So I’m not a psychologist or sociologist but I’m a lifelong student of human nature and have a lot of experience with extremism personally. I feel like all of our analyses of the US right wing are sometimes missing and sometimes just dancing around a key element of what has gone wrong in American politics in the last half century. We talk about social media, money in politics and so forth, all of which are relevant, but I think this feedback loop is a key insight. Here’s my layman’s view of how this works.
I’m defining “extremist beliefs” as beliefs that are contradicted by reality, by a substantial chunk of popular opinion, or both. This includes false beliefs about reality (like 2020 election denial) as well as beliefs that are either false or at least not held by a large chunk of the population (like racism, sexism, etc.) Now the thing about extreme beliefs like this is that they face pushback from reality or from the populace so in theory over time these beliefs should moderate. However, we have seen in recent decades the opposite. My theory is that there has arisen a feedback loop, a reinforcement mechanism composed of right wing media and culture, arising out of both technology as well as cultural and economic circumstances, that has reinforced these extremist beliefs.
The way I see it, in the late 60s and early 70s, the hard-right GOP and the wealthy/corporate elite worked to “get their message out” in a very ugly way: appealing to social conservatives with extremist views on race, gender, religion, etc. to then motivate these voters to vote for GOP candidates who primarily then pursued (initially) a pro-wealth economic agenda. The GOP harnessed, in stages, various media including talk radio, TV (Fox News), the internet and social media to exploit these extremist beliefs for political power. However, what may have been unintended is that this created a powerful self-cycling and ever-more-powerful feedback loop that has now driven the US right wing into extreme and dangerous territory.
(Note: I’m talking about a mass-level phenomenon here rather than individual level “cognitive dissonance” - there is overlap in these concepts but I’m talking meta, not micro.)
The way it works is this: people with extremist views normally face pushback from reality or from the populace and this upsets them. They seek reinforcement and comfort. The rise of right wing talk radio in the 70s and 80s gave them a ready source of reinforcement. People who held the same beliefs, all calling in to say they agree, is very very comforting to people with extremist beliefs. An example of this is the early Rush Limbaugh fan nickname - they called themselves “Dittoheads.” This is because callers would call in and say “I agree with you Rush!! Ditto!!!” or “I agree with the last caller!! Damn! Finally someone said what I feel!!! Ditto!!!”. That social connection was incredibly comforting to the listeners and drove addictive-style listening habits.
Now here is the thing: to keep the audience, the right wing outlets have to go as extreme as they can. The listeners’ extremism is going to face varying amounts of pushback based on their experience so there is no “one size fits all” level of extremism to make all listeners perfectly in equilibrium with their extremism. If a radio host went light on extremism, then some of their audience would not get enough feedback and would drift away. The only way to maximum audience retention was to go hard right 24/7. In fact one of the early signs of this toxic feedback loop was the conversion of “talk radio” with may different POVS (in the 70s) to exclusively right wing talk radio by the later 80s. Listeners who heard Rush Limbaugh did not want to hear a moderate or liberal after that: that was a slap in the face to the feedback loop. Instead they wanted MOAR RIGHT WING!! So talk radio gave it to them, in bucketloads.
And then the inevitable happened: the increasingly extremist feedback from talk radio pushed the audience to the right so that they needed YET MORE extremism to feel comforted. Which means the right wing media machine had to crank the extremism to 11 then to 13 and… you get the picture. We started with Nixon then got Reagan then Limbaugh then Gingrich then George W. Bush then Trump, each more extreme than the last.
And it wasn’t just media: this feedback loop includes cultural and social connections as well. People sorted themselves by wanting to be around people they were comfortable with so right wingers were hanging with right wingers more and more. And as they grew more extreme, they put moderates and left wingers off so those folks withdrew. What we ended up with is a society segregated by levels of extremist belief. That’s how we ended up where we are.
And this feedback loop is POWERFUL. People who have pushed themselves (or been pushed, it’s a philosophical question) to the extremes like Covid deniers and Big Lie election fraud believers need a damn lot of comforting reinforcement to maintain those obviously ridiculous, contradicted by reality, and unsupported by a big chunk of the populace idiocies. They NEED Fox News screaming about extremist shit all day. They NEED Twitter and Facebook and talk radio. And along the way, this feedback loop has not just grown more powerful, it has also trampled on other sources of info. One way to decrease the pushback from reality and the populace is to decry those things: to reject reality, to treat the view of the populace as biased “wokism”, etc. So you end up with something like 35-40% of the electorate being detached from reality and driven to every greater lengths of extremism. It’s a process, a powerful meta-level psychological/sociological process way beyond mere “tribalism” or “social media” or other individual factors. Culture, economics and technology all contribute to this but the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and the parts are also inextricably intertwined.
And lastly, there is also a “ratchet” effect, where once someone has gone far enough extreme it becomes very very hard for them to moderate. Once you’ve believed ugly and/or foolish things for long enough, it would be horribly psychologically hurtful to admit you were wrong. On top of that it would be vastly embarrassing and you would also face vicious counter-attacks from your former fellow extremists (b/c they fear cracks in the edifice, too, at a subconscious level). Just as the ring wing cultural reinforcement of Facebook posts, email chains and so on form a feedback loop, they also form a punishment loop for those who quit the extremism. Look at how "RINO"s get slaughtered by the right.
Basically, to understand where we are, you have to have some sense of this big powerful process that’s going on. Money in politics, social media and all the rest are PART of this process (I don’t believe this feedback loop would be fully operational without modern media technology and also social media) but the process is the big deal, IMO.
This frame of reference explains an awful lot. How can smart people appear to believe such obvious ugly and false bullshit? Are they just cynical manipulators who happen to be great actors? Or have they been processed through this feedback loop so that even smart people find it easier to believe this bullshit and act on it than to face the mental pain of admitting they believe a lot of ugly and false shit? IMO, the ratio of “true believers” (as defined by this feedback loop system) is MUCH higher on the right than many observers seem to think. There are still a few cynical manipulators out there so cold in their emotions they are unfazed by the feedback (cough Mitch McConnell cough) but I truly believe that the vast majority of MAGA folks have been sucked into this loop and believe what they are spewing. That makes them extremely dangerous. Also, they have lost the ability to trust and verify reality and other people’s emotions, so they can’t be reined in that way.
So any ideas about fixing this through education or whatever moderate milquetoast ideas the mainstream centrist media puts out there is doomed to failure. This process is way too powerful and way too self actuating for that. About the only things I can thing of to stop this are two ideas:
One, the ever-extremist loop does create vulnerabilities for elections as if we target our message correctly we can win elections by convincing the less-aligned/independent voters to vote against the GOP, and also by getting the left wing voters to turn out in high numbers. One nasty thing I’ve noticed is “low level feeder” media types like Joe Rogan and those youtube “question askers” who are sort of gilding the lily and appearing less extreme to try to create an onramp for this feedback loop. However, the vast majority of the right wing media machine is so far right, and believes its own shit so strongly that we do see them pushing independents away and also motivating the liberal voters. So that’s an opportunity.
Two, part of this feedback loop is it managed to grab power, in Congress in the 90s, at the local levels after 2010 and so. It’s much easier to crank this feedback loop hard when you control the levers of power, and can appoint Judges and write laws to facilitate the right wing push. So one way to pushback against this feedback loop is to use the opportunity in One, above, to win elections and reduce GOP power, at the national, state and local levels, in all branches of government.
And we probably also need to see if can weaken or shutdown the “feeder onramps” like youtube etc. I don’t actually think going hard at deplatforming the most extreme stuff is good bang for buck (those dudes are fuckin’ crazy) but I do think if we can “slow the flow” of newbies to this loop, it will suffer attrition over time.
Anyway, that’s my magnum opus Big Sharpe Theory.
Discuss.