In Attacking Trump, Did Clinton Strengthen Support for Him?

David Ignatius provides a thoughtful commentary in the Washington Post November 2016. Here is the full text.

A week later, America is still struggling to understand what produced last Tuesday’s election stunner, but here’s one factor that’s too little discussed: Hillary Clinton’s relentless (and in my view, accurate) attacks on Donald Trump’s character may actually have made his supporters more entrenched.

One of my closest high school friends drove home this point in a message last Thursday, as the country was struggling to process the election results. “As a traditional Christian, I felt attacked, myself — not implicitly, but explicitly — during the entire election cycle,” he emailed me. The attacks on Trump by Clinton and the media backfired, he argued.

I’ll come back to my friend’s comments in a moment, but first some background.

This “backfire effect” was something I explored in a column in August. I cited behavioral science research by Christopher Graves, global chairman of Ogilvy Public Relations, and others showing that attempts to refute false information could actually reinforce people’s misperceptions.

“Arguing the facts doesn’t help — in fact, it makes the situation worse,” Graves had written in February 2015 in the Harvard Business Review. Because of a behavioral trait known as “confirmation bias,” people discount arguments that challenge their beliefs. 

[Let that sink in. Don't deny it. Factchecking, noting that Trump lied 90% of the time, reminding them that the world is not flat...not only does not persuade, it makes it harder to persuade.]

“Instead of changing their minds, most will dig in their heels and cling even more firmly to their originally held views,” Graves wrote.

If this psychological research is accurate, then the Clinton campaign’s focus on Trump’s racist and sexist statements may have had the perverse effect of making his supporters feel defensive, and more supportive. That was especially true after Clinton called some holding these views a “basket of deplorables” (and again, I thought she was right to admonish them).

Graves noted in an October interview with the Harvard Business Review: “Clinton’s categorization of Trump’s supporters as deplorable is an example of what behavioral scientists call ‘outgroup derogation.’ It can be a powerful mobilizing—and polarizing force.” People who feel attacked retreat to “which tribe we hope to be identified with, and which we would not want to be caught dead with,” Graves argued.

[It may have been both. Polarizing and then mobilizing the polarized Trump supporters.]

Now, back to my high school classmate, Rev. Paul F.M. Zahl. He was the top student at my school, graduated from Harvard University and took a doctorate in theology from the University of Tubingen (in German). He’s not the stereotypical undereducated Trump voter, in other words. He has been dean of an Episcopal cathedral, head of a seminary and rector of local parish churches. My friend wrote me Thursday:

“I told some friends, 18 months ago, that I believed Trump would win, even though I did not expect to vote for him — for the simple reason that what you resist, persists.” Zahl cited a passage from scripture to support his argument: “The Law increaseth the trespass” — which is to say, the more one interdicts a phenomenon, the more reaction among those who identify with the phenomenon.”

[Reminds me of Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant--do not respond to your opponents charges, because then you become an actor in their movie, with their script.]

Zahl went further, taking me and my colleagues to task: “The media, in my opinion, helped make this happen — albeit, unwittingly,” he wrote. “I felt personally attacked by the Democratic Party’s current ethos, as a Bible Christian. I wondered whether, if Clinton won, I and others who believe as I do would be considered legitimate Americans any more.”

[I just do not understand this. The speaker is clearly intelligent, but this still strikes me as fundamentally stupid. I would like to ask him about it. The Vox stuff at the end here helps me understand a bit more.]

I wrote back to my friend (with whom I have been having political arguments for 55 years):

“Dear Paul: In friendship and respect: This notion that ‘the media made me do it’ baffles me, frankly. Each human brain (and heart) must weigh these choices, yes, prayerfully, in terms of what is best for the country. 63 percent of those voting thought Trump was unqualified, 61 percent thought he was temperamentally unsuited to be president, according to exit polls. Yet people voted for him anyway, out of … what? Spite? Anger at the media? I see what has happened, and it makes me very sad, but each voter is responsible for making a wise decision, no?”

And Zahl responded: “No, David. Many people don’t make decisions rationally or even consciously. … When people are told, across the board, that they are ‘xenophobes, racists, misogynists, and Islamophobes’ for holding the views they do — whatever they are — they become hardened in those views.

[This makes some sense to me. But I do not recall anyone telling anyone else that because they were Christian they were racist, etc. We did observe that because they support a candidate who unquestionably and repeatedly made racists etc statements (and actions too) that they might want to re-think this....]

“Condemnation (of people or groups of people–and this goes for all ideologies, right and left) always has the opposite effect: ‘The Law (i.e., judgment/condemnation) increases sin (i.e., the very thing that the judgment is supposed to correct or educate),’” Zahl admonished.

We’re all working through the meaning of this election with our family and friends. Zahl urged me to share his thoughts with readers. Amen to that.

Let’s keep talking.
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Take Two on Related Info

Vox reported on a Stanford study that helps us understand this, showing that there are ways to reduce racism and that calling others racist is not one of those ways. After working with the Vox piece a bit I lost track of their and my language, so the link is at the end if you want to sort that out.

"The study, authored by David Broockman at Stanford University and Joshua Kalla at the University of California Berkeley, looked at how simple conversations can help combat anti-transgender attitudes. In the research, people canvassed the homes of more than 500 voters in South Florida. The canvassers, who could be trans or not, asked the voters to simply put themselves in the shoes of trans people — to understand their problems — through a 10-minute, nonconfrontational conversation. The hope was that the brief discussion could lead people to reevaluate their biases. 

It worked. The trial found not only that voters’ anti-trans attitudes declined but that they remained lower three months later, showing an enduring result. And those voters’ support for laws that protect trans people from discrimination increased, even when they were presented with counterarguments for such laws."

Many white Americans hear ‘racist’ or ‘white privilege’ as “coded slurs” directed against them.

Not sure why, but this never occurred to me. Sounds right.

“These terms don’t signal to them that they’re doing something wrong, but that their supposedly racist attitudes (which they would deny having at all) are a justification for lawmakers and other elites to ignore their problems.

So when they hear politicians and journalists call them racist or remind them about their privilege, they feel like elites are trying to distract from the serious problems in their lives and grant advantages to other groups of people. When Hillary Clinton called half of Trump voters “deplorable,” she made this message explicit.

That is a threatening message.”

These whites feel left out, left behind, like an invisible minority group. Bombarding them with facts to show they are still doing better than racial minorities does not change how they feel, though it might harden their positions, triggering powerful defense mechanisms designed to avoid even seeing one’s own privilege, on the experiential basis of the fact that their lives feel anything but privileged.

Robin DiAngelo, who studies race at Westfield State University, described this phenomenon as “white fragility” in a groundbreaking 2011 paper:

“White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to what I refer to as White Fragility. White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.”

One key issue is that people want to feel heard before they can open their minds to other people’s points of view.

“…her love for conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh because he stood up to people — feminists, environmentalists, and other liberals — that she felt belittled her and her lifestyle…. She felt that these accusations overlooked many of the problems that rural white Americans faced — growing up poor, struggling to get a better education, and so on.

People don’t want to be immediately dismissed because they might have a view that you consider wrong or even vile; they want to feel heard. And once that happens, it’s a lot easier for them to make mental space to understand other people’s problems.

Actually having these conversations will be incredibly difficult and time-consuming.

In The Science of Equality, Godsil and her co-authors proposed several tactics that seem, based on the research, promising: presenting people with examples that break stereotypes, asking them to think about people of color as individuals rather than as a group, tasking them with taking on first-person perspectives of people of color, and increasing contact between people of different races. 

All of these interventions appear to reduce subconscious racial biases, while interracial contact appears most promising for reducing racial anxiety more broadly.

Of course, interracial contact can be hard to achieve in communities that are racially homogeneous — in other words, a lot of rural white communities. But the researchers note that even indirect contact — for example, knowing that one of your white neighbors is friends with a person of color — can reduce prejudice, suggesting there are ways to reduce racial anxiety without direct contact.

Godsil and her team also put forward tactics that can help people limit actions based on racial biases, such as getting people to slow down in their decision-making and teaching them about how subconscious processes can influence their impulses — even on issues unrelated to race — in order to push them to question their own objectivity. 

The research suggests these ideas have potential, but they generally seem to require that people are genuinely willing to reduce their biased behavior and actions.

More broadly, people need to be shown that people of different races can live and thrive in diverse communities. Trump supporters are clearly worried, as the study I noted earlier found, that white Americans are losing status in the country. But there are plenty of examples — in big, diverse cities like New York City, for example — that show they don’t have to look at race relations in a zero-sum manner in which white people lose and everyone else wins. 

The empirical research, after all, shows that more immigration can ultimately lift up the entire country’s economy, benefiting everyone.

“There’s an unfortunate lack of understanding that interactions across groups can be positive and enrich rather than divide,” Godsil said. “That’s what people who do live in pretty homogeneous parts of the country just don’t know. They’ve never experienced it.”

So how do you get people to see that diversity isn’t a threat to them? Godsil pointed to the transgender canvassing study as one example. Perhaps nonconfrontational conversations with people of color in which both parties share their lived experiences could go a long way to demonstrating that different racial groups don’t have to be at odds. And white Americans could engage in these types of dialogues with other white people to help open their minds to another perspective.

But there’s other ways too, from creating local spaces in which people can talk about race issues and air out their fears to more formal public education campaigns.

The key to these conversations, though, is empathy. And it will take a lot of empathy — not just for one conversation but many, many conversations in several settings over possibly many years. It won’t be easy, but if we want to address some people’s deeply entrenched racial attitudes, it may be the only way.”

http://www.vox.com/identities/2016/11/15/13595508/racism-trump-research-study