Unaccountable: How the Establishment Corrupted Our Finances, Freedom and Politics and Created an Outsider Class

UNACCOUNTABLE

How the Establishment Corrupted

Our Finances, Freedom and Politics

and Created an Outsider Class

JANINE R. WEDEL

PEGASUS BOOKS

NEW YORK   LONDON

Again, to my parents, Arnold and Dolores Wedel

And to the memory of Antonina Dachów and Erna P. Harris,

each one a force of nature who changed my life

Contents

How the Likes of Hillary Clinton Led to the Likes of Donald Trump

A DOZEN THINGS I GOT RIGHT YEARS BEFORE THE ANTI-ELITE REVOLTS OF SEPTEMBER 2016

No one likes to be told I told you so. But at the risk of sounding nearly as shameless as Donald Trump, I ask you honestly, whose pronouncements are more credible: a johnny-come-lately analyst who begins pontificating about a phenomenon like the rise of Trump after it becomes undeniable? Or a scholar who wrote years ago about the emergence of outsiderism. I am (blush) the latter. In 2014 I wrote in the preface to the book you are now reading:

How is it that ordinary people have an instinctual grasp of the real nature of corruption and the inequality that often results, while many experts are still wedded to the idea that corruption happens somewhere out there? Witness the Occupy protests that began on Wall Street in 2011 and the Tea Party movement that helped grind the U.S. government to a halt in the fall of 2013. They may otherwise have little in common, but they share a resounding refrain: that the system is gamed by the powerful.

When I wrote those words, Donald Trump was just a middling, blustering reality television star and self-aggrandizing real estate mogul. Senator Bernie Sanders was a distant third on the list of famous Vermonters, well behind Ben and Jerry, of ice cream fortune. Now, more than two years later, I’ve heard these revolutionary figures and a parade of their supporters sing the same refrain, that the system is gamed.

Since the release of Unaccountable in fall 2014, I have watched with distress, though not much surprise, as the arguments I made in the pages you are about to read sprang to full flower in massive anti-establishment movements in the United States and Europe. My lack of surprise is because I come at this issue from a perspective and history few others have. I am an American who has spent the past few decades in Central and Eastern Europe and in the United States as a social anthropologist. On both sides of the Atlantic I have been studying elites who wield power and influence and how they operate in new and insidious ways—the result being that average people now have little meaningful voice in making and shaping the policies that affect their lives and livelihoods. (I had been in a low-grade, but escalating, state of alarm for at least a decade when I published a previous book, Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market, in 2009.) Unlike the hundreds, if not thousands, of articles written about this year of the Outsider, Unaccountable will give you a different framework for looking at the transformational changes that have allowed Western elites to defy public interest, while often enriching themselves, leaving regular citizens with little ability to hold them accountable.

In Unaccountable, my goal was to try to redefine corruption as actions that violate the public trust, even if they are not technically illegal. Most, if not all, of the elite boundary-pushing is fully legal, even if most of us would consider it unethical. When the book was first published, the populist movements erupting around the world showed that regular people were starting to instinctually know the contours of this new corruption, as I call it, because indeed they were living with it. Now this is a stone-cold reality. The public knows full well that this new corruption is flourishing, though the culprits that are usually mentioned—money in politics, greedy banks, or the simple revolving door—tell a story that’s dangerously incomplete. Many elites, by contrast, have been blind-sided. The media, too, have been caught off guard by insurgencies from both right and left. So have most pundits and scholars. This one was not.

As you read this book, looking closely at the arguments I put forth back in 2014 will help you better understand the astonishing events of 2016. Here are just a dozen.

1. Increasingly, people identify themselves as outsiders and look to leaders who claim to do the same. That is because people sense that the system is rigged against them. I wrote Unaccountable, as you will read in the original preface,

because more and more we feel like we’re outsiders, excluded from a system we used to know how to negotiate but no longer quite do. Figuring things out is not as straightforward as in the past. We’re subject to new ways of influencing and organizing influence that are not as obvious as they were just twenty-five—or even five—years ago. [W]e sense a division between outsiders and insiders and that the insiders are working on their own behalf, even as they purport to have us, the public, in mind. The rest of us are left on the outside, knocking to get in.

As I just said, this rigged system has driven millions of Americans to seek leaders they perceive as outside of it—the most successful being Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. In fact, as I argue, the new corruption of Hillary Clinton and many, many elite players of all stripes has paved the way for the likes of Trump and Sanders. Trump, it is important to note, is not one of the elites I study who shape policy. He is actually useful in making the distinction about who I am talking about. Trump is a wealthy celebrity who until now has not involved himself in any major way in policy manipulation. He may look establishment, but he is not, at least as I write in September 2016. Trump is what happens when elites in the establishment game the system to their advantage, leaving regular people disillusioned and looking for a savior in an authoritarian figure like him.

Sanders, of course, never exhibited the disturbing authoritarianism that Trump does, but his followers are equally anti-establishment and anti-elite. To Sanders’s supporters, Clinton represents the unholy alliance between Democrats and Wall Street, and the corruption of a political system awash in mystery money from corporations and even foreign governments.

Such disaffection from the establishment and the resulting populist revolts are not limited to the United States. I have witnessed them first-hand in Europe, where I spent the year from September 2015 through August 2016 conducting research and teaching in several cities across the continent, in part as a Fulbright scholar. In Germany, for example, I saw the continued rise of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), founded only in 2013. The AfD scored strongly, earning votes in the double digits in three German states during elections in spring 2016 and, in September 2016, even beating the party of chancellor Angela Merkel in her home state. I watched German news coverage of France, where terror attacks have been feeding xenophobic support for Marine Le Pen and her far right-wing National Front party.¹ I viewed coverage of presidential elections in Austria, where, for the first time since World War II, neither establishment party (Social Democrats and Austrian People’s) saw their candidate appear in the top spot. Instead, there will be a run-off in December between the Green Party candidate and a right-wing ultra-nationalist (some would say fascist) one, again between far right and the left. In June, from Ukraine, I watched coverage of how voters in the United Kingdom shocked elites there and around the world by voting to Brexit the European Union.

Whether from the right or the left, these candidates and movements have one hugely salient attribute in common: They are profoundly and aggressively anti-elite, anti-establishment, and anti-system. They seek to abolish the system without any real or viable plan for replacing it.

How did we get here?

2. The system is, in fact, rigged. Unaccountable warns of the grave dangers to democracy in a system that is riddled with new corruption, dominated by players who violate the public trust yet often not the letter of the law. The system is gamed not because of any wild conspiracy, but because patterns of influence, at least in the West, have fundamentally changed over the past several decades. What has changed is how influence elites operate and organize themselves in response to seismic changes: Financialization, in which the financial arena takes a dangerously outsized role in the economy; privatization and deregulation, which changed the very shape of government; the dispersion of global authority with the end of the Cold War, creating huge numbers of new entities involved in policy making; and digital technology, which remade the media and gave elites new ways to brand themselves and their actions.

Given these titanic changes, elite players maneuver their own agendas into policy in more complex ways, with little transparency and near total immunity from consequences. The rest of us are more or less exiled from the democratic process.

Examples from Unaccountable include:

• The four top finance regulators who, during the 1990s, blocked not just the regulation of exotic derivatives, but even the mere discussion of regulating them, and then went on to take a role at a Wall Street firm, bank, private equity firm, or hedge fund that made bundles on . . . unregulated derivatives. Their agenda helped lead the economy to ruin in 2008, but those regulators were still sought after in the media, at think tanks, banks, and even in the new Obama White House. (See Chapter 1.)

• The former top environmental regulator on the payroll of the nuclear power industry who doesn’t consistently disclose conflicts of interests when promoting that industry in op-ed pieces. This power broker uses a slick website to brand stealth lobbying with a fake grassroots image. By appearing impartial, the player gives the public an illusion that the nuclear industry is clean and safe, an assertion many critics would scorn, especially after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. (See Chapter 9.)

• Two top military and intelligence officers who retired to extremely lucrative positions at a private contracting behemoth, only to return to government and then back again, to the point at which the government and company’s interest seem to have fully merged. A key problem is that the company is under far less oversight than government agencies, and yet the company is carrying out highly sensitive functions that should be handled only by government. This has created enormous concerns over privacy and security. The public is left to wonder whose interests these top players serve: the nation’s or their company’s—and how can we hold them and this private conglomerate to account? (See Chapter 6.)

Such elite players have made their mark across nearly all venues, and the cumulative result is decisions that favor those already at the top. Empirical data support this. Researchers have found that policy preferences favored by the wealthy elite (and the power brokers I study are almost always also rich) tend to win out over the desires of the rest of us. As I recounted in Chapter 1:

Two political scientists looked at 1,779 policy issues hashed out from 1981 to 2002 and found that policies widely supported by economically elite Americans were adopted about forty-five percent of the time. If these same Americans indicated little support? Eighteen percent.

These elite preferences are surely one big factor behind the surge in income inequality since the 1980s. When I have raised the question about elite players and the new corruption many practice, I was often greeted by those inside the Washington bubble with dubious if not derisive reactions. Now many more people are taking that question seriously, as well they should.

3. The rigged system has led to a wholesale collapse of trust in institutions. People used to have a lot more confidence in a wide array of institutions that affect nearly every facet of our lives, and they have a lot less now. Again, as I wrote in in Chapter 1,

That the system is rigged resounds worldwide. There’s a documented and striking loss of confidence in formal institutions, from governments, parliaments, and courts to banks and corporations, to the media. Apparently, people feel that their public institutions and leaders now merit even less confidence than in the past.

Unaccountable cites what was then the latest Gallup poll, 2013, which showed double-digit percentage declines since the 1970s for ten of sixteen U.S. institutions (including banks, Congress, the presidency, schools, the press, and churches), five were essentially stable, and only one, the military, saw an increase. Since 2013, trust has continued to erode broadly, with eleven out of fourteen institutions falling further in the public esteem, one, the presidency, holding steady, and two (the medical system and small business) seeing a bump-up.²

With the ascendancy of Trump and Sanders, the trust deficit has been invoked innumerable times. As one Sanders supporter put it to Slate, My generation grew up during the war on terror and skyrocketing unemployment rates. We’ve seen a lot of things, and . . . our trust is pretty shaky in a lot of institutions.³

Loss of faith in the system can be seen across the world. One study published in 2007 on corruption and declining trust globally (cited in Chapter 1) showed that

over the last four decades, nearly all of the so-called developed, industrialized democracies have been experiencing a decrease in the public trust in government. This has not occurred at the same pace or necessarily for the same reasons everywhere, but the trend is pervasive. . . . Even Swedes and Norwegians, traditionally highly trustful of their political institutions, expressed less trust in them in the 1990s.

And yet, once again, the establishment, this time in Europe, has been blindsided by public anger.

Today, in addition, trust has gone personal. As I saw in eastern Europe under communism, people rarely trusted official information. They relied on trust-based personal networks to provide accurate information. In the same vein, we in the West are sinking into a friends and followers bubble and living in our own, isolated information universes—a dangerous polarization for democratic society.

4. The trust deficit is a grave threat to democracy and society. The despair people feel was palpable, even when Unaccountable went to press in 2014, and it has worsened since. This recalls my experience under communism, as I wrote in Chapter 1:

In Eastern Europe during late communism, I witnessed a pervasive feeling of helplessness, fatalism, and gallows humor. Now I am seeing it here in the supposedly much more transparent West.

Unaccountable discusses two recent movements, backed largely by the far edges of the two disaffected generational groups: Occupy Wall Street (young, mostly white) and the Tea Party (older, mostly white). By late 2014, both groups had gone relatively quiet. And yet the rumbles of discontent could still be heard, not least in popular culture. The Netflix series House of Cards and HBO’s Veep presented politics as devoid of idealism, strikingly nihilist compared to the soaring vision presented by NBC’s The West Wing some fifteen years earlier.

Given these and many other signals in popular culture and the trust deficit as seen in the dire polling on trust, it seemed only a matter of time before the anger exhibited in these outsider movements would again erupt.

When the 2016 American presidential campaign started to gather steam, people voiced their (correct) belief that the system was rigged. In a way, this was democracy in action. Protest voters who didn’t feel heard decided to rattle their respective establishments. And rattle they did . . . and continue to do so, and as I mentioned above, not only in the United States.

But democracy forged in anger and fear can have dangerous and unintended consequences. When I wrote Unaccountable I was concerned that ordinary people might not always identify the real culprits behind the new corruption (certainly most elites haven’t) and consequently would turn to inappropriate places for redress. The lack of understanding is not because people are stupid. It’s because the forces behind the new corruption are enormously complicated. Privatization, deregulation, financialization, globalization, digitization—any one of these topics is weighty to say the least. Put them together, which you need to do to recognize how elites can so agilely exploit the system, and it’s a lot to grasp. Understanding and identifying the new corruption has been my nearly full-time job, and it’s taken me years to fully comprehend and be able to explain it.

Should we be surprised, then, when millions flock to Donald Trump and his counterparts in Europe? His comforting certitude and authoritarian style is frighteningly familiar to those of us who have a long history of work in eastern Europe. Like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Trump exploits nostalgic yearning and nationalism, and he finds convenient scapegoats in vulnerable people, like immigrants, who have nothing to do with the new corruption that is truly impoverishing the populace. Citizens, of course, have every right to vote as they will. But democratic society is perverted when disillusioned people are encouraged to harass and demonize already-marginalized groups. A big risk, too, is that dictatorial figures can end up threatening the democratic rights of all citizens. Today it might be immigrants, but tomorrow it might be you.

The trust deficit is a grave threat not only to democracy but to a healthy citizenry and economy. Last year, a study pointed to surging mortality rates for middle-aged less educated white men, some scholars and publications calling the trend a huge wave of despair deaths.⁴ As for millennials, they are delaying getting married, and buying a home or car;⁵ some, if not many, say they’ll do none of these things, ever.⁶ They are living with their parents at rates not seen since 1940. They are less likely to start a business and less likely to invest. Many are eking it out through a patchwork of gigs, without benefits or job security.⁷

5. Foreign stealth influence is a growing danger. Of all the themes I explored in 2014, the one I didn’t expect to show up in quite so dramatic fashion—let alone become a big issue in the American presidential election—was foreign stealth influence. It’s not just Donald Trump’s business dealings in Russia or personal ties with Vladimir Putin. As I wrote in Unaccountable, these days in the United States, lobbying by foreign powers, frequently unsavory ones, is so accepted that foreign money often goes to law and public relations firms that engage in reputational whitewashing, often using digital dirty tricks.

And so it was with great interest this past summer while in Kiev that I read the front-page story in the New York Times about the illegal off-the-books $12.7 million designated for Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s then campaign manager, by the pro-Russian political party of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.⁸ Manafort had much experience as a lobbyist for all manner of unsavory figures and regimes, and he had helped bring Yanukovych to power. (As it happens, Manafort’s former office in Kiev is just around the corner from where I lived.) Yanukovych, who ruled from 2010 till 2014 and has been accurately described as a Putin puppet was overthrown in a people’s uprising in 2014.

Subsequent reports revealed that Manafort was involved in funneling $2.2 million to two top Washington lobby shops through a non-profit connected to Yanukovych.⁹ Manafort, of course, denied the reports, but they reignited suspicion that he and the Trump campaign were cozy with Putin, and Manafort quickly resigned. Manafort was suspected of being responsible for the last-minute removal of military support for Ukraine in the Republican Party platform, an allegation he also denied. Manafort’s brand of lobbying on behalf of foreign governments is a kind of paid privatization of diplomacy. It used to be the domain of only the most shameless of lobbyists—sometimes even considered treasonous. How things have changed, as you will see in vivid detail in Chapter 3 and elsewhere in these pages.

6. Philanthropies and foundations often serve as vehicles of elite influence. These kinds of organizations are not typically included when studying elite influence, but they should be. And thus I wrote about them in Unaccountable, including one that would become a huge story in the 2016 race: the Clinton Foundation. Hillary Clinton, of course, has been accused of conflict of interest in her capacity as secretary of State because of donations from foreign powers and corporations to her family’s foundation. This story has been well covered by liberal and mainstream publications, as well, of course, by right-wing media. What makes the story so fascinating is that the recipient of the donations is not a lobby firm or a Super PAC, but a philanthropy. I devote quite a few pages in Chapter 9 to the byzantine set-up of this foundation, and more broadly, what’s been called philanthro-capitalism, in which corporate, political, personal and charitable goals blend into an unaccountable stew. This stew has opened Clinton to attacks from both the left and right, and, of course, tarnishes the many good works carried out with Clinton Foundation support. It was a major issue for Sanders’s supporters. For Trump, of course, it is red meat, and he has made the Clinton Foundation a prime area of attack. One of his Facebook posts involving donations from Saudi Arabia was shared more than 56,000 times and liked nearly 400,000 times. While a definitive conflict of interest is impossible to establish, this is one concrete way that the Clinton style of new corruption, taken as pervasive and writ large, has led to the rise of the Trump phenomenon.

7. Think tanks are another prominent vehicle of elite influence. I devoted Chapter 7 to the rise of think tanks and their use by elites to serve their own agendas—but not necessarily that of the public. Since the publication of Unaccountable, both the Washington Post, and, more recently, the New York Times have featured extensive articles on Washington think tanks and raised questions about funding and independence. Their examples range from the venerated Brookings Institution to the Center for Strategic and International Studies to the Atlantic Council to the conservative American Enterprise Institute.¹⁰ In Chapter 7 you will read my analysis of how think tanks have evolved over the past several decades and how, today, top players use these power centers without accountability.

8. Political parties are sidelined. A key theme in Unaccountable is how new organizations are using novel techniques to flex influence and sideline traditional institutions and procedures, displaying little loyalty to them. In 2016 the American political establishment parties—Democratic and Republican—have been undeniably sidelined. Both parties vastly underestimated the anger and plight of everyday Americans, likely due in no small part to the fact that for them—elite party operatives—the system is working just fine. This would help explain the utter mystification they often express about the insurgent candidates and their supporters.

The sidelining of parties was at a crescendo even before the 2016 election cycle. Chapter 9 discusses players, both liberal and conservative, who marginalized both the Democratic and Republican National Committees. On the Democratic side, there was candidate Obama’s campaign organization, Obama for America, that helped upend Hillary Clinton in 2008. The personality-based OFA, centered, of course, around Obama, morphed into Organizing for America after the election and then back to Obama for America for the mid-term election cycle, and, still later, to Organizing for Action, the backbone always being Obama, the transcendent celebrity politician. The major point is this, captured in my earliest writings on OFA in 2010, in which I included this observation by Matt Bai, writing for the New York Times: [OFA] has virtually supplanted the party structure . . . When Democratic officials inside the headquarters say ‘we,’ they are more often than not talking about OFA, rather than the party organization that existed before.¹¹

If Democrats weren’t worried earlier about OFA’s continuing impact on the Democratic National Committee, they should have been. There have been any number of reports stating that OFA caused significant resource drain for the DNC going into the 2016 election season, as well as the previous midterm election.¹² And, when the establishment faced an unexpected challenge from Senator Sanders, it came as little surprise to me that the DNC resorted to some desperate tactics to contain a populist explosion.

The Republican National Committee, of course, has fared even worse than the DNC in terms of being sidelined by a charismatic figure. Chapter 9 discusses the complex apparatus set up by the billionaire Koch brothers following the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United, fully legalizing unlimited independent campaign spending. Americans for Prosperity helped support the early Tea Party, and innumerable other causes largely focused on an anti-regulatory platform. American Crossroads and sister organization Crossroads GPS, founded by top Republican operative Karl Rove, also poured money into Republican coffers, earning it the nickname the Shadow RNC. Meanwhile, the RNC floundered. The Wall Street Journal interviewed one former RNC chairman in 2011, who reported: What we have is a diminished RNC that is probably not going to be able to do what it has done for so many past elections . . . For better or worse, that means that outside groups are going to be all the more important.¹³

Indeed they have been. The Shadow RNC, the Koch brothers, and the actual RNC failed to recognize just how much wrath with establishment politics emanated from below.

9. Branding can trump money. How many times have we heard that civic life is corrupted by big money? Countless times from Bernie Sanders’s supporters and many others, and yet an irony stands out: Sanders’s extraordinary success is a rebuke to the big money conventional wisdom. His campaign showed that a lot of people donating very little could do huge things and gave his big-money rival the run of her life.

In Unaccountable you’ll hear quite a bit more about branding than about the scourge of big-money Super PACs. While that is partly because the menace of big money in politics has been well covered by others, it is also because evidence suggests that spending a staggering amount is not a sure bet. The year 2016 was supposed to be, as Slate put it, the election the Kochs bought. But then another billionaire entered the picture, a party of One: Trump demonstrates that money isn’t everything. Running on a shoestring budget, he vanquished Koch-friendly candidates like Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio by railing against immigration, free trade, and pretty much everything else the Kochs hold dear.¹⁴

Just how did Trump pull that off on that shoestring budget? Unaccountable explains how the powerful develop their personal brands, through a variety of methods. That brand, once built, can be used to exert influence without spending a dime. You might see a former government official take on a lucrative private sector job. On top of that, he assumes a government advisory board role to gain insider access and information; takes on a university or think tank position to appear neutral and bolster his gravitas; opines on political talk shows or op-ed pages to maintain visibility and relevance; donates prominently to help deflect an image of self-interest; and uses social media aggressively to appear current. Manipulating these overlapping and not-always-disclosed roles, the power broker can amass a portfolio to press his interests at any time he wishes. Evading accountability is easy as well. Consider an out-of-office world leader who was accused of engaging in stealth deal-making for his bank client but was able to plausibly argue he was operating in one of his other roles, as an informal diplomatic advisor. (See Chapters 2 and 9).

Trump combines traditional and more modern forms of branding power. His common thread is a literal brand—the golden Trump name emblazoned prominently. He had an enormously potent brand going into the 2016 campaign, if not exactly a political one. He leveraged both the old media with a long-running NBC reality show and the new media by maintaining a very active social media presence with more than ten million Twitter followers. He was a call-in fixture on Fox and Friends, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and other outlets, which gave him a great perch to continue calling in when he announced, after previous flirtations, his run for president. When criticized on a Sunday show, he tweeted his response just minutes later, which the host read on the air. He allied himself with veterans’ philanthropies to buff the brand (but did not fork over contributions till he was called out by the Washington Post).¹⁵ And, of course, he is a businessman with a wide scope and of varying success and controversy.

Trump is able to deflect accountability for many reasons, but chief among them is that he can say I’m not a politician, despite the fact that he is angling to be the most powerful politician in the world. Part of this denial involves projecting an image of authenticity. As the New Yorker put it in July 2016:¹⁶

[H]e is a visionary salesman whose ingenious project, hatched while he was still in his twenties, was to brand and plaster himself everywhere. He started with the family business—real estate—and then expanded to casinos. Despite several bankruptcies, he continued to pursue myriad schemes . . . Trump had long since chosen to reduce—or, in his calculation, surely, to inflate—himself to a persona: Donald Trump. . . . The praise Trump elicits from voters for his authenticity, for telling it like it is, elides the fact that he is committed to hiding his human side from the world and, for that matter, from himself.

10. We can no longer escape truthiness, performance culture, feigned intimacy and authenticity. If we are indeed choosing politicians as one might choose, say, toothpaste, is that different from the past? I argue that yes, it is different, because of one seismic change to which I devote all of Chapter 5. That is the reinvention of the media, the explosion of reality TV, and most important, social media.

We seem to have fully embraced performance culture, feigned authenticity and intimacy, and so-called truthiness, in which facts feel as if they are true even when they are not. I began examining how players of every political persuasion were exploiting this media evolution in my previous book, Shadow Elite. When I wrote it, reality television was already well-ensconced in the public imagination. Also well ensconced was 24-7 cable news; Fox News, the outlet with the most obvious political/cultural slant, was riding high. Power brokers of all sorts were using various cable channels to advance their narratives, with the more colorful or polarizing getting the most eyeballs.

Interestingly, some of the most cogent take-downs of both Fox and the other news outlets eating up these narratives, often spoon-fed from the elite, were coming from satire, especially Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. This took me back to my experience under late communism in eastern Europe, where, similarly, the most trusted source of the real news was often found in parody.

Social media was exploding as I worked on Shadow Elite, and the iPhone was new. It took me several more years to formulate how fully mobile social media have affected our worldview and choices. As I wrote in Chapter 5 of Unaccountable:

Think of this new world of media/Internet as a sort of privatization, or personalization. . . . [I]n personalizing the media, we have depleted it of uniform standards, like, say, fact-checking, and eroded the capacity for accountability. Think about it: our online likes and those pages we choose to follow are personal choices. All the while, our personal/private choices in the collective would seem to guide how the news is shaped—indeed, what even becomes news. Success is assessed instantaneously through the number of followers or retweets on Twitter. This personalization and obsession with performance (as in acting) has a profound influence on what is deemed real and what policymakers act on. For even when something is not true—it is merely truthy, as Stephen Colbert famously said—when enough people believe or engage in it, this truthiness can and does have real and huge consequences in the real world. Newsmakers themselves know that they have to present compelling theater just to get attention in a now-fractured news environment. We are at the mercy of our ignorance. If we do not pay heed, it will come back to haunt us in ways that affect our daily lives and livelihoods—in forms we may not yet even imagine.

That form has come to life with Donald Trump. There’s such irony even in his Twitter handle: realDonaldTrump. Love him or hate him, one can hardly turn away from his antics. Thus he continues to draw attention. He expertly manages the all-powerful social media outrage machine, in which outlandish statements entertain his supporters, enrage his foes, and prompt impassioned counter-defense from supporters—only to begin the cycle again. This, of course, is part of an elaborate performance. He is the say-anything tough guy, the supposed truth-teller in a politically correct world who will restore the supposed glory days for older, mostly white Americans.

Sanders has his own brand, also a truth-teller, the gruff wise old man with big goals but noticeably short on details, though thankfully also short on ugly invective. Throughout Unaccountable, look for the many ways that performance culture has permeated elite behavior, often on social media, and even accountability culture, where the audit process has devolved into following a checklist that often misses the forest for the trees.

As the National Review, which supported neither Trump nor Clinton, summed up this societal shift: We are requesting from our politics the amusements we enjoy from the entertainment world. We are applying to political candidates the criteria we apply to musical artists. We are, in a word, consuming our politicians, not electing them. And the success candidates are having apotheosizing into brands is accelerating.¹⁷

In other words, we, the citizens, are complicit. Yes, the media have changed. But perhaps we could recognize that fact and monitor our media diets for more healthful choices?

11. Is digital technology a force for democracy or tyranny? Of course, the answer to a question about an innovation as far-reaching as this one has to be, both. That said, after living under communism and later watching the disastrous privatization of resources after the Soviet Union’s break-up in 1991, I am wary of utopianisms. This includes tech utopians offering private solutions to public problems in similarly buoyant tones—venture capitalists insisting that they can both do good and do well (very well for themselves, of course). These entrepreneur-idealists still more-or-less owned the narrative as I wrote Unaccountable, presenting themselves as a force for democracy, prosperity, and offering up life hacks of all sorts. But dissenters were starting to grow louder. At the risk of looking like a Luddite, I injected some healthy skepticism myself. Thus, I included critiques of digital proliferation in Unaccountable. Here are some of them, and the update on each since 2014.

• The dire impact of free digital content on traditional journalism.¹⁸ The latest Pew State of the Media report shows further destruction in old media by the spread of free digital content, with tech companies, not journalists, increasingly driving what we see: Over time, technology companies like Facebook and Apple have become an integral, if not dominant, player in most of these arenas, supplanting the choices and aims of news outlets with their own choices and goals.¹⁹

• The social media’s role in allowing us to descend into ideological cocoons. Most Americans with a Facebook page during the 2016 election year already know this all too well. The technology allows this role because we want it, providing us with a user experience that flatters us, the consumers, and connects us with like-minded friends. A report this year showed that social media was part of the documented, growing polarization among voters.²⁰

• The ability of leaders to amass supporters able to speak directly to them, 24-7, without any semblance of an impartial mediator. Every candidate of the 2016 American presidential campaign has done this, of course, but the one with the worst record on the facts, according to the truth-squad group Politifacts, is Trump. He is constantly putting out facts, and even if a reporter quickly dispels a claim, that fact is now lodged in the minds of his ten million followers.

• The ability of powerful forces to game search results. The top candidates no doubt have used so-called search engine optimization to promote good news, bury bad news, and pull in the most readers with keywords for their respective constituencies. It’s now a standard and a crucial part of the messaging arsenal. But perhaps the biggest controversy in the 2016 election year involved Google and accusations (which Google denies) that it was favoring Democrats in its all-powerful search function. Three scholars analyzing the underlying algorithm said: [M]aybe it’s high time to rein in or at least double-check how this new actor in the democracy is behaving.²¹

• The gig/sharing economy, a Wild West zone of unregulated activity. In addition to the problems experienced by workers or sharers in the gig economy, reports of its dangers were cropping up as Unaccountable went to print. Such reports have been everywhere in the two years since. These include crimes against both passengers and drivers and accusations of racism on the part of drivers and AirBnB hosts. Of course, these are problems, too, in the traditional industries that the gig/sharing economy is disrupting, but they don’t quite square with the tech world’s high-flying we can do this better rhetoric. Cities have struggled with all sorts of unanticipated problems, like increased congestion, and are scrambling to figure out how to regulate such rapidly growing businesses.

This may be a harsh takedown of digital technology but, of course, the benefits of technological advances had already been well documented. I did include positive aspects to technology and social media, especially the fact that activists the world over have far more effective ways to organize and spread their message. Take, for example, the use of smart phones to capture in vivid, horrific detail cases of police abuse that people of color have been dealing with for centuries. These videos spread virally on social media, the emergent Black Twitter, and well beyond. To offer an entirely different example, hackers and leakers have exposed all manner of corrupt government and corporate and personal practice involving the conduct of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Guantanamo Bay detention abuses, the sweeping post-9/11 collection of personal data of average Americans, and massive and long-running financial dodges in offshore banking by elites, to name just a few.

12. Brazen is in, track records don’t track, and top players fail up. It would be difficult to catalogue the many brazen statements Donald Trump has made—such as boasting that I could . . . shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters²² or implying that the mother of a dead war hero was silenced at the Democratic Convention because of her faith.²³ His business practices and even his billionaire status have been repeatedly questioned. But until late in the campaign, little seemed to stick. Call it the post-truthiness era, in which even absurd declarations have little or no impact on the speaker’s popularity or reputation. And who better than a reality star—well-versed in simulating authenticity—to understand just how far our tolerance for this farce has gone?

Trump is an extreme case, but Unaccountable is filled with examples of what most people would consider to be spectacular missteps or flat-out shady moves on the part of powerful figures who not only don’t face consequences, but continue to rise to greater positions of power and influence. For instance, key members of the Clinton-era economic team, long cozy with Wall Street, found top jobs in the Obama administration despite making epic mistakes when it comes to financial regulation. A group of star academics were found to be on the payroll of an unseemly, possibly illegal, foreign lobbying project on behalf of Libya. Rather than apologize, several twisted themselves into rhetorical spasms trying to justify it. A clique of leaders who led Iceland to financial ruin have continued to thrive; the president was, in fact, tried for negligence, touted by the press as a rare case of accountability in action. Not only did he suffer no punishment, he was then awarded yet another plum job: Iceland’s ambassador to the United States.

Hillary Clinton is no stranger to the high-profile misstep. She makes a few appearances in Unaccountable, mostly because of the wildly lucrative post-presidency of her husband, Bill Clinton, a brand genius of the highest order. His tangled philanthropy has already posed some sticky conflict-of-interest questions for his wife and will continue to do so should she win the presidency. One transgression that has caught my interest had not yet come to light when Unaccountable went to press. That was her use of a private email server during her time as secretary of State. This was a classic subversion of procedure, a subject to which many pages of Unaccountable are devoted, that has become routine among power brokers, who find it useful to personalize the bureaucracy and feel as if the rules don’t apply to them. Once again, the system did not treat her as it would a lower-level functionary. While she faced a stern lashing from the FBI director, who called her actions extremely careless, no punishment was forthcoming. Indeed, today’s top power brokers have personalized their activities, subverting the machinery of the state and flexing their own networks to bend to their own agendas, at the expense of the rest of us.

I must say that it gives me no pleasure to say I told you so. But at least, within these pages, I trust you will find tools that will help you understand our crazy world.