As I have said in numerous posts, America has laid waste to its principles of “democracy” as chronicled by event after event after event in its history. And really, America has never been a democracy. Americans forget their long history of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump is merely renewing the triumph of that history – and confounding the experts who greatly underestimated how powerful those old white guys still are.
The following are a few selections from a presentation I am making this year at the Mykonos “unconference” from a longer piece-in-progress for the Huffington Post (France) and my French publisher Les Arènes under the (English) working title “Donald Trump, media politics and the business of outrage”.
28 July 2019 (Greece) – When I made my first trip to Ukraine over 5 years ago at the invitation of one of my cyber security vendor partners, it was part of my information war/cyber war education. It was based on my desire to see Russian information warfare “live”. Russia has spent decades tinkering with doctrines related to information warfare. In my research I had come across a fascinating presentation made in 1997 by Vladimir Markomenko, then deputy director of FAPSI (which was then Russia’s signals intelligence agency, the equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency) that described its history. Whatever you might think of Russia’s recent antics on the world stage, you have to concede: they have brilliantly exploited information-age tools to confuse audiences about what is truth, what isn’t, and to set their own narrative. This fall I hope to write a blog post that assembles all I learned on what has been three trips so far, and to explain why media reports and analysis merely scratch the surface of what the Russians have going on. The Kremlin goal … which the President of the United States embraces daily … is to exhaust our critical thinking, to hide the truth by seeding a thousand falsehoods around it.
Because like so many other things, you can read about information warfare, and cyber security, and consult cyber security experts, etc. but it is only by doing “red team” events and working with cyber people on the front lines (and Ukraine is very much on the front lines) in real-world problem situations that you can get any meaningfully construct of the concepts, the relationships, the contexts. It also helped me to focus on the different skill sets involved in cyber-enabled information warfare as distinct from cyber warfare; the former targets human minds, whereas the latter targets computer and communications systems.
I have also tried to learn some Russian and Ukrainian and one phrase that stuck with me was “чемодан без ручки” (“suitcase without a handle”) – meaning something too important not to keep carrying but too difficult to carry for any distance. I think it describes perfectly what the Trump resistance movement faces post-Mueller.
Robert Mueller was going to save the republic. He was going to be that “handle” for the suitcase. But it did not work out that way. Most pundits said he would save us and send Trump packing, but only a few got it right. Like Sarah Kendzior who wrote “The View From Flyover Country”, one of the most clear-eyed accounts of the realities of life in America’s overlooked heartland, and her prediction that it would lead to the rise of a president who rules like an autocrat, and who would win the Presidency. And that man was Trump. And Andrea Chalupa who is an expert on authoritarian states and who wrote a series of articles warning about Russian election hacking years before 2016 and said nobody was focused on the seriousness of the threat.
Both Sarah and Andrea predicted that the Mueller Report would be a dud. As Sarah pointed out in her Twitter feed and blog and a stream of articles: there was a fundamental mismatch. She parsed the many bits and pieces slowly coming out over the 2 years of investigation, read the detailed indictments and realized Trump was cutting every corner, trampling on every ethical guideline, while Mueller and those like him were primly weighing up the legal niceties and nuances. They were thumbing through the rulebook of the monastery while in front of them a mafia don set the monastery on fire.
Last week’s Mueller hearings
For Trump, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
For me, the biggest take-away from the Meuller hearings last week was this exchange:
Congressman Guy Reschenthaler: “You made a decision not to prosecute, correct?”
Mueller: “No. We made a decision not to decide whether to prosecute or not.”
“We made a decision not to decide” is the Mueller motto. As Sarah Kendzior has pointed out, his two-year probe:
was marked by witness interviews that were never held, probable criminals who were never prosecuted, and troubling questions that were never answered – and may never be.
This is a pattern for Mr. Mueller. The Mueller Report, while lengthy, shed little light on why Trump associates apparently complicit in foreign interference in a U.S. election – such as Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. – were not charged, or why criminals such as Michael Flynn walk free after plea deals that seemingly led nowhere. The rollout of the report in March, tarnished by the misleading memo of Attorney General William Barr, further muddied the matter – particularly since the April release of the report allowed Barr’s deceitful summary to dominate discourse for a month.
As I watched the Meuller hearings last week I thought “Mueller acted like a man terrified to state the obvious. Why? And if the way the Democrats have handled the Mueller report is any indication of the state of the party, they are in serious trouble going into 2020. They keep operating with a mentality of fear and caution despite Trump’s wrecking ball approach to politics, which has strong Republican support. They keep underestimating what their opponents will do to achieve victory.”
The Democrats brought a butter knife to a gun fight and proceeded to stab themselves in the face. The Republicans brought a bazooka and killed everyone … and their base was delighted. Nobody in the Democratic party has any idea how to wield power. They “control” the House but the Republicans have neutered that power. And so this creates a vacuum … and the Democrats eat their own.
And the babbling this past week over “the bad optics of the hearings” and “Mueller was experiencing cognitive issues” and “everybody is missing the substance of the Meuller Report” misses so much of what is going on.
It is difficult to write about this stuff because although I am no longer a U.S. citizen I find myself irrevocably tangled in America’s hopes, arrogance, and despair. But I have the comfort of living and writing on a remote island in Greece, not mysterious or impenetrable, but awesome – made of earth, air, fire and water. It breathes. Here you can get a bit nearer to the stars and the ether. And I find people who actually enjoy face-to-face encounters, away from a national conscious with its fevers of conspiracy and ancient hatreds and malignity. No signs that read “Your consideration of your neighbors is appreciated. Thank you for not engaging in abusive talk or elaborate paranoia”.
My points are not neutral but hopefully take the conversation to a different level, as I try to get beyond “the-hearings-were-nothing” vs. “the-hearings-were-everything” war:
1. What Mueller said, coupled with his report, is breathtaking, dangerous, and impeachment-worthy.
2. It is also true that, in 2019, only clear talk that cuts through noise matters … and those 7 hours were not that.
3. In my opinion, when you know as much as Bob Mueller knows, and love this country and its institutions as much as he does, it is actually irresponsible to be so evasive, curt, and protective of your own integrity as opposed to country’s integrity.
4. You have to know the culture of your time, the media of your time, and, if you have something urgent and important to say, you have to know how to get it heard now. If he thinks the president is a lawbreaker, he should say it in a way people without a law degree can understand. Those of us who want more declarativeness aren’t asking for reality TV or celebrity culture. We do not want a man whose primary goal seemed to be to avoid talking and doing justice to the gravity of his own conclusions. This was a moment when his propensity for personal honor and rectitude actually became dishonorable.
5. Refusing to read the text of his own report out loud? To give viewers context, especially those who did not read it? Come on. This is dangerously close to someone putting his own reputation for sobriety and seriousness and integrity ahead of the country.
6. We are living in a new communications age in which people who understand how to command attention win. There are good people who get that and evil people who get that. You can’t whine about the age you live in. You have to master it. This isn’t a normal investigation. This isn’t a normal presidency. This isn’t a normal anything. No Pollyannas here. Save your patrician rectitude for family reunions. If you are Bob Mueller, you have a chance to save the republic. Acting like you’d rather not be there ain’t it. And if you don’t want demagogues and tyrants to keep winning and getting away with things, the people on the fair side of justice may need to get over their snobbery and self-image of seriousness and understand how to actually reach the public in 2019.
7. Because we are living in a world in which bad guys command all the attention, and therefore all the power, while good people sit on the sidelines having righteous conversations about how attention shouldn’t matter this much.
Democracy is for the Gods, not humans
My mother told me to be polite to strangers as a matter of self-respect and also because they may be enduring some personal tragedy you will never be aware of, so be kind. Civility is based on empathy, and it is at the heart of democracy.
But civility is dead in America, and it shall never come back. And so democracy is dead. America must turn the page on that bit of its history. But was it ever (really) a democracy?
There has been a flood of books over the past few years on the theme “Why do democracies fail?”. Well, books, and opinion pages and cable news shows, in an increasingly anxious public debate. But I always find myself answering the question with another question: “Why shouldn’t they?” Because in the short history of mankind on this planet, every democracy, every republic has failed. And history is the only true guide we have on this matter. We know that democracy is rare and fleeting. It flares up almost mysteriously in some fortunate place or another, and then fades out, it seems, just as mysteriously. Genuine democracy is difficult to achieve and once achieved, fragile. In the grand scheme of human events, it is the exception, not the rule. As Paul Woodruff put it in his 2006 book “First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea” :
Democracy – all adults are free to chime in, to join the conversation on how they should arrange their life together. Despite democracy’s elusive nature, its core idea is disarmingly simple: as members of a community, we should have an equal say in how we conduct our life together. And no one is left free to enjoy the unchecked power that leads to arrogance and abuse. Have you ever heard of anything more reasonable?
Hold on. Whoever said we were a reasonable species? Fundamentally, humans are not predisposed to living democratically. One can even make the point that democracy is “unnatural” because it goes against our vital instincts and impulses. What’s most natural to us, just as to any living creature, is to seek to survive and reproduce. And for that purpose, we assert ourselves — relentlessly, unwittingly, savagely, violently — against others. We push them aside, overstep them, overthrow them, even crush them if necessary. Behind the smiling facade of human civilization, there is at work the same blind drive toward self-assertion that we find in the animal realm. Just scratch the surface of the human community and soon you will find the horde. As zoologist Konrad Lorenz writes in his book “On Aggression” :
It is the unreasoning and unreasonable human nature that pushes two political parties or religions with amazingly similar programs of salvation to fight each other bitterly, just as it compels an Alexander or a Napoleon to sacrifice millions of lives in his attempt to unite the world under his scepter. World history, for the most part, is the story of excessively self-assertive individuals in search of various scepters.
It doesn’t help matters that, once such an individual has been enthroned, others are only too eager to submit to him. It is as though, in his illustrious presence, they realize they have too much freedom on their hands, which they find suddenly oppressive. Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler and Mussolini were all smooth talkers, charmers of crowds and great political seducers. So are Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.
Their relationship with the crowd is particularly intimate. For in regimes of this kind, whenever power is used and displayed, the effect is profoundly erotic. Just watch a Trump rally. Better yet, watch “The Triumph of the Will” (thanks, in good measure, to Leni Riefenstahl’s perverse genius) to see people experiencing a sort of collective ecstasy. The seducer’s pronouncements may be empty, even nonsensical, but that matters little; each one brings the aroused crowd to new heights of pleasure. He can do whatever he likes with the enraptured followers now. They will submit to any of their master’s fancies. In 2016 I covered the U.S. presidential election for a French news organization. I was back in the U.S. last fall for follow-up, my last trip to the States. Both times I attended Trump rallies, spoke to Trump supporters. Both times, same responses:
We Donald Trump supporters don’t agree with everything that he has done in the past and said in the past and we all wish that he would make it easier for us to stand up and fight for him. But the Trump Train continues to grow and grow and grow. Because he hates the same things we hate.
This is, roughly, the human context against which the democratic idea emerges. No wonder that it is a losing battle. Genuine democracy doesn’t make grand promises, does not seduce or charm, but only aspires to a certain measure of human dignity. It is not erotic. Compared to what happens in populist regimes, it is a pretty frigid affair. Who in his right mind would choose the dull responsibilities of democracy over the instant gratification a demagogue will provide? Frigidity over boundless ecstasy? Boundless emotion? Boundless feelings, none of that “mental stuff”? And yet, despite all this, the democratic idea has come close to embodiment a few times in history — moments of grace when humanity almost managed to surprise itself.
Costica Bradatan is an American philosopher, a Professor of Humanities in the Honors College at Texas Tech University. He has a book-in-progress, some of which he has shared, entitled In Praise of Failure. A Manifesto for Humility. He says:
One element that is needed for democracy to emerge is a sense of humility. A humility at once collective and internalized, penetrating, even visionary, yet true. That has been completely lost in Amercia.
The kind of humility means being comfortable in your own skin, because you know your worth, your limits, and can even laugh at itself. A humility that, having seen many a crazy thing and learned to tolerate them, has become wise and patient. To be a true democrat, in other words, is to understand that when it comes to the business of living together, you are no better than the others, and to act accordingly. That has been erased in America. The institutions of democracy, all of its norms and mechanisms, have been corrupted.
Ancient Athenian democracy devised several institutions that fleshed out this vision and it made democracy work – for awhile. One of them was the institution of ostracization. When one of the citizens was becoming a bit too popular — too much of a charmer — Athenians would vote him out of the city for ten years by inscribing his name on bits of pottery. It was not punishment for something the charmer may have done, but a pre-emptive measure against what he might do if left unchecked. Athenians knew that they were too vulnerable and too flawed to resist political seduction so they promptly denied themselves the pleasure. IF Stone in his classic book The Trial of Socrates fleshes this out in detail having done a dive into scores of ancient texts. But the gist is: “Man-made as it is, democracy is fragile and of a weak constitution — better not to put it to the test. There are so many ways it can crumble.”
Yes, democracy has resurfaced elsewhere, but in forms that the ancient Athenians would probably have trouble calling “democratic”. For instance, much of today’s American democracy (one of the best versions on the market right now; buy it before it passes its sell-by date!) would by Athenian standards be judged “oligarchic.” It’s the fortunate wealthy few (hoi oligoi) who typically decide here not only the rules of the political game, but also who wins and who loses. Ironically, the system favors what we desperately wanted to avoid when we opted for democracy in the first place: the power-hungry, arrogant, oppressively self-assertive political animal. Funny, that.
Yet we should not be surprised. It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who wrote:
So perfect a form of government as democracy is not for men. If there were a people of gods, it would govern itself democratically. But not a people of men.
Democracy is so hard to find in the human world that most of the time when we speak of it, we refer to a remote ideal rather than a fact. That’s what democracy is ultimately about: an ideal that people attempt to put into practice from time to time. Never adequately and never for long — always clumsily, timidly, as though for a trial period.
What social media has really done to us
There’s a passage in Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises in which a character named Mike is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he answers. “Gradually, then suddenly.”
Technological change happens much the same way. As does political change. Small changes accumulate, and suddenly the world is a different place. We’ve all tracked (and some of us have been involved with) “gradually, then suddenly” movements: the World Wide Web, open source software, big data, cloud computing, sensors and ubiquitous computing, and now the pervasive effects of AI and algorithmic systems on society and the economy.
But social media technology has transformed politics and society irrevocably, in a dystopian way, that we are only now slowly grasping. Our civil institutions were founded upon an assumption that people would be able to agree on what reality is, agree on facts, and that they would then make rational, good-faith decisions based on that. They might disagree as to how to interpret those facts or what their political philosophy was, but it was all founded on a shared understanding of reality. And that’s now been dissolved out from under us, and we don’t have a mechanism to address that problem.
And it is not due to the two tropes dragged out to explain all of this: the surfeit of information coupled with a decentralized communications media that intrinsically fails because there are too many voices. It has to do with the particular structure of social media. The problem is it’s all algorithmically driven, that there are no humans in the loop making decisions, making the sort of editorial and curatorial decisions you’d expect about what is going to be disseminated on those networks. As such, it’s very easy for people who are acting in bad faith to game that system and produce whatever kind of depiction of reality best suits them. Sometimes that may be something that drives people in a particular direction politically, but there’s also just a completely nihilistic, let-it-all-burn kind of approach that some of these actors are taking, which is just to destroy people’s faith in any kind of information and create a kind of gridlock in which nobody can agree on anything.
More information was supposed to mean more freedom to stand up to the powerful, but it has also given the powerful new ways to crush and silence dissent. More information was supposed to mean a more informed debate, but we seem less capable of deliberation than ever. More information was supposed to mean mutual understanding across borders, but it has also made possible new and more subtle forms of subversion. We live in a world in which the means of manipulation have gone forth and multiplied, a world of dark ads, psy-ops, hacks, bots, soft facts, deep fakes, fake news, Putin, trolls, and Trump.
What we are seeing is, in the words of Columbia law professor Tim Wu, a situation where “speech itself is seen as a censorial weapon”. This questions the old idea that the answer to “fallacious speech” is “more speech” – that we live in a “marketplace of ideas” where the best “information products” will win out. No. That idea is dead. The information market can be rigged.
In their brilliant series of monographs (very long reads) that analyse the role of bots, dark ads, and psy-ops, researchers at the University of Oxford Internet Institute (I will quote from the monograph series at greater length in the longer version of this piece) found something more insidious is going on: a process called “manufacturing consensus”. These techniques are being used across the world: in Brazil, China, Poland, Russia, the US, the UK, and many other countries. For instance, the Oxford researchers show how the Chinese government posts 448m social media comments a year, the aim of which is not to engage but to distract, as critical topics are replaced with positive ones.
Today social media puts absolutely no constraints on our limits of self-expression; each of us can be a modernist author on our Facebook feed. But this self-expression is then transmuted into data: the language we use, our likes and shares, all passed to data brokers and then on to advertisers and spin doctors who target us with specially tailored campaigns we might not even be aware of. The more we express ourselves, the less power we have. Our language is used against us. As Peter Pomerantsev notes in his soon-to-be-published book This Is Not Propaganda:
This technology has produced a propaganda model that is very different from the 20th century. Instead of stuffing an ideology down people’s throats via TV and radio, a spin doctor has to tailor different messages to different social media groups.
In his book, Peter uses as an example the “Vote Leave” campaign in the UK, which is also the subject of an HBO special movie this week called “Brexit” (Dominic Cummings is played by Benedict Cumberbatch). In the movie (but more detailed in Peter’s book) is the story of the “Vote Leave” digital director, Thomas Borwick, who used 70 to 80 different types of targeted messages. Borwick’s job was to connect individual causes to his campaign, even if that connection might feel somewhat tenuous at first. Borwick, who approached the challenges “like a Rubik’s Cube”, claimed that the most successful message in getting people out to vote had been about animal rights. “Vote Leave” argued that the EU was cruel to animals because, for example, it supported farmers in Spain who raise bulls for bullfighting. And within the “animal rights” segment Borwick could focus even tighter, sending graphic ads featuring mutilated animals to one type of voter and more gentle ads with pictures of cuddly sheep to others.
Standard operating procedure. I have read about similar varied messaging used by spin doctors across the world, most notably by the Trump campaign in 2016, but “on steroids” for the 2020 reelection bid. The challenge with this sort of micro-targeting is that it requires some big, empty identity to unite all these different groups, something so broad these voters can project themselves on to it – a category such as “the people” or “the many”. The “populism” that is thus created is not a sign of “the people” coming together in a great groundswell of unity, but is actually a consequence of the people being more fractured than ever, of their barely existing as one nation.
So, as Peter notes in his book:
When people have less in common than before, you have to create a new version of “the people” for every election. As too many concrete policies and coherent ideologies would risk alienating parts, these pop-up people need to be united around a leader’s personality and a vague feeling, such as “take back control” or “optimism”. Facts are a hindrance rather than a help: you are not trying to win a rational debate with floating voters; you want to say what gets more attention in fragmented social media groups, where the more outrageous you are the more likes you’ll get. Indeed there is something of a rush in throwing a middle finger up to facts, farting at glum reality. Trump and Johnson are both products of this environment.
At the end of the day, people are not going to agree on facts unless there’s a reason for them to do so. I’ve been reading a very interesting book called A Culture of Fact by Barbara Shapiro, which is a sort of academic-style book that discusses how the idea of facts entered our minds in the first place because we didn’t always have it. Procedures were developed that would enable people to agree on what was factual, and that had a huge impact on culture and on the economy and everything else. And now that’s going away, and the only way to bring it back is, first, to have a situation where people need and want to agree on facts. In today’s world … impossible.
And so we live in this fragmentation. “The people” no longer having a common basis to have conversations with each other. But is that kind of fragmentation bad? So we run a society on less consensus. We each go our own merry ways, and we talk to people who are in our niche, but otherwise, there’s no common conversation like on network TV. Does that have to be so bad?
We’re going to find out because that’s where we’re going. It is an odd thing that we’ve seen the normal expectations and standards of how the constitutional system of checks and balances is supposed to work, and the wheels have come off completely in the last couple of years, with no one in a position of power seeming capable (or willing) to do anything about it. And yet … day-to-day life seems to go on without any obvious change. You can read that as we’re in the calm before the storm, and it’s all going to just collapse pretty soon. Or maybe this is how things are now, that political D.C. is just a kind of sideshow, and it doesn’t matter.
America is a sociology experiment gone horribly wrong
My mantra of America has been a simple on: it is a place where money is everything, the only thing in almost every facet of its life. For me, America is a sociology experiment gone horribly wrong. Donald Trump is the price you pay for living in a marketplace culture. Corporatism rules.
And it fails to face its history and predilections and contradictory attitudes on so many basic things, as if “those things are best forgotten”. I think of:
1. The forever talk that America’s nature and beauty and “pastoral being” was the most important thing in its existence, yet its forebears did everything in their power to create an urban industrial juggernaut. The “machine” would enter the “American garden”, and stay — becoming the greatest central metaphor of contradiction.
2. In mainstream American public discourse, personal narrative, identity politics and “ME!” would replace critical argument and the discussion of ideas of which America was so proud and professed – ad nauseam.
3. And most recently, that enduring, persistent myth: that the internet was once great but then we ruined it. Flaming and abusive behavior were there from the very beginning. The big difference today? Facebook, Google and all the rest just weren’t profiting from it, building billion-dollar companies.
It is because Americans do not know their history, have no care for their history. The recent cauldron of bile created by Donald Trump after his flood of racist remarks “has never been heard before”, or so I read. Well, maybe not heard coming from a U.S. President but let me run this by you. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, lets the Tom Buchanan character speak:
“If we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”
I have a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letters and it’s worth noting what he says inspired the quote. The novel was written and published in 1925, but was set in the summer of 1922. Congress had just passed a law restricting overall immigration; in 1924 it passed another, targeting Catholic and Jewish “hordes” from Southern and Eastern Europe, seedbeds of anarchy and “bolshevism.” There were scores of letters-to-the-editors about it. Tom Buchanan would later morph into the leaders of the Republican party.
All of this racism, xenophobia and violence due to Donald Trump’s years of Twitter bile we have seen many, many, many, many times before in American history. Oh, how quickly Americans forget. Or do not even know. For instance, those of us who attended American public school (and even university) and took various American history courses were brainwashed by the works of Bernard Bailyn, Edmund Morgan and Gordon Wood. Air brushed out/filtered out were the enormous economic and class conflicts dividing colonial America, and the diverse often violent difference in political beliefs that stayed throughout our history. As John Adams famously wrote when describing the First Continental Congress convened in 1774: “Delegates were strangers, unfamiliar with each other’s ideas and experiences and diversity of opinion”. There was no unity of political beliefs.
So let’s forget Bailyn, Morgan and Wood. We should have been reading Eric Foner, Alan Taylor, Daniel Vickers and Ian Williams. As they have written, the political ideology motivating the colonists had deep and complex roots, with deep social and class conflicts. And it was “many beliefs” that served as the primary motivation for revolution … for many different reasons. It wasn’t all about taxes or “freedom”.
CONCLUSION
As I noted at the beginning, these were just a few selections from a presentation I am making this year at the Mykonos unconference and come from a much longer piece-in-progress which will expand on these themes. Americans have allowed a commercial oligarchy to treat its “democracy” as if it was a talk show guest sitting alone in the green room with a bottle of water and a banana, armed with its “once-upon-a-time-I-was-a-star” press clippings to prove it, waiting to come on between the shampoo commercial and the demagogue.
It will get more ugly. What Trump and his sycophants have unleashed cannot be put back in the bottle. Only the naïve still believe it can be reversed. There might … might … have been a chance for some redemption with Meuller but even he could not have stopped the cancer from spreading. For the U.S., the worse is yet to come.
And it will get worse all over. For the past 200 to 300 years, ideas have been in full flow, stimulated by ever-increasing contacts between peoples, and transmitted by accelerating means of communication. Globalization is the result: a fizzing ferment of words and images. But that accelerating means of communication has caused a retreat into populism and chauvinism. Confused by chaos, infantilized by ignorance, refugees from complexity flee to fanaticism and dogma. People are being fractionated into their own information realities. The pillars of logic, truth, and reality are being replaced with fantasy, rage, and fear. People’s cognitive architectures are being changed, and not for the better. That will not change.