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Dear Editor,

We thank the Ulster County Legislature for voting down the sanctuary county law.

The biggest problem with immigration is that we did not enforce the laws, resulting in people not knowing the rules, often disobeying the rules and then feeling entitled. They can also be manipulated and abused, which has happened in many cases.

The resiliency of a democratic form of government is based on its citizens and governmental agencies adhering to its laws. Without that philosophy, you no longer have a trued government of the people, by the people and for the people.

In order for a democracy and its people to thrive, we need a sense of who we are as a nation, including borders which define us and a strong cultural identity while embracing legal immigration. Without any of these components, you create a threshold for anarchy and the emergence of an oligarchic form of government in which we all lose. We become the pawns in the grab for power.

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Thanks to the proven leadership of our county legislators and their adherence to the rule of law, Ulster County residents can be assured that our elected officials continue to promote a true democracy.

Michael and Joan Paccione

Woodstock, N.Y

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LETTER: Defeat of Ulster County 'sanctuary' is victory for democracy - The Daily Freeman

Shaun King, columnist for the New York Daily News, knows how to fix American representative democracy. For King, a democracy that could elect Trump is no democracy at all, and he has five solutions, growing increasingly more ambitious: automatic voter registration, mail voting, making elections a national holiday, abolishing the Electoral College, and making the Senate more representative.

Now, I have no problem with moving federal elections to weekends or allowing mail voting, and it doesnt bother me very much when states institute automatic voter registration. As for abolishing the Electoral College and making the Senate more representative well, those are truly terrible ideas, but they have approximately no chance of happening anytime in the near future. The actual proposals in Kings article are a convenient mix of the inoffensive and the unrealizable, and therefore are not particularly concerning. But the underlying attitude behind the piece is concerning indeed, it reflects a very popular theory of democracy that is unworkable in practice and incoherent in theory, and that undermines confidence in our own quite excellent system.

Why, one may ask, does American representative democracy need fixing? To be sure, there is much room for debate as to the current state of American institutions: My particular hobby-horses here are the growing power of the presidency and the courts relative to Congress, and the parlous state of civic culture. But Kings concerns have little to do with such institutional concerns what worries King is that American governance doesnt represent the popular will. Our current system is such that the overwhelming majority of Americans despise Trumpcare, but politicians have the power to pass it anyway, laments King. Were not getting meaningful gun reforms and reasonable immigration reforms and its because our government no longer represents the popular will of the majority of Americans.

King is advocating here the popular theory that governance, properly construed, is a sort of constant referendum: that government consists of always advocating the policies that obtain majority support in the latest poll. Put aside the fact that even liberals dont consistently believe this, that Obamacare didnt have majority support when it was passed, that many wanted the courts to mandate gay marriage when most of America still opposed it, that some polls suggest most Americans support one way or another Trumps refugee-ban policy and consider the two main complaints: that some American institutions allow politicians or parties to win without winning a plurality of votes, and that Americans dont vote enough. Both are very frequent complaints generally on the left, but occasionally on the right as well. Both are unfounded.

The first complaint is very often a simple failure of civics. There are two sovereign bodies in the American political system: the states and the federal government. The Electoral College and the Senate the two allegedly undemocratic elements of the American political system fail to consistently reflect plurality popular opinion at the national scale because they are also structured to represent the states. Now, it is possible to make the case that it shouldnt be this way: that the states shouldnt be sovereign units and that the Constitution should be amended to reflect this. As a staunch federalist, I disagree quite strongly with this point of view, but it is an honest argument. But it is disingenuous to claim that these federalist structures are intrinsically undemocratic. Rather, they reflect a federalist view of democracy that balances democracy at the level of the state with democracy at the level of the broader nation. Martin Diamond put it best in his excellent essay The Electoral College and the American Idea of Democracy:

In fact, presidential elections are already just about as democratic as they can be. We already have one-man, one-vote but in the states. Elections are as freely and democratically contested as elections can be but in the states. Victory always goes democratically to the winner of the popular vote but in the states...Democracy thus is not the question regarding the Electoral College, federalism is: should our presidential elections remain in part federally democratic, or should we make them completely nationally democratic?

It is unfortunately representative of the current political debate that the word federalism never once crops up in Kings article.

The second complaint falls apart upon closer examination. The claim that American democracy requires automatic voter registration, mail voting, and a federal holiday for elections is in effect a claim that democracy entails the largest possible number of citizens voting. In the same vein are the occasional proposals that America adopt Australias system of mandatory voting. There is debate over whether voter-ID laws effectively prevent some Americans from voting National Review has weighed in on this debate but that isnt really whats at stake here. Whats at stake here is a matter of just getting as many people as possible to the polls: King, for instance, worries that finding where, when, and how to register to vote is cumbersome beyond belief.

Now, as a 21-year-old who has voted in three elections since turning 18, I would challenge the contention that its really that hard to fill out some forms and make your way to the correct polling place. But it probably is true that if we automatically registered everyone, or made Election Day a federal holiday, or allowed people to vote by e-mail, more people would vote. To which I wonder: So what? What good is done by dispensing ballots to every adult citizen who would not trouble himself with investing the effort to send an application to the registrars office, or to figure out the correct polling place, or to arrange his schedule so he has time on Election Day? How much harm is really done to democracy when those who by all accounts dont seem to prioritize their own voting very highly dont vote?

Liberals like to talk about the sanctity of votingthat it is a civic duty, an ethical responsibility that comes with citizenship. And actually, unlike, say, Kevin Williamson, I agree. But if you believe that voting is a sober obligation, why would you want to make it such a trivial act that it can be done without a moments thought or planning? If voting really is sacred, ought we really to make it frictionless for those who dont seem to take it very seriously at all? Really, its not voting that liberals hold sacred its votes. Liberals believe that an expanded electorate will vote Democratic and, in large part because of this belief, they have internalized a notion that democracy, properly construed, is something of a poll. The higher the response rate, the better the poll as if democracy were nothing more than sampling the attitudes of the broader public to see which candidate is most in line with a Rousseauian sort of general will.

This version of democracy does not make any sense, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as a static set of coherent public attitudes that can be dispassionately measured. Poll after poll has found that Americans are shockingly ignorant about politics a problem almost certainly compounded within the population that doesnt regularly vote. Public opinions are often far less robust than they may seem support for an issue often changes dramatically depending on how it is phrased in opinion polls. And many widely held political positions are incoherent: Americans often express support for the good parts of Obamacare such as the pre-existing-conditions provision and community rating but not the bad parts of the bill such as the individual mandate as if it were possible to have some without the rest. This all suggests that expanding the electorate would serve less as a transparent view of the policy preferences of America and more as a slightly improved measuring of tribal allegiances.

Fortunately, there is an alternative vision one that I, at least, find quite compelling. In this vision, there is nothing passive about voting: rather, voting is the crucial act whereby the American people affirm the consent of the governed by collectively choosing their leaders and representatives. The heart of democracy is not some abstract correspondence between governance and popular attitudes; it is the citizenry going to the polls and choosing its government. This is a serious task, and it should be taken seriously. It is a shame that many Americans are poorly informed, or lazy, or dont particularly care much for voting. But it is not a failure of democracy that we dont reach out to them with open arms. Democracy is not just a poll. Its something greater.

READ MORE: Why Are Democrats Afraid of the Election Integrity Commission? The Obama Administrations Ugly Legacy of Undermining Electoral Integrity Non-Citizen Voting Has Not Been Debunked

Max Bloom is an editorial intern at National Review and a student of mathematics and English literature at the University of Chicago.

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Democracy Is Not a Poll - National Review

During the presidential campaign, there were regular stories of protesters being attacked at Donald Trumps rallies.In oneparticularly disturbing example, aBlack Lives Matter protester was punched and kicked as he lay on the ground at a rally in Alabama in November 2015.In the video taken of the attack, Trump is heard yelling, Get him the hell out of here! Later when asked about the incident, Trump replied, Maybe he should have been roughed up. It was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.

The concept that fighting for black lives is disgusting is at the heart of a powerful documentary about the uprisings in Ferguson, MO that took place after unarmed Michael Brown was shot to death by a police officer on August 9, 2014.

Directed bySabaah Folayan and Damon Davis, Whose Streets? focuses on how the death of Michael Brown served to catalyze a community into action. Whose Streets? forces viewers to face the reality that when black protesters fight for their rights as citizens they are regularly seen as disgusting or as thugs, rather than as people legitimately protesting a system that denies their basic right to life.

The film is divided into five chapters that roughly follow the chronology of the events in Ferguson, when unarmed Brownwas shot multiple times by 28-year-old white police officer Darren Wilson and left lying in the street for more than four hours. But the real art of the film is not in the way it captures the unfolding of events; it is in the way that it offers viewers a unique form of storytelling that humanizes those in the Ferguson community and offers a model for future activists.

The opening sequence sets the stage for the whole film.The film begins in the interior of a car driving through the rain at night. We hear that the car is about to pass through an intersection that brings together three of the four poorest zip codes in the St. Louis area. The driver of the car mentions that these neighborhoods have the worst schools in the area and then remarks on the irony of a school system that asks parents to help their kids with homework when the parents themselves dont know how to do it. Another passenger then points out that the current school system is simply the legacy of slavery a strategy to deny black kids an equal future.

Remarking on the horrible living conditions in the community, we hear, I dont know what year it is, but it isnt 2014. Emphasizing the lack of historical progress for black citizens, the film then offers a quote from the 1857 Supreme Court ruling in the Dred Scott case that denied slaves basic human rights. The message is clear: We are not as far from Dred Scott as our nation would like to think.

If you arent up on the details of Browns death and the investigations that followed it, you will want to refresh your memory before seeing the film, because covering those details is not its primary goal. Rather, Whose Streets? is a film dedicated to revealing how a community rose up in the face of injustice and helped foster a social movement.

The film has a series of themes all of which revolve around the crisis our nation faces in its treatment of black citizens.Filled with footage shot by members of the community, the film emphasizes the fact that protesters in Ferguson were denied their basic democratic rights and treated like criminals when they sought to peacefully mourn a member of the community.

Ferguson was treated like a war zone almost from the moment that Brown was shot and the community was denied their right to witness the treatment of the body. As the film covers the events we see protesters armed only with signs, chanting hands up, dont shoot, while the police are dressed in riot gear, armed with machine guns.

Later the National Guard arrives in armored vehicles and begins shooting rubber bullets and using tear gas. One of the protesters remarks, We are trying to mourn and you show up in riot gear. Another states that he saw no difference between the West Bank and Ferguson. Yet another refers to the events as an unseen war.

One of the most powerful moments in the film takes place as we see some of the protesters crack from police pressures and attack a convenience store. While the leaders of the resistance dont advocate violence, they do find the response to the destruction of property telling. Once a store window was broken, the police and the media were outraged. And yet, nothing similar happened when Brown was shot dead on the street. The concern over store looting makes it clear that in Ferguson property has more rights than people.

Besides emphasizing how black citizens in Ferguson are systematically repressed, the films second key theme is that the media has played a central role in demonizing black lives. Every day, Americans experience a mediascape that humanizes whiteness, delving into the emotional lives of privileged white protagonists while portraying people of color as two-dimensional and mostly negative stereotypes, writeFolayan and Davis in their directors statement. Showing how college-boundBrown was portrayed in the media as a thug and a criminal,the film suggests that the institutionalized racism in the police force is equally matched by the racist practices of the mainstream news media.

Countering the desensitized coverage of Ferguson by the news media, Whose Streets? is deliberately a different type of story, one that humanizes the protesters through a creative use of collective storytelling.

The real art of the film takes place in the unconventional way that it builds connections between the viewer and the activists. While we are introduced to several activists in a traditional documentary format, the film makes a point of not allowing the viewer to become overly invested in stories of isolated individuals.

This technique is the one that is most likely to vex viewers and critics expecting a predictable narrative arc.One reviewer remarkedthat one of the films flaws was the inadequate focus on a handful of key individuals prominent in the struggle.

That reading, though, misses the aesthetic brilliance of the film.Whose Streets? refuses to tell the story of the political awakening of Ferguson through a focus on individuals. Even though the film clearly features a few prominent leaders in the struggle, it most clearly sees the whole community as the collective protagonist of the story.

Thus the art of the films storytelling is in the way that it humanizes a community often depicted like a demonized mass, while also offering examples of remarkable activists that can serve as role models.

Throughout the film the fact that the protesters are struggling for their rights as citizens is emphasized in their chants: We want answers, We are human, Hands up. Dont shoot, We have nothing to lose but our chains, This is not Iraq, you guys are the aggressors, We dont do this because we hate the police; we do this because we love each other. But it is the phrase, This is what democracy looks like, that really underscores the crisis covered in the film.

On the one hand, the phrase reminds the audience that protest is a central feature of democracy. On the other hand, the phrase emphasizes the fact that our so-called democracy acts more like a repressive regime for many in the black community. The phrase encapsulates both crisis and hope and it sets the tone for the whole film.

In the last chapter of the film, the Justice Departmentreleases a reportthat confirms what the black citizens of Ferguson knew all along: The Ferguson Police Department was routinely violating the constitutional rights of its black residents. But while the report is a gratifying acknowledgment ofinstitutionalized racism, it is treated more as a starting point than as closure.

As the film ends one of the activists remarks that, if there is going to be any change, its going to be with our children. Thus the last core theme of the film is in the way that it shows children participating in protests, leading chants and reflecting on the movement.Circling back to the opening lines of the film that pointed out the poor state of Ferguson schools, we hear that the community is overincarerated and undereducated.Closing shots show community members working with kids to raise the next generation of activists.

At a time when protesters struggling against systemic racism are regularly mocked or demonized, Whose Streets? insists that the refusal to take seriously these protests is a sign of the failures of our democratic system. Gentle and fierce, Whose Streets? is an uncompromising look at how this new generation of activists are todays freedom fighters.

Whose Streets?opens in theatersonAugust 11.

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This is what democracy looks like: Why Black Lives Matter is a struggle to save our democracy - Salon

Complete freedom for billionaires means poverty, insecurity, pollution and collapsing public services for everyone else. Because we will not vote for this, it can be delivered only through deception and authoritarian control. The choice we face is between unfettered capitalism and democracy. You cannot have both. (Photo: Joe Brusky / Flickr)

When and how were the seeds sown for the modern far-right's takeover of American politics? Nancy MacLean reveals the deep and troubling roots of this secretive political establishment -- and its decades-long plan to change the rules of democratic governance -- in her new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America. Get your copy by making a donation to Truthout now!

It's the missing chapter: a key to understanding the politics of the past half century. To read Nancy MacLean's new book,Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, is to see what was previously invisible.

The history professor's work on the subject began by accident. In 2013 she stumbled across a deserted clapboard house on the campus of George Mason University in Virginia. It was stuffed with the unsorted archives of a man who had died that year whose name is probably unfamiliar to you: James McGill Buchanan. She says the first thing she picked up was a stack of confidential letters concerning millions of dollars transferred to the university by the billionaireCharles Koch.

Her discoveries in that house of horrors reveal how Buchanan, in collaboration with business tycoons and the institutes they founded, developed a hidden program for suppressing democracy on behalf of the very rich. The program is now reshaping politics, and not just in the US.

Buchanan was strongly influenced by both theneoliberalism of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and the property supremacism of John C Calhoun, who argued in the first half of the 19th century that freedom consists of the absolute right to use your property (including your slaves) however you may wish; any institution that impinges on this right is an agent of oppression, exploiting men of property on behalf of the undeserving masses.

James Buchanan brought these influences together to create what he calledpublic choice theory. He argued that a society could not be considered free unless every citizen has the right to veto its decisions. What he meant by this was that no one should be taxed against their will. But the rich were being exploited by people who use their votes to demand money that others have earned, through involuntary taxes to support public spending and welfare. Allowing workers to form trade unions and imposing graduated income taxes were forms of "differential or discriminatory legislation" against the owners of capital.

Any clash between "freedom" (allowing the rich to do as they wish) and democracy should be resolved in favor of freedom. In his bookThe Limits of Liberty, he noted that "despotism may be the only organizational alternative to the political structure that we observe." Despotism in defense of freedom.

His prescription was a "constitutional revolution": creating irrevocable restraints to limit democratic choice. Sponsored throughout his working life by wealthy foundations, billionaires and corporations, he developed a theoretical account of what this constitutional revolution would look like, and a strategy for implementing it.

He explained how attempts to desegregate schooling in the American south could be frustrated by setting up a network of state-sponsored private schools. It was he who first proposed privatizing universities, and imposing full tuition fees on students: his original purpose was to crush student activism. He urged privatization of social security and many other functions of the state. He sought to break the links between people and government, and demolish trust in public institutions. He aimed, in short, to save capitalism from democracy.

In 1980, he was able to put the program into action. He was invited toChile, where he helped the Pinochet dictatorship write a new constitution, which, partly through the clever devices Buchanan proposed, has proved impossible to reverse entirely. Amid the torture and killings, he advised the government to extend programmes of privatisation, austerity, monetary restraint, deregulation and the destruction of trade unions: a package that helped trigger economic collapse in 1982.

None of this troubled the Swedish Academy, which through his devotee at Stockholm University Assar Lindbeck in 1986 awarded James Buchanan theNobel memorial prize for economics. It is one of several decisions that have turned this prize toxic.

But his power really began to be felt when Koch, currently the seventh richest man in the US, decided that Buchanan held the key to the transformation he sought. Koch saw even such ideologues as Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan as "sellouts", as they sought to improve the efficiency of governmentrather than destroy it altogether. But Buchanan took it all the way.

MacLean says that Charles Koch poured millions into Buchanan's work at George Mason University, whose law and economics departments look as much like corporate-funded think tanks as they do academic faculties. He employed the economist to select the revolutionary "cadre" that would implement his program (Murray Rothbard, at the Cato Institute that Koch founded, had urged the billionaire to study Lenin's techniques and apply them to the libertarian cause). Between them, they began to develop a program for changing the rules.

The papers Nancy MacLean discovered show that Buchanan saw stealth as crucial. He told his collaborators that "conspiratorial secrecy is at all times essential". Instead of revealing their ultimate destination, they would proceed by incremental steps. For example, in seeking to destroy the social security system, they would claim to be saving it, arguing that it would fail without a series of radical "reforms". (The same argument is used by those attacking the NHS). Gradually they would build a "counter-intelligentsia", allied to a "vast network of political power" that would become the new establishment.

Through the network of think tanksthat Koch and other billionaires have sponsored, through their transformation of the Republican party, and the hundreds of millions they have poured into state congressional and judicial races, through the mass colonisation of Trump's administrationby members of this networkand lethally effective campaigns against everything from public health to action on climate change, it would be fair to say that Buchanan's vision is maturing in the US.

But not just there. Reading this book felt like a demisting of the window through which I see British politics.The bonfire of regulationshighlighted by the Grenfell Tower disaster, the destruction of state architecture through austerity, the budgeting rules, the dismantling of public services, tuition fees and the control of schools: all these measures follow Buchanan's program to the letter. I wonder how many people are aware that David Cameron'sfree schools projectstands in a tradition designed to hamper racial desegregation in the American south.

In one respect, Buchanan was right: there is an inherent conflict between what he called "economic freedom" and political liberty. Complete freedom for billionaires means poverty, insecurity, pollution and collapsing public services for everyone else. Because we will not vote for this, it can be delivered only through deception and authoritarian control. The choice we face is between unfettered capitalism and democracy. You cannot have both.

Buchanan's program is a prescription for totalitarian capitalism. And his disciples have only begun to implement it. But at least, thanks to MacLean's discoveries, we can now apprehend the agenda. One of the first rules of politics is, know your enemy. We're getting there.

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A Despot in Disguise: One Man's Mission to Rip Up Democracy - Truth-Out

In a vote that has been described as an assault on democracy by European officials, the Polish Senateis expected to approve a rushed and controversial law on Friday that would retire all Supreme Court judges and allow the presidentto replace themwith more favorable alternatives.

[Polish parliament expected to approve measure stripping Supreme Court of independence]

Proposed by the ruling right-wing Law and Justice (Pis) party, the legislation has been widely condemned as the mostworrying development in a country where democratic institutions are under mounting pressure. If passed, thechanges would constitutean unprecedented attack on judicial independence,according to ajoint statement by leading judges from the neighboring Czech Republic.

It is only the latest of many unprecedented attacks.

Only two years ago, Poland was widely considered a success story that had managed to seemingly leavebehindits communist past, and turned into a robust role model democracy praised by officials across the European Union.

Now, it is becoming a case study for why liberal democracy should not be taken for granted. The Polish government has pursued a number of strategies to weaken its opponents and democratic institutions, including repressions against journalists or judges and the dissemination of conspiracy theories, which preceded Friday's vote.

A populistelection campaign that paved the way

When Polish voters decided it was time for a new, populist administrationtwo years ago,the reasons for the election outcomeappeared hard to understand from the outside. Poland's economy had grown by nearly 50 percent over the previousdecade, benefiting from an integration with the rest of the continent.

But the landslide victory of Poland'sright-wing and anti-E. U. Law and Justice partyrevealeddeeper divisions, which were harder to measure than the country's GDP.Senior party officials took a decidedly anti-immigration stance in the days beforethe election, even warning that migrants might carry dangerous diseases.

The timing was right for the Law and Justice party. Europe faced the peak of its massive refugee influx in the second half of 2015, which provokedfears in more conservative nations, like Poland, and ultimately pavedthe way for Law and Justice's victory. In particular, rural voters there had long felt neglected by their previous government and complainedthat economic prosperity had not been accompanied by improved social services.

Repressions against journalists

With its sweeping mandate, Law and Justice quickly began to consolidate its power. The country's public broadcaster, TVP Info, essentially turned into a mouthpiece of the government months after the election. Through amendments to the country's media law, the government gained control over the public media network's executives, which triggered the resignation of more than 140 employees.

Soon thereafter, the government went after independent newspapers and broadcasters, as well. It attemptedto limitthe number of journalists allowedaccess to parliamentbut had to abandonthe plans after large-scale protests.

As a result, Poland's ranking in the Press Freedom Index dropped to partly free this year due to government intolerance toward independent or critical reporting, excessive political interference in the affairs of public media, and restrictions on speech regarding Polish history and identity, which have collectively contributed to increased self-censorship and polarization, according to Freedom House, a nongovernmental organization based in Washington.

Despite international protests, the government's control over state media outlets has created a parallel reality in parts of Polish society, where protests against the illiberalLaw and Justice party are being portrayed as a coup against the democratically elected government.

Conspiracy theories

State media outlets have alsorepeated some of the conspiracy theories that have further deepened divisions in the country over the last two years. Law and Justice leaderJaroslaw Kaczynski has blamed former Polish prime minister and current president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, for somehow beingcomplicit in the death ofKaczynski's twin brother seven years ago.

Tuskcampaigned for Law and Justice'srival party, the liberal-conservative Civic Platform, and was prime minister in 2010 when President LechKaczynski died in a plane crash in Russia. Kaczynski's Law and Justice party has long believed that the crash was not an accident but an assassination.

Last year, the party pushed for theexhumation of the bodies of the 96 victims to investigate thetheory, but critics have said the move was timed to stoke anti-European Union tensions. There is no evidence to proveKaczynski's suspicions.

The government vs. the justice system

The emergence of investigations that are being criticized as politically motivated by critics hasbeen accompanied by a parallel effort to restrict the independence of judges.

Friday's vote on the Supreme Court law is only the latest governmental interferencewith Polish courts.After the 2015 election victory, for example, Law and Justice initiated the replacement ofa number of judges of the country's Constitutional Tribunal and then essentially paralyzed the tribunal by requiring two-third majorities for rulings and a mandatory participation ratio.

Threats to jail opponents

The more recent legislation would give parliament large sway over the appointment of judges, stoking fears among government critics who believethe changes would make the prosecution of political opponents more likely. Human rights advocates say such fears may be warranted, given that Law and Justice published photos of anti-government protesters and threatened to prosecute them earlier this year, despite warnings by NGOsthat the move would have a chilling effect on the opposition. There has been little resistance to such measures inside the civil service, which has largely been replaced by loyalists over the last two years.

With the next parliamentary elections expected to take place in 2019, Law and Justice is unlikely to run out of time in its effort to weaken its opponents and to politicize previously independentinstitutions.

Read more:

Thousands in Poland protest government judicial reform plans

Polands senators to vote on contentious court overhaul

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It only took two years for a 'robust' European democracy to fall apart - Washington Post