Category Archives: Politics

260,000 Words Later

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The New York Times has analyzed every word the President has uttered during his daily press conferences/campaign rallies. Equivalent to a 700-page book.

Some context from Charles Duhigg in The New Yorker:

“During the H1N1 outbreak of 2009—which caused some twelve thousand American deaths, infections in every state, and seven hundred school closings—Besser and his successor at the C.D.C., Dr. Tom Frieden, gave more than a hundred press briefings. President Barack Obama spoke publicly about the outbreak only a few times, and generally limited himself to telling people to heed scientific experts and promising not to let politics distort the government’s response. ‘The Bush Administration did a good job of creating the infrastructure so that we can respond,’ Obama said. . . . At no time did Obama recommend particular medical treatments, nor did he forecast specifics about when the pandemic would end.”

One of The Times conclusions:

“. . . the self-aggrandizement is singular for an American leader. But his approach is even more extraordinary because he is taking credit and demanding affirmation while he asks people to look beyond themselves and bear considerable hardship to help slow the spread of the virus.

“He doesn’t speak the language of transcendence, what we have in common,” said Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of American political rhetoric at Texas A&M University. Instead, Dr. Mercieca said, he falls back on a vocabulary he developed over decades promoting himself and his business.

“Trump’s primary goal is to spread good news and information and market the Trump brand: ‘Trump is great. The Trump brand is great. The Trump presidency is great,’ she said. “It’s not the right time or place to do that.”

“Transcendence”, shit, the nation would settle for silence.

Another:

“The coronavirus briefings have often contained the same phrases and themes that he used in his 2016 race.

“It’s consistent with the way he campaigned when he said, ‘I alone can fix it,’” said John Murphy, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who studies the rhetoric of American presidents and politicians.

Dr. Murphy said that most presidents avoid taking personal credit because they appreciate the fact that Americans can draw the connection themselves between presidential leadership and the country’s successes.

With Mr. Trump, there is no such subtlety. “The level of self-congratulations that occurs every day at these press conferences is unprecedented,” Dr. Murphy added.”

I’ve been wondering, what would my dad think about the President? He was a free-market capitalist, a successful businessperson, lived in Florida, and leaned right. Despite all of that, I’m convinced he’d be damn near as critical of him as me because he couldn’t stand self-promoters.

He grew up poor, during the Depression, in Eastern Montana. Sometimes in the West self-promoters are said to be,”All hat, no cattle.” Dad was “All cattle, no hat.”

When I was a young professor, the President at my college resigned. He wrote a letter for the campus community that detailed his accomplishments. I was impressed, dad was anything but. Why? Because of John Murphy’s insight—he trusted that people could draw the connections themselves between leadership and a business’s or university’s success.

 

 

 

 

Outstanding Leaders Who Happen To Be Women

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Demick providing global context on North Korea:

“. . . consider that, as many commentators have noted, the coronavirus crisis is accelerating the pace of change in technology and culture throughout the world. A widely noted aspect of the pandemic is that many of the countries winning high marks for containing the contagion and protecting their economies are headed by women—among the most notable, Germany’s Angela Merkel, New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, and Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen. Could North Korea fare better under a woman, too”

Could the United States?

In North Korea, The Fourth Man Could Be A Woman

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Barbara Demrick in The New Yorker:

“The conventional wisdom is that a woman could never ascend to the leadership of North Korea, a country stuck in a time warp of passé fashions, hairdos, music, and social mores. A toxic mix of Confucianism and totalitarianism indentures women to their husbands, to their in-laws, and, ultimately, to a male-dominated regime. With a few exceptions (the best known being the vice foreign minister, Choe Son Hui), North Korea’s senior cadres are almost entirely male. The Supreme People’s Assembly—which currently has six hundred and eighty-seven members—is supposed to set aside twenty per cent of its seats for women, but the percentage has frequently dipped lower. And the primary function of these token deputies seems to be to brighten the optics, by wearing the jewel-toned, floor-length Korean gowns best known by the South Korean term hanbok. Since 1948, North Korea has been ruled by three men—the founder, his son, and his grandson—but, nevertheless, it is now conceivable that the fourth man will be a woman. That is because, with reports that Kim Jong Un is in failing health, the most obvious successor is his thirtysomething sister, Kim Yo Jong.”

And dig this:

“She was reportedly a favorite of her father, Kim Jong Il, who ruled from 1994 until his death, in 2011, and who, according to a former Russian official, Konstantin Pulikovsky, may have had a more enlightened attitude toward women than some of the North Korean élite. Pulikovsky, who travelled with Kim Jong Il by train and later wrote a memoir about the experience, told interviewers that the leader praised the intelligence of his daughter, while deriding his sons as ‘idle blockheads.'”

Despite being 36 years young, obscenely rich, and with access to world class medical care, Kim Jong Un is allegedly at risk of dying due to obesity, chain smoking and who knows what other vices. Dad’s assessment seems spot on, which begs the question, why didn’t he go with Kim Jo Young in the first place.

Most likely for two reasons. Too young and . . .

“‘North Korea is so outlandishly sexist, despite the fact that they are supposed to be a revolutionary society. When it comes to gender relations, it is like South Korea decades ago,’’ Katharine H. S. Moon, a political-science professor at Wellesley College who has written about gender issues in Korean politics, said. In fact, as Moon notes, women have not fared well in politics in South Korea, either, a nation that is routinely toward the bottom of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s list of developed countries’ rankings on gender equality. South Korea’s only female President, Park Geun-hye, was impeached in 2017, and is now in prison, serving twenty-five years for bribery, extortion, and abuse of power, which some maintain is harsher treatment than accorded men who committed comparable offenses.”

 

Taking A Pass On Human Empathy

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Susan Glasser in The New Yorker, “Fifty Thousand Americans Dead from the Coronavirus, and a President Who Refuses to Mourn Them”.

Impossible to argue with this description:

“To the extent that he discusses those who have died, he tends to do so largely in self-justifying, explicitly political terms, framing the pandemic as an externally imposed catastrophe that would have been much, much worse without him.”

Or this opinion:

“The numbers of dead citizens he throws about, meanwhile, seem to be abstractions to a President who believes that even the subject of mass death is all about him.”

Glasser with much needed historical context:

“Honoring the dead has long been one of the tests of American Presidential leadership. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was, after all, not just another political speech but a remembrance of those who were killed in the bloodiest single battle of the Civil War, in which some fifty thousand Americans became casualties and about eight thousand died. Twenty-five years ago this week, Bill Clinton’s lip-bitingly empathetic response to the Oklahoma City bombing, in which a white supremacist blew up a federal building and killed a hundred and sixty-eight people, was seen as a key moment of his tenure. He was dubbed the ‘mourner-in-chief,’ at a time when he was languishing politically. That speech is often said to have saved his Presidency. More recently, Barack Obama wept from the White House lectern in speaking about the deaths of schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut, and gave arguably the speech of his lifetime in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, singing ‘Amazing Grace as he mourned at a funeral service for nine African-Americans killed by a white supremacist at a church massacre. Even those Presidents who aren’t particularly good at speechifying—think of the two George Bushes—have considered public commiseration amid national tragedy part of the job description. Have we ever had a President just take a pass on human empathy, even of the manufactured, politically clichéd kind?”

Showing empathy is not something he could be coached to do, even if he was coachable. I wonder, do his supporters, some which are empathetic people, look for it in him or not?

Leaders Manage the Unknown

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The New York Times is hopelessly old fashioned, still practicing fact-based investigative reporting and all.

Today’s lead article, He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus, was the work of six people.

Unfortunately, we live in an age when only the liberal “choir” will read it, which is too bad, because it’s incredibly restrained.

For example, this is not politicizing the pandemic.

“There were key turning points along the way, opportunities for Mr. Trump to get ahead of the virus rather than just chase it. There were internal debates that presented him with stark choices, and moments when he could have chosen to ask deeper questions and learn more. How he handled them may shape his re-election campaign. They will certainly shape his legacy.”

“Ask deeper questions,” when has Trump done that?

I listened to Scott Galloway interview Tim Armstrong on his podcast this week. Galloway asked him about leadership during crises. Armstrong talked about interviewing many top executives during the 2008-2009 global financial crisis. He summarized their insights this way, “Managers manage the known and leaders manage the unknown.”

The President has not managed the known well and has shown no aptitude for the unknown. Governors, mayors, business leaders, epidemiologists, selfless healthcare workers, and other “essential” people have filled the void brilliantly, managing the known extremely well against all odds.

Armstrong was talking about commercial enterprises, but what about noncommercial ones? What about the common good? Who will manage 21st century unknowns related to public health, environmental degradation, and global poverty?

 

“There’s a Disconnect”

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Jason Gay in the Wall Street Journal:

“Francesa’s March 30 rant about the president had gone viral, in part because it had surprised people, given Francesa’s known affection for Trump, but also because it sounded close to home, New Yorker to New Yorker, like he was yelling from a cab. Back in the day, a young Francesa had parked Fred Trump’s limousine at the Atlantic Beach Club, and he still had admiration for Fred’s son. “The President is brilliant at branding…brilliant at marketing,” Francesa told me. But he didn’t back down from his critiques: ‘I steadfastly stand by that. I think the federal government has not done a great job because I feel like they haven’t connected with the people.'”

1925-1930’s Germany and the (dis)United States

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Political science pop quiz.Who is the gravedigger of American democracy?

Christopher Browning, renowned Holocaust scholar; and my liberal friends Richie and Larry; are no doubt cursing me for giving Trump any cover. And for good reason. They’re convinced, among other historically minded people on the left, that life in the (dis)United States today is frighteningly similar to 1925-1930’s Germany. And I agree.

Here’s a summary of Browning’s argument with excerpts from his October 2018 New York Review of Books essay, “A leading Holocaust historian just seriously compared the US to Nazi Germany”.

As Vox explains, Browning warns that democracy in the US is under serious threat, in the way that German democracy was prior to Hitler’s rise — and really could topple altogether.

Vox’s Beauchamp explains:

“Browning’s essay covers many topics, ranging from Trump’s ‘America First’ foreign policy — a phrase most closely associated with a group of prewar American Nazi sympathizers — to the role of Fox News as a kind of privatized state propaganda office. But the most interesting part of his argument is the comparison between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Paul von Hindenburg, the German leader who ultimately handed power over to Hitler.”

Props if you identified Mitch McConnell as the gravedigger. Could the nerdy Kentuckian really be that dangerous? Beauchamp again:

“McConnell, in Browning’s eyes, is doing something similar to Hindenburg— taking whatever actions he can to attain power, including breaking the system for judicial nominations (cough cough, Merrick Garland) and empowering a dangerous demagogue under the delusion that he can be fully controlled.”

Do conservatives have the necessary self-awareness to take this critique seriously? Beauchamp:

“Now, as Browning points out, ‘Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism.’ The biggest and most important difference is that Hitler was an open and ideological opponent of the idea of democracy, whereas neither Trump nor the GOP wants to abolish elections.

What Browning worries about, instead, is a slow and quiet breakdown of American democracy — something more much like what you see in modern failed democracies like Turkey. Browning worries that Republicans have grown comfortable enough manipulating the rules of the democratic game to their advantage, with things like voter ID laws and gerrymandering, that they might go even further even after Trump is gone.”

How does one maintain meaningful, personal friendships with people who support McConnell and Trump when our democracy is under serious threat in the ways Browning convincingly illustrates? The vast majority of people do it by avoiding any discussion of politics, but it’s too late for that for me because my friends and I have been locking political horns for decades.

My successfully balancing the two is less important than us avoiding Germany’s fate.

I highly recommend reading all of Beauchamp’s summary and all of Browning’s original essay if you know someone who has a subscription to The New York Review of Books or if you can access it through a university library or interlibrary loan.* And of course, it’s important to remember that Browning isn’t the only scholar highlighting these historical parallels. See also. . .

A Scholar of Fascism Sees A Lot That’s Familiar With Trump

The rise of American authoritarianism