Greg Gianforte and What Post-Truth Politics Really Looks Like

Today there is a special election to fill Montana's congressional seat, which is currently vacant. A colossal amount of money has been spent there, as it has in a similar election in Georgia, because these are competitive races that would generally be considered safely Republican. The unpopularity of the president has emboldened Democrats to pursue these races aggressively, and by all acounts both are close. Tensions are understandably high across the board.

That is the context for the jaw-dropping occurance yesterday in Montana. Greg Gianforte, the Republican candidate, was being questioned by Ben Jacobs, a reporter from the Guardian. Jacobs was being persistent, in the way that anyone who has seen a reporter in action will recognize. Gianforte snapped. He grabbed Jacobs, threw him to the floor, and apparently hit him in the face, breaking his glasses. He was charged with assault.

While there is no excuse for the application of violence in this case, I at the very least can acknowledge that Gianforte is under a colossal amount of pressure and sympathize that everyone has a breaking point. This post is not, strictly speaking, about him. It is about the response of the campaign. Once upon a time a politician who was charged with assaulting a reporter would be forced out of the race, either by the people, the press, or their own embarassed fellow partisans. Instead, the Gianforte campaign released the following statement:

Tonight, as Greg was giving a separate interview in a private office, The Guardian's Ben Jacobs entered the office without permission, aggressively shoved a recorder in Greg's face, and began asking badgering questions. Jacobs was asked to leave, After asking Jacobs to lower the recorder, Jacobs declined. Greg then attempted to grab the phone that was pushed in his face. Jacobs grabs Greg's wrist and spun away from Greg, pushing them both to the ground. It's unfortunate that this aggressive behavior from a liberal journalist created this scene at our campaign volunteer BBQ.

This account, it must be said to begin with, is utterly at variance with accounts from the other reporters in the room (here is a report from the Fox News team present at the time), as well as the actual audio recorded by Jacobs. It is a hastily constructed and transparent lie. What is more concerning is that it bears all the worst hallmarks of politics in Trump's post-truth America. Do not trust the evidence of your eyes and ears. The enemy is out to get you, and only people like you are trustworthy.  Don't believe what the liberal reporter says happened, he's just out to get me. I'm not lying, the reporter is lying.

The strategy is simple, crude, and harmful. Ignore objective reality by turning every negative story into a question of party loyalty. Claim the opposite of what the other person claims no matter what, and then howl about ideological witch hunts when they point out that you're wrong. Make it easy for people to reflexively go into partisan corners instead of directly confronting disturbing developments.

It is a reliable charcteristic of humans in general that we will draw the least uncomfortable conclusion from whatever evidence we are given. There is already a large scale mentality of cultural persecution among the white middle and lower classes, who are uncomfortable with the torrent of change in recent decades. One shouldn't be astonished that so many still take Trump's part after each fresh absurdity or scandal when these are the tactics being used. They're making it up. They're coming after me just like they've come after people like you. 

Appealing to peoples' deepest and most instinctive fears will always incline them to circle the wagons. When politics is reduced to this very basic "us vs them," where ideology and evidence are transcended wholly by cultural identity, it becomes a naked struggle for power. When "they" are percieved to be in control of the official state and the media, are deemed to be relentlessly persecuting "us," only winning matters. Principles, even of the flexible sort associated with politicians, vanish.

We have now reched the point where we are being not just mislead, but openly and brazenly lied to on a regular basis by our leaders. We have moved beyond the point where political differences are bound to differences in interpretation or value judgment to the point where the facts themselves are at issue. The result will be ever increasing polarization and an extremism from all sides that demands all or nothing. As power replaces policy as the ultimate goal, our politics will continue to degrade. Unless we have some exceptional leaders who demand of themselves and others that we conduct politics with a certain regard for decorum and objectivity, I don't see how this process can be reversed without doing major harm to the country.

The Republican Party Has Choices To Make

Everyone is aware of what has happened in the last two weeks. The president has fired the FBI director with no obvious logic to the timing, then contradicted both himself and his staff regarding the rationale behind the move. He has revealed Israeli intelligence to the Russians without permission, and the information revealed was so secret that our closest allies were unaware of it and the press is still not permitted to say exactly what it is. Then it came to light that Director Comey kept a contemporaneous memo of a conversation with Trump in February, in which Trump asked Comey to quietly let go of the investigation into contacts between members of the Trump campaign and Russian officials. If that account is accurate, the president committed a crime. Even some Republicans have begun to wonder openly whether the president will be permitted to finish his term of office.

Those are the stories on every page and screen right now. They are of such overwhelming importance that the attention given to them is more than justified. What I would like to do though is take a step back from the immediate issue, and wonder a bit about what comes next, with Trump or without him. As ubiquitous as Trump has been within the political upheavals of the last two years, he is also the product of unique historical circumstances and political decisions taken well before he was a force in public life. The fissures in the Republican Party that he has exposed remain stark, and even if Trump were to resign tomorrow that party would still be firmly in control of the government for a minimum of a year and a half. There are very real divisions the Republicans have to deal with.

There are two Republican archetypes these days. The first one is modeled on Reagan. An optimist at heart, this Republican is firmly committed to the belief that a less restrictive government benefits everyone, but is open in principle to the use of the government to achieve worthy objectives. This Republican believes in an open society, free trade, and a reasonably open system of legal immigration. Marco Rubio,  John Kasich, and Lindsey Graham come immediately to mind. I may believe them mistaken about many things, but they are people with whom I have no difficulty communicating.

But there is another force in Republican politics, which has been brought from the fringe to the foreground in the last ten years. Steve King, Jeff Sessions, and Steve Bannon are representative of this group. They see foreign trade as other countries ripping off the US, they see a growing non-white and non-Christian population as a threat to western (read "European") culture. They believe that they are fighting for the substance of civilization in the United States and that their enemies are a part of every branch and department in the government. Accordingly their respect for process and institutions, where it exists, is limited.

This latter faction has been frequently compared to the Nazis, with considerable controversy about that designation. While they may not be genocidal, or (Bannon excluded) in favor of the third World War, there is an important aspect of how they see the world that they have in common with the Nazis, and indeed with any nationalist ideology motivated explicitly or implicitly by race. That is the idea that culture is something to be preserved in stasis, rather than something that is constantly and unavoidably changing in a densely interconnected world.

In reality of course there is a spectrum between these two Republicanisms. Every conservative and nationalist has a little of the other in them. It may even be viewed not as a division within the party, but as a struggle within the ideology itself to accept the consequences of its own program. Republicans championed trade agreements and moderate immigration policy for decades. In order to enact that agenda they needed the support of the white working class, and successfully seduced them with cultural and racial appeals after the civil rights acts of the mid 1960s.

The result of free trade, free markets, and relatively free movement of individuals has been an extraordinary mixing of heritages and profound demographic change for the United States. This, ironically, is the most admirable achievement of the program that the US and the Republican Party in particular has championed for the last half century. Conservatives presented an enticing vision of a dynamic economy, always on the move and moved by passionate individuals, but failed to realize that such dynamism could scarcely be confined to economics. Society followed suit. The divisions in the modern GOP can be largely characterised as between those who embrace social change - however tentatively - and those who reject it.

Trump may be the embodiment of those divisions but he is not their source. With or without him, the Republicans will have to decide where they stand. That drama will play out over the coming decade, and will do much to determine the political landscape of the country in the 21st century.

The Comey Firing

On Tuesday, very suddenly, the president fired the FBI director. Because James Comey - a very highly regarded former prosecutor, Deputy Attorney General, and Republican - was in charge of the investigation into untoward contact between members of Trump's campaign and Russian officials, there is predictable outrage. Not only has the president fired someone who was investigating people close to him, but he will also appoint Comey's replacement, who will presumably head the contintuing investigation. One needn't be a conspiracy theorist to see an obvious conflict of interest.

Two aspects of the situation in particular stand out. The first one is the truly extraordinary cynicism in the justification the administration has provided for the move. It was said that Comey was fired because of his refusal to acknowledge the "nearly universal judgment" that his handling of the Clinton email investigation was flawed, and that he could not inspire the confidence of public or administration.

Notice the shiftiness of the wording. Hardcore Trump supporters will see Comey being punished for what they view as an inexcusable failure to prosecute Clinton. In public, the administration can shield itself behind criticism of the unusual press conference Comey held to announce the results of his investigation (at which he thoroughly criticised Clinton). Democrats have repeatedly castigated his handling of the investigation and subsequent two-day reopening of it just before the election. The administration will now point to those complaints and pretend to be defending the institutional integrity of the FBI.

The second striking aspect of the whole situation is that Comey himself found out by reading a television monitor while giving a speech in Los Angeles. The Director of the FBI found out that he had been fired from cable news. That betrays an utter contempt for the organs of goverment outside of the White House on the part of this administration, and makes their protestations about defending the FBI as an institution laughable. As a rule, if you hold a position of sufficient importance to be fired personally by the President of the United States, you are yourself important enough to be informed about that decision before CNN.

As Comey himself said, it is true that the president has the right to fire the director of the FBI for any reason at any time. Yet reports coming out about Trump's thinking on the issue are disturbing. Trump was upset about "leaks" coming from the bureau, and angry at Comey's "disoyalty" in flatly contradicting his demonstrably false assertion that President Obama had ordered personal surveillance on him. We have a president who says obviously untrue things and is furious when the head of the country's most prestigious law enforcement organization refuses to share his delusion.

The use of terms is illustrative. If Trump was alarmed at a breach of his constitutional rights and an unconscionable abuse of power by the previous administration and he saw the FBI refusing to take it seriously, he might have used words like "negligence" or "dereliction of duty." Instead he chose "disloyalty." Comey's cardinal sin for Trump wasn't a breach of principle or inability to function in his post. It was not agreeing with the president. Instead of appreciating someone willing to speak truth to him, Trump revels in sycophancy and regards contradiction as betrayal. The emperor doesn't want to know he's naked.

Beyond that, the disrespect shown to the public in the propaganda war over the firing would be depressing if it hadn't become so commonplace already. The administration has pretended that the Clinton investigation was the rationale for firing Comey (it wasn't) and that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein recommended the decision (he didn't, he was brought in to provide a justification for a decision that had already been made). In fact, Rosenstein has already threatened to resign over having his name pushed as part of a false narrative to deflect blame from Trump himself.

The Democrats, in my view, have already made a number of political mistakes in their handling of the situation. Their first instinct was to call unanimously for a special prosecutor appointed by the congress to deal with the Russia investigation, because of the obvious conflicts with Trump appointing someone who will do so. With a few exceptions, Republicans have yet again clung to Trump and defended him. The Democrats' intemperate criticism of Comey during the election exposes them to the charges of hypocrisy levelled by the White House.

By focusing on Russia, they are allowing this to become yet one more partisan issue where it is easy for people to walk to their respective corners and shout at each other. Every time this happens, the stakes of the partisan warfare are raised and the prospects for healing some of our national divides diminish. As important as the Russia investigation is, the misuse of the Presidency is for me far more immediate and alarming. If the director of the FBI can go down for calling out one of Trump's many falsehoods, it's hard to imagine an executive branch official who would be immune from such treatment.

This all points directly to an executive branch that is increasingly ruled by compliance. Career accomplishments, ability, and tenure are of secondary importance to an individual who prizes loyalty and agreement above all else. Not only is this a recipe for very bad government, it directly enhances the already excessive personal authority of the president. It is up to Congress and the courts to limit that authority, and thus far only the courts have shown a willingness to do so.

Whether a breaking point will come where Congress finally sees the need to check a president of the same party I do not pretend to know. With each fresh provocation it seems less likely that anything could shake their complacency. What we can count on is that until and unless he is checked by something Trump will continue to regard the executive branch of government as his personal despotism. To anyone who respects and values the separation of powers and representative government, that should be cause for concern.

The President is Upset By How Congress Works

I have noted repeatedly in this forum that the president has an extremely personal conception of power. Some have said that he is unprincipled, I would say instead that he is aprincipled - getting his way is the only principle he acknowledges. He has always believed that strong people get their way, and he has always been out to prove that he is a strong person. The best. Tremendous.

In this context, it is not difficult to see why he has very little commitment to the institutions of American government. The guiding principle of the Constitution is to make power diffuse. Many individuals and entities in the government have the ability to intitate or block policy changes. Because the people who wrote it were so very afraid of personal despotism, they created a government that would not permit an individual to dominate it.

The government they created stands rather precariously. In the interest of clarity, I do not expect a violent takeover of power in the immediate future by anyone. What I do expect is that the erosion of norms and institutional roles in the government will soon mean that, regardless of whether the institutions themselves survive as entities, they will operate so differently from the design that the resulting government will not function in accordance with its principles.

An interview Trump gave to Fox News recently was illustrative and unsettling. He repeatedly referred to the difficulty in passing legislation as the product of "archaic" rules in the Congress. He said explicitly that he felt it was absurd that he couldn't pass laws with a simple majority in the Senate because of the filibuster. He went on to say that such institutional roadblocks are "bad for the country." He had said a few days earlier that he thought the presidency would be "easier" than his old life.

Trump's response to finding that heading the world's most powerful state is more difficult than a life as a real estate magnate is characteristic. He did not reevaluate his tactics, or consider that his work habits are inimical to success at the level on which he now operates. He blamed the system for being too hard. In evaluating the trade off between maintaining a delicate balance of institutional power nearly 250 years in the making and getting what he wants, he struggles to find merit in the former.

In the current political circumstances such intemperance may seem comically impotent, but it should give us pause that this is the person who legally holds the most powerful office in the land for the next three and a half years, at minimum. Allowing this sort of behavior to be normalized is exactly how we become complicit in the slow undermining of institutional barriers to personalized power. A country need not be a formal dictatorship for an individual to consistently abuse their authority. Understanding how important those barriers really are is the first step to successfully opposing individuls who seek to unduly concentrate power.