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      John Hersey, Hiroshima and the End of World

      by

      Whether you’re reading this with your morning coffee, just after lunch or on the late shift in the wee small hours of the morning, it’s 100 seconds to midnight. That’s just over a minute and a half. And that should be completely unnerving. It’s the closest to that witching hour we’ve ever been.

      Since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has adjusted its doomsday clock to provide humanity with an expert estimate of just how close all of us are to an apocalyptic “midnight” — that is, nuclear annihilation.

      A century ago, there was, of course, no need for such a measure. Back then, the largest explosion ever caused by humans had likely occurred in Halifax, Canada, in 1917, when a munitions ship collided with another vessel in that city’s harbor. That tragic blast killed nearly 2,000 people, wounded another 9,000 and left 6,000 homeless, but it didn’t imperil the planet. The largest explosions after that occurred on July 16, 1945, in a test of a new type of weapon, an atomic bomb, in New Mexico and then on August 6, 1945, when the United States unleashed such a bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Since then, our species has been precariously perched at the edge of auto-extermination.

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      No one knows precisely how many people were killed by the world’s first nuclear attack. Around 70,000, nearly all of them civilians, were vaporized, crushed, burned or irradiated to death almost immediately. Another 50,000 probably died soon after. As many as 280,000 were dead, many from radiation sickness, by the end of the year. (An atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki, three days later, is thought to have killed as many as 70,000.)

      In the wake of the first nuclear attack, little was clear. “What happened at Hiroshima is not yet known,” the New York Times reported on that August 7, and the US government sought to keep it that way, portraying nuclear weapons as nothing more than super-charged conventional munitions, while downplaying the horrifying effects of radiation. Despite the heroic efforts of several reporters just after the blast, it wasn’t until a year later that Americans — and then the rest of the world — began to truly grasp the effects of such new weaponry and what it would mean for humanity from that moment onward.

      We know about what happened at Hiroshima largely thanks to one man, John Hersey. He was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and former correspondent for Time and Life magazines. He had covered World War II in Europe and the Pacific, where he was commended by the secretary of the Navy for helping evacuate wounded American troops on the Japanese-held island of Guadalcanal. And we now know just how Hersey got the story of Hiroshima — a 30,000-word reportorial masterpiece that appeared in the August 1946 issue of the New Yorker magazine, describing the experiences of six survivors of that atomic blast — thanks to a meticulously researched and elegantly written new book by Lesley Blume, “Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World.”

      Only the Essentials

      When I pack up my bags for a war zone, I carry what I consider to be the essentials for someone reporting on an armed conflict. A water bottle with a built-in filter. Trauma packs with a blood-clotting agent. A first-aid kit. A multitool. A satellite phone. Sometimes I forgo one or more of these items, but there’s always been a single, solitary staple, a necessity whose appearance has changed over the years, but whose presence in my rucksack has not.

      Once, this item was intact, almost pristine. But after the better part of a decade covering conflicts in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya and Burkina Faso, it’s a complete wreck. Still, I carry it. In part, it’s become (and I’m only slightly embarrassed to say it) something of a talisman for me. But mostly, it’s because what’s between the figurative covers of that now-coverless, thoroughly mutilated copy of John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” — the New Yorker article in paperback form — is as terrifyingly brilliant as the day I bought it at the Strand bookstore in New York City for 48 cents.

      Embed from Getty Images

      I know “Hiroshima” well. I’ve read it cover-to-cover dozens of times. Or sometimes on a plane or a helicopter or a river barge, in a hotel room or sitting by the side of a road, I’ll flip it open and take in a random 10 or 20 pages. I always marveled at how skillfully Hersey constructed the narrative with overlapping personal accounts that make the horrific handiwork of that weapon with the power of the gods accessible on a human level; how he explained something new to this world, atomic terror, in terms that readers could immediately grasp; how he translated destruction on a previously unimaginable scale into a cautionary tale as old as the genre itself, but with an urgency that hasn’t faded or been matched. I simply never knew how he did it until Lesley Blume pulled back the curtain.

      “Fallout,” which was published in August — the 75th anniversary of America’s attack on Hiroshima — offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of just how Hersey and William Shawn, then the managing editor of the New Yorker, were able to truly break the story of an attack that had been covered on the front pages of the world’s leading newspapers a year earlier and, in the process, produced one of the all-time great pieces of journalism. It’s an important reminder that the biggest stories may be hiding in plain sight; that breaking news coverage is essential but may not convey the full magnitude of an event; and that a writer may be far better served by laying out a detailed, chronological account in spartan prose, even when the story is so horrific it seems to demand a polemic.

      Hersey begins “Hiroshima” in an understated fashion, noting exactly what each of the six survivors he chronicles was doing at the moment their lives changed forever. “Not everyone could comprehend how the atomic bomb worked or visualize an all-out, end-of-days nuclear world war,” Blume observes. “But practically anyone could comprehend a story about a handful of regular people — mothers, fathers, grade school children, doctors, clerks — going about their daily routines when catastrophe struck.”

      As she points out, Hersey’s authorial voice is never raised and so the atomic horrors — victims whose eyeballs had melted and run down their cheeks, others whose skin hung from their bodies or slipped off their hands like gloves — speak for themselves. It’s a feat made all the more astonishing when one considers, as Blume reveals, that its author, who had witnessed combat and widespread devastation from conventional bombing during World War II, was so terrified and tormented by what he saw in Hiroshima months after the attack that he feared he would be unable to complete his assignment.

      Incredibly, Hersey got the story of Hiroshima with official sanction, reporting under the scrutiny of the office of the supreme commander for the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur, the head of the American occupation of defeated Japan. His prior reportage on the US military, including a book focused on MacArthur that he later called “too adulatory,” helped secure his access. More amazing still, the New Yorker — fearing possible repercussions under the recently passed Atomic Energy Act — submitted a final draft of the article for review to Lieutenant General Lesley Groves, who had overseen the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb, served as its chief booster and went so far as to claim that radiation poisoning “is a very pleasant way to die.”

      Whatever concessions the New Yorker may have made to him have been lost in the sands of time, but Groves did sign off on the article, overlooking, as Blume notes, “Hersey’s most unsettling revelations: the fact that the United States had unleashed destruction and suffering upon a largely civilian population on a scale unprecedented in human history and then tried to cover up the human cost of its new weapon.”

      The impact on the US government would be swift. The article was a sensation and immediately lauded as the best reporting to come out of World War II. It quickly became one of the most reprinted news pieces of all time and led to widespread reappraisals by newspapers and readers alike of just what America had done to Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It also managed to shine a remarkably bright light on the perils of nuclear weapons, writ large. “Hersey’s story,” as Blume astutely notes, “was the first truly effective, internationally heeded warning about the existential threat that nuclear arms posed to civilization.”

      Wanted: A Hersey for Our Time

      It’s been 74 years since Hiroshima hit the newsstands. A Cold War and nuclear arms race followed as those weapons spread across the planet. And this January, as a devastating pandemic was beginning to follow suit, all of us found ourselves just 100 seconds away from total annihilation due to the plethora of nuclear weapons on this earth, failures of American-Russian cooperation on arms control and disarmament, the Trump administration’s trashing of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and America’s efforts to develop and deploy yet more advanced nukes, as well as two other factors that have sped up that apocalyptic doomsday clock: climate change and cyber-based disinformation.

      The latter, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is corrupting our “information ecosphere,” undermining democracy as well as trust among nations and so creating hair-trigger conditions in international relations. The former is transforming the planet’s actual ecosystem and placing humanity in another kind of ultimate peril. “Dangerous rivalry and hostility among the superpowers increases the likelihood of nuclear blunder,” former California Governor Jerry Brown, the executive chair of the Bulletin, said earlier this year. “Climate change just compounds the crisis. If there’s ever a time to wake up, it’s now.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Over the last three-plus years, however, President Donald Trump has seemingly threatened at least three nations with nuclear annihilation, including a US ally. In addition to menacing North Korea with the possibility of unleashing “fire and fury” and his talk of ushering in “the end” of Iran, he even claimed to have “plans” to exterminate most of the population of Afghanistan. The “method of war” he suggested employing could kill an estimated 20 million or more Afghans, almost all of them civilians. Hersey, who died in 1993 at the age of 78, wouldn’t have had a moment’s doubt about what he meant.

      Trump’s nuclear threats may never come to fruition, but his administration, while putting significant effort into deep-sixing nuclear pacts, has also more than done its part to accelerate climate change, thinning rules designed to keep the planet as habitable as possible for humans. A recent New York Times analysis, for example, tallied almost 70 environmental rules and regulations — governing planet-warming carbon dioxide and methane emissions, clean air, water and toxic chemicals — that have been rescinded, reversed or revoked, with more than 30 additional rollbacks still in progress.

      President Trump has not, however, been a total outlier when it comes to promoting environmental degradation. American presidents have been presiding over the destruction of the natural environment since the founding of the republic. Signed into law in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln, the Homestead Act, for instance, transformed countless American lives, providing free land for the masses. But it also transferred 270 million acres of wilderness, or 10% of the United States, into private hands for “improvements.”

      More recently, Ronald Reagan launched attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency through deregulation and budget cuts in the 1980s, while George W. Bush’s administration worked to undermine science-based policies in the 2000s, specifically through the denial of anthropogenic climate change. The difference, of course, was that Lincoln couldn’t have conceptualized the effects of global warming (even if the first study of the “greenhouse effect” was published during his lifetime), whereas the science was already clear enough in the Reagan and Bush years, and brutally self-apparent in the age of Trump, as each of them pursued policies that would push us precious seconds closer to Armageddon.

      The tale of how John Hersey got his story is a great triumph of Lesley Blume’s “Fallout,” but what came after may be an even more compelling facet of the book. Hersey gave the US an image problem — and far worse. “The transition from global savior to genocidal superpower was an unwelcome reversal,” Blume observes. Worse yet for the US government, the article left many Americans reevaluating their country and themselves. It’s beyond rare for a journalist to prompt true soul-searching or provide a moral mirror for a nation. In an interview in his later years, Hersey, who generally avoided publicity, suggested that the testimony of survivors of the atomic blasts — like those he spotlighted — had helped to prevent nuclear war.

      “We know what an atomic apocalypse would look like because John Hersey showed us,” writes Blume. Unfortunately, while there have been many noteworthy, powerful works on climate change, we’re still waiting for the one that packs the punch of “Hiroshima.” And so, humanity awaits that once-in-a-century article, as nuclear weapons, climate change, and cyber-based disinformation keep us just 100 clicks short of doomsday.

      Hersey provided a template. Blume has lifted the veil on how he did it. Now, someone needs to step up and write the world-changing piece of reportage that will shock our consciences and provide a little more breathing room between this vanishing moment and our ever-looming midnight.

      *[This article was originally published by TomDispatch.]

      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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      in World Politics

      Mitch McConnell and the Newspeak of Democracy

      by

      US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has the reputation of acting as a powerful unifier of his party’s troops in the Senate. He has demonstrated his ability to convince fellow Republicans of what needs to be done (or prevented from being done) and how to move forward with urgency (or not move at all), as circumstances require.

      McConnell, a Republican senator, famously blocked sitting Democratic President Barack Obama’s attempt to nominate Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court after the death of Justice Anthony Scalia in February 2016. He did so on the grounds that it was an election year. Now, McConnell is faced with a similar situation, but this time his aim is to force rapid confirmation of President Donald Trump’s candidate, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, less than a month before a presidential election that risks unseating the Republican president. 

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      From the announcement of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death on September 18, the task of pushing through Barrett’s confirmation already appeared to be a daunting task. It would require every bit of talent and energy McConnell is capable of, especially after learning that he was guaranteed only the slimmest of margins in a vote of the full Senate. Still, the odds of success looked good, at least until the nation learned on October 2 that President Trump had tested positive for COVID-19 and would be hospitalized. Worse, two Republican senators also tested positive.

      As everyone knows, the valor of great heroes will always be tested by the gods. Sensing the panic that might follow concerning the continuity of government itself, McConnell wasted no time reassuring an anxious nation that everything would continue as planned. After speaking to the president, he reported via Twitter the good news: that the president was healthy enough to govern and that Barrett’s confirmation was still on course.

      On Friday, McConnell tweeted: “He’s in good spirits and we talked business — especially how impressed Senators are with the qualifications of Judge Barrett. Full steam ahead with the fair, thorough, timely process that the nominee, the Court, & the country deserve.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition permitting to understand McConnell’s vocabulary:

      Fair, thorough, timely:

      Hypocritical, incomplete, rushed  

      Contextual Note

      McConnell provides a textbook example of a rhetorical device called a tricolon: “a series of three parallel words, phrases, or clauses.” Some teachers call it the “rule of three,” observing that three aligned items are “always stronger and more memorable than one.” It is the key to sounding authoritative.

      The senator insists that his precipitation, in this case, is “fair” because some people dared to suggest it contradicted the sacred principle he himself had invoked in 2016 to justify delay. At the time, McConnell insisted that only the newly elected president had the legitimacy to nominate a candidate. “The American people are perfectly capable of having their say on this issue, so let’s give them a voice. Let’s let the American people decide,” he said.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In effect, a US presidential election is the only time the will of the people of the entire nation is expressed. And so, in 2016 democracy prevailed. Trump was elected. McConnell had his way, effectively preventing the confirmation of Judge Garland. Alas, it wasn’t “the people” who offered Trump the keys to the White House but the Electoral College. In their clear majority, the people had voted for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee. 

      So much for fair. What about the idea of thorough? The New York Times reports that “Republican officials said they had no doubt that senators would find a way to muscle through the nomination over Democrats’ protests.” In US culture, the idea of “thoroughness” often implies exactly that: using muscle to overpower any opposition, making the result irreversible. The adversary must be thoroughly defeated. The terminator must be thoroughly terminated.

      Finally, “timely” normally contains the idea of optimal timing to produce an acceptable result in the general interest. For McConnell, it seems to mean any timing that achieves his own goals. In the current context, a timely confirmation must take place before November 3. This ensures that even if the will of the people in 2020 results in the election of Democrat Joe Biden, the more sacred will of the Electoral College in 2016 will be honored. The meaning of words sometimes evolves. In 2016, timely meant “not now.” In 2020, it means “immediately.”

      Historical Note

      Any lucid observer would agree that politicians tend to be disingenuous. Sometimes it is for laudable reasons, such as conveying an optimistic message in dire times to bolster the public’s morale. But more commonly, it reflects the simple fact that most of their public discourse is motivated by their electoral strategy rather than the logic of government or the needs of the people.

      This has become accepted as the normal hypocrisy of politicians. Mitch McConnell may be twisting the meaning of words, but he is guilty of nothing more than everyday political hypocrisy. In contrast, Donald Trump is one of those rare politicians who, lacking any serious training in political culture, consistently rises above the habit of everyday hypocrisy by boldly and brazenly prevaricating. Trump will never miss an opportunity to deny the obvious or affirm the absurd. 

      President Trump’s success over the past four years may have created a trend that has now infected others. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy demonstrated this trend on October 2 when, in an interview with CNN about Trump’s temporary absence due to COVID-19, he asserted that the president “is going to rely on his surrogates. And unfortunately, one of his surrogates is Vladimir Putin.”

      When politicians make statements as comically over the top as this on national television without being challenged by their hosts in the media, the very notion that a stable frame of reference exists in public life risks disappearing irretrievably. What emerges is the impression that democracy and the ritual of elections constitute little more than an entertaining facade, a form nor of reality TV but of hyperreality TV, produced by people whose business is to seek, manage and manipulate power. Nothing they say has meaning other than as a badge of power. The more brazen the lying, the more respect they earn for demonstrating their competence in playing with the levers of power.

      In recent years, the concept of democracy has come to designate little more than the toolbox successful politicians use to convince the populace that they are fulfilling their will, even when contradicting it. What better illustrates this truth than Brexit in the UK? Theresa May and Boris Johnson, the two prime ministers who succeeded the hapless David Cameron, argued that the official result of the poorly designed and clearly manipulated 2016 referendum asking people to answer “leave” or “remain” to a question no one could understand definitively represented “the will of the people.” Similarly, Trump has consistently claimed that any policy he supports, however absurd, reflects the will of the people who voted in 2016.

      In his book, “The Will of the People: A Modern Myth,” political theorist Albert Weale claims that “around the world, political parties and movements – on both the left and on the right – invoke the will of the people.” He compares the idea of “the will of the people” to unicorns, flying horses and the sunken continent of Atlantis.

      Gideon Rachman, writing for the Financial Times last year, detected a common thread to Trump’s and Johnson’s approach to governing. He saw their insistence that the result of one election or referendum in 2016 justified every one of their own most extreme policies as “signs that the laws and conventions that underpin liberal democracy are under attack in both the UK and the US, two countries that have long regarded themselves as democratic role models for the world.”

      Both the US and the UK are on the brink. We still have no idea of how Brexit will play out in 2021. What happens in the US after November 3 is anybody’s guess, but the result is unlikely to be pretty. Democracy, in its unnatural marriage with capitalism, is reeling from the unexpected structural and economic effects of a pandemic. It has aggravated capitalism’s unbridled tendency to upset human life everywhere in the world. The consequence of that is undeniable: It has become increasingly difficult for any politician to conduct business in a way that is fair, thorough and timely.

      *[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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      All the President’s Surplus White Men

      by

      The problem of America today is the problem of white men. Who lies at the intersection of guns, right-wing fanaticism, pandemic and climate change denialism? Who ensures that racism continues to course through the lifeblood of the country? Who stands in the way of gender equality? Who supports foreign wars and the military-industrial complex? Who is getting hit hard by the erosion of the manufacturing base in the heartland? White men.

      White men are twice as likely as non-white men and white women to own guns. Although white women espouse racist right-wing views as much or even more than white men, it is the latter who overwhelmingly show up to vote, to gather with guns on the street, and to intimidate non-whites in person and on social media.

      Conservative white men have been at the forefront of climate denialism, according to a fascinating sociological study from 2011, and it’s not just Donald Trump who hates wearing masks during a pandemic but men more generally. A significant gender gap exists on the use of force, with women considerably less likely to support military intervention.

      Take the example of Brad Pascale, Trump’s former campaign manager. He was detained in Florida this week after allegedly hurting his wife, waving guns and talking about suicide. After his demotion to a digital consultant position on the campaign in July, he no doubt was worried about losing work altogether after the November election. There it is in a nutshell: white male violence, right-wing politics and anxiety over economic security. And residual white privilege. If Pascale were African American, an encounter with the police like that might not have ended peacefully.

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      Of course, I’m not talking about all white men. Plenty of white women have jumped on the alt-right bandwagon. And American conservatives can always point to a few people like Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson and Diamond and Silk to allege that their ideology is colorblind.

      But white men who are all revved up and with no place to go pose the greatest challenge to American democracy. They are the core of Donald Trump’s support. They are showing up on the streets in militia formations and with Proud Boy banners. The “manosphere” of online anti-feminism is the gateway for many right-wing activists who worry about being “replaced” by minorities and immigrants. And white men have been struggling with a long period of enormous economic dislocation that has turned them into a surplus labor force.

      Go West

      If Donald Trump loses in November, these white men will remain a problem. After all, unlike liberals who threaten to decamp to New Zealand if Biden loses, disgruntled Trump bros are not going to just up and leave the United States. Yet that’s precisely how countries have long dealt with the problem of surplus white men.

      In the bad old days, countries handled surplus men by sending them off to populate far-off lands. The political and religious misfits of the incipient British Empire sailed off to settle the land that hugged the eastern seaboard of North America. Later, the British exported its unruliest men to the prison colony of Botany Bay in Australia. The imperial nations of France, Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal similarly redirected male energy into meeting, enslaving and killing the locals of distant places. Those white men who didn’t have imperial realms to colonize —  Germans, Italians, Scandinavians, Irish — ended up founding America’s early immigrant communities.

      Men with little prospect of improvement have always been a potential source of trouble. They turn to drink, to crime, to revolution — and sometimes all three — if left to their own devices. The law of primogeniture, whereby the oldest son inherited all and left the other male heirs penniless, only compounded the problem by producing a seemingly endless supply of dispossessed men.

      For its first 100 years of existence, the United States had a convenient safety valve for such male restlessness: the Western frontier. In the Midwest, the Southwest and the Far West, the industrious built family farms, the greedy sought gold, and the opportunistic robbed banks. Along the way, they did what white men often did in those days: kicked the locals off the land and killed them when they refused to leave.

      When the frontier closed at the end of the 19th century, white men enlisted to expand a new American empire in the Spanish-American War and through expeditionary interventions in Latin America. World War I and the flu epidemic of 1918 “solved” the problem of the surplus with a ruthless cull of more than 100,000 men. Later, World War II removed four times that many from the equation. Since that time, America has continued to go to war. But the US government also made an effort to deal with its white male population by creating well-paying jobs in an expanding manufacturing sector and offering returning soldiers a leg up through programs like the GI bill

      This golden age of American economic growth, however, was primarily a golden age for the white American male. White women, if they broke with tradition to enter the workforce, earned considerably less than their male counterparts. And black Americans, especially prior to the successes of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, were relegated to second-class citizenship. In 1960, a mere 2% of women and black men worked in high-wage jobs like engineering and law. Virtually all doctors in the United States were white men. Racism and sexism permeated the immediate postwar government programs.

      Angry White Men

      In the 1960s, as a result of powerful social movements, women and minorities began to rise professionally. They continued to make gains in the ensuing decades, but the US economy as a whole hit a brick wall in the early 1970s. Real wages peaked in 1973. Imports began to appear more frequently on supermarket shelves and in car showrooms. Unions began to shed members in the 1970s and 1980s. And by the 1990s, the manufacturing jobs began to shift overseas — first with a massive expansion of the maquiladora program in Mexico after the passage of NAFTA and then to low-wage locations in Asia. Between 2000 and 2014, the United States lost 5 million manufacturing jobs.

      These economic transformations left behind many male blue-collar workers. They could still get jobs, but those jobs didn’t pay as well as the manufacturing positions of the golden age. In response, this proletariat didn’t organize against the ruling capital class. Increasingly, these workers listened to sexist, racist and xenophobic slogans that blamed women, minorities and immigrants for taking away their jobs. The financial crisis of 2008-09 swelled the ranks of the new right with many angry white men from the middle class as well.

      This is not a purely American problem. Angry white men have been a fixture in European right-wing politics, in Australia, in Israel. Machismo has long played a role in Latin American politics and, despite the rise of feminism across the continent, continues to influence electoral outcomes from Colombia to Brazil. Even China, where men can get jobs but not necessarily wives, has to deal with a problem of surplus men, given the population’s preference for male babies. India, too, faces an excess of 37 million men.

      But the United States must address a particularly toxic version of this problem because of the country’s endemic racism, polarized politics and Rust Belt economics. Angry white men contributed to the Reagan revolution of the 1980s, the Gingrich backlash of the 1990s and the rise of the Tea Party in 2009. But it wasn’t until 2016 that they found a leader just like them. Enter Trump, stage right.

      The Problem of Surplus

      Donald Trump would seem an unlikely spokesperson for white workers left behind by the deindustrialization of the United States. With his business empire, Trump has invested overseas in more than 30 countries, outsourced the production of his own brand-named items to foreign companies and hired undocumented workers for his US facilities. As his recently leaked tax returns reveal, he has also been spectacularly unsuccessful with his ventures even as he has cheated the government out of what he owes in income tax.

      Trump knows that playing to Wall Street is not a winning political strategy. Rather, as I point out in a piece on TomDispatch this week, the president has put himself at the front of a white male mob, channeling the violent vigilantism that has erupted periodically throughout American history. In this way, Trump lucked out by appealing to just enough white voters in economically distressed states to eke out an Electoral College victory in 2016. One month before the 2020 election, the polls suggest that Trump may not be so lucky this time.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The white mob still supports him for all his efforts at closing borders, suppressing minority votes and celebrating the racist history of the United States. And he still supports the white mob, this week refusing to denounce white supremacy in the first presidential debate. But the president hasn’t delivered on the economy, and the pandemic has claimed too many victims to be easily swept under the rug.

      Whoever wins in November, the problem of surplus white men won’t go away. The Democrats, entranced by “third ways” and “post-industrial” economics, have ignored white male workers at their electoral peril. Joe Biden has courted this vote by appealing to his working-class roots in Scranton. But he’ll have to pay more than lip service if he gains the White House.

      The past option of sending surplus white men off to other lands is no longer on the table. In taking the problem of surplus white men seriously, it’s not necessary to jettison identity politics or pander to sexism and racism. Rather, the answer is to create well-paying jobs for all through Green New Deal policies. The bulk of these jobs — retrofitting buildings, creating new energy infrastructure, building a fleet of new electric cars — need to be open to those without a college education. As automation advances, new educational opportunities have to be made available as well or else technology will just add to the problem of surplus labor.

      Racism and sexism won’t magically disappear with a Green New Deal. Nor are jobs alone the answer. They need to be jobs that promise a future and a sense of belonging to something greater. The Trump campaign has provided its followers with this sense of belonging. So, for that matter, have the Proud Boys. Together they have turned surplus white males into an urgent political problem for this country.

      A personnel change in the White House will not solve this problem. But putting into place a dramatic new economic program that relies on working-class Americans to save this country? That puts white men shoulder to shoulder with workers from all backgrounds on behalf of a common purpose? And that links up with Green New Deals in other countries? That might do the trick of turning a surplus into an asset.

      *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

      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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      in World Politics

      American Carnage From a Pandemic President

      by

      The year was 1991 and the United States was suddenly the globe’s lone superpower, its ultimate hyperpower, the last and greatest of its kind, the soon-to-be-indispensable nation. The only one left — alone, utterly alone and triumphant atop the world.

      Who could have asked for more? Or better? It had been a Cold War fantasy of the first order — until that other superpower, the Soviet Union, imploded. In fact, even that doesn’t catch the true shock of the moment, since Washington’s leaders simply hadn’t imagined a world in which the Cold War could ever truly end.

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      Now, go ahead, blame me. In this pandemic moment that should perhaps be considered a sign of a burning, sickening future to come, I’m stoking your nostalgia for better times. Admittedly, even that past was, in truth, a fantasy of the first (or perhaps last) order. After all, in retrospect, that mighty, resplendent, lone superpower, victorious beyond the wildest dreams of its political elite, was already about to embark on its own path of decline. Enwreathed in triumph, it too would be heading for the exits, even if so much more slowly than the Soviet Union.

      It’s clear enough now that, in 1991, with Ronald Reagan’s former vice president, George H.W. Bush, in the White House and his son, George W. Bush, waiting in the wings of history — while Iraqi autocrat and former US ally Saddam Hussein was still perched in his palace in Baghdad — the US was already launching itself on the path to Donald Trump’s America.

      No, Trump didn’t know it. How could he? Who could have possibly imagined him as the president of the United States? He was still a tabloid phenomenon then (masquerading that year as his own publicist, “John Miller,” in phone interviews with reporters to laud the attractions and sexual conquests of one “Donald Trump”). He was also on the road to bankruptcy court since his five Atlantic City casinos would soon go down in flames. Him as a future candidate to head an America where life for so many would be in decline and its very greatness in need of being “made” great again… well, who could have dreamt it? Not me, that’s for sure.

      Welcome to American Carnage

      Let me apologize one more time. Yes, I was playing on your sense of nostalgia in this besieged American moment of ours. Mission accomplished, I assume.

      So much, I’m afraid, for such “Auld Lang Syne” moments, since that one took place in a previous century, even if, remarkably enough, that wasn’t actually so long ago. Only 29 years passed from that singular moment of triumph in Washington (a period that would then be fancied as the “end of history”) to Trump’s America-not-first-but-last world — to, that is, genuine “American carnage” (and I’m not just thinking about the 200,000 Americans who have already died from COVID-19 with no end in sight). Less than a quarter of a century took us from the president who asked God to continue to “bless the United States of America” in the wake of a historic victory to the man who campaigned for president on the declinist slogan of making America great again.

      And don’t think Trump was wrong in that 2017 inaugural address of his. A certain level of American carnage — particularly in the form of staggering economic inequality, not to speak of the “forever wars” still being fought so brainlessly by a military on which this country was spending its money rather than on health, education, and infrastructure — had helped bring him to power and he knew it. He even promised to solve just such problems, including ending those forever wars, as he essentially did again in his recent White House acceptance speech, even as he promised to keep “rebuilding” that very military.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Here was the key passage from that long-gone inaugural address of his: “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

      Of course, more than three and a half years later, in that seemingly eternal “now” of his, the carnage seemed eternal — whether in the form of those wars he swore he would get us out of; the spending on the military and the rest of what’s still known as the national security state, which only increased; the economic inequality, which just grew, thanks in part to a humongous 2017 tax cut, a bonanza for the wealthiest Americans (and no one else), leaving the government and so the rest of us owing far more money than previously imaginable; and above all, the urge of his administration, from top to bottom, not just to deny that climate change exists but to burn this planet down by “unleashing” a program of “American energy dominance” and taking every imaginable restraint off the exploitation of fossil-fuels and opening up yet more areas for those industries to exploit.

      In other words, Donald J. Trump has given American carnage new meaning and, in his singular way, lent a remarkable hand to the transformation of this country.

      A Simple Math Problem

      When The Donald descended that Trump Tower escalator in June 2015 to declare himself a candidate for president, he made a promise to the disgruntled citizens of the American heartland. He would build what he hailed as a “great wall” (that the Mexican government would pay for) to seal us off from the lesser breeds on this planet (Mexican “rapists”). Until that moment, of course, there had been just one “great” wall on planet Earth, and it had been constructed by various Chinese dynasties over untold centuries to keep out nomadic invaders, the armed “caravans” of that moment.

      As Americans would soon learn, however, being second best to or only as good as just about anything wasn’t, to put it mildly, Donald Trump’s signature style. So, in that first speech of his, he instantly doubled the “greats” in his wall. He would create nothing less than a “great, great” one.

      In the years that followed, it’s also become clear that neither spelling, nor pronouncing words is among his special skills or, put another way, that he’s a great, great misspeller and mispronouncer. Given that he managed to produce only 300 miles of wall on the US-Mexico border in almost four years in office, almost all of it replacing already existing barriers (at the expense of the American taxpayer and a set of private donors-cum-suckers), we have to assume that the candidate on that first day either misspelled or mispronounced one word in that phrase of his.

      Given what’s happened to this country since, it’s hard not to imagine that what he meant was not a great, great wall, but a great, great fall. And in this pandemic hell of a country, with its economy in the kind of tatters that no one has yet faintly come to grips with, its health (and mental health) in crisis mode, parts of it burnt to a crisp and others flooded and clobbered by intensifying storms, if that’s what he meant to say, his leadership of what remains the world’s lone superpower (despite a rising China) has indeed been a great, great success. For such a triumph, however, this country needs some new term, something to replace that old “indispensable nation” (and, for my money, “dispensable nation” doesn’t quite do the trick).

      And I have a suggestion. Once upon a time when I was much, much younger, we spoke of three worlds on planet Earth. There was the First World (also known as “the free world”), which included the developed countries of North America, Europe, and Japan (and you could throw in South Korea and Australia, if you wanted); there was the Second World, also known as the communist bloc, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China; and, of course, there was the Third World, which included all the other poor and underdeveloped countries, many former European colonies, scattered around the globe’s south and often in terrible shape.

      So many years later, with the first billionaire in the Oval Office presiding over an era of American carnage at home rather than in distant lands like Vietnam, I suspect we need a new “world” to capture the nature and state of this country at this moment. So, how about a “Fourth World”? After all, the US remains the richest, most powerful nation on the planet (First World), but it is also afloat in a sea of autocratic, climate-changing, economic, military and police carnage that should qualify it as distinctly third world as well.

      So, it’s really just a simple math problem: What’s one plus three? Four, of course, making this country once again a leader on this ever less equal planet of ours; the United States, that is, is the first official Fourth-World country in history. USA! USA! USA!

      Or if you prefer, you could simply think of us as potentially the most powerful, wealthiest failed state on the planet.

      A Hell on Earth?

      Humanity has so far — and I use that phrase advisedly — managed to create just two ways of destroying human life on this planet. In doing so, it has, of course, taken over tasks that it once left to the gods (Armageddon! Apocalypse!). On both counts, Trump is proving himself a master of destruction.

      The first way, of course, would be by nuclear weapons, so far, despite close calls, used only twice, 75 years ago. However, the president and his crew have focused with striking intensity on tearing up nuclear arms pacts signed with the Soviet Union in the final years of the Cold War, backing out of the Iranian nuclear deal, pumping up the “modernization” of the US nuclear arsenal, and threatening other countries with the actual use of such weaponry. (Who could forget, for instance, The Donald’s threat to release “fire and fury like the world has never seen” on North Korea?)

      In the process, the Trump administration has loosed what increasingly looks like a new global nuclear arms race, even as tensions grow, especially between China and the United States. In other words, while promising to end America’s “forever wars” (he didn’t), President Trump has actually pumped up the relatively dim possibility since the Cold War ended of using nuclear weapons, which obviously threatens a flash-bang end to human life as we know it.

      And keep in mind that, when it comes to world-ending possibilities, that’s the lesser of his two apocalyptic efforts in these years.

      While we’re still on the first of those ways of destroying this planet, however, let’s not forget to include not just the increased funding devoted to “modernizing” those nukes, but more generally the ever-greater funding of the Pentagon and what’s still called “the national security state.” It hardly matters how little of that money goes to true national security in a twenty-first-century moment when we’re experiencing a pandemic that could be but the beginning of a new Black Plague-style era and the heating up of the atmosphere, oceans, and seas of this world in ways that are already making life increasingly unbearable via ever fiercer storms, ever more frequent wildfires, the ever-greater melting of ice sheets, ever more violent flooding, ever greater drought — I mean, you name it, and if it’s somewhere between deeply unpleasant and life (and property) endangering, it’s getting worse in the Trumpian moment.

      In that second category, when it comes to destroying human life as we’ve known it via the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the president and his men (and they are basically men) have shown a particular flair. I’m still alone in doing so, but I continue to refer to the whole lot of them as pyromaniacs, because their simple denial of the reality of global warming is the least of it. Trump and crew are clearly determined to burn, burn, burn.

      And lest you think any of this will ever bother the president or his top officials, think again.

      After all, having had an essentially mask-less, cheek-by-jowl election rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which spread the coronavirus and may have killed one of the president’s well-known supporters, he then doubled down in his acceptance speech for the presidential nomination. He gave it in front of the White House before the kind of crowd he glories in: 1,500 enthusiastic followers, almost all mask-less, untested for COVID-19 and jammed together cheering him for an hour. That should tell you all you need to know about his concern for the lives of others (even those who adore him) or anyone’s future other than his own.

      Perhaps we need a new chant for this election season, something like: Four more years and this planet will be a hell on earth!

      It was the worst of times, it was… no, wait, in Trumpian terms, it was the worstest of times since no one should ever be able to outdo him. And as CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite would have said in my youth, you (and I and the rest of humanity) were there. We truly were and are. For shame.

      *[This article was originally published by TomDispatch.]

      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 Science of Voter Suppression

      by

      Great traditions persist for centuries even as they change their style. New York’s Tammany Hall and its colorful leader “Boss Tweed” in the late 19th century perfected the art of “manufacturing votes” to elect the people they preferred and run the show in their manner. It set the standard followed by many other local political bosses across the nation.

      In his film “Kansas City,” Robert Altman presented a special world of corrupt 1930s politicians, black and white gangsters and late-night jam sessions in KC clubs. The film demonstrates the well-documented fact that “the Kansas City area has a rich legacy of election fraud, stretching from before the Civil War to after World War II.” More recently, former Kansas secretary of state and failed gubernatorial candidate, Kris Kobach, perfected a system he shared with Republican governors that arbitrarily suppressed voters in different states based on the principle that any two people who happened to have the same name must be fraudulently voting in two different states.

      Ever since Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, Democrats have focused on Russian interference to explain Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Greg Palast, who exposed Kris Kobach and Georgia’s Brian Kemp, among others, has found evidence that points to Trump’s 2016 victory being a result of voter suppression. According to Palast, if all the ballots had been counted, Hillary Clinton most likely would have won the state of Michigan. Some 75,355 ballots, mostly from majority-black precincts, were discarded. For some mysterious reason, Democrats have never raised that issue, presumably because there was no way of placing the blame on Russia.

      With a new election approaching, some Democrats may have realized that their party establishment having over-exploited the theme of Russian meddling has to look for a culprit elsewhere. Motivated by the fear of another close election that might favor Trump in the Electoral College, they have found another theme related to meddling to explain their Clinton’s defeat in 2016.

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      Jamie Ross, a journalist at The Daily Beast, cites an “enormous data leak” obtained by the UK’s Channel 4 News that exposes an operation mounted by the 2016 Trump campaign that consisted of using Facebook ads to persuade black voters to stay home rather than vote for Hillary Clinton. The article’s subtitle sums up the scandal: “A huge data leak shows that three million Black Americans were unknowingly added to a list of people that Team Trump wanted to keep away from polling places.” Jamal Watkins, vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is cited as saying that “It’s not ‘may the best candidate win’ at that point, it’s ‘may the best well-funded machine suppress voters and keep them at home thereby rigging the election so that someone can win.’”

      Like the kerfuffle surrounding the Russians, the vehicle for meddling was Facebook. Because Facebook was willing to release private data to Cambridge Analytica — a British political consulting firm at the heart of this still-ongoing data breach scandal — who then made that data available to its clients, the Trump campaign could target black voters with ads or articles critical of Hillary Clinton. Though there is no direct evidence of this practice and even less of its effect, Ross asserts that “it’s likely that it was used to help the campaign micro-target people on Facebook in the months leading up to Election Day in 2016.”

      Anything that is “likely” must qualify not just as “rigging” but as a form of voter suppression. Ross reminds readers that Facebook has recently “cited its new rules prohibiting voter suppression,” presumably justifying his characterization of an act designed to demotivate voters as voter suppression.

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Voter suppression:

      A traditional practice that has been refined into an obligatory scientific tool of the two major political parties in the United States, though used more extensively and with far more skill by Republicans than Democrats.  

      Contextual Note

      The Daily Devil’s Dictionary sees three problems with calling this operation “voter suppression.” The first is that the supposed crime has only been qualified as “likely.” This is unconfirmed news. It may deserve a mention in passing, but not as the basis of a news story.

      The second is that whatever it is and whatever its ultimate effects, it cannot be called voter suppression. Discouraging people from voting by exposing them to a negative message about a candidate is standard practice in political campaigning. It may be disingenuous and, when channeled through Facebook, passably devious, but it is little more than an original form of political advertising.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Finally, it implies that virtuous Democrats would never attempt to “micro-target people on Facebook.” Given the professionalism of modern political campaigns conducted by both major parties, that seems very “unlikely.” No one would doubt that the Republicans are always ready to go the extra mile — as they did by engaging Cambridge Analytica and profiting from Facebook’s complicity — but Democrats have always tried their best to hone their own skills. They may simply be more discreet in doing so.

      Evidence of Democrats practicing voter suppression can be found throughout the recent history of political campaigns. The hallowed practice of gerrymandering by both parties has more similarities with voter suppression than negative ads on Facebook. Former Democratic Party Chairwoman Donna Brazile admitted that the party deployed various means to rig the 2016 primaries in favor of Hillary Clinton. There have been documented cases of voter suppression by the Democratic Party establishment, though it was directed not at Republicans but at the Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders.

      Can it be that the Republicans are specialized in voter suppression for general elections and Democrats for primaries? In any case, recent events — from the hanging chads and butterfly ballots in Florida in the 2000 election to Donald Trump’s outcry against mail-in ballot fraud as a pretext for canceling the result of this year’s election — have shown that American democracy, to the extent that democracy is defined by the act of voting, is seriously broken. The damage goes well beyond simple cases of Facebook advertising.

      In March, The Atlantic published an article by Ibram X. Kendi describing how the political establishment has systematically discouraged young voters from voting. Kendi writes: “Both Republicans and moderate Democrats share a joint interest in not increasing the voting rates of young people. Republicans lose general elections to Democrats when young people vote in high numbers. Moderate Democrats lose primary elections to progressive Democrats when young people vote in high numbers.”

      A sclerotic system designed principally to protect those who settled into a position of power within government and their parties has effectively disenfranchised entire generations, often sanctimoniously referred to as “the future of the nation” but clearly felt by those in power to be a threat to the sovereignty of the elite they identify with.

      Historical Note

      The Republicans have an advantage over the Democrats when it comes to voter suppression to the extent that large swaths of Democratic voters are easier to identify and target. Most minorities, especially blacks and Latino voters, have over the years consistently supported Democratic candidates in preference to Republicans. Since at least the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democrats have directed their appeal to the working class in contrast with the Republicans, whose ideology aligned with business interests.

      The effective rule of the WASP elite (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) permitted the creation of a class system in which racial and ethnic minorities were left to fester in the bottom rungs of society. The lowly economic and social status of blacks and Mexicans led them to line up behind a Democratic Party that seemed more sensitive to their needs. This turned out to be very convenient for the Republican specialists in voter suppression. Thanks to the statistical distribution of family names, especially for the Hispanics, and even first names, since African Americans have always been more creative and less conformist in naming their children, targeting “duplicate” voters could be done with a simple computer program.

      Some youngsters who study “political science” in college — with its focus on political systems, laws, ideology and economic theory — and manage to drift into politics, end up discovering that their job will really be about “electoral science” rather than political science. They will learn that politics nothing to do with the art of governing but focuses on the science of winning. In other words, it is mostly about intellectual suppression.

      *[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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      The Extinct Race of “Reasonable Viewers” in the US

      by

      Reporting on a defamation trial brought against Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Business Insider notes a rare but significant crack in the facade of contemporary media that could, if we were to pay attention, help to deconstruct the reigning hyperreality that has in recent decades overwhelmed public discourse in the US.

      To maintain its control not just of our lives but of our perception of the environment and culture in which we live, the political class as a whole, in connivance with the media, has created the illusion that when people speak in public — and especially on TV or radio — they are essentially engaged in delivering their sincere opinion and sharing their understanding of the world. They may be mistaken or even wrong about what they claim, but the public has been taught to give any articulate American credit for standing up for what they believe.

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      We have been told that this respect for public personalities’ freedom of expression serves a democratic purpose. It allows for productive debate to develop, as different interpretations vie and eventually converge to establish a truth that legitimately supports variable faces and facets. Though they generally try to avoid it, when Americans happen to hear the opinion or the analysis of a person they don’t agree with, they may simply oppose that point of view rather than listen to it, but they also tend to feel sorry for that person’s inability to construe reality correctly.

      In other words, the default position concerning freedom of speech has traditionally maintained that a person’s discourse may be wrong, biased or misinformed, but only in exceptional cases should the sincerity of the speaker be called into question. For this very reason, US President Donald Trump’s supporters may think that many of the things he says could be erroneous, but they assume that their hero is at least being sincere. They even consider that when his ravings contradict the science or reasoning of other informed voices, his insistence is proof of his sincerity. They admire him for it.

      In contrast, Trump’s enemies want us to believe he is unique and the opposite of the truthtellers on their side. But Trump is far from alone. He just pushes the trend of exaggerating the truth and developing unfounded arguments further than his opponents or even his friends. And because he shakes off all challenges, his fans see him as that much more authentic and sincere than everyone else.

      And so the hyperreal system maintains itself without the need of resorting to objective reality. That may explain why the ruling of the judge in favor of Carlson seems to jar with the rules of the hyperreal game. A former Playboy model accused Carlson of defamation. Here is how Business Insider framed the case: “A federal judge on Wednesday [September 23] dismissed a lawsuit against Fox News after lawyers for the network argued that no ‘reasonable viewer’ takes the primetime host Tucker Carlson seriously.” In the judge’s words, “given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statements he makes.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Reasonable viewer:

      An imaginary human being considered to be capable of critical thinking when sitting in front of an American news broadcast on television, contradicting all empirical evidence that shows no such person has ever existed

      Contextual Note

      The idea of a “reasonable viewer” is similar to the equally nonexistent “homo economicus,” a concept dear to economists who want the public to believe that markets represent the ultimate expression of human rationality. They imagine a world in which all people do nothing other than pursue their enlightened and informed self-interest.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The judge in the Carlson case is one of those rare Americans who understand that all the news — and Fox News par excellence — is entertainment. But what he fails to acknowledge is that broadcast “news” has become a consciously tendentious form of entertainment that privileges emotion over reason and has an insidious impact on people’s civic behavior. 

      Whether it’s Fox News, MSNBC or CNN, no complex story exists that cannot be reduced to the kind of binary conflict its viewers expect to hear about and resonate to. That means nothing could be more unreasonable than to believe there is such a thing as a “reasonable viewer,” especially one who refuses to take Carlson “seriously.”

      In other words, the judge is right to highlight the fundamental triviality — or, worse, the hyperreal character of most TV news and Carlson in particular — but wrong to think it appeals to “reasonable” viewers or that reasonable viewers, if they exist at all, are even aware of it.

      Historical Note

      Throughout the history of the US in the 20th century, media fluctuated between a sense of vocation in reporting fundamentally factual stories and one of serving the needs of propaganda either of the government or of political parties. There has long been a distinction between “liberal” and “conservative” newspapers, though throughout the 20th century, the distinction applied more to the editorial pages in which columnists had the liberty to express their particular bias than to reporting of the news itself.

      Quentin Fottrell, in an article for Market Watch published in 2019, described the process by which, in his words, “U.S. news has shifted to opinion-based content that appeals to emotion.” He sums up the findings of a study by the Rand Corporation in these terms: “Journalism in the U.S. has become more subjective and consists less of the detailed event- or context-based reporting that used to characterize news coverage.”

      Significantly, the Rand study found that the very language used in reporting had evolved: “Before 2000, broadcast news segments were more likely to include relatively complex academic and precise language, as well as complex reasoning.” This points to the core issue in the shift that has taken place. Over the past 20 years, “broadcast news became more focused on-air personalities and talking heads debating the news.” This indicates a deliberate intention of news media to appeal to emotion rather than reason, even to the exclusion of any form of critical thinking.

      Fottrell notes the significance of the year 2000, a moment at which “ratings of all three major cable networks in the U.S. began to increase dramatically.” When the focus turns to ratings — the unique key to corporate income — the traditional vocation of informing the public takes a back seat. He quotes a patent attorney who studied media bias and found that the “extreme sources play on people’s worst instincts, like fear and tribalism, and take advantage of people’s confirmation biases.”

      The “worst instincts” are also known as the lowest common denominator. According to the logic of monopoly that guides all big corporations in the US, the standard strategy for a news outlet is to identify a broad target audience and then seek to develop a message that stretches from the high-profile minority who have an economic or professional interest in the political agenda to the dimmest and least discerning of a consumer public who are moved by “fear and tribalism.”

      It’s a winning formula because the elite segment of the target audience, a tiny minority of interested parties who are capable of understanding the issues and the stakes, willingly participate in the dumbing down of the news with the goal of using emotion to attract the least discerning to the causes they identify with and profit from economically and politically. 

      Just as the average Fox News viewer has no objective interest in Donald Trump’s tax cuts for the rich or his permanent campaign to gut health care but will be easily incited to see the president as the champion of their lifestyle, the average MSNBC viewer will endorse the Wall Street bias of establishment Democrats always intent on eschewing serious reforms, citing the fact that they are too expensive. They do so only because MSNBC has excited their emotions against the arch-villain Trump.

      It isn’t as if reasonable viewers didn’t exist. The news networks have banished them to pursue their interests on the internet or simply replaced anything that resembles reason by pure emotion.

      *[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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      How Catholics Can Tilt the US Election

      by

      Few Americans these days are likely to recognize the name Thomas Nast. Yet in the Civil War era, Nast was arguably the most famous cartoonist in the United States, responsible for creating and popularizing iconic images, such as “jolly St. Nick” (aka Santa Claus), Uncle Sam and the donkey and the elephant — symbols of the Democrats and Republicans ever since. Nast’s fame was reflected in the Overseas Press Club of America’s decision, in 1978, to name their annual award for best cartoons on international affairs after him.

      Yet 40 years later, the Press Club decided to wipe Nast’s name clean of the official title of the award. This came at the heel of the controversy, a few years earlier, provoked by Nast’s nomination for induction into New Jersey’s Hall of Fame. The nomination, his third in four years, once again ended in failure, despite Nast’s merits of having exposed the corruption of New York’s infamous Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, and despite his commitment to the anti-slavery cause and racial equality.

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      Unfortunately, Nast had a serious blind spot: a pronounced hostility to the country’s Catholic, and particularly Irish Catholic immigrant, community. Nast routinely portrayed the Irish as drunkards with ape-like features, bent on creating havoc; one cartoon has an Irishman sitting on a powder keg, a bottle in one hand, a torch in the other. His famous cartoon, “The American River Ganges,” was a perfect expression of the way Protestant Americans viewed the influx of European Catholics. It depicts Catholic bishops as crocodiles crawling onto American shores bent on attacking innocent schoolchildren.

      Blind Spot

      Nast’s kind of bigotry was hardly something new. Anti-Catholic sentiments ran rampant throughout the 19th century, starting with the massive influx of Irish and southern German Catholics in the 1840s and 1850s, regaining steam in the decades of the Civil War, with the emergence of the American Protective Association and a wave of pamphlets peddling anti-Catholic conspiracy theories, most famously the claim that the Catholic Church had been behind the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

      Catholics were generally regarded with suspicion, if not outright fear, as an alien force sent by the pope to subvert the country’s republican institutions and destroy democracy in the United States. Even those who would concede that these allegations were highly exaggerated maintained that Catholic immigrants were not in a position to act as responsible citizens, lacking the independence of mind indispensable for being a good democrat. They were deemed to be under the influence of the pope and priests, who, in turn, were charged with being fundamentally hostile to American democracy.

      Most of its detractors maintained that the Catholic faith was fundamentally incompatible with the basic values that informed the American republic. Nativist and white supremacist organizations in the 1920s, most notoriously the second Ku Klux Klan, routinely targeted the country’s growing Catholic community.

      It took more than a century for American Catholics to be accepted as fully equal citizens. In 1937, when Gallup first asked the question, no more than 60% of respondents said they would vote for a Catholic presidential candidate. It took until the late 1970s that that number surpassed the 90% mark. As late as 2003, a prominent book on anti-Catholicism referred to it as the “last acceptable prejudice” in the United States. Some 15 years later, a commentary in the Catholic News Agency charged that it was “becoming more and more obvious that the Catholic Church is being targeted as the public enemy of our society.” For the author, a retired bishop from New Jersey whose diocese was marred in sex abuse scandals during his tenure, the main reason for anti-Catholic hostility was the church’s standing firm on “her teaching on contraception, abortion, stem cell research, in-vitro fertilization, marriage and divorce.”

      This is one side of the story and certainly an important one that must not be ignored or trivialized. For large parts of American history, Catholics represented a besieged minority, particularly if they happened to be of Irish or Italian descent. At the same time, however, as the size of the Catholic immigrant community grew in size, so did its influence. Many in the first wave of Catholic immigrants settled in large northeastern cities, such as New York and Boston, where they quickly became a major political factor, primarily for the Democratic Party, which built a whole patronage system on the largely Irish Catholic vote. From this perspective, Nast’s crusade against New York City’s Tammany Hall and his anti-Irish cartoons acquire a certain logic.

      It is also a fact that the American Catholic Church actively opposed abolitionism in the United States. And it is also a fact that there was little love lost between the Irish, and later Italian, immigrant communities and the African American minority, with animosities coming from both sides. Catholic immigrants had always voted for the Democratic Party, and the outcome of the Civil War only strengthened the association, as did Lincoln’s Republican Party’s association with the anti-Catholic cause, albeit rather subtle, even if it was well known that in some parts of the country there were strong ties between the Republicans and the American Protective Association.

      Historical Irony

      It is important to keep this in mind in order to appreciate the significance of the role of the Catholic vote for the November election. Gone are the days when Catholics formed a dependable vote bank for the Democratic Party, when the Republicans were seen biased, if not hostile, to the Catholic faith. In 2016, according to Pew Research, 56% of registered Catholics voted for Trump, 44% for Hillary Clinton. Generally, nowadays, about half of registered Catholic voters identify themselves more or less as Republicans; roughly the same share more or less as Democrats. This implies that the Catholic vote is a perfect reflection of the pronounced political polarization and partisanship that has characterized the country as a whole for the past few decades.

      At the same time, Catholics are no longer considered unfit for high political offices, their republican credentials questioned, as was still the case when John F. Kennedy ran for office. To be sure, this has not yet played itself out with respect to the presidency. Joe Biden, if elected, would only be the second Catholic to be elected to the country’s highest political office. It is, however, the case for the other branches of the American political system — the Congress and particularly the Supreme Court. It is perhaps one of the great ironies of American history that today, the majority of the Supreme Court justices who are supposed to interpret and uphold the Constitution of the United States happen to be Catholics — members of a faith that once was considered anathema to everything the country stood for, or at least claimed to stand for.

      With the passing away of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on September 18, the Supreme Court has once again become a focal point of attention. This might appear a bit strange. After all, the Supreme Court is generally seen as “‘the least dangerous branch’ because it can only tell you what the law means.” Its principal task is “to settle conflicting judgments from lower courts, and determine whether laws are in conflict with the Constitution or other federal laws.”

      This, however, is not how America’s Christian fundamentalists see it. For them, the Supreme Court is the one crucial institution that is in a position to reverse what they consider the greatest abomination in American legal history, Roe vs. Wade, the decision that made abortion legal countywide. President Donald Trump’s choice of Amy Coney Barrett, a devout Catholic and mother of seven (two of the children by adoption), to fill the vacant seat on the Supreme Court is, therefore, of supreme significance. Not only because it would tilt the court decisively to the right, but also because it might help sway the outcome of the November election in Trump’s favor, particularly with respect to the Hispanic Catholic vote.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In a recent commentary in The New York Times, Linda Chavez called upon the Democrats not to take the Hispanic vote for granted. In 2016, almost 30% of Hispanics voted for Trump, despite his blatant denigration of migrants from south of the border. There are numerous reasons for the way Hispanics vote the way they do, not least their national origins. And there is the religious factor. As Chavez points out, a growing number of Hispanics identify themselves as Protestants or even evangelicals, and as such are more prone to vote for Trump.

      In addition, there is the question of abortion — an abomination to evangelicals and devout Roman Catholics alike. In a recent poll, more than 50% of Hispanic Catholics thought abortion should be illegal in most or all cases. In fact, Hispanics were the only distinct ethnic group to think so. Among white Catholics, for instance, roughly 40% took the pro-life position. To complicate things even more, a study from 2007 found a marked difference between first and second-generation American Hispanics on the question of abortion. Among the former, almost two-thirds indicated at the time that it should be illegal; among the latter, only a bit more than 40% thought so.

      God’s Tool

      In an earlier article, I have suggested that Trump’s core constituency, evangelicals and devout Catholics, have supported him not because they believe he is a man of God — he quite clearly is the opposite, all his pretending notwithstanding — but because they believe he is “God’s tool.” Ginsburg’s passing away a few weeks before the election, allowing Trump to choose an avowed abortion opponent to fill her seat, cannot but strengthen their belief that the president is on a mission from God. Trump, of course, has far more mundane motives, first and foremost to lock in all the conservative, reactionary and far-right groups in American society that might put him over the edge in crucial states.

      There is a certain irony to the fact that the most widely loathed president, both at home and abroad, in recent American history might be put in a position to impose himself for four more years both on the United States and the world at large with the help of a community that for a long time in the past was one of the most disparaged, if not outright abhorred religious minority in America. One might be tempted to see in this an instance of belated revenge for the treatment received in the past. As the good book states in Romans 12:19, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” Poor Thomas Nast must be spinning like a mad top in his grave.

      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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      in World Politics

      Trump at the UN: A Failure to Lead

      by

      True to himself, US President Donald Trump completely failed to address any of the issues confronting the global community in his keynote speech to the 74th General Assembly of the United Nations. Instead, he used the platform to criticize China, to excoriate Iran, to boast of how big and dangerous the US military has become, and to urge every nation to close its borders to even the most hungry or persecuted migrants. He did, however, think it appropriate to support the right of all Americans to own as many guns as they want.

      In the same speech, Trump made headlines with his words urging the world to hold China accountable for having “unleashed this plague on to the world,” in reference to the COVID-19 pandemic, and for deliberately encouraging the coronavirus to spread. The White House cut these words from the transcript posted on its website. Perhaps even the administration’s press office did not have the stomach to publish such libel.

      This speech to the UN was a moment when the leader of the free world — as a US president might once have been seen — could actually attempt to lead. The speech was an opportunity to inspire and to set out a roadmap to a better future. Trump chose to do the reverse. The world is facing a triple crisis of an international pandemic, economic collapse and climate emergency. Trump could only reach out for people to blame: the Chinese, Iranians or Venezuelans. He failed to mention that the United States has the biggest coronavirus death toll of any country in the world, with over 200,000 dead and counting. 

      Nor did Trump comment on the millions out of work or that America’s west is burning at the same time that its southeast is inundated by hurricane after hurricane. These are not just America’s problems: Trump did not address the dire straits of billions of non-Americans impacted by these dangers. Why would he? This is the true measure of “America First.”

      The American leadership vacuum is a grave danger to not just Americans but to us all. Trump’s failure to act early to stem coronavirus infections — a deliberate decision he made to fatuously “avoid panic” — will likely cost the lives of tens of thousands more Americans on top of the current staggering death toll. The US withdrawal from the World Health Organization in the middle of the pandemic signaled that Trump wanted no part of the international leadership out of the health crisis. The resultant deaths will be beyond imagination.  

      Trump has employed the same approach to international economics. His regime’s policy has been to withdraw from trade agreements, set up sanctions barriers against competitors and allies, and complain that everyone else’s industrial policies are more successful than his. Trump has also embarked on a determined effort to weaken the international institutions — the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and so on — that have enabled the world economy to prosper for the past 75 years. The world is going to need a great deal of leadership to emerge out of the current economic wasteland, on a scale of what was done to repair the damage of the Second World War. We can rely on Donald Trump to be absent from that role, too.

      As for the climate emergency, Trump has chosen to deny it. More than that, he has proceeded to undo everything previous US governments and the international community had done to try to save the planet from disaster. All of these crises are going to produce millions of refugees across the world. Trump couldn’t care less.

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