Lovely, illuminating explanation.
Now and then
I had lunch yesterday with an old (and elderly) friend who is in a despairing mood about what is happening to his country (the US) and the UK. Part of our conversation was about the nature of the seismic change that we both sense in those two democracies. (This was a theme of my earlier post below.)
Later in the evening, I sent him an excerpt from a column by my Observer colleague, Andrew Rawnsley, which illustrated one aspect of the change.
When people refer to the British constitution, they are talking about a hotch-potch of such conventions, combined with ancient charters, precedents, international agreements, legislative bolt-ons and unwritten understandings. The fabric of this messy tapestry is held together by a crucial thread. That is an underlying assumption that everyone can be trusted to behave in a proper way. In the absence of a formal constitution, British democracy is heavily reliant on politicians acting with honour and playing fair.
What if they don’t? What happens then? We may be about to find out if Boris Johnson faces a no-confidence vote this autumn, loses, refuses to quit as prime minister and barricades himself in Number 10 for long enough to force through a no-deal Brexit before an election can take place. This is a scenario so grotesque as to be scarcely believable. That doesn’t make it an impossible one.
What Rawnsley’s article illustrates is what we are discovering about the fragility of our democracies. Their survival depends on politicians respecting norms. But they seem to have no recourse to people who don’t respect — indeed flaunt their contempt for — those norms. So Johnson could lose a confidence vote and yet ignore the conventions. And as far as one can see there’s nothing that we could do about it — even if two million people marched in protest in London, he could sit it out.
Ah well, people say, that’s what you get when you don’t have a written constitution and make do with an ad-hoc patchwork quilt of conventions, precedents, jumbo jumbo and laws that passes for one in Britain. But the Americans do have a written constitution and a fat lot of use that seems to be in dealing with Trump. Again, what’s so shocking to liberals is the way the president is contemptuously flouting norms that were once regarded as semi-sacred. For example, it was more or less unthinkable until 2016 that a sitting president would use his office to enrich himself and his family in flamboyant style. (Think of the way the Trump hotel in Washington is now being milked for profits derived from foreign clowns who stay there in the hope that it might gain them some favour in the White House.)
The other topic in yesterday’s gloomy conversation was the awful sense of impotence many citizens (or subjects, in the UK case) feel as they watch this wanton despoliation of democratic norms. In that context, this quotation from a piece by Niamh Cullen in the London Review of Books, puts a nice historical spin on it:
“When I began to research my book on Piero Gobetti”, she writes,
the precocious young anti-fascist journalist and early victim of Mussolini, the world in which he lived seemed very remote to me. I could relate little of the post-1918 anger and desperation – the obsession with borders and national grievance, the struggle to make ends meet in times of unemployment and rising inflation, the angry men convinced they had been dispossessed – to my own circumstances. It was Dublin in the mid-2000s and the city was still feeling pretty boomy, with little hint of the global recession to come. The ideas and institutions of the EU seemed broadly secure and democracy was taken for granted. Now with the rise of populism and nationalism across Europe and the US, as responses both to the global recession and to the migration crisis, the anxiety, anger and fear of the 1920s and 1930s seem a little more real.
And now?
I feel as if I now have a little more insight into how it might feel to see the ideas and institutions of the state collapse around you, and yet still go about your life as if nothing much has changed. In the last several years, with the rise of right-wing populism in Europe, Brexit, the migration crisis and the increasingly palpable effects of climate change, the world has profoundly shifted on its axis. Yet I have done little about it. I imagine these feelings of inertia and dread – the conviction that something should be done to prevent this downward slide combined with the strong sense that I can do nothing – is what it might have been like to live through the normalisation of fascism in Italy in the 1920s. This is not to suggest that Johnson, Trump et al. are similar to Mussolini – they may be, but that is a whole different issue – but rather that the sense of crisis that people lived with in the 1920s has parallels to our own time, as the extreme becomes normal, and it becomes gradually more difficult to imagine how things could be different.
Who elected tech CEOs?
This morning’s Observer column:
Sites that host extremist content are themselves vulnerable to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Anyone can go to the murkier regions of the internet and rent a botnet that will then overwhelm the target site with millions of pings. Easy as pie. And DDoS can be turned on and off like a tap. So if you run a controversial site you need protection against that kind of thing.
For 8chan, that protection was provided by Cloudflare, a service with the resources to ensure that sites can remain online no matter how severe a DDoS attack is. But on Monday, Matthew Prince, Cloudflare’s CEO, pulled the plug. He announced that the company was terminating 8chan as a customer.
“The rationale is simple,” he wrote on the company’s blog. “They have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths. Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law, in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit.”
Prince clearly agonised over the decision, not because he was sympathetic to 8chan, but because he found himself wielding a kind of power that corporate executives are not prepared for…
How times change.
In writing my Observer column this week I had to check something about the Watergate episode – in which a sitting US President was forced to resign after the Washington Post revealed that a slush fund that had been used to finance the Watergate burglars (among many other sleazy operators) had been run from the White House by HR Haldeman, Richard Nixon’s most senior aide.
Those activities (according to the Wikipedia summary) included such dirty tricks as bugging the offices of political opponents and people of whom Nixon or his officials were suspicious. Nixon and his close aides also ordered investigations of activist groups and political figures, using the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as political weapons.
The scandal led to the discovery of multiple abuses of power by members of the Nixon administration, the commencement of an impeachment process against the president, and Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. The scandal also resulted in the indictment of 69 people, with trials or pleas resulting in 48 being found guilty, many of whom were top Nixon officials.
Having been catapulted back into that period, I then re-watched one of my favourite movies, All the President’s Men, which I haven’t seen for years. It tells the story of how two junior reporters – Carl Bernstein (played by Dustin Hoffman) and Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) – traced the money given to the burglars to the inner sanctums of the White House. It’s a great, romantic story about journalism at its best, and so very comforting to those of us who believe in our trade.
But then an uncomfortable thought struck me. The Watergate story is reassuring because it shows how a democracy should work. The journalism produced evidence of a dangerous high-level conspiracy – a conspiracy which was of course energetically denied by all those involved in it. But once the journalists had done their work, the action passed to Congress – which in turn did its job, by launching an impeachment process against the sitting president. Nixon resigned before that process could run its course.
Like I say, this is how the system ought to work. But then consider the difference between then and now. One lesson from the Mueller Report is that no amount of evidence that Trump had – for example – colluded with the Russians would have prompted a dysfunctional, partisan, Republican-dominated Congress to launch an impeachment process. And although the Democrats are now in charge of the House of Representatives (and therefore of impeachment) it’s hard to see them making any real progress before 2020, when it’s likely (IMHO) Trump will have been re-elected.
Which of course makes one wonder what kind of crime this president would have to commit before Congress would act? It all reminds me of something he said during the 2016 Election campaign: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
I gloomily suspect that that judgement was accurate. It doesn’t seem to matter what he does: his ‘base’ of 30% seems unaffected.
Quote of the Day
Everyone is a philosopher. Not everyone is good at it”
Alfred North Whitehead
Silicon Valley ideology in a nutshell
The proprietor of N-gate is an engineer who grew up in Palo Alto and now lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he works in high-performance computing. He agreed to exchange e-mails on condition of anonymity. “Almost every post deals with the same topics: these are people who spend their lives trying to identify all the ways they can extract money from others without quite going to jail,” he wrote. “They’re people who are convinced that they are too special for rules, and too smart for education. They don’t regard themselves as inhabiting the world the way other people do; they’re secret royalty, detached from society’s expectations and unfailingly outraged when faced with normal consequences for bad decisions. Society, and especially economics, is a logic puzzle where you just have to find the right set of loopholes to win the game. Rules are made to be slipped past, never stopping to consider why someone might have made those rules to start with. Silicon Valley has an ethics problem, and ‘Hacker’ ‘News’ is where it’s easiest to see.”
From a terrific New Yorker essay on the task of moderating Hacker News.
Quote of the day
”Experience is a good school. But the fees are high”
Heinrich Heine
The perils of being regarded as a ‘liberal’ institution
The Twitter firestorm over the way the New York Times covered Trump’s speech after the El Paso shootings was a thing to behold. (In its Tuesday first edition, the Times had a page One banner headline, “Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism” — which was changed to “Assailing Hate, But Not Guns” for the remainder of the print run.)
The furore also spurred Jack Shafer, the Politico columnist, into action. “The fury uncaged by the five-word Times headline”, he wrote,
had less to do with the language used and more to do with the political validation that liberals and lefties have come to demand from the news media they consume. It’s not good enough for some liberals that the Times has kept a tight vigil on Trump since he announced his candidacy four years ago, exposing him as a tax cheat, tracking his lies, aggressively covering the Mueller investigation and the Stormy Daniels case, cataloging everybody he’s insulted on Twitter, fending off his “enemy of the people” charges, recording his abuse of emergency powers, and documenting his contempt for the rule of law. They want every column-inch of copy in the Times to reinforce and amplify their resistance values, right down to the headlines. Anything perceived as even a minor deviation from that “mission,” they seem to think, requires the mass cancelation of subscriptions and calls for the executive editor’s resignation.
The defect with this resistance view of the Times is that the paper completely rejects it. “Our role is not to be the opposition to Donald Trump,” Baquet said at the SXSW conference in March 2017. “Our role is to cover him aggressively.” Times reporter David Sanger reiterated Baquet at another conference later that year. “The biggest single mistake we could do in navigating our coverage of the Trump administration would be to let ourselves become the resistance to the government in place,” Sanger said. In expecting the Times to be something it has vowed it will never, ever be, members of the resistance have positioned themselves for perpetual disenchantment.
Yep. And quite right too.
Quote of the Day
”If this is the information age, what are we so well-informed about?”
Journalism and mass shootings
Somber reflections from the journalist who was Editor of the Rocky Mountain News when the Columbine shootings happened, and who covered that story exhaustively.
I’m out of daily journalism now. But whenever there’s a mass shooting I have no desire to read the stories or watch the footage. There’s a ritual to the coverage, and it feels like it always follows the same arc and ends the same way. Journalists tell the story of what it was like to survive the slaughter. Then they offer tender accounts of the victims’ lives, detail where and how the weapons were purchased, publish profiles of the killer or killers, and write accounts of the struggles of the wounded. And then most of us move on, until the next shooting. Even the killing of 20 elementary-school children in Newtown, Connecticut, changed nothing.
This ritual can make journalism seem futile. I am forced to ask why journalists are doing this work in this way, and whether in the end it’s worth it.
Journalists feel the need to bear witness. But to the same horror, again and again? I can’t say anymore that I believe we learn from terrible things. I can say that I’ve seen the limits of journalism—and of hope. And I’m struggling with what to do about it.
I feel much the same. These atrocities have become, somehow, ‘normalised’.