Democracy and Inoculation

Showing that politics is not a continuum, but more like a scattershot

Were I Queen of the Universe, no one would graduate from high school without knowing the difference between causation and correlation, and no one would graduate from college without understanding the rhetorical concept of inoculation.[1]

Democracy requires understanding opposition points of view. Our current media undermines democracy by relying heavily on inoculation—regardless of which “side” your media is on. It makes you think you know the opposition point of view when you really don’t. It presents you with a weak version of an argument, so that you won’t even listen to the stronger version—you will reject as stupid someone who disagrees with your party line.

It does that through two strategies.

First, most media relies on the false frame of there being “two sides” (Dem v. GOP) to every issue. There isn’t. There is no issue that is accurately bifurcated into two sides, let alone two sides that map onto the two major political parties. That false frame takes the rich, entangled, and nuanced world of policy options, and reduces it to an identity issue—do you see yourself as liberal or conservative?

In our current world, all politics is identity politics.  And it’s a deliberate evasion of policy argumentation.

That’s a bad world, a damaging frame for democratic politics, and a different post. Here I’ll just use the example of what to do regarding drug addicts to point out it isn’t a Dem v. GOP issue. There are people who are opposed to legalized abortion who prefer rehab to jail for drug addicts—are they conservative or liberal? There are people who want no government restrictions on the “free” market who also want no criminal penalties for drug use—conservative or liberal?

Let’s just walk away from the notion that there are “two” sides on any issue. There aren’t. There isn’t even a continuum. There are people who really disagree.

The second strategy builds on the first. It’s inoculation. Once you’ve persuaded your audience that the complicated world of political decisions is actually a zero-sum fight between us and them, then you need to persuade your audience of a particular construction of Them. This is a little complicated. You have to acknowledge that there is a group that disagrees with your group’s positions, but you know that, if your audience looked into the issue with any effort, they’d find it’s more complicated than you are trying to pretend it is—they’d find there are lots of people who disagree, and those people have some good arguments. So, you’ve got the tricky task of making your audience believe that they know what They believe while persuading them that they shouldn’t actually look into Their argument in any detail.

You rely on inoculation.

Vaccines, inoculation, work by giving the body a weak version of a virus, so that, when the body gets the stronger version, it shuts that shit down.

Con artists often use inoculation. They tell their marks that there are people out to get them, and give a weak version of the criticisms, framing it all as part of their being the real victim here, and it often works. The mark refuses to listen to criticisms of the person conning them on the grounds that they know what that critic will say, and they already know it’s wrong. They don’t. They haven’t listened. Inoculation is about persuading someone not to listen to anyone else because you believe (falsely) that you already know what they will say (you don’t.) It works because the con has established what feels like a real connection with the mark.

That’s how it works in politics and media too.

People who inhabit rabidly factional enclaves believe that they are not rabidly factional—they believe that they have impartially considered “both” sides (mistake number one—there aren’t only two sides) because they believe they are thoroughly informed as to what “the other side” thinks.

They aren’t. Matthew Levendusky has shown that factionalized media spends more time talking about how awful They are than they do defending their group. So, it doesn’t actually argue for a policy; it argues against an identity. And it does so in a way that makes people feel good about themselves (we aren’t as dumb as those assholes) while trying to ensure that the audience doesn’t try to understand why people disagree.

What I’m saying is this: the biggest problem in our political situation is that we rely on media that spends all of its time with two messages: we are good because those people are assholes; they’re such assholes that you shouldn’t even listen to them but repeat these talking points we are giving you.

Here’s what I think. People really disagree. The real disagreements in our world are not usefully divided into two groups. You should never rely on an in-group source to represent any out-group argument accurately. You should try to find the smartest versions of opposition arguments.

I love vaccines. I think, when it comes to biology, we should all get vaccinated. When it comes to politics, we shouldn’t. Polio might kill you; a different political point of view won’t.

[1] I’d also insist that Billy Squier’s “Stroke Me” be put on mute for a couple of years, just because I’m really tired of it. I’m open to persuasion on this.

3 thoughts on “Democracy and Inoculation”

  1. I just spent a week at the Cato Institute with 150 others teachers/educators at the “Sphere Summit” dedicated to teaching civil discourse. Each day of the five-day conference involved being treated like an intelligent, educated, experienced, and talented individual. Having a complete experience like that with a minimum of soft-ball Libertarian commercials, an no hard-ball ever, was refreshing and renewing in a way that’s hard to describe.

    What can you say for people who considered how to get teachers to drop a lot of their armor and say what they think, so they provided an open beer-and-wine bar each night before and after the dinner program?

    As Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (she visited us with Congressman Justin Amash) said over dinner on the last night, if you disagree one ten things but agree on two, work on the two, I now can give the Libertarians the benefit of the doubt. As a big-government, progressive Democrat, public school-teaching Union member, I disagree with Libertarians. But we agree on the necessity of teaching about and teaching how to do liberal democracy, as well as how to fight for it in the face of exposed and powerful authoritarianism with all of its ugly attachments.

    Allies, yet imperfect allies. I can work with that.

    I want my hunger to be satisfied for tangible displays of how much what I do is valued. I find public pronouncements of “supporting teachers” without action to be insulting. I see the agenda; I’m calling it out. I have experienced the difference.

    Yes, I have been inoculated, but perhaps not in the way intended.

    1. And the new generation is being exposed to Queen and Elton John, both bodies of work that can be played on a “classics” radio station for parents and grandparents to play for the young people we are transporting. You have to have the “no earbuds or headphones in the car” rule in place, however. You can’t stop them from accessing anything else on their phones. Their fingers would mutate into talons and their heads would swell up like the Elephant Man with the pent-up flow of information.

      This part of the Baby Boom was not finished expressing itself. Billy Squier can wait a couple of years.

  2. Omg, it took you this long to get tired of that song? As for me and my house, it could have disappeared into the wind after three months and never been missed.

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