I think that the really notable insight that Trump has had is that the typical voter has little or no idea what is actually happening in the policy areas being discussed, and that making false or self-contradictory statements isn’t – at least in the existing environment of commentators and media and such – as politically-damaging as is conventionally held to be the case.
He also worked to get people listening directly to him. Like, instead of his statements being mediated by the media – who might call him out – he works to get people following a social media account that he runs directly, on Twitter. When even that media cut him off, he established his own social media outlet. Cut out middlemen, avoid situations where other people might call out your statements as false and have those calling-outs reach your target audience.
I’d add that the problem really doesn’t go away when Trump loses the election or wins and then four years down the road, leaves office. That is, it’s not that Trump has some unique ability to exploit it…he’s just the one who found the hole. If you’ve found a mechanism that is effective and works, other people will also make use of it, unless you restructure the environment so that it isn’t effective any longer. That is, this is going to be an issue into the future, unless it’s possible to redesign things so that it’s not practical to exploit.
The good news, I think, is that we live in an era with a lot of change going on in the media environment. That is, it’s not that the present environment is one that’s been around for a long time and it’s very difficult to come up with anything else. Newspapers and TV are in decline, various social media sources are on their way up, and there isn’t much by way of entrenched and impervious entities. Hell, I’m writing this and you’re reading this on a platform that didn’t even exist a bit back and was put together on a shoestring budget. So there’s a lot of potential for change, including in ways that would make it a lot harder to make outright false claims.
Trump polls better among low-education voters, but I don’t think that is as interesting as it might seem. That is, I don’t think that an effective counter is “just teach everyone enough about everything to identify holes in what’s being said”. Even if it were possible to bring everyone up to speed on a broad range of policy areas – and it just isn’t – you could always just find less-egregious, more-subtle false statements, adapt to a different audience.
Like, I know a few things pretty darn well, would have expert knowledge on them. There are a lot of areas that I know a little bit about, maybe enough to pick up on things that are false, but I can’t pick up on subtle errors in those. And there are areas that I just know nothing about. I can call people out pretty well in areas that I have expert knowledge in, but I’m inevitably going to be less-able to do so the less I know about a given area. And every person out there is going to have some mix of those levels of knowledge for various areas. Humanity long-ago specialized knowledge via division of labor. That lets society do more than any one human could – can “know” more – but as we specialize, though it lets society do more, it also means that each individual person has a narrower and narrower sliver of knowledge sufficient to understand everything that goes on in an area in society. We don’t have the kind of fairly-complete understanding of what’s going on in society that someone in, say, a small band of hunter-gatherers might.
If I had to give an off-the-cuff guess as to what a counter would be, I’m pretty sure that whatever has to happen has to involve some level of delegating evaluating statements to people in an area who do have expert knowledge and getting a reasonably-objective take from them. Gotta make sure that someone can’t insert their own experts or the like to get through a statement that they want. And that’s not an easy problem. Newspapers and such might have regularly consulted experts – and that process may itself be imperfect, might have media sources happy to let through flawed information if they think that it benefits them – but in today’s environment, where direct mass communication between people is a lot easier, that kind of filter often doesn’t exist.
I mean, people have taken stabs at it. I’ve seen some sort of fact-checking thing that Google News has in the sidebar, and I’ve seen various media sources aiming to do explicit fact-checking projects. But I don’t think that, as things stand in July 2024, it’s sufficiently effective, if major-party candidates can just regularly make outright outrageously wrong claims and have them go through.
I think that the really notable insight that Trump has had is that the typical voter has little or no idea what is actually happening in the policy areas being discussed, and that making false or self-contradictory statements isn’t – at least in the existing environment of commentators and media and such – as politically-damaging as is conventionally held to be the case.
He also worked to get people listening directly to him. Like, instead of his statements being mediated by the media – who might call him out – he works to get people following a social media account that he runs directly, on Twitter. When even that media cut him off, he established his own social media outlet. Cut out middlemen, avoid situations where other people might call out your statements as false and have those calling-outs reach your target audience.
I’d add that the problem really doesn’t go away when Trump loses the election or wins and then four years down the road, leaves office. That is, it’s not that Trump has some unique ability to exploit it…he’s just the one who found the hole. If you’ve found a mechanism that is effective and works, other people will also make use of it, unless you restructure the environment so that it isn’t effective any longer. That is, this is going to be an issue into the future, unless it’s possible to redesign things so that it’s not practical to exploit.
The good news, I think, is that we live in an era with a lot of change going on in the media environment. That is, it’s not that the present environment is one that’s been around for a long time and it’s very difficult to come up with anything else. Newspapers and TV are in decline, various social media sources are on their way up, and there isn’t much by way of entrenched and impervious entities. Hell, I’m writing this and you’re reading this on a platform that didn’t even exist a bit back and was put together on a shoestring budget. So there’s a lot of potential for change, including in ways that would make it a lot harder to make outright false claims.
he does “love” the uneducated, after all.
considers
Trump polls better among low-education voters, but I don’t think that is as interesting as it might seem. That is, I don’t think that an effective counter is “just teach everyone enough about everything to identify holes in what’s being said”. Even if it were possible to bring everyone up to speed on a broad range of policy areas – and it just isn’t – you could always just find less-egregious, more-subtle false statements, adapt to a different audience.
Like, I know a few things pretty darn well, would have expert knowledge on them. There are a lot of areas that I know a little bit about, maybe enough to pick up on things that are false, but I can’t pick up on subtle errors in those. And there are areas that I just know nothing about. I can call people out pretty well in areas that I have expert knowledge in, but I’m inevitably going to be less-able to do so the less I know about a given area. And every person out there is going to have some mix of those levels of knowledge for various areas. Humanity long-ago specialized knowledge via division of labor. That lets society do more than any one human could – can “know” more – but as we specialize, though it lets society do more, it also means that each individual person has a narrower and narrower sliver of knowledge sufficient to understand everything that goes on in an area in society. We don’t have the kind of fairly-complete understanding of what’s going on in society that someone in, say, a small band of hunter-gatherers might.
If I had to give an off-the-cuff guess as to what a counter would be, I’m pretty sure that whatever has to happen has to involve some level of delegating evaluating statements to people in an area who do have expert knowledge and getting a reasonably-objective take from them. Gotta make sure that someone can’t insert their own experts or the like to get through a statement that they want. And that’s not an easy problem. Newspapers and such might have regularly consulted experts – and that process may itself be imperfect, might have media sources happy to let through flawed information if they think that it benefits them – but in today’s environment, where direct mass communication between people is a lot easier, that kind of filter often doesn’t exist.
I mean, people have taken stabs at it. I’ve seen some sort of fact-checking thing that Google News has in the sidebar, and I’ve seen various media sources aiming to do explicit fact-checking projects. But I don’t think that, as things stand in July 2024, it’s sufficiently effective, if major-party candidates can just regularly make outright outrageously wrong claims and have them go through.
great reply! I think his actual phrase was… “I love the poorly educated.”, so I didnt nail my punchline.
agreed with pretty much everything you said, with the caveats that…
To be fair, I’m not sure Trump knows what’s actually happening in the policy areas either. He just says stuff that he thinks will get him notoriety.