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Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee Executive Business meeting, including the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to serve as an associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States, Thursday, Oct. 22, 2020, on Capitol Hill inWashington.

Friday, Oct. 23, 2020 | 2 a.m.

The Republican Partys war on minority voters is more than a last-resort strategy to keep winning elections.

Its actually an assault on democracy itself.

Think about it: Why would the GOP not want people to vote? Yes, the surface-level answer is that Republicans need to freeze out voters of color so the party can continue to win elections by artificially pumping up the power of the white supporters who sustain it, but theres more to it than that. In breaking down the situation, it becomes clear that the GOPs voter suppression strategy speaks to vastly more than simply a political calculation of a minority party.

Going back decades, the GOPs overall campaign strategies have pitted Americans against each other by dividing the population into us versus them us being white voters, them being voters of color. This is a fundamentally biased position that excludes whole swaths of the population. Its not clear exactly when the GOP crossed this line it wasnt always this way. But traces of it can be found in the Southern Strategy that was developed in the Nixon years, and it appears to have metastasized during the Reagan administration remember his welfare queens attacks on Black women to appeal to a white base? and the beginnings of the culture wars of the 1990s.

Today, the Republican Party must suppress votes because its a minority and is one by choice. Instead of broadening its appeal to ethnic communities, it has doubled down on its whites-only strategy. Consider that upwards of 85% of the votes for President Donald Trump in 2016 and congressional Republicans in 2018 came from whites, even as the American population grew more ethnically diverse. Continuing to win elections on that strategy is unsustainable, and the GOP knows it. Therefore, their satisfaction with minority status means they must suppress votes.

The GOP understands that us is a minority group led by an even smaller minority certain big-money interests, the people benefiting from the enormous wealth transfer of recent decades due to Republican economic policies that tilt heavily toward the wealthiest Americans. More wealth is concentrated in fewer hands than at any time in American history, and the GOP is entirely about representing the interest of that 5% or 6% of the population. The rest can be damned. The Republicans simply manipulate the rest of the have-nots in their narrow minority coalition by spreading irrational fears.

The GOPs absolute refusal to try to create a bigger tent by listening to the needs of a larger population and therefore court them means one thing: It doesnt want to represent anyone other than its narrow leadership. This renders the contemporary GOP as fundamentally anti-democracy, because the inherent design of a democracy compels parties to vie to expand their base and represent more, rather than fewer, people. And expanding the base means including more people, solving problems for as many people as possible, and representing the interests of an ever-widening group of constituents. Republicans want nothing to do with that they know who they represent, and its a vanishingly small percentage of society. Todays GOP is deaf to the voices and needs of a diverse America and listens only to the tiny percentage at the top.

The corollary of this is that the modern GOP wants to silence everyone else. Indeed Republicans want to limit the fundamental rights of non-supporters. Consider last weeks explicit remarks of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., that young Black people can go wherever they want in South Carolina as long as they are conservative. The message to nonconservative South Carolinians? You cant even travel freely in the state, much less vote without GOP interference. Us will be free in the GOP view, them will face ever-narrowing rights. And of course, Graham lied when he used the term conservative the modern GOP has no resemblance to a conservative party. Instead what he meant was you can travel wherever you like if youre a Republican.

President Donald Trump amplifies the moral rot of the modern GOP but this anti-democracy effort has been the long-term project of Republicans for several decades, with or without Trump. Whatever vestiges of ideology are gone from todays GOP. It didnt even offer a policy vision for the next four years at its 2020 convention.

True conservative ideology most certainly has a place in the dialogue of the nation but real conservatives ethical and pro-democracy now find themselves stateless because todays GOP has abandoned conservatism.

Clearly, the partys goal is to maintain power for the top few percentages of Americans at the cost of everyone else. It means to silence and suppress the rights of non-Republicans.

There is no cure for that and no signs of reform ideological conservatives must form a new party to represent their political philosophy. For everyone else, the message of this election cycle where Republicans across the country have gone to war with voting is this: This isnt simply strategy, its a worldview and the GOP has declared war on democracy itself.

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If conservatism is to live on in this nation, its adherents must flee the GOP - Las Vegas Sun

Disparate groups of protesters in Senekal on Friday.

PHOTO: Pieter du Toit/News24

Race and cultural issues are being used by some political parties as a growth strategy and this could have an impact on democracy in the long-term, writes Mmusi Maimane.

Who benefits from racial divisions in South Africa? Who benefits from culture wars and increased public conflict? Surely it is not the average citizen? These divisions do not make the workplace more productive, they do not improve the quality of life and they do not create the necessary conditions for quality debate.

South African politics is quickly following the path that American politics has taken - a politics of racial and cultural division have witnessed the American spiral to mayhem. One wonders if this is something that we should readily embrace. It has clearly not improved the quality of discourse or law-making in the USA, if anything the race and culture wars have been a noisy distraction from the hard work of thinking through the modern challenges of democracy and solving them with maturity and due concern for the most vulnerable communities in society.

In our country, we must stand firm and say that race matters.

We cannot ignore that the apartheid system organised around race and allocated social and economic rewards on the basis of race.

We cannot skip ahead to a non-racial utopia without doing the hard work required to undo the injustices of apartheid; we have done some of that work, but the job is incomplete.

Our present goal should be to create a society that is racially cohesive, where there is empathy for injustices of the past, tolerance for difference and a deliberate pursuit of redress for those left behind.

READ |Opinion: As a nation how do we move from hopelessness to hopefulness?

We must affirm that people can be seen for the colour of their skin and that's okay as long as seeing their colour does not lead to discrimination against them because of their colour.

We are not weak because of our racial diversity, actually together we make a beautiful diverse society. We must avoid the current trend towards racial toxicity. We must avoid the acceleration of political race entrepreneurship.

Locally, the beneficiaries of race conflict are the populist political movements and the liberation movements who want to keep up a narrative of an incomplete liberation struggle, borne out of a liberation movement and their offshoots.

Dominant party states

A liberation movement must affirm liberation credentials permanently against the backdrop of failures in other areas. So they benefit from any events that they can use to shape a narrative, reminding citizens that "we liberated from you the oppressive race, and whilst we may have failed on the economy and education, we are still liberators".

If we can all agree that dominant party states are part of the problem in Africa, we must examine what they use to retain popular support. Robert Mugabe was especially good at this, he positioned himself to Africa as the one true defender of Africa against the white colonial settler, his favourite target was Tony Blair.

In the USA, the beneficiaries of the race divisions are the extremist politicians and the extremist movements. They are able to gain traction and funding from the fanning of racial divisions. Ultimately, it is not in their interests to find pathways to unity, they are rewarded by continuation and escalation of conflict.

Some opposition parties are also using the race and cultural issues as a growth strategy, but this is something we must not readily welcome. It poses a long-term threat to the stability of our democracy.

READ |Elmien du Plessis: Senekal murder: Whichever lens you are using, we are affected by the same issue

In SA, the challenge to create unity is profound. We have to work towards creating real economic equity, which is to say, creating real pathways for those who have been economically marginalised to access social mobility and dignity.

This work remains largely undone, and it requires a different atmosphere to the one currently being created by those who benefit from the politics of division and confrontation, the politics of conflict rather than a politics of cohesion.

The outcome of conflict politics based on race and culture wars is that, ironically, it preserves the historical spatial and economic legacy that keep our divisions in place.

Our political discourse is unhealthy for democracy and is unsustainable.We are fighting each other, rather than fighting the real and common enemy.

In simply terms, our enemies are those who abuse power and poverty.

Let us build afresh and break down political parties who divide us on race.

Let us build a new movement.

- Mmusi Maimane is Chief Activist of the One South Africa Movement

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Mmusi Maimane | We must reject race and culture wars - News24

Over the four feverish years since the Brexit vote and Donald Trumps election, we have got used to thinking of populism as a movement whose time has come. Its loudmouth leaders, constant rule-breaking and seductive promises of national renewal have dominated democratic life in much of the world.

Many people who find populism appalling have also been fascinated, sometimes mesmerised. After the relatively predictable and cautious politics of the 90s and 00s, populism has provided electoral shocks, colourful ideologues, risk-taking governments and also a potent sense of novelty.

Surges of populism have happened before, but often so long ago in 1930s America, in 1950s France that until recently the phenomenon had been largely forgotten. So the 21st-century version has been able to present itself as fresh and radical. And many voters and journalists, jaded by decades of stodgier politics, have been taken in. Populism has been the indulged young rebel of the political world.

But that phase in its life cycle may be coming to an end. After four years of President Trump, and four years of trying to get Brexit done, populism is entering a trickier political stage: middle age.

All political movements age if they make it into power, scarred by inevitable failures and worn down by increased public exposure. But populism ages faster than most. Its huge pledges to voters tend to invite disillusionment: at his inauguration, Trump said he would get America winning like never before.

And its governing style is manic and exhausting. After only 15 months in Downing Street, Dominic Cummings already seems to be trying to transform most of the British state, and to be at war with large parts of it.

Having claimed to represent the people against the elite, populism also loses some of its credibility and vitality when populist premiers create their own versions of the establishment. The always-centralising, often complacent governments led by Trump and Boris Johnson look ever less like insurgencies and more like circles of cronies. Theyve made populism feel less novel and iconoclastic by pursuing traditional rightwing policies, such as outsourcing state functions to corporations and cutting taxes for the rich.

Populisms ageing in office has been accelerated by the pandemic, too. Usually a broad-brush politics that plays on voters yearnings for an idealised past or a dramatically better future, populism finds dealing in practical detail with present-day problems much more difficult. The Covid-19 tolls in countries with populist leaders have made that horribly clear.

Over the next few weeks, the British and US varieties of populism are going to be judged in ways they havent been before. First in the US elections, on 3 November, and then after Brexit finally happens on 1 January, the consequences and future of transatlantic populism will become a lot clearer.

Trump likes to say how much he loves electioneering. For once, he may be telling the truth: hes a showman, and elections are a break from governing. But they are also especially perilous for populist leaders.

Losing, as Trump seems increasingly likely to, doesnt just mean leaving office: it also shows that your claim to represent the people is a fiction. And thats the opposite of what populist leaders want elections to do.

They may win power through them, just as other politicians do, but once in office they tend to see elections less as open, democratic competitions and more as opportunities for the people to reaffirm their support. A populist government regards itself not as a temporary [electoral] winner, wrote the analyst of populism Nadia Urbinati in 2018, but as if it were the right winner. So a failure to get re-elected is hard, and sometimes impossible, for populists to accept.

Trumps threats not to respect Novembers result should be seen in this light: as a sign of American populisms brittleness its lack of readiness for electoral setbacks as well as its stubbornness and arrogance.

Populists are also vulnerable if their grand promises end up as unglamorous policies. From 1 January, Brexit will start being less about coming up with clever nationalistic catchphrases, and more about laying on enough temporary toilets for thousands of lorry drivers queueing for customs checks in Kent. I dont think these are the colossal new investments in infrastructure that Johnson envisaged in his 2019 election victory speech.

If Brexit is a disaster, and Trump loses, many may conclude that populism is in terminal decline. That may be premature. The Conservative party and press have already identified enough Brexit saboteurs from the EU to remainer civil servants to keep British populism riled up and politically mobilised. After its defeat in the first referendum on European membership in 1975, British euroscepticism survived many changes of government and shifts in society until it won the second referendum four decades later. The culture wars constantly launched by the Johnson government this week, over the concept of white privilege may sustain British populism for a long time.

American populism is likely to survive any Trump defeat too, however difficult that loss may be to swallow. When populists find themselves in electoral opposition, wrote the political scientist Paulina Ochoa Espejo in 2017, they see that as a flagrant injustice that requires taking back the country. The two most recent Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, had to govern against a distracting backdrop of claims from the right that their tenures were illegitimate, despite the fact they both won two presidential elections. Joe Biden may suffer the same fate.

In Britain, anyone excitedly looking forward to Trumps defeat, and imagining it will be a foretelling of Johnsons, should remember that populists do sometimes get re-elected. The current populist leaders of Poland, Hungary, Turkey and India all managed it. Populism may be a crude and often ineffective philosophy for government, but the record in office of smoother operators such as Emmanuel Macron and David Cameron has not been much better.

And unlike centrism and mainstream conservatism, populism at least has an urgency and intensity that fits the times. Populists realise that the more stable world of the two decades before the financial crisis is not coming back.

Yet even if the movement stays strong in Britain and the US, its best days may be over. Many voters and journalists are now familiar with its tricks and limitations, such as supposedly tough-talking leaders who can only cope with friendly audiences. Meanwhile, orthodox politicians such as Biden and Keir Starmer seem less flustered by populism than their predecessors were. They have not been drawn into its culture wars. By sounding measured instead, theyve made the movement seem shrill.

If British and American populism does lose its hold on power, it may discover an uncomfortable truth about being a supposedly radical movement in opposition. Its much harder if youve just been in office: your rebel aura has gone. Populism has never had that much else.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

Legendary Watergate reporter Bob Woodward will discuss the Trump presidency at a Guardian Live online event on Tuesday 27 October, 7pm GMT (3pm EST). Book tickets here

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This is a moment of truth for rightwing populists but don't celebrate yet - The Guardian

The artist Lynda Barry turned her syllabus into a graphic novel.Art work by Lynda Barry, from "Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor" / Courtesy Drawn & Quarterly

Back in the days before college was largely virtual, one of the first things you learned as a student was that very little, if anything, happens on the first day of classes. Perhaps youve been waiting for this momentyoure eager to have your mind blown, a mix of awe and self-doubt coursing through you. Usually, the professor gives a brief, ready-made spiel about the class, an overview of expectations and policy, after which youre free to go early. Just be sure to pick up a copy of the syllabus on your way out.

Students and teachers often regard the syllabus as a dull formality. At the most basic level, its like an itinerary, offering a sense of where a class might go from week to week. Its a checklist, stating what youll need, when youll need it, and how youll be demonstrating that youve done the work. Increasingly, syllabi have a contractual feel, with language carefully vetted by a schools lawyers insuring that classrooms are accessible and free of discrimination. But, as William Germano, a professor of English at Cooper Union, and Kit Nicholls, the director of the Center for Writing at the same institution, argue in Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything, serving all these purposes means that few people take the syllabus seriously for what it can be: a story.

Maybe you dont know this when the class starts; youre just here to learn something about astronomy or a group of poets. A good story, Germano and Nicholls write, is driven by not-knowing, just as every thoughtfully designed course should contain mysteries, problems, as-yet-unresolved difficulties with which students will wrestle all term. Narrative is also driven by turns, transformations, moments of recognition. Importantly, its up to the students to find their way through this story together, not for the teacher to simply deliver it.

Germano and Nichollss gently polemical, deeply romantic book regards the syllabus, and the work that goes into constructing one, as an opportunity to ponder the possibilities and pathways of the classroom. The document happens to be the classrooms point of entry, timekeeper, and compass, they write. Consequently, they argue that it sets a tone for the months to come, revealing the teachers philosophies, even the expansiveness of their hopes. Everything else about your teachingfrom anxiety dreams to writing assignments, from understanding testing and what its for to your choice of readings and what students are going to do with themare folded into the innocuous document.

The term syllabus comes from a fifteenth-century misreading of the Greek word sittybas, a parchment label or title-slip on a book. But it came into more common usage to refer to a collection of items in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment didnt just result in a widespread expansion of knowledge; it also meant defining these different domains of knowledge and contemplating what they were for. Over time, education itself became more formalized, disciplines were defined, and something resembling the university emerged; in the early twentieth century, the syllabus became synonymous with the methodical organization of knowledge.

Throughout the culture wars of the past half century, the syllabus has been a site of contestation, as reading lists were scrutinized for questions of diversity, inclusion, and how much canons had changed. In recent years, this understanding of the syllabus as a kind of curated primer on a given topic has become more common outside academic settings. In 2014, the Georgetown historian Marcia Chatelain started the #FergusonSyllabus hashtag in order to explore how the Ferguson, Missouri, uprisings could be meaningfully introduced into classrooms. It was an attempt to more closely align academia with the world outside. The following year, a group of scholars started the #CharlestonSyllabus as a way of contextualizing the histories and politics that converged in a white supremacists massacre of worshippers at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church. In 2016, a Ph.D. student named Candice Benbow assembled a Lemonade Syllabus as a way of bringing together the histories, ideas, and inspirations she and others heard in Beyoncs album of the same name. There was something powerful and transgressive about adopting the syllabus, with its air of canonicity and expertise, to describe worlds that had grown in the shadows of official neglect.

Despite its title, Germano and Nichollss book is less interested in actual syllabi than in what this point of entry represents. At a time when college teaching has grown increasingly routinized, and a professors attempts at innovation are pitched as much to the schools internal assessment panels as its students, the authors remind us that education is about moments of spontaneous connection. Youre looking for opportunitiesthose temporal junctures where something special can happen. As such, their book is filled with useful insights about teaching and how, under ideal circumstances, what is transferred isnt a body of knowledge but a kind of craft, a way of reading and taking in the world. They consider the virtues of being the biggest goofball in the room, in order to demystify the student-teacher relationship. They write that the way we gain knowledge is nonlinear and recursive and that teachers should build in moments of repetition, regression, leaping ahead into a course. Maybe one class ends on a note of unease, where it seems like we find ourselves at an impasse, which gets resolved weeks later.

Germano and Nicholls do discuss a few specimens: the ambitious reading list that W. H. Auden handed out for his survey of European literature, which featured six thousand pages of text and nine operas; a law-school class taught by Barack Obama, built around fifty-page readers compiled by students so they could begin to think like teachers; Gloria Anzaldas lengthy syllabus for a feminist-theory course, filled with notes and commentary that undermine the form itself, critiquing traditional notions of mastery and expertise.

The authors of Syllabus come across like fantastic and committed teachers, although, in this case, I would have hoped to learn more about their books purported subject. I would have read hundreds more pages of examples like Audens and Anzaldas. I was drawn to Syllabus because, as a student and professor, I have always found the genre fascinating. Some syllabi are mystifyingly brief, others aggressively helpful, filled with pages upon pages of generous encouragement and auxiliary readings. Maybe the instructor has included a stirring epigraph or a striking image to distinguish theirs from all the others. In the case of the artist Lynda Barry, her entire lesson plan takes the form of a graphic novel.

There is a folder on my desktop called Other Peoples Syllabi that I consult whenever Im stumped building my own. I keep some syllabi because they offer primers for fields of knowledge that I only dimly understand; I keep others because Im curious about how a peer has taken the same collection of books I teach but shaped them into a far more provocative argument.

The literary-analysis class that David Foster Wallace taught in the nineties included airport thrillers by Jackie Collins, Mary Higgins Clark, and Thomas Harris. Underneath the course aims, he writes a WARNING to students: Dont let any potential lightweightish-looking qualities of the texts delude you into thinking that this will be a blow-off-type class. The writer Lily Hoang included a cookie policy for her M.F.A. fiction-writing workshop. As in, if your phone rings in class, you have to bring cookies for everyone the following week. In 1971, the jazz visionary Sun Ra taught a course called The Black Man in the Universe at Berkeley, and the reading list is a fascinating glimpse into his self-made cosmo-mythology, including everything from the Russian occultist Madame Blavatsky to the King James Bible (which Ra referred to as The Source Book of Mans Life and Death) and the Black fiction writer and poet Henry Dumas, who had been killed by a police officer three years earlier.

Few of us produce syllabi that fit within (or illuminate) our uvre or sensibility the way these examples do. I still look forward to constructing mine, fiddling with old ones, thinking about sequencing as though I were putting together a mixtape, even if the courses rarely go the way Id intended. A syllabus, as opposed to a monograph or journal article, is one of the rare things an academic writes knowing that it will be readalthough perhaps not when we intended, or with the care that we put into its assembly. A syllabus is the beginning of a story but also a leap of faith. You hand it out, its no longer yours, and you trust that students will know what to do with it.

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A Celebration of the Syllabus - The New Yorker

During this summers historic protests for racial equality, film studio Lionsgate announced a groundbreaking partnership with the New York Times, Nikole Hannah-Jones and Oprah Winfrey to adapt the award-winning1619 Project into an expansive portfolio of new media content. At the time, Lionsgate confirmed that feature films, television series and other content for a global audience were in the works.

Late last week at a virtual attractions expo hosted by tourism industry outlet Blooloop, Lionsgate executive vice president and head of global live, interactive & location-based entertainment Jenefer Brown revealed that the company was developing exhibitions and live events based on the concept.

In speaking at the Blooloop V-Expo, Brown explained that Lionsgate was looking into developing content from the 1619 Project into exhibitions and experiences, and perhaps live events. Lionsgate film franchises Now You See Me, La La Landand The Hunger Games were all successfully translated into live performances, and The Hunger Games also saw success with a traveling exhibition.

Even before this summers rise of Black Lives Matter protests, there wasincreasing interest in uncovering and understanding the racist actions that fill U.S. history. Demand has meant that despite being open for four years, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (another project Oprah Winfrey was involved in, including making a $13 million donation to ensure its realization) still required timed entry tickets on select days. (It currently requires them as part of its COVID safety protocols.) In 2019, the museum ranked among the most visited Smithsonian museums in the nation, with an estimated 2 million visitors. Meanwhile, the nations first memorial dedicated to lynching victims saw thousands in attendance for its opening in 2018.

Trumps thrusting of the 1619 Project into the middle of the modern culture wars has helped make the New York Times Magazine project a household name. Conservatives, especially President Trump, have been vocal critics of the project, condemning its conclusion that systemic racism is at the root of many decisions that have had significant impacts on present-day realities. In September, Trump vowed to investigate the use of the 1619 Projects resources within public schools, claiming "This project rewrites American history." Trump also vowed to limit federal agencies from conducting racial sensitivity training that it finds offensive, especially those that teach from a Critical Race Theory perspective or acknowledge the existence of white privilege.

None of the partners working on the upcoming events or exhibitions have yet shared timelines regarding the new collaboration.

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The 1619 Project will be adapted into exhibits and live events by Lionsgate with Oprah Winfrey - Orlando Weekly