The Power of Tribal Politics to Stupefy

The tribe is displeased

Stupefying tribalism

Republican reactions to the president's attempted coup have been mostly muted or non-existent. Some are reasonable and some are incoherent. The silence and incoherence reflects the toxicity of tribal politics. In particular, the incoherence in defense of tribe loyalty leads some into an inability to think clearly or rationally. For example, Senator Patrick Toomey (R-PA), a Harvard graduate commented “I do think the president committed impeachable offenses,” and the president's “behavior this week does disqualify him from serving.” Toomey then went on to complain that House democrats would probably  “politicize” the impeachment process.

The politicized process criticism is incoherent. First, since republican politicians refuse to act quickly to remove the president, they have already politicized the situation. Second, by objecting to the election results, GOP politicians politicized the final vote certification on the basis of no objective evidence. Third, by definition, impeachment is a political process because it is not a judicial or legislative process. That is true whether an impeachment succeeds or fails. The question is whether an impeachment has merit or not, not whether it is political. 

Clearly, Toomey's brain is scrambled into incoherence by his tribal loyalty to the GOP. Such loyalty is inherently anti-democratic because it replaces inconvenient facts and sound reasoning with partisan motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning creates false realities that are usually (~95% of the time?) needed to create to get to a desired belief. Inconvenient facts are simply swept aside.

The art of the lie: Truth- and reason-based democracy is a deviation

A New York Times news analysis article, The Art of the Lie? The Bigger the Better, focuses on tribalism in politics. The NYT writes:

Lying as a political tool is hardly new. But a readiness, even enthusiasm, to be deceived has become a driving force in politics around the world, most recently in the United States.

In a cable to Washington in 1944, George F. Kennan, counselor at the United States Embassy in Stalin’s Moscow, warned of the occult power held by lies, noting that Soviet rule “has proved some strange and disturbing things about human nature.”

Foremost among these, he wrote, is that in the case of many people, “it is possible to make them feel and believe practically anything.” No matter how untrue something might be, he wrote, “for the people who believe it, it becomes true. It attains validity and all the powers of truth.”

Mr. Kennan’s insight, generated by his experience of the Soviet Union, now has a haunting resonance for America, where tens of millions believe a “truth” invented by President Trump: that Joseph R. Biden Jr. lost the November election and became president-elect only through fraud.

A readiness, even enthusiasm, to be deceived has in recent years become a driving force in politics around the world, notably in countries like Hungary, Poland, Turkey and the Philippines, all governed by populist leaders adept at shaving the truth or inventing it outright.

“The art of tribal politics is that it shapes reality,” Mr. Kreko said. “Lies become truth and explain everything in simple terms.” And political struggles, he added, “become a war between good and evil that demands unconditional support for the leader of the tribe. If you talk against your own camp you betray it and get expelled from the tribe.”

What makes this so dangerous, Mr. Kreko said, is not just that “tribalism is incompatible with pluralism and democratic politics” but that “tribalism is a natural form of politics: Democracy is a deviation.”

The utility of lying on a grand scale was first demonstrated nearly a century ago by leaders like Stalin and Hitler, who coined the term “big lie” in 1925 and rose to power on the lie that Jews were responsible for Germany’s defeat in World War I. For the German and Soviet dictators, lying was not merely a habit or a convenient way of sanding down unwanted facts but an essential tool of government.

It tested and strengthened loyalty by forcing underlings to cheer statements they knew to be false and rallied the support of ordinary people who, Hitler realized, “more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie” because, while they might fib in their daily lives about small things, “it would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths.” 

Despite his open admiration for Russia’s president and the system he presides over, she said, Mr. Trump, in insisting that he won in November, is not so much mimicking Mr. Putin as borrowing more from the age of Stalin, who, after engineering a catastrophic famine that killed millions in the early 1930s, declared that “living has become better, comrades, living has become happier.”

“That is what the big lie is,” Ms. Khrushcheva said. “It covers everything and redefines reality. There are no holes in it. You so either accept the whole thing or everything collapses. And that is what happened to the Soviet Union. It collapsed.” (emphasis added)

What we are witnessing with millions of Americans who sincerely but falsely believe that Biden is an illegitimate president-elect is what Kennan, called “some strange and disturbing things about human nature.” Can American democracy somehow cope with American stupefied tribalism? Or, will it revert to the mean, showing once again that democracy is just a deviation?

One thing is certain, some or most of the conservative tribal minds in modern America have been deceived, manipulated and betrayed. 

A big lie in Turkey: Protesters outside a courthouse in Turkey in 

2013 where 275 people were accused of trying to overthrow the

government. Turkey’s leader later acknowledged the case was a sham.

A Key Source of Political Power

NYT caption: Losing his huge online following would deprive 

Mr. Trump of cultural influence. It takes away the privilege 

he seems to covet most: the ability to commandeer the 

world’s attention with a push of a button.

A New York Times article, In Pulling Trump’s Megaphone, Twitter Shows Where Power Now Lies, points out the power that social media has. The NYT writes:

The ability of a handful of people to control our public discourse has never been more obvious.

In the end, two billionaires from California did what legions of politicians, prosecutors and power brokers had tried and failed to do for years:

They pulled the plug on President Trump.

Twitter’s decision to permanently suspend Mr. Trump’s account on Friday “due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” after a decision a day earlier by Facebook to ban the president at least through the end of his term, was a watershed moment in the history of social media. Both companies had spent years defending Mr. Trump’s continued presence on their platforms, only to change course days before the end of his presidency.

Why these companies’ chief executives — Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook — decided to act now is no mystery. They have been under pressure for years to hold Mr. Trump accountable, and that pressure intensified enormously this past week, as everyone from Michelle Obama to the companies’ own employees called for a permanent ban in the wake of Wednesday’s deadly Capitol riot.

These companies, corporate autocracies masquerading as mini-democracies, often portray their moderation decisions as the results of a kind of formulaic due process, as if “don’t incite an insurrectionist mob” had been in the community guidelines all along. But high-stakes calls like these typically come down to gut decisions made under extreme duress. In this case, Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Zuckerberg considered the evidence, consulted their teams, weighed the trade-offs and risks of inaction — including the threat of a worker revolt that could damage their ability to attract top talent — and decided that they’d seen enough.

There you have it, corporate autocracies masquerading as mini-democracies hold major political power. Together, social media along with major political donors, probably hold more power than all other sources of political and social power in the US. The other major contenders are politically active Christianity and authoritarian radical right political and Christian Nationalist ideologies.

What power do the people and voters have? That's not so clear.

A Short Question About Racism

A number of commentators at various sources have commented that the response of the police at the Jan. 6 coup attempt showed far too much deference to the mob, which was almost completely white. They point out that police are not nearly as deferential to protesters when blacks protest and get out of hand. Those people conclude that this is another example of deeply ingrained systemic racism in American society, government and their institutions, especially law enforcement. 

Did what happened on Jan. 6 reflect systemic racism? 

What would be YOUR movie title concerning Jan. 6?

 YOU have to know, that they will make a movie about the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

IT is inevitable.

The only question I ponder, is what title they will give such a movie.

Will it be bland, like:

Jan. 6, 2021, The Storming of the Capital

OR will it be imaginative, like:

Duck Dynasty vs The Capital Police

OR will it be hyper-partisan, like:

Rightwing terrorists invade the Capital

OR will it take a documentary twist, like:

Riot at the Capital: The Real Story 

SO JUST FOR FUN:

IF you, yes YOU, had a say, what title would YOU give such a movie?

Happy Sunday.

The Fraught Way Forward

Is social media greater than insurrection?

The poll data from 538 indicates that the president was still within his normal range, 41.9%. His attempted coup does not yet seem to have cost him much support. Maybe that will appreciably change in coming days. 

Because the president's core supporters are loyal to the man personally, not the president, democracy or the Constitution, it may be the case that banning him from social media will hurt his approval more than his attempted coup. Loss of social media access arguably is the bigger threat to the president's power and influence than his act to overthrow the government by violence. Based on his public reactions so far, the president arguably sees his social media problem as more serious than his insurrection problem, which he doesn't take any responsibility for. 

For example, Trump is considering moving to the radical right authoritarian-fascist social media site Parler or setting up his own social media platform. The president needs to maintain a constant flow of dark free speech to his supporters to keep them trapped in his fake realities and to maintain his power over them. He also needs it to maintain his ability to tap his people for money. 

It is reasonable to think that the president assesses his situation correctly. If so, then the way forward for American politics and society will be fraught. Trump's supporters firmly believe that Trump won, Biden lost, the election was fraudulent and people who say otherwise are liars. There is no indication so far that a significant portion of the GOP leadership is going to take the coup attempt seriously or otherwise act to counteract the fake realities that Trump has created to trap his supporters. Those people have been sucked into the president's vortex of lies and manipulation. 

So, what can people who oppose the president do to try to inject some reality and context into the situation? The minds of trumplanida believers are not going to easily change, assuming they can ever be changed. For the most part, those minds will have to change themselves. At the moment, the best way to do that probably is to keep the demagogue off of social media. Memories fade, including the memories of Trump supporters. 

The unsolvable problem: dark free speech

Of course the problems with that are (1) Fox News, Breitbart, Newsmax, OANN, etc., and (2) Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and other radical right GOP demagogues itching for power. Those radical right propaganda sources are not going to change their rhetoric and tactics nor will they go away. And, maybe the radical right online presence will migrate to Parler as the central propaganda clearing house for Trump. Supporters could go to Parler as the central source, while maintain their hundreds of millions of accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and whatever else there is for repeating and spreading demagoguery, propaganda and lies.

By now, it is clear that simply stating inconvenient facts and laying out sound reasoning has either a neutral or no effect, or they are counterproductive by reinforcing false beliefs. The trumplandia "reasoning" is that assertions of inconvenient facts or reasoning is evidence they are false and the messenger or source is liar. There is no way to penetrate that kind of mindset with mere truth or logic.

Maybe it is a personal lack of imagination and/or intelligence, but every democratic, civilized path forward seems to be significantly (mostly?) blocked by the unstoppable power of dark free speech. 

So, other than keeping Trump off of social media, which probably won't work, and teaching people critical thinking skills, what other plausible options are there? What am I  missing? The problem always seems to boil down to dark free speech.

Treason in the capitol security plan?

 This is an excellent article in Business Insider:  https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-attempted-coup-federal-law-enforcement-capitol-police-2021-1  It details the reasons why there is good reason to suspect that security officials connived to leave the Capitol unprotected.  The primary sources are foreign-based police officials.  From the article:

The French police official detailed multiple lapses they believe were systematic:

1. Large crowds of protesters needed to be managed far earlier by the police, who instead controlled a scene at the first demonstration Trump addressed, then ignored the crowd as it streamed toward the Capitol.
2. "It should have been surrounded, managed, and directed immediately, and that pressure never released."
3. Because the crowd was not managed and directed, the official said, the protesters were able to congregate unimpeded around the Capitol, where the next major failure took place.
4. "It is unthinkable there was not a strong police cordon on the outskirts of the complex. Fences and barricades are useless without strong police enforcement. This is when you start making arrests, targeting key people that appear violent, anyone who attacks an officer, anyone who breaches the barricade. You have to show that crossing the line will fail and end in arrest."
5. "I cannot believe the failure to establish a proper cordon was a mistake. These are very skilled police officials, but they are federal, and that means they ultimately report to the president. This needs to be investigated."
6. "When the crowd reached the steps of the building, the situation was over. The police are there to protect the building from terrorist attacks and crime, not a battalion of infantry. That had to be managed from hundreds of meters away unless the police were willing to completely open fire, and I can respect why they were not."

The French police official said they believed that an investigation would find that someone interfered with the deployment of additional federal law-enforcement officials on the perimeter of the Capitol complex.

It is routine for the Capitol Police to coordinate with the federal Secret Service and the Park Police and local police in Washington, DC, before large demonstrations. The National Guard, commanded by the Department of Defense, is often on standby too.

On Wednesday, however, that coordination was late or absent.

"You cannot tell me I don't know what they should have done. I can fly to Washington tomorrow and do that job, just as any police official in Washington can fly to Paris and do mine," the official said. The official directs public security in a central Paris police district filled with government buildings and tourist sites.

"These are not subtle principles" for managing demonstrations, "and they transfer to every situation," the official said. "This is why we train alongside the US federal law enforcement to handle these very matters, and it's obvious that large parts of any successful plan were just ignored."

The National Guard, which was deployed heavily to quell the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, did not show up to assist the police until two hours after the action started on Wednesday, according to The Associated Press.

Kim Dine, who was the chief of the Capitol Police from 2012 to 2016, told The Washington Post that he was surprised that the Capitol Police allowed demonstrators on the steps of the Capitol. He said he was also mystified that few rioters were arrested on the spot.

Larry Schaefer, who worked for the Capitol Police for more than 30 years, told ProPublica something similar: "We have a planned, known demonstration that has a propensity for violence in the past and threats to carry weapons — why would you not prepare yourself as we have done in the past?"

 

So -- "nice country you have there ..."