Trump and opinion dynamics

The January 2020 issue of PhysicsWorld includes an article on 'The physics of public opinion', written by Rachel Brazil. The article focuses on the claim made by French physicist, Serge Galam, that Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 US Presidential election can be explained using his model of 'minority opinion spreading'.

Galam's work models how opinions evolve in a network of human agents. The idea is that an individual's beliefs can be changed by social interactions with people holding other beliefs. However, Galam also represents the fact that some people can be more stubborn in retaining their initial beliefs. In particular, he models the way in which an initial minority opinion can eventually become the majority opinion, if the proportion of stubborn people is larger in the initial minority group than it is in the initial majority group:

'An opinion that starts in the minority can quickly spread as long as it is above a base threshold...As few as 2% more stubborn agents on one side puts the tipping point at a very low value of around 17%, which leads to the unfortunate conclusion that to win a public debate, what matters is not convincing a majority of people from the start, but finding a way to increase the proportion of stubborn agents on your side.'

This is interesting work, but more problematic is Galam's attempt to use a variation on this theme to explain Trump's 2016 victory:

'In the case of the 2016 US presidential elections, Galam says the prevailing factor was peoples’ "frozen prejudices". He argues that Trump’s outrageous statements, though initially seen as repellent by most voters, managed to activate their hidden or unconscious prejudices. First, many Trump supporters shifted to Hillary Clinton, rejecting his statements with great outrage, leading to a decrease in support. But the initial outrage led to more public debates with an automatic increase in the number of local ties. At those points, “it’s like flipping a coin, but with a coin biased along the leading prejudice”, Galam says. Then many voters started to swing in favour of Trump.'

There are two problems with this. The first is the explanatory dependence upon the theoretical concept of 'frozen' or 'unconscious' prejudices. This sounds almost like a retreat into the mysterious world of Freudian psychoanalysis, with its array of unverifiable unconscious motives.

Moreover, the notion that there is some form of latent fascism or Nazism within society, just waiting for an opportunity to gain ascendancy, plays the role of a tribal myth within Progressive politics. The Enlightened Ones urge continual vigilance against this ever-present threat, and such appeals perform the function of enhancing group cohesion. Galam's work therefore falls into an extant genre of Progressive literature, which has flourished in the wake of the Brexit referendum and Trump's election victory. 

The second problem with Galam's proposal is that there is already an adequate and much simpler explanation: 

Trump won the 2016 election because a critical proportion of blue-collar voters rationally assessed their changing economic circumstances and prospects, and concluded that their interests were better represented by Trump than the Democrats.

Unfortunately, to accept this explanation would require those within Progressive politics to accept their own culpability in bringing Trump to power. Better, perhaps, to believe in the existence of sinister, hidden prejudices.

Indeed, if there's one phenomenon which does call out for an explanation within social physics, it's the very spread of Progressive politics and political-correctness in recent decades. Back in the 1980s, politically-correct opinions were minority opinions held only by vocal, stubborn and fanatical groups. Today, these ideas have spread to become mainstream within the professional middle-classes. 

Sadly, one suspects that those working in academia are prejudiced about the nature of prejudice.