This post is about thinking through the possible consequences of the hearing by the House Committee on the January 6, 2021 events. My premonitions about this have caused me considerable anxiety. I'm going to try to put those aside in this post and do the type of analysis that blends knowledge about how people learn, on the one hand, with economics/game theory, on the other.
The first speaks to the question of how Trump supporters will react to the evidence that is provided during the hearings (and the evidence that has already been provided). Yesterday, while overhearing what was being aired on MSNBC while my wife was watching TV, the following argument was made more than once. In a situation where people hear evidence that counters their prior held view, who the messenger is matters. The House Committee has been careful to present the evidence from Republicans in Trump's corner. Specifically, much was made of the testimony given by former Attorney General William Barr. If this argument holds sway, then by the time the hearings have concluded most Americans will conclude that the election wasn't stolen and that claiming otherwise was a diversion created by President Trump for his own personal and political benefit.
But there is a quite different possibility entirely. The following paragraph is taken from a post I wrote about a decade ago called: Is reasoning taking a beating? I think the entire post is relevant for understanding our current politics, but the particular paragraph is especially relevant while not being about politics at all.
In the book, What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain teaches us that students don't know what to do when they confront evidence that contradicts their prior held world view. Perhaps it is surprising to learn that the initial student reaction is to deny the evidence. The world view has sanctity and deep down the student wants to preserve it. The excellent teacher understands the tension the student is under. With patience and persistence, the instructor nudges the student to reconsider his position. It would be good for that position to account for the evidence that is observed. Of course, in this case Bain is referring to an academic matter. When looking at circular motion the students are apt to have an Aristotelian view. A Newtonian perspective appears unnatural. There is a getting used to period necessary to take on the new perspective. There is leadership in helping students make the transition.
This paragraph suggests that people might very well retain their prior world view in spite of evidence to the contrary. Further, in regard to the events of January 6, 2021, there is obviously a question of whether people watch the hearings directly and in full or if, instead, they watch the hearings as they've been filtered through their favorite news outlet, which cherry picks segments and excludes much of the rest. There is no doubt that viewers of Fox News are getting a different story than viewers of MSNBC.
Thus, it seems more than possible that one of two different scenarios will prevail. In the first scenario, the vast majority of Americans converge in the belief that the 2020 election was not stolen. There may still be substantial disagreement about how to manage the situation given such beliefs, which I would summarize as either punish severely or largely forgive and forget. But in this first scenario we'd be coming at these managing-the-situation questions with a general consensus of what had occurred. In the second scenario, there is no such consensus. We remain a divided nation about whether the 2020 election was stolen. And members of each side in this hold contempt for members of the other side.
Now, let's complicate this admittedly simple characterization some. This is about the intensity of the belief as measured by the perceived consequences assuming the belief is true. For Democrats, especially the ones who are regular watchers of MSNBC, the nation is in crisis and is under grave risk that we will become a fascist state. But, for example, consider those swing voters who voted for Obama but then switched to vote for Trump. Many of them may be upset at the Democrats now because of the high inflation they are seeing as well as the shortages of goods (notably baby formula). These voters may vote Republican in November, even if they believe the election was not stolen in 2020.
Thus, we now have two dimensions to consider. The first is whether the hearings are persuasive in convincing Americans that there was no steal. The second is in regards to which party controls the House after the elections in November. To this one might further complicate things by considering the behavior of Congressional Republicans between now and the November elections. Will the House Republicans led by Kevin McCarthy stick with their current line, that the hearings are a sham? Or, in the event that the hearings do appear to be broadly persuasive, might these House Republicans change their tune and then help to achieve consensus? And, surely, there can be further dimensions to complicate the picture even more. But I see no reason in doing so now for the purpose of the analysis.
We've reached the point where we can perform the backward induction. In the economics/game theory approach, one solves for the equilibrium in the future first, or solves for all the possible equilibria in the future when the future is not uniquely determined, and then, given that future to fix expectations, one solves for equilibrium (or equilibria) in the present. What seems evident now is that the January 6, 2021 House Committee members have a strong preference for the outcome where the hearings are broadly persuasive, while the House Republicans under McCarthy have the opposite preference. If most Americans now line up with one side or the other at present, what will they do if their side wins and what will they do if their side loses?
Those questions seem straightforward enough and yet they are too difficult for me to respond to with straightforward answers. Instead, I will give some unknowns for me. Are the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers far out there and thus unlike most Trump supporters who believe the election was stolen? Or is there a continuum of sorts here? In other words, I would certainly predict there would be more violence in the event that the hearings are broadly persuasive, more so if the Democrats retain the House, but it's very hard to have a sense of the scale of that violence. Would it be a fringe activity or the beginning of a civil war? A further unknown is how the police, in particular, but really all law enforcement, respond to the threat of such violence. And here the complications may be more obvious. If these fringe Trump supporters are in possession of large amount of assault weapons, as seems likely to me, law enforcement and warfare will seem to blend. Will the police get strong support from the rest of America, even if events in the last couple of years have challenged such support?
Now lets consider the other possibility, where the hearings are only mildly persuasive to those who supported Trump and there remains a large following of Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was stolen, even after the hearings conclude. How will Democrats react in this case? I will answer this one from my own perspective. There seems to be way too much trust in the system to warrant it and I have concluded some time ago that the system is broken and requires a strong response. Jamelle Bouie's column today asserts that this is a generational thing, where younger Democrats agree that the system is broken but older ones cling to current beliefs as if it were the past where the system did function reasonably well (the Vietnam War and Watergate notwithstanding). If the system is broken and your side seems to be losing in the current political conflict, what then? Is there a sensible alternative to resorting to violence at this point? Or, if we would be heading to fascism under this scenario, would any non-violent alternative amount to appeasement?
Suppose you answered yes to that last question, but you recognized that Democrats, who are largely anti gun, are terribly unprepared for a violent alternative that might escalate into a civil war. What would you do then? On a personal note, I get a large number of solicitations from Democrats for funding their campaigns, both by email and by snail mail. I have donated in the past on occasion. This, I suppose, is how the system works now. But I have not received any communications about preparing for the possible contingency that is described in the first sentence of this paragraph. Indeed, I don't think that elected officials of either party want to openly talk about a broken system. If that's right, leadership on this will have to come from elsewhere. I would like to see evidence of such leadership. I would then give my support to their effort.
These days I write a piece like this essay largely to get the ideas out of my system, if I can. In the past I've found that when I put in the effort to write up my ideas, I can move onto something else in my thinking. If I don't write in this way, I'll just keep stewing about it over and over again I'm hoping to get past my fixation with this piece.
I learned when I was a campus administrator that while writing this blog and discussing controversial issues I should put forward arguments which were less advocacy for a particular approach and more inquiry into the issues at hand. Style-wise, that's what I've tried for in this piece. If you are one of the rare few who have reached this point in the reading, I hope it has piqued your interest in getting at answers to these questions, and thanks for your attention.
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