Picture Men In White Hoods

The talk about the Alt Right is long overdue, but we shouldn’t flatter them with this hip new label. It makes them sound like a music trend from Seattle. They are white supremacists. They are bigots. They are anti-semites. They believe women should be subservient and silent. Their methods are hate and ridicule and intimidation. They are unAmerican. Millions who voted for this new team thought they were voting for the old team, the Republican team. It is no longer the Republican Party. It is the White Male Party. It is a clear and present danger to our democracy, our nation, and the world.

Story in the Guardian

The Southern Poverty Law Center calls out the outright racism in the Trump White House team

This Salon/Alternet article looks into the white minority anger that swept Trump into office

They are a group organized around anger and disruption led by a corrupt billionaire. They are not likely to govern honestly or competently. They will probably earn a profit.

The Vandals in the White House discussed by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo

(Marshall discusses White House corruption by invoking Grant and Truman. I am familiar with the corruption charges thrown at Truman. I believe some of the pettier ones but think most of them were part of the witch-hunting fervor of that time. Truman’s foibles were trivial compared to Trump’s long history of self-dealing. It was Truman, after all, who doggedly investigated the war profiteers of WW2. This was one big reason he had enemies after the war.)

We suddenly have a president elect who is completely unequal to the difficult tasks, and the people he is bringing in to guide him are partisan fighters and outright bigots. Steve Bannon once described himself as like Lenin, bent on destroying the system. He is in an excellent position to do that. Where are the people who’ve worked their whole lives building this system and trying to make it work? Too many have been displaced by lobbyists who seek to make the system work only for themselves and their clients.

From the New Republic, Obama's calm, measured words about this transition do not deny the serious risks we face.

An interview with Noam Chomsky about president-elect Trump

If we survive, if our democratic institutions survive, the next four years, the Supreme Court is where Trump can do more permanent damage.

Dahlia Lithwick discusses the dire SCOTUS implications. Sadly, complex longterm dangers like this were not enough to get millions on board to elect Hillary.

We need hope right now because misdirected and unfocused anger will do us no good at all. It may lose us the longer argument. We need to be angry, but focused and non-violent. Pull what hope you can from this:

Politico urges us to be hopeful. Whether it's rational, we won't win through without it. (Think Churchill in 1940.)

Our friends are worried about us. Our enemies are delighted. It’s surprising how many enemies there are among us. People who were willing to cheer the interference of an enemy power as long as it helped their team win the Big Game. As Andy Borowitz said “I’m nostalgic for when the FBI and the Russians were on opposite sides.” Amen to that. Will the words Fifth Column and Quisling be used more in coming months and years? Whose side are these new “Republicans” on?

From Der Spiegel. If Europe lived next door they would be on the phone with the police and social services right now.

Know-Nothing-ism

How did Americans become so distrustful of knowledge and education? We have been swept along in a powerful anti-expert wave for a few decades now. Maybe it dates to Reagan, who preferred folksy to informed. W raised it to an art. He beat Al Gore by being more likably stupid than that annoying smartypants.

It's pleasant to not let the hard stuff bother you, to just drift along and avoid the difficult questions. We were told not to worry our sweet heads about stuff. But it wasn't wiser heads who appropriated much of the thinking role, it was cleverer heads. Mass ignorance tends to be advocated by those who like having a jump on everyone else. Backward people are easier to manipulate and take advantage of. Who can we trust? People who want us to know what's going on. Teachers and the politicians who want better funding of education and libraries, advocates of open-government and transparency in our public sphere.

The “anti-expert” trend: “It’s entirely wrong… It’s the road back to the cave." An interesting conversation in the Guardian.

Here's another very good discussion in the New York Times about our national forgetfulness.

There is a powerful and very well-funded faction in America that seems to advocate ignorance and forgetfulness. We are urged en masse to forget history, which means forgetting the lessons of history. There are groups busily rewriting and erasing inconvenient and embarrassing parts of history, sanitizing it, making it more uniform and simpleminded and patriotic and pro-business, a history book written by the Chamber of Commerce. We are urged to doubt the multifariousness and endless debate of science. Why? Because some powerful people would prefer a blank slate, people with vacant minds that can be filled in whichever way will enable these powerful people achieve their goals. Their idea is a vast receptive and gullible public led by one unquestioned authority that keeps all the information to itself.

In this devious and subversive way the widespread carefully planted fear of elitism enables a small elite to have a monopoly on good information. In a perverse way, the very strength of expert science, its diversity and multiplicity, is used to discredit it. Science is many expert intelligences working at once. The lay public is being trained to distrust the experts. When in doubt throw up your hands and wait to be told what to do. Anti-intellectualism has created a strange kind of rebelliousness, one that likes to be obedient to simple, clear, undetailed commands. An individuality that prefers to belong to an obedient mob adhering to a uniform and unchanging set of ideas.

One odd example of this pre-enlightenment mindset sits on our Supreme Court. (The New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin writes about it here.) Clarence Thomas sees and administers justice as a set of biblical foregone conclusions. Anything that upsets his fixed ideas is evil. He is an “Originalist”, which means he believes in the absolute truth of the Founding Documents. Those documents, including his bible, the Constitution, believed that people like Clarence Thomas were barely 3/5 of a person, not really fully human, certainly not entitled to citizenship, whose proper place was as property, to be bred and worked like horses and oxen. That is a profoundly intellectualized form of deep anti-intellectualism. Foolishness masquerading as wisdom. Something Voltaire and Twain would have had a lot of fun with.

There’s the view that intellectuals have “ushered the world into a dangerous age of political nihilism.” (Of course anti-intellectuals are unfamiliar with the word nihilism.) There's an article about this in Quartz.

(There is something to this. Socratic lectures in front of large auditoriums tend to leave the ridiculous and the counter-intuitive and the counterfactual up in the air without shooting them down. Because the Socratic lecturer’s job is to leave the answers to the audience. What happens when 25%… 60%… 90% of the audience is taking the questions as answers? In a small room of students the discussion would be lively and the Socratic proposal would be thoroughly discussed, the false arguments debunked, the obvious stupidities would be shredded. This doesn’t happen in the large auditorium or in the ether where every individual stupidity has equal weight.

Which is why we have the inane standard on “news television” that both sides are always equal, whether it’s Science vs. Superstition or Science vs. ExxonMobil or “Did Hillary murder Vince Foster?”

Shawn Otto has a new book discussing the foolish American habit of devaluing science and elevating the bogus. (I think it all goes back to episodes of Mannix and Matlock and Murder, She Wrote where the killer was always the least likely person. It created a habit of disbelieving what evidence and our own logical minds tell us.)

We saw the triumph of unthinking mob mentality in the recent Brexit vote. There were plausible reasons for public anger in the UK, but it was a dangerously thoughtless decision ginned up by fear. Fear trumps reason.

(Scientific American explores the unthinking mindset behind Brexit and Trumpism.)

Unreason has created Donald Trump. The GOP has for decades cultivated a deep distaste for experts and intelligent people and evidence and science, creating a right-leaning electorate that behaves like the foul-mouthed delinquent in the back of the junior high classroom. Their candidate this year is that delinquent. (Reported in SLATE)

Trump welcomes the goofball audience of radio conspiracy theorists, the folks who hate to think but love to suspect. (The New Yorker explores the bizarre marriage of Trump and radio fruitcake Alex Jones... the man who believes the moon landing was faked and believes Obama is a Muslim terrorist from Kenya.)

In the nineteenth century there was an anti-immigrant party called The Know-Nothing Party. Today’s Republicans embrace the same kind of stubborn ignorance. If they dislike something or find something inconvenient or disagreeable it either doesn’t exist or it’s simply wrong from the get-go, no evidence necessary. They think with their abdomen, like George W. Bush did. Often as not their conclusions are fed to them via the radio or FoxNews. And those sources of “information” are informed by commercial interest groups, the corrupt end of the finance industry or Big Pharma or the private prison industry or the gun industry or the fossil fuel giants. If there is some great public need we have to address those corporate interests worry that it might finally roll back three decades of lower corporate taxes. If some pressing public issue or problem is going to cost them money they get busy persuading the public that the problem doesn’t exist. If a problem doesn’t exist it doesn’t need to be solved. (The people who say poverty is a myth, reported at Bill Moyers' website.)

We have a modern habit of disputing expertise, disputing best practices, disputing evidence (not just items of evidence but the weight of evidence), disputing the consensus. This has led to a habit of disruption. (Reported in WIRED.) Worshipping and admiring and rewarding the vandals and the anarchists. Business schools teach disruption as a positive good. It is good to question things; that’s the scientific method. But what happens when we begin to disrupt the scientific process? What happens when we attack the structures upon which our society and our systems are built? What happens when that is combined with the degradation from decades of cheapskatism which has left our systems and infrastructures unrepaired and behind in the routine upgrades?

What happens when disruption is combined with active attrition? Republican cheapskatism has left our public systems unrepaired and dangerously behind the innovation curve.

Take our election system: Republicans have attacked it on multiple fronts. They broadcast endlessly about voter fraud that doesn’t exist, and this undermines public confidence, which justifies various other attacks on the system they despise and pretend to protect and enforce. They have made it more difficult to vote. They also have large corporate allies who design and operate the voting and vote tallying systems. It’s as if they want a broken system. Partly this may be motivated by the companies that profit from “fixing” and replacing these systems, but the replacements are in fact more suspect and opaque than what they are replacing. There is a philosophy on one side that warns of chaos and fraud and suspicion and sinister invisible conspiracies while promoting these things.

Deadbeats, Radicals, Vandals, Anarchists, Republicans

It's getting pretty difficult to think of Republicans as conservative, considering all that they're trying to tear down. Conservatives don't play chicken with the U.S. economy. They don't conduct off-the-books wars or lie us into them. Real conservatives don't max out the national credit card and leave the next president with a bankrupt economy. So what are these new Republicans? News organizations and prominent journalists from here to Australia are trying to figure that out. Follow the links to today's must-reads.

Republicans are Deadbeats who don't fulfill agreements or honor contracts.

Republicans are Radicals, eager to undo every functioning institution.

Republicans are Anarchists, who want no government at all so they can run amok.

Republicans are Vandals, looking for opportunities to burn, loot and pillage.

Today's Republicans are not conservatives because they don't want to preserve what works. They want to tear down programs and institutions that have worked efficiently and well for the best part of fifty years, the most prosperous and stable period in American history.