Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Turning politics up to 11: Russian disinformation distorts American and European democracy | The Economist

Turning politics up to 11: Russian disinformation distorts American and European democracy

The Mueller indictment reveals some of the Kremlin’s tactics

Print edition | Briefing

Feb 22nd 2018 | AMSTERDAM, ROME, STOCKHOLM AND WASHINGTON, DC

HAD Barack Obama looked out of the right window in the White House on May 29th 2016, he might have seen someone holding up a sign that read “Happy 55th Birthday Dear Boss”. The felicitations were not for Mr Obama (whose birthday is in August); they were for Yevgeniy Prigozhin, a Russian businessman known as “Putin’s chef”. The sign-carrying well-wisher did not know Mr Prigozhin. But over the course of 2016, many people who were strangers to Putin’s cook nonetheless did what he wanted them to do, both in America and elsewhere.
This bizarre story is one of the details which make the grand-jury indictment filed in Washington, DC, on February 16th so fascinating, as well as deeply troubling. The indictment was filed by Robert Mueller, a former director of the FBI who is now the special counsel charged, as part of his investigation into Russian efforts to interfere with America’s election in 2016, with finding any links between Donald Trump’s election campaign and the Russian government. It charges three companies Mr Prigozhin controlled, including the Internet Research Agency (IRA, see article), and 12 other named Russians with identity theft, conspiracy to commit wire and bank fraud and conspiracy to defraud America by “impairing, obstructing and defeating the lawful governmental functions of the United States”.

Using fake social-media personas, the Russians tried to depress turnout among blacks and Muslims, encourage third-party voting and convince people of widespread voter fraud; their actions were designed to benefit Bernie Sanders, who lost the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton, and Mr Trump. “Many” of the social- media groups created as part of the operation, Mr Mueller says, had more than 100,000 followers. The Russians organised and co-ordinated rallies in several states, such as a “Florida Goes Trump” day on August 20th. They were in touch with “US activists” (perhaps it was one of them who sent those birthday greetings from Lafayette Park). These included “unwitting members, volunteers, and supporters of the Trump campaign”.
The indictment says nothing about the degree to which witting parts of Mr Trump’s campaign may have encouraged these actions, though it does refer to co-conspirators “known...to the Grand Jury”. Nor does it delve into the question of Russian responsibility for hacking the Democratic National Committee. But it is an unprecedentedly thorough, forensic account of a scheme that was of a piece with the covert propaganda and influence operations Mr Putin now wages against democracies around the world. Sometimes, these interventions seek to advance immediate foreign-policy goals. They also have a broader, long-term aim: weakening Western democracies by undermining trust in institutions and dividing their citizens against each other.
In this, they are working with the grain of the times. Social media are designed to hijack their users’ attention. That makes them excellent conduits for the dissemination of lies and for the encouragement of animosity. Russia’s manipulations make use of these features (from the point of view of those who would make money from social media) or bugs (from the point of view of people who would like political lying to be kept to a minimum) in much the same way as unscrupulous political campaigns that are not subject to malign outside influence. This makes the effects of Russia’s actions hard to gauge. In many cases they may be minor. But that does not make their intent less hostile, or their evolving threat less disturbing. Nor does it make them easier to counter. Indeed, the public acknowledgment of such conspiracies’ existence can help foment the divisions they seek to exploit.
The use of disinformation—“active measures”, in the KGB jargon of Mr Putin’s professional past—to weaken the West was a constant of Soviet policy, one that the would-be victims fought back against with similar weaponry. In the 1960s the KGB-funded Liberty Book Club published the first title alleging that John F. Kennedy’s assassination was a conspiracy. Later the KGB forged a letter from Lee Harvey Oswald in an attempt to connect the plot to the CIA. Mostly this had little effect. In the 1970s forged pamphlets designed to start a war between the Black Panthers and the Jewish Defence League failed to do so. But some worked. The CIA did not invent HIV in a biological-weapons lab, but the KGB did invent the story, and many people still believe it.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union the use of active measures against the West went into hiatus, though they still found use against some countries of the former Soviet Union. Then, in December 2011, people took to the streets in protest against Mr Putin. Mr Putin blamed Mrs Clinton, then America’s Secretary of State.
The Maidan uprising in Ukraine in February 2014, the subsequent Russian-backed fighting in the east of the country and the annexation of Crimea moved things up a gear. Kremlin-controlled media claimed that Ukraine’s government was dominated by fascists and that its armed forces were committing atrocities. Russian trolls spread the stories on Twitter, Facebook and the Russian social-media platform VKontakte.
In July of that year 298 people were killed when Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down by a Russian missile over eastern Ukraine. The Kremlin responded with a barrage of disinformation blaming Ukraine. Its defence ministry hosted a press conference at which it presented fake data on the plane’s flight path, as well as a tampered video which made it appear that the lorry carrying the missile had passed through Ukrainian-controlled territory. As European public opinion turned sharply anti-Russian, the Kremlin stepped up efforts at covert influence well beyond Ukraine proper.
The cyber elements of such activities get the most attention, but much of Russia’s activity consists of techniques from the pre-digital Soviet manual: marshalling human assets, be they active spies or sympathetic activists; funding organisations that may be helpful; and attempting to influence the media agenda.

Tried and not true

Anton Shekhovtsov, a Ukrainian political scientist, has studied the links Russia has cultivated with an array of European parties. Some are tiny outfits like Italy’s neo-fascist Forza Nuova. Others are much larger, such as the right-wing Northern League. Last year its leader, Matteo Salvini, signed a co-operation agreement with Mr Putin’s party, United Russia. Austria’s hard-right FPÖ, which now controls the foreign, interior and defence ministries, has a similar pact. In Germany Russia maintains ties with Die Linke, a far-left group descended from East Germany’s Communist Party, but has also cultivated the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. The AfD does especially well with the million or so Germans of Russian descent; last year it published its manifesto in Russian.
Sponsored visits to Russia have bolstered relationships with politicians including Nick Griffin, once the leader of the fascist British National Party; Frank Creyelman, a member of the Flemish parliament for the far-right Vlaams Belang party; and Marton Gyongyosi, a leader of Hungary’s far-right Jobbik party. Last September an MP from the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD), Pavel Gamov, managed to get kicked off one of these junkets by demanding that his hosts pay his bar tab and other untoward expenses. (The SD expelled him, too.)

Direct funding of sympathetic parties is often rumoured but rarely proven, in part because many European countries have strikingly lax election-finance laws. The Czech Republic’s pro-Russian president, Milos Zeman, pulled off a narrow re-election victory last month with the help of a massive advertising campaign financed by a group known simply as “Friends of Zeman”; the source of some of that money is not known. A British investigation into the source of £8.4m ($12m) in loans and donations provided to the Leave.EU campaign in the run-up to the Brexit referendum by Arron Banks, a prominent campaigner, have yet to reach a conclusion.
Broadcasters like RT and Sputnik spread disinformation that furthers Mr Putin’s ends and slant news stories in ways that play up their divisiveness. Plenty of news outlets with greater reach do the latter; but one area where Russian active measures go further is in the use of straight-up forgery. Martin Kragh, a Swedish security expert, describes more than 20 forgeries that have made news in recent years. One was a fake letter supposedly written by Sweden’s defence minister, offering to sell artillery to Ukraine. A second purported to contain evidence of a conspiracy to install Carl Bildt, a former Swedish foreign minister, as Ukraine’s prime minister. The forgeries often appeared first on Russian-language websites, or were placed on social media by a pro-Russian account. As Mr Kragh notes, such fakes often continue to circulate on social media long after they are debunked.
It is in assuring such continued circulation that outfits like the IRA play a role, setting up automated accounts—“bots”—that promulgate messages to specific groups and individuals. Last November NATO’s Stratcom Centre of Excellence in Riga, which studies disinformation, found that 70% of Russian-language social-media communication about NATO in the Baltic states seemed to be generated by bots. A study of social media during the Brexit campaign by 89Up, a consultancy, found that Russian bots delivered 10m potential Twitter impressions—about a third of the number generated by the Vote Leave campaign’s Twitter account. Such echoing amplifies the effect of RT and Sputnik stories, which are in general not much watched.
Their all-or-nothing nature makes referendums particularly juicy prizes. At least one in the Netherlands has been targeted. Javier Lesaca, a political scientist at George Washington University, found that RT and Sputnik stories on Catalonia’s independence referendum last year—which took the pro-independence side, as Russia would wish—were retweeted on a vast scale by “Chavista bots” which normally spent their time tweeting messages sympathetic to the Venezuelan government.
Estimating how many bots are out there is hard. Primitive bots give themselves away by tweeting hundreds of times per hour, but newer ones are more sophisticated. Some generate passable natural-language tweets, thus appearing more human; others are hybrids with a human curator who occasionally posts or responds on the account, says Lisa-Maria Neudert, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute. It is not always easy to distinguish bots from humans. “Journalists spend a lot of time talking on social media. Sometimes they look almost automated,” she says.
Discovering who controls such accounts is even harder. In America the main work of identifying which bots and troll accounts were run by the IRA has been done by Twitter and Facebook themselves. Independent analysts can try to identify Twitter bots based on their activity patterns, but for Facebook accounts, which are mainly private and post only to their own friends, it can be impossible for anyone outside the company.
“We don’t have a list of Russian troll accounts in Europe, similar to what we have for the US,” acknowledges Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), which studies online influence operations. In Germany Mr Nimmo identified a Russian botnet—in this context, a network of mutually reinforcing bots—that amplified right-wing messaging in the week before the German election in September, promoting #Wahlbetrug (“election fraud”) as a hashtag. Beforehand the botnet had spent its time promoting pornography and commercial products. It may have been a freelance rent-a-botnet also available for far-right messaging; it may have been a Russian operation. The difference can be hard to see.
So can the impact of such interventions. Analysts are most confident of ascribing influence when they see a superhuman burst of bot activity followed by a deeper but more leisurely spread deemed to be “organic” (both in the sense of proceeding naturally and being done by flesh not circuits). This is what happened when material stolen from Emmanuel Macron’s campaign was posted shortly before the second round of last May’s French election. An analysis by DFRLab showed that the top ten accounts retweeting links to the material posted more than 1,300 times in the first three hours, with one account posting nearly 150 tweets per hour. Later, says Ms Neudert, the messages began to spread organically. On the other hand, Mr Lesaca’s figures suggest that the retweets of RT and Sputnik by Chavista bots were not taken up by living, breathing Catalans.
Some European countries are trying to strengthen themselves against web-borne disinformation. On a sunny afternoon at the Alessandro Volta junior-middle school in Latina, 50km south of Rome, Massimo Alvisi, who teaches digital literacy, runs through some of the topics the rumbustious children in front of him have covered this year. A visitor asks the class: why do people make things up online, anyway?
“People put up false stories to earn money,” shouts a dark-haired wiseacre at the back. “To create panic!” says another. “To deceive people.” “Just to have fun!”
Mr Alvisi, a history teacher by training, has been leading the digital-literacy classes for two years. He developed his course partly on his own initiative. But the issue has been given a new push. Last year the president of Italy’s Chamber of Deputies, Laura Boldrini, announced a “Basta bufala” programme (fake news, for reasons which appear obscure, is known as “bufala” in Italy). She has herself been a target of online attacks; she has furiously denounced a Northern League senator who shared a baseless post alleging that she had obtained a government job for her brother, a well-known abstract painter.
Italy is an easy target for disinformation; fake news is rife, trust in the authorities low, and some parties like it like that. In last year’s German elections all parties swore off the use of bots (though the AfD dragged its feet). In Italy the Northern League positively encourages bottishness with an app that automatically embeds party postings in supporters’ timelines. The populist Five Star Movement is opposed to anything top-down, including efforts to block fake news (which can indeed, in government hands, look disturbingly like ministries of truth). Its websites and Facebook pages have become Petri dishes for conspiracy theories in the run up to the general election in March.
Sweden, too, is rolling out a national digital-literacy curriculum. Teachers there are particularly impressed by the effect of assignments that get the students to create fake-news campaigns themselves; they dramatically improve students’ awareness of how disinformation works, and how to recognise it. Sweden’s Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB), which is responsible for communications during emergencies and for combating disinformation, runs similar “red teaming” exercises for government agencies, in which staff brainstorm attacks to test their own vulnerabilities.
Its flow chart for handling information attacks looks at the emotions they seek to engender (fear, shock, discouragement) and the tools they employ (trolls, hacks). Identifying the aggressor is not a priority. “Intelligence agencies can handle that. We need to think about the effects,” says Dominik Swiecicki of the MSB. Indeed, in some cases attribution could be counter-productive; saying someone has struck you without having the will, or wherewithal, to strike back can, as America is learning, make you look hopeless.
Robust efforts by platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to monitor trolls, bots and aggressive disinformation campaigns would greatly help all such moves towards resilience. Facebook, for which Russian meddling poses a severe image problem (see article) has promised it will have 20,000 people monitoring abusive content by the end of the year. Twitter’s identification of IRA-linked bots has enabled independent groups to track their activities as they happen, observing them as they seized on topics such as the high-school massacre in Parkland, Florida on February 15th (see article). Governments are pressing them to do more. But, as Ms Neudert observes, “There are massive concerns about freedom of speech.” She says that because of German fines for online hate speech and fake news, “The platforms are ‘over-blocking’ all kinds of content that they are worried might be in any way problematic”. France, Italy and the Netherlands say they too are looking at laws and other measures to combat fake news.

Please tread on me

Such European efforts may backfire; but they are at least efforts. And some European leaders take the problem seriously. At his first meeting with Mr Putin, Mr Macron publicly accused RT and Sputnik of being state propaganda channels. Mrs Merkel is said to have explicitly warned him about interference in Germany’s elections at a meeting in Sochi. In America, by contrast, one of the most striking things about the Russian attacks is how little has been done about them.
When evidence of the conspiracy first surfaced in 2016, Congressional Republicans refused to agree to a bipartisan statement warning of Russian attempts to breach voting systems. Mr Obama responded to what the intelligence services were telling him with modest warnings and symbolic sanctions, aware that to do more in defence of the election without the support of Republicans might backfire with suspicious voters. After the election, but before Mr Trump’s inauguration, the director of national intelligence issued a report laying out much of the evidence he had seen and warning of its seriousness.
Then things got worse. Mr Trump appears to read allegations of Russian meddling not as national-security threats but as personal attacks—insinuations that without them he would not have won. He lies about the issue, as when he tweeted, “I NEVER said Russia did not meddle in the election” on February 18th, and he has undermined the FBI’s attempts to understand both the conspiracy and its links, if any, to his campaign. He fired James Comey, the FBI’s respected head, after Mr Comey refused to offer him a pledge of personal loyalty. He publicly attacked the bureau after the Florida shooting (see Lexington).

Some Republican representatives have taken up Mr Trump’s rhetoric about a “deep state” out to undermine his presidency, calling for a “purge” of the FBI and the sacking of Mr Mueller. So have media organisations such as Fox News—much more influential than Russian active measures could ever hope to be and similarly dedicated to division. Indeed, Mr Mueller may have released his indictment in part to make sacking him even less defensible than it would have been otherwise.
Mr Mueller still has a way to go. He has years of e-mail and social-media communication belonging to the 13 indicted Russian agents and, it appears, unnamed “co-conspirators”. Many expect him soon to indict those responsible for hacking into Democratic servers, and perhaps in doing so link them to organs of the Russian state, or members of Mr Putin’s inner circle. On February 20th Alex van der Zwaan, a lawyer involved in Ukrainian politics and the son-in-law of a Russian oligarch, pleaded guilty to making false statements about his communications with a worker on the Trump campaign. But whatever Mr Mueller finds, the fate of the president will be political, not legal, determined by Congress and, ultimately, the voters.
Unfortunately, when it comes to voting, says Michael Sulmeyer, head of the Belfer Centre’s Cyber Security Project at Harvard, interference looks set to continue. Mr Trump’s intelligence chiefs also expect Russia to try to influence this autumn’s midterm elections—presumably to benefit Republicans, since congressional Democrats are more eager to investigate their meddling. Many states use voting machines vulnerable to hacking (some are turning back to paper to guard against it). The Department of Homeland Security found that Russian hackers tried to breach election systems in 21 states in 2016.
Mr Trump has given no instructions as to how to counter this threat. His refusal to take Russian interference seriously and dismissal of unfavourable reports as “fake news” have made America fertile ground for further disinformation campaigns. They let his supporters deny the facts. A poll published this January found that 49% of Republicans do not believe Russia tried to influence the election in 2016. It would be naive to expect that number now to fall to zero. “If it was the GOAL of Russia to create discord, disruption and chaos,” Mr Trump tweeted on February 17th, “they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.” For once, he had it right.

Is President Trump about to start a trade war? By Dan Drezner

February 26 at 8:15 AM

The first year of the Trump administration’s foreign policy has been a tale of Trump saying one thing and his administration’s strategy documents saying something else entirely. Trump repeatedly articulates his worldview of populist nationalism. Some of his hired men echo his argot of vulgar realism. As previously noted, however, his National Security Strategy sounds almost Straussian in its subversion of “America First.” If one looks at administration actions while muting Trump’s Twitter feed, one can kinda sorta see a poor man’s version of liberal internationalism.

The same thing has been true of Trump’s foreign economic policy. Trump has deeply held views on this topic. His withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, call to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, exaggeration of the trade deficit and disdain for the multilateral trading system have made his mercantilism clear. At the same time, NAFTA has not been renegotiated. Trump’s threats to withdraw from it have proved hollow. Both the president and his Treasury secretary have even made noises about joining TPP.
Furthermore, the administration’s economic documents, much like its strategy documents, seem to contradict the president. The Cato Institute’s Scott Lincicome unleashed an epic tweetstorm last week documenting the myriad ways the 2018 Economic Report of the President subverts Trump’s trade rhetoric. Here are some sample quotes from the report that the president would hate if he had bothered to read them:

“Historically, international trade as a whole has on net increased American productivity, standards of living, and American economic growth.”
“Consumers — and disproportionately, low-income consumers — may benefit as import competition fosters innovation and product differentiation, as well as drives down the prices of goods and services.”
“Fiscal and monetary policies may be more important than trade policies in determining the magnitude of trade balances. The distribution of trade balances across trading partners is attributable to a variety of factors that are idiosyncratic to individual countries.”
“Although trade agreements are associated with about twice as much overall trade, the causal impact on the trade balance is unclear.”
“The United States gets better outcomes via formal WTO adjudication than negotiation, increasing the probability that the complaint will be resolved and decreasing the time it takes to remove the barrier in question.”
“The United States has exercised leadership in pursuit of a policy of lowered trade barriers and increased market access. The gains from these actions have, as a whole, served to boost income in the U.S. as well as around the world.”

So it would seem that trade is another area where the president’s instincts have been stymied by the system.
And yet.
I am beginning to wonder if that is all about to change for the worse. For one thing, Politico’s Andrew Restuccia reports that Trump’s favorite mercantilist may be getting a promotion:

White House aides are strongly considering promoting [White House trade adviser Peter] Navarro to assistant to the president for trade policy. … The new title would ensure that he has a seat at the table at a pivotal moment for trade, and it would grant him access to the daily senior staff meeting.
One administration official said Trump, who likes Navarro and regularly inquires why he isn’t in key meetings, ordered the change. Another person familiar with the issue said the move hasn’t yet been finalized, but that Kelly has agreed to implement it. …
“The change in [Navarro’s] stature is a sign that the promises the president made on trade and manufacturing are more likely to be implemented,” said Mike Wessel, who knows Navarro and is a longtime commissioner on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a watchdog panel set up by Congress in 2000.

Navarro’s promotion, if it goes through, could be pivotal. Axios’s Jonathan Swan reports that the administration is close to making a decision on the steel and aluminum tariffs recommended by Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross:

Bloomberg scooped on Friday that Trump wants the Commerce Department to seek the harshest maximum tariffs on global steel imports: 24 percent.

I’m told that’s accurate, but with one small tweak: Sources tell me the president has told confidants he actually wants a *25* percent global tariff on steel because it’s a round number and sounds better. …

Also, an official with knowledge of the trade discussions told me the White House is preparing to impose tariffs on a [lot] — meaning, potentially hundreds — of Chinese products. They’ll avoid going through the World Trade Organization — which Trump doesn’t trust — and instead use Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to unilaterally retaliate against China for stealing Americans’ intellectual property.

A former U.S. trade official told Swan, “This is how trade wars start,” and that’s certainly true. Any broad-based application of tariffs will trigger painful countermeasures from other countries. China has already responded to Trump’s announced tariffs on solar panels and washing machines. The use of Section 301, rather than the WTO process, will further weaken the multilateral trade system and represent an inferior form of trade policy.

Chad Bown noted earlier this month that in past episodes such as this one, the trading system largely held. In the past, however, there was confidence that U.S. presidents were fundamentally committed to the multilateral trading system. No one feels that way about the current president.

Finally, Shawn Donnan of the Financial Times reports on some proposed reforms of the U.S. system that investigates the national security implications of foreign direct investment:

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) is one of the most powerful — and enigmatic — regulators in the world. An inter-agency committee that brings together defence and intelligence staff with economic policymakers, it was created to vet inbound foreign investment for potential national security threats.

Yet reforms being pushed by President Donald Trump and contained in a bill now working its way through Congress would, if enacted, expand its workload from a few hundred transactions a year to potentially thousands. …

For the first time, the bill now under consideration would give CFIUS broad jurisdiction over major outbound investment by US companies, that since 1990 has been worth some $250bn, and the overseas ventures of US-based multinationals. And for that reason it has provoked a growing revolt from blue-chip American companies such as General Electric and IBM and a debate in Congress over how best to curtail Chinese pressure on US companies. …
“This is a radical change,” says Rod Hunter, who oversaw CFIUS while on President George W Bush’s National Security Council and is now a partner at law firm Baker McKenzie. “You would basically turn the US technology industry into a regulated industry. If there was ever a way to turn the US technology industry into [failed carmaker] British Leyland this is how you do it.”

It is possible that none of these stories will pan out. The stories above also report that numerous Trump advisers oppose this kind of crude protectionism. These advisers have thwarted Navarro in the past. Clearly, a large swath of U.S. multinationals are mobilizing against any expansion of CFIUS jurisdiction. This could all prove to be as much a mirage as the threat to withdraw from NAFTA.

It should always be remembered that Trump does not understand most foreign policy. His staff members have succeeded in using stupid arguments to persuade him not to take precipitous action on trade. Still, trade is an area where the president had strong beliefs. I worry that while his advisers can delay his wishes on this subject, they cannot deny him. And then we will get to see whether the president really can end his team’s civil war on trade and trigger an actual trade war in the global economy.

Even if Trump does not get what he wants in the short run, he has already succeeded in sabotaging American economic leadership. So I’ll close with Adam Posen’s sobering conclusion from the latest issue of Foreign Affairs.

If the United States continues its retreat from economic leadership, it will impose serious pain on the rest of the world — and on itself. Unless the Trump administration chooses to launch a full-blown trade war, the consequences will not come immediately. But a sustained U.S. withdrawal will inevitably make economic growth slower and less certain. The resulting disorder will make the economic well-being of people around the word more vulnerable to political predation and conflict than it has been in decades.

It almost does not matter if Trump launches a new trade war. The United States has already lost it.

It’s time to say last rites over American conservatism. By E.J. Dionne Jr.

By E.J. Dionne Jr.

6-8 minutes

It is time to read last rites over the American conservative movement. After years of drifting steadily toward extreme positions, conservatism is dead, replaced by a far right that has the Republican Party under its thumb.

Conservatism is a complex creed, some of it less than appealing and some of it noble. The less-attractive kind involves an ideology whose main purpose is to defend existing distributions of power and wealth, and to resist reforms that might redress the grievances of those facing discrimination and marginalization.

The enticing brand of conservatism is rooted in an affection for a particular place and its way of life. This conservatism is not always opposed to reform because reforms are often required to preserve the arrangements its exponents revere. Conservatism’s positive function is to warn against measures designed to fix things that are wrong, but whose main effects are to undermine institutions that are widely valued. Sometimes, seemingly sensible changes can unintentionally cause new problems.

Obviously, these two forms of conservatism cannot be easily separated. What I have called the attractive kind often serves the needs of dominant groups.
But — again, at its best — conservatism is supposed to be resistant to extremism precisely because it is, in principle, the antithesis of a revolutionary creed. Conservatism is more about tweeds and a good scotch. Neither brings to mind incitement and divisive anger.
Yet for two decades, the tweedy sort of conservatism has been giving ground to the extremists who want not simply to defeat their adversaries but to crush them; who traffic in conspiracy theories rather than in respect for facts and history; and who are willing to destroy the very institutions they claim to be trying to save. This has happened before (as when the white South’s displaced leadership backed the Ku Klux Klan to end Reconstruction after the Civil War), and we are seeing it anew in the age of President Trump.
The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in recent days was a clear demonstration of the far right’s success in displacing anything that deserves to be called conservative.
Before President Trump, it would have been shocking to see Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, a leader of the French neo-fascist National Front, appear at the same event with traditional conservatives such as Vice President Pence and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), and also with the president of the United States. But thanks to Trump, European-style ethno-nationalism has become so much a part of the movement that Maréchal-Le Pen’s visit seemed almost natural.
Encouraging responsibility in the sale and use of firearms would seem to be a thoroughly conservative cause, an effort to maintain order and protect the innocent from violence. But the National Rifle Association is one of the most powerful forces within the Republican Party and the conservative movement. It uses paranoid rhetoric and incendiary attacks on its foes to justify riotously permissive firearms policies that no other democratic republic would dream of adopting.
Shamefully, Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s top gun who is increasingly becoming America’s extremist in chief, showed few signs of being moved by the slaughter of high school students and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. On the contrary, he had the impudence to say that those who think it’s time for some modest reforms in our weapons statutes were “saboteurs” and “socialists” using the deaths of young people to forward a dangerous agenda.
“If they seize power, if these so-called European socialists take over the House and the Senate — and God forbid, they get the White House again — our American freedoms could be lost and our country could be changed forever.”
What should worry us is that the radicalism of the NRA is not exceptional on the American right. It is what the right is all about.
This was brought home when the conservative writer Mona Charen had the courage to ask the crowd on Saturday why CPAC had invited Maréchal-Le Pen (“the Le Pen name is a disgrace,” she said) and called out “people on our side for being hypocrites about sexual harassers and abusers of women.” How unwelcome was Charen’s dissent from the extremist line? She needed to be accompanied by security guards when she left.
And The Post’s Dave Weigel reported on an otherwise little-noticed CPAC speech by White House Counsel Donald McGahn linking Trump’s judicial appointments to his dismantling of regulation.
“There is a coherent plan here where the judicial selection and the deregulation effort are really the flip side of the same coin,” McGahn said. Remember when conservatives criticized the politicization of the judiciary? McGahn is describing a judicial branch that is little more than an instrument of right-wing executive power. This should scare us, too.
The movement toward extremism has been gradual, so it has not been sufficiently acknowledged. But if those who still believe in moderation don’t face up to it now, they will be complicit in the far right’s ascendancy.
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E.J. Dionne writes about politics in a twice-weekly column and on the PostPartisan blog. He is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, a government professor at Georgetown University and a commentator on politics for National Public Radio, ABC’s “This Week” and MSNBC. He is the author of “Why the Right Went Wrong."

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Monday, February 26, 2018

If this is what conservatism has become, count me out. By Max Boot

I’m used to being vilified by the far left as a bloodthirsty neocon warmonger for the Original Sin of having supported the invasion of Iraq along with 72 percent of the American public. It has been a little more surprising to be simultaneously vilified by the far right as a dangerous left-winger.

David Horowitz’s FrontPage magazine accused me of going “full leftist” for acknowledging that racism and sexism remain pervasive problems. Breitbart called me, with ironic quotation marks, the “Washington Post’s ostensibly new ‘conservative’ columnist,” because, among other sins, I support gun control and immigration. American Greatness wrote that I am a “soulless, craven opportunist” whose “brain is broken,” because I compared President Trump’s indifference to the 2016 Russian election assault to a president ignoring 9/11. For the same offense, Jack Posobiec — an Internet troll notorious for pushing the theory that Hillary Clinton was running a child-sex ring out of a Washington pizza parlor — said I was “sick” and a “Russian propagandist.” In the Orwellian language of the far right, someone who wants to combat Russian aggression is a “Russian propagandist,” whereas someone who echoes Russian propaganda is putting “America first.”
In the past I would have been indignant at such attacks and eager to assert my conservative credentials. I spent years writing for conservative publications such as the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Commentary magazine and working as a foreign policy adviser for three Republican presidential campaigns. Being conservative used to be central to my identity. But now, frankly, I don’t give a damn. I prefer to think of myself as a classical liberal, because “conservative” has become practically synonymous with “Trump lackey.”
Richard Brookhiser, a longtime stalwart at National Review, summed up the Trump effect: “Now the religious Right adores a thrice-married cad and casual liar. But it is not alone. Historians and psychologists of the martial virtues salute the bone-spurred draft-dodger whose Khe Sanh was not catching the clap. Cultural critics who deplored academic fads and slipshod aesthetics explicate a man who has never read a book, not even the ones he has signed. . . . Straussians, after leaving the cave, find themselves in Mar-a-Lago. Econocons put their money on a serial bankrupt.”
Principled conservativism continues to exist, primarily at small journals of opinion, but it is increasingly disconnected from the stuff that thrills the masses. I remember as a high school student in the 1980s attending a lecture at UCLA by William F. Buckley Jr. I was dazzled by his erudition, wit and oratorical skill. Today, young conservatives flock to the boorish and racist performance art of Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter. The Conservative Political Action Conference couldn’t find room for critics of Trump, save for the brave and booed Mona Charen, but it did showcase French fascist scion Marion Maréchal-Le Pen.
The career of Dinesh D’Souza is indicative of the downward trajectory of conservatism. He made his name with a well-regarded 1991 book denouncing political correctness and championing liberal education. Then he wrote a widely panned 1995 book claiming that racism was no more, and it was all downhill from there. In 2014 he pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws. Now, as the Daily Beast notes, he has become a conspiratorial crank who has suggested that the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville was staged by liberals, that Barack Obama is a “gay Muslim” and Michelle Obama is a man and that Adolf Hitler, who sent 50,000 homosexuals to prison, “was NOT anti-gay.” He managed to sink even lower last week by mocking stunned Parkland school-shooting survivors after the Florida legislature defeated a bill to ban assault weapons: “Worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs.”
It is hard to imagine anything more cruel and heartless, but for a bottom-feeder like D’Souza it’s all in a day’s work. As he wrote in his 2002 book “Letters to a Young Conservative,” “One way to be effective as a conservative is to figure out what annoys and disturbs liberals the most, and then keep doing it.” (Thanks to Windsor Mann for the quote.) That, in a nutshell, is the credo of today’s high-profile conservatives: Say anything to “trigger” the “libtards” and “snowflakes.” The dumber and more offensive, the better. Whatever it takes to get on (and stay on) Fox News and land the next book contract!
Naturally, just as drug addicts need bigger doses over time, these outrage artists must be ever more transgressive to get the attention they crave. Coulter’s book titles have gone from accusing Bill Clinton of “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” to accusing all liberals of “Treason,” of being “Godless” and even “Demonic.” Her latest assault on the public’s intelligence was called “In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!”
If this is what mainstream conservatism has become — and it is — count me out.

End of article

Some reviews of Earin M2 on Amazon (inJapanese)

N
5.0 out of 5 stars
この手のモノでは現時点で最高
February 25, 2018
Color: Black|Verified Purchase
主に前モデルとの比較になります。GALAXY　NOTE8で音楽をきいています

・音の途切れ…解消！！。凄いです、ほぼ無しと言っていいくらい解消されました。100回が1回になったくらい
・音質…前モデルと同等かな、ここはBTとしてはもともと満点だったので、今回も満点。そこらの有線より良い音です。
・左右自動判別・切替…イヤーピースに左右の概念がありません。地味に便利です。
・環境音取り込みモード…凄く便利です。音楽止めたら、マイクで周りの音を拾ってくれます。（調整可）
・デザイン、装着感…前モデルより確実にカッコイイです。フィットします。
・タッチ操作…これも凄く便利。耳をトントンで快適操作。
・充電ケース…前モデルはゴムに頼っていましたが、今回はマグネット。進化を感じますし、使い勝手良好！重量が増したのはマイナスかな
・納期…9月にポチったのに2月になりました。しかし、待っただけの価値は十分ありました。

以上…前モデルの不満点をすべて解決し、便利機能を追加してきました。特に音が途切れないのは本当に快適です。もうずっとEARIN信者でいこうと思います。
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars
良いです。
February 24, 2018
Color: Black|Verified Purchase
昨年8月に注文して先ほどやっと届きました。apt-x接続できる数少ない完全ワイヤレスイヤフォンで、貴重です。音質は素人の感想ですが、apt-x接続はノイズが少なく、M-2が届くまでのつなぎとして使っていたeonfineのイヤフォンより良いです。駅などの人込みでは使用していませんが、家で使っている限りでは左右で途切れることもありません。充電器もコンパクトでカッコ良い。半年待って買って良かったです。
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K
5.0 out of 5 stars大満足！！！
February 23, 2018
Color: Black
接続:1日渋谷で使いました。一度も途切れることはありませんでした。満員電車でも地下鉄でも途切れなかったのでかなりのものだとおもいます！

音質:完全独立型のイヤホンにしてはいいほうだとおもいます。少し音がこもってる感じはありますが、イヤーピースを変えると良くなりました！コンプライだと音がこもるので、シリコンのイヤーピースをオススメします！イヤーピースを変えてもケースに全然収まります！

その他:個人的にはトランスパレンシー機能がとても気に入っています！コンビニなどで音楽を止めて起動するとイヤホンをはずさずに周りの音がハッキリと聞こえるので便利です！ペアリングもとてもはやくケースからとりだして耳にはめたらいつのまにかペアリングが完了しています。

追記:バッテリーの持ちは音楽再生でだいたい3時間半くらいですかね

迷ってる方にはオススメしたい商品です！
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いぬのすけ
5.0 out of 5 stars
利便性は最高、音質はそこそこ ←イヤーチップ交換で結構いい音
February 22, 2018
Color: Black
少々音はこもり気味ですが小型なワイヤレスという点を重視するなら許せる範囲です。※追記あり
数千円レベルのイヤホンよりはいい音しているとは思います。
充電器兼ケースも小型ですし小型軽量に3万出す感じですけど個人的には大満足。
汚い耳の写真を付けてますが、フランケンにもならないのがとても良い感じ。
左右を自動判定してくれるのは地味ですけどとても便利。

遮音性は高め。
屋内ですが尻ポケットにiPhone7を入れて動いても接続は切れません。
タッチでの操作は便利ですけど位置調整で触ってしまうので慣れるまでは鬱陶しいかも。

※追記
シリコン製のイヤーチップ(SpinFit)に変えた所、篭りは解消しかなり良い音になりました。
遮音性は落ちて、低音も控えめになりますがこちらの方が好みです。
ただSpinFitは長く充電器に両方入りませんでしたので根本を少し切りました。
交換でかなり音が変わるのでイヤーチップ遊びが楽しめそうです。
また混雑している東海道線の東京→横浜間の夜の通勤時間帯でも切れませんでした。

America doesn’t need Russia to ruin democracy. It can do it itself. By Anne Applebaum

America doesn’t need Russia to ruin democracy. It can do it itself.

By Anne Applebaum for The Washington Post
6-7 minutes

Enrage the base. Use violent language. Create fear and anxiety. Talk the country down, tell everybody that things are getting worse. Promote division — sort Americans into “us” and “them,” in speech and online. Undermine democracy itself: Hint heavily that the vote is rigged, that the system is broken, that the nation’s ideals are trash. Engage in voter suppression, too: Discourage potential opponents from going to the polls at all. Imply that your rivals are crooks or thieves, and lie about their records.
These were the tactics used by the Russian “Internet Research Agency” during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, brilliantly exposed by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s indictment. We’ve all marveled at how clever they were, how precisely they were aimed at American divisions, how they undermined our Constitution. We’ve been startled by the fake Russian Facebook pages, promoting fake groups called “Being Patriotic” or “Blacktivist.” We’re amazed at the Russian Twitter bots, the teams of “supporters” who were actually bits of computer code, cheering on the president and boosting the “popularity” of his fans.
There’s only one thing we’ve forgotten: These were the same tactics used by Donald Trump himself.
From the beginning, Trump’s campaign sought to exploit the inherently divisive properties of social media, to reach carefully targeted groups with different messages. In South Florida, Cubans got angry missives about President Barack Obama’s Cuba policy, warning that Hillary Clinton would continue it. Their Haitian neighbors received stories about Clinton’s supposed failure to help Haiti in the wake of the 2010 earthquake, in an attempt to persuade them not to vote. Meanwhile, people who dislike both Haitians and Cubans were simply told, over and over again, that Trump would build a wall.
Fake followers, often in large numbers, were of course part of Trump’s game plan, just as they are part of most political campaigns in most countries. Provocative trolls and websites that promoted conspiracy theories were a part of the Trump campaign, too. “Pizzagate” — the bizarre theory that Clinton was running a pedophile ring in the basement of a D.C. pizzeria — was not a Russian invention, but it might as well have been. Remember: This was an entirely phony theory, spun out of Clinton campaign emails leaked by Russian hackers that actually inspired an armed man to drive from North Carolina, enter the pizzeria and demand to see the nonexistent children in the nonexistent basement. That bizarre episode was ginned up by Americans, among them conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, a confidant of the president. At the height of the madness, Jones declared, “When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped, I have zero fear standing up against her” in a video that was watched hundreds of thousands of times.
So similar were their methods and language that it is not easy to pull the fake Russian stories and the fake Trump stories apart: Both the Russian trolls and Trump trolls made up wild stories from the hacked emails, which served the same purpose for both. At times, the two moved even closer: After a year of investigations, no one has yet explained why Trump, at some point in the summer of 2016, began repeatedly using stories and slogans that originated on Russian website Sputnik, or even on Russian state television, at his campaign rallies. “Obama created ISIS” and “Hillary will cause World War III.” Did Trump know he was using stories invented by Russian propagandists? Given the frequency of contacts between Trump campaign staff and a wide range of Russians, I find it impossible to believe he did not. But the main point is that in any case, they had become indistinguishable.
From a legal point of view, of course it matters who learned from whom during the U.S. election and how. National security also demands that we respond to the Russian intervention in our democracy and others. Russian support for extremist and anti-democratic political parties all across the West has been growing over the past decade, including funding and other support as well as propaganda. This was considered a fairly niche concern when I first started writing about it a few years ago, and I’m glad it’s now getting the attention it deserves.
Still, let’s be honest: The elimination of Russian influence from U.S. cyberspace would not prevent another Pizzagate. A shutdown of Russian bots will still leave swarms of American bots free to deceive American voters. By its very nature, social media makes disinformation campaigns possible on a larger scale than ever before: Its algorithms encourage deep polarization, and its promise of anonymity opens the door to fraud. By its very nature, American society seems to be susceptible to these campaigns, too. Mueller’s indictment shouldn’t end our investigation into this problem. We should consider it just the beginning.
Read more from Anne Applebaum’s archive, follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her updates on Facebook.

Sunday, February 25, 2018

Why the hard-right activists at CPAC love Trump so much By Paul Waldman

Why the hard-right activists at CPAC love Trump so much
By Paul Waldman Email the author
February 23 at 1:24 PM
“We’ve come a long way together,” President Trump told the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference today. But near the beginning of his speech, Trump acknowledged that he wasn’t always embraced by the CPAC crowd. As late as 2016, when he pulled out of the conference in the midst of the primary campaign, his appearances generated controversy and debates about whether he was ideologically pure enough to qualify as a real conservative.

“Do you remember,” he asked the crowd, “I started running and people said, ‘Are you sure he’s a conservative?’ I think now we proved that I’m a conservative.”

In his speech, Trump made expansive claims about how he has accomplished more than any president in history and spoke about the shooting in Parkland, Florida, temporarily quieting the crowd before bringing them back to cheers with a vision of armed teachers blowing away attempted mass shooters. As he did at many of his campaign rallies, Trump read the lyrics to “The Snake,” a song about a compassionate woman who takes a snake into her home; the snake then bites her. Trump uses this song to explain why it’s foolish and naive to admit immigrants to America who because of their evil natures will try to kill us.

And when in passing he mentioned his 2016 primary opponent, it prompted chants of “Lock her up! Lock her up!” It wasn’t the first time the chant had rung out during the conference, which is a bit ironic given that on this very day, Rick Gates would become the third former Trump aide to plead guilty to criminal charges.

The CPAC crowd was unbothered, because at last they have a president who not only supports their agenda but also reflects their entire approach to politics, someone perfectly at home in the carnival atmosphere of extremists and outright nutballs for which CPAC has always been known. Yesterday, longtime GOP consultant John Weaver tweeted:

Weaver was both right and completely wrong. The fact is that CPAC is a far better embodiment of conservatism in the age of Trump than any Heritage Foundation policy forum.

That isn’t to say that the attendees don’t care about traditional conservative ideology. But while they are cheered by the actions this administration has taken on matters like cutting taxes, slashing environmental regulations and undermining the safety net, what really endears Trump to them is as much about style as it is about substance.

It’s partly that Trump mirrors them in his obsession with critics and enemies. The form of hard-right conservatism that dominates the conference is particularly concerned with liberals — how awful they are, how much they should be hated and feared, and what means might be used to infuriate them.

Which is why having a friendly administration in Washington always presents a challenge for the kind of activists who come to CPAC. They draw their strength from opposition (just as liberal activists are drawing strength now), and it can be difficult to generate the passionate anger that feeds your movement when your side is in charge. But through everything he does, Trump brings a furious intensity to what would normally be the most mundane proceedings of the political world, not least because of his constant search for enemies (the news media, immigrants, Democrats) he can demonize and vilify.

But there’s an even more important reason the CPAC crowd loves Trump: He has, so far anyway, succeeded using the political model they’ve advocated for decades.

The hard-right always said that moderation was for losers, and the formula for victory has two parts: pure conservative positions on policy, and scorched-earth political tactics. Which is exactly what Trump did in 2016 and has continued to do.

They’ve realized, as everyone else has (or should have), that Trump’s momentary rhetorical nods to moderation on issues such as DACA are meaningless; when it comes time to actually make policy, he won’t deviate from conservative dogma. Just as important, Trump won in 2016 with a strategy that could have been written by the CPAC attendees: Vilify immigrants, attack Muslims, curse the news media even as it props you up, foment hate and fear, make wild and baseless accusations about your opponent, and even promise to jail her should you win. Don’t pretend that those who disagree with you are people of good will who happen to be mistaken; proclaim that they’re evil. Above all, focus all your attention not on “reaching out” to an increasingly diverse America but on mobilizing the old America, the one where white Christians are the only people who matter.

What was so intoxicating to the hard right wasn’t just that Trump ran that kind of campaign, but that he won with it. As far as they’re concerned, he proved that they were right all along.

And he has continued that strategy in office. Trump has made more than clear that he has little interest in being president of all Americans; whether his base is happy is all that matters. In 2020, he’s going to follow the same strategy to try to get reelected.

I happen to think that lightning won’t strike twice, and that strategy won’t succeed again. But whether it does or doesn’t, it won’t change the minds of conservative activists that it’s the only path to victory. Though they may turn on him if he loses, for now Trump is the leader they’ve always yearned for.

A frighteningly large number of Americans support arming teachers

CPAC has always been ‘out there.’ Now the rest of the GOP is, too.

No wonder Wayne LaPierre is freaking out

Democrats are now firmly behind single-payer. Thanks, Trump and Republicans.

Angry about Trump and gun violence? Do this now, Democrats.

Paul Waldman is a contributor to The Plum Line blog, and a senior writer at The American Prospect. Follow @paulwaldman1

Learning to trust again. By Lee Drutman

Learning to Trust Again
“Objectivity” may never have been the right thing to look for in the media.
By LEE DRUTMAN
February 23, 2018

Illustration by Alex Nabaum
In January, the Knight Foundation issued a new report on “trust, media, and democracy.” It was a long document—71 pages, with eight headings atop 28 bullet points in the “Key Findings” section alone—and took a detailed look at why modern news organizations struggle to “fulfill their democratic responsibilities of informing the public and holding government leaders accountable.” The report identified many contributing factors, but none more than the perception among the public that the nation’s news organizations weren’t being objective. According to a Gallup-Knight survey conducted for the report, fewer than half of all Americans could think of a news source that “reports the news objectively.” Political partisanship had, apparently, so eroded trust that respondents to a “media trust scale” rated their belief in the news at an abysmal 37 out of 100.

Implicit in both the report and its findings was the assumption that journalism should be objective and nonpartisan—and that the current state of affairs is unusual because it lacks both qualities. It represents a nostalgia for the supposed glory days when the press was the hero behind Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, and when integrity and independence mattered to journalists and publishers. “If I’ve lost Cronkite,” Lyndon Baines Johnson (reportedly) said, “I’ve lost the country.” These are concerns over which the current president likely does not lose much sleep.

Widespread objective, nonpartisan media did once exist in this country, from roughly the 1950s to the late 1970s. But at the time, that was something new, too. Before that, there was no press other than the partisan press. Newspapers controlled by the Federalists branded Thomas Jefferson an “infidel,” while the Democratic-Republican press called George Washington a “traitor.” Before journalism became a “profession” in the Progressive Era, newspaper editors organized parties and held meetings in their offices. So if the passage of modern objective news is lamentable, it is also not all that surprising. Objective reporting in this country arose from a unique confluence of circumstances: a consolidation of distribution technologies (more network television and fewer local newspapers), broad political consensus and bipartisanship, and a strong professional credo of independence. These factors came together like never before and perhaps never again.

With the advent of television, networks began experimenting with serious news programs, eventually enshrined in the 30-minute network news programs of the 1960s. People watched. Lots of them. What choice did they have? Americans consumed more or less the same news, which made it easier to agree on a single set of facts and narratives. Such consensus, unthinkable today, also stemmed from the existing political dynamics. In the postwar years, Democrats and Republicans were not the attack-oriented and ideologically disciplined teams they have become today but rather two loose, overlapping coalitions, with national programs similar enough to one another’s that they didn’t require entirely different facts and values to justify their existence. Political leaders might quibble with the tone or emphasis of news coverage—Nixon was famous for this—but what, really, could they do about it? The mainstream media served as both information gatekeeper and arbiter of fairness. There was no place else to go.

Equally important was that newspapers underwent a dramatic consolidation around this time. For decades, small cities in the United States had morning and evening newspapers with different political slants. Take Charleston, West Virginia, which published the conservative Daily Mail in the morning and the liberal Gazette in the afternoon. As television and radio expanded, the subscription base of newspapers collapsed, sinking news diversity along with it. Chains like Knight Ridder and McClatchy and Scripps took over the smaller markets, pushing out the other voices and imposing a wide-gauge, politically neutral uniformity. Between 1945 and 1968, the number of cities with two or more daily newspapers declined by more than 60 percent. Circulations at the remaining large publications swelled, and the publishers chose to accommodate subscribers, and of course advertisers, by catering to a broad—and yes, objective—range of political views.

The nonpartisan news consensus began to unravel in the 1980s. Cable television imposed a new kind of pressure on the broadcast networks, forcing them to forgo the serious, fact-based news that was the staple of objective, nonpartisan professional journalism in favor of eye-grabbing sensationalism. In 1969, 58 percent of network news stories had “civic affairs” content; by 1997, that number had fallen to just 36 percent. In 1987, Reagan revoked the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to provide balanced news coverage, and conservative talk radio exploded: Between 1990 and 2009, the number of news or talk radio stations increased more than sixfold, reaching 53 million listeners per week. In 1996, Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News, which became the first partisan national television news network, forever altering the norms and underlying values of the profession. The internet did the rest.

The current wave of media consolidation has not resulted in more objectivity, as anyone who has ventured online for a read knows. Opinion-oriented blogs and full-fledged opinion web sites have supplanted many of the outlets of traditional media in influence, resulting in a sprawling range of partisan content. Professional norms have adapted to the dynamics of the new reality, self-optimizing for the powerful emotions of anger, threat, and outrage. This is great for political engagement—see Fox News—but bad for objectivity.

Is there a way to reverse the trend? Probably not. U.S. politics is now organized largely around national issues, which makes pragmatic compromise harder: People are less likely to give ground on these broad, symbolic issues, which tend to take on an all-or-nothing quality in the service of zero-sum partisan warfare. More important, Republican ideology has evolved from a vague antipathy to academics and intellectuals into an all-out hostility to almost all forms of science and expertise. Note that in the Knight Foundation report, it is Republicans who overwhelmingly—67 percent—claim to see a “great deal” of media bias, while only 26 percent of Democrats do. For people consuming rightward media, truth is not the stuff of fact checks and scientific method. It has an almost religious quality and is a matter of faith and feeling.

Technology will surely change again. Perhaps in a new era of virtual reality, the costs of news production will rise, and so, too, will the barriers to entry, pushing the bloggers and political hotheads out of the game and restoring objectivity. But even if the hot takers depart, opinions in hand, there is no guarantee that something good will replace them: Lack of news diversity could easily translate into centralized, totalitarian power, which may be one reason why the anti-tyranny ethos of the early United States produced a First Amendment that protected the free press.

More likely, Americans will have to learn to live with partisan media, which is the norm in most democracies, just as conflict and contestation are democratic norms (consensus politics deprives voters of meaningful choices). Partisan media can amplify existing partisan divisions—see Fox News yet again—but mostly they reflect them. In a political system divided on fundamental questions of science, religion, and national identity, the question of what responsible media looks like will only get more pressing—but it can’t be answered in terms of “objectivity.”

Lee Drutman is a senior fellow at New America and the author of The Business of America is Lobbying.
@leedrutman

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

President Trump is losing control. By Paul Waldman

The Plum Line

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation, and the Russia scandal in general, are driving this president around the bend, to the point where he is setting himself against not just the government he leads but also the interests of the United States of America. And everything we’ve seen up to now suggests that it will only get worse.
Multiple reports today from journalists covering the White House paint a picture of a president who spent the weekend seething with rage — at Mueller, at the media, at members of his administration, at the fact that he couldn’t play golf because it would have been unseemly in the wake of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting — and lashing out at everyone in sight, up to and including Oprah Winfrey. This is not a man with a firm command of his impulses.
Josh Dawsey and Philip Rucker described President Trump’s weekend:

In a string of 10 Twitter messages — which began after 11 p.m. Saturday and ended around noon Sunday, and which included profanity and misspellings — Trump opened a window into his state of mind, even as Trump’s representatives at a global security conference in Germany advised jittery allies to generally ignore the president’s tweets.
Trump’s latest attacks built on remarks last week in which he misrepresented the evidence revealed by Mueller. He tweeted falsely, “I never said Russia did not meddle in the election.” He blamed President Barack Obama’s administration for doing “nothing” to stop the intrusion. Trump rebuked national security adviser H.R. McMaster for publicly saying the evidence of Russian interference was “incontrovertible.”
And he held the FBI responsible for last week’s devastating shooting at a Parkland, Fla., high school that left 17 dead. Trump tweeted that the bureau was committing so many resources to the Russia probe that it missed “all of the many signals” about the shooter.

Many people are justifiably upset that the FBI received tips about the Parkland shooting suspect and didn’t follow up. But unless the Miami field office has been secretly running the Russia probe, I’m pretty sure that the agents involved in investigating Russia’s attack on American democracy are not the same ones responsible for fielding tips on troubled teenagers in Florida, as much of a threat as the latter might pose.
But Trump brings everything back to himself. If the FBI made a mistake anywhere, it can only be because it’s out to get Trump. There’s no issue — not even the murder of 17 people, most of them teenagers — that he won’t make about him. That’s why he’s so obsessed with the media, much more than the substance of any issue at hand: It’s the one place where he’s always the story and always the star.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the Russia affair is that it would be so easy for Trump to act like something resembling a responsible president of the United States. He could simply say that whatever effect Russian meddling had on the 2016 election, it was unacceptable and the integrity of American elections must not be compromised. Then he could direct someone like Vice President Pence to lead a task force to make recommendations on how to secure elections in the future from both hacking and foreign propaganda efforts. Everyone would say that he’s doing the right thing, and he wouldn’t look so paranoid, dishonest and defensive.
But he can’t bring himself to do that. He obviously believes that if he even admits that Russia attempted to intervene on his behalf, then the legitimacy of his entire presidency will be called into question.
So at a moment when his own appointees atop the nation’s intelligence agencies are urgently warning that Russia is preparing to meddle in the 2018 and 2020 elections, their boss is all but telling them to stand down. No matter what Russia does, Trump won’t ever be willing to deal with the problem, because he’ll always feel that doing so will only validate his critics. Do you think Russian President Vladimir Putin knows that? I suspect he does.
It’s possible that various agencies of the government will, in spite of the president, manage to take reasonably effective steps to minimize the effects of Russian efforts to subvert our elections. But Putin must realize that he needn’t worry about anything that might require presidential approval, such as retaliatory actions aimed at punishing Russia for its assault on American democracy. That, we can be sure, isn’t going to happen as long as Trump is president. You don’t have to believe he’s being blackmailed or that he’s Putin’s puppet; all you need to know is that any admission of the truth of what happened in 2016 is intolerable for him.
We also should understand that whatever effort Russia makes at interfering in the 2018 elections will be happening at the same time as the Mueller investigation is reaching its critical point, which will make Trump even more resistant to doing anything about Russian meddling. As Mueller issues more indictments, Trump is certain to become angrier, more self-absorbed and more insistent that his great victory was pure and unsullied. This is a man who as of yesterday was still tweeting that “the Democrats, lead by their fearless leader, Crooked Hillary Clinton, lost the 2016 election. But wasn’t I a great candidate?”
With each new step Mueller takes, Trump will react by saying that none of it’s true and it’s all a conspiracy against him. When his aides tell him about some new Russian intrusion, he’ll ask not what’s necessary to defend the country, but how the whole thing is going to make him look. As he also tweeted yesterday, “They are laughing their asses off in Moscow.” At least he got that right.

Paul Waldman is a contributor to The Plum Line blog, and a senior writer at The American Prospect.

Don’t blame ‘Washington.’ Blame the GOP. By Catherine Rampell

Dysfunctional Washington refuses to work out its differences to solve problems that matter to Americans.
So say pundits and policy activists, perhaps hoping that diffuse criticism, rather than finger-pointing, will yield a government willing to govern.
But the problem isn’t “Washington.” It isn’t “Congress,” either. The problem is elected officials from a single political party: the GOP.
Republicans in the White House and Congress are the ones standing in the way of helping “dreamers.” They are not merely obstructing gun reform but also rolling back existing gun-control measures.
You’d never know it from the usual “blame Washington” rhetoric, but there are lots of common-sense policy changes, on supposedly unsolvable issues, that large majorities of voters from both parties support.
These include protecting dreamers, the young undocumented immigrants brought here as children. In a recent Quinnipiac poll, 81 percent of Americans, including 68 percent of Republicans, said dreamers should be allowed to stay and eventually apply for citizenship. Other polls have had similar results.
And yet, dreamers are scheduled to start losing their protected status in two weeks.
Who set this in motion? President Trump, a Republican.
And who has blocked a legislative fix? Republican lawmakers. Call it caving or call it compromise, but Democrats have repeatedly ceded ground on their immigration principles — including by agreeing to fund a border wall.
The Senate held three votes last week to help dreamers. All three failed.
The first was on a “clean” proposal that offered dreamers citizenship. Nearly all Democrats voted for it; all but four Republicans voted against it.
There was also a bipartisan “compromise” plan. It included a path to citizenship for dreamers, funding for border security and a prohibition on dreamers sponsoring parents for legal status. That also failed, with nearly all Democrats voting for it and nearly all Republicans against.
Finally there was a plan to protect dreamers in exchange for gutting the legal immigration system, an idea that until recently resided only among the far-right fringe. Only this bill did a majority of Republicans support, even though they knew it was DOA thanks both to Democratic opposition and to defections within their own party.
On guns, too, Congress has been portrayed as generically dysfunctional, always at reasonable-people-can-disagree loggerheads. But here, too, there is widespread agreement among voters — from both parties — on modest gun-control measures.
Nine in 10 Republicans support background checks for all gun buyers. The same share supports preventing the mentally ill from purchasing guns.
Majorities of Republican voters also support banning gun modifications that can make semiautomatic guns more like automatic ones; barring gun purchases by people on terrorist no-fly lists; banning assault-style weapons; and creating a federal database to track gun sales.
Again, that’s what Republican voters want. Those preferences have been ill-served by NRA-funded Republican politicians, however.
Republican lawmakers killed universal background-check bills considered after Sandy Hook and San Bernardino. They voted against reinstating the assault weapons ban five years ago, and not a single Republican is co-sponsoring the same proposal now in the Senate. Last year, Republicans voted to roll back an Obama-era rule that would have made it harder for people with mental illness to buy a gun.
And the Republican House has already passed the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, which would force states that prefer stricter gun-control measures to cede their ability to enforce them, states’ rights be damned.
Commentators have been tiptoeing around some of these patterns, calling Congress “deadlocked” and slamming Democrats for being “unwilling to consider compromise.” Even the awe-inspiring Marjory Stoneman Douglas High student survivors, while calling for stronger gun-control measures, have appeared cautious about disproportionately picking on Republicans.
“I was very partisan in the beginning and violently attacking the GOP. I was angry and scared. Now I know that people from every party are supporting us. Everybody is demanding change,” junior Cameron Kasky tweeted when a critic accused him of spouting “Democrat talking points.”
Kasky is, of course, correct that Americans of all parties demand change. But politicians of all parties do not.
Kasky, his classmates and other survivor advocates using language urging nonpartisan “compromise” may understandably fear alienating possible allies in their righteous cause.
That may well be the right calculus in these politically tribal times.
But for the rest of us, obscuring which politicians stand in the way of that elusive “compromise” may instead allow them to keep getting away with it.

Catherine Rampell is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post.