Newsletter #228 — April 14, 2024
Why Are American Elections Always so Close?
By Guy Burgess
A few days ago, we received an interesting email from David Beckemeyer at the Outrage Overload Podcast asking our thoughts on a provocative question – why, in addition to being so bitterly divided, is the United States so equally divided? Or, as David put it, why do we keep have a "knife edge" elections.
The 51% Hammer Strategy
My initial response focused on something that I have, for years, been calling the "51% hammer strategy." This strategy is based on the fact that, from a purely rational, game theory perspective, the most powerful coalition within a democracy is likely to be the smallest coalition capable of gaining the power needed to effectively control the government. In the United States with its complex array of checks and balances, as well as overlapping jurisdictions at the federal, state, and local level, this requires much more than simply winning an election with 51% of the vote. Still, 51% is a quick way to refer to this much more complex process of gaining effective control the government. The advantage of keeping your coalition only 51% of the population is that it allows you to "hammer" the losing 49% with an array of distributional and other policies that reward your side and penalize the losers. In other words, you get to transfer the spoils of victory from the largest number of losers to the smallest number of winners.
This explains why it is so much harder to win elections with a much bigger 70% coalition. With a 70/30 strategy you can make only 30% of the electorate furious and you have to try to keep 70% of the population happy — something that is much harder to do, especially in a diverse society with a wide array of differing and often competing interests. Situations where there are more than two parties vying for power creates an even more attractive scenario, since all you need to control the government is a plurality of support which may be substantially less than 50%.
While it is true that the system of checks and balances and the various rights that US citizens enjoy limit the tyranny of the majority (or the winners), it is still quite possible for the winners to assemble enough power to convey substantial benefits from electoral losers to their supporters — enough to be a major driver of political life and our hyper-polarization problem.
The sophistication of available techniques for predicting the support that particular policy options and campaign strategies are likely to receive among targeted voting blocks has given political strategists the ability to be amazingly successful at making the 51% strategy work. This is evidenced by the very large numbers of very close selections that the US has been having at the Presidential and other levels.
The 51% hammer strategy is obviously very dangerous — it is almost as easy to lose as it is to win. Still, if the other side is playing this game, you don't have much choice but to play it as well. It is also a game that is most successful when both parties are free to promise the voters whatever they think they want to hear. This is something that is harder for incumbents to do, since they have to run on their record. In some cases this is an advantage (because it makes it easier to deliver real results to your supporters). In other cases, however it is a disadvantage because political officeholders invariably have to make decisions that disappoint and disillusion many of their supporters.
Fear and Hate Mongering
Still, as cute as the above explanation is, I do not think that it quite answers David's question. There is another equally, if not more powerful dynamic at play — the fact that it is easier to mobilize a political coalition around fear of a shared enemy — an enemy that deceptive, hate-mongering tactics often make appear more dangerous and evil than they actually are. Part of the reason this approach is so effective is that the fear part of the brain is wired ahead of the hope part of the brain. People pay much more attention to things that scare them than they do to the things that might make their life more attractive.
It is only once these threats are seen as being under control (something that rarely happens in a climate of ongoing and sophisticated hatemongering) that people start to focus on how things could be better. Besides, building a coalition around a program for positive change (as opposed to fear) is much more difficult because any such aspirational program requires difficult compromises between coalition members who never really want the same thing (and often want competing things). The larger and more diverse the political coalition, the more difficult it is to reach agreement on a political platform that will keep everybody happy (that's why such platforms tend either consist of glowing generalities or an impossible deliver collection promises). Still, you can keep a diverse coalition together if you focus on how scary the other side is.
Unfortunately, those who try to make this more positive approach work have a way of losing to political coalitions based on more divisive, but effective, hatemongering tactics. When you have two sides, both playing sophisticated and extremely well-funded hatemongering campaigns – campaigns that depend upon "mobilizing the base" and winning a sufficient number of "swing voters" you have what amounts to a sophisticated bidding war – one that (especially when combined with the 51% hammer strategy) tends to result in near equal outcomes.
Another part of the problem is that these hatemongering strategies really terrify the people who are being targeted. This can be counted upon to provoke a rather extreme, defensive response — a response that quickly escalates into an all-out battle for political power. This is a battle that takes us from the rough-and-tumble of "hardball" politics, through a series of increasingly dirty tricks, to something much more extreme and, potentially, violent. In other words, hatemongering often proceeds to the point where the other side really does constitute a serious threat that, even those who disapprove of hatemongering tactics believe must be combated.
This intensifies the ambient level of political animosity and fear. When this is combined with the roughly equal size of competing power blocks, you have the very real danger of runaway escalation.
Scapegoating
There is, however, a very popular and effective strategy for taking advantage of the hatemongering's ability to unify a political movement without antagonizing the 49% of the population that the 51% hammer strategy entails. Scapegoating, which has a long and infamous history, dramatically reduces the risk of some sort of hyper-polarized political confrontation that could easily lead to defeat. The approach is really quite simple. Pick a relatively small social group that, because of some complex array of socio-cultural factors, tends to live in relative isolation from the larger society — a fact that leaves the group with relatively few sympathizers. It also helps if the group is successful enough to leave other elements of society resentful of their success.
A scapegoating campaign starts by using sophisticated and misleading propaganda techniques to convey the impression that the scapegoated group is vastly more influential than it really is. Next, the scapegoated group is accused of using that influence to advance its own narrow, selfish interests at the expense of the larger population. Next, these two elements are combined in ways which allow the scapegoated group to be blamed for all (or most all) of society's ills. This lays the groundwork for political campaigns that promise to solve a nation's (or a community's) problems by getting tough on the scapegoated group by taking severe steps to limit their power, wealth, and influence. Scapegoating's big advantage is that it allows corrupt and authoritarian leaders (and their core supporters) to maintain a sufficient base of support within the larger population while, at the same time, exploiting that population.
Perhaps the best, and the most infamous, example of scapegoating was Adolf Hitler's campaign against the Jews — a campaign that ultimately led to the Holocaust. This, of course, is just the most extreme case in the long history of antisemitic scapegoating campaigns and pogroms — all, in part, traceable to the fact that Jews have been a relatively successful but small minority within so many societies. Still, the Jews are by no means alone. If one looks at the history of persecution and, especially, instances of genocidal violence, one commonly finds that scapegoating politics plays a big role. Scapegoating is a big threat faced by immigrant groups. It also plays a major role in the ongoing explosion of antisemitism and the Muslim world's long-running campaign to eliminate the Jewish state — a campaign that so viciously exploded on October 7 and is being supported by a worldwide epidemic of antisemitic scapegoating.
Possible Solutions
This gives rise to the big question, what might be done to limit the effectiveness of these three strategies? This is obviously a huge challenge. The big reason why these divisive forces play such a huge role in human history is that they are so successful and hard to combat.
Still, we think that there is hope if we focus on the principal area in which this kind of politics is vulnerable — it's moral indefensibility and the fact that it violates fundamental democratic principles of fairness. The only reason that it works is that people don't realize that they are being tricked. They think that corrupt leaders are actually looking out after their interests when in fact, they are eroding the social fabric upon which everyone's ability to defend their interests depends.
This suggests that the most promising countermeasures would revolve around efforts to promote public awareness of how these tactics are being used to sugarcoat widespread corruption and exploitation. We think that it's reasonable to expect support for and the effectiveness of these strategies to erode markedly as public awareness of their cynical nature increases and people become aware that the leaders who are using these tactics are actually harming their followers, not helping them.
A campaign designed to expose the threat posed by these tactics could benefit from the cognitive bias mentioned above — the bias that leads us to prioritize threat reduction efforts. Public education campaigns designed to undermine support for hatemongering tactics could be quite effective if they can find a way to persuade people that the big thing that they have to fear is not the other side, but the fear mongering tactics that are being used to turn us against ourselves. In doing this. we would not be employing some sort of deceptive propaganda trick. We would be telling people the honest truth. This kind of divisiveness is the biggest threat that we face. It is a threat that is effectively preventing us from successfully addressing all other threats and it is leading us down a very dangerous path. More and more people are predicting (and sometimes even calling for) a second U.S. civil war. Anyone who is remotely familiar with civil wars should know that no one wins, and everyone loses substantially. That should give people good reason to look for a way out of our current political games and structures.
Our colleague Kristin Hansen, Director of the Civic Health Project titled her recent newsletter "Civil war? No, thanks. Civil discourse? Yes, please!" She then went on to discuss the new Civil War movie that came out in theatres last weekend. She quotes Alex Garland, the film's writer and director, who said that "Civil War is trying to create a conversation about political divisiveness in general that vilifies the other side; ratcheting up rhetoric into an ethical debate which makes it easier to see others as evil — and once somebody is considered morally wrong, their opponents can justify all sorts of extreme measures to stop them." This is nothing new to peacebuilders, of course, but too many of us are still falling into this trap ourselves when we start talking about the upcoming Biden/Trump rematch or other issues where we see the other side as "pure evil."
Kristin goes on to say civil war "doesn't have to be our fate." "In fact, the film can be more than just an important conversation starter ... it can be a catalyst inspiring millions more Americans to reject tribalistic 'us vs. them' thinking and to embrace opportunities to engage constructively across our differences." Kristin continues by quoting another colleague of ours, Zach Elwood of Starts With Us, who argues that "Our future depends on what all of us do together. We all can play a role in building a less toxic and more stable America. We can demand less contemptuous and polarizing behaviors from leaders, activists, and people in the media. We can strive to disagree with our political opponents in better, healthier ways."
As we have been saying repeatedly, making a substantial change is going to take many of us, ideally all of us, working towards those ends. Success is not assured. But failure (and possibly civil war) is assured if we sit back and do nothing, or worse, contribute to the continuing escalation, polarization, hatred, and fear that is driving our discussions and our politics now.
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Photo Credit: This is William Holman Hunt's classic painting entitled "The Scapegoat" :Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoat#/media/File:William_Holman_Hunt_... By: William Holman Hunt; Permission: Public Domain; Date Acquired: April 13, 2024
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