Enchanted America

When Erik and I did Matthew Sheffield’s Flux podcast last week, I ran into a podcast Sheffield had done a couple of weeks earlier with University of Chicago political scientist Eric Oliver, on Oliver’s book Enchanted America. I’m reading it now, and it’s fascinating, and you should too. Oliver and I co-authored a paper on the moral panic over obesity 20 years ago, and there are a bunch of connections between the crypto-fascistic purity fetishes of people like RFK Jr. and the fat panic.

Speaking of purity fetishes, here are a couple of snippets from Oliver’s podcast about what might be called the hippie/fundie convergence:

My co-author, Tom Wood, was a graduate student with me at the time [about ten years ago]. And I said, wow, we’re getting back these crazy numbers. Let’s see what’s going on here. ’cause is this measurement error or is this really something that’s kind of floating beneath the radar, at least a political science. And so we started doing more research into why people believe in conspiracy theories and to the extent that they do. And the two things that kept. Popping up again and again we’re kind of what we would call magical thinking, so having a lot of paranormal and supernatural beliefs as being a very big predictor of whether or not people believed in conspiracy theories.

So if you believe in UFOs or ESP or even general sense that there is a God who will respond to your prayers, you’re far more likely to believe in conspiracy theories than not. Sort of across the board. And what we also found was that people who believed in conspiracy theories were also more likely to believe in a host of other [00:04:00] kinds of things.

Like, for example, natural medicines. Homeopathy. Uh, they tended to be more nationalistic in their orientations. They were a lot more populist in their orientations, just generally mistrustful of elites and sort of established groups. They often tended to be wary of foreigners and more xenophobic.

And so we saw this kind of interesting constellation that seemed to defy normal ideology and it didn’t necessarily align with race or even partisanship yet. It was this factor that really explained a lot of how people are understanding the world. And so we’re in the process of doing all this research, this is 20 14, 20 15. We’re fielding survey after survey to kind of generate all these data and who appears on the political horizon, but Donald Trump and he is emblematic of a lot of the things that we’re studying.

And what we, we came to realize was that with the popularity of Trump and this welling ground swell, um, around him in 2015, that American politics weren’t simply divided by ideology or partisanship or race, but there was another dimension.

And we ended up labeling this dimension kind of intuitionism. And most people are in the middle on this, but you can imagine the intuitionism dimension is anchored on two poles. On one side are people we call rationalist, and those are people who are products of the enlightenment. They believe in science, reason, logical deduction, empirical fact. And on the other end of this spectrum are people we call intuitionists and they believe in gut feelings, um, their own kinds of just intuitions about things. How they’re very susceptible to feeling as a guide to understanding the world as opposed to say, for example, maybe thinking. Um, and they place a lot of weights and [00:06:00] then, inferential weight on their own feelings.

 You know, the, the thing that really struck us about this was that you know, at the time in particular, intuition is cut across ideology and party. And I had a sabbatical year, uh, back in Berkeley where I had done my PhD and I was surrounded by a lot of very, very liberal people who are very strong [00:08:00] Intuitionist, for example.

And you could see this a lot in sort of their opposition to vaccines and traditional medicine. And the idea of really, and, you know, their, their apprehensions about corporate power their fetishizing this idea of something as being natural. And the interesting thing is they have that a lot in common with if you, when I would go to Texas to visit my family a number of whom are evangelical Christians, and they share a lot of the same beliefs. And you know, really, and that was kind of surprising to me. It’s like, oh, okay. The Berkeley hippies and the Evangelical Texans have some strong commonalities here, and particularly around questions of, of health, of seeming, naturalism and a real susceptibility to conspiracy theories too.

And, and these people were really what we would call kinda strong intuitionist. And so when I was thinking about sort of the political scene, it was inevitable to me that Donald Trump would probably draw into his orbit, not just people who believed in conspiracy theories, but probably a lot of people on the left who. Share this kind of strong intuitionist proclivity. And it’s not that surprising to me, for example, that a lot of people who were formally, enchanted by Bernie Sanders when he didn’t get the nomination, then switched over to Trump. Because Bernie tapped into a lot of those types of things that Trump, uh, those sentiments.

What Oliver found was that the rationalist/intuitionist split used to be much more evenly divided across political affiliation and ideology, but over the past ten to fifteen years it’s morphing into a liberal v. conservative thing (Basically In This House We Believe signs v. Trumpist Jesus Rally where the lady in the photo seems to be offering up her baby to Moloch I mean Donald).

We tried to have a few illustrations in the book of people who we thought were emblematic of this and, and at one level, Lucy seems like a, kind of like, similar to what I would describe earlier, like an organic kind of California hippie in terms of prioritizing natural foods and herbal remedies and health supplements and homeschooling her kids and really just being, you know, of the earth.

But she’s also a very strident, evangelical Christian. And you know, believes that the end times are upon us and that, God’s wrath is imminent and has a lot of apocalyptic visions [00:40:00] of the world. And when we were speaking to her and trying to talk through some of these and try to make sense of her orientation you know, we, we would talk about basic policy issues with her.

Like, so, you know, she’s somebody who on at one level seems very liberal. She’s very concerned with, social equality and seeing people not suffer and preserving healthcare for the poor. Um, and I think that reflects her honest Christian beliefs. And yet she would support Republican politicians who wanna, cut all those programs.

And you know, we would try to go back and forth and she’d always have some sort of rationale and say, well. Those democrats, they’re just out for that particular group. You know, they, she would kind of echo a lot of, I think, what she consumed from Fox News and her rhetoric. And it finally, we, we’d go back and forth and back and forth, and then she just sort of stopped us and she said, you know, the, the difference between you and me is that you believe in reason and I believe in the Bible. And I, I thought that was a very prescient thing for her to observe, which is she just, she wasn’t interested in having rational consistency. Uh, the, the thing that we know I would pride myself in as a, as a professor, a so social scientist that just, those criteria meant very little to her, you know, and what she, what meant to her is this sort of what was important to her was just this, I, you know, kind of a more mythic, uh, worldview, uh, kind of situated around a set of stories that she was interpreting. I, I, in a very particular kind of way, in, in a way that sort of, I think, satisfies her own emotional needs. And she was pretty upfront with that and saying that, you know, I, I I don’t really have much need for your science. I, I’ve got my myth.

A big message here is that trying to approach voters in general and swing voters in particular through rational explanations of how X Y and Z policy will help them is way overdone by Democrats, because people don’t think like that, especially voters associated with my favorite pop music singer metaphor.

You have to appeal to their hopes and especially their fears on a visceral, emotional, intuitive level, because that’s where the action is in a country where levels of all kinds of magical thinking are through the roof, in large part because this country was founded by religious zealots, and said zealots and their hippie-trippy ideological cousins still have a massive influence on American political life.

60 years ago Peter Berger said that if India was the most religious country in the world and Sweden the least, America was a country of Indians ruled by Swedes. Well the Swedes have been pretty much kicked out of one of the two major parties which is a bit of a problem, at least until the seventh seal gets opened.