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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

New York Times

Will the Real Democracy Lovers Please Stand Up? New York Times Journalists, their subscriptions and ratings spiking, howled about another move to undercut the role the free press plays in a democracy (which Dies in Darkness as the new Washington Post slogan has it). The administration doubled down on its ...

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Will the Real Democracy Lovers Please Stand Up? - New York Times

I spent almost eight years working for the Obama administration, in the White House as the deputy press secretary, deputy communications director, communications director, and as the spokesperson at the State Department. We were not always perfect about how we handled media relations.

We also had rough press days when the front page of the newspaper was completely depressing and every story on cable news felt like a punch in the stomach.

We gave exclusive interviews and stories to reporters just as every White House does, but we never excluded a set of targeted reporters or any reporters from attending a briefing. Why? Because the back-and-forth, the arguments in briefings, are all a part of what you do in every White House, Democratic or Republican, to make the work of government accessible to the American people. It is part of democracy.

And they made folk heroes out of the toughest reporters at the State Department in Russia.

But I learned some of the most important lessons about the role of the media from these same reporters. Not only is being targeted by the Russian government a badge of honor, it highlighted what we have that they don't. A free press, and briefings in the White House, the State Department and the Department of Defense that are open to reporters from all different backgrounds, beliefs and even political persuasions.

So why did the Trump team exclude targeted reporters from a briefing Friday?

Here is my best educated guess:

The Trump administration wants to continue to delegitimize institutions like the mainstream media. The more they can confuse the lines between facts and truth, legitimate and illegitimate sources of information, the more they will be able to brainwash the small segment of the public they care about reaching.

Is this the worst thing the Trump administration has done this week? Probably not.

So why does it matter?

Because the way an administration interacts with the free press in the United States, through briefings and access to reporters -- even those who have reported unflattering, harsh and sometimes unfair stories -- sends a message to the rest of the world about how much we value the freedom of the press. And Russia shouldn't be our role model.

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Jen Psaki: Without free press, democracy dies - CNN