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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. People can become involved in politics in a number of ways. They can vote, volunteer in campaigns, or even run for office themselves. But when it comes to improving the state of the U.S. democracy, what can the average citizen do?

Christopher Beem, managing director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State, attempted to answer that question in his upcoming book, "The Seven Democratic Virtues: What You Can Do to Overcome Tribalism and Save Our Democracy."

The book describes the characteristics and practices such as humility, courage, and charity that Beem said can help people become better democratic citizens. According to Beem, the book was inspired by a question he was often asked when people learned about his area of study.

Many people would ask me what the average citizen can do to defend our democracy, and its a good question that deserves a serious answer, Beem said. People might not be able to change the way the news is reported or overcome the power of lobbyists and campaign donations. But we can step up and analyze our own behavior and make small changes to the way we think and act to help stand up for our democracy.

According to Beem, one of the greatest current threats to democracy in the U.S. is tribalism, the tendency for people to form groups, cooperate within them, and distrust and disparage those outside the group. He argued that tribalism is a basic neurological tendency for people to be drawn to others similar to themselves, and that it affects almost everyone.

Beem said that while democracies are generally vulnerable to tribalism for example, the two-party system in the U.S. tends to split people into one team or the other the problem has reached new heights in the U.S. in recent years.

It has swamped the banks of our democratic life and turned us into two ever-more-hostile camps, Beem wrote in the books introduction. In this moment, the other side is no longer an opponent but an existential threat; norms of behaviors are for suckers; politics has become a zero-sum game. As more partisans politicians and citizens alike reflect this attitude, the rhetoric ratchets up, leading to ever more distrust, antagonism, and even enmity.

However, Beem said there is still opportunity for people to step up and be part of the solution: changing the way they think about democratic citizenship.

To organize the list of virtues that would help citizens live together and thrive within a democracy, Beem broke them down into three categories: democratic thinking, democratic acting, and democratic belief.

According to Beem, intellectual or thinking virtues help us understand what is good and just, and the three thinking democratic virtues are humility, honesty and consistency. While humility is about understanding that everyone has biases that are hard to overcome, honesty is about recognizing that those biases can lead us to believe falsehoods.

Consistency is how we can try to overcome those biases, Beem said. For example, if you think a certain behavior is acceptable when its done by someone on your side, would you feel the same way if it was somebody on the other side? Of course, every circumstance is different and there could be exceptions. But at minimum, having that kind of discussion helps move us beyond our biases. Thats democratic thinking.

Next, Beem described the moral or acting virtues, which help us improve our actions courage and temperance. Courage is the ability to challenge the beliefs and actions of members of your own group, not just those of other groups. Temperance, meanwhile, is the ability to keep anger toward others from morphing into hate.

Finally, Beem listed the final virtues of charity and faith. While charity is the process of giving each other the benefit of the doubt and trusting that everyone has a common, shared commitment to democracy, faith is the belief that democracy can ultimately prevail.

Faith is the idea that you can be a witness for what you understand to be true, and you can have faith that your fellow citizens will respect your voice and actions, listen to what you have to say, and actually be moved, Beem said. Thats not to say that happens all the time, or even the majority of the time, but that it can and has happened.

Ultimately, Beem said he hopes people walk away from reading the book feeling more empowered than when they started.

If youre unhappy with the state of the country, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed or even despair, Beem said. I hope people can find things they can do to feel like theyre making a difference. In President [Joe] Bidens inaugural address, he talked about times that America has been in crisis before, and that it took enough people standing up and doing the right thing to find a solution. And I think that's right, that if you have enough people, you can change the culture. And by doing that, you can change our politics.

"The Seven Democratic Virtues: What You Can Do to Overcome Tribalism and Save Our Democracy" will be published Aug. 30, by Penn State University Press. Beem will be teaching a one-credit class organized around the book in Spring 2023.

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What are the seven virtues of a healthy democracy? - Pennsylvania State University

Is the United States a democracy?

According to a strict definition of the term, the answer is no. Citizens dont vote on proposed legislation, with the exception of infrequent ballot initiatives and perhaps in some small New England towns. We vote for people to represent us when they vote on legislation. That makes America a republic or, and I concede this point, a representative democracy.

So most of us would answer the question in the affirmative. We are as much a democracy as any other nation in the world, even if imperfect in our application of the textbook definition.

That said, why do so many of our politicians charge their opponents with being threats to democracy? We heard this for years, as many Democrats and not a few Republicans claimed that the election of Donald Trump was such a threat. The inconvenient fact that he won the 2016 election because he received more Electoral College votes than did Hilary Clinton simply moved their target to our faulty Constitution.

The operating principle here appears to be: Democracy is under threat whenever our side loses an election.

And give Donald Trump credit, something I am generally loath to do, for simply turning that argument back on his opponents by claiming election fraud to explain why he lost in 2020. They may be strange bedfellows, but they are fellow travelers in their lack of allegiance to our constitutional structures.

What is the single most important characteristic of a democratic form of government? Surely it is the expression of the will of the people at the ballot box. Democracy, in its simplest sense, is about voting. We either trust our fellow citizens or we dont. Hurling irresponsible charges of illegitimacy whenever the wrong candidate wins does not advance a democratic polity. Rather, such reckless hyperbole erodes its very foundation.

There is a reason we are not a pure democracy, and not simply that it would be ponderously inefficient for a nation of our size. The Founding Fathers recognized the need for checks and balances to guard against a tyranny of the majority. Hence, they established different election procedures for the President, the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Most critically, they assured that our judiciary would be independent of and removed from political pressure. Disagreeing with the Supreme Courts decisions is ones right under the First Amendment; it does not make the Court illegitimate nor does it justify political attacks bent on reducing or removing its independence. Threatening individual justices or the Court as a whole is the true threat to our democracy. Conservatives didnt understand that in the previous decade and Progressives dont understand it now.

We have John Adams, among others, to thank for this balance of power. While not attending the Constitutional Convention of 1787 due to his foreign posting as ambassador to England, his influence was in the room. It was he who midwifed the Massachusetts constitution which served as a model for others. The more I read about the period, the more I appreciate Adams despite his curmudgeonry.

The question of how much democracy is good consumed much of the debate during the 1780s leading up to the 1787 convention. The existing state legislatures tended to be captured by temporary majorities of special interests that passed self-serving laws. James Madison, who served briefly in the Virginia legislature, was beside himself with the lack of altruism among his fellow representatives.

I have the historian Gordon Wood to thank for this new insight. His most recent book, Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution, is a travelog through the decades of the 1770s and 1780s as the great thinkers of the day wrestled with defining the role and structure of a government created to advance liberty. He made me realize that my understanding of the issues of the day was rather shallow.

Our system is one of majority rule, even when election results are not to our liking. At the same time the rights of all are protected from a tyranny of the majority. The Constitution draws the line past which the majority dare not go. That line of defense is our court system, as unpopular as it is with one side or the other. That unpopularity among the powerful attests to its fidelity in performing its constitutional function.

Our national discourse would benefit from a ratcheting down of the illegitimacy rhetoric. Democracy is about elections, about winners and losers. When the people speak through the ballot box, thats just pure and simple democracy as it is meant to work.

As long as I am referencing presidents low on my ranking scale, I must add Barack Obamas response to Republican criticism during the early years of his administration. I won. Get over it.

A better quote comes from a losing Democrat candidate in a California Senate primary election. The people have spokethe bs.

Mark Franke, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.

Mark Franke, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.

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The Warts of Democracy | Opinion | shelbynews.com - Shelbynews

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)

Some personal news: Keep calm and carry on. Ill be taking some time off for a family wedding, new baby, French grandkids, and reunions. But well be back in fine fettle after Labor Day!

Happy Redacted Affidavit Friday.

Summer 2022 is ending with a bang. So, talk amongst yourselves:

Judge Orders Redacted Affidavit Used in Trump Search Warrant to Be Unsealed, Via NYT

Biden's Job Rating Rises to 44%, Highest in a Year, Via Gallup

Trump's social media app facing financial fallout, Via Fox (!) Business

J.D. Vance Appeared With Podcaster Who Once Said Feminists Need Rape, Via Mother Jones

Biden calls on 'mainstream' GOP to reject 'MAGA', Via Reuters

ICYMI, I talked with Marine combat veteran Elliot Ackerman on Wednesdays podcast about his new book, The Fifth Act: Americas End in Afghanistan.

We discussed the fall of Kabul and its aftermath, but Ackerman had a warning about threats to democracy in this country and the possibility that someday the military might become involved.

Heres a partial (edited) transcript of some of our conversation:

Elliot Ackerman: When you go from contested election to contested election, at each juncture, there's a game of brinksmanship that's going on with whether or not the military will have to come in and restore some type of order.

There was talk about them having to restore order after the January 6 riots, and there was National Guard I'm actually from Washington, D.C. there was National Guard all over Washington, D.C. in the wake of those riots.

Remember there was Tom Cottons New York Times op-ed, and President Trump talking about evoking the Insurrection Act in the summer of 2020. I mean, that was in a presidential election, but it shows how there is this temptation for our political class to start politicizing the U.S. military.

And that is very, very dangerous, because, although the military is seen as a non-political entity in the United States, that does not mean that those in uniform do not have their political biases, like every other American.

The only difference is there's a culture of omerta in the U.S. military. We don't speak it. But, that culture can break.

And, it seems as though our political leaders, from the right and the left, at every juncture, are eager to politicize the U.S. military. And it's something we should be very aware of and alarmed about as citizens.

My concern is that because so many citizens, again, don't speak the language, they aren't necessarily literate with what's going on inside the military.

They won't be able to see it until it's too late.

Charlie Sykes: [But in 2020,] the line held. And I think that reassured some people, because you had people like General Mark Milley, who issued public statements that there is no way the military is going to be involved. We had a letter signed by 11 former Secretaries of Defense saying, the military is not going to play any role whatsoever. So, at least in the existing top ranks of the military, they seem to understand the danger.

But, if I understand you correctly, you're saying, Don't become complacent about that, or assume that that necessarily reflects what might happen in the culture of the military going forward.

Ackerman: Absolutely. I mean, listen, our popular culture tends to fixate on these four-star generals, the most senior sliver of the U.S. military. But, the military is a massive organization with officers up and down the chain of command, who are not Mark Milley and might not do what Mark Milley says in the heat of the moment....

I'm really not trying to be alarmist, but we have such high levels of dysfunction domestically, and every time we kind of set up these scenarios where we're asking our military to play a role in domestic politics, we're really tempting the fates.

The analogy I use is that these contested elections remind me of a drunk driver.

A drunk driver will go to the bar, right, and they will get completely hammered drunk, and they'll drive home.

And, probably the first time they do that, like, they make it home, and they do it and they make it home the second time, the third time.

And then on the fourth or fifth time, they get hammered drunk and try to drive home.

That's when they wrap their car around a telephone pole.

When I look at our contested elections, it's like we're doing the equivalent as a nation of going to the bar getting just hammered drunk, and we try to drive home.

We've done it twice now, and we have sort of managed to make it home, but one of these days, if we keep doing this, we are going to wrap our proverbial car around a telephone pole.

And, it worries me. We have to stop engaging in these behaviors.

Two stories tell the tale:

Via NBC: In Arizona, Blake Masters backtracks on abortion and scrubs his campaign website.

NBC News took screenshots of the website before and after it was changed. Masters' website appeared to have been refreshed after NBC News reached out for clarification about his abortion stances.

"I am 100% pro-life," Masters' website read as of Thursday morning.

That language is now gone.

Another notable deletion: a line that detailed his support for "a federal personhood law (ideally a Constitutional amendment) that recognizes that unborn babies are human beings that may not be killed."

**

Meanwhile, in Michigan

Last week, the GOP candidate for governor said that rape victims find healing through having their rapists baby.

This week? Republican Tudor Dixon now trails Democratic incumbent, Gretchen Whitmer, by double digits.

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More smart stuff from Ruy Teixeira:

Democrats will surely be happy for anything that delivers a relatively good election result in the current terrible national environment. It did not appear to bother them in 2020, nor does it appear likely to bother them in 2022, that their partys character and coalition keep skewing toward white college graduates. Consciously or not, this is the track the party is currently onthe cultural left turn of the party makes no sense outside of that context.

Between 2012 and 2020, the Democratic advantage among nonwhite working class voters declined by 19 points, while the Democratic advantage increased among white college graduates by 16 points. Stay tuned for more of the same.

Meanwhile, via the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget: New Student Debt Changes Will Cost Half a Trillion Dollars.

President Biden todayannounceda set of changes to student loans including cancellation of up to $20,000 for some borrowers that will cost between $440 billion and $600 billionover the next ten years, with a central estimate of roughly $500 billion.

Combined with todays announcement, the federal governments actions on student loans since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic have cost roughly $800 billion. Of that amount, roughly $750 billion is due to executive action and regulatory changes made by the Biden Administration.

Bonus via Axios: GOP ad blitz mocks Biden's student loan plan.

Republicans are confident that the president's plan will be politically problematic, and are backing up their spin with paid advertising.

The ad, which will be airing during upcoming college football and Major League Baseball games, features a waitress, mechanic and landscaper talking about working extra shifts to help theatre majors and business majors get out of debt.

A landscaper in the spot says: " Biden's right you should take my tax dollars to pay off your debts. My family will figure out how to get by with less. What's most important is we spare college graduates from any extra stress." A mechanic follows up: "Wanna be a struggling artist? College is on me."

Cathy Young, in todays Bulwark:

Some things seem straightforward: For instance, as long as Russia wages a barbaric war in Ukraine, cultural institutions in liberal democracies should not collaborate with or engage any state-run or state-affiliated Russian cultural entities, including private organizations with government connections. The same, I would argue, applies to pro-war, pro-regime figures such as Gergiev. While, generally speaking, art should not be politicized and artists should not be punished for their politics, some circumstancessuch as wars of aggression and unconscionable violations of human rights that amount to state-sponsored terrorallow for exceptions.

Other cases, however, are far more complicated.

Matt Johnson, in this mornings Bulwark:

After decades as one of the worlds most courageous champions of free expression, Rushdie is in critical condition because a would-be assassin obeyed the command of a long-dead religious dictator to kill him for writing a novel. One reason his life has been in danger for the past 33 years is the fact that so many people are afraid to do what he has done: stand up to religious totalitarians and fight for the universal right to free expression, especially for those who live under oppressive and intolerant regimes. The least we can do now is show a bit of courage on his behalf and stand by his side in the fight to come.

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The Military and the Fate of Democracy - by Charlie Sykes - The Bulwark

Bangkok

The suspension of Thailands unpopular prime minister, Prayuth Chan-O-Cha, was given a lukewarm welcome Thursday by pro-democracy forces, who say his replacement another elderly ex-army chief shows the same authoritarian players still dominate national politics.

Prayuth was suspended from office Wednesday by the countrys constitutional court, while the bench deliberates whether he has hit the eight-year term limit.

The limit was introduced in a constitution written by Prayuths allies after he toppled the elected government in 2014 as army chief, promising to stay on only as long as necessary to remedy years of division and political violence.

But eight years later he has refused to step down, staggering on through waves of mass protests, economic crises, no confidence votes in parliament and even the loss of some of his key political allies.

His deputy and longtime political wingman, Prawit Wongsuwan, takes over as caretaker until the court delivers its final ruling, which could take several weeks.

But hopes of a quick change of momentum for Thailands battered democracy movement were hard to find with the 77-year-old Prawit now steering the government.

Some speculate that the constitutional court which has toppled democratically elected leaders and taken out their election-winning parties in favor of the conservative establishment is just making a show of its neutrality as the country prepares for elections, likely early next year.

This changes nothing as Prayuth or Prawit both come from the same power structure, said prominent pro-democracy activist Attapon Buapat.

The court suspended Prayuth only to calm the public in the next weeks or months when it again rules in favor of the establishment. Its all just a game.

It is too early to predict a likely winner of the next election, experts say, as the widespread unpopularity of Prayuths government may not reflect their ability to pull together a working coalition.

Thalufah, a youth-led reform group galvanized by years of anti-Prayuth protests, tweeted Thailand is going down with the frail Prawit as acting premier.

When Prayuth was PM, Thailand was standing at the edge of a cliff, one Twitter user wrote. Now that Prawit is acting PM, Thailand has fallen off the cliff.

True democracy

Prawit has long held influence from behind the scenes among key pillars of Thai politics and society: the military, the palace and the business dynasties that control the economy.

His promotion, experts say, is a sign of the enduring hold the establishment has over a country battling inflation, soaring household debt and increasing inequality.

It really doesnt matter whether Prayuth stays or goes, he is merely a mechanism of the existing power. If he goes, his replacement will rule in favor of this power, Khemthong Tonsakulrungruang, a constitutional law scholar at Chulalongkorn University, told VOA.

Were going backwards. Everything that weve tried to dismantle as a society, like the patronage system, has all come back.

Opposition lawmaker Rangsiman Rome also warned it may not be over just yet for Prayuth, a leader who professed he carried out the coup to save the country but became a sucker for power.

Should the court rule in favor of him, I think Thailand would officially be gearing toward the Dark Ages, he told VOA News.

There was scattered applause for Prayuth from within the ranks of an army that has carried out 13 successful coups since the kingdom became a constitutional monarchy in 1932 and refused to accept election losses to pro-democracy parties.

People should praise Prayuth for following a democratic path by respecting the courts order, Army chief Gen Narongphan Jitkaewthae told reporters. It shows this is a true democratic system. Hes been a gentleman about it, a true soldier if you will. This is true democracy.

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Even with Political Nemesis Prayuth on the Ropes, Thai Democracy Advocates Still Glum - VOA Asia

A bellwether New York primary Tuesday confirms what polls in the last week have been telling us: The cup of American democracy, which many advocates have long seen as half-empty, may actually be half-full. Americans now seem ready to take their twin desires to preserve democracy and abortion rights to the polls in November.

In a closely watched swing district north and west of New York City, Democrat Pat Ryan defeated Republican Marc Molinaro, 52% to 48%.In late campaigning Ryan's message was largelyfocused on protecting abortion rights and the need to counteract threats to American democracy.

Ryan's victory was presaged by polls released earlier this week. This apparent good news arrives against the backdrop of long-running concerns about the public's commitment to democratic norms and values.

A 2016 study found that when Americans were asked to rate on a scale of one to 10 how "essential" it was for them "to live in a democracy," 72% of people born before World War II responded with 10, the highest value. But among people born since 1980, fewer than one in three expressed a similar belief about the importance of democracy.

Another study published in 2020 by political scientists Matthew Graham and Milan Svoloik found that only 3.5% of voters would "realistically punish violations of democratic principles" if candidates they otherwise supported did something destructive of those principles.

A December 2021 article in Vox explained that "the politics of saving democracy look like a sped-up version of the politics of climate change. In theory, everyone knows it's important. In practice, the threat feels remote and abstract far enough removed from [people's] everyday concerns that they aren't willing to change their behavior to avert looming catastrophe."

But new polling suggests that Americans may be more aware of the threat to democracy, and more concerned about it, than those earlier bleak assessments suggest.

An NBC News poll, conducted Aug. 12 to 16, asked for the first time about threats to democracy on the list of issues facing the country. It found that 21% of registered voters ranked those threats as the most important issue facing the nation today, five points higher than the second-ranked issue, the cost of living.

When respondents were asked to choose their top two issues, threats to democracy tied with cost of living as the leading concern for 29% of respondents, followed by jobs and the economy at 28%.

Asked earlier this week about the poll results, even Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the U.S. Senate, acknowledged that threats to democracy are "an important issue."

The NBC poll also found that 66% of the public thinks that Donald Trump bears responsibility for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Furthermore, Americans believe that the investigations into Trump's involvement should continue, by a 57% to 40% margin, though there remain sharp partisan divides on this issue.

This last statistic helps us understand the finding about the public's concern about threats to democracy, which appears directly related to Trump's attempts to end democracy, rather than his claims of ballot fraud.

The House Jan. 6 committee's June and July hearings on Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election seem to have affected America's consciousness, and the steady drumbeat of publicity about the former president's legal troubles also seems to be registering with the American people.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

In addition to the select committee hearings and Trump's legal troubles, the Supreme Court's June decision overturning Roe v. Wade arrived as a wake-up call, demonstrating clearly what Americans have to lose if we abandon democracy and individual rights.

That decision "lit a fire under people," in the words of former Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. In early August, voters resoundingly defeated an anti-abortion amendment to the state constitution.

Of course one set of polls and one referendum in a heartland state do not prove that protecting democracy and rights will drive the vote in November. Fortunately, there are other polls in battleground state elections that suggest a national environment increasingly favorable to those who stand for rights and for free and fair elections.

An Aug. 17 poll by Public Policy Polling found that more than 60% of Wisconsin voters expressed "serious" or "very serious" concerns about Trump's "lies about an election he knew had lost." And 55% of Wisconsinites had concerns about Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican incumbent up for re-election this year, and his alleged efforts "to put fake elector documents from Wisconsin and Michigan into [Mike Pence's] hands" on Jan. 6.

In Arizona, according to an Aug. 18 Fox News poll, incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly leads Republican election-denier Blake Masters by eight percentage points.

The same pattern showed upin an Aug. 21 Trafalgar Group poll in Pennsylvania's key Senate race, with Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman leading Dr. Mehmet Oz, by five points. Oz, an ally of Trump, has supported overturning Roe. Tuesday's victory by Ryan in upstate New York where many experts believed the Republican had the advantage reinforces the meaning of that poll.

Whatever the MAGA base does, one thing is becoming clear in 2022: Most Americans support abortion rights, want to keep democracy and reject election lies.

Another poll released on Aug. 22 bySuffolk University and the Reno Gazette-Journal shows that in Nevada, incumbent Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto's lead over Republican Adam Laxalt has grown from just three points in April to about seven points now. Laxalt has supported Trump's election falsehoods and called the Supreme Court's original Roe decision "a joke."

All these polls occurred after the Aug. 8 FBI search of Trump's home and resort at Mar-a-Lago. As further evidence of the sharp partisan divide, a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted on Aug. 10 showed Republicans rallying around Trump, with support declining for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential 2024 opponent.

That could prove a temporary bounce or a lasting one, but either way, the message of the recent polling is this: Whichever way the 30% to 40% Republican MAGA base turns, the vast majority of Americans value and want to keep democracy, generally support abortion rights and dislike those who deny legitimate election results.

These findings give Attorney General Merrick Garland some room for maneuver as he pursues his investigations of Jan. 6 and Trump's potential crimes

They also suggest that, despite her primary loss in Wyoming, Rep. Liz Cheney may find a receptive audience for her new pro-democracy campaign, dubbed "The Great Task."

In launching that effort, Cheney said, "I'm going to be very focused on working to ensure that we do everything we can not to elect election deniers. We've got election deniers that have been nominated for really important positions all across the country. And I'm going to work against those people. I'm going to work to support their opponents."

The great task of preserving American democracy is not just the distinctive work of our generation. It has been with us all along. From the beginning, America's leaders have warned about democracy's fragility and tried to rally citizens to its cause.

In 1787, at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, a woman on the street in Philadelphia reportedly asked Benjamin Franklin what form of government the convention had created. He replied with a warning, "A Republic, if you can keep it."

These recent polls suggest that Americans' worries about democracy will propel many to vote in November, and to organize others to vote. Hope feeds action. For every one of us ready to take up the task that Franklin long ago set out, the cup of American democracy looks more than half-full.

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about the coming midterms

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It's happening: Abortion rights and the threat to democracy are reshaping the midterms - Salon