Happy Warriors

In January 2009 each day’s paper, each swipe of the president’s pen, seemed to bring hopeful news. Wars winding down. Guantanamo closing. State Department abortion gag orders rescinded. Smart, sane cabinet appointees. Competence and caring throughout the executive branch. OK, economic appointees disappointed liberals hoping to decrease the power of  and hold to account Wall Street bankers. But overall, what refreshing changes! Springtime in Washington! 

Now it’s January 2017, and my social media feeds are filled with despair from the sort of people who hit U.S. streets Saturday in the large Women’s March protests. Among the concerns (in addition to those against a half-dozen or more cabinet appointees): 

Pulling out of international trade agreements threatens U.S. leadership in the world. The White House is trying to gag federal workers. The notion of civil service itself is under assault -- not surprising, given that Newt Gingrich, among others, has touted the G.O.P.’s desire to end the practice of civil service. (The 19th-century good-government policy holds that those working on the people’s behalf should be shielded from political winds as they do their jobs.) 

Meanwhile, members of Trump’s inner circle leak news of their boss’s instability like flowing spigots -- entertaining, perhaps, though I again wonder if such leaks feed a reality-TV narrative that serves to distract from actual policy.

And, back in the losers' locker room: how can Democrats resurrect political relevance? 

In any event, it’s clear that the Trump Administration intends to wage war not only with the press but with factual information itself. Example: If unemployment is not 4.7 percent and perhaps not countable at all, that makes possible the 2020 “Morning In America Redux” campaign, since things will certainly have gotten rosier since the 2016 days of 42 percent unemployment and American carnage.

Bloomberg columnist Tyler Cohen distinguishes between what a friend calls "bullshit" (political shading, diplomatically nuanced truths, doublespeak, deceptive rhetoric) and the sorts of bald-faced lies in which the Trump Administration has to date trafficked. Cohen opines that the usefulness of lies is manifold: to serve as a loyalty test for new underlings; to damage the credibility of those underlings and thus tie them closer to the leader; and to help push through policy changes fast, gambling that long-term credibility damage is negligible or irrelevant.

Academic Dawn Gilpin points out that the lies paint a picture needed to justify future policies. Millions of illegal voters? Runaway violence in Chicago? Unchecked immigration? Bloated government staffs? Rising abortion rates? "Politicized" scientific research on climate change? "None of these claims are true," Gilpin writes, "but they have to be said to lay the groundwork for specific actions."

Though mostly predictable since Nov. 9, this news flood has depressed or enraged a sizable number of Americans. My friends on the Trumpian side have noted lefties’ dismay with derision, glee, and bafflement. A friend with whom I sparred on Facebook wrote: “I understand the discomfort that you all feel. I felt that same way eight years ago. But you know what? I refused to allow myself to ride the roller coaster of depression like some of my friends. Take a wait-and-see attitude. Verbally protest that which concerns you. But for heavens sake, relax! I love all of my friends too much to see them in self-imposed agony.”

His comment led me to alter my outlook before hitting the Manhattan streets on Saturday. Without lessening my determination to be counted among those opposing the new administration’s plans, I decided to do so joyously. What surprised me about the event was how many marchers shared high spirits. No violence, little anger, lots of patience among people densely packed for hours. The crowds expressed not irritation but solidarity: Look how many of us there are! From where I marched folks were friendly, ebullient, wry, steadfast: Not in our names. We stand for another way. This is what democracy looks like. 

Such energy is almost absent on my gloomy social media feeds. So in the spirit of the happy warrior, I humbly ask concerned leftists and centrists to consider the following examples of engaging with those with whom we disagree. 

For starters, deep perspective matters. The indispensable press critic Jay Rosen demonstrates that understanding the political views of opponents helps him withstand the daily social media storm. 

Jeff Tweedy, boss of the rock band Wilco, spiritedly invites trolls into his tribe: “Sure, we live in a bubble. I'd love for more of you to share our bubble though! It's awesome! In our bubble I know cops and rappers and grocery store cashiers and artists and garbage collectors...so many decent people that don't really care that much about people being different than they are. ... I grew up in what I think might be something like your bubble. You should at least try this one! Come on in!” 

Most instructive: this piece from a Venezuelan reflecting on lessons of fighting a populist authoritarian, Hugo Chavez. My inadequate summary: 1). Chavez labeled his enemies in ways similar to the G.O.P.‘s war against “coastal elites.” 2). The goal of political engagement with the leader’s followers needs to be “Don’t feed polarization. Disarm it.” 3). Don’t try to force the leader out through non-democratic means, which only feed his message of populism and polarization. (“See how the elites hate me/us?”) 4). Find counterarguments that demonstrate to the leader’s enemies that we all in fact belong to the same tribe. Show that you’re human, that you share some of their concerns. 

When I responded Saturday morning to my Facebook friend, I agreed with his suggestion to relax. I noted that I was “not in agony; I'm concerned about the future of our nation, including the ability of all to march and protest and speak freely. That's why I'm out today.” 

His response: “We agree on more items than we probably realize. Including being concerned about the future of our nation. March on brother! Be safe out there. Peace!”

The New Regime

David Remnick, now editor of The New Yorker magazine, from 1988-92 covered Moscow for The Washington Post, where he won a Pulitzer Prize and a George Polk Award for his work documenting the breakup of the Soviet empire. A fellow American correspondent arrived in Moscow midway through Remnick’s tenure and wondered at the famously indefatigable reporter’s behavior at press conferences and other public events. Remnick would uniformly attend; but, standing or sitting at the back of the room while the luminaries made their presentations, his notebook would stay in his pocket. What the hell is the guy doing?, the reporter thought. It took a couple of months to realize that Remnick had done all his reporting in advance, knew that the dog-and-pony shows were news free, and that he attended merely to confirm what he had already learned. 

Remnick exemplifies expert foreign correspondence; American news organizations gladly allow their coverage of foreign lands, including those controlled by authoritarian regimes, to reflect news of moment rather than pomp, noise, and circuses. The best U.S. business coverage, too, routinely ignores the official product rollouts (save Apple’s) and finds news behind the scenes. But coverage of American political institutions has operated on different principles. Certainly the Fourth Estate trails a long history of brilliant political investigations that have uncovered corruption from Tammany Hall to Abu Ghraib. But the press has also long assumed that coverage of daily political events, Capitol Hill hearings and White House news briefings and Pentagon pressers, requires energy and industry. “Holding the powerful to account,” rationalize the press poobahs. While every campaign season U.S. news organizations investigate candidate backgrounds and analyze policy implications, at least since Theodore White’s heyday in the 1960s daily “horse race” coverage has dominated, especially on television. Who’s up? What’s the latest poll say? Who won the last 24 hours? 

The age of Donald Trump requires us as a political body to examine our first principles. For the news media, this needs to include such fundamental questions as, What is purpose of our coverage? How can we best inform the American people about what our leaders are doing in our names? It’s clear that the Trump administration will require creative responses; so far, I’m less than sanguine about the press's choices. 

Saturday, the first full day of the Trump Administration, featured the first White House briefing by press secretary (and Dickensian Name Of The Week nominee) Sean Spicer. Watch it (the stream starts 1:33:28), if only to witness the extent of Spicer’s righteous imperiousness. He took no questions but delivered an excoriation of press behavior of the past 24 hours. Interestingly, Spicer started by pointing out that a reporter had incorrectly tweeted that Trumpians had removed a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr., from its public place in the White House. (The Time magazine reporter later tweeted an apology, saying that security staff had blocked his view of the bust.) One tweet featuring a modest mistake by one reporter over a matter of little consequence would have warranted public mention by no past White House. But Spicer and Trump play by different rules. In the absence of an immediate political campaign, the media represent Trump’s prime adversary; on Saturday the President called his relationship with the press a “running war.” His main strategy: full-on propaganda blitz. Stories the White House dislikes are to be branded “fake news”; press errors are to be relentlessly documented in the service of tarnishing the entire Fourth Estate; and the press itself is to be branded a self-interested opposition party whose disclosures are meaningless because motivated only by hatred of the President. Each day will offer a chance for power to be defended aggressively and the adversary weakened. 

To this campaign truth, of course, is irrelevant. Spicer filled his presentation with mischaracterizations, half-truths, and falsehoods. Trump spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway later characterized these as “alternative facts.” We’re all just self-interested players batting around balls of information, Trumpians say; you’ve got your data, we’ve got ours. Nothing is true, and so nothing matters, except power. One can describe Trump as a master media manipulator. Or one can say that such manipulations are child’s play so long as the manipulator has no shame. 

The immediate response of (to take one example) The New York Times was amusing to read. Its main story on Spicer’s performance prominently labeled several of his claims falsehoods. (This would have been standard practice under no previous administration.) Since Spicer’s lies had concerned the number of Trumpian inaugural attendees, it also ran a story citing two "crowd scientists," a field of whose existence I had heretofore remained ignorant. 

Longer-term, I wonder if chasing such stories, even with journalistic relish (which is to say a relish for accuracy), contributes to distracting us from matters of more moment. Perhaps the news organizations have no choice: Trump's confrontational, Roger Ailes-style disinformation campaign may demand immediate response. Certainly Spicer will leap each day to the tune of his master, and following news in the Trumpian era will surely mean being tied to the president's desiccated ego. The spectacle would be comic were it less consequential.

Conservative analyst Eric Erickson (creator of Red State, now at The Resurgent, no fan of Trump) fills this post with invective against the press. But he points out that actual news transpired Saturday while the media wallowed in Spicer’s mire: the White House vetting likely candidates to fill the vacant Supreme Court seat. 

So I wonder if we would better adopt to Trump’s performances a Remnickian pose. (Jay Rosen, an NYU professor of journalism who is tracking our new era with insight, has started a hashtag to define what he thinks should be the Fourth Estate’s response: “send the interns.”) Trump will never tire of these machinations, will never run out of bright, shiny objects to toss. Will media magpies tire of fluttering about in response? 

A friend and former Washington Post reporter posted on Facebook this weekend that she has hesitated comparing Trump to despotic governments she’d covered, or of comparing his media strategy to those of foreign Ministries of Information. “But it is familiar,” she wrote. 

The time of hesitating is past. The Ministry of Information is here.