Apropos of nothing, I was browsing through a bunch of YouGov polls and thought I'd put together a summary of Republican views of the world. YouGov is handy for this because they ask lots of different questions and always provide crosstabs. Here it is:
You may think this is my way of saying "Republican are idiots." But not really.¹ My point is more that, thanks to Fox News and Donald Trump and the rest of the conservative ecosphere, this is what Republicans think of the world. They believe Christians are widely discriminated against. They believe Biden stole the election. They believe COVID came from a Chinese lab. They believe we're in a recession. Virtually all them believe the country is "out of control."
If you believed this stuff, you'd act like a Republican too. We are all far more susceptible to what the media tells us than we like to think. The problem with Republicans is just that their media is so much worse than ours.
If someone else wants to create a chart like this for Democrats, feel free to dive in.
¹Well, maybe a little bit.
If you believed this stuff, you'd act like a Republican too. We are all far more susceptible to what the media tells us than we like to think.
Partly, yes.
But it bears mentioning that we're seeing increasing partisan bifurcation along education attainment lines. I like Washington Post a lot more than I like Fox News, but I'd like to think I'm capable of recognizing misleading information coming out of the (liberal-coded) mainstream media. Indeed, Kevin Drum himself is a nice example of the ability of liberals to evince healthy skepticism of what their "own" media tells them.
Republicans are not similarly equipped (at least not to the same extent). That's just reality.
It's not about capabilities, it's about personality differences and desires.
It's not about capabilities
Sure it is. If this comes across as "liberals are more intelligent than conservatives" so be it. The growing evidence of partisan sorting by education attainment (this is not only a US phenomenon, I'd add) is very real.
(I'm obviously not claiming that education attainment is the sole factor explaining contemporary US partisan and ideological sorting; nor does any of this obviate the existence of shrewd right wing elites who very much know what they're doing. Steve Bannon's a horrible guy, but not a dumb one! But yes, vast swaths of the US electorate are the way they are in part because weaker cognitive capacity renders them vulnerable to the machinations of the Murdoch family.)
One can be intelligent but still temperamentally unwilling to engage with ideas that challenge one's worldview.
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The good news is that at least one kind of intelligence can be increased with directed practice.
The bad news is that a lot of people don't want to increase their intelligence, at leas, not if they have to do a lot of directed practice.
74% see fake news frequently.
Considering their typical news sources, no fucking wonder.
If only 51% of them saw Fox News in this past month what are the rest of them watching, indoor pickup truck racing? (which is a real thing).
OAN, Newsmax, and youtube apparently.
I know from personal experience that if you deny youtube much information for it to feed you new content, it very rapidly starts to send you down a whackadoodle rabbit hole. Any whackadoodle rabbit hole - it just wants you to pick one.
I had not thought about YouTube, but you're right.
I happen to own a rare Italian car made in the sixties. I recently watched a YouTube video about it. Over the next few days when I opened YouTube it suggested dozens of videos about the car. My initial reaction was delight that these was such a sudden increase in public interest in the car. How many people realize YouTube algorithms feed you what YouTube thinks you want to see?
I was remembering an episode of Car 54 Where Are You, the one with Sugar Ray Robinson, and thought I’d see if someone posted a clip. Sure enough, it was there! Now my feed is filled with clips from the show.
Mostly I use YouTube for music. The algorithm has led me to some people who are now favorites and I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have known about them otherwise.
I remember looking up how to demonstrate generating an electrical current using a magnet and got totally bogus Youtube videos showing a static magnet resting against a wire loop supposedly driving an electric motor. Several of them even had overlays saying "It Really Works". No, it doesn't.
I can't imagine using Youtube for a recipe or repair work. I like my food to be edible and have no desire to make things worse when I do a repair.
Lots of right-wingers have abandoned Fox since (in their judgement) it became a hotbed of liberalism. Firing Carlson was the last straw.
Lots of people don’t watch/consume any news media. I know this is surprising to us because we’re well informed. But there are people who actively avoid all the news sources out there, either because they’re too busy with their lives or because they don’t like hearing about the news. (Honestly, give how negative all of it is, I enjoy taking breaks from all news myself when I’m on vacation. These people just are mentally on vacation all the time.)
And they are probably happier for it! I mean, there ARE other things to think about that are not as aggravating!
Let's be real... a LOT (most?) of the people reading this and similar sites are news hobbyists/junkies who enjoy the arguments and sometimes tribalism a little more than is healthy...
My wife no longer watches news media. Instead, TikTok "informs" her of what's really going on. It's a slippery slope.
"The problem with Republicans is just that their media is so much worse than ours."
So, if that's true, why do they watch it?
My theory is that their news sources give them exactly what they want.
Now watch the clip in the previous post with these results in mind....
Of course the indictment was to protect Hunter!!!
and if there wasn't an indictment....
Of course the White House pressured the special council to drop charges!!!
You can build a flow chart like that for just about any issue. For Republicans, it's all about whining.
People want to feel confident. Conservatism promotes self-confidence as an engagement with an aesthetic, then they promote more self-confidence, and more confidence in the aesthetic, so faith appears as confidence in an aesthetic by itself, like MAGA and QAnon.
This is why they think everyone else's point of view is foundationally arbitrary.
Conflicting with that is that our systems of governance, industry and technology are founded on ideals of objectivity established for the purpose of working through issues to find the right, or at least the better, answer --you can call that an aesthetic if you like, but it's more like engineering, --and you can call that an aesthetic if you like, but it's more like trial and error, --and you can call that an aesthetic, foundationally arbitrary, but if you do that you'd have to be able to point to another aesthetic that gets the same kind of practical and universally applicable result --and when you can't do that you'd probably start to think that the sun doesn't shine because of an art theory, and it's not foundationally arbitrary, --social conservatives can't control it, and the sun reminds them they can't control a lot of things, --and that's how they have anxiety, and why they'd much rather everyone remained in the dark.
Conservatism cultivates anxieties then creates an aesthetic as a plausible resolution for them.
And that's why they're against anything that alleviates anyone's anxiety about anything, and they are confident they can get away with it.
There's a bit of chicken/egg dilemma here (I know, I know - in reality the egg came first, but it's a saying...).
Echo, echo, echo.... echo....... echo......
Echo chambers do that.
I'm scanning the chart and thinking, boy, Fox News is a big reason for this but doesn't get enough credit (blame) for the state of affairs. Then, to my immense satisfaction Kevin puts Fox News first on the list.
I used to poo=poo claims that the media (newspapers back in the day, Internet now) could be so influential. After all, people have a basic B.S. detector and a wild falsehood couldn't be sustained. I was wrong.
Four years ago, a post like this would have had me smirking and shaking my head about those darn misinformed Republicans, but lately I'm seeing a lot of bad information on the left as well.
The obvious one for me is the pediatric sex trait modification mishegas (the reason I am politically homeless and I've busted out of my information bubble), but Democrats/liberals are much more likely to have incorrect ideas about the incidence of unarmed black men being shot by police and the usefulness of masks worn outdoors or when alone in a car.
Just the Manichean worldview of oppressors and oppressed leads to many incorrect assumptions. It's complicated.
You're politically homeless because you believe trans kids aren't real?
Dude. I have been posting under Kevin's columns since he was Calpundit. I also transitioned before that - twenty-eight years ago. That was after I took hormone blockers.
No one is doing surgery on children. No hormones are given to children. Gender-affirming care means to accept them as they are; and no more. It does NOT mean giving care they don't ask for, or aren't comfortable with.
I'm sorry you're been misled. We exist. Regret rates are tiny. Most of our trouble? Being rejected by family and society.
That's cute that you think there are "Democrats/liberals" who are likely to have incorrect ideas about the usefulness of masks worn outdoors or when alone in a car. You fell for a misinformation meme.
If Christians are being persecuted, where are the crucifixions?
It’s about time the country realized all the discrimination that is present against whites and Christians. I mean when is the last time you saw a white self-proclaimed Christian Senator, banker or rich businessman?
Some Christian’s complain they are persecuted just like the Jews under Hitler. I will believe it when they are being forced to clean the streets with a toothbrush while in their underwear.
Kevin McCarthy,
https://i.redd.it/h9508i53gz4c1.jpeg
Remarkable how often Republicans have just this epiphany the moment they leave office.
This seems to be the actual video:
https://twitter.com/EdBonillaB/status/1729599514363723823
This doesn’t make any sense though, cause while perhaps McCarthy’s social circle looks like a restrictive country club, the universe of “people voting Republican” looks like what used to be called white trash to me. (I’m sorry but I don’t know what the polite term is.) Lots of homes still flying those tattered Trump 2020 flags are so dilapidated, they look like they should be condemned. And the “fuck your feelings” T shirt wearers look like they should be on ozempic. I’m not intentionally making fun of them here… but many of Republicans I see certainly do not look like “exclusive country club members” to me. They look like people who have crappy lives and are so bitter about it that they want to just burn everything down so they vote for the arsonists’ party.
Bobby Jindal summed it up, the Republican Party has become the “Stupid Party”.
So, what is Mr Jindal doing now? At one time he was one of the leading lights of the once-grand old party.
Kevin is much too fond of this kind of sweeping generalisation. Educated people should be, and often are, capable of evaluating what they read in the media by referring to multiple sources of secondary data, reviewing it critically, and forming tentative opinions which they change if and when new evidence demands it. Smugly arguing for example that people who accept the findings of countless scientific studies into global warming are mindless victims of media hype no different to those who babble "the climate has always changed" is offensive, frankly.
Sigh. Yes, those kinds of arguments are offensive. Which is why a certain subset of Kevin's regular commenters so reliably offend me.
Everyone should spend some time learning about how misinformation actually works, and why we are so susceptible to it.
The bottom line is that we have developed a lot of heuristics that can be hijacked for bad purposes: giving credence to information that is easier to process, trusting people we think are like us, assuming repetition is truth, etc. Even when people know that they are at risk of believing false information, we can't stop all misinformation from getting through. Humans are cognitive misers. None of us can think critically about every single bit of information we encounter.
If your media diet is mostly composed of people trying to accurately inform you, you should be mostly fine. The information repeated the most will likely be accurate. Questionable info will be highlighted as tentative, so you will be prompted to think more critically about it. Wrong information will be corrected. Some misinformation will get through, but most info will be good.
But not everyone consumes a steady diet of carefully reported news or scholarly research studies. If you get all your news from right-wing media, or you get your information via random tidbits you run across on TikTok or from friends, you are going to suffer from a lot of misinformation exposure, and you're unlikely to effectively use your critical thinking skills.
Humans just aren't designed to live in an environment of constant BS.
The "environment of constant BS" is overwhelming, and with the media ecosystem we have today it's easier than ever to manipulate public thinking. But I think there's more to it than just media like Fox or Tik Tok running made-up crap and twisting people's minds.
On election night 2020, a certain relative was going to host a "victory party" for a few Trump voters. A small affair. There was still a pre-vax pandemic going on. Her confidence about the coming Trump win was unshakeable. I'd mentioned the polls were predicting a Biden win and she might want to reset her expectations. Nonsense. She was certain what was going to happen.
(The polls of polls actually favored Biden overwhelmingly. 538 gave him an 89% chance of winning, and The Economist, 97%.)
We know how it went. Trump led part of the night, as expected, and then Biden went ahead. Fox called the election that night, correctly. Other media waited till Saturday before making it official. (Without Trump in the race, they'd have called it earlier.)
My relative's reaction: disbelief.
What happened to Fox? They faced a viewer revolt for telling (for once) the truth. For a while, Trump voters started watching NewsMax, OAN, et al., where the Trump lies were aired unfiltered. Fox eventually regained its viewership. They went all in on the The Big Lie, until the Dominion settlement cost them most of a billion.
Now it's gospel in GOP politics. Biden stole the election (74% on the chart). Jan 6 was just a few hooligans who got a little too rowdy. Trump was robbed. GOP media and GOP pols know they are the thinnest of thin ice to question the MAGA narrative. (Of course, once the pols decide to leave, they'll start telling the truth. See Romney, McCarthy, et al.)
The conventional way of looking at it: Fox makes up lies, the base eats it up.
Another way of looking at it: the base demands lies, Fox (or a substitute) will make up the lies for them.
Even Trump is subject to what the base wants. As ex-president, he tried taking credit for Operation Warp Speed, but by then the antivax orthodoxy had taken over and Trump dropped all talk of vaxes in his rallies.
This is not a phenomenon of right-wing media only. When polls show the public thinks we now have a worse economy than in the depths of the Great Recession, what do media do? Do they say, Hey, folks, the economy is really, really good? Look at inflation come down! Look at all those new jobs! Look how America is doing better than any other country in the world! No. The media makes up b.s. stories about how people are truly hurting at historic levels, albeit during a period of historic prosperity. It makes no sense. But people see more stories of economic pain and feel justified to complain about all the money they get to spend. Maybe it's time we elected Trump again!
I think news media -- the "good" and the "bad" -- live in fear of their audience. Tell the truth and they may get punished for it. Especially if it doesn't jibe with the prevailing narrative, which is typically based on a collection of half-truths and lies.
People don't want the truth. That's the heart of the problem.
I heard a report on (I think) librul NPR yesterday that included bits from the public about how they can't afford a house in this terrible economy, how the terrible economy was an issue for them, etc. But never any follow up questions about where they got that idea or what they meant exactly, no mention of the record GDP growth and low unemployment or that interest rates have been higher most of the time in the past few decades (OK, I just made that up but it's probably true). Or anything about how since around 1980 average pay stopped tracking productivity growth and wealth started to be directed to the top income groups and not to anything below the 50th percentile of incomes. Or about how supply and demand work, how sprawl and lack of transit is fine for a while until an urban area gets to a certain size and then it's not or anything else. Just People Blame Bidenomics for something something something.
Libril NPR? The same people that repeatedly reported that Trump met with striking union workers in Detroit, when Trump actually visited a nonunion plant that was not on strike?
NPR likes to have these "human interest" stories where they ask some clueless man or woman on the street a highly technical question, requiring both expertise and having kept up with current information. Their ignorant responses are then presented as The Story, rather than experts interpreting what the data says.
Without bad faith…..
Republicans would have no arguments at all
Wypipo...
Beyond "Trump treated harshly by justice system," which is my sentimental favorite, the most stupendous item is "Christians face a lot of discrimination."
Atheist presidents so far: 0
Atheist SCOTUS justices so far: 0
Atheist senators so far: 0
Atheist House members so far: 2 (1 came out only after several years, the other after retirement)
I am a non-believer and believe the balance of prejudice on these matters comes down as more hostile to non-believers than not these days.
But let's not pretend that our religious countrymen do not also have a case. They see a USA which is increasingly secular and hostile to outward signs of religiosity. Movies and TV are generally hostile in their depictions of religiosity where they show it, conservative Christian views on matters like homosexuality and pre-marital sex derided, and our school system is rather aggressively secular these days.
There is a culture war going on and us folks on the left are quietly winning it. Which I am glad for, but don't be surprised when the side losing ground is angry because they see what is happening.
They see a USA which is increasingly hostile to outward signs of religiosity? Prove it.
This is a pretty non-controversial assumption.
But, for a start, look at the graph above... or do a quick google search? For instance: https://www.christianpost.com/news/with-culture-hostile-to-christianity-what-will-the-church-look-like-in-20-years.html or: https://time.com/4385755/faith-in-america/
"Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care." - Theodore Roosevelt
Sweeping generalizations are not necessarily bad. The idea that every atom is comprised of neutrons, protons, and electrons is a sweeping but valid generalization. So is the above Roosevelt quote.
If your actions have a significant negative influence on people you don't care about, then you will look stupid to those people. You've also detached yourself from reality and have made yourself vulnerable to conspiracy theories because you need to rationalize the negative effects of your actions.
Conversely, if your actions have a significant negative influence on people, and you care about those people, then the fact that you care is implicit in your behavior.
The way to understand human behavior to stop asking whether the person is smart or stupid, truthful or lying, Republican or Democrat, and etcetera. Instead, follow the advice of a former Republican POTUS. If everyone starts asking what interest is being served, and what interest is outside of that circle of concern, then the MAGA version of the Republican party is toast, along with political malpractice in both parties.
MAGAs have a powerful interest in White Christian Supremacy. This is not rational, it is instinctive. This kind of instinct obviously comes into play in war, and justifies treating the enemy as subhuman, and their lives as inconsequential.
How can you get people to act either rationally or compassionately in the face of this?
Good question. This might help:
"The very essence of instinct is that it is followed independently of reason." - Charles Darwin
So, we can all agree about that, and the idea that MAGAs have a powerful interest in White Christian Supremacy. We can also agree that we all have a powerful interest is serving a specific interest. The question we need to ask ourselves is, "What interest am I serving?" One theory is the the idea that "I am rational. I serve the interest that is being rational." All that means is, "I'll pick and choose depending on the context" ... aka "I don't want to admit to myself that I'm selfish."
I like that you've equated "rational" with "compassionate." So do I. My advice is follow Viktor Frankl's advice when he says, "When we are no longer able to challenge a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves." Or MLK's "Love even for enemies is the key solution of the problems of the world." Also known as care, in lieu of not caring.
To simplify a little, Kevin thinks Republicans believe what they do because they watch Fox News. Of course it's not just Fox News - when they say they believe that the 2020 election was stolen they are just believing what Trump says. Remember that early in the 2016 campaign Fox was not supporting Trump, but now Fox - not to mention most Republican politicians - can't afford to contradict Trump.
But why do Republican voters watch Fox News and why do they think Trump has superhuman talents and authority? To simplify again, it's because Fox and Trump and Republicans in general are telling them what they want to hear. And what they want to hear is that their tribe - White Christians - deserves to dominate the country and is now under threat. This is a real threat - overall the country is becoming more liberal in social matters and less religious and the fraction of white European descent is decreasing. Republicans have been exploiting this tribal reaction since Goldwater. What Trump and Fox say often makes no sense, but it triggers the reaction.
I can't suggest an overall strategy to counter this, except for Democrats to try to change the emphasis to economics, which could backfire if there is a recession. Democrats are also influenced by big business and finance. But there won't be a strategy if people are distracted into what are actually side issues, such as the evil of Rupert Murdoch, the supposed resentment by poor whites of the liberal "coastal elite" on economic grounds, and many other things that the media go into to avoid talking about racism and religious bigotry.
Getting the mass of white lower-income voters to lose touch with economic reality has been essential to Republican success for over 50 years. Their racial and religious dominance is evidently more important to these voters than their economic well being. But this was not the result of a massive rightist media apparatus. After the national Democratic party came out against racism through the 40's, 50's and 60's and Republicans switched to supporting racism, there was an immediate reaction on the part of voters. The Southern states, in particular, voted for Goldwater in 1964. This was not the result of any media campaign - Goldwater basically only had to come out against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Reagan also opposed it and Nixon had his Southern Strategy. The Fairness Doctrine was repealed in the Reagan administration, opening the door for both Fox and right-wing talk radio, but by that time the parties and voters had mostly realigned.
Now Fox can feed Republican voters all sorts of false information, but actually Trump got his message across at the start of the campaign in 2024 mostly from the MSM as Fox did not support him initially. The rightist media supply excuses, such as the supposedly bad state of the economy, for the preference of voters for Trump, and they exaggerate real problems such as immigration, but the real reason for both the preferences and the ostensible beliefs on the subjects cited by Kevin is their own cultural and instinctive tribalism.
Republicans support Trump because they think he's their only chance to influence a world that is moving in the wrong direction. The question is, what is the right direction? Answer: treat others the way you would want to be treated. That is the foundational principle of every legitimate religion, and certainly all the world's great religions. It is also the foundational principle of science. "Do as I say and not as I do" is the opposite of science. The same is true of capitalism. Adam Smith's "Theory of Moral Sentiment" is capitalism's foundational principle. Milton Friedman's "theory of immoral sentiment" is the opposite of capitalism.
Yes. Under Reagan, Republicans tried to make the case that tax cuts for the wealthy would “trickle down” to everyone else, and that tax cuts on the wealthy would pay for themselves (based upon the Laffer curve). Romney tried to rebrand the wealthy as “job creators.” But mostly, Republicans have just campaigned on social issues or whatever, and hoped that nobody except the people in the top 1% would notice that their economic policies were designed to benefit the top 1%.
It's unfortunately in the nature of surveying, cleaving a world of grey into a choice of black or white (admittedly not for things like whether the election was legit). Choosing a category in such a survey is partly a way of choosing affiliation; regardless of truth, an R would rather be in the pool with people who think voting machines were hacked.
"Are Republicans idiots?" Look at the post immediately prior to this: Title: "James Comer is an Idiot".
Nearly half of men think they can safely land a plane in an emergency, survey finds,
https://inshort.geartape.com/nearly-half-of-men-think-they-can-safely-land-a-plane-in-an-emergency-survey-finds/
You can work with confidence like that.
It's not just Faux News. It's also the whole constellation of right-wing radio/podcasts, it's large neighborhoods of Xitter and TikTok, and it's Breitbart/DailyCaller/etc.
"We are all far more susceptible to what the media tells us than we like to think."
That is very true of people in general. Just look at Russia. Now that Putin controls all of the media, the majority of Russians sheepishly buy Putin's propaganda regarding the Ukraine war. It's worse than a Russian version of Fox News on every channel.
I’m not going to take Drum’s invitation to build a similar chart for Democrats, but I did look at one question:
Do you think that Hamas' attack on Israel was justified or not justified?
Dem: 15%/60%/25% (yes/no/not sure)
Rep: 12%/70%/19% (yes/no/not sure)
Republican commentators have been accusing the left of supporting Hamas, but there’s not a lot of support for the Hamas attack, and that support is almost equally divided across the political parties.
https://today.yougov.com/topics/travel/survey-results/daily/2023/11/09/49efe/3
“Arab leaders rejected it completely.”
Of course they did. No one on earth would accept what happened under the Mandate as legitimate if it happened to them.
If this isn’t patently obvious, try to imagine scenarios where the USA was Balfour’d and Mandated. Clearly nukes would fly and all but the hippiest hippies would be 100% down with it.