I think the most underappreciated lens on public opinion is that voters are centrally - in many cases primarily - concerned with detecting cues of alliances and rivalry, figuring out who is on their side, who looks down on them, whose social interests are at odds with theirs, and so on.

• Abstract intellectual matters, policy questions, ideological consistency, etc., don’t matter very much. As is well-documented, most people are low-information and don’t care, and will often endorse policies diametrically opposed to those implemented by the parties and leaders they intuit to be “on their side”.

• And of course underneath the superficial intellectual focus of many high-information voters, the same core factors - rooted in our evolved ape psychology - are playing a role.

• One implication of this is that the best frame for understanding propaganda is not in terms of attempts to manipulate public opinion about factual or policy matters but rather in terms of deceptive alliance signalling. To take a concrete example, Trump’s “Big Lie” was far less politically consequential than the optics of him wearing baseball caps, serving in a McDonalds, and more generally exemplifying “tastes” - in his personality, style of speaking, and general aesthetic - viewed as appallingly philistine by highly-educated urban professionals but that nevertheless resonate with low-education working class voters.

• Another implication is that it matters very little whether the explicit policies endorsed by a leader or party will in fact benefit people’s interests if such people don’t view the leader/party as championing their interests and taking their side in society-wide status competition. In the Brexit debate in the UK, for example, Brexit was objectively not in the interests of most of those who voted it and yet it was obvious even to me (an insufferable liberal elite Remainer) that most of those championing “Remain” visibly held - and continue to hold - large segments of British society in contempt. They look down on them.

  This is the kind of framework you get if you combine consensus findings from political science with insights from evolutionary psychology of the sort advanced by the great David Pinsof (and maybe Karl Schmidt? I’ve never read him). Anyway, my post-coffee thoughts this morning. Lots to think about!