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To look on the bright side for a moment, one effect of the Republican assault on electionswhich takes the form, naturally, of the very thing Republicans accuse Democrats of doing: rigging the systemmight be to open our eyes to how undemocratic our democracy is. Strictly speaking, American government has never been a government by the people.

This is so despite the fact that more Americans are voting than ever before. In 2020, sixty-seven per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot for President. That was the highest turnout since 1900, a year when few, if any, women, people under twenty-one, Asian immigrants (who could not become citizens), Native Americans (who were treated as foreigners), or Black Americans living in the South (who were openly disenfranchised) could vote. Eighteen per cent of the total population voted in that election. In 2020, forty-eight per cent voted.

Some members of the losers party have concluded that a sixty-seven-per-cent turnout was too high. They apparently calculate that, if fewer people had voted, Donald Trump might have carried their states. Last year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, legislatures in nineteen states passed thirty-four laws imposing voting restrictions. (Trump and his allies had filed more than sixty lawsuits challenging the election results and lost all but one of them.)

In Florida, it is now illegal to offer water to someone standing in line to vote. Georgia is allowing counties to eliminate voting on Sundays. In 2020, Texas limited the number of ballot-drop-off locations to one per county, insuring that Loving County, the home of fifty-seven people, has the same number of drop-off locations as Harris County, which includes Houston and has 4.7 million people.

Virtually all of these reforms will likely make it harder for some people to vote, and thus will depress turnoutwhich is the not so subtle intention. This is a problem, but it is not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that, as the law stands, even when the system is working the way its designed to work and everyone who is eligible to vote does vote, the government we get does not reflect the popular will. Michael Kinsleys law of scandal applies. The scandal isnt whats illegal. The scandal is whats legal.

It was not unreasonable for the Framers to be wary of direct democracy. You cant govern a nation by plebiscite, and true representative democracy, in which everyone who might be affected by government policy has an equal say in choosing the people who make that policy, had never been tried. So they wrote a rule book, the Constitution, that places limits on what the government can do, regardless of what the majority wants. (They also countenanced slavery and the disenfranchisement of women, excluding from the electorate groups whose life chances certainly might be affected by government policy.) And they made it extremely difficult to tinker with those rules. In two hundred and thirty-three years, they have been changed by amendment only nine times. The last time was fifty-one years ago.

You might think that the further we get from 1789 the easier it would be to adjust the constitutional rule book, but the opposite appears to be true. We live in a country undergoing a severe case of ancestor worship (a symptom of insecurity and fear of the future), which is exacerbated by an absurdly unworkable and manipulable doctrine called originalism. Something that Alexander Hamilton wrote in a newspaper columnthe Federalist Papers are basically a collection of op-edsis treated like a passage in the Talmud. If we could unpack it correctly, it would show us the way.

The Bill of Rights, without which the Constitution would probably not have been ratified, is essentially a deck of counter-majoritarian trump cards, a list, directed at the federal government, of thou-shalt-nots. Americans argue about how far those commandments reach. Is nude dancing covered under the First Amendments guarantee of the freedom of expression? (It is.) Does the Second Amendment prohibit a ban on assault weapons? (Right now, its anyones guess.) But no one proposes doing away with the first ten amendments. They underwrite a deeply rooted feature of American life, the I have a right syndrome. They may also make many policies that a majority of Americans say they favor, such as a ban on assault weapons, virtually impossible to enact because of an ambiguous sentence written in an era in which pretty much the only assault weapon widely available was a musket.

Some checks on direct democracy in the United States are structural. They are built into the system of government the Framers devised. One, obviously, is the Electoral College, which in two of the past six elections has chosen a President who did not win the popular vote. Even in 2020, when Joe Biden got seven million more votes than his opponent, he carried three states that he needed in order towin the Electoral CollegeArizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvaniaby a total of about a hundred thousand votes. Flip those states and we would have elected a man who lost the popular vote by 6.9 million. Is that what James Madison had in mind?

Another check on democracy is the Senate, an almost comically malapportioned body that gives Wyomings five hundred and eighty thousand residents the same voting power as Californias thirty-nine million. The District of Columbia, which has ninety thousand more residents than Wyoming and twenty-five thousand more than Vermont, has no senators. Until the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified, in 1913, senators were mostly not popularly elected. They were appointed by state legislatures. Republicans won a majority of votes statewide in Illinois in the 1858 midterms, but Abraham Lincoln did not become senator, because the state legislature was controlled by Democrats, and they reappointed StephenA. Douglas.

Even though the Senate is split fifty-fifty, Democratic senators represent forty-two million more people than Republican senators do. As Eric Holder, the former Attorney General, points out in his book on the state of voting rights, Our Unfinished March (One World), the Senate is lopsided. Half the population today is represented by eighteen senators, the other half by eighty-two. The Senate also packs a parliamentary death ray, the filibuster, which would allow forty-one senators representing ten per cent of the public to block legislation supported by senators representing the other ninety per cent.

Many recent voting regulations, such as voter-I.D. laws, may require people to pay to obtain a credential needed to vote, like a drivers license, and so Holder considers them a kind of poll taxwhich is outlawed by the Twenty-fourth Amendment. (Lower courts so far have been hesitant to accept this argument.)

But the House of Representativesthats the peoples house, right? Not necessarily. In the 2012 Presidential election, Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney by five million votes, and Democrats running for the House got around a million more votes than Republicans, but the Republicans ended up with a thirty-three-seat advantage. Under current law, congressional districts within a state should be approximately equal in population. So how did the Republicans get fewer votes but more seats? Its the same thing that let StephenA. Douglas retain his Senate seat in 1858: partisan gerrymandering.

This is the subject of Nick Seabrooks timely new book, One Person, One Vote: A Surprising History of Gerrymandering in America (Pantheon), an excellent, if gloomy, guide to the abuse (or maybe just the use) of an apparently mundane feature of our system of elections: districting.

We tend to think of a gerrymander as a grotesquely shaped legislative district, such as the salamander-like Massachusetts district that was drawn to help give one party, the Democratic-Republicans, a majority in the Massachusetts Senate in the election of 1812. The governor of the state, Elbridge Gerry, did not draw the district, but he lent his name to the practice when he signed off on it.(Seabrook tells us that Gerrys name is pronounced with a hard G, but its apparently O.K. to pronounce gerrymander jerry.)

Gerrys gerrymander was by no means the first, however. There was partisan gerrymandering even in the colonies. In fact, the only traditional districting principle that has been ubiquitous in America since before the founding, Seabrook writes, is the gerrymander itself. Thats the way the system was set up.

Partisan gerrymandering has produced many loopy districts through the years, but today, on a map, gerrymandered districts often look quite respectable. No funny stuff going on here! Thats because computer software can now carve out districts on a street-by-street and block-by-block level. A favorite trick is moving a district line so that a sitting member of Congress or a state legislator is suddenly residing in another district. Its all supposed to be done sub rosa, but, Seabrook says, those in the business of gerrymandering have a tendency to want to brag about their exploits.

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American Democracy Was Never Designed to Be Democratic - The New Yorker

So, how should America deal with media that purports to be news but, in fact, is offering a healthy serving of spin, misdirection, and outright lies? if you have any additional ideas, what are they?

Can a nation survive as a democratic republic without an honest and trusted news ecosystem? Is it an actual fact that truthful and reliable news combined with the kind of cultural trust people have in both government and each other as the result of a shared reality are both historic and necessary preconditions for a democracy to work at all?

Thomas Jefferson once famously said that if he was given the ultimatum of choosing to live in a functioning nation without newspapers or a place with newspapers but no national government, hed surely choose the latter.

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It was a statement of his generations love of newspapers, literature, and free speech far more than the anti-government spin that rightwingers try for when quoting the author of the Declaration of Independence. No republic in the history of the world had ever survived without an informed, participating electorate, and this nations Founders knew it.

This truth was echoed two generations later when the young French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, spent half a year traveling America and wrote one of the entire centurys best-selling books, Democracy in America, published in 1833.

Astonished, he repeatedly mentions in the book how blown away he is that the dirt-poorest farmer or remote-hollow hillbilly is as literate and enthusiastic about discussing current world events and politics as an upper-class resident of Paris.

Alexis de Tocqueville concluded that our vibrant, free, trusted press was the one thing that set America apart so democracy could work here; it was so critical, he believed, that he was openly skeptical there were enough literate people or a free enough press in France to be able to safely give up the monarchy and imitate America.

Now, it seems, consolidation and the pouring of billions of dollars by conservative billionaires into our media infrastructure has produced a crisis in Americas democracy.

Its frightening people, and theyre looking for solutions.

The Pew Research Center published a surprising new study this week showing that fully 48% of Americans say the government should take steps to restrict false information, even if it means losing some freedom to access and publish content This is up almost 10% from just four years ago.

Similarly, the percentage of Americans, Pew notes, who say freedom of information should be protected even if it means some misinformation is published online has decreased from 58% to 50%.

Depending on the outlet, news is often skewed (either by omission of stories or simply presenting partial information) even on so-called mainstream media; naked lies told by politicians are only rarely called out; and political advertising today is more often deceptive than straightforward.

And Americans know it, and are sick of it.

A Pew study from last November found that roughly two-thirds of Americans believe theyve seen news media slant stories to favor or disadvantage one political party or point of view. Three-out-of-five people said this was causing a great deal of confusion about issues related, for example, to the last presidential election.

The problem is particularly bad on the conservative side of media, in part because theres only a very limited progressive media ecosystem, and in part because (in my opinion) conservative positions are often so unpopular that lies are necessary to bring voters along.

Who in their right mind, after all, is enthusiastic about voting for politicians whose platform includes defunding the FBI, denying toxin-exposed veterans healthcare, forcing 10-year-olds to carry a rapists baby to term, keeping insulin prices almost 10 times higher than in most other nations, and ending Social Security and Medicare?

No wonder so many rightwing radio, podcast, and cable-TV personalities focus instead on trans girls in sports, refugees from Guatemala, and crimes committed by Black and Brown people.

I have colleagues and acquaintances in conservative media who, in moments of braggadocio or drunken candor, have told me straight-up that they know some of the stories they cover are either lies or spun in ways that distort their actual meaning. Their justification is Socrates noble lie doctrine: that a small lie serving a greater good is not really a sin.

One was both shocked and skeptical when I told him that, to the best of my knowledge, Id never promulgated a lie on the air and, when I do occasionally get things wrong, I always try to correct them on-air as soon as possible.

The nonprofit group Media Matters for America has built a solid following and reputation by almost daily identifying naked lies and half-truths being promulgated on Fox News and other rightwing media. Fox hosts and guests most recent spin, for example, is that the FBI spent Tuesday of this week planting evidence at Trumps Mar-a-Lago home.

Brian Maloney used to run a site called the Radio Equalizer designed to hold lefties to account when they lie on the air and used to occasionally skewer me. He hasnt posted on his blog since 2012, however, and his YouTube channel seems moribund. His latest project, Media Equalizer, seems not so much to hold liberal media to account as to complain about liberal politicians and progressive policies.

Either leftie shows like mine and those on MSNBC are generally truthful, or were so small compared to the multi-billion-dollar conservative empires that populate the American media landscape that were not worth covering.

So, how should America deal with media that purports to be news but, in fact, is offering a grotesque serving of spin, misdirection, and outright lies in addition to the factual news that gains them credibility and underpins their coverage?

This is a really, genuinely tough one. Truth in media laws are a legal and political minefield, particularly when it comes to public policy.

For example, is Medicare Advantage a sneaky way to privatize and thus destroy real Medicare, or an innovation allowing competition in the senior healthcare market?

My opinion is solidly in the former camp, but there are some seniors who simply cant afford the premiums for Medicare and a Medigap plan so, for them, the free Advantage programs are barely but definitely better than nothing at all. My opinion, in other words, isnt necessarily a fact and there are arguable shades of gray around conclusions that can be drawn from the facts themselves.

That said, there are objectively definable lies that are regularly told by so-called conservative media and propaganda outlets run by foreign governments. Not to mention the striking reality that 45% of Americans get much or most of their news from Facebook.

And this is serious stuff. Propaganda and fake news represent an existential threat to liberal democracies. When theres no consensus about shared reality, governance even highly compromised governance becomes nearly impossible.

Today in America (and, increasingly, around the world) advocates of dictatorship and oligarchy are using this device to divide and tear apart liberal democracies, from the Americas to Europe to Australia.

Billionaire oligarch Rupert Murdoch began his rightwing propaganda operation in Australia, throwing that nations political system so deeply into crisis that former Prime Minister Keven Rudd was moved to write an op-ed for the nations largest independent newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald, in which he chronicles how Australian politics has become vicious, toxic and unstable.

Rudd then asks, The core question is why? and answers his own question unambiguously:

But on top of all the above, while manipulating each of them, has been Rupert Murdoch the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy.

Murdoch is not just a news organisation. Murdoch operates as a political party, acting in pursuit of clearly defined commercial interests, in addition to his far-right ideological world view.

From Australia, Murdoch moved to the UK where he took over numerous newspapers and media outlets, cheerleading for grifter and Trump wannabee Boris Johnson and his Brexit. He then became an American citizen, which let his company legally own US television networks and stations and now lords over Fox News, arguably the second most toxic source of anti-American and white-supremacist propaganda.

In the social media arena, Facebooks owner and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, oversees what is the largest purveyor of news in the world today, including here in the US.

Zuckerberg, the countrys richest millennial, had a secret dinner with Donald Trump during the Trump presidency, and held multiple meetings with rightwing politicians, reporters, op-ed writers and influencers, according to Politico. I can find no record of him having similar private dinners with either Obama or Biden, nor with any groups of progressive journalists, writers, or influencers.

Numerous sources identify Facebook as one of the major hubs of organizing for rightwing events including January 6th, the rise of Qanon, and the contemporary militia and white supremacist Nazi movements.

His company continues to keep a tightly held secret the algorithm which decides which pages and posts get pushed to readers and which dont, thus secretly deciding what types of news and opinion are most heavily spread across America.

Arguably, their dominance of news dissemination makes Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg two of the most powerful men in America. Another morbidly rich billionaire, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post, although apparently hasnt personally influenced or interfered with that publications reporting. But the potential is certainly there: he who has the gold makes the rules, as the old saying goes.

To compound the confusion about who to trust in the news business, about two decades ago two reporters for a Fox station in Florida were explicitly told by station management to alter a story about Monsantos recombinant bovine growth hormone to make it friendlier to Monsanto. They complied multiple times until the alterations reached the point where they believed the story was filled with blatant lies and refused to air it.

The Fox station fired them and they sued for wrongful termination. Fox fought the case, arguing that, as their employer, it could tell them what to say and they had to do it to keep their jobs.

A jury awarded them about a half million dollars, but when Fox appealed the case it was reversed (and Fox then went after the reporters for attorneys fees, threatening to bankrupt them). The court explicitly ruled that news organizations can direct their on-air personalities to lie to viewers.

So, what do we do about this?

Al Franken had a novel idea a few years back, suggesting a way to deal with lying politicians like Trump:

Anyone can call the FCC and lodge a complaint. The FCC then presents the complaint to an adjudicative body comprised of three judges appointed by Republicans and three judges appointed by Democrats. If a majority determines that the statement is untrue, the FCC can warn the president. And if he tweets or tells the same lie again on TV or radio or to a newspaper, he can be fined up to $10,000, or 15 percent of his net worth.

The problem, of course, is the old James Madison quote about our not needing laws if men were angels, and its corollary, that those who administer and adjudicate our laws are as potentially corruptible as anybody else.

For example, what if President DeSantis were to hand-pick the six members? As we learned with the board that overseas the Postal Service, there are more than a few people with a D after their names who are just as corrupt as many Rs: would you trust the outcome?

The FCC already has a policy opposing fake or misleading news. As they note on their website:

The FCC is prohibited by law from engaging in censorship or infringing on First Amendment rights of the press. It is, however, illegal for broadcasters to intentionally distort the news, and the FCC may act on complaints if there is documented evidence of such behavior from persons with direct personal knowledge.

That said, the FCC doesnt regulate the content of cable or internet-based programs; content-wise, their authority is pretty much limited to over-the-air broadcast media like radio and TV.

Libel lawsuits are another remedy for the victims of fake news, but theyre extraordinarily difficult to win in the US given our First Amendment protections and the doctrine that public figures generally cant sue for libel at all.

Canada explicitly outlaws fake news, although that hasnt stopped Fox News from popping up on outlets across that country. Their Broadcasting Act explicitly says:

Prohibited Programming Content:

Its nonetheless difficult to enforce on cable or Internet outlets in Canada, and a similar approach here would run afoul of the First Amendments prohibitions on regulation of freedom of speech, or of the press.

Finland has taken an unique approach to the problem of fake news, particularly on social media, by incorporating news and media training into required elementary and secondary school classes. America could consider the same, although, like the snit we just saw about teaching American history or sex education, it would almost certainly provoke squeals of outrage from rightwingers.

But screw them. America is in a crisis right now caused, in large part, by dishonest actors across the rightwing spectrum of our media and social media.

Forty % of Americans dont believe the results of the 2020 election, and nearly half of Republicans think Democrats engage in ritual drinking of childrens blood and worse. There is no corollary or even similar misunderstanding of reality or bizarre set of beliefs among the left or those in the center.

For the moment, media literacy training in schools across America and requiring transparency from social media both things Congress would have to undertake to succeed seem like the best approaches we can take to both protect free speech and diminish the impact of lies and propaganda on American political and social life.

If the Biden administration were to enforce the nations antitrust laws and break up the media conglomerates, or Congress were to bring back the media ownership limits as they were before being gutted in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, either or both would go a long way toward increasing the social and political diversity of voices across our media public squares.

These will all be hard, but theyre important if we value our democratic republic and want it to survive. And theyre just the start: if you have any additional ideas, Id love to hear them.

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Can American Democracy Survive the "Fake News" Crisis - Random Lengths

Over the past week, Donald Trump has shown Americans that, even out of office, he remains this nations Hypocrite-in-Chief.

His performance is a reminder that the term hypocrisy can be traced back to Greek drama, where it was used to refer to the feigning and dissembling of the stage actor.

Trumps most recent feigning and dissembling was apparent in the revelations about the classified documents that he apparently purloined from the White House and kept at Mar-a-Lago, which has received a great deal of press coverage. It was also on full view in his shameless invocation of the 5th Amendment nearly 450 times during a deposition in New York.

What Trump practices and what he preaches have little in common. He feels no compunction about doing the very things that he denounces and uses to demonize his political opponents.

His hypocrisy undermines democracy; it erodes trust and breeds cynicism.

That is the point of Trumps double standards, because he has ridden a wave of cynicism for all of his years in public life.

Lets start with the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago.

Last Thursday The Washington Post reported that the list of items seized by FBI agents during the search included 11 sets of classified documents; four were marked top-secret, three were secret and three were identified as confidential the lowest level of classified information. In addition, Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in a search of former president Donald Trumps Florida residence.

Trump responded to the search by characterizing what the FBI did as an unAmerican, unwarranted and unnecessary raid and break-in of his home.

The former president also took to his social media site to deny that he possessed any nuclear weapons documents. Reprising some of his greatest hits, Trump said: Nuclear weapons is a hoax, just like Russia, Russia, Russia was a hoax.

And in typical Trump-speak, he contradicted his denial by suggesting that it is okay for a former president to possess such documents when he made the false and baseless claim that former President Obama kept millions of pages of documents after he left office, including classified material that pertained to nuclear weapons.

President Barack Hussein Obama kept 33 million pages of documents, much of them classified, Trump wrote. How many of them pertained to nuclear? Word is, lots! That particular fabrication elicited a statement from the National Archives that Obama had done no such thing. And, of course, throughout his 2016 presidential campaign Trump repeatedly harped on Hilary Clintons alleged carelessness in handling classified information.

ABC News reports that in July 2016, Trump tweeted, Crooked Hillary Clinton and her team were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information. Not fit!

In September 2016, Trump said that, We also need the best protection of classified information. That is the worst situation. Hillarys private email scandal, which put our classified information in the reach of our enemies, disqualifies her from the presidency. Totally.

One wonders if it is simply an irony of history that in 2018 Trump signed a law that increased the criminal penalties for taking classified materials and changed it from a misdemeanor to a felony.

Last Wednesday, in a different display of hypocrisy, the former president invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to testify almost 450 times during a deposition in New York Attorney General Letitia Jamess investigation of the Trump Organizations business practices.

Trump has previously denounced people who take the Fifth. At a July 2016 rally in Iowa, he asked If youre innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment? Another time, he said, Fifth Amendment. Fifth Amendment. Fifth Amendment. Horrible.

And, during a 2016 presidential debate he linked his criticism of Hilary Clintons handling of classified materials and his criticism of people who take the Fifth: When you have your staff taking the Fifth Amendment, taking the Fifth, so theyre not prosecuted,when you have the man that set up the illegal server taking the Fifth,I think its disgraceful.

After his deposition, Trump changed his tune: I once asked, If youre innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment? he wrote. Now I know the answer to that question. When your family, your company, and all the people in your orbit have become the targets of an unfounded, politically motivated Witch Hunt supported by lawyers, prosecutors, and the Fake News Media, you have no choice.

These are just the latest examples of Trumps cynical hypocrisy. It has been a consistent through-line in his political career and his time in the White House.

Some scholars and commentators think that hypocrisy is an inescapable part of politics and that it is mostly quite harmless. As the political theorist Ruth Grant notes, in this view, to condemn hypocrisy would be to condemn politics altogether.

But democratic politics cannot thrive, or perhaps even survive, when hypocrisy becomes the norm. Political scientist John Keane has rightly observed that Hypocrisy is the soil in which antipathy towards democracy always takes root.

Keane argues that democratic politics rests on a foundation of trust among citizens and between citizens and their representatives. Hypocrisy erodes that trust. It leads people to discount what others say in the political arena and promotes a corrosive disgust with politics.

Keane notes that the normalization of hypocrisy will sap peoples confidence, or reinforce their unbelief in democratic ways of being. But for this to happen, people must feel let down or put off by democracy; and that means they must have a gut sense that the gulf between the promises of democracy and its actual performance is so wide that democracy itself is a ruinous sham.

Trumps success in politics has been founded on insinuating that democracy is a ruinous sham, opening a wide field in which Trump should be free to do as he wishes. He has been a master of saying one thing and doing another. He has held up others to ridicule and then done the very things for which he shamed them.

What Hannah Arendt wrote almost 60 years ago seems an apt description of Trump: The hypocrites crime, she said, is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

But hypocrisy is most dangerous to democracy when calling out hypocrisy stops mattering.

That is what Trumps hypocrisy seeks to achieve. He wants to rob the exposure of hypocrisy of its bite. He seeks to normalize hypocrisy, to make it seem like a mere tool of political survival in a world dominated by hoaxes, witch hunts, and conspiracies.

Defending democracy requires that we do not give in to that effort.

We must continue to call out hypocrisy and work to convince millions of Americans that they should want more from their leaders than the hypocrites feigning and dissembling.

Democracy requires that citizens expect leaders to tell the truth in public, and not to invent lies in self-defense when their foibles if not their crimes are exposed.

Austin Sarat (@ljstprof) is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. The views expressed here do not represent Amherst College.

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Trumps hypocrisy threatens democracy thats the point of it - The Hill

The Debate|Opinion

Preaching and pressuring has failed to move the needle. An era of resurgent authoritarianism calls for a new approach.

As Taipei accuses Beijing of trying to take control of the Taiwan Strait in the wake of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosis controversial visit and the Biden administration continues along with its Western allies in their proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the global status quo has seemingly and suddenly been upended.

There is little doubt that China and Russia have entered into a new and potentially dangerous period of their relations with the United States. As bilateral ties between Washington, Beijing, andMoscow reach lows not seen since the height of the Cold War, tensions have reached a point where there is a palpable risk of what some have called a new cold war turning inadvertently into direct confrontation.

For now, Washington has primarily responded to these multiple challenges by strengthening its military alliances. The Biden administration is working with its long-standing allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region, including Japan, South Korea, Australia, and India to bolster military cooperation as a means of countering China. At the same time, Western allies are spearheading the strengthening of NATO and providing direct military aid to Ukraine in a bid to turn the tables on Moscow in a conflict that has destabilized the entire European subcontinent.

Bidens foreign policy team understands that these challenges require more than just military-type responses. While Washington has imposed economic sanctions on Russia in its bid to punish Putin, it has also stepped up to the even more daunting task of countering Chinas influence in the developing world, most recently by initiating the Build Back Better World.

Get briefed on the story of the week, and developing stories to watch across the Asia-Pacific.

Launched during last years G-7 Summit in Cornwall, England, Build Back Better World is a global infrastructure financing scheme meant to compete directly with Chinas Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a trillion-dollar initiative under which nearly 150 countries have signed up for and has been a centerpiece of Chinas foreign policy since its launch in 2013.

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Yet in spite of Washingtons efforts to push Russia out of Ukraine and counter a rising China, one cant help but notice that most developing countries have decided to steer clear of supporting Americas economic sanctions against Russia or taking a clear stance on the Taiwan issue.

In some cases, countries have even supported Russia and have been careful not to criticize China over its recent incursions into Taiwanese waters and airspace. One of the underlying reasons for this behavior is purely pragmatic: most developing countries dont want to be seen taking sides with the U.S. in superpower rivalries, mostly out of the fear they would be punished by either Moscow or Beijing through economic sanctions for doing so.

But there is another factor driving such reticence, one that is often overlooked. Democracy has been in a global recession for most of the last decade, and as more and more illiberal leaders have come to power there has been a widening circle of ties between authoritarian states.

Hence the challenge that the U.S. faces when trying to build stronger and larger alliances against the likes of China and Russia. The Biden administration understands this constraint, which also explains why Washington is rolling out pro-democracy initiatives in regions such as Africa where, for example, American policymakers are promoting democratic governance through what they are describing as a targeted mix of positive inducements and punitive measures such as sanctions.

Unfortunately, a carrot and stick approach in attempts to forge more open societies is not likely to be effective and sometimes could prove in the end to be counterproductive. Illiberal leaders, authoritarians, and military juntas dont want to be told how to run their countries and will not take it lightly if America tries to induce them into enacting democratic reforms. By doing so, Washington faces the risk of alienating leaders and pushing them even closer to Moscow and Beijing.

A better and more nuanced approach to promoting democracy would be not to preach to or punish politicians, but rather to engage directly with pro-democracy leaders and activists. Often Washington forgets that where countries are governed by non-democratic politicians there are bound to be civil society leaders and opposition figures fighting for change. These are Americas best friends on the ground, and if the Biden administration is serious about promoting democracy then it should invite them for high-level meetings in Washington. Invariably a handshake here and a hug there from U.S. officials would send clear and strong signals of support that would also resonate back in the home countries of pro-democracy leaders. In essence, it would be saying to wayward leaders that while Washington may still do business with them, it does not mean that it totally supports their being in power.

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Another and Better Way of Promoting Democracy - The Diplomat

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Letter: Roe v Wade reversal was democracy in action - Daily Reflector