Motivated ignorance as identity maintenance

This Thomas Edsall piece (gift link) is essential reading. It poses the following question:

The mystery of 2024: How is it possible that Donald Trump has a reasonable chance of winning the presidency despite all that voters now know about him? Why hasn’t a decisive majority risen up to deny a second term to a man in line to be judged the worst president in American history?

The litany of Trump’s liabilities is well known to the American electorate. His mendacity, duplicity, depravity, hypocrisy and venality are irrevocably imprinted on the psyches of American voters.

Trump has made it clear that on a second term he will undermine the administration of justice, empower America’s adversaries, endanger the nation’s allies and exacerbate the nation’s racial and cultural rifts.

The New York Times gets a lot of deserved criticism here at LGM, but it does publish Edsall, who asks all the right questions in a completely unvarnished way.

Edsall’s exploration of the answer via various academic experts, mainly political scientists, is absolutely worth your time. It’s especially valuable for liberals and leftists who rightly reject the crude moralizing and anti-structural naivete behind responses that assert Trump has probably something around a 50/50 chance of getting re-elected because 45% of the electorate is simply made up of “bad people.”

I mean obviously there are a lot of bad people on the right, but successful populist demagoguery requires certain cultural conditions that go well beyond the existence of a lot of bad people.

A key factor to Trump’s success is what students of contemporary American politics call “motivated ignorance.” Political scientist Gary Jacobson:

Motivated ignorance differs from the more familiar concept of rational ignorance in that ‘ignorance is motivated by the anticipated costs of possessing knowledge, not acquiring it.’ That is, it is not simply that the benefits of accurate political knowledge may be less than the cost of attaining it and thus not worth pursuing, but that the costs of having accurate information exceed the benefits.

When expressed opinions and beliefs signal identification with a group, it is rational to stay ignorant of contradictory facts that, if acknowledged, would threaten to impose personal and social identity costs for the uncertain benefits of accurate knowledge.

Only by remaining ignorant of such facts as those can Trump supporters avoid facing the painful possibility that they might have been wrong about him and their despised enemies, right. Such a realization could unsettle their self and social identities, estranging them from family and friends who remain within the MAGA fold. As Michael Patrick Lynch, a philosopher who studies political beliefs put it, “To be blunt, Trump supporters aren’t changing their minds because that change would require changing who they are, and they want to be that person.” Staying ignorant, deliberately or unconsciously, is thus rational.

It’s easy to be sanctimonious about this, but imagine how strongly you would resist any information that would, if accepted as true, lead you to discard a cherished belief that is central to both your identity and your membership in your core social circle. We’ve seen recently, for example, the extent to which ardent Zionists will reject out of hand any and all information that might lead them to consider the possibility that Israel as a society is fundamentally in the wrong in its conflict with the Palestinians — a conclusion which, if accepted, could eventually lead to the identity-destroying conclusion that the state of Israel was ultimately a mistake. There are plenty of people for whom the previous sentence involves a kind of thought crime, and therefore is almost literally unthinkable.

What’s important to remember, when thinking about why Trumpism is such a powerful and resilient social movement, is that everyone has core beliefs that remain as impervious to empirical and moral argument as the idea that Israel was a mistake must by definition remain to the Zionist. In other words, certain beliefs can only be discarded in the context of a fundamental conversion experience, and such experiences are rare.

One consequence of this is that, in a perverse, paradoxical, but ultimately unsurprising way, the very fact that more and more evidence comes forth all the time that Trump is a shameless criminal and lifetime grifter binds his supporters to him even more tightly, because such evidence, if accepted, would threaten their core identities and the stability of their social networks. This evidence is thus either rejected out of hand, or, more interestingly, reinterpreted as evidence that Trump’s attacks on the establishment are so righteous that the establishment is, inevitably, out to destroy him by any means necessary. This is the apotheosis of the paranoid style, related to the observation that paranoid individuals eventually produce at least some of the actual conditions that they initially fantasized about (“Everyone is conspiring against me.”).

Three political scientists, in a paper entitled “The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue,” describe this dynamic:

The greater his willingness to antagonize the establishment by making himself persona non grata, the more credible is his claim to be his constituency’s leader. His flagrant violation of norms (including that of truth-telling) makes him odious to the establishment, someone from whom they must distance themselves lest they be tainted by scandal.

But this very need by the establishment to distance itself from the lying demagogue lends credibility to his claim to be an authentic champion for those who feel disenfranchised by that establishment.

Another political scientist, Yptach Lelkes, describes this process as a kind of “crystallization” of politics:

Crystallization describes a world where people’s attitudes won’t be swayed, no matter what new information they get. Campaign dynamics do very little to move attitudes. Polarization is the engine of crystallization.

Intense partisan hostility works to Trump’s advantage in a number of ways, according to Lelkes.

First, MAGA loyalists believe “the investigations against Trump are witch hunts and baseless.” Taking this logic a step further, “people think that the other side is dangerous and that we need someone willing to do whatever it takes to stop them. That is, they think they are protecting democracy by supporting Trump. Finally, in a polarized world, people value policy and partisan outcomes over democracy — they are willing to tolerate some authoritarianism to further their own political goals.”

Edsall goes on to make the crucial point that for decades the Republican party was laying the groundwork for someone like Trump to appear. Political scientist Marc Hetherington puts it this way:

Something important had been occurring for decades at the elite level in the G.O.P. Starting with Black civil rights in the 1960s, leaders started to take positions that would ultimately attract a different party base than the one that existed before.

Next it was opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights, with clear implications for women’s equality. Then it was a stance against L.G.B.T. rights. The G.O.P. remained steadfastly religious in its orientation, while Democrats started to embrace secularity.

The thing that ties all these issues together is a stance toward societal change. Traditional or modern, some call it closed or open.

After Mitt Romney’s defeat in 20212, party elites decided the GOP needed to tack toward bringing more traditional out groups into its coalition. This led to a massive backlash in the Republican base:

After the defeat of Mitt Romney in 2012, Hetherington wrote, “party elites decided in their autopsy that they needed to take a more open tack in trying to attract a more racially and ethnically diverse base of support.”

Trump, however, “challenged this leadership consensus. Elites lost control of the base right there — but bear in mind that Republican appeals on race, gender and sexual orientation were responsible for creating that base.”

Trump has remained a powerful, if not dominant, political figure by weaving together a tapestry of resentment and victimhood. He has tapped into a bloc of voters for whom truth is irrelevant. The Trump coalition is driven to some extent by white males suffering status decline, but the real glue holding his coalition together is arguably racial animus.

Edsall cites a bunch of evidence for the extent to which support for Trump is fundamentally a function of hostility toward a cluster of distinct marginalized groups:

Trump’s support, they write, is “tied to animus toward minority groups,” specifically “toward four Democratic-aligned social groups: African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims and gays and lesbians.” . . .Interestingly, though, “feelings of animosity toward Democratic groups do not predict favorability toward the Republican Party, Paul Ryan, or Mitch McConnell,” Mason, Wronski and Kane write. Instead, “Trump support is uniquely predicted by animosity toward marginalized groups in the United States.” . . . animosity toward Democratic-linked groups predicts Trump support, rather remarkably, across the political spectrum.

All this may on some level seem self-evident, but Edsall’s syncretic analysis of several sources of Trump’s enduring support — I’m leaving a good deal out — is really compelling, and I encourage everyone to read it.