January 6, how not to make arguments about racism, and how to maintain intellectual rigor

 I'm going to do a somewhat longer form post, mid-week today based on a forum in which I participated last night.  It was... odd.  In some ways, predictably so, but such oddities speak to an unfortunate cognitive impulse about which I write today.  The impulse is towards a method of simplistic analysis, management of cognitive dissonance, and what we can call the "I have a hammer" phenomenon.  (Hey, look!  There's a nail!  Everywhere a nail, nail!)

The forum was a discussion of the January 6 riots, the pending impeachment trial, and associated issues.  Because of the organizers and participants, one of the themes was going to be race, and my hypothesis going into the forum was that there would be some scholarly discussion of the relationship between police response to the insurrectionists on January 6 and the police response when BLM protests turned violent, "what if they had been black," and such questions.  That isn't my area of scholarly expertise, but there were others on the panel in order to cover a range of topics from the election itself to law to protests.

I will make a few political science-y observations about the question, though, because these methodological questions seem to have been lost in the shuffle.  If we wish to compare police response and lethality, the quantitative measure would be death toll per capita.  How many protesters and rioters were there in each respective event/set of events, and how many died?  You need both a numerator and a denominator, and you need those figures for both in order to make any assessments.  I'm gonna let that dangle there.  You may continue analysis after comparing ratios, but you must at least begin with those ratios.

This was not, for the most part, the role that race played in the forum.  Instead, it went largely as followed.  According to some participants, the insurrection was intended by its participants to invalidate the votes of people of color and perpetuate "white supremacy."  It was, according to participants, centrally about race and "white supremacy."  Not about people who falsely believed that an election had been rigged, but about race and "white supremacy."

Of course, if you believe that the insurrectionists were not motivated primarily by the "rigged election" lie, then you should oppose the impeachment of Donald Trump!  The article of impeachment is about him inciting insurrection based on the stolen election lie, not anything about disenfranchisement or "white supremacy," so take your pick.  You can either make the "white supremacy" argument, or impeach Trump.  You don't get it both ways.

With limited time in a forum, I had limited time to knock down this absurdity, but here is a slightly longer-form version of what I said.

In social science, we assess causation through the counterfactual.  What if the world were otherwise?  A causal relationship consists of an independent variable (the cause) and the dependent variable (the effect), and the counterfactual is the hypothetical world in which there had been a different score on the independent variable.  Would we have observed a different score on the dependent variable?

To the attendees, I posed the following counterfactual.  What if Donald Trump had responded to his November loss like a normal candidate/president?  What if he had simply conceded and not told "The Big Lie" that the election had been rigged/stolen?  Would we have observed the January 6 insurrection?  No.  The insurrectionists believed that democracy had been stolen.  They believed that they had won, and that Biden didn't.

First, do we understand the fact that the insurrectionists believed that they had won, and that the election had been stolen?  We must.  Second, do we understand that they believed this because Trump and his minions lied?  We must.  So, take away the lie.  Create the counterfactual.  Does the insurrection happen?

No.

Was it an insurrection to disenfranchise minorities and create "white supremacy," or an insurrection based on a false belief that the election had been stolen?  Once you accept each answer, which you must factually accept, the social science answer is that the insurrection was not about "white supremacy."  It was about Trump's narcissism, insecurity, and those gullible enough to believe his lies.

But of course if you are ideologically committed to the idea that everything is about race, you don't stop at that.  Have I just written that race played no role in the election?  Of course not.  Pay attention.  Keep up.  I wrote that it wasn't the cause of the insurrection.  Don't change the subject.

Which... was a thing that happened when I made the observations above.

In election law, policies that have a disparate impact on minorities can run afoul of the Voting Rights Act precisely because we have a long history of policies that are, on their face, race-neutral, but that have the effect, and sometimes the intent of creating racial biases.  The most notorious example was the literacy test and its, shall we say, uneven application.

I've written about this stuff here, and I have even published about the necessity of applying the disparate impact standard when it comes to voting rights.  This stuff is serious.

But it also has fuck-all to do with January 6, and any attempt to invoke the issue is an attempt to change the subject.  Were there attempts to apply policies with disparate impacts in 2020?  Yup.  Was that shitty?  Yup.  Count me on your side when it comes to policy-making there.

But that wasn't what January 6 was about.

In my limited forum time, here was the other critical empirical observation I chose to make, to demonstrate this.  Y'all know that Trump's idiot lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, is being sued by Dominion for over $1 billion, right?  Why?  Because one of the primary components of The Big Lie was that Dominion's voting machines were flipping votes.  Trump probably even believed this himself, paranoid dipshit that he is, as demonstrated by his attempt to use this lunacy in the Georgia phone call, but this was a big part of The Big Lie.  Giuliani?  He knows it's a lie.  He's an idiot too, but his wits aren't quite as fucked as Trump's.

So I posed the observation that Dominion's voting systems have no race.  The insurrectionists believe that the machines were fixed.  That's not about race.  It... just isn't.  And you can't make it about race.

Well, you can try.

But if you're trying, it's because you really, really want it to be about race.

Why?  Because if the answer, "it's all about 'white supremacy'" gives you ideological comfort, then that's what you'll tell yourself, and you will twist any set of observations into whatever pretzel is required to get that answer.

So a long time ago, I was sitting in the office of my grad school advisor, Nelson W. Polsby, as he worked on his final book, How Congress Evolves.  We all joked that it was a book about air conditioning, because it was sort of about how migration to the South by Northerners changed the politics of the South, allowed a Republican Party to develop in the South, and that changed the institution.  And that migration wouldn't have happened without air conditioning, because have you been to the South in the summer?  Yikes.

Anyway, one day, one of his research assistants walked into his office after looking up the history of a subcommittee chair, and told him that he was right about that committee chair getting sacked.  My smart-ass response:  "what happened, did somebody drop an air conditioner on his head?"

Nelson took it in stride, because I was somehow allowed to give him shit.  He didn't miss a beat.  He looked at me, and said, "you're just jealous of my one independent variable!"  Nelson was so cool.

The point, of course, is that you can't explain everything with one independent variable, and if you try, you're going to wind up twisting facts beyond recognition.

If you are committed to an ideology that says that everything is race-- like Ibram X. Kendi, for example-- then any time you observe anything, rather than asking, "is this race," you will ask, "how is this race?"  That's a scientific problem motivated by the desire to adhere to an ideology.

Not everything is race.  January 6 wasn't.  It occurred because Trump told a lotta lies, and people believed him.  They believed that the election had been stolen from them, and if you believed that, you'd be angry too.  I even posted something about this, a while back, and made some similar comments to the forum.

So imagine this.  Imagine such a forum put on by a women's studies program.  How would a discussion have gone?  Would it have been "this is all race?"

No.  It would have been about "toxic masculinity," and violence as performance of "male gender identity."  Yeah, Ashli Babbitt was a woman, but she was ex-military, and military is traditionally male, so she was "performing masculinity."  That would have been the central thesis of such a forum.  Why?  Because if your central ideology is that everything is gender, then you will explain January 6 with gender, not race.

Is Trump racist?  Obviously.  Are his supporters racist?  They are either racist, or tolerant of racism, and I don't particularly care about the distinction.  I am intolerant of intolerance, and I don't give a fuck about any supposed paradox therein.

But that does not mean that every action is motivated by racism.  That's why we put things in terms of independent variables and dependent variables, and why you must interrogate explanations that appeal to you for ideological reasons.  The scientific method works the way it does for a reason, and the more ideologically appealing you find a claim, the harder you need to push back against it.

Don't accept it, until you have tried to knock it down, and failed.

If, instead, you encounter empirical observation after empirical observation that, on its face, challenges what would comfort you, and you look for a way to accept the comforting explanation anyway, you're going about everything the wrong way.

And the more reductive your model, the more prone you are to such an approach.  A hammer is a useful tool, but not everything is a nail.  Yeah, Trump is a racist.  Yeah, he probably raped a few dozen women.  But his racism isn't the reason he raped them.  And if you try to connect them for the sake of a reductivist model... no.