Latest news with #Outraged:WhyWeFightAboutMoralityandPoliticsandHowtoFindCommonGround
Yahoo
23-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
News Analysis: Trump consistently frames policy around 'fairness,' trading on American frustration
In a sit-down interview with Fox News last month, President Trump and his billionaire "efficiency" advisor Elon Musk framed new tariffs on foreign trading partners as a simple matter of fairness. "I said, 'Here's what we're going to do: reciprocal. Whatever you charge, I'm charging,'" Trump said of a conversation he'd had with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. "I'm doing that with every country." "It seems fair," Musk said. Trump laughed. "It does," he said. "It's like, fair is fair," said Musk, the world's richest person. The moment was one of many in recent months in which Trump and his allies have framed his policy agenda around the concept of fairness — which experts say is a potent political message at a time when many Americans feel thwarted by inflation, high housing costs and other systemic barriers to getting ahead. "Trump has a good sense for what will resonate with folks, and I think we all have a deep sense of morality — and so we all recognize the importance of fairness," said Kurt Gray, a psychology professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of the book "Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground." "At the end of the day," Gray said, "we're always worried about not getting what we deserve." Read more: Trump-appointed judge dissents in California ammo case with gun-filled YouTube video In addition to his "Fair and Reciprocal Plan" for tariffs, Trump has cited fairness in his decisions to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, ban transgender athletes from competing in sports, scale back American aid to embattled Ukraine and pardon his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump has invoked fairness in meetings with a host of world leaders, including Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. He has suggested that his crusade to end "diversity, equity and inclusion" programs is all about fairness, couched foreign aid and assistance to undocumented immigrants as unfair to struggling American taxpayers, and attacked the Justice Department, the media and federal judges who have ruled against his administration as harboring unfair biases against him. Trump and Musk — through his "Department of Government Efficiency," which is not a U.S. agency — have orchestrated a sweeping attack on the federal workforce largely by framing it as a liberal "deep state" that either works in unfair ways against the best interests of conservative Americans, or doesn't work at all thanks to lopsided work-from-home allowances. "It's unfair to the millions of people in the United States who are, in fact, working hard from job sites and not from their home," Trump said. In a Justice Department speech this month, Trump repeatedly complained about the courts treating him and his allies unfairly, and reiterated baseless claims that recent elections have been unfair to him, too. "We want fairness in the courts. The courts are a big factor. The elections, which were totally rigged, are a big factor," Trump said. "We have to have honest elections. We have to have borders and we have to have courts and law that's fair, or we're not going to have a country." Before a meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte this month, Trump complained — not for the first time — about European countries not paying their "fair share" to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression, and the U.S. paying too much. "We were treated very unfairly, as we always are by every country," Trump said. Almost exclusively, Trump's invocations of fairness cast him, his supporters or the U.S. as victims, and his critics and political opponents as the architects and defenders of a decidedly unfair status quo that has persisted for generations. And he has repeatedly used that framework to justify actions that he says are aimed at tearing down that status quo — even if it means breaching norms or bucking the law. Trump has suggested that unfavorable media coverage of him is unfair and therefore "illegal," and that judges who rule against him are unfair liberal activists who should be impeached. Of course, grievance politics are not new — nor is the importance of "fairness" in democratic governance. In 2006, the late Harvard scholar of political behavior Sidney Verba wrote of fairness being important in various political regimes but "especially central in a democracy." Verba noted that fairness comes in different forms — including equal rights under the law, equal voice in the political sphere, and policies that result in equal outcomes for people. But the perception of fairness in a political system, he wrote, often comes down to whether people feel heard. "Democracies are sounder when the reason why some lose does not rest on the fact that they are invisible to those who make decisions," Verba wrote. "Equal treatment may be unattainable, but equal consideration is a goal worth striving for." According to several experts, Trump's appeal is in part based on his ability to make average people feel heard, regardless of whether his policies actually speak to their needs. Read more: Federal Reserve sees tariffs raising inflation this year, keeps key rate unchanged Gray said there is "distributive fairness," which asks, "Are you getting as much as you deserve?" and "procedural fairness," which asks, "Are things being decided in a fair way? Did you get voice? Did you get input?" One of Trump's skills, Gray said, is using people's inherent sense that there is a lack of distributive fairness in the country to justify policies that have little to do with such inequities, and to undermine processes that are in place to ensure procedural fairness, such as judicial review, but aren't producing the outcomes he personally desires. "What Trump does a good job at is blurring the line between rules you can follow or shouldn't follow," he said. "When he disobeys the rules and gets called out, he goes, 'Well those moral rules are unjust.'" People who voted for Trump and have legitimate feelings that things are unfair then give him the benefit of the doubt, Gray said, because he appears to be speaking their language — and on their behalf. "He's not just saying that it's him. He's saying it's on behalf of the people he's representing, and the people he's representing do think things are unfair," Gray said. "They're not getting enough in their life, and they're not getting their due." Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Center for Right-Wing Studies at UC Berkeley and author of "Empire of Resentment: Populism's Toxic Embrace of Nationalism," said Trump and his supporters have built him up as a leader "interested in fixing the unfairness to the working class." Read more: 'Freaked out': Fear, uncertainty grip California's immigrant community as Trump rolls out crackdown plan But that idea is premised on another notion, even more central to Trump's persona, that there are "enemies" out there — Democrats, coastal elites, immigrants — who are the cause of that unfairness, Rosenthal said. "He names enemies, and he's very good at that — as all right-wing authoritarians are," Rosenthal said. Such politics are based on a concept known as "replacement theory," which tells people to fear others because there are only so many resources to go around, Rosenthal said. The theory dovetails with the argument Trump often makes, that undocumented immigrants receiving jobs or benefits is an inherent threat to his MAGA base. "The sense of dispossession is absolutely fundamental and has been for some time," Rosenthal said. John T. Woolley, co-director of the American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara, said Trump has "a remarkable capacity for constructing the world in a way that favors him" — even if that's as the victim — and appears to be an "outlier" among presidents in terms of how often he focuses on fairness as a political motif. "Certainly since his first term with impeachment, 'the Russia hoax,' 'dishonest media,' 'fake news' and then 'weaponizing' of justice — he's constructed a kind of victim persona, in battle with the deep state, that is now really basic to his interaction with his core MAGA constituency," Woolley said. In coming to terms with Trump's win in November, Democrats have increasingly acknowledged his ability to speak to Americans who feel left behind — and started to pick up on fairness as a motif of their own, in part by zeroing in on mega-billionaire Musk. In an interview with NPR last month, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) evoked the idea of unfairness in the system by saying American government is working for rich people like Musk, but not for everyone else. "Everything feels increasingly like a scam," she said. She and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have since embarked on a nationwide "Fighting Oligarchy" tour, where they have blasted Musk's role in government and questioned how his actions, or those of Trump, have helped average Americans in the slightest. "At the end of the day, the top 1% may have enormous wealth and power, but they are just 1%," Sanders wrote Friday on X. "When the 99% stand together, we can transform our country." Get the L.A. Times Politics newsletter. Deeply reported insights into legislation, politics and policy from Sacramento, Washington and beyond, in your inbox twice per week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
23-03-2025
- Business
- Los Angeles Times
News Analysis: Trump consistently frames policy around ‘fairness,' trading on American frustration
In a sit-down interview with Fox News last month, President Trump and his billionaire 'efficiency' advisor Elon Musk framed new tariffs on foreign trading partners as a simple matter of fairness. 'I said, 'Here's what we're going to do: reciprocal. Whatever you charge, I'm charging,'' Trump said of a conversation he'd had with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. 'I'm doing that with every country.' 'It seems fair,' Musk said. Trump laughed. 'It does,' he said. 'It's like, fair is fair,' said Musk, the world's richest person. The moment was one of many in recent months in which Trump and his allies have framed his policy agenda around the concept of fairness — which experts say is a potent political message at a time when many Americans feel thwarted by inflation, high housing costs and other systemic barriers to getting ahead. 'Trump has a good sense for what will resonate with folks, and I think we all have a deep sense of morality — and so we all recognize the importance of fairness,' said Kurt Gray, a psychology professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of the book 'Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground.' 'At the end of the day,' Gray said, 'we're always worried about not getting what we deserve.' In addition to his 'Fair and Reciprocal Plan' for tariffs, Trump has cited fairness in his decisions to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, ban transgender athletes from competing in sports, scale back American aid to embattled Ukraine and pardon his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump has invoked fairness in meetings with a host of world leaders, including Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. He has suggested that his crusade to end 'diversity, equity and inclusion' programs is all about fairness, couched foreign aid and assistance to undocumented immigrants as unfair to struggling American taxpayers, and attacked the Justice Department, the media and federal judges who have ruled against his administration as harboring unfair biases against him. Trump and Musk — through his 'Department of Government Efficiency,' which is not a U.S. agency — have orchestrated a sweeping attack on the federal workforce largely by framing it as a liberal 'deep state' that either works in unfair ways against the best interests of conservative Americans, or doesn't work at all thanks to lopsided work-from-home allowances. 'It's unfair to the millions of people in the United States who are, in fact, working hard from job sites and not from their home,' Trump said. In a Justice Department speech this month, Trump repeatedly complained about the courts treating him and his allies unfairly, and reiterated baseless claims that recent elections have been unfair to him, too. 'We want fairness in the courts. The courts are a big factor. The elections, which were totally rigged, are a big factor,' Trump said. 'We have to have honest elections. We have to have borders and we have to have courts and law that's fair, or we're not going to have a country.' Before a meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte this month, Trump complained — not for the first time — about European countries not paying their 'fair share' to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression, and the U.S. paying too much. 'We were treated very unfairly, as we always are by every country,' Trump said. Almost exclusively, Trump's invocations of fairness cast him, his supporters or the U.S. as victims, and his critics and political opponents as the architects and defenders of a decidedly unfair status quo that has persisted for generations. And he has repeatedly used that framework to justify actions that he says are aimed at tearing down that status quo — even if it means breaching norms or bucking the law. Trump has suggested that unfavorable media coverage of him is unfair and therefore 'illegal,' and that judges who rule against him are unfair liberal activists who should be impeached. Of course, grievance politics are not new — nor is the importance of 'fairness' in democratic governance. In 2006, the late Harvard scholar of political behavior Sidney Verba wrote of fairness being important in various political regimes but 'especially central in a democracy.' Verba noted that fairness comes in different forms — including equal rights under the law, equal voice in the political sphere, and policies that result in equal outcomes for people. But the perception of fairness in a political system, he wrote, often comes down to whether people feel heard. 'Democracies are sounder when the reason why some lose does not rest on the fact that they are invisible to those who make decisions,' Verba wrote. 'Equal treatment may be unattainable, but equal consideration is a goal worth striving for.' According to several experts, Trump's appeal is in part based on his ability to make average people feel heard, regardless of whether his policies actually speak to their needs. Gray said there is 'distributive fairness,' which asks, 'Are you getting as much as you deserve?' and 'procedural fairness,' which asks, 'Are things being decided in a fair way? Did you get voice? Did you get input?' One of Trump's skills, Gray said, is using people's inherent sense that there is a lack of distributive fairness in the country to justify policies that have little to do with such inequities, and to undermine processes that are in place to ensure procedural fairness, such as judicial review, but aren't producing the outcomes he personally desires. 'What Trump does a good job at is blurring the line between rules you can follow or shouldn't follow,' he said. 'When he disobeys the rules and gets called out, he goes, 'Well those moral rules are unjust.'' People who voted for Trump and have legitimate feelings that things are unfair then give him the benefit of the doubt, Gray said, because he appears to be speaking their language — and on their behalf. 'He's not just saying that it's him. He's saying it's on behalf of the people he's representing, and the people he's representing do think things are unfair,' Gray said. 'They're not getting enough in their life, and they're not getting their due.' Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Center for Right-Wing Studies at UC Berkeley and author of 'Empire of Resentment: Populism's Toxic Embrace of Nationalism,' said Trump and his supporters have built him up as a leader 'interested in fixing the unfairness to the working class.' But that idea is premised on another notion, even more central to Trump's persona, that there are 'enemies' out there — Democrats, coastal elites, immigrants — who are the cause of that unfairness, Rosenthal said. 'He names enemies, and he's very good at that — as all right-wing authoritarians are,' Rosenthal said. Such politics are based on a concept known as 'replacement theory,' which tells people to fear others because there are only so many resources to go around, Rosenthal said. The theory dovetails with the argument Trump often makes, that undocumented immigrants receiving jobs or benefits is an inherent threat to his MAGA base. 'The sense of dispossession is absolutely fundamental and has been for some time,' Rosenthal said. John T. Woolley, co-director of the American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara, said Trump has 'a remarkable capacity for constructing the world in a way that favors him' — even if that's as the victim — and appears to be an 'outlier' among presidents in terms of how often he focuses on fairness as a political motif. 'Certainly since his first term with impeachment, 'the Russia hoax,' 'dishonest media,' 'fake news' and then 'weaponizing' of justice — he's constructed a kind of victim persona, in battle with the deep state, that is now really basic to his interaction with his core MAGA constituency,' Woolley said. In coming to terms with Trump's win in November, Democrats have increasingly acknowledged his ability to speak to Americans who feel left behind — and started to pick up on fairness as a motif of their own, in part by zeroing in on mega-billionaire Musk. In an interview with NPR last month, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) evoked the idea of unfairness in the system by saying American government is working for rich people like Musk, but not for everyone else. 'Everything feels increasingly like a scam,' she said. She and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have since embarked on a nationwide 'Fighting Oligarchy' tour, where they have blasted Musk's role in government and questioned how his actions, or those of Trump, have helped average Americans in the slightest. 'At the end of the day, the top 1% may have enormous wealth and power, but they are just 1%,' Sanders wrote Friday on X. 'When the 99% stand together, we can transform our country.'
Yahoo
28-01-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Why is everyone so outraged? Kurt Gray has some ideas — and some solutions
Before Kurt Gray wanted to understand the human mind, he was drawn to the physical world. Gray, a social psychologist and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studied geophysics in college until he realized he didn't want to dedicate his career to studying rocks. Instead, he was captivated by what he describes as things 'more real in (people's) hearts,' such as moral convictions and religious beliefs. 'I wanted to make scientific sense of people's deepest beliefs when it comes to morality, politics and religion,' Gray told me recently. Gray now leads the Deepest Beliefs Lab and the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding, which seeks solutions for bridging the moral and social divides that often fuel political conflicts. In his latest book, 'Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground,' released earlier this month, Gray argues that the perception of harm is at the core of all moral judgments. 'We condemn things based on how harmful they feel to us,' he says. In that respect, according to Gray, we are all more alike than we think, regardless of our politics and worldviews. By understanding the emotions that drive our moral judgments — particularly powerful ones like outrage — Gray believes we can foster greater empathy and respect in conversations around contentious issues. 'Studies show that feelings of harm are the master key of morality: all people judge acts as wrong based on how harmful they feel, explaining how even so-called harmless wrongs can be condemned based on harm,' Gray writes in the book. 'This finding provides a new understanding of morality and provides a powerful lingua franca to connect with others across divides.' Gray, who holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and co-authored, with social psychologist Daniel Wegner, 'The Mind Club — Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It Matters,' recently spoke with the Deseret News about how understanding what shapes our moral convictions can help us bridge divides and foster respect toward the other side's worldview. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Deseret News: Let's start by talking about what morality is. What role does it play in our society? Kurt Gray: I think it's important to say from the get-go that I'm a moral psychologist. I study how our mind works, I study what morality does in our society from a descriptive level. I'm not telling folks this is the right thing or this is the wrong thing — that's for philosophers, theologians, pastors, parents. From a scientific perspective, I think morality is this kind of gut feeling we have that something is right or wrong, the kind of visceral sense that someone did a bad thing, that someone deserves a punishment. We're all familiar with the feeling of outrage in our society today, and that's what I'm really focused on and the behaviors that are associated with that feeling. And so morality, as the evolutionary argument goes, evolved to help people live in society better, to cooperate, to suppress our selfish instincts, to work together. Groups where people are less selfish thrive more than the groups that are selfish and are hurting each other. Ultimately, our morals are based on the harms that we see — the threats that we try to protect ourselves, our family and our groups against. And while different people disagree, they don't disagree about the importance of protecting people from harm. What they disagree about is what is harmful and who is particularly vulnerable to victimization. DN: In the book, you talk about how the 'destruction narrative' became prevalent in our political disagreements. What is that? And how does it contribute to polarization today? KG: Every time we make a policy decision on a contentious issue, there are trade-offs. There is harm on both sides. For instance, the issue of abortion: If you move the abortion restrictions earlier, it's going to cause more potential harm to women, who are trying to get reproductive rights. If you move them later, then it harms fetuses and growing babies. So everyone's trying their best to protect themselves and what they care about, but people don't see it that way. What they see is this destruction narrative — the idea that the other side is out to harm and destroy. This plays out in politics, where both Republicans and Democrats think the other group is going to create a hellscape filled with violence for the country and especially for themselves. They view each other as evil and stupid — they're either trying to burn the world down or they don't recognize the truth and are just parroting back talking points from their media environment. But if you dig into how and why people hold fast to their moral convictions — no one is a supervillain who just wants to burn the world down. Instead, we're trying to protect our group and our values. We have evolved more as prey than predators, feeling incredibly vigilant to threats. So rather than a destruction narrative, I think the more accurate narrative to account for how people act in politics is the 'protection narrative.' DN: Many people divide our society into the oppressed and the oppressor. You talk about this dichotomy in terms of 'competing perceptions of victimhood.' How do these perceptions of victimhood fuel conflict? KG: It's natural when people emphasize victimhood when they talk about morality. If someone harms you, your own victimhood is so powerful in your own mind — it's very obvious to you, as opposed to when someone else claims their experience as a victim. So if harm and victimhood is the thing that really underlies morality and that everyone understands, it's one thing that might ring through the noise. The phenomenon of competitive victimhood occurs because if someone thinks you're the victim, you (escape) blame, but if you're the villain then you're punished by everyone and everyone gets outraged at you. So it's a really high-stakes competition for who gets to claim the central role of a victim. We tend to typecast people into: This person is 100% a villain and this person is 100% a victim. Sometimes we typecast ourselves. It's totally fair given people's strong moral convictions to see naturally one person more a victim than another. But when you say that someone's 100% the victim, that kind of annihilates any chance for conversation, for finding common ground. What you need is a little bit of moral humility to move off 100 to zero, even to 99. You can say: 'There is a seed of responsibility within me and a seed of victimhood within the other party.' It's a start. And I think that's a really important start. DN: How can understanding the root of our moral outrage and convictions help us bridge divides? You make a case for sharing personal experiences of harm rather than facts. KG: There are a couple of answers to why facts so often fail us in moral conversation. Our minds are not attuned to statistics. I've tried to teach college kids statistics — it's really hard. Our minds are not made to think about distributions and probability. I think, too, increasingly we live in different ecosystems with different facts. The other side's facts seem fake or not relevant to the situation at hand. Facts are the wrong kind of thing when we talk about morality. 'A story seems true in a way that a fact never can, even if it's just about one person.' Kurt Gray Morals are these deep truths about how the world should work and who's being harmed, and a statistic is not relevant in the same way. But a story seems true in a way that a fact never can, even if it's just about one person. For example, I'm talking to one individual and they're pro-gun rights, because their mom defended herself with a handgun from an attacker. It's much harder to deny the truth of that one experience. And now we're not having a conversation about some far-flung societal truth — we're talking about one person's convictions, and now I understand where that comes from. And even if I disagree with you, I can understand how it's rational. You're not stupid for having this moral conviction because your experiences make that make sense. And so it increases respect because now I can see the harms that you care about and I'm confronted firsthand with your victimhood. It's much easier to put yourself in someone's shoes in a story. That's why we watch movies, that's why we read articles — the story shifts us out of our own mind into those of others. There is also a 'civ' framework that is useful for some people to have challenging conversations — it stands for connect, invite, validate. Underlying all those things is an understanding that you're talking to a full human being. So first, you connect with them as another human being — give someone the choice to share and then validate their views, because it's hard to share and people are worried about being attacked. I think the ultimate goal should always be to understand and not to win. And if you try to win, I think you've already lost. But you can understand where someone's coming from, have some mutual understanding, and then maybe try to influence someone that way just by sharing where you're coming from. Trying to understand, I think, is much more important than trying to win.
