An effective criticism of social and political woes by public intellectuals might get the attention of some segments of the public, especially those who might be labeled “politically aware”—individuals who regularly follow the news and crises of the day. But there is more to being a public intellectual than becoming a gadfly gnawing on the pestiferous hide of the establishment. Eloquently depicting misdirection, mismanagement, and overweening ambitions among the political class can be motivating but often prove insufficient. Worse yet, it could become a self-defeating enterprise when these criticisms lead to public despair and political alienation. It is akin to the proverbial heralding that “the emperor has no clothes,” with the added twist that no tailor can sew one either. When others pile on, we get closer to a political black hole.

Churning out critical essays and commentaries should not be the end but an inducement to search for remedies. What utility do such analyses offer if their message only intimates a rotten and entrenched status quo immune to change and improvements?

Channel 4 New Video: “Hannah Ritchie on replacing eco-anxiety with ‘cautious optimism’ & how to build a sustainable world”

The public intellectual must go beyond criticism of the unsatisfactory status quo and policies by inspiring a sense of optimism in the public’s mind about change and reform and suggesting how they might be achieved. How can this be done responsibly?

Paul Romer, a Nobel laureate in Economics (2018), distinguishes complacent optimism from contingent optimism (he calls it  “conditional optimism”; I prefer contingent optimism to  accentuate the difference with complacent optimism) by giving an example of each: “Complacent optimism is the feeling of a child waiting for presents. “Contingent optimism “ is the feeling of a child who is thinking about building a treehouse. ‘If I get some wood and nails and persuade some other kids to help do the work, we can end up with something really cool.” In the first case (complacent optimism), the child is passive, awaiting a present with earnest expectation. In the second case (contingent optimism), the child lays out a plan to make her wish a reality. The optimism of the first child is wholly dependent on the largesse of others; she makes herself the object of her expectations. The optimism of the second child is born of her agency to identify and secure the resources she needs to build her treehouse.

Contingent optimism begins by taking stock of the challenge. Once the problem is defined, you search for credible solutions to change the situation in the desired direction. In other words, contingent optimism makes the reason for developing an optimistic outlook contingent on working out a strategy of change that makes it likely to achieve the outcomes one seeks. It is the careful mapping out of a plan that justifies feeling optimistic about change. That optimism is contingent on having correctly defined the problem and potential solutions.

We should expect contingent optimism from public intellectuals, not despair. They are uniquely equipped and positioned to critically analyze our societal ills and propose remedies that can change the system to better serve the common good. The same goes for the rest of us. Deluding ourselves with passive hope is the essence of complacent optimism. Planning how to achieve our wishes justifies optimism—contingently, of course!

Pundits tell us it is easier to make voters dislike an idea (or an individual) than to convince them to like it; psychologists call this the “negativity effect“— negative traits make disproportionately a greater impact than positive ones. Remarkably unexamined, however, is how and why such a politically momentous word —- one that enlightens our system of representative government as a “liberal democracy”—became such a ready target of vilification by the political right.

The answer lies in the way “liberal” over time degenerated into what I call a “mule word.” Let me explain. The mule -— a beast of burden — is an infertile offspring of a male donkey (jack) and a female horse (mare). As an old Persian saying goes, when asked who its father was, the mule replied, “The horse is my mother!” to evade acknowledging the boorish jackass as its begetter. Lacking pride of pedigree and no prospect of progeny, the mule is valued for its endurance to carry dead-weight over long distances. In elections, a “mule word” functions as the metaphorical “beast of burden” for attacking one’s political adversaries by distorting their ideological positions.

To understand the devolution of “liberal” into a mule word we need to go back to an earlier era. As a college student in the 60s and early 70s I learned “liberal” meant two things: (1) respect for individual freedom and dignity, and (2) tolerance for individual differences. The first describes the values (freedom and dignity) associated with “liberal; the second, the attitude of a liberal person toward others who might be different in sundry ways (gender, race, ethnicity, religion, ideology, etc.,)

In today’s political discourse, however, liberal often is used to describe someone who is pro-change: “a person who believes that government should be active in supporting social and political change.” This is an unfortunate change in meaning. First, there is no good reason to link “liberal” with “change.”

We have two perfectly good words describing people’s attitudes toward change. “Conservative” means opposing change; “progressive” means favoring change. Of course, conservatives and progressives often use disparaging labels to describe each other. Typically, conservatives label progressives as “radicals,” even though “radical” means “extreme” and equally applies to both ends of the political spectrum. Progressives also frequently brand conservatives as “reactionaries,” which unlike “radical” at least it points to the correct end of the ideological scale.

Secondly, to suggest “liberal” means “pro-change” is misleading and confusing. Hitler, Mussolini, and Khomeini all advocated radical changes. Liberals vehemently opposed all of them because the movements they led undermined individual freedom and dignity and were grossly intolerant of human differences. There is nothing intrinsic to the word liberal that suggests a “pro-change” attitude. A liberal can be “for-,” or “against-change,” depending on how the change impacts its values (freedom, dignity) and attitude (tolerance). If change promotes them, a liberal will likely favor change; if it weakens them, a liberal would likely oppose change. Without knowing the impactof change we would not be able to tell whether a liberal would be “pro-” or “anti-change.”

Finally, using “liberal” to mean “pro-change” completely overlooks the centrality of liberal values to liberal democracy in the West. Democracy (majority rule) becomes a liberal democracy when the minorities’ rights are protected against the power and pressure of the majority. The Bill of Rights was an example of an “anti-majoritarian” document intended to safeguard the liberties of the minorities (ideological and demographic).

Today, in the United States, “liberal democracy is popular among average citizens,” even though, in recent years, the public’s commitment to it seems “underwhelming.” None of the values associated with liberal is conveyed when it is used to mean “pro-change.”

How did “liberal” become unmoored from the context where it made sense to devolved into a political “mule word?” To understand its most recent provenance, we need to backtrack a little more than half a century to the time when Ronald Reagan’s political fortunes began to take-off. An affable man of modest wit and abilities, and meager accomplishments, Reagan was downright disinterested and unlearned in governance and policy. Instead, he channeled his energy and acting talent to launch a sustained ideological broadside demonizing the “liberals” and the Democrats’ “liberal policies”.

In an interview with “60 Minutes” in 1975, the former California governor and future U.S. president declared: “if fascism ever comes to America, it will come in the name of liberalism.” He either didn’t know the meaning of fascism or was parroting someone else equally as ignorant. The exquisite irony was that his brand of right-wing populist conservativism has always been ideologically much nearer to fascism than any other ideology to its left.

Reagan’s vice president and successor, George H.W. Bush, who ran against Democrat Michael Dukakis in 1988, toed the line. He smeared Dukakis as a liberal and “a card-carrying member of the ACLU (the American Civil Liberties Union)” conjuring up membership in the communist party to mislead less-informed Americans.

The Democrats deserve blame for their inaction that has made it easy for the Republicans to turn the word “liberal” into a mule word suggesting radical change. Having failed to muster an effective rebuttal, the Democrats need to become proactive to counter the Republican attacks. They can restore the meaning of “liberal” into the context where it belongs and makes the most sense by embracing the “liberal” label and presenting themselves as the guardians of human freedom, dignity, and tolerance.

The moral is: we already have two clear-cut words to identify political attitudes “for” and “against” change: progressive and conservative; No good justification exists for mucking up the word “liberal” to suggest a “pro-change” attitude other than wanting to distort it. “Liberal” is not an ideology in the usual sense of the word; it is about the values of human freedom and dignity, and an attitude of tolerance for human diversity.

A large majority of Americans of all political stripes would have little reservations embracing the values of human freedom and dignity ingrained in the idea of liberal. The crux of the matter, therefore, rests on the second element of liberal: tolerance for individual differences. It is here where a person with a liberal attitude behaves differently than an illiberal one. The liberal values of individual freedom and dignity must be exercised under the umbrella of tolerance for individual differences. To grant freedom and dignity to those whom we like is easy; extending them to everyone, including peoples whom we might dislike is a much taller order. Being liberal demands vetoing our prejudices from our attitude.

Featured illustration: From Encyclopedia Britannica, 1880.

What is Patriotism?

Let’s begin with the difficult part: defining and understanding patriotism. Patriotism refers to the feelings and behaviors of individuals and groups who see themselves belonging to a large community called a nation, and who identify intensely with it. When the chips are down, those who most strongly feel patriotic are willing to make major sacrifices, even risking their lives, to protect and advance the fortunes of their nation.

A nation is an “imagined” community. Reflect on this for a moment. The bond that animates it is something to marvel over. We will never know, meet, or hear from the overwhelming majority of our compatriots. Yet the kinship and comradery we feel towards them exist because in our minds “lives the image of their communion.” This bond shall endure so long as the national community continues to have faith in a common destiny for the citizen of the nation. In a multiracial, multiethnic, and multi-religious nation many of us either dislike our differences or barely tolerate them. But the linchpin that holds us together, enabling us to rise above our differences and divisions, and remain patriotic is the realization that we share a common destiny as a nation.

Given that a nation is the imagined community we feel most strongly attached to, I will imagine this attachment in three distinct ways. I call them Good-patriotism, Bad-patriotism, and Ugly-patriotism. All three regard themselves as exemplars of true patriotism. I maintain, only one of them can nurture and sustain the most vital element of nationhood and patriotism: a shared faith in a common destiny. I discuss below some key traits, mostly norms and values, I associate with each type of patriotism. They do not add up to an exhaustive list. My aim is to provoke critical self-reflection on who we are and how we relate to others as a nation.

Good Patriotism (G-Patriotism)

What I call G-patriotism in America can be distinguished from other forms of patriotism by how it understands freedom. “Freedom embraces responsibility and is guided by reason and virtue.” G-patriotism recognizes that the exercise of individual freedom confers responsibility upon the individual who exercises it. The challenge of responsibility is playing out before our eyes during the current pandemic. As Americans, we have a responsibility to protect others and ourselves by practicing social distancing and wearing masks, even if it discomforts many of us. Acceptance of a responsible exercise of freedom sharply contrasts with the outlook of those Americans, including our irresponsible president, for whom freedom is purely an individual-centered idea. More about them under “Bad patriotism.”

The second element of G-patriotism is communitarianism, or what I call “community-mindedness:” placing a high value on serving and protecting our collective interests, or the “common good.” G-patriotism recognizes that the citizens’ freedoms are not absolute: “if my free action seriously violates the common good, it should not be permitted.” The idea is that “communities have rights and interests which sometimes override individual rights or interests.” President Kennedy directly appealed to America’s collective interests during his inaugural address in January 1960, when he famously enjoined Americans: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” G-patriots don’t just ask “am I better off?” They also ask “Is America better off?” When we subordinate our communitarian interests to advance our individual interests, G-patriots recognize that we are chipping away at the core idea that drives and sustains our nationhood and patriotism: a shared destiny.

The third element of G-patriotism is empathy. Our love for and pride in America can and ought to coexist with empathy towards our compatriots and peoples of other nations. There are different types of empathy. The one that is at the core of G-patriotism is called compassionate empathy or empathic concern: “It means I know how you feel, I know what you need, but I’m predisposed to help you if I can. It’s the caring system of the brain. That’s the core of empathy.”

Empathy is just as critical in our interactions with other nations as it is among ourselves. One of the most lethal expressions of patriotism arises when we find ourselves in conflict with other nations. The realization that peoples in other lands have similar attachments to and aspirations for their nations is a precondition for accurately understanding them and managing our differences non-violently. G-patriotism assumes other nations too might be as patriotic as we are, but this fact does not necessarily make them our enemies. The willingness to understand how other nations feel, how they define their national interests, why they act and react as they do, and what commonalities we might share with them all require of us to look beyond our narrow interests and parochial outlook. Absent empathetic concern, raw patriotism makes us highly vulnerable to misperceptions and misreading of other nations’ intentions. This could turn patriotism into a volatile brew that derives nations into conflicts and wars.

Bad Patriotism (B-patriotism)

Throughout the globe, peoples of other countries, even those who dislike their governments, proudly identify themselves as their country’s citizens. In America, we have long been conditioned to call ourselves, taxpayers. Something seems off-kilter when a nation condenses its national identity into a narrow, monetized idea of “taxpayers.” It is an uncouth self-image, as if, our main role and responsibility as citizens are holding the government and politicians financially accountable for the provided goods and services.

The “taxpayer” identity, of course, is not unique to B-patriotism, but probably is mostly prevalent among the B-patriots. Many conservative politicians have mastered the art of exploiting our historically-conditioned anti-government sensitivities. It offers them a ready-made symbol to manipulate vulnerable masses into believing that the government is the taproot of all our troubles. The only thing we have to fear, they tell us, is government itself: “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Little wonder why our venal politicians encourage us to regress to the anti-government glory days of the revolution by naming themselves after the Tea Party and its slogan of “no taxation without representation.”

Leaving aside our castrated national identity as “taxpayers,” B-patriotism regards freedom and liberty as license, a prerogative. It gives primacy to individual freedom over group and community interests. Out goes responsibility for our lives, and the common good. In comes self-abandonment, unrestrained liberty, freedom without interference, and being “on the loose.” This unfettered freedom of a socially-unmoored individual is what Isaiah Berlin calls “negative freedom:” the liberty of individuals to “act unobstructed by others.” B-patriotism glorifies the idea of freedom as an act of defiance. This is played out daily by many supporters of Donald Trump who refuse to wear masks amid pandemic. They justify their anti-social behavior by asserting the pandemic is a hoax, masks are ineffective means of protection and, the real reason behind mask ordinances is to find out “how much freedom and liberty can be taken away from you:” “a faked pandemic created to destroy the United States of America.” Whatever this might be about, it has little to do with citizenship: balancing one’s obligations as a citizen to both the community and personal freedom. B-patriotism elevates individual freedom above any responsibility to the larger community.

Another feature of B-patriotism is its dearth of empathic concern. Even those B-patriots who regard themselves as empathetic often seem unwilling to feel much compassion for nonwhite, poor, or non-cisgender Americans. They show little understanding, let alone appreciation of America’s mosaic of racial, ethnic, and religious diversity. Rather than seeing it as the fount of America’s strength and creativity, they view it as a source of our weakness and vulnerability.

B-patriotism’s empathy deficit directly translates into arrogance toward other nations. It’s been fed and nurtured by a smug interpretation of American exceptionalism: the belief that America is a shining city on a hill, a morally superior nation unlike any other in human history, and “one to which all other peoples should aspire.” If ever there were much substance to our exceptionalism, the Spanish-American War put the lie to that belief. In 1898 America found itself at a crossroads. After many tendentious but eloquent debates on the meaning of our creed and exceptionalism, Americans made a faithful decision to ignore their lofty ideals and values, to become an empire. Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, American Samoa, Hawaii, and Wake Island became our colonies, like Theodore Roosevelt, and later Woodrow Wilson “unabashedly call them.” We took our rightful place next to the other great European empires. Viewed from afar, it marked the coming-of-age of the United States in the mold of European nation-states. The B-patriot notions of sole superpower and the indispensable nation the world could not do without all point to the reality that the B-patriots, for the most part, are full of themselves.

Ugly-Patriotism

American politics used to be mostly battles over ideology; today it has devolved into the raw Us versus Them identity politics of tribal wars. U-patriotism is the most lethal expression of our current political malady. Of the three forms of Patriotism, U-patriotism in America is easiest to describe and recognize. It is a depraved form of patriotism practiced mostly by vigilante mobs of white ethnonationalists and hate groups who only can imagine the United States as an exclusively “Anglo-American” (non-Hispanic whites)-ruled nation. Whites, as the master race, they believe, are entitled to rule America—a belief parroting Hitler’s promise to his followers of a millennium of the Aryan rule in Nazi Germany. Virtually all hate-groups are primed for violence against the non-white Americans; little wonder that the only right they obsess about is the 2^nd amendment right to bear arms.

These hate groups embrace nearly all the hard-core, radical right-wing, neofascist, and neo-Nazi movements. They range from Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to Patriots and the Proud Boys, nearly all grouped under the umbrella of “The Patriot Groups.” They are the chief promoters of the conspiracy theories that the Federal government’s goal is to deprive Americans of their constitutional liberties.

The U-patriots are political outliers. The blog HATEWATCH is a good place to learn about them. One thing stands out about their threat: other than ordinary criminals, they are the only domestic groups prepared to take up arms against other Americans. Their mutant form of “patriotism” has nothing to do with devotion to America; it is entirely about gaining personal/group power to rule over the rest of us. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 has given the hate groups a new lease on life. Trump continues to court them and sees them as his modern-day praetorian guard to ensure his pugnacious re-election bid. When given the opportunity to condemn the white supremacists, Trump instructed them: Proud Boys — stand back and stand by.” The Proud Boys were ecstatic by the Duce’s “standby” call. They had good reason to be; it was a “historic” remark by a sitting president of the United States. The Department of Homeland Security considers these hate groups as posing “the most lethal threat” to America, and, I might add, to our lame democracy

No modern American president has done as much or worked as hard to dishonor Good patriotism, ennoble Bad patriotism, and revive and empower Ugly patriotism to create a loyal base of support. And, no American President in living memory has become as dependent on the support of the U-patriots, openly stoking and courting them, as President Trump has. He brings to mind Samuel Johnson’s famous remark made on the eve of the American Revolution: “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” When you vote, remember which type of American patriots will be joining you to vote as you do.

—–

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

DW: “Right-wing populists and the EU | DW Documentary”

In the real world, the opposite holds true. If, after the November 2020 elections, Trump is left standing, madness will reign sovereign, while chaos, perhaps even anarchy, become a more likely scenario than if he was gone. Disappointment and anger are two incendiary ingredients that fuel chaos and anarchy. A recent poll by Pew Research Organization shows that the voters’ disappointment and anger will be significantly greater should Trump win a second term. Among all voters, a clear majority of 57% say they will be either “Disappointed” (24%) or “Angry” (33%) if Trump wins. If Biden wins, the figure drops down to 47%, with the “angry” percentage reduced by half (17%). If we compare the reactions of the supporters of each candidate to losing the election, nearly twice as many Biden supporters describe their emotions as angry compared to Trump supporters (61% vs. 37%).

As for Trump self-anointing himself the keeper of the American Dream, after the 2007-8 financial meltdown, Americans pretty much gave it up. So did Trump. In 2015, when he announced his candidacy for the presidency, Trump declared: “Sadly, the American dream is dead.” Today, not even the ever-duplicitous Trump can seriously claim the American Dream is alive and well ready for the Democrats to destroy it once again!

For most of its lifespan, the American Dream has remained an elastic idea meaning different things in different eras and to different peoples. Its nearest origin goes back to the Horatio Alger myth popularized during the Gilded Age of late 19^th century America. The term, however, was coined by James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book, Epic of America to convey the “dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” Over the years its meaning has ranged from very broad to narrow. In its broad rendition, the dream enshrines the pie-in-the-sky belief that “anyone, regardless of where they were born or what class they were born into, can attain their own version of success in a society where upward mobility is possible for everyone.” In its unadorned version, the Dream has come down to the goal of homeownership for the working class. More importantly, over the years most Americans have learned to downsize their version of the dream. Today, eight out of ten Americans have shrunk the scope of their American dream to one of attaining “financial security for themselves and their family.”.

Even in one of the most optimistic polls about the American Dream in 2020, “just over half (54%) of US adults think the American Dream is attainable for them.” Among them, however, only 46% of Millennials (born between 1981-1996) believe it is “within reach for them personally”, less than either the older or the younger generations. This is no accident. Millennials are most directly grappling with the challenges and obstacles in the path of reaching their American Dream. “Crippled by debt and bereft of Horatio Alger paths out of it,” millennials “mock the traditional American tenet that each generation will be better off than the one before.”

If the attainment of the American Dream ever was as ubiquitous as the American public has been led to believe by politicians and the media, it might well have been due partly to an artifact: our fixation on hyping the successful stories while overlooking or discounting the failed ones. However, defined, the uninterrupted growth in income inequality in America, a compliment of stagnant wages of the past decades, all points to the Dream’s fairy-tale pedigree.

One final finding from the Pew poll comparing Trump and Biden supporters discussed earlier is worth reflecting upon: the percentage of all voters who say they would feel “relieved,” should one or the other candidate wins. If Trump wins, 28% of the voters feel “relieved,” but if Biden wins, it jumps to 42%. Indeed feeling “relieved” is the dominant reaction to Biden’s victory among all voters, paling “disappointed” (30%) “angry” (17%), and “excited” (9%). Even though only 9% of all voters feel “excited” about Biden’s victory, over 40% of them say they would be “relieved” if he wins. This suggests that American voters are prepared to say good riddance to their deranged president, even if they don’t feel excited about his successor. Bottom line (excuse the pun): sanity trumps madness. Left unexplored by the polls is the likelihood that, should Trump lose, would he enflame his Blackshirt goons –the white supremacist and extreme right-wing militias—to descend upon our cities to start the anarchy, chaos, and madness he forewarned about?

——

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

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‘Canyon Of Danger’: Hayes On Trump Stoking Chaos As Reelection Strategy | All In | MSNBC

In Trump’s America, we are witness to a high-tech replay of the Iranian village scene just described. The role of the deceitful mullah is taken up by Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Kelly Ann Conway, and, of course, Donald Trump. All are hell-bent on duping politically illiterate Americans. How the crowd feels and reacts to an issue, they brazenly declare, is more important than the facts and the evidence behind them! “As a political candidate,” Gingrich proudly acknowledged, “I’ll go with what people feel;” even if it’s false, he conveniently forgot to add. Or take Rudy Giuliani’s infamous declaration: “Truth isn’t truth,” a contrariety that in Kellyanne Conway’s rendition becomes “alternative facts.” Indeed, throughout Trump’s presidency, Americans are not only entitled to their opinions but also to their own facts; the crowd’s reaction ultimately determines the truth.

Not long ago when reality had not become a politically contested issue, political discourse hardly ever drifted into the twilight zone of “alternate” reality. Reality was a given; those who praised a substitute risked ridicule or were given up as delusional. For this and other reasons, political campaigns and debates rarely veered off into questioning the sanity of the person seeking or holding the country’s highest office. Barry Goldwater’s candidacy in 1964 was, of course, the exception that proves the rule.

This all changed dramatically with the 2016 election. A minority of mostly disgruntled Americans, benefiting from the US’s byzantine and undemocratic electoral college, succeeded in placing a person of doubtful sanity into the highest office of the land. Let’s be honest: we have a deranged president.

A broadly recognized definition of insanity is the loss of contact (touch) with reality. Since he began his campaign for Presidency in 2015, Donald Trump has consistently challenged the “reality” of the American political system by promoting conspiracy theories including the “deep state,” which he claims is the locus of real decision-making in America. Several psychiatrists and journalists have openly questioned Donald Trump’s sanity. Bandy Lee, a Yale University forensic psychiatrist, observes: “It is no accident that everything he says is the exact opposite of reality … Trump endangers lives by waging war on reality, not the coronavirus.” Most recently, Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, who holds a doctorate in clinical psychology, chronicled in her book, Too Much and Never Enough, the sordid psychological environment where Donald’s personality took shape. She maintains Trump became a sociopath who unlike his father is not “high functioning at all. ”

Trump’s presidency has revived in my mind the remarks by Theodor Kisiel (a philosophy professor at Northern Illinois University) during a lecture in the early ‘70s where he described a “mad person” as one “who has lost everything except his logic.” Think about it! A paranoid individual obsessed with escaping the harm he is convinced his tormentor intends to inflict on him is acting perfectly rationally, given his assumptions about the alleged tormentor. What makes him irrational (“mad”) is not his behavior (escaping), but everything else that he has lost due to the illness which prevents him from testing whether his paranoid ideations are real or not.

Those who demur at the insanity charge levied against Trump, are left with one other option to explain his contemptibly bizarre and anti-social behavior: deception. If not insane, then Trump ranks among the greatest con artists in the history of this county who has made it to the presidency. Donald Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, a former federal judge, sees him in this light. In secretly recorded remarks to her niece, Mary Trump, the judge says her brother “has no principles.” “His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God,” she continues, “The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit.” A compulsive liar, few imposters have been as successful in hoodwinking so many Americans to buy into his self-serving “alternate reality” as Trump has. So, is Trump insane or is he an imposter? The two are not mutually exclusive. He is both.

What is before us in the upcoming election is not just a nation divided along racial, ethnic, religious, economic, ideological, you name it, cleavages. We have a nation bifurcated along a reality-delusion fault line! Never before have we experienced such a schism and have had a president who sees his re-election riding on further fracturing this social fissure so he could win and stray the nation away from the world as we know it.

Many have warned that our democracy is at stake in the upcoming elections. Without a doubt, Trump poses a clear and present danger to American democracy (or what is left of it): “When somebody is the president of the United States,” Trump recently pontificated, “the authority is total and that’s the way it’s got to be.” (my emphasis). But no less important, this election is a referendum on reality versus make-belief. It is about rescuing our collective sanity by reconnecting politics back to the real world.

Trump’s disconnect with reality (insanity) is the most compelling reason to vote him out of office. Many Biden’s supporters appear to recognize the stakes and concluded that Trump is both deranged and a danger to America. Should he win, our democracy might end up irreparably damaged for decades to come (think Supreme Court). Among the Democrats and the independents, those who regard themselves as “progressive” will be pivotal players. They will have an outsized role in the elections’ outcome. If they seriously want to pursue their progressive agenda, they should not overplay their hand. Their priority must be defeating Donald Trump. To do so, they ought to heed the advice of their mentors, especially Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, by actively supporting the Biden’s campaign, despite policy disagreement. Trump’s supporters make up nearly half of the voting electorate; they are funded to the hilt by the plutocrats and their rightwing Super Pacs. By all appearances, Trump has successfully redefined in his mendacious image both American conservativism and its vanguard, the Republican Party. Moderate Republicans and conservatives have been co-opted, silenced, or forced out. Some now find themselves ideologically closer to the Democratic party than to the zealotry and the reality-distortions that have become the touchstone of Trump’s Republican Party. They too should be welcomed by the Democrats. Still, the progressive voters remain a pivotal force that could enable the Democratic party to defeat Donald Trump and his party.

——

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Democracy Now: “From Reagan to Trump: Why the RNC was a pinnacle of conservative propaganda”

Should we find ourselves in the company of the Trumpies, does it make sense to engage them in a political conversation? If your real aim is to influence their outlook by confronting them with a reality check, most probably you will end up deeply frustrated having wasted your time and energy. Let me try to explain why.

First, we need to distinguish falsehood, from both willful ignorance and a lie. My discussion loosely follows the ideas of the Boston University philosopher of science, Lee McIntyre, elaborated in his recent book, Post-Truth (2018). “Falsehood” is an untrue claim without the intention of doing so. It could be due to an error caused by faulty memory or lack of knowledge. “Willful ignorance” involves harboring a belief that probably is false, but remain unwilling to seek the information that would show if it is false. Perhaps the person might be too lazy to look for such evidence.

Some degree of self-deception is inherent in all willful ignorance; an ideological bias might be behind it as well. Yet, knowingly clinging on to a dubious belief makes one, at least partly, culpable for perpetuating a false belief. (p. 155, 7). Finally, willful ignorance crosses over into a lie when one intentionally attempts to deceive others with falsehood. The driving power behind a lie is the act of deception—encouraging people to believe in something you know to be untrue for self-serving purposes

From a political perspective, lies are important because, to quote McIntyre, “every lie has an audience.” More than plain ignorance, or even willful ignorance, a lie is a social act and, especially in the post-truth era, a political one as well.

Keeping these distinctions in mind, to understand the challenges of conversing with the Trumpies, we need to understand why they so blithely believe Trump’s lies, half-truths, and distortions, even when confronted with unequivocal evidence to the contrary. Research on cognitive biases in the field of experimental psychology offers the best explanations. I will briefly discuss the three most important sources of cognitive biases. They are (1) motivated reasoning; (2) confirmation bias, and; (3) the backfire effect.

Nearly two millennia and a half ago, the great Greek historian, Thucydides, called attention to what today we call motivated reasoning by observing:

“It is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy.”

Motivated reasoning is a natural human tendency that helps protect our preexisting beliefs against hostile evidence. We tend to accept what we want to believe more readily and with far less scrutiny than that which we don’t want to believe. To that end, we are inclined to seek evidence that supports and reinforces our beliefs, while ignore or dismiss facts that refute or contradict them. Most of the time such biases operate semi-consciously or unconsciously.

Confirmations bias is another human tendency to give greater weight to evidence that supports (confirms) our preexisting beliefs than to facts and information that undermine (disconfirm) them, even if the latter is more compelling.

Motivated reasoning and confirmation bias are closely related; often they work in tandem, but they are not the same. Motivated reasoning pushes us to believe more willingly any information that is in tune with our beliefs and outlook, but to remain hostile toward the information that conflicts with them. McIntyre provides detective work as an example. Typically, once a detective becomes convinced of the suspect’s guilt, she will actively search for any evidence that would support the guilty outcome while conveniently ignore those that may lead to an acquittal.

Confirmation bias, on the other hand, involves interpreting information in a manner that reinforces one’s pre-existing beliefs. It disposes one to give more weight to supporting evidence than to disconfirming one, even if the latter happens to be stronger. A good example of this bias is the religious dogma, creationism–a theologically inspired belief that God created humans in its present around 10,000 years ago. The creationists passionately embrace the biblical account of the creation, but ignore or dismiss evolution as “just a theory,” despite the enormous weight of the scientific evidence from fossil records that supports it.

The last, and in the light of the theme of this essay, the most consequential form of cognitive bias is the “backfire effect.” When people who are deeply attached to their preexisting beliefs are presented with facts that contradict them, they often react differently than expected. More than just resisting, the exposure to unwelcome information may backfire by provoking them to dig-in and intensify their preexisting convictions. The backfire effect was documented by Nyhan and Reifler in a series of experiments that began in 2005, titled “When Corrections Fail: The persistence of political misperceptions.”

The subjects were first shown fake news about the US having found Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), biological and chemical, in Iraq after the US invasion, which was, of course, false. Next, the subjects were presented with the corrected information in a speech by President George W. Bush’s where he admits no WMD was found in Iraq. To the researchers’ surprise, the subjects who most strongly believed Iraq had WMD, the correction not only failed to reduce their misperception but instead reinforced and fortified their preexisting belief about Iraq’s WMD. The correction had “backfired!” The moral is: trying to change the minds of the Trumpies with facts and reasoned arguments are likely to backfire by making them double-down on their false and distorted beliefs.

This brings me to the final point in this essay: What psychological purpose cognitive biases serve? They alleviate cognitive dissonance—a concept developed by the great American psychologist, Leon Festinger in his 1957 book of the same name. Those who had an introductory psychology course may recall this concept and the related idea of rationalization. Cognitive dissonance is a mental struggle (dissonance) caused by holding two contradictory ideas.

Here is an example: a friend has given you the answers to an upcoming important and very difficult exam. Being an overachiever, to protect your future career, you know you must perform very well on the exam. On the other hand, your self-image as an honest and highly ethical person is in complete disharmony with the idea of cheating on an exam. The anxiety produced by these clashing values associated with each belief (success versus honesty) demands some form of reconciliation, or what psychologists prefer to call rationalization to resolve the discord. Rationalization is a dissonance-reduction strategy to reconcile incompatible thoughts or ideas. It involves cognitive adjustments in your attitude to reduce conflict by inventing a new justification for the choices one will make. The purpose is to make you feel good about your decision. You might, therefore, rationalize cheating on the exam with the comforting thought that “everyone else probably is doing the same!” Cognitive biases operate the same way. Confirmation bias, for example, subjectively elevates one’s belief as it devalues hostile facts to diminish the conflict between the two.

No one, liberal or conservative, is immune from cognitive biases. Now and again, we all fall prey to them. However, the weightier one’s beliefs and perceptions, the higher the chances of one sliding into some variety of cognitive biases. In general, when challenged with hostile facts, people who are intensely committed to their outlook behave differently than the uninformed individuals. The latter often welcomes the correction and adjust their outlook accordingly. The former typically dismiss them and may even become more zealous! The Trumpies are distinguished by the potency with which the cognitive biases distort their thinking and overwhelm their ability to undertake a reality check. When Donald Trump boasts “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters” he intuitively knows these biases help preserve and even enhance the loyalty of his supporters.

I will end by citing a powerful passage that encapsulates how the three biases reinforce each other:

“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point … Suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before.”

Festinger, et al., When Prophecy Fails (1957)

A person with an iron conviction is a person unreachable by facts and reason! The Trumpies belong on a pedestal marked unreachable!

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Magically Protected’: Why Hardcore Trump Supporters Won’t Wear Masks At Rally | All In | MSNBC

Trump has had enormous help in his disinformation campaign. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, famously remarked: “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” In carrying out his agenda, the propaganda machine known better as the “Fox News” has played a pivotal role repeating, disseminating, and marketing Trump’s lies and misinformation to millions of vulnerable Americans.

The totality of what we know consists of three elements cohabiting in our mind: knowledge, misinformation, and ignorance. The first occupant, knowledge, is evidence-based information. Because evidence can change with time and place, knowledge is always tentative and fallible; never certain and absolute.

The second occupant, misinformation, consists of false beliefs and misperceptions. Many of them are easily correctable with little or no resistance. But some we hold on to dearly even when faced with an overwhelming evidence discrediting them as untrue. These false beliefs usually are emotionally invested in the mind of the misinformed. This protects them against potential ravages by the truth. As we shall see, the fervently held misinformation is the juggernaut that can wreak havoc on human society.

Finally, the third occupant, ignorance, is what we don’t know, whether we are aware of it or not. Strictly speaking, it is not an element but a void, a space that the other two occupants– knowledge and/or misinformation– could occupy. The difference between these two occupiers is, of course, critical—it affects the balance of the mind.

Focusing on the cognitive dimension as distinct from the affective one, human behavior is in large measure a result of the relative proportions of these three elements and how they interact. All else being equal, human beings are better off remaining ignorant than misinformed.

In the remainder of this brief commentary, I shall focus on the role of the last two occupants of the mind– misinformation and ignorance–in American politics.

To be politically uninformed (ignorant) is vastly different than being misinformed (holding false beliefs and perceptions). As a rule, it is much easier to inform an uninformed individual than the misinformed one. Uninformed individuals have little reason wanting to remain in the dark about politics. They are usually receptive to fact-based information and are willing to exchange their void of ignorance with political knowledge they can put to good use, such as voting for a better party or candidates.

Not so with the politically misinformed, especially those who have powerful stakes in perpetuating and propagating their false beliefs and slanted perceptions. Confronting them with even powerful evidence that debunks their views hardly would move them. It may even backfire and lead them to double down their commitment to their false beliefs.

This brings me to the extraordinary times a deeply divided America finds itself in since Trump became president. It is hard to find a comparable period in our history when so many politically uninformed citizens became profoundly misinformed ones. More alarmingly, at no time in our history so many misinformed citizens have become as organized, mobilized, and self-assured as they are today. Their impact on America’s political scene has given rise to the epithet “Post-truth.”

The term captures the disoriented outlook pushed by the misinformed supporters of Trump. Their agenda is to displace fact-based political narratives with self-serving falsehood and distortions and present them to the credulous Americans as “alternative facts.” In their hands, truth becomes the handmaiden of politics.

As noted above, Fox News is a giant corporation; it has the largest daytime viewership of any cable news channel. But it has also evolved into arguably the most important institution engaged in disinformation in America. It performs two key roles for Trump and his right-wing allies. First, it repeats and embellishes his lies and conspiracy theories to enthrall its viewers and keep them mobilized; second, it routinely attacks and disparages the real news deemed as inconvenient by relabeling them as “fake news.” They are uniquely effective at these tasks because most of its viewers tend to see Fox News as a “legitimate” news outlet rather than as a rightwing partisan organization masquerading as “cable news.”

These are deeply troubling developments. They pose a serious, if not a lethal, threat to our battered democracy. As we approach the 2020 elections, the gravity of the moment brings to mind Marx’s famous remark on history repeating itself, the first time as a tragedy, the second time as a farce. This time around, it is playing out in reverse: Trump’s election was a farce; if re-elected, it will be a global tragedy.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

CNN: “Cooper: Trump and Pence are lying. The Covid data proves it”

For Iran, pushing the US military out of the Middle East has remained a central aim of the Islamic Republic since the 1979 Revolution. For the US, however, the strategic decoupling from the ME began towards the end of President Obama’s first term in 2011 when the “Pivot to Asia” strategy was announced. It called for a rebalancing of US global reach away from the Middle East and its endless wars (Iraq and Afghanistan) toward Asia-Pacific.

To pursue this new strategy, Obama faced one daunting challenge: preventing a nuclear-armed Iran before the US military would leave the region. During his second term, Obama’s major diplomatic efforts were expended on negotiating the nuclear agreement (JCPOA) between Iran and the five permeant members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (5 +1). The agreement was unanimously adopted by the UN Security Council in July 2015.

By the end of his last term, Obama felt reasonably confident that Iran would abide by the terms of JCPOA and thus opens the way for rebalancing the US’s forces toward Asia and the Pacific. Enter President Trump. Not unlike Obama, throughout his campaign and during his first term, Trump has repeatedly stated that the Middle East and its oil are no longer strategically vital to the United States and his aim is to end America’s endless wars and pull American military out of the region. But for Trump, the main obstacle for decoupling militarily from the Middle East was the JCPOA. He despises the nuclear deal for one major reason: It was an “Obama’s deal.”

Trump is obsessed with Obama. His modus operandi in both domestic and foreign affairs has been to undo or reverse as many Obama era policies as he possibly can. The impulsive president lacks the conation, the patience, and the acumen to properly understand the JCPOA. No compelling reason can adequately explain the revulsion he repeatedly expresses about the Iran nuclear deal (“the worst deal ever”) other than the fact that deal is widely regarded as a crowning diplomatic achievement of Obama. What Trump wants, as he has often told Iran, is a new nuclear deal that he could negotiate himself and take full credit for it. But if Trump-Kim nuclear negotiations portend what to expect, a new nuclear deal with Iran is a pipe-dream, at least during Trump’s remaining term.

So, here we are, at the brink of war, even though the leaders of both countries have an identical strategic goal—withdrawal of the American military from the region! What then fuels this unique conflict? It is the tactics each country employs to pursue the same strategic goal. Iran has to learn that the surest way to delay America’s military exodus from the region is by trying to humiliate the US. Such acts invariably would lead to a surge in American nationalism, reduces the decisional latitude of the president, and pushes the US to respond disproportionally and more lethally. The fact that Iran’s retaliation for the fervid killing of a highly popular Iranian general was carefully calibrated to avoid American casualties offers some hope.

The situation in the US is more complex, vastly different from that of Iran, but hardly comforting. Virtually every major national security/foreign policy advisor of President Trump, not only does not share his strategic goal in the ME but, almost to the person, they push for America’s military presence in the ME for the long-haul. Their outlook toward the ME has been irremediably shaped by the 9/11 attack and the Global War on Terror. They see the US’s unrivaled military might as the primary instrument for advancing US policies in the region and beyond. They also regard diplomacy mostly as a handmaiden of military force. For these individuals, the US’s military withdrawal from the Middle East spells disaster.

The two most notorious figures in Trump’s team are John Bolton, the former national security advisor, and Michael Pompeo, the current secretary of state. Unless Iran cries uncle, both would push to defeat Iran militarily. It was Pompeo’s constant prodding that led Trump to pull out of the JCPOA and assassinate Soleimani.

Clearly, we have a problem. President Trump wants to end the US’s military presence in the region, while his Secretary of State is doing his utmost to provoke a war with Iran and keep the American forces pinned down in the region! In the aftermath of Soleimani’s killing, even though the President declared that our energy independence has “changed our strategic priorities” because “we do not need Middle East oil,” Pompeo rebuffed the request by Iraq’s Prime Minister to discuss US troop withdrawal from Iraq. Can anyone recall a situation when the President and his hand-picked foreign policy team were pursuing opposite strategic goals simultaneously? Failing to see this gross contradiction brings to mind Hans Christian Andersen’s story of the courtiers who fail to see that the emperor has no clothes!
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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

AP from last fall: “Trump doubles down on decision to withdraw troops”