story narrative

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this is part of messaging

SEE NAOMI KLEIN

SEE BIG PICTURE

SEE LONG GAME

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we don't make decisions based on facts but on stories? see reductionist

cf 4 horse dovetail ism pattern match experiment vs phobias; --> coherent story?

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MMA

November 23, 2025, edition of MSNOW's The Weekend

EUGENE DANIELS (MS NOW HOST): Angelo, you spend a lot of time, probably more than anyone at this table, looking through right-wing media apparatus and kind of the world that is happening there. What we keep hearing from folks, whether it's here on MS NOW or other news organizations that are saying there's cracks in the MAGA base because Marjorie Taylor Greene is leaving and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah — but you spend a lot of time — is there actually cracks in the MAGA base, or is this something that we're over reading?

ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): I think that, I wouldn't use the word base, right? The narrative is starting to unravel a little bit, and that's why it seems like there's this chaos or cracks. There is dissension. There certainly is. I mean, part of what we've been dealing with for so long is a consistent narrative coming out of the right-wing media. That's why we call it an echo chamber. And in a way, Trump has been the conductor for that chorus, which has helped him sort of not just have political power, but control the story. And what you're seeing in the last, you know, month or so are these cracks, Marjorie Taylor Greene being one example of that, the Tucker stuff with Nick Fuentes, lots of other examples. And I think what that — there are discrepancies. And I think it is reflective of two things. One, Trump does not have his finger on the zeitgeist the way that he typically does. He just isn't as connected to that audience and that's given him the ability to bob and weave and sort of control them and layer in things and sort of anticipate where it's going and that's why Marjorie Taylor Greene had a leg up on this.

DANIELS: Does it feel different this time? Because we've seen these cracks. You talked about Elon Musk. But like for years, since 2015, we've seen the Republican Party figure out how to love Trump again, whether it's Ted Cruz, who Trump called his wife ugly, to Marco Rubio who's now the secretary of state when he was talking about Trump's hands. Does this time feel different, the cracks, the dissension?

CARUSONE: Yeah, it does, it does. And now that does not mean that Trump is not dangerous. That's not to diminish his political power, his destructiveness. There's clearly a lot of it there. But what's different this time is sort of a much more — a forward looking idea. And they're all sort of looking beyond 2028. I mean, Tucker even did it explicitly, something they don't talk about. He was doing an interview with Paul Dans not that long ago where they were talking about it's time to start thinking about what happens after Trump. But that is like taboo — a year, six months ago, three months ago, that would have been taboo. But now that is a topic that they all want to think about and that's been the difference. So now I think it's fair to call him a lame duck. They would not have called him a lame duck a month ago. And Marjorie Taylor Greene is one part of that storyline unraveling. And I also think it's reflective on the larger media is that we all love a heel turn and we have to be careful.

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an 11 25

In Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, political theorist Laura K. Field explains how "under [President Donald] Trump, post-liberal intellectuals have abandoned tradition for radicalism and scholarship for vulgarity," according to a review in The Atlantic.

"For the past decade or more, the intellectual energy in American politics has been on the right," writes George Packer.

"The MAGA ideologues who provide America’s new ruling elite with any claim to having a world view should be understood as offspring of a shared parentage, not unlike the Lovestoneites, Trotskyites, and Shachtmanites of 1930s and ’40s communism," he continues.

"More reactionary than conservative, their political ancestry is in the underground of the American right — Strom Thurmond, Joseph McCarthy, Patrick Buchanan — rather than the forward-looking Reaganite libertarians who dominated the Republican Party for four decades," he adds.

MAGA's modern hero, Packer says, aren't philosophers or even a Nazi theorist of authoritarianism.

"They share a revulsion toward liberalism and pluralism, which, they believe, have corroded the moral and spiritual fiber of America by accommodating false ideologies and harmful groups. Their modern hero is Viktor Orbán," he writes, of the authoritarian Hungarian president.

Field's book explains how this affects American democracy today.

"The American experiment in egalitarian, multiethnic democracy fills these intellectuals with anxiety, if not loathing," Packer writes.

"As Field notes, they often express undisguised hostility toward women, sexual minorities, the 'woke Marxists' of the left, and the cultural elites of the 'soulless managerial class,'" he explains.

The mood of MAGA intellectuals, Packer notes, is "overwhelmingly negative."

“The movement is, in many respects, untethered from the ordinary decency and common sense that characterize America at its idealistic best, and from the pluralistic reality of the country as it exists today," Fields says.

Packer says that Field's "background perfectly positions her to deliver this lively, devastating taxonomy and critique of MAGA’s ideologues."

"She was originally trained in Straussian scholarship — a reading of classical political thought that criticizes the modern turn away from the sources of moral authority toward liberalism and, in Strauss’s view, nihilism," he explains.

Packer notes that "anti-liberal intellectuals made a Faustian bet that this coarse real-estate developer and reality-TV star would be the vehicle for realizing the Good, the Beautiful, and the True."

"Trump was the strongman brought to bring liberalism to heel,” Field writes.

Packer says that "in attaching themselves to MAGA, they did less to influence the new regime than Trump did to corrupt them."

"The MAGA right has filled a vacuum created by popular disenchantment with globalization, neoliberal economics, mass immigration, political corruption, technological power and democracy itself," Packer adds.

There's one thing Field doesn't have the ability to explain in her book, Packer writes.

"A question that Field touches on but never analyzes in depth is why liberal minds haven’t produced an equally potent answer" to the MAGA right.

"Liberals are in the necessary but untenable position of having to defend democracy from right-wing assault in an age of broad discontent," Packer explains.

"They need their own theorists and influencers, their own institutes and manifestos, to undertake the historic task of not only reversing America’s self-destruction, but showing the next generation why liberal democracy offers the best chance for a good life," he concludes.

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NO LNX

Trump supporters scared into submission because their brains have been hijacked: expert

:{:{John Stoehr May 19, 2025}:

I’m going to make a confession in this introduction to my interview with Jennifer Mercieca, a professor of communication and journalism at Texas A&M. Here it is: I have lost so much trust in democracy that I don’t know how to rebuild trust in democracy. She says that “anyone who supports democracy should work to build trust between people, and between people and the government,” and I just don’t know.

I mean, I used to have faith. Since the conclusion of Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial for the crimes of mutiny and insurrection, I had felt pretty confident that in 2024 most people most of the time could tell the difference between a sandwich and a shit sandwich, and I was pretty confident they could do that, because they already had.

Now, after only months of his second presidency, polls are showing majorities of people, including those who voted for him, don’t like what he’s doing, even though he’s doing what he said he was going to do. At the same time, my liberal brethren are pointing to these same polls as a proof of the tide turning against Trump, seemingly overlooking the implication that hope for democracy rests in the hands of people for whom the future will never come and yesterday never happened.

That said, my interview with Professor Mercieca does rekindle some faith, especially by pointing out that we live in a time of information overload. Everything everywhere seems to happen all at once. In that context, Trump tells a story that “scary outsiders are doing scary things and you should be scared!” Liberals, she said, need to tell a counternarrative, one that works against the grain of that story.

That I can trust. The good work. The good people. May it be so.

JS: Trump says things to suggest he’s the Big Man in charge. Then, sometimes in the same breath, he says he’s not responsible. The Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, for instance. How does the fascist square that?

JM: This is an apparent contradiction, but is easily resolved when you understand that fascist leaders are unaccountable or “cognitively irresponsible” leaders. That means they want to rule over others without being questioned about the success or failure of their policies. They don’t want citizens or media to question their authority or their decisions. They want “because I said so” to end any conversation. So Trump represents himself as all-powerful, but also has many strategies to deflect responsibility so his decisions cannot be questioned.

JS: The electorate voted for the Big Man, but now at least one poll suggests a majority sees him as a “dangerous dictator.” All of this was obvious. Were the founders right to be skeptical of democracy?

JM: I wouldn’t conclude that Trump’s re-election tells us much about the appropriateness of democracy as a form of government or whether the founders were right. They lived in a very slow media environment and they were generally skeptical that the public could get enough information to make good decisions.

Our problem is the opposite, of course. Living in a world with too much information allows propagandists like Trump to manipulate reality. Also, it was very easy to believe that Trump wouldn’t do the things he promised he would do. When he said that he’d be a “dictator on day one,” folks either didn’t believe him, or thought someone or some institution would stop him, or wanted him to be a dictator to solve what they saw as urgent problems. Probably that last group (rightwing authoritarian voters) still support Trump and are happy with his presidency so far.

JS: I have said we’re in a transition, as we were in the 1970s. Back then, it was between the liberal consensus (New Deal, Great Society) and the conservative consensus (Ronald Reagan, neoliberalism). You have also said as much. How do you see it?

JM: Governments around the world are backsliding from stable democracies to authoritarianism. According to V-Dem data, the world is down to levels of democracy not seen since the 1980s, nearly three quarters of the world’s population now live in autocracies. So we live in an era of democratic collapse. We also live in an era of climate catastrophe. And an era of massive societal changes in migration, the economy and communication. These things are related because when things are unstable people look for stability and believe the promises of “strong leaders” who claim they will restore order. Autocrats take advantage of vulnerabilities, and right now we’re vulnerable – in the US and around the world.

JS: I think it is useful to think about Trump in terms of Big Man theory (the Leviathan, as you said recently). The crisis facing democracy seems to be that that’s what Americans want. What do liberals do in your view to fight against that?

JM: Rightwing authoritarians (RWAs) are a significant portion of the electorate (some scholars estimate 35-40 percent of people), but they’re not always “activated” – meaning they don’t always use the RWA framework to think about politics. When RWA are activated, they look to a “strong leader” who promises to restore stability and protect them. These authoritarian “strong leaders” use fear-appeals, outrage-bait and other strategies to cultivate the appearance of instability. These leaders thrive on distrust, cynicism and frustration in a political community and use strategies to try to make all of those democracy-threatening conditions worse. Anyone who supports democracy should work to build trust between people and between people and the government. That doesn’t mean denying that problems exist. It means solving problems and demonstrating trustworthiness.

One more thing. Authoritarianism works because it’s a compelling story: scary outsiders are doing scary things and you should be scared! Unfortunately, fear-appeals work. They hijack our ability to think critically and scare us into submission. Liberals and friends of democracy need to tell a different story, but one that is also compelling. That story needs to unite the nation in a common goal and affirm human dignity. I don’t think “fight fascism” or “fight Trump” are the kinds of messages that can reach tuned out Americans. They might respond to a positive story about America’s future that moves us past identity and cultural issues and talks about how to solve the big structural problems that affect us.

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AN GUK 4 25

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor tell The Guardian that corporate city-states are back in fashion thanks to Trump politics indulging tax-hating millionaires and billionaires to start their own high-tech fiefdoms.

A “glorified gated communit[ies]” like Próspera on a Honduran island and Elon Musk’s distant proposal of “a handful of people and robots eke[ing] out survival on two barren orbs (a radically depleted Earth and a terraformed Mars) appear to be catching on with ultra-wealthy members of the Trump circle.

End-time communities were on the rise in 2023, when a campaigning Donald Trump promised to hold a contest that would lead to the creation of 10 “freedom cities” on federal lands. And since election, “would-be country starters have been on a lobbying blitz, determined to turn Trump’s pledge into reality.” Próspera Chief of Staff Trey Goff called the new energy in DC “absolutely electric, and legislation “paving the way for a bevy of corporate city-states” complete by the end of the year, Klein writes.

It’s a fantasy word evolved from the “doom-prepping” movement of the first Trump administration, only now fueled by ultra-wealthy “religious end-timers.” It also hastens the degradation of the only world humanity realistically has, Klein and Taylor say.

IFrame Content

“Indeed, in a strange twist on the Old Testament tale, Musk and his fellow tech billionaires, having arrogated god-like powers to themselves, aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to cause the flood. Today’s right-wing leaders and their rich allies are not just taking advantage of catastrophes, shock-doctrine and disaster-capitalism style, but simultaneously provoking and planning for them,” says Klein, a Canadian author.

There is no second planet to occupy, however, and reducing humanity to a tiny dome on a distant island or mountain peak requires a commitment to letting a huge swathe of humanity die. So, how do you break the apocalyptic fever?

“… We help each other face the depth of the depravity that has gripped the hard right in all of our countries,” Klein writes. “We must first understand … [that] we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.”

Second, Klein advises countering “their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.”

Read the full Guardian article at this link.

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aha: when real story/reality not acceptable, does not fit Story 1, rw must manufacture alternative fact/story = conspiracy eg (many )

antifa -->

https://www.mediamatters.org/newsmax/newsmax-host-suggests-democrats-may-have-set-january-6-insurrection

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an 4 25

In politics, the word "ideologue" can have a very negative connotation, describing someone who has an extremely rigid set of beliefs. An ideologue could be anyone from a far-right Christian nationalist to a far-left Maoist or Marxist-Leninist.

Politico neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod addresses that type of rigidity in her new book, "The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking," which she discussed with the New York Times' Matt Richtel in a Q&A interview published on April 8.

When Richtel asked Zmigrod what "ideology" is, she responded, "It’s a narrative about how the world works and how it should work. This potentially could be the social world or the natural world. But it’s not just a story: It has really rigid prescriptions for how we should think, how we should act, how we should interact with other people."

Zmigrod continued, "An ideology condemns any deviation from its prescribed rules…. Ideologies satisfy the need to try to understand the world, to explain it. And they satisfy our need for connection, for community, for just a sense that we belong to something."

During the interview, Zmigrod described research on children.

"Liberal children," according to Zmigrod, "tended to recall more accurately the ratio of desirable and undesirable traits in the characters of the story" — whereas the "most ideologically-minded children incorporated fictions that confirmed their pre-existing biases."

"The people most prone to ideological thinking tend to resist change or nuance of any kind," Zmigrod told Richtel. "We can test this with visual and linguistic puzzles. For instance, in one test, we ask them to sort playing cards by various rules, like suit or color. But suddenly, they apply the rule, and it doesn't work. That's because, unbeknownst to them, we changed the rule."

===

an 12 24

no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/americas-story/

alternet

Trump has offered extreme versions of America's four basic stories

Robert Reich December 12, 2024

Democrats are finally waking up to the fact that Trump Republicans have succeeded in framing issues to their advantage. While it’s true that Kamala Harris lost by a small margin, the overriding reality is that through many elections, Democrats have failed to speak to America in ways that most Americans understand.

The challenge facing Democrats is deeper than simply finding the right words and phrases. To win back the heart and soul of America, Democrats must retell the four basic stories that have defined and animated the United States since its founding.

For most of the 20th century, Democrats did this instinctively. But in this century, they have tended to speak in technocratic terms, giving Republicans — culminating in Trump — the dominant political narrative.

I want to tell you about how the four basic American stories have been told and explain why it’s urgent that the real story of our era be told: that wealth and power concentrated at the top are corrupting American democracy and shafting most working people.

There are four essential American stories. The first two are about hope; the second two are about fear.

The Triumphant Individual. This is the tale of the little guy who works hard, takes risks, believes in himself, and eventually gains wealth, fame, and honor.

It’s the story of self-made people who buck the odds, spurn the naysayers, and show what can be done with enough gumption and guts. They’re plainspoken, self-reliant, and uncompromising in their ideals — underdogs who make it through hard work and faith in themselves.

Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography is the first in a long line of U.S. self-help manuals about how to make it through self-sacrifice and diligence. The same story is epitomized in the life of Abe Lincoln, born in a log cabin, who believed that “the value of life is to improve one’s condition.”

The identical theme was captured in Horatio Alger’s hundred or so novellas, whose heroes all rise promptly and predictably from rags to riches. It’s celebrated in the tales of immigrant peddlers who become millionaire tycoons. And it’s found in the manifold stories of downtrodden fighters who undertake dangerous quests and find money and glory. Think Rocky Balboa, Norma Rae, and Erin Brockovich. The moral: With enough effort and courage, anyone can make it in the United States.

Trump wants Americans to think of him as the Triumphant Individual, and he has extolled others, such as JD Vance and Elon Musk, as similarly triumphant.

The Benevolent Community. This is the story of neighbors and friends who roll up their sleeves and pitch in for the common good.

Its earliest formulation was John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity,” delivered on board a ship in Salem Harbor just before the Puritans landed in 1630 — a version of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, in which the new settlers would be “as a City upon a Hill,” “delight in each other,” and be “of the same body.”

Similar communitarian and religious images were used by the abolitionists, suffragettes, and civil rights activists of the 1950s and 1960s. “I have a dream that every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low,” said Martin Luther King Jr., extolling the ideal of the national community.

The story is captured in the iconic New England town meeting, in frontier settlers erecting one another’s barns, in neighbors volunteering as firefighters and librarians, and in small towns sending their high school achievers to college and their boys off to fight foreign wars. It suffuses Norman Rockwell’s paintings and Frank Capra’s movies. Consider the last scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” when George learns he can count on his neighbors’ generosity and goodness, just as they had always counted on him.

Trump Republicans have distorted the story of the Benevolent Community to show what America would be without “woke”ism, Critical Race Theory, transgender kids using bathrooms or being on high school sports teams inconsistent with their sex assigned at birth, “cat ladies” who choose not to have children, and other cultural bogeymen.

The Mob at the Gates. In this story, the United States is a beacon light of virtue in a world of darkness, uniquely blessed but continuously endangered by foreign menaces. Hence our endless efforts to contain the barbarism and tyranny beyond our borders.

Daniel Boone fought Native Americans — white America’s first evil empire. Davy Crockett battled Mexicans. The same story is found in the Whigs’ anti-English and pro-tariff histories of the United States, in the anti-immigration harangues of the late 19th century, and in World War II accounts of Nazi and Japanese barbarism.

It animates modern epics about space explorers (often sporting the stars and stripes) battling alien creatures bent on destroying the world. The narrative gave special force to Cold War tales during the 1950s of an international communist plot to undermine U.S. democracy, and subsequently of “evil” empires and axes.

The underlying lesson: We must maintain vigilance, lest diabolical forces overwhelm us.

Trump and his Republican enablers have emphasized this story to scare Americans into believing we’re being overridden by undocumented immigrants and taken advantage of by foreign nations who are allied with us and major trading partners.

The Rot at the Top. The last story concerns the malevolence of powerful elites. It’s a tale of corruption, decadence, and irresponsibility in high places — of conspiracy against the common citizen.

It started with King George III, and, to this day, it shapes the way we view government — mostly with distrust.

The great bullies of American fiction have often symbolized Rot at the Top: William Faulkner’s Flem Snopes, Willie Stark as the Huey Long-like character in All the King’s Men, Lionel Barrymore’s demonic Mr. Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and the antagonists who hound the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath.

Suspicions about Rot at the Top have inspired what historian Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style in U.S. politics — from the pre-Civil War Know-Nothings and Anti-Masonic movements through the Ku Klux Klan and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts.

The myth has also given force to the great populist movements of U.S. history, from Andrew Jackson’s attack on the Bank of the United States in the 1830s through William Jennings Bryan’s prairie populism of the 1890s.

Trump and his Republicans have used this story against government workers, civil servants, independent agencies, the FBI, and other examples of a so-called “deep state.”

Speak to these four stories and you resonate with the tales Americans have been telling each other since our founding — the two hopeful stories rendered more vivid by contrast to the two fearful ones.

These four mental boxes are always going to be filled somehow, because people don’t think in terms of isolated policies or issues. If they’re to be understandable, policies and issues must fit into these larger stories about where we have been as a nation, what we are up against, and where we should be going.

Major shifts in governance — in party alignments and political views — have been precipitated by one party or the other becoming better at telling these four stories.

In the early decades of the 20th century, progressives and Democrats filled all four boxes.

They accused leaders of big business of being the Rot at the Top. They argued that the large industrial concentrations of the era, the trusts, were stifling the upward mobility of millions of potential Triumphant Individuals and poisoning democracy.

During his 1912 campaign, Woodrow Wilson (who also promoted racism) promised to wage

“a crusade against powers that have governed us ... that have limited our development, that have determined our lives, that have set us in a straitjacket to do as they please.”

The struggle to break up the trusts would be nothing less than “a second struggle for emancipation,” by a national Benevolent Community intent on restoring freedom and democracy.

Wilson’s Mob at the Gates was composed of the large, bellicose states of prewar Europe who posed similar challenges to democratic freedoms. Wilson grimly rallied Americans to “defeat once and for all ... the sinister forces” that rendered peace impossible.

Theodore Roosevelt shared Wilson’s antipathy toward trusts, but by the 1920s, Republicans were mostly apologists for big business and Wall Street. That was okay with Americans as long as the economy roared, but it left the Grand Old Party vulnerable in harder times, which soon came.

Like today’s Trump Republicans, the GOP’s approach to foreign policy through most of the 20th century was mainly to avoid the Mob at the Gates — close the doors to immigrants, erect tariff walls, and isolate the nation.

They celebrated the wealth of Triumphant Individuals but didn’t champion upward mobility or equal opportunity, and they offered no particular view of the United States as a Benevolent Community. As such, they stayed firmly in the minority most of the first half of the 20th century.

The Great Depression and World War II presented the United States with palpable illustrations of the Democratic stories.

By the 1930s, the Rot at the Top included Wall Street as well as big business. In the 1936 presidential campaign, Franklin D. Roosevelt warned against “economic royalists” who had impressed the whole of society into service. “The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor ... these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship,” he warned. What was at stake, he concluded, was nothing less than the “survival of democracy.”

To cope with the Depression, Americans needed a national Benevolent Community. “I see one third of our nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” FDR told a nation whose citizens clearly understood they were all in this together. He described the purpose of the New Deal as “extending to our national life the old principle of the local community.” “We are determined,” Roosevelt said, “to make every American citizen the subject of his country’s interest and concern.”

The Social Security Act was not just a social insurance scheme but the very symbol of national solidarity. Henceforth, all American families would share the risk of becoming unemployed or losing the family’s breadwinner or retiring without adequate savings.

Then came Adolf Hitler’s war, which cemented this national unity as FDR led the country — over the objections of Republican isolationists — into battle with the most fearsome Mob at the Gates it had ever encountered.

Democrats managed the transition from Depression and world war to postwar prosperity and the Cold War with only slight alterations in story line. The Benevolent Community remained at the core of Harry S Truman’s Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

The upwardly mobile Triumphant Individual depended on federal provisions — the GI Bill, government-backed mortgages, a guarantee of equal civil rights.

Meanwhile, the Democrats continued their assault on the Mob at the Gates, but now the Mob was the dangerous and expansive Soviet Union. Truman stopped the communists in Korea. Kennedy stopped them in Berlin and during the Cuban missile crisis. And he tried to stop them in Vietnam, which he saw as “the finger in the dike” holding back the Soviets.

Johnson, of course, tragically tried and failed to erect a dam against the North Vietnamese and their patrons.

While Republicans continued to wrestle with the isolationists and nervous Nellies — such as Senator Robert Taft of Ohio — Democrats spoke of paying any price and bearing any burden to protect the United States.

In the 1960s, the Rot at the Top gradually dropped out of the Democratic message. Gone were tales of greedy businessmen and unscrupulous financiers.

This was partly because the economy had changed profoundly. Postwar prosperity allowed the middle class to explode in size and the gap between rich and poor to shrink. White-collar workers were now abundant, and blue-collar workers got generous wage increases that could be absorbed by the huge postwar market.

Rot at the Top rhetoric was also a casualty of the Vietnam War, which spawned an anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian New Left and split Democrats down the middle.

For many liberals, the Rot came to be personified by Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and even the federal government itself. (Ironically, Richard Nixon’s White House and the Watergate scandal would hurt the Democrats, too, by confirming that the Rot at the Top was to be found in government rather than among business elites.)

The Vietnam War also undermined Democrats’ confidence about the Mob at the Gates. Soviet communism remained dangerous, to be sure, but the McGovern wing of the party had no clear plan of action. Indeed, its approach seemed redolent of the Republican isolationists of the earlier part of the century, who wanted the United States simply to turn its back on the Mob.

After President Carter and the hostage crisis, even when Democrats did try to tell this story, they seemed uncertain of themselves.

In short, Democrats and progressives came off as confused and conflicted about the dangers the United States faced. They stopped talking about both the Rot at the Top and the Mob at the Gates and thus ceased giving Americans convincing stories about what the nation was up against.

Tomorrow, in Part 2, I discuss why the Democrats left Trump to tell his fake version of the Rot at the Top, not the real one.

NOW READ: A reckoning is coming for the people who didn't care about their country

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

===

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STORY (btw left/commie infidels who do not believe this story of Am exceptionalism hate america /freedom and want destroy/supplant it}:

see strict fr

see god/devil terms

cf 4 horse dovetail ism pattern match experiment vs phobias; --> coherent story?

---

aha stories are tribal // echo boost ampl by soc med:

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/here-s-why-anti-vaxxers-appear-more-likely-to-embrace-unproven-drugs-report/

Anti-vaxxers, often motivated by baseless conspiracy theories, have a long history of questioning the work of the scientific community while discrediting medical breakthroughs. However, there is also a bizarre phenomenon of these same people having no qualms about embracing unproven drugs.

In fact, reports began circulating in September when anti-vax residents in Mississippi began using the anti-parasital drug Ivermectin as an alternative treatment for COVID. Since the drug is typically used to treat animals, it is strongly opposed to human consumption. So why would people who are deeply critical of medicine and the scientific community be open to trying unproven drugs?

Vox reporter Dylan Scott explores the mind-boggling hypocrisy behind it. Speaking to the publication, a number of psychological experts offered their take on the situation. Jay Van Bavel, director of New York University's Social Identity and Morality Lab, explained the psychology behind how people convince themselves to believe things that are known to be false.

"When you really want to believe something — like 'you can't trust the vaccines' — you'll come up with any number of rationalizations," Van Bavel said. "It's like whack-a-mole. You falsify one premise and they just create a new one."

Van Bavel also highlighted the irony of anti-vaxxers' stance and how it doesn't add up.

"On the face of it, it doesn't make sense that you don't trust doctors and science, but then the next moment, you're sharing news about some other medical cure and taking that and putting it in your body," said Van Bavel. "These are not trivial beliefs. These are some of the most significant decisions you can make in a once-in-a-century pandemic."

Scott also explained how difficult it is for new information to be presented in areas where people are predominantly skeptical about vaccinations.

"New information isn't necessarily treated as an opportunity to reassess their beliefs," Scott wrote. "Instead, new facts are seen either as affirmation of what this community already believes or as a distraction that should be dismissed because it doesn't neatly sort into their anti-vaccine narrative."

David Dunning, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan also offered a similar opinion. "People listen to people 'from their group' and whom they think they can trust,"Dunning said. "People really don't know what science is, and so do you feel you can trust the person giving you advice, rather than appraising their expertise, becomes the thing."

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capitalism built on myth/story /schama of spot transaction/barter, not found in real world?

aha: trump is just apotheosis: invis hand me vs we short vs long term: $ = winner, vs losers who deserve poverty, corruption/crony capitalism is natural inevitable outcome

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// metaphor; immune sys digestive sys goes on overdrive?

aha: reduction = retaliation = transaction [extraction is just a more extreme form where other has no power] INEQUALITY

terministic screen/tunnel vision limits to small number of visible things right here and now self-ish vs larger complex system/ long term; also zero sum

long term means more entities, more events thus more complexity (tho a story can simplify/screen/ change emphasis, make a pattern (even where none exists, eg qanon) thus meaning, which then acts as term screen filter to repell conflicting/anomalous/dissonance info ); but fills vacuum need, that previously would have been filled by experts/textbooks/teachers/leaders/pastors?

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aha: reduction = retaliation = transaction

terministic screen/tunnel vision limits to small number of visible things right here and now vs larger complex system/ long term

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/americas-enemies-perceive-weakness-in-donald-trump-foreign-policy-expert-explains-how-the-president-squandered-us-exceptionalism/

no lnx audio

c de v

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aha: reduction = retaliation = transaction

terministic screen/tunnel vision limits to small number of visible things right here and now self-ish vs larger complex system/ long term; also zero sum

long term means more entities, more events thus more complexity (tho a story can simplify/screen/ change emphasis, make a pattern thus meaning, which then acts as term screen filter to repell conflicting/anomalous/dissonance info )

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/americas-enemies-perceive-weakness-in-donald-trump-foreign-policy-expert-explains-how-the-president-squandered-us-exceptionalism/

no lnx audio

c de v

bot line chaotic makes him weak/played

president of the United States takes the following oath at his or her inauguration: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Donald Trump has repeatedly betrayed this promise, and should long since have been removed from office for doing so.

The Constitution deems that the president is commander in chief of the military. As revealed in famed journalist Bob Woodward’s new book “Rage”, Donald Trump believes that members of the U.S. military who have been wounded or killed in battle are “suckers” and “losers” for not being as selfish and cowardly as he is. Trump also believes that disabled veterans should not be seen in public because they somehow shame or embarrass the country.

Trump also has no respect for the United States military’s role as defender of the country’s democracy from threats both foreign and domestic. To that end, he attempted to order military commanders to attack Americans who were (and are) exercising their constitutionally-guaranteed civil rights by protesting against his regime in response to the police killing of George Floyd, as well as in support of social justice more generally.

Fortunately, military commanders put the institutional legitimacy of the armed forces ahead of the president’s whims by deflecting his orders. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has also apologized for appearing alongside Trump on the streets of Washington.

Trump has repeatedly suggested that he is likely ignore the results of the 2020 election, and may seek to use the military to quell protests or other acts of resistance, perhaps by invoking the Insurrection Act.

Trump has also pardoned accused or convicted war criminals because he idolizes cruelty and lawlessness. Trump and his regime, in fact, views war criminals as useful tools in his authoritarian campaign against American democracy.

Many of the United States’ most senior retired military personnel, members of the intelligence community and diplomats, as well as other elites in the national defense community, have publicly condemned Donald Trump as an extreme threat to the country’s safety, security and democracy.

Overall, Donald Trump has made the United States less safe, less respected, less powerful, less influential, and less respected as a world power. In the Age of Trump and the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. has become a pariah nation, shamed before the world.

Is there any strategic logic to Trump’s decision-making about the United States and its role in the world? How do Trump’s ignorance, selfishness and authoritarian beliefs, combined with his conviction that his own personal interests are identical to the nation’s, imperil our safety and security? Does the Trump regime’s contempt for the truth and empirical reality endanger the long-term future of our nation?

In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Jim Sciutto, CNN’s chief national security correspondent and co-anchor of “CNN Newsroom.” Sciutto previously served as ABC News’ senior foreign correspondent and during his extensive career has reported from more than 50 countries, including Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. His new book is “The Madman Theory: Trump Takes on the World.”

At the end of this conversation Sciutto warns that the consensus among many of the country’s senior defense and intelligence professionals is that Donald Trump idolizes Vladimir Putin, and is somehow personally bound to him. If this is true, Trump’s fealty to a foreign leader has fatally compromised his ability to make decisions in the best interests of the United States and the American people.

You can also listen to my conversation with Jim Sciutto on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below.

How are you feeling, given all that is happening and has happened with Donald Trump and his administration?

I’m feeling stress for my country. That is not a political sentiment. I love my country. I’ve spent a lot of time outside of it for professional reasons. As a foreign correspondent, you end up loving America more because you live in places where they do not have our freedoms or institutions, many of which we take for granted. When I see those institutions being undermined here in the United States and people losing confidence in their own country, I am very concerned. I am still an optimist, but there is much to be concerned about here in the United States because of Donald Trump and all that has happened.

How does America look from abroad?

:{:{}:

There is not a lot of respect right now for the United States. I do not want to overstate that because, frankly, there are many countries in the world with much bigger problems than this country right now.

For example, the COVID outbreak. The U.S. has certainly been one of the worst in terms of responding to it. That is not a political statement. It is based on the data. Europe is doing much better for example than the United States with the pandemic and its deadly consequences and other problems.

The state of the country’s political discourse is also not good. Is the United States able to solve problems in the way it did not too long ago? Pew polling shows that the world’s opinion of the United States has greatly diminished. The world is viewed much worse than it was during another low point, which was during George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

How are career diplomats and other public servants reacting to the Trump regime and its assaults on norms and values? These are government professionals who have served in multiple administrations. How are they making sense of this tumult?

Here is what is different. There have always been disagreements about policy and how best to accomplish those goals. What is different now is that there is an assault on the truth. There is not an agreed-upon set of facts. At first, I thought that maybe having to confront a pandemic would do that. Another example would be Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. There was a bipartisan judgment that Russia interfered, and that the Russians did so to help Trump win.

It came out of committees, as well as the intelligence agencies. Trump attacked those findings and took them personally. That was a consensus not just of a bipartisan committee but the country’s intelligence community as well. Intelligence findings can be attacked more easily because it is still a matter of interpretation.

But in the middle of a pandemic, there are hard facts. People are dying. You can count the number of people dying. You can count and document the positive infection rates.

You can count the number of infections. One can easily disprove Donald Trump’s claims that cases are only rising because there is more testing, because the percentage of people testing positive is also going up. But not in this environment where even the facts are disputed. Conspiracy theories existed well before Donald Trump, but he has super-turbocharged them to the point where they are leaking more and more into mainstream conversation. Democracy cannot operate without an agreed-upon set of facts and the country is miles down that rabbit hole right now.

:{:{}:

Does Donald Trump have an ideology? Is his administration guided by some overriding principle that orients its approach to the world?

:{:{}:

He has an approach and a view of the world. It is an open question as to whether he has a strategy — and that is a question raised by people who worked for him. For my new book, I spoke only to people who worked for Trump and were appointed by him at the highest levels.

:{:{}:

When I asked those officials to describe Trump’s view of the world it was described as transactional: “What can you do for me? I scratch your back. You scratch mine.” Trump has done that equally with adversaries and allies. Trump has no worldview beyond that. There is no understanding of the ancillary benefit of friendships and alliances.

[Former national security adviser] H.R. McMaster told me how much trouble he had convincing Trump that there was more to alliances than just some sort of quid pro quo bottom line. These include shared history, shared values, a shared interest in the rule of law, sharing of intelligence to fight terrorism and other understandings. Trump does not see the world and alliances in that way. As such, Donald Trump will just as easily upend a friendship as he will antagonize a competitor. The United States is on a path of confrontation with China. But the United States also has highly antagonistic relationships now with our closest allies in Europe. With South Korea, the president is demanding they quintuple their contribution to the deployment of U.S. forces there and is threatening to take those forces away in the midst of the worsening standoff with North Korea.

Or even consider Canada, arguably one of our closest allies. Trump has used national security powers to impose economic sanctions on them including tariffs. In essence, Donald Trump has labeled Canada a national security threat.

Donald Trump does not read. He is proudly ignorant. He is a malignant narcissist. How is it even possible to have a coherent foreign policy with such a president?

Trump’s national security advisers knew and realized that he was not reading any of the briefing notes. So early on, McMaster’s team came up with the idea of boiling the briefings down to note cards with just three bullet points, thinking that would get through to Trump....

---

aha 820 entrepreneur as CONCEPT/GOD TERM: sparked by rnc convention: entre is also a GOD term, ties into Yankee ingenuity/ am exceptionalism sil valley garage mystique: affirms meritocrisy [sic] that racism will fix itself when AA POC start small biz that expand (cain godfather pizza 999 RIP?] overlooking the fact that redlining by gov't and banks deprived of capital for decades; but of course you have to get rid of burdensome regulation/red tape that stiffle [when in fact corps/amazon will use data to steal your idea/product and crush you or buy you out. small biz and gig economy means own boss thus in control thus = freedom --> fix for INEQUALITY THUS RACISM

but of course to be an entre you must have skills/a good education but socialist dems want to trap poor kids in failing public/gov't schools to serve big corrupt union bosses, so devos waNts FREEDOM TO CHOOSE/SHOP voucher/charter b/c free mkt will create better schools [vs suck/extract from big part of public budget/ schools are the COMMONS THAT MADE DEMOC AND PROSPERITY POSSIBLE; --> scam online virtual classes [jail the blk girl who refuses pointless jumpthruhoop fill in the blank

aha: concept of control = freedom, loss of control = slavery

commies want to control your mind, your actions, your energy use (as a way of controlling your behavior)

control is also law and order, which the strict father must impose/ punish transgression because children / POC do not have discipline (or intelligence) to control their own actions/base impulses

order is enforcement of hierarchy; the job of the strict father is to instill discipline in sons who can handle it and marry off daughter, outsource/delegate the job of control/disc of women

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/rnc-review-speakers-described-an-alternate-reality-in-which-chaos-and-violence-of-the-trump-era-is-joe-bidens-fault/

no lnx twt

RNC review: Speakers described an alternate reality in which chaos and violence of the Trump era is Joe Biden’s fault

---

Once Upon a Time the pilgrims were being discriminated against [by a Prot?] King geo III, so like good entrpreneur/pioneer/explorers they sailed to New World discovered by Columbus to bring God to America; friends w/ Nat Am first thxgiving, Boston Tea Party no Tax w/o rep, Lexington Minutemen militia w/ musket beat dumb/dainty Redcoats, Dec Indep, Sacred Const by Founding fathers all men created equal, gave th gift of democ/freedom/light to world,

undergd railroad, civil war for states rights (freedom from gubmint tyranny; rebs underdogs fought well but beat (by industrial/banker?) north, emanc proc freed slaves, reconciliation, all americans.

Railroads, robber barons fixed by trustbuster Teddy; we stayed out of endless pointless Eur wars, till WWI (WW promised to keep out in ca,pign) now war to make world sagfe for democ? war to end all wars [jail/deport reds who said war for capital/bosses via espionage act]. Yanks won war, no L of N but after Gt Depression we won WWII [UN? boo] became superpower vs USSR; Reagan thatcher won the cold war, socialism forever discredited, some tyrants manage to hold on Cuba and even export to S Am Chavez and Central Am [guate coup 1954, Iran year before]; MLK > Malcolm/panthers fixes racism; Contras beat by Ollie and Reagan; End of History, Free Mkt fundamentalism Ayn Rand Greenspan. tax and spend liberal dems cripple our economy with regulations to solve non-existent problems like asbestos, carcinogens, AGW [Heartland says hoax, reverse engineer, Agenda 21 comie one world plot to take our freedom]

unions are corrupt and hinder economy; teachers unions control dems and trap our/POC kids in failing schools; a few bad cops shot AA men, but look they shoot each other all the time selling drugs; Blue Lives matter, Biden and KH want to get rid of cops, so no protection so you need a GUN.[also to fight off gov't tyrannt like woam dem gov of Mich who takes away your Const freedom by forcing you to wear a mask, worst kind of nanny state;

Biden son corrupt, sol us out to ChiCom who sent covid virus, which djt quickly took action by shutting border // caravan/muslim; he created prosperity by rolling back regulations and gave massive tax cut to the job creators; the lazy/dumb/sinful deserve to be poor; [opportunity zone actually real estate scam for rich?]

but now the godless commies have come back for your guns, and the gov't will destroy your white quality of life suburbs by rezoning low quality apts (which bring low quality POC criminals/gangster] who will make you unsafe and drive down the value of your house/property/equit/ retirement nest egg.

trump the strong man/strict fr will protect us from godless irrational muslim extremeist jihadi terrorists, the brown horde at southern border WALL and from antifa extrmeisty terrorists who want to loot and burn even small biz of POC entre.

dems will let crims out of jail. invite MS13 into suburbs, coddle anarchists/antifa; trump will send in the tough guys to restore law and order/control, put those ppl back in their place [and deploy at polls to ensure not rigged/cheating]

BLM is identity politics, put me at head of line give me a handout i do not deserve b/c i'm lazy; worst form is reparations for sin of slavery [nikki h at UN tyrants defy us and then demand $, a lot of it that we could use to build our country MAGA]

trump master negotiator will make better deal (nafta the worst deal in the history of the world don jr rnc], NATO pay fair share we will not be chumps to freeloaders.

this story has to explain how we lost power/prestige/leadership/prospeirty and how we will get it back

---

aha: concept of control = freedom, loss of control = slavery

commies want to control your mind, your actions, your energy use (as a way of controlling your behavior)

control is also law and order, which the strict father must impose/ punish transgression because children / POC do not have discipline (or intelligence) to control their own actions/base impulses

order is enforcement of hierarchy; the job of the strict father is to instill discipline in sons who can handle it and marry off daughter, outsource/delegate the job of control/disc of women

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/rnc-review-speakers-described-an-alternate-reality-in-which-chaos-and-violence-of-the-trump-era-is-joe-bidens-fault/

no lnx twt

RNC review: Speakers described an alternate reality in which chaos and violence of the Trump era is Joe Biden’s fault

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon August 25, 2020 Commentary

The first night of the Republican National Convention featured a diverse lineup that defended President Donald Trump from charges of racism, even as other speakers sought to stoke racial fears and push conspiracy theories.

The convention, largely consisting of a mix of live and pre-taped speeches before an empty auditorium, appeared to take place in an alternate reality where Trump had successfully beaten back the coronavirus pandemic, and where the protests, violence and racial division seen during Trump’s presidency would only get worse Democratic nominee Joe Biden is elected. It was a wildly dishonest night, with the New York Times fact-checking team counting at least 30 false and misleading claims.

“This one half-night of Republican programming so far has been exponentially more dishonest than the entire four nights of the Democratic convention,” wrote CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale.

While Republicans insisted that their convention would be optimistic, and headliners like former UN ambassador Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina delivered speeches on the promise of America that could have taken place under any other Republican president, the tone of the night was dark and the theme was racial fear-mongering.

The night kicked off with a speech by Charlie Kirk, founder of the right-wing student group Turning Point USA, who described Trump as a “bodyguard of Western civilization” — a common white nationalist dog whistle — who is defending America against a “vengeful mob that seeks to destroy our way of life, our neighborhoods, schools, churches and values.”

Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio gave a speech riddled with falsehoods accusing Democrats of stoking “crime, violence, and mob rule.” Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, one of Trump’s most loyal followers in Congress, bizarrely warned that Democrats will “disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home, and invite MS-13 to live next door.”

Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who threatened Black Lives Matter supporters with guns, delivered a gloomy, downbeat chat accusing “radical Democrats” of trying to destroy the suburbs.

“They are not satisfied with spreading the chaos and violence into our communities. They want to abolish the suburbs altogether by ending single-family home zoning,” Patricia McCloskey said. “This forced rezoning would bring crime, lawlessness and low-quality apartments into thriving suburban neighborhoods.

“These are the policies that are coming to a neighborhood near you,” she added. “So make no mistake: No matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America.”

These divisive speeches were interspersed between people of color who insisted that neither Trump, the Republican Party nor the nation had a problem with racism.

:{:{}:

Former NFL player Herschel Walker — who once played for the New Jersey Generals, a long-gone USFL team owned by Trump — said it “hurt my soul” to hear people call Trump “racist,” noting their long friendship. Haley, speaking of her own experience as the daughter of Indian immigrants, said that “America is not a racist country” but a “work in progress.”

Scott, the night’s keynote speaker, [heh appt by nikki] delivered a powerful speech on the promise of America and his own experiences with racism. Scott urged viewers to “not look simply at what the candidates say” before listing a number of remarks made by Biden to suggest that he, and not Trump, would ignore minority communities. Scott repeatedly insisted that Biden wants to turn the U.S. into a “socialist utopia,” which would be news to Biden and the progressive primary challenges who repeatedly criticized him for being too conservative.

But while the headliners tried to ignore the division stoked by Trump since long before he launched his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, former Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle, stole the show with stunningly dark and loud diatribes that prompted viewers to question whether cocaine was involved.

Guilfoyle, who earns $180,000 per year from the Trump campaign, shouted an amped-up speech into the empty auditorium comparing Democrats to socialistsin Cuba and Venezuela. Guilfoyle, who was formerly married to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, claimed that Democrats (including her ex-husband, apparently) had turned California into a “land of discarded heroin needles in parks, riots in streets and blackouts in homes.”

“They want to control what you see and think and believe so that they can control how you live,” she warned. “They want to enslave you to the weak, dependent liberal victim ideology to the point that you will not recognize this country or yourself.”

“Biden, Harris and the rest of the socialists will fundamentally change this nation,” she continued. “They want open borders, closed schools, dangerous amnesty, and will selfishly send your jobs back to China while they get rich. They will defund, dismantle and destroy America’s law enforcement. When you are in trouble and need police, don’t count on the Democrats.”

Donald Trump Jr. gave a speech touting his father’s response to the pandemic, albeit one that was entirely detached from reality.

He claimed that the president had “acted quickly,” even though Trump spent the crucial early weeks downplaying the threat, and that the administration had delivered supplies to “hospitals that needed them most,” even though the Health and Human Services Department’s inspector general found rampant shortages of vital supplies. Six months into the pandemic, such equipment remains in short supply.

:{:{}:

The night also featured segments in which Trump hyped hydroxychloroquine, a drug that has repeatedly been found ineffective in treating the coronavirus, and a video that touted Trump’s “rapid policy changes” in the face of the pandemic.

MSNBC broke away from the broadcast to fact-check the claims.

“To say that 170,000 souls lost in our country up to now is a success by any measure is fantasy,” Dr. Vin Gupta, a disease expert at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, said during the segment. “It’s disrespectful to the families who lost loved ones, to frontline clinicians who put their lives at risk. It’s just fantasy. It’s propaganda.”

During another segment, Trump spoke with a group of Americans who had been freed from overseas prisons, including pastor Andrew Brunson, who was arrested by Turkey during President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s purge following an unsuccessful coup attempt.

“To me, President Erdogan was very good,” Trump told the pastor, who was detained for two years.

Though all of the major news networks break away during portions of the convention for analysis and ads, Fox News host Sean Hannity warned his viewers that “the media won’t cover large parts of the RNC that we’ll be showing.”

:{:{}:

Twitter users couldn’t help but notice that Fox News actually aired fewer segments from the convention than CNN and MSNBC. Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Parscale, tweeted his complaints at Fox News.

:{:{}:

“Can’t believe I have to watch the convention on @CNN,” he wrote. “Unbelievable.”

---

...cody f an 820

flesh out bizman SCHEMA?

Do you have any theory of why Trump still polls relatively well on the economy?

First off, his numbers have slipped on the economy. They used to be his strongest suit — I think they still are his strongest, but I’ve seen several polls this summer where he had fallen even or fallen behind Biden on economic questions.

I think the president is a very good economic storyteller. And a lot of people who support him — not just his white working-class base, but a lot of his Republican donor class — still really buys this idea of his approach of low taxes, low regulations. And there’s perhaps varying degrees of buy-in to his trade policies. But there’s this idea that he had a business acumen that could get the country back going.

And I think a lot of people underrated that narrative in its ability to capture voters in 2016, and I think it’s very sticky for people. And he’s also just relentlessly selling the idea that the economy is doing well. The vice president the other day was on television the other day bragging that they had created more jobs in two months than Obama had created in his presidency. That is chutzpah! But it is relentless messaging. I don’t think there’s any sorcery behind why the president’s popular on the economy — I think he’s relentlessly selling the idea that he’s good on the economy, and for a long time he had the levels on low unemployment to sell that.

And even now — there’s been no reshoring of jobs from China — [but] you still see people telling pollsters that they think he brought back a lot of jobs. And I just think that’s really effective political messaging.

So I wanted to get to the core idea of the book, as I interpreted it, that the president and much of the media push this false idea that there’s a zero-sum competition between white, male working-class workers and a lot of other groups. Can you summarize what you think is the best evidence against that idea?

I think there’s a lot of evidence against that idea...

aha/doh see novels! BLM 1619 Project invite a questioning of am exceptionalism/chosen by God to spread freedom vs colonial/racist/PIC

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/white-evangelicalism-is-in-decline-and-qanon-could-take-its-place/

Remember the “Left Behind” series [story], about how the Rapture would whisk away all devout right-wing Christians before Jesus Christ unleashed the apocalypse on the unbelievers? Purity rings? Jesus Camp? Breathless stories about “girls gone mild,” giving up sex and tank tops for the Lord? A federal health official who believed that women who had premarital sex couldn’t feel love? Jerry Falwell Sr. and Pat Robertson blaming 9/11 on the “pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way”?

There can be no doubt that the heyday of Christian fundamentalism in America was the George W. Bush administration. Conservatives craved reassurance that they were defenders of “morality”, despite supporting an indefensible invasion of Iraq that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. These claims to moral superiority over liberals mainly came in the form of policing hymen status, harassing women at abortion clinics and claiming a right to Christian forgiveness (for yourself) whencaught with prostitutes or soliciting gay sex in public bathrooms.

White evangelicals still hold considerable political power, which is why Donald Trump occasionally tries to get photographed fondling a Bible in ways he vainly hopes are convincing. Abortion and LGBTQ rights are still under serious threat, as the Christian right has made major inroads into the federal judiciary.

Perversely, however, the cultural power of white evangelicals is clearly fading, both in terms of numbers and relevance, and that process started long before Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr.’s namewas ever associated with a “pool boy.” Bibles have been largely replaced with Pepe the Frog memes. Public prayer has given way, among right-wingers, to chants of “Lock her up.” You hardly hear anyone on Fox News these days talking up premarital abstinence anymore. They’re too busy arguing that it’s no big deal that Trump has routinely cheated on his wives, or that it’s “pearl-clutching” to be angry that he has bragged about committing sexual assault.

white evangelicalism is in decline, but another movement is rising to take its place, a movement that scratches that same right-wing itch towards false piety and elaborate tribalist mythologies that are incomprehensible to outsiders: QAnon.

Yes, QAnon, the bizarre paranoid conspiracy theory that holds (more or less) that behind the scenes of observable reality lies a shadowy worldwide pedophile ring run by Democrats and prominent celebrities, and that Trump’s bizarre and self-serving authoritarian behavior is actually an elaborate ruse to hide his secret fight to destroy this elite child-abuse conspiracy.

QAnon has grown rapidly since it first emerged in 2017, morphing from an online conspiracy theory to anexplosive political and cultural phenomenon, one that can probably be considered a cult — although it lacks leaders in any conventional sense. While there hasn’t been systematic research into how many Americans are QAnoners, an NBC News study earlier this month discovered that QAnon accounts on Facebook have more than 3 million followers.

An estimated 20 QAnon adherents are running for congressional office this year. One of them, Marjorie Taylor Greene, just won a primary race for the Republican nomination in a Georgia district that is nearly certain to go red in November, in a landslide that suggests, at the very least, that her wacky beliefs didn’t scare off Republican voters. While some Republicans have publicly expressed reservations about Greene — who has apparently made racist comments and used sexist slurs — Donald Trump just called her a “future Republican Star”.

It’s a measure of our bizarre political climate that the Trump campaign sees QAnon as the future, but it’s hardly a surprise. Trump hasn’t been shy about courting QAnon followers, frequently retweeting its adherents (while later suggesting he doesn’t know much about it). But this public endorsement of a QAnon candidate brings the public embrace of the movement to the next level. Now Trump’s campaign is publicly attacking at least one Republican congressman who committed the sin of criticizing QAnon, with Trump’s deputy communications director arguing that the “real” conspiracy theory is the Russian collusion story. (That’s actually true, even if Team Trump has the story upside down.)

As ridiculous as all of this is — in the real world, Trump has wished accused child-sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell “well,” and has shown no particular interest in the issue — the rise of QAnon as a more secular replacement for evangelical Christianity makes a lot of sense.

By claiming to pursue a crusade against the sexual abuse of children, QAnon gives its adherents a feeling of self-righteousness, one that allows them to ignore the reality that they support a deeply immoral and sociopathic president who is bragging about his efforts to steal the November election, and whose malicious mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic has destroyed our economy and led to 166,000 deaths and millions of damaged lives. It lets them construct a story where they’re the good guys who oppose sexual exploitation, when in fact they are fiercely loyal to a man who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by two dozen women.

Evangelical Christianity played the same role for conservatives in the pre-Trump years, letting them feel holy and moral despite openly backing politicians who promoted immoral policies. But it came with a bunch of downsides, like being made to feel guilty for premarital sex, divorce or even (as Falwell Jr. found out) drinking and partying. With QAnon, you get to sleep in on Sunday and have all the sex you like, without giving up that pious assertion of moral superiority or the presumption of secret knowledge.

QAnon even swipes a central tactic from the Christian right: Focusing its concern on imaginary threats to children, while ignoring the very real threat to children (and everyone else) posed by their beliefs and actions.

With the Christian right, it’s all about melodramatic appeals that abortion supposedly “kills babies,” rhetoric that allows them to feel righteous while they undermine the services — social welfare, health care, housing and education — that allow parents to raise actual living children in safe, healthy environments.

QAnon claims to be fighting for children, but the child sex-trafficking victims they speak for are exclusively in their heads. In fact, QAnoners not only ignore the real cases of sex trafficking that exist, which have nothing to do with their conspiracy theory, but get in the way of activists who fight the real problemby clogging up phone lines, confusing their fundraising efforts, and interfering with social media campaigns.And they certainly don’t give a damn about the real-life children that Donald Trump separated from their parents and stuffed in cages along the border.

Embracing ridiculous beliefs, whether in the Rapture or in Pizzagate, seems to be a part of American right-wing DNA, perhaps because wild fantasies are the only way they can distract themselves from the real evil they do in the world. In light of that, the rise of QAnon makes sense. It’s the perfect mechanism, in Trump’s America, for conservatives to tell themselves a story about how they’renoble warriors for truth and justice in the face of overwhelming evidence that they’re not.Hardly anyone likes to face the genuinely bad things they’ve done, and QAnon provides Trump-loving conservatives a fable to justify all their dreadful choices.

During a July 23 webinar hosted by YES! Media that I took part in, Nafeez Ahmed, executive director of the System Shift Lab and research fellow at the Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems, noted that the emergence of the new depends on the disintegration of the old. While many of us have been eager to welcome the new, we are not always so ready to accept the disintegration of the old. Yet the point that Nafeez drove home in our webinar is that both are part of the process of transformation.

As the institutions of the imperial civilization of our past disintegrate, it exposes the extent to which their power has rested on a foundation of war, racism, and violence devoted to enforcing mass servitude and securing the rights of property owners. Succumbing to the enticements of money worship, we celebrate the successes of a miniscule super-wealthy minority, and the fiction that we might one day join them.

Let us welcome the growing recognition that returning to business as usual is neither possible nor desirable. We must accept our current mission to birth a new civilization devoted to the well-being of people and Earth:A civilization in which money is just a tool, and nurturance of life is the prime purpose.

David Korten is co-founder of YES! Media, president of the Living Economies Forum, a member of the Club of Rome, and the author of influential books, including "When Corporations Rule the World" and "Change theStory, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth." His work builds on lessons from the 21 years he and his wife, Fran, lived and worked in Africa, Asia, and Latin America on a quest to end global poverty.

his site

https://davidkorten.org/home/ecological-civilization/

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aha-ish: Bannon promoted djt as disruptor, A STORY: the system is sick/rigged so he will blow it up and give us something better; he will fight your enemies (the chinese, the godless commies/boomers, drain the swamp, restore American pride/dominance [coal mfg]; relatd to throw the bums out they are all crooks? What do trumpistas think the swamp is? they atre fine with crony capitalism b/c bizmen MYTH [is a recurring/useful/ meme-able story?]are tough minded, numbers-based tough realists who will be efficient and stop wasting our tax money on losers/POC lazy welfare queens. so we should not be surprised when system crashes, because trump ppl know nothing, and are grifter rent-seekers. all they know about gov't is how to leech off it and dump their messes on it. short term / self-ish thinking: how do I/the books look good for next qtr (or for trump the next news cycle, which is 12 hours?!)

as someone else recently observed (burn dwn hse gingrich?) gop has built in political/rhet advantage b/c willing to crash the system to maintain power. (gives them leverage in negot? BUT lost votes in gov't shutdowns?]

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-derangement-syndrome-those-of-us-who-warned-america-that-fascism-was-coming-were-called-hysterical-alarmists-we-were-right-all-along/

Do you remember “Trump Derangement Syndrome?”

It was a cute phrase that likely first appeared in 2015, deployed by prominent voices across the political spectrum to demean, mock, reject, dismiss and deflect the warnings that Donald Trump was a fascist, an authoritarian and a white supremacist, not to mention a vile and dangerous human being with apparent mental pathologies who posed a massive threat to American democracy....

no lnx

Do you remember “Trump Derangement Syndrome?”

Such truth-telling patriots were called “hysterical” and “alarmist,” or told they were “out of touch” and overly “bitter” about Hillary Clinton’s defeat thanks to the antiquated mechanism of the Electoral College and Russian interference. Those who first raised the alarm about Trumpism as a new version of fascism were also assured that ” the institutions were strong” and fascism could never take hold in America — and most certainly not in the form of a proudly ignorant wrestling-heel wannabe and reality-TV huckster.

When Trump won the presidential election in 2016, there were some on the left eager to dance on Hillary Clinton’s grave. A few even gave Trump the totally unearned benefit of the doubt: He claimed to oppose globalization, neoliberalism and “endless war,” and to speak for the “white working class”.

Centrist Democrats and the so-called mainstream American news media also rejected the existential threat to democracy that Trump represented. They convinced themselves, over and over, that the supposed power and gravity of the office would normalize and mature him. He was a “businessman” and a “pragmatist” eager to make deals, not an ideologue — so why worry? Trump was “brash” and “unconventional,” but America’s political institutions were strong.

The stenographers of current events and the other hope-peddlers, with their horse-race journalism, false equivalence “both-sides-ism” and obsession with meaningless controversies would not let themselves see the truth of Trump’s danger or that of his neo-fascist movement. To admit the truth about Trump would mean that the old habits of writing and thinking about American politics are obsolete. Moreover, such an admission would demand speaking truth to power in a way that many members of the mainstream news media, specifically, are too afraid to, for both professional and personal reasons.

Republicans and other members of the Trump movement used “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to bully their critics into silence. The American right celebrated drinking “liberal tears” and loved the way Trump’s victory had made Democrats and so-called progressives go “crazy.”[// to the fed art'l that mollie h etc do not defend djt cos can't but own the libs/ hit bogey[wo]men]

Trump Derangement Syndrome is weaponized language in the same vein as the myth of the “liberal media.” Both lies put Democrats and the mainstream news media on the defense. While the American right and the Republican Party (and now Trump’s neo-fascist movement) drag the issue-space further and further to the right — and have done so for decades — the “liberal media” tries to find an imaginary balance by presenting right-wing extremism as somehow a “reasonable” alternative point of view.

Trump Derangement Syndrome was also a smokescreen for Donald Trump’s wild success in advancing the agenda of the plutocrats, gangster capitalists, Christian nationalists and “Dominionists” — as well as overt white supremacists — in destroying the very idea of government itself as well as American multiracial democracy.

Of course, it was not Donald Trump’s most vocal critics who were “deranged” but his followers, enablers and allies. As I explained in January 2017, shortly before his inauguration:

It is not those who oppose Trump who are deranged, but rather those voters who convinced themselves that a plutocrat authoritarian reality TV star con man and professional wrestler wannabe with no experience in government at any level was qualified to be president of the United States.

This is America’s great national derangement. Those who stand against and oppose Donald Trump are patriots who are trying to return the country to sanity.

Now, some three months away from another Election Day, Donald Trump has finally arrived at the moment which those of us who were slurred as “hysterical” and “alarmist” have warned about for more than five years.

Last Thursday, Trump issued this now-infamous tweet:

With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote??? [// muslim ban "whAT'S GOIng on" = agenda/ deep state]

That same afternoon, when questioned about Trump’s threats to interfere with the 2020 election, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the U.S. Senate: “In the end, the Department of Justice and others will make that legal determination.” This is not true. The Department of Justice and the president possess no legitimate authority to delay or cancel a federal election.

Later in the day, Trump continued to work from the authoritarian’s playbook, attempting to pivot away from his earlier statements. During a White House press event, Trump said:

Do I want to see a date change? No. But I don’t want to see a crooked election. What will happen in November – it’s a mess. I want a result much more than you… I don’t want to be waiting around for weeks and months.

This is a familiar strategy in which the authoritarian challenges norms and boundaries by floating trial balloons and then pretends to change his mind as a way to make the heretofore-unthinkable into something acceptable.

Trump’s most recent threats are but another crescendo in he and his servants’ efforts to subvert and eventually overturn secular multiracial democracy and the rule of law in America.

Only weeks ago Trump began deploying his own personal secret police force, hoping to enforce his will by suppressing dissent and free speech in Democratic-led cities all over the United States. The events in Portland, Oregon, are but a prelude to Trump’s national terrordome.

Trump’s own personal secret police force along with his civilian “watchdogs,” may well be used to intimidate Democratic voters on Election Day and beyond. Trump has repeatedly asked hostile foreign countries to interfere in the 2020 presidential election on his behalf. He was impeached for doing just that with his attempt to blackmail the government of Ukraine to launch a phony investigation of Joe Biden.

Trump continues to threaten senior Democratic leaders, including Biden, Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and others withtreasoncharges, potential imprisonment and perhaps even execution. Former national security adviser John Bolton’s recent book includes details of Trump’s lurid fantasies about having journalists killed. According to Bolton, Trump supports imprisoning his “enemies” in concentration camps — something he is already doing with brown and Black migrants and refugees from Latin America, the Caribbean and other parts of the nonwhite world.

Donald Trump, has repeated his threats, ever since the 2016 campaign, that he will not respect the will of the American people if he loses a presidential election.

In sum, Donald Trump is not pretending. None of this is a game. He is a neo-fascist. Such observations and warnings are not hysterical. They are plain observations based on a consensus of the available facts. [also he can be prosecuted, just today info DA new charges?]

As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat explained in a 2017 essay at The Washington Post:

The strongman knows that it starts with words. He uses them early on to test out his plans to expand and personalize executive power on political elites, the press and the public, watching their reactions as they arrange into the timeless categories of allies, enemies and those who help him by remaining silent. Some say the strongman is all bluster, but he takes words seriously, including the issue of which ones should be banned.

Now what to do?

In a perfect and just world, the hope peddlers, professional centrists, stenographers of current events and others who maintain the boundaries of approved public discourse in America would go to the public square, prostrate themselves before the world and then beg forgiveness for how they, for years and by various means, empowered Donald Trump.

That will not happen. Instead, such voices will proclaim that they were sounding the alarm about Donald Trump years ago and are the real vanguard defenders of American democracy. In reality, such voices were enablers, far behind the truth if not actively running away it. They are now trying to position themselves on the correct side of history because their shame and failure to protect America from Donald Trump and his neo-fascist movement are so great.

In the weeks remaining before Election Day — which will certainly not be “free and fair” and when Trump’s machinations will be at their most extreme — the mainstream news media and theAmerican people must internalize the fact that the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution mean little for Trump and his regime.

Hopeful claims — or delusions — that the Constitution and state laws dictate the rules of Election Day must be viewed with extreme cynicism. Trump and his enforcers are not restrained by such arcane conventions.

If there is indeed an election on Nov. 3, Americans mUst vote against Trump in overwhelming numbers in order to force him to step down. Unless Donald Trump is convincingly vanquished at the polls, he will find some way to stay in office.

If Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr try to cancel the presidential election or interfere with it in any other way, Americans must take to the streets and engage in corporeal politics — including a national strike and other plans to disrupt day-to-day life and “business as usual” — on a scale so large that they make the George Floyd people’s uprising look like a PTA meeting.

Ultimately, those of us who warned the American people for years, sometimes on a daily basis, about this Mad King and would-be tyrant take no joy from saying, We told you so. There is no satisfaction in being correct about such a horrible thing.

On this point,Jared Yates Sexton, author of “American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World But Failed Its People,” wrote last Thursday on Twitter:

Those of us warning that Trump is an authoritarian capable of destroying democracy haven’t been doing it for profit or attention or out of unwarranted alarmism. None of this is hard to predict. They don’t hide it at all. Stop expecting everything to be fine because “America.”

To watch American democracy, fall so ill so fast, and now to be on the verge of collapse — when such a thing could have been so easily prevented — is a world historical tragedy. SYSTEM CRASH economy, health care sys?!

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520

aha: see zinn on sacrifice, // austerity (= tough, discipline, rational, male)

free mkt FUNDAMENTALISM: = METAPHOR // STORY WORLDVIEW

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/its-time-to-reject-the-gods-of-commerce-america-is-a-society-not-an-economy/

david m

The “economy” does not exist. Human beings do. What nearly everyone understands, except Republican officials and economists on television, is that there is no singular, shared experience within one large-scale economic system. Leilani Jordan, a 27-year-old woman with a developmental disability, who worked as a grocery clerk at a satellite store of Giant Food — a chain throughout three states — died from the coronavirus infection she contracted when earning her final paycheck. That check was for $20.64. She worked without a facial mask, and lived in an entirely different universe than Nick Bertram, Giant’s CEO, who collects a salary in the high six figures.

The majority of Americans have less than $500 in savings. They simply do not experience the same “economy” as Rep. Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana, a Republican who described Americans dying as a result of “opening the economy” as the “lesser of two evils.” Hollingsworth is the 12th-richest member of Congress, with a net worth of $50.1 million, most of it coming from his father — the “silent partner” in Hollingsworth’s investment firm.

Americans as disparate as Trey Hollingsworth and Leilani Jordan, whose death the congressman would presumably regard as collateral damage, might not share an economy in any substantive sense, but they do share a society.

The ideological disease that cripples the United States is the belief that society does not exist beyond its commercial activity. President Calvin Coolidge famously remarked that “the business of America is business,” while Joel Millman, a formerreporter for the Wall Street Journal, once wrote, “America is not a nation … America is a market.”

Millman was making a neutral, analytical observation, but a similar thesis has guided America’s long succession of disastrous policy decisions that treat the “economy” — meaning profits for corporations and their owners or shareholders — as sacred. An entire set of religious assumptions follow, most significantly that people like Jordan are martyrs for the God of profit. Their deaths are acceptable losses in the name of God and country, which mutate together into the bloodless idol of commerce.

Human sacrifices at the altar of the idol have become almost commonplace. Millions of children of color in the inner cities develop asthma and suffer from other respiratory problems because they breathe heavily polluted air; 26,000 Americans die every year because they lack health insurance; public health experts have concluded that poverty — and the lack of robust social services — causes tens of thousands of deaths a year.

The fatalities caused by environmental injustice, denial of health care and outright deprivation never provoke widespread scrutiny because, unlike the daily stock market report or reports of marginal GDP growth rates, they are largely out of sight and out of mind.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the United States to confront its market-based theology. Americans now must consider whether their country is anything more than an engine of commerce, and whether human life has value separate from a financial calculus. For the first time in most of our lifetimes, the question of priorities is direct and implicates almost everyone....

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ctr-pt: to covid bailout bill as dis cap'l NEW STORY? WE CAN SAVE $ AND PPL BY GOING GREEN

https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-crisis-economic-growth-2645724784.html

Every country around the world would see economic gains from combating the climate crisis and trying to keep global heating within the bounds of the Paris agreement, according to a new study published in Nature Communications.

The straw man argument against taking action on the climate crisis is that the cost of limiting emissions and investing in green infrastructure is too steep and would cripple economies. It turns out, according to the research, that the opposite is true.

In fact, the study found that if nations around the world fail to curtail greenhouse gas emissions within the bounds of the Paris agreement, the global economy will lose anywhere from $150 trillion to nearly $800 trillion by the year 2100, as CBS News reported. The upper end of the range is if countries fail to meet their current commitments, which are inadequate to meet the Paris agreement as they are expected to lead to 3 degrees Celsius in warming.

The study's authors, from the Beijing Institute of Technology and other Chinese institutions, billed their findings as a self-preservation strategy for government, according to The Guardian.GUK

The researchers calculated the potential benefits of emissions reductions by looking at the social welfare aspects of cutting greenhouse gases and its affect on economic growth. They found that the benefits from cutting emissions would provide the largest boost to developing countries with large populations of poor and vulnerable people, who are most likely to be negatively affected by droughts, floods, fires, storms and food shortages, as The Guardian reported.

While all countries would benefit in the long term, the most immediate benefits would go to developing countries with high emissions, such as India, Indonesia, Nigeria and China, according to The Guardian.

The Paris agreement is composed of voluntary commitments known as Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, made by each country in the accord. The main aspect of the commitments is to reduce greenhouse emissions by cutting the burning of fossil fuels, thus reducing global warming and the adverse impacts of warming. However, many countries are witnessing economic damage from the coronavirus lockdowns and are rethinking their commitment to their NDCs. Already, government bailouts for the fossil fuel industry and the airline industry are in the works, as well as a rollback of their carbon emission reductions, as CBS News reported.

"A number of studies have proved that current [NDCs] are not enough to achieve the global warming targets," said Biying Yu, from the Beijing Institute of Technology and a co-author of the study, as CBS News reported.

The research shows that the choice between climate action and economic growth is in fact a false dichotomy. The authors' work concludes that countries could reach their climate goals and at the same time see an increase in their net income.

According to CBS News, Yu and her team calculated ideal strategies for countries to improve their NDCs, minimize economic losses and maximize gains. They found that if nations are able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, then the net global economic benefit would range between $127 trillion and $616 trillion by the end of the century.

"Early and quick action will provide a better chance to close the widening emissions gap, even though a large amount of abatement cost would occur in the short term," said the study.

"The literature overwhelmingly shows the economic benefits of serious mitigation efforts exceed the costs in the long run," said Noah Kaufman, a climate and energy economist from Columbia University, to CBS News.

However, Yu is concerned that governments will be short-sighted and balk at the upfront cost of investing in infrastructure to combat the climate crisis. She also sees that the climate emergency takes commitments from every country.

"Combating climate change is not a matter for one country. It requires collective action and cooperation from all countries around the world," Yu explained, as CBS News reported. "Let's work together and save ourselves"...

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walter t andersson says only 6

https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-5501

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trumps-horrendous-last-ditch-gambit-to-win-re-election-is-scary-as-hell/

no lnx

Trump’s horrendous last-ditch gambit to win re-election is scary as hell

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon April 10, 2020

Thursday night, the access journalism team at the Washington Post published a piece declaring that Donald Trump intends to “reopen much of the U.S.” in May.

“The Trump administration is pushing to reopen much of the country next month,” Matt Zapotosky, Josh Dawsey, Jose A. Del Real and William Wan report, noting that Trump, behind “closed doors,” has “sought a strategy for resuming business activity by May 1.”

This is, needless to say, scary as hell. We’re nowhere near conquering the coronavirus epidemic and, thanks to Trump’s deliberate negligence — born from his desire to conceal the spread of the virus — we have nothing close to the testing capacity necessary to start letting people congregate safely again. Unsurprisingly, the article caused a lot of panic and anger, and reasonably so: There is nothing but downside to “reopening” the economy without a plan to control the spread of the virus.

But not to get too 11th-level chess about it, Trump — or at least his allies — probably aren’t serious about this. Instead, the chatter about “reopening” the economy is very likely more of a political gambit than a serious suggestion.

Trump and his allies know he needs to come up with some argument why the economic devastation we’re facing is not his fault. (It is his fault.) More importantly, they’ll need someone else to blame. This chatter about “reopening” is about laying the groundwork for that. Come fall, Trump will argue that he wanted to save the economy and get everybody back to work, but the “deep state” wouldn’t let him. He’ll try to use this ruined economy as evidence that he should be re-elected to take on this supposed conspiracy of embedded liberal-socialist traitors.

There are a couple of reasons to believe this is more a political gambit than a serious suggestion. For one thing, Trump doesn’t actually have the power to “reopen” the economy, as national security expert Marcy Wheeler pointed out on Twitter. State governments control those, and while at least some red states will no doubt go along with any loony plan Trump rolls out, states like New York, California, Illinois and Massachusetts — which are critical to the economic well-being of the rest of the country — will not play along with a harebrained scheme that causes the already devastating pandemic roaring back to life.

There’s also the coronavirus itself. Even if Trump could wave his magic wand and “reopen” the economy, the rapid spread of COVID-19 would probably do as much, if not more, to wreck the economy as the weeks of quarantine did. Piles of bodies and overwhelmed hospitals are not good for the economy, generally speaking! And it’s not like people will suddenly revert to their previously normal lives when a dangerous disease is still spreading all around them.

Maybe Trump is dumb enough to believe that the economy is like a light you can just switch back on, and everything will then go back to the way it was before. But there are people around him — like Attorney General Bill Barr, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. — who, evil as they may be, understand that there’s no straightforward path “back to normal.” The millions of Americans who’ve become unemployed over the last three weeks won’t magically find new jobs, and recovery from the current economic devastation will be long and difficult.

Yet Mnuchin has been backing Trump up, saying that he believes the economy can be “reopened” as soon as next month. Barr, too, recently declared that current lockdown orders are “draconian” and suggested that some modified form of “social distancing” can be accomplished without telling “people to go home and hide under their bed.”

Barr’s wild caricature of the current state of affairs — no one’s under the bed, and we’re all allowed to leave home for grocery shopping and exercise — hints at the fact that this rhetoric is more political than serious. So is his disingenuous proposal for a version of “social distancing” that is somehow different than what people are currently doing. There is, of course, no such thing and Barr is, of course, blowing piping hot air.

On the propaganda front, we also have the folks at Fox News eagerly pushing this “reopen the economy” line. Some of them, like Sean Hannity, really are diddle-brained fools who don’t realize how bad that would be. But others, like Tucker Carlson, are probably intelligent enough to grasp that such a move would ruin both the economy and public health, and so are floating this as a cynical political ploy rather than an actual policy proposal.

Indeed, there’s no way around a deeply cynical theory of what’s happening here: Trump and his allies are exploiting access journalism, which speaks to the reader’s desire to feel like they have insider knowledge, to spread a dishonest narrative. That narrative is that Trump wants to “reopen” the economy and save everyone’s jobs, even though that’s impossible. And the goal is that when the economy continues to tank, Trump can paint himself as a victim of nefarious forces who thwarted him from making America great again.

Trump wouldn’t actually benefit from “reopening” the economy, after all, and on some level he may understand that. It wouldn’t work the way he implies it would, and it would probably lead to even more economic devastation to go along with the public health catastrophe. But he certainly might benefit from sowing a narrative about how his heroic efforts to save us all were crushed by the oppressive forces of the “deep state.”

There is no evidence that anyone at the White House or in the Republican Party in Congress is even engaging with the various proposed plans out there to reopen the economy. Their lack of interest in taking this seriously is a good sign they are not taking this seriously.

Viewed in this light, it’s likely that right-wing pundits are being deliberately provocative when they say, as Bill O’Reilly recently did, that many “people who are dying [of this virus], both here and around the world, were on their last legs anyway.”

The purpose of that is, in large part, to draw the outraged reaction from liberals that can then be characterized as “political correctness.” Conservatives can then cast themselves as hard-nosed realists who are being suppressed by oversensitive liberals who are willing to tank the economy in a hapless bid to save a handful of people who were going to die anyway.

This simply can’t be stated firmly enough: That’s a horrendous lie. It’s a false dichotomy to pit saving lives against saving the economy. For one thing, you can’t do the latter without doing the former; the viral pandemic is hugely disruptive in and of itself, and not just because of the quarantine. For another, liberals appear to be the only people willing to do what it takes to save the economy, which is not some hasty “reopening,” but a major government stimulus program that pumps in as much money as needed (and then raising taxes the rich to recoup the losses).

But these provocations from O’Reilly and other conservatives who say they don’t mind letting people die to save the economy are surprisingly effective. They generate the desired outrage from liberals and, more important, they pull the focus away from the urgent discussion this country needs to have, which is about how to save lives and rebuild our economy.

This narrative about the “deep state” and “political correctness” is Donald Trump’s last-ditch re-election strategy. Perversely, his false dichotomy between saving lives and saving the economy works better if it remains hypothetical, which is to say, if the economy isn’t “reopened.” That way, Trump can spin fantasies of how great things would have been if we had just listened to him, and claim that conditions only got worse because the snowflake liberals got their way. If he actually could “reopen” the economy, the widespread devastation would speak for itself. He benefits far more from leaving that as a fantasy than from making it a reality.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/a-medieval-historian-explains-how-trump-is-trying-to-control-narratives-of-the-past-with-nostalgia-for-a-fabricated-vision-of-america/

no lnx

A medieval historian explains how Trump is trying to control narratives of the past with ‘nostalgia for a fabricated vision’ of America

Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon March 17, 2020

Donald Trump has responded to a public health emergency affecting the entire American public with a startling combination of ignorance, arrogance and total incompetence. His two closest advisers, Stephen Miller and Jared Kushner, are a white supremacist and real-estate plutocrat, respectively, with no expertise in public health, viral biology or epidemiology.

Trump has commanded that scientists and other experts whom he deems insufficiently loyal should be systematically purged from the federal government. As part of his racist vendetta against Barack Obama’s administration, federal programs designed to help prevent pandemics and other diseases, both in America and around the world, were terminated. Because Donald Trump and other Republicans have no conception of the public good, the federal government has been hollowed out, leaving it crippled in its ability to respond to a large-scale public crisis such as the coronavirus pandemic.

Ultimately, lies are the connective tissue of the Trump regime’s ineffective and irresponsible response to the coronavirus pandemic.

To wit: CNN has documented at least 28 times when the Trump administration has imperiled the health and safety of the American people by lying about the coronavirus pandemic.

These lies are predictable. Authoritarian regimes lie in order to confuse the public and (in theory) to prevent or blunt resistance. Authoritarian leaders such as Donald Trump – who himself has publicly lied at least 16,000 times since becoming president – lie to soothe their malignant narcissism and other mental health problems. Lies also help authoritarians to maintain control over their servants and followers.

In a public health crisis, lies are lethal. The Trump administration’s lies about the coronavirus and related matters are likely to kill people, if they have not done so already.

I recently spoke with historian and journalist David Perry about the urgent question of how America recovers from Trump’s regime of lies. Perry’s work has appeared in many publications, including the Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic, CNN.com, The Guardian, The Nation, Newsweek, Rolling Stone and others.

Perry explained why, in his view, the United States will ultimately need a truth commission to begin healing from the harm done to the country by the Trump administration’s lies and systematic abuses of the rule of law, not to mention its criminality, corruption and other assaults on democratic norms and values. Such a commission would also be a necessary first step in documenting the Trump regime’s crimes and assaults on truth, reality and America’s collective memory.

Perry also outlined how the Trump regime’s assault on the truth serves another agenda: enabling increasing cruelty against nonwhite Americans, black and brown immigrants and other “racial undesirables” through a campaign of “soft ethnic cleansing.”

How are you feeling in this fourth year of the Age of Trump?

Like everyone, I am a bit exhausted. Many of us are ready to figure out what the next phase of politics looks like. I know that every day I encounter people with whom I should be allies, and I get angry about something and we break up. We break up on social media and we block each other. There is a kind of exhausting fracturing that is happening in America right now. I believe much of that has to do with how authoritarianism breaks a person down.

What is the Age of Trump doing to America’s collective memory? Navigating this state of malignant reality and the Trump regime’s ongoing torrent of lies is not healthy.

In the context of history, there is nothing particularly unusual about Donald Trump in terms of 20th- and 21st-century authoritarianism. I’m a medieval historian. Thus, I can draw obvious analogies between Trump and kings and emperors and similar types of rulers in history. So yes, I think it helps us to think about Trump surrounded by a court, rather than a bureaucracy, with courtiers who are trying to please him. But ultimately Trump is governing in a very typical kind of 20th- and 21st-century authoritarian way. That includes the corruption, the manipulation of the judicial system, his media messaging, and also the psychological effects that Trump and his authoritarian regime have on the American people. To say that Trump is not unusual is not to diminish the challenge and threat he represents.

Trump’s presidency has forced many actual experts, such as historians, political scientists, sociologists, philosophers and others, to find a public voice. That is very unusual in America. These experts have been sounding the alarm about the Trump regime yet, for the most part, reporters and pundits are very late in explaining the truth about the harm that Trump and his agents have been doing to America. Why have so many traditional voices in the establishment news media been so slow to respond to what is so obvious to others?

We are in an amazing moment in terms of the public discourse and the prominent role of experts. There is a large group of powerful people in American society who would like to believe that Trump’s rise to power and the presidency are just some type of blip or outlier that will end. These same elites did not think that Trump would be elected, and they made a lot of bad bets based on that assumption. They assumed he would lose. Former FBI Director James Comey, the New York Times and others fall into that group.

These powerful voices thought that Trump would lose and America would just go right back to where we were in 2015, with a Democratic president who has to deal with a hostile Republican Congress. There are many people invested in that arrangement, who actually believe that is the best form of American government. Those people work in legacy news media — but more importantly, their bosses represent powerful interests who support the status quo, and Trump unsettled their priors.

I describe such people as “hope peddlers.” Do you believe they actually know the truth about Trump but are just choosing to downplay the crisis? Or do they really believe the overly hopeful fictions about American society they tell the public?

I try not to spend too much time getting into their heads. Instead I focus on what they are doing and saying, and the consequences of what they do and say. For example, I do not care what James Comey’s motivations were in his behavior. I care about the harm that he’s done to the country. There should in turn be consequences for Comey, in terms of how much his public voice and recommendations are trusted in the future. I apply that to racism as well. I’m not interested in how people feel in their hearts or whether they “have a racist bone in their body.” Racism is as much a thing as it is an action. Racism is a performance, and people perform racism every time they vote for Donald Trump.

If you were to craft a narrative about the Age of Trump, what would it look like?

We don’t know yet. For example, during Trump’s impeachment people kept saying, “History will show.” But that is not how history really works. I do take some hope from how every time the American people have voted [since 2016], they have voted resoundingly against Trump. He is not very popular. In a free and fair election, I believe Trump would lose by a huge margin. But the harsh truth is that we are not going to have a free and fair election in America. We are far away from having a full story about this moment with Trump as president. There are many things that are going to happen. That is especially true given how Donald Trump is now unleashed, knowing that, post-impeachment, there is no accountability. Donald Trump will start a war to try to win the 2020 election. He will order arrests of people if he thinks that his power is in jeopardy. We have also learned from Donald Trump’s presidency that America’s political institutions are much weaker than we were told previously.

As a historian, what do you see and understand about the Age of Trump that others may not?

I study the ways in which people change narratives about the past in order to serve their interests in the present and the future. There is much nostalgia at present on both the right and the left, among the pro-Trump forces and the anti-Trump forces.

There is Trump and his supporters’ nostalgia for a fabricated vision of 1950s America. This also includes an incorrect, nostalgia-colored vision of the American Civil War. The struggles of memory around the Civil War are critical to understanding Trumpism. On the other hand, there is also a type of nostalgia on the left, a belief that America is just fine, and that the institutions will be just fine after Trump is gone. The left believes that if we just convince people to vote, everything will be OK. The left also thinks that we as Americans can somehow vote our way back to freedom. But that narrative is not really holding up when confronted by the facts of Trumpism. We as Americans must be very alert to the types of stories about our past and present and future that are being told in this moment with Trump.

That is one of the reasons that America will need truth commissions after Donald Trump’s presidency, in order to gain clarity and really understand all that has happened under his rule.

One little-reported story is that the Trump administration has mandated neoclassicism as the official architectural style for federal buildings. That is also connected to how the Trump regime has been systematically lying and altering public records in the National Archives and elsewhere to literally rewrite history. How are those moves connected?

There is an attempt to ensure that all federal buildings will be built in a neoclassical style. No more modernism, no more subtle architectural innovation. This is ultimately about the idea of America and “Western civilization.” But that language, especially as used by the Trump administration, has a very specific white supremacist framing. “Western civilization” is a term that came into being in the age of European colonialism and imperialism as a way of creating a kind of past for European whiteness and then asserting it as the dominant and most advanced heritage on the planet. That logic helped to justify European imperialism.

Within that narrative, people cherry-pick. They take Egypt and they take Mesopotamia and they take only some parts of Persia and then they take Greece and Rome, and then they keep sliding out of the Mediterranean up into Northern Europe. They then proclaim that as the “true” European heritage. And in the United States there is the specific claim that America is based upon some type of “Judeo-Christian” Western tradition.

This neoclassical mandate is yet another example of Trumpism trying to assert control not only of the present, but also control of narratives about the past.

The global New Right is fighting a full spectrum battle to shape public memory. This even includes video games and other types of media which they believe should not depict a “diverse” European and American past. This literal whitewashing of history is prefaced on an assumption that so-called Western civilization is superior and the “best” in human history. How do you expose the incorrect assumptions and lies upon which those fantasies rest?

I do that work in several ways. I focus on accuracy and narrative. The accuracy is that there is no such thing as “the West.” The idea of a sealed Europe that’s a hegemonic, patriarchal white space is just false. That is just not true about the Middle Ages.

One cannot fact-check your way out of white supremacy. But that doesn’t mean one should not in fact intervene against white supremacy on a factual level. And then the other way is to try to make the story visible, and by doing so to talk about 18th-century books on the Anglo-Saxons. That is another place where there are big arguments at present about how the very language of “Anglo-Saxon” and “Nordic” reveal how modern notions of race were and are constructed.

This is connected to the recent controversy about the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” about the history of white-on-black chattel slavery.

The people, almost all white, who are marching to preserve early 20th-century cheap Confederate statues, and who say “Get over the past” to black Americans, are obviously either in denial or not very critical. Again, I do not care what is in their hearts. Their hypocrisy is obvious. It’s about hegemony. Conservatives are trying to erase difference. Therefore, in terms of the color line, they want to claim that there is only one true narrative about American history — and their story is the only one they want told. No one who participated in the 1619 Project was saying, “This is the only way to talk about American history”.

All those scholars were arguing is, “What we are discussing is true and it is a piece of a larger story that has not largely been told to the public.” Speaking as a historian there is nothing objectionable about such a mission.

You and others — myself included — have been arguing for truth and reconciliation commissions in America as a way of confronting the impact and harm done by the Trump regime. What would that look like in practice?

We’re in a moment in which the corruption of the government is running so deep and so wide and in so many different ways that there is not going to be any one pathway out of it. To look forward and not back will just enable people to continue to steal and will enable distrust in institutions.

In America, we need to have a system that is dedicated to exposing the truth. This process of truth-telling must be based upon some principles: “These are the things that happened. Here are the records. Here are the documents. Here are the things we know that have been altered, that we’ve been able to track down.” Consider how the Trump administration changed the photo of his 2016 inauguration. That was only discovered by happenstance.

How many other things have been changed that the American people and the world do not know about? And that they won’t know about unless dedicated resources and investigators go through receipts, go through emails, look at images and check for documents? How will we know? The American people and the world must know the truth.

What would this look like in practice? Past presidents have formed these commissions. The president sets the agenda at the beginning and gives them their powers and a budget. The 9/11 Commission is one example. There are many examples of truth commissions throughout America’s history.

I would prefer a truth commission that is really dedicated to looking at the functioning of the federal government. But this commission must be independent, with enforceable subpoena power and an ample budget for investigators who would go through documents, figure out where they needed to have testimony and bring people in. And all the testimony is available on public. The truth commission’s work should be streamed on C-SPAN and other media outlets. Their discoveries must be put on the record. Afterward, we as a country can fight about what it all means.

Any truth and reconciliation commission would also need to examine the human rights abuses and other crimes of the Trump regime. The commission should also try to explain why so many millions of white Americans were willing to support Trump’s authoritarianism, white supremacy, nativism, general cruelty and other evil. The Age of Trump is a moral crisis that must be exposed, so such a thing does not take place again.

I believe that a future president should order that: “I want every document that hasn’t been shredded, every email we can find, including the ones that have been deleted in which Steven Miller proposed the family separation policy. We are going to put them on the internet, We’re going to put these discoveries in archives. We’re going to put them in the Library of Congress.”

I do not know if a truth and reconciliation commission’s findings would result in Donald Trump being arrested for obstruction of justice or some other crimes. The impeachment records and related documents all need to be released. The Democrats need to campaign on a promise that all the evidence related to the Trump administration is going to be made public.

The result should be that we as a country can say, “Here’s the truth. Here’s the evidence that we know. Even though the argument about what it means and what should happen will be bitter, and the divisions in America will not be eased, at least there will be a shared narrative and facts.”

How does Trump’s proposed 2021 federal budget fit within your model of authoritarianism?

Presidential budgets are a statement of values. They never go into full effect, even when they have both houses of Congress in their pockets. Budgets are negotiating positions. Therefore, when we see a presidential budget do things such as take a billion dollars out of Medicaid, that is a preference for what Trump wants. The Trump administration also sees no role for the federal government to promote the spread of knowledge or the arts. Independent knowledge production is a threat to authoritarianism. When you empower scholars to be independent, that does not serve the authoritarian state. Authoritarians only want intellectuals and artists who are beholden to the state and involved in propaganda.

I use this language intentionally and with full knowledge of the weight of history that comes with it. When I look at Trump’s budget and the priorities and policies of the Republican Party more generally, it is clear to me that they want to “kill the useless eaters.” As a historian, is that framing appropriate?

Donald Trump’s and the Republican Party’s 2021 budget is going to kill people. There are people dying in cages right now. I am not sure if the Trump administration wants to kill off the “useless eaters” but they are for sure going to kill people. Certainly, since Reagan if not Goldwater, there’s been a narrative in America — especially among the right — of the “useless poor” versus the “worthy poor.” Of course that narrative involves race. The so-called deserving poor are white rural people. Black urban people are not deserving of assistance. Latino immigrant communities are also not deserving of help.

The Republican Party under Trump is going all-in on ethnic cleansing. Trump and the Republicans want to create a whiter America where white people are the majority and forever remain in power. Trump and the Republicans can accomplish that goal by incarcerating nonwhite people and then not letting them vote, but still counting them for the census. The goal of a white America can also be accomplished by deporting nonwhite people. It can happen by scaring nonwhite people into silence. It can be made real by impoverishing people so that they cannot be engaged in civic life. That includes marginalized groups in general, such as disabled people who rely on federal intervention for basic support.

“Ethnic cleansing” is a language that we as Americans should be using more. When I talk about ethnic cleansing and Trump and the Republicans and the right wing more generally, people tell me I am being too shrill, that there are no forced marches and the other horrors commonly associated with ethnic cleansing. In response, I tell those naysayers, “Well, not yet.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/bill-moyers-joseph-campbell-would-want-us-to-seek-an-america-that-transcends-this-putrid-moment-of-trumpism

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Bill Moyers: Joseph Campbell would want us to seek ‘an America that transcends this putrid moment’ of Trumpism

Written by Bill Moyers February 15, 2020

A Facebook member responded to our recent post Bill Moyers and Steve Harper on Lawyers, Liars and Trump on Trial with a question:

Though I doubt that Bill Moyers will answer this question in person, I’d like to know what he thinks Joseph Campbell would have to say about this “moment.”

Bill Moyers responds:

I don’t know what in particular Joseph Campbell would say about our situation today. But I can imagine him lamenting, as he did when we talked some thirty 30 years ago, our failure “to admit within ourselves the carnivorous, lecherous fever that is endemic to human nature.” Malevolent greed was on the loose then – it was the mid-1980s as Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko popularized the mantra that “Greed is good” — and the disease was infectious. So I am sure he would not be inclined to place all the blame for the vulgarity and decadence of today on a single individual, no matter how venal, but would say that one conspicuous culprit is the symptom, not the cause, of our discontent.

He would likely be sad now, as he was then, over the weaponizing of religion. He told me, “My notion of the real horror today is what you see in Beirut [then a battleground of religious conflict]. There you have the three great Western religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and because the three of them have different names for the same biblical god, they can’t get on together. They are stuck with their metaphor and don’t realize its reference. They haven’t allowed the closed circle that surrounds them to open. Instead, each insists, ‘We are the chosen group; we have the Truth.’“

Joe believed that we need “myths that will identify the individual not with the local group but with the planet.” Remember, the atmosphere was already warming, but the threat preoccupied mostly scientists. And Joe was looking ahead: “The only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet…and everybody on it. And what it will have to deal with will be exactly what all myths have dealt with—the maturation of the individual, from dependency through adulthood, through maturity, and then to the exit; and then how to relate to this society and how to relate this society to the world of nature and the cosmos.”

AHA: MYTH IS METAPHOR PLUS STORY --> POV = BASIS FOR DECISIONS/ACTION

He described this “as the ground of what the future myth is to be: the eye of reason, not of my religious community; the eye of reason, not my linguistic community. But a philosophy for the planet.” I am sure he would be appalled at the failure of our political class to prepare for saving not an elite or privileged group – not this group, that group, or the other group, but the earth and all those living on it. “This might be the symbol, really, for the new mythology to come. That is the country we are going to be celebrating. And those are the people that we are one with.”...

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/the-sacrificial-rites-of-capitalism-we-dont-talk-about/

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The sacrificial rites of capitalism we don’t talk about

Written by Lynn Parramore, Institute for New Economic Thinking September 5, 2019

Every society has at least one dominant story. Think of it as the official line: Here’s who we are, what we’re doing and why. But if you pay attention, you may notice other stories, too. Stories that circulate below the radar — and sometimes right out in the open — contradicting the official narrative. Most people don’t openly acknowledge them, but the signs are everywhere.

Think of Catholic saints beaming their polytheistic, atavistic messages on brightly colored church windows. See the majestic Mary, whose exaltation helps to hold at bay the tensions of a monotheistic, father-centered religion officially in denial of the divine feminine. The Queen of Heaven papers over gaps in the main story, making it more appealing, more workable.

The Church needs Mary. Without her, the dominant story might fall apart.

So deployed, counter-narratives are not necessarily a threat, but can serve to constrain a system’s instabilities, balance its tensions. Supritha Rajan, an English professor at the University of Rochester, sees the dominant story of capitalism working in this way. Part of a wave of humanities scholars taking a closer look at the meaning and history of capitalism, her book, A Tale of Two Capitalisms, reveals how the fields of anthropology and economics, along with the literary form of the novel, which developed together in the late 18th and 19th centuries, cross-pollinated each other and worked in tandem to investigate and offer new theories about human nature and culture. Together, they helped create a new story for the citizens of an emerging world.

Rajan was born in India and emigrated with her family to Massachusetts at the age of seven. She is attuned to how the dominant narrative of capitalism appeared at the height of Britain’s colonial power, a time when major thinkers often looked to far-flung countries like India as sites of static, superstition-ridden, “primitive” cultures that the capitalist system would render obsolete.

Capitalism’s official story, Rajan explains, charts a linear progression from magical-thinking hunter-gatherers doing their “trucking and bartering,” as Adam Smith would have it, to today’s rational global capitalists engaged in free competition.This story insists — and here we come to a tricky part — that when individuals act in their own interest, the best results occur for everybody. Millions of self-centered actions add up to create an equilibrium that gives birth to a society that is fairer and more stable, creative, and abundant than ever before.

Quite a tale! But far from the whole story, says Rajan. She warns that accepting it at face value blinds us to the ways it damages our lives.

Rational Agents, Ritual Actions

Rajan charts the development of anthropology as a distinct field of study at a time when practitioners tended to separate things like ritual and magic — often performed communally — from the main flow of modern life. By then this stuff belonged on the periphery, contained, perhaps, within a few hours at church on Sunday or in entertainment halls. Anthropologists held that the relegation of the “irrational” to the margins was what distinguished advanced societies from the backward places where such activities remained central to life.

Rajan started with a hunch that magical rites, sacrificial rituals, and sacred values were not just relics of a pre-modern past, but actually woven right into the story of capitalism from the beginning. They exist everywhere under our noses, popping up in everyday economic activities and permeating even the high-tech exchanges of the global marketplace. What we are taught to think of as irrational and rational are actually mobile, flexible categories that continuously overlap.

To test her hunch, Rajan revisits the time when capitalist speculation and credit was replacing Britain’s traditional land-based economy. Technologies like the telegraph were collapsing time and space, and social life was morphing from extended kinship models to the nuclear family we know today. At this time, anthropologists were shaping a story that human society developed from a focus on primitive religion to the embrace of scientific rationalism. Any pre-modern ideas that might appear in the new forms were supposed to be merely fading ghosts.

Political economists, she notes, went even further: They insisted that the capitalist economy had exorcised these ghosts altogether. The new human being was hailed as “homo economicus” — a rational person who pursues wealth for self-interested motives. He, for such a being was imagined to be male, belonged strictly to the realm of the profane.

The great Victorian novelists, who were very much engaged with these developments, sensed that something was not quite right in the story. They noticed that capitalism was producing not just abundance and stability, but inequality, alienation and misery. Yet in criticizing the new system, they tended to accept and even buttress the separation of categories of experience insisted upon by social scientists. Thomas Carlyle’s famous condemnation of the “cash-payment” as “the sole nexus” of capitalism, for example, posited an economic realm as one in which ethical and religious values hold no sway.

But was it really so?

Rajan takes up the case of Charles Dickens, often viewed as the great anti-capitalist of Victorian literature, who observed that a society of self-interested economic actors could produce tremendous horror. Ideologically opposed to various aspects of capitalism, he turned to sacred ideas like sacrifice and ritual to imagine a community invested in values like disinterestedness, reciprocity, and communality — the very values endangered by the capitalist model of self-interest.

In A Tale of Two Cities, whose plot begins in year 1775, Dickens depicts Paris as a city stuck in backward economic and social modes in contrast to the more productive, modern city of London. But in order for capitalism to work harmoniously in London, something of the religious sphere had to be added to the sauce. Dickens casts a woman, Lucie, as the person who takes the stink away from all the selfish business conducted by the men — a Victorian “angel in the house,” an emblem of all the non-utilitarian values that homo economicus supposedly had no use for. Lucie, like many other female characters in Victorian novels, is supremely compassionate and sacrifices for the greater good: she is homo communis.

Dickens makes this female homo communis the servant of homo economicus, keeping his house and guiding his better nature.Like Mary’s role in the Catholic Church, she makes the official story of capitalism more palatable and helps conceal its failures. Contra the popular view of Dickens as something of a radical, Rajan points out that with his storytelling, he reintegrates sacred values in a way that ends up helping capitalism to expand. (As a popular author selling books, she notes, capitalism was serving him quite well). What had been disinherited from economic thought and pushed out to the colonies returns to the city as the domestic woman who synthesizes market and non-market values. This move, Rajan argues, is a frequent pattern not just in fiction, but in all of economic thought. It’s a second narrative that conceals the gaps in the official story. [anti-suffrage women?]

The Visible Hand

Like their novelist friends, early social scientists were not insensible to the possibility that a society of self-interested economic actors might end up in constant warfare. When they asked how the interests of individuals could be harmonized, they often ended up thinking about ethical values. Homo economicus might drive the story of capitalism, but political economists kept coming back to ideas like communality, consensus, reciprocity, and just distribution — even ritualistic behavior.

Rajan notes that theorists of economic equilibrium, for example, tended to present society as achieving a balance between self-interest and self-sacrifice for the success of the whole. Leading 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill and William Jevons, an English economist and logician, described theideal modern capitalist as a person who has the discipline to make sacrifices — abstaining from short-term pleasures and working hard today in order to stockpile money for the future. This ethos of sacrifice becomes key to social cohesion and stability — just as it was, Rajan points out, in so-called “pre-modern” societies.

The ideas of sacrifice and sacred values also come to play in theories of labor. Adam Smith described labor as “the most sacred and inviolable” form of property a person owned, positing it as a sacred source of the nation’s wealth, the pious foundation of the economic system itself: “We sacrifice ourselves in our labor in order to have the gift of ourselves in return,” he wrote in The Wealth of Nations. Labor is sacrificed, sacralized, and regenerated. British political economist David Ricardo, Mill, and Jevons followed him in describing a circular, gift-sacrifice economy embedded within the labor theory of value.

John Ruskin, a critic of industrial capitalism, glorified the worker as a kind of holy martyr who ensures the reproduction of life and the stability of society through the sweat of his brow. In the creation of the worker-martyr, Ruskin bridges the rift between the secular and the religious. In colonized places, a herder sacrificing a cow to promote the well-being of the community would be considered primitive, but a modern person sacrificing her labor was something else entirely. (Rajan notes that Karl Marxalso picked up the idea of labor as sacrifice, although for him it was obscene, rather than glorious, that capitalists accumulated wealth on the backs of sacrificing laborers).

Economists, despite their professed adherence to rationality, also continually presented economic forces as quasi-magical energies. Think of Smith’s famousinvisible hand, a sort of god of the market that coordinates human actions and somehow overcomes atomized individuality. Rajan astutely observes that the notion of communality lurks here— people unconsciously coordinating their actions to arrive at a societal consensus.

Late 19th century economist Alfred Marshall went so far as to invoke the concept of medieval chivalry to explain how modern economic systems should function. In “The Social Possibilities of Economic Chivalry,” he criticized contemporary accounts of the free market and described a middle path between government non-interference and a systemic welfare state, calling on a “spirit of chivalry” which could drive people to combine self-interest with self-sacrifice. This model would function to uphold the paternalistic administration required for the British Empire.

As the discipline of economics continued to develop, Rajan shows that while professional practitioners might come to focus more on mathematics, scientific objectivity, and moving far from their roots in moral philosophy, they could never fully banish the old ghosts — chiefly because they weren’t ghosts, but central players in the new order. The modern capitalist system, she argues, can’t do without the ethics of communality, interdependence, and reciprocity that are officially associated with pre-modern, pre-capitalist societies. Market and non-market values always operate right alongside one another.

Finding a New Plot

If you have lived and breathed global capitalism since birth, examining its narrative can feel a bit like a fish analyzing water. But, as Rajan argues, we have to examine it because its flaws and strains are threatening to dry up the entire pond.

It gets tougher every day to deny the human wreckage wrought by capitalism everywhere it exists — the steaming heap of alienation, market failures, inequalities, and rigged outcomes. Proponents of globalization cheer unfettered capitalism as the vehicle for spreading democratic values, freedom, and reciprocal exchange, but in reality, as Rajan notes, entry and participation are not equally open to all. This reality is currently erupting into worldwide unrest and the rise of right-wing populism. Clearly, the official story and what happens on the ground don’t match: Lots of people work hard but get little benefit, while plenty who do not work at all get rich.

Belief that the magic of markets will result in global solidarity, progress, and wealth for all is sounding a bit like magical thinking.

The official narrative of capitalism is easy to recognize, but the second one is harder to see: You have to piece it together. Marx described capitalism as ideological false consciousness, but Rajan detects something more complex, arguing that if you can show the ethical ideas and the sacred, communal values baked into capitalism’s own paradigms and premises, you can begin to hold it accountable for those ideals in the globalized world economy.

For starters, we can acknowledge that human beings are not simply atomistic competitors, but beings that seek to share a common experience and fate. Perhaps that is why the Occupy Movement was such a heady experience for many. The slogan “We are the 99%” was a respite from the oppressive “I” — the painful anomie of individualism that the official story insists upon.

When we speak about this unspoken narrative of capitalism, we can give up pretending that moral and economic values are opposed or somehow separated. We can say clearly, for example, that the financial crisis of 2007-8 was not just a failure of markets, but a failure of morality — for what else can you honestly call it when predatory banks escape justice as ordinary people suffer? We can question who is doing the sacrificing, and for whose good the system is working.

We can also see how the strategic deployment of sacred values and ritual can be used to conceal harmful activities. In Silicon Valley, executives instill eastern values like mindfulness and meditation into workplaces in a way that covers up the exploitation of employees and consumers that many companies are built around. A firm may spy on people to turn a profit, but the espousal of sacred values (recall Google’s former “Don’t be evil” motto) helps hide the exploitative mission. We can call out executives who ascribe intrinsic value to people, even as they strip away what people need in order to survive.

If we can clearly see the double narrative at work, maybe we can insist that homo communis should not be the servant of homo economicus, but the master.

mark T

I’ve long considered climate change to be above all a communications problem, and I’ve been exploring the work of Dr. Randy Olson, marine biologist-turned-Hollywood filmmaker and student of mass communications. His podcast discussing Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 is a good introduction to his thinking about the importance (and lack of!) progressive narrative.

Randy’s point regarding narrative got me thinking about the MANY narratives that cloud the climate change conversation:

2oC Success Narrative
350 ppm Emergency Narrative
Runaway Climate Narrative
Climate Justice Narrative
Economic/Social Collapse Narrative
Green Jobs Narrative
Rebellion Narrative
100% Renewable Energy Narrative
Economic/Political Systems Change Narrative
Restoration Narrative
Techno-Optimism Narrative
Business Led Narrative
Individuals Led Narrative
Cities Led Narrative
Project Drawdown Narrative
Sustainability Narrative
Adaptation Narrative

And that’s without separating out sub-narratives like the Soil Carbon Narrative (part of the Restoration Narrative in the list).

Given the contradictions inherent among several of the narratives, and infighting among their constituencies, these narratives are working against the need for an over-arching climate narrative that can be used for mass communications. Randy Olson has developed a detailed framework for developing better narratives, described in his just published book Narrative is Everything: A New Approach to Communication.

But his larger body of work may offer easier points of entry to the topic. You can access that body of work in an easy-to-access Narrative for Progressives ClimateWeb Mini-Brain that includes blogs, talks, films, books, podcasts, and more. You can access it for FREE through our Your External Brains website. The knowledgebase even includes access to a FREE copy of Randy’s just released book.

I urge you to take advantage of it, and become a better communicator forclimate change!

aha: application of the wrong/too simple metaphor as diagnosis --> cure

my classic eg urban renewal

another dangerous metaphor is run gov't like a biz, which presumably means rational, metrics, maybe an eye towards boosting economy=prosperity = well-being, Mitt R ran on this [truman dismissed as storekeeper [failed] but accidental prz ~ wallace]

trump and by assoc kushner as rational planner, but also good DEALMAKER [transactional metaphor, maybe realated // invisible hand magic mkt BS?

note related: a story can embed/embody a metaphor

https://www.alternet.org/**2019/06**/palestinians-dismiss-economic-portion-of-kushner-plan-as-dead-on-arrival/

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Palestinians dismiss economic portion of Kushner plan as dead-on-arrival

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old story (// to buffer BS fallback) is that jobs/economy are at odds with environment

// new green deal is that inconsistency between social justice and envir eg polar bears

result of reductionist/silo (andrew weinberger chaos: we think the flat isa result of the nail, but it's everything (that ever happened?!)

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burgess sp give them an argument

https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-june-3-2019/

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Sound familiar? History shows that as empires crumble the ruling elites become ever more ruthless in...

DAVID KORTEN / YES! MAGAZINE

18 APR 2019 AT 13:16 ET

This article from the YES! Media archives was originally published in the Summer 2006 issue of YES! Magazine.

By what name will future generations know our time?

Will they speak in anger and frustration of the time of the Great Unraveling, when profligate consumption exceeded Earth’s capacity to sustain and led to an accelerating wave of collapsing environmental systems, violent competition for what remained of the planet’s resources, and a dramatic dieback of the human population? Or will they look back in joyful celebration on the time of the Great Turning, when their forebears embraced the higher-order potential of their human nature, turned crisis into opportunity, and learned to live in creative partnership with one another and Earth?

A defining choice

We face a defining choice between two contrasting models for organizing human affairs. Give them the generic names Empire and Earth Community. Absent an understanding of the history and implications of this choice, we may squander valuable time and resources on efforts to preserve or mend cultures and institutions that cannot be fixed and must be replaced.

Empire organizes by domination at all levels, from relations among nations to relations among family members. Empire brings fortune to the few, condemns the majority to misery and servitude, suppresses the creative potential of all, and appropriates much of the wealth of human societies to maintain the institutions of domination.

Earth Community, by contrast, organizes by partnership, unleashes the human potential for creative cooperation, and shares resources and surpluses for the good of all. Supporting evidence for the possibilities of Earth Community comes from the findings of quantum physics, evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, anthropology, archaeology, and religious mysticism. It was the human way before Empire; we must choose to relearn how to live by its principles.

Developments distinctive to our time are telling us that Empire has reached the limits of the exploitation that people and Earth will sustain. A mounting perfect economic storm born of a convergence of peak oil, climate change, and an imbalanced U.S. economy dependent on debts it can never repay is poised to bring a dramatic restructuring of every aspect of modern life. We have the power to choose, however, whether the consequences play out as a terminal crisis or an epic opportunity. The Great Turning is not a prophecy. It is a possibility.

A turn from life

According to cultural historian Riane Eisler, early humans evolved within a cultural and institutional frame of Earth Community. They organized to meet their needs by cooperating with life rather than by dominating it. Then some 5,000 years ago, beginning in Mesopotamia, our ancestors made a tragic turn from Earth Community to Empire. They turned away from a reverence for the generative power of life—represented by female gods or nature spirits—to a reverence for hierarchy and the power of the sword—represented by distant, usually male, gods. The wisdom of the elder and the priestess gave way to the arbitrary rule of the powerful, often ruthless, king.

Paying the price

The peoples of the dominant human societies lost their sense of attachment to the living earth, and societies became divided between the rulers and the ruled, exploiters and exploited. The brutal competition for power created a relentless play-or-die, rule-or-be-ruled dynamic of violence and oppression and served to elevate the most ruthless to the highest positions of power. Since the fateful turn, the major portion of the resources available to human societies has been diverted from meeting the needs of life to supporting the military forces, prisons, palaces, temples, and patronage for retainers and propagandists on which the system of domination in turn depends. Great civilizations built by ambitious rulers fell to successive waves of corruption and conquest.

The primary institutional form of Empire has morphed from the city-state to the nation-state to the global corporation, but the underlying pattern of domination remains. It is axiomatic for a few to be on top, many must be on the bottom. The powerful control and institutionalize the processes by which it will be decided who enjoys the privilege and who pays the price, a choice that commonly results in arbitrarily excluding from power whole groups of persons based on race and gender.

Troubling truths

Herein lies a crucial insight. If we look for the source of the social pathologies increasingly evident in our culture, we find they have a common origin in the dominator relations of Empire that have survived largely intact in spite of the democratic reforms of the past two centuries. The sexism, racism, economic injustice, violence, and environmental destruction that have plagued human societies for 5,000 years, and have now brought us to the brink of a potential terminal crisis, all flow from this common source. Freeing ourselves from these pathologies depends on a common solution—replacing the underlying dominator cultures and institutions of Empire with the partnership cultures and institutions of Earth Community. Unfortunately, we cannot look to imperial power-holders to lead the way.

Beyond denial

History shows that as empires crumble the ruling elites become ever more corrupt and ruthless in their drive to secure their own power—a dynamic now playing out in the United States. We Americans base our identity in large measure on the myth that our nation has always embodied the highest principles of democracy and is devoted to spreading peace and justice to the world.

But there has always been tension between America’s high ideals and its reality as a modern version of Empire. The freedom promised by the Bill of Rights contrasts starkly with the enshrinement of slavery elsewhere in the original articles of the Constitution. The protection of property, an idea central to the American dream, stands in contradiction to the fact that our nation was built on land taken by force from Native Americans. Although we consider the vote to be the hallmark of our democracy, it took nearly 200 years before that right was extended to all citizens.

Americans acculturated to the ideals of America find it difficult to comprehend what our rulers are doing, most of which is at odds with notions of egalitarianism, justice, and democracy. Within the frame of historical reality, it is perfectly clear: They are playing out the endgame of Empire, seeking to consolidate power through increasingly authoritarian and antidemocratic policies.

Wise choices necessarily rest on a foundation of truth. The Great Turning depends on awakening to deep truths long denied.

Global awakening

Empire’s true believers maintain that the inherent flaws in our human nature lead to a natural propensity to greed, violence, and lust for power. Social order and material progress depend, therefore, on imposing elite rule and market discipline to channel these dark tendencies to positive ends. Psychologists who study the developmental pathways of the individual consciousness observe a more complex reality. Just as we grow up in our physical capacities and potential given proper physical nourishment and exercise, we also grow up in the capacities and potential of our consciousness, given proper social and emotional nourishment and exercise.

Over a lifetime, those who enjoy the requisite emotional support traverse a pathway from the narcissistic, undifferentiated magical consciousness of the newborn to the fully mature, inclusive, and multidimensional spiritual consciousness of the wise elder. The lower, more narcissistic, orders of consciousness are perfectly normal for young children, but become sociopathic in adults and are easily encouraged and manipulated by advertisers and demagogues. The higher orders of consciousness are a necessary foundation of mature democracy. Perhaps Empire’s greatest tragedy is that its cultures and institutions systematically suppress our progress to the higher orders of consciousness.

Given that Empire has prevailed for 5,000 years, a turn from Empire to Earth Community might seem a hopeless fantasy if not for the evidence from values surveys that a global awakening to the higher levels of human consciousness is underway. This awakening is driven in part by a communications revolution that defies elite censorship and is breaking down the geographical barriers to intercultural exchange.

The consequences of the awakening are manifest in the civil rights, women’s, environmental, peace, and other social movements. These movements in turn gain energy from the growing leadership of women, communities of color, and indigenous peoples, and from a shift in the demographic balance in favor of older age groups more likely to have achieved the higher-order consciousness of the wise elder.

It is fortuitous that we humans have achieved the means to make a collective choice as a species to free ourselves from Empire’s seemingly inexorable compete-or-die logic at the precise moment we face the imperative to do so. The speed at which institutional and technological advances have created possibilities wholly new to the human experience is stunning.

Just over 60 years ago, we created the United Nations, which, for all its imperfections, made it possible for the first time for representatives of all the world’s nations and people to meet in a neutral space to resolve differences through dialogue rather than force of arms.

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Less than 50 years ago, our species ventured into space to look back and see ourselves as one people sharing a common destiny on a living space ship.

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In little more than 10 years, our communications technologies have given us the ability, should we choose to use it, to link every human on the planet into a seamless web of nearly costless communication and cooperation.

Already our new technological capability has made possible the interconnection of the millions of people who are learning to work as a dynamic, self-directing social organism that transcends boundaries of race, class, religion, and nationality and functions as a shared conscience of the species. We call this social organism global civil society. On February 15, 2003, it brought more than 10 million people to the streets of the world’s cities, towns, and villages to call for peace in the face of the buildup to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. They accomplished this monumental collective action without a central organization, budget, or charismatic leader through social processes never before possible on such a scale. This was but a foretaste of the possibilities for radically new forms of partnership organization now within our reach.

Break the silence, end the isolation, change the story

We humans live by stories. The key to making a choice for Earth Community is recognizing that the foundation of Empire’s power does not lie in its instruments of physical violence. It lies in Empire’s ability to control the stories by which we define ourselves and our possibilities to perpetuate the myths on which the legitimacy of the dominator relations of Empire depend. To change the human future, we must change our defining stories.

Story power

For 5,000 years, the ruling class has cultivated, rewarded, and amplified the voices of those storytellers whose stories affirm the righteousness of Empire and deny the higher-order potentials of our nature that would allow us to live with one another in peace and cooperation. There have always been those among us who sense the possibilities of Earth Community, but their stories have been marginalized or silenced by Empire’s instruments of intimidation. The stories endlessly repeated by the scribes of Empire become the stories most believed. Stories of more hopeful possibilities go unheard or unheeded and those who discern the truth are unable to identify and support one another in the common cause of truth telling. Fortunately, the new communications technologies are breaking this pattern. As truth-tellers reach a wider audience, the myths of Empire become harder to maintain.

The struggle to define the prevailing cultural stories largely defines contemporary cultural politics in the United States. A far-right alliance of elitist corporate plutocrats and religious theocrats has gained control of the political discourse in the United States not by force of their numbers, which are relatively small, but by controlling the stories by which the prevailing culture defines the pathway to prosperity, security, and meaning. In each instance, the far right’s favored versions of these stories affirm the dominator relations of Empire.

THE IMPERIAL PROSPERITY STORY says that an eternally growing economy benefits everyone. To grow the economy, we need wealthy people who can invest in enterprises that create jobs. Thus, we must support the wealthy by cutting their taxes and eliminating regulations that create barriers to accumulating wealth. We must also eliminate welfare programs to teach the poor the value of working hard at whatever wages the market offers.

THE IMPERIAL SECURITY STORY tells of a dangerous world, filled with criminals, terrorists, and enemies. The only way to ensure our safety is through major expenditures on the military and the police to maintain order by physical force.

THE IMPERIAL MEANING STORY reinforces the other two, featuring a God who rewards righteousness with wealth and power and mandates that they rule over the poor who justly suffer divine punishment for their sins.

These stories all serve to alienate us from the community of life and deny the positive potentials of our nature, while affirming the legitimacy of economic inequality, the use of physical force to maintain imperial order, and the special righteousness of those in power.

It is not enough, as many in the United States are doing, to debate the details of tax and education policies, budgets, war, and trade agreements in search of a positive political agenda. Nor is it enough to craft slogans with broad mass appeal aimed at winning the next election or policy debate. We must infuse the mainstream culture with stories of Earth Community. As the stories of Empire nurture a culture of domination, the stories of Earth Community nurture a culture of partnership. They affirm the positive potentials of our human nature and show that realizing true prosperity, security, and meaning depends on creating vibrant, caring, interlinked communities that support all persons in realizing their full humanity. Sharing the joyful news of our human possibilities through word and action is perhaps the most important aspect of the Great Work of our time.

Changing the prevailing stories in the United States may be easier to accomplish than we might think. The apparent political divisions notwithstanding, U.S. polling data reveal a startling degree of consensus on key issues. Eighty-three percent of Americans believe that as a society, the United States is focused on the wrong priorities. Supermajorities want to see greater priority given to children, family, community, and a healthy environment. Americans also want a world that puts people ahead of profits, spiritual values ahead of financial values, and international cooperation ahead of international domination. These Earth Community values are in fact widely shared by both conservatives and liberals.

Our nation is on the wrong course not because Americans have the wrong values. It is on the wrong course because of remnant imperial institutions that give unaccountable power to a small alliance of right-wing extremists who call themselves conservative and claim to support family and community values, but whose preferred economic and social policies constitute a ruthless war against children, families, communities, and the environment.

The distinctive human capacity for reflection and intentional choice carries a corresponding moral responsibility to care for one another and the planet. Indeed, our deepest desire is to live in loving relationships with one another. The hunger for loving families and communities is a powerful, but latent, unifying force and the potential foundation of a winning political coalition dedicated to creating societies that support every person in actualizing his or her highest potential.

In these turbulent and often frightening times, it is important to remind ourselves that we are privileged to live at the most exciting moment in the whole of the human experience. We have the opportunity to turn away from Empire and to embrace Earth Community as a conscious collective choice. We are the ones we have been waiting for.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190419152623/https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/sound-familiar-history-shows-that-as-empires-crumble-the-ruling-elites-become-more-ruthless-in/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/how-sci-fi-could-help-solve-climate-change/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2SxP4PANr4

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/its-time-to-revise-americas-exceptional-national-story-line/

The 18 Yale students who crowded into a seminar room one September morning in 1999 for a course entitled “New Conceptions of American National Identity” didn’t know what they were in for. Nor did I, their instructor. Nor did most Americans know what the nation itself was in for, as we know now, 20 years later.

Or do we? What have we learned about American national identity since 9/11, since the Afghanistan and Iraq war fiascos, since Hurricane Katrina and other climate disasters beyond any one nation’s power to prevent, and since 2016, when the accumulation of injustices in our own streets and suites erupted in blind rage to empower a casualty and carrier of what he called the “American carnage” to “fix it”?

One thing I thoughtI knew on that first day of that 1999 class was that “The New Colossus,” a grand civic poem that Emma Lazarus wrote in 1883 for the Statue of Liberty, signified what had really made America powerful in the exceptional and, yes, troubling ways that had brought most of my students’ grandparents or parents to the country and the students themselves to my class:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name:

Mother of Exiles….

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

No other nation had peopled itself and become strong that way, as I could see from the surnames of the young American citizens who’ve taken my course: Remes, Bumatay, Kim, Ly, Jarrow, Fiskin, Espitia, DeShong, Dizon and on and on. Yes, white Americans had slaughtered Native Americans and had conquered, abducted and subordinated Latinos and Africans who hadn’t joined the United States of their own volition. Ernst Renan’s 1882 essay “What is a Nation?” showed my class that every nation lies to itself about its suppression and forcible incorporation of varied peoples into a supposed national family. The historian Benedict Anderson’s brilliant “Imagined Communities” showed us that members of even supposedly homogeneous nations know and feel bound to one another mainly through school textbooks, market exchanges and national story lines — collective fictions like “The New Colossus” and myths dramatized in movies and other mass media — that tell them who they are as a people and what they share and owe to one another.

What makes those national story lines true? When Lazarus’ new colossus welcomed the world’s huddled masses in 1883, a still-open frontier and burgeoning labor markets beckoned them too. But as a rising plutocracy’s Gilded Age clamped down on republican civil society, the Golden Door began to resemble the biblical Golden Calf that some Israelites fabricated and worshiped idolatrously even as Moses was bringing them the tablets of the Covenant. Even universalist, republican France, which gifted the Statue of Liberty to the United States, was just as hypocritical in dissembling its oppression of colonies and its grinding inequities at home.

What no other nation besides the U.S. had done at the time of the American Revolution was to establish itself officially on universal, “self-evident truths” about equal dignity and unalienable rights, instead of on nationalist myths of divine destiny, blood kinship and sacred soil – Blut und Boden, as Germans called it. America’s exceptional national story line told of a gunshot, fired by “embattled farmers” against an empire in 1775, that was “heard ’round the world,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, heralding the Enlightenment’s entry into history.

In that American myth, a new, republican citizen was rising against divine-right monarchy, aristocracy and mercantilism. History seemed to have destined Americans, “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force,” wrote Alexander Hamilton in 1787, urging ratification of the Constitution.

That Constitution made the American nation all the more exceptional, precisely in abducting and plunging into its “white” midst masses of people who, because the Constitution existed, had the highest possible stakes in making the country make good on its enlightened, constitutional response to Hamilton’s “important question.” Some former slaves and their descendants became the national myth’s strongest adherents and most eloquent champions, insisting that citizenship isn’t a racially, ethnically, sexually or economically exclusive club but a joint public effort to reach goals in common that no subgroup or lone ranger can reach by acting on its own.

Twenty years ago, most of my students and I took that creative American tension and its emblematic, progressive struggles as given: In America, “the language of hegemony and the language of dissent were all but inseparable,” as the literary historian Sacvan Bercovitch told us in “American Jeremiad.” Speaking truth to power was daunting and sometimes lethal, but ultimately it was irrepressible in our civic culture and national character.

So we’d been told, and it certainly seemed true on the night of Barack Obama’s election in 2008, when thousands of Yale students, including my own, poured spontaneously out of their residential colleges and into the historic Old Campus, bursting, unbidden and unrehearsed, into singing rounds of “The Star Spangled Banner.” The groundswell of unabashed, “liberal” patriotism seemed to answer Hamilton’s question again, and the answer was echoed as Obama, in Chicago’s Grant Park, affirmed that “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” had not perished from the earth.

But now it seems that the United States needs a rather different story line — that it has needed a new one at least since 9/11 and the Iraq War fiasco discredited its claim to herald a classically liberal, capitalist, democratic world order. Certainly we’ve needed a better national story since 2005, when Hurricane Katrina showed us all that climate change’s causes are all-too-human (and disproportionately American.) Surely we need one now that reactions to proliferating injustices in our streets and suites have elevated a carrier and casualty of accident, force and fraud to subvert Hamilton’s Constitution.

Have we decided his “important question” by proving ourselves incapable of democratic self-government after all? Have the swift, dark undercurrents that are also transforming other nations and notions of order swamped all hope that even America’s worst crises make us exceptionally promising? Are we back at the foot of Mt. Sinai, worshiping a Golden Calf?

Some New England Puritans thought so in 1701. They founded Yale because they thought that Harvard was dragging the holy Puritan mission into a swamp of slippery deals, in a world increasingly connected and flattened by commerce. The world isn’t flat, Yale’s founders insisted. It has abysses that open suddenly at our feet and in our hearts, and young Americans need myths and coordinates that are clear and potent enough to help them plumb those depths, face the demons in them and in themselves, and sometimes defy worldly powers on behalf of a higher one.

I’ve reckoned with those claims this week in an assessmentfor the Los Angeles Review of Books of historian Daniel T. Rodgers’ “As a City on a Hill,” which tells how the Puritan lawyer John Winthrop, first governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, tried to offset the “carnall lures” of its early capitalist profiteering with stricter enforcement of its “weal,” or common good. “It is a true rule that particular estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public,” Winthrop warned. That sounds like today’s Commonwealth of Massachusetts senator, Elizabeth Warren, when she tells entrepreneurs and investors that their private success depends on public investments in education, infrastructure and more:

You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. … You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

One of John Winthrop’s favorite public narratives was the biblical account I’ve cited of Moses versus worshipers of the Golden Calf. Winthrop took up Moses’ daunting rule in leading a wayward, sometimes-fickle people from slavery to a new promised land. So did Yale’s founders, who put Hebrew on its seal and called it a “school of prophets,” likening themselves to the Israelites leaving Egypt. So did John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who proposed that the Great Seal of the United States depict Israelites crossing the Red Sea. So did Martin Luther King Jr., who invoked the Exodus myth often in leading his formerly enslaved people toward a new American promised land.

All these “national” story lines converged at Yale’s 1964 commencement, when university president Kingman Brewster Jr. — himself a descendant of the Elder William Brewster, who ministered to a Puritan “exodus” on the Mayflower — presented an honorary doctorate of laws to King. They shook hands across not only the color line but also across time and space, bending the poetry of a national story line toward power.

We needn’t revert to Winthrop’s puritanism to renew a narrative that’s progressively national and exceptional, without being ideologically “nationalist” in the ways that the current occupant of the White House wants. My classes on American national identity have pondered that challenge.

G.K. Chesterton called America “a nation with the soul of a church” because its civic compact requires faith, even as it wisely refrains from imposing a particular doctrine and leaves room (as Winthrop’s commonwealth did not) for respectful non-believers like me and many of my students. To pull off that balance, and to prevent militarized, bureaucratized states from hovering like crows over the nests that nations make, as the historian Robert Wiebe put it in “Who We Are,” a fine book defending our anthropological need for nations even when they’re economically and technologically outmoded and misrepresented by states.

To nurture and defend familial nations against brazen nationalism, we’d need to tap and channel American civic culture’s mythic wellsprings and story lines vigorously toward national service projects for the young and larger contributions from “particular estates” that prevent “the ruin of the public” and of private estates themselves. Anyone who claims otherwise is likely a nationalist defender of mythically “sacred” blood and soil and the Golden Calf, but not a patriot of the liberal American nation through whose Golden Door my students’ families and mine escaped the cobwebs and chains of ethno-racial superstition and nationalist war.

out of the wreckage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1-9zg0cgN0

George Monbiot: How to Really Take Back Control

3/18

George Monbiot speaking at Falmouth University.

www.truthfal.com 60 min climate # 3 vs soil loss, mesh w/ economic crisis cf piketty wealth vs capital, stuff no one made) enterprise to rentier economy) --> pol crisis [neo-lib till busted, so no name, all just natural): our relationships ar transactional, treat all soc as a corp, naturl winners and losers (virtue), any interferenc is illigitaimate, eg taxes. not imperonal but very personal (oligarchs). anti-deoc, shrink state, politics can't help ppl, so they ignore it, turn to anti-poltics, symbols and sensations, come and belong to us, you will be the elect and can crush the losers; authoritarian everywhere; hatred of kindness, resurg of fascism

book interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBe7bNSBa0w(the road, cormac macc thought experiment}:

60 min

excrement piers morgan

posy 12/17

George Monbiot - Out of the Wreckage - A New Politics for an Age of Crisis - The Gaia Foundation

In this powerful and positive talk for The Gaia Foundation, George Monbiot brings to life his new book, Out of the Wreckage - A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. George explains how a toxic ideology of extreme competition and individualism not only rules the world, but misrepresents human nature, thereby destroying hope and common purpose whilst fracturing communities and the ecosystems upon which we all depend. He argues that only a positive vision can replace it; a new story that re-engages people in politics and lights a path to a better world, and a more respectful relationship with our beautiful planet. George explore new findings in psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology cast human nature in a radically different light: as the supreme altruists and cooperators. He shows how we can build on these findings to create a new politics: a ‘politics of belonging’, and a politics which has community, reciprocity and respect for all species at its heart. Both democracy and economic life can be radically reorganised from the bottom up, enabling us to take back control and overthrow the forces that have thwarted our ambitions for a better society and better stewardship of the Earth. George provides a thrilling and positive vision, and the hope and clarity required to change the world. Find out more about The Gaia Foundation and our events here www.gaiafoundation.org This was filmed in Heath Street Baptist Church, North London by Ben Gray for The Gaia Foundation. 23rd November 2017.

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1681 Monopoly on Tea (a bit like WalMart vs indep. businesses); FF protections (Story of CU) [irony of tobacco corps co-opt → Kochs, stole/perverted out origin story]

Einstein famously said you can't fix a problem using the kind of thinking that created it, but we do cling to reductionistic, mechanistic, linear and silo/disciplinary thinking, which is not suitable for addressing complex systemic problems.

Conservatives use a very basic kind of systems analysis: the Free Market will solve all problems (a very impoverished model: the environment, our life support system is dismissed as an "externality"). Market one of 4 inter-locking ideologies/stories.

Four interlocking ideologies: military, economic, fundamentalist and anti-communist. Greatly simplifies thinking and messaging, increasing coherence and unity. Progressives have more complex ideas and diversity (and less message"discipline"). Reinforced by Lakoff’s Strict Father framing.

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trump rightwing talk radio have simple algorithm based on the 4?

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https://www.alternet.org/local-peace-economy/no-more-united-states-fairy-tales

Here’s one final New Year’s resolution: let’s stop lying to each other.

Let’s stop lying about the state of the planet and what it will really take to fix it. Let’s stop lying about who the “founding fathers” were and what kind of constitution they wrote. Let’s stop lying to each other that we can fix everything by electing better people to office.

We live in a bubble of myths. They scramble our brains. They make it difficult for us to see the forest, rather than just individual trees; especially when the most powerful forces within our system whisper those myths incessantly in our ears.

While it’s certainly easier to blame the latest president for our state of affairs, the reality is much more troubling—that we have a system of law and government which poses as a working democracy while guaranteeing the destruction of the planet. In other words, it’s the hardware, not the software. It’s a faulty system.

Here’s what we believe:

We believe that the planet is in bad shape, but that we can fix it by recycling, buying electric cars, and taking shorter showers.
We believe in the “founding fathers,” the “rule of law,” and our constitution, and that we need to “strengthen” our democracy, which assumes we had one to begin with.

As they say, denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.

Suicide economics

Let’s start with our planet, the planet Earth. Almost all major ecosystems are in various throes of decline; climate change-caused catastrophes have now become the norm; and our very own life support systems are all under siege.

We are rapidly turning the planet into one giant Superfund site, and we show no signs of putting on the brakes.

Yet with one unified voice, democrats and republicans alike call for more economic growth, even though more “growth” means more destruction of the planet. Smart growth, green growth, sustainable growth—it doesn’t matter what you call it; it’s all about the belief that we can continue to consume without causing more damage to the planet.

When was the last time a politician called for “less” rather than “more?” When was the last time a government called for “negative growth” or a “reduction in GDP” as necessary for survival?

The only thing that believes in endless growth, other than our politicians, is a cancer cell. And we all know what eventually happens to the host.

The democracy myth

In our “federal” system, the federal government reigns supreme—that means that laws passed by Congress legally override laws adopted by any state or municipal government. Given that supremacy, the ability of people to elect people who will govern in the public interest would seem to be the determiner of whether we have a democracy.Then there’s the belief that we live in a democracy. Democracy literally means that the people govern themselves. In a democratic republic, people elect other people who are then supposed to govern in the interest of those who elected them. You know, “of the people, by the people, for the people” and all that jazz.

Want to get elected to Congress? Just reach into your pocket and pull out the $2 million average cost to be competitive; or the $5 million it takes to be competitive for a Senate race. For the House, that means raising $2,700 a day—and that’s after you decide to sell your soul to one of the major parties to have a shot at moving to Washington.

Elizabeth Warren raised over $42 million to win her seat. That means raising over $19,000 a day for six years!

Couple this with theCitizens United decision by the U.S. Supreme Court (and the multitude of cases that came before it, recognizing constitutional “rights” for corporations), in which the Court guaranteed that corporations can dump unlimited amounts of cash into races for candidates that they prefer, and it’s no surprise that both parties scout for millionaire candidates that can self-finance campaigns. Either way, the parties are completely dependent on those with the financial ability to support their candidates.

How does an average, ordinary person, who knows what it’s like to miss a mortgage payment or an electric bill, run for office?

They don’t. Which means that the people elected at the federal level have no clue what it’s like to be the other 99 percent, and their decisions are guaranteed to be out of whack with the average American. And yes, occasionally a Paul Wellstone sneaks through, but that doesn’t change the underlying calculus: One salmon breaking through ain’t enough to spawn.

Protest culture (in reverse)

People will perfect sign-making, marching routes, letters to the editor, and rally agendas targeting one single issue like removing funding from a government agency or shrinking national monuments, but many seem incapable of moving from defense to offense. I call it the “protest culture”— one in which we define our activism almost entirely by what we’re against.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, however, that we’re stuck in this mode because we’re so used to not having power that we’ve done the best we can to leverage whatever obstructive power we have left.

What would it look like if corporations were on the permanent defense? What if corporate executives were forced to make signs and march down the street in response to a bill or governmental decision? What if the owners of the largest corporations in this country were relegated to “free speech zones” at international trade conferences?

What do we have to do to make that happen? How do we create a system of law and government that isn’t placed in service to the wealthiest players in that system? Shouldn’t that be the question that we ask, rather than the color of the marker that we should use on our latest protest sign?

We may not know what else to do. But it’s time we learn if we are going to survive on this planet.

No more fairy tales

This belief that we live in a democracy is most clearly tested when we come face-to-face with threats to our own communities.

Let’s actually face it. Even our own towns, cities, counties, villages—you name them—are utterly overwhelmed when a big corporation squeezes into town. Not only are they mismatched in resources against a new corporate hog farm project, or toxic waste incinerator, but they find themselves on the wrong end of the law.

Because corporations have constitutional “rights,” if a community makes a decision to stop a bad project that has been permitted by the state or federal government, a corporation has the ability to sue the community to force its project into the town.

There’s no self-government at work here. Our communities aren’t even recognized by our own constitution, and courts have gone so far as to say that our towns, cities, counties, and villages only have the powers that the state legislature has deemed to give them. That means that we are all rightless within our own communities, and that corporations automatically have more rights than the people who live in these places.

In some ways, because we all continue to reinforce these myths about how our country works, we’re just as guilty as those who benefit directly from the way the system works.

That means that the well-meaning organizations that work to “tweak” the system may well be more of a problem than the corporations operating within it. “If only this were changed, or that,” they say, “Everything would be okay.”

I, for one, have stopped telling that fairy tale to people. Perhaps if enough of us stop telling it to each other, we can begin the hard work of building a new operating system—from scratch.

One Final New Year’s Resolution for 2018 was first posted on the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund’s website and is reposted on Rural America In These Times with permission. CELDF has partnered with nearly 200 communities across the country, “spearheading a movement to establish rights for people and nature over the system that control them.” For more information, click here.

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https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/01/30/ursula-k-le-guin-walking-on-the-water

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survival of FITest

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https://www.alternet.org/books/how-americas-economic-ideology-making-people-depressed-and-anxiety-filled

// ppl make us happy, not stuff

stuff is proof of ability/decency, discipline

https://www.alternet.org/personal-health/rampant-consumerism-unfulfilling-work-and-lack-social-connection-all-factor

Why Depression Is Rampant in Our Times

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/neoliberalism-taking-steep-toll-entire-generations-mental-health-study

Are you a millennial prone to self-criticism? Is your sense of worth inextricably bound to your professional standing and achievements? Do you suffer from acute social anxiety or are otherwise fearful of being judged by your peers?

The source of your unhappiness may not be chemical or emotional but a product of our economic system. According to a study from *Psychological Bulletin*, neoliberalism is producing generations of young people who are increasingly demanding, both of each other and themselves.

So what is neoliberalism, anyway? Despite what the pundit class might have you believe, it's more than a glib pejorative for the policies of corporate Democrats and the GOP, although both parties have embraced a neoliberal model to varying degrees. Mike Konczal offers the following definition at Vox:

"'Neoliberalism' encompasses market supremacy—or the extension of markets or market-like logic to more and more spheres of life. This, in turn, has a significant influence on our subjectivity: how we view ourselves, our society, and our roles in it. One insight here is that markets don’t occur naturally but are instead constructed through law and practices, and those practices can be extended into realms well beyond traditional markets."

As Meagan Day points out in Jacobin, meritocracy and neoliberalism often go hand in hand. If the whole of society can be reduced to a series of market transactions, then individuals become commodities in direct competition with one another.

"Since the mid-1970s, neoliberal political-economic regimes have systematically replaced things like public ownership and collective bargaining with deregulation and privatization, promoting the individual over the group in the very fabric of society," Day notes. "Meanwhile, meritocracy—the idea that social and professional status are the direct outcomes of individual intelligence, virtue, and hard work—convinces isolated individuals that failure to ascend is a sign of inherent worthlessness."

Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill, the authors of the study, attribute these feelings of inadequacy to a rise in perfectionism across the culture. While perfectionism is generally understood as the rejection of anything that fails to meet one's own exacting standards, Curran and Hill assign the term distinct categories: self-oriented (holding unrealistic expectations of oneself), other-oriented (unrealistic expectations of others), and socially prescribed, the "most debilitating of the three dimensions." Day describes the latter as "the feeling of paranoia and anxiety engendered by the persistent—and not entirely unfounded—sensation that everyone is waiting for you to make a mistake so they can write you off forever."

For those born in the United Kingdom, Canada and the U.S. after 1989, Curran and Hill observe a marked rise in each category, but especially in socially prescribed perfectionism, which has become twice as prevalent as it was a generation ago. This can manifest itself in a variety of ways, including anxiety, depression, eating disorders and suicidal ideation, not to mention an increased dependence on social media.

"[Curran and Hill] cite data showing that young people today are less interested in engaging in group activities for fun, attending instead to individual endeavors that make them feel productive or fill them with a sense of achievement," Day continues. "When the world is demanding that you prove yourself worthy at every turn, and you can’t shake the suspicion that the respect of your peers is highly conditional, hanging out with friends can seem less compelling than staying in to meticulously curate your social media profiles."

Ironically, social media itself tends to produce feelings of anxiety and alienation. A wealth of research has linked an overreliance on Facebook to depression, so the pressures of neoliberalism and the stresses of social media appear to work in concert with one another, if they're not one and the same. (What are these sites, after all, if not platforms for personal branding?) Either way, the results are deeply troubling.

"Even young people without diagnosable mental illnesses tend to feel bad more often, since heightened other-oriented perfectionism creates a group climate of hostility, suspicion, and dismissiveness—in which the jury is always out on everyone, pending group appraisal—and socially prescribed perfectionism involves an acute recognition of that alienation," Meagan Day adds ruefully. "In short, the repercussions of rising perfectionism range from emotionally painful to literally deadly."

Until we can begin to imagine an alternative, the destructive cycle seems destined to repeat itself.

H/T Jacobin

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https://www.alternet.org/activism/democracy-movements-fight-brutal-capitalism

In this tumultuous world, one thing seems certain: today’s dire threats to our democracy did not arise out of nowhere. Every culture thrives, or not, on whether itscore narrative—the causation story we tell ourselves—enhances mutual gain or spurs division. And, the narrative driving today’s unfolding catastrophe feeds the latter.

It begins with a deep distrust of human nature.

Way back in 1651, philosopher Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan summed up our nature with the Latin proverb Homohominilupus, “Man is a wolf to his fellow man.” From this thought tradition, now reinforced through much of media and advertising, we absorb the notion that humans are essentiallyselfish, competitive, and materialistic. Yet, with this dim view of our nature, how can we possibly make society work? The dominant narrative has the answer: Just put self-interest to work.

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