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How do you hold primaries when much of the countrys being asked not to go out in public? Its another thing to sort out on the fly with everyone open to practical compromise.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has postponed all village elections, scheduled for Wednesday, until April 28 the date still set for New Yorks presidential primary.

We are dealing with an unprecedented challenge, but I think it is a signature of a stable democracy that elections happen, Mayor de Blasio said before postponing the March 24 special election for Queens borough president. Indeed, its worth taking the time to figure out how to vote safely.

Cuomo has moved to make absentee voting available to everyone and to extend the application deadline to the day before the primary. Were no fans of vote-by-mail but its all fair, in these extraordinary circumstances. As the saying goes: Needs must when the devil drives.

Indeed, the state Board of Elections needs to craft vote-by-mail and drop-off ballot procedures before April 28, in case the shutdown lasts that long.

The Legislature can pass the necessary laws, making it plain that this isnt absentee voting, which the state Constitution severely limits, but special emergency voting. (Reformers who want vote-by-mail for all elections need to resist the urge to exploit this crisis: Compromise.)

Other states are doing their own experimenting, as the epidemic hits nationwide.

The Democratic National Committee, which is mulling penalties for states that change their rules suddenly, needs to back off, too: Its a crisis, and people are doing their best. Both parties should be figuring out how to hold conventions via video, if it comes to that.

Tech-savvy campaigns are hosting virtual town halls in place of in-person events. Social media and virtual phone banks are replacing in-person canvassing.

Some of these innovations will persist even once normalcy returns. We hope to see familiar in-person Election Day balloting again the norm, but the emphasis for now is on making democracy work while under duress.

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Making democracy work during this crisis requires everyone to compromise - New York Post

llustration by Joey GuidonePortrait illustrations by Sam Kerr

Democracy and capitalism coexist in many variations around the world, each continuously reshaped by the conditions and the people forming them. Increasingly, people have deep concerns about both. In a recent global survey, Pew found that, among respondents in 27 countries, 51% are dissatisfied with how democracy is working. Further, Millennials and Gen Zs are increasingly disinterested in capitalism, with only half of them viewing it positively in the United States.

In The Business Case for Saving Democracy, Rebecca Henderson argues that the failure of each system is married to the other, and that to rebuild a strong free market we are going to have to strengthen democracy. But do other observers agree?

To learn more about the complex global relationships of democracy and capitalism and why global opinion of the two appears to be waning Harvard Business Review, with Henderson, reached out to top economists and political scientists who study democracy, and who are from, live, or work in countries that are struggling with it. We asked them these questions: Do democracy and capitalism need each other? Why or why not?

Heres how they answered.

Isabelle Ferreras

Tenured fellow of the Belgian National Science Foundation, professor at the University of Louvain, and a senior research associate of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School

Clearly not: Capitalism, as we can see across the globe, is compatible with all different kinds of political regimes: liberal democratic, communist, autocratic and now illiberal democracies, too.

Democracy is a system of government based on the recognition that people are equal in dignity and rights and should therefore have equal political rights. This ideal can be applied to entities of any size.

Capitalism is also a system of government, but an unequal one. It grants political rights based on capital ownership. Its core institution is the firm, which is made up of two classes of investor: capital and labor. In capitalist firms, political rights to govern are held by capital investors only, through the legal vehicle of the corporation. The only citizens that matter in the extractive logic of the capitalist firm are those who own capital in other words, shareholders. They exercise the power and reap the bulk of the financial returns, while labor investors (i.e., workers) are disenfranchised and the planets resources exhausted.

Capitalism is not naturally meant to support the free market. The market is an exchange mechanism that is legally and culturally produced and secured by the state. Its superiority in coordinating supply and demand has been proved, but it is seldom acknowledged that the market economy is compatible with both democratic and capitalist governments at the firm level. Capitalism and democracy both need markets, not each other.

This confusion has created the illusion that democracy and capitalism go hand in hand, when, in fact, they contradict each other. Todays political leaders (democratic or not) are scrambling to hide their powerlessness to reduce inequalities or save the planet in the face of transnational capitalist corporations. One result of this is crumbling democracies. We have a clear choice before us: either expand our democratic commitment to include corporations, through democratizing them internally (by including the representation of labor investors along the current representation of capital investors), or forfeit our democratic rights to those who own capital a possibility looming on the horizon, particularly in the United States.

Isabel V. Sawhill

Senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution and author of The Forgotten Americans: An Economic Agenda for a Divided Nation

Capitalism and democracy absolutely need each other to survive, but right now it is democracy that is most threatened.

Capitalism is the right way to organize an economy, but its not a good way to organize a society. Markets do a good job of allocating resources, fostering dynamism, and preserving individual choice, but they cannot solve climate change, too much inequality, or the plight of workers whose jobs have been destroyed by trade or technology. When government fails to address these or other systemic problems, democracy begins to lose its legitimacy. In desperation, citizens turn to populists on the right or the left. If these leaders then prove unable to keep their promises, trust in government erodes further. Political instability begins to threaten capitalism itself.

We are now seeing that spiral in action. Dissatisfaction with democracy in the U.S. has risen by one-third since the mid-1990s and now includes about half the population, according to the Centre for the Future of Democracy at Cambridge University. It was the white working class, whose counties had been ravaged by a loss of jobs, that elected Donald Trump in 2016. Yes, his supporters had cultural anxieties (opposition to immigration in particular) in addition to economic ones, but theres no denying the surprisingly strong county-level correlation of votes for Trump with long-term economic distress, very low employment rates, plant closings related to trade, and the location of the opioid epidemic.

Now the U.S. is in the midst of another presidential campaign and the signposts of instability are rising on the left. If Bernie Sanders wins the Democratic nomination this year, it will be clear that it is not just the working class that is fed up but also young people and progressives, who believe the system is corrupt and that only a democratic socialist can save the day. But a Sanders revolution would almost surely disappoint his voters further, since enacting most of his proposals is politically infeasible, leading to more fraying of trust in government.

Fewer than half of 18- to 29-year-olds now support capitalism. They are right that markets without guardrails do not produce a healthy society. But a government that overreaches by trying to replace the market in areas like health care or job creation will not restore that trust. This is the balancing act we face.

Archon Fung

Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Of course they dont need each other.

Ancient Athens and the revolutionary United States were democratic but not capitalist, and China practices what some call state capitalism without democracy. To be provocative, let me pose a different question: Can democracy and capitalism coexist?

Democracy is a system of government in which people make the laws and policies together as equal citizens. But under capitalism, capitalists tend to like to make the laws and policies. The new Oxford dictionary defines capitalism as an economic and political system in which a countrys trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit. Thats simply not democracy.

In societies that contain elements of both democracy and capitalism, the challenge is to maintain political equality against the economic inequality that capitalism tends to produce. Capitalist democracies with greater political equality tend to look less capitalist; Im thinking of northern European countries with more-generous social safety protections, stronger unions to counterbalance the political power of businesses, higher tax rates, and more-egalitarian labor market and distributive policies. Indeed, those places are commonly called social democracies rather than capitalist democracies. And the places that are more capitalist tend to be less democratic. In the United States, for example, the political scientist Martin Gilens has shown that over many decades, numerous public policies have been very responsive to the wishes of those at the top of the income distribution but not at all to the bottom 80% of Americans.

Reetika Khera

Indian development economist and associate professor at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad

While neither capitalism nor democracy exist in their ideal form, especially today, what democracy promises is more appealing to me than what capitalism promises. For instance, unlike democracy, capitalism does not even strive to achieve equality.

The failings of democracy are all around us. The rise of authoritarian government in India and the revolting levels of social and economic inequality are signs of this. Too often the not-so-invisible hand of crony capitalism is apparent in this. Yet, Indian democracy even infirm and fragile has shown its value and provided glimpses of potential to achieve social change: Since the countrys independence in 1947, life expectancy at birth has more than doubled, from 32 years in 1951 to 66 years in 2011. Another glimpse: In 2017, a nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India reaffirmed the right to privacy as a fundamental right, paving the way for striking down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalized same-sex relationships.

Similarly, the reality of capitalism is troubling. Be it car manufacturers who fudge emissions, banks that move drug money with impunity, or, in India, business tycoons who flee the country when their debtors come knocking, living by the rule of law and equality before the law do not appear to be the norm. When powerful capitalists are not violating laws, they buy influence to shape the law-making process to their advantage (e.g., by scuttling basic worker-protection initiatives) and carry out legal theft. In decades past, the sugar and tobacco industries sponsored friendly research to cover up the ill effects of their products; today we see the tech industry doing something similar, including undermining free and fair elections, the foundation of a functional democracy.

Do democracy and capitalism need each other? Capitalism needs a pretence of democracy more than democracy itself. Increasingly, I feel that plutocracies pass themselves off as democracies. In plutocracies, capitalism is consolidating its wealth and power while maintaining a charade of democracy.

Manuel Agosin

Professor, department of economics, Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Chile, and former dean of the faculty (20102018)

Capitalism can survive without democracy for a long time, as exemplified by the experiences of China, Russia, Turkey, and other authoritarian states. However, capitalism without democracy usually favors corruption and control over resources through means other than merit, such as party loyalty.

That said, in the short term, we have seen democracies being abused for personal gain in many mostly democratic countries. The many cases of mega corruption that have come to light in democratic countries in Latin America (Lava Jato, or Car Wash, in Brazil, and the Odebrecht cases all over the continent) are ample evidence of this. Even the United States has been far from impervious to the subversion of democracy by a would-be autocrat.

By emphasizing individualism and personal gain, capitalism tends to breed market concentration and a long series of abuses, as the Great Recession clearly showed. Individuals and corporations are continuously tempted to evade or to use loopholes in the law. The financial sector is particularly prone to this type of behavior, since it allows market participants to reap gains not only by producing services that people need but also by the clever manipulation of financial engineering. More often than not, such creativeness produces nothing of value for society; rather, it often engenders conditions that create financial crises down the road.

This is why only a true democracy can correct the ills of capitalism, such as lack of competition and a skewed distribution of its rewards, through the use of state power. Strong democracies have checks and balances that can put a limit to what capitalism can do: courts where cases of uncompetitive markets, corruption, and subversion of democracy can be tried and punished. In fact, the maximum benefits of capitalism can be fully reaped only in a democratic society. And so the most pressing challenge for democratic societies is this: how to ensure that finance serves the real needs of citizens rather than lining the pockets of those who are lucky to win at the financial game.

Steven Klein

Assistant professor of political science at the University of Florida; beginning June 2020, lecturer in the department of political economy, Kings College London

The past 30 years have shown that capitalism does not need democracy to take root: In China, the introduction of capitalism has not lead to an expansion of democratic rights, and authoritarian governments in other countries like Hungary have also enthusiastically embraced capitalism.

At the same time, its clear that capitalism does need democracy to save it from itself. The financial crises in the United States and Europe show how democratic institutions have been called on to come to capitalisms rescue.

Historically, we know that democracy and capitalism can evolve together. Merchant city-states like Florence and Amsterdam had forms of representative government, and in Great Britain, the development of democracy protected the interests of the rising merchant classes against older vested interests. Yet countries like Great Britain only ever saw a partial democratization, with property qualifications to vote, and it was widely thought that universal suffrage would destroy property rights and, by extension, capitalism. Elsewhere, the eventual collapse of democracy in Europe was tied to the needs of capitalism: The German chancellor Heinrich Brnings austerity policy of the 1930s, an effort to keep Germany on the gold standard and so part of global capitalism, helped propel the Nazis to power.

The organizing principles of democracy and capitalism differ. Democracy rests on the belief that everyone should have an equal say in decisions that affect them. Capitalism doesnt. Instead, it bases production around the profit motive and the capacity to enter and exit relationships based on opportunities. This is the heart of the tug they have on one another: Realizing an ideal of equal voice will mean limiting the ability of individuals and firms to abandon their economic and political relationships even if democratic decisions dont favor them. We know what the outcome of this tension is: Capitalists often turn to authoritarianism before they accede to a new regime of democratic checks.The Big Idea

About the author: Laura Amico is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review.

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Do Democracy and Capitalism Really Need Each Other? - Harvard Business Review

Freedom House, the Washington-based think tank, opened in 1941, with a mission to counter isolationism in America and fascism around the world. It was conceived as a bipartisan project; the honorary chairs were EleanorRoosevelt, the First Lady, and Wendell Willkie, who had been the Republican Presidential nominee in 1940and lost to Roosevelts husband. Over the years, Freedom House studied a broad spectrum of threats to freedom, from McCarthyism to Soviet oppression. Since 1973, it has published Freedom in the World, an annual country-by-country report that has been called the Michelin Guide to democracys development.

The latest edition was published last week, and, as you might expect, it recorded the fourteenth straight year of deteriorating freedom around the world; sixty-four countries have lost liberties in the past year, while only thirty-seven registered improvements. (India, the worlds largest democracy, has seen some of the most alarming declines.) Its assessment of the United States is also disturbing. In 2009, the U.S. had a score of ninety-four, out of a hundred, which ranked it near the top, just behind Germany, Switzerland, and Estonia. In the decade since, it has slipped eight points; it now ranks behind Greece, Slovakia, and Mauritius. Looking at the United States, Freedom House analysts note the types of trends that they more customarily assign to fragile corners of the globe: pressure on electoral integrity, judicial independence, and safeguards against corruption. Fierce rhetorical attacks on the press, the rule of law, and other pillars of democracy coming from American leaders, including the president himself.

Explaining what, exactly, accounts for this decline is the work of a growing body of literature. Much of it focusses, of course, on the tenure of Donald Trump, but, interestingly, some scholars and advocates tend to identify a point of origin well before the election of 2016. According to Protect Democracy, a legal-watchdog group dedicated to combatting the rise of authoritarianism in America, the growth and spread of democraciesthat defined the 20th Century peaked in the early days of the 21st; since 2005, the state of democracies around the world has receded.

One of the most frequently cited theories for this change is depicted in whats known as the elephant graph. The graph, which the economist Branko Milanovi popularized, in 2013, is, in fact, a chart that shows income growth by stratum (or, in technical terms, by percentiles of the global income distribution) in the twenty years leading up to the 2008 global financial crisis. The graph got its name because it looks like an elephant: on the left, there is a plump body of rising incomesChina, India, and other beneficiaries of globalizationand, on the right, a rapidly rising trunk, which reflects the spectacular fortunes of the worlds top one per cent. The most politically significant part of the elephant is in between: the bottom of the trunk, which shows the stagnant incomes of American and European working and middle classes. Those groups have proved to be fertile bases of support for populist rebellions against democratic traditions that, from their vantage point, now appear false or obsolete.

Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, cites the elephant graph as part of the reason for Americas democratic decline. But I think finance only tells part of the story, he said, because there are other factors that need to be accounted for. Instead of invoking an elephant, Bassin visualizes a volcano. At the base, there are massive underlying conditions that are changing in the same way that the Earths tectonic plates shiftclimate, migration, globalization, tribalismand lava flows into the base of the volcano. At the layer above, you have what I think of as accelerants, like the rise of social mediathings like Russian interferenceand democratic distortionslike partisan gerrymandering. The cumulative effect of those accelerants, he said, has been to fuel skepticism about the functioning of American democracy, because they have warped or thwarted the effect of the popular will. Bassin continued, At the very top of a volcano, there are supposed to be a bunch of checks and balances that hold back the heat and force. But we have a Congress that has basically abdicated its congressional obligations of oversight of the executive, and an executive who openly claims to be above the law. So youve got the lava exploding out the top of the volcano.

Its a bleak image, but, in Bassins view, the metaphor also contains the promise of some realistic interventions. In the three years since Protect Democracy started, he said, Weve been able to have some success at the top of the volcano, where its narrow, trying to fix some of those checks and balances. The group has filed a range of legal actions that have resulted in national injunctions, including blocking Trumps use of emergency powers to build the border wall, and Administration efforts to slow low-income green-card holders from gaining citizenship. In December, Protect Democracy organized a statement, which eight hundred and fifty legal scholars signed, asserting that the President had committed impeachable offenses.

In some other countries that have registered a decline in democracy over the past decade, such as South Korea and Poland, demonstrators have flooded the streets in opposition. In the United States, by contrast, the largest public protest in the name of democracy was on the first day of Donald Trumps Presidency. The erosion has been gradual enough that many Americans have become inured to it, numb to the alarm. First, they stopped paying attention to the tweets. Then they found it easier to ignore the rallies and the random acts of transgression. American legal activists seeking to stop the slide documented by Freedom House consider that, since Trump was acquitted in his impeachment trial, he has entered a more audacious phase. In the latest gesture of pressure on the press, the Trump campaign has sued the Times, the Washington Post, and CNN, for libel.

There are still eight months to go until the election, with no obvious check on the Presidents behavior in place. Many experts fear that Trump will veer even further from the traditions of American governance. Bassin suspects that he will, but also thinks that Americans are gaining a new awareness of their own role in preserving democracy. Theres been a phenomenon throughout the Trump Presidency of people casting about, looking for a savior, Bassin said. Was it going to be Robert Mueller? Jim Mattis? John Kelly? And, of course, all of those figures have let us down because, at the end of the day, the Founders understood that the only ultimate savior for the experiment of self-government is the savior described in the first three words of the constitution: We the people.

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Why Democracy Is on the Decline in the United States - The New Yorker

Many citizens in the replica democracies of the East began to feel that their own cultural and religious traditions were being disparaged by an obligatory conversion to foreign attitudes, values and institutions, including secularism and multiculturalism. A public embittered by the Wests treatment of its Eastern neighbors as second-class Europeans began rallying to populist demagogues who posed as defenders of authentic national identities. Their signature slogan was: We dont want to be copies! We want to be ourselves! Resentment against democratization as imitation has proved particularly toxic in Central and Eastern Europe where democratization coincided with the process of European integration, which in practice meant that voters could vote political parties in and out of power but that laws and policies never changed since they were set in Brussels.

Third, the three-decade Age of Imitation that began in 1989 inflicted serious damage on liberal democracy in the West by putting to sleep the self-critical faculties of its leading politicians and political commentators. Busy trying to democratize others, Western policy elites became complacent toward the failures and deficiencies of free-market democracy in their own societies. This uncritical idealization of the state of democracy at home was the direct result of the Wests preoccupation with democratizing others. It is not by accident that the National Endowment for Democracy, a symbol of Americas commitment to democracy worldwide, has no mandate to work on problems within the United States. (Though this is also the reason it still enjoys bipartisan support.) This failure to look inward made efforts to export American-style democracy into an easy target for charges of hypocrisy.

The Wests one-sided focus on the struggle for democracy abroad made Western advisers shy away from discussing the ongoing struggle for power within democracies themselves. Liberals who overemphasized individual rights and voluntary market exchange, spoke about power only when discussing authoritarianism, genocide or corruption. Otherwise, their message has seemed to be that, if the government does not abuse its authority, the asymmetry of power relations characteristic of every society is of negligible importance.

Taking hold in the two-decade heyday of liberal hegemony following 1989, this sanitized image of liberal democracy has become the favorite straw man of illiberal politicians today, including the president of the United States. It explains why they repeatedly insist that all relations in society are power relations, that right doesnt matter, that politics is a zero-sum game, that there are no impartial institutions and that fraud is just a clever way to win elections. This cynical perspective, which has now gained a receptive audience worldwide, represents a backlash against the excessive promises made by liberals after 1989. Democracy promoters insisted, unrealistically, that politics and economics, with a little good will, could easily become a win-win game, that periodic elections guarantee that citizens will control politicians, and that impartial institutions could overcome the unfairness associated with asymmetries of power in society. The ease with which these illusions were dashed was another factor opening the door for the steamrollering of illiberal forces to political power.

Western-style democratic capitalism has many well-known virtues. But having been put on a pedestal for post-Communist countries to admire and emulate, it lost all critical distance to itself, dismissing sensible warnings, for instance, about the downsides of military interventionism abroad and economic deregulation at home. By defining democracy as the ideal state of society and the only possible path to prosperity, the post-1989 consensus paradoxically undercut the most basic advantage of democratic governments. Democracies are not and cannot be satisfaction machines. They do not produce good governance the way a baker turns out doughnuts. What democracies offer dissatisfied citizens is the right to do something about their dissatisfaction. That is why a chastened democracy, having recovered from its unrealistic and self-defeating aspirations to global hegemony, remains the political idea most at home in the current age of dissatisfaction.

Ivan Krastev is a contributing opinion writer, the chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Stephen Holmes is a professor of law at New York University. They are the authors of The Light That Failed: A Reckoning.

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Of Course They Gave Up on Democracy - The New York Times

Read: Italys coronavirus response is a warning from the future

Italy has always been a harbinger of shifts, whether political or otherwise, in Europe and beyond. Countries around the world will also likely make decisions that try to balance protecting the health and welfare of citizens with protecting the economy from grinding to a halt, decisions that balance lives and livelihoods. In some ways, Italy and Europe are well positioned to face this crisis. They have good universal public health care. In other ways, the region is decidedly ill-suited to do so, because of the very reason the European Union exists in the first place: the principles of free movement of people, goods, and information. This virus knows no borders.

The list of sites that are closed is long: day cares, schools, universities; museums, cinemas, theaters. The Italian soccer league has canceled all matches; public gatherings are bannedno weddings, funerals, or religious services. Public transportation and trains are still running and airports are open, though with restrictions and a sharp reduction in frequency. The measures are stringent, but the language of the decree is somewhat flexible. To leave their immediate areas, people will need to fill out an auto-certificationa legally binding document stating what crucial need requires them to get on a plane or train, and why they cant defer the tripor risk arrest and a fine.

Goods are still circulating and essential services still functioning. Grocery stores are open, and so are restaurants and bars, but with a 6 p.m. curfew and only if they can ensure that guests remain three feet apart. Today, some Italian politicians from the right-wing opposition League party are calling for even more drastic measures, including closing all shops except grocery stores.

Italy is offering some cushions to soften this blow. Mortgage payments will be suspended. The government is exploring proposals to let people delay paying their bills and other taxes, as well as tax breaks for businesses and vouchers for child care. There has been unrestsome runs on supermarkets and riots at prisons after visits from relatives were banned, resulting in the deaths of several people.

These measures are testing the contours of what is possible in a democracy balancing freedom with public safety. China put in place efficient, but not democratic, measures. Iran, which also isnt a democracy, didnt manage to do that, Matteo Renzi, the former Italian prime minister, told La Repubblica today. Europe is being tested now and Italy, unfortunately, has been the guinea pig.

The rise in the number of cases and deaths in France and Germany suggests that those countries are where Italy was about 10 days ago. Yesterday, French Culture Minister Franck Riester announced that hed tested positive for the virus, and the lyse Palace said that the French government was following the countrys health protocolsofficials are taking their temperature and isolating themselves if they have symptoms. French President Emmanuel Macrons chief of staff, Gatan Escorbiac, is working from home after coming into contact with someone who tested positive, the lyse said.

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Italy Shut Down. Which Country Will Be Next? - The Atlantic