“Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Eugene Robinson: Trump’s America is not the only ‘real’ America
Humility is a virtue, but fake humility is a sin, or ought to be. So let me begin the new year with full-throated praise of some people and institutions that supposedly got their comeuppance in November: the mainstream media, “coastal elites,” share-the-wealth liberals, pointy-headed intellectuals and others said to be hopelessly out of touch with the “real America.”
In what too quickly became the consensus view, all of the above were put in their place by Donald Trump’s narrow electoral victory. We unreal Americans were demonstrated to be clueless, the conventional wisdom has ruled, and now are obliged to slink away and repent.
All of this is pure rubbish. It’s time to stop all the self-flagellation and raise our voices to insist that things such as knowledge, experience, qualifications and respect for objective facts still matter — now, perhaps, more than ever.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: Three steps for progressive resistance and rebuilding as Trump era launches
As the new year begins, any honest progressive knows the political outlook is bleak. But if we’re going to limit the damage that President-elect Donald Trump inflicts on the country, then despair is not an option. The real question, as Democracy Alliance President Gara LaMarche recently said, “is how you fight intelligently and strategically when every house is burning down.”
Indeed, with Trump and Republicans in Congress aggressively pushing a right-wing agenda, progressives will need to invest their resources and attention where they can do the most good — both now and over the next four years. With that in mind, here are three steps to take to resist and rebuild as the Trump administration gets underway. [..]
To that end, the race for Democratic National Committee chair presents a significant opportunity to shift the party’s direction. Regardless of who prevails, progressives would be wise to insist on a return to the 50-state strategy that former chairman Howard Dean championed and that all of the current candidates say they support. Ultimately, the party’s fortunes will depend on recruiting a new generation of progressive leaders, especially women and people of color, who can harness the power of social movements and drive it into electoral politics — everywhere in the country, at every level of government.
Rebecca Solnit: Another, more beautiful America is rising. Trump will be resisted
The time when you don’t need hope is when your hopes have been fulfilled. Hope is for when you don’t have what you need and for when things are not OK. It is the belief that liberation might be possible that motivates you to make it more possible, and pursuing hope even when it doesn’t lead to the ultimate goal can generate changes that matter along the way, including in yourself.
A dozen years ago I talked about hope to a roomful of working-class community college students in Washington, citing the German philosopher Ernst Bloch to the effect that without hope there is no action but without action there is no hope. A woman said in a clear voice that she agreed, because if she had not hoped she would not have struggled and if she had not struggled she would not have survived Pol Pot and the Cambodian genocide.
That floored me. Sometimes hope is just that you will survive, or that you will escape. Then you can hope for more. I wish I knew her story, but that she was in North America, alive and well and confident enough to speak out, told me something of it. Even despotic regimes end, though it’s important to remember that not everyone and everything survives; you can be devastated for what won’t and hopeful for what will at the same time.
Amanda Marcotte: Fake news for the Great Leader: Donald Trump’s readymade White House propaganda machine
Donald Trump ran a campaign built almost exclusively on lies and demagoguery, so it stands to reason that his presidency will usher in a new era of deceitful propaganda as well. It could very well dwarf the George W. Bush administration’s infamous propaganda push around the Iraq War.
As detailed in a recent report from Media Matters, is that Trump can rely on a pre-existing infrastructure of well-funded conspiracy theorists, like Alex Jones, James O’Keefe, and David Daleiden, who pose as “citizen journalists” and pump out a steady stream of lies and misinformation to support the Trump agenda.
This kind of propaganda is strikingly different from the propaganda efforts of previous right-wing administrations in the past, which tended to be more top-down in nature. Take, for instance, the Bush administration’s efforts to sell the American public on the Iraq War. Those efforts were largely coordinated by the Bush administration, which constructed an elaborate but false narrative — that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction — and then spread White House officials and surrogates across the media to keep pushing that story until the public bought into it.
But the Trump propaganda machine is not top-down. While sites like Infowars and Breitbart News — major hubs for the right-wing hoax stories created by these fake journalists — are heavily linked to the incoming Trump administration, they are technically independent organizations.
Catherine Rampell:
Will Trump’s White House have computers?
Donald Trump likes his technology like he likes his decor: stuck in the ’80s.
For all the praise he receives for embracing 21st-century social media, the president-elect seems to understand little about modern technology. And he exhibits even less interest in learning about it. [..]
Trump has twice now mentioned Barron as his touchstone for technical savvy when answering questions about cyberattacks. And, hey, maybe the kid is unusually good at navigating the series of tubes. But Russian and Chinese hackers are probably better.
Trump’s recent comments bode ill for federal investments in cyberdefense. They do help explain his economic worldview, however. His technical incuriosity helps us understand why, for example, he (wrongly) believes that manufacturing jobs are primarily disappearing due to insufficient tariffs, rather than automation. And it illuminates why he’s so keen on rebooting obsolete jobs in the first place, rather than investing in forward-looking sectors such as clean energy, biotech — or cybersecurity.
If Trump gets his way, maybe the “Age of Computer” will be shorter than we think.
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