Kevin Drum wrote a post that reminded me that I need to avoid social media right now like the plague — and should probably ignore stories about social media too. His very wise post about a story I posted yesterday is much more reasoned than mine was.
Here’s the latest trend story from the New York Times. It’s about—God help us—”TikTok economics”:
"Look at economic data, and you’d think that young voters would be riding high right now…"
"Look at TikTok, and you get a very different impression…"
"Social media reflects — and is potentially fueling — a deep-seated angst about the economy." https://t.co/ZtC3UTxJNp
This is the most tiresome thing ever. When are newspapers going to learn the obvious: social media doesn’t represent anything in the real world? I mean, how likely are you to post a TikTok about how your life is fine and everything is pretty good?
Not very. That’s just the nature of H. sapiens, who love to performatively gripe and complain a lot more than we like to performatively say that things are OK. The way to account for this bias is to actually ask people how they feel. Then you’ll get equal responses from everyone. Let’s try it:
Compared to 2019, young people have jobs at the same rate; they’re satisfied with their jobs at the same rate; they’re earning a little bit more; they rate their financial situation about the same; and they’re probably about as happy now that they’re recovering from their pandemic blues.
As Kevin says, it appears that nothing much has actually changed despite the propensity of people on Tik Tok and Twitter to whine constantly about everything.
I have to remind myself of that. Social media, whether twitter, Facebook, youtube, threads, Blue Sky whatever, is not reality. There is no reason to put much stock in anything you see on there that isn’t actual documentary evidence. I still appreciate the video threads that some people are generous enough to put together but beyond that it’s really not that useful anymore.
“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Michael Beschloss will be along presently.
Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg to speak and consecrate battlefield four months after victory, today 1863: pic.twitter.com/aiT0qRMqkm
The anniversary brings to mind something related to Gettysburg that I wrote for Dirty Hippies in 2011, “The Future They Feared”:
We were sitting in a Waffle House in Staunton, Virginia discussing the state of the nation over breakfast. I had just read an Ed Kilgore column in Salon about the nationwide Republican war on voting rights, and the conservative debate over whether voting is even a right or not.
As I am standing in line to pay my tab, a African-American man in his forties slides into an occupied booth next to the register and sits opposite an older white man. They share a brief exchange about how his shift went. Two smiling, white waitresses come over to take his order and start a friendly argument over how he likes his toast. He is a regular.
“Toast, not grits?” remarks the older white man.
“It’s Filmore,” smiles one of the waitresses to the cook. “Burn it. He likes it burnt.”
“Dark, not burnt,” Filmore insists.
This is Virginia — the capitol of the Old South. Black man. Restaurant. Sharing a table with a white man. White women competing over who will wait on him.
It occurs to me that the prospect of the very everydayness of such a scene horrified many Virginians and others across America 50 years ago.
Some people need an “other” to fear or they don’t know who they they are themselves. It’s not just generational. It is a personality type. Many of the same types today fear poor people, gays, Muslims and Mexicans.
We are on our way to see the Gettysburg battlefield where two American armies slaughtered each other, where the Army of Northern Virginia lost its war over the right to deny rights to an entire class of “others,” and to hang onto a people’s irrational fear of the future I saw at a northern Virginia Waffle House.
Today add to the list of irrational fears transgender people, grooming, drag shows, and black history. In 50 years, should we survive the next few, no one will bat an eye.
“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Working on it. Hope you are. The work is never finished.
Late Update: Heather Cox Richardson has more on the events of the day.
It’s heartening to see people who still believe in public service as a vocation. A neighbor spent his career in international development. My state representative served first in the Peace Corps. I recently met a couple who retired here after careers as Foreign Service officers.
Donald Trump calls Washington, D.C. a swamp and people eat it up in part because guys like George Santos and Bob Menendez give public service a bad name. (Even though there’s some “both sides” to that, political corruption and faithlessness does seem to have a right-wing bias.)
Yet some people still believe. They’re not the ones who become notorious in the press.
On #WorldParkinsonsDay, I'm here to share that I've been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease.
I'm doing well, and I want to bring about as much good from this diagnosis as I can—including here in Congress. pic.twitter.com/bvEwzZQbqp
CBS this morning profiles Virginia congresswoman Jennifer Wexton (D). Wexton comes from a family of public servants. She’s afflicted with a rare disease, yet forgoes some speech and physical therapy to keep serving her consituents:
Progressive Supra-nuclear Palsy, as Wexton said, has no cure. At this time, there is no treatment that will slow its progression, and it tends not to respond to medication, according to the National Institutes of Health. It often worsens rapidly, and most patients “develop severe disability within three to five years of symptom onset.” It affects movement — loss of balance is a common symptom — and causes slurred speech. Vision problems often develop as the disease progresses, too.
Wexton described exhaustion, missed therapy appointments and lost sleep as the effects of the recent relentless House schedule. The narrowest of margins between the parties meant she needed to be present on Capitol Hill for the dozens of votes and debates.
Her fatigue was so severe that she suspects it contributed to a painful fall at her home in Virginia four weeks ago. It was the fall that injured her neck and continues to cause her pain.
“It’s just so hard for me now,” Wexton told CBS News. Her voice and her ability to speak have been impaired by her medical condition, and her fatigue has grown.
“Fatigue absolutely does have an impact,” she said during an extended interview. “The most important thing you can do is get sleep.”
She teared up several times as she echoed the message she sent to constituents in a written statement earlier this year: “I’m heartbroken to have to give up something I have loved after so many years of serving my community.”
“I’ve been worse since September. It’s been tiring. It’s been really hard being here for the ten weeks,” she said. “It’s awful.”
Wexton will leave the office she’s held since 2019 after sge defeated incumbent Republican Barbara Comstock.
“There is no ‘getting better’ with PSP,” Wexton told the press in September. She was dignosed in April. “People with progressive supranuclear palsy typically die six to nine years after their diagnosis,” reports the Cleveland Clinic. Plus, “People with PSP also have a higher risk of falls, which can result in bone fractures and head traumas. Falls that cause serious injuries are a common cause of death among people with PSP.”
Note: This coming Wednesday marks 60 years since the JFK assassination, so I am re-posting this piece (from November 23, 2019) with revisionsand additional material. -D.H.
“Strength takes many forms, and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant. The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us. […]
If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. […]
We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth […] But democratic society — in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.”
– President John F. Kennedy, from his Robert Frost tribute address (October 23, 1963)
“Where were you when Kennedy got shot?” has been a meme for anyone old enough to remember what happened that day in Dallas on November 22, 1963…56 years ago this past Friday.
I was but a wee military brat, attending my second-grade class at a public school in Columbus, Ohio (my dad was stationed at nearby Fort Hayes). Our class was herded into the gym for an all-school assembly. Someone (probably the principal) gave a brief address. It gets fuzzy from there; we either sang “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” or recited the Pledge of Allegiance (or we possibly did both), and were sent home early.
My 7-year-old mind could not grasp the profound sociopolitical impact of this tragedy; naturally I have come to understand it in the fullness of time. From my 2016 review of Jackie:
Understandably, the question of “why now?” could arise, to which I would reply (paraphrasing JFK) …why not? To be sure, Jacqueline Kennedy’s story has been well-covered in a myriad of documentaries and feature films; like The Beatles, there are very few (if any) mysteries about her life and legacy to uncover at this point. And not to mention that horrible, horrible day in Dallas…do we really need to pay $15 just to see the nightmare reenacted for the umpteenth time? (Spoiler alert: the President dies at the end).
I think that “we” do need to see this film, even if we know going in that there was no “happy ever-aftering” in this Camelot. It reminds us of a “brief, shining moment” when all seemed possible, opportunities were limitless, and everything was going to be all right, because Jack was our king and Jackie was our queen. So what if it was all kabuki, as the film implies; merely a dream, invented by “a great, tragic actress” to unite us in our sadness. Then it was a good dream, and I think we’ll find our Camelot again…someday.
They will run you dizzy. They will pile falsehood on top of falsehood, until you can’t tell a lie from the truth – and you won’t even want to. That’s how the powerful keep their power. Don’t you read the papers?
– From Winter Kills (screenplay by William Richert)
The Kennedy assassination precipitated a cottage industry of independent studies, papers, magazine articles, non-fiction books, novels, documentaries and feature films that riff on the plethora of conspiracy theories that flourish to this day.
Then there was that Warren Commission report released in 1964; an 888-page summation concluding JFK’s alleged murderer Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. This “conclusive” statement, of course only fueled more speculation that our government was not being completely …forthcoming.
2019 marks the 40th anniversary of one of the more oddball conspiracy thrillers based on the JFK assassination…Winter Kills, which has just been reissued on Blu-ray by Kino-Lorber. Director William Richert adapted his screenplay from Richard Condon’s book (Condon also wrote The Manchurian Candidate, which was adapted for the screen twice).
Jeff Bridges stars as the (apolitical) half-brother of an assassinated president. After witnessing the deathbed confession of a man claiming to be a “second gunman”, he reluctantly gets drawn into a new investigation of his brother’s murder nearly 20 years after the matter was allegedly put to rest by the findings of the “Pickering Commission”.
John Huston chews the scenery as Bridges’ father (a larger-than-life character said to be loosely based on Joseph Kennedy Sr.). The cast includes Anthony Perkins, Eli Wallach, Sterling Hayden, Ralph Meeker, Toshiro Mifune, Richard Boone, and Elizabeth Taylor.
The film vacillates between byzantine conspiracy thriller and a broad satire of other byzantine conspiracy thrillers–but is eminently watchable, thanks to an interesting cast and a screenplay that, despite ominous undercurrents, delivers a great deal of dark comedy.
I own the 2003 Anchor Bay DVD, so I can attest that Kino’s 4K transfer is an upgrade; accentuating cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond’s exemplary lens work. Unfortunately, there are no new extras; but all bonus materials from Anchor Bay’s DVD have been ported over, including an entertaining commentary track by director Richert (the story behind the film’s production is nearly as over-the-top as the finished product).
Is Winter Kills essential viewing? It depends. If you like quirky 60s and 70s cinema, it’s one of the last hurrahs in a film cycle of arch, lightly political and broadly satirical all-star psychedelic train wrecks like The Loved One, The President’s Analyst, Skidoo,Candy and The Magic Christian. For “conspiracy-a-go-go” completists, it is a must-see.
Here are 9 more films that either deal directly with or have a notable link with the JFK conspiracy cult. And while you’re watching, keep President Kennedy’s observation in the back of your mind: “In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.”
Suddenly – Lewis Allen’s taut 1954 hostage drama/film noir stars a surprisingly effective Frank Sinatra as John Baron, the cold-blooded leader of a three-man hit team who are hired to assassinate the (unnamed) President during a scheduled whistle-stop at a sleepy California town (interestingly, the role of John Baron was originally offered to Montgomery Clift).
The film is essentially a chamber piece; the assassins commandeer a family’s home that affords them a clear shot at their intended target. In this case, the shooter’s motives are financial, not political (“Don’t give me that politics jazz-it’s not my racket!” Sinatra snarls after he’s accused of being “an enemy agent” by one of his hostages). Richard Sale’s script also drops in a perfunctory nod or two to the then-contemporaneous McCarthy era (one hostage speculates that the hit men are “commies”).
Also in the cast: Sterling Hayden, James Gleason, Nancy Gates, Christopher Dark, and Paul Frees (Frees would later become known as “the man of a thousand voices” for his voice-over work with Disney, Jay Ward Productions, Rankin/Bass and other animation studios).
Some aspects of the film are eerily prescient of President Kennedy’s assassination 9 years later; Sinatra’s character is an ex-military sharpshooter, zeroes down on his target from a high window, and utilizes a rifle of a European make. Most significantly, there have been more than a few claims over the years in JFK conspiracy circles suggesting that Lee Harvey Oswald had watched this film with a keen interest.
There have been conflicting stories over the years whether Sinatra had Suddenly pulled from circulation following Kennedy’s death; the definitive answer may lie in remarks made by Frank Sinatra, Jr., in a commentary track he did for a 2012 Blu-ray reissue of the film:
[Approximately 2 weeks] after the assassination of President Kennedy, a minor network official at ABC television decided he was going to run Suddenly on network television. This, while the people were still grieving and numbed from the horror of the death of President Kennedy. When word of this reached Sinatra, he was absolutely incensed…one of the very few times had I ever seen him that angry. He got off a letter to the head of broadcasting at ABC, telling them that they should be jailed; it was in such bad taste to do that after the death of President Kennedy.
Sinatra, Jr. does not elaborate any further, so I interpret that to mean that Frank, Sr. fired off an angry letter, and the fact that the film remains in circulation to this day would indicate that it was never actually “pulled” (of course, you are free to concoct your own conspiracy theory).
The Manchurian Candidate – There’s certainly more than just a perfunctory nod to Red hysteria in John Frankenheimer’s 1962 cold war paranoia fest, which was the last assassination thriller of note released prior to the zeitgeist-shattering horror of President Kennedy’s murder. Oddly enough, Frank Sinatra was involved in this project as well.
Sinatra plays a Korean War vet who reaches out to help a buddy he served with (Laurence Harvey). Harvey is on the verge of a meltdown, triggered by recurring war nightmares. Sinatra has been suffering the same malady (both men had been held as POWs by the North Koreans). Once it dawns on Sinatra that they both may have been brainwashed during their captivity for very sinister purposes, all hell breaks loose.
In this narrative (based on Richard Condon’s novel) the assassin is posited as an unwitting dupe of a decidedly “un-American” political ideology; a domestic terrorist programmed by his Communist puppet masters to kill on command. Some of the Cold War references have dated; others (as it turns out) are oddly timely…evidenced as recently as this past week.
Seven Days in May – This 1964 “conspiracy a-go go” thriller was director John Frankenheimer’s follow-up to The Manchurian Candidate. Picture if you will: a screenplay by Rod Serling, adapted from a novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II.
Kirk Douglas plays a Marine colonel who is the adjutant to a hawkish, hard right-leaning general (Burt Lancaster) who heads the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The general is at loggerheads with the dovish President (Fredric March), who is perceived by the general and some of the other joint chiefs as a “weak sister” for his strident support of nuclear disarmament.
When Douglas begins to suspect that an imminent, unusually secretive military “exercise” may in fact portend more sinister intentions, he is torn between his loyalty to the general and his loyalty to the country as to whether he should raise the alarm. Or is he just being paranoid?
An intelligently scripted and well-acted nail-biter, right to the end. Also with Ava Gardner, Edmund O’Brien, and Martin Balsam.
Executive Action – After the events of November 22, 1963, Hollywood took a decade-long hiatus from the genre; it seemed nobody wanted to “go there”. But after Americans had mulled a few years in the sociopolitical turbulence of the mid-to-late 1960s (including the double whammy of losing Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King to bullets in 1968), a new cycle of more cynical and byzantine conspiracy thrillers began to crop up (surely exacerbated by Watergate).
The most significant shift in the meme was to move away from the concept of the assassin as a dupe or an operative of a “foreign” (i.e., “anti-American”) ideology; some films postulated that shadowy cabals of businessmen and/or members of the government were capable of such machinations. The rise of the JFK conspiracy cult (and the cottage industry it created) was probably a factor as well.
One of the earliest examples was this 1973 film, directed by David Miller, and starring Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan. Dalton Trumbo (famously blacklisted back in the 50s) adapted the screenplay from a story by Donald Freed and Mark Lane.
A speculative thriller about the JFK assassination, it offers a scenario that a consortium comprised of hard right pols, powerful businessmen and disgruntled members of the clandestine community were responsible.
Frankly, the premise is more intriguing than the film (which is flat and talky), but the filmmakers deserve credit for being the first ones to “go there”. The film was a flop at the time, but has become a cult item; as such, it is more of a curio than a classic. Still, it’s worth a watch.
The Parallax View – Alan J. Pakula’s 1974 thriller takes the concept of the dark corporate cabal one step further, positing political assassination as a sustainable capitalist venture, if you can perfect a discreet and reliable algorithm for screening and recruiting the right “employees”.
Warren Beatty delivers an excellent performance as a maverick print journalist investigating a suspicious string of untimely demises that befall witnesses to a U.S. senator’s assassination in a restaurant atop the Space Needle. This puts him on a trail that leads to an enigmatic agency called the Parallax Corporation.
The supporting cast includes Hume Cronyn, William Daniels and Paula Prentiss. Nice work by cinematographer Gordon Willis (aka “the prince of darkness”), who sustains the foreboding, claustrophobic mood of the piece with his masterful use of light and shadow.
The screenplay is by David Giler and Lorenzo Semple Jr. (based on the 1970 novel by Loren Singer, with a non-credited rewrite by Robert Towne). The narrative contains obvious allusions to the JFK assassination, and (in retrospect) reflects the political paranoia of the Nixon era (perhaps this was serendipity, as the full implications of the Watergate scandal were not yet in the rear view mirror while the film was in production).
The Conversation – Written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, this 1974 thriller does not involve a “political” assassination, but does share crucial themes with other films here. It was also an obvious influence on Brian De Palma’s 1981 thriller, Blow Out (see my review below).
Gene Hackman leads a fine cast as a free-lance surveillance expert who begins to obsess that a conversation he captured between a man and a woman in San Francisco’s Union Square for one of his clients is going to directly lead to the untimely deaths of his subjects.
Although the story is essentially an intimate character study, set against a backdrop of corporate intrigue, the dark atmosphere of paranoia, mistrust and betrayal that permeates the film mirrors the political climate of the era (particularly in regards to its timely proximity to the breaking of the Watergate scandal).
24 years later, Hackman played a similar character in Tony Scott’s 1998 political thriller Enemy of the State. Some have postulated “he” is the same character (you’ve gotta love the fact that there’s a conspiracy theory about a fictional character). I don’t see that myself; although there is obvious homage with a brief shot of a photograph of Hackman’s character in his younger days that is actually a production still from …The Conversation!
Blowout -This 1981 thriller is one of Brian De Palma’s finest efforts. John Travolta stars as a sound man who works on schlocky horror films. While making a field recording of ambient nature sounds, he unexpectedly captures audio of a fatal car crash involving a political candidate, which may not have been an “accident”. The proof lies buried somewhere in his recording-which naturally becomes a coveted item by some dubious characters. His life begins to unravel synchronously with the secrets on his tape.
The director employs an arsenal of influences (from Antonioni to Hitchcock), but succeeds in making this one of his most “De Palma-esque” with some of the deftest set-pieces he’s ever done (particularly in the climax).
Three Days of the Condor – One of seven collaborations between star Robert Redford and director Sydney Pollack, and one of the seminal “conspiracy-a-go-go” films. With a screenplay adapted by Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and David Rayfiel from James Grady’s novel “Six Days of the Condor”, this 1975 film offers a twist on the idea of a government-sanctioned assassination.
Here, you have members of the U.S. clandestine community burning up your tax dollars to scheme against other members of the U.S. clandestine community (no honor among conspirators, apparently). Also with Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson and Max von Sydow.
Pollack’s film conveys the same atmosphere of dread and paranoia that infuses The Conversation and The Parallax View. The final scene plays like an eerily prescient prologue for All the President’s Men, which wasn’t released until the following year. An absolutely first-rate political thriller with more twists and turns than you can shake a dossier at.
JFK – The obvious bookend to this cycle is Oliver Stone’s controversial 1991 film, in which Gary Oldman gives a suitably twitchy performance as Lee Harvey Oswald. However, within the context of Stone’s film, to say that we have a definitive portrait of JFK’s assassin (or “assassins”, plural) is difficult, because, not unlike Agatha Christie’s fictional detective Hercule Poirot, Stone suspects no one…and everyone.
The most misunderstood aspect of the film, I think, is that Stone is not favoring any prevalent narrative; and that it is by the director’s definition a “speculative” political thriller. Those who have criticized the approach seem to have missed that Stone himself has stated from the get-go that his goal was to provide a “counter myth” to the “official” conclusion of the Warren Commission (usually referred to as the “lone gunman theory”).
Stone’s narrative is so seamless and dynamic, many viewers didn’t get that he was mashing up at least a dozen *possible* scenarios. The message is right there in the script, when “Mr. X” (Donald Sutherland) advises New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner), “Don’t believe me. Do your own work…your own thinking.”
JICYMI-This recent episode of “The Commonwealth Club” features Mark Shaw, best-selling author of 6 books related to the Kennedy assassination, reflecting on the 60th anniversaryof the tragedy:
Back when he was running against Clinton he used to say she belonged in jail and she was crook and that she didn’t “have the strength and stamina” to be president. It wasn’tsubtle by any means. But this … this is beyond grotesque. And his audience loves it.
Don’t let them forget Trump or shirk who they’ve become
Following up on the post below, here’s a great piece by Brian Beutler from his excellent newsletter Off Message. He recaps the infuriatingly terrible media response to Trump’s “vermin” comments, proving just how inured they’ve become to his escalating extremism. He notes that the outcry from regular people finally jolted them out of their reflexive “that old Trumps says the darndest things” reaction. But what do we do?
But the question now—as days turn into weeks, and fresh stories vie for our attention—is whether this will be a passing kerfuffle, or one Republicans, as long as they support Trump, can never live down.
Reporters have no shortage of Trump outrage porn to cover, and if Democrats can’t differentiate the vermin libel as something that transcends his more typical offenses, it will fade like most of the others. That’s the main source of my small misgivings over the couch-fainting, pearl-clutching way liberals have responded to it. “Ack, Hitler said that!” True enough, he did. But every reference to Hitler comes fraught not just with the repugnance of his words and deeds, but with danger and fear—of invasion, and war, and death camps. It grants Trump the air of menace he wants to cultivate. He and everyone in his orbit derive juvenile pleasure when good people flinch at their provocations. They are much less happy when they get caught taking things too far. That’s when the artifice falls away, and they clam up like bullies who realize they’ve antagonized someone who can kick their asses. That’s when they start turning on each other.
So what could Democrats say or do to transform the vermin libel into a red line? Why is it that, seven years later, the word “deplorables” remains a galvanizing term for Republicans and an embarrassment for Democrats? Was it that Republicans recoiled in fear that Hillary Clinton might tie up the deplorables and send them down a river in a basket? Or was it that they used it to undermine her claim to want to be president for all Americans—and then kept saying that?
Clinton fairly but unwisely described Trump’s most bigoted supporters as “deplorables” on a Friday evening. That Monday, Trump responded, “She revealed herself to be a person who looks down on the proud citizens of our country as subjects for her rule,” and insisted, in deep projection, that anyone with “contempt in your heart for the American voter” should not run for president.
I think Democrats can exploit the vermin libel in much the same way. So that there’s no forgetting, even after Trump’s gone. But they have to want to.
True, but: Why did that happen? Was it inevitable? If it wasn’t inevitable, shouldn’t Democrats have labored harder to keep memories fresh, since, unattended, they are short? And now that the forgetting is underway, how much damage has been done? Is it reversible? Can a professional campaign and a few well-produced ads jog memories that have faded over three years?
I’m actually staking a lot of hope on the answer to that last question being “yes.” The trauma and scars of the Trump presidency are real, which means mass forgetting should be slower, harder. When he’s tormenting us nonstop again, people will remember. Or at least I hope they will.
[…]
“Trump is more mentally fit for the presidency than Biden” is a false contagion of an idea, and it can only spread through a combination of lost knowledge (about Trump) and new impressions (about Biden).
Biden’s enemies have gone to great lengths to foster those impressions, and spread them. Democrats have done much less work to preserve our collective memory of the Trump years.
If the net effect of those decisions is to turn the question of fitness for the presidency on its head, why couldn’t it also upend our perception of other things? Those same Trump loyalists have gone to similarly great lengths to spread the idea that the Biden economy is tattered and miserable; most Democrats have shied away from directly refuting that assertion for fear of seeming insensitive to a struggling minority. Coincidentally, a strong public consensus has emerged in favor of the idea that the economy is bad when (broadly speaking, for most people) it is very strong.
Coincidentally, or perhaps not.
The consensus could just as easily reflect the effectiveness of propaganda—mostly on the right, but some on the left—over material reality, and the Democrats’ acquiescence to it.
So what is to be done? If the tools required to make the vermin libel a lasting liability for Republicans include repetition, and the tools required to remind people that Trump is a crook and a lunatic include repetition, what’s the best way to introduce people to the idea that the economy is much stronger than public opinion suggests?
If Democrats interpret public opinion to mean they should be delicate about their economic messaging, that they should reinforce the primacy of people’s struggles, they will in essence feed the false perception, and compound the problem. Why do that work for the people who want to beat you?
But if the right move is to contest public opinion in the realm of ideas, it means politics is more about information warfare and less about governing excellence than we might like. I believe this because I’ve spent half of a life-long journalism career watching elections turn on bullshit. But I think even skeptics recognize it when it takes a toll, as it often does, in other countries.
The notion that political popularity is a variable that’s highly dependent on the trajectory of material conditions is very reductive. Obviously it’s better to succeed than to fail, and it’s easier to husband public approval in prosperity than in recession. But what people expect of their political leaders is constructed socially, not an inherent property of the human mind. Russian public opinion does not appear to be tightly linked to material conditions. Public opinion in Mexico doesn’t seem to turn on conditions there either, and it makes sense as a theoretical matter that people in societies with incompetent governments will lose faith in the idea that politics is about improving material conditions, and start making their assessments of leaders based on other things.
In the Republican nation of America, where government is and should be incompetent, perceptions of the economy have become a pure proxy for partisanship, good when the president is on team red; bad when on team blue.
We’re evolving into the propaganda society we imagined we were too advanced to become.
This may be an insoluble problem (though if any progressive billionaires want me to take a stab at solving it, my Venmo is easy to find). But even if it can be solved, Democrats will for now have to shape opinion through the system as it exists. They could attempt this by scampering to address every last economic indicator that isn’t pointed the right direction, and maybe they should. I’d never fault an officeholder for trying to make people’s lives better. But they’ll have more success moving the arrows of public opinion by transmitting opinion than they will by transmitting money.
Here’s the advice:
I’d suggest: Say what you mean bluntly on the topics you want people to care about. Don’t outsmart yourself. Don’t let your paranoid suspicions about how your opponents will react or your fears about playing into their traps overcomplicate the task of conveying simple ideas.
If you think the vermin libel disqualifies Trump, say so. It’s a much simpler way to introduce the idea than comparing Trump to Hitler and hoping the masses a) agree with the comparison and b) decide it is disqualifying on their own. The economic message should be similarly blunt. “We’ve built the best American economy in 70 years, after Trump destroyed the last one.”
More than any particular poll or paper liability, I worry about the way the party strains to explain Donald Trump’s enduring strength as a candidate against Joe Biden. The kids call it cope, but whatever it tells us about the state of the Democratic psyche, it also suggests something much worse—that strategic weaknesses keep going unaddressed.
For the weeks and months following Donald Trump’s campaign announcement, the whipping boy was inflation. When the government tamed inflation, it became an under-theorized “lag” in public sentiment about the economy. When polls suggest Biden’s age explains his poor polling, we’re told the point is moot because Donald Trump is also old. When Biden trailed Trump in the late summer, we were reminded that Barack Obama also trailed in head-to-head polling at the same point in 2011. Now that it’s November, we’re due for a new hypothesis.
Those who insist good policy is destiny will try to find it in economic data. For most of my career, they embraced the view that job and GDP growth were skeleton keys to political success. They continued making that argument under Biden until it ceased to be true, at which point they insisted it was inflation, then specifically gas prices, then a hangover effect from inflation, then housing prices. You can call it a curve fitting exercise, I think of it as Dems trying to tug carpeting into every corner of a room that’s too big. The missing piece is storytelling.
I can’t argue with any of this. Relentless repetition is key. Trump knows that and he’s right. It works/. Even when you think you’ll scream if you have to say it again, do it anyway. There is a cacophony of news and information in our culture and it’s the only way to break through. And he’s right: Keep It Simple Stupid.
I don’t know if Dems will get the message. They are still caught in the argument between “popularism” kitchen table issues and bold confrontational politics, using the wedge issues like abortion and democracy. I think it’s more than fine to tout accomplishments but in a country where people think the economy is in a great depression despite all evidence to the contrary, the latter is the better choice.
Over the past few years people have argued over whether or not Trump and his movement were fascist. (I came down on the side of yes, quite some time ago..) But others made the point that the word has a specific meaning and Trump didn’t necessarily fit it perfectly. Tom Nichols, Never Trump conservative, was one of those people.
In this piece he correctly describes him as a lazy, narcissistic, gadfly who doesn’t really care about anything but himself. He points out that he “had only two consistent issues: hatred of immigrants and love for foreign autocrats.” He writes:
“Trump, as a person and as a public figure, is just so obviously ridiculous; fascists, by contrast, are dangerously serious people, and in many circumstances, their leaders have been unnervingly tough and courageous. Trump—whiny, childish, unmanly—hardly fits that bill”
He warned that the indiscriminate use of the word word could blind us to the time when it might actually become accurate. He says that time has come:
For weeks, Trump has been ramping up his rhetoric. Early last month, he echoed the vile and obsessively germophobic language of Adolf Hitler by describing immigrants as disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” His address in Claremont, New Hampshire, on Saturday was the usual hot mess of random thoughts, but near the end, it took a more sinister turn. (It’s almost impossible to follow, but you can try to read the full text here.) In one passage in particular, Trump melded religious and political rhetoric to aim not at foreign nations or immigrants, but at his fellow citizens. This is when he crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism:
We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country … On Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible … legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream
It’s not just the vermin thing. It’s the threat to “drive out” the people he calls communists, Marxists, fascists and radical left thugs, all of which he has used to describe the people who oppose him. That’s us, folks.
As the New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat later pointed out to The Washington Post, Trump is populating this list of imaginary villains (which she sees as a form of projection) in order “to set himself up as the deliverer of freedom. Mussolini promised freedom to his people too and then declared dictatorship.”
Add the language in these speeches to all of the programmatic changes Trump and his allies have threatened to enact once he’s back in office—establishing massive detention camps for undocumented people, using the Justice Department against anyone who dares to run against him, purging government institutions, singling out Christianity as the state’s preferred religion, and many other actions—and it’s hard to describe it all as generic “authoritarianism.” Trump no longer aims to be some garden-variety supremo; he is now promising to be a threat to every American he identifies as an enemy—and that’s a lot of Americans.
[…]
It is possible, I suppose, that Trump really has little idea of what he’s saying. (We’re under threat from “communists” and “Marxists” and “fascists?” Uh, okay.) But he has reportedly expressed admiration of Hitler (and envy of Hitler’s grip on the Nazi military), so when the Republican front-runner uses terms like vermin and expressions like poisoning the blood of our country, we are not required to spend a lot of time generously parsing what he may have meant.
More to the point, the people around Trump certainly know what he’s saying. Indeed, Trump’s limited vocabulary might not have allowed him to cough up a word like vermin. We do not know if it was in his prepared text, but when asked to clarify Trump’s remarks, his campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, told The Washington Postthat “those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”
What?
Cheung later clarified his clarification: He meant to say their “sad, miserable existence” instead of their “entire existence,” as if that was somehow better. If that’s not a fascist faux pas, nothing is.
But here I want to caution my fellow citizens. Trump, whether from intention or stupidity or fear, has identified himself as a fascist under almost any reasonable definition of the word. But although he leads the angry and resentful GOP, he has not created a coherent, disciplined, and effective movement. (Consider his party’s entropic behavior in Congress.) He is also constrained by circumstance: The country is not in disarray, or at war, or in an economic collapse. Although some of Trump’s most ardent voters support his blood-and-soil rhetoric, millions of others have no connection to that agenda. Some are unaware; others are in denial. And many of those voters are receptive to his message only because they have been bludgeoned by right-wing propaganda into irrationality and panic. Even many officials in the current GOP, that supine and useless husk of an institution, do not share Trump’s ambitions.
I have long argued for confronting Trump’s voters with his offenses against our government and our Constitution. The contest between an aspiring fascist and a coalition of prodemocracy forces is even clearer now. But deploy the word fascist with care; many of our fellow Americans, despite their morally abysmal choice to support Trump, are not fascists.
As for Trump, he has abandoned any democratic pretenses, and lost any benefit of the doubt about who and what he is.
Nichols thinks that people who were premature anti-fascist (where have we heard that before?) in response to Trump have caused a problem because now nobody will believe it since he’s now actually a fascist. I don’t think I agree with that. He was always a fascist, he’s just too ignorant to know what he is. Before he didn’t have enough people around him to bring a full program into fruition and the Republican Party was too confused to help him. (They still are to some degree, fortunately.)
He is naturally gifted at propaganda since he’s a pathological liar and he’s demonstrated amazing power with his Big Lie. Others have noticed and see the potential of using him for fascistic purposes. It’s here whether we call it by its name or not.
Greg Sargent on the latest accomplishments of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer:
Few Democrats would deny that the party must win back working people. Yet one of the party’s long-term conundrums is whether they can pursue ambitious efforts to combat climate change without threatening those very workers’ wages or jobs.
In coming days, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is set to sign a package of bills that would transition the state to 100 percent clean electricity by 2040. The bills — which also include robust provisions for workers — are among the most ambitious efforts undertaken by any state to move toward a carbon-free future in a manner that is actively good for working people. Significantly, Democrats are testing this approach in a swing state in the heart of the industrial Midwest.
[…]
Climate action tends to expose cracks in the Democratic coalition precisely because it aggravates existing tensions between the goals and interests of environmentalists and workers. But in a surprise, after long negotiations between the governor, labor advocates and Democrats in the state legislature, the end product pleased most climate activistsand labor officials.
“Michigan is leading the way in creating high-road labor standards that protect good-paying jobs while providing a pathway to a clean energy future,” Ryan Sebolt, director of government affairs for the state’s AFL-CIO, told me. As energy work evolves, Sebolt said, the bills will ensure that these remain quality jobs “long into the future.”
That’s strikingly positive talk given that organized labor has long been skeptical that such a balance can be achieved. And it comes with good news on another front: United Auto Workers members are close to ratifying their new contracts with General Motors, Ford and Stellantis. These contracts will cover a large number of workers at electric-vehicle battery plants, another sign that the transition could translate into quality green-energy manufacturing jobs in the future.
All of this is very heartening stuff. If working people come to see that they have a stake in the green transition, it could help build durable political support for it over time.
“This is a multi-decade-long transition to remake the energy system,” said Jesse Jenkins, a climate expert at Princeton University. “The only way we’re going to accomplish that is if we sustain a political coalition to see that process through.”
Opponents of the green transition understand the fault lines in that coalition perfectly well. When former president Donald Trump traveled to Detroit to speak about the UAW strike, he railed that the transition to electric vehicles will ultimately destroy autoworkers’ livelihoods. Michigan, one of the three “blue wall” states that Trump won in 2016, is trending Democratic but will be heavily contested in 2024 with Trump making exactly that sort of appeal to the state’s industrial workers.
At the same time, Whitmer and Democrats are using the majorities they won in 2022 to pass a range of socially liberal measures — from new LGBTQ+ protections to repeal of an antiabortion statute — that are often said to be driving working-class voters from the party. But they are doing this while also appealing to workers’ material interests: Earlier this year, they repealed Michigan’s anti-union “right to work” bill, and now, they’re passing a climate bill that working people can learn to love.
If Michigan Democrats can win back working people by passing solid pro-labor legislation without abandoning the party’s deepest priorities on cultural issues — and defeat Trump in the industrial heartland — that would be a big step forward. But if they can also pull this off on climate, it could provide a model for more efforts to sell the green transition as a boon to workers in difficult political territory going forward.
And the stakes riding on getting thatone right are impossible to overstate.
Thomas P.M. Barnett’s “The Pentagon’s New Map” (2004) outlined how the sources of conflict in the world are concentrated in the non-integrating “gap” areas under cultural stress and disconnected from the broader economy.
The cultural stress in the U.S. these days, Barnett tells James Fallows on his podcast this week, is connected to America “losing its whiteness.” But that’s more connected to climate change than Americans of the Baby Boom generation care to admit.
Barnett is crystal-clear about climate change as a central driver of world politics, economics, and strategic tensions. And he emphasizes two related aspects of particular importance to the United States.
—One is climate’s role as driver of migrations—mainly south-to-north around the world, since that’s more feasible than east-west migration across the broad oceans. Millions of people are going to have to move, and sooner or later someone will have to accept them.
—The other is climate’s potential to be the next great motivating theme in American life, a rough counterpart to frontier-expansion in the late 1800s, and industrialization in the early 1900s, and military challenges in the mid-1900s.
You can read more about this as the central argument in his new book, and a recurring theme in the second half of our conversation. For instance: Barnett argues in his book that the US will naturally become more open to Latin American migrants, both because more of them will be coming, and because the US will have greater needs.
But how does America move past its impulse to shoot migrants at the border?
Barnett: It’s going to be accomplished by generational turnover.
The Boomers and the Gen Xers, both Cold War babies, what do they know? They know the sanctity of borders. It’s a very Cold War mentality. That’s what they know. That’s what they’re comfortable with. OK?
When you start talking millennials, Gen Zs—I got six of them as kids—they don’t have those instincts. They’re not gonna sign up for a 50 year Cold War with the Chinese to prevent them from doing—what? Building bridges around the world or something like that? They’re very skeptical about our military interventions. You’re seeing the resistance on our support to Israel right now. You’re seeing the wavering of our support to Ukraine. They’re very much focused on climate change.
They are very much convinced that they’re going to live in this (ethnically changing) world. I think they’re right. And they’re eager to address it. So think about who’s going to be running the system in 2050. The peaking and the points in history where we’re going to have the most adaptation are going to be probably in the 2030s, 40s, 50s. And that’s when Gen Z and the millennials are going to come online.
The mean age for a white person in America, Barnett says, is about 58, which turns out to be the mean age of people arrested or charged for the January 6th protest (as of April 2021 study; 94% white, average age 40). The nonwhite mean age in America is about 27. The Ancien Régime is fighting to hold on and hold out against change but will ultimately fail.
California over our lifetimes became a “majority minority” state. Guess what? The sky did not fall. It won’t in the rest of the country. The question is how much political violence has to occur before the Boomers let go of (or die out trying) the world they grew up as comfortably in as they don’t in this changing one.
Gen Z, Barnett tells Fallows, does not feel those winds of change. Like flying in a hot air balloon, they don’t feel the wind. Gen Zers are in it and part of it. The cultural changes that make Boomers tear their thinning hair out are natural for Gen Z.
It’s a fascinating 55 minutes of conversation. Especially the part about what a positive American “brand” could look like in a climate-changed future. Now, I have to get the (audio) book.
To my Gen Z friends: Hurry up every chance you get.
