A Common Frame Of Reference

I was scanning a run-of-the-mill report on product advertising when I came across a single sentence that explains far, far more about the current problems we face than just the marketing challenges that were the subject of the article. And when I say “we”,  I’m talking about humanity, not just the American people.

The article in the Washington Post  used a recent ad by a McDonald’s executive to explore–and bemoan–the challenges contemporary advertisers face as a result of the splintered information environment. When there were only three major television networks, for example, product advertisements mainly succeeded through “ceaseless repetition.” You would see the same ads during multiple commercial breaks, repeated night after night. Successful ones would spawn late-night jokes and parodies. Co-workers would hum  jingles that you would immediately recognize, and–as the article noted–lines from widely seen commercials would turn into catchphrases.

The marketing messages that became ubiquitous did so because Americans inhabited a common entertainment and information environment. We had–as the article noted in passing–a common frame of reference.

We’ve lost that common frame of reference–a frame that enabled a shared view of reality.

Dozens of streaming television channels compete for our attention. There really is no “mass media” anymore–as I have often noted, thanks to the Internet, we live in an environment that encourages us to “curate” our preferred social and political realities, an enormous expansion of choice that allows us to construct both entertainment and information “bubbles” that confirm our pre-existing biases. The growth of remote work has reduced (and sometimes even eliminated) our interactions with co-workers–it has been decades since office folks gathered around the water fountain to discuss the most recent episode of “I Love Lucy.” (Even recalling that once-common experience seems impossibly quaint.) We are increasingly splintered.

Today, it isn’t simply advertising that suffers from our fragmented and inconsistent media environment. The realities of that fragmentation have enabled and encouraged our political polarization.

We live in a world where the realities we share are steadily diminishing, and the informational and entertainment and political environments we choose to inhabit are not only different, but frequently incompatible. If you are–like me–an older person, you increasingly encounter references to celebrities and “huge stars” of stage and screen that you’ve never heard of, and you’ve had younger people give you a blank look when you reference major events of a history you’ve lived through.

The technologies that allow us to access immense amounts of information with an amazing immediacy have also allowed us–or more accurately, forced us— to construct our own realities, facilitating our separate and increasingly inconsistent understandings of the world we inhabit.

This blog is an example. When I began these daily explorations, I viewed them as extensions of my classroom teaching. I would read something–perhaps scholarly, perhaps newsworthy–and share that information. Since I rather clearly have a point of view, perhaps I would be able to persuade a few others of the correctness of policy approach A or the dangers of pursuing policy B. Instead, this daily exercise has become an example of “preaching to the choir.” At best, I offer extra data to readers who already share most of my biases–readers with whom I share a frame of reference.

I have become steadily more convinced that the fragmentation of our information environment is at the root of our inability to fashion a working politics. When different groups of people occupy dramatically different realities, when person A hears about the disasters we are experiencing thanks to Trump’s insane war on Iran, while person B hears only some version of the rantings the mad would-be King posts on Truth Social, there is no middle ground. We can’t come together to solve a common problem because we don’t see a common problem.

The most confounding part of this dilemma is the absence of any obvious solution.

The First Amendment was grounded in belief in a marketplace of ideas–the conviction that We the People could bring our discrete and disparate views to a common intellectual “marketplace” where those views would be aired and would contend with each other, and the strengths and weaknesses of those arguments would become apparent. The Founders and philosophers who championed that clash of ideas did not– could not– have envisioned a time when no common marketplace existed.

I’m not sure democracy can exist in the absence of a common frame of reference. I guess we’ll find out….

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It Can Happen Here

It’s hardly surprising that references to “It Can’t Happen Here”–a 1935 satire by Sinclair Lewis– have been multiplying. For those of you who haven’t read it, or who read it too long ago to recall the plot elements, it depicts the election of a populist demagogue who dismantles democracy through a mix of nationalism, fear and a paramilitary force. The authoritarian takeover includes silencing the press, curtailing rights and establishing concentration camps.

Sound familiar?
 
Today, we see media outlets steadily being taken over by Trump allies and enablers. We see reports on the growth and effectiveness of nationalist organizations, most wearing a “Christian” disguise. The New Yorker has a chilling report on “The New Faces of Christian Nationalism,” tracing the growth of these psuedo-religious groups in the wake of Trump’s hollowing out of the Johnson Amendment–a law that kept churches from endorsing candidates. The article focused on Mercy Culture, a church-sponsored organization operating in Fort Worth, and its political arm, For Liberty & Justice.
 
 For Liberty and Justice promotes political candidates who are “committed to a shared vision of religiously infused far-right politics.” Its goal is to “Christianize” government.

People not attuned to the evangelical world may have missed the growing prominence of hyper-politicized churches such as Mercy Culture, which have become a key wing of the MAGA coalition. Compared with the religious right of previous generations, this cohort of pastors, influencers, and self-described prophets offers up a version of worship that’s at once more mystical, with an emphasis on supernatural powers, and more militaristic, with heightened political rhetoric. Many adopt a Christian-nationalist framework, arguing that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and should be governed as such.

In another parallel to Sinclair’s book, studies confirm that the MAGA movement was an outgrowth of fear–especially although not exclusively the fears and resentments of White Christian men to their perceived loss of status to women, gays and people of color. The administration plays on that fear to justify attacks on DEI and those “woke” equal rights.

A “paramilitary force”? Can we spell ICE? “Concentration camps?” DHS is buying warehouses with the intent of turning them into “holding facilities.”

Lest we be tempted to dismiss these startling parallels to fascism, The Atlantic has documented the constant stream of Nazi propaganda being spewed by the Trump administration.

The article reports on the embrace of Nazi slogans and tropes by the U.S. Labor Department, the Pentagon’s use of neo-Nazi graphic elements in its social-media feeds, and the Department of Homeland Security’s recent post of lyrics that mimic a song by a band with ties to an ethno-nationalist social club.

The official social-media channels of the Trump administration have become unrelenting streams of xenophobic and Nazi-coded messages and imagery. The leaders of these departments so far refuse to answer questions about their social-media strategies, but the trend is impossible to miss: Across the federal government, officials are advocating for a radical new understanding of the American idea, one rooted not in the vision of the Founders, but in the ideologies of European fascists.

The article proceeds to provide a list of examples, including a DHS post with the text “We’ll have our home again” –a phrase  that is nearly identical to lyrics from a song by a group affiliated with the Mannerbund, a far-right folk group that draws upon Germany’s ethno-nationalist movement: “Oh by God, we’ll have our home again.” Another example–one that I have previously referenced–came from the Department of Labor, which posted a video captioned “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.” It’s impossible to miss the reference to the Nazi slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (“One people, one realm, one leader”).

A number of posts promote the idea of “remigration,” a term meaning the voluntary departure of immigrants to their birth countries. The term has “gained popularity in white-nationalist circles in Europe and America as a euphemism for the expulsion of non-white immigrants from Western countries, potentially including naturalized citizens and their descendants.” The official White House X account has weighed in, posting  a portrait of Trump with the single word: remigration.

All of this is an effort by Trump’s administration and the White Christian nationalists and neo-Nazis who support it to reject the notion–perhaps best articulated by Lincoln–that America is “a proposition of equality and liberty,” or (as I have frequently asserted) an Idea. Instead, they insist the U.S. is not a country based on ideals, but on blood and soil.

It can happen here. 

We need to demonstrate massive public resistance, starting with the upcoming NO KINGS.

 
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Where Do We Go From Here?

It sometimes seems like a bad dream–an America governed by a deeply corrupt cohort of incompetents and fools, led by a President who is clearly insane. Not simply criminal and stupid, but quite obviously untethered to reality, and currently busy waging a senseless war and destroying the world economy.

I remember Watergate, and while Nixon may well have been as malevolent as Trump, he was a lot smarter. He understood how government worked, and the geopolitical context within which the country existed. Most importantly, when his corruption became public, Republicans in Congress withdrew their support and told him to resign.

What happened to America in the years between Nixon and Trump? What has led Congress and the Supreme Court to enable, rather than restrain, consistent lawbreaking from the executive branch? What brought us here–and how do we extricate ourselves from the downward spiral?

Last October, Paul Krugman addressed that first question, noting the degeneration between then and now. After all, Nixon, who “was a piker by comparison to Donald Trump,” had been repudiated by his own party.

Not only is Donald Trump a wannabe dictator, surely the worst person on multiple dimensions ever to occupy the White House, but he made his intentions clear in the January 6th insurrection and his promises of retribution if re-elected. But unlike Nixon, Trump is backed by a Republican party that has become so extreme, so unwilling to acknowledge that opposition is even legitimate that none of his actions matter. Today’s Republicans show no hesitation whatsoever in adopting the Führerprinzip, the “leader principle”, in which Trump’s diktats override all written law and democratic norms.

How did we get here? How did we go from a time of substantial overlap between the parties–an overlap that allowed Democrats and Republicans to work together on many problems– to today’s polarization? Krugman reminds us that much of that former “bipartisanship” and overlap was on economic issues, and attributable to the fact that the South still voted Democratic. The Dixiecrats, “politicians who were economically conservative and anti-civil rights” caucused with the Democrats. “Since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, that faction has switched parties.”

Indeed, that racist faction now dominates the GOP, which–as I have frequently noted–looks much more like a White Christian nationalist cult than a traditional political party. And evidently, taking the country back to a time when straight White Christian males dominated is more important to that cult than economic prosperity and competent governance. The centrist, bipartisan bloc that forced Nixon out no longer exists.

Data shared by Krugman and others traces the result of the Dixiecrats’ move into the Republican camp, a move that left the  Democratic Party dominated by Northern Democrats who–despite Republican allegations–remained ideologically pretty much where Democrats had been since 1950. Meanwhile, Republicans have moved very far to the right.

These changes have produced asymmetric polarization. While the de-Dixiecratted Democratic Party broadly looks like a center-left European party, the GOP doesn’t look like the European center right. Instead it looks like Germany’s AfD or Hungary’s Fidesz, extremist parties with a clear authoritarian streak.

Krugman acknowledges Trump’s personal depravity, but says that it’s the nature of today’s GOP that is responsible for the decline of American democracy.

The transformation of the GOP can be attributed to a number of things: extreme income inequality, the power of the plutocracy, the “left-behind” areas of the country, the ability of people to live in curated realities thanks to the Internet…all of these factors have contributed, but above all is the racism that has always been America’s original sin. Whatever the relative contribution of these causes, I agree with Krugman that the threat we face is much bigger than Trump and his clown show of an administration, and it won’t be magically cured by his departure–fervently desirable as that departure is.

I don’t have any “cure-all” for what we need to do once these venal and despicable people are ousted, but I have become convinced that repair of our republic needs to begin with an American version of the Nuremberg trials. It isn’t enough to defeat the GOP at the polls, as critical as that is. We need a full, public display of what this administration has done–a display that even the propaganda sites cannot obscure. The sheer extent of the wrongdoing has operated to mask much of the corruption, venality and bigotry. Nuremberg-like trials offer us a roadmap, a place to begin what will be a difficult recovery.

It helped Germany, and it can help us.

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The Supreme Importance Of Reforming The Supreme Court

The need to reform the Supreme Court has generated wide public debate due to recognition of the obvious (and I must say, shocking) degree of corruption of the current Court majority, but among political scientists and law professors, the need to reform the Court has been a topic for years. When I was teaching Law and Public Policy, I participated–mostly as a “lurker”–for some twenty years in a “Law and Courts” listserv, where scholars of the justice system and the courts discussed problems that long preceded the current Court, and argued about the merits of various proposals to mend those problems.

One significant issue was the diminishing number of cases the Supreme Court was able to decide annually–an issue that led to suggestions for various ways to expand the Court’s capacity, including the addition of judges. Another problem was that Americans live a lot longer now than they did when the Court was established, reducing turnover and raising the likelihood that some Justices would “serve” while senile or otherwise diminished. The most popular “fix” for that issue was a proposal to set term limits–eighteen years was a common proposition because it would be long enough to meet the goal of the Founders to shelter justices from political pressure and popular passion (which was the purpose of lifetime appointments), but short enough to minimize concerns about aging and turnover.

These academic discussions went on long before the elevation of obvious ideologues and political partisans to the highest court, refuting the arguments we hear dismissing the reform movement as ideological “court packing.” The growing recognition of the inadequacies of the current Court are just one example of the structural and systemic problems that have gotten us to the disastrous present. When and if we emerge from our Trumpian nightmare, the goal cannot be to restore what was. Structural changes will be essential–very much including to the Supreme Court.

In a recent post, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo made that point.

It’s not just turning things back to the status quo ante, as we’ve discussed. We’re in an era in which it’s critical to make major structural changes when the opportunity arises and build new structures that are more durable than the ones which have fallen so quickly over the last decade and specifically the last year. So you need smart people putting time into this work during the next three years, really thinking it through and having that list of reforms ready, support built them, etc.

That recognition brings us to the reason that Court reform is so critical. As Marshall points out, thoughtful people can identify numerous needed reforms, from the filibuster to the Electoral College to gerrymandering…the list goes on. But if we are dealing with a corrupt Supreme Court, those reforms are likely to be struck down. This Court has demonstrated that it can just manufacture pseudo-constitutional arguments for getting to the majority’s desired results. As Marshall wrote, “It’s really as simple as that. We’re now locked into public policy which fits an aggressive version of right-wing pseudo-constitutionalism and, even more, a jurisprudence aimed at keeping federal policy in line with the electoral and political interests of the Republican Party.”

The point is that the corruption of the Supreme Court is actually beginning to slow, disincentivize, detour policy work. It could not be more critical that people across the Democratic world — policy, law, electoral politics — have this realization. There’s no reason to accept a situation in which democratic self-government is only allowed now for Republicans.

We the People are gradually coming to recognize that we can’t fix our broken government unless we first fix the Court. And–as Marshall also emphasizes–not only must something be done about it, something can be done about it. “This isn’t like amending the constitution. It can be done. Get a trifecta, kill the filibuster and you can do it all on simple majority votes.”

And it really does have to be done, and not only for the reasons Marshall notes. When a Court deviates so profoundly–and so obviously–from adherence to precedent and established legal reasoning and analysis, citizens lose respect for the very concept of the rule of law. When they see the highest court in the land enabling government corruption and Christian nationalism, their belief in constitutional governance understandably evaporates, and rather than identifying as an American polity, the population devolves into tribes and factions contending for power and influence.

Reforming the Court should top our “to do” list.

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Corruption And Stupidity…What Could Go Wrong?

Two observations today. The first is just more confirmation of the pervasive corruption that has characterized the Trump administration. The second is evidence that the stupidity and incompetence that triggered an illegal war will cause global instability and economic chaos.

#1. ProPublica has made a trove of 3200 documents public and searchable. The documents “detail the finances of more than 1,500 federal officials appointed by President Donald Trump. Records for Trump and Vice President JD Vance are also included.”

The documents reveal a web of financial ties between senior government officials and the industries they help regulate — relationships that have drawn scrutiny as Trump has dismantled ethics safeguards designed to prevent conflicts of interest.

On his first day back in office, Trump rescinded an executive order signed by President Joe Biden that required his appointees to comply with an ethics pledge. The pledge barred them from working on issues related to their former lobbying topics or clients for two years. Weeks later, Trump fired 17 inspectors general charged with investigating fraud, corruption and conflicts of interest across the federal government. Around the same time, he removed the head of the Office of Government Ethics, the agency that oversees ethics compliance throughout the executive branch. The office is currently without a head or a chief of staff.

#2.  As one pundit recently observed, the focus on Trump’s malevolence has obscured the extent of his stupidity. His inability to plan, his dismissal of expertise, his inability to read briefings and his life-long reliance on “gut feelings” rather than data or logic led to his adventurism in Iran. Evidently, he confused warfare with video gaming.

Trump displays total ignorance of global strategic and economic interrelationships.

So now we are seeing results that were predictable, but clearly unanticipated: civilian casualties, the deaths and severe wounding of U.S. soldiers, huge financial costs, energy-market shocks, strengthened geopolitical rivals, regional instability…the list goes on.

Trump was evidently unaware of the global importance of the Strait of Hormuz and unprepared for the spiking costs of gas. Given the worldwide agricultural dependence on the fertilizer that also comes through the Strait, it will take longer to see the effect on prices at the supermarket, but those are coming.

And then there’s Taiwan, which has little domestic fuel and relies on imported liquid natural gas (LNG) that comes–you guessed it!–through the Strait of Hormuz. Due to storage issues, Taiwan can keep only 10-14 days of LNG reserves. If the Strait is closed long enough to cut off Taiwan’s LNG supply, the effect on its semiconductor industry would be rapid and severe;  chip manufacturing is extremely energy-intensive and Taiwan’s power system depends heavily on imported fuel.

If semiconductor supply from Taiwan is significantly reduced, the economic effects will be global. In today’s world, chips are embedded in thousands of products. (When there were shortages and supply chain disruptions during the pandemic, prices rose sharply and production fell in multiple industries.)  Taiwan manufactures most of the world’s advanced chips, and a reduction in its capacity would lead to shortages and huge price spikes in everything from automobiles to consumer electronics to household appliances to medical equipment.

It is abundantly clear that the administration didn’t think about–or know–any of this. It obviously never occurred to Trump or Hegseth that there might be strong reasons past administrations had decided not to start a war in the already volatile Middle East, and that it might be prudent to consult intelligence experts. (Whoops! I forgot–experts have been routinely purged…)

And as The Bulwark recently reported, the administration’s few articulated goals have not been met. There has been no regime change. Intelligence reports provide “consistent analysis that the regime is not in danger” of collapse and “retains control of the Iranian public.” ‌

Trump was confident the Strait of Hormuz would be kept open because we could prevent the Iranian Navy from laying mines. “But it turned out that the mere fact of risk was enough to cause maritime insurers to refuse to cover shipping vessels. Which had the same effect as a waterway full of mines. The Trump administration was completely blindsided by this completely predictable situation.”

There’s much, much more, but I’ll just leave you with the last paragraphs of the Bulwark report.

The Iran war is also burning through Patriot missiles and other air defense munitions that are needed in Ukraine. Which strengthens Russia’s position, makes Putin less likely to seek a ceasefire, and increases the risk of wider European destabilization.

All of which is much worse for American economic and security interests than a destabilized Iran reeling from air strikes and internal unrest was three weeks ago.

Elect a clown, expect a circus….

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