Thread by @hecubian_devil

Yeah this is worth really interrogating.

My take: Trump’s rare political talent is that he intuitively understands how metaphor, archetype, and category work in human cognition. Namely, they’re fuzzy. So are his promises. This then becomes a liability in governance.

Let’s use a concrete example: immigration. On immigration, Trump’s promises of mass deportations and chauvinistic nationalism seemed concrete to liberals and leftists—and the far right!—but because he did a great job of defining the *category* of “illegal immigrant” through *examples* rather than axioms, many voters interpreted it in a fuzzy way.

See, axiomatically, “illegal immigant” means something specific and concrete: a person in the US without legal immigration status. No visa, green card, or citizenship, but resides in the US. That’s what it means in the law, and the law is axiomatic. It’s about bright-line rules.

But Trump rarely talked about immigration in these terms. Whenever he talked about “illegals” he used examples of gang members, rapists, cartel enforcers, murderers, and so on. He also always used examples of Black or Latino immigrants, not Asian or white immigrants. Trump intuitively understood that whatever “illegal immigrant” might mean in the law, human beings naturally tend to understand what a label/category *means* by looking at a constellation of examples it’s applied to. Categories, in human cognition, are basically Bayesian—you look at a constellation of data points, a cloud, and derive a fuzzy/probabilistic sense of whether something or someone belongs to it.

This is how, in the minds of many voters, “illegal” came to be applied to people here legally—eg Black and Latino citizens who are criminals, or homeless, or just vaguely unappealing—but also NOT to actual undocumented immigrants who are “good” and “orderly”—grandmas, farm workers, white undocumented immigrants, etc. It’s not about axiomatic rules (whether or not you actually possess legal status), but whether these individuals seem statistically similar to the other salient examples used to define the category “illegal.” Brown gang member born in the USA? That’s an illegal. Russian guy with no visa? Legal. Haitian refugee? Illegal. Your own grandmother who’s been here 30 years without papers? Legal.

It’s very frustrating to the kind of ideological partisans who *do* think axiomatically, or just anyone high-info enough to understand how the law and government work. But it’s actually quite natural. It’s intuitive. This is the default mode of human cognition.

This is how you get Joe Rogan and Andrew Schulz saying “I didn’t vote for this, deporting grandmas, that’s crazy.” Because undocumented grandmas *are not illegals immigrants* in their minds! They don’t fit the category, because they don’t *look like* the other examples used to define the category in their cognitive model! They’re outliers in that Bayesian cloud, and their brains return a <1% probability that these people could belong to a category defined by “MS-13 members” and “dog-eating Haitian barbarians.”

This fuzziness collapses when you’re in government, though, because the law and government are axiomatic. They are deporting the grandmas. They are deporting students, and construction workers, and farm workers. And the Rogans of their world are baffled; they feel misled. And in a sense they were, albeit willingly.

https://x.com/hecubian_devil/status/1986157508549853549

When Trump is on the ballot even in office, his campaigning can sort of obscure this; many people start listening to what he says and paying less attention to what he does. The fuzzy categories start to take over as salient again—they can imagine his promises fit their desires.

But when he’s in power and off the ballot, it’s just the reality they’re seeing. And the reality is ugly. Most people actually don’t like it.

This also explains how even though Trump’s execution of his immigration policy is deeply unpopular, Dems hold only a very narrow advantage on “immigration” in issue-polling. Does “immigration” mean the actual policies and reality of Trump governance? Or does it mean something fuzzier? Does it refer to a worldview? To values, categories, metaphors, and archetypes?

“Remove all the bad people from society” or more narrowly “remove the main troublemakers” makes sense to a lot of people. Yes it’s childish and magical thinking, yes it’s impossible to actually *do*, but a lot of people don’t think that hard about politics. It sounds good. Who wants the bad people around? Wouldn’t it be easier to just get rid of them?

It’s also ancient—ostracism and expulsion from the tribe/village/community are tools we used throughout the entirety of our evolutionary history to regulate society. Our brains are not well-adapted to modern bureaucratic polities of 340 million people. “Ostracize the bad people from the tribe! Send them out into the savanna to fend for themselves!” our primate brain screams. We used to be able to do that! It doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from millions of years of experience baked into our neurological structure.

This is a sticky problem for Democrats. If they just become Bayesian liars like Trump, they’ll face the same backlash in governance that he does.

But there is a middle path. One that at least *attempts* to speak the language of values, to use salient exemplars to define categories. One that presents a *moral worldview* that makes archetypical sense of reality.

Harris could talk about border security—and did—but couldn’t define the *categories* of who that border is supposed to keep out! She couldn’t define the community! She couldn’t define *who* is causing the problems! She couldn’t explain the *moral premises* of “border security” and so it bought her no sympathy with voters who want to vote for someone who will keep the bad people out.

If Dems want to win on these issues, they’ll need to develop a message about worldviews, *and policies that express that message in governance*. They don’t need to and probably shouldn’t try to sell themselves as authors and executors of the conservative worldview. Instead they can appeal to liberal values and a liberal worldview on immigration and pluralism, but they need to do the work of setting up the categories and archetypes that define it.

This is a huge part of why Democrats keep losing when they shouldn’t, and why Trump tends to overperform his unfavorables. People don’t like his governance, but they like his worldview because he *can articulate one*. He works with our Bayesian impulses, not against them.

A Democratic argument that shifts the debate on immigration—that turns a +1 issue into a +10 issue—has to redefine what “immigration” *means*. There are other values to appeal to besides the conservative impulse to purify the body of the community by expelling bad actors. We have let them define “immigration policy” to *mean that*. It means “the regulation of the moral makeup of the community through expulsion of bad actors and defense against their entry.” It has to *mean something else*.

And policy needs to express that. But that’s a whole long thread in its own right. I have ideas, but there’s probably multiple ways to approach it. The main thing is that leftists and liberals *must* start approaching this problem. Not accepting the present moral and categorical meanings of “immigration” defined by the right, but redefining what that word means, what the job of the state *is* when regulating the composition of the community. Redefining our collective *purpose*. And we need to get better at using examples to define these categories and purposes.