It is not only Trump who lies

IF YOU'D followed the election campaigns of parties such as the Democrats and Republicans in the American elections, you probably feel exhausted after months of conflict, debate, mudslinging and vilification. If your candidate has also lost the race, you are probably left with a sense of emptiness on top of it all.

The political divide between the Democrats and Republicans in America is deeper and wider than in decades. In places, it is so militant that American security agencies, such as the National Guard, have been placed on standby in 19 states for potential armed unrest during and after the election.

The divisive chasm largely falls between traditionally conservative and progressive communities. In many cases recently it has even driven families and households apart or ended friendships, especially since Donald Trump appeared on the political scene.

Unique forces cross paths in America

In his latest book, Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America's Dangerous Divide, the political psychologist Keith Payne writes that surveys show that between 20% and 25% of Americans are estranged from a loved one due to politics. He says the percentage of people who feel a strong aversion to the opposition has increased 400% in the last 20 years.

Payne believes America is at a dangerous and unstable historic moment where two trends intersect. The first is that the Republican Party has become a uniformly conservative party and the Democratic Party a consistently liberal party. In past centuries the parties were much more diverse and much more tolerant of internal differences.

The second trend is that demographic changes, and the social identities that accompany them, have resulted in fewer and fewer Republicans. This is the case even though Donald Trump winning the election might suggest the opposite. The longer trend shows that the balance is shifting in favour of the Democratic Party's diverse alliance of minorities. It has also won the popular vote in seven of the last nine elections.

Trump's strong inroads into the Latin American communities and younger black men are fairly surprising and against this trend.

According to Payne, America is currently at a knife's edge where the voters are equally divided between the two parties. In a country of 200 million adults, a few thousand votes in a handful of swing states can sway a national election. Once demographic changes have caused a decisive shift in social identities, it is likely to remain that way forever. Every election therefore feels like a desperate last chance, especially for the Republicans.

Brother against brother

Payne is a child from a lower-middle-class family in western Kentucky and one of seven siblings. He is the only one who broke away to some extent from his fate, now living an upper-middle-class academic life in a liberal college town far from Kentucky. He writes in particular about the ideological divide between him and his four-year-younger brother, Brad, an electrician who remained in Kentucky.

Needless to say, Brad is a fully-fledged member of the MAGA cult and his belief in clear and simple untruths leaves a bad taste in Keith's mouth. On a plain brotherly level, he likes Brad – he's funny and irreverent. But Keith just can't understand that Brad has no problem with the blatant nonsense Trump spews, such as Barrack Obama's birth certificate proving he's not American or the 2020 election being stolen from him by Joe Biden.

When he tries to talk to Brad about it, the conversation very quickly deteriorates with Brad admonishing him for discussing morality because, as an atheist, he has no moral ground to stand on.

He recounts how he once managed to involve Brad in a more rational argument on Facebook about the allegations of electoral fraud and how he found Brad's more considered response very interesting. After he had backed Brad into a corner, his answer was: “By the letter of the law, Biden won, yes. [Still,] I think there was some malfeasance in places; I believe it, but it can't be proven."

Keith reckons this was the closest Brad would come to acknowledging that Biden was the legitimate president, and he thanked him for his honesty.

Payne considers this a fascinating example of how people use reason flexibly to defend their own identities and affiliations. The fact is that Trump, with his fabulous lies, especially about the stolen election, places his supporters in a dilemma. They want his statements to be true, and they feel intuitively that they are not, but dozens of lawsuits, vote counts and audits have had to be launched to confirm that the vote counts were correct.

Some of the MAGA people simply sweep away all the evidence and insist that the election was stolen. Many others, like Brad, say Biden won according to the letter of the law but not the spirit of the law. Biden won due to a technicality, much like a criminal who got off due to a procedural error by the police.

Payne prepares his reader that this kind of flexible reason, this kind of mental gymnastics, is by no means a feature that only occurs among “evil right-wingers". He says we all use it from time to time to ensure we don't look like idiots when we get caught up in a contradiction.

He also warns us that our attachment to a supposed “truth", “logical inconsistencies" and other apparent flaws in human reasonableness – such as changing our tune over time and applying different standards to our arguments than to others' – are misplaced. From a psychological perspective, these are not seen as errors, but simply as features or characteristics. Our cognitive systems are simply doing what they are set up to do, and it is not necessarily always to seek the truth.

Identity trumps lies

Like Payne, I also moved away from a conservative rural town, first to a more liberal university town and later to big cities. I have also shifted politically to the left, but not to the extent that it has created noticeable tension in my family.

My parents and siblings are politically pragmatic and predominantly slightly left-of-centre, probably more liberal than most white South Africans. Even with our extremely violent political past and a soft revolution in the country, I find the discussions about politics in South Africa not nearly as divided, embittered and poisonous as in America.

My best friend from school (we knew each other even before school) is an attorney in Pretoria and much more conservative than me. He too has left the countryside and become a city dweller. Since childhood, he's also had a great interest in American culture and is a Republican at heart. However, he is more of a supporter of the kind of president George Bush Sr. was, rather than Trump. He calls him, “Brave soldier, polite, humble, just plain decent." I get along with him very well, but my Facebook friends less so.

During the previous US election period, he occasionally brought a bit of a Republican perspective to the discussions at the bottom of my posts. He was almost every time attacked by my own Facebook friends with the same kind of venom and shortsightedness that we see in the average MAGA supporter. It is painful to experience a friend being attacked, and several times I pleaded in vain for politeness and reason.

He eventually unfriended me and when I called him afterwards, he told me it was more important for him to remain friends with me than to win a trivial political argument.

My only other contact with school acquaintances around politics was on the WhatsApp group of our 30th school reunion – the group was formed about a year before the function. I have written about this before, and it is difficult for me to continue without coming across as elitist or condescending.

Although I knew enough reasonable and moderate people were lurking silently in the wings, the conversation was dominated by daily religious fanaticism on the one hand and a political identity that can only be described as little more than naked racism on the other.   

The racist aspect was truly terrible. It was largely driven by three personalities. One had posted a photo of a severely injured black man in a kind of shack – somewhere in the mines up north where the man was a security guard – with a caption along the lines of “those who don't listen, must feel". This is the level we're talking about.

The three men made a point of using the K-word repeatedly every day. It was blatantly aggressive, but other group members simply let it slide. I eventually opened my mouth when one of the three posted a well-known false statement constantly circulated on right-wing WhatsApp groups, ostensibly from Dr Albert Schweizer, a physician, missionary, musician and scientist from the early 20th century who had worked in Gabon. Although Schweizer had typical colonial and patronising opinions, it is well known that this “paper" that declares black people to be inferior is false. A single Google search suffices to find this out.

When I pointed this out, the man who had posted it left the group in a melodramatic pirouette (only to sneak back in through the back door a day later). I tell this story because it struck me how these men kept this racism going as if it were an important statement about their identity. I couldn't believe at the time that one would want to integrate hatred into one's identity, and therefore read Payne's statements about identity with great interest.

The group trumps ideology

Payne says that it is well-documented that almost nobody (except perhaps journalists, political scientists and politicians themselves) has a personal political ideology. Most people are quite happy to adapt their political values quite easily to circumstances, and even in conversation. People care much more about fitting in than about finding some kind of truth.

People are extremely group-driven and the groups we care about are the ones that give us a sense of identity as a good and reasonable person. Payne believes the most important principle for understanding people's political behaviour is understanding that each person regards themselves as good and reasonable. He calls this the “psychological baseline".

The second principle is that we believe the people around us are good and worthy, and these people form part of a “psychological immune system" which works like a physical immune system. The job of this immune system is to make sure that everything we experience and are involved in is in line with the psychological baseline.

If you apply these principles, you can view Trump's lies in one of two contexts:

1. I am a good and reasonable person.
2. The other people in my group are good and reasonable.
3. The leader of my group is telling lies in an attempt to hold on to power, despite having lost the election.

OR

1. I am a good and reasonable person.
2. The other people in my group are good and reasonable.
3. The leader of my group is protecting us from our enemy's attempts to steal the election.

Of course, most Trump followers will prefer a version of the second statement. Payne writes in depth about how little a role political ideology plays with people and how extremely important group loyalties are. Once people identify as part of a group, a psychological immune system kicks in, ensuring that people protect their psychological baseline at all costs.

Payne points out that in many cases it is relatively easy to convince a Trump supporter that Trump has lied, but they will care nowhere near as much as when hearing that someone has lied about them or Trump. As long as Trump's lie is for the good of the group.

At the end of the book, Payne makes several suggestions on how personal and national wounds and rifts can be healed, but for that, you'll have to buy the book. Let's just say that it won't be easy and that it will involve much more listening than speaking. And that it will include you having to accept that you are just as prone to lying as Trump, although perhaps not quite as blatantly.

• Good Reasonable People – The Psychology Behind America's Dangerous Divide is available on Amazon.com (US Amazon) @ R280 (Kindle version).

♦ VWB ♦

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