What Happens When Trust Is Lost

Yesterday's US attack on and killing of Iranian military leader Qassim Suleimani, provoked an immediate personal reaction: What is the bad news that the president is trying to deflect our attention from?[1] The administration’s claim that the killed Iranian was planning imminent attacks on Americans is a diversion. The dead general is always planning attacks on Americans and he had been doing that for years. The president intentionally timed this attack to divert public attention from damaging information from information coming out of federal courts.

The objective basis for that instant reaction is the president’s track record of constantly lying to the American people and his track record of trying to deflect public attention when bad news about him and his corruption becomes public. So far, the president’s public track record includes over 15,000 false and misleading statements he has made to deceive, confuse, distract and polarize the American people. He relies on tactics of lies and deceit to try hide his constant stream of crimes, corruption, incompetence and golf course sloth.

His non-existent golf outings have cost taxpayers about $115 million so far

More evidence of lies and illegal activities

It turns out that there is massive bad news that the president is desperate to deflect public attention from. Newly released documents the courts have forced to be made public show overwhelming evidence that the president obstructed justice. That evidence could easily be the basis to start another impeachment proceeding in the House against the president. Also newly released is unredacted documents proving that Trump and the administration was breaking the law in looking for dirt on Joe Biden from Ukraine. That could also constitute grounds for new House impeachment proceedings.

Kate Brannon at Just Security reported yesterday:

“‘Clear direction from POTUS to continue to hold.’ 

This is what Michael Duffey, associate director of national security programs at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), told Elaine McCusker, the acting Pentagon comptroller, in an Aug. 30 email, which has only been made available in redacted form until now. It is one of many documents the Trump administration is trying to keep from the public, despite congressional oversight efforts and court orders in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation. 

Earlier in the day on Aug. 30, President Donald Trump met with Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to discuss the president’s hold on $391 million in military assistance for Ukraine. Inside the Trump administration, panic was reaching fever pitch about the president’s funding hold, which had stretched on for two months. Days earlier, POLITICO had broken the story and questions were starting to pile up. U.S. defense contractors were worried about delayed contracts and officials in Kyiv and lawmakers on Capitol Hill wanted to know what on earth was going on. While Trump’s national security team thought withholding the money went against U.S. national security interests, Trump still wouldn’t budge. 

Thanks to the testimony of several Trump administration officials, we now know what Trump was waiting on: a commitment from Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden. 

But getting at that truth hasn’t been easy and the Trump administration continues to try to obscure it. It is blocking key officials from testifying and is keeping documentary evidence from lawmakers investigating the Ukraine story. For example, this note from Duffey to McCusker was never turned over to House investigators and the Trump administration is continuing to try to keep it secret.”

Also, documents related to the Mueller report were released. Buzzfeed reported yesterday that 356 pages of documents were obtained from FOIA litigation after a long legal fight between Trump’s corrupted Justice Department and the House Judiciary Committee. The House committee wanted to get an unredacted copy of the Mueller report and grand jury testimony from the investigation, along with FBI summaries of 33 interviews. Corrupt Justice Department officials claimed the impeachment inquiry does not entitle the panel to see those records. Buzzfeed commented: “A federal judge disagreed, ruling in October that ‘DOJ is wrong’ and that the White House and the Justice Department were ‘openly stonewalling’ the committee.”

But wait, it gets much worse

Release of all of that information is the real story the president is desperate to distract public attention away from, regardless of the cost or damage to American interests it causes. The president thus attacked and killed a bitter American enemy at this time to try to distract the public from the fact that there is plenty of new evidence for another impeachment proceeding in the House. The counts could include (1) obstruction of justice, and (2) illegally withholding aid to Ukraine. The two counts the House impeached the president on are (1) abuse of power related to Ukraine, and (2) obstruction of congress. If the House wanted to get aggressive, it could also add to the list the president’s stunt yesterday in trying to deflect public attention from his political problems at the cost of new Middle East unrest and maybe a new war.

That harsh assessment of the attack on the Iranian general yesterday is how an American could see it as a blatant attempt to deflect attention away from the newly released information that is very damaging to the president. That kind of thinking is what can happen when people lose trust in a corrupt chronic liar like Donald Trump.

Is that belief unreasonable or irrational? Opinions will obviously differ. But at the very least there is solid empirical evidence to believe this version of reality.

Footnote:
1. The president has a well-know track record of trying to distract public attention from his problems.

“PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP was facing a potentially very bad news cycle, with special counsel Robert Mueller preparing to testify before Congress and a past friend, Jeffrey Epstein, charged with sexually molesting underage girls. So he went on a rant about four minority, female members of Congress, calling on them at rallies and in tweets to "go back" to their countries of origin. It was a classic Trump move: distract, divert, repeat. When a presidential problem surfaces, the president finds a way to move the problem out of the public eye, relieving pressure on him to solve the actual problem.” (emphasis added)

“Don’t let Donald Trump’s antics distract you from what’s really important. He’s paying fraud fines and collecting bribes — and distracting you with Hamilton tweets. .... Foreign diplomats are booking rooms at Donald Trump’s hotel in Washington, DC because they believe that directly putting money in the pocket of the President-elect of the United States will serve as a bribe that helps them curry favor with him and influence foreign policy.”

Continuing Conservative-Trump Attacks on Science

One of the more blatantly false and damaging partisan aspects of conservatism, conservative populism and the president is their rejection of science they dislike. Conservative attacks on inconvenient truths go back decades but the trend is intensifying under our anti-science president. Attacks on the EPA are not new.

The New York Times reports that the president’s appointees to the EPA posted a draft letter criticizing the president's anti-environmental policies as not supported by science. This was unexpected because Trump appointees presumably were yes-people chosen for loyalty, not adherence to facts, logic or scientific principle. Some of the scientists that the president appointed had ties to the industries they were supposed to regulate. It is reasonable to think that the president will fire and replace these scientists with scientists who will claim that modern climate science is clear that there is no such thing as anthropogenic global warming or that science contradicts any regulation that the president wishes to gut. The NYT writes:

“WASHINGTON — A top panel of government-appointed scientists, many of them hand-selected by the Trump administration, said on Tuesday that three of President Trump’s most far-reaching and scrutinized proposals to weaken major environmental regulations are at odds with established science. 

Draft letters posted online Tuesday by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Scientific Advisory Board, which is responsible for evaluating the scientific integrity of the agency’s regulations, took aim at the Trump administration’s rewrite of an Obama-era regulation of waterways, an Obama-era effort to curb planet-warming vehicle tailpipe emissions and a plan to limit scientific data that can be used to draft health regulations. 

A forthcoming rule on water pollution “neglects established science” by “failing to acknowledge watershed systems,” the scientists said. They found “no scientific justification” for excluding certain bodies of water from protection under the new regulations. 

Many scientists on the advisory board were selected by Trump administration officials early in the administration, as President Trump sought to move forward with an aggressive agenda of weakening environmental regulations. During the first year of the Trump administration, more than a quarter of the academic scientists on the panel departed or were dismissed, and many were replaced by scientists with industry ties who were perceived as likely to be more friendly to the industries that the E.P.A. regulates.”

Regarding the president’s proposal to limit scientific data in health regulations, the EPA scientists wrote that “key considerations that should inform the proposed rule have been omitted from the proposal or presented without analysis.” The Trump administration is receiving increasing criticism that policies ignore, distort or unreasonably downplay scientific data despite contrary environmental, public health and legal requirements.

This is more evidence of the corrupt, irrational ideological anti-science corruption that our president brings to bear on policy. Under Trump, the office of the US presidency has become an immoral disgrace.

Book Review: Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes

Jacques Ellul’s 1962 book, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, expresses a dark vision of propaganda, democracy and human nature. Ellul was a professor of law and social history and he built a reputation on social and political philosophy. Propaganda is written from a sociological point of view and sees propaganda as a sociological phenomenon. Although technology and society have changed enormously since 1962, some of Ellul’s insights about propaganda and human nature are disquietingly close to what modern experience and science is revealing in real time.

Two caveats merit mention. First, some of the social norms that were in place have since fallen away. Norms that constrained propaganda and how propagandists used it in democracies have weakened or disappeared. In this sense, the situation we live in today is more perilous that what Ellul described in 1962. Second, some of his arguments run counter to current conventional wisdom. Changed technology and social circumstances have rendered some of Ellul’s assertions somewhat or mostly no longer true. Ellul seems to struggle with a period of flux where technology and social norms were rapidly changing, while the impacts of the recent Nazi and Stalinist past still echoed powerfully in his mind. Ellul fought the Nazis as a member of the French resistance.

Like others who study propaganda, Ellul sees propaganda as sometimes capable of obliterating truth and creating fake reality. He writes: “History shows that plain truth can be so thoroughly snuffed out that it disappears, and that in certain periods the lie is all powerful. . . . Propaganda, in fact, creates truth in the sense that it creates in men subject to propaganda all the signs of true believers. For modern man, propaganda is really creating truth.” That is conventional wisdom today.

He saw the US, Russia and China as the world’s main sources of propaganda, with other regions and nations being less influential globally. Ellul argues that propaganda in earlier times was often based mostly on blatant, outrageous lies, but the propaganda of his time was more sophisticated and based on more truthful content because the public was too educated. Thus truths, truths out of context, half-truths and mixed truth-lies was the dominant form of propaganda. However, even with propaganda that starts out as lies-based morphs into content that contains some truth because truth sometimes has power if it is positioned properly.

Ellul makes a disturbing assertion that for propaganda to be effective, the people it is used on must be educated. Unfortunately, it isn’t clear what he means by educated, but he seems to imply college graduates. That assertion appears to go against mainstream current belief that the more education a person has, the more resistant to propaganda they tend to be. Ellul argues that intellectuals are the most susceptible to propaganda in part because they falsely believe they cannot be deceived or used. There may some truth in that. Nonetheless, it isn’t clear that educated intellectuals, whatever that means, are more or less susceptible to propaganda than other groups.

Disappointingly, Ellul refuses to define propaganda. At various places he says what traits it has or does not have, but what it is remains a matter for personal interpretation of his heavy prose. That is unsatisfying. Another concern is that Ellul does not rely on empirical experiments or statistics to assess what propaganda does and doesn’t do. Instead, he relies on personal observation and logic. That is suspicious. Nonetheless, some of his observations intuitively ring true and/or have some empirical support in later research.

Ellul does assert some qualities of propaganda that modern research has supported as true. For example, he claims that propaganda can generate beliefs mainly through provoking emotional responses and not by facilitating reasoned thinking or logic. He also argues that as time passes and propaganda narratives are adopted and internalized, there is a tendency for affected minds to (1) harden and become resistant to inconvenient or contradictory facts, truth and logical reasoning, and (2) become unable to discern detail and nuance or their relevance. Loss of detail and nuance allows for simplification of issues and moral questions and that leads to greater persuasive power for more propaganda. Regarding the weakness of facts, Ellul comments that “even a proved fact can do nothing against crystallized opinion.” The same holds for sound reasoning. All of that is undoubtedly true. It accords with empirical findings from modern cognitive and social science research.

Ellul sees propaganda as the greatest danger to democracy and civil liberties. He argues that propaganda inherently and necessarily tends toward totalitarianism. Lies and deceit take away the ability of deceived people to consent or object to what they have been deceived about. That is authoritarian, not democratic. In this regard, he anticipates one of the key arguments that Sissela Bok asserts in her 1999 book, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (my book review is here) is the reason that lying to the public is immoral. Ellul predicts that over time with the advance of mass communications, both authoritarian and democratic governments will increasingly resort to technological tyranny to infringe on and attack fact, truth, reason and civil liberties. He claims that nations that do not resort to propaganda will weaken. In democracies, this is necessary simply because the masses participate in governance and the government itself must have some way of communicating both facts and its preferred narratives.

Ellul predicts that because of the increasing cost of propaganda, political parties would be forced to turn to private sources of wealth. In turn, that will “indenture themselves to a financial oligarchy.” That prediction has turned out to be true. It also reflects a truth that, with few exceptions, money is power. Because propaganda is power and money can buy it, the logic seems solid and unassailable. In addition to money buying power in political parties, wealthy people and interests can cut out the economic waste of buying a middleman and go directly to government to buy favors, advantages and influence. That is something that is done in abundance these days.

What Ellul leaves is the critical unanswered question: Assuming it is possible to do so at all, how can propaganda be used in defense of democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties, social civility, facts, truths and sound reasoning? The political playing field favors tyranny-oligarchy-kleptocracy. It is heavily stacked against democracy, the rule of law, etc. If Ellul is basically correct in his vision of the future, he projects a sobering, frightening vision. American democracy has not yet arrived at a satisfactory answer, or any answer at all.

Update on Disqus Technical Problem

As most of you know, Disqus notifications have stopped due to an unspecified technical problem. I asked about the status of the fix and got this reply:

Hey Germaine - status is still 'partial outage' and 'degraded performance.' Sorry.  

 https://status.disqus.com/ 

It is reasonable to think that notifications will be coming back in the next few days. Patience Grasshoppers.

Dark Free Speech and the Media’s Burden

NBC's Meet the Press broadcast a 13-minute segment yesterday about the burden on the professional media to try to call out the tidal wave of dark free speech in politics. The transcript of the broadcast is here.




A couple of key points are worth mentioning.

1. The rise of fact checkers in the professional media reflects the rise of extremely aggressive dark free speech tactics in politics. Often social media amplifies its power to deceive, distract and divide. In response, newsrooms are reorganized to do aggressive fact checking and to be more assertive about calling out lies and deceit in real time. The media knows it has lost much public trust, much of which is undeserved. Media distrust is significantly based on dark free speech intended to undermine facts and truths that for-profit propagandists, tyrant wannabes, ideologues and kleptocrats want to suppress. Intense fact checking is the media's attempt to regain some public trust and to try to show the public that finding and defending fact and truth is a critically important service to the public interest.

The point is this: US professional media has flaws and weaknesses, e.g., corporate ownership and a for-profit morality. Despite that, flawed media is better than either no media or propaganda sources like Breitbart, Fox News or the president himself.

2. The burden on the media is enormous. The public has lost, or never had, a good grasp of how to defend itself against the dark arts of sophisticated deceit, lies and unwarranted, intense emotional manipulation that divides, distracts and foments bigotry and distrust. All of those emotional responses play into the hands of liars, ideologues, authoritarians and kleptocrats. Dark free speech-driven benefits to them usually come at the expense of the public interest.

Martin Baron, executive editor at the Washington Post reflected on the burden and complexity of trying to defend a significantly defenseless society from relentless attacks:

“How do you address beliefs, when they're not rooted in reality? How do you tell someone, ‘I'm trying to treat your fears seriously. But your facts don't exist?’ How, as individuals, and how, as a country? Like, this is a challenge. Like, this reminded me of Sharia law, right? There would be all these, ‘Sharia law's coming.’ And you're like, ‘It's not.’ And you would try to reassure -- there's nothing like that. And yet, you're like, ‘There's no facts here to support it.’ .... We live in an environment where people are able to spread crazy conspiracy theories and absolute falsehoods and lies. And that's made possible by the internet and social, social media. And people are drawn to sources of information, so-called information, that confirms their preexisting points of view. And you know, that's what's contributing to this environment that we have today. .... But we still have the responsibility for, for determining what's, what’s true and what's false and, in particular, holding our government officials accountable for what they say and telling people whether they're telling the truth, or they're not telling the truth. That's fundamental to the responsibilities that we have as a journalistic institution.”

3. Although the president has made over 15,000 false or misleading statements since coming to office, an astounding 91% of Trump supporters said he is the source they rely on for accurate information. Fact checks are irrelevant. This is what the president wants and reinforces it by calling the press the enemy of the people and urging the public to reject everything the press (and courts, historians and scientists) asserts as fact with the exception of facts that are favorable to the president and his agenda. In history, this is what it looks like when a tyrant-kleptocrat wannabe makes a run at power and attempts to destroy a democracy in the process. Our president is no different than past tyrant-kleptocrats making a run for power.

4. The press is waking up to the fact that it needs to be much more aggressive about defending truth and democratic institutions, which includes being more transparent and showing as much raw information as possible in an attempt to win some public trust in the face of the tyrant wannabe’s vicious attacks on the press, facts and the truth.


Thanks to Susan for bringing this to my attention. 😊

Pragmatic Rationalism: A Short, Simple Explanation

Intolerance is almost inevitably accompanied by a natural and true inability to comprehend or make allowance for opposite points of view. . . . We find here with significant uniformity what one psychologist has called ‘logic-proof compartments.’ The logic-proof compartment has always been with us. Master propagandist Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 1923

We found ourselves at the end of chapter 3 with a dystopian assessment of democracy, an apparent ill-suited match between the mental apparatus of the public and the high-minded requirements of democracy: People should be well informed about politically important matters, but they are not. People should think rationally, but they most often do not. Political psychologist George Marcus, Political Psychology: Neuroscience, Genetics, and Politics, 2013


On various occasions, I've tried to explain that pragmatic rationalism operates as an anti-ideology ideology by focusing on four core moral values that are intended to help reduce partisan distortion, bias and irrationality in how people perceive facts and truths and how they think about what they think they see. It's not clear that prior explanations have been particularly successful. This is another try. Hope springs eternal.

Context

Pragmatic Rationalism[1] is an anti-bias political ideology based on four core moral values instead of core political, economic, philosophical or religious beliefs that characterize standard pro-bias ideologies, which can be overlapping to some variable extent, e.g., capitalism, socialism, fascism, nationalism, globalism or Christianity. Three of the four morals (1, 2 and 4 in the list below) are chosen because they are more objective than most concepts in politics.

Most concepts in politics are not universally definable and people bicker endlessly over what a concept means and how it applies to the real world. Undefinable concepts like that are called essentially contested concepts. They include fairness, the rule of law, sovereignty, privacy, constitutionality, etc. In modern American politics, endless disagreements over what is fair or unfair, or what is constitutional or unconstitutional are unresolvable except by compromise. Minds will not agree willingly.

Pragmatic Rationalism -- what it is 

Pragmatic rationalism is an ideology that holds that the four most important political moral values are: 

1. fidelity to trying to see facts and truths with less bias, especially inconvenient facts and truths that undermine or contradict personal beliefs;

2. fidelity to trying to apply unbiased or less biased conscious reasoning or logic to the facts and truths we think we see, especially inconvenient reasoning that undermines or contradicts personal beliefs;

3. applying 1 and 2 in service to the public interest[2]; and 

4. reasonable compromise.

That's the whole ideology.

Morals 1 and 2 are at the heart of the modern scientific mindset or ideology, but in pragmatic rationalism they are just applied to the definitely unscientific, messy endeavor called politics.

Very brief explanation

1. Each moral value serves as a bulwark against (1) authoritarianism, (2) kleptocracy, (3) dark free speech (lies, propaganda, unwarranted emotional manipulation, etc.), and (4) ideological partisan bias and politics based on false or unreasonably distorted facts, false or distorted truths and abuse of power by the majority or minority in democracy.

2. Regarding moral 4 or compromise, in authoritarian regimes the person or people in power don't have to compromise with anyone they have the power to ignore, or even abuse if they are so inclined. Compromise also fights against the kleptocracy that usually accompanies highly concentrated power.

3. Fidelity to less biased facts, truths and reason fights directly and powerfully against dark free speech or propaganda.

4. Most everyone doing politics firmly but falsely believes they do politics based on unbiased facts, truths and logic. Most also believe their beliefs best serve the public interest.

5.  If one tosses any of one of the four morals out, you have dictatorship or oligarchy, not democracy.


Footnotes:
1. Political ideology is hard or impossible to authoritatively define, just like most other politics-related concepts. I define pragmatic politics as a way of thinking within a framework of a cluster of concepts that are grounded in the real world. In essence, it is pragmatic politics, which is non-ideological. Pragmatic rationalism is anti-ideological because it is explicitly intended to try to keep perceptions of reality and reasoning strongly tethered to objective facts and truths and sound logic or reasoning. Pro-bias ideologies tend to lead to distortions of inconvenient fact and truth and flawed reasoning. The distortions and flaws include outright denying of objectively true facts and reasoning that is objectively flawed or incorrect.

2. Service to the public interest is an essentially contested concept and as I articulate it, it is larded full of additional essentially contested concepts. That is unavoidable because multiple concepts reveal the contours of politics in a democracy, but not the details. In essence service to the public interest outlines the contours of what is basically a food fight among competing interests over policy and everything else. But unlike most unresolvable partisan ideological disagreements, it is constrained by the other three core moral values, i.e., less biased facts, less biased reasoning and compromise.

For those interested, here's my current, but revisable, articulation of the food fight (service to the public interest):

The conduct of politics and governance based on identifying a rational, optimum balance between serving public, individual and commercial interests based on a transparent fact- and logic-based analysis of competing policy choices (evidence- and reason-based politics), while (1) being reasonably responsive to public opinion, (2) protecting and growing the American economy, (3) fostering individual economic and personal growth opportunity, (4) defending constitutional personal freedoms, (5) fostering improvement in the American standard of living, (6) protecting national security, (7) protecting the environment, (8) increasing transparency, competition and efficiency in government and commerce when possible, (9) fostering global peace, stability and prosperity whenever reasonably possible, including maintaining and growing alliances with non-authoritarian democratic nations, and (10) defending American liberal democracy and democratic norms, by replacing federal norms with laws, and (a) requiring states to maximize voter participation, making voting as easy as reasonably possible, (b) elevating opinions of ethics officials in the federal government to the status of laws or requirements that bind all members of all branches of the federal government, particularly including the President and all Executive Branch employees, (c) incentivizing voter participation by conferring a tax break on voters and a reasonable tax penalty on qualified citizens who do not vote, (d) prevent or limit corruption, unwarranted opacity, and anti-democratic actions such as gerrymandering voting districts to minimize competition or limiting voter participation, and (e) requiring allowing high level federal politicians and bureaucrats, federal judges and members of congress to show their tax returns for at least the six tax years before they take office or starting federal employment or service, all of which is constrained by (i) honest, reality-based fiscal sustainability that limits the scope and size of government and regulation to no more or no less than what is deemed needed and (ii) genuine respect for the U.S. constitution and the rule of law with a particular concern for limiting unwarranted legal complexity and ambiguity to limit opportunities to subvert the constitution and the law.

 

Hope springing eternal, again