Nate Silver has been researching the 2016 presidential election, starting with a comparison with Brexit earlier in 2016:
The U.S. presidential election, as I’ve argued here, was something of a similar case. No, the polls didn’t show a toss-up, as they had in Brexit. But the reporting was much more certain of Clinton’s chances than it should have been based on the polls. Much of The New York Times’s coverage, for instance, implied that Clinton’s odds were close to 100 percent. In an article on Oct. 17 — more than three weeks before Election Day — they portrayed the race as being effectively over, the only question being whether Clinton should seek a landslide or instead assist down-ballot Democrats:
Hillary Clinton’s campaign is planning its most ambitious push yet into traditionally right-leaning states, a new offensive aimed at extending her growing advantage over Donald J. Trump while bolstering down-ballot candidates in what party leaders increasingly suggest could be a sweeping victory for Democrats at every level. […]
The maneuvering speaks to the unexpected tension facing Mrs. Clinton as she hurtles toward what aides increasingly believe will be a decisive victory — a pleasant problem, for certain, but one that has nonetheless scrambled the campaign’s strategy weeks before Election Day: Should Mrs. Clinton maximize her own margin, aiming to flip as many red states as possible to run up an electoral landslide, or prioritize the party’s congressional fortunes, redirecting funds and energy down the ballot?
This is not to say the election was a toss-up in mid-October, which was one of the high-water marks of the campaign for Clinton. But while a Trump win was unlikely, it should hardly have been unthinkable. As we were fond of pointing out at the time, Trump’s chances in mid-October were around 1-in-6 according to betting markets and FiveThirtyEight’s forecast, about the same as a chance of being shot while playing a “game” of Russian roulette. And yet the Times, famous for its “to be sure” equivocations,2 wasn’t even contemplating the possibility of a Trump victory. It expressed nearly as much confidence in Clinton two weeks later even after the polls tightened substantially after FBI director James B. Comey’s letter to Congress, at which point Trump’s odds jumped to about 1-in-3 in our forecast.”
It’s hard to reread this coverage without recalling Sean Trende’s essay on “unthinkability bias,” which he wrote in the wake of the Brexit vote. Just as was the case in the U.S. presidential election, voting on the referendum had split strongly along class, education and regional lines, with voters outside of London and without advanced degrees being much more likely to vote to leave the EU. The reporters covering the Brexit campaign, on the other hand, were disproportionately well-educated and principally based in London. They tended to read ambiguous signs — anything from polls to the musings of taxi drivers — as portending a Remain win, and many of them never really processed the idea that Britain could vote to leave the EU until it actually happened.
So did journalists in Washington and London make the apocryphal Pauline Kael mistake, refusing to believe that Trump or Brexit could win because nobody they knew was voting for them? That’s not quite what Trende was arguing. Instead, it’s that political experts aren’t a very diverse group and tend to place a lot of faith in the opinions of other experts and other members of the political establishment. Once a consensus view is established, it tends to reinforce itself until and unless there’s very compelling evidence for the contrary position. Social media, especially Twitter, can amplify the groupthink further. It can be an echo chamber.
I recently reread James Surowiecki’s book “The Wisdom of Crowds” which, despite its name, spends as much time contemplating the shortcomings of such wisdom as it does celebrating its successes. Surowiecki argues5 that crowds usually make good predictions when they satisfy these four conditions:
Diversity of opinion. “Each person should have private information, even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.”
Independence. “People’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them.”
Decentralization. “People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.”
Aggregation. “Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.”
Political journalism scores highly on the fourth condition, aggregation. While Surowiecki usually has something like a financial or betting market in mind when he refers to “aggregation,” the broader idea is that there’s some way for individuals to exchange their opinions instead of keeping them to themselves. And my gosh, do political journalists have a lot of ways to share their opinions with one another, whether through their columns, at major events such as the political conventions or, especially, through Twitter.
But those other three conditions? Political journalism fails miserably along those dimensions.
Diversity of opinion? For starters, American newsrooms are not very diverse along racial or gender lines, and it’s not clear the situation is improving much.6 And in a country where educational attainment is an increasingly important predictor of cultural and political behavior, some 92 percent of journalists have college degrees. A degree didn’t used to be a de facto prerequisite<a class — “It’s not clear how many newsrooms require a college degree for their reporting positions — we usually don’t do so at FiveThirtyEight and a quick perusal of other job listings suggest that many other newsrooms also do not. But there may nonetheless be a lot of self-selection in which candidates seek out these jobs and who succeeds in the recruiting and hiring process for a reporting job; just 70 percent of journalists had college degrees in 1982 and only 58 percent did in 1971.
The political diversity of journalists is not very strong, either. As of 2013, only 7 percent of them identified as Republicans (although only 28 percent called themselves Democrats with the majority saying they were independents). And although it’s not a perfect approximation — in most newsrooms, the people who issue endorsements are not the same as the ones who do reporting — there’s reason to think that the industry was particularly out of sync with Trump. Of the major newspapers that endorsed either Clinton or Trump, only 3 percent (2 of 59) endorsed Trump. By comparison, 46 percent of newspapers to endorse either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney endorsed Romney in 2012. Furthermore, as the media has become less representative of right-of-center views — and as conservatives have rebelled against the political establishment — there’s been an increasing and perhaps self-reinforcing cleavage between conservative news and opinion outlets such as Breitbart and the rest of the media.
Although it’s harder to measure, I’d also argue that there’s a lack of diversity when it comes to skill sets and methods of thinking in political journalism. Publications such as Buzzfeed or (the now defunct) Gawker.com get a lot of shade from traditional journalists when they do things that challenge conventional journalistic paradigms. But a lot of traditional journalistic practices are done by rote or out of habit, such as routinely granting anonymity to staffers to discuss campaign strategy even when there isn’t much journalistic merit in it. Meanwhile, speaking from personal experience, I’ve found the reception of “data journalists” by traditional journalists to be unfriendly, although there have been exceptions.
Independence? This is just as much of a problem. Crowds can be wise when people do a lot of thinking for themselves before coming together to exchange their views. But since at least the days of “The Boys on the Bus,” political journalism has suffered from a pack mentality. Events such as conventions and debates literally gather thousands of journalists together in the same room; attend one of these events, and you can almost smell the conventional wisdom being manufactured in real time. (Consider how a consensus formed that Romney won the first debate in 2012 when it had barely even started, for instance.) Social media — Twitter in particular — can amplify these information cascades, with a single tweet receiving hundreds of thousands of impressions and shaping the way entire issues are framed. As a result, it can be largely arbitrary which storylines gain traction and which ones don’t. What seems like a multiplicity of perspectives might just be one or two, duplicated many times over.
Decentralization? Surowiecki writes about the benefit of local knowledge, but the political news industry has become increasingly consolidated in Washington and New York as local newspapers have suffered from a decade-long contraction. That doesn’t necessarily mean local reporters in Wisconsin or Michigan or Ohio should have picked up Trumpian vibrations on the ground in contradiction to the polls. But as we’ve argued, national reporters often flew into these states with pre-baked narratives — for instance, that they were “decreasingly representative of contemporary America” — and fit the facts to suit them, neglecting their importance to the Electoral College. A more geographically decentralized reporting pool might have asked more questions about why Clinton wasn’t campaigning in Wisconsin, for instance, or why it wasn’t more of a problem for her that she was struggling in polls of traditional bellwethers such as Ohio and Iowa. If local newspapers had been healthier economically, they might also have commissioned more high-quality state polls; the lack of good polling was a problem in Michigan and Wisconsin especially.
There was once a notion that whatever challenges the internet created for journalism’s business model, it might at least lead readers to a more geographically and philosophically diverse array of perspectives. But it’s not clear that’s happening, either. Instead, based on data from the news aggregation site Memeorandum, the top news sources (such as the Times, The Washington Post and Politico) have earned progressively more influence over the past decade:
The share of total exposure for the top five news sources9 climbed from roughly 25 percent a decade ago to around 35 percent last year, and has spiked to above 40 percent so far in 2017. While not a perfect measure10, this is one sign the digital age hasn’t necessarily democratized the news media. Instead, the most notable difference in Memeorandum sources between 2007 and 2017 is the decline of independent blogs; many of the most popular ones from the late ’aughts either folded or (like FiveThirtyEight) were bought by larger news organizations. Thus, blogs and local newspapers — two of the better checks on Northeast Corridor conventional wisdom run amok — have both had less of a say in the conversation.
All things considered, then, the conditions of political journalism are poor for crowd wisdom and ripe for groupthink. So … what to do about it, then?
Initiatives to increase decentralization would help, although they won’t necessarily be easy. Increased subscription revenues at newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post is an encouraging sign for journalism, but a revival of local and regional newspapers — or a more sustainable business model for independent blogs — would do more to reduce groupthink in the industry.
Likewise, improving diversity is liable to be a challenge, especially because the sort of diversity that Surowiecki is concerned with will require making improvements on multiple fronts (demographic diversity, political diversity, diversity of skill sets). Still, the research Surowiecki cites is emphatic that there are diminishing returns to having too many of the same types of people in small groups or organizations. Teams that consist entirely of high-IQ people may underperform groups that contain a mix of high-IQ and medium-IQ participants, for example, because the high-IQ people are likely to have redundant strengths and similar blind spots.
That leaves independence. In some ways the best hope for a short-term fix might come from an attitudinal adjustment: Journalists should recalibrate themselves to be more skeptical of the consensus of their peers. That’s because a position that seems to have deep backing from the evidence may really just be a reflection from the echo chamber. You should be looking toward how much evidence there is for a particular position as opposed to how many people hold that position: Having 20 independent pieces of evidence that mostly point in the same direction might indeed reflect a powerful consensus, while having 20 like-minded people citing the same warmed-over evidence is much less powerful. Obviously this can be taken too far and in most fields, it’s foolish (and annoying) to constantly doubt the market or consensus view. But in a case like politics where the conventional wisdom can congeal so quickly — and yet has so often been wrong — a certain amount of contrarianism can go a long way.
Dan O’Donnell lays out what Congressional Republican leadership has devised to replace ObamaCare, beginning with the parliamentary hurdle:
Before the ink had even dried on the House Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare, the American Health Care Act (AHCA), Democrats and Republicans alike were blasting it.
Naturally, very few had a chance to actually read the bill, but that didn’t stop every one of them from giving their opinions on it. Most have been remarkably disingenuous, especially those that fail to mention the budgetary process needed to get around a Democratic filibuster in the Senate.
A filibuster is all but a certainty, as Democrats have made it their sole mission to thwart the Republican agenda at quite literally every turn. Heck, they are even delaying President Trump’s Cabinet confirmations longer than any other President’s in American history.
Given that, does anyone really think that they would allow Republicans to just dismantle former President Obama’s singular (and some would say single) domestic policy achievement? Of course they wouldn’t. They would filibuster the American Health Care Act and Republicans would be powerless to stop them.
A cloture vote to stop a filibuster requires 60 Senate votes, and since Republicans only control 52 Senate seats, Democrats will be able to stop any Republican legislation by simply announcing plans to filibuster.
Thanks to a change in Senate rules in the 1970s to a “two-track system” of legislation, they don’t actually have to hold the Senate floor for weeks on end; they merely have to threaten it. Under this two-track system, once they do, if Republicans don’t have the votes for cloture, the filibustered bill (in this case, the AHCA) would quite literally be sidetracked–placed on one track while all other Senate business moves to a second track. The change to a two-track system led to a dramatic rise in filibusters and the AHCA debate would be no exception: The bill would simply stall in the Senate with no hope of rescue unless Republicans were to win an additional eight Senate seats in the 2018 midterms.
To get any sort of Obamacare repeal and replace measure passed through Congress, then, Republicans need to get around the filibuster. In a rather ingenious but admittedly limiting move, the House has settled on a method of passing legislation known as “budget reconciliation.” This allows for a bill to pass through the Senate with just 20 hours of debate and no possibility of a filibuster.
However, there are specific requirements for a bill to qualify for the reconciliation process–most notably that the bill be budgetary in nature. This means that the AHCA can only repeal Obamacare’s taxes and spending and not its onerous regulations.
Understandably, conservatives are furious that the bill is not tackling what they believe to be the fundamental problems with Obamacare, but the AHCA does repeal the individual and business mandates–generally seen to be the linchpins of Obamacare itself–as well as taxes or tax increases on prescription medication, over-the-counter medication, medical devices, health savings accounts (HSAs), and Medicare.
The bill also repeals the elimination of deductions for expenses that can be allocated to Medicare Part D subsidies, repeals the increase in the income threshold for medical expense deductions, repeals limitations on contributions to flexible savings accounts (FSAs), establishes a refundable tax credit for health insurance, and increases the maximum contribution limit to HSAs.
All of these, particularly the repeal of the individual mandate and the medical device tax, have been things conservatives have clamored for for years. Moreover, the AHCA completely overhauls Medicaid in the wake of Obamacare’s massive expansion of it. The Republican bill gives states far more flexibility in administering Medicaid than the remarkably unworkable one-size-fits-all approach of Obamacare.
Yet conservatives understandably want more. They don’t want the AHCA to merely repeal Obamacare’s taxes and spending, they want to eliminate all of its regulations. Unfortunately, that would necessitate a normal bill that would be subject to normal Senate rules and therefore subject to the inevitability of a Democrat filibuster.
Because of the two-track system, Democrats could keep any such bill sidelined for years and Republicans would be left with neither the repeal of nor the replacement for Obamacare that they so desperately want (and that America so desperately needs).
So House Republicans chose to repeal and replace as much of Obamacare as they legally could using the only realistic means they have of sidestepping Democrat obstruction–reconciliation.
In order to qualify for reconciliation (which can only occur once a year), a measure must be passed by April 15th and, critically, it must be budgetary in nature. Otherwise, it is subject to 2 U.S.C. § 644, more commonly known as the “Byrd Rule” as an homage to former Senator Robert Byrd.
If a bill or a portion of a bill does not generate a net change in either budgetary outlays or revenues–in other words, if it does not explicitly deal with taxing or spending–it is not eligible for reconciliation and would be declared a regular bill and thus subject to regular rules (and a filibuster).
Even an effort to erase the most onerous Obamacare regulations, which one can absolutely argue have an impact on the federal budget, would be subject to the Byrd Rule, which makes a bill that “produces changes in outlays or revenues which are merely incidental to the non-budgetary components of the provision” ineligible for reconciliation.
This is why the bulk of Obamacare’s regulations are not able to be included in the AHCA: They are simply not budgetary in nature. Were they to be included, Democrats would invoke the Byrd Rule and simply filibuster the measure to what would effectively be its death.
Given this harsh reality, Republicans are wise to use the budget reconciliation process to bypass Democrat obstruction and achieve the bulk of their single biggest campaign promise, the repeal and replacement of Obamacare.
It is only natural that conservatives want the AHCA to do more, but ignoring the fact that Democrats would simply filibuster any effort to completely undo all of Obamacare’s provisions is disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst.
A Democrat filibuster isn’t just a threat, it’s a certainty, and the reality is that passing the AHCA through the budget reconciliation process is quite simply the best option that Republicans have.
So Republicans’ best opportunity here appears to be to repeal as much of ObamaCare as they can without invoking the filibuster, get a larger majority in the 2018 elections, and then do the rest. And that’s an uncertain strategy not merely for the obvious reasons, but because poll results are mixed about how Americans feel about ObamaCare. Great.
So President Trump set off a firestorm over the weekend with a series of tweets alleging that Obama had tapped Trump Tower. But getting hung up on imprecise language in the president’s tweets isn’t the right way to look at things. What seems to be at true is that the Obama administration spied on some of Trump’s associates and we don’t know exactly how much information was collected under what authority and who was targeted.
FISA surveillance has to be approved by a special court, which almost always allows the government to spy on people when asked. But when the Justice Department asked to spy on several of Trump’s associates, the court refused permission, according to the BBC. As McCarthy writes, this is notable because “the FISA court is notoriously solicitous of government requests to conduct national security surveillance.”
Not taking no for an answer, the Obama administration came back during the final weeks of the election with a narrower request that didn’t specifically mention Trump. That narrower request was granted by the court, but reports from the Guardian and the BBC don’t mention the tapping of phones..
Former Obama officials issued denials that the former president had anything to do with it, which McCarthy calls “disingenuous on several levels.” Others have characterized them as a “non-denial denial.”
To the Obama camp’s claim that the president didn’t “order” surveillance of Trump, McCarthy writes:
First, as Obama officials well know, under the FISA process, it is technically the FISA court that ‘orders’ surveillance. And by statute, it is the Justice department, not the White House, that represents the government in proceedings before the FISA court. So, the issue is not whether Obama or some member of his White House staff “ordered” surveillance of Trump and his associates. The issues are (a) whether the Obama Justice Department sought such surveillance authorization from the FISA court, and (b) whether, if the Justice Department did that, the White House was aware of or complicit in the decision to do so. Personally, given the explosive and controversial nature of the surveillance request we are talking about — an application to wiretap the presidential candidate of the opposition party, and some of his associates, during the heat of the presidential campaign, based on the allegation that the candidate and his associates were acting as Russian agents — it seems to me that there is less than zero chance that could have happened without consultation between the Justice Department and the White House.
And as journalist Mickey Kaus commented on Twitter, there’s a reason why presidents name trusted allies as attorney general. As close as former attorney general Loretta Lynch was to Obama, and as supportive as she was of his political goals, it seems very unlikely that this was some sort of rogue operation.
It’s certainly not impossible to believe that the Obama administration spied on Trump. Obama wouldn’t be the first president to engage in illegal surveillance of opposition candidates, and his administration has been noted for its great enthusiasm for domestic spying. In an effort to plug embarrassing leaks, the Obama administration spied on Associated Press reporters and seized the phone records not only of a Fox News reporter but also of his parents. Obama’s political allies even alleged that his CIA spied on Congress.
Nor is it unbelievable that under the Obama administration, supposedly non-partisan civil servants would go after political opponents. After all, the notorious IRS scandal was about exactly that.
Trump has called for a congressional investigation, but what this really needs is a special prosecutor, someone from outside the politically tainted Justice Department, to look into the political abuse of surveillance laws by the Obama administration. Maybe, upon investigation, it will turn out that nothing improper happened — that this is a lot of smoke, but that there’s no fire. But we can’t know without an investigation, and if there really were political abuses of the Justice Department and the intelligence surveillance process, those guilty should not simply be exposed but go to jail. Such abuse strikes at democracy itself.
Note that FISA surveillance is severely limited and requires information from surveillance to be kept very secret or, if not relevant, deleted. If those limits were exceeded, if Obama officials lied to the court, or if the information was — as it appears to have been — excessively shared within the government, or leaked to outsiders, those are all serious crimes, as First Amendment attorney Robert Barnes notes.
Watergate brought down a presidency, but if the worst suspicions here are borne out, we’re dealing with something worse. Hopefully not, but there’s no way to tell at this point. As The Washington Post has been saying lately, “Democracy dies in darkness.” Let’s shine some light on what the Obama administration was doing during this election.
Oh, and sometime would you to write about the change if the republican (note,little r) party, and its fall from grace when it was still the Grand Old Party!
Upon thinking about it, I figured out the answer, which requires a bit of history. In 1954, voters gave control of both houses of Congress to the Democrats. That meant that Republican presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford had to deal with Democratic Congressional leaders, which limited what they were able to do that dovetailed with what the GOP wanted to do.
Small government is always the correct answer, but it’s easier to tout small government when you’re not in charge. Whatever Richard Nixon was, he was no conservative. What conservative would enact wage and price controls to stop inflation (which only pushed it down the road), and create the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (both of which metastasized into the most anti-business job-killing agencies of the federal government)? What conservative raises taxes? (See the Tax Reform Act of 1969.)
Then in 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president and the Republicans took over control of the Senate. My theory is that Republicans enjoyed being in charge in Washington and decided that they liked government the size it was as long as they were in charge. Government did not shrink under Reagan’s presidency, nor did it under George H.W. Bush, nor did it under George W. Bush. (While 9/11 was a reason in the latter case, 9/11 should have been a reason to radically reduce the size of government to get more resources for the war on terror without increasing taxes or the deficit.)
Wisconsin Republicans have really never been small-government conservatives. State and local government is twice the size it should be given growth in inflation and population since the late 1970s. A constitutional mechanism like the Taxpayer Bill of Rights would stop unjustified growth in government, but despite the fact that the GOP has been in total power in Madison since 2011 (and on and off for 25 years before that), there are no constitutional controls on growth in government in Wisconsin, only (weak) legislative controls, which obviously can be overturned by a future Legislature.
My theory proves that there is less difference than one might think between parties — not in ideology, but in the desire to get into office, get more Ds or Rs into office, and keep them in office. The more power government has, the more the stakes are raised in elections, and the more expensive and nastier politics gets. State Republicans obviously believe that the current size and scope of government is just fine as long as they’re in charge of it. Constitutional controls on what government can do would give people one less reason to vote for Republicans, since with the right limits on taxation and spending Democrats couldn’t raise spending and taxes whenever they felt like it.
Did you know that The Capital Times and The Nation are mentioned in The Constitution of the United States? Specifically, in the First Amendment?
Neither did I. Sorry for the trick question, but John Nichols thinks they are.
In a piece blasting (who else?) Donald Trump (“The enemy of the people …” blah blah blah), Comrade Nichols makes this remarkable assertion:
… that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment — the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution …
The only “business”? You mean, haberdashers are left unprotected? Hod carriers bereft of the Constitution? HVAC contractors out in the unconstitutional cold?
Only “The Press,” aka the news media, enjoys that special status? Really, John?
It is typical of the Left to regard the term “the Press” to mean exclusively the institutional news media — the New York Times, CBS, CNN, et cetera. Corporations, all. Because the Left vigorously denies the blessings of free speech to us commoners, the deplorables!
The truth is that the basement conspiracy-monger, high on mimeograph fluid, has as much First Amendment protection as Chuck Todd. The fact is that Koch Industries has every bit of constitutional protection for its free speech as The Capital Times or, for that matter, Stately Blaska Manor. Because nothing in the Constitution singles out one “business” for more constitutional protection than another.
Nichols, the news media corporations,and the Democrat(ic) party itself, are adamant that the First Amendment should be gelded to limit free speech only for the credentialed experts in Press Row. Where is your journalism degree?! Papers!
Justice Scalia says the First Amendment means what it says:
The Amendment is written in terms of “speech,” not speakers. Its text offers no foothold for excluding any category of speaker, from single individuals to partnerships of individuals, to unincorporated associations of individuals, to incorporated associations of individuals … “All the provisions of the Bill of Rights set forth the rights of individual men and women — not, for example, of trees or polar bears. But the individual person’s right to speak includes the right to speak in association with other individual persons.
Surely the dissent does not believe that speech by the Republican Party or the Democratic Party can be censored because it is not the speech of “an individual American.”
Since I was doing something productive Tuesday night — announcing a playoff basketball game — I did not see Donald Trump’s speech.
James Freeman did, and noticed something not about Trump:
Tuesday was a rough night for the resistance, and not just because Donald Trump gave the finest speech of his career. The movement also suffered grievous self-inflicted wounds in its continuing campaign to destroy the nation’s 45th president. Democratic donors are no doubt beginning to ask themselves why they signed on for another era of Nancy Pelosi’s leadership of their party in the House.
Mrs. Pelosi led Democratic women in wearing white, recalling the suffragette movement. This could have been a patriotic gesture of unity—similar to the President’s reference to Black History Month in the opening lines of his speech—allowing all Americans to appreciate how far human liberty has advanced in this great nation while recognizing challenges that remain. But instead it was a gimmick, used by Democrats to suggest that Mr. Trump is a threat to our most basic freedoms.
Mrs. Pelosi and her colleagues obviously decided before the event that they would provide television cameras with reaction shots expressing their disapproval or even contempt for the President. He caught them off guard by delivering a big-hearted, moving and gracious address, but they seemed unable to react in real time. The pantsuit caucus and their equally grumpy male Democratic colleagues continued to sit, frown and offer tepid applause or none at all even for lines that would be objectionable to no one outside of ISIS.
Perhaps the most compelling moment in the history of presidential addresses—with the nation seeing a grieving widow as her heroic husband was being honored—also was not sufficient to inspire the anti-Trumpers to alter their communications strategy. Then Democrats fled the chamber immediately at the conclusion of Mr. Trump’s remarks like Jets fans in the third quarter. Even after it was over, Ms. Pelosi still didn’t understand what had just happened and continued to fire off negative remarks across various media.
Tuesday was in many ways a mirror image of the start of the previous presidency. Whereas Mr. Obama gave Republicans not the slightest incentive to try to cooperate, Mr. Trump just made it extremely difficult for Democrats in swing districts to keep pretending he’s Hitler.
One could argue that the Trump resistance is making encouraging progress in refining its message given that members of the movement began his presidency by fashioning headgear named after genitalia. But the campaign to de-legitimize Mr. Trump can’t afford too many nights like Tuesday. And it will be interesting to watch which Democrats running in 2018 think they can afford to stand next to Mrs. Pelosi.
So much is written about our historically unpopular president that it’s easy to overlook how unpopular the Democratic congressional leadership is. The latest WSJ/NBC poll shows that while Mr. Trump has only slightly higher negative ratings—47% compared to Mrs. Pelosi’s 44%—he also has much higher positive ratings. In the survey, 46% of Americans have positive feelings toward Mr. Trump, while only 19% feel that way about the House Democratic leader.
This does not mean last night was an unmitigated triumph for conservatism. The President offered an encouraging promise of “big, big” tax cuts, but with few details. His calls for de-regulation were inspiring, such as when he pointed out the lives at stake when the FDA drags its feet on drug approvals. But after making a powerful case against government regulation of business, he then explained that government must regulate business that crosses our borders. This makes no sense, and as Mark Perry points out with a nearby chart, even if one believes the trade deficit in goods is a problem, one shouldn’t forget the rising trade surplus we are running in services.
Still, after watching Tuesday’s Trump triumph and the reaction of Democrats, Republicans running in 2018 probably have one thing on their minds this morning: Vive la Résistance!
James Freeman replaced James Taranto on the essential Best of the Web Today beat, and here is his first offering:
Who says Donald Trump is against entitlement reform? While he probably won’t propose changes to Medicare or Social Security in his first budget proposal, the President seems eager to consider whether all members of the media establishment should continue to enjoy privileges not available to the average citizen.
CNN and the New York Times are upset they weren’t included in a Friday press briefing at the White House, even though they still had access to media pool reports filed that day. Almost all Americans—and for that matter almost all journalists—were also not invited to the meeting with White House press secretary Sean Spicer. But CNN and the Times seem to feel particularly offended.
But even the Times doesn’t think much of this comparison. On Saturday the paper ran a piece taunting Mr. Trump based on the Times conviction that even the highest elected official in the U.S. will ultimately lose a power struggle with Washington’s un-elected establishment. Reporters Glenn Thrush and Michael Grynbaum fault Mr. Trump for “believing he can master an entrenched political press corps with far deeper connections to the permanent government of federal law enforcement and executive department officials than he has.” The Times report adds that the President “is being force-fed lessons all presidents eventually learn — that the iron triangle of the Washington press corps, West Wing staff and federal bureaucracy is simply too powerful to bully.”
But even the Times doesn’t think much of this comparison. On Saturday the paper ran a piece taunting Mr. Trump based on the Times conviction that even the highest elected official in the U.S. will ultimately lose a power struggle with Washington’s un-elected establishment. Reporters Glenn Thrush and Michael Grynbaum fault Mr. Trump for “believing he can master an entrenched political press corps with far deeper connections to the permanent government of federal law enforcement and executive department officials than he has.” The Times report adds that the President “is being force-fed lessons all presidents eventually learn — that the iron triangle of the Washington press corps, West Wing staff and federal bureaucracy is simply too powerful to bully.”
When trying to play the sympathetic victim whose rights are being violated, referring to oneself as part of an “iron triangle” is generally not recommended. Also, how often did Soviet dissidents get the chance to force-feed Stalin? If they could have found anything to eat presumably they would have kept it for themselves.
Apparently CNN can’t stick to the script either. The ubiquitous Mr. Grynbaum of the Times observes that both friends and foes of CNN President Jeffrey Zucker “say he can handle — and even relishes — a harsh spotlight.” The piece recounts how, while nibbling on filet mignon at a recent gathering of select reporters, Mr. Zucker said that his team wears Trump insults “as a badge of honor.” The headline notes that Mr. Trump and Mr. Zucker are “2 Presidents Who Love a Spectacle.”
If Mr. Zucker seems unconcerned about the possibility of being sent to the gulag, it’s perhaps because he knows that his First Amendment rights are not threatened. It is not essential to our democracy that the White House gives information first to particular entrenched media incumbents before sharing it with the public. And the First Amendment does not say that the New York Times and CNN must have an edge over smaller competitors.
Last year the Times ran a front-page story saying that reporters who thought Mr. Trump was a dangerous demagogue “have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer.” More recently CNN happily broadcast repeated references to an accusation-filled “dossier” of negative rumors about Mr. Trump without bothering to confirm they were true.
The President can be forgiven for thinking that CNN and the Times have been trying to build the case for impeachment since Election Night. He has no obligation to help them. Along with refusing to give them an informational edge on their media competitors, this entitlement reform could be paired with an effort to make more government data available to everyone, and to make it more easily understandable and searchable, empowering amateur and professional journalists alike.
The latest NBC/WSJ poll suggests the issue could resonate. A full 86% of respondents agree with the following statement: “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.” Also, a majority in the survey believe that the “news media and other elites are exaggerating the problems with the Trump Administration because they are uncomfortable and threatened with the kind of change that Trump represents.”
The survey sample skews Democratic, yet survey respondents have become more optimistic in the Trump era. Now 40% think the country’s headed “in the right direction,” compared to 33% two months ago and just 20% in December of 2015. Mr. Trump’s approval ratings, while still low by presidential standards, are also improving. And perhaps that’s what is most upsetting to CNN and the New York Times.
If President Trump’s first tumultuous weeks have done nothing else, at least they have again made us a nation of readers.
As Americans grapple with the unreality of the new administration, George Orwell’s “1984” has enjoyed a resurgence of interest, becoming a surprise best seller and an invaluable guide to our post-factual world.
On his first full day in office Mr. Trump insisted that his inaugural crowd was the largest ever, a baseless boast that will likely set a pattern for his relationship both to the media and to the truth.
At an event marking Black History Month last week, the president took a detour from a discussion of Frederick Douglass — he described the abolitionist as “an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more” — to talk about the press. “A lot of the media is actually the opposition party — they’re so biased,” he said. “So much of the media is the opposition party and knowingly saying incorrect things.”
Mr. Trump understands that attacking the media is the reddest of meat for his base, which has been conditioned to reject reporting from news sites outside of the conservative media ecosystem.
For years, as a conservative radio talk show host, I played a role in that conditioning by hammering the mainstream media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to be far higher than I imagined. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information. We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience. Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that could be easily misled.
The news media’s spectacular failure to get the election right has made it only easier for many conservatives to ignore anything that happens outside the right’s bubble and for the Trump White House to fabricate facts with little fear of alienating its base.
Unfortunately, that also means that the more the fact-based media tries to debunk the president’s falsehoods, the further it will entrench the battle lines.
During his first week in office, Mr. Trump reiterated the unfounded charge that millions of people had voted illegally. When challenged on the evident falsehood, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, seemed to argue that Mr. Trump’s belief that something was true qualified as evidence. The press secretary also declined to answer a straightforward question about the unemployment rate, suggesting that the number will henceforth be whatever the Trump administration wants it to be.
He can do this because members of the Trump administration feel confident that the alternative-reality media will provide air cover, even if they are caught fabricating facts or twisting words (like claiming that the “ban” on Muslim immigrants wasn’t really a “ban”). Indeed, they believe they have shifted the paradigm of media coverage, replacing the traditional media with their own.
In a stunning demonstration of the power and resiliency of our new post-factual political culture, Mr. Trump and his allies in the right media have already turned the term “fake news” against its critics, essentially draining it of any meaning. During the campaign, actual “fake news” — deliberate hoaxes — polluted political discourse and clogged social media timelines.
Some outlets opened the door, by helping spread conspiracy theories and indulging the paranoia of the fever swamps. For years, the widely read Drudge Report has linked to the bizarre conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who believes that both the attacks of Sept. 11 and the Sandy Hook shootings were government-inspired “false flag” operations.
For conservatives, this should have made it clear that something was badly amiss in their media ecosystem. But now any news deemed to be biased, annoying or negative can be labeled “fake news.” Erroneous reports that the bust of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office or misleading reports that sanctions against Russia had been lifted will be seized on by Mr. Trump’s White House to reinforce his indictment.
Even as he continues to attack the “dishonest media,” Mr. Trump and his allies are empowering this alt-reality media, providing White House access to Breitbart and other post-factual outlets that are already morphing into fierce defenders of the administration.
The relationship appears to be symbiotic, as Mr. Trump often seems to pick up on talking points from Fox News and has tweeted out links from websites notorious for their casual relationship to the truth, including sites like Gateway Pundit, a hoax-peddling site that announced, shortly after the inauguration, that it would have a White House correspondent.
By now, it ought to be evident that enemies are important to this administration, whether they are foreigners, refugees, international bankers or the press.
But discrediting independent sources of information also has two major advantages for Mr. Trump: It helps insulate him from criticism and it allows him to create his own narratives, metrics and “alternative facts.”
All administrations lie, but what we are seeing here is an attack on credibility itself.
The Russian dissident and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov drew upon long familiarity with that process when he tweeted: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
Mr. Kasparov grasps that the real threat is not merely that a large number of Americans have become accustomed to rejecting factual information, or even that they have become habituated to believing hoaxes. The real danger is that, inundated with “alternative facts,” many voters will simply shrug, asking, “What is truth?” — and not wait for an answer.
In that world, the leader becomes the only reliable source of truth; a familiar phenomenon in an authoritarian state, but a radical departure from the norms of a democratic society. The battle over truth is now central to our politics.
This may explain one of the more revealing moments from after the election, when one of Mr. Trump’s campaign surrogates, Scottie Nell Hughes, was asked to defend the clearly false statement by Mr. Trump that millions of votes had been cast illegally. She answered by explaining that everybody now had their own way of interpreting whether a fact was true or not.
“There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts,” she declared. Among “a large part of the population” what Mr. Trump said was the truth.
“When he says that millions of people illegally voted,” she said, his supporters believe him — and “people believe they have facts to back that up.”
Or as George Orwell said: “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.” But Ms. Hughes’s comment was perhaps unintentionally insightful. Mr. Trump and company seem to be betting that much of the electorate will not care if the president tells demonstrable lies, and will pick and choose whatever “alternative facts” confirm their views.
The next few years will be a test of that thesis.
In the meantime, we must recognize the magnitude of the challenge. If we want to restore respect for facts and break through the intellectual ghettos on both the right and left, the mainstream media will have to be aggressive without being hysterical and adversarial without being unduly oppositional.
Perhaps just as important, it will be incumbent on conservative media outlets to push back as well. Conservatism should be a reality-based philosophy, and the movement will be better off if it recognizes that facts really do matter. There may be short-term advantages to running headlines about millions of illegal immigrants voting or secret United Nations plots to steal your guns, but the longer the right enables such fabrications, the weaker it will be in the long run. As uncomfortable as it may be, it will fall to the conservative media to police its worst actors.
The conservative media ecosystem — like the rest of us — has to recognize how critical, but also how fragile, credibility is in the Orwellian age of Donald Trump.
Mika Brzezinski, co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, had an unfortunate turn of phrase the other day. She said it’s the mission of the press to “control exactly what people think.”
My suspicion is that this was less a Freudian slip than a simple slip-up. Brzezinski was referring to her fear that President Trump may be trying to control the way people think by discrediting the media — whom he calls “enemies of the American people” — and she lost her rhetorical footing, stumbling into saying that mind control is “our job.”
But the misstatement resonated with a lot of people, as did Trump’s claim that the press is an enemy of the people.
The first thing that needs to be said is that whenever you hear a politician talk about “the American people,” either they’re over-generalizing to the point of banality, or they’re referring to only one segment of the American public. “The American people love an underdog” is an example of banality. The press “is the enemy of the American people” is a highly subjective declaration.
I don’t blame journalists for taking offense. It was a grossly irresponsible thing for the chief constitutional officer of our government to say. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a point or that people are crazy for seeing it.
Which brings me back to Brzezinski’s comment about the media’s controlling how people think.
One need not paint with an overly broad brush or accuse the entire press corps of being part of a knowing conspiracy to manipulate the public. Many mainstream journalists sincerely believe they are operating in good faith and doing their job to the best of their abilities. At the same time, it seems patently obvious that the “objective” press is in the business of subjectively shaping attitudes rather than simply reporting facts.
Consider the hot topic of the moment: illegal immigration. The syndicate that distributes the column you are reading follows the AP stylebook, which says that I am not allowed to refer to “illegal immigrants” (i.e., people who migrate illegally), but I can refer to illegal immigration (i.e., the act of migrating illegally). Kathleen Carroll, then the senior vice president and executive editor of the Associated Press, explained that the change was part of the AP’s policy against “labeling people.”
Many news outlets followed suit, using such terms as “unauthorized” or “undocumented” to describe immigrants formerly known as illegal.
The move was hailed by left-wing immigration activists as a great leap forward. And for good reason: It is part of their agenda to blur the distinctions between legal and illegal immigration, and to make it sound as if objecting to the former is morally equivalent to objecting to the latter. But as a matter of fact and logic, the difference between an “unauthorized immigrant” and an “illegal immigrant” is nonexistent. The media play these kinds of linguistic games all the time.
Economics professor Tim Groseclose walks readers through countless examples in his book Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind. Partial-birth abortion virtually never appears without a “so-called” before it, and the procedure is virtually never described clearly. The word “kill” is almost never used to describe any abortion, despite the fact that this is what happens. Whenever some great sweeping piece of liberal social legislation is passed by Democrats, it’s a “step forward.” Whenever a law is repealed, Republicans are “turning back the clock.”
The language games are part of a larger tendency of journalists to follow certain scripts that conform to how coastal elites see the country.
In 2015, during the ridiculous hysteria over Indiana’s religious-freedom law (since revised), a news reporter went around a small town asking business owners about the law. The owner of Memories Pizza, Crystal O’Connor, said anyone could eat there, but they’d probably turn down a job to cater a gay wedding. The story was immediately blown up by national news outlets as proof of some prairie fire of anti-gay discrimination, even though no one had been discriminated against. Memories Pizza had to shut down.
My hunch is that O’Connor nodded along when Trump said the press is the enemy of the American people.
Lost in most of the coverage of President Trump’s decision to rescind the Obama administration’s transgender mandates is a fundamental legal reality — the Trump administration just relinquished federal authority over gender-identity policy in the nation’s federally funded schools and colleges.
In other words, Trump was less authoritarian than Obama. And that’s not the only case. Consider the following examples where his administration, through policy or personnel, appears to be signaling that the executive branch intends to become less intrusive in American life and more accountable to internal and external critique.
• Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, a man known not just for his intellect and integrity but also for his powerful legal argument against executive-branch overreach. Based on his previous legal writings, if Gorsuch had his way, the federal bureaucracy could well face the most dramatic check on its authority since the early days of the New Deal. By overturning judicial precedents that currently require judicial deference to agency legal interpretations, the Court could put a stop to the current practice of presidents and bureaucrats steadily (and vastly) expanding their powers by constantly broadening their interpretations of existing legal statutes.
For example, the EPA has dramatically expanded its control over the American economy even without Congress passing significant new environmental legislation. Instead, the EPA keeps revising its interpretation of decades-old statutes like the Clean Air Act, using those new interpretations to enact a host of comprehensive new regulations. If Gorsuch’s argument wins the day, the legislative branch would be forced to step up at the expense of the executive, no matter how “authoritarian” a president tried to be.
• Trump nominated H. R. McMaster to replace Michael Flynn as his national-security adviser. McMaster made his name as a warrior on battlefields in the Gulf War and the Iraq War, but he made his name as a scholar by writing a book, Dereliction of Duty, that strongly condemned Vietnam-era generals for simply rolling over in the face of Johnson-administration blunders and excesses. In his view, military leaders owe their civilian commander in chief honest and courageous counsel — even when a president may not want to hear their words.
• When the Ninth Circuit blocked Trump’s immigration executive order (which was certainly an aggressive assertion of presidential power), he responded differently from the Obama administration when it faced similar judicial setbacks. Rather than race to the Supreme Court in the attempt to expand presidential authority, it backed up (yes, amid considerable presidential bluster) and told the Ninth Circuit that it intends to rewrite and rework the order to address the most serious judicial concerns and roll back its scope.
Indeed, if you peel back the layer of leftist critiques of Trump’s early actions and early hires, they contain a surprising amount of alarmism over the rollback of governmental power. Education activists are terrified that Betsy DeVos will take children out of government schools or roll back government mandates regarding campus sexual-assault tribunals. Environmentalists are terrified that Scott Pruitt will make the EPA less activist. Civil-rights lawyers are alarmed at the notion that Jeff Sessions will inject the federal government into fewer state and local disputes over everything from school bathrooms to police traffic stops.
A president is “authoritarian” not when he’s angry or impulsive or incompetent or tweets too much. He’s authoritarian when he seeks to expand his own power beyond constitutional limits. In this regard, the Obama administration — though far more polite and restrained in most of its public comments — was truly one of our more authoritarian.
Obama exercised his so-called prosecutorial discretion not just to waive compliance with laws passed by Congress (think of his numerous unilateral delays and waivers of Obamacare deadlines) but also to create entirely new immigration programs such as DACA and DAPA. He sought to roll back First Amendment protections for political speech (through his relentless attacks on Citizens United), tried to force nuns to facilitate access to birth control, and he even tried to inject federal agencies like the Equality Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) into the pastor-selection process, a move blocked by a unanimous Supreme Court. In foreign policy, he waged war without congressional approval and circumvented the Constitution’s treaty provisions to strike a dreadful and consequential deal with Iran.
There’s no doubt that Trump has expressed on occasion authoritarian desires or instincts. In the campaign, he expressed his own hostility for the First Amendment, his own love of expansive government eminent-domain takings (even to benefit private corporations), endorsed and encouraged violent responses against protesters, and declared that he alone would fix our nation’s most pressing problems. But so far, not only has an authoritarian presidency not materialized, it’s nowhere on the horizon. Instead, he’s facing a free press that has suddenly (and somewhat cynically) rediscovered its desire to “speak truth to power,” an invigorated, activist judiciary, and a protest movement that’s jamming congressional town halls from coast to coast. …
It was just three weeks ago that David Frum published a much-discussed essay in The Atlantic outlining how Trump could allegedly build an American autocracy. Over at Vox, Ezra Klein wrote at length about how the Founders’ alleged failures laid the groundwork for a “partyocracy.” And now? Trump’s early struggles are leading pundits to ask, “Can Trump help Democrats take back the House?” In the American system, accountability comes at you fast.
Liberals were blind to Obama’s authoritarian tendencies in part because they agreed with his goals and in part because their adherence to “living Constitution” theories made the separation of powers far more conditional and situational. But authoritarianism is defined by how a president exercises power, not by the rightness of his goals. It’s early, and things can obviously change, but one month into the new presidency, a trend is emerging — Trump is less authoritarian than the man he replaced.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 