Unfalsifiability

Jim Geraghty has a column in National Review Online discussing an attitude among certain Trump followers that is fairly obvious to anyone who spends time reading their comments on the internet.  And that is their unshakable belief that their stubby-fingered messiah is a political genius who is just misunderstood by the elites that oppose him.  No amount of bad news can diminish their ovine devotion to the Donald.  Their reasoning is a flexible as a contortionist.  During the primaries, when Trump was leading in the polls, they were gospel.  Now that he trails Hillary across the country, the polls are meaningless, or they are rigged or just lies.

Trumpism is a kind of religion.  It's adherents are motivated by faith in their casino god and not by reason or empiricism.  Ask a Trumpswab what evidence, fact, occurrence or revelation would convince him that Trump is not the god-emperor they he imagines him to be and you will get no answer.  Trumpism is an unfalsifiable belief.  In his latest G-File, Jonah Goldberg surveyed the history of Trump defenders assuring the public that his juvenile buffoonish manner was just for the primary season and that he would eventually "pivot" to a more presidential demeanor.  Simultaneously he surveyed Trump's history of defying that prediction at every term.  Goldberg then publicly challenged the Trumpkins:

I want to put forward a challenge to everyone still clinging to the he-can-change, pie-in-the-sky, free-beer-tomorrow, Godot’s-bus-is-just-running-late, he-can-change fantasy. Pick a date. Any date between now and Election Day. I want you to commit to the idea that if he hasn’t changed by that day, he never will. And on that day, you need to accept that he is the same cheeto-dusted smatterer some of us saw from Day 1. Then, ask yourself: “What should we do now?”

I suspect that the date Jonah is asking for will never arrive.  I suspect Trump will remain the same narcissistic blowhard he always has been.  And when he goes down to defeat, the Trumpsters will blame #NeverTrump.  Some of them are already laying the groundwork for that.

So I ran through all that just to say this.  Trumpism reminds me of another unfalsifiable religion that claims a significant number of adherents - Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, or CAGW.  CAGW is a faith based on computer models that is impervious to actual facts.  There has been no warming trend for fifteen years now.  We're in the middle of a run of exceptionally mild hurricane seasons.  Fifteen years ago ABC predicted that Manhattan would be under water by now.

None of that matters.  Whatever happens is taken as proof that CAGW is happening and that it's the greatest, most immediate threat the world faces.  If it's warm out that's global warming.  If it's cold out, that's global warming.  Things that have nothing to do with climate, like earthquakes and volcanoes, are taken as proof of global warming.

There are other examples of devotion to ideas that flies in the face of evidence, Obamacare and Head Start for instance.  It appears that unfalsifiable faiths are a tempting refuge for all sorts of people.