Author: Dave

Passover tonight, and in light of the release of the Mueller Report, I wanted to include in our seder some thoughts on intellectual freedom, the importance in a democracy of being able to express and demand truth, and the relatedness of these themes to freedom and enslavement generally.  I am also pretty pissed off.  

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/moments-after-donald-trump-became-president-the-white-houses-lgbt-rights-page-disappeared/

Imagine being so hollow of purpose, so lacking in positive vision, that this is literally the first thing you can think to do at the levers of power (they took down the climate change page too).  Yet this is what you idiot Trump voters have wrought — an entire administration with nothing at its core so much as resentment and an adolescent itch to antagonize and bully. Enjoy your flag-waving celebration of straight white working folks, you morons, because after today, there is no one listening (including your president), and one way or another I’m afraid this era ends badly for you.  I only hope the rest of us manage to get through it.

It’s not the “popular” vote.   It’s the vote.

And then there is that artifact of slavery, that original voter-suppression effort against the more-populous states, the Electoral College, which we celebrate today, and which results in a citizen’s vote for president in Wyoming counting 3-4 times as much (it is actually more disproportionate) as a vote in Massachusetts, New York, or California. Do I think, as some of the founders did, that direct presidential elections could lead one scary day to the majority electing a witless demagogue to the presidency?  Uh, sure.  But, now that we’ve seen how well that “check” works on the baser instincts of the electorate, how about we spare a thought for the fundamental injustice of taxation without representation?

This “analysis” piece in today’s New York Times (from “The Interpreter”) illustrates pretty well the problem many of us have with our leading news sources in the United States — that they are tepid, apparently cowed by right-wing criticism of the “lamestream media,” and lazily content with repetition, false balance, useless man-on-the-street interviews, and market competition over numbers of eyeballs/clicks rather than amount and quality of new information.

The Interpreter tells us today about “Russia and the U.S. Election: What We Know and Don’t Know.”  That seems like a timely and interesting story to analyze, to put it mildly.  But what the Times gives us in this piece is in fact far less than any moderately well-informed non-journalist could write on the Russian hacking story at this point.  For example, in discussing the practical impact of the Russians’ controlled release of DNC and Clinton Campaign emails, the Times somehow doesn’t think it is appropriate to mention the forced resignation of the chair of the Democratic party in the middle of an election cycle, which was clearly precipitated by emails that we now know to have been strategically leaked by Russia.  This omission seems like it may have simply been an oversight — the rest of the story is similarly lazy in its focus only on the reporting over the last few days — but it also bolsters the conclusion The Interpreter reaches in the section entitled “Did Russia swing the election for Mr. Trump?” (NYT answer: “It is impossible to say for sure, [but no]”), and so might have been left out deliberately.

The purpose of the piece, according to the opening paragraphs, is to “separate[e] fact from misconception” on the Russian hacking story.  Yet, in the very next paragraph (under the heading “What was Russia’s role in the election?”), The Interpreter states “Russian security agencies infiltrated Democratic National Committee email servers last year and again this spring, according to American intelligence assessments and several independent security firms. The Russians also hacked a private email account belonging to John D. Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.”  That’s it.  No mention of the hacking of Republican National Committee servers until much later in the story, though that is clearly another revelation from the last few days.  Imagine a person on a self-imposed news blackout for the last few weeks (not so far-fetched) learning about the Russian hacking story for the first time through this “analysis.”  The piece certainly invites that kind of reader both with its title and with its executive summary, bullet-point format.  Now imagine that the reader is hoping to form his or her own conclusions about the motive and impact of the Russian hacking by reading this analysis.  Wouldn’t that person want to know in the frame-up of the basic story that both parties were hacked by the Russians, according to U.S. intelligence agencies (but that none of the RNC information was disclosed)?  Doesn’t that tend to color the conclusion any interested reader might reach on the big, elementary questions the story seeks to answer: “What was Russia’s role in the election?,” “Did Russia swing the election for Mr. Trump?,” “Was the election itself hacked?,” and “Why does the C.I.A. think Russia wanted to help Mr. Trump?”

By the way, since when does the “C.I.A. think” things?  Usually, an intelligence agency “finds,” “reports” or “concludes.”  This is not a grammatical point — it is a point about the Times and its Interpreter deliberately choosing to de-authorize the conclusions of the C.I.A., to put them on the same footing as any person or entity who “thinks” something is true.  Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.  Why would the paper want to de-authorize or delegitimize the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence services?  There is really only one reason I can think of: because an important individual, Donald Trump, flatly and without evidence says he doesn’t believe it is true.  That’s it.  And that’s what is meant by “false balance” in American journalism, Liz Spayd.

The Interpreter makes the point a few times in the piece, apparently based on his personal observations, that there is “growing confusion” in the U.S. about what the Russians allegedly did to “hack” the 2016 presidential election.  If there is in fact confusion, then presumably it arises from the use of the word “hack,” which connotes direct tampering with electronic voting machines or digital vote tallies, in the same way that Ferris Bueller “hacked” his high school computer system to directly change his grades.  The Interpreter wants to reassure his readers that no such direct hacking of the election results has been found or indeed alleged so far, including by Jill Stein in her various recount requests.  He makes the point clearly at one point: “There is no evidence that hackers, from Russia or elsewhere, tampered with the vote tallies.”  Fair enough, and good to know.  So then why the flirtation in the rest of the piece with a conclusion that goes well beyond the hacking of voting machines and election databases?  Why pose (and answer firmly in the negative) the question, “Was the election itself hacked?”  We do not have enough experience and history with the term, “the election itself,” for the Times to have concluded unreflectively that it refers only to the mechanical process of ballot-recording and vote-tabulation.  Rather, having earlier used the term “vote tallies” to describe these mechanical aspects of the election process, as to which there is “no evidence” of Russian tampering, the  shift to grand pronouncements about the “election itself” seems like an effort to blunt controversy or concern about the actual effects of Russian hacking on the election.  Or it just seems sloppy.

This sloppiness as to what is meant by the Russian “hacking” of the election — that it relates to the selective release prior to the election of hacked information, rather than direct tampering with vote tallies — crosses over into recklessness at one point:

• Mr. Trump has said there was widespread voter fraud that favored Mrs. Clinton, and some liberal commentators have suggested that the election was hacked. Independent analysts say there is overwhelming evidence against both claims.

Having apparently invented the term, “the election itself,” to refer narrowly (if far from obviously) to the digital/mechanical aspects of the voting process, The Interpreter abandons this term in just the second bullet point, declaring that those liberals who have alleged the “election was hacked” have been conclusively proved wrong.  How nice of The Interpreter to include a block quote that be cleanly excerpted from this analysis and reposted to The Blaze!  “‘The election was [not] hacked,’ admits elite liberal broadsheet The New York Times!”  Why would the Times be so careless in appearing to understate the impact of Russian meddling in the election and simultaneously overstate the offsetting and baseless claims by Donald Trump that “millions of people” voted illegally for Hillary Clinton?

I don’t know the answer, but there are two possibilities I see.  One is that, in an effort to appear objective and “interpretive,” the Times has affirmatively decided to downplay (maybe even kill) the partisan/electoral aspects of the Russian hacking story and focus instead on the foreign affairs/espionage angle, as to which there is broader bipartisan interest.  The second is hinted at by the last paragraph of the story, in which The Interpreter darkly equates right-wing “fake news” stories and Russian disclosures favoring one presidential candidate over another with the tweets and facebook posts of liberals who question the impact of Russian hacking on the outcome of the 2016 election:

• Not all misconceptions are directed by Moscow, however. Social media rumors that overstate Russia’s involvement in the United States election risk playing into Moscow’s goal of undermining Americans’ faith in the legitimacy and integrity of their democracy.

If the Times really believes that private individuals speaking and writing freely about how Russia could have handed this election to Trump “plays into” the hands of our enemies — if the paper is really so timorous in the face of honest inquiry — then maybe that’s all we really need to know about this piece-of-shit story.

All right, so I am about two days late with the Michael Moore observation.  As I look at the pundits and the talk shows today, it is clear that “how did the Democrats lose the white working man” has become the dominant narrative.  Lots of self-flagellation by the coastal elites.  Lots of calls for compassion and understanding.  Russell Brand says we have to reach out to angry middle-American white men with love.  The Liberal Redneck says his audiences in northern college towns do not care to understand the issues and concerns of his Texas audiences.  Joe Scarborough shouted down all the men of color on his panel on November 10, accusing them of lack of compassion for the white woman in Flint with lead-poisoned children and a seething hatred for the system that allowed that to happen.  Bill Maher went on a rant in this direction last night — blaming “political correctness” and over-tolerance of Islam for the Democratic parties’ failures — and was asked in all seriousness by Wonkette Ann Marie Cox “Let me get this straight, the problem with American politics is we don’t cater enough to white men?”

Also, there is this:

@VanJones68 Ppl who feel their way of life is threatened have unthinkingly put others in a position where their actual life is threatened.

— Brad Rothbart (@scrdchao) November 13, 2016

And this:

For years I shamefully failed to realise that men who shout Paki at me from passing cars are actually experiencing a lot of economic anxiety

— Ahir Shah (@AhirShah) November 12, 2016

So, there are limits to how far we are going to get with the Michael Moore analysis.  And, moreover, this (and every modern) U.S. election was so close that there is more than one “reason” and more than one way that HRC could have made up the difference and come up on top, even without white people (who, anyway, have voted Republican in every single presidential election since 1976):

1.  If FBI director James Comey had not decided to re-open the investigation into HRC’s emails on October 28, eleven days before the election, that might have been enough.
2. If HRC’s campaign had better polling and recognized that the rust-belt states were actively in play, directing their efforts into places like Wisconsin (which HRC never visited once during her campaign, believing it was “safe”) and Macomb County, MI, that might have been enough.
3. If HRC had not said, on September 9, “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it,” that might have been enough.
4. If more people had voted (46% did not) or people of color had turned out in greater numbers, that might have been enough.

And many, many other factors, having not much to do with the abandonment of white, working-class Middle America, such as voter-suppression laws enacted by red states during the Obama Administration (and particularly after the judicial sunsetting of the Voting Rights Act), Russian hacking into DNC and HRC Campaign emails, the decision by Reince Priebus to put the unreserved effort of the RNC behind the election of Donald Trump, etc., etc.  The autopsy of the 2016 election and the Clinton Campaign will have to list multiple “immediate causes” of death, as the pathologists say, even if economic anxiety by working-class whites goes on the certificate as an important “underlying cause.”

And also, what does it really matter?  We all learn in middle school history that the harsh war reparations and other restrictions imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, as well as the Great Depression, created the conditions of desperation and instability that led to the rise of fascism.  Understanding that the people of Germany had been treated unfairly by the conquering powers after WWI, that they were desperate, and that they were in a vulnerable position to be exploited by a nationalist demagogue, helps us to answer some thorny historical questions about how so many average Germans came to embrace the Nazi ideology, but it doesn’t really tell us anything about how else those people might have been reached or how that nightmare outcome might have been avoided.  We already knew that economically-disenfranchised folks behave oddly in elections — not voting, voting against their self-interest, casting a worthless protest vote, and/or voting for the strongman — but knowing that doesn’t really help us understand how to direct our efforts, particularly in the wake of an election that has shifted power about as far away as it can be from liberal ideas and ideals.  That’s the question it seems like we need to be trying to answer now.

In trying to make sense of the election results this week, I have been looking around for someone who called it.  Because I certainly didn’t.  On Tuesday morning, I woke up believing that the American people would, in their collective wisdom, make the sensible choice.  I even entertained the idea (though this seems very naïve as I look back on it), that voters would deliver a rebuke to the party that had deformed so completely as to put a lying, boastful jackass up for nomination.  I was not the only person who thought this way.  A lot of people who try to pay attention were entertaining ideas earlier this week that the backlash against Trump by ordinary Americans could set the Republican party back by decades, and reasonably might be expected to cost them the Senate on election day as well as the presidency.   That is not at all what happened.  All of us got it spectacularly wrong.  So who got it right?

Two people — Trump himself (who said repeatedly that his campaign’s strategy of focusing on rust-belt states would tip the Electoral College vote in his favor, no matter what the polls said) and Michael Moore.  if you haven’t heard his essay, here he is reading it:

(I should note that it was very hard to find a link to this video from a non-right-wing source.  The people we used to call “tea partiers,” whom I guess we now should call “Trumpists,” loved this, even though it pretty clearly makes the point that pissed-off white people are preparing to act irrationally and in a way that could destroy the country).

And, having thought about it almost to the exclusion of anything else this week, and having looked at and read a lot of other explanations, I think Moore got it right.  That may be because, before I had seen the Moore video, I had been trying out a similar theory in my head — that, in every election since Clinton, the American people had always gone for whichever candidate seemed like the bigger “fuck you” (between the two options) to the establishment and Washington.  That rule seems to hold even in re-election campaigns (such as Bush v. Kerry and Obama v. Romney), where the “challenger” was in each case thought to be someone Washington was already quite comfortable with and would have no trouble assimilating.

Moore has a particular Michigan-centered perspective, and that helps give color to his larger point that working-class people in that state have gotten shafted for 20 years, which has caused (as he sees it) white people to not really care about the more frightening or crazy things Trump says and black people to not believe either candidate is particularly worth voting for.  Michigan and Wisconsin ended up being decisive in this election, so the Michigan-centric explanation is very useful, though you could see how the same kinds of anger and economic victimization could play out in other states that went for Trump, such as Pennsylvania.

What is compelling about Moore’s explanation is, of course, that it is not dismissive.  He holds up the perspective of a person whose first goal in voting for Trump was to piss off the privileged and powerful people who don’t give a shit that working three jobs isn’t enough to make a workable life.  That makes sense to me.  It resonates with me.  Some 61 million Americans voted for Trump, and while I absolutely believe that group includes racists, sexists, and xenophobes (including some of the self-loathing variety), it also includes a lot of decent and kind people who voted the wrong way.  There are also a lot of decent and kind people who didn’t vote at all for the same or similar reasons.  I don’t really understand them either.

I have more to say about this, but I should eat dinner.  First post — done!