On our minds: The difference between a trend and an assumption. |
When Conventional Wisdom Goes Wrong |
 | | Election campaign billboards featuring Armin Laschet, the conservative Christian Democratic Union party's candidate in Germany's coming elections, left, and his Social Democratic rival, Olaf Scholz.John Macdougall/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
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When I entered professional journalism in 2008, there were three pieces of prevailing wisdom about world politics. |
The first was that the European Union faced an imminent collapse, or at least an "unraveling," whatever that meant. |
Second, that the election of Barack Obama would usher in an era of enlightened liberalism and a return to 1990s-style American leadership. |
And third, that Mr. Obama, as president, would bring the war in Afghanistan to a swift and decisive victory. |
Needless to say, none of those have held up. |
It is a lesson, as looking back on the predictions of yore often is, in the perils of accepting the conventional wisdom as anything more than an indicator of elite consensus. |
At the time, that consensus was rooted in mistaken assumptions (that voting for Mr. Obama's post-racial vision indicated a willingness to carry it out). And in outdated understandings of how the world worked (that American hegemony of the 1990s was the natural default, rather than an aberration). And in a belief that all present trends would continue indefinitely into the future (that the E.U. would only get more and more troubled). |
Since then, of course, we've all learned our lessons and have never fallen for misguided orthodoxy or overstated its certainty. |
Nonetheless, the idea of conventional wisdom has value. We need common points of understanding to predict and navigate our worlds. |
When the economy does poorly, the party in power suffers. Democracies are better for individual rights than are dictatorships. Right-wing leaders tend to be confrontational abroad. These are all pieces of conventional wisdom that are, to the best of my knowledge, true. |
But in judging conventional wisdom, we tend to rely on whether it is familiar (psychologists call this the availability heuristic), whether it is commonly held by our peers and whether it feels intuitive. All these can be useful shorthands. But none is a substitute for actually testing an assumption's accuracy. |
I was reminded of that this week in reporting a story on how the pandemic has changed politics in Western democracies. |
"This was going to be the death knell of populism because they weren't going to be able to take this seriously," Brett Meyer, who researches political trends at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, said of the early conventional wisdom. |
It was a reasonable assumption. President Donald J. Trump was downplaying the virus and rejecting scientific consensus on how to fight it. Perhaps as a result, his poll numbers looked dire. Other right-wing populists, like Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, were following his lead. |
But when Dr. Meyer went to test this theory, he found something surprising. |
"Most populist leaders have followed the advice of public-health experts and have given them a prominent role in the public response to the crisis," he wrote in a report last August. |
The mistaken assumption, he found, was that Mr. Trump and Mr. Bolsonaro would represent the populist norm. In fact, both were outliers. But they are the more famous names. |
The gap between familiar anecdote and unfamiliar trend can be hard to bridge. It's part of what makes conventional wisdom so sticky. |
Take another example: the perception that populist parties are on the rise globally. In reality, they have been in decline since 2018. But, at least until the 2020 American election, that decline was rarely splashy and rarely did it topple famous populist leaders, making the conventional wisdom, of populism being on the march, hard to challenge. |
Conventional wisdom might initially be true. But sometimes, even if early assumptions hold, the world can change around them. |
Look at polls for the German election, to be held later this month, and you will see proof of this. The current trend, showing a victory for the center-left party, is, under the conventional wisdom, an impossibility. |
"That's been an enormous surprise. I don't think anyone saw that coming," Dr. Meyer said. "People have been writing for several years now about how the Social Democrats are going to die out for good, and now here they are, they're the leading party." |
For the past decade, there have been few axioms of global politics more deeply held than that of the decline, and quite possibly the death, of the establishment center-left. |
Those parties have largely lost their once-reliable base of support in labor unions. Cultural backlash has reduced support for much of their agendas. So has growing distrust of establishment institutions. |
Sure enough, center-left parties have been losing support for years in Europe and Latin America. |
So maybe the conventional wisdom was correct. But this did not mean it would hold forever, because the circumstances behind those assumptions can change. |
It's not just Germany. Last week, the center-left took power in Norway, ending eight years of center-right rule. The center-left holds the White House. It's part of a governing alliance in Italy. |
So what changed? Right-wing populists have continued to lose support, which may be flowing to the center-left. The pandemic has convinced many voters of the need for concerted government action, drastic economic interventions and social unity — all of which favor establishment left-wing politics. |
But all political trends have a great many moving pieces to them, not all of which might be immediately visible. Maybe other factors behind this are not yet understood. Maybe what looks like center-left victory is actually center-right collapse. Maybe it's a series of flukes. |
"What we've got is realignment and volatility," said Pippa Norris, a Harvard University political scientist. "It's very difficult to say that there's a pattern at the time, until you can look back." |
The same was true of the right-wing populist surge in the mid-2010s. With the understanding of hindsight, we now know that some of the forces behind that rise were permanent, while others were temporary. And some populist victories initially attributed to the movement's appeal were actually more about, say, the center-right's collapse. |
The trend was real. The conventional wisdom, in its overstated certainty and simplicity, was not. |
Differentiating between those two isn't always easy. But here's a simple shorthand: A trend has data behind it, which allows you to isolate what is actually happening and under what circumstances. Conventional wisdom doesn't, which makes it nearly impossible to test or falsify. That won't always tell you which is which. But it can get you a lot further than you might think. |
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