Trump and the Republicans should find common ground, the platform is already there: electoral and social reform
What is happening between Trump and the Social Networks ? How is this war between great powers unfolding and what does it have in store for us? The background is Trump's speech on the Ellipse lawn, the facts of the Capitol and the reaction of Biden and the Democrats .
At the beginning, Trump communicates as usual on Twitter : on January 6 a brief appeal for pacification (in which he does not give up denouncing the alleged fraud), on January 8 a speech that we are going to read. He begins by claiming to have called the National Guard "immediately" to help, which appears to be false . He states, “to the demonstrators who have infiltrated the Capitol: you have contaminated the headquarters of American democracy; to those who commit acts of violence and destruction: do not represent our country; to those who have broken the law: you will pay ”, which is true and is a way of emphasizing that he did not invite them to enter.
He adds: we have “vigorously pursued all legal avenues to contest the election results, my only goal was to ensure the integrity of the vote. In this way, I was fighting to defend American democracy ”, concepts already expressed before the crime.
He continues, "I continue to firmly believe that we must reform our electoral laws to verify the identity and eligibility of all voters and to ensure faith and trust in all future elections." And it says 'future', as now, “Congress has certified the results. A new administration will be inaugurated on January 20 ”, that is, it is no longer possible to correct the alleged fraud in the present elections. There follows an invitation to reconciliation: that is, to take note of the fait accompli.
But, this only applies to past elections, not future ones, so: “To all my wonderful supporters: I know you are disappointed, but I also want you to know that our incredible journey is only just beginning. Thank you, God bless you and God bless America ”.
All concepts anticipated by a previous tweet from the head of his communication, Dan Scavino:
“President Trump's statement: even if I totally disagree with the outcome of the elections and the facts reinforce that belief, there will nevertheless be an orderly transition on January 20. I have always said that we would continue our struggle to ensure that only legal votes were counted. While this marks the end of the biggest first term in presidential history, it's only the beginning of our battle to Make America Great Again! ".
Then two more tweets, again on January 8: “the 75,000,000 great American patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE for a long time into the future. They will not be treated without respect or unfairly in any way or form ", and then" to all those who have asked, I will not go to the inauguration on January 20 ".
In short, Trump would go on as if the events on the Capitol had not happened: with his political platform and on Twitter .
* * *
This is where Social Networks enter the scene. They had already intervened in the election campaign, supporting the Democrats financially and censoring some matters of Biden's son, Hunter. Now they take a long step further: they deplatform the President , literally deplatform Trump, that is, they take away the communication platforms, they silence him. The case of Facebook is particularly instructive: it suspends the Trump account "indefinitely … at least until the transition is complete", deletes all content including a reference to Trump's slogan: stop the steal , considering it may "lead to violence"; during the inauguration ceremony he will provide his own media coverage and, from then on, will tag any post that attempts to delegitimize the election results by specifying "that Joe Biden is the incumbent president."
Equally instructive is the case of Twitter , which bans Trump for the last two tweets we mentioned: the one in which he returned to calling his 75 million voters "American patriots" and the other in which he announced that he would not participate in the Biden inauguration. on January 20. Facebook and Twitter are joined by other tech companies, including one of electronic cards and one of mailing that will no longer process operations related to the Trump campaign, or Shopify that closes its online store trumpstore.com . Finally, almost all the major tech companies boycott or silence Parler (a Social Network competitor of Twitter ), causing a legal action for abuse of dominant position. Few of those, like Airbnb , limit censorship to individuals who have actually entered the Capitol. Twitter CEO says he "doesn't believe" such actions are coordinated… well he was asking himself.
It is true that Social Networks do not act in isolation. Traditional media sing so much in chorus that the evil Zingales notes that, "after all, some of them are owned by TAGAF [ Twitter , Amazon , Google , Apple and Facebook , ed ] ( The Washington Post is by Bezos, The Atlantic is by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs) and everyone depends on TAGAF for their survival ”.
Golfers' Association Cancels National Tournament on Trump-Owned Course, Scheduled for 2022; the city of New York anticipates that it wants to take away the concession of an amusement park, two ice skating rinks, a golf course; the Signature Bank of New York closes its deposit accounts; Deutsche Bank will no longer do any new business with him or his companies; ditto the Professional Bank of Florida; his lawyer Rudy Giuliani is placed under procedure in view of an imminent expulsion from the registers of the legal profession. For a son of Trump, Eric, these actions "exemplify the cancel culture of liberals … if you don't agree with them, if they don't like you, they try to cancel you." But, for the father, it is the Social Networks that weighs because that's where the modern political struggle takes place.
* * *
Indeed, it is to the latter that Trump replies, on January 9, with a tweet from the official account of the presidency, which was then silenced. He begins by accusing Twitter of "banning free speech … silencing me – and you, the 75,000,000 great patriots who voted for me … promoting a Radical Left platform." He adds that he is looking for alternatives ("we will not be silenced!"). It states: " Twitter may be a private company, but without the government gift of Section 230 they wouldn't exist for long." This last reference is to Section 230 of the Communications Act , introduced in 1996, which exempts Social Networks from the normal responsibilities of publishers, granting them full immunity: not only for any content their users publish, but also if any of these content they decide to remove. Thus, for example, Twitter will never have to reply to anyone, both for the posts it has let Trump publish and for having then deleted them. An exorbitant privilege.
Trump returns to speak on January 11, in a brief exchange with reporters and then with a speech , in which he claims his program ("they analyzed my speech and my words and my last paragraph, my final sentence and everyone has concluded that it was entirely appropriate ") including the attack on the Social Networks we know, to which he now reserves a new broadside (" freedom of speech is under attack like never before "," they are doing a horrible thing for the our country and our country and I believe it will be a catastrophic mistake for them, they are dividing and divisive "). As well as, of course, attacking impeachment , rejecting violence, claiming one's role as guardian of order.
* * *
What about the Republicans? The number of those among them willing to vote against Trump is uncertain: ten deputies have already done so, in the future perhaps ten senators (17 would be needed), who knows some friends of Vice President Pence who (unlike Trump) will participate in the inauguration. It remains, then, to demonstrate that this schism translates into lasting support for Biden (the approval of the new recovery package, the confirmation of the new ministers today blocked in the Senate, or in the continuum of the legislature). The embarrassment of the wisest Bidenians is now evident: in the face of the new impeachment , voted on by the House on Wednesday, they propose to postpone its transmission to the Senate (therefore the beginning of the actual trial) for at least 100 days; or simply to let go, with good arguments ( impeachment would hardly collect the necessary 2/3 of the votes in the Senate, it would be the first time in history that a president suffers two, the post-end of mandate application is very dubious constitutionality ).
The fact is that, by putting themselves in conflict with Trump, the Republicans risk being overwhelmed by a reverse McCarthyist drift anyway (i.e. being banned from Social Networks anyway) and, on the right, alienating voters enough to be denied any future chance of victory. Their only way out is to find with him a common ground of political proposal: a platform.
It happens that this platform was offered by Trump himself, with his Ellipse speech : electoral reform including the reform of Social Networks . The first has been a theme dear to Republicans for years: identification of the voter, proof of American citizenship, ban on ballot harvesting and universal postal voting, drafting of regular electoral lists, voting on election day. And the Republicans outside Washington, down in the big body of the country, are showing interesting signs of life: like the arrest , in Texas, of a woman who allegedly collected 7,000 postal cards in favor of Biden.
On the second, some of their mentors have recently expressed themselves: Niall Ferguson, for example, who suggests to stop thinking about anti-trust interventions, rather putting Social Networks in front of the alternative between being considered editors (and, therefore, ending ruined by millions of cases), or no longer censor anyone (leaving this task to the normal courts). In such an exercise, Republicans could be helped by the Supreme Court, after the nominations imposed by Trump solidly conservative and strongly legitimized by the lack of support offered to Trump himself: a previous ruling by that Court already defines Social Networks as "the modern public square" and it is hard to see why it could not go further, for example by denying the right to delete content and ban users.
That electoral reform can be done without touching the Constitution, is demonstrated by a law approved by the Democratic Lower House in June 2019, the Securing America's Federal Elections Act – Safe Act : among other things, it would have made the use of machines mandatory. vote counter with paper receipt and national production. Republicans in the House had proposed inserting a ban on ballot harvesting , only to get the Democrats rejected. But the precedent shows that it can be done.
It would not simply be a question of distracting attention from the facts of the Capitol, but of launching, right from the start, a slogan of "return to the Constitution" , around which both the Republican Party and the Trump movement can gather, in the manner of as the Tea Party did years ago. In order to win the next mid-term elections and spend the next two years grilling Biden on a spit. There is no shortage of slogans: “stolen elections”, “a level of censorship that would make China proud”, the Republican senator's book canceled by the publisher was entitled “The tyranny of Big Tech” , and so on. It is certainly a question of democracy (in Italy, on the left, Massimo Cacciari explained it ). If this were the case, we doubt that, for the Democrats, the crime of the Capitol would be enough to successfully support the defense of a frankly broken electoral system and a sincerely exorbitant privilege granted to Social Networks .
The post Trump and the Republicans should find common ground, the platform is already there: electoral and social reform appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/a-trump-e-ai-repubblicani-conviene-trovare-un-terreno-comune-la-piattaforma-ce-gia-riforma-elettorale-e-dei-social/ on Fri, 15 Jan 2021 05:03:00 +0000.