BBC4 Analysis: The Return of Reality?

Before Covid-19 hit, the latest research showed we were more polarised than ever. We broadly agree on the issues - it's the emotions where things get tricky.

If someone is part of the other tribe then we want little to do with them. And the more polarised we are, the more prone we are to what philosophers call 'knowledge resistance' - rejecting information that doesn't fit our worldview.

If we're in a situation where identity trumps truth, is there anything that can pull us back to reality? Peter Pomerantsev, author of This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, looks at whether Covid-19 could bring us back towards a sense of shared reality - or whether it might push us further apart.

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Vox: The New York Times 1619 Project is reshaping the conversation on slavery. Conservatives hate it.

At the heart of both men’s criticism is that the New York Times’ focus on race is part of what they and other conservatives see as a broader decline at the newspaper. It’s the type of criticism the institution often hears from President Donald Trump, who has referred to the newspaper as the “failing New York Times.”[...]

The 1619 Project, as it appears online, is sprawling and interactive. Matthew Desmond writes about how slavery shaped modern capitalism and workplace management norms. Jamelle Bouie connects the early 19th century political efforts to preserve slavery to current conservative political movements like the Tea Party and its efforts to nullify federal authority. Kevin Kruse explains how the country’s history of racism contributes to Atlanta traffic. [...]

This represents a shift in race coverage as the country heads toward the 2020 election. The media faced blowback — including from reporters of color — for not talking enough about race in the 2016 election, and outlets are now framing more of the political debates in this country around the topic of race.

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The Atlantic: What If the Chaos Is Strategic?

Of the many challenges facing anyone trying to understand Donald Trump’s presidency is the fact that it is maddeningly nonlinear, lurching several times each day between policy objectives that may be dictated by a Fox News anchor, a friend from Mar-a-Lago, or the prime minister of Norway. This was especially true in the first six months of his administration, when the chief political strategist Steve Bannon was at the height of his influence, while Reince Priebus wielded the chief of staff’s potentially awesome authority with all the gravitas of a substitute teacher.[...]

The question of intentionality is impossible for anyone but Trump to answer, and he would surely answer it by claiming that he has had a plan all along. That would be a typically Trumpian boast. That aside, however, it is undeniable that the exhausting storms that mark political life in Washington obscure the ruthlessly effective work happening across the federal government.[...]

The diversionary maneuver has been so effective because Trump remains an object of intense public fascination. If nothing else, Trump is an effective distraction from Trumpism, which is to say a kind of raw modern Republicanism that has shed the last vestiges of its eastern-establishment roots. The more Trump acts like Trump, the more it seems to the rest of us that his administration is about to collapse into a heap of faux-golden shards, the more the Trump administration actually gets done.[...]

In Trump’s first several months in office, Republicans used the CRA more than a dozen times. They repealed a rule that prevented internet companies from selling individuals’ data without their explicit consent. They undid the Stream Protection Rule, which was intended to keep surface mines from polluting waterways with the potential toxic products of their activities. They killed a mandate that employers report workplace injuries. And they made it easier to hunt bears in Alaska. Now you can shoot them from helicopters again.

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The New York Review of Books: Mitch McConnell, Republican Nihilist

Writing for the Review last fall, the American historian Christopher R. Browning said of the Senate majority leader, “if the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell.” In Browning’s view, McConnell is not dissimilar from the German conservative politicians, who in the 1930s brought Adolf Hitler to power, “thinking that they could ultimately control [him] while enjoying the benefits of his popular support.” With Hitler as Chancellor, the conservatives saw their fulsome policy agenda enacted: rearmament, suspension of civil liberties, the outlawing of the Communist Party, and the abolition of labor unions, among other moves. But as they would later find out, controlling the monster they put in power would be something else altogether.[...]

What separates McConnell from other destructive political actors, such as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his fellow congressional Republican revolutionaries, or President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, is that McConnell’s political actions are unmoored from ideology and policy. For McConnell, politics is fundamentally about accruing political power for the sole purpose of accruing more political power.[...]

McConnell seemed almost to relish the anger his positions engendered. When reformists began referring to him as Darth Vader, he appeared at a press conference toting a light saber. In playing this part, McConnell earned the gratitude of his fellow Republicans, something that would pay off when he sought to become the party’s leader in the Senate. McConnell would adopt a similar position in 2009 after Barack Obama’s inauguration. He became the public face of opposition to Obama’s policies, as he expertly wielded the Senate’s limitless tools for obstruction and delay to block the new president’s legislative goals. In his willingness to again play the role of villain, McConnell displayed a unique understanding of how modern American politics works: the more liberals hated him, the more Republicans loved him.[...]

There was, however, a political downside to McConnell’s unrelentingly rejectionist approach: it played directly into the hands of the extremists in his own party. Indeed, the Senate GOP’s inflexible opposition to Obama, the venomous attacks of Republican partisans (including questions about Obama’s birthplace and religion), and McConnell’s declaration that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president” gave oxygen to the fledgling Tea Party movement. In 2010, the victory of extremist conservative Republicans in party primaries would help cost McConnell the chance to become majority leader in the Senate (postponing that outcome until 2014).

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The Atlantic: The Unintended Consequences of Helsinki

Since Trump took office, the U.S. has sanctioned more than 200 Russian individuals and entities, expelled 60 Russian diplomats, closed the Russian consulate in Seattle, approved weapons sales to Ukraine, and significantly increased spending on European defense meant to deter Russia. And despite Trump’s lambasting of European allies for not spending more on defense at last week’s nato summit in Brussels, the U.S. signed the joint nato communique, which condemned Russia for its annexation of Crimea, its alleged nerve-agent attack in the United Kingdom, and other acts of aggression against European countries. In 2017, the U.S. Senate passed legislation that prevents the president from unilaterally removing sanctions on Russia without Congress’s consent. The law also grants a broad mandate to the administration for sanctioning Russian companies and Putin’s cronies. Oddly, the president himself has appointed advisers, most notably Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National-Security Adviser John Bolton, who are known for their hawkish views on Russia.

In stark contrast to the administration’s policies, however, Trump’s own views on Russia don’t seem to have shifted—something Trump made clear in the lead-up to the Helsinki meeting. Trump suggested that he would be open to recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea because “everyone there speaks Russian.” He called for Russia to be readmitted to the G7. At a rally in Montana earlier this month, Trump said that Putin is “fine.” There is no shortage of evidence that despite occasional lip service to being tougher on Russia than Obama, Trump’s affinity for Putin in particular has remained unshakeable. Indeed, Trump has likely grown increasingly impatient with the constraints his advisers, Congress, and the unfolding special-counsel investigation have placed on his ability to pursue that elusive U.S.-Russia friendship. He undoubtedly felt frustrated that he was prevented from meeting with Putin earlier in his presidency and instead had to seek out opportunities to talk with Putin one-on-one on the sidelines of other meetings (which he did twice, in Germany and Vietnam). These frustrations likely built up when he went against his advisers and called to congratulate Putin on his sham election victory in March. It was during that call that Trump finally invited Putin for a tete-a-tete and set the wheels in motion for Helsinki. [...]

Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, suggested that the Senate may take up new legislation to address the Russian threat. In January, Senators Marco Rubio and Chris Van Hollen introduced a bill that would require the administration to implement sanctions on Russia within 10 days if Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats determines that the Kremlin has interfered in any future elections. It likely had little chance of amassing enough support before the Helsinki summit, but it’s gaining traction now. And if President Trump was hoping to be able to remove sanctions on Russia, he has achieved the opposite: The bill would require even harsher sanctions on Russia’s economy, and it would be up to Coats, who has reaffirmed that Russia is actively carrying out influence operations ahead of the fall midterms, to make that call. Earlier this month, the Senate also passed, 97–2, a motion to support nato. Some Congressional members are now considering new initiatives that would make it impossible for the U.S. president to pull out of the alliance.

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The Atlantic: The End of All Illusions

Even Fox News was appalled at President Donald Trump’s performance at his Helsinki press conference alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin. The network, usually only too happy to cheer on the president, responded somewhat differently this time to Trump’s insistence that “President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial” of Russian involvement in election interference. Neil Cavuto, a Fox Business Network host, called the press conference “disgusting.” Appearing on Fox, Mary Kissel of the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board said, “President Putin scored a great propaganda victory by standing up with President Trump on that stage.” Newt Gingrich declared that Trump’s comments were “the most serious mistake of his presidency.” [...]

But he didn’t. In fact, almost every outrageous comment Trump made at the Helsinki press conference was a variation on something he’d said before. That doesn’t mean those comments weren’t outrageous. But it does mean that the furor over his performance has the echo of Captain Renault’s sudden outrage in Rick’s Cafe: “I am shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on in here!” [...]

The visual of Trump framed by American and Russian flags, standing alongside a smirking Putin and insisting that Russia had no involvement in his election, was a shocking one. It clarified and distilled into a single frame the president’s appalling lack of care about an assault on the democratic life of the American people and his inability to carry out the duties of his office. As with his comments after the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump’s obsequiousness toward Putin ripped away what remained of a very tattered fig leaf. Just as Charlottesville made it no longer quite so taboo to describe the president as sympathetic to white supremacy, perhaps Helsinki will allow mainstream commentators to more comfortably acknowledge the danger of the Trump presidency on the world stage. [...]

Multiple times on the day of the summit, Trump also gestured toward what Representative Liz Cheney—otherwise a strong supporter of the president—decried as a “moral equivalence” between the United States and Russia. Before his meeting with Putin, he suggested that the “Rigged Witch Hunt” was responsible for a decline in U.S. relations with Russia. Asked by a reporter whether he “[held] Russia accountable” for that decline, the president doubled down: “I hold both countries responsible … I think we’re all to blame.” There is more than an echo here of Trump’s comments on Putin to Bill O’Reilly in February 2017: “There are a lot of killers,” he said. “You think our country’s so innocent?”

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Social Europe: Could The US Become A Democratic Dictatorship?

Yet Hungary is still a democracy in the sense of having reasonably genuine elections. As the opposition is fragmented there is little need to resort to the kind of tactics used in other democracies, such as Turkey. When occasionally the opposition does win a local election, Orbán unleashes the full might of his nationalist, enemies at the door, enemies within narrative at them. With almost total control of the media and civil institutions, he can make life very difficult for the opposition. He won his last election with ease. It is an effective model that could survive for many years. [...]

He may not control the courts to the extent that Orbán does, but he is not miles away. Soon he, or at least his party, will get a majority on the supreme court. He has pardoned whoever he likes at his whim. The Republican party have retained a majority in the House in part because of gerrymandering, and the supreme court allows this to continue. Orbán fights a long but successful battle to close down a university in Budapest, while Trump’s climate change denying appointees try to close down scientific research in the US (on the latter, see this excellent essay from Carl Zimmer HT Tim Harford).  [...]

Trump certainly acts like a dictator would act. The barriers to Trump becoming an Orbán type figure are that his supporters do not control most of the media, and he faces a single and organised opposition party. These are the two threads by which this pluralist democracy hangs. You might think it an exaggeration to call these two only threads, and I hope we will see that it is in the midterms, but there are worrying signs in the US and elsewhere that popular support for democracy is falling, as documented by Yascha Mounk in a book reviewed here. The fact that Trump could be elected and then supported in the first place by one of the two main political parties in the US is a clear sign that all is not well with US democracy. Those, like Paul Krugman, who have for a long time appeared ‘shrill’ about what was happening to the Republican party have been fully justified in their fears.  

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The Atlantic: How the GOP Prompted the Decay of Political Norms

But during some periods of divided government, when one party controls the White House and the other has a majority in the House, the Senate, or both chambers, cross-party coalitions where parties share responsibility for governance have thrived. As political scientist David Mayhew showed, divided government during the decades following World War II produced significant legislative achievements—and arguably did so as or more often than when a single party held all the reins of power. [...]

So what happened? Parties have certainly become more polarized, shaped by the great ideological and geographical sorting that began in the 1960s. The South, realigned by Lyndon Johnson’s commitment to civil rights, lost its status as nearly uniformly Democratic and gradually became the GOP’s most important power center. New England and the West Coast had once been strongholds of an often-moderate brand of Republicanism. They became bastions of Democratic strength. A repolarized partisanship solidified by the 1990s and became even more pronounced after 2008. [...]

Gingrich transformed the Republican Party in Congress. His recruits came in believing what Gingrich had taught them. Although he had a deep interest in science, Gingrich launched an attack on the use of science and facts in public policy that would be picked up by other Republican politicians in the years to come. One of the more enduring norms of Congress was that evidence vetted by acknowledged experts would frame debate and deliberation. Lawmakers could differ sharply on policy solutions, but all would share facts curated by the experts. As speaker, Gingrich abolished the Office of Technology Assessment, a blue-ribbon congressional agency that had been established for scientists to offer objective analysis on issues ranging from defense and space to climate and energy. The new majority defended shuttering the office’s doors as a cost-saving measure, and it was part of Gingrich’s broader (and largely successful) effort to centralize power in the speaker’s office. But the move also sent a message that ideological commitments would trump evidence. [...]

But there was no better example of extreme partisanship than McConnell’s refusal to consider any nominee Obama put forward to replace Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia after Scalia’s sudden death in February 2016. McConnell argued that the “American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice” and that “this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.” This was a radical departure. Supreme Court nominees had been rejected before, but except for those who withdrew, none in recent memory had been denied both a hearing and a vote. That it was justified with a risible claim to being democratic, as if the American people hadn’t reelected Obama for a full four-year second term, showed just how far McConnell was willing to go. And nearly all of McConnell’s colleagues overwhelmingly supported this strategy, one by one announcing that they, too, would seek to delay hearings and a vote on a nominee until Obama had left the White House. This even included Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, who had once praised Garland as a “consensus nominee.”

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Social Europe: How Populists Win When They Lose

Less obvious, but more pernicious, is the insinuation that citizens who do not share the populist’s conception of “the people,” and hence do not support the populist politically, are less than legitimate members of the polity. Think of Farage claiming that Brexit was a “victory for real people.” The 48% who voted to remain in the European Union, he implied, might not be part of the “real” British people at all. [...]

Populism is thus a form of anti-pluralism. To say that “the people” are rising up against “the establishment” is not a neutral description of political developments; it’s actually populist language. It accepts the populists’ claim that they authentically represent “the people.” [...]

The image of an irresistible populist “wave” was always misleading. Farage did not bring about Brexit all by himself. He needed the help of established Conservatives such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove (both now serve in Prime Minister Theresa May’s post-election cabinet). Likewise Trump was not elected as the candidate of a grassroots protest movement of the white working class; he represented a very established party and received the blessing of Republican heavyweights such as Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich.

In fact, if anything, Trump’s election was a confirmation of how partisan US politics has become: 90% of self-identified Republicans voted for Trump; they clearly could not fathom voting for a Democrat, even if many Republicans in surveys registered deep doubts about the party’s nominee. To this day, no right-wing populist has come to power in Western Europe or North America without the collaboration of established conservative elites. [...]

The idea that the Dutch and the French elections heralded the arrival of a “post-populist moment” fails to appreciate the distinction between populism as a claim to a moral monopoly on representation and the policies – think of restrictions on immigration – typically promoted by populists as part of their exclusionary identity politics. For example, Wilders, who really is a populist, did less well than expected in March. But his main competitor, center-right Prime Minister Mark Rutte, adopted Wilders-like rhetoric – telling immigrants that they should leave the country if they do not want to behave “normally.”

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Vox: How Republicans came to embrace anti-environmentalism

It’s ironic that today’s Republicans see America’s environmental state as such a liability, given that Republican presidents had such a big hand in constructing it. In the early 20th century Teddy Roosevelt pushed a federal system of parks, forests, and monuments. In 1970, it was Richard Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed many foundational laws. Even during the last Republican administration of George W. Bush, longtime EPA employees have told me there was considerable if often tacit support by party leaders. [...]

For starters, it helps to recall where the strongest environmental support came from in the 1960s and 1970s, during the great bipartisan build-out of America’s environmental laws and agencies: those regions where urbanizing and industrializing had gone the furthest, across the cities of the coasts and the Great Lakes and especially in their suburbs. A new political language of “the environment” was born along urban edges; it interwove homeowner concerns about pollution and developer intrusions that state and local governments had failed to address. [...]

The other strand of early anti-environmentalism ran through the South, where traditional Democratic dominance was in flux. Democrats like then-Georgia governor Jimmy Carter embraced environmental causes. Some Republicans did as well. When college professor Newt Gingrich ran for Congress starting in 1972 in a West Georgia district extending into Atlanta’s suburbs, it made sense that he did so both as a Republican and an environmentalist. [...]

Racial and geographic realignments over the 1980s and ‘90s favored the anti-environmental Republicanism Gingrich now sought. Better-off black Americans moved to suburbs of their own, as civil rights groups spearheaded a new movement for “environmental justice.” White environmental groups gained bases in well-off older suburbs as well far-flung newer ones, but energy concerns inclined them to identify with a gentrifying downtown and the “walkability” espoused by a New Urbanism. At the same time, black majority districts were also being created to bring racial equity to Georgia’s Congressional delegations, starting with the 5th district, which was won in 1986 by John Lewis. Black representatives became the state’s foremost supporters of environmental causes in Congress.

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