Fear Itself

Paul Krugman’s column on August 24th really, really hit the proverbial nail on the head.  It was titled “QAnon is Trump’s Last, Best Chance,” and it homed in on the nature of the snake oil that Trump and the GOP are peddling.

Last week’s Democratic National Convention was mainly about decency — about portraying Joe Biden and his party as good people who will do their best to heal a nation afflicted by a pandemic and a depression. There were plenty of dire warnings about the threat of Trumpism; there was frank acknowledgment of the toll taken by disease and unemployment; but on the whole the message was surprisingly upbeat.

This week’s Republican National Convention, by contrast, however positive its official theme, is going to be QAnon all the way.

I don’t mean that there will be featured speeches claiming that Donald Trump is protecting us from an imaginary cabal of liberal pedophiles, although anything is possible. But it’s safe to predict that the next few days will be filled with QAnon-type warnings about terrible events that aren’t actually happening and evil conspiracies that don’t actually exist.

Think about that last line: terrible events that aren’t actually happening and evil conspiracies that don’t actually exist. Inculcating fear–of Black people, Jews, immigrants, socialists–has been a Republican staple since Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” but until recently, it was only a portion of that strategy.

Now, the once-Grand-old-Party has nothing else.

As Krugman points out, the messaging employed by this administration has focused on efforts to panic Americans over nonexistent threats.

If you get your information from administration officials or Fox News, you probably believe that millions of undocumented immigrants cast fraudulent votes, even though actual voter fraud hardly ever happens; that Black Lives Matter protests, which with some exceptions have been remarkably nonviolent, have turned major cities into smoking ruins; and more.

It has been a constant barrage of Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts.”

Krugman says that much of this focus on imaginary threats is a defense mechanism from people who have no clue how to do policy, or to cope with real threats.

Covid-19, of course, has been the. all-too-visible example of that inability. In the face of massive American deaths, Trump has offered quack remedies (drink bleach!), and little else other than blaming China. and denying the severity and extent of the pandemic.

Trump, in other words, can’t devise policies that respond to the nation’s actual needs, nor is he willing to listen to those who can. He won’t even try. And at some level both he and those around him seem aware of his basic inadequacy for the job of being president.

What he and they can do, however, is conjure up imaginary threats that play into his supporters’ prejudices, coupled with conspiracy theories that resonate with their fear and envy of know-it-all “elites.” QAnon is only the most ludicrous example of this genre, all of which portrays Trump as the hero defending us from invisible evil.

If all of this sounds crazy, that’s because it is. And it’s almost certainly not a political tactic that can win over a majority of American voters.

Trump’s base is terrified. They are afraid most of all of demographic change, of losing their white, Christian, masculine privilege, but they are also deeply uncomfortable with the increasing ambiguities of modern life. They  want desperately to “return” to a world that never was.

Real-world policies–the kind that would appear in a party platform, or be embraced by competent grownups–can’t soothe those fears. The Republican Party has retreated to the only thing it has left: fantasy.

So they are ramping up the fear and telling us “those people” are to blame.

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Funding Insanity

What if we discovered that the attendants in a mental institution were reassuring patients that the aliens they were seeing were real? That they should listen to and believe the voices in their heads? At the very least, we’d wonder why–what nefarious scheme could account for actions clearly motivated to confirm inmates’ insanity?

The Guardian has raised a very similar set of questions, but about the GOP. It reports that groups tied to Donald Trump’s chief of staff and several party mega-donors are funding GOP candidates who champion the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Republican party leaders linked to the White House helped boost the primary campaign of a QAnon supporter with a history of making racist and bigoted statements, campaign finance filings show.

Campaign finance reports show contributions to QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Green’s campaign from groups connected to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and his wife, as well as the chairman of the board of the Heritage Foundation,  the attorney who represented “Covington Kid” Nicholas Sandmann (aka “the smirking kid”) in his defamation suits against the Washington Post and CNN, and multiple Republican mega-donors.

“Getting involved in a primary on behalf of an absolutely insane, conspiracy-minded, explicitly racist candidate in a seat that is reliably conservative is mind-bogglingly irresponsible,” said Tim Miller, a former spokesman for the Republican National Committee who is now political director for Republican Voters Against Trump.

For readers who may not be familiar with QAnon,  it’s a conspiracy theory rooted in age-old antisemitic tropes. Followers believe that Donald Trump is waging a secret battle against an evil cabal of Democrats, celebrities and billionaires who are engaged in pedophilia, child trafficking, and even cannibalism. The movement has repeatedly inspired vigilante violence–remember the guy who shot up the D.C. pizza. parlor?– and the FBI. has warned. that it represents a potential domestic terrorism threat.

A few high-profile Republican leaders spoke out against Greene after Politico unearthed and published videos of her  making racist and. anti-Semitic statements, and the Koch Industries Pac requested a refund of an earlier donation. But her campaign continued to be backed by  other major Republican donors and influential political leaders. The Guardian report lists a number of them, including a  Pac run by Representative Jim Jordan, who has been dogged for years by allegations that he knew and did nothing to stop sexual abuse of student athletes at Ohio State University when he worked there in the 1980s and 90s.

Greene received $2,800 from John W Childs, the former chairman of JW Childs Associates who stepped down after being charged with misdemeanor solicitation in an investigation related to the suspected human trafficking sting that led to the arrest of New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. Childs denied the charge at the time and said he had retained a lawyer. Kraft pleaded not guilty to two misdemeanor solicitation charges.

QAnon is reminiscent of other fringe movements in the Republican Party–the John Birch Society comes to mind. (Remember when the Birchers accused President Eisenhower of being a conscious Communist agent?)

The. other morning,  Mike Pence was on CBS This Morning,  and was asked about QAnon.  He pretended to know nothing about it. Meadows has also professed ignorance of it. Those denials ring very hollow, leaving us with two possibilities: (1) having engaged in pedophilia and/or trafficking themselves, Greene supporters from the Trump cult  (aka “projection-is-us”) actually believe in QAnon, or (2) they don’t believe  in QAnon,  but do believe that encouraging the racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim bigotry that is at its core will help them win the election.

Either way, it’s a sad–and revealing– commentary on a once-respectable political party.

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When Voters Can’t Connect The Dots…

Thousands–probably, millions–of words have been written about Republicans’ religious devotion to anti-tax beliefs. Unfortunately, that dogma is matched by a pervasive lack of understanding of how tax dollars are spent, and what citizens get for our money.

There are plenty of. wasteful programs, of course, not to mention subsidies that have long outlived whatever merit they may once have had. These wasteful and unnecessary programs allow politicians to make the case that all taxes are theft. It then follows that any and all efforts to reduce taxes are by definition laudatory.

Which brings us to Donald Trump’s recent plan to end or defer the payroll tax.

 As a number of media sources have explained, payroll taxes support Social Security and Disability Insurance. Social Security’s Chief Actuary, Stephen C. Goss, evaluated the Trump proposal; he concluded that it would end Disability Insurance in mid-2021 and destroy Social Security by mid-2023.

When those of us who are fortunate enough to still be employed look at our pay stubs, we see hefty deductions for FICA.  Most of us have undoubtedly thought about how nice it would be to have those dollars right now.  Reasonably informed adults,  however, who realize that they will need Social Security at some point, understand that deferring instant gratification is in their long-term best interests. (It’s true that some small portion of the population would be able to invest on their own behalf, but since most people couldn’t or wouldn’t, massive poverty among the elderly would result.)

Those who don’t know what the payroll tax deduction pays for see it as just another tax to attack.

I understand that tax policy can be complicated. When I pontificate about Americans’ lack of civic literacy, I’m not suggesting that we all need to know the ins-and-outs of the various ways government assesses us to pay for services–but it would  be helpful if people recognized that we need to pay for services that are widely popular and obviously needed at the local, state and federal levels.

Actually, it would be more than helpful if Americans could agree on the essential components of both our physical and social infrastructure. At the  local level, there’s a public outcry if streets,  roads  and bridges aren’t properly maintained. Whatever our concerns about policing, a vast majority expect local government to provide for public safety.  Most of us think cities should provide public transit, garbage and snow removal, and a variety of other services. 

Survey research leaves no doubt about the popularity of federal social welfare programs like Social Security and Medicare. Survey research also tells us that far too many Americans fail to connect the dots between the taxes they pay and the services they demand.

Should thoughtful and competent individuals  and organizations monitor government. programs to ensure that our tax dollars are being wisely and appropriately spent? Absolutely. Are there programs that should be eliminated? You betcha! But ensuring the efficiency of public administration is a far cry from across-the-board anti-tax dogma–and a very far cry from uninformed and dangerous efforts to keep today’s dollars by selling the future short.

As usual, Trump and his administration are counting on the ignorance of his supporters. And to be fair, eliminating the payroll tax is (marginally) less dangerous than drinking bleach…

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American Exceptionalism?

When we hear the term “exceptional,” we tend to think in terms of merit–someone who is exceptionally good at something. But exceptional has another meaning: unusual. As in “not typical” or “abnormal.” Even before the disaster of the past four years, I’ve come to see American exceptionalism as more of an illustration of that less desirable definition than the former. Our current struggle with COVID-19 has certainly undercut the widespread belief that Americans are exceptionally competent.

My cardiologist cousin recently shared an article from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that focused on the prevalence of biases that have inhibited our national response to the pandemic–biases that, when added to the utter lack of competent national leadership, certainly help to explain our inability to contain it.

The article began with a discussion of ventilators. One of the first decisions made by the Trump administration in response to the pandemic was to spend $3 billion dollars to build more ventilators. As the article noted, however,

These extra ventilators, even had they been needed, would likely have done little to improve population survival because of the high mortality among patients with COVID-19 who require mechanical ventilation, which acts to divert care-givers away from more health-promoting endeavors. Yet most US residents supported this response because they believed that enough ventilators would lead to better overall survival from this scourge.

So why are so many people supportive of ensuring a sufficient number of ventilators but not similarly supportive of efforts to implement earlier, more aggressive physical distancing, testing, and contact tracing– policies that would have saved far more lives? The article attributes that (illogical) response to the referenced biases, beginning with our human tendency to “prioritize the readily imaginable over the statistical, the present over the future, and the direct over the indirect.”

In other words, to prioritize emotion over science.

This causes humans to respond more aggressively to threats to identifiable lives, ie, those that an individual can easily imagine being their own (or representing of people they care about such as family members) than to the hidden, “statistical” deaths reported in accounts of the population-level tolls of the crisis. Similarly, psychologists have described efforts to rescue visible, endangered individual lives as a highest priority goal, even if more lives would be saved through alternative responses.

Anyone who has ever wrestled with the Trolley Problem has encountered that bias.

This very human trait is why descriptions of the millions of people killed by the Nazis and the Soviets, or reports of the Rwandan and Chinese genocides–or our own near eradication of Native Americans– are less moving, less likely to cause outrage, than the individual stories that emerge from those and other horrific episodes in human history.

The article also cites “Optimism Bias,” our human tendency to predict optimistic outcomes.

Although early pandemic prediction models considered both best and worst-case outcomes, sound policy would have attempted to minimize mortality by doing everything possible to prevent the worst case results, but human optimism bias led many to act as if the best case was in fact the most likely. President Trump provides one of many good examples of this bias.

There were others: A preference for benefits in the “here and now” to larger benefits in the future,  leading us to place greater value on saving a life today than a life tomorrow, and something called Omission Bias–a desire to avoid an imminent “harm” (like the pain of a vaccination) even when avoiding it is likely to lead to significantly worse results down the road.

It’s one thing to recognize the prevalence of these very human biases. It’s another thing, however, to indulge them–and it is unforgivable to cater to them through public policies rather than basing those policies on medical and scientific knowledge.

If we really want to achieve that first definition of American “exceptionalism,” we will stop denigrating and dismissing scientific and other expertise, stop scorning people who know what they’re doing as “elitists,” and stop electing people. who pander to our biases rather than those willing to base policy decisions on the best information available.

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I Was Wrong

During the Democratic primary–as regular readers of this blog will remember–I was pretty adamant about America’s need for generational change. I was convinced that both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders were simply too old to tackle the monumental task of rescuing the nation (or what is left of it in the wake of the train wreck that is the Trump administration). I thought that a restoration of hope, of possibility, required a younger, more energetic, more “woke” set of actors.

What I failed to take into account was the immense importance of competence borne of experience, especially at a juncture as perilous as the one we approach.You would think that–as an old woman myself–I would have recognized the value of lessons learned over a lifetime, many of them the hard way.

The Democrats have a truly impressive “bench” of very smart, very idealistic young people: Mayor Pete, AOC, a number of others. But they will still be smart (and hopefully, still idealistic) 4 or 8 or 12 years from now, and the experience they will have gained in those years will deepen their understanding of the political process and sharpen the skills it takes to negotiate the convoluted structures of governance.

The (virtual) Democratic Convention reminded me that Joe Biden–who was also a smart and idealistic youngster “back in the day”– offers America fifty years of successful public sector experience. Unlike the reality-show buffoon who currently occupies the Oval Office, he knows what it like to do the hard, grunt work of governing. He knows what it is like to encounter new facts and perspectives that make you recognize and admit that you’ve been on the wrong side of  a policy issue. His deep experience with foreign leaders has allowed him to forge relationships that will be critical to re-establishing America’s reputation abroad (younger people simply haven’t had the time to establish those relationships, and President Obama drew heavily on them during his first term in office.)

His relationships with others in government, on both sides of the political aisle, have established his reputation as a person who can be trusted to keep his word, honor a commitment, and “tell it like it is.” That reputation simply cannot be established overnight; it requires time.

There’s another relationship that has been established over the years–Biden’s relationship with the American public. He’s a known quantity, which is why the efforts of the Crazy Guy In Chief to define him have fallen flat. GOP spin doctors may be able to paint AOC as some sort of communist (after all, she wants rich people to pay taxes! and she wants to save the environment!), but Joe Biden has already defined himself in the years that he has been a public figure.

These are assets that only come with experience.And time.

I still favor a generational shift, probably sooner than later, but I failed to appreciate the value and importance of Biden’s self-described status as a “transitional figure.” Assuming (as sane people must) a Democratic victory in November and a successful (probably ugly) transition of power, Joe Biden will bring extensive knowledge of government and how it does– and doesn’t– work to the monumental effort of repairing the damage.

If we are very lucky, if we give him the tools to work with by electing a sufficient number of thoughtful, non-lunatic people to the House and Senate, the government he hands over to a younger generation will be recognizably American again.

So,  mea culpa. And think about Joe Biden, a competent and empathetic adult, as you watch the GOP convention nominate– and genuflect to– the child-sociopath who currently occupies the Oval Office.

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