Between faith and disbelief
Some thoughts on making predictions when nobody believes in the future. Plus: links.
“[T]he version of reality that politics presented was no longer believable, that the stories politicians told their people about the world had stopped making sense, and in the face of that, you could play with reality, constantly shifting and changing, and in the process, further undermine and weaken the old forms of power.”
— from Hypernormalisation, a documentary by Adam Curtis
We can not understand our political moment without understanding the substratum upon which it is built. It is not a stable foundation. You’re just as likely to put your foot straight through it as you are to be able to rest anything of substance on it. It’s not concrete, not even rotted out plywood. It’s something worse.
It’s disbelief.
We have a meme punchline for it, “I never thought the leopards would eat MY face!” We dunk on voters who are, for the moment, forced to consider their own disbelief (don’t worry, they’ll shake it off in a minute and convince themselves the leopards didn’t mean to, that there is some reason for it, that it’s good actually).
Voters in the UK did not believe that Brexit would affect their ability to vacation in Spain, or their kids’ ability to get jobs in France or Holland, or the price of produce from Portugal, or fishermen on the British coastline. Voters in the US did not believe that immigration raids would include people with green cards, going through a legal process, in their own families or communities, or that they would lose their job at the VA Hospital, or have the rug pulled on the farm loan for new fences and irrigation. If they’d believed it, surely they would have made some other choice, or fought harder to persuade their neighbors, right?
There is another material in the substrate - it is what gives the disbelief any rigidity at all.
It’s anger.
People want things to materially change in a positive way for themselves; but because the system has not delivered that in their lifetimes, they might want someone else’s circumstances to become materially much, much worse. That seems only fair.
Disbelief and anger combined create a substance that is expressed through schadenfreude and hypernormalisation. You know what schadenfreude is - you might feel it for Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia and the nephrologist who attended a Hezbollah funeral, or you might feel it for the husband whose wife was taken from an airport in Puerto Rico as they returned from their honeymoon.
But hypernormalisation is different. You might not even be aware of how hypernormal you are. In some sense, this post is hypernormal (posting may be the totemic behavior of hypernormalisation). It is acting normal within a deeply abnormal system. It is going along as you would expect if everything around you were true, even though you know nothing is. It is doing something you know is impotent because you don’t believe anything has potency, so you know, YOLO.
Hypernormal is cope
People are still working through the disbelief — in this weekend’s episode of The Focus Group podcast with Sarah Longwell, audio from the focus groups featured the phrase, “there’s method to his madness.” These were Biden-Trump voters - and maybe you’d expect them to experience some level of buyer’s remorse. But they are not experiencing that yet.
Right now it’s hypernormal: they don’t believe that it is pure madness - that would be madness - so they make believe there is a method to it. They make believe that he really won’t tank their retirement funds, disappear their neighbors, censor academics and lawyers and journalists, raise the price of everything, leave the world’s poor and sick to die, and make America a part of an axis of authoritarianism, isolating it from our erstwhile allies. It’s unbelievable. We would never. He couldn’t. There must be some method here, because otherwise… madness.
Hypernormalisation is a coping mechanism for disbelief. And disbelief is part of the grieving process - it’s the liminal experience hovering over denial and anger, anger and bargaining, where it is at its apex, and then tapers off through depression, dissipating but never disappearing in acceptance. I watched my father die, but I don’t always believe it. Sometimes I feel this sudden onrush of anger at him for not being available to take my calls. He died in 2008 and that still happens. That is how persistent, how sticky, disbelief is.
Disbelief makes it hard for people who are trying to be objective to describe things clearly. So they use hypernormal language. Surely the policy of the American government cannot be that Ukraine should surrender - so we describe it as a unilateral ceasefire. Surely the Russians would never retreat - so that too we call a unilateral ceasefire. It can’t be that the President of the United States extorted a law firm for $40 million, so we say they made a deal. It can’t be that the President of the United States threatened to take over a private university or bankrupt it, so we say it was a dispute over federal funding. We have accurate, descriptive words for the things that are happening, but we use disbelief words instead, hypernormal words.
How do you poll disbelief?
There is disbelief in the polling, as well. Multiple surveys have shown that public opinion swings wildly on a variety of issues when you introduce any context or facts to the question, or any detail to the policy or issue they can select.
When people respond to polls about their attitudes to abortion, immigration, the economy, inflation, healthcare, tariffs, they interact with those issues the way you interact with a non player character in a video game - with a limited set of options. The issue, reduced to a single word, both contains universes of meaning, and no meaning at all. Depending on your predisposition, you might imagine the worst caricature of a person who needs an abortion, who is trying to enter the country, who is struggling to find work, who is hit hard at the grocery checkout and the pump, who is saddled with medical debt. And that will influence your response. If you’re thinking about yourself instead, or your children, your answers will be quite different.
We see it even in the attitudes of pollsters, who will tell you two things at once: that people who respond to political polls are “weird”, not normal people - and that they can somehow unskew the weirdness with shedloads of data (still coming from weird people), and math. But at a certain point, all the math is just another way of saying, “what I think this voter was trying to say is…” And from there, it’s ventriloquism, not social science.
But one of the ways we got to this place is through the hubristic belief that the universe was entirely knowable - that it is predictable. If we can predict the future, perfectly model risk, it suggests that Everything is Under Control. You can check out and go shopping. The economy, the border, the democracy? They’re are all five-by-five.
But the thing about quantifying people’s behavior, beliefs, emotions, heuristics, biases and bigotries is that they are all fundamentally qualitative - contingent and contextual, irrational and inconsistent, layered and intersectional. Moments of crisis call for deep understanding, more qualitative, thick description of the inconsistencies, the amoralities, the anger, the disbelief.
Indeed, there is something kind of anachronistic about forecasting now, in an era where most people spend more time in nostalgia for imagined pasts than in imagining likely (or desirable) futures. On some basic level, many people have stopped believing in the future at all. For some people that means more urgent action is needed, but for others - hypernormalisation.
As we get more high quality data about what happened in 2024, forecasters will try to use that data to make predictions about what is going to happen next. But there is always a very fine line between probabilistic guessing and wish-casting. Especially in an era defined by disbelief and anger there is an unmet thirst for material change that is hard to poll because people have had to stop believing that change is possible in order to get through their daily lives. It’s even harder when we’ve stopped describing things as they are because what’s happening seems so unlikely.
How can pollsters stay grounded in what is actually happening and describe it through their survey instruments in a way that keeps respondents grounded in a reality they might not be willing to acknowledge in the first place?
How do you ask people what they want when they don’t believe they’re going to get it?
How do you ask people what’s important to them, when they don’t believe their priorities matter?
It’s our fault, and it’s “their” fault too
There are some who think that the American voter is stupid, or wicked, or decadent. I think there’s truth in that. I suspect they arrive at this disbelief through a cocktail of ignorance, decadence, and selfishness - but those innately human character flaws are also cultivated by governments that lie to us, by a panto of democracy without real choices, by news as entertainment, by advertising-incentivized content algorithms that give you some version of what you want as long as it makes you click, and by parties that seem unwilling or unable to materially improve things for the people who live in this society.
People aren’t wrong, exactly, to adopt this disbelief - they are mourning whatever ideals and shared realities they - we - used to have, and their minds play tricks as they grieve.
When politicians and pollsters and pundits tell you that the economy is good, actually, but you’re underemployed, underinsured, and overleveraged on consumer debt (your mortgage, your credit card, your car loan, your student loans) - you can get angry at them, throw the bums out. And you can also go on acting like they’re right and everything is fine - the YOLO economy at work.
We are experiencing Brazilianization - a future denied, a system that seems to work only for the extremely wealthy and the corrupt. I stood on the platform at Jamaica Station next to guys carrying their Milwaukee backpacks full of power tools and holding cans of Coors Lite in a paper bag, and women carrying Balenciaga handbags full of expensive laptops and canned Prosecco. Riding the same train to very different places.
We are not all living in the same country, or the same economy - to say nothing of our algorithmically derived online lives that both flatten experiences and make you wonder why your life doesn’t look like the feed.
If we never reconcile the disbelief, many of us will simply move on to hypernormal acceptance, pretending things are fine when we know they aren’t. We feel powerless to change the course of things because deep down we’ve come to believe that nothing can be changed. If the people in charge can’t change it, or won’t change it, who are we to beat them at a game they invented? And if it’s all fake, if the present isn’t real, then why would we believe in the future?
I have no idea how you poll that.
And now for this week’s links roundup, compiled, written and edited by Lyn Rafil, who this week described the roundup as “Hefty”, and whoo are they right. Behold:
Headlines
Introducing a New Project to Track Polls, William P. Davis, The New York Times, 3/17/25 (Archive)
In the aftermath of 538’s closure, The New York Times is picking up the poll tracking efforts.
First starting with collating polls for Trump approval ratings, The Times director of election data analytics William P. Davis writes “Our goal is to ensure that this resource, which is a foundational tool for many journalists and researchers, remains updated long-term.”
Trump signs order aiming to close the Education Department, Cory Turner, NPR, 3/20/25 (Archive)
With the confirmation of Education Secretary Linda McMahon, Trump acts on a Project 2025 goal by signing an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education and putting numerous federal grant programs and students’ rights protections additionally at risk.
Though the administration supposedly promises to uphold federal funding streams, many representatives, organizations, and educators remain wary at best and are already preparing to challenge the order (among several others) in court.
See also: Trump moves against Department of Education: What to know, Lexis Lonas Cochran, The Hill, 3/20/25 (Archive)
Social Security Acting Head Claims DOGE Ruling Threatens Agency, Gregory Korte and Zoe Tillman, Bloomberg 3/20/25 (Archive)
Trump-picked acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek appears to be acting in malicious compliance of US District Judge Ellen Hollander’s ruling restricting “DOGE affiliates” access to data, interpreting the broadness as being applicable to the entire staff.
Trump aides circulate plan for complete revamp of foreign aid programs, Nahal Toosi and Daniel Lippman, Politico, 3/19/25
A State Department memo leaked, detailing proposals to restructure USAID by significantly scaling down the aperture and reshuffling mostly into the State Department.
While the memo concedes that many of these proposals require congressional approval and may offer opportunities to walk back current administration cuts, the memo largely aligns with Trump’s known goals to protect particular government interests, especially in opposition of “our geo-political adversaries (such as China).”
See also: The Trump Administration Wants USAID on the Blockchain, Vittoria Elliott, WIRED, 3/20/25 (Archive)
Everyone said “huh?”
Trump Administration Ends Tracking of Kidnapped Ukrainian Children in Russia, Edward Wong and Robert Jimison, The New York Times, 3/18/25 (Archive)
As a casualty of halts on foreign aid contracts, Yale University’s Humanitarian Lab’s partnership with the State Department and Europol to track abducted Ukrainian children was frozen. Concerns arose that the database of preserved evidence may have been permanently deleted, posing a devastating blow to investigations and indicating the severe impact of these program cuts.
See also: State Dept denies deleting data on halted program tracking abducted Ukrainian children, Daphne Psaledakis and Humeyra Pamuk, Reuters, 3/19/25 (Archive) – While the data may still exist, researchers still do not have access, and some still express concern that it may have been compromised in the relocation.
See also: ‘A slap in the face’: activists reel as Trump administration removes crucial missing Indigenous peoples report, Adria R Walker, The Guardian, 3/20/25 (Archive) – A key report by the Not Invisible Act Commission providing detailed data and recommendations concerning the missing and murdered Indigenous peoples crisis has been removed from the federal website. Organizers and researchers respond “what does this mean for the future of other information that supports our work?”
HHS removes surgeon general’s gun violence advisory from its website, Jacqueline Howard and Deidre McPhillips, CNN 3/18/25 (Archive)
The surgeon general’s advisory on gun violence has been removed from the US Department Health and Human Services website in compliance with Trump’s Executive Order on Protecting Second Amendment Rights, removing easy access to data on gun-related injury and death. The advisory is archived here.
Pentagon restores some webpages honoring minority service members but defends DEI purge, Leah Willingham, Jennifer Sinco Kelleher andTara Copp, PBS 3/18/25 (Archive)
While grateful for restoration of some pages, many remain outraged at the mass erasure of historical documentation. As Mark Matsunaga, former journalist, responded – “they’re still eliminating all kinds of content — photos, articles, social media posts — that all help Americans to understand how diverse their military is,” he said. “Clearly this is part of an attempt to whitewash history.”
See also: Massive purge of Pentagon websites includes content on Holocaust remembrance, sexual assault and suicide prevention, Natasha Bertrand, Haley Britzky and Oren Liebermann, CNN 3/19/25 (Archive) – showcasing the breadth of automated errors and concerningly questionable categorizations of “DEI,” leaving many to wonder what was an accident and what is an indicator of things to come.
See also: Here are all the ways people are disappearing from government websites, Huo Jingnan and Quil Lawrence, NPR, 3/19/25 (Archive) – showcasing the urgency in tone of these demanded changes and the harrowing implications. “The removals aren't universal, and sometimes pages are restored as agencies figure out what compliance means. Transgender and non-binary people, on the other hand, are explicitly targeted by a separate executive order and faced the most consistent removal from government websites. Historians warn that this kind of systematic erasure has in the past come when governments strip rights from people, starting from the most marginalized groups.”
Threads & Social Posts
I fear for the unauthenticated web, Seth Larson, 3/20/25 (Archive)
A quick expression of the various mundane ways our data is at risk.
Videos, Podcasts & Clips
DOGE Is Doing the Opposite of Government Auditing, Uncanny Valley by WIRED, 3/20/25 (Archive)
WIRED’s Vittoria Elliott talks about learnings from her story on DOGE after speaking with federal auditors.
“But I think even the term government efficiency, are we using efficiency in the way that you and I might understand it like, this is faster and cleaner and better for us as end user? Or are we using efficiency in like the private equity sense, which is like, this is better at funneling money to private industry and specifically to the people at the top of private industry?”
See also: ‘It’s a Heist’: Real Federal Auditors Are Horrified by DOGE, Vittoria Elliot, WIRED, 3/18/25 (Archive)
Semi-Related
French Researcher Denied Entry to U.S. for Disliking Trump: Report, Matt Novak, Gizmodo, 3/20/25 (Archive)
As France has loudly criticized the Trump administration’s actions culling scientific research and declared support for distressed US researchers and scientists, a French researcher was detained at the border and denied entry. Maybe it’s a coincidence. Maybe it’s retaliation. Either way, it doesn’t bode well for international information exchange.
Don’t forget to back up your data.