Part of the reason I am writing this blog is its "public privacy." It is public, completely public, and if anyone wants to know what I am really thinking, there it is, on full display. Many of my neighbors in this relatively small town in a thoroughly red state would be aghast if they learned what I "really" think -- that I find religion to be a perversity inciting more hate than compassion, that I find most of the conservative agenda to be a smoke screen for cramped minds in cramped places, that I find about "freedom" and their vaunted self-reliance, particularly economic self-reliance, a scam designed to perpetuate and exacerbate the growing disparity between those who are exploited and those who exploit, and no matter how much one dislikes Clinton, no matter how "sick" you might think she is, Trump is an unmitigated monster who revels narcissistically in his monstrosity. Of course, no one reads it because no one cares what I "really" think. At the outside, I have had eleven views on any given day, so I am speaking, so to speak, to an empty room, which in most ways is fine by me. I'm not sure I need (or want) eleven million followers to affirm my existence, and I write this to keep my mind active and to discover, after all, what I really do think. I have thought about going back and correcting for some of the inconsistencies in my thought and expression, expand on some of the personal allusions (like "open society" in my previous post) but then thought better of it. It's not a polished monograph, and the act of discovery, even if it is captured in writing, is bound to be filled with fits and starts.
I have been thinking about privacy, of late, in part because of the "controversy" around Clinton's health. Our health information is normally considered "private," though this seems to run counter to a human instinct. I have had complete strangers, in the line at Walmart, volunteer excruciating detail about their health. I could speculate about why this may be the case, and part of it may simply be their need for empathy, a need that has worn thin on family and friends that "have their own problems." Nevertheless, HIPPA confirms our "rights to privacy" when it comes to medical information, and from every cop show on every network we are also aware of the doctor patient privilege. So it is that Dr. Oz, that all but fake physician, who has agreed to be a pawn in a publicity stunt, can say "The metaphor for me is, this is a doctor’s office, the studio,” Oz said. “So I’m not going to ask him questions he doesn’t want to have answered, and I also don’t want to talk about anybody else.” Perfectly reasonable, and the general practice, though in the perverse double standards that have been applied to this election, Clinton has been roundly criticized for not disclosing her pneumonia, partly on the rationale of the "public's right to know," partly on the rationale that her instinctual privacy just made things worse for her, fueling various conspiracy theories about health issues that make her unfit to serve. As for the conspiracy theories, the Washington Post reports, "according to Sean Hannity's "medical A-team," the Democratic nominee was wracked by seizures. According to Ted Noel, an anesthesiologist with no expertise in Parkinson's disease, Clinton had Parkinson's disease. According to Gateway Pundit and InfoWars, both sites linked regularly by The Drudge Report, Clinton was followed by a medical "mystery man." The Drudge Report itself had promoted an Internet poll conducted by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons — a fringe group that questions whether HIV causes AIDS — as proof that doctors were coalescing around the theory of the candidate's declining health." The belated revelation that she had pneumonia, because it was "belated," brought criticism from Andrea Mitchell, nominally a supporter, who suggested, "'The whole issue of transparency and this only reinforces all of the conspiracy theories. I mean, we’ve all been trying to fact-check and pointing out that there’s nothing wrong with her.'" The Clinton campaign's fumbling of the news led to a series of similar analyses — all of them taking for granted that any Clinton misstep would encourage conspiracy theorists." As indeed it did.
Here, though he has long been in the public eye as a "reality TV star," Trump has been held to the standard of a "private citizen," not only on his health records --releasing essentially a doctor's note clearing him to participate in the presidency not much different from a doctor's note clearing a young person to participate in athletics -- but also on his tax records. His rationale for not releasing his tax information is unmitigated hose hockey. As USA today reports it, "Donald Trump says he isn't releasing his tax returns yet because they are being audited, though the Internal Revenue Service says that's no barrier to disclosure." There are various questions that a release of his taxes might answer -- does he make as much as he claims to make, has he contributed to charity what he has promised to contribute, does he have 'compromising' business operations in Russia and the middle east, has he actually even paid any taxes, et cetera. Clinton, on the other hand, has been held to the standard of a "public citizen," to an extreme unimaginable before the digital age. One understands that those who seek the benefits of being in the public eye must endure its scrutiny. While we might tut-tut the lurid fascination with the private lives of the celebrity class, even empathize to a degree when their privacy is violated in unconscionable ways, but there is nevertheless the lingering taint of self-approbation when the ethical imperative "be careful what you wish for, you might get it" is ignored. That one must be "transparent" and expose what others might consider private information -- like one's tax returns and medical records -- if for no other reason than to avoid fueling the sorts of conspiratorial scandals that now come with the territory. Of course, what goes round comes round, and now Colin Powell has been hacked, revealing him to be a bit more human than we would have liked to believe. As the NY Times reports, "a hack of Mr. Powell’s email this week has ripped away the diplomatic jargon and political niceties to reveal his unvarnished disdain of Donald J. Trump as a “national disgrace,” as well as "his personal peeves with Hillary Clinton." His disdain for Trump stems from the usual sources, the virtually unvarnished racism that animates his campaign, but his peeves with Clinton are more political. Again, as the NY Times reports, "in a series of exchanges, Mr. Powell lamented efforts by Mrs. Clinton’s “minions” to drag him into the controversy surrounding her use of a private email server by claiming he had advised her on the issue. 'H.R.C. could have killed this two years ago by merely telling everyone honestly what she had done and not tie me into it,' Mr. Powell wrote late last month, referring to Mrs. Clinton by her initials. “I told her staff three times not to try that gambit. I had to throw a mini-tantrum at a Hamptons party to get their attention. She keeps tripping into these ‘character’ minefields.'"
Character minefield? Beyond simply the political ineffectiveness of trying to hide what can no longer be safely hidden, Clinton has been accused of a "secretive" and "mendacious" character. The developing non-scandal of the "emails" serves as proof of her "secretive" and "mendacious" character, and they do so even if the emails themselves reveal nothing particularly earth shattering. Nevertheless, she has revealed the "requisite" information -- her medical records and her tax returns -- Trump has not even revealed the requisite. The potential pay-for-access scandal that surround the Clinton Foundation, which by most accounts does good in the world, gets the furrowed eye-brow treatment while the more serious pay-for-play scandal that surrounds the Trump Foundation's illegal donation to the Bondi campaign barely registers. The character mines that Powell laid out, describing "the Democratic presidential nominee as having 'a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational,'" would seem to be the character traits necessary for a presidential run. Clinton has "a long track record," with the inevitable ups and downs of a lengthy track record, but one might also cast that as experience. Would a discerning board hire a CEO for a Fortune 500 who has no track record at all in business? Likewise, one should hesitate at hiring a CEO for the country who has no governing experience at all? Trump, of course, has no track record as a public servant, only his business record as a self-servant, but "business" (and perhaps military service) get a sort of "pass," perhaps on the mistaken assumption that the "business of America is business" and can be "run like a business." Clinton may indeed have "unbridled ambition," but what of Trump? Mr. Powell might lament "that “everything H.R.C. touches she kind of screws up with hubris,” but Trump's well acknowledge narcissism also gets another sort of "pass" on this ethical flaw as well. Clinton may well be "greedy," demanding and getting exorbitant speaking fees, but Trump is not? If anyone exemplifies the inverse moral universe of Gordon Gecko where "greed is good," Trump is your man. As he funnels campaign funds into his private business ventures, even his run for the presidency exemplifies "greed" at its starkest, but here again he gets a sort of "pass." It takes no real analysis to see a double standard at play between Trump, the private citizen, and Clinton, the public citizen, just a sort of passing observation. Clinton, of course, must be enormously frustrated. As Trump becomes more and more "public," it seem the very things that fuel animosity toward Clinton seem to fuel admiration for Trump.
As the on-going hacks of Clinton and Powell demonstrate, increasingly we live is a "post-private" world, where the "private" becomes "public" at a click. For already public figures, our response is one of apathy, in part because they asked for it. For most of us, who give our silent assent to our own surveillance every time we search the internet or use a customer loyalty card, our failing privacy is likewise a matter of apathy. We receive some modest benefit from revealing our interests or shopping preferences because the search engines can better anticipate the other things that might interest us as well as the occasional "discount." For the most part, those of us with modest habits as "private" citizens have little or nothing to hide. We can rest in the assurance that those surveilling us, to include our own government, would find us of little interest. Thor Benson, writing for Salon, quotes Edward Snowden, "saying you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say,” and indeed, most of us have little or nothing to say, and even if we do, it is lost within the conflicting babble of democratic incoherence. This is, after all, a free country and we are entitled to our opinions, and so we post them with abandon on our face-book page or in blogs.
Imagine a worst case scenario, just for a moment -- the sort of scenario imagined by Andrew Sullivan, echoing Richard Hofsteader, analyzing the writing of our founding fathers, who feared nothing more than an excess of democratic passion giving space to the demagogue who makes his move by taking over a "particularly obedient mob." As Hofsteader put it, quoting John Taylor,
A cardinal tenet in the faith of the men who made the Constitution was the belief that democracy can never be more than a transitional stage in government, that it always evolves into either a tyranny (the rule of a rich demagogue who has patronized the mob) or an aristocracy (the original leaders of the democratic element). "Remember," wrote the dogmatic John Adams in one of his letters to John Taylor of Caroline, "democracy never last long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide."
Some of the double standard that pertains to Trump and Clinton can be attributed to gender stereotypes -- the presidency requiring a viral male as opposed to a softer, weaker, nurturing female. As much, I think, can be attributed to the disdain with which we have come to hold the "elites." Trump gets a "pass" because, for good or for ill, the American public can identify with him. Even if we see him as a villain, he is a familiar villain, of the sort we ostensibly "love to hate," the extroverted rich kid who plays class clown much to the exasperation of the principled "elites." His vices are the private vices of self aggrandizement made public, the sort of vices we all would share had we the gumption and means to do so. Who doesn't want the gold plated penthouse and a cheerleading super-model spouse? The private limo and the obsequious minions? If we can't actually be him, well, we can join his entourage. Sullivan notes "one of the more amazing episodes in Sarah Palin’s early political life, in fact, bears this out. She popped up in the Anchorage Daily News as “a commercial fisherman from Wasilla” on April 3, 1996. Palin had told her husband she was going to Costco but had sneaked into J.C. Penney in Anchorage to see … one Ivana Trump, who, in the wake of her divorce, was touting her branded perfume. 'We want to see Ivana,' Palin told the paper, 'because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture.' On the other hand, there is more than a whiff of sanctimony and conceit about Clinton, the A student whose hand shoots up at every question, the "goody two shoes" who volunteers obsessively for every thankless task. Indeed, there is something too good to be true about the Clinton Foundation, so surely, surely! there must be more too it, some hidden self-interest, some nefarious self-profiting purpose beyond simply "doing good," and so the private emails get scrutinized publicly to find it, all the while demanding greater transparency of the already crystal clear. Who wouldn't want to take this sanctimonious goody two shoes down a peg a two? We really shouldn't be too surprised that Trump continues to get "passes" while Clinton move gets scrutinized "two ways from Sunday," but it will be this "double standard" that wastes the time and effort of the government, exhausts its credulity, and eventually murders democracy.
One shouldn't look too hard at historical parallels, but the last "great recession" is now pretty much a thing of the past, as it was when Jackson climbed to prominence, and yet as Hofsteader put it, quoting John C. Calhoun, it brought to the fore
an immense revolution of fortunes in every part of the union, enormous multitudes in deep distress, and a general mass of disaffection to the Government not concentrated in any particular direction, but ready to seize upon any event and looking out anywhere for a leader.
The recession brought to the fore the immense and growing disparities between the very rich and the rest of us. While it would be disingenuous to claim that we are in "deep distress," and the economy is getting better, there remains a sense of exasperated hope and lingering malaise that can (and really should) be attributed to acts of government, a system "rigged" in ways that neither the supporters of Trump nor the supporters of Sanders fully explained, but a system "rigged" against them nevertheless by the political and the economic and the media elites. "The general mass of disaffection of the Government" should be a call for better government, better leadership, but instead "looking about anywhere," it gives us Trump, the rich kid who plays class clown, thumbing his nose not only at the democrats, but at his own party's elite as well. Everyone wants to be Ferris Bueller, playing the system against itself for his own amusement, getting away with metaphorical murder in the process. No one wants to be his sanctimonious younger sister Jeannie, the good girl who cannot understand why she doesn't get credit for actually being good, who resents Ferris' popularity and wants to "out" him. In the end, however, even Ferris Bueller recognized that his last gasp adolescent "day off" was a temporary aberration, that he would actually have to grow up and govern his life, but if Trump's always impending "pivot," his always imminent turn to "the presidential," is any indication, one suspects Trump believes he can actually govern on the Ferris Bueller principle, just making it up as he goes along. What is it, aside from the wall, that we actually expect of Trump aside from the implicit promise to "shake it up?"
In the meantime, we have the double standard, which leads Heather Digby Parton and others to lament that Trump "continues to get away with his many scandals, lies and shady business ties" while Clinton is pilloried on "a presumption of guilt for any possible appearance of impropriety." Although he has failed to release his tax returns, made a circus side-show of his medical records, and used the"faux" announcement of his shifting position on Obama's birth place to stage a media promo for his newest branded hotel -- a position that was ludicrous in the first place and is now perhaps even more ludicrous -- nevertheless "54 percent believe Trump is the more transparent to only 37 percent for Clinton." Johnathan Allen, reporting for Vox, detailed a five part dynamic that governs the reporting on Clinton, which for the most part lays out the double standard in operation. He points out that "The Clintons have been under investigation for about 25 years now. There's little doubt they've produced more information for investigators, lawyers, and journalists about their finances, their business and philanthropic dealings, and their decision-making processes in government than any officials in American history. ... They know there's a good chance that any expressed thought will become part of the public record and twisted for political gain." And while I think Clinton (Hillary, not Bill) is more like me than not -- an introvert who would be fine "doing" president, but less so "becoming" president with the degrading onslaught of opposition claims, and "being" president, with its constant exposure in the public eye -- it's nevertheless understandable "why the Clintons have a bunker mentality when it comes to transparency." It captures them in a vicious cycle where "their paranoia leads them to be secretive, and their secrecy leads Republicans and the press to suspect wrongdoing. That spurs further investigation, which only makes the Clintons more secretive. The paranoia and persistent investigation feed each other in an endless cycle of probe and parry" that so far has revealed little except perhaps "carelessness," even "extreme carelessness," but certainly nothing illegal.
But Trump gets a "pass." He is about as unlike me as a human being can get -- an extrovert who has proven himself adept at "becoming" president, but who would be as disastrous at both "doing" and "being" president as he was for his own casinos. Moreover, he represents just about everything that I find morally and ethically loathsome. I honestly don't know if it is a signal of America's "decline and moral degradation," as one reader of Parton put it, but I do think he's right when he suggests that one "can lay out all the evidence in the world that Trump is corrupt. It's all out there, his veterans charity scam, his dirty dealings, his refusal to release his taxes," and in that sense he IS the most transparent candidate ever, "but [his voters] won't care, because they admire someone who breaks the law to make money and caters to their inner bigot." Perhaps, and I do think there's been a lot of that catering to that "inner bigot," but I also think he caters to their inner Ferris Bueller, someone who flouts and "plays" an ineffectual system, as they say, "right under their noses." For Ferris, however, it was just school, but Trump is "playing" a bigger and more consequential system. The reader cites an article for Slate by Dahlia Lithwick, who writes, "Given Trump’s broad and demonstrable contempt for the rule of law, people who take the breaking of laws seriously are less than charmed by the whole 'I’m too cool to be constrained by your stinking regulatory state' bluster." Of course, the "stinking regulatory state" has been a staple of conservative derogation for some time, and few on the right would mourn its passing, except that they have something very specific in mind, the regulatory state that "protects" the people like the Federal Trade Commission, or the Consumer Protection Agency, or from their frame of reference any sort of regulatory interference that "impedes" the accumulation of, the retention of, and the return on capital. The conservative right is concerned for "minority rights," but not, to use a phrase from Hofsteader, those "chiefly of interest to the modern liberal mind," the "rights to dissent" and "least of all [the rights of racial or] ethnic minorities." They are mostly concerned with the "propertied minority," the so-called 1%, and those "rights" that protect that "minority privilege." They not against the rule of law, particularly those laws that keep an unruly minority populace orderly and well ruled. Their derogation of the "stinking regulatory state" is simply frustration that the 1% minority cannot exercise 100% control over the legislative privilege they feel, by rights, should belong to them. As Lithwick goes on to write, "for anyone who still believes that this is a government of laws, not men, the man who persistently signals that the laws are a hassle has proven pretty terrifying," and this would include the conservative cognoscenti who see a Trump on the verge of inciting an unruly populace to mob violence, but also a Trump who plays fast and loose with ALL the rules, even those designed to protect their capital interests, so long as it gets the crowd dancing to his tune, Danke Shane. Lithwick cites the Hoover Institution’s Richard A. Epstein, writing for the New York Times, 'when it comes to the rule of law, “Trump doesn’t even think there’s an issue to worry about. He just simply says, whatever I want to do, I will do.'” She also cites UC–Irvine School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who has written that “Donald Trump’s views on the law and the legal system are truly frightening.”
Why? What happens, for example, when the promised "greatness" fails to materialize, and it will inevitably fail to materialize, when "the people" are no longer amused with Trump's "twist and shout?" I will leave it to your imagination, but let's just say, the line between the class clown and the spurned and spiteful class bully is a narrow one. If Trump believes in "majority rule," it is a perversion of Thoreau's "majority of one," and the rule of one Trump is as questionable as the rule of one Kim Jong-il. Given Trump’s stated admiration for one authoritarian dictator after another, “should Trump become president, no one would be safe from his toxic mix of bullying through law and acting above the law. He would replace rule of law with what Chinese scholars call rule by law,” and it would of course be Trump's law. It is then that the power of the surveillance state comes to the fore. As Burton points out, "the top presidential candidates have not spent much time talking about privacy, but we do know some things about how they might handle surveillance and other privacy issues." On the one hand, it is likely a reflection of her character, the ambitious introvert's impossible desire to keep the substance of her private life private, but "Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton supported the USA Freedom Act, which was meant to rein in the surveillance started by the Patriot Act." On the other hand, the "Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump appears eager to use surveillance powers. He has proposed surveilling mosques, and he’s said he supports the idea of mass domestic surveillance being done by the National Security Agency." Mass domestic surveillance? To what end? Perhaps to find those "dissenters" who are no longer amused by his antics? As Sullivan points out, "at rallies, whenever a protester is hauled out, you can almost sense the rising rage of the collective identity venting itself against a lone dissenter and finding a catharsis of sorts in the brute force a mob can inflict on an individual." When the "rising rage of the collective identity" can vent itself against the dissenter with government sanction, whether covert or overt, it becomes something much more ominous. Again, as Sullivan points out, simply taking him at his word, "Trump celebrates torture — the one true love of tyrants everywhere — not because it allegedly produces intelligence but because it has a demonstration effect," and it doesn't take too many demonstrations before the populace gets the idea that it's better to keep one's dissent wholly private, not only away from the public arena, the public media, but with the government's ability to "hack," from the "private" media that can unaccountably be made suddenly "public" -- the face book page, the google email account, the cell phone, the digital universe that keeps constant tab on us.
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