The forces that drove this election’s media failure are likely to get worse
As much as I find his persona to be ridiculously self aggrandizing and smug, Scott Adams made some pretty on point calls on this election, predicting Trump would win over a year ago. He&#x27;s got some metaphorical construct he calls the &quot;persuasion filter&quot;, with various notions about its components.
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.dilbert.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.dilbert.com</a><p>He claims he recognized Trump as a &quot;master persuader&quot;, which  once he started running. I confess I didn&#x27;t take it too seriously, but in his view &quot;master persuaders&quot; take advantage of various cognitive and emotional bias we have, often appealing to emotion.<p>In his view, when it comes to something like pursuading voters, appeals based on facts fail. Appeals based on tapping into the right emotions succeed.<p>Non of this theory is particularly novel, propaganda has been a major component of governing since time immemorial.<p>But he did hone in on Trumps ability to tap into these emotional motivational centers in a striking way.<p>I&#x27;ve been rather depressed about the election, with some passing moments of &quot;maybe it won&#x27;t be to bad.&quot;<p>Two days after, some of the shock has worn off. But I&#x27;ve never been quite so distressed by the outcome of an election. Which has prompted some self reflection: how much of my distress is based on the fact that my team lost, that Trump was successfully painted as a thug by Clinton campaign, who manipulated me similar to how Trump did his supporters?<p>I&#x27;m not sure how I&#x27;ll see things tomorrow, next week, next year. But as of tonight, I think the root of my distress is that Trump abandoned all pretense of a fact base campaign. His lies were total, said with impunity, no sense of shame whatsoever.<p>He comes closest to a sort of &quot;impressionistic truth&quot; in his ability to intuit people&#x27;s weak spots, their fear, their hypocrisy, their aspirations. Hence, he is a masterful bully, because his insults hone in on an emotional truth.<p>The downside to this ability, aside from the fact that he uses it to hurt others, is that he has no sense of irony, no insight to his own projection, no humility, and is easily baited. Small slights seem to rattle him almost more than big ones.<p>IMO, Hillary retains a strong comittment to living in a fact based reality. That&#x27;s one reason she lacks political charisma. Her attempts to elide a challenging issue, to convince an unsympathetic audience, her pre-planned &quot;zingers&quot;, her lies, are all so transparent, and she comes off as a phony, practicing on off putting brand of persuasion based around pandering, instead of convincing.<p>I think this is at least part of my alarm with what Trump has done, because there is simply no way to refute anything he says. He simply doesn&#x27;t care. His, statements are often vague, lacking specifics, nouns, big on pronouns, verbs, and meaningless superlatives.<p>When I hear this kind of rhetoric, I tend to get an uneasy feeling. I&#x27;m very sensitive to arguments that don&#x27;t make sense. I can feel it, and sometimes if I want to figure out what is wrong with the argument, I have to actively work through it.<p>I wasn&#x27;t immune to the entertainment value of watching this master bomb thrower destroy his bewildered primary opponents . Especially because his technique undermines the skills of a professional politician. Once Trump pulled back the curtain on his opponents clunky rhetorical machinery, they were powerless to get it back.<p>So I liked it, because watching professional politicians do their professional politician speaking is freaking annoying. The art of political language is to not provide any &quot;attack surface&quot; to your opponents. Trump just bypassed all that, because he is hyper agressive, and cares about winning far more than about how he &quot;looks.&quot;<p>Once that phase of the election was through, I found no appeal in Trumps meandering, stream of conscious boasting and hucksterism.<p>I guess I&#x27;m not the target audience. But watching people eat it up was disturbing, in light of the wildly inaccurate &quot;facts&quot; occasionally peperred in to his speeches. His campaign launched with a big one, characterizing most Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug addicts. I mean, that is demagoguery at its worst, shameful.<p>The sort of CW about what his supporters liked was that he &quot;told it like it was!&quot; To me, that indicates that that many of his supporters took his unabashed bullying as license to feel good about their own assholishness.<p>Political correctness gets a bad rap, but at its root it&#x27;s an attempt to manage difficult social dynamics and power structures, and is intended to protect groups that have been abused and marginalized by a dominant mainstream.<p>If you give up on the intention of political correctness, which is to help excluded individuals and groups become part of the mainstream, you are indeed being racist, ableist, intolerant, etc...<p>Everybody has strains of intolerance and prejudice, we&#x27;re all capable of hate, we&#x27;re all filled with fears and biases. That doesn&#x27;t make us &quot;racist&quot; in pejorative sense it&#x27;s used.<p>What does make someone a &quot;whateverist,&quot; is giving up trying to make marginalized groups part of the main stream, giving up the pretence to political correctness, of attempting to at least make the modicum of effort involved do demonstrate to an outsider that you are aware of their existence, and intend to create space for them. It depends on context. Making fun of someone or some group in private is different than in public.<p>So politically correct speech is disenguous, that&#x27;s how it works. Trump flouts these current norms in public! On purpose! His followers se that as him telling it like it is, because he is! He&#x27;s telling him about the inside parts of his psyche that are not nice, that don&#x27;t care, that want to put others down. Since we all have these elements inside us to some degree, his listeners feel affirmed for the negative parts of their psyche.<p>Instead of having to take the uncomfortable steps involved in trying to overcome one&#x27;s prejudices, of fighting against the negative aspects of the self, which are brought out when we have to try and get along with people different than ourself, Trump followers feel liberated to be their &quot;true selves&quot;.<p>This type of socializing only works well in homogenious social groups. The social bonds in such groups are easily reinforced by designating another set of individuals as &quot;other.&quot; Unfortunately, this type of scapegoating allows for socially sanctioned oppression and discrimination to occur.<p>A &quot;demagogue&quot; takes advantage of this psychology by helping define who is &quot;in the group&quot;, &quot;who is out&quot;, and normalizing these destructive, instinctual human behaviors.<p>There is a phenomena at play here in the &quot;red state&#x2F;blue state&quot; divide that is ironic. Blue staters, being just as human as red staters, are not immune to practicing a similar form of socially sanctioned discrimination and denigration of their own &quot;other&quot;: namely the red staters. This comes off as smugness, condescension, and is obvious to anyone on the receiving end of it. Hence, the awareness of this hypocrisy on the part of the blue stater, by the red stater, coupled with the a blue staters lack of insight of their own hypocrisy, or worse, the lack of attempt at even trying control and minimize their own &quot;scapegoating&quot; behavior, leads to an apparent moral equivalence of the two sides. The blue stater is taking advantage of the psychological balm of feeling superior to some one else.<p>The fact of the matter is that a Social Justice Warrior careening around, throwing bombs, and labeling people as racist can indeed be engaged in the same psychological Mia-behavior as a self-righteous born again Christian who justifies hating gays based on the bible.<p>If you have two, or more, groups of cultural rivals engaged in political battle, the fact that both sides engage in similar dysfunctional and antogonist behavior, doesn&#x27;t mean that core ideas or issues that drive each group are morally equivalent, or equally true.<p>A simple example might be illustrated by the truckers who like to &quot;roll coal&quot; and deliberately thumb their nose at the insufferable goody two shoes environmental &quot;activists&quot; trying to impose their concept of &quot;good behavior&quot; on others.<p>In this case, I find it easy to empathize with the coal rollers, but that doesn&#x27;t mean they are correct on what is needed to protect the environment.<p>This is a rather long winded response to the OP. The article is discussing the decreases power of the media to prevent group think from being reinforced by the filtering feedback loops of social media.<p>Trump has shown that for many voters, this is a quaint notion. In Trump they have found a leader who ignores facts in his rhetoric, and appeals purely on the level of emotions and psychological behaviors.<p>At core, this is what is so disturbing to me. Trumps indifference to facts, his exaltation of power and dominance will not lead to effective governing, and reflect almost a complete abdication of the responsibilities of a leader.<p>My guess is that motley crew of sociopathic right wing has-beens he has surrounding him will quickly move to take advantage of Trumps indifference to facts to exploit there positions in the new administration for their own ends.<p>Guliani, Gingrich, and Christie are the true &quot;deplorable&quot; here. Ruthless, amoral men with grudges to settle. These three have shown themselves to be completely indifferent to the needs of others. The lot of them have an appalling record of anti-social behavior. Unlike Trump, they they seem to operate in the fact based world. So when they lie, it&#x27;s at a very conscious level, calculated to increase their own power. Just looking at their collective record of behavior in their personal lives shows they have no regard for anyone but themselves.