#29 - Post-election blues
I'm happy Biden won, but the Democratic Party needs to ask itself: What's the actual narrative behind Trump?
One of the most pernicious forms of mental biases we hold is narrative bias. The world is so complex, and we have a desire to make sense of it, so we weave stories (“narratives”) that help us to explain the world, when in reality, our narratives do not have any explanatory power. Indeed, some phenomena happen purely due to chance while other phenomena have a host of other causal factors that we failed to consider. When our narrative fails to explain certain empirical data or a certain sequence of events, it’s called a narrative violation. Narrative violations reveal that we don’t know nearly as much as we thought we knew.
The 2016 and 2020 U.S. elections were narrative violations on a national scale, at least for the coastal elites. In 2016, the prevailing mood leading up to the election was: “Donald Trump is absolutely not going to win. Nobody would elect a racist, bigoted xenophobe like him!” Of course, he ended up winning. And then, the prevailing mood leading up to this election was: “Look at what these last four years did to our country. Look at the coronavirus response. Surely, people will see that Trump is awful! And in any event, many people who didn’t vote in 2016 will surely come out in 2020 in droves to vote Trump out!”
And yet, here we are, just a few days after the election, after historic levels of voter turnout, with Biden declared the winner, but only by a razor-thin margin. While many predicted Biden would win, few thought that it would be this close, that Trump would still get this many votes. Nate Silver’s 538, for instance, predicted that Trump would win Ohio, but only by 0.8%. Instead, Trump ended up winning Ohio by a whopping 8%. What’s more, Trump won more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016. Oh, and on top of that, the Republicans actually stole 5 seats from the Democrats in the House of Representatives while losing only 1 seat in the Senate. This is an incredible narrative violation. Why does it seem like so many people oppose Trump and the current iteration of the Republican Party, yet how does the GOP actually garner so many votes?
One of the most intellectually honest ways to combat narrative bias is to shrug, say “I don’t know,” and not even try to create a narrative in the first place because you admit and recognize that you don’t know nearly as much as you think you do. While that solution works great on an individual basis, the leaders in the Democratic Party will not (and should not) use this tactic to steer the Party. On some level, the Democratic Party, and indeed, the Republican Party, needs to ask itself: What is the actual narrative here behind Trump’s incredible support? It’s hard enough to describe the problem (“what happened”), it’s harder to diagnose the problem (“why did this happen?”), and it’s even harder than that to treat the problem (“how do we address this?”). But political parties need to perform diagnosis and treatment in order to keep their fingers on the pulse of the American electorate and remain in power. While I think the Democrats should obviously be happy about the win, I do also think they need to take a long, hard look in the mirror and ask how they found themselves in this position in the first place.
I don’t purport to have an answer for you in this post, but I do think there is a wrong answer. In particular, I do not think that half of our American compatriots are irredeemable bigots and racists. This is an all-too-convenient and lazy characterization that not only drives more people into Republicans’ arms but also guarantees a narrative violation, since Republicans, afraid of being cancelled, will hide their truths privately and tell lies publicly. Any diagnosis and treatment conducted by the Democratic Party requires respect as a starting point. It requires being mentally able to countenance the possibility that certain people voted for Trump not because of his bigoted comments, but in spite of them, to advance different but nonetheless legitimate interests. Or, put differently, they are not (or at least are not all) racists. They just have different principles. The difficulty lies in figuring out exactly what those principles are and how those principles are ranked. Through this understanding, though, perhaps we can de-polarize this political moment and create more collaborative political parties to build a brighter future for America.
Again, I don’t have any answers in this post, but I can point you in the right direction with a few resources (assuming you also lean left and this election was a narrative violation for you).
Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who vehemently opposes Trump, recently did an interview where he talked about some of the things Trump might have gotten right about our political moment.
Reddit has a an AskTrumpSupporters subreddit (thanks to my close friend for sending this to me). I highly recommend checking it out and seeing what some Trump supporters prioritize. It’s very eye-opening.
The Wall Street Journal has an Opinion piece on Fred Siegel, an ex-liberal historian who became more conservative over the last decade and voted for Trump this past election.
While Trump won Florida by a slim 1.2% margin in 2016, he won Florida by a ~5% margin in 2020, largely thanks to a surge in Latino votes. The Atlantic has a good piece on what liberals don’t understand about pro-Trump Latinos.
And, of course, I recommend that you speak with (or even become friends with) a few Trump supporters to understand their viewpoints.
📚 What I’m reading
The market curve. Mike Vernal at Sequoia analyzes how different companies should think about their total addressable markets.
America’s press and the asymmetric war for truth. Jay Rosen has a theory for the current Republican Party (which I find interesting, even if partly incorrect). He also argues that the press has been refuge-seeking instead of truth-seeking. I agree that it’s better to seek truth than to seek refuge as a general principle, but Rosen seems to be jumping to the conclusion that the GOP is always spewing misinformation while the Dems are always right.
On Ben Thompson’s Stratechery. Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia, writes a very critical take of Ben Thompson’s antitrust analyses, calling it “a little too much Kool-Aid.”
Is the Internet different? Ben Thompson responds to Tim Wu.
AI engineers need to think beyond engineering.
Amazon launches a program to pay consumers for their data on non-Amazon purchases.
Three ideas for how to live a fuller life. Yes, clickbait title, but the article provides some very interesting thought experiments that expand your horizon of thinking and help you zoom out of your life.
Justifying a moral duty to vote is a lot harder than you might think.