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What is happening to our country?

What is happening to our country? Something much larger than a radical polarization  between left and right. Nazi analogies inevitably fail not only because, contra conventional wisdom, history never repeats itself. Still, there is something critical to be learned from the rise of Nazism: the impossibility of explaining it.

I have read tens, perhaps scores, of books on the rise of Nazism.  Each adds a small piece to the explanatory puzzle, but if there is anything they have in common, it is that the extreme evil of Nazism,  and the quick and total subversion of German society, a highly civilized one no less, cannot be wholly grasped.

I fear the same is true of the current transformation of American society. What follow are pieces in the explanatory puzzle, listed in no particular order, with no attempt to assign them any particular weight or to suggest that they paint the whole picture.

1. The death of nuance.

Can we evaluate a given policy of President Donald Trump as basically good or basically bad?

The question is rarely asked.

Rather, the assumption is either that Trump is a fundamentally flawed president or a fundamentally refreshing president. Then, all of his given policies are filtered through either of those general perceptions.

The idea that a good idea can come from a flawed president, or that a bad idea can come from a new type of president, is dead; the idea that a policy can be evaluated on its own merits or demerits is dead.

Nuance has died.

That is the definition of polarization.

2. The subversion of our processes of government.

Critics of President Obama took umbrage at his promiscuous resort to executive orders to advance his agenda, when he could not succeed in doing so via the constitutional route: Congress. President Trump has picked up on this technique and intensified it, to such an extent that we have now come to expect multiple executive orders as a normal function of the presidency. The criticism of the technique per se has mostly fallen away, even as specific orders elicit great support or criticism.

President Obama went to the UN to seek approval of his nuclear deal with Iran before he went to the Congress of the American people for its approval. President Trump has not done this. Some six months into his presidency, he has no agreements to submit. While I doubt that Trump would ever go to the UN, again the precedent for avoiding the normal channels of government has lost its controversial edge.

3. Substance and style.

Some policies of President Trump — such as banning elected government officials from becoming lobbyists immediately upon leaving office; or erasing the hostility between the US and Israel — have much merit. But instances of the style of the new president makes him an anti-role model. For example, the way he fired James Comey. Leaving the merits or demerits of the firing aside, Comey was not given the courtesy of learning of his dismissal before the public did. That is not presidential. That is not class. That is not the ethic that young people in America should see in their most influential citizen. That coarsens the expectations of decency in society.

Trump’s indisciplined denunciations of various individuals and ethnic, religious or national groups contribute to this coarsening, even if Trump does not literally mean what he says, which I think is often the case. Still, hurtful words hurt, and elicit commensurately hurtful reactions.

4. This shoe is worn on the other foot, too. 

When Obama was elected, I heard more than once, “I opposed him, but now that he is president, I hope he succeeds.” I don’t hear that about Trump. I witness the opposite: the grabbing at every possible error, unwise locution or, simple policy difference to bring him down. To the extent that this is successful, the victim is not just Trump; it is America.

5. Subversion of the journalistic pillar: separation of news from opinion. 

To see this, it is helpful to step back from a given media outlet for some time, then to come back to it. As a former subscriber to The New York Times, I recently came back to it. It was not possible to get a dispassionate take on a front-page news story that dealt with Trump.

For example, on June 21, a front-page story, “Trump says push by China failed on North Korea,” says that Trump’s announcement came in an “almost cavalier tweet.” The tweet read, “While I greatly appreciate the efforts of President Zi & China to help with North Korea, it has not worked out. At least I know China tried!”

I see nothing cavalier there. Others may differ. The point is, why must the tweet be characterized at all? The NYT news page assumes the role of judging the president’s actions. That is not the role of a news story.

“Fake news” is a different malady. What I am talking about is real news that is presented in a slanted or opinionated way. Various publishers and editors do not trust the public to reach conclusions based  on facts alone. The public cannot judge Trump’s tweet by itself. The public needs to be helped along. That is OK in media expressly labeled as opinion, such as talk radio, but not in media, such at the NYT,  that have held to objectivity as an ideal.

Trump dislikes and denigrates the press, beyond the critique of a specific story, partly because it dismissed him during the presidential campaign. Trump’s attitude is frequently not presidential. However, a nonpresidential attack deserves a professional response, not a tit for tat. One expects more of the primary guardian of our freedom, which remains the press, notwithstanding the growth of other media, with their lower standards.

Whether tweeting is, in principle, appropriate for a president is for the editorial page, not the news page.

The IJN tries mightily to reserve its opinions for the editorial page; if they slip into the news columns, we deserve to be called on it.

What saddens me is that even the attempt to separate fact from opinion is now widely rejected by some major print media. The idea seems to be that Trump is such a threat that the setting aside of normal journalistic ethics is justified. Translation: The public cannot be trusted to figure out things for themselves.

That assumption is a prescription for a negative transformation: diminished independence of thought, a habit of mind with not only political but economic implications. Innovation depends on independence.

6. Free speech.

Predominantly, free speech used to mean: I have the right to express and explain my support for any public policy, and you have the right to do the same for a different policy. That is how free speech is defined by those who bemoan its fall from the sacred space carved out by the First Amendment.

Today, free speech means the elevation of the right to insult, to demean, to bully, to be nasty. Those who would restrict this type of speech cannot do so without also rejecting the expressions of differences over public policies. And so, those who defend free speech also must defend a rise in vulgarity and hate speech; and those who would restrict free speech, including hate speech, undermine the foundation of this country, the First Amendment.

It is still more complicated, for the lay person’s definition of “hate speech” is often subjective and confused with the expression of a policy difference. If a person is opposed to, say, a legal requirement of a company to provide abortofacients, that is not hate speech, but it and the expression of similar policy differences are often taken to constitute hate speech.

7. Terrorism.

Terrorism terrorizes not only people and endangers not only human life. It endangers the values of truth, of religious freedom and of freedom of movement and assembly.

A person has a right to tell the truth that most terrorism in the world today is motivated by radical Islam. A person has the right to be a Muslim, to worship as such, to dress as such, to express non-violent Muslim values and to advocate for freedom for Muslims. All people have the right to assemble and travel without suspicion.

More and more, American society is having difficulty accommodating all three of these truths and rights, or at least acknowledging all of them.

Rabbi Hillel Goldberg may be reached at [email protected].

Copyright © 2017 by the Intermountain Jewish News



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