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And, perhaps most serious of all, an unmistakable pulse of dogmatism has surfaced on campus. Though Daniels doesnt think theres a full-blown speech crisis on campus, he recognizes that something is badly amiss when, according to a 2020 Knight Foundation survey, 63 percent of college students feel the climate on their campus prevents some people from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.

Its hard to argue with Danielss solutions. End, once and for all, legacy admissions. Institute a democracy requirement in school curriculums. Enhance openness in science and reform the peer-review process. Curb self-segregation in university housing. Create spaces for engagement and foster the practices of reasoned disagreement and energetic debate.

All essential proposals and all the more necessary in an era of right-wing populism and left-wing illiberalism. Still, Id add two items to Danielss list of what universities owe democracy.

The first is an undiluted and unapologetic commitment to intellectual excellence. What spurred Dorian Abbot to action was a comment from a colleague that if you are just hiring the best people, you are part of the problem. But if universities arent putting excellence above every other consideration, they arent helping democracy. They are weakening it by contributing to the democratic tendency toward groupthink and the mediocrity that can come from trying to please the majority.

The second is courage. Most university administrators, I suspect, would happily subscribe on paper to principles like free expression. Their problem, as in Abraham Lincolns parable of a runaway soldier, isnt with their intentions. I have as brave a heart as Julius Caesar ever had, says the soldier of Lincolns telling, but, somehow or other, whenever danger approaches, my cowardly legs will run away with it. Right now, we have an epidemic of cowardly legs.

Courage isnt a virtue thats easily taught, especially in universities, but sometimes it can be modeled. After Abbots talk was canceled at M.I.T., the conservative Princeton professor Robert George offered to host the lecture instead; it is scheduled for Oct. 21 on Zoom.

Courage begins with de-cancellation. Wisdom, thanks to books like Danielss, can then take wing.

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Opinion | What Does a University Owe Democracy? - The New York Times

On the spectrum of acts than can be described as political, the everyday mundanity of constituency work in a politicians local clinic and the lone-wolf murder of a politician lie about as far apart as is possible to imagine. The first, the expression in its purest form of politics as engagement with the ordinary citizen; the second, the ultimate substitution of the individual for that engagement, the act of one who looks into his heart to know what is right and arrogates to himself the entitlement to act on it, democracys antithesis.

It is no simple hyperbola to describe the brutal killing of well-liked family man, and diligent local MP Sir David Amess in Southend on Friday as more than a personal tragedy. It must be seen as an attack on democracy itself. And it matters not whether his killer was an Islamist extremist, in common with the culprit behind last weeks bow-and-arrow murders in Norway, or a far-right militant, as in the killing of MP Jo Cox in 2016. Or indeed the previous killings of individual British MPs by the IRA Ian Gow in 1990, Sir Anthony Berry in 1983, Unionist Robert Bradford in 1981, and Airey Neave in 1979 a grim 42-year litany of public representatives who died in the line of duty.

On this island the IRA was also responsible for the murder of Senator Billy Fox in 1974, in recent memory the only member of the Oireachtas to have been killed.

Inevitably in Britain attention has now turned again to the issue of better protecting MPs and doing so without jeopardising all-important access in clinics or even on the street. That may not be entirely possible. Just as importantly, however, there is the need to challenge the increasingly toxic and coarsened culture of politics in the UK and beyond. Polemics about Brexit and migration have undermined a consent to be governed that is the cornerstone of a healthy democratic space. Here, that consent is the key product of the Belfast Agreement, an acceptance by the IRA among others that such methods are not acceptable.

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Irish Times view on the murder of Sir David Amess: attacking democracy - The Irish Times

TUNIS, Tunisia For roughly three months after Tunisians toppled their dictator in January 2011 in an eruption of protest that electrified the Arab world, Ali Bousselmi felt nothing but pure happiness.

The decade that followed, during which Tunisians adopted a new Constitution, gained freedom of speech and voted in free and fair elections, brought Mr. Bousselmi its own rewards. He co-founded a gay rights group an impossibility before 2011, when the gay scene was forced to hide deep underground.

But as the revolutions high hopes curdled into political chaos and economic failure, Mr. Bousselmi, like many Tunisians, said he began to wonder whether his country would be better off with a single ruler, one powerful enough to just get things done.

I ask myself, what have we done with democracy? said Mr. Bousselmi, 32, the executive director of Mawjoudin, meaning We Exist in Arabic. We have corrupt members of Parliament, and if you go into the street, you can see that people cant even afford a sandwich. And then suddenly, there was a magic wand saying things were going to change.

That wand was held by Kais Saied, Tunisias democratically elected president, who, on July 25, froze Parliament and fired the prime minister, vowing to attack corruption and return power to the people. It was a power grab that an overwhelming majority of Tunisians greeted with joy and relief.

July 25 has made it harder than ever to tell a hopeful story about the Arab Spring.

Held up by Western supporters and Arab sympathizers alike as proof that democracy could bloom in the Middle East, Tunisia now looks to many like a final confirmation of the uprisings failed promise. The birthplace of the Arab revolts, it is now ruled by one-man decree.

Elsewhere, wars that followed the uprisings have devastated Syria, Libya and Yemen. Autocrats smothered protest in the Gulf. Egyptians elected a president before embracing a military dictatorship.

Still, the revolutions proved that power, traditionally wielded from the top down, could also be driven by a fired-up street.

It was a lesson the Tunisians, who recently flooded the streets again to demonstrate against Parliament and for Mr. Saied, have reaffirmed. This time, however, the people lashed out at democracy, not at an autocrat.

The Arab Spring will continue, predicted Tarek Megerisi, a North Africa specialist at the European Council on Foreign Relations. No matter how much you try to repress it or how much the environment around it changes, desperate people will still try to secure their rights.

Mr. Saieds popularity stems from the same grievances that propelled Tunisians, Bahrainis, Egyptians, Yemenis, Syrians and Libyans to protest a decade ago corruption, unemployment, repression and an inability to make ends meet. Ten years on, Tunisians felt themselves backsliding on virtually everything except freedom of expression.

We got nothing out of the revolution, said Houyem Boukchina, 48, a resident of Jabal Ahmar, a working-class neighborhood in the capital, Tunis. We still dont know what the plan is, but we live on the basis of hope, she said of Mr. Saied.

But popular backlashes can still threaten autocracy.

Mindful of their peoples simmering grievances, Arab rulers have doubled down on repression instead of addressing the issues, their ruthlessness only inviting more upheaval in the future, analysts warned.

In Mr. Saieds case, his gambit depends on economic progress. Tunisia faces a looming fiscal crisis, with billions in debt coming due this fall. If the government fires public workers and cuts wages and subsidies, if prices and employment do not improve, public sentiment is likely to U-turn.

An economic collapse would pose problems not only for Mr. Saied, but also for Europe, whose shores draw desperate Tunisian migrants in boats by the thousands each year.

Yet Mr. Saieds office has not made any contact with the International Monetary Fund officials who are waiting to negotiate a bailout, according to a senior Western diplomat. Nor has he taken any measures other than requesting chicken sellers and iron merchants to lower prices, telling them it was their national duty.

People dont necessarily support Saied, they just hated what Saied broke, Mr. Megerisi said. Thats going to be gone pretty quickly when they find hes not delivering for them, either.

For Western governments, which initially backed the uprisings then returned in the name of stability to partnering with the autocrats who survived them, Tunisia may serve as a reminder of what motivated Arab protesters a decade ago and what could bring them into the streets again.

While many demonstrators demanded democracy, others chanted for more tangible outcomes: an end to corruption, lower food prices, jobs.

From outside, it was easy to cheer the hundreds of thousands of protesters who surged into Cairos Tahrir Square, easy to forget the tens of millions of Egyptians who stayed home.

The people pushing for Parliament, democracy, freedoms, we werent the biggest part of the revolution, said Yassine Ayari, an independent Tunisian lawmaker recently imprisoned after he denounced Mr. Saieds power grab. Maybe a lot of Tunisians didnt want the revolution. Maybe people just want beer and security. Thats a hard question, a question I dont want to ask myself, he added.

But I dont blame the people. We had a chance to show them how democracy could change their lives, and we failed.

The revolution equipped Tunisians with some tools to solve problems, but not the solutions they had expected, Mr. Ayari said. With more needs than governing experience, he said, they had little patience for the time-consuming mess of democracy.

A Constitution, the ballot box and a Parliament did not automatically give rise to opportunity or accountability, a state of affairs that Westerners may find all too familiar. Parliament descended into name-calling and fistfights. Political parties formed and re-formed without offering better ideas. Corruption spread.

I dont think that a Western-style liberal democracy can or should be something that can just be parachuted in, said Elisabeth Kendall, an Oxford University scholar of Arabic and Islamic studies. You cant just read Liberal Democracy 101, absorb it, write a constitution and hope that everything works out. Elections are just the start.

Arab intellectuals often point out that it took decades for France to transition to democracy after its revolution. Parts of Eastern Europe and Africa saw similar ups and downs in leaving dictatorships behind.

Opinion polls show that emphatic majorities across the Arab world still support democracy. But nearly half of respondents say their own countries are not ready for it. Tunisians, in particular, have grown to associate it with economic deterioration and dysfunction.

Their experience may have left Tunisians still believing in democracy in the abstract, but wanting for now what one Tunisian constitutional law professor, Adnan Limam, approvingly called a short-term dictatorship.

Still, Ms. Kendall cautioned that it is too soon to declare the revolutions dead.

In Tunisia, rejection of the system that evolved over the last decade does not necessarily imply embrace of one-man rule. As Mr. Saied has arrested more opponents and taken more control, last month suspending much of the Constitution and seizing sole authority to make laws, more Tunisians especially secular, affluent ones have grown uneasy.

Someone had to do something, but now its getting off-track, said Azza Bel Jaafar, 67, a pharmacist in the upscale Tunis suburb of La Marsa. She said she had initially supported Mr. Saieds actions, partly out of fear of Ennahda, the Islamist party that dominates Parliament and that many Tunisians blame for the countrys ills.

I hope therell be no more Islamism, she said, but Im not for a dictatorship either.

Some pro-democracy Tunisians are counting on the idea that the younger generation will not easily surrender the freedoms they have grown up with.

We havent invested in a democratic culture for 10 years for nothing, said Jahouar Ben Mbarek, a former friend and colleague of Mr. Saieds who is now helping organize anti-Saied protests. One day, theyll see its actually their freedom at risk, and theyll change their minds.

Others say there is still time to save Tunisias democracy.

Despite Mr. Saieds increasingly authoritarian actions, he has not moved systematically to crack down on opposition protests, and recently told the French president, Emmanuel Macron, that he would engage in dialogue to resolve the crisis.

Lets see if democracy is able to correct itself by itself, said Youssef Cherif, a Tunis-based political analyst, and not by the gun.

Mr. Bousselmi, the gay rights activist, is torn, wondering whether gay rights can progress under one-man rule.

I dont know. Will I accept forgetting about my activism for the sake of the economy? Mr. Bousselmi said. I really want things to start changing in the country, but well have to pay a very heavy price.

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What Have We Done With Democracy? A Decade On, Arab Spring Gains Wither - The New York Times

Fan-favorite guest James Carville returns to ask, What is Merrick Garland doing by the way? I dont think this man knows whether to wind his ass or scratch his watch while arguing that its time to lock up Steve Bannon on the way to locking up Donald TrumpYou cant have the most famous person in the United States blatantly committing crimes.

And Carville talks with Molly Jong-Fast about the critically important... high stakes Virginia raceThis shit is hard but if you dont do it Im not exaggerating to say that they come back in power in 2024, you can kiss this democracys ass goodbye, its goneand explains what Democrats are getting wrong about their most frustrating senator:

Subscribe to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Overcast. To listen to our weekly members-only bonus episodes, join Beast Inside here. Already a member? You can listen here and sign up for new episode email alerts here.

Manchin is an Italian, Roman Catholic Democrat from Virginia. A Democrat has not carried a county in West Virginia since 2008. Your choice is not Manchin or Bernie Sanders. Your choice is Manchin or Marsha Blackburn. So what do you want?

Plus, Alec Ross, former senior adviser for innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, talks about his new book, The Raging 2020s, and why We need to fundamentally rewrite the social contract, and author and activist Ryan Hampton, talks about the Sacklers great deal in the Purdue settlement, and how this whole thing was a set up from day one in which victims were sidelined every step of the way.

Listen to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.

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Either Merrick Garland Gets to Work or We Can Kiss Democracy Goodbye - The Daily Beast

By fleeing to the political extremes, a co-equal House of Congress is abdicating its lawmaking power.

About the author: Daniel Lipinski is a former U.S. representative from Illinois.

In the fight over if and when a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill would take place and whether it would be tied to a vote on President Joe Bidens broader economic agenda, one fact was overlooked: House Democrats passed their own infrastructure bill in July. The reason you havent heard much about that measure is that the House acquiesced to the Senates demand that it vote on the Senates bill without amendment. In doing this, the House accepted a bill that not only omitted many progressive priorities but also had no input from its members.

If the irrelevance of the House in this negotiation were an unusual case, it may not be cause for concern. But this is the way most major laws have been made for the past decade: They are products of the Senate with little or no House involvement. This is because the Housewhether controlled by Democrats or Republicansnow acts as if it were a unicameral legislature in a parliamentary system, rather than acknowledging that it is only one of two legislative chambers in a presidential system. It routinely passes partisan legislation that cannot pass in the Senate, because it is too far out of the American ideological center. The result is a House of Representatives that now serves only to either block orin the case of must pass legislationrubber-stamp Senate bills on major issues. Members of the House have largely given up their power, and thus their constituents power, to create legislation that addresses our nations biggest problems.

From the November 2018 issue: How Newt Gingrich destroyed American politics

This state of affairs is not what the Founders intended. Two of the main reasons the Framers of the Constitution created two chambers of Congress were to provide Americans with multiple access points to the lawmaking process, and to force representatives and senators to deliberate and compromise. They believed that this would not only produce the best laws but also promote the legitimacy of these laws, because the manifold voices in our nation would have the potential to be heard through their representatives as well as their senators.

As I wrote in a chapter of Under the Iron Dome, a recently published anthology, members of the House now mainly represent their party and its platform rather than their constituents diverse views. Through changes in the rules, members have relinquished much of their individual power and disempowered committees in order to give their party leaders the ability to shape legislation for the purpose of pursuing the partys goals. In formulating legislation, party leaders cater to interest groups, activists, and donors aligned with the party to build electoral support. These supporters tend to be further toward the ideological extremes. Little to no effort is expended to pick up votes from the other party in the legislative process. This may be a reasonable way to legislate in a single-chamber parliamentary system, but the House is only one half of one branch in the American lawmaking process.

The problem with the House legislating in this manner is compounded by the prevalence of divided government, where control of the White House, the House, and the Senate is split between the parties. Divided government has occurred more than 30 out of the past 41 years, or 40 out of 41 when considering the need for 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster. During these periods, only bipartisan bills can become law, and partisan House legislating only contributes to gridlock. Sometimes, however, a consensus emerges that legislation must be passed to address a particular issue. When this has occurred in the past decade, the necessary bipartisan compromise bill has been written in the Senate and passed without changes by the House. This happened in October 2013 and January 2018, when Republicans controlled the House and a compromise was needed to end a government shutdown. But it also happens when the House is in Democratic hands. In 2019, when there was a humanitarian crisis at the southern border, a bipartisan bill produced in the Republican Senate became law, because the bill passed by House Democrats could not pass in the Senate.

Read: Political polarization killed the filibuster

When one of the two chambers of Congress is not contributing to lawmaking on the most important issues facing our country, our democracy is not healthy. It is especially troublesome when the weak link is the House, because that chamber was intended to play a preeminent role in ensuring the peoples democratic control of the republic. The House has always been considered the bulwark of American democracy.

Could we solve this problem by eliminating the Senate filibuster? Perhaps. But divided government is now prevalent. And even when Republicans had unified control in 2017 and 2018, and used the budget-reconciliation process to skirt the filibuster in their attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and enact big tax cuts, the Senate still largely determined the outcome on both bills. The Build Back Better reconciliation bill will again test whether the House can generate leverage vis--vis the Senate even without the filibuster.

Jane Chong: This is not the Senate the Framers imagined

Another option to make the House more effective at legislating, and to open up the possibility of more voices being heard in the lawmaking process, would be to change the chambers rules to re-empower individual members and committees, thus providing more opportunities for bipartisan legislating to occur in the House. The bipartisan House Problem Solvers Caucus, of which I was a member, attempted to do this in 2018, when it endorsed a package of rule changes. Leveraging our votes in the January 2019 speaker-of-the-House election enabled us to win a few changes. A new speaker will be elected in the next Congress (assuming that Nancy Pelosi keeps her pledge to step down or Republicans become the majority), presenting another opportunity to secure rule reforms. But if nothing changes, the peoples House will continue to produce more theatrics than solutions, failing the people and our democracy.

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The House of Representatives Is Failing America - The Atlantic