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In 2001, on September 11, Americas sense of security was shattered. It has not yet fully recovered.

In 2008, with the economic recession, Americas sense of economic stability was shattered. It has not yet fully recovered.

And in 2016, with the presidential election, Americas sense of political normalcy was shattered. It may be a long time before the country recovers.

This short century has witnessed the United States fall from the heights of its post-Cold War supremacy from an indispensable nation with unquestioned faith in its invulnerability, inevitable progress and ultimate primacy to one teetering on the edge.

Distrust and dissatisfaction with the government have reached near-record highs. Faith in a broad swath of critical institutions from business to media to religion has declined to near-record lows. Political polarization has spiked to levels not seen in generations; indeed, by some measurements, it now surpassestraditional social cleavages like race and religion. Political violence has become not just a specter but a reality.

If this sounds stark or alarmist, thats because it is. The challenges we face cannot be met with pablum about American exceptionalism. They cannot be hidden by our many advantages our talented people, our innovative private sector, our supreme military or our enviable geography. Nor can they be hidden behind the very real if imperfect progress we have made on a whole host of critical issues, including race and gender.

The stark reality is that despite all the progress weve made and all the assets weve accumulated, the social contract is no longer working. It can no longer provide for a baseline of stability and progress for society. The future of the American dream is at stake. The viability of democracy is beingcalled into question. We are going to have to rethink what were doing. And we are not the only ones.

We are in the midst of a global crisis in democracy and governance. In 2016, political upheaval rocked democracies on both sides of the Atlantic the Brexit vote, the failure of government-sponsored referendums in Italy and Colombia, the strengthening of far-right and separatist movements across Europe and the election of President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, democracy is in retreat around the world. According to Freedom House, 2016 was the11th consecutive year that freedom declined worldwide. Political rights and the rule of law diminished in 67 countries last year; only about half that many countries registered a net improvement.

The advent of the digital age is bringing about a historical transformation as momentous as that which accompanied the Industrial Revolution. In the 21st century, technology and globalization are challenging our institutions of government, which were designed to operate on a national scale or in cooperation with a few allies. For much of the 20th century, these institutions were capable of maintaining stability and delivering progress.

But, today, the old order is ineffective at managing the networked age and its challenges. An onslaught of crises the financial crisis, the Arab Spring, the Euro crisis, the emerging market crunch, the rise of global terror networks, state-sponsored election hacking are all evidence that state responses to technological, generational, economic and political upheaval are falling short.

And the disruptions we now confront will only grow more severe. Take the challenge of job loss due to technology or outsourcing. In America and around the world, millions of jobs have beenlostto technology in the last few decades. Advances in robotics may soon threaten not only manufacturing jobs but also service ones as well even in low wage countries like China. This will put downward pressure on wages, exacerbating income inequality as capital and talent particularly at the highest echelons receive ever-greater returns. The global middle class and those aspiring to join its ranks may stagnate or recede.

These challenges threaten the American dream and its global counterparts. At home and abroad, the ability to live a dignified life seems increasingly under threat. Communities are fragmenting as diverging explanations for how to cope with change exacerbate pre-existing societal cleavages. This is a recipe for disaster. In countries as varied as Thailand, Brazil, Turkey, Israel and Spain, there have been large-scale protest movements driven in part by inequality. But these movements have shown little ability to resolve their underlying grievances. In severe cases, such as parts of the Arab world, Africa and Ukraine, societies are dividing to the point of state fragmentation and civil war.

These vast challenges require new thinking and more than that, they require action. Around the world, democracies must prove the viability and desirability of their system to their own populations who are looking for a better path forward. The tasks are clear: to restore credibility and integrity to the democratic process, to rebuild vibrancy and truth into the public square, to enable governments to effectively operate with all the tools and capabilities of the 21st century and, above all else, to rebuild the social contract to meet the needs of citizens.

The road ahead will be long, but it must begin now with the type of hard work that has always determined the future of democracy: conversation, engagement, service and sacrifice for the greater good.

Read more:
Democracy's Retreat Around The World Requires Immediate Action - HuffPost

CNN will host a special documentary, "The Russian Connection: Inside the Attack on Democracy," reported by CNN chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto on Tuesday night.

Sciutto, a veteran of the Obama State Department who came to CNN in 2014, "recounts and tracks the story of Russian hacks targeting the 2016 presidential election from the very beginning to the investigations still underway today and to new fears of Russian attacks on upcoming U.S. elections," according to the network announcement.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Hillary ClintonHillary Rodham ClintonPro-Trump group pulls ads targeting GOP senator on ObamaCare repeal Stone to testify before House Intel Committee next month Overnight Cybersecurity: New ransomware attack spreads globally | US pharma giant hit | House intel panel interviews Podesta | US, Kenya deepen cyber partnership MORE campaign chairman John Podesta, former national security adviser Tom Donilonand former CIA Moscow Station Chief Steven Hall are among those interviewed for the documentary.

CNN bills the special as "the first comprehensive telling on television of Russia's attack on the 2016 race, with jarring lessons for American leaders and the public about more attacks to come."

The network has covered Russia's meddling in the 2016 heavily since Trump's victory in November.

After working at ABC News as a senior foreign correspondent, Sciutto served as chief of staff and senior advisor to the U.S. ambassador to China, Gary Locke from 2011 to 2013.

"The Russian Connection: Inside the Attack on Democracy" will air Tuesday night at 10:00 p.m. ET.

It airs one day after CNN reported thatthree of its staffers resigned after the network retracted a story tying a top President Trump ally to a Russian investment bank.

A Buzzfeed report earlier Monday said CNN is alsoimplementing strict new rules for the network's stories regarding Russia.

CNNMoney executive editor Rich Barbieri sent out an email Saturday regarding the network's new rules after CNN a day earlier retracted the story.

"No one should publish any content involving Russia without coming to me and Jason [Farkas]," said the email, obtained by BuzzFeed News.

"This applies to social, video, editorial, and MoneyStream. No exceptions," the email added. "I will lay out a workflow Monday."

--This report was updated at 11:16 a.m.

Read the original here:
CNN to air 'The Russian Connection: Inside the Attack on Democracy' Tuesday night - The Hill

The malevolent incompetence of the Trump White House packs a certain entertainment value, but it is also a distraction; a bumbling misdirection in a long confidence game. At stake, as historian Nancy MacLean underscores in her new book, Democracy in Chains, is not just political power, not just the final dismantling of the New Deal order, but the very future of our democracy.

Whatever the fate of Donald Trump and his cronies, the rule of the radical right in Congress, in statehouses, in the courts will remain largely unchecked. And with each electoral cycle or legislative session of that rule, the prospects for challenging it fade.

Democracy in Chains is a remarkable book. At its core is a startling archival discovery: the unsorted and unprocessed papers of the University of Virginia economist James McGill Buchanan. Buchanan was a quiet but central figure in the making of the modern right: indeed, in MacLeans account, Buchanan appears like a libertarian Zelig at each critical juncture in this history.

Educated at the University of Chicago, he takes up his first academic post at the University of Virginia as a fierce defender of segregation and states rights. Discouraged by both the progress of civil rights and Barry Goldwaters defeat in 1964, and wearing out his welcome at Virginia, he decamps to UCLA, only to be horrified by the diversity of the setting and the radicalism of the students. He retreats to Virginia Tech for a decade, before being lured to George Mason University on the eve of the Reagan Revolution.

At each stop, he builds a privately funded fiefdom designed to develop and disseminate the libertarian creed. At each setback, he doubles his resolve to put ideas into action. With each year, he grows wearier of democratic institutions and the tyranny of majority rule.

As an economist, Buchanan was instrumental in developing the moral vocabulary not only for a zealous veneration of property rights, but for a deep suspicion of affirmative state action. As a southerner, taking up his appointment at Virginia in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, he did not hesitate to champion states rights and massive resistance to integration as if these too were just abstractions of economy theory. As an academic, he was a fierce and reliable shill for corporate benefactors, most notably and generously Charles Koch who shared Buchanans blind faith in the market, his contempt for democracy, and his willingness to play the long game.

While this is a work of history, MacLeans overriding goal is to shed light on our current moment; to better understand the roots, arguments, goals, motives, and methods of the radical right. MacLean is interested in how we got here, but Democracy in Chains is really about what comes next for the Right and for the rest of us.

At the core of Buchanans worldview, and of those in his orbit ranging from self-congratulatory business titans like Charles Koch to Ayn Randaddled frat boys like Paul Ryan is a near-religious faith in the autonomy and infallibility of markets.

Buchanans singular professional contribution (for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1986) was the development of public choice economics a field whose largely untested insight was that markets never failed but that state interference in them almost always did. In this view, all were market actors, simply responding to incentives and maximizing selfish gain. Politicians did so to get elected. Civil servants did so to build bureaucratic empires. Citizens did so to garner state benefits. And the only way to pay for this was to extract more and more wealth from the real producers.

Imposing market expectations on public institutions, as Buchanan did with the state in The Calculus of Consent (1962) and with the university in Academia in Anarchy (1970), of course, distorts their very purpose and by questioning their efficiency erodes their legitimacy.

It is strangled logic to view the university as a setting in which student-consumers pay discounted prices for a service they do not value, faculty-producers lose all incentive with tenure, and taxpayer-investors are taken for a ride. But, more so today than in 1970, it is pretty effective politics. In the bargain, as MacLean laments, all other motives for private or public action compassion, fairness, solidarity, generosity, justice, and sustainability fall by the wayside.

This market fundamentalism, and the policies that flow from it, are essentially faith-based and either blind or indifferent to their own contradictions.

Here, MacLean echoes the recent work of the sociologists Margaret Somers and Fred Block, underscoring the many ways in which free markets are embedded in social relations. Ignoring this fact simply camouflages advantage and disguises the reliance and dependence of successful market actors on conditions (property rights, contract law, patent protection, worker suppression) secured by state action.

Market fundamentalism, as MacLean notes, is rooted less in the nations liberal traditions than in the illiberal institutions of slavery and Jim Crow.

The founding father of choice here is not Jefferson or Madison but John C. Calhoun a fierce defender of property rights (at a time when nearly half the population of Calhouns South Carolina were property), with a yen for repression and an abiding distrust of majority rule. Calhoun, who understood liberty as nothing more than the freedom to enjoy and exploit his property, was unfazed by any contradiction between constitutional democracy and chattel slavery.

Calhoun, of course, ended up on the wrong side of history. But his ideas lived on in both the nostalgia for the Confederacy that persisted in the New South and in the segregation and terror of the Jim Crow era. Here again, the preservation of liberty and poverty depended upon extreme inequality and fundamentally antidemocratic and racist strategies of rule.

This was the setting in which Buchanan found himself in 1956 libertarian credentials from UChicago in his back pocket, massive resistance to the Brown decision unfolding outside his new office at the University of Virginia.

Buchanan did not hesitate to align himself with white supremacist minority rule (represented by the political machine of Harry Byrd), and urged voucher-based privatization as the solution to the Virginia schools crisis. [E]very parent could cast his vote in the [educational] marketplace and have it count, Buchanan argued, fleshing out an argument that the Cato Insitute and Betsy DeVos would champion unchanged a generation later.

In some respects, Buchanan seemed either indifferent to the racial underpinnings of the Virginia schools issue or willing to cynically exploit the moment. Yet he championed not only school privatization, but massive resistance as well.

Like Calhoun before him, he saw the real threat as the advance of federal power and the enfranchisement of those without property. In these final hours of the massive resistance era, MacLean observes, can be found the seed of the ideas guiding todays attack on the public sector and robust democracy alike.

In the short run, in Virginia and in the nation, Buchanan and his ilk lost ground. But the bitter anxieties of massive resistance persisted most markedly in the gradual political realignment punctuated by the campaigns of Goldwater, Wallace, Nixon, and Reagan. Over this span, Buchanan helped transform a regional libertarian creed into a national counterrevolution.

By 2017, the post-racialist wisp of the Obama years has evaporated entirely, Congress is wagged by the overwhelmingly southern Freedom Caucus, and the counterrevolution is ably represented in the West Wing by the likes of Mike Pence and Jeff Sessions.

At the intersection of Buchanans market fundamentalism and his embrace of Jim Crow lies a fundamental reservation nakedly evident on todays radical right about equal political citizenship and majority rule. This stemmed in part, from Calhoun onward, from a conviction that the polity could be cleft between makers and takers, and that it was the takers who, by employing state power to tax wealth and income, were doing the exploiting.

Buchanans public choice economics dressed this up as an iron law of both human nature and democratic rule (a cynicism so toxic, MacLean suggests, that, if widely believed, it would eat like acid at the foundations of civic life). Politically, Buchanan and his allies looked to gird the advantage enjoyed by the makers (by removing the last constraints on campaign finance, for example) while muffling the votes and the voices of the rest of us.

The combination, of course, is the hallmark of neoliberalism, whose interest is not in rolling back the state but in employing state power toward particular ends, including the protection of wealth and property and the suppression and surveillance of the poor. For all its thin distaste of big government, Buchanans radical right betrays a healthy appetite for repression.

Calhoun exemplified this view, routinely denying the legitimacy of government power to act for the common good while using government power to suppress others. Buchanan himself offered no objections to Jim Crow rule in Harry Byrds Virginia, advocated harsh punishment of student radicals at UCLA and at Virginia Tech, and lent admiring counsel to the brutal Pinochet regime in Chile.

In turn, as MacLean writes, the radical right is less interested in fighting big government per se as in elevating that branch of government they can best control. Across this history, the Rights jurisdictional safe space is state government. This is evident, of course, in two centuries worth of states rights fulminations against the threat of federal intrusion. And it was evident as the federal promise of equal protection gradually extended by the jurisprudence of the civil rights era began to ebb.

In some areas (such as school integration) the law retreated. In some (such as education or housing or equal employment), the law was not enforced. And in some (such as social policy), devolution of funding and administration invited state-level discretion and inequality.

As importantly, and again echoing through our current politics, is the push to quash local authority. The oft-stated goal of shrinking government to its most local and tangible form is belied by the determination of Calhoun, Byrd, Buchanan, and the reactionary presence in statehouses today (best represented by ALEC and its offshoots) to preempt the initiative of states or counties to act on their own. The goal, quite starkly, is to stem majority rule by weakening those jurisdictions in which it is most easily exercised, and vesting power in those in which representation is most skewed and one-party rule increasingly common.

Devolution and preemption have given the Right an edge in the states, but, as MacLean argues in the closing chapters, such advantages are not enough. For the radical right, victory depends on two further strategies for evading majority rule.

The first, to put it bluntly, is to lie: what was needed to achieve their ends, as MacLean puts it, was to stop being honest with the public.

Over time, Buchanan and his allies tacitly admitted that they had no popular constituency; that the voting public even those who had supported Reagan and cheered the congressional Contract with America hesitated when they learned that freed markets would leave them with sole responsibility for their fates. The solution, first floated in the early debates over Social Security privatization and starkly evident in tortuous repeal of the Affordable Care Act, is to crab-walk around the issues, to claim that frontal assaults on popular social insurance programs areefforts to shore them up rather than destroy them.

The second, and more chilling, solution is to junk the rules entirely; to tilt an already unlevel playing field decisively and irrevocably against the popular will.

The American political system is already strewn with veto points and eagerly attentive to the demands and resources of the wealthy. But, for the Right, holding sway in the least responsive of all the leading democracies to what the people want and need is not enough; the goal is to make it all but impossible for government to respond to the will of the majority unless the very wealthiest Americans agree full with every measure. Calhoun would be proud.

Buchanan and his followers are coldly dismissive of democratic institutions and democratic principles. If American political institutions render market-oriented reforms too difficult to achieve, as Tyler Cowen (who succeeded Buchanan at the helm of George Masons Mercatus Center) argues, then perhaps these institutions should be changed.

Harry Byrds preoccupation with manipulating the rules for voting and representation lives on in ALECs efforts to strangle the franchise through vote suppression and redistricting. For all the ink spilt trying to figure out what combination of backlash, cynicism, or fetishism mobilized Trump voters, the real story is the disenfranchised and demobilized.

The Right is aggressively shackling the popular will on a number of fronts. Fiscal constraints, pioneered by Buchanan and others in Pinochets Chile and pressed in the United States by Grover Norquist and others, aim to starve the beast of resources and flexibility. Legal constraints, particularly the profusion of mandatory arbitration in consumer and employment contracts, aim to strip away recourse to the courts. And a combination of legal activism, expansive police powers, and preemption aim to defang any opposition or alternatives.

Democracy in Chains is a revelation, as politics and as history.

We know a lot about the rise of the Right in postwar America. We have plumbed its social history, calling attention to the singular importance of Southern resistance to civil rights; the ways in which the crabgrassroots politics of white resentment flourished in the suburbs of Atlanta, Milwaukee, and Orange County; and the peculiar amalgam of fundamentalism and libertarianism a strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers, as Rick Perlstein puts it that mobilized, distracted, or conned its followers.

We have traced the contours and timing of the right turn, the business mobilization that stuttered through the postwar era before riding the turmoil of the 1970s to deal decisive blows against labor, against the economics and politics of growth, and against the entirepostwar social contract. And we have begun to unravel the predatory logic of neoliberalism, that toxic combination of free markets and unfree people.

We know a lot about the ways in which a winner-take-all society marked by rising inequality and insecurity is an essentially political project, created and sustained not by the retreat of policy but by policy choices. Economically and politically, the system is rigged, the rules rewritten to redistribute income upwards and ensure that it stays there. And we now have a pretty good grasp of the political infrastructure nationally and in the states that bankrolls, advances, and disguises this agenda.

Democracy in Chains assembles all of these fragments into a much more coherent, and much more frightening, whole.

It establishes the Jim Crow roots of the modern right, not just through the GOPs southern strategy but through shared doubts about the compatibility of property rights and democratic rule. It demonstrates that the lurch right in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Iowa representsnot some existential crisis of a forgotten working class but the triumph of a long push to use statehouses as laboratories for autocracy. It understands the postCitizens United wave of dark money as but the most recent chapter in a long history of corporate stealth and influence.

And it reminds us that, however incompetent the current White House and legislative leadership, they are winning handily.

See the article here:
Democracy's Critics - Jacobin magazine

She was just another gongzhu, or "Hong Kong pig," uninterested in things that did not involve her and too busy with her burgeoning music career to rock the boat by touching controversial issues.

Twenty years later, the 40-year-old Cantonese pop star and actress has been arrested by police, dropped by sponsors, blacklisted from China, and emerged as one of the city's leading LGBT activists.

"Fear is a contaminating disease," she told CNN. "I have this younger generation who listens to my music. So I think I have this responsibility to do the right thing, and not spread fear by my actions."

Ho's attitude began shifting in 2012, when she came out as gay at the fourth annual Hong Kong Pride Parade.

"It wasn't about gay marriage, nothing serious like that, just trying to do a public survey and it was blocked," she said.

"I was so angry back then, and that was the first time I saw how unfair the system is, how the government controlled everything."

"That was an enraging moment for me and for many other Hong Kong people," Ho said. "As a celebrity, as a public persona, as an adult, you have to speak out in support of these students and these other Hong Kong citizens."

Becoming more politically involved hasn't been without repercussions.

As Hong Kong prepares to mark 20 years of Chinese rule on July 1, Ho says this type of Chinese pressure and self-censorship is becoming more and more common.

"This is a very serious issue in Hong Kong because it's not only happening in the entertainment industry, it's happening everywhere," she said.

"We are losing our uniqueness and most of the bigger names are drifting towards the Chinese market."

"People are getting quite reluctant to claim themselves as Chinese because of what's happening with the Chinese government," Ho said.

Despite her fears for the future, Ho remains optimistic that Hong Kongers are becoming more aware of their freedoms and the city's unique identity.

"It's a difficult time but it's also an interesting time to be in Hong Kong right now because you are facing a lot of challenges but with challenges come chance," she said.

"This is a very special time when Hong Kong people can redefine ourselves,"Ho said.

CNN's Daisy Lee, Kristie Lu Stout and Angus Watson contributed reporting.

View post:
How Denise Ho went from Cantopop queen to democracy fighter - CNN

These are difficult times for Americas journalists, and not just because its been such a struggle to replace the failed business models of the 20th Century (but hey, were working on it). Since the dawn of the 2016 presidential campaign, reporters have been harassed, threatened and even arrested and charged with felonies for simply doing their jobs. The winner of that election has threatened to remove libel protections and retaliate against specific news organizations while riling up crowds against the media at his Nuremberg-style rallies. Some moves by the Trump administration are unprecedented, including the latest: Frequently ordering journalists not to film the daily presidential briefings by Sean Spicer or his surrogates, another brick in the wall that Team Trump is constructing against press freedom.

From a report last week in the Atlantic:

But instead of canceling them entirely, the White House has appeared to embrace a different strategy: simply downgrading them bit by bit, from briefings to gaggles, and from on-camera to off-camera. Guidance for the briefings have begun to include a note that audio from them cannot be used. Additionally, though Trump has held short press conferences when foreign leaders visit, he has not held a full press conference since February.

The changes havent gone unnoticed, although reporters are still attending the gaggles. A clearly exasperated Jim Acosta, CNNs chief White House correspondent, said on Monday that White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer had become kind of useless.

It feels like were slowly but surely being dragged into what is a new normal in this country, where the president of the United States is allowed to insulate himself from answering hard questions, Acosta said on CNN. I dont know why we covered that gaggle today, quite honestly Brooke, if they cant give us the answers to the questions on camera or where we can record the audio. Theyre basically pointless at this point.

Asked for further comment, Acosta said in an email, Unless we all take collective action, the stonewalling will continue.If the WH is going to place unreasonable demands on our newsgathering, we should walk out, he said.

Yes, Jim Acosta of CNN, you should walk out. Because things are only getting worse: So far today, Acosta spared with Spicer over the lack of cameras and then his boss, President Trump, held another joint appearance with a major world leader, Indias Prime Minister Narenda Modi, in which he broke with tradition and refused to answer questions building on a pattern of Trump avoiding press contact beyond the friendly confines of Fox and Friends. At a moment when the American people have more questions than ever for our government, this is the only wall the Trump administration has successfully built, a wall against the publics right to know.

And yet Beltway reporters feel they are in something of a bind. As a journalist myself, I get it. The rank-and-file of the press corps may harbor a rebellious spirit, but reporters have bosses, and their bosses are demanding unimpeded access to the decision makers. And any affirmative action by journalists walking out of Spicers dog-and-pony show, for example will get spun in todays political wars as a one-sided, partisan ploy. (And, as an important aside, yes, I agree that the briefings get too much attention, and that the journalism well remember from the Trump era will be shoe-leather investigative reporting; the media critic Jay Rosen is right when he says the White House briefings should be covered by interns. But there are still principles of openness and accountability here.)

Heres the thing: News outlets both on TV especially Acostas CNN and in print, like the New York Times and Washington Post, have seen their viewership and their digital subscriptions rise for one reason: They promised, in the Age of Trump, to report fearlessly. Democracy Dies in Darkness, according to the Posts instantly famous slogan but if thats the case, why do you sit there and say nothing while the camera lights are extinguished? Because it looks like youre cowering in the deathly darkness of undemocracy.

Fearless journalism isnt just asking tough questions but also standing up in meaningful ways against the current, dangerous descent into authoritarianism. The folks who hate you are still going to hate you at the end of the day, but youll win a lot of newfound respect from the rest of America by standing up for press freedom. So the next time Sean Spicer tells you to turn off the cameras, I implore you to turnthemon. You need to find out what happens next. We all need to find out

Everything is happening so fast or at least that's how it feels trying to follow politics these days. You've seen the headlines about President Trump and his policies but what do they mean for Philadelphia? What does that mean for you? We've launched a newsletter to explore just that. You cansign up to get the weekly Trumpadelphia newsletterin your inbox every Tuesday.

Published: June 26, 2017 3:01 AM EDT | Updated: June 26, 2017 7:53 PM EDT Philadelphia Daily News

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Democracy dies in darkness, so please turn on the freakin' camera lights! - Philly.com