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Voters might be quite rational in refusing to give the green light to those who wield power and benefit from the status quo.

This article is part of the Democracy Futures series, a joint global initiative between The Conversation and the Sydney Democracy Network. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.

This is the fourth in a series, After Populism, about the challenges populism poses for democracy. It comes from a talk at the Populism: Whats Next for Democracy? symposium hosted by the Institute for Governance & Policy Analysis at the University of Canberra in collaboration with Sydney Democracy Network.

The flipside of the populism coin is voter ambivalence about democracy as we know it.

Though much of the reporting of last years US presidential race focused on the angry American voter, it has been observed that perhaps the most striking feature of the campaign that led to the election of Donald Trump was not so much that people were angry, as ambivalent.

In another surprising 2016 election, in the Philippines, observers also reflected that a shared ambivalence about democratic government must in large part have led many middle-class voters to support the firebrand Rodrigo Duterte.

And in France, people explained the record low turnout in Junes parliamentary elections by pointing to the ambivalent base. Despite Emmanuel Macrons election, the new president had yet to convince many French voters that his ideas and legislative program will make their lives better.

These examples suggest political ambivalence is everywhere on the rise, and that these are anxious times politically.

If the appeal of leaders like Trump and Duterte is anything to go on, despite or perhaps because of their peddling of a violent and exclusionary rhetoric, widespread ambivalence among citizens of democracies has potentially dangerous consequences.

We often equate ambivalence with indecision or indifference. But its a more complex and more spirited idea than that. Ambivalence reflects our capacity to say both yes and no about a person or an object at the same time.

Eugen Bleuler, the Swiss psychiatrist who coined the term in 1910, wrote:

In the dreams of healthy persons, affective as well as intellectual ambivalence is a common phenomenon.

Freud soon picked up the term to describe our capacity to love and hate a person all at once.

We neednt be Freudians to see that ambivalence reflects our common inner experience. While we cannot physically be in two places at once, in our minds it is not only possible but likely that dualities and conflicting ideas or beliefs co-exist at the same time. Think of Hamlets soliloquy:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them

The point is that, rather than reflecting some psychological deficiency or cognitive dissonance, ambivalence is an active and wilful position to take.

Ambivalence is even rational, in that it requires an awareness of mutually exclusive choices and a refusal to choose; just as wanting a bit of both is also rational.

When it comes to politics, we often hold conflicting, even mutually exclusive visions, of the sort of society we want.

In the Philippines, the middle-class voters I interviewed in 2015 wanted the civil liberties that democracy provides. At the same time, they were concerned that too much freedom was causing social and political chaos.

The two ideas, though contradictory, co-existed in peoples minds. This type of ambivalence at least partly explains why urban middle-class voters came out in numbers to elect someone like Duterte.

As ambivalence is often linked to the victories of populists, there is a general sense that our ambivalence is destabilising, dangerous and needs to be purged. Ambivalent citizens, the reasoning goes, place a heavy burden on their countrys democracy, as by questioning the status quo of the modern democratic state they undermine its very legitimacy.

The failure to reach clarity implies a failed agency on the part of the ambivalent citizen; it is they who carry the burden of resolving their own feelings and returning to a place of undivided certainty.

Commentary after the US election spoke of not letting the ambivalent Trump-voting middle class (who should have known better) off the hook.

Yet, as Zygmunt Bauman noted, the more we try to eradicate ambivalence by calling it ignorance and mere opinion, the more the opposite is likely to occur.

Furthermore, people who have been reduced to decision-takers will be more likely to see radical, revolutionary, even destructive change as the only way to resolve their ambivalence.

Democracy and ambivalence, rather than being antithetical, may be strange bedfellows. At the heart of the democratic idea is a notion of the people as both the source and guardians of power.

Consider the way Ernesto Laclau sees the political as always in conflict, inherent in conflicting identities struggling for dominance.

While the collective identity of the people claims to accommodate difference, this is impossible without the constitutive exclusion of the other.

If this is the case, democracy should stimulate our scepticism. Who is being excluded in the name of the people? And who has gained the power to constitute their particular identity as a unified whole?

Ideally, representative democracy seeks not only to recognise but to institutionalise this scepticism, and to manage our disappointment with democracy. It is our ability to withdraw our support and give it elsewhere that means our contested visions of society dont lead to its destruction.

The trouble is that the 21st-century democratic state has little tolerance of our scepticism about power. Citizens are pressured to turn their trust over to a bureau-technocratic order led by experts in order to deal with complex, contemporary problems. The role of voters is transformed into that of passive bystanders, prone to chaos and irrationality, and not to be trusted.

Matters are made worse by extreme concentration of wealth and income inequality. Thomas Piketty correctly warned that extreme inequality would threaten the democratic order.

Despite observing (and experiencing) the undermining of basic social protections and equity principles, people are expected to stay in their place. It is as if ordinary citizens are not trusted to make their own judgements, unless those judgements endorse the path of little or no change.

Their ambivalence, which may be a purposive response to their evaluation of how democracy is actually working, is deemed toxic and socially useless.

No doubt such widespread ambivalence, as well as this denial of the valid expression of unmet aspirations, has provided fertile ground for populist politicians.

The likes of Trump and Duterte appeal to peoples desire not to be fixed into pre-determined standards of how to think and behave. And in claiming to fill a gap as true representatives of the people, they enable what often turns out to be a radical expression of voter ambivalence.

Political ambivalence is more than a flawed tension of opposites. Neither is it a temporary deviance. It is deeply rooted, and likely here to stay.

The more we dismiss and disparage it, rebuking voters who should know better, the more we risk its manifestation in destructive ways.

A more constructive first step for managing ambivalence as a society would be to recognise it even embrace it as a chance to reflect critically on the status quo.

Kenneth Weisbrode likened ambivalence to a yellow traffic light, the one that exasperates us at the time, but in fact helps us avoid fatal collisions:

a yellow light that tells us to pause before going forward pell-mell with green, or paralysing ourselves with red.

If we heed his advice, the presence of widespread ambivalence should prompt us to pause and look around.

This is more radical than it may sound. Slowing down, and contemplating how our democracy is working for us as a community, potentially limits the power of those who benefit from the status quo.

It could even be seen as one of democracys internal safety mechanisms, since being sceptical about the exercise of power and keeping in check those who benefit from it, is what keeps democracy alive.

Bauman wrote:

The world is ambivalent, though its colonisers and rulers do not like it to be such and by hook and by crook try to pass it off for one that is not.

Ambivalence may be the most rational response to the fact that, in 2017, the notion of democracy as a politics of self-government and collectively made choices has, in many respects, become a lullaby, mere rhetoric that serves the interests of those who benefit from the persistence of a shared yet elusive ideal.

If not the populist figures, who or what else in our democracies today is claiming to represent the people? A living democracy hinges upon this type of circumspection. It could even usher in a new era of democracy.

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We frown on voters' ambivalence about democracy, but they might just save it - The Conversation AU

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Democracy under siege in Maduro's Venezuela Toronto Sun The headlines around the world said it all in describing the bogus July 30 election in Venezuela. Venezuela heading for dictatorship after 'sham' election, wrote the Guardian, quoting Nikki Haley, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Venezuela ... Venezuela Rejects New US Sanctions Against its DemocracyPrensa Latina Venezuela Says US Sanctions Criminalize DemocracyteleSUR English all 138 news articles »

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Democracy under siege in Maduro's Venezuela - Toronto Sun

Pakistan has a new prime minister at least for now. Last Tuesday, Pakistans parliament held a special election to replace Nawaz Sharif of the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N), who was ousted in a judicial coup last week. Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, a staunch Sharif loyalist, is expected to keep the prime ministerial palace warm while the PML-N arranges to secure a seat in the parliament for Nawaz Sharifs brother, Shehbaz Sharif, in a coming by-election and as a prelude to hoisting him into the prime ministers seat.

It is not surprising that Nawaz Sharif has been ousted. What is surprising is that he managed to hold on for so long. The army had its sights on Sharif before he was even sworn in after winning an unpredicted landslide victory in the 2013 election. It had already taken him out of office twice before. Shehbaz Sharif is much more palatable to the army. Unlike his brother, he has eschewed confrontation and has even maintained cordial ties with the generals.

Such are the prerequisites to holding power in Pakistan. Whereas many countries have an army, the Pakistani army has a country. For Pakistans powerful military, the notion of actual democracy is contemptible. The army long ago arrogated the right to step in whenever it felt wanted and repeatedly reminds Pakistanis that civilian leaders are the bane of the nation while the army is the only savior. Whether directly or indirectly, the army has ruled the country since the first Pakistani army chief Ayub Khan staged a coup in October 1958. It has done a far better job hanging on to power than it ever has at winning a war.

Since 2008, when democracy was formally restored after Gen. Pervez Musharrafs nine-year dictatorship ended, Pakistans predatory praetorians have faced a looming problem: Democracy, however flawed, was taking root right under their well-groomed moustaches. Although the general election that brought Sharif to office wasnot pristine, it was the first time that a democratically elected administration had completed its term (although not without considerable havoc ginned up by the army) and handed power over to another democratically elected administration.

Between 1988, when democracy was restored after the demise of Gen. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in a plane crash, and 1999, the army connived to depose the governments of Benazir Bhutto in 1990 and in 1996 and that of Nawaz Sharif in 1993 and ousted Sharif again! in a bloodless coup in 1999. But given that democracy had managed to weather the storms since 2008, Pakistan watchers were cautiously hopeful that, as democracy became more routine, the military would have an increasingly difficult time undermining governments and staging outright coups. The problem is the generals recognized the same and contrived to prevent democracy from sinking its roots too deeply.

In addition to this general concern about maintaining its primacy in national politics, the military had special cause for concern about Sharif. The military has a long memory and so did not forget that Sharif had previously exercised his constitutional prerogative to replace the army chief, Gen. Jehangir Karamat, in 1998 with Musharraf. (This was surely not Sharifs best idea, as history demonstrated.) Nor would it forget that Sharif tried but failed to oust Musharraf in turn after he orchestrated the 1999 Kargil War with India, which ended in ignominy for Pakistan.

Worse yet, Sharif did so while Musharraf was in Sri Lanka and refused to let his plane land in Pakistan with virtually no fuel and nowhere else to land. The military concluded that this was an attempt on Musharrafs life and put the coup into motion. Musharraf, apparently in an act of grace, did not hang Sharif; rather, he exiled him to Saudi Arabia.

Sharif had a long memory, too. When democracy returned, Sharif only demanded that Musharraf be tried only for the 2007 suspension of the constitution and not for the 1999 coup itself. But the very thought of one of their own being tried for a treasonable offense sent the men on horseback into a vertiginous panic. This would not simply be a trial of Musharraf but of the entire institution and its presumptions about its proper role in the governance of the country. The trial never actually happened thanks to unrelenting army pressure and Musharraf still lives in comfortable exile in Dubai and London, where he has mysteriously been able to afford luxurious flats.

Given his relative strength, Sharif sought to assert a whit of civilian control over the countrys bloated military. He took over personal oversight of thedefense and foreign affairs portfolios, which had previously been left to the military. He was vocal about pursuing better ties with India and sought to expand economic and other ties with the armys eastern nemesis. Sharif engaged Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at every opportunity.

And, in an act that the military saw as verging on high treason, Sharif had the temerity to argue for jettisoning the age-old strategy of manipulating Afghanistan to obtain strategic depth against India. Sharif also committed to negotiate with the Pakistani Taliban, which has savaged the country for more than a decade. The army, for its own reasons, wanted to launch a selectiveoperationagainst the group in Pakistans North Waziristan area, which it did in June 2014. Operation Zarb-e-Azb, which ended in April 2016, was so successful that the army had to launch yet another operation in early 2017 called Operation Radd-ul-Fasaad.

While the army had been gunning for Sharif since he returned to power in 2013, it was constrained in its options. Given that Sharifs won an outright parliamentary majority, the military could not simply rely upon coalitional shenanigans to bring his government down. Worse yet, no matter what domestic hijinks the army cooked up by making good use of a lothario cricketer-turned-politician named Imran Khan and a Pakistani-Canadian activist cleric named Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, Pakistanis were not clamoring for the army to come in and rescue them.

The constitutional provision that the Pakistani army had previously relied on to unseat governments was also no longer available to it. This amendment, known as 58(2)(b), was introduced in 1985 and turned Pakistans parliamentary democratic system, which featured a strong prime minister and a titular president, on its head. The amendment granted the president (then Zia) sweeping powers to dissolve the national and provincial assemblies, which he did.But in 2010 President Asif Ali Zardari signed the18th Amendment, returning Pakistan to a more traditional parliamentary democracy.

Without its trusty cudgel, the army needed to develop new ways of bringing democracy to heel, which is why, soon after Musharrafs departure, the military began cultivating Pakistans Supreme Court. The judicial farce that resulted in Sharifs most recent ouster demonstrates that the courts remain tools for the generals to clip democracys wings.

In April 2016, the massive tranche of leaked documents known as the Panama Papers identified that Sharifs family had offshore companies. After considerable rabble-rousing by Imran Khan, whose own accumulation of wealth is deeply suspect, and who threatened to paralyze Islamabad with a lockdown, the Supreme Court agreed to set up a judicial commission to probe allegations of corruption against Sharif. (Khans ability to mobilize crowds most likely involves resources provided by Pakistans intelligence agency, the ISI, which is also strongly suspected of funding his near spontaneous political ascent in 2010.)

But the original charges against Sharif were never proved. Instead, to disqualify Sharif from office, the court relied upon a peculiar article in Pakistans constitution known as Article 62, which relies upon an undefined concept of moral repute. It also utilized Section 99(f) of the Representation of the People Act of 1976, which permits a person to be disqualified if he or she is not sagacious, righteous and non-profligate and honest and righteous. In 2014, a Supreme Court judge observed that the constitution does not define these terms.

While some quarters are hailing this outcome as the triumph of the courts over venal politicians, others understand this for what it is: an arbitrary and selective application of an absurd set of undefined criteria to dislodge a long-festering splinter in the armys middle finger. While there is little doubt that Sharif is actually corrupt, there is also little doubt that any politician in Pakistan is free of corruption. This has set a dangerous precedent to arbitrarily topple elected governments.

Since Shehbaz Sharif is a provincial player with less international experience, the generals believe that hes more pliable on their core issues of relations with India, the United States, China, and Afghanistan. But the military will still work to eviscerate any lingering positive feelings for Nawaz. Over the long term, expect the army to sow fissures in the party to weaken the Sharifs hold over their political fiefdom.

While the courts are being celebrated in Pakistan for liberating the country from a predatory politician, would the gallant justices ever move against the army with any modicum of verve? Doubtful. No Pakistani court has ever had the mettle to hold a single general to account for treason, much less more petty nuisances such as industrial-strength corruption. When Pakistans Supreme Court can take on the real menace to Pakistani democracy the generals we will have something to celebrate. Until then, the army has stumbled upon yet another tool to trim the branches of democracy in Pakistan.

Photo Credit: ARIF ALI/AFP/Getty Images

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The Only Enemy Pakistan's Army Can Beat Is Its Own Democracy - Foreign Policy (blog)

Welcome back to The Monkey Cages weekly presentation of Founding Principles, short videos designed to explain American government and how it works in theory, and in practice. Were up to episode seven, in the midst of thinking about the American publics interaction with politics and the political system.

Last weekwe looked at the role of public opinion.As President Dwight Eisenhower argued in 1960, public opinion is the only force that has any validity in democracy. But, Ike added, since it is so important, it must be an informed public opinion. James Madison put it even more bluntly: A popular government, without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.

That means we have to look at the news media one of the key ways information flows between Americans and their government.

The principle of a free press is a cornerstone of the Bill of Rights embedded in the very first amendment to the Constitution. That doesnt mean we always appreciate it. Google the phrase media bias and you get more than 400,000 results. President Trump has used attacks on what he calls fake news as a political weapon. Indeed, he has dubbed most media outlets the enemy of the American people.

Many presidents have resented their media coverage. Thomas Jefferson, back in 1814, was already lamenting the good old days, saying, I deplore the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, not to mention the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them. And yet Jefferson also said this: Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

This episode explores why that is, and what the media can and cant do. It looks at the role of agenda setting and framing as well as the polarization that both drives and reflects the important shift in recent decades from an era of broadcasting to one dominated by social media and narrowcasting. Finally, it tries to decipher what biases media outlets really have.

A free press is not a goal in itself but a means to educate and edify Americans about the issues that face them not least, the choices they have at the ballot box. So stay tuned for next week, when we move to that most direct connection between the public and the government: the electoral process.

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Are the news media enemies of the people or defenders of democracy? Here's what the founders thought. - Washington Post

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Last week, a Google software engineer named James Damore shot off a 10-page memo criticizing the company's internal politics and diversity efforts. Then on Monday, Google fired Damore.

But this isn't just a story about Google's institutional culture. It's not even just a story about larger national efforts to increase diversity and the ensuing backlash. It also cuts right to the heart of one of the American workplace's defining traits: its anti-democratic nature.

Damore's memo was civil and measured in tone, and frankly more complex than a lot of the coverage allowed it begins, for instance, with Damore saying, "I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and dont endorse using stereotypes." But it also suffered from plenty of faulty logic, short-sightedness, and, indeed, poisonous evolutionary-psychology-style stereotyping. Damore claimed that men have a higher drive for status; that women are more prone to "neuroticism" and "higher anxiety" and have "lower stress tolerance"; that pay and hiring gaps between men and women can be explained by "biological causes"; and that Google's diversity programs can therefore be discriminatory and destructive. Damore then proposed diversity programs of his own.

Understandably, his memo set off a firestorm within the company, across the news, and all over social media. But whether Damore should've been fired is another matter entirely.

It would be easy to frame the whole conundrum as an issue of "free speech" or "the marketplace of ideas." But it's not. What we really have here is a question of power and property rights: What forums can you exercise what speech in and, more importantly, who should have the power to decide what's appropriate?

To put it bluntly, most workplaces in America today are miniature dictatorships ruled by their employer. "Workers can be surveilled by their employer, compelled to work long hours, and even denied bathroom breaks," Jacobin explains. "In most parts of the U.S., employers can legally terminate employees for being 'too attractive,' for having the wrong political affiliations, and for choosing a particular sexual partner."

In many other Western economies, employees cannot be fired "at will"; they can only be let go after a lengthy legal process. Laws often require employers to negotiate with unions and other labor groups. Some countries even require that worker representatives make up half of all corporate boards. Point being, workers have input of real consequence into how the companies that employ them are run. And they cannot be fired except under circumstances agreed to be fair by society as a whole.

None of this is true in America. We're a very long way off from achieving anything like that kind of workplace democracy. That's why I think that liberals who called for Damore's firing will come to regret it. If America is ever to attain true workplace democracy, it will require big coalitions including people who hold otherwise unpleasant ideas like Damore's.

So even as the left fights to expand and solidify anti-discrimination law that protects people on the basis of sex, gender, orientation, and identity, it should fight to expand those protections to include ideological and political beliefs as well. Seek common ground not by expanding employers' freedom to hire, fire, and deny service, but by further restricting it in ways that show good faith to people who sometimes fall on the right.

By all accounts Damore himself is a very privileged individual, and will most likely land on his feet. But what happened to him is a threat that hangs over every American worker, most of whom are far less privileged: from the flight attendants Lena Dunham recently ratted out to American Airlines over transphobic talk, all the way down to some poor sap working thankless and poorly-paid service jobs at Starbucks, McDonalds, or the rent-a-car counter. Furthermore, if employers are free to punish people over bad ideas that make them uncomfortable, they're free to punish them over good ideas that make them uncomfortable, too. (See: Colin Kaepernick.)

None of this means Damore shouldn't face consequences for his memo. Of course he should.

First off, his fellow employees and citizens are free to rip into him. Second, as Yonatan Zunger, a former senior Google employee, rightly pointed out, Damore's memo has created a godawful mess for the company in terms of workplace peace and cohesion. Demoting Damore, stripping him of hiring duties, or publicly chastising him with a company statement are all solutions with their own complications. But they fall short of firing.

A world of job security, labor rights, worker bargaining power, and workplace democracy is meant to create a sort of "town hall" environment of equals within the company. In that sort of environment, these alternative responses to Damore's memo would actually be much easier to hash out.

Franklin Roosevelt once famously called for expanding the basic rights and freedoms all Americans enjoy from the civic and political realms into the economic realm as well. This included treating employment as a human right. These radical notions have fallen out of favor since the mid-century, even among vast swaths of liberalism and the Democratic Party. And it's high past time they were resurrected.

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Google and the case for messy, maddening workplace democracy - The Week Magazine