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Discussions on disinformation mostly focus on the external sources of disinformation: Russia and China. If we focus exclusively on disinformation as a foreign challenge, we are simply ignoring the elephant in the room. Democratically-elected leaders are increasingly fuelling the spread of disinformation.

Contemporary disinformation is distinct from propaganda. It is neither based on ideologies nor facts. In many ways, it is predicated on a much more pessimistic and cynical worldview where, as Peter Pomerantsev writes about the disinformation of the Putin-regime, Nothing is true and everything is possible.

The goal of disinformation is not to persuade the audience with one message. Rather, disinformation is intended to confuse people with multiple messages. As a result, it does not need ideology or to be fact-based at all. It can be almost anything, which is why it is so much more dangerous than propaganda.

Without the pesky requirement of being beholden to facts or ideas, one can simply throw out any sort of (false or strange) information to confuse the public. And it is increasingly being exploited for political gain. We live in an era where political campaigns are less focused on winning hearts and minds; rather, campaigns in now tend to gain traction by sowing division and engendering tribalism.

Disinformation creates chaos. The public finds itself confused about what is true and reality suddenly becomes murky. Without clear and reliable information, people revert to visceral tribalism based on the narrative they like the most. Cleavages deepen. The mission of the disinformation campaign is accomplished.

The pandemic has given a dangerous boost to domestic disinformation narratives in the democratic world.

In Hungary, a NATO and EU member state), Viktor Orbn has created the most centralised media empire ever within the European Union, with more than 400 media outlets all parroting similar political messages. The Hungarian government and its media have also successfully blamed Iranian students in Hungary for the onset of the pandemic, falsely claiming that the primary source of the pandemic is illegal migration. Orban and his media have also blamed George Soros for the tanking Hungarian currency and claimed that a vocal critic of Orbans anti-democratic tactics was descended from Nazis. These narratives are not only for domestic use: Orbn is spreading them throughout the Ango-Saxon world through his news agency V4NA and throughout the Western Balkans via media acquisitions.

Russia Today, the state-financed disinformation outlet planned to open a branch in Budapest a few years ago. Russias foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov announced the plan and the editor-in-chief was selected. Ultimately, RT abandoned the idea. Why? Most probably because they felt there was no need for such an outlet in Hungary, as the state-owned media is misinforming voluntarily for free. As a study by Political Capital - in association with Euronews - found, Euroskeptic narratives representing Moscows interests are present in the Hungarian media space without any efforts being made by the Kremlin (for instance, the messaging that only Russia and China help, the EU does not).

Meanwhile, in Poland, state-owned media have been claiming that opposition mayors have enacted policies that are contributing to the spread of the virus. At the same time, Central European governments like Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria in order to silence critical voices - have passed harsher criminal punishment for media outlets that they claim are spreading fake news.

Even the United States once a respected global beacon of democratic principles and a trusted ally of other like-minded democratic states is spearheading massive disinformation campaigns, especially related to COVID-19. During the pandemic, which has seen a hugely disproportionate death toll in the US (relative to its percentage of the global population), we have seen democratically-elected political leaders flood the public discourse with disinformation.

President Trump is attempting to alter the narrative of the pandemic and its effects and to achieve particular political ends and kickstart his re-election campaign. Rather than providing the public with clear and digestible facts, he touts wild and unproven medical treatments and puts forward man-made sources of COVID-19 without evidence, often contradicting scientists and American intelligence agencies. Trump lies repeatedly about US testing capabilities, and regularly fabricates data regarding the scope of US infections and deaths. When a journalist deigns to question him on the information he puts forth in his press briefings, he becomes agitated, casts doubt on the credibility of the journalist or media outlet, and cries fake news!

Trump also promotes notable conspiracy theorists in his Twitter feed. He recently accused an MSNBC anchor, Joe Scarborough, of murder and has been claiming that young children interfere with mail-in voting in an effort to call into question its efficacy and to discourage voters. Trump has also publicly retweeted conspiracy theories about coronavirus espoused by Diamond & Silk, two celebrities whose Twitter feed was suspended for disinformation, and recently argued that a 75-year old protestor in Buffalo was a member of Antifa.

President Trump will likely continue his disinformation campaign with the purpose of creating chaos and dividing constituents, as tribal politics can always benefit from more division and polarisation. The public confusion and division it breeds may just be enough to save him.

Historically, dictatorships and authoritarians have effectively utilised state-sponsored disinformation tactics and the politically-elected leaders of Western democracies have aggressively condemned them. In fact, the US government and the European Union have proactively opposed the use of such flagrant authoritarian tactics, as they pose a fundamental and profound threat to well-established democratic principles. Western democratic leaders generally oppose authoritarians who deliberately deceived their citizens to create and sustain a virtual reality: Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and in the 21st century, Kim Jung-Un and Vladimir Putin.

But suddenly, state-sponsored disinformation is no longer reserved for authoritarians and dictators. It has infiltrated the Western democratic world, catching us all off guard.

In the last general election campaign in the UK, the incumbent Tories deployed a flood of fake news regarding Brexit and their political opponents until tech giants (including Google) had to step in and remove some of their misleading ads.

We must now recognise the painful truth that - even in a Western democracy - there is almost no way to stop disinformation, especially when it comes from the top. Viritually all of the funds and institutions in the Anglo-Saxon world are aimed exclusively at targeting disinformation coming from the outside - from foreign sources.

Because such extensive disinformation campaigns are a relatively new phenomenon in the West, we do not yet have adequate norms and/or institutional practices in place to combat this new challenge. There are no institutions ready to deal with domestic, homegrown politically-charged disinformation - neither in the US, nor in the UK or in the EU. As a result, we are no longer simply ignoring the elephant in the room. We have allowed the elephant to take over the room.

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State-sponsored disinformation in Western democracies is the elephant in the room View - Euronews

One of the biggest developments in politics last week had nothing to do with the coronavirus pandemic, or the collapse of the economy, or protests for racial justice, but it could have a profound impact on the resolution of all threeand on the larger question of whether America will be a democracy or autocracy in the long run. It was a response from Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), who sits in Joe Bidens old Senate seat, to a question about what Democrats will do if Republicans remain bent on scorched-earth opposition to Democratic governance.

I will not stand idly by for four years and watch the Biden administrations initiatives blocked at every turn, Coons said. I am gonna try really hard to find a path forward that doesnt require removing whats left of the structural guardrails, but if theres a Biden administration, it will be inheriting a mess, at home and abroad. It requires urgent and effective action.

The blocking mechanism at issue is the Senate filibuster rule, which allows the minority to impose a three-fifths supermajority requirement on nearly all legislation. If, optimistically, Democrats enter the new year with control of the presidency, the House, and 53 Senate seats, after winning the election in a landslide, Republicans would still have easy veto power over basically every Biden initiative, whether to suppress epidemic disease, revive the economy, or reform policing. The catch is that Democrats could eliminate this antidemocratic rule, so that a simple majority of senators can pass legislation, with just 50 votes. On the first day of the new Congress, before Biden has even been sworn in, his Senate allies could dramatically expand the horizons of his presidency, giving him (and themselves) the power to govern around Republican obstruction, rather than be confined by it.

There should be no dilemma here, and many Democrats have advocated abolishing or reforming the legislative filibuster for a long time. Coonss statement is meaningful because hes a reluctant convert. Senate Democrats are divided over the filibuster question less along lines of political vulnerability (Coons won his last election by over 13 points) than between those who see the world as it is and those who see it as they wish it was. His change of heart, and his explanation for softening, suggest the latter category of Democrats has begun to accept reality: Leaving the filibuster intact wont generate bipartisan consensus where none exists, but it will make the difference between Bidens presidency failing, with all the collateral damage that would create, and standing a real chance of success.

The challenge now is to convince these same Democrats that abolishing the filibuster is necessary, but insufficientits a key that will unlock a world of new possibilities, but wont on its own protect Biden from right-wing sabotage, or rescue Americas endangered democracy. Harvard political scientist Ryan Enos wrote recently that, When Trump loses in November, America needs to grapple with the fact that it was not our constitutional system, but Trumps own incompetence that preserved our democracy. We might not be so lucky with the next would-be authoritarian. This sentiment is widespread in liberal circles, mostly as a prompt for discussing civil service, ethics, campaign-finance, and other reforms that would better insulate the government from authoritarian corruption. These kinds of reforms are important, and may even receive bipartisan support in an environment where the president is a Democrat and Republicans are trying to cleanse the Trump taint from their party. But they are only second-layer protections, tools better suited to protecting the country should another authoritarian come to power than to closing avenues of power to authoritarians in the first place.

Trump has exploited weaknesses in our laws, but he is more importantly a product of minoritarian powers that should be illegitimate in an advanced democracy. Trump broke the law to win the 2016 election, but he was only successful because our system allows the popular-vote loser to ascend to the presidency, and the same story is likely to be true if he somehow wins re-election. But beyond the well-understood anomaly of the electoral college, Trump also benefited from a high background level of antidemocracy in the years leading up to his election. Trump is the second Republican president in a row to win the presidency while losing the popular vote, and is on pace to be the second Republican president in a row to bequeath his successor a nation on its knees, pseudo-governed by a rearguard of judges who never should have been appointed, legislatures gerrymandered to preserve Republican-minority rule, and Republican senators who represent a minority of the population.

Under more democratic conditions, Trump wouldnt have won even with a structural advantage in the electoral college. Absent the filibuster, President Obama would have been able to secure as much stimulus as the economy needed in 2009, instead of having to outsource that determination to swing-state Republicans. A rapidly improving economy would have limited Democratic losses in the fateful 2010 midterm, which allowed Republicans to gerrymander Democrats out of legislative power for the better part of the decade. It might even have left material conditions in November 2016 stronger than they were, which would have generated political dividends for the incumbent party.

Trumps electoral college margin was extremely narrow and thus overdetermined. Trump critics typically cite this fact to assign significance to oddities unique to the 2016 electionJames Comey, Russian interference, the press obsession with Hillary Clintons emails. But we can extend that very logic to the ambient conditions our roiling crisis of democracy created. A Supreme Court that should not have been under conservative control gutted the Voting Rights Act and left millions of disaffected people stuck in a health-care coverage gap. Gerrymandered swing states exploited right-wing control of the court to pass a variety of voter-suppression laws. Had the citizens of Washington, DC, Puerto Rico, and other American protectorates been granted political representation, it would have diluted the extraordinary overrepresentation rural whites enjoy in Congress, and, thus, Republican power to sabotage Obama.

The easiest path to authoritarian power after Trump wont be for Republicans to reprise corrupt alliances with foreign autocrats, but to use these same antidemocratic powersnow more deeply entrenchedto create conditions that mobilize the electorate against Democrats. And the way for Democrats to stop them is to take the antidemocratic powers away.

That cant be done without abolishing the filibusters supermajority requirement, but it also cant be done unless Democrats commit to passing a broader pro-democracy agenda once the filibuster is gone. They can grant statehood to DC and Puerto Rico, at least for starters, they can pass voting-rights and anticorruption reforms, similar to the ones that House Democrats included in H.R. 1. Perhaps most importantly, they can add seats to the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court.

Court reformers have recently appealed to Democrats to expand the judiciary as a matter of basic institutional maintenance. Because judgeships are lifetime appointments, the judiciary lags the elected branches in terms of representational fairness, and unless Congress grows their ranks, disproportionately white, male judges become swamped by growing caseloads making equal justice a demographic and logistical impossibility. These are perfectly valid bases for adding seats to federal courts, but Democrats shouldnt hide from the fact that expanding the courts is the only way to undo the corruption that allowed Republicans to seize control of them in the first place. Senate Republicans refused to confirm Obama nominees for the final two years of his presidency, and stole a Supreme Court vacancy outright. The president who filled all of those vacancies lost the popular vote and is only president by dint of crimes that allowed him to sneak through the backdoor of the electoral college. Republicans have been amazingly open about the fact that they embraced mass-scale corruption and depravity as a price to pay for stacking the courts for a generation. Apart from the fact that democracy cant exist without consent of the governed, Democrats should add seats to the courts to complete the morality play: The only fitting end is to prove to them it was all illusorythat they sold their souls for nothing. That would be poetic justice, but it would also serve as a reminder to future autocratic parties that illegitimate power grabs can and will be undone.

The fact that Trump has made fixing these interlocking injustices all the more urgent might even make the politics easier. Republicans will raise holy hell about any unilateral Democratic effort to make American democracy more democratic. But if Trump leaves office after one term, widely loathed and a historical failure, they will also be cross pressured by a desire to make a persuasive break from him. They will have an easier time convincing the public that Democrats have cooked up shady pretexts to grab power if Democrats pretend they arent motivated in part by diluting the power of Trump loyalists who should never have been seated in the first place. De-Trumpifying a regime that the country overwhelmingly regrets might actually be an easier proposition to sell than the abstract democratic principles that will be advanced in the process.

Only after taking steps like these will Bidens substantive agenda stand any chance of becoming and remaining law. If Democrats dont reclaim control of the Senate, Biden will be at the mercy of Republicans from day one, and they will leave the country smoldering as a political strategy. If Democrats win a governing trifecta, but dont abolish the filibuster, the story will be little different. If they abolish the filibuster but dont offer statehood to all citizens, centrist Democrats will water down Bidens agenda. If they pass an agenda of any kind, watered down or not, but dont fix the courts, his legislative and regulatory accomplishments will only survive until the Roberts Five strike them down. It took two short years after the abysmal failure of the George W. Bush administration for a Republican Party that should have been discredited for a generation to roar back to power, and it was only possible thanks to a campaign of lockstep resistance to Democratic efforts to fix the damaged country the Obama administration inherited. Preventing history from repeating itself, but with a more militantly antidemocratic Republican Party lying in wait, will require Democrats to do whatever it takes to give voters a reason to continue denying Republicans power. At the same time, our collective ability to fight climate change, coronavirus, economic and racial inequalityto do anything big, together, on a national scalewill grow in proportion to the steps Democrats take to flatten the playing field of our system of government. We should expect them to take every step they can.

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Democracy or Autocracy? Democrats May Have the Final Say - Crooked

Much of the world is likely wondering, What is going on in America?

The other day, as I walked down 16th Street toward the newly christened Black Lives Matter Plaza next to the White House to check out the peaceful demonstrators, I had this strange dj vu feeling. Who can see the demonstrations in Americas streets without thinking about the late Sixties, when young people took to the streets to protest against the Vietnam War and social injustices, demanding civil rights.

But in 1968, I wasnt in Washington not even close. I was watching from afar, from the other side, behind the Iron Curtain in Budapest, where we were flooded with anti-American, negative propaganda written in Moscow. Still, we youths of Eastern Europe did not buy into the Marxist dream that was force fed to us and wasnt true. The agitprop department could not change our view of America as the country of inspiration and hope. We loved the hippies, and we felt sorry for Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy upon their assassinations, and for Americas Black community in general. But we also loved the countrys skyscrapers, Coca-Cola and Levi jeans. We loved America and we most certainly did not want America to fail.

Those epoch-changing events in the U.S. coincided with our own elevated hope for change in Budapest, Warsaw and across the Eastern bloc, for the chance to loosen the oppressive system, with a temporary pause in the harshness of the regime. The Prague Spring, as we called it, promised the embrace of human rights, more freedom for artistic expression and closeness to the West, where we felt we belonged. Sadly, our hopes were soon crushed when Soviet-Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia on Aug. 21, 1968. Yet we were inspired to keep resisting, to remain hopeful. In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall finally opened us to freedom.

The Memorial Day death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and its horrible display of police brutality, on the heels of many other such deaths, sparked demonstrations across the world in solidarity with Americans, including Europe. These demonstrations also bring forth and highlight problems and issues in these other countries. Ironically, yet again, America is showing the way how democracies need to better themselves. Perhaps it is not obvious, but when young people in Europe are angry about the America they see today, it is very much driven by fear that America might slide back, that the America they love to admire is slipping away. When they worry about the U.S., they are scared for their own future.

Like my generation 50 years ago, todays European youths want America to succeed.

It is perhaps a twist of fate that the first American I ever met was a Black man musicianPaul Robeson. As a 12-year-old, my best friend was Billy Hanson, the son of a pastor from Minneapolis, whose brother fled to Sweden to avoid the draft. So, I had plenty of firsthand experience and was never nave about America being perfect. Like many others, I have always understood that it is a work in progress.

No, America is not perfect will never be. Even from our observation point behind the barbed wire in Eastern Europe, we suspected that the America of our imaginations and dreams never existed. We were well aware that at times the ugly face of America rears itself. But the American idea driving this great country is alive and well, attractive and inspiring as ever. Lets keep it that way. Like then, today where many see failure, we also can see strength. Americas immune system is kicking in.

Critics say, But its a different world. For sure, it is that, thanks to U.S. leadership in the past. But the present is always a different world from the past, and we should be driven by our belief that the future of our democracies will be different too. Allowing the U.S. and Europe to drift apart is not an option. That our common values of freedom and democracy create the conditions for a life worth living is not just a throw-away slogan.

In the 1960s, rock-and-roll music helped to provide the message of hope and shaped our worldview, on both sides of the Atlantic. In Eastern Europe, when we listened to our favorite bands on our transistor radios, by way of Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, we could imagine ourselves in New York, Boston, San Francisco. We could pull on a pair of tattered Levi jeans and be one with the demonstrators in those cities. Where is that American soft power today? Where are the messengers of hope?

Do not be mistaken, most Europeans look for leadership, and inspiration, from America. This is important, because they know if American democracy goes down, European democracy will go down with it. That is why, in the end, Europeans are rooting for America.

Andras Simonyi is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and now lives in America. He is the author of the book, Rocking Toward a Free World: When the Stratocaster beat the Kalashnikov. Follow him on Twitter @AndrasSimonyi.

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Here's why Europe, in the end, is rooting for US democracy | TheHill - The Hill

(James Lawler Duggan/Reuters)The filibuster is useful, because it is useful in a democracy to be able to say No to the people and to their duly elected representatives.

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLEThe Democrats are feeling cocky about their chances in November, not only of seeing off Donald J. Trump to whatever awaits him after the presidency but also of entering 2021 with control of both houses of Congress. That means there is a renewed effort at hand to get rid of the filibuster.

The most important legislative reality for Democrats is that majorities do not last forever, but entitlements do. Thats the lesson of the grievously misnamed Affordable Care Act: If you are willing to take a kamikaze run at the issue, you can dig in deep enough in two years that it will take the opposition 20 years to undo what you have done, if it can be dug out at all. Here is something that Democrats under Barack Obama could boast of that Republicans under Donald Trump cannot: They were committed enough to their one big issue that they were willing to trade the majority for the bill. Commitment to an error is a very limited kind of virtue, but there is something to be said for the follow-through.

If the Democrats enjoy a trifecta in November, expect a hard push for aggressive new income-redistribution schemes, probably linked to punitive (which is not to say effective) new environmental regulations, and, on top of that, a court-packing scheme that would convert the federal judiciary into an engine of left-wing policy permanent, unelected, and unaccountable.

The filibuster has many critics on the right, and they are going to miss it when it is gone.

The original constitutional architecture of these United States was a masterpiece of grace and balance. The framers faced the same problem that has faced many republics in the past: balancing the need for widespread democratic access to political power, which helps to confer legitimacy, with the need for more narrow administration that frustrates and defeats the will of the people when the people have gone mad, as they do from time to time. What they came up with was a mix of democratic and anti-democratic institutions: in the legislative branch, a popularly elected House that serves as the accelerator and an appointed, quasi-aristocratic Senate that serves as the brakes; in the executive, a president who cannot appropriate funds or commit the nation to a treaty but who can veto a piece of legislation, requiring a supermajority to override him a president who in most situations can say No more authoritatively than he can say Yes; in the judiciary, a constitution of enumerated powers fortified by a bill of rights that sets core liberal principles beyond the reach of mere majoritarianism. What this produced was a democracy of one man, one vote on a short leash.

The filibuster is not a constitutional provision it is a creation of the Senate, a rule the upper chamber has set for itself. The principle behind the filibuster is the principle of unlimited debate, the belief that any senator has the right to extend the discussion of any issue to whatever point he deems necessary. That principle enabled a procedural maneuver we now call the filibuster, in which a senator kept speaking about an issue not in order to advance the debate but to prevent a vote. (A filibuster is a pirate, and a legislative filibuster was taken to be a kind of legislative hijacking.) On the advice of President Woodrow Wilson, late of Princeton, the Senate adopted a new rule that allowed senators to cut off debate with a supermajority. The current cutoff point is 60 votes.

Senators are no longer always expected to actually speak for hours on end when they engage in a filibuster, though many of them do: Senator Rand Paul, a critic of domestic surveillance measures and national-security excesses, spent 13 hours blocking the confirmation of John Brennan as CIA director. (Ted Cruz had earlier subjected the Senate to 21 hours of Green Eggs and Ham and other readings. Senator Paul read his colleagues some much less entertaining magazine columns.) But rather than a marathon, the modern filibuster is a kind of trump card a senator can throw on the table to require a 60-vote majority to advance any piece of legislation or the approval of an appointment requiring Senate confirmation.

A filibuster is like any other tool that can be use responsibly or irresponsibly. Such instruments do not usually create new political vices but only magnify existing ones. In the minds of many older Americans, the filibuster is very closely associated with Democrat-led attempts to thwart civil-rights legislation: The longest filibuster in our history was Senator Strom Thurmonds infamous stand, lasting 24 hours and 18 minutes, against a civil-rights bill the Republican bill passed in 1957 under Dwight Eisenhower, not the more famous legislation of 1964. Sometimes, filibusters are used in the face of momentous legislation, and, sometimes, they are used for picayune purposes.

The problem with the filibuster is the problem that inhibits Congress especially and Washington more generally in many obvious and subtle ways: procedural maximalism. In our current adolescent political culture, most political actors do not have the prudence or moral sophistication to know when to press a technical advantage to its limit and when to relent. It was for this reason that the Democrats impeachment of President Trump had so little real moral effect on the American people Trumps impeachment was a foregone conclusion simply because the Democrats had enough votes to impeach him and nothing to hold them back but the good judgment and patriotism of Nancy Pelosi, which do not amount to much. The circuses around our Supreme Court nominations amount to much the same thing: Never mind that these dishonest spectacles undermine the very institutions with which our elected officials are entrusted and that they make effective governance all but impossible: If it can be done, it will be done.

The filibuster is useful, because it is useful in a democracy to be able to say No to the people and to their duly elected representatives. That is why we have a First Amendment, a Second Amendment, and the rest of the Bill of Rights: Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump cannot be entrusted with fundamental liberties, and neither can we, the jackasses who entrusted them with power. The Senate, especially, is supposed to slow things down, to suffocate democratic passions, and to make strait the gate and narrow the way for destructive popular legislation. The more the Senate comes to resemble the House, the less useful it is. The Senates distinctiveness serves practical rather than aesthetic functions.

Democrats looking to eliminate the filibuster in 2021 should keep in mind that in January 2017 the elected branches of the federal government were under unified Republican control led by Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump, three representatives of the will of the people to whom Democrats very much wanted to say No. Democrats tell themselves a bedtime story about that that this was not the result of legitimate democracy, which can never fail but can only be failed. That is a superstition, one that James Madison had somehow managed to liberate himself from all the way back in 1787. Madison helped to create a government of checks and balances.

I cannot think of a single thing about Washington today that makes me believe it needs one fewer check.

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We Will Miss the Filibuster - National Review

Written by Ashutosh Varshney | Updated: July 6, 2020 9:23:15 am Indias Muslims are racially similar to the Hindus, but religiously different. (Source: AP)

Are Americas Blacks and Indias Muslims politically comparable? This question has acquired a new salience with the rise of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, underway for weeks in the US, covering several hundred cities. Comparisons have been drawn with the anti-CAA protests in India, lasting three months after mid-December, rebelling against the attempted demotion of Indias Muslims to secondary citizenship. The mainstream Black argument that Blacks have been treated as inferior Americans, with Whites as the putative owners of the nation, is not altogether distinct.

In what ways, then, are Indias Muslims and Americas Blacks similar or different? And are such similarities and differences politically consequential? Blacks, of course, are not religiously distinct from Whites. They are predominantly Christian. In contrast, Indias Muslims are racially similar to the Hindus, but religiously different.

Similarities emerge when we turn to demography and politics. Blacks are a little over 12 per cent of the US population, Muslims slightly over 14 per cent of Indias. Democracies tend to privilege numbers. In conditions of polarisation, racial or religious minorities can get swamped by racial or religious majorities. When a majority of Hindus or Whites vote communally or racially, the threat to minorities can become quite real.

Consider the political arithmetic underlying the proposition above. Hindus are roughly 80 per cent of India, and Whites about 73 per cent of Americas electorate. If 50 per cent of Hindus vote for the BJP, it would constitute 40 per cent of the national vote, which, given a certain geographic distribution, is enough for victory in a parliamentary system, if not in a presidential system. When it won 44 per cent of Hindu vote, the BJP approximated this possibility in 2019. Indeed, only 1.4 per cent of BJPs national vote last year was non-Hindu. That level of Hindu concentration, a voting novelty in India, allowed the Narendra Modi regime to embark on an anti-Muslim legislative frenzy between July and December, culminating in the CAA.

Analogously, if 70 per cent of Whites vote for a racist party in the US, it can easily win the presidential elections, assuming a certain distribution of that vote. Republicans, under Trump, were not too far from this target in 2016, when Trump received 64 per cent of White vote (and only six per cent of the Black vote). After victory, Trump has followed a White racist agenda, and the strategy for November 2020 is also clearly aimed at racial polarisation. He may not, of course, succeed. The BLM protests have been remarkably multi-racial, and polls show a substantial reduction in Trumps White support.

The greatest difference between the US Blacks and Indian Muslims is, of course, historical. The Blacks were brought to the US as slaves, starting 1619. Bought and sold as commodities with no rights, families often split and violence frequently inflicted, they bore the pain of slavery till 1864. After slavery ended, the suffering of the Jim Crow era began, when the recently won equality and voting rights were obliterated, segregation enforced, and lynchings and pogroms unleashed. Finally, after equality and voting rights returned in the mid-1960s, police violence emerged as a method of social control. The nine-minute police knee on George Floyds neck was the wrenching tip of a vast iceberg.

Though the parallel is not exact, untouchability in India came closest to slavery. That is why some social scientists have sought to compare Blacks and Dalits. Muslims were neither forced into slavery, nor untouchability. Between the 11th and 18th centuries, much of India was ruled by Muslim princes. There is no Black parallel in US history. Blacks have been at the bottom of American society for four centuries.

This historical contrast has been undeniably consequential. Muslim princely power has been used by Hindu nationalists to transform the conduct of some Muslim rulers, especially Babur and Aurangzeb, and before them, the invasion of Ghazni and Ghouri, into a larger anti-Muslim political narrative. M S Golwalkars formulation barah sau saal ki ghulami (1,200 years of servitude, thus colonisation starting before the British conquest), which Modi repeatedly articulated when he came to power in 2014, refers to the West and Central Asian invasions from 8th century onwards.

This narrative is very different from the anti-Black narrative of White racism. In the Hindu nationalist narrative, Muslims have always been disloyal to the Indian nation, which in turn is equated with the Hindu majority. Indias partition is presented as the latest proof of Muslim infidelity. It is their everlasting disloyalty which makes Muslims unworthy of equality with the Hindus. In the White supremacist narrative, Blacks are not disloyal to the US which is, of course, viewed as a White nation. But Blacks, for them, are irredeemably inferior, and therefore, entirely undeserving of equality and respect. The two narratives construct unworthiness differently.

Both narratives are fundamentally flawed. The Hindu nationalist narrative errs when it flattens the behavioural plurality of the Muslim princes. The proverbial comparison between Akbar and Aurangzeb the two biggest Mughal emperors belongs to this discursive realm. It is impossible to prove Akbars disloyalty to India, and as for Aurangzeb, even Jawaharlal Nehru wrote, in The Discovery of India, that Aurangzeb set the clock back. No serious historian finds an unbroken chain of Hindu-repression and India-hatred running across centuries of Muslim rule.

More fundamentally, how are Muslim masses implicated in the princely conduct? Why punish them? Historically, Muslim social structure has been bi-modal. A small court-based princely and aristocratic class coexisted with a vast mass of poor Muslims. And in 2005, the Sachar Committee conclusively demonstrated something already intuitively known: That, along with Dalits and Adivasis, Muslims are the poorest community of India.

This is where the Black-Muslim comparison begins to recover its validity. Like Blacks, Indias Muslims are mostly poor and deprived, and like them, they are a minority. After the mid 20th century, a democracy is not a proper democracy unless it safeguards minorities. And if the minorities are also poor, the protection becomes even more necessary. A poor minority deserves empathy and justice, not hatred and repression. It is a morally diminishedand normatively impoverishedsociety, which adopts the latter path..

The writer is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and Professor of Political Science at Brown University

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Hindu nationalism, White supremacism threaten to morally impoverish the two democracies - The Indian Express