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Consider the curious case of New Jersey in 1916: That summer, there was a string of deadly shark attacks along the Jersey Shore. As a result, Woodrow Wilson lost his home state in the presidential election.

Why, you ask? Because the beachfront towns (which rely on tourism) were negatively impacted by the attacks. Though Wilson wasnt responsible for the hungry sharks, he was the incumbent, and people vote against incumbents when things are bad.

This is a story political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels tell in Democracy for Realists, in service of a sobering thesis: Voters dont have anything like coherent preferences. Most people pay little attention to politics; when they vote, if they vote at all, they do so irrationally and for contradictory reasons.

The book lays waste to a reassuring theory about democracy that goes something like this: Ordinary citizens have preferences about what the government ought to do; they elect leaders who will carry out those preferences and vote against those who will not; in the end, were left with a government that more or less serves the majority.

Even voters who pay close attention to politics are prone in fact, more prone to biased or blinkered decision-making. The reason is simple: Most people make political decisions on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties, not an honest examination of reality.

Election outcomes, Achen and Bartels conclude, turn out to be largely random events from the viewpoint of democratic theory.

If Achen and Bartels are right, democracy is a faulty form of politics, and direct democracy is far worse than that. It virtually guarantees that at some point, youll end up with a grossly unfit leader.

And that, of course, is what we now have.

I sat down with Achen and Bartels a few weeks ago to talk about their critique of democracy, and how it might explain our current political predicament.

A warning: This is a long and sweeping discussion, touching on a number of thorny issues. I offer pushback when and where I can. But to be perfectly honest, I found many of their criticisms of democracy compelling. Which is not at all what I had hoped.

I want to believe in those comforting myths about democracy, mostly because the alternatives are worse. But even if democracy is the least bad form of government, we still ought to know how it works and, more importantly, how it doesnt.

What actually drives voter behavior?

I think people are doing the best they can. They just don't have a lot of information, and so they substitute guesses and views of the world that make them feel comfortable. I think people are looking for ways to make sense of what is a very complicated reality out there. It's hard for those of us who get paid to think about it all the time to make sense of it, and it's very hard for people with a lot of other demands in their lives.

So they're doing the best they can but, as we said in the book, we think that we need institutional structures that would get them some help and do what the Federalist Papers suggest should be done, which is to have a popular voice in government but to supplement it with the opinions of people with more expertise and more experience.

One of the more important building blocks for our work was [Austrian-born economist and political scientist who wrote mostly in the early 20th century] Joseph Schumpeters work on democracy. As an economist, he emphasized more clearly than people had previously the significance of the distinction between economic life, where people make choices that directly affect their own well-being (i.e., you stop buying products that you dont like) and the political world, where the connection between individual behavior and the outcomes that I experience is so indirect that it almost makes no sense for me to try to perceive instrumentally.

It turns out, when it comes to political outcomes, most people are not making rational decisions based on the real-world impact they will have on their life, in part because they just dont know.

So much of politics, not surprisingly, turns out to be about expressive behavior rather than instrumental behavior in other words, people making decisions based on momentary feeling and not on some sound understanding of how those decisions will improve or hurt their life. And so if you think about people using the democratic levers that they have available to them to express themselves, rather than to make instrumental choices, you're probably more often than not going to be closer to the actual psychology of what they're up to.

Does the average voter even have what we might call policy preferences?

Well, they do adopt some. They take in some information. So with the Trump phenomenon, for example, people clearly recognize that for certain identities, he was a vocal spokesman for those identities, and they did learn that. And the combination of that and his familiarity from reality TV and so on made him successful in their minds at being the kind of leader they were looking for. And I think people are pretty good at that, actually. They're pretty good at picking out who's on their side.

To be clear, theyre good at picking people who appear to be on their side, who play the right rhetorical game.

Good point. Now, what they're much less good at is thinking about whether it makes any sense to build a wall across the southern border with Mexico. Is that going to solve the problem? How much is that going to cost? Is that how I would want to spend my money? Voters tend not to think about these sorts of questions very well, and their incoherent and shifting positions suggest as much.

In graduate school, I read a book called The Macro Polity, which was published in 2002 by political scientists Robert Erikson, Michael Mackuen, and James Stimson. The thesis was something like: voters as a collective aggregate tend to act with purpose and predictability, even though most individual voters do not.

So the idea was that the vast majority of voters are capricious and uninformed, but in the end they tend to cancel each other out. What pushes elections in an intelligible direction is the minority of educated and engaged voters. But your book claims that elections are basically a coin toss.

Well, that argument, which goes back to the 18th century, works pretty well so long as the errors and political choices are distributed equally on both sides of whatever the option is. But in many cases, that's unlikely to be true. But we don't want to say that politics is essentially random. There are lots of elements, certainly of presidential elections, that are quite predictable. We have this little picture in Chapter 6 of the book about the relationship between economic conditions and how long the incumbent party has been in office and the election outcome. That suggests a good deal of predictability:

But the point is that if the underlying conditions suggest that the election is likely to be close, as has been the case for most recent presidential elections, then the small factors that determine the outcome at the margin are likely to be random and in any case aren't the kinds of things that democratic theory focuses on. Like, for example, people's preferences with respect to policy issues.

The points that Larry just made about the correlated errors are the root of the problem. Those theorems don't go through if people all tend to make the same kind of mistakes at a given time. And there's plenty of that, right? If you look at shares of the two-party vote in the 20th century, the presidential candidate who got the biggest two-party share was Warren Harding, now widely regarded as the worst president in American history. But people thought he was charming. And they all made the same mistake at the same time. And that's the kind of thing that's just fatal to that particular argument you find in The Macro Polity.

I take your broader points about voter behavior, but let me push back just a little bit. Plenty of people will say: Okay, the average voter is misguided in all the ways you note, but there are still heuristics or cognitive shortcuts that voters use to make sense of the political world. For example, they choose the candidate who most aligns with their ideological worldview or they rely on signals from party leaders or trusted authorities. Its not perfect, but it does allow voters to make more or less reasonable decisions.

When that kind of argument has been operationalized, it usually takes as given the basis on which people are choosing what heuristics to rely on. And that itself is quite problematic. If people knew where to go to get the informative cues about questions they need to answer, they probably would do better. But most of the empirical evidence we have suggests that it's only the more interested, better-informed people who have enough context to be able to interpret those cues appropriately and to use them sensibly.

Theres a model in contemporary political science called the retrospective theory of voting, which basically says that elections arent really about ideas or policy preferences, but voters are nonetheless able to accurately judge the performance of incumbent administrations. Whats wrong with this model?

Well, as an empirical matter, we think it works pretty well, and that's why political scientists have increasingly fastened on it as an alternative to the more idealistic notion of an issue-voting populace decision-making. The downside is that in their enthusiasm to fasten on it, they've attributed a kind of normative sheen to it that we don't think is warranted by the quality of the decisions that result.

Can you clarify what you mean there?

Well, people aren't very good at attributing the implications of the decisions that are made by policymakers to those policymakers. In order to do this efficiently, they'd have to have a pretty canny understanding of how the behavior of any particular elected official or party contributes to the good or bad outcomes they experience. And they're not very good at that. They'd have to take a long view of the effects of policy, and they're not very good at that. So they make these retrospective judgments, but in a kind of haphazard way that doesn't seem to promote accountability in the way that political scientists would like to think it does.

So you found no evidence to suggest that voters understand cause and effect in any coherent way?

Again, we're saying, yeah, the world is immensely complicated, so to say that one has a good understanding of cause and effect in this domain would really be asking quite a lot of people. Certainly, economists don't agree about the impact of economic policies on the well-being of individuals or groups. And so what we do in the book in order to try and get around those difficulties is to focus on some cases where it seems pretty clear that the incumbent politicians ought not to be paying for people's bad fortunes and find that even those cases, there seems to be a pretty systematic pattern of punishment.

One of the many assumptions your book undercuts is this idea that large groups of voters can deliberate reasonably that if you give people the appropriate information and allow them to exercise judgment, they will do so more or less intelligently. Or at the very least, they wont steer the country into an abyss.

I think it's hard to see how the public as a whole would steer the country in any particular direction. Usually when we think about public input, we think about public input in response to particular kinds of choices that have been framed by political elites of one kind or the other, whether they're party leaders or elected officials. And whether people come to the right conclusions about the choices that are offered to them, I think this is most of what is interesting and consequential, which is how the choices get framed in the circumstances under which people are allowed to have input into deciding what path to take.

How do choices get framed? How do opinions get formed?

A lot of it is people simply taking cues from political figures, from public figures, that they've identified themselves with one way or the other, whether they're party leaders or the leaders of social groups or interest groups that they feel some attachment to. If, for example, you look at the change in views about Russia that we've observed after Trump made admiring comments about Vladimir Putin, you might think, given the history of the US and Russia over the past century, that people would have pretty ingrained views about what they think of the Russian system. But that turned out not to be the case.

People's views shifted pretty quickly and pretty dramatically in the wake of fairly casual elite cues they were receiving. But from somebody who they trusted and whose cue they were happy to take about something that they hadn't really thought much about. The relationship between Russia and the US is a pretty important thing, but the ordinary American hasn't spent a lot of time thinking about how they should think about that. Indeed, they dont spend much time really thinking about political issues of consequence. This idea that people have fixed or informed views about central issues doesnt square with most of the data we have.

Can you give me some examples of the data you used or case studies you analyzed? What are you basing these claims about voting behavior on?

A substantial scholarly literature on electoral politics and public opinion has accumulated over the past several decades, and we relied on it heavily. But we also added original statistical analyses designed to test our arguments in particularly illuminating times and places.

For example, the notion that voters blindly reward or punish incumbent presidents for good or bad times led us to the presidential election of 1936; political scientists have portrayed that election as a historic ideological mandate for Franklin Roosevelts New Deal, but we found that Roosevelts support hinged crucially on how much incomes grew in each state in the year leading up to the election.

The same logic led us to the Jersey Shore in 1916, where a dramatic series of shark attacks hardly something a president can control turned out to produce a significant dent in the vote for Woodrow Wilson.

To disentangle the effects of policy preferences and social identities, we examined support for John Kennedy in 1960 an unusually pure case of religious affinity (and animosity) with little or no real policy content. Our analysis in that case was bolstered by the fact that repeated interviews with the same people allowed us to relate voting behavior in 1960 to measures of the strength of voters Catholic identities from 1958, before Kennedy emerged as a candidate.

In the same spirit, our analysis of the impact of partisanship on views about abortion employed a decades-long study of changing political attitudes to show that more than half of Democratic men who expressed pro-life views in 1982 were pro-choice by 1997; the corresponding rate of change among Republican men was less than 30 percent. Political attitudes and behavior are enormously complex, and so we are shameless opportunists, delighted to exploit clear glimpses of underlying patterns and processes wherever we can find them.

The parties in the United States, at least seem to have lost much of their control over the process. At the same time, weve seen a spike in partisanship. Do you think a stronger or different party system can correct some of the fundamental problems youve identified?

I wouldnt say a spike in partisanship weve had a long, gradual increase in the intensity of partisan loyalties over the past 35 or 40 years. As with many aspects of the contemporary political system, thats probably a sort of return to normalcy following the unusual period in the middle of the 20th century which saw the breakdown of the New Deal party system, a loosening of partisan attachments, and electoral landslides in both directions.

I wouldnt say that weve had a decline in the power of the parties, either. The parties in Congress are immensely powerful. All of President Obamas big legislative accomplishments the stimulus bill, the Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank were passed with few or no Republican votes. Conversely, President Trump has so far relied entirely on the Republican Party for support, despite his railing during the campaign against the political establishment on both sides of the aisle. When it comes to fundraising and candidate recruitment, the party committees and their allied networks of interest groups have a national reach and ideological cohesion that 19th-century party boss Mark Hanna would have envied.

What we dont (and never did) have is a way to manage the parties democratically. Weve tried to give as much power as possible to ordinary citizens voting in primaries, but the task is too complex too many candidates and issues, too little information, too much strategic uncertainty for that to work reliably. We saw that in 2016. But we also saw a breakdown of the alternative theory of democratic control, in which general election voters keep the parties on a tight leash by refusing to support them if they happen to nominate someone who is too extreme or uninformed or unstable.

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.

I would add only that I do favor stronger parties in one sense that they should have more control over their nominations, both presidential and other. New Jersey does this well, actually, with the "party endorsement" being quite crucial in winning primaries here. We also make it hard to put an initiative on the ballot, and we have traditionally had a strong, competent state supreme court.

The result is good schools, no measles and mumps outbreaks because of low vaccination rates, and much else by way of good government because it's harder for the voters to harm themselves here than in other states where interest groups and nutty ideas have more control through unrestricted primaries and initiatives. Of course, New Jersey has lots of problems, but a bad state governmental structure isn't among them.

I want to ask you both about identity politics, which is a big part of your book. As you know, theres a debate right now about the role and utility of identity politics. Your book argues, somewhat controversially, that in democracy all politics is identity politics, and that its foolish to pretend otherwise. Is that a fair reading of your thesis?

We do think that identities are fundamental. Now, in politics, no one framework is everything, and of course there are some other things going on. But we do think that identity is fundamental. The old left argument is that it's about class and that race and gender are side effects primarily of class issues. But class identification, working-class consciousness, and all of that framework, those are identities as well. So from our point of view, the proposal is to substitute one set of identities for another. That's a plausible argument, but the idea that you can propose policy, economic policy proscriptions, in a social vacuum with no attention to the other identities that are at work, that is something we just don't believe.

So democratic elections, on your view, are essentially just a competition to see who can activate the most identities among the voters?

I would say there's a variety of identities people have that are more or less salient and can be made more or less salient politically. For many people, the principles become part of the identity and are important moving parts of the way they think about politics. But our claim is that the identities are more fundamental, the principles come later rather than the other way around.

There have been two broad reactions to the Brexit vote and to Donald Trumps election. On the one hand, some believe we have too much democracy, too few barriers between popular will and the application of power; on the other hand, some argue that we have too little democracy, that were witnessing a righteous backlash against an anti-democratic and rigged system. Where do you come down?

The notion that the last election cycle somehow brought out a different kind of person or a different aspect of people's political character is misleading from our point of view. We didn't have Trump in our sights at all as we were working on this book over the course of 15 years, but I think the spirit of the book very much suggests that these kinds of things are likely to happen in democratic systems from time to time because of the way they work and the limitations they face all the time.

But what really triggers the kind of problems that people were concerned about in 2016 are mostly of elite-level actions, how the parties behave and what kind of messages they present to people and what kinds of alternatives they present to people. And so the idea that the American people are somehow different than they were five years ago or nine years ago I think is kind of mistaken. But the interaction between the elites and the masses is where the issues are, and I think much of political writing is not very well-suited to dealing with those kinds of interactions because the role of elites isn't very integrated into the overall way of thinking about what's going on. They are almost by necessity a kind of illegitimate piece of the system in a lot of popular thinking about the way politics works.

You mention the problem of elites, and that really is a key dilemma in your analysis. Its not so much about greater mass participation, which doesnt necessarily make things better, as it is about getting elites to not rig the system in their favor.

Absolutely. If you think about democracy in the terms we prefer, you might say the biggest limitation at the moment is that we don't know how to incorporate the role of political elites in a constructive way into the governing process or to somehow make it possible to ensure that they're working on behalf of the interests of ordinary people.

The book calls for a return to something like a group theory of democracy, which amounts to a reluctant embrace of identity politics. What, exactly, are you advocating here, and why is it a smarter alternative to the folk or populist theory of democracy?

Partly what we want to do is to think about a variety of reform proposals that are out there and floating around from this framework. So, for example, making the presidential nomination process more "democratic" by getting rid of superdelegates is exactly the kind of blunder that we're criticizing.

Having the conservative majority on the Supreme Court say that there's a marketplace of ideas here, that there can't possibly be anything wrong with people publicizing their own ideas about policy proposals and candidates and so forth, and so therefore limitations on campaign spending are a violation of free speech. That, too, is the kind of blunder that we're criticizing.

Okay, but where does that leave us?

We have to get out of this overly simplistic framework and create more sensible policy proposals. It seems clear to us that a lot of the actual ways in which people of ordinary education or ordinary means or just not much power, the ways in which they are disadvantaged are often occurring at the level of policymaking rather than at the level of elections themselves. The financial sector, for instance, is having a lot of policy success in Washington, in ways that ordinary people, if they really understood what was happening, would not approve. But they dont follow it closely enough, they dont understand, and the policy process is tilted toward moneyed interests that ordinary people have no chance.

So focusing reform on the places where the real problem is occurring as opposed to making fanciful proposals that ask us to do what none of us is really able to do. That's the kind of emphasis that we want to direct people's attention to.

Yes, but how do we get there? Again, the book latches onto this group theory of democracy as a more intelligent means of channeling popular passions, yet its not clear to me what this vision of democracy looks like or how its very different from what we now have.

Well, in some ways it doesn't look so different from how politics works now. The policymaking president is heavily influenced by groups of all kinds. And some of those are identity groups, like African-American groups or Hispanic groups or LGBT groups. Others are occupational groups and religious groups and vocational groups, like the National Rifle Association. And so on. And so we already have a policy process driven by groups. And the idea is more than 100 years old. It's certainly not original with us. So I think our view is to not pretend that there's a magic wand that can make people uninterested in the groups to which they belong, but instead to direct reform proposals to instead making the balance among these groups fairer than it is now.

So its your view that we ought to accept the fact that we think, act, and judge in terms of group affiliations of one sort or another, that were tribal creatures, and that our political system has to account for this structurally?

I think thats very well put except for the term tribal, which implies that people are members of only one tribe at any given point. I think people's identities are complex and the way they bring them to bear in politics is complex, and that's part of what needs to be understood by us as analysts and also built into any idea of how one might use these groups attachments constructively in improving the political process.

I reacted exactly the same way Larry did. One would not say to African Americans, for example, that the experience of their lives in a heavily white society and the way in which that shapes the things that they want from politics, that that's a tribal attachment and that they should get over that and just think about economics, right? It kind of misses the point.

Oh, I agree, Im just trying to nail down your thesis.

Of course. To be clear, these group attachments are not some bad thing we do instead of being rational, well-informed creatures. They constitute who we are. You know, evangelical Christians don't regard themselves as a tribe. They have a way of thinking about their lives that makes sense. And secular people have a parallel set of views that makes sense of their lives. And so we all do this. We construct an interpretation of our lives, and we're loyal to that and we find other people with similar views. That's what human beings are like, and recognizing that seems to us a big step forward from the way we tend to think about politics now.

So someone shouldnt walk away from this book thinking democracy is too idealistic for high primates like us?

Well, democracy is happening; it's just not the kind of democracy that we hear about in Fourth of July speeches. So our complaint is not so much about democracy as it is about our misleading understanding of democracy and the bad implications it has for how we proceed democratically.

I think our reply to someone who walks away with that impression would be: What is it about the ideas of the American founders that you disagree with? Because that is the position that's being taken here. And as we say in the book, the response is often, well, a lot of them were slaveholders, and we don't have to take their ideas seriously. OK, yes, they were. But to not read them at all is a recipe for ignorance and not the one that we believe.

Visit link:
The problem with democracy: it relies on voters - Vox - Vox

Reformists won big in the recent elections, but Trump favors confrontation, which helpsIranian hard-liners.

Supporters of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani celebrate his victory in the presidential election in Tehran, Iran, May 20, 2017. (TIMA via Reuters)

The US government has drawn a big sigh of relief. After decades of being on the retreat, Irans pro-democracy forces have regained momentum and are once again moving their country in a more liberal direction. The historic 2015 nuclear deal, which benefited Irans moderates, appears to be holding ground. In turn, Washington has decided to double down on diplomacy in order to further move Tehran toward reconciliation and reintegrate it into the global community. Engagement has paid off, and the United States is recommitting itself to the path thats proven to be the only effective policy toward Iran.

Just kidding. The above would hold true in a parallel universe, one in which US policy toward Iran was characterized by rationality. In the universe we live in, however, Washingtons approach is motivated by an irrational fear of losing Iran as an enemy. Instead of welcoming the countrys courageous democratic stepswhich Washington for decades has claimed it desiresPresident Trump clenched his fist and doubled down on enmity by calling for regime change and Irans isolation. Only Saudi Arabia and hard-line elements of Benjamin Netanyahus cabinet in Israel welcomed this belligerent movethe same two countries that also opposed the nuclear deal.

But it isnt just the path to US-Iran reconciliation that Trump is blocking by outsourcing Middle East policy to Saudi Arabia and Israel. He also risks jeopardizing Irans path toward reform and democratization. And it wouldnt be the first time the United States stood in the way of the Iranian peoples yearning for democracy.

In the 1950s, Britain and the US overthrew Irans embryonic democracy in order to seize the countrys oil wealth.

In the early 1950s, Iran was an embryonic democracy. The 1906 Constitutional Revolution had replaced the millennia-old absolute monarchy with a constitutional monarchythe first of its kind in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia still doesnt have a constitution). Iran had a Parliament that was directly elected by the people, which in turn elected the countrys prime minister. The Iranians had fought hard for these pivotal steps toward full democracy. However, Great Britain, then still a dominant Middle Eastern power, stood in the way. Ever so hungry for Irans vast oil reserves, London interfered incessantly in the countrys internal affairs to keep it weak and incapable of fending off British theft of Irans riches.

Led by Mohammad Mossadeq, a nationalist member of Parliament who was elected prime minister in April 1951, the Iranians began demanding that the countrys oil industry be nationalized so that the wealth from it would benefit their own country rather than end up in British coffers.

But Britain was in no mood to share Irans oil wealth with the Iranians. And the ShahMohammad Reza Pahlaviwas wary of the increased power and popularity Mossadeq was gaining from whipping up nationalist sentiments. Even an illegal naval blockade imposed by London, which almost entirely cut off Irans oil sales, failed to diminish Mossadeqs popularity.

As Stephen Kinzer describes in his indispensable book All the Shahs Men, London concluded that it needed to get rid of Mossadeq and expand the power of the Shah. However, vastly weakened by World War II, Britain needed Americas blessing and assistance; earlier attempts to draw Washington into the conflict in support of Britain had failed. But as political deadlock gripped Iran, Winston Churchills government began using a new argument, to which Washington was exceptionally vulnerable: If Mossadeq wasnt removed, he would eventually move Iran into the Soviet camp. This would be a significant blow to the United States at the height of the Cold War. Although there was no evidence that Mossadeq had communist sympathies, the British argued that he could develop such inclinations and that Washington couldnt afford this risk.

The argument worked. The Eisenhower administration ordered the CIA to team up with the British MI6 in what became known as Operation Ajax. With a $1 million budget, the Near East and Africa division of the CIA, led by Kermit Roosevelt Jr., grandson of former US President Theodore Roosevelt, went to work. Propaganda against Mossadeq was disseminated, and Iranian CIA operatives pretending to be pro-Mossadeq threatened Iranian clerics in Mossadeqs name, in order to turn the powerful religious community against the prime minister.

The Shah brutally clamped down on dissent and democratic demandswith the approval and assistance of Washington.

As CIA-engineered protests swept Tehran (the CIA paid protesters on both sides in order to maximize the chaos), the Shahs military stormed the capital on cue and took over the city. Mossadeq was arrested and many of his associates were imprisoned. The Shah quickly moved to negotiate a deal with foreign oil companies that gave Washington and London the lions share of Irans oil, while strengthening his grip on power, reducing the role of Parliament, and brutally clamping down on dissent and democratic demandsall with the approval and assistance of the United States.

The United States and the United Kingdom killed Irans democratic experiment in its infancy. Washington, which under previous administrations had opposed colonization and British intervention in Iran, switched sides and became the ultimate power behind the Shahs dictatorship. To many Iranians, Pahlavi became known as the American Shah.

In recent years, the struggle for democracy in Iran has regained momentum. But it is not Irans political system that is impressiveindeed, it is fundamentally flawed and undemocratic. Rather, it is the maturity of Iranian society that holds the promise for a more democratic future. While most countries in the region dont even hold elections, Iranians have nowin three presidential elections in a rowvoted for the most moderate candidate on the ballot (including the controversial 2009 elections, when the Green Movements victory was stolen from the people). Iran is one of few countries in the world where an anti-populist message wins you a landslide election victory.

Women made significant gains throughout the country, especially in city-council elections.

And perhaps more importantly, it is in local electionswhich tend to be more free, with less government vetting, than presidential and national parliamentary votingwhere the potency of Iranian societys democratic values are most evident. Reformists won landslide victories in the city-council elections of Irans six largest cities, giving them electoral gains in both local and national elections. Even in the conservative city of Mashhad, the birthplace of Irans conservative Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as well as the main conservative presidential candidate, Ebrahim Raisi, reformists swept all of the city-council seats. A female candidate in Mashhad even got elected on a platform of fighting the patriarchy. Her campaign slogan read: Lets vote for women!

Women made significant gains elsewhere as well. In the Tehran city-council elections, women grabbed six out of the 21 seatsthe highest number yet. In the Sistan and Baluchistan province, women won 415 city-council seatsan increase from 185. There were even council elections in which no men were on the ballot at all.

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What we are witnessing is the promise of democracy manifesting itself. In this struggle, now more than a century old, the driving force has consistently been Irans own moderate society. This society has incessantly pushed for democratic change, and whenever external threats and internal strife have been absent, Iranian society has moved the country in that direction.

None of this seems to have registered with Trump. Standing in a room in Riyadh, where the overwhelming majority of leaders standing with him were unelected autocrats, Trump not only called for Irans isolation, he fully joined the Saudi side in the regions increasingly dangerous Saudi-Iranian rivalry.

Just as the Iranian people sent an unmistakable invitation for further engagement and dialogue, Trump took the United States back to the Bush-era policy of confrontation. Its a policy with only one clear winner: Irans hard-line elements, who oppose both Iranian societys desire for more democracy and closer relations with the United States.

The hard-liners attempts to reimpose a repressive security atmosphere inside Iran, as it did in the Ahmadinejad erawith a clampdown on civil society and the NGO sectorhas been decisively rejected by the Iranian electorate. But now Trump is giving the hard-liners a second lifeline by opting for confrontation.

Whether intended or not, we may very well see a repeat of 1953, with the United States once again strangling the Iranian democratic baby just as it is about to take its first steps out of the cradle.

Read more from the original source:
Will America Once Again Undermine Iran's Pro-Democracy Movement? - The Nation.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to a roundtable discussion on President Trumps announcement Thursday hell withdraw the United States from the landmark Paris climate accord signed by nearly 200 nations in 2015 and heralded as a rare moment of international collaboration to avert imminent climate disaster.

From State College, Pennsylvania, were joined by Michael Mann, distinguished professor and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. His latest book he co-authored with political cartoonist Tom Toles is titled The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy.

Via Democracy Now! video stream from Johannesburg, South Africa, Kumi Naidoo rejoins us, South African activist, former head of Greenpeace, chairperson of Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity.

In London, Asad Rehman is with us, executive director of War on Want. He was formerly the spokesperson for Friends of the Earth International.

And in San Francisco, Antonia Juhasz, oil and energy journalist, author of several books, including The Tyranny of Oil: The Worlds Most Powerful Industryand What We Must Do to Stop It.

We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Lets go to the scientist first. Lets go to Michael Mann and your response to just what happened yesterday in the White House Rose Garden.

MICHAEL MANN: Thanks, Amy. Its good to be with you.

You know, what can be said that hasnt already been said? I thought you laid it out very well. The U.S., through the actions of Donald Trump, has now established itself as an international outlaw. We literally are on the sidelines with Syria and Nicaragua as the onlyand Nicaragua hasnt signed onto the Paris accord because they think it doesnt go far enoughas the only countries now that are not respecting the commitments of the Paris accord.

And the most dangerous aspect of that action is the potential ripple effect. With the second-largest emitter of carbon on the face of the planet, the U.S., withdrawing, the fear, of course, is that this will create a snowball effect, a ripple effect, where other countries, like India, might say, "Well, you know, if the U.S., which has had 200 years of access to free dirty energy, isnt willing to do their part, then why should we, a country thats trying to develop its economy, go along with this?" And thats the real danger, is the message it sends to the rest of the world. Thus far, as youve alluded to, there appears to be a solidarity among the remaining nations, among Franceweve heard from China and India. So thats a good sign.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, can you talk about, Professor Michael Mann, the science around this climate accord? Throughout his speech, Trump repeatedly claimed that the accord puts the United States at an economic disadvantage in relation to the rest of the world.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: This agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the United States. The rest of the world applauded when we signed the Paris Agreement. They went wild. They were so happyfor the simple reason that it put our country, the United States of America, which we all love, at a very, very big economic disadvantage.

AMY GOODMAN: Trump also repeatedly claimed the Paris climate accord is hurting American workers and costing them jobs.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The Paris climate accord is simply the latest example of Washington entering into an agreement that disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries, leaving American workers, who I love, and taxpayers to absorb the cost in terms of lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories and vastly diminished economic production.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Professor Michael Mann, I mean, youre a distinguished professor of atmospheric science. He didnt address the science. He talked about the issue of jobs. But Im wondering if you can talk about both, in particular as he talked about his love for coal miners.

MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, sure. So first on the science, he actually did wade into that territory a bit when he claimed that the Paris accord would only shave a tenth of a degree Celsius of temperature rise off of the trajectory that were on. Thats pretty good for Donald Trump. He was only off by a factor of 10, because it will shave at least a degree Celsius. And with proper ratcheting up, it will literally cut the projected warming in half, getting us onto a path where we could see stabilizing the warming below 2 degrees Celsius, what most scientists who study the impacts of climate change will tell you constitutes sort of the level of dangerous interference with the climate.

On the jobs side of things, again, he gets the numbers wrong. First of all, there are only about 70,000 jobs in the U.S. in coal. And energy experts recognize that this is a dying industry. There were nearly a million jobs in renewable energy in the U.S. last year. We are on a trajectory where there is tremendous growth in renewable energy. And, look, the rest of the world recognizes that that is the economic revolution of this century. China, for example, is cleaning our clock when it comes to renewable energyin fact, producing so much solar energy technology that theyve literally flooded the entire global economy with cheap solar panels, and theyve brought down the price of solar technology tremendously. So, you know, the rest of the world recognizes that this is the great growth industry of this century, and the U.S. risks getting left behind if it doesnt get on board. So, whether were talking about the science, whether were talking about economic competitiveness, whether were talking about jobs, everything that Trump said yesterday was wrong.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Mann, you tweeted, "Evidently, Trumps real goal is #MECGA"M-E-C-G-A"(Making Europe & China Great Again)." I wanted to ask Asad Rehman, who is in London right now, whos head of War on Want, your reaction and the reaction in Europe right now to Donald Trumps historic withdrawal of the United States from the Paris accord.

ASAD REHMAN: Thank you, Amy.

Well, first of all, let me just say that there has been a long tradition of U.S. weakening of climate action. If we go back to, of course, the Kyoto agreement, that was very weakweak pledge from the United States, full of loopholes. And that was to accommodate the United States. And, of course, the Paris Agreement was nonbinding. It was all voluntary. The pledges in it would lead to a warming of at least 3 degrees. It needed to be strengthened. And that was, again, done under President Obamas watch, but to accommodate the United States. So, I think one of the very powerful lessons of this is that there is a tradition and a long history of American exceptionalism within climate action and that the rest of the world now has to move on faster and more ambitious and leave the United States behind. So the reaction that youre seeing now, I think, has been very strong and very positive, both from governments, but also from social organizations, civil society, where people are committed and recognizing that the real change will come not necessarily from Donald Trump, but it will come from the grassroots within the United States, because this is bad for the people of the United States.

The temperature increase that were seeing of 1-degree warming around the world is leading to killer floods and droughts all over the world. Its leading to half the summer ice in the Arctic melting. Its leading to coral being bleached. And, of course, that has huge implications and impacts, and not just on the poorest parts of the world. Now those impacts are being felt all around the world. So this is absolutely that Donald Trump has now made the United States a climate criminal and has put itself outside of multilateralism and global society.

But I think its also part of a bigger trend of Donald Trump. I would say that this is a reflection of a real mindset, of a neocolonial white supremacist mindset, because if you take it into context with the Muslim ban, building walls and fences, and then walking away from climate change, where the United States is historically the greatestresponsible for the greatest amount of CO2 in the atmosphereand, actually, its pledge is so weak, its doing less than one-fifth of what it should be doing.

And he was absolutely wrong about thehis comments about climate finance, as well. In fact, the United States is only pledging about $1 billion, which is a drop in the ocean of what the impacts are happening around the world and what is actually needed for poor countries to be able to develop cleanly and be able to tackle poverty, because we have to remember that billions of our citizens, of course, are still without access to energy, are still living in subsistence, still facing multiple poverty. Im originally from Pakistan, you know, where four out of 10 people face multiple indices of poverty. And just last week, we had temperature levels recorded at 53.5 degrees centigrade. Thats literally at the upper level of what a human being can tolerate in the open. And this is the same country where one flood impacted 30 million people, covered one-fifth of the country and cost the country billions and billions of dollars. So these are very real and live impacts.

And what hes done is not only turned his back on the international community, hes basically saying, "Black lives, poor lives dont matter. They dont matter in the rest of the world, and also they dont matter in the United States," because its the poorest and most vulnerable people in the United States who face these impacts, as well, whether thats through air pollution, the extractive industry and, as weve seen with Dakota Access pipeline, the impacts on indigenous communities, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Former Secretary of State John Kerry, who led the U.S. into the Paris accord under President Obama, Thursday, blasted President Trump for withdrawing from the deal. Speaking to CBS, Kerry noted U.S. commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are voluntary under the Paris accord, and said Trump could have simply scaled back U.S. pledges to cut pollution.

JOHN KERRY: No country is required by this agreement to do anything except what that country decided to do for itself. So Donald Trump is not telling the truth to the American people when he says, "We have this huge burden thats been imposed on us by other nations." No, we agreed to what we would do. We designed it. Its voluntary. And the president of the Unites States could have simply changed that without walking away from the whole agreement.

AMY GOODMAN: Asad Rehman, your response?

ASAD REHMAN: Well, he said it himself very, very clearly. They designed a voluntary, weak agreement, that was basically where rich countries could do as little as they wanted. And the United States could have stayed in and then done even less.

I mean, on one level, I think its a veryits a useful signal from the United States, because now it must spur people at the European Union, who have aided the United States in weakening the agreement in the hope that the U.S. would take part. They must now say, "Absolutely, we have a responsibility. We have to live up to our fair share." So the European Union is also not doing its fair share of whats needed.

Climate scientists tell us we have about a decade. Its a decade zero, if we want to keep temperatures below the critical 1.5-degree threshold where impacts will be absolutely devastating for the poorest and most vulnerable countries in the world. And in that, now we have an opportunity. The climate talks take place in Germany this year. There is an opportunity for richer countries to come there and increase their targets. And actually, that would be the best response now to Donald Trump. It would be saying that what we need is a legally binding agreement, an agreement thats based on the science and not on what rich countries want to do or feel that theyre able to do, because that absolutely is disastrous both for the planet and for its people.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to South Africa right now. Yesterday, Kumi Naidoo, chair of Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity, we talked to you about the imminent announcement. We were not sure what was going to happen. But yesterday, just after 3:00 p.m. Eastern time, President Trump did take to the Rose Garden, speaking to his supporters, and announced the U.S. withdrawal from the climate deal. Your response right now, from your position in Johannesburg, South Africa, what this means for the African continent?

KUMI NAIDOO: Well, for people like Asad and myself, who did not think this deal was as ambitious as it needed to be, its quite an interesting situation, because yesterday, after I was interviewed by Democracy Now!, some right-wing publication, I think, said all the critics of the Paris Agreement are now saying, "Oh, dear, its such a bad thing that Donald Trump has pulled out." I mean, this is cognitive dissonance at its worst, where theres a denial about the fact that we are very close to the climate cliff. As one newspaper put it, Donald Trumps message to the world, front page said, world"Message to the World: Drop Dead." OK? Thats how its being reported.

Now, for us in Africa, were already seeing very brutal and the first big impacts of climate change. We think that this is not only a betrayal tofor poor people who have hardly contributed any emissions. For them to be facing the first and most brutal price of climate impacts, its just unjust. But what I think is clear is that the successful nations, companies, societies of the future are not going to be those that win the arms race, space race or any other race. Its going to be those that win the green race, the green technology race. And I think that apart from the harm that hes done globally through this decision, the biggest threats and the biggest damage, he will do to the American people themselves.

And I think that the positive thing about it is that Iyou know, just what Ive heard in the last 12 hours is that it has really energized the climate movement rather than de-energized it. So there are people right nowfor example, Ive been lookingIm looking at a proposal right now thats been sent to me from a coalition of activists who are talking about a strategic boycott of the United States, targeting certain products of the United States. Its something that weve never heard talked about very seriously in the past. I think that you are going to see, as we are seeing already, mayors in the United States, progressive governors, progressive businesses and so on saying to Trump, "Were moving ahead anyway."

So, our call from Africa and from the so-called Global South, what people call the developing countries, to the people of the United States right now is that we do not judge you on the basis of what a crazy president has just done. We will judge you by how you respond to President Trump. And we call on the people of the United States today to mobilize the biggest-ever civil disobedience against the president of the United States. Weve seen some inspiring things already since his election. And I think right now we have to call on the people of the United States to muster the boldest, peaceful, strong civil disobedience to put pressure on him, such that he might have to be humbled to go back and reverse his decision.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring Antonia Juhasz into the discussion, oil and energy journalist, speaking to us from California. Der Spiegel had a remarkable cover, the German magazine. It said, "America First! Earth Last!" Antonia, your response to Donald Trumps announcement?

ANTONIA JUHASZ: I think the announcement shows not the independence that Donald Trump is trying to put forward, but who he is captured by and whos hewho he is being responsive to. So youve got the domestic oil industry and fossil fuel industry. And just to be clear, Donald Trump says he loves coal miners, but coal miners dont love him. He wasnt endorsed by the coal workers union, United Mine Workers of America. They dont like him. Theyve never liked him. Donald Trump is standing with coal companies and fossil fuel companies, who have been very successful in making his domestic agenda be one that would not adhere to our climate commitments in any case, limiting regulation, oversight over fossil fuel production and opening up new areas to production, so that we would increase our already high carbon emissions and pollution and health effects, etc.

But also, lets recall that this is coming quite shortly after Trumps first foreign trip to Saudi Arabia. As I reported from Paris in Newsweek and as we discussed on the show from Paris, Saudi Arabia has desperately been trying to stop the climate accord process for years, and does not want, for very obvious reasons, the world to declare its lack of an intent to continue to use carbon-based fuels. And Trump came back from Saudi Arabia and announced that the United States would be eliminating its commitments and pulling out of the Paris climate accord.

Another country that would very much like to see the world not make a commitment to move off of oil and fossil fuels is Russia, a country, of course, where there is a great deal of concern about the relationship of Donald Trump to Putin and to Russia.

And Trump can do a great deal of damage even in the four years of the withdrawal period. As you used in your headliner, the Paris climate accord had a lot of weaknesses, but one of its strengths was a global $500 billion commitment to helping those countries that are suffering the worst consequences of climate change right now to help deal with those immediate costs and try and do some adaptation. Now, this wasnt enough money, but it was still $500 billion. The Obama administration pledged $4 billion; it had only put forward $1 billion. But Trump is essentially saying the United States is not going to fund and help put money forward, which is something that we have, to help address the immediate impacts right now of the climate crisis. In addition

AMY GOODMAN: In the Green Climate Fund.

ANTONIA JUHASZ: hes slashing already inthats right. And hes slashing, in his already proposed budgets, that already came out prior to this announcement, draconian cuts to U.S. payments to address climate change in its various forms through international agencies, including the United Nations.

And nowhere in all of this, by the way, are we seeing, you know, these great rumors that Rex Tillerson is a great defender of Paris, the Paris climate accord. Where is Rex Tillerson when Donald Trump is already proposing in his budget these cuts to our funds to address our commitments to Paris and our commitments to climate? Where is Rex Tillerson when thewhen Donald Trump is proposing and enacting harsh cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency in its ability to regulate fossil fuels? The New York Times reported, in this article about how Rex Tillerson is, you know, trying to support the Paris climate accord, that also, of course, the current CEO of ExxonMobil just happens to be sharing the same position. And in a meeting where the current CEO of ExxonMobil apparently conveyed that position privately to Trumpand he has joined others in doing so publiclyit was in a meeting, according to the Times, where they were also discussing new offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico that Exxon wants to pursue. So, you know, theres a public stance, which could be, you know, "We support Paris and the Paris climate accord," but then theres the real policy pieces that make it meaningful. And so, the damage that can be done in those four years is vast. And, to me, it shows, you know, as I said, the alliances that Trump has posed.

It also sends a really important and problematic message to the rest of the world, which was brought up at the very beginning. The United States is not going to hold to its commitmentsthe federal government is notunder Paris. And that sends a message to the rest of the world: You dont have to put in place policies that shift away from fossil fuels, because there isnt going to be an international commitment that you do so. And that is a very dangerous message, particularly for countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia, that would really like to make it clear fossil fuels are here to stay, oil is here to stay. That sends a message to the rest of the world: You know, you can continue on this path. Fortunately, of course, as weve heard, local communities, activists, governments, many governments, are not going to listen to that message. But the fact that its coming from the United States is deeply troubling and is certainly a message that the Trump administration was hoping to convey on behalf of, as I said, the domestic oil industry, domestic fossil fuel industry and his allies and allies hes hoping to continue to foster, I would argue, most importantly, Saudi Arabia and Russia.

AMY GOODMAN: Antonia, I want you to stay with us, because after break I want to find out about your latest investigation into TigerSwan, the company that has been surveilling the indigenous movements against the Dakota Access pipeline. News is that oil is now flowing through DAPL, through this pipeline, under the Missouri River. But I wanted to go back to Kumi Naidoo in South Africa to talk about civil disobedience. That is what youre known for, Kumi, former head of Greenpeace, now chair of Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity. What you think people around the world and in the United Stateswhat do you think their responsibility is right now?

KUMI NAIDOO: Well, I think its clear that we have put too much of faith in political and business leaders over the last several decades, expecting them, as parents and grandparents who have a vested interest in the future of their children, to do the right thing. The message that we get now out of Washington and President Trump is one where we have to realize that if we, as ordinary citizens, do not stand up and do not take ownership of putting pressure on our political and business leaders in a much more stronger, peaceful and bold way, we are not going to get the results that we need. We are literally, you know, five minutes to midnight. We are seeing the devastation thats been caused already by existing climate impacts. People seem to have short memories. I would have thought President Trump, being a resident of New York, would have had some sense, even being in his Trump Tower, of the devastation that Hurricane Sandy caused, which was intensified, which the climate scientists told us, by the level of Arctic sea ice during the summer months when it happened.

So, where we are is we have to recognizeand we, as activists and in the climate movement, have to take a very hard look at ourselves. As Albert Einstein once said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting to get different results. We now have to say, "Well, what can we do differently? What can we do that makes it irresistible for corrupt, self-serving, captured-by-vested-interests leaders? How long do we tolerate their misbehavior?" So, I think right now, already over the last couple of years weve seen an intensification of civil disobedience around climate activism. I would like to say to every parent, every grandparent, if you care about your children, you should be now becoming a climate activist. You should be considering civil disobedience, because thats the kind of pressure that we need right now to align the sciencewhat the science is saying we need to do, what Mother Nature is saying we need to do, through extreme weather events and so onand what actions we take.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Michael Mann, what are climate scientists doing? What is your community around the world? It seems that this announcement has brought out climate change deniers that werent even being turned to before, people who werent willing to say this. Theyre now coming out talking about the questionable science on television, and the networks are filled with those voices, as well.

MICHAEL MANN: No, thats right. Sort of the culture that Donald Trump has created here, where the leader of our country, the president of the United States, has adopted as his official position that climate change is either a hoax created by the Chinese or at least something that we dont need to worry about, when the overwhelming consensus of the worlds scientists, which includes the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and every scientific society in the U.S. that has weighed in on the matter, is that climate change is real, its human-caused, its already wreaking havoc in the form of unprecedented heat and droughts and flooding events and superstorms, record-strength hurricanes. Its already wreaking havoc.

And if we dont act now to reduce our emissions dramatically over the next 10 years, we will go right past that 1.5-degree Celsius mark that was mentioned earlier. Well sail past that, across the 2-degree Celsius mark, which is, again, where we have reason to think we will see the worst and potentially irreversible changes in climate. So we dont have time to act. We dont have time, if we are going to avert a crisis. We need to bring emissions back down now. By withdrawing from Paris, Trump risks, again, disrupting this process that has been put in place, the Paris treaty, that will get us on the right path. But if we dont bring down our emissions now, were not going to be able to stabilize below dangerous levels of warming.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Michael Mann, distinguished professor and director of Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, I want to thank you for being with us. Asad Rehman, in England, executive director of War on Want. Kumi Naidoo, thanks for joining us from Johannesburg, chair of Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity. And Antonia Juhasz, please stay with us, because we want to find out your latest expos on what has been happening in North Dakota around the Dakota Access pipeline. Stay with us.

Read more:
Top Climate Scientist, Journalist & Activists Blast Trump's Withdrawal from Paris Accord - Democracy Now!

Bear any burden.

We're past the point of shifting blame. We know who gave us the presidency of Donald Trump, and it wasn't 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, it's 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 isn't wrong, of course. If General Electric Co. had gone bonkers and installed Trump as CEO, the smart money would've deserted the company, fearing for its future. Yet what's 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, emailed:

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.

Clear thinking from leading voices in business, economics, politics, foreign affairs, culture, and more.

Share the View

The nation's 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 House's 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 Trump's Republican enablers to abandon him is unknown.

"If democracy produces a renewed commitment to democracy," said Harvard historian Jill Lepore 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.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story: Francis Wilkinson at fwilkinson1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Katy Roberts at kroberts29@bloomberg.net

Original post:
Democracy Faces the Enemy Within - Bloomberg

Asenior US foreign affairs official gaveone of the most awkward press conference responses ever witnessed in response to aquestion about Saudi Arabias attitude to democracy.

Having served as US Ambassador to Jordan and Iraq and been in Al Anbar Province in 2004, as it became the deadliest region for US forces in Iraq Stuart Jones might have been considered more than able to fend off questions about Saudi Arabias apparent lack of enthusiasm for elections.

Instead the Acting Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East Affairs Bureau, freshly returned from accompanying President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to Saudi Arabia, seemed completely stumped by the relatively straightforward reporters question.

He was asked: While you were over there, the Secretary criticised the conduct of the Iranian elections and Irans record on democracy. He did so standing next to Saudi officials. How do you characterise Saudi Arabias commitment to democracy, and does the administration believe that democracy is a buffer or a barrier against extremism?

Um, said Mr Jones.He took a deep breath. He tried again: Err

And then the senior State Department official fell completely silent. For 16 seconds, although to Mr Jones it may have seemed more like an eternity.

Behind his spectacles, Mr Jones seemed to be staring into space, lost in thought or panic possibly considering his response, perhaps hoping the ground would swallow him up, or maybe wondering why on Earth he hadnt wrapped up the press conference before allowing that one last question.

Finally, a full20 seconds after the question was asked a pause described by one experienced commentator as the longest ever seen from a US official Mr Jones managed a stuttering response.

It made no reference at all to attitudes to democracy in a kingdom where only three elections all of them merelyfor local councils have been allowed in 52 years.

The official State Department transcript seems to have tidied things up by removing the agonising pause and the hesitations, but the video shows Mr Jones full response to have been: I think what we would say is that, uh, at this meeting, we were able to, err, make significant progress with Saudi and GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] partners in, uh, both making a strong statement against extremism and also, um, and also putting errerr, putting in place certain measures through this GCC mechanism where we can combat extremism.

"Clearly one source of extremism one source one err terrorism threat is coming from Iran. And thats coming from a part of the Iranian apparatus that is not at all responsive to its electorate.

There is then yet another pause, Mr Jones staying stock still before a fellow State Department official says okay to indicate that the press conference is over. Mr Jones then quietly thanks the assembled reporters, collects his papers and exits before anyone is rude enough to ask a follow-up question.

In the aftermath, the reporter who asked the question, Dave Clark, AFPs Washington-based diplomatic correspondent, has shown admirable tact.

I asked about Saudi democracy, he said. I found his pause eloquent.

It was pretty awkward being there, added Mr Clark,originally from Newcastle.Especially as I wasnt trying to embarrass Jones himself.

In fairness to Mr Jones, characterising US ally Saudi Arabias attitude to democracy may require American officials to consider their words carefully.

Saudi Arabia has been a monarchy ruled by the Al Saud family since the kingdom was founded in 1932.Since then, elections of any sort have been rare. In the 40 years between 1965 and 2005 there were none at all.

This century, there have been three elections, in 2005, 2011 and 2015. All of them, however, were just elections for municipal councils whose powers were limited to local issues like street cleaning and rubbish collection.

In 2015, for the first time in the kingdoms history, women were allowed to vote and stand as candidates. Prior to that, the kingdoms Grand Mufti, its most senior religious figure, had described womens involvement in politics as opening the door to evil.

But in 2015, with women in Saudi Arabia still not permitted to drive or to address men who were not related to them, female election candidates could only speak directly to female voters.When attending gatherings of male voters, they had to speak from behind a partition or have a man read their speech for them.

At a national level, Saudi Arabia does have a consultative assembly, but the emphasis is very much on consultative. The Al Saud royal family continues to appoint the government, and no political parties are allowed.

All of which may explain Mr Joness difficulties.

Prior to facing Mr Clarks final, apparently unanswerable question, he had briefly discussed his impending retirement.It was, Mr Jones explained, a decision he had made more than a year ago, just a personal choice and nothing to do with the outgoing Obama and incoming Trump administrations, both of whom he had been delighted to serve.

His response, and the fact he gave it before facing Mr Clarks question, also shows that Mr Jones retirement was in no way related to his press conference performance.

He will, though, be missed by at least one reporter.

Im sad hes leaving, said Mr Clark.

Read more from the original source:
Senior US official reduced to very awkward silence when asked about Saudi Arabia's attitude to democracy - The Independent