Trump Nation
Show Description +
An ongoing reader discussion led by James Fallows regarding Donald Trump's rise to the presidency. (For a related series, see "Trump Time Capsule," as well as "Will Trump Voters and Clinton Voters Ever Relate?") To sound off in a substantive way, especially if you disagree with us, please send a note: hello@theatlantic.com.
Sort Notes
Show 31 Newer Notes
8:57 AM / November 28, 2016
How to Deal With the Lies of Donald Trump: Guidelines for the Media
The Washington Post on November 27. Headlines like this are a step toward recognizing the plain reality of today's politics.
A man who will literally have life and death power over much of humanity seems not to understand or care about the difference between truth and lies. Is there any way for democratic institutions to cope? This is our topic in the post-Thanksgiving week.
Being back in China in the U.S.-election aftermath naturally leads to thoughts about how societies function when there is no agreed-on version of "reality," public knowledge, or news.
We take for granted that this was a challenge for Soviet citizens back in the Cold War days, when they relied on samizdat for non-government-authorized reports and criticisms. Obviously it's a big issue for China's public now. But its most consequential effects could be those the United States is undergoing, which have led to the elevation of the least prepared, most temperamentally unfit, least public-spirited person ever to assume the powers of the U.S. presidency.
The United States is seeing both a chronic and an acute new version of this public-information problem. The chronic version, recognized but nowhere close to being solved, is the rise of separate fact-universes into which different segments of society silo themselves—occurring at the same time as the "normal" news media are struggling against economic and other pressures.
The acute version is the emergence as president-elect of a man whose nature as a liar is outside what our institutions are designed to deal with. Donald Trump either cannot tell the difference between truth and lies, or he knows the difference but does not care. Tiniest example: On a single day during the campaign, Trump claimed that the National Football League had sent him a letter complaining that the presidential-debate schedule conflicted with NFL games (which the NFL immediately denied), and then he said the Koch brothers had begged him to accept their donations (which they also flat-out denied).
Most people would hesitate before telling easily disprovable lies like these, much as shoplifters would hesitate if the store owner is looking at them. Most people are fazed if caught in an outright lie. But in these cases and others, Trump never blinked. As part of his indispensable campaign coverage this summer, David Fahrenthold (and Robert O'Harrow) of The Washington Post offered astonishing documentation of Trump being caught in a long string of business-related lies and simply not caring.
The news media are not built for someone like this.
Our journalistic and political assumption is that each side to a debate will "try" to tell the truth—and will count it as a setback if they're caught making things up. Until now the idea has been that if you can show a contrast between words and actions, claim and reality, it may not bring the politician down, but it will hurt. For instance: Bill Clinton survived "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," but he was damaged then, and lastingly, when the truth came out. To close the loop, knowledge of the risks of being caught has encouraged most politicians to minimize provable lies.
None of this works with Donald Trump. He doesn't care, and at least so far the institutional GOP hasn't either.
How can the press gird for action? Here are three early indications from the news:
1) Call out lies as lies, not "controversies." In covering Trump's latest illegal-voting outburst, The Washington Post and The LA Times took the lead in clearly labeling the claim as false, rather than "controversial" or "unsubstantiated." The Post used the headline at the top of this item, and the one below on another fact-check report:
From The Washington Post on Sunday
The LAT also took this approach in an online story:
Los Angeles Times on Sunday
By contrast, the version I've seen from the NYT takes a more "objective" tone—there's "no evidence" for Trump's claim, much as there was "no evidence" for his assertion that Ted Cruz's dad played a part in the JFK assassination.
NY Times on Sunday
What's the difference? The NYT said that the claim had "no evidence." The Post said it was false. The Times's is more conventional—but it is also "normalizing" in suggesting that Trump actually cared whether there was evidence for what he said. I think the Post's is closer to calling things what they are.
A long-experienced figure in the news business sent me a note about the contrasting Post and NYT stories:
It's not that Trump cited no evidence, it's that the claim itself is groundless. Reading The Times, you would think that Trump broke a debating rule.
Now look at the two ledes, emphases mine.
WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Sunday that he had fallen short in the popular vote in the general election only because millions of people had voted illegally, leveling his claim — despite the absence of any such evidence — as part of a daylong storm of Twitter posts voicing anger about a three-state recount push.
President-elect Donald Trump spent Sunday ridiculing Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign for joining a recount effort in Wisconsin, ending his day on Twitter by parroting a widely debunked conspiracy theory that her campaign benefited from massive voter fraud.
Subtler, perhaps, than their respective headlines, but one reflects the essential truth whereas the other is merely fatuously accurate.
2) Fighting for Reality Itself. I highly recommend this new essay by Ned Resnikoff at the Think Progress site. It explains the chaos-generating logic of Trump's seemingly illogical stream of nonstop lies big and small, which Resnikoff traces to reality TV, to Breitbart and Steve Bannon, and to Vladimir Putin's advisor Vladislav Surkov. It also lays out very different responsibilities for the press and public institutions from what they have assumed their duties to be. A sample about the media:
If the United States is to remain a liberal democracy, then Trump's non-linear warfare needs to fail. Politics needs to once again become grounded in some kind of stable, shared reality. It's not clear how that could happen. But there are at least a couple of steps that anti-authoritarians can make right away...
Journalists need to understand what Trump is doing and refuse to play by his rules. He is going to use the respect and deference typically accorded to the presidency as an instrument for spreading more lies. Reporters must refuse to treat him like a normal president and refuse to bestow any unearned legitimacy on his administration.
They must also give up their posture of high-minded objectivity — and, along with it, any hope of privileged access to the Trump White House. The incoming president has made clear that he expects unquestioning obedience from the press, and will regard anyone who doesn't give it to him as an enemy.
Seriously, please read and reflect on this essay. Also, please read Michael Tomasky's latest essay in The Daily Beast.
3) Dealing with this kind of man. While I was chronicling Donald Trump's lies, outbursts, and attention-failures in the Time Capsule series, I received a large amount of mail offering medical hypotheses for why he might behave the way he did. I suspect the same is true of most other reporters who have written about him. And like most other press operations, while the campaign was underway The Atlantic deliberately decided not to "medicalize" any discussion of Trump's behavior. Most of us are not doctors; even the doctors who were writing to us had not dealt with Trump firsthand; and from a civic point of view, the real issue was the behavior itself, not whatever label you might attach to it.
The campaign is now over; Trump is set to assume enormous power; and the world and the country need to understand how to deal with him. A reader with professional expertise in this field has sent a note on how journalism should prepare for Trump, especially in thinking about his nonstop string of lies.
Again, to be clear, this reader is not "medicalizing" Trump's behavior or recommending that the press do so. But there are common-sense meanings for terms to describe behavior, which we can use without relying on a medical diagnosis. We can say someone seems cruel without saying he's a psychopath; that he seems amoral without claiming he's a sociopath; that he seems moody or depressed without implying a clinical diagnosis. And in common-sense terms, anyone can see that Trump's behavior is narcissistic, regardless of underlying cause. I turn it over to the reader:
Now that he is poised to assume power, I (and a lot of others) are feeling some urgency around holding his worst tendencies in check and preventing him from following through on his noxious campaign challenges.
It troubles me to observe that so far the news media are having trouble when they deal with him directly. I am seeing good investigative reporting on his conflicts of interest, for instance, but it looked like the NY Times just sort of rolled over when they interviewed him in person.
Nobody seems to realize that normal rules do not apply when you are interviewing a narcissist. You can't go about this in the way you were trained, because he is an expert at manipulating the very rules you learned. It's clear to me that reporters (and anyone else) who will deal with DT directly need to take a crash course in handling someone displaying these behaviors.
The Times got in trouble by trying to make sense of his words. It's an easy mistake for people in a word-saturated medium to make, but anyone who's dealt with a narcissist knows you never, ever believe what they say—because they will say whatever the person they are talking to wants to hear. DT is a master at phrasing things vaguely enough that multiple listeners will be able to hear exactly what they want. It isn't word salad; it's overt deception, which is much more pernicious.
But the Times fell for it. I'm watching the same mistake get made over and over again, but I don't know how to help journalists get out of the trap. If we are going to survive the days ahead, someone needs to teach reporters the difference between naming narcissism—[JF note: which, to emphasize, there is no point doing]— vs. dealing effectively with a narcissist.
There's a ton of information out there about how to deal with narcissists. I would really like to see journalists get as interested in the topic—and adept at the strategies—as abused spouses are. We need to somehow widely disseminate ideas for dealing with it.
12:54 PM / November 21, 2016
How the Vote Broke, in Historical Perspective
The projected count for the electoral college in 2016 via Wikimedia
From the inbox, an engineer who is directly involved in the technology for tabulating votes in a number of states sends this report on the historically unusual gap between Hillary Clinton's popular-vote lead and Donald Trump's electoral college margin. (Andrew McGill has been covering this issue for us since the election.) The engineer wrote over the weekend with this summary:
It looks as if Hillary Clinton will top the popular-vote margin in percentage points of President Carter in 1976, also JFK in 1960, three elections in the 1880s and James Knox Polk in 1844. And I should include the 2000 election as well.
That is, he said, a total of seven people will have taken the presidency with a winning margin that is smaller, as a proportion of the popular vote, than Hillary Clinton will probably end up having over Donald Trump, in defeat.
Now, the background, in a note from this same reader a few days earlier:
I work in the election industry—on the counting side, not the political side. When I went to sleep on election night, Trump's lead was a million votes and climbing. This was not my preferred outcome, but I accepted the selection of the people—only it wasn't, as it turns out.
My calculation today gives Clinton a 2.5 million vote margin when everything is counted. (Vote-by-mail states count slowly—more paper handling for mail-ins. California has three million uncounted ballots, one million in LA County (3 to 1 for Clinton) and another half-million in San Diego County (3 to 2 for Clinton).) She may also pick up more votes in other vote-by-mail states out west—think Oregon, Washington, Colorado.
The narrative on election night was all how Clinton turned victory to defeat, her campaign overconfident, her voters staying home, and her herself unable to best perhaps the least capable candidate ever nominated by a major party.
The numbers in Florida and California just do not support that evaluation. In both places, turnout was up over 8 percent. She pulled a 930K vote lead in counties covering 58 percent of the state's voters, counties where Obama ran up a 770K margin that enabled him to win a 70K victory in 2012. Her lead failed because Trump himself ran up a million vote margin in the remaining rural counties, beating Romney's numbers by 350K. Hilary lost Florida, but she and Trump engaged the voters.
In California, she will nearly double Trump's tally, and out-poll Obama (the 2008 and 2012 version) by about three percentage points. She will receive nine million plus votes in California. These are the votes pushing her national total two million and more votes past that of the President-elect.
She will not be inaugurated two months hence, not in virtue of a pitiful campaign. She wasn't perfect, and sometimes not very good, but she received support from enough of the republic to win the office in any universe not governed by an 18th century compromise with the slave-owning aristocrats of the Carolinas and Virginia.
She has 2.5 million more votes than the person who will be inaugurated. That is not a close margin.
This is what a democratic crisis looks like.
We all know that the electoral college is the established system for choosing presidents. (Though the National Popular Vote compact is a way better idea for a modern nation—and is what we would expect and recommend for any other nation.) We all know that if there were no electoral college, the campaign dynamics would have been different and the popular vote total might have been different too. We know as well that this is different from the 2000 election, in which a change in the outcome in even one state would have changed the electoral college result, in favor of the popular vote winner, Al Gore. The dynamics now are different.
But as the reader says, this is quite a disproportion. On the one hand, we have a result swung by a tens of thousands of votes in three crucial states. On the other hand, we have enormous impending changes in international and domestic policy. Americans would not regard the result as normal or proportional if they observed it anywhere else.
10:38 AM / November 19, 2016
A Video for the New Age
As a study of oratorical styles, this is genuinely worth watching, even if you don't understand a word of Italian. Spend even 30 or 40 seconds and you will see what I mean. Or for a highlight skip to the passage from 0:50 to 1:50.
The speaker's enunciation is so emphatic and precise, his wording so blunt and simple, and his argument so straight-ahead that even I, who last coped with Italian many years ago, can follow just what he is telling us. Oversimplified, the message is: make Italy great again! (And specifically its navy.) But again the real message has nothing to do with a particular language. It involves personal carriage, facial expression, stance of dominance, and interaction with crowd. I am sorry I had not taken time to watch this before. (Thanks to John Kenney for the lead.)
In the time since the election, I have been otherwise-engaged about 20 hours a day: writing an unexpected article for the next issue; discussing my article in the current issue, about China, on various shows (including Brian Lehrer here, Marketplace with Kai Ryssdal here, and Charlie Rose here); traveling for Atlantic and other events about the next stage of American re-invention (e.g., here and here and here); and reflecting, though not sleeping.
I see that several thousand emails have arrived in that time. With this latest article done and with press junkets on pause for the moment, I'll start sharing some of the reaction that has come in, plus positive news from familiar places like Erie, Sioux Falls, San Bernardino, and Fresno. All this in a buildup to what I expect will be a necessary declaration of Email Bankruptcy at the end of the year and a clean start on many fronts.
For now, please watch the video. Please. Closely.
3:15 PM / November 14, 2016
After the Election: 'What a Pathetic Thing Is Decadence'
Across the generations: Dwight Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States, exemplar of the personal qualities, civic outlook, and record of service that were ideal goals for one era of Republican leaders. The Republican who will be 45th president exemplifies other traits. (Wikimedia)
Thank you to readers for the hundreds of messages that have been pouring in daily. In most of the time since the election, I have been in transit for a long-scheduled set of American-innovation events in the mountain west, Cheyenne and Laramie in specific; and trying to write a completely unscheduled article for the magazine; and absorbing the psychological and intellectual effects of what our country has just done to itself. I had not expected that I would ever again feel as paralyzed, withdrawn, and downcast as I did after my father died eight years ago. But that expectation was a failure of tragic imagination on my part. I was wrong.
The main thoughts I've made public since the election were immediately afterwards, early Wednesday morning on not much sleep, in a Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross. You can listen to it here. I've also just done a talk with Kai Ryssdal for Marketplace, probably for tomorrow's show.
For now I will try to share some of the messages that have come in, and also do updates about the ongoing civic activity we have encountered across the country, like the one my wife Deb provided yesterday about the historically significant library in Birmingham, Alabama. I'll share reader mail in this ongoing Trump Nation thread, since that is what the nation has become; we'll do rest-of-America updates in the American Futures threads; and meanwhile please check out a new reader-interaction thread, Will Trump Voters and Clinton Voters Ever Relate?
I hope you will read carefully this note from Joseph Britt. I sent Mr. Britt an email saying that I would like to quote from his message, and that I assumed he would prefer—as is our default practice—that I not use his real name. His reply wins my great respect:
It's kind of you to make that suggestion. Not an easy call in these times.
But where is it written life should be easy? Use my name. Say, "Joseph Britt in Wisconsin, who has worked on campaigns and in government for Republican politicians..."
So here is Joseph Britt in Wisconsin, who has worked on campaigns and in government for Republican politicians. I leave in one of his setup points about me, because it provides context.
You mentioned on Twitter not wanting to continue the "Time Capsule" series, which is fine. The Atlantic, however, should pick it up, using a team of writers of which you could be one if you chose. America is heading into uncharted territory as I write this, both as a nation and in our relations with the wider world. The path we walk should be documented in a systematic way.
I wanted to say something about the election results that may be obvious, perhaps too obvious to be much remarked upon.
In The Atlantic and other publications, I have read in recent days long essays about people who supported Donald Trump, who had previously voted for Barack Obama or hadn't voted at all, who were nostalgic for the imagined world of their parents' generation, or who for whatever reason had so little hope for the future they were willing to trust in the remarkably general promises of a man who made his fortune putting up hotels and golf courses.
Journalists struggling to understand Trump's support have been keen to describe—or have these people describe themselves—their feelings, in considerable detail.
All well and good. Rural white voters and voters at a loss in the face of economic and social change are certainly an important story, because of their critical marginal influence in electorally significant states. They may have pushed Trump over the top, but they are not the most important reason he seems about to become President.
Alone among systems of government, democracy imposes duties on the ruled as well as the rulers. It doesn't work if those duties are shirked by too many people. People of means—coincidentally the traditional core of the Republican Party—have a special interest in maintaining standards of ethics and probity in candidates for national office, for without lawful and universally accepted authority no property is safe.
The Republican Party supported a war hero and veteran legislator for President in 2008. It backed a legitimate businessman and successful governor in 2012. This year, it fell in behind Trump. About as many Republicans voted for Trump as for Romney four years earlier. The great majority of these were not distressed working-class voters. They weren't threatened by minorities or by globalization. They were—are— people who have lived easy lives, never wanting for anything save the most garish accoutrements of great wealth.
They knew Donald Trump was ignorant and dishonest, and it didn't matter to them. They knew he was a sex predator who fathered children by various women, and it didn't matter. Cheating on his taxes, cheating on his wives, consumer fraud, the bogus charity, the sponsorship of the Russian intelligence services, the anti-Semitic associates, cheating contractors who had done work for him, the picking on individuals before massive rallies, the insufferable racism, the continual running down of America—none of that mattered.
No, the only thing that mattered to Republicans of means once Trump was nominated by the Republican Party was that he had been nominated by the Republican Party. Loyalty to party took precedence over loyalty to American democracy, its mission, and traditions. What counted—all that counted—was that Trump had been chosen to lead Our Team.
What a pathetic thing is decadence. Millions of Republicans as comfortable and secure as any people who have ever lived, who owe everything to the historic miracle that is the United States, chose to go along with a presidential candidacy shot through with moral degeneracy and contempt for the public good. They had other choices in the primaries; they were warned by their own former leaders what Trump represented. They voted for him anyway, hoping to give their team a win in the game, the shallow entertainment that is all they think of politics.
They have put this Republic that has been the light of the world for 240 years in danger. They have put freedom in danger. Years of easy prosperity and soft living have taught them that America could be taken for granted. Lincoln, Roosevelt, Stimson, Eisenhower, Reagan might just as well be random groups of letters to these people, stifled by material wealth and physical sensation.
They will have second thoughts, these comfortable Republicans of means. They will flake off from Trump long before the sad nostalgists and struggling rural voters who actually believe his promises of magic. They will lower his approval ratings. But they made him President, and gave him a Congress full of cyphers, slackwits, and doddering old men to work with. What a price our country and the world will pay, and for how long they will pay it, because those Americans most richly blessed failed so completely in their duty as citizens.
"Democracy doesn't work if its duties are shirked by too many people."
2:19 PM / November 9, 2016
First Thoughts on the Election
Jonathan Drake / Reuters
Most of what I think about last night's results I discussed in a long talk early this morning with Terry Gross, which will be on the Fresh Air this afternoon. The embed for our discussion just went live and you can listen below.
More in this space when I can manage.
An ongoing theme here in recent years has been the contrast between increasingly paralyzed and bitter national-level politics, and a positive-minded and forward-looking sense of practicality at the community level. In that silver-lining spirit, I am happy to report that all of the local initiatives and candidates I mentioned two days ago came to what I consider the right result:
The voters of California rejected Proposition 53, which would have made it much harder for the state to undertake big, long-term investments.
The voters of Stockton approved Measure M, a small sales-tax increased devoted to the city's libraries and recreation centers. The measure needed a two-thirds majority for approval, and it got nearly 75 percent.
The voters of San Bernardino approved Measure L, which will reform the flawed city charter that in itself is a source of the city's problems. The measure required only a majority vote, and was getting more than 60 percent.
The voters of San Bernardino, Redlands, and environs comfortably re-elected former Redlands mayor Pete Aguilar to a second term in the U.S. House.
The voters of the District of Columbia comfortably elected Robert White (and David Grosso) to at-large seats on the City Council, and approved the statehood referendum by 86 percent to 14 percent.
We'll take progress where we can find it.
On the larger prospect, after the jump a thought for the day from W.B. Yeats.
Apropos for today, "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing," by William Butler Yeats, 102 years ago. For the reminder about this poem I thank a Republican friend who took an early and honorable stand against Donald Trump.
Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors' eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.
Chris Bodenner
6:30 AM / November 8, 2016
T-Day: Your Final Thoughts on Trump Before Voting
Carlo Allegri / Reuters
Today is finally Election Day, mercifully. Our tireless politics team is live-blogging events throughout the day and into the night. Over the past several weeks, scores and scores of your emails have poured in, covering a wide array of campaign topics, so here's one final roundup of your smart opinions and analyses as the polls open this morning. (They're already closed in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, the first vote in the nation, and in that tiny hamlet Clinton beat Trump in a landslide, 4-2—a harbinger, we hope.)
Most recently we had a roundup of reader reaction to the Comey aftermath, and a new reader makes an interesting point here:
FBI agents ran to the nearest reporter to leak about potentially damaging material about Clinton. IRS employees, some of whom certainly had access to and knowledge of Trump's tax returns, never said a word. Maybe they're all secret Trump supporters, or maybe IRS employees demonstrated more integrity than our nation's supposed best and brightest law enforcement agents.
Another reader similarly wonders:
Why is there no MSM coverage of Trump having to face Judge Curiel on November 28 over fraud and racketeering charges for Trump University? [Though it's important to note they're civil suits.] If this were about Clinton, it would have been a shark fest descending on her.
This next reader quotes Fallows in "2016: The Year Latinos Saved America?," a note from Saturday on the surge of early voting in Nevada (subsequently boosted by a Hispanic voting surge in other parts of the country, most crucially Miami-Dade County):
"Latino Americans have long had higher-than-average rates of service and sacrifice in the U.S. military. In 2016, they may be defending American freedoms in another way."
Amen! I hope Nevada early voting is truly a bellwether for a landslide of revulsion toward Trump. Assuming Wednesday brings a reason to celebrate with a burst of adrenaline from a near-death experience, I hope we have the maturity to reflect on the two big questions from this horrible experience:
1. What is wrong with our political system that we nominated two such untrustworthy candidates?
2. How do we protect America from current and future versions of Trumpism?
David Frum's argument that we can't afford to tear down the very institutions that protect America from fascism and despotism is worth emphasizing in all the post-election analysis. As Bill Maher rightly pointed out on Friday:
1) Democrats must share the blame for crying wolf by grossly exaggerating their descriptions of Bush, McCain, and Romney, so when a truly horrific candidate emerged, it sounded like typical Democratic bluster, and
2) The Mormons got it right early-on, saw Trump for who he is, and took a stand. They showed courage to speak the truth when GOP politicians showed self-serving cowardice and hypocrisy by putting their self-interest ahead of America's interest.
Regarding the Mormons' principled stand, here's the rest of Bill Maher's rant against Evangelicals supporting Trump despite his deeply un-Christian character (a topic previously tackled by readers):
For more on Trump's character, a reader in San Diego writes:
Thank you for fodder for excellent conversations! I have a theory about Donald Trump that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere else, and it's about the fact that, before the election campaign, he'd only seen the highly scripted and edited versions of himself on TV. Maybe he doesn't recognize himself because he'd never seen himself portrayed as he really is.
For a big dose of scripted Trump, check out the "best firings" compilation from The Apprentice seen below. (One of Trump's early quotes is ominously ironic: "The problem is that Bradford made an impulsive decision—a stupid, impulsive decision. Frankly, if you were running a company and made that kind of a decision, you destroy that company, instantaneously.")
Back to our reader in San Diego:
All through his life as a celebrity, Trump's appearances have been either scripted or edited to show him in the best light—or at least a humorous light. His anger was his tool, but it was always shown as a strength of character, not as a flaw. Then, during the campaign, Trump expected to be shown in the same manner and was dismayed to see his true self. He really doesn't recognize himself. To him, The Media have edited all of his appearances to make him look bad on purpose. That's the only reason I can come up with to explain his constant insistence that he didn't "say/do/act like that."
Trump's supporters have fallen for a man who is only as real as a storybook. Reality TV is built upon layers and layers of pretense: scripted storylines, production staff who stir the pot in order to create tension, sequences of events are edited for a better arc, and so on. The viewers know this, but still they are certain that a person's "true" character is being revealed.
It's like looking at Photoshopped pictures of fashion models; you know it's not a true representation of the person, but you still expect the person to look like the picture. Then, when you see him/her at the airport, you're surprised he's/she's not as gorgeous.
Another reader on the era of reality TV:
Decades ago I pursued a journalism degree, at the University of Montana J-school, followed by a master's in print journalism in Stanford's communication department. Throughout I was drilled in the catechism of our ancient craft. I learned that the three purposes of journalism are to inform, to persuade and to entertain—in that order. A couple of my most prescient professors issued dire warnings that we must protect our trade against the tendency toward frivolity, or entertainment.
Today, I think we have arrived at a point where, at best, these go in reverse order, or at worst we are almost entirely in the entertainment realm. It began, perhaps, with choosing an actor as our president. It ends up with a reality television star as candidate: a person only capable of entertainment, with a dash of persuasion, but zero information. The disturbing part is how readily the public was brought along. I realize myriad factors are at play, but how sad that we have an election that was "informed" almost completely by entertainment.
Back to the real world of information, here's a thorough debunking of Trump's talking points on the stump—"25 outright lies in a single speech":
One of Trump's greatest rhetorical strengths is interrupting people with pithy and withering insults. That may have worked against "low-energy Jeb" and "Little Marco" and others in the primaries, but it probably didn't work in the one-on-one debates of the general election, as reader Todd argues:
I might be too late getting to this, but I think an under-discussed tactic of Clinton's was that she studiously ignored Trump's interjections during the debates. My recollection is that in the GOP debates, the other candidates generally allowed Trump to stop their train of thought as they responded to his snipes. Clinton didn't do this. She just kept pushing on, saying what she wanted to say and ignoring Trump. I feel that this decision was vitally important, keeping her on long-form answers where she has the advantage on Trump and not getting bogged down in trading barbs, which is Trump's territory.
Clinton rigorously prepped along those lines, of course, and many are have remarked on her "listening woman face." (My colleague Rosa has covered this territory with readers.) Here's another reader on a key moment in the Trump-Clinton debates:
Over the course of the presidential debates, Trump repeatedly said that he's "smart" for exploiting tax loopholes and that he's "entitled [to do so] because of the laws."
Much has been written about this in a vaguely indignant way that doesn't really name the core offense, and I think the problem is that we're all partially persuaded by this idea that it's smart to behave in a way that makes money. But there really is a moral failure at play in this dynamic. Let's look at a comparable example: a middle-class family that chooses to eat all of their meals at a local homeless shelter.
There's no law prohibiting such behavior, and for a family of four this would be a "smart" way to save money. But the overwhelming majority of people would, I think, be horrified by such an idea and far too humiliated and embarrassed to do such a thing. It's not clear to me, though, that Trump would respond this way. As it stands, he has effectively argued that this middle class family is "entitled" to eat at the homeless shelter because the law doesn't explicitly prohibit it.
The vast majority of your emails have been critical of Trump rather than Clinton, but here's a pretty standard critique of Clinton, from a reader in Kansas:
I disagree with Fallows that Hillary Clinton's "experience" as U.S. senator and secretary of state was meaningful. I tune in to C-Span often. I read the NYT, The New Yorker, NY Review of Books, Slate and Salon; I listen to NPR almost as a religious devotion. All of these outlets (C-Span is neutral of course) have been cheerleading for Clinton for years. But I can't recall any of them actually enumerating her accomplishments as Senator or SoS, identifying any "value added" attributable to her while she held those positions. What controversial positions did she stake out and take the lead on in the Senate? Was her time in the Senate any more impressive than other Democrats who shared her basic policy views like, say, Al Franken? How, precisely how, did she distinguish herself?
To me, she was just biding her time, schmoozingly building her resume for the single goal she has targeted since college: POTUS. I think the same holds for her tenure at SoS. What—specifically what—value did she add to policy-making on such areas as our approach in Libya (no, not Benghazi), Syria, Ukraine, the European refugee tragedy, to name a few? It's one thing to prefer her clearly over Trump—no contest, really—but to rhapsodize her "experience" as senator and SoS? I just can't see the empress's clothes.
For a much longer and thorough series of criticisms of Clinton, and the Clintons more generally, check out the "Lesser Evil" episode of Sam Harris's podcast, Waking Up, featuring my old Atlantic and Dish colleague, Andrew Sullivan:
A reader, Lee, recommended that episode after seeing this curated list from my boss Matt Thompson. Lee was "hooked from beginning to end":
The "Lesser Evil" episode is a relentless takedown of both candidates—in the interest of building the case that voting for Hillary is the only viable option. Frankly, I had stopped thinking so critically of Hillary because Trump is so dangerous. While I still can't agree with the "Hillary is evil" argument, the extended criticism of her in the first half of the episode was both necessary and reasonably thoughtful. (It also has some crossover appeal; I can imagine Limbaugh-inclined relatives listening and reconsidering Trump, or at least their NeverHillary stance.) And then that first half was totally overshadowed by their articulation of the incredible threat Trump and his rhetoric pose to so many aspects of Western democracy, leaving Hillary as the only sane choice.
This next reader is opting out of that choice:
I see nothing positive in either candidate. Trump is unfit by temperament. Clinton is unfit by ideology. It's like having to choose between a train engineer with no experience and an experienced engineer who will take you to a place you don't want to go. One might get you in a train wreck; the other surely will take you where you don't want to go.
I'm not getting on the train. I am not casting a vote for president for the first time in 50 years. Since I'm in California, my non-vote will not matter. But I will be able to look myself in the mirror and say that I followed my conscience.
In response to Fallows's note "A Third-Party Voter Makes His Case (and I Dissent)," a reader sighs:
Third-party voters in the U.S. seem confused about a two-party system. In a two-party system, factions coalesce into two parties before the election. In a parliamentary system, factions coalesce into two parties after the election.
Which system is better? I have no idea. However, voting third party in a two-party system makes no sense except to satisfy the pique of the third-party voter, a kind of narcissism and not at all honorable. The problem for third-party voters is not Clinton or Trump, it is the system itself.
This next reader would agree:
This election isn't about Clinton, it isn't about Trump, and it sure isn't about your New York reader's feelings, sentiments, ideas, or sense of self. You either get democracy, or you get not democracy.
One of only two people will be president-elect on Wednesday morning: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. There is effectively no other option for voting, no matter who else is running. You can either help Trump win, or you can help Clinton win. You don't get any other choice.
This morning, I was conceding to the Bernie die-hards (in absentia, since I can't stand to talk to any of them at this point) who won't vote for Clinton, that I suspect Sanders would be in a better position against Trump at this point. We certainly wouldn't have to put up with Comey.
But it simply doesn't matter, because it's no longer an option.
This is the problem with pseudo-intellectualism—or bullshit, in simple language. People don't know when to stop. They always think there's a but, when there's only a binary.
There's much more on the subject in the reader thread "The Hunger for a Third Party in 2016." This next reader suspects Trump will go third party himself:
I thought it was interesting that in Chris Bodenner's note "The Trap the GOP Should Have Seen Coming," he quotes several people who contend that the GOP should have abandoned the party to Trump and started a third party. But, as James Glassman has said, it's nearly impossible to do that in America at the moment.
I contend that the way forward is to convince Trump to start the "T" Party and take his core followers with him (35% of the GOP), allowing the party to rebrand itself in a more contemporary way that focuses on small government, low taxes, state's rights, and a strong military. If they leave behind their xenophobic, so-called "values" issues, they could appeal to the 40% of Americans who are registered Independent.
Why would Trump start the 3rd party? Because he won't want to leave the national stage. The adoration and "many people who say" he is great would persuade him he couldn't lose. Because he is mad at Republicans who backstabbed him. Because he doesn't do "math." Because nothing would appeal to his ego more than having a party that was all about him ... or should I call it a cult?
One other hand, this reader doubts that Trump will be able to mount any political comeback if he loses today:
All he wants to do is to win so much that he will get sick of winning, but you can't do that from the political sidelines, especially after having lost to a woman. When his base finds out that he was lying all along about "the wall," and that he has no real power now, they are not going to start a revolution on their own without a leader. And they are not going to start a revolution with a leader who himself lost their cause. It is going to end with a whimper and not a bang.
The only permanent threat to democracy will be if the Democrats don't realize that they got off easy, and if the Republicans don't think it wasn't their fault. Unless the Left can figure out how to appeal to the white working class, the whole thing will just happen again next time. The Republicans, embarrassed at being a permanent minority party, will try to whip up their base again, and the Democrats will represent "the system" that the base is angry at.
Our hope with the Time Capsule series was to create a comprehensive collection of Trump's most egregious acts of unprecedented, norm-shattering behavior for members of the Republican mainstream to reflect upon and avoid in the future. A long-time reader, Jack, appreciates Jim's efforts:
As a retired USAF veteran of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, I would like to offer my kudos to James Fallows for his admirable contributions. His insight, opinion based on fact, and the manner with which he delivered them is, without a doubt, a credit to your publication.
And another reader, Steven, wants to see Fallows continue the Notes series even if Trump is soundly defeated today:
Thank you to James Fallows for his Notes. His blogging has served as a form of lifeline as I was starting to wonder if I was alone in my thinking. Fortunately, I realize that is not the case. Unfortunately, I also realize that even after the election is over, we have not heard the last of Trump or his followers. More importantly, I fear we have not heard the last from his pretend followers more interested in achieving their life long goal of minority rule, namely the cynical GOP leadership who put power (disguised as party) over country.
The easiest path for them to follow is to continue with their damaging obstructionism now targeted against Clinton. This one issue, combined with continued gerrymandering and voter suppression, is the ONLY thing the disparate factions of the GOP can agree on and is the only glue that seems to hold them together. They appear ready, willing, and able to whip that mule to victory or total defeat.
Please consider continuing your Notes series after the election, as I suspect we will continue to see things we have never seen before as our democratic institutions continue to be attacked. You may also consider rebranding it using a different title. Either way, Fallows's brave voice of clarity and reason will be needed to serve and defend the Republic.
How I'd Vote, If I Lived In ...
Stockton, a recently bankrupt city in California, is one of the venues considering important measures in tomorrow's election. Robert Dawson
A for-the-record personal-preference note on election eve.
Yes for Aguilar. If I lived in my original hometown of Redlands, California, tomorrow I would vote to give the city's former mayor, Pete Aguilar, a second term as Representative from California's 31st Congressional district. His district includes San Bernardino, site of the horrific massacre nearly a year ago, and he has done a good job both in the immediate aftermath of the killings and in addressing the city's deeper, longer-term economic challenges. He's part of the next generation of practical-minded leadership for the state.
Yes on Measure L. If I lived a few miles west of Redlands, across the city line in San Bernardino itself, I would vote in favor of Measure L. This is a long-overdue proposal to revamp the city's unusual and dysfunctional governing charter, which itself has been an important reason the city has been officially bankrupt for four-plus years. I wrote about the bankruptcy, and the charter's role in it, last year here and here. Ryan Hagen of the San Bernardino Sun, who has chronicled the city's recent ups and downs, did an explainer on Measure L and how it would change the charter here. The Sun's editorial board formally endorsed Measure L last month. Some previous charter-reform efforts failed. A lot depends on the city's ability to pass this one. Yes on L!
Yes on Measure M. If I happened to be living instead in California's other best-known recently-bankrupted city, Stockton, I would vote in favor of Measure M. (Stockton formally entered bankruptcy in 2012 and left it last year.) I'll plan to say more about Stockton tomorrow, but its story has much in common with San Bernardino's. Each is physically close to a rich and glittery part of California—San Bernardino and its Inland Empire are an hour's drive away from Los Angeles, Stockton is due east from the tech riches of the Bay Area—but economically and culturally they are far removed. Stockton's arc in the past century also resembles, on a smaller scale, Detroit's: industrial and commercial wealth, and the civic benefits that came from it, and then a long decline. The story of its downtown resembles Fresno's, which we've written about here.
Measure M, whose official description you can read here, would approve a very small sales tax, one-quarter of one percent, to develop libraries and recreation facilities for a city that badly lacks them. The measure passed the city council with a 7-0 vote but now requires a two-thirds supermajority approval to go into effect. Here's more from the Yes on M group, and a wonderful profile from the Stockton Record about one of the people behind it, a local dentist name Mas'ood Cajee. The story about him is titled, "Man passionate about using books to rebuild Stockton." More to come about the larger lessons from this kind of investment.
No on Prop 53. In my profile of Jerry Brown three years ago, I said that his lifetime's immersion in California politics had equipped him, in his return stint as governor, to make the big long-term investments that had been so important to the state's past growth. One of California's challenges is its arcane "direct democracy" system of initiatives and referendums, which were enacted in a reform spirit more than a century ago but in practice turn out mainly to favor well-financed interests and pressure groups. One well-financed activist, a rich farmer from the Stockton area, has put millions into financing a proposition that would add another layer of gridlock and impediment to big statewide projects. Most newspapers in the state have editorialized harshly against it, e.g. Sac Bee, SF Chronicle, SJ Mercury News, Santa Cruz Sentinel, East Bay Times, and the Monterey Herald. Here is a video from Brown himself. As the governor puts it in that clip, "It may sound OK, but it's bad for California." If I lived anyplace in California, I would vote No on 53.
Yes for Robert White. If I lived and voted in D.C., which in fact I do, I would (and will) vote for Robert White for an at-large seat on the City Council. As I mentioned back in June, his upset victory in the Democratic primary over incumbent Vincent Orange was a positive step for the city. And while I'm at it, also Yes for Mary Lord for the at-large seat on the D.C. school board. (And, very locally, Yes for Chuck Elkins for the Advisory Neighborhood Commission.)
Yes on D.C. Statehood. The 99%+ of the U.S. population that lives in the 50 states doesn't care. But it's just not fair that those who live in D.C. pay the same income taxes as everyone else, but have no representation in Congress, and no state-style sovereignty over local decisions. How would the Utah or New York legislatures like it, if some Congressman from another part of the country got to double-check laws that they passed? We don't like it either. It's a symbolic vote, but: C'mon.
And for the presidency. You already know this one.
Read; think; vote!
12:15 PM / November 7, 2016
'A Disturbing Series of Events': The Comey Aftermath
Gary Cameron / Reuters
Ten days ago I argued that FBI Director James Comey had changed the dynamics of the 2016 election in an irreversible way, with his announcement of a new trove of potentially "relevant" emails on Anthony Weiner's computers. After Comey's "oh, never mind" followup yesterday, less than 48 hours before election day, I argued that his series of mis-judgments about the FBI's proper role in electoral politics, and his apparent lack of control over the agency, meant that someone else should take his place. But it would be better all around, according to me, if Comey resigned sometime soon after the election, instead of forcing either the president who appointed him (Obama) or the next president in line (presumably Clinton) to fire him.
Readers disagree—most of them because they think Comey deserves harsher treatment, but some for the opposite reason. Here we go:
There is a silver lining. A reader in the tech industry says that the whole episode might have one positive result:
It should put to rest the storyline that Clinton obstructed justice by destroying damaging emails. This previously unknown cache of unscreened email yielded no evidence of criminality, thus undermining the argument that Clinton's emails were sanitized.
'Egregious error.' From a lawyer on the East Coast:
I disagree with your conclusion that Clinton, if she wins, should not fire Comey (or demand his resignation, which amounts to the same thing). Yes, to some people, particularly the Trump supporters, this might look like revenge. And certainly, GOP elected officials will take the opportunity to make the same claim. But those people are incorrigible, and trying to appease them or seek their approval is a no-win situation.
The fact is that pretty much everyone, including Republicans, agree that Comey made an egregious error in judgment. Can you think of any other post-Hoover FBI Director who has made such a significant public mistake? But for the twisted political environment we're in, that alone should be grounds for firing. Assuming that Comey stumbled innocently with his original letter a week and a half ago, he should, within 48 hours, have issued a clarification intended to remove any unintended implications. That he waited in silence until now compounded his error.
In addition, it appears to be that Comey has, as a number of commentators put it, lost control of his agency. Again, this should be grounds for termination, and Clinton should bring in a new director to clean house and impose some real discipline on the agency. That some agents are intervening in the political process by leaking information is inexcusable.
I note that, when first elected, Obama chose not to pursue criminal actions against any members of the Bush Administration, even though there likely were sufficient grounds to do so. The reason was that Obama feared that the partisan reaction to prosecuting would have poisoned the well and eliminated any chance of the GOP working with him on his legislative agenda. Of course, as we now know, the GOP refused to cooperate anyway. (In addition, Obama chose not to seek indictments because he was loathe to create the apparent precedent of prosecuting the prior administration. IN this regard, he showed prudent, long-range thinking.)
Investigations would be good, not bad. Another reader wanting a tougher line:
Respectfully, I think you're way off base here. First, you summarily conclude that "hearings or investigations into whatever has happened at the FBI would not be worth it for anyone."
The problem here is that an investigation into whatever happened at the FBI is not simply a matter of punishing the director for his error/malfeasance, but actually investigating a disturbing series of events at the nation's national largest law enforcement agency. It wasn't just Comey. Credible reports indicate that (1) Comey acted in part because he knew an anti-Clinton faction at the FBI would leak it first; and (2) that there is a rogue faction at the FBI that was pushing against FBI and DOJ orders to investigate a public candidate for office and to leak damaging information and innuendo at a critical time in the election season. At the very least, the director is unable to control his bureau. What happened absolutely needs to be investigated, and whatever bad actors responsible need to be rooted out. If there is a larger cultural problem at the FBI, that needs to be exposed and fixed.
Otherwise, this will continue. And not just in elections. What if this faction decides to investigate members of the Clinton administration, and leak personal information to the press? How can President Clinton or her AG trust the FBI, if they suspect the FBI will leak critical information? Just because Republicans have abused their investigative powers does not mean there isn't a real value to them.
Second, you recognize that Comey cannot continue at the FBI, but you argue that neither Clinton nor Obama should fire him, because that would appear too political, and the FBI director's 10-year term is supposed to insulate the FBI from political pressure.
Well, that ship sailed. Maybe the 10-year term was supposed to insulate Comey from political pressure, but it clearly did not. The president also possesses the authority to fire the director, presumably in situations where politics be damned, the director cannot continue in his job. This is just one situation, as you yourself recognize.
Third, if firing Comey would be too political, how is it any better for Obama to publicly castigate him and pressure him to resign?
Fourth, you're judging the Democrats by a double standard. Comey can interfere in a general election in violation of both agency policy and arguably a statute (the Hatch Act), but he cannot be punished by the president, even when a statute specifically authorizes the president to fire him? If the president fires him, it is Comey who made the U.S. look like a banana republic, not the president.
'A kind of coup.' A reader who identifies himself as a disabled Vietnam veteran sends a copy of his open letter to the president:
President Obama:
In my view, a Special Prosecutor should be created to investigate the FBI.
It would appear that an FBI in-house group of Republican political operatives staged a kind of coup and created a serious political crisis on the eve of the 2016 election. They did it deliberately and with the clear intent of affecting the election. Whether Director Comey knew about it or not is irrelevant (I suspect he did). The constitutional implications of this act are fundamental to the sanctity of our government. Nothing less.
Not since Gore/Bush in 2000 has a presidential election been so blatantly tampered with. It remains to be seen how the election will come out, but there is no doubt that the so-called "FBI letter" put a serious dent in Clinton's sizable lead. According to Nate Silver (who I consider the most reliable source), her lead dropped from roughly 10 points to roughly 4 points. The actions of the FBI, including Comey, had a clear effect. [JF note: the Silver/538 model, which rated Trump's chances lower than some other sources during the primaries, has consistently rated them higher than most others during the general election campaign. When the results are all in, the polling experts can figure out which approach worked out best in this extraordinary year.]
This is a gravely serious threat the security of the U. S. government and should be seen as such. We all have been pointed to the Russians, when all along the real tampering has come, once again, from our own Republican Party. Please take swift and strong action to expose this national security threat.
On the other hand. Another reader with a military background says that Comey took a difficult but unavoidable step:
I live in Maryland and am strongly supporting Clinton. However, I have friends and family who are adamant Trump supporters and who, with justification, believe the Clintons are not forthcoming about their dubious behavior, an issue that is hard to refute!
They believe the system is rigged. Had Comey not come out with his announcements prior to the election and had there been evidence of Clinton misconduct, what would have the reaction? Total belief on the part of Trump and his base that the system had been rigged—that the FBI held evidence back that would have elected Trump—confirming exactly what Trump had been saying!
Comey inoculated the country from that disaster! And it would have been a disaster!
Do you disagree that had Comey withheld the fact that he had more emails and it turned out that they contained inappropriate behavior by Secretary Clinton, that would have sparked widespread outrage, and right so! The fairness and legitimacy of the election would be challenged by the 48 percent of Americans who were Trump voters .
Frankly, I do not believe that the Washington media has little, if any, understanding of the Trump supporters! Frankly, I am stunned by them, I disagree strongly with them, but they are not stupid; they are concerned about the country. I had hope that your flight across the country would have provided some insight to the divisions of the country and the unfortunate passion with which those divisions are held.
To address this central part of the final reader's argument: "The fairness and legitimacy of the election would be challenged by the 48 percent of Americans who were Trump voters." First, he's not going to get close to 48 percent of the vote. Even if he did, what I've seen convinces me that most or all of his real base would believe there was "an email problem" regardless of anything Director Comey ever said.
The email "scandal" is a very peculiar one. Hillary Clinton made a significant mistake in setting up the system to begin with, and for being so grudging about recognizing that. But as far as I can tell, it's a mistake whose main victim is herself. I'm not aware of anyone demonstrating or even claiming specific harm to the national interest because of her email practices. Yet people who chant "lock her up" usually start with this on the bill of particulars.
Clinton should "go high" by keeping Comey. Here's another reader with a somewhat sympathetic view of the FBI director (previous readers along those lines here):
Yes, Comey should resign, but I'm not sure that his resignation should be accepted. His sin—being obsessed with his reputation—is one of which the Founders (George Washington above all), not to mention all modern politicians, have been guilty. And many if not most of them typically go about tending to their reputations in far less salubrious ways than he has.
Justin Dillon is right: The original decision and announcement not to prosecute Clinton should have been made by AG Lynch and her lieutenants. That way anyone who believed that a Democratic AG had made a partisan decision to decline to prosecute her party's nominee could have expressed their displeasure at the ballot box in November. We don't know whether Comey tried to pass the buck to Lynch (as he should have), but if he did, it seems likely that such an attempt would have been rejected.
Instead, the FBI—and Comey personally, with his reputation for probity—were used as a kind of heat shield, like the protective layer which, with one tragic exception, kept the space shuttle astronauts safe during their re-entry into the atmosphere. Then the late-breaking emergence of the Wiener emails put Comey on an even nastier spot, especially with the "fifth column" of troglodytes in the Bureau that Wayne Barrett has described (thank you very much for that link) itching to inflict far greater damage on his reputation (a cover-up!) by leaking their preferred version of the story.
If Clinton and the country manage to survive Comey's horribly clumsy attempt to salvage what remained of his reputation, refusing to accept his resignation would give her and her party a very visible opportunity to "go high." She and they would undoubtedly be accused of rewarding Comey for his last-minute announcement re-exonerating her. However, these are career politicians and partisan operatives, and being criticized unfairly is a baked-in part of the gig that they signed up for.
Fix the (metaphorical) bayonets. From a reader who starts out agreeing with me that no one should fire Comey:
I think I agree with you on this. From a purely cerebral analysis, I'm sure I do. But all this norm smashing—as we've all been discussing for months—isn't going to end just because Trump loses. Indeed, the Republican elected officials are going to be driven by a political constituency driven to madness to act in an increasingly undemocratic fashion during the Clinton II Presidency.
So, as you say, the Democrats have two choices. They can resist the (reasonable) impulse to act in kind, playing the adult in the room while the Republican burn down the house around them. Or they can—at least selectively—fight fire with fire and step outside the previously accepted norms of behavior in order to thwart at least some of the craziest Republican actions.
We already know we'll be facing problems with appointments (not just judicial, don't kid yourself), appropriations legislation, and perhaps most ominous of all, a renewed debt ceiling fight led by the most nihilistic politicians in recent memory.
I'm not sure which course I favor. I'd like to at least be proud of our actions, but there's no doubt that American small-d democracy is in peril, and maybe it's time to fix bayonets ...
I know from context that he means the last line metaphorically.
Read; think; vote.
The Future of Mr. Comey
Director Comey, before his latest two intrusions into the election. Joshua Roberts / Reuters
With his ill-advised intrusions into this year's election, FBI Director James Comey has already damaged U.S. interests and the fabric of American democracy more grievously than even Hillary Clinton's harshest critics could contend that her email-policies have done.
Damaged, how? I made the long-term case a week ago, after Comey's reckless announcement about the Anthony Weiner emails. The shorter-term case is evident right now: No one can ever know how the 2016 election would have turned out—in ultimate victor, in margin and "mandate," in the way specific states go, in down-ballot and Congressional effects—had it not been for Comey's decision to put himself in the middle of charge and counter-charge.
We can't ever know, because some 40 million people have already voted. We can't ever know, because his latest last-minute announcement comes too late to be fully digested by the time everyone else votes on election day.
I have no reason to believe that Director Comey was operating out of base motives. He probably thought he was doing the right thing for the right reasons. But he was mistaken, and the results were damaging—to the country, to the political process, to the FBI and the Department of Justice, and to Comey himself.
In the hyper-litigious current political realm, the usual next step would be hearings and investigations—hearings like those on the deaths at Benghazi, investigations like the endless ones on email. American public life at the moment is all too hearings-bound and criminalization-crazy. Hearings or investigations into whatever has happened at the FBI would not be worth it for anyone.
So what, instead?
Hillary Clinton, if she wins, should not fire Director Comey. If she cares about the norms of governing, as she should and presumably does, she would realize that this would inescapably look like revenge and a purge.
For similar reasons, Barack Obama, who appointed Comey to this job in the first place, should not fire him. FBI directors are given 10-year terms precisely to insulate them from politics. Obama should observe the letter of that apolitical norm, even if Comey himself has not.
But as soon as the election is over, Obama should make clear, bully-pulpit style, what Comey has done wrong, and why Comey has tarnished his bureau's reputation, lost Obama's trust, and forfeited the public's deference to his judgment.
And then, sometime soon, Comey should resign. He shouldn't be fired, but if he cares about his institution and its values, he should recognize that his continued presence is an unavoidable source of continued harm.
Plus, he is sure to get a lucrative follow-on job.
We've had enough hearings and investigations. But this was a big and damaging mistake.
No one should fire Director Comey, because a firing would damage governing norms. But in defense of those norms, Director Comey should resign.
2016: The Year Latinos Saved America?
Jon Ralston on Twitter
Two of my long-time, politically well-experienced friends have been in Nevada recently, doing get-out-the-vote work. Independently, each has just sent me a note saying that their experience and observations match what the Jon "the sage of Nevada" Ralston has been reporting: Namely, a huge surge in early voting among Democrats and especially Latinos in Nevada, which bodes very negatively for Donald Trump's prospects there and by implication elsewhere.
From one of them:
I'm in Las Vegas. Been walking precincts for the last few days. The surge in early voting (now completed) is real [as HuffPo reports]: Nevada's Early Vote Ends With Massive Democratic Surge
I haven't been in Nevada so can't compare impressions first-hand. But I can say that based on what Deb and I have seen around the country in the past few months—in Central Valley and inland southern California, in western Kansas, in rust-belt Pennsylvania and Michigan, in both Mississippi and Alabama—I've been preparing for the least surprising "surprise" of election day. Namely, "surprisingly" high turnout among Latino voters, which will play a "surprisingly" important part in sparing the country and the world a Donald Trump presidency, if in fact we are to be spared.
The surprise factor depends on Latinos across the country being more deeply offended by everything about Trump's campaign, from "they're rapists" onward—and being more determined to show up and vote than their past often-low turnout rates might have indicated or (the surprise part) than this year's polling may fully capture. I'm not a pollster, but all the anecdotal and reportage evidence we've come across supports both halves of this equation. People are really (and rightly) offended. And they are really determined to make their views known.
(I'm prepared for a similar "surprise" in the margin from women voters but don't know of early-voting results that yet give such indications.)
I've argued for years, for instance here and here, that the long-term secret of American greatness is its ability to draw on an outsized share of the world's talent, entrepreneurial creativity, culture, heart, and general human genius through its openness to people of many races and backgrounds. Latino Americans have long had higher-than-average rates of service and sacrifice in the U.S. military. In 2016, they may be defending American freedoms in another way.
A Third-Party Voter Makes His Case (and I Dissent)
The Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson. Jim Young / Reuters
A reader in New York writes about the way he is casting his vote. He also asks a question, for which my answer is below.
From the reader:
As a two-time Obama voter and Obama fan, I am not at all enthusiastic about HRC and plan to vote Gary Johnson to register my unease with her. Your views on Trump are well known, but I would like to know: what do you think of HRC, not as an alternative to Trump per se—who's obviously so much worse—but as an affirmative choice for president?
Put another way, if you set aside the idea of influencing the outcome / blocking Trump and instead focus on voting as an act of affirmation, do you actively support HRC despite her flaws and why? Do you think we should feel good that she will be president? I have seen no evidence of her having "learned" from past ethical missteps or foreign policy misjudgments. My own views are below, and I see three main negatives in HRC.
Her poor judgment and paranoid streak (see: email fiasco) are not just unappealing, but undermine her effectiveness when they blow up in her face. This pattern will continue into her presidency.
The nexus of public service and personal enrichment known as Clinton Inc., regardless of whether it rises to the level of actual corruption. (That they've figured out how to land just shy of criminality almost makes the whole thing worse.)
Her foreign policy will be conventionally hawkish, with all the unnecessary / counterproductive use of resources that entails. Her presidency will be paralyzed domestically by unprecedentedly fierce opposition, so foreign policy will be the only arena where she can demonstrate "effectiveness." This increases the risk of ill-conceived misadventures abroad for the sake of "doing something"—e.g. I expect the U.S. will be dragged into a morass in Syria that Obama has largely resisted. Her clearly telegraphed Syria policy will cost a lot of money; American servicemen will die; and it will worsen terrorist blowback from the Middle East. And this is to say nothing about new crises she'll be faced with.
These negatives bother me very much—but they're livable.
The negatives against Trump are overwhelming and intolerable, and stem only partly from his policies (which I do believe will be worse for America). Cracking down on immigration, banning Muslims or "extreme vetting" of foreign visitors, trade protectionism, massive unfunded tax cuts, haircutting the national debt—all of these will be worse for the country IMO….
But I'm even more swayed by Trump's farcically, outrageously unfit temperament for the presidency. As prolifically chronicled in his Twitter feed, in the context of the U.S. presidency, Trump is a man of unprecedented pettiness, vulgarity, sensitivity to perceived slights, and emotional immaturity.
Yes, Clinton's administration will be 50%+ preoccupied with fending off sundry investigations, inquiries, commissions, inquests, and controversies—some her own fault, others concocted by detractors. But President Trump will be 50%+ preoccupied with obsessively reading his own press, answering slights, and settling a continuous flow of spats, feuds, arguments, tizzies, vendettas, quarrels, and brouhahas—whether with b-list celebrities like Rosie O'Donnell and Alicia Machado, members of the press, bureaucrats and elected officials, or foreign leaders.
Why is that significant? Because it's a near-certainty that he will re-purpose the powers of the presidency in general—most ominously including the U.S. military—as a vehicle for settling disputes, saving face, getting the last word, and asserting dominance. And he'll be equally pliable by flatterers and favor-curriers, within his administration or without, domestic or foreign—including foreign despots much cleverer, more strategic than he is.
His decisions will be guided by emotion, vanity, and ego first, and a rigorous calculation of the national interest only a distant second. Not because he wants them to be, but because he can't help it. By its very nature, this setup makes it literally impossible to predict what those decisions may be, except that they will bear only an incidental relation to what's best for the country.
With Clinton, you know what you're getting: a basically conventional policy offering—left of center domestically, relatively hawkish and interventionist abroad—combined with likely ethical and/or legal lapses; an unhealthy degree of secrecy / paranoia; probably some fresh embarrassments courtesy of Bill's sex addiction (which I assume is alive and well); and maybe even health problems of some severity.
But the negatives are known and bounded. Either she has a decent, effective, scandal-free presidency; or she engages in various scandals, whether or not she gets away with it. But that's the range of outcomes. Not all are desirable, but all are survivable. She may well blow up her presidency, sure—but what could she conceivably do that would be catastrophic not just to her legacy, but to the country? HRC's range of outcomes is between "tolerable" and "pretty shitty," with a non-zero if remote chance of "good."
With Trump, we have no idea what we're getting. The range of outcomes is unbounded and skewed to the negative. He could be great—one of the best. He could be Reagan Redux, as some have hoped. But he could also be catastrophic. Almost nothing is too far-fetched, too fantastical, to put in the realm of possibility. He could be the most negatively consequential president of the post-war era. Why not, given that he gets into 3 a.m. Twitter feuds with 1990s Venezuelan beauty queens while ostensibly running for president?
Forget about his hucksterism, his profound vulgarity and tackiness, his trail of credible sexual assault accusers, his policy ignorance and lack of curiosity… All bad things, but the dispositive issue for me is the signature Trump constellation of vindictiveness, vainglory, impulsiveness, and an ultra-fragile sense of pride. He could offer the best set of policies imaginable, and it wouldn't matter. Those traits alone still make him a gamble that neither the status quo nor the many flaws of HRC are so bad as to justify.
So, if I'm casting the deciding vote, there is no contest: in this particularly loathsome election, HRC is the only sound choice. Thankfully, I'm not in that position and I do consider a third party vote a perfectly honorable thing to do in this cycle.
Like the reader, I vote in a jurisdiction whose Electoral College result is not in question—for him, New York; for me, D.C. Unlike him, I think it's important to cast a vote for one of the two candidates with a chance of becoming president, which in my case means voting for Hillary Clinton.
I didn't write The Atlantic's unusual (third time in 159 years) editorial endorsing Clinton, but I agree with its logic. Essentially: Hillary Clinton is a candidate of clear strengths and some very well-known weaknesses. Her foreign policy instincts and record are more hawkish than I would choose, which is the main reason I preferred Barack Obama in the Democratic primary eight years ago. In principle, it would be better if two families, Bush and Clinton, had not supplied four out of five successive presidents, which will be the case if she wins. But also in principle, it is long past time to have a female president, and if it doesn't happen now it could be quite a while.
Most of all, as the reader points out, her weaknesses are known. Apart from a million such discussions from other people, I wrote about them recently here and here. There's zero risk they'll go undetected. There is a non-zero chance she might adjust and learn.
In contrast, her strengths have been taken for granted or under-appreciated. For evidence I'll rest my case on these past three debates, since I've written so much about them. In terms of knowledge, she was never at a loss. In terms of poise and under-stress self-control, she had it while her adversary manifestly did not. ("Such a nasty woman.") In terms of strategic planning, she had a plan and carried it out, as opposed to Brownian Motion on the other side. And all of this, "backwards and in high heels"-fashion, while dealing with judgments of her as a "shrill" or "harsh" woman that would not have been made of a man.
She was popular with her colleagues of both parties when she was in the Senate. She had a sky-high public popularity rating when she was Secretary of State:
Gallup poll in 2011
As president she would do some things that I, personally, would be enthusiastic about, and others I would not like. But in all cases, from my perspective, she would be competent, intelligent, and serious about the job.
Since the real-world alternative is a someone who is ignorant, impetuous, and contemptuous of both the rules and traditions on which our democracy is based, with no hesitation I say: vote for her, and work out the problems later on. They're the kind of problems our political system is supposed to cope with. The alternative is a problem for the system itself (as Conor Friedersdorf has argued here).
And to my taste, the third-party alternative of saying "Oh, there's something wrong with them both, I'll vote for this other person" is wrong on the merits (Gary Johnson has his obvious weaknesses) and also in its long-term implications. Hillary Clinton, with her strengths and flaws, is the alternative to Donald Trump six days from now. Voting for her is a recognition of that reality; it adds to her popular vote as well as Electoral College strength, both of which matter for her (sure to be challenged) legitimacy; and it gives the voter better karmic standing to hold her accountable afterwards.
My vote in D.C. doesn't "matter," but it matters to me.
Sympathy for Comey
FBI Director James Comey testifying on Capitol Hill before the House Oversight Committee on July 7 to explain his agency's recommendation to not prosecute Hillary Clinton. J. Scott Applewhite / AP
Fallows is swamped at the moment, partly to finish a cover story for our upcoming issue, so he passed along a ton of reader email with permission to post. (Thanks to everyone who has written him, as well as the general hello@ account, and we're trying to post as many of the best emails as we can before Election Day.)
To start us off, a few readers find that the FBI director was put in a very difficult position following his agency's July announcement that it would not recommend charges to the Justice Department against Clinton for her "extremely careless" use of emails. Comey was then lambasted in public before the House Oversight Committee and increasingly invoked in Trump's pernicious "rigged" rhetoric on the campaign trail. This Fox News clip is a taste of things as they got started in July:
A reader suggests that Trump won by getting into Comey's head:
It seems to me that the unfortunate way that Comey handled this situation was definitely a very clear-cut case of "working the refs." Trump and his campaign have pushed so hard on the idea that everything is rigged—including the FBI—that when these potentially new emails came up, Comey lost his backbone and decided to cover his ass and show The Republicans that he was not rigged. Sort of like a make-up call in a big game.
It is an indictment of our current state of affairs in regards to normalizing Trump that despite the widespread pushback on Trump's "rigged" talk, it still was not discredited outright enough by EVERYONE. If we had a normal candidate who accepted the system, then Comey would not have been feeling the pressure to prove he was not "rigged," and he would have followed the 60-day tradition that has been in place for decades even if it meant taking some heat about it down the line.
This next reader has outright sympathy for Comey—pity even, given his apparent weakness in the face of Trumpism:
Fallows makes a number of good points in his thoughtful piece on falling norms. My problem here is that one of the "norms" that has fallen is "equal justice" under the law in this country. The real tragedy here for Comey and the country is the fact that he gave Mrs. Clinton a pass when it is obvious that she violated several laws [or at least federal records rules, which—speaking of the erosion of norms—started to be chipped away by Clinton's predecessor, Colin Powell]. The idea that she should not have been prosecuted is not credible and polls of the American people make that clear. Opinion writers like Fallows seem to ignore this fact, which is why there is the current situation.
I feel bad for Mr. Comey, but he should have done the right thing in the first place.
Update from a reader who rebuts a sentence above:
"The idea that [Clinton] should not have been prosecuted is not credible and polls of the American people make that clear." This is, in fact, the problem itself. In a society governed by law, you have to accept the verdict of law. You can criticize it and rail against it, push for legal reforms, but you should not and cannot question its legitimacy itself (one more norm broken).
In this case, if Comey (a Republican) reviewed all evidence and decided that there was not enough to prosecute, our "feelings" and "polls of American people" (unfortunately) don't matter. A similar parallel is Black Lives Matter, where unless a verdict that is acceptable to the activists is not reached, the jury is racist and the system is corrupt. A more thoughtful viewpoint is that in view of the facts presented, the jury could not / did not reach a "guilty" verdict.
For Comey's part, according to officials close to him, he felt both a sense of obligation to Congress and "a concern that word of the new email discovery would leak to the media and raise questions of a coverup"—though not as much "raise questions" as throw fuel on the Trump dumpster fire already raging for weeks.
This next reader, a lawyer in L.A., while no apparent fan of Trump, points a finger at the Clintons and their deep establishmentarianism:
As far as Comey, the entire process was politicized, and I suspect a careful review of the government's prosecution history for these offenses will show that Clinton was the only one who was not prosecuted for her security breach. A FOIA request could show that. One can be a Democrat, and all that, or simply despise Trump for being the unaccomplished heir that he is, but can one really argue that Billary do not enjoy unprecedented treatment from their capture of the Democratic Party, or that the capture did not lead to her nomination and the FBI's decision not to prosecute?
Another lawyer, on the other hand, blasts Comey:
If there is no warrant to look at the emails, does that not mean that the FBI has not yet been able to articulate, even to the threshold of making a rational connection, that these new emails are connected to an offense? So the FBI is not yet in a position to make an argument to a judge, but the agency's director is prepared to go straight to the public, 11 days before an election?
I am just a Canadian criminal prosecutor. We Canadians are not always the brightest bulbs, so I'm probably missing something. But I don't quite understand why people don't instantly see how outrageous this all is. I fear that you Americans are headed for a very dark place.
Buckle up, buckaroos. Here's one more reader with some understanding of the difficult position the FBI director found himself in:
I'm far from an insider, but Comey from afar seemed to have a Boy Scout moment. My sense is he's a complete man of the system, and as Jonathan Haidt showed, being responsible is a core value to conservatives. He felt a load of pressure, self imagined, and probably had a mini moral crisis. He's probably, if not a hack, a life-long bureaucrat, who serves at others' disposal and lacks a real sense of judgment or sense of psychology. It's like the Book of Judges: In modern America, a random Republican in power will elect himself to steal the election—if not the Supreme Court, the head of the FBI.
I feel a sense of jaw-dropping dread, and Trump is going to play up the inevitability as charismatics do, and people are going to forget his idiocy and thuggishness. But logic—like that of Sam Wang at Princeton Election Consortium and the fact that there will be pushback for the monkeys in the middle to consider—leads me to believe that unless something really big comes up, Clinton will squeeze by. The likely worse outcome is that this will spur talk of impeachment and the illegitimacy of a Clinton regime.
This next reader raises an intriguing contrast between Comey and Gonzalo Curiel, the judge presiding over the Trump University case:
I find it interesting that Curiel chose to delay the trial until after the election so as not to influence it, and, I'm assuming, for there to be less potential influence on the integrity of the trial itself. I also find it interesting that it is the very same judge who Trump has lambasted in the media and accused of not being able to judge him fairly due to his race [and Curiel's parents' Mexican heritage]. Trump said Curiel should recuse himself or be removed from the case. I would have been delighted to see Trump on trial mid-election, but I felt wholeheartedly it was the correct decision, even though it very clearly benefits Trump.
Then, in stark contrast, we have Comey. His decision to release the statement saying there are new emails is bizarre and lacks logic. It seems to me there are two choices he has once he finds out about the emails, but both hinge on knowing what's in the emails. The newest reports are saying the FBI had these for weeks prior to Comey's bombshell. I just don't understand how you don't look at the emails or seek approval to look at the emails (via warrant) until 11 days before Election Day. His two choices should have been the following:
If he releases the statement, it is because there is new information that may or will result in prosecution. It's pertinent information for voters to consider, so it should be released no matter the influence on the election, although precedent and policy seem to say this wouldn't necessarily be enough justification to release the statement. But I at least could see why he felt an overwhelming need to make the statement.
If there's no new information in the emails, then wait to release the statement until after the election. Wait to notify Congress because there's no new info in the emails and any disclosure could sway the election unfairly.
Just as a side note, in an election that saw a number of firsts regarding mentions of sexual acts, parts, abuse, etc, this new email situation arose because of Wiener and his penis pictures. God help us.
"Arose," ugh. Update from a reader, Kevin:
Let me posit two other possibilities behind Comey's decision. First is that he is a supremely calculating bureaucrat, adept at self-preservation even if administratively incompetent. Given his failure to recommend action against candidate Clinton last July, Comey must know that his position as FBI director would be toast if Donald Trump, who had criticized him so bitterly, were to be elected. So Comey did Trump a solid based on no information. This explanation assumes that Comey is so naive as to believe that Trump holds any value to mutuality in any relationship—a position unsupported by the man's history.
Comey must also have calculated that if Clinton were elected and fired him, it would certainly be considered grounds for impeachment by the atavistic GOP. Job insurance, Mafia-style.
The other explanation, which I favor most, is that Comey really is an adult Boy Scout and values his own reputation above all. But when does a fetish for reputation become ruinous? When it devolves into egoism and harms the long-term common good. Comey confused a tactical buttressing of his reputation for his position in history, which I cannot believe is going to be favorable.
You might ask your colleague Fallows about a great decision by an American president who sacrificed his reputation for the long-term good. In 1979, Jimmy Carter appointed Paul Volcker as his Federal Reserve Board chair with an explicit mandate to tame inflation by any means necessary. Volcker's extreme tight-money policies caused a sharp and prolonged recession and high unemployment—but it did bring inflation down (the collapse of OPEC unity did help as well). Carter's replacement, the perennially overrated and intrinsically dishonest Ronald Reagan, trashed Carter, blaming him for the unemployment (but taking credit of course for the slashing of inflation).
Carter's reputation—as a president, if not as a human being—has never really recovered. But it is undeniable that he set the course for several decades' worth of a sustainable economy. Comey's egoism and short-termism may just have set the course for a constitutional dark age in this country.
Zooming out a bit from the Comey controversy, several more readers offer insight and supplemental reading on the broader themes of American politics that Fallows explored in "James Comey and the Destruction of Norms." He called this email from a reader "well argued" when he passed it along to me:
The word "norms" is a squishy word; it sounds like an abbreviation of normal, mixed in with resonances of a first name shouted at someone who walks into the bar in Cheers. It lacks any immediate sense of purpose or consequence, almost as if it merely applied to manners or political correctness. It's one thing for you to say that norms are important to democracy, but just saying that doesn't communicate an understanding of why or how important they are.
Norms are structural. They create the framework within which we operate. They define up and down, and left and right. They establish what is good behavior and bad behavior. And they are absolutely necessary for democratic institutions to function. They are understood and honored because people recognize the dire consequences of violating them.
Deadlines are governed by the clock—unless someone cynically stops the clock to keep the deadline from passing. The Senate operates on majority rule—unless one party, routinely employing the filibuster, decides that it doesn't. The Constitution requires advice and consent on appointments—unless one party, in a naked exercise of raw power, decides that it doesn't. And if one party can make that decision, what's the point of having a Constitution?
Norms are enforced by the community, not by law. In government they are enforced by the political parties and, ideally, the press. But the Republican party, as you pointed out, has been breaching norms for some time. A party responsible for the functioning of the Constitution has been undermining the very norms it is charged to uphold. And when half of the community fails to enforce norms, then, by definition, the norms are gone—unless the press clearly and loudly points out that the norms are not being enforced. And, except in some small pockets of the press world, that hasn't happened.
And this is the most significant press failure. By false equivalence, and the moral relativism of "he said and the other guy said," without reference to the non-normative behavior of one of the parties, the press has allowed norms to be washed away like a sand castle at high tide. Norms are made out of sand—they are illusory—because they're only effective if the parties share in, and enforce, the illusion. And our institutions, indeed our democracy, cannot function without them.
Republicans have established new norms for a party out of presidential power. If the Democrats take up those norms should they lose the White House, we well never, ever, be able to function. And we will have Trumpism incarnate: He or she who can wield raw power, without consideration of norms, will prevail. And the American people will be the last consideration on the table.
This next reader looks to the intellectual forefather of American conservatism, Edmund Burke, whose lessons seem completely lost on Republicans these days—not to mention completely shredded by Donald Trump. His disdain for political norms and institutions during this election should give contemporary liberals more appreciation for Burke, a philosopher they might have ignored otherwise:
Your discussion of the importance of norms in government reminded me of a comment on the French revolutionaries (so similar in many ways to Donald Trump) by Edmund Burke, on whom I did my M.A. thesis. About their inclination to transgressive behavior, Burke wrote:
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
For most of us, most of the time, that "controlling power" involves our internalization of norms that support civil society—exactly the norms whose wholesale violation you have chronicled. What Burke is saying is that when those norms are discarded, society will have to fall back on enforced external controls, turning custom into law and regulation, if it is to survive. By discarding the norms we have voluntarily observed, we will bring ourselves under forceful compulsion. Our passions will have forged our fetters.
Another reader looks to a classic book by a classical liberal:
Over the past week I have been rereading de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. In it he emphasizes the importance of custom in regulating a democracy. Trash the norms and you begin the process of destroying our experiment in responsible self-rule. I don't know if James Comey was acting as a partisan hack, covering his ass, or just being stupid, but he should be made to pay for the damage he has done. This election is simply awful and he has just made it that much more so.
Another reader looks to literature:
Whatever HRC has done, she's still more trustworthy, intelligent, and competent than Trump, but for the past 20 or so years of teaching The Great Gatsby, I keep seeing the Clintons in Nick Carraway's summation, "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy, they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."
And another introduces a new book:
I'm sure you are getting enough junk traffic on stuff like this. So, a link:
Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg's latest book Toward Democracy lays out a distinctive vision of democracy—one that stresses not institutions or practices, but what he calls "an ethical ideal." The essence of democracy isn't one man, one vote. It isn't majority rule. And it isn't the principle of political representation. Rather, it lies in the combination of individual autonomy and an "ethic of reciprocity." In other words, a willingness to think in other people's shoes and act accordingly, a political version of the golden rule. If such ideals seem practically utopian in today's climate, for Kloppenberg that is an indication of just how badly democracy has lost its way.
Another reader teaches us a new word:
An alternative explanation of the Trump campaign has kept urging itself forward to me. It requires a little background for some.
Ethnomethodology is a part of sociology that purports to be theory-free, or at least theory-neutral, concerned with identifying rules within a social group rather than figuring out what model the group fits. One of the research methods for ethnomethodologists is a breaching study, in which the researchers identify important norms in a group by participating in the group and systematically violating various observed norms. The responses of the group members to the breaches reveal the importance of the norms.
Is it possible that the entire Republican presidential campaign has been an ethnomethodology research project? How else do we explain the unprecedented series of breached norms (as you have noted in your Time Capsules)?
This reader digs up another time capsule of sorts:
In a letter to Joshua Speed dated August 24, 1855, Abraham Lincoln famously wrote:
I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that "all men are created equal". We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be take pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.
That's quoted on page 39 in Lincoln's Virtues, by William Lee Miller. On page 90, Miller observes:
As president he would display charity in many ways, and sometimes give expression to it in religious themes. He would show magnanimity to rivals and critics, mercy to the accused, patience with insolent generals, eloquent sympathy to the bereaved, generosity to associates and subordinates, nonvindictiveness to enemies. He would explicitly disavow planting thorns, malicious dealing, holding grudges.
Two human beings more different than Lincoln and Trump can scarcely be imagined. Our current "progress in degeneracy" is indeed pretty rapid.
Lastly, a reader in Vermont tries to end on an optimistic note:
Thank you to Fallows for his reports from across the country showing how people are making things work. The professional dog-biter circus that goes for national politics needs to be documented, but it gets to be a bit much after a while. Whether or not it is true, at this point it is not that hard to believe that a major force in this campaign is that Trump was honey-trapped by the Russians. As it is, both Trump and the Russians would enjoy fouling the bed of American politics. They are both intent on profiting from a bitter, divided America.
Let's hope the country survives this week.
More Notes From The Atlantic
An Action Plan for the Future of Media January 14, 2020
Looking at Libraries December 26, 2019
A Portrait of Public Libraries December 23, 2019
Dayton, Ohio, Is 'a Place That Knows What It Is' December 19, 2019
How Artists Build the Spirit of a Town December 16, 2019
Most Popular On The Atlantic
Bloomberg / Getty
Why Manhattan's Skyscrapers Are Empty
Derek Thompson
Approximately half of the luxury-condo units that have come onto the market in the past five years are still unsold.
In Manhattan, the homeless shelters are full, and the luxury skyscrapers are vacant.
Such is the tale of two cities within America's largest metro. Even as 80,000 people sleep in New York City's shelters or on its streets, Manhattan residents have watched skinny condominium skyscrapers rise across the island. These colossal stalagmites initially transformed not only the city's skyline but also the real-estate market for new homes. From 2011 to 2019, the average price of a newly listed condo in New York soared from $1.15 million to $3.77 million.
But the bust is upon us. Today, nearly half of the Manhattan luxury-condo units that have come onto the market in the past five years are still unsold, according to The New York Times.
Can You Cure a Domestic Abuser?
Matthew Wolfe
A class developed in Duluth, Minnesota, has heavily influenced how domestic abusers are rehabilitated across the U.S. But critics question whether it works.
The photograph above shows Andrew Lisdahl and his fiancée, Theresa, at their home, along with Andrew's daughter with his ex-wife (left) and one of Theresa's daughters (right).
Andrew Lisdahl was mad. His wife, Gretchen, had smoked a cigarette, a habit he detested. They fought, and Gretchen spent the night at a friend's house. The next day, Andrew drank a bottle of tequila and hitched a ride to the stained-glass studio where Gretchen, an artist, gave lessons. When Andrew found her, he grabbed her left hand and tried to remove her wedding ring, but Gretchen fought him off. As Andrew stumbled away, he took Gretchen's car keys and phone.
After work, Gretchen's father drove her back home to retrieve her things. Inside, Andrew had been passed out on the couch, but he woke up and yelled at Gretchen, "Get the fuck out!" When she didn't, he grabbed her by the hair, dragged her into the living room, threw her on the carpet, kicked her in the chest, and pinned her to the ground. As Gretchen's father approached the house, Andrew let her go and she was able to escape.
KGC-09 / STAR MAX / IPx 2019 via AP
Meghan, Kate, and the Architecture of Misogyny
Helen Lewis
Policing correct female behavior keeps all women in their place.
Are you Team Kate or Team Meghan? If you're anything like me, you don't want to pick a side—and you don't think there should be "sides" at all. Yet ever since Meghan Markle married Prince Harry, parts of the media have pitted the former actor against her sister-in-law.
Where Kate Middleton was once depicted as a dull social climber, she is now presented as the epitome of female virtue: a respectable, silent, discreet, and selfless mother. Meghan must therefore be her opposite—a political, manipulative, "woke" careerist.
Essentially, the two duchesses have been assigned to opposite sides of the culture war. All kinds of seemingly unrelated items have become symbols of one side or the other—quinoa, avocados, the English flag, attitudes toward the death penalty—and now Kate and Meghan have been conscripted too.
Orlando / Three Lions / Getty
How Negativity Can Kill a Relationship
John Tierney
Roy F. Baumeister
Successful marriages are defined not by improvement, but by avoiding decline.
There's an elegant symmetry to traditional wedding vows: for better or for worse. But love is not symmetrical, and most of us don't realize how lopsided it can be. The worse matters far more than the better in marriage or any other relationship. That's how the brain works.
Our thoughts and feelings are skewed by what researchers call the negativity effect, which is our tendency to respond more strongly to negative events and emotions than to positive ones. When we hear a mix of compliments and criticism, we obsess over the criticism instead of enjoying the praise. This imbalance, also known as the negativity bias, evolved in the brain because it kept our ancestors alert to deadly threats, but too often it warps our perspective and behavior. A slight conflict can have ruinous consequences when the power of bad overwhelms your judgment, provoking you to actions that further alienate your partner. You'd fare better by using your rational brain to override your irrational impulses, but to do that you need first to understand just how powerful bad can be.
Brian Snyder / Reuters
Andrew Yang's Campaign Is Not a Joke
His sometimes-goofy bid has been a surprise success. But can he make voters take the idea of Commander in Chief Yang seriously?
BURLINGTON, Iowa—Not long ago, Andrew Yang would have considered his presidential campaign a success just for having injected a discussion of job automation into the race. He was a novelty candidate, a single-issue candidate, known as much for joking around on the debate stage and for viral videos (like the one that shows him squirting whipped cream into the mouths of two kneeling volunteers) as for his signature policy position, the "freedom dividend," a universal basic income of $1,000 a month.
But now that Yang has outlasted a number of more conventional and better-known rivals—and achieved surprisingly robust poll numbers and fundraising totals—his campaign has started to dream about what could happen if their candidate could transcend his novelty status. So when Yang's top staff gathered at the end of December, his campaign chief, Nick Ryan, made clear that the strategy for the final weeks before voting starts would be to "present our guy as President Yang, Commander in Chief Yang." How do you do that when Yang is the $1,000-a-month guy—not the bilateral-summit guy or the Situation Room guy? He's the candidate who loves to crowd-surf, whose fans meme him into Obi-Wan Kenobi robes ("He is our only hope"), who wears his thick blue-and-red campaign scarf everywhere he goes. Can he convince voters he's commander-in-chief material while continuing to indulge in the oddball routine to which he ascribes much of his success so far?
A 97-Year-Old Philosopher Ponders Life and Death: 'What Is the Point?'
Emily Buder
Herbert Fingarette once argued that there was no reason to fear death. At 97, his own mortality began to haunt him.
Dolittle Is One of the Worst Movies in Years
The new film starring Robert Downey Jr. as a doctor who talks to animals is transfixing at times, if only because it's such a disaster.
Hollywood makes bad movies all the time. Sometimes they're highly enjoyable pieces of schlock that divert your attention for 90 minutes before vanishing from memory. Sometimes they're unwatchable slogs, similarly not worth remembering. Then there are the debacles of the release calendar: genuine catastrophes such as Dolittle, the likes of which are rarer than a talking dragonfly. The newest adaptation of Hugh Lofting's whimsical 1920s stories about a doctor who can commune with animals stars Robert Downey Jr. and a boatload of CGI critters, and clearly no expense has been spared in bringing it to the big screen. But that doesn't keep it from being one of the worst cinematic fiascos I've seen in years.
ROBYN BECK / Getty / nito / shutterstock / The Atlantic
Elaine Godfrey
The left is more energized than ever. So what happens if Joe Biden is the nominee?
"Please don't make me vote for Joe Biden!" a flock of teenagers pleaded in a series of videos posted to the social-media app Tik-Tok earlier this month.
But as the Iowa caucuses draw closer, a Biden nomination is looking more likely by the day. Lefty groups are worried—and warning that a Biden win could crush the activist enthusiasm they're counting on to win in November.
The thousands of Americans who wait for hours in line to snap a photo with Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and who fill arenas for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont simply will not be as enthusiastic about the former vice president, the leaders of nine progressive organizations, all of which are involved with organizing and get-out-the-vote efforts, told me in interviews this month. "I can't imagine having Biden on the ticket is going to be the thing that energizes these folks to get out and do the door-knocking and have the conversations we need them to have," said Natalia Salgado, who runs civic engagement at the Center for Popular Democracy, a left-wing advocacy group. "It's incredibly concerning to me."
Kevin Lamarque / Reuters
Tom McTague
The president, however inadvertently, may be reminding the world of the reality of international relations.
A year and a half into Donald Trump's presidency, Henry Kissinger set out a theory. "I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences," he told the Financial Times. "It doesn't necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident."
A term has been coined to describe this notion: Ryan Evans of War on the Rocks calls them "Trumportunities." It is the idea that, whether by accident or design, Trump creates chances to solve long-running international problems that a conventional leader would not. His bellicose isolationist agenda, for instance, might already be forcing Europe to confront its geopolitical weakness; China, its need for a lasting economic settlement with the U.S.; and countries throughout the Middle East, the limits of their power.
Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty
Does Anyone Dare Tell Trump the Truth?
The president's habit of shooting the messenger is going to prove costly.
The Trump administration has placed civil servants and nonpolitical government employees in a terrible position. Their job is to provide accurate, nonpartisan information and make decisions grounded in law; sometimes that involves providing testimony to Congress, which legally must be truthful. Yet if they tell the truth, President Donald Trump and his allies will publicly crucify them. Bureaucrats, of course, are not viewed by most people as terribly sympathetic victims, but if you shoot these messengers, you end up wounding citizens. Taxpayers send money to the government so it can develop accurate information, not partisan pabulum—but Trump is doing all he can to change that.
Yesterday, the Government Accountability Office, an independent watchdog within the federal government, released a decision on whether the Trump administration violated the law by freezing millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine. The GAO found that it wasn't even a close call.
Latest Notes
An Action Plan for the Future of Media
Looking at Libraries
A Portrait of Public Libraries
Dayton, Ohio, Is 'a Place That Knows What It Is'
How Artists Build the Spirit of a Town