openDemocracy: “Even when they’re wrong, they’re right”

One response is to claim that the data fails to reflect voters’ lived experience and that people’s first-hand perceptions are surely more accurate than dry statistics and aloof academic analysis. Yet a subjective interpretation of an anecdote – an unemployed local builder sees a Polish one working and blames the immigrant for his lack of a job – is scarcely rigorous evidence.

Indeed, negative perceptions of immigration are often not based on personal experience. It is telling that while few people in Britain think immigration is negative for them personally, many believe it is detrimental to the country as a whole. And in both the UK and the US attitudes towards migration are often much more negative in areas where there are few or no migrants than in areas where there are many. Mediated misperceptions are even less credible than first-hand ones. [...]

It is vital that instead of validating misperceptions and lies, politicians, campaigners and commentators put a positive, evidence-based case for immigration. They need to dispel ignorance and misinformation with information, misinterpretation with explanation, and confront prejudice head on. For instance, people typically think the immigration share of the population is much higher than it really it is; better information can help. Many people believe it is common sense that every job filled by a migrant is one less for locals; one can explain that there isn’t a fixed number of jobs to go around and migrants also create jobs when they spend their wages and in complementary lines of work. When Donald Trump slurs Muslim refugees as would-be terrorists, it can be pointed out that no American has been killed by Islamist terrorists who arrived in the US as refugees. [...]

Stories need to be accompanied with an attempt to reach out to those with different values and to speak their language. In his book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, argues that liberal westerners suffer from a rationalist delusion that reasoning can cause good behaviour and is our pathway to moral truth. Yet in practice, he writes, most of our conscious reasoning is after-the-fact justification for our moral intuitions, which shape our emotions and unconsciously govern our behaviour.

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Jacobin Magazine: Information Is Power

NARMIC wanted to research the power and money behind the defense industry and get this research into the hands of peace activists who were resisting the Vietnam War so they could fight more effectively. They wanted — as they put it — to “fill the gap” between “peace research” and “peace organizing.” They wanted to do research for action — hence, their use of the term “action/research” to describe what they did. [...]

NARMIC was started in 1969 by a group of antiwar Quakers who were active with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). They were inspired by the Quaker preacher and abolitionist John Woolman, who told his followers “to see and take responsibility for injustice imposed through economic systems.”  [...]

The first was a list of the top one hundred defense contractors in the United States. Using data available from the Department of Defense, NARMIC researchers meticulously put together rankings that revealed who the nation’s biggest war profiteers were and how much these companies were awarded in defense contracts. The list was accompanied by some useful analysis from NARMIC about the findings. [...]

The story of NARMIC is an example of the critical role that power research has played in the history of US social movements. NARMIC’s research during the Vietnam War, and the way this research was used by organizers to take action, made a dent in the war machine that contributed to the end of the war. It also helped educate the public about the war — about the corporate power profiting off of it, and about the complicated weapons systems the US was using against the Vietnamese people.

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The Atlantic: What Is Really Unprecedented About Trump?

If we use “unprecedented” with care, then we are able to see what is genuinely distinct about the moment within which we live. Never have we had a president, for instance, who directly communicates with the public in the same kind of unscripted, ad-hoc, and off-the-cuff manner as we have witnessed with Trump. The kind of unbridled rhetorical attacks that he has unleashed on every enemy from the news industry to Puerto Rican officials to kneeling NFL football players to Republican legislators has been a striking contrast to what we have witnessed in American presidential history. In contrast to FDR, who spoke directly to the public through fireside chats on the radio that were carefully crafted, thoughtfully edited, and broadcast strategically, President Trump has used Twitter to literally say what is on his mind at any moment without much consideration for the consequences. This is a new style of presidential communication and a dramatic lowering of the editorial barrier as to what the commander in chief is willing to utter before the world.

Another truly unprecedented part of the Trump presidency that doesn’t get much attention anymore has to do with the massive conflict of interest that exists in this Oval Office. When the president made a decision in January to avoid erecting a strict firewall between his family business and the presidency, he set the democracy on a dangerous path that we have not yet experienced. Never have we had a businessperson with such vast economic holdings as president. To have our leader be the titular head of a sprawling global company with property interests all over the globe, even with his two sons “running the business,” creates obvious problematic situations where the line between making money and making policy is permanently blurred. [...]

Of course, even the evidence that President Trump has been willing to push the boundaries of what is permissible by abusing his presidential authority, such as when he fired FBI Director James Comey to get rid of that “Russia Thing,” he replicated the kinds of behavior we saw under President Richard Nixon with the Saturday Night Massacre and his efforts to stop the investigation of the FBI or, possibly, President Reagan when his national-security team conducted an illegal operation to provide assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras—despite a congressional ban on doing so. When the public frets that we can’t have someone as president who is so out of control given the power they hold, particularly to launch a nuclear war, we need to remember that this is a risk we have already encountered, including Nixon’s dark days toward the end of his presidency.

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The Atlantic: Trump Is Radicalizing the Democratic Party

But what if the asymmetric trend is no longer so asymmetric? Recent polling from Pew finds, as one might expect, that not only are parties becoming ideologically homogeneous, but so are people. Two decades ago, or even one decade ago, most Americans had a mix of conservative and liberal views. That’s increasingly not the case. Today, 97 percent of Democrats are more liberal than the median Republican—an even more extreme concentration (by a hair) than across the aisle, where 95 percent of Republicans are more conservative than the median Democrat.

Digging into Pew’s numbers, something notable emerges. Starting around 2015, views among Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters (I’ll just refer to this group as Democrats from here on out) tend to change sharply. For example, here are Democrats’ view on immigrants, perhaps Trump’s No. 1 target on the stump: [...]

Yet there is, naturally, a connection between the voters and their representatives, as Mann and Ornstein pointed out about the GOP in 2012. One question to track is whether Democratic legislators now start behaving as Republicans have in Congress. Predictions of a “Democratic Tea Party” or an irredentist faction equivalent to the House Freedom Caucus have so far come to naught. One reason is that Democratic voters tend to value compromise more per se, and the Pew poll suggests that is one thing that hasn’t changed. Seven in 10 Democrats say they like elected officials who can reach deals, while a slim majority of Republicans prefer ones who stick to their positions.  

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