GOTV (Get Out The Vote) is the greatest nightmare for Republicans today. Democrats of all sorts, cowed in a multitude of different ways over the last 50 years, will learn to believe in themselves, and to vote regularly, in both Presidential and off years, up and down the ticket, and even run for office. When we vote, we win. We have the numbers to flip all of the seemingly Red states of the former Confederacy, even Alabama, in the next few cycles.
Our book for today, which I will use to explain much of this, is Learned Helplessness: A Theory for the Age of Personal Control, by Peterson, Maier, and Seligman. It explains how helplessness arises in many different situations, how it operates, how it can be created and enforced, and also what can be done about it. Like using GOTV to get people out of the helplessness of "My vote doesn't matter."
When experience with uncontrollable events leads to the expectation that future events will elude control, disruptions in motivation, emotion, and learning may occur. This phenomenon has been called learned helplessness.
The most important result of research on helplessness is that those who have learned not to be helpless cannot be taught to be helpless again. The history of government and religion amply confirms this lesson, while showing how hard it has been to create conditions in which not being helpless can flourish. And yet we see it arise over and over again, and sometimes radically transform societies. But then the forces of reaction react and try their worst to undo it all, over and over again.
We discussed those motives in Grokking Republicans: Authoritarian Followers, Leaders, and Doubles. Now we are going to examine specific techniques, and how to counter them, particularly in the context of voting.
Republicans are in full freakout mode over Democratic GOTV. It is not just that they will lose elections, and that Democratic and Progressive measures will be enacted. They believe that this is an existential threat, because they will no longer be the self-proclaimed aristocracy of America and the world, and they are convinced that Democrats will be just as evil to them as they are to all of those whom they hate and revile and despise. Therefore they must do anything and everything possible to prevent the rest of us from realizing our power, from rising up out of our former helplessness. It is going to be ugly.
Among the most cherished values on the right are total obedience to approved authority and total belief in religious dogma and ideology, and the imposition of total control, physical and mental, on others. This is justified with the notion that the Right People are inherently more moral, smarter, and more important than everybody else. The question for them, then, is how to convince others not to resist this in any way.
Teaching people to be helpless is a great racket if the feeling of total control is your thing, whether abusing a spouse or child, or exercising tyranny over a nation or an empire. The rewards include wealth, power, social status, and sex. All you have to do is completely give yourself over to evil, to sell your soul to the Devil, to become a complete Authoritarian of the kinds we have been studying. Research has shown a great deal about how that works, and also what it takes to teach animals and people not to be helpless.
The forms that concerns us is the lie that individual votes don't matter, or that the parties are the same, or that even if you win elections the system is rigged so that you can't address the actual problems, combined with actual threats against disfavored populations. It worked as designed for nearly a century under Jim Crow, and large parts of it are still active. But we are at the end of that time now, because we have the numbers to flip the entire South if we just register eligible voters and get them to the polls for a few years. Yes, as I said, even Alabama.
The Fundamental Experiments
It is worthwhile to read about all of the experimental evidence laid out in Learned Helplessness, because it explains many phenomena, and suggests many remedies. Also because the book describes a scientific revolution, the creation of a new paradigm for psychology, in a way that greatly illuminates how science actually works. But this particular sequence of experiments is fundamental, and gives us what we need to confront voter helplessness.
- Various mammals, including mice and dogs, will try to escape from an electric shock over and over, even if they cannot, up to some point, but after that will become helpless and cower in a corner each time as long as the shock continues.
- If there is an escape into another section of the experiment where there are no shocks, they will take it every time.
- If the other section also shocks them, they will stop trying to escape, and cower in a corner, as in the first experiment.
- If, at that point, the shocks are given only in one section, they do not find that out, and continue to cower helplessly.
- If the experimenter forces them to escape to the shock-free section, they will at first resist, but after several tries will go back to normal escaping behavior, ceasing to be helpless.
- After learning not to be helpless once, they cannot be taught to be helpless again, and will continue trying to escape from then on.
There are further phenomena, including vicarious helplessness (learning to be helpless by watching someone else confront unavoidable unpleasantness) and group helplessness (creating a shared culture of despair).
Suppressing the vote
Why do people not vote? Because their votes seem not to matter. One party is locked in, or both parties are just the same because they have been bought by the same corporate interests, or winning elections does not allow the victorious party to do anything of value to the voters. But those are all lies. If your vote did not matter, Republicans would not be putting so much effort into suppressing it.
Major populations of eligible voters have been systematically targeted with measures designed to teach them over and over again to be helpless, and not to try to vote. This has been only partially successful, but it has allowed Republicans to get in from time to time and do enormous damage. And now we are in the process of undoing that damage, to voters and to our world, as widely as possible.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 undid Klan violence, literacy tests, and other oppressive practices of the Jim Crow era. Poll taxes were banned by Constitutional Amendment. Majority-minority districts were created to guarantee minority representation (although at the cost of reinforcing Republican majorities in many places). With great effort, multitudes were brought out of the helplessness of the times and began voting, so that significant numbers of Black politicians were elected at all levels of government. But then the forces of racial oppression regrouped, and found ways to prevent voting or dilute its impact.
These measures include, but are not limited to
- Claiming both sides are the same
- Gerrymanders
- Voter ID
- At-large elections
- Wrecking education, especially cutting out civics
- Cutting social programs at every opportunity
- Union-busting so that workers cannot organize economically or politically
- Voter purges
- Threatening to go after undocumented immigrants if legal immigrants start voting
- Accusing legitimate GOTV projects of voter fraud
- Administrative and judicial corruption
- Regulatory capture, putting industry insiders in charge of regulating their industries
- Claims of voter registration fraud
- Defunding voter registration organizations
- Vicious propaganda against voter registration organizations
- Legal restrictions on voter registration
- Taking away voting rights from felons
- Providing false voting information to voters
- "Losing" registrations
Two generations after the Voting Rights Act, a new generation has again been brought up in a significant degree of electoral helplessness in seemingly permanent Red states, and we have to do the work of registration and GOTV all over again. But this time we are not looking to elect modest minorities of Black, Latino, and Asian officials; women; people who understand real economics and can blow holes in Reaganomics with every breath; believers in science; LGBTs; and so on. We have the numbers to take over every state in the entire former Confederacy within the next few election cycles, and several more besides. Yes, as I keep saying, even Alabama.
Many human institutions are founded on the ability to teach other humans to feel helpless, and thus not to try to do anything about it. Others are founded on the ability to teach other humans not to be helpless, whether by encouraging them to act together for various purposes, or to form their own understanding and stand up for what they value and believe. The first category includes the propaganda of tyrants, much of military training, dogmatic Religious Right education, and science denial, including Market Fundamentalist economics. On the other side stand the organizations for empowering individuals to act against such forces, such as some political parties, labor unions, and issue organizations; educational and cultural organizations of every kind; and the resources for individuals to learn critical thinking and standing on their own.
How do oppressors teach people that they should not vote? In the bad old days of Jim Crow, Whites threatened Blacks with loss of jobs, or with violence, sometimes even death. They put in poll taxes, literacy tests, and other forms of voter suppression with the permission of the Supreme Court. They made sure that Blacks could not get adequate education, again with Court permission. As Lee Atwater described it much later, racist Whites were fine with acting against their own economic interests
as long as Blacks got hurt worse.
After the Civil War, in the Reconstruction period, when many former Confederates were ineligible to vote, there were Black majorities in several Southern states electing Blacks to state and local office and to Congress. That was undone by Klan terrorism and then Jim Crow legislation. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which we can think of as a Second Reconstruction, undid a lot of that, but left Whites in charge in a multitude of other ways, and left many other forms of systemic discrimination in place. Whites then busied themselves inventing more, including ingenious ways of lying about it. Most of all, racist Republicans and racist Democrats realigned into a single party, which then invited in the homophobes and misogynists and Mammonites in the Religious Right.
In the Reagan enhancement of the Southern Strategy Republicans set out to cripple government so that even electing Democrats was not enough to get anything done. Any effective government activity was demonized as Communism. Civil Rights are Communism, and Civil Rights workers are Communist outside agitators. Social programs are Communism. Health care is Communism with Death Panels. Regulation is Communist Central Planning. Taxes are Communism. Science is Communism. Gun safety measures are worse than Communism; they are One World Government with UN black helicopters and FEMA death camps. Renewable energy is Communism. Marriage Equality, however, is not Communism. Everybody knows how homophobic Russia is. Marriage Equality is the work of the Antichrist.
Now, finally, we have begun the Third Reconstruction in which the remnants of the old South, the neo-Confederates, the Religious Right, and so on, will find themselves firmly and permanently in the minority.
It would have happened some time ago, but for voter suppression, gerrymanders, and teaching people to be helpless. The remedy for all three is well known: GOTV.
Reviving the Vote
It is well-known that Barack Obama put together the best election teams ever, with the best ground game ever. Now that he is not going to run again, those who ran those campaigns have been free to look for opportunities to make a difference elsewhere. The most notable such project before this year was Battleground Texas, which has raised many millions of dollars and recruited tens of thousands of volunteers to work on getting legal immigrants to become citizens, citizens to register and get ID, and registered voters to turn out on the various election days. Some are even being encouraged to run for office.
We have the numbers for turning Texas Blue, starting with those eligible to become citizens and register, and continuing with the demographic shifts that are locked in for the next generation. That is to say, children already born who will reach voting age year by year. It isn't a project for a single campaign season. It's a big state, and we need a lot of new voters. We also need to teach people to vote in every election, not just in November of Presidential election years.
Similarly, the New Georgia Project has the numbers for unregistered Blacks and Latinos and Asians. There are more than 800,000 of them, and we only need about 250,000 more votes to flip the state completely. If we register 90% of those eligible, which we know we can do, that is more than 700,000 new voters. If even half of them turn out, that is more than 350,000 new votes. It is no wonder that Georgia Republicans have joined in the national freakout. Georgia's Secretary of State has pulled out the anti-ACORN playbook and is suing the New Georgia project for following the law, claiming that turning in a piddling number of invalid registration forms as the law requires is massive voter fraud. Also, he has "lost" more than 40,000 of the new registrations that were turned in to his office, but never made it to the counties to be enrolled.
The Bannock Street Project has targeted ten states for GOTV, and Moral Mondays is working in 14 states. They are somewhat late to the party for this year, but both are determined to keep up a continuous effort until we turn the entire South and several other states Blue. Yes, believe it, even Alabama.
Becoming Effective
When we next take the House, the first order of business must be nuking the filibuster on legislation, and passing a new, comprehensive Voting Rights Act to outlaw the gerrymander and require non-partisan redistricting; to outlaw Voter Suppression and put in standards for access to polls; and to create a new, SCOTUS-proof preclearance list including several states that lost major voter suppression cases since SCOTUS struck down the old list based on the lie that it depended only on data from the 1960s.
Then we have to be prepared for Supreme Court nominations. The next President, whether Hillary or perhaps (if a political miracle occurs) someone less centrist, should get two, three, perhaps even four nominations. Scalia and Kennedy will be 88 in ten years. We could go from a 4-5 minority on the court to a 6-3 majority.
At any rate, with a President, two Houses of Congress, and no immovable filibuster, we get to line up any or all of those hundreds of bills that Nancy Pelosi put through the House in the 2009-2011 session, rewritten without so many concessions to Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats. Then we can talk about a real Progressive agenda.
When we win, we are going to win big. And when Republicans lose this one, they may implode completely, like the Federalists of old, who became the Party of No to Thomas Jefferson in 1800, became irrelevant nationally by 1808, and disappeared completely in 1815. I wouldn't be surprised if the Religious Right, which has been bluffing about forming a third party, decided that the political grapes are too sour, and that politics is too sinful a business for them to dirty their hands in if they can't take over and impose Christian Shari'a on us all.
Notes on Other Applications
Learned helplessness is an extremely valuable discovery for two separate kinds of reason.
It helps us to understand how many problems in human society come to be, and gives us help in designing interventions to undo them, or redesigning parts of our social system to prevent helplessness in the first place.
It is also a scientific breakthrough in psychology at the same level as Pavlov's original experiments in simple conditioning, and the later experiments commonly associated with B. F. Skinner on operant conditioning. Pavlovian conditioning is typified by ringing a bell before giving food to a dog, and observing that the dog then salivates on hearing the bell, before the food appears. Skinnerian conditioning is typified by a pigeon in a box learning to press a bar to get food, and then to press a particular bar depending on stimuli presented to it. Learned helplessness, however, demonstrates conditions that neither of those theories can explain, in which an animal or human will fail to learn, in which certain behaviors are suppressed.
Both simple conditioning and operant conditioning were new ideas when they first appeared that provided new insights into behavior. Both opened up a multitude of lines of research. Both were misapplied in an attempt to explain all of psychology. Learned helplessness cannot be explained in the Stimulus-Response framework. It requires a notion of cognition. I cannot lay out all of the experiments that were carefully designed to demonstrate that none of the proposed S-R mechanisms could explain learned helplessness, and that demonstrated other features that psychologists were not taking account of.
Learned helplessness is a robust theory, applying in many animal models.
Escape deficits have been demonstrated in cats, goldfish, gerbils, guinea pigs, mice, rats, and people.
It also applies to a wide range of human behavior, including all kinds of oppressions and depressions. The application to education is particularly important, since we have experimental evidence that inescapable oppression lowers grades unless students can be taught to be resilient to helplessness.
Helplessness transfers from one stimulus or response to another. Animals trained not to avoid shock are slow to learn to escape from water. Humans trained not to report abuse suffer from a multitude of other cognitive and emotional deficits.
Thank You to Everybody Here
I have continuously updated the first Diary in this series, Grokking Republicans Book List, with links to each weekly Diary, so Hotlisting or bookmarking just that one will give you easy access to all of the others for future reference.
This is the last book Diary in this series. But it is not the last time I will visit the various kinds of research we have looked at, and apply them to other forms of Republicanthink, and what we can do about it. I am going to take a bit of time off to catch up on things I have neglected, and review the Diary drafts I have started but have not been able to finish while working on this series, on guns, Global Warming, economics, religion, undoing oppressions…I would like to write about education, but it is such a mess that I hardly know where to begin. Well, I'll think of something.
I will be an Election Judge next week, in charge of a polling place here in Columbus IN. The aftermath of the elections will keep us all busy for a time, particularly if control of the Senate ends up not decided until the runoffs, and possibly even until some new Independents decide which party to caucus with when the new Congress starts up in January.
Then the 2016 campaign will begin in earnest.
I have had a wonderful response to many of these Diaries from commenters and the wider community, rescuing or republishing some of them, including Community Spotlight today. I know that there are many who read and learned something but did not comment. Thanks to you all.
See you soon.
