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This is a piece by Stan Grant, Professor of Indigenous Belonging at Charles Sturt University, and Jack Jacobs, Research Fellow at Charles Sturt University, following the launch of the Yindyamarra Pledge for democracy: a call to reimagine Australian democracy.

Democracy is under siege.

In every corner of the world, it faces external and domestic threats that challenge its standing relative to alternative political systems.

China rises, an authoritarian power to threaten the West.

Russia invades Ukraine, its democratic neighbour, as the West rallies in support.

Autocracy is also on the rise within democracies. The United States, Brazil, United Kingdom, India and several European democracies are or have recently been led by populists fuelled by the discontent of the dispossessed: those left behind by markets that have for decades prioritised profits over people.

All this is inflamed by tribalism and a public debate deranged by the worst aspects of social media.

Not long ago, political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared liberal democracy the end of history.

What went wrong?

One place to look for an explanation is in history, in the Enlightenment myth of progress that has shaped our world since the 18th century.

From the French Revolution of 1789 to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, many philosophical liberals have been motivated by the idea that history has a forward movement: that human societies, though infinitely complex and diverse, are to be experimented on and redesigned according to rational, liberal principles.

This illusion of destiny to invoke a striking phrase from Harvard University philosopher and economist Amartya Sen has left tragedy in its wake.

Perhaps the most pernicious form of progress myth has been colonialism.

Throughout the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, European powers struggled to subjugate once free peoples in Australia, the Americas, Asia, Africa and the Pacific.

In her recent book, Legacy of Violence, Harvard historian Caroline Elkins reminds us that in the British case, liberalism was used as a coercive force:

[] violence was inherent to liberalism. It resided in liberalisms reformism, its claims to modernity, its promises of freedom, and its notion of the law exactly the opposite places where one normally associates violence.

In places like Australia and India from where these authors hail, respectively the British promised freedom but delivered submission.

What are we to do with liberal democracy, a tradition that makes a virtue of freedom yet has been imposed down the barrel of a gun?

To the colonised millions of the world, liberalism remains captured by Whiteness.

These people are speaking back to liberalism.

They have not always spoken the language of liberalism they have their own traditions of tolerance, dignity, sympathy and respect but have brought a powerful moral force to liberalism.

Edmund Burke, the 18th-century philosopher-statesman of Irish Catholic heritage, spoke back to liberalism when he impeached Warren Hastings, governor of Bengal, for betraying liberal ideals through colonialism in India.

Mahatma Gandhi, writing a century later in Hind Swaraj, spoke back to liberalism when he called on the English to honour their own scriptures and respect Indian freedom.

W.E.B. Du Bois spoke back to liberalism when he told a UN Peace Conference after the second world war that the West had conquered Germany [] but not their ideas by keeping illiberal practices alive through colonialism in Africa.

These people shamed liberalism.

Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of a bus and inspired a movement.

Powerful voices like Martin Luther King junior may have appealed to liberalisms dream of character over colour, but he had no illusions about an America that he had also damned to hell.

In Australia, Yorta Yorta man William Cooper sent a petition to King George VI to remind him of his moral duty to a people whose lands were expropriated by the Crown and whom the Crown denied legal status. He called for black seats in parliament to prevent the extinction of the Aboriginal race.

And Pearl Gambayani Gibbs helped lead a day of mourning in 1938, proclaiming: I am more proud of my Aboriginal blood than of my white blood.

These figures implore us to remember that liberal democracy is but one way of living and being.

Wiradjuri people have our own philosophy, yindyamarra. It defies simple translation but it grounds respect in all we do.

How do we bring respect yindyamarra to Australian democracy? Is our liberalism even capable of respecting the sovereignty never ceded of First Nations peoples?

Australian liberalism has passed from extermination to exclusion to assimilation but has stopped short of recognition.

After two centuries of broken hearts and shattered dreams, it is little wonder hope can appear delusional.

As Munanjahli and South Sea Island writer and scholar Chelsea Watego has said: Hope is as passive as the social world we occupy insists we have to be.

Hope, or its absence, has been an enduring theme in talking back to history and political liberalism. Du Bois spoke of a hope not hopeless but unhopeful.

A constitutionally enshrined First Nations Voice offers its own version of what Noel Pearson has spoken of as radical hope.

Proponents of the Voice say it is a pathway to justice to truth and treaty.

Political philosopher Duncan Ivison says it prefigures a possible refounding of Australia.

But its modesty a voice not a veto risks losing faith with First Nations people. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has already said it is a voice nothing more, nothing less.

He says the parliament will set the composition of the Voice.

That begs the question: can the parliament meet the urgency of the demands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples?

The challenge of the Constitutional Voice is to honour the unending struggle of those Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander champions who have sought to prise open the locked door of Australian democracy.

With liberal democracy struggling under the weight of its racist and violent history, now is a time for our voices to add more weight to the scales: to demand liberal democracy is responsible, accountable, and fit for the 21st century.

Yindyamarra is a Wiradjuri voice; a voice for justice.

It is a voice inspired by Wiradjuri elders including my father, Dr Uncle Stan Grant Snr, whose work has helped a new generation to speak Wiradjuri and speak back to power.

Yindyamarra is his gift to me, his son.

Yindyamarra winhanganha: calls us to build a world of respect grounded in our knowledge and being in a world worth living in

Yindyamarra is an antidote to Western nihilism and the worst of Western liberalism.

Yindyamarra is my fathers Wiradjuri hope; a hope to be earned.

Yindyamarra dares this nation to build a democracy worthy of that hope.

Excerpt from:
The power of yindyamarra: how we can bring respect to Australian democracy - The Conversation Indonesia

Peter Thiel is far from the first billionaire who has wielded his fortune to try to influence the course of American politics. But in an election year when democracy itself is said to be on the ballot, he stands out for assailing a longstanding governing system that he has described as deranged and in urgent need of course correction.

The German-born investor and tech entrepreneur, a Silicon Valley disrupter who helped found PayPal alongside Elon Musk and made his fortune as one of the earliest investors in Facebook, has catapulted himself into the top ranks of the mega-donor class by pouring close to $30m into this years midterm elections.

Hes not merely favoring one party over another, but is supporting candidates who deny the legitimacy of Joe Bidens election as president and have, in their different ways, called for the pillars of the American establishment to be toppled entirely.

Thiels priorities this midterm cycle have partly aligned with those of Donald Trump, with whom he has had an on-again, off-again relationship since writing him a $1.25m check during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Thiel, like Trump, has made it his business to end the careers of what he calls the traitorous 10, Republican House members who voted to impeach Trump in the wake of the January 6 insurrection. Four of these members opted not to run for re-election at all, and four more, including Liz Cheney, the vice-chair of the House committee investigating January 6, went down in the primaries.

But there are also signs that Thiel is thinking around and beyond the former president. The lions share of his largesse $28m and counting has been directed towards two business proteges who, with his help, have established themselves as gadfly rightwing darlings: JD Vance, the best-selling author of the blue-collar memoir Hillbilly Elegy, who is running for Senate in Ohio, and Blake Masters, a self-styled anti-progressive and anti-globalist who is running for Senate in Arizona.

Over the past decade, ever since the supreme court dramatically loosened the rules of political campaign giving in its Citizens United decision, Thiel has placed sizable bets on candidates who are not only conservative but have sought to challenge longstanding institutional traditions and break the Republican partys own norms: Senator Ted Cruz in Texas and Senator Josh Hawley in Missouri as well as Trump himself.

Masters, who has campaigned on the notion that psychopaths are running the country right now and spoken approvingly of the anti-establishment philosophy of the 1990s Unabomber, and Vance, a frequent speaker on the university circuit during his book tour days who now says universities are the enemy, fit the same mould. They and Thiel all have ties to a branch of the New Right known as NatCon, whose adherents believe, broadly, that the establishment needs to be torn down, much as Thiel and his fellow Silicon Valley disrupters believed two decades ago that the future lay in destroying longstanding business models and practices.

Thiel himself opined as far back as 2009 that he no longer believed democracy to be compatible with freedom and expressed little hope that voting will make things better. While a member of Trumps presidential transition team in 2016, he flashed his institution-busting instincts by proposing that a leading climate change skeptic, William Happer, be appointed as White House science adviser. He also pushed for a libertarian bitcoin entrepreneur who did not believe in drug trials to head up the Food and Drug Administration.

Such proposals were too much even by Trumps iconoclastic standards. Steve Bannon, Trumps ultra-right campaign manager and political strategist, told a Thiel biographer: Peters idea of disrupting government is out there.

Thiel did not respond to a request for an interview, and his representatives did not respond to multiple invitations to comment.

Masters and Vance also did not respond to inquiries.

Thiel sat out the 2020 election but appears to have been re-energized by the Covid-19 pandemic, Trumps claims of a stolen presidential election and the January 6 insurrection. Addressing a NatCon convention this time last year, he denounced the incredible derangement of various forms of thought, political life, scientific life and the sense-making machinery generally in this country.

Liberal democracy, in his view, had turned the United States government into a dissent-squashing Ministry of Truth working toward a homogenizing, brain-dead, one-world state a problem to which only rightwing nationalism could provide an all-important corrective.

Were close to a Toto moment, a little dog pulling aside the curtain on the holy of holies only to find theres nobody there, he told the crowd. We always think of democracy as a good thing. But where do you shift from the wisdom of crowds to the madness of crowds? When does it become a mob, a racket, a totalitarian lie?

Such views might be easy to write off as the eccentricities of a wealthy man but for the money that Thiel has spent buying influence and supporting like-minded candidates thanks in large part to a campaign financing system that, while still capping contributions to individual campaigns, allows unlimited funding of nominally outside groups and political action committees.

Campaign finance experts see Thiel as a symptom of a much broader problem: a political environment in which a small group of mega-donors are growing ever bolder in the size of the checks they write and the erosion of any nominal firewall between the war chests run by candidates and the funds controlled by outside groups dedicated to their success.

It does seem to be getting worse, said Chisun Lee, an expert on campaign finance who directs the Brennan Centers Elections and Government program at New York University. Outside spending in this federal midterm cycle is more than double the last midterm cycle. Since Citizens United, just 12 mega-donors, eight of them billionaires, have paid one dollar out of every 13 spent in federal elections. And now were seeing a troubling new trend that some mega-donors are sponsoring campaigns that attack the fundamentals of democracy itself.

Thiels spending has been dwarfed this year by at least three other mega-donors Soros ($128m to the Democrats), shipping products tycoon Richard Uihlein ($53m to Republicans) and hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin ($50m to Republicans). And Thiel has some way to go to match the consistent giving, cycle after cycle, of the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson, the late Las Vegas casino magnate.

Many experts also believe the attack on democracy began long before it became as explicit as Thiel has made it, because the whole point of funneling large amounts of money into the political system is to sway policy away from the will of the majority to the narrow interests of the donors and their friends.

This ability to control the policy agenda drives spending even more than the desire to see specific candidates win, says the Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, whose 2011 book Republic, Lost offers an enduringly devastating analysis of the relationship between money and political influence. And the spending is likely only to increase.

Youre going to see much, much bigger individual contributions and an acceleration of contributions to Super Pacs [like the ones established to support Vance and Masters], Lessig said. The candidates and the Super Pacs cant coordinate on spending, but that doesnt mean they cant coordinate on the fundraising. Since the Super Pacs are outspending candidates by orders of magnitude, its all a dance to flush money into Super Pacs They basically call the shots, and politicians cant get anything through that they oppose.

Less than a month from election day, both Vance and Masters are trailing their Democratic opponents in the polls (Vance by less than Masters). But, Lessig says, it would be wrong to conclude Thiel or any of the other mega-donors are wasting their money.

If youre a candidate and you know $10m is going to come in against you on a particular issue, he said, you are going to bend to avoid the effect of that money, whether or not its going to decide the race If youre someone who would otherwise be a strong climate activist, but you know that if you mention a carbon tax, a million dollars will drop from some anti-carbon tax Super Pac, you wont talk about it.

Thiels bid to overthrow the system, in other words, goes well beyond his ability to determine which party controls the Senate next year. The money will solidify the notion that the country is being run by psychopaths, at least among a hard core of Republican voters, analysts warn, and will further harden the ideological battle lines that have split the country in two and made common ground ever harder to find. It also brings the extreme opinions of NatCon further into the mainstream, making it easier for radical Republican candidates to run and win in future races, they say.

We are at a crisis point here, not so much because the ideas are hard to defeat but we dont have a context in which to defeat them, Lessig said. The fact that the same number of people believe the election was stolen as believed it on 6 January is a profound indictment of the information ecology in America.

The Brennan Center believes there are ways of improving the system, at least at the state and local level, and points to efforts in both red and blue states to close certain loopholes and introduce public financing models to rein in the influence of the mega-donors. Lee said she would also like to see federal legislation to build a meaningful firewall between campaign funds and Super Pacs.

The legislation exists, she said, and it would be a constitutional improvement even under [the] Citizens United [ruling]. All we need is the political will to act.

The rest is here:
Peter Thiels midterm bet: the billionaire seeking to disrupt Americas democracy - The Guardian

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We are facing a danger to democracy, as the media are constantly reminding us.

Its Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans, says the press, the current president and the Democratic Party, who refused to accept the results of a fair election, are perpetrating the big lie and electing people to steal the next election.

For his part, Trump uses equally dramatic rhetoric, making unsubstantiated charges about the 2020 election and how he should be reinstated, and accusing his opponents of the big lie.

"For six straight years," he said at his Ohio rally over the weekend, "I've been harassed, investigated, defamed, slandered and persecuted like no other president. And probably like no one in American history These people are sick, sick."

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President Joe Biden, protected by bulletproof glass, delivers remarks on what he calls the "continued battle for the Soul of the Nation" in front of Independence Hall at Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia, September 1, 2022. (REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst)

All this unfolds under the shadow of Jan. 6 Trump says he plans to pardon some of those convicted and the Justice Department probe of the former president, who took many top-secret, classified documents to Mar-a-Lago.

So were inundated with warnings about the threat to democracy as well as Trump, in a radio interview, saying there will be "big problems" in this country if hes indicted.

But whats increasingly happening is that this debate becomes conflated with ideological goals.

When President Biden gave his Philadelphia speech the one the White House insisted was not political he pivoted from attacking Trump World to saying that "MAGA forces" would take the country backwards "to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love."

In other words, youre an outlier if you dont agree with the Democratic agenda on abortion rights, birth control and same-sex marriage. But those, unlike the importance of democracy, are the subject of legitimate political debate.

I see the same two-step in a big front-page New York Times story titled "A Crisis Coming: The Twin Threats to American Democracy."

The first, "acute" threat is the familiar one: a growing movement inside one of the countrys two major parties the Republican Party to refuse to accept defeat in an election."

Then comes number two:

"The power to set government policy is becoming increasingly disconnected from public opinion."

And what that means, according to the piece, is that Democratic goals, and the ability to elect Democrats, are being frustrated by our structure of government. The complaints here, some of which are familiar, are ultimately partisan, but smuggled in the Trojan horse of defending democracy.

The piece is by David Leonhardt, a former Washington bureau chief, a smart guy who makes some smart points. But he has to acknowledge that some of what hes complaining about is "written into the Constitution." So now the Constitution is a threat to democracy?

Facimile of The Constitution For The United States Of America Dated September 17, 1787. (Fotosearch/Getty Images)

Every schoolkid knows that America was created as a republic, and that the compromises that favor small states were adopted not just because they feared being overrun by the big states, but because it was the only way to pass the Constitution in 1787.

Thats why each state has two senators to offset the advantage for the big states in the House, where the number of seats is awarded by population.

The problem, the Times says, is that "in 1790, the largest state (Virginia) had about 13 times as many residents as the smallest (Delaware). Today, California has 68 times as many residents as Wyoming; 53 times as many as Alaska; and at least 20 times as many as another 11 states." So when Biden won California by 29% and New York by 23%, the huge margins are "wasted votes" from the Democratic point of view.

And that gives the Senate "a pro-Republican bias," the paper declares.

Well, as JFK said, life is unfair. And good luck amending the Constitution on the makeup of the Senate, given that two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states would never go for it.

The same goes for the Electoral College. I wouldnt be upset to see it abolished tomorrow, though then presidential candidates wouldnt waste time campaigning in smaller states.

"In seven of the past eight presidential elections, stretching back to Bill Clintons 1992 victory, the Democratic nominee has won the popular vote," says Leonhardt. And yet, "two of the past four presidents have taken office despite losing the popular vote" namely George W. Bush and Trump. So that, ipso facto, is unfair to Democrats.

Except everyone campaigns to get to 270. And again, good luck getting enough support to junk the Electoral College.

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Geographic trends have also contributed, with Democrats tending to cluster in urban states and metropolitan areas, limiting their impact in the winner-take-all Electoral College.

As for the House, gerrymandering is a factor, and both parties have shamelessly played that game. But Leonhardt says Republicans have been "more forceful about gerrymandering" than the other party. Really? In April, New Yorks top court in the state where the Times is published threw out the Democrats attempt at gerrymandering.

Then we get to the Supreme Court, so out of step with popular opinion that it threw out Roe v. Wade. "Every current justice has been appointed during one of the past nine presidential terms, and a Democrat has won the popular vote in seven of those nine and the presidency in five of the nine. Yet the court is now dominated by a conservative, six-member majority."

Theres one legitimate beef here: The Republican essentially hijacked a SCOTUS seat by refusing to give Merrick Garland a hearing, then rushed through Amy Coney Barrett at the end of Trumps term.

But luck is also involved: Jimmy Carter didnt get a high court appointment during his term. And Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to retire when Barack Obama could have named her successor. Ah, but if only "Senate seats were based on population," maybe none of Trumps three appointees would have been confirmed. Seriously?

Activists flocked to the Supreme Court following the overturn of Roe v. Wade on Friday, June 24, 2022. (Fox News Digital/Lisa Bennatan)

Whats more, the Supreme Court is periodically out of step with public opinion in ways that can be good. Did a majority of the country favor integrated schools at the time of the Brown v. Board of Ed in 1954? Of course not.

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In only one instance does Leonardt take a swipe at his own side: "Some on the left now consider widely held opinions among conservative and moderate Americans on abortion, policing, affirmative action, Covid-19 and other subjects to be so objectionable that they cannot be debated." That is stifling open debate and here comes the qualifier "in the view of many conservatives and some experts."

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So: If we awarded Senate seats based on population and threw out the Electoral College, Democrats would win more presidential elections and be able to appoint more Supreme Court justices the real agenda here. Too bad the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia were so misguided.

These are all points that have been debated for a very long time, and given that pesky Constitution, are not going to change. But does that kind of help-the-Democrats argument really constitute a threat to democracy?

Howard Kurtz is the host of FOX News Channel's MediaBuzz(Sundays 11 a.m.-12 p.m. ET).Based in Washington, D.C., he joined the network in July 2013 and regularly appears on Special Report with Bret Baierand other programs.

Read more from the original source:
The latest threat to democracy? The language of the Constitution is hurting Dems - Fox News

The January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol sparked an ongoing debate about how widely held democratic values are in the United States and what can be done to strengthen those values. One commonly proposed prescription is revitalizing public education about the duties, as well as rights, of citizenship in democratic societies. It is a familiar theme in American history with some of the earliest efforts to publicly fund education in the 19th century having civic education as a leading rationale.

In a paper published this monthin the American Political Science Review, Kenneth Scheve, Dean Acheson Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs and Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean of social science, and his co-authors examine whether these efforts in the early republic worked. Did state funding of education nurture a culture of participatory democracy?

Scheve, a faculty fellow with the Institution for Social and Policy Research (ISPS); Tine Paulsen, assistant professor of political science and international relations at the University of Southern California; and David Stasavage, Silver Professor of Politics at New York University, utilized a natural experiment in which some towns in Central New York were provided additional financial support for education based on funds established when the area was first being settled.

Analyzing outcomes from the mid-1800s by comparing neighboring regions that differed in access to a geographically determined external source of education funding, the authors found that greater public funding of primary school education led to improved earnings, lower inequality, and higher voter turnout. The authors argue that the historical circumstances that led to sharp differences in public education funding in these towns allow for the differences to be interpreted as the causal effect of greater education spending.

We interpret this result as suggesting that, in this case, we have an example where even if initial endowments were favorable to democracy, creating a participatory democratic culture depended on subsequent political choices, and perhaps the most important of these was to educate the population, they wrote.

Examining gubernatorial elections in 1842 and 1844 and the presidential election in 1844, the researchers found that residing within the towns receiving additional public education funding contributed to a 3-percentage point increase in eligible voters casting ballots. This was true even as those elections were very competitive and overall turnout was high.

Our findings support the view that maintaining democracy requires active investments by the state, the authors wrote. Something that has important implications for other places and other times including today.

Read more here:
Did Publicly Funded Education Promote Democracy in Early America? | Institution for Social and Policy Studies - Yale University

Major Garrett and David Becker open The Big Truth, half a love letter to democracy and half a warning about its ailing state, with a bit of speculative fiction about the ways a contested election could destabilize the country, rend states apart, and ultimately lead to a national divorcethat is, a second American civil war. The great cleaving could be closer than we think, the authors write. But while they were putting pen to paper, they struggled a bit with the hypothetical. We asked ourselves, Are we being too dramatic? Garrett told me, reflecting back on the period. Hell, I feel now like we were unduly restrained.

Garrett, chief Washington correspondent for CBS News, and Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, followed that line of inquiry with me in an interview, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, ahead of their September 20 book release. Democracy, they told me, has become existentially endangered by Donald Trumps baseless claims of election fraud. And while both men laid out various ways the country could be fought back from the breach,Becker also said that their optimism is being fundamentally challenged right now. (The authors arent the only ones concerned: Democracy Challenged is how The New York Times put it on Sundays front page.) Ive been someone who people dont want to invite to parties lately, Becker said. Because Im a little bit depressing.

Vanity Fair: I want to begin on a high note. You write in the book that you harbor deep, but not debilitating fears about the future of American democracy. What gives you cause for optimism? Why arent the concerns debilitating, since so much of what you describe here is pretty frightening?

Major Garrett: What gives me optimism is the longevity of our country. We have stared into abysses before and pulled back from them. I know thats an overused metaphor right now, and I know there have been barrels upon barrels of either ink or the digital equivalent spilled asking when America will pull back from the current abyss. So the question persists. Why are you optimistic? Well, 100,000 people in 2020 signed up to be poll workers for the first time, jumping into a breach of a situation that was not familiar to them. Not because they were going to get paid, not because they were going to be lionized in their community. Not because they were going to get a promotion. But because it mattered at a very basic civic level of accountability and participation. And Im gonna bank our countrys future on their optimism.

Now, having said that, I know some of them didnt get what they bargained for. They didnt sign up thinking that they would be harassed, followed from their polling place to their cars, or people who train them and who they look up to being harassed, threatened, and the like. So its a wobbly moment, and Im not going to suggest to you it isnt a wobbly moment. But I have an innate, enduring confidence in the American experiment. And that American experiment is having oxygen breathed into it in a way that to some is unfamiliar, but I believe is deeply strengthening. The concepts and the language we have always used around democracy are now being applied. And people are at the table, because theyve been elected to be at the federal level in ways we havent seen before. Thats not easy, but its real, and that participation and that visibility and that representation, in the modern sense, sends signals to people long underrepresented that this is actually real. And the notion that they have a stake in that reality is much more tangible. Does that please everyone? No. Does it get it closer to what we have long aspired to and said we believe in? Yes. And I believe my optimism is rooted almost entirely in that.

David Becker: Yeah, I have a similar thought. We are in a perilous moment in American democracy. And it is easy to focus on those who failed to stand up for democracy when given the opportunity, and we do in the book. But whats also sometimes somewhat harder is to note the large numbers of people who have stood up, and often at great personal peril to themselves, often at great political peril to themselves, often at physical peril to themselves and their families. To do the right thing, to stand up for an election. That was the most transparent, secure, and verified election in American history, even when their candidate lost. And that is in the best tradition of American democracy. And we havent had to see many people courageously stand for that in the past, because it was never a question with candidates and their supporters about whether or not they would accept the results of elections.

Threats to democracy, stress tests on the electoral processobviously, nothing new. You write about several of them: 1876, 2000. What was different about 2020? And, obviously, looking forward at the challenges were facing in 2022, 2024, and beyond?

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We Have Stared Into Abysses Before and Pulled Back: Looking for Flashes of Hope as Democracy Frays - Vanity Fair