Why Do Conservatives Hate Europe?

On August 12, Trish Regan of FOX News offered her version of the standard conservative critique of Europe, in the form of a brief “report” on economic life in Denmark, comparing “socialism” there to the disasters of socialist Venezuela. She began with “a federal tax rate of 56%. In other words, everyone in Denmark is working for the government:” Therefore, “Noone wants to work.” University education is free, therefore “Nobody graduates from school.” Barely taking a breath before contradicting herself, “Nowadays, all the kids graduating from school in Denmark, they want to start cupcake cafés.” “Nobody is incentivized to do anything, because they’re not going to be rewarded.” “Denmark, like Venezuela, has stripped people of their opportunities.” Here’s the point, for Regan and FOX: “That’s the reality of socialism.”

Here’s the reality of Denmark. The proportion of the working-age population which is employed is 75%, one of the highest in the world, compared to 71% in the US. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative free-market think tank, gives the world’s nations an “index of economic freedom”: Denmark and the US are exactly tied. Denmark’s middle class is much bigger than in the US, because our low-income and high-income segments are twice as large. Denmark ranks second in the world on maternal health, well ahead of the US. Because higher education is free, Danes have more, not fewer, opportunities for advancement. Those facts might explain why Denmark ranks at the top in terms of its population’s happiness, along with Norway and Finland with similar social systems.

After an international outcry about her lies, Regan offered a “clarification”, in which she cited her “sources” and addressed none of her falsehoods.

The issue is truth.

Conservative propagandists use various media to tell stories about America and the world that they know are not true. Ann Coulter makes a fine living calling liberals traitors: in her 2003 book, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, and since then. Jonah Goldberg, who has written for the National Review for 20 years, goes a bit further, calling liberals fascists: Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. The American Conservative lambasted Goldberg’s book in their review entitled “Goldberg’s Trivial Pursuit”, saying he “misunderstands liberalism” and calling his “most ambitious thesis” “without merit”. Dinesh D’Souza goes one step further, equating liberals and Nazis in his new film “Death of a Nation”.

Trish Regan’s made-up “Denmark” is just the latest version of right-wing nonsense, presented as fact, in order to promote hatred of their political opponents.

These purveyors of historical fiction all know that the stories they are telling are not true. They don’t want to tell the true, but more complicated stories that might lead their readers and listeners and viewers toward some liberal conclusions.

They make piles of money, because much of the conservative public apparently doesn’t care about truth either. Unpacking the nonsense of conservative ideologues into its untrue and contradictory elements takes effort. It has been clear since the beginning of political advertising in America, that eye-catching slogans turned into simple stories repeated over and over again are enough to move votes.

Usually those stories had to be plausible. McCarthyism was an exception: it was possible to enlist the government into repressive measures against liberal and radical activists with a bizarre story about Communists taking over the US. By the 1960s, the people who pushed outlandish conspiracy theories, like the John Birch Society, were back on the wacko margins.

But once again, some sizable minority of Americans is gobbling up the stories that they want to hear. It no longer matters that they are implausible. A wide fringe will believe nearly anything, hence the popularity of Alex Jones. A larger segment will listen to less apocalyptic visions, which merely cast half of the American public as willing dupes of murderous traitors. Hence the popularity of “Lock Her Up” for the crime of liberalism. Nearly all Republican voters take the watered down version that FOX presents. Regan just put her toe over the line and didn’t even have to yank it back.

In none of this is truth the goal. There may be bits of fact in conservative story-telling, but the object is falsehood. And the conservative public likes it. Fact-checkers are the enemies of these people.

In the past, a few thoughtful and courageous political voices have saved us. No modern President had been willing to give the wildest fringe credibility. A handful of politicians, like Margaret Chase Smith and the late John McCain, have spoken truth to lying power in their own Party. Now our President leads the fringe.

So expect much more of the same. As Variety wrote in a review of D’Souza’s film, “If your agenda is to stoke resentment and create cartoon enemies, then you don’t need to be accurate.”

Why do conservatives hate Europe? Because the truth about Denmark, like the truth about climate change and about liberalism, doesn’t fit their ideology. Instead of adapting their ideas to reality, they create their own alternative reality and feed it to people who would rather be ignorant than have to change their minds.

What a way to make a living.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, August 28, 2018

I Love Private Property

I would not be happy if I could not own private property. I am glad to possess my own wool shirts, my vehicles and especially my real estate.

I lived as a tenant in other people’s buildings for about 20 years after I graduated from high school. I liked most of my landlords and usually was able to improve their properties while I lived there. But inevitably there were restrictions on what I could do in my home. Disagreements arose from this sharing of responsibility between owner and renter.

When we finally were able to buy our own house, our responsibilities increased enormously, as every homeowner knows. But we could make every choice: where to plant trees; what color to paint; what to fix; how to remodel. Our home could become an expression of our values and tastes.

Homeowners cannot do anything they want. Local ordinances and zoning regulations, as well as the need to keep peace with neighbors, put limits on private property owners. Various state laws about sewage and waterfront limit our freedom to do whatever we want with our property on the outskirts of a tiny village in northern Wisconsin. I’m okay with that.

In fact, I help to enforce some restrictions in my own neighborhood, which is a historic district in Jacksonville, IL. Owners of historic homes need to get permission from the Historical Preservation Commission if they want to change the way their homes appear from the street. The purpose is to preserve the historic character of the neighborhood, so that future owners and future generations can enjoy the increasingly rare sight of streets filled with historic buildings. The job of the HPC is to prevent a current homeowner from making poor decisions which will never be undone.

Exactly where to draw the line between private and public is sometimes contentious. About one-fifth of Americans live in developments where homeowners’ associations can specify paint colors, parking spaces and even the size of pets.

I also love public property. Americans use public property every day. Every time we get into a car, stroll along the sidewalk, cross a bridge, or take public transportation, we benefit from public property. Our national park system, thousands of rivers and streams, picnic areas, bridges, airports, train stations, and roads are owned by us all and are run in our collective interest. One of those interests is affordability. A pass to all 2000 recreation sites owned by the federal government for a full year costs $80. That covers everyone in a car. Compare that to one day at Disney World, where even 3-year-olds pay over $100.

Public property is a political issue: Democrats want to maintain and expand public services and Republicans want to turn public resources and services into private property.

The Republican platform for the 2016 election proposed cutting federal support for transportation projects that were not about cars: bike-share programs, sidewalk improvements, recreational trails, landscaping, historical renovations, ferry boats. Republicans proposed privatizing rail service among northeastern cities. Just before the 2016 election, Trump proposed massive infrastructure projects, which would effectively privatize roads and bridges. Republicans tried to privatize Medicare in their 2018 budget proposals, and introduced a bill to privatize air traffic control.

The Trump administration, led by Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education, is reducing the regulation of private, for-profit universities, despite their abysmal record of misleading students about the likelihood of getting jobs after “graduation”. DeVos has long supported using public funds to support private schools through voucher programs. Her family spent millions of dollars in a failed effort to convince Michigan voters to support a voucher program.

The vast resources of the Koch brothers are being used to oppose improvements to public transportation in communities across the country. Republican politicians have been trying for years to force the sale of federal land in Western states. They have been stymied by the organized public outcry of those who use the land for recreation, many of whom are Republican voters.

The economic arguments for privatization don’t stand up against historical experience. When Chicago sold the rights to its parking meters to a private company, the cost of parking jumped. When Vice President Pence was Indiana’s governor, he pushed the privatization of a stretch of Indiana highway I-69 in 2014. The project is years behind, the private company went bankrupt, and the state had to take over the road.

Private property is administered for the good of the owner. Public property is managed for public good, for all of us. I want to be in charge of my own home, where I can make decisions reflecting my personal interests. I want public ownership of facilities which serve the public, so that everyone can have a voice in their administration. Neither private nor public is automatically better than the other – they have different purposes.

The Republican drive against public property and public services would put our fates into the hands of rich companies and rich people who want to make money, not do the public good.

I love both private and public property. The proper mix insures the democratic equality that should be the basis of American society.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, August 21, 2018

Those Crazy Republicans

There are some wild candidates out on the trail this election season. I can’t remember a time when so many unusual candidates for political office made headlines through what they say and do.

Maybe it’s the length of the campaign season, underway since the beginning of the year, meaning at least 10 months of constant campaigning for a midterm election. Campaigning for the 2016 presidential election was already in progress when Ted Cruz in March 2015 and Hillary Clinton in April became the first announced candidates for each party. By the time we vote this November, we will have been bombarded with political campaigns for about 30 of 42 months.

Our legislators are able to do less, because they campaign more. Most of their actual work, that we pay them well for, does not involve serious discussions about the problems the rest of us face. The work that many politicians for high office do most of the time is exaggerate their own accomplishments, make promises they can’t keep, and tell lies about their opponents. Campaigning brings out the least reasonable, least forthright, least truthful side of even the most honest politicians.

So it’s no wonder that national politics brings out some wacky people. People who think that having lots of money or shouting on talk radio or running some corporation means they are ready to run our country. People who think they already know it all and don’t mind telling you. But some candidates these days are so ideologically vicious, so impervious to reality, and so incompetent that they are dangerous to themselves and us.

It’s unusual to have an avowed Nazi from a major party running for Congress, but this year we have two. Patrick Little, who calls the Holocaust a “propaganda hoax” and wants to limit the number of Jews in government, ran in California’s June primary and came in 12th. Arthur Jones, a neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier, ran unopposed in the Republican primary in a Chicago congressional district. He got 20,681 votes, even though he raised no money and his long history of Nazi sympathies was known a month before the vote. His district is mainly Democratic.

More likely to end up in Congress, Paul Nehlen, who is running for the seat that Paul Ryan is vacating in Wisconsin, describes himself as a “pro-White Christian American candidate”. He regularly tweets antisemitic comments about “the Jewish media” and says that “Jews will burn in hell.” He has been supported by all the luminaries of the Republican right: Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity.

More competitive and somewhat less distasteful, Corey Stewart is a Republican Senate candidate from Virginia. Last year he called Nehlen “one of my personal heroes” and has appeared together with Jason Kessler, the white nationalist who organized the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. Last year he revived the idea that President Obama’s birth certificate was “forged” by Democrats.

Brian Kemp won the Republican primary for governor in Georgia. He made a name for himself as Georgia’s Secretary of State by trying to keep African Americans from voting. After years of heavy-handed investigations of non-existent “voter fraud”, Kemp achieved no charges, no indictments, and no convictions, but successfully kept thousands of newly registered citizens from voting. His TV ads show him with various guns, threatening to use his “big truck” to “round up” undocumented immigrants.

Kris Kobach exemplifies what continual campaigning rather than practical politics brings to a democracy. He has said for years that voter fraud is so rampant in America that we need unprecedented new restrictions on voting. That earned him a new office in Trump’s administration with the power to find out exactly where that fraud is. He found nothing. Don’t hold your breath waiting for him to admit that he has been wrong all this time. He earned big bucks “consulting” with towns which passed new anti-immigration laws. The towns lost big in court. He wrote the Kansas law requiring people who wanted to register to vote to prove their citizenship. A federal judge struck down the law as unconstitutional and rebuked Kobach personally for violating rules of the courtroom: Kobach was held in contempt and required to go back to class for 6 hours of legal education.

How incompetent can you get? But Kobach is very good at riling up Kansas Republicans and he just squeaked by in the Republican primary for governor.

These men are not representative of all Republicans running for election this November. But such far-right ideologues are becoming more numerous, because of the example of Donald Trump. Corey Stewart claimed in 2016, “I was Trump before Trump was Trump.” Trump endorsed Kobach and Kemp in their primaries.

Making wild charges about rigged elections seems to win Republican votes. Failing to prove them doesn’t matter. Playing with racism and hanging around with racists doesn’t matter either. Paying no attention to the real problems in America, like persistent poverty and crumbling infrastructure, doesn’t matter. Maybe the only thing that will matter is if the rest of us vote against them.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, August 14, 2018

How to Kill the Free Press

Anti-democratic rulers always try to prevent a free press from reporting what they are doing. Authoritarian governments past and present have developed a model for eliminating independent news reporting. Donald Trump and his allies are creating a different model, with disastrous long-term effects for American democracy.

The common model has been to shut down unsupportive newspapers and to create their own “news” outlets spouting official “truth”. When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia in October 1917, they were uncertain about how much press freedom they would allow. During the New Economic Policy period from 1921 to 1928, limited freedom to publish was given to sympathetic non-Communists. After Stalin took power, however, every word published in the Soviet Union had to conform to strict government guidelines.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, there were 4700 newspapers in Germany, but the Nazis took control over the published word much more quickly than the Soviets had. Leftist parties were outlawed and their newspapers seized. Two Jewish publishing empires owned by the Ullstein and Mosse families were destroyed within a year. Critical journalists fled the country. Joseph Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry issued detailed daily guidelines about what could be printed, with the threat of arrest and concentration camp for those who disobeyed. By the end of the Nazi regime, there were only about 1000 newspapers, and those owned by the Nazi Party outsold independent organs 5 to 1.

Violent repression, censorship and news written by the government were the hallmarks of the Nazi and Soviet destruction of press freedom. This model has been followed by many repressive regimes since then, and extended to news media on radio and TV.

The connection between control of journalism and development of authoritarian government is demonstrated most clearly today in Recep Erdogan’s Turkey. As Erdogan jailed political opponents and reconstituted the government to consolidate personal power, he initiated a wide crackdown on the press. Turkey has jailed more journalists in the past two years than any other country.

Donald Trump’s war against the free press is often compared to the methods of Hitler, Mussolini, and other dictatorial rulers. But I think these comparisons are misleading. The Republican Party in no way resembles the monolithic parties which violently suppressed opponents. Trump’s administration does not have the broad powers to deploy force against the press. Closing newspapers or arresting journalists would cause a constitutional crisis in the US.

Instead Trump has used another model for reducing the ability of our free press to describe and criticize his government. First, he has spread distrust of the mainstream media, so that their reporting about his words and his administrative actions is not believed by his supporters. He goads those who attend his rallies to shout “CNN sucks”, calls journalists “horrendous people”, and lately uses the phrase “enemy of the people” to describe the mainstream media in general. Attacks on the major national news outlets are part of nearly every speech he gives.

Trump did not initiate conservative attacks on mainstream news reporting. The objective reporting of news was Sarah Palin’s primary political target in the 2008 campaign and afterwards, but she was following an already conventional conservative complaint about media bias against the right. In 2014, before Trump began his campaign, Pew surveys showed that “consistent conservatives” distrusted the major national newspapers, NYTimes, Washington Post and USA Today, and the national TV news organizations, except FOX.

Second, Trump supplements attacks on responsible media with unprecedented support for the irresponsible reporting of pretend journalists. Again, the far right media establishment predates Trump. Already in 1995, FAIR reported on a “right-wing media machine” based on personal attacks, fabricated stories, and thinly disguised white supremacy. But Trump gives respectability to what used to be a lunatic media fringe. His anti-free-press model uses existing right-wing media organizations to circulate the “news” he likes.

Alex Jones disseminates made-up conspiracies on his website Infowars, designed to create distrust of our government: that the mass murders at Sandy Hook, the Boston Marathon, and Oklahoma City were government hoaxes perpetrated. Trump appeared on his program as a presidential candidate, praised him as “amazing”, and repeated many of his wild and untrue ideas. The White House granted Infowars official press credentials in 2017.

Trump’s promotion of Steve Bannon, the director of Breitbart News, to be his campaign director and then special advisor in the White House, put the leading voice of alt-right disinformation at the center of his administration.

Recent polling shows that more than two-thirds of Republicans think traditional major news sources make “fake, false, or purposely misleading” reports “a lot”. That is true for only 42% of independents and 22% of Democrats. Most Republicans think the NYTimes (74%) and the Washington Post (65%) are biased, but only 19% distrust Breitbart.

Trump’s model is designed to subvert democracy from within without violence. Responsible news sources will continue to report Trump’s constant lying and his political failures, while Trump will continue to call these reports “fake news”. Unless FOX decides to start reporting in a “fair and balanced” manner, conservative voters will continue to prefer the fantasyland of right-wing media to the real world of factual journalism.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, August 7, 2018