Tag Archives: Donald Trump

“There’ll Be More Death”

Health, Politics,

The American oligarchy has spoken. For wealthy Americans, the cure is worse than the disease. We will restart the economy, regardless of how many lives are lost. Donald Trump is deliberately implementing a policy that he knows will result in hundreds of thousands of additional deaths.

From President Trump:

There’ll be more death. The virus will pass, with or without a vaccine. And I think we’re doing very well on the vaccines but, with or without a vaccine, it’s going to pass and we’re going to be back to normal.

We can’t keep our country closed. We have to open our country. . . . Will some people be affected? Yes. Will some people be affected badly? Yes. But we have to get our country open.

I used to say 65 thousand, and now I’m saying 80 or 90. And it goes up, and it goes up rapidly.

And look, we’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100 thousand people.

From Governor Greg Abbott, as he announced the reopening of Texas businesses:

Listen, the fact of the matter is pretty much every scientific and medical report shows that when you have a reopening—whether you want to call it a reopening of businesses or just a reopening of the economy—in the aftermath of something like this, it will actually lead to an increase and spread.

From former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie:

The American people have gone through significant death before [in World Wars I and II] . . . and we’ve survived it. We sacrificed those lives.

Christie added that the sacrifice was necessary “to stand up for the American way of life.” When asked whether the American people would be willing to tolerate this many deaths, he replied, “They’re gonna have to.”

Drawing on a military analogy, Trump and Christie have referred to those who are about to die as “warriors,” hoping we will see them as having sacrificed their lives for their country. In fact, Trump is not making war on the coronavirus but surrendering to it in order to achieve herd immunity. As Vox columnist David Roberts noted, rather than referring to workers, the elderly and the sick as “warriors,” a more appropriate term might be “cannon fodder.”

How many Americans will die? On May 4, the New York Times leaked a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicting that, if we reopen the economy, we will have 200,000 new cases and 3000 deaths per day by June 1. This is up from the current 25,000 cases and 1700 deaths per day. Epidemiologists predict that, assuming a mortality rate of 1%, allowing deaths to continue until we achieve herd immunity will result in about 2 million American deaths.

As usual, as Trump and his surrogates were making these grim announcements, the corporate media were obediently obscuring their importance by distracting us with trivial “issues” such Trump’s decision to tour a face mask manufacturing facility without wearing a face mask.

Letting the virus run its course conveniently coincides with Trump’s reelection strategy of hoping that a majority of Americans care more about their pocketbooks than the lives of their fellow citizens. Despite unanimous recommendations from experts that we need more COVID-19 testing, Trump rejected their advice, saying that “by doing all this testing, we make ourselves look bad.”  Does “ourselves” refer to the American people, or just the Trump administration?

It’s easy to dismiss Trump as an obvious sociopath, but he speaks for the American financial and political oligarchy that is quietly but ruthlessly taking pages out of the class warfare playbook. They began by passing trillions of dollars in bailouts, and ensuring that the majority of the funds would go to those corporations and individuals who are least in need of the money. (For details, see this article.) Needless to say, these bipartisan corporate welfare bills passed Congress almost unanimously.

However, in order to restart the economy, the corporate class still faces two problems. First, in order to reopen businesses, they must persuade workers (and sometimes consumers) to risk their lives and those of their families. This is to be accomplished through economic blackmail. Although figures are hard to come by, a high percentage—perhaps a majority—of working Americans are either ineligible for unemployment, or have not received it yet due to a bureaucratic system designed primarily to prevent fraud. Many of these same people have lost their health insurance. These workers will have to choose between risking death from COVID-19 and starvation.  (The weakest link in Trump’s plan may be the fact that consumers will usually not have to make this choice.)

Trump issued an executive order directing meat packing plants to remain open during the pandemic in spite of unsafe conditions. Republican governors of three states, Iowa, Oklahoma and Texas, have announced that workers who refuse to return to work when their workplace reopens will be ineligible for unemployment benefits. Denying benefits to people who have turned down a job is apparently legal and is likely to spread.

A second possible problem for corporations is that, should they fail to provide safe working conditions, they might be held legally responsible for the deaths or illnesses of their workers. Senator Mitch McConnell has announced that one of his conditions for approving any future coronavirus relief is that Congress grant employers immunity against any lawsuits from employees or their survivors.  Trump’s Justice Department has stated that they intend to take the side of meat-packing companies should they be sued by their workers for not providing a safe environment.

Whenever we turn on TV, we are bombarded by insipid messages from corporate America claiming “we’re all in this together” (and presumably all equally in need of the sponsor’s product). This message becomes a form of black humor in a country where not everyone has been rescued by the government and not everyone will be protected from harm.

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Did Ebola Influence the 2014 Elections (Revisited)?

Things That Never Change

Media, War and peace, , ,

               It’s deja vu all over again.

                                                  Yogi Berra

Some thoughts on the corporate media’s coverage of the Middle East crisis in the two weeks since President Donald Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Suleimani:

The corporate media’s initial response was uncritical acceptance of the Trump administration’s justification for the attack.

There is near universal agreement that media coverage of the George W. Bush administration’s justifications for the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a total failure. The media reported without skepticism our government’s false claims that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and that he had participated indirectly in the 9/11 attacks. A 2003 study by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) found that pro-war commentators greatly outnumbered anti-war voices on the major networks during the run-up to and early days of the invasion. If fact, only 3% of American sources could be classified as anti-war. People’s misperceptions continued long after the war and were systematically related to the coverage provided by their preferred news sources.

This month, the media are continuing in their traditional role as “stenographers to power,” dutifully reporting that Suleimani’s assassination was necessary to prevent “imminent” future attacks on Americans. Following unwritten rules, it was only after Congresspeople began to question the administration’s claims that the media began to focus on technicalities such as Trump’s failure to consult Congress. Unfortunately, this “he said/she said” journalism was not followed by any serious attempt to discover the truth.

Trump eventually contributed to the partial unraveling of the rationale for his attack by making embarrassingly inconsistent claims that his own subordinates were unwilling to confirm, i.e., “I believe it would have been four embassies.” In the end, Trump concluded that whether Suleimani posed an imminent threat “doesn’t really matter because of his horrible past.”

In fact, there was almost a consensus among politicians and media commentators that Suleimani deserved to die, since he was a “terrorist.” He was said to have helped Iraqi dissidents to kill American soldiers with roadside bombs. (Trump: “Great percentages of people don’t have legs right now, or arms, because of this son of a bitch.”) Presumably, the Iraqis are too dumb to have constructed such bombs on their own. But even if this charge is true, terrorism is defined as violence directed at civilians, not at soldiers and “contractors,” i.e., mercenaries, who have occupied Iraq since our illegal invasion in 2003.

The media’s pro-war bias is facilitated by their almost exclusive reliance on “expert” commentators who are current and former government employees, including retired generals.

Within a few weeks, someone will undoubtedly publish an analysis similar to the 2003 FAIR study showing that hawkish voices predominated during these past two weeks. As we wait, I want to make two points.

  • Many of these pro-war voices turn out, on closer inspection, to be owners or directors of, or consultants to, weapons manufacturers; for example, Barry McCaffrey (Raytheon), Michael Chertoff (BAE Systems), and Jeh Johnson (Lockheed-Martin) . These financial conflicts of interest are almost never disclosed on the air.
  • If one were looking for a true expert on the Middle Eastern conflict, a logical choice might be someone who had opposed the disastrous 2003 invasion. There are such people. Some of them are still in Congress. (One of them is even running for President.) However, the socialization of media personnel is so complete that looking for this source of information is unlikely to even occur to them. Instead, we hear the same old voices that have been so wrong so many times in the past.

Iran may well be another Iraq waiting to happen. That Trump and his advisors believe that we can get Iran to capitulate with “maximum pressure” shows how little they know about the Middle East. Trump, like Obama before him, is testing the limits of presidential war powers. But short of a mass movement taking to the streets, what’s to stop him? A recent survey shows that over two-thirds (69%) of voters want an end to the “war on terror” in Afghanistan and the Middle East. But does public opinion make any difference?

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Worthy and Unworthy Victims

The World According to the Donald

Compared to What?

Cognitive psychology, Politics, ,

According to an October 22-24 The Economist/YouGov poll, 51% of Democrats have a favorable opinion of George W. Bush, while only 42% have an unfavorable opinion of him. Journalist Jacob Sugarman calls this “the single most depressing poll of Trump’s presidency.” He implies that our current president is implicated in this result.

George W. Bush told the American people the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. His invasion of Iraq was illegal under international law. It resulted in the deaths of 4400 Americans and 268,000 Iraqis at a cost conservatively estimated at $2 trillion. It set off chaos in the Middle East and led indirectly to the formation of ISIS, sponsors of a terrorist threat that continues 14 years later. According to a Gallup poll, only 6% of Democrats had a favorable opinion of Bush when his presidency ended in January 2009. But now a majority of Democrats have a favorable opinion of him. How can we explain this?

Human judgment is context dependent. Today’s temperature will feel warm or cool depending on what the temperature was yesterday. Both assimilation and contrast effects can occur. If today’s temperature is similar to yesterday’s, it may be assimilated to yesterday’s and the two days perceived as more alike that they actually were. However, if there is a noticeable difference between yesterday’s and today’s temperatures, a contrast effect occurs, with the result that today’s temperature feels cooler when it follows a warmer day than when it follows a colder day.

What determines whether assimilation or contrast will occur? Assume we are comparing an object of judgment, called the target, to a standard of comparison. According to the inclusion/exclusion model of Norbert Schwarz and Herbert Bless, if the standard of comparison can be included within the target group, assimilation will occur, and the evaluation of the target will shift in the direction of the standard. However, if the standard cannot be included within the target—that is, if it is excluded—the target will be contrasted with the standard and its evaluation will shift in the opposite direction.

If that sounds complicated, here’s an example. In a 1992 study, Schwarz and Bless encouraged participants to think about a corrupt politician. They used German politicians, but an American example might be Richard Nixon. Participants were then asked to judge the trustworthiness of politicians in general, and the trustworthiness of several specific politicians. In this example, Richard Nixon is the standard by which other politicians are judged. Since Nixon is a member of the category of politicians, he is assimilated to the target group, and politicians in general are evaluated more negatively. However, when participants are asked to judge other politicians, say, Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter, contrast effects occur. Richard Nixon is not Gerald Ford; they are mutually exclusive. If Nixon comes to mind when Ford is evaluated, they will be contrasted and Ford will be seen as more trustworthy than he would have been if the participants had not been thinking about Nixon.

According to an August 2017 survey by the American Psychological Association, a majority (59%) of American adults consider this to be the lowest point in our nation’s history that they can remember. The target of the Economist/You Gov survey was George W. Bush. Let’s assume that Donald Trump’s recent behavior has been very salient to most Americans. Even though respondents were not asked to compare Bush to Trump, he is now the standard to which all other presidents are compared. Since Bush is not Trump, he will be contrasted with Trump. In the survey, 91% of Democrats had an unfavorable opinion of Trump, while 7% had a favorable opinion. Therefore, we can expect Bush to be evaluated more favorably by Democrats than he would have been had Trump not been our president.

The argument here is that Democrats consider Donald Trump to be so corrupt and so incompetent that, while he has a negative effect on the evaluation of politicians in general (an assimilation effect), he has a positive effect on the evaluation of all other specific politicians (a contrast effect). Compared to Donald Trump, any other past president looks good to Democrats, even George W. Bush.

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A Plague on Both Your Houses

The Stress of Politics

So Far, It Looks Like It Was the Racism

Living in the Danger Zone

Cognitive psychology, Politics, , ,

We often receive information about alleged benefits or harms of existing or possible states of affairs. We may be told that North Korea has missiles that can reach the United States or that carbon sequestration and storage is a viable strategy for preventing climate change. How do we determine whether such information is credible?

One basic principle is that “bad is stronger than good.” We are more likely to pay attention to and remember negative information than positive information. The costs of mistakenly believing hazard information, unnecessary precautions, are much lower than the costs of mistakenly disregarding such information, which may include injury or death. There is no such asymmetry between the costs of mistakenly accepting or dismissing positive information. We are more vigilant toward hazards because the stakes are higher.

This is related to the principle of loss aversion in decision making. We consider losing $1000 to be a more negative outcome than gaining $1000 is positive. The larger the amount, the greater this disparity. According to Kahneman, loss aversion is a product of our evolutionary history: “Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.”

In 2014, the journal Behavior and Brain Sciences published a target article by political scientist John Hibbing and two colleagues presenting research suggesting that conservatives are more physiologically and psychologically responsive to negative information than liberals. This negativity bias causes conservatives to prefer stability rather than change, which can be seen as threatening. The article was followed by 26 commentaries by social scientists, most of which questioned details of Hibbert’s argument, but did not seriously challenge its basic assumptions.

A new article by Daniel Fessler and others explores the implications of negativity bias (or threat bias) for information processing. They conducted two separate, but similar, studies involving a total of 948 participants recruited through the internet. Particpants read 16 statements, half of which claimed the existence of a benefit while the others claimed to have identified a hazard. The majority of the statements (14 of them) were false. Here are two examples.

  1. People who own cats live longer than people who don’t.
  2. Terrorist attacks in the U. S. have increased since September 11, 2001.

Respondents were asked whether they believed each statement on a 7-point scale ranging from absolutely certain the statement is false to absolutely certain it is true. They were also asked judge the magnitude of each benefit or hazard on a 7-point scale running from small to large. (The benefit and hazard items had been matched in magnitude on the basis of previous testing.) The authors created an index of credulity by multiplying the judged truth of the statements by the magnitude of their benefit or hazard. Negativity bias was computed by subtracting the credulity of the eight benefits from the credulity of the eight hazards.

The authors constructed a summary measure of liberalism-conservatism combining input from four measures: an issues scale asking them to evaluate 28 political concepts, i.e., gun control; a social principles index asking them to choose between 13 social principles, i.e., punishment vs. forgiveness; self-ratings on a 9-point liberalism-conservatism scale; and political party affiliation.

Replicating Fessler’s previous research, they found that, for the sample as a whole, hazards were rated as more credible than benefits. As they predicted, there was a positive relationship between conservatism and this negativity bias. Breaking the effect down, they found that conservatives rated hazards as more believable than liberals, but there was no difference between liberals and conservatives in the credibility of benefits.

Of the four components of the conservatism measure, the issues index accounted for greatest portion of its relationship to negativity bias. This index contained three types of items: social conservatism, i.e., school prayer; military conservatism, i.e., drone strikes; and fiscal conservatism, i.e., tax cuts. As shown in the chart below, only social conservatism was strongly related to negativity bias. Fiscal conservatism was unrelated to it, while the relationship between military conservatism and negativity bias was positive but not statistically significant.

(For you statistics nerds, in these charts, the small squares indicate the sizes of the correlations and the lines indicate the confidence intervals. If the line crosses zero, the relationship is not statistically significant. Study 1 is on the left; Study 2 on the right.)

It is impossible to state, in the abstract, whether conservatives have a better strategy than liberals for processing information about potential hazards. If we had independent evidence suggesting that the hazard information were true, the conservative strategy would be more rational, while the liberal approach would be more sensible if the information were known to be false.

We can say, however, that their negativity bias leaves social conservatives vulnerable to alarmist rhetoric such as candidate Donald Trump’s often repeated claim that the homicide rate in the U. S. is the highest it has been in 45 years, or his attempt to publicize crimes committed by immigrants.

In a previous post, I reported that conservatives are more likely than liberals to rate syntactically correct but meaningless statements—technically known as “bullshit”—as profound. There is also evidence that conservative websites contain a higher percentage of “fake news.” It would be interesting to know how many of these fake news stories report alleged threats to people’s well-being. There may be a pattern here.

Much of today’s most alarming rhetoric deals with threats of terrorism. Since 2001, an average of 40% of Americans report that they fear they will be victims of terrorism. The actual probability of perishing in a terrorist attack—about one in four million per year—contrasts favorability with more prosaic dangers such as being killed in an auto accident or drowning in the bathtub. Fear of terrorism imposes enormous financial and social costs on our society, way out of proportion to the actual threat. These fears are ripe for exploitation by politicians. How much freedom have Americans already surrendered in the name of false security? As Timothy Snyder notes in On Tyranny, “It is easy to imagine situations in which we we sacrifice both freedom and safety at the same time: when we . . . vote for a fascist.”

You may also be interested in reading:

Bullshit: A Footnote

Publicizing “Bad Dudes”

Are the Terrorists Getting What They Want?

They Saw an Inauguration

Politics, Social psychology, ,

On November 23, 1951, Princeton University’s football team beat rival Dartmouth in a hotly contested game in which key players on both sides suffered injuries and there were several infractions. The referees saw Dartmouth as the primary aggressor, penalizing them 70 yards to Princeton’s 25. In the aftermath, there was controversy in the press about allegations of overly rough and dirty play.

In 1954, social psychologists Albert Hastorf (of Dartmouth) and Hadley Cantril (of Princeton) put aside their differences and published a study entitled “They Saw a Game.” Two types of data were collected. Samples of Dartmouth and Princeton students were given a questionnaire measuring their recall of the game. Secondly, a smaller sample of 48 Dartmouth and 49 Princeton students were shown a film of the game and asked to identify any rule violations they saw. The results suggested that they saw a different game. For example, on the questionnaire, 86% of Princeton students but only 36% of Dartmouth students thought that Dartmouth had started the rough play. The mean numbers of judged infractions are shown here:

Dartmouth students thought the number of violations had been about equal, but Princeton students saw more than twice as many infractions by the Dartmouth players.

This study is an example of myside bias, which is in turn a special case of confirmatory bias, the tendency to search out, interpret and recall information in a way that supports your pre-existing beliefs. (“Myside bias” is more likely to be used when two competing groups, such as Democrats and Republicans, are at odds.) There are hundreds of studies of confirmatory bias.

For example, Dan Kahan and his colleagues did a study entitled “They Saw a Protest.” Participants were shown a video of a political demonstration. Half were told that it was a protest against the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, and the others that it was an anti-abortion protest. As expected, liberals and conservatives differed on whether they had observed free speech or illegal conduct. Liberals were more likely to see the demonstrators as obstructing and threatening bystanders when the demonstration was identified as anti-abortion, while conservatives were more likely to see the anti-military protest as containing illegal behavior.

Inspired by the flagrant misperceptions of President Donald Trump, political scientist Brian Schaffner and Samantha Luks of the YouGov polling organization surveyed 1388 American adults on January 23 and 24. They showed them the two photographs below.

Half the respondents were asked which photo was from the Trump inauguration and which was from President Obama’s 2008 inauguration. The other respondents were simply asked which crowd was larger. Finally, all participants were asked for whom they had voted.

The data on the left show that, consistent with their presumed belief that Trump has broad public support, Trump voters were more likely to misidentify Photo B as his inauguration than either Clinton voters or non-voters. A more surprising result is shown at right. Fifteen percent of Trump voters said that Photo A contained more people!

The finding that Trump voters were more likely to choose B as the Trump inauguration is an example of myside bias. People (mis)identified the photos in way that was consistent with their political affiliation. An alternative explanation is that, since Trump voters are more likely to be what political scientists call “low information voters”—people who don’t often follow the news—they were less likely to have seen the two photos on TV or in a newspaper. It’s unfortunate that the authors didn’t ask respondents whether they had seen them before.

The behavior of the Trump voters who said Photo A had more people is more difficult to interpret. We can assume that they deliberately gave an incorrect answer. The authors interpret this as a partisan attempt to show their support for Mr. Trump, which has been called expressive responding. A related possibility is that they may have suspected the study was an attempt to embarrass Mr. Trump, and their response was an upraised middle finger directed at the researchers.

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In Denial

Is Democracy Possible, Part 1

Bullshit: A Footnote

What Happened? What Will Happen Next?

Politics, Prejudice and discrimination, , ,

This post is not completely thought out and is inadequately sourced.  I decided to write it quickly in order to compare my initial impressions of a Trump presidency to what happens weeks, months, or years from now.

What happened? And what will happen next? The first question must be approached with caution. I hope social scientists have collected good data on the demographic and ideological characteristics that are associated with support for Donald Trump. My guess is that the two leading contenders will be economic deprivation and racial or ethnic prejudice.

The corporate media have attempted to “normalize” Trump’s candidacy by suggesting that his support comes mainly from less educated Whites who have seen their standard of living decline in recent years. A couple of early studies cast doubt on this explanation and suggested that “racial anxiety” was the stronger motivator of Trump supporters. (See also this previous post.) A study by Rothwell and Diego-Rosell of the Gallup organization—the best I’ve found so far—finds only limited support for the economic explanation. Trump supporters are less educated and more likely to be blue-collar workers, but they are wealthier than either Clinton supporters or the population generally, and are no more likely to be unemployed. In other words, Trump is supported by the traditional Republican base of relatively affluent people hoping to increase their wealth. These authors also found that Trump supporters tend to live in racially isolated communities. However, their study lacked a measure of prejudice. Let’s hope some political scientists have included measures of racial attitudes in their research.

Why were the polls so wrong? The most likely explanation is the so-called Bradley effect, named for LA Mayor Tom Bradley, in which pre-election polls overestimate support for Black candidates. The flip side of this is that polls underestimate support for candidates who appeal to voters’ prejudices. The best indication of a Bradley effect so far has been the finding that Trump did better in online polls than telephone polls, possibly because respondents were embarrassed to admit they support Trump to a live person. (Of course, there are other explanations for this finding.)

To determine what will happen next, we need to divide Trump’s campaign promises into those that he can easily fulfill on his own, those that will require the cooperation of Congress, and therefore can be disrupted either by lack of unanimity among Republicans or a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, and those that will be difficult or impossible to carry out under any circumstances.

The easiest thing for Trump to do is abandon efforts to control climate change. Both the Obama Clean Power Plan and the United States’ ratification of COP 21, the Paris climate change agreement, are essentially executive orders by President Obama. They can be undone with the stroke of a pen, and most likely they will be. The latest studies of climate change are extremely alarming, suggesting that previous climate models have dramatically underestimated the problem. Any international climate agreement will collapse without U. S. cooperation. This suggests that by electing Trump, Americans may have inadvertantly brought about the end of human life on Earth within a couple of decades.

All the rest is merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Since Republicans control the Senate, it is likely that Trump will be able to ensure conservative domination of the Supreme Court for at least the next three decades. If so, Roe v. Wade is likely to be overturned, and the few remaining barriers to racial discrimination will be eliminated. But the best descriptor of the Roberts court is “pro-corporate.” This is important due to corporations’ tendency to sue any time a law is passed which they find inconvenient. Needless to say, they will find a sympathetic audience in a Trump-appointed court.

I also believe that Trump will have little difficulty getting approval for elimination of the minimal protections against Wall Street risk taking and outright fraud provided by the Dodd-Frank Act. This will likely include elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. However, this may not make much difference since Dodd-Frank is so weak. In other words, it’s likely that we will have another Great Recession fairly soon, regardless of what Trump does.

At an intermediate level of difficulty for Trump are actions that require Congressional approval, and which all Senate Democrats and some Republicans may be reluctant to go along with. I put the repeal of the Affordable Care Act in this category, since it is essentially a massive giveaway of public funds to the insurance, medical and pharmaceutical industries, all important Republican donors. More likely to happen are modifications to Obamacare that increase corporate profits and make it more difficult and expensive for less affluent Americans to obtain medical care.

Another change requiring Congressional approval that will elicit Congressional resistance is Trump’s promise to cancel and/or renegotiate so-called “free trade” agreements such as NAFTA, or to withdraw from the World Trade Organization. These treaties, the primary goal of which is to increase corporate dominance of the international economy, have always had greater support from Republicans than Democrats.

On the impossible side is Trump’s immigration policy. In the final months of the campaign, he began to back off from his promise to build a wall on the Mexican border. More importantly, it is difficult to imagine the kind of chaos that would result from any attempt to deport the approximately 11 million undocumented people living in this country. More likely, he will cooperate with Congress in passing laws that make it more difficult or impossible for people of certain religious or ethnic groups to enter to the country in the future.

Now for two wild cards.

Will Trump be more or less likely than Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton to involve us in any more than the five foreign military interventions in which we are currently involved? My guess is that he will escalate the war against ISIS, with totally unpredictable consequences, but be reluctant to deploy American troops in new wars. But given Trump’s childlike temperament, this prediction could be way off base.

Finally, it is important to remember that George W. Bush and Barack Obama have created a massive national security apparatus, including the capability of spying on virtually any electronic communication between American citizens, and the militarization of the police, who can bring overwhelming force to bear against protesters and demonstrators. This is important because if Trump is able to fulfill his campaign promises, there will be widespread dissent on the left, and if he blunders badly, there will be buyers’ remorse among his current followers. Some of us were dismayed by FBI Director Comey’s recent intervention in the presidential election, but we should be prepared for the possibility that Trump will not hesitate to use the national security state for political purposes, including attempts to influence future elections.

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Trump’s Trump Card

The World According to the Donald

Framing the Debates

Trump’s Trump Card

Politics, Prejudice and discrimination,

Kenneth MacWilliams, a pollster and graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, reports that only two variables predict support for Donald Trump among Republican voters. Gender, age, income, education, religiosity and even ideology failed to predict Trump support. The two significant predictors were authoritarianism and fear of terrorism, and authoritarianism was “far more significant.”

MacWilliams’ article is light on details, but the poll was a national sample of 1800 registered voters conducted by UMass during the last five days of December.

What is authoritarianism? The theory of the authoritarian personality has its origin in the aftermath of World War II when social scientists were attempting to account for anti-Semitism in Europe. It was originally measured using the California F-Scale, in which “F” stands for fascism.

The most extensive research program on authoritarianism was conducted by Bob Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba in the 1980s and 1990s. He found that authoritarianism is best described by three attitudinal clusters:

  • Authoritarian submission refers to a high degree of obedience to authorities that are regarded as legitimate in the society in which you live.
  • Authoritarian aggression refers to hostile behavior directed at disliked outgroups, provided that such aggression is sanctioned by authorities.
  • Conventionalism refers to a high degree of conformity to behavioral norms endorsed by religious and political authorities.

Combining the first two clusters, authoritarians are said to have a bicyclist’s personality. They bow to those they perceive to be above them in the social structure, while kicking those they think are below them. Not surprisingly, people high in authoritarianism tend to be politically conservative, religious, and prejudiced against racial and ethnic minorities and homosexuals. They favor more punitive sentences for criminals and are more accepting of covert government surveillance such as illegal wiretaps. Their preferences for strong leaders and for the exclusion of outsiders are consistent with their support for Trump. MacWilliams found that high authoritarians were more likely to support deporting immigrants that are in the country illegally, prohibiting Muslims from entering the country, closing mosques, and establishing a national data base to track all Muslims.

MacWilliams measured authoritarianism with four questions about child rearing. Participants were asked whether it is more important for children to be respectful or independent, obedient or self-reliant, well-behaved or considerate, and well-mannered or curious. The first of each pair is the authoritarian option. While these questions may seem remote from politics, I see this as a strength of the current survey, since these items are largely independent of any campaign issues.

Political scientists Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler found that, while at one time authoritarianism was unrelated to party affiliation, over the last several decades white authoritarians have gravitated to the Republican party while non-authoritarians have shifted into the Democratic party. This may be a result of the Democrats’ support for civil rights and Republicans’ “Southern strategy” of using coded racial messages to appeal to white Southern voters. In the current survey, 49% of Republican voters scored among the top quarter of authoritarians, over twice as many as the number of Democratics.

In 2008, authoritarianism predicted preference for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama among Democratic voters. However, in the current survey, authoritarianism did not predict Democrats’ candidate preference. (Maybe not enough Democrats are aware that Bernie Sanders is Jewish yet.)

Hetherington and Suhay found that the threat of terrorism is associated with greater support for an aggressive foreign policy and the suspension of civil liberties among low authoritarians, but not among high authoritarians, since they prefer these policies regardless of the threat level. In other words, the threat of terrorism leads low authoritarians to act like high authoritarians. There is a very real danger that terrorist attacks in the U. S. and Europe could influence the 2016 presidential election.

Figure-3-Threat-Decreases-Effect-of-Authoritarianism-on-Preference-for-Military-Strength

Altemeyer reports a small study in which he had two groups of about 65 participants each—one consisting of high authoritarians and the other of low authoritarians—play the Global Change Game, a complex 3-hour simulation of the Earth’s future in which players represent different continents. In the low authoritarian simulation, no wars or threats of wars occurred and there was considerable international cooperation. However, the the high authoritarian game, countries responded to the same crises by increasing their arms and the session ended with a nuclear war in which the total population of the Earth was declared dead.

Of course, it was only a game.

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The World According to the Donald

A Darker Side of Politics

Old-Fashioned Racism

The World According to the Donald

Politics,

Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would—in a heartbeat. And I would approve more than that. Don’t kid yourself, folks. It works, okay? It works. Only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work. . . . Believe me, it works. And you know what? If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing.

The corporate media find Donald Trump to be by far the most newsworthy candidate of the 2016 presidential campaign. According to the Tyndall Report, as of November 30, he accounted for more than a quarter of the campaign coverage on the nightly ABC, CBS and NBC newscasts, more than the all the Democrats combined. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have made preliminary attempts to describe his rhetoric.

Patrick Healy and Maggie Haberman of the Times “analyzed every public utterance by Mr. Trump over the past week from rallies, speeches, interviews and news conferences”—95,000 words, we are told. Four days later, Paul Schwartzman and Jenna Johnson of the Post did a “review of the businessman’s speeches, interviews and thousands of tweets and retweets over the past six months.” The Times article focuses more on the content of the speeches while the Post identifies what they call campaign strategy. Unfortunately, neither article describes the process by which the analyses were done or provides any meaningful data. I assume they simply read the speeches and recorded their impressions.

According to the Times, Trumps’s speeches are characterized by “constant repetition of divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery.” They identify  several overlapping themes.

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  • Us vs. them. Trump takes advantage of the human tendency to categorize people into ingroups and outgroups, and to show ingroup favoritism, but he carries this to an extreme by characterizing the outgroup as inherently evil. In this exchange with a 12-year-old girl, he describes terrorists as “animals,” then makes a promise.

You know what, darling? You’re not going to be scared any more. They’re going to be scared. . . .We never went after them. We never did anything. We have to attack much stronger. . . . We have to be much smarter, or it’s never, ever going to end.

Trump identifies the grievances of his audience, and attributes these problems to disliked groups, as when economic problems are blamed on Mexican immigrants. According to the scapegoat theory of prejudice, prejudice, discrimination and violence toward minority groups increase during times of economic hardship.

  • Ad hominem attacks. Trump frequently attacks the person rather than his or her ideas. As Ted Rall points out, we have Trump to thank for introducing the word “stupid” into campaign discourse. According to the Times, he used the word “at least 30 times.” (Unfortunately, this number is meaningless without something to compare it to. How often do other candidates use such negative descriptors?) Other favorite adjectives are “horrible” (14 times) and “weak” (13 times). No target is out of bounds, including mocking a reporter with a disability.
  • Violent imagery. ISIS is described as “chopping off heads,” and Trump is going to “bomb the hell out of” our enemies. “Attack” is a favorite word. At one rally, Trump appeared to endorse the roughing up of a “Black lives matter” protester in the audience.
  • Creating mistrust. Trump tries to create suspicion about scientific facts and other data provided by the government and the news media. His audience is told that “nobody knows” the number of illegal immigrants or the rate of increase of health care premiums, when in fact reasonably accurate estimates are available.
  • Ingratiation. If you’ve seen films of Adolf Hitler, or American demogogues such as Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace, you known that they are not attractive or charismatic speakers. Trump, however, is a practiced entertainer. He is relaxed and informal (a favorite word is “guy”). He flatters his audience. While other candidates are stupid, he claims that no one is smarter than the American voter.

The Post adds two comments about Trump’s campaign strategy.

  • Message testing. Trump takes an experimental approach to constructing his stump speech. He tries out various lines, using audience response as the criterion of success. The article describes a joke about Bernie Sanders’ hernia operation that was tested, revised, tested again and eventually abandoned when it did not get laughs.
  • Consistent presentation. Trump repeats the same words and lines in almost every speech. Of course, all candidates have a standard stump speech. The difference may be that Trump appears to be ad libbing, but is not.

I found two other reports which compare Trump’s rhetoric to that of other candidates.

Matt Viser of the Boston Globe transcribed all the speeches in which the candidates announced they were running for the presidency, and analyzed them with the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test. The test uses word and sentence length to determine how difficult a passage is to understand. The results are expressed as a grade level. Trump’s speech was the simplest. It could be comprehended by a fourth grader. One hypothesis is that candidates try to match the educational level of the audience they are hoping to influence.

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Angie Drobnic Holan, the editor of PoliFact, a political fact checking website, published an analysis of the ratings of all the statements by 2016 candidates that she has fact-checked since 2007. Trump scores second only to Ben Carson in dishonesty. Of 70 Trump statements, 76% have been found to be false, mostly false, or “pants on fire”—reserved for the worst lies. There seems to be a relationship between honesty and party affiliation.

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PoliFact describes the process by which statements are selected and analyzed. There are two possible sources of bias in these data. They do not analyze a random selection of candidate statements. Maybe front-runners or people who are disliked by reporters are subjected to greater scrutiny. And since the content of these statements varies, there is no uniform method of deciding whether a statement is true or false.

To my knowledge, no one has done a scientific content analysis of Trump’s rhetoric. Such an analysis would require selecting a random sample of statements to be analyzed, operationally defining the speech categories to be counted, and comparing Trump’s totals to those of other candidates. Unfortunately, the time and effort required to do such an analysis makes it unlikely that it will be done until after the campaign is over.

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Media, Politics, , ,

Although we are right to be concerned about the growth of campaign advertising, especially when the candidates’ resources are unequal, you could argue that the amount of free time (or space) given to candidates by the news media is more important.  Statements made by and about candidates in the free media are not as likely to be discounted as advertisements. (The discounting principle states that our confidence in a particular explanation of behavior is weakened by the presence of alternative explanations. In an advertisement, our knowledge that this is a paid message intended to persuade us makes us less likely to see the message as truthful.)

Senator Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have both shown similar increases in support in the presidential polls. According to the Real Clear Politics average of all polls, support for Sanders has grown from 12.7% to 25% from July 1 to the present, while Trump has gone from 6% to 22%. Sanders’ progress might be considered more impressive, however, since he has received less free media coverage.

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Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) used the Nexus database to count the number of free mentions of Sanders and Trump on 13 news media sources between July 1 and August 15. In all cases, Trump received more coverage. The chart below gives the percentage of stories mentioning Sanders as a percentage of those mentioning Trump. For example, on CNN, the ratio was 33%, meaning that Sanders was mentioned one-third as often, or that Trump received three times as much coverage.

TrumpSandersChartOn average, Sanders received 36% as much coverage as Trump. However, there were some interesting differences among the 13 outlets.

  • On the three outlets with the largest audience, the broadcast networks ABC, CBS and NBC, Sanders was mentioned only 16% as often as Trump, or in other words, Trump received six times as much publicity.
  • The country’s five major newspapers averaged 34%, very close to the overall average.
  • Public radio and television, which presumably have a mandate to be fair, scored only slightly above the overall average in Sanders coverage.
  • MSNBC, sometimes described as a “progressive” cable network, did have the highest percentage of Sanders coverage, but still mentioned Trump more often.

As Bernie Sanders continues to draw large crowds, the message of the news media seems to be that there’s “nothing to see here.” If we were to ask them why Trump receives so much more publicity than Sanders, my guess is they would claim that his flamboyant personal style makes his activities of greater public interest. However, I suspect that a more important cause is that a central theme of Sanders’ campaign is reducing economic inequality, an unwelcome message to those who own, advertise on, or perform on the news media.

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In addition to discounting campaign advertising, these data suggest we should also discount some of the coverage candidates receive in the free media. However, we’re less likely to do that, since their conflicts of interest are less obvious.