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On Saturday, Jan. 21, I joined somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 people in downtown Los Angeles as the city made its own unique contribution to the women's marches galvanizing more than a million people across the US and around the world. In LA, as elsewhere, activists fighting for a wide range of causes from reproductive rights to Black Lives Matter, from climate change to workers' rights came together in a powerful display of unity. That is why, as organizers met after the march to maintain a unified momentum, I found it somewhat disconcerting to read Oregon Senator Jeff Markley's statement that, "Trump is the cure here; he brings everybody together." Yes, it is true that Trump's persona and actions have had a great deal to do with energizing and mobilizing the protests, and it is certain that he will continue to inspire resistance as he seeks to realize his agenda.

Yet in the long term, Trump can hardly sustain a movement as a "cure" or unifier. Something much deeper has to be involved, and that something is nothing less than the reclamation of our democracy and the democratic promise of the American experiment.

In saying this, I don't use the term democracy simply to refer to the formal institutions of representative government, nor to such practices as voting, nor even to the norms and unwritten rules that maintain the rule of law and the peaceful transition of power. Important as these elements are, they lack meaning without the presence of a living culture of democracy, a body of understandings and habits that bind us to one another in mutual responsibility and to a commitment to human equality and freedom. This is the vision of democracy powerfully expressed by political scientist Danielle Allen in her recent book, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. This is a vision affirming that we are all not only entitled to the "unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," but also to equality of access to government as the tool by which we secure those rights.

There is a direct line of inheritance from the Declaration's writers to the marchers who crowded the streets of American cities on January 21. The writers who generated the Declaration of Independence did not compile their grievances against King George III by brainstorming their complaints in closed session, but by placing advertisements in newspapers across the country. They relied on what Allen called the "collective intelligence" of ordinary citizens to build their argument for independence. As Allen said, "In developing their list of complaints against King George and in coming to understand their situation, the colonists became the free people capable of self-government that, with their declaration, they asserted themselves to be." In other words, they were developing the habits of freedom even before the nation became formally independent. They reinforced this process by drafting constitutions for the future states even before signing the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

By the same token, the marchers of Jan. 21, 2017 didn't wait for a midterm election to enact a vision of what democracy is and can be. Despite the oligarchic, authoritarian nature of the Trump candidacy and presidency, the marchers moved boldly to reclaim their democratic heritage by reinterpreting it in the light of contemporary circumstances. The marchers I know understood that today the phrase, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" incorporates the unalienable right to decent, affordable health care. They equally understood that this powerful phrase includes the unalienable right to a healthful environment and the right to counter powerful economic interests that elevate short-term profit above the well-being of all.

Moreover, the marchers I know understand that reclaiming democracy necessitates coming to terms with the tragic distortions and exclusions coiled within the DNA of the young American republic. They know that reclaiming democracy means coming to terms with the legacies of slavery, genocide, and racism, and that democracy must now mean full inclusion of all people within the American polity. That is why, ultimately, we don't need a Trump as a "cure" or unifier. Certainly, resistance will and must continue. But it is democracy itself that is the unifier. The issues represented in the marches Black Lives Matter, immigrants' rights, Standing Rock, reproductive rights, among others are all deeply connected by the sacredness and dignity of human life, and by the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for this generation and all generations to come.

At one point in the LA march, I looked up in the blue, cloudless sky and saw a lone airplane trailing a banner proclaiming, "Congratulations President Trump on Your Inaugural." A young woman standing next to me noticed my glance and said, looking up at the plane as well, "That looks like one of Trump's tweets. But there's just one of him, and there's all of us." Looking down Hill Street at some of the hundreds of thousands of people that day, and perhaps with King George III in the back of my mind, I knew she was right.

Andrew Moss

Emeritus professor

California State Polytechnic University

Pomona, California

Read more from the original source:
Reclaiming our democracy - Progress Index

The editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel on Sunday said a front cover illustration of U.S. President Donald Trump beheading the Statue of Liberty, which split opinion at home and abroad, was a response by the German magazine to threats against democracy.

Published on Saturday, the cover depicts a cartoon figure of Trump with a bloodied knife in one hand and the statue's head, dripping with blood, in the other. It carries the caption: "America First."

It followed a series of attacks on Berlin's policies by Trump and his aides that have marked a rapid deterioration in German relations with the United States.

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U. S. President Donald Trump is depicted beheading the Statue of Liberty in this illustration on the cover of the latest issue of German news magazine Der Spiegel. Reuters

"Der Spiegel does not want to provoke anybody," editor-in-chief Klaus Brinkbaeumer told Reuters TV after the cover set off a debate on Twitter and in German and international media, adding he was surprised by the impact of the illustration.

"We want to show what this is about, it's about democracy, it's about freedom, it's about freedom of the press, freedom of justice and all that is seriously endangered," he said.

"So we are defending democracy... Are these serious times? Yes they are."

Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, a member of Germany's Free Democrats (FDP) and vice president of the European Parliament, described the cover as "tasteless."

Die Welt said it "damages journalism,"while another German daily, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, said it was "exactly what Trump needsa distorted image of him, which he can use to work more on his distorted image of the press."

Karl-Georg Wellmann, a lawmaker for Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU conservatives, told mass-selling daily Bild: "I urge everyone to calm down and to handle this with reason, rather than gut feeling."

Merkel was the go-to European ally for former U.S. president Barack Obama, who praised her as "an outstanding partner."

But Trump has said she made a "catastrophic mistake" with her open-door migration policy, and his top trade adviser last week accused Germany of using a "grossly undervalued" euro to gain advantage over the United States and its European partners.

Read the rest here:
Der Spiegel: Trump Beheading Cover About 'Defending Democracy' - Newsweek

NEW DELHI: Congress leader in the Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge on Monday said the Congress should be thanked for protecting the democracy in the country because of which Narendra Modi, coming from a poor family, could become the Prime Minister of India.

Participating in the Motion of Thanks to the President for his Address, the Congress leader said the Congress protected democracy for 70 years, slamming the ruling party for saying repeatedly that the Congress did not do anything for years.

"I think you brought Green Revolution. And White Revolution in your Gujarat also came in your time... (Verghese) Kurien was also born in these times -- everything happened in the last two and half years," Kharge said sarcastically.

"We brought Green Revolution to feed the people, we brought White Revolution... You question what happened in 70 years, if nothing had been done, you would not have been alive, there would not have been democracy, the Constitution would not have been protected," he said.

Excerpt from:
Congress protected democracy, so Modi could become PM: Mallikarjun Kharge - Times of India

There has long been a debate about democracy as a form of governance and whether it is in decline Brexit and Trump have only exacerbated it. Drawing on research in four capital cities, Armine Ishkanian explains how activists view democracy. She explains why these committed and engaged citizens reject representative democracy, and the internal struggles of organisation within contemporary social movements.

Democracy would appear to constitute one of the great paradoxes of our age. In established democracies, the recurring eruption of protest movements from Occupy to Nuit Debout in France and the Democracy Spring movement in the US come with low voter turn-out, low approval rates of political institutions, and the rise of populist parties and politicians. This paradox has caused some to proclaim a crisis, the death of democracy. Others argue that we are experiencing interrelated crises of global capitalism and representative democracy. Despite these prognoses, democracy remains an enduring idea that continues to appeal to protesters in authoritarian settings, so much so that even after the apparent failure of the Arab uprisings in most countries, they continue to take great risks to achieve it from Hong Kong to Harare.

It has been six years since the squares movements emerged. While many scholars recognise that the movements which emerged in 2011 have changed political debates by drawing greater attention to issues of inequality, debt, social justice, and the shortcomings of representative democracy, it is also clear that they have fallen short of bringing about more fundamental changes in terms of policy and governance. The grievances that initially brought people to the squares and streets in protest, have not been resolved and in some instances they have been exacerbated (e.g. Cairo).

Moreover, drawing on the same sense of discontent with the status quo, populist parties have grown stronger. Six years on from the height of the Arab Spring, Occupy, and anti-austerity movements, the deeper commonalities we uncovered in the activist conceptions of democracy have lasting implications which social scientists studying democratization and democracy should take note.

In a recent article, which draws on research with activists in Athens, Cairo, London, and Moscow, Marlies Glasius and I ask two questions. First, what did democracy mean for the protesters in the squares, and were there shared understandings and conceptualisations of democracy? Second, how have activists understandings of democracy shaped their organisational processes? While much research on the state of democracy rests on surveys or analyses of voter turn-out and party membership, our work sought to shed light on both the discontent with and the appeal of democracy through interviewing activists. The latter included those who took part in sustained street activism either demanding democracy or contesting the defects of their democratic system. Such activists have variously been described as active, critical or insurgent citizens.

Shared understandings

We found that regardless of the type of economy or political regime, activists in the four cities converged on the point that representative democracy alone is an unsatisfactory system; that for meaningful democracy to emerge, citizens must embrace a sense of responsibility and agency, and fight for inclusion in political decision-making. We discovered considerable commonalities in understandings and conceptualizations of democracy, despite the cultural, political, and economic differences between the four cities, and the ideological heterogeneity of the activists both within and across contexts.

We found that the activists almost universally rejected representative democracy as a sufficient model, and set great store by more demanding versions, variously referred to as real, direct, or participatory democracy. This referred to a process-oriented notion of active citizenship that places strong demands both on the citizens themselves and on those who govern at all levels.

With variations, the activists in all our field sites argued that democracy means having a voice, a right, and even a responsibility to participate in politics and the public life. Each in their own context, they developed more demanding ideas of what democracy should mean ideas that are not idiosyncratic, but resonate with each other and with certain writings in political theory. Activists saw themselves as engaged in prefigurative politics which sought to foster democratic practices in the internal organisation of the movement and, ultimately, in society. Yet they also raised concerns about internal power dynamics, maintaining that the movements did not always challenge existing inequalities within society (class, gender, race, etc.) and at times even replicated these in the structures and patterns of organisation.

Intersectionality and inequality within movements

According to much of the recent literature, we should see the contemporary movements as prefigurative in that they not only demand things from governments and other institutions of power, but translate these claims into concrete local practices and actions with prefigurative activism, seeking to implement direct democracy in local public spaces. The scholars who have highlighted the role of prefiguration made an important contribution, making clear that social movements are voluntarist and deeply normative enterprises, and a straight comparison with other forms of organisation can be reductive.

That said, with a few exceptions, they have tended to skate lightly over the challenges involved in dealing with diversity. We urge a more critical examination of the intersectionality within movements. Movements often claim to be inclusive and yet, we discovered that age, class, gender, race, and religion can affect organisation and mobilisation within them.

We asked our interviewees whether they really saw themselves as doing democracy, and how well they thought they were doing it. We systematically asked our respondents Do you think the movements are democratic? Responses in our four field sites were mixed and far from self-congratulating. We found that activists understandings of democracy (e.g. including voice and participation) has led to conscious attempts to foster inclusive and horizontal practices within their own movements. This has meant eschewing leaders, creating spaces to listen to different voices (e.g. through the assemblies), and relying on consensus-based decision-making.

However, our findings demonstrate how such horizontal practices, which are informed by and seek to realize what activists consider real democracy, co-exist and clash with more hierarchical practices of organising, agenda-setting, and decision-making. Moreover, while movements in all four contexts strove to embrace democratic practices and challenge existing hierarchies in society, many activists recognized the gap between their aspirations to be the change they desired and the perpetuation of existing inequalities within the movements.

Implications and looking ahead

The recent spate of movements have opened up debates around the meaning of democracy, inequality, and the role of the state. Yet activist conceptions of democracy bleeding outward and upward into the transformation of society and decision-making are bleaker than proponents of prefiguration would have us believe. The space for protest is declining through repressive legislation, the securitisation of public spaces, and the criminalisation of protest.

The Brexit referendum and the rise in popularity of right-wing populist politics demonstrate a growing anger with the status quo and mistrust of mainstream political parties and elites. Setting aside their anti-immigrant rhetoric, populists share demands with the movements we studied, frame those demands in the language of democracy, and argue for giving people greater control over unresponsive or unrepresentative institutions.

Brexit and Trumps victory is a reflection of that anger, discontent, and mistrust of the status quo. Today, the gap between what is on offer formal representative democracy within the confines of the global capitalist system and the culture of democracy activists envisage, is such that no accommodation can be reached and recurrent political mobilisation is to be expected.

____

Note: the above draws on the authors co-authored article in Democratization.

About the Author

Armine Ishkanian is Assistant Professor in the Social Policy Department at LSE.

Original post:
Answering the age-old question: what does democracy mean to those who protest for it? - EUROPP - European Politics and Policy (blog)

NEW DELHI: Taking a dig at Congress after Election Commission asked it to complete its organisational elections by June, Union Minister Venkaiah Naidu today said all was not well in the main opposition party where internal democracy was not effective.

"It's duty of every political party, that too for a political party which claims 125 years of history...Parties should conduct internal elections in a free and fair manner and report to the Election Commission. They should have taken the lead in doing this.

"Very fact that the Election Commission has to remind the Congress party shows that all is not well and democracy is not effective in internal functioning of the Congress party," Naidu told reporters here.

Since September, 2015, Congress has on two occasions urged the poll panel to allow it to defer its internal elections.

EC had recently said it would grant no further extension and the internal polls should be over "latest by June 30, 2017".

Congress has also been asked to submit the list of its new office bearers by July 15 to the poll panel.

With the Commission refusing to grant more time to Congress to hold the organisational polls, the demand for anointing Rahul Gandhi as party president could gain momentum after the assembly elections in five states are over in March.

Under the EC's rules, all registered political parties have to hold organisational elections annually. Congress has, however, cited its constitution to say that its internal polls are held every 5 years.

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Internal democracy not effective in Congress: Venkaiah Naidu - Economic Times