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Democracies die behind closed doors.

Those were the words of federal judge Damon Keith about secret deportation hearings after the 9/11 attacks. Judges Keiths eloquent phrase could also be applied to thousands of back room government meetings in town halls, courthouses and statehouses across this country.

Many candidates preach transparency on the campaign trail, but fail to practice it in office. The issue can expose a canyon between a politicians words and actions.

Some local boards develop a bad habit of gathering as quorums outside their chambers. City commissioners in my town headed for a main street saloon after adjourning. Those sessions lasted longer than their actual meetings.

Our county board had a similar routine. On meeting day, commissioners took a lunch break together. It would be nave to believe county business did not come up at the caf, or city business was not rehashed in the downtown bar.

Local officials are often criticized when caught breaking laws against secret meetings. Meanwhile, elected officials at the state level roam free to do the same thing.

In bright red South Dakota, Republicans make up 85 percent of the State Legislature. GOP lawmakers meet privately in committee quorums, scripting kill or pass strategy for bills before public testimony is even heard. Legal? Yes. Right? No.

Consider the citizens who drive across the state to testify at those committee hearings. Their time and words are wasted when votes are mere rubber stamps of pre-negotiated deals. It is a less than transparent system.

After the committee hearings, South Dakotas Republican legislators hold large closed caucus meetings before the afternoon floor session is gaveled to order. As with the earlier pre-meeting meetings, these top-secret gatherings amount to giant executive sessions on the state level because the super majority caucus has a clear quorum.

Some say its harmless for a quorum of Republicans lawmakers to caucus secretly. We say its a case of too many elephants in the room.

The closed caucus is a place to get those elephants in a row away from public view. Its a place where decisions are made about teacher pay and taxing food and Medicaid expansion. Its a place where Democrats and Independents are excluded from meaningful dialogue about issues important to people of all political labels. Its a place where citizens cannot monitor public policy debates and those who seek to influence them.

Shouldnt people buying the sausage get to see it made? They have a right to watch the Legislatures machinery grinding in all its rust and dust and glory. Let them observe the logic, reasoning, horse-trading and arm-twisting that propels all those ayes and nays on the House and Senate floors. Open caucus doors to media and the public!

Those who say private meetings are more productive and efficient do not give citizens enough credit. Officials should have faith that people smart enough to elect them are also wise enough to judge their deliberations.

Meanwhile, legislators pass state laws requiring local boards to conduct the publics business in public. Hypocrisy anyone?

Wheels of change turn slowly in local government, but some progress has been made. More city and county officials strive to follow open meeting rules. Commissioners in our town no longer meet after meetings for cold beer or hot beef sandwiches. Slow open government beats no open government.

Meetings at the statehouse level are a different story. The addiction to secrecy grows stronger as a majority grows larger. The party in power assumes election success is a license for top-secret business as usual.

Democrats are just as prone to secrecy. One party rule by either party is not conducive to open government. It eliminates checks and balances. Genuine transparency is poisoned.

In most states, there are no laws against a statehouse majoritys secret meetings. But there could be and should be. State lawmakers tell local officials, Do as we say, not as we do. They should be saying, Do as we say and we will, too.

Because democracy dies behind closed doors.

(Brian Hunhoff is a South Dakota journalist who has written extensively about open and closed government. His defense of First Amendment principles was recognized with the Freedom of Information award from the National Newspaper Association. He is contributing editor for the Yankton County Observer.)

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Democracy dies behind closed doors - The Montgomery Herald

To the editor:

Public education should not just be limited to preparing students to attain a good job but more importantly a well-rounded quality of life. A lot of that quality of life can be worsened or bettered by the health of democracy. Currently, our democracy is in distress.

It is time that we realize that our public schools must prioritize the teaching of civic education. By civic education I mean that students should be able to graduate from high school with a comprehensive understanding of how to navigate their democracy. This civic education must go beyond informing students that they can call their representatives when they dont agree with a policy. It should give students the tools to have a critical and productive conversation with their fellow citizens, to organize to bring forward effective change, to engage in their local communities and to take into consideration the equal voice among all people.

It should also present students with an encompassing view of American history so that we can learn from past successes and mistakes and apply them to the future. We cannot turn away from of our history no matter how ugly some of the details may be.

Showing students, even at a young age, that elected officials work for them and that they can exert pressure on those officials is vital to a civic revival. In comparison with STEM courses (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), the teaching of social studies, civics, and the arts is positioned by school systems as being less important.

Our political discourse is trash. Not only does it reek in the heat of campaigns, but within the halls of government and in interviews presented to us in the media. Now, lies are spewed, science and fact are ignored, and events are made up out of thin air. The fourth estate is being attacked as fake and deemed worthless. This is not a partisan issue. This is an issue where we must be able to look past the labels of liberal and conservative. I urge you to call your state representatives and senators regarding Bill SD954/HD2189 that is waiting to be heard in committee at the Statehouse. If passed it would provide Massachusetts youth with a student-centered civic education.

While better civic education programs wont solve all of our problems, it can instill people at a young age with the skills, tools, and will to create a healthier democracy. Civic education may just be the spark we need inreclaiming that power.

Matthew Mogavero

Peabody

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Letter: Better education, better democracy - The Salem News

The political alternative to public divisions is to fix elections or perhaps censor one side, to create an illusion of unity, like those polls where the dictator scores 98 per cent. That would be as anti-democratic as the mock democracy of continually calling for another referendum when you dont like the result of the last one.

Historically speaking, bigger and wider divisions in modern political life have emerged as a product of mass democracy. It was as representative democracy spread that political parties formed to represent different competing interests in a necessarily divided body politic.

For example, Americas Founding Fathers originally envisaged a US republic without political parties or factions, united in one common national interest. George Washington thought party politics agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another. Thomas Jefferson declared that if I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all. This outlook reflected their strictly limited original vision of how democratic America should be, with voting rights restricted to a minority of property-owning males who could agree where their mutual interests lay.

However, as the republics political life began and voting rights spread, political divisions and factions quickly took shape. By 1793 Jefferson the anti-party man had resigned from Washingtons cabinet to lead the opposition and form the Democratic-Republican Party, via which he won the highly divisive presidential election of 1800 in a battle against the authoritarian Alien and Sedition Acts. America the anti-party republic thus became the first to have national political parties competing for power at the ballot box. As US democracy expanded and deepened, in other words, so did political division.

Of course, our supposedly anti-division politicians understand that a political divide is inevitable. What they really seem to object to is raising the wrong kind of division. Such as, the gaping divide between the political and cultural elites on one hand and the deplorables, the revolting proles, on the other, as highlighted by reactions to the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump.

Today, societys divisions are most often presented in terms of identity or demographics rather than ideas and outlooks. So the EU referendum result has been endlessly analysed as a product of a generational divide or an educational divide in UK society, rather than a moral/political divide over values. And divisions over everything from free speech to immigration tend to be seen in terms of intersectionality, disputes between minorities and identity groups.

Such divisions then become seen as fixed and immovable, often leading to exchanges of identity-based abuse and competitive offence-taking rather than engaged, opinionated debate. The solution is not to try to wish divisions away in empty calls for unity, but to draw different dividing lines in the debate.

What we need for a proper democratic divide is a political choice the thing that ultimately makes democracy worth voting for. Democracy has to mean more than a pencil cross in an empty box. It must involve making a choice about the sort of society we want to see, and taking responsibility for that decision. Such meaningful choices are sadly lacking in a culture where leading Western political parties have become mere election machines rather than popular movements, offering different brands of managerialism rather than distinct ideologies or outlooks.

But dont despair. The current heated issues provide the opportunity to start drawing new dividing lines and not along the traditional left-right divide. The first line we need to stand on is the division between the supporters and the new enemies of democracy, the most pressing issue of our times.

Divided we must stand in defence of democracy. Down with the internecine identity wars, bring on the divisive politics of choice.

Mick Hume is spikeds editor-at-large. His new book, Revolting! How the Establishment is Undermining Democracy and what theyre afraid of, is published by William Collins. Buy it here.

For permission to republish spiked articles, please contact Viv Regan.

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Divided we stand in defence of democracy - Spiked

U.S. President Donald Trump arrives aboard Air Force One at Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S. March 3, 2017. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

Democracy tends to be the exception, not the rule. Historically, the form of government that puts the people in charge emerged several times over long periods in fits and starts, sometimes aided by bloody revolution, only to collapse upon itself like a dying star. In its place came empire, feudalist-monarchy, autocracy, or anarchy.

In antiquity, Greek democracy was short-lived and constrained, and the Roman Republic was less an entity centred on people power than it was an aristocratic enterprise. The English acceptance of the rule of the many was sluggish to say the least and uncertain of itself more often than not, and the French Revolution quickly gave way to The Terror and then to Napoleons monocratic impulses. The fall of the Soviet Union seemed to herald the end of history and the rise of global liberal democracy. It did no such thing.

READ MORE: Donald Trumps paranoid pedigree

The American experiment with democracy has always seemed remarkable to me because it was both rather abrupt and mostly successful as far as these things go. The Revolution unfolded over the course of several years, from about 1765 until 1783. The Treaty of Paris between Great Britain and the U.S., which ended the Revolutionary War, left a fledgling nation in fine enough shape to emerge as a democracy. And it wasnt long before the Articles of Confederation, which had stitched the 13 colonies together, was replaced by the Constitutionwhich fused them. In the decades and centuries that followed, America came to enjoy its status as the apotheosis of government by and for the people, even if such eminence was often betrayed by politics that ranged from dubious to odious.

From the beginning and ever since, American democracy was premised on ideals that were as lofty in theory as they were violated in practice. Consider slavery: Basing a political system on the idea that all men are created equal while keeping millions as property was as plainly inconsistent as it was repugnant. A limited franchise, colonial misadventures that drew independent entities into the American firmament, shameful civil rights abuses, gerrymandered electoral districts aimed at fixing electoral outcomes, the corrosive and grotesque influence of money on elected officials, and the overwhelming influence of special interests over average citizens have all undermined U.S. claims to democratic preeminence. But despite these remarkable shortcomings, there was value in having a state that set the democratic bar high enough that people around the world had something to reach for.

MORE: Donald Trump imagines America is under siege

Donald Trumps election as president is a departure from the democratic ideal that America has embraced since its beginning. Trump is not the cause of the abandonment of this ideal, but the effect. As Harvard professor Pippa Norris notes, the 2011 World Values Survey revealed that a segment of the U.S. population was ready to embrace democratic retrenchment: 44 per cent of non-college graduates agreed that it was fairly good or very good to have a strong leader who doesnt have to bother with Congress and elections. Translation? Screw your ideals: We just want things to get done.

Democracy in America has been slipping away for some time. As political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found in their study of 1,779 policy issues between 1981 and 2002, elites dominate U.S. politics and the majority does not ruleat least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interest, they generally lose. Translation? The Onion had it right years ago. Democracy is A moderately representative plutocracy.

President Donald Trump delivers his inaugural address on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

When you read Gilens and Page alongside the findings from the World Values Survey, Trumps win starts to make more sense. Donald Trump is what happens when populist nativism gains momentum throughout the world, when gerrymandering is left unchecked, when voter turnout is low in the just the right way, when his competition is wildly unpopular, when racists and sexists and xenophobes feel as if they finally have one of their own to vote for, when political polarization reaches toxic levels, and when economic, social, and cultural anxiety mix with runaway elite resentment. Hes the unlikely outcome of a confluence of factors. If you were to rewind the tape and run it again, who knows if it would play out the same waybut that result was more likely in 2016 than in previous decades, and for good reason.

What does this mean for democracy? Perhaps nothing, at least in the sense that the formal system it has become as a form of government might remain in place for the foreseeable future. But even that scenario belies the risk of everyday authoritarianism creeping into America. As Tom Pepinsky, a scholar of comparative politics at Cornell, puts it:

Most Americans conceptualize a hypothetical end of American democracy in Apocalyptic terms. But actually, you usually learn that you are no longer living in a democracy not because The Government Is Taking Away Your Rights, or passing laws that you oppose, or because there is a coup or a quisling. You know that you are no longer living in a democracy because the elections in which you are participating no longer can yield political change.

To this I would add that you may also know that you are no longer living a democracy because your government isnt responsive to your preferences, which is already true in the United States insofar as the sorts of policies the country produces tend not to reflect the popular will (replacing the Affordable Care Act with Trumpcare, for instance). Now, with Donald Trump, Americans enjoy a president who represents the interests of very few of them and who shows consistent contempt for democratic institutions. This unholy alliance of policy unresponsiveness and disrespect for institutions manifest in Trump has emerged at a time when a significant number of folks either take democracy for granted or seem to be fine with setting aside core elements of it.

The American crisis today is not quite like the house divided against itself that Lincoln warned against as much as it is a house whose foundation has rotted away by several forms of neglect, different in nature but similar in effect. If democracy is lost in the United States, it wont be with tanks in the streets or a coup in the White House or the rise of an ersatz Berlin Wall. If democracy is lost in the United States, it will be through prolonged neglect that reaches a tipping point at which it produces just enough of whats already theresay, elections that offer the illusion of representative and responsive democracythat any honest observer evaluating the republic will be unable to recognize any trace of the ideal on which the country was founded. The process is already well underway.

David Moscrop is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia and a writer. Hes currently working on a book about why we make bad political decisions and how we can make better ones. Hes at @david_moscrop on Twitter.

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How American democracy could slowly fade away - Macleans.ca

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

These wise words were spoken by Thomas Jefferson. He knew that preserving democracy required a strong and free press. Something the current occupant of the White House should realize. Although the press and the president have a natural adversarial role, Donald Trump has taken press bashing to dangerous levels.

In vitriolic attacks not seen since the days of Richard Nixon, Trump has routinely vilified the press.

Constantly denigrated as false and crooked, the news agencies have only done their jobs; maybe too well. At an off-camera press briefing at the White House, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN and others were forcibly blocked and forbidden to be there and only a select group was admitted. Trump claimed CNN and others kept reporting stories critical of him; the so-called fake news. He should know being in the White House means being criticized.

Another president, Harry Truman, once said, If you cant stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

Speaking of Nixon, he despised the press, also. But were it not for the Washington Post, Watergate might have remained the third rate burglary he claimed it was. Were it not for the New York Times, we might never have known about the Pentagon Papers and our involvement in Vietnam.

Are we seeing a Nixon 2.0 with Trump? There are his bitter attacks on the media. Theres Kellyanne Conways bizarre assertion that there are alternative facts that reminds one of Nixons Press Secretary Ron Ziegler and his infamous comment of: This statement is operative. The others are inoperative.

Trump has already done the Saturday Night Massacre in which he fired the Acting Attorney General Susan Yates for not supporting his executive order on a Muslim ban which courts later blocked.

Were Jefferson alive today, he would be appalled at the animosity for the 4th Estate. He would lecture Trump on the importance of one of the bedrocks of our democracy. He would give him a sharp rebuke for saying the press was the enemy of the people.

Jefferson also said: Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.

History shows when democracy is attacked, one of the first things done is to suppress newspapers.

This is why the press needs to be a powerful check against the government, especially now.

When Trump claims he cant be challenged or his rulings cant be questioned, this arrogance must be reined in.

A Trump spokesperson, Stephen Miller, made an incredulous statement. Miller claimed Trump had absolute power when it came to issues like immigration. Show me anywhere in the Constitution where anyone has absolute power over anything. When claims are made that power cannot be questioned or challenged, it is time to do both loudly and repeatedly.

Jefferson observed: The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed ....

That force was certainly seen nationally with the Womens March on Washington. It also was seen locally with many town hall meetings being packed with people expressing their opinions. Those who would deny or denounce these events do so at their own peril.

Detroit Judge Damon Keith of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit once said, democracies die behind closed doors. A free press will always make sure those doors are open to all.

Southgate resident Allan Bieniek has appeared in several publications, including The New York Times and the Harvard International Review.

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When democracy is attacked, one of the first things done is to suppress newspapers - Southgate News Herald