We All Need To Get Smarter

This is Jim: A good friend forwarded the following Facebook post regarding Trump's efforts to protect the USA from terrorists sneaking into the country. 

This addresses the manner in which popular opinion is managed/manipulated by propagandist (Goebbels of Nazi Germany fame perfected the process.)             

From Heather Richardson, professor of History at Boston College:

"I don't like to talk about politics on Facebook-- political history is my job, after all, and you are my friends-- but there is an important non-partisan point to make today.

What Bannon is doing, most dramatically with last night's ban on immigration from the seven countries (originally selected by the Obama administration) -- is creating what is known as a "shock event."

Such an event is unexpected and confusing and throws a society into chaos. People scramble to react to the event, usually along some fault line that those responsible for the event can widen by claiming that they alone know how to restore order.

When opponents speak out, the authors of the shock event call them enemies. As society reels and tempers run high, those responsible for the shock event perform a sleight of hand to achieve their real goal, a goal they know to be hugely unpopular, but from which everyone has been distracted as they fight over the initial event. There is no longer concerted opposition to the real goal; opposition divides along the partisan lines established by the shock event.

Last night's Executive Order has all the hallmarks of a shock event. It was not reviewed by any governmental agencies or lawyers before it was released, and counterterrorism experts insist they did not ask for it. People charged with enforcing it got no instructions about how to do so. Courts immediately have declared parts of it unconstitutional, but border police in some airports are refusing to stop enforcing it.

Predictably, chaos has followed and tempers are hot.

My point today is this: unless you are the person setting it up, it is in no one's interest to play the shock event game. It is designed explicitly to divide people who might otherwise come together so they cannot stand against something its authors think they won't like.

I don't know what Bannon is up to-- although I have some guesses-- but because I know Bannon's ideas well, I am positive that there is not a single person whom I consider a friend on either side of the aisle-- and my friends range pretty widely-- who will benefit from whatever it is.

If the shock event strategy works, though, many of you will blame each other, rather than Bannon, for the fallout. And the country will have been tricked into accepting their real goal.
But because shock events destabilize a society, they can also be used positively. We do not have to respond along old fault lines. We could just as easily reorganize into a different pattern that threatens the people who sparked the event.

A successful shock event depends on speed and chaos because it requires knee-jerk reactions so that people divide along established lines. This, for example, is how Confederate leaders railroaded the initial southern states out of the Union.

If people realize they are being played, though, they can reach across old lines and reorganize to challenge the leaders who are pulling the strings. This was Lincoln's strategy when he joined together Whigs, Democrats, Free-Soilers, anti-Nebraska voters, and nativists into the new Republican Party to stand against the Slave Power.
Five years before, such a coalition would have been unimaginable.

Members of those groups agreed on very little other than that they wanted all Americans to have equal economic opportunity. Once they began to work together to promote a fair economic system, though, they found much common ground. They ended up rededicating the nation to a "government of the people, by the people, and for the people."

Confederate leaders and Lincoln both knew about the political potential of a shock event. As we are in the midst of one, it seems worth noting that Lincoln seemed to have the better idea about how to use it."

Heather Cox Richardson

professor

Office: Stokes Hall S335

E-mail: heather.richardson@bc.edu

Twitter: @HC_Richardson

Tumblr: heathercoxrichardson.tumblr.com

Facebook: Heather Cox Richardson

FIELDS OF INTEREST:

American History, primarily politics and economics. Nineteenth century U.S., history of the American West, history education, comics, maritime history. Writing.

ACADEMIC PROFILE:

Professor Richardson teaches nineteenth-century American history at both the undergraduate and the graduate level. Her early work focused on the transformation of political ideology from the Civil War to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. It examined issues of race, economics, westward expansion, and the construction of the concept of an American middle class. Her history of the Republican Party, To Make Men Free (2014) examines the fundamental tensions in American politics from the time of the Northwest Ordinance to the present. She is currently working on an intellectual history of American politics and a graphic treatment of the Reconstruction Era.

REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS:

• To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (2014)
• Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (2010)
• “Richardson’s Rules of Order,” at: http://histsociety.blogspot.com/search/label/Richardson%27s%20Rules%20of%20Order
• West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (2007)
• “North and West of Reconstruction: Studies in Political Economy,” in Thomas J. Brown, ed., Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States (2006)
• The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 (2001)
• The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War (1997)