You can fool all of the people some of the time.
—Unknown
You wouldn’t think Donald Trump and socialist Hugo Chavez would have much in common. But both trapped their bases with charismatic populism. Another, very different trap is the myth that the Clinton-endorsed crime bill of 1994 caused the mass incarceration of Blacks. The crime bill myth still entraps all sorts of people, especially Democrats.
Understanding these traps will help us understand how Trump’s base has been trapped and see some of the traps that our side gets caught in. Politics is mostly a game of traps. To understand it, we need a clear idea of what a Political Trap is and a familiarity with the three most common kinds of traps.
What’s a Political Trap?
The polarization escape strategy explained in Chapter 4 urges us to assume our opponent has “good intentions” but has been sucked into a Political Trap. The examples of traps that I present here are so different from each other that it might seem that the “trap” concept can’t be defined. Yet such traps can be recognized by three simple characteristics of those who have been trapped:
- Having “good intentions”
- Being deceived by the trap
- Regret if they see through the deception
Here’s an excellent example of these three characteristics at work. Edgar Maddison Welch read online that Comet Ping Pong, a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C., was holding child sex slaves owned by Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager. Edgar arrived from North Carolina with his assault rifle and revolver to rescue them. Shooting off the lock on a door, he discovered … a computer room. The judge gave him four years in prison.
Welch got caught in a weird Political Trap. But weird as it is, Welch demonstrated the inevitable three characteristics of someone sucked into a Political Trap: “good intentions,” being deceived, and regret after recognizing the deception.
Even the judge agreed that Welch had “good intentions” and saw himself as risking his life to save children. Had Welch’s intentions been bad, had he just wanted to harass a pizza joint for the heck of it, we would not say he’d been sucked into a trap. A person who’s trapped by politics always has “good intentions.” That’s what I mean by trapped.
Clearly, Edgar Welch was deceived. But once he knew the truth, he certainly regretted having been sucked in.
The stories that follow illustrate the three most dangerous Political Traps currently active in U.S. politics and provide an orientation to three major parts of this book:
- Charisma Traps (See Part 2)
- Populism Traps (See Part 3)
- Mythology Traps (See Part 4)
Charisma Traps
Charismatic leaders specialize in winning people’s loyalty. If this is done with honesty and charm, they’re not sucking anyone in. But often, loyalty is won by telling an audience exactly what they want to hear—regardless of the truth. This is the trick of demagogues. The worst example of this was, of course, Hitler. Fortunately, most demagogues are far more benign.
With radio, TV and now social media, the need for leaders to be charismatic continues to grow. Enter the reality-show host, Donald Trump.
Is Trump Charismatic? If you’re progressive, you might not think so. That’s because he is only charismatic to his followers. But that’s all that matters. Charisma is not just about personality; it is about emotional bonding with followers.
Trump defeated 16 less-charismatic Republican candidates in 2016 as well as his less-charismatic Democrat opponent. Charisma is now one of the strongest Political Traps in American politics. In Trump’s case, his followers are so enraptured that they have been sucked into believing many of his most outrageous lies and false promises.
Populism Traps
Populism divides society into the righteous people (“Us”) and the corrupt elite (“Them”). It also promises that if “the people” stick together, they can overthrow the corrupt elite and quickly bring about a just society. Left-wing populists won’t fall for a right-wing populist trap, but they can easily be sucked in by a left-wing populist. Here’s the perfect example.
Venezuela’s former president, Hugo Chavez, was a quintessential populist who seemed to have accomplished the impossible by leading a successful left-populist revolution. Naturally, that made Chavez and Venezuela the perfect populism trap for leftists.
Hugo Chavez was elected president and took office in early 1999. Immediately, he did what political scientists say populists always do: He attacked the checks and balances of liberal democracy.
By the end of his first year, Chavez had used a national referendum to replace the constitution with one that increased his powers, threw all national elected officials out of office and replaced all Supreme Court justices. In the years that followed, he shut down much of the media and kept imposing new restrictions on his opposition. In 2005, tens of thousands of people who signed petitions for a recall referendum found they could not get government jobs or contracts, qualify for public assistance programs or receive passports.
To suck in our radical left, he announced a program of cheap oil for poor families in the U.S. Northeast. By the end of 2005, Chavez was delivering free oil to Joseph Kennedy II’s Citizens Energy Corporation, and by the end of 2006, Kennedy was running Chavez-friendly commercials paid for by Chavez. The oil program continued through 2014 and delivered about $400 million worth of free or heavily discounted oil to poor Americans in 20-plus states.
Of course, it made no sense for Chavez to take that $400 million away from Venezuela’s much-poorer poor—except as a propaganda measure. Among those sucked in by this populist “success story,” you will find Bernie Sanders, Jesse Jackson, Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, Danny Glover, Michael Moore, Naomi Klein and millions more. Of these, Sanders is the most interesting example. On February 7, 2006, at a joint press conference with Venezuelan Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez, Sanders announced that he had brokered a long-term oil deal for some of Vermont’s poor. He said it should not be viewed as political.
Then in 2011, after the U.K.’s highly-respected Freedom House had declared Venezuela “not an electoral democracy,” Sanders wrote an article, still posted on his Senate website in 2019, that drew a surprising conclusion:
These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela, and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who’s the banana republic now?
How is that? The U.S. is more of a “banana republic” than Venezuela, where you are more apt to realize the American dream? That was one huge endorsement of Hugo Chavez and his populist, democratic socialism. It didn’t occur to Sanders that Venezuela’s reduced income inequality was built on an oil-price bubble, and not on a socialist miracle.
On September 14, 2015, someone in the Clinton campaign sent an email to a Huffington Post reporter. It noted the oil deal that Bernie brokered with Venezuela.
Sanders immediately responded: “They … even tried to link me to a dead communist dictator.”
Yes, he was talking about that “dead communist dictator,” Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013. Some on the radical left went bananas. How could Sanders call their hero a “communist dictator?”
Remember the third characteristic of someone who has been sucked in: “The person would regret being sucked in if they saw through the deception.” Sanders finally saw through the Chavez deception, and he was regretting it when he was forced to implicitly admit that he himself had brokered a deal with a “communist dictator” to influence his voters.
This is not surprising. People are most easily sucked in by those who pretend to share their worldview. Populism is indeed a powerful trap for those inclined to support the concerns of ordinary people. Because they feel so strongly about their good intentions, they are the most vulnerable to being sucked in.
The Political Mythology Trap
Political myths about the past are used to support arguments for how things should be done now and who is to blame. Myths of past political heroes and anti-heroes are powerful because they sound true (at least to their target audience), and they claim the authority of reality. They are effective partly because they are hard to check—so most people never check them. Here’s an example of a devastatingly wrong political myth that is explored in depth in the next chapter.
[image]
Joe Biden announcing the signing of the 1994 Crime Bill
The 1994 crime bill. It is now widely believed that the Clintons caused the mass incarceration of Blacks by passing the 1994 crime bill and that they did so for racist reasons. Those who believe this are justifiably concerned with the terrible toll taken by the overuse of incarceration and by biases in the criminal justice system. So they do have good intentions.
They also meet the second criterion for being caught in a Political Trap. As we will see in the next chapter, they have been deceived. Finally, they are well-meaning people who would regret falsely accusing the Clintons if they understood what really happened back in the 1990s—the bill was strongly backed by the Black community and did not cause the mass incarceration of Blacks.
Conclusion
A Political Trap is something that deceives well-intentioned people about a political issue in a way that they would regret if they saw through the deception. Such traps come in many varieties, but the charisma, populist and mythology traps are common and particularly relevant today.
Ripped Apart
