It's Too Late to Turn Off Trump

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

10 December 15

We can't change the channel on the culture he's exposed

ome people in the news business are having second thoughts this week about their campaign strategy. They're wondering if they created a monster in Donald Trump.

The LA Times published a piece about how the tone of Trump's TV appearances has changed, now that's he's fully out of the closet as an aspiring dictator, with his plans to ban all Muslims and close the Internet and whatever else he's come up with in the last ten minutes.

The paper noted that the candidate had unusual trouble on Morning Joe, a show that usually doubles as Trump's weekly spa treatment:

"Typically, the billionaire TV personality is able to bluster his way through morning talk shows. But Trump had an unusually contentious appearance Tuesday morning on MSNBC's 'Morning Joe,' where co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski grilled him on his proposals to keep Muslims out of the U.S....

"'It certainly puts the burden on the people conducting the interviews to be tougher the more controversial his comments are,' Scarborough told The Times after the exchange."

The paper went on to dig in to the ethics of covering Trump:

"Trump represents something of a quandary for the media, especially TV networks. Privately, TV news producers acknowledge that Trump has turbocharged their ratings…" 

Essentially, TV news producers are wondering: "How do we keep getting the great ratings without helping elect the Fourth Reich?"

In the same piece, Joe Scarborough said the problem was that Trump gives such great access to the media, just like John McCain did in 2000. "When John McCain was letting members of the press on his Straight Talk Express bus," Scarborough explained, "other Republicans always said he got the benefit of the doubt."

In other words, Trump is so open and accommodating with the press that it makes it hard for reporters to hammer his insane ideas. Scarborough doesn't seem to realize it, but that's a pretty damning admission.

There are some people now who are urging the media to ignore Donald Trump, and simply not cover him. But it's a little late for that.

The time to start worrying about the consequences of our editorial decisions was before we raised a generation of people who get all of their information from television, and who believe that the solution to every problem is simple enough that you can find it before the 21 minutes of the sitcom are over.

Or before we created a world in which the only inner-city black people you ever see are being chased by cops, and the only Muslims onscreen are either chopping off heads or throwing rocks at a barricades.

This is an amazing thing to say, because in Donald Trump's world everything is about him, but Trump's campaign isn't about Trump anymore. With his increasingly preposterous run to the White House, the Donald is merely articulating something that runs through the entire culture.

It's hard to believe because Trump the person is so limited in his ability to articulate anything. Even in his books, where he's allegedly trying to string multiple thoughts together, Trump wanders randomly from impulse to impulse, seemingly without rhyme or reason. He doesn't think anything through. (He's brilliantly cast this driving-blind trait as "not being politically correct.")

It's not an accident that his attention span lasts exactly one news cycle. He's exactly like the rest of America, except that he's making news, not following it – starring on TV instead of watching it. Just like we channel-surf, he focuses as long as he can on whatever mess he's in, and then he moves on to the next bad idea or incorrect memory that pops into his head.

Lots of people have remarked on the irony of this absurd caricature of a spoiled rich kid connecting so well with working-class America. But Trump does have something very much in common with everybody else. He watches TV. That's his primary experience with reality, and just like most of his voters, he doesn't realize that it's a distorted picture.

If you got all of your information from TV and movies, you'd have some pretty dumb ideas. You'd be convinced blowing stuff up works, because it always does in our movies. You'd have no empathy for the poor, because there are no poor people in American movies or TV shows – they're rarely even shown on the news, because advertisers consider them a bummer.

Politically, you'd have no ability to grasp nuance or complexity, since there is none in our mainstream political discussion. All problems, even the most complicated, are boiled down to a few minutes of TV content at most. That's how issues like the last financial collapse completely flew by Middle America. The truth, with all the intricacies of all those arcane new mortgage-based financial instruments, was much harder to grasp than a story about lazy minorities buying houses they couldn't afford, which is what Middle America still believes.

Trump isn't just selling these easy answers. He's also buying them. Trump is a TV believer. He's so subsumed in all the crap he's watched – and you can tell by the cropped syntax in his books and his speech, Trump is a watcher, not a reader – it's all mixed up in his head.

He surely believes he saw that celebration of Muslims in Jersey City, when it was probably a clip of people in Palestine. When he says, "I have a great relationship with the blacks," what he probably means is that he liked watching The Cosby Show.

In this he's just like millions and millions of Americans, who have all been raised on a mountain of unthreatening caricatures and clichés. TV is a world in which the customer is always right, especially about hard stuff like race and class. Trump's ideas about Mexicans and Muslims are typical of someone who doesn't know any, except in the shows he chooses to watch about them.

This world of schlock stereotypes and EZ solutions is the one experience a pampered billionaire can share with all of those "paycheck-to-paycheck" voters the candidates are always trying to reach. TV is the ultimate leveling phenomenon. It makes everyone, rich and poor, equally incapable of dealing with reality.

That's why it's so ironic that some people think the solution to the Trump problem is turning him off. What got us into this mess was the impulse to change the channel the moment we feel uncomfortable. Even if we take the man off the air, the problem he represents is still going to be there, just like poverty, corruption, mass incarceration, pollution and all of the other things we keep off the airwaves.

Is Affirmative Action Finished?

By Garrett Epps, The Atlantic

10 December 15

For the second time, the justices of the Supreme Court are struggling with Fisher v. University of Texas—and the divisive questions it raises.

f this Court rules that the University of Texas can’t consider race, or if it rules that universities that consider race have to die a death of a thousand cuts for doing so, we know exactly what’s going to happen,” Gregory Garre, the lawyer for the University of Texas, told the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday. “Experience tells us that.” When the use of race has been dropped elsewhere, “diversity plummeted.”

You say that like it’s a bad thing, Justice Antonin Scalia in essence replied. “There are—there are those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less advanced school, a ... slower track school where they do well,” he said. “I’m just not impressed by the fact that the University of Texas may have fewer. Maybe it ought to have fewer.”

Garre replied, “I don’t think the solution to the problems with student-body diversity can be to set up a system in which not only are minorities going to separate schools, they’re going to inferior schools.”

There’s a sample of Wednesday’s thoroughly unpleasant oral argument in Fisher v. University of Texas. Fisher has become the Flying Dutchman of American law. “We’re just arguing the same case!” Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the opinion the first time the Court considered it, said Wednesday.

The skeleton at the helm of the good ship Fisher is the Project for Fair Representation, a very determined conservative advocacy group; but the wind in its sails is the unrelenting hatred at least three, and probably four, justices feel for any program anywhere that uses race to advantage minorities in any way.

As Scalia’s remark suggests, ill feeling was on full display Wednesday. Chief Justice John Roberts scoffed at the idea that racial diversity had any educational value: “What unique perspective does a black student bring to a class in physics?” Justice Samuel Alito in effect suggested that, by seeking more minority students than it already has, the University of Texas is belittling the minority students already enrolled. And Justice Sonia Sotomayor, as passionately pro-affirmative action as Scalia or Roberts is against it, pursued the Project’s lawyer, Bert Rein, with questions until he and she got into a barely civil shouting match.

The University of Texas is the state’s premier educational institution. Until 1995, UT allowed its admissions officers to use race as a “plus” factor in admissions. This is the method endorsed by the United States Supreme Court in the case of Bakke v. Regents of the University of California. It means that, when deciding among a pool of qualified applicants, a university can consider an applicant’s race along with his or her test scores and grades, and such things as extracurricular activities, athletic or musical ability, and special achievements outside school.

Bakke was decided in 1978. Conservatives hated it from day one, and battered at the precedent. In 1995, they convinced the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to declare it dead, and to order UT to stop any use of race. The Supreme Court declined to intervene. Minority enrollment declined sharply.

In 1997, the Texas legislature created the “10 percent plan.” Under the plan, any student who graduates in the top 10 percent of a Texas public high school is guaranteed admission to UT. Texas is geographically, and thus educationally, highly segregated by race. Many high schools are mostly white; a smaller number, chiefly in urban areas, are mostly African American or Latino. Thus, not by coincidence, the 10 percent plan brought diversity numbers up, filling most of the entering class. The remaining 25 percent of in-state students were admitted by a traditional, “holistic” program that evaluates their entire record—not including race.

In 2003, however, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the Bakke rule in a case called Grutter v. Bollinger. Race as a plus was back on the table. The University of Texas adopted a plan to use race as a plus in deciding whom to admit to the roughly 25 percent of its admissions that are not automatic under the 10 percent plan. The system seemed to be carefully design to comply with Grutter: Race was not dispositive; racially diverse applicants weren’t given a fixed numerical boost in a scoring system; admissions officers did not track the number of minorities admitted during a given cycle, thus eliminating pressure to boost minority admits late in the cycle to meet a stated or unstated goal.

In 2007, a white college senior named Abigail Fisher from Sugar Land, Texas, applied to UT. She was in the top 12 percent of her class at Stephen Austin High School, below the cutoff, and UT didn’t take her as a holistic admit. She sued, arguing that the use of race in any part of the admissions programed violated her rights. She couldn’t prove that she would have gotten in without the new program; her injury, she argued, was simply having to be judged by race in any degree.

In 2012, Abigail Fisher graduated from Louisiana State University. That same year the Court heard her case—even though, by then, the case was moot. Many people expected Fisher I to be the death knell for Grutter; but in 2013, the Court, 7-2, reaffirmed the Grutter rule. It remanded the case to the Fifth Circuit to make sure that Texas’s program really passed “strict scrutiny”—meaning, in essence, that it must further a “compelling” interest and that it must be “necessary” to do so. Was the UT program really necessary, in light of the top 10 percent plan and other circumstances? In 2014, the Fifth Circuit looked again at the program and concluded that it passed that demanding test. Now the case is back at 1 First St. NE.

The Texas plan, Rein told the Court, is unconstitutional because it is a quota; it doesn’t actually measure how many students it affects or have a target number for a “critical mass” of students; only a few students are admitted because of race, suggesting that the program’s not needed; and it’s impossible know how many students are really admitted because the University doesn’t keep detailed records. But this is a Catch-22—if the program did define a clear target and measure and record its progress, then it really would be an unconstitutional quota.

It is tempting to call this doublethink, but it’s not. The arguments aren’t meant seriously as arguments. There’s been a legal debate about “diversity” since 1978; everybody knows all the moves and nobody’s mind is changing. CFR’s real claim is that use of race to increase racial and ethnic diversity at institutions like the University of Texas is immoral, dangerous, and a violation of the equal-protection rights of whites. It can’t make that argument openly—Fisher I held that universities can use race. So it uses coded language.

The argument was as dispiriting to hear as it must have been to conduct. In the weird constitutional language of affirmative action, no one is allowed to say what they really mean. Under the Bakke rule, the only “compelling interest” a university can pursue is the benefit of “educational diversity”—that is, the idea that all students receive a better education if their classrooms include students of different racial and national origins.

Thus, a lawyer who argued that minority students deserved affirmative action, or received a special benefit from it, would lose on the spot. But the anti-affirmative action justices won’t play by that rule. Scalia now thinks minorities would be happier with their own schools. Justice Alito wondered why minority students can’t go on to have good careers if they go to lesser schools. (The orthodox answer is that Alito is asking the wrong question; he needs to ask how their presence benefits all the students.)

Here is a key question in this case: If the 10 percent plan already produces some increase in minority enrollment, why does UT need more?

Here are the unspoken questions in this case: How many minorities are “enough”? How many is too many? And when will all this affirmative action end?

“Grutter said that we did not expect these sort of programs to be around in 25 years, and that was 12 years ago,” Roberts asked Greg Garre. “Are we going to hit the deadline? Is this going to be done, in your view, in 12 years?” The implication was clear: Affirmative action isn’t working; America is no closer to racial justice than it was a decade ago.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

That would be a bad idea, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli told the Court. Because admission to first-rate schools is the gateway to high-level careers, the nation needs to educate a diverse class: “The interest in ensuring that we have military officers who can lead a diverse military force is critical. The interest in having law-enforcement officers who are not just diverse but who can operate effectively within every racial and ethnic community in highly charged situations is critically important. Corporate America has told you that having a workforce that is able to function effectively in diverse situations is critical ... These are the considered judgments of people who actually have the responsibility to ensure that the vital functions of the government protecting the country with the military and with law enforcement and the vital functions of commerce ... are carried out.”

Justice Elena Kagan, who took part in the case as Solicitor General, has removed herself from the decision. If the remaining liberals win over Kennedy, the result would be a 4-4 split; the University of Texas, having won below, would be the winner. That seems unlikely. Kennedy does not like affirmative action and has never voted to affirm it. On the other hand, he has a horror of the kind of bright-line opinion outlawing affirmative action the conservatives would favor.

On Wednesday, he hinted that the case might benefit from another trip down to the Court of Appeals. No one else—justice or party—seemed enthusiastic about that idea. Nonetheless, the Flying Dutchman may sail again.