Monthly Archives: October 2016

A Declaration of Independence, from Trump

a-christian-dirce-by-henryk-siemiradzki

Should Donald Trump win the presidency, a prospect that looks almost impossible at the moment I am writing this, he certainly wouldn’t be the first misogynists and philanderer to occupy the White House, but he would be the first populist demagogue since Andrew Jackson who had broken through to that office, and everything he says leads me to believe he would, whether out of ignorance or the desire for the efficiency and the rush of power,  either disregard or even begin to dismantle our now over two century old constitutional order.

Thankfully, and barring some catastrophe, or some scandal regarding Hillary Clinton so troubling it erases her current advantage (a prospect that given the Clinton’s history is uncomfortably possible), Trump will in all likelihood lose. The immediate task will then be to shore up the legitimacy of the system with his followers who will likely doubt the results.

My prayer is that none of the disappointed whom Trump has whipped into a frenzy over a “rigged” election turn his dark and violent words into actual bloodshed. Indeed, Trump may be on the verge of tying together a host of disturbing, contemporary trends to create something genuinely new- a political movement as pure spectacle whose goal isn’t so much power as to nurture the desire for revolution only to feed off of the very individuals it cast as heroes crushed by a sinister and cruel order.

That’s the real danger: that we’re only at the beginning, rather than near the end, of this already exhausting drama. Conservative commentator, and, from the beginning outspoken opponent of Trump George Will thinks that Trump might be like chemotherapy for the GOP, his historic loss ultimately purging it of those who either never held the core principles of America’s libertarian brand of conservatism, or were more than willing to surrender them when it became politically expedient. Yet it is just as likely that Trump will end up being the midwife of a politico-media entity that would be like cancer itself eating away at the legitimacy of the the body-politic in which it lives.

Even discounting the potential for violence that would come from such a permanent movement of this sort, that’s a pretty dark vision, so let me close my eyes and imagine a much brighter scenario. That Trump on losing the election does what every other political figure, regardless of how nasty, has done since the birth of the Republic- that he graciously admits his legitimate defeat. To make my day dream even brighter, after his loss, Trump slithers away from the political world and back under his glittering rock of beauty pageants and Trump Success eau de toilette spray from which he came never to be heard from again.

Now to wake up- even if Trump and his Trumpians disappear from the political scene, it is still the case there will remain a hell of a lot of work to do, which we should have known had we ever watched The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (though I was always a Letterman man myself.) On The Tonight Show Leno used to do a skit where he’d walk the streets of New York. He would stop people and ask questions every American should know about the country’s history and politics such as “What do we celebrate on the 4th of July?” Or “Who is the vice president?”. The gag was just how horribly wrong people answered these questions. It was a funny segment, but also kind of, well… sad.

What we’ve seen in this election is how such ignorance can be turned into a weapon. And I don’t mean ignorance as in stupidly, as in Trump and his supporters are somehow stupid. Trump is anything but stupid, and if the people who follow him whom I personally know are a representative sample, neither are his followers. Rather it’s that that both Trump and his loyalists seem to be either ignorant or uncommitted to the very principles that hold our quite fragile polity together in the first place.

The proof I have of this assertion is not only statements that Trump himself has made, but that he has apparently never lost core on account of them. Instead, what seems to be sinking his campaign is the same sort of sexual character accusations we’ve be accustomed to for quite some time, and which almost destroyed the presidency of the spouse of his rival.

Democrats have aggressively, and sometimes shamefully, tried to personalize Trump’s political attacks, a tactic that’s probably effective, but which muddies the principle- we give rights to people despite the fact that we dislike them. In fact, it’s the people we dislike the most who are in greatest need of rights. Trump, and that means the perhaps forty percent of Americans who think he’s a fit candidate for office, have shown disregard or ignorance of rights guaranteed by the constitution in at least the following ways:

In other words, in modern times we’ve never seen a political figure show such ignorance of, or disregard for, the very principles which hold our country together. More importantly we’ve never seen what is actually an anti-constitutional movement become the animating force behind a major political party. And while some might think this signals that the so-called “American Creed” has had its day, we might also conclude that this election has taught us the importance of not only the constitution itself- in providing protections against want to be tyrants- but the necessity of remembering, or even merely learning- and teaching our children- what its principles and protections actually are.

Painting: “A Christian Dirce”, by Henryk Siemiradzki.

 

What democracy’s future shouldn’t be

birth-of-a-tyrant

As William Gibson has famously pointed out, the job of the science fiction writer is not to predict the future but to construct one plausible version of it from the pieces already laying around.  I assume that Malka Older was trying to do this deliberately low key Gibsonian thing with her novel Infomacracy, but given the bizarre nature of this current election cycle she instead, and remarkably, ended up anticipating not merely many of its real or feared events, but even ended her novel on the same note of exhaustion and exasperation and even dread resulting from the perceived failures of representative democracy now expressed by many among the elites, and from another the other angle, the young.

In terms of setting and plot, Infomacracy takes place in an imagined near future when democracy, with some notable exceptions, has gone global. As a consequence of some never quite explained crisis, the major powers we associate with political power today- The US, China, the EU, and Japan are no more. The world’s governments have been replaced by a global democratic order in which a variety of corporate and NGO based political groups compete with one another for electorally generated power. Given the absurd, and disturbing shape of current politics, and not just in the US but globally, one would be forgiven for thinking Older is out to describe a Utopian vision of the future, but you would be wrong.

Instead she describes global democracy dying almost the moment it is born. Sabotaged by an almost successful attempt to hijack a world election by the ruling party which is likely to lose called Heritage, or to ride to the majority through the resurrection of historical hatreds- the intent of the corporatist party named Liberty. I shouldn’t have to mention that there’s a party called Philip- Morris, to convey that Older is not describing a political order any small d democrat would look forward to. And all of this takes place within a world where it appears that the vast majority of media and knowledge are mediated by a sort of super-Google known simply, and perhaps as a shoutout to James Gleick, as Information.

Within the midst of this story Older ends up anticipating a number of the actual and potential cyber assaults on the democratic process during the current election. In Older’s imagined world computer hacks are a political weapon, challenges to democratic legitimacy are a trump card (pun intended), and an internet behemoth has become the arbiter of truth.

Whatever complaints I might have about the believability or depth of the novel’s characters, it did manage to make explicit something I hadn’t really thought through before. Few of us living in prosperous, liberal- democratic societies wouldn’t hope that at some point in the future the kinds of rights and capacities we take for granted will not be extended to all of the world’s peoples. And we think this even if we’ve finally learned the tragic foolishness of freedom compelled from the barrel of a gun.

Yet such faith and hope in the world’s democratic future probably should seem strange given how exhausted many of us have become with the sophistry and theater that defines electoral politics. It’s not just the exhaustion of being ruled by ad men, it’s ad men who don’t care what we want and are corrupt and incompetent besides. That American political consultants find it so easy to move between our system and that of deeply corrupt or authoritarian societies should be a troubling sign.

Older manages to capture this, but rather than imagining some truly democratic alternative ends up giving us the view of Plato refracted through the lens of the information age. After all, the heroes of her novel aren’t really in pursuit of political freedom, but are chasing an ideal world where the right course of action arises from an honest wrestling with the facts themselves, rather than, as in any democratic order worth its salt, emerging from conflicting human values.

One of these characters, Ken, is a high ranking member of the PolicyFirst party whose platform is about reasoned solutions along with a deliberate avoidance of the politics of personality and persuasion. Whereas the protagonist of the novel, Mishima, works for Information whose role it seems is not just to bring under one roof all the world’s knowledge and communication but to actively rid the world of falsehood and propaganda.

Whatever the outcome in the novel its underlying message seems to be one of resignation. With this pessimism Older seems to have joined the growing chorus of thinkers who think the way the internet’s democratic promise has imploded since the year zero of 2011 proves Plato was onto something. Let’s hope they’re wrong and that there are alternative versions of digital democracy waiting in the wings, but things don’t look good.