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

HOW TO WIN AN ARGUMENT WITH YOUR LIBERAL RELATIVES

https://www.snowflakevictory.com/

Conservative Anti-Government Deregulation Marches On: Bird Deaths Increase

A sad story from the New York Times reports that a regulatory change, a “regulation reinterpretation”, guts reporting requirements and penalties for bird kills arising from various development and business activities. The new rule eliminate criminal penalties for “incidental” migratory bird deaths from normal business. Mandatory reporting of bird deaths is now “purely voluntary” and fines for bird kills are eliminated.

Under the Trump administration’s 2017 reinterpretation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, companies are not subject to prosecution or fines, even after a disaster like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 that killed or injured about one million birds. BP paid $100 million in fines for that avoidable but catastrophic company mistake. Similarly, the state of Virginia was going to build an artificial island for birds to nest on to compensate for loss of nesting habitat from a bridge and tunnel expansion in Chesapeake Bay tidewaters. After learning of the new interpretation of the law, Virginia abandoned the island and the habitat loss will not be compensated.

What an oil spill does to birds

The Virginia island story is just one of dozens of bird-preservation projects that are terminated after the 2017 policy change. In its standard public deceit mode, the Trump administration lied by called the change in the century-old law protecting migratory birds a technical clarification.

But, the situation is worse than even that. The NYT writes:

Across the country birds have been killed and nests destroyed by oil spills, construction crews and chemical contamination, all with no response from the federal government, according to emails, memos and other documents viewed by The New York Times. Not only has the administration stopped investigating most bird deaths, the documents show, it has discouraged local governments and businesses from taking precautionary measures to protect birds. In one instance, a Wyoming-based oil company wanted to clarify that it no longer had to report bird deaths to the Fish and Wildlife Service. “You are correct,” the agency replied. (emphasis added)

That is the face of deceitful conservative-populist anti-government, anti-environment ideology and rule. Trump ideology isn’t just neutral to the environment, it is actively hostile.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service claims that the Trump administration will “will continue to work cooperatively with our industry partners to minimize impacts on migratory birds.” Unfortunately, documents the NYT reviewed contradict that. A review of over 20 incidents found that short of literally going out to illegally shoot birds, activities where birds die merit no action. This is yet another of the endless Trump and his administration’s lies that they insult the American people with on a now daily basis.

For context, this summarizes the Trump administration’s work to deal with the environment as of June 2019.

The new interpretation is being challenged in court. If the case winds up before a Trump judge, it will probably be upheld. Otherwise, it is reasonable to think the new ‘interpretation’ will be overturned because it sounds more like the law is being illegally rewritten than merely reinterpreted. Time will tell how this plays out.

In the meantime, thousands or millions of birds will be mindlessly displaced or slaughtered in the name of Trump and his rigid ideological hate of environmental concerns. The companies and states that go along with this indefensible immorality reveal how their moral mindsets, or more accurately, lack thereof, work day-to-day.

If you like this, vote for Trump and republicans in 2020 or just stay home and don't vote at all. If you do not like this, vote for democrats in 2020. It’s your choice.

Chapter Review: Equality or Oligarchy (2016)

“Democracies die when people cease to believe that voting matters. .... The road to unfreedom is the passage from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity.” Timothy Snyder,  The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, Chapter 6, 2018

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Warren Buffett, 2006



This is a review of Chapter 6, Equality or Oligarchy (2016), of Timothy Snyder’s 2018 book, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and a Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His specialty is the history of Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust. Snyder also wrote other books, including On Tyranny, about how democracies fall while tyrannies rise (my review is here). My review of the prologue of this book is here and a review of Chapter 1 is here.

The nonsense of inevitability politics vs. eternity politics

The politics of inevitability and eternity are described in detail in the book’s prologue as discussed here. Briefly, the politics of inevitability posits that over time political ideologies such as communism and capitalism will deliver social improvement and good things to societies and people. In that view, progress is inevitable and politically there is not much to be done other than defend the status quo and tweak things now and then while waiting for utopia to arrive on its own.

By contrast, the politics of eternity basically holds that social and individual progress are impossible and history repeats in cycles of threat to the nation followed by a period of relief. This view sees progress for society and people as a mirage and only a powerful leader (dictator) can save the nation from foreign enemies and evil forces such as globalism and international comity. Eternity regimes see concepts such as democracy, elections, objective facts and logic, and individualism as something that ranges from mere ritual (elections) to actual evil (individualism, facts and logic) working in opposition to the needs of the sacred, innocent nation. As described in chapter 1, that is the ideology and politics of Vladimir Putin, the Russian government and Russian kleptocratic oligarchs.

The sacred nation narrative is that the poor innocent state is only trying to defend itself from both internal and external threats that are always present. It needs to be stressed that objective facts and logic are bluntly denied to be real because the only things that are real in eternal politics is what the supreme dictator says is real and logical, even when that is clearly false or objectively flawed.

From an objective point of view, both inevitability and eternity politics are obvious nonsense. Those fictions work to serve narrow interests at the expense of the public interest por common good. History makes that crystal clear. Both tend to denigrate inconvenient facts and logic, with eternity politics being radically extreme in this regard. What Snyder does not describe is an alternative, maybe because he sees none or more likely because that wasn’t the point of his book. Regardless, the anti-ideology ideology advocated here, pragmatic rationalism, offers an anti-biasing, anti-authoritarian, pro-fact, -logic, -democracy and -rule of law alternative. But that’s a topic for a separate discussion.

Chapter 6

Snyder’s Chapter 6 is stuffed to the gills with facts and details that are heavily sourced. That allows for fact checking for whatever facts Snyder asserts but one wants to question or reject as lies. The chapter focuses on the rise of Donald Trump and how he relied on extensive Russian efforts to help him win the Electoral College in 2016.

The view from team Trump about Russia’s role is exemplified by comments that K. T. MacFarland, aide to Trump made after the election: “If there is a tit-for-tat escalation Trump will have difficulty improving relations with Russia, which has just thrown [the] U.S.A. election to him.” Clearly, at least some Trump aides believed Russia was the cause for Trump’s electoral college win. Not only did MacFarland believe Russia led Trump to win, she also resented, and saw as partisan political, Obama’s efforts to punish the Russians for attacking the US election, commenting that “Russia is [the] key that unlocks [the] door.”

Because there is far too much content in Chapter 6 to review in detail, the following will mention some of the more important context, facts and beliefs that Snyder articulates based on the evidence available to the public and his inferences therefrom. The value of this partial list of events is that it reminds us of who did what and why.

• Russian support for Trump, coerced or genuine, was widespread if not universal in the Russian government, among ruling elites and among Russian journalists. Dimitry Kiselev, a major Russian media influencer and Trump supporter asserted that “a new star is rising -- Trump!” In addition, Kiselev was happy that “the words ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ are in in the vocabulary of Trump.” Alexander Dugin, author of The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia, a geopolitics book that has major influence on the Russian military, police, and foreign policy elites, posted a video entitled “In Trump We Trust” where he urged Americans to “vote for Trump!” Alexi Pushkov, Chair of the foreign relations committee of the Russian Parliament’s lower house expressed the hope that “Trump can lead the Western locomotive right off the rails.” Russian journalists were “given very clear instructions: to show Donald Trump in a positive way, and his opponent, Hillary Clinton, in a negative way.” There was no ambiguity about who the Russian government and elites supported and what they expected him to try to do to America if he gained power.

• In cyberwar, ‘attack surfaces’ are points in a computer program an attacker can access, allowing the attacker to come in contact with human minds. In 2105 and 2016, Russia used Facebook, Twitter, YouTube Instagram and other social media as places where high priority attack surfaces could be found. Such attacks do not necessarily rely on hacking, but instead can simply use and misuse social platforms as they wish. For example, just before the election, Facebook shut down 5.8 million fake political messaging accounts. Six of 470 known Russian fake Facebook accounts had accumulated billions of shares.

• Russian social media propaganda advertising was targeted, not random. In crucial states including Michigan and Wisconsin, Russian ads were targeted at people who would respond to anti-Muslim attacks, e.g., Muslims are terrorists, based on data showing that most members of target audience probably hated or feared Muslims. Regarding immigrants, Russian pro-Trump propaganda associated refugees with rapists. After the 2016 election, Twitter research found that about 50,000 Russian bots were active on its platform. Russian trolls who posed as black activists who portrayed Clinton as a racist reached hundreds of thousands of minds.

• On July, 22, 2016, which was just before the democratic convention, the Russians released about 22,000 stolen emails via Wikileaks. The emails were chosen to increase conflict and distrust between Clinton and Sanders supporters. The strategy worked. Trump supported and encouraged Russian hacking, e.g., by publicly asking the Russian government on June 17 to find and release emails related to Clinton. (My comment: A few hours after that June 17 public request, the Russian government started to hack the DNC and Clinton as Trump explicitly asked)

• On October 7, 2016 about 30 minutes after a Tape of Trump admitting his sexual assaults became public, the Russians released emails by Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. That release significantly blunted public discussion of Trump’s history of sexual predation. Shortly after this episode, Russian trolls and bots began spreading false stories about democratic Satanic practices and a pedophile child trafficking ring run by Clinton that operated out of the basement of a pizza parlor, i.e., the Pizzagate fabrication. (My comments: To a large extent, the press was fooled and unduly distracted by the timing of the Podesta email release. That failure gave many sympathetic people a basis in Russian fiction to see Trump as innocent instead of the sexual predator that he in fact really is.) 

•  The American people shared responsibility for the success of Russian lies and emotional manipulation. Many Americans responded with anger, incivility and sometimes actual threats of violence. Russians also exploited the gullibility of many Americans. Snyder wrote: “Those who chose to call and threaten were in the avant-garde of American totalitarianism. .... Americans trusted Russians and robots who told them what they wanted to hear.” For example, the vulgar Russian Facebook page ‘Heart of Texas’ was clearly written by non-native English speakers and advocated Texas secession. Separatism was and still is in line with standard Russian foreign policy to advocate separatism and the break up of all countries except Russia itself. Russian separatism policy supported and propagandized for Brexit, Catalonian independence, succession of the entire US South and Alaska from the Union, and the Donbas from Ukraine. Heart of Texas had more followers than the Texas democratic and republican parties combined. (My comment: Successful Russian manipulation of the American people included fomenting unwarranted anger, fear, bigotry, outrage, and distrust in democracy, the press, truth, elections and fellow citizens.)

• Professional American media and press and economic conditions shared responsibility for the success of Russian lies and emotional manipulation. Economic factors seriously weakened the media and press. In 2009, about 70 jobs per day were lost at newspapers and magazines, leading to the near total collapse of the local press. The rise of infotainment (and, IMHO, its attendant capitalist immorality) in place of news in the public interest led the press-media to give Trump far more air time and ink than Clinton or other candidates got. Trump’s antics and divisive, deceitful rhetoric were far too entertaining to pass up. That amounted to the professional US press-media giving Trump massive amounts of free advertising. The CEO of CBS commented that the Trump campaign “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” (My comments: Corporate ownership of media also significantly weakens press and media independence. Propaganda outlets such as Breitbart and Fox News continued their years-long propaganda efforts, enthusiastically adopting Russian lies and spreading them, thereby laundering anti-democratic propaganda into something legitimate in susceptible minds.)

• The republican party shared responsibility for the success of Russian lies and emotional manipulation. Snyder writes: “As republicans realized that Russia was attacking the UNited States, the fury of partisanship became the desperation of denial and then the complicity of inaction. .... McConnell let it be known that republicans would treat the defense of the United States from Russian cyberwar as an effort to help Hillary Clinton. .... After categorized the Russian attack as politics, its scope expanded. .... Even as Kasich and Rubio took a stand on Russian foreign policy, the crucial republican legislators surrendered in advance to Russian cyberattack. .... That is how wars are lost.” (My comments: McConnell earned the moniker Moscow Mitch. Putin could not have asked for much more than to have the US Senate majority leader completely mischaracterize Russian attacks as mere politics. In addition to his self described role as the ‘Grim Reaper’ , he deserves the title Moscow Mitch for that bit of deeply damaging disinformation in the name immoral republican partisanship. McConnell’s treasonous action here arguably transcended mere constitutional rot and constituted an actual constitutional crisis.)

• Although Trump said his former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, was as ‘dumb as a rock’, Tillerson did a valuable service for the Russians. Before he left office, conducted a purge of a large group of diplomats that Putin considered to be enemies. By throwing the State Department into chaos, Tillerson significantly crippled American ability to project influence or moral values. Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, illegally took money from foreign governments by not reporting it. Later, he lied to the FBI, falsely claiming he had no conversations with Russia’s ambassador. He was eventually convicted of a felony for that. Flynn’s other escapades included (i) anti-Semitic Tweets at Jews, “Not Anymore, Jews. Not anymore.” for claiming that the Russians had hacked emails of democratic activists, and (ii) followed and shared content from at least five fake Russian social media accounts. (My comment: If Flynn’s contacts with Russians were innocent, why lie about it? One logical answer is that the conversations were not innocent. Another is that Flynn was an incompetent idiot. Another is that he was both.)

• Steve Bannon replaced Paul Manafort as Trump’s campaign chairman. While at Breitbart, Bannon was instrumental in bringing white supremacists into mainstream political discourse. Bannon’s radial propaganda effort was funded by the billionaire Robert Mercer and members of his family. Bannon used some of that resource to experiment with mass public manipulation techniques, e.g., by testing audience responses to certain propaganda about Putin. In 2016, Mercer and Bannon’s company stole the Facebook data of about 50 million Americans and that was used to create tools to either increase or suppress voting by targeted audiences. A major goal was to suppress the African-American vote. Like most Russian practitioners of the politics of eternity, Bannon was hostile toward facts and he liked referring to the press as the “opposition party.” (My comment: The Mercer-Bannon effort to suppress Black voter turnout may have had a significant impact.)

• Unlike Paul Manafort and Steven Bannon who were linked to Russia by corrupt, authoritarian anti-democratic ideology, Jared Kushner was linked to Russia by ambition and  money. Kushner's links were best seen by situations where Kushner was silent. Like Trump himself, banks refused to loan money to Kushner’s father. The exception was the Russian money laundering machine, Deutsche Bank, which laundered billions for Russian oligarchs. A few weeks before the 2016 election, Deutsche Bank gave Kushner a $285 million loan. Although Kushner met with Russian officials, including the Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak. Kushner's escapades included smuggling Kislyak into Trump Tower for the purpose of talks to set up a secret communications channel between Trump and Putin. (My comment: If Kushner’s meetings with Russians were innocent, why go up the freight elevator? One logical answer is that the meetings were not innocent. Another is that Kushner was an incompetent idiot. Another is that he was both.)

Chapter 6 goes on at length in this vein. That brief summary should convey a flavor of what the Russians, Trump, his campaign and the felons, liars and crooks he surrounded himself with were up to. What they were up to wasn’t anything good for the American people, democracy, the rule of law, or other decent moral values. It was all corrupt bad faith based on lies, deceit and emotional manipulation. Snyder constantly points out that even the character “Donald Trump, successful businessman” was a fiction that no one of any significance in Russia believed. The Russians knew full well that Trump was a failed businessman who was saved only by Russian money: “From a Russian perspective, Trump was a failure who was rescued and an asset to be used to wreak havoc in American reality.” Well, American reality really has been blown to smithereens. Snyder’s narrative indicates that the Russians got stupendous value for their stolen money.

Legitimate or not?

Being a data, evidence, truth and logic-driven beast, Snyder’s book raised my personal estimate of confidence that Russian attacks on the 2016 election were a necessary factor, but alone not sufficient, in Trump’s electoral college win. Before Snyder, my confidence level that Russia was necessary was about 80%. Now, it's about 95%. The reality can never be known with certainty, but the evidence supports a belief that Trump is truly an illegitimate president. Or, maybe fake president is a better label.

Chapter Review: Individualism or Totalitarianism (2011)

With law our land shall rise, but it will perish with lawlessness. Author unknown, Njáls Saga, a story of a ~60-year Icelandic blood feud, ~1280 AD

Freedom is fragile, and when demagogues speak, and others start following them, it is wise to pay attention. Jeffrey C. Isaac, professor of political science, Indiana University Bloomington, 2016

A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point. .... But man’s resourcefulness goes beyond simply protecting a belief. Suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schacter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social & Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World, 1957

The basis of almost every honest political disagreement is mostly or completely grounded in one or both of two essential ingredients, differences in perception of facts and differences in application of reasoning or logic to the facts. The basis of almost every dishonest political disagreement is at least significantly, probably usually mostly, grounded in assertions of dark free speech by at least one side among parties in disagreement. One major problem is that it is often hard or impossible to know when a person is being honest with themself and when they aren't. Unconscious biases and flawed logic are unconscious and so are the distortions and flaws they routinely inject into reality and reason. Dishonest disagreements can be either knowingly or unknowingly dishonest. The former are usually immoral and usually damaging to society, democracy and/or the rule of law. The latter are regrettable, but still damaging. Germaine, today



This is a review of Chapter 1 of Timothy Snyder’s 2018 book, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and a Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His specialty is the history of Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust. Snyder also wrote other books, including On Tyranny, about how democracies fall and tyrannies rise (my review is here). My review of the prologue of this book is here.

Chapter 1, Individualism or Totalitarianism (2011), is a detailed description of one of the major influences on the political-spiritual ideology that Vladimir Putin claims to rely on to describe Russia and the world. He justifies the things he does in the name of an ideology that Snyder calls Russian Christian fascism. According to Snyder, the source of Putin’s ideology is the Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954). Until Putin latched onto his mystical religious-political ideology, Ilyin had been relegated to historically insignificant obscurity. Now, Ilyin’s writings are mandatory reading for all major Russian politicians, oligarchs and military leaders.

Ilyin was a Russian political and religious philosopher and a hard core ideologue. European fascism of the 1920s and 1930s shaped his thinking. The fascist mindset of the day was based on three core beliefs, violence should dominate facts, reason and laws, the nation's leader has a vital, deep mystical-religious connection to the nation and its people, and globalization is a dangerous conspiracy against the sacred nation, and not a mundane reality that needs to be rationally managed via international cooperation.

Ilyn started out as a bitter opponent of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. He was a counterrevolutionary who advocated violence against the revolution. He later formulated a Christian fascism ideology intended to defeat Bolshevism. Snyder writes of Ilyin’s rise to prominence and his role in modern events:

“After a new Russian Federation emerged from the defunct Soviet Union in 1991, Ilyin’s short book Our Tasks began to circulate in new Russian editions, his collected works were published, and his ideas gained powerful supporters. He had died forgotten in Switzerland; Putin organized a reburial in Moscow in 2005. .... By [2006] Putin was citing Ilyin in his annual presidential addresses to the general assembly to the Russian parliament. .... In the 2010s, Putin relied on Ilyin’s authority to explain why Russia had to undermine the European Union and invade Ukraine. .... The Russian political class followed Putin’s example. His master propagandist Vladislav Surkov adapted Ilyin’s ideas to the world of modern media. 

Ilyin was a politician of eternity. His thought held sway as the capitalist version of the politics of inevitability collapsed in the Russia of the 1990s and 2000s. As Russia became an organized kleptocracy in the 2010s, as domestic inequality reached stupefying proportions, Ilyin’s influence peaked. The Russian assault on the European Union and the United States revealed, by targeting them, certain political virtues that Ilyin ignored or despised: individualism, [democratic political] succession, integration, novelty, truth, equality.”

Ilyin’s ideology believes that individualism is evil and must be swallowed and subjugated in service to the mystical sanctity of the innocent but always besieged Russian nation. He also believed that God erred in creating a world of human with their facts, knowledge and passions, calling God's act “frenetic, committing error upon error,” and evidence that God had lost “his harmonious unity, logical reason, and organizational purpose.” For Ilyin, human facts and passions are senseless and impediments to attaining the ultimate goal. Snyder describes this as totalitarian, anti-individualism thinking:

“The vision was a totalitarian one. We should long for a condition in which we think and feel as one, which means not to think and feel at all. We must cease to exist as individual human beings. ‘Evil begins’, Ilyin wrote, ‘where the person begins. .... the empirical fragmentation of human existence is an incorrect, a transitory, and a metaphysically untrue condition of the world.’ .... To belong to a layer of society that offered to individuals social advancement was to be the worst kind of human being: ‘this estate constitutes the very lowest level of social existence.’”

That is at the core of Putin’s professed ideology. What that means for average Russians is not anything good. They are mere things to be used to serve the defense and goals of the sacred and innocent but besieged Russian nation, which just happens to include Ukraine. The siege of Russia includes siege by social progress and belief in individualism. What the sacred defense and goals demand of people is whatever Putin says is demanded. Chapter 1 continues in this incoherent, metaphysical vein.

In his thinking, Ilyin saw Russian people as obliged to be happy with a totalitarian political arrangement: “We will accept our freedom and our laws from the Russian patriot who leads Russia to salvation.” By ‘our freedom’, Ilyin refers to the freedom of the Russian people to serve the Russian patriot-savior, not to exercise their individual choice. The freedom is a mirage.

Ilyin’s ideology puts the middle class at the bottom of society in support of the righteousness of his fascist ideal of inequality. This bit of  ideology fits perfectly with Putin's kleptocracy mindset. It both precludes upward social and justifies oligarchy or rule according to what wealthy people want and Putin as Oligarch-in Chief allows. In this regard, Putin might be seen as not quite totalitarian, but that is negated by Putin’s willingness to strip wealth from any oligarch who crosses him or irritated him too much. In practice, Russia is a totalitarian police state, with oligarchs ruling only at the pleasure of the tyrant at the top.

What is going on here??

If one accepts Snyder’s vision of history and recent events as basically correct, Putin appears to be a brutal but modern totalitarian akin to a Hitler or a Stalin. In essence, Putin’s ideology has an obvious, venal goal. He is simply protecting his power and the kleptocracy he has built. He relentlessly uses his power to oppress the Russian people and to steal the nation’s wealth from them. It is hard to imagine Putin giving a fig about God’s alleged mistake in creating humans, knowledge or the human urge to procreate. When Putin oppresses his people and murders political opponents, he can cite Ilyin and claim he is Russia’s redeemer who is only asking the Russian people to make the “chivalrous sacrifice” of killing others in the name of the sacred nation.

The anti-fact, anti-rule of law aspects of Ilyin’s (and Putin’s) rancid ideology are important to keep in mind. When facts and laws do not matter or even exist in any meaningful sense, as Ilyin’s Russian Christian fascism posits, Russia’s leader incurs no moral or legal responsibility for whatever he does or doesn't do. Ilyin was clear about democracy and voting in secret. That allowed Russians to think of themselves as individuals with individual choice, which proves the evil character of a depraved world. Political parties and elections should only be rituals with no significant political importance.