Mediaboss Marketing

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

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

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

The followinghas been edited for length and clarity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What arethe big parts of that pattern?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's very uplifting!

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

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

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

New York Times

How Iran Became an Undemocratic Democracy New York Times Put another way, is Iran a democracy or a dictatorship? Citizens elect the president, as they will on Friday, as well as members of a legislature. But they are overseen by institutions staffed by clerics. One, known as the Guardian Council, approves ... As election looms, democracy in Iran is but a mirage under theocracyThe Hill (blog) all 284 news articles »

See the original post here:
How Iran Became an Undemocratic Democracy - New York Times

This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.

Much outrage has been expressed in recent weeks over President Donald Trumps invitation for a White House visit to Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines, whose war on drugs has led to thousands of extrajudicial killings. Criticism of Trump was especially intense given his similarly warm public support for other authoritarian rulers like Egypts Abdel Fatah al-Sisi (who visited the Oval Office to much praise only weeks earlier), Turkeys Recep Tayyip Erdogan (who got a congratulatory phone call from President Trump on his recent referendum victory, granting him increasingly unchecked powers), and Thailands Prayuth Chan-ocha (who also received a White House invitation).

But heres the strange thing: the critics generally ignored the far more substantial and long-standing bipartisan support U.S. presidents have offered these and dozens of other repressive regimes over the decades. After all, such autocratic countries share one striking thing in common. They are among at least 45 less-than-democratic nations and territories that today host scores of U.S. military bases, from ones the size of not-so-small American towns to tiny outposts. Together, these bases are homes to tens of thousands of U.S. troops.

To ensure basing access from Central America to Africa, Asia to the Middle East, U.S. officials have repeatedly collaborated with fiercely anti-democratic regimes and militaries implicated in torture, murder, the suppression of democratic rights, the systematic oppression of women and minorities, and numerous other human rights abuses. Forget the recent White House invitations and Trumps public compliments. For nearly three quarters of a century, the United States has invested tens of billions of dollars in maintaining bases and troops in such repressive states. From Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have, since World War II, regularly shown a preference for maintaining bases in undemocratic and often despotic states, including Spain under Generalissimo Francisco Franco, South Korea under Park Chung-hee, Bahrain under King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, and Djibouti under four-term President Ismail Omar Guelleh, to name just four.

Many of the 45 present-day undemocratic U.S. base hosts qualify as fully authoritarian regimes, according to the Economist Democracy Index. In such cases, American installations and the troops stationed on them are effectively helping block the spread of democracy in countries like Cameroon, Chad, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kuwait, Niger, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

This pattern of daily support for dictatorship and repression around the world should be a national scandal in a country supposedly committed to democracy. It should trouble Americans ranging from religious conservatives and libertarians to leftists anyone, in fact, who believes in the democratic principles enshrined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. After all, one of the long-articulated justifications for maintaining military bases abroad has been that the U.S. militarys presence protects and spreads democracy.

Far from bringing democracy to these lands, however, such bases tend to provide legitimacy for and prop up undemocratic regimes of all sorts, while often interfering with genuine efforts to encourage political and democratic reform. The silencing of the critics of human rights abuses in base hosts like Bahrain, which has violently cracked down on pro-democracy demonstrators since 2011, has left the United States complicit in these states crimes.

During the Cold War, bases in undemocratic countries were often justified as the unfortunate but necessary consequence of confronting the communist menace of the Soviet Union. But heres the curious thing: in the quarter century since the Cold War ended with that empires implosion, few of those bases have closed. Today, while a White House visit from an autocrat may generate indignation, the presence of such installations in countries run by repressive or military rulers receives little notice at all.

Befriending dictators

The 45 nations and territories with little or no democratic rule represent more than half of the roughly 80 countries now hosting U.S. bases (who often lack the power to ask their guests to leave). They are part of a historically unprecedented global network of military installations the United States has built or occupied since World War II.

Today, while there are no foreign bases in the United States, there are around 800 U.S. bases in foreign countries. That number was recently even higher, but it still almost certainly represents a record for any nation or empire in history. More than 70 years after World War II and 64 years after the Korean War, there are, according to the Pentagon, 181 U.S. base sites in Germany, 122 in Japan, and 83 in South Korea. Hundreds more dot the planet from Aruba to Australia, Belgium to Bulgaria, Colombia to Qatar. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, civilians, and family members occupy these installations. By my conservative estimate, to maintain such a level of bases and troops abroad, U.S. taxpayers spend at least $150 billion annually more than the budget of any government agency except the Pentagon itself.

For decades, leaders in Washington have insisted that bases abroad spread our values and democracy and that may have been true to some extent in occupied Germany, Japan, and Italy after World War II. However, as base expert Catherine Lutz suggests, the subsequent historical record shows that gaining and maintaining access for U.S. bases has often involved close collaboration with despotic governments.

The bases in the countries whose leaders President Trump has recently lauded illustrate the broader pattern. The United States has maintained military facilities in the Philippines almost continuously since seizing that archipelago from Spain in 1898. It only granted the colony independence in 1946, conditioned on the local governments agreement that the U.S. would retain access to more than a dozen installations there.

After independence, a succession of U.S. administrations supported two decades of Ferdinand Marcoss autocratic rule, ensuring the continued use of Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base, two of the largest U.S. bases abroad. After the Filipino people finally ousted Marcos in 1986 and then made the U.S. military leave in 1991, the Pentagon quietly returned in 1996. With the help of a visiting forces agreement and a growing stream of military exercises and training programs, it began to set up surreptitious, small-scale bases once more. A desire to solidify this renewed base presence, while also checking Chinese influence, undoubtedly drove Trumps recent White House invitation to Duterte. It came despite the Filipino presidents record of joking about rape, swearing he would be happy to slaughter millions of drug addicts just as Hitler massacred [six] million Jews, and bragging, I dont care about human rights.

In Turkey, President Erdogans increasingly autocratic rule is only the latest episode in a pattern of military coups and undemocratic regimes interrupting periods of democracy. U.S. bases have, however, been a constant presence in the country since 1943. They repeatedly caused controversy and sparked protest first throughout the 1960s and 1970s, before the Bush administrations 2003 invasion of Iraq, and more recently after U.S. forces began using them to launch attacks in Syria.

Although Egypt has a relatively small U.S. base presence, its military has enjoyed deep and lucrative ties with the U.S. military since the signing of the Camp David Accords with Israel in 1979. After a 2013 military coup ousted a democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood government, the Obama administration took months to withhold some forms of military and economic aid, despite more than 1,300 killings by security forces and the arrest of more than 3,500 members of the Brotherhood. According to Human Rights Watch, Little was said about ongoing abuses, which have continued to this day.

In Thailand, the U.S. has maintained deep connections with the Thai military, which has carried out 12 coups since 1932. Both countries have been able to deny that they have a basing relationship of any sort, thanks to a rental agreement between a private contractor and U.S. forces at Thailands Utapao Naval Air Base. Because of [contractor] Delta Golf Global, writes journalist Robert Kaplan, the U.S. military was here, but it was not here. After all, the Thais did no business with the U.S. Air Force. They dealt only with a private contractor.

Elsewhere, the record is similar. In monarchical Bahrain, which has had a U.S. military presence since 1949 and now hosts the Navys 5th Fleet, the Obama administration offered only the most tepid criticism of the government despite an ongoing, often violent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. According to Human Rights Watch and others (including an independent commission of inquiry appointed by the Bahraini king, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa), the government has been responsible for widespread abuses including the arbitrary arrest of protesters, ill treatment during detention, torture-related deaths, and growing restrictions on freedoms of speech, association, and assembly. The Trump administration has already signaled its desire to protect the military-to-military ties of the two countries by approving a sale of F-16 fighters to Bahrain without demanding improvements in its human rights record.

And thats typical of what base expert Chalmers Johnson once called the American baseworld. Research by political scientist Kent Calder confirms whats come to be known as the dictatorship hypothesis: The United States tends to support dictators [and other undemocratic regimes] in nations where it enjoys basing facilities. Another large-scale study similarly shows that autocratic states have been consistently attractive as base sites. Due to the unpredictability of elections, it added bluntly, democratic states prove less attractive in terms [of] sustainability and duration.

Even within what are technically U.S. borders, democratic rule has regularly proved less attractive than preserving colonialism into the twenty-first century. The presence of scores of bases in Puerto Rico and the Pacific island of Guam has been a major motivation for keeping these and other U.S. territories American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands in varying degrees of colonial subordination. Conveniently for military leaders, they have neither full independence nor the full democratic rights that would come with incorporation into the U.S. as states, including voting representation in Congress and the presidential vote. Installations in at least five of Europes remaining colonies have proven equally attractive, as has the base that U.S. troops have forcibly occupied in Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, since shortly after the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Backing dictators

Authoritarian rulers tend to be well aware of the desire of U.S. officials to maintain the status quo when it comes to bases. As a result, they often capitalize on a base presence to extract benefits or help ensure their own political survival.

The Philippines Marcos, former South Korean dictator Syngman Rhee, and more recently Djiboutis Ismail Omar Guelleh have been typical in the way they used bases to extract economic assistance from Washington, which they then lavished on political allies to shore up their power. Others have relied on such bases to bolster their international prestige and legitimacy or to justify violence against domestic political opponents. After the 1980 Kwangju massacre in which the South Korean government killed hundreds, if not thousands, of pro-democracy demonstrators, strongman General Chun Doo-hwan explicitly cited the presence of U.S. bases and troops to suggest that his actions enjoyed Washingtons support. Whether or not that was true is still a matter of historical debate. Whats clear, however, is that American leaders have regularly muted their criticism of repressive regimes lest they imperil bases in these countries. In addition, such a presence tends to strengthen military, rather than civilian, institutions in countries because of the military-to-military ties, arms sales, and training missions that generally accompany basing agreements.

Meanwhile, opponents of repressive regimes often use the bases as a tool to rally nationalist sentiment, anger, and protest against both ruling elites and the United States. That, in turn, tends to fuel fears in Washington that a transition to democracy might lead to base eviction, often leading to a doubling down on support for undemocratic rulers. The result can be an escalating cycle of opposition and U.S.-backed repression.

Blowback

While some defend the presence of bases in undemocratic countries as necessary to deter bad actors and support U.S. interests (primarily corporate ones), backing dictators and autocrats frequently leads to harm not just for the citizens of host nations but for U.S. citizens as well. The base build-up in the Middle East has proven the most prominent example of this. Since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian Revolution, which both unfolded in 1979, the Pentagon has built up scores of bases across the Middle East at a cost of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars. According to former West Point professor Bradley Bowman, such bases and the troops that go with them have been a major catalyst for anti-Americanism and radicalization. Research has similarly revealed a correlation between the bases and al-Qaeda recruitment.

Most catastrophically, outposts in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afghanistan have helped generate and fuel the radical militancy that has spread throughout the Greater Middle East and led to terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States. The presence of such bases and troops in Muslim holy lands was, after all, a major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and part of Osama bin Ladens professed motivation for the 9/11 attacks.

With the Trump administration seeking to entrench its renewed base presence in the Philippines and the president commending Duterte and similarly authoritarian leaders in Bahrain and Egypt, Turkey and Thailand, human rights violations are likely to escalate, fueling unknown brutality and baseworld blowback for years to come.

To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

See more here:
Forty-five blows against democracy - Salon.com - Salon

Much outrage has been expressed in recent weeks over President Donald Trumps invitation for a White House visit to Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines, whose war on drugs has led to thousands of extrajudicial killings. Criticism of Trump was especially intense given his similarly warm public support for other authoritarian rulers like Egypts Abdel Fatah al-Sisi (who visited the Oval Office to much praise only weeks earlier), Turkeys Recep Tayyip Erdogan (who got a congratulatory phone call from President Trump on his recent referendum victory, granting him increasingly unchecked powers), and Thailands Prayuth Chan-ocha (who also received a White House invitation).

But heres the strange thing: the critics generally ignored the far more substantial and long-standing bipartisan support U.S. presidents have offered these and dozens of other repressive regimes over the decades. After all, such autocratic countries share one striking thing in common. They are among at least 45 less-than-democratic nations and territories that today host scores of U.S. military bases, from ones the size of not-so-small American towns to tiny outposts. Together, these bases are homes to tens of thousands of U.S. troops.

To ensure basing access from Central America to Africa, Asia to the Middle East, U.S. officials have repeatedly collaborated with fiercely anti-democratic regimes and militaries implicated in torture, murder, the suppression of democratic rights, the systematic oppression of women and minorities, and numerous other human rights abuses. Forget the recent White House invitations and Trumps public compliments. For nearly three quarters of a century, the United States has invested tens of billions of dollars in maintaining bases and troops in such repressive states. From Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have, since World War II, regularly shown a preference for maintaining bases in undemocratic and often despotic states, including Spain under Generalissimo Francisco Franco, South Korea under Park Chung-hee, Bahrain under King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, and Djibouti under four-term President Ismail Omar Guelleh, to name just four.

Many of the 45 present-day undemocratic U.S. base hosts qualify as fully authoritarian regimes, according to the Economist Democracy Index. In such cases, American installations and the troops stationed on them are effectively helping block the spread of democracy in countries like Cameroon, Chad, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kuwait, Niger, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

This pattern of daily support for dictatorship and repression around the world should be a national scandal in a country supposedly committed to democracy. It should trouble Americans ranging from religious conservatives and libertarians to leftists anyone, in fact, who believes in the democratic principles enshrined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. After all, one of the long-articulated justifications for maintaining military bases abroad has been that the U.S. militarys presence protects and spreads democracy.

Far from bringing democracy to these lands, however, such bases tend to provide legitimacy for and prop up undemocratic regimes of all sorts, while often interfering with genuine efforts to encourage political and democratic reform. The silencing of the critics of human rights abuses in base hosts like Bahrain, which has violently cracked down on pro-democracy demonstrators since 2011, has left the United States complicit in these states crimes.

During the Cold War, bases in undemocratic countries were often justified as the unfortunate but necessary consequence of confronting the communist menace of the Soviet Union. But heres the curious thing: in the quarter century since the Cold War ended with that empires implosion, few of those bases have closed. Today, while a White House visit from an autocrat may generate indignation, the presence of such installations in countries run by repressive or military rulers receives little notice at all.

Befriending Dictators

The 45 nations and territories with little or no democratic rule represent more than half of the roughly 80 countries now hosting U.S. bases (who often lack the power to ask their guests to leave). They are part of a historically unprecedented global network of military installations the United States has built or occupied since World War II.

Today, while there are no foreign bases in the United States, there are around 800 U.S. bases in foreign countries. That number was recently even higher, but it still almost certainly represents a record for any nation or empire in history. More than 70 years after World War II and 64 years after the Korean War, there are, according to the Pentagon, 181 U.S. base sites in Germany, 122 in Japan, and 83 in South Korea. Hundreds more dot the planet from Aruba to Australia, Belgium to Bulgaria, Colombia to Qatar. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, civilians, and family members occupy these installations. By my conservative estimate, to maintain such a level of bases and troops abroad, U.S. taxpayers spend at least $150 billion annually more than the budget of any government agency except the Pentagon itself.

For decades, leaders in Washington have insisted that bases abroad spread our values and democracy and that may have been true to some extent in occupied Germany, Japan, and Italy after World War II. However, as base expert Catherine Lutz suggests, the subsequent historical record shows that

gaining and maintaining access for U.S. bases has often involved close collaboration with despotic governments.

The bases in the countries whose leaders President Trump has recently lauded illustrate the broader pattern. The United States has maintained military facilities in the Philippines almost continuously since seizing that archipelago from Spain in 1898. It only granted the colony independence in 1946, conditioned on the local governments agreement that the U.S. would retain access to more than a dozen installations there.

After independence, a succession of U.S. administrations supported two decades of Ferdinand Marcoss autocratic rule, ensuring the continued use of Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base, two of the largest U.S. bases abroad. After the Filipino people finally ousted Marcos in 1986 and then made the U.S. military leave in 1991, the Pentagon quietly returned in 1996. With the help of a visiting forces agreement and a growing stream of military exercises and training programs, it began to set up surreptitious, small-scale bases once more. A desire to solidify this renewed base presence, while also checking Chinese influence, undoubtedly drove Trumps recent White House invitation to Duterte. It came despite the Filipino presidents record of joking about rape, swearing he would be happy to slaughter millions of drug addicts just as Hitler massacred [six] million Jews, and bragging, I dont care about human rights.

In Turkey, President Erdogans increasingly autocratic rule is only the latest episode in a pattern of military coups and undemocratic regimes interrupting periods of democracy. U.S. bases have, however, been a constant presence in the country since 1943. They repeatedly caused controversy and sparked protest first throughout the 1960s and 1970s, before the Bush administrations 2003 invasion of Iraq, and more recently after U.S. forces began using them to launch attacks in Syria.

Although Egypt has a relatively small U.S. base presence, its military has enjoyed deep and lucrative ties with the U.S. military since the signing of the Camp David Accords with Israel in 1979. After a 2013 military coup ousted a democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood government, the Obama administration took months to withhold some forms of military and economic aid, despite more than 1,300 killings by security forces and the arrest of more than 3,500 members of the Brotherhood. According to Human Rights Watch,

Little was said about ongoing abuses, which have continued to this day.

In Thailand, the U.S. has maintained deep connections with the Thai military, which has carried out 12 coups since 1932. Both countries have been able to deny that they have a basing relationship of any sort, thanks to a rental agreement between a private contractor and U.S. forces at Thailands Utapao Naval Air Base.

Because of [contractor] Delta Golf Global, writes journalist Robert Kaplan, the U.S. military was here, but it was not here. After all, the Thais did no business with the U.S. Air Force. They dealt only with a private contractor.

Elsewhere, the record is similar. In monarchical Bahrain, which has had a U.S. military presence since 1949 and now hosts the Navys 5th Fleet, the Obama administration offered only the most tepid criticism of the government despite an ongoing, often violent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. According to Human Rights Watch and others (including an independent commission of inquiry appointed by the Bahraini king, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa), the government has been responsible for widespread abuses including the arbitrary arrest of protesters, ill treatment during detention, torture-related deaths, and growing restrictions on freedoms of speech, association, and assembly. The Trump administration has already signaled its desire to protect the military-to-military ties of the two countries by approving a sale of F-16 fighters to Bahrain without demanding improvements in its human rights record.

And thats typical of what base expert Chalmers Johnson once called the American baseworld. Research by political scientist Kent Calder confirms whats come to be known as the dictatorship hypothesis:

The United States tends to support dictators [and other undemocratic regimes] in nations where it enjoys basing facilities.

Another large-scale study similarly shows that autocratic states have been consistently attractive as base sites. Due to the unpredictability of elections, it added bluntly, democratic states prove less attractive in terms [of] sustainability and duration.

Even within what are technically U.S. borders, democratic rule has regularly proved less attractive than preserving colonialism into the twenty-first century. The presence of scores of bases in Puerto Rico and the Pacific island of Guam has been a major motivation for keeping these and other U.S. territories American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands in varying degrees of colonial subordination. Conveniently for military leaders, they have neither full independence nor the full democratic rights that would come with incorporation into the U.S. as states, including voting representation in Congress and the presidential vote. Installations in at least five of Europes remaining colonies have proven equally attractive, as has the base that U.S. troops have forcibly occupied in Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, since shortly after the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Backing Dictators

Authoritarian rulers tend to be well aware of the desire of U.S. officials to maintain the status quo when it comes to bases. As a result, they often capitalize on a base presence to extract benefits or help ensure their own political survival.

The Philippines Marcos, former South Korean dictator Syngman Rhee, and more recently Djiboutis Ismail Omar Guelleh have been typical in the way they used bases to extract economic assistance from Washington, which they then lavished on political allies to shore up their power. Others have relied on such bases to bolster their international prestige and legitimacy or to justify violence against domestic political opponents. After the 1980 Kwangju massacre in which the South Korean government killed hundreds, if not thousands, of pro-democracy demonstrators, strongman General Chun Doo-hwan explicitly cited the presence of U.S. bases and troops to suggest that his actions enjoyed Washingtons support. Whether or not that was true is still a matter of historical debate. Whats clear, however, is that American leaders have regularly muted their criticism of repressive regimes lest they imperil bases in these countries. In addition, such a presence tends to strengthen military, rather than civilian, institutions in countries because of the military-to-military ties, arms sales, and training missions that generally accompany basing agreements.

Meanwhile, opponents of repressive regimes often use the bases as a tool to rally nationalist sentiment, anger, and protest against both ruling elites and the United States. That, in turn, tends to fuel fears in Washington that a transition to democracy might lead to base eviction, often leading to a doubling down on support for undemocratic rulers. The result can be an escalating cycle of opposition and U.S.-backed repression.

Blowback

While some defend the presence of bases in undemocratic countries as necessary to deter bad actors and support U.S. interests (primarily corporate ones), backing dictators and autocrats frequently leads to harm not just for the citizens of host nations but for U.S. citizens as well. The base build-up in the Middle East has proven the most prominent example of this. Since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian Revolution, which both unfolded in 1979, the Pentagon has built up scores of bases across the Middle East at a cost of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars. According to former West Point professor Bradley Bowman, such bases and the troops that go with them have been a major catalyst for anti-Americanism and radicalization. Research has similarly revealed a correlation between the bases and al-Qaeda recruitment.

Most catastrophically, outposts in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afghanistan have helped generate and fuel the radical militancy that has spread throughout the Greater Middle East and led to terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States. The presence of such bases and troops in Muslim holy lands was, after all, a major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and part of Osama bin Ladens professed motivation for the 9/11 attacks.

With the Trump administration seeking to entrench its renewed base presence in the Philippines and the president commending Duterte and similarly authoritarian leaders in Bahrain and Egypt, Turkey and Thailand, human rights violations are likely to escalate, fueling unknown brutality and baseworld blowback for years to come.

David Vine, a TomDispatch regular, is associate professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C. His latest book is Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (the American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books). He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and Mother Jones, among other publications. For more information, visit http://www.basenation.us and http://www.davidvine.net.

Excerpt from:
Forty-Five Blows Against Democracy - Center for Research on Globalization

My GOP cronies bridled. "This is America," one insisted. "When one side gets into power, they let the other side retire quietly -- they don't stick their predecessors' heads on spikes. We don't use the law as a tool to punish political opponents. That's what makes us different from banana republics in Africa. That's what makes us the greatest democracy in the world."

Regardless of what you think about George W. Bush -- or this characterization of the entire African continent -- my friend summed up what many Americans believe about their nation's strengths. From Thomas Jefferson onward, the rhetoric of the democratic example has been fundamental to the mythology of American exceptionalism.

Central to this reverence is the faith Americans have in their Constitution: a document which promises to punish corrupt representatives, constrain executive overreach and protect judicial independence. But beyond America's borders, even its greatest admirers reserve a dose of skepticism. America's confidence that its Constitution uniquely protects against abuse of power feels, at best, nave.

People are concerned about traveling to the US, even concerned about doing business in a country that no longer seems to uphold the rule of law. No longer is America a shining example, as my college friends would have it, to the tin pot dictatorships of Africa.

It seems much more revealing that Comey's firing took place a day after he reportedly stepped up his own inquiry into the Trump campaign's alleged links to Russia. (It is worth noting, too, that Rosenstein, an Obama appointee, does not explicitly call in his memo for Comey's dismissal -- just as Comey himself criticized Hillary, but declined to recommend charges. Precision matters in high-stakes legal inquiries.)

None of this makes comfortable watching for America's allies. Should British Prime Minister Theresa May trust her friend Donald to treat her as professionally as he has treated James Comey? Should she direct her intelligence agencies to share with American colleagues their information on Vladimir Putin's activities?

If there is a scrap of hope to be gleaned from President Trump's obvious misdirection this week, it is that Trump has veiled his attack on his own FBI director in the language of bipartisan constitutionalism. The attempt to present this sacking as a favor to Democrats -- who blame Comey for styming Clinton's campaign -- at least suggests that he knows the directors of major civic infrastructure should command bipartisan support.

Or does it? The problem with being European, looking at America, is that we know dictators have always used the language of constitutionalism to camouflage their land grabs.

If there's a single question on every European's lips, it is: How long can Trump last? To those of us who've heard Americans wax lyrical about the legacy of the Founding Fathers, now is the time when we expect to see the US Constitution's checks and balances swing into action. We know that Americans are good at getting rid of presidents: In the American TV series that form our stable diet, it happens all the time, from "Veep" to "24." It's happened in living memory, too. If you can impeach a president simply for lying about sex, surely you can impeach a president who sacks the person investigating him?

Now, however, it's American observers who sound more skeptical. If you're actually living in America, you know that it'll be hard to get much of the congressional GOP on board for an impeachment; that nothing really constrains the executive branch's power over civic appointments.

It is evident that separation of powers only truly exists in the United States when separate parties control the executive and legislature.

Smug Europeans are congratulating themselves that Americans were always wrong about their exceptional democracy. Those of us with a foot in both continents are not so much smug as heartbroken.

Original post:
Europe view: American democracy isn't as strong as you think ...