Former President Barack Obama: Google

By Glynn Wilson –

This is something I’ve been thinking about and writing about for a long time, but now former President Barack Obama and The Atlantic are talking about it.

In an exclusive interview by Jeffrey Goldberg, the former president identifies the greatest threats to the American experiment in democracy, explains why he’s still hopeful, and opens up about his new book: Why Obama Fears for Our Democracy.

Now, the question to start with it this: Is it possible that Barack Obama, clearly our smartest president to date in these United States at least in modern times (forget for a moment about his black skin) could be our last educated, intellectual president?

If we are now living and breathing in a full blown “epistemological crisis” of epic proportions, when it’s not possible to build a successful communications system to create a shared reality based on science and facts, then the Trump reality show presidency is literally only the beginning of our very real “idiocracy.”

Or, another way to look at it might be called the “Alabamafication” of America, a term that came into being in early 2018.

The funny, satirical movie was supposed to make us think about what a dumbed down future might look like, so we would all run as far away as we could from such a world. Instead, like the Southern racists who loved Archie Bunker not because he made fun of them but because they agreed with him, is it possible that we have traveled so far down the Rush Limbaugh talk radio Fox News road that we can never turn back?

But, but … Joe Biden, you say, who was just elected president by the skin of our teeth. Joe Biden may be a good guy and a moderate Democrat, although some progressives and Republicans might disagree, but he’s no intellectual. Obama was a bona fide intellectual with an IQ of like 162 or something, four standard deviations above the mean.

If you were to really take a long, hard look at what just happened, and think for a moment about how hard so many had to work to beat Donald Trump — scratching for votes in poor, urban communities and wealthy suburbs — and then think about how little work it took for Trump to convince 73 million people to vote for him, that really should scare the hell out of you.

Related: It’s A Mystery: Why Would 71.6 Million Americans Vote for Donald Trump?

That is, of course, if you are someone who pays enough attention to real news going on in the real world and actually care about the future of democracy and the planet. Clearly half the population is not concerned about those things. That is what should concern you.

Is there any way to convince at least some of them that they should care? Or is it too late?

How on Earth did we get here, and what, if anything, can we do about it?

I’ve got lots of thoughts about that, and so does Obama.

According to Goldberg, in the book The Promised Land it comes out that Sarah Palin was “the first horsewoman of the apocalypse” and Rick Santelli, the CNBC reporter who helped spark the Tea Party, was “the second horseman.” And then the cast grows.

Yes, some things changed in 2008, and Palin was the first social media political star in the early days when people were just getting on Facebook. We had already been through a few years of what might be called the “blogging era,” when writers of all kinds were publishing on the web as newspapers were dying, downsizing and going out of business right and left. Before there was social media, we had email lists and list serves to get the word out on interesting writing being published online rather than in print.

I was right there back in the day with Matt Drude, chasing headlines on an html news links page and publishing my own original stories on a blog.

The Locust Fork News-Journal

Obama tells Goldberg that the news sources changed after his election.

“Even as late as 2008, typically when I went into a small town, there’s a small-town newspaper, and the owner or editor is a conservative guy with a crew cut, maybe, and a bow tie, and he’s been a Republican for years. He doesn’t have a lot of patience for tax-and-spend liberals, but he’ll take a meeting with me, and he’ll write an editorial that says, ‘He’s a liberal Chicago lawyer, but he seems like a decent enough guy, had some good ideas’; and the local TV station will cover me straight.

“But you go into those communities today and the newspapers are gone. If Fox News isn’t on every television in every barbershop and VFW hall, then it might be a (conservative) Sinclair-owned station, and the presuppositions that exist there, about who I am and what I believe, are so fundamentally different, have changed so much, that it’s difficult to break through.”

He says he is “very worried about the degree to which we do not have a common baseline of fact and a common story. We don’t have a Walter Cronkite describing the tragedy of Kennedy’s assassination but also saying to supporters and detractors alike of the Vietnam War that this is not going the way the generals and the White House are telling us. Without this common narrative, democracy becomes very tough.”

***

“Now you have a situation in which large swaths of the country genuinely believe that the Democratic Party is a front for a pedophile ring. This stuff takes root. I was talking to a volunteer who was going door-to-door in Philadelphia in low-income African American communities, and was getting questions about QAnon conspiracy theories. The fact is that there is still a large portion of the country that was taken in by a carnival barker.”

Never mind that Trump’s friend Jeffery Epstein was a pedophile who sexually abused young girls. Never mind that the Boy Scouts — with many chapters and leaders loyal to Trump like Hitler’s Nazi youth — are now facing lawsuits involving over 60,000 cases of sexual abuse. Never mind that the person responsible for starting Qanon was himself a pedophile.

We have not lost the ability to transmit and see truth, but a large swatch of the population is simply not reading, not listening, not watching anymore. They have chosen their tribe and will go down and over the cliff or into the fire with it.

In a section of The Atlantic interview on the “Tech Companies vs. Democracy,” Goldberg asks a good question about whether “this new malevolent information architecture” might be “bending the moral arc away from justice,” about one of Obama’s favorite quotes about the arc of the moral universe trending toward justice.

“I think it is the single biggest threat to our democracy,” Obama says. “I think Donald Trump is a creature of this, but he did not create it. He may be an accelerant of it, but it preceded him and will outlast him. I am deeply troubled by how we address it…”

Part of the common narrative back in the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s and to some extent even in the early ’90s was a function of “the three major networks and a handful of papers that were disproportionately influential,” Obama points out.

There is a massive amount of academic research showing how The New York Times — what is often called the national newspaper of record which established the gold standard for objective journalism — for about 100 years in the 20th century set the agenda for other newspapers and television news, and as a result, public opinion. Some of that research is my own.

Public Attitudes and Press Coverage of the Environment, 1968-1996

When Baby Boomers like me and Obama were growing up, we had CBS, ABC and NBC, the New York Times and mass circulation daily newspapers in every major town, mainly running the same AP stories, although there were some alternatives, like UPI, which I wrote for on an off for about nine years.

The first big 24-hour cable news outlet, CNN, started by Ted Turner in Atlanta, did not come into its own until the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, and by then people around research universities were already starting to get online. But even in the early days, it was still the New York Times and Time magazine that people read with an AOL account, like I started doing in Tuscaloosa in 1993-95 while in grad school at the University of Alabama after 10 years of working in the news business.

Rush Limbaugh started doing his thing on the radio in the 1980s, but scholars didn’t pay much attention to him early on. Commercial radio was dead then compared to public radio, where broadcast news reporters also read the local newspapers and the New York Times.

It wasn’t until the late 1990s that Fox News began to take hold, just in time for the turn of the century and the new millennium and for the U.S. Supreme Court to hand the 2000 election victory to George W. Bush over Vice President Al Gore.

“You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” Obama says. “You’re not going to eliminate the internet; you’re not going to eliminate the thousand stations on the air with niche viewerships designed for every political preference. Without this it becomes very difficult for us to tackle big things.

“It becomes hard for us to say, ‘Hey, we have a pandemic here; it’s deadly; it’s serious; let’s put partisanship aside; let’s listen to Anthony Fauci because he’s been studying stuff like this for a long time. We may not get everything exactly right, because science works iteratively, but let’s hew as closely as we can to the science. Let’s do what science tells us to do to save lives. That becomes harder to do.”

Goldberg asks if he holds the tech companies responsible.

“I don’t hold the tech companies entirely responsible, because this predates social media. It was already there. But social media has turbocharged it.

“I know most of these folks. I’ve talked to them about it. The degree to which these companies are insisting that they are more like a phone company than they are like The Atlantic, I do not think is tenable. They are making editorial choices, whether they’ve buried them in algorithms or not.

“The First Amendment doesn’t require private companies to provide a platform for any view that is out there. At the end of the day, we’re going to have to find a combination of government regulations and corporate practices that address this, because it’s going to get worse. If you can perpetrate crazy lies and conspiracy theories just with texts, imagine what you can do when you can make it look like you or me saying anything on video. We’re pretty close to that now.”

Goldberg says, “It’s that famous Steve Bannon strategy: flood the zone with shit.”

“If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work,” Obama says. “And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.”

For the uninitiated, the word epistemology is derived from the ancient Greek epistēmē, meaning “knowledge”, and the suffix -logia, meaning “logical discourse” (derived from the Greek word logos meaning “discourse”). Epistemology is the doctrine or theory of knowing, just as ontology is the science of being… It answers the general question, ‘What is knowing and the known?’—or more shortly, ‘What is knowledge?

Th word epistemological is an adjective relating to the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion.

An “epistemological crisis” then is a crisis of knowledge. How do we know what we know, and can we really know anything?

The example Obama talks about is related to global warming and climate change, which is also the main example I use in my book.

Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again

“I can have an argument with you about what to do about climate change,” Obama says. “I can even accept somebody making an argument that, based on what I know about human nature, it’s too late to do anything serious about this—the Chinese aren’t going to do it, the Indians aren’t going to do it—and that the best we can do is adapt. I disagree with that, but I accept that it’s a coherent argument.

“I don’t know what to say if you simply say, ‘This is a hoax that the liberals have cooked up, and the scientists are cooking the books. And that footage of glaciers dropping off the shelves of Antarctica and Greenland are all phony.’

“Where do I start trying to figure out where to do something?”

Yes, where do we start. For now we have a Democrat about to be inaugurated as president, if Trump will simply get out of the way, and we have a majority in the House. The U.S. Senate is going to remain tied up in knots and keep this false narrative going for a little while longer, however, and now the conservatives have a decisive majority on the Supreme Court, thanks to Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

The people on the side of truth and justice just won an important battle in this war, but the war is not over yet. Which side will remain fired up and vigilant, and which side with burn out and give up?

American democracy has always been a precarious experiment, and even many of the so-called Founding Fathers were not sure it would last. Through thick and thin and wars, depressions and previous pandemics, we have endured.

But now the entire planet and human life on Earth are at stake, and Trump and his followers not only don’t seem to care, they don’t even believe there is a problem — because they have been told there is not a problem and they “believe” as if this was a matter of belief. It is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of fact.

The science tells us there is a problem. If we don’t all rally to do something about it, the war will be lost.