Diatribes of Jay

This blog has essays on public policy. It shuns ideology and applies facts, logic and math to social problems. It has a subject-matter index, a list of recent posts, and permalinks at the ends of posts. Comments are moderated and may take time to appear.

26 December 2018

The “TMI Effect” and How to Save Democracy from Facebook


[For Democrats’ core values, click here. The Last Adult is Leaving the White House. Who will Shut Off the Lights? For how our two parties lost their souls, click here. For the dire portent of Putin’s high-fiving the Saudi Crown Prince, click here. For updated advice on how to drive on the Sun’s power alone, or without fossil fuels, click here. For a 2018 Thanksgiving Message, click here. For a list of links to recent posts in reverse chronological order, click here.]

Introduction
1. Drowning in TMI
2. Obsessive-compulsive responses to TMI
3. Psychological pathologies
4. Anonymous-sourced “news”
5. Believing in bulk
6. Letting your guard down
7. Facebook doing it all
Conclusion

Introduction

In common parlance, the initials “TMI” stand for “too much information.” My fiancée uses them whenever I put too much detail into a story, or whenever my details drift into biology in a way that offends her finer sensibilities.

The similar term “information overload” smacks of machines, computer systems, and global politics. It sits well in the mouths of nerds. In contrast, “TMI” is simpler and more human. It applies equally to individuals and machines. It fits anything from the oral telling of an anecdote to an algorithm digesting terabytes of data per minute.

What does “TMI” have to do with Facebook? As it turns out, plenty. Today Facebook stands accused of crushing personal privacy, supercharging hate, and destroying democracy with targeted disinformation and “fake news.”

Virtually all these charges focus in part on Facebook’s scope, scale and relentless global growth. According to a must-read profile, these aspects of Facebook’s business have been singular obsessions of its CEO Mark Zuckerberg. His early drive was to grow the Facebook “network” at all costs and to “Move fast and break things.”

That he has done. He has all but broken personal privacy by selling private user data to businesses, in addition to advertising. He has broken cultural taboos on racism, bigotry, misogyny and homophobia by allowing haters to post on Facebook. And he has gone a long way to aid our nation’s enemies, both domestic and foreign, in breaking democracy.

Zuckerberg’s single-minded quest for growth above all has made all three evil effects worse. Invasions of privacy get worse the more people’s private lives are revealed to more strangers. Hate breeds more violence and distrust when spread more widely. “Fake news” undermines democracy quicker the more voters see and believe it.

But details matter. The question is not what Facebook does, but how it does it. Broadcast radio and TV started reaching millions of people a century ago. Today, with the help of satellites, they can easily reach an audience comparable to the “[m]ore than 2.2 billion people, about a third of humanity, [who] log in [to Facebook] at least once a month.” But nothing quite like the impact of Facebook ever attended broadcast media, although Rupert Murdoch’s Fox gave it the old college try.

So precisely what gave Facebook, almost unbidden, the world-changing and global-order-destroying power that a century of broadcasting, also now made global, never attained?

The answer, I think, is an Internet capability remarked mostly by social-science theorists, seldom by nerds. The Internet is the first global medium to feature “many-to-many” communication, as distinguished from “one-to-one” (the telephone and telegraph) or “one-to-many” (traditional radio and television broadcasting). In theory, if Facebook signed up the approximately two-thirds of our human species that are not now its subscribers, every single member of our species could communicate with every other through Facebook. That’s something new under the Sun!

Why does it matter? The “extra dimension” of many-to-many communications multiples TMI in two ways. The first is an obvious multiplication of sources. Today it’s impossible for any single individual even to follow the daily news output of the six cable news networks—ABC, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NBC and PBS. How much more impossible is it for anyone to follow the daily output of Facebook’s 2.2 billion subscribers?

But the second way Facebook generates killer TMI is the clincher: unfamiliarity. Habitual viewers of cable networks can come to know the various news shows and their anchors and pundits. Often viewers can predict how they will report events, and how they might overreact to or twist things. With upwards of 2.2 billion possible “announcers,” that familiarity is impossible, even in theory. So receivers of what purports to be “news” on Facebook must either discard it utterly or assume it’s valid, unless they have the time to compare it to news from other sources and evaluate it fully.

In other words, when the source of your “news” can be anywhere and anyone on the planet, you have no basis for discounting or evaluating it other than comparing it to other sources. The need to do so vastly complicates the process of evaluating and crediting information—well beyond the simple expedient of crediting a known and respected source.

Unfortunately, that’s precisely what social media like Facebook have done to the average consumer of news from the Internet, at least the younger ones. In a single generation—and largely without training or instruction—social media have goaded the average Internet news consumer into abandoning a single or few trusted news sources in favor of myriad unknown sources, each of which could originate anywhere and with anyone on Earth.

That fact alone—the explosion of TMI occasioned by global, many-to-many communication—is responsible for most, if not all, of the social-media pathologies that researchers have observed so far. Here’s how:

1. Drowning in TMI.

Suppose you’re an adolescent smart enough not to confuse your personal self-worth with the sheer number of your artificial “Friends” on Facebook. Suppose instead you’re content with naming as “Friends” just the 25 peers whom you see and actually interact with occasionally at school and in your neighborhood. And suppose all of them are just as smart and only so name their 25 real-world friends as well.

If you also limit your Facebook privacy circle to “Friends of Friends,” then the circle will number 650. Lo, all of a sudden, willy nilly, you will have more “Friends” than probably 95% of people of my generation would have ever used that term to describe. All of them can communicate with you—about anything from a cool joke, through their athletic or dating prowess, to stuff their siblings, parents or teachers said. And since they’re on line, they can write you any time of the day or night, all 650 of them.

Now suppose every one of them posts a paragraph and a photo every five days. Then you have 130 paragraphs—maybe forty pages with photos—to read every single day, probably more on weekends and holidays. That’s likely to be more pages than you are assigned to read for your classes, at least until your college years. If you spend five minutes reading and responding to each post, that’s 200 minutes per day, or 3 hours, twenty minutes.

How do you keep up? How do you read and view all this stuff, day after day? It never ends. And snarky interactions on line or in the real world can penalize you if you don’t keep up. You could lose “Friends.” You could be made the butt of jokes or teasing. You could even be bullied online.

And so you have this 3 hour, 20 minute per day never-ending chore. It’s above and beyond all you do to study, maintain real-world relationships with your family and actual-face-time friends, engage in sports, or enjoy hobbies, music, specialized learning, or just restful “down time.”

If you sleep the eight hours recommended for youth and take a half-hour for each of three meals, this torrent of TMI sucks up nearly a quarter of the rest of your life. That’s a burden that previous generations of youth never had. And the less you limit your “Friends” (and them theirs!) to a real-life-possible numbers—the more you play the numbers game and go for quantity of “Friends,” not quality—the more the TMI assaulting you daily spins out of control.

Erratum: Earlier versions of this post assumed that the circle of “Friends” would have to include both “Friends of Friends” and “Friends of Friends of Friends” to reach a total of 625. That was a plain arithmetic error: 25 x 25 = 625, and the original 25 “Friends” adds to 650. I regret the error, which actually obscured the point about TMI made here. It only takes two levels of “Friends,” not three, to attain a potentially unbearable burden of TMI.

2. Obsessive-compulsive responses to TMI.

Once you start down this road, running down it every day becomes an obsession and a compulsion. You feel an obligation to respond to every e-mail notification of a post to or about you, and you feel a duty to read and respond to the post.

How do I know? Because something similar happened to me. It happened to me as a hardened, disciplined, veteran of three professions (science, law and law teaching), even at the age of 73. It happened even though I don’t use my Facebook account and completely ignore all the e-mail that Google’s Gmail automatically (and mercifully) tosses into “Social Media” and “Promotions” categories. My temporary downfall (now ameliorated) arose out of ordinary e-mail, not even social media, as described in a footnote.

The key to my understanding and correcting my own obsessive-compulsive conduct was noticing that I don’t do anything similar with offline newspapers printed on dead trees. My fiancée has a paper subscription to the New York Times’ print version, and I read it almost daily when at her home. Something about having to turn actual paper pages makes it easy to push the news aside when I have other, more important things to do. Often the paper lies mussed up on the breakfast table or the couch, with even stories I once thought worth reading neglected.

Not online. There’s something about the linear appearance of online media—and the ease of scrolling down—that demands attention and completion. So even I found myself reading all the online headlines in the Times’ daily newsletter on the arts and sports, although I have little interest in stories about artists and virtually none in professional sports. My compulsion to complete got the better of me.

Maybe I’m unusual. Maybe teens are smarter and more self-protective than I. But I think not. If I can fall into this trap after three highly disciplined careers and at the age of 73, and when my remaining time is short, surely teens can fall into it more easily when they have yet to establish strong habits of discipline, their interests are eclectic, and their remaining time on Earth seems infinite.

So bear with me, gentle reader, while I explore some logical consequences of the hypothesis that TMI in digital media is uniquely entrancing and compelling, especially when, as in Facebook, it seems to be mostly about you or come from your “Friends.”

3. Psychological pathologies.

If you accept the hypothesis of obsessive-compulsive behavior in reading and responding to social media, a lot of personal pathologies follow. The Web never sleeps. It never takes a vacation. It never gets sick and it never rests. It’s always on duty, even when you aren’t. So if you let it, it will treat you like a slave.

The first thing you will notice is that you have trouble keeping up. The TMI rushing at you makes you feel pressured, always falling behind, always a bit inadequate. And the more “Friends” you have—the more you try to keep up with them even though you rarely or never see them outside of cyberspace—the more pressured, failing, and inadequate you feel.

As you spend more and more time trying to keep up, you spend less and less time on things you actually enjoy doing solely for themselves: interacting with your siblings or non-cyberspace friends, playing sports or cards, listening to music, or just getting outside in the fresh air. You will also spend less time doing school work, and you may tend to shirk work that you do for money. Your grades and your “professional” reputation can suffer.

If you avoid sports and other exercise, your health will suffer, too. You won’t notice this at first, because you are young. But exercise is one of the ways the human body fights tension, stress, and fatigue. If your obsession with social media keeps you from sports and exercise, your lack of exercise will increase your feelings of stress, tension, and anxiety. It will exacerbate your feeling of being on an online treadmill; but unlike working out on a real treadmill, it won’t improve your wind, your health, or your sense of calm and relaxation. This is what we call a vicious circle; if it goes on long enough, it can lead to clinical depression.

These conclusions come not only from my own introspection. Careful studies of youth show that the incidences of anxiety and lonliness rise with use of social media. And that stands to reason. The joys of youth are being outdoors, using your young body to do miraculous things, and developing your social skills by interacting in the real world, where you can see people’s faces, “smell” their pheromones, and hear every intonation of their voices. The more you give up these pleasures for staring at an electronic screen, the more you deprive yourself of the delights of being young. How better to court clinical depression?

My stepfather was a writer and one of the wisest men I’ve even known. When he thought I was working too hard, he warned me, “No one, on his death bed, ever bemoaned not spending more time at the office.” If that’s true of work that provides financial rewards and a character-sustaining career, how much more is it true of spending time in a dark room poring over social media?

But that’s not all. There’s one more subtlety. Insecure people who think that having large numbers of Facebook “Friends” validates them as people can easily find more than the rest of us. They can start by “Friending” people they barely know and then “Friending” every one whom those “Friends” suggest for “Friending,” plus their “Friends,” and so on.

But what does this mean? It means that the most insecure people, the ones with the least interesting lives and the weakest wills, are most likely to encounter serious TMI, which puts them under time pressure and stress and further erodes their capacity for sound judgment. This scenario is tailor-made for softening up weak minds for fake news, propaganda and disinformation.

4. Anonymous-sourced “news.”

Unfortunately, Facebook’s deleterious effects on avid users only begins with turning the joys of youth into a never-ending online treadmill. Even more disastrous are its effects in killing skepticism and increasing gullibility.

Ever since the invention of newspapers, readers have been able to know the sources of their news. A newspaper’s title and masthead reveal the corporate entity, its owners and who runs and controls the newsroom. Reporters’ bylines tell who reported and wrote each story. As you read a particular journal, you get to know the various authors. You can judge their skill in writing and thinking. You can come to know their quirks, prejudices and blind spots. Then you can make allowances for their personal capacities and failings in determining what to believe.

Facebook is completely different. It allows chains of “Friends of Friends” so long and complex that the average user may has no idea who many of them are. Even if they use their real names, a user remote in a chain may “know” them only as a monicker, not as a person.

So you will not necessarily know the author of what you read on Facebook, either personally or professionally. In our example of 25 “Friends” and 650 total “Friends” and “Friends of Friends,” you will know for sure only your own 25, at least at the outset. That’s less than 4% of the total. And if some writers forward others’ posts or Tweets without attribution, you will not know a post’s true source even then.

Traditional reporting of news greatly disfavors anonymous sources. Reporters do use them from time to time, but only when the source has a good reason for remaining anonymous. Reporters can and do analyze the reasons: good reasons tend to corroborate, rather than undermine, the sources’ credibility. An example is a whistleblower or low-level White House employee testifying to others’ wrongdoing anonymously, so as not to be fired or suffer other retaliation by the wrongdoers. Apart from cases like this, reporters routinely name the sources of their news, so that you, the reader, can know both the source and his or her position in life in evaluating his or her credibility.

Why is it important to know who the sources of news are? People lie, exaggerate, mislead and “spin.” They also make inadvertent mistakes. People tout themselves and their work and businesses when perhaps they don’t deserve praise. This is just common sense, part of every person’s basic life skill. Newspapers give you the means to exercise that skill. Television does, too: often you can see the source and look in his or her eyes, right on the TV screen.

In denying you the ability even to know who are the key sources of your news, Facebook deprives you of the chance to exercise this basic life skill. It turns you into a child listening to adults’ instructions, or to their fairy tales.

This sad fact is not merely a result of Facebook’s peculiar operation, or of any other social media’s. It’s an intrinsic property of any form of many-to-many communication. Ordinary people who post online reveal or link their sources only if they have prior experience or training as journalists or academics, so that citing sources is, for them, a routine part of basic professionalism. Most people who lack this sort of experience not only fail to reveal sources; they sometimes confuse facts with opinion and can even get basic historical facts wrong. (In another many-to-many medium—online comments on news articles—I have seen comment authors express disbelief that Cuba was ever a US colony.)

5. Believing in bulk.

In general there are only three ways to recognize a lie. First, you might coincidentally know the truth and see the contradiction. But that won’t happen often with fake news because the whole idea of “news,” fake or otherwise, is telling you something you don’t already know, usually some breaking current event.

The second way to recognize a lie is to know the speaker‘s motivation for lying. But you can’t do that if you don’t know who the speaker is. Facebook, with its many anonymous sources, is dangerous precisely because it doesn’t reveal the ultimate source of many a claim, preventing you from even asking whether the source has a motive to lie.

The final way to tell a lie is to compare similar stories from other sources and see whether and how they match. If at least some of the other sources are known, and if the majority contradict the one you are scrutinizing, you are probably safe in going with the majority. I call this “believing in bulk.”

But on Facebook and other social media this expedient is no longer safe. Why? On social media it’s possible, and sometimes easy, for liars to create a false “majority.” They can use trolls and bots and other technical means to post many similar false stories anonymously or under fake names. So if you rely on “believing in bulk” today, you can become a sitting duck for Russian, Chinese and other foreign intelligence services, as well as for professional liars employed by political parties and candidates. All these professional masters of lying now know full well how to use bots, trolls and other, more sinister, means of multiplying their Internet lies.

If you seek truth and certainty in an uncertain social media world, you won’t find it by “believing in bulk.” You’ll find it only by believing in quality, namely the quality of reliable, known sources of news with no known motive to lie. Since social media thrive on anonymous and unknown sources, “believing in bulk” simply won’t work any more.

6. Letting your guard down.

The treadmill aspect of social media has other consequences besides stress, fatigue, anxiety and depression. Scrolling through, let alone responding to, posts of people you barely know (“Friends of Friends” and “Friends of Friends of Friends,” not to mention anonymous commenters) can become really boring and tedious.

At first it may seem interesting. But as the days turn to weeks and reading and responding become chores, the marriage of one barely-known person and another’s high-school graduation (let alone a third’s blind date) all seem to blend together.

This is where “clickbait” comes alive. In this boring, tedious, monotonous environment, the only things that stand out (besides key life events of real-life relatives and close friends) are stories that are unusual, surprising and sensational. They are what you come to seek, and they are what you remember. They are what you click on to “learn more.” And so they are the definition of “clickbait.”

In Senate testimony, Facebook has admitted that catching your attention through clickbait is part of its business model. That means its corporate and political clients pay to do everything they can to grab your attention through ads and “news” that are unusual, surprising and sensational.

For political clients, how better to create effective clickbait than through stories that seem too bizarre to be true?

In buying and selling, most of us know that, if something seems too good to be true, it probably isn’t. For example, if a salesman tells you a small compact car can go from zero to 60 MPH in a single second, you’re unlikely to believe him, at least if you know much about cars. But somehow when a political poster says things equally bizarre, social media freaks will often believe him, especially if the bizarre assertions comport with their pre-existing political prejudices or ideologies.

Three aspects of Facebook induce users to let their guards down to fake news and other lies. The first is the boredom and tedium of the social-media treadmill. The second is the lie’s appearance in the midst of routine notices of unquestionable veracity: relatives and “Friends” reporting real events in their own lives, with motives, perhaps, to exaggerate, but not to make things up out of whole cloth.

Third and final is the stress, fatigue and haste with which many users approach clearing their inboxes of Facebook notifications. Feelings of impatience and stress amplify the outrage that users feel in crediting “fake news” that presses their personal buttons. That outrage, occasioned in part by the stress and tedium of the social media treadmill, gives the coup de grace to skepticism and disbelief.

Why doesn’t this happen in print media? I think for three reasons. First, print media are “always there” because they exist in real space. They don’t evoke fears of vanishing from a screen or being lost, forgotten or mislaid by pressing the wrong key.

Second, print newspapers don’t have inboxes of notifications addressed to you personally, which you feel you have to empty. So they don’t evoke the same compulsive pressure to read, view and respond. Print media just don’t create the stress, impatience, and haste that trying to get through your personal inbox does.

Finally, print media (at least reputable ones) name sources and have reputations to maintain. Barely known sources on social media do not.

7. Facebook doing it all.

Facebook stands out among social media because it’s the giant. It reportedly has 2.2 billion subscribers worldwide.

But that’s not the most important aspect of Facebook’s size. It also tries to do everything. What started as an online means to keep college buddies interacting and socially engaged morphed into a tool of business that every firm now thinks it has to use, in addition to having its own website. Then Facebook morphed again into a tool of political information, disinformation and propaganda that every candidate and cause wants to use, and that Russian intelligence used to help elect Donald Trump president.

No one much cares if college buddies exaggerate or lie when they interact socially amongst themselves. And while businesses, too, can exaggerate and lie, they face limits, both legal and social, at least when they identify themselves. Of course every business on Facebook has every incentive to identify itself and its products or services. Have you ever heard of an anonymous Facebook page for a business?

So the main focus of evil spawned by Facebook is and ought to be its supplanting news media and serving as a massive conduit for “fake news,” propaganda, disinformation, and demagoguery. For it’s precisely in those applications that Facebook users have the greatest motivation to hide or confuse their real identities.

This analysis suggests some simple legislative and regulatory expedients to control Facebook’s most widely reviled impact: serving as the indispensable global platform for lies, fake news, disinformation and propaganda. First, Facebook as a company could be broken up, leaving the buddy-bonding and business markets in place but putting the politics inside another, more tightly controlled corporate entity.

Second, legislation could require Facebook (if not broken up)—or a separate political platform (the forced spinoff)—to rigorously disclose the party creating each political post and the underlying source(s) of information if not that party.

Accurately disclosing sources would cause no difficulty under the First Amendment, for it would not require controlling the content of the communication or becoming an arbiter of “Truth.” It would not force Zuckerberg to develop artificial-intelligence algorithms for “Truth,” but simply to identify what is “political.” A broad approach to that question would be appropriate, because the sole consequence of an affirmative finding would be mandating disclosures of sources. Every post about a political candidate or office holder, party, or cause ought to qualify, as should most posts about identifiable social groups with social or political grievances.

Finally, the law could provide strong motivation for accurate disclosure of the sources of the post and (if different) the underlying information by imposing significant fines for political postings made without the required disclosures. Fines as high as $500,000 per unsourced post would get Facebook’s attention and motivate compliance. This expedient would impose no prior restraint; instead, it would impose only permissible “time, place and manner” restraints on communication, by requiring additional important information about sources.

Conclusions.

The reason why Facebook has had such an outsized and sudden impact on human society is that it’s something truly new under the Sun. It’s not just another website, newspaper or broadcaster.

In a way, it’s a system that already gives one-third of our human species the ability to set up their own newspapers (focused mainly on the “society pages”) with minimal investments of capital and time. It is—as Zuckerberg constantly insists in ducking responsibility for the vast harm Facebook has done—just a platform. But it’s a platform the like of which our human species has never seen before.

There are other examples of many-to-many communication today. There are product reviews on Amazon and elsewhere. There are reader comments on online news stories. Both allow multiple creators to reach audiences of many. But these examples of many-to-many communication are limited by their purposes. Product reviews discuss the products reviewed. Online comments discuss the stories commented on. The big difference is that Facebook posts can discuss anything: personal stories, businesses and their products and services, and any aspect of politics, including fake news and propaganda.

As a many-to-many medium, Facebook originated for friendships and personal matters. It later adapted to business. Its recruitment for politics was perhaps inadvertent, until it added significantly to Facebook’s revenue. In retrospect it seems an unfortunate accident—a massive airplane crash putting global democracy at risk.

The question before us is how to ameliorate that risk most quickly and effectively. We cannot do it, either effectively or (under the First Amendment) legally by making Zuckerberg and his underlings arbiters of Truth. And there is no algorithm that can serve that function; there may never be. Even if there were, its use by or for anyone in government would violate the First Amendment.

Zuckerberg reportedly has tried to develop algorithms to detect “hate speech.” Those efforts would be laughable, if they were not doomed to both legal and practical irrelevance. A better way to detect hate speech would be to appoint three-person arbitral committees, each consisting of two members and one non-member of a hated group, with a supervisor to step in if and when a committee produced too many two-to-one decisions by the hated-group members.

At this primitive stage of so-called “artificial intelligence,” no one wants an algorithm doing a person’s job, let alone in such a fraught field as hate speech. Yet if hate speech and more subtle dog whistles were properly identified as coming from the Klu Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis or their lesser-known equivalents, it might not be necessary to suppress them at all. The chief danger of modern hate groups is that they keep a “low profile” and disguise their nature and origins, and social media like Facebook often let them.

No one really complains much about the exaggeration, boasting and lies that are endemic to personal posts, even among supposed “Friends.” No one much complains about misinformation on the myriad business pages on Facebook, in part because existing laws of false advertising and trade libel control exaggeration and lying by businesses through litigation directed at the source. Rather, the crux of Facebook’s deleterious social and political effects lies primarily in political speech.

So Congress ought to pass a law requiring that all posts of a political nature on Facebook and other social media be stamped prominently with their origin and the origin of their information. Sources should be stated not just with technical accuracy, but with real meaning. Imagine, for example, what might have happened if each bit of fake news from Russia’s Internet Research Agency had come stamped with a big legend, right under the title, reading as follows:
”Brought to you by the Internet Research Agency (“IRA”), St. Petersburg, Russia. The IRA is an official operation of Russian intelligence. It’s working hard to elect Donald Trump as president by presenting racist material to both whites and blacks to get them to distrust Hillary Clinton and Democrats. As far as Facebook can tell, the IRA made up the substance of this post; we could find no credible external source.”
Such labels on fake news wouldn’t break any law or violate any constitutional principle. Facebook could still collect revenue from the liars, at least until they wised up. Labeling wouldn’t cost Facebook much, although researching the labels would require staffing some news operations. Tracing Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and proxy servers, plus comparing fake news to real news, would be a lot easier to automate than determining what is Truth. (As an alternative, the law could require Facebook not to publish political posts from untraceable sources, easing Facebook’s technological burden of tracing.) It’s all worth a try, isn’t it?

The First Amendment generally precludes controlling the content of political speech, even if inaccurate. The reason is that our culture treats dialogue, not authority, as the sole legitimate means of finding Truth. But identifying both the source of questionable speech and the sources of the information in it would go a long way toward “defanging” disinformation, fake news and deliberate lies.

Forcing that identification with stiff fines for failing to make it could help curb Facebook’s mostly inadvertent assault on democracy and civil society. Then civil society might just have the time for teaching and experience to reduce the less disastrous, mostly personal, consequences of mushrooming TMI.

Footnote 1: In addition to e-mail of a personal and business nature, I get lots of news on line. I subscribe online to the Washington Post, and I get both its and the New York Times’ daily online newsletters. During the political crunch just before and after Trump’s election, I started reading Daily Kos, a progressive, near-daily, free-of-charge online newsletter with headlines linking to stories by obscure screen-named authors, nearly all unknown to me. And then the Times and the Post started up various other headline newsletters—one by the Times’ David Leonhardt (my favorite journalist) on his and other journalists’ opinion pieces, and one by the Post on science and technology.

Soon I found I was drowning in TMI. I spent hours per day just clearing my e-mail. When I skipped a day or two for work on this blog, social engagements, or travel, it was a big chore to catch up. I’ve since developed a few personal strategies to cut down the mass of material. But the chore remains alive, daily, seductive, demanding, and never-ending.

Footnote 2: Facebook earns “more ad revenue in a year than all American newspapers combined.”

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posted by Jay Dratler, Jr., Ph.D., J.D. @ 12/26/2018 02:23:00 PM   0 comments

19 December 2018

What Makes a Democrat?


[The Last Adult is Leaving the White House. Who will Shut Off the Lights? For how our two parties lost their souls, click here. For the dire portent of Putin’s high-fiving the Saudi Crown Prince, click here. For updated advice on how to drive on the Sun’s power alone, or without fossil fuels, click here. For a 2018 Thanksgiving Message, click here. For a list of links to recent posts in reverse chronological order, click here.]

Introduction
1. Equality
2. The “common good”
3. Free enterprise restrained 4. Reality and science
Conclusions

    “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”—King James Bible, Mark 8:36
Introduction

As my last essay showed, both major parties have fallen into the trap described in this biblical quotation. Their lust for power and their leaders’ naked ambition have caused them to lose their souls. They have forgotten who they are and what they stand for. They’ve lost sight of their core values and often have betrayed them.

There’s nothing “grand” about the Grand Old Party now. It stands for little more than an old narcissist’s ego. Its “principles”—if it still has any—can change on a dime with his whim. Its self-rediscovery will come only with Trump’s impeachment and removal, the party’s wholesale reinvention, or takeover by a third party.

But the Dems still have a chance to reinvent themselves. In fact, they may already have started to do so. The effort may have begun with Ralph Nader’s independent run in 2000. Bernie Sanders’ primary run in 2016 brought it closer to fruition.

It’s vital that the process continue and accelerate, for a party must have clear core values. They provide a basis for reasonable compromise with the opposition and a scale for measuring the party’s own progress and success. As our biblical quotation reminds us, winning elections is not enough if you betray your core values and the reasons why you got into politics in the first place.

Core values have little to do with fifteen-points plans, although they may point the way to concrete action and help evaluate it. You should be able to count a good list of core values on the fingers of one hand.

So here’s a list of only four core values that the Democratic Party has stood for, on and off, for most of a century, and someday might stand for again:

1. Equality

Democrats’ highest and simplest core value comes directly from America’s Founding document, the Declaration of Independence. “All men are created equal [and] endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights.” Today we see the word “men” as unlimited by gender, but generic, encompassing all of our human species.

This value is just a nondiscrimination principle. Democrats don’t discriminate against individuals based on who they are or who their ancestors were, or what their sexual proclivities are. Dems care about what people do in the public sphere, or what they do privately to children or non-consenting adults. Otherwise, Dems’ counterpart to equality is tolerance: live and let live.

The word “created” in Jefferson’s credo is key. It implies that we all start out with a clean slate.

Both nature and nurture make us humans perceptibly unequal as we grow, develop, become educated, and experience the rewards and vicissitudes of life. Yet Democrats’ core value of equality doesn’t contradict this or any other reality. What the “clean slate” rule means is that everyone is entitled to equal treatment before the law and by other human beings in public life, insofar as reality allows. There is to be no discrimination, no supremacy in mere identity, no misogyny, no racism, no bigotry, no homophobia, nor any other phobia based on characteristics that have no visible, indisputable and universally recognized practical consequences, like a missing hand or eye or a broken leg.

The inscription atop our Supreme Court building states the same core value another way: “equal justice under law.” The law and our courts are supposed to treat all equally, regardless of who they are or who their ancestors were. That’s also the meaning of the blindfold over the eyes of Lady Justice in the statue.

Among the realities that our law is bound to respect are a president’s lawful powers and Secret-Service protection. But a president who lies is still a liar. If the lie is official and serious, he or she is a still a criminal subject to prosecution and punishment, albeit perhaps not while in office. In important cases, impeachment and removal are options. If a president makes foreign policy based on the hope that a foreign adversary will let him build a hotel in its capital, he is still a traitor, and to be treated as such.

Thus a Democrat has no trouble reconciling the “Right” of freedom of religion with the “Right” of freedom from discrimination based on identity. If your religion disapproves of homosexuals, you have a right not to associate with them in your private life. But if you seek your State’s protection for your business, its property and contracts, you cannot refuse to serve homosexuals in your business just like any other human beings. The same analysis applies to every customer of every gender (including trans), race, religion, ethnicity, linguistic group, and national origin.

We are all the same and to be treated the same except when hard physical reality or lawful distinctions intervene. That simple principle and its direct consequences has made us the strongest, most just and most envied society in human history.

Among the most important “Rights” that this core value of equality protects are democratic and economic ones. The right to vote is most sacred, because it’s ultimately the logical source of all the others.

If you think there’s voter fraud, then you should find ways to detect and punish it. You should not make it harder or impossible for whole identifiable classes to people to vote and hope that, by doing so, you will discourage voter fraud. That’s taking a shot in the dark while discriminating against people by location, race or wealth.

You should not, for example, have 36 polling places in a county of mostly white people and only one in a county of roughly equal population with mostly black people. You should not make it harder for recent immigrants to own property, and you should not put pollution-belching power plants mostly or only where poor people or minority people live. These are rules that Democrats believe and that we need to revive in our nation as a whole.

Likewise we cannot have people of one race incarcerated and shot down in the streets at rates far greater than people of any other race. This is not something to shrug off or lament without action. It’s something to fix with great urgency. It’s a shameful gap between our ideals and our nation’s reality.

A bipartisan bill to reduce draconian sentencing for non-violent drug crimes is now approaching the president’s desk. It’s a good start, but it’s only a start. We need to attack this problem with overwhelming force and attention, as if it really mattered, which it does.

We are wasting the lives and the talents of our young black males by short-changing their education, putting them in prison, and shooting them down in the prime of their youth. There is no excuse for this—no rationale in good policy, biology or science. There is only a four-century legacy of lies, slavery, bigotry, oppression and poverty, which we must start blasting away in earnest.

Democrats believe that black lives do matter, just like all other lives. When we waste them with bad policy, we are spilling the substance of our nation. “They” are us. Once we get that simple truth straight, positive change should follow.

All these rights—voting rights, property rights, economic rights and environmental justice—flow directly from the core value of equality. But pride does not. Nor does any kind of supremacy.

It’s fine for various groups to take pride in who they are, as long as their pride doesn’t morph into delusions of supremacy. But it’s not the role of the state or any government to promote pride of identity, even including pride of traditionally oppressed groups like gays. If you want to strut your identity in public, our First Amendment gives you that right. Government cannot hinder you, but it can’t help either. For too often one identity has strutted its stuff only to oppress or intimidate another. Just think of the Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, or a few years ago Nazis marching through Skokie, a Jewish suburb of Chicago.

There’s a good rule of thumb for this core principle. It’s not infallible, but it’s helpful to consider in close cases. If you’re just doing what everybody or every other group does, then the core value of equality lets you proceed. If you’re just strutting your stuff, or if you’re asking for special treatment other than to remedy vestiges of past discrimination, you probably shouldn’t be asking for the state’s help.

2. The “common good”

Democrats’ second core value is closely related to the first, and almost equally important. Not only should people be free from discrimination based on who they are and who their ancestors were. They should also have equal opportunity to a good life, the “American Dream.” Whether they clean toilets and make beds in hotels or invent cures for cancer, their lives and happiness matter.

We Americans are all in the same big boat. We sail or sink together. We all matter. The cohesion that derives from that simple empathetic principle is what makes us strong as a nation.

This credo, too, comes directly from our Founding American documents. Our Declaration of Independence states our common belief that everyone has the rights to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Our Constitution states as one of its primary purposes “to promote the general welfare.” (emphasis added)

Our Founders packed a lot of meaning into that two-word phrase “general welfare.” As educated men of the eighteenth century, they were all familiar with the writings of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, the so-called “Utilitarians.” They believed in the Utilitarian principle of “the greatest good for the greatest number” because they understood that making everybody productive and economically secure makes society healthier, stronger and more cohesive. They believed that a society that leaves no one behind would be the freest and strongest in human history. So far, they have been right.

Perhaps our greatest demonstration of these ideas came during and after the Second World War. Two classes of people in our nation had been indubitably legally oppressed. African-Americans in the South labored under a regime of legal inequality called “Jim Crow,” and Japanese-Americans in our West were interned after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in what amounted to non-lethal concentration camps. Yet, however badly their kind were treated, the sons of both of these groups fought fiercely on our side in the War, for the mere promise of the words in our Founding documents. African-Americans fought bravely as common soldiers and as Tuskegee Airmen, and sons of Japanese immigrants fought in the famous 442d Brigade—the most decorated in our entire war—which liberated the deadly Nazi concentration camp Dachau.

After the war, the men and women who had fought so bravely came home from their victory with a new sense of purpose, honor and capability. Their new sense of self-worth motivated the civil-rights struggles of the 1960s. African-Americans threw off the chains of Jim Crow with the civil rights laws. Japanese-Americans got recognition and ultimately small compensation for their parents’ Internment. Women who had learned to work in war factories while their men were away began to contribute to society—and to their families’ economic security—as more than mothers.

It was no coincidence that this explosion of self-worth and societal recognition produced the greatest surge in productivity and economic well-being the world had ever seen. Our GDP rocketed upward. The massive war debt vanished. Our cities and suburbs blossomed with cars, private homes, small businesses and (in warmer climates) swimming pools. Our industry hummed like a fine Swiss watch, and we Americans invented television, high-altitude flight, the transistor, the laser, the integrated circuit, the digital computer and (later) the Internet, among other things. Beginning in the seventies, environmental and workplace regulation made our mines and factories and our industrial cities the cleanest, safest and most liveable of any in the world.

Almost all of this happened while the top rate for individual income taxes was 92%.

Then the right-wing ideologues got to work. Taxes were too high, they told us. Rules and regulations were stifling “liberty” and “freedom,” mainly of the strong and the rich. Regulated capitalism, they claimed, was tantamount to socialism or even Communism, which was still working its evil ways in Russia’s Soviet Union and in China. (They told this lie although no serious politician in America, let alone any major-party candidate, had ever so much as suggested getting rid of private enterprise.) Government, which had won the war and, through its sponsored research, supported all the new science behind this prosperity and happiness, was, they lied, the villain.

“Government is the problem, not the solution,” declared Ronald Reagan. When Reagan became president, he had had the least experience in public office of any president in our history, if you count the military commands of our general-presidents like Grant and Eisenhower. He had no national experience and only eight years as governor of California—a record whose thinness would later be surpassed only by Dubya’s six years as governor of Texas and Trump’s zero years as governor or representative of anything.

Yet these men joined propagandists on Fox and talk radio, plus rabid recent refugees from Communism like Ayn Rand, to make us forget all our Founders’ wisdom. They bid us ignore our Founders’ careful analysis of human government from ancient Rome, through monarchical Britain and Europe, to the European Enlightenment and beyond. They told us to channel our inner selfishness, saying “It’s your money!” They urged us to downsize and “starve” the very government that had made our society the world’s fairest and most egalitarian—and therefore the strongest, most prosperous and most innovative.

Our Founders had taken decades to study millennia of human history and the Enlightenment and condense them into a few shining pages in our Declaration and our Constitution. It was as if the right wing, with Reagan their avatar, had thrown those golden pages all away in favor of a lurid cartoon telling the rich and powerful to “go get yours!”

So far, the pinnacle of American civilization came during the postwar period, before Ronald Reagan told us it was every man for himself. It’s the function of Democrats, as keepers of the Enlightenment’s Flame, to build that pinnacle back, law by law, regulation by regulation, brick by brick, and (if necessary) strike by strike. They can do that by holding to the core value of the common good, the general welfare. No one can do it by giving every advantage to the strong, the rich and the powerful in the name of so-called “liberty” and “freedom.”

To reach that pinnacle again, we do not have to destroy or even wound capitalism or free enterprise. Far from it. Capitalism and free enterprise have proved themselves to be the greatest engines of human progress and prosperity ever discovered. But like a strong stallion or bulls in a china shop, they can break things if not tamed. It’s the function of a democratic society to put them in harness, where their power can serve the common good and general welfare.

One of the appalling things about our species is our tendency to run to extremes. Unrestrained capitalism can be rough on regular workers, to be sure. So what did we do? In the last century we humans tried to replace it with two authoritarian systems made up out of whole cloth. One, called Communism, was a fiction created by two writers (Marx and Engels) as a means to cure the massive oppression of workers that laissez faire capitalism had caused in the nineteenth century. The other, Nazi fascism, tried to curb capitalism by bringing it under the absolute control of thugs.

Neither dreamed-up system worked. Both systems failed miserably, causing cataclysmic wars that killed tens of millions. The battle between Communism and fascism was part of the motivation for World War II in Europe. The battle between Communism and capitalism we call the Cold War, which came within minutes of extinguishing our human species in the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.

We don’t need any more cataclysms. We don’t need to kill the horse or bulls or (in another metaphor) destroy and replace the machine. We just need to tame, civilize and train the animals, or to govern, adjust and calibrate the machine. We need to improve capitalism and ameliorate its rough effects on workers, slowly, carefully and intelligently, day by day, year by year, regulation by regulation, and strike by strike.

That’s what FDR and his “Brain Trust” did. That’s the kind of system that even Republicans maintained, at least under Eisenhower and into Nixon’s presidency. That’s what our Founders meant by promoting the general welfare and creating “a more perfect Union.” It’s a process, not a war.

As long as our species exists, that process will never end. Its goal will be to tame free enterprise to serve the common good and the general welfare, with emphasis on the words “common” and “general.” That may not seem a transcendent goal for a political party, but it’s the right one. It’s right for Democrats because it’s the essence of “democracy,” from which Dems take their name.

3. Free enterprise restrained

To some, Democrats’ third core value may seem anomalous, even incongruous. Ask the average Democratic voter whether he or she is a “capitalist,” and you will probably get a blank or hostile stare. But ask whether he or she believes in “free enterprise” and you will probably get a grudging “aye.” Ask the same of independent voters and left-leaning Republicans (of which Trump has made more than ever) and the “aye” will become more enthusiastic.

In truth, the two terms are practically synonymous. You can’t have free enterprise without the money (capital) to start a business. And you can’t have “capitalism” without the freedom to start and run a business. So both terms refer to a certain economic “freedom” or “liberty”—the freedom of individuals, alone or with others, to start businesses out of whole cloth, with nothing more than their own ideas and initiative and whatever money they can cobble together, whether from their own savings, their friends’ and relatives’, or organized capital markets.

Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court Justice and great African-American bringer of liberty, understood this point. He penned perhaps the most memorable paean to free enterprise to be found in the dusty tomes of Supreme Court decisions. It’s still worth a read by every Democrat and every American:
The antitrust laws in general, and the Sherman Act in particular, are the Magna Carta of free enterprise. They are as important to the preservation of economic freedom and our free-enterprise system as the Bill of Rights is to the protection of our fundamental personal freedoms. And the freedom guaranteed each and every business, no matter how small, is the freedom to compete—to assert with vigor, imagination, devotion, and ingenuity whatever economic muscle it can muster.”
Marshall hit the nail on the head when he compared the personal freedoms enshrined in our Bill of Rights with the economic freedoms protected by our antitrust laws, by so-called “competition law” abroad, and by our Constitution more generally. These economic or “business” liberties are as vital to our success as a people as those that came from our credo of individual liberty, equality and nondiscrimination. The fact that the right wing often emphasizes the former and the left wing the latter should not impede clear thought: both are vital, and both make us Americans.

The main problem is the word “capitalism.” It carries a lot of historical baggage. For Democrats and the left wing, it smells of exploitation, oppression, the last century’s bloody struggle to form and recognize labor unions, and their recent decline under globalization. It carries a whiff of longstanding labor-management struggles, in which workers battle with managers and shareholders over how big a share of the productive pie each will have.

But the term “free enterprise” carries little or no such baggage. It’s a more neutral, economists’ term. No Democrat ought to oppose free enterprise, as long as workers get their fair earned share of its proceeds.

I use the term “free enterprise restrained” for precisely that purpose. It means capitalism restrained by government action and by regulation, including the recognition and enforcement of collective bargaining, to insure that workers get their fair earned share of the proceeds of free enterprise. The terms “free enterprise” and “fair earned share” are more neutral and less loaded than “capitalism” and ultimately ought to prevail in Democratic political parlance. The trouble is that pols and the people often focus so obsessively on the last century’s cataclysmic struggles that they can’t think straight. They forget that workers need jobs, and that free enterprise provides them.

Whatever their tortured history, capitalism and free enterprise are America’s economic system. They’re far too old and established to be challenged as such, or to be replaced with a completely different system. An effort to do that would tear our nation apart, just as Russia did to itself in its 1917 Revolution.

In the last century, Russia and China, along with other nations, tried to replace capitalism and free enterprise with Communism. They gave Communism a fair and free practical trial—Russia for seven decades and China for three. Communism failed in both nations, and both voluntarily abandoned it of their own accord. No one but a fool would repeat those decisive large-scale experiments, which caused vast human suffering and economic dislocation.

The achievements of our system are equally important. Capitalism and free enterprise are directly or indirectly responsible for all our modern creature comforts, from the flush toilet and indoor plumbing to cars, trains, air travel, radio, TV, the Internet, computers, cell phones and modern medicine. Our American system—widely recognized as the world’s most enthusiastically capitalistic—either invented or rapidly adopted all these things and more.

When something is working that well, you don’t smash it and replace it, whatever its discontents; you fix it. That’s exactly what our pols did, including even Nixon, with “regulated capitalism.” They exploited strong, sensible regulation and collective bargaining by workers to produce the most finely tuned job-and-prosperity machine the world had yet seen. Democrats should understand this point and downplay or expunge any criticism, express or implied, of capitalism or free enterprise generally. (It’s OK to identify and fix the many flaws and discontents. That’s what Democrats do.)

A final point is political. Whatever their actual benefits and effects, “capitalism” and “free enterprise” are sacred cows in America. For every voter you might attract by using terms like “socialism” or “Democratic socialism,” you will alienate two more, in part because few Americans really know what those terms mean.

“Socialism” and related words are the kiss of death in American politics. They have been for over a century. Not only do they alienate individuals; they give Fox and other agit-prop provendors carte blanche to confuse the public and to tar and feather Dems. They provide the rope to hang Dems with and can even tie the hangman’s knot.

So Democrats simply ought not use these loaded terms. They should put the word “socialism” and all its many variants (including “Democratic socialism”) in a box. They should lock them away and bury the box. They should bury them deep in the same place where they put the “N-word” for African-Americans and the “F-word” for gays. Then Dems will be forced, each time they want to talk about health insurance (or anything else that requires collective action), to think through what they mean and express themselves with limitation and precision.

That way, they’ll get good at explaining the relevant economic principles so clearly a five-year-old could understand them. Then they won’t let demagogues bury them and their ideas.

Democrats once seemed to understand these basic points of applied philology, but today they sometimes forget. The point is so important that I digress briefly (in a long footnote below) into universal health insurance as an example.

Now that we’ve discussed the fraught “capitalism” part of our Dems’ third basic value, we come to the most important practical question: “what restraint”? Today, it’s not just a matter of environmental and workplace regulation, as it was in the seventies. Today’s corporations mostly rule our day-to-day lives in ways that monarchs did half a millennium ago and that the bureaucratic state did and does more recently.

The problem is that our Bill of Rights doesn’t apply to corporations (or to any private party) as it applies to government. That simple, vital and basic fact of law requires us Americans to rethink, for corporations, all the limitations and rights that took Anglo-Americans half a millennium to work out for governments.

Getting these limitations right will be the work of at least a century. Neither Dems nor anyone else can hope to complete the task in one or even several electoral cycles. But the journey of a thousand leagues begins with a single step, and that initial step is long overdue.

Civilization requires rules of morality and empathy. We cannot let an amoral and unrestrained profit motive determine what fake news and hate mail we receive, what lies about our public and private lives torment us, what Russian and Chinese spies can serve us on our own computers and mobile devices, and what intimate details of our private lives people anywhere, for good or for ill, can use for their own dark purposes. We cannot tolerate these things, at least, and have a real democracy, any more than we can have one when debtors are languishing in prison, poorly paid workers are sleeping and convalescing in our streets, or large sectors of our people are letting their native talents and intelligence go unused for lack of education.

Regulation of pollution, health and workplace safety covers none of these, so we need to develop entirely new fields of law and regulation. And we need to do so with full recognizance of the rights we already possess as human beings and the need to preserve them. If we fail, corporations will rule our lives from day to day, down the smallest detail, by the simple expedient of “take-it-or-leave-it” form contracts that we click to “accept” as we surf the Web. And they will silence our protests with gag orders and non-disclosure agreements, just as Trump is trying to do with the porn star.

Corporations will bind us in their own web of law, which they make themselves, backed by form arbitration clauses that our own Supreme Court has ruled enforceable. They will forge their own legal system, with their own hired lawyer-arbitrators as “judges,” dispensing with juries altogether. Thus they will force each of us, as consumer, customer or employee, to abandon not only all the protection of our American Constitution, but all of the protection of our Anglo-American legal system going back to Magna Carta.

If we let corporations do this, motivated by all the valuable goods and services they provide us, they will have carte blanche to rule us as lords did serfs in the Middle Ages. Our only recourse will be to use government to impose different, better and more humane rules.

When he mouthed his puerile credo “Government is the problem!” Ronald Reagan could not foresee the extent to which corporations would come to rule our daily lives just a few decades on. He had no idea that he was inviting free American workers and consumers to become a new class of serfs.

But we Democrats know today. The Big Five—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft—among others, have taught us well.

So we have to develop a new regime of human rights for the twenty-first century, one that will restrain the oppression (both willful and unintended) of corporations just as the Bill of Rights sought to restrain oppression by monarchs and even democratic governments in the past. Here are three basic principles that Democrats should consider as they work on that new regime of humanity:
    A. Corporations are not people and have no human rights.
The underlying principle of Citizens United—that corporations are “people” with all their human rights—has a checkered pedigree. It began with the notion that corporations are “citizens” with all the “privileges and immunities” thereof under Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution. That so-called “Privileges and Immunities Clause” is what knits our nation of fifty sovereign states into a single economic zone. It gives “the citizens of each state . . . all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states.”

During the our nation’s westward development phase, we grew from thirteen original states to fifty, plus several territories. As we did, it was practically necessary to apply the Privileges and Immunities clause to inanimate corporations. Otherwise, corporate businesses might suffer exclusion or discrimination from state to state merely because they were not created or domiciled in the state where they happened to be doing business.

The Clause knits our federal nation and its myriad businesses into a single social and economic entity. Without it, the states could tax and exclude people and corporations from other states and make a mess of the single economic zone that our Founders envisaged, anticipating the EU by two centuries.

The problem came with the argument that, if corporations are “citizens” under the Privileges and Immunities Clause, they must be “people” under the Bill of Rights because “citizens” can’t be inanimate, let alone legal abstractions.

Although consistent with abstract verbal reasoning, this conclusion made absolutely no practical sense. Corporations are not alive; they are abstractions. Giving them human rights simply elevates the people who own and run them above others, violating Democrats’ core value of equality. The wholly predictable result of this misguided “logical” decision has been skyrocketing inequality, massive corruption, and unwanted intrusion of corporations and their managers into aspects of human life far removed from their natural industrial and economic purviews.

The Citizens United decision that occasioned these results is a legal abomination. It’s a classic example of Jonathan Swift’s dictum that sometimes “the law is an ass.” It belongs in the dustbin of history, along with the Supreme Court’s other vast blunders: Plessy v. Ferguson, which declared “separate but equal” education for some of us adequate in a nation of equals, and Dredd Scott, which kick-started our Civil War by forcing citizens of free states to capture and return runaway slaves. Statistically, Citizens United is even worse: while the white-supremacy decisions oppressed only a 12% minority of us, Citizens United oppresses 99% of us—all but the 1% who benefit from speech more equal than others’.

So one core principle of Democrats’ restraints on free enterprise ought to be somehow reversing Citizens United. Corporations are not alive. They are not people. And even if they seem to represent people, the ones they represent are the ones who own and run them, i.e., the most privileged and powerful people in our society. To give corporations human rights, including separate rights of speech, is to elevate the privileged and powerful even further above the rest, contradicting the first principles of American democracy.

Therefore, corporations should have no human rights whatsoever, apart from those of the people who own, manage and work in them. They should have the same “privileges and immunities” as if they were citizens, so that they can operate in every one of the fifty states as if they were at home. But the people who own and run them should have no more rights as human beings simply by virtue of that ownership and management. Otherwise, we Americans would be living the fiction of Animal Farm, where some were more equal than others. That novel was supposed to be a parody of the old Soviet Union.

There may be a relatively simple way to achieve this desirable result legally. Congress could pass, and the president could sign, a law giving corporations the privileges and immunities of citizens as if they were people, under the Interstate Commerce Clause. (Almost by definition, any corporation requiring those privileges and immunities would be operating in interstate commerce.) Then the Supreme Court, in a test case, could reverse Citizens United as unnecessary for interstate commerce and incorrectly decided, relying on the rule that recent precedents are more subject to reversal than older ones. The old cases on privileges and immunities could remain on the books, impliedly repudiated on the issue of corporate personhood but reinforced by the congressional statute on the issue of privileges and immunities. Then Congress would be free to pass reasonable restraints on corporate speech as such and the misuse of corporate money, especially “dark” money, in politics.
    B. Corporations are not free to disseminate their own or anyone else’s lies.
The most important thing to understand about America’s First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech, is that it doesn’t work against corporations. On the contrary. Under certain circumstances, it can protect corporations’ speech, including lies and fake news, even when corporations are careless (but not reckless or deliberate) in publishing them.

So there is virtually no chance, under current law, that our government, by itself, could stop the flood of lies and fake news on corporate platforms over the Internet by legal action alone. We’re going to have to find some other way.

The problem is not, as in the case of Citizens United, just a matter of thoughtless and mischevious law. It’s fundamental to our system. Our Constitution reflects the supreme value we put on private speech criticizing our government, even when it’s wrong. We believe in a “marketplace of ideas,” in which good and right speech supposedly will prevail over bad and wrong (inaccurate) speech, as free citizens compare both. And we’ve traditionally relied on that “marketplace of ideas” to keep government and our public officials honest.

The problem is that our Founders, who drafted the First Amendment, never came close to conceiving of anything like our Internet. In their time, you had to have a printing press to make a big impact, and only substantial property owners did. Now, using Facebook and other similar digital platforms, anyone with access to a public library—indeed, anyone in the world, even a Russian or Chinese intelligence agent who writes English—can have access to tens or hundreds of millions of American readers, at virtually no cost, and virtually instantaneously. In some cases he can promulgate lies or fake news to large fractions of the American public. As our Senate’s recently released reports of its investigations reveal, that’s precisely what happened in our 2016 elections.

Lies and fake news of this sort overwhelm our legal and practical defenses in three ways. First, they allow massive and instantaneous publication of a kind that never existed in human history before the Internet went live in 1996, just twenty-two years ago. Never before in human history could a single individual (let alone hundreds), with assets no more expensive than access to a public library, put lies and fake news in credible format before hundreds of millions of people with just a couple of hours work.

Second, the lies and fake news confront an American public unaccustomed to (and unprepared by education and training for) massive volumes of propaganda and disinformation. Until recently, propaganda and fake news were something Americans dabbled in as part of rare training in how foreign totalitarian states operate by deluding their “masses.” Now any individual can get in the act, and any American can be its victim or its perpetrator.

Finally, the sheer volume and variety of fake news on the Web can induce voters to “just give up,” concluding that “nothing is real” and “it’s impossible to know anything for sure.” This supine state of mind can lead voters to believe only what they want to believe, regardless of evidence—a point toward which Russian intelligence services have deliberately tried to drive American voters.

To say this phenomenon is an existential threat to our democracy and our way of life would be an understatement. So would saying that it’s a serious threat. Although “soft” and not literally explosive, this is undoubtedly the most serious single threat to our society since our close brush with a mutual suicide pact with the Soviet Union in October 1962. In fact, it’s probably a greater threat to us because we are more vulnerable to it than our rival authoritarian states. Also, the threat is ongoing. It could last for decades or centuries, and it could come from domestic or foreign sources.

Lawmakers quite naturally turn first to the Internet platforms themselves as potential “chokepoints” in this flood of lies. But for three reasons, there’s not much lawmakers can do to constrict the chokepoints besides grandstand, goad and cajole. First, they can’t tell the platforms what to publish or not publish because the whole idea of the First Amendment is to prevent government from declaring what is true.

Second, the ways in which the platforms work are both highly complex technologically and proprietary. Lawmakers do not have the time, expertise or access to information to tell the platform managers, in detail, how to cut the flow. Imagine, for example, what would happen to the Internet if Congress passed a law that every single Internet posting had to be reviewed by a live human being before going on line. That law would ruin the Internet’s spontaneity and flexibility, and the shares of every platform company would crash.

Finally, lawmakers themselves cannot enforce rules or regulations that ultimately would require every Internet posting to be monitored by a person or machine (perhaps an AI). Nor are courts equipped for that purpose. Congress would have to set up a massive regulatory agency to enforce its rules, with necessary staff and electronic connections. That agency would make the NSA—which now monitors a tiny fraction of Internet traffic to thwart terrorism—look like child’s play. Some day the flood of lies may be so daunting as to require such a solution, but we are by no means at that point yet, either technologically or politically.

Beyond second-guessing and goading the corporate platforms, Congress could make some gross and draconian rules. It could shut down the worst-offending platforms, close them to offending foreign traffic, or perhaps close them to all foreign traffic. Other countries, such as China and Iran, have done similar things with varying degrees of success, and we Americans could probably do them quicker, better and cheaper.

Congress also could break platforms up into smaller, more manageable units handling specific subject matter. But enforcing the subject-matter limitations would be almost as hard as enforcing the rules against lies and fake news in the first place. Or Congress could use threats of these expedients as whips to get the platforms’ managers and technical personnel to work harder to reduce the flow of lies. Finally, as a carrot, Congress could grant awards and incentives—or greater privileges, such as licenses to broader use of unused electromagnetic spectra—to those platforms that did demonstrably best in cutting the flow of lies.

The mere enumeration of these expedients suggests that none of them would be a sure or quick remedy. Probably the surest, if not the quickest, expedient would be to harden the targets—the American people.

By its very nature, the disinformation threat requires “recruiting” our entire population to see and credit lies. For our entire population is the intended target, even if only parts of it are targets of specific lies. If the liars and disinformation artists can get our people to believe them instead of our own sources, authority figures and intelligence services—as Trump is doing with a substantial minority regarding the Russian influence investigation—then we as a nation are lost. It’s just a matter of time.

There’s not nearly enough time, and an insufficient legal and practical basis, for coercive action. So our most immediate government action must be hortatory and instructive. All of our official channels must speak with a single voice. They must declare that this is happening, that it’s wrong, that it’s hostile, that it’s extremely dangerous, and that citizens must protect themselves against it just as they once built fallout shelters and accumulated stocks of food against nuclear Armageddon during the Cold War.

Every day, a new bit of specific fake news should be exposed, discussed and analyzed. Schools should teach self-protection against lies and fake news from the earliest possible age, starting as early as seven or eight years, the age of reason. We must harden our children against this scourge like little Spartans, making a game out of it for the younger set.

Here the Democrats’ core value is clear: truth, clarity and wholesale rejection of lies and fake news, both as individual political ploys and cultural phenomena. In order to stay credible, Dems must abjure lies and fake news in their own campaigns—just as Dems recently resisted the temptation to gerrymander in New Jersey. They must press the issue and the initiative relentlessly, using every opportunity for a “teachable moment.” They must bring the fight especially to Republicans (including the President!) who use, exploit or promulgate lies and fake news themselves. They must point out, as is true, that acquiescence in lies and fake news is tantamount to treason to our way of life and our democracy, and they must chide and goad Republicans to take up the cudgel in every way possible.

This is an “all hands on deck” threat that requires a universal, coordinated response. The sooner Democrats are able to goad or compel one, at least among their own party, the safer our society will be, and the greater credit for our cultural survival Democrats will deserve.
    C. Corporate rule must be restrained for the common good.
“Corporate rule” is not the same as capitalism or free enterprise. Capitalism and free enterprise are the processes by which business are formed, financed and grown. They are not limited literally to corporations but embrace sole proprietorships, partnerships and unincorporated associations. In contrast, “corporate rule” is the process by which big corporations and other big businesses are coming to control our daily lives as individuals in a detailed, comprehensive way that even our government never intended or achieved, except perhaps over active-duty military personnel.

I have written several essays on corporate rule, which is rapidly becoming a fact of life of our new twenty-first century (see this one first, then this one and this one). But in the context of politics, some specific examples may be helpful. Three credit-rating agencies for individuals—Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion—determine, in essence, whether anyone in America can get a loan, a lease of property or a car or (in many cases) employment. Their ratings also determine how other corporations price goods and services to individuals.

So these corporations’ acts in the ordinary course of their businesses probably have as much or more impact on individuals’ lives as the IRS’ calculation and extraction of taxes. In fact, if an individual is never audited by the IRS, as most individuals are not, the credit-raters probably have far more impact at more critical times in individuals’ lives, such as buying a house or car or taking a vacation. There is a federal statute, the Fair Credit Reporting Act, that governs these agencies’ conduct, but outside the narrow confines of that statute no one and nothing restrains these agencies but their own internal rules and algorithms, stated in and enforced by their own self-written form contracts.

The same is true of air travel. After numerous mergers, airlines today have an oligopoly of six or so, American, Delta, Jet Blue, Southwest, United, and Virgin America. Because international rules exclude foreign airlines from entirely domestic city-pair routes inside the United States, decisions of these few corporations collectively determine how cheaply, when, how and whether you can fly domestically inside the United States. If you want to fly inside your own country, you have to “play ball” with them under their rules.

I could go on, of course. Passenger train travel is a monopoly: Amtrak. Telephone service is a smaller oligopoly: AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon.

Of course none of these things existed when our Founders ratified our Constitution in 1791. Life was much simpler then, but also much shorter and poorer. So our Founders never conceived how these private corporations today could impact our lives and make them more painful or happier with their internal rules and procedures. In many cases corporations’ internal rules and procedures have more impact on our daily lives than the laws that Congress makes and the regulations under them.

So if you think a moment about how many key aspects of your daily life depend directly on government, and how many depend on corporations and their products, services, rules, regulations and procedures, you will probably conclude, after only a moment’s thought, that corporations govern your day-to-day life far more than government. So much for Ronald Reagan’s breezy dictum that “Government is the problem!”

In addressing this phenomenon, Democrats apply the same core values as they do to government: equality, nondiscrimination, fairness, and a quest for the common good and general welfare. That is, Dems expect that corporations will treat all people equally (accounting only for objective reality), without discrimination, fairly and for the common good. Dems expect that corporations will give all people equal or equivalent opportunities to use their goods and services, will make allowances for low income and low education, and will make at least a good-faith attempt to help those who are poor or needy, or who need special accommodations like the aged, people with disabilities, or rural customers for Internet service.

In other words, Democrats expect that corporations, if not precisely empathetic, will generally follow the basic principles of our society and our culture that make us cohesive and strong as a nation. They will not, Dems hope, simply just cite their self-drafted “take-it-or-leave-it” form contracts, enforce them, and taunt, “Take us to arbitration if you disagree!” And if corporations do that, Dems expect to be able to take them to court, to seek legislative action, or or to modify their behavior with boycotts and other collective action. Dems do not want corporations to replace the Monarchy that our Founders feared and distrusted as sources of high-handed behavior, arrogance, or oppression, whether of customers, potential customers, consumers, or employees.

In our new Third Millennium after Christ, this core value of Democrats will become increasingly important. For just as real secular power flowed from kings to priests in the First Millennium, and then back to kings and on to parliaments in the second, real secular power is apt to disperse from nation-states and their courts and governments to corporate boards and management in the Third.

As the party that cares most about people and least about abstractions, Democrats will have to keep an eye on their moral compass as they surveil corporations and their behavior in the future. For as time goes on, as the technological impact and specialization of corporations supplant the generalized governance of nation-states in controlling our daily lives, the application of Democrats’ values to corporate rule will be essential to preserving those values in our culture and our democracy.

4. Reality and science

Modern science as we know it is about four centuries old. It began in the early 1600s, when Galileo Galilei used his new telescope to verify the heliocentric nature of our Solar System and published his discoveries. The Catholic Church, which had ruled for centuries that our little blue planet is the center of the Universe, threatened him with excommunication until he recanted.

Ever since, powerful people and institutions have been trying to distort, misrepresent and suppress the findings of scientists in their own narrow interest. The whole phenomenon might seem like just another routine example of lies and fake news in politics. But if so, it’s a particularly nasty and important one. It’s the reason why our species has been so slow to address the existential threat of global warming, and it’s why official recognition of the health risks of smoking took about half a century.

Virtually all the progress and innovation that have made our human lives less “nasty, brutish and short” over the past four centuries have come from accepting—even relishing—the findings of science and turning them into useful technologies, products and services to improve our lives. From the sewer systems that shield us from routine epidemics of cholera, through the aircraft and mobile devices that let us travel or talk all over the world, to the drugs and live-gut-viewing machines that immeasurably improve our health and longevity, science has shown the power to make us much healthier, more capable, wealthier and happier.

Yet today we have a modern repetition of the sad history of Galileo. Our scientists tell us, in stark language and overwhelming majorities, that we are heating our planet beyond repair by burning fossil fuels, and that we have maybe a single decade, but no more than a generation, to make it right. Powerful interests, who make money from fossil fuels or just don’t want to change, try to dilute and distort the message to prevent its implementation in policy.

In this case, however, it’s not just our species’ pride as presumed center of the Universe at issue, but our species’ integrity, happiness and perhaps even survival. If the seas’ rise and our heating planet catch us unawares as oil and gas run out, tens or hundreds of millions of us will lead lives of such suffering, displacement and want as those of us in developed nations now have trouble even imagining.

Sanity, psychologists say, is good contact with reality. That’s what scientists give us, for things we cannot see, hear, sense or predict in our individual daily lives. Democrats believe, as a core value, that science is real, that we should support it as much as economic justice allows, and that we should implement its conclusions as quickly and soundly as possible so as to better our lives. That includes both alternative energy to avoid runaway global warming and universal vaccination for “herd immunity” and warding off pandemics.

Democrats would like to follow science in ways as diversely impactful as lowering public rates of heart disease and diabetes by changing our diets and doing more exercise, as fending off near-earth asteroids that threaten to extinguish us as one did the dinosaurs, and as reducing the acceleration of global warming before we ruin our planet for our species forever.

In other words, Democrats believe in studying our Universe, our Solar System, our Planet and ourselves, down to our DNA and internal proteins, in order to make our lives wiser and closer to our hearts’ desires. Democrats believe that doing so is just another aspect of keeping in touch with reality so as to advance the “general welfare.”

The policies that effect this belief are full support for funding of science, including our medicine and space programs, full support for applying the results of science when the private sector can’t or won’t do so, and fully teaching science (including evolution, the foundation of all modern biology!) to the next generation so that it can implement the results and carry the ball of innovation in the future. Democrats recognize science itself, as well as its conclusions and results, as core values that lead to greater human understanding and welfare.

Conclusions

There! That wasn’t so hard, was it? It didn’t require terminal wonkiness, except maybe in discussing health insurance (below). No fifteen-point plans. No pole-vaulting mind changes. Just basic humanity and common sense.

It’s people, not abstractions, that matter to Democrats. How to reflect that they matter is, as always, an issue of reason and practicality. As long as it serves these values in a practical way, any policy can gain support and a evoke a reasonable compromise from Democrats. Tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the rich and powerful, like cutting the safety net and practical health insurance for millions, is a hard sell.

Democrats are not the caricatures of social levelers that right-wingers suppose. They do not want everyone to be the same. They do not want all of us to be poor so that none of us can become rich. On the contrary, they recognize that individual achievement and the wealth a free-enterprise system can produce are powerful motivations for education, achievement and advancement. Free enterprise is indeed a superb economic engine.

But motivating talented individuals does not require ignoring or oppressing others. We had plenty of progress, prosperity and innovation when the top individual tax rate, under Eisenhower, was 92%. And we didn’t have a dilapidated national infrastructure in which bridges fall down and buildings in cities explode due to gas leaks. Talented individuals will always find ways to rise above others, both in their consumption and in their production. The trick is to find ways to make their talents useful to all of us, to produce the “greatest good for the greatest number.”

That approach doesn’t require soaking the rich or penalizing the talented. Far less does it require giving up free enterprise, without which there might be no benefits to share. It only requires a bit of empathy and some minor but important economic adjustments, by which the talented recognize how much they depend on a whole and savvy society, with all its laws, private property, infrastructure, education, and the results of earlier discoveries.

No man is an island. Ayn Rand’s John Galt is a clumsy myth, with no resemblance to how the real world works, how real people actually live or how talented people actually manage others. The Democrats’ core values insist only that our society and our policies (1) recognize the worth and the humanity of every citizen and every worker and (2) arrange things so that no one suffers unnecessarily and all are rewarded fairly, but not excessively, for their contributions. To that end, Democrats accept as their credo the four core values of (1) equality, (2) the common good, (3) free enterprise restrained for the common good, and (4) an eye ever on the reality of our lives as revealed in part by science.

Footnote: How words made the sad history of health insurance sadder

Virtually every other advanced democracy has a form of universal health insurance. Words are a big part of the reason why it took over a century for America to cobble together a poor simulacrum of such a system, which a district judge in Texas just declared unconstitutional.

Democrats let demagogues tar a universal insurance system as “socialism,” and even “socialized medicine.” They did so because Democrats are, by and large, better educated than Republicans: Dems look inside the box to see what’s there; they don’t just rely on the label. But many voters just look at the label. So the right wing has made great political hay by what I call “applied philology,” basically name calling and jumping to conclusions (“socialism” in health insurance will lead right to the Hammer and Sickle).

Dems are still struggling to find alternative language to duck the name calling. “Single payer” is both dangerous and inaccurate because no one has ever seriously proposed outlawing private insurance. (That would be like outlawing private enterprise, which in America would be tantamount to killing Christ.) Anyway, no matter how good public insurance is, there will probably always be special private health insurance that affluent people will want to buy, perhaps for specific conditions. And why not let them? If nothing else, high-premium private health insurance might finance leading-edge experiments in medicine that most patients can’t afford and that many might not want to suffer.

“Medicare for All” is a phrase that Bernie Sanders has used. It’s better than “single payer” because it doesn’t imply (falsely) an exclusive, mandatory system. Medicare is also familiar to voters, who generally view it positively. What voter nearing the age of 65, especially one cast on the not-so-tender mercies of private COBRA, doesn’t long for his or her 65th birthday and the chance to join Medicare?

But the “for All” suffix in Bernie’s formulation is problematic for two reasons. First, it implies that people who like their employer-provided health insurance might have to give it up. Second, if you insure literally everyone under a single grand plan, it implies enormous expense, begging the question of how much applicants will pay themselves. (I myself pay over $2,000 per year for my Medicare; that’s still a bargain for what I get, but it’s not nothing.)

In theory, a single public insurer has two enormous advantages over our current part-public, part-private balkanized mess. First, insurance is an odd business: competition doesn’t lower premiums; only increasing the size of the risk pool does. There are so many illnesses, injuries, and infirmities to be covered, as well as so many existing and future treatments, that individual economy begs for the largest pool possible, i.e, everyone in the nation. Second, hard numbers from home and aboard reveal private administrative expenses of 10% to 17%, as compared to public administrative expenses of 4% to 5%. If you add in the private profit that makes private systems go, say 10%, that gives public insurance an expense advantage north of 15% to 22%.

Yet there are problems getting to 100% enrollment. First, some young, healthy people will opt out, and “recruiting” all of them will require some form of coercion, either fines for not subscribing (as under “Obamacare”) or payment through taxes (as in many foreign countries). Coercion through fines nearly killed Obamacare (and may still!), and GOP demagogues have made raising taxes difficult. Second, phasing out private insurance without coercion will require prolonged coordination between the private and public sectors, perhaps decades long. During the transition period, there would have to be some public/private negotiation of revenue and risk-pool splitting, with lots of opportunities for corruption and self-dealing.

Terms like “socialism” and “Medicare for All” don’t help in discussing these difficult and very real issues. They cloud the issues, promote demagoguery, and impede rational discussion. The best that can be done, perhaps, is to describe the goal as non-coercive health insurance with nationwide risk pooling and coverage of pre-existing conditions, and address the real problems in arithmetic or mathematical terms with alternative proposed solutions, all with the math done. Economists will have to work with lawyers and pols to propose various transition systems and calculate their probable premiums, their overall cost, and their effects on existing insurance. The goal is worthy and achievable, but the path to it will be rocky. Using loaded terminology like “socialism,” which has a long, fraught, and mostly irrelevant history, won’t help anyone get there.

The Last Adult is Leaving the White House.
Who will Shut Off the Lights?

With the departure of former General Mattis as Secretary of State, all the adults in Trump’s Cabinet will soon be gone. Mattis is the last of the three sober generals to leave, the others being Kelly and McMasters. Even Michael Flynn, the not-so-sober one, is long gone, fighting for his freedom in court. Rex Tillerson, the only civilian Cabinet member ever to run an organization anything like the size of the federal government, is gone. Even Nikki Haley, a relative ingenue who knuckled down, got serious and learned her job, is gone, seemingly of her own volition, like Mattis.

What’s left among the talented are the kids. Whiz kid Pompeo, with his high intelligence and stint on the Harvard Law Review, has all the solid international experience of five years as a Kansas Congressman and fourteen months leading the CIA. Now he heads State.

With his willingness to support Trump in abdicating our international leadership and insulting our allies, Pompeo may be the nearest thing to Alberto Gonzales, Dubya’s short-lived attorney general, in going along to get along. Remember Gonzales? Presidents who have little or no experience themselves learn quickly that appointees with no experience, and therefore no political constituencies, have no tradable coin but loyalty approaching sycophancy.

Then there are the ones who have no business being within miles of the White House. They include: Steven Mnuchin at Treasury, Betsy DeVos at Education, the eighty-year old Wilbur Ross at Commerce, and Ryan Zinke, now leaving Interior. What do these nobodies have but craven ideology, a history of campaign contributions, corruptibility, and gall?

It’s easy to see why so many people are leaving, whether or not fired. Their boss—our Commander in Chief—is lazy, erratic, willful, capricious, nasty, stupid, venal, vengeful, corrupt, forgetful and incompetent. Competent people can suffer him only so long before they start to go crazy or cross the child’s shifting lines in the sand and are asked to leave.

With Mattis’ impending departure, PBS Commentator Mark Shields described the bipartisan mood in Washington as “panic.” [Set the timer at 3:33] And why not? When the last vestige of experienced competence leaves the leadership of the free world, what good is likely to follow?

There is only one sure remedy: impeachment and removal. There is plenty of evidence to support impeachment already. There will be a lot more as Robert Mueller III divulges the results of his many investigations, either seriatim in indictments or all at once in a comprehensive report.

Democrats will soon have the votes to impeach in the House. What is lacking is enough responsible Republicans in the Senate to rid us of this meddlesome narcissist.

As the world’s economy and geopolitical stability begin to spin out of control, the chief predicate of global order or anarchy will be Republicans’ willingness to put country and species over party. It’s now becoming clear that Democrats’ primary duty is to put them to that test, as soon as possible. A chief executive who takes his cues on policy from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and the agit-prop mavens on Fox [Start the timer at 0:44] could drive this nation into the steepest decline of any great nation in human history in a mere two years, let alone another full term.

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posted by Jay Dratler, Jr., Ph.D., J.D. @ 12/19/2018 01:54:00 PM   0 comments