A Sociological Understanding of Attempted Coup D'etat in Washington DC

Understanding the insurrection sociologically

The events at the Capitol on 1/6/21 were unprecedented to say the least.  However, my first thoughts were not surprise or horror, but, (like this stoy from GQ) more of a feeling of "Oh, it finally happened."  These events have been building for years and it was only a matter of time, but since the 2020 election, it has been in plain sight.  Especially as a sociology teacher who studies race, masculinity, violence, social class and protest, I have been worried about these sorts of events for years.  In fact, the day after Trump's election in 2016, I warned about this and I had numerous acquaintances, former students, fellow teachers and administrators question my fears and scoff at my disdain.  But perhaps they don't see the issues in the unique light that someone with a sociological understanding does.  There is far too much to cover in one lesson - but yesterday's attempted coup d'etat has so many sociological elements to it.  And if you pay attention to the rest of the semester, you will indeed have a wealth of knowledge to understand what took place.

In case you need details about what happened, here are some sources:

Washington Post compiled a detailed article of the warnings of violence before the Jan 6 

 

Here is a Propublica compilation of videos downloaded off the website Parlor.

 

From the New Yorker, this video is a reporter's firsthand footage.

The Washington Post put together a video and a graphic of the timeline of events. 

 

Here are the events from a British journalist embedded with the protesters.

Here is a video of the events from CNN.

Here is an explanation from Vice of symbols at the coup.

From PEW, an analysis of Americans reactions to the insurrection.

Collective behavior and the insurrection

Sociologists have studied collective behavior like riots.  From the book, A Sociology Experiment, 

A riot, like many forms of group behavior, can’t be explained by studying individuals as if they move through the world completely isolated from each other. A riot is the product of a collective process where individuals come together and experience a common set of emotions, react to the actions of others, pick up cues from the setting, and take a course of action. A riot is about the way we interact with each other within a specific context. It is, at a fundamental level, a social event. 

In order to understand how it could happen, it is necessary to look at the collective process that brought these people together from all over the country and formed their emotions in a way that could lead to the storming of the US Capital in order to prevent the certification of the 2020 election. 

Be distinct and critical and don't overgeneralize

Before analyzing the collective behavior that led to the insurrection, let's try to be specific about who was involved yesterday.  The group that marched from the protest to the Capitol building was not a relatively large group;  remember that 70 million Americans voted for Trump in the November election.  The group in DC was a fraction of a percent of that group.  And it was a fringe group of extremists.  As ABC News reported:

The individuals who stormed the Capitol were a mixed collection of folks who include militant Trump supporters, election deniers and Alt-Right Folks," said Brian Levin, director of the Center for Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State University San Bernardino.
"We had Nazis... Q-Anon supporters....The Red Elephants, a group that promotes conspiracy theories and white supremacist ideas...the Oath Keepers....Proud Boys...neo-confederates....  and militia 

So, do not make the mistake of homogenizing all Trump voters (outgroup homogeneity).  I am hopeful that millions of Americans who voted for him consciously will object to the violence that occurred yesterday.  And the millions of supporters are not a monolith - there are very diverse groups within the Republican party.  That being said, Trump bears responsibility for stoking what happened yesterday.  And, there were millions of Americans who gave tacit approval to what happened yesterday by continuing to support him, not the least of which are Representatives and Senators who chose to still cast an impotent protest vote against certifying the electoral college results.  Going forward, obviously all students have a right to vote for whomever they choose, but I hope students will look holistically at their votes and the things that their vote tacitly approves. 

The roots of the collective action can be found in the confluence of sociological issues of social class, racism, masculinity, media and conspiracy theories.  All of these topics we will cover in more detail this semester, but while the events of yesterday are still fresh, I want to give you a brief understanding from a sociological point of view.

Social class and the declining of the middle classes

In this article from The Cut, Pramila Jayapal, a Democratic congresswoman from Washington State explains to author Rebecca Traister that "Trump is both a problem in and of himself but also a symptom of all the things that the government has not done for people."  Numerous sociologists have documented the feelings of being let down by the government over the last 50 years or so.  And there is lots of sociological research that shows not only do these people feel this way, but there is ample justification for those sentiments.   For the last 50 years, the vast majority of all Americans have been falling behind financially.   College and healthcare costs have been rising at unsustainable rates, stable working-class jobs are declining, real wages have gone down.  Many Americans feel this even if they can't identify it.  This feeling leaves many of these Americans as distrustful and pessimistic about the federal government and politicians.  See the section below for a list of publications:

 

Arlie Hochschild explains this In her book, Strangers in Their Own Land. She says that while people might vote against their economic needs, they're actually voting to serve their emotional needs. Hochschild says that both conservatives and liberals have "deep stories" — about who they are, and what their values are. Deep stories don't need to be completely accurate, but they have to feel true. They're the stories we tell ourselves to capture our hopes, pride, disappointments, fears, and anxieties.  It doesn't matter if the story is real or true or not.  What matters is that the story is believed to be true so people shape their feelings and actions as if it were real.  Dr. Hochschild's idea is explained on NPR's Hidden Brain.

Katherine Cramer's Politics of Resentment

 

Katherine J. Cramer is author of The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she heads the Morgridge Center for Public Service. Her work focuses on the way people in the U.S. make sense of politics and their place in it. Cramer’s methodology is unusual and very direct. Instead of relying polls and survey data, she drops in on informal gatherings in rural areas—coffee shops, gas stations—and listens in on what people say to their neighbors and friends. It is a method that likely gets at psychological and social truths missed by pollsters.  Summary from Scientific American is here.

 

Janesville, An American Story

The author explains that Janesville is "a microcosm of what was happening in many places in the country and with many kinds of work, because that’s what’s been happening out of the Great Recession. The unemployment level has fallen, but income levels have stayed quite depressed since before the Great Recession..."
New Yorker review here.

NPR review here. 

J D Vance's Hillbilly Elegy

Vance tells NPR that the book is about "what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. He writes about the social isolation, poverty, drug use and the religious and political changes in his family and in greater Appalachia."

The Atlantic's review here. 

A critical review from the New Republic here. 

 

 

Robert Wuthnow's The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America

Wuthnow, a sociologist at Princeton University, spent eight years interviewing Americans in small towns across the country.  He had one goal: to understand why rural America is so angry with Washington.  Hint: it’s not about the economy.

Sean Illing explains on Vox,

Wuthnow argues that rural Americans are less concerned about economic issues and more concerned about Washington threatening the social fabric of small towns and causing a “moral decline” in the country as a whole. The problem, though, is that it’s never quite clear what that means or how Washington is responsible for it.

So I decided to speak with Wuthnow about what he learned and whether fears about America’s “moral decline” are really just a cover for much deeper fears about race and demographic changes.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation is here.

Sociologist Jennifer Silva's We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America

From Slate,

In the run-up to the 2016 election, sociologist Jennifer Silva conducted more than 100 in-depth interviews with black, white, and Latino working-class residents of a struggling coal town in Pennsylvania. Many of the people she spoke with were nonvoters in 2016 and before. Their politics, she writes in her new book We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America, were often a hodgepodge of left and right. Their views could appear “incoherent or irrational” on the surface: Many of them trusted Donald Trump because of his wealth, for example, even as they supported higher taxes on the rich.

Many of the people Silva interviewed were profoundly cynical about social institutions, government, marriage, and family ties. They had often suffered trauma, such as domestic violence or military-related PTSD, and were in near-constant physical and/or psychological pain. Instead of placing their hope in systems that have failed them repeatedly, Silva finds, they worked to recast their own stories of pain into opportunities for individual self-improvement. Organized into groups of brief profiles from the town she anonymized as “Coal Brook, Pennsylvania,” the book is an unsparing and empathetic portrait of a diverse corner of blue-collar America.

Silva, a sociologist at Indiana University Bloomington, was raised in a working-class family in Massachusetts. Her father dropped out of high school to join the military, and she was the first in her family to get a bachelor’s degree. When we spoke on the phone last month, we talked about working-class white people’s affinity for Trump, the rise of conspiracy theories, Hillbilly Elegy, and the lessons that 2020 presidential candidates can take from her research. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Racial resentment and politics of racism

Note that the discontent in social class discussed applies to all Americans in the bottom 80% of income regardless of race, however, there are unique racial dynamics that intersect with social class.  As Adam Serwer notes in the Atlantic, America has only been a true democracy for 50 years.  During the 50 years that economic equality has been declining, we have seen a slow nudge toward more social equality.  Movements like civil rights and BLM have created some progress that is not lost on the whites who feel like they are not getting ahead financially.  Additionally, the 1965 immigration act opened America's doors to a more diverse but higher social class of immigrants.  Whites see these people as nonwhites who are doing economically well in America (i.e. Asian doctors, engineers, and other professionals). And, politicians have been using coded racial language since the 1970s to use white racial resentment to create political support.  Nixon's Southern Strategy is one of the most prominent examples of this.  Mother Jones details a history of the politics of racial resentment going back to the Nixon campaign here. 

Notre Dame Sociology professor Rory McVeigh and Creighton professor Kevin Estep's The Politics of Losing trace the parallels between the 1920s Klan and today’s right-wing backlash, identifying the conditions that allow white nationalism to emerge from the shadows. White middle-class Protestant Americans in the 1920s found themselves stranded by an economy that was increasingly industrialized and fueled by immigrant labor. Mirroring the Klan’s earlier tactics, Donald Trump delivered a message that mingled economic populism with deep cultural resentments. McVeigh and Estep present a sociological analysis of the Klan’s outbreaks that goes beyond Trump the individual to show how his rise to power was made possible by a convergence of circumstances. White Americans’ experience of declining privilege and perceptions of lost power can trigger a political backlash that overtly asserts white-nationalist goals. The Politics of Losing offers a rigorous and lucid explanation for a recurrent phenomenon in American history, with important lessons about the origins of our alarming political climate.

Review of the book in Contexts here.

Dr. Carol Anderson, a history professor from Emory University, has researched and published about the reaction of whites to black civil rights gains.  She calls the backlash by whites reacting to black gains "white rage" as detailed in her book from Bloomsbury;
"Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House, and then the election of America's first black President, led to the expression of white rage that has been as relentless as it has been brutal.  Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage." 

Ian Haney Lopez is a constitutional law professor from the University of California Berkley.  His book shows how racism has been used subtly since Richard Nixon and the "Southern Strategy".  This subtle racism is sometimes called dog whistles - phrases that only register with some people who are tuned in to hear them.  For example, a politician can say, "welfare costs too much taxpayer dollars" and a neutral person would hear simply that paying money to the poor is expensive.  But to those who believe that the poor are mostly black, this phrase says that Americans who are black are taking advantage of taxpayer dollars.

This racial resentment came to a head when President Obama was elected.  Michael Tesler's book Post Racial or Most Racial? explains that some whites were so angered and afraid at the election of a black man for President of the United States that there has been a feeling among whites that somehow they are oppressed.  But, more recently, social scientist   Michael Tesler explains in his book that rather than the Obama era ushering in a post racial society, the U.S. has actually become more racial as a result of it.  Mostly, this is a misplaced fear because some whites think racism is a zero-sum game and so any advances for Americans who are not white means that whites are being oppressed.

Racist Fringe

In the effort to delegitimize Obama, a host of fringe ideas were reinforced through conservative voices.  Here is a sample of them:

One example of conspiracy theory politics which attempted to use race to raise doubts and fears about President Obama is that if elected in 2012, he would institute Sharia law in the United States and destroy democracy:

Here is one website detailing the claim and disputing it.

Another example is the following book published during the Obama administration which tried to cast President Obama as a Muslim terrorist. From Wikipedia,
"throughout the Obama administration, McCarthy promoted views about the Obama administration's advancement of a "Sharia Agenda", arguing that radical Islamists were working with liberals within the United States government to subvert democracy in the West." 

Please know that there is no evidence of any such attempt at President Obama imposing Sharia law or turning the United States into a communist or socialist country.  These were conspiracies that defied reality.  But the racial resentment was real and it led to a host of cringe-worthy campaigns and conspiracies against him:  

The most persistent and damaging conspiracy theory was that President Obama was a Muslim who was not born in the United States as such, was anti-American detailed by this website.  The most public figure promoting the idea that President Obama was not born in the United States was Donald Trump who began his political campaign with an egregious campaign of racial resentment known as birtherism.  This trope follows a long line of viewing "real Americans" as white and because President Obama's father was born in Kenya, the trope falsely pushes the idea that there is no way that President Obama could be American.  (It should be noted that during the 2008 primary election, even the Clinton campaign engaged in the same politics of racial resentment when they circulated a photo of Mr. Obama visiting Africa and wearing traditional garb as an attempt to paint him as unAmerican.)  The Guardian details the history of Trump promoting birtherism here.  And from the Atlantic, here, and birtherism on ABC news here.

If there was any doubt that Trump's rise to political power was about racial resentment, the photo below is from the first day after Trump's election.  That is just one of a whole list of racist hate that was manifest on the first day after his election documented at Medium here.  This is just one example that the 2016 election was about racial resentment.  

And this twitter feed documents similar incidents.

This post from buzzfeed documents middle schoolers chanting Trump catch phrases in a way that alarms the parents of the school on the day after his election.

This article from Raleigh documents that the KKK celebrated Trump's win in 2016.  "Trump, a Republican, was officially endorsed by the KKK during his campaign."

The FBI has warned repeatedly that white nationalist group are the biggest threat to domestic security in the US. 

 Jonathon Metzel's Dying of Whiteness

Read more here: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/politics-columns-blogs/under-the-dome/article113915898.html?fbclid=IwAR03fNvi2Ka8uX52lDtICGzu2boj4LYVr9-ZRtZ0NuY8mcCcK3ovQj8vJVA#storylink=c

Sociologist and physician Jonathon Metzel details the dire consequences of racial resentment in his book, Dying of Whiteness.  Even before the Covid-19 virus, Americans were dying at an alarming rate - for the first time in a century, life expectancy in the U.S. dropped three years in a row!  Chris Hayes interviews Metzel on the podcast, Why is This Happening? 

Metzel reveals how right-wing backlash policies have mortal consequences — even for the white voters they promise to help.  In the era of Donald Trump, many lower- and middle-class white Americans are drawn to politicians who pledge to make their lives great again. But as Dying of Whiteness shows, the policies that result actually place white Americans at ever-greater risk of sickness and death.  Physician Jonathan M. Metzl’s quest to understand the health implications of “backlash governance” leads him across America’s heartland. Interviewing a range of everyday Americans, he examines how racial resentment has fueled pro-gun laws in Missouri, resistance to the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. And he shows these policies’ costs: increasing deaths by gun suicide, falling life expectancies, and rising dropout rates. Even when presented with the dire consequences of the politics, many of the White Americans Metzel interviews would rather die than give up on these policies that define their identity.

Violence and Gender

Not only has there been a white male backlash to social class changes and racial resentment, but gender dynamics have fueled an aggrieved male entitlement and a lurch to violence as an attempt to cling to traditional norms of masculinity.   Not only have the blue color jobs waned over the last 50 years, but also there has been a reckoning toward equality with other genders.  For example, the legalization of same-sex marriage and the Lily Ledbetter law both were civil rights achievements during the Obama administration.  Not only do the majority of white males feel this on a personal level, but politicians have capitalized on it at the macro-level.

Jackson Katz, a gender scholar, from a 2021 interview, Jackson Katz on Performative Patriotism, White Masculinity, and the Future of the Republican Party (Jan 8, 2021);

...there are millions of frustrated and angry white men in our society afflicted with a sense of what the sociologist Michael Kimmel has called “aggrieved entitlement.” That is, they grew up with a set of cultural narratives that told them they should expect American society to grant them the same sort of advantages their fathers and grandfathers enjoyed, but have had to confront a changing world, have had to deal with the inconvenience of women and people of color fighting for equality and refusing any longer to stand on the side, and have had to navigate a global economy that’s been bleeding traditional blue-collar manufacturing jobs.

And Katz is the producer of a new documentary called, The Man Card; White Male Identity Politics from Nixon to Trump,

...For years, right-wing politicians and pundits have accused the left of playing “the race card” and “the woman card” and engaging in identity politics. This eye-opening documentary turns the tables and takes dead aim at the right’s own longstanding use of white male identity politics in American presidential elections.

Violence 

The appeal to masculinity involves advocating for violence:

This Vox article details numerous ways that Trump has appealed to violence.  

This map documents all of the places where Trump incited violence.

This high school teacher feared the inflammatory rhetoric in her school after Trump's election.

And the NRA has been a persistent force in reinforcing both masculinity and violence in the public sphere:

 

 

 

 

Sexism 

 

An appeal to sexism harkens back to when males were the primary earners in the family and women were acceptably objectified.

 

Cosmopolitan documented 25 sexist things that Trump has said.

Here is an article from Vox about all of the sexist things Trump said in 2016.

 

Below is a video from Youtube that details the sexism from Trump 2015-2017:

 

Trump promoted both violence and misogyny in the public political sphere as detailed in this 2021 Atlantic article, Donald Trump's Masculinity Is an Empty Spectacle.

Words matter

Related to violence, the Anti-Defamation League, which formed as a response to the holocaust, published a "pyramid of hate" to show how the outgroup homogeneity and demonization/scapegoating of groups leads to dehumanization and eventually violence.  Notice the levels of the pyramid below.  Trump has provided numerous examples of the bottom two levels and for discrimination, consider Trump's Muslim ban,  his mandate revoking funding for education on discrimination and diversity training and revoking funds for law enforcement of white supremacy.  And he has made numerous threats (orange level) and yesterday was certainly an incitement to that.  And the use of name-calling/slur language like "China virus" led to a rise in hate crimes against Americans perceived as Asian.

And since Trump has taken office, there have been numerous reports of increased hate crimes and violence:

From the Brookings Institute, 

FBI data show that since Trump’s election there has been an anomalous spike in hate crimes concentrated in counties where Trump won by larger margins. Another study, based on data collected by the Anti-Defamation League, shows that counties that hosted a Trump campaign rally in 2016 saw hate crime rates more than double compared to similar counties that did not host a rally.

And from the BBC, hate crimes are the highest they have been in a decade.

Violence at the insurrection

Below is a gallows that was at the insurrection:

And this was the statement today from the Illinois Holocaust Museum:

"Rabbi Joachim Prinz, chief rabbi of Berlin during the Holocaust, said in his speech at the 1963 March on Washington, "The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful, and the most tragic problem is silence." We must combat silence; we must not be indifferent. In the words of Rep. John Lewis, who delivered our inaugural Donald and Sue Pritzker Voices of Conscience Lecture in 2010, "When you see something that is not right, not fair, you have to speak up. You have to say something. You have to do something."

Policing and Race

There is a well-documented connection between right-wing conservative groups and law enforcement/military.  The ACLU also documents that here.  The FBI has been warning about the connection between white supremacists and law enforcement since at least 2006.  And this report from June 2020 explains that it is a much bigger problem than most care to admit.  Many of the right-wing join these groups to get training on weapons and law enforcement tactics.  Also during the Obama administration was the reckoning for racial justice in policing.  After Trayvon Martin's killer was declared innocent, the Black Lives Matter movement began organically on Twitter. The BLM movement gained momentum as dozens of other Americans who are black were killed by law enforcement officers.  In this detailed history of BLM, I detail how Blue Lives Matter became an oppositional force against the BLM movement.  Not only is this an example of the racial resentment against Americans who are black, but also a clue as to possibly why the protesters had such an easy time entering the Capital.  Especially when you compare the photos of BLM protests and the attempted Coup yesterday:

CNN documents the disparate response here.

A Capital Policeman pauses to take a selfie with one of the insurrectionists.

Here are police helping a woman walk down the stairs yesterday:

 

But when disabled people protested at the Capital they were removed by police:

Here is the show of force at the Lincoln Memorial during BLM:

Here are police shoving a BLM protester to the ground and walking past him during the summer of 2020:

And here is a man being forcibly removed in 2018:

And here is Chicago Police Department defending the attempted coup.

Related to the feeling that the law is on their side, these insurrectionists were bolstered by the support of Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas. 

  

Social Media and Conspiracy Theorists

The documentary Social Dilemma details how the rise of social media around 2010 led to algorithms that led people to keep clicking down paths that lead to more and more extreme views.  Eventually leading to conspiracy theories.  The documentary predicted violence.  But Trump has a long history of peddling conspiracy theories.

From Kurt Andersen's book Fantasyland, this Slate article details the rise of conspiracy theories in the US and their effects on politics. 

Here is a 2018 article about Trump spreading conspiracy theory about George Soros and it includes a timeline of the many conspiracy theories about him.

This link is to a list of links Tweeted about Qanon.

QAnon conspiracy theorists posting wildly imaginative claims related to the billionaire philanthropist. But behind the spectacle of paranoid outrage, there is a troubling and undeniable truth about the constant attacks on George Soros:  Anti-Semitism.

At the Trump rally yesterday before the insurrection, IL rep Mary Miller praised Hitler to a crowd of protesters.

And other Trump supporters harassed a Jewish reporter.

USA Today reported that Qanon supporters were among the groups protesting yesterday.  And The Conversation reported it here.

The AP reports that the mob at the Capital was encouraged by online conspiracy theorists. 

In Sep 2020 CNN reported that Trump was promoting 9 different conspiracy theories.  

CNN also reported 15 lies that Trump promoted.

Sadly, the woman killed in the Capital melee was not only a veteran (see the police/military section above) but she was also a conspiracy theorist.

From the Wall Street Journal, 

...a group of the president’s supporters attacked a cluster of television news cameras, shouting “f--- CNN!” and “f---fake news!” and destroyed a mound of camera equipment.

Some of the president’s supporters shouted “traitors” at police.

A man lectured a group of Trump supporters about how the Holocaust was fake. “Hitler really did nothing wrong,” he said.

Believing Conspiracy Theories?

It might be questionable how so many people can believe these conspiracy theories or look the other way when confronted with blatent falsehoods, but there is reseach that shows many people are not fooled by these fallacies.  Instead, they look the other way because they see authenticity in the greater cause of the person pedaling the fallacies.  See the research Hahl, Kim and Sivan below:

The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth about Political Illegitimacy is research by Oliver Hahl, Minjae Kim, Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan first published January 10, 2018 in the American Journal of Sociology.  It explains why some people are so willing to support people who are obviously lying. One of the authors of this research, Ezra Zuckerman Sivan (@ewzucker) tweeted about this research here. Here is his thread:

Obvious (“common knowledge”) lies can be effective tools for proclaiming deeper truths to those who are primed to hear them.  As with Trump, the deeper truth is that a particular group is treated unfairly by the establishment (recall Kavanaugh’s opening). Then, so long as the obvious lies can be framed as serving that larger truth, the liar can present himself as the group’s “authentic champion.”

It just so happens that our study tested this theory in the context of a simulated college election where the main issue was the imposition of a campus alcohol ban so as to limit sexual assault. Such a ban would threaten campus drinking traditions.And when people were experimentally manipulated to see themselves in the traditionalist group and were led to believe the establishment was treating them unfairly, they regarded clearly false, misogynistic statements as “authentic” & were more likely to support the candidate. it’s not that these aggrieved traditionalists ignore the lies. They recognize lies as such in our experiments. & in a post-election survey, Trump supporters largely acknowledge that one of his most notorious lies (about the Chinese inventing climate change) was false.  It’s just that they see these lies as a tool for expressing a larger truth. 

What’s the larger truth in Kavanaugh’s case? I’m speculating now but I’d say there are three levels to it. 

At the most basic level, it’s simply that it’s unacceptable to hold someone accountable for high school hijinks 35 years later, esp without evidence. And so when he claims there were no hijinks when everyone knows there were, he’s inviting his fellow partisans to help protect him from being held to an unfair standard. They know he’s lying but they collude in the lie for a higher purpose. 

Second, the larger truth may be the partisan battle, as evoked by his opening statement. Under this logic, the GOP are invited to collude in his lies bc he will be a reliable champion of the cause. The lies are in service of the larger truth that Democratic power is illegitimate.Finally, and as suggested by our experiments, he may also be appealing to his fellow traditionalists’ anxiety about threats to their culture. What kind of real American doesn’t like beer, amirite? And what kind of loser doesn’t have too many beers once in awhile? The larger.truth then is that those high school hijinks were *good* and it’s wrong for these jerks to now cast aspersions on them. Of course these three logics are complementary. One, two, or three of them could be working for any one person. Exposing lies is insufficient to reach across this kind of partisan divide. We have to look harder for the deeper implicit claims being made & why they resonate with those who seem unable to see the lies. They *can* see the lies but their *focus* is elsewhere. A few people have asked what the action implications of our (@minjaekim22 @ohahl) research are. Excellent question and our guess is as good as anyone's.  

I would offer four observations though, fwiw: 

First, *everyone* is prone to this behavior, as our experiments attest (even women excuse a misogynist!). And in real life, you can choose various examples on the left. I mention a recent one here: https://twitter.com/ewzucker/status/1040630071239868416 ….
Second, mere partisanship is *insufficient* for a lying demagogue to seem authentically appealing. If there's no "legitimacy crisis" (bc the establishment appears corrupt or to favor an upstart group), partisans don't cotton to the lying demagogue (see https://twitter.com/ewzucker/status/1036666246232768513 …)
This makes sense bc US political history isn't dominated by lying demagogues (thank goodness). So the real Q is why so many Americans felt so aggrieved going into the 2016 election, & continue to feel that way (on the right, even tho they control executive & legislative!) today.Third, while the previous two points identify mechanisms that turn this on & off, it's important to recognize that the problem may actually be worse than what we document in our research. Why? Because it's one thing to excuse deviant behavior one time, in private but it's quite another to do it repeatedly (think of how many norms Trump has broken since coming on the political scene) in public. This "escalates commitment" like no one's business. Very very hard to reverse. (yes, this is key to cults; see Kanter's classic study) 

Finally, a personal takeaway is that I don't take seriously anyone who can't find serious faults w their own "side." All human beings are flawed and any leader commits major errors, in part bc they always have to balance competing values & in part bc they're fallible. If you can't recognize this then you are a partisan hack, not a committed citizen of a republic. An example: I was extremely disappointed in 2012 when Romney was vilified on the left for his "binders full of women" line. The implication was that Obama was great for women. But was he? Definitely not, if you read Ron Suskind's Confidence Men, an excellent treatment of the first two years of the Obama Administration. Ask Christy Romer. Or ask Anne-Marie Slaughter: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020/ ….The point wasn't that Romney was a better candidate than Obama. I personally thought that Obama was the better candidate. The point is that we must recognize *and work hard to overcome* our tendency to excuse faults on our side & howl at faults on the other side.

Adam Serwer in the Atlantic (2017)  The Nationalists Delusion correctly predicted that the supporters who instigated the coup yesterday will not change their minds because they feel rage and Trump validates their rage:
"Supporters will not change their minds, because this is what they always wanted: a president who embodies the rage they feel toward those they hate and fear, while reassuring them that that rage is nothing to be ashamed of."

As Serwer writes above, supporters will not change their mind, and the conspiracy theories online help them to continue to justify their opinions.

One example is the claim proved false by Politifact that it was secretly Antifa pretending to be Trump supporters who showed up and stormed the Capital,

Mentions of "antifa" and "false-flag" started to take off on 4chan, an anonymous online forum, around noon on Jan. 6, according to data from the Social Media Analysis Toolkit.

Reuters published a report of the fraudulent claims that Antifa had anything to do with the insurrection. 

And the Chronicle of Higher Ed reinforces the importance of education as truth to siphon through all of the lies and conspiratorial misinformation,

Preserving a commitment to the truth is hard because lying is easy. Truth typically requires the underpinning of evidence, on matters both large (evolution) and small (“I could not have been in that bar because I was at home at the time with my brother”). Truth is indifferent to our desires. It can be reassuring or terrifying, a confirmation or a repudiation of our most deeply held beliefs. Often it takes some time to explain. Lying requires no work and has no limits. It demands no proof. Like a magic lamp in a legend, it can grant every wish and fulfill every desire. It can bend and shape itself to fit the circumstances of the moment. It can fit tidily within 140 or 280 characters. Told often and emphatically enough, lies can overwhelm the truth by raising questions about whether there is truth. It takes effort to gather and report actual news; it takes almost none to declare all inconvenient news “fake.” This is why authoritarians always view education, and higher education in particular, as a threat.

Yale history professor explains the importance of facts on the Daily Show.

And that assault on the truth (and science) and embrace of conspiracy theories has resulted in hundreds of thousands of American lives lost due to covid and a refusal to wear masks, a movement against vaccines, and against global climate change.  

From Vox (2020),

In recent weeks, I spoke with nearly a dozen people who consider themselves anti-mask to find out just that. What I discovered is that there is certainly a broad spectrum of reasons — some find wearing a mask annoying or just aren’t convinced they work, and others have gone down a rabbit hole of conspiracies that often involve vaccines, Big Pharma, YouTube, and Bill Gates.

From Princeton, an analysis of collective protest and violence across the U.S. since 2020.v


Application to yesterday

There have been numerous reports about right-wing groups wanting to incite a race war or a second civil war, sometimes called the boogaloo.  This NBC report is from February of 2020.

Now, think about the connection between race, violent masculinity, policing and see how these images fit that:

"You'll never take our country back with weakness, you have to show strength." -Trump Jan 6 2021

Think about how you show strength at a rally like this.  And who are they taking the country back from?

Note the "ok" signs which symbolizes white power.

Left side is yesterday at the Capital coup d'etat and right side is BLM at the Capital.

A Confederate flag being marched through the Capital Rotunda.

This was the Lincoln Memorial when BLM wanted to protest.

Read the caption above.  This is Proud Boys wearing tshirts that not only promote the holocaust but think it did not go far enough.

These Trumpers are wearing a MAGA shirt that advocates for a civil war which was supposed to start yesterday.

Here is an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education about how the insurrection reveals a need for better education that leads to a shared understanding of truth.

Update from The Atlantic June 2021:  The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists

Authors, Robert A. Pape, a political-science professor at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, and Keven Ruby, senior research associate of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago detail conclusions based on their data analysis of the insurrectionists:

1. the attack on the Capitol was unmistakably an act of political violence, not merely an exercise in vandalism or trespassing amid a disorderly protest that had spiraled out of control.
2. a large majority of suspects in the Capitol riot have no connection to existing far-right militias, white-nationalist gangs, or other established violent organizations.
3. the demographic profile of the suspected Capitol rioters is different from that of past right-wing extremists; the Capitol insurrectionists are notably older, more employed and more white collar.
4. most of the insurrectionists do not come from deep-red strongholds; instead they are representative of the population at large. Where Trump voters are, so are insurrectionists.