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“You’ll never take back our country with weakness,” Trump explained, “you have to show strength, and you have to be strong.”

Trump didn’t have any actual proof of election fraud—at least not any that would stand up in a court of law. Trump instead offered his supporters conspiracy instead of proof, urging them to “show strength” by believing him and taking action against their shared enemies.

Such rhetoric was not new or unusual for our outgoing president. To the contrary, this approach is at the heart of his political career, the most telling moment of which occurred almost exactly four years before the mayhem of his final week in office.

On January 11, 2017—nine days before his inauguration, and five days after the U.S. government released a report accusing Russia of attempting to “influence” the 2016 election in his favor—Trump held his first news conference as president-elect. Surrounded by an audience of family and employees who provided a laugh-track for his performance, the president-elect stood next to a table overladen with manila folders and assured the nation that he had separated himself from his business empire: “These papers are just some of the many documents that I’ve signed, turning over complete and total control to my sons.”

Trump promised that the papers proved that he and his businesses wouldn’t profit off the presidency, but when reporters asked to examine the evidence, the folders and papers appeared blank. Not for the first time nor the last, Trump had offered props instead of proof.

Such theatrics are baffling to scholars of serious presidential rhetoric, who expect presidents to provide credible evidence to support their claims. But Trump makes more sense when you think of him not as president, but as demagogue. Trump is a new kind of demagogue—part entertainer and part authoritarian, he is a demagogue of the spectacle.

French critical theorist Guy Debord coined the phrase “society of the spectacle” in 1967, using the term “spectacle” to denote a moment in history when representation had replaced direct experience as our epistemology—as our way of knowing. Earlier in the 20th century, he explained, we knew things because we experienced them directly (and one’s sphere of information and influence was necessarily very small). But by the second half of the 20th century, we had expanded our sphere of information to such an extent that we knew things only because we learned about them from media sources—most, if not all, of our knowledge had become mediated by others.

What was worse, to Debord, was that this new knowledge was commodified. It was a part of the capitalist system of production and distribution, which meant that it was always only partial knowledge. What was “true” was limited to what would sell.

This is the essence of Trump’s epistemology: “Truth” is merely what he can sell.

Debord was talking about television and newspapers and magazines. Fifty years later, the spectacle has expanded into our computers and our phones, following us everywhere and erasing all private, non-spectacular space. The spectacle’s dangerous demagogue has used the power of social media and the tactics of weaponized rhetoric and propaganda to set the nation’s agenda, confuse political debate, and marshal supporters to defend their positions and overwhelm opposition. Trump plays the spectacle for what it is. He is its creature, its essential qualities.

If we put Trump’s demagoguery into a spectacle frame, we ask different questions than if we judge him based on whether or not he is a good president, offering good arguments and solid proof for his positions or doing what’s best for the country and its people. As a spectacular demagogue, Trump uses strategies that he thinks will make great or compelling TV and dominate the news cycle. He asks: What will attract attention? What will divide people into teams to cheer for (or boo against) the story’s main character, me? What kinds of plots will distract from other stories? Just like any other brand or app or electronic device, Trump has engineered his demagoguery to gain and keep our attention.

Trump read the rhetorical landscape better than anyone else during the 2016 election. He saw that the nation’s crisis levels of distrust, polarization, and frustration made Americans vulnerable to demagoguery. So Trump used rhetorical strategies like ad hominem attacks, threats, and conspiracy theory to attack our public sphere, attacking America. Those strategies are authoritarian. Trump’s rhetoric is a kind of force; it’s based on authoritarian compliance-gaining rather than on democratic persuasion.

Like an authoritarian P. T. Barnum, a con man who used hyperbole to profit off of our curiosity, Trump has used stagecraft, suspense, and outrage to keep us all engaged and on tilt, and thus to dominate our public sphere—no small feat in an attention economy like ours. The showman’s rhetorical strategy is a legerdemain—a sleight of hand. Part of Trump’s success was that he dominated the conversation by saying things so outrageous that we could not look away and had to respond. It’s no surprise that almost exactly a year before Trump’s first news conference as president-elect, he told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press that he enjoyed being compared to P. T. Barnum. “We need P. T. Barnum, a little bit,” Trump said, “because we have to build up the image of our country.”

Yet while Trump wanted our attention, he did not want our scrutiny. Like any showman or other dangerous demagogue, Trump didn’t want to be held accountable for his words or actions.  He didn’t want us to examine his rhetoric—or his folders—too carefully. Trump would trivialize concerns about his rhetoric as mere “political correctness” or “women trying to control how men speak” or “so unimportant.” Of course, he would also say, “I have the best words.”

He always claimed that he was just telling it like it is, but he never allowed us to examine his “proofs.” He promised us that he’s “really smart” and a “genius,” but he didn’t release his high school or college transcripts. He claimed that he was “really rich,” but he didn’t release his tax records. When Congressional Democrats asked to see documents or hear testimony for oversight purposes, he refused. He never told us why he made an emergency visit to Walter Reed hospital in 2019; when he contracted coronavirus, he never told us when he last tested negative for COVID-19 or when he first tested positive. Who knows what else he hasn’t told us?

Like a good showman, Trump has developed a repertoire of tricks to prevent the audience from seeing reality. Non-disclosure agreements, lawsuits, retribution, and humiliation silence would-be whistleblowers from telling the nation what they know about his authoritarian circus. Trump’s 21st century version of P. T. Barnum doesn’t mind resorting to force to make sure that his preferred view of “truth” will sell.

We are especially attracted to characters like Trump during times of great transition when we feel alienated and confused, and reality can be more easily distorted. Part of the showman’s strategy is to confound the public so that audiences are more likely to be misled, making it that much easier to sell their “truth.”

Voters ultimately held America’s authoritarian P. T. Barnum accountable by voting him out of office, denying him a second term. A record 81 million Americans voted for President-elect Joe Biden, but Trump is still trying to deny reality, still using his props to sell Americans on his version of “truth.”

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So argued the London-based essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra during a fast-paced and wide-ranging Zócalo/Noēma Magazine online event yesterday, titled “Has Hysteria Conquered America?”

Mishra and The Atlantic senior editor Ronald Brownstein, who served as discussion moderator, spent over an hour discussing how international trends and intellectual history might explain today’s American politics.

Those politics, Mishra and Brownstein agreed, are full of conspiracy theories, xenophobia, over-the-top rhetoric, and questionable thinking. Over the course of the event, the two writers tried to locate the reasons for this crack-up—in economic dislocation, racism, wars, imperialism, and especially in Americans’ misunderstanding of their own place in the world.

Mishra, who is Indian and the author most recently of Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race and Empire, suggested that it may have been easier to understand what’s happening in America if you’re not American. “I’ve come to the subject not through the American experience, but through the experience of India, supposedly the world’s largest democracy,” said Mishra. During his life, education, and work as a writer in India, he saw democracy decline. “A whole culture of hatred, of division, was emerging,” he said, “and many people were happily subscribing to it and looking for a demagogue who could at least seem to be protecting their rights.”

“With that kind of training,” Mishra concludes, “what’s happened in America hasn’t come as a huge surprise.”

Pressed by Brownstein, a leading American political journalist, on what explains political hysteria in the U.S. and around the world, Mishra returned to themes from his previous book Age of Anger: A History of the Present. The modern world, he said, is based on “contradictory promises.” The first promise is equality and individual dignity. But the second promise, “is that we will realize individual and national power through capitalism.” That, he said, is “when the contradictions start becoming sharper and sharper, because capitalism tends to generate inequality.”

Inequality creates disaffection with society, and starts to undermine democracy. And democracy’s spread in recent decades, because it coincided with the rise of neoliberal capitalism, produced a backlash because “the promise of equality got entangled with the promise of prosperity,” Mishra said.

Right-wing populism, Mishra said, is part of that backlash, and is driven by a desire for protection not just from capitalism but from the many disasters afflicting the world.

“There’s a sense that the world is falling apart and we have to take drastic measures to protect ourselves,” Mishra said. “The survivalist instinct has kicked in, in many different parts of the world.”

This backlash has surprised many leaders and thinkers in the U.S., the U.K., and the West who Mishra described as “too self-absorbed, far too self-congratulatory, [and] not really perceptive enough to the sufferings or ordeals of ordinary people.” Mishra also cited the widespread hubris that the U.S. had reached “a particular summit of human achievement.”

“One reason we are unable to look at our world clearly is because we are too influenced by a certain ideology of progress and of continuous, irreversible improvement,” said Mishra, adding: “Trump has been welcome in at least one aspect—he’s forced us to confront many of these problems that we understated or ignored or suppressed in the past.”

Very few progressive thinkers in the West have been exposed to a lot of non-Western thought, said Mishra, citing, in particular, the criticisms of Western liberalism by Gandhi. He lamented how Western writers routinely pontificate about Iran or Russia or other societies without speaking the language, or reading the leading thinkers from those parts of the world. Those with broader experience and knowledge, who often are outsiders or minorities in a society, he said, can be more perceptive.

Brownstein, who authored The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America in 2007, agreed. “As a card-carrying member of that mainstream punditocracy, I can say that the person who I encountered in 2016 who was the most convinced throughout that Trump could win was an African American pollster named Cornell Belcher.” Belcher correctly predicted that Trump’s open racism “would not be disqualifying for as many voters as someone like me probably thought in 2016.”

During a question-and-answer period, audience members offered queries about China, the balance of power between the countries, the pandemic, the global power of American culture, and what Mishra thinks of Los Angeles (he said he enjoys going for walks and visiting bookstores on his visits). Some audience questions asked the two writers to predict the future.

“I think the 2020s in America are going to be the 1850s,” said Brownstein, “where you had a rising majority whose agenda is being stalemated by a minority that controls a lot of the key institutions.”

In response to a question about the perceptions of the United States, Mishra said the country’s recent path posed a warning to those who saw it as a global model. “What America offers to the rest of the world is a cautionary tale. You were trying to imitate America, but America can end up in a very unfortunate place.”

For the U.S., humility is now in order, and a willingness to look and think more broadly about everyone’s needs. “Arrogance [and] hubris have, in a way, reached a monstrous culmination with those images of Trump on the White House balcony taking off his mask,” Mishra said. “Humility has an opportunity right now to make itself manifest.”

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Besides, who needed modern distractions when the history was so thrilling? The story of treason—attempts to overthrow the government or to aid our enemies—is nothing less than the story of America itself. Our country was forged in the American Revolution by people willing to commit treason against Great Britain, and the Confederate cause in the Civil War was the largest-scale act of mass treason in our history. The individual characters are riveting, from Benedict Arnold and his sordid betrayal of West Point to the poet Ezra Pound, prosecuted for treason for broadcasting fascist propaganda from Mussolini’s Italy. The accused persons represent every segment of society, from a former vice president (Aaron Burr) to the local leader of a miners’ union prosecuted for treason against West Virginia in the 1920s.

The Revolutionary War officer Benedict Arnold was a traitor to the American cause who defected to the British Army in 1780. Here, Arnold is depicted providing plans to surrender West Point to the British to his friend British Major John André. André was later captured and hanged; Arnold got away. Courtesy of C.F. Blauvelt/Library of Congress.

For many years, I worked on the book that would become The Trials of Allegiance: Treason, Juries, and the American Revolution. I could proceed at a glacial George R.R. Martin-agonizing-over-The Winds of Winter pace because there was no obvious connection to current events. In 2015, a Zócalo Public Square essayist confidently proclaimed that “We’re living in what has to be the nation’s golden age of loyalty.” The essay was headlined, “Is Treason now Just a Punch Line?”

And then that world was turned upside down with the political rise of Donald J. Trump. The first phone call from a reporter came in July 2016, after Trump publicly encouraged Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s emails. The question—which I would quickly become used to—was: “Is this treason?” And the answer (which I also quickly became used to, given the Constitution’s narrow definition of the crime), was no. But the calls kept coming, becoming a flood after Trump’s inauguration, as antennae perked up at further revelations about Michael Flynn, Russian interference in the election, the Mueller investigation, and the infamous meeting at Trump Tower.

Around this time, my literary agent asked me to write a second book about treason, one that would bring the story up to the present day, and that would lay out the byzantine law of treason in a manner accessible to interested citizens. I wasn’t sure I was ready to take on another book so quickly, but as misguided treason charges and countercharges swirled through our national debate, I came to realize that we were in a unique historical moment. If we were going to be arguing about American treason law so much, we should at least have a better understanding of what it is—and maybe even more importantly, what it is not.

All nations have treason laws to deal with the problem of disloyalty. But if those laws aren’t carefully circumscribed, they can easily become a tool of domestic oppression—a tendency the framers of the U.S. Constitution recognized all too well. In the tumultuous years prior to the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, British authorities had threatened to prosecute American tax protestors for high treason in England, far from the protections of a local jury. Prominent attorney James Wilson, who represented Pennsylvania at the Constitutional Convention, explained the problem this way at the Pennsylvania ratifying convention: “Crimes against the state! and against the officers of the state! History informs us that more wrong may be done on this subject than on any other whatsoever.” Wilson and the other framers of our Constitution accordingly chose to define the crime directly in the document itself—and to define it narrowly. Article III, Section 3 restricts the offense to “levying war against the United States” or “adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” Although these phrases pose many interpretive difficulties, they clearly prevent treason prosecutions for offenses such as criticizing the government or organizing a political party.

There have been few actual treason prosecutions under the U.S. Constitution, and only one person, Hipolito Salazar, has been executed for treason under federal authority (a truly bizarre case from the Mexican-American War—Salazar was a Mexican citizen, tried and convicted on Mexican soil). A handful of American presidents have been traitors, though none during their time in office—and none were prosecuted. Our first five presidents all committed treason against Great Britain during the Revolutionary War, well before the adoption of the Constitution. During the Civil War, former president John Tyler committed treason when he supported military actions against the United States in his role as a member of the Virginia Secession Convention. Curiously, the older crime of treason against individual states was not definitively eliminated by the Constitution and states have occasionally brought charges, most notably the 1859 prosecution of John Brown by the state of Virginia for leading the raid on Harpers Ferry.

Other than the distinctive case of the secessionists during the American Civil War, it’s rare for disloyalty to rise to the level of treason as defined in the Constitution. So why is it that treason—or “treason”—is now so regularly discussed? There are two simple reasons: what Donald Trump does, and what Donald Trump says.

First, for many people, Trump’s conduct raises considerable suspicions about his underlying loyalty. Trump consistently seems to place Russia’s interests ahead of America’s, whether by ignoring or condoning blatant Russian misbehavior or by kowtowing to Vladimir Putin. Indeed, Trump’s consistent failure to publicly criticize Putin is perhaps the most bewildering aspect of his presidency. Many Americans fear the worst, pointing to news reports suggesting that Trump’s tangled financial dealings involve significant debts to Russian sources. It is not irrational to suspect that Russia may have all kinds of personal or financial kompromat on him.

In a colloquial sense, Trump’s conduct—far beyond the bounds of normal presidential behavior—may have betrayed the country. But nothing Trump has done (or is alleged to have done) formally rises to the level of treason as a matter of criminal law. Foreign nations like Russia are “enemies” only if we are in a state of open war with them. Despite all the covert back and forth with Russia, we are simply not in a state of open war. For similar reasons, Americans who spied for the Soviet Union, like the Rosenbergs or Aldrich Ames, were prosecuted for espionage (which doesn’t require a state of open war), not treason.

Still: “it’s not technically treason” is a strange thing to have to say about an American president.

Second, unlike any of his predecessors, Trump uses his presidential podium to routinely accuse other Americans of treason, targeting congressional Democrats, anonymous critics, James Comey, Adam Schiff, and, perhaps most notoriously, his predecessor, President Barack Obama.  In a Tweet (naturally), Trump claimed that the “ObamaBiden Administration” had committed “treason” by spying on his 2016 presidential campaign. These accusations lack even the flimsiest basis in fact or law—but unfortunately many of Trump’s supporters take him at his word. They are convinced that actual traitors permeate the Democratic party and the federal government.

We have become so numb to the excesses of Trump’s rhetoric that it is easy to forget just how extraordinary this is. Treason is a capital offense and routinely described as the highest crime in American law, worse even than murder. Accusing a fellow American of treason is (or at least used to be) one of the most significant utterances a president could possibly make. But now it often doesn’t even make the news.

Since the current excitement over treason and disloyalty is so heavily tied to Trump’s distinctive behavior and rhetoric, it will likely dissipate significantly when someone else occupies the Oval Office. At the same time, even a defeated or termed-out Trump may continue making outrageous claims from the sidelines, thus risking continued pollution of our political rhetoric.

American treason law is a rich and rewarding field, one that is absolutely central to the larger story of America itself. On some level, I suppose I should be pleased that the subject into which I have invested so many years of research is now attracting a much wider audience. But, as fascinating and surreal as it is to be queried regularly by reporters about whether the president of the United States has committed treason, I’d much prefer to live in a world where that question doesn’t arise.

The post Why ‘Treason’ Usually Isn’t Treason appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Throughout the pandemic, public commentators have been quick to draw historical analogies between Trump’s performance and past White House communications. The president’s televised briefings have been compared, often unfavorably, to Abraham Lincoln’s carefully crafted public addresses, or to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats. “D.J.T. is No F.D.R.,” one columnist opined.

The promise of “nightly surprises” for the RNC convention has, once again, encouraged political pundits to fixate on the rhetorical work Trump has before him. But while seeking sense and stability from the nation’s historic statesmen is only natural, the drive to find positive examples from the past distracts as much as it illuminates. Sometimes, presidential silence is most constructive for leading citizens through a crisis.

A case in point is a speech that President Kennedy considered delivering on civil defense. Drafted at the height of the Cold War but never presented to the public, this “fireside chat” would have explained what would happen if the Soviet Union launched a surprise attack against the U.S., with the goal of rousing Americans to build their own personal shelters against attack. The story behind Kennedy’s decision to remain silent reveals the enduring limits of presidential communication.

John F. Kennedy’s time as president coincided with a period of international relations often referred to as the nuclear crisis. Bookended by the surprise launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957 and the Cuban Missile Crisis and signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1962 and 1963, the nuclear crisis was the true high point of the Cold War. When Kennedy entered the Oval Office in 1961, the Kremlin and the Pentagon were engaged in multiple covert operations against each other. Spy networks hunted out military secrets, and cultural warfare was conducted through various media. The two nations also backed proxy conflicts across the globe from Cuba to the Congo.

An artist’s rendition of a basement fallout shelter, from the mid 1950s. As the threat of nuclear war began to feel real to Americans, many built protective home hideouts. Courtesy of the National Archives at College Park/Wikimedia Commons.

Nuclear weapons were at the heart of the Kennedy-era Cold War. Military strategists and think tank intellectuals—the people parodied and immortalized in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove—saw the proliferation of nuclear warheads as the best way to deter the Kremlin. These “wizards of Armageddon,” as journalist Fred Kaplan branded them, based their judgment on cold, mathematical calculations, and game-theory models of decision making with the aim to predict strategic interactions between the Cold War superpowers. This work led them to embrace a paradox: that more nuclear weapons could create stability; neither side, they argued, would risk attack because of the certainty of an equally violent response.

Mutual assured destruction (unironically referred to as “MAD”) had a tangible impact on U.S. military spending. By 1960, the United States nuclear stockpile consisted of 18,638 missiles, enough to destroy the world many times over. But nuclear war is equal parts foreign and domestic policy—and in 1961, Kennedy’s first year in office, managing public anxiety over nuclear weapons became a major political headache for the administration.

A series of high-profile international incidents turned the topic of Armageddon into water cooler conversation. April brought the public revelation of CIA misadventures in the Bay of Pigs, where 1,400 Cuban exiles launched a botched invasion of Cuba’s south coast in an effort to depose Fidel Castro. In June, during a conference in Vienna, Kennedy engaged in a tense exchange with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev over a continuing border dispute in divided Berlin, where a steady stream of emigrants fled East Germany for the West. Refusing to engage Khrushchev in an ideological debate or to guarantee citizenship status for fleeing East Germans made Kennedy appear nervous before the international press. Newspapers on both sides of the Iron Curtain ran stories about a young president “outmatched” and “underprepared”.

On July 25, 1961, Kennedy, still stinging from media coverage of his performance in Vienna, replied to critics at home and abroad in a televised public address in which he implied the U.S. might be willing to risk nuclear war over Germany’s fate and increasing Communist aggression. Staring directly into the camera, under the harsh glare of klieg lights, Kennedy told an audience of 25 million Americans that nuclear war was a real possibility—and that they needed to prepare.

The country had a “sober responsibility to recognize the possibilities of nuclear war in the missile age,” the president said, adding that neglecting to show Americans “what they should do and where they should go if bombs begin to fall, would be a failure of responsibility.” If a nuclear bomb fell on American soil, he suggested, families who were not killed in the initial blast or fires could be saved “if they are warned to take shelter and that shelter is available.” Kennedy affirmed his personal investment in helping the nation-in-crisis, promising “to let every citizen know what steps he can take without delay to protect his family in case of an attack.”

The speech, designed to wake listeners and call them to constructive action, was a disaster: Instead of banding purposefully together, Americans panicked. Previously, the public had been aware of the threat of nuclear attacks and the existence of civil defense—thanks to Federal Civil Defense Administration’s public education campaigns, featuring Bert the Turtle cartoons and duck and cover drills in schools—but apathetic about the practical ramifications of surviving them.

Yet after Kennedy’s speech, they obsessed over building protective shelters. Newspaper reports from the time described anxious families hounding officials at the Office of Civil Defense for information on converting houses, gardens and basements into nuclear bunkers.

The news kept raising new alarms. In August 1961, construction of the Berlin Wall began. A month later, the Soviet Union detonated a 16-kiloton bomb—codenamed “Joe 75”—at the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan, breaking an international moratorium on nuclear testing that had been in place for nearly three years. Over the next 16 months, the United States and Soviet Union conducted more nuclear tests than they had in the 16 preceding years. Global radiation levels spiked. The Cold War heated up. And thermonuclear war was becoming a real possibility.

While the total number of shelter assembly kits sold between 1961 and 1962 remained relatively low (Consumer Reports estimated around 200,000 were sold), the topic of shelters and survival became an editorial goldmine. LIFE magazine dedicated its September 1961 issue to the “fallout shelter question.” Public intellectuals from Margaret Mead to I.F. Stone produced stunning editorials on the damage privatized survival might have on the national character. TIME reported that some people openly threatened to shoot outsiders who tried to access their private shelter spaces—a strategy the magazine called “gun thy neighbor.”

After the July 1961 address, the Kennedy administration, realizing its misstep, started drafting a new presidential speech and preparing a new civil defense pamphlet, tentatively titled “Fallout Protection and You,” to deliver to every household in the United States. Modeled directly on Roosevelt’s successful Fireside Chats, Kennedy’s new address was intended to right the wrongs of the July message, providing a series of practical steps every household could easily take over the next few months. From September to late December, the administration worked tirelessly on the speech and pamphlet, a blueprint for the nation’s survival.

The task proved far more difficult than anticipated. The writers were dealing with tough content. “One conclusion is that any major nuclear attack on this country would kill tens of millions of people,” one proposed version of Kennedy’s speech stated plainly, adding:

There is no practicable program which would avert incredible destruction, slaughter, horror and chaos. The only way by which we could protect ourselves from the direct of blast, heat and firestorm is by burying our cities deep underground. We could carry out such a program only to the exclusion of nearly everything else in our national life—a course of action which makes no sense to me.

The proposed speech also made direct reference to the potential violence surrounding access to private shelters, with a warning given that “superpatriots” stockpiling private shelters should not “tyrannize their fellow citizens.”

Reading the various drafts, it is striking how honestly the issue of nuclear annihilation was addressed. White House staffers—wrestling with how to ask regular citizens to mount a civil defense with cinder blocks and concrete when there was no practical way for the federal government to do so—began to wonder if the whole exercise was entirely absurd. Some began to refer to the booklet as the “Fallout Is Good for You” guide. Fred Dutton, special assistant to the president, wrote in a memo that “the feel of the pamphlet, especially the drawings, is not reassuring. I suspect a poor public reaction to this.”

Dutton’s response was the mildest among Kennedy’s advisors. Senior White House advisor John Kenneth Galbraith criticized the Department of Defense for allowing some ridiculous ideas into early drafts of the message, including a bizarre reference to a wooden fallout shelter modeled after a frontier log cabin. Chiding the Pentagon in a memo prefaced, “I regard this as a matter of high importance,” Galbraith expressed concern about the political cast of the messaging. Privatized survival was a strategy designed for “saving Republicans and sacrificing Democrats … There are survival plans for people who have individual houses with basements in which lean-to fallout shelters can be built” but “no design for civilians who live in congested areas, tenements, low cost apartments.” The address in its current form, he continued, “seeks to save the better elements of the population, but in the main writes off those who voted for you.” Galbraith found the prospect of a presidential address on the matter “absolutely incredible and particularly injudicious.”

Ultimately, Kennedy’s advisors determined that the best solution, in the words of top aide and speechwriter Theodore Sorensen, was to allow the issue to “balloon” away—to “resist” Kennedy’s “natural urge to address the nation.” It would be better to leave the matter to other officials with greater knowledge, and less political profile. Spokespeople from federal agencies would still handle public inquiry, and local officials would work to identify existing public spaces that might be converted in community shelters. But direct communication from the president to the public on the question of privatized civil defense was severed.

There is much to glean from the tumultuous journey of this forgotten and abandoned speech. One crucial lesson is that the messenger matters. As public anxiety grew and the threat of nuclear warfare drew closer, Kennedy’s team came to realize that a presidential address would be unhelpful—because the public trusted experts more than elected officials when it came to their families’ survival.

In our COVID-19 pandemic, we can trace a similar response. As officials rush to reassure the public through an unceasing barrage of updates—muddling statistics and offering deeply questionable advice on using disinfectant in the body—they should consider whether their interventions, like Kennedy’s, result more in fear than faith.

The post When Presidential Silence Speaks Louder than Words appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The competition also explains why voters are suddenly seeing so many new approaches to political communications—approaches that can make politics feel both more democratic, and more chaotic. We are watching the end of one kind of political campaigning and the rise of a new “post-rhetorical” era. To understand what “post-rhetorical” means, and why campaigning now feels so different than even a decade ago, one has to look at the past, when the press and presidential campaigns weren’t at odds. In fact, they once cooperated for the mutually beneficial purpose of making news.

Presidential candidates used to campaign via retail politics, such as meeting voters face to face in diners or speaking to voters at train stops or other events, while the press gave print space and airtime to candidates, amplifying the rhetoric and messages of campaigns while also filtering political news for the public. Since candidates needed to use the press to connect with voters that they couldn’t meet in person, they gave the press access and information. In return, the press had campaign news to sell to advertisers and enjoyed the prestige of “winnowing” candidates—separating the legitimate candidates from the also-rans. Press and politicians—particularly winning politicians—cooperated with each other, and were mutually dependent.

Scholars call presidents communicating to the people via the press the “rhetorical presidency” model because presidents use rhetorical practice (communication) as a tool for governing. The era of the “rhetorical presidency” started first when Teddy Roosevelt wanted to get the public interested in his ideas and agenda. In 1898 he invited reporters to cover his “Rough Riders” as they prepared for battle in the Spanish-American War. By providing the press with a good story, Roosevelt also got their cooperation to get out his ideas about why he thought that the war was necessary. The press covered Roosevelt as a hero, preparing for battle. Once he was president, Roosevelt then used the press to “go over the heads of Congress” by using the press to speak directly to the people, hoping that voters would pressure Congress to enact his agenda. The press facilitated Roosevelt’s message distribution and Roosevelt found that he had a “bully pulpit” from which he could set the nation’s agenda. The rhetorical presidency—communicating with the public via the press—increased the power of the presidency itself, and in its time it was revolutionary. It helped to elevate the Executive Branch over Congress, establishing what scholars call a “second Constitution.”

The rhetorical presidency model worked for presidential campaigning too. Woodrow Wilson took advantage of the latest media technology in 1908 by recording his campaign speeches on phonographic records. Presidential candidates since Wilson have taken advantage of each new technology—radio, television, cable, internet—with the winner typically being the one who best took advantage of the new ways to communicate. The opposite was also true: presidential candidates who failed to understand how new communication technologies could work against their campaigns have tended to fail in their bids for the presidency. When JFK and Nixon debated on TV in 1960, Nixon’s failure to understand how TV would magnify non-verbal messages sank his campaign. Likewise, in the Bush-Kerry campaign of 2004, Kerry’s failure to understand the power of political blogs resulted in Kerry being “swift-boated.”

We’re no longer in the era of the “rhetorical presidency.” Cooperation between the press and presidents began to fray after Watergate, and was hastened along by the invention of cable news, the rise in “horse-race” reporting, and the fracturing of media. By 1988, the average presidential campaign soundbite had shrunk from 43 seconds to 9 seconds. Presidential candidates found that the press was filtering their messages more than they were facilitating them and they sought new ways to communicate with the public.

In our century, presidents, starting with George W. Bush, sought to cut the media out of the communication process, which laid the foundation for the “post-rhetorical” era. New communication technologies meant that candidates could make their own media networks and communicate their messages directly to the public.

Barack Obama was the first to perfect post-rhetorical campaigning. His 2008 run was the first to take advantage of newly available communication technology to communicate with supporters directly via text message, apps, email lists, and social media. As Obama campaign chief communications officer Anita Dunn explained after the election, the campaign sought whenever possible to “communicate around the filter.” The campaign announced important decisions like selecting Joe Biden as Obama’s running mate, rejecting public financing, and picking the location for Obama’s 2008 DNC acceptance address directly to supporters via email and text message. The press found out the news when everyone else did, which meant that they no longer had a monopoly over what was “news.” Never again would the press have the sole power to filter, amplify, and winnow presidential candidates.

Political campaigning since 2008 has operated within the logics of the “post-rhetorical presidency”—presidential campaigns compete rather than cooperate with news organizations. While candidate Hillary Clinton was known for being suspicious of the press, carefully controlling her campaign messages, Donald Trump attacked the press directly. During his 2016 presidential campaign and since he has threatened the press, called them “lying scum,” his re-election campaign has sued them, withheld information from them, prevented them from covering his events, stopped holding press briefings, and lied to them almost constantly. In so doing Trump has tried to take the agenda-setting power away from the press. All of this is the opposite of the kind of cooperation required by the “rhetorical presidency” model. As journalism professor Jay Rosen noted, Trump has tried to “break the press.”

Trump was able to break the press because political campaigns work on the same metrics as everything else in the attention economy: engagement. Trump’s campaign and presidential communication strategy was to use post-rhetorical messages—what he calls his “modern day presidential” communication style—to speak directly to supporters to keep them engaged. This enables Trump to set the nation’s agenda and frame reality. The post-rhetorical presidency model is asymmetrical, with power resting with the most engaging candidates. The press has been reduced to amplifying the news that Trump makes on his own vast direct communication network. Because Trump attracted so much attention, media companies were powerless to withhold news coverage. In fact, they did the opposite: During the 2016 campaign, the media gave Trump the equivalent of $5.9 billion in free airtime.

In 2020 we can clearly see that we’re in the post-rhetorical era of campaigning, and we can see new norms for this strategy taking shape. The post-rhetorical campaign model is a combination of retail face-to-face politics and direct communication with supporters. Campaigns are still using traditional media for amplification, but they are trying to mitigate the media’s ability to “winnow” and “filter” as much as possible.

So far, we’ve seen three different post-rhetorical models in 2020 and one candidate who is still using the “rhetorical presidency” model.

First, Trump and Sanders are both using what we can think of as the post-rhetorical “extreme energy” strategy. This strategy requires campaigns to have the ability to speak directly to supporters—called “vertical” communication—and counts on supporters to be energized to spread the campaign’s messages to other voters—a form of “horizontal” communication.

Since 2016, both Trump and Sanders have taken advantage of the horizontal energy of their supporters to drive their messages. The campaigns have amplified messages from supporters and then relied on outrage for those messages to go viral. This strategy makes sense because both Trump’s and Sanders’ campaigns are “outsider” populist campaigns that infiltrated a major political party, attempting to remake it in the candidate’s image. An outsider campaign like that requires an energetic horizontal and vertical strategy to be viable.

Campaigns take risks with this strategy because it is difficult to control the horizontal messages that circulate on your campaign’s behalf. For example, some Sanders supporters have used hostile, swarming techniques to attack supporters of other Democratic candidates online, which could hurt the Sanders campaign when it needs to attract those supporters for the general election. While some Democrats have asked Sanders to discipline his supporters, Republicans have not sought to hold Trump accountable the behavior of his fans, rejecting standards as mere “political correctness.”

For voters, the risk of such “extreme energy” horizontal communication is that it’s hard to know whether it is authentic. One wealthy benefactor supported some of Trump’s 2016 campaign’s horizontal “meme magic,” and the Mueller investigation found evidence that internet personas funded by Russia supported both Trump and Sanders’ campaigns in 2016, with U.S. intelligence officials now warning that Russian trolls are active on behalf of both of their campaigns again in 2020.

By contrast, Elizabeth Warren used what we can think of as a post-rhetorical strategy of “connection.” Unlike Trump and Sanders’ campaigns, Warren’s campaign was not based in outrage. Instead, Warren’s campaign sought to use a positive message to go around the news filter through a horizontal “selfie” campaign. Warren spent hours talking with voters and taking photos with them after her speaking events, which allowed her to hear directly from voters and connect with them about their concerns. Voters then posted their selfie photos online, which spread Warren’s messages horizontally. Warren’s campaign strategy was deliberately joyful and relied upon connection and engagement. It sought to gain attention and engagement through the authentic joy people felt about spreading her message through posting selfies.

The risk of this strategy for the campaign became obvious when voting started. While voters may have liked Warren, connection was not a sufficient motivation to show up to the polls and vote for her. Extensive research shows that a negative emotion like outrage can motivate voters, but it’s less clear if a positive emotion like connection can. That being said, Warren used the attention gained through her horizontal strategy to effectively fundraise and spread her detailed policy proposals. In this way, the horizontal campaign supported and complemented her vertical campaign—as well as her overall campaign message. In hindsight, her campaign strategy may enable future campaigns to get the press to focus more on policy ideas rather than merely on personality or the horserace.

The third post-rhetorical model we’ve seen might be called the “Billionaire” strategy, used by Mike Bloomberg, and to a lesser extent Tom Steyer. Bloomberg paid for a vertical, top-down campaign. The former New York City mayor went around the news filter by purchasing nearly a half a billion dollars in paid advertising, hoping to connect with voters through abundant message saturation. Typical of an outsider negative campaign, Bloomberg’s ads featured lots of attack ads on the incumbent. The horizontal element of Bloomberg’s campaign was also paid for—the campaign created scripts for paid campaign workers (“deputy digital organizers”) to use with their social networks. In addition the campaign paid for the creation of viral meme messages that winked at the fact that they were paid for.

One problem for the Bloomberg campaign was that a paid-horizontal strategy did not read as authentic. Another problem was that it’s difficult to control so many paid campaign workers or to check on their “work” due to the private nature of their networks. Reports emerged of Bloomberg’s paid-horizontal memers negating the campaign-provided vertical messaging by instructing their friends to vote for other candidates after they shared Bloomberg’s paid message. For the electorate, the obvious and serious concern about the “billionaire” strategy is whether a wealthy person should be allowed to buy a position of political power, which would strike at the very heart of the American democratic process.

The exception to these post-rhetorical campaign models may be former Vice President Joe Biden, who has continued to use the rhetorical presidency model, combining retail politics with earned media coverage and endorsements from high-profile supporters. In his comeback surge in South Carolina and on Super Tuesday, he seemed to rely on the backing of other politicians, from U.S. Representative Jim Clyburn to U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar, who had endorsed him. Biden’s surprise success on Super Tuesday may have been a result of voters’ exhaustion with post-rhetorical politics. It’s unclear whether Biden can win this way—he will surely have to build some version of his own post-rhetorical strategy if he wants to control his message and speak directly to his supporters.

It can be fascinating to watch campaigns develop new strategies to sideline the press. But these strategies also raise serious meta-questions about the political process and its future. What are the consequences for society of having presidential candidates with unlimited access to communicate with the public? Should the press have any power to set the agenda, police rhetoric, or winnow and vet candidates? And if the press doesn’t have that power, then who should? And how could the process work? There are lots of questions with these emerging presidential campaign strategies, but few clear answers.

The post Why Does the 2020 Presidential Campaign Feel So Loud and Angry? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The writer went on to demand that Congress make citizenship harder to obtain, so the government would be protected “against the vicious and criminal, the incompetent and the unfit.”

Sound familiar?

The Trump administration’s endless, bigoted campaign against immigrants may seem shocking. But the rhetoric accompanying that campaign, down to the metaphors comparing immigrants to small, loathsome animals, is nothing new. Much of what we hear today echoes opinions like the ones expressed in that editorial, published in the San Antonio Light, during the early years of the nation’s worst economic downturn, the Great Depression.

William Randolph Hearst’s own eugenicist views were proliferated throughout the newspaper titan’s media empire, which included the San Antonio Light. Hearst, who, as Fortune noted, owned “the biggest pile of newspapers in the world,” had a platform that reached an estimated 5 million daily and 7 million Sunday subscribers in major American cities.

In San Antonio, the Hearst editorial messages reverberated through both English- and Spanish-language media. The Light’s “vermin” editorial, along with its other anti-immigrant diatribes, were at once xenophobic and ironic, as they were published in a city that represented the crucible of Spanish-colonial culture and the U.S.’s Mexican American future. These immigration arguments, however, were far from parochial—they were regional, national, and even transnational. In turn, they made San Antonio’s print culture a case study for the nation’s immigration debates of that day—as well as our own.

While media technology was very different in the early 1930s, at least one important thing was the same then as now: News organizations were divided into camps with polarized ideas about who might be considered American. Many newspapers, including the Spanish-language outlet La Prensa, met the Hearst attacks with equally vociferous counternarratives extolling the virtues of immigrants to the United States.

In examining the 1930s back-and-forth between the news camps, something emerges that might be called “the mediated immigrant.” Unlike the real-life immigrant, composed of flesh and blood and known through personal experience, the “mediated” or “newspaper” immigrant is constructed of the themes, narratives, and rhetoric that U.S. broadsheets and tabloids offered their readers.

San Antonio was a perfect environment for cultivating this mediated immigrant. There, the arguments over immigration weren’t theoretical; the United States was in the process of kicking hundreds of thousands of immigrants out of the country, and Texas sat at the center of the story.

During the Great Depression, approximately 500,000 jobless Mexicans and Mexican Americans were repatriated to Mexico, courtesy of city and county governments nationwide. The formal and largely voluntary repatriation program—which required immigrants to process through local Mexican consulates—was the gentle way to go. Many people were rounded up by law enforcement and deported after a court hearing.

As a result, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, some who had never lived in Mexico, were forced from the United States through Texas, whose 1,254-mile frontier with Mexico is the longest of any U.S. border state. Caravans of hundreds of immigrants crossed the state as they fled with their worldly goods and farm animals packed up or tied to cars, trucks, and horse-drawn wagons. Others poked their heads out of train windows, taking in the dry, dusty landscape of Texas—their last view of the U.S. home they were leaving for an uncertain future in Mexico.

It was an exodus of biblical proportions. Yet the actual story received scant news coverage in papers such as Light, whose editorial page preferred broader, bigoted denunciations.

Meanwhile, the independent English-language San Antonio Express—a powerhouse which represented the Southwest’s banking, ranching, and railroad interests and their investments in Texas’s economic, cultural, and social relationship with Mexico—focused its reporting not so much of farmworkers being removed, but of their employers, U.S. farmers and ranchers, who were suddenly left with fruit and vegetables rotting in fields, and chores undone. The Express’s editorial page campaigned against legislation being debated in Congress that for the first time would restrict Mexican immigration, arguing that Mexicans did “work native white men generally will not do.” In making this argument, the Express called Mexicans “indispensable,” even as it marked them as racially distinct.

It was left largely to La Prensa to convey the exodus’s human dimension, including the starvation and poverty that befell many when they returned to an economically paralyzed Mexico.

Under the Mexican immigrant publisher Ignacio Lozano, La Prensa had become the foremost exemplar of Spanish-language news in the country. Founded in 1913, it circulated in almost every state in the nation, and also in Mexico. Its sister publication, La Opinión, which Lozano started in Los Angeles three years before the stock market crash of 1929, is still in business today. Through his news outlets in these two major American cities founded by Spanish-speaking immigrants, Lozano would help define what it meant to be Mexican and American.

La Prensa emerged as a champion of Mexicans in the face of attacks during this period of forced migration. For instance, one U.S. official in El Paso—referred to only as one “high North American bureaucrat”—characterized the Mexican deportees as “‘lunatics,’ demented people, and prostitutes,” providing a veneer of justification for their removal. La Prensa was quick to report the Mexican consul general’s protests of the smear.

Likewise, La Prensa sprang into action when John C. Box, a congressman from East Texas and a leading proponent of closing the door to Mexican immigration, complained in the language of white nationalism about the “Mexican peon population … injuring farmers and farm life and working and middle class Americans of every group” as well as “injuring public health, burdening charities.”

Countering this image of Mexicans as weak, undesirable, and racially inferior, La Prensa quoted Texas railroad builder Col. Samuel Robertson’s homage to the Mexican role in developing Texas: “Neither the Americans of the pure white race, Englishmen, Welshman … not even the negroes could have opened these lands, infested with snakes, coyotes and vermin; no race other than the Mexican has been macerated in the hands and legs, by the strong spines of the cactus; these workers of Indian blood are forgotten heroes who have made civilization possible in the [Rio Grande] Valley.”

Through this vivid prose of the early 20th-century press, the mediated immigrant took on a form still recognizable today: In Hearst’s newspapers, Mexicans were vicious criminals who constituted vermin. On La Prensa, Mexicans were indigenous heroes who conquered vermin. For the San Antonio Express, the immigrant was a critical economic component whose existence Texas depended upon to thrive.

However they were characterized, as La Prensa assured its readers, Mexicans would remain a part of the nation. Presciently, and on its front page in a banner headline, the paper offered the most vigorous rebuttal to the anti-Mexican hysteria that fueled calls for limiting immigration from Mexico, when its columnist Rudolfo Uranga declared:

There will always be Mexicans in the United States, whether temporarily or permanently … Even though some anti-Mexicanists and xenophobes shout furiously for their removal and exclusion … they will not achieve it because it is no longer possible in our century.

Uranga wrote those words in 1929. Now almost a century old, his writing carries all the more relevance.

The post How Three Texas Newspapers Manufactured Three Competing Images of Immigrants appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Moderator Carla Hall, editorial board member of the Los Angeles Times, started off the event, held before a standing-room-only crowd at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in downtown Los Angeles, by asking the panelists if propaganda can be both bad and good.

Hal Hershfield, a marketing scholar and psychologist at UCLA Anderson said that propaganda isn’t necessarily bad; it can help people “do the things that they say that they want to do.” Consider the campaign to convince people to take 10,000 steps a day did not have scientific backing—it was promoted by a company that made pedometers, Hall said. Whatever the intentions behind messaging, if propaganda is “moving people in the right direction health-wise, is this a problem?” Hershfield asked.

Hershfield said the positive propaganda around participation in retirement plans is similar; such messaging may come from the retirement plans themselves, but it has led to big increases in America’s retirement savings.

Another panelist, the UC Santa Cruz social psychologist Anthony Pratkanis, said propaganda can have multiple definitions. Propaganda can simply mean the promotion of one side of a dispute, or it can have a more nefarious definition. The definition he uses for propaganda is: “A message that plays on your emotions and prejudices.” Propaganda, he said, “is typically short, like a sound bite, a photo, a vivid image, and it’s designed to speak to your gut” and arouse your feelings, often fear, guilt, or your prejudices. Pratkanis offered the example of Nazi propagandist Fritz Hippler, who said his role in the production of propaganda in Nazi Germany “was to simplify, make it agreeable, entertain, and then repeat, repeat, repeat.”

One problem with this approach, according to Pratkanis: If a leader is simply constantly appealing to the public’s emotions, he or she effectively prevents real discussion of the issues. And, Pratkanis said, “a democracy is founded on having deliberative persuasion, discussion, negotiation, and (an) understanding (of) the core issues.”

Hall, the moderator, questioned whether, with the American public sphere broken, people even know the rules of productive discussion and debate. “What are the rules?” she asked the panelists.

Texas A&M historian of rhetoric Jennifer Mercieca said that we communicate more as propagandists than as citizens. Americans no longer join organizations the way we used to, and instead exchange views on social networks like Facebook and Twitter that use algorithms “designed to promote the most outrageous and emotive content,” she said.

And the notifications the networks send users are designed to “ping the dopamine receptors in your brain to get you addicted” to using the platforms. The networks train you “to speak as a propagandist on social media. It will only show your content if you’re outrageous,” Mercieca said.

Hall then asked how, given the overwhelming number of messages, notifications, and ads that reach us, we are able to pick our way through all the propaganda of this work.

Pratkanis replied that it’s impossible to think, let alone think critically, about each persuasive message we encounter in a given day. This, he said, “is the real issue we face as citizens.”

The saturated environment is one of the reasons that propaganda is so effective, Pratkanis said. Unable to think about messages, people start to use heuristics—simple rules to decide if something is good or bad, or true or false. And that strategy leads us to conclusions such as, “Well, it came from my political party so it must be good, (or) it came from their political party it must be bad.” The public simply doesn’t have the time—or necessarily the skills—to successfully wade through all of these persuasive messages.

But is there anything we can do to be “smart consumers of propaganda” Hall asked?

Mercieca said that her best advice is to be “super vigilant,” though that can be hard, since social media platforms are designed to prevent us from thinking critically. Still, Mercieca said, it’s important to ask what the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero asked, “Cui bono?,” or “Who profits?,” when consuming propaganda. You have to think about who might be attempting to manipulate you and for what reason, she said.

Pratkanis said that “when you’re receiving messages you have to pay attention to your emotions” and monitor how your thinking or emotions change after consuming a certain message. If you’re feeling guilty, or experiencing moral outrage, you should ask yourself why. And if you are feeling panicky in a sales situation, this is a “clue that someone is trying to use propaganda against you,” Pratkanis said.

Hershfield argued for bigger changes, especially in social media, to allow people to better understand the propaganda aimed at them. But that requires more transparency over social media platforms like Facebook that have shrouded their algorithms in mystery. He said, “We need the social media platforms to figure out ways to change the algorithms so that people are more mindful consumers of the messages.”

During the question-and-answer session with the audience, the panelists were asked if they thought teaching rhetoric and educating high schoolers about propaganda could be part of the solution. All the panelists agreed that more education on these issues would be helpful.

But a change in mindset is also needed. Mercieca said that one of the major differences between ancient Greek society and ours, is that citizens then saw themselves as “officers of the government.” Today, she said, “we don’t think of ourselves as having an office as citizens” and instead “act more as partisans than we do as citizens.”

In this way, the biggest propagandists are regular people themselves, spreading the propaganda we receive. In essence, Mercieca said, we “communicate as propagandists,” and not as citizens.

The post Beware the Propagandist You See In the Mirror appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Those timely, troubling questions, among many others, confronted panelists Tuesday evening at a Zócalo/The California Wellness Foundation event titled, “What Are the Social Consequences of Racist Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric?” The discussion took place as verbal attacks on Mexican immigrants and Muslims by President Trump and nativist pundits have escalated relentlessly. Meanwhile, media, academic, and law enforcement reports reveal sharp rises in racist verbal attacks against immigrants from the United States to Italy, and from Britain to Burma.

In a wide-ranging conversation before an overflow audience at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in downtown L.A.’s Little Tokyo, UCLA psychologist Patricia Greenfield, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Dean Hansell, and the UCLA School of Medicine’s David Hayes-Bautista examined a wide variety of negative consequences, from stressed-out immigrant children, to nasty divorce/child custody cases, the construction of detention camps, and ramped-up threats—as well as acts—of violence.

Responding to an opening question about past anti-immigrant episodes from moderator Simon Romero, a national correspondent for The New York Times, Hayes-Bautista, who directs the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at UCLA School of Medicine, noted that anti-immigrant rhetoric and discrimination has been a recurring theme of U.S. history.

Hayes-Bautista explained that, when much of the present-day Southwestern United States was part of Mexico in the early 1800s, slavery was abolished, non-whites were allowed to hold citizenship, and married women had some property rights. Time after time, Hayes-Bautista indicated, the extension of immigrant rights has gone hand-in-glove with the expansion of other forms of individual freedom. When the Southwest territories were absorbed into the growing United States, they virtually overnight enshrined laws enforcing race-based discrimination. For example, the defenders of the Alamo, popularly portrayed as heroic freedom fighters, were actually mainly Southern whites bent on extending slavery into Texas.

But, every 20 years or so, there has been a backlash against immigrant rights, including the mass deportations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the 1930s, and the passage of Proposition 187 in 1994, which prohibited undocumented immigrants in California from using non-emergency health care, public education and other social services.

“It’s really nothing new, it’s just U.S. tradition,” Hayes-Bautista said.

Turning the discussion toward a more immediate example, Romero asked Greenfield, the UCLA psychologist, what effect xenophobic rhetoric is having on children and young people. Greenfield responded by citing a research study that tracked attitudes among a range of sociological groups before Trump’s election in 2016, and in the months following his inauguration.

The results were striking. One subject feared that more Americans would feel they had a greenlight to echo racist statements. A gay respondent expressed anxiety that it would be open-season politically on LGBT people. Yet another, a Latino respondent worried about being targeted as a minority, and worried that one of his parents might be deported. An African-American woman voiced concern that she, too, might face intensified discrimination.

Romero, the moderator, who did a stint as a foreign correspondent in Venezuela some years ago, noted that under that South American country’s authoritarian regime, judicial independence has all but disappeared. The question was put to Judge Hansell: Is the independence of America’s judicial system beginning to erode under pressure from growing partisan rhetoric?

Hansell first noted that certain protocols prevent judges like himself from speaking publicly about politics—which, he said, underscores the importance of keeping the judiciary free of the taint of partisanship. That has become a critical and difficult challenge for local and state court systems in border states like California, where many people who appear before judges may themselves be immigrants or have relatives who are, Hansell suggested. Judges in many types of courts (family courts, for example) don’t inquire about the immigration status of those who come before the bench, which can complicate child custody and other types of cases in which one parent might be facing the possibility of deportation.

Romero mentioned that, in countries such as Brazil and Germany there are severe legal penalties for using overtly racist rhetoric. Is it time, he asked the panel, for the United States “to have a discussion” about First Amendment free speech rights that protect even the most virulent forms of hate speech? In response, Hansell noted that many of our most cherished free speech protections arose from cases defending highly objectionable speech, by neo-Nazis and others.

Romero then asked about the example being set by the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, who regularly disparages entire immigrant groups.

Greenfield cited another research study, of first-generation, first-year Latino UCLA students, 98 percent of whom had at least one parent born in a foreign country. The study, which required students to write about their families and take what Greenfield described as “a simple cognitive test,” revealed that students who took part in the study after Trump became president had lower powers of concentration, and performed worse on the test than students who participated before Trump’s ascendancy.

Romero acknowledged that he and many other U.S. journalists currently are wrestling daily with how to characterize the speech of Trump and other politicians. Is it fair to label it flat-out as “racist?” Can the case be made that such a label, rather than passing judgement on intent, is simply being factually correct?

Greenfield had no such hesitations, suggesting that such behavior should be called out in no uncertain terms. She described Trump as a “dictator” who has run roughshod over our constitutional checks and balances, and she validated the view of those who believe that Trump suffers from a range of personality disorders. “It’s so clear that he’s mentally ill in so many different ways,” she said.

During the question-and-answer period, a community organizer from Long Beach asked, “Where do we go from here? How do we change the narrative” about immigrants? Hayes-Bautista recommended using factual data to refute false narratives, and to demonstrate the benefits that accrue from immigration. For example, data shows that California, one of the nation’s most ethnically diverse states, also is the second-healthiest state, after Hawaii—which is even more diverse.

Another audience member asked Hayes-Bautista whether there were any identifiable social forces that have fed these 20-year cycles of backlash against immigrants. Hayes-Bautista said they seem to recur at times when surging immigration coincides with an economic recession. But neither of those things is happening right now, he observed; undocumented immigration levels have been declining, and the economy is booming, to most appearances.

As for Hayes-Bautista, a feisty eighth-generation Mexican American, he professed no fears of becoming a target.

“Try to deport me,” he said. “I’ll duke it out.”

The post When Racist Language Spreads, Immigrants Suffer—and the Social Fabric Frays appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What explains this surprising easiness? Trust is at the heart of the answer. Hume believed that since the people always outnumber their leaders (and thus retain the power of “force”), the legitimacy of all government rests merely “on opinion.” Governments exist solely because “the many” trust the government to serve their needs. Once government loses the trust of “the many,” then they will refuse to be governed by the few.

From my perspective as an American scholar of communication and rhetoric, Hume frames many questions, including: What tools of rhetoric and communication inspire the trust needed to support legitimate governments? And, in eras such as ours when trust in government declines, what rhetorical appeals must government leaders make to keep power? And conversely, as trust in government declines in the U.S., what role does rhetoric play in diminishing that trust?

Americans today still trust the government to do a lot of things—even if we don’t always value and recognize its role in our lives. According to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey, 94 percent of Americans think it’s the government’s job to keep “the country safe from terror;” 88 percent think it’s the government’s job to respond “to natural disasters;” 87 percent think it’s the government’s job to ensure “safe food and medicine;” 76 percent think it’s the government’s job to maintain “infrastructure;” and 70 percent think it’s the government’s job to ensure “access to high quality education.”

We trust, when we buy food or drinks from a grocery store or a restaurant, that the government has checked to make sure we won’t be poisoned. We trust that the government has made sure that the water we drink and the air we breathe won’t give us diseases. We trust that if we get sick, the government has credible research about how to cure us and has credentialed enough people as doctors and nurses to treat us. We trust that the government-provided roads we drive on won’t destroy our cars and will take us in the direction that we want to go. We trust that the government-printed money we earn will be deposited into government-guaranteed checking accounts and be available for us when we want to buy things. We trust that the government will make sure that the lights, heat, and water will go on, and if there is a natural disaster that all of these services will be restored as quickly as possible.

But such trust and legitimacy, as Jürgen Habermas reminds us, is fragile. And so political communities can be destroyed when the “system does not succeed in maintaining the requisite level of mass loyalty.” What is the requisite level of “mass loyalty,” and have we crossed over into a dangerous decay in trust in our government?

According to a 2015 Pew Research Poll, “only 19 percent of Americans today say they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right,” which is consistent with trends since 2007. Pew reports that this widespread distrust represents “the longest period of low trust in government in more than 50 years.” A 2016 Gallup poll found that we also have historically low trust for all sorts of authority figures, including clergy (44 percent of Americans have a very high or high opinion, down from well above 60 percent in the 1970s and 1980s), journalists (23 percent of Americans have a very high or high opinion), lawyers (18 percent of Americans have a very high or high opinion), and labor union leaders (18 percent of Americans have a very high or high opinion).

What explains our distrust in our government and our leaders? According to Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, Americans have grown more distrustful of one another and our government because we have less “bridging social capital” and more “bonding social capital” than previous generations of Americans. That is, we spend more time with people like us and we spend less time interacting with others, including government organizations and schools: We are failing to join the PTA or the bowling league and instead are cocooned in our media bubbles. Our lack of participation negatively influences our trust in one another and in the decisions made by the government because, in this case, unfamiliarity breeds contempt.

Today, not only is our trust in government and established leadership waning, but lately it is under attack by a surprising figure: the President of the United States.

Donald Trump became a political aspirant on the strength of a conspiracy theory—the “birther” argument over President Obama’s birth certificate. According to one count he subsequently advanced more than 50 different conspiracies during his presidential campaign. Now, as president, Trump foments distrust by proclaiming corruption and conspiracy in many aspects of American life.

Trump has sought to undermine the trust that we have for judges by referring to them as “so-called” and implying that they are part of a plot against American safety. He has sought to undermine the trust that we have for the media, polls, and facts by claiming that journalists are an “opposition party” and by pre-emptively claiming that any negative polls are “fake news.” He has appointed Cabinet members who actively purport to distrust established science such as inoculations and climate change.

What makes such conspiracy theories appealing—and what are the consequences of such appeals for government legitimacy? As Richard Hofstadter famously noted, conspiracy rhetoric is premised on the “paranoid style.” Conspiracy argument, he observed, is rife with “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” that creates a coherent narrative of a dangerous plot. Conspiracy theories in American history often have been premised on the blurring of difference between appearance and reality: what is apparent is false and hides the actual plotting that is determined to and capable of destroying America.

Conspiracy rhetoric is also premised on a self-confirming or circular reasoning (Latin: circulus in probando or “circle in proving”). Once the narrative of conspiracy and corruption takes hold within a political community, it is difficult to dispel because conspirators cannot be trusted to tell the truth about their plot. Conspiracy argument is “self-sealing” in that any holes in the story are quickly covered up by the logic of the conspiracy. For example: Why didn’t media reports show that there is a massive increase in crime, as Trump claimed? Not because crime didn’t increase, but because the media are part of the plot to deny that crime has increased.

In this way, conspiracy rhetoric creates a perverse sort of legitimacy for the leader who uses it. And conditions are ripe for conspiracy rhetoric.

Communication scholar Jack Bratich explains via Michel Foucault, that conspiracy theories participate in any society’s “regime of truth,” or the politics surrounding the techniques and standards that a society uses to determine “true” from “false.” Obviously, there is much power at stake in labeling one version of “truth” a “conspiracy” and another “fact.”

It’s easier for society to control what counts as “true” when there is a unified “truth” presented to the public via mass media. But the fracturing of media and the dominance of polarized news have created concurrent truth realities that enable conspiracy theories to flourish.

Trump’s conspiracy arguments have exploited pre-existing distrust, frustration, and polarized versions of “truth.” What are the potential consequences? Conspiracy rhetoric is dangerous because it creates a cohesive reality for those who adhere to its narrative, and naturally lends itself to violence.

The Civil War, for example, can be seen as the culmination of two opposing conspiracy arguments. Abolitionists believed that there was a “slave power” conspiracy determined to deprive the North of political power. Slaveholders believed that Abraham Lincoln was part of a plot to abolish slavery, deprive them of their justly owned property, and destroy the South. Despite Lincoln’s assurances in his First Inaugural Address, Southerners had been convinced of the conspiracy of “miserable fanatics” against their rights and believed themselves justified in seceding from the Union.

Like the polarizing rhetoric leading up to the Civil War, Trump’s distrustful conspiracy rhetoric could potentially make the nation even more distrustful of the government and established leaders. In this way, Trump is at war with his government and himself. The conspiracy rhetoric he uses to legitimize himself as president threatens the fragile trust that legitimizes his government.

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