A review of a book

In fact, Trump doesn’t get so much as a mention in this book. As Roberts-Miller makes abundantly clear in this short but powerful book, to focus on Trump-the-demagogue would be to mistake for cause what is actually demagogic effect. Roberts-Miller’s central claim about demagoguery is that, contrary to popular belief, charismatic demagogues do not usher in periods of demagoguery through the sheer force of their personality; rather, periods of demagogic public argumentation make the means available for individual demagogues to step forward. In other words, demagoguery is not about what individual demagogues do; rather, demagoguery is about how a culture deliberates. Her theory of demagoguery is much more complex than resisting a particular president—even a demagogic one. It is “about how we, as citizens, argue, reason, and vote” (p. 8). The book, then, is about argument.

At one end of the argumentative spectrum, Roberts-Miller puts the ideal of democratic deliberation. Democratic decisions, by definition, are supposed to result in policies that serve everyone involved in some form or fashion. “The common good” is a grounding principle. But democratic policies are complicated because serving “the common good” entails balancing an awful lot of competing goals with each decision.

And democratic decisions, even in the ideal case, never serve anyone fully because they have to serve everyone at least partially. Democracy requires deliberation because the competing goals, visions, beliefs, and proposals have to be aired, heard, weighed, and measured. Like democracy, deliberation (especially about policy) is messy, it takes work and compromise, it requires the people involved to treat each other fairly, and it requires responsibility and self-skepticism from everyone involved. Democracy and deliberation about democratic issues are constitutionally hard.

Demagoguery, by contrast, is an art of simplifying decision-making. As Robert-Miller carefully teaches her readers, demagoguery reduces all questions to easy choices—specifically the choice between a good us and a bad them. In other words, demagoguery makes the process of arriving at decisions—even supposedly democratic decisions—about whether someone likes and agrees with people they are already disposed to liking and agreeing with.

Consequently, for Roberts-Miller, “demagogue” cannot simply be reduced to an epithet we use to slander our opponents as unethical, deceitful, and hateful. This is because such shorthand characterizations play directly into the structure of demagogic argument that makes demagogues not just possible but practically inevitable. Roberts-Miller writes, “Conventionally, demagoguery is about passion, emotionalism, populism, and pandering to crowds” (p. 7). We have a long tradition of applying such definitions to our best-known demagogues—Cleon, Hitler, Joe McCarthy, and so on. But for Roberts-Miller, “thinking about demagoguery that way makes it likely that we won’t notice when we are persuaded by and promoting demagoguery because it gives us criteria that enables us to see only their demagoguery” (p. 7).

It’s a classic us-versus-them scenario. Their orators are passionate and emotional, ours are logical and rational. Their orators are pandering, ours are telling it like it is. Their orators are demagogues, ours are democrats. Our team is always right, their team is always wrong, and any sign of weakness on our side portends doom.

If the stakes seem outlandishly high in this formulation, it’s because they are supposed to be. How else would people be convinced to give up on deliberation? Demagoguery reduces all public policy deliberation to questions of identity—again, us versus them. We are good, they are bad. As such, dissent is dangerous, compromise is treasonous, and failure is catastrophic.

But as Roberts-Miller makes clear, this happens at the level of public argumentation, across time and across multiple media. And when public argumentation falls into this pattern, it becomes circular and mutually reinforcing. As a result, demagoguery becomes available to everyone involved in in public deliberation. The thesis of this book, then, is resolutely not some decorous version of “here’s how to stop Trump’s idiot supporters” or “here’s how to counteract fake conservative news” or even “here’s how to fight idiots across the political spectrum.” It is, instead, that we all need to be better arguers about arguing. This assertion is stated most succinctly near the end of the book: “Basically, we need to persuade people to engage in more public deliberation and less demagoguery. That isn’t easy because demagoguery isn’t just a way of arguing about politics; it’s a way of thinking about decision making” (pp. 121-22).

Roberts-Miller’s argument turns on some crucial distinctions that bear elaborating. For one, the “we” she refers to in the above quote is more or less anyone who is concerned about living in an age of demagogues. It is ecumenical, nonpartisan, and openly invitational. For another, this means “we” are all responsible for demagoguery—for allowing it to grow and flourish. When I say “we,” I mean you and I mean me. None of us is off the hook for our current circumstances.

This is a complicated argument to make in such a small book—somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand words—and for a nonspecialist audience. But Roberts-Miller does it, and she does it well. The book is broken into eight short chapters. In each, Roberts-Miller lays out a small aspect of her theory of demagoguery, which she then works through deliberately. This working through consists of definitions (what deliberation is, what most people think demagoguery is, what a more useful definition of demagoguery is), procedural descriptions (how demagoguery works in general, how it works in specific cases, what that means on a cultural scale), and recommendations (what do we do). The chapters are short, digestible, and provocative.

In working through these various sections, Roberts-Miller exemplifies her definition of democratic deliberation. Rhetoricians will note, for instance, that the above sections correlate to establishing stases, making claims and using evidence, and inducing action. In addition, she practices what she identifies as four basic principles of democratic deliberation: insisting on fairness, which means “whatever the argument rules are, they apply equally to everyone in the argument”; responsibility, which means “representing one another’s arguments fairly, and striving to provide internally consistent evidence to support their claims”; internal consistency, which means appealing to consistent “premises, definitions, and standards” and not making contradictory claims or appealing to contradictory premises; and falsifiability, which means making arguments that can be proven wrong and that you “can imagine abandoning, modifying, and reconsidering” (pp. 125-26). In so doing, she models what her vision of good deliberation can be.

This book is not without its limitations. There are some things that simply cannot be done in such a short book, such as providing extensive historical context for various references (the Warren Commission, for example). There are specialist rhetorical, sociological, and political terms that don’t get the full definitional treatment, despite the main audience being a nonspecialist one. Readers will probably have to know some stuff and will have to be willing to look up other stuff. That may be a high bar for many readers.

That said, it is an important book. For rhetoricians, this book does double duty—it extends scholarship about demagogic rhetoric in ways scholars can learn from (and argue with), and it also extends rhetorical scholarship more generally to a broader audience of potentially interested citizens (and would-be citizens). But more centrally, and probably more importantly, Democracy and Demagoguery is designed to teach us—all of us—to be better citizens by learning to be better deliberators.

It is more about the latter than the former, which means—at least by my accounting—that it has the potential to do far more than just strengthen rhetorical studies. It has the potential to make our democracy (and maybe any democracy?) stronger and deliberatively healthier. In working through how to define demagoguery, how it works, how it connects to deliberative democracy, how it pervades argumentative cultures, and what we can do about it, Roberts-Miller invites all of her readers to see that we are all responsible for whether deliberation or demagoguery predominates in our culture. And maybe that eventually results in fewer demagogues running our government(s).
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Predators of New York

Predators of New York

By Josh Marshall

Over the weekend I flagged this video clip of Fox Business News’ Maria Bartiromo previewing her weekend show. Today we picked up clips from the show itself. The gist in both cases is Bartiromo, once a reasonably well-respected business news journalist, is aping the wildest conspiracy theories about a ‘deep state’ conspiracy against President Trump. Watching the reaction to her comments put me in the mind of a topic I have been wanting to write about for some time but don’t yet know enough to fully capture it in its fullness.

There’s something about New York, New York City, that is, that is at the root of the Trump phenomenon. This comes from watching the Trump story unfold over the last three years. It also comes from my own experiences living here for fifteen years.

New York City is a liberal city, probably the most progressive big city in the country, as far as it goes. Yet its power structure, its money class includes a whole community of people with extreme wealth who live in a culture in which predation and acquisition is the norm.

Some of it is rooted in the culture of the big city real estate dynasties.

Consider a few facts. We know about the Trump family, not even that big a real estate family in the city, despite their pretensions. We know about the deep corruption they are based on. A couple decades ago the head of another of these families was arrested for trying to hire a hitman to kill his business partner. The heir of another of these families appears to be a serial killer. The head of another of these families – sort of a cadet branch from New Jersey – got in a dispute with his brother-in-law and hired a prostitute to have sex with the brother-in-law, film the sex and blackmail him. That guy is Jared Kushner’s father. All three went to prison. That’s just a subsection of the stories which police uncovered, certainly just scratching the surface.

There’s a lot of weird transgressive behavior for only a tiny community of people. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. There’s a TV show close, to literally based on the mix of power and bad acts of these people. Outside the real estate families, there’s simply the New York City investor class. I’ve crossed paths with a few of these people over the years living here. One I shut down half a dozen years ago when he was trying to get me to write a hit piece that his paymaster wanted to get published about Eric Schneiderman of all people. To be clear, it had nothing to do with any of the bad acts that ended Schneiderman’s career a few weeks ago. It had to do with an obscure claim of unethical legal practices that didn’t even hold up. Earlier this year I got a phone call from this character out of the blue with a series of totally insane threats. “You fucking cock-sucker, I’ll destroy you!” Weird stuff. But that’s how they talk and think.

There’s a whole ecosystem of these predators, operating in the city’s real estate world, its investor class, on Wall Street. When I heard those tape recordings of a young Donald Trump and Roy Cohn hard-selling that Forbes reporter on the idea Trump had a net worth of literally 100 times his actual net worth I recognized it. I heard the high-velocity hard sell voice – back at it again and again and again, bam, bam, bam – it was the same carnivorous voice I’d had with this other guy a month or two earlier. It’s of a piece with the various Trump rackets we’ve learned about. It’s the Scaramucci talk. Whatever world he was in before he left the Mayor’s office, Giuliani has marinated in that world for the almost two decades since he left office. Roger Ailes was part of it.

Ailes is important because at least the current version of this New York power and predator class I’m describing is heavily bound up with Fox News. That’s another part of the connection with Trump, even though a lot of the people – Trump included – were once at least nominal Democrats. The Kushners, of course, were major, major Democratic donors. Indeed, that’s one of the striking things about the Trump Family, in the mafia sense. A lot of the biggest players, maybe even most, were Democrats before Trump came to power. The key is they come from a place where party affiliations are more like factions in a 15th-century Italian city-state than what we think of as modern political parties. It’s about personalities, money, and power. That world I said Giuliani was marinating in for two decades is the city’s GOP money world, except of course when it overlaps with the Democratic power brokers.

One of the deepest dynamics of the Trump presidency is his mounting rage at his inability to control the press. To a degree, this is simply that nothing is like the national political press in scandal mode. No matter what pond you’re from or how big it was, nothing compares. But a major part of the story is how well Trump did working and directing and playing the New York City press for decades. They ate out of his hand. All the crime and money laundering and crazy bad acts went mostly unreported in the big papers – and this is in the national media capital.

I’ve been thinking about this for months. As you can see, my thoughts about it are still quite inchoate and incomplete, fragmentary. I was excited to read Frank Rich’s recent essay about Roy Cohn and Donald Trump. It’s the closest I’ve read to a discussion of this. But it’s still somehow different. It’s more focused on indictment than capturing the milieu, how the social sickness of Cohn/Trumpism was allowed to germinate in the city’s political and money class. This isn’t a criticism. It’s quite good. I strongly recommend it. It’s just maybe thirty degrees off the piece, the discussion I’m thinking of.

To some degree, this is probably just the confluence of vast wealth and power, no different in New York than anywhere else they come together in such vast and raw proportions. When I flagged that Bartiromo clip I mentioned above, several people said to me, ‘What happened to Maria Bartiromo?’ When did she get so nuts? To me, there was zero mystery. She’s part of that milieu I’m describing. Of course, she’s singing from the same page. They all are.

With all this, there’s something specifically New York to it. Trump is an outlier. In most respects, he’s considered a clown and always was considered a clown by the New York City money and political elite. But he’s of it to a great degree, the voracious appetite and instinctive predation. There’s a common New York root to all of it. But it’s also somehow a story about early 21st century plutocracy, media barons like Murdoch, foreign kleptocrats like the ones who seem to have bought into Trump and channeled his rise to power toward their goals. It’s all of a piece.

We no longer have an independent Justice Department

We no longer have an independent Justice Department

By Josh Marshall

Late last week, right-wing media outed the FBI informant who in 2016 talked to Trump campaign officials as part of the bureau’s efforts to learn about the campaign’s ties with Russia. That’s likely to hurt the bureau’s ability to recruit sources, especially those with access to information about the right.

But if anything, the fallout from the news has been even more damaging.

On Sunday, President Trump tweeted that he planned to ask the Justice Department to investigate whether the FBI “infiltrated or surveilled” his campaign. His goal, plainly, is to discredit the Mueller investigation into Russian meddling. Then later that day, Rod Rosenstein, the DOJ number two who’s overseeing the Mueller probe, said he’d ask the department’s inspector general to add the issue to his ongoing probe of the FBI’s application for a FISA warrant to surveil Carter Page. (It’s worth noting: The IG is independent from DOJ leadership, so it doesn’t have to comply with Rosenstein’s recommendation.)

In other words: The president demanded that the Justice Department launch an investigation that he clearly hopes will benefit him politically. And the Justice Department, within hours, said it agreed.

DOJ essentially taking orders from the president on this represents a level of political interference in the U.S. justice system that may go further even than anything else we’ve seen under Trump. It’s true that DOJ’s announcement back in March that it would probe the FISA issue came after weeks of agitation by Trump and his allies in Congress. But even that sequence of events felt less direct in terms of cause and effect than what played out on Sunday.

This isn’t to criticize Rosenstein. He may well have concluded that, given a set of bad options, the least bad was to hand the issue off to the IG, with the hope of defusing it. Trump allies are already calling it a “Potemkin investigation.”

But it’s worth recognizing what’s happened. Until Trump, it was basically thought that the appropriate response from DOJ to a demand by the president that it launch an investigation, especially on an issue of such political sensitivity, was to say: We’ll consider that on the merits like any other matter, but the president doesn’t dictate the department’s priorities. Of course that doesn’t mean that, in reality, DOJ has never been susceptible to political pressure in the past. But at least as a matter of publicly expressed policy, its position was clear.

We no longer have a Justice Department that feels able to say that. That’s a big step away from the rule of law.

The August Trump Tower meeting with Gulf emissaries

 The August Trump Tower meeting with Gulf emissaries

By Josh Marshall

Let me share some thoughts on the significance of that blockbuster Times article from the weekend on that 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Don, Jr. and emissaries from Gulf monarchs offering to help candidate Trump’s campaign.

Since early this year we’ve heard a steady stream of reports about backchannel discussions and deals between key Trump advisors like Jared Kushner and leaders of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. This part of the investigation broke into the open early this year after FBI agents working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller met George Nader at Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C. on January 17th, 2018. Nader had arrived from abroad on his way to Mar-a-Lago for a celebration of the anniversary of Trump’s first year in office. He had become a close advisor to the White House, Trump, and Jared Kushner. Agents had warrants to seize his electronic devices. They questioned him for two hours. The upshot of the encounter was that Nader more or less immediately became a cooperating witness with the Mueller probe.

It soon emerged that it had been Nader, acting on behalf of the UAE, who had arranged that January 2017 meeting in the Seychelles which brought together Erik Prince and Kirill Dmitriev. As had long been suspected, it was an effort to build a backchannel to Russia. Nader had also made at least two visits to Moscow during the 2016 campaign as the emissary of the leader of the UAE.

Somehow Nader seemed to bring together elements of the Russia probe with a seemingly distinct effort to ally the Trump administration with the conservative Gulf monarchies trying to build a regional coalition against Iran. Nader’s efforts also put into a new light Trump’s and particularly Jared Kushner’s support for the Saudi-UAE blockade of Qatar starting mid-2017, even against the opposition of the Departments of State and Defense. Money appeared to be flowing from these conservative Gulf monarchies to the Trump family, with great effect. Elliott Broidy was also in the mix, a close collaborator and business partner of Nader’s, who separately had used Michael Cohen to secure a hush money agreement with a former Playboy model he’d impregnated. Somehow these covert efforts to ally Trump with UAE/Saudi seemed to overlap with efforts to build a backchannel with Russia. But how and when did it start?

The ties between Nader and the Trump campaign clearly had some backstory before the election. But what it was remained unclear. That’s the importance of this article. This August 2016 meeting seems to have been the key moment in bringing Nader into the Trump fold, with specific assistance on offer from his paymasters in the Gulf.

On August 3rd, days after the end of the Democratic convention, Donald Trump Jr. met with Nader, Prince and an Israeli social media psy-ops campaign expert at Trump Tower. Nader was there as the representative of the de facto leaders of UAE and Saudi Arabia. They wanted to help Trump become President and they wanted to assist with money. Trump Jr. was apparently happy to accept their help — something that clearly violates U.S. law.

This is an article you definitely want to read. Here are my key takeaways.

What’s notable to me about this article is how many things it suggests without quite saying. Joel Zamel had previously worked on behalf of the government of the UAE as well as Oleg Deripaska, the oligarch who Paul Manafort owed millions to. He’d also worked for Dmitry Rybolovlev, who bought a Palm Beach mansion from Trump for $95 million in 2008. It appears that the offer was for Zamel to run a social media campaign that sounds very similar to the one Russia was then conducting on Trump’s behalf and that the effort would be paid for by the UAE. Nader was also pushing a plan to create a vast mercenary army to destabilize Iran. Prince has been pushing similar plans for some time.

The article, for instance, notes that Nader later paid $2 million to Zamel. Nader works for the UAE. Presumably, that’s where the money was from? Why would he pay that? Presumably, because Zamel & Co. did the social media psy-ops work they proposed. After the campaign, they also hired another Zamel firm to analyze the importance of social media efforts to Trump’s victory. Why would they do that? Presumably to demonstrate the effectiveness of Zamel’s efforts. Yet in the Times piece, these “presumablies” aren’t stated — presumably because the Times reporters were not able to confirm that Zamel’s firms had done the work, something his lawyer (a close associate of Rudy Giuliani) denies.

This is, to put it mildly, a complex set of facts to unravel. Here are some further observations.

1: This is now the second instance where emissaries of a foreign power(s) offered their support to President Trump’s campaign and got a welcome reception.

2: Clearly the UAE/Saudis collaborated at some level with Russians, trying to build channels into the Trump world. On its face at least this is perplexing because the UAE/Saudis are primarily focused on building an anti-Iran coalition in the Middle East and making the U.S. a robust part of that coalition. Russia is on the other side of that fight, the major regional backer of the Syrian government which is closely tied to Iran. This requires more explanation. But I think there are various ways that they would see themselves having overlapping interests.

3: George Nader is at the center of all of this. He appears to have been the key player in the Gulf side of this and significantly involved in the Russia part. Our best evidence is that he has been fully cooperating with the Mueller probe for more than four months. So they likely have all the information from Nader, if not in every case the proof of Nader’s claims. This investigation is likely much further along than we know.

Take all of this together and you have a very far-flung counter-intelligence probe involving multiple foreign powers and vast sums of cash. The scope of all this seems to go far, far beyond what we know.

The Sad Sack Tale of Rob Goldstone, by Josh Marshall | Talking Points Memo

The Sad Sack Tale of Rob Goldstone

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo

by Josh Marshall  /  1h  //  keep unread  //  hide 

May 16

We — and no doubt many other news organizations — are still working our way through the various new documents, interview transcripts and reports on the Trump-Russia story that were released today. There’s one small thread of the story that captured my attention. It comes out of Senate interviews and email records from Rob Goldstone, the British music publicist who worked exclusively for Emin Agalarov, the singer son of Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov. It was Goldstone who notoriously set up the meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer and government agent Natalia Veselnitskaya.

We know that story, at least its main outlines. We also saw more evidence today of what looks like a highly suspicious phone call Donald Trump Jr. made to an unknown number between his calls to Emin. There’s some circumstantial evidence that call could have been to Donald Trump Jr.’s father. But what really comes through in Goldstone’s testimony (which I’m still making my way through) and especially the email records he provided is someone who was essentially set up or — perhaps better to say — used for a purpose without having a clear sense of what he was getting himself into or the danger to which he was exposing himself.

Don’t get me wrong. You don’t have to be a genius or an international relations scholar to know that a U.S. presidential candidate getting assistance from the Russian government might be a problem. I’m sure most Brits would get that. And in fact — what I learned today — Goldstone is actually a naturalized U.S. citizen. Indeed, as the press swarms around him he reminds Emin on more than one occasion that he said at the time the whole thing was a bad idea. Still, reading these documents, I definitely get the sense Goldstone didn’t know the fullness of what he was getting himself into. When the shit hit the fan, he felt very badly used to Emin and his father Aras. And with good reason. The Agalarovs were in Russia, beyond anyone’s reach. It wasn’t their problem.

For Goldstone, on the one side are the Agalarovs who he no longer worked for but was keen to protect and lawyers for the Trump organization who were coaching him on what to say.

“I hope this favor was worth it for you dad — it could blow up big” Goldstone tells Emin in one text message. “This has and will have a disastrous effect on my Business also and I trust we will be compensated in some way — already one new client has walked away over this and it can only get worse.”

At other times, Goldstone gets more intense. “I have 20 years of reputation basically destroyed by this dumb meeting which your father insisted on even though Ike and Me told him would be bad news and not to do.” This wasn’t the only time Goldstone claimed after the fact that he’s said the whole thing was a bad idea. In late June 2017, after news of the meeting had broken in The New York Times, Goldstone is emailing Emin about his mounting troubles and reiterating: “I did say at the time this was an awful idea and a terrible meeting.”

All of the back and forth is with Emin, the son and singer, not Aras, the oligarch who is close to Vladmir Putin. That makes sense. Emin’s the singer who can’t seem to get traction outside of Russia where his father appears to have largely bought him his career. Still, the distance and cushion Emin provided in this caper looks to have been convenient to Aras and whoever was directing him. It’s a bit hard to read Emin in the exchanges, whether he’s just clueless or whether he’s unwilling to come clean about the trouble he and his father have gotten Goldstone into.

At a minimum, there’s clearly a lot of the former.

At one point Goldstone is harping on the press storm engulfing him when Emin asks: “Why does this destroy your reputation?”

Goldstone: “Because I work in music and it’s FULL of Liberals and I am seen as some weird link to the kremlin.”

Goldstone: “Have you been watching the news!”

Goldstone: “And because I am not able to respond out of courtesy to you and your father”

Goldstone: “So am painted as some mysterious link to Putin”

Emin Agalarov: “That should give you mega PR [wide open eyes emoji]”

Later Emin wishes Rob a Happy Birthday. “Wish you all the very best, for all the clouds to pass and sunshine always be above!!! Missing our good times. hope you are well! Emin” At this point, Goldstone is thoroughly low energy and sad sack. “Thanks. All I can do I somehow also hope for the best. Rob.”