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It can sometimes feel that humanity is taking two steps forward and one step backwards. Fewer people are hungry and poor these days, its true. But we're still far from a world where democracy and freedom are the norm, and where everyone shares in economic progress.

Take a look at these charts put together by Tariq Khokhar, global data editor at the World Bank. They show how constitutions, electoral democracies, and the language of "rights" are spreading, but also how fewer people are participating in elections and how electoral "integrity" is on the decline. More Latin American and eastern European countries have constitutions, for instance, but they're frequently amended, suggesting the documents are no more durable than ordinary laws.

The original charts come from a new World Bank report looking at how countries can be economically dynamic while serving a broad base of citizens. It argues that nations succeed in this way not because of their resources, or even the strength of their public services and infrastructure, but because of their level of social cooperation, their commitment to transparency, and the rough equilibrium of their power interests. In other words: whether or not they have effective governance.

Globalization has lifted 1 billion people out of poverty in the last 20 years. But the spread of technology and greater access to capital and world markets has had uneven effects, increasing inequality and promoting "vulnerability to global economic trends and cycles," the report says. And the development community has too often focused on "designing best-practice solutions and building the capacity needed to implement them," rather than the institutional underpinnings that allow those policies to succeed.

Download the full report here.

[Photo: Flickr user ]

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Democracy Is Advancing Around The World, But Also Deeply Fraying - Co.Exist

Observers were uncertain whether the American system, with its checks and balances and its diffusion of sovereign power across multiple levels of government, was up to the task of addressing these crises. Looking across the Atlantic, the political scientist Pendleton Herring pointed to the rising tide of authoritarianism: We face a world where discipline, organization, and the concentration of authority are placed before freedom for the individual and restraints on government. In this context, he asked: Can our government meet the challenge of totalitarianism and remain democratic? Is the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches compatible with the need for authority?

For some, the answer was that the United States would have to abandon its constitutional system, at least temporarily, to meet the roiling crises of the period. Alfred E. Smith, the former New York governor and Democratic presidential nominee, asked in 1933: What does a democracy do in a war? It becomes a tyrant, a despot, a real monarch. Since the depression was doing more damage at home to our own people than the great war of 1917 and 1918 ever did, he reasoned, it was similarly necessary to suspend constitutional government in order to combat it. As war approached in the late 1930s, Herbert Emmerich recalled, Praise for the efficacy of the Fascist dictatorship in Italy was heard in surprisingly high places in the democracies. Some doubts were being expressed as to the ability of the American system to supply the bold dynamic leadership required for solution of the problems of modern government.

Emmerich was among a group of administrative reformers, now largely forgotten, who worked to formulate a different response. Beginning with the 1937 Presidents Committee on Administrative Management, and continuing through the early years of the Cold War, these reformers crafted a number of institutional mechanisms that would enable the executive branch to decisively address emergency situations without undermining the traditions of American democracy.

Two innovations in particular were key to the success of this process of governmental reform. First, an array of new administrative devices increased the presidents capacity to take decisive action without undermining democratic procedures. For instance, the delegatory statute gave the executive branch powers normally reserved for Congress to make regulations and issue executive orders while maintaining a check on this power. Second, the Executive Office of the President was established as an apparatus of technical support for the executive that could be reorganized according to changing demands, providing input and guidance on complex problems of economic policy, foreign relations, and military strategy. Over the ensuing years, U.S. presidents have relied extensively on the counsel of advisory bodies based in this office, from the National Resources Planning Board and Bureau of the Budget of the 1930s and 1940s, to the post-war National Security Council and Council of Economic Advisors.

Today the tools invented by these administrative reformers are largely taken for granted, assimilated into the everyday workings of government. But in the mid-twentieth century, they were seen to have monumental significance for the preservation of American democratic institutions. The political scientist Clinton Rossiter argued in 1949 that the reorganization of the executive branch had been a far more momentous constitutional fact that anyone seems yet to have realized. It may, he wrote, have saved the Presidency from paralysis and the Constitution from radical amendment. The historian Barry Karl proclaimed that the reorganization was the American alternative to revolution.

These adjustments in our governmental system have not, of course, prevented terrible abuses of executive power. Witness, for example, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, or the extrajudicial imprisonment and torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. But they did allow the U.S. to navigate crises that brought down many of the worlds democratic governments in the first half of the twentieth century. And for seven decades the structure of executive authority established during the depression and the Cold War has enabled the American government to manage economic and military emergencies without resort to dictatorship or martial law.

How disturbing it is, then, to see Trump, within a week of his inauguration, using the very institutional mechanisms that were designed to preserve democracy in actual crises to undermine constitutional order in response to fictional crises. We should be alert to the strategic fabrication of more such crises by this administration. As Evan McMullin has warned, the president will likely endeavor to create a threat as broad, pervasive, nebulous, and yet urgent as possible. And unlike the reformers of the mid-twentieth century, Trumps goal will be to thwart constitutional protections rather than to sustain them.

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Trump's Fictional Crises and the Real Threats to American Democracy - New Republic

The life of Fidel Castro spanned almost a century, but the decisive event that would seal his fate and that of the Americas occurred over the course of a few weeks in 1948, amidst popular riots in Bogot and the vicious reaction against them during the Ninth Pan American Conference. Castro arrived in Colombia believing that mobilization and populist reforms in the country offered a space for the expansion of economic and political rights. They did not. And 1948 would be the last time Castro believed that they could. Embracing armed struggle against those who proclaimed the ideals of freedom and equality in order to attain those ideals was not an abrupt authoritarian turn but a logical conclusion that situated him within a regional tradition dating back to the Haitian Revolution between 1789 and 1804. In Latin America, mass movements adopted revolutionary violence not against democracy, but as the only way to put it into practice.

Castro's embrace of revolutionary violence is relevant again today. The U.S. presidential election in 2016 exposed not only the obstacles that democratic institutions offer for progressive social change; it also laid bare the way in which liberal procedures have allowed for the rise of American fascism. This is a reality that Black Americans have lived with for two centuries. And its a realization that may serve as a basis for a historical conversation between Black America and Latin American revolutionary movements past.

Part of the 1948 Bogot story is well-known: Castro went to protest the presence of the United States at the Ninth Pan American Conference, a meeting that gave birth to the Organization of American States (OAS). Following the assassination of Colombian caudillo Jorge Elicer Gaitn, he joined the violent popular riots that engulfed the city. But the background of his arrival brings to light a different perspective about this formative episode. Castro did not travel to Bogot to make a revolution. He was part of a vast network of progressive and nationalist activists and leaders at the peak of a democratic spring that had swept the region after the Second World War.

U.S. diplomats, on the other hand, had hoped that the OAS would be the hemispheric armor against postwar communism. They traveled to Bogot with a set of resolutions promoting the political and military coordination of countries facing social unrest and internal conflict. It was a pivotal moment for the United States. The notion of the Western Hemisphere was finally becoming a reality, with Latin America joining the Cold War efforts of the U.S. and submitting to the unprecedented political and military power of the most prosperous nation on earth. As Spruille Braden, the conservative former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State who organized the arrangements for the 1948 Pan American Conference, wrote to a friend three weeks before the meeting: "I feel sure that the Bogot Conference will make historythe kind of history we all want to see made." And history it made indeed.

The Spring

The Bogot episode actually began in Buenos Aires three months before the April 1948 diplomatic meeting, when Argentine President Juan Pern decided to sponsor a region-wide rally to protest the presence of U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall at the conference. Many in Latin America were pushing for expanded political participation and a more just distribution of wealth for peasants and the regions emerging working classes. Parties from both the political Left and Right consistently denounced the U.S. as an ally of local elites in blocking those demands. In this context, Pern sent personal envoys to different capitals around the region to reap the harvest that U.S. policies had sown.

Argentine senator Diego Luis Molinari marched to Havana. He arrived in late February 1948 with ideas about regional social reform and some money for carrying those ideas out. In Cuba, Molinari met with Csar Tronconi, a former socialist labor activist in the Argentine meatpacking industry. Tronconi was Argentinas worker attach in Cuba, one of the union members appointed to Argentine embassies to promote Peronism throughout the world. Tronconi offered Molinari a meeting with leaders from the Cuban University Students Federation (FEU). A young law student who had been tipped off about Molinari's visit asked to join the group. His name was Fidel Castro. He told the Argentines that he was impressed by Pern's anti-imperialist message.

In Molinari's room at Havanas Hotel Nacional, the Argentines suggested that Cuban students create a Centro de Estudiantes Latinoamericanos (Center of Latin American Students), an organization whose actions would be inaugurated in Bogot. The Cubans and Argentines discussed the basics of an agenda for postwar democratic politics: an end to military dictatorships, the achievement of social equality and improved labor legislation, the modernization of regional infrastructure, and the establishment of fair terms for economic trade with the United States. By the end of the meeting, Molinari had pledged diplomatic support so the Cubans could leave the country, in addition to contacts, and enough money to support them on their way to Bogot.

With Peronist funds, Castro left Cuba for his first stint at non-violent transnational activism. His actions expanded the reach of Perns initiative beyond the narrow scope of Argentine nationalism. En route to Bogot, he met with leftist students in Panama who were protesting the U.S. control of the Panama Canal. In Caracas, he sat with Rmulo Betancourt, the former president of Venezuela who had proclaimed the 50/50 tax reform that secured substantial revenues from the oil industry for the Venezuelan state. Though Betancourt despised Pern, he backed the idea of the protests at the Bogot conference. Once in Colombia, Castro met with Gaitn, the caudillo and frontrunner for that countrys coming presidential elections who had just broken ranks with the oligarchic bosses of the Liberal Party. Gaitn so too offered his full support for the demonstrators and even scheduled a second meeting to talk more with the young Castro.

The U.S. obsession with anti-Americanism and the perpetual menace of its southern neighbor is not a recent invention, nor does it belong exclusively to U.S. Republicans. In Bogot, the U.S. followed the movements of protest organizers closely. A cable from the U.S. embassy in Havana considered these heated actions to be in line with current Argentine international policyclearly anti-American and anti-Pan-American. U.S. officials characterized the new Centro de Estudiantes Latinoamericanos organization as an effort similar and parallel to the Pern Latin-American labor project."

Castro was only 21 years old at the time, but he had already traveled from presidential palaces to clandestine student shelters and union halls. On April 4, 1948, he wrote to his father in Cuba, ecstatic about how the Argentines had provided the largest possible support to our movement. From his room at the Claridge Hotel in Bogot, Castro concluded with a hopeful note: After this, I might go to Argentina and spend three months there, with a fellowship from the Argentine government.

That would not come to pass. On April 9, half-an-hour before his scheduled second meeting with Castro, Gaitn was killed by a hired assassin, putting an end to the progressive alternative that he had led in Colombia. His killing sparked the massive riot that would become known as the Bogotazo. This was followed by ferocious repression and the descent into a period known as La Violencia.

Pern read the repression, and the United States support for it, as part of a new regional dynamic and subsequently joined the paranoid crusade against the social unrest that his activists had promoted. In Panama, students were violently repressed during a rally against U.S. military bases, and a few months later, a new president won office there through fraudulent elections. In Venezuela, the stardom of President Rmulo Gallegos, the novelist who had Betancourts support, collapsed due to military pressure by forces led by General Marcos Prez Jimenez. Gallegos had only been in office for nine months.

Castro called off his visit to Argentina indefinitely and assessed the lessons.The young Fidel had been hopeful about the ability of democratic movements to push for social reform and the support of populist leaders; he was now aware of the limitations of the former and wary of the betrayals of the latter.It took him only five years to organize the attack on the Moncada Barracks and start the Cuban Revolution. By April 1948, Castro had already grasped the lessons that Ernesto "Che" Guevara would learn in Guatemala in 1954, when he witnessed the CIA-sponsored coup against the democratic government of Jacobo Arbenz. And he did so not in the face of Fulgencio Batista's brutal dictatorship in Cuba but rather in democratic Latin America.

Black America

Haiti was the first independent Black republic in in the world and the first to abolish slavery. A powerful lesson from the revolutionary period that ran from 1789-1804 was that to abolish slavery, slaves had to use armed violence in the name of freedom and equality against a revolutionary regime that proclaimed these very same ideals. The formerly enslaved, under the leadership of Toussaint L'Ouverture, sang the Marseillaise on their way to kill revolutionary soldiers from France who had sung the same anthemalthough with a narrower interpretation of its lyrics.

These teachings are encrypted in Latin Americas DNA: Anti-Americanism and a pledge to social progress are vital features of the region's landscape.But what is unique to Latin America is a successful, full deployment of the absolute idealism of democracy in the creation of modern nations.This idealism encompasses the elimination of those interests, namely private property rights, whose mere existence prevents freedom from being universally exercised. The shortcomings of the Cuban Revolutionfrom its legacies of state repression to its legacies of racial inequality to the corroded regimes in the region sheltered under Cuba's wing todayall confirm that expanding democracy is a task that should start with the revolution, not end with it.

The flaws of other revolutions that coexist with propertied interestsfrom Mexico and Bolivia to the tragic failure of those who attempted to forge peaceful paths to revolution in Guatemala and Chilereinforced the influence of the Cuban Revolution. In Latin America, it is not irrational to think that armed struggle will achieve democracy.What is foolish, based on the lessons of history, is to believe that those whose interests are affected by the expansion of democratic practices will relinquish their positions in the name of the general interest or because they will somehow be better off if the rest of society improves. This is a set of beliefs that are dominant, though weakened, in U.S. political culture.

In 1963, historian CLR James famously wrote an appendix for his book The Black Jacobins, which he titled "From Toussaint L'Ouverture to Fidel Castro." He did not compare the two leaders but highlighted a quest for national identity that had occurred against the common backdrop of sugar plantations and slavery. The most realistic and pregnant question of all, James said, was how Cuba would project itself to the rest of the world. After all, it was free Haiti that had nursed Simn Bolivar and helped him to go back to the field to help free the Five States of Saint-Domingue. What would Cuba do? Export what Castro learned in Bogot: in Latin America, revolutionary violence produces not a radical form of democracy but the only possible form of democracy.

The lesson of violence immediately reflected upon the United States, where, for many, the foundational revolution had erected the enforcement of property rights and its corollary, slavery, as the only way to keep the nation united, expanding, and prosperous. As James punctuated the steps that led from Toussaint to Castro and onward to the future, U.S. conservatives filled in the blanks. With Black riots engulfing U.S. cities in 1967, Spruille Braden, the former U.S. diplomat to Cuba and Argentina who prophesied that the Conference in Bogot would make history, saw how Latin American violence reached Black American hands. He said to a friend that, since the Revolution, "Communists in Cuba were directing their radio with propaganda to the negroes in Southern United States and that Castro was sending over agents to infiltrate our factories in Tampa and in the South."

He raved. But in the paranoid delirium of the proprietors expressed in his comments, he unveiled truths truer than facts. There were no agents infiltrating factories in Tampa, though Black radicals were indeed looking at Cuba. As Dan Georgakas recently wrote, a Detroit-based group of Black radicals who later led the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, traveled to Cuba in 1964 to speak with Che Guevara. The Detroit radicals found armed defense to be more appealing than non-violence. While they respected Martin Luther King, Jr. as a leader, they did not want to emulate him. With the Cuban experience at hand, reading The Black Jacobins provided them "an example of how seemingly impossible rebellions could be successful."

Castro was exporting the lesson that societies founded upon slavery, from Saint-Domingue to Havana, had learned over centuries about the limits of institutional procedures, mass politics, and peaceful social reform.Blacks in the United States, the Detroit radicals believed, could hear their own voice in the Latin American undertones of the island's tale. That violence is an indispensable resource of popular politics is a legacy that reverberates still todayif not as a practice, at least as a warning about the obstacles that democratic institutions present to social change and as an indictment against the fascist embryo that those institutions help to engender. In ways that Braden could not have anticipated when he wished it, 1948 Bogot was making history. And still is.

Ernesto Semn teaches history at the University of Richmond's Jepson School of Leadership Studies.

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Democracy in the Americas, the Revolutionary Way - NACLA

Trump was defending the Russian President after Fox's Bill O'Reilly called Putin a "killer." His response, "You think our country is so innocent," reveals Trump's dismissive attitude toward the most fundamental democratic norms that America has aspired to embody. Clearly, the United States has made many grave mistakes throughout history, but the country's guiding principles have remained unchanged: the fierce defense of individual liberties and an unshakeable commitment to democratic ideals. In Russia, by contrast, Putin has decimated the opposition, imprisoned critics and taken control of all branches of government. The free press is a faint shadow of its former self, and Putin's critics, including journalists, continue to turn up dead under suspicious circumstances. One of Putin's most vocal critics, Vladimir Kara-Murza, remains in a Moscow hospital in "grave condition" after suffering a "full organ failure" that, as his lawyer told CNN, doctors agree is the result of a "toxic substance."

Despite Trump's comments and recent executive actions, Trump should expect push-back from a country committed to liberal democratic principles. This division between the President and the American people makes the United States the latest battleground in a worldwide clash of ideologies.

When the wave of populist authoritarianism started, few would have expected the United States, the principal beacon of modern democracy for over 200 years, to fall under the spell of nativist politics. But fall it did.

The many Americans who remain skeptical of Trump and now find themselves protesting on a weekly basis can take comfort in knowing they are not alone.

On Sunday, while the American public was rapt in the Super Bowl, an astonishing sight came into focus in Romania. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest a government push to decriminalize corruption. The remarkable part was that protesters had already won.

Romanians knew they had to fight for democracy because of their recent communist past and the onslaught in neighboring countries against liberal democracy, which requires separation of powers, a free judiciary, free and fair elections and, yes, freedom to protest.

Sadly, now, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and the surge of refugee arrivals, demagogic politicians have leveraged popular discontent, lashing out against foreigners, vowing to put their country's "true" residents first, and gradually dismantling the foundations of liberal democracy.

It's true that protests have not achieved much against other authoritarian regimes. In Venezuela, the Chavista regime came to power in 1999, and despite every effort from a determined opposition, it remains in power. In Turkey, mass demonstrations, and even what seemed like electoral victories, have failed to stop Recep Tayyip Erdogan's march to de facto dictator. In Russia, Putin is all but unchallenged, with a quiescent legislature and near-complete control of the news Russians consume.

America has deeper democratic roots than any of the countries whose liberal democracies has been toppled. The national religion is freedom from tyranny.

History is being written by two opposing forces -- those fighting for and those fighting against liberal democracy. President Trump's likening of America to Putin's Russia puts him on the illiberal side. But the American people have spent hundreds of years building a strong democratic system, and they are prepared to fight to defend it.

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Trump vs. America: The fight for democracy - CNN

While onstage at the 10th annual Crunchies Awards last night, Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson talked a bit about a new initiative to connect people with their government representatives. The program, called Twilio Voices for Democracy is part of the companys Twilio.org program dedicated to helping nonprofitsmake a difference through utilizing their tech.

The programdonates ordiscounts Twilio products and helpsnonprofits make use of the techto engage their audience, expand their reach and focus on making a real change in the world, according to the initiatives site.

Twilio.org has worked on partnershipswith the Red Cross to streamline emergency response dispatches, alongside other efforts related to stopping human trafficking and improving experiences at childrens hospitals.

Voices for Democracy is aiming to help developers bring people deeper into the democratic process.

We feel that in this politically charged climate, no matter what your opinions are, the most important thing you can do is to tell your representatives what you believe, and we want to help the developers of the world who are doing that, Lawson told TechCrunch.

The Voices for Democracy tool joins a host of other initiatives led by tech companies in Silicon Valley aiming to use tech to create a more meaningful sense of transparencyin politics.

Twilio is still finessing some of the details, but developers interested in applicable projects can text their email address to TWILIO to sign up for updates, Lawson says.

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Twilio debuts initiative to help developers build democracy tech - TechCrunch