This article presents results from a series of online surveys—conducted among American voters during and after the Trump administration—that show how voters from both parties provide explicit moral justification for politicians’ statements that flagrantly violate the norm of fact-grounding. Such justification is inconsistent with prevailing theory, whereby partisan voters’ tendency to mistake misinformation for fact is what drives their positive response to misinformation purveyed by partisan standard-bearers. The studies presented here provide consistent evidence of such factual flexibility. Yet they also provide consistent evidence of moral flexibility, whereby voters justify demagogic fact-flouting as an effective way of proclaiming a deeply resonant political “truth.” A key implication is that political misinformation cannot be fully eliminated by getting voters to distinguish fact from fiction; voters’ moral orientations may be such that they prefer fact-flouting. More general lessons pertain to the role of democratic norms in liberal democracies and to how moral orientations relate to perceived interests.

An estimated 21% of US adults have taken genetic ancestry tests (GATs). Recent studies have found that many test-takers change their ethnic and racial identities based on GAT results, viewing them through social lenses rather than always deferring to genetic information. Yet these studies have several limitations; most fail to consider the counterfactual or account for ancestry percentages reported in admixture tests. In this first randomized controlled trial of GATs, the authors analyze GATs’ causal impact on identity change among non-Hispanic White Americans (N=802). The authors address how much identity change can be attributed to GATs and evaluate the independent and interactional effects of identity aspirations and test-reported ancestry percentages. They find very low rates of racial identity change and significant but small amounts of ethnic identity change beyond that experienced by non-test-takers. The authors find support for identity aspirations and GAT-reported ancestry percentages as change mechanisms. They also find that GATs do not support test-takers’ claims to Native American ancestry; they are more than twice as likely as non-GAT-takers to drop Native American identities after testing.

The authors present results from a new data set that has been assembled from tax and other administrative sources to provide evidence on economic mobility and persistence in the United States. This data set allows the authors to take on the methodological problems that have complicated previous efforts to estimate intergenerational income elasticities. The resulting estimates of intergenerational persistence are as high as all but the highest of the previously reported survey-based estimates. Because the intergenerational curves are especially steep within the parental-income region defined by the 50th–90th percentiles, approximately two-thirds of the inequality between poor and well-off families is passed on to the next generation. This extreme persistence cannot be attributed to any single factor. Instead, the United States is exceptional with respect to virtually all factors governing intergenerational persistence, including the returns to human capital, the amount of public investment in the human capital of low-income children, the amount of socioeconomic segregation, and the progressiveness of the tax-and-transfer system. It follows that any substantial increase in mobility will require a wide-ranging package of reforms that cut across many institutions.