Us And Them, Again

One of the most troubling aspects of America’s current political gridlock is the degree to which the citizens who choose political leadership are currently polarized. A recent essay from The Conversation considered the extent to which that polarization is implicated in the the country’s widely reported “downgrade” as a “backsliding democracy” by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.

One key reason the report cites is the continuing popularity among Republicans of false allegations of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

But according to the organization’s secretary general, perhaps the “most concerning” aspect of American democracy is “runaway polarization.” One year after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Americans’ perceptions about even the well-documented events of that day are divided along partisan lines.

Polarization looms large in many diagnoses of America’s current political struggles. Some researchers warn of an approaching “tipping point” of irreversible polarization.

The author of the essay, who has recently published a book on the subject, identifies two types of polarization: political polarization and belief polarization. 

Political polarization is simply the ideological distance between opposing parties. When–as now–those differences loom large, they produce the sort of gridlock we are experiencing, especially at the federal level.  As the author points out,  although political polarization can be extremely frustrating, it isn’t necessarily dysfunctional. (It does offer voters a clear choice…) 

Belief polarization, also called group polarization, is different. Interaction with like-minded others transforms people into more extreme versions of themselves. These more extreme selves are also overly confident and therefore more prepared to engage in risky behavior.

Belief polarization also leads people to embrace more intensely negative feelings toward people with different views. As they shift toward extremism, they come to define themselves and others primarily in terms of partisanship. Eventually, politics expands beyond policy ideas and into entire lifestyles.

That hostility toward members of the other party leads members (“us”) to become more conformist and thus increasingly intolerant of the inevitable differences among “us.” The rigidity of our identities as “woke” or “anti-woke” demands conformity from others of our own tribes. As a result, the Left loses Al Franken; the Right loses Liz Cheney. And as the essayist writes, “belief polarization is toxic for citizens’ relations with one another.”

Even more concerning is the way that political and belief polarization work together in what the author calls “a mutually reinforcing loop.” When a polity is divided into two clans –an “us” and a “them” increasingly fixated on what is wrong with the other guys–the situation provides political actors with incentives to amplify hostility toward their partisan opponents.

And because the citizenry is divided over lifestyle choices rather than policy ideas, officeholders are released from the usual electoral pressure to advance a legislative platform. They can gain reelection simply based on their antagonism.

As politicians escalate their rifts, citizens are cued to entrench partisan segregation. This produces additional belief polarization, which in turn rewards political intransigence. All the while, constructive political processes get submerged in the merely symbolic and tribal, while people’s capacities for responsible democratic citizenship erode.

I think this analysis is exactly right, and–unfortunately–an accurate description of today’s  American public (at least the portion of that public that is politically engaged).

In a recent guest essay for the New York Times, Rebecca Solnit considered an important element of “belief polarization,” the tendency of partisans to accept propaganda produced by their “tribe” as fact. (This happens on both the Left and Right, but is particularly widespread on the Right. Sandy Hook was a hoax. Hillary Clinton was trafficking children in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor. Bill Gates has inserted chips in COVID vaccines…Donald Trump really won the 2020 election.)

Tribalism, it turns out, enables and encourages gullibility.

Distinctions between believable and unbelievable, true and false are not relevant for people who have found that taking up outrageous and disprovable ideas is instead an admission ticket to a community or an identity. Without the yoke of truthfulness around their necks, they can choose beliefs that flatter their worldview or justify their aggression….

But gullibility means you believe something because someone else wants you to. You’re buying what they’re selling. It’s often said that the joiners of cults and subscribers to delusions are driven by their hatred of elites. But in the present situation, the snake oil salesmen are not just Alex Jones, QAnon’s master manipulators and evangelical hucksters. They are senators, powerful white Christian men, prominent media figures, billionaires and their foundations, even a former president. 

The problem–as both essays conclude–is that while  autocracy requires people who will obey orders about what to think as well as what to do, democracy requires independent-minded people who can reason well. 

We desperately need more of those people.

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Reward And Punish

I recently stumbled upon a report issued (and constantly updated) byJeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management identifying the U.S. companies that have–and have not– withdrawn from Russia in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The report separates the companies into four categories:

1) WITHDRAWAL – Clean Break: companies completely halting Russian engagements;

2) SUSPENSION – Keeping Options Open for Return: companies temporarily curtailing operations while keeping return options open;

3) SCALING BACK – Reducing Activities: companies scaling back some but not all operations, or delaying investments;

4) DIGGING IN – Defying Demands for Exit: companies defying demands for exit/reduction of activities .

The date I logged on, there were 34 companies “digging in.”Unsurprisingly, Koch Industries was–and remains– among them, and there are calls to boycott goods like Bounty paper towels, that are produced by Koch subsidiaries.

American pundits sometimes seem divided between the tiresome ideologues who  believe the market  can solve every problem known to humankind, and the equally tiresome scolds who want to replace capitalism entirely. Actually, both the unwillingness of some companies to forego profits in order to help pressure Russia to withdraw, and the calls to boycott those companies, display what we might think of as the yin and yang of capitalism.

Ignore, for the purposes of the ensuing discussion, the fact that the American economy has devolved into crony capitalism and corporatism, a situation that deserves its own analysis.

America’s most pervasive and longstanding economic error has been one of categorization–determining what goods and services should be left to free  (appropriately regulated) markets, and which by their very nature must be collectively supplied by government. Other western nations have long understood that the provision of effective and accessible health care, for example, is incompatible with a market approach. (Market transactions require a willing buyer and willing seller, both of whom are in possession of all information relevant to the transaction–an impossibility with respect to health care.)

On the other hand, there is no reason for government to be involved in the manufacture or sale of most consumer goods. The genius of a properly operating capitalism is its ability to provide us with a multiplicity of products and sources of entertainment. Government  agencies would be highly unlikely to invent the iPhone…or Netflix.

If we are to have a properly operating economy–not to mention a properly operating government–we need to distinguish between the consumer goods that are most efficiently provided by the market, and the social and physical infrastructure that must be provided by government.

A good example is education. Efforts to “privatize” public education rest on the mistaken assumption that education is just another consumer good–that schools exist only to provide children with the skills to compete–or at least operate–successfully in the economy. That assumption entirely ignores what has been called the “civic mission” of public education–the role of our public schools in the transmission of democratic norms, and the forging of a common American identity among children from  diverse backgrounds.

So what does all this have to do with Ukraine?

When we look at Sonnenfeld’s list of companies that have placed profit above morality, we see the dark side of capitalism–its tendency to incentivize greed over concern for the human consequences of economic (mis)behavior. (It is encouraging, and worth noting , that the list of companies that have elected to remain is far, far shorter than the list of those that have pulled out–often at considerable cost.)

When we look at the calls to boycott the products of the companies that have elected to “dig in,” we see the power consumers can wield in market economies. Consumers “vote” with our dollars, and if enough of us choose to do so, we can punish companies engaging in behaviors of which we disapprove. A number of such boycotts have succeeded in the past and there are several websites enumerating those successes.

When it comes to mega-businesses like Koch Industries, it’s admittedly difficult: their products are pretty much everywhere. (Here’s a list.) Others–like Subway– are much easier to spot.

Bottom line: market economies provide consumers with the ability to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior–but just like democracy, delivering those rewards and punishments requires an informed  and engaged populace.

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GOP’s Targeted Messages

Republicans’ skill in “messaging” has been a consistent theme of comments on this blog.

One of those skills is the ability of the GOP to tailor its communications–telling one group of people one thing , while assuring a different group (wink, wink) that the party has absolutely no intention of doing precisely what it is promising others it will do.

A recent illustration can be seen in an exchange between Rick Scott (The Florida Senator with a private-sector history of engineering Medicare fraud) and Mitch McConnell, aka the smarter but most evil man in America.

Recently, Scott  unveiled an 11-point plan that he identified as the GOP’s agenda–the party’s “to do” list once it retakes control of Congress. As Dana Milbank introduced a discussion of Scott’s plan in the Washington Post,

Suppose, for a moment, that the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the group overseeing the 2022 campaigns of all Democratic senators and Senate candidates, announced that Democrats, if they keep congressional majorities after November’s elections, would enact a plan that would raise taxes on working families more than $1 trillion over 10 years.

Further suppose that this top Democratic official also pledged that the Democratic majority would “sunset” laws that provide Americans with Social Security and Medicare, military retirement benefits, veterans programs, unemployment compensation, student loans, deposit insurance and more. Additionally, the Democrats would require U.S. businesses to shut down $600 billion a year in foreign trade and abandon countless billions in overseas investments.

The cry from Republican officials and the Fox News echo chamber would be deafening. Socialism! Defund! Tyranny! They might not even have time left to blame President Biden for Russia’s Ukraine invasion or high gas prices.

Of course–as Milbank proceeds to document–that’s really a description of the bulk of the Republican agenda Scott outlined. (Anti-gay, anti-CRT measures comprise most of the rest.) It is worth noting that Scott is hardly a “rogue”–he heads the National Republican Senatorial Committee. However, the agenda he unveiled was so politically toxic that McConnell disavowed it.

Scott’s plan would eliminate (sunset)  all federal legislation over five years. Scott assures voters that “worthy” laws would then be reenacted; presumably, policies that Republicans find  “unworthy” would stay dead. As various pundits have pointed out, that would probably mean the end of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and numerous other social programs that offend today’s GOP.  

As Milbank writes,

Don’t just take my word for it. Here’s how McConnell recently described the Scott plan: “We will not have as part of our agenda a bill that raises taxes on half the American people and sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years.”

About that provision raising taxes on half the American public: Analysis of Scott’s tax plan by the Brookings Tax Policy Center and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that the “Republican plan would raise taxes by $100 billion a year, or more than $1 trillion over the standard 10-year budgeting time frame. Almost all of it would be shouldered by households with income of $100,000 or less.”

As a column in Common Dreams explained, Scott introduced his tax proposal by saying “All Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount. Currently over half of Americans pay no income tax.”

To the mega-rich Scott — and his fellow Americans of ample means — this proposal no doubt seems entirely reasonable. To Americans who understand how our overall tax system works, Scott’s proposal just seems cruel.

All Americans, for starters, pay some taxes. They have “skin” in the game. They may not pay any federal income tax. But if they work, they pay federal payroll tax. If they don’t work, they still pay sales tax on goods they purchase. They face other state and local taxes as well.

Analyses of the plan found it would “increase taxes by more than $1,000 on average for the poorest 40 percent of Americans.”

“Low-income families with children would pay the most,” notes the Tax Policy Center analysis, “Achieving Scott’s goal would slash their after-tax incomes by more than $5,000, or more than 20 percent.”

Meanwhile, points out a Patriotic Millionaires analysis, those “uber-wealthy Americans who avoid federal income tax thanks to a series of loopholes that allow them to claim little to no income” would continue to face no more than a minuscule tax on their mega millions under the Scott “11 Points.”

“In the end,” the Patriotic Millionaires sum up, Scott’s plan amounts to “a wink and a nod to his wealthy donors to keep stealing.”

No wonder McConnell wanted to shut Scott down–the official GOP message machine keeps telling people that Republicans will cut taxes. Poor people don’t understand that only wealthy folks will see those cuts–and that they are the ones who will pay for them.

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A New Way Of Reporting

It’s called “Open source intelligence,” and we’re learning about it thanks to Vladimir Putin and his savage assault on Ukraine.

Here’s the lede from the linked Time Magazine report

The ability of anyone with a phone or laptop to see Russia’s invasion of Ukraine unfold in almost real time—and to believe what they’re seeing—comes to us thanks to the citizens operating what’s known as open-source intelligence (OSINT). The term is shorthand for the laborious process of verifying video and photographs from Ukraine by checking everything about the images, establishing what they show, and doing all this work out in the open, for all to see.

The article focused on one of the individuals who pioneered this effort,  Eliot Higgins , who had what was described as a “boring office job in the U.K. ” during the war in Syria. In addition to examining social media posts, he also analyzed YouTube videos  that had been uploaded from phone cameras .

Although he had no training as a journalist, he set out to decipher the credibility/accuracy of those uploads by noting things like the serial numbers on munitions, and using online tools like Google Maps. While he was engaged in that exercise, he compared notes with people who were also trying to figure out what was accurate and what wasn’t–and in the process of  blogging about his efforts (under the alias “Brown Moses”)–he built a reputation as an “authority on a war too dangerous to be reported from the ground.”

In 2014 Higgins used Kickstarter to found Bellingcat (the name refers to resourceful mice tying a bell to a cat), a nonprofit, online collective dedicated to “a new field, one that connects journalism and rights advocacy and crime investigation.” Three days after its launch, a Malaysian passenger jet was shot down over the part of Ukraine held by Russian troops. Bellingcat proved the culprit was a Russian surface-to-air missile, by using largely the same array of tools—including Google Earth, the social media posts of Russian soldiers, and the passion of Eastern European drivers for posting dashcam videos—that hundreds of volunteer sleuths are now using to document the Russian invasion of Ukraine in granular detail.

It’s an extraordinary turn of events—and a striking reversal of fortunes for Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which in the past deployed disinformation so effectively in concert with its military that NATO refers to “hybrid war.” In Ukraine, however, Russia has been outflanked. Its attempts to establish a pretext for invasion by circulating video evidence of purported “atrocities” by Ukraine were exposed as frauds within hours by Bellingcat, fellow OSINT volunteers, and legacy news media outlets that have picked up reporting tools the open-source crowd hands around.

Higgins has written a book, We Are Bellingcat: An Intelligence Agency for the People, in which he describes–evidently in great detail–the time-consuming process needed  to produce an airtight case for the conclusions they reach. It was Bellingcat that ultimately assessed responsibility for the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17–but it took a full year. In Ukraine, reporting has been much faster, thanks to what Higgins calls parallel team operations.

We’re also then setting up, at the moment, two teams. One is focused on more editorial, journalistic-type investigations, where you can get that stuff out quite quickly after the events have occurred. But another team that runs parallel to that is focused purely on doing investigations for accountability.

The importance of what Bellingcat is doing can be seen via a  CNN report on two videos that Russia circulated  before its invasion. The videos  purported to show  Ukrainian attacks. Both were exposed as frauds  by the online open-source community–and the network also cited its own analysis, using online geolocation methods pioneered by the open-source community, to prove that the videos had actually been filmed behind Russian lines.

The analytic tools developed by Bellingcat and other open-source detectives are now being used by a network composed of hundreds of nonprofessionals–and tools such as geolocation have saved open source analysts hundreds of hours of work. These new tools and the growing network of volunteer sleuths have undermined Russia’s once-masterful ability to spread propaganda. As Higgins says:

This is the first time I’ve really seen our side winning, I guess you could say. The attempts by Russia to frame the conflict and spread disinformation have just collapsed completely. The information coming out from the conflict—verified quickly, and used by the media, used by policymakers and accountability organizations—it’s completely undermined Russia’s efforts to build any kind of narrative around it, and really framed them as the aggressor committing war crimes.

The most important war currently being waged is the war against disinformation and propaganda–and open source intelligence is a new and very welcome weapon.

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Wisdom From Harvey Fierstein

Sometimes, you stumble across wisdom in the least predictable places. 

Time Magazine recently had an interview with gay icon Harvey Fierstein,. The interview was triggered by the publication of Fierstein’s memoir, titled “I Was Better Last Night.” As you might expect from a writer known for his wit, the interview elicited some funny responses; for example, asked what had prompted him to write the memoir–what circumstances had led him to consider doing so–Fierstein replied, 

First, you arrange for a global pandemic. You clean your desk of all other garbage; then you look around the house for other things to do. I made five quilts. I walked the dog. And then the next thing—the only thing—I could possibly come up with, besides cleaning the refrigerator, which is nothing anybody ever wants to do, was to write my memoir.

The interview covered a number of more serious topics, several focused on Fierstein’s long history of activism on behalf of gay rights. But it was the following exchange that made me stop and reread both the question (in bold) and the answer.

You wrote about rehearsals for the Torch Song Trilogy, and a scene specifically where Estelle Getty took issue with a line from her character, when she tells her son, “It gets better.” She’s talking specifically about grief, but that phrase has become such a rallying cry for the LGBTQ community more broadly—and maybe too generally—in recent years. Do you think that’s been the case?

Whatever you survive becomes a triumph, right? And I think time, you know, does make things better. Does it bring somebody back to life? No. But makes it easier to take that breath without that incredible pain underneath. Do things get better politically just because time passes? No. You actually have to do the work. One thing that people don’t understand, and I don’t understand why they don’t understand, is that you can’t go backwards. Nothing goes backwards! If you want to go backwards in time, you’re just kidding yourself. Especially these days when you see this ‘Make America Great Again’ idiocy; I look at those people and what I see are these walking skeletons. Dead people. They’re not looking to the future, and if you’re not looking to the future you’re not alive. You are saying, I am no longer a force in the world. I am just a memory. And that’s no way to live.

This exchange highlighted the under-appreciated connection between the pain of loss and the utter uselessness of trying to reverse that loss. Reading it made me (marginally) more understanding of the people trying so desperately to return the country and the world to an earlier time that existed in their (very selective) memories.

Most of us who have reached a “certain age” have experienced the grief that comes when loved ones or friends of longstanding die, and we have no choice but to come to terms with the hole in our lives that results. Three years ago, I lost my best friend of 50 years, and Fierstein is exactly right when he says that “it gets better” is limited to the dulling of the pain, not its absence. 

He is definitely right when he points out what should be obvious: you can’t go back.

No matter how much you grieve–about a personal loss, about the disappearance of a social environment in which you felt comfortable–your grief, nostalgia and yearning won’t reverse what has happened. If you aren’t working on accepting changes you cannot undo, Fierstein is exactly right: you aren’t really living.

Reading the interview reminded me of my grandfather’s favorite saying: denial isn’t just a river in Egypt.

When people are unwilling to accept reality–when they are in denial–they are surrendering an important, even essential part of what makes us human. Acceptance doesn’t mean you don’t feel the pain of loss; that pain also makes us human. It does mean that–as Fierstein eloquently framed it–if you’re not looking to the future, if you’re not engaging with your environment as it actually exists and making decisions about how you will continue that engagement, you aren’t truly alive.

Fierstein’s observation made me think of that famous line from the movie “The Sixth Sense,” where the young boy says “I see dead people.” 

So does Fierstein. So do I. A lot of them.

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