Let’s talk about a genre of political punditry that appears genuine and reasonable but has more in common with conspiracy theory than well-intended debate in the interest of democracy, intellectual honesty and the common good. On closer inspection, in fact, it’s clear these writers are modeling ways of rationalizing political decisions that have already been made. They are, moreover, demonstrating a total lack of caring about whether their “arguments” are plausibly right or wrong.

Opinion editors have incentive to balance views, obviously, but they have no incentive to sort good faith from bad. They themselves don’t care if opinion writers care about the truth, because the business of journalism doesn’t care. It encourages and rewards venomous bullshit.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The genre I’m talking about was in wide circulation when the Democratic Party was searching for a new standard-bearer. Everyone envisioned a nominee who could unite the party while appealing to disaffected white Republicans, the balance being critical to amassing the majority needed to defeat the president. Bernie Sanders seemed to be the frontrunner. Op-ed pages were filled with dire warnings — apparently in good-faith — against the party choosing “a socialist.” The perspectives varied, but the conclusions were the same. Picking Sanders would guarantee four more years of Donald Trump.

These arguments had almost no effect, fortunately. Joe Biden’s nomination was rooted in the preferences of pragmatic Black voters, in the south and midwest, more than the preferences of disaffected white Republicans. (Black Democrats saw Biden as a shield against white supremacy and other bigotries more than white Democrats favoring a progressive candidate, and they were right.)

That these arguments had almost no impact on party decision-making allowed them to stay in circulation. Writers who said they’d vote for Trump if the Democratic Party picked “a socialist” are now saying the same thing: they’ll vote for Trump if the Democrats keep “being socialist.”

You get the feeling it doesn’t matter what Biden does. The goal isn’t genuine engagement in free speech. It’s exploiting free speech to sow confusion, cast doubt and otherwise discredit the Democratic nominee. Moving the bar is what serial abusers do.

Opinion editors don’t seem aware of their complicity in the gaslighting of trusting readers. More importantly, opinion editors do not seem aware that this genre of punditry, however much it might appeal to their need for balancing an array of political views, does not care whether it’s plausibly wrong or right.

Caring about the rightness or wrongness of an argument means caring about the practical consequences of it, which means taking responsibility for the integrity of the social relationships that constitute a community.

In other words, caring about rightness or wrongness means caring about trust.

Writers of I-was-for-Biden-before-I-was-against-him don’t care whether you trust them. They care instead about poisoning public discourse, making it harder for voters to make good choices, and thus improving the president’s chances of winning.

Making all this worse is these “arguments” are seen as respectable. They’re more like dangerous conspiracy theories, though, and opinion editors should see them as such.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Conspiracy theories are not just crazy cult conniptions. They are the rational result of people deciding to sever previous obligations to the democratic process and the common good, because the democratic process and the common good are getting in the way of their political goals.

For many now welcomed into the GOP, it’s no longer possible to win by arguing the Democrats are right or wrong about this or that policy. Reasonable good-faith arguments are insufficient. (Reasonable good-faith arguments, moreover, demand sharing space with political opponents deserving annihilation, not respect.)

Conspiracy theories not only create boogeymen that justify any means of destruction; they attack the ways by which the enemy maintains an advantage: the persuasive power of free speech. Undermine free speech. Undermine the enemy.

As I said before, QAnon “believers” don’t care whether their conspiracy theory is true. All they care about is bringing to mainstream attention the allegation that the Democrats, and by extension Joe Biden, are part of a secret cabal of pedophiles and cannibals conspiring to bring down the president from the inside of the federal government.

The conspiracy theory, in other words, is merely a convenience that, among other goals, legitimizes political violence in a society that normally shuns political violence. In a very real sense, all Republican rhetoric is conspiratorial.

Biden is a Trojan Horse for the radical left. The Democrats tried stealing the 2000 election. Jamie Harrison, Senate candidate, is hiding something in tax returns he won’t release. (He did.)

Making the allegation is the point. Caring about whether it’s true isn’t.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 16 September 2020

Word Count: 784

—————-

White centrist pundits like New York’s Jonathan Chait have an annoying habit of downplaying the authoritarianism that ambushed the American liberal tradition before crashing through democracy’s guardrails down the road to serfdom. They keep failing to see what’s happening with their own eyes. Indeed, they won’t see.

They’re too invested in the idea of America being the exception to the tendency of other nations to eat themselves. Yet this exceptionalism cannot be squared with the following truth: No one expects Donald Trump, should he emerge victorious, to win the popular vote.

And I mean no one. Not his rivals, his donors, his supporters, his campaign, not even the president himself. All things being equal — by which I mean if we’re lucky and the president behaves somewhat “normally” — Trump’s only chance of winning reelection is by moving just enough white people in just enough states to eke out an Electoral College win.

His victory in that case would be the third time in six elections the winner of a democratic election was determined by a minority of voters. (That’s compared to one time it happened between 1789 and 2000.) We can quibble about whether he’s more of a crook than a fascist, but we can’t quibble about this fundamental fact. Our system isn’t preventing authoritarianism. It’s maintaining conditions for its rise.

Actually, we can’t quibble about the crook-fascist thing either. Quibbling about whether this president is more this (crook) than that (fascist) is just another way white centrist pundits avoid seeing what’s right in front of them. Fact is, the Nazis and other authoritarian regimes were and are breathtakingly corrupt. Corruption is their bag. They can’t be otherwise.

Authoritarians do not compete against legitimate political opponents according to an agreed-to set of rules. Politics is an end, not a means. They refuse to be restrained by laws, institutions, and other people. Enemies are not just defeated. They can’t be permitted to fight another day. Enemies must be annihilated.

The president is a clown, to be sure. He’s a clown who’s preternaturally corrupt and metabolically incapable of recognizing the authority of moral, legal or institutional constraints on his appetites. From his brain worms can come things white centrist pundits won’t allow themselves to imagine, because imagining them would mean questioning faith in America as the exception to the world’s evils.

The irony is they don’t have to imagine. Trump told Fox’s Jeanine Pirro on Monday that he’d declare victory and “put down” any challenge. “Look, it’s called insurrection,” he said.

We just send them in and we do it very easy. I mean it’s very easy. I’d rather not do that because there’s no reason for it, but if we had to we’d do that and put it down within minutes, within minutes. Minneapolis, they were having problems. We sent in the National Guard within a half an hour. That was the end of the problem. It all went away.

Nor do we have to imagine what many normal people will do in the face of corruption seeking dominance above all. My friend Greg Sargent wrote that Trump’s cronies “are also corruptly manipulating the levers of your government to [turn lies] into truths, or inflate them into issues that will garner news coverage that helps him in some way, or both.” Greg went on to say:

Because the crush of governmental manipulation to serve Trump’s personal and political ends is so relentless, we often focus only on isolated examples as they skate past. But we need to connect the dots. Taken together, they tell a larger story that is truly staggering in its levels of corruption.

Greg pointed out seven ways the president is corrupting the government for his own reelection purposes, including “rushing coronavirus treatments,” “limiting disclosure of knowledge of Russian sabotage,” and “discrediting vote-by-mail,” and while Greg is right, there’s another way of looking at this. It’s what white centrist pundits fail to see, because seeing it contravenes their cherished beliefs.

Leaders don’t actually run things. They need normal people for that, and the fact is, lots of normal people in this government are willing to roll over and give an authoritarian whatever he wants.

Anyone maintaining the argument that authoritarianism can’t happen here must contend with the fact that so much authoritarianism is already happening here.

It’s time we stopped asking if Trump is trying to place himself above the law. It’s now time to say he succeeded. The question now should be whether he’s going to be punished.

Chait fortunately says, in “The Case for Consequences,” that the president should be punished. Unfortunately, he says fascism is the wrong way to understand him. There’s no reason to separate the two. The world’s fascists were world-historical criminals. Turning criminal behavior into politically legitimate and socially acceptable behavior is, after all, what makes authoritarianism terrifying.

It won’t be enough to punish Trump for his crimes. We must reform our political system, too, so that a minority of voters determines the presidential winner once every 200 years, not thrice every 20.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 15 September 2020

Word Count: 840

—————-

Bob Woodward is the most conventional of conventional reporters. He is very good at gaining access and gathering facts, but like most members of the Washington press corps, he nearly always avoids thinking through the ramifications of what he’s found, even if the evidence, which he reliably piles high, demands that he think it through.

The legendary reporter was on “60 Minutes” Sunday to talk about his new book, Rage. It reveals for the first time that the president knew in February how deadly the new coronavirus was going to be — that it’s airborne and worse than the flu — but did everything in his power to prevent the public from understanding it fully.

That would have been enough to warrant an interview with Scott Pelley. Then Woodward did something to my knowledge he’s never done, nor have too many in Washington.

He came to a moral conclusion.

 

Pelley: You’re known as the reporter who doesn’t put his thumb on the scale. And yet, at the end of this book, you do just that.

Woodward: It’s a conclusion based on evidence, overwhelming evidence, that he could not rise to the occasion with the virus and tell the truth. And one of the things that President Trump told me, ‘In the presidency, there’s always dynamite behind the door.’ The real dynamite is President Trump. He is the dynamite.

Remember that coming to a conclusion is taboo among orthodox journalists like Woodward. (And the older the reporter, generally the more orthodox they are.) Coming to a conclusion violates the news tradition of neutrality and letting readers decide.

The reporter’s job is reporting facts. Moral conclusions are for editorial writers. That Woodward of all people is breaking this rule should be seen as a reckoning of sorts for a press corps complicit in the creation of a “post-truth” authoritarian presidency.

When Donald Trump speaks, every third word is a lie. Reporters keep giving him the benefit of the doubt, though. They report what he says unfiltered or weakly qualified.

After more than 20,000 falsehoods (as of July), you’d think empirically-minded people like members of the press corps would by now have come to the conclusion that Trump is a liar. Don’t believe him. Verify everything.

They haven’t. They seem to have an almost religious belief that democracy will endure no matter how many lies poison it — that the status quo is strong and sustainable, and will outlive Trump.

The press corps isn’t alone. Many Americans, even now, tend to take democracy for granted.

For granted? That flies in the face of conventional wisdom, doesn’t it? We’re told that Donald Trump’s election and that of authoritarians in Hungary, Brazil, Turkey and the Philippines are proof that people have lost faith amid a conspiracy of international crises — climate change and globalization being chief among them.

Instead of reforming institutions or reviving political participation, they are turning to would-be strongmen to save them. People have too little faith in democracy, not too much.

The whole truth in this country is there are plenty of voters (most of them white, most of them affluent) who do not believe the president is dangerous to the republic. They believe it will carry on, so much so they can grind as many axes as they please.

Sure, he says things no president should say, but he doesn’t believe half of them. He doesn’t believe, as he said in Nevada over the weekend, that after winning a second term, he’s going to “negotiate” a third, maybe even a fourth. He doesn’t believe these things that these voters believe, because he knows a president can’t do that, even if he wanted to.

This is an “unthinking faith,” according to David Runciman, allowing people to believe democracy can withstand anything. “Far from making democracy invincible, this sort of blithe confidence makes it vulnerable,” the Cambridge scholar told The Economist in 2018. “It gives us license to indulge our grievances regardless of the consequences.”

You see where I’m going. There are plenty of voters in this country who don’t mind the president’s effort to ban Muslims, deport “illegals,” police Black people and otherwise punch down on the margins of society if they can get another tax break.

They don’t mind his corruption, dereliction of duty and erosion of the rule of law. They think his critics are partisans only, or complaining for the sake of complaining. Importantly, they don’t or won’t believe their support is fueling democracy’s decline. These mostly white and mostly affluent Americans believe they are serious, respectable, reasonable and patriotic citizens.

They know the president is lying but won’t act. They know he’s lying but don’t care. Both are the result of too much faith in democracy, not too little. Like the press corps, they suspend their disbelief and refuse to come to a moral conclusion.

Let’s hope Woodward’s taboo-shattering goes some way toward changing that.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 14 September 2020

Word Count: 814

—————-

The headlines over the last seven days have been terrible for the president. It was reported first that he said dead Americans Marines were “losers” and that volunteers for military service were “suckers.” Last came Bob Woodward’s bombshell.

Turns out Donald Trump knew the new coronavirus was deadlier than the flu. Turns out he consciously chose to minimize its anticipated impact as early as February. His abject dereliction of duty produced a death toll 66 times that of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

That’s a lot of bad press, so I suppose we’re due for a change of pace from members of the Washington press corps. If they’re going to spend time and energy producing bad headlines for the president, journalistic “balance” demands they produce at least one bad headline for Joe Biden — even if they must look under rocks and bushes to find it.

NBC News’ Sahil Kapur and Jonathan Allen, right on cue, made it happen with “Democrats are nervous about Trump’s persisting edge over Biden on the economy.”

This is not to say Kapur and Allen are wrong. They are quite right in reporting that polls suggest “Americans in battleground states still trust Trump over Biden on the economy, which often tops the list of decisive issues for voters.” I’m not here to quibble with their interpretation of the data. I’m not here to say the economy is an increasingly unreliable metric of voter behavior.

The only points I want to make are simple ones. First, Democrats, especially liberal Democrats, are always nervous, not because of polling or Trump’s swing-state resilience, but because they’re liberals. Second, and more importantly, Democrats should be nervous. The stakes can’t be higher. Defeat will surely mean the advance of the GOP’s politics of annihilation.

Liberals doubt themselves habitually in ways experienced rarely by Republicans, especially the White House’s current occupant. Trump believes he’s always right about what’s going to work for him politically, and after every instance in which he expresses superlative confidence in himself, he’s shown to be wrong. (When I say “every instance,” I mean every single one. Being impervious to shame means being impervious to humiliation wrought by troglodyte political judgment.)

Liberals just don’t work that way. Doubt is part of the mindset that makes them liberal. This is important to point out as it pertains to journalistic “balance.” Worried Democrats will always appear newsworthy compared to Republicans who are never worried, even if they should be.

Having doubts, moreover, is a good thing compared to the alternative. Here, I’m thinking of an essay written by Boston College political scientist Alan Wolfe. Published 16 years ago, it examines movements within the Republican Party at the time. It finds elements of thinking originated by fascist philosopher Carl Schmitt. In the process, Wolfe outlines the philosophical underpinnings that distinguish liberals from “conservatives” (his word).

I think of the differences reading reports treating Republicans and Democrats as if they were two sides of the same coin. The parties are different and dialectical in the ways they position themselves in the world. One has grave reservations about the moral use of political power. The other has none at all.

Wolfe writes that the most important lesson Schmitt teaches is that the differences between liberals and conservatives are not restricted to policy but include the very “meaning of politics itself.” Residues of Schmitt’s German version of conservatism, he said, “which shared so much with Nazism,” can be “detected in the ways in which conservatives today fight for their objectives.”

Writing in 2004, he went on to say:

Liberals think of politics as a means; conservatives as an end. Politics, for liberals, stops at the water’s edge; for conservatives, politics never stops. Liberals think of conservatives as potential future allies; conservatives treat liberals as unworthy of recognition. Liberals believe that policies ought to be judged against an independent ideal such as human welfare or the greatest good for the greatest number; conservatives evaluate policies by whether they advance their conservative causes. Liberals instinctively want to dampen passions; conservatives are bent on inflaming them. Liberals think there is a third way between liberalism and conservatism; conservatives believe that anyone who is not a conservative is a liberal. Liberals want to put boundaries on the political by claiming that individuals have certain rights that no government can take away; conservatives argue that in cases of emergency … the reach and capacity of the state cannot be challenged.

When journalists equate the unequal, they not only obscure what’s bad about the Republicans — making them seem confident and strong, when they might in fact be overconfident and weak — they obscure what’s good about the Democrats, and in turn, veil the authoritarian creep over an American liberal tradition for which there’s always something more important than winning, whether that’s “procedural integrity, historical precedent, or consequences for future generations,” Wolfe said.

Democrats doubt themselves when it comes to attaining power. Once they have it, they doubt again.

That’s good. That’s worth voting for.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 11 September 2020

Word Count: 833

—————-

As I write, I’m sitting with my daughter while she zooms into fourth grade. We’re about 40 minutes into class time. It’s taken this long to take attendance amid the sounds of dogs barking, ambulances blaring and infants crying. It’s taken this long, because every detail of teaching more than thirty 9-year-olds is magnified many times over. (If you’ve never had to navigate Google Classroom, consider yourself lucky.) It’s a microcosm of the maddening complexity of life in the time of the novel coronavirus.

This isn’t the half of it. The pandemic hasn’t hit my family nearly as hard as others, but we’re feeling pain. Universities and arts nonprofits, which had been the spheres of our employment, were not designed to weather a once-in-a-century virus. (Thanks to you, our largest source of income is now the Editorial Board!) Universities are grasping wildly in the dark. Arts nonprofits are the walking dead. We’re not among the 22 million filing jobless claims (yet) — and we’re not among the 6.5 million suffering from Covid-19 (yet) — but this pain is the norm now. It will be for the foreseeable future.

I’m not the kind of person who blames presidents for everything. I’m the kind of person who thinks presidents don’t have as much power as we tend to think they have. I didn’t blame George W. Bush for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, for instance. I didn’t blame Barack Obama, furthermore, for the desiccation of the Democratic Party during his tenure. Sure, he played a role, but other factors played greater roles (the white supremacist backlash against the first Black president being first and foremost). Nor did I credit him solely for the longest economic expansion in American history. I subscribe to the Lars-Erik Nelson school of thought in that presidents have a lot of power, but let’s not fool ourselves with “illusions of presidential omnipotence.”

And I didn’t blame the pandemic entirely on the current president. To be sure, I have accused Donald Trump of greed, cowardice, narrow-mindedness, and breathtaking irresponsibility. I have asked why the pundit corps is not talking more about negligent homicide. But these accusations were based on effects, not intent. A part of me has wondered whether he truly understood how deadly this thing is, even though he’s surrounded by people explaining how deadly this thing is. The Washington press corps, moreover, cites unnamed current and former White House officials claiming he just doesn’t get it, and that he probably never will get it. That seemed to jive with comments by former administration officials who claimed that he’s an idiot’s imbecile, that he’s got a gnat’s knack for focus, and that his ego is a clown car bursting with bile.

I blame him now. Thanks for Bob Woodward’s reporting, published Wednesday in the Washington Post, there is no more ambiguity. In an audio recording, the president told Woodward he knew how deadly the pandemic was going to be. He knew it was going to kill more people than the flu kills. He knew, and yet he failed to take appropriate action to warn and prepare the country for a death toll exceeding that of all foreign wars since 1950.

Not only did he fail to take appropriate action, the action he did take was “almost criminal,” as Joe Biden put last night in an interview with CNN. More than 200,000 will be dead by Election Day (or sooner). Two hundred and fifty thousand will be dead by Inauguration Day. Half a million may be dead by mid-2021. Normal, ordinary life meanwhile is upside down, backward and prolapsed. There’s just no end in sight.

He knew, and because he knew, my mind is reeling with questions. How many times has he put his own supporters in danger, as they gathered by the thousands without protection, while knowing he was putting them in danger? How many times has he golfed while knowing the pandemic was killing so many people city officials had to dig mass graves? How many times has he ridiculed people for wearing masks, thereby insulting the memory of the dead, while knowing the virus was airborne. How many times has he attacked public officials, whose job is serving the public’s interest, while knowing their service prevented the death toll from being even bigger?

Most important of all, how many Republicans understood that a man who commits treason is the kind of man who stands by while Americans die in droves — if that’s what it takes to win? The answer is all of them.

On Feb. 3, 2020, the Senate Republicans acquitted Trump of an attempt to extort a foreign official into an international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people. That’s a long-winded way of saying acquitted of treason.

On Feb. 7, after having gotten away with betraying his country once, the president laid the groundwork for betraying his country twice. He told Woodward in exacting detail how much deadlier the new coronavirus is compared to influenza. “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu. This is 5 percent versus 1 percent and less than 1 percent. You know? So, this is deadly stuff.”

For months after, Trump in his own words “played down” the pandemic, saying that warmer weather would drive it away, that flu season is worse, that the Democrats and the “fake news” press corps were making a big deal out of it for political reasons, and that governors trying to save lives by shutting down their states were tanking the economy on purpose to sink his chances of getting reelected. (He’s now saying he played the pandemic down to avoid inciting a panic, which is so ludicrous as to be insulting.) And for the last eight months, every Republican in the US Congress took his side.

If he didn’t know better (being an idiot’s imbecile, after all), they knew better, surely. But now we know he knew better, too, making their complicity more disgusting. They, too, were willing to stand by while Americans died en masse, all in order to win. And now, as they did at Trump’s impeachment trial, they have the gall to defend the indefensible. First, they sent people to their graves. Now, they’re pissing on them.

I don’t normally blame presidents for everything. This time is different, though. We now know the president’s goal was deception with deadly consequences. This is more than negligent homicide. This is criminal intent. And yesterday, he confessed to the crime.

Where can normal Americans turn for justice? I wish I knew the answer.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 10 September 2020

Word Count: 1,116

—————-

Most of us are familiar with the genre of political reporting in which a journalist from the New York Times parachutes into Ohio or Arizona (or wherever) to talk to Donald Trump’s supporters while they’re eating. Most don’t know, or have forgotten, this genre is a result of regime change.

After the liberal order established under Roosevelt in the 1930s gave way to the conservative order established under Reagan in the 1980s, a regime in which we are living still, the press corps got into the habit of explaining, after a Republican wins the White House, why Republican voters think a Republican president is super-duper, even now when he’s a lying, thieving, philandering sadist.

Implied in explanations ad nauseam is a specific audience: people residing on the coasts, and in and around major cities throughout the country. Also implied, but more subliminal, is a conclusion: that people residing on the coasts, and in and around major cities, don’t understand people who don’t do the same.

Another implication, far more cartoonish, is that everyone on the coasts, and in and around major cities, is a Democrat, while everyone who does not live in those areas is a Republican. This is often called the urban-rural divide. It’s so symmetrical as to be almost entirely fictional.

To be sure, country folk really do not, and will not, try to understand city-dwellers above and beyond what they see on television. The reverse, however, is mostly false. A minority percentage of city residents understand country folk intimately, because they left country living for jobs, excitement, love — everything cities can offer. And they have done so in a historic wave.

When FDR’s regime changed into Reagan’s regime, cities really were terrible places. But “by the turn of the third millennium, cities had turned around, not just in the United States but also all over the world,” Alex Marshall wrote today in Governing magazine.

They had gotten safer, cleaner, richer and more populous. Characters in countless TV shows and movies led fulfilling lives in urban environments, with ‘urban’ now meaning cool, interesting and less car-oriented.

Beneath the urge to find jobs and excitement lies something else, though — a desire to get the hell away from the country people. While a small minority of rural residents care about democracy, individual liberty, the common good and the rule of law, a large majority does not. It is indeed hostile toward small-r republican values.

Rural culture, while it goes by a variety of abstractions, is first and foremost top-down, rigid and intolerant of novelty, innovation and fair play (rules-based competition). Many young people leave because they can’t find work. However, many young people who possess creativity, sensitivity and intelligence must leave if they value their freedom and sanity.

In a very real sense, they didn’t leave as much as they were driven out. Creativity, sensitivity and intelligence are rewarded in the city. They are punished in the country. (I’m speaking in generalities, but simply ask anyone who has fled their roots for details.)

The Times almost never hires the people I’m talking about. The Times, like all elite institutions, hires its own, which is to say other elites. A reporter who spent her life in college prep schools and the Ivy League before moving to Manhattan to work at the Times is vulnerable to media representations of rural life, because they are media representations created by and for other elites.

Fact is, when rural Arizonans talk about “law enforcement” over eggs and bacon, what they mean is punishing the weak. When they talk about their “liberty,” what they mean is their dominance. When they talk about their “traditional values,” what they mean is their control. A Times reporter can’t possibly know any of that.

The problem is made worse when sources give voice to this or that conspiracy theory. She can’t know her sources are not delusional. She can’t know they are not crazy. She can’t know that conspiracy theories are central to their authoritarian view of the world. So she doesn’t report how dangerous their politics is.

She ends up reporting some Americans believe, for instance, that a “secret cabal” of Democrats and other “radical leftists” in the “deep state” is, in addition to sexually molesting innocent children and perhaps eating them, too, trying to bring down Donald Trump. (This is the QAnon conspiracy you’ve read about lately.)

What she should be reporting is some Americans are willing to say anything to justify any action — violence, insurrection, even treason—to defeat their perceived enemies. Elite reporters, and some non-elite reporters who are following suit, keep talking about conspiracy theories as if they were a “collective delusion.” They are no such thing.

The authoritarians who espouse them don’t care if QAnon is true. They don’t care that it’s false. Conspiracy theories are a convenience, a means of rationalizing what they already want to do, which is precisely what elite reporters can’t know and do not report.

Reporters dashing off to heartland diners to interview Republicans was an indicator that the old liberal order had given way to a new conservative order. My hope is that reporters will soon figure out they’re being played. Once they do, perhaps that will be an indication the conservative order we’re all still living in has finally given way.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 09 September 2020

Word Count: 884

—————-

Ezra Klein, a prominent white liberal, is the top editor of Vox. During last month’s Republican National Convention, he tweeted something I think we should address head on. It’s a claim white liberals tend to accept at face value, but if they thought about it, they’d realize two things. First, it’s false. Second, believing it’s true enables the real problem.

“This isn’t a political party,” Klein said. “It’s a personality cult.”

Before I go on, there are good reasons for making such a claim. The president’s most ardent supporters exhibit traits in keeping with adherents of religious cults. Dear Leader is always right even when he’s always wrong. His word carries more authority than observable empirical reality. (The sky isn’t blue. It’s green, because he said it is.)

Fidelity to the leader, and subsequently the sacred group, is more important than personal liberty and well-being. If he says people wearing masks in the middle of a pandemic are the enemy, well, that’s what they are. They deserve the sacred group’s wrath, even as the new coronavirus eats away at one’s own family and livelihood.

Be that as it may, white liberals are making a grave error. The Republican Party isn’t a personality cult as much as it is a collection of authoritarian personalities.

Individuals, taking pleasure in belonging to a “sacred group” (which revels in the new vitality and promised glory under Dear Leader), are submissive to authority, punitive toward minorities and “difference,” and adhere to “tradition,” wrote political psychologist Fathali Moghaddam in Threat to Democracy: The Appeal of Authoritarianism in an Age of Uncertainty.

Importantly, authoritarian personalities believe morality is obedience. They cannot tolerate nuance, ambiguity and precarity. Their worldview is black and white. Their “anti-scientific attitude,” Moghaddam wrote, dismisses fact if it doesn’t “correspond to what the potential or actual dictator presents as the truth.”

White liberals are seeing a deranged cult. What they are missing is a dangerous politics.

On the one hand, white liberals buy into the idea, proffered by prominent “Never Trump” conservative pundits, that the Republican Party isn’t what it used to be: a party of individual freedom. It no longer stands for much of anything, wrote the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof.

Donald Trump didn’t come out of nowhere, though. The present is a product of a past in which “conservatism,” as political scientist Frank Wilhoit famously said, stood for the idea that “there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

“Conservatives” have desired the installation of a president-king for at least 40 years. That they now have one has been occasion for non-stop celebration for the last four. (They are growing tired of him, however. Eventually, they’ll glom onto someone else.)

On the other hand, white liberals buy into respectable but uncritical explanations of Republican behavior under Donald Trump. The Brookings Institution, for instance, released a report trying to understand why some Americans refuse to wear masks. “We find that the number one reason given by Americans who are not wearing a mask is that it is their right as an American to not have to do so,” said co-authors Edward D. Vargas and Gabriel R. Sanchez.

“This is an important finding that suggests the core principal of individualism in American culture is leading to significant health consequences across the country” (my italics). This conclusion, while in good faith, is as wrong as it is empowering of the dangerous politics that’s powering such dangerous behavior.

People refusing to wear masks are not practicing individualism. We know this from the way they police people who do wear masks. We know this from the way they attempt to punish mask-wearers, either with physical harm, which is rare, fortunately, or with social sanction and emotional harm, which is common unfortunately.

Recall that obedience is morality. Recall that fidelity to the sacred group trumps rational choice. These are not rugged individualists. These are craven collectivists. Some white liberals are stuck in the habit of thinking of conservatives as anti-Communists. They forget that conservatives merely wanted to swap one kind of collectivism for another.

This is hard to hear, but I suspect that some white liberals want to believe the GOP has been reduced to a personality cult. They want to believe our age is the exception, not the rule; a bug, not a feature. They want to believe it’s just a matter of time before Donald Trump is gone and things can return to normal. This is a powerful desire on the part of white liberals, so powerful, I suspect, that they are willing, even eager, to ignore the real political problem.

There is no return if normal means the absence of authoritarian politics. It has been with us. It will be with us. White liberals must face that truth.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 08 September 2020

Word Count: 808

—————-

The percentage of the electorate that approves of the president’s performance has barely budged since he took office. How can that be? That’s one of the thorny and infuriating questions of his presidency. It doesn’t matter what he does. It doesn’t matter what he does not do. Donald Trump’s job approval has remained steady, around 40 percent, give or take a few points, according to FiveThirtyEight’s poll aggregator.

It might not be as thorny and infuriating, however, once you give it some thought. The reason nothing changes is because nothing else about Trump has changed either.

I’ll explain.

The most cynical explanation has the most common currency unfortunately. The president dominates every news cycle with lies, scandal and disinformation. The electorate has become both immune to controversy and inured to outrage.

This is the most frequent view among members of the press corps, whose job it is to pay attention to all things Trump, which is the reason why many of them are so cynical. This is why Politico’s Jake Sherman wondered if anyone outside Washington cared about the Republican National Convention’s nationally televised violation of the Hatch Act.

Citizens do care. Sherman got shellacked for being such a nihilist. But Sherman had a point if the president’s job approval is any indication. Every government bureaucrat involved in staging a political convention on the White House lawn broke federal law many times over. Yet Trump’s job approval is steady. According to FiveThirtyEight (as of this writing), it’s 43.5 percent. A crime-staged-in-real-time didn’t change a thing.

Same goes for the pandemic. More than 193,000 Americans have died from Covid-19 as of this writing, per Worldometer. That’s about 64 times the death toll of Sept. 11, 2001. That’s about 48,250 times the death toll of Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012. In fact, more Americans have died from the new coronavirus than from fighting in all foreign wars since the Korean War. We will probably reach 200,000 by Election Day, 250,000 by Inauguration Day, half a million by 2021’s midpoint. If the Trump administration had done a mediocre job, not a great job, of handling the pandemic, about 145,000 fewer Americans would be dead, according to analysis today by the New York Times’ David Leonhardt. Yet here we are. Negligent homicide isn’t enough to sink Trump below 40 percent.

Some have noted Trump is impervious to economics, too. They point to George W. Bush’s second term when his approval slid as the economy slid into a financial panic sparking the near decade-long Great Recession. Last week was the first time in 23 weeks in which weekly unemployment claims dropped below 1 million. About 22 million jobs were lost between February and April. Half haven’t come back, according to the Post.

The pandemic is now spreading rapidly into 22 rural states in the south and midwest, places where Trump’s support is strongest. (Cases rose by 126 percent in South Dakota over two weeks, according to Reuters.) Meanwhile, parents are jammed between the need to send kids to school and the need to earn a living. Trump seems to be the exception to economic forces that didn’t spare the last Republican president.

Given the simplest explanations are usually the best, I offer two.

One, Trump isn’t feeling what Bush felt, because he’s running for reelection. Many GOP partisans are willing to eat pretty much any outrage to prevent a Democrat from winning the White House. These voters, I contend, constitute the president’s floor. His approval rating won’t go any lower than it has been until he’s reelected. By then, perhaps we’ll know what Trump supporters really think of death-by-Covid. Until then, they’ll fake it.

The second explanation is simpler. It may be that most of the electorate made up its mind some time ago, perhaps as far back as Trump’s Inaugural Address, during which he made clear that he’d be a Republican, not an American, president. I’m guessing these voters decided who they’d vote for in 2020 by February 1, 2017, or soon afterward. These voters, I contend, constitute the president’s ceiling. It doesn’t matter what he does. It doesn’t matter what he does not do. He will never attain majority approval.

It could be we’re all desensitized and nothing matters, or it could be that most of us have made up our minds, and little or nothing is going to change it. Indeed, as things get worse, our mindsets are only deepened. The more the president talks about “law and order,” the most we’re reminded of his lawlessness. The more he talks about violence, the more we’re reminded he’s inciting it. The more he brags about the economy, the more we’re reminded that he’s ruined pretty much everything. Time will tell if I’m wrong, but this is better than the most complex, most nihilist perspectives.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 07 September 2020

Word Count: 801

—————-

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg revealed the president said dead American soldiers buried in Europe were “losers” and “suckers.” On the one hand, this might finally eat into Donald Trump’s approval rating of which around 40 percent of the electorate thinks he’s doing a bang-up job, no matter what he does, no matter how he does it. On the other hand, Goldberg’s revelations might sink like a stone, never to be seen again.

The optimist in me believes the former. The realist in me believes the latter, which is due, I think, to a huge chunk of the country desiring to believe Trump’s lies. It is also due, I think, to a smaller chunk not knowing it is being lied to. Even if we fail to communicate what’s surely the truth (“losers” and “suckers” fits Trump’s profile), we must try nevertheless. (The Washington Post and the AP have confirmed details of Goldberg’s story.)

We must try getting beneath and in-between layers of fact to expose a darker truth: a malicious contempt for doing the right thing for its own sake. He isn’t just immoral. He isn’t just amoral. His one commitment is anti-morality. He is hostile to anyone, anywhere, genuinely moved to act morally.

But even this, I suspect, gives Trump too much credit. We keep failing to appreciate just how petty this man is.

In 2018, Trump was scheduled to visit Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris, where 1,800 Marines were buried after helping stop the German advance toward Paris in 1918 in World War I. The site is hallowed ground to the US Marine Corps. Trump cancelled at the last second, citing weather too dangerous for helicopter flight. That wasn’t true, Goldberg wrote in a piece published Thursday night. The real reason, Goldberg said, was because the president “feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day.”

I think Goldberg buried the lede. Midway through his piece, he relates the following anecdote. On Memorial Day 2017, Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery. John Kelly, who was secretary of homeland security at the time, was with him. Kelly’s own son is buried at Arlington. He was killed in 2010 in Afghanistan at age 29. “Trump was meant … to join John Kelly in paying respects at his son’s grave, and to comfort the families of other fallen service members,” Goldberg wrote.

 

But according to sources with knowledge of this visit, Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned directly to his father and said, ‘I don’t get it. What was in it for them?’ … [Kelly] came to realize that Trump simply does not understand non-transactional life choices.

That’s one way of putting it. A translation: “Why would your son sacrifice his life for his country when he got nothing in return? Only losers and suckers do that.” Imagine saying something like that straight to the face of a father honoring his dead son on Memorial Day. Imagine, if it’s possible to imagine, being that kind of sumbitch.

Goldberg spends time parsing “losers” and “suckers.” Trump “believes that nothing is worth doing without the promise of monetary payback, and that talented people who don’t pursue riches are ‘losers.’” The word “suckers” has a more “capacious definition,” Goldberg writes. It “includes those who lose their lives in service to their country, as well as those who are taken prisoner, or are wounded in battle.” Eighteen hundred Marines killed defending Paris from the Germans in 1918, for example, were suckers.

We should appreciate good people interpreting Trump’s word-salad in good faith. But truth demands less generosity. This president was a serial draft dodger. Everyone knows about the “bone spurs” that kept him from fighting in Vietnam.

To him, failing to get out of doing something you don’t want to do means you’re a loser. Genuinely believing in values like patriotism, duty, and honor means you’re a sucker. All that matters is money and power. Anyone telling you different is trying to scam you. Spending a day at Arlington paying respects to the dead was surely confounding to someone who has never once experienced the ennobling uplift of moral action.

Trying to understand Trump risks giving him too much credit, though. I don’t think Trump cares. I don’t think he cares enough to expend the energy to wonder why people would behave with no expectation of constant praise or instant reward.

My most skeptical take is the hardest to swallow, because it’s so hard to imagine a grown man being so petty, but here it is: Goldberg said the president cancelled his visit to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery because “he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain” and because American war dead are “losers” and “suckers.” That’s two causes, simultaneously. I don’t think that’s right. I think Trump’s first and only concern was his hair. I think he knew his hair would not be a good enough reason to cancel, so he searched for a “good” reason — and decided to malign fallen heroes.

I suspect, to his way of thinking, fallen war heroes are nothing compared to his hair. That’s so petty as to be so inconceivable that no one is seeing the truth in plain sight.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 04 September 2020

Word Count: 888

—————-

I’ve been telling my Wesleyan students to prepare. The weeks between Election Day and Inauguration Day will be the tenderest, scariest period of their lifetimes. When they look back, decades from now, when they are settling as I am into middle age, they will either be relieved knowing things have gotten much better or distressed knowing things have gotten much worse. No one knows what’s going to happen. The only thing we do know with any confidence, as Rosa Brooks said today, is there will be blood. Short of a massive win for the Democrat, we can expect to see violence in the streets.

The president, of course, is the reason. For weeks now, Donald Trump has been laying the rhetorical groundwork for declaring Joe Biden’s victory — should that happen — to be the result of a dark-shadow “deep state” conspiracy to depose him. (It might even be the result of an international attack led by the Chinese.)

Fake votes, fake news, fake majority. Everything’s fake, he will say, unless he says it isn’t. We can be certain of violence, as Brooks said. We can be certain of constitutional crises. We can also be certain, I’d add, that our president is incapable of admitting defeat. This is a man, after all, who spent vast fortunes over a prodigal lifetime shielding a shattered-glass ego.

Let me be more precise. There is potential for violence and anarchy and bloodshed not so much because of the president’s lies, but because so many Americans take his word as true. I could be wrong. I could be giving the Washington press corps more credit than I should. (I could be giving Trump’s followers more credit than I should.)

I think it’s worth asserting, however, that more of them would be more skeptical if more reporters and editors acted morally, and did more to discredit him categorically. When he yells, “VOTER FRAUD,” it should be reported as bullshit, in so many words.

There will be blood, and it will be on the hands of reporters who deny a moral obligation.

The president was in North Carolina Wednesday where he was asked whether he had faith in the state’s voting system, which permits mail-in balloting. He said Republicans should vote by mail as well as in-person, as a means of testing the system’s integrity, according to the New York Times.

It’s totally legit to report he’s recommending fraud while railing against. It’s also legit to come to a conclusion — double voting is a crime; Trump encouraged double voting; ergo, Trump encouraged the commission of a crime. Then ask: Why are you encouraging criminal conduct? Is fraud important to your campaign? Why are you recommending it while also accusing your opponent of doing the same?

I have zero doubt Trump would give bullshit answers, but a) they’d make news; b) reporters love making news; and c) they’d be meaningful, I’m going to presume, to some of the 40 percent of Americans who currently approve of the president’s job performance.

Indeed, many of them would dismiss the outcome as fake news, as the president prefers. But others would understand the moral conclusion implicit in the question. When I ask why you’re encouraging criming, what I’m saying first is you’re encouraging criming. A person encouraging criming should be the last person to credibly accuse others of criming. I think this would have an appreciable effect.

Some Republicans won’t care. Are they reachable? They say they care about social order, respect for authority, and taking care of people who put themselves in harm’s way to serve and protect. This is certainly the angle Trump and others are taking.

In reaction to the rise of Black Lives Matters, which some have called a “terrorist” organization (it’s not, obviously), they say Blue Lives Matter. Well, if Blue Lives Matter, what is the president going to do about the No. 1 cop killer? It’s not gangs, mobs, or “Antifa.” It’s not anything fitting into Trump’s campaign narrative about the dangers posed by “anarchist cities.” The leading cause of death among police is Covid-19.

To my knowledge, Biden was the first to report this Monday during a speech in which, as I said Tuesday, he destroyed Trump’s “law and order” message. The Washington Post confirmed the fact last night. According to the Officer Down Memorial Page and the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, the Post reported, the new coronavirus has killed more cops this year than all other factors combined. More than vehicular accidents, more than gunfire.

So Biden was right. The best way of securing public safety is ending the pandemic. The best way of maintaining law and order is ending the pandemic. So the question reporters must ask: “Mr. President, you’ve said Blue Lives Matter. Covid-19 is the No. 1 cop killer. Your administration has pushed most of the pandemic response to the states. Have you stopped believing Blue Lives Matter?”

Lots of Republicans are lost. Not all of them. Some really believe the president really believes Blue Lives Matter. They don’t understand they will not matter as soon as they are a liability to Trump. They don’t understand he will cut them off, as he has cut everyone off in his prodigal life, the moment they are no longer useful.

Some of these people can be reached. Some of these people, I’d argue, are most likely to mitigate threats of violence. To reach them, however, the press corps must recognize, and accept, its moral obligation.

Alas, I’m not hopeful.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

—————-

Released: 03 September 2020

Word Count: 917

—————-