Post-election reflection

Let’s use the (relative) calm of this moment to think about how to calm things down in the longer run

Michael Beschloss may be America’s most recognizable historian. He’s been a fixture for decades on the PBS NewsHour and, in recent years, on NBC and MSNBC. A few days before this week’s election, he put himself in the running for America’s most apocalyptic historian.

Speaking on MSNBC about the stakes of the election, he said, “A historian 50 years from now—if historians are allowed to write in this country and if there are still free publishing houses and a free press, which I’m not certain of, but if that is true—a historian will say, what was at stake tonight and this week was the fact whether we will be a democracy in the future, whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed. We’re on the edge of a brutal authoritarian system, and it could be a week away.”

If Beschloss had asked for my advice on how to avoid becoming an object of ridicule in right wing circles, I would have said, “Maybe you should leave out the part about them arresting and killing our children.” But he didn’t seek my advice, and he did wind up being an object of right-wing ridicule.

In defense of Beschloss: He wasn’t talking just about the consequences of Republicans winning the election, but also about the consequences of some Republicans, in some states, possibly subverting the election—the prospect that “losers will be declared winners by fraudulent election officers or secretary of state candidates or governors or state legislatures.”

Still, that was a pretty intense riff.

As the dust from the election clears, there are no signs that right-wing authoritarians are scheming to steal and kill children. And there are encouraging signs for people who worry about a brutal Trumpist regime coming to power. A number of Trump-backed candidates lost, and, though some of them may contest the results, we haven’t seen the most feared kinds of attempts to subvert the democratic process—violence at polling places, mass denial of clear-cut election results, and so on.

Still, America is definitely not out of the woods. By that I don’t mean that the Republican party, in years to come, could well usher in a brutal authoritarian regime. Republicans could conceivably do that, of course. (Ron DeSantis, the smarter and smoother version of Trump whose presidential prospects were brightened by his resounding gubernatorial win in Florida, seems to have the temperament of an authoritarian.) But my concerns are more general: a future of sustained and even escalating red-blue tensions that could lead to any number of bad outcomes—maybe, eventually, authoritarian rule, but maybe just ongoing civil conflict or a long slow slide toward complete government dysfunction and national dissolution.

So I’d say job one remains what it was before the election: get red-blue tensions down to a manageable level. And to that end I’d give this advice to the Michael Beschlosses of the world:   

I know that the drive toward authoritarianism you see coming from the other side of the political spectrum seems like a horrifying and malicious power grab—like a bunch of bad people who are staging a scorched earth offensive against the values we hold dear. And there’s definitely a sense in which that’s true of at least some of these people. But you have to understand that this scorched earth offensive gets much if not most of its political energy from a defensive emotion that you seem to be very familiar with: fear. And understanding the future that the other side fears could help prevent the future that you fear.

I would deliver roughly the same message to any MAGA Republicans who are as wound up about Democrats as Beschloss is about MAGA Republicans: 

I know you see, and fear, a ruthless offensive coming from the left—an offensive that would subvert values you hold dear and could bring authoritarian rule if not stopped. But it’s in your interest to understand how much of this is driven by fear kind of like the fear you feel.

In other words, though this country’s polarization problem is sometimes described as symmetrical hostility—and though that is a fair description, in so far as it goes—the problem could also be described as symmetrical fear. And I think the chances of avoiding a grim future—authoritarian rule, civil war, unending low-level chaos, whatever—will be better if people of good will on both sides understand what the fears are on the other side.

Before elaborating, and fleshing out the fears in play, I want to underscore the generic dynamic at work here and the breadth of its application. More and more I think this dynamic—reading a threat as purely offensive when it is motivated or powered largely by defensive impulses—is a big driver of conflict both within nations and between them. If enough people got better at recognizing this dynamic and adjusting their perception accordingly, there would be not just less intranational strife but less international strife—not just fewer civil wars, but fewer wars.

Here are a couple of examples of the dynamic at work on the international stage, one from the contemporary world and one from the world a century ago:

The contemporary example is about US-China relations. Here is how the political scientist Michael Beckley, co-author of a recent book on China and a recent guest on the Nonzero podcast, replied when I asked about the motivation behind China’s military assertiveness in the Pacific Ocean:

 I think there’s certainly, from a Chinese perspective, a strong defensive motive, in the sense that China is critically and chronically dependent on foreign economies for its own livelihood. It imports 80 percent of its oil, and high-end computer chips, and manufacturing equipment, and medical devices. It’s the number one food importer of the world. And something like 90 percent of Chinese trade passes through the South China Sea on its way to the Chinese mainland. And so China is doing what great powers tend to do, which is secure their vital economic lifelines.

Now the problem is that what looks like a defensive effort from China’s perspective looks to other countries like China’s attempt to essentially annex these vital international waterways, which are also vital for all the other states in the region, and so that of course sets up a severe conflict of interest between China and its neighbors as well as the United States…

The historical example of defense being read as offense comes from the runup to World War I, which famously featured military buildups that were largely defensive in motivation but were taken by adversaries as threatening. President Theodore Roosevelt wrote in 1904 that Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany “sincerely believes that the English are planning to attack him and smash his fleet, and perhaps join with France in a war to the death against him. As a matter of fact, the English harbor no such intentions, but are themselves in a condition of panic [and] terror lest the Kaiser secretly intend to form an alliance against them with France or Russia, or both, to destroy their fleet and blot out the British Empire from the map! It is as funny a case as I have ever seen of mutual distrust and fear bringing two peoples to the verge of war.”

Needless to say, this got less funny with time.

Both the China example and the World War I example illustrate what international relations scholars refer to as the “security dilemma”: if you strengthen your military posture out of defensive considerations, the natural tendency of your adversaries to see offensive motivation or at least offensive potential in this strengthening will likely lead to countermeasures that erode your relative defensive strength and so lead you to further strengthen that posture and… and so on—a circle of fear can lead to endless escalation.

The late political scientist Robert Jervis, one of the seminal analysts of the security dilemma, wrote: “The inability to recognize that one’s own actions could be seen as menacing and the concomitant belief that the other’s hostility can only be explained by its aggressiveness help explain how conflicts can easily expand beyond that which an analysis of the objective situation would indicate is necessary.”

There are a lot of differences between the runup to World War I and what’s happening in America now. But let’s look at the core similarity—the way fear motivates what is perceived by the other side as threatening behavior, and the way this can lead to sustained escalation via a positive feedback cycle.

Among Michael Beschloss’s fears is that election denialism will lead to the actual subversion of elections. It’s not a crazy fear. Two years ago Donald Trump and his allies came uncomfortably close to subverting a presidential election.

Now, Trump’s attempt to subvert the election wasn’t directly motivated by fear (unless you mean fear of losing power), but it drew strength the fears of grassroots supporters.

Consider Ashli Babbitt, who was killed by a police officer on January 6, 2021. At the moment that she began to climb through a broken window into a forbidden zone in the Capitol Building, hoping to help overturn Joe Biden’s victory, she was a personification of what Michael Beschloss fears. And she was motivated by fear. A QAnon adherent, she feared that a ring of pedophiles permeated the government and would do more and more evil unless stopped.

Now, it’s not all that valuable for liberals like Beschloss to recognize this particular fear. Completely delusional fears, after all, are hard to undermine. But the QAnon delusion is just one salient manifestation of a whole stew of fears on America’s right, and what they collectively represent is a fear remarkably like Beschloss’s fear: that the other political tribe is subverting the freedoms and democratic processes America stands for.

Here is a small sampling of dots that some MAGA Republicans connect to reach that conclusion:

1) The Hunter Biden laptop story, which broke days before the 2020 presidential election, was suppressed by social media platforms—and the platforms got validation for the suppression from eminent figures in the national security establishment who said the story had the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. The laptop story turned out to be true, and the Russian disinformation claim turned out to be unfounded, but by the time this was clear the 2020 election was over.

2) Most powerful media outlets are in liberal hands, and they sometimes distort reality to liberal ends. Hence what some on the right call “the Charlottesville lie”—the misleading rendering of Trump’s infamous “fine people on both sides” comment. The word “lie” may be too strong—I don’t know that reporters intentionally distorted Trump’s message—but, as I’ve shown in this newsletter, the New York Times, for example, did distort it.

3) “Woke” liberals, MAGA Republicans tell their followers, want to impose their values on public schools—which could mean, for example, that your thirteen-year-old daughter uses the same bathroom as a trans student who is anatomically male; or that your high school daughter might compete in interscholastic sports against athletes who are anatomically male (or were anatomically male during puberty, and have the muscles to show for it). The likelihood of these things happening may be hugely overstated, but the key thing is that people on the right can point to cases of them actually happening. Fear often doesn’t require much evidence.

I could go on listing such connectible dots all day. But note a few features of the list so far:

(1) Each dot represents a kind of fear—respectively: (a) fear that speech will be suppressed by liberals who run social media; (b) fear that liberals who run mainstream media will distort the truth about MAGA politicians and their followers; (c) fear that liberals who shape policy (in this case school policies) will impose their values on families that don’t share them.

(2) These different kinds of fears can create and sustain a larger fear. The more things liberals do that you fear, the more there is to fear about them holding power.

(3) This larger fear fuels countermeasures. The more reason there is to fear liberals holding power, the harder you fight to keep them out of power. And why should you assume they’re not playing dirty? After all, if liberals would suppress speech on social media and distort reality in their media, why wouldn’t they try to steal an election? So why shouldn’t you question election results and use all the tools at your disposal to overturn them?

(4) These fear-driven countermeasures feed fears in the other tribe, fears that in turn fuel countermeasures. The more Trump supporters doubt the validity of elections, and try to overturn them, the more liberals fear Trump’s election, and the harder social media and media platforms may work to keep him out of power. (Of course, the sale of a social media platform like Twitter can change things, and is a reminder that contingency can intervene in this cycle, but my point is that the cycle itself has a certain intrinsic logic and power.) And the more hyperbolic things will get said on MSNBC by people like Michael Beschloss.

(5) All of this heightens fears in MAGA circles. (The Beschloss clip got little circulation in liberal circles but lots in MAGA circles—where it presumably reinforced the belief that the enemy tribe is driven by dangerously irrational rage.) So we’re back to square one, but with the intensity now a bit higher; and the cycle of fear continues to feed on itself.

The darker suspicions found in MAGA America don’t just form spontaneously. They often take shape with the help of manipulative elites—Trump, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, whoever. Then again, some stoking of grassroots fears by elites, whether cynical or not, happens in blue America. How many MSNBC viewers had considered the possibility that Republicans might arrest and kill their children before Michael Beschloss suggested as much? Similarly, liberal elites—on MSNBC, in the New York Times, in Congress—hyped evidence for Russiagate so much that to this day many liberals think there’s strong evidence that Trump gets orders from Moscow, when in fact there’s not.

And of course, this fear that Trump is in cahoots with a foreign adversary made liberals only more likely to countenance the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. After all, when the stakes are existential, extreme measures are called for.

Don’t get me wrong: I consider Trump a kind of existential threat. So much so that, in the days before the 2020 election, I didn’t exactly mourn the decision by social media platforms to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story. I’m only human!

But I think if we hope to defuse the threat that Trump poses, we need to understand the things that fuel it. And I think the biggest cause is fear—or, rather, fears, lots of fears, some of them delusional but some of them not completely crazy and some of them not at all crazy.

Some of these fears liberals (and anti-Trump Republicans) can’t do anything about, and some of these fears they may decide they don’t want to do anything about. But whatever they decide, the decision should be informed by a full understanding of its consequences—especially when those consequences include amped up fears that may be propelling this country into a kind of death spiral.  

The role of fear in this spiral could use much more illumination than this preliminary exploration has provided. It could also use a systematic compare/contrast with the international relations version of mutually reinforcing fear—the classic “security dilemma” spiral. But this issue of NZN is already (at least) long enough, so I’ll stop here.

For now I’ll just note (in case you’re not familiar enough with this newsletter’s current obsessions to have noticed), that the dynamic I’ve described is yet another example of cognitive empathy being impeded. The natural sensitivity of the human fear response keeps us from fully understanding what’s going on in the minds of people in the other tribe; it encourages us to frame them as dangerous enemies, which in turn leads us to focus on their aggressive aspirations, obscuring what drives those aspirations. Our fear blinds us to their fear. And the rest is history.