Mastering Trumpian Arithmetic: Why, In The New Political Order, 2+2=5.

The Calculation Of Tyranny: "If Trump’s White House is willing to lie about something as obviously, unquestionably fake as [their estimates of Trump's Inauguration Day crowd] just imagine what else they'll lie about. In particular, things that the public cannot possibly verify the truth of. It's gonna get real bad." - The Washington Post

 

ONE OF THE MOST CHILLING ASPECTS of Donald Trump’s political style is its sheer, amoral audacity. Like all the truly great political manipulators, Trump understands that whether or not something is true is a question best left to the philosophers. What matters in politics is what people believe to be true. And, when it comes to persuading people to choose unreality over reality; “alternative facts” to the facts themselves; Trump is a virtuoso.

There are two great literary illustrations (at least) of the Trump Administrations brutal ontology. The first is to be found in the exchange between Alice and Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass:

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”

“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,’ Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

 

The other illustration is contained in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four:

 

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five*, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”

 

So, when the White House spokesperson, Sean Spicer, flatly declares the equivalent of 2+2=5 by asserting that Trump’s inauguration attracted more spectator’s than Barack Obama’s; and when Trump adviser, Kellyanne Conway, justifies Spicer’s behaviour by referencing his use of “alternative facts”; how should we respond?

 

The temptation is to question the sanity of Trump and his team. “Just look at the photographs!” you shout in exasperation. “Are you people completely nuts! Do you think we’re all blind!” But, of course, these are the wrong questions. Because Trump and his team, just like everybody else, can see that Obama’s crowd was way bigger than theirs. Yes, their actions may resemble the behaviour of a terrible two-year-old, but appearances can be deceptive. There is method to Trump’s madness.

The Washington Post has reproduced a memorandum, supposedly penned by a former White House official, which sets forth with chilling clarity what the Trump Administration hopes to achieve with its 2+2=5 strategy.

 

Apart from immediately lowering the expectations of the White House Press Corps (because after Spicer’s opening salvo relations can only improve, right?) the author of the memorandum further argues that the Administration may also be seeking to widen the gap between the one-third of the American electorate who are Trump’s supporters, and the remaining two-thirds who are not:

 

"By being told something that is obviously wrong – that there is no evidence for and all evidence against, that anybody with eyes can see is wrong – they are forced to pick whether they are going to believe Trump or their lying eyes. The gamble here – likely to pay off – is that they will believe Trump. This means that they will regard media outlets that report the truth as ‘fake news’ (because otherwise they’d be forced to confront their cognitive dissonance.)"

 

The Washington Post’s anonymous author then puts forward another, even more disturbing, explanation for the Trump team’s dysfunctional relationship with the truth. By convincing a large chunk of the American population that truth and falsehood are fundamentally unknowable, the Administration hopes to induce them to disengage from politics altogether.

 

“A third of the population will say ‘clearly the White House is lying,’ a third will say ‘if Trump says it, it must be true’ and the remaining third will say ‘gosh, I guess this is unknowable.’ The idea isn’t to convince these people of untrue things, it’s to fatigue them, so that they will stay out of the political process entirely, regarding the truth as just too difficult to determine.”

 

The memorandum’s chilling conclusion: “This is laying the groundwork for the months ahead. If Trump’s White House is willing to lie about something as obviously, unquestionably fake as this, just imagine what else they’ll lie about. In particular, things that the public cannot possibly verify the truth of. It’s gonna get real bad.”

 

Fighting this strategy will require the US news media to demonstrate a measure of tenacity and courage not seen by the American public since the darkest days of the Nixon Administration.

 

Such demonstrations are never easy. As Orwell noted of the Nazi regime in 1943:

 

“Nazi theory [ … ] specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. [ ... ] The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.”

 

But almost certainly not as much as the man currently in command of the United States’ nuclear codes frightens us.

 

* It is possible that Orwell was inspired to use the 2+2=5 metaphor after seeing a Communist Party poster exhorting Soviet workers to complete Stalin’s Five Year Plan in just four years.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 23 January 2017.

Status Quo In No Danger From The "Left".

True Colours? The transgressive, system-challenging Green Party that marched into Parliament in 1999 has gone. In its place we find a slick, professionalised operation that has stood down the uncompromising passions of Rod Donald in favour of the sleek corporate reassurances of James Shaw.

 

IT’S THE LIES we allow ourselves to believe that cause the most harm. If the year just past has taught us anything at all, then surely it has taught us that. Never has the ability to separate objective facts from unabashed appeals to our emotions been more important. The alternative is to embrace “post-truth” (the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2016 international word of the year) as the norm – and that way lies madness.

This ability to separate truth from falsehood is much more important to those on the left of politics than it is to those on the right. Preserving and strengthening the status quo has always been the right’s prime objective. And since recognising things as they are is a lot easier than imagining things that could be, the right’s political road is the easier to travel.

The left’s considerably more daunting challenge is persuading people to embrace change. This requires creativity, organisation and raw political courage on a scale the right is only rarely called upon to provide. The first priority for left-wing voters, therefore, is to correctly distinguish political parties committed to defending the status quo from parties committed to its demise.

 

Accordingly, the critical question for left-wing voters in 2017 is a simple one: “Are Labour and the Greens parties of change, or parties of the status quo?”

 

The answer, sadly, is that both parties are committed to very few policies that involve more than marginal changes to the status quo. And even these minimal reforms are best characterised as policies designed to repair and strengthen New Zealand’s existing economic and social institutions – not replace them.

 

The Housing Crisis, for example, is resolvable only by a massive shift of resources in the residential construction sector from private to public. The scale of state intervention required to meet the needs of those currently denied access to safe and affordable accommodation would, however, have far-reaching effects on the wealth and status of middle-class New Zealanders. A private construction sector starved of resources would produce swift and serious knock-on effects for speculators, developers, landlords and, ultimately, home-owners.

 

Given the level of both the Labour Party’s and the Greens’ electoral dependence on important groups within the middle class (salaried professionals, small and medium-sized enterprises) and acknowledging the enormous difficulties associated with mobilising the marginalised communities most likely to benefit from a state-led solution to the housing crisis, the modest (and wholly inadequate) housing policies of both “left-wing” parties make perfect sense.

 

This same, class-based, reticence is evident across the whole of Labour and Green policy-making. In the case of the former, it is observable in the party’s labour relations policies. The reconstitution of working-class power by restoring universal union membership is simply off the agenda. Similarly, the tax increases required to substantially increase the level of government support for working families, beneficiaries and tertiary students forms no part of Labour’s fiscal policy.

 

Such policy initiatives as have been announced, the Future of Work exercise particularly, present an “adapt or perish” approach to the demands of twenty-first century capitalism. John Harris, writing in The Guardian, illustrates the cultural gap between contemporary Labour’s professionalised politicians and its increasingly marginalised core voters with the following, chilling, quotation from Tony Blair adviser, Charles Leadbeater:

 

“Strong communities can be pockets of intolerance and prejudice […] Settled, stable communities are the enemies of innovation, talent, creativity, diversity and experimentation. They are often hostile to outsiders, dissenters, young upstarts and immigrants. Community can too quickly become a rallying cry for nostalgia; that kind of community is the enemy of knowledge creation, which is the wellspring of economic growth.”

 

How long will it be before the Greens in New Zealand begin nodding their heads in agreement with such paeans to entrepreneurship and innovation?

 

Not long. Because the transgressive, system-challenging Green Party that marched into Parliament in 1999 has gone. In its place we find a slick, professionalised operation that has stood down the uncompromising passions of Rod Donald in favour of the sleek corporate reassurances of James Shaw. Worried about the looming apocalypse of runaway climate change? Then worry no more. The Greens will ride to our rescue with the mother of all technical fixes!

 

The status quo is under no threat in 2017 – not with New Zealand’s three largest political parties committed to its continuing renovation and repair.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 13 January 2017.

Death In The Arena.

Making America Grate Again: For the past week the world has watched with growing horror the fevered phantasmagoria of far-Right lunacy that the Republican Party is attempting to pass off as a political convention. Does the rise of Trump mark the fall of the American Republic?

 

WATCHING THE OPENING HOURS of the Republican National Convention was like encountering Bob Dylan’s prophetic visions made flesh. There were the ghosts of Belle Starr – resplendent in their blinding white Stetsons – all lustily cheering-on a procession of Trumped-up heroes, while the heads of chambers of commerce from across America looked on in ill-disguised embarrassment.

 

Even so, for sheer implausibility the opening day’s speakers would have taxed even Dylan’s surreal imagination.

 

Scott Baio – all grown up from his stint as “Chachi” on the television sit-com “Happy Days” – warmed-up the crowd. Speaking movingly to the teleprompter, he soaked up the startled audience’s applause like a parched field in the rain.

 

Bizarre enough for you? Well, you just wait, there’s more.

 

David A. Clarke is the Sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. Marching up to the podium, the gaudily decorated sheriff snapped out a brittle salute and almost immediately brought the Convention to its feet by declaring that “Blue Lives Matter!”

 

He was black.

 

The opening day’s theme was “Making America Safe Again” – making it just possible to discern the faintest outline of a rationale behind the Trump team’s extraordinary choices. If your slogan features a word as loaded as “again” where better to begin than with the Eisenhower-era certainties of “Happy Days”. And who better than a second-rate actor to sing their praises?

 

The same applies to the Convention’s response to the groundswell of anger and bigotry that has been whipped up by the recent attacks on police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge. Who better than a sheriff to make the pitch for law and order?

 

Not as good as Sheriff Andy Taylor from Mayberry, North Carolina, would have been, but Uncle Tom Clarke from Wisconsin was a more than adequate substitute. Better, perhaps, since having a white police officer poor scorn on the Black Lives Matter movement could very easily have been misinterpreted by the “liberal media”.

 

Not that was ever any fear of that.

 

The air of surrealism pervading the Convention’s agenda may have been disconcerting, but it was no more unsettling than the mainstream news media’s live coverage of the event. Veteran CNN broadcasters like Wolf Blitzer never batted an eyelid as the procession of freaks and fakes that had been billed as Republican movers-and-shakers made their way across the stage.

 

What’s been unfolding this presidential election year has been called “Post-Truth Politics”, and watching CNN’s coverage it’s easy to see why. The most mendacious misrepresentations of events; glaring sins of omission; outright lies: all are weighed carefully and analysed with the same ponderous gravitas of the seasoned news anchor. So determined are the big networks to escape the dreaded accusation of bias (in favour of what – the truth?) that all of them have steadfastly refused to acknowledge the blow-waved emperor’s nudity.

 

They justify this refusal to speak truth to power by citing their journalistic duty to remain “fair and balanced”. As if their failure to acknowledge the fevered phantasmagoria that the Republican Party is passing off as a political convention is somehow a noble gesture. That they will have to “balance” this week’s moral capitulation by presenting the Democratic Party’s Convention as a collection of equally freakish flakes and fakes only highlights the extraordinary damage “Post-Truth Politics” is inflicting upon the American electorate.

 

The Convention venue, Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena, is billed as the home of the “Cavaliers, Monsters and Gladiators”. That these are all the names of Ohio sports teams in no way detracts from the thoroughly Dylanesque symbolism. Cavalier in his treatment of Republican Party tradition, and the fabricator of the most monstrous political expectations, Donald Trump has, predictably, turned his party’s convention into a four-day television mini-series for gladiatorial poseurs.

 

The noted American blogger, Richard Escrow, describes the man who would be crowned America’s king as “a bloated bleached-blond Narcissus transfixed by his own silhouette” – and it is hard to disagree. Who else would subject his party to night after night of saccharine tributes to his own greatness from his own family?

 

No stranger to Post-Truth Politics himself, Britain’s new foreign secretary will have little difficulty in making sense of the Cleveland spectacle. Boris Johnson has made a special study of Rome’s imperial dynasties. His classical historian’s eye will recognise the apotheosis of Donald Trump for what it is: the death of the American Republic.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 July 2016.