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Posts Tagged ‘Donald Trump’

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Dumbocracy – Face it, America, we suck at this.

In Politics on November 8, 2024 at 8:52 am

As I write this, it is just three days since the 2024 Presidential election, and the pundits and talking heads and “election experts” are going at it hammer and tongs to explain how an orange-faced, seventy-eight-year-old, unhealthy, increasingly demented, ignorant, hate-spewing, fascist, male felon managed to win election over a highly qualified, highly intelligent, demonstrably competent, healthy, sixty-year-old woman.

I suspect that, as you read that last sentence, you have already begun to form your own opinions about the reasons.  And the reasons you will come up with are probably the same as the ones being proposed by the swarm of analysists now converging on the subject.  I haven’t even read or listened to any of it, but the headlines are to ubiquitous not to be seen, and I already know what they are saying.  It was her sex, her racial and ethnic heritage; it was the economy; it was Gaza; it was her choice of running mate; and on and on ad infinitum.  

The way I see it, however, is that while all of those things may have had some influence, none of them, nor all of them together are the real reason Donald Trump won the election.  They are the symptoms, not the problem?

So, what, you may ask, is the real problem, then, oh great and all-knowing person sitting in my living room and offering no qualifications whatsoever on which to base my opinions.

Thank you for asking.

The problem is that, for some time now Americans have sucked at democracy.  We do it badly.  We do it stupidly. We do it in ways that fling us out and reel us in between right and left like some bizarre existential yoyo trick.

Allow me to explain.  Or don’t.  I’m going to, anyway.

—  First, as a general rule, Americans pay remarkably little actual attention to our democracy.  (I know, we’re not “really” a democracy, we’re a democratic republic, a constitutional republic, a representative constitutional democratic republic.  Whatever.  It’s irrelevant what you want to call it.)  Most of us ignore it.  We go about our daily business until we are called upon every two or four years to vote for the people who will do the actual business of governing – or not.  And we congratulate ourselves for our neglect.  “I don’t like politics.” We announce proudly, justifying our dislike and inaction by claiming that all politicians are the same, both major parties are the same, it doesn’t make any difference, it doesn’t affect me.  None of which is actually true.  The majority of people in politics and government are good, hard-working people doing a difficult, frustrating job through the best of times and the worst.  (The Tale of Two Cities reference was deliberate, in case you missed it, or were wondering.  I’ll get back to it later.) 

— When we do pay attention, every two or four years at election time, we let ourselves think that voting is all that’s required of us.  And we complain about having to do it at all.  We let all kinds of things keep us from it.  We put our elections on a day when people have to work, but don’t insist that voting day be a national holiday.  (Note that the root meaning of “holiday” is “ holy day.”  If we’re going to treat anything as sacred, shouldn’t a day of direct involvement in our of/by/for the people democracy be a good choice?)  We ty to solve that by allowing things like mail-in voting, on-line voting, and early voting; then we accuse those of being fraudulent, we say they shouldn’t count, we make them as inconvenient and difficult as regular voting.  And we complain about how the news is suddenly all politics, politics, politics, and can’t we talk about something else for a change?

— When it comes to politics and the actual state of our democracy, we decided a long time ago that ignorance is, in fact, bliss.  No ifs about it.  And we want our democracy to be blissful.  We want someone else to take care of it.  You know, the politicians.  Those corrupt, self-serving, probably criminal people we keep electing to take care of it.  So, we don’t have to worry.  And we help ourselves in our blissful ignorance by latching onto sound-bite reasoning gleaned from simplistic infotainment news and, more recently, social networks.  It’s the economy, stupid.  We know that because we were told it fifty years or so ago; and we know it’s true because we remember that a loaf of bread cost, like, fifty cents when we were kids.  And clearly, the President is charge of all that, right?  The President can do stuff, right?  We don’t know what, because we really don’t know how it all works, but that’s the President’s job.  Right?  Any problem we have, small or large, anything that threatens to interfere with that bliss we believe is our right in a democracy is something the President should be fixing.  I won’t go into all the many issues of things like health care, individual rights, and so on, but pick any issue and we’d rather be ignorant than uncomfortable.  Quick democracy hack – if a Presidential or any other political candidate mentions a problem and says they’ll absolutely fix it, they’re lying.  What they will actually do is take some sort of action.  Won’t be a solution, because solutions are difficult and not blissful, but an action.  We like actions.  The more simplistic and immediate, the better.  Especially if we don’t have to do anything in particular, ourselves.

— When we do have to actually know about a problem, we go straight to the most important question: who do we need to blame?  Second question: who else can we pick to solve the problem, or take action, whatever?  To put it another way, who can we pick to blame for the problem next time, once we’ve gotten rid of the people we blamed this time.  Not all our blame is for politicians or government, of course.  We have lots of usual suspects.  The Others.  People whose color, or religion, or traditions, or culture, or choices about the way they live their lives are always available for blame.  Tell us how we aren’t the problem, tell us that we are the real Americans, tell us that God, but not Allah, has chosen us specially, and we will pick you to fix the problems.  This time.

— Oh, and by the way, since we don’t really want to know about the real issues, give us lots of non-issues to help us keep our ignorant bliss.  Facts are so boring.  Especially facts about thins like how the economy really works, or how government really works, or how biology really works, or how, really, anything important really works.  We welcome any random squirrel that comes along to take our attention away from all of that boring knowing about important things.  And random distractions allow us to become excited or enraged without having to actually know stuff.  We listen to all the noise around us (and the noise is, itself, part of the problem), so we know that the really important issues are whether a candidate can prove that she did a short-term, minimum wage job fifty years ago, or whether a candidate’s time vacationing and leading student groups in China was during or after Tiananmen Square. (When was that, exactly, anyway?  I think I remember hearing about that at the time, or I was supposed to read about it in history class, or something.  It was a bad thing, right? Those evil Communists did it, right?)  Oh, and we need to wonder if the guy who went there might be a secret communist agent, like, you know, in that movie, the one with, who was it?  Doesn’t matter.  Could be true, though, right?

All right.  I could go on, and I sincerely appreciate those of you who have paid attention, or at least stayed around this long.  So, let me finish with one last, I don’t know, recommendation, piece of advice?

We all need to do better.  We need to pay attention more closely, more of the time.  We need to be involved in and knowing about our democracy and our reality.  And we need to do it all the time, not just during elections.  We need to insist that our sources of information tell us the truth, based on relevant and compelling facts and rational thinking.  We need to shut out the noise and focus.  We need to have uncomfortable, but necessary conversations about our democracy, about our history, about our humanity. 

These things may become increasingly difficult over the next four years, but they will be necessary if this democracy we are so exasperatingly bad at is to survive.  And we need to start doing this right away, because we will have an opportunity in just two years for a course correction.  Presidential power is still limited by our tri-partite government.  The party now in power has shown us how difficult it is for a President to do whatever a President might want to do, when one or both houses of Congress are controlled by the other political party.

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PRESIDENTIAL LIMBO: How low can he go?

In Politics on June 30, 2017 at 8:59 am

“Limbo” has two common meanings. One is a game in which people try to wriggle under a bar that is gradually lowered until even the best players can no longer go any lower. The last player to get under is the winner. The other is a state of existence between Heaven and Hell where lost souls get to contemplate their sins in the hope of salvation and the fear of eternal damnation.
Both meanings apply to the current President and his government.
It seems as though every time the President sends out another tweet, issues a new proclamation, makes a public speech, engages with a foreign government, or agrees to an interview there are subsequent cries that he has reached a new low, that the bar is already subterranean and still he surpasses himself.
This is the game of Presidential limbo, and it would seem that President Trump has no rivals.
But remember the second half of the meaning. The one who goes lowest wins. This is the current state and direction of politics (and much of the rest of life) in the United States of America. The one who goes lowest wins. The President’s race to below the bottom is not the cause of this phenomenon, but he is its current chief beneficiary. The lower he goes, the more his supporters see him as winning. And this applies to Congress as well. The harder the people’s representatives work to benefit the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the poor, the disadvantaged, the powerless and the needy; the more they use dirty tricks, draconian laws, gerrymandering, denial of demonstrable reality, and legal gymnastics in their quest to establish, in the words of Karl Rove, a permanent majority; and the more they proclaim moral certainties they are already violating; the more they win.
One result is that we have become a nation in limbo, applying the second meaning. We are spending precious time focusing our collective energies following the President’s ever more remarkable contortions as he wriggles his way lower, and not paying enough attention to the real damage being done. We are having to contemplate our collective sins and decide whether we will follow him down or strive to raise the bar again. We are lost souls, torn by a lack of agreement as to which way is Heaven and which Hell. There may be some consensus forming, the President’s approval ratings are at or approaching historic lows as he does, but there are still formidable forces working to drive us lower and far too many citizens who either are willing to go to hell, or don’t believe that’s where we’re headed.
We have, of course, been living in fear for a long time. Making us afraid makes us controllable. The people who tell us we should be afraid also tell us that only they can save us from the fear they are creating.
Uncertainty is a necessary element of our system of government. The greatest enemy of democracy is complacency. The moment we think we have won is the moment we stop paying attention to those who are already planning to beat us the next time. We cannot and should not ever assume that what we have achieved will always be. And some of what has been achieved needs to be undone. Rigid, moralistic, self-satisfied certainty is the second enemy of democracy.
So, here we are; playing limbo in limbo. Trying to see how low it can go risks getting our heads stuck in the sand. It is time to stop playing the game. It is time to set our sights higher and move upward out of this limbo. Good and evil aren’t places, they’re directions; and the farther you go in either direction, the harder it is to turn around and the longer the journey back. And while it is tempting, when one is rolling downhill to just let go and keep rolling, because the climb back up gets ever more daunting; turning around and making the climb is what we need to do.

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The Nonlinear Narrative: A Rhetoric of Donald Trump’s Mind

In Politics on February 21, 2017 at 10:28 am

 

Here’s what you need to realize about Donald Trump’s speaking style; and why it is both revealing and dangerous.

All of us experience reality in a non-linear way.

Each new thought, each new response to the constant barrage of stimuli is disconnected from the last thought or response until we make the connection intellectually.  Because the universe is not selective, we have to be.  We cannot respond equally to every new stimulus because there is simply too much information coming into contact with our senses all the time.  So we filter out some information, paying attention to whatever our brain in the moment considers most important.  Every stimulus except the one we have chosen to focus on is noise. 

What happens next is that we make a higher level selection that allows us to string certain stimuli together into a coherent, linear experience.  In effect, we create a story that allows us to understand and create meaning out of the experience.  The longer we can continue to string together stimuli in this way, the more coherent our experience becomes and the better able we are to articulate that experience.  Often, however, the rapid pace of life keeps us from focusing very long on any one string, any one story, while we are having the experience.  As a result, we have to create the narrative of our experience through memory at a later time.  We sort through all the stimuli, select those that seem connected, create meaning, and develop a linear narrative that expresses that meaning.  When we can’t do that, or choose not to, the result is stream of consciousness, non-sequitur, incoherence and inarticulateness.

That’s where Donald Trump lives.  He is unable or unwilling to string his thoughts together in a selective, coherent, linear narrative in order to articulate a specific complex meaning.  It would be one thing if this were simply a fault in the moment; that is, if his initial thought process was chaotic and disorganized.  That’s simply the way it is for most of us.  We need to focus, perhaps take some time with our experiences and thoughts, and find the most reasonable narrative to help us understand and express our experiences.  The problem, however, arises when we can’t make those connections in the moment and can’t or won’t do it later, either.  The mind just leaps from thought to thought, unable to maintain a linear narrative for more than a few moments. There is one advantage to this rhetorical style: it allows us to see how Trump’s mind works.

It’s easy to interpret his ravings as simply ego, but it is actually a little more complicated than that.  Everyone has ego needs.  We all want a degree of validation of our self-identity, and ego gratification.  But we also have more and less dominant needs that inform that validation.  Some of us focus a significant amount of our ego on altruism; we get ego satisfaction from doing things for others.  Some focus on intellectual validation; we want others to see that we know things, are learned.  Some of us focus on material things; we are constantly telling people about our possessions. 

Trump seems to focus mostly on his social needs; he is constantly referencing what other people have told him, especially about himself.  He wants us to know how many people voted for him, how many of these people or those love him.  He wants us to know that when he claims something is true, it’s because other people, the best people, smart people, have told him they are true.  And it doesn’t really matter who, exactly, these people are, there just has to be a lot of them.

Trump references everything back to himself, of course, but it isn’t simply self-importance.  He simply has no other useful reference points for his experiences, so when he drifts off topic to talk about himself, he is making the only logical connection he can find between his otherwise random thoughts.  Instead of arranging things according to the usual linear logic, Trump creates something more like a thought web, with himself at the center and all things connected through himself.  When you listen to him speak, you can follow what is happening by looking for the rhetorical linkages back to himself.

This rhetorical style is tolerable, though certainly frustrating, in your quirky relative who thinks himself a raconteur, but actually just rambles interminably without ever finishing any particular story.  In the President, however, it is dangerous.

That’s because it means that those who recognize this rhetorical trait can use it to manipulate and control him. If you want him to believe something or act in particular way, you merely need to give him a narrative that connects the parts of the argument you want him to follow back through his self-reference.  The argument doesn’t have to make any kind of logical sense whatsoever on its own.  It only needs to make sense in the filter of that self-reference. 

It also means that you are most likely to be successful if you can make your voice the last one he hears before he has to make his decision.  Because he doesn’t develop a coherent narrative, he has no way of reviewing that narrative later to understand or even accurately remember his own process.  He only knows what his final decision was; and since it was his decision he cannot question or change it.  He can, however, be led to make a new, even contradictory, decision by the next person who can make the appropriate connections through his self-reference between the old decision and the new.

Moreover, the President cannot respond effectively to sudden or unanticipated changes; that is, think on his feet. We can see this in his press encounters and Twitter rants, where he either cycles the unexpected through his self-reference or falls back on tried and true attack lines or dominance strategies.

The danger in this, of course, is that we can neither understand nor predict his actions based on his prior choices or his current rhetoric.  The chaos of his mind leads to chaos, inconsistency, unpredictability, and lack of trust.  This chaos is especially dangerous when applied to decisions affecting domestic policy or international relationships.

For this reason, we need to pay less attention to his rhetoric, which becomes a distraction, and more attention to the rhetoric of those he has appointed as advisors and members of his administration.  We have to assume that his positions and policies will reflect not his reasoning, not his narrative, but those of people like Steve Bannon.  Whoever has his ear at any moment will create the narrative that informs the policy.