Uneducating America

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

                Imagine a democratic country where voters ended a political campaign knowing more about the difficult issues than they did at the beginning. Imagine the learning experience of hearing presidential candidates seriously discussing how to curb the wars in Europe and the Middle East, compete sensibly with China, retard climate change, address the coming revolution of AI, open economic opportunity for the impoverished, reduce racial discrimination, and gain control over immigration. Now flip that upside down and you have the world’s supposed model of democracy, the United States of America.

                On the tasks before us, we understand less and less. If we once believed we lived in a free-market economy with prices set mainly by supply and demand, the campaign has taught us to think that a president has all the power and so should get all the blame—or credit—for our struggles or our prosperity, whichever happens to occur during an administration.

                If we ever understood the limits of US control over global conflicts, we are now convinced that an omnipotent president could stop Russia vs. Ukraine and Israel vs. Hamas and Hezbollah.

                If we ever took the trouble to grasp the complex forces of desperation and hope that drive immigrants from their violent homelands to ours, we can no longer be bothered with anything but simplistic measures and instant cures.

                Elections seem to dumb us down. Its practitioners filter out the nuance, contradictions, and history essential to forming smart policy. We retreat into our caves of certainty and disparage the “undecideds.”

The Democratic Party vs. the Anti-Democratic Party

                                                     By David K. Shipler 

                If Donald Trump were solely responsible for the whirlwind that the United States now reaps, his departure on January 20 would bring calm. But the wind was sown long before Trump and will blow a long time after. It gnaws away at beliefs essential to a free people, even as Americans take pride in their democracy’s survival through the latest Day of Infamy, Jan. 6, 2021.

                Notwithstanding the democratic-sounding platitudes by Republicans since the riots, their party has not favored true, open democracy, but rather a kind of semi-democracy at best. The Republican Party has conducted nationwide operations to prevent minorities and other likely Democratic voters from casting ballots, efforts now ramping up in some state legislatures poised to restrict the early and mail-in voting that broadened turnout last November. It has eagerly worn the mantle of racism inherited from Southern Democrats. Its assertions of fraud in the presidential election have mostly cited heavily Black cities. And it has become the gateway through which right-wing authoritarian movements are entering the political landscape.

                Trump is the facilitator and the current figurehead, the “accelerant,” as former President Obama has called him. But he could never have done it as a Democrat. It was among Republicans that he found resonance for his multiple hatreds and autocratic impulses.

                Yale history professor Timothy Snyder likens the Republican Party to authoritarian parties of Eastern Europe: Law and Justice in Poland and Fidesz in Hungary. Fascist methods, he notes, depend on a Big Lie, as in the claim of election fraud, and on faking election results, as Trump sought to do. “The people who stormed the Capitol building were fascists,” Snyder says.

The Dynamics of Democracy and Dictatorship

 

By David K. Shipler 

In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.

--Abraham Joshua Heschel 

                The 2020 election and its aftermath have exposed the fragility and resilience of democracy, making this an opportune moment for national introspection by the United States. It is a crisis so serious that it calls for a non-partisan 911-style commission to help Americans wrench free of their myopic politics and look clearly in the mirror. Nothing less than the country’s constitutional freedoms are at stake.

Significantly, both Democrats and Republicans agree on one argument: that the other side is jeopardizing democracy. Each side contends that its opponent is only pretending to support free and fair elections, that either Republicans want to overturn the people’s vote, or Democrats want to win by fraud—take your choice. The antagonists, whether cynical or sincere, still put the ballot box on a pedestal. Democracy is still the lodestar.

But that is where equivalence ends. This is a clash between reality and unreality, a study in the power of manipulation, propaganda, and popular gullibility, which are ingredients of dictatorship. Rarely if ever in U.S. history have so many citizens fallen for such a grotesque fiction as President Trump’s evidence-free claim of a stolen election. Rarely if ever before have election officials been threatened with violence. And rarely if ever before have calls been heard for a new election under martial law, as voiced by a group calling itself “We the People Convention” and supported by retired General Michael Flynn, the pardoned felon who served as national security adviser and head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.  

Currently, the risks to democracy exist inside minds more than inside institutions. There are systemic problems, obviously, but the process held up well in this difficult election. By contrast, thoughts and beliefs did not.

The Grinch Who Stole Thanksgiving

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Thanksgiving is the most universal of American holidays. It either transcends or embraces religion, whichever you choose. It brings family together. It invites reflection on the nobility of gratitude. What’s more, in election years, after the people raise their voices to determine how they are to be governed, the celebration can contain an offering of thanks for the precious right of democracy.

                Not quite so this year. Family gatherings have been impeded by a pandemic much worse than it need be. Unbridled pride in the power of the vote has been stolen by invented charges of fraud, a fabrication that has taken root like a malignancy among millions of Americans. President Trump has grouchily damaged America’s faith in its democratic birthright.

This should be a moment of thanksgiving for the system that held the line against a president’s assaults. We should be buoyed by the poll workers, vote counters, election boards, courts, and local officials who maintained a bulwark of honesty against the Republican assaults on the vote. As Tom Friedman wrote today, “It was their collective integrity, their willingness to stand with ‘Team America,’ not either party, that protected our democracy when it was facing one of its greatest threats — from within. History will remember them fondly.”

Yet Trump allows us no delight in our achievement. He drains our pleasure in seeing more citizens vote than ever before. He makes it hard for us to congratulate ourselves for running a free and efficient election amid a devastating pandemic. He doesn’t even permit a bow by his own Department of Homeland Security for repelling foreign hackers and domestic manipulators. He seeds the electorate with cynicism and will surely fertilize that weed of faithlessness in the coming years.

Trump's Winning Strategy

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Donald Trump has been so successful in convincing tens of millions of Americans that he won the election that he plans to market the strategy to sports teams, lawyers, and gamblers, according to remaining sycophants in the White House.

                “He’s very upbeat about this,” a Senior Sycophant disclosed. “He’s already contacted Dan Snyder, who might buy a license to use the Trump Method as early as this season. Snyder considered testing it last Sunday by declaring that Washington beat Detroit—it was so close, decided in the final seconds, just like the stolen election! But Mr. Trump wouldn’t let him do it without a subscription to the service up front. The President is a very canny dealmaker, as you know. He’s created many problems that only he can solve, and he’s actually solved a few. He just wishes that Snyder hadn’t changed his team’s name from the Redskins. What was racist about that? The President’s orange skin makes him look handsome when he smiles—even a Biden voter said so. The Washington Football Team? What a dumb name. But President Trump has made the best of that, too, as he does of everything. He gets a kick out of screwing around with the team’s initials. He calls it the WTF team.”

                The Senior Sycophant descended into peals of laughter so severe that he had to excuse himself to get a glass of Kool-Aid.

                Time is of the essence for the WTF team, whose abysmal 2-7 record, with only seven games left, can be inverted only if it begins to declare victories immediately. “Then, on to win the playoffs and the Super Bowl!” gushed the Senior Sycophant.

With that model, Trump is sure that other teams will subscribe. The Baltimore Orioles come to mind. “Baltimore is not his favorite place,” said a middle-level official, “but he’s a man of principle, as you know, so is willing to put aside race and politics for money.”

 Lawyers ought to be prime customers, but so far Trump’s own attorneys haven’t signed up—except for Rudy Giuliani, according to internal emails intercepted by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, and leaked to The Shipler Report. “These lily-livered lawyers can’t see the writing on the cave,” Giuliani told Trump (as translated from English to Russian to English), “so they won’t use the Trump Method, even for free. I suggest that you bypass them and start declaring victories yourself.”

Gamblers constitute a large potential customer base, and Trump is considering a 3-day free trial, enough to get them addicted to winning. Promotional material is already being prepared with the logo, “I WON!” which is presumably the opening gambit once the dice are thrown or the roulette ball clicks into a number. Customers are promised a handbook and an encoded online strategy for demanding that the wheel and dice be tested, the deck of cards be thrown out and replaced, the cries of “Fraud!” be echoed by ringers planted strategically around the casino. Since Trump knows how to go bankrupt repeatedly, he is sure that casinos will just pay up.

So far, his fellow casino owner and mega-donor Sheldon Adelson has been kept in the dark about this plan. If Mr. Adelson reads The Shipler Report, President Trump might be hearing from him by the end of the day. 

This is satire. It’s all made up, a disclosure made necessary by the absurdity of current reality, which prevents lots of people from telling the difference between truth and fiction.