You Tube Video Transcriptions Plus Sources

Hi, and welcome. My name is Teri Kanefield, and I plan to do a series of short clips, about five minutes in length—which I guess is long by modern TikTok standards, but short by the old-fashioned standards I’m used to.

I plan to talk about how we got here, and how we can neutralize the dangers to democracy.

Basically, I’ll go back, and summarize and distill the things I’ve been writing about for the past several years. Instead of writing all out in a book, I’ll just tell it to you, in a series of small bites, which is quicker and easier (at least for me!)

I plan to start with the basics, and build.

Here we go.

So how did we get here?

By “here” I’m thinking of January 6, 2021 when the sitting president of the United States could incite an insurrection against Congress, and a major political party shields him. By here, I mean feeling we have that there are dangerous forces whose purpose is to undermine democracy.

When I say democracy, I mean a representative government in which all adults have an equal voice.

I’ll start with what we might call the progressive view of American history, which goes like this:

The founders started with some pretty good ideas. The idea of a government based on rule of law instead of the whim of a king.

The idea of an independent judiciary.

The idea of an independent prosecutor whose job it is to decide who should be charged instead of leaving it to the king, who might weaponize the judicial system to attack enemies, or perceived enemies.

The idea that all “men” are created equal.

These were good ideas. The problem was that the founders left out a lot of people out of “we the people.”

In fact, they included only white, well-educated, mostly landowning men.

The progressive view of American history is that as we’ve moved forward we have expanded who is included in the “we the people,” and as we did so, we’ve moved closer to the founding ideals and closer to a more perfect union.

We come to the Civil War, which expanded the electorate to include (in theory) Black men. I say in theory because even though the 15th Amendment gave Black men the right to vote, the reality is that Blacks were still not given anything like equal access.

Then we come to the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote—in reality, white women—but even white women were still largely excluded from the professions and government.

So, we’re moving in the right direction.

Now, in the early part of the 20th century, there were no laws against fixing prices, or manipulating markets, or insider trading. If someone sold you rotten goods it was your problem. You should have inspected better. Men (well, white men) who were willing to cheat a little bit could get rich.

Another way we’ve expanded who is included in “we the people” is through regulations that create fairness and allow more people the means and ability to participate in public life.

So we come to the 1930s and President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal, which was a way to try to increase fairness. The New Deal was a series of programs, and projects, and legislation. This was when we got the minimum wage, 40-hour workweek, worker protections. This was when we got a number of our regulatory agencies. We got laws against fixing prices and manipulating markets.

A progressive tax code helped usher in, for the first time in American history, a strong middle class.

But Blacks were still left out.

Then we come to 1954 and Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. This is the case that held racial segregation in schools unconstitutional. This is the case that kicked off the modern Civil Rights movement, which in turn ignited the women’s rights movement.

As a result of these movements, for the past 60 or so years, for the first time in our nation’s history, we began moving toward a true representative democracy.

Liberals view American history as an upward slope.

This is often taught in schools as if it’s inevitable, or as if liberal heroes of the past fought and won the battle. So now like we’re in a boat and we don’t even have to paddle. The wave of history and what is right and good will carry us forward to better more inclusive tomorrow.

Then, what happened?

According to this view, all was going well, and then, over the past 50 or so years, the Republican Party went off the rails and here we are.

I’ll stop here, and in the next clip, I’ll talk about an opposing view of American history. Thanks for joining me, and I’ll see you next time. Well, I won’t see you, but you know what I mean.

Now I have to figure out how to turn this off, and then I can start a new one.

Source and inspirations:

Most of the material comes from the research I did writing the last 6 biographies I published (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Thurgood Marshall).
While researching Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I found a lecture in which she talked about expanding “we the people” to include more people. She said that the phrase “we the people” in the Constitutions preamble directly proceeds “more perfect union” because the closer we get to including everyone, the more perfect the union.
Yale history Professor Timothy Snyder, in his YouTube series “Snyder Speaks” talks about how people were lulled into complacency by thinking that history naturally moves toward a better tomorrow, and were thus shocked and rendered helpless when Trump came along and “broke” the story.

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#2: A Zigzag View of History

It seems to me the only thing that makes this harder than writing it all out in a book is that I have to think about what I’m going to wear, and clear away the clutter in my office. Actually do miss footnotes, because I am getting all of this from somewhere, so I’ll attach bibliographies and sources.

Wait! What kind of nerd says I miss footnotes? All right, moving on.

In the last segment, I talked about the progressive view of America and American history. Now let’s look at a different view. Let’s look at America from a different perspective.

According to what we might call the reactionary or regressive view, when America was young it was a place of wide open opportunity. There was almost no federal government. There were almost no regulations. People (well, white men) could do what they wanted.

On the frontier, they could grab land.

Before regulatory agencies and most of the laws we have in place now, they could fix prices and manipulate markets. They could cheat. They could grab. They could sell you bad good and it was your problem.

According to this view, America started out good, pure, and free.

If white men were in control, it’s because they deserved it. According to this view, nature forms a hierarchy. A kind of natural order.

John Calhoun, who was vice president under Andrew Jackson, actually said slavery was a positive good based on inherent differences in the races. Women of course were seen as irrational and unsuited for a public life.

This is all a forerunner of the makers and takers theory, which says if you remove regulations and let nature take its course, those who are capable will produce enough abundance and create enough jobs for everyone.

If this sounds like myth, that’s because it is. White supremacy is a myth.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson, in her book, How the South Won the Civil War, talks about the cowboy myth: The white man on his horse with his gun making his own way on his own ingenuity without government help. This is also a myth, but it’s the ideal a lot of people hold.

According to this view, the Civil War infringed on liberty by taking power away from local governments and by upsetting the natural order of things: The Civil War—or government intrusion—interfered.

Under this view, taxes are a form of theft.

Under this view, the programs and regulatory agencies of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt era are the beginning of a controlling bureaucratic, administrative state spewing regulations that infringe on personal liberty.

According to this view, American history is on a downward slope. Regressives feel if they don’t act quickly, the slope will continue downward until all that is good about America will be destroyed and forever lost.

What I’ve discovered from studying American constitutional history is that there are no slopes. There’s an upwardly sloping zigzag. I drew a diagram. (You can see this is a sophisticated presentation, complete with a diagram.)

The way I think of history how is progressives push forward, and reactionaries push back. So we do do, sort of mostly progress because they have never been able to push us all the way back.

So take the Civil War Amendments, for example. After the Civil War, progressives added the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution.

The13th amendment prohibited slavery.

Reactionaries pushed back against this got by devising a criminal justice system that puts lots of Black men in jail and puts them into chain gangs.

The reactionaries pushed back against the 14th Amendment due process and equal protection requirements for all people by holding that, for example, women were not intended to be included in “we the people.” The reasoning was, well, “infants and lunatics” are also people, but you don’t let them vote. So women are technically people, but they’re more like “infants and lunatics.”

Of course, the reactionaries pushed back against the Fifteenth Amendment allowing black men to vote by creating voter restriction laws.

While the reactionaries pushed us back, they were not able to push us all the way back to 1850, so there was some progress.

Reactionaries have been trying to roll back the New Deal ever since the 1930s, and have somewhat succeeded which is why our current income inequality is approaching 1920s levels.

The modern Civil Rights movement happened because of federal court orders and federal legislation like the Civil Rights act and voting Right Act.

The backlash against the Civil Rights movement started immediately, and we’re still riding that backlash.

The lawbreaking you see in the Republican Party is a pushback against the laws that didn’t used to be there, by people who don’t think the laws should be there.

So the moral arc of the universe does bend toward justice, but much more slowly than we’d like and with constant setbacks.

Seeing history as a zigzag lifts us out of a feeling of helpless shock when there’s a pushback and puts us into the mindset of, “Here we go again. We made some progress, so now they’re trying to push it back.”

Next, I’m going to offer a brief history of the two major political parties.

I hope you are finding these clips helpful and thank you for joining me.

Sources:

As with the first video, most the material came from research for the past five biographies I’ve published, in particular, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Susan B. Anthony, and Thurgood Marshall.
The “Infants and lunatics” argument I ran across while researching Susan B. Anthony.
John Calhoun, “positive good.” The full text of the speech is here: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/slavery-a-positive-good/ You will find Confederate defenders saying that he didn’t actually say slavery is a positive good.
The Cowboy Myth, from Heather Cox Richardson’s book, How the South Won the Civil War.

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#3: Democrats and Republicans (a history)

In this segment, I’ll offer a brief history of the political parties in America. One subtitle could be, “How the Party of Lincoln became the party of the Proud Boys.” Another subtitle could be, “How the Party of the Confederacy came to embrace Civil Rights.”

The Democratic Party formed while George Washington was still president. Initially it was called the Democratic Republicans. But you probably know that because you saw Hamilton. If you saw Hamilton, you also know Hamilton’s party was the liberal Federalist Party, and Jefferson’s party was the slave-owning Democratic Republican Party.

What you don’t know from the musical because it ends after Hamilton dies, is that after Hamilton died, his federalist party imploded. I won’t go into why because I promised to keep these short. But if you really want to know, I’ll tell you later. In a nutshell, the slaveowners won out here.

I’ll skip to the Civil War. The Democratic Republican Party was by then called simply the Democratic Party. It was the pro-slavery party of the Confederacy and agricultural America.

The Democrats wanted a limited federal government because they knew the North, if given the chance, would end slavery.

So Democrats vetoed federal funds for canals and highways and other infrastructure because they understood such infrastructure would strengthen the industrial north.

In 1855 the Republican Party, all called the “Freedom Party,” was born as an anti-slavery, pro-industry, pro-federal government party. It’s anti-slavery stance made it pro-labor and pro-Civil Rights. Well, as pro-labor as anyone was back then.

After the Civil War and the crushing defeat of the South, the Republicans had the power to pass pro-industry legislation including the building of infrastructure. Republicans, by the way, gave us our first income tax. As a result of the building of infrastructure, the industrial revolution boomed. Now the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful people were no longer plantation owners. Now they were railroad and business tycoons.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Republican Party split into two factions: The conservative pro-industry part and liberal civil rights part. By the 1920s, the pro-industry part took control. The Republicans dropped racial equality and labor issues from its platform and became the party of business.

Democratic Party base at the time consisted of Southern whites, agricultural America, and also factory workers.

Neither party championed racial equality.

This ushered in a long period of relative harmony between the parties—they respected each other’s “differences” because they weren’t that different. Both parties were basically ruled by white men.

President Harding (a Republican) in the 1920s deregulated business and repealed taxes. Money flowed into the pockets of business tycoons. Unregulated banks freely lent too much money. It was the age of business.

Meanwhile, laborers worked long hours in dangerous jobs at poverty wages.

Then, in 1929, it all came crashing down. First the market crashed and then came the Great Depression.

Enter, stage left, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his pro-labor New Deal.

Roosevelt drew blacks into the Democratic coalition, because they liked his pro-labor stance.

Republican, who used to want a strong federal government, now pushed back against FDR’s expansion of the federal government through the New Deal. They had the infrastructure they needed. Now they didn’t want labor rights.

The modern Civil Rights movement radically expanded the Federal government giving us the Voter Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act.

Libertarians, who don’t want any government regulations, the White supremacists, and the party of business found themselves with a common goal: Dismantle the federal government. For some, the ideal is to return to the 1920s, the age of business. Others want to go back even farther.

White Evangelicals, who used to be mostly Democratic, had their own reasons for opposing strong federal government. They think that problem solving should be left to the church. White Evangelicals were also now drawn into the Republican Party.

Nixon and Reagan actively lured White Southerners and rural Democrats to the Republican Party. Nixon talked about being “tough on crime” (which was code for putting Black men in jail). Reagan talked about “welfare queens,” cynically playing into ugly stereotypes of Black women.

The divide stopped being North v. South and became urban v. rural.

And here we are.

Here’s the question.

Is America, for the first time our history, on the cusp of a true representative democracy with all adults included in “we the people?”

Or, are we on the verge of an autocratic takeover?

The answer is both, because one caused the other.

Because the modern Civil Rights movement and modern women’s rights movement brought us to the threshold of a true representative democracy, the reactionaries are pushing back hard.

I’ll wrap this one.

Next I plan to talk about what political psychologists call the authoritarian personality. I hope you’ll join me.

Sources:

How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Zblatt (2018)
To Make Men Free, by Heather Cox Richardson (2014)
Grand Old Party, by Lewis L. Gould (2003)
The Democrats, from Jefferson to Clinton, by Robert Allen Rutland (1995)
The bibliographies from the books in my Making of America series.

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#4: The Authoritarian Personality

Hello, and welcome to segment on the authoritarian personality.

I’m not a political psychologist. So everything you’re about to hear comes my reading. I’ll attach bibliography and sources to this video so you don’t think I’m just making things up.

These videos are meant to be viewed in order. But if you go out of order, the “go in order police” will not come knocking on your door. No worries.

Political psychologists tell us that about a third of the population has what they call an authoritarian disposition. That 1/3 number is important and appears across cultures. The Nazis came to power with 33% of the vote. Le Pen won 35% of the vote in France.

Authoritarians exist on both edges of the political spectrum, but I’ll focus on right-wing authoritarianism because it has distinct features and it’s the danger we’re facing right now.

Political psychologists started studying the authoritarian personality after World War II to try to understand the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s.

The authoritarian personality describes the followers, the rows of people dressed alike raising their hand in salute, not the demagogic leader. I’ll talk about that separately.

The authoritarian personality is marked by deference to established authorities. Traits of the authoritarian personality include rigidity and cynicism. It’s also been called an anti-democratic personality. Those with an authoritarian disposition are averse to complexity. In the words of one political psychologist, they prefer sameness and uniformity and have cognitive limitations. They are, to use her phrase, “simpleminded avoiders of complexity.”

Remember, diversity is a form of complexity.

When they are not riled those with authoritarian personalities can be good citizens. They’ll embrace institutions and they’ll follow rules. They will support traditional values when those values are endorsed by the authority figure.

When they are riled, they can become cruel and tolerate cruelty in others. They can show aggression toward out-groups when authorities sanction that aggression.

What riles them is what psychologists call a normative threat, which is something that threatens sameness and order.

If you want an example of a normative threat, watch some of those Fox News programs. Trump governed by creating normative threats. He talked about invaders and criminals coming over the Southern border take what belongs to real Americans and upset the order. Authoritarians want order.

Order often manifests itself in a hierarchy.

Americans in the 19th century lived in a particular kind of hierarchy, which scholars call a patriarchy. It was a well ordered society with white men at the top and Black women at the bottom. The laws all supported this patriarchy.

Authoritarians were very comfortable in this ordered society.

Slavery was authoritarian.

Jim Crow was authoritarian.

Certain Evangelical churches are very authoritarian, with a rigid culture and a strict patriarchy.

Conspiracy theories appeal to those who are averse to complexity. Globalism gets complicated. Our federal government has grown complicated. People who are afraid of complexity are eager and able to see evil in it. A conspiracy theory a belief that some covert but influential organization is responsible for a circumstance or event. Conspiracy theories seem complicated, but in fact, they reduce complicated situations down to a simple explanation that fits the world view that enemies are attacking us from within. How Trump lost the election is complicated and may not make sense if everyone you know supported him. It’s easier to believe that the election was stolen from him.

I talked about the zigzag view of American history in the second segment.. I still have my diagram right here.

Political psychologists Karen Stenner and Jon Haight talk about the Authoritarian Dynamic, which is another way of talking about this zigzag.

The authoritarian dynamic works like this: Democracy naturally expands. People who are not included want to be included, and progressives (those who are not afraid of diversity) want to include them. For example, as voting rights expands, the electorate becomes more diverse. As the electorate becomes more diverse, and society becomes more complex, It then becomes easy for a demagogic leader to create a normative threat and rile those with authoritarian dispositions.

So as democracy expands, those with authoritarian dispositions react.

The authoritarian dynamic creates an ever present dynamic. Liberal democracy naturally wants to expand. Liberals want to keep pushing the slope upward. A certain segment of the population—those with an anti-democratic personality—will never be completely comfortable in a representative democracy. They will naturally push back against the a growing diversity.

This is why, in the last video, I said that coming to the brink of a true representative democracy will unleash a powerful reaction in those with anti-democratic dispositions.

Next, I’ll talk about the leaders which brings us to fascism.

Sources:

Karen Stenner and Jon Haidt, “The Authoritarian Dynamic,” in Authoritarianism in America: Can it Happen Here?” (2018)
Benjamin Saunders and Josephine Ngo, “The Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale” (2017)
Karen Stenner, The Authoritarian Dynamic (2010)
Theodor W.Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality (1950)

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#5: Fascism v. Democracy

Welcome to the segment on democracy v. fascism.

This will build on what I’ve talked about in the first four clips.

I talked about the liberal view of history, which that we’re on an upward slope and society will naturally become more inclusive. And I talked about the push back we can expect.

I talked about authoritarians and non-authoritarians.

All this leads to two different forms of government that appeal to different kinds of people.

By coincidence (or not) the form of government that appeals to authoritarians, also to appeals the Republican Party (for various reasons.)

German sociologist Max Weber, in his classic essay, Politics as a Vocation, written in 1919, outlined three sources of authority for government.

The first is traditional. This is the authority underlying monarchies. This says that we look to this family as an authority because that’s how we’ve always done it. This form of government has obvious problems and is exactly what the drafters of our constitution didn’t want.

The second form of government is Legal-rational or rule of law. This is where the underlying authority for the government is the law. This kind of government strives for fairness and it’s the form of authority we have in democracies. This one too has intrinsic problems. For example, it strives for fairness but it can never be completely fair. Why? Because there is always pushback and because the institutions of democracy are carried out by mere mortals.

What do I mean by the institutions of democracy?

I mean all those good ideas the founders had that I talked about in the first clip: An independent judiciary. Prosecutorial independence.

The third is form of government is what Weber calls personal charisma, which the source of authority underlying dictatorships and fascist regimes. Today we might say demagogue, or cult leader, or strongman.

One of the first scholars to study fascism was Robert O. Paxton. He called fascism a cult of leadership. He described characteristics of fascists. He said they tend to fall in line behind a leader, they move in lockstep and like to have sort of uniform or identifying clothing. (MAGA hats, anyone?)

That sounds a lot like the authoritarian personality.

So it’s obvious who a leadership cult appeals to. It appeals to people who look to an authority figure and who want to fall in line behind an authority figure.

Paxton also said the world’s first fascist regime was not actually born in Italy. He said the world’s first fascist group was the Ku Klux Klan. He said look, they even a uniform, th9se white sheets.

Yale professor Jason Stanley also studies fascism, and he talks about the leadership principle. This is the idea is that the leader is infallible, that his intuition is better than the academics and experts, and he embodies the mystic destiny of the nation.

Trump is classic. He made no secret that he believes his authority draws from his own instincts. Remember, he knows more about military matters than the generals.

Fascism is based on the myth. Remember, white supremacy is a myth.

One of the myths that we see across fascist regimes is the “we were once pure and good, and outsiders are defiling our nation.” That’s what White Supremacy is based on. That’s what “Make America Great Again” is based on. It’s a desire to loop backwards to a mythic time when all was good.

The first thing a fascist leader has to do according to Yale professor Timothy Snyder is to away factuality so that myth can take hold.

If fascism rests on myth, rule of law, in contrast, requires a shared factuality.

A court of law doesn’t work if half the jury believes alternate facts.

So fascism and democracy can’t exist together. To exist, fascism must destroy truth. To exist rule of law must uphold truth.

The fascist leader comes to power through legal means. After he is in power, he begins assaulting and taking apart rule of law and democratic institutions.

This is why fascism didn’t appear on the world stage until the old monarchies broke down and democracy begin trying to take hold in Europe. A lot of people don’t like democracy. I’ll expand on that later.

The charismatic leader offers an appealing alternative.

I said that fascism appeals to people who prefer an authority figure to rule of law. It also appeals to people who want to dismantle the American federal government because fascism destroys democracy.

I’m going to wrap this one up because I promised to keep these short. I’ll hope you’ll join me for next video installment of How we Got Here and How We Get Out.

Sources:

Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works (2020)
Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom (2019)
Timothy Snyder YouTube “Snyder Speaks” series.
Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (2004)
Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” (1919)

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#6: Crisis and Spectacle

Hello, and welcome back.

In the last few videos, I compared and contrasted two different ways of seeing the world, and two corresponding forms of government. We can call these two views the hierarchical view and the fairness view.

For fairness people, the purpose of government is to increase fairness, which happens through regulations, rule of law that treats all people equally and gives all people equal access.

Hierarchy people don’t believe fairness and equality are possible. Mussolini said democracy is beautiful in theory, but in practice it’s a fallacy.

If you don’t believe equality is possible, the winner is the person who gains power.

Professor Jason Stanley, who studies fascism, says fascism is a set of tactics for gaining power. Franklin Delano Roosevelt defined fascism as the ownership of government by an individual, a group, or any other controlling private power—which is basically what happens you privatize government to the point where the government is essentially owned by private individuals.

Oligarchy, to define our terms, is when government is in the hands of a few people who own the government.

So oligarchy is a form of government that happens when a few people gain power and solidify their place at the top of the hierarchy and come to essentially own the government.

When fairness presidents go to work, they do things like create healthcare for everyone, expand voting rights, create progressive tax code. Things that help everybody, including people at the bottom.

Fascists and would-be oligarchs can’t do that because if everyone has equal access you don’t have a hierarchy anymore.

So how do they govern?

Russian philosopher Ivan Illyin explains how to do it. Timothy Snyder writes about Illyin in his book the Road to Unfreedom. llyin was a Russian nobleman who went into exile after the communist revolution. He admired Hitler and Mussolini. He admired order. The nation, for Ilyin, was like a body. The citizens are the cells. Each remains in its place. The foot cell doesn’t try to be a brain cell, and the brain cell doesn’t want to be a foot cell and wouldn’t even try.

He believed in a natural order. He also for this reason believed fascism would eventually replace both communism and democracy.

Illyin disliked the middle class, which was always striving for social advancement. He believed that this fractured society and created chaos. He thought the rulers at the top should rule, everyone else should be at the bottom.

He wrote guidelines for Russian leaders who would come to power after the fall of communism so they would know how to be good fascist. Putin followed these guidelines, and people like Trump have imitated Putin.

For Illyin, the task of the oligarch is to preserve the status quo, which means preserving their own wealth and power, and keeping others in their places.

But you can’t tell the people THAT. So you tell them a good story.

You tell them the oligarchs are “redeemers” with a mythic connection to the destiny of the nation, and that they will do battle with the nation’s enemies.

The fascist leader distracts everyone with these battle so they don’t have time to think about why they don’t have health care. They create crises.

Made up enemies are safest. We know that from George Orwell.

Twentieth century fascist really went war, and that was their undoing.

21st century fascists prefer harmless or made up enemies. That way the fascist leader doesn’t have to worry about getting hurt or having his property damaged. Trump preferred harmless enemies—those homeless migrant families at the border.

The followers are so busy cheering on their leader (the strongman) who is doing battle with their enemies that they don’t have time to wonder why they don’t have better healthcare or why they’re getting sick or and don’t have the same quality health care as people at the top, There is something they want more.

They want safety and order restored. They want their enemies vanquished. Now the enemy is Antifa.

No matter how low you are in the hierarchy, there are people lower trying to take what’s yours. The migrants at the border are perfect. They’re very low on the hierarchy trying to come up and take what belongs to “real” Americans.

What Trump did is basically what would-be oligarch do. He gave tax breaks to himself and his pals, and riled up his followers against Black Lives Matters implying that Blacks are trying to upset the natural order take over the top of the hierarchy.

There are so many things wrong with that, but the point is that hierarchy people see a desire for equality as a threat to order.

Crisis and spectacle is how fascists and would-be oligarchs govern.

The main way they gain and solidify power is through lies.

That’s a big a big topic, so I’ll probably break it into a few parts in the next few videos.

I hope you’re finding these helpful.

Sources:

Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works (2020)
Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom (2019)
Timothy Snyder YouTube “Snyder Speaks” series
Emilio Iodice, “Lessons from History: The Startling Rise to Power of Benito Mussolini” (2018)

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#7 Lies and Liars

I want to talk about lies.

When we talk about liars and lies, we have to separate the liars who know they’re lying from the victims who believe the lies.

And it’s best to think of them as victims, and to think of the liars as cynically manipulating those with particular cognitive dispositions.

Lying and presenting myths as a way to solidify power goes all the way back to the ancient world. There’s an inscription called the Behistun Inscription (I hope I said that right). In huge lettering King Darius, who lived about twenty-five hundred years ago, presented the story of his life. If you believe him, his power was given to him by the gods, he never suffered a single defeat, and he single-handedly killed anyone who dared question his authority. The inscription is what scholars pseudo-autobiography. A leader creates a myth about his life to solidify his power.

Donald Trump came to power with a pseudo-biography, which went like this: “I am a successful businessman.” Of course if that were true, he wouldn’t be hiding his taxes and financial information.

Another form of ancient lie is what one ancient leader called “concealed wars.”

Let’s go back to the Mauryan Empire. That was in India. (the other thing that makes this harder than writing a book is I have to figure out how to pronounce these names, and if I get it wrong, the pronunciation police might come.)

The founder of Maurya Empire had a prime-minister who literally wrote a manual on how to use lies to win wars talked about “concealed wars” as opposed to “open wars.”

An open war is when two armies meet on the battlefield and have it out. The prime minister (I’m not even going to try to prounounce it. I’ll put it in the sources), said that open wars are a bad idea. Your own people can die. Heck you can die.

Concealed wars are when you spread lies to beat your enemies. This is much safer.

He gave examples about how to use lies to stir up jealousy in the enemy ranks and demoralize the enemy ranks. Basically you get your enemies all rattled. For example, he said, figure out how to get an undercover spy to spread the rumor that their king is cheating his top ministers. If you’re lucky one of them might even be driven to assassinate the king and then throw their kingdom into chaos. Think how much easier that is than trying to kill your enemy king in an open war.

A Soviet Union spy manual bragged that Russians had invented and perfected the art of disinformation.

Interestingly, that the claim that the Russians invented disinformation was itself a piece of disinformation, but it had a purpose.

By the way, the reason I know these things is because I have a book coming out on disinformation so I had to do a lot of research.

I’m telling you this because using lies as a way to weaken and destroy an enemy, and build up your own power, goes back a long way.

It’s used by people who are trying to consolidate power, which is exactly what the Republican Party is trying to do.

They didn’t invent this.

In the last video, I said that oligarchs and would-be oligarchs have a problem: If they are trying to consolidate their own power and maintain a hierarchy with themselves at the top, they have to enact policies that hurt their own constituents.

So what do they do? They lie. They invent enemies who are trying to upset the order and destroy and take what belongs to ‘real’ Americans, who are of course, white.

People who are lying on purpose in order to gain power are not going to stop.

Now let’s talk about the people who believe the lies. People believe lies for all kinds of reasons. The lie can make them feel good. The lie might reinforce their worldview. Trump told his base that you are the real Americans and you would be at the top of the hierarchy except for people taking what belongs to you. This made them feel good.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders explained that Trump’s lies pointed to a deeper truth. An example: Birtherism was a provable lie, but pointed to what Trump’s base sees as a deeper truth: Obama is Black. He’s not a real American.

Some people embrace the lies because the lies destroy, and they want to destroy.

Some people caught in these cults are not reachable. Some are your own family members. Psychologist tells us that mocking them will not help. The best strategy is to outnumber them at the polls.

Right now, one of the best vehicles we have for reaching them is the criminal investigations into the Capitol Riot because the people who participated were deep in these conspiracy theories. I’m reading their pretrial motions, and they’re realizing they were duped.

I’ll stop this one here and pick up next time.

Sources:

Bittman, Ladislav, The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider’s view. Washington, D.C.: Pergamon-Brassley’s International Defense Publishers, 1985, available here: https://archive.org/details/TheKGBAndSovietDisinformationLadislavBittman/page/n3/mode/2up/search/elite
The full text of the Arthashastra (written by Kautilya, prime minister to the Mauryan emperor, translated in 1915. Available here: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00litlinks/kautilya/index.html
Translation of the Behistun Inscription by Vanderbilt Professor Herbert Cushing Tolman, published by Vanderbilt University in 1908, available here: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/txt/ah/Persia/Behistun_txt.html
Sarah Huckabee Sanders quotation: https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/936…

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#8: Hierarchy v. Fairness

In a previous video, I talked about fascism v. Democracy, but there are problems with using the term ‘fascism.’ Scholars of fascism don’t agree on a definition, and the twenty-first century variety (I’m thinking of Putin) is different in fundamental ways from the twentieth century version, so it’s hard to use the term “fascism” with precision.

I think a better way to distinguish the kind of government that certain people want versus the kind that other people want is to talk about fairness v hierarchy.

Fascism is actually about hierarchy. The county is like a body. The foot cells don’t try to become brain cells.

The confederacy was a hierarchy. White supremacy is a hierarchy.

Hierarchy people, remember, think there’s a natural order. Some people belong on top. Others belong at the bottom.

For hierarchy people, the purpose of government is to allocate power. When they are in power, they try to grab more. They cynically assume everyone sees government this way.

They say there is always unfairness, life is always unfair, there’s always a winner and a loser, so they want to be the winners.

The idea that there is never fairness is cynical. Remember that cynicism is a trait of those with authoritarian personality. So this all starts to come together. If you don’t believe in fairness or equality are possible, if you think there will always be winners and losers, the top and the bottom, the guiding principle is how to make sure you’re not on the bottom.

Fairness people, in contrast, believe equality and fairness are possible, so for them, the purpose of government is to create fairness, to give everyone equal opportunity, and to prevent cheating. So they pass regulations that protect people. They create a progressive tax code. They outlaw cheating.

Hierarchical people see democratic or fairness government as giving handouts to those who don’t deserve it and hampering people at the top who they think can get things done.

So when democratic presidents go to work, he or she tries to figure out how to make life better for all people, like setting up panels to deal with pandemics and finding ways to make health care available for all Americans.

When hierarchical presidents go to work, they can’t do this. They think about how to maintain the hierarchy—with themselves at the top. They think if they try to create fairness others will replace them at the top.

That’s why Republicans think that good government means giving tax cuts to the rich and tyranny means mandating masks in a pandemic.

It makes sense when you understand that tax cuts for the rich, and no taxes at all, increases income inequality and maintains the hierarchy—it keeps the rich, who they think are on top because they deserve it, at the top.

On the other hand, health care for everyone helps the people at the bottom move up, which strikes hierarchy people as giving handouts and as potentially displacing themselves.

They see a demand for equality as a threat to the order and as a threat to their place on the hierarchy. Remember, hierarchy people always think there are others who are lower, even if they are phantom enemies at the gates trying to cross the border to take what belongs to “real” Americans.

When others demand equality or question their place at the top, they feel victimized because they think someone else what’s what is theirs.

Get that. They feel victimized by people demanding equality, because they don’t believe in equality so they don’t really think that’s what equality people are demanding. They think equality people are really trying to displace them.

In an interview in October of 2018, Melania Trump actually said, “I am the most bullied person in the world.” She doesn’t just see herself as a victim. She was the most bullied person in the world.

When you consider that she lives in opulent wealth, it’s ridiculous.

But, if she thinks her natural place is at the top, and everyone is supposed to accept that and treat her with deference and respect—and they don’t—she feel bullied and victimized.

Seeing the distinction as hierarchy v. fairness explains, for example, the GOP obsession with abortion, which really comes down to a woman’s “place” in nature.

I was talking about this on Twitter and someone asked me whether the drafters of the Constitution were fairness or hierarchy people.

The answer I think is both. We had both.

If we’d had only fairness people writing the Constitution, there would have been no slavery. Hamilton, who didn’t want slavery, said without that compromise, there would have been no union.

All through American history, fairness people opposed the hierarchy people. That’s what the Civil War was about. The confederacy was a hierarchy. I suspect this won’t stop. If you believe in fairness and you think the purpose of government is to create fairness, you can expect constant pushback from people who believe in a natural hierarchy.

This is why White supremacists like the Proud Boys and others have found a home in the Republican Party.

The Republican Party cynically rejects the concept of fairness and equality and embraces hierarchy. They think people who want equality are faking it for political gain.

Thank you for joining me. I think I’m about ready to move into how we save democracy from attack by those who embrace hierarchy.

Sources (the sources for this are the same as the sources for the video on fascism because the ideas here are entirely derived from the scholarship on fascism, in particular, Jason Stanley, who pointed out that fascists are threatened by demands for equality.

Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works (2020)
Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom (2019)
Timothy Snyder YouTube “Snyder Speaks” series.
Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (2004)
Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” (1919)
Source for Melania Trump’s quotation is here: https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/11/politics/melania-trump-be-best-initiative-bullying

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9: Strengthening democracy (the basics)

So, how do we save democracy ?

Well.

Democracy means rule by the people. Literally. Demos is from Greek. It means people or citizens. Kratos means power. The cure for a democracy in danger is more democracy, or what Obama calls “citizenship”:

In a tweet Barack Obama wrote this

If the universe is unfolding as it should, Trump awakened enough people from complacency and taught us that we are not riding the upward slope that I mentioned in the first video that will automatically carry us to a better and more inclusive future.

Democracy means we are responsible. My son is an American government class. The textbook opens by saying that democracy depends on citizen involvement, which makes sense.

Need some ideas? Here are a few.

Don’t worry about taking notes. I’ll attach a link with all this information to the video.

Want to really make a difference in politics and government? To use the slogan from a group that help young people run for office: Don’t just march, run for something.

Make sure things are done right. Be the person in charge.

If you can’t run for something, find someone who you know who would be terrific, and help that person run for something.

At the very least, find a good local candidate and help that person.

Now that Trump is out of office, the biggest danger we’re facing, it seems to me, is at the state and local level as extremists are trying to make it harder for people to vote. They also want state legislatures to be able to overturn the vote, if they don’t like the results. What they’ll say is that there was some kind of fraud so they will cancel out the election send own slate of electors, which is basically what some states tried to do in 2020, but couldn’t do it. The courts stopped them. Now they’re trying to change the law in their state so they can do this.

So the most important thing anyone can do right now is get involved in your state and local level politics.

Next suggestion: Be a Community Organizer.

Do you have a talent for organizing? If so, democracy needs you. One reason the Tea Party was successful was that they organized locally and put pressure on local officials.

If you’re not an organizer, join an existing group. There are lots of them.

Register New Voters. Stacy Abrams taught us what that can do. Start now. It’s not too early. In some states, you can become an official volunteer voter registrar. Find out what your state allows.

Next, be an Institutionalist

Our democratic institutions are under attack.

So what should we do? We defend them.

In fact, “defend institutions” is #2 on how to prevent tyranny on Timothy Snyder’s list in his book, On Tyranny.

He says “It is institutions that help us preserve decency . . .so choose an institution you care about— a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union—and take its side.

If you are a teacher consider an assignment requiring students to advocate on behalf of an issue of their choice or allow your students to substitute an assignment with a civic engagement activity of some kind. They are the future. Empower them.

Also, if you’re a teacher, consider assigning stories about young people who step up and do what the adults seem unable to manage.

Just look at the Parkland students, who, incidentally, were raised on a steady stream of dystopian novels in which young people save the nation.

Help People Become Citizens.

Another idea: subscribe to local newspapers and national journals that do good investigative reporting. If everyone does this, lots of money will get pumped into good newspapers. We need good reporters.

Don’t like Fox? Don’t buy from companies that advertise there.

If you can—and this is very important—get involved with your local elections.

Good poll workers help voters vote. Bad poll workers make it harder for people to vote. Hence the need for good poll workers.

If the 2020 election taught us anything it’s the importance of the people who administer elections and count the votes.

You can be one of those people. Figure out how in your state.

Make your views known

Put a sign on your lawn.

Of course, there’s the time honored : write letters to elected officials.

I’ll also add: Take a lots of mental health breaks

If you spend too much time on social media reading politics and you start to feel upset, get away from the screen. There are outrage merchants who get clicks and hook people by keeping them frightened. This happens in left-leaning social media as well as right-leaning. Fox News also hooks people by playing on their fears.

Yes, democracy is fragile. That is not new. It’s always been fragile, it’s just that a lot of people didn’t realize it before.

Nobody owes us a democracy. If we want it we have to work for it.

There’s a place for you. Find it.

I have more ideas, but I’ll wrap it up, and I’ll see you next time.

Sources:

Two of the ideas are from Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny. Other ideas come from my own volunteer experiences.

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#10: Hold on to your Ideals

In the first two videos, I talked about progressives who see history as an upward slope, and regressives, who see history as a downward slope.

Now I’m going to talk about people who see history as a straight line: The cynics and nihilists.

First, some definitions. A cynic is a person who believes that all people are motivated purely by self-interest and never act for honorable or unselfish reasons. They think showing virtue is “virtue signaling” and done for political gain.

In a previous video I talked about fairness people v. hierarchy people. If you’re a fairness person, by definition, you’re not a cynic, because you believe fairness is possible, but you run the risk of disillusionment when you realize there’s a lot of injustice and unfairness out there.

Democratic institutions are run by mere human beings and not all people are good people, so institutions will never work perfectly.

A nihilist is a person who rejects principles because they don’t believe they exist. This is also a person who rejects democratic institutions because they can’t be perfect.

Recall that one goal of active measures is to undermine confidence in democratic institutions, because when that happens, they fail. Nihilist and cynic and people who are hopelessly disillusioned go around saying things like, “The system is broken. It’s hopeless.”

Nihilism, cynicism, and disillusionment happen on the left side of the spectrum as well as the right. Here’s an example. A person on Twitter told me:

Then she said she’ll never serve again, because the system is hopelessly broken. Her words. Basically she didn’t get the outcome she thought was fair, so she wanted nothing more to do with any of it.

If you believe the system is broken and can’t be fixed, you have two alternatives: One, like this woman: tune it all out. That’s one alternative. But if enough people do that, democracy fails because democracy, remember relies on citizen involvement. So if enough people go around saying, “The system is hopeless broken,” it becomes self-fulfilling because if you keep saying it, and you persuade enough people to give up and tune out, you have created a situation where democracy fails.

If you think the system is hopelessly broken, the only other alternative I see is burn the whole thing down and start over, or, fall in line behind a charismatic leader who promises you that he alone can fix it. All right. That puts you in line with Roger Stone, so we don’t want to go there.

Obviously burn it all down is not a good way to save democracy. At least it seems to me it’s not a good way to save democracy.

Also, remember, one way to save democracy, from Yale prof. Timothy Snyder, is to defend institutions, which you can’t do if youre going around saying they’re all hopeless we need to burn them all down.

Some of this is the same binary thinking you get in the authoritarian personality, which goes like this: There are flaws, therefore it’s all broken.

Another form of binary thinking, which a lot of people throw at me on social media, is the “if-then” statement, that goes like this: “If Trump doesn’t go to prison, there is no rule of law.”

If-then works in science. If I drop something, it will fall. But doesn’t work in politics, particularly with sweeping conditional statements.

If a person commits a crime and doesn’t get punished, that doesn’t mean that there is no rule of law. Expecting every lawbreaker to get punished is not a reasonable expectation unless you want to live in a police state.

Nuance says, there are flaws and we work to fix them. Nuance says perfection is an ideal that we strive toward but never reach.

Another way respond to injustice and imperfection is to say, “What can I do?” Look at how the Parkland students reacted to injustice and laws that were wrong.

Yesterday people on Twitter told me that the system was broken when it was created, and it remains broken. They also told me that a single bad apple spoils the entire barrel.

Such people see history as a straight line. It was broken, it is broken. Because there will always be bad apples, it will always be broken

Nihilism.

Now, what is the criminal justice system that’s broken? An independent judiciary. Independent prosecutors. A jury of your peers. The right to counsel. And a lot of bad apples.

Trust me on this: People who reject the system because it is flawed would actually miss the system if it disappeared because there is only one alternative to democratic institutions, and it’s worse.

Change is brought about by people with ideals.

All we can do, as individuals, is try to leave the world a little better than we found it. Each generation must try to make improvements.

So if you care about democracy, hold on to your ideals. If we give up, autocracy wins.

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#11: The High Road

I’m back, like I said I would be.

This video builds on the earlier videos. It’s better to watch them in order, but if you don’t I will not issue you a citation.

I’ll start this one with a fact: The Republicans use hardball tactics. Remember when Mitch McConnell, then Senate Majority Leader, refused to consider Obama’s nomination for the Supreme Court because it was March in an election year. But when Trump was president, he jammed a Supreme Court appointment through in a few weeks in October, after the voting started?

Another example would be lies, Lies are also a hardball tactic. The lie that the election was stolen is a provable lie. So is the lie that there is widespread voter fraud.

Hardball tactics are technically allowable under the constitution. They don’t violate the Constitution. The Constitution doesn’t say “don’t lie.” That would be hard to enforce.

But they put stress on institutions. They weaken democracy by destroying norms and making politics not work.

One question I often get, which is usually phrased in the form of a frustrated statement is, “how can one party play by the rules when the other party is breaking rules and laughing about it?”

If both parties engage in democracy-destroying behavior, both sides will be damaging the institutions, and democracy will be destroyed. One side has to defend the institutions.

Harvard professor Steven Levitsky (I’ll give you the link in the sources) says that the GOP has resorted to hardball tactics because they see their medium and long term prospects shrinking as their base shrinks. This is partly because the party is mostly white Christians. These are statistics from Professor Levitsky’s lecture that he gave In 2019. In 1994, white Christians were 74% of the electorate. By 2024, they’re projected to be less than 50%.

Now that they’ve become a full-on white grievance party, their numbers are shrinking even more.

That’s why they’re trying to make voting harder.

Democrats, on the other hand, have better long term prospects because the Democrat’s base is expanding. So it’s in the best interest of the Democrats to preserve institutions while the Republican’s only hope is to smash them. If Democrats also play hardball, they’re helping the Republicans

Put another way: If you fight fire with fire, you burn the place down.

For democracy to survive at least one of the two major political parties has to uphold and defend institutions. You can’t defend institutions while you’re battering them.

What makes this hard is that norm and rule breakers have advantages. It’s harder to play by the rules. So how do you fight back while protecting and defending democratic institutions?

One way is what legal scholars calls anti-hardball tactics. Not fighting back with fire doesn’t mean you’re meek and roll over. It means you respond to in a way that mitigates the damage to the institutions without engaging in hardball.

For example, take voter suppression, which is based on the lie that there’s widespread fraud.

When Republicans enacts laws making it harder for minority communities to vote, an anti-hardball tactic is to mobilize the population to work around the barriers by mobilizing to get people to the polls. Later, after winning election by large enough majorities, the unfair laws can be changed.

I understand that rule breakers have advantages. It’s easier to win if you cheat. It’s easier to win elections if you shamelessly lie.

But the truth tellers also have an advantage.

Being on the side of truth is powerful. Standing on the side of democracy is powerful. So is standing on the side of making voting easier rather than harder for eligible voters. So is trying to enact fairness instead of maintaining a hierarchy. It’s hard to feel noble when you’re knowingly spreading lies because you think the ends justifies the means.

Moreover, there are more of us, which is why the Republicans are trying so hard to suppress the vote.

Some well respected political commentators advise Democrats to fight like Republicans.

It seems to me, why would we try to imitate people we don’t admire?

If Democrats start breaking norms, they prove true that both sides are the same. If they act like Republicans, who can see the difference? They prove that neither side cares about democracy.

If both parties are guilty, what’s a person (voter) to do?

If we want to save democracy, someone has to take the high road.

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#12: Outrage

Hi. Now I plan to talk about outrage.

I’ll start with how and why right wing extremists outrage their own people. Keeping their own people outraged is a fascist strategy. All modern fascist leaders do it. Yale professor Timothy Snyder calls it Sadopopulism. The formula works like this:

Modern fascists leaders need to hurt their own constituents. You can’t have a white grievance party if the constituents are not grieving. You can’t keep yourself at the top of the hierarchy if you allow people at the bottom the opportunity to rise up. You have to keep them down. Tell them not to wear masks and take away their health care. Keep them poor, and in pain so you can keep them angry.

I’ll take a recent example of this. Governor Abbott of Texas lifted the mask mandate and then blamed the spread of the virus on immigrants. I mean, you cannot have a clearer example than that.

Right-wing extremists also enjoy stoking outrage on the left. If you need an example, look at Marjorie Taylor Greene. She’s doing it on purpose.

Enraging the left serves a few purposes. First, it keeps the right wing base excited and engaged. They don’t think about the fact that they’re hurting. When the see that someone like Majorie Taylor Green incite panic and outrage on the left. Now they feel stoked. Second, when the opposition is spinning with outrage, they can’t think clearly. They can’t make a plan or look forward. Outrage keeps them in the moment.

Also, it baits the left into engaging in the same destructive tactics that the right wing uses. In fact, one person responded to my video about why the left should not engage in democracy-smashing behavior by telling me, “You can’t play nice when you’re fighting fascism.”

Well, that makes sense. If you’re dealing with someone like Hitler, you have to break the rules to beat him, right? But what happens if both sides in a democracy start breaking the rules? As I explained in the last video, if both sides break rules nobody is upholding institutions.

It’s instructive to point out the ways that the current Republican Party uses fascist tactics. It’s important to point out the things the Republican Party is doing to suppress the vote. It’s important to point out white supremacist attitudes. But stoking constant panic and outrage on the left also does harm.

This brings me me to leaders and influencers on the left try to keep their own people in a state of constant outrage. The good leaders don’t do this. Biden doesn’t do this. Kamala Harris doesn’t do it. But a lot of social media influencers do.

In 2018, a person with a large Twitter account assured me that if we don’t remove Trump immediately “by any means necessary” he will destroy democracy and we are doomed. I told her that there is no legal means to remove Trump as long as the Republican-led Senate is shielding him. She called me a bad lawyer and blocked me.

I’m a lawyer who thinks the quickest way to destroy democracy is for both sides to start breaking rules.

I actually stopped following a journalist in 2020 because he often opened his reporting with a phrase like “This is alarming.” Often it was alarming because he was making assumptions. I also noticed that when he kept uncovering ‘five-star alarms’ many of which turned out not to be, his popularity grew rapidly. Fear keeps people hooked and everyone wants to be popular. Just look at Fox. They keep people hooked with fear.

This creates a dilemma. When someone like Marjorie Taylor Green says racist things what do you do? You don’t want to normalize or ignore blatant racism. On the other hand stoking too much outrage can create other problems. Often it wears people out and discourages them. It might also motivate people to do the work but it can wear people out.

When left-leaning influencers stoke panic and rage on the left, it also, incidentally, keeps the right wing base stoked, which keeps right-wing leaders happy because then their people are engaged. You don’t want to normalize democracy-bashing behavior, but you don’t want to inadvertently encourage it, and you don’t want to raise the temperature and create more of that fighting.

So what do we do? I think a calmer reaction is more appropriate, like this, “That’s not the kind of country we want to live in, so we’re going to spend the next two years doing everything we can to vote her out.”

Panic never helps. It’s always better, even in an actual emergency, to keep a cool head so you can solve whatever problem is at hand.

Biden has been trying to bring down the temperature. If we’re calm and well informed, we’re better able to do the work that needs to be done.

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#13: The GOP is Shrinking, But . . .

First, an item of business: Now that I’m caught up on the Republican Party’s radicalization and what that radicalization means, and I’m moving into current events, these clips will get a bit longer, between 6 and 10 minutes.

What’s going on right now is that there is a pernicious effort across several states to make voting more difficult. The Republican Party has evidently decided if fewer people can vote, they’ll win. The move to make voting harder is based on the lie that there was widespread voting fraud. There wasn’t, of course.

Some examples of this kind of voter suppression: The Iowa governor has signed a bill shortening early and election day voting. In Georgia, the legislature is passing a law eliminating no-excuse absentee voting. In practical terms, this means a wealthy Georgian will still be able to vote from their second home in Florida, but a poor person who can’t get time off from work won’t be able to use mail-in or drop-off balloting. This kind of thing is happening literally in dozens of states. In the words of political scientist Michael McDonald of the University of Florida, we’re witnessing the greatest roll back of voting rights in this country since the Jim Crow era.

In particular, the Republican Party wants to suppress the vote in lower income and minority communities. There was a reason Donald Trump went on about Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.

What this new legislation will do is make it harder to vote. It will make the lines longer, particularly in highly populated areas. It will make people in these areas jump through two or three or four hoops, instead of none. It will make it literally impossible for some people to vote if, for example, they can’t get the day off work and there not allowed to vote absentee.

The reason the Republican Party wants to suppress the vote is simple: They are a minority party and they don’t think they can win without suppressing the vote. The problem the Republican Party has, of course, is that the message of white supremacy and tax cuts for the rich has limited appeal. They enact policies that hurt a lot of people, and a lot of voters don’t like that.

Remember, the Republicans won the popular vote in a presidential election once since 1988. They won the popular vote in 2004. Every other presidential election, the Democrats won the popular vote. After the Capitol insurrection, the indications are that the Republican Party is shrinking even more. Not too many people want to be associated with a party that thinks it’s okay to storm the capitol and stop the counting of votes. The changing demographics in the US are also working against the GOP. These stats are come from Harvard Professor Steven Levitsky. I’ll give the link in the sources.

In 1994, white Christians were 75% of the electorate. By 2014, they were down to 57%. By 2024, they are projected to be less than 50%. This is a problem if your appeal is to White evangelicals.

So the challenge that the Republican Party faces is dealing with a shrinking coalition. While they have an obvious disadvantage, they have several advantages. They appeal to those with an authoritarian personality. I talked about that personality type in fourth and fifth videos.

One advantage of an authoritarian party is that those with an authoritarian personality like to fall in line behind a leader. That’s one reason these far right wing, White nationalist parties have always punched above their weight. Lining up and moving in lockstep gives them strength. The leader signals the message and they all repeat it. They don’t mind if it’s a lie. That’s why they have a well-oiled media / propaganda loop: Fox News, conspiracy theorists, elected Republican leaders repeating lies, sometimes starting them. In Max Boot’s book, The Corrosion of Conservatism, he says that “in the name of unity,” those on the right will overlook things like racism.

Those with an authoritarian personality like order and dislike complexity and diversity. If you have a non-diverse party, it’s easier for everyone to be on the same page. That’s why Tucker Carlson said it’s never true that diversity is a strength. Another advantage: Authoritarians want to dismantle democracy and put one person in charge. Dismantling, or destroying, is always easier than building or preserving. They’re willing to lie and cheat because they want to destroy and the lies destroy democracy.

Authoritarianism also has a lot of appeal, more than you might realize. There’s no gridlock. Change can happen quickly because there are no checks and balances to slow things down. Democracy is harder. Ziblatt and Levitsky, in How Democracies Die, say that democracy is grinding work. It requires negotiation, compromise, and concessions. All those checks and balances slow things down. It can be frustrating. Setbacks are inevitable.

So the Republicans have a disadvantage: shrinking numbers. They also have an advantage: they fall in line behind a leader.

The Democratic challenge is the opposite. The Democratic base is growing. It’s becoming more diverse. Now that the Republican Party is a full-on white nationalist party, the Republicans naturally exclude a lot of people. This means the Democratic party potentially includes all of those people who are excluded by the Republican Party.

The Republican Party includes people who are cool with white supremacy. That leaves everyone else. Who finds a home in the Democratic Party?

Latino communities in Texas
African American communities in the South
Democratic socialists from Queens
Democrats from more conservative areas of the country
Asian communities in California

Some of these communities are traditionally a little more conservative than others.

To beat back the authoritarian threats, Democrats and all people opposed to authoritarianism need to pull together. This isn’t so easy because you have to pull people together who don’t naturally fall in line. Non-authoritarians like nuance, so they dislike simple messages. That’s why they tend not to stay on message. Sometimes people on the left also want change to happen fast and they’re impatient with the slow working of democracy. Some people who say they want democracy don’t really like it: They want rapid changes and they want everything their way. They don’t want to compromise. My way or the highway is autocracy.

The other problem is that non-authoritarians tend to get complacent. They’re often not as motivated. Why? Because they tend to see history as an upward slope cruising toward a better and more inclusive future. I talked about that in the first video, the Progressive View of History.

Now, there are two solutions to the sweeping voter suppression legislation being enacted in these states. First, Congress passes federal voter protection legislation, which Congress have the power to do under the Constitution. To do this, Congressional Democrats will have to get around the Congressional Republicans, who will fight tooth and nail against such legislation. We saw how hard they fought to keep people from getting COVID relief. I have not given up hope that such legislation can happen. Biden has been president under two months, and COVID relief was the first item on the agenda.

If national legislation can’t happen in the next few years (and if it doesn’t, it will be because of Republican obstructionism) we have to then organize voter protection teams to get people registered and too the polls around these barriers. Stacy Abrams is teaching the world how to do that. If the Republicans put up a barrier, we need to figure out how to get people over it. That’s why my own volunteer work the past few years has been in the area of voter protection. It’s also why I keep saying the most important thing people can now do is organize locally. If you need ideas, see my video on Saving Democracy.

SOURCES:

Iowa Voting Bill

Georgia Reporter on the new law in Georgia.

Tucker Carlson, “Diversity is not a strength”

GOP registration drop after Capitol attack is part of larger trend, MSNBC, March 9, 2021

Fox Viewership Plummets, Forbes, Jan. 16.

GOP Advances New Voting Restrictions, MSNBC, March 9, 2021.

Max Boot, The Corrosion of Conservatism

Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky, How Democracies Die

Steven Levitsky lecture.

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#14: COMBATTING DISINFORMATION

I’m going to talk about ways to combat disinformation.

Journalist Ben Kesling recently said:

I’ll add that Finland (which declared independence from Russia in 1917 and has successfully fought off Russian disinformation campaigns since) knows a few things about how to do this.

It’s not a coincidence that the same people who spread disinformation are also not interested in funding public schools. Remember from video #5, I talked about how fascism and democracy can’t exist together. Fascism relies on myth, and the leadership principle—the idea that the leader’s instincts are superior to the “elites” and superior to rational knowledge. He just knows. (So far it’s always been a ‘he’ and there may be reasons why it has to be). So to exist, fascism must destroy truth. On the other hand, Democracy requires truth and a shared factuality. So Democracy, to exist must uphold truth. So these things are always at war with one another.

It’s no surprise that someone like Putin has perfected the art of disinformation, which is one way that truth can be undermined so that fascism can take hold.

While doing research for my upcoming book on disinformation, I learned about Kari Kivinen, a headteacher in Finland, who explained how Finland combats disinformation.

They do it through the public school system. In math, they teach students how easy it is to lie with statistics. In art, students learn how an image’s meaning can be manipulated. In history, they analyze notable propaganda campaigns. Language teachers show how words can be used to confuse, mislead, and deceive. In primary schools, they use fairytales.

“Take the wily fox who always cheats other animals with his sly words. That’s not a bad metaphor for a certain kind of politician, is it?” —Kari Kivinen

In the U.S. we have people suggesting less education for people like officers. This is from author J.D. Vance:

We should eliminate the university degree requirement from the officer corps. It’s dumb to make people get a BA before becoming officers anyway, and it just may make military leadership less woke.”

One of the problems here is the anti-intellectual “don’t-listen-to-elites” schtick that the Republican Party has been pushing for some time is quite. When people like Sen. Ted Cruz from Texas (who has a law degree from Harvard) and Sen. Josh Hawley from Misosuri (who has a law degree from Yale) tell people not to trust “elites,” it invites mockery on left-leaning social media. Who are they? But “Don’t Trust Elites” is a dangerous message that erodes confidence in democracy. It erodes confidence in government. It erodes confidence in education while encouraging people to line up behind a Trump-like figure, who decides what is true and what is not.

America has a history of this kind of anti-intellectualism. For example, just before the Civil War, a Northern antislavery party arose called the American Party. They were also known as the Know-Nothings because they started as a secret order, and when asked about their party affiliation, said they knew nothing.

The American Party was antislavery, also anti-Catholic, and anti-immigrant. Until 1840, Protestantism was the dominant religion in America. After about 1840 came the first large waves of Catholic and Asian immigrants. The Know-Nothings wanted to restrict immigration. Their members viewed these new immigrants as strange, foreign, less American, and of course, less white. The party slogan was “Americans must rule America,” where “Americans” were understood to be people of northern European ancestry. Interestingly, or ironically, the No-Nothings called themselves “Native Americans,” based on the idea that white Protestant settlers were the first and true Americans.

Do these ideas sound familiar? It’s almost like the modern Republican Party took notes. It’s because America has a long history with this sort of thing.

A minority party with shrinking demographics has several tools for maintaining power. One, of course, is to suppress the votes from the opposing party. Another is through partisan gerrymandering. Another way is by keeping their supporters in a disinformation-propaganda media bubble.

One way to do that is by keeping people uneducated and distrustful “elites.” One way to do this is to underfund public schools and make college unaffordable to most people. I wrote a biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was raised in a very affluent family, and what was clear from researching early years of his life was that the wealthy had a pipeline to places like Harvard, they sent their kids to the right kind of public schools and they all just wen t to Harvard. Anyone who wasn’t wealthy or privileged would have a very difficult, if not impossible time, securing even a college education.

We made progress, and now, the reactionaries want to roll us back so that the “masses” are uneducated and don’t trust those who are.

That brings me back to one of the most important things we can do: Stay involved at the local level. Every election matters, particularly who is on your local school board. That lesson came home to me last summer when our local school district was trying to decide what to do about the pandemic, before there was much guidance, and one member of our school board made clear that he thought the virus was a hoax

We need good local officials to help us combat disinformation. The way to combat disinformation often is locally.

That’s also why one of the most encouraging things I read about the future of our democracy was Tweet from one of the officers of Run for Something, an organization that helps recruit young people to run for office:

So if you’re looking for an organization you can get involved with and support, consider supporting Run for Something. We need to get good people into local offices to help combat disinformation and to help secure our public education. Thank you.