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Spencer Critchley, managing partner for Boots Road Group, is hosting a discussionthe fourth in an ongoing seriesthat seeks to improve communication across political divides, but the true goal of the discussion is more profound, as evidenced by its title, Saving Democracy.

Its finding the people wherever they sit on the ideological spectrum who believe in civil debate, says Critchley. The members of this partythe party of democracyhave to find each other.

The next Saving Democracy installment is Tuesday, May 26 from 6:30-8pm, streaming on Facebook Live.

Past Saving Democracy events have spanned ideologies, with voices from both the right and the left. Critchley says Tuesdays event will focus on the conservative perspectives and on political moderates. It will be titled What Would Lincoln Do. Guests will include former California Republican leader Kristin Olsen and Dan Schnur, who once served as media chief for Senator John McCains 2000 presidential campaign and who now teaches at both USC and UC Berkeley. Another guest will be Mike Madrid, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a conservative group aiming to defeat President Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box, according to the organizations website. None of the guests are fans of President Donald J. Trump.

Critchley will moderate the talk.

He says the thing that makes Trump so dangerous is his corruption. That includes the presidents self-dealing, his firing of anyone who gets in his way, his efforts to solicit help from foreign governments, and his persistent lies, which are intoxicating in and of themselves, Critchley elaborates.

The point is not to get away with the lie. The point is to do away with the concept of truth, Critchley says.

He says Americans should not give in to their differences, or else those who are driving divisions will get their way by making groups of people hate each other more. Critchley says many of those who pursue a divisive brand of civil discourse are Trump supporters, but not all of them.

Theres a brand of liberal intolerance. Its a different brand. It takes a different shapeif you disagree with me, then youre corrupt, he explains.

Critchley, author of the new book Patriots of Two Nations: Why Trump Was Inevitable and What Happens Next, traces the central schism in American political discourse back to the founding days of United States. There was a group that supported the ideals of the enlightenment and another, which he calls the counter-enlightenment, that did not.

In order to win elections in the 21st century, Critchley says, Democrats will need to learn to better communicate with those they disagree with.

The problem is not Trump, he says. The problem is that someone like Trump could become president.

Saving Democracy: What Would Lincoln Do will air on Facebook Live on Tuesday, May 26, from 6:30-8pm. Attendants may register in advance, to get a reminder when the event goes live. Visit bootsroad.com/democracy for more information.

UPDATE May 22 7:50pm: A previous version of this headline misspelled Spencer Critchleys last name.

Jacob, the news editor for Good Times, is an award-winning journalist, whose news interests include housing, water, transportation, and county politics. A onetime connoisseur of dive bars and taquerias, he has evolved into an aspiring health food nut. Favorite yoga pose: shavasana.

See original here:
Spencer Critchely, Never-Trumpers Look to Save Democracy - Good Times Weekly

It is time to talk about the elephant in the room. The harsh reality is that the Constitution no longer functions. Our government is as broken and dysfunctional now as it must have been under the Articles of Confederation. In a rational world, serious people would be talking about the obvious solution: a series of constitutional amendments to overhaul and modernize our political system.

We live in a country where the president lost the popular vote by a full 2 percent, and yet won the election. We live in a country in which one partys candidates for the Senate received over 17 million fewer votes than the others in the most recent election, yet increased their majority by a mere two seats. A majority of Americans did not support the election of this president or the majority party in the Senate, and they do not support the policies advanced by that president and party.

We live in a country in which the president can profit from his public office, spend money not appropriated by Congress, block every investigation of himself, use the Justice Department to protect those who serve him, and get away with it all by stalling in court and using his partys Senate majority to prevent impeachment.

And we live in a country where the national legislature cannot pass a budget or address any major problems due to crippling partisan gridlock.

Democracy is a simple concept. Candidates and parties present their ideas and qualifications to the voters. The winners then can govern and enact their policies, consistent with the rule of law. But our system of disproportionate representation in the Senate, the indirect election of the chief executive, and gridlock-producing layers of checks and balances now prevent the United States from being a functional democracy.

Theres a well-known but specious argument that the founders created this nation as a republic, not a democracy. Its true that our Constitution requires a republican form of government. But anyone who took Political Science 101 in college should know the definitions of these terms. A republic is a state without a monarchy. A democracy is a state in which the people elect the government. The U.S. is both a republic and a democracy. Great Britain is a democracy but not a republic. China is a republic but not a democracy.

Our democracy is broken. There are more Democrats than Republicans in America, yet the minority party controls the presidency and Senate. And in the present state of polarization and hyper-partisanship, our elections do not produce governments that can govern unless one party can elect the president, a solid majority in the House, and over 60 seats in the Senate (enough to overcome a filibuster). Gridlock encourages the president to assume more and more authority to govern by executive orders. A rogue president cannot be constrained in a timely fashion by either the courts or the Congress, so long as his party controls one-third of the seats in the Senate.

The solutions are obvious. The electoral college must be abolished, or at least substantially altered to make it proportional to the population. The same is true of the U.S. Senate. The Senate should reflect the will of the American people. In what rational world does Alaska have as much power in the upper house of the legislative branch as does California?

Those two reforms are central, but more should be done. The ability of the minority to block legislation in the Senate should be abolished. The ability of Congress to investigate the president should be strengthened. And the question of whether the president can be prosecuted while in office must be clarified.

The only way to restore democracy to our republic is by amending the Constitution. In practice, getting that done looks nearly impossible in our current political atmosphere. But that does not mean we shouldnt try. It has often taken decades of persistent activism before changes to the Constitution can be pushed through. The Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced to Congress in 1923 and the battle is still going on. We need to begin a campaign to create a government that allows a majority of Americans to elect a government that can actually govern on their behalf.

The current situation cannot go on forever. Support for democracy is eroding. If we continue to elect national governments that support policies opposed by the majority, which cant pass budgets or solve problems, the people will turn to other alternatives. This is how authoritarians take control.

The Constitution was never meant to be static. The founders knew that constitutional amendments, maybe even a second constitutional convention, would be needed at critical moments in history. Now is one of those times.

Continued here:
Amending the Constitution Is the Only Way to Restore Our Democracy - Niskanen Center

Over the past six week, readers of The Fulcrum have selected their top voting rights, election administration and money in politics reforms. Now it's time to kick off the final "region" in our Democracy Madness tournament.

We're calling it the "Best of the Rest," and we're inviting you to vote on a final group of 16 ideas for fixing the problems with our democracy's fairness and functionality. They range from proposals for enhancing election security to bolstering government ethics rules, and from the promotion of civic education to statehood for Washington, D.C.

Checking in as the top seed is a national mandate for paper ballots in all elections. While this remains the biggest concern among those focused on securing elections against hackers, it has ceded the spotlight to vote-at-home efforts because of the coronavirus.

The second seed, creating a steady stream of federal election funding, covers both of those issues. Congress has appropriated $800 million to secure the 2020 elections and $400 million for making it safer and easier to cast a ballot during the pandemic. But these are both one-time payments, not the annualized outlays that states say they need in order to conduct elections properly.

To get to the regional finals, each of these will need to get through a number of other proposals -- each with its own merits.

First-round voting continues through Wednesday, with succeeding rounds taking place over the following week and a half. Two weeks from today, we'll kick off the Final Four. The winner of this region will then face the earlier winners: ranked-choice voting, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and repealing Citizens United.

Click the Vote Now button to make your eight selections. (You can click the matchups, then each label, for more about the proposals.)

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Continued here:
'Best of the Rest:' Democracy Madness reaches the draw's final quarter - The Fulcrum

Published: May 20, 2020 8:33:25 pm

Written by Bhanu Joshi and Shamindra Nath Roy

An urban-centred pandemic, stranded migrants, a stalled economy across cities have laid bare the perils of Indias urban transformation. An event like this forces us to ask: What happens to a society, its networks and power, when a transformation refuses to acknowledge politics and participation?

Famines, plagues and displacement have ravaged Indian cities in the past. Yet, what makes the current moment unique is that it forces us to confront how in the face of informality and demands for social protection in the urban as a distinct category is posing serious questions for the state and society.

These questions manifest in three ways. First, our politics refuses to recognise the urban. India is the only country in the world with an intersection of discrete criteria population density, economic and/or administrative to declare an urban area fit for a municipal government. Research suggests that this arbitrary threshold creates perverse incentives for development trajectories leading to unacknowledged urbanisation and prejudiced funding for cities. For example, in 2001-11, more than one-third of the urban population growth happened in census towns, which are urban settlements in all characteristics but are governed by panchayats. Tamil Nadu, the most urbanised state, for instance, reclassified 566 town panchayats as village panchayats so that it could receive more funding from the Union and state governments. This fluidity of Indias urban transformation highlights the need for imaginative thinking which moves beyond bureaucratic processes.

Second, this unimaginative thinking is an outcome of a non-politicised urban sphere. Beginning the 1990s, power was decentralised for both urban and rural governments. Today, panchayats not only do stuff but also have a significant political and financial domain. An excellent reflection is how competitive panchayat elections have become. One of the present authors work provides evidence to higher competitiveness of panchayat elections over city elections as measured by narrow margins of victory, the parties mobilisation efforts, campaign expenditures and turnouts. To compound the problem, even after the last delimitation process of 2008, urban areas did not have enough representation in the vidhan sabhas and the Lok Sabha. For instance, in the case of Maharashtra, where the level of official urbanisation is 45.2 per cent, the share of urban constituencies in the state assembly is only 35 per cent.

Third, at its core, a good city is a coordinated city. From everyday activities of designing an efficient public transport or garbage collection roster, to complicated matters like dealing with a pandemic or coordinating migrant relief requires coordination across line departments. COVID hotspot districts consisted of 87 per cent of the countrys urban population (as per the list released by May 1), with many of the cities accounting high mortality. Yet, from quarantine facilities to stranded migrant relief, most city governments have shown little capacity to articulate a coordinated vision on the pandemic.

The three challenges to the state are complemented by a transformation of society in urban India. Indian cities are a hodgepodge of rich and poor neighbourhoods located next to each other. This spatial fluidity reflects in the economic activity, its scale and co-location of formal and informal activities. In Mumbai, for instance, the share of the workforce engaged in regular salaried activities in slum areas is 61 per cent, which is not too dissimilar than non-slum areas (68 per cent according to the NSSO, 2018). However, about 40 per cent of the salaried employment in slums is personal and domestic care work or elementary occupations, which are structurally different from non-slum areas. What this means is that both the rich and poor though engaged in different occupations, live in various types of city neighbourhoods but have deep interlinks that run through the city. Cities controlled by bureaucratic minds often overlook these interlinkages, where the prosperity of the upmarket, planned areas is mistaken for the broader wellbeing of the whole city.

These interlinkages are missed because there is a gap between the form and the practice of democracy citizens do elect their representatives but cannot be part of the effective citizenship, creating what is often referred to as a principal-agent problem. Preferences of the principal (citizens) are aggregated by the agents (councillors), who have no power since the true agent in a city is a bureaucrat or the state government. Political parties, local councillors, party workers, middlemen all operate in a world which aggregates voter preferences and set the agenda.

If a pipeline is to be laid in a neighbourhood, a political actor has the incentive to coordinate across line departments and intervenes when mundane but necessary negotiations between rich and poor interests clash. In contrast, the city bureaucrat has no capacity and little incentive to do that. The functional domain of the local political representative is limited in terms of service delivery, even when his ability and incentive to work around various line-departments is high. This results in the disruption of the crucial formal-informal linkage that drives the Indian city and veils the productive nature of the informal.

These limitations create weak forms of participation where the rich and the aspiring middle classes secede from the public sphere and see the poor and their demands as a nuisance. For the poor, these limitations create a situation of permanent disarray. The poor, who cannot afford to provide all of these public goods privately, must raise grievances with the state for basic civic service but in doing so reproduce dependency and vulnerability, and an absence of trust that drives the solid foundation for a city.

Fundamentally, therefore, by not allowing politics to operate in Indian cities, a major transformative challenge is being reduced to technocratic solutions. The challenge, therefore, demands an imaginative architecture which genuinely envisions citizenship-based governance and this pandemic provides that opportunity.

Democracy is messy but is the only way to answer demands that this transition will put on the state and society. Urban India, like anywhere else, needs more, not less of it.

(Joshi is a PhD candidate in Politics at Brown University and Roy is a researcher at the Centre for Policy Research)

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Dealing with Covid-19 requires more democracy, less bureaucracy - The Indian Express

ASEAN Beat|Politics|Southeast Asia

The countrys political upheaval reinforces the continued importance of paying attention to structural dynamics and the more contingent and contested nature of outcomes in domestic politics.

This week, Malaysias troubled transition was on full display again with an unprecedented one-day parliamentary session that put off a no-confidence vote and left the countrys politics in flux.

While these developments are notable for their own sake, it is also worth reflecting on a broader question that has lingered in recent months amid all this: what Malaysias troubled transition says and does not say about the state of democracy in the region.

As I have observed before, though Southeast Asia is often subject to country- or event-focused accounts about whether democracy is rising or declining, the region has in fact long been home to a hybrid of regime types and varying societal pressures beyond the state, which makes it even more difficult to extrapolate from perceived litmus tests. A case in point is Myanmars opening in 2011 and the victory of Aung San Suu Kyi in 2015 elections, which was initially met with international euphoria, but quickly gave way to disappointment as governance challenges were exposed beyond that litmus test and below the state level. Meanwhile, beyond that single case, democracy in the region has seen a much more mixed and murkier outlook than the dramatic rise and falls often portrayed with the initial progress seen in Myanmars transition existing alongside other stories such as the suppression of the Cambodian opposition, worries about democratic rollback and decline in the Philippines, Thailand, and even Indonesia, and the endurance of one-party communist governments in mainland Southeast Asia.

Perceptions with respect to Malaysias experience with democracy also reinforce this point. Viewed more superficially, over the past few decades, the country has been through a series of dramatic pendulum swings from dashed hopes of reform during the Reformasi period to kleptocracy under the government of Najib Razak; and, more recently, from the shock election victory Pakatan Harapan (PH) recorded in the May 2018 elections to the dramatic collapse of the coalition and hope for a New Malaysia this February. But that superficial treatment belies a more complex reality: that enduring structural challenges to democratization that scholars have long pointed to such as the personalization of politics and politicization of institutions have remained and that small margins or sudden developments be it Mahathir Mohamads surprise return to politics or the narrow, contested majority the current Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin was able to secure can quickly reverse perceived gains or losses.

Seen from this perspective, Malaysias troubled transition represents just the latest case in point where these broader realities are once again manifesting. Analogous to the case of Myanmar, expectations that a single election could help power reform and democratization have unsurprisingly proven to be unrealistic. Variables such as the personalization of politics and the dominance of UMNO have been at play in several senses, be it in the continued rivalry between Mahathir and Anwar, which had complicated any handover of power following PHs victory, or the demonstration of UMNOs staying power in fluid party politics through a mix of realignment, factionalization and absorption. And, once again, contrary to notions of a dramatic swing or clear trend, prospects for democratization or even reform now hang by a thread, with the Perikatan Nasional commanding a razor-thin and contested majority, which could easily be reversed once again in the coming months.

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While the story of Malaysias troubled transition is still playing out, what, then, does this say (and, equally if not more importantly, not say) about democracy and Southeast Asia? For one, Malaysias experience should reinforce caution about too hastily attributing a change in one country to a diverse region as a whole, particularly given how fragile gains can be and how quickly they can be reversed. For another, the continued influence of structural dynamics should serve as an important reminder that they will continue to be powerful shapers of politics, even though agency whether in the form of the influence of individual leaders or the actions they take or do not take also obviously matters greatly. And the narrow margins also point to the importance of paying attention to the intricacies of domestic politics down to the role of individual members of parliament or the powers of the monarchy.

The lessons Malaysias troubled transition offers may not seem that grand or groundbreaking. But sticking to the basics including recognizing the enduring realities and narrow margins at play and paying close attention to short and long-term state-society dynamics as well as unexpected developments that could be just around the corner and reverse previously perceived linear trajectories may also be exactly the right lessons to learn from one of the more remarkable recent cases in the evolution of regime dynamics in Southeast Asia.

Link:
What Does Malaysia's Troubled Transition Mean for Democracy in Southeast Asia? - The Diplomat