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South Korea is in an uproar. Crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands have been surging through the streets of Seoul, the capital city. Some of the marchers are celebrating a ruling Friday by the Constitutional Court, which has upheld the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. Others who support the president have been angrily denouncing the court, leading to clashes with police that have resulted in the deaths of two protesters.

All of this turmoil is taking place against the backdrop of ominous gestures from North Korea, which fired off a salvo of four medium-range missiles in a test Monday. The distance traveled by the missiles would have enabled them to hit a U.S. military base in Japan a point explicitly mentioned by the North Koreans in a communique accompanying the launch.

What are we supposed to make of all of this? Is the Korean Peninsula descending into chaos?

Its important to keep two things separate here. First of all, the latest developments in South Korea follow revelations of corruption at the highest levels of political power. The allegations encompass not only the conservative President Park who is accused of using her close friend, Choi Soon-sil, to funnel bribes to businessmen but also the de facto head of Samsung, the vast business conglomerate that accounts for more than 10 percent of the countrys GDP. The companys vice chairman, Lee Jae-yong, was maneuvering to expand his power at the top of the Samsung hierarchy. His trial on corruption charges has just gotten underway.

Eight court justices voted unanimously to remove the president from office. Parks actions in office, said acting chief justice Lee Jung-mi, betrayed the trust of the people and were of the kind that cannot be tolerated for the sake of protecting the Constitution. Note: It was all about the people and the Constitution. The courts act of institutional defiance is especially remarkable when you consider that democracy in South Korea is a mere 30 years old

This is the first time in Korean history that a democratically elected head of state has been removed from office by nonviolent, legal means. But thats not all. The fact that Parks fate became intertwined with that of Lee, a scion of the immensely powerful clan that controls Samsung, has given her case even greater resonance. This is a major landmark in the young political history of the South Korean state, says Sung-Yoon Lee, a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Its significant because it really speaks to the deep problem of collusion between the government and big business. The scandal has fueled the outpouring of public anger by reminding the public that the people in the country who have money and power feel theyre above the law, says Lee. In this sense, this is a big blow against the old political culture. Its a victory for the rule of law.

Now the country faces fresh elections within the next 60 days. The current front-runner is the opposition leader Moon Jae-in, head of the Democratic Party. Among other policy proposals, he favors a return to the so-called sunshine policy, a program of rapprochement with North Korea that was favored by left-wing governments in the 1990s and early 2000s. Parks conservative administration, routinely vilified by North Korea, preferred sanctions to negotiations.

At the moment, North Korea doesnt appear to be particularly interested in compromise. The rhetoric coming from the regime of Kim Jong Un has been especially harsh lately, and this weeks missile launch (not to mention the bizarre assassination of Kim Jong Nam, the current rulers half-brother) doesnt exactly sound like an overture to reconciliation. Yet Sung-Yoon Lee, the Tufts scholar, notes that North Korea has little incentive to moderate its appalling behavior since thats the only way it can get regional powers to treat it like a player. (Plus, a revival of the sunshine policy would give the North a new lease on life by allowing it to squeeze financial and material benefits from the Southerners.)

For the time being, though, not even North Koreas military prowess or South Koreas current political instability can conceal the fundamental divide between the two. North Korea remains one of the worlds few examples of a fully totalitarian state, its leaders presiding over an impoverished and brutalized population. South Korea, which boasts one of the worlds most dynamic economies, continues to evolve and broaden its democratic institutions. Observers sometimes invoke the rivalry between the two states, but it isnt really much of a competition, and it hasnt been for years. Thats worth contemplating at a time when many around the world are bemoaning the authoritarian resurgence and the ills of democracy.

To be sure, South Korea still has many problems. But its people, buoyed up by an extraordinary wave of civic activism, are showing that they arent prepared to accept the established way of doing things. They have mounted a remarkable campaign for change, and today that campaign has borne fruit of the most dramatic sort. Their cousins to the north can only dream of similar acts of defiance which is why their country remains frozen in time, beholden to a leader whose only plan for the future is tied to the machinery of violence.

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South Korea shows the world how democracy is done - Washington Post

Unless we act fast, the world may have already reached peak democracy.

After World War II, there were only a few lonely democracies scattered across the West. This began to change dramatically in the 1980s, when most of Latin America joined that exclusive club. But most crucially, in the 1990s, the fall of the Soviet Union unleashed a rapid and broad expansion of democracy across the world. From Eastern Europe to sub-Saharan Africa, civil liberties rose as dictatorships fell.

That rosy trend has reversed. In each year since 2006, the world has become less democratic. We have now suffered more than a full decade of declines for global democracy.

At the same time, despots across the globe are becoming more authoritarian. Their abuses are becoming more brutal; their violations of democracy more egregious. From Turkey to Russia to Iran, ruthless regimes are steadfastly suffocating the dying gasps of pro-democracy reform movements in their societies. Indeed, in the last 11 years, 109 countries have seen a net decline in their level of democracy, according to the independent watchdog organization Freedom House.

The Westthat hodgepodge of developed countries that embody liberal values, from Canada to the European Union to Japanis partly to blame for the global recession of democracy. Misguided Western foreign policy, like backing friendly dictators, turning a blind eye to abuses of democracy, or actively toppling democratic regimes, hurt democracy in the long run. More recently, counterproductive foreign policy decisions have corresponded with the rise of illiberal populism.

Unfortunately, in the short term, the state of global democracy is going to get worse. US president Donald Trump certainly did not start the trend of democracys retreat, but his America First foreign policy guarantees its continuedand likely acceleratedglobal decline.

To understand why we find ourselves in this perilous tipping point, we need to look at our foreign policy choices over the past several decades.

The United States and its Western allies have, at best, a checkered relationship with promoting democracy around the globe. During the Cold War, American foreign policy was far more concerned with finding friendly pro-West, anti-Soviet regimes than it was with finding democratic ones. Indeed, in de-classified memos, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger argued that the biggest threat to American interests was the insidious model of a legitimately elected democratic regime that supported the Kremlin instead of the US. As a result, from Iran to the Congo to Chile, the American government has actively intervened (often with the help of European allies) to overthrow democratically elected regimes at various points in history.

That calculation shifted when the Cold War ended. The Berlin Wall crumbled, and despotic regimes collapsed. Western foreign policy began to earnestly support democracy in a much stronger way. It was still imperfect, of course. But there was genuine, sustained diplomatic pressure exerted in an attempt to liberalize authoritarian states. The results were clear: The 1990s were so auspicious for the spread of democracy that Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama even claimed that the world was approaching The End of History, with democracy as the natural and inevitable endpoint of global development.

But we now live in a darker period for democracy. Certainly, the true culprits for democracys decline are dictators and despots, along with counterfeit democratsthose authoritarian wolves like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines or Viktor Orban in Hungary who cloak themselves in the faade of democratic sheepskins to gain political legitimacy.

They deserve the overwhelming blame. They have organized and executed a heist against democracy, from Turkey to Thailand and Azerbaijan to Afghanistan. But when you look closely, its clear that the West has often been driving their getaway car.

First, theres what I call the Saudi Arabia effect. The Westwith America at the helmhas, for decades, cozied up to awful, abusive authoritarian regimes out of geopolitical expediency. The United States knows that it is being two-faced, praising democracy publicly while inking arms deals with emirs and despots under the table. But the West proceeds nonetheless because it perceives some despotic regimes as key strategic allies. The same hard-nosed realpolitik calculation is made with many countries across the world, even though that type of global diplomacy inhibits democracy and empowers authoritarian regimes.

Second, increasingly since the 1990s, Western governments set laughably low standards for what constitutes democracy. This serves as a counterproductive incentive for cynical leaders to do only the bare minimumto simply appear democratic. This allows Western governments to accept deeply flawed counterfeit democracies so that they can work with them in seemingly good conscience. I call this the curse of low expectations.

In Madagascar, a few years ago, I met with the head of a political party who told me:

Unlike the other parties, we are a party of values.

Okay, I responded, which values?

A look of panic crossed his face.

I left the values in the car. Someone go get the values for the American.

This was a carefully choreographed charade gone wrong. He was trying desperately to play the part of an ostensibly committed democrat. He was expecting me to play the part of the Westerner waiting eagerly to see just enough glimmers of democracy. The problem, though, is that the more than 100 regimes around the world trapped between pure dictatorship and genuine democracy have no meaningful political competition, and no meaningful input from the people.

Nonetheless, the West often calls elections free and fair when they are not (which I saw firsthand in Madagascar) and often labels countries as democracies when they are not. In Azerbaijans 2013 election, US Congressional representatives even praised an election where the results were accidentally released on an iPhone app before voting took place.

Counterfeit democrats get foreign aid and political legitimacy that should only be conferred to genuine democrats. Yet that low bar for what counts as democracy, paradoxically, ensures that leaders in the developing world have absolutely no incentive to ever build a real democratic government.

The last issue is the botched Western military interventions that purported to be in support of democracyparticularly in Iraq, Afghanistan, and, most recently, Libya. These misguided efforts have given despots a gift of plausibility when they crack down on pro-democracy activists, foreign NGOs, and human rights organizations. Because America and its closest allies claimed to be invading those countries in the name of democracy, despots use those examples as a pretext to purge pro-democracy reformers.

Despots often falsely claim that any pro-democracy agenda is a Trojan horse, a ploy to craftily achieve the Wests true goal: regime change by force. Paradoxically, then, misguided and failed interventions in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya have given anti-democratic forces key rhetorical ammunition to justify their authoritarian rule. And in the West, the risks of pushing hard for democracy has also reinforced the emerging consensus in Brussels, Washington, London, and Paris that the dictatorial devil we know is better than the democratic devil we dont.

Those three aspects of Western foreign policy coincided catastrophically with the rise of illiberal populism across the globe and a crisis of confidence in the concept of democracy in the West. This was the perfect storm necessary to halt democracys advance and transform it into a retreat back toward authoritarianism.

President Trump is already accelerating this retreat. Several authoritarian regimesincluding Chinaare already using his 2016 election as anti-democratic propaganda, arguing that Trump is clear evidence of the bad decision-making ushered in by democratic government.

More substantively, Trumps early foreign policy decisions (and especially his America First rhetoric) has sent a clear signal that the United States will be shifting its focus away from global human rights to focus exclusively on its narrow conception of self-interest. Indeed, his budget proposal would gut the State Department budget, axe pro-democracy foreign aid, and make it far more difficult for the United States to promote democracy generally. Thats not the right approach, even though there is room to improve the strategies that the United States uses to boost democracy across the globe.

Beyond the budget, US secretary of state Rex Tillerson bucked longstanding tradition and did not unveil the State Departments annual human rights report personally, thereby signaling the United Statess diminishing focus on human rights.

Such signals matter. The United States and its Western allies used to be an important referee on the global stage, blowing the whistle on the most egregious abuses of democracy and human rights. Certainly, America has been a biased refereeturning a blind eye to countries like Saudi Arabia and only lightly penalizing others that deserved harsher treatment. But its important that the referee exists. After just a month, Trumps rhetoric suggests that hes not even going to watch the game.

Follow Brian on Twitter at @brianklaas. Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

Read next: Harvard research suggests that an entire global generation has lost faith in democracy

Read next: The US has been downgraded to a flawed democracy, but not just because of Trump

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Democracy is dying around the worldand the West has only itself to blame - Quartz

Donald Trumps presidency is just one element of our disintegrating democracy.

A voter pulls back the curtain as she leaves a voting booth on November 8, 2016. (Kristopher Radder / The Brattleboro Reformer via AP)

Today, less than two months into a new administration, we are now facing the biggest crisis of legitimacy of our democracy in a generation or more. But the crisis has been building for years.

Normally, our democracy is considered the most legitimate form of government because the power rests with the people. But when this power dynamic is altered and citizens lose their influence, the legitimacy of the system is threatened. And thats what we now face: a system in which money speaks louder than voters, voting is increasingly difficult, and the votes that are cast may not matter because of an archaic system known as the electoral college. As a result, we, as citizens, are governed by representatives who do not reflect or respect the values and priorities of the majority, and our democratic legitimacy is in grave danger as a consequence.

To understand the roots of our current crisis, we must first look to the orchestrated attack on the pillars of our democracy that began seven years ago, starting with the lawless Citizens United decision. In the years that followed, the attack continued with the recent wave of racially targeted voter-suppression laws, last years hijacking of the Supreme Court by the GOP, and capped off by a president who lost the popular margin by nearly 3 million votes. Yet we cannot treat these issues as one-off concerns. Instead, we must respond as a citizenry, as a movement, to the broader threat, taking action from the local level on up, and refusing anything less than the restoration of the power of the peopleand our democratic legitimacy.

First, our democracy is built on the pillar that elections are determined by the votersnot by money. The Supreme Courts 2010 ruling in Citizens United has turned political campaigns into proxy wars between billionaires and giant, multinational corporations who dont seek to buy just election results but the legislative and policy decisions of the government itself. The result has been a Gilded Age on steroids, with more than $6.8 billion spent on the 2016 election alone. In my recent race for the US Senate, I saw personally how much influence these dark money groups now enjoy, and how normalized their influence over down ballot elections has become. In fact, the press now treats the strategy and plans of these groups as near-definitive indicators of whether a candidate can win. In the eyes of pundits, support from a billionaire now means a candidate on the rise. Only seven years after Citizens United, activity from the groups it created is assigned as much predictive power as any credible poll. This era of massive institutional corruption must end, and the only way to do so it by returning elections to the voters with a system of elections that puts power back in the hands of individual voters.

Second, the fundamental right to vote must not, once again, be restricted for cynical, political purposes. Voter-ID requirements may be the latest tactic, but weve seen this evil before, in the form of the literacy tests and poll taxes of Jim Crow, which unconstitutionally suppressed the voting rights of African Americans. In todays version, Republicans, despite no evidence, have invented charges of voter fraud in a deliberate attempt to justify voter-suppression laws that disproportionately, and intentionally, suppress minority and low-income voting. We must fight back, both by using litigation to overturn these laws, and by working directly with the communities these laws disenfranchise. We cannot allow a new generation of black voters to face exclusion from our most sacred right.

Third, protecting the vote means protecting the power of the popular vote. Two of the last three presidents have been elected by the electoral college in defiance of the national popular vote. The electoral college is a historical relic designed to balance power between slave-owning and non-slave-owning states. Our democracy has come a long way since then, and yet we have stuck with this electoral relic. It is time to leave it to the history books and ensure that the popular vote decides national elections. The best solution is a constitutional amendment that removes the electoral college. But states also have the power to at least nullify the electoral college by joining the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact; 11 states have already done so and more should join.

The stakes are higher now than ever. Get The Nation in your inbox.

Finally, the legitimacy crisis facing our system of government has also extended to the Judicial Branch, when, last year, GOP senators decided to abandon their constitutional responsibilities by blocking Justice Merrick Garlands nomination. They offered no legal justification for their actions, fully admitting that their sole intention was to sacrifice the legitimacy of the Supreme Court on a bet that a Republican would win the White House and they could secure their own nominee. I have never seen a type of politics more cynical than this strategy, crafted by keader Mitch McConnell. The severity of this action and what it means for the country cannot be overstated, because the legitimacy of the court will be questioned for a generation. The difference between Garland and Gorsuch could be the difference between overturning or cementing voter suppression laws, with future elections in the balance.

Dark money and voter suppression would be severe problems even in isolation, but combined they are devastating threat to the standing of voters in our democracy. This is the crisis of our lifetimes, and must be met with a call to actionto restore our democratic legitimacy. As citizens, as voters, we have work to do. And it starts at the local level. Ensuring we have a democratic governor in Virginia to prevent hyper-partisan gerrymandering. Increasing the number of states that enact the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Overturning Citizens United. We may not have another national election for four years, but there are nationally-relevant laws being debated and issues being addressed right now. What happens in four years depends on what we do today. And nothing less than the legitimacy of our democracy is at stake.

View original post here:
The Very Legitimacy of Our Democracy Is Under Threat - The Nation.

By Brian Klaas By Brian Klaas March 10 at 8:10 AM

Former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. on March 5 denied that President Trump's 2016 campaign was wiretapped while senators of both parties weighed in on the allegations. (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)

Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) is a fellow in comparative politics at the London School of Economics and author of The Despots Accomplice: How the West is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy.

Today, March 10, is President Trumps 50th day in office. Since his inauguration on Jan. 20, Trump has governed in a way that poses a unique threat to the integrity of American democracy.

Democracy is bigger than partisanship. Therefore, this is not a critique of Trumps policy proposals. Rather, its a sober assessment of American democracy at a pivotal moment and a call for Americans of all political stripes to press all politicians to agree, at minimum, on preserving the bedrock principles that make the United States a democracy.

The call is urgent. In just 50 days, Trumps presidency has already threatened American democracy in six fundamental ways:

1. Trump has attacked the integrity of voting, the foundation of all democratic systems. Without any evidence, Trump has repeatedly claimed that millions of people voted illegally in 2016. This claim is not true. Every serious study that has assessed voter fraud, including studies conducted by Republican presidents, has concluded that the scale of the problem is negligible.

Nonetheless, on his sixth day in office, Trump called for a major investigation into voter fraud now largely forgotten by many Americans. Unfortunately, his assertion has not been forgotten by a large swath of Trumps base. Tens of millions likely now believe Trumps claim which will certainly prove an important alternative fact when, in the future, attempts are inevitably made to make it harder for certain Americans to vote.

2. After attacking the integrity of his own election, Trump has also undermined the credibility of his own office. Democracy will not function if Americans cannot be sure that the presidents claims are at least grounded in evidence-based reality. And yet, in just 50 days, Trump has made at least 194 false or misleading claims an average of about four daily. (March 1 was the only day without one, so far.)

Recently, Trumps early morning tweet-storm alleging that former president Barack Obama personally ordered a wiretap of Trump Tower has not been backed up by a shred of evidence. Key Republican senators and representatives have expressed their bafflement at the accusation. Yet there have been no consequences for the president baselessly accusing his predecessor of criminal action. Rep.Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) went so far as to chide reporters for asking questions about the wiretap claim, saying, I think a lot of the things he says, I think you guys sometimes take literally. How can democracy function when people cant take the president literally?

3.Trumps administration has repeatedly flouted ethics guidelines without consequence. When Trump failed to discipline Kellyanne Conway for brazenly giving a commercial for Ivanka Trumps jewelry and clothing line, the Office of Government Ethics had to send an extraordinary letterreminding Trump that ethics rules apply to the executive branch. Trump has also failed to meaningfully separate himself from his business interests. Most recently, Trump received 38 lucrative trademarksfrom China, not just a likely violation of the Constitutions emoluments clause but also a benefit that will call into question whether Trumps foreign policy will pursue what is best for the American people or what is best for his profits. That conflict of interest is precisely why democracies set ethics guidelines and why it threatens democracy to violate them.

4. Trump has attacked the independent judiciary. When U.S. DistrictJudge James Robart defied Trumps travel ban, Trump called him a so-called judge and insinuated that he would lay blame for a terrorist attack squarely at the feet of the judiciary. Presidents routinely object to individual court decisions, but it threatens democracy to go one step further and demonize any judge that dares cross the president. After all, the judiciary is charged with upholding the law and the Constitution not blindly affirming the presidents worldview.

5. Crucially, Trump has accelerated a long-term trend, prodding tens of millions of Americans to further lose faith in basic institutions of American government. Any experts in federal agencies are now the deep state. Trumps team has begun suggesting that the nonpartisan, independent Congressional Budget Office a trusted authority for Democrats and Republicans since 1974 is simply a group of hacks. There is virtually no authority trusted by both Democrats and Republicans anymore. Instead, the opposing sides are all too inclined to view government as captured by evil partisans rather than disagreeing patriots. Rep.Steve King (R-Iowa) made this view explicit, recently calling for a purge of leftists from government in an astonishingly totalitarian tweet. Public trust is part of the lifeblood of democracy, and it is draining faster than ever.

6. Finally, Trump has attacked a cornerstone of every democracy: the free press. He has called legitimate media organizations fake news no fewer than 22 times on Twitter in the first 50 days and many more times in speeches. Worse, Trump called the press the enemy of the American People, language that echoes Mao and Stalin rather than Ronald Reagan or John F. Kennedy.

Trump only views the press as a legitimate player in American democracy insofar as it is willing to affirm his narrative. To Trump, negative polls are fake. Unfortunately, his attacks are working. A recent Quinnipiac poll showed that 81 percent of Republicans agree that the media is the enemy of the American people. Eighty-six percent of Republicans trust Trump to tell the truth rather than the media (up from 78 percent just two weeks earlier). Throughout history, the blurring of the line between fact and fiction has been a critical precursor to the breakdown of democracy and the creeping advance of authoritarianism.

Whether these six attacks are a deliberate long-term strategy to erode American democracy, or simply a political ploy to poison the electorates view against any anyone that is willing to defy the president, remains to be seen. Certainly, Trump is not fully to blame; he is capitalizing on long-term divisions and a long-term erosion of American institutions. But he has accelerated those trends.

The Constitution and checks and balances are not magical guardians. Documents dont save democracy people do. American democratic institutions are only as strong as those who fight for them in times of duress. This is one of those times, and this is just the beginning. It will be a long fight. To win it, Democrats and Republicans must set aside policy divides and unite in the defense of democracy.

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How President Trump has already hurt American democracy in just 50 days - Washington Post

Middlebury College students turn their backs to Charles Murray during his lecture on March 2, 2017. Photo: Lisa Rathke/AP

Heres the latest in the assault on liberal democracy. It happened more than a week ago, but I cannot get it out of my consciousness. A group of conservative students at Middlebury College in Vermont invited the highly controversial author Charles Murray to speak on campus about his latest book, Coming Apart. His talk was shut down by organized chanting in its original venue, and disrupted when it was shifted to a nearby room and livestreamed. When Murray and his faculty interlocutor, Allison Stanger, then left to go to their car, they were surrounded by a mob, which tried to stop them leaving the campus. Someone in the melee grabbed Stanger by the hair and twisted her neck so badly she had to go to the emergency room (she is still suffering from a concussion). After they escaped, their dinner at a local restaurant was crashed by the same mob, and they had to go out of town to eat.

None of this is very surprising, given the current atmosphere on most American campuses. And protests against Murray are completely legitimate. The book he co-authored with Harvard professor Richard Herrnstein more than 20 years ago, The Bell Curve, included a chapter on empirical data showing variations in the largely overlapping bell curves of IQ scores between racial groups. Their provocation was to assign these differences to both the environment and genetics. The genetic aspect could be and was exploited by racists and bigots.

I dont think that chapter was necessary for the books arguments, but I do believe in the right of good-faith scholars to publish data as well as the right of others to object, critique, and debunk. If the protesters at Middlebury had protested and disrupted the event for a period of time, and then let it continue, Id be highly sympathetic, even though race and IQ were not the subject of Murrays talk. If theyd challenged the data or the arguments of the book, Id be delighted. But this, alas, is not what they did. (I should add up-front that I am friends with both Murray and Stanger having edited a symposium on The Bell Curve in The New Republic over two decades ago, and having known Allison since we were both grad students in government at Harvard.)

But what grabbed me was the deeply disturbing 40-minute video of the event, posted on YouTube. It brings the incident to life in a way words cannot. At around the 19-minute mark, the students explained why they shut down the talk, and it helped clarify for me what exactly the meaning of intersectionality is.

Intersectionality is the latest academic craze sweeping the American academy. On the surface, its a recent neo-Marxist theory that argues that social oppression does not simply apply to single categories of identity such as race, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. but to all of them in an interlocking system of hierarchy and power. At least, thats my best attempt to define it briefly. But watching that video helps show how an otherwise challenging social theory can often operate in practice.

It is operating, in Orwells words, as a smelly little orthodoxy, and it manifests itself, it seems to me, almost as a religion. It posits a classic orthodoxy through which all of human experience is explained and through which all speech must be filtered. Its version of original sin is the power of some identity groups over others. To overcome this sin, you need first to confess, i.e., check your privilege, and subsequently live your life and order your thoughts in a way that keeps this sin at bay. The sin goes so deep into your psyche, especially if you are white or male or straight, that a profound conversion is required.

Like the Puritanism once familiar in New England, intersectionality controls language and the very terms of discourse. It enforces manners. It has an idea of virtue and is obsessed with upholding it. The saints are the most oppressed who nonetheless resist. The sinners are categorized in various ascending categories of demographic damnation, like something out of Dante. The only thing this religion lacks, of course, is salvation. Life is simply an interlocking drama of oppression and power and resistance, ending only in death. Its Marx without the final total liberation.

It operates as a religion in one other critical dimension: If you happen to see the world in a different way, if youre a liberal or libertarian or even, gasp, a conservative, if you believe that a university is a place where any idea, however loathsome, can be debated and refuted, you are not just wrong, you are immoral. If you think that arguments and ideas can have a life independent of white supremacy, you are complicit in evil. And you are not just complicit, your heresy is a direct threat to others, and therefore needs to be extinguished. You cant reason with heresy. You have to ban it. It will contaminate others souls, and wound them irreparably.

And what I saw on the video struck me most as a form of religious ritual a secular exorcism, if you will that reaches a frenzied, disturbing catharsis. When Murray starts to speak, the students stand and ritually turn their backs on him in silence. The heretic must not be looked at, let alone engaged. Then they recite a common liturgy in unison from sheets of paper. Heres how they begin: This is not respectful discourse, or a debate about free speech. These are not ideas that can be fairly debated, it is not representative of the other side to give a platform to such dangerous ideologies. There is not a potential for an equal exchange of ideas. They never specify which of Murrays ideas they are referring to. Nor do they explain why a lecture on a recent book about social inequality cannot be a respectful discourse. The speaker is open to questions and there is a faculty member onstage to engage him afterward. She came prepared with tough questions forwarded from specialists in the field. And yet: We cannot engage fully with Charles Murray, while he is known for readily quoting himself. Because of that, we see this talk as hate speech. They know this before a single word of the speech has been spoken.

Then this: Science has always been used to legitimize racism, sexism, classism, transphobia, ableism, and homophobia, all veiled as rational and fact, and supported by the government and state. In this world today, there is little that is true fact. This, it seems to me, gets to the heart of the question not that the students shut down a speech, but why they did. I do not doubt their good intentions. But, in a strange echo of the Trumpian right, they are insisting on the superiority of their orthodoxy to facts. They are hostile, like all fundamentalists, to science, because it might counter doctrine. And they shut down the event because intersectionality rejects the entire idea of free debate, science, or truth independent of white male power. At the end of this part of the ceremony, an individual therefore shouts: Who is the enemy? And the congregation responds: White supremacy!

They then expel the heretic in a unified chant: Hey hey, ho ho! Charles Murray has got to go. Then: Racist, Sexist, Anti-gay. Charles Murray, Go away! Murrays old work on IQ demonstrates no meaningful difference between men and women, and Murray has long supported marriage equality. He passionately opposes eugenics. Hes a libertarian. But none of that matters. Intersectionality, remember? If youre deemed a sinner on one count, you are a sinner on them all. If you think that race may be both a social construction and related to genetics, your claim to science is just another form of oppression. It is indeed hate speech. At a later moment, the students start clapping in unison, and you can feel the hysteria rising, as the chants grow louder. Your message is hatred. We will not tolerate it! The final climactic chant is Shut it down! Shut it down! It feels like something out of The Crucible. Most of the students have never read a word of Murrays and many professors who supported the shutdown admitted as much. But the intersectional zeal is so great he must be banished even to the point of physical violence.

This matters, it seems to me, because reason and empirical debate are essential to the functioning of a liberal democracy. We need a common discourse to deliberate. We need facts independent of anyones ideology or political side, if we are to survive as a free and democratic society. Trump has surely shown us this. And if a university cannot allow these facts and arguments to be freely engaged, then nowhere is safe. Universities are the sanctuary cities of reason. If reason must be subordinate to ideology even there, our experiment in self-government is over.

Liberal democracy is suffering from a concussion as surely as Allison is.

Meanwhile, of course, President Trump continues his assault on the very same independent truth in this case, significantly more frightening given his position as the most powerful individual on the planet. He too has a contempt for any facts that do not fit his own ideology or self-image. Thats why the lies he repeats are not just moments of self-interested dishonesty. They are designed to erode the very notion of an empirical reality, independent of his own ideology and power. They are an attack on reason itself. A fact-driven media has to be discredited as fake news if it challenges Trumps agenda. Equally, a bureaucracy designed impartially to implement legislation has to be delegitimized, if its fact-based neutrality challenges Trumps worldview. And so the administrative state, in Steve Bannons words, has to be deconstructed.

Likewise, a health-care bill must be passed through committee before an independent CBO can empirically score it. The overwhelming conclusion of climate scientists that carbon is warming the Earth irreversibly is simply denied by the new head of the EPA. The judiciary can have no legitimate, independent stance if it too counters the presidents interests. A judge who opposes Trump is a so-called judge. Equally, intelligence-gathering can have no validity if it undermines Trumps interests. It suddenly becomes intelligence. It can be ignored. Worse, the intelligence agencies are maligned as inherently political, rather than empirical. Last week, Trump went even further, claiming, with no evidence, that the Justice Department colluded in a criminal wiretap with the previous president to target Trumps candidacy in the last election. Maybe this was designed merely as a distraction from the accumulating lies of his campaign surrogates about their contacts with Russian officials. Maybe it was another temper tantrum from a man with no ability to constrain his emotions by reason. But I tend to think Peter Beinarts take is closer to the mark. Trump was delegitimizing the Justice Department so that he can reject the conclusion of any investigation of his campaigns ties to Russia as politically rigged:

They are all corrupt. They are all agents of the opposition, part of the massive conspiracy to deny Trump his rightful triumph. And thus, the independent standards by which they judge his actions are a sham. There are no independent standards. There is only the truth that comes from Trump himself.

This is the vortex we are being led into by the most reckless, feckless, and malevolent president in this countrys history. It is a vortex where reality itself must subordinate itself to one political side; where facts are always instruments of power and nothing else; where our entire Constitution, designed to balance power against power to give truth and reason a chance, is being deliberately corroded from within. Its been seven weeks. And the damage done to our way of life is already deep, and deepening.

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Thats the year it was meant to explode, because Obama wont be here, the president explained to the House GOP leadership.

Then-president-elect Donald Trump had asked the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York to stay on in November.

GOP Representative Justin Amash of Michigan tweeted an apology to his constituents.

Steve Bannons old site (correctly) notes that the House GOPs Obamacare replacement would hurt Trumps base and endanger his party in 2018.

And then force you to mitigate your genetic liabilities, or else accept higher premiums on your health insurance.

As GOP leaders try to whip the AHCA through the House unchanged, Trump is negotiating with conservatives in a way that could destroy Senate support.

Executive-branch employees are supposed to keep quiet on jobs numbers for an hour after their release.

Trump claims he didnt know that Flynn had lobbied for Turkey when he hired him. But his transition team was informed of that before Inauguration Day.

The action star is said to be keen on a Senate run so he can needle Trump, but hell first have to win back Californians.

Another report that hints at the the marginalization of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

A simple question explains the logic of the GOPs hatred for universal health insurance.

Which is to say, pretty much in line with what was happening under Obama.

Its pretty clear the economy was not Clintons problem.

Its the latest academic craze, and in practice it veers far from principles of liberal democracy.

Hes avoided questions from reporters, and wont take any members of the press on his trip to Asia.

Its still unclear what the barrier will look like, and even Republicans are questioning how it will be paid for.

Her ouster following a corruption scandal could have a major impact on how Asia and the U.S. handle North Korea.

Tom Cotton tells CNN that Paul Ryans bill would not solve the problems of our health-care system and would make things probably worse.

Originally posted here:
Liberal Democracy Is Suffering From a Concussion - New York Magazine