Thread by @normative

So, years ago I quite accidentally injected the phrase “epistemic closure” into political discourse. This became a buzzword for five minutes, but a lot of people misunderstood it as effectively just a pretentious synonym for “stuck in an echo chamber” or “closed-minded.”

And that’s not quite how I originally used the phrase (which at the time thought was just... two words used descriptively, not some new buzzword). Originally, I used it to mean you had an *ideology and media ecosystem* that would enable you to reject new contrary information.

So an “echo chamber” just means you never hear any contrary information. The idea of “epistemic closure” was that you WOULD hear new and contrary information, but you have mechanisms in your belief system that reject anything that might force you to update your beliefs.

So, for instance, if someone believes that the Illuminati control the world, and that any evidence AGAINST this hypothesis was manufactured by the Illuminati to hide their existence—proving their power and influence—that’s more what I meant by “epistemic closure.”

I bring this up now, because the Trump ecosystem has developed a pretty sophisticated set of epistemic closure mechanisms that work to reject new information that might otherwise pose a problem. Like this...

https://twitter.com/RVAT2020/status/1298669972026204160

It is extraordinary, and as far as I know unprecedented, how many of Trump’s own former appointees & senior officials have come out to say “this guy is unfit for office, and in fact a serious threat to U.S. national security.” You’d think people might find that hugely alarming.

This doesn’t seem to give supporters much pause, though. Not (just) because they don’t become aware of it, but because there’s a mechanism that enables supporters to reject this sort of testimony out of hand: The “Deep State.”

If the “Deep State” is part of your belief system, the testimony of these officials doesn’t affect your confidence in Trump’s competence; it proves how threatening he must be to the wicked network determined to undermine his presidency.

Ditto “Fake News.” Plenty of news every day calling into question Trump’s honesty, competence, decency, etc. But if “Fake News” is part of your belief system, the sheer volume of this actually works to validate his claim that media elites are hopelessly biased against him.

Ditto “The Swamp”: If people who were once widely respected conservative thinkers or elected officials are appalled by Trump, their stature is converted from a reason to take them seriously into a reason to discount them: They don’t want their cushy position disrupted.

I think these overlapping mechanisms are pretty critical to the resiliency of Trump support among his admirers, despite a constant flow of new information that, to the rest of us, counts as overwhelming and ever-clearer proof of his radical unfitness.

It’s not that they never encounter any of this information, but that there are mechanisms in place that effectively judo-flip it into confirmation of the preexisting narrative, rather than new contradictory data.

I’m not sure what you do about this, but to the extent Dems political messaging is aiming at chipping away at that base—rather than just turning out more of their people—it needs to factor in, and maybe even focus on—those closure mechanisms.

One thing worth considering is that closed belief systems like this tend to be strong but brittle. That is, it’s hard to make a crack in the firewall, but if you DO make a crack, often the whole edifice crumbles with surprising speed. And the crack can be something small.

I remember hearing a talk by a North Korean refugee who wholeheartedly bought into the state’s propaganda—and when his mother was arrested for crimes against the state, he took for granted she HAD to be guilty... until he noticed one small and indisputable error in the charges.

The government claimed she was in one place (at a dissident meeting or some such) at a time and date when he knew for certain she hadn’t been. And once it was clear the state COULD make mistakes, everything else was suddenly in doubt.

(“Whataboutism” is one of the mechanisms that works against the formation of minor cracks: If you’re in danger of having to concede a point, you change the subject, then develop localized amnesia about the near-concession.)

Honestly, it probably doesn’t make sense for *political campaigns* to waste too much effort messaging to the true believers, but for friends & family who still have the energy to argue, it’s worth thinking about how to target the closure mechanisms—the ideological immune system.

If you try to attack the Trump-belief Death Star head on, your arguments are just going to bounce off the force field. You need to take out the shield generator first. I don’t know how you do that, but maybe folks who’ve had some success can offer what worked for them.

Final thought: Are there sources of authoritative information that DON’T have a closure mechanism—an ideological T-cell—set up to neutralize them in the Trumpist narrative? There’s a T-cell for media, intelligence agencies & national security officials, Republican incumbents...

They’ve covered the bases pretty well, frankly—there’s a prefabricated “you can disregard this because...” mechanism for the obvious sources of contrary information. But if there’s one they’ve missed, that might have some luck until they can construct a counternarrative.