Professor Ilya Somin has an appealing analysis of the behavior of consumers of the Internet with regards to scams, commercial and political, on The Volokh Conspiracy:
By contrast, we do a much worse job of minimizing the risk posed by political deception and disinformation. If you get an e-mail from a wealthy heiress who offers to pay you a million dollars, or see a website that promises to increase your sexual potency at a bargain-basement price, you are likely to be highly skeptical. By contrast, many people don’t apply anything like the same degree of common-sense scrutiny to political snake oil – especially when it conforms to their preexisting views. Politicians and activists who peddle dubious conspiracy theories, promise to give you something for nothing, and otherwise spread disinformation, often gain a wide following. Donald Trump’s large-scale use of lies and deception is just an extreme case of a far more widespread tactic, also successfully used by more conventional candidates and political movements.
The problem here has less to do with the specifics of the internet and more with the way we process political information. In most private-sector contexts, we have strong incentives to guard against deception and keep wishful thinking under control. If you believe the promises of the self-proclaimed Saudi prince who e-mails to say he will send you a million dollars tomorrow if only you will forward him a much smaller sum today, you will probably lose your money. That leads most people to be duly skeptical of such offers, even if they badly want to believe in the possibility of getting rick quickly with little effort.
By contrast, if you find a website or Twitter feed that promises we can promote social justice or make America great again by supporting some dubious candidate or public policy, incentives for skepticism are much weaker. If you get taken in and end up with false political beliefs that lead you to vote for the “wrong” candidate on election day, the chance that your vote will make a difference to the outcome is infinitesimally small. And even if your mistaken vote does somehow end up being decisive, most of the cost of the error will fall on the rest of society, not you or your family.
As a result, most voters have strong incentives to be “rationally ignorant” about politics, often remaining unaware of even very basic information. They also tend to a poor job of evaluating what they do learn – including believing extremely dubious claims that reinforce their preexisting views, while ignoring strong evidence that cuts the other way.
In most nonpolitical transactions online, we stand to pay a high price for ignorance and credulity. That does not mean we completely avoid bias and error. But it does greatly reduce it. When it comes to politics, by contrast, we can indulge our prejudices at little personal cost.
I like it because it explains the tenacity with which horrible political positions are retained by otherwise bright people – when you’re one of just a few holding an outré political position, you’re unlikely to be hurt by it because it never achieves dominance. And, for many, learning comes only from mistakes that bloody your nose.
But this Administration is the actualization of those odd-ball political beliefs. My suspicion is that, as horrific as it might have been, we will lose the opportunity to learn from this mistake, because Trump will be impeached, resign, or will flee the country and try to govern from afar, out of reach of law enforcement.
I give that last one a 1% chance of occurring.
However, if Trump does ride out the storm that seems to have been unleashed this morning, we may have the opportunity to discover just how bad Trump and GOP governance can be. Sadly, that will be much to our regret, in my opinion.
