#^d 2017-05-14 #^h Weekend Roundup
Arthur Protin asked me to comment on a recent interview with linguist George Lakoff: Paul Rosenberg: Don't think of a rampaging elephant: Linguist George Lakoff explains how the Democrats helped elect Trump. Lakoff has tried to promote himself as the liberal alternative to Frank Luntz, who's built a lucrative career polling and coining euphemisms for Republicans. I first read his 2004 primer, Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, which consolidated ideas from his earlier Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think -- a dichotomy he's still pitching as "the strict father/nurturent parent distinction." I've never liked this concept. I'll grant that conservatives like the flattering "strict father" construct, not least because it conflates family and society, in both cases celebrating hierarchical (and, sure, patriarchal) order, and there's something to be said for recognizing how they see themselves. But the alternative family model isn't something I'd like to see scaled up to society, where nurturing morphs into something patronizing, condescending, and meddlesome, and worse still that it grants the fundamentally wrong notion that what's good for families is equally good and proper for society and government. This is just one of many cases where Lakoff accepts the framing given by Republicans and tries to game it, rather than doing what he advises: changing the framing. I don't doubt that his understanding of cognitive psychology yields some useful insights into how Democrats might better express their case -- especially the notion that you lead with your values, not with mind-numbing wonkery. But it's not just that Democrats don't know how best to talk. A far bigger problem is that Democrats lack consensus on values, except inasmuch as they've been dictated by the need to collect and coalesce all of the minorities that the Republicans deplore.
You see, back in Nixon days, with Kevin Phillips and Pat Buchanan doing the nerd-work, Republicans started strategizing how to build a post/anti-New Deal majority. They started with the GOP's core base (meaning business), whipped up a counterculture backlash (long on patriotism and patriarchy), and lured in white southerners (with various codings of racism) and Catholics (hence their about face on abortion), played up the military and guns everywhere. The idea was to move Nixon's "silent majority" to their side by driving a wedge between them and everyone else, who had no options other than to become Democrats. The Democrats played along, collecting the votes Republicans drove their way while offering little in return. Rather, with unions losing power and businesses gaining, politicians like the Clintons figured out how to triangulate between their base and various moneyed interests (especially finance and high-tech).
Lakoff is right that Clinton's campaign often played into Trump's hands. While some examples are new, that's been happening at least since Bill Clinton ran first for president in 1992. Clinton adopted so many Republican talking points -- on crime and welfare, on fiscal balance, on deregulating banks and job-killing trade deals -- that the Republicans had nowhere to go but even further right. For more on Clinton and his legacy, see Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal! Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? The key point is that Clinton almost never challenged the values Republicans tried to put forth. Rather, he offered a more efficient (and slightly less inhumane) implementation of them. Indeed, his administration oversaw the largest spurt of growth in the wealth of the already rich. If the rich still favored Republicans, that was only because the latter promised them even more -- maybe not wealth, but more importantly power. That Clinton left the rich unsatisfied was only part of the problem his legacy would face. He also left his voters disillusioned, and his post-presidency buckraking left him looking even more cynical and corrupt, in ways that could never be spun or reframed.
So Hillary Clinton's own political career started with two big problems. One was that she was viewed as a person whose credentials were built on nepotism -- not on her own considerable competency, except perhaps in marrying well -- and even when she seemed to be in charge, he remained in her shadow. The second was that she couldn't separate herself from the legacy of ashes -- the demise of American manufacturing jobs, the concentration of wealth for a global financial elite. Indeed, with her high-paid speeches to Wall Street, she seemed not just blind but shameless. Her husband had refashioned the Democratic Party into a personal political machine, both by promoting personal cronies and by losing control of Congress (a source of potential rivals), leaving her with a substantial but very circumscribed fan base.
As for Hillary's campaign, as Lakoff says, the focus was against Trump:
The Clinton campaign decided that the best way to defeat Trump was to use his own words against him. So they showed these clips of Trump saying outrageous things. Now what Trump was doing in those clips was saying out loud things that upset liberals, and that's exactly what his followers liked about him. So of course they were showing what actually was helping Trump with his supporters.
Lakoff doesn't say this, but the lesson I draw was that Clinton's big failure was in treating Trump as an anomalous, embarrassing personal foe, rather than recognizing that the real threat of a Trump administration would be all of the Republicans he would bring into government. She thought that by underplaying partisan differences she could detach some suburban "moderates" to break party ranks, and that would make her margin. Her indifference to her party (and ultimately to her base) followed the pattern of her husband and Barack Obama, who both lost Democratic control of Congress after two years, after which they were re-elected but could never implement any supposed promises. You can even imagine that they actually prefer divided power: not only does it provide a ready excuse for their own inability to deliver on popular (as opposed to donor-oriented) campaign promises, it makes them look more heroic staving off the Republican assault (a threat which Republicans have played to the hilt). When Harry Truman found himself with a Republican Congress in 1946, he went out and waged a fierce campaign against the "do-nothing Congress." That's one thing you never saw Clinton or Obama do.
So, sure, you can nitpick Clinton's framing and phrasing all over the place. A popular view in my household is that she lost the election with her "deplorables" comment, but you can pick out dozens of other self-inflicted nicks. I saw an interview somewhere where a guy said that "everything she says sounds like bullshit to me" where Trump "made sense." Maybe she could have been coached into talking more effectively, but the subtext here is that the guy distrusts her and (somehow) trusts Trump. Lakoff is inclined to view Trump as some kind of genius (or at least idiot savant) for this feat, but my own take is that Hillary was simply extraordinarily tarnished goods. Democrats have many problems, but not recognizing that is a big one.
Lakoff has a section on "how Trump's tweets look":
Trump's tweets have at least three functions. The first function is what I call preemptive framing. Getting framing out there before reporters can frame it differently. So for example, on the Russian hacking, he tweeted that the evidence showed that it had no effect on the election. Which is a lie, it didn't say that at all. But the idea was to get it out there to 31 million people looking at his tweets, legitimizing the elections: The Russian hacks didn't mean anything. He does that a lot, constantly preempting.
The second use of tweets is diversion. When something important is coming up, like the question of whether he is going to use a blind trust, the conflicts of interest. So what does he do instead? He attacks Meryl Streep. And then they talk about Meryl Streep for a couple of days. That's a diversion.
The third one is that he sends out trial balloons. For example, the stuff about nuclear weapons, he said we need to pay more attention to nukes. If there's no big outcry and reaction, then he can go on and do the rest. These are ways of disrupting the news cycle, getting the real issues out of the news cycle and turning it to his advantage.
Trump is very, very smart. Trump for 50 years has learned how to use people's brains against them. That's what master salesmen do.
The three things may have some validity, but Lakoff lost me at "very, very smart." Much empirical observation suggests that he's actually very, very stupid. Indeed, much of the reason so many people (especially in the media) follow him is that they sense they're watching a train wreck. But also he gets away with shit because he's rich and famous and (now) very powerful. But can you really say tweets work for Trump? As I recall, his campaign shut down his Twitter feed the week or two before the election, just enough to cause a suspension in the daily embarrassments Trump created.
Lakoff goes on to talk about how advertisers use repetition to drum ideas into brains, giving "Crooked Hillary" as an example. Still, what made "Crooked Hillary" so effective wasn't how many times Trump repeated it. The problem was how it dovetailed with her speeches and foundation, about all the money she and her husband had raked in from their so-called public service. It may have been impossible for the Democrats to nominate an unassailable candidate, but with her they made it awfully easy.
For a more detail exposition of Lakoff's thinking, see his pre-election Understanding Trump. There is a fair amount to be learned here, and some useful advice, but he keeps coming back to his guiding "strict father" idea, and it's not clear where to go from there. As someone who grew up under a strict (but not very smart or wise) father, my instinct is to rebel, but I wouldn't want to generalize that -- surely there are some fathers worthy of emulation, and I wouldn't want to condemn such people to rule by the Reagans, Bushes, and Trumps of this world. The fact is that I consider conservative family values as desirable, both for individuals and for society. On the other hand, such family life isn't guaranteed to work out, nor is it all that common, and I've known lots of people who grew up just fine without a "strict father." But more importantly, the desired function of government isn't at all analogous to family. This distinction seems increasingly lost these days -- indeed, important concepts like public interest and countervailing power (indeed, checks and balances) have lost currency -- but that's in large part because the Democrats have followed the Republicans in becoming whores of K-Street.
Still, I find what Lakoff and, especially, Luntz do more than a little disturbing. They're saying that we can't understand a thing in its own terms, but instead will waver with the choice of wording. It's easy to understand the attraction of such clever sophistry for Republicans, because they often have good reason to cloak their schemes in misleading rhetoric. Any change they want to make is a "reform." More underhanded schemes get more camouflage -- the gold standard is still Bush's plan to expedite the clearcutting of forests on public lands, aka the "Healthy Forests Initiative." Similarly, efforts they dislike get labels like Entitlement Programs or Death Taxes or Obamacare. And so much the better when they get supposedly neutral or even opposition sources to adopt their terminology, but at the very least they make you work extra hard to reclaim the language.
Republicans need to do this because so much of their agenda is contrary to the interests of many or most people. But I doubt that the answer to this is to come up with your own peculiarly slanted vocabulary. Better, I think, to debunk when they're trying to con you, because they're always out to con you. Even the "strict father" model of hierarchy is a con, originating in the notion that the social order starts with the king on top, with its extension to the family just an afterthought. But they can't very well lead with the king, given that we fought a foundational war to free ourselves from such tyranny. Indeed, beyond the dubious case of "strict fathers" it's hard to find any broad acceptance of social hierarchy in America -- something Democrats should give some thought to.
On the other hand, Democratic (or liberal) euphemisms and slogans haven't fared all that well either, and to the extent they obfuscate or distort they undermine our claims to base our political discourse in the world of fact and logic. Aside from "pro-choice" I can't think of many examples. (In contrast to "right-to-life" it actually means something, but I believe that a more important point is that entering into an extended responsibility requires a conscious choice -- pregnancy doesn't, but the free option of an abortion makes parenthood a deliberate choice. But I also think that deciding to continue or abort a pregnancy is a personal matter, not something the state should involve itself in. So there are two reasons beyond the frivolous air of "choice.")
There is, by the way, a growing body of literature on the low regard reason is held in regarding political matters. One book I have on my shelf (but somehow haven't gotten to) is Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012); another is Drew Westen's The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (2007). These books and similar research provide hints for politicians to try to scam the system. They also provide clues for honest citizens trying to foil them.
The big news story this week was Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey. This has forced me to revisit two positions I have tended to hold in these pages. The first is that when people would warn of some likely coup, I always assumed they meant that some organization like the US military might step in to relieve Trump of his power. This, pretty clearly, was not going to happen: (1) the US military still has some scruples about things like this; and (2) Trump is giving them everything they want anyway, so what reason might they have to turn on him? Trump's firing of Comey isn't a coup, because Trump was already in power. It was a purge, and not his first one -- he fired all those US Attorneys, and several other people who dared to question him. But those were mostly regular political appointees, so to some extent they were expected. As I understand it, the FBI Director enjoys the job security of a ten-year term, so Trump broke some new ground in firing Comey. It seems clear now that Trump will continue to break new ground in purging the federal government of people he disagrees with -- to an extent which may not be illegal but is already beyond anything we have previously experienced.
Second, I tended to disagree with the many people who expected Trump not to survive his 4-year term. I would express this in odds, which were always somewhat a bit above zero. I still don't consider a premature termination of some sort to be likely, but the odds have jumped up significantly. I don't want to bother with plotting out various angles here. Just suffice it to say that he's become a much greater embarrassment in the past week. In particular, I don't see how he can escape an independent prosecutor at this point. Sure, he'll try to stall, like he has done with his tax returns, but I think the Russia investigation will be much harder to dodge. Also, I think he's dug a deeper hole for himself there. It seems most likely that Comey would have done to him what he did to Hillary Clinton: decide not to prosecute, but present a long list of embarrassments Democrats could turn into talking points (after all, he's a fair guy, and that would balance off his previous errors). Hard to say whether an independent prosecutor would do anything differently. Probably depends on whether he draws some partisan equivalent of Kenneth Starr.
Meanwhile, some links on the purge:
Jonathan Chait: Trump Has Sparked the Biggest Political Crisis Since Watergate; also Trump Is Trying to Control the FBI. It's Time to Freak Out.
Esme Cribb: UN Ambassador Defends Comey Firing: Trump Is 'CEO of the Country': Nikki Haley, adding "He can hire and fire whoever he wants." Actually, many of his hires must first be approved by the US Senate. And most government employees are protected by civil service laws. CEOs often have similar restrictions, but Haley seems to think they possess enough absolute power for the president to envy, much as CEOs often envy the power of absolute monarchs and dictators.
Tim Dickinson: The Totally Deserved but Deeply Troubling Firing of James Comey
Bridgette Dunlap: Trump's Surprise at Comey Firing Fallout Is a Scary Sign
James Fallows: Five Reasons the Comey Affair Is Worse Than Watergate: "The underlying offense"; "The blatancy of the interference"; "The nature of the president"; "The resiliency of the fabric of American institutions"; and "The cravenness of party leaders."
Travis Gettys: Comey Furious Over Trump Team's Smear Campaign -- and He's Prepared to Respond
Charles Krauthammer: A political ax murder: Not that he minds ("Comey had to go") but still "brutal even by Washington standards. (Or even Roman standards. Where was the vein-opening knife and the warm bath?)"
Michael Kruse: 'He Doesn't Give a Crap Who He Fires': "The only people who aren't surprised by Trump's dismissal of James Comey are the people who've watched his whole career."
Kathleen Parker: A theory: Trump fired Comey because he's taller: Probably the most benign spin, but one that occurred to my wife, so I figure it's worth mentioning.
David Rothkopf: Is America a Failing State?
The brazen firing of Comey is an escalation. If Trump is allowed to get away with this and appoint a lackey as chief investigator into his team's alleged wrongdoing, the world will see the United States as a failing state, one that is turning its back on the core ideas on which it was founded -- that no individual is above the law and that those in the government, at every level including the president, work for the people.
Michael S Schmidt: In a Private Dinner, Trump Demanded Loyalty. Comey Demurred.
Bruce Shapiro: Comey's Firing Is Worse Than the Saturday Night Massacre
Jeffrey Toobin: Firing Comey Was a Grave Abuse of Power: "In 1974, Republicans put country before Party and told Nixon it was time to go. Today's G.O.P. seems unlikely to live up to its predecessor's example."
Laurence H Tribe: Trump must be impeached. Here's why. I wouldn't normally bother with such an unlikely scenario, but consider the source. For more on Tribe, see: Dahlia Lithwick: How the President Obstructed Justice. In an unrelated matter, Tribe had made some news recently: Ryan Koronowski: One of the Nation's Most Respected Constitutional Scholars Sells Out to Nation's Largest Coal Company.
; and By firing James Comey, Trump as put impeachment on the table.
Some scattered links this week in the Trumpiverse:
Rosa Brooks: Donald Trump Is America's Experiment in Having No Government: For example:
Meanwhile, President Trump froze most federal hiring, ensuring, for the experiment's sake, that the executive branch is also short-staffed at middle and lower levels. Similarly, Trump has asked Congress to slash the budgets for most civilian agencies, in the hopes that those employees who remain will be unable to fund any programs. He has moved quickly to eliminate many of the regulations put into place by previous governments, leaving private sector actors more free to pollute the environment and fleece the general public. This week, President Trump announced his intention to precipitously slash corporate taxes as well, in an apparent effort to reduce federal revenues and thus further reduce the federal government's ability to function.
Elisabeth Garber-Paul: Jeff Sessions Orders Harsher Sentences, Taking US Policy Back to the 1980s
Peter Maass: Birth of a Radical: Profile of Steve Bannon protégé Julia Hahn.
Gareth Porter: Will Trump Agree to the Pentagon's Permanent War in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria?
Micah Schwartzman/Mark Joseph Stern: How Trump Will Transform the Federal Courts: Republicans have been systematically nominating younger judges, on the theory that they'll stay in power longer, resulting through natural selection in a disproportionately conservative bench. Trump's influence will also be furthered by McConnell keeping open "more than 100 court vacancies" (double the number open when Obama became president).
Steven W Thrasher: Trump voter fraud commission is a shameless white power grab: Hard to think of anything America needs less than a kangaroo court led by Mike Pence and Kris Kobach coming up with new schemes to keep even more people from voting. Still, voter suppression has already helped Republicans get elected, for instance in Wisconsin: Ari Berman: Wisconsin's Voter-ID Law Suppressed 200,000 Votes in 2016 (Trump Won by 22,748); Berman also wrote: Trump's Commission on 'Election Integrity' Will Lead to Massive Voter Suppression.
James Traub: Donald Trump Is the President America Deserves: Author normally covers politics in France, which after spurning Marine Le Pen seems relatively sane and sensible.
Matthew Yglesias: The latest Trump interview once again reveals appalling ignorance and dishonesty
Also a few links less directly tied to Trump, though sometimes still to America's bout of political insanity:
Jessica Bonanno: Progressive Senators Are Going Big for Employee Ownership of the Businesses They Work At: Specifically, Bernie Sanders and Kirsten Gillibrand. I'm a big fan of employee-owned businesses: they promise to harmonize labor-management relations, and they inherently incentivize workers to contribute as much as possible. This strikes me as preferable even to unions, which give workers more power and a fairer share of profits but work mostly through adversarial conflict. Gar Alperovitz has written much about this. Thomas Geoghegan has focused more on Germany's co-determination system, which gives workers board seats but not actual equity.
Ariel Dorfman: What Herman Melville Can Teach Us About the Trump Era: "He would point out that what plagues us are the sins of the past coming home to roost: America's tolerance of bigotry and blindness to its own faults."
Tom Engelhardt: The Globalization of Misery. Also new at TomDispatch this week: Danny Sjursen: America's Wars and "More" Strategy; and William Hartung: Ignoring the Costs of War. From the latter:
Even on the rare occasions when the costs of American war preparations and war making are actually covered in the media, they never receive the sort of attention that would be commensurate with their importance. Last September, for example, the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute released a paper demonstrating that, since 2001, the U.S. had racked up $4.79 trillion in current and future costs from its wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria, as well as in the war at home being waged by the Department of Homeland Security. . . .
On the dubious theory that more is always better when it comes to Pentagon spending (even if that means less is worse elsewhere in America), Trump is requesting a $54 billion increase in military spending for 2018. No small sum, it's roughly equal to the entire annual military budget of France, larger than the defense budgets of the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan, and only $12 billion less than the entire Russian military budget of 2015.
Henry Farrell: Cybercriminals have just mounted a massive worldwide attack. Here's how NSA secrets helped them. Also: Sam Biddle: Leaked NSA Malware Is Helping Hijack Computers Around the World.
Richard Kreitner: 'Trump Is Just Tearing Off the Mask': An Interview with Eric Foner: Who has a new book: Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History.
Nina Martin: The Last Person You'd Expect to Die in Childbirth: "The US has the worst rate of maternal deaths in the developed world, and 60 percent are preventable."
Sophia A McClennen: The DNC's elephant in the room: Dems have a problem -- it's not Donald Trump: Some sobering numbers here:
Trump currently has a 45.1[*] percent favorability rating, one of the lowest for any president in the history of polling. But Democrats fare worse. The DNC has only a 38.8 percent favorability rating.
A January Gallup poll indicated that party identification is at record lows, with 42 percent identifying as independents, 29 percent as Democrats, and 26 percent as Republicans. A recent Washington Post poll showed that the DNC trailed both Trump and the GOP when voters were asked if the party was "in touch" with their concerns. In fact, only 28 percent of those polled felt the party was connected with issues that matter to them. . . .
The elephant in the room for the DNC isn't Trump or the GOP or Bernie bros or Russian hackers; it is its own elitist, corporatist, cronyist, corrupt system that consistently refuses to listen to the will of the people it hopes to represent. Thus far, though, DNC leadership has refused to take these issues seriously. It's a strategy that smacks of arrogance and hubris. And it's a politics that looks a lot more like the GOP than a party invested in helping the little guy.
[*] Latest figure at 538 is 40.6% approve Trump, 53.4% disapprove.
Jacob Sugarman: The Financial Crisis That Spawned Austerity, Corporatized the Democratic Party and Gave the World Donald Trump: Interview with Kim Phillips-Fein, who has a new book about New York City's default in 1975: Fear City: New York City's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics.
Matt Taibbi: Free Lunch for Everyone: Review of Rutger Bregman's book, Utopia for Realists, which "argues that money should be free and a 15-hour work week sounds about right." Taibbi also wrote The War in the White House, which prematurely cited April 5-7 as "the most crucial [period] in the history of America's last president, Donald John Trump." Mostly about Steve Bannon, whose power was curtailed during said period, yet a month later he's started to look like the sane one. The fact that someone with the imagination and flair of Taibbi can't write a piece on Trump that doesn't seem hopelessly dated two weeks hence is possibly the scariest statement you can make about the president.
Stephen M Walt: 'Mission Accomplished' Will Never Come in Afghanistan