Mediaboss Marketing

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.

Read the original post:
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.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. Wed like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And heres our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Read the original:
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.

Read more here:
Italy Shut Down. Which Country Will Be Next? - The Atlantic

Across the country, millions of voters turned in early ballots for the US presidential primary elections, often voting for candidates no longer in the race on election day.

In Colorado and Texas, early voters for candidates other than Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders might have made a statement, but they didnt have the chance to influence the primary election. Some of the estimated 20% of Californians who voted early asked for a do-over. In Minnesota, 40,000 people had reportedly cast their ballots a week before Super Tuesday and days before Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out.

Just yesterday, more than a million Washington voters finally had the chance to weigh in. Unlike other states, which saw long lines and voting machine errors, the state votes by mail and has a highly engaged electorate. As a result, a significant proportion of ballots were returned early, essentially throwing away their vote.

Early voting is generally viewed as a good thing by civil rights advocates it helps avoid errors on election day, and curbs long lines at the precinct. But voting for soon-to-be unviable candidates is not only a frustrating reality for proactive voters, but intrinsically harmful to the democratic process.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution: ranked-choice voting (RCV). And its one that has the potential to address a host of other problems that plague our electoral system, including negative campaigning and lack of minority representation.

Four states Alaska, Kansas, Wyoming and Hawaii are already using ranked-choice voting in the current Democratic presidential primaries, and one state, Maine, uses it for state elections and for US Congress and president. New York City also recently adopted ranked-choice voting beginning in 2021. But most of the country has yet to catch on.

Under ranked-choice voting, voters rank their favorite candidates in order of preference, and if their first choice is no longer viable, their vote would count towards their next choice. The process would continue until all votes are supporting viable candidates.

If ranked-choice voting had been in place in Washington, voters who turned in their ballot early for Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Mike Bloomberg or Elizabeth Warren could rest assured that their vote would still count towards their next preference rather than being wasted on a candidate who is no longer in the running. And candidates would probably face less pressure to drop out of the race early.

But reforming our primary elections is only one benefit.

Under the current plurality voting system, candidates benefit from attacking their opponents and highlighting their ideological differences in an effort to appeal to their base. However, in a ranked-choice election, candidates are also campaigning to be voters second and third choices.

We saw this happen in the 2018 San Francisco mayoral race: two candidates, Mark Leno and Jane Kim, actually campaigned together to fight for shared values as they reached out to voters in a ranked-choice election. In a political field that is often fraught with negativity, this kind of positive campaigning is a welcome change.

This same system, meanwhile, can help historically marginalized communities achieve representation in their own cities.

Here in Washington, for example, Yakima county is in the middle of a legal challenge under the Washington Voting Rights Act. The population of the county is approximately 49% Latino, but the county has only ever elected one Latino candidate to the county commission partly because it has an at-large general election system that dilutes minority voting rights.

We are trying to ensure that we have a more equitable election system here in Yakima county, Dulce Gutirrez, a plaintiff in the case, and one of the few Latinx city council members elected told us. We believe that there are remedies that can improve the likelihood of representation.

In Yakima, a switch to ranked-choice voting with multi-member districts would help achieve 'proportional representation'

Historically, the remedy has been to move to majority-minority districts that concentrate minority voters in a particular geographic district in order to garner representation. However, such a system is vulnerable to gerrymandering and vote splitting and, perversely, only protects communities of color that live in highly segregated neighborhoods.

In Yakima, a switch to ranked-choice voting with multi-member districts would help achieve proportional representation and guarantee that roughly every one-third of the residents is able to pick one of the three commissioners. Latino candidates regularly get more than a third of the countywide vote, but historically are unable to win countywide races.

Washington state has been a leader in adopting commonsense reforms, like mandating marriage equality or legalizing marijuana, but it is well behind the curve in electoral reforms like ranked-choice voting.

We have plenty of real-life examples of ranked-choice voting working for communities. Its already used in several countries, including Australia, Scotland and New Zealand. Its also gathering momentum in the United States, where it is used in over 20 jurisdictions.

After all, our democracy is at stake.

Mohit Nair is partnerships director of FairVote Washington.

Colin Cole is legislative director and a co-founder of FairVote Washington. He is also policy director at MoreEquitableDemocracy.

Read the rest here:
Millions of Democratic votes were lost in the primaries. Is this the fix? - The Guardian

Just when I am starting to think that the New York Review of Books is not irredeemably idiotic on political issues, they publish an article that is so conspicuously incoherent and outrageously out of touch with the political climate in the U.S. that it is destined to be anthologized in perpetuity in collections with Clueless in the title. The article, The Party Cannot Hold, by Michael Tomasky is about the current state of the Democratic party.

The current divide in the Democratic party, writes Tomasky, is about capitalismwhether it can be reformed and remade to create the kind of broad prosperity the country once knew, but without the sexism and racism of the postwar period, as liberals hope; or whether corporate power is now so great that we are simply beyond that, as the younger socialists would argue, and more radical surgery is called for.

Hmm, hes right, of course, that there is a faction of the Democratic party that wants to reform capitalism, to remake it to create the kind of broad prosperity the country once knew. The thing is, that faction is the younger one. The older, liberal, Democrats have concentrated almost all their efforts on getting rid of sexism and racism, laudable goals to be sure, but oddly disconnected in the liberal imagination from economic issues.

Tomasky is also correct, of course, that a growing number of people in this country think Capitalism in any form is simply morally bankrupt and that we need a new socioeconomic system entirely. Few of these people, however, are registered Democrats. Most of them arent even Social Democrats since the overthrow of capitalism hasnt been a part of the Social Democratic platform since the middle of the last century, at least according to Encyclopedia Britannica. Indeed, Wikipedia defines Social democracy as a political, social and economic philosophy that supports economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a liberal democratic polity and a capitalist-oriented economy (emphasis added). That Social Democrats are planning the overthrow of capitalism would be disturbing news to the many capitalists countries in Europe where they are an important political force.

Tomasky points out that Sanders, even if he were elected, would be unable to implement many of the programs that are part of his platform, that the best hed get in terms of healthcare, for example, would be a Bidenesque public option, meaning, I presume, and option such as Biden is advocating for now, because as Americans know too well, politicians almost never deliver on campaign promises. The electorate is nearly always forced to accept some watered-down version of what theyve been promised, if indeed, they get any version of it at all. Thats clearly part of the reason so many people support Sanders.

Few of Sanders supporters are so politically nave that they think once he was in office wed have universal healthcare. They assume theyd get something less than that. They also assume, however, and history suggests, correctly, that if Biden were elected, theyd get something less than he is promising, which means theyd get nothing at all! Its either disingenuous or idiotic of Tomasky to suggest that theres essentially no difference between Sanders and Bidens healthcare plans, since even a child will tell you that something is clearly better than nothing.

Tomasky assumes that only if someone other than Sanders gets the nomination would the left try to increase its leverage by, for example, running left-wing candidates against a large number of mainstream Democratic House incumbents. I kid you not, he actually said that. See, thats what happens when you dont pay sufficient attention to what is going on around you. Or perhaps Tomasky is simply being disingenuous again and hoping that the average reader of the New York Review of Books hasnt been following the Sanders campaign and the calls of both Sanders and his supporters for bringing about sweeping political change by running left-wing candidates against a large number of mainstream Democratic House incumbents.

If Sanders wins the nomination, writes Tomasky, it becomes absolutely incumbent upon Democratic establishment figures to get behind him, because a second Trump term is unthinkable. But the reality is, he continues, that a number of them wont.

Hmm. Why is it that a number of Democratic establishment figures would rather have a second term of Trump than even one term of Sanders? Thats not my charge, I feel compelled to remind readers here. Its Tomasky who came right out and admitted that! Yes, the Democratic establishment, despite it protestations to the contrary, would rather have a second term of Trump than even one term of Sanders according to Michael Tomasky, editor-in-chief of Democracy, a special correspondent for Newsweek and The Daily Beast, and a contributing editor for The American Prospect, as well as a contributor to the New York Review of Books.

Why is that? Well, because as Tomasky observes himself earlier in the article, Democrats have, since the 1990s, gotten themselves far too indebted to certain donor groups, notably Wall Street and the tech industry. Yes, this is the same Tomasky who began the article in question by characterizing these very same Democrats, now in the pocket of Wall Street and the tech industry, as wanting to reform capitalism, to remake it to create the kind of broad prosperity the country once knew.

Biden is apparently not the only prominent Democrat who appears to be suffering from some kind of dementia.

Thats not the only dotty thing Tomasky says in the article. In a parliamentary system, he says, Biden would be in the main center-left party. Okay, yeah, maybe, if we suddenly had a parliamentary system in the U.S. In any other country that presently has a parliamentary system Biden would be in the center-right party, if not actually the far-right party.

The view that Sanders supporters are mostly young socialists is delusional. The very same issue of the New York Review of Books includes an excellent article about our current health-care crisis entitled Left Behind by Helen Epstein. Epstein explains that substantial numbers of the working poor support Sanders and that 117,000 Pennsylvanians who voted for Sanders in the [2016] primary cast their general election ballots for Trump. Hmm, it seems unlikely that those 117,000 Pennsylvanians were all young socialists.

Tomaskys world doesnt even cohere with the world as represented by other contributors to the publication in which his article appears, let alone to the real, concrete world. It exists only in his fevered imagination and the similarly fevered imaginations of other Democrats who delude themselves that they are centrists rather than right-wing neoliberals. There are bits and pieces of the truth in Tomaskys vision of the disunity in the Democratic party but he puts those bits together like a child forcing pieces of a puzzle where they dont belong.

What Tomasky fails to appreciate is just how mad, in the sense of angry, the average American voter is. Epstein writes that [i]f you include those who have left the workforce altogether, the U.S. employment rate is almost as high as it was in 1931. She cites Anne Case and Angus Deaton as observing in Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism that [t]he amount American spend unnecessarily on health care weighs more heavily on our economy than the Versailles Treaty reparations did on Germans in the 1920s.

Oh yeah, people are angry. Few people are blaming capitalism as such, but nearly everyone whos suffering economically appears to be blaming the political establishment, and blaming the Democrats just as much as the Republicans. This is clear from the people interviewed in the 2019 documentary The Corporate Coup dEtat. These are people who voted for Sanders in the 2016 primary, but who then voted for Trump in the general election. Theyre not socialists. Theyre just angry. Really angry, and theyre angry at both sides of the political establishment.

Tomasky is worried about the Democratic party, with its two fictional factions, breaking apart because he concludes our [political] system militates against a schism. No third party, he thinks, could be a significant political force.

Oh yeah? Think again, Tomasky.

The rest is here:
Extraordinary Democratic Delusions and the Madness of the Crowd - CounterPunch