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After the Bolivian military forced out Evo Morales as president last month, following a wave of demonstrations protesting fraud in his fourth presidential election, the right-wing Catholic politician Jeanine Aez Chavez, second vice president of the Bolivian Senate, was deemed next in the line of succession and sworn in as his replacement.

Ms. Aez pledged to bring back democracy and tranquillity, but she instead embarked on a blatantly revanchist, ruthless path, stacking her cabinet with religious conservatives bitterly opposed to Mr. Moraless Movement for Socialism, breaking ties with the left-wing governments of Cuba and Venezuela and dispatching an ambassador to a gleeful Trump administration, the first in Washington in 11 years.

She issued a decree exempting security forces from criminal prosecution when maintaining public order; the following day, eight protesters were killed in a lethal crackdown, and more have been killed since.

At the same time, Mr. Moraless legions of Indigenous followers sealed off access to their region, where he comes from, with scores of barricades and vowed to give the government no peace until he returns.

Mr. Morales became Bolivias first Indigenous leader when he was elected 14 years ago, breaking the monopoly on power of a small elite of European descent. He sharply reduced the poverty rate, expanded the economy and helped introduce a new, more equitable constitution.

Then he overreached, calling a referendum in 2016 to lift constitutional term limits he himself had supported and, when the vote went against him, getting a Constitutional Court filled with his followers to rule that term limits violated his human rights.

The flawed election on Oct. 20 followed. Early suspicions of fraud by the Organization of American States helped fuel the protests and provided cover for the military to suggest that Mr. Morales leave office.

Last week the O.A.S. issued an audit, to which Mr. Morales had agreed, substantiating those suspicions and finding a series of malicious operations aimed at altering the will expressed at the polls on Oct. 20.

The Bolivian legislature has passed a law, with support from Mr. Moraless party and signed by Ms. Aez, paving the way toward new elections within a few months, with Mr. Morales barred from running.

Mr. Morales, who is now in Cuba, has agreed to renounce his candidacy, though he continues to claim, as he told The Guardian newspaper, I have every right to it.

Renouncing any candidacy is the right way for him to help restore peace and democracy in a country for which he has done so much. There is no clear successor on the left, so Mr. Morales should focus on finding a worthy successor in his party who could hold off an inevitable challenge from the far right.

Ms. Aez, for her part, can make clear that her dubious leap from obscurity was not the coup that her opponents claim it was by abandoning her vindictive policies and fulfilling her promise to arrange a free and fair election. Anything less would mark a sad relapse to the era of serial coups and counter-coups that ravaged Bolivia, often with the clandestine participation of the C.I.A.

A continued standoff would only exacerbate the countrys deep ethnic and ideological polarization. Mr. Moraless fall thrust Bolivia into the center of a left-right struggle convulsing much of the Americas. Seeing that resolved through the democratic process, rather than outside meddling, should be the goal of the United States and Bolivias Latin American neighbors.

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Restore Bolivian Democracy and Break Its History of Coups - The New York Times

But, while impeachment is kind of a break glass in case of emergency procedure, there's still several elements of the democratic process within it, Hermes said. It is necessary, he added, to have some means of removing a federal official before the end of their term. Hermes offers a solution to the argument that impeachment is undemocratic by pointing out the possibility of removing or changing the impeachment clause through the amendment process if people are unhappy with it.

Congress views have little to do with impeachment, Timothy Johnson, a political science and law professor, said. Members of Congress are vessels through which the Constitution acts to hold officials accountable. Its their duty, he said, to investigate if officials display signs of abuse of power. To the question of whether impeachment is democratic or undemocratic, Johnson answered, Its neither. Its actually just part of the Constitution.

Senator Amy Klobuchar, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, supports the impeachment inquiry. We have a constitutional duty to follow the facts, she said, and I cannot think of anything more important right now that we have to do. She calls attention to James Madisons words from the Constitutional Convention. Madison was fearful that the president might one day betray our country to a foreign power for their own gain.

This takes us back to when the Constitution was created and how it was intended to be applied. Democracy means rule by the people, according to political science professor Lisa Hilbink, whose research and teaching focus on democratization and judicial role in democracy. Hilbink pointed out its important to know who the people are and how they rule before we can define what makes a democracy.

Myers said that people often interpret democracy as whatever the majority of people voted for, and added that it is a very simplistic understanding of what it means to be a constitutional democracy.

Our democracy, Hilbink explained, was designed with the recognition that what the people of one state want may differ from what the people of another state want, and that any majority constituted at the national level should not be allowed to trample on or eliminate the rights of the minority.

This provokes the questionIs the duty of a representative to go up there and literally represent what their constituents would do, Myers said, or is the duty of the representative to exercise independent judgement and do what they think is best, or in this case what they think best fulfills the constitutional duty theyre supposed to carry out?

As has become very clear over the past several years, what keeps our democracy running smoothly are not detailed rules, Hilbink said, but rather, informal normsof honesty, respect for political rivals and opponents, and forbearance.

While the impeachment process has not changed, the society during which we apply it has. The political climate has become more polarized in recent years. Myers and Johnson both believe we cant separate political environment from impeachment attempts, which are sometimes linked to policy disagreement. During Clintons impeachment inquiry, there were 31 Democrats who voted in favor. During Trumps impeachment inquiry, one Republican spoke in favor. Today the line between Democrats and Republicans is more palpable than ever. Its rare for a politician to stray from their party, regardless of the issue. In some situations, the divide can go as far as people choosing party loyalty over listening to the facts.

Political scientists have a term that can describe the current political climate: regime cleavage. It is a divide in the population caused by disagreement over the governing systemthe constitutional democracy. What used to be arguments over partisan issues has morphed into the question of democracy itself.

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There's No I in Democracy - The Wake

On June 3, the sit-in was attacked. Exact lines of responsibility for what is now referred to as the Khartoum massacre are the subject of an independent investigation, but victims I spoke with told of gang beatings by the governments Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia carrying sticks, and being shot at by sniper fire from a nearby building. The dead bodies of protesters, weighed down by bricks, were later retrieved from the Nile. Incredibly, the protesters did not give up. On June 30, they reclaimed the streets in a million-person march, 30 years to the day since Bashir had taken power in a military coup.

The June 30 march will go down as a defining moment in this period of Sudanese history. The Khartoum massacre showed that the brutality of Bashirs regime could survive his ouster; June 30 showed that this was something the protesters were unwilling to accept. Subsequent negotiations between the military and an umbrella coalition of civil-society groups, known as the Forces for Freedom and Change, led to a transitional government that would take the country through to democratic elections in 2022. Thetransitional arrangementdoes not, however, establish complete civilian control of the government, as the protesters had sought.

A cabinet of technocrats runs the day-to-day bureaucratic administration, but the head of state is an 11-person Sovereignty Council, composed of five military members and six civilians. Its leader is Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan; his deputy is the RSF militia leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti, who is notorious for his role in the latter stages of atrocities in Darfur. In the final 18 months before the 2022 elections, the Sovereignty Council will be led by one of its civilian members. The arrangement is a second-best option, but it is what the current balance of power will bear.

Over three decades of rule, Bashirs regime decimated the countrys human, financial, and natural resources. Now, the transitional government is tasked with laying the foundations for a new Sudan underpinned by the three pillars of the revolution: freedom, peace, and justice. The transitional arrangement lists a mandate of 16 bullet points, including directives such as Resolve the economic crisis by stopping economic deterioration and Dismantle the June 1989 regimes structure for consolidation of power (tamkeen), and build a state of laws and institutions. It is a herculean undertaking, even if they get the full three years of the transition period to work on itand its not at all clear they will. The coming months will likely decide whether Sudanese democracy will die before its ever born.

There are many potential ways that Sudan could fail to arrive at its scheduled democratic elections in 2022. The first threat comes from the National Congress Party (NCP) and its supporters. The transitional government recently passed a law that dissolved the NCP, but this does not mean that members of the NCP will exit the political landscape. Former NCP members are prohibited from participating in the new Legislative Council, but they can still do much to undercut the reforms that the transitional government seeks to make. From outside the government, NCP supporters are pushing their messaging out through mosques and social media. The goal seems to be to sway citizens against the transitional government, claiming its members are intent on undermining traditional Sudanese culture by creating a secular state that respects human rights. And from inside the government, concerns of a deep state within the bureaucracy have credence; while many bureaucrats no doubt have no love lost for the NCP, there are certainly others who will stonewall change.

Another risk is that established political elites may call for early elections. Under the terms of the transitional arrangement no one in the cabinet or Sovereignty Council can run in the 2022 elections. This means that the established opposition parties, formed before and during Bashirs reign, have little direct power during the transitional period. The theory behind this arrangement is that the three-year transition will give the younger generation, many of whom only became politically engaged during the revolution, time to prepare for electoral campaigning. The sooner elections are held, the more likely it is that the established political parties will win.

Complicating matters further, the army, RSF, and internal security forces all have competing loyalties, interests, and cultures, opening up the possibility of different parts of the security sector going into battle against each other. Notwithstanding the revolution, the entire security sector remains shrouded in secrecy, with off-the-books financial flows that make accountable governance impossible. As it stands, outside actors ranging from the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to the European Union have provided Sudan with financial support for services provided by the RSF. Contingents of the RSF militia serve as mercenaries in Yemen, and were enlisted by EU partners to help counter human trafficking operations in Sudan and the surrounding region (though this is reportedly nowsuspended). Internally, the financial flows are harder to track. The RSFs involvement in illegal smuggling operations range from gold (from theDarfuri minesthat Hemeti owns) toweapons(bought by the neighboring Central African Republic). Until this sector is opened to scrutiny, no civilian-led government will be safe from the threat of a takeover.

Next, there are the as-yet unresolved conflicts throughout the peripheral parts of the country. Reaching peace deals with armed groups from The Blue Nile to Darfur is essential, not only forstability, but also to enable the transitional government to realize the revolutions goal of building an inclusive state. The transitional government has put the formation of the new Legislative Council on hold while peace agreements are being negotiated so that representatives from the peripheral regions can participate. This is a wise move in the short term, but the Legislative Councils formation cant be delayed indefinitely.

Finally, there is the ever-present risk that the people who made the revolution happen will withdraw their support for the transition if they see no meaningful improvements in their daily lives. This makes economic recovery the transitional governments number one priority in a crowded list of urgent tasks. As one of the leaders of the protest movement put it to me, The people showed extraordinary bravery and so expect extraordinary results.

Of course, even if the transitional government does manage to make it through the next three years, theres no telling it will succeed at its task of transitioning the country to democracy. On a recent trip to Sudan, it quickly became clear just how challenging it is to implement ideals of freedom, peace, and justice against a backdrop of 30 years of dictatorial rule.

Yet the scale of the challenge is precisely what makes Sudan such a vital experiment. Everyone agrees that ousting a dictatorial regime is a positive development. Yet the playbook for how to navigate the weeks and months after a dictators overthrow is far from clear. One year since the anti-regime protests began, Sudan provides a window into the struggles of a society seeking to excavate itself from decades of dictatorship.

One can dream of a Hollywood script: The people overthrow the dictator, every remnant of his regime disappears, and democracy takes hold overnight. But in the real world there is a prolonged period of navigating a gray zone. For those tasked with leading the transitional period, this means an ever-present trade-off between advancing the reforms required to move Sudan toward democracy and actually behaving in a way that reflects the democratic ideals they hope to bring about. It would be easy for the transitional government, and gratifying for many ordinary Sudanese, to see a mass purge of all those associated with the former regime. But such an approach would just continue the cycle that has dogged Sudan since its independence. As Mohiedeen al-Fadih, a Sudanese teacher and poet, put it to me: The problem with the previous revolutions is that they were not revolutions. They were just changes in the regime.

Originally posted here:
The Enemies of Sudan's Democracy Are Lurking Everywhere - Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

In democracies around the world, voters increasingly feel as though most of the major choices affecting their lives have already been decided through existing legal and international frameworks. But while rules-based technocracy and corporatism before it may have been well-suited to monolithic forms of identity, it no longer suffices.

PRINCETON There is no longer any denying that democracy is at risk worldwide. Many people doubt that democracy is working for them, or that it is working properly at all. Elections dont seem to yield real-world results, other than to deepen existing political and social fissures. The crisis of democracy is largely a crisis of representation or, to be more precise, an absence of representation.

Recent elections in Spain and Israel, for example, have been inconclusive and frustrating. And the United States, the worlds longstanding bastion of democracy, is in the midst of a constitutional crisis over a president who was elected by a minority of voters, and who has since made a mockery of democratic norms and the rule of law.

Meanwhile, in Britain, which will hold a general election on December 12, the two major parties and their respective leaders have become increasingly unattractive; but the only alternative the Liberal Democrats has struggled to fill the void. Only regional parties the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru in Wales, and the Democratic Unionists in Northern Ireland are commanding any credibility. And in Germany, an apparently exhausted grand coalition has become a source of growing disillusion.

To many commentators, todays democratic fatigue is eerily similar to that of the interwar years. But there is an obvious difference: that earlier crisis of democracy was inextricably linked to the economic misery of the Great Depression, whereas todays crisis has arrived at a time of historically high levels of employment. Though plenty of people today feel a sense of economic insecurity, the response to the current crisis cannot simply be a repeat of what came before.

During the interwar years, democratic governance was frequently remolded to include different forms of representation. The most attractive at the time was corporatism, whereby formally organized interest groups negotiated with the government on behalf of a particular occupation or economic sector. The expectation was that collectives of factory workers, farmers, and even employers would be more capable of arriving at decisions than elected representative assemblies, which had come to be seen as cumbersome and riven by intractable political divisions.

The interwar corporatist model now seems abhorrent, not least because it was associated with the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. For a time, though, Mussolinis approach was attractive to politicians elsewhere, including those who did not think of themselves as occupying a political extreme. For example, US President Franklin D. Roosevelts original vision of the New Deal comprised many corporatist elements, including price controls, which would be negotiated by unions and industrial organizations. If we have forgotten about these corporatist provisions, it is because they did not survive a 1935 decision by the Supreme Court, which ruled Title I of the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act to be unconstitutional.

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But, of course, elections and pseudo-elections during this period were also producing dictatorships, not just in Europe but also in Asia and South America. And owing to these catastrophic failures, democracy came to be circumscribed in the post-war era, both by new domestic constitutional and legal boundaries and through international commitments.

In the case of continental Europe and Japan, democracy was largely imposed as a consequence of military defeat, which meant that its rules were set from the outside and not subjected to any formal challenge. Thereafter, European integration in the form of the European Economic Community and then the European Union manifested as a system of adjudication and enforcement in the service of established norms. And more broadly, international agreements became a way of implying that certain rules were unbreakable or simply inevitable; they could no longer be contested, democratically or otherwise.

These new legal constraints were, of course, augmented by military considerations. International alliances were presented as the means for maintaining domestic security. NATO, in the famous words of its first secretary-general, Lord Ismay, was meant to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and Germans down.

This uniquely successful arrangement for ensuring post-war stability was disintegrating even before the sudden decline in US legitimacy following the 2003 Iraq War and the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. When French President Emmanuel Macron recently used extreme language to describe the EU as standing on the edge of a precipice and NATO as brain dead, he was being entirely accurate. Under President Donald Trump, America and thus NATO is no longer capable of strategic thinking, nor willing to safeguard transatlantic interests.

The post-war order was often criticized for not allowing any genuine democratic choice. Accordingly, Western political scientists started talking about widespread demobilization. And well before a new German radical right appeared, prominent German intellectuals had concluded that voting was unimportant, that modernity is about rule by self-constrained moderates on behalf of the immobile a lethargocracy.

The modern challenge, then, is to achieve greater democratic inclusiveness. Old-style corporatism cannot be the answer, because most people no longer define themselves solely or even largely by one occupation. By the same token, the argument for an international rules-based technocracy now looks tired and lazy, even though international institutions (including the EU and even NATO) are still needed to provide public goods.

Nowadays, personal identity is determined by a complex array of factors. Most people think of themselves as consumers, producers, lovers, parents, citizens, and breathers of the same air, depending on the context. More frequent and clearly defined choices are needed to translate the complexities of selfhood into political expression.

Fortunately, current technologies could help. Digital citizenship through electronic voting, polling, and petitioning is one obvious solution to the problem of declining participation. Of course, it is important to think through which decisions we subject to new, more direct methods of deliberation and voting. Such mechanisms should not be used for major, defining choices that are inherently controversial and divisive; but they could help with more quotidian, practical issues such as the location of a rail or road system or the details of emissions control and energy pricing.

This vision of democratic renewal would work most effectively in smaller countries like Estonia, which has pioneered digital citizenship and e-residency. Individual cities could do the same, thereby offering lessons for larger polities. Thinking locally about the problem of representation may be the first step toward overcoming the crisis of democracy globally.

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What's Behind the Crisis of Democracy? | by Harold James - Project Syndicate

We're coming to the end of what might be called the anti-democracy decade. It began Jan. 21, 2010, with the Supreme Court's shameful decision in Citizen's United v. Federal Election Commission, opening the floodgates to big money in politics with the absurd claim that the First Amendment protects corporate speech.

It ends with Donald Trump in the White House, filling his administration with corporate shills and inviting foreign powers to interfere in American elections.

Trump is the consequence rather than the cause of the anti-democratic surge. By the 2016 election, the richest 100th of 1% of Americans 24,949 very wealthy people accounted for a record-breaking 40% of all campaign contributions. That same year, corporations flooded the presidential, Senate and House elections with $3.4 billion of donations. Labor unions no longer provided any countervailing power, contributing only $213 million $1 for every $16 corporate dollars.

Big corporations and the super-wealthy lavished their donations on the Republican Party because Republicans promised them a giant tax cut if they won. As Sen. Lindsey Graham warned his Republican colleagues "financial contributions will stop" if the GOP didn't come through.

The political investments paid off big. Pfizer, whose 2016 contributions to the GOP totaled $16 million, will reap an estimated $39 billion in tax savings by 2022. GE contributed $20 million and will get back $16 billion. Chevron donated $13 million and will receive $9 billion.

Groups supported by Charles and the late David Koch spent more than $20 million promoting the tax cut, which will save them and their heirs between $1 billion and $1.4 billion a year.

Not even a sizzling economy could match these returns.

With the help of the tax cut, corporate profits are now at an all-time high. But almost nothing has trickled down. Companies have spent most of their extra cash on stock buybacks and dividends. This has given the stock market a sugar high but has left little for workers.

The anti-democracy decade has been hard on American workers. Despite the longest economic expansion in modern history, real wages have barely risen. The share of corporate profits going to workers still isn't back to where it was before the 2008 financial crisis. Never in the history of economic data have corporate profits outgrown employee compensation so clearly and for so long.

The so-called "free market" has been taken over by crony capitalism, corporate bailouts and corporate welfare.

No wonder confidence in political institutions has plummeted. In 1964, just 29% of voters believed that government was "run by a few big interests looking out for themselves." By 2013, 79% of Americans believed it.

Enter Donald Trump.

"Big business, elite media and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place," Trump charged in his nomination-acceptance speech at the Republican convention in 2016, and then he rode the rigging all the way into the Oval Office.

It doesn't have to be this way. Even if Citizens United isn't reversed by the Supreme Court or defanged by constitutional amendment, a principled Congress and decent president could still rescue our democracy. House Democrats have already begun with their "For the People Act," the first legislation introduced when they gained a majority. It expands voting rights, limits partisan gerrymandering, strengthens ethics rules and limits the influence of private donor money by providing $6 of public financing for every $1 of small donations (up to $200) raised by participating candidates.

On the other hand, a second Trump term of office could make the anti-democracy decade a mere prelude to the wholesale destruction of American democracy.

Trump couldn't care less. As he said in 2016, "I gave money to everybody, even the Clintons, because that's how the system works." These might have been the most honest words ever to come out of his mouth.

Robert Reich's columns are distributed by the Tribune Content Agency.

Originally posted here:
Kingdom of the rich displacing our democracy - News from southeastern Connecticut - theday.com