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In May 2020, with the world still in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, Margaret MacMillan, an historian at the University of Toronto, wrote an essay in The Economist about the possibilities for life after the pandemic had passed.

On a scale of one to ten, where one was utter despair and ten was cautious hopefulness, it would have rated about six. Her thesis was that the future will be decided by a fundamental choice between reform and calamity.

She saw the world as being at a turning point in history. It had arrived there as a result of the conjunction of two forces: growing unrest at economic inequality, and the crisis induced by the pandemic.

It was at such times, she argued, that societies took stock and were open to change. Such a time, for example, was in the immediate aftermath of the second world war, which resulted in radical reforms to international political and economic frameworks.

She was writing against a backdrop of a larger crisis the crisis in democracy. The most spectacular symptoms of this were the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and the Brexit referendum. Both occurred in 2016, and both appealed to populism largely based on issues of race and immigration.

In the four years since, many books have been written on this crisis, among them Cass Sunsteins #republic, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatts How Democracies Die, and A. C. Graylings Democracy and its Crisis.

Then, somewhat surprisingly, in May 2020 a new spirit of what might be called economic morality announced itself.

This came from within the Republican Party of the United States. It happened while Trump, that most amoral of Republican presidents, was in office, and reasserted some of the fundamental values of conservatism.

It took the form of a new organisation, American Compass, https://americancompass.org/, founded by Oren Cass, who was domestic policy adviser to Mitt Romneys 2008 and 2012 US presidential election campaigns. He is also the author of an acclaimed book on labour markets, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America.

American Compasss mission, as stated on its website, was to:

restore an economic consensus that emphasises the importance of family, community, and industry to the nations liberty and prosperity.

As the coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc across the United States, Cass described the nations response as an indictment of what he called an economic piety a form of ideological purity that ignored many values that markets do not take into their calculations.

These included the well-being of workers, the security of supply chains, and the running down of Americas self-sufficiency, exemplified by a shortage of medical supplies.

His line of argument was supported by a senior Republican, Senator Marco Rubio, in an article for The New York Times. Rubios critique of the failure of American economic policy over two decades was crystallised in one sentence:

Why didnt we have enough N95 masks or ventilators on hand for a pandemic? Because buffer stocks dont maximize financial return, and there was no shareholder reward for protecting against risk.

The fact that this significant shift in economic thinking and socio-political priorities was coming out of elements in the Republican Party in the lead-up to the presidential election is perhaps an indication that MacMillans thesis has some substance. Perhaps democracies are on the cusp of a change in direction.

Alongside these developments, the existential crisis facing news media was made worse by the coronavirus pandemic. As business activity was brought to a stop by the lockdown, the need for advertising was drastically reduced.

Coming on top of the haemorrhaging of advertising revenue to social media over the previous 15 years, this proved fatal to some newspapers.

In Australia, the impact of this was worst in regional and rural areas. News Corp announced in May that more than 100 of its regional newspapers would become digital-only or close entirely.

Read more: Digital-only local newspapers will struggle to serve the communities that need them most

In April, Australias largest regional newspaper publisher, Australian Community Media (ACM), announced it was suspending the printing of newspapers at four of its printing sites, halting the production of most of its non-daily local newspapers. ACM has about 160 titles.

These developments represented a serious loss to local communities and added to the democratic deficit already apparent over more than a decade as advertising revenue flowed away from traditional media to the global social media platforms.

At a national level, the Australian government took up a recommendation by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to force the global platforms, particularly Facebook and Google, to pay for the news it took from Australian media.

The platforms mounted a fierce rearguard action against this proposal, which remains unresolved for now.

If a democratic revival is to occur, however, a strong media will be a necessary part of it. The necessity of a free press has been clear since the germination of modern democracy in the late 17th century, and in the late 18th century it was given powerful recognition in both legal and political terms.

In 1791 it was articulated in the First Amendment to the US Bill of Rights. In 1795, Edmund Burke stood up in the British House of Commons and asserted that the press had become what he called the fourth estate of the Realm.

If the media are to play their part in any democratic revival, however, financial and material security will be only a part of what is required.

One factor that has contributed to the present crisis in democracy is polarisation, the opening up of deep divisions between the main political parties of mature democracies. This has been magnified by media partisanship.

There is a lot of research evidence for this. One of the most significant is a 2017 study that showed the link in the United States between peoples television viewing habits and their political affiliations.

A further factor in the crisis has been the emergence of the fake news phenomenon. In the resultant swirling mass of information, misinformation and disinformation that constitutes the digital communications universe, people have returned to traditional mass media in the hope that they can trust what they see and hear there.

Read more: Trust in quality news outlets strong during coronavirus pandemic

The Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual global study of public attitudes of trust towards a variety of institutions, including the media, showed that since 2015, public trust in the traditional media as a source of news had increased, and their trust in social media as a source of news had decreased.

A third factor in the crisis, exacerbated by the first two, is the rise of populism. Its defining characteristics are distrust of elites, negative stereotyping, the creation of a hated other, and scapegoating. The hated other has usually been defined in terms of race, colour, ethnicity, nationality, religion or some combination of them.

Powerful elements of the news media, most notably Fox News in the United States, Sky News in Australia and the Murdoch tabloids in Britain, have exploited and promoted populist sentiment.

This sentiment is reckoned to have played a significant part in the election of Trump.

It is also considered to have played a part in the outcome of the Brexit referendum.

It follows that if these are contributing factors to the crisis in democracy, then the media has a part in any democratic revival.

To do so, it needs to take four major steps. One is to focus resources on what is called public interest journalism: the reporting of parliament, the executive government, courts, and powerful institutions in which the public places its trust, such as major corporations and political parties. This work needs to include a substantial investigative component.

A second is to recommit to the professional ethical requirements of accuracy, fairness, truth-telling, impartiality, and respect for persons.

The third is to take political partisanship out of news coverage. Media outlets are absolutely entitled to be partisan in their opinions, but when it taints the news coverage, the public trust is betrayed.

The fourth is to recalibrate the relationship between professional mass media and social media.

That recalibration involves taking a far more critical approach to social media content than has commonly been the case until now.

While it is true the early practices of simply regurgitating stuff from social media have largely been abandoned, social media still exerts a disproportionate influence on news values. Just because something goes viral on social media doesnt make it news unless it concerns a matter of substance.

Social media is where fake news flourishes, so the filter applied by professional mass media to what appears there needs to be strong and close-meshed.

That is the negative side of the recalibration.

The positive side is to further develop the extraordinary symbiosis that has been shown to exist between social and professional mass media.

It was most spectacularly demonstrated by the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Social media allowed millions of people all over the world to be eyewitnesses to this gross act of police brutality.

Professional mass media, by applying its standards of verification and corroboration then disseminating the footage on its mass platforms, ensured the killing became known to the community at large, well beyond the confines of echo chambers and filter bubbles.

It also added that element of long-established public trust that respected news brands have to offer.

The world saw how powerful that combination was. A single act of police violence with racist overtones in a relatively obscure American city set off protests not just in the United States but in many countries with a history of police brutality against people of colour: Canada, Britain, Belgium, France, Australia, the Dominican Republic.

And then the same combination exerted a high level of accountability on the police for their further acts of violence against the protesters, which spilled over into police violence against the media covering those protests.

These events show the importance of the community having a common bedrock of reliable information on which to base a common conversation and a common response to an issue of common concern. It is the opposite of the fragmentation that is created by online echo chambers.

If Margaret MacMillan is right, and the world really is at a point where significant economic, political and social change is possible, lets hope the media might be brave and honest enough to reflect on the contribution they have made to the creation of democracys crisis, and be prepared to change in order to help rebuild public trust in democratic institutions.

Read the rest here:
Media have helped create a crisis of democracy - now they must play a vital role in its revival - The Conversation AU

Sheri Berman urges the American left not to squander the sea-change in public opinion of recent weeks by only preaching to the converted.

From the outside, what is going on in the United States may seem bewildering. Not only has the most powerful country in the world (as well as one of the richest and most technologically advanced) proved unable to deal effectively with the pandemic; it now seems to be tearing itself apart in paroxysms of protest and civil discord. Reflecting a common view, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, proclaimed that the US was in a deep internal crisisone which echoed, others asserted, the type of crisis that plagued the Soviet empire as it careened towards its collapse.

The US is at a critical juncture, its most obvious manifestation being protests which may be the largest in our history. But rather than reflecting or furthering a deep internal crisis, as Putin and other believe (and perhaps hope), these protests are as likely to strengthen American democracy as weaken it.

Moreover, they may produce victories for the left which would have been unimaginable only a few weeks ago. Whether we will look back at this time as one in which the US shifted from a path of democratic decay and discord to one of positive and progressive change will depend on many factorsnot least choices made by the left itself.

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Protest is a legitimate political exercise in democracies, a way for citizens to make their voices collectively heard outside the electoral process. Indeed, protesting is often motivated by dissatisfaction with that processwith the decisions and behaviour of elected officials. Large-scale mobilisation and even dissatisfaction are not, therefore, necessarily problematic for democratic regimes. By providing citizens with myriad, legitimate ways to express their demands, democracies have peaceful means of self-correction dictatorships lack.

The protests agitating the US are indeed motivated by dissatisfaction with the behaviour of elected officials and other decision-makers. They were triggered by outrage at the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota in late May by a police officer, subsequently charged with his murder. But they quickly grew to encompass demands that longstanding injustices and inequalities which made Floyds murder possible be addressed. In their scale and scopethey have occurred in every state, in urban and rural areas, and included participants from every imaginable ethnic, religious and socio-economic groupthe protests have been an astonishing manifestation not merely of anger and discontent but also of the potential power of democratic participation.

Within a few weeks they have had dramatic impactsperhaps most obviously on public opinion. In contrast to past episodes when African-American citizens were killed by the police, excuses for, or rationalisations of, Floyds murder have been absent. Eighty-eight per cent of white Americans believe the protests it has triggered are justified. As CNNs incredulous political director noted, that percentage dont agree on anything.

Also shifting rapidly are views of the movement most associated with the protests. Black Lives Matter was previously criticised or looked upon with wariness by many white citizens but in the last few weeks support for BLM has increased by almost as much as in the preceding two years.

Yet it is not merely views of Floyds murder, police brutality and BLM that have shifted; more citizens have acknowledged and begun to confront deeper issues of racism and inequality. For example, six in ten white Americans now say that racism is a big problem in society and over two-thirds that Floyds killing reflects broader problems within law enforcement in the US.

Reflecting this wider shift, even deeply conservative publications, such as the National Review and The American Conservative, have recently run articles with titles like Seven Reasons Police Brutality is Systemic not Anecdotal and America Begins to See More Clearly Now What its Black Citizens Always Knew. As one observer of race in the US noted, When it comes to such a dramatic, almost on-the-spot change, I dont think weve ever seen anything of this level.

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And its not just public opinion thats in flux. Businesses, sports franchises, entertainment outlets and other institutions, which had previously avoided confronting issues concerning racial justice, have shifted course too.

The National Football League has belatedly accepted the legitimacy of the taking the knee protests by Colin Kaepernick and other athletes against police brutality. Several brands which explicitly or implicitly employed racist imagery have been withdrawn. Companies and other organisations rushed to celebrate Juneteentha holiday, previously unknown to many white Americans, which commemorates the proclamation of freedom for slaves in Texas on June 19th 1865. All this has been associated with a record-setting flood of donations to racial justice groups, bail funds and black-led advocacy organizations across America, remaking the financial landscape of black political activism in a matter of weeks.

The political pressure coming from the protests, the attitudinal shifts and the behaviour of private-sector and civil-society actors has already begun influencing policy. Politicians at the local, state and national levels have begun debating and implementing reforms. Congressional Democrats, for example, have put forward a reform bill (the Justice in Policing Act) which represents the most expansive intervention into policing proposed in recent memory.

The bill would, among other things, ban chokeholds, establish a national database to track police misconduct and make it easier to hold officers accountable for misconduct in civil and criminal courts. In response, Congressional Republicans released their own reform bill (the Justice Act) which, while much less far-reaching than the Democrats, nonetheless reflects a recognition of the way the winds are blowing.

In short, the protests reflect precisely the way democracy should work: citizens acted collectively to express their demands and the political system has begun to adjust accordingly. For change to be long-term, structural and institutionalised, however, more will be needed. Fundamental, progressive reform of society and the economy in the US will require winning elections and holding on to political power.

Which brings us to the crucial backdrop to the proteststhe most important election in modern American history.

During his time in the White House, Donald Trump has supercharged the ugliest tendencies in American society, deepened the problems which made Floyds murder possible and undermined American democracy more than at any point in recent history. Despite over three years of corrupt, divisive and reactionary behaviour, Republican politicians and voters had however hitherto stuck with him.

And yet, in the last few weeks, the political shift Democrats and progressives long expected and hoped for may have begun to emerge. Alongside his incompetent handling of the pandemic, Trumps authoritarian and polarising response to Floyds death has led figures such as James Mattis, James Miller, George W Bush, Colin Powell and others to say they could no longer support him and might even vote in November for his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden.

The prominence and in many cases impeccably conservative credentials of these critics may finally lead to a tipping point, enabling other Republican politicians and voters to turn their backs on the nativist populism peddled by Trump. Reflecting this, the polls have begun to shift, with some now showing Biden amassing a dramatic lead.

What should the left do in this incredible situation?

The response thus far has reflected longstanding divisions within the Democratic party and among left-wing activists. Winning elections requires building coalitions and making compromisesas well as avoiding anything which enables Republicans to shift attention away from injustices that need addressing or erodes broad but fragile support for significant change.

Just as the Trump presidency has made crystal-clear the role played by the politically polarising, racially-inflammatory tendencies built into the Republican party since the era of Richard Nixon, the left needs to recognise that denigrating compromises and coalitions and shouting down opponents, rather than engaging with and trying to convince them, are incompatible with democracy.

We have seen these tendencies over the last days, as defences and rationalisations of rioting have abounded in sections of the left. And in a widely-reported scene in Minneapolis the mayor, Jacob Frey, a civil-rights lawyer, progressive and second-youngest mayor in the citys history, gave an impassioned speech in favour of deep seated, structural reformonly to be surrounded by protesters telling him, inter alia, to get the f*** out of here, having refused to commit to fully defunding and abolishing the citys police department.

The demand to defund the police, which has been central to the protests, is designed to mobilise the already committed and express anger, rather than attract a broad array of citizens to the cause. The goal, of course, is to create a new model of policingless violent and aggressive, more deeply and organically embedded in communities, more integrally paired with expanded social-service organisations to deal with mental health and poverty-related issues with which cops are not trained to deal.

There is broad support for such reforms, yet if couched as defunding or abolishing the police majorities are consistently opposed. If the goal is to win elections and institutionalise major structural reforms, emphasising confusing and confrontational slogans such as defund the police is counter-productive. Unless, of course, the real goal is not to win elections and power but rather to make a point or mobilise the already discontentedtendencies towards which parts of the left are all too prone and have left it consistently vulnerable to being overwhelmed by a more strategic and focused right.

Now is the time the American left has been waiting for. The protests over recent weeks have been a remarkable manifestation of the power of democracycitizens from every state and every background have made their voices heard and forced American society to confront problems which it ignored for too long. The protests have also helped turn the tide against a president who represents the greatest threat to progress and democracy our country has experienced in modern times.

But to seize this opportunity the left needs to recognise that in a democracy there are only two ways of achieving your goals: you can compromise with those who disagree with your views or you can convince them that your views are correct. Illiberal behaviour, purity tests and name-calling are antithetical to both. The US is indeed at a critical juncturethe democratic left must recognise this and act accordingly.

This article is a joint publication bySocial EuropeandIPS-Journal

Go here to see the original:
Protests, the left and the power of democracy - Social Europe

The head of the NAACP called Facebook a major threat to democracy amid a growing advertising boycott over the social-media giants approach to hate speech.

They are probably one of the biggest threats to democracy that we see, Derrick Johnson, the civil-rights groups president and CEO, said Thursday on MSNBCs Morning Joe.

They have fanned the flames of racial hatred and altered the course of our democracy, and they refuse to do anything about it, Johnson said.

The NAACP is one of six advocacy groups spearheading the #StopHateForProfit campaign urging companies to halt Facebook advertising for the month of July. Ben & Jerrys, Patagonia and Eddie Bauer are among the brands that have joined the campaign pushing Facebook to stop generating ad revenue from bigoted content.

Johnson slammed Facebook for allowing white supremacists and other hate groups to buy ads and for placing those ads alongside brand names. Johnson and civil-rights activist Al Sharpton said they met with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at his home about their concerns, but they indicated the talks yielded no progress.

This is not just something that we jumped out there to say, Sharpton said on MSNBC. We tried to reason with them and they will not do it.

Its unclear when Johnson and Sharptons meeting with Zuckerberg took place. Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday morning, but the company has said its had discussions with marketers and civil-rights groups about how to be a force for good.

Facebook and Zuckerberg have faced backlash in recent weeks over the companys decision to leave up President Trumps inflammatory posts about protests against police brutality in Minneapolis. Facebook did remove Trump campaign ads last week featuring a red triangle, a symbol the Nazis used to mark political prisoners in concentration camps. The Trump campaign claimed the symbol is linked to Antifa, a far-left anti-fascist movement, which the president has called a terrorist organization.

More:
NAACP chief calls Facebook 'one of the biggest threats to democracy' - New York Post

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The 45th anniversary of the imposition of Emergency must not be wasted on bashing dead villains or on silly nostalgia. The experience of Indias past brush with authoritarianism must be used to think about how democracies die.

Emergency is at once an energising and misleading prism to think about the state and the fate of our democracy. It is energising as the struggle against Indira Gandhis authoritarianism invokes powerful memories.

I recall my fathers grim face as he listened to Indira Gandhis radio broadcast on the morning of 26 June 1975 in our villageSaharanwas in Rewari, Haryana). I was barely 12 then, more agitated about Gavaskar scoring 36 runs in 60 overs in the first World Cup than about Indira Gandhis insult to Jayaprakash Narayan. The coming 19 months were going to be a period of political education for me, as my moderate, law-abiding father would find non-heroic ways of protesting against the Emergency, much to the horror of everyone around us.

We would tune in to BBC Hindi every evening to learn the truth about our country. In my small town, Sriganganagar (Rajasthan), I gave a passionate speech against the Emergency under the garb of a debating competition. Finally, when elections were announced in 1977, the entire family contributed to the Janata Party campaign. I wasnt even 14 when I addressed my first election rally! I can never forget the vote counting day when I found myself in the middle of an electrifying crowd celebrating the defeat of Indira Gandhi. That was the beginning of my interest in elections and involvement in politics.

Millions of such small stories were woven with a handful of heroic tales of resistance against the Emergency to forge a collective memory that people rejected authoritarianism. This may have been a myth, because the real resistance was very feeble, nothing compared to the resistance offered by the pro-democracy movements in Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Yet, it remains a source of inspiration.

Also read: Legal autocrats are on the rise. They use constitution and democracy to destroy both

At the same time, Emergency is a misleading prism for us today. It invites us to ask the wrong questions: are we likely to see a repeat of Emergency? Are we already in an undeclared Emergency? Will the current government go for an Emergency-like suspension of fundamental rights, media censorship and jailing of opposition leaders?

Thinking of the demise of democracy through the experience of Emergency lulls us into believing that suspension of democracy must take the same form every time. Undeclared Emergency weaves an image of softer and invisible replay of the same experience. That is, of course, not true. Under the Narendra Modi government we are not reliving the experience of 1975-77. Our times may look better, but these may actually be worse than the Emergency. The danger is not that we may face another Emergency, but that we are in the midst of a democracy capture.

The Emergency was an exception to a norm; what we now have is a different norm. Emergency needed a formal legal declaration. Capturing democracy does not. The Emergency had a beginning and was, at least on paper, required to have an end. The new system that we now live under has a beginning, but no one is sure if it has an end. The challenge to democracy does not await us in a distant future. We are living in it. By looking for an Emergency in our times, we forget to notice that the first Republic inaugurated with the Constitution of India is already over.

I call it democracy capture, rather than authoritarian capture of democracy or crisis of democracy. This phrase reminds us that democracy is both the object and the subject of this capture. The apparatus being seized is democracy. And the means being deployed for this capture are also democratic, at least seemingly so. It reminds us that the formal procedures of democracy have been used to subvert the substance of democracy.

Also read: We the people must save the software of Indian democracy beyond BJP-Congress whataboutery

This is the message of the book How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future. Published in 2018 by two Harvard professors of political science, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, this bestseller chronicles democratic breakdowns in our times. It reminds us that democracies mostly die an unspectacular, slow and barely visible death, mostly at the hands of democratically elected leaders, often through legal instruments. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracys assassins use the very institutions of democracy gradually, subtly, and even legally to kill it.

Instead of a military overthrow or a constitutional coup like the Emergency, authoritarian rulers usually kill democracies through everyday subversion of the political game. This takes three forms: capturing of referees, sidelining of players and rewriting of rules. The book draws examples from Peru under Alberto Fujimori, Russia under Vladimir Putin, Venezuela under Hugo Chavez, Hungary under Viktor Orban and, of course, the US under Donald Trump to document how democracies die in our times.

The book does not mention India, but it is hard not to see parallels between these countries and the India of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. If anything, the capture of the referees investigating agencies like the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and Central Vigilance Commission (CVC), oversight institutions like the Central Information Commission (CIC) and Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), and, of course, the apex judiciary has been more smooth and complete in Modis India. The government did not have to exhaust the full armoury of purging, packing, threatening, bribing, hijacking or even dissolving these institutions to ensure their more or less assured compliance.

Also read: Authoritarian streak among Indians on the rise and its helping BJPs hard Right turn

Similarly, the techniques used by the Modi government for sidelining players opposition leaders, media, cultural icons and business leaders are not very different from those used by authoritarian leaders in countries where democracy was killed. It is especially instructive to see how these leaders have captured media without formal censorship. Fujimoris henchman Vladimiro Montesinos was caught saying this about the Peruvian media: All of them, all lined up. Every day, I have a meeting at 12:30 and we plan the evening news. Sounds familiar?

The only thing the Modi government has not done rather, has not had to do so far is a major change in the constitutional rules of the game. As yet, the rules of elections have not been changed, nor have elections been postponed. Its popularity with the voters and its success with the media, the Election Commission and the judiciary makes this unnecessary. But dont rule it out. As the authors say: One of the great ironies of how democracies die is that the very defense of democracy is used as a pretext of its subversion. Would-be autocrats often use economic crises, natural disasters and especially security threats wars, armed insurgencies, or terrorist attacks to justify anti-democratic measures.

Did you think it was written for India of 26 June 2020?

The author is the national president of Swaraj India. Views are personal.

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This is no Emergency. Modi and Shah are using democracy to subvert democracy - ThePrint

I am addressing this letter to voters who look honestly at the issues and vote for what is best for our country. In this election, forget about whether you are Republican or Democrat. You are going to make the most important vote in your lifetime. You are going to vote if you want to live in a democracy or under socialism.

As serious as all the other problems we face today, they dont compare to this biggest question. If socialism gets a foothold, it will be end of democracy, and democracy is what has made America the greatest nation in the world. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party has been taken over by socialists, and I dont think Joe Biden is strong enough to stand up to them. He is already bending. It is likely he will choose a socialistic vice president candidate to appease the far left.

If Biden is unable to remain as president for one reason or another, we will have a socialist president. And the takeover will be that easy. Too many brave men and women have given their all to defend democracy. All of our wars have been to defend our freedoms. Have they given it in vain? Now it is our turn to defend our country. This election is not between Democrats and Republicans, it is between democracy and socialism. Ask this question: What is more important, your country or your party? If socialism prevails, what is next, communism? Dont laugh.

Ken Coombs

Holladay

Continued here:
Letter: This years presidential election is between democracy and socialism - Deseret News