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    Trump’s Gift to America: Spectacle

    Time: January 3, 2015. Place: Trump Tower Bar and Grill, 5th Avenue, New York

    Overheard conversation between two diners.

    “Another great show, Don. You were terrific as usual. Your bluster is so intimidating. I loved the way you thundered on about that one guy’s shortcomings and made him cry.”

    “Yeah, I thought I was excellent. Most of these ‘Apprentice’ wannabes are useless. They couldn’t run a newsstand where there’s no television.”

    “You know, Don, I think you could do anything you want. You should run for president. You’d do a better job than some of these clowns. Last year, Obama had his worst year in office: He accused Russia of invading Ukraine, ordered airstrikes in Syria and, now, he’s got protesters chanting ‘black lives matter.’  He’s even talking about bypassing Congress’ opposition to his plan to allow 4 million immigrants to apply for work permits. Man, he’s in trouble.”

    “I could take care of business.”

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    “Then why don’t you? Run for the big job. Think about it: You could do for America what you’ve done for TV. It’s been running since 2004 and you’ve made it one of the most popular shows in history. You can use ‘The Apprentice’ formula, nominating project leaders who can take responsibility and make strategic decisions. You can call them into the Situation Room and tell them to brief you. If you don’t like their work, you know what to say, right? You’re dismissed! Just kidding, Don.”

    The World’s Most Famous Bouffant

    When people thought they’d seen enough of the world’s most famous bouffant, they were treated to “The further adventures of … .” Except not in another reality TV show, but an American presidency, a presidency that had the thrills and creative destruction of “The Apprentice.” No one, surely not even Trump himself, thought he stood a chance when he decided to take on established figures in the GOP and the hugely experienced Democrats, in particular Hillary Rodham Clinton.

    His upset election triumph over her was so improbable that it briefly managed the impossible, making people forget North Korea’s nuclear tests, the Syrian Civil War, the election of openly anti-American President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and the surprising decision by Britain to leave the European Union. All people were thinking and talking about was Trump, who became a member of an exclusive club: He was one of only five presidents to win office while losing the popular vote.

    What happened? Had Americans lost their senses? After all, Trump had no political experience whatsoever. Even the most inexperienced presidents in history had either served at senior levels in the military or in the legal system. Trump was an entrepreneur-turned-reality TV star. But his leap into the unknown came in the second decade of the 21st century when small matters like this seemed of secondary importance.

    What mattered more was Trump’s ability to deliver a booming, rumbling, roaring performance and easy-on-the-intellect messages that people could understand. Cut taxes. Ban Muslims. Bomb the shit out of ISIS. Build a wall with Mexico. Bring home American troops. Tear up trade agreements. Move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

    There were other similarly attention-grabbing commitments. Trump’s gift to America was spectacle. There had never been such a spectacular candidate, and perhaps that’s what nearly half of America wanted: a captivating leader. America has developed a culture in which everything, no matter how solemn, can be alchemized into handsome if meretricious entertainment. And, if you disagree, I have a two-word response: Kim Kardashian.

    Over the past four years, Trump has dominated world affairs. His foreign policy decisions have effectively redefined US relations with the rest of the world. His fiscal policies have made Wall Street deliriously happy. His attitudes toward racism have divided his own nation as well as huge parts of the world. Trump has angered and delighted, probably in a rough ratio of 60:40. Whatever the world thinks about Trump, the undeniable reality is that he is the most ubiquitous American president in history. There hasn’t been a day in the last four years when Donald Trump has not been reported as doing or saying something headline-grabbing. Reality TV shows that hog our attention are doing their jobs. Presidents who do it are probably doing something other than politicking.For many politicians, a scandalous claim of an affair would be embarrassing, if not ruinous. But porn star Stormy Daniels’ charge that she and Trump had a liaison in 2006 seemed entirely congruent. In fact, it would have been more of a surprise had the president not been entangled in some sort of sex imbroglio.

    There is even a global movement that regards Trump as far more than a politician. For QAnon, Trump is waging a surreptitious war against a cabal of Satan-worshipping Democrats, plutocrats and Hollywood celebrities who engage in pedophilia, sex trafficking and harvesting blood from dead children. Not even a drama, let alone a reality TV show, could have scripted a more fantastic narrative than this. The nearest equivalent I can think of is in Yaohnanen, on the South Pacific island of Tanna, where Britain’s Prince Philip is worshipped as a sort of messiah, a son of the ancestral mountain god.

    Trump has not repurposed himself as president. He has adapted the presidency to his own requirements, surrounding himself with senior-level advisers, assigning them tasks, then firing or promoting them. His staff turnover as of October 7, it was 91%. No one has been safe while Trump has been behind the Oval Office desk, not even the first senator to endorse Trump’s presidential candidacy in early 2016, Jeff Sessions; he was fired in 2017. Many others have resigned, but the revolving door approach to senior political appointments and dismissals suggests a style of leadership in which delegation is key, much like in TV.

    Still Fresh

    Now the big question is whether this novelty is still fresh. Even the most fascinating, amusing and engaging celebrities have a shelf life. Trump has delighted and infuriated people in roughly equal measures. Every faux pas — and there have been a good few of them — is somehow glossed over as blithely as if he’d thrown up in the back of an Uber. Every success is hailed, usually by him, as a groundbreaking masterstroke. Sometimes, to be fair, it is. The rapprochement with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was genuinely significant.

    But awarding himself an A+ for the “phenomenal job” he had done during his tenure grated with as many as it amused. And the response to the COVID-19 pandemic has provided his opponent Joe Biden with a gift-wrapped opportunity to expose him. “We have it under control. It’s gonna be just fine,” Trump assured everyone in January. A month later, he called the coronavirus a “hoax.” “The virus will not have a chance against us,” he claimed as the death rate climbed toward the current figure of 222,000. He blamed “China’s cover-up” and criticized the World Health Organization. His complacency was unnerving even to skeptics.

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    When Trump and Melania were stricken only a month before the election, many must have muttered something about hubris. But, with characteristic bravado, Trump used his brief incapacitation as an occasion to show he doesn’t scare easily. Nor should anyone else. “Don’t be afraid of Covid,” he tweeted. “Don’t let it dominate your life.” Once more, he treated an abstract malefactor as if it were a challenge on “The Apprentice.” “Covid isn’t that serious,” he concluded dismissively. It was typical Trump, making light of what is, to others, a near-irresolvable problem. Then again, that’s been his modus operandi throughout his presidency. For Trump, there hasn’t been a problem that doesn’t have a solution. It’s just that most people are “losers” and don’t want to discover it. He always can. This is why he’s intolerant of journalists whom he calls negative when they attack him. The problems may be larger and more complex than those on “The Apprentice,” but they all have resolutions.

    Most Americans have made up their mind about how they’re going to cast their ballot. Trump’s illness might evoke sympathy, but it won’t affect anyone’s choice. Trump is already back on the road, swatting away criticisms with his usual humorous self-assurance. His flamboyant, often preposterous, occasionally laughable and always entertaining style of leadership has dazzled America and, indeed, the world for four years now. Polls suggest Americans are satiated and ready for a return to a more traditional leader.  

    What worries them most? An extravagantly bombastic president who never doubts the wisdom of his own choices or a more measured and reflective personality who will probably lead competently but never offer the kind of extravaganza to which Americans, as well as the rest of the world, have become accustomed?*[Ellis Cashmore is the author of “Kardashian Kulture.”]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    Traveling on America’s Dangerous Path

    As America plunges toward its own version of an election demolition derby, a choice is very clear to just about everybody. The problem is that there are two choices, no consensus and a lot of angry right-wingers with guns who fervently support the choice that is almost certain to be rejected by the majority. There is rightly a sense of dread that voter intimidation and armed resistance to the otherwise likely outcome will create enough chaos and institutional failure to undermine the nation’s normally routine transfer of power.

    I have just recently been on the road a couple of times in the US. First, for 10 days, trying to dodge COVID droplets in three deeply-divided states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. My car radio provided the backdrop for the journey, filled with right-wing radio, Christian radio (often the same thing), oldies and some country music. I stayed in motels, carried some of my own food, ate in some restaurants and did some take-out.

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    The second trip was to western Maryland, a red zone in a blue state. This trip included some time in the outdoors on popular hiking trails, one of which was a microcosm of everything wrong with America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. On a beautiful fall day, hundreds of people clogged a one and a quarter-mile path along a stream and river with four distinct waterfalls. At least two-thirds of those on the trail carried on as if they and their families were immune from COVID-19. No masks, no effort at protective distancing and no concern about the vulnerable people in their midst, often including small children and aging parents.

    “No Mask, No Entry“

    On the road, I did find one motel that actually seemed to do everything I could think of to protect me, their staff and their other customers. Otherwise, it was a very mixed bag. Almost no motel cleaning staff wore masks — they are going into the rooms of strangers right after they have left to gather up bedding, towels and trash. They breathe it in and then just to make sure that everything that can go wrong will go wrong, they breathe it right back out while sanitizing. Great idea.

    Bartenders with masks perched just below their noses were another common feature. I never saw a single owner, manager or employee of any establishment ever tell a customer to put on a mask or leave. Every place I went into had a big sign on the door requiring masks inside — no mask, no entry. I saw a guy with a gun on his hip but no mask on his face taking a leak at an Interstate rest stop — no mask, no entry. I left that rest stop quickly for a whole bunch of reasons.

    These trips provided ample evidence of just how sick the American body politic is. Words like “choice” and “freedom” permeate conversations from those resisting government measures to control the coronavirus pandemic. These words have been perverted to create a space for some of the most alarming elements of the national divide. It is but a small leap to fighting “tyranny” for those willing to angrily confront their own government.

    It should not be news to anyone that America is in the midst of a pandemic that is taking close to 1,000 lives a day and now infecting more than 50,000 Americans every day and getting worse. Wearing a mask in these times is a really good idea, according to every public health professional in the world. Every single one of them. No exceptions. Yet, here in America, the mask message is still not taking hold. Among some segments of the populace, a Halloween mask is good, but a cloth mask to protect yourself and the health of your family, friends and a bunch of strangers is somehow bad.

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    The key concept at play here is “choice,” as an easily recognized variant of “freedom.” This is OK if you are choosing between milk chocolate and dark chocolate, coffee or tea, Nationals or Dodgers, and the like. It is pathetic as a response to a public health crisis — your choice, wear a mask or sneeze directly into my soup. It obviously isn’t as simple as this, but it should be a lot easier than it appears to be.

    I am telling you this because there will be no end to the pandemic here until the vector segment of America either dies off or can be corralled and enclosed in one or more of the vector states. There is just too much stupidity and willful ignorance to be overcome by anything short of enforced mandatory masking, lockdowns and serious contact tracing. None of the above is on the menu yet, mask or no mask.

    Some of this would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. For example, many people who identify as “pro-life” turn out to be “pro-choice” when it comes to masks, and often choose the path that leads to more death. On the other hand, as absurd as it sounds, it seems that “Zoom” meetings have actually increased human face time for those whose lives are defined by the latest ping on their supposedly “smart” phone.

    A Political Symbol?

    But let’s not be fooled. Large swaths of America and the world are living restricted lives circumscribed by disease while losing ground socially and economically. A nation in need of some measure of collective conscience finds itself sinking ever deeper into a world in which delusion substitutes for judgment and care for others is no longer part of the equation, if it ever was. Sadly, those who seem to have benefited most from prosperity and privilege are often those whose contempt for community puts those less prosperous and without privilege at even greater risk.

    Too many of those with the opportunity to enjoy that waterfall trail seemed so unable to even consider a different way, a safer way. As long as callous people continue to wander dangerously in public places, it is hard to see how enough of these people will allow themselves to be organized to accept the type of vaccination mobilization program that will be necessary to finally end the pandemic.

    To better understand the challenge, it is essential to recognize that wearing a mask in public has become a political symbol in America, and nowhere else. Parents choose to ignore the safety of their own children and children ignore the safety of their own parents to proclaim their “freedom” from government oppression and their support for a president who has abandoned them to disease. These people are choosing to endanger others. (Unbuckle those seat belts and watch the bodies fly.)

    As the US presidential election approaches and the pandemic worsens, each of us has a clear choice to make. Side with the candidate whose venal face can be seen in full or the other candidate who wisely hides part of his face and shows all of his heart. This should not be hard.

    *[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    Donald Trump: The Worst Kind of Populist

    Every year, the movers and shakers of our times come together for a few days in Davos, a swanky resort of literary fame in the Swiss Alps thanks to Thomas Mann, who made it the setting of his magnum opus, “The Magic Mountain.” Today, the economic, political and academic high-flyers no longer come to Davos to be cured of tuberculosis but to contemplate the state of the world. In recent years, the results have been increasingly somber, reflecting a new realism, not to say pessimism, that one might not have expected from such an illustrious crowd. Last year, the reunion was dominated by the threat posed by the eruption of populism.

    Michael Froman, the vice president of Mastercard, set the tone with his warning that “one thing is clear: nationalism, populism, nativism, and protectionism are on the rise. Economic insecurities, as well as a growing sense of lost sovereignty, have contributed to an unprecedented degree of political polarization, and not just in the US.”

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    The reference to the United States is hardly surprising. For the past several years, anyone writing on populism and its various aspects has invariably invoked two major events: Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Both have been framed as part of a larger populist revolt, which is characterized as one of the most significant and distinctive, if not outright defining, political features of today’s world. But is it really that clear-cut, that obvious?

    It largely depends on how populism is defined. Is it merely an expression of widespread disaffection with a political system that appears to have largely failed to take seriously and address the grievances of the “ordinary people”? Or is it something entirely more serious, something that poses a fundamental challenge, if not a threat to liberal democracy?

    It Can’t Happen Here

    As is so often the case, there is ample support for both interpretations. This might explain the passionate, diametrically opposed sentiments Donald Trump has and continues to evoke. Despite everything — his shallowness coupled with an egotism that borders on the pathological, his dishonesty and myriads of lies, his vulgarity, callousness and utter lack of empathy, his obvious ignorance and glaring incompetence — a substantial part of the American electorate will support him, no matter what.

    At the same time, because of what Trump embodies, stands for and projects, a substantial part of the American electorate has nothing but contempt for a president who once claimed that he could shoot somebody in the middle of Manhattan and still maintain the support of his voters. Unfortunately, he might have been right.

    Statements like that led a number of commentators ahead of the 2016 election to express fears that a Trump presidency might descend into fascism. Some of them evoked Lewis Sinclair’s 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” pointing out the eerie resemblance between Sinclair’s Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip and Donald Trump. Several years into his presidency, the debate of whether or not Trump is a fascist is still in full swing.

    The answer is fairly obvious, at least for those who have spent some time studying fascist regimes, such as Benito Mussolini’s totalitarian state. This, in fact, is one of the central tenets of fascism — the glorification of the strong state. As Mussolini once put it, “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state!” What this phrase means, at least in theory, is nothing less than the complete subordination of the individual to the exigencies of the state and its supreme leader. Reality, of course, looked a bit different, as Federico Fellini has so brilliantly shown.

    It is for this reason alone that the fascism charge against Trump makes little sense, given America’s long tradition of, and abiding allegiance to, individualism. It is the rampant individualism that permeates American social and economic life, which, for instance, has been identified as a major reason for the widespread refusal in recent weeks to wear masks. Under the circumstances, it is probably best to abandon the fascism charge altogether, if only because comparing Trump to the likes of Mussolini and particularly Hitler can only but contribute to the trivialization of fascism and Nazism, responsible for mass murder and horrendous suffering on a massive scale.

    If Not Fascist, Then What?

    If not a fascist, what then is Trump? Over the course of his presidency, it has become increasingly obvious that Donald Trump represents the epitome of a radical right-wing populist — and of the worst kind. Radical right-wing populism is a blend of populism and nativism, which promotes a fundamental social and political transformation of the existing liberal system. This is along the lines of Victor Orban’s model of “illiberal democracy” — the endpoint of a slow process of eroding and ultimately asphyxiating both the ideational and institutional foundations of liberal representative democracy. In the past, the populist model of illiberal democracy was largely confined to Latin American regimes, starting with Juan Perón in Argentina and ending with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia.

    In the United States, the most outstanding example of this kind of populism was Huey Long, first the governor of, then the senator for Louisiana in the late 1920s and early 1930s. And, in fact, commentators have drawn parallels between Long, “with his loud mouth and boorish ways,” as a contemporary characterized him, and Trump. Both men “presented themselves to the electorate as insurgents, outsiders seeking to disrupt the established order and tackle vested interests, promising widespread economic and political reform.” Both men, once in office, displayed authoritarian dispositions and established and consolidated a system of cronyism, if not outright corruption, fundamentally at odds with the tenets of America’s model of liberal democracy.

    Here, however, the resemblance ends. Unlike Trump, Long was genuinely concerned about the plight of the poor and, particularly as senator, pushed for a progressive agenda centering around redistributive policies. In fact, his most memorable message, as Adrian Mercer points out, “aimed at the state’s poor, dispossessed, and marginalised, was encapsulated in the “Share our Wealth” programme which offered voters a promised land where, in his famous phrase, “every man a king.”

    According to the prominent economist Barry Eichengreen, Long proposed capping annual incomes at $1 million and inheritances at $5.1 million. The resulting revenues were supposed to go into a basic income of $2,500, provide pensions to the elderly, free health care to veterans and free education to students attending college or vocational training. And unlike Trump, Huey Long never had the chance to run for president. He was murdered in 1935, his assassination triggered by his maneuvering in Louisiana’s legislature to rid himself of one of his political opponents.

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    Populists justify this kind of shenanigans (getting rid of opponents via legislative means) as expressions of the “will of the people.” The people’s will is deemed confirmed via numerous elections and popular referenda and summed up, as it were, by the populist leader who incarnates the people — “El pueblo soy yo,” as the title of Enrique Krauze’s book on populism puts it. Since the populist leader is nothing but the expression of the will of the people — what Ernesto Laclau has called an “empty signifier” onto whom the people can project their anxieties, fears, fury, resentments and, yes, aspirations — there is no need for checks and balances and competitive pluralism. The result is a state “in which the political power relativizes the rule of law, democracy and human rights in politically sensitive cases; constitutionalizes populist nationalism; and takes advantage of identity politics, new patrimonialism, clientelism, and state-controlled corruption.”

    In order to bring this about, populists have employed what Stephen Gardbaum has referred to as “revolutionary constitutionalism.” This entails “using the constitution-making (and amendment) process as a tool of ordinary rather than higher politics to entrench an existing or newly empowered government’s position through measures that concentrate its power and render successful electoral opposition more difficult.” This is what happened, in one form or another, in Hungary, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador under populist regimes.

    “Own People”

    Illiberal democracy is only one side of the radical right-wing populist coin. The other, and significantly more important one — particularly in the case of political parties in competitive representative democracies such as exist in Western Europe that have little chance to gain an absolute majority — is nativism. Nativist doctrine maintains that the interests of the “native-born” should have absolute priority over those new to the national community. The “own people” should always come first: citizens before non-citizens, the native-born before foreigners, the own nation before the rest of the world. Popular slogans such as National Rally’s “La France aux français,” (“France for the French”), “Les français d’abord” (“The French First”), or Vlaams Blok’s “Eigen Volk Eerst” (“Own People First”) attest to the centrality of nativism in the radical populist right’s ideational repertoire.

    Politically, nativists stand for protecting a country’s job market and welfare benefits against “outgroup” competitors. At the same time, they promote a wide array of measures designed to defend, maintain and revive the cherished heritage of the autochthonous population’s culture, customs and values. As far as the government is concerned, nativist doctrine demands that it demonstrate a “reasonable partiality towards compatriots by protecting and advancing the socioeconomic and cultural welfare of its own citizens, more often than not defined in ethnic terms.”

    Radical right-wing populism is hardly new to American politics. In fact, nativism originated in the United States in the first half of the 19th century, with the arrival of waves of immigrants from Europe, the vast majority of them Catholics from Ireland and the southern parts of Germany. In response, Protestants organized secret societies and associations set on countering what they considered the “deadly threat” to the republic posed by an alien force they deemed intent on subverting the country’s institutions and ultimately subordinating America to the pope.

    Over time, the various anti-Catholic organizations merged into a political party, popularly known as the Know Nothings, which combined anti-elite populism with a strong dose of nativism. For a few years in antebellum America, the Know Nothings posed a significant threat to the established political system before falling apart over a new contentious issue — abolitionism. Ironically enough, many Know Nothings joined Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party, bringing with them a legacy of anti-Catholicism.

    Perhaps not surprisingly, the Republican Party under Donald Trump has been compared to the Know Nothings, given its “loathing for immigrants.” This comparison is both fair and unfair: fair because the Know Nothings stoked anxieties and fears of a Catholic takeover of the United States, which was ludicrous, to say the least; unfair because unlike today’s Trump-subservient minions in the Republican Party, the Know Nothings never outright opposed immigration, not even from Catholic countries, and never advocated closing America’s shores or building a wall. What they demanded instead was extending the period of naturalization to 21 years, equal to the period it took for a “native-born” to become a citizen with full citizen rights.

    Greatest Suction Pump in the World

    In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, nativist sentiments have received a significant boost. Surveys suggest a substantial increase in public support for economic protectionism, particularly with respect to critical and strategically important sectors such as health and food. At the same time, calls for regaining national sovereignty, particularly as it regards national borders, and for shoring up a sense of national identity have gained increasing support, not only among the public, but also among the political establishment.

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    Last but not least, the pandemic has provided new justifications for demands to further reduce access to social benefits to the “undeserving” — primarily migrants from non-Western countries — in order to further reduce the welfare state’s pull effect which, as nativists charge, is a major reason why migrants and “bogus refugees” seek to enter Western Europe.

    The ultimate objective is to completely shut down the “suction pumps” — “pompes aspirantes,” as the National Rally likes to put it — such as generous welfare benefits that are held to be the main reason migrants are attracted to Western Europe. Nativists justify their position by claiming that the influx of migrants and the resulting growing ethnocultural diversity threaten to weaken social solidarity and, in the processes, undermine support for the welfare state — what in the welfare state literature is known as the progressive dilemma. It stands to reason that in the wake of COVID-19, “welfare chauvinist” sentiments have grown, even if the absence of reliable survey data prevents a conclusive statement.

    Given these trends and developments, it is probably safe to say that with COVID-19, the “opportunity structure” for radical right-wing populist mobilization has considerably improved. Whether or not this will actually benefit the radical populist right at the polls depends to a large extent on their ability to exploit the political opportunities the pandemic has opened up. The November election is likely to provide the first tentative answers.

    During his tenure as president of the United States, Donald Trump has provided ample evidence that he is the paragon of a radical right-wing populist leader well versed in eliciting some of the worst impulses and affects in human nature. As Frank Bruni has recently put it in The New York Times, “Trump has shown America its resentments. He has modeled its rage.” This explains to a large extent why his appeal among substantial parts of the American electorate remains strong until today. Trump’s amazing staying power, despite his glaring incompetence and lack of positive human emotions, has largely been based on his uncanny ability to sense the grievances and resentments of his various constituencies and turn them into a simplistic narrative of victimization, with himself as the prime victim.

    Populism is a particular style of politics that to a large extent plays on affect and emotions. The gamut is wide, ranging from anxiety, fear, anger and resentment to disdain and contempt, to name but the most important. One, however, is of particular importance in contemporary radical right-wing populist discourse: nostalgia. Nostalgia is that yearning for a happier past “when the world was still in order,” as the Germans like to say. In the United States, these were the days of “Leave it to Beaver” and “Happy Days,” the world evoked in “American Graffiti” and “Diner.” These were the days when a factory job could still guarantee a middle-class life, complete with a house, two cars and two-and-a-half children.

    These were the days when men were still men, women knew their place in society, gays did not dare to come out of the closet, and marriage was limited to a union between a man and a woman. These were the days when the United States was the dominant world power, economically, militarily, even culturally, with Western European audiences were glued to “Dallas” and “Charlie’s Angels.” These were the days when Americans had reason to claim that theirs was “the greatest country in the world.”

    Today, only those Americans who have never set foot out of their neck of the woods, who still believe that Ontario is part of the United States, would subscribe to this notion. For the rest, the realization has sunk in that America is no longer what its cheerleaders on Fox News claim it to be, that the nation is not only coming apart at the seams but increasingly falling behind the rest of advanced capitalist countries and thus no longer attractive as a destination.

    Take, for instance, the case of Norway. In 2018, Trump made it known to the world that he wished for more Norwegians to come and settle in the US rather than all those migrants from “shithole countries” such as Haiti or the African nations. As it turns out, Norwegians — hundreds of thousands of whom migrated to the United States in the 19th century — waved off Trump’s invitation. In 2016, a mere 500 Norwegians moved to the US, 10% less than in the previous year.

    The End of the American Dream

    For the past several decades, a large number of Americans have deluded themselves in believing that theirs is indeed the greatest country on earth. Even Trump’s famous slogan, “Make America Great Again,” apparently failed to alert them to the fact that the tag line might indicate that America was no longer great. And if it actually did, they could always claim that if America was no longer what it used to be, it was all Obama’s fault or the result of an evil plot by the left. Reality, however, tends to be tenacious and rather impervious to spin. Ironically enough, it is that reality which to a large extent explains Trump’s continued appeal.

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    In fact, numerous studies over the past few years have shown that what permeates American society is a profound malaise, which to a large extent has preceded the current pandemic. As a Pew study from early 2019 put it, “Looking to the Future, Public Sees an America in Decline on Many Fronts.” At the same time, the Trump presidency, despite all of its bluster and hype, has done nothing to reverse these sentiments. In September, less than 30% of likely voters thought the country was going in the right direction — virtually unchanged from the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency. And yet, Trump has remained politically competitive and might still win the November election. It would be intellectually dishonest to claim that there is one indisputable explanation for why this is the case. The fact is that there are numerous plausible explanations, all of which throw light on different parts of reality.

    This brings us back to Ernesto Laclau’s theory on populism, particularly his notion of the empty signifier briefly mentioned earlier on. Laclau’s take on populism is to start with the most basic unit of analysis, disparate grievances and demands expressed by ordinary people. If the political establishment fails to meet them, these unsatisfied grievances and demands, particularly if they establish a common denominator — “they could care less about us” — create what Laclau calls a “frontier,” a gap between those below and those on top, which is the perfect basis for populist mobilization.

    In order to understand these dynamics, it is necessary to proceed in two steps. The first step regards the socioeconomic and socio-structural conditions and developments that have given rise to grievances and demands. The second step regards the nature of these grievances and demands, and how they play themselves out politically. One word of caution, however: Not all grievances and demands are the result of recent developments. Some of them have been simmering for a long time, until they found an outlet in the presidency of Donald Trump.

    One of the most widely cited explanations of the outcome of the 2016 election is Diana Mutz’s study from 2018. Mutz advances two arguments. On the basis of empirical evidence, she postulates that Trump’s victory was informed by both a “perceived status threat by high-status groups” — white Americans of European stock — and “American insecurity about whether the United States is still the dominant global economic superpower.”

    Status Loss

    This is hardly the first time that there is a strong sense of decline in the United States. Already in the late 1980s, there were similar concerns, only that time with respect to Japan and Western Europe. Task forces were set up at prominent institutions like MIT, commissioned to examine what had gone wrong and come up with ideas of how America could regain its “productive edge.” With the boom of the 1990s, fueled by the dotcom bubble, the concern with decline quickly dissolved in thin air.

    Today, the situation is fundamentally different. With the rapid ascent of China, the United States is faced with a substantially more serious challenge. As Joseph Nye wrote a year ago in the Financial Times, “Many in Washington, both Republicans and Democrats, fear that the rise of China will spell the end of the American era. This exaggerated fear itself can become a cause of conflict.” Nye was skeptical about China’s potential to pose a serious threat to the United States anytime soon. Others less so,  above all Donald Trump. His increasing belligerence toward China reflected not only personal acrimony  but a broader irritation with the fact that “an economic system different from the U.S. has succeeded so remarkably.”

    There are, of course, a number of quite real reasons for American anxieties and irritation when it comes to China. For one, China has become America’s main creditor, holding hundreds of billions of US debt. Secondly, there is a sense that China is largely responsible for American deindustrialization. To be sure, this is largely bogus. Deindustrialization has a number of causes, most prominently perhaps the pervasive influence of financialization. But it is far easier to blame China than confront domestic failures and shortcomings.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Deindustrialization is, of course, one of the major drivers of the second development identified by Mutz, the perceived loss of status by hitherto relatively high-status groups. Much has recently been written about the importance of status loss for explaining the success of radical right-wing populism. The mechanism, as Sarah Engler and David Weisstanner describe, is fairly straightforward: “The relative deterioration in material conditions … translates into a lower subjective social status of vulnerable groups who then turn towards the radical right.” In the past, loss of status resulting from socioeconomic modernization affected primarily routine blue-collar workers, losing out to competition from cheap labor in developing countries. Today, the range of potential victims of globalization is much greater, reaching all the way into professional groups. This is to a large extent due to the rapid pace of innovation in emerging technologies, such as robotics, AI, 5G and nanotechnology, to name but a few.

    What all of these technologies have in common is that they are highly capital-intensive, digitalized and increasingly automated. This means that they are unlikely to benefit traditional blue-collar workers. On the contrary, like earlier offshoring and outsourcing of industrial production, the emerging automation-driven economy offers few opportunities for low-skilled workers performing routine tasks that are easily robotized. Even worse, with robots “increasingly able to perform not only manual and routine cognitive tasks but also non-routine manual and cognitive tasks.”

    AI-driven automation is expected to threaten even skilled workers, albeit to a lesser extent than oftentimes claimed. Those who benefit most from these developments are highly-educated, high-skilled workers, particularly if well-versed in STEM disciplines, which allow them to perform tasks that are complementary to automation, such as robot design, maintenance, supervision and management.

    The socio-structural consequences are well-known from earlier rounds of technological and organizational innovation, such as the introduction of CNC machinery, CAM/CAD applications, flexible manufacturing systems, just-in-time production: the devaluation of formal degrees (high school diploma, bachelor’s degree, vocational degrees), structural unemployment, early retirement, regional disparities and growing inequality.

    As a result, a growing number of working-age persons have been left with the impression that they have become “structurally irrelevant,” their skills and experience obsolete, their labor no longer needed, their place of home “landscapes of despair.” Take, for instance, oil drilling. In 2014, oil prices fell precipitously. As a result, a large number of oil industry workers lost their jobs. When oil prices rose again, many of them were never recalled. Because of automated drilling, only a fraction of the initial workforce was needed. Of 440,000 workers, roughly half never found their way back. The same has happened, albeit on a smaller scale, in the coal industry, which Trump promised he would save. The opposite happened: Many mines shut down during his tenure, accelerating coal’s decline and leaving hundreds out of work.

    Resentment Exhausted?

    The decline of America’s coal industry provides another glimpse into the dynamics of American decline — the decline of the American male. With the collapse of the coal industry in large parts of the United States, the status of men has fundamentally changed. In the past, as a recent report in The New York Times on the situation of coal mining in the Appalachians describes, coal miners had good jobs, “with good benefits and an income approaching six figures when all the overtime was added.” The men worked underground, the women stayed home to take care of the children.

    With the closing of the mines, the gender balance was completely reversed. While men were laid off, women went back to work. Men were left with the impression that their “very identity” had been “declared insolvent.” Dan Cassino, of Fairleigh Dickinson University, has persuasively shown that men who feel their masculinity threatened react in a particular way. They refuse to do the dishes, buy guns, refuse to wear masks, and vote Republican. They epitomize in the starkest of terms possible the decline of world marked by the likes of John Wayne, Gary Cooper and Clint Eastwood.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Radical right-wing populism is above all a politics of resentment. Resentment is one of the most potent emotions as an impetus of populist mobilization. Donald Trump has been a master in provoking, stoking and capitalizing on resentment. Resentment is provoked by a profound sense of injustice, of a strong sense of being ignored, if not being taken seriously. This is the central message of a number of studies that have appeared in recent years, from J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” to Katherine J. Cramer’s “The Politics of Resentment.”

    It also explains the continued support for Trump on the part of American evangelicals and devout Catholics despite his horrendous moral flaws. For decades, both groups have been the butt of jokes, their beliefs ridiculed, their concerns dismissed. In Donald Trump, they found a presidential candidate who projected himself as on a mission from God dedicated to restoring Christianity’s rightful place at the center of American society. In this way, Trump appealed to wide-spread American Christian resentment against an increasingly secularized society, which embraced values with respect to marriage and the sanctity of life diametrically opposed to their fundamental beliefs.

    On November 3, the American electorate is called upon to elect its president. The choice is between a patently populist incumbent and a representative of the establishment. No matter who will win the election, one thing is clear: The grievances that propelled Donald Trump into the Oval Office four years ago have not been met. Quite the contrary: The COVID-19 pandemic has only but added to the malaise endemic to American society’s mood over the past several years. Trump’s presidency has done little to nothing to alleviate this malaise. Resentment still dominates American politics — a politics more polarized than ever. Under the circumstances, it is difficult to imagine that the United States is going to regain the confidence and bravado that once made it the greatest country in the world.

    *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    Trans and Non-Binary Voters Face Disenfranchisement in US Election

    In the United States, trans and non-binary people’s voting rights are under threat from strict photo ID laws or harassment at polling stations. As November 3 approaches, the impact of such restrictions looms large for the status of the country’s democracy. To have credible democratic elections, they must be free from discrimination, particularly regarding the ability of historically marginalized groups to participate. It is essential that steps are taken to mitigate this impact in the next two weeks and that changes are made for future elections. 

    360˚ Context: The 2020 US Election Explained

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    In the US, 36 states have voter ID laws, with 18 of those requiring a photo ID; notably in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, strict photo voter ID laws were recently struck down. These ID laws significantly affect transgender voters who may have difficulty obtaining an ID that accurately reflects their name, gender and appearance. As a result, transgender citizens with identification documents that do not match their gender may be turned away at the polls. By some estimates, approximately 42% of eligible transgender voters do not have identification documents that reflect their name and gender.

    Disenfranchisement

    When it is permitted, the administrative process of updating voter identification cards can also be onerous and involve significant financial and administrative hurdles for trans people, discouraging voting. At least 14 states have burdensome requirements to alter the gender section on IDs, including a court order, proof of gender-affirming surgery or an amended birth certificate. This is despite the fact many trans people do not want, cannot access or afford surgery or other gender-affirming care. In addition, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of gender-affirming procedures have been put on hold as non-emergency care and surgeries are postponed.

    These requirements potentially disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of trans citizens. The UCLA Williams Institute notes that “In the November 2020 general election, over 378,000 voting-eligible transgender people may face barriers to voting due to voter registration requirements and voter ID laws, including 81,000 who could face disenfranchisement in strict photo ID states.” These difficulties have only been exacerbated by the pandemic when courts and the Department of Motor Vehicles offices closed across the country for weeks, hindering the process of updating identification documents.

    Of course, the potential for disenfranchisement is even higher for transgender people facing other vectors of oppression related to their race, criminal history, ethnicity, age, income or ability. For instance, as Human Rights Watch notes, the practice of disenfranchising felons and of removing inactive voters from the rolls can disproportionately affect transgender voters who experience housing insecurity and incarceration — often due to the criminalization of HIV transmission or sex work — at higher rates.

    Transgender people also often face harassment and discrimination at the polls, even from poll workers. Human Rights Campaign found in 2019 that fear of discrimination has led “49 percent of transgender adults, and 55 percent of trans adults of color to avoid voting in at least one election in their lives.” This fear is not without basis. The Williams Institute also found that after presenting inaccurate IDs at a polling station, many experience voter suppression: “Respondents reported being verbally harassed (25%), denied services or benefits (16%), being asked to leave the venue where they presented the identification (9%), and being assaulted or attacked (2%).”

    Ensuring Equal Access to Suffrage

    Access to suffrage, regardless of gender identity, is fundamental to democracy, and all undue constraints on who can vote should be eliminated. While the responsibility this November will, unfortunately, fall primarily on trans and non-binary voters to create a voting plan that may include voting by mail when possible, it is the state’s responsibility to ensure equal access for these communities.

    Across the globe, there are models on which to base reform. In several countries such as Argentina, Colombia and Denmark, citizens can self-determine their gender on their IDs. In Malta, there is also an “X” or third gender/decline-to-state option for passports. Having this third option is extremely important for including trans and non-binary voters, yet in the US, only 19 states and the District of Colombia allow residents to select a non-binary option on their driver’s licenses. Further, changing one’s gender on an identification card should not require proof of medical intervention and should be based solely on self-identification.

    In addition to these longer-term reforms, there are also opportunities to prevent discrimination against trans and non-binary voters in this electoral cycle. Advocacy groups should continue to encourage members of the LGBTQ+ community to become poll workers. Simultaneously, the government should train all poll workers on interacting with transgender and non-binary voters and ensuring that they are not denied a ballot. Notably, voters can also report any intimidation at the polls to the nonpartisan Election Protection Coalition at 866-OUR-VOTE. These steps can ensure that members of these communities will feel safe going to the polls and making their voices heard.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    The Russian Pathology Deepens at The NY Times

    The Daily Devil’s Dictionary cannot help but love The New York Times, with increasingly diabolical ardor. Whenever the news cycle goes dry, we can turn to The Times and its documented paranoia for inspiration. The risk is repetition. The reward is the pleasure of picking and consuming low-hanging fruit.

    Yesterday, we focused on a glossy piece of propaganda designed to dismiss US President Donald Trump’s warnings that the results of the US election will be invalid because the new generation of voting machines will be Russia-proof. Now, we have the pleasure of examining The Times’ latest contribution to the revival of the Cold War. This time it’s a spy-versus-spy story, a true Cold War classic.

    The New York Times Confesses to Paranoia

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    A trio of Times journalists — Ana Swanson, Edward Wong and Julian E. Barnes — has penned an article bearing the title, “U.S. Diplomats and Spies Battle Trump Administration Over Suspected Attacks.” It turns out to be a valiant effort of their part to resuscitate a story that officially died in 2018. That was when scientists proved that the sophisticated sonic weapon some American diplomats in Cuba believed was targeting their mental health turned out to be nothing more than the sound produced by a certain species of cricket. At no point in their article do the authors acknowledge the debunking.

    Patient readers will find the piece confusing, like so many other Times articles that flood the reader with random facts, creating the impression that some great investigative work has been undertaken. The following paragraph contains the core of the authors’ accusations (or rather insinuations). It illustrates the type of paranoid reasoning The Times has now routinely adopted as a key feature of its editorial policy.

    “The cases involving C.I.A. officers, none of which have been publicly reported, are adding to suspicions that Russia carried out the attacks worldwide,” the journalists report. “Some senior Russia analysts in the C.I.A., officials at the State Department and outside scientists, as well as several of the victims, see Russia as the most likely culprit given its history with weapons that cause brain injuries and its interest in fracturing Washington’s relations with Beijing and Havana.”

    Here is today’s 3D definition:

    Culprit:

    For The New York Times (and Democratic Representative Adam Schiff), whatever the crime: Russia.

    Contextual Note

    The article consists of a magma of unverified and contradictory accounts of impressionistically reported cases. What the authors cannot achieve by the quality and accuracy of their reporting they try to accomplish through the quantity of random examples. They punctuate the citations with passages of pseudo-reasoning meant to point the reader toward a conclusion that no responsible authority — political or scientific — appears to have reached.

    The paragraph cited above offers a glimpse of the modes of reasoning used to make the article’s thesis sound credible. It cites “cases” that “are adding to suspicions that Russia carried out the attacks worldwide.” In other words, the central fact is that suspicions exist, which is undoubtedly true. But whose suspicions, other than Times journalists? They do cite something that is factual rather than a mere suspicion: “The C.I.A. director remains unconvinced, and State Department leaders say they have not settled on a cause.”

    Embed from Getty Images

    Admittedly suspicions exist. That should be true for any thesis that isn’t clearly established. In the same vein, if there are suspicions (in the plural), we might expect that there will also be suspects. But for The Times, there is only one: Russia. The journalists cite different categories of individuals who designate Russia as the culprit: “Some senior Russia analysts in the C.I.A., officials at the State Department and outside scientists, as well as several of the victims.” Now, if “some” Russia analysts see Russia as the culprit, it means that others don’t.

    Readers should always maintain a “suspicion” that journalists who rely on citing “some” of a designated group of people are more likely expressing opinion than reporting news. We know how eagerly climate change deniers love to cite “some scientists” who doubt the majority opinion. The Times reporters never tire of citing “some” authorities for their opinions or assessments. 

    Early in the article, to establish that there was a real and not imaginary health problem, they cite “some officers and their lawyers.” At one point, they tell us, “Some C.I.A. analysts believe Moscow was trying to derail that work.” At another, “Some senior officials at the State Department and former intelligence officers said they believed Russia played a role.”

    They occasionally use “some” disparagingly to identify those who have failed to reach their conclusion about Russian guilt. “Some top American officials insist on seeing more evidence before accusing Russia,” the journalists write. They cite the CIA director, Gina Haspel, who “has acknowledged that Moscow had the intent to harm operatives, but she is not convinced it was responsible or that attacks occurred.” Maybe this article will convince her.

    Critical readers should also be suspicious of sentences that begin with the phrase, “it’s obvious.” Quoting Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the article tells us, “It’s obvious how a U.S. adversary would have much to gain from the disorder, distress and division that has followed.” As Sherlock Holmes might observe, the obvious is the first thing to become suspicious of and the last thing to trust, even if what seems obvious does have a bearing on the truth. The Russians probably do think they have something to gain from disorder in the US. But so do others. That “obvious” fact doesn’t point in any specific direction, nor does it imply agency.

    Historical Note

    In the same edition of The New York Times (October 19), an op-ed by Michelle Goldberg has a rhetorical question as its title, “Is the Trump Campaign Colluding With Russia Again?” Goldberg’s suspects the omnipresent Russians were behind the story of Hunter Biden’s notorious hard disk that enabled The New York Post to publish compromising emails for the Joe Biden election campaign. National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe, a Trump administration appointee, claims that there is not an iota of evidence to support the claim that Russia is behind the story. The Times counters with an op-ed by John Sipher, a former CIA man who worked for many years in Russia.

    Sipher complains that Ratcliffe’s denial represents nothing more than his willingness to toe Donald Trump’s line. He offers this astonishing moral reflection: “Rather than operating as an honest steward of the large and important intelligence community, Mr. Ratcliffe appears to regard the nation’s secrets as a place to hunt for nuggets that can be used as political weapons.”

    Let’s try to decipher Sipher’s thoughts. He may be right about Ratcliffe’s loyalty to Trump and the need to suspect he might be lying. No, let’s correct that and say he is absolutely right about not trusting anything Ratcliffe says. But his contention that a director of intelligence should be “an honest steward” is laughable. The whole point about working in intelligence is to be a loyally dishonest steward of somebody’s political agenda. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a former CIA director, made that clear when he proudly admitted that the CIA trained its people to lie, cheat and steal.

    Presumably, Sipher worked for the CIA under George Tenet, who famously accepted to lie on behalf of President George W. Bush’s agenda and provide false evidence for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In his book, “At the Center of the Storm,” Tenet later complained that Vice President Dick Cheney and the Bush administration “pushed the country to war in Iraq without ever conducting a ‘serious debate’ about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States.”

    By now, most people are aware of The New York Times’ role in supporting and encouraging the invasion of Iraq and confirming as news the Bush administration’s lies. For some people, it was obvious at the time. That in itself is a lesson in the language of the news. When speaking from a historical perspective about what “some” people did and what was “obvious” in a former time, those much-abused tropes of “some” and “obvious” no longer merit our suspicion. The New York Times doesn’t do history. What it does do, and with much insistence, is contemporary political agendas, despite its claim to be an objective vector of today’s news.

    *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    Does Beijing Prefer Biden or Trump?

    Few major events occur in the world now occur without China having a stake, directly or indirectly, in their outcome. That is because Beijing has become a force to be reckoned with, and its influence has grown to rival or even surpass that of the US in many parts of the world. Just as elections throughout the world have historically implied some sort of impact on Washington, now the world is becoming accustomed to the same being true for Beijing.

    The US presidential election is certainly no exception. At least part of the reason that matters to Washington is because, for the first time since America became a global superpower, it now has a proper peer. The former Soviet Union may have been a military peer, but it was not a peer on any other level. That is not true with China, which now rivals the US in some arenas or is on its way to doing so. In some aspects of science, technology, the global economy, diplomacy and political influence, Beijing is already more consequential to much of the rest of the world than America is.

    360˚ Context: The 2020 US Election Explained

    READ MORE

    Given its single-minded focus on creating an alternative world order crafted in Beijing’s image, as well as the tremendous resources it is devoting to that task, there is little reason to believe that China’s trajectory will change in the coming decade and beyond. One could argue, in fact, that the outcome of the election matters almost as much to Beijing as it does to America, for it will define the type and scope of headwind Beijing faces for at least the next four years.

    A second Trump term of course implies more of the same: trade war, challenging Beijing at every opportunity, the war of words, and not giving an inch on anything. But it also implies four more years of discord and disarray between America and its many allies. Both America and China have paid a serious price for having Donald Trump in the White House, but Beijing has certainly benefitted while Washington has suffered from the fractious nature of America’s relationship with its allies.

    Under a Biden presidency, that is likely to be greatly reduced, which should concern Beijing a lot, for it has enabled the Communist Party of China (CPP) to act with virtual impunity on the global stage while America and its allies passively look on. That is what has enabled Beijing to expropriate and militarize the Spratly and Paracel Islands, bulldoze its way into more than 70 countries without opposition via the Belt and Road Initiative, and significantly increase its influence in the world’s multilateral organizations, among other things. That damage has already been done and, in truth, there is relatively little Joe Biden or any subsequent US administration may be able to do about it.

    What Biden can do in response is repair those alliances and lead an effort to coordinate and unify the West’s future responses to Beijing’s actions. It is by acting in unison that the West will not only get Beijing’s attention, but begin to reverse the tide. Beijing has few real allies, and some of its “allies” have dual allegiances between Beijing and Washington. When push comes to shove in a time of crisis, Saudi Arabia, for example, is not likely to pivot in Beijing’s direction, despite China’s growing economic ties with the kingdom. The same is true with a variety of other allies that China believes are in its camp but which Washington has cultivated over the decades. Beijing is a new arrival to the party.

    So, what is at stake for Beijing is an unfortunate choice: endure four more years of Trump’s tirades or (at least) four years of a US administration that values America’s alliances and intends to reinvigorate them. Biden is not likely to try to reverse the course Trump has embarked upon with Beijing. That ship has sailed. US Congress is on board with Trump’s contention that Xi Jinping and the CCP are bad actors and that the Chinese government is America’s greatest adversary. Biden’s foreign policy is unlikely to be substantively differently oriented.

    In that regard, while this is undoubtedly the most important election of most Americans’ lifetimes, it is also crucially important for Beijing. The gloves are off on both sides and they are not going to be put back on. The question is, does Beijing prefer Trump or Biden? While the answer is probably neither, knowing that bilateral relations are not going to revert to where they were under Barack Obama, Beijing may actually prefer Trump over Biden in the hope that the damage done to America’s alliances may become permanent. In the meantime, the CCP will continue to use Trump to whip up nationalism at home, which of course suits its ultimate objective of strengthening Xi’s and the CCP’s grip on power.

    *[Daniel Wagner is the author of “The Chinese Vortex: The Belt and Road Initiative and its Impact on the World.”]

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    The New York Times Confesses to Paranoia

    In carrying out its mission to promote themes dear to the Democratic Party establishment, The New York Times has produced a slick video on voting technology. The document counters US President Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election will be rigged. The video’s title sums up its case and sets the tone: “This U.S. Election Could Be the Most Secure Yet.”

    Some viewers may notice that the verb “could” contains some serious ambiguity. In contrast with “will,” “could” expresses deep uncertainty. This should tip off viewers that they may be in for a rhetorical ride as they sift through the strong innuendo and shaky evidence of the nearly 14-minute video.

    France’s Problem With Freedom of Expression

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    It doesn’t take long to realize that the entire thesis is built on two sweeping generalizations with nothing to back them up. The first is the assertion in the title that the US presidential election will be secure. It wants us to feel convinced a serious problem has been solved. The second is the thesis that can be found in so many Times articles that the only problem with US democracy is Russian interference. 

    Early in the video, we meet the first figure of authority, David Sanger. His title appears on the right side of the screen: The New York Times national security correspondent. He authoritatively announces the gist of the problem: “The Russians managed to get us paranoid about the security of our own election systems.”

    Here is today’s 3D definition:

    Paranoid:

    In the world of journalism, a productive mental state that incites editors and journalists at The New York Times to produce an unending series of stories that blame Russia for every political problem in the United States.

    Contextual Note

    The self-confessed paranoiac Sanger is immediately followed by David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR). He informs viewers that all is well in the asylum thanks to this reassuring message: “I think it is safe to say that this is the most secure election we’ve ever held in the United States.” In case the viewer isn’t sure whether this unknown personality can be trusted, the video editor provides a caption in the middle of the screen with an arrow pointing to Becker’s head. It says, “Expert.” The curious will have to Google CEIR to learn that Becker’s institute was funded by Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. Google will also lead them to stories that tell the true story about voting machine vulnerabilities, such as this one.

    Once we are reassured by what the “expert” thinks, the voiceover reminds us that vigilance is still required because the Russians are still there. “In 2015, Russians infiltrated our voting in every single state,” the female voice tells us against a background listing the states, whose names, one by one, flip from black to red (the color everyone associates with Soviet Russia). Then comes a curiously honest disclaimer: “Now, there’s no evidence Russians altered votes but… .” The “but” is followed by Sanger offering the analogy of a cat burglar that “got into your house and cased the joint but didn’t take anything.” Russia is a cat burglar.

    Embed from Getty Images

    All of the above occurs in the first minute of the video with 13 more to come. It leads to Sanger’s ominous rhetorical question, “Could the Russians actually affect the vote?” The cat burglar will of course return. Suitably alarmed, the viewer is now prepared to hear the heroic story that will follow of a brave woman in Texas who is about to save the nation from the Russian threat.

    Apart from the sophisticated video editing worthy of Madison Avenue, the heavy-handed messaging of this video can best be compared to… Soviet propaganda. (What else, since it’s all about Russia?) The opening sequence alone merits careful rhetorical analysis. It plays on questions asking with no answers, suppositions with no evidence and speculation that things not only could have gone awry in the past but might go awry in the future, while neglecting the real history of US elections manipulated not by Russians, but by Americans.

    The voiceover mentions dire interference by the Russians in 2015, suggesting that it can explain Trump’s election in November 2016. Sanger had previously called this “one of the most successful intelligence operations in modern history.” But the voiceover also admits that this hadn’t changed any votes. How could one of the most successful operations in history have produced no result? No matter. The point was simply to justify the alarming question: “Could the Russians actually affect the vote?” Though no answer is given, we assume that it should be yes.

    The rest of the video turns around the premise that voting machines may be unreliable, which means that Russians (and only Russians) could hack them. The idea that Republicans, Democrats or mafiosi might hack them is never raised.

    The video then goes on to develop the moral tale of a brave woman in Texas who fought for new technology with a “voter-verified paper trail.” She tells us about “a rough world out there in the elections voting system business” without noticing that the problem may have something to do with mixing business and election procedures. We learn about how the established actors, sharing a monopoly on technology designed to exclude a paper trail, successfully stifled competitive innovation, until the dramatic moment when the forces of good succeeded in imposing a better technology now in use in some places (but not everywhere).

    At this point, the voiceover reminds us of an essential truth proving that all’s well that ends well: “It took Russia’s hacking to improve our voting technology.”

    Historical Note

    Over the past two decades, the investigative journalist Greg Palast has done more focused work than anyone in the public eye to expose the scandal of election manipulation in the US. Unlike The New York Times, he didn’t wait for Russian manipulation of the 2016 presidential election to get to work.

    In December 2003, Palast clearly identified the danger that was emerging. It stemmed from President George W. Bush’s 2002 reform — the Help America Vote Act that imposed voting machines as the national norm for elections. Bush, a Republican, hoped for something more manageable than Florida’s controversial hanging chads as the means for turning future elections in his party’s favor. Democrats voted for the bill. Since then, in election after election, including Democratic primaries, Palast and others (including Robert F. Kennedy Jr.), have provided documented evidence of both parties finding ways of exploiting the technologies for their particular needs.

    Back in 2003, Palast correctly predicted that the machines would be conducive to rigging and highlighted the critical factor: “The administration has put to death any plan that would allow you to have some type of backup paper ballot or receipt.” Seventeen years later, The New York Times — always abreast of the latest news fit to print — attributes this insight to an election clerk in Austin, Texas, who, after 18 years of using the paperless machines, came to the conclusion that what was missing was “a paper trail.”

    David Sanger’s claim that “the Russians managed to get us paranoid” is only half-true. The evidence clearly shows that The New York Times is paranoid. Even in yesterday’s edition, The Times revived a debunked theory about Russian interference with US diplomacy across the globe. For the past four years, The NYT has demonstrated its unbending fixation on blaming Russia for every problem in the US, starting with the unanticipated election of Donald Trump in 2016.

    What is untrue is the idea that the Russians are responsible for The Times’ paranoia. It’s more likely that The Times’ paranoia was a preexisting condition. But a third hypothesis may be closer to the truth. It was the Democratic Party seeking an excuse for Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump that encouraged The NYT to go paranoid.

    Or maybe it isn’t about paranoia at all, but cynicism. In today’s hyperreal news cycles, even the Gray Lady needs sensationalism and false drama to sell their reporting. The mere presence of Trump created a permanent background of sensationalism. For The Times, in its service to the Democratic establishment, the idea of grafting evil Russia onto the Trump pantomime could only be a godsend.

    *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    What Explains Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy?

    Ever since his inauguration in 2017, US President Donald Trump has placed an emphasis on unilateralism and the rejection of international organizations and treaties as the hallmarks of his foreign policy.

    Trump has assumed an aggressive modus operandi in dealing with US partners worldwide and alienated many allies. He repealed US participation in the UN Human Rights Council, UNESCO, the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, the Treaty on Open Skies, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Even in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, he pulled the US out of the World Health Organization.

    The president has pledged to draw an end to the “forever wars” the United States has been involved in over the past couple of decades, and he has challenged the view that America should be the world’s “policeman.” At the same time, his Middle East policy has been nothing short of hawkish, and he has dragged the United States to the brink of war with Iran.

    The Role of Foreign Policy in the US Election

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    Some observers explain Trump’s overseas agenda by noting that he has been hellbent on scoring political points by hurling out of the window the foreign policy legacy of his predecessor, Barack Obama. Others say he has been focused on pulling off his “America First” policy, premised on putting US commitments and global leadership on the backburner and emphasizing the empowerment of the national economy.

    Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco. A leading scholar of the US affairs in the Middle East, he is a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus and an associate editor of the Peace Review journal. His latest book is “Western Sahara: War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresoluton.”

    In this edition of The Interview, Fair Observer talks to Zunes about Trump’s foreign policy challenges, his relationship with autocrats and his strategy in the Middle East.

    The transcript has been edited for clarity. This interview took place in summer 2020.

    Kourosh Ziabari: In a recent article on Foreign Policy, the former undersecretary of state for political affairs, Wendy Sherman, claimed that President Trump — after three and a half years in office — has “developed no foreign policy at all” and that his approach to foreign affairs has been one “without objectives, without strategy, [and] without any indication that it protects and advances US interests.” Is Trump’s foreign policy as disastrous as Sherman describes, or is she saying so merely as a former Obama administration official with partisan interests?

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    Stephen Zunes: This is a reasonably accurate statement. Indeed, many Republicans feel the same way, believing Trump has wasted an opportunity to further a more active foreign policy advancing their more hegemonic and militaristic agenda by failing to fill a number of important State Department positions and failing to articulate a clear policy.

    By all accounts, Trump is profoundly ignorant of even the most basic facts relevant to foreign policy — the names and locations of foreign countries, modern diplomatic history and other things which most reasonably well-educated Americans know. His refusal to even read policy briefs his advisers have written up for him has made it impossible for him to develop any kind of coherent foreign policy agenda. His view toward foreign relations is largely transactional — what you can do for me will determine US policy toward your country — and therefore not based on any overall vision of advancing US interests, much less international peace and security.

    His efforts to push foreign governments to pursue policies designed to help his reelection led to his impeachment earlier this year, but the Republican-controlled Senate refused to convict him despite overwhelming evidence of illegal activities in this regard.

    Ziabari: Some of the major foreign policy challenges of the Trump administration emanated from the threats apparently posed to the United States by Iran, North Korea, China and Russia. How has Trump dealt with these challenges? A June 2020 poll by Gallup found that only 41% of US adults approve of Trump’s performance in foreign policy. Is there a yardstick by which we can measure the president’s success in his overseas agenda?

    Zunes: Virtually every administration, regardless of party, has tended to exaggerate overseas threats to varying degrees, and this is certainly true with Trump. There have been real inconsistencies, however. For example, he has been far more tolerant toward North Korea, which has violated previous agreements and pursued its nuclear weapons program, than he has been toward Iran, which had dramatically reduced its nuclear capabilities and was scrupulously honoring its nuclear agreement prior to the US withdrawal from the Iran [nuclear] deal. Similarly, he has tolerated a series of provocative actions by Russia while obsessively targeting China.

    While hypocrisy and double standards is certainly not a new phenomenon in US foreign policy, Trump’s actions have taken this to a new extreme and have severely weakened US credibility in the international community.

    Ziabari: How has foreign policy historically influenced the prospects of politicians winning elections in the United States? Do you expect President Trump’s divisive foreign policy decisions to derail his chances of being reelected in November? 

    Zunes: Foreign policy is even less of a factor in this year’s election than usual, so it is unlikely to determine the outcome. Ironically, as in 2016, Trump may run to the left of the Democratic nominee, so, despite Trump’s impetuous and problematic foreign policy leadership, foreign policy issues may actually weigh to his advantage.

    During the 2016 campaign, Trump successfully, if somewhat disingenuously, was able to portray himself as a president who would be more cautious than his Democratic opponent regarding unpopular US military interventions overseas. Despite having actually supported the invasion of Iraq, Trump was largely successful in depicting himself as a war opponent and Hillary Clinton as a reckless militarist who might get the United States in another round of endless wars in the Middle East. An analysis of voting data demonstrated that a significant number of voters in northern swing states who supported the anti-Iraq War Barack Obama in the 2008 and 2012 elections switched to supporting Trump in the 2016 election over this very issue, thereby making possible his Electoral College majority.

    Already, the Trump campaign has begun targeting Joe Biden on this very issue. Biden played a critical role as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in pushing the war authorization through the Democratic-controlled Senate, limiting hearings and stacking the witness list with war opponents. He has also repeatedly lied about his support for the [Iraq] war — even after inspectors had returned and confirmed the absence of the weapons of mass destruction that he and President Bush falsely claimed Iraq still possessed — giving the Trump campaign an opening to press this issue even more.

    Meanwhile, Biden has alienated many rank-and-file Democrats by pushing through a party platform calling for tens of billions of dollars of unconditional taxpayer-funded arms transfers to Israel while not even mentioning, much less condemning, the Israeli occupation and settlements. It criticizes efforts by both the United Nations and civil society campaigns to end the occupation as somehow unfairly delegitimizing Israel itself. This comes despite polls showing a sizable majority of Democrats oppose the occupation and settlements and support conditioning aid.  

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    Neither candidate appears willing to reduce the United States’ bloated military budget or end arms transfers to dictatorships. However, Biden has promised to end support for Saudi Arabia’s devastating war on Yemen and the longstanding US backing of the Saudi regime, as well as reverse Trump’s escalation of the nuclear arms race, both of which are popular positions.

    Meanwhile, Biden has won over the vast majority of the foreign policy establishment, including quite a few Republicans, who have been appalled by Trump’s treatment of traditional allies and cozy relations with the Russian regime. How much impact this will have on swing voters, however, remains to be seen.

    Ziabari: Trump’s pullout from the Iran nuclear deal was one of his major and contentious foreign policy decisions. In a poll conducted shortly after he announced the US withdrawal, CNN found 63% of Americans believed the United States should stick with the accord, while only 29% favored abandoning it. Last year, a Pew Research Center poll revealed 56% of the respondents did not have faith in the president’s ability to handle the crisis with Iran. Has the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign against the Islamic Republic yielded the results it was expected to achieve?

    Zunes: Iran already made enormous compromises in agreeing to the JCPOA required it to destroy billions of dollars’ worth of nuclear facilities and material while neither the United States nor any of Iran’s nuclear-armed neighbors — namely Israel, India and Pakistan — were required to reduce their arsenals or any other aspects of their nuclear program. Iran agreed to these unilateral concessions in return for a lifting of the debilitating sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council.

    Despite full Iranian compliance with the agreement, the United States not only re-imposed its own sanctions, but it effectively forced foreign governments and countries to do the same at an enormous cost to the Iranian people. Hardline elements in the Iranian government, who opposed the agreement on the grounds that the United States could not be trusted to uphold its end of the deal, feel they have been vindicated, and moderate elements in the government are on the defensive.

    Some fear that the goal of the Trump administration in tearing up the agreement was to encourage the Iranians to resume their nuclear program, which is exactly what happened, in order to provoke a crisis that could give the United States an excuse to go to war.

    The mistake the United States made in Vietnam was seeing the leftist revolution against the US-backed regime in Saigon in terms of its communist leadership rather than the strong nationalist sentiments which propelled it. Washington could not understand why the more troops we sent and the more bombs we dropped actually strengthened the opposition.

    Similarly, looking at the Iranian regime in terms of its Islamist leadership misses the strong nationalist sentiments in that country. While a growing number of Iranians oppose the authoritarianism, conservatism and corruption of the clerical and military leadership, a large majority appear to support the regime in its confrontation with the United States. Iranians, like the Vietnamese, are among the most nationalistic people in the world. Iran, formerly known as Persia, has been a regional power on and off for the past 2,500 years and does not appreciate being treated in such a dismissive way. The more pressure on Iran, the greater the resistance.

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    Concerns raised by the Trump administration about the Iranian regime — its repression, discrimination against women and religious minorities, support for extremist groups, interference in other countries, among other points — are indeed valid. Yet each of these issues are also true, in fact, even more so, when it comes to Saudi Arabia and other close US allies in the region. The problem the United States has with Iran, therefore, is not in regard to such negative behavior, but the fact that Iran is the most powerful country in the greater Middle East that rejects US hegemony. Iran was willing to compromise on its nuclear program, but it is not going to compromise when it comes to its sovereignty.Ziabari: One of the critical points President Trump’s opponents raise about him is his affinity for autocratic leaders and dictators. He has — on different occasions — praised, congratulated or invited to the White House President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines; President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt; President Vladimir Putin of Russia; the far-right leader of the French party National Rally, Marine Le Pen; and the supreme leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un. Why is Trump attracted to these unpopular leaders? Can it be attributed to his desire for becoming a president for life? 

    Zunes: Most US presidents have supported allied dictatorships. Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, US arms have flowed to autocratic regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other repressive Arab regimes as well as dictators in Africa, Asia and, in previous years, Latin America as well.

    What makes Trump different is that while previous administrations at least pretended to support improved human rights in these countries, and often rationalized for arms transfers and other close relations as a means of supposedly influencing them in that direction, Trump doesn’t even pretend to support political freedom and has even praised their repressive tactics.

    There is little question that Trump himself has autocratic tendencies. The US Constitution prevents him from becoming president for life and other more overt autocratic measures, but he has certainly stretched his presidential authority in a number of very disturbing ways.

    Ziabari: Rescinding international agreements, reducing the commitments of the US government abroad and embracing unilateralism have been the epitome of Trump’s foreign policy. This is believed to have created rifts between the US and its traditional allies, particularly in the European Union and NATO. Some observers of US foreign policy, however, say the gulf has been exaggerated and that the United States continues to enjoy robust relations with its global partners. What are your thoughts?

    Zunes: Due to the United States’ economic and military power, most foreign governments have little choice but to work closely with Washington on any number of issues. However, the United States is no longer looked at for leadership in ways it had been previously. This decline has been going on for some time, accelerating during the George W. Bush administration and paused during the Obama administration, but it has now plummeted under Trump to a degree that it is not likely to recover. The rejection of basic diplomatic protocols and other traditions of international relations repeatedly exhibited by Trump has alienated even some of the United States’ more conservative allies.

    While Joe Biden is certainly far more knowledgeable, experienced and diplomatic in his approach to foreign policy than the incumbent president, his support for the Iraq invasion, the Israeli occupation and various allied dictatorships has also made him suspect in the eyes of many erstwhile allies. And many allies have already reset their foreign policy priorities to make them less dependent on and less concerned about the United States and its priorities.

    Ziabari: President Trump appears to have taken US-Israel relations to a new level, making himself known as the most pro-Israel US president after Harry Truman, as suggested by several commentators and pundits, such as the renowned political analyst Bill Schneider. Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, defunded UNRWA, closed down the Palestine Liberation Organization’s office in Washington and unveiled the “deal of the century,” a much-hyped peace plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that Palestinian factions rejected outright on account of being overly biased in favor of Israel. Why has Trump prioritized pleasing the Israelis and advancing their territorial ambitions?

    Zunes: The right-wing coalition governing Israel shares Trump’s anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia and contempt for human rights and international law, so this is not surprising. While Democratic administrations rationalized their support for Israel on the grounds that it was a liberal democracy — at least for its Jewish citizens — what draws Trump to Israel is the right-wing, anti-democratic orientation of its current government.

    Though Trump has brought US support for Israeli violations of international legal norms to unprecedented levels, in practice — at least for Palestinians living under occupation — it has made little difference. For example, previous administrations did not overtly recognize Israeli settlements and annexation as Trump has, saying such issues should be resolved in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. However, this policy ignored the gross power asymmetry between the Palestinians under occupation and the Israeli occupiers, an imbalance compounded by the fact that as the chief mediator in negotiations, the US has also served as the primary military, economic and diplomatic supporter of the occupying power.

    By refusing to condition the billions of dollars’ worth of unconditional military aid to Israel on Israeli adherence to international law and human rights norms and blocking the United Nations Security Council from enforcing — or, in some cases, even passing — resolutions calling for Israeli compliance with its international legal obligations, it gave Israel’s right-wing government no incentive to make the necessary compromises for peace. In many respects, Trump’s policies have simply codified what was already going on under previous administrations.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More