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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Becoming more politically involved hasn't been without repercussions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From a report last week in the Atlantic:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We recently asked you to support our journalism. The response, in a word, is heartening. You have encouraged us in our mission to provide quality news and watchdog journalism. Some of you have even followed through with subscriptions, which is especially gratifying. Our role as an independent, fact-based news organization has never been clearer. And our promise to you is that we will always strive to provide indispensable journalism to our community. Subscriptions are available for home delivery of the print edition and for a digital replica viewable on your mobile device or computer. Subscriptions start as low as 25 per day. We're thankful for your support in every way.

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

By Anna Lhrmann, Valeriya Mechkova and Matthew Wilson By Anna Lhrmann, Valeriya Mechkova and Matthew Wilson June 26 at 6:00 AM

Recent events such as the election of Donald Trump as president and the rise of right-wing extremists in Europe have led to gloomy commentary about the state of democracy. For example, people have argued that liberal democracies are at risk of decline, that support for democracy is being eroded by the conflict between values and expertise, and that democratic backsliding has already occurred in a number of countries.

Is this pessimism warranted? Not quite. Although the average level of democracy in the world has declined to where it was 10 to 15 years ago, the decline is moderate. The world remains more democratic today than it was before the end of the Cold War. A nuanced look at the data suggests that the declines are limited to certain countries and even to certain domains within those countries.

[Worried about a decline in democracy? Worry about politicians, not the public.]

There are still reasons to be worried, though: The quality of democracy has declined in more countries than it has improved in over the past five years.

Heres how we did our research

These conclusions are based on new data released by the Varieties of Democracy Project. The V-Dem Project surveys about 2,800 experts and asks them to assess the nature and development of democracy in more than 177 countries from 1900 to 2016. The value of experts is that they can distinguish between real and fake democracies. For example, most countries today hold elections, but some of these elections are free and fair while others merely legitimize dictators.

Of course, expert assessments are necessarily subjective. Therefore, V-Dem normally asks five experts to evaluate each country on each of many characteristics that characterize democracy. V-Dem then aggregates the expert assessments using a statistical model. V-Dem also provides an estimate of uncertainty that reflects how much the experts disagree. When we speak of significant changes in democracy, we refer to changes that are visible even after taking this uncertainty into account.

[No, people really arent turning away from democracy]

In its first report, V-Dem dissected and evaluated global trends based on several indices created from these data. Here, we focus on the Liberal Democracy Index, which captures whether there are free and fair elections, leaders are constrained by the rule of law, parliamentary and judicial oversight and civil liberties are protected.

The global trends in democracy

The trends in the Liberal Democracy Index are presented in the graph below:

As the graph shows, the average level of democracy grew considerably between 1970 and 2010, especially after the end of the Cold War. There has been only a slight decrease in recent years.

The overall trends conceal some important developments in specific countries. Since 2013, there have been more countries whose scores on this index were declining than countries whose scores were increasing. In 2016, 21 countries declined relative to 2011, while only 13 countries improved.

One example of a country whose score declined is Thailand, in which the military staged a coup in 2014 and suspended the constitution. Another is Poland, where the Law and Justice Party is blatantly undermining the constitution. A third is Turkey, which has seen President Recep Tayyip Erdoan purging the ranks of opposition members and establishing a stronghold over the country.

Among the countries whose scores have increased is Tunisia, in which a popular revolution led to elections and a peaceful transfer of power. It is arguably a success story of the Arab Spring. There were also increases to above the world average in Georgia, which implemented economic reforms aimed at tackling corruption, and in Sri Lanka, where a new government reportedly is committed to transitional justice and restoring rule of law.

Worrying trends among established democracies

A concern of commentators is that democracy is declining even where it was thought to be firmly established: in Western Europe, the United States and Canada. Below is the trend in the Liberal Democracy Index in these 22 countries.

After a steep decline during World War II, democracy recovered quickly and surged above 80 points with the expansion of civil liberties and the fall of Southern European dictatorships in the 1970s. But since 2012, there has been a significant decline, from 84 to 80 points.

This decrease is present in every country except Canada, although in most countries it is not significant either because the decline is small or because experts disagree.

The United States, however, is the only advanced democracy that has experienced a significant decline in five years a drop of nine points.

This appears to support claims that U.S. elections are the worst among other Western democracies or that the United States is a flawed democracy. But we think these claims go too far. The level of liberal democracy in the United States remains high, with a score of 78 points, which puts the United States 17th in the world.

What has changed in the United States

A deeper look at the status of liberal democracy in the United States suggests that three things have suffered in recent years: the quality of elections, media reporting and government oversight. We can break down the Liberal Democracy Index into its two components: (1) the Electoral Democracy Index, which captures clean elections, freedom of association and expression, and whether there are alternative sources of information; and (2) the Liberal Component Index, which captures equality before the law, individual liberties, and legislative and judicial constraints on the executive.

[A new expert survey finds warning signs for the state of American democracy]

From 2011 to 2016, most of the significant declines involved electoral democracy. Experts rated the United States less favorably in the freedom and fairness of its elections, the intimidation of opposition parties by government officials, media bias in coverage of political candidates, the range of perspectives in the media and media self-censorship. Anecdotal evidence that supports these declines concerns voter ID laws, media censorship and gerrymandering practices.

In terms of the liberal principles of democracy, experts rated the U.S. less favorably in freedom of religion, compliance with high court decisions, and the extent to which the executive is held accountable by oversight agencies. Note that these assessments predate the Trump administration, but the drop in freedom of religion in 2016 probably reflects his electoral campaign. The results, however, suggest that any challenges with U.S. democracy are not simply a function of Trump himself.

But all this warrants caution, not alarmism

Clearly liberal democracy is facing challenges in some countries in particular in the United States. Therefore, U.S. political scientists are right to be on alert and continuously monitor the weak points of their democracy. In some places, it is even worse: Countries such as Turkey or Venezuela have experienced serious breakdowns.

But the V-Dem data suggests that alarmist reports about a global demise of democracy are not yet warranted. For one, the average level of democracy in the world is still close to the highest recorded level, even if a slight decline is detectable over the last few years. And there are real success stories, like in Tunisia, even if those do not make as many headlines.

[The wave of right-wing populist sentiment is a myth]

Although the declines in democracy in places such as Europe and the United States deserve our attention, the V-Dem data suggest that political institutions in these countries are relatively resilient. Recent examples include the electoral victory of Emmanuel Macron against Marine Le Pen in France and judicial challenges to the immigration ban proposed by President Trump.

Ultimately, citizens in advanced democracies should remain vigilant against democratic backsliding but we should also celebrate major gains in the quality of democracy among less democratic countries.

Anna Lhrmann is a postdoctoral research fellow at the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg. From 2002 to 2009, she was a member of the German National Parliament.

Valeriya Mechkova is a PhD candidate at the V-Dem Institute/University of Gothenburg.

Matthew Wilson is an assistant professor at West Virginia University and will be a visiting researcher at the V-Dem Institute in 2018.

Originally posted here:
Is democracy on the decline? Not as much as some pundits want you to believe. - Washington Post

BANGKOK (AP) A Thai court on Monday heard year-old charges against a pro-democracy activist arrested over the weekend, as the military government sought to discourage commemorations of the anniversary of the countrys 1932 transition from an absolute to constitutional monarchy.

Bangkoks military court released Rangsiman Rome on bail on the conditions that he not incite unrest or leave the country without the courts permission.

He was arrested Sunday to prevent him from attending a pro-democracy forum critical of the military government, said his lawyer, Poonsuk Poonsukcharoen of the legal aid group Thai Lawyers for Human Rights. She said he also planned to petition the government on Monday to disclose details of a 179 billion baht ($5.27 billion) Thai-Chinese rail project for which the prime minister used special powers to override normal regulations.

Other activists reported being harassed on Saturday, the anniversary of the end of absolute monarchy and the birth of Thai democracy.

This government pledges to lead Thailand toward a democratic transition. It is the juntas main theme that they would eventually return power, said Sunai Phasuk, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch. It is ironic that on the day that marks the 85th anniversary of the first democratic transition, that very same junta was harassing and intimidating activists and academics from publicly commemorating the June 24th event.

Rangsiman was arrested last year for violating a ban on political gatherings of more than five people and for handing out leaflets urging people to vote against a junta-imposed draft constitution. Critics said the constitution, which passed a referendum, limits the power of elected politicians and gives the military continued influence over the government after elections are held. The army took power in 2014 after staging a coup against an elected government and has delayed plans several times to hold new polls.

The military has actively suppressed critics and political opponents.

Sirawith Seitiwat, a student activist who is facing prosecution on charges of lese majeste defaming the monarchy said on his Facebook page on Saturday that police officers appeared at his house and volunteered to drive him around the city for the day. Sirawith said he rejected the offer and instead took a public bus, but spotted a police car following him.

Seri Kasetsart, a student democracy advocacy group, said last week that police had made pointed inquiries about its plans for Saturdays anniversary.

We want to condemn the actions of the government that is destroying and overthrowing democracy, which belongs to the people, the group said in a statement posted Saturday on its Facebook page. To express political opinions is something that all Thais should be able to do. The government should protect such actions, not destroy them.

___

This story has been corrected to show that Sunday forum was a discussion of democracy not railway project.

Go here to see the original:
Thai democracy activist indicted on year-old charges - The Seattle Times