Exposing Them

There really are toxic people floating around that you can't get rid of.  Most annoy you, some do some harm but until recently they were easily called out for who they were and had little support.

That's changed.  We now promote a culture of us against them, winner take all, so it's perhaps time to accept the new rules and win.  One of the other phenomenon has been that while our politics thrives on division, our religions too sometimes, our businesses depend on a large inclusive tent.  So that when one of these toxic, threatening people gets identified through a photo gone viral, the profile of that individual becomes retrievable by Google or LinkedIn.  Corporations don't want troublesome people and quickly dispatch them.  The people who work for those companies may be crazy but they're not dumb and protect their enlightened self-interest.  People who volunteer to be public figures understand they will have opposition.  People who are hotheads or passive-aggressives can be real cowards.  The fear of loss far exceeds the anticipation of meaningful acceptance of their often odious rhetoric, so create a loss and they will go away.

How much random targeting does one need to assure voluntary compliance with expected norms?  It's hard to say.  Fish stay in schools and animals in herds and birds in flocks, knowing that some will get picked off but it doesn't change what the remaining individuals in a herd do.  Police cannot trap every speeder.  If they want to earn revenue for the town they put the radar behind a billboard, if they want voluntary compliance with speed limits they put the radar unit in front of the billboard.  The IRS has probably been the most adept at this, auditing a fairly small sample of returns based on suspicion and just enough randomly without suspicion to assure people don't take their chances with more than minimal underpayment or non-reporting.

You don't really need to expose people, just make undesired public scrutiny a plausible possibility.

I remain optimistic that the White House will turn over and with some good fortune so will the Senate Majority.  That leaves the incoming President at a serious branch point.  How much reprisal and on who?  Richard the Lion-Heart may be a good historical example with an American parallel.  He inherited a malignant division with Norman superiority and entitlement at the expense of the Saxons but wanted to erase the social gradient.  He could have the end vision but it would take until the reign of Edward III for a unified English people to emerge about 150 years later.  But Richard had to start.  He exiled some, hanged a handful, and gave amnesty to some key players, most notably his ne'er do well brother John, who became king, was still a control freak and ended up forced to sign away power through the Magna Carta.

The next President will have a lot of repair work to do. Some virtual guillotines, some exiles, some reconciliations.  But the dossiers and the plan needs to start now and it needs to include those toxic passive-aggressives who thought themselves too individually unimportant to justify any lasting reprisal.