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 “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

-H.L. Mencken, “Notes on Journalism” (1926)

 

2 November 2016 (Milos, Greece) – The latest FBI announcement by FBI Director James Comey regarding Hillary Clinton’s email is a fitting end to this dumpster fire of a Presidential election. A real scandal, right? The latest Clinton email flap has all the trappings of one. With evasive answers, shady characters and FBI investigations, there must be something going on. Right? Rather like Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, we may not know what’s hidden or where, but it sure looks like the Clintons have been hiding something.

But it’s not at all clear what the FBI is talking about in terms of Clinton emails. Some reports suggest they are neither to nor from Clinton herself, in which case we have just consumed a giant nothing-burger. After all, we already know that the FBI has no idea whether the emails amount to anything of any significance. So what on earth was the FBI director thinking when he dropped his letter on Friday making it crystal clear that he knew nothing? As a rule, law enforcement agencies generally don’t publicize the fact that they are clueless.

And as far as the FBI not divulging it was sitting on evidence of Trump’s Russia links so as not to “influence the election” …. pul-eeze.

I hang on one phrase in Comey’s letter: “ … the existence of e-mails that appear to be pertinent”.  Somebody looked at enough for him to make that statement.

I am a cynic. The FBI stumbled upon a trove of emails from one of Hillary Clinton’s top aides, weeks ago. Those of us in the e-discovery world know the FBI has e-discovery and forensic analytics technology they could have used to easily run a “first pass” to find the presence of sensitive emails. If the FBI believed these emails could implicate Clinton, the FBI could have had a court order the same day, and would have been able to scan these emails within hours. The FBI Director’s email was politically motivated to alter the course of the presidential election. Full stop.

As Edward Luce, lead Washington correspondent for the Financial Times, noted over the weekend:

“Autocracies are run on fear. Democracies are held together by trust. The reckless timing of Mr Comey’s disclosure that he was expanding the investigation into Mrs Clinton’s emails is what happens when officials wobble. If Mr Trump wins next week he has vowed to put Mrs Clinton in jail. His supporters chant “lock her up” at every rally. If Mrs Clinton wins, Mr Trump will find more Comeys to intimidate. When one side in a democracy throws around pre-emptive charges of treason — and there is none higher than rigging a presidential election — the ground on which the law stands shrinks. It is harder to uphold blind justice, or administer a neutral process, when a storm is blowing around you. Mr Trump’s campaign is a howling gale. Mr Comey just lost his shirt.”

 

That the U.S. became an oligarchy years ago is a given. That it is on the cusp of becoming an autocracy is foreboding.  And in a country so viscerally divided, is it any wonder that neutrality is treated as collusion?

And I cannot be the only person who watches Trump and sees the demonic Colonel Jessep from “A Few Good Men”: both men confessing their excesses out of defiant pride, not shame. And if Billy Bush can trick Trump into “saying locker room stuff” … as claimed by Melania Trump in her interview with Anderson Cooper, well … one can only imagine what Putin can do to him.

For the media … desperate for one more fix of adrenaline, one more turn of the story to upend the likely outcome … HURRAH! A gift from heaven! Oh, and manna from heaven! Supporters on both sides have become obsessive consumers of any snippet of information that might tip the balance and all media outlets have jacked up their ad rates continually during this election cycle to take advantage. Fear-based media sells. The old American media chestnut writ large: “if it bleeds, it leads”

 

That is the subject of this essay and it fits into my mantra of America simply being a place now where money is everything, the only thing in almost every facet of its life. For me, America is a sociology experiment gone horribly wrong. Donald Trump is the price you pay for living in a marketplace culture. Corporatism rules.

Alas, I must admit being at a bit of a disadvantage. For this election cycle I have been on this side of the Atlantic save for a brief trip to the States for medical reasons but which included a chat with a long-time law school chum (discussed below) who is a major domo in the Republican National Party and … to my horror and amazement … my attendance (at his invitation) to a Trump rally.

But for the bulk of my time it has been “media-say”, what the French writer (and businessman) Jean-Louis Gassée calls “brouet de sorcières dont nous louche off ce qui convient à vos sentiments” (which, roughly translated, means “a witches’ brew from which we ladle off whatever fits our sentiments”) … plus a stack of books and magazines on the election. I even took the time to reread some of The Federalist Papers.

Oh, plus my wife’s contribution: F. Scott Fitzgerald. Specifically this quote from The Great Gatsby (the Tom Buchanan character speaking):

“If we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things.” 

We have a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letters and it’s worth noting what he says inspired the quote. The novel was written and published in 1925, but was set in the summer of 1922. Congress had just passed a law restricting overall immigration; in 1924 it passed another, targeting Catholic and Jewish “hordes” from Southern and Eastern Europe, seedbeds of anarchy and “bolshevism.”  Tom Buchanan would later morph into the conservative nationalist Pat Buchanan 🙂

 

First, I want to run through just a wee bit of American history. Because all of this racism, xenophobia and violence due to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign we have seen many, many, many, many times before. Oh how quickly Americans forget. Yes, the usual explanation for Trump’s  success, especially within “the mainstream media,” is the simple “one-two” of racism and xenophobia. But those are epithets, not even meaningful descriptions. The truth is that in the 21st century, with the end of the Cold War and the rise of the asymmetrical dangers of terrorist attack, the American public lost much of its appetite for global engagement — military, political, economic, cultural. Even if Trump loses — still the probable outcome — his voters won’t go away and neither will the issues he raised. So we need to unpack some of that.

I will conclude this piece with the larger costs resulting from a Trump victory, or even a Clinton win.

The anger eating America 

The quote leading this post is one of the gentler quips uttered by the acerbic American journalist/writer, editor and social critic and thinker H.L. Mencken.  I would posit, by the same token, that nobody ever went broke overestimating the anger of the American people. The country is in an unusually flammable mood. This being America, there are plenty of business people around to monetize the fury — to foment it, manipulate it and spin it into profits. These are the entrepreneurs of outrage and barons of bigotry who have paved the way for Donald Trump’s rise … and given him the gale-force wind to upend everything in this election season.

And it is just a logical step in a long developing history. America has laid waste to its principles of democracy as chronicled by event after event in its history.

And as a historical correction, let me note this. The Mencken “quote” (most sources who use it fail to quote it properly) is actually the traditional paraphrase of what Mencken actually wrote — not a true quote. Just as the phrase “information wants to be free” has been paraphrased and used ad infinitum, it always seems to be missing its full context  (see my short piece explaining that phrase here).

Mencken used to write a column for the Chicago Daily Tribune. In his column for the September 19, 1926 edition … he titled that day’s column “Notes on Journalism” … his focus was the recent trend in the American newspaper business that came to be called “tabloid newspapers” (he coined the phrase) that were geared toward uneducated readers, including those Mencken described as “near-illiterates.” It was a drive by newspaper companies to be less substantive and intellectual than regular newspapers like the Tribune, hoping to sell to the masses.

I will skip the detailed points Mencken made on journalism, education, mass media, etc. (I am a Mencken fan; I have almost all of his writings) and give you the appropriate paragraph from the piece:

“No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.”

Looking around at the media and political landscape today, Mencken’s opinion might be deemed more prescient than ever. But the question today in American politics is whether the milestone we have reached is the end point … or another marker on a long road.

 

America’s fourth president, James Madison, envisaged the United States constitution as representation tempered by competition between factions. In the 10th federalist paper, written in 1787, he argued that large republics were better insulated from corruption than small, or “pure” democracies.  A large electorate on a grand scale would be more likely to select people of “enlightened views and virtuous sentiments”.

But what we got was a large electorate dominated by a tiny faction. What Madison could not have foreseen was the extent to which unconstrained campaign finance, a sophisticated lobbying industry, and a media/entertainment obsessed culture would come to dominate an entire nation.

In the world as we know it, the stable “democracies” in Europe and North America have long been considered guiding examples of how government by the people can endure. That idea is now being endangered, as Donald Trump’s demagogic rise mobilizes anti-democratic threats to minorities, journalists, and the system of voting itself. His supporters are united partly by a sense of doom and persecution (some of it well founded), with the idea that their world is ending and they need to take it back.

At its very simplest, Trump has given voice to an unheard America, the have-nots. The Republican candidate means many different things to his supporters, but all of them feel ignored by Washington. They hear of the glory of globalization from the world’s have-a-lots, but you know what? All this bullshit “prosperity” was never properly shared.

Most amusing (if that is the appropriate word), is that the racism, xenophobia and violence of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is widely seen as an aberration, as if reasoned debate had been the default mode of American politics. But most have forgotten their U.S. history (or simply never read it) because precursors to Trump do exist, candidates who struck electoral gold by appealing to exaggerated fears, real grievances and visceral prejudices.

Does nobody remember the anti-immigrant “Know-Nothing” party of the 1850s? Or the white supremacist politicians of the Jim Crow era? Or the more recent hucksters and demagogues including Joe McCarthy and George Wallace?  How about more respectable types such as Richard Nixon, whose “Southern strategy” offered a blueprint for mobilizing white resentment over the gains of the Civil Rights movement?

I know, I know, I know: that “respectable” and “Nixon” can be included in the same sentence illustrates how far my political standards have evolved since the 1970s.

And sketchy things said about races and genders and groups and opponents and other outrageous acts in the past?  It wasn’t Trump who read Dr. Seuss to filibuster congress in a routine budget function. It wasn’t Trump who lied about weapons of mass destruction. It was not Trump who used Willie Horton, or Trump who swift-boated a decorated war hero.

Trump is not the “new” anomaly that changes the paradigm, but, rather he is just the logical outgrowth of years and years of blatant lies and surreal fabrication and contradictions. Trump merely took it up a notch, an opportunistic predator who saw that there was no downside to lying, slandering or obstructing government and he took it from there. We have seen him before.

 

Violence is not unknown in American political history. Even in colonial times leaders of the resistance to British measures and leaders for the continuance of British rule did not only rely on abstract arguments about taxation and representation but also relied on extra-legal committees and violent mobs; opponents were tarred and feathered. They each terrorized their critics.

And well into the 20th century, Southern blacks who wanted to exercise the right to vote faced violent retribution from the Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups. Let’s get over it: racism, violence, scurrilous attacks on opponents, etc. were part of American political culture from the outset.

Alas, the trope of a glorious American Revolution has worked its way into historical scholarship and brainwashed us in our youthful educations: the idea that unlike the “bad” French and Russian Revolutions which degenerated into violent class conflict, we were a “united” American people who rebelled against British overlords with restraint and decorum.

Oh, brother. For those of us who attended American university and took various American history courses, we were brainwashed by the works of Bernard Bailyn, Edmund Morgan and Gordon Wood. Air brushed out/filtered out were the enormous economic and class conflicts dividing colonial America, and the diverse often violent difference in political beliefs. As John Adams famously wrote when describing the First Continental Congress convened in 1774: “Delegates were strangers, unfamiliar with each other’s ideas and experiences and diversity of opinion”. There was no unity of political beliefs.

So let’s forget Bailyn, Morgan and Wood. We should have been reading Eric Foner, Alan Taylor, Daniel Vickers and Ian Williams. As they have written, the political ideology motivating the colonists had deep and complex roots, with deep social and class conflicts. And it was “many beliefs” that served as the primary motivation for revolution … for many different reasons.

I shall leave it there.  I am writing a piece entitled “Our feuding founding Fathers” that goes into more detail, the result of having recently finished two compendiums of the letters and diaries of John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, plus a recent book by the aforementioned Alan Taylor entitled American Revolutions (note the plural) about the U.S. from 1750-1804.

My focus on these pages: this ritual performance of the legend of democracy in the autumn of 2016 which promises the conspicuous consumption of $15.8 billion in campaign finance funds, enough money, thank God, to prove that our flag is still there.

How and why did the media give us Donald Trump? How did we move from candidates who normally stand as product placements meant to be seen instead of heard, their quality to be inferred from the cost of their manufacture, to Trump bombs bursting in air?  To … literally … game-show contestants?

Just how did we allow the commercial oligarchy … paying for both the politicians and the press coverage … to treat democracy as if it was a talk show guest sitting alone in the green room with a bottle of water and a banana, armed with press clippings of its “once-upon-a-time-I-was-a-star” with it press clippings to prove it, waiting to come on between the shampoo commercial and the demagogue? Well, I will try and tell you. At least my interpretation.

All of this requires a deep think because the mainstream media is often of little help, especially their coverage of the faux “debates”.  They end up asking not whether the candidates made good arguments given what we know to be true but whether they made good arguments given what they imagine voters know to be true. And as Salon’s Amanda Marcotte has noted … in a less tactical and more dispiriting take on Mike Pence’s performance in the Vice President debate … to say Pence “won” the debate is to say “it matters not one bit if someone is a liar and a moral monster, as long as he doesn’t get sweaty.”

The audience for the media barons of bigotry

 

From all that I have read, and from the many conversations I have had with family, friends and colleagues, I feel it all boils down to this:  Trump voters are not defined by their experience of economic hardship, but by their willingness to embrace a particular explanation of that hardship — namely, that it was visited upon them by a black president in cahoots with the swarthy liberal people who have taken their jobs, their “lifestyle,” and their status.

When I was in Chicago in early summer, Gabe Zeptum, a sociologist  who studied the rise of the Tea Party, explained it as people who saw themselves betrayed by “line-cutters” — black people, immigrants, women and gays — who jumped ahead of them in the queue for the American dream.  Southerners feel patronized and humiliated by northerners who tell them whom to feel sorry for, then dismiss them as bigots when they do not. They feel they are victims of stagnant wages and affirmative action but without the language of victimhood: struggling Southerners are not “poor-me’s”. They believe that they are honorable people in a world where traditional sources of honor — faith, independence and endurance — seem to go unrecognized. Well, until Donald Trump began offering hope and emotional affirmation.

The clincher for me was at that Trump rally I mentioned. I met one chap … one of the few literate in the bunch … who talked about the “Trump Train”.  He talked about Trump’s “track record of success” (I was not there to argue) and he admitted  “yes, he has a foul mouth and talks like a sailor and I will never agree with him on everything”.

But then the money shot:

“The thing is nobody has been able to fix my problem and this man tells me that he can. I believe him and I am going to hire him to do the job. We Donald Trump supporters don’t agree with everything that he has done in the past and we all wish that he would make it easier for us to stand up and fight for him but the Trump Train continues to grow and grow and grow.”

Yep. Forget automation. Forget globalization. Forget decades of Republican fiscal policy that starved the nation of infrastructure and human capital while directing the benefits of economic growth to the already engorged rich. Forget personal choices to forgo higher education and additional training. Forget the fact that the ability of low- and semi-skilled workers to achieve a middle-class life was an artifact of a particular moment in this nation’s economic history.

Just remember this: Barack Obama, a black man, was president when our moment seemed definitively over, when “our train left the station”. And he WANTED it that way.

For people who loathe Trump, such steadfast loyalty is hard to fathom. And to add a kicker, a colleague with whom I work in the Middle East on war crime investigations said “we have reached a new milestone. For the first time in history, it is easier to understand the politics of the Middle East than the politics of America”.

The major book this political season (it has been all the rage in the “D.C. Bubble”) which will key you into all of this is J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy”. Vance grew up in Ohio as the son of an alcoholic, drug-addicted mother and an absent father, growing up in some of the depressed industrial towns in the American heartland.  He details the tribalism, mistrust of outsiders and “elites,” violence and irresponsibility among family members, parents without a sense of responsibility, terrible work ethics, and an us-against-them mentality that has doomed the people who live that way to becoming poorer, more addicted, and more marginalized.

Trump’s strength … as explained by Vance in several media interviews discussing the book … is due to his strength and extraordinary popularity with these people.  He totally “gets” Trump people.  His key point:

“Trump is an opioid for the masses. What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain. His promises are the needle in America’s collective vein. Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.”

 

Getting rich by pushing politics to extremes

“People cringe at his vulgarity, clutching at their pearls” (Stephen Bannon, Trump’s chief political advisor and head of Breitbart News).

Ah, the immaturity of so many moments. The demagogue’s instinct for amplifying the angriest voice in the mob. Such a wonder.

From the beginning, the media, instead of uncovering and providing the details about Trump throughout his career, has focused on his celebrity and his bombastic rhetoric, allowing his base to become secure, dug in. In all of its racist, misogynistic, hateful glory.  And worse we have the Alt-Right — the misleading name for a ragtag but consistently repulsive movement that hitherto has flourished only on the internet – which has now insinuated itself, unignorably, into American politics. That grim achievement points to the reverse sway now held by the margins, of both ideology and the media, over the mainstream.

Why? Because by covering Trump as a sideshow, delighting in each moment along with him, it was funny. It meant clicks. It meant web traffic.  IT MEANT MONEY!!

And let’s face it. The problem also is that the media and politics are in cahoots. The big media operatives in politics are paid to make sows’ ears (Bush, Cruz, Rubio & Co.) into silk purses … paid, and paid handsomely, to achieve it.  And to do so they need to work with their big media operative counterparts in … well, the media.  So they deploy buckets of money into advertising spots.

As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi noted earlier this year in a series in Ad Age, even CBS President Leslie Moonves said the media should not be scolded for the clicks and kicks they provide to readers. They have an open incentive to promote Trump … and he openly delighted in the ad money:

“What a fun Trump campaign brought to my network. And the money. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going!!”

And Trump’s saturation of the media market showed he knew how to play the game. Instead of relying on traditional methods of communication — paid advertising, carefully-chosen interviews, corporate-crafted Facebook posts — he became the medium and the message, unpredictable and always around. A great sell. 

NOTE:  two weeks ago he launched a nightly talk show (“Trump Tower Live!”) on his Facebook Live feed, an obvious precursor to the forthcoming TRUMP TV. All I could think of was his daughter, Ivanka Trump. After stunning reviews of the dress she wore in her keynote address at the Republican convention, she was hawking copies of it on the internet. Trumps will be Trumps. 

The Donald has emerged from the populist circuses of pro wrestling and New York City tabloids, via reality television and Twitter, to prove James Madison was right:

“… democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention … and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths”.

Is it any wonder that Roger Ailes is Trump’s media advisor? He is the impresario of reactionary populism … and disgraced former Chairman and CEO of Fox News … who knows more about the persuasive properties of television and studied not only American programming but also the films of Leni Riefenstahl.  Such inspiration.

And the debates? Billed and sold as entertainment:

Clinton vs. Trump, toe to toe!

Come watch Hamilton and Madison’s dream end!

Live at 9 pm!

Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker magazine had it best:

“The debates were seemingly arranged by a God operating in Vince McMahon mode, deciding that in this round the good guy, or woman, would win. The well-coached and prepared wrestler pummelled the sneering loudmouth with the cape and mask into submission while the crowd at home cheered”.

Jay Rosen … media critic, writer, and a professor of journalism … has noted that Fox News was a quintessential example of Clay Christensen’s “disruptive innovators”. They discovered a vast, underserved market—people who were interested in the news but who had little in common with the Ivy League university-educated liberals who dominated regular news outlets such as NPR. They built an audience of millions and showed … contrary to what Marshall McLuhan, a media scholar, said … that what mattered was not the medium but the message.

And the message was outrage.  And that message flew off the shelves … and drove millions of dollars into the coffers.  Fox News and its cohorts like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity & Co. … even Matt Drudge and Andrew Breitbart in their own venues … divided the world into two camps — hardworking Americans struggling to make a living versus liberals bent on taking them for a ride.

Because for the media (just like politics) they speak to marketable demographics and target audiences — Americans distinguished not by the fact of being American but by the ancillary characteristics that reduce them to a commodity: gun-carrying American, female American, white American, gay American, African American, Hispanic American, Native American, swing-state American, Christian American, alienated American. Said Lewis Lapham in his book Democracy:

“The subordination of the noun to the adjective makes a mockery of the democratic premise. It promotes bitter separation, not the binding together of a public good.”

And fury easily turns into bigotry. These “news” outlets pushed the boundaries. They have provided platforms for members of far-right hate groups.

But the key lesson: there are big bucks in bigotry. Apparently very few advertisers are reluctant to be associated with toxic content if they can get “eyeballs”.

Debbie Sarano who studies conservative media says their favorite pattern in newscasts is

“the breaking news story that doesn’t go beyond a surface level. The need to get-the-story-to-get-the-ratings often causes reporters to bypass thorough fact-checking. And rarely will the reporter correct any inaccuracies and missing elements found later. Because that first reported intense emotional vibe or sensationalism is key”.

Matt Taibbi has noted that fear-based media … especially as practiced by conservative media … has several key elements:

(a) feel that their neighborhoods and communities are unsafe

(b) believe that crime rates are rising

(c) overestimate their odds of becoming a victim, and

(d) consider the world to be a dangerous place.

And he notes the liberal press is often equally guilty.  Out the door are the guidelines he was brought up under as a journalist: a sense of proportion, conscience, and, most important, truth-telling.

 

The future of American hate media 

The immediate consequences will be ugly. Assuming that Hillary Clinton wins, she will face an opposing party that demonizes her and denies her legitimacy no matter how large her margin of victory. It may be hard to think of any way Republicans could be even more obstructionist and destructive than they were during the Obama years, but they’ll find a way.

So the outrage boom is not likely to be finished. Assuming Trump will lose, conservative media will still have the doings of the Clinton family to help propel profits from all those who hate them. And they are in the hate business.

Perhaps more importantly, “Trumpism” is not going away. As the election of 2016 lurches to an unmourned end, it feels cruel to report that the presidential race of 2020 is already under way. A close friend of mine is a major domo in the Republican Party.  The challenge for his party, he says, is to keep the new voters brought in by Trump and to capture his populism — “but package it so it is more mainstream”. He said “even in defeat Trump will shape the party’s future”. He noted a Bloomberg poll recently asked Republicans whose view better matched their own view of what the party should stand for: Paul Ryan or Donald Trump. The answer was Trump, by a wide margin. This lesson will not be lost on Republican politicians.

Even if Trump loses … what was Trump’s word? … “bigly”, they’ll know that their personal fortunes will depend on maintaining an essentially Trumpist line. Trumpism is what the party is all about. As Paul Krugman noted “underlying nastiness is now part of Republican DNA”.

For the media … well, “there’s gold in them thar hills”. As historian Nicole Hemmer has said (author of the new book “Messengers of the Right Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics”; a great read) go to the very beginning of these alternative media enterprises and see how they integrated with electioneering activities, such as Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign and James L. Buckley’s successful 1970 run for a U.S. Senate seat in New York:

“In the case of Trump, he has been a lifeline to the dying cable news channels, helping them reverse years of declining viewership. The first presidential debate during the Republican primary season was watched by a record 24 million viewers, three times more than the audience for the most-watched GOP debate in 2012. According to Advertising Age, CNN then charged 40 times its normal fee for spots that were to air during its broadcast of the second GOP candidate forum. Their ad revenue has been through the roof this year”.

As Matt Taibbi has noted, while Trump has never notched more than 47 percent in any reputable public opinion survey, he has tens of millions of loyal supporters who would absolutely love to continue hearing from him even if he ends up losing this election:

“His constant attacks on journalists has only strengthened his fans’ distrust of the media as whole. In the age of broadband internet and cable news, niche conservative media outlets have become even more of a draw for Republican politicians. Roger Ailes’ Fox News Channel took in legions of unsuccessful GOP politicians like Mike Huckabee and Allen West, giving them wads of cash but also high visibility on the top-rated right-leaning media outlet. With corresponding big ad bucks. And not just conservative networks. CNN and other networks will need to stay in the game. It’s gotten to the point where people yelling and shouting at each other pays big bucks.”

For the mainstream media they must be crying “what in hell happened?!”  Because political journalism used to rest on a picture of politics that journalists and politicos shared. As practiced by the “mainstream media” (defined as the professionals who work at NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, PBS, NPR, the AP, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Reuters, Bloomberg, Politico, Time magazine, etc.) political journalism rests entirely on a mental picture of the American system in which the two major parties are similar actors with simply “warring philosophies” (that’s a phrase I nicked from Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times).

So the “mainstream media” is used to a day-to-day of politics with a series of minor battles for tactical advantage. They look at politics in the same way that people in the party establishments do.

Yeah, a normal system.  A stable framework.  How quaint.

So when you get asymmetry between the parties like this year, it fries the brain circuits of the mainstream press. You had in effect one party … the GOP … becoming the insurgent outlier in American politics. It was (is?) an ideological extreme, unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science.  Yes, Stephen Colbert, they rejected “truthiness”.

I know, I know, I know.  Today we say “media” instead of “the press.” Because “the press” has become “the ghost of democracy in the media machine” (Jay Rosen). Yes, we should keep it alive, but we won’t, we can’t. Technology and an almost “negative Zeitgeist” has upended everything.

The great enabler

 

 

“A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.”

 

I would be remiss not to mention social media. The real change was Facebook and Twitter in 2009. In a way, Trump is just a symptom.  John McWhorter (an American academic and linguist who is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and a regular contributor to The Atlantic Magazine and other publications) says that offensive language and ethnic insults and lies became routine at Trump rallies. Twitter and Facebook became the foundations of daily communication for many Americans between 2007 and 2009 revolutionizing conversation about, well, everything, and pushing political chatter in a far meaner direction. In this view, the Trump effect is not unique to the man, but is:

a natural, almost inevitable result of economic and social forces unleashed by swift, powerful technological change that had, even before Trump’s candidacy, made the country meaner, more confrontational and more divided. The populism Trump represents and the social strains that made millions of Americans eager for someone like him appear regularly throughout American history. Previous bursts of populism have usually burned through in less than a generation, fading away as economic expansion, war or political reform eased people’s sense of insecurity.

In a recent piece in New Republic, Matt Hower noted that on college campuses, battles over clashing world views, identity politics and the definition of free speech have raged for years. Online, many Americans had already spent years swimming in a virtual ocean of pornography, foul language and sexual misbehavior — long before Trump’s coarse language about women and the allegations about his inappropriate advances became campaign issues.

As most of my readers know I spend an inordinate a lot of time in the Middle East. I was in Tel Aviv in June 2014 when the ISIS Iraq offensive began – the first military campaign launched with a hashtag. The hashtag #AllEyesOnISIS announced the 2014 invasion – a bloody takeover that still haunts global politics two years later.

Revealing a military operation via Twitter would seem a strange strategy, but it should not be surprising given the source. The self-styled Islamic State owes its existence to what the internet has become with the rise of social media — a vast chamber of online sharing and conversation and argumentation and indoctrination, echoing with billions of voices.

We are still trying to understand the use of social media as both a tool in conflict and a shaper of it, tracking how online chatter has begun to intersect with real-life violence in dozens of armed confrontations around the globe. How this technology has been weaponized. As you read this I am actually off to Jordan to discuss this very issue at a workshop.

But going back to the “calm” of the U.S. Presidential elections, just a few points. About three years ago somebody sent me a 2005 video interview with Mark Zuckerberg, when “The Facebook” was still a Palo Alto start-up run by a college-age Zuckerberg. He noted “The Facebook” was going to be “a mirror of what existed in real life.” Social media is indeed a mirror, one that reflects all manner of human interests and ideas, invariably extending into the realm of politics. Indeed, the more we’ve learned about behavior on social media, the more apparent it has become that the mirror is distorted — or maybe it distorts us.

For all the hope that comes from connecting with new people and new ideas, researchers have found that online behavior is dominated by “homophily”: a tendency to listen to and associate with people like yourself, and to exclude outsiders. Social networks are bad at helping you empathize with people unlike you, but good at surrounding you with those who share your outlook. The new information ecosystem does not challenge biases; it reinforces them.

Since May of this year, The Wall Street Journal has been running a project called “Blue Feed, Red Feed” which shows side-by-side Facebook streams of news sources popular with, respectively, liberal and conservative audiences. The resulting social-media feeds look like they’re from two parallel universes.

Within a circle of friends or like-minded acquaintances, social media certainly fosters connection. But the further one zooms out — to whole societies or the course of global affairs — the more this connection is marred by tribalism and mutual mistrust.

But this problem is particularly disturbing because of another feature of social media: its users are not passive consumers, like TV viewers or radio listeners or even early internet users. Via platforms that range from Facebook and Instagram to Twitter and Weibo, we are all now information creators, collectors, and distributors. We can create inflammatory photos, inflammatory texts, inflammatory untruths. And of course, those messages that resonate can be endorsed, adapted, and instantly amplified. Emerson Brooking (a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a chap who is helping me understand the “weaponization of Twitter”) puts it this way:.

“Both ends of the communications process have been democratized in a way that no prior technology has accomplished. Social media has made a great many of us participants in, as well as observers of, corrupted politics.  The implications of this wide-scale participation extend far beyond the virtual realm and beyond the remit of this post.

So completely false stories, many obviously comical, do not die. They circulate for days among blogs and social media accounts. And their longevity points to the most troubling development in our media environment. Social media sites like Facebook have democratized the media landscape, allowing anyone to create and distribute content to their friends and family. There are a lot of good things about this, but it’s also proving to have a serious downside: without the quality filters traditionally supplied by mainstream media outlets, there’s a lot more room for total nonsense to circulate widely.”

 

The increasing polarization of news through social media allows liberals and conservatives to live in different versions of reality. And that’s making it harder and harder for our system to function. It is why conspiracy theories rocket around the conservative internet, passing from one conservative Facebook user to another. Its spread has been amplified by aggregators like Matt Drudge, who is happy to direct viewers to juicy stories without worrying too much about whether they’re true.

That, plus the algorithmic filtering used by Facebook and others and “feed positions” create an exponential distortion. It is a subsequent chapter in my artificial intelligence series.

And the real cost of all this? Frank Luntz, who is a bit of a master at conducting focus groups, has recently been writing about the effect of social media on children. He has noted that while social media has given a voice to a generation, there’s been a big rise in the number of young people seeking help for their anxieties by exposure to social media reports on global issues such as the U.S. Presidential campaign, the war in Syria, and U.S. gun violence.   Luntz has seen a sharp increase in parents telling him that their children are using Trump-inspired smears at school. “It’s ‘Lyin’ Thomas’ and ‘Little David’ in fifth or sixth grade,” he said. “That’s when you know you have a problem.”

Teachers around the country report not only a disturbing rise in the number of kids who mimic Trump’s insults, but also a burst of fear among immigrant children about the threat of deportation, even when their families are legal U.S. residents. He noted a story from the Roxbury section of Boston, where an eighth-grade English teacher was startled recently to see a boy shaking with fear. She asked what was wrong, and the boy, whose family immigrated legally from Colombia, said that a Trump campaign sign that the owner of the neighborhood laundromat had posted had freaked him out: “He thought it meant that the INS was going to sweep through and he’d be rounded up even though he is legal”.

In his teacher focus groups, one teacher noted that “these are kids who before Trump were interested in the latest sneakers, baseball, football, even sex.  Now they’re hyper-focused on Trump”. Another said “one boy brought me his cellphone to show me Trump’s tweets. They know his insults by heart. They’re scared.”

Yes, I know. While some may see this as further evidence of a wider mental health crisis among young people, it’s important to remember that worrying is a normal part of life. Kids usually learn to cope with worries as they grow older.  But the psychic damage could still be striking.

 

Postscript: the American future

 

Perhaps I am indulgent to the past, or am always looking for patterns. But I do look to the rhythm of history, at what is conspicuous. We tend to learn history and our world in pieces. This is partly because we often have only pieces of the past (shards, ostraca, palimpsests, crumbling codices with missing pages) and even the present (news clips, Twitter/Facebook/”name-that-snip” barrages).

I think you need to take a break from the deafening cacophony of daily noise and take the pieces and set them next to one another, examine, contrast and compare, and attain an overview. Sitting on a Greek rock in the middle of the Mediterranean, I find the time.

And I will admit I am a media guy.  I enjoy this latest/newest revolution in information technology. Yes, it can fracture attention but offers a previously unimaginable kaleidoscope of information …. an infinite, infinitely multiplying space. And the data can bewilder, the web churning out articles and videos and images at a rapid-fire pace, adding new details to the news every few minutes. Blogs, Facebook feeds, Tumblr accounts, Tweets, and propaganda outlets repurpose, borrow, and add topspin to the same output.

Trump and the political phenomenon he has unleashed over the past 16 months has posed the difficult chicken-or-egg question: has Trump transformed America, or did he simply reveal it? Over the weekend Marc Fisher, a senior editor with the Washington Post, blogged:

Trump’s slash-and-burn march to the Republican nomination and on into this fall is perhaps the ultimate blending of entertainment and politics, a coarse yet mesmerizing new show that appears to have changed political language and deepened divisions in an already polarized nation. But is this a singular moment, tied exclusively to Trump’s larger-than-life personality and searing rhetoric, or has he loosed into the culture a new virus of confrontation and anger?

He raises a major point: has Trump granted Americans license to express overt racism and new levels of acrimony? My Republican Party friend (who I noted earlier in this essay) said he sees no indication that the rougher rhetoric is a passing fad: “The more coarse language gets, the more coarse it stays.  We don’t go back. We don’t suddenly become civil and good to each other”.  He noted that in several recent focus groups the tone of disagreements has deteriorated into the kind of attacks that once would have silenced the room. He said it’s gotten to the point where he cannot stop people from yelling at each other.

Hmmm … the larger costs resulting from a Trump victory, or even a Clinton win. The narrower Clinton’s margin of victory, the easier it will be for Trump to spark outrage over a stolen election. It would also give him more of a grip over Republicans in Congress. Legislators respond to feedback from their districts. By Jeffersonian design, the House is where the link between elected and elector is most electric. If Trump’s base is inflamed, Republicans legislators will take their cue. Besides, most of their voters already believe Clinton is dishonest and corrupt. So it is no great leap to endorse Trump’s claim that the Clintons are a “criminal enterprise”.

And a President Trump? Complex. Especially given we are not sure the final make-up of the Congress. The Republican control of the House is a given, thanks to their mastery of “district-packing” and gerrymandering, Yes, national demographic changes should, on a broad scale, help the Democrats. But Kyle Kondik (see paragraph immediately below) says more locally, conservative groups concentrated in their tighter social units, still dominate.

Kyle Kondik has a new book out entitled “The Bellwether: Why Ohio Picks the President” and it is a cornucopia of statistics on American demographics. We need to understand the internal political relationships, he says.  In an interview promoting the book he noted:

“Republicans in the Senate are often less ideological than in the House, because their constituencies are so much larger—an entire (diverse) state rather than a single (uniform) district—and the broad public sympathizes with immigrants, not surprising in a country in which almost everyone originally comes from somewhere else, very often as recently as two or three generations ago. Wall Street and corporate America, eager for cheap non-skilled labor as well as brain-drain talent, also like open borders. Ryan, the friend of “free enterprise,” does too. So the question becomes whether President Trump might defy the Senate and the House leader, and form an alliance with a small band of right-wing tormentors, while rallying much of “his” public behind him, in an already divided nation which is now bristling towards civil discord. It’s possible, but if he’s the leader he has promised to be, he is more likely to work his various “arts” of “the deal.”

And Trump will face the steeple-chase of checks-and-balances that have unhorsed predecessors with far more experience and aplomb than he possesses. As Sam Tanehaus (an American political writer for the UK’s Prospect Magazine) noted:

“Should Trump falter he could quickly be reduced to a raging figurehead, or a paper tiger, shrinking the authority of the office that he has promised to enlarge.”

With one concluding thought: sclerotic government.  America is in the grip of a curious form of minority-rule, “America the vetocracy,” a term coined by the political theorist Francis Fukuyama in his 2014 book Political Order and Political Decay. He says this condition dates back to Bill Clinton’s first term, in 1993, when he came into office with his party in the majority but was stopped in his tracks by Republican filibusters. The same thing happened to Obama. With the looming prospect of President Trump, it could be the Democrats’ turn to obstruct. What Fukuyama and Kondik think is this is a numbers game but with an ideological twist.  They have been writing about the same things of late so here is a “mashup” of their respective ideas, plus a few bits from Tanehaus:

1. The differences in the legislative tactics the two parties adopt often have less to do with ideology than numbers. The Democrats speak in generous terms of majorities and alliances. You know: Hillary Clinton’s “stronger together”. Why? Because as Kondick says they have a raw majority of the public on their side.

 

2. The Conservative Republicans are outnumbered. So obstructionism is their brand. This is why their hardliners blocked that immigration bill earlier this year. As Fukuyama noted in a blog post at the time, they knew that, if a vote were allowed, the bill would pass, pushed through by Democrats and just enough moderate Republicans in states like California and Colorado, where there are large Hispanic populations. Pleased by such a result, they would clamor for Democrats, not Republicans.

 

3. What Trump seems to have grasped says Tanenhaus – “however unfit Trump may be for office” — is that the voters experience the resulting paralysis as a problem. He says “in an ideologically driven hyper-partisan era like our own, with each side hungry for every morsel it can get, America is in the grip of a curious form of minority-rule”. It’s Fukuyama’s “America the vetocracy”.

 

4. Minority rule, then, is the true meaning of Republican governance in the modern era. But while this system works for legislators it has frustrated voters, because the end result of this jockeying is that very little gets done. Look how stopgap funding to combat the Zika virus was delayed … even when the country was clamoring for it … because of skirmishing over Planned Parenthood. Ideology has likewise made it impossible for Congress to pass even a mild new gun control law … again, even though the public supports it.

 

5. Fukuyama: “It is this interlocking mechanism of unpopular program and undemocratic process that Americans have in mind when they say they hate government. They don’t really. What they dislike is not the principle of centralized government but its failure time and again to deliver what they need”.

 

6. In his own very contorted way, Trump promises big government will get fixed … only the government will be himself.

 

My old editor, John Lindell, always told me “in almost every book I have read (other than the ones I edited), I feel like chopping off the last paragraph. The author makes profound, definitive, often controversial statements throughout his work and then ends in a Caspar Milquetoast-like paragraph”. John, in your memory, let me conclude as follows:

This has been the strangest election in modern American history, seeming to yield no consensus whatsoever.

We are 7 days away from the closest the U.S. has ever come to suicide since the Civil War. Trump has stirred emotions which have always lurked below America’s cultural surface. The march of technology has worsened it. American leaders have not grasped this point. Those “enduring” American voices of reason, compassion, tolerance, liberty, free enterprise, courage, strength and hope are now proven what they were all the time … gloss … having been drowned out by the voices of hate.

Couple that with the Bundy brothers’ acquittal showing how white privilege perverts justice in America, the continuing police execution of blacks, the ambush attacks on police officers, and the U.S. media actively abetting Russia’s attempt to manipulate the election by accepting the hacked emails from WikiLeaks as a legitimate source and … well, Mephistopheles must be proud.

All of these emotions will not go away after November 8th and will likely get more ugly. Only the naïve still believe that significant changes will come in a global scenario of generalized overcapacity, endless wars and cratering demographics. For the U.S., the worse is yet to come.