A lot of my old internet writing was at a site called ShoutingLoudly.com, started by a few friends while we were in grad school. It went offline a few years ago, and the posts are only accessible if you do some serious digging on the Wayback Machine. That bugs me.

I’ve decided to dust some of those old posts off and make them Google-able again. This is mostly for my own convenience. But it’s also part of a broader project of examining how the political and technological developments of the past few decades looked contemporaneously. I’m mostly pursuing that project through the lens of the WIRED magazine archives, but if I’m going to critique other writers’ contemporaneous predictions, I should apply the same scrutiny to myself.

So I’m going to start a new series that I’ll call “Throwback Thursdays.” Every Thursday*, I’m going to rescue an old blog post by reposting the content on this site. I’ll include contextual commentary and reflection, so it’s not just a vanity project.

*Unless, y’know, I’m busy with other things.

First up: The comic missteps of Americans Elect.

Context: This is actually a series of three blog posts and a keynote talk I gave at Personal Democracy Forum 2012. Americans Elect was a bad idea by rich people who thought the Internet was magically going to unleash a wave of centrist third-party enthusiasm and “disrupt” the political system. South by Southwest was very impressed. So was Tom Friedman, who insisted that it would do to the two-party duopoloy “what Amazon had done to books.” Pretty much every serious analyst of digital politics thought the whole thing was doomed to failure. We were right. But what makes this interesting is that rich techies and hedge fund-types have been completely unable to learn from its failure. Every election cycles, there’s another well-funded attempt to apply internet magic to awaken and empower the radical center. I think it’s worth remembering Americans Elect so that, when the same centrist pundit-types insist in summer 2023 that there’s a desperate need for a centrist third-party ticket and the Internet can make it happen, we can be historically-informed when we call bullshit on them.

Post 1: March 19, 2012

Title: AmericansElect, my new hat, and fundamental constraints on internet politics

Two noteworthy events from this weekend:

1. AmericansElect.org won a People’s Choice Award from South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), the annual Austin-based tech conference where everything cool seems to happen (read Micah Sifry’s writeup of this year’s conference. Someday maybe I’ll get to attend…). It seems that the digirati have bought into AmericansElect’s sales pitch — that the Internet can finally unleash the “radical center” and make the 2012 election a “three-way race” between the two parties and AmericansElect’s online nominee.

2. I became the owner of a lovely new hat, pictured below.

The relationship between the two? If the former actually achieve their stated goals, I will happily eat the latter.

American’s Elect is a flawed idea, conceived by hedge fund-types (some of them anonymous) who’ve convinced themselves they don’t already have disproportionate influence over government. It proposes to use the freeing power of the internet to nominate a centrist candidate (not beholden to either of our unpopular, partisan operations) who can then wash away all the gridlock in DC.

The two biggest problems with this idea are that it violates Duverger’s Law (electoral systems where you elect a single candidate through plurality voting yield two stable parties) and it wishes away the role of checks-and-balances in gridlock. Presidents don’t enact legislation alone. First they need to navigate their way through a broken Congress. Putting an Independent president in office won’t fix the Senate filibuster, it will just give them zero congressional allies to begin with.

A third problem, which bugs me even more, is that there is no radical center. Most Americans are, indeed, centrists. But by “centrist,” what we actually mean is “not particularly interested in/paying attention to politics.” Efforts to build centrist political blogs and centrist advocacy groups routinely fail. There’s a simple reason why: the engaged segment of the public is a partisan segment of the public.

We hear calls for a centrist third-party challenge almost every Presidential cycle. Sometimes a challenge even happens. It has never worked particularly well before. But this time, we are told (and AmericansElect spends a lot of money on public outreach, so we are told this A LOT), the Internet will change everything. The Internet has empowered citizens like never before, and old institutions will crumble in its path.

My book, The MoveOn Effect, is pretty optimistic about the Internet’s impact on citizen engagement. But the AmericansElect folks are exhibiting a basic internet-as-magic-unicorn style flaw in their thinking. The internet changes some of the constraints on citizen political engagement. Other fundamental constraints remain completely unchanged. Blogs and YouTube do not alter our electoral rules. Twitter doesn’t undo the filibuster. We have political parties for a reason. Changes to our communication system (even radical changes) don’t change those institutional structures. As a result, the big internet-related political changes happen around these fundamental rules, not through them. The big Internet-driven changes are second-order impacts: changes in communications system yield changes in the structure and tactics of political organizations.

AmericansElect claims that this time will be different because they’re gaining ballot access in every state. Whoever is elected through their online primary this summer (current declared frontrunner: Buddy Roemer. Most popular draft candidate: Ron Paul) will appear on the ballot in November. Hence, they tell us, it’s a “three way race.” That’s a great soundbyte (it even works as a #hashtag) but there’s one small problem:

Remember the 2000 election? There were three big-name candidates in that race (Gore, Bush, Nader). The famous “butterfly ballot” in Florida lists 10 options though. Did anyone think that the 2000 election was a “10-way race?”

Getting national ballot access is one hurdle to national viability. It’s a big one, but it’s one of many. You also need a candidate. And a ton of money for advertising and field organizing. And a turnout operation. And a platform that goes beyond simple gimmicks. Getting into the October debates wouldn’t hurt either.

AmericansElect has none of this. AmericansElect is a gimmick. It’s the type of gimmick that leads people to misunderstand politics and misunderstand the Internet. It’s a shame the SXSWi crowd couldn’t see through that. When the whole thing dissipates in a cloud of smoke, I hope the “tech gurus” pause to understand why.

In the meantime, I’ll enjoy wearing my new hat and AmericansElect will keep cranking out internet-as-unicorn pablum. I’m as confident that AmericansElect will fizzle as I am that my fedora looks really, really cool.

Post 2: May 4, 2012

Title: [OP-ED] Americans Elect: They Built It, And Nobody Came

Via DailyKos, Americans Elect has postponed their online “caucuses” for a month. The problem, it seems, is twofold:

1. They don’t have a candidate.

2. Lacking a candidate, they don’t have much online traffic.

I’ve written about this before, in relation to my spiffy new hat. But the lesson here deserves further examination. I’m going to go ahead and call this one a failure. If the mainstream media blitz and SXSW awards of the past year haven’t generated enthusiasm, it isn’t going to appear out of the ether in the 11 days between now and May 15th first “caucus.” What’s more, Americans Elect is evidence of a common misunderstanding of Internet politics. Elsewhere, I’ve termed this the “Field of Dreams Fallacy.”

The Field of Dreams Fallacy (“if you build it, they will come”) plagues all sorts of expensive, half-baked projects in online politics. A few years ago, dozens of interest groups looked at the success of social networking sites like Facebook and became convinced that they should launch their own, branded social networks. Millions of dollars later, it turned out that they were all building virtual ghost towns. Technology alone doesn’t create political communities. If your members are already happily on Facebook, they’re unlikely to divert that time and spend it on a Sierra Club- or NRA-specific social network instead. The real successes in online politics comes at the intersection of motivated communities-of-interest and supportive technological platforms.

Americans Elect was founded on the gimmicky premise that the power of the Internet would “break the gridlock of Washington” by letting online citizens vote in their own non-party primary. Set aside the obvious flaws in that premise (putting a candidate on the ballot does not elect them to office. Electing a president doesn’t remove the gridlock-inducing Senate filibuster.). An awful lot of citizens already vote in primaries — Mitt Romney has received over 5 million votes in the Republican primaries, and he’s constantly criticized for being unpopular. In a country of 311 million mostly-disaffected citizens, one can certainly make that case. The promise of Americans Elect is that the Internet be a bridge to involvement for the rest of us.

From St Paul, MN’s Tri-City Herald, we get the following indicator of just how unfulfilled that promise has been:

Ileana Wachtel, a spokeswoman for the group, says no one gathered enough online “clicks” to qualify. Candidates must show they have the backing of at least 1,000 people in at least 10 states. Some candidates must reach a threshold of 5,000 supporters in each of 10 states because they haven’t held high enough office before under the Americans Elect bylaws.

“It is their responsibility to get the clicks,” Wachtel said. “We are just merely the platform for them to run on.”

Ron Paul is currently the most popular “draft candidate” (meaning he hasn’t actually agreed to run) with 8,753 supporters on the site. Compared to Ron Paul’s online fanbase, that’s an abysmally small number. The most popular declared candidate (meaning he’s actually agree to run) is Buddy Roemer, with 4,389 supporters. I spoke to Wachtel and asked where the influx of additional activity is expected to come from. She noted that the declared candidates and draft campaigns are “working hard” to drum up support, and said they’d reevaluate on May 15th if the 1,000-people-in-10-states threshold had not been reached.

Pay attention to that last line from Wachtel, though: “It’s their responsibility to get the clicks… We are just merely the platform for them to run on.” That’s ridiculous. AmericansElect has spent the better part of a year shamelessly self-promoting the revolutionary power of this platform. Now it turns out they’ve thrown a party and no one has shown up, and it seems their response is to blame the guests. 466,000 people have “liked” Americans Elect on Facebook and 10,803 Twitter followers. That’s support for the platform. When presented with the top three options of Buddy Roemer, Rocky Anderson, and Michaelene Risly, that support evaporates. (And even if it stayed strong, 466,000 is a lot smaller than Mitt Romney’s 5,000,000+ votes.)

Americans Elect is the best example of the Field of Dreams Fallacy I have ever observed. The organization spent a reported $9 million building a cutting edge platform, assuming that high-priced technology and a mainstream media blitz would result in a centrist groundswell that revolutionizes American politics. It built no participatory community, and assumed that the Internet would magically serve one up for them. The result has been an all-too-predictable failure.

Maybe, just maybe, this was prove a high-enough profile blunder that we’ll learn something from it about the limits of online politics from it. The lowered transaction costs of the web help to reveal the true demand curve for citizen politics. That can prove transformative — particularly around issues where there’s pent-up demand, but traditionally high barriers to participation. That’s not the case with voting, however. The barriers to voting aren’t very high. People don’t follow politics because they don’t like politics. For issues where no one was particularly motivated, and barriers were already pretty low, the new media environment doesn’t change outcomes. There is no radical center in American politics. Build the nicest platform money can buy for a disinterested population and you’re still going to be left hearing the chirp of online crickets.

Next time, wealthy donors who want to improve the quality of American democracy should keep the Field of Dreams Fallacy in mind. It will lead them to smarter investment decisions.

Post 3: May 15, 2012

Title: Lessons from the Crash of Americans Elect

As expected, today Americans Elect announced the suspension of their online caucuses. A weekend of cyber-GOTV from Buddy Roemer only rounded up a few hundred more supporters, leaving him several thousand shy of the 10,000-person minimum threshold. No other declared candidate was anywhere close.

Micah Sifry notes that there will be lingering questions about what happens with their ballot slots. Centrist author and longtime AE supporter John Avlon holds out hope that Americans Elect will drum up a “credible, balanced ticket” from somewhere. We’ll know more by the end of the week about what the next step for Americans Elect is. This likely isn’t the last we’ll hear from the organization.

I want to focus on the explanations Avlon gives for Americans Elect, then offer up one key point that continues to get under my skin. Avlon entertains three explanations for Americans Elect’s basic lack of turnout:

-Third-party candidacies tend to do best when there is not an incumbent on the ballot.

-The Republican primary dragged on. Mitt Romney is less of an extremist than Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum.

-Ballot security protocols on the AE website were a real chore, creating a genuine challenge to delegate voting. Avlon writes “In an era of slacktivists used to ‘liking’ something and quickly moving on, this was a serious hurdle.”

There is a little truth to each of the explanations. Perot and Nader were both more effective when running in elections that lacked an incumbent (though John Anderson in 1980 did better than Nader, while running against incumbent Jimmy Carter). The bigger issue, which he appears loathe to admit, is that Barack Obama has governed as a centrist. It’s probably true that if, say, Gingrich had locked up the nomination, there would have been more force behind potential third-party candidacies. But that’s the reason why Republican party elites mobilized so heavily to prevent that from happening. And indeed, if you make voting in an online caucus practically as difficult as voting in a real primary, you shouldn’t expect higher turnout The slacktivism comment is a lazy cheap shot, though.

Avlon goes on to claim “the decision to at least consider a path forward with a bipartisan ticket in 2012 reflects the enthusiasms of the delegates and volunteers.” This is nothing but wishful thinking. If Americans Elect had delegate or volunteer enthusiasm, it wouldn’t be in this mess. There is no radical center. You can buy ballot access in 26 states (you just pay people to gather petition signatures). But you can’t buy volunteer enthusiasm.

The frustrating thing about Avlon shows up in his conclusion: “Americans Elect may be an idea ahead of its time, but…” What evidence, if any, would convince writers like Avlon and Thomas Friedman that their faith in the radical center is misplaced? As I’ve written previously, AE is not an idea ahead of its time; it is a gimmick based on magical thinking about technology!

The problem with all of this isn’t Avlon himself. He’s welcome to write theoretically-misguided centrist pieces for the Daily Beast. Our current media environment isn’t exactly plagued by an overabundance of centrists. The problem shows up when well-meaning big donors spend a ton of money repeatedly tilting at windmills like AE.

Americans Elect had a budget of between $35 and $40 million dollars over the past two years. Much of that was donated by centrists interested in reforming the two party system. That’s 30 or 40 times larger than the annual budget of FairVote.org/The Center for Voting and Democracy (<$500,000 per year). FairVote is the leading electoral reform organization in America. It has been running a promising state-based campaign for the National Popular Vote for years, and is well-respected among researchers who conduct electoral systems research. I imagine that FairVote with a 40-fold increase in their budget could probably find a better use for the money than building a third-party candidacy for a yet-to-be-named candidate.

And there’s the danger. Observers have the opportunity to learn a lesson from the AE debacle. We could learn something about how electoral processes operate (*cough* Duverger’s Law *cough*). We could learn something about where and when the Internet is useful to communities-of-interest. We could learn something about online political organizing. Or we could chalk it up to “an idea ahead of its time” and make the same bland mistakes in the next electoral cycle. In the meantime, more worthwhile ideas and organizations go underfunded. That renders meaningful social/political change ever more elusive as a result.

The next time someone suggests that the Internet has paved the way for the overthrow of the two-party system, hopefully you’ll remember American’s Elect and cast them a withering glare.

Closing reflections:

• Whew. That’s a whole lot of blog posting on a topic that few people have thought of in the past decade. Future throwback-Thursday posts will just be a single entry.
• This was the first time that I wrote and lectured publicly about the Field of Dreams Fallacy. I’ve become increasingly convinced that its a concept with broader applications.
• Oh lord, techies and hedge fund-types are ABSOLUTELY going to launch AmericansElect2: Electric Boogaloo during the 2024 election, aren’t they? I’m cringing a year+ in advance.

(Members of the APSA can sign on to this letter by clicking here)

September 23, 2021

To the members of the APSA Council:

On January 11, 2021, you issued the following statement on behalf of the APSA and its members: “The American Political Science Association strongly condemns President Trump, Republican legislators, and all those who have continuously endorsed and disseminated falsehoods and misinformation, and who have worked to overturn the results of a free and fair Presidential Election.”

John Eastman was an active participant in the attempted coup. Eastman, by his own admission, presented a memo to President Trump and Vice President Pence that “war gamed” alternatives for installing Trump as President by invalidating the Electoral Count Act through Vice Presidential fiat. “The main thing here,” Eastman wrote, “is that Pence should do this without asking permission — either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court.” Had Eastman been successful, the outcome of the 2020 election would have been nullified. American electoral democracy would have come to an abrupt conclusion.

The Claremont Institute has invited Eastman to appear on two of its panels at APSA this year. Eastman is a member of the Claremont Institute’s Board of Directors, and continues to serve as Director of Claremont’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence. As Dr. Laura K. Field documents in her exhaustive study of Claremont’s participation in the 2020 election and its aftermath, the Claremont Institute has been an active proponent of falsehoods and misinformation about the 2020 election and its aftermath. Far from condemning Eastman’s participation in the attempt to undermine U.S. electoral democracy, the Claremont Institute has provided him with a welcome and comforting home for these efforts.

We are aware that Sections and Related Groups are free to populate their panels with whoever they see fit.

But John Eastman has violated our discipline’s professional ethics by participating in the dangerous attempt to overturn the institution of electoral democracy in the United States.

Your statement of strong condemnation on January 11th must apply to the Claremont Institute if it is to apply to anyone at all.

Therefore we hereby request that you, in accordance with APSA’s bylaws, to strip John Eastman of APSA membership.

We also request that you rescind the Claremont Institute’s status as an APSA related group. It is well within your power to do so. The Claremont Institute currently deploys its status as an APSA Related Group as a fundraising vehicle — offering donors the opportunity to purchase a panel slot for a $5,000 donation. Claremont’s status as a Related Group provides a material benefit to an institution that is expressly at odds with the goals and values of the American Political Science Association and its membership.

The Claremont Institute has the right to publish ill-reasoned diatribes that call for the end of electoral democracy in the United States. But the American Political Science Association has the responsibility to sever all ties with the Claremont Institute.

Respectfully submitted,

David Karpf
Associate Professor
George Washington University

[You may add your name to this sign-on letter by clicking here]

[edited 9/23 2:53pm to correct a typo and add a hyperlink]

(Adapted and updated from my remarks at the 2018 International Communication Association Annual Meeting.)

Now that most of the major social media platforms have done something about Alex Jones/Infowars, I think it’s worth taking a minute to think about what we should expect from our social media platforms.

Should we be concerned that Google and Facebook can essentially silence a program for vague Terms of Service violations? In the abstract, yeah. Sure.

It reminds me of a quote from Steven Johnson’s WIRED story about Cloudflare removing protections from neo-nazi sites post-Charlottesville. Matthew Prince (Cloudflare’s CEO) remarked, “Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power.”

Google and Facebook are effectively information monopolies. Run afoul of Google and Facebook and your ability to be heard online is dramatically reduced. Those two companies cannot completely silence speech they disagree with, but they can effectively muffle it so that it fails to rise above the din of online conversation. In today’s digital media landscape, Facebook and Google determine what types of online speech are profitable.

Many of my peers within the internet research community reach this point as their conclusion: Google and Facebook are too big. They ought be regulated. In the United States, it has become fashionable to call for aggressive regulatory oversight. We could adopt our own GDPR! The FCC or the FEC or the FTC could craft their own regulatory frameworks, or apply the existing frameworks that were developed for previous media giants. We could develop a CFPB for the protection of consumer data privacy. The government could even deploy anti-trust enforcement.

In the aftermath of the Infowars ban, they are again ringing these anti-monopoly bells. Infowars may be the worst of the worst, sure. But whenever the platforms act, there’s an opportunity to complain about their size and power.

Here’s the problem, though: calls for regulating the big Internet companies rest on a central suspension-of-disbelief. A CFPB for consumer data and a US equivalent to the GDPR are reasonable arguments, but we do not live in reasonable times.

For those who have determined that the solution is “the government should regulate/break up Google and Facebook,” let me ask: which government? This government?

Which alumnus of the Trump golf and real estate empire ought to be in charge of regulating digital media platforms?

The creative fiction at the heart of “regulate the monopolies” arguments is that they pretend we are talking about a generic government. What’s missing today is not a failure of imagination or a failure of courage from public intellectuals or government officials. The U.S. government is facing a crisis of competence. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the State Department, the EPA, and every other agency is being hollowed out. Rebuilding our regulatory capacity is going to be a multi-year, potentially a multi-DECADE affair.

This is an uncomfortable reality. It feels unprincipled to recommend that the Obama administration should have regulated, and the alternate-universe Clinton administration should regulate, but then suggest a different course for life under the Trump administration. In an ideal world, we would be crafting a sensible framework that constrains the behavior of information monopolies.

But we don’t get to live in an ideal world. We’re stuck living in this one.

So what should be done in this world? Well, let me start by invoking Spider-Man’s credo: “with great power comes great responsibility.”

Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and (to a lesser extent) Twitter all have quasi-monopolistic power today, and they will maintain that power for the foreseeable future. So we, their consumers/users, ought to demand they wield that power responsibly.

From a responsibility framework, it seems obvious that the Infowars ban was long overdue. Alex Jones has been a Sandy Hook truther, a Parkland truther, and a purveyor of the #pizzagate conspiracy theory. Last month, he tried to convince his millions of listeners that Democrats were about to launch an armed revolt (#secondcivilwar). In our current social media environment, Jones’s shtick is equal parts dumb, dangerous, and profitable-as-hell. soaks up the clicks and advertising revenues from his fanciful lies, and takes no responsibility when his listeners turn violent.

Infowars is a nice gut-check for social media platforms. Jones is so brazen, so far beyond the pale, that if he isn’t in violation of your Terms of Service, there must be something wrong the Terms of Service. (Speaking of which… Twitter: Do better.)

Second, and more broadly: a nervous monopoly is a better monopoly. This is evident in Facebook’s improving behavior over the past several months. The company has been scooping up social scientists and policy analysts. It has been devoting serious attention to malicious information campaigns, and wading into the hard problems of monitoring political behavior on the site. The company has also been developing a partnership with academics that, while far from perfect, should be a massive upgrade over the previous state of Facebook research.

A comfortable Facebook ignores external criticism and doesn’t notice that political ads are being bought with rubles. A nervous Facebook goes through the (messy, imperfect) process of trying to plan for and regulate the political use and abuse of the platform.

Third, a reputation-conscious monopoly, motivated by self-interest, can provide some valuable public goods. The era of the Bell telephone monopoly was also the era of Bell Labs. Microsoft has replicated this model with MSR and Data & Society. Where is the Facebook/Apple/Amazon/Twitter equivalent? (In an ideal world, pure research would not be beholden to the largesse of semi-benevolent corporate giants. But, again, need I remind you what world we actually inhabit?)

If we accept that we are going to be living with (semi-)benevolent information monopolies, at least for the next few years, then what does that mean for advocates and public intellectuals?

For political advocates, it means we should continue to monitor these monopolists. Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter should both be targets of political action and central infrastructure for political action. Yes, there is a contradiction here. Political organizing is full of contradictions; make peace with it. The best tactical innovations in the near-term are going to come from movements that pay attention to how Facebook, Google, and Twitter are changing their algorithms. Find ways to take advantage of where the platforms are headed.

For public intellectuals/digital researchers, I think it means we need to stop dunking on these companies at every opportunity. Every time Facebook is in the news, members of the research community rush to amplify attacks (well-founded or not). When conservative media howled about bias in “trending topics,” we knew those complaints were bullshit (Facebook wasn’t biased against conservative news. It was biased against specific websites with a history of false reporting. That’s completely reasonable and appropriate.), but it was an opportunity to make a point about monopolies, so everyone wrote a think-piece. The same was true for the emotional contagion study (which was actually emotional mimicry, not contagion!).

These monopolists are at least semi-benevolent. They are tackling hard problems, filling in the regulatory white space while our government is incapacitated. We can work with them, and help them craft policies and programs that take their responsibilities seriously and increase the public good. We can also take them to task when they actually fail and deserve legitimate scorn (again, Twitter, WTF?!?). But the current status quo of turning every headline into an opportunity to yell “see? MONOPOLIES!” is a cheap high. It leaves people within these companies rightly angry with a research community more interested in scoring points than in solving complex problems.

If we were living in reasonable times, then I could understand the logic of turning every bad media cycle into a call for aggressive regulation. But, at least in today’s United States, we do not live in reasonable times.

So let’s rejoice in Alex Jones finally facing consequences. Let’s demand Twitter catch up with the other big digital platforms, and take its public responsibility seriously. And let’s leave the slippery slope arguments for some later, saner time.

When you dissolve the boundary between politics and entertainment, things start to get weird.

That’s what I found myself thinking last night, as I read the latest story of how the dumbest-possible conspiracy theory, #QAnon, has climbed out of the darkest recesses of the internet.

Stories about QAnon have been percolating for months. (Rosanne Barr is a QAnon supporter.) If you don’t feel like diving headfirst into the feverswamp, just imagine a rightwing conspiracy theory that looked at #PizzaGate and said “hold my beer.” And just as PizzaGate supporters eventually moved offline and started showing up armed at local pizzerias, demanding that they release the child sex slaves, QAnon supporters are now turning out in force at Trump rallies. (Because it’s 2018. And of course they are.)

The striking thing about QAnon is that we’ve celebrated mass behavior like this for years, just in a very different context.

Take a look at this WIRED story from December 2007. The article, by Frank Rose, is titled “Secret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive Gaming.” It describes an intricate alternate reality game (ARG) that was designed around the release of Nine Inch Nails’s 2007 album, Year Zero.

Here’s how Rose defines an ARG:

…a complex game played out over many months, both online and in the real world, in which millions of people across the planet had collectively solved a cascading series of puzzles, riddles, and treasure hunts (...)

…A new kind of interactive fiction. These narratives unfold in fragments, in all sorts of media, from Web sites to phone calls to live events, and the audience pieces together the story from shards of information. The task is too complicated for any one person, but the Web enables a collective intelligence to emerge to assemble the pieces, solve the mysteries, and in the process, tell and retell the story online. The narrative is shaped — and ultimately owned — by the audience in ways that other forms of storytelling cannot match. No longer passive consumers, the players live out the story. Eight years ago, this kind of entertainment didn’t exist; now dozens of such games are launched every year, many of them attracting millions of followers on every continent. (emphasis added)

Nine Inch Nails’s Year Zero was a concept album, telling the story of revolutionary dissidents fighting against a mind-controlling government in an alternate history. The Year Zero ARG spanned months, engaging several thousand fans, dropping clues that could be scavenged at live shows or found online — A USB drive hidden in a bathroom stall, random boldface letters on a t-shirt revealing a web address or a telephone number. By the game’s end, about 50 die-hard fans were loaded onto buses with blacked-out windows, deposited at a large warehouse… and treated to a private live show by the band!

Fan communities dissecting clues are a central part of what Henry Jenkins celebrates as Convergence Culture. Think Lost discussion boards, or the way avid fan bases have combed through Mr. Robot and Westworld in recent years. Part of the reason we’ve entered a new golden age of television is that creators have realized that they can tell more complex stories that reward an intense, connected fan base.

QAnon fans are applying this same participatory behavior that we have celebrated in fiction fandom to real-world political drama. And why not? The boundaries between politics and entertainment have been collapsing for years. The entire Trump presidency operates like Reality TV, completely divorced from any real stakes or substance.

That’s what makes this all so terrifying. Do these people really believe that Tom Hanks and Hillary Clinton are personally running a massive pedophilia ring? Really???

But consider this: Trump announced at a rally this week that the farmers being harmed by his stupid trade war had told him “we can take it.” No actual farmers said that to him. We all know that. But it’s a little thing, just part of the story we are all interacting with.

The pulsating heart of the QAnon theory is not a lunatic fringe denying the real consequences of a failing presidency. The heart of it is a devoted fan base constructing elaborate theories to make the story more fun and engaging. And if you start from the premise that nothing government does matters, then it’s easy to come along for the ride. There’s no real difference between Hillary Clinton and the Smoke Monster. They’re both just characters on the television.

That’s what alarms me most about the growth of QAnon. It’s not that these people are unhinged and possibly armed. It’s that we’ve lost the capacity to treat civics, governance, and public affairs as though they have actual stakes with actual consequences. The premise of the Trump presidency is that nothing matters, so you should root for your side and heckle the opposing team. He encourages his supporters to treat Democrats and journalists like a rival fan base. And if politics and government are just another game with winners and losers, then why not boo and threaten Democrats as if they were Duke basketball fans?

QAnon is that natural endpoint of treating politics as entertainment. If its all just storytelling, then the big fans will group together online, immerse themselves in the story, and try to make it more fun.

If we want to step back from the brink, if we decide we don’t want the entire country to end up like this, we’re going to have to start acting like the things that government does actually matter.

What was the content of the Russian-backed ads in question?

How many people saw these ads? How many people clicked them?

What were the Facebook pages associated with the ads? How many members did they have?

What specific targeting criteria (race, age, and most importantly, location) did the Russian ads choose?

Some of these questions matter more than others. This Russia-Facebook story is legitimately explosive, but not for the reasons you might immediately suspect.

I believe three things can be simultaneously true:

1. The Facebook-Russia-Trump story is a big deal. It may be further evidence of direct coordination between members of the Trump campaign and foreign propaganda outlets. Mueller should investigate this fully, including what (if any) role intermediaries like Cambridge Analytica played in helping Russian troll farms to segment and target their messages.
2. This story further underlines some troubling realities about Facebook today. Facebook is enormously influential in driving web traffic. Engineering decisions at Facebook have massive social consequences, shaping both what news reaches citizens and shaping the incentives for which news outlets will thrive in 2017 and beyond. Facebook effectively has monopoly power in this space, and goes pretty much unregulated. Unregulated communications monopoly power ain’t great, even when the monopolists are well-meaning.
3. The $100,000 ad buy itself had virtually no impact on the outcome of the 2016 election. Whether those ads reached 30 million or 70 million potential voters doesn’t particularly matter. How many people clicked on the ads doesn’t particularly matter. Targeting criteria and message content doesn’t particularly matter. Digital advertisements don’t swing national Presidential elections.

These three points can be simultaneously true. There’s no inherent conflict between them, no need to chose a side among them. But they are often placed in stark contrast to one another. Either you believe microtargeted computational propaganda duped the masses or you believe all this “Russia stuff” is overblown. Either you think Facebook is a new information monopoly or you think social media is overrated.

I’ve particularly noticed a habit among researchers who are genuinely (and rightly) concerned about #2 to overinflate the threat and potential impact of Facebook advertising. The same thing happened during the emotional-contagion controversy and during the trending topics controversy.* If your focus is on reigning in Facebook’s unbridled power, it is easy to adopt a maximalist interpretation of any breach or misstep.

But the result can look kind of silly, and it puts us in a false intellectual bind. $100,000 is really small potatoes in a presidential race. U.S. presidential elections are a multi-billion dollar industry. The Trump campaign itself spent tens of millions of dollars on Facebook advertisements. These Russian Facebook ads are not the videotape from The Ring(…if you watch it, seven days later you vote Trump!).

The literature on political advertising and persuasion is pretty clear on this front: Big tv ad buys produce short-term, marginal shifts in voter intention. Those changes vanish after a few days. Most people don’t notice political ads, the ads that we see are unlikely to change our opinion of the candidates, and when our opinions do change, they often revert back over time. Even with advances in microtargeting, there is no evidence to suggest that Facebook ads are more persuasive than television ads.

This is a hard-won lesson from the field of political communication. Political propaganda does not function like a hypodermic needle, injecting new opinions into the populace. Successful political persuasion, simply put, is really hard. When we conflate exposure-to-propaganda with behavior change, we are taking the propagandists marketing brochures far too seriously.

Many of my peers in the political communication research community have responded to the wave of Facebook stories (both about fake news and psychographic targeting) with dismissive eye-rolls. We know this stuff doesn’t work very well. How many times do we really have to re-teach this literature?!? But in the midst of those eye-rolls, we run the risk of overlooking the substantive importance of these stories. What matters isn’t the direct impact of the Russian advertising. What matters is the chain-of-data-custody that led to the ad buys.

To draw an analogy, there’s no reason to think that the 1972 Watergate break-in at the DNC headquarters changed the outcome of the 1972 election. The break-in mattered because it was part of an illegal attempt to influence the election. And it kept mattering because of who was involved in orchestrating and covering up the break-in. If it had turned out that “the plumbers” were actually just a bunch of drunk White House interns, then the scandal itself would’ve fizzled.

The immediate reason that this $100,000 Facebook ad buy matters is that it didn’t come from nowhere. Maybe Russia threw money at these advertisements just because Putin likes to mess with democracies, and he has oil money to burn. (Except no, per Jim Rutenberg, this is Russia’s new strategy for disrupting democracies through information warfare.) But if it turns out, for instance, that Brad Parscale or some of his peers at Cambridge Analytica were sharing targeting and voter modeling data with Russian cutouts, then we have a clear-cut criminal conspiracy here.

It doesn’t matter if the Russian Facebook ads included microtargeted pixie dust or not. It doesn’t matter whether they were persuasive or changed the outcome of the election. You don’t have to believe that computational propaganda is radically effective in order to care about this scandal, just as you didn’t have to believe that the Watergate break-in fundamentally swung the 1972 election in order to care about Nixon’s abuses of power.

It also doesn’t matter whether you think Facebook is a communictions monopoly in dire need of regulation or a take-it-or-leave-it social media platform.

There was a strategic, intentional campaign by foreign actors to influence the 2016 Presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. There is a trail of evidence suggesting that senior members of the Trump campaign facilitated this illegal influence campaign. That is a crime, and it has been accompanied by a massive cover-up.

So yes, Mark Zuckerberg should testify. His testimony should provide a window into the essential, unregulated role that Facebook plays as an information intermediary. But more importantly, Zuckerberg’s company should collaborate fully with Mueller’s investigation. Because the central question here isn’t just “what specific targeting criteria did the Russian ads use.” The central question is where did this targeting criteria come from? Zuckerberg himself cannot answer that question. But he and his company can help move the investigation forward.

*And hey, I teach strategic political communication for a living. I get it. Public attention is rarely pointed at controversies over information infrastructure. Use it or lose it in rare moments like this one.

Okay, so let’s talk about the Bannon problem. Josh Levy and others (many, many others) correctly point out that my post didn’t really dig into the threat that Steve Bannon posed. Right on schedule, the New York Times editorial board weighed in with an editorial titled “President Bannon?” In effect, the argument is that even if Trump himself really is an out-of-his-depth pathological narcissist, Bannon might be carefully choreographing the chaos.

I am worried about Bannon. It was a big omission from the post. Josh Green’s 2015 profile of Bannon is instructive. The guy is an empire-builder. And he wants to fracture the United States and rebuild it along the nationalist principles of the alt-right. And he has now replaced the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the National Security Council. That’s terrifying.

But I can glimpse one silver lining on the horizon; Steve Bannon is vulnerable because Steve Bannon is not a member of the Trump family.

Trump has a small inner circle of people who he trusts. That inner circle is too small to effectively run the government. It is also an inner circle that appears beset by the type of “court politics” that we usually associate with monarchies and Game of Thrones storylines.* Every member of the inner circle is jockeying for favored status with the king. And that favoritism is a zero-sum game: If you are the king’s most-trusted advisor, then I can best succeed by tearing you down.

Former members of the inner circle include Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie, and Rudy Giuliani. All three spent time looking like trusted advisors. All three have now been effectively banished from the court.

Maggie Haberman’s excellent reporting has documented the ongoing struggles for power between Reince Priebus, Bannon, KellyAnne Conway, Corey Lewandowski, and Jared Kushner. These are not united ideologues executed a longstanding plan for reshaping the United States. They are craven opportunists whose interests temporarily align.

The only permanent members of Donald Trump’s inner circle are the members of the Trump family: Don Jr, Eric, Ivanka, and (by marriage) Kushner. We saw this throughout the long presidential campaign. The Trump family will always have an elevated position, and will often whisper opinions in his ear.

The result is that I view Steve Bannon as a real threat to the republic, but also as an unstable threat to the republic. Trump trusts him and leans on him today. He is, momentarily, the master of Trump’s neuroses and insecurities. But what happens when his and Jared Kushner’s advice diverges? What happens when Ivanka and Eric decide that Bannon’s advice has become a distraction from the real cause of making America great again, or simply decide that he has too much influence for their liking?

Bannon can still do tremendous damage to our society. He may indeed be implementing a plan, and he may indeed be the real opponent that we collectively have to stop. But if I’m right that Trump himself is unhinged and overwhelmed, then I think will matter a great deal for how this fight plays out.

If Donald Trump were a cold, calculating authoritarian with a plan, he would be nearly impossible to stop. (David Frum’s new piece in The Atlantic is chilling in this regard.)

If Trump is unstable, but is taking directions from a cold, calculating authoritarian advisor, then that’s a different story. We don’t have to convince Republican congressional elites to impeach Steve Bannon. We just need to stay vigilant in fighting back against the Trump regime, and wait for the Trump family members to eventually turn on him.

…I noticed someone on social media referring to Bannon as “Trump’s Rasputin.” That may be right. But let’s remember how things turned out in the end for Rasputin…

*Trump is obviously Aerys Targaryen; Bannon is Littlefinger. #fanfictionideas

This is chaos. But what type of chaos?

Last night on Medium, Yonotan Zunger analyzed the first week of the Trump presidency and concluded that it looked like a “trial balloon for a coup.” To summarize, Trump is shutting out career civil servants, installing his personal consigliere, Steve Bannon, onto the National Security Council, and road-testing the ability of the legislative and judicial branches to actually reign in his power-grabs. It is a thorough and frightening analysis.

I want to offer an alternate interpretation though. I don’t think Donald Trump is implementing an intentional plan to rescind and replace American constitutional government. I think Donald Trump is a 70-year old man with narcissistic personality disorder, who has never had to work anywhere near this hard in his life. I think he’s barely sleeping at night, is overwhelmed by stress and negative stimuli that his brain chemistry does not handle well, and is obsessed with what people think of him. I think he’s desperately trying to recapture the glorious feelings of support that he enjoyed on the campaign trail.

In other words, I think he has no plan.

Consider:

• The Trump presidency began with a concert featuring 3 Doors Down and the Piano Guys. Trump spent months being rejected by every A-list celebrity in the world. (Sad!)
• The Inauguration crowd looked immense from where he was sitting, but then he turned on cable news and was told that everyone thought Obama’s was much bigger and better. (Sad!) And the inaugural parade through Washington DC featured empty bleachers. No one was cheering him. (SAAAAAD!)
• The day after the inauguration, over three million women in cities around the world collectively rejected Donald Trump. The news called it the single largest mass protest in American history. And it was all women, all calling him unappealing. (Of course, not all of the attendees at the Women’s March were women. But that’s just a technicality when he’s impotently staring at the CNN news crawl.)

So how does he respond?

• He gives a speech to CIA agents that is supposed to be about bridge-building with the intelligence community. He ends up talking about how many times he’s been on the cover of Time Magazine instead.
• He forces Sean Spicer to make an idiotic statement about crowd size to the press corps. And even Trump thought Spicer looked awful out there.
• He gives an hourlong interview to ABC where, again, he obsesses about crowd size and popularity.
• He revisits the “millions of illegal votes against me” canard.

And when none of that makes him feel better, he starts digging into his “greatest hits” from the campaign trail. He signs executive orders to build the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines! He signs an executive order to build the wall! He enacts the muslim ban, after asking Giuliani how to phrase it so it’ll be (wink, wink) legal. These were the huge applause lines at the rallies. They let him bathe in the warm adulation of his supporters. (Happy!)

Various bureaucrats told him not to do it. (Sad!) Those bureaucrats are standing in the way. They’re part of the problem. He needs to dominate them, to shame them, or else to discard them. He needs to put power in the hands of people he can trust, like Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner. They know how grand Donald Trump is. Once they’re in charge of things, everything will be fine. People will cheer. He’ll feel better again.

In my interpretation, this isn’t a test run for a coup. It’s a tantrum. Coup attempts are meticulously planned. Tantrums are kinetic and reactive.

The reason why I lean towards this interpretation is the sheer speed of these executive actions. If Trump had a well-designed plan to test the separation of powers and replace the federal bureaucracy with his devoted supporters, I don’t think he would be doing all of this at once. This is just too sloppy for a coup attempt! Every action seems to be an attempt to paper over the last mistake. He has the presidency for at least four years. There is no rush to undermine all American norms and values, all at once.

To be clear, I am not saying that this is all going to be fine. The new President of the United States is mentally unfit for the job. He has enormous power and he lasted under 24 hours before totally melting down. His handlers have shown no capacity for helping to get this tantrum under control. Republican congressional leaders have demonstrated not an ounce of discipline in reigning in his worst excesses. We cannot force the leader of the free world to sit in the corner and take a time out until he calms down. This will keep getting worse.

But if we believe, as Zunger suggests, that this is a well-choreographed test run for a coup, then we should proceed by focusing on the next likely steps. (if there is a plan, then we ought to figure out what it is!)

If we instead believe this is the tantrum of a mentally unfit individual who is already cracking under the stress of the job, then we should instead assume (a) he will keep trying to recapture the feeling of adulation that he craves and (b) he will proceed with little advance planning, and will respond to adversity by always doubling down. There is no grand Trump plan, there is just reaction to mental craving for adulation and support, coupled with a bottomless need to assert dominance in all settings.

One week into the Trump era, we know that we are facing chaos. But we don’t know quite yet what type of chaos it is.

There’s an old saying about bankruptcy: it happens “slowly at first, then all at once.”

America’s capacity for democratic self-governance has been going bankrupt slowly for years. Republican elected officials spent eight years obstructing everything, under the theory that they would never be punished for it by the voters. They were never punished for it by the voters. Fox News and conservative talk radio pushed the boundaries of generating false outrage, while traditional news organizations laid off reporters. Economic inequality has grown to staggering heights, and is now mirrored by a Congress that represents the interests of the wealthy over the interests of their median constituents. Each of these is a wicked problem, developing over years, with no simple solution on the horizon. In the parallel universe where a couple hundred thousand Hillary Clinton voters lived in slightly different states, these civic trend lines would still be driving us toward an impending crisis-state.

But as we Donald Trump’s inauguration nears, I think it is critical for us to grapple with the unique threats we are about to face. We’re going to need fresh thinking, new institutions, and bold leadership that adapts to a political landscape that will change radically and fast. The all-at-once bucket of threats is not merely an extension of the slowly-at-first bucket. It is a phase shift.

Questions of how Donald Trump managed to get this far tend to cluster within the “slowly at first” bucket. Donald Trump is manifestly unqualified for the Presidency. We knew this on election day. How did this happen? Millions of pixels have been devoted to the question. You can focus on the failures of the media system, or on new technologies, or on economic inequality, or on resurgent white ethnic identity, or on institutionalized sexism and racism, to name just a few. These are real social problems — ones that would have been just as real and troubling had 100,000 voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan voted another way. They are long-term trends, that require long-term solutions.

But facing the threat that Trump will likely pose for our democracy is not simply an extension of these problems. I expect that Donald Trump will, at minimum, take the following unique and aggressive actions:

1. Establishing a quasi-state media apparatus. There’s already talk about stifling the White House press corp. He has already declared that CNN “fake news.” Is there really much doubt that he will elevate Breitbart.com and other havens of the alt-right while threatening and shutting out independent journalists?
2. Weaponizing the justice department and (possibly) the IRS. Jeff Sessions has a long history of targeting organizations that register poor and minority voters. We should expect him to continue if he is appointed Attorney General. If the Justice Department stops defending free-and-fair elections and starts targeting civic associations that do the critical work of registering voters, then Trump’s administration will become increasingly immune to public opinion.
3. Redirect foreign policy to benefit the Trump organization and its allies, increasing the hazards of potentially catastrophic global instability. We still don’t know what’s in Trump’s taxes. We still don’t know what his ties to russian oligarchs are. He still has not placed his holdings in a blind trust. And meanwhile, Trump has expressly signaled that he prefers Putin to NATO.

I produced an eleven-point list of threats on November 9th. The intervening months have done nothing to assuage my fears. Think of these as emblematic of the “all-at-once” bucket of threats. None of them were part of our public conversation in October 2016. None of them would have been present if Hillary Clinton (or, hell, even Marco Rubio/Jeb Bush/Scott Walker) was about to take the oath of office. They are unique. They are terrifying. And they are coming very, very fast.

I was reminded of this distinction last week, when I had the opportunity to attend a convening at the Institute for the Future about the “Future of Democracy.” Among the roughly 100 attendees, I heard a great deal of conversations about slow problems. (“How do we fund local journalism in the 21st century?” “How do we restore trust social trust and reduce the perils of partisanship?”) Only a handful of the attendees were, as I saw it, appropriately freaked out. Russia may have kompromat on our incoming President. Let’s hit pause on the conversation about local journalism that we’ve been having for the past decade, alright?

For the time being, I think it is helpful to behave as though we are living in the darkest timeline. We live in a universe where Donald Trump will be president. There are other imaginable universes where Trump isn’t president. Those universes seem much more plausible than the one we are, in fact, living in.

If we are going to get through this, we are going to need to focus on getting through this. And that means refocusing attention away from the very real problems that got us into this bizarre mess. We’re going to have to fix those problems too.

But Donald Trump is unique and unprecedented.

I don’t know how we solve the threats posed by Donald Trump. But I know that this is a new threat, and requires fresh eyes.

And that, I think, is a start.

For those dear readers who aren’t up-to-date on Doris Graber Outstanding Book Award winners*, the book argues that American media institutions are most adept at playing their watchdog role when US politicians are behaving normally. If Democratic officials are drawing attention to Republican scandals, and vice versa, then our news organizations are pretty good at following those leads. But when government officials behave abnormally (when Dems are afraid to challenge a popular president on his war propaganda, for fear of electoral repercussions, for instance), the media watchdog fails to bark. The times when we most need a confrontational, adversarial press are also the times when we should least expect one.

The media failed differently in covering the 2016 election than it did in covering the Iraq War. The problem in covering the war propaganda lay in recognizing it as propaganda, and in compensating for the lack of an aggressive partisan response from the Democrats. The problem in covering the 2016 election lay in what we might call “reflexive balancing,” or allocating critical coverage as though the two major-party nominees deserve equivalent scrutiny.

Reflexive balancing is an appropriate practice when both parties produce nominees with approximately equal levels of experience, competence, and flaws. And it is a comforting practice, because it lets journalism professionals absolve themselves of the critique that they allowed partisan bias to influence their coverage. In a normal election, reflexive balancing is basically fine.

2016 was not such an election. All members of the media (and most politicians, for that matter!) knew full-well that it was not such an election. But the media held tight to its practice of reflexive balancing. And the result, of course, was #emailghazi.

Matt Yglesias put together the definitive writeup, titled “The real Clinton email scandal was that a bullshit story has dominated the campaign.” The sheer amount of coverage that Clinton’s email server received was staggering. In fact, Gallup found that email was the single dominant issue that voters associated with Hillary Clinton.

In an interview on The Ezra Klein Show podcast, journalist Ron Brownstein took a defensive stance when asked about the avalanche of email coverage:

was there too much attention to the emails? Probably. But! Clinton made the decision to begin with, and it was a decision that does, you know, reflect aspects of her mindset. Kind of clenched fists, circling the wagons, not having a lot of dissenting voices immediately around her… I think there were aspects of the email story that would have been relevant to her as President. The inability of people from the record-keeping and security divisions of the State Department to get anywhere near her with their objections. So I think it told voters something that they thought they needed to know about her, and whether the press overplayed it, I think it wasn’t irrelevant information for people.

Brownstein offered an additional defense of the email coverage, one that I’ve heard echoed in conversation by a number of journalists:

the press certainly highlighted many, many failings of Donald Trump right? I mean there’s no question about that, it wasn’t kind of as if Trump got a free ride. And, and you know as I said you get to election day and 60% say he’s not qualified and 60% say he doesn’t have the temperament and that’s extraordinary. …Fewer people had a favorable view of Trump than voted for him.

Let’s accept both of these claims: (1) the email story was newsworthy, and (2) Trump also received plenty of negative press scrutiny.

I mean sure, yes, even if the private server was fundamentally a bullshit story, it’s a long campaign! There’s plenty of room built in for bullshit stories. Her use of a private server while Secretary of State was unusual, and there was an investigation. That merits some journalistic attention.

And sure, absolutely, you can point to plenty of moments where mainstream journalists held Trump’s feet to the fire. David Farenthold did outstanding work on the Trump foundation. Jake Tapper asked hard questions. So did Martha Raddatz, Anderson Cooper, The Washington Post editorial board, and a host of other media professionals. It wasn’t all Matt Lauer and Jimmy Fallon.

But granting those two points only raises the problem with reflexive balancing. Why, exactly, did Hillary Clinton’s email receive so. much. attention?

The answer, quite simply, is that Clinton’s campaign wasn’t doing much else wrong.

Clinton had the server issue from her time at State (which ended in 2013). Her campaign team’s and the DNC’s email was hacked (by foreign nationals trying to influence the outcome of our election). And her top aide, Huma Abedin, occasionally shared a laptop with her creepy ex-husband, Anthony Weiner (which gave FBI Director Comey an excuse to interfere with a Presidential election two weeks before Election Day). And there was that one time she had walking pneumonia and didn’t tell the press about it right away.

Donald Trump never released his tax returns. He hired a white nationalist as his campaign CEO. He threatened to undermine NATO. He showed no understanding of nuclear deterrence theory. He sexually assaulted women, and bragged about it on tape. He failed to pay contractors. He was being sued for tens of millions over accusations that Trump University was a scam. He serially lied about statements that were recorded on tape! He proposed banning Muslims from the United States, and proposed directing the military to commit war crimes, and attacked a Gold Star family, and a disabled reporter, and a federal judge. He was endorsed by the KKK. He was not endorsed by any Republican past presidents, or by the most recent Republican Presidential nominee. The Republican Speaker of the House described some of his commentary on the campaign trail as “the textbook definition of a racist comment.” He offered no policy proposals, and displayed no policy knowledge. His campaign rallies were festivals of hatred aimed at liberals and the media that, at times, turned violent. Virtually every newspaper editorial board in the country pronounced him fundamentally unfit to serve as commander in chief.

And the upside of being so blatantly, manifestly unfit for the Presidency was that none of Donald Trump’s public failures stayed in the public spotlight for long. The habit of reflexive balancing meant that we were treated to a media diet that was approximately 50% Trump controversy and 50% Clinton controversy. So we had Trump-attacks-Judge-Curiel/Hillary’s-0ld-email-server, Trump-attacks-gold-star-family/Hillary’s-0ld-email-server, Trump-attacks-former-miss-universe/Hillary’s-0ld-email-server, Trump-quarrels-with-Paul-Ryan/Hillary’s-0ld-email-server. That’s balanced. But it isn’t proportionate, and it sure isn’t fair.

The net result is that the mass public arrives at the voting booth with a strong sense that Clinton must have done something terrible with her email, simply due to the fact that the media has spent a full year talking about nothing else! And Trump, meanwhile, has done a bunch of disqualifying things too. Lots of them. But none that stand out in particular.

That’s a failure of the press. Virtually every newscaster, journalist, and editor knew full well that Donald Trump was unfit for the Presidency. This wasn’t a partisan stance — plenty of conservative Republicans were willing to say exactly these words, on the record and on the air. Reflexive balancing is only appropriate when both parties nominate candidates who are (at least approximately) equally qualified. It is inappropriate when one of the two candidates nominates a candidate who is manifestly unqualified.

Donald Trump was manifestly unqualified to be the Republican Party nominee. Donald Trump is manifestly unqualified to serve as President of the United States.

The media isn’t solely at fault for his election, just as the media wasn’t solely at fault for the Iraq War.

But make no mistake: this was a systemic press failure. The press relied on old habits and routines that were inappropriate for the strange electoral circumstances of 2016.

As we enter the next four years of the Trump regime, we are going to need an antagonistic press. The press is going to need to stop relying on routines of partisan-talking-heads-disagree, and what Jay Rosen calls “view from nowhere” journalism. The press is going to have to not just realize that Donald Trump is an existential threat to American Democracy; it is going to have to behave as though Donald Trump is an existential threat to American Democracy.

The first step is recognizing that, yes, the press failed in 2016. It didn’t fail to investigate the two candidates; it failed in allocating its coverage to appropriately reflect the depth of the two candidates’ failings.

*For shame, dear reader. For shame…

Two weeks ago, there was bipartisan consensus that Donald J. Trump was uniquely unqualified for the job of President of the United States.

We heard this from Democrats, we heard this from Republicans, we heard this from every newspaper editorial board not owned by one of Trump’s close, personal friends. Newspapers that had not endorsed a Democrat in over a century weighed in against Mr. Trump, so sure were they that he would be an existential crisis for the country.

If you believed two weeks ago that Donald Trump was temperamentally unfit for the Presidency, and you believe today that he might be just fine, what new information led you to this new conclusion?

In the week since Trump became President-elect, we have seen an increase in racist and sexist violence across the country. Trump’s response was to deny that it was happening, blame the media, and then offer a lukewarm rejoinder, “I’ll say this, if it helps, stop it.” We’ve also seen anti-Trump protests, which provoked him to tweet “Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!”

Mr. Trump, it seems, has not yet figured out that if he wants the country to come together and unite, it is now his job to unite us.

Trump has also appointed Steve Bannon as his Chief White House Strategist. Who is Steve Bannon? He’s the white nationalist purveyor of Breitbart.com. He’ll be in the White House now, directing strategy from here on out.

This is not normal. This is the Trump that we feared two weeks ago. The only new information that might lead us to think differently is “well, but he’s president now.” And that is the refuge of the cowardly complacent.

We are not safe right now. This is a dangerous time. Pretending that it isn’t only permits the danger to spread.

We are going to need the press to adopt a new adversarial identity. We still have press freedoms right now. They have not yet been restricted. Those freedoms will be chipped away if we grant the new Trump administration the assumption of normalcy.

We are going to need Republicans who are willing to stand up to the worst excesses of the Trump administration, even when it is uncomfortable and unpopular with their base. And that is true both for members of congress and for individual citizens. Right now I am hearing a chorus of Republicans (and their enablers in the pundit class) chanting that there is “nothing more offensive” than labeling all of Trump’s voters as racists.* At a minimum, all of those voters condoned racism — they found it not to be disqualifying. Let me make this very clear: if they do not stand up now against this wave of racist and sexist violence, then they stand behind it. Trump supporters can no longer enjoy the luxury of innocent bystander status.

I hope and pray that the pressures of the Presidency transform Donald J. Trump into a serious man, capable of fulfilling the duties and respecting the traditions and constraints of the office. But I do not expect or assume this will happen. Until he proves himself to be up to the task, I will continue to presume that he is a danger to the republic. You should do the same.

Donald Trump told us what kind of man he was. Every gatekeeper of any sort measured his worth and found him wanting. He was elected anyway, because he received several million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, but they were the right votes from the right citizens in the right states. And now he has unfettered power.

If you believed he was unfit before, please do not assume he is fit now simply because we need him to be.

*Personally, I find the swastikas painted on the side of high schools more offensive. I suppose they’d say that’s just a matter of taste.