The DPCC Messaging Needs To Defeat Trump-- How Will Ted Lieu, Debbie Dingell And Matt Cartwright Manage?

Liz Cheney, considerably to the right of her father, now holds his old Wyoming House seat. Recently, she leap-frogged over all her colleagues into House GOP leadership as Chair of the House Republican Conference, the 3rd highest-ranking job in the GOP caucus after McCarthy and Scalise. She bumped Cathy McMorris Rodgers out of the position. Jonah Weiner’s piece for the New York Times Magazine, Why The Director of ‘Anchorman’ Decided To Take On Dick Cheney isn’t exactly a celebration of the Cheney family.

Adam McKay, the filmmaker behind Anchorman and Talladega Nights and, more recently an Oscar-winning adaptation of Michael Lewis’s financial-crash caper The Big Short has a new film, Vice, “a grim account of the life of Dick Cheney, with Christian Bale-- smoldering beneath prosthetic jowls and the ample weight he gained for the role-- in the lead.

Far from a grateful tribute, Vice-- which co-stars Amy Adams as Cheney’s wife, Lynne-- proceeds in a spirit of frenetic and ferocious irreverence… Vice is, in tone and form, one of the wildest movies he has made-- and one of the wildest movies ever made about politics, period.

…What is unambiguous, by the end, is McKay’s conviction that the American right, in its post-Reagan consolidation of power, has set our country and our planet on a path to ruin-- and that no single figure illustrates this better than Cheney. “He was the expert safecracker who opened up the safe,” McKay said, alluding to Cheney’s deft dismantling of checks on executive power, “and now the orangutan is in there, throwing around the money and the jewels.” McKay knows that a conservative backlash to his film is very likely, and while he emphasized how diligently he grounded the film in research, he also argued that making a less confrontational movie, hewing to a measured realism would have felt not only boring but also incommensurate to the task.

“I’ve never dealt with a tone like this, and I don’t think it’s by accident,” McKay said. “We’re living in a world with a tone that none of us has ever experienced. Pipe bombs are being sent to the leaders of a political party, and the guy who made Dilbert is saying, You know the bombs were really made by left-wingers because they didn’t work.” He made an incredulous face. “So, you’re claiming the assassination attempts are a false flag operation while slamming the liberals and you’re the guy who did Dilbert?” When it came to the movie’s protean tone, he said, “All I can tell you is that we were very conscious of it, we knew it was challenging and indefinable-- and we knew it had to be.”

This was true, he added, not in spite of the material’s seriousness, but because of it. “I’m suspicious of anything that feels like an old form,” he said. “We’re discovering new styles and forms, because this era we’re in demands it. The world has gotten so cartoonishly exaggerated and over the top. Why be subtle anymore?”

…Like many self-identifying progressives, McKay-- who grew up on food stamps and was raised in suburban Pennsylvania by his waitress single mother (his father, a musician, left the family when McKay was 7)-- has grown steadily disenchanted with what he calls “the corporate left.” This summer he joined the L.A. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. He thinks that capitalism must come under greater, Scandinavian-style regulatory control, “especially if we’re going to do anything about climate change.” Earlier this year he left Funny or Die, a comedy website he co-founded in 2007, after it entered into a sponsored-content agreement with Shell, a deal he called “disgusting.”

…In The Big Short, the narrator, played by Ryan Gosling, puts it this way: “Mortgage-backed securities. Subprime loans. Tranches. It’s pretty confusing, right? Does it make you feel bored? Or stupid? Well, it’s supposed to. Wall Street loves to use confusing terms to make you think only they can do what they do. Or, even better, for you just to leave them the [expletive] alone.” Last year, McKay directed the pilot for and served as an executive producer on Succession, an HBO drama about a Murdoch-style media-empire patriarch and his reprobate heirs-- their nefarious business dealings and abject power moves.

In Vice, he uses Cheney’s life to tell a broader tale about what McKay describes as “the Republican revolution and how it changed our country.” He sees Cheney as a “Zelig-style” figure of the right. His career in national politics began in the Nixon administration as a congressional intern and then apprentice to Donald Rumsfeld and, from there, intersected and coincided with the rise of key conservative figures: among them the Fox News founder, Roger Ailes, who first floated the idea for a conservative news network while working for Nixon; right-wing megadonors like the Koch brothers; conservative strategy shops like the Heritage Foundation; and, finally, George W. Bush, over whose administration-- and over whose decision to invade Iraq after Sept. 11, despite paltry intelligence linking the two-- Cheney exercised unprecedented influence for a vice president.

One of McKay’s models was The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s landmark biography of Robert Moses. “He’s in the middle of all this stuff,” McKay said of Cheney, “and finally he gets his hand on the wheel.” Unlike Caro, McKay had to tell his story through a camera, and so there are compressions, elisions and metaphors in Vice that reflect both a filmmaker’s desire to enthrall the crowd and a prosecutor’s desire to nail the defendant. Reading journalistic accounts of Cheney’s move, in 2000, from the private sector back into public service, we learn that he took elaborate steps to divest from Halliburton, the oil conglomerate where he was C.E.O., to avoid the appearance of conflict; here, the relationship between Cheney and the energy sector is presented as one of clear cronyism. Or take Sept. 11. In Barton Gellman’s play-by-play of that morning in Angler, it’s strongly implied that Cheney usurped Bush’s authority, ignoring the chain of command and giving fighter jets the O.K. to shoot down commercial airliners if they appeared to be hijacked. The official White House version was that Bush gave Cheney permission to pass along this order, and Gellman, poring carefully through communications records and notes taken by administration staff members, leaves open the extremely slim possibility that this is true. In Vice there is no such equivocation. We see Cheney give the order to take out the planes himself. Compression, of course, isn’t the same as distortion: Jane Mayer, the investigative journalist, described this scene to me as “a perfect gem,” and told McKay, after he screened the movie for her, that he “got it right.”

One way McKay might have buttressed Vice against possible charges of liberal bias would be to include the sorts of political critiques he readily offers up in conversation. “When Clinton was elected, he cut welfare and deregulated banks, just like a Republican would have done,” he said, from his couch. “Obama waged a war against whistle-blowers, he let the banks off the hook and he expanded executive power.” McKay did tinker for a while with stitching points like these into Vice-- making it “the story of Dick Cheney and the rise of the Republican Party, and how they got so big they swallowed the Democrats.” To this end, he pieced in footage of Hillary Clinton supporting the Iraq war. “But it’s hard,” McKay went on. “The audience only has a certain amount of oxygen in their lungs.” As he said earlier: “I could have made the movie three and a half hours long, but you can thank me that I didn’t.” (The film runs just over 130 minutes.)

…On the subject of villainy, McKay said: “Cheney and Bush did kill, conservatively, half a million civilians in Iraq. Some estimates have it at more than a million. So he’s pretty bad.” But, he said, “I think you have to humanize him, because unless we see how a regular human being can go down these roads, it’s useless.” (McKay has heard nothing from the Cheneys, who did not participate in the making of the film, although he noted that Mary started following him on Twitter.)

Is Vice part of the story Democrats need to be telling between now and 2020, when there’s an historical imperative that Trump be sent packing in no uncertain terms and certainly no with any kind of uncertainty that will encourage fascism to rear its ugly head in our country again any time soon? Wednesday, the L.A. Times published an interview with George Lakoff on what Democrats don’t understand-- and Republicans do-- about how voters think. She kicked it off by asking him about what the story Democrats have to tell to voters for the next two years.

Thursday the Democratic caucus in the House elected Ted Lieu, Matt Cartwright and Debbie Dingell co-chairs of the DPCC-- the Democratic Policy and Communication Committee. It’s their bailiwick. This is what Lakoff would like them to know:

The story has two parts, and they have to do with progressive values. One of them comes from Abraham Lincoln, that in a democracy, you have a government that is of, by, and for the people.

“Of” means the ordinary folks are in charge, and “by” means that the people who are governing you have the same life experiences that you have and understand that, and “for” means that the role of the government is to take care of people.

The second thing is that the private depends on public resources, both private life and private enterprise. You can’t have a business without public resources like roads and bridges and airports and the electric grids. But private life is like that too. You need the same roads and bridges and airports and electric grid and much more. Without public resources, you can’t have private enterprise or private life.

And that's something that is rarely said. If you ask a Democrat if that’s true, they’ll all say yes and they’ll give examples. But if you ask them, “Have you ever said it?” the answer is, no.

And that’s the point. They haven’t said it.

…Every Democrat should deliver the same messages and repeat them over and over and over. Not only that, they should repeat them every time they have a policy, and they should point out how the policy relates to these values.



You want to say this over and over so that people understand, after a couple of years of hearing it-- maybe getting tired of it. But the point is that they would understand that’s what democratic values are, and why they are so crucial.

…It’s not just democratic values. It’s the values of living in a democracy. You can’t have a business without public resources; that affects every business. It affects Republicans as well as Democrats. When you talk about what Lincoln’s words mean-- of, by and for the people-- that affects all sorts of people, Republicans as well as Democrats.

There is a way of talking to people, to say, “Imagine that you don’t have public resources. Imagine that there were no roads, that there were no airports, that there were no air traffic controllers and so on. Here’s what a public resource is. Imagine that it wasn’t there.”

And the Republicans might just say, “Well, privatize them-- privatize roads, privatize airports.”

All very nice except that that won’t happen. If you privatize them, they become a matter of profit for people, and since you absolutely require them, [the private owners] can bilk you for as much as they want. That’s why they’re public resources.

Framing is a concept you brought to the table-- the way you tell the story, the way you make your point. Democrats don’t seem to be as good at it as [Republicans]. Democrats don’t know how people think. It’s really sad. The problem is what I call the Enlightenment reason. [Former President Barack] Obama, in his [recent] speech, talked about the importance of Enlightenment reason. And a week later, Hillary Clinton is talking at Wellesley about how it was important that Wellesley teach Enlightenment reason.

Enlightenment reason says everybody reasons the same way; that’s what makes them human. Whereas if you have different world views, you’re going to reason differently. Enlightenment reason says that all you need to do is get the facts, and everybody will reason to the right conclusion, since everybody has the same reason. No. If they have different worldviews, they’ll reason to different conclusions.

Enlightenment reason does not recognize different worldviews. Enlightenment reason doesn’t admit framing. It doesn’t admit metaphorical thought. It doesn’t admit the way people really work.

The Democrats don’t understand this. They think that if you just tell people the facts, they will all reason to the right conclusion. That’s why they keep coming up with fact after fact after fact, rather than framing things in a way so that people will understand why these things are important.

Trump May Be A "Punk," But No, Trumpism Is Not The New Punk Rock, Even If There Are Some Common Roots

I hadn't been back in America very long-- having been living abroad for nearly 7 years-- when I ran into someone I had met years before when I booked a Doors concert at my school. It was Danny Fields, who had gone from being an A&R man at the Doors' label, Elektra, to working as a journalist and managing a new band. He wanted me to see the new band. I didn't want to. He insisted and insisted until I agreed. I went down to the Bowery to a skeetzy club I had never heard of, CBGB's and saw a brand new band that hadn't recorded yet-- the Ramones. It charged my life, quite literally and completely. Along with others, I started one of the first punk rock magazines, one of the first punk rock radio shows and one of the first punk rock record labels in the U.S. Long before I wound up as general manager of the Ramones label, Sire Records, I had become close with virtually all the punk bands, from the Pistols and the Clash to locals like the Dead Kennedys and Crime. In fact, Johnny Strike of Crime just sent me this piece by Scott Galupo, Is Trumpism The New Punk Rock?

This post is meant to respond to Galupo's and Ijust want to establish that I was there and had a hand in it and understand what it was and why it was and feel confident that the Alt-Right isn't and never could be anything do do with punk rock, other than maybe being the antithesis. This goes way beyond the little dust up over American neo-Nazi Richard Spencer and his assertions about his love for Depeche Mode, unrequited I might add. After writing this little piece about what Depeche thinks of neo-Nazis, I received an e-mail from Daniel Miller, head of Mute and the guy who discovered Depeche Mode, signed them and produced their early music and helped guide their career. It don't want to quote it because it was a little more violent than the way Daniel has always portraysed himself but let it suffice that he wished bodily injury on Richard Spencer.

Anyway, back to punk rock-- which has always used fascist iconology to communicate anger, irony, and, most of all, perhaps, attention-grabbing outrage. Punk bands have always drawn some equivalents of simple-minded, low-IQ Trump supporter-types (i.e., facsist dupes.) and the bands have always had to respond to it. The Clash, Morrissey and the Dead Kennedys all had mini-crises over fascist followers and all disavowed them in no uncertain terms-- the way Depeche Mode did with Richard Spencer last week. Is there anything unclear about this Dead Kennedy's underground hit and the way Jello Biafra introduced it at this 1982 show at the Ritz in Austin?

Punk ain't no religious cult
Punk means thinking for yourself
You ain't hardcore cos you spike your hair
When a jock still lives inside your head

Nazi punks
Nazi punks
Nazi punks-Fuck Off!

Nazi punks
Nazi punks
Nazi punks-Fuck Off!

If you've come to fight, get outa here
You ain't no better than the bouncers
We ain't trying to be police
When you ape the cops it ain't anarchy

[Repeat chorus]

Ten guys jump one, what a man
You fight each other, the police state wins
Stab your backs when you trash our halls
Trash a bank if you've got real balls

You still think swastikas look cool
The real nazis run your schools
They're coaches, businessmen and cops
In a real fourth reich you'll be the first to go

[Repeat chorus]

You'll be the first to go
You'll be the first to go
You'll be the first to go
Unless you think

Galupo writes that a young CPAC attendee explained that he'd grown up a standard-issue George W. Bush conservative Republican, but had more recently migrated to the alt-right movement. One of its attractions, he said, was that it felt like "the new punk rock." I suppose he's never seen Biafra's 1982 explanation at the Ritz. "The word 'punk,' to many, evokes images of angry hooligans and anarchic behavior," continued Galupo correctly. "Then again, it may sound blasphemous: The memory of 'punk rock,' as it has been canonized in the upper echelons of rock criticism, is associated with left-wing anti-authoritarianism. Hence it would be ridiculous to call yourself 'punk' while supporting a right-wing authoritarian like Trump." Exactly... like Trump-- an acolyte of Joe McCarthy collaborator Roy Cohen-- accusing President Obama of McCarthyism, as he did in an Adderall-fueled rage before dawn on Saturday morning on Twitter. He references his friend and former editor Daniel Wattenberg for his rejection of "any association between punk rock the alt-right, racialism, or white identitarianism. Rather, he sees parallels between punk and Trumpism more broadly. "I have to say, it does feel similar in a lot of ways, psychologically and emotionally," he says.

The first thing one must understand about the right-wing character of punk, Wattenberg says, is not that its exponents were soi-disantYoung Republicans, quoting Goldwater or God and Man at Yale. New York-centered punk began as "an intramural insurrection within the counterculture," he says. It was the punks vs. their somnolent, sententious hippie older brothers and sisters, who had for years propounded what Wattenberg calls the "reverse pieties" of anti-Americanism and anti-commercialism and white guilt.

What does this have to do with the president and his core following?

Wattenberg says Trumpism was "an insurrection against Conservatism Inc."-- a political establishment that had become flabby, complacent, and self-indulgent in the same way that 1970s progressive rock music had grown bombastic, pretentious, and long-winded. Whereas Republicans before Trump had been terrified of deviating from orthodox positions on trade, the desirability of immigration, or the wisdom of the Iraq war, Trump thumbed his nose at this orthodoxy.

Then there's Trump's seeming amateurism-- his "inexperience and rawness," Wattenberg says. Just as punks weren't trained musicians, Trump is frequently assailed for not playing politics the right way, that is, the professional way. When Wattenberg hears the media establishment pounce on Trump for falsehoods, misstatements, or exaggerations, he hears echoes of musical sophisticates belittling punk rock for its primitivism. Trump may get lost in the details, but he gets the big things attitudinally right. Put another way: He may know only three chords, but Wattenberg says his followers hear the "right three chords."

He also sees in Trump a political manifestation of punk's do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos. (By "do-it-yourself," punks don't mean changing the oil or remodeling your bathroom; it's meant as a command: Write your own song. Paint your own painting.) Punk-rock bands created their own independent labels and staged gigs in small clubs or church basements. Trump lacked support from Republican Party elites in the same way that punks lacked support from major labels and promoters. So he ran a shoestring campaign and made himself recklessly accessible to the media in pursuit of free coverage.

Finally there is the transgressive appeal of Trump's rejection of political correctness. Wattenberg says: "There's power in that. Punks were also occasionally misrepresented as harboring fascist sympathies. Once they call you a fascist, there's nothing more than they can say. That's the source of excitement Milo [Yiannopoulos] generated on campus: 'We're free again.' That's the thrill and the power of busting taboos."

Where does Trumpism lead, then? The legacy of punk rock can be looked at two ways. It could be seen as a musical movement that, outside of two bands (the potent, one-and-done Sex Pistols and the more creatively catholic Clash), ultimately didn't amount to much. Or it can be seen as a vital current that runs through subsequent movements from grunge to emo to more recent garage revivalists like the White Stripes.

Wattenberg, for his part, doesn't see Trumpism disappearing any time soon. "There are no longer any criteria of judgment independent of politics," he laments. For as long as the left gets to define the "permissible boundaries of expressive freedom," there will be some variant of Trumpism spoiling to defy it. And for as long as politics overspills into awards shows and sports pages and our personal social media, he adds, Trumpism will continue to appeal to those who want to escape its clutches.

It's enough to make you wanna be, well, sedated.

Wattenberg goes wrong in his belief that punk "as a musical movement that, outside of two bands (the potent, one-and-done Sex Pistols and the more creatively catholic Clash), ultimately didn't amount to much." This may sound blashpemous but by almost any conceivable measurement Green Day has had a bigger impact than their spiritual parents (the aforementioned Pistols and Clash). Green Day has had quite a lot to say about Trump and Trumpism to the non-Alt-Right among us. Another figure from the heady early days on punk rock in the late 70s and early 80s San Francisco punk scene was then-producer, now cognitive psychologist, neuroscientist and best-selling author Dan Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession , The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature , The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload and last year's A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age. Literally, moments after Johnny Strike of Crime sent me Galupo's piece, Dan sent me one he had just penned for the Daily Beast, The Butchering of the Age of Reason. "Our country," he wrote, "is in a crisis that threatens to set us back 400 years." He didn't even specifically reference Trump. "I’m talking about reversing the Age of Reason, which ushered in a period of unprecedented intellectual, economic, and social growth. The Enlightenment, as it is also called, drew a line in the sand between rumor and fact, between testable hypotheses and anecdote, and between demonstrable facts and nonsense. Prior to the Age of Reason, people who heard voices in their heads might have been drowned or burned at the stake as witches; by the 20th century we had identified a biological disease that causes this (schizophrenia) and developed drugs to treat it. The Age of Reason led us to the germ theory of disease, penicillin, and-- although it took a while and is still not ubiquitous-- women’s rights, child labor laws, and a reduction in racism." The essence of punk ethos is far more in tune with Dan's critical analysis than in Wattenberg's hand-wringing stretch.

[U]ntil the last few months, [the Elightenment] allowed we citizens to engage in constructive discussion with elected officials about public policy matters, based on facts. It has allowed a free and independent press, with trained investigative journalists, to help us understand what is true and what is not. If the current administration brands as “fake” facts they find inconvenient, it undermines the entire political system. If we are going to throw out facts as a prerequisite to discussion, we are reversing centuries of cognitive progress.

...Why is it that musicians and scientists reach different conclusions when considering the same data? Perhaps for the same reason that voters reach different conclusions when considering the same statements, claims, and data presented by politicians. We engage in expectation-driven perception, and opposed to evidence-driven perception.

Expectations retune neurons and change the way our retinas, our eardrums, and our brains work. They cause firing patterns in our brain consistent with what we think we saw or heard rather than what we actually saw or heard.

Simply knowing that an instrument has a certain history could alter auditory pathways so that they actually sound better to us-- that is, if we know which one we’re hearing. Simply knowing that a person whose political views usually align with ours is speaking may cause us to evaluate the information less critically. Lord Chesterfield understood, over two hundred years ago, that we form impressions of others based on what we see and what we think, and that the seeing tends to overpower the thinking simply because seeing is so much easier than thinking. But we would do well to remember the words of his friend Voltaire: Those who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

When we listen to someone we like, such as an elected official whom we have supported, we tend to accept what they say more trustingly, even gullibly. We filter their remarks through a cognitive bias that they have our best interests at heart. We focus on aspects of the remarks that confirm our hopes, and we discount those that confirm our fears. We do the opposite with elected officials whom we oppose, thinking there can’t be anything of value in what they say. This has led to the current polarization of political parties, and obstructionism in congress. Evidence-based thinking would have us evaluate each statement objectively, and avoid jumping to conclusions. But that’s hard to do. As Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert has shown, under conditions of cognitive overload, we are much less likely to be able to do this.

So it takes some work. We need role models in positions of authority and influence to show us how evidence-based thinking works. Fortunately we have three institutions to help us, institutions that are the foundation of a free and democratic society, institutions that need our support more than ever. They are the judiciary, independent press, and the scientific method. When the panel of federal judges reviewed the Trump administrations immigration ban, note the language in the ruling: “We find no evidence.” Journalists reported that there was “no evidence” of WMDs in Iraq. Science reports “no evidence” of a link between vaccinations and autism. Former Republican President George W. Bush said in an interview recently that an independent press is “indispensable to democracy.” Cutting funding to education, interfering with judges and the press should never be made political issues-- supporting them supports the power of reason.

Punk rocker Billie Joe Armstrong's immediate reaction after learning that Trump had won the election was to urge people to "treat each other with respect and kindness and love" and then to re-write a song slightly, one I don't see the alt-right kiddies embracing any time soon: