Read on Twitter
From a purely scientific standpoint, it has been very interesting talking with people who believe the election was “stolen”. Some very anecdotal food for thought follows...
First, to be clear, everyone I have spoken to, privately or publicly, has maintained that they are utterly sincere. I take this seriously: in some fashion, they really believe this. The question is how.
In a number of cases, the claim that the election is stolen is “morally true” for the person. It’s not true as a statement of fact, but rather the best expression of a more complicated fact that they can’t put clearly into words.
In other cases, the word “stolen” is taken as a moral matter of fairness—even in a Rawlsian sense. It’s not, for these people, that ballots were destroyed, but rather that it wasn’t a “fair fight”.
In other cases yet, it is a second-order matter. These people claim that they don’t believe the election was stolen, but want to get into a discussion about how you can’t say it was.
(I have the least sympathy for this group—I don’t believe it’s the primary reason for them, and in the cases I’ve experienced, it’s really a fairness matter.)
None of the people I spoke to claimed any conspiracy; indeed, (almost) nobody even mentioned a specific state or event (Philadelphia, say, or Georgia, or Arizona).
Nor did anyone suggest that there would be negative consequences for the nation that Biden, rather than Trump, was president. This was particularly striking to me...
...because, compare and contrast theories about Russian interference in 2016, which often suggested that this was going to have downstream effects (Putin controls America).
I’d welcome thoughts from people on this—both people who have interacted with “stolen” types, and those who would say it was. I’m particularly interested In newcomers to this kind of belief...
I.e., *not* people who think Clinton killed Vince Foster, or Biden is lizard king, etc
Just to be clear: I’m talking here about a scientific question, though of course I have moral responses. What is the structure of the belief? What does it most resemble? Etc https://twitter.com/AlexJohnLondon/status/1359651868826296322?s=20
No. Total focus on the month before and after the election. https://twitter.com/mHaGqnOACyFm0h5/status/1359653898106138625?s=20
This is “fairness” camp, I think. Mencius Moldbug/neoreaction is here as well. It’s “clear”, in some sense, what happened—and the basic property is unfairness. https://twitter.com/travontayjones/status/1359654394325737474?s=20
This tweet is expressive of the position I think @JoshHochschild holds. There’s no scenario (and so no subscription to a conspiracy theory). It’s close to what @zizip has been called “affective politics”, a concept I’ve found useful elsewhere. https://twitter.com/CovfefeAnon/status/1359654586232012800?s=20
Affective politics (my interpretation, due in part to @debbieging) is driven by personal (rather than corporate) experiences, and has a private or “privately interpersonal” component.
It’s driven by the circulation of images and a kind of “everyone knows” insider language that communicates and signals, but does not treat in explanations, ordinarily conceived.
This would combine you with the second-order camp, I think. https://twitter.com/CovfefeAnon/status/1359656463673737217?s=20
This is the second-order claim: not that the election was stolen, but that there is something wrong with not saying that it was possible it was stolen. https://twitter.com/JoshHochschild/status/1359657417697591296?s=20
I don’t want to get into the normative side (I know that’s hard). But in general people make judgements about possibilities inductively, in the presence of highly partial information. That’s “normal”, if not normative. https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1359663151743029248?s=20
This group I have not interacted with, but in one sense, the views are the most “normal”, the most similar to how we usually talk about “how things went”. There’s an account of what happened, explanations, etc. https://twitter.com/balensphere/status/1359652846619275265?s=20
This would be the second-order camp, I think (just following both Tweets, the scenario in the first one is disclaimed and rejected in the second.) https://twitter.com/travontayjones/status/1359665465329479680?s=20
This is fairness camp. It’s consistent with zero electoral fraud in the legal sense, and more about how Biden had the deck stacked in his favor. https://twitter.com/travontayjones/status/1359667822192857088?s=20
Another second-order position. https://twitter.com/paperbackpack/status/1359680936070291468?s=20
