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At this point in the last century, a generation horrified by the unprecedented slaughter of the First World War was about to descend into a haze of Champagne, dissolution and Parisian ennui. But progress and change were coming fast, too.

Most women in Canada could vote by 1919, and the battle for universal suffrage had been under way for years and would continue. The notion of an objective press of newspapers that werent partisan but dealt in facts was becoming commonplace. Old monarchies in Europe were ceding to the power of an idea once thought radical: liberal democracy. Canada, barely 50 years old, was taking its place in the world as a model of responsible government.

Soon would come the Great Depression and the massive government efforts, such as the New Deal in the United States, to put people back to work and provide them with basic social security. Then came the Second World War and the global fight against fascism. The United Nations was born from that cataclysm; within three years it had enshrined the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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After that came a global postwar economic boom, fights for civil rights, the womens movement and, in Europe, the first efforts to unite the continent in a common market designed to put its warring ways in the past forever. North American free trade would follow within three decades.

And then the 2010s arrived, and everything seemed to grind into reverse.

Its simplistic to think that a critical shift in our world happened suddenly, of course. But between the Brexit vote in 2016 and the nativist and isolationist rhetoric of Donald Trump, who beat the odds to be elected U.S. President the same year, the past 10 years have felt more like devolution than evolution.

Ten years ago, the postwar international order was still accepted as the foundation on which a better, more peaceful world would be built. Barack Obama, a man who embodied the advances of the previous decades and had the stately demeanour associated with high office, was President of the United States. Among other projects, his government was negotiating a free-trade deal in the Pacific region that included countries from Vietnam to Chile and Malaysia to Canada.

Today, free trade is under fire from politicians and their followers in countries on both sides of the Atlantic. Mr. Trump killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, forced the renegotiation of the North American free-trade agreement and put tariffs on the steel and aluminum produced by stalwart allies, Canada included.

In Britain, voters have twice returned a government dedicated to leaving the European Union. Brexit, unthinkable before the 2016 referendum, is a fait accompli.

The World Trade Organization is meanwhile defunct as a dispute-resolution body, because of the Trump administrations refusal to name new judges to its appeals body.

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NATO, the postwar alliance created to keep the Soviet Union in check, has been rocked by Mr. Trumps mockery of the organization and his closeness to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In tandem with the retreat from economic integration has come a rise in populism in many countries, including the U.S. and Britain, as well as Italy, France, Poland and Germany. Immigrants and refugees are targeted as the cause of economic ills, rather than being welcomed and integrated. In the U.S. and Germany especially, a rise in far-right politics has evoked the racist nightmares of the past.

In China, the regime of Xi Jinping has created a surveillance state so omnipresent and repressive that it obviates the need for George Orwells satirical imagination. In Turkey, journalists have been jailed for the crime of interviewing people opposed to the ever-more-despotic regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

And, because of Mr. Trump, any journalism that isnt flattering is fake news, critical opinion has been renamed bias and the idea of an objective and free press is on the ropes.

These were not things that dominated the conversation at the beginning of the decade. The question is: Is this is a blip, or are we entering a different, darker era?

Well know more in 10 years. But one thing is certain: If those who believe in the postwar, liberal order dont fight for it now, they might not get another chance.

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Editors note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said women in Canada couldnt vote in 1919. In fact, most women could vote in federal elections and in most provincial elections.

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Is this the autumn of liberal democracy? - The Globe and Mail

It was not primarily the athletes that drove the radical change of the sports agenda in the decade we leave. But there are signs that athletes will be at the heart of the agenda of the 2020ies, writes Play the Games international director in a wind-up of ten turbulent years in world sport.

Try to think ten years back (if you are not too young or too old to remember):

If someone had told you, at the doorstep of 2010, that the following decade would

Would you have found such predictions for international sport credible?

Or would you have regarded them as wishful thinking by negative people who tried to build a career by criticising the good work of sport as an official from the very top of international sport in 2009 kindly characterised Play the Game and the speakers we brought along?

Honestly, I dont think even the most critical, most negative, most conspiracy-loving follower of Play the Game in 2009 could imagine the real scope of the crime and corruption challenges woven into modern sport.

Back then, the solid evidence brought forward by investigative journalists, whistleblowers, researchers, and prosecutors, was already bad enough to conclude that sport had a serious and inherent integrity problem.

Sports officials would most often dismiss their well-founded revelations as exaggeration and fantasies, but the 2010s proved that reality also in sport often surpasses imagination.

It can be hard to draw hope and inspiration from the above-mentioned sports scandals and many others we have experienced in the last decade. After all, they have all come at a high price for those who suffered the consequences. Corruption is not a victimless crime: Ask Mario Goijman, ask Yuliya and Vitaly Stepanov, ask Phaedra Almajid, ask Bonita Mersiades, ask Sandro Donati, ask any whistleblower around in sport.

But thanks to these courageous people, thanks to investigative journalists, thanks to honourable public servants, the 2010s brought a remarkable difference: Silence was finally broken. A few examples:

Until 2010, the integrity problems were most often hushed or played down, no matter how hard the evidence. Match-fixing was ignored. Sexual abuse cases were oppressed. The IOC stressed it was not a human rights organisation. Corruption flourished in international federations. FIFA bribes worth 142 million Swiss francs were documented in Swiss courts in 2008, but did not catch many headlines, and sports leaders kept silent.

Matter of public interestToday, the integrity challenges of sport are highlighted at every major sports conference. Governments have started making policies for better sports ethics. A centre for sport and human rights have been established. Anti-Olympic campaigners have formed a global alliance. Athletes unions, too. An international convention against manipulation of sports competitions has been ratified. Every sports federation in the world, even the most backwards, claims its heartfelt commitment to good governance.

All in all, sports politics have become a matter of public interest. Ten years ago, you would spend ten minutes surfing the internet to get a full overview of the days sports political stories. Today, the production is overwhelming, and Google is probably the only entity able to get a full overview.

Many questions can rightly be raised about the quality of the media reporting, the efficiency of government policies, the futility of public interest, and the credibility of the Olympic movements interest in reforming itself.

What is undeniable, however, is that windows of opportunity have been opened over the past ten years for groups who, like Play the Game, pursues more democracy, transparency and freedom of expression in sport.

And it should foster optimism to see how these groups are growing in numbers and strength. They grow among grassroot activists, they grow in parliaments. They grow in the media, they grow at universities. They grow in emerging and trendsetting sports activities, and they even grow inside the sports bureaucracy in the Olympic capital of Lausanne, Switzerland.

What is particularly important, is the growing trend among the athletes themselves to organise and let their voices be heard.

Growing appetite for influenceIt was not primarily the athletes that drove the radical change of the sports agenda in the past decade. But there are many recent signs that professional athletes have a growing appetite for influencing their own arena and society at large. Sporting icons like NFL player Colin Kaepernick, and football players like Megan Rapinoe and Mesut zil have spoken up against racism, discrimination and persecution of minorities.

At the bottom of the competitive pyramid, athletes have voted with their feet for more than a generation, seeking health, fun, and good company far well outside the classic sports system.

Athletes of all kinds will likely be at the heart of the sports political agenda of the 2020s, and their working range may stretch well beyond sport itself.

One of the most important challenges of the next decade will be to develop the forms in which athletes can best express their individual and collective visions, negotiate their disagreements, and influence the decisions that decide the future course of sport.

The old forms of sports politics, the global pyramid of associations and federations, must undergo dramatic reforms just to keep their relevance, and they must, in any case, accept to live side by side with new ways of making politics. Just as the era of silence is over, so have the days of monopoly come to an end in the world of sport, play and physical activity.

Happy New Decade, Happy New Year!

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A decade that opened windows of democracy in sport - Play the Game

Talisse is a philosophy professor at Vanderbilt University.

Democracy is hard work. If it is to function well, citizens must do a lot of thinking and talking about politics. But democracy is demanding in another way as well. It requires us to maintain a peculiar moral posture toward our fellow citizens. We must acknowledge that they're our equals and thus entitled to an equal say, even when their views are severely misguided. It seems a lot to ask.

To appreciate the demand's weight, consider that a citizen's duty is to promote justice. Accordingly, we tend to regard our political opposition as being not merely on the wrong side of the issues, but on an unjust side. Citizens of a democracy must pursue justice while also affirming that their fellow citizens are entitled to equal power even when they favor injustice. What's more, citizens are obligated to acknowledge that, under certain conditions, it is right for government to enact their opposition's will. This looks like a requirement to be complicit with injustice. That's quite a burden.

To be sure, the demand is not altogether unconstrained. For one thing, citizens need not respect every kind of political opponent. Although the boundaries are contested, there are limits to what counts as a valid political opinion. For example, citizens aren't required to respect those who call for the absolute subordination of one portion of the citizenry to another. Furthermore, no citizen is ever required simply to submit to the popular will. In the wake of electoral defeat, we need not quietly resign; we are constitutionally entitled to criticize and protest the outcome.

Although these consolations may make the moral demand of citizenship more bearable, it remains onerous. When it comes to debates over crucial matters like health care, taxation and immigration, there are several valid yet opposed opinions, many of which will strike some citizens as unacceptable. When such views prevail, government is right to implement them, despite the fact that many citizens assess them as unjust. Democracy gives an equal voice even to citizens who favor injustice, even after an electoral or policy defeat.

Put simply, it is not easy to regard those who promote injustice as one's equals, rather than as obstacles to nullify. However, this awkward posture is fundamental to the democratic enterprise. If we give it up, we cede the idea of self-government among equals to a view of politics as, at best, a cold civil war.

Perhaps democracy simply asks too much of us. Though tempting, this conclusion is hasty. To see how we can meet democracy's demand, we can look to the widespread practice of religious toleration.

Many religious believers embrace the following posture. They hold that salvation is the highest goal of life and is available only to those within their own faith community; they additionally recognize an obligation to assist others in achieving salvation. Yet they also hold that matters of conviction must be left to the individual. This means that it would be wrong to force others to perform the correct religious observances or to forbid improper religiosity. Thus a conflict: Despite taking salvation to be paramount, the tolerant believer leaves others to their own spiritual devices even though this may result in their ruin.

This conflict is eased by an underlying conception of conscience. Tolerant believers see religious conviction as an exercise of the human conscience. Accordingly, they can regard those who hold opposing religious views as more than their erroneous convictions. Despite their grave theological errors, they, too, endeavor to live according to their best judgment. Tolerant believers hence see even in the heretic something that they also see in themselves a common aspiration to live well. In this they find a basis for toleration.

The key is the refusal to regard religious conviction as the entirety of a person's identity. For the tolerant believer, the quest for salvation is pursued within the common horizon of human conscience. It is not easy, but religious toleration is nevertheless widely practiced and wholeheartedly embraced.

The lesson for citizens is clear. To sustain the moral posture that democracy demands, we must refuse to see partisan affiliation as the defining trait of our fellow citizens. Alas, this is easier said than done. As I document in "Overdoing Democracy," politics has infiltrated the whole of social life. Not only do we increasingly interact only with those who share our politics, we also have become more prone to take those who are politically unlike ourselves to be irredeemably depraved, benighted and dangerous. By placing our partisan identities at the center of nearly everything we do, we have eroded the conditions under which we can regard our fellow citizens as our equals. As a result, democracy is swiftly devolving.

The proper response is to participate in cooperative endeavors in which partisan identity is irrelevant. Activities of this kind are needed, not because we must be perpetually reaching across our political divides, but rather because if we are to perform well as democratic citizens, we need to see in our fellow citizens something beyond partisan affiliation, something like a common quest to live a valuable life.

In short, democracy needs us to acknowledge that there's more to our shared life than politics. This acknowledgement does not neutralize the conflict at the heart of democratic citizenship we still must bear the burden of our fellow citizens' equality. But it does help us to navigate that conflict in a way that is consistent with a commitment to a robustly democratic society.

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Democracy demands moral citizenship. Is it too much for us? - The Fulcrum

Whats going on? Democracy in action. Or is it democracy in decline?

The pessimist in me says that its a good time to be getting old. I am a septuagenarian, and with age comes wisdom (although, sometimes, age comes alone). The optimist in me, meanwhile, responds that crisis represents opportunity.

Young folks, please pay attention: Our country, the world, desperately needs your 100% buy-in to deal with so many issues. The opening lines here were far from a complete list.

As Americans, we have been blessed. Our wise forefathers constructed a Constitution and within a few years amended it to include a Bill of Rights. The bill includes freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and the right to bear arms.

What is not explicitly stated, but certainly implied, is that with rights come responsibilities: to be respectful of others, to be tolerant, and to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is not a religious diatribe but rather a common-sense approach to addressing the myriad issues confronting our increasingly complex society. Our current lifestyle is way beyond anything our forefathers could have envisioned.

Might our American Constitution be in need of some revision? Perhaps, but there are things we can certainly consider in the interim.

Marches, protests, and walkouts should continue, provided they remain peaceful and without property destruction. Consequences should be imposed for any destruction or violence.

Social-media hate, manipulation, haranguing, and propaganda remain a tough issue, a work in progress within our free-speech norms.

With regard to the right to bear arms, how about mandatory prison time for any crime committed with a gun? How about outlawing all automatic weapons, including bump stocks? For what purposes are such deadly weapons needed? I am a hunter and occasional trap shooter. I understand a handgun for personal or home-security purposes. But other firearms needs befuddle me. Is gun control the answer? Some areas with the strictest gun laws have some of the worst statistics relative to gun violence. Stop and frisk significantly reduced crime in New York City. Might that be applied, with improved guidelines, elsewhere?

Racism and religious and political intolerance are longtime challenging issues. Immigration similarly begs for a solution, not just posturing. Political correctness has outlived any utility it ever had. Media, can you help diagnose and examine these issues? Politicians, get with it; be responsible to your constituents. Citizens, quit whining and get engaged; vote out ineffective elected leaders.

I am encouraged with the growing recognition and acceptance, even if slow, of evolution as the keystone to our earthly existence. Change is not only possible; its the norm. Adaptation and survival of the fittest apply to all plant and animal life (including humans) and even inanimate elements like geology and topography. As humans, we are blessed with opportunities to advance ourselves, our families, our communities, and our nations. Lets lead by example, by doing unto others as we would have them do unto us.

For with rights come responsibilities. Thats democracy in action.

Tom Wheeler was a longtime Duluth-area businessman, civic leader, and philanthropist. Retired he splits his time between Duluth and Tucson, Ariz., and is a regular contributor to the News Tribune Opinion page.

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Local View Column: Democracy in action demands that with rights come responsibilities - Duluth News Tribune

In October, a confrontation erupted between one of the leading Democratic candidates for the United States presidency, senator Elizabeth Warren, and Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. Warren had called for a breakup of Facebook, and Zuckerberg said in an internal speech that this represented an existential threat to his company.

Facebook was then criticised for running an advert by President Donald Trumps re-election campaign that carried a manifestly false claim charging former vice-president Joe Biden, another leading Democrat contender, with corruption.Warren trolled the company by placing her own deliberately false advert.

This dustup reflects the acute problems social media poses for all democracies. The internet has in many respects displaced legacy media such as newspapers and television as the leading source of information about public events, and the place where they are discussed.

But social media has enormously greater power to amplify certain voices, and to be weaponised by forces hostile to democracy, from Russian trolls to American conspiracy theorists.

This has led, in turn, to calls for the government to regulate internet platforms to preserve democratic discourse itself.

But what forms of regulation are constitutional and feasible? The US Constitutions First Amendment contains strong free-speech protections. Although many conservatives have accused Facebook and Google of censoring voices on the right, the First Amendment applies only to government restrictions on speech; law and precedent protect the ability of private parties such as the internet platforms to moderate their own content.

In addition, section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act exempts them from private liability that would otherwise deter them from curating content.

The US government, by contrast, faces strong restrictions on its ability to censor content on the internet in the direct way that, say, China does. But the US and other developed democracies have nonetheless regulated speech in less intrusive ways.

This is particularly true regarding legacy broadcast media, where governments have shaped public discourse through their ability to license broadcast channels, to prohibit certain forms of speech (such as inciting terror or hard-core pornography), or to establish public broadcasters with a mandate to provide reliable and politically balanced information.

The original mandate of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was not simply to regulate private broadcasters, but to support a broad public interest. This evolved into the FCCs fairness doctrine, which enjoined television and radio broadcasters to carry politically balanced coverage and opinion.

The constitutionality of this intrusion into private speech was challenged in the 1969 case, Red Lion Broadcasting Co vs FCC, in which the Supreme Court upheld the commissions authority to compel a radio station to carry replies to a conservative commentator.

The justification for the decision was based on the scarcity of broadcast spectrum and the oligopolistic control over public discourse held by the three major television networks at the time.

The Red Lion decision did not become settled law, however, because conservatives continued to contest the fairness doctrine. Republican presidents repeatedly vetoed Democratic attempts to turn it into a statute and the FCC itself rescinded the doctrine in 1987 through an administrative decision.

The rise and fall of the fairness doctrine shows how hard it would be to create an internet-age equivalent. There are many parallels between then and now, having to do with scale. Today, Facebook, Google and Twitter host the majority of internet speech and are in the same oligopolistic position as the three big television networks were in the 1960s. Yet it is impossible to imagine todays FCC articulating a modern equivalent of the fairness doctrine.

Politics is far more polarised; reaching agreement on what constitutes unacceptable speech (for example, the various conspiracy theories offered up by American radio show host Alex Jones, including that the 2012 school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut was a sham) would be impossible.

A regulatory approach to content moderation is therefore a dead-end, not in principle but as a matter of practice.

This is why we need to consider antitrust as an alternative to regulation. The right of private parties to self-regulate content has been jealously protected in the US; we dont complain that The New York Times refuses to publish Jones, because the newspaper market is decentralised and competitive.

A decision by Facebook or YouTube not to carry him is much more consequential because of their monopolistic control over internet discourse. Given the power a private company like Facebook wields, it will rarely be seen as legitimate for it to make such decisions.

On the other hand, we would be much less concerned with Facebooks content moderation decisions if it were simply one of several competitive internet platforms with differing views on what constitutes acceptable speech. This points to the need for rethinking the foundations of antitrust law.

The framework under which regulators and judges today look at antitrust was established during the 1970s and 1980s as a byproduct of the rise of the Chicago School of free-market economics.

As chronicled in Binyamin Appelbaums recent book, The Economists Hour, figures such as George Stigler, Aaron Director and Robert Bork key players in the Chicago School of Economics launched a sustained critique of over-zealous antitrust enforcement. The major part of their case was economic: antitrust law was being used against companies that had grown large because they were innovative and efficient.

They argued that the only legitimate measure of economic harm caused by large corporations was lower consumer welfare, as measured by prices or quality. And they believed that competition would ultimately discipline even the largest companies. For example, IBMs fortunes faded not because of government antitrust action but because of the rise of the personal computer.

The Chicago School critique made a further argument, however: the original framers of the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act were interested only in the economic effect of large scale, and not in the political effects of monopoly. With consumer welfare the only standard for bringing a government action, it was hard to make a case against companies such as Google and Facebook that gave away their main products for free.

We are in the midst of a major rethinking of that inherited body of law in light of the changes wrought by digital technology. Economists and legal scholars are beginning to recognise that consumers are hurt by lost privacy and foregone innovation, because Facebook and Google sell users data and buy startups that might challenge them.

But the political harms caused by large scale are critical issues as well, and ought to be considered in antitrust enforcement. Social media has been weaponised to undermine democracy by deliberately accelerating the flow of bad information, conspiracy theories and slander.

Only the internet platforms have the capacity to filter this garbage out of the system. But the government cannot delegate to a single private company (largely controlled by a single individual) the task of deciding what is acceptable political speech. We would worry much less about this problem if Facebook was part of a more decentralised, competitive platform ecosystem.

Remedies will be difficult to implement: it is the nature of networks to reward scale and it is not clear how a company like Facebook could be broken up. But we need to recognise that although digital discourse must be curated by the private companies that host it, such power cannot be exercised safely unless it is dispersed in a competitive marketplace. Project Syndicate

Francis Fukuyama is a senior fellow at Stanford University and co-director of its programme on democracy and the internet

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Web threatens democracy and must be regulated without limits on freedom of speech - Mail and Guardian