We’re Not Done Yet

“If the systems hold, it will be because organizers held the systems to account.” That’s Harvard researcher Erika Chenoweth talking to Andrew Marantz of the New Yorker about how nonviolent civil resistance movements win their struggles with would-be authoritarians. Written before this past week’s events, the article very nicely captures how a loose group of activists and researchers informed by decades of scholarship on nonviolence prepared for the election, and why they didn’t counsel panic when President Trump started to claim victory Election Night.

Indeed, it was organizers with We the People Michigan and We Make Michigan who can take a bow for their strategic work mobilizing the kind of pressure needed to ensure that the state’s Board of Canvassers did its job and certified Joe Biden’s 150,000 vote margin of victory there on Monday. Unlike the Trump car caravans and the Stop the Steal micromovement, which brought some intimidating vans and their drivers onto the nation’s interstates and into DC for a day of futile venting, the Michigan organizers knew what they were doing. They bird-dogged the Michigan legislators who were summoned to a Friday meeting with Trump in Washington; they organized phone and text banks that generated thousands of calls to state legislators, and on Monday several hundred of them held a Covid safe car caravan around the state capitol in Lansing.

The decision by the Michigan board yesterday seems to have been the tipping point needed for Emily Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration, who had been holding up the formal ascertainment of Biden’s victory, to release the funds needed for his transition operation to get moving. And with that, we got BuildBackBetter.gov, the official government website of the President-elect.

Consider the Contrast

Last night, I think a lot of us started to breathe easier. I know I am. I’m also finding myself moved by things that previously would probably never have mattered to me. The fact that Anthony Blinken, Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, is the step-son of a Jewish lawyer, Samuel Pisar, who was rescued from a Nazi slave labor camp at the end of WWII by Corporal Bill Ellington, of the all-black 761st, himself the son of a slave. The fact that Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Biden’s pick for UN Ambassador and a career diplomat with deep experience in Africa, grew up in a segregated town in Louisiana and went to a segregated school, and then became one of the few African-American women admitted to Louisiana State University, at a time when KKKer David Duke was all over that campus. The fact that Biden’s choice to run the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, is the first immigrant to lead that agency (and also the son of a Romanian Jewish woman who escaped the Holocaust by fleeing to Cuba, who is very aware of his Jewish heritage and the need to protect minorities from persecution).

All of these choices are, first and foremost, a 180-degree turn from an Administration headed by someone who referred to Africa and Haiti as “shithole countries,” and whose leading adviser on immigration, Stephen Miller, was an open white nationalist whose emails revealed that he regularly frequented extremist websites like VDare and promoted racist literature like Jean Raspail’s novel Camp of the Saints. In case you missed it, a few days ago the excellent Jacob Soboroff of NBC News (who cut his teeth writing posts for me at techPresident) reported that Miller quashed a proposed Justice Department settlement that would have paid for mental health services for migrant families who had been separated by the Trump administration. Ultimately a judge ordered the government to provide them, but Miller’s intervention delayed those services an extra six months, which only made the trauma experienced by those families deeper and harder to address. I’m not sure if there’s a human punishment sufficient for the damage Miller has been responsible for in his four years at Trump’s shoulder, but perhaps we can think of one. For starters, god help whomever offers him a job or pays him for a speech.

Thinking Ahead

While Democrats very much still have Georgia’s runoffs on their mind, we should also remember how much politics is local. This map from RuralOrganizing.org, showing how Biden’s showing in every county in America compared to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 vote, may offer some sobering guidance about which way things are trending near you. (New Yorkers, be careful looking at this map—it doesn’t include the final vote count, which is still not done!)

Here’s an inspiring recollection about becoming a “fully engaged citizen” from Deborah Bogen, a poet and novelist who found “her tribe” in Allegheny County after Trump’s election in 2016. We’re not done yet!

Odds and Ends

–Facebook continues to behave, true to form, as an amplifier of misinformation and extremism, as this story by Kevin Roose, Mike Isaac and Sheera Frankel in the New York Times shows. What makes this particular story a keeper is how it shows that the company’s engineers absolutely have the ability to tweak Facebook’s news feed algorithm in ways that can improve the quality of the information people share, but only choose to do so under extreme conditions, like the days right after the election. Apparently, the algorithm can be taught to reduce the frequency of posts that users rate as “bad for the world,” but when Facebook applies that change it reduces how much people use the site. So, Roose et al report, they decided to demote “bad for the world” content less than they could, to not hurt the company’s bottom line.

Yes, what’s “good for the world” isn’t good for Facebook.

There’s a silver lining in that Times’ story, or rather, an important crack in the façade. Which is that employee morale is dropping as internal pushes for reform get blocked by higher-ups more worried about alienating Republican leaders than really addressing the platform’s toxic effects on society. According to Roose et al, an effort by employees to expand the use of a “correct the record” tool, which helps tamp down the sharing of Covid-19 misinformation, was rejected by policy executives who said it would disproportionately tag content from right-wing sites. So here’s what we could do: start a deliberate effort to identify every Facebook employee (it’s not hard, they’re on LinkedIn!) and contact them, asking them to do more to change the company’s policies—or to leave. Facebook’s workforce has more power than it’s using, and maybe it’s time for an organized effort to leverage that power, similar to the #StopHateForProfit effort of last summer, which was led by several major civil rights organizations. I know there are a lot of grassroots activists who keep asking why we’re all on Facebook, and the answer is, we’re all locked in. But perhaps there’s finally critical mass (and time, since the election is just about over) to turn to fixing this problem.

–For those of you keeping track, Reid Hoffman’s much-hyped promise to fix the Democratic data world is shutting down after one election cycle of operation, as Teddy Schliefer of ReCode reports.

–The always excellent Zeynep Tufekci writes in The New York Times that we know what needs to be done to fix our voting system, and that with rising distrust in voting machines, perhaps there’s an opportunity to pass reforms that both parties could get behind, like improved voter registration systems and funding sufficient to ensure a paper trail for every ballot.

–And the equally excellent Renee Diresta explains in The Atlantic how the rightwing flight to sites like Parler is both bad for democracy and dangerous to social peace. She writes, “Yet the immediate danger persists. Democracy is built on dialogue—on the belief that even when citizens argue about the merits of a politician or the specifics of a policy, they ultimately use the act of voting to decide on a shared direction. Democracy also assumes that people on the losing side will accept the loss, not retreat into an alternate reality in which their candidate won. No amount of content moderation by Facebook can make up for the president’s refusal to concede and his most die-hard supporters’ inability to see any reason why he should. The conspiracy theory that the president-elect is illegitimate and the election was stolen is being reframed as reality, and millions of Americans keep buying it.”

Happy Thanksgiving all! Stay safe out there!