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Jocelyn Benson, a Peters Township native and Michigans top elections official, was on the receiving end of plenty of vitriol in 2020, including from President Trump, who called her a rogue secretary of state on Twitter.

Trumps accusation that Michigan was sending out millions of absentee ballots was not true it was sending out applications for ballots but it was just one of many morsels of misinformation that swirled around in the months leading up the November election and after.

How did Benson deal with being the object of so much bile? While participating in Washington & Jefferson Colleges Symposium on Democracy Wednesday, Benson said she would look at a photo of herself and other secretaries of state on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., where John Lewis and other civil rights activists were beaten by police in 1965, and recognize that protecting our democracy has sometimes engendered violence.

I was on the receiving end of a lot of violent and hateful rhetoric throughout the year, Benson said. But, she added, They werent attacking me. They were attacking voters. They were attacking democracy.

The attempts to overturn the 2020 election, the rise of domestic terrorism tied to white supremacist groups, the movement to protect democratic freedoms in Hong Kong and human rights in the digital age were among the topics up for discussion in this years Symposium on Democracy, which has become a fixture on the W&J campus every February since 2018. Unlike past years, this time around it took place virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Along with Benson, other guests were Adrian Shahbaz, director of technology and democracy at Freedom House, the nonprofit that advocates for democracy around the world; Pat Benic, a United Press International photographer and W&J graduate who witnessed the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6; Kathleen Belew, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago and an authority on the modern white power movement; and Nathan Law, a Yale Univeristy graduate student and Hong Kong democracy activist.

In a recorded message at the beginning of the symposium, Gov. Tom Wolf said, Government by the people has never been easy, and the last year is a reminder of that.

Benson explained that, despite the sound and fury leading up to the election, and the tumult that followed it, the 2020 vote was the most secure in the nations history. In Michigan, voter participation topped the record set in 2008, when Barack Obama was first elected president, and this happened amid a once-in-a-century pandemic. In the elections aftermath, Benson has proposed making Election Day in Michigan a state holiday so more people have the opportunity to do volunteer work at polling places, guns be prohibited within 100 feet of polling places, and other reforms.

Freedom and security need not collide, Benson said.

Meanwhile, Belew outlined how the white power movement has changed over the last 40 years or so, and how the pandemic and social media have worked hand-in-hand over the last year.

Social media has been the primary mode of socialization for everyone, so we see that it has the power to radicalize that is bigger and more powerful than before, Belew said.

At the conclusion of the symposium, John C. Knapp, the president of W&J, said the issues discussed on Wednesday deserve our urgent attention as responsible members of a democratic society.

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W&J symposium explores issues affecting democracy here and abroad - Observer-Reporter

Dr. John E. Warren, Publisher, The San Diego Voice & Viewpoint Published: 18 February 2021

Dr. John E. Warren, Publisher, The San Diego Voice & ViewpointWhen we look at the diversity of the people who attacked the capitol on January 6, most of us are surprised to find that at least 57 of those assaulting the building were elected officials in their home states and cities. These are people who have lived, worked and participated in Democracy as we know it. These people and the thousands of others who join them, refuse to acknowledge an election run and won according to our own constitutional mandates. These people and the White Nationalist who believe that America only belongs to its White citizens, who live and have lived according to White Privilege ignoring the words of the Declaration of Independence which says:

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all menAre created equal, that they are endowed by theirCreator with certain unalienable rights, that amongThese are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.That to secure these rights governments are estab-Lished among men, deriving their just powers fromThe consent of the governed.

It appears that a growing number of Amercans believe that the words of this document only apply to them in terms of the idea of being equal. It appears that many of our White citizens who are the far right extremists who follow Donald Trump believe the inscription written on the barnyard door in the novel, Animal Farm. The fictitious account of animals taking over and running the farm carries an example of the pigs taking over and exercising more power and influence than the other animals. When questioned about this usurpation of power, the pigs wrote the following words on the barnyard door:

All animals are equal, but some animals are moreEqual than others.

Clearly the concept of Democracy has become too inclusive in America. The idea of equality now includes too many Black, Brown, Asian and other immigrant groups. Those rising to the levels of elected leadership come from these groups. Power is no longer all White in America, and White people who have a universal history of taking what they want from others rather than sharing, now feel that violence is necessary because government as they intended it is now serving those who were intended to serve them (whites).

Democracy was intended to acknowledge that all men are created equal and not that some are more equal than others.

African Americans need to pay particular attention to these issues because we are the ones being most affected at every turn by this War on Equality. This is a war that never let up, even after the passage of the 13, 14, and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. We must now come together, as others have done and are doing, if we are to survive. America no longer has the moral compass that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew. We have the knowledge and tools to win this battle. The only thing in our way is us.

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Democracy and White Privilege - The Skanner

Jack Balkin, a law professor at Yale, writes in an email:

Some of the most troubling features of social media come from business models based on surveillance and monetization of personal data. Social media will not improve as long as their current surveillance-based business models give them the wrong incentives.

Trump, in Balkins view, showed how to use social media for demagogic ends to harm democracy.

But, he added,

Trumps success built on decades of polarization strategies that relied on predigital media talk radio and cable. Without talk radio and Fox News, Trump would have been a far less effective demagogue.

Do social media drive polarization? Balkins answer:

The larger and more profound causes of polarization in the United States are not social media, which really become pervasive only around 2008 to 2010, but rather decades of deliberate attempts to polarize politics to gain political power. Once social media became pervasive in the last decade, however, they have amplified existing trends.

Robert Frank, professor emeritus of economics at Cornell, is a leading proponent of the argument that the current business model of Facebook and other social media is a significant contributor to political and social dysfunction.

Writing on these pages, Frank argued on Feb. 14 that the economic incentives of companies in digital markets differ so sharply from those of other businesses.

Digital aggregators like Facebook, he continued,

make money not by charging for access to content but by displaying it with finely targeted ads based on the specific types of things people have already chosen to view. If the conscious intent were to undermine social and political stability, this business model could hardly be a more effective weapon.

Frank notes that the algorithms digital companies use to

choose individual-specific content are crafted to maximize the time people spend on a platform. As the developers concede, Facebooks algorithms are addictive by design and exploit negative emotional triggers. Platform addiction drives earnings, and hate speech, lies and conspiracy theories reliably boost addiction.

The profit motive in digital media, Frank contends, drives policies that result in the spread of misinformation, hate speech and conspiracy theories.

Eric B. Schnurer, president of Public Works LLC, a policy consulting firm, is similarly critical of the digital business model, writing in an email:

The social media companies discovered that there were limited means for making money off social media, settling on an advertising-based model that required increasing and retaining eyeballs, which quickly led to the realization that the best way to do so is to exploit nonrational behavior and create strong reactions rather than reasoned discourse.

Digital firms, in Schnurers analysis,

have now metastasized into this model where their customers are their raw material, which they mine, at no expense, and sell to others for further exploitation; it is a wholly extractive and exploitive business model, whatever high-minded rhetoric the companies want to spread over it about creating sharing and community.

There were early warnings of the dangers posed by new digital technologies.

Shoshana Zuboff, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, pursued a line of inquiry as far back as 1981 with The Psychological and Organizational Implications of Computer Mediated Work that led to the broad conclusions she drew in her 2016 paper, Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization.

Big data is above all the foundational component in a deeply intentional and highly consequential new logic of accumulation that I call surveillance capitalism. This new form of information capitalism aims to predict and modify human behavior as a means to produce revenue and market control. Surveillance capitalism has gradually constituted itself during the last decade, embodying a new social relations and politics that have not yet been well delineated or theorized.

From a different vantage point, Christopher Bail, a professor of sociology at Duke and director of the universitys Polarization Lab, writes in his forthcoming book Breaking the Social Media Prism that a key constituency is made up of those who feel marginalized, lonely, or disempowered in their off-line lives.

Social media, Bail writes in his book,

offer such social outcasts another path. Even if the fame extremists generate has little significance beyond small groups of other outcasts, the research my colleagues and I conducted suggests that social media give extremists a sense of purpose, community, and most importantly self-worth.

The social media prism, Bail writes,

fuels status-seeking extremists, mutes moderates who think there is little to be gained by discussing politics on social media, and leaves most of us with profound misgivings about those on the other side, and even about the scope of polarization itself.

One of the striking findings of the research conducted at Bails Polarization Lab is that contrary to expectations, increased exposure to the views of your ideological opponents does not result in more open-mindedness.

Bail emailed me to point out that we surveyed 1,220 Republicans and Democrats and

offered half of them financial compensation to follow bots we created that exposed them to messages from opinion leaders from the opposing political party for one month. When we resurveyed them at the end of the study, neither Democrats nor Republicans became more moderate. To the contrary, Republicans became substantially more conservative and Democrats became slightly more liberal.

Bail also offered an analysis of this phenomenon:

The reason I think taking people out of their echo chambers made them more polarized not less is because it exposes them to extremists from the other side who threaten their sense of status.

In his book Bail put it this way, People do not carefully review new information about politics when they are exposed to opposing views on social media and adapt their views accordingly. Instead, he observes, they experience stepping outside their echo chamber as an attack upon their identity.

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Opinion | Democracy Is Weakening Right in Front of Us - The New York Times

Kwame Akoto-Bamfos Nkyinkim, a sculpture dedicated to the memory of the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, at the entrance of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice on March 3, 2020, in Montgomery, Ala. (Credit: Barry Lewis / InPictures via Getty Images)

The crisis of American democracy that burst into view on January 6 is rooted in our countrys long history of racism. To begin the work of repair, President Biden issued executive orders undoing many of the policies of the Trump administration and breaking new ground, like ending private prison contracts and embedding racial equity analysis in the federal bureaucracy. As important and welcome as these actions are, they are not enough. A crucial mistake recurs in American history: trying to move forward without reckoning honestly with injustice. We have an opportunity to break this pattern of forgetting. Remembrance and repair are not just morally necessarythey are the keys to saving our fragile multiracial democracy. Here we offer a plan to undertake that vital work.

Historically, we have done a poor job at holding political elites accountable. When white mobs overthrew democratically elected, multiracial governments in the South, bringing Reconstruction to a close in the 19th century, they won nearly a century of Jim Crow and a one-party, authoritarian South. The decades of lynchings and mob violence that followed were enabled by the very Hayes-Tilden compromise that Senator Ted Cruz had the gall to invoke on January 6, and, crucially, by Northern white exhaustion with confronting racism. Essentially, white moderates fervor for racial liberalism proved no match for white supremacists fervor for, well, supremacy. Today, we live with the results of that failure. We face a similar test now.

But its not just the aftermath of the Civil War; the guardians of Jim Crow, from police chiefs like Bull Connor to senators like Strom Thurmond, were never held accountable for the racial terror they enabled. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed as if this legislation could absolve decades of state and private vigilante violence. But for Black families that endured so much, there was no healing because there was no accountability. The heart of the countrys amnesia is the failure to grasp the truth that it took until 1965 to ensure the right to vote to African Americans.

Democracy is new and fragile, not established and stable, and agreement that people of color belong as full participants is persistently contested. The United States suffers from what James Baldwin referred to as racial innocence, a deliberate unwillingness to confront racial injustice, especially when it clashes with stated liberal democratic ideals. But the longer this country resists confronting who we really are, the more unstable our democratic institutions will become.Related Articles

Democracy will not be safe unless there is a truthful reckoning that accounts for both recent and historical wrongs. We propose that the Biden administration adopt a strategy to establish a new, shared narrative for the country. The goal of a truth and reconciliation process in the United States should be to establish a new civic consensus. Not everyone will be part of such a consensusbut a consistent campaign can help move racist ideas to the margins of public discourse and establish shared norms and understandings that are necessary for democracy to be preserved. Evidence from Chile and other countries shows that government-sponsored efforts of this kind can change hearts and minds in significant and lasting ways. What might an effort to achieve this, led by government but involving broad swaths of civil society, look like?

No single truth and reconciliation commission is likely to succeed, because different communities of color have experienced different kinds of oppression. Each experience merits its own attention and forms of redress. We suggest four potential commissions that could be established by the Biden administration or Congress, and spur broad engagement by civil society.

First, through executive action, Biden could establish a Public Education and Monuments Advisory Council, comprising historians, community members, and experts. Monuments tell a story. The Advisory Council would be responsible for conducting a survey of monuments, developing criteria for monument removal, and commissioning monuments to honor a more diverse range of history makers. This project can learn from Bryan Stevensons pathbreaking work with the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and to mark the sites of lynchings of Black people throughout the South. The council should focus on engaging the broader public in an educational dialogue about monuments and monument removal. The council could work with local task forces comprising community leaders, artists, and activists in every state in which a monument is slated to be erected or removed. Remaking our public space to tell the truth about our history is a crucial part of recovery.Current Issue

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Second, federal action on reparations for African Americans is long overdue. Representative John Conyers introduced a bill to study reparations every year from 1989 through his last term in Congress in 2017. This nation was built, and fortunes were made, through the uncompensated, enslaved labor of Black people. Reparations is a core part of the platform of the Movement for Black Lives. The bill to study reparations, now sponsored by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, had a record 173 cosponsors in the last Congress, and it got a hearing for the first time in 30 years. The Biden administration could build on this momentum and establish a Presidential Commission on Repair and Justice to study reparations and recommend different reparations policy proposals for action by Congress.

Also foundational to the American story is genocide against Indigenous people. Indigenous leaders and activists must be engaged to consider a range of potential remedies. One example is legislation introduced by former Representative Deb HaalandPresident Bidens nominee for interior secretaryand Senator Elizabeth Warren to shine a light on one of the crimes committed against Indigenous people: the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policy in the United States, designed to expose the painful and traumatic history of genocide and forced assimilation by the federal government, as Haaland put it. Child separationdeliberately and cruelly revived at the border by the Trump administrationhas deep roots in American history that are not understood by most Americans.

Finally, Trumps campaign and presidency were powered by stoking hatred against immigrants, from remarks about shithole countries to policies like the Muslim ban and indiscriminate deportations. To recover, a high-profile Statue of Liberty Commission should publicly acknowledge the human impact of family separation, caging children, turning away refugees, and other draconian policies. This commission, chaired by the attorney general, should hear from affected families and be authorized to recommend criminal prosecution for those responsible (potentially including Trump administration official Stephen Miller) and restitution to the people and families that were harmed. The commission would be given the power by Congress to offer restitution to victims, including allowing deported families to return and paying financial compensation. This is a matter of justice for victims and accountability for perpetratorsbut its also necessary to prevent future abuses.

Racial reckoning will be hard. Psychologist Carl Jung argued in a different context that healing trauma requires facing up to hard parts of ourselves. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.

Racial reckoning through truth and reconciliationstyle commissions of the kind we propose is not by itself a complete answer to what ails our democracy. There must be other measuresincluding expulsion of members of Congress who collaborated with insurrectionists, an end to the filibuster, expanded voting rights (through the For the People Act), statehood for DC, immigration reform, and equitable economic recovery. But narrative is a form of power. Trump showed the country that narrative can be driven from government in a way that changes peoples behavior and creates the conditions for sweeping policy changes. His false Stop the Steal narrative had such power precisely because it built on the founding tradition of denial of citizenship to Black Americans and denial of the legitimacy of Black votes. The big lie about voter fraud nearly subverted our democracy. If Democrats do not seize the moment to invite Americans into a new story that reckons with both contemporary and historical racism, our democracy will continue to teeter on a knifes edge.

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We Need a Racial Reckoning to Save Democracy - The Nation

In my weekly column forWorld Politics Review,I write about the ethos that should infuse Bidens plans for his democracy summit and how the missing ingredient is not foreign but domestic.

The second impeachment trial of Donald Trump presents a dilemma for Joe Biden, who wants to make democracy promotion a central plank of his foreign policy. How can the United States claim to embody, much less promote, democratic values when one of its two major political parties is gripped by an emergent, homegrown fascism? Unless and until the Republican Party or its successor unequivocally repudiates the authoritarian cult of Trumpism and the conspiratorial mindset that fuels it, the United States will remain a house divided, lacking credibility to advance the cause of democracy and the institutions of free societies abroad.

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What a difference three decades makes. When the Cold War suddenly ended, leaving liberalism unchallenged, many Western intellectuals and policymakers heralded the end of history and ideological conflict itself. The Clinton administrationsNational Security Strategy, in 1994, defined the countrys chief international goal as facilitating the expansion of the worlds community of market democracies, a trend many considered inexorable. Americas hubris reached its apogee a decade later, in the freedom agenda of George W. Bush. In the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq,his administrations second National Security Strategy, in 2006, elevated democracy promotion to the chief goal of U.S. foreign policy, even if it was by force. The United States would defend worldwide what Bush called the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity.

The Internationalist

Read the fullWorld Politics Reviewarticlehere.

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Continued here:
Trump Still Casts a Shadow Over Bidens Pro-Democracy Ambitions - Council on Foreign Relations