"If anything, it is a very effective form of antifascist economic policy," said Zohran Mamdani, asked to describe "Zohranomics."

Quoted in "The Case for Zohranomics/As some Wall Street billionaires melt down over Zohran Mamdani’s policy platform, a prominent progressive economist argues that it meets the moment."

ZM continues: "We are at a moment where the crisis of economic security, of affordability, that comes with basic questions of dignity and identity are being used by the far right in ways that fuel the return of fascist tendencies. I think that having an agenda that is laser-focussed on the needs of ordinary people is what we need, and that is basically where the Democrats fell flat last year. At the federal level and the global level, we are dealing with the consequences of that lack of vision right now."

I ran to Grok where my second prompt was: "Don't just restate it. I can read it. I can understand it as a series of sentences. But I regard it as empty of meaning. So tell me, quickly, what is there of substance. No bullshit."

I got this: "Anti-fascist economics means policies that ensure economic security—fair wages, affordable housing, healthcare—to prevent the far right from exploiting people's struggles. It’s about meeting basic needs to stop fascism’s appeal. The Democrats failed at this, leading to political consequences. That’s the core."

Even shorter: "Anti-fascist economics: policies ensuring economic security to counter far-right extremism. Democrats failed, causing political fallout." That's Grok. The idea is to give people so much that they won't want to change to anything else. Right now they're so deprived that they do want radical change. 

"During a live audio event on the social media platform, Musk’s team of all-male math, AI and engineering experts spoke about how they wanted to create an AI..."

"... that was smarter than humans with the goal of benefiting society. Musk said the fundamental goal of the company is to understand 'what the hell is really going on.' The event showcased how Musk seems to initially be more focused on answering deep scientific questions, rather than competing head to head with OpenAI, Google and Microsoft to create consumer AI products. Musk did say he saw his venture as an alternative to bigger AI companies but said xAI was still 'embryonic,' and that it would take time for it to catch up with OpenAI and Google...."

I'm reading "Musk’s new AI company, xAI, will aim to solve scientific mysteries The billionaire and his team of artificial intelligence researchers gave details of the company’s goals during a live Twitter event Friday" (WaPo).

If it's true that xAI is really about answering deep scientific questions — AKA understanding what the hell is going on — then this is a nice contrast to Mark Zuckerberg's Threads, which was created (it seems) to compete head to head with Twitter.

I went into the comments over there, mainly to see if they were saying what I expected them to say — essentially: We hate Musk. And, yes, there it is, right on top of the "most liked" pile of comments: "Just what we need, AI that is explicitly fascist and white supremacist."

IN THE COMMENTS: Leland writes:  

WaPo commenters are why ChatGPT does so well. Their comments seem like coherent sentences, but the words used don't create a coherent thought. What is explicitly fascist? Was Musk proposing having his AI collude with the government to control the population? That's fascism, and while it exists quite a bit these days; I don't think that is what Musk is proposing. Musk is proposing quite the opposite.

Instapundit quotes that comment in full and adds: "Nowadays anti-fascism is called 'fascism,' just as explicit racism is called 'anti-racism.'"

"[T]he dictatorship of the Western elites is directed against all societies, including the peoples of the Western countries themselves."

"This is a challenge for everyone. Such a complete denial of man, the overthrow of faith and traditional values, the suppression of freedom acquiring the features of a 'reverse religion' – outright Satanism. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus Christ, denouncing the false prophets, says: By their fruits you shall know them. And these poisonous fruits are already obvious to people – not only in our country, in all countries, including many people in the West itself...."

Said Vladimir Putin, in his speech at the "annexation ceremony." I'm reading the full transcript, here.

"By claiming that the aim of the invasion is to 'denazify' Ukraine, Putin appeals to the myths of contemporary eastern European antisemitism – that a global cabal of Jews were (and are) the real agents of violence against Russian Christians..."

"... and the real victims of the Nazis were not the Jews, but rather this group. Russian Christians are targets of a conspiracy by a global elite, who, using the vocabulary of liberal democracy and human rights, attack the Christian faith and the Russian nation. Putin’s propaganda is not aimed at an obviously skeptical west, but rather appeals domestically to this strain of Christian nationalism.... The attack on liberal democracy in the west comes from a global fascist movement, whose center is Christian nationalism. It will be hard to disentangle this movement from antisemitism (albeit a version of antisemitism that allies with forces pushing for a Jewish nationalist state in Israel). Unsurprisingly, proponents of the view that a Christian nation needs protection and defense against liberalism, 'globalism' and their supposed decadence, will be marshaled to their most violent actions when the faces of free, secular, tolerant liberal democracy prominently include Jewish ones."

From "The antisemitism animating Putin’s claim to ‘denazify’ Ukraine/The Russian leader’s pretext for invasion recasts Ukraine’s Jewish president as a Nazi and Russian Christians as true victims of the Holocaust" by Jason Stanley (The Guardian). Stanley, a Yale philosophy professor, is the author of "How Fascism Works."

ADDED: Also in The Guardian, there's "'It’s not rational': Putin’s bizarre speech wrecks his once pragmatic image/Analysis: President makes appeal to Ukraine’s military to abandon its ‘drug-addicted, neo-Nazi’ leaders," in which Andrew Roth describes the speech Putin gave on Friday:

"I believe that nothing living can avoid the political today. The refusal is also politics; one thereby advances the politics of the evil cause."

Wrote Thomas Mann (to Hermann Hesse) in 1945, quoted in "Thomas Mann’s Brush with Darkness/How the German novelist’s tormented conservative manifesto led to his later modernist masterpieces" (The New Yorker). 

The author of the article, Alex Ross, continues:

If artists lose themselves in fantasies of independence, they become the tool of malefactors, who prefer to keep art apart from politics so that the work of oppression can continue undisturbed. So Mann wrote in an afterword to a 1937 book about the Spanish Civil War, adding that the poet who forswears politics is a “spiritually lost man.”... 

[During] the time that the novelist spent at [Princeton U]niversity between 1938 and 1941... Mann called for “social self-discipline under the ideal of freedom”—a political philosophy that doubles as a personal one. He also said, “Let me tell you the whole truth: if ever Fascism should come to America, it will come in the name of ‘freedom.’ ”

That's a great quote — "if ever Fascism should come to America, it will come in the name of 'freedom'" — and I googled it to see if today's anti-freedom leftists had used it against conservatives. 

Looking for Mann, I got Ronald Reagan: "If fascism ever comes to America, it will come in the name of liberalism." 

But it would be a mistake to think Reagan nicked it from Mann and that Mann was the originator of the "if fascism comes to America" clause. In the 1935 Sinclair Lewis book, “It Can’t Happen Here,” there's: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying the cross.” 

You get the picture. There's a lot of If fascism ever comes to America, it will look like my opponents.

The "conservative manifesto" referred to in the New Yorker article title is "Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man." That book was recently reissued — here — and Ross is displeased by the new introduction, which he says "trivializes" Mann, putting him at "the level of an op-ed columnist":

"A fellow ain't got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everyone."

 

That's the bit from "Grapes of Wrath" that I wasn't able to recite off the top of my head as I was recording my podcast yesterday and got to the item about the historian Jon Meacham, who'd helped write Joe Biden's victory speech.  Meacham has a book titled "The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels" and Biden's speech expressed a desire "to rebuild the soul of America." 

Here's the post I was reading in the podcast, and here's the podcast. At 21:40, I begin speaking extemporaneously: 

"I want to get into this idea of 'the soul of America'.... What do you think of the idea that a country has a soul?... I like to think of the idea that individual human beings have a soul, and when I hear of this composite soul of an entire country, I'm skeptical.... That's what makes me think of fascism.... especially if you're not acknowledging the soul of individual people, and so often, from the Democratic side, I get the sense that they view their opponents as being soulless... and I feel that they're also antagonistic to individualism. Everyone needs to think the same thing, and people should be cancelled if they don't all say the same thing.... I read that as a rejection of the sense that individual people have a soul, and then you come at this with the idea that America has a soul. There's just an Oversoul to America. I know you can go very deeply into that. It reminds me of that speech in 'The Grapes of Wrath'... and I know there's some Emerson stuff you could put there. But I'm not writing a post. I'm doing a podcast. So I can't get into the research and come up with stuff. But if I were reading and writing right now and not talking — and this is the advantage of reading and writing — I would research those things, and I would add a few little things,  but why don't you go do it? You go read that."

Here's the Ralph Waldo Emerson essay, "The Over-Soul." Excerpt:

Elegant split-screen editing as Nike hopes to inspire togetherness.

Details at AdWeek: "Clever Video Editing Portrays a Message of Unity in Nike’s Latest Powerful Spot/Wieden+Kennedy produced the third ad in 'You Can't Stop Us' campaign."

Like the other two spots in the campaign, “You Can’t Stop Us,” which has the same name as the overall campaign, draws on the sense of community from being socially isolated during a global pandemic. However, unlike the other two spots, the third 1.5-minute video also touches on the feelings stirred by the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement following the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky.

The voiceover narration is done by Megan Rapinoe, the soccer player.

Ah! I'm glad to see that I didn't just imagine that I'd created a tag "oneness."

ADDED: I had to publish this post and click on the tag to see where I got the idea the idea that "oneness" was going to be important. I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I see that the last time I used it was on November 15, 2008 for "The Office of the President-Elect speaks!/Listen up!"



Oh, my Lord, did I think Obama was going to bring us together? No, no, actually not. I had my cruel neutrality:

In the news — the attack on individualism.

Having created a tag "the attack on individualism" — for reasons stated in the previous post — and gone back to find that subject in my archive, I wanted to look at the present and see how much of this topic was in the current news.

Here are a few things I found:

1. "Big Data Analytics Shows How America's Individualism Complicates Coronavirus Response" (UVa Today):

Painstakingly, and with tremendous amounts of data processed by 97 advanced computers, Jingjing Li, Ting Xu, Natasha Zhang Foutz and Bo Bian went county-by-county to track levels of individualism – measured by the amount of time each locality spent on the American frontier from 1790 to 1890 – and correlate individualism to social distancing compliance and COVID-19-related crowdfunding.... “We were astounded by the large magnitude of those numbers, because they suggest that variations in individualism could account for almost half of a policy’s effectiveness,” said Li, an assistant professor of information technology in the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce.

2. "Andrew McCutchen criticizes Yankees' hair policy: 'It takes away from our individualism'" (CBS Sports):

The Yankees' "appearance policy" has been in force since not long after George Steinbrenner purchased the team in the early 1970s. As the story goes, Steinbrenner didn't care for Thurman Munson's appearance during one singing of the national anthem, and he put in place the following mandates: "All players, coaches and male executives are forbidden to display any facial hair other than mustaches (except for religious reasons), and scalp hair may not be grown below the collar. Long sideburns and 'mutton chops' are not specifically banned."

3. "How Individualism Spreads Racism" by Jackson Wu (Patheos):

"Contact tracing has helped Asian countries like South Korea and Singapore contain the spread of the virus, but their systems rely heavily on digital surveillance..."

"... using patients’ digital footprints to automatically alert their contacts, an intrusion that many Americans would not accept Massachusetts is opting for an old-school, labor-intensive method: people.... The idea of training a corps of contact tracers is emerging in many places at the same time, as leaders think ahead to the point when social distancing constraints will be lifted.... It is built around one-on-one telephone interviews of newly diagnosed patients and their contacts, so that subjects must answer the phone when it rings.... The downside of human contact tracing is that it is expensive, can overlook contacts a subject may not recall, and, some argue, is too slow for a fast-moving virus.... Within the next two hours, the case investigator will aim to reach the patient by phone and compile a list of every person he or she had been in close contact with for 48 hours before the onset of symptoms. The names of the contacts — the expectation is 10 people per new case — will then be passed to contact tracers, who will attempt to reach each one by telephone within 48 hours, calling back three times in succession to signal the call’s importance. For now, tracers are not leaving messages or call back numbers...."

From "An Army of Virus Tracers Takes Shape in Massachusetts/Asian countries have invested heavily in digital contact-tracing, which uses technology to warn people when they have been exposed to the coronavirus. Massachusetts is using an old-fashioned means: people" (NYT).

Reading the headline, I thought that article would be more of a pitch to go to digital surveillance, but it's promoting hiring huge numbers of contract tracers. Does that seem likely to work well in America? The Times doesn't come out and say it, but one might expect Americans to rankle at digital surveillance. The Times is politically correct enough not to lean heavily into the notion that surveillance is an "Asian" approach, but the implication seems to be there. The corollary is that the personal, individual connection is more suited to Americans.

But is it?! It's all about phone calls — phone calls from unknown numbers. Do we even answer the phone when we don't know the caller? I don't.  And what's your reaction when a call comes through without showing the caller's number — especially if they call back 3 times and never leave a message? I would never answer that call. Would you? Would the average American?

The article begins with an anecdote about a caller who not only gets the phone answered, but talks to a woman for 45 minutes. The 2 of them "giggled and commiserated." So... I'm sure some people pick up and love to talk to a stranger about their personal predicament. But I don't believe that's the way most of us Americans are using the phone these days.

The NYT should lay out the digital surveillance option and let us judge for ourselves whether it's superior to these hordes of human telephoners. If I'm protected from digital surveillance, then explain to me why the government that wants to call me on the telephone has my number? If you already can get to my number, then maybe when it's a matter of life and death, you should just go ahead and do the digital surveillance needed to trace the contagion and spare me the nonsense of a nice lady calling on the phone to giggle and commiserate with me for 45 minutes.

IN THE COMMENTS: I Have Misplaced My Pants identifies the worst flaw with the personal approach to contacts tracing:

"The 20th-century German philosopher (and victim of the Nazis) Walter Benjamin warned how fascism engages an 'aestheticization of politics'..."

"... where spectacle and transcendence provide a type of ecstasy for its adherents. Watch clips of fevered crowds, from today or the past, chanting against 'enemies of the people'; they are malignant scenes, but ones that in no small part mimic religious revivals. Critics of democracy often claim that it offers no similar sense of transcendence. The 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche castigated democracy as a system of 'quarantine mechanisms' for human desires, and as 'such they are … very boring.' If the individual unit of democracy is the citizen, authoritarian societies thrill to the Übermensch, the superman promising that 'I alone can fix it.' Yet I would argue that all of the hallmarks of authoritarianism — the rallies and crowds, the marching and military parades, the shouting demagogue promising his followers that they are superior — are wind and hot air. What fascism offers isn’t elevation but cheap transcendence, a counterfeit of meaning rather than the real thing. [Walt] Whitman understood that democracy wasn’t 'very boring' but rather a political system that could deliver on the promises that authoritarianism only pretended it would. For the poet, democracy wasn’t just a way of passing laws or a manner of organizing a government; democracy was a method of transcendence in its own right."

From "Why We Will Need Walt Whitman in 2020/With our democracy in crisis, the poet and prophet of the American ideal should be our guide" by Ed Simon (in the NYT).

What's so bad about boring? Some things — important things — you want to be boring (for example: the operation of your internal organs). I'd prefer a boring government. I don't like people getting all emotional about politics. Rather than pumping up the pro-democracy propaganda and rhetoric, why don't we give respect to boredom. Let politics be boring so our own individual life engages our interest.

I have a tag "I'm for Boring." I started that tag here (in 2014). Reacting to a WaPo columnist who fretted about low turnout in elections, I said:

Boring!... I mean hooray for boredom in politics.

"Joseph Goebbels didn’t die. He just got a job at Hallmark."

Joseph Goebbels didn’t die. He just got a job at Hallmark. https://t.co/oKKOyYxXa6

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) December 26, 2019

ADDED: The linked article at Salon is "Hallmark movies are fascist propaganda/Forget 'Triumph of the Will' — the most insidious authoritarian propaganda comes in the form of schmaltz" by Amanda Marcotte. Isn't this like what Jonah Goldberg did — from the right — in his book "Liberal Fascism"? Goldberg wrote:

For generations our primary vision of a dystopian future has been that of Orwell’s 1984. This was a fundamentally “masculine” nightmare of fascist brutality. But with the demise of the Soviet Union and the vanishing memory of the great twentieth-century fascist and communist dictatorships, the nightmare vision of 1984 is slowly fading away. In its place, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is emerging as the more prophetic book. As we unravel the human genome and master the ability to make people happy with televised entertainment and psychoactive drugs, politics is increasingly a vehicle for delivering prepackaged joy. America’s political system used to be about the pursuit of happiness. Now more and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered....

The history of totalitarianism is the history of the quest to transcend the human condition and create a society where our deepest meaning and destiny are realized simply by virtue of the fact that we live in it. It cannot be done, and even if, as often in the case of liberal fascism, the effort is very careful to be humane and decent, it will still result in a kind of benign tyranny where some people get to impose their ideas of goodness and happiness on those who may not share them...

Make people happy with televised entertainment... sounds like the Hallmark channel. So let's read the Amanda Marcotte thing, published jollily on Christmas at Salon:

When most of us think about fascistically propagandistic movies, we think of the grotesque grandeur of Leni Riefenstahl's films celebrating the Third Reich... even in Nazi Germany, the majority of movies approved by the Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, were escapist and feather-light, with a Hallmark movie-style emphasis on the importance of "normality."

There's plenty of reason that empty-headed kitsch fits neatly in the authoritarian worldview. It's storytelling that imitates the gestures of emotion without actually engaging with real feeling... Hallmark movies, with their emphasis on returning home and the pleasures of the small, domestic life, also send a not-at-all subtle signal of disdain for cosmopolitanism and curiosity about the larger world, which is exactly the sort of attitude that helps breed the kind of defensive white nationalism that we see growing in strength in the Donald Trump era.

Both Marcotte and Goldberg are afraid of oppressive government and think cheap televised entertainment is softening the people up to accept it.

"The Trump Voters Whose ‘Need for Chaos’ Obliterates Everything Else/Political nihilism is one of the president’s strongest weapons."

Headline for a NYT op-ed by Thomas Edsall. I'm blogging this because an order-and-chaos theme has happened to emerge on the blog this morning and also because I think it suggests that Trump voters are not fascists. I'm assuming fascism is grounded in an excessive need for order.

Let's read:

Last week, at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, the winner of the best paper award in the Political Psychology division was “A ‘Need for Chaos’ and the Sharing of Hostile Political Rumors in Advanced Democracies.”... [Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen, and Kevin Arceneaux argue] that a segment of the American electorate that was once peripheral is drawn to “chaos incitement” and that this segment has gained decisive influence through the rise of social media.

I don't know about "decisive," but otherwise this seems like a good observation. But I'm going to resist Edsall's idea of making the problem specific to Trump voters.

The circulation of [conspiracy theories, fake news, discussions of political scandals and negative campaigns] has been “linked to large-scale political outcomes within recent years such as the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

But that doesn't mean that only the winner's voters were susceptible to that sort of material! Also, I wouldn't limit the problem of "chaos incitement" to social media. Mainstream media does it too.

The authors describe “chaos incitement” as a “strategy of last resort by marginalized status-seekers,” willing to adopt disruptive tactics. Trump, in turn, has consistently sought to strengthen the perception that America is in chaos....

That sounds like an appeal to people who don't like chaos! Does Edsall even notice this blatant contradiction?

"Death will come soon to hush us along/Sweeter than honey and bitter as gall..."

Goodbye to Franco Zeffirelli, hushed along at age 96.

Here's the NYT obituary, "Franco Zeffirelli, Italian Director With Taste for Excess, Dies at 96."

His interest in Shakespeare was awakened by an older British woman, Mary O’Neill, who tutored him in English as a child and imbued him with ethical values that foiled the Fascist curriculum served up at school.

“She kept injecting in me the cult of freedom of democracy that remained in my DNA for the rest of my life,” Mr. Zeffirelli told Opera News....

He went on to study architecture at the University of Florence, until the onset of World War II interrupted his education. He joined Communist partisan forces, first fighting Mussolini’s Fascists and then the occupying Nazis. Captured by the Fascists, he was saved from the firing squad when his interrogator miraculously turned out to be a half brother whom he had never known. The half brother arranged his release....

In the late 1940s, the director Luchino Visconti spotted Mr. Zeffirelli, blond and blue-eyed, working as a stagehand in Florence.... A smitten Mr. Visconti gave him his big break in 1949, making him his personal assistant and set designer .... The two became romantically involved and lived together for three years. In his autobiography, published in 2006, Mr. Zeffirelli wrote that he considered himself “homosexual,” disliking the term “gay” as inelegant....

"Romeo and Juliet" is the 1968 movie in my "imaginary film project." What an impact that had on me when I was 17! My high school "outing club" "arts society" took the bus into Manhattan to see it.

The lyrics quoted in the post title are from the song "What Is a Youth" that you hear in the beautiful film clip embedded above. The words do not appear in the text of "Romeo and Juliet." The song lyrics were gathered (by Eugene Walter) "from songs in other Shakespearean plays, particularly Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice." The composer is the great Nino Rota.

Iconoclasm.

"Trump’s Star on Hollywood Walk of Fame Destroyed With Pickaxe" (Daily Beast).

"Multiple people—including police—tell me a man walked up with a guitar case and pulled out the pick axe. Then, it’s believed, he called police himself to report it, but left the scene before they got here. Now, he’s nowhere to be found."

Guitar case, eh? Reminds me of gentler times, when Woody Guthrie had a sign on his guitar, "This Machine Kills Fascists."



No, it wasn't really gentler times! It was 1941, and Woody was doing "Talking Hitler's Head Off Blues."

"This Machine Kills Fascists" has its own Wikipedia page. There, we learn that in later years, Pete Seeger had "This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces it to Surrender" on his banjo — as he sang "Waist Deep in Big Muddy," protesting the Vietnam War.

And Donovan had "This machine kills" on his guitar — and explained that "fascism was already dead" and his "machine would kill greed and delusion." Delusion!? Yes, Donovan can help with delusions — Get together/Work it out/Simplicity/Is what it's about...

But today's news is of a pickaxe in a guitar case. The destruction is direct — smashing with a tool — not indirect like music that has to enter the human mind and motivate the action of others.

By the way, a submachine gun in a violin case is a TV Trope: "This has been done so much that nowadays when some people see a violin case, they assume it contains firearms." Jinx in "League of Legends" says, "What's in my violin case? Violence!"

Now, that guy with the pickaxe used his tool to destroy, but he didn't destroy a man. He didn't "kill fascists." He destroyed an inanimate thing. And that's iconoclasm:

Iconoclasm is the social belief in the importance of the destruction of icons and other images or monuments, most frequently for religious or political reasons....

"I am gravely concerned, Ann," emails Josh Earnest on behalf of the Democratic Party.

Gravely, eh? That's spooky. I'm scared! Josh Earnest was Obama's White House Press Secretary. (Had you forgotten? I had.) He says:

When I was press secretary for President Obama, my strategy was simple: I spoke directly with the president and didn't make a habit of lying to the American people.

Well, of course, you don't want to make a habit of lying to the American people. That's just pathological. A good press secretary lies when it serves a specific purpose. If you just make a habit out of lying, you lose the advantage of all the times when saying what's true is actually in your interest and you miss all the cute chances — like the one you're using here, Josh — where telling a cagy truth works the same way as a good straightforward bald-faced lie.*

You and I both know that's not how the Trump administration operates. Between the constant staff upheaval and drama, the rogue tweets, and overall failure to put the interests of the American people first, it's clear this administration is in utter chaos.

Apparently, Josh wants me to feel like I'm in a special club with him — "You and I" — and we have knowledge together and there's chaos. We "know"! Eh. I don't know. What makes tweets "rogue"? I don't even get the concept. Seems to me, Trump just talks to us directly when he's got something he wants to say.

He may be a rogue ("A dishonest, unprincipled person; a rascal, a scoundrel" or "A mischievous person, esp. a child; a person whose behaviour one disapproves of but who is nonetheless likeable or attractive" (OED)), but I don't agree that the tweets are rogue ("Aberrant, anomalous; misplaced, occurring (esp. in isolation) at an unexpected place or time" or "Inexplicably faulty or defective" (OED)).

And I really don't like seeing characterizations like that portrayed as "knowledge," especially when I'm being roped into it. I supposedly "know" things I don't even believe. And yet it's "clear" that there's "chaos"... and not just chaos, "utter chaos."

I feel like some clown named Josh just popped in to madly gesticulate and grimace. You're not going to alarm and activate me like that. But I never give money, so I'm just a recipient of over-inclusive email. I could unsubscribe, but then I couldn't write posts like this. You have my data and I have yours. You have your channels of communication, and I have mine.

Skipping ahead in that email:

I am deeply concerned that the Trump administration is doing lasting damage to the bond between the American people and their government -- and I can imagine you feel the same way.

I appreciate that he's admitting it's just his imagination now, but I must say I feel a little creeped out by the notion of a "bond between the American people and their government" that must be preserved. I believe in maintaining a separation between oneself and the government. It's dangerous for individuals to feel bonded to government. That sounds like fascism. I think if Trump is making individuals feel less oneness with government, that's good. I'm not a fan of chaos, but too much order is fascistic. I like my distance, separation, and objectivity. One thing I love about Trump — which was not true of Obama — is that we all feel so free and energized to criticize and insult him and just hate him. It's so wholesome... health-giving... salubrious.**

_______________________

* Yesterday, when I was complaining about Hillary, I said:

Hillary Clinton's approach to communication is so annoying. I'm not a Trump fan, but he's at least a straight talker — even when lying! It works for his fans and his antagonists. He's energizing. She, on the other hand, is such a pain. Imagine having to follow the daily blather of President Hillary Clinton.

Not all my readers share my sense of humor. Some people took the trouble to write comments telling me it didn't make sense to say that someone who was lying could be a straight talker. It makes sense to me. That's why you can have a bald-faced lie. Would you prefer a hairy-faced lie? More of a bearded hipster character?

** I love that word, "salubrious." It reminds me of the hardest I ever laughed during a live theater performance, as I told you — if you were reading back then — in 2004:

The play was [Turgenev's] "A Month in the Country," and at the beginning of a scene, where a number of things were going on, a minor character came out and said "The weather is very salaboobious today." Now that was supposed to be funny, but it was just way too funny compared to everything else that surrounded it, and in fact it brought peals of laughter that continued far into the scene.

"Crying is an excellent way of bringing balance and health to your mind and body. Keep crying."

Tweets Yoko Ono.

Among the responses:

Hear that all you poor people? The multi-millionaire Yoko says that crying because of your poverty and desperation is good for your mind and body.

— The Socialist Party (@OfficialSPGB) March 10, 2018

I think that's satire. Please don't destroy my feeling of hope in this world by having that not be satire. I will cry.

I click through to The Socialist Party/@OfficialSPGB — Socialist Party of Great Britain — and it's got the blue check mark of a "verified account." That means they're dead serious, right?

The Socialist Party of Great Britain has been around since 1904, Wikipedia says, offering this photograph of the they looked at their first conference, in 1905:



"Unlike other left groups, the SPGB did not see fascism as a special threat to the working class. Rather than formulating it as the last refuge of capitalism organising to defend itself against the working class, the party’s writers and speakers tended to view it as a particular type of reform movement. The two specific characteristics identified, though, were that it tended to be a form of national consolidation – unifying fragment nations such as Germany, Italy and Spain – and that it tended to have the mass support of the working class. The party's theory made the working class the politically decisive class: thus if the working class supported fascism then fascism would prevail. Answers to letters in the Socialist Standard in the 1930s repeatedly made this point. Early writers noted what Benito Mussolini was able to do with the power of the state on his side, a part of a vindication of the SPGB's approach of the workers seizing control of the state. The SPGB, hence, declined to join anti-fascist fronts or to make a particular issue of anti-fascism, arguing that the pro-socialist case was the necessary remedy for fascism."

Keep crying! It's an excellent way of bringing balance and health to your mind and body.

The experts got blindsided by what happened on Election Day, so why should we care how they try to explain it now?

I'm noticing an article in The New Yorker by Maria Konnikova, "The Psychological Research that Helps Explain the Election," and it just seems so pathetic. I mean, I know the political writers need to keep writing. It's their livelihood. But why are we supposed to keep reading? It's been established that you don't know what you're talking about. Your game is a fraud.

But Konnikova's piece at least has the virtue of digging up old research papers that were written without trying to influence/explain this election. She then uses them to attempt to explain the election.

The first article was about confirmation bias, which Konnikova says "can help explain why Trump supporters remain supportive no matter what evidence one puts to them—and why Trump’s opponents are unlikely to be convinced of his worth even if he ends up doing something actually positive."

The second article was about the polarization effect, which Konnikova tells us helps explain why Trump supporters declined to take instruction from the media: The more negative the press got, the more Trump supporters perceived that media as biased.

The third article was about cultural cognition, the tendency to select information that protects your idea of your own identity. Trump fed people some things that they liked. Konnikova mentions opposition to the left, the establishment, and political correctness. People absorbed that. The rest, not so much.

The fourth article was about authoritarianism — "the desire for strong order and control." People are pretty tolerant, but at some point, they flip. They feel threatened and need protection.

The fifth article is from evolutionary psychology. We evolved to cooperate within a coalition and to fight outsiders when provoked by outrage. Outrage was used to motivate us.

The sixth article is about how people who feel stressed and threatened go for "tighter rules, greater strength, a more authoritarian approach." Trump acted like he knew this, didn't he?

The seventh article is about optimism bias. Konnikova thinks this explains why Hillary Clinton supporters were so inert.

Kanye West is "at once a prop and, because Trump’s political calculations can’t be unsnarled from the narcissistic Trump Show playing in his mind, a bauble for the kingpin to gloat over."

Writes Katy Waldman in Slate in a piece with the drama-queen headline "Donald’s Beautiful Dark Fascist Fantasy/What do Trump and Kanye have in common? Totalitarian aesthetics and disconnection from reality."

How about all the times celebrities have appeared with Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton? Did you call them all props and baubles for a narcissist to gloat over?

Waldman goes on to talk about the "fascist undertone" of West's art. (She doesn't use the word "dark," by the way. That racially questionable adjective only appears in the headline.)

Mussolini’s favorite thinkers exalted the heroic, and curiously amoral, promise of man hurtling toward perfection; West speaks in similarly bombastic terms when he declares that, as a musician, “I can do whatever I want to do. … If I’m gonna take a stage and like, open up a motherfucking mountain I can do that.”... West and Trump’s dynamic—the artist and the strongman—evokes a traditional symbiosis between aestheticism and fascism. In the visually ravishing films of Leni Riefenstahl, the crisp goose-stepping of smartly uniformed troops, the propulsive fervor of futurism, we’ve seen politics married to the pursuit of the beautiful before.

Ironically, it's Waldman who is marrying ideas and images. If she's aware of how propaganda like Riefenstahl's films work, is she circumspect about what she herself is doing? It's not too aesthetically appealing, so there's little chance that it will sway large crowds, but it is, in its own tawdry way, propaganda.

IN THE COMMENTS: MadisonMan said:

So it's come to this. Slate writers assuming that Black entertainers are useful stooges to The Man.

Nothing racist at all about that assumption. 

It's the Clarence Thomas treatment. A black person is given less room to have opinions of his own.

Today's the day I can read The Washington Post without hitting the paywall.

And what do I get? There was that puerile column about the Ohio State attacker, already blogged here.

Now, I'm poking around some more, and here's "I love your family. But I dread your joyous holiday letters."

After I finish the letter, I put it down on the coffee table, stare into space, open a bottle of wine and drink the whole thing. The next morning, the letter still splayed on the table, I realize it’s not just the image of a happy, still-together family that had unmoored me. It’s also the power of the record-keeping and the memories that such records evoke. I was never good at keeping records....

And here's "Does this haircut make me look like a Nazi?"

Trump is "an improviser" — "someone who jumps out and tries to provoke and tries to connect with people by speaking plainly."

"And he truly believes that all publicity is good publicity. He also truly believes that where you are on a particular issue doesn’t especially matter. What matters is connecting with people and getting what you wanted, getting the final step. The bottom line is what’s important to him. And this has been true throughout his business career and his personal life. It’s all about him. It’s am about getting to the goal. And he is quite willing to run roughshod over people to get there."

Said Marc Fisher, co-author of "Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power." Fisher was answering a question, on "Face the Nation" yesterday, from the host John Dickerson, about what are Trump's "core beliefs." After that answer, Dickerson sums it up as: "Just getting a win. Just calling it a win."

At that point, I was talking to the television, saying something like: Yes, but what counts as a win when you are President of the United States? There's no way to win for yourself alone. You have to win for the country. It doesn't make sense any other way. That's the definition of a win — Make America Great Again.

Fisher continued:

Getting a win. He grew up in a house where his father warned him against being a nothing. And his whole life has really been structured around proving to himself and others that he is something, something big and important. And this is only the latest step in really a very consistent pattern throughout his life.

And now he offers to win for us as a country. What is wrong with that idea? And I'm not asking that question as a way to say Nothing wrong with that! I'm really asking the question seriously. What is wrong with a man with a powerful, deep-seated orientation toward winning offering to merge his independent individual persona with the entire country and then winning for us?

I mean, other than that it seems to jump off the page as the definition of fascism.