Rage Against the Machine
When anger in politics is justified, and what to do with it: On the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. Plus, another report on tech and democracy.
Years ago, in the mid-1980s, I was helping lead a group of Nation readers on a “fact-finding” tour of Israel/Palestine (it was one of my first actual jobs at The Nation after being an intern) when I witnessed a fierce political argument between two of the people on the trip. Two middle-aged men, one a law professor and the other a prominent foreign affairs writer, were screaming at each other, red-in-the-face. But they weren’t arguing about Israel or Zionism or the Palestine Liberation Organization. They were fighting about Vietnam. I don’t remember the details, other than something about US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s role in promoting the Vietnam War. But what has stuck with me all these years later is how angry they both were, even though the war had ended a decade earlier. Their fury flowed like hot lava burst from a hidden source, a hint of how badly Vietnam had divided the nation, something that I was too young to experience or understand as it happened.
Is it good to stay angry about such things?
Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the launch of America’s invasion of Iraq. In the lead-up to the war, a parade of top American officials promoted a huge lie, that Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction, as justification for the attack. (Top journalists helped amplify this paranoid and false theory, recycling Pentagon propaganda as facts and even claiming to have discovered proof that Saddam was allied with Osama bin Laden.) A month before the beginning of “Operation Shock and Awe” somewhere between six and ten million of us marched worldwide in opposition, leading the New York Times writer Patrick Tyler to write that there were now “two superpowers on the planet – the United States, and worldwide public opinion.” That was an exaggeration, as President George W. Bush made clear a few days later, when he insisted that Saddam was “a threat to peace” and that the real risk would be if we did nothing. As for the protests, he said, “You know, size of protests--it's like deciding, `Well, I'm going to decide policy based upon a focus group.' The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon, in this case, the security of the people.”
Today, after the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and more than four thousand American troops, and at a cost of at least $2,000,000,000,000 (trillion) – more than double what the US spent in Vietnam – ex-President Bush gets paid six-figure speaking fees where, on one occasion, he even laughed about a faux pas about his “wholly unjustified and brutal invasion.” The audience laughed along with hi. Condoleezza Rice, who was the White House National Security Advisor at the time of the invasion, now runs Stanford’s Hoover Institution and invests in NFL football teams. She’s received ten honorary degrees from various universities since 2003. The name of Colin Powell, who was Secretary of State at the time and who sold a pack of lies to the United Nations as part of his service to the Bush White House, now graces a “School for Civic and Global Leadership” at CUNY, where his official bio highlights his “social commitment” while only glancingly and gently suggesting he might have misled us into Bush’s war. (Fittingly, the Powell School just hosted a conversation with Rice on “leadership and diplomacy,” so we’re all good.)
A few years ago, I was at a private meeting of prominent civic activists when I heard about a documentary in the works, American Creed, that features the friendship between Condoleezza Rice and David Kennedy, a liberal historian also based at Stanford. While the intention of the film’s producers was commendable—America is too polarized and we do have to find ways to talk across party lines—I found myself almost shaking with fury at the thought that anyone would elevate Rice in that effort, and I spoke up with far more emotion than I suppose anyone in the room expected. Aren’t there political mistakes too great to forgive?
To err is human. Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done, as Bryan Stevenson says, right? I think those axioms make moral sense, but only for people with little power. If you attain great power and then abuse your great responsibility to use it well, we shouldn’t forget and you—at a minimum—shouldn’t continue to reap the rewards of “statesmanship” or civic honor. Which is why, of all the pictures that sum up my anger about the Iraq War, this one somehow bothers me the most:
Bonus link: War photographer Christopher Morris is sharing some haunting photos of what the US invasion was like on the ground as heavily armed soldiers encounter Iraqi civilians during the war’s first days.
Tech and Democracy?
New York City’s All Tech is Human is out with a new 129-page report on tech and democracy that is worth reading for the dozens of individuals it profiles working at the intersection of those two ideas. If you’re someone looking to get into the field or just interested in a solid orientation to who is doing what, this is a pretty good guide to what’s out there. But like many other efforts at enlisting techies and tech-savvy organizers in strengthening democracy, this report reminds me of the man searching for his keys under a lamppost, not because he dropped them there but because that’s where the light is brightest. That’s because the report defines the crisis of democracy as a supply-side problem (too much division and disinformation), when it’s much more of a demand-side problem (people who have lost faith in democratic institutions searching for who to blame or what to follow instead). We don’t have more disinformation and polarization because digital technologies make it easier to spread lies and build echo chambers. We have more because unfettered capital, empowered by disruptive technologies that it has been far better-positioned to employ, has shredded the social contract.
The words “middle class” do not appear once in All Tech is Human’s report, even though decades of experience have taught us that without a broad and stable middle class, democracy dies. There’s no mention of taxes, like the ones the tech industry was protected from paying for decades and that it still zealously dodges, starving public sector services like education. Without a strong public education system, democracy dies. The word “inequality” also goes unmentioned in the report, other than in passing in two profiles, one of tech ethicist Emily Gillchrist, who calls for paying people living wages so they can more actively participate in the decisions that affect them, and one of Holly Russon Gilman, a senior fellow at New America, who notes that American democracy is under stress from “governance challenges carried over from the 20th century” including “racial and economic inequality” that persist due to “large-scale structural issues, including antiquated institutions that are unable to equitably deliver on people’s most pressing needs, from attaining economic security to protection from climate change.” High income- and wealth-inequality doesn’t mix well with democracy either.
I guess I don’t really understand All Tech is Human’s theory of change, which seems to be to “tackle wicked tech and society issues and co-create a tech future aligned with the public interest” by bringing diverse people together for multi-stakeholder-multi-disciplinary-something-something, and profit by finding a job in “the emerging Responsible Tech ecosystem.” Or as they say in the introduction to this report, “Power and ideas need to rapidly circulate in order for us to pro-actively consider the impacts of technology and design a better tech future.” Huh?
Odds and Ends
--Library workers in Michigan are turning to union organizing as a way to defend themselves from far-right book-banners, Melissa Gira Grant reports for The New Republic.
--Long before the collapse of cryptocurrency exhcnage FTX, leaders of the “effective altruism” movement were warned, repeatedly, that Sam Bankman-Fried was “unethical, duplicitous and negligent,” Charlotte Alter reports for Time magazine, but instead of avoiding him they took tens of millions of dollars from his charitable fund.
--The first generation of kids born digital are becoming parents themselves, and as Fortesa Latifi reports for Teen Vogue, some of them are choosing to protect their kids’ privacy instead of posting innumerable photos and videos of them. And others, teens whose parents have monetized their every smile and burp, are angry at how they’ve been exploited. As she writes about one, using the pseudonym Claire: “When the family is together, the YouTube channel is what they talk about. Claire says her father has told her he may be her father, but he’s also her boss. ‘It’s a lot of pressure,’ she said. When Claire turns 18 and can move out on her own, she’s considering going no-contact with her parents. Once she doesn’t live with them anymore, she plans to speak out publicly about being the star of a YouTube channel. She’ll even use her real name. Claire wants people to know how her childhood was overshadowed by social media stardom that she didn’t choose. And she wants her parents to know: ‘nothing they do now is going to take back the years of work I had to put in’.” There are no labor laws covering child influencers, Latifi notes.
Deep Thoughts
--For readers interested in the challenge of building digital public squares, Vauhini Vara has a long and complicated story out in Wired magazine about the “The Battle for the Soul of Buy Nothing,” that chronicles how a home-grown movement for hyper-local sharing of everyday goods and services has evolved into a distributed network of millions of participants and some very pissed-off volunteers. It’s a story that was only possible during Facebook’s best years, and the struggle of Buy Nothing’s two co-founders to find a viable way to get their followers off the corporate platform and onto a community-centered app is filled with frustrating reminders of how hard, and perhaps impossible, it is to square the need for leadership, money and structure with the desires of people to free-ride off the goodness of strangers.
--Set aside time for reading this tour-de-force essay on the “Post-Dobbs Abortion Fight” by Ilyse Hogue, the former president of NARAL-ProChoice America. While we’re now living in the America envisioned decades ago by religious right organizers Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Weyrich, Hogue makes a convincing case that a different kind of pro-abortion, pro-democracy politics is possible and winnable.
Who Says Irony is Dead?
Thank you for this very thoughtful post, Micah. This really moved me, " If you attain great power and then abuse your great responsibility to use it well, we shouldn’t forget and you—at a minimum—shouldn’t continue to reap the rewards of “statesmanship” or civic honor."