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Yemen: US-Backed, Saudi-Led Coalition Strikes Kill 10 Civilians - Democracy Now!

Ive called in a doctor (the Ph.D. type) for a consultation on our condition. Christian Crandall is a psychology professor at the University of Kansas. He stresses we need to stay connected to both ends of our political divide.

Troubling things happen in the other Washington, and they need attention. But ultimately the fault with government lies with we the people and largely with our inability to see past our own biases.

Last week I wrote about the political and cultural gulf between liberal Seattle and the conservative Eastern New Mexico town where I grew up. I said rural and urban America need to listen to each other.

This week, Ive called in a doctor (the Ph.D. type) for a consultation on our condition. Christian Crandall is a psychology professor at the University of Kansas. I understand that some of you are not fond of academics, but Crandall makes a point of staying connected to both ends of our political divide.

He grew up in Seattle, across the street from Lincoln Park, graduated from Chief Sealth High School in 1976 and from the University of Washington in 1980, before earning graduate degrees in social psychology from the University of Michigan.

Crandall said the urban-rural divide is getting larger partly because so many people are choosing to associate only with like-minded people. Its an aspect of human psychology that profoundly affects our politics.

I have friends from high school who complain about the Pierce-King County axis driving state politics, he said, meaning urban areas dominate rural areas of the state. He has conservative friends who grew up in Seattle who moved out of the city to places where they could be around people whose political and cultural values matched theirs.

Mobility is a problem for democracy, Crandall said. Clovis (my hometown in New Mexico) lost part of its political diversity when you moved out, he said, and when I moved to Seattle, I added to its dominant political leaning. The two places moved further apart, and that is happening around the country.

Crandall and I had both listened to a story on NPR about the migration from California to Northern Idaho of conservative people who have made that part of Idaho even more conservative and attractive to even more political refugees from liberal California.

The political isolation that breeds makes communication and compromise difficult.

Research shows that people make friends with people who are like them, which is not surprising, he said. People want to be comfortable in their social interactions, not challenged. But theres more to it. Our research shows that once you choose your friends, you dont have much influence on each other, not about major political or cultural attitudes, anyway. You already share those and friends just reinforce the ideas that drew you together in the first place.

Like-minded people talk to each other and become more confident in their views and more extreme.

Thats how terrorist recruitment works. A person who already holds certain ideas is isolated among people who have more extreme versions of the ideas, but then the new person gradually becomes extreme.

Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, had anti-government feelings before he came to Kansas and hung out with other anti-government people, Crandall said. McVeigh was isolated from alternative ideas.

But short of shuffling people around the country, it will be difficult to make interactions happen. We no longer draw from common information sources since media fragmentation gives people the option to stick with only voices that reflect their own views.

And the problem of self-segregation is made worse by political choices that create congressional districts in which only one party has a chance. In those districts, there is no incentive for elected officials to moderate their views in fact, extreme views attract more votes.

The Left and Right dont talk with each other much, Crandall said. He stays connected with conservative friends on Facebook, but he said often, They dont accept what I consider to be settled facts.

But he believes everyone has a duty to reach across the divide, even though it can be uncomfortable. Paying attention to people with whom you disagree matters, he said. People dont want to feel like theyre being dismissed without being heard. Acknowledging the other perspective is one way to reduce polarization Crandall said.

That may be a hard pill to swallow, but its what the doctor prescribed.

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For democracy's sake, we need to burst ideological bubbles - The Seattle Times

WARSAW, Poland U.S. President Donald Trumps inauguration and the subsequent deluge of shocking events that followed have set the tone for what to expect from the new leader and his administration. Many Americans are concerned that their country is going down an alarming and unprecedented path, as are many Europeans. And in at least one European country, the scene playing out in the U.S. may almost seem like dj vu.

In late 2015, Polish citizens took to the polls and ousted the center-right ruling party, Civic Platform. Civic Platform had been in power for nearly a decade by that point, and many Poles had become incensed by scandals that painted its politicians as out-of-touch elites. And although the country had experienced remarkable economic growth during its reign, a big portion of the population still felt that the GDP statistics didnt tell the whole story.Like the Americans who found solace in Trumps campaign speeches targeting the forgotten ones, many Poles felt that they, too, had been passed over in the countrys prosperity run.

In the almost decade of Civic Platforms power, Poles had seen their friends and family members migrate away from Poland to Germany and the United Kingdom en masse. There, they were able to find the high-paying jobs that had become elusive for many in Poland. Although statistics showed growth, to many it felt like most of the available jobs were in low-paying service sector work much like the case for a number of workers in the American middle class.

The employment available was also mostly within foreign-owned companies. Ardent supporters of the right-wing Law and Justice party, also known as PiS, looked at globalization as a black cloud that had brought prosperity to few but caused others to flee, or simply left them behind.

Like many populist leaders who have come before and after them, PiS politicians sought to ride the wave of globalizations failures to power. They focused on elevating the voice of the common man and made clear that their goal was to oppose the status quo of the established government.

Kacper Pempel / Reuters

When PiS ran against the ruling party, the outward appearance of its campaignwas the opposite of Donald Trumps.The partys strategywas an attempt to appeal to moderate voters and so it presented itself as a party of positive, not radical change. But the impact was the same to make Poland great again. Both Trumps and PiS campaign success stem from that fact that they were appealing to people who felt left out of the rewards of globalization. And a lot of the themes employed by Trump in his presidential bid appeared to be taken straight from the PiS campaign playbook, which much like Trumps drain the swamp slogan, focused on the elimination of corruption and a redistribution of power to the population at large, including the disenfranchised. In other words, returning power to the people.

Seen through the prism of the PiS party leaders rhetoric, Poland was like Trumps America a country in ruinsexploited by the corrupt elites. The campaign rhetoric noted that the country had been taken advantage of by foreign powers, its industry hollowed out and moribund, its interests sacrificed at the altar of multilateralism, its pride trampled on.

Much like Trumps relentless scapegoating of Mexico and China for the loss of American jobs, Polands PiS had found its own target for vitriol in the previous ruling party, Rafal Trzaskowski, a prominent leader of that opposition Civic Platform party and a vocal critic of PiS, said in an interview with The WorldPost.

They were absolutely convinced that we were selling off our interests, that we were German lap dogs, and that we were standing up from our knees, he said.

If PiS took power, the party narrative went, the country would once again gain legitimacy and power on the world stageand start pulling its weight and standing up to foreign interest. It would at last dismantle the semi-mythical ukad,a group of corrupt elites who held the levers of power. In other words, it would drain the swamp.

Still, the campaign rhetoric was somewhat toned down. The more radical party figures like the party leader and now the de facto ruler of Poland, Jarosaw Kaczyski were hidden from public view. They were supplanted by images of its prime ministerial candidate meeting with everyday people. And as populist movements spread across Europe, the party enjoyed strong support from Polish youth, clenching it a majority in parliamentary elections.

That semblance of normalcy and moderation was however very quickly abandoned once the election was over. The divisive Jaroslaw Kaczyski vowed in his partys acceptance speech much like Trumps words during his own victory speech to unify the country and become a leader for all citizens, instead of taking revenge on the new opposition. Yet that soon proved false.The new government under President Andrzej Duda and PiS party leader Kaczyski embarked on a blitzkrieg of wide ranging reforms, aimed at a total takeover of the state structures on an unprecedented scale even by Polish standards in which to the victor go the spoils has always been the name of the game.

Pawel Kopczynski / Reuters

While Trump is reportedly considering defunding the public broadcasting corporation entirely and made moves seemingly aimed at putting his stamp on Voice of America, the public media in Poland never free of bias has been filled with fierce loyalists and changed to become heavily slanted towardsPiS.

The public prosecutors have been taken under the direct control of Zbigniew Ziobro, the sheriff-like justice minister.The boards of state-owned enterprises have been replaced with friends, family and loyal supporters of the party. Most worryingly, however, is that the first and most important victim of the takeover was the Constitutional Tribunal, a crucial piece of the checks and balance system. Its rulings were first disregarded, then the court was paralyzed and now brought under control of PiS-friendly appointees. Whether this example will be followed by Trump is still unknown, but some of the new U.S. administrations actions and comments might point to a similar showdown.

Kaczyski believes he can dismantle the constitution because hes been given a mandate to do so, said Lukasz Lipinski, the director for analysis at Polityka Insight, a Warsaw-based think tank, in an interview with The WorldPost. Thats why theyve had a conflict with the Constitutional Tribunal.

The situation in the U.S. is almost exactly the same, with President Trump venting his frustration almost daily via Twitter that the courts are standing in the way of change. Most notably, the courts and federal security agencieshave refused to implement President Trumps executive order banning people from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S. Trump has responded by expressing his disregard to rulings by a so-called judge. And just last Thursday, facing a second setback from the courts on his Muslim travel ban, he retorted on Twitter: SEE YOU IN COURT.

Last time Jaroslaw was in power, he had problems with the Constitutional Tribunal. They stood in his way, so he decided to destroy it before they can start to do anything, said Lipinksi, referring to the period from 2005-2007 when Kaczyski held power in Poland, but could not force through the laws he wanted. Kaczyski, much like Trump, aimed to delegitimize his opposition and vocally express concern with the system as a means to put forth his own agendas in government.

Kaczyskis actions did not result in any sort of national reconciliation. Quite the opposite. Theyve created unprecedented polarization in the same vein as that which is now playing out in the U.S. Polands divide was also fueled by some of Kaczyskis rhetoric, whose utterances about the Poles of the worst sort, though not directly aimed at the opponents of government, was nonetheless received as a clear swipe at them. Most recently, after the opposition occupied the Polish parliaments main chamber in protest against planned media restrictions and the perceived mistreatment of its MPs, Kaczyski accused them outright of trying to stage a coup detat.

The government is encroaching on our liberties, and thats not just our view, thats the view of NGOs and the constitutional court, said Trzaskowski, the leader of Civic Platform party. Theyre destroying the civil service and undermining the foundations of our democracy because Kaczyski wants to revolutionize the country.

In much the same way, Trump and Kaczyski have painted a very black and white portrait of every event, situation and decision. Those in support of them are always right, and those in opposition are always wrong. Or as Trump likes to say, winners and losers. The greatest, the best or the worst of the worst, the terrible.

In America, it is still early on in the presidency to tell what this will mean for Trump, his party and his administration. But this type of rhetoric in Poland has led to a total breakdown in communication between the parties, said Trzaskowski. There simply is no positive communication anymore. There is a wall between us.

Nowhere, however, is the division more pronounced than in the media. As in America, the private media in Poland is divided between the established liberal outlets and the somewhat less renowned conservative media. The divide between them has always been significant. However, since the new PiS government entered power, they have converted into two warring camps, with an ever-shrinking no mans land between them.

The right-wing outletshave become what some are characterizing as apologists for the government. On the other end, the liberal mainstream media outlets, many of which had been known to describe PiS as having fascistic tendenciesandopenly sided with the previous government, are now staunchly anti-government.

The ruling party, not unlike Trump, does its part to fuel this war. PiS politicians, like Ryszard Terlecki, head of the partys parliamentary caucus, who said that media criticism of the administrations changes must be stopped, and Elbieta Kruk, PiS politician and a member of the National Media Council, the new media regulatory body, have characterized the Polish mainstream media not just as negatively skewed to the point of bias think Trumps fake news but have gone a step further to imply that they represent foreign mostly German interests and do the bidding of their foreign owners.

The government has chosen to tackle this backlash from liberal slanted media, and become actively involved in state-owned media outlets. The result has been an almost Trump-like response to the liberal media, with one of the government medias most famous shows, Wiadomoci, now spending much of its airtime lambasting the liberal press and especially the reviledGazeta Wyborcza daily, one of the more famous liberal papers in the country mirroring Trumps consistent references to The New York Times and other U.S. outlets as failing, or fake news.

Lucas Jackson / Reuters

The pro-government slant in Poland is so pronounced today that even some PiS supporters have voiced their concerns. Krzysztof Czabaski, deputy minister of culture responsible for overseeing public media, said in a recent interview with private-owned Radio Zet that the media make mistakes. Pressed further, he could not cite any examples of negative coverage of the governments actions, explaining that apparently it didnt deserve that much criticism. Similar statements have been made by Trump and his surrogates when referring to the U.S. media. Trumps top adviser, Kellyanne Conway, has appeared on talk shows and news broadcasts criticizing what she deems a misappropriation of coverage focused on the mistakes of the government, rather than successes. But when pressed further, she tends to come up short, too.

Beyond just tensions with the media, the criticism from both governments speaks to a larger issue of the sensitivity of both administrations, whichmightve made the first days of the new U.S. administration feel familiar to the Polish audience, particularly in regard to the mass demonstrations.

The record-breaking protests that took over cities across America were eerily similar to those that have become a recurring theme in Poland since PiS took power. As in the U.S., women also took to the streets in a massive protest over abortion rights. That protest in Poland, much like the womens rights march in the U.S. and the Trump administrations reaction to it, was downplayed by the government as not a big deal.

Some media outlets in both countries, and in Russia, also float similar theories about who is behind these somewhat parallel protests: George Soros, the infamous billionaire and philanthropist. Much like in other illiberal democracies, like Hungary, Russia and now also Macedonia, in Poland, too, he has become the nefarious symbol of world finance for whom, according to one Polish official, Poland had been a paradise.

For some on the right, Soros alleged involvement in political dissidence in both the U.S. and Poland comes from speculation that he may be funding social movements in both nations. In Poland, that speculation lies mainly in a political movement known as The Committee for the Defense of Democracy (Komitet Obrony Demokracji), or KOD. The group is most well known for its involvement in anti-government protests, particularly aimed at governmental changes made by PiS. The fears are parroting those of generally pro-Trump slanting outlets in the U.S., such as Breitbart News, some of whose articles have suggested that Soros has similar involvement in U.S. protest movements.

Gallo Images via Getty Images

This fear also extends to Polish media outlets, such as state broadcaster TVP1s show, Wiadomoci, which quoted a lecturer at the Jagiellonian University in Krakw who alleged that Soros has paid professional protesters to stage the massive anti-Trump demonstrations near inauguration weekend. This line of reasoning, often employed by Steve Bannon, Trumps chief strategist and the former executive chair of Breitbart News, is a standard feature among the new ruling elite in Poland. In fact, Kaczyski often points toshadowy foreign influences such as Sorosand his idealsas being the real source of the countrys credibility problem abroad.

It is therefore not entirely surprising that Trumps victory was greeted with considerable elation among some of Polands new ruling class and the government-friendly media. For them it was a triumph over the common adversary the global elites and the parallels between the two governments means the Polish ruling party feels a sort of kinship with the U.S. president.

One of the most enthusiastic supporters of the new U.S. leader is said to be President Andrzej Duda.

He was really impressed by Trumps inaugural speech, a source close to Duda and Kaczyski who asked to remain unnamed, told The WorldPost. He seems to be genuinely fascinated by the man, which raised some eyebrows in the presidential palace, given Trumps connection to Russia, he added.

But Duda is not the only government figure who sympathizes with the struggle of the new U.S. administration.

Donald Trump is being attacked Our government is also attacked by liberal elites, who previously reigned over Poland and over the U.S., said Mariusz Baszczak, Polands minister of internal affairs, in an interview with TVP INFO, a state TV program.

He and others have noted the similarities between the two political forces: the concern over the common people, the anti-immigrant stance and the audacity to go against political correctness. In fact, months before Trump ordered the ban on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, causing turmoil at U.S. airports, Baszczak did something similar, though on a decidedly smaller scalehe prevented Chechen asylum seekers from entering the country, reportedly stranding them at the Polish-Belarusian border.

PiS rhetoric on immigration was not far from Trumps, either. Just as Trump infamously accused Mexican immigrants of bringing crime, drugs and of being rapists, Kaczyski said that Muslim refugees are bringing in parasites and protozoa. Indeed, as a recent Chatham House poll showed, a Trump-like ban on immigration from majority Muslim countries would be overwhelmingly popular in Poland.

Some of the similarities are so striking that Deputy Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki even jokingly suggested Trump must have borrowed parts from his partys platform.

Kacper Pempel / Reuters

Many Poles, however, including some PiS supporters we spoke to,are alarmed by Trumps foreign policy utterances that have undermined NATO, the European Union and called for reaching a deal with Russia. Such policies, if implemented, would go directly against vital Polish security interests, Micha Baranowski, director of the German Marshall Funds Warsaw bureau, said.

Trumps thinking represents a completely new approach to collective security and the system of alliances that have been the cornerstone of our security system. He sees from a purely short-term, transactional standpoint,he told Wirtualna Polska, a Polish news site. From a Polish perspective, its a decidedly bad idea.

Polish officials, however, have largely ignored that part of Trumps message. After all, they gained a powerful ally, who even if he wont protect the country against Russias imperial ambitions, is more likely to aid in the ideological struggle that both governments seem to have embarked on in their respective nations.

It remains to be seen how this plays out for Poland, but some are not terribly optimistic.

The next year will be very difficult, and they can do lots of things, like jailing the opposition on made-up charges of corruption or overreaching their competencies, Lipinski told The WorldPost. I dont have an honest answer on Polish democracy being crushed, but I can see it going either way.

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America's Crisis Of Democracy Looks Shockingly Like Poland's - Huffington Post

To paraphrase presidential candidate Donald Trump, somebodys doing the leaking. But who, and why, and does it represent a defense of American democratic norms or a death knell for them?

Theres no shortage of theories. Some of the damaging leaks are emerging from the White House, as part of internecine warfare between rival factions. But the more consequential ones, including the revelations that forced the resignation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn Monday night, have hinged on information from the intelligence community.

Trump has tried to change the focus away from the substance of the leaks and to their provenance. On Tuesday, he tweeted this:

He then followed that up Wednesday morning:

Trump may want to change the subject, and his imprecations about the danger of leaks look a lot like the tears of a crocodile, but that doesnt mean the questions he raises arent important.

The president referred to a column by Eli Lake in Bloomberg View, calling Flynns ouster a political assassination. Lake rejects the White House spin that Flynn was fired simply because of a breach of trust with Trump. Instead, he blames Democratic politicians and, more importantly, the intelligence community:

Flynn was a fat target for the national security state. He has cultivated a reputation as a reformer and a fierce critic of the intelligence community leaders he once served with when he was the director the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama. Flynn was working to reform the intelligence-industrial complex, something that threatened the bureaucratic prerogatives of his rivals.

But there are other theories, some of which overlap. At the Washington Free Beacon, a site that is conservative but has generally been anti-Trump, Adam Kredo reports on what he says is a secret, months-long campaign by former Obama administration confidantes to handicap President Donald Trump's national security apparatus and preserve the nuclear deal with Iran, including Ben Rhodes, a former top aide to Barack Obama.

Rhodes rejected the Free Beacon story. Its totally absurd and doesnt make any sense, he wrote in an email. I dont know who the sources are for these stories and I dont even understand the false conspiracy theoryhow would getting rid of Flynn be the thing that saves the Iran Deal? Its an effort to make the conversation about anything other than the actual story of what happened with Russia.

Even if theres no grand conspiracy, there are any number of potential individual culprits. There have also been a stream of stories about frustration, demoralization, and fear within the federal workforce.

Central to the Flynn story is Sally Yates, a career prosecutor who became a high-ranking Justice Department official in the Obama administration. She became acting attorney general after Trumps inauguration. Yates informed the White House counsel in late January that Flynn was not telling the truth when he claimed he had not discussed sanctions against Russia with that countrys ambassador, and that the Justice Department was concerned that he was vulnerable to blackmail. A few days later, Yates said Justice would not defend Trumps executive order on immigration, and she was fired. That means Yates loyalists might have an incentive to leak damaging information.

And Trump has waged a months-long campaign against the intelligence community. During the campaign, he repeatedly rejected the consensus assessment that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta in order to interfere with the election, only in January saying he accepted that conclusion. The day after his inauguration, Trump went to the CIA, where he sought to bury the hatchet. I am so behind you, Trump said. There is nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community and the CIA than Donald Trump. In his tweets Wednesday, he notably did not mention the CIA, but his feud with the intelligence community is apparently back in action.

As a general rule, its probably unwise to pick a fight with spies, a point Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer made in early January. Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you, he said. So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, hes being really dumb to do this.

Yet Schumers warning, even if realistic, is chilling: Not only does it raise the possibility of unelected, faceless bureaucrats using classified information to retaliate against a duly elected president, but that comes in the wake of the intelligence scandals of the Obama years. Edward Snowdens revelations showed the vast powers that the NSA had accrued and could use, even on American citizens, with little or no oversight.

Some commentators have dubbed whats going on the revenge of the American Deep State, in reference to the existencereal, imagined, or a little bit in betweenof a bureaucratic shadow government that constrains the legitimate government in places like Turkey. In Turkey, generals devoted to the secularist ideology of national founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk have repeatedly toppled governments that they worried were threatening that ideology. In January, when a dossier of explosive and unverified claims about Trump was published, Glenn Greenwald, the leftist journalist who helped break the Snowden story, warned that liberals who cheered the dossier were in effect cheering for an intelligence coup. Greenwald specifically labeled these actions the work of a Deep State, writing, But cheering for the CIA and its shadowy allies to unilaterally subvert the U.S. election and impose its own policy dictates on the elected president is both warped and self-destructive. Empowering the very entities that have produced the most shameful atrocities and systemic deceit over the last six decades is desperation of the worst kind.

The idea of a Deep State constraining Trump was not new. Back in February, when the idea of a President Trump still seemed wildly implausible, Megan McArdle wrote that he wouldnt be able to do that much damage even if he won, thanks to bureaucrats who could slow-walk or even block his priorities. This is the reality: Most of what you want to do to Washington wont get doneand neither will much of what you want to get done outside of it, if you insist on taking Washington on, she wrote. After the inauguration, some liberals took new heart in that idea.

But the Deep State motif has really gained in popularity over the last few days, as the pace of leaks undermining Trump has accelerated. The fact the nations now-departed senior guardian of national security was unmoored by a scandal linked to a conversation picked up on a wire offers a rare insight into how exactly Americas vaunted Deep State works, Marc Ambinder writes at Foreign Policy. It is a story not about rogue intelligence agencies running amok outside the law, but rather about the vast domestic power they have managed to acquire within it.

Its not just the leaks. At Slate, Phillip Carter argued that pushback from career officials had helped prevent Trump from instituting a plan to reinstate torture, labeling this the work of a deep state.

Not everyone buys the analogy.

I wouldnt call what is going on in the United States a Deep State, said Omer Taspinar, a professor at the National War College and nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution who is an expert on both national security and Turkey.

The Turkish Deep State is something different, Taspinar contendsa clandestine network of retired intelligence officials, mafiosi, and others who engage in prosecutable criminal activity. He offered a hypothetical scenario that would echo the sorts of tactics the Turkish Deep State deployed in the war against Kurdish separatists: Imagine if white nationalists with ties to the administration conducted false-flag attacks intended to gin up concerns about Islamist terror and enable Trumps tough immigration controls.

It was not the judiciary, the civil society, the media, or the bureaucrats trying to engage in checks and balances against a legitimately elected government, he said. What were witnessing in the U.S., its basically the institutional channels.

Even leaking, which sometimes does flirt with violating the law, doesnt deserve to be tarred as the work of a nefarious deep state, Taspinar said.

Anything that would try to portray what the leakers, or what the government officials try to do as a Deep State is an attempt to delegitimize whistleblowers or people who believe that what the government is doing right [now] is against the Constitution, he said. Any kind of bureaucratic resistance is too innocuous to be labeled as the activities of the Deep State.

Perhaps there needs to be a better term for the resistance that bureaucrats offer to presidents they oppose. (After all, some experts contend they also hobbled Obama on some issues.) But one common element, from whistleblowers to bureaucratic leakers to violent Deep State thugs in Turkey, is a commitment to certain norms and practices, and the sense that the only way to defend norms is to violate them on a case-by-case basis.

And as the Turkish example shows, that worksup to a point. The problem is that when a deep state pushes too far, it can undermine itself and end up empowering that which it seeks to prevent. The Turkish military repeatedly toppled governments, starting in 1960. But more recently, its power has waned. Current President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has used allegations of Deep State plotting against the government as a pretext for mass arrests of dissidents, detention of journalists, and further crackdowns on civil society. In July, some elements of the Turkish military attempted a coup, but were too weak to succeed. Even Turkish liberals who disliked Erdogan condemned the coup. The Deep State now seems too weak to work real change, but the threat is strong enough to allow Erdogan to discredit legitimate opposition.

Theres a great gulf between the Turkish situation and the Trump administrationthough some analysts have not hesitated to draw parallels between the two mens styles. Trumps American opponents, like their Turkish counterparts, face the challenge of fostering leaks and bureaucratic resistance that can hem in the Trump administration and reveal any wrongdoing. If they go too far, however, they risk catastrophe in two directions: They might empower an unaccountable intelligence agency, with dangerous long-term effects; or they might inspire such a backlash from Trump and his allies in Congress that he works to dismantle the bureaucratic system, removing an essential constraint on the presidents power. The question isnt what the good choice and bad choice are; its what the least worst choice is.

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Are Deep-State Leakers Defending Democracy or Corroding It? - The Atlantic

Plato argued that democracy by its very nature cannot work. The direct involvement of the people in the affairs of state will lead to a situation where takers outnumber givers, thereby rendering the economy precarious. But that isnt the only issue the demos introduces. Direct participation can lead to the belief thatmajority rules can denythe rights of minorities or there is justification for the people to take matters into their own hands.

Since the beginning of democracy in Athens, the greatest danger to democratic institutions has been the demos, the people themselves. Each person in a democracy is an individual. But when individuals become the people, trouble may be on the horizon.

The Founders of this new nation, having immersed themselves in the classics, created a system that is a republic, with the will of the people manifested through the election of representatives and in which taking matters into constituent hands is both unnecessary and counterproductive. The problem facing the United States is that the Trump presidency has resulted in the belief on the part of many that this is a democracy demanding direct public intervention in the affairs of the nation. Hence, students justify violence at the University of California as a form of democratic action. Street demonstrations calling for overturning the presidents limited ban on immigration is rationalized as democracy at work. Alas, it is democracy at work, but Americans live in a republic.

That distinction is lost on a public uneducated in the difference. Rabble-rousers discuss the right to assemble, but assembly doesnt imply violence. Freedom of expression is a First Amendment right, but even that right is limited by clear and present danger. A republic recognizes constraints overlooked by the flock of direct involvement.

Having stretched the idea of democracy into new and unexplored avenues of public participation, the republic itself is imperiled. The Ferguson effect, in which people believe they were wrongfully treated by the police, justifies taking to the streets. The republic, that relied on the seamless transition from one government to the next, is facing a new and relentless challenge that is based on a misconception.

Even foreign policy, once the domain of experts whose experience offered equanimity, now offer amateur guidance on the basis of which group is least offended by policies. The standards are elastic until such time as they cease to have meaning. Mounting pressure exists to give leftist democrats a stage on which to perform, assuming they will destroy themselves. At the moment, that seems unlikely, but history is not at an end and the confusion between a democracy and a republic is ubiquitous.

For the new democrats, it is feelings that count. It is reminiscent of Baudelaire who wrote Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling. These proponents of direct involvement are romantics who wear their feelings as winter vests. Why doesnt the whole society share their concern? Where are the demonstrators who share our outrage? A voice of the demos shouts into the wind.

Abraham Lincoln argued, With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. Lincoln is right as far as his argument goes. If sentiment misguides the public by wrongly asserting democratic impulses rather than the natural constraints of a republic, it will fail as will the state itself. This is the time to once again teach the young that they reside in a republic, thank God.

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Democracy v. Republic - American Spectator