dilemmas of authoritarianism and resistance . . . + joyous music and dance and, yes, a cat video
In this issue . . .
Six provocative articles from very different angles that speak to the dilemmas of authoritarianism and to the possibilities for (and limitations to!) resistance.
In Savvy Corner, we’re excited to announce a new event hosted by Community Change on 2/26 on Immigration Policy in the First 100 Days and Beyond with Lorella Praeli, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Cristina Jimenez, Cecilia Munoz, and Deepak. And last call for an inspiring event on leading for social change at a critical time with Nse Ufot and Cristina Jimenez on 2/16.
in Delights and Provocations, a beguiling cat video, the Black Pumas bring down the house, and a mesmerizing Indian dance performance by Bijayini Satpathy.
Recommended Readings
Today’s Theme: dilemmas of domination, authoritarianism, and resistance
As a filmmaker, I (Harry) had a hunch in late January that the delay in starting Trump’s Senate trial might benefit the House impeachment managers — and the video producers and editors they had hired — by giving them more time for the painstaking work of reviewing hundreds of hours of footage and assembling an air-tight case. And, indeed, that’s what they did. Many have pointed to videos shown in the trial as among the most persuasive exhibits. Maybe the videos were why seven Republicans voted to convict, making this the most bipartisan impeachment trial in U.S. history. Maybe some of those Republicans were convinced on the very first day by the stunning 13-minute video juxtaposing the president’s own words and tweets with the simultaneous brutality of the mob at the Capitol. Maybe they were persuaded by the many Republican governors and former members of the Trump administration who adamantly pinned the blame for the insurrection on the president himself. Or maybe Trump’s spell over them broke when they saw through the many outlandish lies Trump’s lawyers told. Whatever the reason, the 43 Senators who voted to acquit Trump simultaneously rendered a grim verdict about the GOP. The House impeachment managers, in an effort to win Republican votes and enable them to save face, obscured the fact that, as Michelle Goldberg put it, “the jury [was] stacked with the defendant’s accomplices.” (“Impeachment Offers Republicans Grace. They Don’t Want It.”) Some, like McConnell, who voted most grudgingly in Trump’s favor were simply bowing to the base that Trump and others have radicalized.
According to a new survey by a project of the American Enterprise Institute, 66 percent of Republicans believe that Biden’s victory was illegitimate. Thirty-nine percent of Republicans agree with the statement, “If elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves even if it requires taking violent actions.”
Goldberg concluded,
Republican senators are being given the opportunity to get on the right side of that history, to distance themselves from a disgrace that they must know their descendants will someday read about. They’re being given a chance to rewrite the shameful history of how the Republican Party has behaved for the last four years.
They will almost certainly not take it. For rhetorical purposes, the Democrats waging this quixotic battle for accountability have to pretend that the Republican Party is redeemable. The rest of us do not.
Writing in Project Syndicate, Kelly Born, Executive Director of Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, asks, “Can Digital Disinformation Be Disarmed?” Born offers an excellent, if perhaps too skeptical, overview of proposed solutions, and makes even more clear the depth of our epistemological crisis.
. . . as the Capitol insurrection showed, the overall disinformation landscape of the last few years differs notably from that in 2016.
While foreign adversaries, bots, and fake accounts have dominated the dialogue about disinformation since 2016, over the last year, domestic influencers – real people with authenticated identities – have taken over. The narratives that were promoted also differed, with the coronavirus pandemic taking center stage. As a result, the scope of disinformation went global.
The online information environment we inhabit is dominated by for-profit social-media companies that rely on heavy user engagement to sell advertising space. This, coupled with people’s psychological predisposition to engage more with news that affirms their preexisting beliefs and identities, results in an information ecosystem where falsehoods travel six times faster than facts, on average.
And social-media usage continues to grow. By 2018, leading platforms such as Twitter and Facebook had surpassed print newspapers in the US as a more frequent news source. In 2020, social media surpassed TV (cable, network, and local) as the primary source of political news in the US. . . .
Current proposals [to reform social media] can be broadly grouped into three categories based on their focus within the information ecosystem. Some measures are “upstream,” supporting the production of high-quality information, including both research and journalism. Others are “midstream,” working to change the behaviors of the dominant social-media platforms. And the third set of proposals looks “downstream” to foster healthier forms of audience engagement. . .
A 2018 internal report circulated at Facebook, revealed by the Wall Street Journal, found that 64% of people who joined an extremist group on Facebook’s platform did so only because the company’s algorithm recommended the group to them.
These problems persist. The “Stop The Steal” Facebook page – a hub of US election-related disinformation and a platform for organizing the Capitol insurrection – racked up more than 320,000 followers in less than 24 hours following the presidential election, making it one of the fastest-growing Facebook groups of all time. . .
One recent study found that among posts containing potentially dangerous disinformation about COVID-19 that had already been debunked, 59% remained up on Twitter, 27% on YouTube, and 24% on Facebook.
The always interesting Charlie Warzel has an important op-ed in the New York Times,“I Talked to the Cassandra of the Internet Age,” about the work of Michael Goldhaber, the “attention economy,” and its implications for our politics:
Michael Goldhaber is the internet prophet you’ve never heard of. Here’s a short list of things he saw coming: the complete dominance of the internet, increased shamelessness in politics, terrorists co-opting social media, the rise of reality television, personal websites, oversharing, personal essay, fandoms and online influencer culture — along with the near destruction of our ability to focus.
Most of this came to him in the mid-1980s, when Mr. Goldhaber, a former theoretical physicist, had a revelation. He was obsessed at the time with what he felt was an information glut — that there was simply more access to news, opinion and forms of entertainment than one could handle. His epiphany was this: One of the most finite resources in the world is human attention. To describe its scarcity, he latched onto what was then an obscure term, coined by a psychologist, Herbert A. Simon: “the attention economy.” . . .
The big tech platform debates about online censorship and content moderation? Those are ultimately debates about amplification and attention. Same with the crisis of disinformation. It’s impossible to understand the rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA wing of the far right or, really, modern American politics without understanding attention hijacking and how it is used to wield power. Even the recent GameStop stock rally and the Reddit social media fallout share this theme, illustrating a universal truth about the attention economy: Those who can collectively commandeer enough attention can accumulate a staggering amount of power quickly. And it’s never been easier to do than it is right now.
Robin D.G. Kelley has a luminously brilliant article in Boston Review, “Why Black Marxism, Why Now,” about Cedric Robinson’s classic Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. (The article is adapted from the forward to the 3rd edition of the book.) Kelly makes sense of some of the ways the connection between economic interests and identity gets confused – too often inclining us to ask why people aren’t acting in accordance with their alleged interests rather than how and why their actual social and political identities are and could be constructed. It’s especially useful as a corrective now because the frame of “racial capitalism” is gaining popularity – and can obfuscate as much as it clarifies. (There’s also a lyrical section in Kelley’s piece about time, and how revolts defy mechanistic ideas of when they “should” happen.)
The crossroads where Black revolt and fascism meet is precisely the space where Cedric’s main interlocutors find the Black radical tradition. Black Marxism is, in part, about an earlier generation of Black antifascists, written at the dawn of a global right-wing, neoliberal order that one political theorist called the era of “friendly fascism.” . . .
Contrary to popular belief, Black Marxism was primarily about Black revolt, not racial capitalism. Robinson takes Marx and Engels to task for underestimating the material force of racial ideology on proletarian consciousness, and for conflating the English working class with the workers of the world. . . .
Cedric’s point is that Marx and Engels missed the significance of revolt in the rest of the world, specifically by non-Western peoples who made up the vast majority of the world’s unfree and nonindustrial labor force. Unfree laborers in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the islands of the sea were producing the lion’s share of surplus value for a world system of racial capitalism, but the ideological source of their revolts was not the mode of production. Africans kidnapped and drawn into this system were ripped from “superstructures” with radically different beliefs, moralities, cosmologies, metaphysics, and intellectual traditions. . . .
With this observation Robinson unveils the secret history of the Black radical tradition, which he describes as “a revolutionary consciousness that proceeded from the whole historical experience of Black people.” The Black radical tradition defies racial capitalism’s efforts to remake African social life and generate new categories of human experience stripped bare of the historical consciousness embedded in culture. . . .
Then there is the remarkable and controversial piece in the American Prospect,“Resistance Disconnect,” by Theda Skocpol and Catherine Tervo about Indivisible, the grassroots network born out of the resistance to Trump. Deepak has a LOT to say about the piece and the underlying issues about organizing that it raises – and he just might say it in the coming days! – but in the meantime it’s worth reading:
In retrospect, Indivisible’s organization-building approach and struggles with field outreach are hardly surprising. To actually orchestrate widely dispersed locals operating in very diverse social and political settings, Levin, Greenberg, and others in the founding group would have had to hit the road starting in January 2017, not only to visit potential funders in liberal metropoles but also to get to know the emerging local groups and indigenous leaders in many states across America. Had they pulled off such an enormous investment in making ground-level contacts far from Washington, D.C., they might have been able to identify promising state and regional coordinators to serve on a part- or full-time basis. In turn, such intermediate organizers could have been given sufficient resources to build ongoing state or regional associations accountable to and able to magnify the state and national impact of local resistance groups. But nothing like this happened. Instead, Indivisible’s founders took a much more top-down approach, stressing media relations, staff buildup, and fundraising for what became a very large professionally staffed headquarters with departments trying to reinvent all the “nonprofit industrial complex” wheels at once. . .
Although we cannot prove a counterfactual, early state-level devolutions of authority and resources within the overall Indivisible network might well have sustained a wider array of grassroots groups. The entire history of U.S. voluntary association-building since the 19th century shows that intermediate associations accountable to locals are absolutely vital to the institutionalization of widespread civic activity. Especially for civic movements that aim to influence politics at local, state, and national levels, it does not work simply to “coordinate” thousands of local efforts from a controlling national office.
Finally, this useful paper by Laia Balcells, Valeria Palanza and Elsa Voytas, “Do Transitional Justice Museums Persuade Visitors? Evidence from a Field Experiment,” in the Journal of Politics analyzes the impact of Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights on visitors. The engagement of people’s emotions – not just the provision of factual information – appears to be critical. Here’s the abstract:
Do transitional justice museums persuade visitors? We implement a novel field experiment at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile to understand the effects of governments' attempts to shape citizens' attitudes through symbolic transitional justice policies such as museums and memorials. Our findings suggest that though perceptions of the museum vary along ideological lines, Chilean university students display greater support for democratic institutions, are more likely to reject institutions associated with the repressive period and are more supportive of restorative transitional justice policies after visiting regardless of their ideological priors. We test for the persistence of these results and find that some of the effects endure for six months following the museum visit. We find support for the notion that emotional appeals deployed in the museum can shift citizen attitudes, which might have implications for processes of reconciliation.
Savvy Corner
Lorella Praeli and Community Change will be hosting an event on 2/26 at 1 p.m. with Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Cecilia Munoz, Cristina Jimenez, and Deepak: “Immigration Policy in the First 100 Days and Beyond.” You can register here for the event, which will be a soft launch for a new book co-edited by Ruth Milkman, Penny Lewis, and Deepak in which each of the panelists has a chapter: Immigration Matters: Visions, Strategies, and Movements for a Progressive Future available now for pre-order.
This is also the last call for “Leading for Social Change at a Critical Time: What Do Leaders Need?” with two of the country’s very best leaders, Nse Ufot, CEO of New Georgia Project and Cristina Jimenez of United We Dream. The event is on 2/26 from 12:30 – 2. You can register here.
Delights and Provocations
You may need a beguiling cat video today. (You thought we were above that, didn’t you?) And you most certainly need to hear the uplifting and brilliant Black Pumas bring down the house. Then you need to watch a mesmerizing and joyous original 20-minute dance performance (only viewable till Monday 2/15 @ 5!) by Bijayini Satpathy in the Indian Odissi dance tradition.