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Both historians swam in the intellectual currents of their time. They drew on interdisciplinary scholarship in psychiatry, sociology and anthropology and, in a sharp break with the generation of historians that directly preceded them, came to believe that people were motivated by more than material self-interest. Politics, they argued, was as much driven by emotion and tied up with identity as it was an outcome of economics.

They also took a dim view of human nature. Writing in the aftermath of World War II and at the dawn of the Cold War, they cautioned liberals against a starry-eyed faith in human perfectibility. People were fundamentally wired to do bad and irrational things. To combat that tendency, advocates of liberal democracy would need to be tough.

Re-reading both volumes for the first time since graduate school, I was recently struck by their lasting salienceeven presience. Both historians foresaw the many ways that a seemingly sturdy democratic society could crumble from within. Over seven decades later, Schlesingers and Hofstadters work provides a starting place for conversations about our own troubled political era.

By the time he wrote The Vital Center in 1949, Schlesinger was already a renowned public figure. The son of Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., he won a Pulitzer Prize for his second book, The Age of Jackson, joined Harvards faculty alongside his father and in 1947 collaborated with Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, John Kenneth Galbraith and other prominent activists in establishing Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a preeminent liberal advocacy group.

Much like political observers today who struggle to make sense of the structural and psychological drivers behind MAGA conservatism, Schlesinger wanted to understand the root causes of totalitarianisma catch-all phrase that many midcentury liberals used to capture the violence and authoritarianism of both fascism and Soviet communism.

Unlike his father, whose scholarship downplayed ideology and emotion and instead characterized political behavior as the expression of rational economic self-interest, the younger Schlesinger believed left-wing and right-wing illiberalism were deeply rooted in the alienation and rootlessness of the modern, industrial economy. A combination of impersonality, interchangeability and speed had worn away the old protective securities without creating new ones. In turn, people were prone to experience frustration rather than fulfillment, isolation rather than integration.

When confronted with a feeling of dispossession and isolation, many people turned to violent, extremist ideologies that furnished them with a false sense of belonging and safety.

Core to Schlesingers assessment was a pessimism about human nature. The Soviet experience, on top of the rise of fascism, reminded my generation rather forcibly that man was, indeed, imperfect, and that the corruptions of power could unleash great evil in the world, he wrote.

In a forward to a later edition of the book, he further explained that my generation had been brought up to regard human nature as benign and human progress as inevitable. The existing deficiencies of society, it was supposed, could be cured by education and by the improvement of social arrangements. Sin and evil were theological superstitions irrelevant to political analysis.

But what if they werent?

Borrowing heavily from the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, an influential mid-century theologian and co-founder of the ADA, Schlesinger agreed that a strong social welfare net was sound policyeven necessary to blunt the dislocating effects of the modern, industrial economybut not a sure guarantee of democratic durability. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Niebuhr just a few years after The Vital Center was published, Niebuhr and his acolytes believed that in humans were naturally sinful. People would not naturally see the light; to end segregation, they sometimes needed to be made uncomfortable. Such belief was at the core of MLKs brand of nonviolent confrontation and fundamental to Schlesingers work.

Beyond strong social welfare policies, someone would have to stand up forcefully for democracy. But who?

Certainly not the business class. Schlesinger was scathing in his assessment of American business leaders who, when the chips were down have always been bailed out by radical democracy. In the 1920s capitalists hid behind protectionism and minimalist government. The business community then responded to the challenge of Nazism by founding the America First Committee. It responded to the opportunities opened up by the Second World War by rushing to dismantle instrumentalities of American military and economic influence in the name of tax reduction.

Referring to the nations premier business lobby, he found that without exception the measures favored by the [National Association of Manufacturers] provided some sort of aid to business and industry. Without exception rigid opposition was maintained against similar assistance to other groups and against all other regulatory measures pertaining to industry. In the end assessment, Schlesinger did not expect that the business community would go fascist in the next few years, but his overview of recent American history left him confident that the private sector will probably not produce the leadership to save free society either.

Schlesinger didnt hold the Communist left in higher regard. Several chapters in his book catalogued in detail the horrors of Soviet Russia and the duplicity and credulity of American communists. They posed a threat to this liberal revival, he wrote, given their frequent infiltration of labor unions, advocacy organizations and even Democratic political machines. They were, in Schlesingers mind, an immediate threat.

It was easy for readers to mistake his volume as a broadside against the left. The very title of the bookThe Vital Centerled some commentators to assume he advocated a squishy center in politics. On the contrary, as he later explained, vital center refers to the contest between democracy and totalitarianism, not to contests within democracy between liberalism and conservatism, not at all to the so-called middle of the road preferred by cautious politicians of our own time. The middle of the road is definitely not the vital center; it is the dead center. The vital center would capture a broad spectrum from the ant-fascist right to the anti-communist left, residing in the space between both totalitarian extremes.

Not unlike todays calls forbut tragic absence ofa Republican Party more loyal to the country than Donald Trump, Schlesinger both believed in the necessity of a non-fascist right but also despaired that in its current state, American conservatism was not resilient enough to rescue itself from the grips of its Neanderthal wing. Contrasting the Republican Party, with its vociferous rejection of the New Deal state, with British Conservatives, who accepted and helped build out a welfare state after the war, he took a dim view of the GOPs capacity to lead responsibly. He argued that we desperately need in this country the revival of responsibility on the rightthe development of a non-fascist right to work with the non-Communist left in the expansion of free society. But he wasnt holding his breath.

And moderates? To Schlesinger, they hewed to so cautious a middle path that they were incapable of fighting totalitarianism on either the left or right. Seeking to please everyone, they stood for nothing.

If anyone were to preserve democracy, it would have to be a hard-shelled leftliberals fashioned in the mold of FDR, Harry Truman and the ADA. To be sure, the argument betrayed Schlesingers liberal bias. There was, after all, a strong moderate wing of the GOP that would, in subsequent years, work constructively with liberals on issues like civil rights and health care. But overall, the partys shrill rejection of measures that blunted the effects of industrial capitalism made him skeptical of conservatisms ability to address the conditions that gave rise to totalitarianism.

The Vital Center was a warning shot, but its pages nevertheless reflected the authors belief that a liberal, technocratic elite of the variety that had staffed New Deal and war mobilization agencies could shore up democratic institutions, if that elite corps was uncompromising in confronting and defeating the forces of illiberalism.

Though Richard Hofstadter formally introduced the idea of a paranoid style in American politics in an article published by that name in Harpers Magazine in late 1964, he had explored the theme in earlier works. In sweeping histories of American populism and progressivism, and essays on the contemporary paleo-conservatism of the early Cold War, Hofstadterlike Schlesingerfound that people not only seek their interests but also express and even in a measure define themselves in politics. Political life acts as a sounding board for identities, values, fears, and aspirations.

Unlike Schlesinger, who in 1961 became a staff member in John F. Kennedys White House, Hofstadter devoted his career to teaching and scholarship and remained at arms length from practical politics. From his perch at Columbia University, he came to believe that the rationalistic bias inherent in earlier political histories had broke[n] down under the impact of political events, partly because of what had been learned through public-opinion polling and depth psychology. Historians, in other words, could draw on other fields in the social sciences to draw a richer portrait of political cultureone that extended past the two-dimensional view of people as rational actors who prioritized their most obvious economic interests.

With a broader tool set in hand, Hofstadter provided a sweeping overview of the paranoid style in politics, a strain of political behavior that stretched from the earliest days of the American republic to modern-day conservatism. Marked by heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy, the paranoid style dealt in grandiose theories of conspiracy.

Quoting at length from unrelated documentsa speech by Joseph McCarthy in 1951, a Populist manifesto from 1895, an anti-Catholic broadside from 1855, a sermon by a Massachusetts clergyman in 1798Hofstadter found striking through lines in American politics: a fear of cabals and secret societies, a sense of dispossession, an insistence that invisible actors were driving the course of events. One could easily update his essay with a present-day sampling of delusional and obscene QAnon conspiracies.

Like the Arizonan who traveled to Washington, D.C. to testify against a bill to control the sale of firearms in 1964, and who warned of an attempt by a subversive power to make us part of one world socialistic government, political paranoiacs throughout time were seemingly incapable of viewing the world through a rational lens.

Hofstadter acknowledged that the paranoid style was not specific to the United States, nor to conservatism. World history was replete with notions about an all-embracing conspiracy on the part of Jesuits or Freemasons, international capitalists, international Jews, or Communists. But in his own time, American conservatism was uniquely gripped in its vice.

Thomas Kuchel, the liberal Republican senator from California, estimated in 1959 that of the 60,000 letters his office received weekly, ten percent was fright mailindignant of anguished letters about the latest PLOT! To OVERTHROW America!!! Some of the more memorable plots that come to mind include these: 35,000 Communist Chinese troops bearing arms and wearing deceptively dyed powder-blue uniforms, are poised on the Mexican border, about to invade San Diego; the United States has turned overor will at any momentits Army, Navy and Air Force to the command of a Russian colonel in the United Nations; almost every well-known American or free-world leader is, in reality, a top Communist agent; a United States Army guerilla-warfare exercise in Georgia, called Water Moccasin III, is in actuality a United Nations operation preparatory to taking over the country.

As in earlier eras, the paranoid style was in part a function of status anxiety. People who were used to being on top suddenly felt the ground shifting beneath them. The literature of the American right, Hofstadter observed, was now a literature not of those who felt themselves to be in possession but of those who felt dispossesseda literature of resentment, profoundly anti-establishment in its impulses. Whats more, it was tribal. What seemed important was not only the wrongs the McCarthyist right-wingers thought had been committed but who committed them. Todays villains are the Clintons, the globalists, Antifa, Critical Race Theorists, Socialists. In Hofstadters time, it was striped-pants diplomats, Ivy League graduates, high-ranking generals, college presidents, intellectuals, the Eastern upper classes, Harvard professors

Though Hofstadter noted that the paranoid style was traditionally the preserve of political minorities, by 1964 ideas that had once resided in the curious intellectual underworld had become alarmingly mainstream, with Barry Goldwaters nomination for president. Unlike Schlesinger, though, he offered no sure prescription to stop the illiberal right in its tracks. Like paranoid movements that preceded it, it would have to run its natural course until subsequent events or political realignment caused the fever to break.

Theres a lot to criticize in these two accounts. Writing at the dawn of the modern civil rights movement, both historians had almost nothing to say about raceparticularly, whitenessas drivers of political identity. Religion figured into both works, but only in passing. Critics have noted that Hofstadter overplayed his hand in describing turn-of-the-century Populism as a retrogressive movement, ignoring its constructive aspirations including the movements advocacy of policies that would return economic power and autonomy to small farmers, and its early experiments with interracial political and economic organizing. Schlesinger, for his part, painted the American left wing with a broad brush, failing to distinguish between hardline Communists and those fellow travelers who tolerated communists in their unions and political organizations as a means to an end. At times, both historians took extreme license in applying psychological concepts to broad political movements. Paranoia and anxiety are, after all, defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DMM), and neither Schlesinger nor Hofstadter was a trained mental health professional.

But in the summer of 2021, The Vital Center and The Paranoid Style in American Politics still pack a bold punch. Both volumes urge recognition of illiberalism for what it is: a clear and present danger to constitutional democracynot a loyal opposition with which one breaks bread and compromises. Both take a realistic view of American conservatisms peculiar susceptibility to conspiracy theories and toxic identity politics. Both implicitly reject the idea that the fever will break if only the forces of liberal democracy extend their hand in a show of good will. People are sometimes rational. Often, they are not.

If the parallels are instructive, the takeaway is clear. Democracy is supported by a frail scaffold. It can collapse, and in other places at different times, it has. The vital center is not the dead center, where bipartisan Gangs of 20 go to talk themselves blue in the face. Its the bulwark against democratic backslide. Defending it is imperative, and in the absence of a functioning anti-authoritarian right, it will require unapologetic liberal grit, and determination.

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Summer Reading for Democrats and Never Trumpers - POLITICO

Staring down a big shelf of big Trump books, Im beginning to wonder if when it comes to helping us understand the full import of what happened during his four years in the White House less may very well be more. The 400-page catalogs of ruthless betrayals, nasty insults and erratic tweets add to our store of knowledge mainly by compounding whats already there; a slender volume of political theory, on the other hand, can prompt us to rethink our assumptions, raising central questions that we never properly asked before.

Thats only when its done right which Democracy Rules, a lively new book by Jan-Werner Mller, generally is. Mller teaches at Princeton, and is the author of a number of books about political ideas, including What Is Populism?, which happened to be published in the fall of 2016, three months after the referendum on Brexit and two months before the election of Donald Trump.

Populists, Mller argues in that book as well as this one, like to present themselves as champions of democracy, but their notion of the people is cramped and exclusionary; critics, political rivals and immigrants are banished to a realm beyond the circle of concern.

It should be said that Mllers concept of populism as something thats inherently opposed to pluralism and ultimately democracy is pejorative and not uncontroversial, especially among those on the left who want to reclaim the word. But his definition also offers the benefit of a clarifying specificity. Viktor Orban of Hungary, Narendra Modi of India and Nicols Maduro of Venezuela are all populists in Mllers cosmology; Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are decidedly not.

Mller begins by acknowledging the widespread fear that democracy is in crisis before pointing out that few people who arent political philosophers have given any sustained thought to what democracy actually is. He doesnt want us to fixate so much on democratic norms those informal rules that beguile and bedevil political scientists as he wants to talk about the democratic principles that animate those norms in the first place.

In other words, if were fretting about the degradation of democracy, what exactly is it that we think were in danger of losing?

Mller says that losing is, in fact, a central part of it: In addition to the more familiar principles of liberty and equality, he encourages us to see uncertainty including the possibility that an incumbent may lose as essential to any truly democratic system. Winners cannot be enshrined, and losers cannot be destroyed. When the libertarian venture capitalist (and Trump supporter) Peter Thiel praised monopolies by declaring that competition is for losers, Mller says that Thiel was inadvertently right. Its the kind of sly reversal that Mller clearly delights in; this is one of those rare books about a pressing subject that reads less like a forced march than an inviting stroll.

Preserving uncertainty means that democracy is inherently dynamic and fluid. Individuals remain at liberty to decide what matters to them most, Mller writes, but holding onto democratic commitments also means that freedom has to be contained by what he identifies as two hard borders. People cannot undermine the political standing of their fellow citizens (the growing spate of voting restrictions is a glaring case in point); and people cannot refuse to be constrained by what we can plausibly call facts.

Mller takes care to situate the United States in an international context, using examples from other countries to illuminating effect. Right-wing populists like to rail against neoliberalism, but Orban has been so accommodating of the German car industry clamping down on unions and protests as zealously as any neoliberal shill that critics have started calling Hungary an Audi-cracy. Political parties are an essential part of democratic infrastructure, but parties that are too homogeneous and intolerant of dissent are themselves problematic. Geert Wilderss far-right party in the Netherlands contains a total of two members: Geert Wilders, along with a foundation whose only member happens to be Geert Wilders. What Mller calls intraparty autocracy tends to be a red flag, signaling a profound aversion to the idea that the other side could possibly be right, for no other side is admitted to begin with.

Writing about political institutions in a way that makes them sound vital is a challenge for any writer, and Mllers method is to leaven abstract ideas with concrete examples of bad behavior even if, as he himself says early on, we have a tendency to get caught up in outrageous stories about individuals instead of training our gaze on the less spectacular mechanisms of the system itself.

One of the hallmarks of the Trump years was that the president constantly said things that were startlingly bizarre or blatantly untrue flooding the zone with what Mller (in a polite paraphrase of Steve Bannon) calls info-feces. The incessant clowning made it increasingly hard to draw distinctions between antics that were merely ludicrous and antics that were truly sinister; telling Americans they might consider injecting disinfectant into their veins may have caused terrible harm, but unlike the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, lying about Lysol, Mller writes, wasnt about to kill the system.

Democracy Rules is hopeful, though its author cautions that hes not particularly optimistic. Optimism is about a constellation of probabilities; hope entails active effort. This is a book that encourages thinking, observation and discernment as a prelude to action; Mller, who says that democracy is based on the notion that no one is politically irredeemable and that anyone can change their mind, holds out the possibility of persuasion.

But if this notion is what makes democracy such an appealing idea in theory, its also what makes it so difficult to sustain in practice especially if theres a motivated cohort that doesnt care about Mllers hard border of facts. He points to the right-wing media ecosystem that offered an alternative reality of the 2020 election, in which it was simply unthinkable that Donald Trump hadnt won. At least some of the people who voted for Trump in 2020 hadnt voted for him four years before. Persuasion, like uncertainty, can go any which way.

More here:
Democracy Is for Losers (and Why Thats a Good Thing) - The New York Times

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the state of Arizona had the right to adopt laws, disqualifying votes cast in the wrong precinct and prohibiting organizations from bringing ballots from voters to polling places, that were transparently designed to place hurdles in the path of Democrats seeking to vote. Since most of the United States Republican-dominated states have already passed or are now seeking to pass similar or yet more restrictive rules, the United States may soon become the worlds only established democracy where members of one party have managed to make it much harder for members of the other party to cast a ballot. Republicans do not want democracy to operate; its possible theyll succeed.

When it comes to electoral rules, the United States is an outlier among democracies. Freedom House ranks countries on a scale of 1 to 4 on three electoral metrics: whether elections for heads of state are free and fair, whether legislative elections are free and fair, and whether electoral laws are fairly and impartially administered. Almost all major democracies, and many minor oneslike Jamaica and Romaniaget a perfect 12. The United States gets a 10, which puts it in company with Poland, a country that barely qualifies as democratic at all.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the state of Arizona had the right to adopt laws, disqualifying votes cast in the wrong precinct and prohibiting organizations from bringing ballots from voters to polling places, that were transparently designed to place hurdles in the path of Democrats seeking to vote. Since most of the United States Republican-dominated states have already passed or are now seeking to pass similar or yet more restrictive rules, the United States may soon become the worlds only established democracy where members of one party have managed to make it much harder for members of the other party to cast a ballot. Republicans do not want democracy to operate; its possible theyll succeed.

When it comes to electoral rules, the United States is an outlier among democracies. Freedom House ranks countries on a scale of 1 to 4 on three electoral metrics: whether elections for heads of state are free and fair, whether legislative elections are free and fair, and whether electoral laws are fairly and impartially administered. Almost all major democracies, and many minor oneslike Jamaica and Romaniaget a perfect 12. The United States gets a 10, which puts it in company with Poland, a country that barely qualifies as democratic at all.

U.S. President Joe Biden has castigated the new raft of state laws as Jim Crow in the 21st century. The laws will certainly haveand are designed to havethe same effect of suppressing Black turnout as did the poll tax and literacy test of yore, but it is probably fair to say that todays Republicans, unlike yesterdays southern Democrats, would be quite content to let Black people vote if only they would vote Republican. Racial discrimination has become a means rather than an end.

It is absolutely true that the legacy of slavery and legalized racism makes the United States different from virtually every other democracy in the world. Yet it is the gross politicization of the U.S. electoral process that allows parties at the state and federal level to reshape the rules to their own benefit. What one might call the United States negative exceptionalism arises not only from the role of race but from constitutional designor rather from abuses made possible by that design.

Delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention barely discussed electoral rules and would have had very little precedent from other countries to draw on. Nor did they give thought to the role of parties, which most considered invidious. Preoccupied as many were with checking rather than enabling federal power, they left virtually all electoral rules to the states and provided no federal election oversight.

Modern constitution drafters, by contrast, had abundant experience of democratic dysfunction to draw on. The Constitution of India, drawn up in 1949, established a commission to oversee the preparation and conduct of all elections, both at the Union and state level, and stipulated that its members are to be appointed by the president, a nonpartisan figure. The constitution even prohibits the judiciary from changing the allotment of seats or boundary lines, which are to be fixed by Indias Parliament. Indias elections are wild free-for-alls where winners sometimes switch parties for cash; but Indias Election Commission has powers, including intervening to stop abusive or corrupt practices, that would be unthinkable for the United States feeble and hopelessly deadlocked Federal Election Commission.

Changing boundary lines to rig an election in your favor is, of course, a venerable U.S. tradition that goes by the name gerrymandering. Two features of the U.S. system make this form of backroom conniving possible: the delegation of authority to the states and the weakness of checks on party power at the state level. In A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective, author Steven A. Taylor noted that although a few other countries with federal systems, like Germany, give provincial governments power over local elections, only in the United States do states also set the rules for all federal elections. And politicians exercise virtually total control over electoral rules at the state level.

Even before former U.S. President Donald Trump hypnotized his party to believe Democrats were colluding with the deep state to steal elections from him, Americans held furious debates over issues that just dont arise elsewhere in the democratic world. According to Sarah Repucci, head of research at Freedom House, gerrymandering is a practice almost exclusive to electoral autocracies like Jordan (and Hungary, now deemed partly free). European political leaders have not sought to put obstacles in the way of registering to or actually voting. Money matters much less. The United States is highly unusual in regarding political contributions as protected speech and in treating companies and other entities like natural persons in terms of those speech rights.

It is troubling enough that in the United States, as elsewhere in the world, faith in democracy is yielding to the wish for a strongman who will put things right or restore an imaginary golden age. What is distinctive about the United States is the way in which a localized, politicized, market-based political culture, abetted both by intense polarization and racism, has enabled anti-democratic forces to reduce the vote of the other side and thus win elections even when they constitute a minority. In a 2004 essaylong before TrumpThomas Mann of the Brookings Institution summed up what then seemed to be the most salient features of the U.S. electoral system: a suspicion of authority, political control of bureaucrats, decentralization, parochialism, and a highly contentious and political judicial process.

Other democracies have found ways of reforming dysfunctional elements of their system of voting and representation. After several elections in which numerical minorities elected parliamentary majorities, New Zealands government appointed a commission that recommended the country switch to a system of proportional representation that would more accurately embody voter preferences and enhance the status of minority parties (a system used in much of the democratic world). The government accepted the findings, a referendum in 1992 and 1993 endorsed the changeand New Zealand switched systems to general and lasting acclaim.

The U.S. electoral system can be reformed only by a forcible imposition of national rules on a localized system. Democrats are hoping to do just that: The House bill known as H.R. 1 would, among other things, make registration automatic, prohibit gerrymandering, sharply restrict campaign spending, strengthen the Federal Election Commission, extend absentee and early voting, and prohibit the disenfranchisement of ex-felons. Such a bill, if made law, would align the United States with its democratic peers. It is, however, a dead letter in the Senate; having exploited the system to tilt elections in their favor at the state level, Republicans are not about to let Democrats scotch their move in Washington. They have seized on the Senates own anti-democratic rule that 60 members must vote to end a filibuster in order to prevent debate on any effort to overturn anti-democratic measures by the states. The question of the moment is whether even the most modest legislation now envisioned, which would reestablish federal oversight of jurisdictions systematically suppressing the vote, could pass in the Senate. The answer is almost certainly no.

In the course of his visit to the United States almost two centuries ago, French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville found nothing he admired quite so much as the United States culture of local politicsthe proliferation of elective offices that taught citizens the arts of self-government and gave them a stake in their national democracy. That culture still exists in many older parts of the country. But the spirit of polarization has so thoroughly poisoned the United States grassroots that decentralization has become a fearsome tool in the hands of anti-democrats. Here the analogy with Jim Crow is all too apt, for Southern racists long took shelter in the constitutional protection of states rights.

Im a believer in Biden; he has responded boldly to the great economic and public health crisis of our time. But curing what ails U.S. democracy, as he hopes to do, may be beyond his powers. If thats true, his achievements may prove to be short lived.

Excerpt from:
US Democracy Is One of the World's Worst - Foreign Policy

It has become common to argue that most Africans are not that committed to democracy. Commentators often suggest that Africans care more about development than democracy, and that voters especially those in rural areas dont really understand democracy. They would thus happily trade away their political rights for a strong man who can get things done.

This narrative has proved to be durable despite being wrong.

In our new journal article for the Keywords series of the African Studies Review, we investigated three issues. First, is there support for democracy in Africa? Second, what kind of democracy do people want? Third, why are the desires of African citizens so often silenced?

Drawing on survey data collected by the Afrobarometer between 2016 and 2018, we show that strong majorities think that democracy is the best political system for their country.

Contrary to claims that Western style democracy is unAfrican, we find widespread support for a form of consensual democracy, which combines a strong commitment to political accountability and civil liberties with a concern for unity and stability.

Democracy in Africa has come under considerable pressure over the last decade. Satisfaction with the way that democracy is performing has fallen. This is in part due to a decline in public confidence in the quality of elections how free, fair and credible they are.

We argue that this has only had a modest impact on support for the principle of democratic government, in part because African citizens continue to view authoritarian rule as a worse option. Of the 35 countries surveyed, the proportion of citizens who suggested that non-democratic political systems might be preferable only exceeded 20% in eSwatini and Malawi.

This figure is now likely to have declined in both countries. Malawians faith in democracy was revived by a peaceful transfer of power in 2020. And the people of eSwatini have been protesting against a failing authoritarian regime.

Even in states in which the reintroduction of multiparty politics has been associated with political controversy and conflict, such as Cote dIvoire, Togo and Uganda, more than three quarters of citizens say that democracy is preferable.

It is, therefore, time to stop doubting that African citizens want democracy, and start asking what kind of democracy people want. We argue that there is widespread demand for a form of consensual democracy, in which a desire for elections and checks and balances on those in power goes hand in hand with a concern to maintain national unity.

Consensual democracy has four main features:

Multiparty elections

We show that the vast majority of Africans support selecting their government through multi-party elections. Three-quarters of those surveyed agreed that

We should choose our leaders in this country through regular, open and honest elections.

Almost 65% also agreed that many political parties are needed to make sure that (the people) have real choices in who governs them. Most rejected the idea of one-party rule.

Political accountability

Our article also shows that most Africans want political accountability and the rule of law. Over three quarters of respondents agreed that

The constitution should limit the president to serving a maximum of two terms in office.

Only 34% agreed that the government getting things done was more important than being accountable to citizens.

Civil liberties and political rights

Respondents also wanted to be able to express their own opinions and engage in political activities. Over three quarters (76%) agreed that a citizens freedom to criticise the government was important or essential for a society to be called democratic.

This extends to the right of association, with over 60% of individuals believing they should be able to join any organisation, whether or not the government approves.

Consensual politics

Strong support for rights, elections and accountability goes hand-in-hand with a concern to prevent excessive freedom and competition, lest they lead to disunity and instability. Many citizens worry about violence around elections; they want parties to put aside their differences and work for the common good.

Most respondents were therefore against the use of street protests to settle disputes, even though they often sympathised with protesters aims.

There are of course variations in how people feel about these issues, both across the continent and within countries.

Respondents in eSwatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi and Mozambique were less committed to elections, but only in Lesotho did this drop below 50%.

Namibians and South Africans were more willing to trade accountability off against efficiency perhaps because of majority support for the ruling party.

Yet, what is striking is the consistency of support for the four pillars of consensual democracy across the continent. What does this mean for African politics? Why is this reality not more accepted?

Our article outlines three key episodes in which support for democratic government has been silenced. We also identify vulnerabilities that authoritarian leaders could exploit.

Leaders who can persuade citizens that their country faces a grave risk of violence and instability may be able to legitimise backsliding on democracy whether or not the risk actually exists. This is a cause for concern because supporters of democracy in Africa dont always reject all authoritarian alternatives.

Yet, as our study shows, the overwhelming majority of Africans support consensual democracy.

The argument that multi-party politics is incompatible with African ways of life stretches back to racist colonial officials. It was also used by nationalist leaders to justify creating one-party states after independence. But it is not true, and has become a lazy excuse for authoritarian regimes that are neither popular nor legitimate.

In a decade in which activists have risked their lives to advance democratic causes in Algeria, Angola, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, eSwatini, Ethiopia, Gambia, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe, it is time to recognise that most Africans do not want authoritarian rule.

It is both misleading and patronising to suggest that democracy has somehow been imposed by the international community against the wishes of ordinary people. Instead, it has been demanded and fought for from below.

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Africans want consensual democracy why is that reality so hard to accept? - The Conversation Africa

Interpreters play an essential role in making critical interactions possible every single day, whether the venue is a courtroom, a doctors office, or the United Nationsand sometimes they even facilitate the functioning of democracyitself.

Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS)ProfessorLeire Carbonell Aguero, a 2003 graduate of theMA in Conference Interpretation program,called it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when she was recruited by fellow alumna Maureen Sweeney MPA 94 to lead a team providing interpretation support for the Biden-Harris presidentialcampaign.

According to2019 Census data, 22 percent of voting-age Americans speak a language other than English at home, with about two-thirds of those speaking Spanish. As a result, without interpreting support, a significant portion of the electorate would be shut out of full participation in the democraticprocess.

Members of the Biden campaign reached out to our team atTiller Language Services, says Sweeney of the firm she co-leads with business partner Todd Dennett, after learning about our live and remote interpreting services for other high-level clients. Sweeney then connected with colleagues at MIIS.

It was the beginning of summer 2020 when Maureen and Todd contacted me with the opportunity to be the chief interpreter of the Spanish booth for the Biden campaign, says Carbonell. From that moment on, I worked to put together a core team of five interpreters to cover weekly assignments for the campaign. Four of these five were Middlebury Institutegraduates; two were Carbonells classmates, one was a former student of hers, and the other was fellow professor Cas Shulman-Mora MATI95.

It was a true privilege for me to put together such an amazing and talented team, says Carbonell. Together, we covered more than 40 assignments for the Biden campaign from August through Election Day. In addition, I helped assemble a team of 44 interpreters for the pre-watch parties for the presidential debate. Im very happy to report that, out of those 44 interpreters, 29 were MIIS graduates, including a few of my currentstudents!

In total, Sweeney and Dennetts firm provided interpretation for more than 135 campaign-related events in languages including Chinese, French, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. The majority of our interpreters for this project were graduates of the Institute, says Sweeney, who later this month will serve as deputy chief of the interpreting corps for the Tokyo Summer Olympic Games, with fellow MIIS alum Alexandre Ponomarev MACI 00 serving as chief. We were thrilled to work with so many highly qualified language services professionalsand believe this project goes to show the value of high-level interpretation to the successful functioning of democraticinstitutions.

Carbonell describes it as the highest honor of hercareerto be asked to interpret President Joe Bidens inaugural remarks for Spanish-language media. For the Spain-born Carbonell, though, the stakes were personal as well asprofessional.

The inauguration happened in the same year that I became an American citizen, she says. I came to the U.S. in 2001 for an MA in Conference Interpretation at MIIS. To be part of facilitating conversations that are so important to the functioning of democracy in the U.S. was something I could have never imagined when I arrived here. Thanks to our interpretation, key information was accessible to people who only speak Spanish, who are part of our country and have the right to participate in the political process. Every time I interpreted for the campaign, I felt that, in a way, it was my own story that I was telling. I felt that I was closing the circle and giving back to my new country, a country that has given me somuch.

The opportunity was both unique and uniquely meaningful for Carbonell. I will always treasure it. Paraphrasing Amanda Gormans words in her inaugural poem for the country, I came out of this experience knowing that together, we will continue to climb the hill, in all languages, cultures, andcolors!

Originally posted here:
Facilitating Democracy: Alumnae Led Interpreting Team for Presidential Campaign and Inauguration - Middlebury College News and Events