Satire versus Political Polarization

In late February, I joined two of my Political Science colleagues (Jason Gainous and Jasmine Farrier) to speak at the annual "REDTalks Forum." This year the REDTalks focused on political polarization and I spoke about "U.S. Foreign Policy and Political Partisanship."

I've long been keeping an eye out for interesting stories and poll results about partisanship -- and how to address it. Over the years, I've frequently retweeted or bookmarked some of those findings.

In the current political atmosphere, Americans have partisan opinions about almost everything -- it's not just values-laden questions like gun control or abortion. Opinion about climate change science and policy is highly partisan. The links in the last paragraph point to partisan results from surveys about public opinion on trade and NATO, which reflect an interesting result noted in the literature. People follow cues from elites and take partisan stands, especially AGAINST the views of leaders and people from the other major political party. Democratic party member support for free trade and NATO has increased, in part, because President Donald Trump has attacked free trade and NATO.

This works both ways. David Frum notes a couple of weird Republican changes in the age of Trump:

The share of Republicans with a positive opinion of the FBI tumbled from 65 percent in early 2017 to 49 percent this past July. In the past three years, Vladimir Putin’s approval rating among Republicans has almost tripled, to 32 percent.

When Trump started criticizing the NFL for tolerating kneeling during the national anthem, Republicans started telling pollsters they did not like the NFL. At the time, I asked my students what they thought would happen in the south if a bunch of Southeast Conference (SEC) football players at schools like Alabama, Florida, and Georgia started kneeling during the national anthem -- especially if Trump continued to criticize the behavior.

Speculation aside, I'm writing today about something that ties my "comedy project" to political partisanship. The following paragraphs originally appeared in an Atlantic Monthly article by Pulitizer Prize winning NYT reporter Charles Duhigg. He noted in the January/February issue that some scholars in Israel conducted an interesting experiment:

A group of Israeli social scientists wanted to conduct an experiment disguised as an advertising campaign. The ads would run in a small, conservative Tel Aviv suburb, where many people were religious and supported right-wing politicians. The goal was to persuade the residents to abandon their anger toward Palestinians and agree that Israel should freeze construction of Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank, among other concessions. 

The suburb they were hoping to convert, Giv’at Shmuel, was known for being strenuously opposed to anything associated with peaceniks, liberals, or anyone who said anything good about peaceniks or liberals. 

The scholars rejected standard suggestions to try to promote tolerance in the community. Instead, they decided to use a satirical campaign playing up the community's anger and outrage:

the researchers came up with a clever idea. Don’t tell everyone in Giv’at Shmuel that they’re wrong. Tell them that they’re right: A perpetual war with Israel’s neighbors made a lot of sense. If anything, the people of Giv’at Shmuel ought to be angrier. 

With the help of an advertising agency, the social scientists created online ads celebrating the tension between Israelis and Palestinians, and extolling the virtues of fighting for fighting’s sake. One ad showed iconic photos of Israeli war heroes and proclaimed, “Without [war] we wouldn’t have had heroes. For the heroes, we probably need the conflict.” The ad was scored with Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries.” Another ad featured footage of a soldier with a machine gun petting a kitten and an infantryman helping an old man cross the street. “What a Wonderful World” played in the background. Its tagline read, “Without [war] we would never be moral. For morality, we probably need the conflict.” The ads, along with brochures and billboards, began appearing in Giv’at Shmuel in 2015. Over a six-week period, according to polling, nearly all of its 25,000 residents saw them.

The results were impressive:

when the researchers conducted polls in the suburb at the end of the advertising campaign, the residents who had held the most extreme views at the outset of the experiment appeared to have softened. The percentage of right-leaning residents who said that Arabs were solely responsible for Israel’s past wars decreased by 23 percent. The number of conservatives who said Israel should be more aggressive toward Palestinians fell by 17 percent. Incredibly, even though the advertisements never mentioned settlements, 78 percent more people said that Israel should consider freezing construction in the West Bank and Gaza. (Residents in nearby towns who hadn’t seen the ads were surveyed as a control; they showed no such evolution in their views over the same period.) 

A year after the ads had ceased, by which time some residents had trouble recalling the specifics of the campaign, polls still showed greater tolerance. The campaign wasn’t a panacea, but it is among the most successful conflict interventions in contemporary social science.

The researchers believe the results worked because the satirical ads went to "embarrassing, offensive extremes." 

“No one wants to think of themselves as some angry crank,” one of the researchers, Eran Halperin, told me. “No one wants to be lumped in with extremists or the angriest fringe.” Sometimes, however, we don’t realize we’ve become extremists until someone makes it painfully obvious.

Duhigg conjectures that Donald Trump's political rhetoric -- particularly at his partisan rallies -- is "so extreme" that it offers similar "essentially absurdist provocations."

The hope is that Trump rally attendees will be shocked by the President's words.

Call me skeptical. 

My guess is that context matters. Political ads are public, even if targeted at particular geographic areas, and can be ridiculed publicly within the area. Trump's partisan rallies are closed events in front of his greatest admirers. They might be televised, but the broadcast audience is much more diverse -- and Trump's long speeches have so much content that it would be difficult to separate the mundane partisan words from the truly CRAZY. 

Again, Duhigg might be right that audience members would know, but I'm very skeptical. 

Political opponents, however, might achieve a big payoff by running "pro-Trump" ads that selectively feature some of his most outlandish claims. Don't run them on comedy websites and don't criticize the words as an opponent would. Run them as genuine over-the-top ads. 

That might work to deflate Trump. 

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Quacks

Sorry for the silence here. However, I have recently posted twice to the Duck of Minerva group IR blog:

Sunday, February 16, I posted "Academic Family Tree." It concerns a website that tracks dissertation advisers and their students in academia.

On Friday February 7, I posted "Nuland: Comic misunderstanding?" The post discusses a comedic reading of Ambassador Victoria Nuland's recent comment to "F*** the EU."



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Climate Education

Last week, on May 23, the Louisville Courier-Journal ran a provocative op-ed piece by Kentucky state Senator Mike Wilson, identified as the chair of "both the Senate Education Committee and the General Assembly’s Education Assessment and Accountability Review Subcommittee."

In the piece, Wilson quotes from the Next Generation Science Standards, which were released in April and apparently based on the Framework for K-12 Science Education, developed by the National Research Council. As Wilson rightfully says:

Standards should encourage teachers to create and foster an environment that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of multiple theories.

That's all great, right? Scientists, whether in the social or natural sciences, are in favor of critical thinking, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of various theories. Of course, I hope that everyone would agree that some theories are better supported by the available evidence and should be emphasized when teaching youngsters the state of current scientific knowledge. Right?

Wilson notes that the new standards emphasize climate change, something of great interest to me (often on this blog):

The standards place substantial emphasis on teaching climate change and there is considerable discussion describing human activities as major factors in global warming....The National Research Council appears to be carving out positions and expressing the beliefs of U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

To support his point, Wilson quotes directly from the NGSS. The first claim is from the middle school section on "Weather and Climate": 

Human activities, such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are major factors in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature

The second quote is from the high school section on "Human Sustainability"

 ...outcomes predicted by global climate models strongly depend on the amounts of human-generated greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere each year...

Note: The C-J online version has "depend of" (sic) rather than "depend on." 

So far, so good, right? A state political leader on education is quoting directly from national science standards that clearly recognize the latest information on climate change, the human role in global warming, and the importance of scientific models.

But Wilson (did I mention that he is a Republican?) is apparently a climate skeptic. He lives in a coal state and does not even make much attempt to argue against the standards. He seemingly presumes that he can challenge the standards merely by pointing out that they support teaching about climate change.

Specifically, in his analytic section, Wilson makes just two arguments against climate change. I'll address each in turn. First:

There are those in the scientific field who question the beliefs of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A statement signed by 16 scientists listed several stubborn scientific facts contradicting the Intergovernmental Panel’s beliefs. 

Wow, 16 scientists doubt the IPCC. While Wilson refers to their findings as "beliefs," which is odd for someone interested in science, he didn't mention the fact that "Thousands of scientists from all over the world contribute to the work of the IPCC." Nor does Wilson note that the overwhelming majority of scientists (a clear "consensus") agree about the core science behind climate change. A recent survey of peer-reviewed journal articles found that of 4000 that took a position on the cause of ongoing climate change,  97.2% "endorsed human-caused global warming."

Second, Wilson writes:

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over a decade and the smaller-than-predicted amount of warming over the 22 years since the Intergovernmental Panel began issuing projections.

These claims are often repeated by climate skeptics, but they are false. As NASA recently reported, "January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record." NASA and NOAA also found that "2012 was among the 10 warmest years on record, rising above the long-term average for the 36th year in a row." Any lower than expected warming is readily explained by recent volcanic eruptions, which temporarily cools surface temperatures. Look at the long-term data and the trends are clear:

Source: NASA

There is some year-to-year natural variation, but the long-term trend is obvious -- even in the last 22 years. Indeed, before closing, I should note that Wilson omitted a second clause in the second quote above (highlighted here). It is directly pertinent to the natural variation point:

...outcomes predicted by global climate models strongly depend on the amounts of human-generated greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere each year and by the ways in which these gases are absorbed by the ocean and biosphere. 

Wilson also criticizes the NGSS for its section on evolution. I won't bother to contest this section extensively since this is the entirety of his critique: "There is no factual evidence that this has ever occurred and to suppose that it happens is counter to the beliefs of many Kentuckians."

As for the evidence for evolution, start on the Smithsonian Institute's page. Then, visit a good university library.

When it comes down to it, the education and science senator apparently  wants to challenge evolution and climate change because these are not ideas that people in Kentucky believe.

Isn't science education meant to challenge false beliefs? What happened to Wilson's concerns for critical thinking, objectivity, and logic?


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"I like being able to fire people..."

In the interest of fairness, here's some information about that famous Mitt Romney line. The context is not always reported, but PolitiFact has it:

Romney was specifically talking about the ability to get rid of your health insurance provider when you aren’t satisfied with its services.

"I want individuals to have their own insurance," Romney said. "That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep you healthy. It also means if you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. You know, if someone doesn’t give me a good service that I need, I want to say I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me."

So Romney wasn't referring to his work at Bain Capital -- or to the more general question of serving as a boss who has decided to fire employees of his company -- but rather the notion of switching service providers. He might as well have been talking about switching cellphone carriers or cable TV companies.

That's from January 11, 2012, so the main line has been percolating for some time. In fact, it was really more of an item during the Republican primary season.

Of course, this contextual information does not excuse the Romney campaign from its distortions of Obama's "You didn't built that" line.


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