Welcome to Worthy Reads, where I share some things that I think are worth your time. Everyone gets half of this month’s items (and some meaty thoughts to chew on), but the other half (and footnotes) are paywalled. Please don’t begrudge the paylisters! They’re the ones who keep me writing.
“The Pollster Who Sensed Democracy Was Faltering,” by Garry Kasparov and Frank Luntz:
(I read the transcript of this interview; I rarely actually listen to podcasts unless they are dramas.)
Kasparov: Okay. This is, it’s very, very important, because you said few times the word, the key word in my opinion: trust.
Luntz: Yes.
Kasparov: Trust.
Luntz: Let’s stop there. That is the key word. It’s the No. 1 priority that Americans have: trust and truth. They’re connected to it. Of all the values that are essential to democracy, none is more important than the truth. It’s more important than participation. It’s more important than anything else, because if you don’t trust the information or the people providing it, how can you possibly govern yourselves when you have no idea what’s right and what’s wrong?
[…]
Kasparov: Okay, now the question is, so why the Great Depression—and all the tragic consequence of Great Depression for millions and millions of Americans—gave us FDR as a leader? Why the malaise, in your words, of Jimmy Carter’s rule brought Ronald Reagan to power and to the Oval Office? But why the relatively small crisis, on the surface visually, compared to these two periods of American history brought us not a new Reagan or new FDR, but Donald Trump?
Luntz: For tens of millions of people, Donald Trump is Ronald Reagan, is FDR. For tens of millions of people, Donald Trump speaks the truth, and only Donald Trump does. And his graphic descriptions and language that is accessible to a high-school grad is exactly what FDR was to people back in 1932 and what Reagan was to people in 1980. That’s exactly the point. I know how you feel about him, but there’s a reason why he beat Vice President [Kamala] Harris.
Frank Luntz is what pulled me into this interview.
There’s this weird vibe around Frank Luntz where everyone who’s anyone treats him sort of vaguely as some kind of charlatan. This is, perhaps, the pollster’s curse: if you tell people what they want to hear, they give you no credit; if you tell people what they don’t want to hear and you’re wrong, they mock you; if you tell people what they don’t want to hear and you’re right, they hate you with the fire of a thousand suns. Same thing happened to Nate Silver after 2016, and again after 2024.
Frank Luntz had the very great misfortune to be a Republican pollster in the mid-2000s, so the entire mainstream media found every reason to dismiss him, but then he found himself personally opposed to Trump and Trumpism in 2016, so the GOP no longer had any use for him, either.
Honestly dunno who pays him these days. Should probably look that up. Won’t, ‘cause I’m writing this item on a deadline.
Anyway, Luntz is no Oracle at Delphi. Frankly, he’s no Nate Silver. However, his focus groups are a good source of information about the electorate that you can’t get from polls, and he has always struck me as a straight shooter. He’ll tell you what his groups are saying, and he will try his best not to unconsciously massage it. He’s useful and I’m glad he’s out there. I trust him.
You know who else people trust? Donald Trump. (Smooth segue, James!)
Trump is simply Gul Dukat without the guile or the sex appeal.
As Mr. Luntz observes, Donald J. Trump enjoys substantially more trust than “the media,” an institution whose sole reason for existence is to engender trust in Americans, so it can inform them of facts (and be believed).
And, you know… I think Americans are very probably right about that! We are deep in an epistemic crisis caused by the media, well, lying its face off, year after year, story after story, both when it expected to get away with it and when it must have known it would get caught!
It is still possible to extract truth from the morass of lies (mostly by exposing yourself to partisan sources on both sides that critique coverage by their opposite numbers), but this requires:
a lot of work;
a certain innate talent for reading between the lines that not everyone shares;
and a considerable amount of inculturation, which people outside America’s gentry class don’t have.
(Yes, I’ve linked ACX’s “Bounded Distrust” before, and I’m sure I will again.)
To be clear, I do think the media is, objectively, still a better source of information than Donald Trump—a very low bar for the media to clear—but I understand the set of mental strategies that leads people to trust Trump instead. Given the fact that most people lack the time, talent, and/or inculturation to parse the media correctly, I don’t even think their mental strategy is wrong. Every time I’m tempted to say the bluepilled are better informed than the redpilled, one of them says something incredibly stupid to me, like: America would have had far fewer pandemic deaths if Trump had more enthusiastically followed public health officials’ recommendations; or Amber Thurman was killed by Georgia’s pro-life heartbeat law;1 or Star Trek Discovery is disliked by only a “small, vocal minority” of viewers (mostly racists). These are all obvious lies, often trumpeted by the very same people who breathlessly inform me that Trump’s lies are a threat to democracy.
Now, as it happens, Trump’s lies are a threat to democracy, but the hypocrisy rankles all the same.
…Oh, shoot, the omnipresent gravity well has pulled me in again and I’ve started talking about Donald Trump. Forget Trump; I have a larger point.
The United States overall seems to be in a transition from a high-trust society to a low-trust society. Donald Trump is a symptom of that, and a consequence, but he is not the cause—and, in light of the massive way this will impact every level of our society, Trump isn’t even that much of a consequence.
I don’t know exactly why we are transitioning to a low-trust society. I mean, obviously all the lying has a lot to do with it, but why is there so much lying now?
Pro-religion people (like me) will suggest that decreasing religious commitment is reducing trust. That’s obviously true. At the heart of our society (and especially our legal system) is the expectation that virtually everyone will tell the truth under oath, that they will keep their promises, and that they will do what they “ought” to do even when doing so is to their own personal disadvantage, and even if they are confident no one will ever find out. This norm simply works better if everyone believes that God will send them to Hell for breaking it.
I’m not saying the norm completely fails if you don’t believe in God; there are plenty of moral atheists and doesn’t-matterists who would never compromise their own integrity. There are articulate cases for things like “secular humanism” and “the categorical imperative” and just “don’t be a dick.” Moreover, there are lots of psychological reasons why humans enjoy acting with integrity, even without God looking over their shoulder.
I am only saying that our society was built on the assumption that something like 99% of people will act with integrity 99% of the time it is tested. If just a little less fear-of-God means that number drops to something like 90% of people acting with integrity 90% of the time it is tested, that sets off a cascade, the incentives to do the right thing shift, and our society collapses into Escape From New York.
However, the U.S. has seen waning religiosity at various times in its history (usually right before some Great Awakening). Polling data on social trust from those times is scarce, but it doesn’t seem like there was a general, across-the-board crisis of faith in our institutions, like we are seeing today. Therefore, the decline of religion seems like an incomplete explanation.
Anti-immigration people will say that increasing ethnic and cultural diversity is reducing overall trust throughout society. That, too, is obviously true. Different cultures have different mores and expectations. When different cultures intersect, without realizing their differences, or without knowing exactly the right protocol to navigate them, misunderstandings happen. People get hurt. Trust falls. Cross-cultural communication is a hard skill! We give degrees in it! Most people don’t have that skill, so things tend to go wrong more frequently than they do during intra-cultural communication. In this way, cultural diversity increases strife and distrust even if everyone is acting in good faith and everyone involved has a morally upright culture, which is not always true.
However, I don’t think immigration is the whole story, either. Although the Trust Crisis seems to be hitting the poor and uneducated hardest, the most important casualties of the Trust Crisis seem to be major institutions like government, media, universities, and religious organizations. These are not areas where unassimilated immigrants tend to hold the power.
Maybe there’s a panopticon effect. Maybe everybody always lied, but modern technology allows us to catch far more people in their lies, like that cheating couple at the Coldplay concert. Maybe seeing everyone else’s sins, spread virally for maximum outrage, scandalizes us into giving ourselves “permission” to do bad stuff, too. Or maybe everyone’s lying because of hormones or artificial dyes or whatever RFK is ranting about these days. Maybe it’s media titans exploiting our differences for sensationalism and profit. Or maybe it’s just the “good times create weak men” meme come to life, and all our institutions chose to forfeit all their trust and goodwill at the same time because the men who worked in them were comfortable and confident; maybe they chose power over integrity because their ancestors had given them too good a life.
Whatever is causing it, though, the transition to a low-trust society will transform us from top to bottom. Do you remember the Shopping Cart Theory that made the rounds a few years ago?
I’ve been thinking about that test a lot lately, because I shop for all my groceries at Cub Foods in West Saint Paul. Recently, the neighboring Cub Foods (over in the Midway neighborhood of Regular Saint Paul), ran out of carts and baskets. They had all been stolen. The Cub dutifully ordered a new batch of carts, which arrived in spring. Within a month, all the new carts had also been stolen. Midway Cub now has no carts.
What does Frederick Melo—basically the last metro reporter east of the river— have to say about the situation? “This is what disinvestment looks like… What gives, Cub?” He’s got a bunch of tweets about this, all blaming Cub for not simply accepting this as a cost of doing business in the Midway (apparently, Target and Aldi already have). Then, ominously:
See, trust doesn’t just collapse in one place. It pushes outwards. It expands its own frontiers. Someone who wanted to steal a cart before but was too upright (or too scared) to try it sees someone walking down the street with a stolen cart and thinks, “Oh, I guess it’s not so bad, then.”
We have been blessed to live for centuries in a (Christian) civilization where, even without knowing our neighbors, we could just leave the carts outside all day. We could leave our doors unlocked at night. The few outliers were rare enough to handle without much effort. Now there’s cages on all the baby formula shelves. Now the newspapers remind my mom’s Ukrainian hair stylist of Pravda in its heyday, and schools openly indoctrinate their students, using faculty who openly consider their job political activism. Now CPS gets called if you let a four-year-old play in the front lawn unattended, or let a six-year-old walk half a mile home from school. (We waited until 8, not because our kids weren’t ready at 6, but for fear of CPS. And we still got surprise, skepticism, and “concern” from others!) Now science is tarnished by data that’s constantly manipulated and fudged and sometimes just fabricated outright.
I think all these small breakdowns of trust, taken together, make it more difficult—and, eventually, impossible—to sustain good, healthy, small-d democratic and small-l liberal society. Liberal democracy was an invention of high-trust societies. It has never exported well to low-trust societies.2 Liberal democracy now seems to be in some trouble, not just in the U.S., but throughout the West. I do not think it is a coincidence that that is happening just when the entire West is transitioning to a lower level of social trust. Repairing that trust is perhaps the most important long-term need our society has, perhaps even more important than raising our cratering birth rates. It will be hard to do that without a clearer idea of the cause. It will be impossible to do it if we don’t start rebuilding a critical mass of honest people.
Um, anyway, Frank Luntz said some stuff that was vaguely related to some of that, and then he said the word “trust,” which set me off. Look, it’s my blog; I’m allowed to ramble.
UPDATE: After I wrote the above, the Midway Cub announced its impending closure.
“New Vindication for the Regnerus Same-Sex Parenting Study” by Paul Sullins:
As a kind of stress test, the authors devoted a chapter to reexamining the “now infamous” 2012 study by University of Texas (Austin) sociologist Mark Regnerus which “found that the children of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) parents, compared to those raised in ‘intact biological families’ (IBFs), were worse off in many sociodevelopmental ways”—which they succinctly term the “LGBT effect” (though inaccurately: transgender persons (T) were not studied). The widespread critique of this highly disputed study resulted in a multiverse of more than two million alternative analyses that were statistically significant (meaning the results could not be the result of chance variation due to random sampling). Initially anticipating that “a comprehensive multiverse analysis would drive [the study’s many critics’] point home in a powerfully conclusive way,” Young and Cumberworth instead found something unexpected and remarkable: not one of the two million significant alternatives resulted in positive outcomes for LGBT-parented children. Although often with smaller effects, every analysis confirmed the Regnerus study’s central finding that children turned out better with intact biological parents than with LGBT parents. Regnerus’s thesis, it turns out, was not only true in the analytic model in which he presented it: it was true in every analytic model possible.
Speaking of trust…
I last wrote about the Mark Regnerus study when it came out in 2012, in a pretty short piece called “New Study on Same-Sex Parenting Raises Questions.” I then watched from the sidelines as Regnerus and all who defended him were ruthlessly witch-hunted and, where possible, persecuted… even though his haters offered no serious critiques and couldn’t even raise more than a few interesting questions about the actual data Regnerus had presented. It was immediately clear that academic sociology, as a profession, had decided that Regnerus’s conclusions must be false for moral reasons, subjected his work to ludicrously disproportionate scrutiny (compared to studies that had reached more amenable conclusions) in order to prove it wrong on scientific grounds, failed, and then decided to pretend that it had been discredited on scientific grounds anyway, even though it hadn’t been.
This is a familiar playbook. Progressives are still playing it with the Center for Medical Progress’s videos that indisputably proved that Planned Parenthood sells baby parts. I wasn’t able to obtain the chapter of Young & Cumberworth’s book discussing all this, but Sullin’s synopsis is fascinating in its own right—and, if even partially accurate, damning.
The Right would undoubtedly do the same thing if they had any power in the knowledge production areas of our regime. Curtis Yarvin loosely but usefully characterized these areas as the Brain (academic research), the Voice (mainstream media), the School (education, including K-12 education), the Foundation (nonprofits), and the Conversation (“educated opinion” overall; approximately what Nate Silver calls the Indigo Blob, of which I am a member).3 Since the Right does not have any meaningful level of power in any of these areas, we don’t run this play, and are left with the moral purity (and deep frustration) of the powerless. Eventually, we go off and establish our own alternative, inferior organs of knowledge production, but this never works because of the Witch-Ghetto Problem, so we end up with Breitbart and Donald Trump instead. Meanwhile, the Left continues to run all credible organs of knowledge production, to the extent we still have any. This includes total control over the social sciences.
The fact that the Left holds all this power in the social sciences leads to a pretty perverse outcome. Non-professionals do not have time to delve into the details of all the vast social science literature produced every day. We have to develop simple, efficient heuristics for evaluating what the field produces. If the field were functioning as it is supposed to function—the way it is sold to the public—then the field would police itself, subject all findings to equal scrutiny regardless of political valence, and we in the public could simply accept the consensus of expert opinion. However, as we see in the Regnerus incident and others, the field is not functioning the way it is supposed to function. Its symbiotic relationship with left-wing politics has corrupted it. (Yarvin, again, proposes plausible mechanisms for this political corruption.)
Hence the perverse outcome. For the average Joe, when reading about some new finding by social scientists, the correct heuristic is as follows: the only credible results of social science are those that affirm conservative views.4
This is a terrible situation for all concerned. It cannot possibly lead us in the public to the fullness of truth. (The truth is not, in fact, always on the side of conservatives!) However, given prevailing circumstances, following this heuristic religiously will bring the average Joe much closer to the truth, at least on the issues where social science intersects with politics, than any other approach that the average Joe can manage.
This makes many social science communications projects, like Cornell’s notorious “What We Know” website, worse than useless.5 Such projects confirm progressives in their judgment that they are on the side of objective science and facts, while confirming conservatives in their judgment that they are being lied to and academia delenda est. Our national epistemological crisis advances another step. (I really need to finish my article about that.)
Here is the paywall. Please don’t begrudge the paywall! The paying subscribers are the reason my wife indulges my blog writing as much as she does. (They made a meaningful difference to my family’s financial well-being this year. All the clever dunks in my freelist articles do not, no matter how much I brag about them during pillow talk.)
Below the paywall: I complain about an attempt to pooh-pooh academic reform, and I closely examine a critique of Israel to determine whether Israel’s part in the Gaza War is unjust. (I ended up writing more words about this than the article I linked before arriving at my answer: yes, but not because of the purported famine or genocide or any of the other unserious reasons typically presented by Israel’s enemies.)
Plus, all three Videos of the Month, the comment section—and, of course, the footnotes!
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