Managing editor Mark Gimein’s essay in November 16 issue of The Week is interesting.
“How you whip up hatred and distrust has never been much of a secret. More than 50 years ago, Jaques Ellul, in his landmark book Propaganda, wrote, ‘Those who read the press of their group and listen to the radio of their group are constantly reinforced in their allegiance. They learn more and more that their group is right, and that it’s actions are justified; thus their beliefs are strengthened.’ Substitute ‘tweets’ and ‘memes’ and you have social media today, in which an algorithm feeds you the information you are likely to click on -- because you have clicked or retweeted or reposted something j ust like it. The techniques that once worked on TV and radio have been supercharged by microtargeting. This is not merely an echo chamber: It’s a pinball machine, into which manipulators cynically drop memes -- the Black Panthers support the democrats! -- to bounce around and amplify.
The government of the US was constructed, as James Madison wrote, ‘to break and control the violence of faction’. Now faction is ascendant, and it is the union that is breaking. There are no more big tents. Centrist Republicans such as Bob Corker and Jeff Flake have quit politics; centrist red-state democrats Claire McCaskill and Heidi Heitkamp didn’t survive Tuesday’s vote. In congress, it becomes harder for elected representatives to do anything but vote in lockstep with their parties. When Donald Trump was elected, it was said that he had ‘broken’ the republican party. The opposite is true: The parties are stronger than ever. Except now party loyalty is enforced by you own friends and acquaintances, who will make sure you don’t step out of line on Twitter or Facebook. That’s something that autocrats[1] and demagogues of the past could only dream of. How else can the dark powers of social media be manipulated and misused? In the coming two years of divided government, we will most likely find out.”
When Gimein asserts that how to whip up hatred and distrust is common knowledge, he seems to miss the mark. America has witnessed the whipping up of hatred and distrust to an amazing extent since President Trump came to power.[2] The minds now driven by hate and distrust do not know that they have been manipulated and used. They think that happened to the opposition, not themselves. Manipulators certainly know how to do it. But if everyone knew the trick, it would be harder for that manipulated mindset change to happen on such a large scale in such a short time.
This is an example of what can happen to a society whose people are untrained in defense against the dark arts. The American people are, for the most part, defenseless against manipulation by dark free speech** operating ways that social media make more effective than ever before.
**Dark free speech: Lies, deceit, misinformation, unwarranted opacity and truth hiding, unwarranted emotional manipulation, mostly fomenting fear, anger, hate, distrust, and/or disgust, bogus (partisan) logic, unwarranted character assassination, etc.
Gimein’s reference to Bob Corker and Jeff Flake as ‘centrist Republicans’ reflects the power of rhetoric to obscure unreasonable extremism in the mantle of a reasonable-sounding label like centrist in the context of the republican party. By standards of 25-30 years ago, Corker and Flake would have been seen as far right conservatives on most issues by the republican party. There is nothing centrist about them now. Sure, on a few occasions they ineffectively squeaked at their colleagues in feeble protest over something or another, but it didn't amount to a hill of beans.[3] They both voted the republican way about 84% of the time. By no stretch of the imagination of anyone neutral is it possible to argue that there was not extremism in many of those votes.
That someone today refers to Corker and Flake as ‘centrist Republicans’, shows how extreme the republican party has become and how well the right and/or trapped minds has obscured that fact. Gimein is deceived and wrong. A better label for folks like Corker and Flake is something along the lines of far right republican, with the rest of the party being extreme right. The concept of centrism has no place in the republican party at present. Decades of RINO hunts have insured a thorough ideological and moral cleansing.
Finally, Gimein asks a question with an interesting tell in it: “How else can the dark powers of social media be manipulated and misused?”
Mr Gimein apparently disapproves of dark free speech being deployed on social media to deceive and manipulate the public. Otherwise he would not see it as manipulation or misuse. Presumably, he also sees the same tactics on all other sources of media the same way. For better or worse, there is not a thing anyone can do about it. It is all constitutionally protected free speech, no matter how dark and deadly it is. Therein lies democracy’s greatest weakness.
Footnotes:
1. Gimein made a mistake by referring to autocrats and demagogues in the same breath. As we all know, that pairing seems discordant with Aristotle’s taxonomy of political regimes. Gimein probably meant either autocrats and monarchs or, more likely, he meant oligarchs and demagogues.
2. Yes, partisan hate and distrust had been building for decades, especially since influencers like Lee Atwater and Newt Gingrich injected their poison into politics a few decades ago. Trump brought the emotion to a whole new, more toxic level. It is reasonable to think that Trump was probably helped significantly by years of Russian propaganda fomenting hate and distrust among the American people. That said, it is far and balanced to give Trump most of the credit for us being where we are today. As long as he is in power, the buck stops with Trump whether he likes it or not.
3. For example, both Corker and Flake voted for the nuclear option for supreme court nominees, thereby killing the filibuster. That was not centrist, not even close.
B&B orig: 11/17/18
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