The Corruption of the Republic

02-04-2018

The Corruption of the Republic

To watch President Trump’s “State of the Union” address and to read his tweets about the Russia investigation is to again be reminded that his words are not meant to be taken literally or seriously. We are collectively still struggling to respond to this situation where words spoken by the President are intended as weapons but are not meant to be believed. The very idea of a public discourse comprised of argument is fading into a romanticized past. “Dialogue and discussion, including civil disagreement, depend on words. All become impossible when words cease to matter,” as Marianne Constable wrote just after the election. Day by day, we feel ourselves shrugging off absurdities. To respond is to take the position of the school scold and subject oneself to ridicule. And to ignore the disgraces that flow ceaselessly from the Presidential palette is to be complicit in the demeaning and corruption of our collective public world. We are witnessing, as Roger Cohen argues, the continued corruption and hollowing out of the ethical core of the country.

“President Trump’s most significant, and ominous, achievement in his first year in office is the corruption of the Republic. I don’t mean that he has succeeded in destroying the checks and balances on which American freedom rests. I mean that he has so soiled the discourse that a kind of numbness has set in, an exhaustion of outrage that allows him to proceed with the unthinkable. The greatest danger from a man so unerring in his detection of human weakness, so attuned to the thrill of cruelty, so aware of the manipulative powers of entertainment, so unrelenting in his disregard for truth, so contemptuous of ethics and culture, so attracted to blood and soil, was always that he would use the immense powers of his office to drag Americans down with him into the vortex. Trump is succeeding in this. He is having his way, for all the investigative vigor of the free press he derides, for all the honor of the judiciary that has pushed back against his attempts to stain with bigotry the law of the land. Slowly but surely, the president is getting people to shrug. The appalling becomes excusable, the heinous becomes debatable, the outrageous becomes comical, lies become fibs, spite becomes banal, and hymns to American might become cause for giddy chants of national greatness.”

Jonathan Rauch wrote over a year ago, citing  Benjamin Wittes, that ““The first thing you’re going to blow through is not the laws, it’s the norms.” By “norms,” [Wittes] means such political and social customs as respecting the law, accepting the legitimacy of your political opponents, tolerating speech you disagree with, performing civic duties like voting and staying informed, treating public office with dignity, and not lying. Fervently and frequently, the Founders warned that the Constitution would stand or fall on the public’s commitment to high standards of behavior—what they called republican virtue. James Madison said “parchment barriers” could not withstand the corruption of democratic norms. George Washington, in his farewell address, said, “It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” John Adams warned that “avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net.” When Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of government the Constitution established, he replied: “A republic—if you can keep it.”” Values, norms, and virtue are the inspirational core of all republics. That is why Hannah Arendt argued that the great threat to representative democracy would not come from a conspiracy of the representative leaders against the people whom they represent. The end of democracy will, she argued, come from the corruption of the people: “Corruption in [representative government]  is much more likely to spring from the midst of society, that is from the people themselves.” It is when the people place private interest over the public interest that the virtue necessary to inspire a republic vanishes. President Trump is hardly the cause of corruption in the United States. On one level, he is a symptom of a long-festering rise to political and social power of a corrupt business and governing class that sees success and winning as a validation for any and all misdeeds. On another level, President Trump is also a product of intellectuals who find corruption funny rather than outrageous. The irony of elites who laugh at the inefficiency and incapacity of government is celebrated nightly on late-night talk shows. Satire has become a favorite sport, so that we laugh at the very corruption that should steel us to act. —Roger Berkowitz

Form more information visit: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/opinion/trump-corruption-republic.html

Rumors, Scandals, and Character Assassination

[caption id="attachment_19514" align="alignleft" width="300"] Source: Christopher Morris / VII / Redux[/caption] Julian Zelizer offers a reality check to those who think the Trump administration is imploding. In the last two months since the tax cut, Trump’s popularity has shot up ten points to 42%; he has successfully put the Democrats on defensive on immigration, offering to legalize the “Dreamers” in return for draconian limits on legal immigrants; and he has consolidated Republican support. What is more, Zelizer argues that Trump has succeeded in implanting a narrative into the mainstream conversation that questions the fairness of Robert Mueller’s Independent Counsel investigation.

“In the Trump edition [of the Saturday Night Massacre], nobody actually had to be fired. With all of the experts wondering whether President Trump would get rid of Robert Mueller or a high-level FBI official, the President, with the support of congressional Republicans, undertook a different strategy that is accomplishing the same goal. They moved to discredit the entire investigation through rumors, partisan memos, scandalous innuendo and character assassination. The President's Twitter feed has been an ongoing public relations machine to convince the country that the investigators are up to no good. The hoopla over whether or not President Trump would allow the infamous Republican memo to be seen was always beside the point. Once the news provided 24-hour coverage of the fact that some allegedly shocking memo was lurking in the committee room, the President had accomplished his goal. It didn't really matter what was in the memo or that it was a partisan missive, just that something potentially scandalous existed. He had provided more fuel to the conspiratorial attacks the GOP has undertaken against the Russia investigation. Although the public still supports Mueller's investigation and is dubious about the President's claims, the narrative of a "Deep State" and special investigator who attempted to throw an election and undertake a coup have taken strong hold in the national conversation. The release of the memo Friday will add fuel to the fire with its implication that the investigation was based on flawed information. In a memo that does not provide supporting intelligence and provides an incomplete portrait of how the investigation started, and why it continued, Republicans will claim to see evidence that the entire scandal was manufactured.”

 

Form more information visit: https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/03/opinions/trump-is-making-a-comeback-zelizer-opinion/index.html

Depression and the Smartphone

[caption id="attachment_19515" align="alignright" width="300"] By Senado Federal - Fotos produzidas pelo Senado, CC BY 2.0[/caption] Anyone who teaches in our nation’s colleges and universities is aware of the rising problem of depression amongst young people. The same goes for parents of teenagers. I fit both these demographics and the mental health of young people is clearly in decline. Jean Twenge argues that her research has found a culprit: the ascendance of the smartphone amongst teens.

“Around 2012, something started going wrong in the lives of teens. In just the five years between 2010 and 2015, the number of U.S. teens who felt useless and joyless – classic symptoms of depression – surged 33 percent in large national surveys. Teen suicide attempts increased 23 percent. Even more troubling, the number of 13- to 18-year-olds who committed suicide jumped 31 percent. In a new paper published in Clinical Psychological Science, my colleagues and I found that the increases in depression, suicide attempts and suicide appeared among teens from every background – more privileged and less privileged, across all races and ethnicities and in every region of the country. All told, our analysis found that the generation of teens I call “iGen” – those born after 1995 – is much more likely to experience mental health issues than their millennial predecessors. What happened so that so many more teens, in such a short period of time, would feel depressed, attempt suicide and commit suicide? After scouring several large surveys of teens for clues, I found that all of the possibilities traced back to a major change in teens’ lives: the sudden ascendance of the smartphone…. I found that teens now spend much less time interacting with their friends in person. Interacting with people face to face is one of the deepest wellsprings of human happiness; without it, our moods start to suffer and depression often follows. Feeling socially isolated is also one of the major risk factors for suicide. We found that teens who spent more time than average online and less time than average with friends in person were the most likely to be depressed. Since 2012, that’s what has occurred en masse: Teens have spent less time on activities known to benefit mental health (in-person social interaction) and more time on activities that may harm it (time online).”

Form more information visit: https://theconversation.com/with-teen-mental-health-deteriorating-over-five-years-theres-a-likely-culprit-86996