I don't think disengagement from debating with lunatics is a good strategy. Otherwise, they get to be the only voice. We need to go into hostile environments and patiently repeating the truth. We need to be indefatigable and unflappable.
The pile of shit that needs to be shoveled is enormous and grows on a daily basis. None of us were around for World War II, but we find ourselves in the midst of Trump war II. Time for every one of us to keep doing our bit.
Of course, we must be absolutely confident that we own the Truth from the outset, and never engage in the kind of dialog that might allow a teensy weensey shadow of doubt to creep in
That's not how real debates work. For a debate to be real, both parties need to constantly accept that even their own strongest beliefs might turn out to be true. That's precisely one of the goals of a debate: to get closer to the objective truth together, by taking your opponents' arguments and evidence into account.
If not you're not debating, you're preaching... :-)
I've always thought that the press dropped the ball completely in Trump 1, when that administration came out of the gate lying about the size of the inaugural crowd (among other things). They simply sat back passively when they were attacked for the truth and accepted the statements of, among other things, "alternative facts".
If they'd had any gumption whatsoever, every question thereafter should have been some version of "Since you are willing to lie about the size of the inauguration crowd, how do we know you are not lying now?"
The approach of "We are neutral--we just report what is said" is a cop-out that is being deliberately exploited. It's as if they are actively working to live down to the epithet of "lame stream media".
I second your admonition to the media. They CAN fact check every thing that comes out of this administration's mouth. Do it!
Who leads the Trump opposition? Bashing Trump is makes us feel better, it’s too easy, the issue of the moment, Epstein, dominates the media cycle, the reams of data does not budge the 74M Trumpers, how do we mobilize the opposition? Who are our leaders? Aside from Bernstein and Krugman.
JB, I agree 100% with your observation - the two sides are NOT playing the same game. We are burdened by facts, truth, morals and attempting to have an open mind. They are not. They lie, they deceive, they are working another agenda and they are, in this sense, zealots-in-a-cult. On the face of it, it is irreconcilable. More than frustrating.... impossible. Kinda like Ukraine's challenge facing Russia. Kinda like the Civil Rights era. So, how do we prevail?
Step one is truly under way.....altho already corrupted by money and flaccidly ineffective so far but, still, the beginning of resistance is in speaking up. Our speaking up to get likes, subscriptions and ad sponsors corrupts the message but "In Lucre We Trust", right? But, I guess, better than nothing, eh?
Step two has yet to be taken. Reason: no face of the opposition has stepped up. No real 'face' to relate to. Americans follow like rats a populist figure. We love our celebrities. But we do not yet have a handsome or beautiful champion (figurehead) to look and sound good in front of the camera. We need a David to face their Godzilla. We need to rally around a hero.
Stephen Colbert?
Third step: we have no hero because we have no third step. We have no third step because we are stuck in step one: wringing our hands and moaning on YouTube.
I'll propose step 3. Advocate, promote a boycott of all spending in a draconian way. Do not 'stock up' in week one so that you can be comfortably heroic in week 2. Instead, pick a day of NOTHING and all spending stops for that one day. Total zero. Let the message sink in. Then, a month later, do another 'NO SPENDING' period of a full 5 days. Then, two weeks. Then a month. And NO SPENDING MEANS NO SPENDING. Anything 'essential' is volunteer. No Netflix. No gasoline. No cell phone. Promote embracing hardship.
Also: enter 'bank withdrawl' as a tool. Take it all out. Make the banks hurt. Sell the market short. Do not make payments on anything.
The American people are enslaved by consumerism and debt. Fight the system by 'opting out' for short but impactful times.
"But I do not want to lose my car, my cottage, my season tickets to the Yankees!"
Fair enough. Don't do it then. Find something else that is nice, easy and comfortable instead. Get 'likes' for your writing. I get it....y'all are tough talkers but NOT if the going gets tough. After all, you are NOT Ukranians!
It's indeed not just today's neofascists (basically the entire GOP by now) who systematically engage in debates in bad faith. Doing so was always lying at the very heart of the neocon strategy. And one of the founders of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol (Bill's father), literally explained why this approach is needed in his 1976 WSJ op-ed "The Stupid Party" (he argues that in a "healthy society" (read: one governed by neocons), intellectuals never participate in public debates, because whenever they do, conservatives cannot but lose the debate).
It's why they always refused to have a real debate about Obamacare (even Romney and McCain refused to do so).
The only difference is that neocons were deep down still more or less pro democracy, contrary to the neofascists who took over the party today.
You saw this not only in the 2024 presidential debate (Trump) but also in the VP debate (Vance). If you start claiming that Haitians eat cats and dogs and that Trump SAVED Obamacare during his first term, in a "debate" that only lasts 90 minutes and where you only have a ridiculously short three minutes to say something about the 15 topics addressed in those 90 minutes, you know you destroyed any possibility for a real debate.
The only way to have a real debate is for both sides (not just one) to accept fact-checking.
Now look at how the NYT is reporting on politics. So many facts that are crucial for "we the people" to know (such as the fact that wages rose faster than inflation under Biden, and that Biden created the strongest post-global inflation economy in the West) were unknown by more than half of the American people, poll after poll showed. And yet, the only headlines you saw last summer were... about those polls ("majority rejects Biden on economy"), and the headlines didn't even say that these articles about polls, not objective facts, in the first place...
Fascism can only be installed AFTER key pillars of democracy begin to disappear, in the decades before. Real journalism is part of those pillars. For a while now, the US no longer has real debates - anywhere. It's always just a shouting match, with no fact-checking at all.
THIS is what we need to urgently restore if we want to rebuild democracy.
Dear Mr. Bernstein - I always enjoy your columns and I learn a good deal from reading your work. At one point you stated, "(In case it’s not clear, those debating economic policy in bad faith are not generally fascists. I’m extrapolating Beutler’s points.)". While they might not be 'fascists', they certainly have no issues riding with the fascists as they continue to espouse 'trickle down economics' and other debunked policies, because it fits their greedy narrative. Clearly, they must get something out of continuing to propose policies that have been shown over and over again (with data from those administrations who implement those policies) that it doesn't work. So, while I understand your attempt to carve them out as they are your colleagues, I wouldn't treat them so kindly. They are a big part of the problem.
Face it, there is no point debating adversaries who dismiss all evidence contrary to their positions and assert falsehoods they know to be untrue. This is what, for example, those who study Holocaust "revisionism" have found--namely, that by engaging in debate about whether the Holocaust occurred, you raise denialism to the status of a potentially valid proposition rather than discredit it. This leaves us with basically one, less than satisfactory strategy: constant repetition of provable statements to prevent mythmakers from monopolizing access to the public sphere and thereby to make at least a small dent in public consciousness. This is just what the Trump administration is trying to curtail by defunding public media, which is perhaps the best evidence that it might just be effective.
As always sensible analysis. Particularly agree with the comments re the media not effectively dealing with Trump's nonsense. Personally, I do not understand why his lies are invariably described as "falsehoods" or "misleading". Call them lies. Loudly and repeatedly. He lies every day, almost every time he speaks. Trump lies. Trump lies regularly. Trump lies again. Trump lies about Inflation. Trump lies about GDP. And on, and on.
I'm curious how many people in "bad faith" or fascists you actually have interacted with? I agree that there is not strong empirical evidence for trickle-down economics, but are most people making these types of arguments doing so leading us down the road to authoritarianism? Even most smart people don't make empirical-backed arguments. Not a Trump supporter or Republican but a lot of these examples seem cherry-picked, and are at risk of being considered bad-faith themselves. While I worry about a lot of overreach by the Trump admin, I think some parts here are overstated. Judging from the comments I'm respectfully in the minority.
I fear we are in a no-win situation. Traditional, legitimate, and reliable news sources are being overwhelmed by social media dross, much of it generated automatically. With the rise of AI — which is orders of magnitude more prolific than just using algorithms to promote actual human-created provocative posts — we see the sewer pipes exploding in our living rooms. Can we really have a conversation while all that stuff is flying around?
There isn't a single word in this post about silencing Trump's supporters. There is a suggestion that Lefties should no longer engage in public conversation with them. Thus, Trump supporters should be left to express their views unopposed. That does not sound like censorship to me.
Oh please. There's a great deal about debating 'fascists' - apparently defined as anyone with a different world view than the author's - and the hypocrisy of such persons. But the hypocrite is the author.
No, fascism is defined as the bundling ("fasces" = "bundle", in Latin) of the constitutional powers of the legislative branch of government (Congress) and the judiciary into the power of the executive (the White House).
So instead of having three independent and co-equal branches of government (sometimes called "checks and balances"), each with its own specific powers and duties (the duty of the executive is for instance to "faithfully execute" the laws made by Congress, instead of making laws themselves or ignoring existing law), in a fascist political regime all decisions (including legislative and judicial ones) are made on the executive level.
As Steve Bannon said in the WSJ recently: for the new GOP (the neofascist one), the goal of Congress is merely to be the "lawyers" working for the president, putting whatever he decides (through executive orders) into law - without congressional debates and regardless of what these Representatives' constituents actually want them to do.
Or in Mike Johnson's words: the new GOP sees the role of Congress as "codifying" into law whatever executive order the president signs.
Why would anyone want to deliberately give away their own constitutional power as a citizen like that? No one wants that. That's why the GOP vitally needs debates based on lies and bad faith, so that you can brainwash people into not knowing or seeing what they're actually doing.
"Everything America has stood for and that Americans have believed in for almost two hundred and fifty years is under attack today by the President of the United States and his Administration, with the wholehearted support of the Republican Congress, including most recently the constitutional right of a free press."
As a matter of fact, Judge Luttig's comments are both historical and legal nonsense, but he does happen to agree with your worldview, which I suppose contents you
an interesting take, Frank. Please explain how you arrived at that conclusion. To me, your comment sounds like something right out of a fascist playbook, or perhaps something that George Orwell would have written in 1984.
I'm an old style liberal, me boyo, with enough old style good manners not to address a stranger in a familiar way. The notion expressed in the article that respect for free speech is a fascist tactic is somewhat at odds with the actual practice of the day.
Uh... so you want to argue that it's false to claim that "respect for free speech is a fascist tactic", is that it?
You want to argue that, each time in history, a fascist regime was elected, inside a democracy, and then grabbed power and installed fascism, they did NOT use free speech? You want to argue that they already managed to suppress free speech long before they grabbed power... ?
I don't think disengagement from debating with lunatics is a good strategy. Otherwise, they get to be the only voice. We need to go into hostile environments and patiently repeating the truth. We need to be indefatigable and unflappable.
The pile of shit that needs to be shoveled is enormous and grows on a daily basis. None of us were around for World War II, but we find ourselves in the midst of Trump war II. Time for every one of us to keep doing our bit.
Of course, we must be absolutely confident that we own the Truth from the outset, and never engage in the kind of dialog that might allow a teensy weensey shadow of doubt to creep in
That's not how real debates work. For a debate to be real, both parties need to constantly accept that even their own strongest beliefs might turn out to be true. That's precisely one of the goals of a debate: to get closer to the objective truth together, by taking your opponents' arguments and evidence into account.
If not you're not debating, you're preaching... :-)
I've always thought that the press dropped the ball completely in Trump 1, when that administration came out of the gate lying about the size of the inaugural crowd (among other things). They simply sat back passively when they were attacked for the truth and accepted the statements of, among other things, "alternative facts".
If they'd had any gumption whatsoever, every question thereafter should have been some version of "Since you are willing to lie about the size of the inauguration crowd, how do we know you are not lying now?"
The approach of "We are neutral--we just report what is said" is a cop-out that is being deliberately exploited. It's as if they are actively working to live down to the epithet of "lame stream media".
I second your admonition to the media. They CAN fact check every thing that comes out of this administration's mouth. Do it!
Who leads the Trump opposition? Bashing Trump is makes us feel better, it’s too easy, the issue of the moment, Epstein, dominates the media cycle, the reams of data does not budge the 74M Trumpers, how do we mobilize the opposition? Who are our leaders? Aside from Bernstein and Krugman.
JB, I agree 100% with your observation - the two sides are NOT playing the same game. We are burdened by facts, truth, morals and attempting to have an open mind. They are not. They lie, they deceive, they are working another agenda and they are, in this sense, zealots-in-a-cult. On the face of it, it is irreconcilable. More than frustrating.... impossible. Kinda like Ukraine's challenge facing Russia. Kinda like the Civil Rights era. So, how do we prevail?
Step one is truly under way.....altho already corrupted by money and flaccidly ineffective so far but, still, the beginning of resistance is in speaking up. Our speaking up to get likes, subscriptions and ad sponsors corrupts the message but "In Lucre We Trust", right? But, I guess, better than nothing, eh?
Step two has yet to be taken. Reason: no face of the opposition has stepped up. No real 'face' to relate to. Americans follow like rats a populist figure. We love our celebrities. But we do not yet have a handsome or beautiful champion (figurehead) to look and sound good in front of the camera. We need a David to face their Godzilla. We need to rally around a hero.
Stephen Colbert?
Third step: we have no hero because we have no third step. We have no third step because we are stuck in step one: wringing our hands and moaning on YouTube.
I'll propose step 3. Advocate, promote a boycott of all spending in a draconian way. Do not 'stock up' in week one so that you can be comfortably heroic in week 2. Instead, pick a day of NOTHING and all spending stops for that one day. Total zero. Let the message sink in. Then, a month later, do another 'NO SPENDING' period of a full 5 days. Then, two weeks. Then a month. And NO SPENDING MEANS NO SPENDING. Anything 'essential' is volunteer. No Netflix. No gasoline. No cell phone. Promote embracing hardship.
Also: enter 'bank withdrawl' as a tool. Take it all out. Make the banks hurt. Sell the market short. Do not make payments on anything.
The American people are enslaved by consumerism and debt. Fight the system by 'opting out' for short but impactful times.
"But I do not want to lose my car, my cottage, my season tickets to the Yankees!"
Fair enough. Don't do it then. Find something else that is nice, easy and comfortable instead. Get 'likes' for your writing. I get it....y'all are tough talkers but NOT if the going gets tough. After all, you are NOT Ukranians!
It's indeed not just today's neofascists (basically the entire GOP by now) who systematically engage in debates in bad faith. Doing so was always lying at the very heart of the neocon strategy. And one of the founders of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol (Bill's father), literally explained why this approach is needed in his 1976 WSJ op-ed "The Stupid Party" (he argues that in a "healthy society" (read: one governed by neocons), intellectuals never participate in public debates, because whenever they do, conservatives cannot but lose the debate).
It's why they always refused to have a real debate about Obamacare (even Romney and McCain refused to do so).
The only difference is that neocons were deep down still more or less pro democracy, contrary to the neofascists who took over the party today.
You saw this not only in the 2024 presidential debate (Trump) but also in the VP debate (Vance). If you start claiming that Haitians eat cats and dogs and that Trump SAVED Obamacare during his first term, in a "debate" that only lasts 90 minutes and where you only have a ridiculously short three minutes to say something about the 15 topics addressed in those 90 minutes, you know you destroyed any possibility for a real debate.
The only way to have a real debate is for both sides (not just one) to accept fact-checking.
Now look at how the NYT is reporting on politics. So many facts that are crucial for "we the people" to know (such as the fact that wages rose faster than inflation under Biden, and that Biden created the strongest post-global inflation economy in the West) were unknown by more than half of the American people, poll after poll showed. And yet, the only headlines you saw last summer were... about those polls ("majority rejects Biden on economy"), and the headlines didn't even say that these articles about polls, not objective facts, in the first place...
Fascism can only be installed AFTER key pillars of democracy begin to disappear, in the decades before. Real journalism is part of those pillars. For a while now, the US no longer has real debates - anywhere. It's always just a shouting match, with no fact-checking at all.
THIS is what we need to urgently restore if we want to rebuild democracy.
Never hand the microphone to someone better at sophistry than you are at rhetoric.
Dear Mr. Bernstein - I always enjoy your columns and I learn a good deal from reading your work. At one point you stated, "(In case it’s not clear, those debating economic policy in bad faith are not generally fascists. I’m extrapolating Beutler’s points.)". While they might not be 'fascists', they certainly have no issues riding with the fascists as they continue to espouse 'trickle down economics' and other debunked policies, because it fits their greedy narrative. Clearly, they must get something out of continuing to propose policies that have been shown over and over again (with data from those administrations who implement those policies) that it doesn't work. So, while I understand your attempt to carve them out as they are your colleagues, I wouldn't treat them so kindly. They are a big part of the problem.
More of this please.
Face it, there is no point debating adversaries who dismiss all evidence contrary to their positions and assert falsehoods they know to be untrue. This is what, for example, those who study Holocaust "revisionism" have found--namely, that by engaging in debate about whether the Holocaust occurred, you raise denialism to the status of a potentially valid proposition rather than discredit it. This leaves us with basically one, less than satisfactory strategy: constant repetition of provable statements to prevent mythmakers from monopolizing access to the public sphere and thereby to make at least a small dent in public consciousness. This is just what the Trump administration is trying to curtail by defunding public media, which is perhaps the best evidence that it might just be effective.
Have staffers fact check his claims then report the truth immediately after Trump holds one of his lie-fests.
As always sensible analysis. Particularly agree with the comments re the media not effectively dealing with Trump's nonsense. Personally, I do not understand why his lies are invariably described as "falsehoods" or "misleading". Call them lies. Loudly and repeatedly. He lies every day, almost every time he speaks. Trump lies. Trump lies regularly. Trump lies again. Trump lies about Inflation. Trump lies about GDP. And on, and on.
I'm curious how many people in "bad faith" or fascists you actually have interacted with? I agree that there is not strong empirical evidence for trickle-down economics, but are most people making these types of arguments doing so leading us down the road to authoritarianism? Even most smart people don't make empirical-backed arguments. Not a Trump supporter or Republican but a lot of these examples seem cherry-picked, and are at risk of being considered bad-faith themselves. While I worry about a lot of overreach by the Trump admin, I think some parts here are overstated. Judging from the comments I'm respectfully in the minority.
Speaking of data, seems the quality of CPI data collection is deteriorating. https://www.apolloacademy.com/the-quality-of-the-cpi-data-continues-to-deteriorate/
I fear we are in a no-win situation. Traditional, legitimate, and reliable news sources are being overwhelmed by social media dross, much of it generated automatically. With the rise of AI — which is orders of magnitude more prolific than just using algorithms to promote actual human-created provocative posts — we see the sewer pipes exploding in our living rooms. Can we really have a conversation while all that stuff is flying around?
The lack of self awareness in this post is astonishing. The major enemies of free speech at this point in time are left wing.
There isn't a single word in this post about silencing Trump's supporters. There is a suggestion that Lefties should no longer engage in public conversation with them. Thus, Trump supporters should be left to express their views unopposed. That does not sound like censorship to me.
Oh please. There's a great deal about debating 'fascists' - apparently defined as anyone with a different world view than the author's - and the hypocrisy of such persons. But the hypocrite is the author.
No, fascism is defined as the bundling ("fasces" = "bundle", in Latin) of the constitutional powers of the legislative branch of government (Congress) and the judiciary into the power of the executive (the White House).
So instead of having three independent and co-equal branches of government (sometimes called "checks and balances"), each with its own specific powers and duties (the duty of the executive is for instance to "faithfully execute" the laws made by Congress, instead of making laws themselves or ignoring existing law), in a fascist political regime all decisions (including legislative and judicial ones) are made on the executive level.
As Steve Bannon said in the WSJ recently: for the new GOP (the neofascist one), the goal of Congress is merely to be the "lawyers" working for the president, putting whatever he decides (through executive orders) into law - without congressional debates and regardless of what these Representatives' constituents actually want them to do.
Or in Mike Johnson's words: the new GOP sees the role of Congress as "codifying" into law whatever executive order the president signs.
Why would anyone want to deliberately give away their own constitutional power as a citizen like that? No one wants that. That's why the GOP vitally needs debates based on lies and bad faith, so that you can brainwash people into not knowing or seeing what they're actually doing.
Mr. Bernstein is not a hypocrite. Of course, neither are you. But what you are is a tyrant.
Judge J Michael Luttig has this to say today:
"Everything America has stood for and that Americans have believed in for almost two hundred and fifty years is under attack today by the President of the United States and his Administration, with the wholehearted support of the Republican Congress, including most recently the constitutional right of a free press."
https://substack.com/inbox/post/169377046
Judge Luttig doesn't seem too worried about the censorship of right wing opinions.
I am an independent and I am pro life. I am not a leftist down the line.
As a matter of fact, Judge Luttig's comments are both historical and legal nonsense, but he does happen to agree with your worldview, which I suppose contents you
Do not feed the troll.
Any concrete arguments or evidence to back up your claim?
an interesting take, Frank. Please explain how you arrived at that conclusion. To me, your comment sounds like something right out of a fascist playbook, or perhaps something that George Orwell would have written in 1984.
I'm an old style liberal, me boyo, with enough old style good manners not to address a stranger in a familiar way. The notion expressed in the article that respect for free speech is a fascist tactic is somewhat at odds with the actual practice of the day.
Uh... so you want to argue that it's false to claim that "respect for free speech is a fascist tactic", is that it?
You want to argue that, each time in history, a fascist regime was elected, inside a democracy, and then grabbed power and installed fascism, they did NOT use free speech? You want to argue that they already managed to suppress free speech long before they grabbed power... ?
The rubric applies to authoritarian regimes of all flavors, Right and Left. Capisce?
I'm talking about the current social climate, friend. Historically, free speech has no friends, Left or Right, except the United States of America.
What you are is an arrogant ass.
The inevitable descent to personal insult.