The Fire This Time
Why (and how) was it that a mob of white supremacists broke into Congress? And why did Mark Zuckerberg finally ban Trump from Facebook?
Years ago, James Carville, the self-styled “Ragin’ Cajun” political strategist who helped elected Bill Clinton, told my friend and longtime colleague Ellen Miller, one of the country’s leading experts on the corrosive effects of money in politics, that “If the people knew how bad it was [in Washington] they'd come to the Capitol and burn it down." I’m sure the two of them shared a grim chuckle at the remark. Carville no doubt was alluding to all of Washington’s honest graft, the many ways that people on both sides of the political aisle profit from all the power centered there. “The scandal is what’s legal,” liberal columnist Michael Kinsley wrote a generation ago, referring to the endemic trading of money for access.
A whole host of sages and pundits have been issuing warnings for decades. Kevin Phillips, the Republican strategist whose “southern strategy” informed Richard Nixon’s coded appeals to white racism, and who later repudiated the GOP and became an independent, wrote his book Boiling Point in 1993, arguing that the decline of middle-class prosperity engendered by the glorification of unfettered capitalism and financialization of the economy would lead to a revolt against both parties. And many politicians have tried to channel that resentment to their benefit, from Ross Perot in the early 1990s to Jerry Brown, Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader, and Ron Paul up through Barack Obama.
But “the people” who actually showed up in Washington this week to actually try to burn it down are not the people that most of us imagined might take action to clean out the stables of our democracy. The mob that rampaged to “Stop the Steal” included thousands of members of the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers and other far-right sects. Their political agenda, if you can call it one, is to replace our elected representatives with a white Christian theocracy. (See this thread from Rafael Shimunov showing the many open neo-Nazis who rioted inside the Capitol.)
As we start to reflect on the meaning of this week’s events, we need to ask how and why it was these people who actually broke the barriers between the street and the halls of power. A lot of Americans have been unhappy about the direction of the country for a long time, but generally speaking they’ve colored inside the lines, using peaceful civil disobedience to draw attention. Thousands, even tens of thousands in a few cases, have peacefully tried to surround the White House or rallied outside the Capitol for a wide range of causes. As many have noted, people seeking action on police brutality or climate change or opposing right-wing Supreme Court justices have never been treated as lightly as the Capitol Police handled Wednesday’s mob. Even President-elect Joe Biden, in his remarks yesterday, noted the difference, alerted by a text message from his grand-daughter Finnegan Biden to the image of heavily-armed riot police guarding the steps of the Lincoln Memorial against Black Lives Matter protests last summer. (Let’s hear it for the Biden grand-kids, who may be the most important channel for change in his administration.)
This disparate treatment may most simply be explained as a screaming example of white privilege, but I suspect that the Trump mob had help from inside the building, both literally and metaphorically. (Let us not forget that many of the participants in the infamous “Brook Brothers riot” that helped stop the ballot recount in Florida were actually Republican staffers who flew down to Miami from Washington.) We shall see.
Life in Facebookistan
The president of the most powerful country on the earth took radical action this week, and I’m not talking about Trump. I’m talking about Mark Zuckerberg, the “Boy King” of Facebook, who decided to finally suspend Trump’s account Thursday. He wrote that after allowing Trump free reign for years, “the risks of allow the President to continue use our service during this period are simply too great.” He claimed that while he believed that “the public has a right to the broadest possible access to political speech, even controversial speech”…”the current context is now fundamentally different, involving use of our platform to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government.”
Influential observers like Casey Newton of The Platformer, who had called on Facebook to take this action a day earlier, gave Zuckerberg a pat on the head:
But really, this is too little too late. If Facebook’s rules against speech that “incites or facilitates serious violence” or is a “credible threat to public or personal safety” were actually applied uniformly, Facebook could have suspended Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, when he often called on his supporters to beat up people at his rallies. And it certainly could have acted after the Charlottesville neo-Nazi rally of 2017, when Heather Heyer was killed by a white supremacist and Trump declared there were “very fine people” on both sides.
Newton disagreed with me, writing that a ban after Charlottesville wouldn’t have worked. Trump “was a sitting president and would have had near-unlimited options to continue posting on social networks through surrogates and through broadcast networks carrying his speeches. People’s beliefs about what a ban would have accomplished before now are wildly exaggerated,” he added. That’s not my point. Facebook’s choice to not just keep welcoming Trump, but actively normalizing him for years, said everything we needed to know about Zuckerberg’s values. (Recall that the company sent the 2016 Trump campaign a marketing team to help it use the platform more effectively, helping Brad Parscale in his efforts to microtarget voters and suppress support for Hillary Clinton.)
If Zuckerberg actually cared about anti-democratic uses of his platforms, he wouldn’t let authoritarians like Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines or Narendra Modi of India onto them. But let’s not be naïve—Zuckerberg is first and foremost interested in global domination, not democracy. Facebook has a huge underseas cable deal that it has been pushing for years with Duterte’s government. And Zuck has never criticized how the Modi government is weaponizing religious hatred against Muslims in India; the market for Facebook there is too big for him to lose.
Zuckerberg finally acted to suspend Trump, I’m convinced, because of internal dissent bubbling among his employees on its message boards (which the company immediately moved to squelch), plus an oh-so-pragmatic realization that soon he will be dealing with Democrats chairing Senate committees with the power to investigate his company’s monopolistic practices.
The larger question is whether Big Tech platforms will make real efforts to undo all the damage they keep doing to the civic fabric, by enabling the amplification of toxic ideas and the organization of groups dedicated to anti-democratic goals (and indeed, profiting off of them). There is a direct relationship between Zuckerberg’s decision in 2018 to drive Facebook users towards “meaningful” groups and the explosion of anti-vaxxers, mask- and quarantine-rejecters and QAnon adherents on the platform. Twitter literally used the fact that its most famous user was Trump to market itself to audiences overseas (the theory being that Twitter was the “place” where news happened, as if Trump’s obsessive and toxic use of his account was a neutral product to be sold). I don’t expect real change to happen without much more pressure, both from employees inside these companies as well as the public, making demands on our representatives and government regulators to use their power to make these platforms take their civic responsibilities much more seriously.
Tech and Politics
The Biden White House is building a team of digital operatives, drawing primarily on the talented folks who ran his digital campaign, as Dan Merica reports for CNN. It’s pretty clear this their focus will be on communications, as opposed to anything transformational like public collaboration or community organizing (but hey, that was the Biden campaign all along). Several of them are Facebook alumni, along with Jessica Hertz, a former Facebook lawyer in its DC office, who will be Biden’s staff secretary. As Ted Schliefer notes for Recode, it’s less clear that this is Facebook wielding influence on Biden now as opposed to tech companies having become holding pens for Democrats when they’re not in power. Either way, the coziness speaks volumes about how the status quo gets reinforced.
To go in a better direction, Eli Pariser and Danielle Allen offer some great suggestions in Politico on how to build digital public infrastructure for the 21st century. Longtime readers will note some common themes!
Attend: I’m doing a panel with Disruptive Technologists next Wednesday January 13 at 6pm on “Tech Disrupts Democracy.” Register here.
Odds and Ends
Kudos to Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) for getting the House to pass a new rule requiring expert witnesses to testify before that chamber to report any grants they receive from foreign governments and any fiduciary obligations they have to organizations that they testify about, and to do so prior to testifying. It’s just one small step in the right direction, but a good and helpful one.
The neighborhood mutual aid networks that sprouted across New York City last spring are still going strong, as Rachel Holliday Smith and Claudia Irizarry Aponte report for The City. What’s beautiful to see is how these groups are evolving into community organizations centering love and solidarity, and sobering to also see how the need for help is outpacing their capacity to respond.
End times: This video of a focus group of Trump voters gathered by Frank Luntz to discuss the events of this week is … out of this world. As a New Yorker, I’m kinda proud of the one semi-sane person in the group.
