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The first sign that this was no ordinary opening night of Shakespeare In The Park were the TV crews, and particularly one from Inside Edition.

The same questions were being asked of those going into the Public Theaters Julius Caesar on Monday night in New Yorks Central Park.

How did they feel about the scene in which Caesar, dressed as Donald Trump and played by Gregg Henry, would be bloodily cut down by Brutus and his fellow assassins? What did they think of the controversy, fanned by outrage on Breitbart and later Fox News, around the show that had led Delta Air Lines and Bank of America to withdraw funding from the Public Theater, one of the most venerable arts institutions in New York?

As the events of the weekend seeped into Monday, there were other questions: What of the statements of the National Endowment for the Arts and American Express, distancing themselves from the organization, as if it were a foul stink on the sidewalk? Would there be counter pro-Trump protests?

Shock. Outrage. Rinse. Repeat.

Sad to report to the right-wing fire-starters and Newt Gingrich who invoked the Publics production darkly on Good Morning America on Tuesday morning, but those in attendance Monday night queued for gin and tonics without obvious blood-lust in their eyes, and took their seats, quietly leafing through programs. There were no, I cant wait to see how he dies heard by this reporter.

At least the brouhaha meant Shakespeare was on primetime. If this episode has proved anything, it is the relevance and currency of Shakespeare, many hundreds of years after his plays were first performed.

Also on Monday, eagle-eyed social media users rightly equated the flattery that Trump sought and received from his cabinet with King Lear, at the beginning of that play, demanding the same explicitly stated devotion from his three daughters, Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia. Cordelia declines of course, leading to her father disowning heruntil realizing, too late, she was the most honest and well-meaning one of all.

This PR blitz on the Bard might be welcome, driving ever younger generations to his work, even if the questions of the TV reporters to Caesar-goers were askew. Self-evidently those attending the show were not outraged, as they had come to see the play.

The productions detractors had not realized that a Caesar, dressed as Barack Obama, had also been killed in a production five years ago. Caesar is a figure of power, and different productions in different eras configure him as the leader-figure of that moment.

But most clearly, many of those criticizing the play had not seen it.

The shocking thing about this production of Julius Caesar is not the murder of Caesar itself, bloody as it is, but how the play evokes the fragility of democracy, and how power can corrupt and itself be corrupted.

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Before the performance began, Oskar Eustis, the Publics artistic director took to the stage to loud cheers, asking those assembled to video the speech and post it to social media.

Eustis, quoting Hamlet, said one of dramas functions was to hold a mirror up to natureto show the age his form and pressure. The public aimed to do the same as Shakespeare, Eustis said. When we hold the mirror up to nature often what we reveal are disturbing, upsetting provoking thingsthank god. That's our job.

The Publics mission, said Eustis, was to say that the culture belongs to everybody, needs to belong to everybody; to say that art has something to say about the great civic issues of our time, and to say that, like drama, democracy depends on the conflict of different points of view. Nobody owns the truth, we all own the culture.

In the play itself, its characters in modern-day dress, Gregg Henry as Caesar wears a red tie, and carries himself as Trump would. But he does not affect Trumps tone of voice. He does not swagger exaggeratedly. He does not make his Caesar into a modern-day drag act, to be laughed at or booed. He is Trumpian, not Trump.

Yes, Calpurnia (Tina Benko) speaks in a Slavic accent like Melania Trump, and yes, this drew scattered laughsbut it was no more offensive than a Saturday Night Live skit.

Before the slaying of Caesarwhich occurs not at the end but midway through the playwhat is striking is the gender and color-blind casting, both refreshing and freeing. We also see protesters attired in Resist garb.

When it occurs, the murder of Caesar is brutal, just as Shakespeare wrote it. But it is, whatever your political affiliation, Caesar being murdered, not Donald Trump.

Among the audience, no doubt dismissed as diehard lefties in the minds of the plays detractors, there was no sense of delight at the scene on opening night. One person to my left clapped, tentatively. The rest of the audience sat in silence. The assassins immediately start falling to pieces, interrogating their actions and their consequences. The country falls apart. This Julius Caesar is the very opposite to a positive advertisement for the joy and benefits of a Trump assassination.

The trajectory of the play, which has been largely ignored in the hysterical news coverage of recent days, advances a subversive and ambivalent vision of power and patronage.

Caesar is a divisive figure, just as Trump is one. But Shakespeares emphasis, and the Publics focus, is on what plotting to diminish and take away his power will do to society; what does it mean for democracy; and how easily political and cultural threads can be torn dangerously asunder when such a political assassination takes place.

That Caesars murder occurs midway in the play is important because the sweep of the following half is one of terrible and truly tragic consequences. Mark Antony and Brutus have many supporters and many enemies, and the public itself is representedingeniouslyby around 20 to 30 planted actors in the audience, who shout approval or dissent to speeches being made. This polyphony is the polyphony of democracy, and later the destructive discontent of an imperiled democracy.

This is also a Shakespearean tragedy, so those same bodies ultimately join the main characters in going to war over what they believe, and the truly shocking thing is not the bloodied body of Caesar, but the massed corpses on the stage by the plays end.

Those bodies you can see as real and metaphorical casualties of the arrogant exercise of power, and the manipulations of those who wish to co-opt it. The personal tragedies are real, and the possibility of the death of civil society is real.

Anybody who watches this play tonight will know neither Shakespeare, nor the Public Theater, could possibly advocate violence as a solution to political problems and certainly not assassination, Eustis had said in his introduction.

This play, on the contrary, warns about what happens when you try to preserve democracy by non-democratic meansit doesn't end up too good.

One of the dangers unleashed by that is the danger of a large crowd of people manipulated by their emotions, taken over by leaders who urge them to do things that not only are against their interests but destroy the very institutions that are there to serve and protect them.

That is borne out in the conception of the production. The Publics Julius Caesar does not delight in the death of Donald Trump in any way. It cautions a watching audience instead about what we expect and invest in our leaders, about how they exercise authority, and what can happen to a society where the toxicity of extreme political ambition and inflammatory rhetoric infects the body politic.

That may not be the soundbite Inside Edition is looking for, but its the more complex truth of an unjustly denounced theatrical production.

See the original post:
DemocracyNot Donald TrumpDies Brutally in 'Julius Caesar,' Just as Shakespeare Intended - Daily Beast

BBC News

Has British democracy let its people down? - BBC News BBC News The general election demonstrated that the British democratic system was not serving its country well. and more »

Read more here:
Has British democracy let its people down? - BBC News - BBC News

We Indians tend to be a little too glib about our democracy. We take it for granted, assume it not just exists but is renewed whenever elections take place. Some even believe we have an excess of the stuff, slowing down decisions and suffocating reforms, in contrast to China, which makes up for its deficit of democracy with rapid growth and popular enrichment.

In reality, does India qualify as a democracy? Regular elections to form a government, multiple parties that compete and a multiplicity of media outlets are necessary parts of a democracy, but not sufficient ones. Protection of fundamental rights of individuals and groups and the rule of law, active participation of the citizenry in public life, apart from institutional dispersal of power and the ability of the people, the ultimate sovereign, to hold all arms of the state to account are other essential ingredients of democracy. On these, we fall short.

When groups take the law into their hands, and beat up individuals or even kill them, the rule of law disappears. When teachers appointed to village schools play truant and get away without being sacked, citizen participation in public life and popular ability to hold parts of the state to account break down. When Christians are attacked for proselytisation, minority rights are breached. When Dalits are attacked by socially more powerful groups and the state fails to prevent or penalise such attacks, not just the rule of law but equality before the law also breaks down.

Democracy in the Making In those parts of India where sections of the people challenge the authority of the state, such as in Kashmir, the Northeast and the tribal belts of central India, individual rights and liberty are abrogated not just of the militants but of ordinary people as well.

When a member of the higher judiciary pronounces, in court, the cow to be his mother, he puts personal values and custom in place of the law of the land he is dutybound to uphold. This is as much breakdown of the rule of law as a legal dispute taking decades to be settled beyond final appeal.

Individual liberty is rviolated when undertrials languish in jail for years, only to be pronounced not guilty by the courts later, after their youth and vitality have drained out of them and their dear ones have passed on, broken by grief, if not old age.

India is better understood as a democracy in the making, rather than as a full-fledged democracy. And this is not a particularly uncommon thing in the history of nations.

When the American revolution produced its first constitution and provided for elections, about 6% of the population qualified to vote. Slaves, women and those without property did not qualify. Just like in Athenian democracy. Europe had to go through wrenching revolutions, multiple rounds of them, to achieve universal adult suffrage. Women got the right to vote much later. Black Americans continued to be disenfranchised till after the civil rights movements of the 1960s. Even today, some southern states make it difficult for black people to register as voters, leave alone take part as equal citizens in public life.

Challenge and Opportunity Democracy must be understood as an evolving system of expanding rights of the ordinary people. Its defining virtue is that its governance structures offer the space for people to add to and enhance their realised rights. In theory, this should be easier in India than it was in the countries that first secured democracy. Indians got their democracy gift-wrapped, when they got Independence. If democracy were a building with many rooms, Europeans had to struggle to build those rooms one by one, before occupying them, whereas Indians already had those rooms designed for them by Europeans and built for them by the framers of the Constitution, but still have to train themselves to move into them. This is not all that simple. When you design and build a room yourself, you know what it is for. When you stumble upon a room that you never knew you could enter, you might be intimidated into staying out.

The good news is that sections of the traditionally excluded are asserting their right to be part of national life on an equal footing. The Dalits are an obvious example. But they encounter violence, as in Una in Gujarat and in Sahranpur, in UP.

Muslims are being intimidated out of a key traditional occupation, of butchering animals for meat. Transportation of cattle, whether legally or illegally, runs the risk of violent death at the hands of vigilantes. The sale of cattle for slaughter now stands banned by fiat.

These are instances of extreme violation of democracy. But they are also invitations to expand democracy by resisting them. The resistance could take multiple forms, ranging from legal challenge to popular protest. Organising such resistance is a way of building democracy and leadership credentials.

Democracy has to be earned, through struggle to acquire and enforce rights. Whom does this challenge beckon, is the question.

Views expressed here are the author's own, and not Economictimes.com's

Go here to read the rest:
View: Recent violations of democracy also offer a chance to build a new India - Economic Times

By Sirianne Dahlum and Carl Henrik Knutsen By Sirianne Dahlum and Carl Henrik Knutsen June 13 at 8:00 AM

Democracies outperform autocracies on education. At least thats what many political scientists believe: Because voters care about the future of their children, democratic politicians should have strong incentives to build schools, reduce fees, enroll children and so on. Autocrats, who are not responsible to voters, should lack such incentives. At best, autocrats may offer university education that benefits the children of elites supporting them. And indeed, according to the evidence, in democratic countries, more kids go to school.

But in a recent article in World Development, we challenge that conventional wisdom. While its correct that democracies provide more education to their kids, democracies do not deliver better education. In other words, the schooling that children receive in democracies is, in general, of no higher quality than what their counterparts receive in autocracies. In fact, recent reports show that an alarmingly large proportion of schools across the world fail to teach even the most basic literacy skills. Our study suggests that improving democracy will not remedy this situation.

[Worried about the decline in democracy? Worry about the politicians, not the voters.]

Consider two rich democracies, the United States and Norway (the authors home country). In both countries, the quality of lower-level education has been questioned; students have often scored quite poorly on international performance tests such as PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment). For instance, in the 2015PISA test, in mathematics, the United States and Norway scored far below the more authoritarian countries Singapore and China. And the average American student was outperformed by the average Russian or Vietnamese student.

How we did our research

While such quick comparisons are startling, we wanted to look more systematically at broader patterns across countries and time. We use an innovative data set that estimates the cognitive skills of primary and secondary school students, using different types of regional and international tests in mathematics, science and reading.

We do not find any clear relationship between democracy and student performance. Even when considering data from about 100 countries between 1965 and 2009, and no matter how we twist and tweak our statistical models, this null result holds up: On average, kids living in democracies are not visibly better in math, science and reading than kids in dictatorships. Neither is there any evidence that countries that have recently gone through democratization improve their education quality.

How can this be? Shouldnt democratic politicians be concerned about giving children high-quality education, and not only about putting kids behind a desk? We suggest that, unfortunately, the answer is often no.

Voters have trouble holding politicians accountable for education policies

To hold politicians accountable, voters must be able to trace the outcomes they care about to specific policies. Few ordinary voters are familiar with the details of supposedly quality-enhancing education reforms; nor are they able to evaluate those effects. Even education experts are unsure whether such measures as reduced class sizes or homework actually affect learning outcomes. Even if parents suspect that their child is getting a subpar education, who will they blame the teacher, the principal, the local government or the national government?

[Venezuelas government wants to write a new constitution. That way lies autocracy.]

If members of a democratically elected government sense that they wont get the credit (or blame) for policies that may improve the quality of schools, they may prioritize other education policies that they can take credit for, such as lowering school fees or expanding school enrollment. Simply sending your child to school especially if thats a new possibility in your country will probably leave a strong impression on voters. Thats not as true for new methods of classroom teaching that can boost reading skills, or for changes in the syllabus that improve science literacy.

Because voters are less likely to see or be able to evaluate those changes, politicians have a harder time explaining and taking credit for those reforms at campaign rallies or in broadcast ads. As a result, democratic politicians may prioritize education quantity over education quality.

Sirianne Dahlum is a researcher at the University of Oslo Department of Political Science.

Carl Henrik Knutsen is a professor of political science at the University of Oslo.

Read more here:
Democracies are no better at educating students than autocracies. This is why. - Washington Post

The political strife that defines today's America derives its energy from the feeling among many that their voices are not being heard. By and large, Americans do not trust Congress and often vote to send a message, hoping to get their opinions represented. The reality is that the political parties do all they can to stay in power, with achieving fairness and democracy not their primary goals.

Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing the borders of voting districts to favor specific candidates or political parties. It can make a difference in the number of representatives of each party that a state sends to Washington. In essence, using these strategies can allow one party to keep winning the majority of districts (and representatives) without having the most votes.

Jonathan Mattingly, a mathematician from Duke University in North Carolina, has been working for the past several years to figure out mathematical solutions to the problem. He would like to take the job of drawing voting district lines away from self-serving politicians.

As part of that goal, Mattinglycreated an algorithm that produces random iterations of the states election maps to show the impact of gerrymandering. This is not just a hypothetical exercise. The mathematician says that partisan gerrymandering is having a serious effect on our democracy.

Even if gerrymandering affected just 5 seats out of 435, thats often enough to sway crucial votes, he said in an interview with the journalNature, referring to the number of representatives in Congress.

Two of the most used methods in gerrymandering are packing and cracking. When they employ packing, legislators try to draw the map in such a way that the opposing voters would be packed into the fewest districts possible. Cracking means dividing the other partys voters into several districts, making it harder for them to elect a representative. This tactic helps the party in power to stay in power.

Heres a useful graphic from Washington Post on how gerrymandering works:

Mattinglys state of North Carolina has been ground zero in this fight. While both parties used to receive a generally equal number of representatives (either six or seven), Republican redistricting several years ago packed most of the Democrats into three districts. The 2015-2016 North Carolina cohort to Washington included just3 Democrats and 10 Republicans,while the statewide vote is split close to 50-50 between the two parties.

Recently, the Supreme Courtweighed inthat two districts in North Carolina were drawn along racial lines and were, as such, unconstitutional.

While the Supreme Court intervened in that case, the highest court in the land doesn't generally address gerrymandering as long as districts abide by four criteria - the districts need to be compact, continuous, have more or less the same number of people and give minority groups a chance to elect their own rep. The difficulty of objectively proving whether and how the district is gerrymandered has been one of the difficulties in stopping this practice.

Mattingly set out to create mathematical tools that would prove to the courts time and time again if a district borders have been drawn by politics and not fairness. What Mattingly and his student Christy Graves realized is that gerrymandering produces certain statistical signs. The opposition party usually gets a landslide in the packed districts and loses narrowly in the cracked ones. Using data analysis, Mattingly and his team were able to create an index that shows the extent of gerrymandering in a district.

It is important to note that Mattingly is not alone in this quest. Other mathematicians have also been working to create better methods for evaluating gerrymandering. The political statistician Wendy Tam Cho from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has also designed district map-drawing algorithms that satisfy state law requirements without relying on partisan voting information.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a political scientist from the University of Chicago, created an "efficiency gap" to show how each state's wasted votes can reveal signs of gerrymandering. If a party has landslide victories or losses, with numbers much more extreme than the proportion it actually needed to win, that could be a sign of political shenanigans.

Despite the various science and math-based ideas to combat gerrymandering, they have not been embraced by the politicians. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, as they do not want to lose this weapon from their arsenal. But there are signs that the courts are admitting more mathematical analysis when gerrymandering is being alleged. Whitford v. Gill, aWisconsin case, which may end up before the Supreme Court, used Stephanopoulos's efficiency gap analysis to inform their decision.

The upcoming 2020 census is the next big event in this fight. The new numbers are likely to create much redistricting around the country. While Republicans have been shown to use gerrymandering to their advantage, the Democrats also engage in the practice. Mattingly's analysis showed they used the tactic in Maryland, where they control the legislature. For the sake of American democracy, devising objective mathematical approaches that ensure all voices are being heard equally seems like a no-brainer.

You can read the paper by Mattingly and his team here.

Read more here:
How Mathematicians Are Fighting to Save the American Democracy - Big Think