Donald Trump's Agenda is to Dominate the News

Ezra Klein interviews Yuval Levin about the first year of the Trump administration. They are exploring the notion that Trump prefers "retail" to "wholesale" governance. For example, rather than try to pass a law mandating changes in how universities receiving Federal funding can operate, Trump perfers to do individual deals with each university in turn.

Klein: 

There’s an interesting dynamic where retail deal making fits the bandwidth of the news and legislation doesn’t. People do not know one-tenth of what was in the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act or the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, for that matter. Much more change is happening in legislation than people realize.

But you cannot fit it into the size of a news story. You cannot even fit it into a dozen. And people’s attention span — particularly as we’ve gotten down to social media — things are just flying by really quickly.

Whereas these deals — they cut a deal with Nvidia, they cut a deal with Japan — they actually fit. Maybe not everything in the deal, but the sense that something is happening that is graspable: They made a deal with this university, they intimidated this person, they launched an investigation here. Everything is the size of a news story, functionally.

I have never covered an administration before where the problem was not that we have a communication problem, where people don’t know how much we’re doing. Every administration — Biden, Obama, Bush — they all felt that way.

Whereas Trump, in a way, it’s almost at least in your telling, and I do want to complicate this eventually, the opposite — that the pace of events feels actually faster in some ways than the events themselves.

Levin:

Yes, absolutely. There’s more said than done. There’s more above the surface than beneath the surface, and it is very well suited to a telling of the story.

One way I think about it is that the president wants himself to be at the end of every story on Fox News. So if something going on in the world is troubling or challenging, at the end of the story, Donald Trump has solved that problem.

One way to think about that is he wants to do everything. He wants to control everything. But it’s actually a very narrow notion of what the president can do, and it’s not using most of the powers as the chief executive of the American government. But it’s absolutely true.

It’s not just legislation. Regulation, too, works this way. There’s never a moment when you can say: We’ve done this. When you’re moving regulatory action, there’s a proposed rule, and there are comments, and it’s years, and at the end of the day, you’ve done something that’s going to endure — but it’s not an easy story to tell, and it’s very dull and lawyerly.

If you just instead make a deal with Brown University or with Nvidia, then you can just say it that day, and there’s the C.E.O., and he says it, too, and something big is going on.

So I think this approach of deal making has definitely expanded the distance between perception and reality. It has created an impression of an enormous amount of action when the real amount is — not zero, by any means. But we’re living in a less transformative time than we think in this way.

Here is another reason to worry about the future of democracy. Governing a huge nation is hard and complictaed, and laws intended to make real changes are long, complex, and often take years to bear fruit. It seems like most of the voters who want more manufacturing in America went for Trump, even though the Biden administration made that its biggest focus, and the CHIPS and Science Act may end having very important long term effects. But you can't explain it in a two-minute news segment, or a tweet.

We may find out that a nation with a 5-second attention span gets governed only in ultimately ineffectual sound bites.

Against Debate

Matt Yglesias thinks "debate" is a waste of time, because 1) debating is a skill that has little relationship to being right, and 2) it never changes anyone's mind. And this:

Most people who disagree with you have no idea what they’re talking about.

They’re generally pretty dumb and haven’t spent much time interrogating their own views, and they certainly haven’t bothered to form even a minimally coherent intellectual or moral approach to the world. They may invoke particular principles to defend their specific commitments, but those principles are so inconsistently applied that it almost feels like bad faith.

This is all completely true. But it’s easy to forget that it’s also true of people who agree with you.

Evan Mawarire on Freedom

Evan Mawarire is a Zimbabwean pastor and opponent of the Mugabe government:

When you are pressed hard by a dictator, you don't sit down. You stand up! You keep speaking, you keep rising, because the freedom we ask for is not what they give us, but what is inside us. . . .

We are freedom in every moment that we refuse to be silenced. We are freedom every time we refuse for the handcuffs convince us that we have lost hope. We are freedom every time we are arrested and we leave the jails and the courts and go right back to demanding the very thing that they arrested us for.

"Weak" Speech and Gender Stereotypes

A few years ago I read an article by a female reporter who heard somewhere that journalists quote men much more often than women. So she checked found that this was true of her own work. She resolved to stop doing this and tried hard to achieve equality, but failed; even when she was able to quote equal numbers of men and women in her pieces, the editors always cut out many of the statements by women. Because, she said, men are just more quotable according to the standards of modern journalism. Which brings me to this NY Times piece by Adam Grant about women and "weak speech."

“Stop using weak language.” If you’re a woman, you’ve probably gotten this advice from a mentor, a coach or a teacher. If you want to be heard, use more forceful language. If you want a raise or a promotion, demand it. As the saying goes, nice girls don’t get the corner office.

Weak speech means peppering your discourse 

with disclaimers (I’m no expert, but …), hedges (sort of, kind of), and tag questions (right? wouldn’t you say?).

Or always saying, "in my opinion," "I think", etc. Which is way the reporter whose name I have forgotten quoted men more often even when she tried not to; all those disclaimers make a statement weaker and less interesting for a short segment on the news. On the news, you want people to take bold, simple stands, not qualify themselves or explain. Explanation and nuance are boring.

Incidentally I have noticed that this is true of the subjects Tyler Cowen interviews for Marginal Revolutions. All of these are really elite people, CEOs and authors of prize-winning books, but the women still qualify their speech a lot more than the men do. I have also noticed that the trans women of my acquaintance are still completely masculine in this regard.

Anyway, Grant's piece is an argument, backed up by a bunch of studies, that women speak this way because this is what actually works for women:

It turns out that women who use weak language when they ask for raises are more likely to get them. In one experiment, experienced managers watched videos of people negotiating for higher pay and weighed in on whether the request should be granted. The participants were more willing to support a salary bump for women — and said they would be more eager to work with them — if the request sounded tentative: “I don’t know how typical it is for people at my level to negotiate,” they said, following a script, “but I’m hopeful you’ll see my skill at negotiating as something important that I bring to the job.” By using a disclaimer (“I don’t know …”) and a hedge “(I hope …”), the women reinforced the supervisor’s authority and avoided the impression of arrogance. For the men who asked for a raise, however, weak language neither helped nor hurt. No one was fazed if they just came out and demanded more money.

In the United States and in many cultures, gender stereotypes still hold that men should be dominant and assertive, while women should be kind and caring. When women violate these stereotypes, they often get punished. In a meta-analysis of dozens of studies, when women asserted their ideas, made direct requests and advocated for themselves, they were judged as less hirable. Although they were seen as equally competent, they were liked less than men who engaged in the exact same behaviors.

New evidence reveals that it’s not ambition per se that women are being penalized for. . . . The problem arises if people perceive them to be forceful, controlling, commanding and outspoken. These are qualities for which men are regularly given a pass, but they put women at risk of being disliked and denied for leadership roles. (Not surprisingly, the backlash is even stronger when a woman is Black). Instead of being judged just on their performance, they are dinged for their personality. Overbearing. Too abrasive. Sharp elbows.

Grant does the performative thing in blaming this on men – "It’s outrageous that women have to tame their tongues to protect fragile male egos" – but the studies he cites don't support that; they find that the bad reaction to pushy women is just as prevalent among women as among men.

It seems that as women achieve dominance in certain fields of business, like publishing, it hasn't happened because women have become more masculine; it has happened because the habits of aggressive men have become less associated with leadership.

Meloni Defends Aid to Ukraine

In the Italian parliament last week a spolesman for the Five Star Movement, a populist party, introduced a motion to end military aid to Ukraine. PM Georgia Meloni answered like this.

At one point, in reference to the position of the Five Star Movement, on the topic of Ukraine, he says, "Look, it's better to live under a dictatorship than to die."

And so the mask comes off.

We have in these words a massacre of centuries of history in which freedom, democracy and all the values of our civilization were built with the sacrifice of those who were ready die for them. We have a massacre of the choices made by Paolo Borsellino, Giovanni Falcone and all those who fought against the Mafia.

I don't think it is better to live under a dictatorship than to die. I think we must work so that people can live free. That is the difference between what we are doing and what you propose.

Magnificent.

Algorithms, Disinformation, and the Deep State

At Tablet, Jacob Siegel has launched a 12,000-word attack on what he calls the "hoax of the century," which is the government's war on disinformation. I did not read the whole thing but I think I read enough to get the general idea. Working together with search engines and social media sites, they – whoever "they" are – are censoring what we can read and trying to control our thoughts in the name of fighting a bogus threat:

The crime is the information war itself, which was launched under false pretenses and by its nature destroys the essential boundaries between the public and private and between the foreign and domestic, on which peace and democracy depend. By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning weapons of war against Americans citizens. It turned the public arenas where social and political life take place into surveillance traps and targets for mass psychological operations. The crime is the routine violation of Americans’ rights by unelected officials who secretly control what individuals can think and say.

While Siegel's essay is over-the-top bordering on madness – among other things he is obsessed with Hunter Biden's laptop – the issue he raises is real and worth talking about. Siegel is absolutely right that some people in the government are obsessed with disinformation:

Something in the looming specter of Donald Trump and the populist movements of 2016 reawakened sleeping monsters in the West. Disinformation, a half-forgotten relic of the Cold War, was newly spoken of as an urgent, existential threat. Russia was said to have exploited the vulnerabilities of the open internet to bypass U.S. strategic defenses by infiltrating private citizens’ phones and laptops. The Kremlin’s endgame was to colonize the minds of its targets, a tactic cyber warfare specialists call “cognitive hacking.”

If you followed the run-up to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the early days of the war, statements from US and other western officials were full of this fear. Russia, it was said over and over, was spreading propaganda so effectively that this might undermine Ukraine's will to fight and the west's willingness to support them. This turned out to be complete nonsense. Most Ukrainians are fighting like hell, and the ones who do support Russia mostly do so while fully understanding what Putinism is all about. They aren't "fooled by Russian propanganda," they are authoritiarians who miss the Soviet Union, or else opportunists who thought they could make a fast buck and maybe get good jobs out of supporting the eventual winner.

If you're paying attention, you may have noticed that I just elided the crucial issue: is there a difference between believing something in some sort of genuine way, and believing it because you have been fooled by propaganda and disinformation? But we'll get back to that later.

Anyway the fear of Russian propaganda became a big thing in the west, among both security hawks afraid of Russian or Chinese aggression and liberals afraid of Donald Trump. Various Twitter accounts were identified as Russian bots, and Twitter kept mum about it even though they knew some of them were in fact real people living in the US. I still meet people who say that Russian trolling elected Trump, even though this has been refuted in every possible way. Claims that Trump was a Russian agent were all over liberal social media sites.

Now security hawks have shifted their attention to manufacturing artillery shells, but liberals are still obsessed with disinformation of two kinds. First, there is Trump's claim that he won the 2020 election. That false claim certainly did lead to a nasty riot and has spawned a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit over voting machines; it is one of the blind spots in Siegel's essay that he doesn't really deal with the whole election business. Second, Covid. 

It is on the subject of Covid that I think you can see the real damage being done by the fight over disinformation. Terrified of spreading pro-Invemectin or anti-vaxx propaganda, Google and the other search engines have tweaked their algorithms to direct all medical queries toward officially approved sites like the CDC, the Mayo Clinic, or WebMD. But those sites are, as Scott Siskind has shown several times, all but useless for many people. If you try to look up drug side effects on any of them, they simply repeat the warnings that come on the label. Siskind once put up, side by side, the warning labels for a drug that doctors consider very safe and one that causes 40,000 emergency room visits a year: to the untrained eye, they are identical. Sites that work to explain the differences to lay people used to get many more page views, but Google's shift shredded their readership. In the name of keeping us safe from disinformation, Google and Facebook and probably others have made it much harder to find useful medical knowledge.

This shifts our attention from the military industrial complex to the other arcane thing about our world: the operations of search engines and other internet algorithms. Online retailers are constantly complaining that some minor tweak in Google's code caused their business to plummet overnight. People who sell on Amazon say the same thing about their algorithm. I believe this is true, because over the years it has happened half a dozen times to this site. Since this is only a hobby for me, I merely note it and move on, but if I made my living this way I would also be screaming. Google, Facebook et al. really do have enormous power over what we see and read. How are they using it?

Mostly to make money. I think that if the algorithms do any real political damage it is mostly by directing our attention to outrage porn, which gets the most engagement. But we know that Google and Facebook work with the government in several ways. For example, against child porn; they have an elaborate arrangement with the FBI that allows them to store and transmit images that would otherwise land them in prison. Testimony in Congress has confirmed that they also do this for anything that smacks of Islamic terrorism, including discourse that I think ought to be protected under freedom of religion. Surely there is also collaboration around the surveillance of neo-Nazis and other violent right-wing types.

Where does this end? I doubt anybody really knows, even in the highest reaches of the FBI or the NSA. Their supercomputers have compiled so much data, and so many different people might have access to it, that we simply don't know how it is being used.

I think, though, that we can say with confidence that it is not being used to censor conservative thought. Conservative ideas are all over the internet and the airways in every conceivable form. If Google's algorithm has a preference for liberal ideas, as has been claimed, that certainly doesn't keep conservative firebrands from becoming internet stars. So I think the basic premise of Siegel's argument is false; he is obviously not being censored, since his essay is spreading like crazy.

But I wonder two things: first, how are our interests being manipulated by search engines? Are there things I would really like to read that have been hidden from me? And does this, sometimes, relate to government pressure to hide certain sites or promote others?

And second, what is disinformation anyway, and how do we really form our beliefs? Is there a hard line to be drawn between things that are so firmly refuted that defending them in public is lying, and things that are probably not true but still worth thinking about? 

I think this is a hard problem. I am concerned about what CO2 emissions might do to the planet, but I regularly see statements about climate change that I think are not at all supported by the evidence; for example, that the western drought of the last 20 years was caused by global warming, or that hurricanes have gotten more powerful and numerous. When you are dealing with a vast, chaotic system like the weather, it is simply impossible to know, even in theory, what "caused" a particular drought or storm. I suppose some people would call that "disinformation." I prefer to call it a difference in interpretation that should be hashed out in public debate.

Many people think that their own beliefs are so obviously true that opposition to them is just lying or wrong. The algorithms used by search engines and social media sites are opaque, biased, and probably influenced in some ways by government pressure.

Put these things together and you get, on the one hand, demands that Twitter silence the Russian bots that were electing Trump, and on the other Jacob Siegel ranting about a conspiracy to silence conservative thought. Both fears are overblown. Millions of people on both political sides believe that other people get their politics from disinformation and Russian lies, to which those other people are uniquely susceptible. But maybe we just disagree, like we always have.

The Anti-Fascist

In 1931 the exiled anti-fascist Lauro De Bosis flew, in a flimsy wooden aeroplane, from Marseille to Rome. Arriving in the skies over the Italian capital, he dropped leaflets, then turned back. The round trip was too long for such an aircraft, and De Bosis did not expect to complete it. He had left behind, ready for publication, a text called The Story of My Death. On the return journey his plane – out of fuel – crashed into the sea. One of his leaflets contained a warning to those less principled Italians who were, gladly or with glum pragmatism, getting by in fascist Italy: "Accept nothing from fascism. All that it can give you is the price of your prostitution."

–Lucy Hughes Hallett

More Ukraine

Russia carried out a sort of revenge attack after its recent losses, with strikes on electrical infrastructure that caused blackouts in 5 oblasts. Zelensky responded like this:

Read our lips:
Without gas or without you? Without you.
Without light or without you? Without you.
Without water or without you? Without you.
Without food or without you? Without you. . . .
Cold, hunger, darkness and thirst are not as scary and deadly for us as your 'friendship and brotherhood'.
But history will put everything in its place. And we will be with gas, light, water and food... and WITHOUT you!

Oryx count of destroyed and abandoned Russian equipment, September 8-11:

54 tanks
114 APCs, IFVs, etc.
5 towed artillery
13 self-propelled artillery
9 Grad rocket launchers
2 SAM systems
92 others

And more is still coming in this morning. Before the counting is done we will be looking at an armored division worth of equipment, most of it abandoned. Some of it was not operational; you may have seen photographs of 7 or 8 tanks just sitting around in the yard of a church, which looks to have been a sort of repair yard, since the engine of one tank was next to it on the ground. But people are frankly puzzled by the sheer number of "random" infantry fighting vehicles in particular, just parked, like the one at the top. Why didn't somebody drive these away? No fuel? Or just panic?

Worse for Russia is the large number of abandoned self-propelled artillery pieces. Lately Russia has been fighting mainly with artillery, and with two more 152mm guns we have already seen this morning, that's 15 lost in this one battle.

Russian Fascism

Wow, some straight-up 1930s Fascist rhetoric from Vladimir Putin this week, something you could use in a history course as a perfect example of the type:

Yes, of course, the West will rely on the so-called fifth column, on traitors. On those who earn money here, with us, but live there. And they live not only in the geographical sense of the word, but according to their thoughts, according to their slavish consciousness. I do not judge all those who have a villa in Miami, or on the French Riviera, who can't do without foie gras, oysters or the so-called gender freedoms. The issue here is not in that, but in the fact that many of these people by their very nature are mentally located exactly there, and not here, not with our people, not with Russia. This is, in their opinion, a sign of belonging to a higher class, a higher race. Such people are willing to sell their own mother if only they are able to sit in the hallway of the highest caste. They want to be like her [the caste, presumably], imitating her in every possible way. Yet they forget or do not understand that if they are needed by this so-called higher caste, it is only as expendable material used to inflict the maximum damage on our people.

The collective West is attempting to splinter our society, speculating on military losses, on the socio-economic effects of sanctions, in order to provoke civil unrest in Russia, using the fifth column to achieve its goal. And there is only one goal, as I have said: the destruction of Russia. But any people, the Russian people especially, are able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors, and will spit them out like gnats that flew into their mouths. Spit them onto the pavement. I am certain that this necessary and natural self-purification of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, our togetherness, and our readiness to answer any calls to action.

"Cultish" and Me

Cultish: the Language of Fanaticism (2021) is a very interesting book by linguist Amanda Montell, bringing out the ways every sort of "cult" from Heaven's Gate to Amway uses language to create a separate world for its followers. Listen to a conversation between two high-ranking Scientologists, she says, and you will not have a clue what they are talking about. The special cult language bonds members together, creates a sense of being special insiders, and divides them from the rest of humanity.

It's a good book, a bit too chatty for me, but that's probably why I will never write a best seller. If you're interested in the topic, read it. I enjoyed it, and the topic is fascinating.

I wanted to write about my own very personal reaction. Montell's father was raised in a cult, and she describes herself as someone with a special sensitivity to anything that smacks of cultish language. I feel the same way.

Whenever I hear words used to divide us from them, signal membership in a group, or create any kind of unthinking emotional response, an alarm goes off in my head. I despise political slogans of every sort. I can't hear anyone say "family values" or "taxation is theft" or "diversity is strength" or "black lives matter" without cringing. Not that I disagree with all of these slogans; some strike me as mostly true. I just can't take seriously any idea that can be expressed in three words.

I used to go to demonstrations once every year or two, but I never liked them. I hate to hear slogans chanted, because to me they all sound like cultish mantras rather than actual thoughts. The speakers mostly mouthed strings of buzz worlds they knew would fit into certain emotional receptors in their audiences. People around me cheered, but I always thought, "That was a weak argument and you mischaracterized what your opponents actually believe." To me the world is too complex to express in all the words ever spoken, let alone by your slogan.  If you think allegiance to your slogan says something about people, I think you know nothing about either slogans or people.

Consider "diversity." I believe very strongly in diversity; my political ideal is what John Dewey called "pluralism." Let 10,000 flowers bloom. But I cringe almost every time I hear the word used in our discourse, because they people who use it don't seem to believe in it at all; in fact they all seem to be using it to attack those who disagree with them, thereby denying any kind of meaningful diversity. What they mean is, "I am a not-racist, non-homophobe etc. and therefore good, and you are not and therefore bad." Which makes my stomach turn over. And I feel this way about every slogan, every politically charged word.

Freedom? What sort of freedom? For whom, to do what?

Revolution? Against what? For what?

What, exactly, is a "community"?

And for me this goes far beyond just politics. There are exercise groups where people work out while shouting affirmations. I am about as likely to do that as I am to walk on the moon. 

I have friends who enjoy church services despite their agnosticism, but I can't take it. My mind is too taken up with quibbling about the details of what is being said or implied to ever relax.

I used to be arrogant about this and felt superior to the world. I don't any more. Instead I worry that as I age I will grow increasingly lonely. I do not feel like I belong to anything, have ever belonged to anything, and I worry that the consequences of this will get ever more dire after I retire and my children move on. I suspect this is largely because I am so allergic to the things that create belonging.

As Amanda Montell shows, cultish words and ritual actions are not tangential to belonging, they are its heart. These things are what creates group feeling, and that sort of group feeling has always been central to human life. Yet I have hardly experienced it at all.

Amanda Montel believes that cults are dangerous and bad, and that people should resist being drawn into them. Ok, fine, Jonestown was a disaster. But my reading of history is that if you go far enough back, everybody lived in a cult, a small community with its own language, its own rituals, a deep suspicion of outsiders, and shunning of people who questioned the agreed rules. We evolved in that sort of world. 

Our world is too big and diverse for us to be able to feel anything in common with the people of our town, let alone our nation. So those who crave belonging throw themselves into various groups. We have a million options: churches, exercise clubs, yoga studios, fandoms, political movements. I often hear people ask, "How could anyone believe that?" I always think, they are looking for a home, and this belief provides one, and you almost certainly hold to unquestioned beliefs of your own because you also want a home.

Without that sort of belonging, does anyone really have a home? Do I?

Pushing the Panic Button

At Vox, Anna North writes a magnificently unhinged cry of pain titled "The world as we know it is ending. Why are we still at work?" Some samples:

For a moment in early 2020, it seemed like we might get a break from capitalism. A novel coronavirus was sweeping the globe, and leaders and experts recommended that the US pay millions of people to stay home until the immediate crisis was over. These people wouldn’t work. They’d hunker down, take care of their families, and isolate themselves to keep everyone safe. With almost the whole economy on pause, the virus would stop spreading, and Americans could soon go back to normalcy with relatively little loss of life.

Obviously, that didn’t happen.

Instead, white-collar workers shifted over to Zoom (often with kids in the background), and everybody else was forced to keep showing up to their jobs in the face of a deadly virus. Hundreds of thousands died, countless numbers descended into depression and burnout, and a grim new standard was set: Americans keep working, even during the apocalypse.

Now it’s been nearly two years since the beginning of the pandemic — a time that has also encompassed an attempted coup, innumerable extreme weather events likely tied to climate change, and ongoing police violence against Black Americans — and we’ve been expected to show up to work through all of it. . . .

What do people like North think would happen if we stopped going to work?  Well, for starters, nobody would grow food, or ship food, or sell food, so we would soon all be going hungry. With nobody working in the waterworks and the sewage treatment plants and the power plants, our basic infrastructure would quickly crumble. Without people working, we simply can't survive.

The thing is, I get the impression that people like Anna North want something like that to happen. They want the world to be a s bad as they feel it is. They feel that we are, as North writes, "in the end times," and they want apocalypse in the streets. 

I don't, so I keep working.

People like Anna North also make the strange error of thinking that we have to go to work because of capitalism, and a "break from capitalism" would mean we don't have to work any more. But it isn't capitalism that forces us to work; we have to work because it is fundamental to animal life in this universe. We tried socialism and one thing we learned from that experiment is that people still had to go to their jobs every day.

Between the pandemic, the attempted coup, and the climate crisis, misery abounds:

Making these kinds of calculations all the time is exhausting and takes a toll on mental health. The “constant, low-level stress” of slow-moving disasters like the melting polar ice caps can make everything more difficult, including work, Remes said. “It makes it harder for people to be productive, because they’re worrying about their basement flooding.”

If these things are problems, doesn't that mean that we should be working all the harder to solve them? My readers know that I think greenhouse gases are a solvable problem, but we certainly won't make much progress if we all stay home and cocoon because we're too anxious to work. Plenty of people on the left justified the George Floyd protests with the argument that political change can't wait for the pandemic to end. Pulling your blankets over your head will not help anybody, not even you.

This kind of rant would be incomplete without the (usually white) authors tossing in the assertion that things are even worse for minorities:

Seventy percent of respondents in one September survey said they were anxious or stressed about work, and 81 percent said they were more burnt out than at the start of the pandemic. Among Americans of color, who have experienced many of the pandemic’s interlocking crises most acutely, “depression and anxiety and stress are spiking in ways that are disproportionate to their peers,” Anderson said.

But mental health is one part of American life where people of color do not have it worse; despite numerous attempts to show otherwise by people convinced that the root of our misery is oppression, white Americans suffer more from all the major forms of mental illness than other groups.

The world has serious problems. It always has. But it is not ending. As Freddie de Boer put it, in a response to North's essay,

The person who wrote this wrote it on a functioning computer, passed it off to her superiors as part of a more-or-less unaltered business operation, and it was uploaded to the internet, where it can be accessed by billions of people through the use of technologies that require an exquisite amount of collaboration across vast distances of geography and circumstance. In other words, the world as we know it is apparently ending in such a gentle way that the most basic economic, technological, and communicative infrastructures of our civilization are puttering along nicely.

I find apocalypticism mysterious and fascinating. I think it is often born from a personal sense that life day-to-day is so unendurably bad that anything would be better, even the collapse of civilization, mass starvation, and civil war.

Anna North is clearly on the left, but we could easily find equally unhinged screeds from people on the right. For reasons that I find mysterious, this era when human life is by most numerical measures better than ever before has spawned a very widespread sense that everything is going to hell. I don't really understand why, but I think all this doom-mongering has become a problem of its own as big those it is supposed to be based on.

Mitch McConnell, All In

Soon to be ex-Majority Leader McConnell, today, an hour before Trump supporters stormed the Capitol:

We're debating a step that has never been taken in American history, whether Congress should overrule the voters and overturn a presidential election. I've served 36 years in the Senate. This will be the most important vote I've ever cast. President Trump claims the election was stolen. The assertions range from specific local allegations to constitutional arguments to sweeping conspiracy theories. 

I supported the president's right to use the legal system. Dozens of lawsuits received hearings in courtrooms all across our country, but over and over, the courts rejected these claims, including all-star judges whom the president himself has nominated. . . .

The Constitution gives us here in Congress a limited role. We cannot simply declare ourselves a national board of elections on steroids. The voters, the courts, and the states have all spoken. They've all spoken. If we overrule them, it would damage our republic forever. This election actually was not unusually close.

Just in recent history, 1976, 2000, and 2004 were all closer than this one. The Electoral College margin is almost identical to what it was in 2016. If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral. We would never see the whole nation accept an election again. Every four years would be a scramble for power at any cost.

The Electoral College, which most of us on this side have been defending for years, would cease to exist, leaving many of our states with no real say at all in choosing a president. The effects would go even beyond the elections themselves. Self-government, my colleagues, requires a shared commitment to the truth and a shared respect for the ground rules of our system. . . .

We cannot keep drifting apart into two separate tribes with a separate set of facts and separate realities. with nothing in common except our hostility towards each other and mistrust for the few national institutions that we all still share.

The framers built the senate to stop short-term passions from boiling over and melting the foundations of our republic. So I believe protecting our constitutional order requires respecting the limits of our own power. It would be unfair and wrong to disenfranchise American voters and overrule the courts and the states on this extraordinarily thin basis. And I will not pretend such a vote would be a harmless protest gesture while relying on others to do the right thing. I will vote to respect the people's decision and defend our system of government as we know it. 

Not that I want to carry water for Mitch McConnell, a son of a bitch if there ever was one, but I like to give credit where credit is due, and parts of this speech are magnificent.

The KGB's Plan for Destroying America

Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov was a KGB agent who defected to Canada in 1970. In 1984 he gave an interview in which he laid out what the KGB was actually doing in America:

Bezmenov made the point that the work of the KGB mainly does not involve espionage, despite what our popular culture may tell us. Most of the work, 85% of it, was "a slow process which we call either ideological subversion, active measures, or psychological warfare."

What does that mean? Bezmenov explained that the most striking thing about ideological subversion is that it happens in the open as a legitimate process. "You can see it with your own eyes," he said. The American media would be able to see it, if it just focused on it.

Bezmenov described active measures like this:

What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.

I suppose this used to be trotted out all the time by far right characters upset about socialism. But maybe the hippies were just a red herring and the goal all along was Fox News.

Costly Signaling, or, Why Trump Says Outrageous Things

The political strategy of Trump and his friends might be summarized as 1) divide the country into two warring sides, and 2) pose as the perfect champion of one side. As Thomas Edsall explains, this is why Trump often says things that seem pointlessly outrageous and offensive:

According to Joshua Greene, a professor of psychology at Harvard, Trump is expert at sending “signals that are music to the ears of his base,” signals that ineradicably affirm his membership in the populist right wing of the Republican Party.

Green argued in an email that when

Trump says that a judge of Mexican ancestry can’t do his job, or attacks women for their physical appearance, or makes fun of a disabled reporter, or says that there are good people on both sides of a violent neo-Nazi rally, or that Haiti is a “shithole.” or that the “Second Amendment People” can maybe do something about Hillary Clinton, Trump is very deliberately and publicly excommunicating himself from the company of liberals, even moderate ones.

In Greene’s view, Trump offers a case study in the deployment of “costly signals.”

How does it work? Greene writes:

Making oneself irredeemably unacceptable to the other tribe is equivalent to permanently binding oneself to one’s own. These comments are like gang tattoos. And in Trump’s case, it’s tattoos all over his neck and face.

At the same time, Trump’s “costly signals” make his reliability as a protector of white privilege clear.

John Tooby, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Santa Barbara, described the signaling phenomenon in a 2017 Edge talk as an outgrowth of what he calls a “coalitional instinct.”

“To earn membership in a group,” Tooby says, “you must send signals that clearly indicate that you differentially support it, compared to rival groups.”

This, Tooby notes, encourages extremism: “Practical and functional truths are generally useless as differential signals, because any honest person might say them regardless of coalitional loyalty.” Far more effective are “unusual, exaggerated beliefs,” including “alarmism, conspiracies or hyperbolic comparisons.”

This phenomenon of “costly signalling”  drives a lot of political behavior in the US right now. Many statements are made all over the place simply from a desire to show everyone where you stand in a powerful way. I think the popularity of something like QAnon is all about this, about signaling that you are such a strong Republican you will consider anything; or, on the other side, talk about Revolution.

The Optimistic View of American History

 Obama sums it up:

I'm in Philadelphia, where our Constitution was drafted and signed. It wasn't a perfect document. It allowed for the inhumanity of slavery and failed to guarantee women -- and even men who didn't own property -- the right to participate in the political process. But embedded in this document was a North Star that would guide future generations; a system of representative government -- a democracy -- through which we could better realize our highest ideals. Through civil war and bitter struggles, we improved this Constitution to include the voices of those who'd once been left out. And gradually, we made this country more just, more equal, and more free.  . . .

Last month, we lost a giant of American democracy in John Lewis. Some years ago, I sat down with John and the few remaining leaders of the early Civil Rights Movement. One of them told me he never imagined he'd walk into the White House and see a president who looked like his grandson. Then he told me that he'd looked it up, and it turned out that on the very day that I was born, he was marching into a jail cell, trying to end Jim Crow segregation in the South. What we do echoes through the generations.

Whatever our backgrounds, we're all the children of Americans who fought the good fight. Great grandparents working in firetraps and sweatshops without rights or representation. Farmers losing their dreams to dust. Irish and Italians and Asians and Latinos told to go back where they came from. Jews and Catholics, Muslims and Sikhs, made to feel suspect for the way they worshipped. Black Americans chained and whipped and hanged. Spit on for trying to sit at lunch counters. Beaten for trying to vote.

If anyone had a right to believe that this democracy did not work, and could not work, it was those Americans. Our ancestors. They were on the receiving end of a democracy that had fallen short all their lives. They knew how far the daily reality of America strayed from the myth. And yet, instead of giving up, they joined together and said somehow, some way, we are going to make this work. We are going to bring those words, in our founding documents, to life. I've seen that same spirit rising these past few years. Folks of every age and background who packed city centers and airports and rural roads so that families wouldn't be separated. So that another classroom wouldn't get shot up. So that our kids won't grow up on an uninhabitable planet. Americans of all races joining together to declare, in the face of injustice and brutality at the hands of the state, that Black Lives Matter, no more, but no less, so that no child in this country feels the continuing sting of racism.

To the young people who led us this summer, telling us we need to be better -- in so many ways, you are this country's dreams fulfilled. Earlier generations had to be persuaded that everyone has equal worth. For you, it's a given -- a conviction. And what I want you to know is that for all its messiness and frustrations, your system of self-government can be harnessed to help you realize those convictions.

You can give our democracy new meaning. You can take it to a better place. You're the missing ingredient -- the ones who will decide whether or not America becomes the country that fully lives up to its creed.

Note that "North Star" was Frederick Douglass's abolitionist newspaper.

I am of course a sucker for this kind of rhetoric, pioneered by abolitionists, of invoking the spirit of the nation's founding while calling on it to do better. It went on through the Progressives and the Civil Rights movement and so on down to Obama, its greatest contemporary practitioner. 

I say again that this, not cynicism or talk of revolution or attacks on the Revolution and the Founding Fathers, is the only way for the Left to win elections in America. There is no need to "recast" the nation's history or find some entirely new way to tell it; what is needed it to pick up this strain of the song and carry it on.

George Will v. Lindsay Graham

George Will turns his contempt for Donald Trump onto a new target, Trump's new ally Lindsay Graham:

In 2015, Graham said Donald Trump was a “jackass.” In February 2016, he said: “I’m not going to try to get into the mind of Donald Trump, because I don’t think there’s a whole lot of space there. I think he’s a kook, I think he’s crazy, I think he’s unfit for office.” And: “I’m a Republican and he’s not. He’s not a conservative Republican. He’s an opportunist.” Today, Graham, paladin of conservatism and scourge of opportunism, says building the border wall is an existential matter for the GOP: “If we undercut the president, that’s the end of his presidency and the end of our party.” Well.

After marveling that any Republican thinks the party of Lincoln could be ended by disloyalty to Trump, Will continues:

During the government shutdown, Graham’s tergiversations — sorry, this is the precise word — have amazed. On a recent day, in 90 minutes he went from “I don’t know” whether the president has the power to declare an emergency and divert into wall-building funds appropriated by Congress for other purposes, to “Time for President . . . to use emergency powers to build Wall.” The next day, he scrambled up the escalation ladder by using capitalization: “Declare a national emergency NOW. Build a wall NOW.” Two days later, he scampered down a few rungs, calling for his hero to accept a short-term funding measure to open the government while wall negotiations continue. Stay tuned for more acrobatics.

But stay focused on this: Anyone — in Graham-speak, ANYONE — who at any time favors declaring an emergency, or who does not denounce the mere suggestion thereof, thereby abandons constitutional government. Yes, such a declaration would be technically legal. Congress has put on every president’s desk this (to adopt Justice Robert Jackson’s language in his dissent from the Supreme Court’s 1944 Korematsu decision affirming the constitutionality of interning of U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent) “loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.” Or an implausible one. However, an anti-constitutional principle would be affirmed. The principle: Any president can declare an emergency and “repurpose” funds whenever any of his policy preferences that he deems unusually important are actively denied or just ignored by the legislative branch.

The partisan leanings of Senators and Representatives used to be somewhat balanced by loyalty to their own institutions, but over the past 25 years this seems to have completely disappeared. Leaving us, as Will says, with nothing but loyalty to the party and its leaders of the moment.

Persuasion is Hard

Trump's speech on the border wall had no effect on opinion polls. Which is as you would expect, since all the evidence suggests that presidential speeches never have any effect on what people believe. Matt Yglesias:

High-profile presidential addresses simply fail to influence public opinion.

. . . a string of Oval Office addressed by Ronald Reagan failed to move the needle on voters’ view of providing aid to the Contras in Nicaragua, George W. Bush’s congressional address on behalf of comprehensive immigration reform left opinion flat, and George H.W. Bush’s speech defending his bipartisan congressional budget deal did nothing to change views.

Indeed, the general tendency is for public opinion to move in the opposite direction from the president’s preferences — a regulatory model that’s known as the thermostatic model of public opinion.

Reagan was an influential president because public opinion became very conservative in the late 1970s, leading to election results in 1980 that allowed him to govern effectively while the strong economic rebound in 1983-’84 helped him secure a landslide reelection bid. But according to Edwards, “surveys of public opinion have found that support for regulatory programs and spending on health care, welfare, urban problems, education, environmental protection and aid to minorities increased rather than decreased during Reagan’s tenure,” while support for higher military spending fell.

The longer he stayed in office, in other words, the less the public worried that liberals were out of control and the more they worried that traditional liberal priorities were being neglected.

FDR gave a bunch of speeches and fireside chats in 1939-1941 arguing for American involvement in World War II, but they had almost no effect. Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and suddenly everyone wanted war. Everything Roosevelt said turned out to be true – the US was eventually forced into the war, we did eventually have to spend a huge amount of money and create an enormous military, it would have been better if we had done more to get ready sooner – but nobody wanted to hear it until the bombs started falling on Hawaii.

Russians Trolling Americans

Via the House Intelligence Committee and the New York Times, a sample of the ads Russians with ties to Putin bought on Facebook:

I have to say they understand Americans pretty well.

What Partisan Journalists are Doing

I was struck by these lines from Michael Gerson, on conservative journalists who defend by Trump by attacking Robert Mueller:

They are dropping lit matches in the dry tinder of American politics. And they would be responsible, in part, for the resulting wildfire.

Indeed America seems to be full of people who, like the Joker, just want to see the world burn.

Confederate Statues and Mao T-Shirts

Bret Stephens has a column in the Times wondering why moralists so outraged at any sympathy toward Nazis or slave owners are silent on the crimes of Communism, and are in fact quite likely to sympathize with radical leftists. After quickly summarizing the horror of the Ukraine famine and the complicity of western reporters in covering it up, he asks:

How many readers, I wonder, are familiar with this history of atrocity and denial, except in a vague way? How many know the name of Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s principal henchmen in the famine? What about other chapters large and small in the history of Communist horror, from the deportation of the Crimean Tatars to the depredations of Peru’s Shining Path to the Brezhnev-era psychiatric wards that were used to torture and imprison political dissidents?

Why is it that people who know all about the infamous prison on Robben Island in South Africa have never heard of the prison on Cuba’s Isle of Pines? Why is Marxism still taken seriously on college campuses and in the progressive press? Do the same people who rightly demand the removal of Confederate statues ever feel even a shiver of inner revulsion at hipsters in Lenin or Mao T-shirts?

These are good questions, but they do have answers.

The first is that nobody has clean hands. All the major religions have murderous extremists in their pasts; all nation states were forged in blood. Capitalism has its own long list of crimes, from the machine-gunning of striking coal miners to drug-price profiteering. One of its crimes, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, had a toll in misery and death that enters the same hellish league as those of Hitler and Stalin. If we have to reject any big idea that has at any time helped to cause cruelty and murder we are going to be left with very few big ideas.

The second is that none of these denunciations – of red terror, Nazi monstrosity, Confederate perfidy, capitalist complicity in the slave trade – has much to do with either morality or history. They are rhetorical moves in contemporary politics. The point of demanding the removal of Confederate statues is to emphasize the historical plight of African Americans and press for greater political attention to their needs. Brett Stephens is alarmed by Che t-shirts because he fears a new wave of leftism led by Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, and he wants to fight this new leftism by tying it to Stalin and the ongoing collapse of Venezuela.

The third is psychological, and more complicated. Many people are outraged about the current state of the United States and Britain. It maddens them to see that some people are billionaires while others go hungry; that some people can work all their lives and never earn what a clever take-over artist can profit from a single stock scam; that poor people who can't afford bail spend years in jail and end up pleading guilty to felonies as the only way they can get out, while rich people with good lawyers can get away with murder. Some people express this outrage by getting interested in communism, or at least wearing Che t-shirts. The point is not to endorse Maoism, it is to say that they are not ok with things as they are. This slides into a fourth point, which is that many people are drawn in psychological and philosophical ways to extremism. Systems like those of the US and Britain are mushy gruels made from compromise after compromise, spawning bureaucracies with hair-splitting rules and lawyers who get rich devising ways to game the system.

Faced with the monstrous edifice of the mixed-economy-semidemocratic-legalist-bureaucratic-police state, which can only be budged in minor ways by ordinary politics, some people long to sweep it all away and start over. Intellectuals seem particularly prone to this fantasy. Like purist programmers who recoil from a gigantic "kluge" like Windows, they long for a clean, simple system in which principles lead to rules in a clear, logical way. They want justice to shine forth like the sun, not be hidden behind roiling clouds of interest, tradition, profit, legislative horse-trading, and whatever else so befouls the air of our times.

I believe that life among social mammals can never be simple and neat, that we are condemned by our very natures to compromise solutions. I also believe that the huge nations and bewildering economies of modern times only make that more true. Given that our social and economic systems are so complex that nobody comes close to understanding them, I think that gigantic kluges are the best that we can possibly do. But I understand the frustration our systems breed, and the longing for a radical solution. So I don't mind if people vent their frustrations by wearing Che t-shirts or flying Confederate flags in their own yards. I have faith that our systems are strong enough to survive a great deal of rhetorical abuse. But the strength of our system is not infinite, and if it not defended with vigor, it must eventually fall. Since the chance that a better system would replace it seems to me remote, I have cast myself as a defender of things as they are. Yes, we can do better in many ways, and should. But not at the cost of overturning the pillars of our system: electoral democracy, the mixed economy, and a firm belief in human rights.