Tuesday, February 28, 2017

1984 (4)

". . . . . Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston.  You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right.  You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident.  When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone sees the same thing as you.  But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external.  Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else.  . . . Whatever the Party holds to be truth IS truth.  It is impossible to see truth except by looking thru the eyes of the Party.  This is the fact that you have to learn, Winston.  it takes an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will.  You must humble yourself before you can become sane."

George Orwell, 1984, PP. 205-206

Monday, February 27, 2017

The Jig is Almost Up on Health Care

President Trump: ‘Nobody Knew Health Care Could Be So Complicated’

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Donald Trump is learning. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
If there’s one thing almost everybody across the political spectrum knows about health-care reform, it’s that it’s really hard. People who study the issue closely know it. People who don’t follow the issue know. (That’s why lots of smart people don’t follow the issue closely — it’s really hard!) But there is apparently a category of people who did not realize until very recently that the issue is hard, and that category consists of Donald J. Trump, who told reporters today, “It’s an unbelievably complex subject. Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.”
Health-care reform is extremely complicated even under the best of circumstances. But when you combine the inherent complexities of the subject with the ideological rigidities of the conservative movement, the problem goes from hard to prohibitively impossible. Providing access to medical care to the tens of millions of Americans who can’t afford it on their own, because they’re too poor or too sick, is arithmetically futile if you’re bound by a dogma that opposes redistribution from the rich and healthy to the poor and sick.
House Republicans have decided to resolve the contradiction between party dogma and the promise not to harm the public in favor of the former. A study prepared by the National Governors Association, and which leaked to the media Saturday evening, finds that the House Republicans leadership’s formative plan to replace Obamacare will deprive millions of people of their insurance. The Wall Street Journal reports that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, lacking the votes for a plan that would create massive humanitarian and economic damage to the health-care sector and millions of voters who would lose their access to care, want to just push the bill ahead anyway. Their purported calculation is that they can force wavering Republicans to go along with the bill for fear of betraying the noble cause of Obamacare repeal that has animated the base for years. “You’re a Republican, you’ve been running to repeal Obamacare, they put a repeal bill in front of you … Are you going to be the Republican senator who prevents Obamacare repeal from being sent to a Republican president who is willing to sign it?” said Doug Badger, a longtime Republican leadership health-policy adviser, tells the Journal.
Juliet Eilperin and Amy Goldstein report that many of the most orthodox members of Trump’s administration, including Mike Pence, who is close to Paul Ryan, side with this strategy. On the other hand, they report, numerous Trump advisers are concerned about the political fallout of blowing up the health-care system. These advisers include Jared Kushner, NEC director Gary Cohn, senior policy adviser Stephen Miller and chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon.
And the reason they fear that is that Trump did not just run on repeal. He ran for president making irreconcilable promises on health care. To win support from voters, he promised “terrific” insurance that would “take care of everybody.” But to remain acceptable to Republican elites, he avoided embracing any policies that would violate party dogma against tax increases. The actual details of his health-care plan were fuzzy and usually ignored, but to the extent they existed at all, they consisted mainly of warmed-over conservative platitudes that would mostly resemble the old, pre-Obamacare system and do little or nothing to cover the uninsurable.
Trump held together the contradiction by simply pretending the solution would reveal itself over time and would be extremely easy. Quite likely Trump believed this himself — as a committed nonreader, and a narcissistic devotee of his own negotiating prowess, he surely believed that he could broker a deal that would satisfy both the moral objective of universal coverage and the specific ideological hang-ups that had prevented his party from ever supporting a plan that would accomplish it in the past.
The only thing that held Trump’s position together was a refusal to engage with the substance of the issue, and a magical belief that it could all be waved away. At best, he will keep either his promise to the Republican elite or his promise to the electorate. At worst he will keep neither. His offhand comment that the issue is hard is a window into the mind of a man who realizes the jig is almost up.

1984 (3)

"The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already."

George Orwell, 1984, P. 165

1984 (2)

". . . . In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they would make this claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense."
George Orwell, 1984, P. 69, Signet Edition

Saturday, February 25, 2017

Escape from Freedom


Will Americans submit to despotism in an urge to “escape from freedom”? Erich Fromm saw it coming 

Pioneering psychologist Erich Fromm explained the rise of Hitler with an analysis that seems way too relevant now 

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Will Americans submit to despotism in an urge to "escape from freedom"? Erich Fromm saw it comingDonald Trump; Erich Fromm  (Credit: Getty/Andrew Harrer/Müller-May/Rainer Funk)
President Donald Trump took his rancorous feud with the press to a frightening new level last week when he posted an inflammatory tweet that echoed tyrants of the past, calling the all-caps “FAKE NEWS” media “the enemy of the American People.”
As many were quick to point out, the phrase “enemy of the people” has a disturbing and violent history, and has long been used by totalitarian dictators to foster resentment and hatred of certain groups, and eventually to crush dissent and opposition. The infamous French revolutionary and Reign of Terror apologist Robespierre declared that the revolutionary government owed “nothing to the enemies of the people but death,” while the term was widely used in Stalinist Russia to single out dissidents, who were either imprisoned, executed or sent to the Gulag (in the end, almost all of the original Bolsheviks became “enemies of the people” during the great purge — which in reality meant enemies of Joseph Stalin).
Needless to say, the fact that President Trump thought it was appropriate to use this incendiary language on the free press — long considered the “bulwark of liberty” — is dangerous and alarming, and just the latest manifestation of the Trump administration’s authoritarian tendencies. Just one month into his term, the president has spent most of his time in public scapegoating and demonizing the free press, blatantly lying and espousing conspiracy theories that undermine faith in the electoral system and displaying his contempt for the idea of separation of powers and judicial review (once again attacking a sitting federal judge).
None of this behavior is particularly surprising for a man who has spent that past two years shattering democratic norms — e.g., threatening to jail his political opponent, encouraging violence against peaceful protesters, publicly sympathizing with oppressive dictators, advocating war crimes and so on.
It is tempting to write this all off as Donald being Donald — an impulsive, thin-skinned little man-child who can’t take any criticism — but that would be a mistake. Trump has surrounded himself with sycophantic enablers and right-wing extremists who appear eager to advance his authoritarian agenda. One of these individuals is the president’s 31-year-old senior adviser, Stephen Miller, a weaselly young man who would be perfectly cast as a Star Wars villain. Last week, Miller made the almost cartoonish assertion that “our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”
Like the phrase “enemy of the people,” this is the kind of language used by party hacks in a totalitarian state, not a free and democratic society.
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Not long ago this kind of rhetoric would have provoked outrage from both sides of the aisle and widespread disapproval from the populace. But today, in our hyper-partisan political landscape, many Americans have instead cheered Trump and his administration’s increasingly dictatorial and undemocratic behavior. This invites the question of whether the American people will stand up to autocracy if and when it comes, and how much of the populace is actually prepared to give up its freedom and submit to a strongman.
Shortly after the election, Yale historian Timothy Snyder, who recently said that we have “at most a year to defend the Republic,” wrote a chilling article in Slate narrating Adolf Hitler’s unexpected rise to power — without once saying his name — to draw parallels with our current historical situation, and to highlight how the German people quickly fell in line once Hitler had consolidated power and established his totalitarian regime.
One of the many brilliant Jewish intellectuals to flee from Germany after Hitler’s rise, philosopher and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm attempted to explain the shocking spread of totalitarianism in his lifetime with his influential and urgent 1941 book, “Escape from Freedom.” This classic investigation into the psychology of authoritarianism can help elucidate some of what is happening today. In the first half of the book, Fromm surveys the profound cultural, economic and political changes that had occurred since the Middle Ages with the Protestant Reformation and the emergence of industrial capitalism, and explores how these shifts impacted the human psyche and the individual’s interaction with the external world.
Fromm posits that industrialization and the rise of liberalism resulted in the “complete emergence” of the individual (i.e., “individuation”), along with newfound freedom, but also upended “primary ties” that had once provided men and women with “security and a feeling of belonging and of being rooted somewhere.” In other words, modernization freed man from traditional authorities that had greatly limited him, but also provided him with security and meaning in life. “Growing individuation,” writes Fromm, “means growing isolation, insecurity, and thereby growing doubt concerning one’s role in the universe, the meaning of one’s life, and with all that a growing feeling of one’s own powerlessness and insignificance as an individual.”
That brings us to Fromm’s powerful thesis:
If the economic, social and political conditions on which the whole process of human individuation depends, do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality … while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom.
The crucial point Fromm was trying to get across is that personal freedom may not be enjoyable or even desirable to the individual if it also leaves him or her feeling isolated and powerless, or without any kind of meaning or purpose in life. Like Karl Marx, Fromm believed that capitalism had turned human beings into cogs in a machine, sapping them of their individuality and creativity, and leaving them alienated and susceptible to authoritarian forces.
Fromm distinguished between negative freedom, or the “freedom from” traditional authorities and cultural/social restraints, and the positive “freedom to” live authentically and realize one’s true individual self. If one is granted negative freedomwithout positive freedom, and thus left uncertain, alone and powerless, he or she may be inclined to escape from freedom and submit to a higher authority. An analogy would be the urge that many adults have felt at least once in their life to return to their mother’s womb, where one is deprived of freedom, but safe from the dangerous and chaotic outside world.
It is not hard to see this psychology at work in modern America, where economic inequality has grown rapidly over the past several decades, where livelihoods have been outsourced or automated and where communities have collapsed due to the forces of globalization and the technological revolution, leaving millions of people desperate and isolated. When these economic factors are combined with other factors, including the perceived dangers facing America (i.e., Islamic terrorism) — which are greatly inflated by the mass media and politicians — and cultural/social shifts over the past few decades, the victory of an authoritarian demagogue like Trump becomes less surprising (as does the fact that Trump supporters are more likely to display authoritarian personality traits).
The danger of the increasingly authoritarian Trump administration is heightened by the growing number of Americans who are now prepared to support a strongman if it means restoring, as it were, “primary ties” that once provided “security and a feeling of belonging and of being rooted somewhere.”
Seventy-five years ago Fromm argued that to counteract this dangerous drive toward authoritarianism, it was necessary to “expand the principle of government of the people, by the people, for the people, from the formal political to the economic sphere.” Democracy, he continued, “will triumph over the forces of nihilism only if it can imbue people with a faith … in life and in truth, and in freedom as the active and spontaneous realization of the individual self.”
Like Bernie Sanders today, Fromm advocated democratic socialism and believed that only a truly democratic society — politically and economically — could stop the dark clouds of despotism. Today, as President Trump rehashes the language of past tyrants, one can only hope that the desire for freedom will triumph over the urge to submit.

Friday, February 24, 2017

The Resistance Must Continue


Donald Trump, Pseudoauthoritarian

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Donald Trump. Photo: Olivier Douliery/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Donald Trump is an authoritarian by instinct. He displays the classic traits of an authoritarian personality — a man obsessed with domination and humiliation, and unable to tolerate cognitive dissonance. (Guidance for Trump’s presidential daily brief directs that his memos not only be short but, Ashley Dejean reports, “should only include facts that support their analyses.”) For years he has lavished praise upon authoritarian regimes in China, Russia, North Korea, and Iraq for having the strength to crush their opponents. And the first month of his presidency has seen Trump metamorphose from a reality-television-populist-outsider candidate into an actual president who sounds — but, so far, at least, only sounds — like the strongman leaders he has always admired.
The prospect that President Trump will degrade or destroy American democracy is the most important question of the new political era. It has received important scholarly attention from two basic sources, which have approached it in importantly different fashions. Scholars of authoritarian regimes (principally Russia) have used their knowledge of authoritarian history to paint a road map by which Trump could Putinize this country. Timothy SnyderMasha Gessen, and other students of Putin’s methods have essentially treated Putinization as the likely future, and worked backward to the present. A second category of knowledge has come from scholars of democracy and authoritarianism, who have compared the strengths and weaknesses of the American system of government both to countries elsewhere that have succumbed to authoritarianism and those that have not. Their approach has, more appropriately, treated Trump’s authoritarian designs as an open question. Trump might launch an assault on the foundations of the republic. On the other hand, he might not.
What are the signs of impending authoritarianism? Trump has rhetorically hyped violence, real or imaginary, committed by enemy groups, while downplaying or ignoring violence or threats from friendlier sources. He said nothing about a white-supremacist terror attack in Canada that killed six people before denouncing a knife attack a few days later by an Islamist radical in France that killed nobody. He quickly directed a government program on countering violent extremism to focus exclusively on Muslim radicalism and stop work halting white-supremacist terrorism. Just as he urged his campaign crowds to rough up protesters, he treated news that pro-Trump bikers would patrol his inauguration not as a threat to create chaos but as a welcome paramilitary force. “That’s like additional security with those guys, and they’re rough,” he gleefully told reporters. Trump’s rhetoric follows a pattern of politicizing violence, simultaneously justifying stringent government action against enemies he has designated while tacitly justifying vigilantism by extremists sympathetic to his cause.
Since his election, Trump has obsessively fabricated a narrative in which he is the incarnate of the will of the people. According to his own concocted history, he won a historically large Electoral College victory, and would have also won the popular vote if not for millions of illegal votes. He has dismissed protesters against him as paid agents, denied the legitimacy of courts to overrule his actions, and, most recently, called mainstream media “enemies of the people.” This is an especially chilling phrase to hear from an American president. Totalitarian dictators like Stalin and Mao used designation of a political figure or a social class as an “enemy of the people” as a prelude to mass murder.
At this point, just a month into Trump’s presidency, this pattern of authoritarian discourse is only that — discourse. A threat as dire as the potential disintegration of American democracy hardly requires certainty before justifying a response. The question is, what response is necessary?
It is worth noting that, so far, normal political countermobilization seems to be working quite well. “The Resistance,” as anti-Trump activists have come to be known, has already rattled the once-complacent Republican majorities in Congress, which Trump needs to quash investigations of his corruption and opaque ties to Russia. Whatever pressure Trump has tried to apply to the news media has backfired spectacularly. His sneering contempt has inspired a wave of subscriptions that have driven new revenue to national media, which have blanketed the administration with independent coverage. Popular culture outlets, rather than responding to Trump’s election by tempering their mockery, have instead stepped it up, enraging the president.
The most plausible (to me) mechanism by which Trump might ensconce himself in power was laid out by Matthew Yglesias three months ago. The scenario Yglesias described would be one in which Trump used the authority of the federal government to compel large firms to give him political support. Companies that opposed him, or who even refused to offer support, might be punished with selectively punitive regulation, while those that played ball might be rewarded with lax enforcement of labor, antitrust, or other regulation.
So far there is no evidence such a scenario is playing out. To be sure, Trump is attempting, sporadically, to bully the private sector. But the effort has backfired. Firms whose leaders make favorable statements about the president have seen their stock get hammered. A long list of prominent CEOs has openly criticized Trump. The reason for this is obvious. Trump’s supporters may have disproportionate power in the Electoral College, but his opponents have disproportionate power in the marketplace. Firms cater in their advertising to the young, who overwhelming oppose Trump, rather than to the old, who strongly support him.
If Trump has a plan to crush his adversaries, he has not yet revealed it. His authoritarian rage thus far is mostly impotent, the president as angry Fox-News-watching grandfather screaming threats at his television that he never carries out. The danger to the republic may come later, or never. In the first month of Trump’s presidency, the resistance has the upper hand