Charlottesville may go down in history as a Father Coughlin-type phenomenon: a troubling but ephemeral episode that shakes the core of our pluralistic society, but passes like a bad storm causing only minor erosion of our civilization. Or it may be remembered as the first expression of a new dystopian America, one that slowly but methodically jettisons the values upon which this country was founded, and which have sustained it over the past two hundred years and counting.
But what will determine its legacy? The key is the process by which seemingly radical, fringe ideas infiltrate the mainstream, in America or in any other social setting. Once we have some understanding of that process, we can address a second question of the moment: What makes President Trump’s behavior so disturbing, given that he doesn’t explicitly endorse such ideas but merely fails to condemn them? Is our intuition correct that his behavior is indeed very disturbing, or are we exaggerating its danger?
Whether Charlottesville is an aberration or the start of a trend will depend largely on the receptivity of American culture to nativism and racism, within families, communities, and polities. Obviously, this receptivity or lack thereof has deep historical and social-psychological roots, but plenty of demons lurk in every culture and only some ever emerge, or re-emerge, to hound us. What makes the difference?
The Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter, in a 2004 paper entitled “Threshold Models of Collective Behavior,” posits a theory that collective behavior emerges from situations where actors have two choices before them, and the decision to act depends on the numbers of other actors who have already made a choice. Drawing on his well-known earlier work on the “strength of weak ties,” he posits a social “threshold” where a person will look to the number of others exhibiting a certain behavior and then do an intuitive cost-benefit analysis as to whether it is worth joining their ranks.
The premise here is that human beings are social animals and do not act in splendid isolation from social cues, whether that pertains to economic choices or choices of other kinds. Solomon Asch’s famous conformity experiments from the 1950s were pioneering efforts to establish what has since become known as the social embeddedness of individual behavior. And of course we have a famous, if dark, literary expression of a kindred concept in William Golding’s 1954 book Lord of the Flies, which features a series of social behavior cascades that flow out from the initiatives of individual leaders.
The classic examples most relevant to Granovetter’s research pertain to behavior during riots and looting. Several studies have shown that the first Molotov cocktail throwers and looters are usually people with criminal and violent backgrounds. But how to account for the second, third, or fourth waves of rioters, who have never run afoul of the law before participating in this anti-social behavior?
According to Threshold Theory, the initial wave of violence and anarchy is perpetrated by actors with a threshold of one. The second wave has a threshold of two, and so on and so forth. The 20th wave of looters, for example, isn’t comfortable making the decision to cross the Rubicon of criminality until there are 19 waves preceding it. Their threshold is 19.
The bigots who marched in Charlottesville two weeks ago are the first wave of filth. They did not need to look left and right at their peers before engaging in misanthropic behavior. Our society may be slightly damaged by these loathsome figures, but it will survive and heal provided that such behavior is condemned by leaders—familial, religious, community, and political—in such a way that the costs of such behavior are made clear.
It is precisely for this reason that President Trump is playing with fire in his cynical ploy to stir racial unrest in order to strengthen his base of support. By providing a patina of social acceptability to the first wave of hatred, he has given permission for the next wave of actors, with a threshold of two, to join the ranks at the next display of hatred. You don’t need to be a social scientist to see how dark the clouds can get, and how quickly.
We are blessed to live in a country with strong institutions and a moral compass that has directed us along an arc of slow but steady moral progress. Those institutions, however, are predicated on leadership that follows that moral compass and uses its bully pulpits constantly to reinforce the values that have made America great. President Trump has failed this test, and our country may never be the same as a result.