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It was a few days after the start of the new millennium, and the U.S. Embassy in Moscow was holding a reception at Spaso House, for decades the elegant residence of the American ambassador. Russias tumultuous Boris Yeltsin era had come to an abrupt, shocking end on New Years Day, when the Russian president who had brought down the Soviet Union and turned his country into a chaotic, fledgling democracy announced his resignation. His successor was the man he had named his prime minister just four months earlier, a man barely known to most Russians, let alone to the outside world: former KGB officer Vladimir Putin.

As Jim Collins, a soft-spoken career diplomat who was then the U.S. ambassador to Russia, made the rounds at that reception, querying guests as to what they thought of the dramatic shift atop the Kremlin, the overwhelming sentiment was relief. The Yeltsin era, which had begun with so much promise, had turned into a shambolic, deeply corrupt dystopia. Yeltsin, who had burst to prominence with a burly energyhis climb atop a tank in central Moscow to turn back revanchists who sought to save the Soviet dictatorship is one of the iconic moments of the Cold Wars endhad become chronically ill and increasingly fond of his vodka. A group of politically connected businessmen had raped the country economically and spirited most of their gains offshore. Its budget was busted, its civil servants unpaid. (I did a story then about a colonel in the Soviet Rocket Forces who killed himself because he could not afford to throw his wife a birthday party.) The once mightyand mightily effectiveKGB had to watch its best officers go off to work for private businessmen, leaving the state security services demoralized and increasingly corrupt. Russia was in chaos.

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Collins listened to the various opinions offered and then offered his own. They need someone, he said, who can get control of this place. In other words, he too was relieved that Yeltsin was gone.

We forget now, in the midst of the intensifying hysteria in Washington, D.C., about all things Russia, that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putinnow commonly portrayed as a cartoon villain by Western politicians and presshad a honeymoon period. Many people back then chose to disregard Putins career in the KGB and focused instead on the fact that he had been an energetic aide to the reform-minded mayor of his native St. Petersburg in the immediate post-Soviet era. Madeleine Albright, then Bill Clintons secretary of state, called him a reformer, and both sides of the political aisle in Washington were conned by Putin in the following decade. George W. Bush, desperately seeking Russian help in the post-9/11 war on terror, famously said he had looked into [Putins] soul. ("So have I, cracked Senator John McCain, "and I saw three letters: KGB.) As recently as the 2012 election, President Barack Obama mocked Mitt Romney for calling Putin a threat to the United States. "The 1980s called, and they want their foreign policy back, Obama cracked.

Outgoing Russian president Boris Yeltsin, center right, shakes hands with Russian prime minister and acting president Vladimir Putin, left, as he leaves the Kremlin in 1999. Sovfoto/UIG/Getty

That was one U.S. election cycle ago. Now, according to its critics, Russia is a mortal threat to all the West holds dear, and it attempted to intervene, largely through cyberspace, in the 2016 election. Americas most prized possessionits democracywas attacked in what McCain, speaking for much of the Washington establishment, called an act of war. The new Trump administration is beset by an FBI investigation into whether members of his campaign colluded with Moscow in an attempt to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House. Trump had to fire his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, for dissembling about what he said to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the transition. Then, on May 10, he fired the man overseeing the FBIs investigation into Russia and the Trump campaign, Director James Comey, in part because he wouldnt publicly clear the president of having any ties to Moscow.

Suddenly, an undeniable whiff of Watergate-style crisis was in the D.C. air. But this scandal has a distinctive feature: As the multiple investigations unfold over the coming weeks and months, remember that this is not a homegrown scandal but one made in Moscow. Rarely, if ever, during the Cold War did Russia so effectively roil American politics.

Set aside, for the moment, whether this is a crisis or, as Trump would have it, a fake story manufactured by Democrats angry that they lost the election and peddled by their allies in the press. Less than two decades ago, Putin had inherited an exhausted, bankrupt country. Once a superpower, it wielded almost no geopolitical clout, not even in its own backyard. (The United States had humiliated Moscowand infuriated Putin, then running the Federal Security Service, the KGBs successor, for Yeltsinwhen it bombed Russian ally Serbia during the Kosovo war in 1999.)

Now Russia is again public enemy No. 1 in the United States, and Putin is on offense around the world. He is the primary backer of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, thanks to his audacious deployment of Russias military to combat the anti-Assad Islamic rebels. He annexed Crimea and sent Russian troops and special operators into eastern Ukraine, where they remain today. In the Far East, he is moving Russia closer to a military alliance with Beijing. And in Europe and the United States, Putins cyberwarriors are wreaking havoc.

How did Putin pull all this off? Out of the humiliation of the 90sremember, Putin has famously said that the Soviet Unions collapse was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th centuryhe had one essential insight. He knew Russias greatest asset was its vast natural resourcesoil and gas and minerals and timberall of which Yeltsin had peddled away to the oligarchs for a pittance. Putin realized it was critical for the Russian state to reacquire those assets. If the government controlled the countrys resourcesand in particular the oilit would again wield significant influence, particularly in Europe. Putin set about doing that.

Consider the case of Yukos, the oil giant acquired in the 90s by businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had paid about $150 million for a company that by 2004 would be valued at $20 billion . Starting in 2003, Putins government brought a series of tax evasion charges against Yukos and its management. Moscow sought $27 billion in back taxes, but thats not all Putin wanted. Yukos produced 20 percent of Russian oil, and Putin wanted it back. The government froze Yukoss assets and declined to engage in settlement talks; then, in October 2003, Khodorkovsky was arrested. (He would spend more than a decade in jail.) Moscow then seized Yukoss assets and eventually transferred them to a company called Rosneft, which was run by Igor Sechinlike Putin, a KGB alumnus.

The reacquisition of assets, either outright by the state or by private companies run by men loyal to Putin, had commenced. Putin was undoing what Yeltsin had done in the 90s. Today, much of Russias oil reserves are controlled by state-owned companies.

Putins timing could hardly have been better. In the 90s, prices for nearly all commodities had slumped. But after the turn of the century, a new and voracious consumer of commodities emergedChina, its economy growing by nearly 10 percent a year for several years running. Russia didnt sell much directly to China back then, thanks to the strategic wariness between the two that dated back to the Cold War. But that didnt matter. Chinas demand for everything from oil to timber to bauxite drove up global prices, and the Russian economy benefited enormously because of it.

Former Yukos chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky, center, stands behind steel bars in a court in Moscow, on August 3, 2004. Alexander Natruskin/Reuters

Human rights activists were outraged that Khodorkovsky was stewing in jail on trumped-up charges, but the average Russian didnt care. I remember visiting Moscow in 2007 and being struck by how it had been transformed since Yeltsins departure. In the 90s, most of the city had a dingy, low-rent feel. Now there were new retail stores everywhere and customers with the money to shop in them.

Putin got lucky that Chinas economic ascent coincided with his first decade in power, but he knew what he wanted to do with the money the commodities boom brought in. He shored up the states finances, and in the process, began rebuilding the state security services, the KGBs successor agencies, the ministry of the interior and the military.

He also recruited young, tech-savvy Russians to work for the motherlandsomething few of them would have even considered when I was there in the second half of the 1990s. And this raises an important point about Putins rise that most of the West, amid the current hysteria about Russia, misses. That countrys economic recovery, as well as the widespread sense that Putin was restoring order when there had been none, made him broadly popular at home. He was, you might say, making Russia great again, and most Russians loved that. That made it easier for Moscow to persuade those bright young people to become cyberwarriors for Mother Russia; the people who hacked the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clintons campaign arent Cold War relics. Theyre mostly millennials who give themselves funky online nicknames and gleefully wreak havoc.

Russia staged its first massive cyberattack against a foreign government in 2007. Estonia was the targetone of three former Soviet states in the Baltics that had claimed independence when the U.S.S.R. collapsed in 1991. Dozens of Estonian government and business websites were crippled for days by distributed denial-of-service attacks from Moscow, which had been angered by alleged discrimination against native Russians living in the country.

As Newsweek reported exclusively on May 12 , that same year, Russia hacked the presidential campaign of then-candidate Barack Obamaattacks that campaign officials were unaware of at the time. Once Obama was elected, Russian hackers targeted several top officials in his departments of state, energy and defense.

Moscow was just getting started. It launched another massive cyberattack in 2008 when Russian forces, as part of Putins efforts to secure what Russians call their near abroad, invaded Georgia. As David Batashvili, then a National Security Council staffer for the Georgian government in the capital city of Tbilisi, recalls, "All of our government and media websites went down just as Russian troops were crossing the border. It was a massive cyberattack and very effective.

Since then, Putin has made his cybermuscle an essential part of Russias influence globally. In late December, Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko said that in just the previous two months, central government institutionsthe ministries of defense and finance and the capital citys power gridhad been attacked 6,500 times, probes that NATO commanders worry could portend a further Russian military incursion into the country soon.

Russia, as weve seen, also uses cyberwarriors to disrupt political campaigns abroad, whether its hacking Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podestas emails or rummaging through the files of new French President Emmanuel Macron, whom Moscow also opposed. (Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate Macron defeated, was openly pro-Putin.) And German Chancellor Angela Merkel has already warned that Moscow will likely try to disrupt the German elections in the fall.

Its clear that Russia is meddling abroad, but its not clear if these intrusions are strategically smart. Political analysts in Moscow deride the notion that Putin was obsessed with defeating Clinton, as she once put it, but he did harbor an animus toward the Obama administration. He believed it helped foment anti-Putin demonstrations throughout Russia in 2011. While secretary of state, Clinton had criticized the legitimacy of Russias parliamentary election, and Putin said publicly that such interference in Russias political process was intolerable. Four years later, he let loose his hackers to work against her campaign for the White House.

The question now for Putin is whether the Russian effort to help defeat Clinton and elect Trump was worth it. Its already clearand will become clearer as the multiple investigations into this affair unfold in D.C.that Moscows cyberwarriors interfered with the election. Assume, for the sake of argument, that Putin ordered his intelligence services to collude with the Trump campaign, if not the candidate itself (although there is no evidence of that). Very little of that could be done in secret, and it will likely be exposed. And thats why Moscow-Washington relations, both sides acknowledge, are now at a post-Cold War low. Trumps meeting May 11 with Putins foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, coming as it did amid the intensifying anti-Russia hysteria in Washington, was an embarrassment for the president. He may have come into the Oval Office seeking better relations with Moscow, but politically he has a shrinking amount of wiggle room to do that.

President Donald Trump meets with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, right, at the White House in Washington on May 10. Trump welcomed Vladimir Putin's top diplomat to the White House for Trump's highest level face-to-face contact with a Russian government official since he took office in January, the day after he fired FBI director James Comey. Russian Foreign Ministry/AP

Diplomats say Putins near-term geopolitical goals are clear: Hes not backing down in Syria, and Moscows military presence there effectively precludes the U.S. from doing anything other than one-off strikes against Assads military assets (while diligently alerting Moscow about them beforehand). He also wants to see if he can leverage his position in Syria to gain concessions from the West on Ukraine. That is, he may offer cooperation in setting up safe zones in Syria in return for the elimination of U.S. and European Union sanctions against Russia triggered by his snatching of Crimea.

That hes even in a position to try to pull all that off is remarkable, given where Russia was on January 1, 2000: in chaos at home and in retreat abroad. But in the current environment, could the Trump administration, and its allies in Western Europe, make concessions to Putin on anything ? In Washington, Putin has managed to turn the Democratic Party, which since the early 1970s has consistently sought better relations with Moscow, into hysterical, the-Russians-are-coming! Cold Warriors. Many Republicans, instinctively mistrustful of Russia, are looking for a bunker to dive into as they hope this Putin storm blows over; theyll give Trump no cover if he tries to reorient U.S. foreign policy in a way that pleases Putin. And the president, increasingly isolated just four months into his term, is left to tweet bizarre threats and accusations.

Putin may have restored Russian pride, and a semblance of its Great Power status, but the former spymaster may well have overplayed his hand in trying to tilt the 2016 U.S. election to his preferred candidate. He may have gotten the result he wantedbut someday wish he hadnt.

Sean Gallup/Getty

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Inside Putin's Campaign to Destroy U.S. Democracy - Newsweek - Newsweek

Outrage over gerrymandering and demands for electoral reform crop up after every election cycle from pundits and journalists whenever they see strangely drawn legislative district boundaries or a peculiar election result. The former occurs every ten years as states undergo the decennial rituals of reapportionment and redistricting. The latter occurs when a president wins the electoral vote and loses the popular vote. Yet, the root cause goes unaddressed.

In the wake of the election of President Trump, calls for reform of virtually the entire electoral process have arisen from all points on the compass: use redistricting commissions, amend the constitution to get rid of the Electoral College, loosen restrictions on voter registration, etc. Fact is, though, advocates of election reform frequently lose enthusiasm when they discover that reform may actually cost them a favorite incumbent. Furthermore, we find that incumbents not surprisingly are more than a little hesitant to call for reforms that might cost them their place in the legislature. Self-interest still guides politics.

Let me suggest that we lengthen legislative terms.

Ask any legislator and she or he will tell you that they like having districts tailored to their strengths so they can decrease if not minimize the cost of and time spent on the campaign trail. At first blush, this would seem about the most anti-democratic sentiment imaginable.

Thats a reasonable reaction in the abstract. But in reality, we need to admit that the legislators have a point. In Virginia, senate terms are four years. In the House of Delegates, they are two years. This is a common arrangement throughout the United States. Only five states have longer terms for the lower house of their legislatures: Alabama, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi and North Dakota have four-year terms. This means that in 44 states (not counting Nebraska that has only a one-house legislature), members of the lower house are in what amounts to a constant state of election campaigning.

In Virginia, the general election is in November. The corresponding 2017 primary election is in June. To get on the primary ballot, one had to file papers no later than March 30. The legislative session runs only through January and February. This means that legislators have barely more than one session to engage in legislation before they need to take on primary challengers in anticipation of a general election. Could this be too much democracy?

Not to mention, the American electoral process is incredibly expensive. Virtually every candidate has to run twice in the primary and in the general election every cycle. To campaign effectively in the election cycle, one must be out courting voters far in advance. So if our elected officials must spend at least half of their time in office campaigning to stay in office, it stands to reason that they might want to make it easier to hang on to the seat they invested so much time in winning. Cast in this light, its not hard to understand a legislators desire for a handcrafted district.

In essence, the urge to gerrymander districts at the peoples expense arises from the peoples desire to have primary elections and lengthy electoral processes. So why not make a minor modification: Make legislative terms longer and give our elected officials more time to spend on legislating and governing?

Incumbents would be less worried about constantly warding off challengers especially from their own parties in primaries if they could spend more time establishing a legislative record. Maybe they would not be so preoccupied with creating designer districts. By lengthening legislative terms, we would decrease the number and therefore the overall cost of elections. This might actually make for a better democracy.

In sum, this is a call for a little less democracy in favor of better quality democracy. The way our politics is constructed, Americans have sacrificed quality for quantity and the cost of this decision shows each election cycle.Everyone would win if this small reform were

Everyone would win if this small reform were affected. Voters would benefit from less gerrymandering and, perhaps, better Election Day choices. Incumbents would be able to focus on governing as well as campaigning. Challengers would have more time to build better platforms. Democracy would improve. From this perspective, a constitutional amendment to lengthen terms would probably be entirely uncontroversial.

Lengthening legislative terms may seem like a small measure, but it would have an extraordinarily positive impact on American elections.

Mark Rush is Stanley D. and Nikki Waxberg Professor of Politics and Law and Director of the Center for International Education at Washington and Lee University. His writing and research cover law, politics, elections, democracy and professional baseball and football. Follow him on Twitter @Mark_Rush.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.

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Less democracy is better democracy Here's why - The Hill (blog)

When Michel Temer was permanently installed as president less than one year ago after the impeachment of elected President Dilma Rousseff, the primary justification offered by Brazilian media figures was that he would bring stability and unity to a country beset by political and economic crisis. From the start, the opposite has been true: Temer and his closest allies were a vessel for far more corruption, controversy, instability, and shame than anything that preceded them.His approval ratings have literally collapsed to single digits.

But yesterdays emergence of proof showing just how dirty and corrupt Temer is makes the situation utterly unsustainable. Leaks from the ongoing corruption investigation reveal that Temer was caught on tape in March endorsingan executives ongoing payment of bribes to maintain the silence of Eduardo Cunha, the formerly omnipotent, now-imprisoned house speaker who presided over Dilmas impeachment and belongs to Temers party. Temer had already faced allegations of deep involvement in bribes and illegal contributions, but that could be overlooked because unlike now no smoking gun existed.

Meanwhile, Dilmas 2014 opponent in the presidential campaign conservative Senator Acio Neves (shown above with Temer at the latters inauguration), whose party led Dilmas impeachment and now dominates Temers government was caught on tape requesting 2 million reals from a businessman. He was removed this morning from his seatby a Supreme Court ruling, had his office raided, and now faces immediate imprisonment. Acios sister was imprisoned this morning as part of the corruption investigation.

In sum, the two key figures driving Dilmas impeachment were just revealed to be hardened criminals, with documentary evidence audio recordings, videos, and online chats which all Brazilians will soon see, hear, and read. The exact type of smoking gun evidence that Brazils notoriously biased corporate media searched for with futility for years against Dilma was just discovered against the two key figures that drove her impeachment, one of whom they installed as president.

To say that this situation Temers ongoing presidency is unsustainable is an understatement. How can a major country possibly be governed by someone who everyone knows just months ago encouragedthepayment of bribes to keep key witnesses silenced in a corruption investigation? The sole rationale for Temers presidency that he wouldbring stability and signal to markets that Brazil wasagain open for business has just collapsed in a heap of humiliation and destruction.

At this point, Temers removal one way or the other seems inevitable. Although he is momentarily refusing to resign, his key allies are starting to abandon him. The media stars who installed him are now trashing him. There is open discussion everywhere about the mechanisms that will be used to remove and replace him.

Even for the sleazy power brokers of Braslia, getting caught on tape directly participating in blatant criminalityis disqualifying: not to stay in the House or Senate, but to serve as the symbolic face of the country to the world and, more importantly, to capital markets. Whats new is not that Temer is corrupt: Everyone knew that, including those who installed him. Whats new is that the evidence is now too embarrassing too sabotaging of their project to allow him to stay.

This always wasthe towering irony at the heart of Dilmas impeachment. As those of us who argued against impeachmentrepeatedly pointed out, removing the democratically elected president in the name of battling criminalitywas such a farce precisely because her removal would elevate and empower the most corrupt factions, the darkest criminals and bandits,and enable them to rule the country without having won an election.

Indeed, the empowerment of the countrys most corrupt factions was a key goal of Dilmas impeachment. As shown by yet another secret recording one revealed last year that captured the plotting of Temers key ally, Romero Juc thereal goal of impeachment (aside from austerity and privatization) was to enable those politicians most endangered by criminal proceedingsto use their new, unearned political power to kill the ongoing investigation (stop the bleeding) and thus protect themselves from accountability and punishment. The empowerment of the nations most corrupt politicians was a key feature, not a bug, of Dilmas impeachment.

The key question now as it was then is what comes next? Those of us who argued against impeachment repeatedly urged that if Dilma were really going to be impeached, only new elections whereby the citizenry, rather than the band of criminals in the halls of power, chose their new president could protect Brazilian democracy. The absolute worst option was to allow the corrupt line of succession in Braslia to elevate itself and then choose its own successors. That would ensure that political criminalitybecame further entrenched. As David Miranda and I wrote in a Folha op-ed in April of last year:

If, despite all this, the country is truly determined to remove Dilma, the worst alternative is to permit the corrupt line of succession to ascend to power.

The principles of democracy demand that Dilma Rousseff complete her term in office. If that is not an option, and if she is going to be impeached, the best alternative is new elections. That way, the population would assume its proper place as provided by the Constitution: All power emanates from the people.

Yet thats exactly what took place. What Brazilian elites fear and hate most is democracy. The last thing they wanted was to allow Brazils population to once again choose itsown leaders. So they foisted on them a corrupt, hated mediocrity who could never have been elected on his own, who indeed is nowbanned from running for any officedue to election law violations and he was tasked with imposing an agenda the country hated.

Brazils elite media and political class are now openly plotting the same scam. Many are suggesting that Temers replacement should be chosen not by the Brazilian people but by its Congress: one-thirdof whom are the targets of formal criminal investigations, most of whose major parties are rife with corruption. As we saw with Temers installation, allowing corrupt institutions to choose a countrys leaders is the antithesis of democracy and anti-corruption crusades. It ensures that criminality and corruption reign. The only debate should be whether direct elections should include not only Temers successor but also a new Congress.

Brazils democracy, along withits political stability, hasalready been crippled by the traumatic removal of the person who was actually elected to lead the country. That her successor has been exposed as a criminal exacerbates the tragedy. But it is not an overstatement to say that allowing the same corrupt factions to choose one of their own to replace Temer once again denying the right of the people to pick their president and instead imposing on thema leader who emerges fromthesleaziest precincts ofBraslias sewer would be its death blow.

Top photo: Michel Temer greets Sen. Acio Neves following Temersswearing-in ceremony as president of Brazil in Brasilia on Aug. 31, 2016.

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After Latest Bombshells, Only Michel Temer's Removal and New Elections Can Save Brazil's Democracy - The Intercept

Technology alone cant save democracy. When technology is designed and used well, it can make it easier for people to participate in elections and other activities of civic life. But when its not, technology that promises to help ends up being harmful.

Some tools or programs meant to improve access to information are only available to people who are comfortable with technology, who have smartphones, and can afford good data plans.

What happens to the people who get left behind?

In the weeks before the November election, the Center for Civic Design followed voters around the country in a research study. We wanted to know how they learned about the candidates and issues they would vote on, especially for the local contests that get less attention. Whether they were deeply engaged in following the election or not, they all felt immersed in a buzz of opinions and news that left them feeling more anxious than informed. Some worried about being able to trust anything they read. Others simply felt overwhelmed and avoided social media.

If we want technology to help connect people with their government, we have to design it with a human face. Its really very simple: if you dont include a wide range of people in the design process, the richness and variety of their experiences are not considered in the final product.

When we have a more complete picture of the people, its easier to see the social impact of design decisions, and harder to build inadvertent stupidity into the assumptions and algorithms that go into creating technology.

At Civic Design, whether we are redesigning a voter registration form or researching barriers to participation, all of our projects start with listening. We hear both small and big things. For example, when we talk to new voters, they are often eloquent about democracy and the importance of giving everyone a voice. They want to know what is on their ballot and how the decisions they make will affect them. But they are less sure of the mechanics of participation.

For example, when we tell first time voters and new citizens that marking a ballot is like taking a standardized test, we shouldnt be surprised when they ask how long they have to be at the polling place. Because their experience is that tests--and most government appointments--take much longer than the few minutes it should take to vote. As one person put it, What exactly do you do when you go to the polling place?

Understanding the perspectives of many different people is important because technology is not neutral. It includes all of the assumptions and blind spots of the people who create it. Its important to question those assumptions, and to ask the hard questions about how civic technology can be useful and inclusive, helping everyone participate.

We need tools that demystify the act of voting in simple, clear language that can can help bridge the civic literacy gap. This starts by designing the entire election experience and all of the materials from voter registration to ballots so they are easier to read and use. One of the saddest things we heard in a research study was a young voter who said, I dont know too much about voting. Thats why I stopped doing it.

Open civic datasets are already making official information about elections widely available. Voters in our study last fall found information about who is on the ballot, how to contact candidates or elected officials, and the location of the nearest polling place in sites like Facebook and Google Search. This extends the reach of the elections office, making personalized, accurate, timely information part of the everyday experience. How do we make sure these tools are easy to use and available for every community?

We also need to ask who might be left out if participating in civic life requires digital literacy and access to the network? Will the information be available on older devices or through low-tech text messaging (or even in print)? Will the tools we create be accessible for people with disabilities, people with low literacy, and people with low digital literacy? What data will be collected about the people who access these tools, and how will it be used?

Most importantly, the new tools of democracy must meet people where they are, inform instead of overwhelm, and invite people to participate in their own way.

This article is part of a collaboration with the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.

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Democracy Has a Design Problem - The Atlantic

Liberal democracy is not dead, but it's not well. From Hungary to Poland to even the United States, far-right populists have won power, and, in a few cases, are busy consolidating it.

In some sense, it shouldn't be too surprising that the worst economic crisis since the 1930s has led to the worst political crisis within liberal democracies since the 1930s. At the same time, though, it's not as if right-wing nationalists are winning everywhere. Just in the last six months, they've come up short in Austria, the Netherlands and now France. So why is it that these abundant raw materials for a far right stagnant incomes and increased immigration haven't always turnedinto a far right that wins elections?

I talked to Harvard's Daniel Ziblatt, whose new book Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy" traces the history of how the center-right often determines whether democracy lives or dies, about what's behind our populist moment and just how close a parallel we're running to some of history's darkest episodes. Hisanswer: It depends. In countries where the center-right is willing to quarantine the far-right, undemocratic forces should be politically neutralized. But when the center-right gives in to the temptation to try to use the far-right because it thinks that's the only way it can win, then their Faustian bargain can end up like they all do: not as they expected. Mainstream conservatives might find out that they, and not the radicals, were the ones being manipulated. That they weren't appeasing the far-right, but empowering it.

The followinghas been edited for length and clarity.

I wanted to start out by talking about why it is that conservative parties seem to matter so much more for either saving or killing democracy. What's going on here?

Historically, at least, the real threat to democracy has come from the groups that conservative parties represent. They were the opponents of democracy, the potential saboteurs who were trying to block it before it was adopted and then undermine it afterwards. So how you get these guys to buy in is critical. Back in the 1800s, we're talking about landed elites and aristocrats and so on. Those who have the most to lose and the most resources at their disposal, these are the ones we have to pay attention to.

Is it any different today?When you look at the populist wave across the world, what do you think is behind it?

Well, there are forces pushing for it, which have to do with slowed economic growth, globalization, and immigration, but, if you look cross-nationally, there is variation in how successful populists are. So what determines that variation are the features of the political system.

To me, the thing that really plays a major role is the structure of and the strategies of the center-right. In particular, whether they distance themselves from, or ally with the far-right. But there's a third answer: they can try to come up with better arguments. That's the hardest path. That's the liberal democratic path. To come up with better arguments and better solutions to win the political debate. When the center-right can do that, it limits the potential for the far-right in the first place.

That sounds like a pretty good description of what happened in France's presidential election last week.

It does. I think there are two big points there. The first is this. When the center-left fell apart in France, you got Emmanuel Macron. But when the center-right fell apart, you got Marine Le Pen. So there seems to be this asymmetry, because, whatever you think of Macron, he's not a major threat to democracy.

The second point is the role of the center-right candidate Fillon in stopping the far-right Le Pen. Fillon got knocked out in the first round of voting, but kind of crossed the ideological aisle to endorse Macron in the second round. And if you look at the polls of how people voted, a significant portion of his party did in fact support Macron. It may have made the difference in the election.

The ability of the center-right to distance itself from the far-right was critical. We see that happening in France. We see that happening in Austria as well, where some Catholic Party members supported the Green Party in the presidential election. But we don't see that in the U.S., in the sense that a lot of Republicans who don't like Trump nonetheless supported him. Looking back historically, the center-right in Britain, I would argue, sometimes played with real extremists like Ulster nationalists, yet, at the end of the day, still tried to distance themselves from them. The German Conservatives, on the other hand, tried to use these far-right actors, but didn't distance themselves from them as part of this myth that they could contain them.

That's a perfect segue to what I wanted to talk about next.Thereare a couple moments in the book that jumped out at me, where obviously there's some recency bias kicking in, but it sounded to me like you were describing Trump and the Republican Party. Am I reading too much into that?

I think you're referring to the descriptions of the Weimar Republic. This is the curious thing about writing this book. I've been working on it for 8 years, long before Trump was anything but a guy on a TV show that I didn't really pay much attention to, and it was really a book about a historical period. I thought I had identified this more general problem, because I'm a political scientist, and this more general problem seemed to be reoccurring throughout the world in different times. That was the relationship of the moderate center-right that plays a small-D democratic game, and the extremist elements on the far-right that do not. So as events in the U.S. unfolded the last two years, I felt like this was an illustration of that general dynamic. It's not something that's unique to the U.S., it's not unique to Trump, it's not unique to the Republican Party, this is a more general pattern.

What arethe big parts of that pattern?

I have this idea that conservative parties, originally as well as today, often have this dilemma: they rely on an activist base that tends to be more extreme than the party leaders themselves. The question, then, is who has the upper hand in that relationship. If you have a strong conservative party, one that has what I call organizational firewalls that can mobilize voters and mobilize activists while allowing the leaders to keep control of the party, then democracy can be stable. But if you have a party that is weakly organized, and in some ways porous almost like a holding company of different groups and interests, where the leadership doesn't have a monopoly on financing and selection ofcandidates, then it's much more prone to radicalism.

That's really the parallel. The political partiesI looked at were the contrasting cases of Britain and Germany. And if there's one thing to take away here, it's this: I think political parties are a great invention we sometimes don't fully appreciate. Now, in Britain, the Conservatives historically had a well-institutionalized party with party professionals. It's really a coherent organization that has members and activists. At election time, the party leaders are able to turn these guys out to vote, but then after election time, they would calm back down and play the democratic game. Theparty leaders, in other words, were steering the ship.

The German Conservative Party, on the other hand, is one that for a variety of reasons was weak and fragmentary and the party leaders never really had control over the activists. Eventually there was a rebellion of the activists, and they took over the party. And it's that relationship between the grassroots and the leadership withinconservative parties that ends up having reverberations for the whole political system.

That makes me wonder about effect the internet has had onpolitics. We tend to think it's a good thing that it's easier for activists to exert influence on parties, in terms of raising money and pressuring candidates. But is there a downside as well? Has this increase in democracy made democracy less stable?

I think that's right. I think of what I'm describing, if we're giving it a label, as the conservative dilemma. This is something that's latent, or is present and becomes more activated in certain places, and I think one of the things that has exacerbated this for the Republican Party are things like thetransformation of media. What this does is itdiminishes the party's control over its own message.

A provocative point that I think comes out of this is that in order to have a stable national democracy, maybe political parties have to be organized in somewhat undemocratic ways. If you think of the Democratic Party with the superdelegates, this is a way of keeping pretty moderate forces in control. It's a double-edged sword, because it keeps maybe some real grassroots reformers out, but it also keeps extremists out. The larger point, though, is that social media does democratize the party, but there is a cost to that. The gatekeeping function of the party is diminished.

What about the rise of cable newsespecially the influence Fox News seems to exert on the Republican Party? There were a lot of uncomfortable parallels for me between that and the story you tell about Germany's big media mogul of the 1920s, Alfred Hugenberg, taking their Conservative Party over and pushing itfar to the right.

Absolutely. We tend to think that the media technological revolutions we're living through now are the first ones ever, but similar kinds of revolutions took place in the past. And the guys who were at the forefront of those could deploy them for political purposes. So in Weimar Germany, the equivalent kind of media revolution was the emergence of the news wire. That let Hugenberg create a common message across a bunch of newspapers throughout the country, and integrate this right-wing radical message into one. He owned these, and then also took over the party.

The Republican media-industrial complex is a similar thing. I think it's an indicator of the degree to which the party is weak, that you have these outside forces shaping the message of the party and putting real pressure on it. And, again, I can imagine people saying, Oh, that's so elitist to say that the party should have control over the message, and I think in some sense that maybe it is. But I'm just trying to point out that there's a cost to this fragmentation.

What about the other big piece of this puzzle: campaign finance?

Well, asthe party has lost its monopoly over money, this means that other groups can shape the agenda in a way. Parties are coalitions, and they hold together diverse groups, but once you lose control over the money, then the groups can assert their own interests much more narrowly. That can generate this populist style of politics.

Another thing that stood out to me was when you talked about how Britain's Conservatives almost triggered a democratic breakdown in the early 1900s. Part of that was over Irish Home Rule, but to me the more interesting part was their reaction to the introduction of the welfare state. They thought this had changed everything, and that they wouldn't be able to win on their own terms ever again.

It made me think of the GOP's response to the 2012 electionin particular, to Obamacare and the Obama coalition. They thought that Obamacare had changed the social contract in a way that they couldn't live with, and that the Obama coalition was proof that there was this younger, nonwhite group of people that, if they wanted to reach out to, then they'd have to change their positionsbut they didn't want to change their positions.

So they kind of saw this as their last chance. You could see that in the way they were talking about makers and takers, and about the "47 percent who were supposedly bringing us to a tipping point where the poorer majority would be able to vote for whatever they wanted from the richer minority. And so in the last couple of years, at the state level, Republicans tried passing a lot of voter ID laws and other ways to restrict the franchise. Instead of persuading people, they're trying to keep their opponents from voting in the first place. Am I overreacting?

No, I think that's right. I see that parallel too. The second part of the conservative dilemma is that if they represent at their base the well-off in society, then how do they win democratic elections? Because the high end of the income distribution aren't the majority of the population. That, in some ways, is the heart of all this: how do you participate in democratic politics when the people who are your core constituency aren't the majority?

Conservatives throughout history have had different ways of responding to that reoccurring dilemma. One way is, if you don't think you can compete, then you come up with ways of evading fair competition by essentially cheating or changing the rules. There's a clear distinction between those types of strategies, which are highly undemocratic, to ways that can actually facilitate democracy. That's finding issues to compete on. You may or may not like the stances they take on particular issues, they may even be racist or nationalistic or defending cultural values that you don't like, but at least they're playing the democratic game.

TheBritish Conservative Party faced the same challenge in the first part of the 20th century of perceiving themselves on the losing end of history. One of theirleaders Lord Salisbury called this the catastrophic theory of politics: you assume that everything is going terribly, history is moving against you, and you're fighting this rearguard action. What ended up happening, though, is because they had effective politicians and an effective political party, they searched around for issues, forged coalitions, and came up with ways of competing. But it's worth emphasizing that in order for that to happen, they needed an effective organization. You had to have people in charge of the party who were highly qualified politicians, and who knew which issues worked. In some way, the modern equivalent would be having pollsters and the ground game to not only tap into but also mobilize thevoting blocs you're trying to reach.

The modern-day Republican Party certainly is doing well electorally, but, in some ways, we're beginning to witness an undemocratic game beginning to unfold. We're at the tail end of this process. And I don't know if it can be restored. The party has already moved to the far-right, so then the question is how do you put the conservative party back on track? In the cases that I've studied, once that happens, it's hard to do that.

I kind of see two contradictory parts to this. On the one hand, Republicans have been extremely successful on the sub-presidential level the last six years. But, on the other hand, you can understand their sense of despair despite that. It wasn't just economic issues that were moving against them, but also the cultural ones. Gay marriage had gone from being something they'd used to mobilize their base in 2004 to something they had the short end of the electoral stick of by 2012. I think there really was this apocalyptic sense among some of them that society had changed in ways they didn't understand, and what are our issues going to be?

For the last six years, that's just been running against Obamacare. But we might find out that only worked until they won. They don't really know what to do about it now that they have a chance to actually do something. It was the same sort of thing during the 2016 primaries. With Trump, it was more affect than anything else. It was about sticking it to everybody else and every other country. It's hard to see what the issues are there.

Here's the thing. I say that weak conservative parties are a threat to democracy, so somebody might say well, the Republican Party is very strong right now, in what sense are they weak? But I think we're witnessing the product of what happens when you have an increasingly desperate conservative party. It's a mistake to read strength off of electoral success. To me, a strong party is one that is organizationally strong, that isn't just a holding company for disparate interest groups, and that can win elections on issues, not on affect and populist leaders.

We're seeing the tail end of this process. I think the Tea Party, the big-money interest groups, organizations like ALEC at the state level, have all essentially hollowed out the Republican Party. The party is, metaphorically-speaking,a rotten house with a rotten door, even though they're winning elections.

You said that it's hard for conservative parties to get back on track. What would Republicans need to do to get back there?

I can tell you where they need to be. I don't know how to get there, though. The party needs to regain controls of its own money. It needs to be hierarchicalinstead of relying on outside sources of money. But that's a function of campaign finance laws. In some ways, I think that opening up the money has possibly led to the radicalization of the Republican Party. Look at their presidential primaries. Over the years, you've gotten increasingly strange collections of people who, as outsiders, have little chance of winning the nomination, but because they're financed by their own personal billionaire can keep going. In that sense, the party has lost control of the nomination process. This also has to do with media, but it's harder to do something about that.

To go back to the British Conservatives, the reason they did so well in the late 19th century is that guys like Lord Salisbury who were not particularly interested in democratic politics were able to hire people who could play the democratic game. These advisers were proto-political scientists running demographic studies and figuring out the details of election appeals, but, most of all, they were working for the party. These were not independent guys running their own companies. When the party has control over this, it can be more democratic. But maybe that's something that has disappeared into the past, and is no longer there.

The only time I've seen this restored is after great devastation, for example, the German Conservatives getting their act together after World War II. Presumably we don't want to have to go through something like that.

That's very uplifting!

Let me leave you with something slightly more optimistic. Politics and economics go through cycles. There are always moments of crisis, and all we can hope for is to get through it without destroying the political system. After that, we cantry to figure out more robust institutions for the next time around. But there's no permanent solution that will solve this once and for all.

The alternative is to think that we're on this trajectory where the world is fundamentally different than it was in the past, and unless we come up with a way of solving the problems we face now, we're doomed. But actually the problems are not so different from previous eras.There's always a segment of the population that's very sympathetic to nondemocratic political parties, and when the economy's worse, that portion of the population grows. We've gotten through these crises before, and we can again.

See original here:
Why liberal democracy only dies when conservatives help - Washington Post