Depolarizing with Braver Angels

What might depolarizing, civilized political discussion look like today?

Braver Angels was started in 2016 by an interesting group of individuals focused on re-establishing the public rituals of our civil religion described in this post, and reducing political polarization. The organization takes its name from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address and boasts board members like Jonathan Haidt and Francis Fukuyama.

The organization drew my interest primarily because of its promotion by Haidt in an article on social media and political polarization. Haidt is famous for interesting social-psychological research into “moral modules” in the human mind that explain moral behavior. He’s also a staunch defender of the civil religion, particularly as it was formulated by Robert Bellah, whom we’ll consider in a subsequent post on vicarious group narcissism, and whom we’ve already touched upon here and here.

Haidt wasn’t always about depolarization and compromise, though. In 2017, Haidt fulminated on twitter and in an article in the Atlantic about Trump’s transgressive statement that there were good people on both sides of the violent Charlottesville protest.[i] Haidt’s article made clear that in some cases the President isn’t supposed to bridge divides and depolarize. The article is larded with secularized religious concepts that connect back to Haidt’s research on moral modules and the civil religion as it was interpreted by Bellah. The President, for Haidt, is supposed to approach certain political situations from a primitive religious perspective that eschews rational discussion and observes the taboos of one denomination of the civil religion. In other words, Trump wasn’t supposed to say that there were good people on both sides of a protest about whether a monument should be torn down, because there were taboo groups on only one side (antifa doesn’t exist, but if it does, it’s good).

Later in the Trump presidency, Haidt began noticing that extremist behavior really was emerging on “both sides” and resolved that we needed to reaffirm the principles of the civil religion and civility to de-escalate polarization. This brings us to public outreach efforts like Braver Angels.

Latent in this discussion of Haidt and Braver Angels above is a question that goes mostly unaddressed in the podcast I review below. The question surrounds whether uncivil or taboo views – views otherwise facially incommensurable with the civil religion – are entitled to a full hearing in the spirit of compromise and depolarization. What happens if the civil religion itself becomes impervious to the evolving standards that writers like Bellah once praised for perfecting our religion? In that case does depolarization just mean indoctrination?[ii]

Braver Angels Podcast

On August 23, Ciaran O’Connor, the Chief Marketing Officer for Braver Angels, hosted a podcast with Wilk Wilkinson, a “Trump supporter” who “helps lead Braver Angels’ efforts to engage working class Americans.”[iii] The title of the podcast references the Mar-a-Lago FBI raid, but O’Connor and Wilkinson spend most of the time discussing other issues. Below I’ll analyze their discussion and assess whether they’re bridging the perspectives of our polarized electorate.

Mar-a-Lago and the problem of media framing

Partisan media gives intelligent and well-meaning citizens the impression that they can outsource difficult and complex issues to journalists. The media have mostly betrayed this trust with their polarizing coverage of Trump. Haidt may be correct about social media, but his analysis will remain fundamentally incomplete until he concedes that the compurgation ordeals the media prosecutes against political opponents are equally polarizing.

O’Connor frames the latent issue with the Mar-a-Lago raid for the “the left” (to use his terminology) as “nobody is above the law, not even the president.” He provides a very high-level gloss on the raid itself, suggesting multiple times that Trump may have violated “the law” by not turning over “classified information”, some of which may have included sensitive information related to national defense. He mentions a report stating that the FBI first “asked nicely” before Trump forced their hand.

Wilkinson responds at an equally high level that this feels like yet another personal attack upon Trump, but qualifies that he agrees a president isn’t above the law and stresses that he won’t defend Trump because he doesn’t have enough information (as opposed to O’Connor, who is willing to attack Trump despite his own uninformed position). Wilkinson then talks about how Obama used the IRS to oppress the Tea Party and suggests that this is what propelled Trump to power in the first place.

This exchange occurs within the frame preferred by the highly polarized, highly partisan media, which keeps ambiguous and complex legal issues from the public and exploits the appearance of impropriety created by reports on litigation or criminal investigations to smear political candidates.

O’Connor repeatedly emphasizes the claim that trump violated “a law” (though nobody knows which law) by refusing to “turn over classified information.” This no doubt sounds intuitive to the average American. But if you take a few minutes to consider the details, you come away with a different impression.

In the spirit of depolarization, I won’t take a position on the legality of the raid or whether Trump committed a crime, but I will offer some considerations that I hope might discourage Braver Angels from recapitulating media framing in the future. Some of the information below came to light after the podcast, but the broader point about media framing stands.

1.       The DOJ has a history of partisan – some might say polarizing – behavior toward Trump.

• Wilkinson bewilderingly does not mention Russiagate, a ploy by the Clinton campaign and Obama White House to create legal pretext to surveil Trump’s campaign. The ploy merged into a sprawling media conspiracy theory hatched by Robby Mook and John Podesta in the wake of Clinton’s defeat[iv], culminating in the DOJ invalidating FISA warrants issued against Trump’s campaign.[v] If Trump had never assumed office, it’s likely that the integrity of the warrants would never have been assessed by the DOJ.

• The text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI Lawyer Lisa Page, both of whom worked the infamous “Crossfire Hurricane” case against Trump, revealed extreme bias toward Trump and his supporters. It’s likely that unreleased text messages between the two are at issue in the FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago.[vi]

• In the context of cases against Trump associates, the DOJ has a history of relying upon judges with whom its staff have non-professional relationships.[vii]

• Many of the same people involved in Crossfire Hurricane are involved in the Mar-a-Lago raid.

2.       The case against Trump presented in the media omits most of the facts that a reasonable citizen would need to know to develop an informed opinion beyond “the President should not be above the law if he did something wrong.”

• The warrant was issued by a magistrate judge, a practice that is controversial even when the warrant is not against a former President.[viii]

• The DOJ have been leaking significant amounts of information to the press about the warrant but nonetheless resisted unsealing the affidavit that supported the warrant, suggesting a political motivation to prejudice the public with cherry-picked information.[ix]

• On August 8, Joe Biden stated through representatives that he learned of the raid when the public did.[x] On August 23, a letter from National Archivist Debra Steidel Wall to Trump’s attorney dated May 10 was leaked to reporter John Solomon. The letter confirms that Biden was personally involved in creating the pretext for the raid by attempting to “revoke” Trump’s privilege over the documents and asserting that they were “necessary”.[xi] In other words, Biden most likely misled the public about his knowledge of the raid. In any case, any conversation about the raid should affirm that the DOJ is under Biden’s authority, i.e., that the DOJ is under the authority of a politician with a vested interest in thwarting Trump’s 2024 run.

• It’s not clear that the one statute referenced in the Braver Angels podcast - the Presidential Records Act (PRA) - is a criminal statute. The statute merely requires that the incumbent President be given access to records that are necessary for the incumbent President’s business and that are not otherwise available to the incumbent.[xii] Neither of these criteria have been demonstrated in the trial-by-media.

• The New York Times has been leaking information about federal grand jury investigations into the matter since May.[xiii] Leaking grand jury proceedings is a serious crime. This suggests that either the DOJ investigation is compromised or that DOJ staff are willing to break the law to publicize information damaging to a political candidate.

• It’s not clear that the classification status of the documents at issue is even relevant to the various statutory violations being alleged. But if it is, the President has broad Article II authority to declassify documents.

• Other statutory authorities thrown out in the affidavit require scienter, meaning that Trump would’ve had to mishandle documents with the intent to impede the operations of a government office (as opposed to accidentally marking them while eating McDonald’s). Merely having the documents isn’t enough, contrary to O’Connor’s suggestion about Trump retaining a letter from Kim Jong-un.

• The Secret Service were always present at Mar-a-Lago and were even instructed by the FBI to improve security on the room containing documents, which the FBI later decided Trump was “unauthorized” to retain.

There may be innocent explanations and air-tight legal arguments that resolve these points. Framing the issue on the media’s terms, that is purely in terms of the raid and fragmentary leaks about its pretext, is inherently polarizing and partisan, given what we know about the nature of the DOJ and its past conduct toward Trump.

Trump’s other investigations

O’Connor and Wilkinson then move on to other investigations of Trump. The first one addressed involves Trump instructing a state official to find him 11,000 votes. Wilkinson responds that if Trump was instructing the official to fabricate votes, that’s wrong (you see a pattern emerging here: assume the media frame is true for the sake of argument).

O’Connor then argues that Trump is the kind of guy who would try to steal an election. He points to Trump’s erroneous statements about the popular vote and inauguration attendance to prove Trump is a dangerous narcissist who would not accept losing. Wilkinson responds that this is just Trump being a bombastic salesman but qualifies that he dislikes Trump’s personality. In a revealing moment, Wilkinson states that he didn’t like Trump during the 2015 primary because of how he comported himself.

The two then segue into a discussion of January 6. O’Connor and Wilkinson agree that Mike Pence did the honorable thing by refusing Trump’s request to not certify the election. While they don’t discuss whether such refusal would be legal, they agree that refusing to certify would’ve undermined confidence in our electoral system and potentially denied the will of the people (Wilkinson, to his credit, suggests the 2020 election results were fraudulent).

Curiously, neither participant mentions the Russiagate astroturf campaign described above, which convinced half the country that Russia stole the election from Clinton. Indeed, even today, nearly 50% of likely voters believe Russia stole the 2016 election, notwithstanding the total collapse of all aspects of the Russiagate narrative.[xiv] It seems like confidence in the electoral system has already been severely undermined by the media.

Trump’s future

A difficult question that doesn’t seem to have a place in civil, depolarizing conversation surrounds the tension between principle and rational self-interest. When you are confronted by various interest groups represented by the opposing party (in Wilkinson’s case, sundry identitarian groups, the foreign policy establishment, and the immigration industrial complex) most of whom are willing to do whatever it takes to win, and whose surrogates in academia and the media often suggest the necessity of illegal revolutionary activity, do you go low or high? When the media touts violent destabilizing riots catalyzed by an ambiguous media-astroturfed police snuff video as the legitimate “voice of the unheard”, what message does that send to the opposing side?

Even though he questions the election results, Wilkinson still believes that Pence not certifying would’ve been a bad idea. However, this ascetic commitment to principle begins to crack when he discusses Trump’s effectiveness in 2016. He explains Trump’s success as partially the result of Trump’s willingness to engage in the Machiavellianism of power brokers like Pelosi. But Wilkinson stresses that he disapproves of those tactics. When O’Connor asks whether Wilkinson will support a Trump run in 2024, he responds yes but qualifies that he would also support his dog for President if it was running against the Democratic Party. His real passion is Ron Desantis. Quite the Trump supporter they’ve embraced at Braver Angels!

Even Wilkinson’s explanation for Trump’s 2016 success seems confused and stands as a missed opportunity. Wilkinson is right that Trump won in part because of his willingness to mirror the tactics of Reid and Pelosi. But he omits the fact that the primary reason for Trump’s success was his deviation from partisan consensus on immigration and foreign policy: two issues on which the establishment assiduously avoids catering to polling trends. Trump campaigned with the polls, calling for immigration restrictions and a repudiation of GOP foreign policy, and thereby capitalized on issues for which broad democratic consensus exists. In a sense, Trump’s 2016 campaign was the work of a braver angel who courageously bridged a partisan divide by promoting issues enjoying substantial support across both parties.

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[i] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/what-happens-when-the-president-commits-sacrilege/537519/

[ii] A frogtwitter friend of mine named Hoyt Thorpe wrote an essay on the persistence of uncivil, polarizing rhetoric in American politics. Sadly, Thorpe died in a go-fast boat accident off the coast of Cuba. His tartan tie was later found in a Havana salsa bar.

[iii] https://braverangels.org/a-trump-republican-on-the-fbis-mar-a-lago-raid-wilk-wilkinson-ciaran-oconnor/?link_id=2&can_id=534bafd6a87ee75c420a5b270a3a6e40&source=email-kind-conversations-about-race&email_referrer=email_1641057&email_subject=the-fbi-raided-mar-a-lago-and-podcast. Wilkinson says he “manages” truck drivers.

[iv] https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/03/how-the-russia-spin-got-so-much-torque/

[v] https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/23/politics/fisa-carter-page-warrants/index.html

[vi] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/justice/russiagate-binder-messages-peter-strzok-lisa-page

[vii] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/peter-strozk-was-buddy-of-judge-who-recused-himself-from-michael-flynn-case-report

[viii] https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/26/can-magistrate-judges-constitutionally-issue-search-warrants-against-trump-or-anyone-else/

[ix] See https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/64872441/67/united-states-v-sealed-search-warrant/ - page 7 lists leaks

[x] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-09/biden-learned-of-trump-raid-from-media-reports-white-house-says

[xi] https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/full-text-national-archives-letter-trump-classified-documents

[xii] https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title44/chapter22&edition=prelim

[xiii] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/12/us/politics/justice-department-trump-classified.html

[xiv] https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/april_2022/democrats_still_believe_russia_changed_2016_election