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Turnout in Bostons preliminary municipal elections last month wasterrible. Commentators and editorial boards blamed civic apathy especially given the ways in which Massachusetts has worked to make voting more accessible. Some of this commentary would have you believe the commonwealth is a democratic bastion. And while its true that our legislature has passed important voting reforms, in reality, Massachusetts democracy remains politically unequal.

To truly be a safeguard of democracy, the Massachusetts legislature must prioritize dismantling barriers to the ballot that affect communities who are historically the targets of voter suppression. That means protecting ballot access for Black and Hispanic communities who are disproportionately disenfranchised by incarceration.

Reforms like mail-in voting and expanded early voting are unquestionably important, but do little to redress political inequality. Research shows those reforms should not be credited for record 2020 turnout, and some, like MIT Professor Adam Berinsky, have cautioned that they can actually exacerbate political inequality. Why? Because these reforms can bolster turnout for already high-propensity, disproportionately white and affluent voting communities, but fail to remove obstacles to participation by Black, Hispanic and low-income voters. Indeed, political scientists have long shown this to be true of convenience voting reforms, and a MassVOTE report demonstrated this was the case in 2020 in Massachusetts.

Leaders in the state House have already demonstrated their support for making only mail-in voting and expanded early voting permanent this session. I hope they reconsider. The state Senate recently demonstrated a commitment to racial and political equality, by adopting an amendment to end the de facto disenfranchisement of eligible incarcerated voters filed by Sen. Adam Hinds, and passing it as part of the VOTES Act.

There are between 7,000 to 9,000 citizens in Massachusetts serving time for misdemeanors, or who are incarcerated while awaiting trial (held in jail because they cannot afford bail), who have the right to vote but cannot exercise it. These eligible voters often do not know they are eligible to vote, and cannot access absentee ballots or informational materials about the candidates. Those few who can access absentee ballot applications often find that, for a variety of reasons, their ballots are erroneously rejected. Advocates refer to this as de-facto or jail-based disenfranchisement.

Reforms like mail-in voting and expanded early voting are unquestionably important, but do little to redress political inequality.

The Hinds amendment and jail-based voting bills, S. 474 also filed by Sen. Hinds and H. 836 filed by Reps. Liz Miranda and Chynah Tyler, would fix that. They would ensure those 7,000 to 9,000 eligible incarcerated voters can cast a counted ballot by placing commonsense requirements on sheriffs, department of corrections officials and the secretary of commonwealth.

But even if those pieces of legislation are adopted, jails and prisons will continue to strip hyper-incarcerated communities of political power. The approximately 9,000 citizens serving felony convictions also lose the right to vote. This is a recent development: for the first 200 years of Massachusetts history, we did not deprive Mass. citizens of their right to vote while serving prison sentences. Only 20 years ago, Mass. took the right to vote away from anyone serving a felony conviction after Gov. Celluccis petition to pass felony disenfranchisement on the ballot succeeded.

All Mass. citizens regain the right to vote after serving a prison sentence, yet many formerly incarcerated citizens believe that they have been permanently stripped of their voting rights. Some are told that by corrections officers. Having seen headlines about those citizens like Crystal Mason in other states, many simply fear that attempting to vote could lead to a felony conviction.

Professor Ariel White at MIT has shown that even those released after serving short jail sentences are less likely to vote than they would be otherwise, and that this impact is more pronounced for Black voters. Political scientists Vesla Weaver and Amy Lerman show that contact with the criminal legal system makes people withdraw from civic life in myriad ways. And further research suggests this impact on civic engagement can extend to families and loved ones of those incarcerated.

Achieving full democratic participation in Massachusetts will require that we end the disenfranchisement of all citizens in prisons and jails.

Ending the disenfranchisement of people entangled in the legal system starting with those who maintain the right to vote while incarcerated must be our legislatures election reform priority, if for no other reason than it is unconstitutional and strips political power from a population that is 60% Black and Hispanic, and disproportionately poor.

Passing the jail-based voting bills to ensure those citizens who legally have the right to vote are able to exercise that right is an important first step. But going forward, our legislature and the democracy reform movement at large must consider the additional ways that incarceration and policies perpetuate inequities in political participation, and maintain political and racial inequality.

Achieving full democratic participation in Massachusetts will require that we end the disenfranchisement of all citizens in prisons and jails.

The Mass. legislature can and must act now to begin to redress the harm done to impacted communities by way of political suppression. If the legislature wants to build a participatory, equitable democracy, it must listen to those people supporting the jail-based voting bills and amendment #1 to the VOTES Act, and pass it.

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Massachusetts is not the democratic bastion you think it is - WBUR

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