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From David, a reader in Oakland:

I hope its not too late to point out the perfect track for Inauguration Day. For so many reasons, it just has to be Leonard Cohens exhausted but hopeful Democracy, recorded 25 years ago [yesterday] and still inspiringand, let us hope, prophetic.

Cohen died just a day before Donald Trump was elected president, so well never know his reaction. But we can still glean wisdom and hope from his lyrics:

Its coming to America first, the cradle of the best and of the worst. Its here they got the range and the machinery for change and its here they got the spiritual thirst. Its here the familys broken and its here the lonely say that the heart has got to open in a fundamental way: Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Shelagh Huston absorbed more of the lyrics in the days following Trumps win:

After months of an election campaign that gave us the feel / that this aint exactly real / or its real, but it aint exactly there, and after years of a rising tide of the wars against disorder / the sirens night and day / the fires of the homeless / the ashes of the gay, Leonard Cohen prophesizes: Democracy is coming to the USA. Like so many of us, Cohen cared about the idea of America (I love the country) but was horrified and revolted by whats been happening to it (but I cant stand the scene). [...] At a time when the US is in more danger of foundering than ever before, Cohens words are the perfect anthem for these times: Sail on, sail on / oh mighty ship of State, were dreading this voyage, not knowing if well we make it to the shores of need / past the reefs of greed / through the squalls of hate.

(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)

Go here to read the rest:
Track of the Day: 'Democracy' by Leonard Cohen - The Atlantic

Its an inevitable feature of left-wing protests everywhere. As they debaseour political discourse with their absurd outrage theater and riots du jour you can count on some of them yelling out This is what democracy looks like!

And so it was hardly surprising that at the Trump inauguration, in which more than 200 violent leftist rioters were arrested, several blocks of Washington D.C. were damaged, and Trump supporters were physically attacked, we heard the chant going up againthis time by protestors who were attempting to block citizens from attending the inauguration to celebrate another successful transfer of power from one president to the next.

A Trump supporter attempting to run the blockade shot back a perfect rejoinder. Pointing to the other side of the fence he was attempting to get to while protesters blocked his way shouting: This is what Democracy looks like! he said:This is what democracy looks like, but I cant get to it because of you!

It was the perfect rejoinder, and the perfect antidote to the incessant anti-Trump whining of our elites and their violent shock-troops whose behavior they consistently excuse and justify, granting it a context they would never grant if mobs of conservatives behaved identically. (Fortunately we dont) The left lost, and they lost this election at every levelstate, national, and local. And no amount of organized violence or immature street theater changes that reality one bit. Whether with Trump in D.C. or with Scott Walker in Wisconsin, the lefts conspicuouspublic rage is a paper tiger.

To riff off of the great Tom Wolfe, the dark night of fascism is always descending on Trump supporters, but somehow it only lands on Trump opponents. Despite the hysterical Nazi/fascist analogies conjured up byour media, the story of political violence in this campaign has been one in which it has been overwhelmingly directed at Trump supporters rather than by them. It is a fact that our media and political elites stubbornly refuse to acknowledge, and similar to Black Lives Mattersaccount of the incidence ofinter-racial violence, the media account of partisan political violenceone of right-wing perpetrators and left-wing victims, is precisely the opposite of the truth. Its yet another example of the left-wings fake news.

Heres the reality: No matter how the left feels about it, the election and inauguration of Donald Trump is exactly what democracy looks like. Universally despised by the elites, he managed to win the support of enough Americans to win the election. Hes the President of the United Statesand the left needs to deal with it, just as conservatives managed to grumble through the Obama inauguration (but without major protests, much less rioting or violence as even the New York Times acknowledged)

But beyond that, there is a lesson that Trumps election should teach us. Anyone who was at the GOP convention saw his numerous tributes to law and order. And anyone who watched him during the campaign saw that one of Trumps greatest strengths, the main thing that drew otherwise skeptical conservatives to his camp, was his fearlessness in confronting leftist thuggery and refusing to play political games according to the lefts rules.

Its been written by well-meaning conservatives here and elsewhere that the biggest challenge for conservatives in this administration is to resist the seductions of power, to make sure we dont avoid challenging the President just because he has an R after his name. I firmly but respectfully disagree.

Of course, when the President does something that we feel breaks fundamentally with our values and principles; we shouldnt hesitate to say so. But for conservatives, especially conservatives in the Washington-New York axis or other liberal enclaves, the bigger challenge is to fearlessly defend the President and his agenda even when he is unpopular. When we find ourselves criticizing the administration, we need to ask ourselves whether we are really speaking truth to power or just courting respectabilitydefending a sort of ethereal philosophical conservatism that has no contact with political reality. Its easy to look like a good conservative and join the coalition of the housebroken.But Trump won because, for whatever his other faults, this was the one thing he absolutely refused to do. And nobody need worryunlike with Obama, there will be an furiously active media, academia and NGO community that will be drawing attention to every one of Trumps mistakes, real or imagined. Conservatives will be just one voice in that chorus.

This is what democracy looks like: Two parties honestly contesting for and advocating their values and principles; Not one party advocating its principles while the other cowers in the corner afraid that they might be called a mean name. The first one hundred days of this administration are going to present incredible opportunities for conservatives if we are bold enough to take them. And, like the anonymous Trump supporter, we need to call out the left without apology if they resort to lawlessattempts to block our way.

Read the rest here:
One Anonymous Trump Supporter Showed the Lawless Left What Democracy Looks Like - National Review

The values we hold have to be vividly alive in a time when we cannot count on government to protect them for us. Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA

We are in a situation that would have been unimaginable a year ago. We have inaugurated a president whose mental life is a thing of television ratings, beauty pageants and egoistical make-believe, who threatens and gloats and holds grudges and wants everyone to know it, whose impulses are alarming and alarmingly incoherent. He lacks the kind of knowledge of history and civic life and decent manners most adults have acquired by paying at least glancing attention.

It is not unreasonable to suppose that he learned his low opinion of the FBI from Law and Orders Detective Tutuola. Everyone was so sure he could not win that he no doubt attracted the kind of protest voter who would otherwise have written in Donald Duck.

The fact must be faced, of course, that a sizable minority of the electorate did vote for him, and a quirk of the system gave him the office. More fundamentally, there is an agenda of privatization of public assets and the weakening of the social safety net at work, only accidentally linked with Trump, that has divided and distorted American politics for years, and which Trump will advance simply by distracting attention from it. We must not allow ourselves to be distracted.

We have a chance to find out how real and deep American democracy is. We have to live out the ethos of free speech, press and assembly, of equal opportunity and equality before the law. The ethos that has been articulated in the best of American history has to be realized in what we say and do.

We have to be far more committed to social reform than we were when the government supported reform. For example, we know that incarceration as it has been practiced for decades is a vast offense against justice. We have to stop being passive in the face of what we know. If this is a living democracy, then there should be a public conscience able to trouble us deeply for injury done to those who might seem least like us, whom it has been convenient to forget.

For those of us who teach or write or study, truth is an issue, or ought to be. I am aware that scholarship is not only vulnerable to interpretive fads but actively receptive to them, and that in using the word truth I might seem naive. I am not naive.

I am aware that the notion that there is only interpretation has spread far and wide, and legitimized appeals to suspicion and resentment that feel no obligation to answer to reality. It is bizarre to confuse the profound difficulties that can arise in the attempt to determine truth for there being no truth. I encounter people who interpret the first amendment as meaning they have the right to believe what they prefer to believe, which therefore has full standing as truth. This is not a basis for rational discussion. We have to resist the great temptation to embrace our own preferences over what we might learn from a disciplined objectivity.

We have to stop accepting certain terms as descriptive rather than tendentious, populism first of all. In recent history this has been an anti-tax movement. Progressive taxation redistributes wealth, not primarily from rich to poor but from private to public.

Those who lament the sad state of their towns and counties elect politicians who run on the promise that they will starve them of resources. Urban areas, being liberal, tax and spend, as their critics say, and also prosper which inspires resentment rather than emulation.

This supposed populism actually accelerates the polarization of wealth, crucially by undermining public education and making public universities unaffordable. We have to have a conversation about all this, not by answering resentment with resentment, and not by accommodation with policies that are simply, demonstrably, bad.

We the living, in Lincolns phrase, we the generations that happen to be sharing this moment with Donald Trump, are suddenly and with no special qualifications called on to take a decisive role in American history, and world history. The values we hold have to be vividly alive in a time when we cannot count on government to protect them for us.

If we are faithful to these values, we will not be anyones enemy. We will not be another source of division. If we are loyal to justice and equality in our own lives and at our own cost, other generations will inherit through us an America to be loved and enjoyed, and, of course, to be criticized and reformed.

Read more from the original source:
With President Trump, American democracy faces its greatest test - The Guardian

Opinion | Column

cut the bull

When I was in grade school, I learned the difference between democracy and authoritative government. In a democracy, that shining city upon a hill, the people had a voice in politics. They chose their leaders in free and fair elections, and their concerns were addressed by caring politicians. In an authoritative regime, those in power were manipulative and tyrannical, stopping at nothing to preserve their seats.

I was taught that authoritative regimes existed exclusively in the developing world and in the past. Places like Iran and Venezuela lacked the true democracy that was unconditionally protected here in the United States. I learned nothing to suggest that my rights, let alone democracy itself, could be threatened right here in my home state.

Yet, it did not take long before I discovered otherwise. By 2010, a vast republican majority was elected just in time for the redrawing of the North Carolinian districts. Instead of chartering a nonpartisan map, the General Assembly chose to charter themselves into unconditional power. By populous, North Carolina is the most evenly split state in the nation; Republicans and Democrats are nearly perfectly matched. Yet, if we judged only by the heavy tide of reactionism stemming from the legislature, we might assume that the entire North Carolinian electorate was a strict Tea Party-er. The shapes of our precincts defy reason. They stretch to include a single house or a single street, snaking around the state to mathematically ensure a constant Republican majority within the General Assembly. No election is fair nor free if the people cannot change its outcome.

Today, the Republican Party has an absolute, veto-proof, overwhelming supermajority in both houses of the General Assembly. Whats more, the N.C. GOP has waged a war against perceived voter fraud. They have cracked down on everything from pre-registration to early voting hours to restrictive ID laws. Any barrier to the polls will fall unevenly on minorities, the poor, and young people; all groups who traditionally vote Democrat. On the day I got my full license in 2015, I pre-registered to vote at the local DMV. In the past, this had been the legal tactic of increasing registration among young people. I walked out, beaming with pride, thrilled at the idea that I would be voting in the next presidential election. Two days after I filled out my form, the legislature decided to do away with pre-registration. An envelope arrived in the mail for me, with a photocopy of my documents, stamped DENIED in red.

If voter manipulation werent enough, the N.C. legislature slashed education budgets across the state. Over the course of my high school career, I watched no less than 18 faculty members leave, all of them searching for higher pay. I knew teachers who worked three jobs and teachers whose children received free-and-reduced-lunch. In 2015, I protested funding cuts at the state legislature, holding a sign about teacher pay. A representative from the Republican Party asked me, Why does a teacher need a living wage when her husband is probably the breadwinner?

By 2014, our per-pupil spending was over $3,000 below the national average. Kids sitting in classrooms right now are being stiffed of the education they deserve. Kids like me have watched their classrooms deteriorate and morale from mentors dissipate. There is no feeling of discouragement stronger than watching hope leave a place of learning.

And yet, beyond dangerous social and fiscal policy, even beyond House Bill 2, North Carolina is faced with pressing illegality of the General Assemblys recent special sessions. The first of these special sessions occurred just days before Governor Roy Cooper officially took office. The bills in question had been in the work for weeks on the Republican side, but Democrats were called to session and given a mere few hours to review House Bill 17 and dozens of other power-stripping bills. Some have called the fourth special session of the McCrory government the North Carolinian Coup, because the ratified bills effectively stole and diverted the power of the incoming Democratic Governor. Under these laws, Coopers cabinet will be subject to approval by the legislature, Cooper will be allotted 425 agency positions to appoint in contrast with McCrorys 1,000 and Cooper will have no say in the appointees to the State Board of Elections. An additional session was called to repeal House Bill 2, the infamous Bathroom Bill. Democrats were promised a clean repeal of the embarrassing discriminatory bill, but instead Senate Pro Tempore Phil Berger proposed a conditional bill that included legislation such as a moratorium on any future locally proposed nondiscrimination ordinances. This partisan move ended in the ultimate failure to repeal House Bill 2, meaning that North Carolina continues to codify discrimination.

The next few years will be a whirlwind. It is difficult for me to optimistic, when even now, Republicans are blocking Governor Coopers attempts to expand Medicaid. This matters not just for those of us raised in this state, but it matters for every single Duke student. We are lucky to share Durham over the next four years as our home. We owe it and its people our steadfast dedication and support, not only because our institution has its roots in this state, but because our degrees are worth more when they come from a true democracy.

With unbounded tyranny and disregard for popular voice, the North Carolina General Assembly is tainting the reputation of its state and all of its institutions; including Duke. We learn about foreign policy and international comparative studies, always considering the best path to democracy abroad. Perhaps its time to consider the path to ensuring democracy right here in Durham.

Leah Abrams is a Trinity freshman. Her column, cut the bull runs on alternate Fridays.

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More here:
Living in illiberal democracy - Duke Chronicle

No sooner had the words preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States fallen from his lips, then Donald Trump laid into it the very system symbolised in the elegant buildings, time-honoured ceremonial and distinguished figures surrounding.

Ill give him full marks for chutzpah, at any rate. There, surrounded by all the former presidents, former vice-presidents, Supreme Court justices, senators, congressmen and congresswomen, first ladies, spies, military chiefs and Washington bureaucrats,Donald Trump decided to condemn them all as failed. Not only failed, but revelling in their failures celebrating their success in Washington while forgotten American workers and families suffered from sea to shining sea.

Politicians, Trump declared,had done nothing to prevent the ravages of foreign powers stealing Americans'jobs and hopes. They had only defended other nationsborders, and not those of their own homeland. He did not quite accuse President Carter, President Clinton, PresidentGW Bush and President Obama of high treason but he was not far off. They must have been cringingwith embarrassment atTrumps clumping around everything they stand for.

To all Americans, Trump declared, "You will never be forgotten again just as all those scoundrels who went before willfully had, he implied.

Protests mar Trump inauguration ceremony

Whatswrong with all that? It is that this brand of populism, infused with strident nationalism and an unthinking protectionism,undermines faith in democracy itself?

Yes, people have always regarded politicians as in it for themselves, their reputation not far above that of journalists and estate agents.The old joke ran that a politician would beg people not to tell his mother that hes a politician because she thinks he plays the piano in a brothel. Political corruption is nothing new, and the democratic process has also always succeeded in cleansing the system and renewing itself.

But this is different. It is rare to find a figure such as Trump going all out to not only take down individual figures, who may guilty of honest of dishonesty, but thewhole political classand, in fact, the whole political system. What else should people expect fromthe swamp but lies?

History provides ugly examples from the first half of the 20thcentury, when people lostfaith in politicians and then slid into losing faith with the democratic process itself. Trump said nothing to defend the democratic process that put him in power, that led him to the stage on which he delivered his inauguration speech. He spoke just as he did on the campaign trail as a demagogue, a would-be dictator, a man who wishes to replace democracy with populism and they are not the same things.

Starting with a thumbs-up and finishing with a fist in the air, this was an address that failed to reassure those of us who feared the worst but hoped for the best form the Trump administration.A cold day in Washington, yes, but this was chilling stuff in more ways than one.

Originally posted here:
Donald Trump undermined democracy as soon as he was sworn in as US President - The Independent