THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE
Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit atrocities.
—Voltaire
THE SERIES of republican moments that created the energyregulatory state established the value of regulation as a tool to correct the failures and socioeconomic inequities that arise within energy markets. Regulation has made energy more widely available, more affordable, and less environmentally harmful than it otherwise would be. The history recounted in part 1 also illustrates that regulatory agency experts tend to understand complex energypolicy problems better than judges or elected politicians do. Congress has wisely chosen to delegate to agency experts many of the important decisions about how to accomplish regulatory goals. It is therefore all the more unfortunate that the Supreme Court chose to embrace a theoretically and historically dubious approach to judicial review of agency action in its West Virginia decision.1 The result has been to circumscribe agencies’ regulatory authority and to drop important energy-transition policy decisions into the lap of a Congress that is increasingly paralyzed by partisan tribalism. Research confirms that partisan tribalism is driven in large part by the online spread of propaganda.2 As suggested by the chapter’s epigraph, modern information technology cultivates partisan contempt by spreading misinformation and triggering negative emotion. Negative partisans prize nothing more than to see the enemy
defeated. Modern propaganda feeds them a constant stream of anecdotal reasons to feel that way, in part by triggering fear. To quote Bertrand Russell (again): “Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity towards those who are not regarded as members of the herd. . . . Fear generates impulses of cruelty, and therefore promotes such superstitious beliefs as seem to justify cruelty. Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.”3 Today’s partisan tribalism is triggered partly by fear of change. Some voters fear continuing changes in the earth’s climate and what it means for their security and that of their children; other voters fear changing socioeconomic and cultural norms and what those changes mean for their security and that of their children. Some, no doubt, fear both.
One of the ways propaganda stokes fear is by undermining the set of norms that make up the civic-virtue mindset: fallibilism, respect for pluralism, truth seeking, and the like. The psychologist Jonathan Baron, author of a seminal text on belief formation, has his own term for that mindset: actively open-minded thinking. Baron sees the norms of actively open-minded thinking as necessary “for a democracy to function well (both for its citizens and outsiders).” Crucially, laws by themselves will not sustain these norms. Rather, they must be sustained by the way we behave in social groups as well.4 A growing body of scholarship tells us that partisanship is becoming more tribal because the most powerful propaganda machine in human history is undermining those norms. It is encouraging presumptuous, closeminded certainty over actively open-minded thinking.
INFORMATION GATHERING, BELIEF FORMATION, AND COGNITIVE BIASES
For those people and groups whose messages were locked out of twentieth- century mass media—newspapers, radio, and eventually television—the invention of the internet and social media transformed their prospects. Modern information technology has opened markets for musicians and artists, put entire libraries of information
at our fingertips, “democratized” the dissemination of information, and connected people who might never have found one another. But in politics it is wreaking havoc, contributing to what leading scholars of partisanship call a “poisonous cocktail of othering, aversion and moralization [that] poses a threat to democracy.”5 Modern media undermine the role of parties as peaceful mediators of intraparty conflict, distort our beliefs about politics, policy, and each other, and create unsustainable levels of partisan hatred.
SOCIAL MEDIA VERSUS REAL LIFE
Forty years ago, cultural and political radicals had no choice but to spread their messages slowly. White nationalists, for example, proselytized by passing around hard copies of The Turner Diaries and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by hand.6 They met to discuss their bigoted, anarchic, or violent ideas face-to-face. Violent groups on the left, such as the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army, faced the same organizational hurdles. The information technology of the day kept fringe groups small by increasing the transaction costs of proselytizing and by maintaining social norms that kept them in the shadows. Today, by contrast, every politically active group across the ideological spectrum can mobilize and “educate” one another continuously online. They can grow much more quickly than ever before, maintain their insularity, and normalize their views among a much larger cohort of people.
The axiom “Twitter is not real life” is giving way to the axiom “All culture is internet culture.”7 Research tells us that social media shapes national political life. How? First, we know that news media frame “major issues of policy and politics as part of an ongoing [national] conversation,” and social media shape the news. Most American adults use social media. Almost half participate in some form of issue-based political activism online, and about 25 percent of Americans regularly discuss politics on social media.8 That 25 percent compose a strongly partisan and relatively ideologically extreme subset of the electorate. The Pew Research Center documents the “U-shaped” histogram of political engagement, with higher engagement levels among those at both ideological poles: “Consistent conservatives and liberals do share
one habit that distinguishes them from other Americans: They spend a lot of time talking about politics and government.”9 These people are the “salesmen” and “connectors” of ideas (to borrow Malcolm Gladwell’s terminology) who disseminate information, frames, and points of view from online to offline social networks.10 According to a team of Princeton scientists who study the issue, this process is in part how “a polarized information ecosystem [online] can indirectly polarize the broader society by causing its individuals to self-sort into emergent homogenous social networks.”11 In other words, the poisonous environment of social media discourse is spreading to the broader society.
Second, traditional news sources now emulate the newer forms of media in the competition for readers and listeners (for “clicks”). They use grabbier, less informative headlines such as “Everything You Thought You Knew About [Issue X or Politician Y] Is Wrong” or “The Frightening New Study [About Issue X]” or “Did [Politician Y] Really Say That?”12 They do so because they now serve a market that one academic describes as “ever-hungry for big stories at whatever cost.” Writers know that the quest for viral stories is driven by “human emotion [and] human psychology,” and so they cater to that emotion by “sanding the inconvenient edges off of facts in order to suit the narrative.”13 Journalists are aware of these perverse incentives but are subject to them anyway. And like most people, they see this problem more easily in others than they do in themselves. For example, the former Buzzfeed reporter Ben Smith wrote an entire book decrying this destructive media trend, but when asked in an NPR interview if he regretted his own decision to be the first to publish the salacious contents of the now discredited Steele Dossier, he demurred (twice).14
Third, traditional mainstream news is reported by people who frequent social media. Journalists get sources and story ideas online, which influences their sense of what is important, of who is an expert, and of who is to blame for a problem.15 In a Pew Research Center survey in July 2022, 94 percent of journalists reported that they use social media for their jobs and that their social media site of choice is Twitter/X.16 But in my field of energy law and policy, many of the most knowledgeable and experienced academic experts are not active on social media. For example, of the ten authors of the two leading
energy-law texts used in law schools, only two or three discuss energy policy on social media.
In all these ways, social media’s toxic norms and power to distort perception routinely escape those media’s borders. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt puts this assessment more colorfully: “You can tell me that 70 percent of Americans don’t participate in the culture war, but it doesn’t really matter. Events today are driven by small numbers that can shame and intimidate large numbers. Social media has changed the dynamic. Even if most Americans practice excellent fire safety habits, if a small minority is rewarded for throwing lit matches, we’re going to live in an age of arson.”17 The remainder of this chapter explains how and why modern information technology impedes our ability to develop a clear- eyed and complete understanding of complex, contentious political issues.
COGNITIVE BIASES AND ATTRIBUTION ERRORS
The Enlightenment philosophy that undergirds the U.S. constitutional design conceived of humans as both rational and emotional, singular and social. It focused on how these forces within us are often in tension with one another. Scholars and philosophers of political economy embraced science and this broad conception of human nature. But early in the twentieth century, the discipline of political economy was divided into distinct social science disciplines. Economics, for its part, turned away from this fuller conception of human nature and toward a stylized, hyperrational model of the human decision maker, homo economicus. As economics grew in influence for a time after World War II, so did this circumscribed conception of human nature, one that chose not to engage most of the social- emotional parts of human behavior. Today we credit the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky with pioneering research that is restoring the fuller picture, and we credit Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein with popularizing it within economics and legal scholarship, respectively.18 But the basic ideas Kahneman and Tversky developed and refined have an older lineage.19
For example, Leon Festinger’s seminal research in the 1950s provides the everyday language we use to describe the emotional tension
(dissonance) that arises when we hold beliefs or ideas (cognitions) that conflict with one another.20 Cognitive dissonance is powerful—so powerful that it must be resolved or rationalized to restore inner harmony. We do this at some cost to truth seeking by rejecting one of the conflicting beliefs or by avoiding information or experiences that cause dissonance in the first place. Rationalization sometimes involves so- called (logical) fallacies of presumption—that is, making assumptions about uncertain or unknown dimensions of an issue in order to relieve dissonance. For example, if I believe in protecting economically vulnerable consumers from hardship, but I also believe that competitive, restructured energy markets benefit society, the price volatility characteristic of competitive electricity markets may cause me dissonance. One way to relieve that dissonance is to assume that state policymakers will enact policies that will protect vulnerable consumers from price shocks. Another way we rationalize is through confirmation bias, which describes how we protect cherished beliefs by holding contrary evidence to higher standards of proof or by instinctively dismissing or ignoring it.21 For example, if I work for an organization that is publicly committed to promoting a particular technological approach to the energy transition, I will instinctively devote more effort and energy to thinking critically about studies or analyses that challenge that approach than about studies that do not.
The power of these biasing effects was so well established by the 1970s that when Kahneman and Tversky first launched their scholarly attack on homo economicus, they were very, very confident that it would succeed. In the words of their intellectual biographer, Michael Lewis, they “knew of course that people made decisions that [economic] theory would not have predicted.”22 The ensuing research demonstrated a series of specific cognitive biases that stray from rationality in predictable ways.23
As noted in the introduction, politicians, lobbyists, and others who would persuade us often try to exploit the bias known as the fundamental attribution error : the idea that because we understand our own motives and thinking but not those of others, we explain our own actions more charitably than we explain the actions of others. Consequently, when an adversary stands in the way of a policy we want, we are quick to ascribe blameworthy motives to that adversary. For
example, when the very first U.S. political parties began to form around Alexander Hamilton (Federalists) and Thomas Jefferson (Republicans), each side believed strongly and sincerely in a particular economic and foreign-policy agenda: one tilted toward merchants, cities, and England, the other toward farms, rural communities, and France. As Hamilton and Jefferson pursued their respective visions within George Washington’s first cabinet, it didn’t take much of a push for each to regard the other as disingenuous, selfish, and misguided.24 In politics, someone is always willing to give voters that push, lobbying us to make those uncharitable inferences about others. A recent study by a group of social scientists confirms that people ascribe more ethical motives—“less egoistic interests and more national interests”—to the leaders of their own party than to leaders of the other party.25
Attribution Errors and Voting
One reason why it is so easy to misread others’ motives in politics is that most political choices are binary, but our decision criteria are multidimensional. The voter’s choice is between two candidates,26 but it is a choice driven by each person’s uniquely weighted combination of considerations: the candidate’s party or personal characteristics, the candidate’s policy preferences, and more. Legislative choices are binary as well. Legislators vote for or against legislation or legislative amendments, but they do so for a multiplicity of reasons. Most of the major regulatory legislation described in part 1 of this book aimed at one big goal—such as incentivizing natural gas production (the NGPA) or reducing water pollution (the Clean Water Act)—but did so via dozens of specific provisions specifying how, when, and where to pursue the larger goal. Most members of Congress presumably liked parts of those bills and disliked others, but each member was forced to make the binary choice, to vote yea or nay.
Votes are observable, but voters’ reasoning is not. Given that voting decisions are multidimensional, it is a leap of logic to impute to a voter some specific belief based on their vote, but we make that leap nevertheless. As the Harvard psychologists Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor note, when making inferences about others’ choices, we tend
to focus on the personal attributes of those others that are most salient to us.27 In the 2020 presidential election, progressive voters and moderate Democrats held differing views about parts of the Biden policy platform, but most progressives and moderate Democrats voted for Biden. Some conservative “never Trumpers” voted for Biden despite disagreeing with most of his policy platform. Likewise, many of the 74 million people who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 did not intend their vote as an endorsement of his venality or irresponsibility in office or of every policy decision he made.
Yet another study concludes that people tend to infer (mistakenly) that the opposing candidate’s most extreme attributes “play[] an especially important role” in voters’ decision to support that candidate. These mistaken inferences create cycles of contempt. According to the authors, “When [we] infer that an entire voter base was singularly motivated by an especially extreme—and divisive—policy issue, perceptions of political polarization are likely to grow.”28 Unsurprisingly, lobbyists exploit these mistaken inferences, feeding popular perceptions of opposing party extremism.29 Online provocateurs know that provoking intemperate reactions from adversaries can accelerate that process. Recall from chapter 3 Saul Alinsky’s Rule (for Radicals) No. 5: ridicule “infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.” The notorious attorney Roy Cohn endorsed a similar idea: “I bring out the worst in my enemies and that’s how I get them to defeat themselves.”30 It bears repeating that it is unfamiliarity that breeds contempt in politics.
Attribution Errors and Groups
The fallacy of division occurs when people attribute the general characteristics of a group to an individual within the group. The fallacy of composition, sometimes also called “the ecological fallacy,” occurs when people ascribe a characteristic of individuals within the group to the group as a whole. These fallacies work together to animate bigotry and other generalizations people make about out-groups, especially in the presence of negative emotion.
In the early American republic, pamphleteers told New Yorkers and Virginians disparaging stories about one another, animating what
leaders of that era called “the party spirit.” Then, as now, they did so simply because it could help their preferred faction win elections. 31 Today, depending on your news feed, you may read a steady diet of stories about ridiculous or blameworthy behavior by individual Floridians or Texans, New Yorkers or Californians, Muslims or Christians, Chicagoans or Los Angelinos, immigrants, corporate CEOs, welfare recipients, racial minorities, white men or women, “the Left,” “the Right,” Generation Z, millennials, Baby Boomers, Democrats, Republicans, fossil-fuel companies, environmental activists, gas or electric utilities, and so on. You may begin to impute the objectionable attributes of those individuals to the groups to which they belong. Lobbyists know that we are wired to seek out patterns and that we are receptive to suggestions that patterns exist even where they do not. One story may be all it takes to create a broader belief regardless of its empirical truth or falsity—especially if that belief is echoed by members of my social group, if it feels good, or if we want it to be true.32
However, public denigration of a group also alienates individual members of the group to which the statements do not apply.33 For example, during the legislative battle over the Biden administration’s energy bill in the fall of 2021, I opened my Twitter feed to an anguished tweet by a woman whose brother worked in the oil industry, pleading with her followers not to treat him as “the enemy.” This is a natural human reaction to expressions of contempt for a group that she interpreted to include her brother. Statements such as “Republicans are climate-science deniers with an irrational hatred of government” and “Democrats are catastrophists who exaggerate climate risk so they can impose socialism” alienate potential allies. Escalating, reciprocal expressions of group contempt feed hatred among the in-group toward the out-group and pose the risk identified by Voltaire in the chapter’s epigraph.34
BIASED ASSIMILATION OF NEW INFORMATION
Confirmation bias closes off critical thinking by creating instinctive doubt about information that contradicts established beliefs. Psychologists describe it as a kind of “unwitting selectivity in the acquisition and use of evidence,” by which people apply much tougher evidentiary
standards to dissonant claims than to agreeable ones.35 Consequently, experimental subjects recall evidence supporting their preexisting beliefs better than they recall contradictory evidence. They require less supportive evidence to confirm a hypothesis than contradictory evidence to reject it. In one experiment, subjects who supported the death penalty concluded from an article that the article also supported it, while readers who opposed the death penalty drew the opposite conclusion about the very same article.36 Once a person has formed a belief about the other political party— or about nuclear energy or wind farms or fracking—confirmation bias insulates that belief from contrary evidence. It protects both unfounded skepticism toward the climate consensus and the unfounded belief that the earth will be uninhabitable by century’s end if GHG emissions aren’t reduced to net zero by 2050.37
A related idea, cultural cognition bias, describes how people’s sense of their own identity biases their beliefs. Humans’ emotional commitments to their social identities are tied to group memberships. These commitments “operate as a kind of heuristic” that distorts how we process information about public-policy matters.38 This bias is a relative of the idea of groupthink.39 The retired congressman Bob Inglis (R–SC), who once tried to rally support for climate policy among congressional Republicans in the early 2000s, understood this connection between climate-policy beliefs and social identity: “[A] lot of what’s going on with denial of climate science is ‘I want to protect who I am’ [and] ‘I want to protect what I’ve built.’ ”40
When one’s political party becomes central to one’s identity, as it has for many today, this suite of social and cultural biases comes with it. Thus, people tend to believe that others who share their political values are more reliable sources of information and expertise, even on subjects that have nothing to do with politics.41 They distrust the experts who don’t share their values and even discount those experts’ actual levels of expertise accordingly. Researchers at Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project have demonstrated this effect across a number of issue contexts, including gun control, the death penalty, the safety of nuclear power, and, in particular, environmental risks.42 In one study, researchers presented subjects with evidence of a national scientific
consensus supporting the following two propositions: that climate change is real and driven by human activity and that nuclear waste can be safely disposed of in a geological repository. Political conservatives rated the credibility of the climate- change experts much less highly than the nuclear-waste- disposal experts; political liberals reversed those rankings.43
Thus, voters tend to regard in-group factual beliefs as “objective” and out-group beliefs as “biased,” which is one way that our instincts mislead us.44 “Individuals tend to assimilate information by fitting it to pre- existing narrative templates or schemes that invest the information with meaning. The elements of these narrative templates—the identity of the stock heroes and villains, the nature of their dramatic struggles, and the moral stakes of their engagement with one another—vary in identifiable and recurring ways across cultural groups.”45
This is why ad hominem attacks work so well. If engaging contradictory information or arguments is uncomfortable, lobbyists can turn our attention away from what the speaker is saying by focusing on the speaker’s attributes. “Why would you ever listen to a [Democrat or Republican or liberal/conservative or Florida man or California hippy or millennial or Boomer, etc.]?” The ad hominem attack is one way that lobbyists divide us into camps in which the “stock heroes” of one side become the “stock villains” of the other.
For example, imagine how people who live in a farming or ranching community might react to news that urban climate activists are urging Americans to give up their pickup trucks in favor of walking, cycling, and mass transit or to forgo the eating of beef. It is not difficult to see how ranchers and farmers might perceive those messages as an attack on their cultural identity. They might then be more receptive to and feel validated by messages that ridicule those outsiders as elites who are out of touch with “real Americans like me.” How will urbanites who are worried about climate change react when they see the phrase “real Americans” used in a way that excludes them? It may sound like an attack on their identity, making them feel more receptive to (and validated by) messages that make fun of those farmers’ and ranchers’ attitudes. And so the cycle continues.