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The White Houses increasing inaccessibility to the press; the violence against lawmakers and journalists; the apparent ease with which Russia preyed on Americans deep political divisions and distrust of government; and the presidents efforts to delegitimize the media, his opponents, unfavorable court rulings, and independent investigations into his campaigns ties with Moscow, have all contributed to a sense that American democracy is battered and besieged.

America is no more immune from collapse than were some of historys most stable and impressive consensual governments, Victor Davis Hanson wrote last week in National Review. Fifth-century Athens, Republican Rome, Renaissance Florence and Venice, and many of the elected governments of early 20th-century Western European states eventually destroyed themselves, went bankrupt, or were overrun by invaders.

America Isn't Having a Constitutional Crisis

Whoa now. Is the United States really in such bad shape? Two recent expert surveys help put the countrys challenges in perspective. They highlight precisely where the U.S. political system is currently strongest and weakest. And together they convey a message that is at once reassuring and unsettling: America isnt end-times Athens or pre-Vichy France. Far from it. But nor, in certain respects, is it a healthy democracy.

In May, amid the fallout from Donald Trumps firing of FBI Director James Comey, the democracy-monitoring group Bright Line Watch polled more than 1,000 political scientists in the United States on whether America was adhering to a list of 29 democratic principles. What they found is that the vitality of American democracy depends on your definition of democracy. The U.S. performed well on measures of free expression but poorly on measures of political civility and equality, with the quality of elections and checks and balances on power earning mixed results.

Most respondents agreed, for instance, that the U.S. government met democratic standards for protecting the right to protest, preventing electoral fraud, deterring political violence, and not interfering with the press. But most disagreed that the U.S. met standards for granting citizens an equal opportunity to vote, stopping officials from exploiting their public office for private gain, and conducting politics and formulating policy based on a common acceptance of basic facts or expert consensus.

Relative to a similar survey in February, in the early days of the Trump administration, the political scientists voiced greater concern about several principles, many of which involve constraints on executive power and relate to two of the most prominent elements of Trumps presidency so far: the travel ban and Russia investigations.

Bright Line Watch also asked respondents to assess on a 0 to 100 scale the overall performance of American democracy at the moment, and to do the same for other periods in U.S. history. With the caveat that evaluating the present is different than evaluating the past (especially the distant past), heres what Bright Line Watch found: The quality of democracy generally improved from the nations founding to 1975increasingly most steeply after 1950 with the passage of civil-rights and voting-rights legislationbefore plateauing for decades and then dipping to pre-1975 levels at the dawn of the Trump Era. (As The New York Times cautions, the Bright Line Watch survey is not based on a representative sample of political scientists, and academics tend to be more liberal than the general public.)

A poll by another democracy-monitoring project, the Authoritarian Warning Survey, helps place Americas political problems in an international context. In May, 68 democracy scholars compared the behavior of American political leaders since January to the typical behavior of politicians in other mature democracies. On average, the United States was judged to be within the norm for consolidated democracies in terms of the rejection of political violence and the protection of civil liberties. It was considered to be just outside the norm when it comes to constraints on executive power, respect for an independent press, and commitment to free and fair elections in which political opponents are treated as legitimate. And, most remarkably, it was deemed significantly outside the norm on political rhetoric that honors democratic principles. When asked what recent development posed the greatest threat to American democracy, the most common response was Trumps dismissal of Comey.

In his analysis of the results, Michael Miller, one of the academics behind the Authoritarian Warning Survey, noted that the respondents expressed greater alarm about democratic breakdown in the United States than one would expect based on traditional indicators of the fragility of democracy in a given country, including average income, literacy rates, the age of the democratic system, and the percentage of democracies in the broader region. A model with these variables created by Miller put the chances of American democracy collapsing within four years at 1 in 6,700, which makes the United States one of the worlds most secure democracies, roughly on par with Belgium. (Its worth noting that Belgium has its own democratic problemsit once went 589 days without an elected government between 2010 and 2011and that Switzerland looks far more stable than the United States, with the odds of democratic breakdown in the next four years about 1 in 32,500.) The participants in Millers survey, by contrast, on average estimated the odds of the U.S. not resembling a democracy in four years at 11 percent.

Yet this is a highly unlikely future for the United States, Miller argued. [T]he most likely downward path for American democracy is not full breakdown, but a steady erosion of democratic norms and practices as seen in countries such as Poland and the Philippines in recent years, he wrote. Democracy experts generally agree that the U.S. has started down this path, but remain cautious about how far it will go before turning back.

Its tempting to be heartened by the fact that the survey respondents were most concerned about political rhetoric since rhetoric is short of action, Miller added. But anti-democratic rhetoric can erode the norms holding democratic compacts together. Anti-democratic language today, he warned, can predict anti-democratic behavior tomorrow.

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Is American Democracy Really Under Threat? - The Atlantic - The Atlantic

The fur is starting to fly as a consequence of Gov. Phil Scotts willful misunderstanding of collective bargaining law as it applies to teacher health benefits and the continuing fallout from the pushback against the statewide school consolidations mandated under Vermont Act 46. But one positive result of all this really bad politics has been the creation of a new school board advocacy group called The Alliance of Vermont School Board Members (on the web at AVSBM.com).

If youre wondering how we ever got into such an unnecessary mess, its important to know that one of the principal instigators has been none other than the Vermont School Boards Association, which since rewriting their bylaws last fall in order to exclude as much of their voting membership as possible from policy formulation, has cast itself in the rather unique position of actively advocating for putting local school boards completely out of business by its aggressive lobbying before the Legislature in favor of Act 46.

Just in case you didnt know it, there is also a Vermont Principals Association and a Vermont Superintendents Association, who along with the VSBA are all conveniently housed under the same roof at 2 Prospect Street in Montpelier and who all utilize the same coffee machine and office copiers. No Chinese wall here between these various interests.

And it makes for an interesting comparison with the firewall the VSBA has built between itself and the school boards. As a result of that bylaw change, the voting members of the VSBA are no longer the local boards, but rather school supervisory unions and the new merged superdistricts, all with one vote each. Nice and tidy for stuffing an unpalatable agenda down our collective throats.

All in all, what it adds up to is a direct assault on the Vermont values, which are embedded in our town-meeting style direct democracy, all of which are headed the way of the dodo bird as a likely consequence of this illinformed gutting of local control.

Now would be a good time to get involved with the Alliance of Vermont School Board Members, even if you dont sit on a school board, and help us put the brakes on this runaway train.

DAVID M. CLARK

(Board chairman,

Bellows Falls

Union High School)

Westminster

View original post here:
Gutting local democracy - Rutland Herald

The Washington Posts newish motto, Democracy Dies in Darkness, received a mixed response. Naturally most of the response was snark. The name of a Batman sequel? A heavy-metal album? Har.

My own preferred motto would be The Posts unofficial one, Follow the Money. Now if The Post put that under its masthead and reported the news with the goal being to understand the extent and influence of money in the political process, wed really be getting somewhere. But at least Democracy Dies in Darkness tells people that there are important consequences to being able to report the news.

But what if democracy dies anyway? What if it can happen in full view of everybody? This is no longer a fanciful question.

What if the voters of the United States dont really care about democracy anymore? What if, instead of sunlight on the process, they are perfectly happy to accept the neon and strobing of a windowless, clockless casino floor?

Let us look at the signs.

We used to have a class of low-information voters. But they have now been cultivated and transformed into wrong-information voters. This was done on purpose. They consist, to a degree, of what psychological studies have identified as people who are actually inclined toward authoritarianism rather than open societies. Note the fact that whether or not President Trump benefited by Russia doing everything it could think of to undermine our election, neither he nor anyone in his administration seems the least bit bothered by the interference, or apparently inclined to do anything about it. And ask his voters if they care either.

We had baked into our cake a Senate with skewed representation, but since then weve added, via gerrymandering, a House of Representatives that is skewed in the same direction. And throw in an electoral college that has given the presidency to someone who lost the popular vote two out of the last three presidents. And then note that the party which has benefited from all this non-representativeness has gamed the system further in a way that will also give it control of the Supreme Court.

The very ethos of a shared democratic destiny of equal citizens has been continuously eroded and replaced with a me-first standard of whoever dies with the most toys wins. Yes, that old semi-humorous bumper-sticker slogan actually seems to be our current governing principle and main measure of the successful American.

This all happened while we were all wide awake and presumably paying attention. Until we now find ourselves with a government that does not, in fact, represent the voting preferences or policy preferences of, you know, the majority of voters. And this unrepresentative government is not taking the healing course of tacking to the center, to balance the inequitable results by reaching out to the other side. No, far from it, and as far as you can get. They are not only trying to enact the severest forms of their policy preferences that they can get away with, but also trying to cement the permanence of their control by relentless shifting of wealth to the rich, all the while riding on the growing vehemence of their wrongly informed, authoritarian-inclined base voters.

And in the face of this very deliberately constructed and powerful non-democratic apparatus, we have what? We have the majority of voters, who have a yet-to-be determined commitment to fight for their beliefs, to fight for their sense of justice and to fight for their democracy.

Read the rest here:
Maybe democracy dies in broad daylight - Washington Post

Reefill has reinvented the water fountain as a Bluetooth-enabled subscription service. Photograph: Reefill

Its a hot day in New York City. Youre thirsty, but your water bottle is empty. So you walk into a store and place your bottle in a machine. You activate the machine with an app on your phone, and it fills your bottle with tap water. Now you are no longer thirsty.

This is the future envisioned by the founders of a startup called Reefill. If the premise sounds oddly familiar, thats because it is: Reefill has reinvented the water fountain as a Bluetooth-enabled subscription service. Customers pay $1.99 a month for the privilege of using its machines, located at participating businesses around Manhattan.

Predictably, the company has already come in for its fair share of ridicule. In Slate, Henry Grabar called it tap water in a suit. But while Reefill is a particularly cartoonish example, its basic business model is a popular one within tech. The playbook is simple: take a public service and build a private, app-powered version of it.

The most obvious examples are Uber and Lyft, which aspire not merely to eliminate the taxi industry, but to replace public transportation. Theyre slowly succeeding: municipalities around America are now subsidizing ride-hailing fares instead of running public buses. And earlier this year, Lyft began offering a fixed-route, flat-rate service called Lyft Shuttle in Chicago and San Francisco an aggressive bid to poach more riders from public transit.

These companies wouldnt have customers if better public alternatives existed. It can be hard to find a water fountain in Manhattan, and public transit in American cities ranges from mediocre to nonexistent. But solving these problems by ceding them to the private sector ensures that public services will continue to deteriorate until they disappear.

Decades of defunding and outsourcing have already pushed public services to the brink. Now, fortified with piles of investor cash and the smartphone, tech companies are trying to finish them off.

Proponents of privatization believe this is a good thing. For years, they have advanced the argument that business will always perform a given task better than government, whether its running buses or schools, supplying healthcare or housing. The public sector is sclerotic, wasteful and undisciplined by the profit motive. The private sector is dynamic, innovative and, above all, efficient.

This belief has become common sense in political life. It is widely shared by the countrys elite, and has guided much policymaking over the past several decades. But like most of our governing myths, it collapses on closer inspection.

No word is invoked more frequently or more fervently by apostles of privatization than efficiency. Yet this is a strange basis on which to build their case, given the fact that public services are often more efficient than private ones. Take healthcare. The United States has one of the least efficient systems on the planet: we spend more money on healthcare than anyone else, and in return we receive some of the worst health outcomes in the west. Not coincidentally, we also have the most privatized healthcare system in the advanced world. By contrast, the UK spends a fraction of what we do and achieves far better results. It also happens to provision healthcare as a public service. Somehow, the absence of the profit motive has not produced an epidemic of inefficiency in British healthcare. Meanwhile, we pay nearly $10,000 per capita and a staggering 17% of our GDP to achieve a life expectancy somewhere between that of Costa Rica and Cuba.

A profit-driven system doesnt mean we get more for our money it means someone gets to make more money off of us. The healthcare industry posts record profits and rewards its chief executives with the highest salaries in the country. It takes a peculiar frame of mind to see this arrangement as anything resembling efficient.

A profit-driven system doesnt mean we get more for our money it means someone gets to make more money off of us

Attacking public services on the grounds of efficiency isnt just incorrect, however its beside the point. Decades of neoliberalism have corroded our capacity to think in non-economic terms. Weve been taught that all fields of human life should be organized as markets, and that government should be run like a business. This ideology has found its perverse culmination in the figure of Donald Trump, a celebrity billionaire with no prior political experience who catapulted himself into the White House by invoking his expertise as an businessman. The premise of Trumps campaign was that America didnt need a president it needed a CEO.

Nowhere is the neoliberal faith embodied by Trump more deeply felt than in Silicon Valley. Tech entrepreneurs work tirelessly to turn more of our lives into markets and devote enormous resources towards disrupting government by privatizing its functions. Perhaps this is why, despite Silicon Valleys veneer of liberal cosmopolitanism, it has a certain affinity for the president. On Monday, Trump met with top executives from Apple, Amazon, Google and other major tech firms to explore how to unleash the creativity of the private sector to provide citizen services, in the words of Jared Kushner. Between Trump and tech, never before have so many powerful people been so intent on transforming government into a business.

But government isnt a business; its a different kind of machine. At its worst, it can be repressive and corrupt and autocratic. At its best, it can be an invaluable tool for developing and sustaining a democratic society. Among other things, this includes ensuring that everyone receives the resources they need to exercise the freedoms on which democracy depends. When we privatize public services, we dont just risk replacing them with less efficient alternatives we risk damaging democracy itself.

If this seems like a stretch, thats because pundits and politicians have spent decades defining the idea of democracy downwards. It has come to mean little more than holding elections every few years. But this is the absolute minimum of democracys meaning. Its Greek root translates to rule of the people not rule by certain people, such as the rich (plutocracy) or the priests (theocracy), but by all people. Democracy describes a way of organizing society in which the whole of the people determine how society should be organized.

What does this have to do with buses or schools or hospitals or houses? In a democracy, everyone gets to participate in the decisions that affect their lives. But thats impossible if people dont have access to the goods they need to survive if theyre hungry or homeless or sick. And the reality is that when goods are rationed by the market, fewer people have access to them. Markets are places of winners and losers. You dont get what you need you get what you can afford.

By contrast, public services offer a more equitable way to satisfy basic needs. By taking things off the market, government can democratize access to the resources that people rely on to lead reasonably dignified lives. Those resources can be offered cheap or free, funded by progressive taxation. They can also be managed by publicly accountable institutions led by elected officials, or subject to more direct mechanisms of popular control.

These ideas are considered wildly radical in American politics. Yet other places around the world have implemented them with great success. When Oxfam surveyed more than 100 countries, they discovered that public services significantly reduce economic inequality. They shrink the distance between rich and poor by lowering the cost of living. They empower working people by making their survival less dependent on their bosses and landlords and creditors. Perhaps most importantly, they entitle citizens to a share of societys wealth and a say over how its used.

But where will the money come from? This is the perennial question, posed whenever someone suggests raising the welfare state above a whisper. Fortunately, it has a simple answer. The United States is the richest country in the history of the world. It is so rich, in fact, that its richest people can afford to pour billions of dollars into a company such as Uber, which loses billions of dollars each year, in the hopes of getting just a little bit richer. In the face of such extravagance, diverting a modest portion of the prosperity we produce in common toward services that benefit everyone shouldnt be controversial. Its a small price to pay for making democracy mean more than a hollow slogan, or a sick joke.

Link:
Privatizing public services could spell their demise and the end of democracy - The Guardian

Why do democracies fail?

Its suddenly a very urgent and important question. Daniel Ziblatts new book arrives just in time to deliver a powerful and supremely relevant answer.

Dont be misled by the aggressively unsensational title, the careful prose, or the hyper-technical charts (Median and Distribution of Conservative and Liberal Party Seats Across Varying Levels of Agricultural Districts in Germany and Britain in Years of Suffrage Reform). Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy is written in fire. It delves deep into long-forgotten electoral histories to emerge with insights of Tocquevillian power, to illuminate not only the past but also the present and future.

Why Conservative Parties Are Central to Democracy

The non-rich always outnumber the rich. Democracy enables the many to outvote the few: a profoundly threatening prospect to the few. If the few possess power and wealth, they may respond to this prospect by resisting democracy before it arrivesor sabotaging it afterward.

Yet despite this potential threat to the formation and endurance of democracy, wealthy countries do often transition peacefully to democracyand then preserve its stability for decades afterward. The classic example is the United Kingdom. Britain commenced a long process of widening the franchise in 1832. By 1918, all adult British men could vote; all British women by 1929. Through that periodand then through the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the construction of the welfare state after 1945British politics remained peaceful and stable, offering remarkably little space for radical ideologies of any kind. You could tell a similar story about Sweden (universal male voting by 1907; for women by 1921), orwith allowances for foreign military occupation in wartimeabout Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Once democracy was extended, it was never again seriously questioned by local elites, even when it taxed them heavily.

But this is emphatically not the story of the rest of Europe, most especially not Germany, but also Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and so on. Its not the story of Latin America or of the Arab world.

What makes the difference between those countries in which democracy arrives peacefully and is ever after accepted by alland those in which it is violently contested and continually challenged? That feels no longer a question about bygone times. It feels very much our question too. Based largely on a study of Western Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, Daniel Ziblatt convincingly offers a surprising and disturbing answer:

The most crucial variable predicting the success of a democratic transition is the self-confidence of the incumbent elites. If they feel able to compete under democratic conditions, they will accept democracy. If they do not, they will not.

And the single thing that most accurately predicts elite self-confidence, as Ziblatt marshals powerful statistical and electoral evidence to argue, is the ability to build an effective, competitive conservative political party before the transition to democracy occurs. That happened in Britain, but not in Germany, as Ziblatt painstakingly details. (If you ever yearned to learn more about German state and local elections under Kaiser Wilhelm II, Ziblatt is here to tell you all about it.)

Why not in Germany? Or Italy or elsewhere? Building a vote-winning political party is hard workand work that carries few guarantees of success in advance.

Pre-democratic incumbent elites, precisely because they were incumbents, commanded other options that seemed both easier to execute and seemingly more likely to succeed than democratic competition:

Imperial Germany resorted to all three: a complex constitution that vested real power in ultra-oligarchic state assemblies rather than the national Reichstag; a lively culture of voter intimidation in rural districts; and of course a government that did not ultimately depend on the voters at all.

Imperial German elites controlled the state without the need to win electionsand that taught them to distrust the whole electioneering enterprise. Because they did not need to win elections, they did not build strong parties. And the absence of strong parties, managed by politicians seeking to win the maximum number of votes, left the pre-1914 and post-1918 German right exposed to outside interest groups that quickly and easily overran weak and institutionally porous parties.

Whereas the pragmatic politicians atop the British Conservative party could restrain ideologically motivated activists, the German Conservatives succumbed to them. The successful British Conservatives could look at Labour governments as unpleasant but ultimately temporary intervals. The Imperial German Conservatives experienced the loss of control of the state after 1918 as an unrecoverable catastrophe to which they could never be reconciled.

One of Ziblatts sharpest insights was that the failure to build an effective conservative party left incumbent elites in Germany and elsewhere too weak to say yes. They could not join the democratic system. They could only resent and resist it.

Probably you are already hearing some echoes in our own time. Its been aptly said that the United States is experiencing an era of strong partisanship but weak parties. This phrase describes the American right even more accurately than the American liberal-left. The organized Republican party lacked the strength to deny its presidential nomination to Donald Trumpand once Trump had gained that nomination, the vehement partisanship of Republican supporters secured him their general election votes despite the distaste so many felt for him. Just as in pre-1914 Germany, an institutionally porous party had been quickly and easily overrun from outside.

Its a striking feature of American politics since 2008 that the Republican right has combined extraordinary down-ballot electoral success with an ever-intensifying pessimism about American society.

If you listen to conservative discussion and debate, its hard to miss the rising tone of skepticism about democracyand increasing impatience with the claim that everybody should have convenient access to the ballot. The pessimism about the society and the weakness of the party have left Republicans vulnerable to an authoritarian populist like Donald Trump. Party rules that would once have screened out a Trump have given way to partisan antagonisms that empower him.

Some conservative intellectuals attribute Trumps ascendancy to a betrayal of conservative ideals. Thats true so far as it goes. But the more relevant truth, as Ziblatt teaches us, is that Trump arose because of the hollowing out of conservative institutions. The Republican party could not stop him. Now it cannot restrain him. And this weakness of the Republican partyand its craven subordination to the ego, ambition, and will-to-power of one mannow stands as the gravest immediate threat to American democracy: a lesson from the 19th century of frightening immediacy to the 21st.

Excerpt from:
Why Do Democracies Fail? - The Atlantic