Oh my god. I do this all the time. I think it's because it feels vulnerable to just like things? What if someone tries it out, and they get frustrated by something bad, and then they judge you???
I think I agree with you at the high abstraction level and I think you're right about why (outrage generates XP points in the gossip trap game, so people are effectively chasing it themselves on the one hand and scared of being a subject to on the other).
But I'm not sure I agree on the specifics.
I think the assumption in "lesser evil" content is precisely that they're FOR those who are choosing a lesser evil. They won't be persuaded by "KH good" arguments because if they were, they'd not need extra persuading at this stage? The Nagoski quote feels like a last ditch desperate attempt to nudge the "nope neither they're as bad as each other" population. That this is what an undecided swing voter is like is arguable. I don't know about American politics enough to judge this. But IF that's the target then it seems a reasonable strategy, not that different from "yes Clinton is bad but she's normal bad while Trump is extra out of the window of acceptable bad" argument people used in Trump Mk 0.0.
As to the "it never happens with art or pop entertainment": I think it does quite often, the perceived need to actively acknowledge the worthiness of the content or the identity/suffering based deservingness of the author before proceeding with a statement of dislike or a personal hatchet job. Or in a more subtle version, to acknowledge the popular appeal and craftsmanship before admitting to hating it.
I have a version of this with pretty much any rap/hip hop, for example. Barbie film. Any misery porn memoir I've come across. Almost all clearly feminist poetry and some prose fiction. And it's not that I object to the feminist ideology or even sentiments that drive those works: I support them. But I also find their treatment almost invariably grating and often just artistically crap, or outdated or super simplistic.
Undecided swing voters of course aren't like this at all; they almost definitionally have a mix of left-wing and right-wing opinions, and Nagoski's talking points are all left-wing. Everyone already knows that left-wing journalists favor Democrats over Republicans, so swing voters aren't going to find this persuasive.
The point I think you're maybe getting at is an argument about persuasion vs. turnout. There's a left-wing meme about how there are huge numbers of disaffected left-wing eligible voters who don't vote, and the outcome of elections depends primarily on getting them to show up and vote, rather than on persuading swing voters. (Sometimes people use this as an argument for lesser-evil messaging like Nagoski's, but more often they use it as an argument for moving to the left on policy à la Bernie Sanders.)
Matt Y has written a whole lot of columns about why this is wrong. In short, surveys consistently and convincingly show that nonvoters care a lot less about politics than consistent voters (which should really not have surprised anyone), and the political opinions they do have tend to be scattered and ideologically inconsistent (much like swing voters). Those with strong and ideologically consistent opinions are the highest-propensity voters; left-wingers unhappy about the state of politics may piss and moan about having to vote for the lesser evil, but in the end, they hold their noses and do it, because they know that doing the opposite only makes things worse. Also, just as a matter of math, persuading a swing voter is twice as effective as turning out an unlikely voter for your side. And increasing electoral turnout across the board now makes Democrats do worse, although that's a recent development.
Matt thinks that this meme persists in spite of its easy disprovability because it gives highly-engaged partisans the excuse to engage in messaging that makes them feel good about themselves and that their similarly-partisan friends will appreciate, instead of messaging that works but makes them feel uncomfortable. Also the turnout thing matches left-wing views of how politics ought to work.
I have my own pet theory which is not backed by any particular empirical evidence, which is that angry ideologues are engaging in the typical mind fallacy. They're aware that turnout is lower among younger people than older people (which is true, and better-publicized than the above statistics about ideology, or at least was when I was young). Being mostly young themselves, they ask themselves what would prevent *them* from turning out. The obvious answer to that is, "if I got so fed up with being unable to get the political outcomes I really want, and always having to vote for the lesser evil, that I gave up in disgust", and so they figure that's what's going on with lower youth turnout and so they need to counter it with more ideological messaging/by promising to not just be another lizard. You can do a similar analysis about race (people of color also vote less); the considerations are more complicated but you can get to a similar conclusion if you're so inclined.
In short, while I agree that "yes Clinton is bad but she's normal bad while Trump is extra out of the window of acceptable bad" sounds a priori reasonable—I myself messaged my swing-state acquaintances with it in 2016, because I believed that it was the most important consideration—it's in fact a lot less persuasive to the people who actually need persuading than the highlight-the-nice-things-your-candidate-is-doing-that-normal-people-like approach that Ozy is taking here.
I think there is a very obvious reason why Dems in this election specifically constantly have to compare their own candidate to voting for "99% Hitler" (actual framing I have seen used independently multiple times, for both Biden and then Harris after he dropped out) to argue that people (certainly not "swing voters" in this context!) should vote for them, and it's just arguing in bad faith to ignore it.
Thanks for this excellent article, Ozy! You've really identified one of the core problems in current discourse that I'm trying to push back on with The Weekly Anthropocene.
Biden wasn't my first choice in the primary elections four years ago, but I actually am very happy with the Biden administration in general, and I would have enthusiastically supported a second Biden term had he been ten years younger. Honestly, I haven't been more satisfied with a Presidential administration in my lifetime.
I think normal politicians are totally depraved. Sure, some manage to be even worse than that, but the default is extremely bad. Commonsensically, what are good people like? At a minimum, they don't steal, murder, etc. But it's basically universal for politicians to enact policies that do some of these things. I don't just mean this in a radical libertarian way - even if you support the existence of the welfare state, that doesn't make it okay to take your money to give it away to businesses that do what some politician wants. It's not "oh well, sometimes they do things I disagree with, they're not perfect", it's just terrible. I'm pretty sure that none of the people I actually consider good have ever stolen my money to give it to favored industries.
Also, if acting like a normal politician isn't a dealbreaker for you, you're a captive audience that lets them get away with their normal level of wrongdoing.
If you are urging people to vote, you should seek to calibrate your emotions about politicians to reflect the range of politicians empirically available, including whatever level of curve-grading is necessary. If you want to dismiss the whole class out of hand, that's fine, but then you shouldn't be trying to get people to vote!
I can dismiss the whole class out of hand as horrible while still opposing some of them more than others, and that's compatible with trying to persuade people to vote for the least bad choice on offer. But this persuasion should reflect my sincere moral evaluation of the candidates, not try to make the less-bad ones look good - if I think Kamala and Trump are both evil but Trump is worse, I should make a case that addresses and compares the negatives of both. It would be dishonest and manipulative of me to just focus on Kamala's positives (or spin her negatives as positive) in an attempt to get people to vote for her.
> if I think Kamala and Trump are both evil but Trump is worse, I should make a case that addresses and compares the negatives of both.
But why *only* the negatives? Presumably, both K and T will do *some* good things and some bad things. Isn't it one-sided to focus only on the negatives for each? So if T would tear down climate protective policies, but K would enact further ones, then that increases K's advantage over T as compared to her just not doing anything. Ignoring the positive actions of either is not very honest either, is it? Even if you think the negatives outweigh the positives in both cases.
A normal US president is far worse than a "normal politician", considering every alive US president (and vice-president) is a criminal against humanity worse than some people who got hung at Nuremberg.
Is it possible to be a US president without being that kind of criminal, or is it just inherent in being Commander-In-Chief of the military of a large country with international alliances?
If someone has the opinion "kamala harris is overall quite bad, but you should vote for her anyway", this is how they would express it. You seem to be under the impression that they like Kamala, but are hiding this for social reasons. What if they just don't like her?
And yeah, they didn't mention all the good things you mentioned, but they also didn't list the bad things she endorses. For example, the continuing funding of the horrific war in Gaza, which is the main thing that people on the left cite as a reason for not voting. I think this is dumb because trump is worse on this and most other issues: which is the point she is making in the post.
Do you have location stats on your audience? I'm guessing it's disproportionately Californian, and of course a Californian's presidential vote isn't worth spending a single pixel trying to influence.
I'm Canadian, so I'm going to focus on Point III.
Oh my god. I do this all the time. I think it's because it feels vulnerable to just like things? What if someone tries it out, and they get frustrated by something bad, and then they judge you???
I'll be more mindful about this.
I think I agree with you at the high abstraction level and I think you're right about why (outrage generates XP points in the gossip trap game, so people are effectively chasing it themselves on the one hand and scared of being a subject to on the other).
But I'm not sure I agree on the specifics.
I think the assumption in "lesser evil" content is precisely that they're FOR those who are choosing a lesser evil. They won't be persuaded by "KH good" arguments because if they were, they'd not need extra persuading at this stage? The Nagoski quote feels like a last ditch desperate attempt to nudge the "nope neither they're as bad as each other" population. That this is what an undecided swing voter is like is arguable. I don't know about American politics enough to judge this. But IF that's the target then it seems a reasonable strategy, not that different from "yes Clinton is bad but she's normal bad while Trump is extra out of the window of acceptable bad" argument people used in Trump Mk 0.0.
As to the "it never happens with art or pop entertainment": I think it does quite often, the perceived need to actively acknowledge the worthiness of the content or the identity/suffering based deservingness of the author before proceeding with a statement of dislike or a personal hatchet job. Or in a more subtle version, to acknowledge the popular appeal and craftsmanship before admitting to hating it.
I have a version of this with pretty much any rap/hip hop, for example. Barbie film. Any misery porn memoir I've come across. Almost all clearly feminist poetry and some prose fiction. And it's not that I object to the feminist ideology or even sentiments that drive those works: I support them. But I also find their treatment almost invariably grating and often just artistically crap, or outdated or super simplistic.
Undecided swing voters of course aren't like this at all; they almost definitionally have a mix of left-wing and right-wing opinions, and Nagoski's talking points are all left-wing. Everyone already knows that left-wing journalists favor Democrats over Republicans, so swing voters aren't going to find this persuasive.
The point I think you're maybe getting at is an argument about persuasion vs. turnout. There's a left-wing meme about how there are huge numbers of disaffected left-wing eligible voters who don't vote, and the outcome of elections depends primarily on getting them to show up and vote, rather than on persuading swing voters. (Sometimes people use this as an argument for lesser-evil messaging like Nagoski's, but more often they use it as an argument for moving to the left on policy à la Bernie Sanders.)
Matt Y has written a whole lot of columns about why this is wrong. In short, surveys consistently and convincingly show that nonvoters care a lot less about politics than consistent voters (which should really not have surprised anyone), and the political opinions they do have tend to be scattered and ideologically inconsistent (much like swing voters). Those with strong and ideologically consistent opinions are the highest-propensity voters; left-wingers unhappy about the state of politics may piss and moan about having to vote for the lesser evil, but in the end, they hold their noses and do it, because they know that doing the opposite only makes things worse. Also, just as a matter of math, persuading a swing voter is twice as effective as turning out an unlikely voter for your side. And increasing electoral turnout across the board now makes Democrats do worse, although that's a recent development.
Matt thinks that this meme persists in spite of its easy disprovability because it gives highly-engaged partisans the excuse to engage in messaging that makes them feel good about themselves and that their similarly-partisan friends will appreciate, instead of messaging that works but makes them feel uncomfortable. Also the turnout thing matches left-wing views of how politics ought to work.
I have my own pet theory which is not backed by any particular empirical evidence, which is that angry ideologues are engaging in the typical mind fallacy. They're aware that turnout is lower among younger people than older people (which is true, and better-publicized than the above statistics about ideology, or at least was when I was young). Being mostly young themselves, they ask themselves what would prevent *them* from turning out. The obvious answer to that is, "if I got so fed up with being unable to get the political outcomes I really want, and always having to vote for the lesser evil, that I gave up in disgust", and so they figure that's what's going on with lower youth turnout and so they need to counter it with more ideological messaging/by promising to not just be another lizard. You can do a similar analysis about race (people of color also vote less); the considerations are more complicated but you can get to a similar conclusion if you're so inclined.
In short, while I agree that "yes Clinton is bad but she's normal bad while Trump is extra out of the window of acceptable bad" sounds a priori reasonable—I myself messaged my swing-state acquaintances with it in 2016, because I believed that it was the most important consideration—it's in fact a lot less persuasive to the people who actually need persuading than the highlight-the-nice-things-your-candidate-is-doing-that-normal-people-like approach that Ozy is taking here.
I think there is a very obvious reason why Dems in this election specifically constantly have to compare their own candidate to voting for "99% Hitler" (actual framing I have seen used independently multiple times, for both Biden and then Harris after he dropped out) to argue that people (certainly not "swing voters" in this context!) should vote for them, and it's just arguing in bad faith to ignore it.
Thanks for this excellent article, Ozy! You've really identified one of the core problems in current discourse that I'm trying to push back on with The Weekly Anthropocene.
Biden wasn't my first choice in the primary elections four years ago, but I actually am very happy with the Biden administration in general, and I would have enthusiastically supported a second Biden term had he been ten years younger. Honestly, I haven't been more satisfied with a Presidential administration in my lifetime.
I think normal politicians are totally depraved. Sure, some manage to be even worse than that, but the default is extremely bad. Commonsensically, what are good people like? At a minimum, they don't steal, murder, etc. But it's basically universal for politicians to enact policies that do some of these things. I don't just mean this in a radical libertarian way - even if you support the existence of the welfare state, that doesn't make it okay to take your money to give it away to businesses that do what some politician wants. It's not "oh well, sometimes they do things I disagree with, they're not perfect", it's just terrible. I'm pretty sure that none of the people I actually consider good have ever stolen my money to give it to favored industries.
Also, if acting like a normal politician isn't a dealbreaker for you, you're a captive audience that lets them get away with their normal level of wrongdoing.
If you are urging people to vote, you should seek to calibrate your emotions about politicians to reflect the range of politicians empirically available, including whatever level of curve-grading is necessary. If you want to dismiss the whole class out of hand, that's fine, but then you shouldn't be trying to get people to vote!
I can dismiss the whole class out of hand as horrible while still opposing some of them more than others, and that's compatible with trying to persuade people to vote for the least bad choice on offer. But this persuasion should reflect my sincere moral evaluation of the candidates, not try to make the less-bad ones look good - if I think Kamala and Trump are both evil but Trump is worse, I should make a case that addresses and compares the negatives of both. It would be dishonest and manipulative of me to just focus on Kamala's positives (or spin her negatives as positive) in an attempt to get people to vote for her.
> if I think Kamala and Trump are both evil but Trump is worse, I should make a case that addresses and compares the negatives of both.
But why *only* the negatives? Presumably, both K and T will do *some* good things and some bad things. Isn't it one-sided to focus only on the negatives for each? So if T would tear down climate protective policies, but K would enact further ones, then that increases K's advantage over T as compared to her just not doing anything. Ignoring the positive actions of either is not very honest either, is it? Even if you think the negatives outweigh the positives in both cases.
A normal US president is far worse than a "normal politician", considering every alive US president (and vice-president) is a criminal against humanity worse than some people who got hung at Nuremberg.
You two agreeing is a beautiful show of bipartisanship.
Is it possible to be a US president without being that kind of criminal, or is it just inherent in being Commander-In-Chief of the military of a large country with international alliances?
If someone has the opinion "kamala harris is overall quite bad, but you should vote for her anyway", this is how they would express it. You seem to be under the impression that they like Kamala, but are hiding this for social reasons. What if they just don't like her?
And yeah, they didn't mention all the good things you mentioned, but they also didn't list the bad things she endorses. For example, the continuing funding of the horrific war in Gaza, which is the main thing that people on the left cite as a reason for not voting. I think this is dumb because trump is worse on this and most other issues: which is the point she is making in the post.
Last I checked, Kamala didn't try to steal the election, so she has my vote.
And that's from a guy who's otherwise pretty right-wing (well, it's more complicated, but all your friends would hate me).
Do you have location stats on your audience? I'm guessing it's disproportionately Californian, and of course a Californian's presidential vote isn't worth spending a single pixel trying to influence.