You might be the subject of political pandering if:

1. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt are the main tricks in the politician’s kit.

A politician who never tires of scapegoating a feared group, or a feared outcome is undoubtedly pandering. Or a demagogue. Or both. Whether it’s Mexicans, or Jews, or Muslims, or gay people, they never seem to stop talking about why you should be afraid of someone or something.

Or they intentionally raise doubts around the edges of established facts. Donald Trump, for example, continues to plant seeds of doubt about President Obama’s birthplace, years after proof has been established.

The cure, of course, is to turn the doubt around 180° and ask for data and context. You aren’t likely to be mowed down by a Islamic extremist. You’re more likely to succumb to cardiovascular disease because you’re inactive, smoke, and don’t eat a proper diet. If a politician makes a claim without citing data, you should disregard what they say and look it up. Recently a jetliner crashed in the Mediterranean Sea enroute from Paris to Cairo. Within 24 hours, Trump was on record as saying the crash was an act of terror. Anyone with an ounce of sense knows that accident investigations are lengthy fact-gathering, hypothesis-testing, and data-analyzing procedures. Short-circuiting these fact-checking exercises is a timely and convenient tool of the panderer.

The vaccine against pandering is readily available. It’s a vaccine of the mind. Read opposing points of view. Seek primary data. Understand how the branches of government work. Look for sources of bias. Be skeptical about everything. Every. Single. Thing.

2. The politician appeals to commonality of religious belief

Indisputably one of the foundational principles of the U.S. is religious liberty. The First Amendment explicitly protects free exercise of religious belief. But it also protects the integrity of government by ensuring that the government is not a tool of religion. The Establishment Clause is widely-understood to prevent the use of government through its authority to promote religious belief and practice.

Religious belief is a private affair. Most religious groups gather in a communal practice but in an official sense, they are private, not public groups. Politicians who go out of their way to emphasize their religious affiliations are almost certainly pandering. Adherence to many different creeds brings people to do good things. We’re better off demanding to know exactly what a politician has done in the public sphere and what he or she intends to do in the future than about what church they attend.

The panderer can also turn this sort of pandering around in the ugliest sort of way by scapegoating and denigrating particular religious groups. Sometimes, though, this isn’t pandering but honest hateful demagoguery.

We should demand that politicians base their arguments in the broadest, most foundational terms. The proscription against baseless harm to others, for example, is common to practically all cultures. Let’s make sure that our appeals to goodness, fairness, and justice appeal to those ideals in human terms.

3. There is an incoherence between stated positions and documented actions

Honest people exhibit a coherence between what they say and what they do. They don’t go out of their way to create an image, let alone one that differs wildly from their easily observed actions. But panderers are crafty. With some, the gulf between their public works and their language is vast. Often there is even an incoherence between statements they make. Most of us in day-to-day conversation use language in such a way that our stated principles pervade our speech. Not so with the panderer where inconsistencies of all sorts abound.

4. The politician claims to be misunderstood

Occasionally the panderer is caught in an inconsistency. That’s the way deception works. The internet has a long memory. A common escape is to claim that he was misunderstood. It is more likely, however, that the message was simply shifting to suit the audience.

5. If you really, really like a candidate

There are some political candidates with whom we identify because of ideological similarities, or some other factor. Before committing to a candidate we should look again for opposing data-driven viewpoints, sources of bias, and other ways in which we might be influenced through personal appeal.

Pandering is a pervasive tool of the political trade. There’s also a fine line separating the genuine effort to put language into the right context for the audience from the purposeful manipulation of group through deception. By applying a few heuristics, panderers aren’t hard to uncover.

The U.S. has become well-rehearsed in its response to mass shootings. An event. The pondering over terrorism vs. generalized craziness. The outpouring of prayers and support. Then the internet outrage. And more internet outrage. More meme pictures about guns and love. More color-your-profile picture trends. Empty scripted responses from pious politicians. A week or two, then back to our regularly scheduled programming.

News flash: this isn’t getting better. It’s not going to get better.

Why?

1. We focus on single causal factors.

It’s the guns. No, it’s evil people/crazy people/bad guys with guns. Stop with it. Just stop. Have you people never heard of the fallacy of the excluded middle? The false dilemma?

Only a hair-splitting fool would claim that guns have nothing to do with a crime in which a gun was used to kill people. Likewise it takes a different kind of fool to claim that guns have everything to do with it. (Fortunately, there aren’t too many of the latter. But of the former…)

We’re stand no chance of reducing these incidents if we don’t think systemically. (See, I didn’t say stopping these incidents.)

2. As a species, our default programming seems to make us conflate mythology with truth.

This is the part that everyone is too polite to do. The simpleton nationalists grab their giant brush and paint every Muslim a terrorist. The liberals claim make the equally ridiculous claim that Islam is the religion of peace. Remember that fallacy of the excluded middle? How about Islam is the religion of both peace and violence?

The problem isn’t Islam. It’s the conflation of mythology with truth. Remember there was a time when people were dead serious about Zeus up there on Mt. Olympus hurling lightning bolts? It wasn’t a mythology back then. It was the real deal. Now it’s a new “real deal.” It’s a new improved monotheistic flavor of Zeus and his buddies toying with us.

Most of us are too polite to say it. Here’s the questions we should be asking: “What do you claim?”, “How, exactly do you know that?”, “Do you have any corroborating evidence?”, “On what grounds do your claims create an exception to the general prohibition against harm to others?” We ought to be willing to say: “Gee, that sounds an awful lot like nonsense to me. Perhaps you’d be willing to explain that logically to me.” The Trumpsters go astray by attacking people. People are just instances of a bigger problem.

Our recorded history is just too short to see a lot of evolution on this front. Maybe in another 10,000 years or so.

3. Gun ownership is baked into the U.S. Constitution.

This is a tough nut to crack because the weapons of choice for mass killers are a coddled, protected entity in the U.S. And for some reason, we can’t admit in large enough numbers that like the entire Constitution, the Second Amendment is purposely ambiguous.^[Perhaps you don’t agree that it’s ambiguous. Then what does the “a well-regulated militia” have to do with private gun ownership?] It’s ambiguous because the authors of the Constitution imagined we would sit down and have reasonable debates and compromise over some foundational principle. But we can’t get beyond “Ban all guns.” and “There should be no restrictions on gun ownership.”

We worship the Founders like secular heroes. But I’m calling the Second Amendment a bone-head move on their part. No, I’m not for banning guns in the U.S. There’s a giant middle ground here. And no, dear conspiracy theorists, High Priests of the NRA, and other lunatics, Obama’s not coming for your guns.

So let the grief turn to internet outrage. Let the impotent internet outrage turn to nothing. I’ve lost my idealism about any of this. I’m not changing my Facebook picture. I’m not posting any meme pictures of politicians saying stuff about guns or terrorists. It’s all empty.