Trump’s Immoral Legacy of Distrust

Flags at the D.C. Armory grounds in Washington representing those who have died of the coronavirus in the United States. The lasting effect of Mr. Trump’s relationship with the truth may be most evident in terms of the pandemic.

The New York Times writes about the president's legacy as one of significantly eroding public distrust in facts, the legitimacy of political opposition and democracy itself. Those have been among the top Trump goals from day one. Sadly, he succeeded. The NYT writes:

“Born amid made-up crowd size claims and “alternative facts,” the Trump presidency has been a factory of falsehood from the start, churning out distortions, conspiracy theories and brazen lies at an assembly-line pace that has challenged fact-checkers and defied historical analogy. 

But now, with the election two days away, the consequences of four years of fabulism are coming into focus as President Trump argues that the vote itself is inherently “rigged,” tearing at the credibility of the system. Should the contest go into extra innings through legal challenges after Tuesday, it may leave a public with little faith in the outcome — and in its own democracy.

During his final weekend of campaign rallies, Mr. Trump continued to sow doubt about the validity of the election, making clear that he would deem any outcome other than victory for him to be corrupt. At a rally in Philadelphia, which has a sizable nonwhite population and a Democratic-led government, he asserted that the city would falsify the results. “Are they going to mysteriously find more ballots” after polls close, he asked. “Strange things have been known to happen, especially in Philadelphia.”

The nightmarish scenario of widespread doubt and denial of the legitimacy of the election would cap a period in American history when truth itself has seemed at stake under a president who has strayed so far from the normal bounds that he creates what allies call his own reality. Even if the election ends with a clear victory or defeat for Mr. Trump, scholars and players alike say the very concept of public trust in an established set of facts necessary for the operation of a democratic society has eroded during his tenure with potentially long-term ramifications.  

‘You can mitigate the damage, but you can’t bring it back to 100 percent the way it was before,’ said Lee McIntyre, the author of “Post-Truth” and a philosopher at Boston University. ‘And I think that’s going to be Trump’s legacy. I think there’s going to be lingering damage to the processes by which we vet truths for decades. People are going to be saying, ‘Oh, that’s fake news.’ The confusion between skepticism and denialism, the idea that if you don’t want to believe something, you don’t have to believe it — that’s really damaging, and that’s going to last.’”

That assessment is basically correct. In my experience, most of the president’s supporters are mostly closed to accepting facts, true truths and/or sound reasoning. In particular, true truths and sound reasoning are often rejected out of hand. Unfortunately, most of his supporters cannot see this and deny it when the facts and argument is presented. 

Maybe his worst legacy boils down to this: Tribal loyalty and reality talk, and everything and everyone else walks. Tribal reality can be true, false, mixed or ambiguous, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is loyalty. The radical right has been working for decades to get the typical conservative mind to this point. They surely are not going to give up on what has finally succeeded for them. Radical right elites are on the cusp of realizing their decades-long vision of a corrupt, authoritarian, white America and culture. That vision is built mostly on lies and deceit, and thus it is built mostly on immorality.

As the NYT comments, “the very idea of truth is increasingly a fungible commodity in a political environment that seems to reward the loudest voices, not the most honest.”

My Restless, Discontented Mind

Multiple matters are on my mind before this election. Here's a couple.

The morality of the capitalist mind, and its 

intent to deceive, knowing or not

One of the things I am exposed to for hours and hours and hours is financial reporting, information and news on cable TV. If it were up to me, I would be exposed to very little of it. Maybe that mindset is a mistake. 

But once awakening to that kind of content and listening carefully for years, it is now clear that the word moral and the concept of morality is almost never used. The closest the capitalist folks ever get to is 'good' or 'bad', almost always in the context of future earnings. That now strikes me as intending to wall off broader thoughts about morality beyond the culprit(s) and heroes du jour. That is how I interpret this. My personal opinion.

What basis in logic or reason is there for that? Why would the concept of morality be walled off, even by Bloomberg? As best I can tell, people deeply involved in capitalism are all most on the same page. Capitalism, free markets and profits are sacrosanct. Social impacts are downplayed into almost non-existence. Adverse social impacts, more pollution, exploitation of poor people, etc., are almost never even mentioned, much less discussed in significant detail. The modern capitalist propaganda mirage (lie) is that business is "amoral" and thus off the table for moral consideration.

IMHO, that is a false capitalist lie and deceit propaganda tactic. That said, there is also such a thing as pure socialist, communist, fascist and/or Christian-religious propaganda. We are awash in in all of that nastiness and deceit. It is not going to go away because it is protected free speech, at least so far.

The morality of rigid political, economic and religious ideology, and their 

hidden intent to deceive and enslave

Over the years, the power of rigid ideology to corrupt and deceive minds, societies and governments has become clearer and clearer. Ideology tends to kill acceptance of, real facts, true truths and sound reasoning. Rigid and/or sacred ideology goes a long way to lead minds to reject inconvenient facts, inconvenient true truths and inconvenient sound reasoning. Al Gore was partially right to label the concept of inconvenient reality and reason as inconvenience. The rest of the right he didn't mention was that intentional deceit is immoral and unwitting deceit is ignorance.

As social and political polarization stays in place, or increases, ideological distortion and misplaced beliefs are more likely to get worse than better. The radical right has been working relentlessly for decades to get most conservative minds to where they are today. That cannot be undone in my lifetime. The problem is multigenerational. One line of thought posits that this problem could eventually lead to forever human enslavement as the power of tyrants and demagogues to deceive, divide and enslave populations increases. One source labeled that technology-enabled potential outcome as "The grim fate that could be ‘worse than extinction’." 

The question is whether societies can keep up and self-preserve against the increasing power of evil, often powered in the name of (1) sacred profit, (2) a sacred ideology, and/or (3) a sacred God.

Now, exhale

Obviously, that is all potential, not certainty. Societies can and do learn to self-defend. It is possible that on Nov. 3, Americans will reject the path we are now on. That would come in the face of millions of Americans who see the path we are now on as the road to salvation, goodness and morality, not something worse than human extinction. From what I can tell, the differing visions of reality and possible outcomes could not be much different.

The Long-Term Effects of Trump Judges

Since 2017, there has been no plausible basis to pretend that republican Supreme Court judges are impartial. All basis for that pretense is gone. GOP justices are politicians in black robes proclaiming radical right outcomes by whatever means works for them. Party loyalty and ideology trumps principle, reason and the public interest. Given that personal opinion, it is of some interest to try to gauge the situation from the point of view of how long a judge can affect the law and American society. 

Propublica analyzed the situation, and it looks like this for the Supreme Court. 

The situation is even more dire for federal appeals court judges, where Trump has also had a major impact.

ProPublica writes:

"President Donald Trump says he considers one of his greatest accomplishments to be appointing a record number of federal judges. But the tally doesn’t tell the full story. Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court and appeals courts tend to be younger than appointees by presidents going back to Richard Nixon by about four years on average. As a result, because these are lifetime appointments, they’re poised to serve for decades to come, shaping American law and politics long after Trump leaves office. Of the current nine Supreme Court justices, Amy Coney Barrett, 48, just confirmed Monday, was the second-youngest when appointed."

It looks like Trump judges are going to be plaguing American society, democracy and the rule of law for a long time to come. Even if the president is not re-elected, it is hard to see how our democracy, which is under direct attack by the radical right, can survive mostly intact in view of this harsh reality.

Regarding How Social Media Works and What It Does to the Human Mind

This 27-minute video, A Real Doctor Watches "The Social Dilemma", summarizes the key points from the longer NetFlix program The Social Dilemma. A commentator, ZDoggMD, plays key passages from The Social Dilemma and then explains them to make the points clear to his audience. 

Four key points of about five or six:

1. The real customer: "If you are not paying for the product, you are the product." People who use social media are the product being sold. Specifically, people's time and attention is sold to advertisers. The customers of social media companies are advertisers, not the millions of people who use social media. 

2. You are not paranoid, you really are being watched and watched very carefully: Social media tracks everything that people do online in great detail. All of that data is used to profile you and package your profile for sale to advertisers. The algorithms that social media use are sophisticated, powerful and used to predict with you will do next online. In time, the software will improve to the point that it will know more about you than you do, e.g., it will be able predict if you are at risk for suicide before you even know you have a problem. 

3. Social media can damage people and whole societies: Social media is intentionally designed to be addictive and vacuous to better package customers for advertisers. The rise of social media in the hands of children correlates with the rise of various kinds of damage, e.g., increased suicide, especially in teenage girls. The rise of this kind of damage to children was observed in the ~2010-2011 time period. The damage to society includes the new political polarization and accompanying hate, distrust and belief in blatant disinformation. The point is this: Polarization sells and advertisers want it for profit. That also correlates with the rise of social media. In my experience, I believe that the way social media works on the human brain, as described in the video, it causes the polarization, hate, distrust and tribal belief in disinformation.

4. Social media can be designed to be less harmful to people and societies: The owners control the product. They know exactly how and why it works, e.g., little squirts of dopamine in the brain, etc. Social media works exactly the same way a slot machine works, i.e., little squirts of dopamine reward in the brain. The science of addiction and manipulation is sophisticated and getting better all the time as the software improves. The owners are 100% aware of the damage they are causing. But in our significantly unregulated capitalist economy, profit talks and social concerns walk.

Question:

Are me or Dissident Politics a personally or socially damaging or addictive social media source?