It’s Not About Trump

How the left succumbed to the cult of Trump

No Indictment? No collusion? In the wake of the Mueller investigation report this week, many of my progressive friends are reliving the trauma of election night. This can’t be true. It can’t have happened.

Like that night, they are desperately looking for a conspiracy — some reason why the unthinkable happened. Anything to get away from the fact that America really did elect a (hopefully unwitting) fascist game show host for its president.

And to make matters worse, Trump and his spokespeople are already magnifying the extent of their victory. It’s not enough that Mueller appears to have concluded there isn’t enough evidence to prove Trump’s team colluded with Russia to swing the election. No, Trump, his press secretary, and the now fully subservient Republican Party are claiming the report fully exonerates the president — even though the summary specifically states that Mueller’s investigation did not exonerate Trump and leaves open the question of obstruction of justice.

The administration’s exaggerations add a bit of calculated insult to injury — reminiscent of the president and Sean Spicer lying about the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration. He won the friggin’ presidency. Why lie about the details when the truth is already a victory? Because it makes the Democrats even crazier, distracting them from reality and focusing them on a phantom menace.

I get it. I, too, was traumatized on election night. But rather than pretending it didn’t really happen, I recorded a monologue for Team Human — “The Trump Opportunity” — in which I argued that we get over the seeming tragedy. Whining and screaming and protesting may be the wrong tack, I suggested. Spending the next four years amplifying Trump’s negatives could backfire, I worried, given the way our personality-driven media landscape works.

Instead, I offered (to much critique), we should see this bizarre presidency as an opportunity for labor activism and social justice. “The red state that we’re now in may provide an opportunity for a worker’s economy,” I argued, “as long as we’re not afraid for the Republicans to get credit for some of it.” My idea, at the time, was to leverage the widespread urge for a genuine populist revolt to the advantage of the poor and disenfranchised. Promote and support programs for mutual aid, local economic recovery, and worker ownership. Just start doing it, without labels, and let people eventually recognize this is the progressive agenda.

Instead, many Democrats insisted on using Trump’s frequent lying as an excuse to claim that his presidency was also somehow false. My contacts in the Democratic establishment were interested in my help only insofar as I could offer them ways of undermining Trump’s popularity with average Americans. What they failed to realize was that Trump is the only star of this reality show. The harder he’s attacked, the more audience empathy will be generated. We are human beings, after all, and identify with the protagonist. We love contemptible characters — from Richard III to Tony Soprano — as long as we experience them as under attack. The more Trump is assailed for who he is, the more beloved he becomes.

Just as Trump’s administration became something of a cult, with subordinates taking increasingly daring and untenable positions in order to win his approval, the anti-Trump movement has become a cult of conspiracy psychosis. The idea that progressives could actually work with, through, or even against this guy to advance their agendas was labeled “collaboration,” and they surrendered to the wild hope that someone would uncover his illegitimacy. He’s not our real father, right?

So, in comes Robert Mueller, whose quiet authority gave regressed Democrats the dignified parent onto whom they could transfer all that usurped authority.He uncovered plenty of malfeasance by Russia and plenty of corruption in Trump’s campaign — but he couldn’t quite put things together as neatly as a criminal case required or the conspiracy theorists imagined. Might Mueller’s report still contain leads or even evidence of collusion? Sure. But is fixating on this possibility the best hope for achieving positive change — or simply mitigating the damage — over the next few years?

As I write this, the analysts on NPR are trying to parse the word “established” in the summary statement, hoping that just because Mueller can’t establish collusion doesn’t mean it isn’t there. And my Twitter feed is still reading like Alex Jones, with Kirsten Gillibrand pleading, “Sign the petition now to stop the Trump administration from burying the truth!”

This is not the path to victory in 2020, nor even for incremental progress in the here and now. No, the Mueller report should be used instead as an opportunity to reset the progressive agenda to something other than undermining the legitimacy of the Trump presidency or uncovering his treasonous acts. Like Trump said, he can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and pay no political price. That was a big hint.

It’s time for everyone, from the Democratic candidates and progressive pundits to Rachel Maddow and the New York Times, to focus on the real, even existential issues that have been largely ignored in the forensics game showthat has been masquerading as current events for the past two years. We are busy playing our own version of reality television while the planet dies, poverty grows, immigrants suffer, and children everywhere wonder why the adults refuse to act like grown-ups.

Not everything is about Trump. Unless we insist that it is.

What if Mark Zuckerberg had Stayed in School?

This month, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced yet another new direction for his famously bad-acting company. Now, he says, the platform once responsible for the Cambridge Analytica election fiasco and countless other personal invasions will become the poster child for privacy and encryption. Maybe after all the evasions, missteps, and pivots, Zuckerberg is finally learning from his experiences.

But as I watch Mark Zuckerberg zig and zag his way through one disaster after another, I can’t help but muse on one of the ways he could have spared himself — and the rest of humanity — all this trouble. What if he had simply stayed in school?

At the end of his sophomore year, Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard’s class of 2006 in order to pursue development of Facebook. The social networking platform was already the 10th most trafficked site on the internet, so young Zuck decided to follow in the footsteps of Harvard dropout Bill Gates and pursue Silicon Valley venture capitalists over Cambridge academics.

After all, at least by the logic of lean startups, Harvard had already served its purpose. Young Zuck had gained enough programming chops in computer science to build his minimum viable product, and — perhaps more important — he had leveraged the elite student population of Harvard to find the partners and ideas he needed to get a company up and running.

But by forgoing a college education, Zuckerberg may have denied himself — and the world — the benefit of some historical, cultural, economic, and political context for his work. And we are all now paying the price for his impatience. What if Mark Zuckerberg had decided to stay in school instead? Looking back through Harvard’s course catalogs for 2005 and 2006, one finds a bounty of offerings, from sociology and psychology to philosophy and literature, that would have challenged the assumptions underlying Silicon Valley dogma and might just have given Zuckerberg the insight he needed to build a platform that promoted human cognition and connection, and even democracy itself, instead of undermining them.

For example, over his four semesters as an upperclassman, Zuckerberg could have availed himself of Harvard professors, including Greg Manciw, former chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. If Zuck had taken Manciw’s “Principles of Economics” class, he may have recognized that there is a growth-based economic operating system running beneath every Silicon Valley unicorn — one that ultimately demands turning users into products or, worse, data fodder for the algorithms. He may have realized that taking the most investment at the highest valuation would only put his company at the mercy of its shareholders and obligate him to grow by any means necessary.

Or what if he had chosen to study with superstar literary critic Helen Vendler, whose undergraduate course “Literature and the Arts” offered “a study of poetry as the history and science of feeling”? Might Zuckerberg have later been able to predict his platform’s bias for emotional insensitivity, or could he have curtailed the use of language as cognitive weapon.

Maybe that inquiry would have been even better informed by taking Steven Pinker’s course that spring, “The Human Mind,” which covered psychoanalysis, behavioralism, cognitive neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology. Imagine if Zuckerberg had considered human consciousness in an academic or ethical context before setting upon entraining the collective psyche through his news feed algorithms?

He could have also learned about demographic change and social stratification — the very impulse for nationalism — by attending Niall Ferguson’s history course. He could have taken “The Harlem Renaissance” with Henry Louis Gates Jr. and learned how a neighborhood of real people interacting in real space differs from an online, data-determined affinity group. Or what if he had chosen to study under Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, whose courses meant to “show the interconnections between public events and private experience”? Maybe learning about the delicate interplay between people’s interior and public worlds would have led Zuckerberg to think twice about offering up his users’ brain stems to the highest political bidder.

Yes, Zuckerberg has apologized profusely after the fact for helping to drive American democracy off a cliff. “We didn’t take a broad-enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake,” he told Congress. But what if he had chosen to study the elements of working democracy before reengineering it on all of our behalf? Facebook wants for some good lessons in history, economics, sociology, psychology, governance, and ethics.

When Mark chose to drop out of school, he was barely 20 years old. His own brain wasn’t even completely formed yet. The myelin sheaths hadn’t fully developed around the cells of his neocortex, offering the sort of impulse control and executive functioning required to make decisions of this magnitude. Instead of continuing to develop his mind with educators profoundly dedicated to that purpose, he transferred parental authority onto the likes of Napster founder Sean Parker and big-data billionaire Peter “Palantir” Thiel. With mentors like these, it’s no wonder Zuck turned Facebook into the poster child for a surveillance economy.

As if to create more such intellectually and emotionally challenged founders, Thiel is paying more future Zuckerbergs to drop out of school, with a fellowship that “gives $100,000 to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.” Why learn if you can build?

Yet this only makes sense when we think of education in its most utilitarian context — as if the point of school is to become a more productive worker, get a good job, or offer a startup to a billionaire. Since when do we understand school as training for work? If anything, as I’ve explained before, it was meant as compensation for a life of work. Even the coal miner, it was thought, should enjoy the dignity of being able to return home after a day in the mines and appreciate a good novel or be able to vote intelligently.

Today, however, concerned principals and college presidents regularly meet with corporate CEOs to find out what sorts of skills they’ll need from the worker of tomorrow. JavaScript or Python? Excel or blockchain? School becomes, at best, a way for corporations to externalize the cost of job training to the public sector and, at worst, a form of social control.

Zuckerberg got the message: Program or be programmed. And he went right along with it, understanding his human users purely in terms of our utility value. We are not human beings with essential dignity, but data to be mined, inventory to be tagged, and nervous systems to be triggered.

Real education subverts this dynamic. School is a means of promoting not social control, or even productivity, but the higher value of learning itself. School is less valuable for the information or skills transmitted than the mimesis — the live mirroring and modeling — through which students learn to think critically, develop rapport, and establish solidarity. School is not directed at our utilitarian value, but our essential, intrinsic dignity. How profoundly sad it is that many of us think of a Harvard education more as a professional credential than a pinnacle of humanism.

If Mark Zuckerberg had valued his own human development over his compatibility with Silicon Valley and its investors, he may not have stumbled so easily into the ethical nightmare that is Facebook today. Admittedly, had Zuckerberg finished out his college career, Facebook may have come out two whole years later. But, oh, what a difference those two years might have made.