What do we learn? Americans have a peculiar sense of morality. I wrote yesterday about the difference between killing someone in a random mugging, and killing people indirectly through the economic havoc wreaked by con artistry, referencing Terry Pratchett's Going Postal. Both are immoral, but one allows perpetrators to delude themselves about what they are doing. Americans like to delude themselves. I frequently reference the 10,000 or so people who die every day due to waterborne pathogens, and that doesn't bother very many people in this country because they are faceless people in countries that Trump calls "shithole" countries. Contamination in the water in Flint-- you at least get news stories for a couple of weeks, but the news stories have gone away, even if the water is still contaminated. Americans want to not think about horrible things. They'll do horrible things, and permit horrible things to happen. They just don't want to think about it. Doctor Who, The Beast Below. Brits, but still... Out of sight, out of mind. Trump's family separation policy put horrible things in sight, and hence, in mind.
Problems ensued.
Our scholarly reference here is Shanto Iyengar and Donald Kinder's News That Matters. Put people in a controlled setting. Show half a regular news broadcast. Show the other half, randomly selected, the same broadcast with an inserted story. What happens? The test group, who see the doctored program, are more likely to think that the issue at the heart of the doctored story is more important. We call this the "agenda-setting" effect. There are different "frames" that can be used to present the story, and that can affect how people respond, and people can be "primed," by context, to respond differently to news stories. I'm summarizing a book, very, very cursorily, and it's way more complex than that. Basically, show people a news story, and people think it is important.
Here's something interesting, though. You'd think that a personal interest type of presentation, where there is a "vivid" news story to connect with people at an emotional level, would affect people more than a dry, "pallid" presentation, as Iyengar and Kinder put it in their book. Not so much!
It may be that simply telling people that kids are being torn away from their parents would have the same effect as hearing the screams, but then again, Iyengar and Kinder didn't test that, and that's kind of an extreme thing, beyond the bounds of their data. The sound of a child screaming, being torn away from his or her mother... stepping back and doing the Mr. Pump analysis requires being a golem. And laughing at it requires being Stephen Miller. Either way, it is difficult to say how much weaker the effects would have been with a pallid presentation, but the agenda-setting effects are there, and it is difficult for even Ted Cruz to ignore the reprehensibleness of the policy.
As a strategy, this was a loser, and Trump was going to back down. He was going to be...
Weak. Ooooh, that felt good to type.
What now? Nothing. Do you think this will matter in 2018? Or 2020? Remember the Access Hollywood tape? Remember how horrified everyone who had a conscience was? Roughly as horrified as we all were when that fucking shitbag was inaugurated. There are five months between now and the midterm elections, and 2.5 years between now and the 2020 presidential election. That's a lot of time for intervening events. In 2016, what it took was James Comey's decision to hand the White House to Trump. If he has regrets now, good. That motherfucker needs to live with the guilt of what he did. Every reprehensible thing Trump does is on him. What can happen in 5 months? 2.5 years? Damn near anything. Will this matter? Nope.
Democracy. Now taking bids on alternatives...
