A normal, intelligent conversation
Is it even possible to separate politics from policy?
Thanks so much to everyone who responded to the last newsletter on hopepunk, which is easily the second most-read newsletter we’ve done. Every email and donation was appreciated more than you know. This week we’re explaining what streaming Frasier on Netflix has to do with why we can’t have normal political conversations these days.
Vote: for this SXSW panel proposal about disinformation and for The Stanford Newsletter Experiment as “best local blog” on the Austin Chronicle’s Best of Austin ballot because they don’t have a category for newsletters — and vote for Crossroads Scholars for “best local nonprofit”! Do you have something we should be voting for in Austin? Shoot me an email.
Read: flagging satire as such is the most-effective way to prevent people from thinking it’s real, which happens a lot, a horrible tale about a father falsely accused of being a gang member, information is not power but a weapon, toxic nostalgia, where men are listing union membership on their online dating profiles, anti-racist voters are more excited about voting in 2020 than they were in 2016, lightning that was longer than Kansas, eight states that voted for Trump where abortion support is over 50 percent, a Ninth Circuit Judge quoted Zoolander, “fake news articles use more expressions that are common in hate speech,” chicken sandwiches are economic indicators, rolling back fuel standards will not make our highways safer, a county in Oregon is trying to criminalize basic journalism, and solutions journalism gets better reader engagement.
Watch: See You Yesterday, a Netflix time-travel movie that becomes something else entirely
Listen: to Brittany Howard’s soul ballad “Stay High,” or better yet watch the video
But first: Why do we stream shows we’ve already seen a million times?
The most-streamed shows on Netflix right now are The Office, Friends, and Grey’s Anatomy. Netflix is producing more original content than all the Hollywood studios put together, but given a world to explore people are binging on the familiar. I think it’s madness, but it turns out that rewatching shows is more enjoyable than people think, because science. Some of it might be due to seeing new things in old favorites, or maybe the enjoyment comes from the reliability of knowing exactly what will happen and that you will like it.
Right now my wife is re-watching Frasier. “Here it comes!” she said yesterday when Martin Frasier went into the kitchen to check on Daphne Moon’s progress with a holiday meal. He didn’t want her to get fussy and add things to the mashed potatoes.
Daphne: “Isn't that a bit bland?”
Martin: “Hello? Welcome to potatoes!”
My wife’s smile could have lit a city. Right now, reading this, she’s chuckling to herself about potatoes. Every year when she makes mashed potatoes for Thanksgiving, she runs those lines, reliving the joy of watching John Mahoney say, “Hello? Welcome to potatoes.” She has been laughing at this for years.
All of this is a long way to getting to the point. My friend S.G. asked me to write about what he called “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” which he explained thusly:
“I mean that if you watch the (non-Fox) news, everything Trump supports is wrong. The Wall, for example, or slapping harsh controls on immigration. But neither one is completely wrong. The Wall, once known as the Fence, enjoyed wide bipartisan support. Hillary supported it. The Obama Admin was famous for harsh immigration control, deporting 800,000 people. Obama is not regarded as a racist monster, as far as I know. My point is that it should be possible to have a normal, intelligent discussion of how to control our borders, and it should be possible to have a normal and intelligent discussion of the uses and effectiveness of a border fence to help do that. And the fact is that, even though Trump is a psychotic nutball, many of his ideas are not entirely unfounded. But no such discussion is possible now. This is Trump Derangement.”
It should be possible to have what he calls a “normal, intelligent discussion” about any number of things, of course. And in a different timeline, Americans of all political persuasions are finding common ground on Chinese currency manipulation, Israel and Palestine, and considering possibly maybe ending one or both of our wars over there at some point.
But with whom should we have this conversation?
Say Democrats were to go to the White House to work out a compromise on something we all want. (Remember Infrastructure Week?) They would have to negotiate with an administration that this week didn’t just flip-flop on background checks, Russia in the G-7, and a payroll tax cut, but denied in some cases that he’d ever taken a position in the first place. It’s no wonder the political class hates Trump. He’s the worst kind of a politician, one who won’t stay bought. The same goes for negotiating with the Republican-held Senate, where a Republican can’t go against the President without end his or her political career.
It’s similar for regular folks. It’s possible for an everyday American, not a member of Congress, just a voter, to listen to the President talk about how China isn’t playing fair, nodding along as he says, "This is a trade war that should have taken place years ago,” because, OK, perhaps this is our last best option to dealing with China. And then he says, “Somebody had to do it,” which, OK, he is after all the President. And then he says, “I am the Chosen One,” and you throw up your hands as participatory democracy loses some of its shine as a human experiment.
Resisting derangement tempts even the soberest among us in a week in which the President tried to buy Greenland and then called the Danish Prime Minister nasty when she refused to consider the idea, waded around in antisemitic tropes after retweeting a conspiracy theorist who called him the “King of Israel,” and flamed Ford and General Motors on Twitter over fuel-efficiency standards. This was before he “ordered” U.S. companies to move factories out of China and, when the stock market tanked, jokingly blamed the losses on Seth Moulton quitting the presidential race. It seems unfair to expect anyone to have a “normal, intelligent discussion” while the President is providing new pretexts for invoking the 25th Amendment and the Republican Party is selling T-shirts with maps of a United States of America that includes Greenland. “Support President Trump and his efforts to help America grow!"
But still, what have we won if we survive Trump only to sacrifice our own sanity? A while back my friend R.H. found this note that he wrote to himself: “Be the calm, not the liability.” It does us no good to become deranged in an atmosphere of insanity. To be the calm addresses a part of what S.G. was after, I suppose. It takes a lot more work to be the calm, not the liability, these days. R.H. even has a book about it.
Where I can’t go with S.G. is this idea that there is a place separate from politics where people can have “a normal, intelligent discussion” about policy. Once politics gets its mitts on an idea, it changes what the idea means. There is no dusting it off and considering an idea in its own light. When Obama was building a border fence and deporting hundreds of thousands undocumented aliens, Democrats liked him in spite of this. Democrats tolerated it because he wasn’t making coming to America so horrible that people would stop trying. He didn’t call Mexicans rapists.
Now we have a President for whom expressions of feral meanness are the tokens that make all the pinball machines light up. The border wall and deportations are national expressions of nationalism and xenophobia. It’s impossible to order immigration policy a la carte when they are taking nursing babies away from their mothers. Before, a border wall was a President negotiating against himself to coax the other party to the table to talk about immigration reform. Now a border wall is a fundamental argument with the Statue of Liberty. The thing has not changed, but its meaning did. When the ground shifts beneath you, you might not move your feet but you still end up in a different position.
We’ve leave for another day that brains have little use for sober policy discussions. As Drew Westen wrote about a decade ago in The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, "A dispassionate mind that makes decisions by weighing the evidence and reasoning to the most valid conclusions bears no relation to how the mind and brain actually work." We’re emotional creatures. Facts don’t change our minds because we evolved as social animals, and we’re wired to see things like other people in our group. We’re also hard-wired to find fault with things we disagree with or that we think are inaccurate. We are all howler monkeys, screaming at the rival troop invading our territory about how the President promised GDP growth of at least 4 percent but has only delivered 2.9 percent, seemingly unable to enjoy a pretty decent economy.
I don’t think S.G. was talking about having a “normal, intelligent discussion” to have any impact on actual policy. He’s a journalist by training and used to being ignored by policymakers. I suspect the key word for him is “normal,” which may never have existed as we remember it if it ever existed at all, but a little normal would go a long way now.
It would be nice to spend time with friends, talking about what we ought to do about something or other without having to parse the distinction between concentration camps and death camps. It would be nice to have a normal president who made us normally mad about normal things and not put us into the position of having to think, “But Judaism doesn’t believe in a Second Coming!” I’m tired of fact-checking a madman. I’m tired of double-checking to make sure I’m not getting suckered by a parody account and really am seeking the President’s tweets. It would be nice for politics to be ordinary enough to allow us space to worry properly about nuclear accidents in Russia or the Amazon rainforest burning down.
Maybe my friend means we should collectively hand the President his Twitter machine so he can soothe himself with screen time while the adults soberly discuss the competing interests of security and immigration on our border. He’ll be content yelling at car companies and ordering U.S. manufactures to get out of China. He’ll tire himself out, and meanwhile we can have grown-up time discussing currency manipulation and state-sponsored industrial espionage. That’s not citizenship, though. That’s babysitting
But it sounds nice, doesn’t it? There was a time that we could go more than a few hours without worrying whether the President was going to behave like such a grump at the G-7 that he would end the Western Alliance. We shouldn’t have to hope someone in DC remembered to crate-train the President. We shouldn’t feel relieved that the President was playing golf, because what’s the worst that can happen then? It would be nice just to sit on couch, turn on the television, like what you see, and have a pretty good idea of what is going to happen next. Sounds like a nice, normal Saturday, and I’m completely down with it. A bit bland would go a long way these days.
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What I’m reading
True story: When Ted Cruz demanded answers from Defense Sec. Ash Carter about Jade Helm, I and two friends, E.J., and F.S., wrote a reply from the Secretary to the Senator that was so insidiously convincing that reporters actually called the Pentagon to get ask Carter why he would write such a thing. A friend who worked at the Pentagon called to ask that we label our letter as satire, which I found unsporting but did it anyway. Apparently flagging satire as such is the most-effective way to prevent people from thinking it’s real, which happens a lot, because people are dumb.
This is another long one. People overuse the term “Kafkaesque,” but not in this case. My friend M.B. wrote the hell out of this horrible tale about a father falsely accused of being a gang member.
The “strangest consumer trend of our lifetimes … is the erosion of the divide between commerce and personal interaction." Speaking of which, transparency and vulnerability have important roles in marketing communications.
Another take on how information is not power but a weapon, and this is completely true in my experience: “The most effective disinformation has always been that which has a kernel of truth to it, and indeed most of the content being disseminated now is not fake—it is misleading. Instead of wholly fabricated stories, influence agents are reframing genuine content and using hyperbolic headlines.”
Great on toxic nostalgia: “A society invested in real, tangible common projects needs objective truths. One organized around a desperate longing for a mythologized past does not. Pomerantsev’s book suggests that the authoritarian darkness that’s descended on so much of the globe is a hangover from the so-called end of history after the Cold War. If that’s true, perhaps one way to dispel it is to get history moving again.”
Trump’s approval has stayed between 32 percent and 42 percent in the AP poll. Right now, his disapproval rating is 62 percent. This is bad.
Africa is on track to be declared polio-free in 2020.
Philly men are listing union membership on their online dating profiles.
Anti-racist voters are more excited about voting in 2020 than they were in 2016 and more than anti-black voters are in 2020.
A reporters making too much of recession worries?
Some scientist saw lightning that was longer than Kansas.
The U.S. is testing missiles that were previously banned under a treaty with Russia that Trump pulled out of.
There are eight states that voted for Trump where abortion support is over 50 percent: Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. There are six states where abortion support as well as Trump’s approval ratings are under 50 percent: Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Nebraska, North Carolina, and Texas. If you’re wondering why Democrats aren’t highlighting abortion rights, the answer begins in North Carolina.
In a dissenting opinion, a Ninth Circuit Judge quoted Zoolander.
Love this analysis of presidential candidates’ playlists.
Alexandra Petri, who usually makes you laugh, here goes for the tears.
Can we use linguistic analysis to stop fake news? “On average, fake news articles use more expressions that are common in hate speech, as well as words related to sex, death, and anxiety.” Careful: These algorithms are racially biased.
This is a well-written look at why Texas is turning blue. Here’s one that quotes me.
Remember I told you about that great book about math and truth? K.O., the genius author, is speaking at Book People in Austin on Tuesday.
Chicken sandwiches are economic indicators, at least at fast food restaurants.
The administration says rolling back fuel standards will save 1,000 lives a year. Meanwhile, the EPA says it will actually increase annual highway deaths by 17, and it will end up costing Americans much more in added fuel costs than it would save them because of not having to buy new cars. All told, the President’s proposal to lower fuel-efficiency standards could be the single-worst thing he’s done for the environment.
Alarm: “30% of black millennials surveyed by the University of Chicago's GenForward Project said they feel the Democratic Party doesn't care about them.”
Recent studies indicate: “The Hispanic community now exhibits significantly higher levels of opportunity-driven entrepreneurship than does the rest of the US population.” Rolling back fuel standards will not make our highways safer.
News nerds: Twice as many teens get news from social media everyday than get it from news organizations. “Fox News convinced 3 to 8 percent of its viewers to vote Republican.” When one area in the U.K. stopped reading a conservative tabloid because of a sports controversy, support for the E.U. went up 11 percent. Having children makes you happier, but only once they are out of the house. A county in Oregon is trying to criminalize basic journalism. Solutions journalism gets better reader engagement.
Last word: You know the “Hot Priest Summer” guy? He’s a friend of mine and a heckuva writer, especially on struggling with faith after combat.
What I’m watching
See You Yesterday is sneaky good. It’s got a 95 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes (critics love it) but only a 37 percent score from audiences, who are evidently mostly comprised of morons. Yes, it’s sort of a kids movie, and a time-travel one at that, but then you realize that they are making a serious point very well while you get caught up in the adventure.
What I’m listening to
A while back I told you about Brittany Howard’s solo album called Jaime that’s dropping next month, but that was before she released “Stay High.” If you told me that this song was a lost recording in Motown’s vaults I would believe you in a second. It is classic soul, and it’s just lovely. This video? Nothing really happens, but it works. It tells the story of a happy man, and in the last scene you find out why. Another thing I love about this video, besides that it stars Terry Crews, is that they filmed it in Howard’s hometown of Athens, Alabama and cast tons of her friends and family in it. Y’all, it’s low key great.
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