Archive for the ‘Democracy’ Category

Opinion: The Supreme Court can’t protect both democracy and Trump – Los Angeles Times

Will the Supreme Court stand up to the Trump administration in 2020? This question is enormously important, affecting the lives of many, as well as the future of constitutional democracy in the United States.

President Trump has taken legal positions unlike those of any other president in American history, treading into dangerous territory far beyond what the Constitution allows. But will any of the five conservative justices on the court be willing to join with the four liberal justices and say he has gone too far?

Take his cancellation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, an action that puts more than 700,000 so-called Dreamers at risk of deportation. President Obama created DACA to allow immigrants brought to the United States as children to continue to live and work here as long as they meet certain criteria, such as completing school or serving in the military and staying out of serious trouble with the law.

This should be an easy case for the court. An administrative action in this case, canceling a program that covers hundreds of thousands of U.S. residents requires an articulated, legitimate reason. Every lower court to consider President Trumps action, regardless of whether the judge was appointed by a Democrat or a Republican, has ruled against the administration and held that there was no basis for rescinding DACA. But the oral arguments before the Supreme Court on Nov. 12 provided little ground for optimism that one of the conservative justices will join with the liberals in ruling against Trump.

Another cause for concern is three looming cases, to be argued in March, in which Trump is claiming unprecedented immunity from subpoenas.

The issue in one of them, Trump vs. Vance, is a state court grand jury subpoena for eight years of Trumps business and personal records in connection with an investigation of money paid during the 2016 campaign to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. Trump sued in federal court to keep his accounting firm, Mazars USA, from turning over his financial records. The federal district court ruled against him and the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that decision.

A second case, Trump vs. Mazars USA, involves a subpoena by the House Oversight and Reform Committee, which is investigating the same payments, as well as Trumps financial involvement with Russian companies and the accuracy of financial statements he made to obtain loans and reduce taxes. The federal district court ruled against Trump and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia affirmed the ruling.

The final case, Trump vs. Deutsche Bank AG, involves subpoenas from the House Financial Services and Intelligence committees directed at two financial institutions that did business with Trump, Deutsche Bank and Capital One. Once more Trump went to court to block the subpoenas, but lost in both the district court and the 2nd Circuit.

These, too, should be easy cases. Trump is claiming that he and those with whom he does business are all immune from subpoenas. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected that proposition in United States vs. Nixon in 1974. The Watergate special prosecutor subpoenaed tapes of White House conversations to use in the prosecution of those who had been involved in the Watergate cover-up. President Nixon claimed that executive privilege protected the tapes from disclosure and that the courts could not enforce a subpoena against the president.

The court, in an opinion by Nixon appointee Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, explicitly rejected these arguments and held that the president had to comply with the subpoenas. Nixon then produced the tapes, which clearly showed that he had engaged in obstruction of justice. Just days after the release of the tapes, Nixon resigned.

If the court rules in favor of Trump in the current cases, it would be effectively saying that the president is above the law, even for actions that occurred prior to taking office. Such a ruling would irreparably damage the checks and balances integral to separation of powers under the Constitution.

So far, the Supreme Court has a mixed record on standing up to the Trump administration. In Trump vs. Hawaii in 2018, the court upheld Trumps travel ban in a 5-4 vote, despite overwhelming evidence that the order was motivated by a desire to ban Muslims from the country. But in Department of Commerce vs. New York, the justices voted 5 to 4 to keep the Trump administration from adding a question about citizenship to the 2020 census forms. In both cases, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was seen as the swing vote.

Roberts is likely to be key in the 2020 cases involving Trump as well. Many have said that he cares greatly about the courts credibility. The hope is that he will realize that ruling in favor of the Trump administration in these cases would not only fly in the face of established precedent; it would also make the court seem highly partisan and strike a serious blow to its institutional legitimacy. But Roberts is deeply conservative, and the critical question for 2020 will be whether he or any of the conservative justices can put partisanship aside and say no to Trump.

Erwin Chemerinsky is dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law and a contributing writer to Opinion.

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Opinion: The Supreme Court can't protect both democracy and Trump - Los Angeles Times

Boris Johnsons Victory and the Political Realignment Shaking Western Democracies – National Review

Britains Prime Minister Boris Johnson delivers a statement at Downing Street after winning the general election in London, England, December 13, 2019.(Toby Melville/Reuters)Johnsons electoral triumph proved that politicians who refuse to reckon with the desires of the voters will be crushed even by those who pretend to do so.

Six months ago, the British Conservative party was planning its own funeral; Nigel Farage had embarked on a sold-out tour of its strongholds, helping to cut its vote share to 8.8 percent in the European Parliament elections. Today, the Tories look to be in the prime of their youth. Boris Johnson has taken them to their fourth straight general-election win, the first time in British history that a governing party has increased its share of the vote in four consecutive elections. They now have a mandate for five years of majority government and, judging by Johnsons recent pronouncements, he thinks that theyll have at least five more after that.

A great deal of thought has already been dedicated to figuring out just how the Tories did it. The consensus is that a fusion of Brexit fatigue, Jeremy Corbyns ineptitude, and Johnsons pagan pizzazz won the day. But the forces underlying these contingencies have implications for politics worldwide. They point to a political realignment that could dominate western democracies for years to come.

The 2016 Brexit vote revealed that a large portion of the British population was unrepresented in Westminster party politics, and its aftermath exposed the fact that a large number of politicians would stop at nothing to keep that group unrepresented. To be sure, these MPs would not have put it in such words they thought that attempting to stop Brexit for three years was acting in their constituents best interests. But constituents express their beliefs at the ballot box, and most of them simply did not think that their representatives knew what was best better than they did.

There is plenty to criticize about Johnson and the government that he will now lead, but the same accusation cannot be leveled against them. Johnson ducks scrutiny, avoids substance, and can often seem entirely devoid of empathy. His campaign consisted of the three words Get Brexit Done, spun around like a broken play toy. But these words had more power than Labours message of social justice, just as the Brexit slogan Take Back Control held more sway than the countless predictions that Brexit would bring about economic doom in the run up to the referendum. Both phrases were fashioned by Dominic Cummings, Johnsons infamous chief adviser, and their success point to a very simple fact: Voters believe in democracy, and they do not take nicely to politicians who dont. No handout can compensate for the snobbery of those offering it, because voters disdain moral superiority more than they appreciate moral purity.

The roots of this tension go back decades, as successive British governments implemented EU treaties and constitutional reforms without democratic assent. In 1992, when the European Economic Community turned into the European Union, John Majors government refused to offer the public a referendum on the issue. And in 1997, under Tony Blair, monetary policy was placed in the hands of the Bank of England. The same Blair government pushed for executive asymmetrical devolution in Scotland and Wales, without considering its extreme constitutional implications for Englands representation in Westminster. Then came the 2007 EU Lisbon Treaty, a major change to the U.K.s constitution that Prime Minister Gordon Brown decided he could ratify without asking for voters consent. This move effectively rendered any future promise on migration numbers a lie, because the United Kingdoms borders were made subservient to Eurozone economics. Voters are not stupid: They realize that an open-borders policy raises problems for the welfare state. Ignoring this fact only made room for extremism when the Eurozones economy eventually fell into crisis in 2008.

These were the beginnings of a political realignment that has found its voice in liberal democracies across the continent and beyond a realignment based on the divide between democratic politics and technocratic politics, in which liberals turn to the courts in order to entrench cultural values for which they cannot not secure democratic consent. The Blair years might have seen continuous government, but they also saw a significant drop in voter participation. Labours 2001 and 2005 electoral victories saw turnouts of 59.4 percent and 61.4 percent, respectively some of the highest levels of voter apathy recorded since World War II. This was rule under the primacy of law and economics masked by the pretense of political consent and temporary economic stability. Divides between the electorate and their representatives on questions of immigration, foreign policy, and national identity were buried under a centrist carpet.

Brexit brought the divide into the open, because it gave voters an opportunity to reject the new constitution of a United Kingdom that had been radically transformed since it joined the EU in 1973. An unprecedented number of people did exactly that, and it is no surprise that this vote then took on the political and cultural significance that it did. Politicians across the Commons agreed to let the voters decide, only to explain away the referendums result as an aberration of common sense. Such arrogance meant that Brexit became a symbol of the cultural divide between those who had political control and those whose wishes were considered problems to be solved.

Any politician unwilling to reckon with the scale of the referendum was destined to shrivel into electoral insignificance. Corbyn had no easy way out, because Labour was effectively three different constituencies mashed uncomfortably into one party: middle-class Remainer liberals, woke millennial students, and socially conservative workers. These groups hold irreconcilable views on Brexit and stand in different places along the democratictechnocratic divide. It is a split similarly represented by their Westminster MPs, albeit in distinctly different ratios.

When Corbyn tried to win over Brexit voters, he could not deny that he had allowed a majority of his MPs to prevent Brexits implementation. And when he tried to win over Remainers, he was forced to face the fact that he had never been a Remainer (not to mention the fact that his anti-Western brand of foreign policy is antithetical to many Remainers liberal internationalism). The only group that truly stuck by him were the students, and anyone who knows anything about democracy knows that students dont win you elections.

It is easier for the Right to turn its back on austerity than it is for these fundamental issues to be reconciled on the left. David Cameron showed no interest in winning over the group of working class, culturally conservative, Eurosceptics alienated by Labour, but Johnson knew that convincing them to vote Tory was the key to electoral success. That simply meant doing everything in his power to distance himself from his partys previous three governments on the economy and Brexit. He made a series of generous public-spending promises, even going so far as to question his own partys entire record of austerity. And while Corbyns Labour floundered between Brexit policies, the prime minister kicked out the 21 rebel MPs whod refused to keep open the possibility of leaving the EU without a deal.

It was a radical move, but also a deeply Conservative one. The Tories are the oldest political party in Europe and, by some accounts, the oldest in the world. They co-opt extreme movements, ameliorate them, and incorporate them into their fold; they spend years locked in rampant infighting, only to find a way to work together when election time comes around. This time, they used Brexit to tame a toxic brand of nativism. The two key players, Johnson and Michael Gove, stabbed each other in the back repeatedly before aiming their fire at Corbyn. (Gove twice ran against Johnson for the partys leadership, but has played a major role in his government.) If the Conservative party really is in its youth, then its lifespan will be something to be behold. But it will not be a surprise that it has managed to adapt, because its adaptability is a mainstay of democratic history.

Adaptability can also be called opportunism, and both words apply to Johnson is in equal measure. He knew that assembling the entirety of the Leave coalition was a path to victory, because the Remain vote would be fractured between parties. He knew that Brexit had become a symbol of the divide between democratic politics and technocratic politics, and that party allegiances were being redefined by a set of politicians whose beliefs had long been at odds with their voters. Johnsons tactics may well have been cynical, reckless, and divisive proroguing Parliament is hardly a moderate response to political deadlock. But his claim to be on the side of the people was made convincing by the fact that he was the only potential prime minister promising not to turn his back on a democratic vote. Opportunists wear masks, and often say less than they know. But they arent nave, and Johnson is no exception.

Hence, Johnson and Corbyn can be considered two different kinds of liar. Johnson is untrustworthy, careless, and unprincipled. His lies are half-truths, told with a grin that makes them appear more like chat-up lines. They make some people swoon and some people sick but they also make almost everyone laugh. Corbyns lies do not make people laugh, because they give the impression of someone who is not ready to admit that he is lying. In this election, confronted with a parliamentary-party split on Brexit and an electorate that did not trust him on national security, Corbyns ultimate lie was to pretend that he could conduct his form of politics while staying honest. Asked about his position on Brexit, his partys record of anti-Semitism, and his view on the Russian-poisoning scandal, Corbyn simply equivocated, and pivoted to talk about suffering children.

Nobody ever doubted that Corbyn cares for suffering children, of course. People doubt that he is capable of recognizing that holding political office requires more than caring. He is all passion and no realism, a man of conviction rather than responsibility. Politics is an art of power-plays that often involves difficult choices, not a competition of sincere passions and honest intentions. While Johnson lies for the sake of politics, Corbyn lies about politics, and voters know it. Johnson may be playing a game, aware that he needs power in order to leave behind a legacy. But democracy will always choose a bluffer over a hedger. While Johnson told a series of little lies, Corbyn told a big lie: He pretended that the electorate cared more about his priorities than its own.

Johnson now has five years to make this electoral shift permanent, to convince workers in the North who lent him their vote that they made a wise decision. This means focusing on the so-called peoples priorities another campaign phrase directly lifted from the final line of one of Cummings blog posts. He must secure the trade deals necessary to offset Britains exit from the Eurozone, address regional inequality, get tough on crime, invest in the NHS, crack down on terrorism, and somehow do all of it without alienating wealthier voters in the Southeast.

It remains to be seen how long jail sentences for whistleblowers will be paired with a massive green-energy R&D budget, or whether control of borders is more important to voters than cutting the number of people crossing them (Johnson is adopting an Australian-style points system, but shows no signs of capping immigration). Brexit will have negative economic consequences, and the government will have to borrow its way through them. Its coalition is made up of groups that will shrink with time older, whiter, and less qualified than tomorrows population.

But perhaps the greatest question mark is whether the Tories can hold the U.K. together along the way. Johnsons victory was primarily an English victory. His Brexit deal effectively means that Northern Ireland will stay part of the single market, making the case for unification with Ireland proper more credible. Meanwhile, the Scottish National partys dominance in Scotland puts the union under further threat from the North; SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon has already demanded another independence referendum.

But ironically, a divided Britain is likely to hurt Labour more than the Conservatives. After it was wiped out in Scotland in 2015, Labour effectively lost any path to an electoral majority and an independent Scotland would only cement its political impotence. Though many in the party are justified in considering how it can reclaim the working-class constituencies with which it fell out of touch, perhaps a better approach would be to double down on its success in big cities. Deserting its historic base and teaming up with the Liberal Democrats for the college-educated vote may help the party in the long term, but would also turn it into an entirely different organization (and could lead it to a similar fate as the French Socialists). The triumph of Conservative adaptability has often been aided by the failure of the Tories opponents to adapt, and the Tories current opponents have a difficult task ahead of them.

In 2015, Cameron was hailed as a magician for leading the Tories to a meager twelve-seat majority, and an era of coalitions and minority governments was expected to rule Britain for decades. In 2020, Johnson has a stronger mandate for reform than almost any other leader of a liberal-democratic country on Earth. The EU will have no choice but to negotiate with his team: Brussels faces enough problems of its own and will not want to be blamed for creating another. And if Johnson can temper threats to the union while Labour continues its infighting, he will be practically beyond parliamentary scrutiny.

None of this is to say that Johnson will have it easy. He will likely soon face the difficulties that such power brings: Party conflict, economic downturns, and geopolitical crises. But this election was a sign that politicians who have refused to reckon with the beliefs of their voters will be crushed even by those who have pretended to do so. In other countries, the catalyst for this realization may not be Brexit. Indeed, Brexit may have forced a conversation to take place in Britain that many liberal democracies cannot yet bring themselves to have.

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Boris Johnsons Victory and the Political Realignment Shaking Western Democracies - National Review

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

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

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

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

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

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