Call it the New Trickle Down. While the sore-loser-in-chief stokes in his hardcore followers a denial of reality the likes of which we haven’t seen before—Trump didn’t lose the election; a cabal including long-dead Hugo Chavez, George Soros and Republican election workers stole it from him!—the really concerning thing is the permission such behavior gives to local officials to follow a similar script.

Facts are malleable; instead of solving public problems, elected officials are taking note of Trump’s diabolical example. Don’t like the public policy challenge that confronts you? Just deny that it exists and solve instead for a problem that you invent—and you too can look like you’re being constructive!

Denial, it turns out, works in politics—at least for a while. That’s the theme of Showtime’s documentary series The Reagans, which drives home the degree to which Ronald Reagan changed the course of the country in the 1980s, when, not coincidentally, the pop song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” climbed the charts. There’s much in common between Reagan and Trump, the doc points out, including the “Make America Great Again” slogan. Reagan was a far more likable character, but both, when faced with inconvenient facts, just ignored them, and replaced the hard work of competent governing with good ol’ fashioned spin.

Lately, the Age of Denial has come to Philly’s public life. Exhibit one was the email sent out by Councilwoman Helen Gym just before Thanksgiving. “This week is the Committee hearing on my Black Workers Matter Economic Recovery Package,” she wrote, explaining that the purpose would be to “ensure that hospitality workers displaced by the COVID-19 pandemic can return to their jobs as the industry reopens…Our legislative package will ensure that hospitality workers, who have held their jobs for years, won’t be discriminated against in the rehiring process and provide a means for the industry to rehire the most experienced and dedicated employees first.”

Whether you’re an elected official, TV anchor or newspaper columnist, the harder thing is to move beyond spin, to reject expediency, to put your hands in the middle of the huddle and do the work of repairing the breach. At other times in our history, that was simply called citizenship.

At first blush, nothing wrong with that, right? Who’s not on board with enforcing anti-discrimination laws? But consider the context. Just days before, the Mayor had shut down indoor dining, amidst a slew of other regulations. (Including the ludicrous stipulation that only families of the same household can dine together outdoors.) No one was reopening, which means no one was rehiring, which means Councilwoman Gym was solving for a problem that didn’t yet exist.

Not only that, Gym was ignoring the real issue: The existential crisis faced by the restaurant industry, which overwhelmingly employs working-class folks. Nationally, restaurants comprise a $650 billion industry that accounts for something like 4 percent of the nation’s GDP, but they have famously small margins, with 90 percent of revenue going to employees, suppliers and rent. One study last summer predicted that 85 percent of non-chain restaurants were staring at extinction by year’s end.

A local public official who values practical problem-solving over the politics of denial would at the very least lobby Congress for the passage of the bipartisan RESTAURANTS Act, co-sponsored by Bucks County’s Brian Fitzpatrick, which would provide a lifeline for many restaurants to make it until we get to widespread vaccine distribution—when the rehiring Gym is concerned about can take place. But Gym could be doing more than that, too; on her personal Twitter page, there’s her motto, after all: Not waiting.

So why stop at waiting for Congress to act? If Gym really cared about restaurant workers, she’d lead a charge among elected officials and stakeholders to bail out local restaurants, which would require the blocking and tackling of political coalition building. Instead, as restaurateur Avram Hornik outlined in a well-reasoned Inquirer op-ed, after the latest round of shutdown orders, he and his colleagues were left to wonder whose side the city was on.

Gym suggesting that the real danger posed to restaurant workers is discrimination practiced by restaurateurs is not only a nod to Trump-like us and them division, it also serves to distract from the true problem.

Gym’s denial, however, pales in comparison to the Mayor’s. On the Sunday before Thanksgiving, the Inquirer published a terrific piece by Christian Hetrick and Joe DiStefano that laid bare something we’ve long harped on at The Citizen: Compared to peer cities, we lag far behind in terms of job growth and, not coincidentally, making it easy to do business here.

The data is incontrovertible. Fully 76 percent of all jobs created locally since 2009 have paid on average $35,000 or less and our median household income of $39,759 not only ranks 23rd of the top 25 cities—barely besting Memphis and Detroit—but is trending downward.

That didn’t prevent this mind-numbing quote of denial from the Kenney administration from making its way into the Inquirer story: “We do not agree with the assertion that Philadelphia isn’t a favorable place for business,” said Lauren Cox, a spokesperson for Mayor Jim Kenney. “Philadelphia had been on a historic job-creation streak prior to the pandemic, with more jobs in the city than at any point since 1990, which is proof that businesses can and do succeed and thrive here.”

“You have to empathize, which means I don’t have to agree with any of your sentiments, but I do have to understand enough to understand why you think the way you do,” said MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi this week. “The idea that you can only hang around with people who share your political views is stupid.”

Hetrick and DiStefano gently correct Cox, pointing out that “the city’s annual job growth in the decade after the Great Recession, however, was slower than the national average and 23 major cities.”

But doesn’t this spin—akin to Trump-like gaslighting—deserve a far stronger rebuke? I don’t know Lauren Cox, and I feel for spokespeople who get trotted out to deny facts that hover in plain sight, but we’ve got to assume that she and those who hide behind her name know full well the game they’re playing. This is where media—as it has done with Trump—needs to borrow from those kids in Parkland, Florida a few years ago and explicitly say: We call BS.

But we’ve got to do more than call out denial; we’ve also got to ask, especially of this Mayor, who hasn’t demonstrated any intellectual curiosity that would lend itself to new policy solutions: What’s the plan, dude?

The Chamber of Commerce, after all, is out with its Recharge & Recover plan, which the Mayor endorsed in a press conference, but doesn’t own. (Unlike other Mayors, such as Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot.) This week, Kenney announced a few meek efforts: allowing restaurants when calculating their use and occupancy tax to exclude the square footage that is closed due to the indoor dining ban; permitting businesses to revise their annual income estimates; delaying the due date of a $250 trash services payment, and the creation of a new tax payment plan option for businesses. These steps, taken together, are more Whack-a-Mole than strategic vision.

Philadelphia faces a daunting list of simultaneous crises. There’s Covid; a cratering economy; a murder epidemic; raw nerve tensions between police and community; the oncoming ramifications of automation and AI, and, oh yeah, climate change. Do you get the sense that anyone in local government is working on confronting any of them in a proactive way? Or does Cox’s response tell you that the longest lame duck mayoral term in history is doubling down on denial? That Jim Kenney is essentially a passenger in his own mayoralty?

But it’s not just elected officials who practice the fine art of denial. In the aftermath of the election, countless thought leaders and pundits have opted for the warmth of their ideological cocoon rather than practice what the moment calls for in each of us: A renewed sense of wide-eyed introspection, and a curiosity about those who may have a different way of seeing the world. In the New York Times, Wajahat Ali wrote a provocative op-ed, proclaiming “I give up” when asked to reach out to and empathize with Trump voters.

In the Inquirer, the normally-clearheaded Helen Ubiñas seemed to give into the same temptation, writing that, since Trump’s election, “I talked and listened and wrote about trying to reason with more Trump supporters than was healthy or productive.” Ubiñas’ piece is more open-minded than Ali’s, but both speak to a close-mindedness we hear often on the Left. Trump got 73 million votes—how can so many people be so wrong! So racist! So…stupid?!?

Well, it’s a big country out there, with a helluva lot of opinions. Have you ever persuaded someone to your point of view by telling them straight off how stupid or racist or deplorable they are?

The data is incontrovertible. Fully 76 percent of all jobs created locally since 2009 have paid on average $35,000 or less and our median household income of $39,759 not only ranks 23rd of the top 25 cities—barely besting Memphis and Detroit—but is trending downward.

According to the American National Election Study, 13 percent of Trump voters in 2016 had voted for Obama twice. If you’re not curious about what went into that switch, then you’re more invested in believing you’re right than in being part of the solution. (Keep in mind the likelihood that, for a swath of white working class voters, voting against Hilary Clinton was an act of rationality, given her husband’s embrace of global free trade. By the time she ran, in other words, the Clintons had had 25 years to retrain workers victimized by necessary but disruptive trade deals like NAFTA, something they only paid lip service to.)

At our virtual Ideas We Should Steal Festival (join us!) last week, we spoke with MSNBC anchor (and Citizen board member) Ali Velshi. As part of his Velshi Across America series, he spent much of the election talking to actual voters in battleground states, and it gave him a firsthand glimpse into the way forward.

“One thing we should all be doing is reading Arlie Russell Hothschild’s book, Strangers In Their Own Land,” he said. “She went and lived in the Louisiana Bayou, very conservative, Rush Limbaugh listeners. And her big lesson was she had to turn her personal alarms off because they went off every two seconds while these people were talking…You have to learn how to actively listen. You have to empathize, which means I don’t have to agree with any of your sentiments, but I do have to understand enough to understand why you think the way you do. The idea that you can only hang around with people who share your political views is stupid.”

Amen, brother. It’s easy to pretend problems don’t exist, or to cast blame when they become too big to deny, or to just simply not engage. Whether you’re an elected official, TV anchor or newspaper columnist, the harder thing is to move beyond spin, to reject expediency, to put your hands in the middle of the huddle and do the work of repairing the breach. At other times in our history, that was simply called citizenship.