Starving the beast cuts both ways
by Tom Sullivan
Indiana overdose victims. Via WTHR.
Magician and psychic debunker James Randi once wrote, “A magician will instantly see the truth behind any colleague’s illusion. But we have a bit of an advantage: We know we are being fooled.” Scientists taken in by psychics aren’t accustomed to their data trying to fool them, as Randi knows. They are over-confident. They believe themselves too smart to be fooled. And get fooled.
Forever frustrating is progressives’ belief in our own intelligence and schooling. We think they somehow immunize us from making mistakes of fact and judgment. They do not. One former investigative journalist and author in my Facebook feed spent much of 2016 sharing rabid, anti-Clinton posts. Some of those surely included propaganda revealed as being churned out by the “Alice Donovans” in the employ of Vladimir Putin and published by lefty outlets like Counterpunch. Liberal smartness was no prophylactic.
So it was not surprising that at the highest levels counterintelligence officials in the Obama administration were caught off guard. They believed Russians would not dare use propaganda efforts here to help elect Donald Trump and sew discord among Americans. The Washington Post again yesterday reported on how long it took for officials to realize they’d been had. But eventually they sent a delegation to warn NATO allies about what they had uncovered:
For the first time since the days after 9/11, the American officials in Brussels sounded overwhelmed and humbled, said a European ambassador in the room.
When the briefers finished, the allies made clear to the Americans that little in the presentation surprised them.
“This is what we’ve been telling you for some time,” the Europeans said, according to Lute, the NATO ambassador. “This is what we live with. Welcome to our lives.”
That’s the long way around to suggesting those who have lived with populist authoritarians like our sitting president may know a little something about populist authoritarians. Rather than assume our smarts will keep us from being outwitted, maybe we should listen.
Venezuelan economist Andrés Miguel Rondón has been issuing warnings for a year at least:
Populism can survive only amid polarization. It works through the unending vilification of a cartoonish enemy. Never forget that you’re that enemy. Trump needs you to be the enemy, just like all religions need a demon. A scapegoat. “But facts!” you’ll say, missing the point entirely.
What makes you the enemy? It’s very simple to a populist: If you’re not a victim, you’re a culprit.
It’s political “wedging” on steroids. A Republican state representative here visited neighborhood after neighborhood in his district following a simple formula. Find out what riles people. Give them someone to blame. Promise to fix it. Deliver what’s easy. Forget what’s hard. Blame Them for your failures.
Rondón wrote yesterday in the Washington Post that his country lived in a postfactual world for decades under Hugo Chávez. He has advice for Americans struggling to understand why blow after blow and scandal after scandal fail to bring down Donald Trump. “If you want to fight Trump effectively,” he suggests, “you have to learn to think like [his supporters] do.”
Rondón explains:
What you call scandal is only a sign that he is fighting back. Indeed: that he is fighting you. To his supporters, this is no scandal at all — he’s doing exactly what he promised he would do.
It does not matter that he is eroding the nation’s democratic institutions. That this combat is dangerous, hypocritical, built on lies. That you, after all, are innocent. His supporters are convinced that you are to blame. Until you can convince them otherwise, they will cheer him on. The name of the game is polarization, and the rookie mistake is to forget you are the enemy.
Normal politicians collapse in the face of scandal because the scandals show them dozing on the job or falling back on their promises. To get elected, they offer a bargain: “Vote for me: I will make you richer/fight for your rights/assure your progress.” Scandals reveal they can’t do that, and thus, they tumble. However, like all populists, Trump offers a much different deal — “Vote for me: I will destroy your enemies. They are the reason you are not rich/have less rights/America is not great anymore.” Scandal is the populist’s natural element for the same reason that demolishing buildings makes more noise than constructing them. His supporters didn’t vote for silence. They voted for a bang.
States and regions where people believe they don’t matter voted for “a wrecking ball to disrupt the system.”
Rondón concludes:
This is not a call for appeasement, only for efficiency. If dwelling on scandal too much can be counterproductive, then the focus must be elsewhere. Again, I believe it should rest on understanding and empathizing with the grievances that brought Trump to power (wage stagnation, cultural isolation, a depleted countryside, the opioid crisis). Trump’s solutions may be imaginary, but the problems are very real indeed. Populism is and has always been the daughter of political despair. Showing concern is the only way to break the rhetorical polarization.
It is not clear whether Rondón is right. Chávez opponents survived him, but never defeated him. Still, failure can be instructive. Rondón wrote last January:
But we failed. Because we lost sight that a hissy-fit is not a strategy. The people on the other side, and crucially Independents, will rebel against you if you look like you’re losing your mind. Worst of all, you will have proved yourself to be the very thing you’re claiming to be fighting against: an enemy of democracy. And all the while you’re just giving the Populist and his followers enough rhetorical fuel to rightly call you a saboteur, an unpatriotic schemer, for years to come.
The key may be to focus less on Trump’s perfidies and more on how his base’s American dreams go unrealized. As any Trekker knows, the way to disarm a creature that feeds on negative emotion is to stop feeding it. In this case, however, highlighting sympathetic victims of Trump’s actions could have an effect. Tribalism is his strength. Weakening it makes him vulnerable.
* * * * * * * *
Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.
It’s the Holiday Season and if you feel like putting a little something in the Hullabaloo Christmas stocking this year it would be much appreciated.
