I think I read somewhere that Al Gore regretted getting so involved in the Climate Change debate because it became politicized. Reading Ezra Klein’s inaugural piece at Vox helps explain how that process works. Basically, half the country didn’t like Al Gore and had opposed him when he ran for president. That half of the population didn’t just distrust Al Gore, their identity was wrapped up in disbelieving pretty much anything he had to say. The more evidence Gore supplied, the less these people were inclined to believe the evidence.
Obviously, there’s a whole disinformation industry out there, but that’s only part of what has happened. It’s a cautionary tale about who you choose to be your spokesman.
these fucking idiots are ridiculous. It didn’t matter if Al Gore got involved with it or not….he’s indulging his ego…
they are fucking stupid and sheep and want to be idiots…didn’t matter if it was Al Gore or not supporting Climate Change Education.
That’s just the thing. Just look at how the 2nd Amendment fetishists turned on Gabby Giffords and her husband. And she was a big time Blue Dog in Congress!! So Al Gore had little to do with it.
They’re not dumber than the rest of us. (Well, the rest of you…I’m smarter.) Both sides are mostly sheep.
If there are people who doubt climate change because of identity-protective cognition, that doesn’t mean that the people who believe in it are immune to identity-protective cognition, it just means they just got lucky in the coin flip to decide who gets which side of the debate.
it just means they just got lucky in the coin flip to decide who gets which side of the debate.
Or they read the actual science …………………….
I think you didn’t read the link.
Sorry, but MY approach to math or science doesn’t depend on Ezra Klein’s writing.
You’re an atypical person. It’s a shame if you don’t realize that you are atypical.
Trust me, I get told more often than not.
I got lucky, in that I read a bunch of Robert Anton Wilson in high school and had impressed upon me the utility of exposing myself to viewpoints other than my own, and trying to understand them.
The more books and articles I have read over the last few years on the subject which Kahan calls Identity Protective Cognition, and the more I make an effort to observe it all around me, I find myself becoming utterly depressed at times that our politics might have reached a tipping point where it can’t simply be repaired through the normal processes which we have depended on since the beginning.
Our ability to “create our own realities” has now grown to the point that we are immune to anything that is not circling within our chosen zones of data. And like Kahan points out, this has created a very visceral tribal environment where our neighbors, friends and family don’t just have differing opinions which can be roundly debated at the Thanksgiving table or over the back fence. They are allied with “the enemy”. I know, I have often felt that myself. And it is a very jarring reality to try and absorb.
Do you recommend any of those articles or books in particular?
We are all being played on a daily basis by misinformation campaigns of various aims. Our own psychological defense mechanisms also contribute to keep each of us in some degree of self-delusion. Between our innate insecurities and external peer pressures, our drive to stay true to the tribe is strong. Politics often does make each of us more stupid.
Ezra has written about politics and perceptions for years and I think this article of his is a great way to start his new endeavor.
It’s kind of interesting, in our own group within the local Democratic Party, there are wide variations in points of view on single issues; such as guns and abortion. But it really doesn’t occur to anyone, at least outwardly, to throw someone under the bus or out of the group because of it. There are some very vocal discussions over a beer now and then, but no overt sense that some kind of tribal obedience must trump our larger goal as Democrats.
I sometimes wonder how local Republican meetings go. I know how things like this are handled at local Tea Party meetings, as I’ve seen video from some of them, and I have attended a couple of them myself. Let’s just say, it usually ain’t pretty, if you know what I mean. Some of the leadership might try and hold it together for a time, but it usually ends up going off the rails pretty quickly. The inherent authoritarian streak within their ideology just rises to the top every time.
I’m intrigued by Jeb Bush’s comment on Fox about immigration. The one where he puts it into the context of ‘an act of love’.
He’s a Bush so he knows all about calculation so is he naively or shrewdly staking a nominee’s claim to try and shake the same Right that denies climate change and hates Al Gore for it…back to the center?
He hasn’t apologized to Rush yet for saying it so I’m thinking he’s going to make a play for the non crazy base of the GOP.
But now 14 years after Bush v Gore, is there a way to make jello out of the Right’s cement shoes?
I keep waiting for the other shoe on that one, too. It strikes me as far ‘worse’ than the insufficiently-anti-brown stuff that torpedoed Rick Perry.
“It’s a cautionary tale about who you choose to be your spokesman.”
I gotta disagree. People simply get branded as traitors to Murka and dismissed if they espouse something other than right wing orthodoxy, regardless of their actual politics. Look at supposedly moderate Republicans like Sullivan and Frum – there’s no room in the party for them.
Karl Rove, at the height of his influence, couldn’t get the GOP to budge on immigration reform. No spokesperson on the planet would have been capable of getting them to pay attention to climate change. Had the person taking the lead been, I dunno, Lamar Alexander or someone of that ilk instead of Gore, do you really think the message would have gotten more traction on the right? I don’t.
In that sense I think Gore might have been one of the best possible spokespersons for the cause. He reached those who were capable of being reached.
I’m with you. The idea that climate denialism got underway or got unduly entrenched because Al Gore was the leading exponent of action is very dubious. Don’t forget that ALL spokesman for climate action–including all climate scientists, NASA or otherwise—are hated and vilified by the braindead denialists as well.
The plutocrats and BigOil absolutely were going to fund and create the massive disinformation campaign of abject lies and falsehoods about climate no matter what. Their creatures, the “conservative” movement and the Repub party, were going to violently and universally oppose climate action just as they had violently opposed ALL environmental protection since the start of the Conservative Era under St. Reagan.
The plutocrats and fossil fuel CEOs were going to fund lies about the scientists and game the useless corporate media if there was a “known” climate spokesman or if there wasn’t one. Gore was the VP of a conservative Dem admin, and a southerner. He had acquiesced to Bushco’s stealing of the 2000 election. What exactly was his oh-so-terrible baggage that made him putrid in the eyes of “conservatives”? They hated Gore more as the rancid lies of denialism became ever greater. But he certainly didn’t CAUSE American denialism or make it worse than it would have been.
And if not Gore, who? Hansen? What other figure was even in the running? I’d rather have had Gore as the face of the issue. He was a big enough presence to at least begin to get the issue on the teevee and to establish its importance. That climate action was going to be viciously and deeply politicized by the keepers and coaches of the braindead American Rightwing was an absolute given. It was their strategy from the first.
I certainly hope that Gore doesn’t actually feel that climate policy would have gone better without him leading the charge. It most certainly would not have.
I remember having the impression that Al Gore’s biggest mistake during the campaign (under the influence of Mark Penn, no doubt) was the way he seemed to avoid talking about the environment at all. Since everybody knew it was supposed to be his big cause, it encouraged people to see him as dishonest. And many things went wrong in 2000 was when the post-Viguerie disinformation industry really got going, wasn’t it? But surely the politicization of the climate change debate was initiated and carried out by the coal and oil industries, going back to 1991. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial
You’ve got to be kidding. “Basically, half the country didn’t like Al Gore”…like that happened by itself?
A decorated veteran and Yale grad with an accomplished record and a Nobel Prize? And meanwhile people “like” a C-student cheerleader oil-industry bum with the mind of a high school dropout and elect him President? (Or the other Bush, or Reagan, or Romney, or any of the ghoulish rogue’s gallery of dim-witted, rich monsters we’ve been force-fed?)
Al Gore is the best possible example of the press’ power to arbitrary nullify a political figure. Articles and books have been written about the New York Times and ABC and all the ways that Gore was strategically destroyed as a candidate. There’s never been a clearer case of a good person being deliberately ruined in the public eye for the purpose of canonizing a worse-than-nothing figure that the establishment had decided that they preferred for their own reasons.
Gore still won. Unlike what the press did to the very decent and prescient candidate that ran against a crook in 1972. “Medicare for all” in 1972 would have been just in time before the US sick care system began to run amok. Universal care with better health outcomes and at a much lower cost (per capita and as a percentage of GDP). But no; in a landslide Americans went with Tricky Dicky and his criminal sidekick.
He would have won by Nixon/McGovern or Reagan/Mondale landslide proportions, without the phenomenon I’m describing. Bush was such a weak candidate (in a way that was, of course, spectacularly borne out by “his” presidency) that he probably would have won only a handful of states in a fair contest.
Remember how Gore won all three debates by wide margins? And how the press went into overdrive about how he was “mean” and “sighing” (or — my favorite –that his policy positions were “boring” to listen to)?
Not arguing that the MSM didn’t do a number on Gore and didn’t give GWB lots of passes. However, the latter was practically a habit – Nixon was a known sleaze, Reagan before 1984 was clearly senile (and exhibited some of it in a 1984 debate with Mondale), and GHWB was out of touch and not too bright. Ford, Quayle, and Dole were the three Republicans that were presented more honestly. The coverage of McGovern, Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis was dishonest. What Gore had working against him was similar to that of Mondale. After the MSM finished trashing Carter, Mondale’s association with Carter put him down one with the general public. Gore was saddled with Clinton (who half or more of the country didn’t like). And it was team GWB and not the MSM that kept that front and center during the campaign. GWB ran against Clinton — that’s what his “restore honor and dignity to the WH” messaging was about. I would add Oprah as a factor in 2000 — she gave GWB a forum with an unstated message for all those white women that trust her that GWB was a regular, and not scary, candidate.
Gore had another handicap. As noted by the Chicago Tribune in 1991 in discussion of possible VPs for Clinton: “For all that, Hamilton is probably the best choice in Clinton`s narrow range. He can take a frisk from the press and, unlike Gore and Kerrey, hasn`t proven he`s a poor campaigner.” And “Four years ago, Gore proved to be among the more wooden and phlegmatic presidential candidates offered up by the Democratic Party in recent memory.” A Sober and staid manner works well for a VP when the top of the ticket appears gregarious.
Then there was a large portion of the electorate that thought they were voting for GHWB in 2000. And when a race is extremely close, small error are magnified. Nixon’s sweaty brow in his TV debate with Kennedy and Gore’s clownish make-up in his first debate with GWB. It possible that Lieberman cost Gore WV (and the election). Let’s also not overlook the facts that Gore wasn’t a savvy fundraiser (was forced to compete with Hillary among large donors), had to shut down hi campaign from the time he secured the nomination and the convention (a rule of primary matching funds that team Bush wisely rejected), and didn’t have good enough campaign managers.
While a landslide was highly unlikely in 2000, it could have been an easy Democratic win if Democrats had nominated Bill Bradley. He would only have had to cut slightly into that GOP advantage with white men.
Respectfully, I still think you’re stuck “inside the box” that was created for this purpose by the establishment media.
Gore wasn’t “saddled with” Clinton. No matter how many times we’re told otherwise, Clinton was spectaularly popular…vastly more popular than Reagan. None of the Whitewater/Lewinsky/Impeachment tar stuck to him. (“Where is the outrage?” demanded on ABC News, when the polls revealed yet another time that the public refused to hold any of it against Clinton.)
One of the bitterest critiques of Gore’s campaign is that he mysteriously didn’t have Clinton stump for him, since he bought into the beltway myth that one of the most popular and successful presidents of the 20th Century was “a liability.”
Meanwhile they’re naming airports and schools after Reagan, who was never popular.
And Clinton got in trouble for “politicizing” Nixon’s funeral because, of all the speakers, he was the only one to utter one half of one sentence obliquely suggest that there might be some element darkening Nixon’s legacy.
Boom time, peace time; a popular president; a well-qualified Veep with a record in Vietnam…running against a n’er-do-well lifelong failure who said “nucular” and called Greeks “Grecians” and who could barely talk into a microphone.
But the mechanics of American politics don’t run in that direction. The gears are ratcheted the other way. The only exception was the massive system failure in the mid-Seventies when the President resigned, his entire cabinet went to jail, and a Southern preacher Democrat was elected handily. And Dick Cheney (spinning away from the Death Star wreckage in his TIE fighter) and others took notes on how to ensure that this would never happen again.
…demanded Cokie Roberts on ABC News. (Sorry; no edit function)
Respectfully, you’re buying into Democratic party elites version of history. What’s your factual basis for “Clinton was spectaularly popular…vastly more popular than Reagan?”
Mine: 1) 1984 re-election: Reagan 58.8%; 1996 re-election: Clinton 49.2%.
2) 1992 – Democratic majorities in House and Senate. 1994 – Republican majorities in House and Senate. For the “spectacularly popular” Clinton, he didn’t have any coattails as the GOP maintained its congressional majorities for over a decade. (Although in 2000 with Gore at the head of the ticket, Democrats came within striking distance in the Senate.)
Whitewater (always far too complicated for the public to understand, but it was sleazy and probably as illegal as the sleazy financial deals the George, Jeb and Neal Bush engaged in) hurt in the 1994 mid-terms. Just because the public didn’t think Clinton should be impeached for lying about a dalliance with an intern, doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt Clinton. (While anecdotal, the people I encountered that were most outraged by Clinton’s affair were white men who also hadn’t been faithful to their wives.) You seriously think that Rove didn’t poll test “restore honor and dignity to the WH?” That was also building on the charge that the Clinton’s “rented out the Lincoln bedroom.”
As for this:
No mystery at all. Well, unless one doesn’t bother to listen to what Gore has said about this. Gore trailed GWB from the earliest days (1999) of the campaign. A lead that GWB never relinquished until the Democratic convention. Every freaking internal poll that team Gore did pointed out that Clinton was dragging his numbers down. That interpretation was confirmed when Clinton did stump for Gore — wherever Clinton appeared, Gore’s approval numbers declined. Honestly don’t get Democrats/liberals resistance to facts that don’t support their preconceptions.
One last point — Dick Cheney wiped the floor with Lieberman in their debate. Edwards didn’t fare any better in 2004.
Absolutely, exactly what Jordan Orland said.
I remember how much Al Gore was hated by the hard left in the SF Bay Area when I lived there, too. Gore was made weak in part due to single-issue activists turning their backs on him, and holier-than-thou types sticking their noses(in part due to being spoiled by a relatively good economy during the Clinton years that allowed a certain amount of single-issue-indulgence).
The media and the right smelled that weakness, that lack of base support, and went for the jugular. They wanted a horserace, too, and played that up as much as they could.
In the end, Al Gore’s individual contributions by small donors were so small compared to Obama’s in recent years that most people would be shocked. The rank and file never showed up for him, not at the beginning, not at the end.
And even so, he won the election by any fair standard. Pretty tough guy, really. But his “loss” only legitimized the clownish caricature and it persists today, like the legend of Paul Bunyan or the Jackalope.
Remember “Gush and Bore”? I do, and did.
Right through the Iraq war, the one that there are still people claiming Gore would have launched anyways.
Idiots.
Would be very cautious in extrapolating from Kahan’s small study. The primary finding was that “most people failed” to interpret the neutral study results accurately and only those that demonstrated high “numeracy” did better. (Still 25% of those above the 90th percentile in “numeracy” failed.) IOW – middle-aged, non-college graduates aren’t good at math. Few of them are likely to have taken and passed a course in statistics or an experimental science class either.
The bias in this study is that data = numbers. But most people absorb data through stories. Make the numerical data difficult (as the problem was) and the story easy (as it was in the gun-control condition), the story wins even among those better able to figure it out mathematically. Exactly what cognitive psychologists such as Lakoff have been saying for quite some time.
Don’t pick scientists. They believe in evolution and extinction.
Don’t pick progressives of any type.
Only a conservative business executive can speak for the evidence of climate change; someone like one of the Koch brothers.
Trying to get through is a fool’s errand. We will have to live with the consequences of 35-and-counting years of ostrich-like stupidity.
Shouldn’t have picked Carter; they hated him too and moved his religious denomination right out from under him to defeat him as President.
But the Republicans who made sure that our hostages in Iran had to stay hostages until Ronald Reagan’s inaugural day will never suffer the consequences of a student who was a translator.
Why should we keep playing a rigged game?
You ask:
Because it’s the only game in town.
I proposed a Mediastrike!!! long ago and far away, but there are simply too many people totally addicted to the consumption of “news” to even budge what is happening here. This next campaign will be as media-corrupted as have been the previous 50+ years’ worth.
Worse, most likely.
Watch.
AG
My understanding of the social science literature is that while everyone is subject to confirmation bias, that liberals are more likely to be swayed into changing their positions on issues that matter to them by persuasive, objective facts than are conservatives, who are more likely to harden existing beliefs when confronted with alternate narratives. Also that liberals tend to start with facts to build a narrative, and conservatives tend to start with a conclusion and build a “factual basis” for reaching that conclusion. You can see that happening time and again with our current Supreme Court, McCutcheon being a prime example.
As Steven Colbert said, facts have a liberal bias.
There are some interesting points there, but overall the story misses the main thing. Why did climate change become an ideological hobbyhorse for the right?
Because very well funded and well connected industries made it an ideological issue within the language and culture of the movement.
Why did the HPV vaccine become politicized? Probably this was a less determined outcome. I suspect there was an opportunistic culture war skirmish that probably wouldn’t have happened in a Republican administration.
Who did they make it an ideological issue for? For the 27% of the voting population that is mainlining Fox.
There is no reasoning with those people. Their home could float away in a 10,000 year flood and they’d still be clinging to whatever up is down canard they’d been spoon-fed. As always, the focus needs to be on organizing the reachable people.