free associations

A blog about political psychology and current events.

Midterms Set the Stage for the Final Boomer Showdown in Washington

The next Congress will be the Baby Boomersâ€™ last act before Generation X takes power, but it sets the stage for a potentially combustible confrontation between the House Democratic majority and the Trump White House.

Democratic Wave Benefits Millennials, Leaves Baby Boomers With a Narrow Plurality; Generation X Takeover Set for 2021

The next Congress will be the Baby Boomers’ last act before Generation X takes power, according to data (PDF) from First Person Politics, a public affairs consultancy whose groundbreaking research linked generational shifts in the U.S. House of Representatives to unexpected and sweeping changes in the national political culture. If the handful of races yet to be called are won by the candidate expected to win, Boomers will hold 202 House seats (down from 226), while Gen Xers will hold 192 seats (up from 177) leaving Boomers in charge of the next Congress with a narrow 10-seat plurality.

A review of the 2018 congressional candidate pool strongly suggested that the size of Gen X’s gain was very nearly a foregone conclusion. Every election scenario we modeled — ranging from a massive Democratic wave to an equally massive Republican one — resulted in Gen X capturing between 190 and 195 seats. Gen X was represented about equally in the candidate pools of both parties. (First Person Politics did not publish this review due to the large amount of unconfirmed but subsequently verified birth year data for many of the challengers.)

The same review indicated that a Democratic wave would benefit the Millennial Generation at the expense of the Boomers. Millennials, who picked up 18 seats, were overrepresented in the Democratic candidate pool, while Boomers were overrepresented in the Republican one. It is not surprising that the youngest generation would be underrepresented in the candidate pool of the current majority party, since party majorities inherently are made up of incumbents from older generations. But 2018’s large generation gap could persist in future elections due to the Millennial Generation’s progressive values and affinity for the Democratic Party.

The 2018 election was the first with a significant number of Millennial candidates running for Congress, and it showed up in the results. For the first time, Millennials (with 23 seats) will outnumber the elderly Silent Generation (down to 18 seats). But, according to previous research from First Person Politics, it is unlikely that Millennials will exert much influence over national political and policy debates until the late 2020s. Despite their dwindling numbers, Silent Generation leaders such as Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Jim Clyburn, Maxine Waters and Nita Lowey will continue to wield influence in the next Congress by virtue of their experience, relationships and seniority holding some of the top leadership spots and committee chairs.

It might sound strange, but the generational composition of the House has been linked to broad trends in the national political culture. Building on William Strauss and Neil Howe’s groundbreaking generational theory, original research authored by First Person Politics showed that each new generation to win a majority in the House brings about a large-scale shift in the national political culture. These shifts, determined by each generation’s character and the timing of their first majority, unfold over 20- to 25-year time spans, which makes them difficult to recognize for those immersed in the 24/7 news cycle. Research has yet to demonstrate any effects linked to the generational composition of the U.S. Senate, likely due to the institution’s anti-majoritarian and broadly unrepresentative character.

Gen Xers are virtually certain to outnumber Boomers in the House after the 2020 election, but Gen X’s rise to power has been historically lethargic, even for a generation with a reputation for political apathy and civic disengagement. If it had followed the historical averages, Gen X should have won its first majority in 2013. By 2021, Gen X will be an astounding eight years overdue. This considerable delay has allowed Boomers to continue setting the tone for the national political culture, and it is tearing the country apart.

Generational theory strongly suggests that it is Boomers, especially Boomers on the right, who are fanning the flames of hyper-partisanship, polarization, gridlock, extremism, brinkmanship, poor performance and self-serving narcissism in our politics. These destructive tendencies took off in 1995 after the Boomer takeover of the House in the 1994 wave election. But American politics wasn’t always so confrontational and dysfunctional. From 1977 through 1995, the Silent Generation ruled Washington — setting a conciliatory, technocratic, business-like and business-friendly tone. Since the Boomer takeover, high stakes showdowns between Congress and the White House that inflame partisan tensions have become routine, but most of these clashes have revolved around fiscal policy. This time the stakes different.

Over the next two years, battles between the House Democratic majority and the Trump White House could escalate into a series of dangerous political, legal and constitutional standoffs that revolve around some of the nation’s founding ideals: representative governance, institutional checks and balances, and the rule of law. Already, it is clear that the Republican Party is threatened by long-term demographic change and majority rule, and that the corrupt and increasingly autocratic Trump administration is threatened by meaningful oversight and accountability from Congress, as well as Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. It is equally clear that Republicans in the White House and Congress are intent on filing the courts with right-wing ideologues and political operatives whose job is not to uphold the law but to remake the law in whatever way most helps Republicans, giant corporations and the ultra-rich.

Seen from the perspective of generational theory, the danger is that this battle between plutocracy and democracy appears to be intensifying at a uniquely precarious time in the generational cycles of history. America is quickly approaching the final and most critical climax phase of its latest Fourth Turning. Anticipated by Strauss and Howe more than 20 years ago, this is a time of ultimate peril for the nation and very likely the world, when long-simmering conflicts — especially ones that touch on fundamental values — are prone to metastasize into violent and genuinely existential ones. A decade from now, the pre-election wave of stochastic right-wing terrorism and President Donald Trump’s post-election attacks against the press, vote counters and the Mueller investigation may be remembered as ominous signs of things to come.

Historically, it has fallen to rising reactive generations like Gen X to curtail the raging excesses of aging idealist generations like the Boomers. Reactive generations are known for their pragmatic, cynical and pugnacious leadership style and for their role as history’s crisis managers. Reactive generations never make the nation’s deep and abiding conflicts go away, but successful ones give rise to a political culture that is noticeably less apocalyptic and a good deal more pragmatic — capable of implementing large-scale, workable solutions to the nation’s most dire problems. But there also have been times in our history when a rising reactive generation arrives in power too late, and instead of curbing the elder generation’s raging excesses exacerbates them. The last time this happened, it helped propel the nation into its first civil war.

History never repeats exactly, but it usually rhymes, which is why modern generational theory is such a valuable tool for examining trends in our nation’s history. With the final showdown of the Boomer generation at hand, the next two years are certain to be the most combustible period in American politics since 1860. The question is how much damage will Boomers do before their time expires. When Gen X takes the reins in 2021, their leaders will inherit a nation more divided than ever — and very likely one facing existential peril.

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First Person Politics founder David L. Rosen is available for press interviews and speaking engagements. Contact him at david@firstpersonpolitics.com.

Methodological Note: First Person Politics will update the numbers if the results of the uncalled House races differ from expectations, but the major findings in this analysis are unlikely to change. First Person Politics uses the Strauss and Howe generational breakpoints in all generational analysis and commentary. These breakpoints provide a powerful and coherent framework for analyzing and anticipating the behavior of generations in the real world.

Categorized in: Generational Theory, Political Analysis, Political Psychology

November 14, 2018

How to Avoid Spam Words

You might think you donâ€™t have to worry about spam because youâ€™re a campaign, an advocacy group or a consultant. Wrong! Everyone who sends mass emails has to worry about spam.

Whether you work in communications, fundraising or field, if you write a lot of mass emails, spam filters should be the bane of your existence. If they aren’t, some of your emails might not be getting through.

Email spam filters are triggered by certain keyword and phrases — and you can probably already guess what some of them are. Here is my latest piece in Campaigns and Elections on how to avoid spam words.

Everyone who sends mass emails has to worry about their messages getting blocked by spam filters, and my latest piece offers some guidance on how to handle this particularly thorny problem.

Categorized in: Messaging

February 13, 2018

The Battle for Democracy

One of the greatest fairy tales in American politics, practically an article of civic faith, is that “we all want the same things.” No, we really, really don’t.

Josh Marshall and Zachary Roth hit on something important in their posts about the lack of shared principles between the two parties in the U.S. One of the greatest fairy tales in American politics, practically an article of civic faith, is that “we all want the same things.” No, we really, really don’t. This is a story we tell ourselves to paper over the very deep and abiding differences that from time to time in our history have threatened to tear the nation apart. And I believe we’re approaching another one of these moments in the years to come.

Their assessment that the contemporary right does not believe in basic democratic principles is correct, but it severely understates the case. It’s not just that today’s right doesn’t believe in democracy. They consider representative government of any kind to be dangerous — something to be opposed and dismantled to the maximum extent that they can get away with. And they’ve been getting away with quite a bit these days: from gerrymandering to voter suppression to anti-majoritarian obstruction to stealing elections and public offices and more.

You can find evidence of the right’s anti-democratic views in the historical writings of conservatives, as Corey Robin has done. Or you can find evidence of it in the news, as Marshall and Roth done. But you also can find an abundance of evidence of the right’s hostility to representative governance their psychology. The fact that various anti-democratic measures align with the GOP’s electoral interests obscures the extent to which these measures are also driven by two distinct psychologies on the right — right wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation — that hold popular participation and political pluralism in contempt.

Right wing authoritarians — whose worldview is rooted in fear and danger — reject social and political pluralism, crave strongman leadership and are intolerant of dissent. Social dominators — who hold a competitive, anti-egalitarian worldview — want to be the strongmen that authoritarians crave and seek to constitute themselves as a more or less permanent aristocracy of power, wealth and privilege (in this era of history, organized around the corporate capitalist system). In short, the American right fears, hates and opposes representative government, as a matter of self-interest, ideology, psychology and survival.

I can understand why journalists and political authors would have serious reservations about making such a sweeping set of claims. But as someone who takes political psychology seriously and who has been sounding the alarm about this for years, it is refreshing to see journalists finally beginning to come to terms with the nature of the threat the right poses to the American experiment. This is a problem that has been brewing since long before Trump arrived on the scene and is sure to outlast him.

Thankfully, our own history shows that the best way to combat the dark impulses toward despotism is with more democracy. In this era, that means things like fair elections, automatic registration, greater ballot access, competitive districts, abolishing the Electoral College, more sensible campaign finance laws, primary reform, and so on and so forth. It’s no secret that Democratic and progressive activists are getting fed up with trying to win in a fundamentally rigged system. And Democratic leaders, who in recent decades have relied on anti-Republican backlash to gain a fleeting hold on power, have self-interested reasons to get out in front on these issues: they will be empowered by taking up this fight and making it central to the party’s platform, vision and governing agenda. They’re already taking it up in piecemeal form.

Here’s the bottom line. Both parties are facing rapidly escalating pressure, as a function of their political self-interest and their psychology/ideology, to change our political system in ways that are likely to permanently alter the balance of power in American politics. The center cannot hold.

Categorized in: Fixing Politics, Ideology, Partisanship, Political Analysis, Political Psychology

January 9, 2018

The Strategy Behind the Monopoly Man

The Monopoly Man illustrates what progressives can achieve when we embrace creative and non-rational approaches to activism and political influence.

I hope you won’t mind if I take a little credit and engage in a little shameless self-promotion.

On the morning of Oct. 4, reporters and Twitter users were surprised and delighted to discover an activist dressed as the Monopoly Man sitting directly behind Equifax CEO Richard Smith at a U.S. Senate Banking Committee hearing. The stunt enraptured viewers as the Monopoly Man was seen adjusting a monocle, wiping his brow with an oversized hundred dollar bill, and even chasing down Smith with a bag of money after the hearing.

The Monopoly Man’s appearance got more attention than anyone could have imagined, present company included. To say that it went viral would be an understatement. It was THE STORY in the press and on social media that day. The Monopoly Man’s “Ask Me Anything” chat on Reddit is now the eighth most popular of all time, surpassing similar chats with Bernie Sanders, Gordon Ramsay and the creator of The Simpsons. The character became an instant national folk hero with liberal and conservative audiences alike and made headlines around the globe.

I’m bringing this up because I’m one of the two architects of this stunt. Yes, you read that correctly: this was my idea.

To give credit where credit is due, it wouldn’t have been possible without co-conspirator Amanda Werner, who deftly portrayed (and continues to portray) the Monopoly Man. But the truth is that sending someone to Capitol Hill in costume as the Monopoly Man originated right here. It was an idea that had it’s origins in political psychology.

As you may be aware, when I’m not ruminating about political psychology on this blog and on Twitter, I serve as Public Citizen’s communications officer on regulatory affairs. In that capacity, I work on a wide range of issues including stopping anti-regulatory legislation, blocking harmful policy riders that sneak their way into the federal budget process and advancing public protections.

The Monopoly Man’s appearance and the delivery of Get Out of Jail Free cards to all 100 U.S. Senate offices was part of a campaign I’m involved in that is intended to draw attention to the lack of accountability for financial institutions like Equifax and Wells Fargo. In particular, these and other large financial institutions have been using of forced arbitration to block ripped off customers from taking them to court.

Regulations and forced arbitration are both perfect examples of the kind of wonkish policy debates that Democrats and progressives tend to engage in while failing to communicate effectively. As I wrote in a piece explaining the strategy behind the Monopoly Man:

Many of the leading progressive advocates of this era have embraced a communications style that prioritizes research, facts, numbers, statistics, and logical arguments. But as any good political psychologist or communicator will tell you, this bias toward hyper-rationalism is profoundly counterproductive to communication with mass audiences. The Monopoly Man, the Get Out of Jail Free Card and the bags of fake money told a powerful and accessible story that regular people could relate to, even if they didn’t know much of anything about Equifax or forced arbitration.

Human beings aren’t Vulcans. We’re not rational, logical, informed or even particularly self-aware, self-interested or autonomous. The expectation that we are is a myth passed down to us from our Age of Enlightenment for-bearers. It’s an expectation that Democrats and progressives have internalized deeply, even as we’re drowning in evidence to the contrary. Team Blue is so enamored with the reasoning powers of the mind that many refuse to acknowledge its demonstrated limits, particularly as a tool of communication, persuasion and influence.

The Monopoly Man “put metaphor over literal precision, style over substance, image over text, and fun over facts.” In other words, we did the exact opposite of what people on Team Blue usually do. It worked — not in spite of this — but because of it. Indeed, the truth is that human beings are fundamentally irrational and profoundly biased — and in more ways than we’ll likely ever be able to count. We experience and understand the world through emotions, stories, symbols, values and relationships — and those are the things that Amanda and I drew upon in staging this protest the way we did.

The Monopoly Man is an instantly recognizable character, whose appearance evokes far more than just his namesake board game. By placing this character in the foreground of a hearing about a debased financial institution, it intuitively called attention to the predations and excesses of billionaires and big banks. The message was implicit in the situation — no explanation was necessary, even as it called out for one. American culture is filled with familiar characters, imagery and symbolism that, like the Monopoly Man, could be deployed to make a powerful political statement without saying a word.

The instant and mind-boggling success of the Monopoly Man may not have been predictable, and only time will tell whether this specific model of protest is replicable, but it was not a random occurrence. It came from two people who’ve spent years pushing our allies to embrace new, creative and non-rational approaches to activism, influence and political change. The Monopoly Man illustrates what we can achieve when we do.

I believe those new approaches hold the key to a brighter, more progressive, more humane future. And that’s precisely why First Person Politics exists: to show you the way and encourage you to be part of it.

Read the piece and contact me if you’re interested in booking an interview.

Categorized in: First Person Politics, Humor, Messaging, Political Analysis, Political Psychology

October 17, 2017

Did Overconfidence Cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 Election?

All human beings have biases — lots of them. If we’re going to make good strategic decisions, we have to be aware of what those biases are and how they might affect our choices.

In explaining her 2016 loss, Hillary Clinton has said that “I was the victim of a very broad assumption that I was going to win.” Is there any truth in this?

My latest piece in Campaigns and Elections looks at this question. Here’s how it likely influenced her decision making:

[…] human beings are cognitively hardwired to be loss averse. We don’t treat prospective gains and losses the same way. When presented with a gain and a loss of equal value, say, a win or loss of $100, the loss feels worse that the gain, sometimes a great deal worse. One of the many consequences that flows from this fundamental fact of human psychology is the notion that you should play it safe when youâ€™re ahead.

Clinton spent virtually the entire campaign ahead in the polls, believing her election victory (a prospective gain) to be nearly certain. This would have put Clinton and her campaign â€“ already known for a cautious and methodical disposition â€“ into an even more guarded and risk-averse mindset, focused on preserving her lead. These restrained qualities were even marketed as a selling point against Clinton’s erratic and unstable opponent.

An expectation of victory and the behavior that stemmed from it is, in my view, one of many factors that hurt her campaign. But I would take issue with Clinton’s choice of the word “victim.” If she’s a victim of the psychology of loss aversion, then so is every human being ever born who’s lived to be old enough to make decisions. Loss aversion is a universal feature of human psychology and behavior, one that is extremely familiar to most economists, psychologists and marketers. It is regrettable that so many political candidates and strategists remain oblivious to its power.

All human beings have biases — lots of them. If we’re going to make good strategic decisions, we have to be aware of what those biases are and how they might affect our choices. That’s why the article suggests how political strategists might compensate or correct for the innate biases we all have around risk.

Go read it.

Categorized in: Cognitive Psychology, Political Analysis, Political Psychology

September 21, 2017

Where, Oh Where, Did Trump Learn to Blame Both Sides?

Where might Trump have gotten the idea that blaming both sides is a reasonable-sounding thing to say in the midst of a contentious political dispute?

Donald Trump has demonstrated over and over again that knows next to nothing about politics — and is devoid of original ideas. What precious little he knows, he absorbed from right wing media, conspiracy nuts or the last person he talked to.

So when President Trump today blamed both sides for the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, you can rest assured that he did not think this up himself. Setting aside whether or not it’s true — it self-evidently is not — Trump at some point in his life must have absorbed the notion that blaming both sides is a reasonable-sounding thing to say in the midst of a contentious political dispute.

Where, oh where, might he have learned such a thing?

False equivalence — blaming both sides for a problem or error that in actuality is confined to just one — is a favorite trope of American political journalism. It’s one of the chief ways that political reporters prop up the illusion of their own neutrality, even as it actively deceives and misleads their audience.

That Trump used such a common media trope in some his most disgraceful remarks to date is a reminder that he is not some inexplicable aberration from American political and media culture. Rather, he embodies its deplorable state.

Categorized in: Political Analysis, Political Psychology

August 15, 2017

Could Star Trek Discovery Be the First Prestige Drama for Millennials?

If Star Trek Discovery can reinvent the franchise as a prestige drama, while reinventing prestige drama in Star Trekâ€™s image, it could be the catalyst that propels American television into a bold new Millennial era.

I don’t usually wade into pop culture commentary. But I’m going to make an exception in this case, because I have a point to make that touches on two topics near and dear to my heart: generational theory and Star Trek.

As you may be aware, CBS All Access is about to premiere a new Star Trek series in September, dubbed Star Trek Discovery. Having seen the trailers and read dozens of interviews with the cast, writing team and production staff, it’s clear to me that the show’s producers are attempting to reinvent Star Trek as a modern prestige drama. That’s what I would do if I were in charge of the franchise at this time.

Prestige dramas typically feature top notch writing, casting and production values; serialized storytelling with well structured arcs and high stakes for the major characters; and engagement with complex moral, social and political dilemmas. You might say that prestige drama is the high literature of television.

Many pop culture commentators trace the origins of the modern prestige drama to HBO’s The Sopranos, which premiered in 1999 and paved the way for subsequent shows like The Wire, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Six Feet Under, House of Cards and more. This is far from an exhaustive list of examples.

But if you run through the best known examples of the genre over the past 20 years, it’s easy to see why prestige dramas also have come to be strongly associated with complicated and conflicted anti-heroes; gritty, cynical, exploitative, and survivalist themes; as well as amoral approaches to sex, drug use and violence.

Let me suggest the possibility that these dark themes are not defining features of prestige drama, but rather are defining features of prestige dram in this era. They are, in fact, a reflection of Generation X’s cultural tastes, which are prevailing in this era of American television history. Gen X’s tastes will not dominate our television landscape forever, nor even necessarily for much longer.

As a reactive or nomad generation, according to William Strauss and Neil Howe’s generational theory, Generation X’s cynicism, amorality and grittiness are well documented. It should come as little surprise that Gen X’s media tastes — both as media producers and consumers — might skew in that direction.

Just as there are natural and predictable periodicities in every generation’s life cycle (as Strauss and Howe discovered) and political life cycle (as my own research has revealed), we also can find patterns in each generation’s cultural tastes and reach.

While it’s always possible to find exceptions that defy the prevailing winds, Gen Xers for the most part have set the thematic tone of American television in the 2000s and 2010s, just as Baby Boomers did in the 1980s and 1990s, Silents did in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Greatest Generation did in the 1940s and 1950s. These date ranges are rough approximations, marked by gradual transitions from one era to the next.

With the 2010s soon coming to a close, Gen X’s dominance of the American television landscape soon will begin to wane, eventually giving rise to a new era of television catering to Millennial preferences and tastes.

Already you can find a host of popular shows aimed predominately or exclusively at Millennials — airing both on television and on various online streaming services: The Big Bang Theory, The Flash, Stranger Things, Girls and many, many more.

My expectation is that the next few years will see the premieres of the first successful prestige dramas of the Millennial era. The dark, amoral and exploitative themes so prevalent in the prestige dramas of the past two decades will soon begin to share the spotlight with similarly prestigious shows defined instead by their optimism, progressivism and inclusiveness.

Which brings me back to Star Trek.

Never in American history has there been a television franchise so thoroughly defined by its optimism, progressivism and inclusiveness. If Star Trek Discovery’s writers, producers and cast embrace these values and do their jobs well, the show could turn out to be one of the first successful prestige dramas of the Millennial era of American television.

To capture the imaginations of a new generation of Millennial fans, Star Trek Discovery will need to stay true to the franchise’s founding ideals while boldly going where the show has never gone before. If this new series can reinvent Star Trek as a prestige drama, while reinventing prestige drama in Star Trek’s image, it could be the catalyst that propels American television into a bold new Millennial era.

Categorized in: Culture, Generational Theory

July 26, 2017

Why Democrats Should Accept Credit for Killing Trumpcare

Team Blue is so cowed by Republican attacks, so habituated to fact checking every false accusation, and so enamored with empirical precision that they’ve lost sight of political common sense. Voters usually like it when their leaders stop horrible and unpopular things from happening.

After the Republican health care bill failed to muster the necessary votes in the U.S. Senate, some Republicans — including President Donald Trump — blamed Democrats for its failure.

President Donald Trump took a shot at Congress on Tuesday morning after the latest Republican plan to replace the Affordable Care Act collapsed amid party divisions.

“We were let down by all of the Democrats and a few Republicans,” Trump tweeted. “Most Republicans were loyal, terrific & worked really hard. We will return!”

Most Democrats and left-leaning media figures have studiously denied these accusations, rebutting them with analysis like what you see below. I’m excerpting this passage not to pick on this particular reporter, but to offer a prototypical example of the kind of rebuttals I’ve been reading and hearing:

To be clear, Democrats have never been part of the Republican majority’s calculus on health care reform. That’s by design.

At the beginning of this year, thinking only Senate Democrats — with the power of a filibuster — would stop them from repealing Obamacare and cutting taxes, Republican leadership devised a plan to bypass Democrats altogether: They tied their major agenda items to the budget through budget reconciliation a bill that can impact spending, revenue, or the debt ceiling, with only a party-line vote in the Senate.

In other words, Republicans, knowing they wanted to do something Democrats would never sign on to, found a way to circumvent them altogether. It means they have an incredibly small margin of victory (they can only lose two votes) and only themselves to blame every time their proposals fall apart.

My reaction: Heaven forbid that Democrats take credit for killing a bill that’s polling at 17 percent and would throw more than 22 million Americans off health insurance!

If your opponent blames you for killing a horrible and unpopular bill — even if it’s a lie — you take all the credit you can get. You say, “Yes, we did it! We’re proud of doing it. And we’d do it all over again if given the chance.” And then you repeat your well-practiced talking points on how horrible and unpopular the bill is.

Retreating into a fact check is just about the dumbest response you can give.

Rebuttals like the one quoted above may be intended to show how incompetent Republicans are at governing, but what they actually demonstrate is how spectacularly incompetent you are at politics. The impulse to fact check in premised on the assumption that your greater fidelity to the truth gives you the political upper hand. It does not — and we have decades of scientific research to prove it.

The science of persuasion is pretty much settled on this point: fact checking doesn’t work. If it did, Trump probably wouldn’t be president. If anything, fact checking amplifies the lie it’s meant to discredit and often leads the perpetrators and their supporters to double-down on the original falsehood, a phenomenon known as the backfire effect. Even when the backfire doesn’t occur and fact checks do nudge people toward the truth, they don’t change people’s opinions of the public figure behind the lies.

So if fact checking isn’t the right response in this situation, what is?

If you want your opponents to stop lying, your only effective options are to make their lies hurt them or work for you. Factual rebuttals usually accomplish neither. By blaming Democrats for the defeat of their health care bill, Trump and Republicans have handed Democrats a golden opportunity to make a right wing lie work for us.

To be clear, I would never suggest that Democrats proactively claim credit for something they didn’t do. But the truth of the matter is that Democratic activism, messaging and discipline — at both the grassroots and elite levels — did play a significant role in the defeat of the GOP’s health care legislation by framing the debate and raising the political costs of voting for the health care bill. Democrats can and should take credit for this.

There’s at least one other reason Democrats should happily take credit for killing the Republican health care bill — and it has to do with the party’s position in the halls of power. In politics, perception matters. So when you’re walled out of power, as the Democratic Party is today, it’s important to seize any chance you can to look powerful — both to your supporters and your opponents. The inverse of this is true as well: Looking powerless is one of the most effective ways to end up — or remain — that way.

Taking credit for blocking the health care bill makes Democrats in Congress look powerful. Denying credit by pointing to the Democrats’ relative powerlessness just validates the unhelpful and demoralizing narrative that Democrats are weak and ineffectual. You return to power by capitalizing on your opponents’ mistakes, not by reminding the voters how impotent and ineffectual you are.

So my recommendation is this: When Republicans blame Democrats for the defeat of Trumpcare, Democrats shouldn’t defensively nitpick the accuracy of this claim. Democrats should accept credit with open arms and remind voters why the defeat of Trumpcare is a victory worth celebrating.

Categorized in: Messaging, Partisanship, Political Analysis, Political Psychology

July 19, 2017

This Could Get Ugly

Is Trump’s base locked into a cult of personality? Democrats and liberals need to be prepared for the worst.

Conformist. Obedient. Rule-oriented. Rigid. Prudish. Dogmatic. Repressed. None of these are words you would use to describe President Donald Trump. Yet they are among the defining traits of individuals who score highly on the right wing authoritarian scale, the most widely used political psychology measure for identifying authoritarian personalities.

So am I saying that Trump isn’t an authoritarian? Well that depends on your definition of the word. Trump may be an authoritarian in the political science sense of the word, but not in the political psychology sense. I happen to think that political psychology has the better argument, and its implications are more than just a matter of semantics. Hear me out.

Political psychologists have observed that authoritarian social systems, groups, parties, institutions, movements, governments and societies characterized by repression, force and centralized power aren’t always led by authoritarian personalities. At least as often, autocratic social systems tend to coalesce around individuals who display a strikingly different set of characteristics.

Meet social dominators. They tend to be domineering, competitive, status-obsessed, rule breaking, hedonistic, manipulative, deceptive, exploitative and ruthless. Social dominance orientation (SDO) is a psychological domain, meaning you can find people at the high and low ends of it and everything in between, which measures an individual’s preference for intergroup dominance and anti-egalitarianism. In plain English, social dominators favor high levels of inequality between groups and believe that some groups should literally dominate and exploit others. These beliefs are strongly associated with a broad array of other traits and patterns of behavior â€“ all stemming from a Darwinian worldview and a highly competitive disposition.

In case it isn’t already obvious, Donald Trump fits the definition of a social dominator to a gold-plated T. Trump’s quintessentially dominance-based politics is among the solid evidence for his very high SDO disposition. Add to this his predatory business career, his obsession with being the best, his flexible relationship with the truth and his monomaniacal ego, and it’s pretty easy to infer that that we’re dealing with a social dominator rather than a strict and doctrinaire authoritarian — even if they share many of the same racial and religious prejudices and agree on many of the same policies.

To be fair, not all social dominators are despots in waiting. More sober figures such as Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney (as well as a large number of Republican politicians and voters) also would score highly on the social dominance orientation scale, though perhaps not as highly as Trump. Deep down, they share his competitive and hierarchical worldview, Machiavellian instincts and anti-egalitarian preferences. But unlike Trump, their characters are tempered by other features of their psychology — such as loyalty to institutions and a careerist mentality — that stop them from morphing into right wing demagogues. It’s when social dominance traits in a leader are left unchecked by a lack of impulse control or are amplified by other dark personality traits (think narcissism) that they can turn dangerous.

Through dominance displays and appeals to nationalism, traditionalism and widely held prejudices, social dominators have a way of attracting authoritarian followers by providing the transgressive, bellicose and punitive leadership that authoritarians crave. In return, authoritarians provide the worshipful, obedient and credulous followers that social dominators secretly crave. This leader-follower relationship pattern is a kind of universal psychological template for how demagogues build power.

If youâ€™re having trouble grasping what this dynamic looks like in the real world, just picture a typical Republican rally during the 2016 general election campaign crowds chanting “lock her up” or “build the wall” in lockstep, egged on by a smug and vindictive Trump who can’t help but relish the angry and adoring crowds. In these exchanges, both sides were stroking each other’s ids.

Scholars have documented that authoritarians — defined as those who demand conformity to rigid social norms, obedience to traditional authorities and punishment of social deviance — have been gathering under the banner of the Republican Party since the 1960s. While there is continued debate over how large a role they played in 2016, many political psychology and political science experts agree they played a significant role in Trump’s nomination and Electoral College victory, having reached a kind of critical mass in the GOP.

Now, just over four months into his administration, Trump’s voters appear to be sticking with him, despite months of scandals, policy failings, ethical and legal breaches, outright betrayals of his most central campaign promises and press coverage not seen since the Watergate era. At most, their enthusiasm has dampened just enough to register in polls. Nothing that has happened since Trump’s inauguration — nor, for that matter, since he launched his campaign — has made much of a dent in their support.

Many people have pointed to partisanship and the right wing media bubble as explanations for this loyalty. Undoubtedly, both these forces a playing some role. But Trump won by ruthlessly attacking the Republican Party and many of his most enthusiastic followers, especially the alt-right, had no love for the GOP or any history of party loyalty. Furthermore, right wing media can’t filter out all critical information, and plenty of conservative pundits with national platforms have criticized Trump from the right.

I suspect there are other forces at work keeping Trump’s followers marching in lockstep. So I’d like to offer another possible explanation. The unwavering support these voters continue to give in the face of their leader’s monstrous conduct is exactly what we’d expect from a classic authoritarian cult of personality.

I’m not the first one to notice that Trump’s following has cult-like qualities. A recent Public Policy Polling memo remarked, “Over the course of the campaign we found there was a cult like aspect to Trump’s support, where any idea he put forth a substantial share of his supporters would go along with. We see that trend continuing post election.” And a Huffington Post / YouGov poll found that if a national media outlet reported that Trump said something untrue, only two percent of Trump voters would believe the media.

The human mind, once made up, has an almost infinite capacity to rationalize. It’s called motivated reasoning. People, especially authoritarians in thrall to an idealized leader, will believe all kinds of demonstrably false and nonsensical things in the service of their political preferences: that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; that climate change is a hoax; that poor minorities, rather than Wall Street bankers, caused the 2008 financial crisis; that a border wall to keep out immigrants will be built in the middle of the Rio Grande River and that it will be financed by Mexico.

When it comes to ideological convictions, partisan loyalties and leaders we trust, people don’t respond well to evidence that threatens their position. Harping on Trump’s unkept promises, failures, betrayals and crimes may already be triggering a well-documented psychological phenomenon known as the backfire effect, wherein people double-down on an erroneous commitment in the face of contradicting evidence. If the backfire effect distorts the thinking of even normal people, imagine what it does to someone captivated by a personality cult, which by its nature fiercely resists attempts at disruption. It’s not hard to see why, at least for his base, Trump’s word would always trump the truth.

Arguably the most important scientific contribution psychology has made to the study of politics is the recognition that we vastly overestimate the powers of reason, evidence and fact to influence people’s beliefs and behaviors. People aren’t as rational, autonomous, self-aware or even as purely self-interested as our Age of Enlightenment forebearers once believed. Instead, cognitive and personality traits, emotions and narratives, as well as social conditioning and generational forces are in the driver’s seat of political and social change. These powerful and largely invisible psychological forces — which include right wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation in their ranks — explain all kinds of irrational phenomena from the everyday to the extreme: why people seem to vote against their own material interests and why cults of personality can still spring up around demagogues, even in the age of big data and Twitter.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Trump’s following isn’t a personality cult after all. But a lot of Democrats and liberals won’t even consider the possibility, at least not outside of a happy hour, because they’re deeply troubled by its implications. After all, if Trump is leading a cult of personality, then it means his voters aren’t reachable. As I’ve raised this possibility in serious conversations, I’ve found that it is completely unacceptable to many people, because it necessarily means that efforts to reach Trump’s voters would be futile.

Think about what this would mean if it were true. Even the best-packaged, most terrific economic proposals the left could imagine would fall on deaf ears, even if they were tailor made to address the concerns of Trump’s voters. Not even protracted material suffering brought on by the administration’s policies would convince these voters to abandon their man. (Actually, cults tend to grow tighter and ever more desperate for scapegoats as their members’ suffering increases.) Or as Trump famously remarked, he could walk down the street and shoot a man, and it wouldn’t make any difference.

None of this is to dismiss the interests and concerns these voters may hold — or to suggest that they are lost to the left forever. Rather, it’s a recognition that what’s actually motivating them lies outside the realm of strictly rational interests and policy. If Trump’s voters are locked into a cult of personality, we won’t be able to reach them again until Trump was out of the picture.

We all like to think we can reason with people: that if we just present the truth in the right way, especially by packaging it as a story laden with emotion, people will open their eyes. But decades of psychology studies show that changing minds tends to be a steep uphill battle, even when you’re dealing with normal, reasonable people. Consider your own experience at this very moment: after you’re done reading this article, you’re likely to go right back to acting as if Trump’s voters can be convinced, even if you believe every word I’ve written. The assumption that persuasion is relatively easy is so fundamental to the modern mind that it looks more like a compulsion than a belief.

Admittedly, it’s a dreadful prospect to think that tens of millions of our fellow Americans simply wouldn’t care that Trump betrayed his core campaign promises and has been working for the Russians all along. But if they haven’t been moved by any of the ten thousand bombshells so far, why would they care about next one? For at least some Trump’s supporters — the ones who get excited about “Second Amendment remedies” or never met a government shutdown they didn’t like, the bombshells may be what they secretly like about Trump the most.

I see where team blue is coming from and share the strong desire to drive a wedge into Trump’s base. For both moral and strategic reasons, neither Democrats nor liberals want to cede the white working class to the opposition — or should want to — even if we can find a way to build winning majorities without these voters. But from this desire flows an absolute conviction — one that so far has not been subject to debate — that at least some of Trump’s supporters must be persuadable, especially those who previously voted for Barack Obama. The truth is that there is precious little evidence to support or refute this conviction outside of a few focus groups — artificially constructed microcosms of opinion that may or may not reflect the wider reality. We just don’t know, and to be clear, I don’t claim certainty in this matter.

If a cult of personality — or some other collection of phenomena indistinguishable from one — has sprung up around Trump, we would expect Trump’s followers to see recent news events exactly the same way he does. Instead of perceiving, as most of the rest of us do, a corrupt and treasonous demagogue being brought to justice, they would see the same thing Trump sees: illegitimate partisan persecution intended to drive America’s one true savior from office. Right now, that’s what the polling shows they see.

Trump’s loyal followership — and the electoral threat they pose to incumbent officeholders — is widely acknowledged to be one of the main reasons that Republicans in Congress have demurred at every opportunity to hold Trump accountable. In fact, as recently as Tuesday, congressional Republicans were running interference for Trump during former CIA director John Brennan’s testimony before the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence regarding Russia’s influence on the 2016 presidential election.

Republicans who hope to remain in Congress are, quite correctly, terrified of crossing Trump’s base, who have stuck by Trump through thick and thin and show no signs of abandoning him, even as the rest of the country recoils in disgust. Trump’s followers demonstrated in 2016 that they are the most powerful voting constituency in the national Republican Party, and it’s possible they could remain be kingmakers for many years to come, especially if they continue to vote as a block.

At the moment, the political tide seems to have turned against Trump. In my opinion, probably the best we can hope for is that Trump and his ilk are gone by Labor Day, replaced by a caretaker administration with nominal bipartisan consent until the next presidential election. But as the investigations looking into the president, the vice president and both current and former administration officials ramp up, it is worth meditating on the darker possibilities that could be in store. Trump’s demagoguery could turn out to be his ace in the hole.

What happens if a desperate Trump calls on his easily goaded, rage filled and spectacularly well armed followers to save his political hide? If you think he wouldn’t do this, remember that Trump has seldom shown regard for institutional norms and legal restraints. Recall that in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election, Trump was openly disputing the validity of the election results on the presumption that he would lose, sowing the seeds for a national crisis of legitimacy. And more recently, he openly admitted to obstruction of justice and sharing highly classified secrets with the Russians.

Many people have interpreted these seemingly destructive admissions and transgressions as examples of Trump’s stupidity and recklessness. No, Trump’s ignorance and impulsiveness are not in question. But there’s another way of looking at Trump’s attempts to block the investigations into his Russia ties. Trump expects other powerful officials to act as his personal henchmen, as social dominators at the center of authoritarian personality cults often do. His moves are blunders only from the standpoint of someone invested in lawful and accountable governance, which Trump and his supporters evidently are not. Indeed, Trump’s confessions sometimes resemble the taunts of a schoolyard bully, intended to shock, intimidate and show off. “Of course I keyed Comey’s car,” you could imagine Trump saying. “What are you gonna do about it, butthead?”

For a variety of reasons, some based in reality and some not, Trump believes he can get away with just about anything. Can he and will he? Trump understands — I suspect far better than most of his opponents do –that so long as it remains an open question, he is getting away with it.

Trump’s recent behavior can be understood, at least partly, as continuation of the dominance displays and demonstrations that have been the trademark of his politics from day one. And as the threat to his administration grows, we should be prepared for his actions to get more brazen, more confrontational and more coercive — and for the possibility that his followers and congressional Republicans may be with him every step of the way. Whether or not a classic cult of personality has formed around him, Trump knows that he has captured the imagination of his followers, and that they delight in his lashing out at their shared enemies.

No matter how bad things look for Trump at this moment, this is no time to breathe easy. Trump’s predatory instincts, dominance displays and willingness to tear up the rules — telltale indicators of high social dominance orientation — are what put him in the national political spotlight and eventually into the White House. The right question to be asking is: how long they will keep him there?

So here’s my advice to the Democratic Party and to the broader anti-Trump resistance. If you’re one of the tens of millions of people fighting to hold Trump accountable or drive him and his co-conspirators from office, DO NOT assume that the scales eventually will fall from the eyes of his supporters or that Republicans in Congress will eventually come around. Welcome his backers if they start to turn on him, but take the time to find and then pursue strategies that can succeed even if they never do.

Remember that if Trump gets desperate, there’s no telling what he and his followers might do. Like a wild animal, a social dominator is at his most dangerous when he’s cornered. At this critical juncture in our nation’s history, we need to keep ramping up the pressure on all fronts, expect the worst in return, and pray that the better angels watching over 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue prevail.

This could get ugly.

Categorized in: Cognitive Psychology, Ideology, Lasswellâ€™s Formula, Partisanship, Political Analysis, Political Psychology

June 4, 2017

Trump: Boomers’ Biggest Mistake

Dana Milbank, columnist for The Washington Post, interviewed First Person Politics founder and senior analyst David L. Rosen in his latest column.

Dana Milbank, columnist for The Washington Post, interviewed First Person Politics founder and senior analyst David L. Rosen in his latest column. Here’s an excerpt:

“It’s really the boomers that are driving the hyperpartisanship and polarization and gridlock,” says David Rosen, a consultant specializing in generational effects in politics. Beginning with the boomer-led 1994 Republican revolution, “that’s where you see the origin of the insane politics that we have right now. Trump is in some ways taking that style to its most absurd and ridiculous extremes.”

But maybe this is the boomers’ last gasp. “Hopefully,” Rosen tells me, “when Gen X comes to power it will repudiate the boomers and the entire legacy of this style of politics and move us toward something that is more pragmatic.”

Read the rest of Milbank’s column. If you’re interested in learning more about generations in Congress, check out our piece in Politico from earlier this year.

Categorized in: David Rosen, First Person Politics, Fixing Politics, Generational Theory, Ideology, Partisanship, Political Analysis, Political Psychology

October 25, 2016