Chapter 5: Swipe Left or Right (For Everything)
Public policy is incredibly complex. Any choice that you make is likely to trigger unintended consequences. For those who saw the film Slum Dog Millionaire, you may remember an exceptionally cruel depiction of this complexity. Recognizing that people give blind people more money out of sympathy, begging rings intentionally blinded beggars to earn more money for the ring. Empathy and good intentions led to people being blinded. Our public policy plans rarely go this astray, but there are many examples of unintended negative consequences.
The trouble is that we have moved almost entirely away from handling our political issues in a manner that openly acknowledges that we are making tradeoffs, and instead dismiss any context which might be provided to constituents as mostly just a plan to trick us. Let’s say for example that I, as a private citizen, favor eliminating the income tax. When focused on their own pocketbook, so might everyone. Yet without the tax we would lack the money to fund programs that people like. A policy maker then might ask the income tax opponent to consider the impact of the lost tax revenue and spell out what programs might be cut to support axing the tax. But in our oversimplified world, the tax opponent might point to one program that irks them (say foreign aid), and without any analysis of the math proclaim that the existence of that program proves money is being wasted and so the income tax must go. Discussions of tradeoffs (what must I give up if I want to eliminate the income tax?) just seem so old-fashioned.
Polarized, knee-jerk responses can also lead to a lot of misleading polling because an idea that is presented to people outside of a partisan binary choice can suggest a far more reasonable and open-minded public than the one which emerges after the choice is put through a binary choice filter. For example, you can find an endless parade of people in the gun violence prevention movement who cite polling showing over and over again that some 90% of Americans support background checks for gun purchases. It is used most often as evidence not only of support for their position, but also of the total failure of Washington to do what is so overwhelmingly popular. But in truth this is an example of polling results that will collapse as soon as the choice about background checks is aggressively framed by opponents as the preferred option of the anti-gun forces promoting a more sweeping agenda.
Take what happened in Maine. Maine is generally about five percentage points more Democratic than the country as a whole, although there are times where it has fallen closer to the national average. Rarely in recent memory though has it strayed to the right of the country. In 2016 during the height of the claims that background checks were polling at 90% nationally, Maine had a referendum on the question of a mandatory statewide background check. It was defeated. Maine is more rural than the average state, so is entirely possible that Maine is both more Democratic than the country and more pro-gun than the country. But it is not possible for an issue to have the support of even 60% of the country and lose in Maine, let alone 90%. So how did such a shocking event come about?
The answer is Tinder politics. No matter how much people might try and educate and motivate and explain the nuances, in the end the referendum became a question of whether you did or did not like guns. Swipe left or swipe right. All of those who lined up on behalf of liking guns were against this referendum, all who didn’t like guns supported it. And it turns out a slim but important majority of Mainers liked guns. I love to share this example, because it shows what happens when there is an attempt to manufacture a sense of consensus that does not really exist, and the ease with which that fake consensus crumbles when placed under even the slightest pressure.
This brings us to another important fact that shows how groups can gain power. They simply need to care more.
Gun ownership can be a near permanent swipe right for the right. If gun rights are your number one issue, then you will vote for the candidates of the right. This is an important constituency within this country. The 5% of the country who owns 50% of the guns are incredibly powerful, not because of some deep dark Russian money web or campaign contributions, but because that 5% cares a lot. That 5% will dominate the organizations which speak on behalf of all gun owners despite being only about 1/7th of gun owners because they care more and shower the issue with resources, time, and effort. Other gun owners look to them for leadership, and this is how we end up with extreme laws.
Far more political decisions are made at this “whose side are you on” level of policy than more nuanced policy debate—certainly more than we might like to believe. Because of this, the people for whom an issue is the absolute most important thing can push the whole country in their direction, even if they do not initially have a majority.
Let’s use an easy example. Ten people at a party want to order pizza; pepperoni is the most preferred choice, but there is one vegetarian and one kosher person in the group. Those who refuse to eat the pizza if it is pepperoni will likely veto the popular majority choice because “I can’t eat that” is a much stronger preference than “I would like that topping a bit better.”
Ultimately, the battle for gay rights was similarly decided. (To be clear, I am not comparing LGBTQ people to pizzas.) While there is some debate about the true percentage of LGBTQ Americans, they and their most fervent allies (family and friends, mostly) represented at most about 15% of all Americans at any given time during the fight for gay marriage (these numbers may have climbed since it was legalized). But their commitment to getting the policy they wanted was rightfully unwavering. This passionate caring was so great that even after sad defeats at the ballot box, elite decision makers were still more likely to side with this community than they were willing to risk its ire.
This reality ultimately led to victory both at the ballot box and then later in the courts. Over time, despite efforts of gay marriage opponents to slow progress with middle grounds (remember civil unions?), same sex marriage became first the position of the Democratic Party and then within three years the law throughout the land. I applaud this outcome, but it should remind all of us about the power of insisting people pick a side. In the end a binary choice was forced: swipe right or left. A great deal of time, effort, and energy is still spent on trying to imagine that such choices need not be made or forced, arguing that people will take complicated positions on issues and vote according to them. But the reality is that in general, binary choice tends to overcome any hope of moving voters with appeals to the complexity of an issue.
Moreover, once a voter ends up adopting a core political identity position such as making gun ownership or support for the LGBTQ community their most important issue, they may easily back-fill their other political positions to match it as well. Just like Tinder, once your decision is made and you are matched, if it is a good match you might stick with it, and the background information that maybe you should have read before will become subordinate to your feelings about the match.
A serious danger in politics is that if a side is not careful, it can end up on the completely wrong side of what has become a binary issue. An example of a recent issue that risks being Tinderized is support for law enforcement. Based on voting patterns and a general sense of the mood evident on law enforcement-aligned Facebook groups, law enforcement personnel, rather than waiting to see who will give them more funding and equipment, have now started to believe that only Republicans care about them. These law enforcement professionals tend to see even mildly critical Democratic rhetoric as a full-on assault and respond accordingly. This is a problem for Democrats with law enforcement voters, but the far greater danger is that this view will prevail not just amongst officers, but amongst their entire communities as well.
The number of law enforcement officials who fall into the particularly important White Christian non-Evangelical group is large, and thus letting them become ambassadors of hatred toward you is quite dangerous. The phrase “defund the police,” which could mean anything from the elimination of police departments to a small shift of funds toward priorities that actually improve the lives of law enforcement officers, is now a binary. Pick a side, cop or not cop. Any nuance is lost, and being stuck on the non-cop side is a complete political loser, as the polling on issues like defund the police shows a lopsided pro-cop position, including 72% approval of police and law enforcement.[1] Once you are on the side of the cops, you start to tune out not just arguments related to that issue, but arguments on any issue from anyone you perceive to be on the other side on the question of police support.
Similar risks exist when it comes to something like climate change. Being against Big Oil is fine and a winning position, but if climate change gets framed instead as anti-driving and anti-travel, or anti-meat, then being on the wrong side of those binaries is a massive problem. Hoping that being sufficiently nuanced will save you is a loser; that’s like asking a Tinder user to read profile language before swiping. It is just not part of their natural order.
The other problem that exists is That, despite what seems like an obvious creation of forced binaries, almost any advocacy group can produce data which says that its position is an overwhelming winner, but only if it does so without a field test. That’s what we saw in Maine with the failed background check referendum. Whether that support is real or just the result of not having faced the binary choice test is incredibly important. It is crucial not to believe in your own hype, and to understand the danger in being on the wrong side of a binary choice.
The core problem is that in trench warfare any lost ground is very hard to regain. If someone comes to the political right via a pro-law enforcement sentiment, they might well adopt the entire set of positions on the right and thus become unreachable, even if their position on law enforcement were to change drastically. In the end, almost anything you say or do as a party or movement could turn out be your political Tinder photo, and it is almost impossible to get the voters back once they have swiped left.