So once again: What was Obamacare rage about?
Much of it was orchestrated by pressure groups like Freedom Works, and it’s a good guess that some of the “ordinary citizens” who appeared at town halls were actually right-wing activists. Still, there was plenty of genuine popular rage, stoked by misinformation and outright lies from the usual suspects: Fox News, talk radio and so on. For example, around 40 percent of the public believed that Obamacare would create “death panels” depriving senior citizens of care.
The question then becomes why so many people believed these lies. The answer, I believe, comes down to a combination of identity politics and affinity fraud.
.. Whenever I see someone castigating liberals for engaging in identity politics, I wonder what such people imagine the right has been doing all these years. For generations, conservatives have conditioned many Americans to believe that safety-net programs are all about taking things away from white people and giving stuff to minorities.
And those who stoked Obamacare rage were believed because they seemed to some Americans like their kind of people — that is, white people defending them against you-know-who.
Jeff Flake Plants a Flag
Do you ever get the feeling we’re all going to be judged for this moment? Historians, our grandkids and we ourselves will look and ask: What did you do as the Trump/Scaramucci/Bannon administration dropped a nuclear bomb on the basic standards of decency in public life? What did you do as the American Congress ceased to function? What positions did you take as America teetered toward national decline?
.. When I had coffee with Flake this week, he spoke about the philosophical and political corruption of the DeLay era with uncharacteristic contempt.
.. In 2016 the Republican Party, Flake argues in the book, lost its manners. “It seems it is not enough to be conservative anymore. You have to be vicious.” And it lost its philosophy. “We become so estranged from our principles that we no longer recognize what principle is.”
Flake told me he doesn’t want his book to be seen simply as a broadside against Trump. The rot set in long before, but Trump takes the decay to a new level.
.. betrayed the Goldwater Creed:
“Is it conservative to praise dictators as ‘strong leaders,’ to speak fondly of countries that crush dissent and murder political opponents …? Is it conservative to demonize and vilify and mischaracterize religious and ethnic minorities …? Is it conservative to be an ethno-nationalist? Is it conservative to embrace as fact things that are demonstrably untrue?”
.. Frankly, I think Flake’s libertarian version of conservatism paved the way for Trump. People are being barraged by technology-driven unemployment, wage stagnation, the breakdown of neighborhoods and families. Goldwater-style conservatism says: “Congratulations! You’re on your own!” During the campaign, Trump seemed to be offering something more.
Lunch with the FT: Marc Andreessen
The Netscape founder and tech investor talks about the trouble with stock markets, what he looks for in entrepreneurs and why illegal immigration is good for America
His extended family farmed in Iowa. His father, Lowell, sold seed corn for an agricultural company; his mother, Patricia, was a housewife.
.. Deferral of gratification is a huge thing. Calvinism runs very deep. It sets you up pretty well for engineering.”
.. Andreessen sees technology as enabling what he calls the “great awakening”. Waggling his iPhone affectionately, he says: “This little guy right here is the equivalent power capability of the $20m supercomputer I was using. This thing is in two billion people’s hands.”
.. Within six months he had posted 22,300 tweets, and now, according to Bloomberg, averages more than 100 a day to his almost 250,000 followers.
.. His tech-optimism attracts both admiration and mockery. Last June, a Salon article said he used Twitter as a “personal pulpit for delivering Silicon Valley’s version of the Sermon from the Mount”.
.. it is not so much his voice as the speed at which he talks that makes lunch like navigating conversational rapids. He rushes at sentences, starting so many with “And”, or “So”, it is as if his speech cannot keep pace with his ideas. The transcript of our two-hour conversation comes to 20,000 words.
.. I’m really boring. My wife and I have no social life. We don’t travel. We don’t go on vacation. We don’t go out.”
.. We watch an unbelievable amount of TV or movies.” He gossips about The Honourable Woman series, and attributes the creative renaissance of television to its expanding internet audience.
.. He likes television, he says, because it puts the writer in charge, and compares it to the best tech companies which are also built when you put founders in charge for long periods. “By the way, writers are often crazy; they’re unpredictable, they don’t necessarily operate on a budget or timetable you might want. They argue a lot. Which is the same thing we deal with, with founders. But you get the magic.”
.. “We look for the ones who have been programming since 10.”
.. While the position of minorities and women are obviously things Andreessen has thought about, he is bluffly dismissive of too much hand-wringing. “In 2004, it was outsourcing. In 1989, it was Japan. Now it’s China. There’s always some bogeyman. I think the destiny of the US is in our hands.”
.. All will be well, he says, provided we allow more technology. “If we don’t get it quite quickly, we will not be able to afford things like social security, Medicare. We need far higher productivity for the shrinking percentage of people who are going to be working.”All will be well, he says, provided we allow more technology. “If we don’t get it quite quickly, we will not be able to afford things like social security, Medicare. We need far higher productivity for the shrinking percentage of people who are going to be working.”
.. “There is no backlash,” he continues: technology companies remain popular with the public. “There is only the tech backlash of the New Yorker and the New York Times and of the New Republic and of Harvard University.”
.. “They’re threatened. It’s a power recalibration. There’s a coastal element to it. There’s a liberal arts versus engineering element to it.
.. It’s a CP Snow thing.” Snow, a British chemist and novelist, in the 1950s identified two camps: a liberal arts culture and a science one.
.. “Business journalism ought to do extremely well … [people need to] know what’s going on.” But “for general news people want their biases and prejudices confirmed”.
.. In the US, growth would be slowing were it not for “illegal immigration. It’s the best thing that can possibly be happening to us, and I find it ironic; nobody wants to talk about that.”
.. His biggest worry? “There are so many people paid to make the problem worse: paid to regulate, to short-sell; to activists, to the governance experts, to the analysts. The pressure that comes to bear when you’re a public company is just astonishing and it comes at you from a dozen dimensions and you’re, “I can’t believe all these people are out there getting paid to attack me like this.”
.. Besides, tech groups have access to multimillions of private capital to fund growth, so have less need for public markets. Any gains, therefore, accrue to a narrow group of wealthy private investors, such as Andreessen, rather than pension funds.
Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race
The ad we purchased was targeted to Facebook members who were house hunting and excluded anyone with an “affinity” for African-American, Asian-American or Hispanic people. (Here’s the ad itself.)
When we showed Facebook’s racial exclusion options to a prominent civil rights lawyerJohn Relman, he gasped and said, “This is horrifying. This is massively illegal. This is about as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find.”
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 makes it illegal “to make, print, or publish, or cause to be made, printed, or published any notice, statement, or advertisement, with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin.” Violators can face tens of thousands of dollars in fines.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 also prohibits the “printing or publication of notices or advertisements indicating prohibited preference, limitation, specification or discrimination” in employment recruitment.
Facebook’s business model is based on allowing advertisers to target specific groups — or, apparently to exclude specific groups — using huge reams of personal data the company has collected about its users. Facebook’s microtargeting is particularly helpful for advertisers looking to reach niche audiences, such as swing-state voters concerned about climate change. ProPublica recently offered a tool allowing users to see how Facebook is categorizing them. We found nearly 50,000 unique categories in which Facebook places its users.