From Grover Cleveland’s secret oral surgery to First Lady Edith Wilson running the Executive Branch after her husband, Woodrow Wilson, suffered a stroke, the legacy of medical cover-ups among Presidents and candidates continues. This past weekend, Hillary Clinton left a 9/11 memorial early after feeling overheated and dizzy, as well as losing her balance. Clinton’s staff later released that Clinton had been diagnosed with pneumonia the previous Friday and ignored her doctor’s request of a five-day break from the campaign.
Mexico’s Finance Minister, Luis Videgaray, recently resigned. The reason seems to be the events of last Wednesday, September 31st, when Republican Presidential Nominee Donald Trump visited Mexico. The visit was not well received by the Mexican population. Due to their discontent, Videgaray seems to have been forced to resign; he is attributed to have been one of the main supporters and architects of Trump’s visit. Shortly after Videgaray’s resignation, Trump deemed his visit a success since he was able to influence the composition of the Mexican president’s cabinet. Success or failure, these are the events as they unfolded:
Polls in 1948 indicated Harry Truman had no chance to win the election. He ignored the ominous polls, took off on his whistle-stop tour and won the election anyway. Pollsters and pundits were shocked. Americans today would be wise to follow Truman’s lead and disregard the swarm of polls dominating the media landscape this year.
Most Republicans don’t want Donald Trump as the nominee. Most Republicans didn’t want Trump during the primaries. He benefited from a crowded field of traditional candidates in the early primaries. The preferences of voters who voted for the third place candidates and beyond were simply lost. They had no say between the first and second place candidates.
It was a hotly contested presidential election, and the mudslinging was fierce. There were allegations of fiscal corruption, sexual impropriety, and—perhaps most damning of all—bad writing.
The Democratic candidate, it was rumored, spelled Congress with a K. Couldn’t construct a complete sentence. Had to hire someone to write his letters for him. Was almost entirely illiterate.
The charges went viral. They even inspired snatches of satirical poetry in the newspapers:
Then a nice writing-man I have hired for my use,
To hide the bad spelin I skrawl—
And them are as says how my grammar is bad,
Don’t know nothing of it all.
The man the poem was mocking, the one supposed to be guilty of these several crimes against the English language, now appears on the $20 bill. The John Quincy Adams campaign’s efforts to smear their upstart rival’s literacy did not stop Andrew Jackson from winning the White House.
Modern scholars have actually tried to figure out, “Could Andrew Jackson Spell?” The evidence is inconclusive, but the question doesn’t seem especially important for us now. What is relevant today is what the episode suggests about how we evaluate candidates—the role ideas about literacy play in political discourse, and to what effect. Left-leaning commentators’ gleefulness over Sarah Palin’s recent display of verbal clumsiness, in her speech endorsing Donald Trump, doesn’t look very different from the hilarity that ensued among Adams supporters when they heard about a 25-line letter by Jackson that included 23 misspellings.
Spelling Congress with a K doesn’t by itself seem like a disqualifier from the presidency. An effective chief executive must be able to do many things with Congress, but spelling is lower on the list than cooperating, negotiating, persuading, and maneuvering. The general idea behind the Adams campaign’s gambit was that by portraying Jackson, born in the backwoods of Tennessee, as illiterate, they could persuade voters he lacked the aptitude to manage the complexities of the national government—as the incumbent Adams, scion of one of the founding families of the republic, obviously could.
Arguably there was some truth to this. By all appearances, Jackson failed to comprehend the function and importance of the Bank of the U.S. when, with devastating economic results, he effectively destroyed it in the 1830s (one of the reasons many people would like to see an American woman replacing Jackson on the $20 bill, rather than Alexander Hamilton on the $10). But this may have been a coincidence. People who did grasp the ins and outs of central banking in the 1830s probably were highly literate, but the converse isn’t necessarily true. Plenty of people who knew the correct spelling of Congress still didn’t understand what the Bank of the U.S. was good for, just as many well-read and eloquent people in 2008 had no idea what a collateralized debt obligation was.
Besides, it didn’t work. Jackson beat Adams. The election of 1828 proved to be an early installment in the long American tradition of affection for politicians who are “regular guys” (or, in the lexicon of pollsters during the election of 2000, people you’d like to have a beer with). Not for the last time, a bookish and bespectacled candidate inspired more distrust among voters than a rough-edged, inarticulate one. Never mind that the supposedly effete Bostonian went on to serve nine terms in Congress and successfully defend the Amistad rebels, while the manly frontiersman earned a reputation for exterminating American Indians. Maybe the Adams camp would have done better for their candidate, and the country, by talking more about principles than orthography.
Which may be useful to remember in our own era. The whirlwind of attention paid to Sarah Palin’s recent speech has been dominated by derision of her odd phraseology and general incoherence—which is a perfectly legitimate (and certainly amusing) subject for Saturday Night Live (“She sounds like a greeting card from a Chinese dollar store!”). But even the venerable New York Times’s coverage devolved into a listicle called “The Most Mystifying Lines of Sarah Palin’s Endorsement Speech.”
The first question about that speech or any other politician’s shouldn’t be whether or not it’s a fluid sequence of grammatical sentences (as nice as that would be) but whether or not it’s bullshit—a word I use here in its technical sense to refer to indifference to truthfulness. Misused and made-up words are great fodder for social-media mockery (refudiate! squirmishes!), but they’re less outrageous than (to choose just one example from Palin’s speech) the claim that military veterans are not “treated better than illegal immigrants are treated in this country.” And they’re far less damaging than an attitude toward political discourse that doesn’t care whether that claim, or any other, can even be backed up. Sarah Palin may be inarticulate, but there is more important work to be done than pointing that out.
I’m voting for Hillary Clinton. As a young, liberal, white male, that may come as a surprise. Bernie Sanders has captured the heart and soul of my generation through a combination of emphasis on environmental protection, social justice, and student debt. His campaign has churned out t-shirts bearing his face among the cast of Seinfeld and depicting, in bold black and white, his arrest as a student demonstrator during the civil rights movement. He has successfully portrayed himself, despite being a 74-year-old white male and career politician, as an outsider on a crusade to reform government and return the reins of power to the people, rather than big-moneyed interests and corrupt politicians.
An election season that was already dramatic enough has recently become even more interesting with the rash of violence that has been breaking out at rallies for colorful Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. There has been much debate about whether Trump is to blame for these riots. Here is a brief recap of the recent violence that has occurred on the Trump campaign trail:
‘Tis the season for politics, once again, in the United States of America. And while some surprising new topics, like the size of candidates’ hands, have cropped up in this cycle, some of the mainstays of American political rhetoric are also at the rendez-vous.
Take Donald Trump, for instance.
In January, one of his campaign rallies featured the following performance:
While it features somewhat dated nationalist lyrics (including verses like “Come on boys, take them down!”), slightly updated for promoting Mr. Trump’s bid in the 2016 presidential contest, it also highlights a theme that is about as central to American political rhetoric as apple pie is to American cooking: freedom.
Whether freedom has been invoked as an empty rhetorical trope, as in this case, or whether it has been used more substantitvely, it has so completely permeated electoral discourse as to become inescapable.
Whether they have talked about government regulation, trade, national security, tax reform, education, abortion, or immigration, freedom has been Republican candidates’ preferred frame of reference.
Meanwhile, on the left of the political spectrum, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have been quite as single-minded. While Clinton has spent a great deal of her time trying to square away her commitments to free trade and to an equalitarian progressive politics, Sanders has explained his commitment to democratic socialism as meaning “that we must create a vibrant democracy based on the principle of one person one vote.” “True freedom” according to Sanders, “does not occur without economic security. People are not free, they are not truly free, when they are unable to feed their family.”
And yet, these invocations are largely based on outdated conceptions of what freedom is. The idea at the back of Sanders’ viewpoint, that economic independence is the necessary precondition for democratic citizenship harks back to Thomas Jefferson’s glorification of the yeoman farmer, as historian Eric Foner was already noting in his book, The History of American Freedom. And as sociologists have been observing since the 1950s, such an ideal of economic independence is woefully inadequate to the corporate economy in which we live.
But it is just as true that the thesis that deregulation of international trade or of the labor market will result in greater individual freedom is based on the idea, first defended by classical liberals like John Stuart Mill, that government power threatens individual liberty. Mill’s disciples in the twentieth century, intellectuals like Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, argued that the crux of liberal freedom consists in the absence of coercion of the individual, either by private monopolies or by government power, so that the smaller the size of the government is and the less active it is in citizens’ lives, the greater will their freedom be.
But as early as the 1960s, the American social psychologist Stanley Milgram actually found, in a series of now famous experiments, that most people do not need to be coerced into doing things they don’t want to do, including engaging in actions which they are convinced will most likely result in the death of an innocent person: they will do these things of their own free will – a situation that suggests that “free will” and freedom may not be the same things after all.
In fact, a growing body of evidence has been produced in the human sciences over the past 40 years that suggests that the notion of a free-willing individual, who can make decisions independently of social and cultural contexts is a figment of our imagination. What this research reveals is that it is not the absence of context that enables individuals to act freely (whether it be the absence of a monopoly or the absence of a state bureaucracy), but on the contrary the presence of one.
This scientific research reveals several very surprising things about human nature that directly contradict the vision of human beings as rational, egoistic individuals, driven by an unquenchable lust for pleasure, money, or power, which we inherited from classical liberalism. The most recent of the great apes, it turns out, is a hypersocial being, whose subjective experience of the world is profoundly shaped by its empathetic openness to others, an openness that is not premised on any sort of fundamental or primitive goodness, but rather on the evolutionary mechanics of communication. Social psychologists, for instance, have discovered that in order to understand what someone else is saying we have to imitate the motion of their vocal chords (though in a much reduced fashion). We have to, in other words, become them. Neuroscientists have also found a specific type of neuron which corresponds to this process in the brain itself, the so-called “mirror neuron.”
Our identities, and therefore our desires, are profoundly affected by our cultural, social, and political contexts. To be free thus necessitates participating in the formation of the communicational contexts that affects and form us all. Freedom requires not only the freedom of expression cherished by classical liberals, but a certain freedom of connection – the power to shape the contexts in which this free expression happens. The freedom of choice advocated by classical liberals and their twentieth century followers confuses the fruit of freedom, the will, with its root. Likewise, those social liberals and socialists who emphasize economic independence while ignoring the other complex dimensions and processes involved in the creation of a free personality seem to be missing a significant component of the reality of the process of freedom.
This conception of freedom, if we examine it closely, suggests that democracy is not just a matter of elections or of constitutional rights (though it undoubtedly includes those concerns). Nor is the issue that of how “big” government bureaucracy will be. More fundamentally, political freedom consists in individuals and communities having the power to mutually affect each other and form each other. Democracy, understood from this perspective becomes a way of life rather than a formal mode of government, one that has consequences not only for the way in which ownership of the media of mass communication is organized for instance (a frequent complaint of the Sanders campaign is that this ownership structure is creating a bias in its coverage of politics), but also for every aspect of our lives, from the workplace to the bedroom, its fundamental principle being “equality of participation.” The aim of a “politics of freedom” in this context would be neither decreased regulation of the economy or increased government intervention but the creation of increased opportunities for participation by all members of society in both economic and political decision-making, regardless of their wealth or income level. Beyond the public funding of elections, one might imagine this agenda including decreased mediation of the mechanisms of political representation. Currently, for instance, the average ratio of representatives to represented in the US House of Representatives is something like 1: 290,000, making it extremely difficult for any but the most powerful interests to gain a hearing, regardless of the way elections are funded. And yet, there seem to be few technical impediments to cutting that ratio in half for instance. Any number of other reforms could be proposed that would enable greater citizen participation in the polity, from making congressional office-holders into recallable delegates in order to increase accountability, to instituting worker and consumer co-management councils in private corporations, legally entitled to raise concerns about the social and environmental consequences of business policies (corporations being legal entities to begin with, there seems to be little weight in the argument that this would be “undue government interference”).
Now, wouldn’t the transformation of everyday life from the standpoint of such a principle of “equality of participation” be the basis for a genuine “political revolution”?
“And these children that you spit on,
as they try to change their world”
The observation goes back at least to Bertrand Russell of an inverse correlation between how adamant a person is in their opinion and how much they know about the topic, but nowhere is this more starkly illustrated than when we come to questions of grassroots movement strategy. It seems every pundit this week – from the Daily Show to the New York Times to Fox News – has felt the need to weigh in on the protests that shut down Trump rallies in Chicago and elsewhere. And the consensus is that the protestors are SOOOOOO naïve. As Trevor Noah so respectfully put it: “It’s like trying to put out a fire by putting wood on it.” … “Ah yes, trust Bernie Sanders’s fans to have an unrealistic view of what is actually happening.”
Why this systemic condescension? In the NYT case, we are treated to a poll suggesting that many of those on the other side are really angry about the disruptions. In other cases, it is little more than a priori intuition, or some vague reference to the fact that Trump says he has enemies and now protestors are proving it.
But the question of how to effectively respond to a growing neo-fascist movement – one that has been building in this country for the last 30 years, involves a deeply disaffected and heavily armed population in control of many local governments and with a disproportionate representation among police and the military – is an empirical one. And in the case of most complicated empirical questions, it isn’t a bad idea to actually look at some research before launching into a lecture.
There are a number of routes to gaining knowledge of movement strategy, to a more informed judgment about the likely long-term effects of tactical decisions in a movement. You could read historical accounts of movements around the world and try to discern patterns. (One might start with books like Guns and Gandhi in Africa – ed. Bill Sutherland and Matt Meyer; or Protest, Power, and Change ed. Roger Powers, et al.)
Or you could gain some skills “on the job” by actually participating in the work over a long period of time. (Or at least read some of the experiences of folks who have, for example the
marvelous collection We Have Not Been Moved, ed. Elizabeth “Bettita” Martinez et al.)
People who are most knowledgeable in all these ways tend to be epistemically humble – to realize that it is very hard to predict the long-term effects of various actions. But they do, at least, realize that there are many complex and often competing dynamics and come to recognize some of the issues that go far beyond the local and immediate reaction. For example, one point of many movements is to make structural violence explicit and obvious. In the Civil Rights Movement, the daily indignities, oppression, and thwarting of life by segregation inflicted all manner of violence on blacks. But this daily violence of the system was easy to ignore. When people sat down in segregated restaurants, or walked together over a bridge, however, preserving the Jim Crow order required the use of literal guns, fire-hoses, chains, beatings, and jail. And the violence of beating children was something that others could see and react to far more easily than daily indignities and “dreams deferred.” Critics then, as now, said that these confrontations precipitated violence. And in one sense, of course they did. That was the whole point. They brought out direct, person-to-person violence. But the violence was always there, just operating in the shadows, where oppression always grows best.
And by pulling violence out of the shadows – turning in-group organizing to deport Latinos, ban Muslims, reintroduce torture, bomb more civilians, demean and oppress women, etc. into an open direct confrontation – one forces the masses of apathetic or undecided Americans to confront the situation. Yes, many of the readers of this blog hear of nothing else, but the majority of Americans do not vote, and are woefully ignorant of what is going on either in towns like Ferguson or in Trump rallies and Klan meetings. The long-term effects on this population is far more important to the evaluation of a movement tactic than the short-term effect on someone already convinced of neo-fascist ideology.
Or consider the way that movements put issues and concepts into the public debate. Would everyone talk about “the 1%” without Occupy? Would anyone be debating “Black Lives Matter” without Black Lives Matter, Ferguson Frontline, and other militant protests?
But the main point is that if you haven’t made an attempt to educate yourself in any of these ways, you really should consider the possibility that you have no opinion worth listening to. Rather than jump on a soap-box and lecture people who have been studying and practicing movement politics their entire life, might I consider listening and learning instead? It may, in the end, be a bad idea to directly confront Trump’s neo-fascist rallies, but the pundits insisting on this haven’t a clue. They aren’t even so much as attending to the complex long-term dynamics of how right-wing movements grow in in various political contexts, of how left-movements are nurtured, developed, and given confidence, or the way that apathetic or ignorant people are pulled into the conflict.
Take a moment to hear from the organizers about their goals and strategic vision. Take a social movements course. Take a movement history course. Take a peace studies course. Take my course Nonviolence: Theory and Practice, or one of the hundreds of similar courses around the country. Go to a meeting of the Peace and Justice Studies Association.
Otherwise, seriously, just stop. The “children” “are immune to your consultations.” And that is a very good thing.
