Take a breath

The pace of the Trump administration is dizzying. It is always finding a way to do something outrageous while preparing to pivot to the next piece of madness. The Atlantic pointed this out recently when they wrote about four stories that broke in a single day. Prior to this I have wanted to publish several articles on the Trump administration; none have made it through the editing process before losing not only their timeliness but almost their coherence, as the world around us seemed to change.

            I have wanted to write about how Donald Trump is getting co-opted by those around him, and how his alt-right followers should be furious. There were too many examples to keep going, the article never seemed up to date enough. Sure he didn’t reinforce Article 5 but he did just quietly allow in a bunch of refugees.

            I started doing research on health care, tax policy, and infrastructure. None seemed important enough to pull together 500 words on while the Russia story burned brightly. There is so much that could be said on them but each feels as if it will have its moment. The Russian moment is now, and like a glitter bomb it is on everything.

            I wanted to write several wide ranging analyses of the Russia revelations but that might be the least solid ground in politics right now. I scroll through my Facebook feed to see the “promoted” stories are a part of the scandal that I have almost forgotten. Reading back through stories the news site algorithms suggest stories that seem like ancient history. In fact reading news from April, right now being the end of May, feels like simpler time. The most recent breaking news has been about the Transition, a time which even allowed non-political news to enter the public consciousness.

            It has been said many times before but it is worth repeating, Donald Trump is good at disruption, it is how he likes to run his businesses and it is how we are being governed. He wants to keep people off balance, he wants us to be stuck five outrages ago while he is off signing executive orders or golfing. This allows him space to operate, but also gives him plenty of coverage on the news. The NPR politics podcast pointed out last week that he will say whatever he wants to get to the next 10 minutes, but once under oath he is evasive and disciplined.

            So it is time to take a breath away from Russia, the investigations will continue at pace. The world is a place full of problems and provocations, so for the next two weeks those will take center stage for The Polaris Revolution.

Why should they get the court too?

Yesterday Neil M. Gorsuch was sworn in to the Supreme Court of the United States. He will serve a lifetime appointment from now until most likely at least 2048, the year he turns 80, very possibly beyond. There are two current members of the court who are older than that.

Today more than most I feel it is important to ask, why should they get the court too?

The Republicans have the House of Representatives. A prize won through the collection of state legislators to properly sequester or dilute Democratic votes in as many states as possible during redistricting. Allowing them to hold a strong and defensible majority, if not one that is entirely impenetrable to ideological disagreements, within the lower house.

Add to that the simple fact that Democratic states are more populous, while Republican states are more numerous. This means that on average, more states will send Republican Senators to Congress as their allocation is a constant two per state no matter how sparse.

This advantage in number of states has played out at the presidential level as well. Democrats have won 6 of the last 7 popular votes for president (‘92, ’96, ’00, ’08, ’12, ’16). However they have only won 4 of the last 7 Electoral College votes. To be clear, those have produced legitimate presidents as those are our rules. They could not be considered truly democratically elected though.

The Democrats are not particularly good at actually winning elections. 2016 should have been a clear indication of that. Even while indicators were pointing to a large Democratic victory, the party failed to deliver. That is made even worse by the notion that democratic ideas and policies often poll much higher than Republican ones. They are just not sold as well when the time comes. Gay Marriage, the Public Option, Marijuana legalization, supporting education, climate change, all public polls show the country siding with the Democratic platform, yet we have a Republican House, Republican Senate, Republican President.

So why should they get the court too?

Shouldn’t one branch of government actually reflect the people? Shouldn’t the minority be protected? Or majority represented? It doesn’t follow that this country should be governed by regressives trying to hold the country back from the direction which it is naturally heading.

Judge Gorsuch is not the coming of the apocalypse, he is a conservative, and some might say that it is a “conservative seat” which he sits on. That logic should not follow, just because the predecessor was a conservative, or an originalist, does not mean that the successor needs to be. If you’d like to find out if the gender of the judges should remain the same, I believe Ruth Bader Ginsburg enjoys answering that question.  The court must be allowed to evolve. It should reflect the practice of law for its own time, but it should also reflect the country for which it is interpreting those laws.

Just because Justice Scalia may have liked the person who replaced him, does not mean that we owe it to him to have Judge Gorsuch on the court. The country deserves to have a Justice that will dispense justice in a way that it recognizes.

The Atlantic reminds us all to rise above controversy

            Ian Bogost writes in The Atlantic that “Pepsi’s New Ad is a Complete Success.” By all conventional standards he would be wrong. The ad was likely not cheap to produce and could only be aired for all of a day before getting attacked so thoroughly that they could not get value out of it before getting pulled. He is also more right than anyone else who has weighed in on this controversy.

            Pepsi has created something not meant to actually be an advertisement but a stunt. Bogost does an excellent job of breaking down how this is more an act of capitalism than politics. How we are treated by corporations reveals their ideological bent, consumerism first everything else second.

            The article politely brings you the realization that whether outraged or not, you are playing in to the trap that Pepsi has set for you. It does not lay out the trope of not thinking of a purple elephant, though it could easily be excused if it did. Bogost even calls himself out for being part of the machine that has eaten the controversy and allowed it to live out its lifecycle.

            Universalized, the message is much more profound. We live in a time of great outrage. There are things happening within our political and social spheres that are worthy of outrage. We are inundated by all sorts of things that could make us angry. Everyone knows that the superlative emotions get the clicks. Which is why no one does anything that you will think is generally kind of neat, they do things that will totally blow you away. We live with our whole lives on max outrage. Which is why we can be at full breath screaming that the president of Syria is gassing his own citizens, but what wins the news cycle is a cola ad. Why? Well Middle East politics are a tricky mine field of terrible choices and less than ideal allies. Going full blast at a cola company is something we can change today. (Also, land mines are still totally a thing, which we might be rid of by 2025 but I wouldn’t count on it.)

            The lesson here though is we need to focus on the decisions and the policy behind things. Pepsi wanted you to be mad, or to be mad at the people who were mad, so we would all be talking about them. Did it work? Sure. Did we spend our time well? Depends how you define it. Yes we managed to take down a tone deaf ad. But we still didn’t fix the issues that the protests the ad was parodying were about to begin with. So in a week when we should have been teaching ourselves about infrastructure, and whether or not it’s racist (hint: kinda), we something something omg Kendall Jenner.

            So please stop being outraged, calm down enough to decide what matters, and choose to care about it. And even if you do get taken in by something from the outrage machine, at least be honest with yourself that you are being frivolous. If we admit it, then later we can go back to what really matters. 

Why the Speech didn't matter

Last night we heard the President give his first speech before a joint session of congress. It is an important time for any administration. It helps set the tone for the work they are going to do and it helps to outline the agenda of not only the first hundred days, but the full legislative calendar.

President Trump stayed on script and on message throughout the speech, a notable exception for him. He read from a teleprompter, which he had criticized President Obama for doing religiously, and his critics wondered if he had the discipline to do.

The speech held to many solidly Republican themes and emphasized the campaign promises that we have come to love or loathe. He was graded above average, and below average. He was graded on a curve, he was graded tabula rosa. Everyone is trying to make sense of it, myself included. I took notes, and I have compared them to notes I have taken at similar speeches. I noticed that my engagement level might have been a little lesser than some previous speeches I had watched.

Therein lies the problem. As the masses and the pundits try to make sense of it all there is one thing that is missing. This speech didn't matter.

The President does not communicate this way. The public does not receive information this way. This is not the way this administration operates, its as if we tried to play a CD on a phonograph. There was a time, seriously not that long ago, when the President of the United States needed to stand before congress to outline their agenda. The gravity of having all of the branches of government sitting together in the same room would bring the viewers to not only turn on their TV sets but to give pause. No matter what the ratings for the event were, the people were not engaged the same way.

Had the whole thing been live tweeted by the President's Id while his human shell spoke the party line the world would have been enraptured. Instead, we got the speech he was supposed to give. It may have been a relief, or a victory, or a sign of things to come. But it didn't really matter.

I should be pointing out that this is a degradation of our public discourse. A destructive and corrosive progression that allowed a reality TV star and not a professional trained in the operation of good government win the the presidency. This is an argument that should be made, but is only noted here to demonstrate just how far downstream we are from being able to have that discussion.

The policy agenda is proposed by this White House through the President's twitter, then it is clarified and reiterated through the official channels and surrogates. This is usually when some heat is taken off the original pronouncement. That phase is followed by a period of uncertainty. Do we trust what we know the president's own hand put out to the internet, or do we trust those who might actually need to be putting in the work to draft orders and research the next day's talking points? Its a hard call to make, and ad hoc reasoning is often needed, taking context clues and a winnowing of the possible, to make a definitive call.

After, or more accurately during, that process we view the whole big mess through the lens of each individual's truth teller. Be it MSNBC, or Fox News, or the Times, or infowars, or what have you. We don't just need the raw tweets we need the context. A personal favorite is “The Atlantic”'s Trump tweet tracker. Once we have the context we need the “take.”

The speech didn't matter because it lacks, by definition, the type of “authenticity” that President Trump is known for. He has made it part of his brand. Even if authenticity needs to remain in quotes, it remains a potent brand. It didn't matter because we are unable to use these context creators, ones that check facts or dial up the entertainment value.

Either way this speech could be a turning point for presidential addresses. If years from now the State of the Union is no longer seen as a pivotal piece of the the president's legislative roll out, and sales pitch to the nation, this will be the speech it is traced back to. And in that way it will matter very much.

Stop Being Surprised

                We need to end the sense of shock some people are experiencing as President Trump enacts his agenda. He was clear about his desires to ban Muslims, dispose of trade deals, wield the power of a “strong leader,” and push forward a classic Republican agenda. As the Republican war against the LGBT community has now landed in a directive that the Trans students are not going to be provided with the ability to use the bathroom associated with their gender. We need to remove our sense of shock. The trope of whether we were taking the President seriously or literally should now be answered. Take him both ways. Nothing was campaign puffery. Nothing was just for the rallies. Nothing will be toned down.

                This thought is furthered by the fact that Stephen Bannon has just noted at CPAC that all of Mr. Trump’s whole platform was in the rally speeches. He was not dialing up or dialing back, he has no filter and no desire to acquire one.

                When President Trump says something, we should expect that he will try to do it at some point. Whether he is talking about torturing detainees, or convincing Robert Patinson to get over Kristen Stewart, he says what he means, literally and seriously.

How to "Get Over It"

Note: This piece was written about a week prior to President Donald Trump's inauguration as president. At the time "The Polaris Revolution" was not live yet. While not timely we believe this piece still has value, and is presented now.

                Donald Trump has told us all to get over it. He doesn’t want to answer questions about whether the Russians have hacked the election. He wants to get on with his presidency. He does not want you to dwell on anything that will ruin his already razor thin victory and deeply murky mandate. Instead he wants us all to just get over it. The thing is, we should, we need to.

                The way we “get over it” is we must begin to understand that we are at the opening of a new administration that is bringing to us a world view that is vastly different than that of the typical American. That this world view could threaten our democratic values and getting ourselves stuck on the injustices that have brought us to this moment will only weaken us. This world view, Trump’s world view, is one that must be prepared for so we can catch its abuses.

                To be clear, Donald Trump may not actual realize that he has a coherent “world view,” as best as anyone can tell his twitter account is a stream of consciousness look in to all of his thoughts. Instead we must glean from those tweets, and his actions that surround them, an underlying theory and methodology. To this I attribute a sense that the president-elect believes that the United States of America is a business that he has been appointed CEO of rather than a government that he has been democratically elected to. He believes that the main actors in his world are corporations. Those will be the entities he is most concerned with interacting with. He views states as secondary actors in the realm of international relations. Often times states are even more impediments than actors.

                His clear views on all relations in his life revolve around an “us” versus “them” mentality. One that his supporters will tell you will serve the American people because he will be fighting for “us.” He also sees the world as a world of deals, by his own statements many times; those deals have winners and losers. He wants to always be the winner, and when he hasn’t won by enough he changes the rules. This can work in the “low-context” world of business, but international relations are oftentimes considered a “high-context” type of interaction. This is borrowing terms of art from international relations focusing on the individual interaction versus seeing each interaction as a part of a series which constitutes the entire relationship. Those are low and high, respectively.

                To make sure that we are winners he will destroy any relationship or norm that the US has participated in, no matter its worthy history. He will focus on business and businesses bottom lines. Again his advocates say that this will be a boon for the country, until one realizes that focusing on bottom lines is the leading cause of worker mistreatment. His selection for Secretary of State suggests that the focus will be on business, and making deals that benefit those business interests.

                A major side effect of this world view may be that he will view conflict through the lens of business. Economic activity tends to pick up around the time of war. When a leader decides not to take in to account the significant implications for the real human impact of war, they are much more ready to jump in to conflict. The added benefit to the economic view is that all things destroyed during war must be rebuilt, a principle that will excite the business man, but should give pause to the public servant. We may only have the former, not the latter deciding.

An Unusual Gift to Black History Month

            This week Donald Trump made news for referring to Fredrick Douglass in the present tense. Sean Spicer, the president’s press secretary, made less news by similarly not seeming to know that Douglass had died or even what he was talking about. The Democrat and Chronicle the one remaining newspaper in the city of Rochester, where Douglass published The North Star from 1847-51, went to Mount Hope Cemetery to get a comment.

            Side stepping the laughter and the mockery, President Trump has proven a useful object lesson to the cause of how we teach history when it is not about DWM (Dead White Men). Those that are not taught about Eli Whitney and the cotton Gin, Douglass is the first non DWM that is mentioned in most American History Classes, almost a 100 years after the founding of the republic. If Douglass is not recognized, then students will wait another hundred before they are taught about an individual African-American, Martin Luther King Jr. The first woman is often another newspaper publisher out of Rochester, NY, Susan B. Anthony.

            We don’t give credit to the work that African-Americans did to build this country, we don’t give credit to the work that women did to either. We focus so much attention on white men. Granted we often study those in power, which by rule were those DWM, but we should also study those who wield power, those who can empower all of us. We have benefited in this country and every other from the contributions of people from all walks of life. So while we are all enjoying this gaff, we should be taking a slightly more serious stock that our President is a reflection on our people. He has reflected that we don’t learn enough about all of our citizens, we should find a way to better ourselves from his example.

            So, thank you, Mr. President. I may not get to say that often, so I’ll enjoy it while I can.