A THOUGHT

I should like to spend a little time elaborating on an idea I have long had, prompted in this instance by a powerful two part piece by my friend, old student, and co-teacher Todd Gitlin, a senior professor at Columbia’s Pulitzer School of Journalism and, in the old days, president for a while of SDS.  You can find the two parts of the essay here and here.

The embrace by Trump supporters of manifestly false claims about the world in defiance of all the evidence has been endlessly discussed first by commentators on the left and more recently even by mainstream media.  Countless explanations have been put forward for this embrace of nuttiness, which is manifested most often in opinion polls and surveys.  Let me offer an additional explanation that, I think, accounts for at least some of the statistical bizarrerie.

People are by and large not stupid, especially when it comes to things in their own lives or touching on their immediate interests.  I may not know where Ukraine is, but I know how to find my way to the grocery store or even to my son’s house all the way across the continent in San Francisco.  I don’t actually know much of anything in detail about what a virus really is and how it causes an illness, but I know how to turn a pound of raw shrimp, some spinach, and a yam into a tasty healthy dinner for Susie and me, as in fact I did yesterday evening.  When someone shows up at my door or calls me on the phone and asks me a series of questions about Ukraine, or COVID-19, or immigrants, or Barack Obama’s birth status, I know perfectly well that the questions are really proxies for the unspoken question, “Which side are you on?”  And so does everyone else who shows up in the statistics of an opinion survey. 

People in America, with the possible exception of the overeducated, are compulsive consumers of social media, and hence they know where Trump stands, at least for the moment, on Obama’s birth certificate, immigrants at the Mexican border, or the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine.  When an opinion surveyor [what we used to call a pollster] calls and asks “Do you think Barack Obama was born in America?” we all understand that the latent message [as Robert Merton used to say] of the question is “Are you for Trump or against him?”  And so we answer that question, not the one the pollster has actually asked.

Everyone’s direct experientially based knowledge of the world is actually quite circumscribed.  Almost everything I believe beyond the circle of my direct observation comes from reports that I credit as objective, scientific, true, but which I would be at a dead loss to really justify if I were called on to do so without appeal to authority.  I am typing these words into my desktop computer, but even though I could begin to explain the process by which my tap-tapping on my keyboard produces the words on my screen, my explanation would peter out pretty quickly.  I don’t really know anything beyond the words about solid state transistors, for example, and even what I claim to be my knowledge about their roles in a computer is entirely based on what I have been told by others on the basis of their expertise.

I actually watched a man walk on the moon for the very first time.  Or at least that is what I was told I was watching.  What I saw was some images on a little black and white TV with rabbit ears for an antenna.  I also watched Gandalf turn back to confront the Balrog in the Caves of Moria.  That too was images on a screen, this time in color.

I suspect that the large minorities of polled Americans who are reported as believing that Obama was not born in America are actually Trump supporters who, when asked that question, hear “Do you support Trump?” and answer that question truthfully, albeit regrettably.