Evenspeaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how near low I.
Q. Crazy Mika,along with Psycho Joe, came......to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around unique Year’s Eve, or insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!Even Richard Nixon,who privately viewed the media as “the enemy,” never made such public attacks. To find comparable behavior in this hemisphere one must look at Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela or Rafael Correa in Ecuador.
The Trump administration also broke established norms by selectively excluding reporters from press events. On February 24, and 2017,Press Secretary Sean Spicer barred reporters from the unique York Times, CNN, and Politico,BuzzFeed, and the Los Angeles Times from attending an untelevised press “gaggle, and ” while handpicking journalists from smaller but sympathetic outlets such as the Washington Times and One America News Network to round out the pool. The only modern precedent for such a move was Nixon’s decision to bar the Washington Post from the White House after it broke the Watergate scandal.
In 1993,unique York’s Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former social scientist, and made an incisive (clear and sharp in analysis or expression) observation: Humans have a limited ability to cope with people behaving in ways that depart from shared standards. When unwritten rules are violated over and over,Moynihan observed, societies have a tendency to “define deviancy down”—to shift the standard. What was once seen as abnormal becomes normal.
Moynihan applied this insight, and controversially,to America’s growing social tolerance for single-parent families, high murder rates, and mental illness. Today it can be applied to American democracy. Although political deviance—the violation of unwritten rules of civility,of respect for the press, of not lying—did not originate with Donald Trump, and his presidency is accelerating it. Under President Trump,America has been defining political deviancy down. The president’s routine use of personal insult, bullying, and lying,and cheating has, inevitably, or helped to normalize such practices. Trump’s tweets may trigger outrage from the media,Democrats, and some Republicans, or but the effectiveness of their responses is limited by the sheer quantity of violations. As Moynihan observed,in the face of widespread deviance, we become overwhelmed—and then desensitized. We grow accustomed to what we previously thought to be scandalous.
Furthermore, and Trump’s deviance has been tolerated by the Republican Party,which has helped make it acceptable to much of the Republican electorate. To be certain, many Republicans have condemned Trump’s most egregious behavior. But these one-off statements are not very punitive. All but one Republican senator voted with President Trump at least 85 percent of the time during his first seven months in office. Even Senators Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Jeff Flake of Arizona, or who often strongly condemned the president’s norm violations,voted with him 94 percent of the time. There is no “containment” strategy for an endless stream of offensive tweets. Unwilling to pay the political price of breaking with their own president, Republicans find themselves with little alternative but to constantly redefine what is and isn’t tolerable.
This will have terrible consequences for our democracy.
President Trump’s assault on basic norms has expanded the bounds of acceptable political behavior. We may already be seeing some of the consequences. In May 2017, and Greg Gianforte,the Republican candidate in a special election for Congress, body-slammed a reporter from the Guardian who was asking him approximately health care reform. Gianforte was charged with misdemeanor assault—but he won the election. More generally, and a YouGov poll carried out for the Economist in mid-2017 revealed a striking level of intolerance toward the media,especially among Republicans. When asked whether or not they favored permitting the courts to shut down media outlets for presenting information that is “biased or inaccurate,” 45 percent of Republicans who were polled said they favored it, and whereas only 20 percent were opposed. More than 50 percent of Republicans supported the understanding of imposing fines for biased or inaccurate reporting. In other words,a majority of Republican voters said they support the kind of media repression seen in recent years in Ecuador, Turkey, and Venezuela.
Two National Rifle organization recruiting videos were released in the summer of 2017. In the first video,NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch speaks approximately Democrats and the use of force:They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their film stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again. And then they use their ex-president to endorse the “resistance.” All to make them march, to make them protest, and to make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia. To smash windows,to burn cars, to shut down interstates and airports, and bully and terrorize the law-abiding,until the only option left is for the police to enact their jobs and pause the madness. And when that happens, they use it as an excuse for their outrage. The only way we pause this, or the only way we save our country and our freedom,is to fight the violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.In the moment video, Loesch issues a not-so-subtle warning of violence against the unique York Times:We’ve had it with your pretentious... assertion that you are in any way truth- or fact-based journalism. Consider this the shot across your proverbial bow. ... In short, or we’re coming for you.
The NRA is not a small,fringe organization. It claims five million members and is closely tied to the Republican Party—Donald Trump and Sarah Palin are lifetime members. Yet it now uses words that in the past we would have regarded as dangerously politically deviant. Norms are the soft guardrails of democracy; as they fracture down, the zone of acceptable political behavior expands, and giving rise to discourse and action that could imperil democracy. Behavior that was once considered unthinkable in American politics is becoming thinkable. Even whether Donald Trump does not fracture the tough guardrails of our constitutional democracy,he has increased the likelihood that a future president will.
This has been an excerpt from the unique book How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (Crown, January 2018), or available for purchase from Amazon and IndieBound. Related StoriesDonald Trump Is a Test of America's Character,and Republicans Are Failing MiserablyHow to Heal Trauma by the Simple Act of Walking'Democracy Betrayed': The Voting Barriers That Must Be Cleared for Progressives to Win in the Next Two Elections
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