This past Sunday my husband and I listened to an interview with this author on The New Yorker Radio Hour on NPR. And Andrew Marantz reflected on things such as why would anyone want to believe that Hilary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, and Tom Hanks drink the blood of children? Truly, how did we get to where we are today? And what can we do about it? This is an excellent and deeply important book. Deep bow of respect and gratitude to Andrew Marantz. ― Molly
Some types of people seem to be particularly susceptible to extremist online propaganda: people with weak real-world social ties; people with unstable senses of self; people with too much verbal intelligence and not enough emotional intelligence; people who prize idiosyncrasy over logical consistency, or flashy contrarianism over humble moral dignity. Still, there is no formula that can predict exactly who will succumb to fascism and who will not.* People act the way they do for a million contingent reasons. Nature matters and nurture matters. Some people seem strong but turn out to be weak; some people bear opaque trauma, invisible even to themselves; some people are desperately lonely; some people just want to watch the world burn. We would like to imagine that, in the current year, the United States has developed a moral vocabulary that is robust and widespread enough to inoculate almost all of us against raw bigotry and malign propaganda. We would like to imagine that, but it would be wishful thinking.
On November 28, 2000, while the Bush and Gore campaigns were still arguing over hanging chads in Florida, Sailer wrote a blog post. Citing exit-poll data, he demonstrated that if Bush had increased his share of the white vote by just 3 percent—if 57 percent of white Americans had voted for him, rather than 54 percent—he would have won in a landslide. Sailer then expanded his hypothetical: what if, in order to win those additional white votes, Bush had embraced a platform so caustic, so openly hostile to racial minorities, that he lost every nonwhite vote? “Incredibly,” Sailer found, “he still would have won.”
Lee Atwater, a Republican consultant and the Paganini of the modern political dog whistle, once explained the Southern Strategy, a ploy by which his party used coded racism to appeal to white voters. “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’” Atwater said. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, it backfires—so you say stuff like ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights,’ and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.”
Some on the left still found it comforting to assume that every Trump supporter was a shiftless rube under a demagogue’s spell. The reality I’d seen so far was more unnerving in its complexity. The leaders of the Deplorable movement were deeply wrong on many fundamental questions, both empirical and ethical, but they weren’t guileless or stupid. They were deft propagandists who, having recognized that social media was creating an unprecedented power vacuum, had set out to exploit it.
Their opinions about specific matters of policy were almost beside the point. Of course, reasonable people can and should disagree in good faith, both about mundane issues (tort reform) and incendiary ones (immigration, abortion). But anybody who was paying attention could see that the leaders of the Deplorable movement were not good-faith interlocutors. They didn’t care to be.
In a perfect world, of course, no one person, much less a thirty-three-year-old computer programmer in soccer shoes, would have the power to manipulate a presidential election. And yet this is the world we live in. For too long, the gatekeepers who ran the most powerful information-spreading systems in human history were able to pretend that they weren’t gatekeepers at all. Information wants to be free; besides, people who take offense should blame the author, not the messenger; anyway, the ultimate responsibility lies with each consumer. Now, instead of imagining that we occupy a postgatekeeper utopia, it might make more sense—in the short term, at least—to demand better, more thoughtful gatekeepers.
To reform the financial system, or the energy sector, you wouldn’t invent a meme, or gather a group of executives to journal their feelings; you would regulate companies, sue them, or otherwise alter their financial incentives.
Then, swiftly, came the unthinkable: smart, well-meaning people unable to distinguish simple truth from viral misinformation; a pop-culture punch line ascending to the presidency; neo-Nazis marching, unmasked, through several American cities. This wasn’t the kind of disruption anyone had envisioned. There had been a serious miscalculation. We like to assume that the arc of history will bend inexorably toward justice, but this is wishful thinking. Nobody, not even Martin Luther King Jr., believed that social progress was automatic; if he did, he wouldn’t have bothered marching across any bridges. The arc of history bends the way people bend it.
Kuhn argued that revolutions in human thought progress through five stages. It’s no accident that the word Kuhn used for the inconclusive-muddle stage—a stage that can last for decades, even centuries—was “crisis.”* To change how we talk is to change who we are. More and more every day, how we talk is a function of how we talk on the internet. The bigoted propagandists of the alt-right are wrong about almost everything, but they are correct about this much: the United States of America was founded by white men, for white men. The problem with the bigots is not that they acknowledge this aspect of the country’s history; the problem is that they cling to it, doing their utmost to revive the horrors of the past, instead of taking up the more difficult task of piecing together the future. The bigots are not destined to win. Nor are they destined to lose. The ending is not yet written. The blithely optimistic view—the view that still infuses far too many op-eds and Silicon Valley pitch meetings and political stump speeches—is that the basic good sense of the American people will prevail, that the good stuff will spread, that if we just hold fast we will surely end up in the right place. But the vehicle doesn’t drive itself. Getting to the right place takes work. Copernicus was not the first astronomer to suggest that the Earth revolved around the sun. Aristarchus of Samos proposed the same idea in the third century B.C., but Aristotle convinced everyone that the idea was wrong. Overcoming Aristotle’s mistake took almost two thousand years, and even then it required a struggle.
Andrew Marantz writes narrative journalism about politics, the internet and the way we understand our world. He became a staff writer at the New Yorker in 2017. Prior to that, he worked on the magazine's editorial staff, splitting his time between writing stories (about such topics as hip-hop purism and the Truman Show delusion) and editing stories (about Las Vegas night clubs, Liberian warlords and many other things). Ultimately, Marantz's main interest lies not in any particular subject matter, but in how people form beliefs ― and under what circumstances those beliefs can change for the better.
Since 2016, Marantz has been at work on a book about the perils of virality, the myth of linear progress and the American far right. To report the book, he spent several years embedded with some of the conspiracists, white supremacists and nihilist trolls who have become experts at using social media to advance their corrosive agendas. He also watched as some of social media's earliest and most influential founders started to reckon with the forces they'd unleashed. The book, forthcoming in October from Viking Press, is called Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.
Marantz is also a contributor to Radiolab and The New Yorker Radio Hour, and has written for Harper's, Mother Jones, the New York Times and many other outlets. He holds an undergraduate degree in religion from Brown University and a master's degree in literary nonfiction from New York University. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, who is a criminal-justice reformer; his two-year-old son.
https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/andrew-marantz
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