[Ilya Somin] How Political Ignorance Helped Cause the January 6 Attack and Trump's Subsequent Political Comeback

The attack on the Capitol. January 6, 2021. (Probal Rashid/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom)

 

Today is the fourth anniversary of the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, and - ironically - also the date Congress certifies Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 presidential election. As I have previously written, widespread voter ignorance and bias in evaluating political information played a major role in both causing the attack, and facilitating Trump's subsequent political comeback.

I wrote about the role of ignorance and bias in causing the attack in a 2022 post.As explained there, ignorance and partisan bias enabled Trump to  persuade a large part of the GOP base that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from him, even though that claim was a blatant lie.

More recently, Trump's 2024 win was itself facilitated by ignorance, in ways I outlined in a post written just before election day:

Ignorance and bias are playing a huge role in Trump's relative success. Polls consistently show that a third or more of Americans - including a large majority of Republicans - believe Trump's lies about the 2020 election, despite the overwhelming evidence against them, including numerous court decisions rejecting Trumpian claims of voter fraud (including some written by conservative judges appointed by Trump himself). Ignorance and partisan bias are great enough that many millions of GOP base voters reject fairly obvious facts here. If you believe the 2020 election was "stolen" from Trump, then his reaction may well seem justified, or at least excusable.

But this isn't the full story. If Trump only had the support of voters who actually believe his lies about the 2020 election, he could still have won the 2024 GOP nomination. But he would be losing the general election in a landslide of about 60-40 or even more. He remains competitive with Kamala Harris because there are many voters (probably around 10-15% or so of the electorate) who reject his take on 2020, but prioritize other issues, such as the economy or immigration.

Here, more conventional political ignorance is playing a role. Surveys indicate that the economy is the highest priority for voters, including swing voters, and many are angry about the inflation and price increases that took place in 2021-23…. Swing voters blame incumbent Democrats for the inflation and price increases, even though actually both parties supported the policies that caused them (primarily massive Covid-era spending). Even worse, they tend to think Trump will bring down prices, even though his agenda of massive tariff increases and immigration restrictions would predictably raise them.

The problem of voter ignorance and biased evaluation of information isn't limited to GOP voters or the political  right. It's a serious problem on the left, too, though right-wing version more immediately dangerous now. See my discussion of left-wing ignorance and bias here.

Sadly, there is no quick and easy solution to these problems. But I go over various possible strategies in this 2023 article. See also my book Democracy and Political Ignorance (introduction available for free here) for much more extensive analysis of the problem and possible solutions.

I've been writing about the dangers of political ignorance since long before the rise of Trump, beginning with my  1998 article "Voter Ignorance and the Democratic Ideal." Early on, it was mostly left-liberals who opposed me, arguing ignorance is not much of a problem. In the Trump era, the ideological and partisan valence of political ignorance has flipped. But it remains a grave danger, nonetheless.

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