Booked

Stopped in a Barnes and Noble today, and saw these. I find it interesting that that the byline for Save America is "President Donald J. Trump," considering that Mr. Trump is currently not the President, and, contrary to what I had previously thought, the title is not conferred for life.

While it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, I do find in interesting how the presentations of Mr. Trump and Vice President Harris' books match their broader personalities; Mr. Trump being self-aggrandizing and Vice President Harris being about as low-key as someone running to be President can manage.

It was also notable that there was a children's book for the Vice President. I would have expected there to also be one for Mr. Trump, but perhaps that's not really his thing.

Partial Picture

The difficulty with staying informed isn't that the news media is necessarily untrustworthy, it's that its coverage of the world is necessarily incomplete, and editorial decisions, even when they can be inferred, are not transparent. And this is to be expected. After all, there's no independent source that one can consult that has an exhaustive list of every event, person or circumstance that may be newsworthy. So there's nothing to compare to.

Typical media incentives tend to push stories towards the more sensational, but something can be sensational without being either informative or actionable. But this is the nature of free (and even some paid) news sites. While one could say that this is due to the fact that their main customers are their advertisers, rather than their readers, advertisers don't have a big interest in story selection; they want stories that will attract the most eyeballs. And that means that news sites, as a business, are searching for the largest common denominator. The mass market, unsurprisingly, seeks to cater to the greatest mass of people.

And so what it really comes down to is my own perception of myself as an outlier when it comes to the news, based on the fact that I don't find the stories presented to be particularly useful most of the time. They can be interesting, and somewhat diverting, but they often strike me as being more entertaining than particularly informative. But, again, not having a worldwide index of everything that's going on at my fingertips, I couldn't say whether the coverage as I encounter it is representative or not. I simply have the impression that I'm outside the target demographic for it.

Lying Down

Here's a really cold take on things: If you tell someone something that they really want to believe, because it lines up with something that has high emotional salience for them, there's a good chance they'll believe it.

This isn't new. So why do journalists (of all people) seem to have so much trouble understanding that this is how people work? "America's Gullibility Crisis" is an article from Axios that mainly demonstrates, well, if you tell someone something that they really want to believe, because it lines up with something that has high emotional salience for them, there's a good chance they'll believe it.

Surprising, I know. But when Texas Republican Chip Roy shares a headline that turns out to be faked, or "Pro-Harris accounts" claim that Karl Rove is campaigning on her behalf, the reason these things catch on is simple: Republicans want to believe that Democrats could only win November's election via fraudulent means, and Democrats want to believe that Donald Trump is so loathsome that even Karl Rove would rather see Vice President Harris win.

I'm not clear on why this is so difficult to understand, or why it's considered newsworthy. Wishful thinking isn't a new concept. Part of it may be that this all seems really sudden. The American public didn't seem so invested in partisan and personality-driven politics a decade ago, and journalists may not have been prepared for the phenomenon, even though it's been there all along. But I suspect that this is also something that been relatively rare in affluent White communities. The sort of motivated reasoning that underlies Axios' "gullibility crisis" had been more common in poor and minority communities (where people felt that government didn't work for them, or was actively working against them); but that's not where the national media spent much time. So, like any number of other concerns, it was safe to ignore until it "went mainstream," as it were.

But while motivated information intake and reasoning may be alarming to journalists, especially those that lean Left, for most people, it simply isn't a problem. There's no cost to them for believing that Democrats are plotting to falsify election results or that high-level Republicans are abandoning Trump's ship. It simply doesn't matter; no-one's paychecks depend on them getting that information correct. And correct information is only useful to the degree that it makes things work better or more smoothly. In politics and culture (especially during culture wars), that's simply not the case. And if there's no benefit to being right, why wouldn't one expect people to believe whatever they want to?

Left In

Every election cycle, the State of Washington sends a Voters' Pamphlet to each home. It's a convenient way to see who, and what, is on the ballot this time around. I've paged through mine, and checked to see how many parties were fielding candidates for President. This year, in addition to the Big Two, there are eight.

Three of them stood out for me:

• The "Socialism and Liberation" Party
• The "Socialist Workers" Party
• The "Socialist Equality" Party

My first thought was, "Wow. That's a lot of Socialist parties." Then, I became curious why. There could be any number of reasons.

It's possible that one or more of them are not seriously contending the election. Now, to be sure, there is a sense in which none of them, or any of the other "third" parties, are seriously contending the election. I'd be impressed if any of them managed to pull in a full percentage point of the vote, and utterly blown away of they managed two points. Their chances of winning a single electoral vote is, flatly, zero. But here I mean not serious in the same way that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and his "We The People" Party is not seriously contending. They are on the ballot here in Washington in hopes of siphoning enough support away from Vice President Harris and Governor Walz that the Trump/Vance ticket might have a shot at winning; "We The People" has removed themselves from the ballot in states friendly to Mr. Trump.

And it's possible that the trio of Socialist parties are more of the same, on the ballot here in Washington with Republican support, in hopes that disaffected Progressives might take the opportunity for a protest vote, and maybe give Trump/Vance a shot at an upset.

It could also be a party-building exercise. I'm always dubious of third parties attempting to run for the Presidency when they don't appear to hold any down-ballot offices; mainly because a) there's no chance that they'd win, and b) even if they did, they wouldn't have any members of Congress that they could rely on to help advance their policy platform. But it's reasonable to presume that the various Socialist parties have placed themselves on the ballot in Blue states, because they're mainly looking for name recognition, and Blue states offer them more bang for their buck in that endeavor. Pushing back against this theory, however, is the fact that I have seen exactly zero yard signs or billboards for them; relying solely on the Voters Pamphlet would bring them to the attention of people like me, but precious few others. But this sort of third party strategy would explain why I didn't see any parties that appeared to be running to the right of the Republicans.

Which brings me to something else that occurred to me. As I noted, there weren't any parties that appeared to stake out a position to the right of the Republicans. And maybe that's because the Republican platform appeals more to the Far Right of American politics than the Democratic platform appeals to the Far Left. As much as the Republican caricature of the Democratic Party casts them as unrepentant (although not always open) Socialists, there have always been Socialist parties in the United States that have sought to stake out positions to their Left. And there are any number of Progressives, for that matter, who are of the opinion that the Democratic Party leans too far to the Right of American politics.

While I have heard of third parties that have sought to occupy the space to the right of the Republicans, there have never seemed to be as many of them. Now, it's possible that, not really attempting to win the election, they've adopted a strategy of only appearing on the ballot in Red states, the opposite of what I conjectured above. In such a case, I'd never hear of their candidates unless they somehow made the news.

So maybe what's happening here is that between the two major parties, there is a rightward skew; the "non-partisan" area between them is not in the center of American political thought, but is itself somewhat to the right. This would leave a greater vacuum on the Left, and, as such, more parties have arisen to fill that void. Being a random weblogger, rather than a political scientist, I have no idea.

So, in that sense, it's not even an educated guess. But it's an interesting phenomenon, regardless of the precise cause.

To Speak, or Not to Speak

I started listening to the Misinformation and the Three Languages of Politics (with Arnold Kling) episode of EconTalk. I made it about a third of the way through, and then gave up. Not because I had a problem with Professor Kling's notions that giving one entity the power to censor others is dangerous, or the idea that the antidote to bad speech is more speech, but because the discussion between Professor Kling and Professor Roberts seemed to go out of its way to avoid the real question that lies at the heart of things like "misinformation" and "censorship": Who is empowered to decide what is harmful?

It was already a given that some speech should be punishable, because it was harmful: Professor Roberts called out threats of violence early on. And in the wake of this, the idea that Holocaust denial, for instance, was effectively harmless was assumed, but never examined.

And while I understand the idea that thee is no harm done to anyone by the simple fact that someone claims that the killings of some six million Jewish people and another six million others didn't actually happen, there are nations in Europe that have decided otherwise. So rather than simply condemn them for being overly censorious in a misguided attempt to protect the hypersensitive, I think that a discussion of the various metrics have for determining whether, and when, people are harmed by speech was in order.

Because no matter which decision a government comes to, someone is going to be unhappy. Either someone feels that their free speech rights are being trampled (or they aren't being given a right that they should have) or someone's going to conclude that harms to them have been trivialized.

And the body that decides between these incompatible interests is not the censor, but whomever decides what it is the censor can sanction people for.