John G. Messerly's Blog, page 86

The Washington Post: “…The case against Trump’s dangerous authoritarianism …”

… I’m afraid … that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.

~ Sen. Huey Long

On the eve of the 2016 election, The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent penned, “A final plea: The case against Trump’s dangerous authoritarianism—in one chart.” (Virtually every major newspaper in America, including conservative ones, endorsed Hillary Clinton.) 

Sargent was musing about the fact that:

After the FBI cleared Hillary Clinton once again late yesterday, Donald Trump did not permit this inconvenient new set of facts to knock him off stride. Instead, he effortlessly converted it into more evidence for the argument he’s made all along—the system and the election are both rigged, and any Clinton victory in this election will by extension be illegitimate …

In so doing, Trump laid bare the core of his whole argument for the presidency. But … Trump’s own argument, objectively described, constitutes the strongest possible argument against electing him.

Sargent says that the essence of Trump’s argument are two basic themes:

The first is a hyper-exaggerated narrative of national decay and decline — skyrocketing crime, rotting inner cities, decaying factories, a festering terror threat from within, a border that is being breached by dark hordes of invaders. The second is the notion that our elites are both fecklessly responsible for that perilous state of national decline and too corrupted to fix it — they’ve rigged the system against you, undermining American sovereignty to enrich themselves, while allowing American identity to be degraded by immigrants who are at best parasitic and at worst a lethal threat.

Note that Trump is not simply saying that elites and other subgroups are ripping you off, he’s saying that democratic institutions are so corrupt they can’t do anything about this.  Sargent captures these radical ideas in the diagram below: Some of the undeniably authoritarian elements of this worldview are as follows:

* Trump’s narrative of national decline is rank propaganda.Trump’s regular claims about skyrocketing crime and soaring murder rates are distortions and lies. His relentless claim that the border is being overrun is a Big Lie, too—immigration rates have leveled off and experts have said the border is being managed.

… He is both selling an agenda that is pure fraudulence and exploiting legit grievances with xenophobia, nativism, and white nationalism, all of which rest upon a narrative of national decline that is a fever dream of invention. Which leads to the fact that…

* Trump has repeatedly and explicitly said that if he is elected, he will have no choice but to resort to measures well outside our political norms and democratic processes. The vow of mass deportations promises unthinkably cruel disruptions … He’s banned media organizations from his rallies, egged on supporters against reporters just doing their jobs, and promised to somehow open up libel law to restrict criticism. His proposed ban on Muslims would impose a religious test for entry. He’s flirted with closing mosques and a Muslim registry …

* Trump’s narrative charges that elites are complicit in enabling outgroups to fleece you and weaken our American (and white) identity. Trump says the media is covering up the truth about the thousands of American Muslims who celebrated 9/11. That our elections officials are allowing rampant voter fraud in “certain areas”… And that our political leaders are letting in illegal immigrants so they too can nefariously influence the election’s outcome, a story that the media is also suppressing …

* All roads lead to “I alone can fix it.” That was probably Trump’s single most telling declaration of the campaign. But it must be understood in the broader context of Trump’s ongoing claims that our democratic institutions are so corrupted and corroded that they are no longer capable of solving our problems.

The “I alone can fix it” rhetoric means that: 1) if he is elected he will use non-constitutional measures to “fix things;” and 2) if he is not elected, it shows the system can’t fix things. Consider how he said the FBI was corrupt for not indicting Clinton, then when the FBI appeared to be changing its mind Trump said the FBI was trying to save us. And when they cleared her again he said they were corrupt. Then when, just days before the election, Comey suggested there may indeed be some malfeasance, he again applauded their efforts. In short, “He is claiming that our institutions cannot legitimately clear his political opponent of criminality.”

All of this is plainly designed to badly undermine faith in our institutions … Trump has explicitly said that he may not accept the outcome if he loses … But if he does win, he has already made his intention—to conduct his presidency in full accordance with his contempt for those institutions—absolutely clear. Maybe Trump is just putting on a big show. But why should we not entertain the possibility that he might mean what he says?

The Washington Post: “A final plea: The case against Trump’s dangerous authoritarianism …”

On the eve of the 2016 election, The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent penned, “A final plea: The case against Trump’s dangerous authoritarianism—in one chart.” (Virtually every major newspaper in America, including conservative ones, endorsed Hillary Clinton.) 

Sargent was musing about the fact that:

After the FBI cleared Hillary Clinton once again late yesterday, Donald Trump did not permit this inconvenient new set of facts to knock him off stride. Instead, he effortlessly converted it into more evidence for the argument he’s made all along—the system and the election are both rigged, and any Clinton victory in this election will by extension be illegitimate …

In so doing, Trump laid bare the core of his whole argument for the presidency. But … Trump’s own argument, objectively described, constitutes the strongest possible argument against electing him.

Sargent says that the essence of Trump’s argument are two basic themes:

The first is a hyper-exaggerated narrative of national decay and decline — skyrocketing crime, rotting inner cities, decaying factories, a festering terror threat from within, a border that is being breached by dark hordes of invaders. The second is the notion that our elites are both fecklessly responsible for that perilous state of national decline and too corrupted to fix it — they’ve rigged the system against you, undermining American sovereignty to enrich themselves, while allowing American identity to be degraded by immigrants who are at best parasitic and at worst a lethal threat.

Note that Trump is not simply saying that elites and other subgroups are ripping you off, he’s saying that democratic institutions are so corrupt they can’t do anything about this.  Sargent captures these radical ideas in the diagram below: Some of the undeniably authoritarian elements of this worldview are as follows:

* Trump’s narrative of national decline is rank propaganda.Trump’s regular claims about skyrocketing crime and soaring murder rates are distortions and lies. His relentless claim that the border is being overrun is a Big Lie, too—immigration rates have leveled off and experts have said the border is being managed.

… He is both selling an agenda that is pure fraudulence and exploiting legit grievances with xenophobia, nativism, and white nationalism, all of which rest upon a narrative of national decline that is a fever dream of invention. Which leads to the fact that…

* Trump has repeatedly and explicitly said that if he is elected, he will have no choice but to resort to measures well outside our political norms and democratic processes. The vow of mass deportations promises unthinkably cruel disruptions … He’s banned media organizations from his rallies, egged on supporters against reporters just doing their jobs, and promised to somehow open up libel law to restrict criticism. His proposed ban on Muslims would impose a religious test for entry. He’s flirted with closing mosques and a Muslim registry …

* Trump’s narrative charges that elites are complicit in enabling outgroups to fleece you and weaken our American (and white) identity. Trump says the media is covering up the truth about the thousands of American Muslims who celebrated 9/11. That our elections officials are allowing rampant voter fraud in “certain areas”… And that our political leaders are letting in illegal immigrants so they too can nefariously influence the election’s outcome, a story that the media is also suppressing …

* All roads lead to “I alone can fix it.” That was probably Trump’s single most telling declaration of the campaign. But it must be understood in the broader context of Trump’s ongoing claims that our democratic institutions are so corrupted and corroded that they are no longer capable of solving our problems.

The “I alone can fix it” rhetoric means that: 1) if he is elected he will use non-constitutional measures to “fix things;” and 2) if he is not elected, it shows the system can’t fix things. Consider how he said the FBI was corrupt for not indicting Clinton, then when the FBI appeared to be changing its mind Trump said the FBI was trying to save us. And when they cleared her again he said they were corrupt. In short, “He is claiming that our institutions cannot legitimately clear his political opponent of criminality.”

All of this is plainly designed to badly undermine faith in our institutions—no matter who wins the election. Trump has explicitly said that he may not accept the outcome if he loses, which raises the prospect of further disruptions. But if he does win, he has already made his intention—to conduct his presidency in full accordance with his contempt for those institutions—absolutely clear. Maybe Trump is just putting on a big show. But why should we not entertain the possibility that he might mean what he says?

Summary of Umberto Eco on Fascism & Its Connection to Trump

[image error]

I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

Umberto Eco OMRI (1932 – 2016) was an Italian novelist, literary critic, philosopher, semiotician, and university professor. He is best known internationally for his 1980 novel Il nome della rosa (). Eco grew up in an Italy ruled by the fascist Benito Mussolini. In 1995, Eco penned an essay in the New York Review of Books entitled “Ur Fascism.” (Eternal fascism) Here are the 14 features of fascism that Eco describes.( Bold text are quotes from Eco’s essay. Indented material are quotes from Brenner’s, “How Autocracy Will Come To America,” the subject of yesterday’s post.)

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.

A time when men worked in automobile factories, steel mills, and coal mines. When no immigrants cut grass, picked crops, wrote software, or attended the country’s best universities. When women were mothers, teachers, secretaries or nuns. When blacks got lynched and didn’t vote.

That obviously is what the slogan “Make America Great Again” is all about. It harks back to some fictional Golden Age when the United States was unanimously declared the world’s No. 1—forever and anon.  When the American Dream of inexorable betterment was a tangible fact; when Horatio Alger was the boy next door; when this truly was the land of the free and the home of the brave; when American soil was inviolate … when John Wayne rode high in the saddle.

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism.

A rejection of Enlightenment ideals with their emphasis on rationality.

The Orangutan and his minions take a cavalier approach to facts, to the most elementary logic, to consistency. There is no objective truth for them. There is only the truth that is rooted in their angry emotions. That is the sole legitimizer. Genuine fascist movements of yesteryear packed raw emotion into a contrived ideology of some sort. Our crypto-fascists don’t even bother with that. “Americanism” is their sole ideology.

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake.

Exalting action, especially physical action with a penchant for violence.

Trump’s message is saturated with the words and images of violence. His very manner and gestures convey little more than bellicosity. The meager content is expressed in short, declaratory sentences: I will bomb the hell out of the Islamic State! I will not let Syrians into the United States! I will build the Wall to keep out rapists and murderers!

4. No … faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

A critic is an enemy—an enemy of the movement, an enemy of the leader, an enemy of America. Standard autocratic stuff. Trump will use all the means at his disposal to intimidate, to cajole, to seduce the media into serving as tacit allies in his campaign to remake the country’s political institutions and culture. All the evidence we have summoned tells us that it will succeed to a very great degree …

5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.

This connection with Trump is self-evident. Hence his emphasis on the Chinese, Mexicans, immigrants, refugees, non-Christians, etc.

6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.

I think this connection with Trump is also self-evident.

7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is … to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism … the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot … The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.

Hence the call to end birthright citizenship, the global Jewish conspiracy and more.

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.

The enemies of the people are Chinese, Arabs, crony capitalists and, most of all, the government. Government doesn’t run well because decadent officials have broken it, ignoring the real reason which is that the nation has failed to properly fund government.

9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare.

There is no need for diplomacy, just “bomb the shit” out of the enemy. Why discriminate between civilians and non-civilians. Why not torture people. After all, America is besieged.

10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak …

Trump views his subjects as his followers. They are weak and deserve to be led; he knows what’s best for them. Trump’s followers view him as their leader, and disregard his extraordinary flaws.

11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero … This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death … the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death … The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

Foreign suicide bombers and terrorists are evil, but the military who kill and occupy are heroic. Of course neither the leader, his children, or the children of his wealthy minions will fight. They send others to their deaths.

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality).

Trump played shamelessly to the macho instincts of the white American male – among the most insecure cohort in the world. It was a coarse, simple message: “they” have been trying to denature you; “they” have undermined your natural prowess; “they” must be put in their place for you to regain your potency. Look at me; Trump personifies the ultimate Alpha male who is surrounded by beautiful, servile women. ”I am the one who can lead you to new heights of manliness. I even can legitimize sexual assault.” The truth of assumptions about male insecurity is confirmed by how many bought into this line of adolescent nonsense …

13. Ur-Fascism is … a qualitative populism … In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view … For Ur-Fascism … individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as … a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will … Because of its qualitative populism Ur-Fascism must be against “rotten” parliamentary governments.

Notice how the fascist leader attacks the legitimacy of government because it supposedly doesn’t serve the people. When this happens, fascism is near.

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak … All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the … form of a popular talk show.

Trump’s speech is estimated to be at about a 4th grade level. It limits the need for deep, complex thinking. Moreover, the use of persuasion and propaganda as a means to manipulate his followers is everywhere.

Reflection – It is true that humans are pattern seekers and I want to resist the temptation to find patterns that aren’t there. But Eco lived through fascism and correctly identifies its major elements. The parallels with much of what’s happening today in the USA and other parts of the world are striking. I hope I’m wrong.

Michael Brenner’s: “How Autocracy Will Come To America”

Michael J. Brenner

Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

~ James Baldwin

Another great piece about the rise of American authoritarianism that I’ve read recently is:

“How Autocracy Will Come To America” by Michael J. Brenner. Brenner is a Senior Fellow, the Center for Transatlantic Relations, and Professor of International Affairs at University of Pittsburgh. Brennan sets the stage like this:

The uniqueness of the 2016 election is the radicalism of the winner—in terms of content, manner, and temperament. There is no precedent among mature democracies for the election as head of government of someone so gross, so ignorant, so bigoted and so inexperienced.

While the obvious response to this situation is to fight or flee, instead Brenner says most people adopt a third option

… to inhale through a scented kerchief until one gets accustomed to the smell and treats it as normal. Most Americans already have chosen that third path … For it is the course of least effort; and we have acquired considerable aptitude at devising methods to spare ourselves harsh realities by making believe that they are something else … the man in the White House is there because of that facility at blurring the line between the virtual and the actual—and to live in a world of self-delusion.

Moreover, all of this newfound radicalism is made to appear inevitable:

Everything must look to be the same so that everything can change.Thereby, the sharp edge is taken off opposition to those drastic changes, opportunities for cooptation expanded, language molded so that the old words and phrases subtly acquire new meanings, so that … a new normal is impressed on minds …

Americans are particularly receptive at seeing this radicalism as the new normal because Americans value practical wisdom and willpower. They tell themselves to pragmatically adapt to the new situation, and to seek out common ground with this new radicalism … After all, there is good in everyone. Liberals especially believe such things, as they tend to be optimistic. The problem is that, “This philosophy guided Obama’s strategy of conciliation mingled with appeasement toward his implacable Republican opposition. The results were nil in terms of policy and disaster politically for the Democrats.” Furthermore, these traits impede efforts to counter the growing menace in our politics:

The unpalatable truth is that authoritarian movements and ideology with fascist overtones are back—in America and in Europe. Not just as a political expletive thrown at opponents, but as a doctrine, as a movement, and—above all—as a set of feelings. Against this historical backdrop, it should not be a complete surprise that due to the troubled state of the West, across Europe and now most pronounced in America, we should see recrudescence of the attitudes, the rhetoric and the inspirations that marked Fascism’s rise 80 or 90 years ago. Some ingredients are recognizable: racist hate; scapegoating of the alien “other;” mounting feelings of insecurity … ; frustrated feelings of lost prowess; the scorning of elected democratic leaders condemned at once as “weak” … and overbearing … Its intoxicating effects have given America over to the Tea Party and placed the Orangutan in the White House.

Brenner admits that our situation doesn’t exactly match previous versions of fascism. “Trump is not a mass murderer. He is, though, a mentally unbalanced racist with strong autocratic tendencies.” To better understand the similarities between Trump and previous forms of fascism, Brenner turns to the “extraordinary essay by Umberto Eco (recently deceased) who composed a concise disquisition that presents the distilled essence of Fascism.” We will discuss that essay in detail in tomorrow’s post.

Summary of Amanda Taub’s: “The Rise of American Authoritarianism”

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. … Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. ~ George Orwell 1984

Some of the most disturbing pieces I’ve read recently concern the trend toward a more authoritarian regime in the USA. Let’s begin with a definition:

In government, authoritarianism denotes any political system that concentrates power in the hands of a leader or a small elite that is not constitutionally responsible to the body of the people. Authoritarian leaders often exercise power arbitrarily and without regard to existing bodies of law …  Authoritarianism thus stands in fundamental contrast to democracy … ~ Encyclopedia Britannica

In short, authoritarianism describes a government with a large amount of control over the population, using coercive threats, suppression of a free press, as well as propaganda and disinformation to manage the people it rule. Totalitarianism is an extreme version of authoritarianism, and fascism brings ultra-nationalism to the mix; with a hint of racism. All fascist governments are authoritarian, but not all authoritarian governments are fascists.

One of the best pieces I’ve read on this topic is, “The Rise of American Authoritarianism” by Amanda Taub. Taub reports on the political science research of MacWilliams in: “The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter,” and Hetherington and Weiler’s book: Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics[image error]. This research converges on the idea that support for Donald Trump correlates almost perfectly with having an authoritarian personality. I’ll highlight a few of the salient ideas from each section of her thoughtful and thorough analysis.

I. What is American authoritarianism?

Some people are psychologically predisposed to extreme, authoritarian politics. Such “tendencies can be triggered … by the perception of physical threats or by destabilizing social change” leading those individuals to desire authoritarian leaders and policies who:

prioritize social order and hierarchies, which bring a sense of control to a chaotic world. Challenges to that order—diversity, influx of outsiders, breakdown of the old order—are experienced as personally threatening because they risk upending the status quo order they equate with basic security.

II. The discovery

The study of authoritarianism began after World War II as researchers tried to understand the Nazi phenomenon. Almost 50 years later researchers found that “authoritarianism [was] a personality profile rather than just a political preference …” Moreover, such profiles could be detected by a series of questions about hierarchy, order, conformity, and the desire to impose certain values. Since then large surveys “of American voters conducted in each national election year” has provided “political scientists who study authoritarianism have accumulated a wealth of data on who exhibits those tendencies and on how they align with everything from demographic profiles to policy preferences.”

III. How authoritarianism works

The first insight is that since the 1960s, “the Republican Party had reinvented itself as the party of law, order, and traditional values—a position that naturally appealed to order and tradition-focused authoritarians.” Since then “authoritarians increasingly gravitated toward the GOP” and gained influence there. The second insight is research that shows that these authoritarians tendencies can be triggered under the right circumstances, especially under conditions of rapid social change when people feel threatened. The third insight is that “when non-authoritarians feel sufficiently scared, they also start to behave, politically, like authoritarians.”

Together, those three insights added up to one terrifying theory: that if social change and physical threats coincided at the same time, it could awaken a potentially enormous population of American authoritarians, who would demand a strongman leader and the extreme policies necessary, in their view, to meet the rising threats.

This theory seems “to predict the rise of an American political constituency that looks an awful lot like” those who support Donald Trump.

IV. What can authoritarianism explain?

It is relatively easy to demonstrate “a link between authoritarianism and support for Trump.” But the theory also predicts that “people who scored highly on authoritarianism … express outsize fear of “outsider” threats such as ISIS or foreign governments versus other threats … [and] that non-authoritarians who expressed high levels of fear would be more likely to support Trump.” And the theory predicts that “If the theory about social change provoking stress amongst authoritarians turned out to be correct, then authoritarians would be more likely to rate the changes as bad for the country.” Was any of this true?

V. The party

The data supports the claim that Republican voters are disproportionately authoritarians, while the Democratic voters are not. (For example, the former voters generally favor corporeal punishment of children, while the latter do not.) This phenomenon can be traced:

to the 1960s, when the Republican Party shifted electoral strategies to try to win disaffected Southern Democrats, in part by speaking to fears of changing social norms—for example, the racial hierarchies upset by civil rights. The GOP also embraced a “law and order” platform with a heavily racial appeal to white voters …

This positioned the GOP as the party of traditional values and social structures … That promise[s] to stave off social change and, if necessary, to impose order happened to speak powerfully to voters with authoritarian inclinations.

Democrats, by contrast, have positioned themselves as the party of civil rights, equality, and social progress — in other words, as the party of social change, a position that not only fails to attract but actively repels change-averse authoritarians.

This has brought about a sorting of authoritarian types in the GOP, and the inability of GOP traditionalists “to ignore authoritarians’ voting preferences …”

VI. Trump, authoritarians, and fear

Authoritarianism was the best single predictor of support for Trump, although having a high school education also came close … the relationship between authoritarianism and Trump support remained robust, even after controlling for education level and gender.

As for non-authoritarian voters, irrational fear of physical threats from abroad best predict their susceptibility to authoritarian leaders and policies. In short, “non-authoritarians who are sufficiently frightened of physical threats such as terrorism could essentially be scared into acting like authoritarians.” Given how much “Republican politicians and Republican-leaning media such as Fox News have been telling viewers nonstop that the world is a terrifying place,” it isn’t surprising that so many people are swayed by these sophisticated media manipulation.

VII. America’s changing social landscape

In addition to physical threats, social change threatens authoritarians. Changes in traditional gender roles, new ideas about sexual orientation, religious diversity, and immigration all scare authoritarian types because they upend tradition. In response, authoritarians seek leaders and policies that “preserve the status quo.” And research confirms that authoritarians are, by wide margins, more troubled by social change like gay marriage than non-authoritarians. Thus “something as seemingly personal and non-threatening as same-sex marriage” triggers authoritarianism proclivities.

The point … is that the increasingly important political phenomenon we identify as right-wing populism, or white working-class populism, seems to line up, with almost astonishing precision, with the research on how authoritarianism is both caused and expressed …

… it helps explain how Trump’s supporters have come to so quickly embrace such extreme policies targeting these outgroups: mass deportation of millions of people, a ban on foreign Muslims visiting the US. When you think about those policy preferences as driven by authoritarianism, in which social threats are perceived as especially dangerous and as demanding extreme responses, rather than the sudden emergence of specific bigotries, this starts to make a lot more sense.

VIII. What authoritarians want

Authoritarians, especially Trump voters, were highly likely to support policies such as: 1) using military force over diplomacy; 2) bar citizenship for children of illegal immigrants; 3) eliminate immigration of people of Middle Eastern descent; 4) require all citizens to carry a national ID card; and 5) allow the federal government to scan all phone calls.

People who feel threatened (regardless that they should really worry about obesity, auto accidents, air pollution, antibiotic resistant infections, or other more real threats) want action in response to their perceived threats. They want the government to protect them from Mexicans, Syrians, Muslims, gays, atheists, etc.

This helps explain why the GOP has had such a hard time co-opting Trump’s supporters, even though those supporters’ immediate policy concerns, such as limiting immigration or protecting national security, line up with party orthodoxy. The real divide is over how far to go in responding. And the party establishment is simply unwilling to call for such explicitly authoritarian policies.

Moreover, authoritarianism doesn’t correlate with support for tax cuts on the wealthy or certain views about international trade. On these issues there was no difference between authoritarians and non-authoritarians. But one factor that this data doesn’t capture is Trump’s:

… rhetoric and style. The way he reduces everything to black-and-white extremes of strong versus weak, greatest versus worst. His simple, direct promises that he can solve problems that other politicians are too weak to manage

…  [and] his willingness to flout all the conventions of civilized discourse when it comes to the minority groups that authoritarians find so threatening … He is sending a signal to his authoritarian supporters that he won’t let “political correctness” hold him back from attacking the outgroups they fear.

This is “classic authoritarian leadership style: simple, powerful, and punitive.”

IX. How authoritarians will change American politics

Taub thinks “We may now have a de facto three-party system: the Democrats, the GOP establishment, and the GOP authoritarians.” Yet she predicts:

the forces activating American authoritarians seem likely to only grow stronger. Norms around gender, sexuality, and race will continue evolving. Movements like Black Lives Matter will continue chipping away at the country’s legacy of institutionalized discrimination, pursuing the kind of social change and reordering of society that authoritarians find so threatening.

The chaos in the Middle East, which allows groups like ISIS to flourish and sends millions of refugees spilling into other countries, shows no sign of improving. Longer term, if current demographic trends continue, white Americans will cease to be a majority over the coming decades.

This portends a “GOP that is even more hard-line on immigration and on policing, that is more outspoken about fearing Muslims and other minority groups …” But she believes (or is it hopes?) that the Republican Party’s promise “… to stand firm against the tide of social change, and to be the party of force and power rather than the party of negotiation and compromise” will ultimately destroy itself.

I hope she is right. Authoritarianism is the enemy of freedom.

(Taub discussed similar themes in her New York Times piece: “How Stable Are Democracies? ‘Warning Signs Are Flashing Red.’” I highly recommend her work.)

Amanda Taub’s: “The Rise of American Authoritarianism”

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. … Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. ~ George Orwell 1984

Some of the most disturbing pieces I’ve read recently concern the trend toward a more authoritarian regime in the USA. Let’s begin with a definition:

In government, authoritarianism denotes any political system that concentrates power in the hands of a leader or a small elite that is not constitutionally responsible to the body of the people. Authoritarian leaders often exercise power arbitrarily and without regard to existing bodies of law …  Authoritarianism thus stands in fundamental contrast to democracy … ~ Encyclopedia Britannica

In short, authoritarianism describes a government with a large amount of control over the population, using coercive threats, suppression of a free press, as well as propaganda and disinformation to manage the people it rule.

One of the best pieces I’ve read on this topic was, “The Rise of American Authoritarianism” by Amanda Taub. Taub reports on the political science research of MacWilliams in: “The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter,” and Hetherington and Weiler’s book: Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics[image error]. This research converges on the idea that support for Donald Trump correlates almost perfectly with having an authoritarian personality. She expands on this basic theme and explains all of the following:

I. What is American authoritarianism?

II. The discovery

III. How authoritarianism works

IV. What can authoritarianism explain?

V. The party of authoritarians

VI. Trump, authoritarians, and fear

VII. America’s changing social landscape

VIII. What authoritarians want

IX. How authoritarians will change American politics



Taub discussed similar themes in her New York Times piece: “How Stable Are Democracies? ‘Warning Signs Are Flashing Red.’” I highly recommend reading Ms. Taub’s work.

Eliezer Yudkowsky on Politics – Part 2

Our two previous posts showed how prospect theory in behavioral economics explains why so many gambled on Trump, and why the artificial intelligence and decision theory expert Eliezer Yudkowsky thinks that this was a mistake. In a post written the day before the election, Yudkowsky expanded on both themes. Yudkowsky provides a simple explanation of  how many of the gamblers reasoned:

Life (in Alabama, let’s say) used to be good.Then it got worse. So something is going wrong. Something must be making life in Alabama worse than it used to be a couple of decades earlier. Some malevolent force is pushing life in Alabama away from its natural default state of goodness.

Then it would be wise to do something, anything, differently. Like whacking your malfunctioning microwave with your hand, in hopes that you shake loose whatever component is in a rare state of malfunctioning, and the microwave goes back to its default state of working correctly.

On this perspective, most possibilities … are pretty good … So if life instead seems bad, there must be some unusual factor that’s forcing things to go poorly … In which case there’s a lot to be said for overturning the table and doing *anything* except more of what you’re currently doing … The most important thing you need in a President is that they not be part of the same malevolent structure that has repeatedly punched you in the nose.

Then there’s the other perspective:

Most countries in the world aren’t as nice as the United States is right now. Venezuela used to be an up-and-coming country with one of the fastest-growing economies in South America. And then they elected an impulsive populist leader who made a few decisions he probably didn’t think were that bad at the time, and now Venezuela is on the verge of being a failed state.

The good things are fragile. It takes hard work to preserve them, and even people who try to do that sometimes fail … The United States is currently enjoying an unusual position of dominance in world affairs; the US wasn’t the center of the world one century earlier … History shows the kind of global prominence the US currently has, can fade very very quickly if a country makes a few wrong moves.

Even “relative” prosperity can fade very very quickly, if you do something that sounds like a virtuous idea but doesn’t stir economists to enthusiasm. Most ways of reaching into your microwave that’s been seeming a bit elderly, and randomly switching up the circuits a bit, will very very rapidly cause your microwave to work worse. A lot worse.

 

The point is that the modern world is a very dangerous place. Forget to tell allies you’ll defend them and wars start. Mistakenly tell Saddam Hussein you don’t care about Kuwait and he will  believe you and invade there. As Yudkowsky puts it: “Being President means standing on a shaky platform over a pit of radioactive lava, on which platform also happens to rest the United States and often the rest of the world.”

If your choice is between two qualified candidates then by all means choose the one you think is better for you—assuming both candidates understand serious politics! But if one of them doesn’t then it is madness to choose the madman. In other words your current situation in the USA may not be great, but it is probably better than the catastrophically bad outcomes that might result from putting people in important positions who don’t understand the seriousness of politics.

Pumping up the entropy doesn’t shatter a fragile malevolent thingy and let us go back to the normal good days. It obliterates the careful moves that barely manage to achieve the meh results you see around you, and dumps us into the boiling lava underneath. That’s what happened to Venezuela …

In short, things can get much worse very quickly.

And that’s really and actually true, despite your sense that things like that aren’t *allowed* to happen, they can’t *really* happen, not *here*. Not to *you*. Not in *real life* as opposed to the 1930s. That’s all only in history class, which is part of the same fictional continuum that includes movies and television.

You can read endless phrasings of those very words, from people in various countries that went downhill, about how they thought it couldn’t happen to them. “That couldn’t *really* happen here, could it?” is a common refrain, historically speaking, from just before very bad things happen to countries …

Of course some smart people still don’t think Trump and the Republicans could do that much damage and again, maybe it will turn out ok. But don’t expect that existing political structures will restrain him. Sure Obama had limited power, but he played by the rules.

The lesson of history is that populist strongmen … yes, populist strongmen can happen here, they can happen anywhere, it happens all the time, not to aliens but to populations of human beings pretty much exactly like the population of human beings surrounding you …

… Lesson one of history: Populist strongmen *fire* the senior bureaucrats who don’t obey them and replace them with loyalists. And that works. The strongman does successfully consolidate power and he is obeyed henceforth, even by people who theoretically shouldn’t obey him, even when it is theoretically against the law.

Lesson two, you’d be *amazed* at how fast senior bureaucrats capitulate to populist strongmen. I was amazed at how fast the existing Republican party structure rolled over for someone who’d cheerfully slit their throats, back when Trump was running for President with, God help them, the support of the Republican leadership. But … the history books repeat over and over … the story of the surprisingly fast capitulation of government bureaucrats and key social figures to the strongman …

Still many people, especially white males, don’t think it can get that bad. (Non-whites and non-males better understand how bad it can get.) Surely somebody will stop it. Some military officers will stop the use of nuclear weapons. But even if they did, Trump could simply order another to carry out his orders. Somebody will stop Trump from getting the nomination, but they didn’t. Here’s the lessons Yudkowsky takes from Trump not being stopped thus far:

1) Goodness is fragile; 2) What you have can be taken away. Surprisingly quickly, if not quite overnight; 3)The nebulous people and forces that are supposed to stop bad things from happening, won’t. It *can* happen here.

 

And, perhaps most importantly, Yudkowsky compares the situation to what he knows best, artificial intelligence:

AIs with random utility functions will not turn out pretty much all right. Even AIs that somebody tried to make go right, but screwed up in any of a dozen ways, will not turn out pretty much all right …

Your sense that this current world is true and enduring and steady, that it has existed forever in the past and will always exist in the future, that modern humans have existed forever and will always exist and that developments like Artificial General Intelligence are part of the continuum of movies and fairytales, is only slightly less blind than thinking that the 1940s were too far in the past to be real.

There’s no nebulous group of competent, well-intended AI scientists who will make sure that everything goes reassuringly well … things are allowed to not turn out all-right. … It can enter into your immediate reality instead of being safely on television or in history books or somebody else’s Facebook wall.

Yudkowsky concludes with some of the most chilling words I’ve ever read:

You could wake up on November 9th, 2016 to find that the United States as you knew it has ended. And even if that doesn’t happen tomorrow, there’s the more eloquent candidate and November 9th 2020, now that the groundwork has been laid.

It’s *allowed*. Learn from that now, before Wednesday, while you can still ponder that awful uncertainty. No nebulous surely-someone prevented Donald Trump from gaining the Republican nomination, no nebulous surely-someone stopped half the country from voting for him, and if November 8th goes poorly, no nebulous surely-someone will prevent all the other things that Donald Trump goes on to do.

And none of that will matter, on some later day when you don’t wake up at all. Because there were no nebulous forces that swooped in and saved the day. Because the reassuringly powerful and competent and benevolent people who are supposed to make sure that things aren’t allowed to get that bad, do not actually exist. This world of ours isn’t so strong, just like the United States proved weaker than you expected. What you see is all there is–maybe a little less.

My deepest appreciation to Mr. Yudkowsky for his contribution in service to saving humanity.

Eliezer Yudkowsky on Politics – Part 1

In our previous post we examined how prospect theory helps explain why so many American voters were willing to risk voting for such a manifestly unqualified candidate for President as Donald Trump. Of course what citizens who are willing to take these risks fail to understand, as the artificial intelligence and decision theory expert Eliezer Yudkowsky writes on his Facebook page, is “how there’s a level of politics that’s theater and a level of politics that’s deadly serious.” For example, it’s deadly serious when a President talks about scrapping the NATO alliance or using nuclear weapons. In such cases you would hope that competent and conscientious people exercise power in the international relations realm.

Unfortunately some people don’t seem to understand the difference between entertainment and reality. Yudkowsky offers the example of those who believe the moon landing was faked. From an educated perspective this belief is self-evident nonsense, and I understand that TV shows that promulgates such nonsense are entertainment. But some people don’t know this; they don’t know there’s real science that allowed us to go to the moon, a serious level underneath the entertainment level. (There the entertainment level of having some ignorant evolution denier debating someone on TV, and the serious level where biological evolution underlies all of modern biology.) But often the scientifically illiterate only know the world that comes to them from their entertainment bubble.

Similarly, many people can’t differentiate political theater, Level A, with the deadly serious part, Level B. Perhaps they think that Level A is all that exists and there is no deadly serious politics, no Level B. They are mistaken.

But the Level B in Washington DC, the issues that people take seriously unlike insider trading, is also not just sociopaths reacting to disasters that are *so* bad that their own personal hometown might get a nuclear missile. The Level B does contain more stuff than that … it *is* the level where you worry about things like the stability of the Europe-Russia border, not because a journalist is going to clutch their pearls in offense because you don’t seem concerned enough, but because you actually care about the stability of the Europe-Russia border. Yes, there are people in Washington DC like that.

So there is a deadly serious level of politics that demands equanimity. In this context Yudkowsky notes: “Perhaps there are dozens of other cases where a country elected an impulsive, chaotic, populist leader and nothing whatsoever went wrong.” But in such situations something could go terribly wrong. Yudkowsky recalls playing a National Security Decision-Making Game with about 80 participants and finding out how much strategizing it takes to avoid oblivion.

By the end of NSDM, I left with a suddenly increased respect for any administration that gets to the end of 4 years without nuclear weapons being used … I left with a greatly increased appreciation of the real skill and competence possessed by the high-level bureaucrats … who keep everything from toppling over …

I think that a lot of the real function of government is to keep things from toppling over like they did in our NSDM session, and that this depends on the functionaries including the President staying inside certain bounds of behavior––people who understand how the game is supposed to be played. It’s not always a good game and you may be tempted to call for blowing it up rather than letting it continue as usual. Avoid this temptation. Randomly blowing it up will NOT end well. It CAN be so, so much worse than it already is.

The system isn’t as stable as it might look when you’re just strolling along your non-melted streets year after year, without any missiles ever falling on your own hometown. I don’t even know how much work it really takes to prevent everything from falling over.

Pursuant to the above, Yudkowsky argues how dangerous it is to have a President like Trump. It is bad to be ambiguous about who will defend who for example. Both world wars in the 20th century began because of such ambiguities. And it is deadly dangerous to wonder why we shouldn’t use nuclear weapons. This leads Yudkowsky to muse about the relative importance of otherwise important issues:

Like it or not, there is in Washington DC a perceived difference between ‘committed sexual assault’ and ‘violated the system guardrails that prevent World War III’ … Maybe you wish that Washington DC culture would take sexual assault more seriously, as something deadly serious in its own right … instead of some people laughing it off, some people being frankly offended, and everyone in Washington DC tacitly understanding that this is not one of the issues that everyone has agreed to take deadly seriously even when no journalists are looking.

Maybe you look at that, and conclude that this ‘deadly serious level of politics’ thingy does not respect your own values and priorities. Maybe you conclude that the kind of political issues people are fighting over theatrically in the newspapers are, yes, every bit as vital to you as that so-called ‘deadly serious’ stuff even if a lot of other people are treating them as entertainment.

I think you’re making a dreadful mistake. Scope is real. If you ever have to choose between voting a convicted serial abuser of children into the Presidential office—but this person otherwise seems stable and collected—versus a Presidential candidate who seems easy to provoke and who has ‘bad days’ and doesn’t listen to advisors and once said “Why do we have all these nukes if we can’t use them?“, it is deadly important that you vote for the pedophile. It isn’t physically possible to abuse enough children per day over 4 years to do as much damage as you can do with one wrong move in the National Security Decision-Making Game.

An evil but sane NSDM player is far, far less dangerous than an impulsive one who doesn’t care all that much about what the rules of NSDM are supposed to be.

I suppose you can now see why Trump worries a deep thinker like Yudkowsky. As for me, I basically agree with everything Yudkowsky says here. We should remember that survival is a prerequisite for the existence of any beauty, joy, truth, or goodness in our fragile existence. Civilization bestows so many benefits compared to the state of nature most of us have long since forgotten. Civilization itself is fragile; it can end at any moment. The politics of Level B is deadly serious and our very survival depends on serious, knowledgeable people occupying positions of extreme power.

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(I don’t know Mr. Yudkowsky but I taught his “Creating Friendly AI” to computer science students at the University of Texas at Austin.) I thank him sincerely for his various intellectual contributions.)

Prospect Theory & The Election

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. ~ H.L. Mencken

As a follow-up to my recent post, “Education and the Election,” another thing that struck me about the voting was how prospect theory in behavioral economics explains why many gambled on Trump.

Prospect theory helps explain why voters reject safe options—say remain in the EU or elect a well-qualified Democrat candidate—in favor of riskier ones. Here’s the idea. If I offer you a choice between accepting a $50 bill, or flipping a coin and giving you either $100 or nothing, most people take the $50. They accept the sure thing. But when people are already down $50, and have the choice of either doubling to get even or lose $100, most will accept the risk. When people are losing, or believe they are, they are less risk averse.

Now it’s pretty straightforward how this applies to a choice like Clinton-Trump or Brexit-NoBrexit. In fact, the behavioral economists Quattrone and Tversky showed how prospect theory rather than rational choice theory generally explains voting. Again, if people believe they are doing poorly, and/or that others are doing better than they are, then they favor riskier candidates. As explained by Christophe Heintz:

Many of the explanations for the Brexit and Trump votes … emphasized how frustrated citizens were with their economic situation, and the effect of fear mongering discourses and appeal to lost grandeur … The political discourses of the Trump and Brexit advocates have framed the stakes in terms of losses rather than gains. The slogans “Make America great again” and “Take back control” clearly refer to the lost grandeur of the past. This sets the reference point as a lost state that was much better than the current one. Also, fear mongering is by definition talking about the frightening (negative) state in which we find ourselves. All this motivates citizens to favor risky options: the gains, even if they are unlikely, are so strongly desired that they induce discounting the very likely losses.

In conclusion, I lament: just another cognitive bug in Pleistocene brains that is unmoved by reason or evidence.

More Devastation About Trump

My recent post, “Devastated By The American Presidential Election,” evoked the expression of similar sentiments from friends and readers. Some particularly insightful comments on the topic were shared by my friend Chris Crawford. Chris, who runs the website Erasmatazz, is a highly successful computer game designer, polymath, seer, and overall smart guy—he has a master’s degree in physics and that’s a hard degree to earn! I highly encourage you to visit his site for great material about computer game design and politics, and for moving personal blog posts. (The blog is named after Erasmus (1466 – 1536), the Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, social critic, teacher, and theologian. That any non-philosophy major would know of him is itself impressive.)

Here is his correspondence in full:

I too have been struggling with my reaction to the election. My wife’s reaction was the same as mine, with the volume turned way up. She is furious; she is terrified; her attitude is now “America can go to hell!”

So what exactly is it that is so devastating about this election? I see it terms of four factors. In order of increasing importance, they are:

First, the defeat of Ms. Clinton. We were so excited that, at long last, we’d have a woman President. And not just that: probably the best-prepared candidate in a long time. This woman has magnificent credentials for running the country. She would certainly have been one of our finest Presidents.

Second, the idiocy of some in the left for turning their backs on her because she wasn’t liberal enough. Couldn’t those idiots see that she was the only person standing between Mr. Trump and the White House? How could they be so STUPID?!?!

Third is the election of Mr. Trump. If Ms. Clinton had been beaten by, say, Marco Rubio, I would have been intensely disappointed, but I would not have been devastated. The American system could survive another George Bush II, perhaps with an acceptable loss in blood, treasure, and prestige. But Mr. Trump will be a catastrophically bad President. I don’t need to articulate his disastrous lack of knowledge, intelligence, or temperament — we all know that. His Presidency will cement the downward spiral of America, ending all hope of the country maintaining to its position as leader of the free world.

But the fourth, and truly devastating factor for me is what this election reveals about the American voter. I now realize that a controlling portion of the citizenry is racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-rational, intolerant, shamefully naive, gullible, bereft of ethical standards, nationalistic, and antagonistic towards the ideals that have constituted the very soul of the American experiment. The nation that even an globalist like me admired for its ideals has been thrown aside by a wave of ugly, vicious fascists. I recall in my youth reading a pundit who observed that when fascism came to America, it wouldn’t be with swastikas, Brownshirts, and goose-stepping soldiers; it would wrap itself in the flag, mother, and apple pie — which is precisely what has happened. Perhaps we have begun a downward spiral to fascism.

The good news is that I really don’t think we’ll end up with a fascist state. Yes, the people who voted for Trump want that, but remember, they are still a minority; more Americans voted for Ms. Clinton than for Mr. Trump. My expectation is that two personas of America are no longer compatible. The ignorant rubes who hate gays, Mexicans, Muslims, and intellectuals, and who think that a woman’s place is barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen will never go away, but the Americans who still believe in tolerance and justice for all remain a powerful force. The two sides are now too far apart to be able to find any middle ground for compromise. The conflict between them will only grow more intense with the years, until ultimately the hotheads on both sides start the violence, at which point a divorce between the two sides will be the only option. I hope that Americans find the decency to carry out that divorce with a minimum of violence, but I fear that the fascists among up will not readily give up their power over the economically more productive half of the nation. The dissolution of the USA is now inevitable. That is what terrifies me.

I thank the time Chris took to craft these thoughts. Again his is a voice worth listening to. A man with a nimble and analytical mind, unlike so many of the ignorant pundits who occupy the airwaves.