Who are the baddies?

Remember the Dress—the one that set the internet on fire back in 2015, when millions fought over whether it was white and gold or black and blue?

That people could perceive the dress in two completely different ways and were so confident about what they saw was a fascinating social test. It also offers a way into thinking about a dilemma that’s come up a lot for me, and maybe for others, too.

The dress is a way to consider the bitter worldview that seems to have swallowed so many Americans. And it’s a path into understanding how bigotry flourishes and what we might do about the baffling resistance to facts that seems like it’s everywhere today.

Those people are just different

When I started researching my concentration camps book over a decade ago, I encountered all the evil perpetrated on vulnerable groups who’d been targeted by ruling parties and governments. I’d expected that, and had braced myself to research some of the worst acts committed by humans.

But a different, unexpected kind of encounter also began happening. People would say things to me like, “There's something inherently evil about Germans that led to Auschwitz." It was a common statement, and if I didn’t personally see a basis for it, I could at least understand the permanent outrage about the Holocaust. But when I was looking at camps during World War I, I found that the trope of Germans as inherently evil predated the Nazis altogether.

Then two and a half years ago, I was doing archival research in Moscow when Putin launched his massive invasion of Ukraine. After the horrors at Bucha and Mariupol came to light—the rapes and torture and murders—friends from Central Europe and former Soviet republics said both privately and publicly that Russians were subhuman, that they possessed an essential badness, perhaps on a genetic level.

One intelligent and educated friend suggested that of course the genes themselves weren’t more primitive, but perhaps epigenetic expression—how and when genes get activated—was different in Russians, rendering them fundamentally different than Ukrainians or Estonians.

In the same vein, I know Israelis who excused brutal conditions in Gaza before the reprisals for the bloody October 7 massacre by saying, "They voted for terrorists, and so they all bear responsibility for the suffering of their own people." After October 7,  some of them said worse.

Across the last year, I’ve seen acquaintances online discussing Israelis as uniquely evil. And now, the world may well begin to say it about the American people, for electing Trump twice.

What I’m addressing here isn’t the slurs from obvious and manipulative bigots, like Ben Shapiro, as in this tweet from over a decade ago.

I’m talking about usually thoughtful people who, in the face of state-sponsored atrocities, begin to see a willingness to commit evil as an essential characteristic of some group of people.

The role of propaganda

The more research I did for my book, the more I realized that dozens and dozens of countries had run concentration camp systems, locking civilians up on the basis of who they were rather than any specific crime being committed. It became clear that no essential aspect of Germans or Russians or Americans led them to do it. Colonialism had a central role in launching camps in the nineteenth century. But post-colonial societies also sometimes resorted to them.

Where, I wondered, does that kind of hatred come from?  One thing I found was that in societies that developed concentration camps, prejudice had previously existed on a national level against the people who ended up in detention. Overall social or economic tensions got warped and funneled, festering into resentment directed against particular groups of people.

That bigotry was involved was hardly a surprise. But it’s important to note that it wasn’t just bigotry. Prejudice was channeled to bring someone else power or money. A vein of bigotry was tapped to further a delusional narrative that eventually competes with and displaces reality.

Two narratives

I grew up in a religious household with what would today be called a Trumpist worldview. We were expected to be submissive to my stepfather even in the face of violence, embrace a Christianity fused with deep nationalism, and fear people who were foreign or different.

In high school, I had a government teacher who seemed like a creep, paying far too much attention to me and asking a lot of personal questions. But in his class, he assigned stories from Newsweek, which was then a serious magazine. I remember reading an article about the Vietnam War that contradicted what I’d been told at home.

I disliked my stepfather, but I believed the worldview with which I’d been raised. I disliked my teacher, too, but the magazine reporting seemed to be based on real sources. I remember being aware that there were two competing narratives.

It was like the dress in the BuzzFeed story decades later. But I got stuck between the two narratives. I could still live inside the narrative I’d grown up with, but once I was aware of this new narrative, I could go back and forth. For a time, both made sense depending on how I looked at them.

It was uncomfortable, because I understood that at their core, they were mutually exclusive. Not until more than a year away from home at college had I read enough history to see the ways my upbringing had misrepresented the world in fundamental ways.  

Building narratives

This month before the election, there were also two American narratives on offer. And in a post-election opinion piece for Scientific American last week, computational social scientist Duncan Watts wrote about how two factors could explain the elections results: a global anti-incumbent trend and the more successful Republican narrative.

Psychiatrist Robert Lifton wrote in the same publication this week about entering a state of “malignant normality,” when society has made falsehood and destructive behavior intro everyday matters. The stories we tell in response, insisting on a true and meaningful narrative are critical.

I’ve been looking at how nonfiction narratives work for more than a decade, and back in 2009 founded a site focused on them for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. As part of that project, I talked with political scientist Michael Jones in 2010 about his research into how policy narratives work. We spoke about climate as a central issue then, and the two different main stories about the environment presented to the public.

He noted that for a long time people simply believed that “you just present better information, and you get better policy outcomes.”Instead, understanding of climate change eroded over time and became politicized. Jones argued that when it comes to the public, “they see uncertainty, they see a scientific community that doesn’t have consensus. That’s because the anti-climate forces have put together a better narrative, one that focuses on uncertainty.”

Jones’s research suggested that the kind of story that was presented about policy options was vital. He suggested that politicians have to take these narratives in hand and understand that they’re building a framework to explain the world. Even journalists, he suggested, have to be more aware that—whether they like it or not, whether they somehow imagine themselves to be completely objective—they’re also building narratives for the public.

“When you put pencil to paper, or type on your laptop, every word you select is an act of prejudice,” he said. “This idea that you’re not manipulating anything, or you’re just putting the facts out there—I don’t know about that.”

We saw it again and again with Trump over the last decade. On nearly every issue, where there were two narratives and one of them was rooted in reality, he managed to capture the audience from the conspiratorial narrative and fuse it to the larger vision he was selling—a vision of himself as Dear Leader and protector.

Back before Trump was ever a candidate, Jones’s research likewise found that the most important variable in the narrative was the hero. And Trump was more than willing to present himself as that hero.

Don’t think you’re the exception

My sense is that a lot of people imagine themselves as immune to overly simplistic narratives, and it might be comforting to think so. But what I found around the world was that in societies that had been exposed to years of constant propaganda, almost anyone could fall prey.

I’ve mentioned it before, but the unintentional social experiment that saw people in the U.K. bathed in transphobic stories for years in their national media is a good example. A well-educated and informed group of readers in Britain were exposed to stories that were different than what most people in the U.S. saw. As a result, a particular kind of transphobia emerged, a regional one that had been rationalized as being somehow feminist.

I’m not arguing that people in the U.S. weren’t alarmist about trans people, too. It’s just been possible to see the specific effects of a particular narrative on a given population, and to watch how it shifted public opinion in real time. And it was an educated, high-information group that fell for it. Under the right conditions, anyone can be vulnerable.

An outside observer might be able to spot how strange it can be when a narrative takes hold. But in my experience, when you’re drowning in propaganda, everything begins to fit together and seem coherent. Once inside, it’s almost impossible to step away from that worldview. You can’t see the actual dress anymore—you’re seeing your idea of it.

Those bad people

We can absolutely hold people responsible for the things they do on an individual level. But on a societal level, it’s critical to understand that the story of the twentieth century is that given enough time and exposure, propaganda works, and large segments of the population will be coopted.

It’s tempting to believe that there is some essentially bad other: whether its Israelis or Palestinians, or Germans, or Trump voters. But really, you’re just doing the work of the worst people in the world when you believe that, even about Trump voters. They’re a messy coalition of competing priorities. To believe otherwise is to make them a monolith and give them a kind of power they don’t have.

Are there Trump voters who voted on purpose for the harm that will come to immigrants, to pregnant women, to trans people? Yes, absolutely. I’m not attempting to exonerate anyone for voting for a demagogue.

What’s more, the people who voted out of greed or hate are unlikely to change. Even the people who voted for a false narrative out of ignorance may not be retrievable, but we need to stop that pool from growing.

Our only choices are to increase turnout, to recruit nonvoters and apolitical people, or to persuade those who’ve bought into a false narrative to leave it behind. If we’re going to move past where we are, we have to understand the effect that propaganda has on selling a narrative to receptive people. We’re going to have to do a better job of counteracting the dangerous and paranoid narrative by limiting its reach or by offering something better.

Mass propaganda powered the atrocities of the twentieth century, and it works on Americans, just like it works on any other people who face constant exposure to it. But even if we decide the answer is to build a better narrative, the task isn’t a simple one. Building a narrative for explaining and transforming the country is harder when actual obligations to the public are respected, and you refuse to rely on lies and empty promises.

But there is hope. My reporting from various countries parallels the numbers referenced in an October Boston Globe opinion piece by behavioral scientist Karen Stenner on authoritarian personalities. I don’t agree with her entire argument, but she shares some information that’s important to know.

Only about a third of people are real authoritarians, with the cognitive inflexibility and closed personality that accompany that personality type. They’re particularly vulnerable to the narratives of grievance and punishment. Others can be manipulated into supporting paranoid narratives through the creation of fearful stories that generate hysteria over things like crime and immigrants or trans kids.

You probably already know if you’re part of a hardcore group of people who want to see somebody get punished. But what you can’t know is whether, under the right circumstances, you could be hoodwinked into accepting a false narrative through fear. All of us are more vulnerable than we'd like to imagine.

It’s uncomfortable to think about how society can draw out different aspects of any individual. In Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning wrote about how average Germans in a reserve police battalion were transformed into monsters during World War II.

People living in a community with good institutions tend evolve toward their best selves, and dysfunctional or punitive institutions tend to bring out the worst in us. In the long run, the answer is to build a world with stronger communities, instead of leaving gaps in which people are isolated and encouraged to nurse their grievances against imaginary enemies.

Mutually exclusive narratives

I want to be clear that these aren’t just competing narratives about the country or the world. The answer to what color the viral-sensation dress is a fact. Whatever colors you saw, the real dress is black and blue.

There is a knowable reality. But we have to make it visible and comprehensible. We have to connect worlds with vulnerable people—meaning most of the population—to an idea of what the country is and what it can become.

On the big-picture side, perhaps the most important thing to remember is that the narrative that’s built around hatred and exclusion is funded and driven directly and indirectly by people with deep pockets and a strong desire to change society for their personal benefit. They’re doing it so that they can get the kind of laws and workforce that will maximize their power and profit.

There are true believers like Stephen Miller in Trump’s political world, people who are dedicated to obscene, inhumane policies. But their power and the movement as a whole is bankrolled by people who are using Trump’s voters and his culture warriors for cynical ends.

Changing local and even national law to break the power of billionaires to buy politicians and judges will be key long term to fixing what ails us. In the meantime, let me be clear: you don’t have to be one of the people that reaches out to people already captured by a delusional narrative.

The most important work to be done on the daily level is to build a world in which libraries, schools, and universities are shored up to establish accurate history and sustain a base of knowledge, so there’s a truth in place from which to build a positive narrative. A world in which communities support their most vulnerable populations leaves fewer people to be picked off by cynical profiteers.

Run for school board, become a library volunteer, show up to community events. Resist lazy narratives yourself, so that you don’t become a sucker for people who want to use the current crisis to terrify you and make money off you. Right where you live, locally, build a world that will make it harder for people to check out of reality or be seduced by paranoid conspiracies.

Nothing is inevitable

After my camps book came out, my brother asked me if it was hard to write it, knowing that people over and over devolved to their worst selves, that humanity turned again and again to cruelty. But what I’d found wasn’t that at all.

While it was true that every country had the potential to be the bad guys, and many have adopted that role at some point, it took years of money and concerted propaganda efforts to turn a population toward supporting or committing the worst behavior. Even the relatively quick move to Japanese American internment in the US relied on decades of anti-Asian immigration policies, rhetoric about the “Yellow Peril,” and violence against Asian Americans in order to succeed.

Most people don’t accept the false narrative right away. They have to be trained to it and sold on it over and over. And that means there are times and places to intervene in that process.

The good news, relatively speaking, is that the voting population is largely split. A very small percentage of people have made the difference in the last several elections, each of which could have gone either way. We don’t have to move heaven and earth; we just have to shift turnout a couple percentage points. If it’s too late to undo the harm that Trump’s narrative has already done, if some people now seem beyond saving, it’s not too late to keep this dangerous worldview from capturing more people, to offer a narrative that’s both true and inspiring about how we can move forward.

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