The biggest threat to progress

Thesis: the biggest obstacle to a political party's goals is not the power and reach of the other party's critics, but the aggressive nature of the party's own fanatics who make more enemies than allies. For example, the biggest threat to a wealth tax isn't Sean Hannity, it's Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. I am going to set my confidence interval at 65%.

At the end of this post, I am going to make a forecast that can be tracked. The forecast will be based on my thesis.

 I've made the case that the biggest threat to things like racial equity and expanding the welfare state comes from the left. I argue that the people Paul Graham would call "aggressive conventionals" (people who are "fighters" when they're in your ingroup but "bullies" when they're in your outgroup) push passive, moderate, or otherwise politically disengaged people to more reactionary positions that fight back against progressives. Their aggressiveness should be curbed so the more civil among us can court these moderates.

The other argument is that reactionaries and aggressive conventionals on the right are the biggest threat to progressive goals. Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham are out there telling lies and saying harmful things that radicalize their listeners. We should deplatform them and limit their speech so they do not expand their audience and bring more people to their side.

If I'm being honest, I cannot prove which is the bigger threat. Based on what I know of human behavior, it is easier to push people than to pull them. They are more likely to identify with an ideology that is against something they hate, than for something they like. 

So, no, I don't think "giving a platform" to some toxic person is going to make much of a difference in their pursuit of gaining followers. However, I also don't think I can court many moderates to the left if the far left would just tone down their "abolish the police" rhetoric. But I still like to try.

So here is my best argument for why I think the aggressive left is making things worse for progressives.

Campaign Tactics

Scott Alexander analyzed the voter turnout approach vs. court swing voters approach to winning elections. He found that there isn't much evidence either approach works better at getting more voters, but the more extreme a candidate is the more she turns out voters to vote against her. 

Likewise, extreme candidates do a better job of making enemies than allies.

Support for BLM

In the following section, I opine about polling data regarding support for Black Lives Matter. It might be too boring/confusing, in which case you can skip to the Bad Phrasing section. My basic point is that support rose sharply after George Floyd's death and dissipated rather quickly. The sharpest change was in the reduction in people who had no opinion on BLM; most of them now oppose BLM. I find it unlikely that this group takes their cues from Fox News and what changed their behavior was the rioting and anti-police rhetoric.

According to FiveThirtyEight, The death of George Floyd polarized White America's attitudes toward Black Lives Matter. If I'm reading this correctly, at the time of his death, attitudes were the same; 35% support, 35% oppose. This means 30% had no opinion. We are now at 49% oppose (an increase of 14%), 37% support (an increase of 2%), meaning 14% have no opinion (a decrease of 16%). 

People could have moved from support to oppose, or support/oppose to no opinion, but it seems more likely that, of the 16% of pollsters who are no longer in the no opinion category, 14% moved to oppose and 2% moved to support. So what moved them, watching Fox News' unfavorable coverage of the riots or reading New York Times op-eds about abolishing the police?

Moving the Fencers

In a past blog post, I coined the term "fencers" to describe the White respondents who are on the fence about supporting BLM, the people who said they "somewhat support" the organization. In a June 2020 poll, those who leaned Democrat were at 30% and those who leaned Republican were also at 30%. In a follow-up September poll, that number for republicans had dropped from 30% to 14%, while the number for democrats rose from 30% to 36%.

However, the overall change--including responses for both "somewhat" and "strongly" support--dropped for both groups of White respondents. Republicans went from 37% to 16%; Democrats went from 92% to 88%. For simplicity, here are the June numbers and here are the September numbers. Notice that left-leaning "strongly support" dropped from 62% in June to  51% in September.

So what likely happened is left leaning respondents moved from "strongly support" to "somewhat support". I doubt that 11% decrease is the result of them turning on Tucker Carlson and drinking his Kool-aid. 

So something happened that shrunk overall support for BLM for every racial group--except Blacks, who picked up a point, although the FiveThirtyEight graph shows even their support has dropped a bit since then--even when controlling for ideology. And according to the FiveThirtyEight data, that drop has continued or at least leveled off.

Why was there such a rise in support that quickly began to fade? Did Fox News give favorable coverage after George Floyd's death and then quickly change their stance? Or did sympathy turn to apathy once rioters began burning down police departments and tearing down statues of Ulysses S. Grant? Whereas "Justice for George Floyd" was a rallying call, "All Cops Are Bastards" became a deterrent. 

(I tried using Infoplease to look at the top stories in August, and found three stories about riots that could have dampened support of BLM, which would then show up in the September polls. But then I looked at June, when poll numbers for BLM were still high, and saw three more stories about riots, so maybe they didn't make much of a difference.) 

Bad Phrasing

David Shor is an election expert and posits that two topics don't poll well and hurt Democrats at the ballot: defund the police and socialism. The main problem is messaging. A recent poll shows that only 18% of respondents support "defund the police." 

This FiveThirtyEight story shows that while most Americans oppose "defund the police" when you break it down by specific policies you get better results.

"For instance, when Reuters/Ipsos queried people about “proposals to move some money currently going to police budgets into better officer training, local programs for homelessness, mental health assistance, and domestic violence,” a whopping 76 percent of people who were familiar with those proposals supported them, with only 22 percent opposed. Democrats and independents supported these proposals in huge numbers while Republicans were split, 51 percent in favor to 47 percent opposed."

So this seems like an easy fix. Just focus your message on the stuff that polls well. But wait! This is a post about how the left can't get out of its own damn way.

It wasn't an accident. Policing in our country is inherently & intentionally racist.

Daunte Wright was met with aggression & violence. I am done with those who condone government funded murder.

No more policing, incarceration, and militarization. It can't be reformed.

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) April 12, 2021

Trump Good for Immigration?

Does this happen on the right? Maybe. This Gallup poll asks people if immigration should increase, decrease, or stay the same. For the first time since they began asking this question in 1966, more people favor increase than decrease. 

What did the Democrats do to sway public opinion? Probably nothing other than give Donald Trump enough rope to hang himself. Trump made the demonization of immigration and the promotion of nationalism the core of his campaign and it seems to have backfired. 

Here is a Google Trend for "illegal immigration":

There is a huge spike in 2006, when the House passed the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006, which later died in the Senate. Another bump in 2010, when Congress considered the DREAM Act, which later died. And that's about it. Nothing Trump did got people talking about immigration quite like past pro immigration policies.

So it's possible that Trump's angry rhetoric actually tilted public opinion in support of immigration.

Unite the Left

In Against Murderism, Scott Alexander critiques defining racism by its consequences (basically Antriracism before the term was ubiquitous), writing:

"Suppose the KKK holds a march through some black neighborhood to terrorize the residents... The march is well-covered on various news organizations, and outrages people around the nation, who donate a lot of money to anti-racist organizations and push for stronger laws against the KKK. Plausibly, the net consequences of the march were (unintentionally) very good for black people and damaging to white supremacy. Therefore, by the Sophisticated Definition, the KKK marching the neighborhood to terrorize black residents was not racist. In fact, for the KKK not to march in this situation would be racist!"

I know he's trying to be hyperbolic to make a point but I don't think it's quite the own he thinks it is. That is basically what happened during the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally! This Civiqs poll of Black Lives Matter support shows that the Charlottesville rally made people more favorable toward BLM. 

The Hard Work

I get that people want to denigrate what Ibram Kendi called "moral suasion." It's slow-moving and produces small results. But it's the best thing we've got because more aggressive approaches just push people to the other side and embolden the enemy. However, I did set my confidence interval at 65%, so it wouldn't be too difficult to have my mind changed.

Forecast: since Derek Chauvin was found guilty on all three counts, the right will spend the next several months talking about how the trial was unfair and police need more protection. Black Lives Matter will largely be out of the news. As a result, support for Black Lives Matter will increase again. According to the Civiqs poll above, support is at 47% as of April 17, 2020. I predict that it will be 49 percent by June 1. My confidence interval is 55%.

Short Takes Part II

 In my review of How to be an Antiracist, I used #ShutdownSTEM as an example of someone applying antiracism to an area that has nothing to do with racism. I was trying to show an example of well-intentioned activism obstructing innovation and technological progress that will actually improve quality of life for all races.

Two things have changed my mind. First this Twitter thread about motion sensor faucets not working on black skin. Then, an update I made to that same post about facial recognition software producing more false positives on black and brown faces. These things should have been caught before the products made it to the market.

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 In "Diversity Training has a Rationality Problem" I suggested that the best way to fight implicit bias is not with diversity training but with empirical tactics to combat bias at the subconscious level (eg reordering a stack of resumes in a way that preference is given to Black candidates). In that vein, it turns out that using a rubric can completely eliminate racial bias in grading. Much cheaper and more effective than a $20,000 session with Robin DiAngelo. More science, less racism.

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More evidence to support my belief that two parent families are an underrated privilege:

"Children residing in households with unrelated adults were nearly 50 times as likely to die of inflicted injuries than children residing with 2 biological parents" https://t.co/icG891KFZm pic.twitter.com/ZCHjDWbAbG

— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) March 13, 2021

Two-parent privilege even overcomes racial disparities:

"simply waiting until marriage to have children is a positive predictor of multiple “success variables,” including income. When Prager wrote in 2016, the poverty rate was nearly 25 percent for white children born into single-mother families, but only 7 percent for black children born into two-parent families.”

In my blog post "Through the Lens of Salience" I wrote about how, when intersectionality is used in diversity training, it usually stops at race and gender, which is really unfortunate since more context is always needed. In the example above, the Black child in a two-parent family is more privileged than the White child with a single mom. 

As Conor Friedersdorf shows, controlling for only race and gender will lead to the conclusion:

"that to be Black and female is to be “the most unprotected person in America,” many students might come away with the impression that Black women are the demographic group most likely to be killed by police in America.

According to a 2019 paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the lifetime risk ... for ... white men [is] 39 per 100,000. For Black women, the authors find, the lifetime risk of being killed by police is 2.4 to 5.4 per 100,000." 

Being white and male is a privilege, except when it isn't. Privilege still matters, but it is also context-dependent. So let's choose messaging that doesn't demonize our fellow citizens and actually makes everyone feel included.

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In my post "Everyone is Wrong About Robin DiAngelo" I suggested ways to increase support for Black Lives Matter by thinking of how messages can push or pull "fencers", people who said they "somewhat support" BLM. 

This whole idea of coalition building and gaining the support of fencers comes up a lot in my writing. It turns out that someone already said this much better than me. Here are my favorite quotes from that post:

"Social norms are the only way to achieve cooperation without coercion ...This means that the social norms that promote cooperation are the most valuable thing we have.... 
And this means that nothing is more harmful than the norms that promote polarization and hamper cooperation.”

He then uses an image as a way to picture the spectrum of racist voters.

He then writes: 

"If half the country voted for Trump, the median Trump voter is at the 75th percentile of racism. That’s 0.67 standard deviations more racist than the median American, and 1.33 SDs more racist than the median Clinton voter (and people like the New York Times). On the other hand, there are 6,000 registered KKK members out of 242 million American adults, that more than 4 SDs out on the racism axis."

Which is a math-y way of saying that there is a whole contingent of Trump voters (fencers!) that are much closer to what we consider normal than they are to actual Nazis. Stop calling them names and start working on gaining their trust because, as he writes, we'll need them.

"Trump is especially worrying in regards to racism .... To combat that, we need to build an overwhelming anti-racist coalition. We can’t risk having just 51% of people on our side, we need at least three-quarters of the country. That means we need the “orange quarter” on my chart, the 25% of Americans who voted for Trump but are less racist than the median Trump voter."

Anyway, the whole blog post is fantastic and speaks to everything I care about.

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In my blog post "Kill the Demon, Destroy the Wall" I wrote about how the racial makeup in a school can make things better or worse for African-American students, but we didn't have enough research into the right ratio. I found some new research that looked at "acting white," something I am very uncomfortable writing about and I feel like a need a disclaimer before continuing.

Disclaimer: the authors of the report are testing the thesis of whether "acting white" is real and find that it mostly is not. However, they find certain instances in which data suggests it could be happening. So when I write "acting white" I'm just using their words to describe the data points they are referencing, I am not making any claims about whether or not it exists. I'm only interested in the data as it relates to my idea of Maxwell's Demon in the classroom.

They find that "acting white" is most prominent in schools that are less than 20 percent black, and tends to disappear in schools that are more than 80 percent black. They say it increases with "interracial contact." This aligns with Judith Harris' work--the more interracial contact a student has, the more race becomes a salient category, the more likely students will adopt opposing stereotypes to distinguish themselves from their peers. 

The researchers also say "acting white" is more salient in public schools and low-income families, this makes sense as Harris suggested that in a predominantly White school, a Black student would be assimilated into the culture.

Also of note, the report mentions the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment, which assigned housing vouchers via random lottery to public housing residents in five large cities. They found that females exhibit lower arrest rates, improvements in education and mental health, and are less likely to engage in risky behaviors. Males, on the other hand, were more likely to engage in risky behaviors, had no decrease in arrest rates, and experienced more physical health problems (e.g., injuries or accidents).

This accords with the New York Times study which showed that controlling for class eliminated the wealth gap between black and white girls, while a gap persisted when looking at black and white boys.

Is Malcom X Winning?

Photo by Bettmann via Getty Images

(disclaimer: I refer to the ideas of Dr. King and Malcolm X throughout this blog post. I acknowledge that their views are complex and continued to evolve throughout their tragically short lives. My intention is not to narrow their beliefs. I purposefully use the term "legacies" because what I'm writing about is how they are most remembered today, what the most influential aspect of their beliefs are, what ideas of theirs are shaping today's discourse, even if those ideas represent a small part of their overall ideologies.)

Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are probably the two biggest names from the Civil Rights era. They both wanted to end the system that treated African Americans as second-class citizens, but they had opposing visions of what a future America would look like for their children. 

For most of my life, it seemed that King's vision won, by which I mean captured the narrative and dominated the discourse. His face was the one most associated with Black History Month. Everyone in my elementary school could recite the first few lines from his "I have a dream" speech. Everyone in college read Letter from Birmingham Jail.

Over the last year, however, I've noticed that Malcom X's ideas are making a comeback. In fact, within certain groups, I think his ideas have won.

Although he later changed his views, his legacy is separatism, similar to a term today known as "spaces." From Wikipedia:

"While the civil rights movement fought against racial segregation, Malcolm X advocated the complete separation of blacks from whites. The Nation of Islam proposed the establishment of a separate country for African Americans in the southern or southwestern United States as an interim measure until African Americans could return to Africa."

So Malcolm envisioned a world apart from White America, a world in which they are free from White oppression. Dr. King, on the other hand, envisioned the Beloved Community.

"As early as 1956, Dr. King spoke of The Beloved Community as the end goal of nonviolent boycotts. As he said in a speech at a victory rally following the announcement of a favorable U.S. Supreme Court Decision desegregating the seats on Montgomery’s busses, “the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opponents into friends. It is this type of understanding goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men.”

This sounds more like integration. It's definitely not separatism or "segregation, but woke."

In a private community Facebook group, I asked if using pandemic pods that include students from marginalized backgrounds could help reduce the inevitable inequity that will arise through remote learning. I was directed to this blog post and admonished that pods are bad and you cannot even try to diversify them. 

The blog writer addresses the question "Would it be more socially just to invite families with fewer resources to join our pod?", saying, "this entire conversation is largely an exercise in privileged people trying to feel better about their own complicity in generations of inequality and injustice." Wow, bad faith much?

What struck me wasn't so much the poor reasoning as the aggressively shutting down of any notion of mixing. I think this is X's legacy bubbling up: Help Black Americans but do it from a distance.

It reminded me of this article by a Black writer who describes the COVID-19 lockdown like a dream come true because he doesn't have to interact with White people. Or Jamele Hill writing "It’s Time for Black Athletes to Leave White Colleges." Or the families that bought 97 acres of land in Georgia to create a city safe for Black people. These aren't people interested in a Beloved Community. These are people who want their own space.

Patents and Racism

One of the most interesting stories I've read is this research into the effects of racism on patents. Around the turn of the 20th century, African Americans filed patents at roughly the same rate as white inventors. They invented all kinds of stuff during this time—an elevator, rotary engines, a tapered golf tee, a dough kneader, a telephone system, a fertilizer distributor, and a bunch of other things.

Two things killed their progress: Plessy v. Ferguson and the Tulsa massacre. The former supports King's vision, the latter supports X's.

Tulsa was known as the Black Wall Street. It had become famous as a bustling, affluent community, a place where Black Americans could settle and live well. It had its own newspaper, hospitals, schools, banks, and a bus service. In other words, it was a Black space free from White oppression. That is, until a White mob massacred its residents and burned the place down.

Plessy v. Ferguson, on the other hand, led to segregation. African Americans became locked out of libraries and commercial districts. But they were also cut off from talking to other (White) inventors. In other words, they were denied the social capital and networking opportunities available in integrated communities.

Risk/Reward

I believe that if we pursue X's vision, there will never be equality. You can tax and redistribute money all you want, which will help some. But social capital is a source of the privileged that cannot be taxed and redistributed. The only way to tap into that is through integration, which cannot happen in Malcom X's world. 

The direction we take for civil rights is important to me because these visions are not compatible. And my ideas, like here and here, involve integration. If we choose Malcom X, I will be fighting a losing battle. 

My sense is that the direction people take will depend on their comfort with risk. Malcom X's vision is the safer route, but it has a lower ceiling and will never close the racial wealth gap. Dr. King's vision has the highest ceiling, but comes with the risk of microaggressions, racism, stereotype threat, and screwing up the Maxwell's Demon ratio so that Black students perform worse and/or seek riskier behavior (especially boys).

But I also recognize that it's not up to me. African Americans can and should be the ones deciding which type of world they want.

The Off Ramp to Herd Immunity

One of the things coronavirus has done is change the way I think about my behavior. I've moved from thinking about what consequences my actions have on myself to what consequences they have on others. This move doesn't come naturally to people and I think it helps explain the resistance to things like masks and vaccines. 

A lot of the arguments against lockdown are some version of this: "If I want to put myself at risk, that is my decision and the government does not have a right to make it for me," or "The vast majority of COVID deaths are the elderly or immunocompromised. I am neither, so why can't I eat indoors/attend a wedding/go to church/etc."

People easily understand risk of death but not risk of transmission. Risk of death involves thinking of the self; risk of transmission involves thinking of others. 

Another common anti-lockdown argument is that the COVID-19 recovery rate is between 97% and 99.75%, meaning only 1-3% of the people who get it die from it. More people die from car crashes than COVID, and we don't ban cars.

But car crashes are not contagious and that mortality rate grows the more the disease spreads. And the disease spreads based on our actions. The question we should ask is "Three percent of what?" 

If we throw caution to the wind, it's 3% of the US population, all 328 million people, and nearly 10 million people die. If we limit exposure by wearing masks and practicing social distancing, it might only be one-third of the country that gets exposed, roughly 100 million people, and 7 million fewer people die. 

My point is that our individual behavior determines how many people that 3% mortality rate applies to.

Muh Freedoms

The individual vs. society-wide thinking is also evident in discussions about a post-vaccinated world. Biden, Fauci, and the CDC have been saying that even after you are vaccinated, you will still have to wear a mask and practice social distancing. 

The individual thinker hears this and thinks "what is the point of getting vaccinated if I can't get my freedom back." The society thinker hears this and thinks "I'm protected but transmission is still possible; I need to keep others safe until we reach herd immunity, so I will continue to wear a mask."

Unintended Signaling

The other thing I've learned from coronavirus is the disastrous consequences of politicizing behaviors. To an antimasker/antivaxxer, you can show all the studies and give all the convincing arguments until you are blue in the face. There is one giant hurdle that no one wants to talk about. Even if unintentional, wearing a mask has the secondary effect of signaling membership in the Blue Tribe.

And every time an antimasker/anti-vaxxer sees their Blue Tribe Facebook co-worker/family member change their profile to a mask-wearing headshot or give the status update "Just got my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine" it unintentionally reinforces the idea that mask wearing and getting a vaccine correlates with Blue Tribe membership.

People often make public displays to normalize behavior they think is good for society. But I think this is one of the examples in which it makes things worse. So what should we do? Be more like Eric Weinstein and less like Patton Oswald.

Got vaccinated yesterday. I will continue to speak about the overselling of vaccines at the same time I talk about the virtues of vaccines.

I elected to go w/ the somewhat lower efficacy of the virus based J&J because novelty of the mRNA approach had a more opaque risk profile.

— Eric Weinstein (@EricRWeinstein) April 6, 2021

When the polio vaccine dropped in 1955 people lined up to get it, & we were 2 years away from artificial satellites. Now in 2021 we carry external world-brains in our pockets & there’s robots on Mars and idiots think the COVID vaccine is full of wizard poison.

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) April 6, 2021

Which one do you think got piled on? Surprisingly, not the one that called a whole group of Americans "idiots."

Why did it get piled on? Because of the on-ramp theory. The belief is that Eric has a large platform, including many right-wing followers, and questioning the science of vaccines is going to put people on the path to extremism.

Promoting vaccine suspicion is legitimizing antivaxx conspiracy thinking. He presents himself as bold and scientific, but he just leads people onto a dangerous anti-science highway and soon they are following QAnon.

Patton, on the other hand, has "the right views" and rightfully makes fun of anti-vaxxers. 90K likes and 18K retweets.

For the vaccine-hesitant crowd, which tweet is more likely to move them in the direction of vaccination? Which is more likely to politicize vaccines and push them to vaccine resistance?

Off Ramp to Herd Immunity

The problem with the on-ramp theory is that it ignores the off-ramp theory. 

Regarding the New York Times piece on Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson writes:

"The piece devotes enormous space to the idea of rationalism as an on-ramp to alt-right extremism.  The trouble is, it never presents the idea that rationalism also can be an off-ramp from extremism ... precisely because he gives right-wing views more charity than some of us might feel they deserve, [he] actually succeeded in dissuading some of his readers from voting for Trump."

Eric is the antidote to craziness. He provides influence for a certain group of people who, in his absence, would continue on the highway of craziness all the way to Alex Jones.

I recently heard a quote about Joe Manchin, saying that he isn't the Democrat that progressives want, but he's the Democrat that can get elected in West Virginia. Likewise, Eric Weinstein isn't the liberal progressives want, but he's the liberal that can convince vaccine-hesitant citizens to put a needle in their arms.