Can Public Banks Help Re-Establish an Economy That Works for the Majority?

The New Republic’s Sarah Jones is reporting on how citizens in Los Angeles will be voting on a ballot initiative about whether the city should be permitted to create a public bank.  She provides a concise overview of what public banks are and what they do.  But don’t feel confused if you’ve never even heard of them: only one — the Bank of North Dakota — exists in the entire United States.

As with a couple other economic reforms we’ve discussed recently — ending stock buybacks and requiring that workers have a place on company boards of directors — two contradictory thoughts come to mind.  Like these other proposals, public banks seem like common sense, but clearly face an uphill battle against status quo thinking that the private sector and the free market will take care of all the public’s needs.  What’s particularly intriguing about all three of these reforms, though, is how they challenge mainstream thinking about the economy in a way that exposes how preferential to wealthy interests our current economic arrangements are, and how such public-minded reforms can actually move us in the direction of actual free(er) markets.  

Since the 2008 financial crisis, big banks have clawed their way back into respectability and ensconced themselves ever more firmly in the economic firmament.  Too big to fail has become an accepted reality of the financial sector, with entities like Citigroup having successfully resisted moves to chop them down to less systemically-threatening size.  Since the election of Donald Trump, we’ve also seen the rollback of various Dodd-Frank requirements that sought to protect the economy from another financial meltdown.

Despite these unfortunate developments, though, 2008 and its aftermath have left an indelible impression on the public consciousness, and offered living proof, that there is nothing sacrosanct, let alone inherently robust, about our privatized banking system.  In this context, public banks might be seen as a necessary addition to the financial sector that would provide stability the next time our profit-hungry banks overreach and threaten to take us all down with them.  In terms of competition, too, it’s hard to argue that more banks would somehow not be a good idea.  And after the countless instances of banks exploiting their customers by misrepresenting mortgage terms and gouging them with random bank fees, it’s laughable to say that there’s not a need for a public-oriented banking sector to balance out private finance’s propensity to screw ordinary Americans.  That would give consumers a real choice, more so than asking people to grapple with whether Wells Fargo or Bank of America would abuse them the least.

In a parallel fashion, ending stock buybacks and putting workers on company boards also directly address glaring imbalances in how rewards and power are distributed in our economic system.  By doing so within the existing framework, and in fact in ways that arguably would strengthen it, they demonstrate that our current arrangement is merely one among many that are possible.  And as with the banking sector, the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath of slow growth and increasing inequality put into question the fairness of buybacks and exclusion of workers from business decisions.  It’s clearly time to try something else, as more extreme versions of the same old thing fail the basic test of logic.  Co-determination and public banks also have the great and necessary virtue of reforming the economy by making it more democratic; in doing so, they'd also contribute to the revitalization of American democracy, which will only return to health when economic matters are brought more firmly under its scope.  Political and economic justice are two sides of the same coin. 

Mafia Don

Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general during the Obama administration, has an opinion piece in The New York Times that cuts to the heart of the import of Michael Cohen’s claims that he made hush money payments to two women at Donald Trump’s direction.  Katyal writes that, aside from the specific crime of violating campaign laws that appears to have been committed, these claims also means that Cohen and Trump were in a conspiracy to break the law.  And conspiracy, as he notes, is a particular and serious crime in and of itself.

Describing why two people who might have received six-month sentences for each selling a marijuana joint would both receive five years of jail time if they conspired to sell a single joint, Katyal writes:

The answer has to do with the harm to society when individuals agree with one another to commit criminal acts.  These acts are seen as possessing a higher level of moral culpability and are also more dangerous.  Two people can often do more harm than one.  And those criminal economies of scale are sometimes supplemented by psychological dangers.  People tend to take more risks in groups than alone.  For these reasons, the law has always treated conspiracy harshly. 

I'd push this thinking somewhat further, though: conspiracy can be seen as requiring forceful punishment because it is not only a scaled-up effort to break the law, but also both an agreement that the prevailing law itself does not matter and that the conspirators de facto agree to adhere to a different set of rules.  In essence, the conspirators tacitly set themselves up as a subversive, quasi-political entity that challenges the legitimacy of the prevailing legal structure.

This might seem a gross overstatement when we’re talking about two amateur pot dealers who work together to move a single joint - why dignify them as revolutionaries when they’re plainly just criminals working together, any supposedly political dimension to their act ending with their single sale?  However, I think this perspective begins to hold a lot more water when we think about the case of a powerful person like the president, whether in the Cohen payoff matter or in his general attitude toward the law.  For the president to engage in a conspiracy, and to then either deny the conspiracy or say that no law was broken, is for him to very much argue that he lives by a set of rules that he has established and has effectively invited his supporters to agree to, not by the law as we commonly know it.  And when the president does this, is it really much of a stretch to say that he has set himself up in an insurrectionary manner in opposition to our legal system, not just breaking the law but setting up an entirely new framework as he sees fit?

It’s not surprising that the president’s criticism of the practice of “flipping” witnesses against higher-value targets comes in the context of his “no conspiracy to see here” pushback.  Not only is flipping how conspiracy charges are often made to stick, but even more basically, it’s a commonly used, legal practice in American jurisprudence.  Yet, out of the blue, we now behold the president speaking with the perspective of a mob boss, talking about what a shame it is that the feds have a way to convict high-value criminals.  In raising the possibility of a world in which the government is not allowed long-established legal norms to bring lawbreakers to justice, we can see the president tracing out an alternative system of law for our country.  And conspiracy is the key concept here, because for the president’s subversion of the law and its replacement with a criminal-friendly perspective to work, he must recruit other political figures into agreement with this deranged and authoritarian perspective.  The political dimensions of conspiracy, when conducted by the president, become quite glaring.

Thinking about conspiracy provides a basic insight about the nature of this presidency.  We talk so much about the president’s disregard for the law, but that’s only the half of it.  He’s not simply breaking the law, but, due to the conspiratorial acquiescence of his base and of GOP politicians, attempting to substitute a new legal framework on our country.  Its principles are really very simple: if the president does it, it’s legal.  Also, if a wealthy and/or powerful person does it, it's also legal, unless the president doesn’t think so, in which case it's illegal until proper arrangements can be made to allay the president’s concerns.

At a rally here in Portland a couple months ago against Trump’s immigrant family separation policy, one of the speakers reminded those assembled that the word “conspire” literally means “to breathe together.”  In doing so, she was urging the protestors to playfully adopt the idea of "conspiring" against the bad actions of the Trump administration, as a collective action we were taking by literally all showing up at a particular place and sharing the same morning air.  The elegance of this idea, and its ironic reminder that our democracy is no conspiracy at all but a society-wide understanding that we hash out our differences and make a nation through open discussion, is the antithesis of the president’s suggestion that prosecuting little fish to bring down kingpins is the height of unfairness.  We don’t need to pretend that our legal system is at all perfect or not in need of major reforms to recognize that the president’s remarks don’t pass even the most basic tests of good faith or bullshit detection.  When Donald Trump talks like a mafia don, we hear two things: a very powerful man threatening to impose his laws for our own, and a very ridiculous man clearly trying to save his own ass with transparently self-serving arguments.

Trump's Terrible Tuesday

At various points in the last two years, many of us have had the feeling that the tide was finally turning against Donald Trump, only to realize a day or a week later that he had weathered a self-inflicted wound or external catastrophe that would have ended any previous presidency.  However, I do think the one-two punch of Michael Cohen’s guilty plea and Paul Manafort’s conviction yesterday has done real damage to this presidency, both in and of itself and in its promise of still more to come. 

Although neither event directly involves collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to secure the presidency for Donald Trump, both are the result of the special counsel’s investigation of such allegations.  It is highly likely that prosecutors have acted against both Manafort and Cohen not simply because they discovered crimes incidental to collusion, but because they see pursuit of these crimes as key ways to move forward the collusion investigation.  In the case of Manafort, conviction on eight of eighteen charges means that the government has now secured real leverage against him in the larger investigation.  Likewise with Cohen, his guilty pleas mean that the government has created an enormous incentive for him to cooperate on the collusion front — cooperation that Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, has already indicated will be forthcoming (though it remains unclear if an official cooperation agreement has yet been struck by the two sides). 

In a broader sense, the way that yesterday’s events move forward the collusion investigation demonstrate how the broader collision between the steady grinding forward of our legal system and the president’s ongoing attempts to defame and discredit the investigation will likely play out in the coming months.  The special counsel's team is following a methodical legal strategy aimed at proving its case as to what happened between Trump and Russia.  Yesterday, we got a high-impact view of this strategy in action.  Whatever Donald Trump’s attempts to discredit the investigation, Americans still by and large believe in the reality of guilty pleas and guilty verdicts; in this sense, the events of yesterday are like an antidote to Trump’s daily river of propaganda.  Indeed, according to Politico, officials close to the president are expressing worry that these developments will “lend new credence to the Mueller probe.”  But beyond public opinion and the battle of perceptions, yesterday also reminds us that we do still live in a country of laws where wrongdoers are sometimes punished for their bad deeds.  To me, this makes the possibility of charges against more administration officials, up to and including Trump, likelier than ever.

But it gets even worse for the president when we focus specifically on the Cohen plea, which includes claims that the president directed him to make illegal payments to two women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump.  This is a separate issue from Russian collusion, and it is incredibly serious for the president.  As many people are pointing out, Trump is now essentially an unindicted co-conspirator to Cohen’s actions, the same ignominious status that Richard Nixon achieved during the Watergate investigation.  Trump, in other words, is one short step from being accused of a crime himself. 

The illegal payoffs (illegal because they constituted illicit campaign contributions by Cohen) gain greater significance beyond their basic criminality when we consider how very close the 2016 election was, and the very probable impact news of Trump’s affairs with these two women would have had on the number of votes he received.  Only 30,000 votes spread across three states decided the last election; it certainly seems possible that stories of these affairs could have turned it in Hillary Clinton’s favor.  Even if this question is unresolvable, it points up the seriousness of such illegal campaign contributions: it was not just the amount of money — which was a drop in the bucket compared to overall expenditures by and on behalf of the Trump campaign in 2016 — but the way illegal activity was conducted to avoid serious, even fatal, damage to the campaign.  Such allegations threaten the very legitimacy of this presidency.

Overall, the damage to the president from yesterday’s legal developments is so significant because it suggests far greater harm still to come.  It’s important, though, to step back and reckon the consequences not just for the president, but for the GOP as a whole, because of this basic fact: by providing unquestioning cover both for the president’s efforts to derail the Russia investigation and for his corruption more generally, the GOP has made itself complicit in those efforts.  Now, as the reality of the Mueller investigation makes a quantum leap forward, and as the president’s corrupt acts on his way to the Oval Office are further exposed, the GOP will be increasingly tainted by that wrongdoing.  The overall Republican response so far only verifies this theory, since the strategy, in talking points and in practice, has simply been to double down on calls to end the Mueller probe and to try to discount the significance of yesterday’s events.  The GOP has so closely tied itself to Trump’s narrative that it has no choice but to continue on, lashed to the mast of this deranged presidency as it crashes forward into stormier seas.

The GOP’s implication in Trump’s corruption isn’t helped by the charges announced yesterday against Representative Duncan Hunter of California; according to The New York Times, these include “allegations that he spent tens of thousands of dollars in campaign funds on family trips to Hawaii and Italy, private school tuition for his children and even a $600 airline ticket for a pet rabbit.”  What makes this worse for the Trump-GOP death embrace is that Hunter was the second congressman to endorse Donald Trump for president; the first, Chris Collins of New York, was also recently indicted on insider trading charges.  However the collusion investigation plays out, the idea that Trump and the GOP are mutually enabling massive corruption is beginning to achieve irresistible narrative force.  This is obviously bad news for the Republicans in the midterms and beyond.

Finally, I’m still not sure what to make of reports that Republican officials are worried that these new developments give the Democrats more ammunition to seek impeachment of the president, but I do find them noteworthy.  Until now, the GOP’s line has been that impeachment is a great issue for them in the midterms, as it serves to rile up their base to come out and vote in order to protect Trump.  At the same time, many Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, have downplayed impeachment as a possibility, seeming to agree with the Republicans’ assessment that it’s a net winner for Republicans as a campaign issue.  At just a basic level, though, it feels like the momentum is shifting when Republican officials actually worry aloud about impeachment as a real possibility, rather than an abstraction they can use to gin up votes.  Pelosi’s response to yesterday’s news — she released a statement that “Cohen’s admission of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in hush money ‘at the direction of the candidate’ to influence the 2016 election shows the president’s claims of ignorance to be far from accurate, and places him in even greater legal jeopardy” — seems to strike a politically savvy position.  When the legal system is bearing down on the president, letting the implications of his complicity and criminality work their way into public consciousness arguably does more to damage the president and help the Democrats than inserting impeachment talk into the mix.

McGahn's Cooperation with Special Counsel Shows Not Everyone's Top Priority is Saving the President's Skin

Two articles out this past weekend from The New York Times detail the cooperation provided by White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II to the special counsel investigation, as well as the revelation that Trump administration officials had been previously unaware of the extent of McGahn’s assistance.  There are now reports that this news has the Trump administration in a tizzy, evidenced as well by the president’s Twittered weigh-in on the articles and escalated attacks on Robert Mueller’s team (in particular, referring to the government prosecutors as “thugs”).

It’s remarkable that a White House counsel has given such extensive testimony in an investigation against a president.  According to the Times’ reporting, McGahn has provided information that the investigators would not have known otherwise, such as Trump's attempts to fire Mueller.  We don’t know the extent of his other testimony, but it seems quite possible that there’s much more.  This is incredibly bad for a president who, pretty much beyond a shadow of a doubt, colluded with a foreign power to gain the presidency, has worked to protect that foreign power’s efforts from full discovery, and who has also worked non-stop to protect himself from the repercussions of his treasonous actions.

The account of McGahn’s rationale for fully cooperating with the investigation is also noteworthy.  Not only was he acting in accordance with the strategy of openness advocated by Trump’s original outside counsel, but McGahn also apparently feared that he might be made the fall guy for some of Trump's illicit activity.  Thus, he acted out of a basic instinct for self-preservation that can be sourced, at least in part, back to the environment of distrust and disloyalty created by the president himself.  McGahn also seems to have been aware of the legal risks that non-cooperation posed to him and other White House counsel.  This raises the intriguing point that the president may have been undercut by the White House attorney possessing at least some minimal sense of lawyerly ethics.  This, in combination with McGahn’s professed belief that he serves the presidency, not the president, suggests a professional roadblock to the president’s scorched earth attempts to derail and discredit the Mueller investigation.

These Times pieces are remarkable for the picture of incompetence they draw around this president and those who advise him.  The idea that not until the first Times article was published did they know about the extent of McGahn’s testimony is mind-boggling.  Did no one really not stop to consider what McGahn might be saying to investigators until now?  The reports of surprise on the part of the president and his staff suggests a massive blind spot, and raises the question of what other gaping holes in their defense they’ve left open for the special counsel investigation to ride through.

This massive oversight on the part of Trump and his staff brings into sharper relief than ever a fundamental dynamic of the president’s frantic and transparent attempts to escape the consequences of his various bad actions.  Even as the president attempts to subvert not only our justice system, but arguably our entire political system to hide his guilt and stave off punishment, the system itself is chugging methodically along in a way that increasingly appears set to unleash catastrophic consequences on this president.  Donald Trump has created the highest stakes both for himself and our democracy: he has bet his defense on burning down our country’s institutions, but the price of failure increasingly means devastating legal repercussions for his team and likely himself, not to mention toxic political fallout for the Trump-enabling GOP as a whole.  McGahn's testimony and the amazing failure of this administration to fully anticipate it reminds us that this president really has bet the farm on blowing up our country in order to save himself.  If we can manage to win the political fight against him, and hold his authoritarian efforts at bay, then we might still hope to see justice prevail.

When Reality Rains Lemons on Your Parade, Turn Those Lemons Into Even Sourer Lemons by Blaming Everyone But Yourself

Can we call Trump's cancellation of his Trump Victory Parade a win for the good guys?  Or was this just a self-inflicted wound that finally had to be staunched due to excessive financial bleeding?  Be you pacifist or warmonger, Americans of all stripes largely agreed that a military parade celebrating nothing but the childish whims of a non-veteran commander in a chief would be a supreme waste of taxpayer money, and an insult to the armed forces’ actual responsibilities.  In light of the president’s rock-bottom popularity and mounting peril in the face of the Russia probe, this exercise was always what it looked like: a ploy by an unpopular and unfit president to wrap himself in the sacrifice and bravery of American servicemen and -women.

Once the estimates of its cost escalated from $12 million to $92 million, reality at long last rained on this parade.  This being the Trump administration, the president has done what he can to extricate himself from this stupid idea with his usual grace and tact, falsely blaming the high costs on attempts by Washington, D.C. officials to gouge the federal government.  You need look no further than the fact that only 4% of D.C. voters cast their votes for Trump, and that its mayor is an African-American woman, to see that a sour, race-baiting response by the president to the demise of his parade plan under its own weight was pretty much inevitable.  We also need to give a shout out to the president's claim that if there's a cheaper parade in the future, the money saved can be spent on buying more fighter jets.  Huh?  Even the most die-hard Trump supporter should feel a bit queasy about this delusionary sense of how the government "saves" money: propose outlandish, expensive ideas; cancel them; claim the non-existent costs as massive savings for the taxpayer.

Just as the parade began as a scam that claimed to celebrate the military while in reality aggrandizing the president, so it ends as a scam, with the president using the cancellation to propound insane budgetary ideas and blame anyone but himself for this predictable fiasco.

The Devil's Apprentices

In the last few days, I’ve read several articles that serve up amusing, schaden-freudy takes on the way Donald Trump has spawned imitators who are now using his own media-savvy tactics against him; check them out here, here, and here.  The proximate cause for these pieces is the heartburn/brewing crisis in the West Wing caused by former Apprentice star and presidential staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman publishing her memo and dropping secret recordings of White House interactions in quick succession over the last week.  But these observers note that not only Manigault Newman, but Michael Cohen and Michael Avenatti as well, represent this trend of "mini-Trumps."  Of course, with Manigault Newman, you may have the most distinct instance of the phenomenon: a person who not only has learned to emulate Trump’s tactics, but at a deeper level seems to share many of his darker character traits.

I’ll admit it: on a gut level, the idea that Trump has both created (in the cases of Manigault Newman and Cohen) and inspired (in the case of Avenatti) opponents who are able to throw him off his game and potentially do him real damage is deeply satisfying.  In his article on the phenomenon, Josh Marshall refers to them as Trump’s “nemeses,” which I think playfully captures some of the surreal justice of these figures rising up to smite the president.  But it’s in the strong sense that we are watching a Godzilla versus Mothra battle of nuclear fallout-spawned titans that we begin to understand that no matter who wins these battles, the American people are certain to lose.

If it hadn’t been clear when our attention was focused solely on Trump, it’s come into focus now: those who embrace and evolve strategies of media manipulation and information warfare can really only use these tools to destroy, never to build up.  They might or might not be able to beat each other, but their scorched earth tactics and personal aggrandizement are antithetical to the consensus-building and mass participation necessary for healthy democratic politics.

And yet, in the spectacle of their demonic clash, it’s difficult to look away from the fireworks, the raw animus, the pure drama.  The pieces I've read all draw clear parallels to the mechanisms of reality TV.  Ultimately, these are tactics meant to draw viewers and build ratings; while there’s no denying their magnetic power, they get us nowhere good as a country.  Confusing matters in the case of all three of the “mini-Trumps” I’ve noted are extremely serious matters of public concern in which they're embroiled, whether it’s Cohen’s knowledge of illegal activities by the president, Trump’s use of campaign funds to pay off Avenatti’s client Stormy Daniels, or the fact that Trump is all too comfortable using the “N” word, as alleged by Manigault Newman.  These hard stones of substance end up conferring legitimacy on the debased tactics of these three, providing cover for their primary goal of self-promotion and, for Manigault Newman and Cohen, self-exoneration.

Avenatti raises the most worrisome concerns by far.  He’s suggested interest in seeking the Democratic nomination for president in 2020, which is both deeply insane and also uncomfortably plausible given his success to date as an anti-Trump trickster-lawyer media savant.  It’s hard to see Avenatti actually winning — too many Democrats would rebel at his opportunism — but it’s believable that he’d gain some sizable following as someone who can fight on Trump’s level, the substance of his ideas be damned.  As likely, he would perform the same feat as Trump did in the 2015-16 primaries, sucking away oxygen from other candidates due to a combination of freak show appeal and publicity smarts.  This would potentially be catastrophic for the Democrats in a few ways: it would divert attention from hashing out the real policy and strategy questions that the party faces, increase the chances that the Democratic Party adopts a stance that prioritizes attacking Trump over putting forward a constructive agenda for America, and undercut the eventual nominee.

But it’s with that last point — the damage someone like Avenatti would inflict on the actual Democratic candidate for president, whether through direct attacks or simply suctioning off news coverage — that reality really begins to warp and weave in a nauseatingly familiar way.  Whether or not Avenatti runs, the Democratic nominee will still have to face Trump’s analogous ability to swim the currents of the media like a fish in water.  The big question, then, is whether Democratic politicians can figure out a way to counter Trump’s mastery of the contemporary media environment without adopting his nihilistic, manipulative, and essentially anti-democratic tactics, in which politics is alternately primal, apocalyptic, a joke, a lie, and a Darwinian survival of the Twitter fittest.

In a recent interview of media and technology guru Zeynep Tufekci, Ezra Klein discussed with her the idea that technology shapes how we perceive reality, including politics.  Television has arguably led us to see everything in terms of entertainment, with our reality show president a logical outgrowth of this tendency.  But Tufekci and Klein also talked about the fact that we’re in, or at least moving into, a world in which social media is now serving as the central paradigm for how we conceive of the world.  The nature of this new structure is both in flux and subject to debate, but ideas such as information or attention overload and a prioritization of personal and mass anger and resentment come forward as prime characteristics.  Regardless of its specific nature, it seems incontrovertible that our communications networks, and by extension our sense of how we view reality, have changed.

The basic question that I keep coming back to is this: in such an environment, is it even possible to counter the new Trumpian media approach to politics without simply becoming uncomfortably like Trump himself?  No good has come of the way we have collectively viewed politics as entertainment (a propensity that still continues, and is interacting with social media technology), and it’s hard to be optimistic that this latest mutation will bring anything good (particularly with Donald Trump as the avatar of this new dispensation).  It seems impossible for any successful Democratic presidential candidate to avoid grappling with what really are existential issues for American politics.  My nightmare is a repeat of 2016, with an “analogue” Democratic candidate never being able to break through the media frenzy surrounding a widely-despised opponent.

But I suppose It’s possible I’m worrying too much.  After all, despite her many flaws and media disadvantage vis-a-vis Donald Trump, Hilary Clinton still beat him by a good margin in the popular vote — a point we should not lose track of.  Similarly, it was Trump’s revanchist and populist message that gained him so many votes, without which his mastery of the media would have meant far less.  But then I start to think that an environment that favors lies, disinformation, and rage will always favor the candidate who seeks to break us down into a mythical past, not the candidate who runs on facts and conscious, collective change. . .

Are Democrats Ready to Give Workers a Real Say in the Economy?

Eric Levitz at New York Magazine has a piece out about an intriguing policy proposal for all congressional Democrats to embrace in the midterm elections: a law that would require all large companies in the United States to each have a third of their boards of directors elected by their workers.  This arrangement, called co-determination, is widely used in Western Europe, and Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin has put forward a bill to implement it in the United States.

Levitz folds his proposal into a larger argument: that ideas around larger government involvement in the economy have found a receptive audience among both Democrats and Republicans, and that an idea previously seen as of the left might not be perceived by the public as such.  His description of how the debate over co-determination might play out suggests why it might scramble ideological categories.  Republicans would inevitably be put in the position of arguing that working people aren’t qualified to help run a company, a bad spot for any political party to be in, and forcing the GOP to side with bosses over the working class.  This is not a good look for a party that has long fought to persuade voters that it’s not the defender of plutocrats.

But co-determination also scrambles ideological categories for two particular reasons.  First, it cuts the political conflict more clearly into an axis of the 99% versus the 1%, rather than left versus right.  Second, when viewed as a left-wing policy, it’s effective because it provides clarity that liberals stand for enhancing the political and economic power of those who work against those who profit off their work.

Co-determination also seems like a strong palliative to the broad perception among working class people that too much of our economic direction has been ceded to highly educated, supposedly non-ideological experts who it is clear actually have their own biases about the nature of the economy.  This is not to say that only working class people would be represented on the boards of directors as the “workers” contingent, but it would open up a whole new perspective on whose opinions should be considered at both the level of the company and of the economy as a whole.

Levitz also suggests that the default GOP argument that particular economic policies should be opposed because they primarily or disproportionately benefit minorities would be ineffective here, since co-determination would apply across all large companies and not have any discernible racial angle.  I feel less sanguine about Republicans’ capacity to resist racializing even a broad-based policy like this.  At a minimum, though, I think there’s no overestimating the hysteria of GOP politicians’ response were the Democrats to advocate for co-determination on a mass scale.  Their billionaire and millionaire donor base would open the taps as never before to defeat such a fundamental pro-worker change to the economy.  It is also quite possible that such opposition to a policy that would benefit millions of Republican voters would create explosive rifts in the GOP.

But I fear that the very reasons that would drive Republican officialdom to call out such a Democratic policy as the communistic-socialistic end of America as we know it are the same reasons the Democrats will not adopt co-determination as a broad, unifying proposal for the midterms.  Too many Democrats not only don’t want to piss off their own wealthy donors, but also are believers in an economy that puts employers over employees and capital over labor.  But even if we’re not ready for this to be the decisive issue for 2018, it’s not too soon for progressives to push it in primaries against their more centrist opponents, and to cudgel their Republican opponents with it in the general election.

Make Love, Not Space War

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that Donald Trump, the most belligerent of presidents, who sees every issue as a fight, from trade tariffs to a war on immigrants, eventually came to project his aggression onto the biggest canvas of all: outer space.  From here on out, space will be known not as the final frontier, but as the ultimate sinkhole for Pentagon dollars, a vastness not to be explored so much as made to reflect worst of our president’s, and so humanity’s, impulses in the direction of dominance and destruction.  The idea that Russian and Chinese militarization of space should be matched by the U.S. jumping on the bandwagon, rather than inspire efforts to head off a costly arms race that serves the people of no nation, seems to go unquestioned.  

The problem is not a Space Force per se, or even Donald Trump's enthusiasm for a new military branch, but the general idea of militarizing space.  We can only hope that the ludicrousness of the Space Force nomenclature will focus public attention on this larger travesty of the Pentagon finding our planet insufficient for its perpetual war-making, and now looks to the stars, or at least beyond the atmosphere, for fresh pastures.

It’s telling that the official announcement of a plan to create a Space Force is more outlandish than a related piece of out-of-left field space news: that Patrick Stewart will be reprising his role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in a new Star Trek spinoff, an announcement that appears to have caught even Stewart off guard ("Set your phasers to stunned," as one CNN writer accurately observed).  One can only wish that Donald Trump had watched a lot more Star Trek, and had spent a lot less time playing the part of the blustering tycoon, so that his ideas of space were more informed by the optimism of that show and less by the dark needs of his mangled psyche.

Canny observers are asking what business interests, including those who have contributed to Trump and the GOP, stand to benefit from the creation of a Space Force and militarization of space.  But even as those questions are run down, the Trump 2020 campaign itself is already working to make money off the proposed new entity, with a plan to sell Space Force-themed merchandise, and an ongoing solicitation to Trump supporters to vote on the Space Force logo of their choice.  It’s not clear whether this logo vote would also result in an insignia for the actual Space Force, in which case we would have the sorry phenomenon of only Trump supporters being allowed input regarding a public entity, and raising the possibility that the eventual winner will manage to incorporate references to “Crooked Hillary,” Benghazi, and the fine Trump line of luxury hotels. 

Politics Is an Art, Not a Science

Frank Bruni’s latest New York Times column makes a case for optimism in the Democrats’ quest to re-take the Senate.  In surveying their long but improving odds, he indirectly raises an issue with contemporary political prognostication that has received insufficient attention.  Over the last few decades, and certainly over the last ten years or so, as American politics have become more polarized and close or funky outcomes more normal (e.g., two presidential elections out of the last five in which the popular vote winner did not win the presidency), coverage of politics has been subjected to increasing levels of professional, political science-type expertise that has made polling and other expert research a larger and more familiar part of the public discussion.  As a former poli sci student myself, this development in some ways deeply pleasing — welcome to my world, America! — but unfortunately all this professionalism has obscured the fact that political science is not actually science with verifiable theories and predictable outcomes.  Exhibit A is election night of November 2016, when we witnessed the upset of the century in terms of polls and the expectations set by the common wisdom.

Of course politics can be measured and surveyed to greater or lesser degrees.  The problem, though, is not just that there is a general tendency to forget the limitations of this approach, but that we might allow this forgetting to in turn blind us to the possibilities of politics, and to turn the prognostications into self-fulfilling prophecies.  Some of the dangers along these lines can be seen in discussions around not only the fate of the Senate, but around the Democrats’ possibility of taking back the House of Representatives.  The generic ballot polls asking people to choose between Democrats and Republicans has narrowed significantly since blowout numbers earlier in the year, yet any on-the-ground assessment shows massive and arguably growing Democratic enthusiasm to support their candidates, kick the GOP’s racist ass, and get out the vote in a highly fire and fury manner.

Bruni’s reference to trends being in favor of the Democrats gets at a particular limitation of an overly analytical political model.  It is simply part of reality that political opinions can move and that change can happen; too obsessive a focus on the state of play each minute of each day can systematically blind us to these basic facts, which are of course also necessary aspects for democratic politics.  It may be that the political polarization that helped usher in this deep-focus political coverage also carried with it a bias against seeing the possibility of change in such an environment.

For the sake of our democracy, it's critical that the Democrats win back both the House and the Senate, but it is as important that they run on a progressive, pro-democracy platform that signals a clear repudiation of Trump’s efforts to subvert our system of government and run working Americans into the ground.  The immediate battle is Election Day 2018, but the larger fight will continue well after that: to reform U.S. politics and the economy so that our nation cultivates and empowers citizens who are dedicated to our commonwealth, and no longer mass produces marks for whatever Trump 2.0 the GOP might try to inflict on us next.  We need to make profound change that can’t just be measured in poll results and survey responses.

Time to Say Bye to Stock Buybacks, Part 2 (aka the Long Goodbuyback)

Even readers with Memento-like short-term memory problems (no judgment!) will recall The Hot Screen going googly-eyed a few days ago over a recent report by the Roosevelt Institute that zeroes in on the economic harm inflicted by the widespread practice of stock buybacks.  We’re not the only ones flabbergasted by this research: at The New Republic, Alex Shephard ties the practice to Apple’s much-publicized crossing of the $1 trillion market capitalization threshold last week.  Shephard states that, “Apple’s recent success on Wall Street isn’t due to its technological innovations or its sleek products.  Instead, its stock has been juiced by a record-breaking number of buybacks.”  Zeroing in on Apple is instructive, as the numbers are mind-boggling: it plans $100 billion in buybacks in 2018, and its $285 billion in cash means it can potentially buy back even more.

However, Shephard’s critique stumbles when he asserts that the situation is as straightforward as Apple’s buybacks being used to compensate for declining profit margins, and leading to a lack of investment in the company.  While for most companies this critique of buybacks is on solid ground, Apple presents a rarer case: a company that, whether or not it is suffering from declining profit margins, is nonetheless churning out massive and increasing levels of profit based on its current business practices, including what it views as adequate and acceptable levels of investment.  Apple thus also highlights a central pro-buyback argument: that as a successful business that has more money than it knows what to do with, Apple is at least rewarding its shareholders using money that it has earned, money moreover earned based on those shareholders' existing investments in the company.

If the case against buybacks is to take hold, it needs to account for companies like Apple that can plausibly say that because they are investing in themselves sufficiently, they are entitled to spend their remaining profits as they see fit.  After all, it is extremely difficult to see Congress passing any laws mandating that companies spend a certain percentage of their profits on investment, hiring, or pay increases.  As I noted before, the question of limiting or eliminating buybacks is closely linked to the question of raising taxes on corporations: if they are making so much money that they don’t know what to do with it, then they are making a strong case that their taxes are too low, particularly in the context of starved public services, crumbling infrastructure, and ballooning deficits due to the Trump tax cuts.

However, Apple raises a central assertion that opponents of ending buybacks, and supporters of increased taxes on corporations, need to be able to make: that by taxing a company’s profits, the government will make efficient use of the revenues it brings in.  Apple and other corporations with massive profits provide an opportunity to revisit and renew a fundamental argument for taxes and government spending: that we as a nation need to spend money on collective goals not provided by the market.  Defenders of buybacks would argue that only individual companies can be relied on to most efficiently spend their own money, even if that’s for stock buybacks; but buybacks push this argument to the point of least persuasiveness when placed against the very real public good that buyback money would do in a variety of public contexts, from health care to education.  Buybacks can even make conservative arguments against the inefficiency of government spending versus the private sector look laughable: what’s more inefficient, after all, than simply pumping up your share price?  

Two final, semi-related points about buybacks.  First, proponents say that they’re a fair reward for stockholders, but stockholders are already rewarded when their investment is successful and the stock price goes up; there is a subtle but pernicious suggestion that they wouldn’t be making money if not for buybacks, which is just silly.  Second, investors who don't worry about a company not maximizing its money on internal investment and development are investors who have lost sight of the idea that a company needs to build long-term value.  There is little doubt that buybacks now means less returns in the future, making them effectively a short-sighted investment that drags down overall economic performance in the bargain.

Focusing on Apple is illuminating not only in what it says about buybacks, but about the probable difficulties in rolling them back.  Many people will feel like they’re losing money if buybacks go away, and the arguments that the overall economic health of the country will be helped need to be air-tight and persuasive.

To Negotiate Demographic Change, Americans Need to Talk More. A Lot More.

If there has ever been a single statistic that made me despair of the fate of the human race, it's the finding in recent surveys that white Americans believe there is greater prejudice against whites in the United States than against African-Americans.  I suspect that some of my initial shock at this finding will linger forever; that it will always feel like the worst statistic in the history of the world, suggesting a socio-political catastrophe of Biblical proportions: of history flowing backwards, of victors perceiving themselves as victims and the victims as oppressors, of delusion overcoming reason, of fiction beating out fact.  It is also profoundly, darkly funny, in that the denial of the relative extent of white prejudice towards African-Americans in itself might be viewed as validating and verifying that very prejudice.  It is delusion on a society-wide scale, a virtual conspiracy of self-pity and paranoia.  In short, it is shocking to me in the way that the election of Donald Trump was shocking, betraying a sense of historical progress and shattering a belief that America has moved beyond its darkest impulses (though of course it bears some connection to his election).

Luckily, sociologists, psychologists, and political scientists are made of sterner stuff than myself, able to bear the troubling nature of their own findings and to press on with their research.  Studies like the one that sent me reeling provide invaluable evidence of 21st century racial dynamics that are profoundly shaping our society and our politics; a future in which white Americans will no longer be a majority in this country.  The election of Donald Trump and the rise of a Republican politics of white supremacy embodies the dark path the U.S. can go down as a response to this change.

As depressing as attitudes like the one I started with can be, and even as I semi-joke about my own weak-kneed inability to face a reality of racism and denialism, there is in fact no way for this country to move forward in the coming decades if we do not collectively acknowledge our demographic changes and the fears they are provoking.  In the first place, the demographic transformation of America is something that currently exists in a sort of twilight consciousness: deeply felt by millions of Americans, yet at the same time not explicitly discussed nearly enough in proportion to the unease it is causing.  Donald Trump’s demonization of Latino immigrants is the single most dramatic example of this dynamic.  By primarily attacking undocumented immigrants, he channels the fears of his white base about larger demographic change: after all, it is not undocumented immigrants but documented immigrants who over the years have most seriously shifted the ethnic make-up of our country.  The president attacks the idea of America changing without having to say his beef is with non-white immigrants and new Americans, which would be more explicitly racist.

As a country, the United States has short-circuited any discussion of our changing demographics, moving swiftly from an era when we might have seen general discussions about this fact straight to a narrative driven by extremism, scapegoating, and white fears of no longer being the majority.  The idea of a United States no longer being majority white has not been sufficiently talked about; instead, the public debate is driven by the racist and xenophobic backlash to this fact, without the fact itself being fully acknowledged.  Perhaps a better way of putting it is that Donald Trump in particular has short-circuited our discussion, exploiting the fears of change before we’ve been able to have a more rational, public discussion of the fact of the change, in which we could have an airing of not only the anxieties, but also the great possibilities, of such a change.  Instead, the actual underlying changes remain occluded, repressed, making it easier for white Americans to project all manner of fears onto them.

As even casual readers have likely picked up on, The Hot Screen has frequently argued for a view of our political reality that carves out a large role for economic malaise as a negative force supercharging racial and gender revanchism in our country.  Simply put, economic insecurity is real, and opens up our politics to racial scapegoating in a variety of ways, from unscrupulous politicians using racism to distract workers from the way the rich gobble up the lion’s share of our country’s wealth, to low-income workers’ fear that immigrants will take their jobs.  Throw in difficult to define but real fears of “cultural” changes, and the overall situation, as it more fully embraces reality, accordingly reveals itself to have many interrelated and moving parts.

Both a bottom-up and top-down approach is needed to navigate our current crisis.  That is, we need to tackle these challenges of race, economics, and culture at both their individual and interrelated levels.  We can reduce irrational white racial anxiety by fixing our economy so that it works for all, and we can improve our economy by making the case that immigrants and other newer Americans make our economy stronger, not weaker.  But perhaps particularly with racism, as this is the most fraught and emotional of the various realms of social conflict, we need to publicly explore the dynamics head on.  If Donald Trump has more successfully mainstreamed racism into American politics than any other previous president, then to counter it we need a strategy that opens up to public scrutiny the unacknowledged factors that enable him to do so, and that identifies and disassembles the forms that white racism takes.

As I discussed recently, the task at hand is not so simple as calling out racism wherever it happens, though some form of this is surely part of the solution.  But the psychology of prejudice, and the way that racial resentment is supercharged by economic fears in particular, means that we need to fully understand the nature of white racism and racial fears if we are to collectively work to transmute these attitudes into a renewed sense of connection and solidarity among all citizens, regardless of skin color or place of origin.  Because it has functioned as my own point of extreme disbelief and discouragement, the statistic I began with — the white perception that they suffer greater prejudice than African-Americans — feels like the right place to start, at least for me.

I’ve already expressed my visceral sense that this attitude on the part of so many whites is deeply absurd.  But the architects of the survey I noted above were also exploring a theory of racial perceptions that is both fascinating and a potentially huge clue to the persistence of racism in America: that white Americans have “a view of racism as a zero-sum game,” in which any gains for African-Americans necessarily come at the expense of whites.  This zero-sum mentality would be a more essential problem than whites seeing more bias against themselves than against black Americans.

Obviously, there’s more than a grain of truth to the idea that whites will be more powerful collectively in a regime of white racial dominance than otherwise.  What’s interesting to me, though, is the sense of ongoing and perhaps never-ending diminishment due to a perception of growing African-American success.  It raises the possibility that white Americans’ sense of racial threat is so deeply ingrained that they can’t imagine any other possibility than that African Americans’ success is somehow diminishing their own prospects.

The picture is complicated by the fact that since the 1970’s, our economy has seen both an increasing stagnation and a shift of economic rewards to the top of the economic ladder, irrespective of race.  Is it simply all too easy for white Americans to ascribe their increasing economic anxiety, and related sense of diminishing power, to perceptions of African-American success?  I say “perceptions” because the negative effects of the 2008 financial crisis and aftermath have fallen much harder on African-Americans than whites, putting an end to any sort of factual basis for arguing African-Americans are somehow doing enviably well in today’s economy.

Or could it be that the zero-sum mentality is closely connected to the perception of prejudice against white Americans?  Could there be a sort of white guilt or perhaps white pessimism at play here, a sort of assumption that African Americans and perhaps other racial minorities are sure to mirror the same racial animosity towards whites that whites had historically shown them?  This feels like a hideous twist to the cycle of racism: whites imagining that minorities will essentially seeking payback, a hallucination of certain revenge that in turn justifies the perpetuation of white racism.

Perhaps we are still at a point where there really is no clear path to unknotting an attitude of white racism that's as old as our country; but surely there is no way forward that doesn't involve bringing it to light, and puzzling over it together.  There is an optimistic part of me that thinks even survey results like the one I started with might be part of the solution, if enough whites would only realize how absurd their fears are when stated so openly.  At any rate, we will never move forward if we let demagogues and bigots like Donald Trump frame the discussion.

Trump's War on the Free Press is a War Against Us All

Yesterday’s exchange between CNN reporter Jim Acosta and press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, in which Sanders declined to say whether she disagrees that the media is “the enemy of the people,” is yet one more piece of evidence that Donald Trump’s attacks on the media are a crisis for American democracy.  As I wrote a few days ago, treating this as a situation in which the media should be left to defend itself on its own against the president is absurd, and indeed, is just how the president wants to frame this assault on American democracy.

While it’s entirely understandable that Acosta, who has patiently weathered the deranged howling and threats of countless Trump supporters, would want to query Sanders on whether she supports the president’s authoritarian position, Sanders chose to spin his remarkable question into a complaint about the personal attacks that have been made on her.  In this way, she suggested that Acosta’s complaint was simply personal, and that the larger issue was actually the alleged incitement of violence against a member of the Trump administration.  Needless to say, this is a typical Trumpian reversal of reality.  It is not that Acosta did something wrong so much as demonstrate the structural limitations to journalists being forced to defend themselves.  The Trump administration is all too eager to make such defenses seem simply personal and tied to a vendetta against the president, even as Trump and his staff pretend that their self-serving attacks on the media are actually being done in the name of the public good.  Another way of putting it: Acosta asked a question that no reporter should even have to ask a press secretary in the United States — a press secretary, moreover, who clearly would refuse to answer the question or signal disagreement with the president.

It’s also worth noting the related news that Ivanka Trump, when asked the same question, replied that she doesn’t believe journalists are the enemy of the people.  That this is even news is another sign of the larger free press crisis.  After all, acknowledging the legitimacy of the media is a baseline assumption for democratic citizenship.  What is really newsworthy is a president who had adopted a perspective and a language shared by authoritarians and other killers of journalists. 

When the American president attacks the free press for simply existing, it cannot be left to journalists and opinion editors alone to point this out and offer a defense.  In the first place, this plays into Trump’s specific strategy of trying to personalize this fight and isolate the media.  Second, and more importantly, a free press is so central to our democracy that all of society should take part in its defense.  In particular, Democrats should be making news by talking every day about how this language demonstrates Trump’s unfitness for office, and by proposing legislation that increases criminal penalties for threatening or killing journalists.  The idea that the media is the one on the defensive is absurd.  The president stands in contempt of American democracy, and should be on the defensive over this every day.  

If you want additional motivation for why we need to collectively mount this defense, look no further than the feral and benighted supporters who show up at the president's rallies to scream insults and threats at the reporters who are there to simply do their jobs.  Think about the mentality of a person who has adopted the authoritarian mindset that you must simply shoot the messenger and replace him with a pliant mouthpiece who echoes everything that dear leader wants him to say.  Every American has a choice as to how they get their news and information; anyone who chooses only to listen to the propaganda of Fox News and other conservative outlets dedicated to fetishistic worship of President Trump have committed dereliction of their democratic duty.

The president would be well within his rights to criticize particular reporting by any media outlet he wanted.  However, he’s chosen to do something else entirely.  He attacks the free press simply for existing; attacks the idea of reporting as itself intrinsically treasonous.  Such a mindset is so far outside the bounds of American democracy that some may have trouble believing that this is actually happening.  But this is not a case where his supporters can remotely claim that this phenomenon is being misreported by a hostile media.  In this matter, at least, the president’s own words can be counted on to tell the true story.

For Donald Trump, fake news is simply accurate news, news that reports the facts.  He has not a quibble with Fox News, whose reporting ranges from tendentious to purely fictional, but has the virtue of nearly always casting the president in a positive light.  And it is also clear that the president’s anger against the media, apart from being a deliberate strategy to create an enemy for his base to rally against and for him to exert fuller control over what information his backers believe, is also founded in its accurate reporting about his own misdeeds.  He is not attacking the media on principle; he is attacking it as a personal enemy.

Time to Say Bye to Stock Buybacks?

I first learned about stock buybacks a few years ago, when I was given the option of directly investing my 401(k) in companies of my choosing and started to educate myself about the stock market.  My initial reaction, as far as I remember, was to take them for granted, just as I did most everything I learned about investing.  They were widespread, they were good for stock prices, and everything I read and heard treated them as normal parts of the stock world.

At some point, though, they began to strike me as in opposition to the basic tenets of investing I’d read about: that one should invest in companies built for the long haul, and that companies invest in themselves in order to become more successful businesses.  The idea that companies would spend their profits on reducing the number of their own shares in order to raise their stock price seemed like a short-cut, a sugar high boost to stock prices instead of underlying value.  But the sense that all companies seemed to be doing it made me think that maybe I was missing something, that this wasn’t such a big deal, that there must be economic arguments I was missing.

Recent studies, including one by the Roosevelt Institute and National Employment Law Project highlighted in this recent Atlantic article, are making the case that stock buybacks are in fact a much more objectionable and even destructive element of the modern economy than I’d hazarded to guess.  The amount of money shoveled into buybacks, particularly when expressed as a percentage of company profits, is shocking.  According to the Roosevelt Institute study, retail companies spent an average of 80% of their profits on buybacks, while food-manufacturing firms spent 60%.  The restaurant industry, though, spent an amazing 140% of profit on buybacks, which means they not only spent their profits but cash reserves or even borrowed money to do so.  

The study looked at these three particular industries because their workers have particularly low wages, and to support a central critique of buybacks — that they essentially constitute a decision to pay workers less in order to reward shareholders more.  The company by company breakdowns are frankly shocking.  “Lowe’s, CVS, and Home Depot could have provided each of their workers a raise of $18,000 a year,” The Atlantic notes, “while Starbucks could have given each of its employees $7,000 a year, and McDonald’s could have given $4,000 to each of its nearly 2 million employees.”  Such figures dwarf the meager payouts that have trickled down to workers under the Trump administration’s trillion dollar tax cuts for businesses and the wealthiest Americans.  The money has been there all along to boost worker pay; the bosses have just chosen not to.

Critics speculate that the buybacks feed into diminished growth throughout the overall economy.  The choice not to pay workers more means millions of Americans have less money to spend and thus to stimulate the economy.  Every dollar on buybacks is also another dollar companies don’t spend making themselves more innovative and competitive, such as by training workers, spending on research and development, or improving equipment.  This, too, results in economic drag at both the individual company and macro level.

Common to both these major critiques is evidence that those whom we’d assume are most devoted to capitalism — the managers and directors of American corporations — lack a sense of the basic elements of how capitalism actually works.  If people don’t have money to spend, then how can they buy what those companies have to sell?  And if companies don’t invest in themselves, how can they hope to compete in the marketplace?  This seems an example of short-term greed over long-term thinking, and critics point to buybacks as a possible culprit for the depressed wages and lackluster growth of the U.S. economy in recent decades.  One research paper cited in The Atlantic article uses the term “investment-less growth,” which should send a shudder down the spine of anyone who’s been led to believe that companies are worth investing in because they actually look to improve themselves, and not just grow on paper.

Buybacks also reinforce arguments that corporate taxes are too low.  A common refrain against higher taxes is that corporations spend money more efficiently than the government.  This is already a questionable and misleading argument, but the existence of buybacks weakens it even further.  The government spending money on almost anything would be a more efficient use of resources than spending money to jack up stock prices.  And when you put the opportunity cost of allowing buybacks and not raising corporate taxes in concrete terms — using higher government revenues to put people to work improving America's infrastructure or hiring more teachers — you get even more of a sense of how flimsy the pro-buyback, anti-tax argument really is.

I was unsettled to learn that stock buybacks were actually illegal until the 1980’s, with the major critique being that they constituted an illicit way for companies to boost their share price.  The Atlantic notes that several Democratic senators have proposed legislation around this issue, but I would not underestimate the degree to which this issue will be a difficult one to address, even if its damage to the economy makes action necessary.  Millions of middle-class Americans have money in the stock market, and the practice of stock buybacks has given them a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.  More insidiously, it has effectively set their interests against those of working people, and even themselves, when the question comes down to buybacks versus wage increases.  The sticky politics of the situation point to the need for a wider economic argument that fits a reversal of buybacks into a larger assertion that we will collectively benefit more when we all share economic gains more fairly.

Democrats Can't Let the Free Press Stand Alone Against the President

Donald Trump’s attacks on a free press were disturbing the moment he began making them as a candidate for the presidency.  And when he started to incite the anger of campaign crowds against journalists in attendance, his war on journalism disqualified him from ever being considered a legitimate president of the United States.  Attempts to discredit and intimidate the free press, whether by legal or physical means, are the mark of an authoritarian mindset, not a person fit to be the American president.  Even more than his “fake news” refrain — as self-serving a term as any tinpot dictator might come up with — nothing captures this anti-democratic attitude more than the president’s increasingly frequent declarations that journalists are "the enemy of the people.”  If this phrase sounds foreign and weirdly translated from another language, that’s because it’s been previously employed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.  Even putting aside that provenance, it’s a phrase that’s curiously propagandistic and absolutist, and alien when compared to the generally uplifting sloganeering of American politics.

But aside from its generic oddness, it’s a phrase that, particularly when spoken by the president, constitutes a declaration of war on the United States.  There really is no other way to consider Donald Trump’s phrase, given the reality journalists, editors, photographers, and others are the cornerstone of American democracy itself.  After all, there can be no democracy without public access to information, and a journalistic profession that presses our government to provide that information.  

We have long been able to see that for Donald Trump, the only way the press would not qualify as “the enemy of the people” would be for it serve as an unquestioning outlet of state propaganda.  Accordingly, the one news outlet he considers legitimate is Fox News, which at this point is indistinguishable from a government television service dedicated to the protection of Donald Trump.

Many have long warned that, apart from being a transparent attempt to protect himself from bad deeds by discrediting those who would bring the truth to the light of day, the president’s extremist rhetoric would inevitably lead to violence against journalists.  This fear was realized in Maryland last month, when an Annapolis newspaper suffered a mass shooting - the worst single loss of life of media professionals since 9/11.  An ordinary person might be chastened by such an event, and lay off the “enemy of the people” rhetoric.  Unfortunately for our country, Donald Trump is no ordinary person, resuming use of his anti-democratic language a mere week after the slaughter.

For the president, this return to form was a real two-fer, because these new tweets were in the context of his upcoming trip to Helsinki to meet with Vladimir Putin.  Putin, a master dissembler in so many ways, doesn’t bother to dissemble when it comes to a free press.  Journalists who get out of line are beaten or killed as a matter of course in Putin’s Russia, which Donald Trump is aware of, and which he effectively endorsed when resuming his attacks on the free press so close to the Helsinki meeting.

As enraging as the president’s incitement of violence against journalists and clear wishes to substitute a regime of propaganda in place of a free press, though, is the general lack of an adequate response on the part of America’s elected officials.  Republican silence has edged into complicity with this man’s deranged war on journalism, and stands as one more firm reason why the Republican Party must be routed in 2018, in 2020, and beyond.  And though Democrats have been far more outspoken in criticizing these attacks, the party as a whole has failed to recognize, and respond to them, as the unforgivable, code red attack on American democracy that they are.  If journalists cannot do their jobs, then it matters not at all how progressive and assertive the Democratic Party becomes in the coming years.

There seems to be too much of a mindset across the political spectrum that the press is fully capable of defending itself — but this is a complete misreading of where we are, and plays into Trump’s fake critique of the media.  The adversarial relationship between the press and the government holds true when we are talking about the general idea of reporters trying to cover a particular story, but not when the government, in the form of the president, is attacking the press for simply existing.  Such an attack is so far outside the bounds as to necessarily trigger a political response from other major actors in American society, particularly the other branches of government.

The events and stories out today related to a July 20 meeting between New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger and Donald Trump only reinforce the point that this is no longer a situation in which we can say that the press should simply be left alone to battle the president.  The narrative goes as follows: On July 20, Sulzberger met with the president, at the president’s invitation.  The meeting was off-the-record, but on Sunday Donald Trump tweeted the public’s first news of the meeting, writing, “Had a very good and interesting meeting at the White House with A.G. Sulzberger, Publisher of the New York Times. Spent much time talking about the vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media & how that Fake News has morphed into phrase, “Enemy of the People.” Sad!”

Sulzberger soon responded to the president’s tweet, which made it sound like he had acquiesced to the president’s “fake news” and “enemy of the people” rhetoric.  Sulzberger said he had in fact accepted the meeting mainly in order to raise his concerns with the president’s anti-free press language, and that he pressed this point during the meeting, including his belief that such language will lead to violence against journalists.  There is no reason to dispute Sulzberger’s summary of the meeting, and at any rate, the White House has not challenged it thus far.

This means that Sulzberger met with the president off-the-records to defend the free press, only to have Donald Trump use the meeting as fodder for his anti-free press message, suggesting that Sulzberger actually agreed with him.  

Even for this president, such a maneuver is grotesque.  Trump essentially turned a meeting in which a major American publisher attempted to privately communicate his concerns about the president’s rhetoric into yet another example of his anti-press vitriol.  One can critique Sulzberger’s decision to take the meeting, and his relative level of naiveté in thinking anything good might come of it, but any debate over whether Sulzberger made the wrong decision pales in comparison to the monolithic bad faith and anti-democratic darkness of this president.  It is yet one more demonstration that the president’s overriding interest is in constructing a storyline that journalists are "the enemy of the people."

As if to hammer home the point of his own perfidy, Donald Trump has now responded to Sulzberger’s version of events by a series of tweets calling the media “very unpatriotic,” and accusing journalists of putting lives at risk — an obvious black-is-white, up-is-down response to Sulzberger’s critique.

At this point, it is clear the press can offer no facts or other rational response to counter the president's accusations, since they are accusations based not on reality, but on an overriding desire to discredit the work of the one force in our country holding this president to account more than any other.

The overwhelming silence of Republicans over the last two days only highlights the peril of this moment, and the need for Democrats to make the defense of a free press both a central piece of their critique of Donald Trump and of a positive vision for America that aims to restore the presence of local and independent news sources across this country. 

Is the Con Man Starting to Con Himself?

A recent New York Times piece recounts President Trump’s insistence that televisions on Air Force One be uniformly tuned to Fox News.  He made this requirement known after apparently throwing a fit when discovering that Melania Trump’s TV was showing CNN.  Perhaps most disconcerting about this episode is the suggestion that Donald Trump, rather than just employing the term “fake news” to discredit legitimate coverage of him and his administration, may actually himself believe that only Fox reports the truth.  To attempt to deceive the American people about the nature of a free press in service of an authoritarian agenda is chilling enough; the possibility that he believes his own propaganda is a whole other layer of crazy piled atop the proto-fascist mindset.  I would expect even the most cold-blooded propagandist to keep one eye on what actual reporters are reporting and what the truth actually is, if for nothing else than to effectively craft a twisted and tendentious response to the facts.

Intriguingly, Andrew Sullivan argues that in Trump’s taped 2016 conversation between him and Michael Cohen that was leaked last week, we heard a Trump who behind closed doors is far different from the one we see on TV and reflected in his tweets.  Sullivan remarks on how in control and in his element Trump sounded, “a world-weary operator in sleaze and outright deception, dealing with an item of everyday business.”  This is hardly the only time people have pointed out the distance between the buffoonish version of Trump easily inferred from his media appearances and the actual man.  

But in light of the Times report about his CNN-Air Force One air rage incident, I wonder if I’ve too readily discounted the argument that Donald Trump is as out of control as so much of his public persona would suggest.  Has the man changed since the tape was made in 2016?  A possibility arises: that the pressure of the presidency, and particularly, the pressure of facing the consequences of his likely collusion with the Russian government, is beginning to drive the man a little batty.  After all, keeping all the lies straight must in itself be a full-time job, right?

In the Sullivan piece noted above, he frames Trump’s frantic behavior through a parallel or possibly alternative explanation: Trump is essentially a con man, and is stuck in the unenviable position of keeping his con going long past the point of good sense, at a level higher than he’s played at before: the presidential stage.  Apart from a measurably increased rate of lying, Trump also recently made his most far-reaching statement about “fake news” to date, telling supporters that “Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening [. . .] Just stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news.”  Sullivan is a great fan of George Orwell, but he interprets Trump’s statement as less reflective of a totalitarian mindset and more the evidence of a “con man getting a little rattled, as his trade war is beginning to wreak havoc in the Midwest.”

Of course, even someone who might fundamentally just be a con man out to grift the American people can still do immense damage when he’s found that the best way to make a killing is to rally his base via an authoritarian nationalism.  The situation is compounded a hundred-fold when we remind ourselves that the problem is not simply Trump, but a GOP that has decided to embrace him more or less wholesale, and which has already long embraced anti-democratic approaches to governance, from gerrymandering to voter suppression to covering up the Russian attack on the 2016 election.  But any insight into Trump’s mindset is important, because it can be used to fashion an appropriate response to him.  And if we are beginning to understand that the president has embarked on a multi-layered scam — encompassing collusion with the Russians, an effort to shower the 1% with more riches than ever, and of course an overarching effort to aggrandize his own family’s wealth — then it is useful to understand the problems that any con man begins to encounter when he’s forced to run his scam past its expiration date.

As chilling as I found Trump’s exhortation to essentially ignore reality and only believe him, making the case that his reasoning is indistinguishable from that of a grifter may be a way to start breaking his rapport with his base supporters, and to encourage less determined supporters to take a more critical perspective.  Sullivan notes the tug of war between the grifter’s con and reality; when Donald Trump begins to ask his backers to ignore a reality that includes the very reasons they supported him to begin with, a crack in the foundations of his support begins to appear, even if it’s not immediately obvious.  The president can ask them to ignore everything but his own words all he wants, but he has no way to ask them to block out their daily experiences of the world.  No con is that good.  One day, you wake up, and can’t ignore that fact that despite the president’s words, your pay still hasn’t gone up, and your health insurance still hasn’t come back.