Extremism Goes Mainstream

I really try to stay positive.

Take the environment, where there are signs of genuine progress. Despite the mounting effects of climate change, there is much to applaud about the multiple efforts at what I’ll call “eco-responsibility”–for example, in the most recent issue of the Engineering News Record (my husband subscribes), there are stories about efforts to add plastic additives to road construction (thus extending pavement life while re-using plastic waste), new methods of decreasing concrete’s carbon footprint, and a particularly encouraging article about updating the U.S. grid to aid in the transition from fossil to renewable energy.

In a number of areas, serious people are making serious efforts to confront the multiple threats to our various societies that range from problematic to dangerous, and in many of these areas, there is slow but discernible progress.

But. (You knew there was a “but”…) A significant number of humans evidently cannot cope with the world they now inhabit, and are retreating into fantasy, hate and violence.

ProPublica recently explored the extent to which such individuals control today’s Republican Party.

North Carolina state representative Mike Clampitt swore an oath to uphold the Constitution after his election in 2016 and again in 2020. But there’s another pledge that Clampitt said he’s upholding: to the Oath Keepers, a right-wing militant organization.

Dozens of Oath Keepers have been arrested in connection to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, some of them looking like a paramilitary group, wearing camo helmets and flak vests. But a list of more than 35,000 members of the Oath Keepers — obtained by an anonymous hacker and shared with ProPublica by the whistleblower group Distributed Denial of Secrets — underscores how the organization is evolving into a force within the Republican Party.

ProPublica identified Clampitt and 47 more state and local government officials on the list, all Republicans: 10 sitting state lawmakers; two former state representatives; one current state assembly candidate; a state legislative aide; a city council assistant; county commissioners in Indiana, Arizona and North Carolina; two town aldermen; sheriffs or constables in Montana, Texas and Kentucky; state investigators in Texas and Louisiana; and a New Jersey town’s public works director.

ProPublica found over 400 members and/or newsletter recipients who used government, military or political campaign email addresses; they included candidates for offices ranging from Congress to sheriff–a list that also included a retired assistant school superintendent in Alabama, and an award-winning elementary school teacher in California. There were significant numbers of police officers and military veterans.

Oath Keepers pledge to resist if the federal government imposes martial law, invades a state or takes people’s guns, ideas that show up in a dark swirl of right-wing conspiracy theories.

By far the most frightening aspect of the revelations is the degree to which these commitments have become mainstream within the GOP.

“Five or six years ago, politicians wouldn’t be caught dead hanging out with Oath Keepers, you’d have to go pretty fringe,” said Jared Holt, who monitors the group for the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “When groups like that become emboldened, it makes them significantly more dangerous.”

The article identifies a number of current lawmakers as members. Among them is Indiana state Sen. Scott Baldwin, whose spokesperson said he was unavailable to comment. The article meticulously categorized the members whose identities were disclosed by the hack: elected officials, GOP party leaders, and (chillingly) poll workers.

In the wake of the hack and the disclosures, several media outlets investigated how enrollees learned about the organization– how it was able to spread so readily. One conclusion: social media, particularly Facebook, is central; it provides a platform for the “patriot” movement. That conclusion would seem to confirm other recent studies showing how social media recruits for the far right more generally. One report found that Facebook was joiners’ most frequently cited source for having first heard about the Oath Keepers.

Mother Jones found that certain right-wing media outlets and figures, notably Alex Jones and Infowars, have played key roles in spreading the extremism. But more “mainstream” outlets and figures were also found to play central roles: Fox and Fox News were prominent.

There have always been extremists, malcontents, and outright lunatics. What is different today–and scary–isn’t just that they have moved the Overton Window and become almost mainstream. It’s that they have effectively taken over one of America’s two major political parties–and made it impossible to govern. Nationally, the GOP simply refuses to participate in legislative activities, preferring to wage culture war. That has driven virtually all sane people to become Democrats or Democratically-leaning independents–but they represent such a broad spectrum of political ideology that it is nearly impossible to unite them behind a single agenda.

Bottom line: Either the fever will break, or the country will.

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Frightened Little Men

I know we are facing enormous threats–to the planet and to democracy, to identify just the two that most concern those of us who are actually paying attention. Racism and other forms of tribalism aren’t far behind. But the severity of those challenges shouldn’t be an excuse for ignoring misogyny, especially since much of it emanates from the panicked denialism at the root of all the other problems we face.

And that brings me to Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who may or may not believe the bilge he spewed to receptive Republicans at a recent “conservative” gathering.

According to The Guardian,Hawley claimed that women’s efforts to gain equality and combat toxic masculinity have led men to consume more pornography and play more video games.

Speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, Hawley addressed the issue of “manhood”, which he said was under attack, and called for men to return to traditional masculine roles.

The Donald Trump supporter who notoriously raised a fist in support of a mob outside the US Capitol on 6 January appeared to echo talking points made by the likes of the Proud Boys, a far-right group that opposes feminism and believes men are under attack from liberal elites.

The rest of Hawley’s speech was evidently a paean to “masculine virtues,” which he asserted are a foundation of everything from family life to political liberty. He identified “assertiveness” and “independence” as two of those “manly virtues.” (I can’t help noting that. when I was young, men who were “assertive” were praised and encouraged, while women who were assertive were disparaged as unfeminine, “aggressive” and “castrating.”)

As a report on the speech in the Intelligencer put it,

If women possess any virtues beyond childbearing in Hawley’s estimation, it’s impossible to tell. In his speech, women are assigned no quality but their identities as birthing parents. 

Everything I’ve read about Hawley screams insincerity and ambition; he’s the son of a banker and a product of Stanford and Yale. If his analytical skills were as limited as his rhetoric suggests, he would never have made it through those institutions.

If Hawley was simply another QAnon-believing GOP cult member, I wouldn’t bother to post about this diatribe. But he has clearly decided that his path to glory lies with the Trump cult–and he has aimed his dishonest rhetoric at the angry and frightened people (mostly, but certainly not entirely, male) who make up that cult.

It is a truism to say that people are disoriented by change. We call phrases “truisms” because they are basically true–because they communicate a largely accurate observation.

Over the past few decades, the changed nature of the workplace and advances in medical science have combined to enable the advancement of women that so horrifies Hawley’s audience. Physical strength has declined in importance, birth control has allowed women to plan their reproduction. The skills needed by today’s economies are equally distributed between men and women, rendering the formerly massive privileges of maleness increasingly irrelevant.

I suppose it shouldn’t surprise us that this state of affairs has shocked and dismayed the men who had very little going for them other than their gender. It hasn’t posed a problem for most of the accomplished and self-confident men I know–quite the contrary. There is much to be said for marriages and partnerships of equals. But we now inhabit a society where–haltingly and in the face of angry blowback–men are coming to realize that women are equal and independent human beings– not submissive “vessels” provided for their sexual and breeding needs.

The audience for Hawley’s pitch are the so-called “Proud Boys” and Incels and their like, males unable and/or unwilling to adjust to a world where the women they encounter are fully-realized human beings who must be treated as such– a world where their gender alone is insufficient to make them King of the Hill.

If the hysterical rejection of female equality was the only problem with the world-views of Hawley’s constituency, it would be bad enough, but the sad, angry and resentful people who are receptive to this drivel are also the people who believe in White Christian Supremacy and the Big Lie, who are sure that climate change is a hoax and COVID–if it is real–can be cured by horse dewormer. 

Next to climate change, they are far and away the greatest threat we face. 

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Free Speech And Online Propaganda

The recent revelations about Facebook have crystalized a growing–and perhaps insoluble– problem for free speech purists like yours truly. 

I have always been convinced by the arguments first advanced in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty  and the considerable scholarship supporting the basic philosophy underlying the  First Amendment: yes, some ideas are dangerous, but allowing government to determine which ideas can be expressed would be far more dangerous.

I still believe that to be true when it comes to the exchange of ideas in what we like to call the “marketplace of ideas”–everything from private conversations, to public and/or political pronouncements, to the publication of books, pamphlets, newspapers and the like–even to broadcast “news.” 

But surely we are not without tools to regulate social media behemoths like Facebook–especially in the face of overwhelming evidence that its professed devotion to “free speech” is merely a smokescreen for the platform’s real devotion–to a business plan that monetizes anger and hate.

We currently occupy a legal free-speech landscape that I am finding increasingly uncomfortable: Citizens United and its ilk basically endorsed a theory of “free” speech that gave rich folks megaphones with which to drown out ordinary participants in that speech marketplace. Fox News and its clones–business enterprises that identified an “underserved market” of angry reactionaries–were already protected under traditional free speech doctrine. (My students would sometimes ask why outright lying couldn’t be banned, and I would respond by asking them how courts would distinguish between lying and wrongheadedness, and to consider just how chilling lawsuits for “lying” might be…They usually got the point.) 

Americans were already dealing–none too successfully– with politically-motivated distortions of our information environment before the advent of the Internet. Now we are facing what is truly an unprecedented challenge from a platform used by billions of people around the globe–a platform with an incredibly destructive business model. In brief, Facebook makes more money when users are more “engaged”–when we stay on the platform for longer periods of time. And that engagement is prompted by negative emotions–anger and hatred.

There is no historical precedent for the sheer scale of the damage being done. Yes, we have had popular books and magazines, propaganda films and the like in the past, and yes, they’ve been influential. Many people read or viewed them. But nothing in the past has been remotely as powerful as the (largely unseen and unrecognized) algorithms employed by Facebook–algorithms that aren’t even pushing a particular viewpoint, but simply stirring mankind’s emotional pot and setting tribe against tribe.

The question is: what do we do? (A further question is: have our political structures deteriorated to a point where government cannot do anything about anything…but I leave consideration of that morose possibility for another day.)

The Brookings Institution recently summarized legislative efforts to amend Section 230–the provision of communication law that provides platforms like Facebook with immunity for what users post. Whatever the merits or dangers of those proposals, none of them would seem to address the elephant in the room, which is the basic business model built into the algorithms employed. So long as the priority is engagement, and so long as engagement requires a degree of rage (unlikely with pictures of adorable babies and cute kittens), Facebook and other social media sites operating on the same business plan will continue to strengthen divisions and atomize communities.

The men who crafted America’s constitution were intent on preventing any one part of the new government from amassing too much power–hence separation of powers and federalism. They could not have imagined a time when private enterprises had the ability to exercise more power than government, but that is the time we occupy. 

If government should be prohibited from using its power to censor or mandate or otherwise control expression, shouldn’t Facebook be restrained from–in effect–preferring and amplifying intemperate speech?

I think the answer is yes, but I don’t have a clue how we do that while avoiding unanticipated negative consequences. 

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Back To Basics

Yesterday, I posted about Wang Huning, the behind-the-scenes Chinese public intellectual whose philosophy is evidently immensely influential in that country, and whose six-month visit to the U.S. triggered his disenchantment with Enlightenment rationalism/liberalism.

Wang reportedly came to believe that culture is a vital component of political stability–that  a society’s “software,” by which he means culture, values, and attitudes, shapes political destiny as much or more as the “hardware” (economics, systems, institutions) most of us consider far more influential.

Since I read only the article to which I linked, I don’t know whether Wang ever addressed the extent to which hardware–especially economic systems–influences and shapes or distorts culture. In the U.S., for example, sociological research tells us that capitalism has strengthened America’s cultural emphasis on individualism.

Be that as it may, Wang’s impressions of America, and the conclusions he drew from his observations, underscore one of the enduring questions of political philosophy: what is government for? What are the tasks that must be done collectively–through government–and what tasks are properly left to the private and voluntary sectors?

I don’t think it is an over-simplification to suggest that American Right-wingers agree with Wang in one crucial respect: the importance of culture and tradition. (In their case, the supreme importance of their culture and tradition.) The Right thus believes that it is government’s job to protect their culture–a culture which gives social dominance to White Christian males and facilitates a dog-eat-dog form of market capitalism.

The Left–which, in America these days, includes pretty much anything and anyone to the left of radical Right-wing Republicanism–sees the job of government very differently. For most of us, the ideal government is boring; it is (or should be) almost entirely concerned with building and maintaining the physical and social infrastructure that underlies and enables genuine human liberty–which we define as the ability to pursue one’s personal life goals. So we want government to attend to the public safety, build and maintain the structures that allow us to travel, communicate and collaborate, and–ideally–provide a social safety net sufficient to prevent poverty and a degree of inequality that endangers social stability.

What we label the American Left today includes a very wide a swath of opinion, so it is inevitable that there will be many “intra-Left” arguments about what that infrastructure should look like, how robust it should be, and how government should go about funding and maintaining it. But virtually everyone on the Left would define the role of government in terms that are utterly incompatible with those of the radical Right.

These incompatible views of what government is for have led to incommensurate demands on government.

In today’s America, the Left (pretty much across the broad spectrum of Left-of-Fascism opinion and despite disputes about how to achieve these goals) wants roads and bridges repaired, healthcare access expanded,   and voting rights protected. It also wants the wealthy to pay taxes at the higher rates that were historically imposed.  Today’s (far more unified) Right wants school history courses censored and trans students ostracized, women’s reproductive liberties curtailed, voting made more difficult for minorities, and White Christian privilege protected. it also wants taxes further reduced, especially on corporations and the rich.

The Bill of Rights, as I have repeatedly noted, is a list of things that government is forbidden to do;  the nation’s Founders did not believe that government’s job included protection of a particular worldview, religion or status.

Wang’s belief in the importance of culture isn’t wrong. But cultures develop over time; they are the result of numerous factors that interact to influence social mores, attitudes and values. In the U.S.,over time, the culture has been heavily influenced by the values of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and by the other aspirations built into our constituent documents.

Most Americans have been “acculturated” to see government’s role as a provider of infrastructure (however narrowly or broadly defined)–not as a protector of privilege, which is what today’s Right demands in its breathtakingly radical effort to remake both American law and culture.

There’s a reason the Right wants to censor and distort the teaching of accurate history. Those who control the historical narrative control the culture–and the country.

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The Chinese Tocqueville?

Most Americans–or so I hope–have at least heard of Alexis de Tocqueville, the Frenchman who traveled the United States in the mid-1800s and wrote of his observations. Those of us who have taught social studies of one kind or another generally include at least some of Tocqueville’s writings in our lesson plans.

It’s worth considering just how out-of-date Tocqueville’s observations are, some two hundred years later, especially right now when Americans have evidently lost the ability to govern ourselves. 

What brought Tocqueville to mind was an article a reader shared from a publication called Palladium, which situates itself as “Governance Futurism.” The article focused on a figure from the Chinese Communist hierarchy I’d never heard of, one Wang Huning. According to the article, very few people actually have heard of him, although he is evidently a powerful voice in China’s governing hierarchy. The article describes him as “arguably the single most influential ‘public intellectual’ alive today.”

Such a figure is just as readily recognizable in the West as an éminence grise (“grey eminence”), in the tradition of Tremblay, Talleyrand, Metternich, Kissinger, or Vladimir Putin adviser Vladislav Surkov.

Wang’s work has centered on the centrality of culture, tradition, and value structures to political stability. He has argued that society’s “software” (culture, values, attitudes) shapes political destiny as much or more as its “hardware” (economics, systems, institutions). The article notes that this represents a “daring break from the materialism of orthodox Marxism.”

Originally, Wang was hopeful that classical liberalism could play a positive role in China. That changed after he spent six months in the United States as a visiting scholar.

Profoundly curious about America, Wang took full advantage, wandering about the country like a sort of latter-day Chinese Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting more than 30 cities and nearly 20 universities…Wang recorded his observations in a memoir that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book America Against America. 

Wang concluded that America’s problems all have the same root cause: “a radical, nihilistic individualism at the heart of modern American liberalism.”

“The real cell of society in the United States is the individual,” he finds. This is so because the cell most foundational (per Aristotle) to society, “the family, has disintegrated.” Meanwhile, in the American system, “everything has a dual nature, and the glamour of high commodification abounds. Human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power, and law can all become the target of commodification.” This “commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to a number of serious social problems.” In the end, “the American economic system has created human loneliness” as its foremost product, along with spectacular inequality. As a result, “nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit.”

Wang observed a growing tension between Enlightenment liberal rationalism and a “younger generation [that] is ignorant of traditional Western values.” “If the value system collapses,” he asks, “how can the social system be sustained?”

Good question. (In fact, very similar to the concerns voiced by Leonard Pitts, about which I previously posted.)

Ultimately, he argues, when faced with critical social issues like drug addiction, America’s atomized, deracinated, and dispirited society has found itself with “an insurmountable problem” because it no longer has any coherent conceptual grounds from which to mount any resistance.

“Coherent conceptual grounds” is another way of approaching what I have been calling the “American Idea”–the belief that to be an American does not require any particular identity, but does require allegiance to the founding, aspirational philosophy of the country. Authentic allegiance, obviously, requires knowing what that aspirational philosophy is. 

In other words, it requires basic civic literacy.

The America that Alexis de Tocqueville visited is long gone, and with it, the cultural ties and local collective practices that made civic knowledge less critical.  If Wang Huning’s observations–and the conclusions he drew from those observations–are correct, we are seeing the socially-destructive consequences of a radical individualism facilitated by a profound ignorance of America’s governing premises. 

The current belligerence being displayed by self-described “patriots’ over vaccination mandates is a perfect example: angry people insisting on their “right” to risk infecting others, and claiming a constitutional protection of that right that does not exist (and never has). 

China has not escaped the modernization and “liberalization” Wang deplored; Chinese society, albeit not its governance, reflects many of the same problems of commodification and inequality that we Americans face. But that doesn’t make our own experience less perilous–or the remedies more ascertainable.

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