Executive Power, Lying, and Democracy

One of the disturbing aspects of the political spectacle today is the paralysis and hopelessness many feel watching a president who is willing to double-down on all levels of lies, from the trivial to the monumental, with unlimited hubris over and over again demonstrating a blindspot in our system of checks and balances.

We have not solved the vexing problem of bully’s in the playground and now face a similar challenge of a bully in the White House…one who is willing to push the envelope at every turn, mixing and matching skillful bullshitting with threats and an awareness that authority figures must proceed cautiously against bullies for a variety of very concrete reasons.

David Ignatius frames the challenge as Comey the moralist ill-equipped to make sense out of Trump the dealmaker, or perhaps the pragmatist.

George Will’s column today argues that, while Will is no friend of the president, he sees in the tactics of some environmentalists a form of moralism that chooses to be ill-equipped to make sense out of pragmatism dealmakers in DC and corporate boardrooms.

Ignatius notes the centrality of lying in Comey’s thinking, such that when more than 90 million watched Comey’s testimony he says we saw a ‘raw morality play, told in Comey’s words, about his dealings with a president whose behavior frightened him. “I was honestly concerned that he might lie about the nature of our meeting, and so I thought it really important to document,” Comey said about his Jan. 6 meeting with Donald Trump.’

Ignatius also includes the ever-present personal dimension to even the most high-drama conflicts: Comey’s image-management and ‘personal pain’ as well as the president’s personal prioritizing of loyalty over competence.

‘Thursday’s hearing offered a haunting portrait of a moralist confronting a dealmaker. Comey conveyed his fastidious attention to ethics, and to his own reputation. He spoke of his “personal pain” in dealing with the Hillary Clinton investigation, his concern for morale if FBI agents heard that Trump “wants the Flynn investigation to go away.”

He wrote memos after his encounters and briefed his closest aides. But he didn’t take the evidence of what he saw as Trump’s wrongdoing to Justice Department superiors or congressional oversight committees…. As Trump stressed so baldly, in Comey’s telling, he wanted loyalty — much as a feudal lord might seek allegiance from his barons.’

Will’s analysis juxtaposes a DC lawyer’s case for more reasonable environmental regulations, reforms that might reduce delays from many years to no more than two years, with one activist group’s efforts to portray this lawyer’s claims, seen by Will to be moderate, as extreme. And, as Will paints the picture, by doing so to silence even reasonable counterarguments resulting in a stalemate.

This activist group, according to Will, choose stalemate on the mistaken belief that any capacity to delay corporate polluters benefits progressive causes like the environment. Will argues that tactics like this are short-sighted, in the long run hurting the causes that progressives support.

Will provides several illustrations, including the claim that ‘while faux environmentalists litigate against modernizing America’s electrical grid, transmission lines waste 6 percent of the electricity they transmit, which equals 16 percent of 2015 coal power generation and is equal to the output of 200 average sized coal-burning power plants.’

What interests me more, since I do not know enough about the specifics to conclude the degree to which the reformist lawyer or the activist group is correct, is how Will describes the activist groups approach to political communication.

‘Intelligent people of goodwill can dispute, as the CAP [activist group] rejoinder does, Howard’s [DC Lawyer] cost-benefit calculations. But the CAP partakes of the hyperbole normal in today’s environmental policy debates: It includes Howard among “hardcore opponents of environmental review” who “consider federal laws that protect the environment fundamentally illegitimate.” Even the title of the CAP’s response to Howard’s arguments for more pertinent and efficacious environmental reviews is meretricious: “Debunking the False Claims of Environmental Review Opponents.”

Opponents? Including Howard? Hardly. David Burge, who tweets as @iowahawkblog, satirizes this slapdash style of progressive argumentation: “To help poor children, I am going to launch flaming accordions into the Grand Canyon.”

“That’s stupid.”

“WHY DO YOU HATE POOR CHILDREN?”’

I wonder if there is another type or level of ‘lying’ manifest here. Maybe it is structural lying or a corollary to the ‘iron law of bureaucracy’ we might call ‘process lying’ that is, at its core, less about truth v falsity and more about misrepresentation, about re-presenting a private interest (sustaining my activist group) as a public interest. This is a tactic long known to be central to corporate BS; why wouldn’t those who seek greater constraints on corporate power use it as well?

Will concludes by returning to the president.

‘Today’s governance is illuminated by presidential epiphanies (e.g., “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated”). Barack Obama had one concerning infrastructure: “There’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” This is partly because, as Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama says, America has become a “vetocracy” in which intense, well organized factions litigate projects into stasis.’

This is not really a conclusion, but more like a starting point. And it seems smart to start by putting the president’s hubris into a larger context that gives meaning to it, not as idiosyncratic but symptomatic of how our democracy has come to operate over time.

Here I am less interested in whether any party is ‘right on the facts here’ and more interested in the portrait of dysfunctional communication provided, where the confusion can be seen to be by design, constructed by PR experts for decades to insulate elites from accountability and protect governmental preference for corporations and more. And it has now morphed into something even uglier and more dangerous in a principle-and-experience-free president willing to exploit this deep-seated dysfunction to the detriment of the Republic.

Watching this president disturbs me, every day. Figuring out how to reverse the decline he represents and accelerates, however, requires us to turn our attention to the larger structural fissures in the great American experiment that his portrayal of ‘John Doe’ reminds us about. And then, as if that were not daunting enough, to do this while also balancing the imperative to oppose him everyday.