was not uncommon.
Here is what factual news reporting would look like:
A New York appeals court reduced the amount Trump must pay as bond from $450 million to $175 million – and gave him an additional 10 days to post it. Trump claimed that securing the cash to cover the bond amount was a “practical impossibility.”
The only real issue is whether Trump was lying about whether he could cover the bond amount, and nobody could answer that question without examining his finances. We can speculate about whether he was lying, but speculation isn’t news.
Now I’ll show you how MSNBC legal expert Tristan Snell responded to the news. The clip (which you should be able to listen to here) is from his appearance on MSNBC.
The lead is an emotionally evocative quotation from Snell, “This is so infuriating.” In the recording, Snell said, “This is so infuriating, I don’t even care what the process is, how the judge arrived at this. I just know it is flawed.” Snell says he agrees with someone else, who implied that Trump is getting special treatment because of who he is. Snell says, “Trump gets his own private court of justice. He has a private plane; he has private clubs that he lives in . . . be basically fashioned his own private militia to try to take over the Capitol (on January 6, 2021) . . . now he gets his own system of justice. It would not happen for anybody else.”
He then says that anyone except Trump who claimed not to have the cash would be told, “Sorry, buddy, you lost. Pay up.”
It seems to me that if that were true, if a person who couldn’t afford the bond could not appeal, it would mean that only wealthy people would be permitted to appeal large judgments. What Snell offered was an angry tirade implying that the court, behind the scenes, was behaving unethically. In real life, of course, lawyers are always having rants about what courts do. The reality of court showdowns is that one side loses, and the losing side often feels angry.
But this isn’t news. It’s a personal rant. I’ve delivered a few of these myself to friends and family when a client doesn’t get the result I believe they deserved. In situations like reducing bond amounts, trial judges have discretion. We don’t know why the court made the decision it did because we don’t have access to the court’s reasoning or the evidence presented.
But people listening to Snell on MSNBC will take what he says as truth instead of an angry rant that the judge didn’t do what he wanted the judge to do. Just listening to him made me feel tense and angry. I can see how his audience will feel a righteous anger at this horrible, terrible miscarriage of justice.
He posted this on Twitter:
Notice the attempt at humor: What is “breaking” is the New York justice system, and the implication is that the courts are cheating on Trump’s behalf.
The response meets the criteria for a conspiracy theory as given by Dannagal Goldwaithe Young. Something happens that appears “inexplicable.” _Trump’s bond was lowered!_ They look for a way to assign blame. _The courts are corrupt!_ They feel part of a group of like-minded outraged citizens, in this case an enormous media audience and the 2.9 thousand people who left comments. I glanced at a few. They were outraged by this miscarriage of justice!
I’m not sure this is the right analogy, but it seems to me a case of crying wolf. If there is an earth-shattering crisis every day, won’t some people get numb to it?
The counterintuitive part is that some people will become addicted to the rage. Neuroscientists tell us that this kind of rage feels good because it confirms the biases of the audience and allows them to get behind a banner. They feel in control. They will tune in tomorrow for more, which drives up ratings. We can call it, “Enraging people for fun and profit.”
Here is another example from the same day in March of 2024. The story began a few weeks earlier in a different case, _The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump_ , more commonly known as the Hush Money Case. What happened was this: Trump’s legal team claimed that the prosecution dumped millions of documents on him at the last minute as part of a “strategy to hide the truth.” They therefore asked for an extension for an upcoming deadline. On March 14, 2024, the court agreed to a 30-day delay to assess Trump’s claim.
Factual reporting would look like this:
Trump claimed that, because of a last-minute document dump, he could not meet his deadline. In response, the court agreed to a 30-day delay to assess Trump’s claims.
Before I show you the spin, hype, and a conspiracy theory, I’ll tell you how the story ends. On March 25, after the Court had a chance to assess the alleged discovery document dump, Judge Merchan found that Trump and his lawyers misrepresented the facts and that there were no errors on the part of prosecutors. (By the way, in the legal world, lawyers don’t lie. They misrepresent the facts. If you are a lawyer and a court accuses you of misrepresenting the facts, you’re in big trouble.)
The judge, who was visibly angry at Trump’s team, said: “It’s incredibly serious, unbelievably serious. You are literally accusing the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and the people involved in this case of prosecutorial misconduct and trying to make me complicit in it.”
On March 14, when Trump was given his extension – before anyone had any facts – Andrew Weissman appeared on MSNBC. You can see the clip from the MSNBC YouTube channel here.
The headline offers an emotional quotation from Weissman, “You’ve got to be kidding!” The host opens by presenting Trump’s claims of a document dump as if it was true, even though she didn’t know. She then implies that the prosecutors screwed up. She asks legal expert Andrew Weissman, “What is going on?” He speaks firmly and decisively when he says, “At the very least, this is a massive screw-up on the part of the Southern District of New York Prosecutors.” He accuses the SDNY prosecutors of “poor judgment.” Law professor Melissa Murray, who also appeared on the show, instead blamed U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland for the screw-up, which never actually happened.
This, too, is a conspiracy theory. Nefarious and corrupt insiders are blamed for something that appeared inexplicable. The inexplicable fact was a last-minute document dump. Before finding out what actually happened, these TV lawyers jumped in to blame the prosecutors.
When the facts came out, I checked the social media feeds of both Melissa Murray and Andrew Weissman to see if they apologized for their errors. I found no apology or admission of error. They were on to the next outrage. In this new world of outrage media, nobody admits error. There is no collective memory in a filter bubble. Members of the audience come and go. The people who remain are already on to the next outrage. When confronted with contradictory facts, confirmation bias kicks in, and they find ways to dismiss the evidence.
Now, for an example of a right-wing conspiracy theory. Here are the facts: On March 26, 2024, at 1:28 am, the Francis Scott Key Bridge across the Patapsco River in Maryland collapsed. Six members of a maintenance crew who were working on the railway were killed. Two more were rescued from the river. While the cause has not been fully determined, a preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board several weeks after the accident indicated a container ship lost power and drifted into a support pier, triggering a catastrophic chain reaction that led to the collapse into the river.”
Immediately after the bridge collapsed, a member of the Republican Party who served in the Florida House of Representatives, posted this on social media:
“DEI stands for “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The implication, of course, is that the bridge collapsed because unqualified people were hired because of their race.
Fox News personality Maria Bartiromo mused that the “wide-open border” was responsible for the bridge collapse, and she blamed Joe Biden’s immigration policies.
Matt Schlapp on Newsmax said the bridge collapsed because of “drug-addled” employees and covid lockdowns.
From these examples, you might conclude that the right wing does it better. The right-wing conspiracy theory is more simply stated and more graphically presented. It is also clear what the right-wing pundits hoped to gain. They dislike immigration, DEI as a policy, and COVID lockdowns. Blaming the things you dislike for anything that goes wrong achieves the goal of making other people hate the things you dislike. This, in turn, furthers the goals of a platform that wants to curtail immigration and end DEI hiring.
The left-wing conspiracy theories are more subtle and less graphic. Second-guessing a court’s decision and suggesting that the courts are corrupt, or Trump gets preferred treatment, or the prosecutors screwed up is much less direct. It is also unclear to me what the left-wing gains by attacking the legal system as corrupt. Do they really want Americans to hate the legal system? Turning people against the legal system does not benefit liberal policies. My conclusion is that MSNBC pundits needed a compelling story, and anything related to Trump will interest viewers. Accusing the prosecutors who indicted him of screwing up engages and riles the audience.
I am not suggesting that the left wing needs to get better at this. I am suggesting that consumers of news need to see through what is happening. The partisan pundit model is making people less informed and angrier, which pushes people into ideological thinking and extremism.
#### **CONCLUSION**
The problem can be broken down into seven parts:
1. The information revolution is causing large numbers of people to confuse spin, speculation, and constructed narratives with facts. Because of separate ideological filter bubbles, we no longer operate from a shared set of facts.
2. Panic and outrage generate engagement and therefore fund the new media systems. Being constantly pummeled with fear and anger-provoking content sends people deeper into ideological spirals.
3. The world has undergone rapid changes over the past 70 years. The United States government and legal system have grown increasingly complex. We live in a global economy. The increasing complexity of our world has surpassed our ability to keep up. In evolutionary terms, our brains are not equipped to fully understand or navigate this brave new world. Put another way, our technology has outpaced our wisdom to manage it.
4. The very complexity of globalism and our legal system generates conspiracy theories because people look for simple explanations to explain what seems incomprehensible.
5. Some people are just uncomfortable with the changes. For example, some men are uncomfortable with women’s independence.
6. A great many people are malleable and will believe what authorities tell them is true. In our age of fragmented news media, “authorities” often include talk radio stars, cable news pundits, and anyone with a social media account who speaks with enough force.
7. A lot of people don’t like being told what to do. When the frontier was open – and before the rise of federal regulations and regulatory agencies – there were not many rules. Now people who think they can (and should) grab what they wish are forced to integrate into a society governed by volumes of regulations.
The question is, how do we resolve this?
I will begin with what doesn’t work. If someone is trapped in an ideological filter bubble, calling the person names will not help. I suspect that no one has ever stopped being deluded because someone said, “You are deluded.”
You also can not argue them out of their position by confronting them with facts. Keith M. Bellizzi, a professor of Human Development, explains why, when it comes to politics, new facts often do not change people’s minds. A challenge to a person’s worldview may feel like an attack, which can cause that person’s views to harden. What psychologists call cognitive bias kicks in when people encounter evidence that contradicts their firmly held views. Instead of reevaluating their beliefs, they reject the new evidence.
Bellizzi offers this advice:
Presenting new things in a nonconfrontational way allows people to evaluate new information without feeling attacked. Insulting others and suggesting someone is ignorant or misinformed, no matter how misguided their beliefs may be, will cause the people you are trying to influence to reject your argument. Instead, try asking questions that lead the person to question what they believe. While opinions may not ultimately change, the chance of success is greater.
Earlier I said that some take the rage bait, which is easy to do. Others tune out the noise and disengage from politics entirely, which, though easier, creates a new problem: Widespread apathy. The ideal response is to filter out the noise and engage with politics in a more productive way.
But how?
Karen Stenner reminds us that those with authoritarian vulnerabilities are simple-minded avoiders of complexity — and they are also malleable. If one side makes them feel reassured that we are all united with shared values, they will transfer their loyalty to that side. It might seem obvious, but if you want a productive political discussion, start by finding common cause with people and avoid directly attacking their views. Affirm as much as you can.
Another tactic I have found effective is to say, “The divide isn’t left versus right. It’s the extremists on either end versus people who are more balanced.” I suspect this works because nobody thinks of themselves as an extremist. Everyone believes they are balanced. The extremists are over there. The reasonable people are here.
Plato’s concern for democracy was that too few people can think deeply about the complex issues inherent in politics. He also believed that people were too susceptible to the siren call of a demagogue for democracy to be stable.
Our task is to prove Plato wrong. Karen Stenner’s research has led her to conclude that about 1/3 of the population are what she calls “simple-minded avoiders of complexity.” That leaves 2/3 who should be able to think about the complex issues inherent in politics. The non-extremists must find a way to re-establish a shared factuality and set a new tone for discussing politics.
The question is: How? Here are a few ideas.
**1. Look for neutral sources of news.**
Ignore overly sensationalized reporting. Rely on neutral (nonpartisan) outlets that stick to facts. Avoid environmental hotbeds for ideological thinking. Support non-partisan news reporting.
Support unbiased news reporters whose job is to uncover the news. Remember that the people doing the hard work are earning about $60,000 per year. The people delivering emotionally evocative performances are earning millions. Good reporters are necessary to a functioning democracy. Find ways to support people who stick to the facts.
We must insist on non-partisan news reporting that engages the more evolved parts of our brains.
If something enrages you, look to see what reasonable people with alternative viewpoints are saying and ask yourself why they are saying whatever it is. Recall Learned Hand’s admonition that the spirit of liberty seeks to understand the minds of men and women.
**2. Withhold judgment as long as you can.**
Back when I taught college English, I noticed that most of my students were quick to judge literary characters, but slow to sympathize with them. I thought this was a problem. I agreed with John Updike, who said the purpose of literature is to enlarge our sympathies.
There are a myriad of ways to enlarge our sympathies, which, in turn, help us become more flexible and nuanced thinkers. The study of literature is one way. The towering literary figures endure because they reveal essential truths about human nature. Shakespeare understood the authoritarian personality long before the phrase was coined. If you don’t believe me, read _Julius Caesar_ and pay attention to the behavior of the crowds. Read _Richard III_ and notice how easily the citizens and noblemen accept Richard as their savior against supposed threats.
The study of history is another way. History offers perspective and shows that there is more than one way forward. When we look back and study what has been, we see the wisdom in King Solomon’s words:
“What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.”
I found that the work of a criminal defense lawyer is also excellent practice for withholding judgment and trying to understand the minds of men and women. The job of the defense lawyer is to say things like, “Let’s look more closely at the facts,” and “Let’s consider what happened from the viewpoint of the defendant.” The question defense lawyers often get is, “But what if they’re guilty?” Another – and perhaps a better – question is: “But what if they’re not?”
**3. Make Politics Cool Again**
The loud, angry, hyper-partisans dominate the conversation, drowning out more nuanced perspectives and shaping the way we think about politics. It’s time for the rest of us – the majority – to recreate what sociologists call the public sphere. The public sphere, which is necessary for a functioning democracy, is a place where citizens come together to exchange ideas regarding public affairs and eventually form public opinion. It can be a specific place where citizens gather (like a town hall meeting) or a communication infrastructure where citizens send and receive information and opinions.
There is a wonderful passage in historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, _Team of Rivals,_ a book about the Lincoln era, in which she talks about how, in the nineteenth century, politics was a concern to all citizens. (Okay, white male citizens, but you get the point.) She opens Chapter Three, “The Lure of Politics,” with this:
A cave-dweller with a philosophical frame of mind who heard the approach of a predatory cat and stopped to consider all possible responses while contemplating the point of view of the cat would most likely be lunch meat. Parts of our brains are still in the “watch for predatory animals” stage of evolution. This creates more problems than it solves because now we live in a world of the Internet and a global economy. We are generally not in danger of predatory cats. We are, however, in danger of facts being lost in a tidal wave of speculation, spin, and conspiracy theories.
Most political events happen outside our personal experiences and are given to us through symbols. The best response to any political situation, therefore, is to pause, delve more deeply, and think about the best response.
Thank you for reading this far. I have disabled my comments, so **if you want to send me a correction, comment** , or **question,** click here:
This is long for a blog post, so I am considering a downloadable PDF or maybe reading it in segments as a podcast. I’ll let you know. https://terikanefield.com/whyextremismhappens/
