Can We Talk?

It’s a new year, and Americans need to talk. But communication is hard. It has always been hard, even between people who speak the same language.

It isn’t just the crazy, although in the era of Trump, crazy seems to dominate. A recent article in the Atlantic,  titled “Let’s Talk About Trump’s Gibberish,” noted the insane stuff that comes out of his mouth and then becomes subject to the media’s “sane-washing.”

For too long, Trump has gotten away with pretending that his emotional issues are just part of some offbeat New York charm or an expression of his enthusiasm for public performance. But Trump is obviously unfit—and something is profoundly wrong with a political environment in which he can now say almost anything, no matter how weird, and his comments will get a couple of days of coverage and then a shrug, as if to say: Another day, another Trump rant about sharks.

The article quoted one of Trump’s frequent departures from rationality. In a campaign speech, his digression focused on a fanciful encounter with a shark. “I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight and you’re in the boat, and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery’s now underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?’”This bizzare detour from the ostensible subject of the speech went on–and on– with Trump clarifying that–assuming he had his choice, he’d rather be zapped than eaten. 

Evidently, people who voted for Trump simply discount his looney-tunes digressions (along with yesterday’s list of appalling behaviors). More to the point, the proliferation of disinformation, distortion and click-bait has desensitized us to “communication” that ought to alarm us–or at least signal that the speaker is mentally ill.

What, if anything, can we do about an information environment rife with intentional lies and propaganda and the purposeful “flooding of the zone”? (I believe it was Hannah Arendt who observed that propaganda isn’t intended to make us believe X rather than Y–it’s meant to destroy our ability to believe anything.)

Countering the ocean of disinformation we swim in was the subject of a December article in Common Dreams.

It’s a crisis. America is now among 11 nations deemed most threatened by both mis-and disinformation.

Little wonder that almost 90% of us fear our country is on the “wrong track.” And, President-elect Trump has led the way with 492 suspect claims in just the first hundred days of his first presidency. Then, before the 2020 vote, in a single day he made 503 false or misleading claims. By term’s end he’d uttered 30,573 lies, reports The Washington Post.

Now, he is joined by his promoter Elon Musk who is flooding his own platform X with disinformation—for example, about the bipartisan end-of-year funding deal.

Irish philosopher Vittorio Bufacchi distinguishes between lies, which are about a particular event, and “post -truth,” which is a “shift to another reality” –one where facts simply don’t matter anymore. 

The article tackles the important question: what can we do to restore the centrality of fact to our discourse? 

One key will be more independent and public journalism, including PBS and NPR, driven not by narrow profit or partisan agendas. As local journalism—perhaps easiest to hold accountable—has suffered a sharp decline in the past decades, state and local governments can step up with financial support and incentives. Here, many peer nations can inspire us.

The article points to an experiment from New Zealand, which it calls a “unique approach.”

Since 1989, its Broadcast Standards Authority has offered an easily accessible, transparent online platform for any citizen to call out disinformation. The authority is tasked with investigating and requiring removal of what is both false and harmful material.

The BSA seems to have been both cautious and effective.

In the early years, complaints were upheld in 30% of cases. But by 2021-22, those upheld had shrunk to just under 5%. That’s a big change. And, a possible implication? Knowing one can be exposed for harmful lies can discourage perpetrators.

Such a mechanism would help the ordinary citizens who cannot afford the financial cost of a lawsuit for defamation, which is our (expensive) remedy for such harms. Requiring courses in media literacy in the schools is a longer-term but important effort.

The problem–as I have repeatedly noted–is our very human proclivity for confirmation bias. People who share Trump’s hatred for “others” and don’t want to believe he is unfit for public office will gravitate to sites that characterize his “shark” episodes as humor and his ugly attacks as “locker-room jokes.”

If “post truth” is “pre fascism,” as Timothy Snyder asserts, we’re in a lot of trouble.

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George Packer On How We Got Here

I consider The Atlantic a truly indespensible source of information and commentary.  The publication is a welcome island of thoughtful and penetrating articles in our ocean of superficial punditry and outright propaganda. I subscribe to the old-fashioned print magazine, and the last issue included an introductory essay by George Packer that I found particularly insightful. (Okay, honesty compels me to admit that I found his essay so “on target” because he essentially agreed with my own analysis. I’m not immune to confirmation bias…)

The essay is titled “The End of Democratic Delusions.” I think the following paragraph tells us how America has come to this unfortunate place.

This new era is neither progressive nor conservative. The organizing principle in Trump’s chaotic campaigns, the animating passion among his supporters, has been a reactionary turn against dizzying change, specifically the economic and cultural transformations of the past half century: the globalization of trade and migration, the transition from an industrial to an information economy, the growing inequality between metropolis and hinterland, the end of the traditional family, the rise of previously disenfranchised groups, the “browning” of the American people. Trump’s basic appeal is a vow to take power away from the elites and invaders who have imposed these changes and return the country to its rightful owners—the real Americans. His victory demonstrated the appeal’s breadth in blue and red states alike, among all ages, ethnicities, and races.

If we look back at history, at other periods of rapid, dizzying change, we see similar reactions and upheavals. The Industrial Revolution sparked labor uprisings, anarchist movements, and clashes between traditional monarchies and then-emerging democratic and socialist movements. The Protestant Reformation fractured the Catholic Church’s authority, reshaped Europe’s religious and political map, sparked religious wars (think the Thirty Years’ War), and devastated large parts of Europe. There are plenty of other examples.

As Packer notes, reaction is insular and aggrieved, and it “paints in dark tones.” It’s characterized by an intent to undo what most of us see as progress and “reverse history, restoring the nation to some imagined golden age when the people ruled.”

When Democrats lose a presidential election, they descend into a familiar quarrel over whether the party moved too far to the left or to the center. This time the question seems especially irrelevant; their political problem runs so much deeper. The Democratic Party finds itself on the wrong side of a historic swing toward right-wing populism, and tactical repositioning won’t help. The mood in America, as in electorates all over the world, is profoundly anti-establishment. Trump had a mass movement behind him; Kamala Harris was installed by party elites. He offered disruption, chaos, and contempt; she offered a tax break for small businesses. He spoke for the alienated; she spoke for the status quo.

As Packer also notes, we are at a time when the parties have once again switched identities. The GOP of Lincoln was anti-slavery and the Democratic party of the time (and for many years after) was the party of White supremacy; in the 20th Century, they essentially traded places. More recently, another major switch made Democrats rather than Republicans the party of institutionalism. As Packer points out, that realignment has been going on since the early ’70s:

Democrats now claim the former Republican base of college-educated professionals, and Republicans have replaced Democrats as the party of the working class. As long as globalization, technology, and immigration were widely seen as not only inevitable but positive forces, the Democratic Party appeared to ride the wave of history, while Republicans depended on a shrinking pool of older white voters in dying towns. But something profound changed around 2008.

Packard points to three of those profound changes: a growing “conviction that the political and economic game was rigged for the benefit of distant elites; a sense that the middle class had disappeared; and the absence of any institutions that might have provided help, including the Democratic Party.”

Packer is hardly the only political scientist who has reminded Americans that the reactionary period we are experiencing is global. He spends much of his essay focusing on the challenges posed by what he calls “The Trump Reaction,” which he also says is more fragile than many believe, thanks to the fact that Trump has surrounded himself with ideologues, opportunists, and crackpots who will inevitably turn on each other–and the even more obvious fact that Trump has absolutely no interest in governing.

Prior eras of rapid change have also sparked chaos and irrational reaction. History tells us that “this too shall pass.”

We really need to figure out how to speed that passage.

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The End Of Ethics?

Americans were recently treated to the official results of the U.S. House’s ethics investigation of Matt Gaetz. The concluding paragraph of the 37 page report says it all:

The Committee determined there is substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress.

This was the person Trump initially chose to head up the Department of Justice. (I’ve lost a lot of respect for Merrick Garland due to his timidity and what has evidently been an overly zealous desire to avoid politicizing DOJ, but the contrast between a compulsively ethical Attorney General and a thoroughgoing degenerate is representative of the difference between today’s Democratic Party and the cult of Trump–aka the GOP.)

Because it isn’t just Gaetz. Trump has chosen nominees who mirror many of his own numerous legal and ethical failings–a clown show composed not only of ignoramuses and conspiracy theorists, but sexual predators, racists and businessmen with falsified resumes and glaring conflicts of interest. Long gone are the days when political figures were held to a high moral standard–when those aspiring to leadership positions took care to project an ethical and probative public persona, even if their private behaviors were somewhat less exemplary.

To be fair, the Trumpian mafia being assembled to run the Executive branch has its counterpart in the current, rogue Supreme Court;  Rolling Stone, among others, has reported on recent, added discoveries of highly unethical behaviors by the Court’s “usual suspects.”

A new 20-month Senate investigation into ethical conflicts and legal violations at the Supreme Court has uncovered and underscored a raft of dubious behavior by justices both living — and dead.

The new 95-page report reveals that deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia — who expired in 2016 on a “free” quail hunting trip, paid for by a benefactor — was a conflicted mess, and effectively patient zero for the corruption now dogging the court. The arch conservative justice accepted “at least 258 subsidized trips” from wealthy patrons, including “several dozen hunting and fishing trips with prominent Republican donors.” Scalia accepted more such gifts “than any other justice,” the report states, and failed to properly disclose them “in violation of federal law.”

The report, issued by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, also excoriates current conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito for violations of federal law over undisclosed travel, including luxury fishing and yacht vacations. It targets Thomas in particular for having “accepted lavish gifts from billionaires with business before the court for almost his entire tenure as a justice,” adding that “the number, value, and extravagance of the gifts accepted by Justice Thomas have no comparison in modern American history.

Dick Durbin, chair of the Judiciary Committee, issued a statement underscoring the effect of these ethical lapses, saying that “justices are losing the trust of the American people at the hands of a gaggle of fawning billionaires.” 

Disclosure of the repeated failures of Supreme Court justices to recuse themselves from cases affecting the interests of the billionaires whose largesse they’ve enjoyed comes at a time when trillionaire Elon Musk has assumed a de facto role as “co- President,” and as Trump is preparing to install a cohort of shady billionaires with massive conflicts of interest in important government positions–positions for which most of them are massively unqualified. 

As ABC News recently reported,

President-elect Donald Trump has shown no qualms about making or sticking by picks for his Cabinet no matter the baggage they carry — even some accused of sexual assault.

It’s a far cry from the days when much smaller-scale scandals, such as marijuana use or hiring an undocumented worker as a nanny, sunk candidates put forward by Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, experts said.

“We’re in untested waters,” Jonathan Hanson, a political scientist and lecturer in statistics at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, told ABC News.

I suppose it shouldn’t surprise us. After all, American voters just elected a mentally-ill convicted felon who has also been found liable for sexual abuse by a  civil jury. 

Apparently, MAGA’s version of “Making America Great Again” is limited to its (very obvious) goal of “Making America White Again.”

Ethics? They don’t need no stinkin’ ethics! 

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The Shutdown

One of my favorite economists, Paul Krugman, has abandoned his New York Times column after 20 plus years. He has, however, continued his daily subscriber letter, which I receive, and in a recent one, he addressed the  embarrassing pre-Christmas clown show that threatened to shut down the government. He titled the essay–quite appropriately–“The Chaos Monkeys Have Already Taken Over the Zoo.” 

In an earlier Times piece, written before passage of the last-ditch, last-minute deal to keep government over, Krugman had written

Speaker Mike Johnson (soon to be ex-speaker?) is scrambling to put a budget deal together to avoid a government shutdown tomorrow. What a Holiday Gift from President Musk and First Laddy Trump. More at The NY Times here.

They couldn’t even wait till January to unleash the chaos. Classic hubris — too bad the country and the world are within the blast radius.

One more thing. Assuming Johnson is unable to remain Speaker in the next Congress, the days and weeks it might take the GOP to select a new ‘leader’ might take them past the deadline to certify the election.

(I hadn’t considered that possibility, and quite probably, neither did the congressional monkeys, aka “the usual suspects.” An inability to certify Trump’s election, brought on by the most MAGA members of the House, would have been..interesting…)

Krugman was far from the only observer who pointed out that the reasons “President Musk” gave for torpedoing the initial bipartisan measure were mostly bogus. His enumeration of the items in the measure he found unacceptable included a number that weren’t actually included in the measure. (I’m sure everyone reading this is shocked by the revelation that Musk is happy to depart from the truth when it serves his purposes…) A number of reports have zeroed in on what was apparently the real reason he wanted to kill the measure.

As the Hill explained,

In a Friday letter to congressional leaders, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) claimed Musk derailed the deal that would have avoided a government shutdown “in order to protect his wallet and the Chinese Communist Party at the expense of American workers, innovators and businesses.”

The spending agreement released Tuesday included a bipartisan provision to limit and screen U.S. investments in China, among dozens of other proposals attached to the 1,500-page bill.

As the CEO and largest stockholder in Tesla, Musk has extensive business connections to China. The company operates a major manufacturing plant in Shanghai and has sought to build deeper connections with Chinese companies.

Interestingly, although the final bill did not include Trump’s demand to scrap the debt ceiling, it did omit the provision that would have curtailed Musk’s business with China. Musk evidently had more clout with lawmakers than Trump–quite possibly because he has ample resources to fund his threat to primary any legislators who failed to knuckle under.

What is most stunning about this particular “Chaos monkeys” episode is that the entire fiasco was triggered by a man with no official government authority–a man who has never submitted himself to the electorate, who has never received a single vote– yet clearly considers himself a co-President, and just as clearly, intends to use the considerable power of his purse to protect his personal financial interests, if need be, at the expense of the American public’s interests.

Musk is by far the richest of Trump’s proposed governing cabal, but he’s not the only billionaire, nor is he the only one who will bring multiple conflicts of interest to a designated role. The grifter-in-chief proposes to surround himself with other rich men (almost all of his designees are White “Christian” males) who are equally ignorant of government operations and constitutional constraints. They are clearly unconcerned about what policies might be in the national interest. Their first impulses will be to protect their own sources of wealth (or, in the case of RFK, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, to impose their loony-tunes worldviews on the country.)

The dictionary defines Kakistocracy as “government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state,” and Corporatism as economic control by powerful corporate interests.

I think we’re there.

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The Mump Regime

Well, I see where Elon Musk has recently praised Germany’s neo- Nazis. That’s not a big surprise–anyone who has followed the remaking of Twitter/X into a platform filled with racism, anti-Semitism and other assorted bigotries promoted by the world’s richest man can hardly be shocked by an explicit admission of his already-obvious political preferences.

What has been shocking–at least to me–has been the growing evidence that Musk used his riches to purchase the Presidency. The last few days–as our dysfunctional Congress struggled to avert a pre-Christmas government shutdown–Americans have been introduced to a stunning reality: for his expenditure of a quarter-billion dollars to elect Trump, Musk evidently expects to be a co-President. 

Despite the old adage, there really is something new under the sun…

Timothy Snyder–author of a best-selling book about tyranny–has summed up the situation in his Substack.

How to call this thing that is coming to America in a month?

“Administration” seems inaccurate, since it assumes that the elected president just administers a government for four years, whereas Trump clearly wants to rule indefinitely. It also seems wrong since the people he has appointed will chiefly break things rather than run them.

And so “regime” rather than administration. But whose?

As Snyder points out, the correct answer to that question might be Musk. Compared to Musk, Trump is a poor man. He’s also a man who owes Musk a lot more than he owes his voters or even his other ultra-rich donors. And as Snyder predicts, “Looking ahead, it will be Musk, not Trump, who pays for all the lawsuits to quiet the rest of us, or for the campaigns to primary dissenting Republicans.”

As he says, given that reality, any effort to accurately describe the upcoming regime should probably put Musk’s name first. Snyder dubs it “The Mump Regime.” It’s a title that does double duty.

And that recalls a very essential element of the collapse. One weakness of democracy in the United States has always been public health. The lack of a national health system brings us shorter lives, greater anxiety, and less freedom.

Now, with RFK Jr., we face the rollback of vaccinations, and thus a return, precisely, of mumps. And rubella and measles, which are halted by the same vaccine. And much else. The rest of oligarchical cabinet will weaken government by law through incompetence, spite, or avarice. But RFK Jr. will break society by making us sick.

And, thus, another reason to call this thing the Mump Regime. Get ready.

The chaos of the past few days hasn’t just highlighted the inability of Republicans to govern. (Anyone who’s been following the GOP clown-show in the U.S. House already knew that.) It has introduced us to an unprecedented display of the power of wealth.

However, it has also foreshadowed what is likely to be an epic clash of egos.

Musk and Trump share a couple of obvious attributes: massive ignorance of the way government works, and huge egos that prevent them from recognizing their own limitations. The outcome of Musk’s effort to throw a monkey wrench into the original bipartisan bill (itself a stopgap measure that displayed the inability of House Republicans to legislate) was a bill that defied most of their demands. It was also something of a PR disaster for Trump–and if there’s anything that is really important to Trump, it’s hogging the limelight.

The likely implosion of the Mump administration–an epic, forthcoming battle between two massive egos– may save the country from at least some of Trump’s “promises” that would vastly increase inflation, harm millions of Americans, and reverse the strong economic progress made under the Biden administration.

It’s probably too much to hope for, but the antics of these man-child know-nothings might also help undercut the widespread, mistaken belief that very wealthy people are rich because they’re smarter than the rest of us. That belief–that unwarranted respect for those who have managed (for Musk and Trump, via inheritance) to be richer than most people–has been critical to Trump’s support. His wealth and bluster have allowed him to escape public accountability for multiple manifestly stupid acts and pronouncements. The same is true of Musk. (Because they are rich, observers often assume that there must be a method to the madness.. )

By a very slim margin, American voters elected one rich ignoramus. They didn’t elect the other, richer one, although he is acting as though his “investment” entitles him to a “co-Presidency.”. A “come to Jesus” moment can’t be far off.

Pass the popcorn…..

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