President threatens authoritarian state. Nation shrugs.

You know, I used to be the guy whose politics were publicly inscrutable, but some days, it is just hard to figure out how to approach these posts. Today, I am referencing Trump's statement that he would like to yank NBC's broadcasting license because he doesn't like their reporting. That is not how the Constitution works. We shouldn't have to explain this to the President, but that's not the point of today's post. The point of today's post is the observation that the President is a pathological liar who thinks he should be able to shut down media organizations who call him on his lies. That is authoritarianism. Authoritarianism has many flavors, and I'm not going to bother getting into the definitional games over what constitutes "fascism" versus any other item on the Baskin Robins menu of bad governance, but it should suffice to say that shutting down media organizations when they call the government on its lies is not kosher. (OK, I'm losing the thread here. Ice cream, kosher... never mind).

Rather, my point for today is the question of how worried we should be about the fact that Trump is threatening this? The story is only a minor one throughout the news because most news organizations treat a Trump tantrum in which he threatens an insane, disgusting, wildly unconstitutional act as... Wednesday. And that's just a demonstration of how fucking nuts everything is right now. See my earlier post on "the paradox of news." We live in a political world in which the President doing this kind of thing is only a minor story. The smallness of the story is probably what is most terrifying to me. It shows just how wrong everything has gone, because in an even remotely normal political world, a president even suggesting this would be an earth-shattering scandal.

At this point, it is worth turning to the latest iteration of Bright Line Watch, which does a survey of a bunch of so-called experts on the state of democracy in the US. Why do I use the term, "so-called?" Because somehow those jackasses got my name and decided to ask me to participate. Obviously, their standards can't be very high.

As you can see in Figure 1, the "expert" rating is significantly higher on the "no interference with the free press" standard." Why? Basically, Trump hasn't have the power to carry this shit out. Trump is throwing a temper tantrum, as always. He is an idiot fucking child. He doesn't have the power to yank NBC's broadcasting license. The public is more likely to notice the tantrums, but those of us who get surveyed are more likely to understand the fact that Trump's powers here are limited, hence the difference.

That doesn't mean you should relax about this shit. Attitudes change. Beliefs that were once unthinkable become mainstream. Sometimes with startling speed. My favorite example is gay marriage. Today, support for gay marriage is the majority position, but in the 2000 American National Election Studies Survey, the topic wasn't even asked because support for gay marriage was such a non-mainstream position that asking the question seemed pointless in the construction of the NES survey. And in 1996, Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which was very popular, as a way to shut down any accusation that he might support gay marriage. Remember that, any time you appeal to majority opinion in defense of your policy positions...

Or, how about the topic of Barack Obama's birth? When Orly Taitz filed her idiotic lawsuit after the 2008 election, she was just some sideshow curiosity. We saw where that led us...

Donald Trump went on a stupid rant about how he "won the popular vote" if you discount the illegal votes. This was bullshit. Aside from my usual rant about how there is no such thing as the popular vote, the claim about illegal votes was nonsense, pre-debunked by all attempts to measure fraudulent voting so far. See, in particular, the analysis of Justin Levitt, in many papers. However, that claim, because Trump can't back away from anything, led to the formation of a commission which may do... who knows what?

Will Trump yank NBC's broadcasting license? No. He can't. This is some serious shit, though. The President is an authoritarian who doesn't understand or accept the principles of the Constitution. Has that happened before?

Absolutely! On a worse scale? Absolutely! FDR interred Japanese-Americans just because of their ethnicity. There is ugly history for what happens when presidents don't understand or accept the principles of the Constitution, and when the public accepts those violations.

That last part is key. Free speech is tricky. Very few people truly believe in free speech. We see this over, and over, and over again. Free speech is great, until you say something that pisses me off.

Most of the research on support for the abstract principle of free speech, or any civil liberty, shows that it is most strongly associated with education. Educated people are more likely to hold sincere beliefs in the actual concept of free speech, even speech with which they disagree. (Have you noticed that I keep writing positively about the ACLU defending the neo-nazis' right to march in Skokie, IL? Hi! I have a Ph.D.!) Only around a quarter of the country has a college degree. Anything in this country that is dependent on widespread support for abstract principles is always at risk.