On December 9, 100 B.C., Romans assembled to vote for the two consuls who would serve as the Republic’s top magistrates for the coming year. The election promised to be momentous. Gaius Marius, the dominant political figure in the Roman Republic for the previous decade, was finishing his fifth consecutive consulship. Once an extraordinarily popular figure, Marius had only won his most recent consular term through widespread vote-buying and intimidation.

Marius’s behavior in office had been even worse than his campaign conduct. In alliance with two radical populists, the tribune Saturninus and the praetor Glaucia, Marius spent much of the year before the election mobilizing angry crowds that violently backed laws that benefitted their partisans and punished their rivals—in one case even beating their opponents with clubs after polling had begun. So Rome seemed ready to move on.

Marius was not on the ballot that day, but Glaucia was. Glaucia understood that an electoral victory might again depend upon violence and intimidation, and so his supporters came to the polling place, hoping he would win but ready to fight if that would prevent his loss.

Roman magistrates did not win election by simply carrying a majority of the popular vote. Roman elections for consul were instead decided when candidates won a majority of Rome’s 193 voting centuries. The voting centuries were neither equally distributed across property classes nor were they the same size. The wealthiest Romans had the most centuries in the assembly, but their centuries had far fewer members than the ones to which poorer Romans belonged. Romans nevertheless accepted that a successful consular candidate needed to win the support of 97 centuries, regardless of their raw vote total. This was, in a way, a Roman analog to our own Electoral College.

Also, as in 21st-century America, there was a ceremonial aspect to how Romans announced voting results. Each century announced its vote separately, one at a time, until the votes of 97 agreed. And, as the votes were cast on that December day, it became clear that Glaucia would lose the consulship to a man named Memmius. Rather than accept this outcome, he and his supporters rioted. They disrupted the vote counting, attacked Memmius, and beat him to death. The assembled voters fled in terror before the election could conclude.

The Roman historian Appian wrote that “neither laws nor any sense of shame” remained among Romans after the bloodshed began. Supporters of Glaucia battled in the streets with their rivals, before retreating, along with Glaucia and Saturninus themselves, to the Capitoline Hill, the ceremonial center of Rome’s Republic and the place from which our Capitol building derives its name. The insurrectionists then seized the Capitol and barricaded themselves on it.

The Roman Senate invoked a constitutional measure called the senatus consultum ultimum, a rare emergency action that empowered magistrates of the republic to use whatever means they had at their disposal to save Rome’s representative democracy. This time, the person the Senate chose to put down Glaucia’s seizure of the Capitol was none other than Glaucia’s associate, Marius.

Marius faced a wrenching decision. Much of what he had accomplished during the past year came from his deft use of populist rhetoric and political intimidation to excite a base he shared with Glaucia. Marius had looked the other way when Glaucia and Saturninus used mob violence to push Marius’s policy goals and punish Marius’s political adversaries. The senatus consultum ultimum meant that Marius could no longer pretend not to see Glaucia’s abuses. He had to act—or face charges that he was complicit in Glaucia’s insurrection.

Appian tells us that Marius “was vexed” about whether to defend his old ally or defend his state, but he ultimately chose to defend the Republic. He “armed some of his men reluctantly,” approached the Capitol with his troops, and surrounded the hill until the water supply was cut, forcing Glaucia and his men to evacuate.

But that didn’t end the crisis—it only relocated it. Marius, hoping for peaceful trials of his allies, granted Glaucia and his men safe passage down from the hill to the curia, the building where the Roman senate often met. Once Glaucia and his supporters reached the curia, though, an angry mob appeared and set upon the insurrectionists—killing them with a barrage of tiles broken off of the chamber’s roof.

No Roman woke up that December day imagining that the election to choose one of Rome’s top magistrates would end with one candidate killed during the voting and another dying with his supporters in the Senate House. Romans worried constantly about their lawful Republic descending into anarchic violence, but none imagined that this descent would happen so quickly or with such terrible results.

Americans today face a similar moment of shock, and reckoning. On a day when our Congress was supposed to perform the ceremonial task of accepting the electoral votes for our next president, this democratic exercise was halted by violence. Like Glaucia’s mob in 100 B.C., the Washington insurrectionists were incited by the candidate who was about to officially lose the election. With his encouragement, they marched to the Capitol carrying weapons and bombs, stormed through its gates, and interrupted the vote tallying. They were met with gunfire. At least one was killed.

Donald Trump could not even muster the integrity that Marius showed. Instead, Trump expressed love for his supporters, and offered only the most lukewarm criticism of their actions.

It is hard to overstate the damage that a day like this can cause to a republic. The violent disruption of the consular vote in 100 B.C. initiated two decades of political dysfunction that led to the first civil war in Rome’s recorded history. That fighting ultimately deprived hundreds of thousands of Romans of their lives or property.

That’s why Americans must not dismiss, or move quickly past, the events of January 6, 2021. Our leaders and regular citizens must respond far more forcefully to an assault that targeted not just the seat of government, but the democratic rights and protections we enjoy. We need to condemn more clearly the insurrectionists’ actions, to identify and punish all the perpetrators, and to remove the instigators from our public life. If we cannot do that, sedition, insurrection, and political violence threaten to become the most potent political tools in the America of the 2020s—just as they did in the Rome of the 90s B.C.

The post When a Violent Mob Stormed Rome’s Capitol appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“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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In the 21st century, we must learn the Peter Navarro Principle: if you’re maniacally angry and relentless in accusing others, your incompetence will be no obstacle to your rise.

That’s the career arc of Peter Navarro, who now is a leader of the White House’s efforts to reopen the country and produce enough medical equipment to protect America from COVID-19. So for all the frightening aspects of this moment—the rapid spread of the virus, the rising death toll, the lack of a vaccine—it’s even more chilling to think we’re dependent on this Californian to curb the biggest pandemic of our lifetimes.

It’s especially scary for San Diegans who knew him as a local politician. One book about his furious and failed political career called Navarro “the cruelest and meanest son of a bitch who ever ran for public office in San Diego.” If that doesn’t curdle your blood, this will: the author of that book was Navarro himself.

The tale of how one of San Diego’s worst politicians rose to power during America’s worst crisis since the Second World War is not about just one man. It’s a lesson about what kinds of people prosper when a nation’s civic conversation becomes dominated by anger and accusation.

Navarro’s career is often recounted as a mystery, centered on an apocryphal political about-face. How did a Democrat who sounded like San Diego’s Bernie Sanders in the 1990s and 2000s turn into a leading Trumpist?

But Navarro’s life is not really all that mysterious—it’s actually a highly consistent story of a man thoroughly devoted to the dark art of accusation.

Navarro was a working-class kid from the East Coast who earned a doctorate in economics from Harvard. His thesis, characteristically, was built around an accusation: that special political interests were “stealing America.” He joined the faculty at UC Irvine.

In San Diego, he soon made himself the area’s most prominent NIMBY. Navarro founded Prevent Los Angelization Now, an anti-growth group devoted to attacking anyone who dared to build housing or infrastructure.

Running as a Democrat, Navarro quickly jumped into local politics, and might have won high office—if not for his addiction to accusation. In 1992, with a huge lead in San Diego’s mayoral race, Navarro foolishly attacked his more conservative opponent Susan Golding over her ex-husband’s conviction for laundering drug money. Navarro’s attack was so gratuitous it created sympathy for Golding, who cried in the debate and rallied to win the race.

Navarro did not learn his lesson. He ran angry campaigns for city council in 1993, for county board of supervisors in 1994, for Congress in 1996, and again for city council in 2001. He lost them all.

The rejections spoke volumes. San Diego may be sunny but it has a history of electing difficult or divisive people, including mayors from Pete Wilson to Bob Filner. But San Diego drew the line at Navarro. Larry Remer, who’s worked as Navarro’s campaign consultant, recently called his former client “the biggest asshole I’ve ever known.”

True to form, Navarro did not stay classy in defeat. Instead, he published an accusatory book, San Diego Confidential. In the guise of a how-to guide for political candidates, it gleefully recounts every accusation of his campaigns, describes various San Diego figures as ugly and stupid, and airs sexual gossip about opponents.

Navarro gave up elected politics in the 2000s, but didn’t abandon accusation. The professor began publishing finger-pointing books with names like Death by China. His critiques went beyond criticism of the Chinese government’s human rights abuses and trade policies, veering into overtly racist claims. The books were peppered with “expert” quotes (“You’ve got to be nuts to eat Chinese food”) purportedly from a businessman named Ron Vara, whom Navarro made up as an anagram of his own name.

Just as Navarro’s campaigns became a joke in California, his books were not taken seriously in the academy. But the ridicule of Navarro didn’t matter, because in his devotion to anger and accusation, he was actually ahead of his time.

The internet was his opening. Navarro’s constant, over-the-top accusations were catnip to online trolls and right-wing media. With mainstream conservative intellectuals fleeing the Republican Party, Navarro had the political field wide open to sell himself and his attacks.

Navarro soon came to the notice of Donald Trump, who hired him in 2016 as a campaign advisor, and in 2017, gave him a top role on trade policy.

In the White House, Navarro was at first sidelined by mainstream aides with better credentials and social graces. But such internal rivals were no match for the abrasive Navarro, who routinely demeaned and undermined colleagues to win the confidence of Trump, a fellow master of accusation. By 2018, Navarro was using his growing influence to promote destructive trade wars with American allies, from Mexico to Canada to Europe.

When you make constant accusations, sometimes you’ll hit the right target. This January, Navarro, ever on the attack against China, wrote a prescient memo predicting that COVID-19 would become a full-blown pandemic. But, according to press reports, Navarro’s reputation for anti-China invective allowed others in the White House to dismiss his views as overly alarmist.

By March, Navarro had been given the most important task in the country: working with companies and other countries to secure medical supplies and machines for the pandemic response. But in this role, he was tragically miscast. For all his skill in accusation, Navarro had no experience in ramping up a large cooperative effort, and the administration’s failure to deliver the needed supplies has left states to fend for themselves.

The San Diegan still finds the time for accusation. Weeks ago, reports surfaced that Navarro launched a bitter personal attack on Dr. Anthony Fauci in the White House situation room. Navarro also publicly advanced the dubious claim that the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine would work as a treatment for COVID-19.

Perhaps you cling to the romantic notion that karma will catch up with a man such as Navarro. Or perhaps you believe that other officials or the media will hold him accountable. Maybe in another country, or at another time. But not now, and not here, in the United States of Accusation.

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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.

If all this is correct, then it means that at some point the United States will have its first post-imperial president. So it’s worth asking: What would such a presidency look like? And by what criteria would we know that a future president was really post-imperial?

The foundation stone of the U.S. empire is a belief in American exceptionalism. This nation, it is argued, is not like other imperial powers that have acted selfishly and amorally—or even immorally—abroad in pursuit of the national interest. Since it took lands from European, Latin American, and Indian nations, the United States has portrayed itself as a “force for good” that is driven by different motives in its foreign interventions than those of other great powers. Thus, U.S. presidents since World War II have always preferred to talk of America as a “leader” or as “indispensable” rather than refer to it as an empire.

A post-imperial president would therefore have to accept that the United States is no longer exceptional, that its actions in other parts of the world have not been significantly different from those of other imperial powers in the past, and that its motives have been venal on many occasions. These views resonate with a majority of millennials today, and with a large number of older voters as well, but no president so far has been willing to articulate them.

And this political challenge would be only the first of the problems facing a post-imperial president. It’s true that the territories of the American empire have shrunk significantly—either by absorbing them into the United States as states, or by granting them independence, leaving Puerto Rico as the largest of those that remain. In spite of this, the semi-global empire constructed after World War II still remains in place. And the basis for this empire, now increasingly questioned inside and outside the United States, has been the control of global and regional institutions, coupled with strong support from non-state actors such as multinational companies, think-tanks, philanthropic foundations, the media, and religious organizations.

Most of these global and regional institutions are still in existence—including the United Nations Security Council, where the United States has a de jure veto; the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, in both of which the United States has a de facto veto by virtue of the size of its shareholding; the World Trade Organization, the agenda of which the United States controlled until recently; and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, of which the United States remains overwhelmingly the dominant member. There are also regional bodies such as the Organization of American States and the Inter-American Development Bank, in which the United States maintains a predominant role with a de facto veto.

Yet other countries increasingly resent the in-built advantages enjoyed by the United States. In some cases, nations, notably China, are taking steps to build alternative organizations. A post-imperial America would have to accept a loss of privilege and therefore a reduced status. At the very least this would require the dilution of its veto in the Security Council by all five permanent members—if not its abolition—as well as acceptance of the loss of a veto in other global institutions.

The United States’ role in NATO would also have to be reconsidered—if not ended. This organization, designed for security in the North Atlantic region during the Cold War, has become an instrument to project power globally. Complemented by nearly 800 U.S. military bases, NATO in its present form is wholly inconsistent with a post-imperial role for the United States. Furthermore, its members have become skilled at dragging the United States into their own conflicts, knowing that only the United States has the military power to make threats credible.

By contrast, a post-imperial president would not necessarily need to abandon nuclear weapons, since the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) “only” requires nuclear weapons states to phase them out without a deadline being imposed. If and when other nuclear-armed states move towards ending their current monopoly, however, a post-imperial president would need to move in the same direction.

Finally, a post-imperial president would need to ensure that the United States participate in those global organizations and treaties of which it is not currently a member on an equal basis to other states. This would include all environmental organizations concerned with tackling climate change as well as bodies concerned with international human rights and international justice. Congress would also be required finally to ratify those treaties that have remained “unperfected” for many years, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) signed by President Carter (1977-81) in 1980 and still not ratified after nearly 40 years because of its strong defence of reproductive rights.

No administration since World War II has come anywhere close to meeting these criteria for the first post-imperial presidency. And it would have been completely unrealistic to expect them to do so while the U.S. empire was in its ascendancy. Indeed, President Bill Clinton was quite explicit that the “unipolar” moment provided by the end of the Cold War created an opportunity for the United States to rewrite the rules of international politics so that it would be comfortable living in a world in which it was no longer hegemonic. President George W. Bush was equally forthright if less articulate about this.

Barack Obama is the first who could seriously be considered for the role of a post-imperial president. He pushed the United States to participate fully in a number of organizations and treaties in which it did not have special privileges (notably the Treaty of Paris on climate change). He was also clearly preparing the ground for a time when the United States would have much less leverage in the world and wished to use his influence, as in the case of the nuclear agreement with Iran, to maximize its fading imperial power.

But Obama—despite some ambiguous statements at the beginning—ultimately proved to be a true believer in American exceptionalism, fiercely resisted a dilution of American institutional control, and remained firmly committed to expanding NATO under U.S. tutelage.

So far, Donald Trump may have come the closest to being the first post-imperial president when, during the campaign, he questioned the use of the word “exceptional” to describe the United States and subsequently put in doubt American commitment to NATO. Furthermore, his slogan “America First” has been interpreted by many as a sign that the nation is no longer willing to provide the global public goods in return for which it received broad support from its imperial vassals. However, his message of “Make America Great Again” has such a strong imperialist undercurrent that he could never be described as post-imperial.

The runners-up in all recent presidential contests have also been very much in the imperialist mode. John McCain (2008) was a traditional imperialist. Mitt Romney (2012) was more nuanced, but still undoubtedly an imperialist, while Hillary Clinton (2016) was quite explicit in support of American empire. Only in the primary contests have candidates emerged with the potential for the label “post-imperial.” The strongest such candidate has been Bernie Sanders, whose questioning of American exceptionalism in the Democratic primary contest in 2016 suggested that a post-imperial message is starting to resonate inside the United States.

Does this make a post-imperial president possible anytime soon? Much will depend on the performance of the world economy and America’s place within it. That China will overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy is not in doubt (China is already the largest in purchasing power parity). But the speed of U.S. decline, relative to China and other powers, will be important in determining how Americans themselves transition to post-imperialism. And if the U.S. economy becomes better at distributing income and wealth more equally to its citizens, there may be less reason for voters to question the current imperial status.

But with the empire so clearly in decline abroad, and the social fabric tearing at home, I would be very surprised if the United States reached the middle of this century without having elected its first post-imperial president. This president will need to manage imperial retreat while maintaining the optimism and confidence of the voters. This was the role played by Harold MacMillan in the United Kingdom, Charles de Gaulle in France, and—much less successfully—Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. Who will step forward in the United States?

The post Will Donald Trump Be America’s First ‘Post-Imperial’ President? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In other words, for the originators of the concept, in-group leaders who condemn and punish out-groups are the authoritarian’s highest ideal. Since 1950, however, social scientists have tended to doubt that aggressiveness really matters. Under the influence of that doubt, the nation’s principal attitude surveys—the General Social Survey and the American National Election Studies—have traditionally sought evidence of authoritarian submissiveness, but not aggressiveness.

Until now.

In 2016, at our request, the American National Election Studies (ANES) included two statements expressing aggressively authoritarian attitudes that respondents were asked to either agree or disagree with. These strongly worded statements, which were pioneered a generation ago by psychologist Bob Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba, evoked equally strong responses.

The first statement was unambiguous: “Our country will be great if we honor the ways of our forefathers, do what the authorities tell us to do, and get rid of the ‘rotten apples’ who are ruining everything.” The second test statement was similar: “What our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush evil and take us back to our true path.”

Our analysis of the ANES data shows that voters who pulled the lever for Donald Trump in 2016 loved these statements. Only a few other ANES items divided Trump voters from Clinton voters as significantly and reliably—mainly, statements expressing resentment towards women, minorities, immigrants, and Muslims. And population variables (age, gender, education, marital status, and income) proved comparatively insignificant. Voters who wanted domineering leaders to crush evil and get rid of rotten apples supported Trump at every age and stage, at every level of education and income. These voters wanted to win the culture wars, and their “submissiveness,” we think, is better understood as fealty to a culture warlord.

Altemeyer foresaw this possibility. In 1994, he worried aloud that if the public was as avid about “crushing evil” as his students were, “tens of millions of North Americans” would want to give aggressive leaders free rein to crush evil, without worrying too much about minority rights. Now, nearly 25 years later, this fear seems amply justified. Yet many social scientists remain skeptical about the political relevance of aggressiveness.

By now this skepticism is very familiar. In 1958, so many psychologists were redefining authoritarianism as “acquiescence” that Richard Christie, who just two years earlier had co-authored a guide to the literature on authoritarianism, felt the need to object: “… most of us who have ventured outside the ivied halls,” Christie insisted, with his co-authors Joan Havel and Bernard Seidenberg, “have known individuals who emphatically” volunteer the very same ideas that appear in statements tapping authoritarian aggression. And rather than being placidly “acquiescent,” Christie adds, they angrily reject liberal pieties and denounce “anyone making such statements [as] a fool if not a traitor.”

In 2016, 17 candidates sought the Republican presidential nomination. The one who triumphed was the one who sounded most like Christie’s angry interlocutors and Altemeyer’s belligerent students—the candidate, that is, who most fervently promised to eliminate evil and evil-doers. In November 2016, 63 million people voted for that candidate.

If we hope to resist authoritarianism, we must understand it. And that remains a challenge. Even now, many people believe that aggressiveness is just a sign of ignorance or fear, which can be allayed by reasoned argument. They think that many Trump voters winced when they went to the polls—that they voted for a domineering leader not to crush out-groups, but simply to shake things up, hoping for the best.

Our data suggest otherwise. Although 26.9 percent of Trump voters did not call themselves his “strong” supporters, they closely resembled his strong partisans in nearly every attitude. Both groups voiced resentment toward what they see as overbearing women, undeserving minorities, and intrusive immigrants. And they also vented bitterness about what they saw as the excessive inclusiveness of authority figures like Obama who tolerated (or, they thought, favored) the very evils they wanted to see crushed.

Not every Trump voter held these opinions. But most did. And that suggests the need for deeper insight.

Before 2012, the ANES had studied authoritarianism in the full sense, with a focus on both aggression and submission, only twice—in 1952 and 1956. In the ensuing six decades, while many smaller surveys have yielded valuable insights, reliable and representative findings about authoritarianism in the wider public have been scarce. So the lessons we can draw from our 2016 items finally take us a step in the right direction, and offer a starting point for further inquiry.

What should we study next? We learned, in our analysis of the 2012 election results, that prejudice is strongly associated with authoritarian aggression and modestly associated with submission (as measured by survey statements about children). In 2016 we learned, as well, that Trump voting is strongly associated with authoritarian aggression and prejudice, and that Trump’s most zealous partisans are likely to say that white people are the victims of reverse discrimination. But many things still remain obscure.

20 years have passed, for example, since we learned that authoritarianism comes in several flavors, including two relatively rare but extreme forms. People with “Wild Card” tendencies are so antagonistic to tolerant authorities that they sound like anarchist rebels—except that they rebel in favor of harsher authority. And we learned from political psychologists Felicia Pratto and Jim Sidanius that some people with prejudiced and authoritarian attitudes regard themselves, not as defenders of conventional morality, but as cynical, self-aggrandizing winners in a world of also-rans.

The latter finding has often been replicated, not least in 2012, when the ANES, at our urging, included four statements testing the sentiments that Pratto-Sidanius discovered. But those statements were omitted from the 2016 survey, and Wild Card attitudes have not yet been tested in any major survey. So many questions remain unanswered, despite recent progress.

Richard Christie intuited long ago that the intolerant are often belligerent as well—and belligerence, as recent research has shown, spurs actions that differ fundamentally from actions driven by fear. We misunderstand that at our peril.

The post What Authoritarian Voters Really Want appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In asking that, I don’t mean that earthquakes will turn California into an island. Instead, what California and Taiwan share is a problem—the predicament of the halfway country.

Taiwan is in reality an independent nation—in its ambitions, its advanced economy, its democratic government. But many of the world’s countries refuse to recognize it as a separate nation, deferring to mainland China, which claims Taiwan as a possession and responds with bullying and threats whenever Taiwan goes its own way.

California shares some aspects of this half-country conundrum. Our state has the ambitions, economy, and democratic government of one of the leading nations of the world. But it remains very much a part of the United States, which responds with bullying and threats whenever California goes its own way.

Yes, Californians fervently hope that our current conflict with the American government is temporary, a result of the Madness of King Trump, and that once the president is gone, we will return to being full members in good standing in the United States. But the hard truth is that California’s differences with the rest of America predate Trump, and so our status as a halfway country—in the United States, but not quite of it—is likely to become the new normal.

I spent last week in Taiwan, and the major lesson I learned (while planning a 2019 conference on democracy) is that it is exhausting to be a smaller country in the shadow of a larger power. The challenges there resemble those of California, and of younger siblings everywhere. When you’re often having to defend against a bullying big brother, how do you develop yourself into a success, much less a model whose examples might change the world—and even change big brother?

Of course, comparisons only go so far, because although Californians may chafe at our troubled relationship with the federal government—not to mention the relentless verbal attacks by the president—the Chinese government has repeatedly threatened to attack Taiwan militarily, seizing the island nation by force if it becomes too independent.

Still, Taiwan and California share some striking similarities. Both have advanced in education, technology, and culture, and punch well above their weight on the international stage. California has the world’s sixth largest economy, though with just 40 million citizens, it ranks 35th by population. Taiwan, likewise, has the world’s 22nd largest economy, even though its population of 23 million puts it at 55th most populous worldwide.

Even in an era of rising nationalism, both Taiwan and California go their own ways, remaining stubbornly internationalist, committed to free trade and immigration. Taiwan recently liberalized its immigration laws to attract more skilled workers and take advantage of mounting immigration restrictions around the world.

Despite struggling to forge diplomatic relations, Taiwan has built trading relationships all over the world, and stays close to other China neighbors—especially Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea—in the hopes that they will help Taiwan deter any Chinese attack. California, in a different context but a similar spirit, works with other states in a legal defense against the federal government, and has made alliances with other countries to address climate change, which the leaders of the American government consider a hoax.

It is precisely because Taiwan and California are so distinctive that they face threats. Just as President Trump has called California “out of control” and falsely accused Californians of engaging in massive election fraud, President Xi Jinping’s propagandists have raised constant questions about the legitimacy of Taiwan’s own free and fair elections.

Even though the economies of both California and Taiwan are tethered to these larger countries, both places see themselves as defenders of openness and democratic values that are at odds with the increasingly authoritarian governments of their national big brothers.

That authoritarianism has sparked resistance in both places. Taiwan and California each have independence movements that want a more formal split—which adds to the risk of greater conflict. Last week, two former Taiwan presidents and the head of a broadcasting company announced a campaign to force a referendum for Taiwanese independence. Back in California, different groups have filed ballot initiatives seeking votes on California independence.

Both movements pose the same question: How many threats must we suffer from Beijing or Washington before enough is enough?

There are many Taiwanese answers to this. The mainstream response is to stay the course. “We don’t want to be in conflict with China,” Taiwanese premier Lai Ching-te said at a Taipei forum. “But we won’t bend to pressure either.”

But I also heard more robust, provocative answers.

First, be opportunistic in building solidarity. Whenever the Chinese issue threats, point that out to the world, and use it to develop a shared sense of identity. Taiwan has been adept at this. A generation ago, most Taiwanese told pollsters they saw themselves as Chinese. Now, after decades of Chinese bullying, most Taiwanese see themselves as primarily Taiwanese.

Second, never miss an opportunity to expand your autonomy when the larger power leaves an opening. To imagine how that logic might apply to California, consider President Trump’s recent suggestion that he might remove federal immigration enforcement from California. Our state’s political leaders reacted by condemning the president or disregarding the comments as Trumpian nonsense. Perhaps, instead, they should have taken his statements as an offer—and accepted it, declaring the state would happily take control of immigration enforcement and asking him for a date by which ICE would leave California.

Finally, success is the best revenge. The conflict with the larger power is a competition, so do everything you can to be friendlier, more democratic, and more attractive than the larger power menacing you. The most interesting conversations I heard in Taipei were about whether Taiwan should respond to China’s militaristic behavior by declaring itself officially an island of peace—a neutral country, like Switzerland, unwilling to participate in wars outside its boundaries. Such a stance might make it harder for China to attack, and win Taiwan more international support.

And just imagine how popular it might be if California, perhaps through ballot initiative, declared its own official neutrality and said it no longer would support America’s costly and endless wars.

It is possible to take the California-Taiwan comparison too far. “The mainland has missiles pointed at us,” one Taiwanese journalist reminded me. “Does America have missiles pointed at you in California?”

No. But I took heart that Taiwan and California are pursuing strategies based on a similar faith: that a smaller place doesn’t have to be at the mercy of the larger place. That a smaller place, through the power of its own example, can reshape the larger place.

California’s long history of leading America to the future suggests there is real wisdom in such an approach. People in Taiwan—whose foreign investment-based economic revival inspired China to open itself up to foreign investment decades ago—can see this too.

In Taichung, I visited a new Literary Museum located in an old police dormitory from the Japanese colonial period. In one courtyard, I encountered the most magnificent tree you’ll see outside Sequoia National Park. It’s a banyan that has grown so many different roots, that it now appears to be multiple trees with a couple different trunks.

“In this way,” said a guide, “a tree becomes a forest.”

The post Can Taiwan Teach California How to Thrive Under an Authoritarian Power? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Although Teddy Roosevelt won in 1904 (having acceded to the presidency after President William McKinley was assassinated), most successful politicians from New York City failed when they ran for president. This list includes Al Smith, Tom Dewey, Nelson Rockefeller, and Rudy Giuliani.

By contrast, Donald Trump never made it in New York City’s business, cultural, or civic world. He’s neither rich enough to compete with multi-billionaires like Bloomberg, nor generous enough to qualify for the boards of cultural institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the city’s leading medical centers. In New York, you’re known for how much you give to museums or hospitals, not how much you have; New York tolerates any behavior but not intolerance and racism; and in a city of loudmouth mayors like Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s mouth was a minor leaguer. In a city with 400 million square feet of commercial office space, having your name on a bunch of hotels and golf clubs does not mean much. That’s why he had to run for president: Almost no one admired or deferred to him in New York City.

And he never went out of his way to pay attention to the city and its tragedies either. In fact, he had never even gone to the September 11 Memorial until the 2016 campaign when he invoked the 2001 attack to criticize his Republican nominee rival Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

To understand how Trump emerged from New York City, and why he succeeded so well outside it, we must start in the borough of Queens. From the moment of his birth, Trump was an outsider, the son of an outer borough real estate developer. He was born in the Jamaica Medical Center, not a high-prestige Manhattan hospital, and he was a resident of Queens, not a wealthy Manhattanite.

One of the five boroughs that make up New York City, Queens is a collection of self-contained communities, not a coherent jurisdiction. Queens’ reputation for detachment was famously established 50 years ago when Kitty Genovese was killed while her neighbors ignored her cries for help. It’s notable that the 1960s primetime television program that established Queens’ identity was “All in the Family,” a hit sitcom featuring the working-class anti-hero, Archie Bunker.

Queens lacks the swagger of Brooklyn, which was once a separate city, or the spirit of Staten Island, which is part of New York City politically but culturally closer to New Jersey. And it’s a world away from the grittiness of The Bronx, which, despite hosting the Yankees, is also home to the poorest congressional district in the nation (and the nation’s largest wholesale produce market).

Today, Queens is best known as the home of the U.S. Open, Kennedy and LaGuardia Airports, and the New York Mets, who never fail to find a way to fail. But it has a history of producing memorable personalities, among them Nancy Reagan, Martin Scorsese, Paul Simon, Cindy Lauper, Russell Simmons, and Harvey Weinstein. The most prominent residents of Queens, when Trump was growing up, were African Americans: Malcolm X, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, and Ralph Bunche.

Trump was not even elite in Queens. He went to the undistinguished Kew-Forest School and then attended the New York Military Academy, rather than the nationally ranked Jamaica High School located near his home. Trump, whose father was of German descent and mother was a Scottish immigrant, lacked the pedigree, money, or education to gain entry into fancier circles.

Trump’s father, Fred Trump, a real estate developer, lived in what was designed to be a gated, very white, insular enclave: Jamaica Estates, Queens. The Trumps didn’t live in either of the two higher-status neighborhoods of Queens: Forest Hills Gardens, well-known for its restrictions barring Jewish or African American homeowners, or Douglaston, adjacent to the Long Island Sound waterfront, where John McEnroe was raised.

Trump had a bigger handicap in the form of his heritage. Fred Trump, who built middle-income housing in Brooklyn and Queens, had been arrested in 1927 at a KKK protest rally in Queens, according to The New York Times. (The German Bund met regularly in Ridgewood, Queens, where pro-Nazis subsequently opposed President Franklin D. Roosevelt for supporting Britain in its war against Hitler.)

Since World War II, a German heritage has been a liability for prospective politicians in New York. In fact, the current mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, was born Warren Wilhelm, Jr., and was called Bill Wilhelm before he legally changed his name to Bill de Blasio, adopting his mother’s maiden name as his own just in time to run for city council.

Trump then missed out on two opportunities that would have expanded his exposure to other cultural groups. Although of age for military service during the Vietnam War, he successfully avoided the draft with four deferments—and one medical deferment after college.

He also entered adulthood just as white Protestants were declining in status and power in New York City. With the end of fixed commissions on Wall Street, and the advent of new information technologies, financial services became a competitive industry where brains replaced bloodlines. Instead of a Wall Street job, Trump graduated from college and returned to work in the family real estate business.

As an ambitious young man, Trump found himself in the outer boroughs, which were, until recently, the minor leagues for real estate developers. Trump made the leap into Manhattan by using his father’s political connections and his own impressive negotiating skills to get control of the aging Commodore Hotel located next to Grand Central Terminal. With financing from the Hyatt Corporation, and a generous tax abatement from the city and state, Trump Tower was built in the 1980s, at 56th Street and Fifth Avenue, a prime Manhattan location. Today, it is best known as the Trump family version of Buckingham Palace.

But these real estate successes were not followed by integration into the city. Trump couldn’t fit in, and he never actually owned many properties—he was focused far more on licensing his name, and attaching them to buildings, like a barbarian marking what he had seized.

Trump never became a member of the Real Estate Board of New York, the leading organization of property owners in New York City. And the city’s major law firms and real estate consulting firms were reluctant to work for Trump, since he is known for not paying his bills. Most of the major commercial banks in New York refused to finance his real estate projects, especially once they became aware of his propensity to use bankruptcy laws to protect whatever money he had earned from projects, while hurting investors.

In New York City, Trump, like any interloper, did take advantage of the tools available to him. Specifically, he manipulated the Manhattan-based mass media to create a national identity as a celebrity. Trump’s success was thus built more by maintaining a high profile in New York media, and then through national TV, as host of NBC’s The Apprentice, for 25 years, than by business acumen.

The New York City tabloid newspapers loved to feature Trump, in stories about his three marriages and his calls for proof of President Obama’s birth. The front page of the New York Post is the equivalent of a daily billboard, which the local radio and television news programs treat as raw material for their evening programs. Trump was a master at getting the New York Post to cover his words, his wives, and his fights with Ed Koch and Barack Obama. He became famous as someone New Yorkers loved to ridicule.

Trump didn’t care about being right or smart or ethical, only about being known. In 1989, he took out $85,000 in full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty after five young African American men were arrested for attacking the Central Park jogger. The charges against them were ultimately dismissed.

But the image and attitudes that made him unacceptable to most of New York City were precisely what Republican Party voters valued in 2016. (It’s worth noting that Trump even lost Manhattan, his home county, to Ohio Governor John Kasich, in the 2016 presidential primary.)

Trump’s is hardly an accidental presidency. In fact, his failure to make it into the upper echelon of New York’s business community is what drove him to run for president. The kid from Queens made it across the East River into Manhattan but he never absorbed the values of New Yorkers and the importance of immigration, global trade, higher education, and the free press. Trump’s presidency is actually based on a rejection of “New York values.”

But his career assaulting the political and cultural elites of New York taught him one lesson: Even a bad bully can have a fan club; you can succeed in life without being housebroken.

News reports now have him marveling that New Yorkers who once wouldn’t give him the time of day—like the former Goldman Sachs chieftain Gary Cohn—now work for him.

In light of his history, the Trump campaign promise to “take back America” was more than an empty slogan. It’s a genuine reflection of his inability to fit into the cultural and economic arena of New York City where he was never recognized as a person of consequence.

The post We Can Thank New York City for Trump appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Can you think of a more innocuous word for a machine that could eradicate a city in seconds, incinerating both humans and buildings within a radius of several miles?

But in the moments after the blast, J. Robert Oppenheimer—who oversaw the design and construction of the world’s first atomic bomb—was overcome with emotion.

“We knew the world would not be the same,” he recalled some 20 years later during a television interview about the experience. “A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, …’Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

From the Trinity explosion onward, the ways that Americans have talked about nuclear war—in policy speeches, Civil Defense campaigns, in media—have been more “Gadget” than “destroyer of worlds.” We’ve adopted and accepted a language that is detached and sterilized from the reality of what a nuclear bomb actually does. We’ve developed a whole nuclear linguistics that allows us to consider “winning” nuclear wars and other impossibilities—as exemplified in President Trump’s statements and tweets about North Korea.

Phrases like “collateral damage” and “nuclear exchange” dehumanized what could be the death of thousands, even millions. How accurate a homicidal bomb was became “CEP”—“circular error probable,” aka the chances that it would hit what you aimed at. Terms like “BAMBI” were coined to describe weapons in the nuclear world; BAMBI was a “Ballistic Missile Boost Intercept” system that envisioned using giant nets deployed from missiles to foil Soviet attacks. (Never mind that it didn’t work.)

It’s long past time to consider whether the way we talk about nuclear bombs makes us more likely to launch one.

In the beginning of the nuclear age, this coded language was part of the secrecy of the Bomb itself and then the early Cold War. It was barely four years after the Trinity test, and the subsequent bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when our erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union, ended the U.S. monopoly on atomic weapons with a flash in the Kazakh plains of Semipalatinsk. Game on!

And a game it was. Beginning in the late 1940s, senior intelligence officials, military leaders, and politicians scrambled to understand the practical functions of this fundamentally new and devastating weapon. There was the policy called “containment,” by which communism would be sort of “fenced in” by nuclear threats. Later there was “deterrence,” whereby the pain we would inflict on an adversary if they did something we didn’t like was assurance that they wouldn’t do said thing. Nuclear weapons and war became the fundamental underpinning of international security—based almost entirely on theoretical concepts with no real way to test them.

Once nuclear-armed missiles and later nuclear-armed submarines joined the mix, the numbers and types of weapons grew dramatically. The very existence of the planet hung in the balance. There was no defense against nuclear attack. It became urgent that we learned how to manage these deadly arsenals so that they wouldn’t be used. The answers came from policymakers’ belief in game theory—a concept drawn from economics—as well as assumptions about what had worked in the past, and confidence in the rationality of your adversaries. The approaches to avoid the very catastrophe these weapons were built to unleash were described and conveyed in language that often had dark, absurdist undertones. Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD, is the most famous, and perhaps most honest.

Studies found that Americans were deeply concerned about the devastation a nuclear war would entail. As nuclear stockpiles and threats grew, the public did “duck and cover” drills. But while there was widespread concern and fear, psychologists also discovered that people could at once be terrified about nukes and mollified into a weird acceptance of them. Consider this from a 1986 report on The Medical Implications of Nuclear War by Susan Fiske from the University of Massachusetts:

“Despite high levels of reported awareness about the issues, people report relatively little fear or worry … and most people take no action to prevent nuclear war. These contrasts have prompted the enduring puzzle variously called fear suppression, psychic numbing, denial, and apathy, which are attributed to people’s feelings of impotence, helplessness, inefficacy, and the like. The discrepancy between people’s nuclear understanding and their elusive emotional and behavioral concern continues to be a puzzle.”

Nuclear war is so terrible and awesome that the very thought of it stymies people from doing anything about it. That dynamic was aided by the continuous generation of words and phrases that sanitized and distanced people even further from reality. There were scores if not hundreds of phrases, words, and acronyms used to talk about nuclear bombs exploding (“stockpiles”), and nuclear war unfolding (“ladder of escalation; proportionate response”).

This phenomenon was given a name in an article by Professor Edward Schiappa in 1989—“Nukespeak.” He wrote: “The moral and practical implications of nuclear war are ignored or underestimated by Nukespeak users, and nuclear policy issues are rendered trivial or less accessible to the public.”

OK, enough history. Where are we today?

The language surrounding nuclear weapons and war has not changed, despite the advent of instantaneous communications and massive social media platforms. If anything, it now combines the worst elements of trivializing the realities of nuclear war with the hubris and testosterone-laden schoolyard taunts that almost dare us to use them.

Consider our own National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). (Notice the word “security” rather than “weapons”?) The NNSA has an ongoing program to upgrade and prolong the operation of U.S. nuclear weapons. It’s called the “Life Extension Programs.” How’s that for Orwellian doublespeak? The first bomb to get this facelift is a gravity bomb carried on aircraft. Known as the B-61, it is categorized as a “tactical nuclear weapon.” Tactical connotes a limited, battlefield scale utility, right? But this bomb has a “yield” of up to 170 kilotons, roughly 15 times more powerful than the bomb that devastated Hiroshima. No normal person, reading of this in the news, will be able to decode this “tactical life extension” for what it is.

President Trump’s imminent “Nuclear Posture Review” is expected to have elements that would support building so-called “mini-nukes.” These are said to be more “usable” in a conflict, and their name gives them a diminutive, friendly air. But the very idea of a usable nuke undermines the entire premise of nuclear deterrence and the special status of nuclear weapons that is supposed to draw a bright line between them and all other weapons. Nuclear weapons are, and should remain, in a class by themselves.

But on top of the continued use of “Nukespeak,” we now face another risk: a president who seems to not understand the specialness of nuclear weapons. During a Republican presidential debate in late 2015, he said: “With nuclear, the power, the devastation is very important to me.” Later in the campaign, it was reported that candidate Trump, during a briefing on foreign and defense policy, asked multiple times about “why, if we have nuclear weapons, can’t we use them?” These statements suggest that the president simply doesn’t get how nukes are different—very different. They aren’t supposed to be used.

The most recent outbursts by the president tie all of these risky elements together into one thermonuclear case of Nukespeak. On January 2, President Trump, in a response to the North Korean leader’s New Year’s Day speech in which he warned that Pyongyang had at the ready nuclear forces, tweeted: “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

Lest you think that this is just Trump being Trump, the fact is that our current military and national security leaders have been gaming out a military attack on North Korea. The belief is that we can attack them in such a way that they understand it’s just a “bloody nose”—not a full-scale war. What could possibly go wrong?

We are living at a dangerous confluence: first, a tradition of language that masks the true nature of nuclear war; second, terms that support the ongoing maintenance of the nuclear establishment; and finally, a president who threatens their use with schoolyard-like taunts that ratchet up the risks of actually doing so.

But we needn’t succumb to this Nukespeak. We all have the power to use the same social media platforms as those in positions of power. We have more access to information about nuclear weapons than we ever had during the Cold War. And we have perhaps the most potent leverage of all—an equal stake in the risks of nuclear war. We are ALL, at the end of the day, targets.

In many ways, the nuclear age was constructed linguistically. And while we do not yet have the access or policies to dismantle the nuclear bombs ourselves, we do have the ability to dismantle the language that has made them possible.

Social media is one place to fight with memes and words. There we can to reveal the lie that turned the “destroyer of worlds,” into “proportionate responses” or “limited” or “surgical” nuclear strikes. And, most of all, we can explain loud and clear that there is no ice pack big enough for a nuclear bloody nose.

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E.J. Dionne—a prominent liberal pundit who is both a nationally syndicated columnist for The Washington Post and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution—thinks so.

“My grounds for optimism are looking at how the country has reacted to Trump’s election and mobilized,” Dionne told an overflow audience at the Artistry Honolulu, where he was the featured guest in a Zócalo/Daniel K. Inouye Institute “Pau Hana” event titled “Will the Trump Administration Renew American Democracy?”

Moderated by Bill Dorman, news director of Hawaiʻi Public Radio, the event offered Dionne’s Washington insider perspective on year one of the Trump presidency and the massive resistance to it, which Dionne believes may signal better times ahead for American democracy.

Dionne—co-author of the new book, One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported (2017)—laid out the evidence Trump is inadvertently energizing a renewed civic spirit and a desire, especially among younger people, to get active in government. Dionne pointed out that 60 percent of Americans now say there’s something wrong with the country, and Trump’s support is eroding even among his base of non-college-educated whites.

In some ways, Dionne suggested, Trump’s policies have awakened Americans to their responsibilities as citizens, a duty that many had been neglecting.

“It’s our job to be civically engaged, it’s our job to be politically engaged,” said Dionne, who paraphrased his own activist son to the effect that “sitting around drinking wine and complaining about Trump” (or any other politician) won’t make the country better.

If Dionne isn’t ready to write democracy’s obit, he concedes that his new volume is “a worried book.” He’s concerned about the future of self-government not only in the United States but globally. But he doesn’t believe that democracy is under siege to the degree it was in the 1930s.

“We saw from the very moment of his [Trump’s] election that large numbers of people in the country were ready to act,” Dionne said, citing the large-scale women’s marches that took place in cities across the country and around the world. “It sent a really powerful message.”

Then, when Trump started trying to implement policies “that people thought were dangerous,” such as the ill-fated travel ban against people from predominantly Muslim nations, he was met with a flurry of legal challenges.

“Lawyers were heroes!” Dionne said.

But has that oppositional energy been sustained, Dorman asked.

Dionne thinks that it has, pointing to election outcomes last year in places like Virginia and Alabama.

Later in the evening, Dionne and Dorman were joined onstage by Colleen Wakako Hanabusa, the Democratic U.S. representative for Hawaii’s 1st congressional district since 2016, and now a candidate for governor of the Aloha State.

Hanabusa predicted a “swing” in American politics, by which states like Hawaii will move further left, while other regions move further right. Eventually, that could allow the nation to find a middle ground, she ventured, but “the problem is whether the rest of the country wants to be in the middle.”

And she underscored the increasing factionalism with the major parties themselves, as shown by the rise of the Tea Party on the right, and an invigorated progressive wing on the left.

“I have colleagues in Congress who consider themselves very progressive who are more afraid of the progressives than anything else,” said Hanabusa, who marveled at Trump’s ability to carry blue-collar strongholds like Michigan.

Hanabusa said her hope is that bi-partisanship somehow will return to fashion in Washington, and that a creeping cynicism about all politicians won’t further paralyze our political culture.

Dionne concurred. After all, he said, in the post-World War II period, politics had been regarded as a positive thing. It was only after the disillusionment of the Vietnam War, the disgrace of Watergate, and a string of disappointments and setbacks up to the Great Recession and beyond that record numbers of Americans started seeing all politics (and politicians) as poisonous.

Dionne and Hanabusa agreed that our politics might improve if our federal representatives actually spent more time living in Washington, socializing informally with the folks seated across the aisle.

Despite his optimism, Dionne fears that the longer-term damages from Trump’s presidency are piling up, and that already “we have lost some things in this period that are going to be hard to get back.” While the United States withdraws from the world stage and backs away from its advocacy of human rights, China is pushing itself as a rival Great Power.

As Trump and his appointees chip away at the machinery of government, corruption is seeping into our system, Dionne indicated.

But Dionne managed to find another silver lining. Trump’s election “did point toward problems that we actually need to deal with in the country,” including the economic decline of the type of old manufacturing town like Fall River, Massachusetts, where Dionne grew up.

“You have places around the country that have been hammered for decades,” Dionne said—and voters in many of those places thought that Trump, not Hillary Clinton, was more likely to improve their lives.

Dionne drew a laugh by referring to one of his most unpopular positions: being a New England Patriots fan. The so-called Deflategate episode, when the Patriots star quarterback was accused of cheating, “taught me the joy of being a Fox News commentator, because I didn’t care what the facts were I just knew what side I was on.”

As a journalist, Dionne said he is troubled by the country’s growing inability to agree on basic facts. Today, “we’re in a very much more difficult environment now for truth, partly because the president doesn’t seem to know what it is,” he said.

It was an evening punctuated by literary references (George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language”) and breezy pop-culture allusions (Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”), with an impassioned soliloquy by Hanabusa that a new generation of elected women won’t suffer the same prejudices that their mothers did.

And it was Dionne who summed up—optimistically, of course.

“I do think hope is a good thing,” he said, “and I think it’s a plausible thing right now.”

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