March 2019 – Sheila Kennedy

Trump, The Not-Just-April Fool

Tomorrow is April fools Day, which raises the question: how many fools are there? (Does the apostrophe go between the l and the s, or after the s?)

Among the many, many detestable things that Donald Trump and his “best people” have done is shake my former faith in the good sense of most Americans–and increase my estimate of the country’s percentage of fools.

If the last two years have taught me anything, it is that approximately a third of Americans are unable or unwilling to recognize stupidity and incompetence when they see it. I’m not talking about bad ideas, unworkable policies or even the venality and self-dealing that has characterized this administration; I’m talking about the special blend of arrogance, ignorance and limited intellectual capacity that Trump demonstrates anew every day.

Take these remarks reported by The Hill.

Trump touted at an event in Ohio that the U.S. was the largest producer of crude oil and natural gas in the world. He suggested that would not have been the case had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election.

“Hillary wanted to put windmills all over the place,” he told workers at a tank factory in Lima, Ohio.

Trump then mimicked a man telling his spouse to “turn off the television” when the wind doesn’t blow in order to save electricity. The joke was reminiscent of a similar line he delivered earlier this month at the Conservative Political Action Conference in which he derided the Green New Deal.

“Put the windmills up, and watch the value of your house if you’re in sight of a windmill — watch the value of your house go down by 65 percent,” he said Wednesday. “Wonderful to have windmills. And solar’s wonderful too, but it’s not strong enough, and it’s very very expensive.”

How incredibly dumb do you have to be in order to believe that if you use wind power, its availability will be intermittent–that when the wind isn’t blowing, the energy isn’t available? Does he really think the enormous growth of wind power use would have occurred if that was the way it worked?

Has he ever heard of batteries?

And solar is not weak and “very expensive.”One megawatt-hour of solar-produced electricity in North America currently costs $50, compared to $102 for coal-originating power, according to new analysis.

Alternative power generation is much cheaper now over the lifetime of a plant than when working with traditional fuels like coal, according to a report by investment bank Lazard.

I’ve posted before about this administration’s war on science; much of it is being waged by former lobbyists who’ve been installed at the EPA and Department of the Interior to protect the bottom lines of fossil fuel interests. Those officials probably know better and simply don’t care–maybe they have grandchildren who don’t have to breathe air and drink water.

But I don’t think Trump does know better. (One of the reasons I never thought he actually colluded with Russia is that he lacks the mental capacity and self-discipline for collusion–he was simply Putin’s useful fool.) Trump is a walking, talking illustration of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effectis a cognitive bias in which people of low ability have illusory superiority and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. The cognitive bias of illusory superiority comes from the inability of low-ability people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence.

I think that is a perfect description of Trump.

The more important question is: what explains those Americans who–two years into this disastrous Presidency–still support him and cheer him on? A lot of it, of course, is simply racism/white nationalism. He hates and fears the same people they do, and in return, they’re willing to overlook the fact that he is an embarrassing idiot. But some of it may also be attributable to their own Dunning-Kruger effects.

Either way, the rest of us need to get off our duffs, soundly defeat him and them in 2020, and begin to reclaim and rebuild our country.

Otherwise, Fools Day won’t just be in April.

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Meanwhile, Behind The Scenes…

While most of our media is caught up in “Mueller frenzy,” and Trump continues to suck all the oxygen out of the room, I thought I’d just share some underreported information about what our disgraceful federal government has been doing largely out of public view.

The Guardian is one of the few publications that seems to be following the day-to-day efforts of the Trump Administration to thwart global environmental efforts.

The United States and Saudi Arabia have hamstrung global efforts to scrutinise climate geoengineering in order to benefit their fossil fuel industries, according to multiple sources at the United Nationsenvironment assembly, taking place this week in Nairobi.

The world’s two biggest oil producers reportedly led opposition against plans to examine the risks of climate-manipulating technology such as sucking carbon out of the air, reflective mirrors in space, seeding the oceans and injecting particulates into the atmosphere.

Geoengineering is the name given to technical efforts to stop or reverse climate change; as scientists have proposed various methods, concerns over the potential for dangerously negative global effects have increased. Assessing the risks of proposed massive environmental interventions would certainly seem prudent–but the fossil fuel industry has seized on these proposals as a way to justify further expansion of their industries, and they aren’t interested in risk assessments that might cast doubt on that expansion. Full steam ahead.

Add that to the administration’s other efforts to sabotage environmental measures.

This was not the only agenda item in Nairobi that Trump administration diplomats were accused of watering down; they were also accused of undermining efforts to ensure strong environmental governance. “They are trying to remove all targets and timelines,” said one senior delegate.

An ambitious Indian resolution to phase out single-use plastics by 2025 has been diluted to resolving to “significantly reduce” them by 2030, said another delegate. The US was supported by Brazil and at least four other countries in pushing back the deadline and making the language more vague.

On marine waste, a Norwegian proposal to build an effective global strategy for dealing with plastics that enter the oceans has also met with resistance from the US. “They want to postpone measures so they can protect their industry,” said an ambassador from a large developing country.

In yet another example of being on the wrong side of history, there is the administration’s push-back against women’s rights.

US officials in New York are attempting to water down language and remove the word “gender” from documents being negotiated at the UN, in what is being seen as a threat to international agreements on women’s rights.

In negotiations at the Commission on the Status of Women(CSW), which resume at UN headquarters this week, the US wants to replace “gender” in the forum’s outcome document with references only to women and girls.

The move follows similar attempts by the US last year to change languagein documents before the UN human rights council.

In draft documents, seen by the Guardian, the US is taking a step further at CSW by refusing to reaffirm the country’s commitment to the landmark Beijing declaration and platform for action, agreed at the fourth world conference of women held in 1995.

After all, why would practitioners of “locker room talk” and predatory sexual behavior want to empower women?

Under the Trump administration, US negotiators have found themselves more aligned with countries including Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russia than European nations. These countries consistently seek to undermine agreements on women’s rights at the UN, specifically around reproductive health and rights. This year’s US delegation includes Valerie Huber, a proponent of abstinence-only sex education and now a senior policy advisor in the Department of Health and Human Services, and Bethany Kozma, an anti-choice activist and senior advisor for women’s empowerment at the US Agency for International Development.

Just file these “factoids” in the growing category “why the world no longer looks up to the United States.”

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Demagoguery

The Washington Spectator arrives via my snail-mail (many thanks to Gerald Stinson!), so I can’t link to the article, but the most recent version contained a fascinating essay by one Patricia Roberts-Miller, who is a Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin.

She begins by acknowledging a recurring question posed by most sane Americans: why in the world hasn’t Trump’s obvious incompetence, constant lying and childish language and behavior undercut his standing with his base?

One answer to that question–an answer that research continues to confirm–is that the base shares his racism/White nationalism, and for his base, that animus outweighs everything else. But Roberts-Miller provides a different–albeit not inconsistent–analysis, involving the language of demagoguery.

She cites to a rhetoric scholar who analyzed Hitler’s use of language and characterized it as a “relentless repetition” of the “bastardization of religious thought.” The “religious ways of thinking” that lent themselves to bastardization included identification of a common enemy, allied with scapegoating and projection.

Demagoguery, she points out, “displaces policy argumentation with praise of “us” and condemnation of “them.”

Roberts-Miller also says we should not be surprised by Evangelical Christian support for Trump, since conservative Christian Germans overwhelmingly supported Hitler and conservative Christian Americans previously supported slavery, segregation and lynching.

Although she takes care to say that Trump isn’t Hitler, she admits the parallels are troubling. Hitler railed against a socialist Parliament, internationalism (what we would call globalism), the presence of aliens, rampant immigration, liberalism and the liberal media (which he claimed was “stabbing him in the back”).

And of course, he promised to “make Germany great again.”

Roberts-Miller says that Trump’s use of demagogic rhetoric is less important than the fact that his “rise to power was fueled by a demagoguery that reflected the racist, xenophobic, misogynist and authoritarian values” of today’s iteration of the GOP. As she notes, Trump didn’t bother with dog whistles; he just came right out and said shocking things–“and the GOP media machine didn’t condemn him for it. They justified it, promoted it, and repeated it.”

So here’s where we are in today’s America. In a country and an era where the structures of democracy no longer work, we are governed–thanks to vote suppression, gerrymandering, and the current operation of the Electoral College–by a minority of our fellow citizens who subscribe to a set of pernicious beliefs and act out of a set of visceral resentments that are inimical both to America’s founding values and to human rights. Rather than finding Trump’s inarticulate use of language bizarre and repulsive, his language actually speaks to them. It reinforces their sense of grievance and their belief in their own victimization.

We’re getting a master class in demagoguery.

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Regulatory Capture

Those of us who teach classes in public administration routinely include lessons on what is called “regulatory capture.” That’s jargon for the “coziness” that often develops between regulators and those whom they regulate.

The more technical and “exclusive” the area being regulated, the easier it is for employees of the government agency charged with oversight, and the representatives of enterprises they are overseeing to become comfortable with each other, and to develop a trusting relationship.

The concern, of course, is that it gets too trusting, and that the oversight intended to protect the public becomes too lax.

Regulatory capture is generally not intentional–familiarity leads to comfort, and things slip between the cracks. But of course, there are also situations in which lax enforcement is, shall we say, more calculated. The question being asked in the wake of two Boeing aircraft crashes, and reports that the FAA allowed Boeing to “self-certify” the safety of its aircraft, is: which kind are we dealing with?

According to the Washington Post, Boeing and the government have long had a “special relationship.”

As a top economic adviser to President Bill Clinton, Dorothy Robyn was charged with advancing America’s aerospace industry.

Part of the job was not choosing sides between companies. But there was one exception: Boeing.

“It was the one company for which I could be an out-and-out advocate,” Robyn said Thursday. In competitions between American companies, the administration as a rule remained neutral. But Boeing’s commercial airplane division employed tens of thousands of Americans and its prime competition, Airbus, was in Europe.

“In the engines business, you can’t choose between GE and Pratt & Whitney. With Boeing, that’s it. They’re ours. It is the only sector where we have a de facto national champion and you can be an out-and-out advocate for it.”

That “special relationship” has existed for decades. Boeing makes the planes that fly as Air Force One. A former Boeing executive, Patrick M. Shanahan, was tapped by Trump to be acting defense secretary after the resignation of Jim Mattis, despite the fact that he had no prior government experience. Boeing’s business is so dependent on federal government policies that the company spent $15.1 million last year on approximately 100 Washington lobbyists.

Boeing booked a record $101.1 billion in 2018 revenue, up 13 percent from the year before, and analysts say about a quarter of that was from government contracts. In 2017, Boeing received an estimated $23.3 billion in taxpayer-funded contract awards, not including classified military funding. And its joint ventures with Lockheed Martin and Bell Helicopter Textron received $2.2 billion and $2.5 billion, respectively, in federal contract funding in 2017….

Daniel Auble, a senior researcher at the Center for Responsive Politics, called Boeing “an excellent illustration” of the “the undue influence of money in our political system.”

In the wake of the two crashes, Congress has demanded answers about FAA oversight of Boeing, including why the FAA didn’t ground the company’s planes until regulators in Europe, China, Australia and elsewhere had done so.

Some FAA personnel have complained that the agency has given Boeing too much responsibility for its own safety checks. Concerns about a lack of rigorous oversight–especially as reports have emerged about Boeing’s “rush” to beat a rival and deliver these aircraft–is only the most recent evidence that warnings about the company’s “cozy” relationship with the government are not misplaced.

The close relationship between the Pentagon and Boeing is part of a long-standing revolving-door culture in which senior defense officials move back and forth between jobs in government and with defense contractors.

In 2004, Darleen Druyun, a high-ranking Air Force procurement official, was sentenced to prison after she admitted that she approved a purchase of 100 refueling airplanes from Boeing at an inflated price of about $20 billion to enhance her job prospects with the company. She also leaked proprietary pricing information from a competitor and helped Boeing secure a separate $4 billion as a thank you for hiring her daughter and future son-in-law.

According to Bloomberg (link unavailable)

In one previously unreported case involving a separate aircraft program, a Boeing engineer sued three years ago, claiming he was fired for flagging safety problems that might have slowed development. Boeing has denied the claims.

If the investigations now underway find evidence that regulatory oversight was lax–whether due to an excess of trust or something worse–it will be yet another item on the growing list of reasons other countries no longer feel they can trust us.

As airlines cancel several billion dollars of orders for Boeing airplanes, and the company’s stock tanks, the livelihoods of Boeing’s 153,027 employees are at risk. The economic consequences for the whole country could be very ugly.

America is about to get a lesson that our anti-government Republicans won’t like: effective regulation and oversight are essential to economic stability and growth, and only government can provide it.

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Localism, Federalism, Globalism

Almost all the problems we face as a society can be traced to the “lag time” between the accelerating pace of significant–even monumental– change, and the alterations to existing social and political institutions that are needed to deal with new “facts on the ground.”

Another way of saying that is that we are trying to manage 21st century realities with tools created for the problems of the (early) twentieth century.

The recent mass murder in New Zealand provided an example. As the Washington Post recently put it,

The United States and its closest allies have spent nearly two decades building an elaborate system to share intelligence about international terrorist groups, and it has become a key pillar of a global effort to thwart attacks.

But there’s no comparable arrangement for sharing intelligence about domestic terrorist organizations, including right-wing extremists like the one suspected in the killing of 50 worshipers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, according to current and former national security officials and counterterrorism experts.

Governments have considered domestic extremists a domestic problem. In the U.S., such tracking as is done largely falls within the jurisdiction of the FBI. Thanks to the Internet, however, white nationalism is an international threat.

But increasingly, nationalist groups in different countries are drawing inspiration from each other, uniting in common cause via social media, experts said. Brenton Harrison Tarrant, the 28-year-old suspected gunman in Christchurch, posted a manifesto full of rage on Twitter in which he cited other right-wing extremists as his inspiration, among them Dylann Roof, who killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., in 2015.

It isn’t just the globalization of terrorist networks that requires rethinking where responsibilities should lie. Communication and transportation technologies have made a large number of institutional assumptions and arrangements obsolete.

Take federalism, America’s division of jurisdiction among local, state and federal levels of government. The division may still be useful (state and federal governments really have no reason to assume responsibility for handing out zoning permits or policing domestic violence disputes, for example), but many of the current assignments of responsibility no longer make much sense. State-level management of elections, for example, was necessary in the age of snail-mail registration and index cards identifying voters; in the computer age, it’s an invitation to misconduct.

In a number of areas, there are awkward pretenses of state “sovereignty” where none really exists. Think of federal highway dollars that are conditioned on state compliance with federally mandated speed limits. Or the myriad other “strings” attached to federal funding that remind state-level agencies who’s really in charge.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are an increasing number of issues, including but certainly not limited to the threat posed by white nationalism, that must be addressed globally. Climate change is the most obvious.

We humans are creatures of habit: we become accustomed to the world we have grown up with, and assume that the structures of whatever society we inhabit are just “the way it is.” A great example were the people who argued against same-sex marriage by insisting that marriage “has always been between one man and one woman.” That’s demonstrably false. Even if you ignore biblical history, more than half of the world still recognizes plural marriage. But it was true within the confines of their (limited) experience.

I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard someone defend a practice by saying “but that’s the way we’ve always done it!”

Unfortunately, the way we’ve always done it isn’t necessarily the way it needs to be done–and ultimately, those who don’t adapt to the realities of their brave new world become extinct.

I worry that we’re on the way…

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