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Aug 25th 2021

ENRIQUE, A LAWYER (not his real name), worked for the authorities in El Salvador for over a decade, going from advising a local council to being employed in the transport ministry. Despite his misgivings about graft in politics, he worked with the two parties that have dominated the country since the end of the civil war in 1992. But shortly after Nayib Bukele, the president, came to power in 2019, he went back to private practice. This government is worseit attacks anyone who doesnt take its position and abuses of power go unchecked, he says. There is no rule of law.

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Mr Bukele, a 40-year-old populist, is threatening the fragile democracy that was built up in El Salvador over 30 years of peace. Shortly after coming to power he entered the legislature with armed soldiers to force lawmakers to vote for a loan to buy equipment for the police and military. In May the Congress, which Mr Bukeles party now controls, dismissed the attorney-general and all five members of the constitutional chamber of the Supreme Court, replacing them with cronies. In June he did away with CICIES, an anti-corruption body. He expelled a journalist for El Faro, a digital-news publication, from the country and proposed sweeping changes to the constitution, including one that would extend the presidents term by a year.

El Salvador is a striking example of democratic regression. In last years democracy index compiled by the EIU, a sister company of The Economist, it was demoted from flawed democracy to hybrid regime, meaning semi-authoritarian. Its neighbours are troubled, too. Although Latin America generally became more democratic in the 1980s and has held up reasonably well over the past few years (with notable exceptions, such as Venezuela), Central America has not. In four of its seven countriesEl Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, collectively known as the Northern Triangle, and Nicaraguathe systems are buckling. That matters for those who live there, but it also affects the United States.

Each Central American country differs from the others and has its own unique problems. Yet all have certain things in common. They have long been dominated by small yet powerful political and economic elites that do not necessarily favour democracy. Institutions are young, weak or politically charged. Economies tend to work best for those at the top. Corruption is depressingly common.

Poor governance has led to insecurity, economic stagnation and shoddy public services. Institutions that ought to uphold the rule of law, such as the courts and UN-backed bodies, have been co-opted or dismantled, allowing corruption to increase. The pandemic has added to these problems. The region fell off a cliff last year, says Dan Restrepo, a former adviser to Barack Obama who is now at the Centre for American Progress, a think-tank in Washington, DC. The pandemic provided a pretext to curtail civil liberties in the name of public health.

In Guatemala things went from bad to worse in 2019 when CICIG, a UN-backed anti-corruption body, was disbanded. It had looked into government sleaze and abuses of power by the army, which ruled the country until 1996. Over the past two years military men, corrupt officials and criminals have only become more powerful, says Carmen Rosa de Len, who heads the Institute for Sustainable Development, a Guatemalan think-tank. American hopes that the country could be its main ally in the Northern Triangle are evaporating as President Alejandro Giammatteis government attacks the justice system. On July 23rd Juan Franciso Sandoval, the anti-graft prosecutor, was fired, allegedly for bias. Mr Sandoval, who fled the country, said he was dismissed because he was investigating high-ranking officials. Drug money has started to seep into the state, too. Ms de Lens organisation has connected 38 lawmakers to drug-traffickers.

The criminality of the state is also the biggest concern in Honduras. Drug barons have seemingly infiltrated politics at every level. Juan Orlando Hernndez, the president, has been fingered in at least threeUS cases against drug-traffickers, including one in May in which his brother was sentenced to life behind bars. Elections in November are unlikely to change much. Yani Rosenthal, a leading presidential candidate, served three years in a jail in the United States for money-laundering.

In Nicaragua Daniel Ortega, the authoritarian president, acts with increasing impunity. Over the past four months seven presidential hopefuls, as well as numerous intellectuals and former ministers, have been detained. On August 6th Nicaraguas electoral council disqualified the main opposition party, Citizens for Liberty, from running. As of December NGOs must register as foreign agents. Police are also going after La Prensa, the countrys oldest newspaper. There is no trace of democracy, says a Nicaraguan businessman.

Few ordinary folk in these countries think they can change things through elections or protests. Many think their only option is to flee from their homes. In July US border guards had 213,000 encounters on the southern border, the largest number in a month since 2000. Some 44% were from the Northern Triangle. But this understates the problem. Many more of those fleeing spend time in Mexico, before trying to go farther north, while many Nicaraguans go south to Costa Rica.

President Joe Biden has made Central America, especially the Northern Triangle, a foreign-policy priority. (Officials fear they can do little about Nicaragua.) Rather than simply reinforcing the border, the administration wants to tackle the democratic regression and its effects.

That is easier said than done. The United States has some diplomatic tools at its disposal, such as slapping visa bans on the ruling elites. Last month the State Department published a list of more than 50 current and former officials accused of corruption or undermining democracy in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. They will not be allowed to travel to the United States and may face further sanctions. (Similarly, Nicaraguans linked to the regime have been issued with visa bans.) The Justice Department says it will launch a task-force to investigate corruption and human trafficking in the region.

Boosting governance, security and prosperity in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador from afar will be much trickier. Some violence-reduction programmes may have had a bit of success over the past few decades. But even assessments by USAID admit that past aid efforts have had little effect. American officials say they have learned from previous mistakes. Their initial focus now is on improving prosperity, by working with the private sector in each country. For example, US officials are trying to persuade local businesses to provide more jobs. They also want them to lobby for policy changes, such as the introduction of well-regulated public-private partnerships for infrastructure projects. Such projects are typically wholly state-run and highly prone to graft.

Mr Restrepo says that American efforts need to be more disruptive. That could be achieved by creating a parallel market for captive industries, such as sugar. Producers could then sell goods directly to the United States rather than going through local cartels. Such work, he says, takes a lot of nerve. Mr Biden and his team may not have enough.

For more coverage of Joe Bidens presidency, visit our dedicated hub

This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline "Joe Bidens other headache"

Originally posted here:
Democracy is quickly eroding in Central America - The Economist

In the popular imagination, successful coups require the participation of the military. Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, in their latest book on the Trump presidency, I Alone Can Fix It, paint Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in heroic colors. During the runup to the 2020 election, Milley, worried about a Reichstag moment, resolved with his colleagues to thwart whatever the former president might try.

The truth is, the biggest threat to American democracy isnt a military coup, as Milleys laudable behavior tends to show. The more probable danger is much less dramatic and much more terrifying: a horrible decision from the final arbiter of our constitutional system the Supreme Court of the United States.

A constitutional theory is gaining ground at the court that could theoretically have awarded the 2020 election to Donald Trump, despite his having been swamped at the polls. Its basis is an obscure and muddled argument that first surfaced when the Supreme Court stepped into the George W. Bush-Al Gore 2000 presidential contest and stopped a state-court ordered recount in Florida.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist, straining to explain why the U.S. Supreme Court should meddle in the matter, seized on Article I, Section 4 and Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution, which specify that state legislatures may establish rules for the Manner in which federal elections are conducted (unless Congress sets a contradictory national rule). In a separate opinion in Bush vs. Gore, joined by Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, Rehnquist discerned from these provisions that a significant departure from [a state] legislative scheme for appointing Presidential electors presents a federal constitutional question.

In other words, if in the judgment of the Supreme Court, a state court decision about state election law seems to strain the state legislatures intent, the federal high court can strike it down as a violation of the Constitution.

This is a wholly wild-eyed theory. Its chief flaw (there are others) is that it ignores the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court had neither the authority nor the expertise to pronounce a state court ruling a significant departure from a state legislative scheme. The Supreme Court interprets federal law, not state law. Anything else runs roughshod over core constitutional principles of federalism.

It also clears a path for making mischief with free and fair elections.

Rehnquists dubious theory has not yet commanded a majority of the court, but sad to say, it has struck the fancy of several justices. In the last two years, Thomas, Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Justice Samuel Alito have all cozied up to Rehnquists opinion in their own writings.

Thomas weighed in in February, in a case that challenged Joe Bidens victory in Pennsylvania. The Supreme Court ultimately denied it a hearing, but Thomas penned a dissent.

With the pandemic raging before the 2020 election, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had ruled, based on the state constitution, in favor of a three-day extension of the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots. Thomas argued that the added days represented a federal constitutional violation: The Pennsylvania justices had changed an election law, coopting the role the U.S. Constitution reserved for state legislatures.

If the court had agreed to hear the case and had Thomas view of the facts prevailed, the likely remedy would have been to toss the Pennsylvania election back to the state and into the Legislature for a do-over. At an extreme, the partisan Republicans that dominate the Pennsylvania Legislature might have tried to declare a new set of electors for Trump, not Biden and the voters be damned.

This is the kind of legal coup Trump conjured when he tweeted on the morning of Jan. 6, All Mike Pence has to do is send them the election results back to the States, AND WE WIN. It would also have been the endgame of the attempt by a Trump loyalist to strongarm the Department of Justice into disparaging the election results in Georgia.

A wave of lawsuits would have followed, and the Trump forces could have dressed up their treachery with the Rehnquist argument, potentially empowering state legislatures in the presidents thrall to defeat democratic rule.

It should be unthinkable that the Supreme Court would be party to such a cataclysmic outcome as overturning the clear will of voters on the basis of a lawless theory. As the aphorism goes, The Constitution is not a suicide pact. At the same time, it was beyond belief for many legal scholars that a bare conservative majority of the court would bulldoze the law in Bush vs. Gore, all but handing the White House to the GOP.

That notorious decision played out amid extreme partisan fervor on all sides. The passions that would accompany another election-law showdown in the Supreme Court in, say, 2024 could make the Florida frenzy look like a school board squabble. Its conceivable that the partisan instincts of a majority of the court would again override their legal judgment about both constitutional provisions and the courts proper role.

The bullet that American democracy dodged in 2020 was not boots in the street but jurisprudence in the Supreme Court. It remains a remote threat, but thats still where a death-blow to the republic lies.

@HarryLitman

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Why the Supreme Court is a threat to American democracy - Los Angeles Times

What the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes report confirmed this month is that the stable climate many of us grew up with is gone and has been replaced by a fundamentally unstable one. Sea levels will almost certainly rise and storms will get more intense. Amid a drumbeat of depressing news and decades of inaction, theres a sort of folk wisdom emerging that liberal democracy might just be too slow to tackle a problem as urgent and massive as the climate crisis. Its an enticing vision: that governments can forgo the messy, deliberative work of politics in favour of a benign dictatorship of green technocrats who will get emissions down by brute force. With a punishingly tiny budget of just 400 gigatonnes of CO2 left to make a decent shot of staying below 1.5C of warming, is it time to give something less democratic a try?

It would be easy to look at the longstanding stalemate around climate policy in the US, the worlds second biggest emitter and embattled superpower, as evidence that something more top-down is needed. Yet the failure isnt one of too much democracy but too little. The US Senate empowers West Virginias Joe Manchin a man elected by fewer than 300,000 people to block the agenda of a president elected by more than 80 million. Climate-sceptical Republicans, backed by corporate interests, have attempted to gerrymander their way to electoral dominance, halting progressive climate action in its tracks. The fossil fuel industry can engulf lawmakers with lobbyists and virtually unlimited campaign donations to sway their votes. And as the Republican partys leading lights flirt with authoritarians like Hungarys prime minister, Viktor Orbn, comprehensive bipartisan climate action remains a pipe dream.

If a less democratic world is needed to deal with the climate, who are the people whod like to bring a less democratic world into being? Take Spains far-right party Vox, the third largest in the countrys parliament. Having tried climate denial and taken regular jabs at environmental movements and policy, it has unveiled a set of proposals for how to deal with rising temperatures. As Lluis de Nadal wrote for openDemocracy recently, the partys true ecology platform aims to create a national energy autarchy and mobilise a green manufacturing renaissance. In France, the far-right National Rally formerly the Front National has made ecological politics a key part of its rebrand away from Holocaust denial. Jordan Bardella, the partys vice-president, has called borders the environments greatest ally, casting foreigners as rootless cosmopolitans divorced from the land. The aim is not to reach net zero faster neither party has laid out workable plans to do so but to endear climate-conscious voters to an ethno-nationalist cause.

Its not just the right, however, that has considered a turn away from democracy for the planets sake. Back in 2010, the influential climate scientist James Lovelock suggested that it may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while to curb emissions. More recently, centrists such as Michael Bloomberg have started to see corporations as more reliable engines of climate progress. As much as US and UK liberals have talked up the promise of spreading democracy throughout the world this century, though, many centrists as the Progressive Internationals David Adler wrote in 2018 are pretty down on democracy itself. Analysing the World Values and the European Values surveys, Adler found that centrists in wealthy countries were less supportive of democracy than their counterparts on either the left or the far right. Less than half of centrists in the US thought elections were essential; only 25% saw civil rights as a critical feature of democracy.

Actually existing centrist politicians, meanwhile, such as Emmanuel Macron in France, havent shown any willingness to address the climate crisis at the speed or scale it demands. They share a basic weariness about enthusiastic uses of state power to plan out what it is an economy ought to be doing, and cower in the face of major polluters like carmakers and the fossil fuel industry. There are still plenty of austerians hanging around, too, weary of the deficit spending necessary for decarbonisation.

Openly authoritarian governments hardly fare better. China has rolled out an impressive array of green technologies over the last decade with massive industrial policy. Yet still it continues to prioritise fossil-fuelled growth, with its 14th five-year plan pledging to reduce emissions intensity by just 18% through 2025, and the planned opening of 43 new coal-fuelled power stations not to mention the atrocities that government routinely commits against its own people. In India, now the worlds third biggest emitter, Narendra Modis far-right government has balked at setting a mid-century carbon cutting target. Like China, India has missed the deadline to update its emissions reduction plan in advance of UN climate talks in Glasgow this November.

There is simply no class of enlightened technocrats in powerful governments waiting in the wings to save the day. No authoritarians are gunning to decarbonise at the breakneck speed required to avert catastrophe. And no billionaire saviour in the form of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos will rescue our dying planet theyre both more interested in getting off it than improving it.

The answer, stubbornly, is more democracy both within and beyond our borders. Countless millions will be displaced as temperatures soar, meaning national boundaries are bound to become more porous. Our conceptions of democracy should too, to see those living downstream from the wests massive historical emissions as deserving of citizenship and a say in how and how quickly decarbonisation happens. A proposal for curbing emissions from the developed world so that the billion individuals who live without electricity can enjoy its benefits would probably pass in a landslide in a world referendum, the writer and filmmaker Astra Taylor has argued, but it would likely fail if the vote were limited to people in the wealthiest countries.

A best-case scenario detailed in their report by IPCC scientists, Shared Socioeconomic Economic Pathway 1, involves more inclusive development and unprecedented collaboration among the worlds governments to manage the global commons. In the less upbeat SSP3, resurgent nationalism and concerns about competitiveness and security start to emerge as countries go their own way in trying to adapt to and (more rarely) mitigate rising temperatures.

Roads away from democracy all lead to climate chaos. Theres no easy alternative on offer of course. The illiberal right is ascending much faster than the socialist left that has long sought to extend democracy into political systems, homes, and workplaces. The best hope in the short term is for a popular front to browbeat the middling centrists who claim to believe science into actually acting on it, and beating back the illiberal right accordingly.

Kate Aronoff is a writing fellow at In These Times

This article was amended on 26 August 2021. An earlier version said incorrectly that Modis government had pledged to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

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Is democracy getting in the way of saving the planet? - The Guardian

Yet when many Americans think of democracy, they think less of themselves than of politicians, less of community and lifestyle than of government and elections. Our narrow concept needs widening, our democracy needs learning and community. There is no better place to start than at the grassroots level by forming democracy learning communities all across America.

We come to this conclusion from long careers, domestic and foreign. Paul is a political sociologist who has studied and engaged in grassroots citizen activism in the United States for over 30 years. Mike is a former State Department diplomat who worked for 35 years to support democracy abroad in countries ranging from Russia to Iraq to South Sudan.

From these different vantage points, we have learned that democracy is fragile and demands wide, constructive citizen engagement. This engagement can produce valuable public goods such as mutual trust, better health and lasting peace. In South Sudan's long civil war, Mike witnessed first-hand how stalled peace talks between the government and rebels advanced only after youth, women, and community and religious leaders were given a seat at the negotiating table. In Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Florida, Virginia and Washington, D.C., Paul experienced how active citizens tend to be more informed and confident about their civic power. Research shows such citizen qualities can nurture more responsive government.

Citizens are not born, they are made. The best making is sustained, not episodic. Yet for most Americans, the practice of democracy is at best episodic and narrow: voting every few years, then watching in consternation from afar as paid activists, lobbyists, and elected officials run the show. All Americans are affected by democratic dysfunction, so we need sustained, inclusive ways for citizens to connect, learn and collaborate about democracy.

We can start by learning about human behavior and its interaction with larger forces shaping American life. First, abundant research shows humans tend to favor and gravitate toward people like themselves. Second, this tendency fuels a variety of cognitive biases that make it harder for humans to understand and get along with people unlike them. These include going along with our group to get along, seeking and trusting information that confirms our group's views, and seeing members of outside groups as more alike and those of our in-group as more diverse. Third, when these human biases face new conditions daily absorption in electronic media, media algorithms that feed us what we like and believe, and communities more segregated by class and political affiliation our biases are magnified in ways that aggravate democratic dysfunction.

How can Americans meet these social and structural challenges and strengthen our democracy? One way is to create democracy learning communities. DLCs enable us to tap into two powerful human traits that have helped us survive and thrive as a species: our capacity to learn, and our inclination toward sociability.

The concept of a learning community is most discussed and practiced in higher education, where structured, residential learning communities have been shown to improve student grades and graduation rates. Yet in our complex, interdependent and rapidly changing world, learning communities can and should be cultivated throughout society. This would help people intelligently, collaboratively tackle problems, and fulfill their needs for belonging and purpose.

Democracy learning communities can bring people together across political, class, race and religious divides to learn about their commonalities and differences as well as the complexities, challenges and possibilities of democracy. Further, when organized municipally or regionally, DLCs can bring people together in-person as well as online, on an on-going rather than episodic basis, to nurture greater trust and collaboration.

Clearly, bringing people together across lines of difference is not easy, and can spur conflict rather than collaboration. But effective learning communities uphold rules of engagement and foster long-term relationships through regular, curated activities like networking socials, issue deliberations, and collaboration workshops that engender learning and cooperation.

Democracy can and should be a lifestyle as much as a governance system. Municipal and regional DLCs can cultivate more good citizens and help Americans overcome political dysfunction. There is no better place to start than in your own town, city or region.

Paul Lachelier is the founder of Learning Life, a nonprofit lab devoted to innovating education and citizen engagement. Mike Morrow is a former U.S. diplomat and current senior democracy strategist with Learning Life.

2021 The Fulcrum. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Paul Lachelier and Mike Morrow: How can we build a better democracy? It starts here. - PostBulletin.com

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Letter to the editor: This sort of democracy isn't new, has its perils - The Bozeman Daily Chronicle