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Review of Post-Democracy After the Crises, by Colin Crouch (Polity, 2020).

These are no easy times for liberal theorists. The multiple crises we are living through all seem to carry negative implications for the liberal orders credibility and its future. Rampant inequality, widespread political dissatisfaction, the rise of anti-liberal populist movements and, indeed, the devastating consequences that the pandemic will have for a globalized economy all seem to pose serious challenges to liberalism.

Even before the coronavirus outbreak, this was already a theme widespread in political science literature, from Edward Luces The Retreat of Western Liberalism, to William A. Galstons Anti-Pluralism, and Patrick Deneens Why Liberalism Failed a trend amplified by the growth of all sorts of populist movements. Furthermore, on the economic front, neoliberalism as really existing liberalism is blamed for many of the ills societies are experiencing, at a time of huge economic inequality and failing public services. The dominant atmosphere in liberal circles is thus, understandably, one of dejection and confusion. And all that liberal theorists seem to have to offer is an appeal to the lofty ideals of liberal democracy and trite pleas for a more rational, well-informed, and balanced politics.

This disorientation is reflected not only among unrepentant Blairites such as Yascha Mounk, but also among more progressive liberal political scientists that have been critical of the neoliberal involution of liberal democracy. The foremost example is Colin Crouch, emeritus professor at the University of Warwick. He is the theorist of post-democracy a notion that has become widely used by sociologists and political scientists to express the progressive erosion of democratic accountability in a neoliberal era, marked by technocracy, the government of experts, and suspicion toward all forms of popular participation.

Coining this term at the turn of the millennium, Crouch reported that while society continues to have and to use all the institutions of democracy, [...] they increasingly become a formal shell. In Post-Democracy After the Crises (Polity, 2020), a title just released amid the coronavirus emergency, Crouch aims to revise and update this influential thesis, at a time marked by multiple crises that seem to further aggravate the hollowing out of democracy. Indeed, from a diagnostic perspective, current events seem to be a vindication of his early thesis.

Yet this impressive analytical prescience is not matched by a convincing prognosis. All Crouch has to offer are symptomatic remedies, a mere tweaking of the global system, with more effective forms of transnational cooperation, the return to a truly competitive market system as a means to reduce political interference by economic oligarchies, and more institutional responsiveness. But is this really enough to address the crisis of democracy?

The term post-democracy was first introduced by Crouch in 2000 in the book Coping with Post-Democracy, and then developed in a number of later works such as Post-Democracy in 2004, and The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism in 2011. According to this theory, our democracy is marked by a split between political form and substance, in which democracy continues to exist formally but its substance is lost. In this context, the energy and innovative drive pass away from the democratic arena and into the small circles of a politico-economic elite.

Putting forward this concept at the height of Tony Blairs New Labour, Crouch had different trends in mind: the growth of technocratic government, making all political decisions a matter of expertise; the lurching of political debates toward propaganda and advertising; the privatization of public services through practices known as new public management, with the profit logic encroaching on health and education; and, more generally, the disruptive role of globalization on economics and politics. These different tendencies were leading to increasing fatigue of the electorate and serious short circuits in political accountability, with nefarious consequences for democracys legitimacy.

Updating this thesis in his new book, Crouch asserts that many of the trends identified at the beginning of the 2000s are coming to maturity. He argues that the economic crisis of 2008 and the way governments managed it marked a further blow to democracy. The European sovereign debt crisis, and the way in which in 2011 the Troika of European institutions forced both Greece and Italy to change their prime ministers, provided glaring demonstrations of this suspension of democratic substance. However, amid this crisis, Crouch does not seem to find any ally in the political arena. In fact, he paints all emerging actors of both the Left and Right who have criticized failing neoliberal democracy as populists who do not deserve a serious hearing.

For Crouch, populism in all its forms is no solution to present problems. If anything, it leads to an even worse situation, where we move from technocracy to outright autocracy and xenophobia. Populisms particularism, furthermore, puts us in an untenable position when it comes to dealing with global issues such as climate change. The term populism here is not only used to take aim only at Trump, Bolsonaro, and Salvini. Rather, as with other liberal theorists such as Atlantic contributing writer and former director at Tony Blairs Global Change Institute, Yascha Mounk the term is also used to attack all new left phenomena from former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to Podemos and La France Insoumise.

Adopting a spiteful bitterness that has become prevalent among many left-liberals both in the United States and in Europe, Crouch accuses this post-crash left wave of being on par with right-wing populism, because of its supposed anti-internationalism and even hostility to migrants. This, despite the fact that these same forces are the most adamant defenders of the rights of migrants and refugees. Ultimately, what seems unacceptable to Crouch is the way so-called left-populists have mounted a critique of economic globalism and again invoked the need for state interventionism. In other words, for Crouch, while the global liberal system is failing, none of the alternatives that have emerged in recent years are any better.

Crouchs book is most disappointing when he makes recommendations on a better politics. All he has to offer is some tweaking of some structural mechanisms of liberal democracy that do not seem to be working too well. Crouch calls for fully democratic responsive politicians and a more resilient democracy. Some readers may find this as an expression of empty rhetoric. And to a large extent, it is. It seems that, for Crouch, a few changes around the edges would be sufficient to deliver us from the sorry state of liberal democracy and open the way for a real democracy, closer to the lofty ideals liberal theorists such as himself associate with the term. If only communication were more rational, information more available, capital less concentrated, markets truly competitive, our public sphere more open, our institutions more responsive, liberal democracys ills would be resolved, and we would not have to witness the deranged behavior of anti-liberal populists such as Donald Trump.

This is most evident when Crouch discusses the way the political class allowed financial deregulation, creating the conditions for the 2008 crisis. Crouch makes no excuses for the disastrous way in which the crisis was handled. However, he seems to read this mismanagement simply as a problem of information or institutional design. Thus, he argues, had politicians in the 1990s been willing to listen to a wider range of opinion ... cautionary voices would surely have been more likely to have been heard and deregulation would have proceeded more carefully. Similarly, had politicians been in more active, two-way contact with groups in society outside the financial elite, they would have been less ready to concede the banks initial deregulatory demands.

Had politicians done this and that But the fact is that politicians did not do that. And they didnt do it, not because of a problem of communication or of inadequate institutions, but because they could not listen, because they were representing interests that were by and large incompatible with citizens interests. Alike what happens in large swathes of Anglo-American political science, dominated by obtuse liberal positivism, there is little attention for the material interests that motivate different parties. All comments are made at the level of political institutions, as if political institutions were independent from society. The narrow functionalism of Crouch dispenses with everything that makes politics political, starting from political conflict and class interests. It dubiously suggests that with some minor superstructural adjustment, there will be no need to really delve into the root causes of current social and political ills.

The image Crouch offers of the current political scenario is ultimately one of impotence a Catch-22 situation in which the Left has no clear path forward. This is most evident in his discussion of globalization and its discontents. He acknowledges that globalisation certainly takes us to places where democracy is very weak, but warns that we cannot recreate the world that existed before globalization. While Crouch is clear about the fact that globalization is to a large extent responsible for the failure of democratic institutions, he does not call for a surpassing of globalization.

Trying to exit globalization, according to Crouch whose pro-European sympathies are evident, despite his criticism of EU failures would not return us to the 1970s, because there is never a return to preexisting conditions. A deglobalization would happen in a context of growing international hostility in which income and wealth would decline as gains from trade were lost and as populations became more nationally conscious they would grow in enmity towards, and suspicion of, foreigners of all kinds, including those living among them. For him, any departure from globalization would just be a nostalgic and impossible return to the past.

Crouchs proposal is thus a disappointingly modest one: a progressive liberal proposal with no serious calls for a redistribution of economic and political power. For him, we need to be realistic and improve what we already have, rather than devising something altogether new. Big concentrations of capital need to be overcome and anti-trust measures reintroduced, moving back to a truly competitive market situation, which has not been seen for decades if not for centuries. Furthermore, we should even accept that lobbying can be good for democracy, current problems being due merely to an excess of the influence of lobbying. Finally, we need to stop being so critical of the European Union, because it may well be weak and post-democratic, but it exists, and the EU is the only example of an elaborate system of cross-national cooperation that extends beyond trade relations.

In short, Crouch is a perfect representation of the current impasse of the globalist liberal left, caught between a moral denunciation of the fallacies of the system and a refusal to take stock of their structural motivations. The present is wrong, but the future may be worse. In the meantime, lets stick with what we have, tweak it a bit, and most importantly lie low, because some rocks may be incoming. What we are thus offered, in short, is a recipe of paralysis and impotence. A truly unexciting prospect for future politics. But perhaps the failure in projecting any coherent alternative is not a failure of imagination or analytical perceptiveness virtues which Crouch does not lack. It is simply the reflection of a structural reality: that counter to what is hoped by the likes of Crouch, liberalism cannot be repaired; it has to be overcome.

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Liberal Democracy Is in Trouble And Liberals Won't Save It - Jacobin magazine

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

On Monday May 4, the British Court decided that the extradition hearing for WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, scheduled for May 18, would be moved to September. This four month delay was made after Assanges defense lawyer argued the difficulty of his receiving a fair hearing due to restrictions posed by the Covid-19 lockdown. Mondays hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court proceeded without enabling the phone link for press and observers waiting on the line, and without Assange who was not well enough to appear via videolink.

Sunday May 3rd marked World Press Freedom Day. As people around the globe celebrated with online debates and workshops, Assange was being held on remand in Londons Belmarsh prison for publishing classified documents which exposed US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. On this day, annually observed by the United Nations to remind the governments of the importance of free press, Amnesty International renewed its call for the US to drop the charges against this imprisoned journalist.

The US case to extradite Assange is one of the most important press freedom cases of this century. The indictment against him under the Espionage Act is an unprecedented attack on journalism. This is a war on free speech that has escalated in recent years turning the Internet into a battleground.

Privatized censorship

While he was living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, after being granted asylum in 2012, Assange alerted the public about the oppressive force that is now threatening press freedom around the world. In a statement that was read during the Organizing Resistance to Internet Censorship webinar in January 2018, Assange noted how multinational tech companies like Google and Facebook have evolved into powerful digital superstates. He warned that undetectable mass social influence powered by artificial intelligence is an existential threat to humanity.

Most who care about digital rights are well aware that tech giants like Google and Facebook have long been embroiled with Washington halls of power. Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Facebook has been candid about his pro-censorship stance. In his 2019 Washington Post op-ed Zuckerberg shared his belief that Facebook, the worlds largest social networking site with more than 800 million users, should take an active role to control content for governments.

In When Google Met WikiLeaks, published in 2014, Assange exposed the way Google executives used revolving doors within the US State Department, and highlighted their close ties to US intelligence agencies like the NSA. Googles internal research presentation, leaked to Breitbart News from the companys employees in 2018, revealed government requests for censorship have tripled since 2016. An 85-page briefing entitled The Good Censor concluded that the multinational search giant needs to move toward censorship if it wishes to continue to receive the support of national governments and continue its global expansion.

Google has been accused of discriminating against conservative viewpoints and suppressing free speech. YouTube, one of Googles subsidiaries, is now censoring the WikiLeaks Collateral Murder video. Real images of war that exposed the US militarys brutal killing of innocent Iraq civilians, including two Reuters journalists, is now assigned to the inappropriate for some users category, severely compromising its viewership. Meanwhile, the many millions of YouTube videos, of which tens of thousands depict violence, are allowed to be played without restriction.

Big Techs fight against misinformation

Now, amidst the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, this privatized censorship via a monopoly on information became more overt and even normalized. On March 11, after the White House asked Big Tech for help in fighting the spread of false information about Covid-19, top tech industry players including Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Twitter and Reddit issued a joint statement on their collaborative efforts to battle against disinformation on their platforms.

As measures to quell the spread of inaccurate information and harmful content, Facebook implemented a new policy to direct users who have interacted with posts that contain harmful coronavirus misinformation to a myth busters page, maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO). In setting forth this companys new aggressive move to counter misinformation about Covid-19, Guy Rosen, Facebooks vice-president of integrity commented in a blogpost:

We want to connect people who may have interacted with harmful misinformation about the virus with the truth from authoritative sources in case they see or hear these claims again off of Facebook.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai also announced that the company is partnering with the US government in developing a website to educate about COVID-19 and provide resources nationwide. The blog post indicated that the multinational search giant would work under the guidance of the WHO and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Silencing the voices of dissent

Since it declared a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization positioned itself as a source of legitimacy, setting guidelines and recommendations to direct a worldwide response to Covid-19. Narratives put forward by this Geneva-based global health body began to rapidly shape the scenery of our everyday life.

Images of emergency rooms filled with those who are infected with novel coronavirus have quickly flooded into American homes through major cable news networks. With a daily report of death count increasing everyday, fear began to spread around the world. As doctors and nurses at the frontline fight to save the lives of victims in what has now become the War on Covid-19, views that challenge the mainstream discourse on the pandemic have emerged on the Internet. Physicians who disagree with the expert opinion of WHO on the transmission of Covid-19, efficacy of its treatment and/or management of the outbreak began speaking out.

Recently a call by two Californian doctors to reopen the economy and to examine the death rate of Covid-19 and justification of lockdown, created a wide sensation, attracting both support and criticism. A news conference held by Dr. Daniel W. Erickson and Dr. Artin Massih, co-owners of Accelerated Urgent Care in Bakersfield, was livestreamed by local television stations. When the online video went viral, being viewed millions of times, YouTube pulled the plug, stating that the doctors were disputing local health authority guidance.

In the first week of May, David Icke, the former football player and author of more than 20 books, got deplatformed from Facebook and Google for posting content that questioned the motives of WHO and countered the official narratives on the threat of Covid-19. In deleting his account, YouTube stated that the 68 year old UK citizen, often labeled a professional conspiracy theorist, violated their Community Guidelines on sharing information about coronavirus. Prior to deleting his account, a video of an interview of him by London Real was deleted. That video, discussing misdiagnosis and misclassification of death and economic consequences of the lockdown, is reported to have been viewed over 30 million times.

The disciplinary actions of these digital mega corporations against those who dont conform to the edicts of the designated health authority resemble the censorship of authoritarian states such as China. In a name of public safety, efforts to widen discourse and open up a democratic debate were uniformly shut down across major media platforms. This contravention of First Amendment principles does not stop with restriction of the freedom of speech. It also abridges the right of the people to peaceably assemble, prohibiting political dissent. Facebook has now confirmed that the company, after consulting with state governments, is banning promotions for protests that violate social distancing rules.

CIAs cyber-warfare

A little over a year before his arrest inside the embassy, Assange gave a dire warning: The future of humanity is the struggle between humans that control machines and machines that control humans. In this digital age, a battle for free speech is not fought on the political ground alone with legislators, corporate lobbyists, senators and presidents. Civil liberties are being eroded by an algorithmic control dictated by the Silicon Valley tech titans. They use AI in ways that act beneath conscious awareness, manipulating reality at a speed and level that humans can no longer keep up with, to control perception.

Now, the machines seem to be out of control, fueling cyber-warfare. In 2017, WikiLeaks released the largest publication of confidential documents, code-named Vault 7, sourced from the top-secret security network at the Cyber Intelligence Center. This release revealed that the CIA had lost control of the cyber-weapons it had developed.

What is alarming is that the CIA became aware of this loss but didnt warn the public about it. Now, this horrific arsenal that was designed to hide all traces of its own actions, is loosed upon the world and can be used for malicious purposes by cyber-mafias, foreign agents, hackers, and anyone else who eventually got their hands on it.

The CIAs covert hacking program and their weaponized exploits target a wide range of U.S. and European company products. The series of documents and files categorized in Year Zero revealed the specific CIA malware that grants the agency capacity to penetrate Googles Android phone and Apples iPhone software the very software that runs (or has run) presidential Twitter accounts and to avoid or manipulate fingerprints in any subsequent forensic review. An example of the abuse of this power is found in evidence of CIA espionage, targeting French political parties and candidates in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election.

Rage against the machine

The Framers of the US Constitution believed there is a seed of corruption inherent in humans. This is why Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of Americas founding document, emphasized the vital role of a free press in keeping government power in check. He said that if he had to choose between a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

Although the social and political landscape has significantly changed since his time, fundamentals of democracy have not changed. As our society quickly moves into a 1984 Orwellian technological dystopia, Jeffersons words that alarmed a nation back then should sound more loudly now. If people care about democracy, a healthy distrust of the government must be restored, awakening moral courage to ignite our rage against the machine.

Through his work with WikiLeaks, Assange aimed to hold people who run the machine to account. As a project of free software, he created an exemplar of scientific journalism on the platform of the Internet. It provided ordinary people with a formidable tool that can help them take back their power to control the machine and end its hostile takeover of society.

The whistleblower behind WikiLeaks publication of Vault 7 (allegedly Joshua Schulte, still held in custody in New York) disclosed CIA documents in an effort to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons. In releasing the material, Assange, as editor in chief of WikiLeaks, responded to his sources call for peacemaking, by affirming the organizations role as a neutral digital Switzerland for people all over the world, to provide protection against nation-states and cyber attacks.

After the whistleblowing site carefully redacted the actual codes of CIA hacking tools, anonymized names, and email addresses that were targeted, it contacted Apple, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and MicroTik, stating that WikiLeaks would work with tech companies by giving them exclusive access to appropriate material so they could help create a possible antidote to the CIAs breach of security and offer countermeasures.

Existential threat to democracy

For these efforts to end the military occupation of cyberspace, Assange is now being aggressively pursued by the Trump administration. At the time when WikiLeaks released a massive trove of documents that detailed the CIA hacking tools, Vice President Mike Pence vowed to use the full force of the law to hunt down those who released the Intelligence Agencys secret material. Calling WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence service that needs to be shut down, Secretary of State and former CIA director Mike Pompeo has taken on and expanded Obamas war on whistleblowers to attack the publisher.

John Kiriakou, who became the first CIA officer to give evidence of the use of torture, repeatedly said that if Assange were extradited, he would receive no fair trial. The CIA whistleblower, who was jailed for calling this torture unconstitutional, noted that in the Eastern District of Virginia where Assange was charged, juries are made up of people from the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, the department of Homeland security and intelligence community contractors or their family members and that no national security defendant has ever won a case there.

In his fight against extradition to the US, where he faces 175 years in prison and being subjected to harsh conditions under Special Administrative Measures, Assange is rendered defenseless. He is in effective solitary confinement, being psychologically tortured inside Londons maximum-security prison. With the British governments refusal to release him temporarily into home detention, despite his deteriorating health and weak lung condition developed as consequences of long detention, Assange is now put at risk of contracting coronavirus. This threatens his life.

Now, as the world stands still and becomes silent in our collective self-quarantine, Assanges words spoken years ago in defense of a free internet call for our attention from behind the walls of Belmarsh prison:

Nuclear war, climate change or global pandemics are existential threats that we can work through with discussion and thought. Discourse is humanitys immune system for existential threats. Diseases that infect the immune system are usually fatal. In this case, at a planetary scale.

Prosecution of WikiLeaks is an attack on the free press that is supposed to promote the discourse necessary to maintain the health of our society. A potential US extradition of Assange poses existential threats to democracy. We must fight to stop it, for without each individuals ability to speak freely, the tyranny of the authoritarian technocracy will become inevitable. It will be the extinction of free human beings everywhere in the world.

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Assange's US extradition, Threat to Future of Internet and Democracy - CounterPunch

People have long assumed that autocrats and dictators have an advantage in waging war. Today, as the novel coronavirus sweeps across the globe, there is some speculation that autocracies have an edge in fighting that war, too. Autocrats can potentially enforce shelter-in-place orders more effectively and use their surveillance abilities to better engage in contact tracing.

These concerns are without foundation. Contrary to popular beliefs, democracies are more effective in responding to various crises. Our political science research found that democracies are more likely than autocracies to win their wars. From 1816 to 1987, democracies won about 76 percent of their wars, while nondemocracies won about 46 percent of their wars. Even more striking, democracies rarely lose when they start wars, winning 93 percent of the time.

What is true of wars against armies is also true of a campaign against disease. Past studies have found that citizens in democracies are healthier than citizens living under tyranny and that democracies suffer lower mortality rates than dictatorships in epidemics. Analyses of responses to the current pandemic have already found that once the tenth coronavirus case was reported, democracies were faster than dictatorships to close schools. There is good reason to think that the attributes that make democracies perform better in warsespecially accountable leaders and superior information flowsmake them more effective in fighting the coronavirus as well.

In our research, we found that democracies win wars in part because of the reelection anxiety of their leaders. Democratically elected leaders are motivated to avoid waging losing wars because they know that unpopular policies often lead to their removal from office: U.S. Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, for example, both took steps to limit troop involvement in Syria for this reason. True, sometimes elected leaders start or escalate wars that turn out poorly, as did President Lyndon B. Johnson in Vietnam and President George W. Bush in Iraq. But the eventual decline of these leaders political fortunes serves as an enduring recommendation for caution to their successors.

As a result, elected leaders start ill-conceived wars less often than other leaders. Dictators do not have such reelection anxieties, and they are more confident that they can repress popular opposition in order to stay in office. They are thus more likely to start risky wars they might not win. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, for instance, was able to crush domestic opposition after his disastrous 1980 invasion of Iran and 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Superior information flows also help democracies win wars. Democratic leaders make better choices about wars because independent news media facilitate open debate, exposing bad ideas and promoting good ones. This environment of open debate also increases the likelihood that democratic leaders will inherit and choose qualified advisers and military officerseven sometimes rivalswho in turn provide better advice. Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, for example, prudently deferred attacking Pakistan in 1971 until she had a very promising (and ultimately successful) military plan and the weather was favorable. And U.S. President George H. W. Bush held extensive debates among his advisers in 1990 planning for war against Iraq, which produced one of the most decisive victories in military history.

Dictators are more opposed to open discussion because they fear internal political threats. They are more likely to appoint and promote yes men, who are unmotivated to provide their leaders with the unvarnished truth and/or unqualified to provide insightful advice. Arab attacks by Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq on Israel in 1948, 1969, and 1973 all ended in defeat. The poorly conceived Soviet attack on Finland in 1939 is a perfect example of a pyrrhic victory, leaving more than 100,000 Soviet dead and only a few scraps of Finnish tundra to show for it. And although Americans bemoan the long war in Afghanistan, the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan turned out far worse for Moscow, with perhaps 15,000 dead and absolutely no gains.

The same characteristics that help democracies win wars can help them tackle challenges such as the pandemic. Democratic leaders who mishandle a pandemic can expect to be at greater risk of being tossed out of office and are thus more likely to take effective action.

Dictators are more likely to survive botched crisis responses and therefore do not face pressure to reform their strategies. This can have a devastating effect during health crises. In the current outbreak, Iran has suffered an estimated 900,000 cases of the virus because the Iranian government has made such poor policy choices. But the governments botched coronavirus response will not threaten the regime because Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has substantial tools at his disposal to repress threats to his power. Similarly, should the coronavirus crisis stimulate unrest in China, President Xi Jinping will tighten his control even further.

The strict controls dictatorships have over information flows have also impeded their response to the pandemic. In Russia, President Vladimir Putin has censored information about the virus, even arresting or intimidating individuals who speak out about it: Russian police assaulted and arrested one doctor who posted videos describing authorities concealing the severity of the pandemic. China, the first country to confront COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, squelched information about the source and characteristics of the virus: the regime arrested doctors in Wuhan in late December for sounding the alarm, allowed a banquet of 40,000 families in Wuhan to occur in early February, refused help from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hampered distribution of data on how the virus spreads among those infected who show no symptoms, and underreported the number of cases by a factor of four. Although the Chinese government reports success in combating the virus, doubts about Chinas progress persist, given the countrys lack of transparency. These patterns are not new; Chinas heavy clampdown on information substantially interfered with its efforts to battle the SARS outbreak in 20023.

Open information flows in democracies, by comparison, have helped fight the outbreak. Democracies such as the United States and Germany have created policy laboratories that have helped to explore innovative approaches. But more important, open societies have generated a flood of important information about the virus, advancing public understanding and helping policymakers and citizens develop and distribute protective measures. And open channels of information have identified and exposed fake news, conspiracy theories, and quack cures, limiting their domination of public discourse on the coronavirus.

Unlike wars, however, information sharing during a pandemic is not limited to the individual liberal societies coming up with winning policy ideas. Rather, scientists, doctors, policymakers, and journalists around the globe have embraced the liberal norm of sharing ideas and information, creating an open and expansive community of knowledge. Chinese scientists substantially advanced progress toward testing, vaccine, and cure development after publishing the complete genome sequence of the coronavirus in January (although their Shanghai lab was subsequently shut down by Chinese government authorities). Meanwhile, hundreds if not thousands of other research labs around the world are racing to perfect tests, vaccines, and cures, rapidly publishing and sharing scientific papers. The health company Kinsa publishes data from its Web-linked home thermometers to forecast novel coronavirus clusters accurately and rapidly. And Google helps distribute information on social distancing, possible new symptoms, and other important developments.

Several democracies have made substantial progress in avoiding or containing outbreaks, including South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, Australia and New Zealand, Denmark, and Israel. The United States response to the coronavirus, however, has seemingly challenged the notion that democracies are better at fighting pandemics. President Trump has come under severe criticism for his handling of the crisis, downplaying early warnings of potential death tolls and moving slowly to initiate widespread testing. Despite his early performance, however, Trumps response to the virus illustrates how democracies excel in containing disease: recognizing that the outcomes of the November elections will turn on his handling of the pandemic, Trump has begun to take the crisis more seriously, imposing travel restrictions, supporting massive economic relief, and using the Defense Production Act to boost the manufacture of testing materials. Unlike dictators, who can squelch opposition, democratically elected leaders such as Trump are pressured to respond to criticism, which ultimately can yield more effective containment measures.

No one can predict with certainty the course of this pandemic. But our research on democracy and war suggests that there are critical actions both policymakers and individuals should take to fight the virus. Voters should continue to hold their elected leaders feet to the fire to motivate them to fight the virus as effectively as possible and to respond flexibly to changing conditions. Democracies should nurture information flows inside and outside of government to spur open debate about the best path forward.

As in wartime, the looming challenge for democracies will be expanding the power of the state without undermining democracy itself. South Korea, for instance, stifled the coronavirus by collecting widespread personal information about patients and informing individuals who came into contact with victims. The U.S. government may need to direct mass production of critical goods such as ventilators and control prices to prevent gouging. This can be a difficult balancewitness, for example, Prime Minister Viktor Orbans power grab in Hungary or the Israeli governments concerning expansion of data collection powers. But democracies have managed this balance before, winning wars without destroying freedom, and it can do the same in fighting the novel coronavirus. As in wars, democracy will be a source of strength in fighting the virus, not a source of weakness.

Continued here:
Democracies Have an Edge in Fighting Wars - Foreign Affairs Magazine

Andrew Yang speaks during the 100 Club Dinner. (Scott Olson / Getty Images)

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Last week, the Democratic commissioners of the New York Board of Elections did something unprecedented in election law: They threw legally qualified candidates off the ballot without their assent. Yesterday, a district judge held that what the board had done was unconstitutional and ordered it to reinstate the presidential primary for June 23.Ad Policy

Judge Analisa Torress decision was a lucid, thorough 30-page destruction of the boards argument. It was an especially important decision given that Donald Trump, whose disrespect for the law and desire for power are well established, might use any precedent to justify canceling or closing down elections later this year.

The Board of Elections is planning to appeal to the Second Circuit, setting up a major court battle about just how far states can go in authoritarian ballot stripping because of the pandemic. The question of the case boils down to this: During a public health crisis, do we lose our constitutional rights? Does the state still have to justify major burdens on our rights with well-tailored responses, or can it simply say pandemic and gain arbitrary powers it would never otherwise have?

The suit that led to yesterdays decision was brought by Andrew Yang, Yang delegates, and delegates for Bernie Sanders, all of whom had qualified to appear on the ballot in the New York presidential primary, after that primaryoriginally scheduled for April 28 and then postponed to June 23was canceled. On April 3, Governor Andrew Cuomo had pushed through a law that gave the same-party members of the Board of Elections total discretion to remove from the ballot any qualified candidates who had suspended their campaigns. The Democratic commissioners of the Board of Elections then used that newfound power to get rid of 10 candidates and their delegates and cancel the primary. The reasons they gave were that the candidates were no longer in the race (something the candidates disputed), that the race was a foregone conclusion, and that we have a serious pandemic.

Sanderss campaignwhich had recently won 23 percent of the delegates in Kansas, despite his not actively campaigning in the statecalled the move outrageous and pointed out that the Vermont senator had not dropped out of the race. Yang, like Sanders, was clear that while he had suspended his campaign, he had not terminated it. In an affidavit for the case, Yang wrote that he believed and expected that [his] name would nonetheless stay on the ballot in states with upcoming elections. Yang and Sanders delegates, who had worked hard through the winter to get on the ballot (no easy feat in New York), pointed out the practical reasons they wanted to be elected even if their candidate was a long shot: Every delegate gets a voice and votes in key decisions about rules and the platform at the Democratic National Convention. If elected, they will have the power to vote on DNC rules, the DNC platform, the candidate for president, and the candidate for vice president.

In modern election law, limits on the right to voteincluding ballot access limitsare subject to a balancing test, in which the reason for the limitation is weighed against the nature of the right being burdened. If a state stops someone from voting altogether, the burden is enormous, and the decision is subject to the strictest scrutiny and highly unlikely to be found constitutional. If, on the other hand, the state moves a polling location from a post office to a school, the burden on the voter is slight, and the state can give convenience justifications for the move, which will likely be upheld.

Courts have long recognized that a states ballot access rules affect both the rights of candidates and the rights of votersand that these rights cant be easily separated. While a state has enormous leeway in crafting ballot access rules, that leeway extends only up to the time the rules are put in place; it cant create one set of expectations for how to get on the ballot and then change them after the fact. Therefore, the burdens on the right to vote in this case were extremely severe: ballot stripping. That means any justification must be stacked up against other ways the same goal could be achieved. Plaintiffs lawyers argued (and I agree) that the state decision should be subject to the strictest scrutiny, because the vote was taken away. Judge Torres didnt use that language, but she recognized the cancellation was a weighty imposition on the plaintiffs rights, one that would require a serious, carefully and closely crafted justification.Current Issue

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This test the Board of Elections failed miserably. It gave no thorough justification at the time of the decision but instead relied on generalities about how the candidates werent running and the need to protect public health. More importantly, the boards public health justification simply doesnt hold up under scrutiny. Judge Torres pointed out in her opinion that on the same date as the presidential primary, there are elections in most of the political units of the state, so it doesnt make sense to cancel one election when the voters will be at the polls (or mailing in absentee ballots) anyway. She noted that the few areas where there are no other primaries are rural: The election is going forward in the most populous areas of the stateprecisely those where the risk is highest. She noted that no other state had canceled a primary, despite the national nature of the pandemic; that the Board of Elections was offering absentee ballots to any voter who wanted one; and that it still had seven weeks to plan for safety measures in those areas where no election would otherwise have been held. Basically, she correctly concluded that the board cant use a general claim of public health to justify such a severe burden on constitutional rights when there are less burdensome ways to address the health risk.

There are two other features of New Yorks actions that are very troubling. The law put absolutely no constraints on how the decidersthe Democratic commissioners of the Board of Electionscould determine which suspended candidates stayed on the ballot and which did not. On its face, the law would allow the board to kick off Yang and keep Warren for no reason, just because it liked Warren better. The commissioners stated reasoning, while not mentioning personal dislike, came pretty closeone claimed that Sanderss desire to remain on the ballot would render the vote a beauty contest. At best, this represented the commissioners making an independent judgment on what counts as a serious election and what does not, something you never want a state official to do without guardrails.

Also, until the legislature acted on April 3, the term suspend had no meaning in election law. Terminate, on the other hand, has always been highly consequential. For just that reason, suspend has long been the word candidates used when they wanted to stay on the ballot but take time off, with the possibilitybut not certaintythat they would return. John McCain suspended his campaign for a few days in the middle of the financial crash of 2008, asking for a debate to be canceled and saying he needed to focus on the historic crisis at hand. Ross Perot suspended his campaign for three months in 1992 and then returned after his supporters demanded it. When Gary Harts Monkey Business went 80s-viral, he, too, suspended his campaign, saying, Under the present circumstances, this campaign cannot go on. Seven months later, Hart returned to the campaign trail.

If we allowed a state to change the meaning of the word suspend midstream and transform election laws in this way, it would open the door to stripping lots of states rights. Imagine if, between now and November, Trump were to encourage Republican states to cancel the presidential election for public health reasons and suggest that the Republican-controlled state legislature change the ballot access rules in order to justify it. If that would outrage you, then Cuomos move should outrage you, too. It isnt about Bernie or Yang; its about whether the state can arbitrarily strip away our rights on any pretext.

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The Board of Elections would be wise not to appeal this decision but instead spend all its time and limited resources working to make the June 23 election run smoothly. Cuomo and New York state lawmakers should acknowledge that they made a mistake and speak out opposing the appeal. We have disagreed often in the past. However, I wouldnt wish any Democratic governor to be remembered as the governor who fought for the right of states to rip names off a ballot without due process.

Judge Torress decision is a rare cause for celebrationfor the sake of our voting rights and for the future of the Democratic Party. As the lawyers for the plaintiffs said in a statement late last night, The victory here is not just a victory for candidates, it is a victory for the voters and for the political process. For Democrats to unite behind Joe Biden, for the thousands and thousands of supporters, particularly young supporters, to take up the fight against the Imperial President in the way which we need it to be taken up, the Democratic Party must be as open and democratic as possible.

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Democracy Wins in New Yorkand Bernies Back on the Ballot! - The Nation

Ann M. Ravel and Hamsini Sridharan|May 08, 2020

Image by sorbetto/Getty Images.

The following opinion piece byAnnM.Ravel and Hamsini Sridharanoriginally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

An 'infodemic': that is what the World Health Organization has labeled the miasma of coronavirus-related conspiracy theories, misinformation, and lies circulating on social media.

Beyond its potentially disastrous consequences for public health, disinformation about the pandemic has become a weapon for organized political actors. Through posts suggesting that Dr. Anthony Fauci (one of the nations leading experts on infectious disease) is a deep-state operative, that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has contracted the virus, or that the pandemic has been overblown for partisan reasons, political forces have sought to manipulate public opinion, jeopardizing democracy alongside public health. With the 2020 election well underway, the situation underscores how grave a threat digital deception is to the integrity of our political system, and how urgently we need to address it.

We know from previous elections that online disinformation has been deliberately deployed to sow discord and distrust in order to suppress the vote and undermine confidence in democracy. Now at a time when voting processes have been physically disrupted, political campaigns are increasingly moving online, and a climate of fear and uncertainty has left the public more open to manipulation the situation is exacerbated exponentially.

In many ways, the manipulative practices we are seeing during the coronavirus pandemic mirror previous patterns. Political actors are using online disinformation to push a variety of agendas, often at odds with the public interest, and frequently without any transparency into where messages are coming from. Members of the alt-right, for example, have been circulating the claim that the coronavirus is part of a Democratic plot to prevent Trumps reelection. President Trump and his political allies, meanwhile, have promoted the idea that Democrats are obstructing access to hydroxychloroquine despite the lack of scientific evidence that the drug is an effective and safe treatment for coronavirus. Indeed, Trumps personal attorney Rudy Giuliani was temporarily suspended on Twitter for spreading misinformation touting the drug.

Foreign actors are similarly engaging in deceptive digital practices to spread propaganda. China is pushing a conspiracy theory that it was Americans who brought the virus to Wuhan, while Russia has deployed what one State Department official called swarms of online, false personas to plant narratives blaming the United States for the coronavirus outbreak and accusing the U.S. of using bioweapons against China.

Because of the imminent danger to public health, social media companies have responded more decisively to this crisis than they did to the rampant political disinformation surrounding previous elections. Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter and YouTube released a joint industry statement saying they are working together to combat misinformation around the pandemic. Facebook has prioritized fact checking coronavirus-related posts and surfacing credible information, including offering ad credits to the WHO to promote accurate data. YouTube has been displaying CDC links below any videos on coronavirus. Twitter has said it will remove all posts that in any way encourage people to catch or transmit the virus.

However, as with their previous attempts to address political disinformation, the platforms responses have not been consistent or adequately enforced, and do not go far enough towards protecting our democracy from manipulation. Much more decisive action is still needed to combat digital deception.

One of the first steps should be to ensure that there is adequate transparency for all paid political communications online, via on-ad disclaimers and a standardized, publicly accessible database, so that the public knows who paid for a message and who that message targeted.

Platforms also need to develop a clear and consistent policy to minimize lying in political communications. They have taken a firmer stance against coronavirus misinformation from politicians and political figures, but Facebook, at least, still allows politicians to lie freely about other issues. This inconsistency needs to be fixed and policies against deliberately spreading disinformation uniformly enforced.

Lastly, in much the same way that social media companies are currently directing people towards authoritative health information during the current crisis, they should similarly promote credible election information from local press and election officials. And as Congress considers funding for the states to support offline electoral processes in the face of public health needs, it should provide support to disseminate reliable election information online.

The coronavirus pandemic highlights exactly how much of a threat digital deception is and shows how urgently we need to address this issue with clear regulations and policies. Our own health, as well as the health of our democracy, depends on it.

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Protecting Democracy During the Infodemic During the Pandemic - MAPLight.org