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TYRANNOS

The Ancient Greeks Warned Us About Donald Trump

We might think tyrants are the opposite of democracy. But like it or not, they can spring from within democracies as well. And here we are. Buckle up.

WILLIAM DUGGAN

12.10.16 8:00 AM ET

To understand President Trump, we must go back to ancient Greece. The key to its democracy was a large Assembly that the mass of male citizens elected directly. Members of the Assembly served in rotation as government officials. But sometimes, mostly because of outside threats, the Assembly named a single ruler for a set period of time. That ruler took over all the functions of the Assembly. The technical name for this ruler was tyrannos. In English: tyrant.

Tyrants arose in two ways: at the initiative of the Assembly, or of the tyrant himself. Often it was hard to tell the difference. In all cases, some large number of citizens clamored for the Assembly to name a particular tyrant. That clamor might convince the Assembly to hand over willingly. Or the tyrant threatened to take over by force, with popular support, and the Assembly gave in. At the end of a tyrant’s term, he might hand power back to the Assembly, or might demand that the Assembly prolong his term. Again, there was a fine line between the Assembly giving in willingly or under the threat of force.

In recent centuries especially, as it spread across the globe, democracy took many forms that were different from and more complex than the simple Assembly of ancient Greece. Yet the appeal of a tyrant endured. For example, the French Revolution threw the country into crisis. Within, France faced civil war, economic chaos, and the Terror. Outside, the other kings of Europe attacked the country to put the French king back on the throne, before the Revolution spread to overthrow them too. In this time of peril, Napoleon arose as a tyrant in the technical sense from ancient Greece.

It happened like this. In 1799 members of the existing democratic government, the Directory, asked their most successful general, Napoleon, to take over by force. He did so in a bloodless coup. The result was a consulate, modeled after ancient Rome, where a Senate elected three consuls to rule for ten years. Napoleon was first consul, and quickly froze out the other two. Three years later, a popular vote confirmed Napoleon as first consul for life. He remained popular in France throughout his reign. It was only by uniting their armies against Napoleon and defeating him in battle that his foreign enemies were able to put a French king back on the throne.

A more recent example is Mussolini. He rose from the ranks of the Italian Socialist Party to turn against them in 1914: They promoted working-class solidarity across countries, while Mussolini aimed to unite all of Italy against foreign powers. But the working class remained his biggest supporters. He aimed to expand the current borders of Italy northeast into Austria and south into Africa, on the model of ancient Rome. His chance came at the end of World War I, when Italy suffered economic crisis, mass strikes of peasants and workers, and the rise of militias of the left and right, including Mussolini’s fascists. Italy was still a constitutional monarchy with a weak parliament. In the elections of 1921, 14 parties won seats, and no party gained as much as a quarter of the votes.

In the fall of 1922, Mussolini’s militias massed at strategic points around the country and threatened to march on Rome to seize power. The prime minister resigned. The king asked Mussolini to form a new government. This was a legal transfer of power. Mussolini proceeded to appoint his followers to all key government positions and manipulated the voting rules to gain 65 percent of the vote in 1924 and 98 percent in 1929. He remained popular until Italy’s military defeat in World War II.

Mussolini had many admirers elsewhere in the democratic world. These included the president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. That same year, in his welcoming address to his incoming freshman class, Butler declared that “the assumption of power by a virtual dictator whose authority rests upon a powerful and well-organized body of opinion” produced leaders “of far greater intelligence, far stronger character and far more courage than does the system of election.” 

Let’s skip ahead to President Trump. His rise to power came from a direct appeal to a large mass of followers outside the current democratic system. He ran against both major political parties and the traditional media that both covered them and typically sided with one or the other. New social media, especially Twitter, helped him appeal directly to individual citizens. He staged live rallies that also gave his followers a feeling of direct connection with him. The followers of a tyrant acclaim him directly, not through democratic institutions. They trust him, not those institutions. He promises not to let them down.

In this way, we can understand how criticism from the mainstream—about racism, sexism, lies, and distortions of fact—meant little in the Trump campaign. His followers trust him to serve their interests. With the enemy at our door, we must rally behind a strong leader and not second-guess him. You salute and follow. This is no time to quibble or waver. He is our general in battle. Since the 9/11 attacks, America has been under attack by foreign enemies, and the existing democratic system proved unable to mount a defense. Instead, it only weakened our national character and thereby added an internal threat to the external one.  

Note that Trump railed against President Obama and Hillary Clinton as individuals: weak leaders, that is, incompetent tyrants. He saw in Putin of Russia a fellow tyrant worthy of his respect. Now as president, Trump retains his disdain for the norms and procedures of our democratic system. Why should he conform to it? He ran against it, and won. He is appointing anti-government officials and authoritarian figures—military generals and business tycoons. He will aim to bypass Congress and rule by executive fiat wherever he can.

Where does Trump get his ideas to rule as a tyrant? It is unlikely he studied ancient Greece or previous tyrants like Napoleon or Mussolini. Instead, similar forces in democracies lead to similar results. And his background put him in a good position to fill the role of tyrant when the opportunity arose. He inherited his father’s business and never reported to a corporate board. He was in charge. The real estate industry runs by deals: a particular site, project, and financing, different each time, and you try to make the best deal you can. Expect the Trump presidency to run the same way—like his deal with Carrier in Ohio.

Likewise, Trump’s television career and celebrity status gave him practice appealing to large numbers of strangers. Simple words, short sentences, vivid images, and opinions rather than facts. That’s how you reach the masses. And his business became a form of celebrity marketing too, where he sold the Trump name and image more than building things himself. He was a popular public figure, in business and in entertainment, long before his campaign.

Trump’s one Achilles’ heel might be that he lost the popular vote but won through a quirk of the country’s particular democratic system, the Electoral College. A majority voted against him. But there’s nothing he can do about that. He will just have to steam ahead and rule as he ran, as a tyrant. He will continue to bypass the traditional media and deal directly with his followers through social media. He will blame any new problems that arise on the rotten system he inherited, and the soft-headed rulers who came before him.

President Trump is not an aberration. A tyrant is a feature of democracy, not its opposite. He won as a tyrant, he will rule as a tyrant. Hold onto your hats.

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 ALEXIS PAPACHELAS

Tough years ahead

COMMENT 21.01.2017

Politics, Diplomacy

America and the world will not be the same again. Donald Trump left no doubt about that with his speech on Friday. First of all, he is different. He rode the anti-establishment wave that has swept the West; and it appears that he didn’t simply do it “professionally” using extreme rhetoric and slogans as tools.

The rage, emanating from his pre-election rallies and his notorious late night tweets, was also on display at the moment of his ultimate triumph. Many believed he would stretch out his hand to everyone standing opposite him. He didn’t. That’s perhaps because he’s not made of the same stuff as other presidents.

The way he sees America’s global role, trade, the security grid, US obligations, is radically different to what we’ve known since the end of World War II. Europe and the world will go through four difficult and adventurous years.

Protectionism will cast doubts over the system of globalization. America’s disentanglement from its basic obligations will create a new situation; one which we can’t even begin to imagine now. For us in Greece it means that there will be no one in the White House who cares about Europe, and who will pick up the phone to speak to Angela Merkel about the need for Greece to remain in the euro. He’s not interested in a united Europe, which was a fundamental pillar of American policy. At the same time, we will also have a new war to root out radical Islam. And this change will impact us.

Some believe that America needed a reboot; that, in other words, it needed a leader who would liberate it from the excessive constraints on business and lay emphasis on production and the creation of infrastructure. According to this theory, Trump may annoy us Europeans and half of America aesthetically, ideologically and in terms of perception, but he will serve as a catalyst for changes that are needed. Maybe they’re right and he is a rougher-round-the-edges version of Ronald Reagan.

But there’s also another theory, whereby America enters a phase of decline reminiscent of Rome in its twilight. Trump promises a return to an ideal grandeur but he will be the president that will make America small, inward-looking and isolated. Besides, he represents the “plastic” and superficial aspects of the Middle America beyond its two coasts.

It’s too early to draw conclusions. Trump may be the angry and unpredictable politician but he will govern with executives of Goldman Sachs and Exxon. The deep establishment in Congress and in the security apparatus will remain. America is a country that, up until now, respects its institutions.

What is certain is that the West will enter a new phase. And we will all feel the repercussions, especially in Greece, the West’s weakest link.

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from ...

http://www.ekathimerini.com./215497/opinion/ekathimerini/comment/tough-years-ahead

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 ALEXIS PAPACHELAS

Dreaming of Trump

COMMENT 29.01.2017 : 12:58

Politics, Diplomacy

Greek society is raging again. People are exhausted and angry. The things you hear being said are very similar to the noises ahead of the first elections in 2012, when the old political system was routed in a spectacular manner. Nobody could have predicted then what would follow.

In this era of rage and exasperation, Donald Trump has, unsurprisingly, gained fans here in Greece, some of whom are particularly fiery. His anti-systemic style, the offering of simple and immediate solutions to longstanding problems and his underlying authoritarianism are completely in line with the kind of qualities part of our society would like in a leader.

The longer our democracy fails to provide solutions to problems, the more admiration for Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Trump will grow. Of course, I find it difficult to imagine how today’s Greece would accept a government made up of bankers, hedge fund managers and generals, but in this crazy age anything is possible.

Is it to Greece’s advantage that Trump is the US president today? At the moment, he seems to be leading an administration that has a positive view of the political forces that want to break up the European Union and is not particularly interested in the eurozone’s cohesion. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will no longer be able to call Barack Obama or Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and ask them to put pressure on the International Monetary Fund. Some people seem to believe that as a result of some kind of metaphysical miracle, the new US president will order the American representative on the IMF board to insist that the Fund withdraws from the Greek program. There are many in the IMF who would like this to happen but there is absolutely no indication that it will.

The fact that Washington is abandoning its policy of supporting a united Europe and a cohesive eurozone means that it is certain we will encounter challenges in the future.

In geopolitical terms, we do not yet have a clue about how Trump will affect us. One possibility, which has been the subject of much discussion, is closer cooperation between Greece and the USA in the fight against Islamic terrorism. Some people take it a step further and suggest that if Incirlik Air Base in Turkey ceases to be available to the Americans, Greece could host their aircraft instead. They believe that Greece will become the West’s line of defense against Islam.

The question that will arise in such an eventuality is whether we can live up to such a role. Are we a country that could or would want to be a lighter version of Israel? And, how serious will the threat of a terrorist attack be in retaliation for our cooperation with the US? As is well known, Greece is not an impregnable fortress in terms of domestic security.

Lastly, Trump is certain to try to get involved in energy issues between Turkey, Israel, Egypt and Cyprus. The corporate interest is significant and many of the players are his acquaintances.

For the time being, part of Greek public opinion is imaging what it would be like to have a prime minister like Trump. And, part of the Greek establishment is imagining deals and geopolitical action with him. The first dream is understandable, the second is, for the time being, dangerous.

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from ... 

http://www.ekathimerini.com./authors?id=219

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OPINION | JAMES STAVRIDIS

President Trump’s immigration order tests the nation’s principles

Demonstrators marched in Washington Sunday to protest President Trump’s executive order on immigration and refugees.

By James Stavridis   JANUARY 30, 2017

In that lovely and atmospheric 1973 Oscar award-winning movie about the present and the past, “The Way We Were,” there is a powerful exchange between the two principal characters, Hubbell Gardner (played by Robert Redford) and Katie Morosky (portrayed by Barbra Streisand). Hubbell says, “People are more important than their principles,” but Katie counters tellingly with: “People are their principles.”

As we contemplate the executive orders issued by the Trump administration over the weekend, we need to ask ourselves simply: Are we our principles? I hope so. I think so.

Let me begin by giving the benefit of the doubt to President Donald Trump. I hope his intentions are to keep us safe, to ensure that we only admit people to our nation who want to be here for the right reasons — to join in this union, work hard to better themselves, create productive outcomes, and join in the occasionally uncertain but fundamentally just trajectory of this most unique of countries. I agree we should vet people coming here carefully (which I believe we have been doing), and use common sense and sophisticated intelligence and technology to ensure we make good decisions about who is allowed to come here.

And I am a deep admirer of General John Kelly, a retired Marine four-star officer, whom I have known for over four decades, since we served together on an aircraft carrier in the early 1980s. There is no finer person than John Kelly, and we are lucky to have him as the secretary of Homeland Security, charged with our security.

And yet . . . I am deeply disturbed by the general tone and thrust of the executive orders that, at least on initial read, seem to ban significant classes of people because of their religion, or prioritize one religion over another. I do not agree with decisions that simply close off any migration here from a particular nation, no matter the situation or background of the individual applying for a visa or refugee status. I am confused about what appears to restrict or at least subject to “extreme vetting” (whatever that may be) people who already hold green cards, worked honorably for the United States military (like my interpreters in Afghanistan and Iraq), have already been through two years of vetting, are students at US universities like Tufts, where I am a dean, or hold valid documents to enter the United States.

I do not understand the arbitrary selection of some Muslim-majority nations but not others to face the consequences of this executive order, nor the rationale for a 90- or 120-day time period. I cannot support a policy that simply relieves us of our obligations under international law to respect the right of refugees to apply for asylum arbitrarily.

It all appears to be an attempt to fulfill a campaign promise without sufficient thought to second order consequences, ill-staffed by an administration that does not as yet have a strong team in place, and shot through with an undercurrent of loathing for the Muslim world. That hurts us, and we will reap what we sow over time. As the old saying goes, “to every problem there is a solution: easy, quick, and wrong.” This is a classic example of “ready, fire, aim.”

Three principal objections leap out at me to these executive orders. The first is that the executive order does not comply broadly with international laws that require civilized nations to respect the right of legitimate refugees to have a free and fair hearing as to the circumstances of their situation before being rejected for entry. International law is shaped by custom and tradition, international treaties to which we subscribe, and our shared sense of values as an international community. Do we really want to be the nation that watches Germany (with one-fourth our population) take in more than a million refugees, in accordance with international law, while we say no and close our borders to those in need? Do we want to stand outside of international law in that way?

The second concern goes beyond the measured and logical words of the law. It is about our values and who we think we are as a people and as a nation. I understand that we must control our borders, and that no non-US citizen enjoys a right to come here. But are we not in the end the sum of our principles? Do we not believe in compassion, justice, and doing all we can to make the world a place where, as Marin Luther King said, the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice? These executive orders do damage to that ideal.

Third, and pragmatically, we should recognize the benefits of taking in these refugees. The vast majority are risk-taking, determined, creative thinkers who will over time give us a high return on investment. It takes enormous courage and endurance to take your 4-year-old son’s hand, put your 2-year-old daughter on your back, smile encouragingly at your wife, and walk a thousand kilometers across Syria to a refugee center in Turkey. I want that person on my team.

Certainly, there are risks. In the slipstream of refugees and visa returnees and amidst all the confusion, a few bad actors will slip in. But as we have seen over the last decade it is impossible to predict where the next terrorist attack will come from; and the overall damage we do to our reputation in the world is simply not worth the small incremental increase in our security.

There are hard calls, and I respect the challenges faced by the president and his team as they try to wrestle with them. But this set of executive orders stands in violation of international and treaty law, is poor policy, and fails the common sense check. It hurts us a nation, and places us on the wrong side of our principles. Let’s admit we are on the wrong course, and adjust accordingly before more damage is done.

Admiral James Stavridis is dean of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He was the 16th Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and was vetted to be vice president by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and interviewed for a cabinet post by President Donald Trump.

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from ...

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2017/01/30/trump-immigration-order-tests-nation-principles/L6jBXpFpF0iO3vjiFfeC8M/story.html?event=event25?event=event25

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Trump’s Lies vs. Your Brain

Unfortunately, it’s no contest. Here’s what psychology tells us about life under a leader totally indifferent to the truth.

By MARIA KONNIKOVA January/February 2017

All presidents lie. Richard Nixon said he was not a crook, yet he orchestrated the most shamelessly crooked act in the modern presidency. Ronald Reagan said he wasn’t aware of the Iran-Contra deal; there’s evidence he was. Bill Clinton said he did not have sex with that woman; he did, or close enough. Lying in politics transcends political party and era. It is, in some ways, an inherent part of the profession of politicking.

But Donald Trump is in a different category. The sheer frequency, spontaneity and seeming irrelevance of his lies have no precedent. Nixon, Reagan and Clinton were protecting their reputations; Trump seems to lie for the pure joy of it. A whopping 70 percent of Trump’s statements that PolitiFact checked during the campaign were false, while only 4 percent were completely true, and 11 percent mostly true. (Compare that to the politician Trump dubbed “crooked,” Hillary Clinton: Just 26 percent of her statements were deemed false.)

Those who have followed Trump’s career say his lying isn’t just a tactic, but an ingrained habit. New York tabloid writers who covered Trump as a mogul on the rise in the 1980s and ’90s found him categorically different from the other self-promoting celebrities in just how often, and pointlessly, he would lie to them. In his own autobiography, Trump used the phrase “truthful hyperbole,” a term coined by his ghostwriter referring to the flagrant truth-stretching that Trump employed, over and over, to help close sales. Trump apparently loved the wording, and went on to adopt it as his own.

On January 20, Trump’s truthful hyperboles will no longer be relegated to the world of dealmaking or campaigning. Donald Trump will become the chief executive of the most powerful nation in the world, the man charged with representing that nation globally—and, most importantly, telling the story of America back to Americans. He has the megaphone of the White House press office, his popular Twitter account and a loyal new right-wing media army that will not just parrot his version of the truth but actively argue against attempts to knock it down with verifiable facts. Unless Trump dramatically transforms himself, Americans are going to start living in a new reality, one in which their leader is a manifestly unreliable source.

What does this mean for the country—and for the Americans on the receiving end of Trump’s constantly twisting version of reality? It’s both a cultural question and a psychological one. For decades, researchers have been wrestling with the nature of falsehood: How does it arise? How does it affect our brains? Can we choose to combat it? The answers aren’t encouraging for those who worry about the national impact of a reign of untruth over the next four, or eight, years. Lies are exhausting to fight, pernicious in their effects and, perhaps worst of all, almost impossible to correct if their content resonates strongly enough with people’s sense of themselves, which Trump’s clearly do.

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What happens when a lie hits your brain? The now-standard model was first proposed by Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert more than 20 years ago. Gilbert argues that people see the world in two steps. First, even just briefly, we hold the lie as true: We must accept something in order to understand it. For instance, if someone were to tell us—hypothetically, of course—that there had been serious voter fraud in Virginia during the presidential election, we must for a fraction of a second accept that fraud did, in fact, take place. Only then do we take the second step, either completing the mental certification process (yes, fraud!) or rejecting it (what? no way). Unfortunately, while the first step is a natural part of thinking—it happens automatically and effortlessly—the second step can be easily disrupted. It takes work: We must actively choose to accept or reject each statement we hear. In certain circumstances, that verification simply fails to take place. As Gilbert writes, human minds, “when faced with shortages of time, energy, or conclusive evidence, may fail to unaccept the ideas that they involuntarily accept during comprehension.”

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Our brains are particularly ill-equipped to deal with lies when they come not singly but in a constant stream, and Trump, we know, lies constantly, about matters as serious as the election results and as trivial as the tiles at Mar-a-Lago. (According to his butler, Anthony Senecal, Trump once said the tiles in a nursery at the West Palm Beach club had been made by Walt Disney himself; when Senecal protested, Trump had a single response: “Who cares?”) When we are overwhelmed with false, or potentially false, statements, our brains pretty quickly become so overworked that we stop trying to sift through everything. It’s called cognitive load—our limited cognitive resources are overburdened. It doesn’t matter how implausible the statements are; throw out enough of them, and people will inevitably absorb some. Eventually, without quite realizing it, our brains just give up trying to figure out what is true.

But Trump goes a step further. If he has a particular untruth he wants to propagate—not just an undifferentiated barrage—he simply states it, over and over. As it turns out, sheer repetition of the same lie can eventually mark it as true in our heads. It’s an effect known as illusory truth, first discovered in the ’70s and most recently demonstrated with the rise of fake news. In its original demonstration, a group of psychologists had people rate statements as true or false on three different occasions over a two-week period. Some of the statements appeared only once, while others were repeated. The repeated statements were far more likely to be judged as true the second and third time they appeared—regardless of their actual validity. Keep repeating that there was serious voter fraud, and the idea begins to seep into people’s heads. Repeat enough times that you were against the war in Iraq, and your actual record on it somehow disappears.

Here’s the really bad news for all of those fact-checkers and publications hoping to counter Trump’s false claims: Repetition of any kind—even to refute the statement in question—only serves to solidify it. For instance, if you say, “It is not true that there was voter fraud,” or try to refute the claim with evidence, you often perversely accomplish the opposite of what you want. Later on, when the brain goes to recall the information, the first part of the sentence often gets lost, leaving only the second. In a 2002 study, Colleen Seifert, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, found that even retracted information—that we acknowledge has been retracted—can continue to influence our judgments and decisions. Even after people were told that a fire was not caused by paint and gas cylinders left in a closet, they continued to use that information—for instance, saying the fire was particularly intense because of the volatile materials present—even as they acknowledged that the correction had taken place. When presented with the contradictions in their responses, they said things like, “At first, the cylinders and cans were in the closet and then they weren’t”—in effect creating a new fact to explain their continued reliance on false information. This means that when the New York Times, or any other publication, runs a headline like “Trump Claims, With No Evidence, That ‘Millions of People Voted Illegally,’” it perversely reinforces the very claim it means to debunk.

In politics, false information has a special power. If false information comports with preexisting beliefs—something that is often true in partisan arguments—attempts to refute it can actually backfire, planting it even more firmly in a person’s mind. Trump won over Republican voters, as well as alienated Democrats, by declaring himself opposed to “Washington,” “the establishment” and “political correctness,” and by stoking fears about the Islamic State, immigrants and crime. Leda Cosmides at the University of California, Santa Barbara, points to her work with her colleague John Tooby on the use of outrage to mobilize people: “The campaign was more about outrage than about policies,” she says. And when a politician can create a sense of moral outrage, truth ceases to matter. People will go along with the emotion, support the cause and retrench into their own core group identities. The actual substance stops being of any relevance.

Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth University who studies false beliefs, has found that when false information is specifically political in nature, part of our political identity, it becomes almost impossible to correct lies. When people read an article beginning with George W. Bush’s assertion that Iraq may pass weapons to terrorist networks, which later contained the fact that Iraq didn’t actually possess any WMDs at the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the initial misperception persisted among Republicans—and, indeed, was frequently strengthened. In the face of a seeming assault on their identity, they didn’t change their minds to conform with the truth: Instead, amazingly, they doubled down on the exact views that were explained to be wrong.

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With regard to Trump specifically, Nyhan points out that claims related to ethno-nationalism—Trump’s declaration early in the campaign that Mexico was sending “rapists” across the border, for instance—get at the very core of who we are as humans, which “may make people less willing or able to evaluate the statement empirically.” If you already believe immigrants put your job at risk, who’s to say the chastity of your daughters isn’t in danger, too? Or as Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, once Trump makes that emotional connection, “He could say what he wants, and they’ll follow him.”

So what can we do in the face of a flagrant liar-in-chief? Here, alas, the news is not particularly promising. Consider a 2013 paper aimed at correcting political misperceptions, specifically. In the study, a group of people around the country were first asked about their knowledge of several government policies: For instance, how familiar were they with how electronic health records were handled? They also were asked about their attitudes toward the issues: Were they in favor, or opposed? Everyone next read a news article crafted specifically for the study that described the policy: how electronic health records work, what the objectives of using them are and how widely they are, in fact, used. Next, each participant saw a correction to the article, stating that it contained a number of factual errors, alongside an explanation of what was wrong. But the only people who actually changed their incorrect beliefs as a result were those whose political ideology was aligned with the correct information already. Those whose beliefs ran counter to the correction? They changed their belief in the accuracy of the publication that could possibly publish such an obviously bogus correction. It’s easy enough to correct minor false facts, the color of a label, say, if they aren’t crucial to your sense of self. Alas, nothing political fits into that bucket.

***

Scarier still for those who have never supported Trump is that he just might colonize their brains, too. When we are in an environment headed by someone who lies, so often, something frightening happens: We stop reacting to the liar as a liar. His lying becomes normalized. We might even become more likely to lie ourselves. Trump is creating a highly politicized landscape where everyone is on the defensive: You’re either for me, or against me; if you win, I lose, and vice versa. Fiery Cushman, a moral psychologist at Harvard University, put it this way when I asked him about Trump: “Our moral intuitions are warped by the games we play.” Place us in an environment where it’s zero-sum, dog-eat-dog, party-eats-party, and we become, in game theory terms, “intuitive defectors,” meaning our first instinct is not to cooperate with others but to act in our own self-interest—which could mean disseminating lies ourselves.

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The dynamic we are seeing unfurled in the United States is not merely hypothetical. We already have a model of this process—a country regressing when its leader goes from progressive to deceptive: Russia under Vladimir Putin. “This worldview”—a zero-sum, I win-you lose one—“is relatively more prevalent in Russia and other cultures with weak rule of law, high corruption and low generalized trust, as compared with Western democracies,” Cushman says. But when Western democracies start looking like those cultures, the norms can quickly shift.

The distressing reality is that our sense of truth is far more fragile than we would like to think it is—especially in the political arena, and especially when that sense of truth is twisted by a figure in power. As the 19th-century Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain put it, “The great master fallacy of the human mind is believing too much.” False beliefs, once established, are incredibly tricky to correct. A leader who lies constantly creates a new landscape, and a citizenry whose sense of reality may end up swaying far more than they think possible. It’s little wonder that authoritarian regimes with sophisticated propaganda operations can warp the worldviews of entire populations. “You are annihilated, exhausted, you can’t control yourself or remember what you said two minutes before. You feel that all is lost,” as one man who had been subject to Mao Zedong’s “reeducation” campaign in China put it to the psychiatrist Robert Lifton. “You accept anything he says.”

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Maria Konnikova is a contributing writer at the New Yorker and author, most recently, of The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It … Every Time.

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from 

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/donald-trump-lies-liar-effect-brain-214658

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Will This Man Take Down Donald Trump?

They’ve been squaring off for years. Now New York’s attorney general is emerging as the leader of the Trump resistance.

By DAVID FREEDLANDER February 03, 2017

I like you. You and me, we’re going to be best friends.”

It is early January, and Eric Schneiderman is sitting in his 25th-floor office above Lower Manhattan, doing his best Donald Trump impression, puckering his lips into a duck face, scrunching up his nose and lowering his voice into something that resembles the president’s outer-borough growl.

Schneiderman is recalling his meeting with Trump in 2010. Back then, Schneiderman was running for attorney general of New York, and Trump was still in his pre-birther, reality TV host phase. Trump had donated money to one of Schneiderman’s opponents in the Democratic primary. Schneiderman managed to pull off a come-from-behind victory, and after the race, he went to Trump Tower to ask for a donation for the general election. Trump coughed up $12,500 to the Democrat, and Schneiderman went on to beat his Republican opponent and win.

But Trump and Schneiderman did not become best friends. That meeting was the beginning of a long and increasingly bitter saga between the two. Schneiderman took up the state’s existing case against Trump University—New York wanted the school to drop the “university” from its name, since it was not chartered as an institution of higher learning and lacked a license to offer instruction—and as he pursued it over the next five years, he became the target of a relentless series of personal attacks from the Trump camp. Trump filed an ethics complaint alleging that Schneiderman offered to drop the suit in exchange for donations; he went on television to denounce Schneiderman as a hack and a lightweight, and said he was wasting millions of taxpayer dollars when he should have been going after Wall Street. (Never mind that Schneiderman had already been declared “the man the banks fear most” by the liberal magazine The American Prospect.) “The whole scorched-earth strategy towards those who would challenge him, we got a preview of,” says Schneiderman.

Schneiderman is a slender, slightly built former corporate lawyer, the only son of a New York philanthropist whose last names adorns several city cultural institutions. One never senses from him the kind of comfort and ease that people from his position tend to radiate, but rather a twitchy impatience, as if the vein on his forehead is going to pop while he busts some of the high-priced glassware in the political china shop. In the six years after he won that race, Schneiderman has emerged as perhaps the lefty media’s favorite lawyer, tangling with mortgage bankers, ExxonMobil, and national retailers like Abercrombie & Fitch, J Crew and The Gap. And on November 9, he was handed what might become his largest target when Donald Trump, his longtime nemesis, was elected president.

The Trump University suit eventually was settled for $25 million days after the election, despite the then president-elect’s repeated pledges never to settle. Schneiderman could have left it at that. But Schneiderman has let it be known that Trump is still in his crosshairs. In the days since November 9, Schneiderman fired off a letter warning Trump not to drop White House support of Obama’s Clean Power Plan, introduced a bill in the state Legislature to give New Yorkers cost-free contraception if the Affordable Care Act is dismantled, threatened to sue after Trump froze EPA funding of clean air and water programs, and joined a lawsuit that argues that Trump’s executive order on immigration is not just unconstitutional and un-American, but it brings profound harm to the residents of New York State.

He has a record of going not only after Trump, but going after people now in Trumpworld. He’s on the opposite side of the Clean Power Plan fight from Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, since named head of the EPA, and who Schneiderman labeled a “dangerous and unqualified choice.” He’s gone after Rex Tillerson, who as CEO of ExxonMobil defended his company from a Schneiderman investigation; since the election he’s begun investigating a reverse-mortgage business once led by Steven Mnuchin, the nominee to be the next Treasury secretary.

---

Schneiderman doesn’t think that the fact he has already appeared in court against Trump necessarily prepares him for what is about to come, but he has little doubt that something will come. Congress remains in Republican hands, and for the foreseeable future looks unwilling to provide much in the way of a check or a balance on the presidency. Governors and mayors can scream and protest, but beyond “setting an example” for other policymakers, the effect of their actions will be limited to their constituents.

Schneiderman, though, effectively leads a law firm of more than 650 lawyers, one with a two-decade tradition of taking its fights national. Now he faces an administration in Washington that is not just “pro-fraud,” as former Maine Attorney General James Tierney put it, but one helmed by someone very used to using the courts to get his way. “He’s not playing hide the ball,” Schneiderman said when asked about what he learned about the new president from his earlier tangle with him. “He’s not that different offstage from how he is on stage. This is him. He is a complicated guy in some respects, but he is used to making his own rules and he plays a very aggressive game. When he wants to get something done he will use every tool at his disposal.”

If Governor Eliot Spitzer became known as the “sheriff of Wall Street,” and Gov. Andrew Cuomo vowed to clean up Albany and become the “sheriff of State Street,” Schneiderman could very much become the next sheriff of Pennsylvania Avenue.

***

Schneiderman had seen dirty pool in his years as the state’s chief law enforcement officer, but his fight with the Trump Organization was, he says, “on the outer edge of normal.”

Two years into Schneiderman’s investigation of Trump University, Schneiderman filed a lawsuit against the company with charges of fraud; Trump himself retaliated by filing a complaint against the AG with the New York State board of ethics. He alleged that Schneiderman and his aides several times approached Trump, his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner for a contribution and for “the aid of their influence and celebrity status to secure other favors and preferential treatment in furtherance of Mr. Schneiderman’s political aspirations.” Schneiderman also promised several times to make sure that the messy investigation into Trump University went away, according to the complaint.

In an interview, Schneiderman says that nothing of the sort happened, and, in fact that after assuming office, he was expressly outlawed from soliciting Trump, since the developer was involved in all sorts of litigation with the state. Trump’s complaint was dismissed, but it was just one piece of a larger counteroffensive. “We got a preview of what everyone else got a few years later,” Schneiderman says.

Some of the assault came via Twitter: “Lightweight NYS Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is trying to extort me with a civil lawsuit,” Trump tweeted in August 2013. When Schneiderman toured Syracuse University that month with President Barack Obama to promote low-interest college loans, Trump went on Good Morning America and The Today Show to accuse Obama of paying Schneiderman off to take the suit. That fall, a new website appeared, 98percentapproval.com, that said on its homepage that it was “created to bring to the public’s attention the gross incompetence of New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman.” The domain was registered by Trump’s attorneys.

Perhaps most remarkably, in February of 2014, Schneiderman was the target of a lengthy, ferocious cover story in the New York Observer – the newspaper owned by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner—published in the midst of the dispute. The headline read, “The Power and Politics of AG Schneiderman: Will Righteous Eric bag big prey? Or will Reckless Eric come undone?” and it portrayed the attorney general as the Malcolm McDowell character from A Clockwork Orange—an unredeemed sadist in too much eye makeup. (The eye makeup was a specific dig at his appearance: The attorney general takes a glaucoma medication that makes his lashes appear thicker and darker than normal.) The article itself was a thinly sourced anti-Schneiderman op-ed, 7,200 words long, that spent almost half of its pages defending Trump. The story became a bit of tantalizing New York media gossip when it was revealed that the famously under-resourced society paper spent eight months on the story, and its editor, a Kushner family loyalist, had found the manager of an ice cream shop in suburban New Jersey without a single previous byline to report and write it. (The ice cream shop manager, it should be noted, eventually begged off when the story seemed too much like a hit piece, and The Observer found someone more credentialed to do it.)

By November 2016, it seemed as though Schneiderman would have Trump all to himself. Polls showed the reality TV star losing the presidential race, and he looked set to return to New York, where liberals were prodding Schneiderman to make his return to private life miserable. There was the ongoing litigation involving Trump University, which Trump pledged to never settle, and a new investigation of the Trump Foundation.

Then came November 8. Schneiderman had spent the evening at various VIP suites at the Hillary Clinton election night party, when it started becoming clear that his tormentor was not only not returning as a constituent, but was about to become the leader of the free world. A Democratic official turned to one of Schneiderman’s aides and said: “I guess it’s going to be up to you guys now.”

The next morning, as the office’s lawyers stumbled into work in a fog of exhaustion and worry, Schneiderman called a meeting. In the room were his senior staff and some of the bureau chiefs. There were tears. There were lawyers who couldn’t believe that Donald Trump—Donald Trump!—was about to become the next president of the United States. Schneiderman urged calm. Don’t just rush out and do. Take a deep breath, he told them. Let the moment wash over you. We can’t do everything at once, so prioritize. We are going to have to do more—not with less, necessarily, but with no greater resources.

Schneiderman ordered a top-to-bottom review of all his office’s outstanding business with the U.S. Department of Justice, both for and against, expecting that in the former cases that the federal government would be likely to switch sides, which would mean a loss of resources and knowledge-sharing. Another mission was to prepare rearguard actions to protect New Yorkers against whatever onslaught might come from Washington, including laying out new sanctuary city guidelines, and possible responses if the administration defunded Planned Parenthood or the EPA. They also began to lay the groundwork to fill in as regulators in areas where the federal government might stop enforcing laws already on the books, from labor laws, to securities regulation, to clean water and clear air enforcement. And he began to free up staff for what the attorney general’s office refers to internally as “Bet The House Litigation”—the kind of thing that would require a massive redeployment of the office’s resources, such as fighting a Muslim registry, or blocking an executive order to reinstitute some kind of stop-and-frisk program.

It was becoming clearer to liberal America in the days after the election that any real resistance to Trump would have to come from the states, especially those that went big for Clinton. At David Brock’s post-election donor retreat in Florida, former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm introduced Schneiderman as “the dean of progressive AGs.” He made the rounds on CNN and MSNBC and was singled out for praise from Mark Ruffalo and The Nation’s Katrina Vanden Heuvel. And he traveled around the state, appearing at town halls with grass-roots activists where he urged them not to despair. They were in the early stages of a new movement for civil rights, he said, and would prevail in the end.

It’s not just a question of blocking Trump’s policies: Schneiderman is one of the names that arises when it comes to the great liberal dream: finding something in Trump’s web of conflicts that prohibits him from serving out the remainder of his term. That Trump was a resident of New York and until recently ran his businesses there—and still owns those businesses—would appear to give Schneiderman a big target. Plus, in September, in the heat of the election, Schneiderman announced that he was beginning an investigation into the Trump Foundation for, among other things, using foundation money to make a donation to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi soon after she announced that her office would not investigate Trump University. After the election, Trump attempted to dissolve the charity as part of his transition, and Schneiderman ordered him not to. The investigation is continuing.

Earlier this week, Schneiderman appeared on a call-in radio show on a New York City public radio station when a caller asked whether any of Schneiderman’s investigations could lead to Trump’s eventual impeachment. The attorney general demurred, saying he doubted that anything related to Trump’s foundation or his university would rise to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

“There are a lot of reports of egregious acts he’s taken in the course of his business: his sexual assaults and other things—that’s all fair game,” he added. “We’re not—you know, we’re not out to get Mr. Trump. We’re just out to enforce the law. And if he’s broken New York law, we will enforce the law.”

When I visited Schneiderman’s office last month, I asked him a version of that same question—whether Trump’s tangled business interests, many of which were housed within a few miles of where we were sitting, meant that the attorney general of New York had a particular role to play in investigating the president. On his desk, between a tiny Buddha figurine, a bumper sticker reading “ASSUME NOTHING” and a handful of other files, was a report from the Brookings Institution on the Emoluments Clause, a once obscure constitutional provision that prohibits federal officeholders from accepting gifts from foreign states.

“I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but we are so far off the map in terms of any litigation that has taken place,” Schneiderman said, waving around a copy of the report. “We are not dealing with case law here. What are the examples you got of violations of this? Oh, American emissaries to the Court of Louis XVI were tortured and he bestowed on Benjamin Franklin a snuff box bearing the royal portrait of—I mean, this is the precedent?” I don’t want to overstate what I can do.”

***

Nationally, Schneiderman is taking advantage of something of an empowerment wave among state AGs. Over the past few years, the network of Democratic attorneys general has become more cohesive and more professionalized. In 2014, a number of other Democratic AGs decided that they wanted the group to become on par politically with the Democratic Governors Association, or the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. They hired Sean Rankin, a DC-based political consultant, as executive director and hired a staff of a dozen.

Though Schneiderman has served only since 2011, he is now one of the more senior Democratic attorneys general in the country—the Obama years weren’t kind to statewide Democratic officeholders—and he has been organizing his more left-leaning counterparts into something like a cohesive force, recently meeting with Josh Shapiro, the newly minted attorney general of Pennsylvania, Xavier Becerra of California and Maura Healey of Massachusetts to plot strategy. Because the office is so large, and because New Yorkers have come to expect an activist attorney general, New York is often the lead state when the group drafts a letter to Congress or files an amicus brief, a strategy that allows him to shape the direction the group goes in.

People who knew Schneiderman from his days in the New York State Senate, where he represented the ultra-liberal Upper West Side, wouldn’t exactly have picked him as a unifying force. In fact, he was almost immediately so disliked by his colleagues that Republicans and Democrats alike redrew him into a 55 percent Latino district that stretched through West Harlem and Washington Heights. He learned Spanish, won reelection anyway and served for 10 more years in the Legislature. But the reputation of not playing well with others has been one he hasn’t quite been able to shake. It was solidified when he refused to join the Obama administration’s 2011 mortgage settlement, one that 49 other AGs had already signed off on, instead holding out for more money and a less forgiving deal. In the end, the settlement broke his way—his intransigence helped win another $6 billion and a tougher agreement—and Obama named Schneiderman to co-lead a commission investigating the banks.

When speaking with other attorneys general around the country, it is possible to pick up on a slight air of resentment that Schneiderman’s proximity to New York City television studios grant him a larger audience than he would otherwise receive. But in the Trump era, with a White House run by an aggressive, take-no-prisoners rule-breaker, his style suddenly looks like an asset. “It’s a New Yorker thing—the brashness, the sharp elbows,” said an aide to another attorney general. “It’s hard not to notice the atmospherics when he takes on Trump.”

Through the new national AG network, the New York attorney general’s office was able to jump out quickly last week with a statement co-signed by 15 other state AGs when Trump’s Muslim ban went into effect at the airports. Schneiderman’s office had been preparing for just such a moment—it was why Schneiderman offered guidance to “sanctuary cities” after the election on how to handle any moves by the new administration—and worked through the weekend with AGs around the country on how to react. In the letter, which called the measure unconstitutional and un-American, Schneiderman demanded that the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Enforcement release the names of anyone being held. He then went on CBS This Morning to accuse the administration of unleashing chaos and not being forthcoming about the number of people detained at airports around the nation. The actual lawsuit, however, was filed by the attorney general of Washington, hoping to get a better hearing in the 9th Circuit on the West Coast. (Similarly, the Connecticut attorney general struck first after the inauguration, taking the lead on a lawsuit defending the constitutionality of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, a strategy on the part of Democratic AGs to share manpower and resources.)

At a post-election town hall, Schneiderman said his immediate role after the election was in talking people off the ledge. If there is a sanguinity to him these days, it is because Schneiderman sees this as a moment when Democrats can at last learn the lessons that Republicans have internalized over the past 70 years: that the real power in the Constitution lies in the states. The long-term political project he envisions is building a progressive grass-roots answer to what the right has been building for decades—not in the halls of Washington, but in “sexy towns like Tallahassee and Columbus and Madison and Albany.” That last one is instructive. New York’s state Senate remains in Republican hands, largely because a rogue group of centrist Democrats caucus with them, a group propped up by Cuomo, a longtime foil of the attorney general and of liberals throughout New York.

“We have to be a lot tougher. We have to be as demanding of our elected officials as conservatives are of theirs,” Schneiderman told an audience in the weeks after the election. “Nice words are not enough anymore. You have to deliver rewards. If you can’t deliver rewards on climate, on human rights, on protecting immigrants, on unwinding our failed experiment in mass incarceration, well, we love you and we will help you find another job, but right now, we have to find someone else that can do the job.”

Schneiderman has consistently denied that he is running for governor, a denial that seems to have helped smooth over the relationship between him and Cuomo and given Schneiderman more room to operate. When he talks of tossing the party-changers out of the temple, though, he certainly sounds like someone with political ambition.

The New York AGs office is known as a springboard for the ambitious, and in New York political circles the knock on Schneiderman has been that he’s slightly underplayed his hand there, retreating after the mortgage case in 2011 and 2012 and keeping quiet even if notching up victories. “He’s been perfectly fine if not spectacular,” said one local political operative close to him. “We are used to seeing Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo in that office, and he just hasn’t risen to that level yet.” In part, this is because Cuomo made it clear early on that he didn’t want anyone to upstage him in Albany, creating a new office dedicated to regulating financial services and installing a close ally to help run it. The two battled for the early part of Schneiderman’s tenure, but the feud has cooled in recent years as Cuomo has turned his attention to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Schneiderman has also had to work alongside a crusading U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, a charismatic presence who has used his office to target exactly the kind financial and political bad actors that both Spitzer and Cuomo made life difficult for. And in part, this is because of circumstances—both Spitzer and Cuomo spent the bulk of their time battling a Justice Department helmed by George Bush appointees. “I think he is probably as good a lawyer as they have had in that office in a long time,” said Tierney, “But you just don’t get the kind of splashy cases with an Obama presidency. Democratic AG’s are going to largely agree with his agencies and his Department of Justice.

***

All of that changes now. What Schneiderman can do—one state AG, or even a number of state AGs—against the leader of the right-populist wave in the White House remains to be seen. On the policy level, lawyers in his office are confident that so much of what Trump has proposed so far is so poorly written, and even more poorly thought out, that it opens itself up to all kinds of lawsuits.

“We don’t know what the legal consequences are yet of a lot of these executive orders,” said Healy, the attorney general of Massachusetts and a close Schneiderman ally. “But we do know that you are going to see a federal administration that is going to be rolling back consumer protections, labor protections, environmental protections, and looking to dismantle rights that have been put in place. The way you address that is you uphold the law through the courts, and that is the job of state AGs right now.”

Among Schneiderman’s New York troops, there is the unmistakable sense of suddenly fighting on new terrain. The office feels like it is in the middle of campaign season, with the other side rolling out a series of unpredictable attacks over the course of the week, leaving New York to figure which to fight back on and how. Applications for new positions have soared, even from private-sector lawyers willing to forgo hundreds of thousands of dollars in pay to help take on Trump.

“We are the backstop,” added Alvin Bragg, a top deputy in the office. “The system is set up in a certain way, that if the federal government doesn’t do certain things, we have to step up and push back. If they leave things wide open, we have to step into the void.”

At a standing room-only town hall in midtown Manhattan weeks after election, Schneiderman sounded like someone ready to lead the charge. Although few probably wanted to hear it, he painted a picture of an election that amounted to a clarifying moment for the left: it was time to clean out its hidebound notions and some of its own slow-moving elected officials.

“We are facing a crisis, not over conservative or liberal, but a crisis over whether or not the rule of law is respected or not, over whether the Constitution is respected or not, and whether the central American notion of equal justice under the law and that everyone be treated with dignity and equality and fairness—all that is at issue now,” he told the crowd.

But don’t despair, he hastened to add. “There is good news, too: Those who were asleep,” he said, “are now awake.”

The crowd loved it, nodding along, cheering and clapping at Schneiderman's urging. He left as soon as his speech was over, but everyone else stayed behind. The real work, it seemed, had not yet begun.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said that Oregon's attorney general filed a lawsuit against Trump's ban on immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries. It was actually the attorney general of Washington.

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from 

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/eric-schneiderman-donald-trump-new-york-214734

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