Wall Street Journal (subscription) | Trump as a Democracy Promoter Wall Street Journal (subscription) If it were an easy task to set up a flourishing democracy, the entire world would be experiencing peace and prosperity. But it has never been simple. Many people around the world understand that liberty, opportunity and fairness flow from democratic ... |
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Trump as a Democracy Promoter - Wall Street Journal (subscription)
Garry Kasparov, chess champion and chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, on Wednesday urged people to stay engaged in the global fight for democracy.
The United States biggest problem is that its credibility as a global leader has been shattered by every president since Ronald Reagan as people around the world saw it switch from too little engagement under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and too much engagement under George W. Bush, said Kasparov.
Speaking at a dinner sponsored by the Ronkonkoma law firm Campolo, Middleton & McCormick, Kasparov also delved into how his career shaped his views of dictatorships and artificial intelligence. The event was a fundraiser for the Human Rights Foundation, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that promotes and protects human rights globally, with a focus on closed societies.
Kasparov pinned Russias current lack of freedoms on Russian activists and the West permitting the re-election of Boris Yeltsin and allowing him to cheat to ensure Communists did not return to power instead of protecting the new democratic institutions that proved too fragile to withstand the rise of Vladimir Putin.
Under Putin, Russia is besieged, he said, adding:
There people live in fear.
Though Kasparov and his family fled ethnic violence in his native Baku as the Soviet Union collapsed, his 80-year-old mother, who still lives in Moscow, tells him Putins regime in some ways is worse than the communist state.
At least the Soviets offered a more promising though distant future, he said, while, under Putin, the propaganda machine portrays an entire world against Russia and a culture of death.
Kasparov, who is half Armenian and half Jewish, said his native country would never recover until it grappled with the sins of communism, as both Germany and Japan did with their World War II atrocities.
The same holds true for Turkey, which has never recognized the Armenian genocide, he said.
Maybe its something mystical, the shadow over the dark past prevents you from recovering.
Kasparov, honored as a hero in the Soviet Union after becoming the worlds youngest chess champion at 22, later lost a match to an IBM machine called Deep Blue.
Humans should not be afraid of machines, Kasparov said, jesting that 20 years from now children will wonder at how primitive this generation was for driving cars themselves, when automated cars are so much safer.
Some good things could happen from technology because technology will help us move onto something else, he said.
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Keep up global fight for democracy, says Garry Kasparov - Newsday
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Legal battles over the precise borders of voting districts in the United States are common.
Leaning back in his chair, Jonathan Mattingly swings his legs up onto his desk, presses a key on his laptop and changes the results of the 2012 elections in North Carolina. On the screen, flickering lines and dots outline a map of the states 13 congressional districts, each of which chooses one person to send to the US House of Representatives. By tweaking the borders of those election districts, but not changing a single vote, Mattinglys maps show candidates from the Democratic Party winning six, seven or even eight seats in the race. In reality, they won only four despite earning a majority of votes overall.
Mattinglys election simulations cant rewrite history, but he hopes they will help to support democracy in the future in his state and the nation as a whole. The mathematician, at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has designed an algorithm that pumps out random alternative versions of the states election maps hes created more than 24,000 so far as part of an attempt to quantify the extent and impact of gerrymandering: when voting districts are drawn to favour or disfavour certain candidates or political parties.
Gerrymandering has a long and unpopular history in the United States. It is the main reason that the country ranked 55th of 158 nations last among Western democracies in a 2017 index of voting fairness run by the Electoral Integrity Project, an academic collaboration between the University of Sydney, Australia, and Harvard Universitys John F. Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although gerrymandering played no part in the tumultuous 2016 presidential election, it seems to have influenced who won seats in the US House of Representatives that year.
Even if gerrymandering affected just 5 seats out of 435, thats often enough to sway crucial votes, Mattingly says.
The courts intervene when gerrymandering is driven by race. Last month, for example, the Supreme Court upheld a verdict that two North Carolina districts were drawn with racial composition in mind (see Battleground state). But the courts have been much less keen to weigh in on partisan gerrymandering when one political party is favoured over another. One reason is that there has never been a clear and reliable metric to determine when this type of gerrymandering crosses the line from acceptable politicking to a violation of the US Constitution.
Mattingly and several other mathematicians hope to change that. Over the past five years, they have built algorithms and computer models that reveal biases in district borders. And theyre starting to be heard.
In December 2016, a Wisconsin court considered a statistical analysis when ruling against partisan gerrymandering. And Mattingly will serve as an expert witness in a case this summer in North Carolina.
Although such fights have begun to crop up in other countries, such as the United Kingdom and Australia, the stakes are particularly high in the United States. Lawsuits fighting partisan gerrymandering are pending around the country, and a census planned for 2020 is expected to trigger nationwide redistricting. If the mathematicians succeed in laying out their case, it could influence how those maps are drawn.
This is what the courts have been waiting for, says Megan Gall, a social scientist with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington DC. This is our way to stop it, she says.
In 1812, Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry signed a bill that redrew some voting districts to benefit his party. One odd-looking district wrapped around the city of Boston in the shape of a salamander. Political satirists dubbed the new district the 'Gerry-mander'. Since then, this strategy has become a staple of US politics as state legislators redraw voting blocs with tortuous creativity.
The two predominant approaches to gerrymandering are often referred to as packing and cracking. In packing, legislators from the party drawing the map try to pack likely opposition voters into as few political districts as possible. Cracking divides supporters of the rival party into several districts, reducing their ability to elect a representative, and ensuring victory for the party in power (see Packing and cracking).
The Supreme Court historically has not intervened, as long as districts meet four criteria: they are continuous; they are compact; they contain roughly the same number of people; and they give minority groups a chance to elect their own representatives in accordance with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In the 1986 case Davis v. Bandemer, the court agreed that it had the power to intervene in cases of partisan gerrymandering, but it declined to do so because it lacked a clear measure to indicate when this had occurred.
As a specialist in statistics and probability, Mattingly had never given much professional thought to the issue. But his general interest in the political process led him to attend a public meeting in 2013, where he heard a speaker rail against North Carolina's 2012 election outcomes. For about a decade, the state had had a relatively even split in its 13 electoral districts. Sometimes Democrats took six seats, sometimes seven. But Republican redistricting before the 2012 election packed Democrats into three districts, putting the party at a severe disadvantage. Even though its candidates won 50.3% of the votes, the party captured only four seats.
Mattingly was struck both by the passion of the rant and the puzzle it posed. If it really was unfair, there should be a way to show that mathematically, he says. I wanted to move beyond he said, she said and create something more objective. Reading around the issue, he realized he had a chance to create the metric that judges had been looking for.
Packing and cracking result in some telltale signs of interference: the opposition party tends to win by a landslide in packed districts, but lose by a narrow margin in cracked ones. And heavily gerrymandered districts are more likely to be geographically spread out and of unusual shape. With a student, Christy Graves, Mattingly got to work to combine these measures into a single, quantitative Gerrymandering Index for North Carolina.
Reporter Shamini Bundell finds out how scientists are helping get to the bottom of gerrymandering.
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The duo began with the states 2012 election districts and public data that broke down voting by neighbourhood. They then made thousands of tiny shifts to the boundaries of the districts, essentially testing every iteration that would meet the four Supreme Court criteria.
Ensuring continuity and that each district varied in population size by only 0.1% was relatively straightforward. So was guaranteeing that the map included a representative number of African American and Hispanic-majority districts to comply with the Voting Rights Act.
But evaluating compactness was a challenge. One problem was that its difficult to analyse mathematically whether a district meets a rather vague written criterion of being compact. For another, mathematicians have more than 30 different ways to calculate a shapes compactness, each of which gives slightly different results. There is no consensus on which is the best for voting districts. Mathematician Moon Duchin at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, has spent the past few years trying to devise a compactness metric for gerrymandering. But the field is a giant mess, she says.
Complicating the issue even further, many districts have odd shapes owing to rivers and other natural boundaries. Mattingly and Graves developed a compactness score calculated as the length of a districts perimeter squared divided by its area, a version of what's known as the PolsbyPopper measure (see Compact division). A circle has the lowest ratio of perimeter to area; but as borders meander to include and exclude specific areas, the perimeter expands, giving a higher ratio.
With thousands of maps and their resulting voting outcomes in hand, Mattingly and Graves could begin to analyse just how gerrymandered the North Carolina voting districts were. Three of the 13 districts for the 2012 elections were more than three-quarters Democrat, much more packed than in any of the teams randomly drawn maps, even for their bluest-of-blue Democratic districts. More telling, however, was the impact on election outcomes. Using the randomly drawn maps, 7.6 seats went to Democrats on average, compared with the 4 they actually won (J. Mattingly and C. Vaughn Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.8796; 2014). The more you learn, the more infuriating it gets, Mattingly says.
Their analysis of data from other states revealed a partisan gerrymander in Maryland perpetrated by the Democrat-controlled legislature to freeze out its conservative rivals. States such as Arizona and Iowa, which have independent or bipartisan commissions that oversee the creation of voting districts, fared much better. In a separate analysis, Daniel McGlone, a geographic-information-system data analyst at the technology firm Azavea in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, ranked each states voting districts for compactness as a measure of gerrymandering, and found that Maryland had the most-gerrymandered districts. North Carolina came second. Nevada, Nebraska and Indiana were the least gerrymandered.
In the summer of 2016, a bipartisan panel of retired judges met to see whether they could create a more representative set of voting districts for North Carolina. Their maps gave Mattingly a chance to test his index. The judges districts, he found, were less gerrymandered than in 75% of the computer-generated models a sign of a well-drawn, representative map. By comparison, every one of the 24,000 computer-drawn districts was less gerrymandered than either the 2012 or 2016 voting districts drawn by state legislators, which Mattingly, Graves and their colleagues reported in April 2017 (S. Bangia et al. Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1704.03360; 2017).
This is the result that I hope gets traction, Mattingly says. It shows that the election results really didnt represent the will of the people. When representatives from Common Cause, a pro-democracy advocacy group based in Washington DC, saw the work, they asked Mattingly to serve as an expert witness in a North Carolina partisan-gerrymandering case coming up this summer. The question for researchers and judges, however, is whether Mattinglys approach is the best.
The election results really didn't represent the will of the people.
Mathematicians in other states have also been developing methods for evaluating gerrymandering. At the University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign, political statistician Wendy Tam Cho has designed algorithms to draw district maps that use the criteria mandated by state law, but do not include partisan information such as an areas voting history. By altering the importance of the compactness score, or how equal the different populations in each district need to be, she can generate a new set of districts. Cho measures how closely a states existing legislative districts line up with billions of non-partisan maps drawn by her supercomputing cluster. If they diverge significantly, then the people who drew the districts probably had partisan motives for placing the lines where they did, Cho says.
Chos approach creates more maps than Mattinglys, which she says gives it an advantage. But Mattingly argues that his algorithms are more transparent and so can be used to calculate a score that judges might prefer. Both strategies are highly technical and require professional expertise to implement and interpret, says Sam Wang, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, New Jersey, who analyses elections and voting in his spare time at the blog Princeton Election Consortium. The Supreme Court has said it is looking for a manageable standard. For constitutional questions, judges might find it more manageable to avoid having to call upon outside experts, Wang says.
Political scientist Nicholas Stephanopoulos at the University of Chicago, Illinois, takes a much simpler approach to measuring gerrymandering. He has developed what he calls an efficiency gap, which measures a states wasted votes: all those cast for a losing candidate in each district, and all those for the victor in excess of the proportion needed to win. If one party has lots of landslide victories and crushing losses compared with its rivals, this can be a sign of gerrymandering. The simplicity of this metric is a strength, says Wang.
But Duchin argues that methods that analyse only one aspect of gerrymandering, whether its lopsided wins or low compactness scores, are less than ideal. She favours a metric, such as Mattinglys, that incorporates the variety of factors that contribute.
Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, questions the validity of all these quantitative metrics, however, because they rely on creating a random sample of all possible voting districts. It is impossible to calculate how random a sample they are looking at, he argues. There are more ways to draw voting districts in the US than there are quarks in the Universe.
There are more ways to draw voting districts in the US than there are quarks in the Universe.
Accusations of gerrymandering have also cropped up in the United Kingdom. Until 20 years ago, the creation of voting districts by the independent Boundary Commissions was a largely apolitical process, according to geographer Ron Johnston at the University of Bristol, UK. In the 1990s, supporters of the Labour party, then in opposition, realized that they could influence the creation of parliamentary constituencies by submitting their own maps to the Boundary Commissions for consideration, which opened the door to all parties jockeying for power, Johnston says. An overhaul of UK constituencies currently under way could cut the number of Members of Parliament by 50; the final result of the Boundary Commissions' review is expected in 2018. Political parties are expected to try to shift the results in their favour, but quantitative solutions could help to depoliticize the process.
US legislators have been reluctant to embrace a mathematical solution to gerrymandering. But current court cases show that pressure to do so is mounting, Gall says. In the Wisconsin case Whitford v. Gill, federal judges used the efficiency gap to rule that the states voting districts represented an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. The case could end up before the Supreme Court later this year.
If judges are to accept a mathematical test for gerrymandering, they will need testimony from expert witnesses such as Mattingly to explain how and why these tests work. But the handful of mathematicians researching the subject will not be enough for the countrys pending lawsuits. Even if the courts settle on a standard metric, judges might need an expert in each case. Thats why Duchin is organizing a week-long summer camp to help mathematicians learn the underlying subtleties of the various gerrymandering models and how to apply and explain them. Duchin expected 50 people to sign up; more than 1,000 have applied. The response blew us out of the water, she says, and several camps will now be held.
Mattingly and his model will have their day in court this summer. Even if his algorithms dont become the standard, Mattingly hopes that the judicial system will find a way to curb gerrymandering and restore his faith in the electoral system. Im a citizen, too, he says.
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The mathematicians who want to save democracy - Nature.com
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi at the Capitol on Friday in Washington.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
Last week, President Trumps White House took a significant but little noticed action. At meetings with top officials for various government departments this spring, Uttam Dhillon, a White House lawyer, told agencies not to cooperate with [any oversight] requests from Democrats, reported Politico. This is the formalization of an ongoing practice of sidelining such requestswhich were often responded to in previous administrationsamid Republican fear that any evidence could be used against the president. As Politico reports oversight letters requesting information from agencies have gone unanswered since January.
Jamelle Bouie isSlates chief political correspondent.
Whats more, the White House Office of Legal Counsel holds that no minority lawmakerincluding ranking members of a given committeecan be granted information without the approval of the chairperson. As long as Republicans hold both chambers of Congress, in other words, they can lock Democrats out of any meaningful oversight authority. Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, calls this the latest in a series of abuses by the Trump administration to operate in a shroud of secrecy, a move that overturns long-standing norms and practices raising the standard for congressional inquiry to an almost unreachable high. Yes, previous administrations, Democrat and Republican, have ignored or slow-walked oversight requests from opposition lawmakers. But this blanket rejection is a major escalation of partisan combat in governance, an outright statement that Democrats have no prerogatives a Republican administration is bound to even acknowledge.
Its an attack on democracy. Members of Congress represent the people, and refusal to provide them with the information they want or need as a matter of policy is saying that were going to shut down half of Congress, Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York told Slate. To systematically say were not going to give people the time of day to half the members of Congress just because theyre the wrong political party, thats smacking the American people in the nose. Its saying how dare you elect Democrats; we dont approve of what you did.
More broadly, White House rejection of opposition oversight is in keeping with actions from congressional Republicans, as well as Republicans at the state level. Americas two-party democracy only works if both sides see each other as legitimate actors with the right to wield power should they win it. The Democratic Party, as evidenced by the rapid and normal transfer of power from President Obama to President Trump, still holds that principle. But increasingly, it seems the GOP does not.
From Congress and the White House to the state and local level, Republicans have embraced a style of politics that treats opponents as presumptively illegitimate, using all and any means to hinder their ability to govern. On the other side, when Republicans hold power, a growing number reject constraints on their ability to act, attacking inconvenient norms and tilting the playing field in their favor. With the modern Republican Party, weve moved from ordinary partisan competitioneven partisan hardballto something ominous and illiberal.
The political roots of this extend back to Richard Nixons silent majority and found a modern expression in the 1994 Republican revolution and the often-extreme response to the presidency of Bill Clinton. But the previous apotheosis of this politics was in the reaction to Barack Obama. Yes, opposition parties oppose, and theres no crime in maximizing ones advantage or leverage over an opponent. And many of the moves and tactics in question had been used before, albeit rarely, by Democrats. What makes Republican behavior under Obama noteworthy, however, was the unprecedented intensity, ferocity, and uniformity.
From the outset, Republican lawmakers formed an almost undivided front against the Obama administration. After 2011, when Republicans gained a House majority, they began a strategy of legislative brinkmanshiphostage takingthreatening catastrophic outcomes to extract extreme concessions from Obama. The underlying premise was always clear: Obama was not a legitimate president, and if he would not voluntarily bend to conservatives will, they would force him to do so.
Equally disturbing was the drive toward a kind of nullification, blocking qualified nomineeseven after acknowledging their competence and integrityto prevent implementation of duly signed laws. Republicans filibustered nominees for both the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, not out of any dispute with the nominees, but because they opposed the agencies themselves. The problem is obvious: Lawmakers are obligated to carry out laws. It is one thing to condemn a law or run against it; its something differentand novelto attempt to sabotage it for ideological and partisan gain.
Most significant was the blockade of the Supreme Court seat left by the late Antonin Scalia. For more than a year, Republicans refused to accept or hear then-President Obamas nominee for the court, Merrick Garland.
This unbending strategy of obstruction, demonization, and near-nullification was echoed in the partys overall rhetoric toward Obama.
Any Republican who voted for Garland risked a massive backlash from a conservative base who saw the Supreme Court fight in stark, almost apocalyptic terms. There would be no hearing and no vote. Led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Republicans ignored the presidents nomination, essentially treating it as illegitimate.
Had Hillary Clinton won the presidency, this may have continued. [I]f Hillary Clinton becomes president, I am going to do everything I can do to make sure four years from now, we still got an opening on the Supreme Court, said North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr just before the election. Of course, that didnt happen. Trump was elected president, and Republicans quickly cleared the way for his Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, killing the judicial filibuster to preclude Democratic opposition.
This unbending strategy of obstruction, demonization, and near-nullification was echoed in the partys overall rhetoric toward Obama. Both Republican politicians and right-wing media routinely cast Obama as a fundamental threat to American democracy. He was destroying our economic system as we currently know it; his economic plan was Stalin without the bloodshed; he was driving the nation off the cliff to oblivion; he was even enslaving the nations children. When Donald Trump emerged to cast doubt on his origins and birthplacequestioning his legitimacy with racist innuendoRepublicans normalized the charge, with a number of candidates expressing their doubts during the 2010 midterm elections.
Obama was the focal point for attacks on the legitimacy of Democratic governance for the simple reason that he was presidentalthough one cant discount the significance of racial backlash either. But this goes beyond him.
Since 2010, and exploding after 2013, when the Supreme Court struck down key portions of the Voting Rights Act, Republicans across the country have embarked on a comprehensive project of gerrymandering and aggressive voter suppression, slashing access and raising new barriers to voting. Theyve been neither shy nor demure about their aims. Now we have photo ID, and I think photo ID will make quite a difference as well, said Wisconsin Rep. Glenn Grothman on the eve of the 2016 election, when asked about Hillary Clintons chances of winning the state. (Trump won.) Four years earlier, in Pennsylvania, Republican lawmakers bragged that a new strict identification law would deliver the state for Mitt Romney. (He lost there, but four years later Trump won.) Republicans in states like Florida and North Carolina, likewise, have openly said that their voter ID laws are meant to smooth the path for GOP candidates. The North Carolina law was especially egregious, an effort that targeted black voters with surgical precision, according to a federal court.
In addition to voter suppression, North Carolina also saw an effort to all but nullify the results of an election, full stop. Following the surprise victory of Democrat Roy Cooper in the race for governor, the Republican-led legislature held an emergency session where it stripped the office of much of its authority, just a few years after those same Republicans expanded its power and influence under a GOP governor. Republicans eliminated executive appointments, removed the governors power to appoint trustees to the university system and the state board of education, and reformed state election boards to protect Republican efforts to restrict the vote.
One can read these measures as crude attempts to win partisan advantagehardball political tactics taken too far. But they cannot be viewed outside the long history of efforts to curtail voting among black Americans and other more marginal groups. These are also in line with a long strain in American thought that has cast suspicion on the political claims of women and nonwhites, groups held as dependent and thus unsuited to self-governance.
The founders of the country were preoccupied with what they called republican virtue. In their view, a democratic society couldnt function without a virtuous citizenry, with virtue defined by ones economic independence. Landowners and self-sufficient farmers were imbued with the qualities for republican self-governance. Women, enslaved people, and anyone without an obvious stake in societylike immigrants and industrial workerswere not.
For as much as we have expanded our notions of citizenshipof who counts and who can governthose ideas are still embedded in our political culture. They found expression after the Civil War, when opponents of black voting rights argued that the experience of slavery rendered black Americans unable to participate in the process of self-government. They found expression at the beginning of the 20th century, when a new Ku Klux Klan established itself on a white supremacy and patriarchy informed by that republican tradition and its suspicion of the dependent and propertyless. We even see it now, albeit in less extreme form; Romneys 47 percent and Paul Ryans makers and takers remarks during the 2012 campaign both reflected the belief that theres something illegitimate in the claims of people who rely on explicit aid from the state.
Supercharging these strains of thought are the homogenous demographics of the Republican Party itself. It is the political home of the large majority of white Americans, especially in the South, where it dominates. In turn, it has absorbed that regions legacy of reaction, including a radical theory of democracyarticulated by South Carolinas John C. Calhounthat placed sovereignty in political minorities, and which sanctioned nullification as the proper response to governments that overstep their bounds or infringe on the liberty of the powerful to exert force for the powerless.
Whether or not Republican politicians articulate these views and ideas, its clear that their actions are informed by them. It takes few conceptual leaps to move from classical republican thought to the idea that, because of their membership, some political parties are more legitimate than others; to move from Calhoun to the reactionary ethos that demands the restoration of an imagined America under an idealized Constitution.
In the Trump era, the drive to delegitimize opponents has only grown stronger, driven in large part by the president himself. In his short tenure as chief executive, Trump has attacked federal judges for challenging his travel ban; portrayed protesters as tools of shadowy conspirators; and continued his crusade against the news media, denouncing it as fake and even calling it the enemy of the people. Far from defending journalists, more ordinary Republicans have joined in, taking a blind eye to attacks on reporterssometimes literallyeven building political strategy around anti-journalist sentiment, stoking and embracing anti-media sentiment to show Republicans voters that they, just like the president, are battling a biased press corps out to destroy them.
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Republicans treated the mid-term elections of 2010 as an electoral coup that put them in a position to gerrymander legislative and congressional districts, suppress Democratic votes, politicize state courts -- and when all that failed -- to steal elections in... More...
In their book Its Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein wrote that the Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
That was published in 2012. Since then, the GOP has gotten worse. The Republican Party is even more scornful of its opposition, and even less willing to concede their legitimacy. It is even more contemptuous of shared governancecrafting vast, consequential legislation in complete secrecyand increasingly hostile to those who vote and march against it. None of this is to say the Democratic Party is faultless. But its problemsmost prominently its myopia, muddled message, and hidebound thinkingare typical. Theyre normal. The GOP doesnt have problems, it has pathologies. And they are not normal.
Were past the point of shifting blame. We know who gave us the presidency of Donald Trump, and it wasnt Hillary Clinton or Jill Stein or James Comey.
The culprit was democracy.
Even if you defend democracy on the grounds that Trump lost the popular vote, its still a lame argument. After all, what kind of sensible political system generates 63 million votes for a thuggish incompetent to become its supreme leader?
Democracy was rarely an exercise in smooth sailing. Now, this.
The choice of Mr. Trump, a man so signally lacking in the virtues, abilities, knowledge and experience to be expected of a president, has further damaged the attractions of the democratic system, wrote an exceedingly glum Martin Wolf in the Financial Times this week. The soft power of democracy is not what it was. It has produced Mr. Trump as leader of the worlds most important country. It is not an advertisement.
Wolf isnt wrong, of course. If General Electric had gone bonkers and installed Trump as CEO, the smart money wouldve deserted the company, fearing for its future. Yet whats to stop Trump from doing far more damage as president?
In an interview with Vox, political scientist Larry Bartels said:
History clearly demonstrates that democracies need parties to organize and simplify the political world. But parties dont make the fundamental problems of democratic control disappear; they just submerge them more or less successfully. When professional politicians are reasonably enlightened and skillful and the rules and political culture let them do their job, democracy will usually work pretty well. When not, not.
Democracy is not working pretty well in the U.S. Still, while there may be no reason to grant Trump himself patience, the democratic system itself has earned some.
Shashi Tharoor, a longtime United Nations official who is now a member of the Indian parliament, wrote in an email:
Every system of government produces uneven results: There have been wise monarchs and feckless ones, capable benign dictators and incompetent ruthless ones, brilliant statesmen in democracies and people who owed their leadership positions to luck (the weakness of the alternatives) or merely inoffensiveness (the least unacceptable candidate). . . .
The strength of democracies is that because their leadership emerges from the will of the public as a whole, the system has a way of accommodating to them and very often, blunting their worst mistakes. Undemocratic systems have nowhere else to turn, and no established way of making the turn. So however flawed individual leaders may be, the self-correcting mechanisms built into democracy limit how much damage they can do.
The nations intelligence bureaucracies and news media are already shaking the foundation of the Trump presidency, leak by damaging leak. Courts are constraining some of the White Houses baser impulses. Democratic and civil society opposition is fierce, and has been joined by a small but intellectually potent cohort of principled conservatives. Inflection points, from the scheduled testimony next week of former FBI director James Comey to the midterm elections in 2018, present opportunities to educate the public and strengthen resistance. Whether anything can induce Trumps Republican enablers to abandon him is unknown.
If democracy produces a renewed commitment to democracy, Harvard historian Jill Lepore said in an email, democracy is working.
In his book The Confidence Trap, political scientist David Runciman pointed to the 1970s as an era in which democracy seemed to be marching haplessly toward failure, yet turned out to be gaining strength. In an interview with me last year he said:
Apparently the Chinese leadership is enjoying watching Trumps rise, because it seems to confirm all their suspicions of democracy: Its hucksterism plus stupidity. But in 1974 the Soviet leadership thought Watergate showed that democracy was finished. How could it survive such a scandal?
It survived, of course, and even thrived, eventually grinding down the Soviet Union. A similar emergence from the Trumpian ashes is possible. But it is not assured. Wolf is correct to worry that democracy everywhere is undermined by Trump anywhere. Yet with profound exceptions, democracy has been very good both to Americans and the world. Both may yet rally to the cause.
Francis Wilkinson writes editorials on politics and U.S. domestic policy for Bloomberg View.
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Democracy faces enemy within - Fairfield Daily Republic