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Letter to the editor: Democracy dwindling as GOP rewards Trump - TribLIVE

By 21 years old, Frederick Douglass declared himself free, sailed to New Bedford, Massechuttsets, paid the $1.50 poll tax and voted for the first time. He voted again the following year, 1841. Douglass served in Abraham Lincolns cabinet and joined with women suffragettes demanding the right to vote.

Like so many born into slavery, Douglass did not know his birthday. He chose Feb. 14 as his birthday. Over 100 years after his birthday, the League of Women Voters became a national organization. The right to vote drove both.

The right to vote wasnt a right for all. From 1865 to 1868, Reconstruction allowed Black men to work, vote, run for office and enjoy the rights of white men. The white supremacy groups arose. Thousands were killed or intimated for trying to vote in spite of the 15th Amendment (1870), which nationalized Black mens right to vote. States used many creative, even violent methods to restrict access to the polls. Poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses shut Black men out. In 1868, Louisiana white Democrats killed over a 1,000 Black men and white Republicans. 1874, white people drove away a thousand Black Alabama men trying to vote. The white residents of Barbour County circulated rumors of an invasion, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama. They rioted, killing seven men, injuring 70, and were just one of many groups in multiple states who scared off Black voters.

Meanwhile in some states, a few women could vote. They had to pass mental competency, age and residency tests. The 19th Amendment, ratified in 1920, came with its own troubled existence. Sojourner Truth separated herself from the women suffragettes when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony denounced the right of Black men to vote before women had the right. When Southern Senator Ellison Smith resisted the 19th Amendment because it would give the other half of the Negro race the right to vote, suffragette Carrie Chapman Catt pointed out that white supremacy could be restored. She argued tragically that white women were under Black men at the moment, and the right to vote would make them equals.

When the 19th Amendment passed in 1920, the right to vote remained barred for many. Black women in Savannah, Georgia were turned away en masse that year because the state said they had to register a full six months before election. In 1924, many Native American should have been able to vote, having been recognized as citizens finally. Many states prevented their votes by labeling them wards of the state. Because of the Alien Exclusion Act of 1900, Asian-Americans could not naturalize. Finally in 1943, they were legally able to vote.

Until 1965, localities limited voting with every creative tactic they could muster. In 1961, Junius Edward published Liars Dont Qualify to show how good ol boys frustrated Black veterans. Four years later the Voting Rights Act outlawed sneaky tactics. They obstructed Black World War II veterans, such as Maceo Snipes and Medgar Evers. Snipes was lynched in Taylor County, Georgia, in 1946. Evers was murdered in his home in 1963.

From 1965 to the present, the ability to vote freely remains fickle. Its fragility returned in 2013 when Congress and the Supreme Court invalidated key portions. A process that began in Indiana in 2006 has begun to steamroll the ability to vote freely and fairly.

For this reason, the League of Women Voters, among others, supports the For the People Act (HR 1, S.1) which passed in 2019 in the House by a significant bipartisan margin. Its one of the most transformative laws to be on the docket this year.

The For the People Act reduces barriers to voting, controls gerrymandering and changes campaign financing. It allows for automatic voter registration when citizens obtain a drivers license, expands early voting, allows for voting by mail for any reason, improves paper balloting and other election security. It normalizes provisional ballot requirements across the nation. In other words, it improves registration and voting access for everyone. It requires independent commissions in all 50 states for redistricting. Currently only 13 states rely on such commissions exclusively for redistricting. 8 other states use them for help in the process. Finally, H.R. 1/S.1 multiples the power of small donors so that big money is not the loudest voice clamoring for political attention.

A great way to honor the birthdays of Douglass and the League is to let our Congress people know we want them to pass the For the People Act into law.

The League of Women Voters, a non-partisan, multi-issue organization encourages informed and active participation in government, works to increase public understanding of major policy issues and influences public policy through education and advocacy. All men and women are invited to join the LWV where hands-on work to safeguard democracy leads to civic improvement. For information, visit the website http://www.lwvmontcoin.org or the League of Women Voters of Montgomery County, IN Facebook page.

Continued here:
For the love of democracy - Journal Review

Jocelyn Benson, a Peters Township native and Michigans top elections official, was on the receiving end of plenty of vitriol in 2020, including from President Trump, who called her a rogue secretary of state on Twitter.

Trumps accusation that Michigan was sending out millions of absentee ballots was not true it was sending out applications for ballots but it was just one of many morsels of misinformation that swirled around in the months leading up the November election and after.

How did Benson deal with being the object of so much bile? While participating in Washington & Jefferson Colleges Symposium on Democracy Wednesday, Benson said she would look at a photo of herself and other secretaries of state on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., where John Lewis and other civil rights activists were beaten by police in 1965, and recognize that protecting our democracy has sometimes engendered violence.

I was on the receiving end of a lot of violent and hateful rhetoric throughout the year, Benson said. But, she added, They werent attacking me. They were attacking voters. They were attacking democracy.

The attempts to overturn the 2020 election, the rise of domestic terrorism tied to white supremacist groups, the movement to protect democratic freedoms in Hong Kong and human rights in the digital age were among the topics up for discussion in this years Symposium on Democracy, which has become a fixture on the W&J campus every February since 2018. Unlike past years, this time around it took place virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Along with Benson, other guests were Adrian Shahbaz, director of technology and democracy at Freedom House, the nonprofit that advocates for democracy around the world; Pat Benic, a United Press International photographer and W&J graduate who witnessed the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6; Kathleen Belew, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago and an authority on the modern white power movement; and Nathan Law, a Yale Univeristy graduate student and Hong Kong democracy activist.

In a recorded message at the beginning of the symposium, Gov. Tom Wolf said, Government by the people has never been easy, and the last year is a reminder of that.

Benson explained that, despite the sound and fury leading up to the election, and the tumult that followed it, the 2020 vote was the most secure in the nations history. In Michigan, voter participation topped the record set in 2008, when Barack Obama was first elected president, and this happened amid a once-in-a-century pandemic. In the elections aftermath, Benson has proposed making Election Day in Michigan a state holiday so more people have the opportunity to do volunteer work at polling places, guns be prohibited within 100 feet of polling places, and other reforms.

Freedom and security need not collide, Benson said.

Meanwhile, Belew outlined how the white power movement has changed over the last 40 years or so, and how the pandemic and social media have worked hand-in-hand over the last year.

Social media has been the primary mode of socialization for everyone, so we see that it has the power to radicalize that is bigger and more powerful than before, Belew said.

At the conclusion of the symposium, John C. Knapp, the president of W&J, said the issues discussed on Wednesday deserve our urgent attention as responsible members of a democratic society.

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W&J symposium explores issues affecting democracy here and abroad - Observer-Reporter

Dr. John E. Warren, Publisher, The San Diego Voice & Viewpoint Published: 18 February 2021

Dr. John E. Warren, Publisher, The San Diego Voice & ViewpointWhen we look at the diversity of the people who attacked the capitol on January 6, most of us are surprised to find that at least 57 of those assaulting the building were elected officials in their home states and cities. These are people who have lived, worked and participated in Democracy as we know it. These people and the thousands of others who join them, refuse to acknowledge an election run and won according to our own constitutional mandates. These people and the White Nationalist who believe that America only belongs to its White citizens, who live and have lived according to White Privilege ignoring the words of the Declaration of Independence which says:

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all menAre created equal, that they are endowed by theirCreator with certain unalienable rights, that amongThese are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.That to secure these rights governments are estab-Lished among men, deriving their just powers fromThe consent of the governed.

It appears that a growing number of Amercans believe that the words of this document only apply to them in terms of the idea of being equal. It appears that many of our White citizens who are the far right extremists who follow Donald Trump believe the inscription written on the barnyard door in the novel, Animal Farm. The fictitious account of animals taking over and running the farm carries an example of the pigs taking over and exercising more power and influence than the other animals. When questioned about this usurpation of power, the pigs wrote the following words on the barnyard door:

All animals are equal, but some animals are moreEqual than others.

Clearly the concept of Democracy has become too inclusive in America. The idea of equality now includes too many Black, Brown, Asian and other immigrant groups. Those rising to the levels of elected leadership come from these groups. Power is no longer all White in America, and White people who have a universal history of taking what they want from others rather than sharing, now feel that violence is necessary because government as they intended it is now serving those who were intended to serve them (whites).

Democracy was intended to acknowledge that all men are created equal and not that some are more equal than others.

African Americans need to pay particular attention to these issues because we are the ones being most affected at every turn by this War on Equality. This is a war that never let up, even after the passage of the 13, 14, and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. We must now come together, as others have done and are doing, if we are to survive. America no longer has the moral compass that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew. We have the knowledge and tools to win this battle. The only thing in our way is us.

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Democracy and White Privilege - The Skanner

Jack Balkin, a law professor at Yale, writes in an email:

Some of the most troubling features of social media come from business models based on surveillance and monetization of personal data. Social media will not improve as long as their current surveillance-based business models give them the wrong incentives.

Trump, in Balkins view, showed how to use social media for demagogic ends to harm democracy.

But, he added,

Trumps success built on decades of polarization strategies that relied on predigital media talk radio and cable. Without talk radio and Fox News, Trump would have been a far less effective demagogue.

Do social media drive polarization? Balkins answer:

The larger and more profound causes of polarization in the United States are not social media, which really become pervasive only around 2008 to 2010, but rather decades of deliberate attempts to polarize politics to gain political power. Once social media became pervasive in the last decade, however, they have amplified existing trends.

Robert Frank, professor emeritus of economics at Cornell, is a leading proponent of the argument that the current business model of Facebook and other social media is a significant contributor to political and social dysfunction.

Writing on these pages, Frank argued on Feb. 14 that the economic incentives of companies in digital markets differ so sharply from those of other businesses.

Digital aggregators like Facebook, he continued,

make money not by charging for access to content but by displaying it with finely targeted ads based on the specific types of things people have already chosen to view. If the conscious intent were to undermine social and political stability, this business model could hardly be a more effective weapon.

Frank notes that the algorithms digital companies use to

choose individual-specific content are crafted to maximize the time people spend on a platform. As the developers concede, Facebooks algorithms are addictive by design and exploit negative emotional triggers. Platform addiction drives earnings, and hate speech, lies and conspiracy theories reliably boost addiction.

The profit motive in digital media, Frank contends, drives policies that result in the spread of misinformation, hate speech and conspiracy theories.

Eric B. Schnurer, president of Public Works LLC, a policy consulting firm, is similarly critical of the digital business model, writing in an email:

The social media companies discovered that there were limited means for making money off social media, settling on an advertising-based model that required increasing and retaining eyeballs, which quickly led to the realization that the best way to do so is to exploit nonrational behavior and create strong reactions rather than reasoned discourse.

Digital firms, in Schnurers analysis,

have now metastasized into this model where their customers are their raw material, which they mine, at no expense, and sell to others for further exploitation; it is a wholly extractive and exploitive business model, whatever high-minded rhetoric the companies want to spread over it about creating sharing and community.

There were early warnings of the dangers posed by new digital technologies.

Shoshana Zuboff, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, pursued a line of inquiry as far back as 1981 with The Psychological and Organizational Implications of Computer Mediated Work that led to the broad conclusions she drew in her 2016 paper, Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization.

Big data is above all the foundational component in a deeply intentional and highly consequential new logic of accumulation that I call surveillance capitalism. This new form of information capitalism aims to predict and modify human behavior as a means to produce revenue and market control. Surveillance capitalism has gradually constituted itself during the last decade, embodying a new social relations and politics that have not yet been well delineated or theorized.

From a different vantage point, Christopher Bail, a professor of sociology at Duke and director of the universitys Polarization Lab, writes in his forthcoming book Breaking the Social Media Prism that a key constituency is made up of those who feel marginalized, lonely, or disempowered in their off-line lives.

Social media, Bail writes in his book,

offer such social outcasts another path. Even if the fame extremists generate has little significance beyond small groups of other outcasts, the research my colleagues and I conducted suggests that social media give extremists a sense of purpose, community, and most importantly self-worth.

The social media prism, Bail writes,

fuels status-seeking extremists, mutes moderates who think there is little to be gained by discussing politics on social media, and leaves most of us with profound misgivings about those on the other side, and even about the scope of polarization itself.

One of the striking findings of the research conducted at Bails Polarization Lab is that contrary to expectations, increased exposure to the views of your ideological opponents does not result in more open-mindedness.

Bail emailed me to point out that we surveyed 1,220 Republicans and Democrats and

offered half of them financial compensation to follow bots we created that exposed them to messages from opinion leaders from the opposing political party for one month. When we resurveyed them at the end of the study, neither Democrats nor Republicans became more moderate. To the contrary, Republicans became substantially more conservative and Democrats became slightly more liberal.

Bail also offered an analysis of this phenomenon:

The reason I think taking people out of their echo chambers made them more polarized not less is because it exposes them to extremists from the other side who threaten their sense of status.

In his book Bail put it this way, People do not carefully review new information about politics when they are exposed to opposing views on social media and adapt their views accordingly. Instead, he observes, they experience stepping outside their echo chamber as an attack upon their identity.

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Opinion | Democracy Is Weakening Right in Front of Us - The New York Times