The gay marriage debate in the United States was between one side who trafficked in a moral argument and factual claims about things like the lengths gay people had to go to in order to manage simple things like inheritance, and the other side, which said that any change to marriage laws would result in the destruction of Western civilization. The side that made the moral and factual argument ultimately won out. This is not an accident.
When you say “if you do this, the sky will fall”, and then people do it and the sky doesn’t fall, you are left without an argument. Indeed, worse than that, you are left discredited. Once gay marriage was legalized in a lot of states and foreign countries and it did not destroy civilization, why was anyone going to believe a gay marriage opponent?
That is a stark demonstration of the importance of facts to advocacy. Every lawyer knows this, of course. The most straightforward way to win a court case is to have a client who is right on the facts. The easiest way to lose one is to have a client who the judge or jury perceives as dishonest.
But for any number of reasons- because facts are inconvenient, because they conflict with deeply held ideologies, and perhaps because of the popularity of communications gurus like Frank Luntz who swear you can sell the American public a crap sandwich if use the magic, focus-grouped words- a lot of people in the political and advocacy worlds do not stick to the facts. Indeed, claims are often thrown about with no factual evidence whatsoever.
Another example of conservatives doing this is with respect to tax cuts and tax increases. When Bill Clinton enacted his tax increase in 1993, Republican after Republican took the House floor and went on TV to predict it would result in a recession. It didn’t, of course- the economy boomed for seven years. It turns out there isn’t a straight linear relationship between tax increases and economic contraction. Republicans, of course, won an important congressional election in 1994 based on that incorrect argument, but in the long run, as it became more and more clear that they were full of it, it hurt them badly. First, Clinton was reelected in 1996, and then they turned in a poor performance in the impeachment-saturated 1998 congressional midterms as well.
Maybe the most culturally salient example of the right doing this is the fight against the theory of evolution. Cultural conservatives have fought Darwin on multiple fronts for over a century, doing everything from trying to prohibit the teaching of evolution in public schools to funding astroturf organizations to push psuedo-scientific creationist explanations for the origin of species. It hasn’t worked. Evolution is actually one of the basic building blocks of the biological sciences. For instance, to take something currently relevant, both mammals’ immunity to pathogens and pathogens’ resistance to drugs are underlied by the principle of natural selection. You simply cannot explain the natural world without Charles Darwin’s theory.
And as a result, conservatives’ attempt to stop Darwinism has been an abject failure. Very few people want to see science come to a halt or the study of biology undermined or Americans to fall even farther behind other countries in science education. The scientists have truth on their side, and have a theory that proves its utility over and over again. You can’t beat truth over a long enough time horizon.
And this, I think, provides a reason to worry about the direction of online discourse. A lot of very loud voices do not care about facts. I have referenced Alice Dreger’s excellent Galileo’s Middle Finger before, but people really do need to read it. The story that forms the moral center of the book is how a few online trans activists disliked a typology that sex researchers at gender identity clinics had developed based on their observations of trans women and that helped explain why people get gender dysphoria. So, when a psychologist and academic named Michael Bailey wrote a mass market book about it, a book that initially received praise from LGBT organizations, these activists just flatly made up a bunch of lies about Bailey. About how he supposedly was a child molester, had sex with his research subjects, and grossly violated ethics rules. None of it was true, and Alice Dreger, who had been an activist on intersex rules (and thus an ally to the LGBT community), got wind of it, researched it, and blew the whistle on the whole scheme.
The key is, two things came out of the Bailey controversy, both of which are really bad for the cause of LGBT rights: (1) a lot of people who knew nothing about the controversy read Dreger’s writings and came to the conclusion that the trans activists who went after Bailey were sociopathic and unstable; and (2) some other people who later got into activism themselves and who admired Bailey’s attackers continue to repeat the allegations long after they are disproven, thereby making themselves look bad to anyone who knows the truth. Even now, if you go on Twitter, you will see people saying that Bailey was a “chaser”. Apparently, it’s a favored assumption that anyone who cares about trans issues and disagrees with any part of the dogma must be doing it because they secretly want to hook up with trans people- this same accusation is lobbed at Jesse Singal, the researcher Ray Blanchard (who codified the typology of trans women), and a number of others.
And the fact-free approach described in Galileo’s Middle Finger is spreading. Here are some examples of things that people say as ABSOLUTE FACT online: (1) nobody is inspired to cross the border without documents as a result of anything that President Biden says; (2) the Supreme Court decides every important case in favor of Republicans and will invalidate any legislation Biden signs; (3) no teenage trans boy transitions because of the influence of his peers; (4) any surge in anti-Asian hate crimes is caused by white supremacists; and (5) one of the two categories of trans people described by Bailey and Blanchard, the “autogynephile”, does not exist.
The problem with this sort of thing is what happens when the facts prove you wrong, just like they did for the Republicans on gay marriage and taxation? What are you left with?
And the facts will prove them wrong. To go through these examples quickly:
The media has already found people who are saying that Biden’s rhetoric has had a substantial effect on their decision to come to the US, and will find more of those people in the future.
The Supreme Court still decides many politically salient cases against the Republicans. Recent examples include the Bostock gay and trans rights case, and the Court’s summary rejection of all the Republicans’ election challenges.
The “social contagion” explanation for trans boys is almost certainly overblown, and I read Abigail Shrier’s book and it really did not prove its case. But the simple fact that there are clusters of teenage friends who transition around the same time, and who talk about peer influence, and the presence of online influencers urging teens to transition, at least provides some evidence that peer influence is a part of what is going on. Lisa Littman, a respected and (as far as I can tell) scrupulous researcher, has found some evidence of a peer effect. I suspect there will be more found in the future.
It appears that many of the suspects in anti-Asian hate crime cases are Black. I think one should be extremely careful with espousing monocausal explanations for crime, whether the alleged perpetrators are white or Black. It’s really easy to slip right into the rhetoric of racial generalization. I wish those positing the “white supremacy” explanation would follow the same rule.
While Blanchard’s “only two types” theory is controversial, the fact that there are autogynephiles who become trans women is not. An “autogynephile” is someone assigned male at birth who develops gender dysphoria in or around puberty as a result of an erotic or romantic attachment to the thought of being a woman. (Think about a cross-dresser who gets a thrill or even an erection from putting on a pair of women’s panties, but then consider someone with a much greater attachment to being or becoming a woman, such that it becomes incredibly uncomfortable to continue living with a male gender identity. That’s an autogynephile.) The DSM-V (which was written with significant input from trans people) recognizes this in a diplomatic way in its description of late-onset gender dysphoria, and also contains a definition of autogynephilia. Blanchard’s theory was based on 100 years of observations and data collected by numerous different sex researchers who talked to the trans women who came to their clinics, and has decades of published research behind it. Plus, there a number of prominent trans women who admit that they are autogynephiles and that the condition played a role in their transitions.
The point is, what happens when someone calls BS on this stuff? My working theory is that the folks who are peddling it assume that they will be able to silence their critics or minimize their influence by calling them all ignorant bigots or biased. Thus, anyone who goes down to the border and talks to immigrants inspired by Biden to cross is accused by “media critics” of being in the tank for the Republicans and wanting to see Biden fail. Anyone who points out that the Supreme Court decides salient cases in favor of Democrats on a regular basis is accused of not understanding the Supreme Court. And of course, anyone who points out any facts that contradict a race or gender narrative is a racist, misogynist transphobe.
The thing is, I don’t think this is going to work. It certainly didn’t work for conservatives on the evolution issue. They constantly accused supporters of the theory of being anti-religious bigots and people who wanted to destroy traditional religion and replace it with the God of Science and Rationalism. Some supporters, of course, cheered this advocacy on. But meanwhile, in places where actual science went on, the science did, in fact, go on. Because it turns out it is really hard to suppress facts.
And as I said, the end result is that when factual chickens do come home to roost, it is going to cost people needed credibility. The Asian community faces real threats. It’s important to figure out who is actually attacking them and why. Repeating pat bromides about white supremacy isn’t going to save any Asian lives; indeed, it may distract from the effort to do so. Certainly Democrats should not be deterred from pushing for legislation by some imaginary theory that the Supreme Court is going to strike down whatever they do. And, of course, disclosures that activists were spewing BS could be incredibly harmful to the causes of immigrants’ rights and trans rights. If there’s hundreds of Keira Bells in 20 years, regretting that their peers pushed them to transition, that’s going to be a disaster for LGBT people. A totally avoidable disaster. An own goal, as they say in soccer.