Where did you get your political preferences?

We decide what to believe by deciding who to believe

I believe that people obtain their political preferences from role models. That is, there are people you wish to emulate and gain approval from, and you adapt your political beliefs to align with those people.

Samuel J. Abrams reports on a recent survey of Jewish Americans that found that almost three-fourths prefer President Biden to former President Trump. This may seem a bit odd, given that President Trump’s foreign policy is considered more favorable to Israel and President Biden strongly supports affirmative action, which tends to work against Jews.

Abrams explains the result as follows:

Large numbers of Jews believe that abortion (26 percent), climate change (25 percent), and gun-related issues (24 percent) are hugely important to them come November 2024. It is noteworthy that Jewish voters under 40 consider climate change as the top issue for 2024 (40 percent) and this aligns with younger Americans who are appreciably more worried about the environment than their older generational counterparts.

Nonetheless, the issues that Jews are worried about come 2024 are not particularly salient to Americans. Based on the Gallup poll, even after the Dobbs’ Supreme Court decision, just 2 percent of Americans state that abortion is the most important issue facing the nation and 5 percent feel the same way for guns and gun control. Climate change only picks up 2 percent among Americans as well. While these questions are not perfectly identical, Americans are generally far more worried about immigration policy, crime and violence, a broken judicial system, and issues related to race relations and racism than issues of the environment and abortion.

Abrams is using a naive model to explain Jews’ preference for Mr. Biden. In the naive model, they started with a set of beliefs about issues and a ranking of the importance of those issues. They then proceeded to select the candidate whose views on the issues they considered most important aligned best with their own.

A cynical model is that people align tribally with a party. Its leaders then tell them what to believe.

I have a third model, which is that people decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. In the case of politics, that means what I call role models. People adapt their views on issues in order to minimize dissonance relative to their role models. It used to be that role models came mostly from your intimate world—friends, families, co-workers. But in the age of electronic communications, people may obtain remote role models.

For many Jews, their role models are people in high-status cultural positions who are inclined to hate Mr. Trump and prefer Mr. Biden. These role models make Jews want to feel comfortable supporting Mr. Biden. The easiest path to supporting him is to put an emphasis on the issues of abortion and climate, where they are inclined to agree with him, rather than on the issues of support for Israel and affirmative action. If they focused a lot on the latter, they might find themselves disagreeing with Biden, which would mean having to depart from their role models.

I have observed this in conversation with friends who are Democrats, both Jews and non-Jews alike. That is, they have become very passionate about the issues of climate and abortion, where they feel comfortable with where the Democrats stand. They are much less inclined to get into the issues of crime or inflation, where they might feel less comfortable about where Democrats stand.

In short, I am saying that Jews’ inclination to view climate and abortion as important issues is caused by their desire to rationalize their support for President Biden, rather than the causality running the other way. The causal model that I have in mind—for everyone, not just Jews—is that we have a small set of people who we wish to emulate and get approval from, and we adapt our political preferences to align with those people.

If Republicans do well in local races in 2024, pollsters may report that “The issue of crime was really important.” Instead, I would suggest that people found role models (not necessarily celebrities; the role models could just be influential friends) who favored Republicans. They then rationalized voting Republican by saying that crime mattered to them.

If you want to change people’s minds, you have to change their role models. As long as many Jews have as role models prominent figures in law, academia, journalism, and entertainment who lean left, Jews will prefer Democrats to Republicans.

If your role models are fine with drag queen story hour and Lia Thomas competing in women’s swimming, then you will repress any doubts you might otherwise have. You will dismiss as rubes those of us who have a problem with such activities.

Ross Douthat talks about the problem faced by conservative elites. He points to

seven decades in which conservatism’s attempted elite-replacement project has repeatedly and conspicuously failed. The mandarin class has moved either gradually or sharply left more often than it has been pulled back rightward

Douthat asks,

How was the 19th-century Protestant establishment built, how did it harness the popular energy of the Great Awakenings, why did it begin to unravel after the Civil War? Why did liberal Protestantism and the WASP elite enjoy a sunset glow in 1950 … and seemingly collapse completely a generation after that? What were the strategic decisions, the blunders by its rivals, the catalysts that transformed academic progressivism from an ivory-tower fashion circa 1980 into an overbearing elite consensus by 2021?

To those who are to the right of center, the progressive academic elites seem to have done more than enough to disgrace themselves. The fact that conservatives’ attempts to replace these elites have “repeatedly and conspicuously failed” is hard for us to explain.

Consider the recent news concerning racial preferences. The Supreme Court may have ruled against affirmative action in college admissions. But as role models on issues of race, is the ruling going to cause Ibram X. Kendi and Nicole Hannah-Jones to be replaced with Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, and Coleman Hughes? If so, then we will see quite a preference cascade toward race-neutral admissions. But if not, then disobedience with the spirit of the ruling will be be status symbol.

Until the role models change, my prediction is that the DEI juggernaut will proceed forward. Perhaps readers will be able to formulate a bet between me and Richard Hanania.

When children enter the American school system, they encounter role models that are overwhelmingly on the left. The young people who proceed to college see this even more.

When I was in college, at Swarthmore of all places, my main role model was Professor Bernard Saffran, who was center-right. I do not think that college students today are likely to have such an opportunity. Centrists and even old-style liberals are rapidly aging out of the system.

I conceived the Fantasy Intellectual Teams project as a way of trying to elevate the status of intellectuals who use a rigorous thought process, regardless of where they land politically. I hope that somebody comes up with a way to achieve that goal.

As it is, we are stuck in a bad equilibrium in terms of who becomes an influential role model. As someone to the right of center, I see progressive role models as frequently mistaken. As someone with strong views about what constitutes intellectual rigor, I see academic role models as falling horribly short.

This essay is part of a series on human interdependence.

Substacks referenced above:

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10 Notes on the End of Affirmative Action

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Why SFFA v Harvard Matters