The "Me" Presidency

This week, the President of the United States used his ubiquitous Twitter account to promote a series of anti-Muslim videos which are both fraudulent and intentionally inflammatory. He then attacked the British Prime Minister after she saw fit to criticize his use of the videos, which were produced in England. Unsatisfied with this performance, he then suggested that Joe Scarborough, former Republican congressman and co-host of the morning political talk show "Morning Joe" on NBC, was guilty of murdering a staffer in 2001.

There is little that can be said about the actions themselves that has not been said already. It has been suggested by many, including myself, that the president intentionally causes outrage for the sake of obscuring an inconvenient story in the news cycle or shoring up his political base. There is certainly ample evidence that his Twitter account has been put to those uses. But the scattershot nature of Trump's public indiscretions this week suggests anything but a coherent plan.

He seems to regard his impulses as ends in and of themselves. He says precisely what is on his mind with such cringe-worthy regularity that it is as if he thinks, to quote my favorite movie*, that "every thought that tumbles through [his] head is so clever it would be a crime for it not to be published." This is the man who ridiculed John McCain for being captured in Vietnam, suggested that Megyn Kelly's line of questioning was motivated by her menstrual cycle, claimed that Ted Cruz's father was complicit in the Kennedy assassination, engaged in a prolonged feud with the parents of a Muslim solider killed in Iraq over their criticism of his travel ban proposals, and suggested that a judge then trying a case in which he was involved was incompetent to try it because his parents were from Mexico, all before he was even elected.

Since he became president, he has pettily threatened and/or insulted multiple members of his own party who have dared to criticize his antics, claimed the former FBI Director manipulated the results of the Clinton email investigation as part of a personal vendetta, repeatedly accused the Republican special counsel appointed to investigate his presidential campaign of actively taking part in a partisan witch hunt, engaged in personal insults and irresponsibly over-the-top threats of nuclear war against North Korea, and lest we forget he also all but publicly instructed the Justice Department to criminally investigate his erstwhile political opponent.

These various insults, recriminations, tantrums, outbursts, etc. are the behavior of a person whose self-regard is so excessive that it cannot bear contradiction. Disagreement with him is a sign of stupidity, or weakness, or whatever pejorative occurs to him. He can't let conflicts go because he has to be right. He continues to return, unprompted, to how unfairly he feels he has been treated because he honestly thinks that anyone who really knew him would admit how great he is. That attitude has a self-reinforcing quality, as the people around him who want a part of his power shower him with extravagant praise, confirming his self-image.

All of this would be comically grandiose, if a bit pathetic, were he not the President of the United States. But when he is invested with genuine and vast power his qualities are alarming. This is something that we should be talking about constantly, because it is not normal. It has already had effects. Republicans who want to get into his good books compliment him personally in ways that are borderline unseemly as the administration continues to govern chaotically.

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) recently claimed, ludicrously, that Trump was among the best presidents he had served with. Lindsey Graham, who last year called Trump "a kook... not fit to be president," recently lamented "this endless attempt [by the press] to label the guy some kook not fit to be president." When they say these things, they are encouraging a man who has shown a savage disregard for anyone other than himself in his reckless use of his platform as the most powerful man in the country.

They think of it as a trade, giving him power in return for him using it to help them enact their agenda. They will find, to their sorrow and ours, that they are empowering someone who does not have their interests at heart except to the extent that they coincide with his own, and will not tolerate the illusion of shared power.

Getting to the end of this, I feel frustrated. Every single thing I've said here has been said before, by me, on this platform. I'm consistently torn between the compulsion to keep pointing out that this isn't normal - in fact it's dangerous - and the self conscious fear that it has become repetitive, boring, or useless. The evidence continues to mount that Trump has already done and is currently doing irreparable institutional harm to our political system. "Limit the damage!" is hardly an inspiring battle cry, and the constant reminder that damage is being done can be both demoralizing and irritating.

But, unpleasantness notwithstanding, this is something that we have to keep talking about. The conflation of the person and the office, the inability to distinguish political and personal criticism, and the worship of power for its own sake are all dangerous trends that are accelerating under this president. If we are going to pursue a more genuinely democratic and egalitarian society, those trends need to be arrested and eventually reversed.




*The movie, for the curious, is The Social Network. The quote, like the rest of the scintillating dialogue in that film, was written by confirmed screenwriting genius Aaron Sorkin.

The Importance of Net Neutrality

Recently, the FCC announced its intent to repeal net neutrality rules next month. That change would allow internet service providers (ISPs) to charge different rates for different internet services a la carte. While in principle this allows individuals to pay for only the parts of the internet they want to use and potentially save money, it also would allow ISPs to control the packaging and pricing of different portions of the internet, restricting access to those parts of it that it wants to discourage people from seeing.

The purpose of popular government is to enact and enforce such rules as tend to promote the sort of society we want to be. Without social rules that are taken seriously individuals that are physically stronger or more wealthy or better connected or luckier will inevitably, intentionally or unintentionally - but usually intentionally - use the advantages they have been given to tyrannize over their fellows.

I don't intend that to be a damming moral judgment on humanity. With the acknowledgment that all power must by definition be wielded by individuals comes an understanding that the difference between power and tyranny is disconcertingly unclear. Ultimately, I do not believe that those terms are really distinct.

That abstract discussion was meant to illuminate the real reason why net neutrality is such a big deal. It may well be that net neutrality would be repealed and not a great deal would change in the short term. It may be that the rise of politically active markets in recent years would police the activity of ISPs and restrict the unethical exercise of the ability to promote parts of the internet at the expense of others.

But we need to remember that in the economic sphere no less than in the political the granting of power is a guarantee that it will, at some point, be misused. It is a sad characteristic of our time, as it has been of others, that we are far too credulous in giving power to governments or corporations in return for something we want right now. We are, myself included, currently giving information about every salient aspect of our lives to technology companies in return for ease and comfort. We have given vast powers of surveillance to national governments in the hope of avoiding large scale terrorist attacks. We have lived for 16 years in a state of perpetual warfare for the same reason.

I feel very strongly that the repeal of net neutrality is an error of similar magnitude. Allowing ISPs to favor the content they want us to see is to renounce the democratization of information that is the internet's greatest achievement. It would amount to a direct swap of power for convenience.

What such swaps guarantee is that ultimately that power will be used to benefit those to whom we have given it, at our expense. When ISPs are permitted to favor content by charging for its competition, they are in effect manipulating us into picking the products they want as the price of receiving an essential product from them. If the electric company were to upcharge me for not using a Kenmore refrigerator, I would rightfully be outraged. Which refrigerator I use, and why, is none of the electric company's business.

In the same vein, which video streaming service I use is not the ISPs problem. Which news sources I wish to view is likewise not my provider's concern. Humanity itself built the knowledge base and infrastructure that made the internet possible. There is no individual or group of individuals that has the right to influence which parts of it we can feasibly see and use.

Brief Comments on Tuesday's Elections

On Tuesday night, the Democratic Party won an unexpectedly complete victory in the slate of state and local elections. The race for Governor of Virginia, expected to be razor-close, was a comfortable ten percent victory for Democrat Ralph Northam, who was generally acknowledged to have been out-campaigned in the closing days.

There were a number of victories that packed an enormous symbolic wallop. A trans woman defeated the state legislator who sponsored the bathroom bill in Virginia, and a civil rights lawyer was elected District Attorney for Philadelphia, the fifth largest city by population in the country. Such results are a clear indication that the upsurge in local activism protesting the Trump Administration has real electoral potency.

The results from Tuesday have shaken Republicans and emboldened Democrats, who are now turning up the heat on the Republicans' tax cut bill which is still pending in the Congress. Both parties look to the 2018 midterm elections and see a potential blowout, unless there are drastic changes in the political environment in the next year.

State and local elections are particularly interesting in gauging the strength of political movements, because they are the races that require the least help from a national party apparatus to contest successfully. In some of the most impressive victories of the night, establishment backing came to the winning Democrat late or not at all. The victory, plainly, was less the victory of the Democratic Party than it was of the left-leaning grassroots.

Establishments by their very nature, even when they are the farther left of two political parties, are fundamentally conservative in outlook - not in the political sense, but in the sense of being set in their ways and resistant to change. Like all bureaucracies, they bring advantages of efficiency and coordination, but they also bring inefficiencies because the uniformity of thinking they encourage prevents them from taking full advantage of local situations as they arise.

If the Democrats would like to replicate Tuesday's success next year, the party establishment will need to enable the kinds of local efforts that provided this week's signature victories. What the Party should not do is think that they can ride the anti-Trump wave and co-opt it for their own purposes. The Republicans made that mistake when presented with a similar situation in 2009-2010. Their repeated refusal to adopt the grassroots instead of patronizing them lead to the utter disgust among their voters that gave us Donald Trump.

The Democrats will have to learn from that example. There is a tremendous amount of local level energy on the Left to be tapped, but in order to draw from it the Party will have to relinquish some control and allow activists to build a genuine grassroots movement. Few activists on the Left trust the Democratic Party right now, and the Democrats have so much to gain from association with them that making some bold first moves to rebuild trust would be a sound investment politically.