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Most United States citizens consider ourselves fortunate to live in a modern, maturedemocracy. We appreciate the great freedoms and abundant material things our democracy affordsus. But while we all know the old adage that freedom is not free, neither is democracy. Our systemdepends on citizens being in ultimate control of the government through a written constitutionwith checks and balances, frequent elections, term limits, free speech, free press, the right topetition the government, the right to bring lawsuits against the government, referendums, recalls,and more. Unfortunately, too few of us take the time to actively participate in our democracy.

Which brings up another adageyou only get as much out of a thing as you put into it.So, how much are we putting into our democracy? How much are we as a countryinvesting in making sure our citizens are informed, knowledgeable, and prepared to fullyparticipate in our continuing experiment in self-government?

Our Current Investment in Civics EducationSchools can help prepare our youngest citizens for their critical role in our democracy. In fact, public education in the United States historically had the three related purposes of preparingstudents to participate in life as citizens, to engage in adult work and careers, and to becomefunctioning members of their communities.

The first goal is essentially civics education. What value do we place on achieving thisgoal today? Governments at all levels have given little support to developing civics educationover the last thirty years, according to the March 2, 2021, Educating for American Democracyreport sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department ofEducation. At the federal level, we spend five cents on civics education per student each year,significantly less than the fifty-four dollars per student for Science, Technology, Engineering, andMathematics education. Danielle Allen, Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethicsat Harvard University, discussed this disparity in an Oct. 8, 2020, interview on Harvard EdCasttitled The Role of Education in Democracy. Her point was not that less money should be spenton STEM, but that the lack of support for civics education results in an inability for young peopleto understand democracy, be motivated to participate in it, [and] to have the skills and tools theyneed to participate effectively in democratic self-government.

The Cost of Neglecting CivicsIn a wonderful, wide-ranging discussion sponsored by the Center for Strategic andInternational Studies on April 14, 2021, titled Civics as a National Security Imperative, UnitedStates Supreme Court Justices Sonya Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch discussed the importance ofcivics from their perspective as judges of the highest court in our country. Justice Sotomayor citedthe wide disparity on STEM and civics spending discussed above. Both Justices discussed thetroubling lack of knowledge about how our government functions, the low rate of participation ingovernment, the surprisingly large number of people who disapprove of democracy, and howpervasive false information is in our society, especially as spread by social media.

The Justices identified these dangers as resulting from a lack of civics knowledge, whichequips citizens to discern false information regarding our government and its functioning. JusticeGorsuch noted that more often in history, democracies fall not from external threat but frominternal discord. He noted democracy is not an automatic thing. Recently, foreign enemiescapitalized on our internal divisions and discord to further divide us, and Justice Gorsuch noted, it is no surprise that a lot of the false misinformation spread on social media is deliberately spread by our enemies to sow disagreement internally in the country.

Our democracy suffers when we as citizens are unable to fulfil our responsibility as theultimate control of government. We have to make reasoned decisions at the ballot box and in theother means of exercising our power. We cannot fulfill this responsibility when we do not knowhow our government functions. As Justice Gorsuch stated, when we are uninformed, not only dowe allow unresponsive and dysfunctional government, but we also allow foreign and domesticthreats to endanger our democracy.

Among the strengths of the American legal system are civility, civil discourse, constructivedisagreement, critical thinking, and respectful dialogue. Both Justices spoke of how society atlarge could use these principles, practiced every day in our courts, to bridge the divides we nowface.

By failing to educate our young people and ourselves on our government and our civicresponsibilities, we risk losing the freedoms we value so highly. We may have well-educatedSTEM students, but if we lose our democracy, in what kind of country will they live? In thatevent, we will all have to ask ourselves, did we pay the appropriate price for democracy?

Curtis L. CollierUnited States District JudgeChair, Eastern District of Tennessee Civics and Outreach Committee

Carrie Brown StefaniakLaw Clerk to the Honorable Curtis L. CollierImmediate Past President, Chattanooga Chapter of the Federal Bar Association

Eliza L. TaylorLaw Clerk to the Honorable Curtis L. Collier

* * *

In the recent opinion What is the Price of Democracy?, the authors advocate a return of basic civics in the education curriculum. I wholeheartedly agree and thank them for their advocacy. However, I find it somewhat disturbing the learned authors used the term democracy 15 times, but not once used the term Republic in their writing. Both terms are necessary to accurately substantiate and better explain the authors advocacy.

To illustrate, the opening paragraph should have read Most United States citizens consider ourselves fortunate to live in a modern, mature democratic Republic. We appreciate the great freedoms and abundant material things our democracy affords us. But while we all know the old adage that freedom is not free, neither is democracy.

There are other places in the opinion where Republic rather than democracy is the proper term to describe our country. By using the noun Republic appropriately to accurately describe the United States, and the use of democracy to describe the political process used to operate our Republic, the authors would demonstrate the difference and help inform a reader who may not have the benefits of a Civics class.

Ironically, the misused terminology helps to show the need and necessity to return a course in United States civics to our Republics education curriculum.

Bryan Bowen

Read the original:
What Is The Price Of Democracy? - The Chattanoogan

Published: 5/7/2021 6:40:36 PM

There seems to be much gnashing of teeth about how the Charter Review Committee is destroying democracy by raising the bar for overturning City Council decisions. What actually destroys democracy is 300 people being able to hold an entire town hostage (and cost us an extra $500k+!) when a decision has been made by a democratically elected council.

Exhibit A: the anti-library petition that almost cost the town $10M in grant funds and backed up construction by most of a year.

Obviously there needs to be a way for citizens to petition their government, but it has to be a high-enough bar that a small group cant just stop our city from functioning. 1200/5% seems like a reasonable minimum, but perhaps give more than two weeks to gather the signatures.

If 300 people stopped the budget every year because of something they didnt like it in, we could quickly run into a constitutional/charter crisis.

Garth Shaneyfelt

Greenfield

See original here:
Democracy - The Recorder

Over the last year, American workers have attempted to make their workplaces sites of social change and political discourse. Employees have fought for action, hoping the firms they work for will be agents in the fight against, among other things, systemic racism and harassment.

But recent changes at Basecamp, a workplace collaboration software company with approximately 60 employees, show why it is so hard to make American businesses respond to these problems. At the end of the day, the American workplace is not a democracy, it's an autocracy. In a democratic workplace, bosses would be accountable to the employees through a union or because employees held a significant number of seats on the corporate board, or, among other things, the law made it much more difficult to terminate employees. But in America, owners, managers, and bosses have the final say, and if political questions challenge their rule or even just inconvenience them they will be shut down.

On April 26, Basecamp cofounder and CEO Jason Fried and cofounder David Heinemeier Hansson posted a message on Fried's blog entitled "Changes at Basecamp." The post announced a suspension of employee benefits for gym memberships and farmer's market shares, but, more ominously, highlighted a new ban on political discussions at work and a dissolution of all committees.

Fried noted that discussions "related to politics, advocacy, or society at large" are "not healthy, [they haven't] served us well. And we're done with it at Basecamp." Fried added that the company could no longer dwell on past mistakes.

"Who's responsible for these changes?" Fried asked rhetorically, "David and I are. Who made the changes? David and I did." Fried and Hansson had unilaterally changed the workplace policies with a tone that could be read as hostile to disagreement. "The responsibility for negotiating use restrictions and moral quandaries returns to me and David," Fried wrote.

While the letter was vague about what had caused this policy change, a few days later, The Verge reported that the push came because what Fried construed as a political discussion really concerned a potential instance of workplace harassment.

In the last year or so, Basecamp employees had grown increasingly concerned about what was known as the "Best Names Ever" list a collection of Basecamp customer names that employees had presumably found funny. While the list included many Nordic or American names, it also included some names of apparent African and Asian descent. In the wake of the uprisings for racial equality in the last year and particularly the wave of anti-Asian violence, workers were demanding to know why this list, which both Fried and Hansson had known about since at least 2016, had festered for so long. Some employees had revived a dormant diversity, equity, and inclusion channel in order to address these and other concerns.

One employee cited the Anti-Defamation League's "pyramid of hate," suggesting that allowing this "Best Names Ever" list to exist was a dangerous precedent, and felt that Hansson and Fried should be held accountable. Hansson fired back in his own blog post saying that he thought this was an unfair argument and that this employee themself had tolerated the list. Two weeks later, on a Monday, Fried posted "Changes at Basecamp." After Friday's all-hands meeting, more than 20 employees resigned.

Much like a similar announcement by Coinbase, the uproar at Basecamp is an example of the reaction by bosses to workers' demands that workplaces address discrimination, harassment, and the political and structural factors that perpetuate racism, sexism, and xenophobia. Basecamp also demonstrates why addressing those issues in the workplace is so challenging in America. Companies are structured like an unaccountable totalitarian regime. Fried and Hansson, legally, have the power to end discussions. That is, they have the unilateral power to silence speech they don't like.

This seemed to be at odds with that fact that Basecamp, as a company, had been explicitly political in the past. They donated their office space in Chicago to a political candidate running for mayor, and the owners testified about Apple's monopolistic practices, and Fried even published an article in Inc. about Basecamp's failure and attempts to address workplace diversity.

None of this surprises University of Michigan philosophy professor Elizabeth Anderson, author of the book "Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It)." In her book, she argues that while Americans aspire to democracy, most American workplaces are, structurally, dictatorships. Workers have little to no say in who is in charge of them and almost no free speech protections. Bosses can hire whomever they want, determine pay, control who does what work and when, and fire employees for almost any reason.

The latter is enabled by "at will" employment provisions, which give employers freedom to terminate workers. Our legal system is such that founders like Fried and Hansson are largely unaccountable to employees, unlike the situation in many other countries, like Germany, where it is much more difficult to fire employees, and the inclusion of workers in managerial decisions is often the norm. This often takes place via "workers councils" in which a certain number of seats on corporate boards are reserved for workers.

Researchers of the role of politics in the workplace note that increasing democracy in the workplace and giving workers a say in the rules that govern their conduct trains people for democratic life in general. New York University Law Professor Cynthia Estlund says that there used to be a more robust discussion 80 years ago about what was then called "industrial democracy," and about the workplace as a "school for democracy."

Unions were growing, and they fought for worker protections that limited the bosses' ability to unilaterally fire workers and dictate the terms of work. Such protections empowered workers to speak out against unfair, discriminatory, or harassing conduct in the workplace. Today, we spend most of our time at work, so it's no wonder that many workers want their workplaces to be sites of societal and political change, or at least be a place where people can talk freely about current issues.

Estlund said that there are additional benefits to worker protections for open political discussion: The workplace is one of the few places in life in which we engage with a relatively politically diverse group of people. Coworkers are generally not people we grew up with or freely choose to associate with. They are a "bridge to the larger citizenry," Estlund said. If we hope to create a less divided country and get outside our ideological bubbles, "it's mainly in the workplace that we actually interact on a sustained basis with once-strangers."

In fact, the workplace protections against racial harassment that sprang up in the post-war period may have been violated at Basecamp, Anderson told me in an email.

"All employers are legally obligated to act against racial harassment including hostile environment harassment that need not target an identified employee," she wrote. "So the racist spreadsheet is clearly covered by already existing requirements. Instead, Basecamp really wanted to shut down criticism of Basecamp's racist working conditions, even though labor law clearly protects the right of workers to complain about working conditions, even if they are not organized into a union."

It's unclear why exactly employers prefer this top-down arrangement that is so opposed to the values of American life, though for Fried and Hansson the benefit is clear. They alone can end a discussion that implicates their conduct. Instead of engaging with what they found to be a bad argument and find a path forward, they shut down the discussion completely. And the result was catastrophic for the company not only for how they look, but because they lost more than a third of their employees, suggesting that leaning on authoritarian tactics is detrimental for retention.

To make the workplace more democratic, we could, among other things, strengthen laws and norms protecting employment, make cooperative ownership easier, dramatically bolster unionization and collective bargaining, and give workers a say in managerial decisions. But until then, firms' prerogatives will only reflect a minority of opinions (a minority that skews heavily white and male) and workers' voices will continue to be silenced.

And as calls by workers for their firms to be agents of social change increase for businesses to take stances on systemic racism, the climate emergency, and to make the workplace free of harassment Basecamp demonstrates why that is so difficult in America. Without any legal accountability or widespread union representation, change will only happen at the whim of owners and managers.

Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein writes about economic life in America.

View original post here:
Basecamp politics ban is reminder that the workplace isn't a democracy - Business Insider

GAZETTE: Do politicians play any role in citizens assemblies?

MANSBRIDGE: This is a quite contested and discussed topic in the community of people working with these groups. The theory from the beginning was This is citizens only and Keep politicians out. In Iceland, they completely excluded the politicians. In Ireland, a hybrid citizens assembly in 2012 on marriage equality and some other issues included one-third politicians. That assemblys positive vote led to a referendum on same-sex marriage, which led to its legalization in Ireland. The citizens assembly led to a referendum on abortion, which led to the legalization of abortion in Ireland. One of the interesting things the organizers found was that politicians were actually rather deferential to the process; instead of pushing their agendas in an aggressive way, they often kept quiet and listened to the citizens.

GAZETTE: What are the mechanisms by which these assemblies can be structured?

MANSBRIDGE: The basic structure is usually an alternation between small groups and plenary assemblies, with plenary assemblies being more the kind of listening and questioning experts thing. But they can take quite different formats. For example, the standard format, if you can afford it, would be a weekend. If you cant afford a weekend, then it could be a day; you really shouldnt take less than that.

In Britain, the Citizens Assembly on Brexit was designed to have one weekend that was informational, followed by a three-week break, and then another weekend that was more deliberation. The important thing about the Brexit citizens assembly was that some citizens learned about an EU rule that was not enforced in Britain. The rule said that if an EU citizen had been in an EU country other than their country of origin for more than three months without getting a job, they could be deported.

After the first weekend, some citizens in the assembly wanted Britain to stay in the EU but with this three-month rule and asked the organizers to include that option on the second weekend. That option garnered the support of the majority. Its conceivable that had there been a second referendum on Brexit worded to include the three-month rule, the choice of remain could have won. That might have been enough, before Britain polarized. But after the first referendum, Britain polarized tremendously, relatively quickly.

GAZETTE: Besides Britain and Ireland, which other modern democracies are implementing these assemblies?

MANSBRIDGE: Right now, many countries, including Colombia, France, and Germany, along with Ireland, Britain, and Iceland. Belgium is doing some of the most innovative work in a small section of Belgium, the German-speaking Community, or East Belgium, where theyve created a permanent citizens assembly, which includes a citizens council, drawn randomly from the citizens assembly, which sets the agenda. They have not met yet because of COVID; theyve put it to the side until the pandemic is over. But the idea is that the Citizens Council will call citizens assemblies, and the Parliament will be responsible for either implementing the recommendations of the citizens assemblies or giving public justification for why theyre not implementing those recommendations. Thats in the law now.

Mongolia has also written this into its constitution as a requirement for constitutional amendments; a citizens assembly, designed as a deliberative poll, has to approve them. In the deliberative poll they held in Mongolia, they had 85 percent participation, which is extraordinary. People came in from the outer steppes, some on their horses, to be part of it. It was a major event for the whole country. Colombia is doing something called itinerant citizens assembly in Bogota. The idea is the first citizens assembly will set an agenda, and the second will deliberate on the basis of that agenda and will make recommendations that the City Council is required to either implement or give reasons for public justification as to why not. And then the third citizens assembly will look back and evaluate what has been done.

GAZETTE: What do these citizens assemblies say about the legitimacy of democracy?

MANSBRIDGE: In the work that I do, I stress the fact that were going to need more and more government coercion as we go forward as a more and more interdependent society. Our structures of democracy, which basically evolved in the 18th century, are not sufficient to carry the load of the government coercion that we now need. We need much more robust democratic mechanisms than what we have. The structure of elections gives you a clear majority that is legitimate, in almost every case, but its not sufficient. If we think about climate change and the tremendous burdens we need to take on to reduce global warming, its clear that the world is not ready to take on those burdens and that our democracies dont have the capacity to create legitimate decisions on that scale yet. We need to have supplements to democracy.

GAZETTE: Citizens assemblies seem to help revitalize democracy, but theyre not new. Can you talk about their origins?

MANSBRIDGE: Ancient Athens had assemblies in which free Athenian men would get together to discuss and vote on matters of importance. The open-door assembly was supplemented by mechanisms of random selection, and the Greeks had a little machine called a kleroterion to choose the citizens through lottery. In a way, citizens assemblies are a revival of an ancient practice in Aristotles view, the quintessential democratic practice.

GAZETTE: What are the obstacles to adopting citizens assemblies in the U.S.?

MANSBRIDGE: There are many obstacles. Were very much in the experimental stages. It behooves human beings not to jump into big changes in democracy without having experimented quite a bit and having learned the appropriate lessons from that experimentation. Another obstacle is that at the moment, most citizens dont understand the concept of representation by random selection. They understand that its fair to distribute a prize by lottery or a burden, like the draft, by lottery. But the idea of how you would be represented by people chosen randomly is not something that most people understand in their gut.

I advocate, for the sake of experimentation, that public high schools could have first a student government elected in the fall semester, and then in the spring semester, one chosen by lottery, and find out how the two work. Now that might not be a good experiment because some adolescents might act out and not take being chosen by the lottery seriously, but if it did work, it would allow us to see the difference between an elected group and a randomly chosen group. And it would get people used to the idea of being represented through random selection. The other obstacle is that citizens assemblies are expensive because you have to coax the people to come and pay a stipend, transportation, child care, etc. These assemblies require giving up some time, because it takes time for citizens to become informed enough to deliberate in depth.

GAZETTE: How can citizens assemblies help reduce polarization in society?

MANSBRIDGE: The citizens assembly on Brexit I described came up with the idea of not leaving the European Union but putting in this three-month rule; thats a non-polarizing move that recognizes the genuine grievances of some people who were worried about immigrants taking their jobs. Thats one of the roles a citizens assembly can play. Getting citizens to listen to one another and see other peoples points of views can help society be less polarized. Its not a panacea, but its a step to restore civil dialogue.

I believe that citizens assemblies can make a difference on polarized issues. I would recommend that citizens assemblies be advisory for quite a while until we understand their dynamics, but they carry with them a great deal of legitimacy, and that thats tremendously important now as the legitimacy of democracy is plummeting across the world.

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

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See the original post:
Jane Mansbridge offers a solution to mending a riven democracy - Harvard Gazette

This post was coauthored byMelanne Verveer, executive director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security and formerU.S. ambassador for global womens issues, andLucina Di Meco, cofounder of #ShePersisted Global Initiative.

Addressing the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in March, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris remarked that the status of women is the status of democracy and provided a strong message to the international community about Americas renewed commitment to gender equality and human rights.

More on:

Women and Women's Rights

Women's Political Leadership

Twenty-five years after Secretary Hillary Rodham Clintons historic womens rights are human rights speech in Beijing, important progress has been made in terms of womens representation in decision-making, but new challenges to womens rights and democracy have risen and remain largely unaddressed.

Women Around the World

Women Around the World examines the relationship between the advancement of women and U.S. foreign policy interests, including prosperity and stability.1-2 times weekly.

Technological innovations, initially celebrated for their democratizing potential, have come under increasing scrutiny for their harmful effects on democracy, social cohesion, and womens rights.

While being part of a global online community has helped female activists rally against repressive governments, raise awareness on injustices, and call out sexual abuse through global movements like #MeToo, #NiUnaMenos and the Womens March, womens rights activists and some of Silicon Valleys most astute critics are increasingly calling out social media platforms for enabling sexism, misinformation, and violence to thrive, concealed by premises of freedom of speech and inclusivity.

Although online harassment against women manifests across the globe, it is particularly pernicious in the Global South. According to a recent analysis from the Economist Intelligence Unit, over 90 percent of the women interviewed in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East experienced online attackswith misinformation and defamation as the most common tactics.

Women in politics and journalists, particularly women of color, have experienced relentless, overwhelming volumes of online abuse, threats, and vicious gendered disinformation campaigns, framing them as untrustworthy, unintelligent, too emotional, or sexual.

More on:

Women and Women's Rights

Women's Political Leadership

In the United States, a coordinated campaign of disinformation and harassment was at work against then-Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris throughout the 2020 election cycle, disseminating lies about her record as a prosecutor and claiming she used sex to gain powerper the oldest, tritest tune in the misogyny playbook.

What happened to Harris is not an exceptionit is the norm, as large social media companies often do not grant public figures with the same (already very small) level of protection from abuse granted to other citizens. Loopholes in platform guidelines have allowed some authoritarian world leaders to use social media to deceive the public or harass opponents despite being alerted to evidence of the wrongdoing."

While most women restrict their online activity as a result of social medias toxicity, silence does not grant protection, as First Lady of Namibia Monica Geingos stated in a powerful video released on International Womens Day: When there was a clear social media campaign of anonymous WhatsApp messages specifically targeting me in the most disgusting ways, and I was told not to respond but to ignore and I did. But it was a mistake, your silence will not protect you; the insults just got worse and the lies became a lot.

The consequences are far-reaching.

The disproportionate and often strategic targeting of women politicians and activists discourages women from running for office, pushes them out of politics, or leads them to self-censor and disengage from the political discourse in ways that harm their effectiveness. The psychological toll on them and their families is incommensurable.

While sexist attitudes are integral to understanding violent extremism and political violence, they are just a part of the story.Research has shown that womens political leadership often represents a challenge to entrenched illiberal and autocratic political elites, disrupting what are often male-dominated political networks that allow corruption and abuse of power to flourish.

As women have been among the most outspoken critics of populist authoritarian political leaders in many countries, state-led gendered disinformation campaigns have been used to silence and deter them, stifling their calls for better governance. Vladimir Putin in Russia,Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey are just some of many leaders who have used gendered disinformation campaigns to attack political opponents and erode liberal values and democratic principles all together.

Building on sexist narratives and characterized by malign intent and coordination, gendered disinformation has also been employed by Russia to exercise influence and undermine foreign elections. The targeting of Hillary Clinton during the 2016U.S. presidential campaign, and, more recently, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya in Belarus and Svitlana Zalishchuk in Ukraine are prominent examples.

These types of attacks do not only represent a threat to the women they target.

Weaponized by malign foreign and domestic actors, these attacks threaten democratic institutions and have important ramifications for global peace and security and the broader human rights system. Yet while authoritarian leaders have heavily invested in troll factories that cynically take advantage of a technology that is particularly good at spreading misogyny and lies, female politicians and activists have largely been left to fend for themselves in an online world that is increasingly toxic and violent. America has a crucial role to play in promoting a new digital social contract that upholds democratic values and promotes womens rights, through a three-pronged strategy.

First, we need better standards for digital platforms that take into account the real-life harms and abuses that women face and to proactively address them from a product design and risk assessment perspectiveas opposed to content moderation only. Convening theNational Task Force on Online Harassment and Abuse, proposed by President Joe Biden on the campaign trail, will be an important milestone in that direction.

Second, we must make sure that women leaders and activists are deeply involved in the conversations on establishing new internet and social media standards and regulations, and that their unique perspectives are reflected in key fora like the Summit for Democracy. Similar to how womens participation in peace negotiations is essential for successful outcomes, womens leadership in designing a new digital social contract between tech companies, governments, and citizens will be key in building an online world that works for everyone.

Third, we must buttress women in politics and journalism, particularly those who are working in fragile democracies and often become targets of vicious state-sponsored disinformation and hate campaigns as a result of their engagement, such as Maria Ressa in the Philippines. Women working in politics and journalism must be provided with the tools, information, and the support network they need to respond to gendered disinformation campaigns.

In many fragile democracies, women are the beacons of liberal values. Ensuring that the internet is not used as a tool to defame, silence, threaten and de-platform them must be a priority for anyone who seeks to advance democracy, peace, and security.

Read more from the original source:
Gendered Disinformation, Democracy, and the Need for a New Digital Social Contract - Council on Foreign Relations