Manufacturing Liberal Consent

Image via TPM

Noam Chomsky wrote a book with Edward S. Herman in 1988 called Manufacturing Consent.  It is about how media outlets are controlled and manipulated by people in positions of power to influence public opinion.  

I couldn’t help but think back to Chomsky’s message in Manufacturing Consent as I took stock of the media coverage of this year’s Democratic primaries, which has been uniformly awful.  

Take, for instance, the popular narrative that after Joe Biden won Michigan that the Bernie Sanders campaign is all but over.  Headlines include:

The bleak picture painted by these headlines suggest that the Sanders Campaign’s chances of victory is slim.  But that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.  Right now, Joe Biden has 864 delegates.  Bernie Sanders has 710.  So Bernie is roughly 150 delegates behind.  And there are still over *2000* delegates that haven't been awarded yet.  

So why are so many pundits saying Bernie Sanders' campaign is basically over and has failed to “win key states” when the Obama campaign was even further behind in 2008?  Why the slanted media coverage?

The answer seems pretty clear:

This stigma is largely a type of manufactured consent, however.  When you ask people if they agree with the policies Bernie Sanders is proposing, polls consistently show that the majority of people approve of his policies.

Polls also consistently show that the Bernie Sanders campaign is the best suited to defeat Donald Trump in the general election.

So why do we continue to hear how dangerous it is to nominate Bernie Sanders as the Democratic presidential candidate from media outlets?  Why are people like Chris Matthews freaking out on national television?  Why are moderate democrats calling for the primary to be “shut down” when there’s still a relatively small gap between the candidates?

This is how the rich and powerful manufacture consent.  They use their influence over media outlets to ensure that a certain narrative is reinforced.   And frankly, I have to say that this year’s coverage of the Democratic primary has been uniquely demonstrative of that fact.  Never before has it been more plain that people in charge of powerful institutions are using their large bank accounts and ability to influence media programming decisions behind the scenes to try to sway public opinion in a specific direction by making certain narratives about politics appear to be "common sense" among the intellectual class.

How else can we explain the fact that we have been bombarded with opinion pieces over the past year telling us how Bernie Sanders isn’t electable, despite poll after poll showing that Bernie Sanders does better against Trump than any other candidate?  How else can we explain the fact that nearly all the other  moderates in the Democratic primary dropped out in near-perfect synchronicity just before Super Tuesday in an effort to shore up support for a single moderate candidate?  

The DNC has made it publicly apparent that they want to stop Bernie Sanders from getting the nomination.  Some reports suggest that Barack Obama made several calls telling the other candidates it was time to drop out and get behind Joe Biden.  Whether that specific factoid is true or not, who knows.  But given the DNC’s very publicly announced bias towards Sanders, it seems probable that there was an organized effort to get the moderate candidates to coalesce around a single moderate.  

And so the DNC has now forced Joe Biden upon us.  A man who--not unlike our current President--apparently has trouble not touching women without their consent.  A man who is showing signs of deteriorating cognitive ability.  A man who is so gaffe prone that his own surrogates are trying to limit the number of public appearances he makes to avoid more media gaffes.  A man who, despite signaling support for the #metoo movement and women’s rights, once said this about Roe v. Wade:

And even if you ignore all this, imagine how Donald Trump--a master of verbal misdirection and appealing to the electorate’s baser instincts on the bully pulpit--will manhandle a Democratic presidential candidate who recently tried to quote a well known phrase from the Declaration of Independence and forgot it halfway.  This is to say nothing of the ammunition Trump will have during the general election given that the Republican led Senate is now proceeding with an official corruption probe into Joe and Hunter Biden’s private dealings.

Despite all this, establishment Dems are doing their best to manufacture consent for Joe Biden.  And by every indication they are doing a hell of a job.  Before Super Tuesday, Biden’s performance was abysmal.  But once he became the only moderate left in the race, and suddenly received a storm of endorsements from other establishment politicians, he was suddenly electorally competitive.  Add to this a little bit of voter suppression designed to discourage young voters from participating, along with the emotional resilience of the “problematic Bernie Bro” mythology that has been empirically demonstrated to be false, you have an excellent full court press designed to manufacture consent for Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Keep this in mind as the primary campaign continues.  And keep it in mind this Sunday when Joe Biden debates Bernie Sanders.  Better yet, think about all of this if  Joe Biden gets the nomination, because if he does, he will almost certainly lose to Donald Trump in November.  Not just because he is a weak candidate, but because nominating Joe Biden is the end of the Democratic party as we know it.  

Progressives have made it clear that they are sick of being lied to and used to support Democratic candidates who then flip the script once they are in office.  They are tired of being black-mailed into supporting candidates like Joe Biden, who told a room of wealthy donors last year that “nothing will fundamentally change” if he is elected President.  

The media has done a fantastic job of making Joe Biden seem like an electable moderate.  But  “our needs our not moderate.”  As we speak, New York City can’t close schools to prevent the Corona Virus from spreading because over 100,000 kids in the NYC school system are homeless and depend on meals from school to get enough food for the day.  But since nothing will fundamentally change if Biden is elected, it sounds like he will not show half as much determination to solve this problem as he showed in opposing federal busing to end segregation in the 1970′s. 

 Remember that Al Gore lost in 2000.  John Kerry lost in 2004.  Hillary Clinton lost in 2016.  And recall that Obama won in 2008 by appealing to young voters, who are  much more supportive of progressive policies than older voters.   Despite this, the Democratic party has once again--just like in 2000, 2004, and 2016--made it abundantly clear that it would rather run a weak establishment moderate and lose, than run a progressive change candidate and win.  Why?  Well, at least that way, wealthy democratic donors get to keep their yacht money.  

On Cruelty

It’s been awhile since I last posted around these parts.  Awhile ago I swore off posting about politics on facebook (you know how that goes), which has reduced my social media stress substantially.  But occasionally, I still see something that grinds my gears enough that I feel like I need write about it somewhere.  

I guess this is a sign that the afore-mentioned compulsion has finally hit it’s fever pitch and, consequently, like a refrain from an old Marshal Mathers single, I’m back to sing the tune.

We are living in strange times.  White Nationalism, an ever-present but (until recently) largely marginal cultural phenomenon in the modern era, is on the rise.  While the stain of White Supremacy has always been with us in a cultural sense, White Nationalism--as a political force--has been largely confined to the fringes of society in the past few decades.  

We can see its manifestations bubbling up in milder forms as bigots scream at brown-skinned people in public, presumably because they believe they can intuit a person’s nationality or legal immigration status simply by the color of their skin.   We also see it in its more catastrophic forms like mass shootings fueled by hatred of immigrants, where American citizens are also liable to be shot and killed.

White Nationalism and White Supremacy are inter-linked but separate ideas.  White Nationalism is a conscious socio-political ideology.  White Supremacy, however, is a cultural force that permeates our collective decision-making and choices.  It is a presumptive sense of subjective “normalcy” that blinds us to our own discriminatory behavior.   It is the reason why Police officers are more likely use force against Black citizens, and why employers are more likely to hire a similarly-educated White job applicant than a Black job applicant.  We can charitably assume that police and employers are not consciously deciding to treat Black people differently.  But the data shows that they often do.  That’s because White Supremacy is a disease of cognitive dissonance.  We often don’t realize we’re treating others differently in the moment, but upon reflection and self-analysis, the same becomes clear.

To put it bluntly: White Supremacy is what happens when you live in a world where the majority of your peers are White, and stereotypes about minorities are culturally ubiquitous.  It is what happens when your interactions with others are gilded with assumptions drawn from the family you were raised in, the media you consumed your whole life, and your own limited personal experiences.  These are the shadows on Plato’s cave that we use to construct our reality.

White Supremacy can blind us to the humanity of others.  Offenses that we might feel the desire to treat with compassion when committed by one group suddenly become intolerable transgressions when committed by another group.  The concept of “legality,” which we often loosely apply to our own actions, becomes a justification for the most exquisite cruelty when applied to other human beings.

Which brings me to this headline:

There are, generally, two types of reactions to this headline:

You can browse my immigration tag for a fairly thorough discussion of why I feel being undocumented is not a crime at all in any meaningful ethical sense (while you’re at it, I recommend you take a gander at Economist Bryan Caplan’s academic article, which notes that there is a consensus among the majority of economists that open borders would literally double world GDP).

But let’s be clear: what happened here is that Trump’s ICE performed a raid that swept up a bunch of undocumented immigrants and left a lot of young kids without parents.  We’re talking elementary-school aged kids in many cases.  Many of these families have been here for years.  And aside from their immigration status, the parents have minded their own business and have clean records:

There is no good policy reason for this.  There is no good ethical reason for this. 

The fact that “it’s the law” is not a response here.  I know it’s the law.  I am suggesting that the law is wrong.  

Furthermore, even if it is the law, the Executive branch has a lot of discretion with how it enforces the law.  As former Supreme Court Justice Jackson explained, the decision to prosecute is a policy choice, not a stiff obligation:

In other words, the decision to harshly enforce immigration laws is a policy choice.  It is a policy choice the same way that it is a policy choice when a police officer decides to let you off with a warning rather than give you a ticket.

Let me say this loud and clear: being undocumented in of itself should not be a crime.  The reason is simple: nobody is responsible for where they are born.  In many cases, undocumented immigrants are born to places with extreme poverty and violence in their native countries.  Conversely, you committed no heroic or respectable act to be born in America.  Your parents had sex on American soil and now you’re here.  That’s it.  Your entitlement to the rights and privileges of American citizenship is an accident of the birth you had no control over.

Now imagine being born into a place with endemic violence and little economic opportunity.  Your family lives at constant risk of violence and starvation.  The conditions are so bad that you would travel 1,500 miles knowing that you could be turned down at the border or that your children could die in the journey.  And yet, it is still a more preferable risk than staying where you are.  Imagine you lived in similarly desperate conditions.  Would you do that for your family?

Of course you would.

Make no mistake: this is how desperate these people are.  And our government is turning them away.  

It makes little sense to say that the parents are responsible for this from an ethical standpoint.  In most cases, immigrants from Mexico and Central America are coming here to flee poverty and violence in their home countries.  So by all accounts, as parents, they are doing the right thing by trying to get to America to save their kids from a terrible fate.  I am fairly certain most people would do the same if faced with similar circumstances.

Even when considered from the perspective of a person who wants to “Make America Great Again,” deporting undocumented immigrants still makes little sense.  These are people who are thankful for America and desperate to live and work in it.  Aren’t these the type of people you would want here?  

And if not, what’s the reason?  

Seriously.  I wish people who view headlines like this without a hint of sympathy would think really hard about why they don’t want Mexican/South American immigrants here.  Because that’s largely who we’re talking about here.  

Because in my mind, I can only think of one reason.

Title image source 

Live footage from Donald Trump’s victory speech.

The More Things Change...

I haven’t been terribly active on Tumblr as of recent.  That stubborn thing called life has been busy happening while I was making other plans.

But I couldn’t help but laugh when I read the headline that the Bundy ranch defendants were found not guilty on all counts after very publicly and unambiguously taking over a federal building by force with a lot of guns, and very publicly and unequivocably threatening to use them on federal officers if the latter tried to remove them from the federal building in question:

(Source)

To recap: a group of heavily armed White people took over a federal building and threatened to shoot federal law enforcement officials (or anyone else for that matter) who tried to remove them.  They did so very publicly, and there was zero ambiguity regarding their intent.  And I say this as a person who tries to get people to see ambiguities and shades of grey for a living.

To be clear, as person who in his wildest dreams would like to see prisons abolished, I don’t covet the idea of anyone being put in prison.  

However, that shouldn’t prevent us from observing inequalities and absurdities in the system we have now.  It seems pretty clear to me that under the current system we currently  have, these folks should have easily been convicted of a whole host of crimes.  Frankly it makes me wonder how serious the prosecutors and law enforcement officials involved were taking this case.

This has got to be White privilege at it’s most farcical.  If a group of heavily armed Black Lives Matter activists occupied a federal building to protest systemic injustice against the Black community, it’s not hard to imagine how the results might have been different.  These guys literally occupied a federal building and threatened to shoot anyone that tried to remove them.  And a jury of their peers found them not guilty.  Of anything.

That’s remarkable.

Is The IDF Conducting a Kneecapping Campaign in the West Bank?

Read More at Haaretz

A Few Facts About Alton Sterling That Are Not Going Viral

1) On The Relevance Of Sterling’s Criminal History: CNN noted that "there's no evidence that officers who responded to the convenience store were aware of [Sterling's] criminal history." -  http://tinyurl.com/z4rb3so 

2) On Sterling’s Relationship with the Store Owner: "Muflahi, the store owner, said he'd known Sterling for six years and never saw a confrontation between Sterling and anyone. Sterling never got into fights, he said." - http://tinyurl.com/z4rb3so, 

3) On Sterling’s Status As a Sex Offender: "I just got back from meeting with someone who runs a transitional housing complex that’s for — many times, for offenders that are being released from prison or trying to get back on their feet.  [Sterling] had been released for about six months. But he really was on the right track. The person that I spoke to said Mr. Sterling was one of the good ones and never had issues with him, rent was always on time, loved to cook for the men that he lived with...And he was spending time with his children. That was really, it sounded [] to me, what he was up to in the six months that he had been released. He was working a part-time job as a cook. He was selling these C.D.s sort of as a little side entrepreneurial gig. And in the other time that he had, he was trying to see his kids."  - http://tinyurl.com/gt2wctr

4) On Whether Sterling Drew His Firearm: The store owner, who witnessed the ordeal, said that he never saw Sterling reach for his gun, as the police are claiming he did: http://tinyurl.com/z4rb3so

5) On Sterling’s Illegal Gun: "Muflahi told The Advocate that Sterling began carrying a gun after he was mugged."  - http://tinyurl.com/jgsa6jh  

6) On The History Of The Officers: "[One of the arresting officers] is on record for hitting men while he arrests them, disobeying orders in his use of a Taser stun gun in pursuit of a suspect, and for causing a “preventable crash.”  - http://tinyurl.com/zjplqy5

7) On The Store Owner’s Version Of Events: "'I am talking to my lawyer and he is writing to the police that the film should be given to me so I can let the world see it too,' Muflahi, 28, told Daily Mail Online.  "They can see how my friend was murdered for nothing. There can be no cover up in this. This camera has got the whole story and the world demands it."  - http://tinyurl.com/j3wzckb 

Ayelet Waldman

No, We Didn’t Need To Drop Atomic Bombs On Japan.  Yes, U.S. Intelligence Confirms It.

From the United States Strategic Bombing Survey Report of July 1946:

More here.  See also this excellent article from Washington’s Blog collecting historical documents on the matter.

On Burying Bernie Sanders

The Nevada State Democratic Party recently held its convention to distribute delegates.  According to numerous sources, Sanders delegates were forced out of the voting process and their votes were not counted, resulting in Hillary Clinton winning a majority of Nevada’s delegates over Bernie Sanders.  Allegedly, the reason that the Sanders delegates were excluded is because they did not have the proper credentials by the caucus timeline of May 1.  Via Tim Hains at Real Clear Politics, here is what the Nevada Democratic convention Credentials Committee Co-Chair, said:

Why does this matter?  Well for starters, it’s anti-democratic and fundamentally unfair to the Sanders campaign.  For a long time now, when Sanders supporters complained about the rules governing the Democratic Primary, Clinton supporters have fired back that “rules are rules” and must be followed. But it’s hard for the Sanders campaign to follow the rules when they are simply ignored or changed at the last minute by Hillary supporters.  

What happened in Nevada also matters because Bernie can actually still win the nomination.  Despite what some have been saying, it is not mathematically impossible for Bernie Sanders to win the nomination.  Improbable?  Yes (personally I believe Clinton will be the nominee).  Nonetheless, as of this writing, there are 897 pledged delegates left.  While Clinton wins on Superdelegates at this time, Bernie Sanders’ current strategy is to try to win a simple majority of pledged delegates in state races, and then use that momentum to convince the Superdelegates that he is the better choice for the general election.  

Will that happen?  Who knows.  The point, however, is this: given that Sanders’ election strategy depends on winning as many pledged delegates as possible, losing 64 delegates at a state convention is a big deal.  Particularly when those delegates are bargaining chips that Sanders plan to use to get more delegates at the convention.  So this isn’t just a small procedural hiccup.  It matters in the grand scheme of things.

Lastly, these sorts of shenanigans do more to galvanize the suspicion of many Sanders supporters who believe that Clinton is using her political connections in the Democratic establishment to stack the deck against Sanders.  When 64 delegates get shut out of a state convention against the convention’s own rules, it’s hard not to suspect foul play.  Especially since we’ve been here before.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma Of American Electoral Politics

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a well-known philosophical riddle that goes like this:  Two people are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is placed in a separate room.  The prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to convict both.  So they hope to get both sentenced to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the prosecutors offer each prisoner a bargain: testify against the other prisoner and get a reduced sentence of 2 years.  But if you don’t cooperate and the other prisoner does, you’ll get a sentence of 3 years.  

This means both prisoners have two choices:

This creates the following set of possible outcomes:

The purpose of the dilemma is to demonstrate the effect that a lack of knowledge can have on rational decision-makers.  Each prisoner knows that if they both remain silent, then both prisoners get smaller sentences.  But because they don’t know what the other prisoner will do, there is a risk that the other prisoner won’t remain silent, and the prisoner who does remain silent get a longer sentence.  So under these circumstances, each prisoner could be convinced to testify against the other, even though they can both get a better outcome by choosing to remain silent.

American politics works in a similar way.  There is a system dominated by two political parties.  If voters voted the way they actually wanted to, there would almost certainly be an electoral revolution in this country.  But  because they fear “throwing away their vote” on a candidate who won’t win, they continue to vote for candidates from two parties whose self-identified membership has been shrinking for some time.   In other words, the fear the worst out come, so they vote for the worse outcome instead of trying to achieve the best outcome.

I was reminded of this when I saw Matt Yglesias post the following from Conservative blogger Mark Krikorian:

Here’s the logic:

The first problem with this thesis is that it seems to prioritize the “small picture” problems that lower-level staffers deal with (which are certainly important) over the “big picture” problems.  But the big picture stuff matters too.  For example, Krikorian is supposed to be an immigration wonk.  Does he really want a guy in office whose current approach to fixing America’s immigration policy is to build a giant wall across our Southern border and try to force Mexico to pay for it?  Furthermore, does he really want a man in office who could at best undermine trade agreements in China that would cause economic upheaval in the states, and at worst, start WWIII by antagonizing Chinese leaders with violent rhetoric?

The second problem with this thesis is—as Matt Yglesias points out above—this thesis doesn’t apply to Donald Trump.  Nobody knows who he’s going to appoint if he’s elected president.  He has already bucked the Republican establishment throughout his candidacy, and remains popular despite organized opposition from Republican elites.  Can we really expect Trump to appoint staffers from the Republican establishment when most of the Republican establishment hates Trump?

Furthermore, does Mark Krikorian really want someone who “wouldn’t recognize the Constitution if he tripped over it in the street” appointing law enforcement figures like the Attorney General?  Or perhaps more importantly, appointing judges to the federal bench?  Does he really want someone who “doesn’t even know the Cliff Notes version of any policy issue” to be the chief executive in charge of enforcing those policies?  Wouldn’t he prefer someone like Gary Johnson, who unlike Trump, once successfully governed a 2-to-1 Democratic state as a Republican, demonstrating that he is not only competent, but able to work across the aisle and facilitate an actually functioning government without causing riots in the streets?

This is the American electoral Prisoner’s Dilemma in action.  People vote for candidates they don’t actually want because they’re afraid that “something worse” will happen if everybody else votes differently.  Of course, if everybody collectively voted for candidates they actually wanted, there would almost certainly be a political revolution in this country.  Independents now comprise the largest share of the electorate, and many people—myself included—maintain their party affiliations only to get access to closed primaries.  So the idea that we all need to keep voting for Democrats and Republicans is quickly losing its steam.  But fear is a powerful emotion.  And it still dominates the American electoral zeitgeist in ways that convince people to keep voting for the same elected officials they repeatedly claim to disapprove of so vehemently.

At this point, I will be very surprised is Senator Sanders gets the Democratic nomination.  Trump is essentially the Republican nominee.  So in November, voters will have a choice between a mendacious careerist and a megalomaniacal sycophant.  And despite the many sins of both these candidates, they will probably garner the most votes.  Not because people actually support them, but because of fear.  People will vote out of fear of the bigger bogeyman.  To paraphrase Debs, they will vote for something they don’t want, and get it.  Because they’re too afraid to do otherwise.  They will vote for the worse outcome to avoid the worst outcome, and foreclose the possibility of getting the best outcome.

But imagine if Americans didn’t vote out of fear, and instead voted for the candidate they actually wanted.  Imagine a world where the best outcome was actually possible.  

That would truly be something to behold.

Pretty much.

Context

Peter Beinart

From the article:

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Rabbi Brant Rosen, founder of the Tzedek Synagogue in Chicago.

Anon Whistleblower@Mossack Fonseca.  

More:

Suddeutsche Zeitung: Panama Papers Home Page

Guardian: A Guide To the Biggest Data Leak in History

Economist: Panama Papers Document Chart

Fusion: “Wikileaks of the Megarich”

Global Witness: U.S. connections

ICIJ: Panama Papers Power Players

Charlotte Bruneau

Jerry Taylor