Posted on by porlando

What is Unity? (Post-Election Questions)

Now that the US presidential election is over (well, probably) we’ve seen calls for unity (at least from Biden’s side). But what is unity? What do you need in order to have it? And if we don’t have it now, why not?

This story of unintended consequences starts with business models that benefit from division. Always look for incentives in designed systems and in systems that emerge.

Old News, New News

News of all types – real, fake, stressed, ignored, and biased – was a big part of the last four years. Let’s look at the general change in the media industry from pre-Internet days to today.

If we don’t have unity today, but maybe did in the past, is some of that due to changing news industry business models?

Pre-Internet, geography was the limiting factor for physical papers needing quick distribution and there was less of an incentive to cultivate political bias. Today, online paid subscriber publications can target specific political affiliations and produce content appropriately.

Further to the right on the above image would be people gaining most of their information from social media and newsletter subscriptions. Finer-targeted and more extreme publications can be sustainable now while they couldn’t in the past. There’s no need for a Yuri Bezmenov international subversion conspiracy when business models will do.

Following the news business model example, the US population, when split into political categories, went through this transition over time. More divergence rather than more unity.

The following findings are from related studies.

  • The paper “Cross-Country Trends in Affective Polarization” shows that the US, but not all nations studied, polarization grew over the past 40 years.
  • Reuters conducted a study of the span of media consumption across different countries. You’ll see a much wider range in the US, compared to the relative centrality of the UK, and extreme centrality of Germany.
  • From the Gallup Poll results chart titled “Most Americans Say News Organizations Are ‘Often Inaccurate.'” By 2017 (latest year of results), 36% marked news organizations as having their “facts straight” and 55% as being “often inaccurate.” The flip between most people believing in accuracy over inaccuracy happened around the year 2000.
  • Same for the Gallup Poll chart titled “Most Americans Believe Media Favors Democrats Than Republicans,” with 64% believing the news favors Democrats to 22% believing the news favors Republicans.

Finally, this is an image from Morning Consult, a data company.

But I think a better representation of the above image is as follows.

I reworked Morning Consult’s image to better visualize the trust Democrats and Republicans put in their news sources. Here I took the percent that marked each source as credible, subtracted those who found the source not credible, and put the whole thing on a Y-axis to make the comparisons easier. The results are very different from the original.

Notably, Democrats trust their own preferred news sources much more than Republicans trust theirs.

Also notably, even a relatively conservative paper like the Wall Street Journal was less trusted by Republicans than Democrats.

What is Unity?

What is unity? I struggle to define unity in a national context, at least in the US, which is diverse in so many ways. Unity can’t mean we all have all the same beliefs. That’s not possible. But unity could mean that we share the same basic values. As I wrote in an earlier article on Basic Values:

“Basic values are important and lasting beliefs or ideals about what is good or bad, shared by members of a group.

“Basic values aren’t laws, written down in detail and with assigned judges. Instead they spring from group or individual ideals, culture, history, and more.”

But sources of information (as above) are siloed. While the Biden-Trump vote split was 51% to 49%, geographic or social separation means that it can be common that many Biden voters don’t have any Trump supporter friends.

Do Americans as a whole have a smaller, weaker set of common basic values? And instead do various groups — and I’m choosing the broad political groups here — have a larger, stronger set of basic values?

Related, this was a year in which saying that you like Washington, Jefferson, or even Lincoln became possibly controversial. That’s a break with unstated values that had tied a nation together.

How does a nation gain unity? A crisis can do it.

After Reagan was shot and brought into a hospital, he said to the doctors: “I just hope you’re Republicans.” One of the doctors replied: “Today, Mr. President, we’re all Republicans.” I struggle to imagine a scenario where such a sentence would be uttered today.

In sudden and short-lived crises, like Reagan’s assassination attempt, or the actual assassination of Kennedy, unity can emerge naturally. By the time differences of opinion start to chip away at that unity, the crisis is over.

But when a crisis lasts a long time, that moment of unity dissipates during the crisis. Consider how unity after the 9-11 attacks (sudden onset, long-lived), both within the US and internationally in support of the US, dissipated and reversed over time.

Sometimes unity comes in response to a common enemy. Unity of support for Olympic athletes during the Cold War surpassed any recent Olympic competition.

When a crisis happens slowly, that moment of unity may never emerge. Consider how efforts around controlling climate change (slow onset, long-lived) divide people.

Of course, consider efforts around COVID-19 (slow onset, long-lived). What could have been a unifying crisis turned into fighting over the best way to proceed, how much to value economic impact, and whether to lessen individual freedoms for group safety.

In the US, there was even less of a chance that COVID-19 would create unity in an election year with Trump as one of the candidates. Not because of whatever Trump might have said, but because half of the country would find it contrary to their basic values to follow anything that he said.

Unity Was Bad. Unity Is Now Good.

It was only four years ago that calling for unity was actively disparaged by the very people who call for it now. That makes sense if you assume that different political groups see different information, have different levels of trust in their news, and have ill will from believing that their opposition members are hypocritical, evil, or worse.

Unbelievably at the time, after the 2016 election we saw the birth of rogue social media accounts set up by staff members in various government positions, including Rogue White House, Rogue POTUS Staff, and even Rogue NASA. More generally, when it came to Trump, “resistance” against him was the theme.

So we started with a baseline set over four years that challenging a political outcome is OK, or even patriotic according to basic values.

False national unity – the unity of a political party rather than the population – leads to a whipsaw effect. You can’t tell which side you fall on until you know who is saying it and about whom.

From Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor: “When this nightmare is over, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It would erase Trump’s lies, comfort those who have been harmed by his hatefulness, and name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe.”

From Steven Levy, Editor of Wired Magazine: “It’s time to go zero tolerance on people toxically sowing doubt on our electoral system.”

Imagine calling for unity after the election in 2016. It might resonate with half the country. Just a different half than who say it now.

This has been at least one good recent outcome. The “Trump Accountability Project,” set up to do what Ocasio and Reich proposed, received enough public outcry that it shut down.

Is it possible to move away from whipsaw unity?

I don’t know that unity is possible barring a convenient crisis or lots of time. I would be more optimistic if business models didn’t support division. Ironically, one pre-election effort at more genuine unity (Unity 2020) was deemed too scandalous for social media platforms and was banned from Twitter.

Outcomes

When it comes to basic values, there are many opportunities to create unintended consequences. Again from the Basic Values article:

“Adherents are concerned ‘with the subjective satisfaction of duty well performed…’ People pushing their own basic values do not consider or try to avoid second order effects that may arise from their actions. They act out of what they believe is the right thing to do, regardless of outcome. (‘The operation was a success but the patient died.’)”

And when there are more sets of basic values, do these problematic outcomes multiply?

Consider that business model chart at the beginning of this essay and keep extending it to separate social networks targeted to different political affiliation.

 

There is little possibility of true unity in the current situation.

Consider

  • An Abraham Lincoln quote used by the Lincoln Project in their Twitter bio: “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.” But if the timeline is a four-year election cycle, maybe that doesn’t matter.
  • Unity does not come from winning at all costs when competing internally.