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After five weeks of steadily pummeling, American democracy is holding because its institutions are stronger than Donald Trump. Lets begin with the press.

As John McCain reminded us, dictators get started by suppressing free press and Donald Trump is no exception. Trump and his press spokesman, Sean Spicer, will not be satisfied until there is a totally sycophantic press, accepting Trumps twisted view of the truth, and adoringly reflecting it back to the great leader and his people. Kind of like the free press in Putins Russia.

But thats not going to happen. The press has never been more determined to hold its ground.

Certainly, press solidarity behind the First Amendment is not all that it should be.

In last weeks schoolyard game of banning from a White House briefing media with the temerity to expose Trumps lies, propaganda organs like Fox News and the Washington Times were all too pleased to play Sean Spicers petty game. Shamefully, so were ABC and NBC, whose correspondents did not walk out when the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and other mainstream media were banished.

But maybe this charade is a blessing in disguise. For one thing, news organs will have to decide whether they are part of White House propaganda machine, or genuinely independent media. The ones that merely parrot Trumps lies will start looking very foolish.

For another, White House press briefings are vastly overrated. Its no accident that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were on the Metro staff of the Washington Post, and did not cover the Nixon White House. They went after the real story where they found it, and press aide Ron Zieglers pressroom was the last place to look.

I had a White House press pass in that era, and I seldom used it. I can tell you that precious little news emerged from Nixon press conferences or briefings.

Fencing matches between reporters and Spicer are a weird form of entertainment, but not a venue from which truth will emerge. Besides, entertainment is Trumps genre, not that of a free press.

Theres a good case that the serious press should not allow itself to be props in Spicers petty games. They should demand equal treatment, but if he continues to play favorites, the hell with him. Indeed, if the Times, the Post, and other serious news organs are banished from the White House, they will have more time and resources to ferret out the truth.

Bullies usually turn out to be cowards. Spicer is hiding from the serious press because he cant face the truth. Likewise Trumps own refusal to follow custom and attend the White House Correspondents annual dinner. Hed be roasted alive.

Each day that Spicer stage-manages a phony press conference, the serious media should publish lists of questions that demand answers. If Spicer ducks them, hes that much more of a coward, because he and his boss cant face the truth.

The press is one of several firebreaks in an era when the President of the United States wants to govern as a dictator. And the press is not alone. Indeed, some of the firebreaks, institutions usually considered conservative, are already surprising Trump.

One is the courts. Even with the eventual confirmation of Trumps Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, the courts will take a dim view of efforts by Trump to defy court orders. There is a higher loyalty to the independence of the judiciary. As opportunistic as many conservative judges are, an open attempt to place the president above the law would be struck down.

Another is the military. The military tends to be conservative in the best sense of the word. When zealous civilians (Cheney, Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, LBJ, Richard Nixon et.al.) send American forces on fools errands based on grandiose lies, it is the military that pays the price. And the generals know that.

It is strange for people with no love of militarism to admit that the security of American democracynot just in the sense of the national defense but of democracy itselfis now in the hands of three retired Marine Corps generals: the defense secretary James Mattis, the national security adviser H.R. McMaster and John Kelly, the secretary of homeland security.

These are serious men, with the patriotism and self-respect to tell the president when he is blowing smoke. He cant fire them all.

As Patrick Granfield wrote in a thoughtful piece for Politico:

A fundamental shift in civil-military relations is taking hold. Rather than civilian leaders checking military power, it is now military leaders who represent one of the strongest checks against the overreach of a civilian executive.

A fourth firebreak is at least part of corporate America. The nations most innovative companies have little patience for Trumps war on immigrants, and are willing to say so. (Other corporations, alas, are following a venerable tradition of getting in bed with fascism if it serves their bottom lines.)

Yet another firebreak is American federalism in two senses. Some blue states and cities can demonstrate policies that are the opposite of Trumpism. These policies are vulnerable, however, because most waivers that allow states to have policies at odds with those of the national government (such as higher minimum wages or tougher clean air standards) are merely statutory, not constitutional. And law can be changed.

But a stronger federal firebreak is the power of state attorneys general, who are beyond the reach of the Trump administration. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is said to be pursuing major investigations of Trump corruption under state law. Among other findings, these investigations could force the release of Trumps tax records.

The press, by its nature, is an insurgent institution. It has always battled privilege and deception. But its a little strange for progressives to be cheering for other institutions that only yesterday were seen as citadels of conservatism: the military, the courts and states rights. Yet these are not just instruments of rightwing policies they are conservative in a deeper sense, one that is especially needed now.

One conservative institution, however, is missing from this list the Republican Party. To an appalling degree, Republicans have been willing to let Trump govern as a would-be dictator, as long as it serves their policy and partisan goals. If John McCain can shame a few more Republicans into remembering true conservative principles, it will drastically shorten this terrible time for America.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and professor at Brandeis Universitys Heller School. His latest book is Debtors Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility. http://www.amazon.com/Debtors-Prison-Politics-Austerity-Possibility/dp/0307959805

Like Robert Kuttner on Facebook: http://facebook.com/RobertKuttner

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Why American Democracy Will Hold Strong - Huffington Post

Donald Trump and the power of the moneyed elite is ignored by Hume. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

If you want to understand the opportunism and shallowness of so much English commentary, look at how former Marxist-Leninists have prospered. On Radio 4s Moral Maze or in the rightwing press the same names reappear: Claire Fox, Frank Furedi, Brendan ONeill and Mick Hume. Their audience is not told they were members of the Revolutionary Communist party, which reconstituted itself as Spiked magazine, or that their careers provide a parable of modern media cynicism.

As Leninists they were the most ultra of the ultra-left, the type who would argue that sanctions against apartheid were a bourgeois compromise, or more funds for the NHS were palliatives that postponed the day of revolution. By the 1990s, they realised that socialism was a dead end. They grasped something else: if they abandoned their calls for revolution, but kept their denunciations of environmentalism, liberal elitism and help for the victims of genocide, they would never want for media work.

The BBC is by no means the ethical institution it professes to be. The majority of its serious discussions are mere entertainment. It seeks out commentators prepared to stop the fickle audience changing channels by reducing arguments to absurdity. The transformed Revolutionary Communist party would do or say anything in its search for attention. So low did its journal Living Marxism sink, it engaged in the Holocaust denial of the 1990s by claiming that pictures of the Serb concentration camps for Bosnian Muslims were manufactured by journalists spreading false accusations of war crimes against innocent militiamen. The BBC liked the talent it saw on offer and held out its clammy hand. For its part, the rightwing press realised that former far leftists willing to strip their attacks on liberalism and social democracy of any trace of leftismwere Tories in everything but name. And useful Tories at that. Torieswho could defend privilege andthe abuse of power in vaguely radical language.

Mick Hume has now produced a defence of democracy against the attacks of the establishment. As the unwitting reader may buy it by mistake, I will explain what Hume does not cover. Democracy is indeed beleaguered. Fifty three per cent of the planets population some 3.97 billion people are controlled by tyrants, absolute monarchs, military juntas and theocrats. Hume has so little interest inthe corruption and injustice they must endure, he fails to acknowledge their existence.

In Russia, the Middle East and the west, meanwhile, the global elite of wealth is producing a global argument against equality, including political equality. Look to the American and European right and you see Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orban and Nigel Farage lining up with the Corbynista far left to applaud Vladimir Putin. The Christian equivalents of Muslim Brotherhood preachers among their ranks admire Putin for stamping down on womens and gay rights. Agnostic members of the super-rich, by contrast, have turned on democracy because it gives the poor and the female the power to limit the wealthy. The vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians have rendered the notion of capitalist democracy into an oxymoron, the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel explained a few years ago.

Any writer on the threats to democracy should wonder how extravagantly unequal societies can sustain an egalitarian political system. Any writer with a knowledge of historyshould know that anti-democratic theories can turn into anti-democratic practice. In North Carolina, for example, Republicans engaged in what Americans euphemistically call voter suppression to stop poor blacksreaching the polls. When these failed, they attempted to strip the newly elected Democrat governor of hispowers.

Hume has not the sense of duty to his readers or what passes for his intellect to deal with the power of the moneyed elite Donald Trump so conspicuously represents. Instead he flags himself as open to offers from the BBC and rightwing press by telling us that it is the beaten opponents of Trump and of Brexit who are the real elite, whose anti-democratic illegitimacy must be exposed and denounced. He has produced a Daily Mail-style liberals are the enemies of the people op-ed, and extended it to book length.

I should, I suppose, give him a lesson on basic political philosophy. I doubt he will understand it, but let me try. Democracies consist of competing elites. But the elite that always matters is always the elite in power. In Britains case it is the pro-Brexit elite. In the case of the United States it is the Trump presidency and the Republican Congress. Trying to write an anti-elitist defence of the elite in power is to borrow Peter Thiels word oxymoronic. Moronically oxymoronic, in fact.

Democracy comes in many forms. By one reading the pre-civil war United States was democratic when the white majority enslaved the black minority in North Carolina and across the south. Modern democracies, in their elitist decadence, include protections against the tyranny of the majority, the most essential of which is the right to argue against the rulers of the day without becoming an enemy of the people.

That Hume knows nothing of this and continues to insist opposition is elitism proves that you can take the boy out of the Marxist-Leninist party but you cannot take the Marxist-Leninist party out of the boy.

Revolting!How the Establishment Are Undermining Democracy and What Theyre Afraid Of by Mick Hume is published by Harper Collins (6.99). To order a copy for 5.94 go tobookshop.theguardian.comor call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99

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Revolting! by Mick Hume review defence of a far-right democracy - The Guardian

TOKYO World leaders seem to be at a loss about how to approach relations with US President Donald Trump, given his worrying positions and often-bizarre behavior toward politicians and the media, allies and enemies alike. Trump is not just challenging political convention to shake things up; he is testing the foundations of US democracy. That test has the potential to transform existing assumptions about the United States and its global role.

Trump was elected largely for one reason: a substantial share of US voters were fed up with the state of the economy and the politicians who had overseen it. Globalization the proliferation of flows of labor, goods, services, money, information, and technology worldwide seemed to be benefiting everyone except them.

These voters had a point. While globalization, and the trade openness that underpins it, has the potential to enrich the entire global economy, so far the richest have captured a hugely disproportionate share of the gains. In the US, wages for the top 1% of earners increased by 138% from 1980 to 2013, while wages for the bottom 90% grew by just 15%.

There is now a stark divide between the struggling workers of the so-called Rust Belt and the high-flying billionaires of Silicon Valley and Wall Street. The only people who emerged unscathed from the global economic crisis of 2008, it seemed, were those who caused it.

Trump seized on this cleavage during his campaign. He tapped the fears and frustrations of this particular group of working-class households, ensuring that they directed their rage not just at the wealthy (like Trump himself), but at the establishment the mainstream politicians who were supposedly in cahoots with Wall Street. For a political outsider challenging the quintessential establishment politician (the Democrats Hillary Clinton), it was an effective tactic.

But the election is now over, and it is time for Trump to help the people who elected him. It is not yet clear how or even if he plans to do that. In fact, if Trump follows through on his campaign rhetoric, he could end up hurting this group and many others even more.

During the campaign, Trump often used scapegoats especially immigrants and major developing-world exporters, such as China and Mexico to attract support. The problem is that it is primarily automation, not offshoring or immigration, that is displacing traditional manufacturing workers in the US.

This means that if Trump fulfills his campaign promises say, to impose severe immigration limits and high import tariffs he wont actually solve the problem. What he would do is trigger retaliation from major trading partners, such as China, causing serious harm to the entire global economy beginning with the US.

A better approach would be to focus on improving the management of globalization, rather than attempting to roll it back. For starters, the Trump administration could offer stronger incentives for foreign investment in major sectors like automobiles and infrastructure.

Effective management of the forces of globalization is how Japan protected its vulnerable sectors. Opening up trade in agriculture significantly improved living standards for ordinary Japanese, but it could easily have hurt the countrys farmers. Fortunately, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abes government recognized this risk, and took steps to protect local farmers, including in negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (which Trump has now rejected).

Against this background, Trumps meetings with Abe provide some reason for hope that the US authorities will pursue such an approach. The hitch is that even if Trump does see the value in it, he may well want to pursue the management task in his own way. He has, after all, shown a clear preference for personal, bilateral deals, like those he makes with his businesses, rather than engaging in formal, much less multilateral, diplomacy.

In a democracy, such personal deals dont necessarily work. To resolve the complex and often controversial issues that arise, broad agreement is needed, and securing it requires clear ground rules. Fortunately, as Trump will soon learn, the US Constitution is well suited to provide just such rules.

In Western democracies, the constitution is the supreme law of the land, taking precedence over all other legislation. The same is true in the US. But, as Michael K. Young, President of Texas A&M University, has explained, because the US Constitution was fashioned when various states, which already had their own laws, agreed to create a political union, it functions like a set of ground rules for negotiations among states, as well as among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government.

By focusing on checks and balances, the US Constitutions framers created a kind of safety valve for the political system, meant to protect it from unexpected shocks arising from any of its many moving parts. With Trump himself essentially amounting to an unexpected shock, this safety valve indeed, the US constitution itself is being tested.

So far, the system has held. The constitutional rights to free expression and peaceful assembly continue to be upheld and exercised on a massive scale. The courts have not bowed to Trump, most notably by striking down his executive order banning entry to the US by people from seven Muslim-majority countries.

But the test is not over. The people and their leaders must continue to defend democracy, and the courts must guard their independence. The entire world is counting on it.

Get to grips with President Trump; Project Syndicate has published more than 100 articles exploring the implications of his presidency for politics, the economy, and world peace and security. They are all here:

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How Trump is Testing Democracy - Project Syndicate

Unlike other social media, where you tweet to the converted, Facebook is well adapted to changing peoples minds: that is the basis of its stupendous valuation as an advertising channel. Photograph: Dado Ruvic/Reuters

The Observers discovery that a secretive firm apparently bankrolled by a rightwing billionaire was at work in the Brexit referendum to sway voters selected on the basis of their Facebook profiles highlights the way in which the erosion of privacy can lead to an erosion of democracy and will inevitably do so without firm, clear, principled action by governments and courts.

The same firm, Cambridge Analytica, has also been credited with helping the Trump campaign in a similar way, although this is disputed by some observers. Even if we cant know how effective such campaigns have been, they will spread so long as any political organisation suspects that its opponents might gain an advantage from them.

Willie Sutton, the American bank robber, explained that he robbed banks because thats where the money is, and political campaigns are certainly going to use Facebook because thats where the voters are. Unlike other social media, where you tweet to the converted, Facebook is well adapted to changing peoples minds: that is the basis of its stupendous valuation as an advertising channel. We have seen this with the phenomenon of fake news, but that is more or less public. Micro-targeted ad campaigns are by their nature private or narrowcast. They never reach outside their target audience. Thus they can contain falsehoods or insinuations that are never challenged because they are never brought to light.

Our model of democracy is based on public campaigning followed by private voting. These developments threaten to turn this upside down, so that voting intentions are pretty much publicly known but the arguments that influence them are made in secret, concealed from the wider world where they might be contested.

There are two kinds of privacy under threat in the emerging economy, where everyone is almost always connected to the internet, and has their lives enmeshed in big data. The first privacy is the kind that we intuitively understand even if it is difficult to define objectively because, like modesty and shame, it is dependent on culture and context. Some Europeans are happy with nudity on public beaches but would be horrified to have their salaries discussed; most Americans react the other way round. But in both cases, they keep private what might make them socially vulnerable if it were publicly known. At one extreme there is the possibility of blackmail; at the other, perhaps, merely embarrassment, but even that can be an excruciating emotion, especially for teenagers. People have killed themselves because their intimate photographs have been shared for the mocking enjoyment of strangers.

Technology has made it much easier to violate that kind of privacy. Some things are now known to advertisers almost before you know them yourself. The classic case is the woman whose online activity shows that shes trying to conceive. If she succeeds it will be almost impossible to conceal her pregnancy from the market. The advertisers will know long before she chooses to tell her friends. But there is a second, more frightening loss of privacy as well. The unprecedented knowledge that the giants of the surveillance economy have acquired about us may disclose vulnerabilities of which we are ourselves unaware.

This is similar to the ways in which demagogues, unscrupulous lawyers, and advertising agencies have always manipulated their victims by playing on their prejudices, but the promise of big data is that this will become easier and more effective than ever before. What we tell our smartphones about our lives, intentionally or otherwise, is far more than the most ambitious secret policeman of the last century could hope to discover by covert surveillance. The ability to exploit the vulnerabilities that this data reveals should be controlled just as tightly as we try to control our security services. Democracy demands no less.

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The Guardian view on big data: the danger is less democracy - The Guardian

Here's the funny thing about democracy: Sometimes, you don't know what you've got til it's gone.

John Carey, a Dartmouth professor of government, would know. He has spent his career studying the erosion of democracy in Latin American countries such asVenezuela and Argentina. And time and again, he has seen the same thing. Its only in retrospect that you can point to the bright line, amoment when a countrys democratic institutions stopped working, he told me. At the time, he said, theres rarely consensus. Instead, Careysaid, there's usually a debate about whether this is an advance or a setback.

One example: In Latin America in the 1990s, democratically elected leaders often tried to seize power by trashing constitutional mandates against reelection. Its a classic first move by heads of state interested in overstaying their welcome, perhaps indefinitely. In fact, those term limits were put in place because a century earlier, a rash of would-be authoritarians used presidential extensions to hang on to powerwell after their populations had turned against them.

But not everyone saw it that way. Too often, the leader would frame his decision as explicitly good for the democratic process. The leader would say, Those restrictions are anti-democratic, the people shouldnt be restricted. If they want me, its their choice, Carey said. That debate is so familiar now you can almost set your watch by it.

Its the same with other things, too. Would-be autocrats frame efforts to rein in the judiciary or purge judges who disagree as a way of being more responsive to the people. Or, theyll say that certain judges are protecting the economic interests of the elite, and they need to go. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has defended his decision to jail thousands of his critics, along with journalists, professors and political rivals, by arguing that those arrested were fomenting discontent and stirring up coups.

We have this sense that were gonna know when democracys under threat, Careysays. We think that if its under threat well all know and share that recognition. I dont think thats the case at all . . . things that wed call anti-democratic the erosion of separation of powers, electoral issues when they are violated, theres often no consensus that there is a violation taking place."

Bright Line Watchis here to help. The website, set up by a small group of political scientists, was born out of the idea that, in their words, One of the greatest threats to democracy is the idea that it is unassailable. Their goal is to carefully monitor the state of democracy in the United States so that they can identify threats to the system.

To start, the creators identified the essential qualities of democracy.Theychose 19, including fair, free elections; judicial and legislative independence; government protection of individuals right to engage in unpopular speech; a robust free press; and an executive authority that wont push its power beyond constitutional limits.There are others, too: Government leaders recognize the validity of bureaucratic or scientific consensus about matters of public policy. Government agencies are not used to monitor, attack, or punish political opponents. Government officials do not use public office for private gain. Political competition occurs without criticism of opponents loyalty or patriotism.

Then, the Bright Line Watch people asked more than a thousand political scientists: How important is each of these traits to a fully functioning democracy? Here are the answers, mapped:

Next, they asked a more complicated question: how is the United States doing? Do we, as a country, still offer the key qualities of a democracy?

The 2016 U.S. presidential campaign taught us not to assume that the countrys political leadership will follow the practices and norms that help guarantee American democracy, the founders wrote on the site. Our overarching goal is to use our scholarly expertise to monitor democratic practices and call attention to threats to American democracy.

The idea is to createa benchmark so that experts can assess change over time. The point isto look out for trends. Its a way to tell whether our institutions are becoming less free, whether our voting system is still fraud-free, whether journalists and judges still have as much autonomy in a year as they do right now.

Heres how the countrys democratic health looks to the professors right now:

The respondents arent alone in their criticism.An Economist report from a couple of months ago rated Americas democracy as flawed because of weak governance, an underdeveloped political culture and low levels of political participation.

Next, the polls analysts did something interesting. They looked at how political scientists rank the U.S. in terms of the characteristics that they regard as especially important to democracy. And on this scale, American democracy is strongest at the things most important to democracy generally:

And finally, the survey asked professors to rate American democracy right now, on a scale of one to 10. Here are the results:

So American democracy gets a C. Not terrible, but not the ideal ranking for one of the most prominent democracies in history.

All graphics courtesy of Bright Line Watch.

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How you'll know when the US isn't a democracy anymore - Washington Post