Trumpism: Long-Term Misinformation Campaigns Confuse Incivility with Virtue

Does the Ohio Civility Consortium ‘sound naïve’ as a leader of that group noted in the today’s Beacon Journal?  In a word: yes.  I applaud and support their effort, but  the article itself concurred, at least in part.

“Usual fixes were suggested: get money out of politics, make elections publicly funded and draw up competitive US Congressional districts.” 

As framed in the article, the suggestion is these were all mentioned without seriousness of purpose, without concrete plans to take on the powerful interests of those who benefit from the existing campaign finance and redistricting structures—many of whom were speakers at this gathering.

Then the article added that the group also discussed “innovative solutions,”  including building relationships among legislators to bring back the ‘good old days’ where legislators from both sides were friends, or public education efforts requiring civics in Ohio schools, and (of course) coming to grips with the internet and social media.

Of course, this list is hardly innovative.  Any discussion of politics, from the local pub to these former elected officials at the Ohio Civility Commission always includes, actually usually focuses on, each one of these ‘innovative solutions,' without a seriousness of purpose such that they ‘create a rhetorical Bermuda Triangle where everything drowns in a sea of empty posturing’ (thanks JSmooth) and then someone blames it on the media and we forget the whole thing ever happened.

What follows in the article is the usual pabulum.   Media sensationalism, as we have seen Trump exploit, is always an attention grabbing story line that reinforces nonsensical analytical frames ‘blaming the media.’  We are reminded that negative ads work even as they encourage citizens to lose faith in the system, that “the coverage of the presidential race is over the top,” and “it’s show business,” and there are more important issues to be discussing.  

And of course, there is the mandatory blaming of the average citizen who consumes the news (and by extension is to blame for both incivility and Trumpism).

Bunk.

In the same paper, we read Michael Gerson attempting to persuade Republicans who he says are ‘beginning to make their inner peace with Trump' that this is a bad move and in doing that he makes this observation:

“What the argument for accommodation is missing is the core reality about Trump.  His answer to nearly every problem is himself….  We are supposed to turn in desperation to the talent and will of one man who happens to be bristling with prejudice and blazing with ignorance.  We are seeing the offer of personal rule by someone with no discernible public or personal virtues…. [a man who] has offered disaffected people an invitation to political violence.”

The rise of Trumpism reveals the chasm between conversations among former elected officials and other public and private sector establishment figures about a return to civility and the deep and abiding culpability of our ruling establishment in creating the conditions that make Trumpism--incivility as virtue--possible and entirely foreseeable.

Candidates, elected officials, talking heads, think tank analysts, many academics and more have stoked the flames of American anti-intellectualism for decades.  Their motivations vary—from highlighting culture wars to mobilize voter segments likely to elect a favored candidate to diverting public attention from leadership failures to aim average citizen disgust at other citizens—but the outcome has been the same.

A steady diet of misinformation has encouraged large segments of our population to believe that Trumpism is a viable answer—that we cannot trust democratic governance or elected officials or ‘the media,’ or ivory tower academics and their ‘data,’ or anyone other than the guy who tells me I have been right all along.  The solutions are simple.  Let’s just give those who disagree an ass-kicking for their ignorance and welcome back the American Dream.

We have all cringed over the individual illustrations: creationism, climate change, vaccinations, the virtue of an unfettered free market, great man versions of history, interventionism is always the best first option, zero tolerance is an effective approach to crime and violence, birthers, all Muslims are terrorists, an inability to agree with those who remind us that black lives matter, and more.

Even though we all know that ‘The Media’ as a monological unit makes no sense.  After all, reporters skew liberal while editors and publishers lean conservative, and it is difficult to imagine Fox News and NPR on the same team in any game.  But even those at the Ohio Civility Commission repeat this tired script and pronounce ‘the media’ as a central culprit…only to invite the predictable retort from media elites that average citizens get ‘The Media’ that they ask for. 

We can circle these wagons only for so long before we just get off the merry-go-round and see that this way of framing the conversation sets us up to find Trumpism ‘incomprehensible,’ rather than just the next step in elite misinformation campaigns.

When we unpack ‘The Media,’ we see, hidden in plain sight, our everyday communication system driven by elites exploiting media outlets, including social media, to outflank traditional filters and avoid countervailing forces that might check and balance--tactics now central to Trumpism.  (Note: this does not remove citizen or reporter or publisher culpability, but only moves them into a shared culpability frame where they are not the most influential source determining what will be ‘the news,’ as we have seen Trump play the dominant role recently in defining what is news.)

Further, these elites misinformation efforts are not random, but loosely coordinated.  Recently the most virulent form of coordination was called the ‘Republican Noise Machine,’ by one former Republican insider, or unpatriotic obstructionism in the words of moderate and conservative co-authors Mann &Ornstein, or in an effort to pretend this ‘just happened without agency or elite finger prints’ the phenomena is sometimes bemoaned as an agentless Echo Chamber.

There are forces poised against this trend.  Many public and private sector elites continue to insist on data-driven decision making, even when it challenges ideological preferences, advancing powerful (but still largely ignored by candidates and parties) new media tools like fact checking, seeking rule changes that favor moderate, compromise-willing, candidates and elected officials willing to regulate in the public interest, tax and spend with prudence, and model the kind of thoughtful leadership (Paul Wellstone, John Danforth and others like them on both sides) that focuses on problem solving for the nation rather than headline skewing for the party.

While the Ohio Civility Commission has its heart in the right place, efforts to stop Trumpism through civility must draw everyone’s attention to the intersection of these ongoing, decades-long, misinformation campaigns that together form a powerful public pedagogy designed to reinforce the powerful and distract & divide the power-poor.  A powerful public pedagogy that no educational reform can effectively counteract.

Civility has to have a truth factor.  It has to address those, particularly the most powerful among us, who intentionally seek to mislead and misinform.  Without this, the effort will indeed prove naive.

A day to rise above
or just seek a different path

We have all experienced the soul-sucking frustration that is every interaction with our insurance companies and yet we allow opponents of single-payer plans to get away with stories about how big government bureaucracies are so frustrating to work with...

Two things are true at the same time here.  Trump and Cruz are embarrassments damaging American democracy and it is not at all clear that this means they will not win.

Imagining the other side using rhetoric we find familiar can really help us see its meaning.

And on a lighter side...some things are just better without equations.  Just better to let it be.

Dilbert on Trump

This smart piece from the Washington Post was posted on FB by my good friend Matt.  It is well worth reading, so I have included it in its entirety.  My contributions are in [blue]. 

"SCOTT ADAMS remembers just how the game turned. He was young and improving at chess, but the masterful kid across the board would outmaneuver Adams till the game seemed a runaway. Now, this kid didn’t want to just beat Adams; he wanted to embarrass him. “So after he’d picked away three-fourths of my pieces and I was discouraged,” Adams recounts, “he would offer to turn the board around and play with my pieces.” And then effectively “win” again.

On those occasions, Scott Adams, the creator of “Dilbert,” got insight into the type of personality that loves not only the challenge of game strategy, but also the thrill of overwhelming the competition. It is the sport of meticulously plotted domination.

And that is part of why Adams believes Donald Trump will win the presidency. In a landslide.

[‘The Simpsons’ predicted a Trump presidency 16 years ago. The writer illuminates the reasons]

Adams, in other words, believes that Trump himself has turned the campaign game around. On the stump, the real-estate mogul is not running on the knowledge of his numbers or the dissection of the data. He is running on our emotions, Adams says, and sly appeals to our own human irrationality. Since last August, in fact, when many were calling Trump’s entry a clown candidacy, the “Dilbert” cartoonist was already declaring The Donald a master in the powers of persuasion who would undoubtedly rise in the polls. And last week, Adams began blogging about how Trump can rhetorically dismantle Clinton’s candidacy next.

[Notice above that Adams sees the power and influence and strategy of Trump as an effort the change the game, so that a different set of resources and criteria for success matter.  So, beneath the presenting conflicts we see a conflict over venue, rules, whose game we will play.]

Adams, mind you, is not endorsing Trump or supporting his politics. (“I don’t think my political views align with anybody,” he tells The Post’s Comic Riffs, “not even another human being.”) And he is not saying that Trump would be the best president. What the Bay Area-based cartoonist recognizes, he says, is the careful art behind Trump’s rhetorical techniques. And The Donald, he says, is playing his competitors like a fiddle — before beating them like a drum.

Most simply put: Adams believes Trump will win because he’s “a master persuader.”

The Manhattan mogul is so deft at the powers of persuasion, Adams believes, that the candidate could have run as a Democrat and, by picking different hot-button issues, still won this presidency. In other words: Trump is such a master linguistic strategist that he could have turned the political chessboard around and still embarrassed the field.

[A second major theme in this piece is the argument that Trump is a master persuader.  Read this with Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit in mind, because there is a stronger case to be made that Trump is a master bull shitter than a master persuader. Further, master persuader suggests his phony ‘business success’ story has merit, so master persuader also frames this argument in a way that is contrary to the best available data.  Master bull shitter does not have the weakness.]

Adams does not claim to be a trained political analyst. His stated credentials in this arena, says Adams — who holds an MBA from UC Berkeley — largely involve being a certified hypnotist and, as a writer and business author, an eternal student in the techniques of persuasive rhetoric. (His self-help memoir is titled “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.”)

“The most important thing when you study hypnosis is that you learn that humans are irrational,” Adams tells Comic Riffs. “Until you understand that, hypnosis is hard to do. … For me, it was this great awakening to understand that humans are deeply irrational, and it’s probably the greatest influence on me in terms of my writing.”

“This was a trick I learned from Bil Keane,” the late creator of “Family Circus,” Adams tells Comic Riffs. “He basically taught me to stop writing for myself, which I realized I had been doing — writing a comic that I wanted to read.”

So Adams pivoted to write more about the workplace, and the budding “Dilbert” in the early ’90s became “about this huge part of people’s lives that was invisible to the rest of the world and about suffering in a hundred different ways.”

“By simply mentioning that world,” Adams says, the comic connected with readers “on an emotional level.”

And isn’t that essentially, in turn, what Trump is doing? He is acknowledging the suffering of some, Adams says, and then appealing emotionally to that.

And he bolsters that approach, Adams says, by “exploiting the business model” like an entrepreneur. In this model, which “the news industry doesn’t have the ability to change … the media doesn’t really have the option of ignoring the most interesting story,” says Adams, contending that Trump “can always be the most interesting story if he has nothing to fear and nothing to lose.”

[Here Adams is smart again.  While media organizations are certainly powerful, they are often NOT the most powerful actors on stage.  Candidates and elected officials and corporate CEOs know how to use the mass media to get ‘free advertising’ and saturate communication channels with their message, their frames, as Trump is very skillfully accomplishing right now.]

Having nothing to lose essentially then increases his chance of winning, because it opens up his field of rhetorical play. “Psychology is the only necessary skill for running for president,” writes Adams, adding: “Trump knows psychology.”

Within that context, here is what Candidate Trump is doing to win campaign hearts and minds, according to Scott Adams:

1. Trump knows people are basically irrational.

“If you see voters as rational you’ll be a terrible politician,” Adams writes onhis blog. “People are not wired to be rational. Our brains simply evolved to keep us alive. Brains did not evolve to give us truth. Brains merely give us movies in our minds that keeps us sane and motivated. But none of it is rational or true, except maybe sometimes by coincidence.”

[I am not a social psychologist, but this seems overstated.  Conveniently so.  But even if we read this with a grain of salt, there is some insight here as well.  Yet it is possible to recognize the power of our emotions without also giving up on the power of cognition…and that, in fact, attending to both is more likely to lead to success.]

2. Knowing that people are irrational, Trump aims to appeal on an emotional level.

“The evidence is that Trump completely ignores reality and rational thinking in favor of emotional appeal,” Adams writes. “Sure, much of what Trump says makes sense to his supporters, but I assure you that is coincidence. Trump says whatever gets him the result he wants. He understands humans as 90-percent irrational and acts accordingly.”

Adams adds: “People vote based on emotion. Period.”

3. By running on emotion, facts don’t matter.

“While his opponents are losing sleep trying to memorize the names of foreign leaders – in case someone asks – Trump knows that is a waste of time … ,” Adams writes. “There are plenty of important facts Trump does not know. But the reason he doesn’t know those facts is – in part – because he knows facts don’t matter. They never have and they never will. So he ignores them.

“Right in front of you.”

And stating numbers that might not quite be facts nevertheless can anchor those numbers, and facts, in your mind.

[Here I will just point out that this has been a critique of Fox News, climate deniers, birthers (like Trump), and others for more than a decade, many arguing that doing this is encouraging us to become the kind of angry and ‘irrational’ voter that Adams says we are.  Lots to think about here.]

4. If facts don’t matter, you can’t really be “wrong.”

Trump “doesn’t apologize or correct himself. If you are not trained in persuasion, Trump looks stupid, evil, and maybe crazy,” Adams writes. “If you understand persuasion, Trump is pitch-perfect most of the time. He ignores unnecessary rational thought and objective data and incessantly hammers on what matters (emotions).”

“Did Trump’s involvement in the birther thing confuse you?” Adams goes on to ask. “Were you wondering how Trump could believe Obama was not a citizen? The answer is that Trump never believed anything about Obama’s place of birth. The facts were irrelevant, so he ignored them while finding a place in the hearts of conservatives. For later.

“This is later. He plans ahead.”

5. With fewer facts in play, it’s easier to bend reality.

Steve Jobs famously aimed to create “reality distortion fields” to meet his needs and achieve his ends. Trump employs similar techniques, and apparently can be similarly thin-skinned when his “reality” is challenged. “The Master Persuader will warp reality until he gets what he wants,” writes Adams, noting that Trump is “halfway done” already.

(Among the persuasive techniques that Trump uses to help bend reality, Adams says, are repetition of phrases; “thinking past the sale” so the initial part of his premise is stated as a given; and knowing the appeal of the simplest answer, which relates to the concept of Occam’s razor.)

6. To bend reality, Trump is a master of identity politics — and identity is the strongest persuader.

“Do you think it is a coincidence that Trump called Megyn Kelly a bimbo and then she got a non-bimbo haircut that is … well, Trumpian?” Adams writes. “It doesn’t look like a coincidence to this trained persuader.”

One way to achieve this is by deploying “linguistic kill shots” that land true, and alter perception through two ways.

“The best Trump linguistic kill shots,” Adams writes,”have the following qualities: 1. Fresh word that is not generally used in politics; 2. Relates to the physicality of the subject (so you are always reminded).”

Writes Adams: “Identity is always the strongest level of persuasion. The only way to beat it is with dirty tricks or a stronger identity play. … [And] Trump is well on his way to owning the identities of American, Alpha Males, and Women Who Like Alpha Males. Clinton is well on her way to owning the identities of angry women, beta males, immigrants, and disenfranchised minorities.

“If this were poker, which hand looks stronger to you for a national election?”

[A very intriguing question.  What do you think?] 

Ideological Decisions Trump Data-Based Policy in Flint

Dana Milbank, from the Washington Post, recently argued that the water poisoning residents in Flint flows from an ideological (rather than practical) approach to politics. 

Flint leadership and the Governor of Michigan made their decision on the basis of a principled commitment to less government and lower taxes combined with a deep suspicion of ‘elitist’ arguments from scientists and bureaucrats in the EPA.  Their freedom to be the decision maker on this question (rather than the Federal EPA) was granted by a Congress that shares this principled commitment and suspicion of science.

Imagine you are an ordinary resident in Flint and, along with your neighbors, you start noticing your children getting sick.  Conversations in the church basement spark meetings with your City Council representative, who tells you her hands are tied. 

Your kids keep getting sicker.

A local activist from Friends of the Crooked River writes a letter to the editor revealing that recent tests of the water in your town, coming from a new source for the past two years, has alarmingly high lead levels that studies have shown can cause the types of diseases your children share.

Your City Council representative brings the City Water Commissioner to the next meeting and it gets heated.  But the only outcome is that now you have two competing studies, one showing the water is fine and the other not.  The Mayor appears on TV in a press conference to reassure residents that the water is safe.

Months go by and more kids get more sick.

City Hall and the local Chamber are content with this stalemate, because they are the more powerful player in a conflict framed as residents of one neighborhood vs city hall.  Keeping the scope of this conflict narrow in this way benefits them and makes it easier for them to avoid hard questions and escape accountability for their decision to switch water supplies to save money.

Once the scope of the conflict is expanded beyond local residents and city hall…when the Governor, state and federal EPA, national and international media, presidential campaigns now paying attention…this expansion to bring in new audiences to the dispute brings in new concerns and interests, changes the venue and alters the rules of the game in ways that to impact the outcome of the conflict over water and sick kids.

Of course, residents just want clean water.  That is the presenting conflict.

And for some it likely seems confusing and frustrating that just to get clean water…just to get city officials to do the right thing…they need to figure out how to manage the media and governor and both state and federal EPAs and now presidential candidates and more! 

But a deeper conflict that, on its own, would never have captured the attention of these residents turns out to be an important cause of the presenting conflict that is making their kids sick. 

It is a deeper argument over principle: in this case the role (and reach) of government regulation, with particular attention in this instance on the comparative value of a strong Federal EPA versus a strong State EPA.  Congress chose to write the laws to favor state agency (and constrain the reach of the federal government), and that appears to be a critically important decision that…many steps down the road, resulted in Fling kids getting sick. 

Winning the argument over what this argument is about is the central political dynamic here.  And that argument was won in a smoke-filled committee hearing when free market ideologues in Congress who believe that less government and lower taxes always lead to better outcomes decided to build a wall between the Federal EPA decisions about clean water in Flint.

Milbank’s analysis highlights the importance of this deeper, hidden-in-plain-sight conflict on the children in Flint.  He also highlights the perverse, and Trump-like, response from ideologues when the data is contrary to their deeply held convictions.

‘In a hearing this week about the poisonous water in Flint, Mich., Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter (R-Ga.) tried to blame the lead-tainted water on the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency.

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy explained that, under the law Congress passed, states are in charge of enforcing drinking-water standards.

“The law?” Carter replied, contemptuously. “The law? I don’t think anybody here cares about the law.”

It was an awkward and inadvertent moment of truth. Congress has hamstrung the federal government, giving states the authority to enforce drinking-water standards and all but eliminating the EPA’s power to intervene. This is a pure expression of the conservative doctrine of federalism: States handle things better than the feds because they are closer to the people.’

How could the law matter here? Or science or public health.  The point is that the federal government is too big and intrusive.  Government regulations reduce freedom.  If we can retain our focus on that, rather than the law or science or public health, that would really make me feel like my deeply held convictions and sound-bites needed to get re-elected are safe from critical public scrutiny. 

But if you insist on focusing on the data and sick kids and irresponsible state goverment, I will have to pull a 1984 on you and ‘Squirrel!’ blame the White House and Federal EPA itself.  Yes, this is an irony free (and fact free and humor free) zone.

‘But then came the debacle in Flint, when Michigan authorities embraced cost-saving changes in the city’s water supply and caused mass lead poisoning. Now members of Congress are blaming the EPA for failing to stop the problem — oblivious to the irony that they and their predecessors were the ones who denied the federal government the ability to enforce drinking-water standards in the first place.

It’s a vicious cycle: Washington devolves power to the states. When states screw up, conservatives blame the federal government, worsening the public’s already shaky faith. Having tied the hands of the feds — in this case, the EPA — they use the failure as justification to restrict federal power further, thus giving more control to the states, which caused the problem in the first place.’

This deeper conflict is rarely our focus, because most of us just want government to do the right thing and help us protect our water supply or strengthen our schools or national defense.  This deeper conflict usually feels too abstract for most of us to make sense of it enough to care about it and pay attention to it…but we see here that…

‘This is no abstract problem. The leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination promises to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency — or the “Department of Environmental Protection,” as Donald Trump calls it — “in almost every form” and to “bring that back to the states.”

We don’t have to wonder what that would look like. It would look like Flint.

Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, the EPA takes a back seat to state regulators. Even if the EPA finds evidence that water is unsafe, it can’t take action until it can prove that a problem is widespread — and until it gives a state time to fix the problem.’

This is no abstract problem in at least three very concrete ways: 

1.    very real kids are very sick and that sickness can be traced back to an ideological approach to governance that holds government itself (and citizens who depend on it) in contempt;

2.    the response here from Congress (and the right-wing media) to blame President Obama and the EPA is a very concrete effort to mislead and misinform so we will direct our anger at the wrong targets; and

3.    the front-runner for the Republican nomination wants to vastly expand this approach to governance.

‘In Flint’s case, an official appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder (R) decided in 2013 to save money by changing the water supply, with disastrous results. The EPA had no say. It got wind of the trouble early in 2015, but, by the time it could meet the law’s requirements to take action, Michigan had already switched Flint back to its original water supply.

“Congress was very clear in the law and also in the congressional record that they wanted us to keep in our lane and they didn’t want us to step on states’ rights,” McCarthy testified.

Snyder, whose administration was responsible for the disastrous decisions in Flint, got relatively gentle treatment from Republicans on Thursday while sitting at the witness table with McCarthy. Republican members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee focused their ire on McCarthy.

“I heard calls for resignation. I think you should be at the top of the list,” said Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.).

Said the chairman, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah): “Wow, you just don’t get it.”

Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.) said McCarthy should “consider scrapping” other pending regulations because “it’s clear EPA cannot currently handle the issues on its plate.”’

Doubling down on failure to dare the mass media, scholars, activists to find a way to untangle the now decades-long misinformation campaign that makes it easy for Fox News viewers in particular to just nod their heads at this confirmation of what they already believe—yes, the president is a Muslim who follows a radical Christian preacher and is not an American citizens.

‘Even though the EPA should have acted faster once it learned of Flint’s troubles, there is no dispute that the state was solely responsible for the changes that caused the lead poisoning….

Chaffetz, the chairman, joined this complaint. When McCarthy explained that, under the law, she had to provide elaborate documentation before overriding state officials, Chaffetz was livid. “Why do we even need an EPA? If you can’t do that?” he asked. “If you want to do the courageous thing,” he said, you “should resign.”

Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.), comparing McCarthy unfavorably with Snyder, accused her of “fraud, denial, incompetence and bureaucratic nepotism” and said she “should be impeached.”

Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.) accused her of a “coverup.”

Chaffetz called her too slow to implement new rules — an inversion of the usual conservative complaint that the EPA is too quick to impose regulations.

McCarthy responded by noting the “infuriating” aspect of the law — the requirement to give states time to demonstrate that they are fixing problems. “I wish we had yelled from the treetops,” she said. “But there is no way that my agency created this problem.”

No, this problem was created by a rigid adherence to the notion that states will police themselves — and that the federal government should step aside.’

These members of Congress are demonstrating, proudly, a profound lack of leadership.  As my favorite political scientist once put it ‘the unforgivable sin of democratic politics is [for leaders] to dissipate the power of the public by putting it to trivial uses….  Democracy [requires leaders to] define the alternatives of public policy in such a way that the public can participate in the decision-making process.’ 

When, instead, leaders take already challenging issues and work hard to make them even more confusing and confounding, they commit this unforgivable sin and make democracy both less possible and less desirable.

A state panel, appointed by Governor Snyder, found that the state is "fundamentally accountable" for this crisis.  See AP story here. 

Incivility: Trump as the Expected Product of Elite Misinformation Campaigns

Does the Ohio Civility Consortium ‘sound naïve’ as a leader of that group noted in the today’s Beacon Journal?  In a word: yes.  I applaud and support their effort, but  the article itself concurred, at least in part.

“Usual fixes were suggested: get money out of politics, make elections publicly funded and draw up competitive US Congressional districts.” 

As framed in the article, the suggestion is these were all mentioned without seriousness of purpose, without concrete plans to take on the powerful interests of those who benefit from the existing campaign finance and redistricting structures—many of whom were speakers at this gathering.

Then the article added that the group also discussed “innovative solutions,”  including building relationships among legislators to bring back the ‘good old days’ where legislators from both sides were friends, or public education efforts requiring civics in Ohio schools, and (of course) coming to grips with the internet and social media.

Of course, this list is hardly innovative.  Any discussion of politics, from the local pub to these former elected officials at the Ohio Civility Commission always includes, actually usually focuses on, each one of these ‘innovative solutions,' without a seriousness of purpose such that they ‘create a rhetorical Bermuda Triangle where everything drowns in a sea of empty posturing’ (thanks JSmooth) and then someone blames it on the media and we forget the whole thing ever happened.

What follows in the article is the usual pabulum.   Media sensationalism, as we have seen Trump exploit, is always an attention grabbing story line that reinforces nonsensical analytical frames ‘blaming the media.’  We are reminded that negative ads work even as they encourage citizens to lose faith in the system, that “the coverage of the presidential race is over the top,” and “it’s show business,” and there are more important issues to be discussing.  

And of course, there is the mandatory blaming of the average citizen who consumes the news (and by extension is to blame for both incivility and Trumpism).

Bunk.

In the same paper, we read Michael Gerson attempting to persuade Republicans who he says are ‘beginning to make their inner peace with Trump' that this is a bad move and in doing that he makes this observation:

“What the argument for accommodation is missing is the core reality about Trump.  His answer to nearly every problem is himself….  We are supposed to turn in desperation to the talent and will of one man who happens to be bristling with prejudice and blazing with ignorance.  We are seeing the offer of personal rule by someone with no discernible public or personal virtues…. [a man who] has offered disaffected people an invitation to political violence.”

The rise of Trumpism reveals the chasm between conversations among former elected officials and other public and private sector establishment figures about a return to civility and the deep and abiding culpability of our ruling establishment in creating the conditions that make Trumpism--incivility as virtue--possible and entirely foreseeable.

Candidates, elected officials, talking heads, think tank analysts, many academics and more have stoked the flames of American anti-intellectualism for decades.  Their motivations vary—from highlighting culture wars to mobilize voter segments likely to elect a favored candidate to diverting public attention from leadership failures to aim average citizen disgust at other citizens—but the outcome has been the same.

A steady diet of misinformation has encouraged large segments of our population to believe that Trumpism is a viable answer—that we cannot trust democratic governance or elected officials or ‘the media,’ or ivory tower academics and their ‘data,’ or anyone other than the guy who tells me I have been right all along.  The solutions are simple.  Let’s just give those who disagree an ass-kicking for their ignorance and welcome back the American Dream.

We have all cringed over the individual illustrations: creationism, climate change, vaccinations, the virtue of an unfettered free market, great man versions of history, interventionism is always the best first option, zero tolerance is an effective approach to crime and violence, birthers, all Muslims are terrorists, an inability to agree with those who remind us that black lives matter, and more.

Even though we all know that ‘The Media’ as a monological unit makes no sense.  After all, reporters skew liberal while editors and publishers lean conservative, and it is difficult to imagine Fox News and NPR on the same team in any game.  But even those at the Ohio Civility Commission repeat this tired script and pronounce ‘the media’ as a central culprit…only to invite the predictable retort from media elites that average citizens get ‘The Media’ that they ask for. 

We can circle these wagons only for so long before we just get off the merry-go-round and see that this way of framing the conversation sets us up to find Trumpism ‘incomprehensible,’ rather than just the next step in elite misinformation campaigns.

When we unpack ‘The Media,’ we see, hidden in plain sight, our everyday communication system driven by elites exploiting media outlets, including social media, to outflank traditional filters and avoid countervailing forces that might check and balance--tactics now central to Trumpism.  (Note: this does not remove citizen or reporter or publisher culpability, but only moves them into a shared culpability frame where they are not the most influential source determining what will be ‘the news,’ as we have seen Trump play the dominant role recently in defining what is news.)

Further, these elites misinformation efforts are not random, but loosely coordinated.  Recently the most virulent form of coordination was called the ‘Republican Noise Machine,’ by one former Republican insider, or unpatriotic obstructionism in the words of moderate and conservative co-authors Mann &Ornstein, or in an effort to pretend this ‘just happened without agency or elite finger prints’ the phenomena is sometimes bemoaned as an agentless Echo Chamber.

There are forces poised against this trend.  Many public and private sector elites continue to insist on data-driven decision making, even when it challenges ideological preferences, advancing powerful (but still largely ignored by candidates and parties) new media tools like fact checking, seeking rule changes that favor moderate, compromise-willing, candidates and elected officials willing to regulate in the public interest, tax and spend with prudence, and model the kind of thoughtful leadership (Paul Wellstone, John Danforth and others like them on both sides) that focuses on problem solving for the nation rather than headline skewing for the party.

While the Ohio Civility Commission has its heart in the right place, efforts to stop Trumpism through civility must draw everyone’s attention to the intersection of these ongoing, decades-long, misinformation campaigns that together form a powerful public pedagogy designed to reinforce the powerful and distract & divide the power-poor.  A powerful public pedagogy that no educational reform can effectively counteract.

Civility has to have a truth factor.  It has to address those, particularly the most powerful among us, who intentionally seek to mislead and misinform.  Without this, the effort will indeed prove naive.

Running to Run Government on Anti-Government Anger

David Ignatius at the Washington Post recently wrote that Trump is tapping into anger and frustration associated with the very real decay of American political institutions. 

‘The danger is that Trump’s responses would probably make the underlying governance problems worse — and increase polarization and dysfunction even more.’

Agreed.  But directing this anger and frustration at government  misses the point, after decades of ongoing efforts by the far-right to paralyze government decision making, demonize government as always the problem, and defund government—firing cops and teachers and failing to invest in infrastructure and more. 

‘Here’s the puzzle: A country that is angry at “government” or “Washington” will have difficulty fixing problems that result from the breakdown of public services caused by underfunding, incompetence and the predominance of private “special” interests over the public interest. What’s needed isn’t less government, but better government — which costs money and requires good leadership.’

Agreed.  But the dominance of special interests ought to redirect our anger and frustration at those private sector elites who both insist on corporate welfare AND freedom from the type of government regulation that would have prevented the recent Great Recession. 

Instead, Trump (and Cruz) redirect that citizen anger toward each other and civil servants and encourage us to conclude ‘both sides’ are equally responsible for the paralysis making democratic decision making even more difficult that it is at the best of times.

Ignatius argues (citing Fukuyama) that our gridlock is not unique in history, but if our situation is to be repaired through the ‘self-correcting’ mechanisms we expect to be a strength of democratic institutions we need to recognize that the voters Trump and Cruz are mobilizing “are poorly organized” to respond.

This is always a possibility for a semi-sovereign people, but with failed leadership today this problem is also amplified by design.

Voters today are more vulnerable that usual to overly simplistic promises of a return to greatness in a context where elites have been exploiting the mass media for decades to misinform us and redirect our anger away from leadership failure—public and private sector—and toward blaming each other, from immigrants to minorities, women to workers or Muslims.

Ignatius also draws our attention to the role of elite failure in institutional decay.

‘Decay happens when agencies that are supposed to serve the public are captured by elites, or overmanaged by elected officials, or buffeted by what Robert Kagan calls “adversarial legalism.”’

 ‘The deep anti-government hostility of the modern Republican Party is part of the problem. Tax cuts have starved many government agencies of money and good people. Fukuyama notes that Medicare and Medicaid, which account for 22 percent of the federal budget, are managed by 0.2 percent of federal workers. As the federal workforce has dwindled, the number of contractors has exploded. Taxpayers suspect that it’s a con, and they’re right.’

‘Congress meddles with the federal agencies rather than passing legislation to solve problems…mandate[ing] complex rules that reduce the government’s autonomy and make decisions slow and expensive. The government then doesn’t perform well, which confirms people’s original distrust.’

‘An angry public watches as the rich get richer, the middle class stagnates and government does nothing. Middle-class prosperity and self-confidence have been the foundation of U.S. democracy. Yet the Pew Research Center estimates that the share of household income going to middle-class families fell from 62 percent in 1970 to 43 percent in 2014, while the share for upper-income families rose from 29 percent to 49 percent.’

Agreed.  This is the argument we should be arguing about, but instead…

‘Trump gives an angry America someone to blame: Muslims, Mexicans, government bureaucrats, free-trade negotiators, politicians, journalists. But he doesn’t begin to address the real problem of how to fix the United States’ political decay.’

A failed business man whose only claim to fame is being born rich and then taking that opportunity to become an uniformed bigot is not even close to the type of person who can help us reverse this decay.

So he wants to reframe the conversation and encourage us to redirect our anger and frustration toward other average Americans, who have also been and remain victimized by the failure of public and private sector elites like Trump for decades.

Explaining Trumpism

Robert Kagan, Neo-Conservative Analyst from Brookings, who worked in the State Department under President Reagan and has advised Republican and Democratic officials on foreign policy ever since argues persuasively that the rise of Trump is rooted in what Republican Party leadership has been teaching its members for a long time.  Kagan asks…

“Was it not the party’s wild obstructionism…the insistence that compromise was betrayal…the party’s accommodation to and exploitation of the bigotry in its ranks…the Obama hatred, a racially tinged derangement syndrome that made any charge plausible and any opposition justified…that taught Republican voters that government…even parties themselves were things to be overthrown, evaded, ignored, insulted, laughed at?”

And he concludes that…

“…Trump’s legion of “angry” people…are angry about all the things Republicans have told them to be angry about these past 7½ years…”

Here is Kagan’s full commentary from the Washington Post, arguing that party elites have been saturating communication channels with a public pedagogy for at least a decade designed to teach Republicans that obstruction is patriotic and that leadership by insult and ridicule is at the core of their brand.

Ramesh Ponnuru, Senior Editor at the conservative National Review, disagrees with Kagan (sort of) and his critique appeared in today’s Akron Beacon Journal.

Ponnuru appears to agree with Kagan’s point at a very general level, beginning his response with this…

“Robert Kagan, a neoconservative writer, has a theory about Donald Trump: He has risen to the top of the Republican field because the party has taught its members to value obstruction and hate President Barack Obama.”

Ponnuru then argues that the closer we look at Kagan’s claim ‘the less plausible is appears.’ Ponnuru argues that because Trump had not called for the nullification of Supreme Court decisions (and Kagan uses that as one illustration of the public pedagogy from Republican leaders these past 7 years), therefore Kagan’s claim is less plausible.  But Kagan is illustrating obstructionism, not arguing each specific illustration is now part of the Trump campaign.

Conclusion:  Ponnuru’s critique is beside the point here.

Ponnuru then argues if party obstructionism is the explanation why is Trump’s central campaign claim that he is a deal maker?  This critique makes sense only if we ignore the context of Trump’s retreat to ‘I am a deal maker,’ since his deal maker claim appears in order to silence uncomfortable questions and to grind conversation to a halt…that is, as a form of obstructionism that is based on a phony record of business success.

Conclusion: Ponnuru’s critique here misses the point.

Ponnuru then argues that exit polls show Trump’s coalition is not limited to angry white middle-aged men.  This is a good point, because it shows that the threat posed by Trump is more serious than originally expected.  But the fact that Trump’s coalition extends beyond angry white middle-aged men is not an argument again Kagan’s claim that the rise of Trump is rooted in the party’s efforts to teach its members to obstruct and hate the president.

Conclusion:  Ponnuru adds helpful data here, but the data reinforces Kagan’s claim.  It does not challenge it.

This situation creates a dilemma.  The very Republican party elites many are now hoping, often demanding, will step in to stop Trump are also those most responsible for creating the toxic political culture that has now made the threat of a Trump presidency possible.

This is an opportunity to put country first.  Yes, it would be a satisfying ‘just deserts’ experience to watch the self-destruction of the party that has put party before country in order to prevent the first African-American president from helping American families. 

This, however, would be us putting party before country by failing to join forces to stop a dangerous and divisive bigot from getting one step closer to the White House.

I hope the rise of Trump becomes the spark that finally brings the adults in the room together to reject the Tea Party occupation of the House and McConnell obstructionism in the Senate to coalesce…Democrat and Republican…around preventing another episode of a house divided.