The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon

[Nevilledog]

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Ben Collins
@oneunderscore__
·
Feb 6, 2021
This is a very good piece. I haven't seen ties between QAnon and poverty or even education level. The ties are mostly circumstantial, like sudden losses of a job or a loved one, and -- more importantly -- how much people know about how the internet works.

The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon
Their belief that this surreal conspiracy has arisen because of the poor education of its adherents is based in classism, not reality.
newrepublic.com

Ben Collins
@oneunderscore__
There are other, obvious, non-exclusive ties among QAnon followers -- deep belief in the omnipresence of Satanists, racism, antisemitism, etc. But traditional education level and income is all over the place.
2:02 PM · Feb 6, 2021

https://newrepublic.com/article/161266/qanon-classism-marjorie-taylor-greene

The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon
Their belief that this surreal conspiracy has arisen because of the poor education of its adherents is based in classism, not reality.

On Thursday, the House voted to strip Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments, putting an end to one chapter of what’s sure to be an ongoing saga in the chamber’s Republican caucus. In a meandering nonapology in the hours before the vote, Greene, who has endorsed an impressive array of conspiracy theories, including QAnon and claims that Hillary Clinton had raped, mutilated, and consumed the blood of a child, characterized negative coverage of her as—surprise, surprise—more “cancel culture” run amok. While Greene’s rise bodes poorly for the country, some have already decided her newfound celebrity is good news for the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects. On Tuesday, Politico reported that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee intends to focus on QAnon in its messaging, ahead of the 2022 midterms, in the hopes that the specter of more Greenes in Congress will push more people away from the GOP. “They can do QAnon, or they can do college-educated voters,” DCCC Chair Sean Patrick Maloney said. “They cannot do both.”

Actually, they can. Trying to tether the GOP more tightly to the extremism it’s cultivated makes sense, and the strategy may help prevent some moderate suburbanites from returning to the party’s inordinately big tent. But polls have shown few differences on QAnon between voters with and without college degrees—Civiqs’s latest survey, for instance, registers 72 percent opposition and 5 percent support for the theory among graduates. The split is 71 to 5 among nongraduates and 78 to 3 among postgraduates. And, notably, Americans without college degrees are less likely than graduates to have heard of QAnon in the first place. If this is a surprise, consider the fact that Greene herself went to college. And when she runs for reelection next year, she’s sure to enjoy the support of many college-educated Republicans who, whether they personally believe in QAnon or not, want to keep as many right-wing firebrands as they can in Congress. Those who think such voters will inevitably doom the party would do well to remember the 2010 midterms—despite the Tea Party’s rhetoric and antics, Republicans took the House in a historic wave.

Of all the “big lies” distorting our politics, one of the largest and most popular—back in 2010 and now—has been the notion that our political divisions are the product of under- or miseducation. The Republican Party’s flight into lunacy, it’s often suggested, has a fairly simple cause. The unwashed aren’t getting The Facts in school or from their media sources, and it’s up to the enlightened to shower The Facts upon them—perhaps, as some “disinformation” experts recently suggested to The New York Times, with a “reality czar” at the White House manning the hose. This was the explanation many turned to as the Trump era began, and it was the explanation many turned to for how it ended. Take the remarkable lede that topped a piece from The Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan on the Capitol rioters last month:

Here they were, a coalition of the willing: deadbeat dads, YouPorn enthusiasts, slow students, and MMA fans. They had heard the rebel yell, packed up their Confederate flags and Trump banners, and GPS-ed their way to Washington. After a few wrong turns, they had pulled into the swamp with bellies full of beer and Sausage McMuffins, maybe a little high on Adderall, ready to get it done.

*snip*

[TheRealNorth]

1. I have come to pretty much the same conclusion....

These are people that so badly want to demonize their political opposition to make themselves feel morally superior that they exploit the internet to "make" their reality. Remember what the Bush administration said about making their own reality. Just a continuation of Republican dogma to the extreme.

[lisa58]

3. Yes! It's about having an enemy...good vs evil....

We’re good they’re bad. The only way to get there when the dems actually give a $h*t about people no matter who they are, is to create a scenario where God condemns dems and if you love God you would too. Just my personal experience

[wishstar]

7. Your important point is the demonization of Democrats that Repubs have seen as vital to winning

Q Anon was a deliberate exaggerated embellishment stemming from years of Repubs making blatant accusations against Dems as being evil and Satanic while Repubs are painted as good and carrying out a mission from God.

Rightwing Repubs were so desperate in face of their dwindling voter base that they stooped to the most extreme accusations hoping to inflame their past supporters plus recruit new rabid followers.

[Mike 03]

8. "We don't want lower bread prices, we don't want higher bread prices..."

Your post and Turbineguy's below reminded me of this passage on page 197 from The Death of Democracy by Benjamin Carter Hett

The best explanation of Nazism that Drucker had ever encountered came from a Nazi agitator "whom, many years ago, I heard proclaim to a wildly cheering peasants' meeting: 'We don't want lower bread prices, we don't want higher bread prices, we don't want unchanged bread prices--we want National-Socialist bread prices.'" Since their logically inconsistent rage and hatred could never deliver any satisfactory social progress, the Nazis' only recourse was to this kind of irrationality: Nazism could only "accomplish its task through a miracle." Higher bread prices, lower bread prices, and unchanged bread prices "have all failed. The only hope lies in a kind of bread prices which is none of these, which nobody has ever seen before, and which belies the evidence of one's reason."

Making their own reality.

[BlueNProud]

20. Jesus that is a scary paragraph

[FakeNoose]

28. This sounds like something Chump could have said

After 4 years of Chump's twisted crazy logic, it's hard to define "normal" any more.
And that was exactly his plan.

[Turbineguy]

2. Hitler appealed to those most affected by

the run-away inflation which was a result of Germany's war reparations debts from the Treaty of Versailles (you know the part where the Americans pointed out that it was a bad idea?).

And similar to now, the blame for the problem was placed on the wrong people?

[lees1975]

39. You are in the right ball park here...

There's a lot about all of this, QAnon and what's happening with Trump and the GOP, that looks a lot like what happened in Germany in the 1930's but it's not a comparison that is permitted. But that's what it is.

[Withywindle]

4. Paradoxically, QAnon tends to attract semi-SMART people

Hear me out. There's an excellent article by a game designer who specializes in Alternate Reality Games (kind of like roleplaying games like D&D only not set in a fully fictional world).

https://www.thestreet.com/phildavis/news/a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon


The reason it attracts smart people (for a certain value of smart) is that it's a puzzle. Q drops clues and encourages people to connect the dots. It encourages people to come up with their own clues. Because of the human tendency to pattern recognition and confirmation bias, if you obsess about a certain puzzle long enough, everything starts to seem like a clue.

Of course they're doing the very thing Sherlock Holmes warned against hardest: “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

But they don't realize this because they think the Q drops ARE facts.

But as the author of this article suggests, they become so much more attached to the theory because they played a role in creating it.

[andym]

10. +1. Q and other conspiracies attract people trying to make sense of the world

They go beyond initial political beliefs and can actually change such beliefs as people are drawn further in. Clever manipulators can setup conspiracy groups like Q to influence others as they like.
I'm only surprised that companies haven't resulted to such techniques more overtly in their marketing campaigns.

[TheRealNorth]

41. Sounds like whoever is behind Q

Is using some advanced techniques to manipulate people. Russians or former CIA/NSA?

[Quixote1818]

5. Psychologists will point out that most people drawn to conspiracy theories feel a lack of control

in their lives. It can be from an abusive husband, loss of a job, other psychological problems etc.


Snip:

The desire for understanding and certainty
The desire for control and security
The desire to maintain a positive self-image

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-apes/201801/why-do-people-believe-in-conspiracy-theories

[Hermit-The-Prog]

6. Yet another Only-I-Can-Fix-It. Gee, glad the Democratic Party has concerned, omniscient saviors.

[oasis]

9. Wake up America!

[Hortensis]

11. Nonsense to the hit on the Democratic leadership. Dunning-Kruger is ALSO

a massive national delusion that sweeps victims up and spits them out as idiots.

The QAnon threat to America, and Democratic power particularly, has been professionally studied, by intelligence services, social psychologists, and many others, and some of those studies were commissioned by the Democratic Party and others obtained. National campaigns don't cost over a billion dollars just for the presidency alone because maintaining outrageous ignorance requires investment of vast sums of money.

[brush]

23. True enough. Getting kooks, half-smarts and not-so-smarts to think they're the smartest people...

in the room takes big bucks and time. Hell, it took the Russians decades to cultivate trump. And during roughly the same time frame FOX and Limbaugn began to flourish and spread disinformation, later followed by facebook and other unregulated social media publishers.

It all cumulated in a perfect storm with trump and now MarjorieQ and the like. We need more than a re-instatement of the Fairness Doctrine which called for equal time for both sides of issues by publishers/broadcasters, but one now with actual punitive teeth that ban conspiracy theories, outright lying and disinformation peddling.

[Hortensis]

27. Yes. Besides the kind of limits you describe, we need at least

one regulated news show dedicated to informing the public in each region, available preferably all day, but at least available on broadcast TV each evening. Such a basic necessity and we don't have it.

[czarjak]

12. Cure, please?

[Progressive Jones]

13. The Q-types are simply part of the shittiest people in our nation.

There is no difference, in my mind, between Q-flakes and any other dreg of our society.

Violent criminals, rapists, pedophiles, Q-flakes --- they're all in the same category --- Undesirables.

[coti]

14. This is nonsense.

The evidence presented is less than convincing.

[Edwcraig]

15. Racism by any other name would smell . . . .

Republicans are racists, sexists and greedy. Can't really claim that so they tried Conservatism. That is not going to well, so why not QAnon. Hell most people can't even pronounce it much less know what it means. Perfect cover.

[stillcool]

16. oh my. And here I thought people were people...

history is full of them. You'd think Q was other-worldly, some brand spanking new bullshit.

[Hekate]

17. I noticed that as soon as the virtual Wanted posters started going up: lots of educated white collar

...types. It overturned my perceptions in a hurry.

Going by “looks” is not enough. With the exception of the cosplay shaman, nearly everybody was dressed very similarly — that is, for the occasion, the occasion being a violent insurrection in the middle of winter.

The insanity has a very wide reach in our society.

[DeminPennswoods]

18. JMHO, but suspect the brains/DNA of these believers

are wired differently to be much more susceptible to addiction. And, the qanon regiment is highly addictive.

[maxrandb]

19. What a bunch of HORSESHIT!

Lots of people have lost loved ones, lost a job, felt disaffected, felt "economic angst", etc.

You know what they didn't do? Turn into insane, violent, evil cultists.

You know why? Because they weren't fucking racist, sexist, flaming hatemongering ASSPICKLES!.

Mommy didn't love him, so now he wants to kill Democrats.

Fuck a bunch of that noise.

There's only one thing to do with these fucksticks...and it's NOT "understand" them.

They need to be DEFEATED! That's it.

Their asses need to be kicked so fucking hard at the ballot box that they NEVER come within a thousand miles of power in this country.

They need to be shunned by society so hard that even their children's, children's, children's, children will be ashamed to have come from their genes

[Tommymac]

37. This.

[TheRealNorth]

42. I agree with your goal

But better understanding them could help in defeating them. But I do tire of the over-humanization of these monsters in the media.

[uponit7771]

51. THIS !!!! ☝🏾☝🏾☝🏾 Make their association with anything MAGA painful af

[JI7]

21. Not this shit again. Where do they get money for their guns, and boats for the ugly ass

boat parades and other shit ?

[TheRealNorth]

45. Rather than go to college (or send their kids to college)

They buy boats, snowmobiles, trucks, and guns with their disposable income.

[ismnotwasm]

22. A fatal misunderstanding of racism, sexism as well as other "isns"

Or, simply, of how lives truly intersect. How toxic (mostly but not all) white people view changing social landscape as something to fear, rather than a path to exhilaration and an avenue to a better world.

So also; greed.

[Silent3]

24. Perhaps a different kind of education than traditional education *might* help

One thing that is not taught very consistently or clearly is critical thinking skills. Even in classes like math and science, the philosophy of critical thinking is more implicit than explicit, turned into rote procedures and "best practices", rules you need to follow to get a good grade or get published in a journal. It's easy to compartmentalize this into something merely situational for getting particular jobs done, without learning much about the broader application of critical thinking to one's entire life.

I'm not sure, however, how well critical thinking can be taught as a general skill. I'd like to think it can be taught, at least to some degree, but I don't know how much this has been tried, and what measurable results if any have been found.

People need to learn about basic foibles of human thinking like confirmation bias and how crappy our untrained, innate handling of probability is. People need to learn the media savvy to recognize manipulation and logical fallacies.

I sometimes suspect that these mental disciplines aren't pushed very hard because it would lead to uncomfortable confrontations with religious beliefs, which don't stand up to well when subject to this kind of careful scrutiny.

[elevator]

33. Critical thinking would seem to me to be a quality obtained in the combination

of one's experiences and the environment in which one spends their childhood, of which, formal education only plays a part. I consider myself fortunate to have had eight years of an excellent parochial education, which, ironically, caused me to question the tenets of religious doctrine. Voila, critical thinking.

[muriel_volestrangler]

25. "more importantly, how the internet works" - what does this mean?

If that's the "important" bit, it's a remarkably flabby phrase. It could mean all kinds of things. Anyone know if Collins has ever written what he means by this?

[Klaralven]

26. I'd be surprised if the uneducated, less intelligent part of the population was into Qanon

There is a lot of complicated information, methods of interpretation, obscure trivia to be analysed, and complex plots to remember.

It seems geared towards the intellect that loves complex fantasy fiction. For example fans of Tolkien, Harry Potter, the Star Wars series, etc.

The only person I know well who is involved with Qanon has a Bachelors degree, is very intelligent, and has several large bookcases filled with an eclectic array of fiction.

Think about the people you knew before Qanon who were anti-vaxxers, JFK conspiracy fans, or 9/11 skeptics. That type of people are the ones who may have become Qanon believers.

[Withywindle]

30. Add Mysteries to the list of genres

QAnon people are encouraged to think that they're solving a mystery and bringing hidden truth to light. They believe they're following clues and that they ARE thinking logically. Think of political/crime thriller novels and movies.

There are whole genres devoted to this: add in the idea that the government is hiding stuff about UFOs (Project UFO, the X-Files), any number of theories about Ancient Aliens on the History Channel etc. which is fiction claiming that it might not be. (Also racist in that the whole premise is based on the idea that black and brown people certainly couldn't have created those marvelous buildings and things, it must have been ALIENS)

Of course the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the ancient anti-Semitic blood libel is a huge part of this, to the core, and can't be removed from it.

Speaking as an SFF and mystery and horror nerd myself, I can say that MOST of us are quite content with fiction being fiction and don't get drawn into thinking it's reality - but we can certainly see how the process works.

Study of cults shows that most people drawn into them as adults (as opposed to being raised in them from childhood) are NOT uneducated or narrow-minded. Rather, the cult encourages them to think that they ARE being rational by joining, that the cult's beliefs are a logical explanation for what they see around them.

edited to add: The first person I knew who really seemed to be on the edge of seriously engaging the theory that Hillary Clinton is an occulist who sacrifices children was a manager in an arts organization who has a Philosophy degree.

The belief that the government is hiding things is not an irrational belief. It's true, all governments do. The room to really spiral out into the weeds, is the nature of those secrets.

[WarGamer]

29. I believe Q was/is a Russian/Chinese/Iranian cointel op...

[harumph]

31. What a "College Education" means depends on the college attended and the courses taken.

So much of what we call college education is merely extended vocational school and need
not offer much in the way of philosophy, poli sci or world literature. Students can obtain a college
education and be good technicians in their chosen field but lousy thinkers.

[live love laugh]

50. Trump "college" alumni probably well represented. nt

[radius777]

32. Very good article, rings true.

The narrative from some on the left is that Trumpism is due to economic anxiety and lack of education - when we can clearly see than many if not most Trumpers are doing pretty well. Trump did get 74 million votes after all, not just the voters we think of as the stereotypical 'deplorable'.

The heart of Trumpism is racism/sexism/etc - IOW white identity politics - which spans the class and geographic spectrum.

RW fantasy such as the Xtian fundamentalism, the Big Lie, Q-Anon etc - are political constructs that the RW uses to drive an alternate reality where the Dem party and its constituents are out to destroy the 'true' (white) America and only the GOP can save them. They want to believe it and are emotionally tied to the narratives being true - and no amount of 'logic' will convince them otherwise.

[betsuni]

34. No, no, no.

I came across this by Carl Jung a few weeks ago and think it is correct:

"I had always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and an equal number who do use their minds, but in an amazingly stupid way. I was also surprised to find many intelligent and wide-awake people who lived (as far as one could make out) as if they had never learned to use their sense organs: They did not see the things before their eyes, hear the words sounding in their ears, or notice the things they touched or tasted. Some lived without being aware of the state of their own bodies.

"There are others who seemed to live in a most curious condition of consciousness, as if the state they had arrived at today were final, with no possibility of change, or as if the world and the psyche were static and would remain so forever. They seemed devoid of all imagination, and they entirely and exclusively depended upon their sense-perception. Chances and possibilities did not exist in their world, and in 'today' there was no real 'tomorrow.' The future was just the repetition of the past.

"It soon became clear to me, however, that the people who used their minds were those who thought -- this is, who applied their intellectual faculty in trying to adapt themselves to people and circumstances. And the equally intelligent people who did not think were those who sought and found their way by feeling. ... These four functional types correspond to the obvious means by which consciousness obtains its orientation to experience."

[SunSeeker]

35. It's a horrible flat world these people live in. Sadly, they bring that misery to our world.

Thanks for posting that.

[betsuni]

38. You're welcome!

My mother used to regularly annoy me by declaring "People are so stupid!" I thought it was a terribly snobby thing to say. But these days, I give up. My mother and Jung are right.

[Act_of_Reparation]

43. Carl Jung has been in the ground for sixty years.

And very little of what he did could actually be considered scientific.

[betsuni]

46. Who doesn't know Jung is dead and not a scientist?

My mother's dead and not a scientist. So what?

[Act_of_Reparation]

47. Did somebody present your mother as an authority on the human mind?

Ah, the ol' head-slap rofle emoji combo. The bbs equivalent of nervous laughter.

[betsuni]

48. ....

[betsuni]

49. Did anyone say Jung wasn't dead and was a scientist? No.

So what?

[Act_of_Reparation]

53. I don't understand why you're struggling with this.

You presented the work of Carl Jung because, presumably, you agreed with his categorization of human minds, or at the very least found his self-congratulatory screed (yeah, I wonder in which of these categories Jung would have placed himself) worth considering. The problem with Jung is, as I have pointed out, is that he wasn't an empiricist, and not being an empiricist had no data whatsoever to justify these classifications.

His status as a scientist isn't in question. His status as an authority on this matter, per the dearth of scientific rigor to his work, is.

[nolabear]

36. Fatal? Biden approval is at 66 percent. We flipped GA.

I agree with the premise about the motives but I think people confuse loud with majority. They’re the loud minority, and media can’t stop covering them endlessly. I get it, but I think it distorts their actual power. The GQP who are feeding off of them are dangerous though, as long as they’re in power.

[David__77]

40. I suspect that class is an important indicator.

I suspect that “small business” is disproportionately represented.

[Act_of_Reparation]

44. We have failed with certain demographics because we view conservatism as a symptom of stupidity.

The reality is conservatism is more akin to religion, where adequately educated people—even highly intelligent people—believe downright ridiculous things.

[OneGrassRoot]

52. Excellent summary. Thank you. n/t