Dead simple: a few clicks and you’ve got a list of susceptible target voters. Note the ‘Facebook partner’ — Axciom. “Acxiom Provides the Data Foundation for the World’s Best Marketers.” Including those who are marketing political ideas, among other things.
Nice scholarly column by Roger Cohen on how Trump’s White House is straight out of commedia dell’arte:
The commedia featured larger-than-life stock characters like the Scaramouch. They included deluded old men, devious servants, craven braggarts and starry-eyed lovers. The president, at 71, is clearly a “vecchio,” or elder. He is probably best imagined as the miserly Venetian known as Pantalone wandering around in red breeches with the oversized codpiece of the would-be womanizer.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, fits the bill as the “Dottore,” who, as Jennifer Meagher writes in an essay, is “usually depicted as obese and red-cheeked from drinking.” I’m tempted to offer the role of the belligerent, windy “Il Capitano,” or Captain, to Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to Trump, who recently told the BBC that, “The military is not a microcosm of civilian society. They are not there to reflect America. They are there to kill people and blow stuff up.”
The lovers, of course, have to be Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner — they of the almost bloodless perfection — whose doting father complicates their sumptuous lives by bestowing upon them titles and tasks for which they are unqualified. The lovers grow quieter and quieter but are so pale they are unable to blush.
From Masha Gessen in the New York Review of Books:
July 26, 2017, was a personal anniversary for me: one year earlier I had written a piece in which I argued for setting aside the idea of a Trump-Russia conspiracy (yes, this idea was with us a year ago) for the much more important task of imagining what a Trump presidency might bring. I wrote that Trump would unleash a war at home and while it was difficult to predict the target, “my money is actually on the LGBT community because its acceptance is the most clear and drastic social change in America of the last decade, so an antigay campaign would capture the desire to return to a time in which Trump’s constituency felt comfortable.” This was a thought exercise; even as I made an argument that I believed to be logical, I could not believe my own words. On Wednesday of this week, one year to the day since I made that prediction, President Trump announced, by tweet, that transgender people would no longer be allowed to serve in the US military—a policy reversal that would directly and immediately affect thousands of people.
Like many others I thought that this move was a distraction — a classic way of appealing to his base — policy by tweeting. The Pentagon announced that it had received no instruction from the President and so things would remain as they were, at least for the time being. Gessen, however, sees it as part of a bigger trend.
Trump got elected on the promise of a return to an imaginary past—a time we don’t remember because it never actually was, but one when America was a kind of great that Trump has promised to restore. Trumps shares this brand of nostalgia with Vladimir Putin, who has spent the last five years talking about Russian “traditional values,” with Hungarian president Viktor Orbán, who has warned LGBT people against becoming “provocative,” and with any number of European populists who promise a return to a mythical “traditional” past.
With few exceptions, countries that have grown less democratic in recent years have drawn a battle line on the issue of LGBT rights…
The appeal of autocracy, Gessen says,
lies in its promise of radical simplicity, an absence of choice. In Trump’s imaginary past, every person had his place and a securely circumscribed future, everyone and everything was exactly as it seemed, and government was run by one man issuing orders that could not and need not be questioned. The very existence of queer people—and especially transgender people—is an affront to this vision. Trans people complicate things, throw the future into question by shaping their own, add layers of interpretation to appearances, and challenge the logic of any one man decreeing the fate of people and country. lies in its promise of radical simplicity, an absence of choice. In Trump’s imaginary past, every person had his place and a securely circumscribed future, everyone and everything was exactly as it seemed, and government was run by one man issuing orders that could not and need not be questioned. The very existence of queer people—and especially transgender people—is an affront to this vision. Trans people complicate things, throw the future into question by shaping their own, add layers of interpretation to appearances, and challenge the logic of any one man decreeing the fate of people and country.
This is very perceptive stuff IMHO. What most liberals (like me) underestimate is Trump’s intuitive understanding of the prejudices and longings of his core supporters. In a strange way, he’s a gifted populist.
My big question about the EU has nothing to do about Brexit, but about why Hungary — and now Poland — have not already been expelled from the Union. Neither country now meets the criteria for a functioning liberal democracy. As Jacek Rostowski (a former Deputy Prime Minister of Poland) points out in a sobering essay:
The EU … faces not just an “illiberal democracy” in its midst, as it does with Victor Orbán’s Hungary. For the first time in its history, the EU must confront the prospect of a member state that is a non-democracy, in the fundamental sense of lacking free, unrigged elections. And Kaczyński can count on Orbán to provide him cover (in the expectation of reciprocation when needed), by vetoing any attempt at depriving the PiS government of its vote within the EU, a move that would require member states’ unanimous support.
If Kaczyński succeeds in controlling Poland’s Supreme Court, or if he finds another way to rig Polish elections, the implications for the EU will be profound and far-reaching. Unless Hungary’s veto can be circumvented, a non-democratic state will participate in legislating for the populations of the remaining democratic member states for many years.
“More than two years ago, soon after Donald Trump entered the presidential race, I noted online that no one like him—with no political, military, judicial, or public-service experience, with no known expertise on policy matters, with a trail of financial and personal complications—had ever before become president. Therefore, I said, it wasn’t going to happen this time. Quite obviously that was wrong. Penitent and determined to learn from my errors, I’ve avoided any predictions involving Trump and his circles ever since.”
This morning’s Observer column:
We are currently going through one of those periodic phases of “automation anxiety” when we become convinced that the robots are coming for our jobs. These fears are routinely pooh-poohed by historians and economists. The historians point out that machines have been taking away jobs since the days of Elizabeth I – who refused to grant William Lee a patent on his stocking frame on the grounds that it would take work away from those who knitted by hand. And while the economists concede that machines do indeed destroy some jobs, they point out that the increased productivity that they enable has generally created more new jobs (and industries) than they displaced.
Faced with this professional scepticism, tech evangelists and doom-mongers fall back on the same generic responses: that historical scepticism is based on the complacent assumption that the past is a reliable guide to the future; and that “this time is different”. And whereas in the past it was lower-skilled work that was displaced, the jobs that will be lost in the coming wave of smart machines are ones that we traditionally regard as “white-collar” or middle-class. And that would be a very big deal, because if there’s no middle class the prospects for the survival of democracy are poor.
What’s striking about this fruitless, ongoing debate is how few participants seem to be interested in the work that people actually do…
Just came on this.
“I can’t help thinking of the Venetian republic in their last half-century. Like us, they had once been fabulously lucky. They had become rich, as we did, by accident. They had acquired immense political skill, just as we have. A good many of them were tough-minded, realistic, patriotic men. They knew, just as clearly as we know, that the current of history had begun to flow against them. many of them gave their minds to working out ways to keep going. It would have meant breaking the pattern into which they had been crystallised. They were fond of the pattern, just as we are fond of ours. They never found the will to break it.”
The Two Cultures, 1959.
Tony Blair has become a toxic brand because of the Iraq war, with the result that his achievements are now overlooked. So I was struck by this passage from Polly Toynbee’s Guardian column marking the first anniversary of Theresa May’s arrival at the top of the greasy pole:
Consider what Tony Blair did in his first year: the Good Friday agreement signed; the national minimum wage and human rights acts passed; the Bank of England made independent; a £5bn windfall from privatised utilities; and devolution to the Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly begun, along with a London mayor. He stripped the House of Lords of most hereditary peers, brought in a Freedom of Information Act, lowered the gay age of consent, ordained the right to roam, and saved the Kosovans. There was much more in the pipeline, with benefits for families increasing hugely. Any one of those achievements would be totemic in hapless May’s wasted year.
Yep.
Interesting take on the tete-a-tete from Masha Gessen, who knows more about Putin than is good for anyone:
Mr. Putin has for years — 17 years, to be exact, for this is how long he has been in power — been clear about what he wanted from his relationship with the United States president: He wants to be treated as an equal partner on the world stage and not to be questioned about or pressed on the Russian government’s actions inside Russia or in what he considers his sphere of influence. Despite the friendly tenor of Mr. Putin’s relationship with George W. Bush and the offer of a “reset” made by Barack Obama’s administration, Mr. Putin never achieved his objective — until now. His fourth American president has given him exactly what he wanted: respect, camaraderie and freedom from criticism.
The one accomplishment of the meeting — a limited cease-fire in Syria — is exactly what Mr. Putin wanted. Not the cease-fire, that is: He wanted an acknowledgment that the United States and Russia are equal negotiating parties in the Syrian conflict. He spent years cajoling and then blackmailing the Obama administration into accepting Russia’s decisive role in the Middle East. Now, Mr. Trump has handed him much more than that. He has demonstrated that Russia and the United States can negotiate Syrian life and death without involving any Syrians.
Lovely column by Jack Shafer. Sample:
If the mark of a great diplomat is the ability to speak craziness with a straight face, Tillerson earned admittance to the Dips Hall of Fame. A “framework” for cybersecurity cooperation would be set up between the two countries, he promised. This would be like going into the fencing business with the guy who burgled your house. Sounding more like a therapist than the secretary of state, Tillerson said, “We’re unhappy. They’re unhappy,” and explained that salvaging this “really important relationship” meant blotting out the recent unpleasantness. (Take a shot of amnesia and call me in the morning.) Then Tillerson produced a laugh line that topped his previous ones. “The Russians have asked for proof and evidence” of the meddling, he said. Perhaps he should buy Putin a subscription to the Washington Post.
And remember, Tillerson was the smart one representing the United States in the room.
The meeting was a giant exercise in “Don’t Think About Russian Meddling,” restoking speculation on what Putin might have on Trump. Back in the U.S.A., heavy sobbing sounded in the corridors of the deep state, where hankies and terry cloths were filled with tears. The gnashing commenced Thursday when Trump gave one of his rambling, having-it-both-ways speeches in which he concluded that the Russians meddled in our election but also that “nobody really knows” whether they did and besides it could have been “others.” This conflicts with the findings by every tier in the U.S. intelligence establishment, which insists the Russians—and the Russians alone—did it.
The biggest puzzle, of course, is why Trump fawned on Putin at the G-20. In the old days, when he was just a property developer, it might have made sense for him to suck up to Vlad when he was staging a beauty ‘pageant’ in Moscow and looking for Russian cooperation in his business ventures. And, Shafer writes,
As many have noted, he has a natural affinity for strong men bound by nothing more than their own appetites. But the display in Hamburg defies reason. Instead of acting like the leader of the first world, Trump is acting like a job applicant, beveling his words so as not to offend Putin. The same goes for his secretary of state. As the G-20 talks slip into the rear-view mirror, Trump has positioned himself in Putin’s garden as a piece of statuary, perhaps a toad, locked into a perpetual smile in the direction of his master.