Curing Ourselves

I find it hard not to be upset all the time about American politics, and the American society underneath. For me, things have been getting worse for a long time. Often, I find out that things had been even worse than I thought earlier, but I didn’t know the facts until they were uncovered by some journalist prying into our secretive government. The good news that honest investigations can reveal what powerful people want to keep secret doesn’t quite outweigh the bad news that these investigations reveal.

I don’t mean that I am upset all the time. At many times every day, I rejoice at my grandchildren and the children who are raising them, I root for some team on TV, I puzzle over a murder mystery, I accomplish do-it-yourself things all around our old house trying to recapture the past, or I kneel in the gardens pulling up weeds. Thoughts about America as a nation are swamped by the joys of one person’s everyday life.

But when those thoughts peek through, or take up all the air when we watch the news at night, they are unhappy ones. In the 15 years I have been writing columns about politics, I have identified all the big problems we face now. The names have changed, but the political ideas and underhanded methods persist. What is new is that those problems all seem more upsetting to me lately. I can identify when this condition began four years ago, as Trump came down the escalator to announce that he was campaigning for President.

I think the diagnosis is evident: I suffer from T.I.A.D., Trump-Induced Anxiety Disorder. There may be some help; please see this video for the wonder drug Impeachara:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXUlhT3-r0c

Even if the drug doesn’t work, or exist, just thinking about it provides some temporary relief.

I think a longer-lasting cure may be available, one that’s been in front of us all the time. Liz and I joined lots of local baby boomers to see “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”. Fred Rogers was news to me. I had never watched his program and I only knew of his reputation, not him.

All the evidence I can find says that Mr. Rogers was just as he was portrayed by Tom Hanks: a lover and inspired teacher of children; impossibly nice to everyone around him; willing to talk to children about the most difficult subjects, like divorce and nuclear war; clever but transparent about using television to spread his message of love and tolerance.

Less well known is that he was a determined advocate for public television, was an ordained Presbyterian minister, and that he wrote all the songs for Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. However far you dig into Fred Roger’s life, he was a remarkably good man who spread goodness all around him.

Instead of stressing about Trump’s latest idiocy or the decline of American politics, about which we can do very little, we could try to emulate Mr. Rogers. We could see the world as an opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives and devote our energies to doing that.

I’m no Fred Rogers. Coming from New York, I could never talk that slowly. The rest of us are just not so good so much of the time. But that doesn’t matter. We can all inch our way toward goodness by thinking more about the real people right in front of us and less about the personalities we see on the screen and the news we get from people we don’t know.

That is really the message of my whole collection of articles. The way to take back our lives is to focus more on the immediate, to practice the principles we believe in, to wrest more control by being intentional whenever we can.

Mr. Rogers can’t save us, even though Esquire did put him on the cover of an issue about heroes. He wasn’t trying to save the world himself. He was doing his part as less than a billionth of humanity. If we want to be cured of T.I.A.D. without danger of remission, we all have to do our parts, for our own lives and for others.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

November 26, 2019

Impeachment Today

When I wrote for the Journal-Courier, I had to send in my columns by Sunday evening for Tuesday publishing. I was not able to broadcast breaking news. I’m not a reporter, that’s their job. My job was to put together some writing that synthesized as much breaking news as I could. The heat was dissipating, it was time for light.

I believe that’s the opinion writer’s job. But often I could not say anything about what had changed since Sunday. If my synthesis was good, it would blend well with and partly explain the latest bombshell. Or perhaps my synthesis was already outdated.

Because I’m now self-published, but no longer printed, I enjoy many new degrees of freedom. It’s Tuesday, this is going out later today, and I can be almost up-to-the-minute about impeachment. The evidence is easy to find. Wikipedia has a lengthy narrative about “Impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump”. The Washington Post put together a timeline through last week.

During last week’s hearing, I thought the most effective defense mounted by the forever-Trumpers was that nothing happened. Whatever may have been said or done, in the end President Zelensky did not announce an investigation of the Bidens and the military aid was released. No harm, no foul. I didn’t buy it for a second, because the facts we have learned already are so overwhelming that I’ve made up my mind. But if someone retains some positive view of Trump, for whatever reason, such an overview of events is greatly reassuring.

That defense was bogus, and the last few days of news are killing it, because in fact a lot happened. Anyone, especially someone both politically astute and internationally vulnerable like Zelensky, would understand from the July 25 phone call that Trump offered a meeting only if he got something specific in return. If anyone could doubt that Trump was demanding specifically a Biden investigation, yesterday’s evidence about Gordon Sondland’s mobile phone call from a Kiev restaurant on July 26 demonstrates Trump’s overriding focus on investigations.

But the key sequence of events began much earlier. Zelensky was elected on April 21. On April 23, Rudy Giuliani tweeted: “Now Ukraine is investigating Hillary campaign and DNC conspiracy with foreign operatives including Ukrainian and others to affect 2016 election. And there's no Comey to fix the result.” That wasn’t truth, it was pressure.

Less than 3 weeks later, Zelensky and his advisers met on May 7 to talk about the Trump-Giuliani pressure to open investigations and avoiding entanglement in the American elections. He hadn’t yet been inaugurated, which happened on May 20.

Fiona Hill, a top deputy at the National Security Council inside the White House, explained to Congress about discussions in the White House in May, showing they already knew that Zelensky was feeling pressure to investigate the leading Democratic candidate.

Zelensky and his top advisors continued talking among themselves about the pressure that was being exerted on them and what to do about it. They realized that the life-saving military aid was included in the deal Trump was offering even before August 28, when Politico published an article about it. Top Ukrainian officials knew already in early August. William Taylor, new acting ambassador to Ukraine after Marie Yovanovitch was fired, characterized Ukraine’s defense minister afterwards as “desperate”.

Trump and Mulvaney and Pompeo and who knows who else decided to release the aid on September 11, only after Democrats in Congress threatened to investigate. The whistleblower spilled the beans to Congress on September 25 and to the public the next day about why it had been withheld.

We know now that Zelensky was preparing to go TV, in particular on Fareed Zakharia’s show on CNN, with a statement about Trump’s investigations. As soon as military aid was resumed, he cancelled the interview, because he had never wanted to do that.

So we already know what happened, and it wasn’t nothing. President Zelensky was desperate for a meeting with Trump and for good reasons. Trump said, “only if you do this favor”. In Ukraine, that message was being pounded home by people who said they were direct representatives of Trump – Rudy Giuliani, Rick Perry, Gordon Sondland. The American face in front of our efforts to help those Ukrainians trying to reduce corruption had been sent home, Ambassador Yovanovitch, accomplished by the Giuliani-Trump team.

Zelensky’s official communications with Americans displayed the heavy weight he put on a meeting with Trump. After the aid was released, the pressure continued. On October 3, Trump said on the White House lawn: “I would say, President Zelensky, if it was me, I would start an investigation into the Bidens,” and added the Chinese for good measure.

But Zelensky wasn’t going to do what Trump demanded, an announcement to the world that the Ukrainian government was investigating the Bidens. The Congressional Republican overview is false, because like Trump, they don’t care about Ukraine. President-elect and then President Zelensky refused for 4 months to do anything in response to Trump’s insistence on investigations, even though he desperately desired a meeting with Trump. When he found out that military aid was being withheld, he still refused for a month to become entangled in our election.

The Trump-Giuliani team caused great anxiety in the Ukrainian government. But with the highest stakes involved, the political neophyte Volodomyr Zelensky said “no” to corruption.

Later today there will be more news, and for many days to come. No facts have come to light that cast any part of this story into doubt. The timeline gets longer and more intense with each revelation.

I don’t know how many people the Republican sleight-of-hand can fool. I don’t know if the elections last week point to any turn against Trump among Southern voters. I don’t know what tomorrow’s headlines will be.

But I know corruption when I see it.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

November 19, 2019

Podcast #1

Dear Friends and Family,

I have had trouble sending this, so I am using my normal method to do this. I’m sorry if the difficulties with sending to a large list is causing inconvenience.

I wanted to say this in person, not in writing. It expresses more deeply held feelings than most of what I write. Maybe it just expresses more emotion than my more disciplined writing.

I couldn’t do it myself and my son-in-law Ben Bruno did everything beyond me talking. I can say that this turned out exactly as I wanted.

For me this is a fundamental message. I want people I don’t know to see me saying what I believe. If you would like to help spread it, please use whatever social media you like to pass along this link. I have no idea if this is the right time for what I say. I had been thinking about this for a long time. It just happens to be ready now.

https://youtu.be/Um7R9QEQ91A

Best, Steve

Polls Worry Me

A NYT article on Monday by Nate Silver, the guru of understanding polls, frightened me: he said that Trump could win in 2020. The main evidence is a poll showing Trump running neck-and-neck with the leading Democrats in certain arbitrarily selected “key” states, every race very close. I have been relying for my sanity on Trump’s approval rating in many polls, which is down near 40%. How could he beat anybody? Maybe I need to revise my understanding of approval. Perhaps enough people disapprove of Trump, but are willing to vote for him.

I don’t think that polls a year ahead of time mean much about what will happen, especially if they are close. There are other polls, though, which cause me more anxiety about the state of our nation. Whether Trump wins next year or not, the views of the minority of Americans who populate his “base” are troubling.

In the most recent head-to-head polls, white working-class respondents preferred Trump by 25%, just the same percentage as they preferred him in 2016 against Clinton. College-educated whites gave the nod to Democrats, but only by 6 - 10%. Those Americans, who are as a whole less interested in real political information, still like Trump, after all he has done. A large minority of those who have been trained to understand that information still pick Trump.

Some aspects of the general approval polls offer more and maybe more unpleasant information. The tracking of Trump’s approval ratings by the Washington Post and ABC News during his whole presidency shows both remarkable stability and, maybe, the beginning of a serious downturn in the wake of impeachment, as his approval among Republicans dropped to 74%. There will be lots more points on this graph, so little weight should be put on this point. More notable is the lack of change among his most fervent supporters, those who “strongly approve of him”, which has stayed between 60% and 70%.

Those squishy approval polls are now being directed at the state level to help predict the 2020 decision in the Electoral College. It’s possible to be heartened by the latest poll, just before impeachment began. More approve of him than disapprove in only 17 states, mostly states in the South or next to it. More disapprove than approve in all the states that the NYT article isolated as “key”. One year ago, his approval ratings were positive in 24 states.

Fox News reported that their two polls this October showed that more people want Trump to be impeached and removed than oppose it, 50% to 41%. But here’s the scary part. Among those who oppose impeachment, 57% say new evidence cannot change their minds. That adds up to about one quarter of those surveyed. They probably all belong in the category of those who think the whole impeachment inquiry is “bogus”, 39%.

Recent polls show that Republicans who are regular viewers of FOX News are much more likely to be hard-core Trump supporters. Over half of Republicans who support the president and watch Fox News say there is “virtually nothing he could do to make them stop supporting him.” A different poll two years ago shows the same thing. In August 2017, 61% who approved of Trump said they couldn’t think of anything he could do that would make them disapprove of his job as President.

For me, the scariest segment of the American electorate has been identified by some political scientists as “chaos-seekers”. They are so disaffected from our political system, that they want to undermine it, even destroy it. They use social media to share outlandish stories, such as the “Pizzagate” rumor, the false story about Obama’s birth, and Alex Jones’ lies about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting being faked. They don’t necessarily believe them to be true. “For the core group, hostile political rumors are simply a tool to create havoc.” The political scientists conducted thousands of interviews, and found a significant minority of people who agreed with statements like the following. “I fantasize about a natural disaster wiping out most of humanity such that a small group of people can start all over.” “I think society should be burned to the ground.” Sometimes I just feel like destroying beautiful things.” These people tended to be Trump supporters.

A study from 2018 found that Trump supporters tended to “take a belligerent, combative approach toward people they find threatening.” The kind of authoritarianism that Trump’s most fervent supporters embody is “the wish to support a strong and determined authority who will 'crush evil and take us back to our true path.’” The Guardian recently listed 52 Trump supporters who carried out or threatened acts of violence since his campaign began. Since Congressman Adam Schiff became the leader of the House impeachment inquiry, he has been subject to violent threats on social media, often approvingly quoting Trump’s comments about him.

A video portraying Trump shooting his critics inside a church was played at a conference for his supporters at Trump’s National Doral Miami resort in early October. The pastor who gave the benediction at the 2016 Republican National Convention told the crowd there, “We’ve come to declare war!” Conference-goers roared back: “War! War!”

Trump himself uses careful language to encourage violent supporters and threaten wider violence against his opponents. In an interview in March, he said, “I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”

Are we near that point now? What if Trump loses the election?

Today, the only important polls will be taken, the elections in Virginia, Kentucky, and Mississippi. They will provide hints about 2020. Then we have only 12 months left to worry.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

November 5, 2019