Political issues – Page 6

Writers who tried to warn us

The zone is completely flooded with you know what. From liberal sources and liberal friends I am hearing two categories of responses. The first boils down to red alert, Defcon 1, all hands on deck. The second is more restrained, and cautions us against wasting our efforts and our mental health on feints, distractions, and smokescreens. This second group points out that many of the outrages of the past two weeks have quickly fallen flat, and that Trump is not as powerful as he wants us to think he is. As someone wrote on Facebook, “Be careful, folks…. Is the constant freak-out to wear us down? … Keep your powder dry till you see the whites of their eyes.”

We don’t know — can’t know at this point — what they actually will be able to do.

But we do know what they want to do, and we do know what they are trying to do. What they are trying to do is to make a reality out of everything that science fiction and fantasy writers have been warning us about for many years.

I have zero patience for centrist chumps who keep telling us that we must “reach out” to them and “try to understand them.” We do understand them. We have understood them for a very long time. There is a huge body of literature, some of it fiction, some of it history and social science, telling us what they are.

Things that have happened before obviously are not impossible and can happen again. We already had a civil war in this country, and historians such as Heather Cox Richardson have made it quite clear that what is happening now comes from the same roots as what happened then. We already had a war on this planet against fascism. No one today is talking about ovens and genocide, but they are talking about ethnic cleansing with forced displacement, offshore prisons, and what would amount to concentration camps. They are cutting off food and medicine to millions of the planet’s poor. People will die. Even if Trump floats an idea and subsequently has to walk it back, they’re telling us what they want, and they will do as much of it as they can get away with.

What they are trying to do is a petrifying mix of pretty much everything that writers of dystopian fiction have tried for many years to warn us about. I’ll try to list some of them.

The Hunger Games: This is where oligarchy leads. It’s about the ugliness and ridiculousness of those who want to rule us. It’s what happens when there is no democracy, when oligarchs have all the power and the little people have none. It exposes the sadism that we can see quite clearly in MAGA, in Trump, and in Trump operatives like Stephen Miller. Hunger Games actually was very popular with the deplorables, who seem to lack the imagination to apprehend who they themselves are in the story.

The Handmaid’s Tale: This is where Christian Nationalism and Project 2025 want to take us. And let’s remember that it’s not just women who pay the price. In this story, African-Americans are forcibly relocated, and it’s implied that there was a total genocide against Native Americans. There are always scapegoats. The rest of us are just natural resources to exploit.

Fahrenheit 451: This is about the importance of ignorance. It’s about censorship and what happens to those who resist the lies that totalitarianism always requires. It’s about not forgetting the things that we once learned at great cost.

Nineteen Eighty-Four: This is about the tools that totalitarian regimes use to install and preserve themselves — surveillance, the suppression of dissent, and, as in Fahrenheit 415, the lie-enforcing systems that totalitarianism always requires. It’s about what happens to us when they flood the zone.

Star Wars: This is about the close connections between autocracy and empire. It’s about how rebellion is inevitable. It’s also about the difficulty of rebellion, when autocracy and empire are entrenched and vastly rich. It’s about the corruptibility of formerly democratic governing bodies. It’s about our need for heroes, for hope, for bravery, for perseverance. It’s about how oligarchs and empires hate diversity, equity, and inclusion; and it’s about how rebellions depend on it.

The Children of Men, The Road, Lucifer’s Hammer: In a dystopia, survival is Priority 1. Oligarchy and totalitarianism have an inherent tendency to lead to uncontrolled pandemic, environmental disaster, famine, and violence. They don’t care about us. To resist, first you must survive.

Wool: This is about mass deception, its consequences, and the difficult process of slowly figuring things out.

The Lord of the Rings: This is about the power of evil, the ugliness of evil, the strange sameness of evils wherever they appear, and the importance of alliances in resisting evils. It’s about how having kings and armies in the resistance is a great help, but also about how the little people can, and must, stand up for themselves.

The Lord of the Flies: This is about how people who are not fully developed human beings — that is, the deplorables — can so easily regress into primitive and inhuman behavior, if someone or something winds them up in a certain way. It’s about the Stanford Prison Experiment. It’s about how power and authority can lead people who are cognitively and morally stunted not just to illiberal ideology but all the way to cruelty and violence.

Fugue in Ursa Major: Here I must apologize for promoting not my own self-published books, but rather my ideas. The number of sales of my novels is next to nothing compared with the above. But I believe that, ten years ago in 2014, I correctly called a great deal of the chaos of today. It’s that it’s the billionaires who finance the engines that overpower the arc of justice. It’s that, ultimately, the billionaires and oligarchs want all the power. Being that rich is deeply corrupting and corrosive, and wealth at that level provides the ability to buy the power to do what they want to do. They finance the so-called think tanks that develop the propaganda, they own the machinery that retails the propaganda, they corrupt our elections and our governing bodies with money, and they have led us to a situation in which the richest man on the planet actually has his hands on the infrastructure of our government. Just months ago, that would have seemed too crazy even for fiction. But here we are. My novel also is about the importance of knowledge and the intelligentsia. JD Vance was entirely right when he said that (from his dark perspective) the universities are the enemy. If corruption and autocracy depend on lies, then the enemy of corruption and autocracy is knowledge and truth. A Frodo may lack the knowledge of a Gandalf, but a Frodo can know enough to do what needs to be done, as long as he can distinguish between who is lying to him and who is not.

We know what we’re up against. We know who they are. We know what they want. We know what they’ll use against us. We know what we have to do to try to stop them. I never guessed that they would get this far this time around. I thought the institutions would hold. I thought we’d learned our lessons about these people. We all got the memo. But 77,284,118 of us were too foolish to read it.

Not a single red cap

Click here for a high-resolution version and check out our new government..

The deplorables are very slow to figure things out, so I doubt that they have yet begun to understand that Trump has no further use for them. It was last July, after all, that Trump told a bunch of Christians at a rally that, if they voted for him in November, then they wouldn’t have to vote again. That went over their heads.

Lots of chumps in red caps came to Washington to participate in the glory. But they were left out in the cold. (And, being what they are, they left miles of rubbish outside the Capitol.) The deplorables still have to be managed, of course. But that’s what Fox News is for — the branch of government charged with profitably managing the deplorables.

Trump loves a pageant and understands the importance of visuals, but obviously he wanted the inauguration to be Mar-a-Lago elegant. Still, it is surprising that he threw no bones to the little people, to keep them convinced that he cares about them. Fox News will need some footage on that, though. So surely it will be arranged, once the weather is better and the price of eggs has come down.

What’s up with these visuals?

Was Elon Musk’s sieg heil intentional, right in front of the presidential seal? The American media, naturally, are playing it as though it’s a both-sides thing, that we can’t be sure what Musk meant. Maybe. But the video has gone viral, and we’ll soon know whether others are inspired to imitate him.

And what about Trump not putting his hand on the Bible while taking the oath of office? Was that intentional? That image, too, has gone viral. Can you imagine the uproar it would cause in MAGA world if a Democrat did that? I have no idea what Trump meant by it. But I hope the deplorables are exerting themselves to figure it out.

Mussolini

At the Contrarian yesterday, Jennifer Rubin interviewed Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. Most of us know more about Hitler than we do about Mussolini. The interview sheds much light on how Trump is following the fascist playbook. Most of us do know, I think, how it all ended for Mussolini. Italians back then, like our deplorables now, were slow to figure out who Mussolini really was. But once they figured it out, they put a stop to it. There are pictures of Mussolini’s end at Wikimedia Commons, for those who haven’t seen the visuals.

Benito Mussolini and you-know-who.

The inability to judge character

Four depraved human beings: Tammy Faye Bakker, Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Matt Gaetz. There are many more.

Regular readers here know that I do not subscribe to the notion that we need to “reach out” to the deplorables and “understand” them, as though they have something to teach us. I do understand them. I have been around them all my life. If they can teach us anything, it’s how not to be.

Back in the 1980s, when televangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker had a television show called “The PTL Club,” I noticed that I, and other morally sane people, could watch the Bakkers and perceive in about a second that the Bakkers were crooks who were scamming their audience. I marveled at how so many people, for some strange reason, were unable to see that. The show lasted for something like 15 years.

In 1987, Bakker was indicted by a federal grand jury and charged with scamming people out of $185 million in donations. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison.

Thousands, maybe millions, of people had not only been unable to see through the Bakkers’ act, they had sent millions of dollars to the Bakkers. Those people saw Jim and Tammy Bakker as the godliest of people. Some people continued to send money to the Bakkers even after Jim Bakker was in prison.

Why does this inability to judge character correlate so closely with religiosity and with whatever it is that leads people to vote for Trump?

This defect in moral perception has two sides, equally ugly. The same people who can’t see through a Tammy Bakker or a Donald Trump easily believe that the people they have been taught to hate and blame — liberals — are the kind of people who hate America, who are out to destroy America, and who traffic children in the basement of a pizza parlor. They believe that it’s poor brown-skinned immigrants, rather than an ill-regulated oligarchy of billionaires with a propaganda machine and the courts in their pockets, that are eating their lunch.

A constantly churning pageant of lies is required to keep the scam going. But those who have this defect can’t see through the lies any more than they can see through the people who are lying to them.

Jim and Tammy Bakker were petty thieves compared with the extravagantly rich global-tier con men who will come to power at noon tomorrow in Washington.

A recent poll found that Republicans believe that Trump will bring inflation down more or less to zero and will bring back cheap eggs. In the real world, chickens are dying from bird flu in record numbers. The real-world reason for egg prices is getting worse, not better. Wild birds spread the virus, and now cows are getting it, too. But that’s just one problem, and there are many more.

Republicans (this blows my mind) feel safer now. But the rest of us can see that no good can possibly come from an alliance of oligarchs and con men taking over Washington, with a crew actually selected for their corruptibility. When things go wrong, liberals will be blamed. Millions of people will believe it.

Part of why this moment is so terrifying is that none of us can predict what will happen during the next four years. It can’t be good. But if eggs suddenly become cheap again and the inflation rate falls to zero in a booming economy that lifts all boats, then I will happily eat my words.

Many people seem to have bought into the oligarch political theory — that democracy has run its course and is obsolete, and that only the swaggering masters of the universe are fit to run the world, the meaner the better.

I thought the world had already learned, always the hard way, how that political theory works out. But here we go again.

Real journalists start to fight back

Jennifer Rubin and Norman Eisen, at Substack

Yesterday, Jennifer Rubin resigned from the Washington Post and announced a new venture, based on Substack, called The Contrarian. Rubin and Norman Eisen have assembled a list of stellar contributors who are named in one of their first posts, On Meeting the Autocratic Moment.

Rubin and Eisen write:

Democracy faces an unprecedented threat from an authoritarian movement built on lies and contempt for the rule of law. The first and most critical defense of democracy—a robust, independent free press—has been missing in action. Corporate and billionaire media owners have shied away from confrontation, engaged in false equivalence, and sought to curry favor with Donald Trump. It is hardly surprising that readers and viewers are fleeing from these outlets. Americans need an alternative.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have long been a voice in the wilderness critical of a mainstream media that dropped the ball years and years ago. It started in 1996, with Fox News. Journalists at that time believed that it somehow violated their principles to plainly call a lie a lie. Instead, the new — and extremely dangerous — ethic of journalists was to write as though there were two sides to things. At a critical time in history when new technologies started putting newspapers out of business and made dispensing disinformation on social media incredibly cheap, it has taken about twenty-five years for authoritarians to hijack the American democracy. They did this by getting 77 million Americans to believe their lies.

Though it is extremely encouraging to see more and more journalists breaking away from publications owned by billionaires (such as the Washington Post), the truth is that journalists get much of the blame for where we are today. They could have decided years ago that truth was their highest principle. Instead, they bought into, and even doubled down on, the belief that their job was “balance,” to report “both sides,” thus becoming amplifiers of malignant right-wing and Republican narratives whose obvious goal was oligarchy. Journalists, most of them members of a blind herd, were unable to see what will happen when lies are treated as though they can be taken seriously.

What we are seeing now is anticipatory obedience, a horrifying new stage of failure. The previous ethic of “both sides” has now crumbled into at last taking sides — not with the truth, but with authoritarians. We know very well what this looks like. It is a form of corruption that has happened everywhere when authoritarians come to power.

At this point I have no idea how to reach the millions of Americans who can no longer distinguish truth from lies and who actually have come to love — and advocate for, and vote for, and troll for — what to the rest of us are obvious lies with obvious intentions.

There are not two sides to the story of where we are today. There never has been. Acknowledging that is not going to magically save us from those who are preparing to turn us into Russia. But it’s a start.

At least we’re smarter than they are

A dragon descends on Oxford. Image by ChatGPT.

Ezra Klein has a must-read piece in the New York Times this morning: Now Is the Time of Monsters. (You can read this link without a subscription to the Times.)

Klein lists the monsters:

1. Authoritarian resurgence

2. AI and technological upheaval

3. Climate crisis

4. Demographic shifts

As Klein writes, “Any one of these challenges would be plenty on its own. Together they augur a new and frightening era.”

I should hasten to say, as Klein also does, that demographic shifts in the form of falling birth rates don’t scare me. That’s mainly a right-wing goblin, and I suspect that it’s only falling birth rates for white people that matters to them. I think I would merge Monster No. 4 into Monster No. 1 — the racism of authoritarians.

I’m also not as worried as some people are about AI’s taking over the world and making the human mind obsolete. But again I think there is a connection to Monster No. 1: Authoritarians will find all sorts of ways to use artificial intelligence as a tool to keep the rest of us down — ever better lies and disinformation, for example. To me, Monsters No. 1 and No. 3 are the biggies, with Monster No. 3 amplified by the authoritarian denial of climate change because of the money and power they get from an oil economy that oligarchs own and control.

When I lose sleep over Monster No. 1, the greatest comfort comes from knowing that no one is alone. The smartest people in the world see what’s happening. It’s the smartest and best people in the world up against the richest and meanest, with the richest and meanest having persuaded the poorest and dumbest that they’re on their side.

Yes, the people who are developing AI’s must be very smart, but they are more like idiots savant interested mainly in the technology and the money.

As for the MAGA crowd — Trump, his appointees, the Christian nationalists, the brownshirts, the right-wing radicals, Trump voters — they are all as dumb as rocks. We’ve got to outsmart them.

Klein offers no solutions. He only describes the monsters. As the smartest and best people in the world try to figure out how to deal with the dumbest, the meanest, and the richest, it occurred to me to wonder if Monster No. 2 — artificial intelligence — might have some useful advice.

Using ChatGPT’s “o1” engine, which is supposed to be better at reasoning than “o4,” I asked a question:

I am going to paste in an essay from this morning’s New York Times written by Ezra Klein. The headline is “Now is the time of monsters.” He lists several existential problems that the world faces today. Please analyze this piece with an eye toward philosophy and psychology. These problems are collective problems. But the question I would like for you to answer is, given these collective problems, what can an individual do not only to help, but also to preserve individual stability in a time of rapid change and chaos. These ideas need to align with my personal politics and philosophy. I am am a progressive. I would like to live in a world shaped by John Rawls’ “justice as fairness.”

The link below is the AI’s response. Most of it, I think, is what any nice and well-mannered intelligence would say. It contains very generalized ideas; there is no brilliant strategy that no one has thought of before. I do like the point about “narrative reframing,” though: “Successful social transformations often begin in the imagination, with bold visions that inspire people to action.”

If AI’s are capable of imagination and “bold visions,” I haven’t yet figured out what questions to ask. But I do think that, as smart people, we should be learning how to use AI’s, and we should keep abreast of their development. The Wikipedia article on ChatGPT says that the man who exploded a truck in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas used ChatGPT to help plan it.

Can AI’s help us plan the resistance?

Ezra Klein: Now Is the Time of Monsters

ChatGPT’s response

The Dark Enlightenment

The view from an upstairs window

It’s a bleak time for those of us who live in the world of ideas as much as in the real world. Today, unless gangs of violent and raging liberals egged on by Joe Biden storm the U.S. Capitol and try to prevent the Congress from certifying Trump as the winner of the November election, the Congress will … certify Trump as the winner of the November election. We liberals, creatures of the Enlightenment, can only grit our teeth and watch as democracy and the law take their course.

It’s a stunning piece of work. An elite of highly privileged people who openly hate democracy have used the institutions of democracy to advance their project of dismantling democracy. It takes a lot of lies to do that. It also takes a lot of people (77,303,573, to be precise) ignorant enough and foolish enough to fall for it.

And it also takes a lot of weakened institutions that could have stood in their way but didn’t, with the media, the justice department, and the courts at the top of the list.

I admit that, every day of late, I find myself pacing back and forth, from upstairs window to upstairs window, trying to figure out what is likely to happen in the next four years. But mostly, I think, what happens in the next four years is unpredictable.

We know what they want. We recoil at the horror of their ideas, best described as the Dark Enlightenment. We know that the men who are about to install themselves in the White House very much believe in this Dark Enlightenment and have a playbook.

But what’s unpredictable is what they actually will do, and to what degree the institutions of democracy remain strong enough to stand in their way. Even though they have a theoretical playbook, they have conflicting interests, and they are not nice people. We can expect them to waste a big part of their energy in conflict with each other, as opposed to conflict with the beast — the Enlightenment — that they all hate and want to overthrow. As JD Vance told a podcaster, “There is no way for a conservative to accomplish our vision of society unless we’re willing to strike at the heart of the beast. That’s the universities.”

Vance uses the word “conservatism” to describe the ideas that are threatened by the universities. I’d call it something else. It’s not just people that we’re up against. It’s also ideas, ideas that are very dark and very ugly.

For those of us who live in the world of ideas and thus know some history, these dark ideas, along with their ugly playbook, are things we’ve seen before. They want something that can’t be done without violence and a means of getting a lot of people out of their way. They’ve already used violence, and they’ve already made a lot of threats against people who are in their way. Now we will see how far they will go.

Where to find Paul Krugman now

Source: Wikimedia Commons.

On December 9, Paul Krugman wrote his last column for the New York Times. He had been writing for the Times for almost 25 years. Now more than ever, with four years of Trumpian madness ahead of us, we need intellects like Krugman’s. Krugman is still with us. He has moved to Substack.

His most recent Substack post, from December 26, is Trump’s Great Illusion: Conquest doesn’t make a modern nation — or its leader — great.

Axios reports this morning on a poll which found that two-thirds of Americans say they are limiting their intake of political news. An exception is Fox News, where viewership has increased since election day.

I can only guess what this means, but here’s my guess. Of all the low-information clodpolls who voted for Trump, Fox-watchers are the sickest and also the most highly motivated. There are not as many of them as we sometimes think. During prime time, about 2.5 million people watch Fox News. That’s far less than 1 percent of the American population. They are probably basking in post-election triumphalism.

As for the rest of us, people are exhausted.

But what about us high-information types?

I don’t think it’s just me, because it’s something that shows up constantly (as contempt and, often, as vitriol) in the comments section of political pieces in the New York Times and the Washington Post. We are fed up with MAGA-cowed both-sides “journalism” that treats MAGA depravity and disinformation as something to be taken seriously. We blame this sanewashing and the normalization of depravity and disinformation for helping Trump get back into the White House.

I have no idea why Paul Krugman retired from the New York Times, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he was under pressure to both-sidesify his columns. At Substack, we will hear what Krugman is thinking knowing that mid-level editors at the New York Times, nervous for their jobs, aren’t pressuring Krugman in any way.

I am not among the many who have canceled their subscriptions to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Though their political reporting is not to be trusted, those two newspapers are still the only remaining news organizations in the country with the resources to cover everything else. And, besides, we need to monitor the degree to which the corporate media are capitulating to Trump and Trumpism.

Speaking only for myself, I’m as eager as always to try to figure out what’s going on in the world. But it’s clear that we’re in an era in which we must give far greater weight to independent voices, and far less weight to corporate sources trying to play both sides.

Clarifying the complicated

It’s a complicated world. Fortunately there are experts who have put extraordinary efforts into understanding it. We ordinary folk must rely on those experts. In a sea of propaganda and disinformation, the trick is to find the people who know the terrain and who aren’t trying to deceive us.

Sarah C. Paine is a historian and professor of strategy and policy at the U.S. Naval War College. Watching this video will require two and a half hours of your time. But I can’t imagine a quicker way to get a high-altitude view of what’s behind the conflicts that are roiling the world today, conflicts that each of us feel in our own lives, no matter how isolated we may think we are.

I have long argued that these conflicts boil down to something simple enough for anyone to understand. This also is the key to understanding the purpose of the disinformation and propaganda with which we all are targeted, disinformation and propaganda that on November 5 swung an American election and put Donald Trump, America’s Putin, back into the White House.

It boils down to this: There are those who believe that democracy and the rule of law are the best way to order societies and to create wealth. And there are those who believe that authoritarianism and corruption are the best way to order societies and to create wealth. The difference is in who gets the wealth and who holds the power — the many, or the few.

The only flaw of this video is that the interviewer is a peacock and a windbag. Sarah Paine’s answers are usually more concise than the rambling, wordy questions. So try to ignore the interviewer as best you can. Sarah Paine, though, won’t waste a second of your time.

Hat tip to Ken, who referenced this video in a recent Substack article.

Young men and the right-wing rabbit hole

⬆︎ Two Europeans who are not down the right-wing rabbit hole. Listen with headphones, or with a good sound system.

That people like Donald Trump, or Elon Musk, should be what they are makes a certain kind of sense. They have money and power, and they want more money and power. In their narcissism, they think they totally deserve what they have. They think they deserve our adulation for having it — lords of the universe.

But for young men there is no excuse. If voices like Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, and Jordan Peterson sound like hope, then something inside is stunted. The options outside the rabbit hole are unlimited. They’re just not as easy.

The smartest podcast I’ve ever listened to

Jonathan Rauch is one of my oldest friends. I’ve known him for forty years. Ken Ilgunas is one of my newer friends, fourteen years. I’ve listened to them at the dinner table a good many times, but listening to them in a podcast is even better.

Both are writers. They are of different generations, which makes their conversation even more interesting.

Here’s the link: Jonathan Rauch on the 2024 election, 1960’s Star Trek, and the magnetism of sociopaths.

Jonathan’s next book, to be published by the Yale University Press in February 2025, is Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain With Democracy. My own tiny press, Acorn Abbey Books, has brought out new editions of two of Jonathan’s books that were previously out of print, Denial and The Outnation.