A Game Gone Tilt

Democracy in America is a bit of an arbitrary concept, better understood as something we have to fight for than something we have. There is the government we elect, using a outdated system that was designed by property- and slave-owning white men to protect their power, and which despite many advances toward universal suffrage is still slanted to benefit incumbents through gerrymandering and less-populated states via the Senate. Then there is economic power, which especially dominates elections for Congress because it is highly concentrated and adept at financing and influencing politicians, to the point that the system is mostly responsive to their concerns. This is the oligarchy, or, in the case of the emerging Trump cabinet, the oil–garchy. Then there is cultural (or people) power, where the First Amendment reigns, numbers truly matter and the people, either organized in movements, or through their buying power, often change norms in ways that also change policies, if not the underlying the structures of the rest of the system.

And then there is the deep state, the government that sees elections the way a glacier might relate to a thunderstorm above. We are now witnessing major pieces of that deep state, namely the CIA and other intelligence agencies involved in assessing Russia’s efforts to influence the election, moving in unprecedented ways into open conflict with the incoming Trump administration. (While the FBI, under director James Comey, appears to have tilted towards him.) Thus on Friday, the Washington Post’s Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller reported that the CIA believes that Russia intervened in the election in the hopes of benefiting Trump (and that senior Republicans blocked public discussion of Russia’s efforts back in September), and later that day, the New York Times David Sanger and Scott Shane added to that the fact that the Republican National Committee’s emails were hacked too, but never released—further confirming the Russian tilt.

In theory, the deep state is supposed to be responsive to popular will, and the winner of the election, however flawed, is supposed to govern it, not the other way around. But no president has ever challenged the deep state and won. (See Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs; the leaks from the FBI that took down Nixon, Clinton and gays and the military, and Obama’s declared inability to pardon Snowden, and every president’s difficulties closing down unneeded military bases and weapons programs.) The Trump transition responded to the Washington Post’s story with a direct attack on the CIA, a three-sentence statement that contained as many falsehoods as it did sentences: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again,’ ” the statement read. As House Democratic minority leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi noted with a tweet, “The intel didn’t state that Iraq had WMDs. The Bush-Cheney WH made that misrepresentation.” The election also ended just a month ago, and Trump’s electoral college victory was rather modest compared to many. Or, as Nate Silver aptly put it when running that comparison, “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Trump Won in a Landslide.”

Yesterday, Trump further claimed the reports of Russian meddling were rooted in Democrats having “suffered one of the greatest defeats in the history of politics in this country.” But a bipartisan group of senators led by Republicans John McCain and Lindsay Graham, and Democrats Chuck Schumer and Jack Reed, and joined by Republicans Rand Paul and James Lankford, have called for a full investigation, as Nicholas Fandos reports for the New York Times.

New York magazine writer Frank Rich points out that “By holding back RNC emails, Putin didn’t just help install Trump in White House but has means to blackmail GOP to do his bidding post-1/20.” Trump’s incoming White House chief of staff is Reince Preibus, the current RNC chair. The RNC has denied that it was hacked, which is funny, because how would it know?

For a deep dive into what is known about Russian hacking efforts worldwide, Thomas Rid’s long feature in Esquire, which came out a month ago, is a good start.

Also unprecedented: Trump transition officials have asked the Energy Department for a list of civil servants who worked on climate change, including people who attended international conferences on the issue, as well as domestic efforts to cut carbon emissions, Steve Mufson and Juliet Eilperin report for the Washington Post. “If the Trump administration is already singling out scientists for doing their jobs, the scientific community is right to be worried about what his administration will do in office. What’s next? Trump administration officials holding up lists of ‘known climatologists’ and urging the public to go after them?” Michael Halpern of the Union of Concerned Scientists asked.

With that news as background, climate scientists Eric Holthaus is crowdsourcing a list of government climate databases that “you don’t want to see disappear.“

What is to be done? Chicago labor lawyer and author Thomas Geoghegan offers four radical ideas for defending democracy in America, starting with a boycott of the Electoral College and objecting to the counting of the votes from states that sought to suppress the vote.

Gordon Adams explains why it’s a bad idea to have so many ex-generals in charge of the foreign and national security agencies.

Historian Aliza Luft explains how the normalization of authoritarian and racist doctrines in Vichy France from 1940-44 took place and what that can teach us about how prominent figures and institutions are relating to Trump today. Noting how Al Gore’s visit with Trump was followed two days later by the nomination of a climate denier to run the EPA, she writes, “what is truly dangerous — and what the lessons of Vichy France teach us — is how attempts at accommodation repeatedly reveal trusted leaders’ willingness to look the other way when it comes to some threatening proposals (including, say, deporting millions of undocumented immigrants or revoking the citizenship of flag burners), in favor of attempts to nudge Trump on others (transportation, infrastructure). Such acquiescence quietly extends the boundaries of what is and isn’t acceptable, with obvious consequence for shared moral sensibilities.”

Speaking of that process of acquiescence, a long list of top tech industry leaders, including Larry Page of Alphabet, Tim Cook of Apple, Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook and Satya Nadella of Microsoft are meeting with Trump this Wednesday in Manhattan, Kara Swisher reports for Recode. Safra Katz, the head of Oracle who is attending the meeting, put out a statement saying, “I plan to tell the President-elect that we are with him and will help in any way we can. If he can reform the tax code, reduce regulation and negotiate better trade deals, the U.S. technology industry will be stronger and more competitive than ever.”

Twitter has reinstated the account of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, and as Aja Romano explores in Vox, the reason he lost it wasn’t his racism, it was because he had too many accounts.

For the history books: In Politico, Glenn Thrush’s reconstruction of the turning points of the 2016 campaign has lots of nuggets of fresh insight, including the stunning fact that the day before the election, “Clinton’s polling team assured the candidate that she would win.” We’ve still not heard a peep since then from Elan Kriegel, the vaunted data whiz whose operation drove campaign decisions. Thrush reports that Clinton hired campaign manager Robby Mook (who brought on Kriegel to reproduce the Obama machine) at the strong advice of David Plouffe, the former Obama campaign manager and current Uber board member, who told the New Yorker’s David Remnick four days before the election was a “100 percent” lock and that nervous Democrats should stop “wetting the bed.”

In Mic.com, Scott Goodstein—who led digital strategy and operations for the Bernie Sanders campaign—pushes back against the argument made by Mook at the Harvard Institute of Politics post-mortem conference that Clinton lost because of millennial voters sitting on their hands. Instead, he demonstrates with chapter and verse on how the Clinton campaign refused the help of Sanders’ operatives like him and took the millennial vote for granted.

This is civic tech: Code for America founder and longtime Civic Hall friend Jen Pahlka wrestles with the question, “Would you work for Trump?” and offers a great list of considerations to ponder. Among them: the fact that government isn’t a monolith “and there’s a big difference between working on Steven Bannon’s communications team and fixing benefits systems for the Veterans Administration.” As she concludes: “a chance to work in government is a chance to fight for and hopefully improve government services and government operations. It is a chance to serve the American public consistent with one’s values, up until the moment one is asked to do something counter to those values.”

Citizen University’s Eric Liu writes in the Atlantic that one way to adapt constructively to the new reality is to start a civic club.

Unfortunately, this is needed: CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism faculty and the NYCity News Service have launched HateIndex, a searchable and continually updated database of hate crimes and other acts of intolerance since the election.

Life in Facebookistan: With pressure continuing to grow on Facebook to address its contribution to the fake news problem, Peter Aldhous of BuzzFeed takes a close look at how the company has tightened up its sharing of internal research by data scientists intimate with the platform’s massive footprint, and also seems to mainly share research that helps it sell itself rather than work with independent researchers who might raise uncomfortable issues. He also quotes some guy named Sifry who reported in 2014 on Facebook’s failure to release promised research on its impact on turnout in the 2012 election—something that it still hasn’t released.

Your moment of zen: Patti Smith covers “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” at the Nobel Prize ceremony for Bob Dylan.