Readings from Hannah Arendt – who’s been keeping the torch of democracy lit since 1951. In these comments she points to the corrosive effect of lies.
From The Origins of Totalitarianism
One could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
From a 1978 Interview in the New York Review of Books
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
Yeah, he lies with a straight face but this seems to be the feature instead of the bug of Republicans.
The rise of “win at any cost” politics, a.k.a. the contemporary Republican party, has returned to the vernacular a term from 1930s noir literature: gas lighting.
Let’s turn the gas-o-matic dial way back … all the way to May 2021.
Describing the January 6 insurrection, Georgia GOP representative Andrew Clyde, claimed that
“Watching the TV footage of those who entered the Capitol and walked through Statuary Hall…. you’d think it was a normal tourist visit.”
As you might’ve guessed, he’s the guy not wearing a mask.
This is where the gas starts to hiss. How many times before this, as other “normal tourists” visited, had Clyde worked with security officers barricading the doors of the chamber of the house? How many times has he done so since January 6?
Since the answer to these questions is zero, we have one of the most graphic examples of recent political gas lighting since Trump declared his inauguration crowd was the largest in history. In both cases photographic evidence existed to directly contradict the point the gas lighters were making. And in both cases there were no consequences for such lies.
Up, the charming Pixar film about a misfit scout and the grouchy senior citizen who he befriends, recounts their journey to a mysterious island populated by “talking” dogs. A recurring scene involves how easily dogs are distracted by squirrels. This trait ultimately saves the heroes when a well-timed “Squirrel!” shout enables an escape.
After many columns where he bemoans the current state of the Republican Party and Trumpism in particular, I expected something along the lines of Andrew Delbanco’s College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be, a spirited defense of college’s role in supporting democracy. Instead it turned out to be a spirited attack on the favorite bogeyman of Republicans: cancel culture supporters.
In a tortured argument, based on a book by his friend and Johns Hopkins University President Ronald Daniels, Stephens manages to blame the current ills of college on its supposed embrace of mediocrity and curtailment of free speech. He quotes Dorian Abbot, a professor at the University of Chicago, who delights in charging the cancel culture battlements. Supposedly Abbott was drawn to the fray by a colleague who said “if you are just hiring the best people, you are part of the problem.”
I was struck by the paucity of the arguments and the blind eye to the actions of those intent on undermining democracy, and did what any blogger worth his salt would do: posted a comment.
I thought this was an engaging response to Stephen’s continued misdirection and support for the conservative values he so prizes, apparently even above democracy itself. I figured that Times commenters, known for their discriminating and perceptive insights, would approve of my post.
Instead, they were distracted by squirrels.
The first response, by a self-described tenure-track professor at an R1 university, was recommended at about three times the rate of my own. Instead of picking up on the democracy in flames theme of my own post, it offered a knee-jerk support for Stephen’s detested cancel culture.
I continue to be amazed at how the Republican party and their supporters, aided by Frank Lutz and his public opinion, can hijack the minds of so many Americans by discovering issues that bypass the cognitive faculties of even highly educated academics and appeal instead to our easily manipulated emotional core.
We see this at the state level when Texas, after a year of crippling winter storms that killed 210 residents and a pandemic that has killed over 68,000, ignored the body count and focused on legislation that addressed . . . banning critical race theory, curtailing voting rights, banning abortion, and blocking mask and vaccine mandates.
Florida, drowning in a sea of covid (57,711 and counting) and threatened by rising sea levels, passed laws against vaccine passports, protests, transgender athletes.
The response of voters to these body counts? Gov. Abbott of Texas enjoys a 41% approval rating; DeSantis of Florida, 48%.
The chances that the states will boot out Abbott or DeSantis? Slim to none.
Squirrels: saving conservatives from electoral accountability . . . for as long as we let them.
A recent “conversation” between New York Times columnists Gail Collins and Bret Stephens revealed the conservative lacunae regarding speech and social media.
Stephens borrows a quote from the usual libertarian source for out of context maxims, Thomas Jefferson, to support his Federalist approach to social media. In his first inaugural address Jefferson wrote that “error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.”
First and foremost, content on social media is not free or open. It is controlled by algorithms which instead of offering challenges (or “combat” to borrow Jefferson’s metaphor) provide a steady stream of bile and invective at whichever side you are against.
For your own beliefs (ascertained by machine learning of course), it serves up pablum, misdirection, and sometimes a big stinking pile of comforting lies. These algorithms play to our base instincts of fear and rage. Arguments, in the sense of a reasoned and logical decision based on a close analysis of competing ideas and facts, make no impact in the ring of fear and anger: when the amygdala and frontal lobe duke it out, it’s instinct in a knockout. Rational thought is left spread-eagled on the mat.
In the same essay, Stephens’ argues that the existing “ecology of truth” will rectify the torrent of this information on social media.
Again, he swings and misses. Our epistemological truth (or “ecology”), just like our natural ecology, has been poisoned by man-made technology. People on social media can never find out what is right or wrong because they are being machine-fed the lies they want to hear.
The lawyers and Supreme Court justices who espouse originalist doctrines need to take it all the way.
Since they believe that our Constitution means the same thing it did when it was written, then white wigs, frock coats, and quill pens need to be the order of the day.
You can’t have it both ways: you’re either an originalist who lives and abides by eighteenth century customs and culture or you live in the modern age.
And I’m still trying to figure out their method of time travel and mind reading: how exactly do they divine what a particular jurist or legislator had in mind when they chose a particular word in a particular statute or provision?
Given their problematic reading of current events – see 2013’s Shelby v. Holder decision that there is no need to continue monitoring southern voting laws because, obviously, racism is over* – it’s difficult to see how they could accurately interpret the bewigged, befrocked, and bequilled minds of the past.
They’re embrace of all things Founding seems particularly jarring when the Founders Founder — the person who wrote the Declaration — warned against the exact kind of veneration originalists espouse.
Jefferson, in a letter to Virginia lawyer and sometime correspondent, Samuel Kercheval, written around 40 years after the Declaration of Independence, famously punctured the holier than thou attitude of those who embrace the idea that it, and the ideas it contains, are written in stone.
Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew this age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in the laws and constitutions . . . . But I know also, that laws and institutions much go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind” (qtd. in Morgan 47).
Morgan, Edmund. “Back to Basics.” New York Review of Books, 20 July 2000: 47-49.
Unfortunately, I’m sure the legal hands who believe in the claptrap of textual fundamentalism have a ready reply to Jefferson’s pointed and specific refutation of their pet doctrine. They loose it towards any belief that interferes with their conservative interests . . . and put it back in its cage when it supports said interests (looking at you Bush v. Gore and your convenient elision of the 10th Amendment states rights clause: where’s federalism when a liberal needs it? Oh yeah, back in its cage).
I’m waiting with my box of leeches to provide medical attention when they become ill. With my barber’s license, I meet the originalist definition of a medical provider.
* From Roberts’ decision: “There is no denying, however, that the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions.” And the mental gymnastics to make such a decision are clear just one paragraph later: “At the same time, voting discrimination still exists; no one doubts that.”
And the originalist basis of this? He cites favorably an earlier decision that “the Framers of the Constitution intended the States to keep for themselves, as provided in the Tenth Amendment, the power to regulate elections.” Still here with my box of leeches.
On January 21, 2017 at least 470,000 people, all races, all genders, gathered in Washington D.C. to protest the election of President Trump.
Janelle Monae led a chant: “Sandra Bland! Say her name!” Ashley Judd noted that her pussy wasn’t for grabbing, but “for birthing new generations of filthy, vulgar, nasty, proud, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, you name it, for new generations of nasty women.” Michael Moore encouraged people to run for office.
Then they went home and went to work. They began organizing, forming committees, becoming more politically active, following reality based news and, challenging Mao’s claim that “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” running for office.
This is called a protest.
What did they want? To change the political direction of the country. They did this by financing and supporting the 2018 “Blue Wave” which led to Democrats gaining the House majority. This allowed investigations of political corruption by the Trump administration and his eventual impeachment for encouraging foreign interference in the 2018 election.
That is called democracy.
On January 6, 2021, “thousands” of mostly white, mostly males gathered in Washington D.C. to stop the certification of the electoral college vote.
Rudy Guiliani told them to engage in “trial by combat” and President Trump repeated his usual lies about voter fraud (rejected 62 times in court, and by various Republican officials), urged them to march on the capital to “take back our country,” and exhorted them to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.”
Then he went home to the White House while his co-conspirators unlawfully entered federal buildings leading to several deaths (including a Capital Police officer) many acts of vandalism, and the forced evacuation of a dual session of congress.
This is called an insurrection.
What did they want? To overturn the votes of over 81 million people by force. “Joe” from Ohio wanted “The people in this House who stole this election from us hanging from a gallow out here in this lawn for the whole world to see so it never happens again – that’s what needs to happen, four by four by four hanging from a rope out here for treason.”
He’s at it again with Elijah Cummings, this time targeting Baltimore, a city that is part of the United States, an apparently foreign country where Trump is president but can’t fix anything.
It looks like Truman’s plaque needs to be reworded to suit a new president: “The Buck Stops Somewhere Else” — usually in the vicinity of a brown person pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes.
The naked truth always brings out the worst in demagogues.
The death of magician/historian/actor Ricky Jay prompted a repeat of his interviews on Fresh Air. Jay, in remarks on trust from an 1998 show, anticipates the tenor of American life twenty years in the future.
Terry Gross mentions that David Mamet, in House of Games (where Jay appears in a cameo), suggests that “a confidence game starts when the con man gives you his trust. Is that true?”
Jay’s response reveals much about the malaise currently infecting America: he agrees, adding that
You want to be able to trust someone [ . . . .] I don’t think any of us would want to live in an atmosphere where we couldn’t be conned because we would be so skeptical of everything in life that it would be a horrible way to live. So on some level, we have to do that [trust]. And the confidence man, you know, is able to inspire that by acting in cons [. . .].
Trust.
Imagine living in a world where the idea of long established news outlets is represented as a con, and where the tweets and utterances of a New York real estate developer are taken as gospel truth. Where legal confessions and convictions concerning interactions between high level campaign advisors and hostile governments are dismissed as “fake news.” When immigrant caravans can go from invading a country to radio silence after an election. Where “alternate facts” are embraced and videos are doctored. Where a confidence man, who happens to be the leader of a democratic country, is prevented by his lawyers from giving a deposition in person for fear he would perjure himself.
That would, indeed, be a “horrible [place] to live.”
It is ironically fitting that it takes a person with intimate familiarity of cons to point out both how they play on people’s trust, and what it would be like to live in a world where cons couldn’t exist: where there was no swamp to drain.
Now the question is when will the shills see the swamp is growing instead of drying up?
Anybody wanna’ buy some prime Florida real estate? . . . .
“Crooked Hillary,” “Lying Ted,” and the latest, “Sloppy Steve,” we have a call to tighten libel laws.
This brings to mind two questions.
First: is libel a high crime or a misdemeanor?
Crooked Hillary, Lying Ted and Sloppy Steve and the impeachment committee want to know.
Second: I thought Trump was a tough guy?
This whining sounds like the kind of snowflake sensitivity the Right ascribes to Liberals: “Waa, waa! Daddy — somebody wrote a book with a lot of true things that make me look bad!! Do something! Hit him with your money belt!”
Apparently, Trump is sick of apple pie. He wants the phrase changed to “As American as Regulated Speech.”
Now where’d I put my copy of the Bill of Rights . . . .
Make America Think Again 