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LONDON Southern Europe is where democracy was once invented. But today, many theresay that democracy isn't working for them.

In a year where Britain's negotiations to leave the European Union will dominate headlines along with elections in France, Germany and the Netherlands, developments in southern Europe could go mostly unnoticed. Yet thecontinent's future may rest just as much with what happens there.

There is no shortage of problems: The International Monetary Fund warned on Tuesday that Greece's debts were unsustainable and there may not besufficient support for another bailout; Italy may need to holdnew elections this year amid growing support for populist parties; newly emerged but decades-old tensions in the Balkans areworrying observers.

What connects all of those woes is a feeling held by many southern Europeans: that their national democratic institutions have failed them. Whereas northern Europeans are mostlysatisfied with how democracy works in their countries, disappointment with democracy has become endemicin the continent's south in recent years,according to an E.U. survey put into graphical form by Harvard University politics professor Pippa Norris.

In 2003, southern and northern Europeans still had similar levels of trust in their respective national governments, hovering around 40 percent. By 2012, only 15 percent of respondents in southern Europe stillheld that opinion. In northern Europe, however, satisfaction with the work of governments had increasedover the same period.

This wasn't the case from 1989 until the early 2000s, when attitudes toward democracy rose and fell more or lessin unison across Europe.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, it was not geography that determined satisfaction with how democracy worked: Dissatisfaction in some eastern European nations such as Poland disappeared as democracy became more stable there, for instance.

Sonia Alonso of Georgetown University thinks that austerity supposedly imposed on the south by northern European countries such as Germany is to be blamedfor the growing divide.

According to Alonso, acase study of recessions in Germany and Greece could help explain what has made the south so vulnerable. Between 2003 and 2007, the German governmentimplemented harsh austerity measures and changes toits extensive welfare programs. Despite a subsequent increasein inequality, satisfaction with democracy in the country remained stable throughout that time, whereas similar austerity measures in Greece caused a significantdrop in satisfaction. The fact that the Germans' own government enforced the measures was critical.

German internal devaluation was part of a policy adopted by democratically elected German politicians whereas the Greek and Spanish devaluations were imposed by external unelected institutions, Alonso said. In other words, Germany's self-inflicted austerity actually improved its democratic legitimacy.

With southern Europe's economic crisis still unsolved, she expects the divide to grow further. Whereas unemployment and the economy werethe top concerns for southern Europeans in the 2016 EuroBarometer survey, residents in the north cared most about immigration. It is almost as if citizens from north and south are living in parallel universes, Alonso said.

For E.U. officials, recent surveys neverthelessoffer a glimmer of hope.As disillusion with national governmentsis on the rise, many in southern Europe may look toward the European Union for solutions.

In fact, the European Union's current decision-making process may be blamed for many of southern Europe's economic problems but across the south, voters are still more satisfied with the work of the European Union than they are with their own governments.

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After Italian Prime Minister Renzis defeat, this Trump fan could throw Europe into crisis

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Europe is starkly divided over whether democracy is working - The ... - Washington Post

Is there really a Beijing Model of governance: authoritarian politics steering economic growth, diluting the appeal of the West's democracy and freedom? The ruler of China thinks so. He's focused on sticking around and seeing it triumph.

Xi Jinping is the first Chinese Communist leader to have been born after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. He did not study or spend early years abroad like most predecessors. Deng Xiaoping, who ruled in the 1980s, studied in France and the Soviet Union after World War I; Jiang Zemin, who ruled in the 1990s, studied in Philadelphia. Only Mao Zedong, prior to Xi, reached maturity before glimpsing the foreign world. For Mao, that meant Moscow; for Xi, born in 1953, it was a 1985 trip to the cornfields of Iowa. Is he then a nationalist, like some other recently installed world leaders?

Very much so. Xi knows grassroots China, county-level China, and province-level China. He lived in Henan, Fujian, and Zhejiang provinces as a local official, and in Shaanxi as a "family victim" of the zealous Cultural Revolution. Beijing, as well as the non-Chinese world, was a late stop for Xi. He's a local politician, newly endowed with global vision, now essential for a Beijing leader in light of China's rise. Unlike his brilliant premier, Li Keqiang, who is left to languish these days, Xi condescends to the West and thinks "small" countries in Asia should defer to "big" China.

Xi wants to reclaim the East China Sea (from Japan) and the South China Sea (from Vietnam, Philippines, and others) and push into Africa. He says the European Union, home of ancient Western civilization, is a natural partner for China, core of ancient Eastern civilization. This East-West pairing will shape "global governance," he implies. Never mind Uncle Sam.

The Chinese president and his advisers assert an intriguing interrelation between their internal politics and global trends. Besides challenging the West on Asia's oceans and in Africa's infrastructure, Xi has started a skirmish on its sacred home ground of democracy. A choice exists, he suggests, between election democracy (the West) and evaluation democracy (China and a growing list of others). The "China Dream" of Beijing's evaluation democracy will become the world's leading pattern of governance, he seems to believe, for it avoids chaos and corruption.

Evaluation democracy, a term coined by Chinese scholar Chen Fangren, is Eastern meritocracy. Leaders are chosen from a holy circle at the top, based on "virtue and ability." These officeholders must then listen to public opinion as it "evaluates" their performance from below.

The West's election democracy "requires only one-time consent by votes to form a government for the duration of its term," according to Chen; leaders are chosen by universal suffrage, but between elections they may or may not listen to grassroots views. When left-wing Americans lose an election, for example, their inclination is to pick up their marbles and turn to street politics, strikes, and litigation. In parallel fashion, some proud conservatives prefer purity on the sidelines to the compromises required for electoral victory.

Xi has used "the top" to co-opt Chinese public opinion since taking power in 2012. He has won praise by firing thousands of senior military and civil officials for corruption. He has laid out fresh domestic and foreign policy ideas, month after month, with a speed and confidence unmatched since Deng. He snipes at the West's messy "multiparty system," touting China's one-party system. Will this backfire on him, as it did on the once-cocky Soviet bloc?

As recently as a decade ago, Americans overwhelmingly favored election democracy, because of its fixed rules. Barack Obama's acerbic quip to Eric Cantor in early 2009, "Elections have consequences," when Democrats and Republicans argued about Obamacare, seemed like gospel. But today in the United States, across the Atlantic, and in Japan, Australia, and other democracies, constant and inaccurate polls, media barrages, the centrality of personality, and enormous sums of money have reduced faith in elections.

The Chinese scholar Chen finds the magic of evaluation democracy in 4,000 years of Chinese history. "Continuous consent to govern" allows emperors and politicians alike to "focus on proper results for the common good" and not the grand opera of multiparty struggles. "Average people" are too busy with their private lives to "take on the heavy burden" of selecting leaders "fit for office."

But continuous consent to rule in evaluation democracy has been (in Chinese history) and is (anywhere) tricky to pull off. In today's China, meddling by "retired" leaders is a major barrier to "citizen evaluation" of current leaders. Cronyism will have its pound of flesh. Chen fails to see how often power struggles creep into his dreamland of continuous consent. Thousands of years of Chinese politics have had, on a per-century basis, no less contention and violence than have centuries of politics in the United States. Chen clings to an ideal that in history worked only occasionally: He lamely admits China was "lucky to have good emperors" from time to time over millennia.

The Beijing Model, as I call the current no-elections version, "leaves the selection of a government to government leaders themselves, who have in-depth knowledge of each other" and know "what it takes to be an effective leader." This sounds like the objections raised inside Republican circles to outsider Donald Trump and Democratic circles to Bernie Sanders before the presidential election. It is a dualism, with a magical circle at the top and eruptions outside it, as old as Chen's 4,000 years of Chinese realpolitik and as young as John Quincy Adams's efforts to knife Andrew Jackson.

One frequent Chinese critique of Western elections flunked in 2016: "The rich always win." Actually, they don't. Nelson Rockefeller (1968) and Edward Kennedy (1980) did not become president despite overwhelming wealth; Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, respectively, with far less money, beat them. Loser Hillary Clinton dramatically outspent winner Trump in November; the bubble of wealth burst in her hands as her coast-to-coast grin did service for policy ideas.

Electoral victory quite often goes to an "outside" or "common sense" candidate, whether good or bad, rather than a wealthy one. Few in the Beijing establishment understand this. Yet in 2016 the Chinese man and woman in the street had a different instinct, sniffing condescension at home and abroad. Anecdotal evidence, including from my own stay in September, indicates millions of "old hundred names" (lao bai xing, unnamed folk) favored Trump.

One Chinese adviser to Xi Jinping writes in a book I am editing that after communism's collapse, "East European countries chose the Western mode and allowed various interest groups to build their own parties. In China, however, political openness comes from the inside." Time will tell how far political openness that comes (and goes) from the top can proceed.

A workaday-style leader, Xi Jinping is amiable in manner, fresh in social policy, bleak in cultural policy, torn in economic policy between market forces and Communist supervision, and adventurist in foreign policy. It is a volatile cocktail. If the Beijing Model fails, Xi's descent would be a minor part of the crisis. But we must admit that hope for the Democratic World model under George W. Bush (which I shared) has shriveled. What remains? Certainly not Wilsonian idealism, either conservative or liberal in inspiration. Its revival in recent decades under Bush and Obama brought few benefits to U.S. interests.

Power politics under American leadership is what Donald Trump should pursue. Our foreign policy gurus chatter about a list of issues (North Korea has topped it for 11 frozen years). But our to-do list is utterly at variance with Beijing's shrewder realpolitik.

Today, for example, Xi Jinping is beaming at the EU and slightly smiling at the United States while squeezing Japan, Australia, Canada, and other U.S. allies. Details don't matter to Xi compared with this balance of power; thus China's bemused level-headedness over the phone chat between Trump and Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen, which sent America's not-so-very intelligentsia reaching for the bottle. The United States has never believed in, or been good at, multilateralism with Washington posing as one capital just like all the rest.

Nevertheless, the fixed schedules and term limits of election democracy lend a steady beat of certainty to our choice of leaders and policies. This otherwise messy sequence is surely better than the everlasting groping of so-called evaluation democracy. Our Sinologists exit Davos and the Council on Foreign Relations saying China is being integrated into the liberal international order. The Chinese elite in Beijing have different ideas.

Ross Terrill is chief editor of Xi Jinping's China Renaissance, forthcoming in Beijing, and the author of Mao, The New Chinese Empire, and Madame Mao. His next book is Mao as a Boy.

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Xi Jinping's Version of Democracy | The Weekly Standard - The Weekly Standard

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Timothy Snyder, a Yale scholar and an authority on European political history, has spent decades studying the rise of fascist movements. With the ascension of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, Snyder sees echoes from history, and warns that the time to save America from autocracy is in short supply.

I think things have tightened up very fast; we have at most a year to defend the republic, perhaps less, Snyder stated in an interview with German outlet Sddeutsche Zeitung. What happens in the next few weeks is very important.

Snyder, whose multiple books include On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, points out that Americans must dispense with wishful thinking about institutions helping to curb Trumps power. In fact, that misguided notion is precisely what landed us in this situation.

The story that Americans have told themselves from the moment he declared his candidacy for president, was that one institution or another would defeat him or at least change his behaviorhe wont get the nomination; if he gets the nomination, he will be a normal Republican; he will get defeated in the general election; if he wins, the presidency will mature him (that was what Obama said), Snyder recounts. I never thought any of that was true. He doesnt seem to care about the institutions and the laws except insofar as they appear as barriers to the goal of permanent kleptocratic authoritarianism and immediate personal gratification. It is all about him all of time, it is not about the citizens and our political traditions.

In the days after the election, Snyder penned a must-read Slate article that recalled historical markers from Hitlers rise to reveal the similar path of Trumps advance. The historian had hoped to cajole Americans out of complacency, to urge them to find their bearings, to remind them none of this is normal and that democracy is in the crosshairs.

The temptation in a new situation is to imagine that nothing has changed, Snyder says. That is a choice that has political consequences: self-delusion leads to half-conscious anticipatory obedience and then to regime change... Most Americans are exceptionalists; we think we live outside of history. Americans tend to think: We have freedom because we love freedom, we love freedom because we are free. It is a bit circular and doesnt acknowledge the historical structures that can favor or weaken democratic republics. We dont realize how similar our predicaments are to those of other people.

I wanted to remind my fellow Americans that intelligent people, not so different from ourselves, have experienced the collapse of a republic before. It is one example among many. Republics, like other forms of government, exist in history and can rise and fall.

Snyder points to the desperate need to shake off historical amnesia as the Trump administration looks to authoritarian regimes as models. [O]ne reason why we cannot forget the 1930s is that the presidential administration is clearly thinking about them, but in a positive sense, Snyder stated. They seem to be after a kind of redo of the 1930s with Roosevelt where the Americans take a different coursewhere we dont build a welfare state and dont intervene in Europe to stop fascism. Lindbergh instead of FDR. That is their notion. Something went wrong with Roosevelt and now they want to go back and reverse it.

During the campaign [Trump] used the slogan America First and then was informed that this was the name of a movement that tried to prevent the United States from fighting Nazi Germany and was associated with nativists and white supremacists. He claimed then not to have known that. But in the inaugural address he made America First his central theme, and now he cant say that he doesnt know what it means. And of course Bannon knows what it means. America First is precisely the conjuration of this alternative America of the 1930s where Charles Lindbergh is the hero. This inaugural address reeked of the 1930s.

Snyder urges immediate resistance to the administrations targeting of Muslims, immigrants, blacks and LGBT people, because if it can slice off one group, it can do the same to others. He says protest and pushback should continue with regularity.

The Constitution is worth saving, the rule of law is worth saving, democracy is worth saving, but these things can and will be lost if everyone waits around for someone else.

He also notes that the speed with which the Trump team has worked to hammer home its agenda is a strategy designed to cause fatigue and depression. The key is not to be grow tired or become resigned. In particular, he cautions against succumbing to Trumps attempts to paint all those who reject his agenda as un-American.

The idea is to marginalize the people who actually represent the core values of the republic, says Snyder. The point is to bring down the republic. You can disagree with [protesters], but once you say they have no right to protest or start lying about them, you are in effect saying: We want a regime where this is not possible anymore. When the president says that, it means that the executive branch is engaged in regime change towards an authoritarian regime without the rule of law. You are getting people used to this transition, you are inviting them into the process by asking them to have contempt for their fellow citizens who are defending the republic. You are also seducing people into a world of permanent internet lying and away from their own experiences with other people. Getting out to protest, this is something real and I would say something patriotic. Part of the new authoritarianism is to get people to prefer fiction and inaction to reality and action. People sit in their chairs, read the tweet and repeat the clichs: Yes, they are thugs instead of It is normal to get out in the streets for what you believe. [Trump] is trying to teach people a new behavior: 'You just sit right where you are, read what I say and nod your head.' That is the psychology of regime change.

The only way to stop is to not obey, Snyder reiterates.

For more of Snyder's insights on historys lessons and how to apply them to Trump, check out his 20-point guide on forms of resistance.

KaliHolloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.

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Time Is Already Running Out on Our Democracy, Says Expert - AlterNet

War is Gods way of teaching Americans geography. This 19th-century quip, often attributed to the satirist Ambrose Bierce, deserves a 21st-century update: Attacks against the U.S. are Gods way of teaching Americans how weaker enemies are stronger than they seem.

Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda are the paradigmatic examples of this. On September 11, 2001, they gave Americans, along with the rest of the world, a lesson in asymmetric warfarearmed conflict between two sides whose relative military power differs significantly, and in which one party can gain advantage by targeting the other ones weak points.

Did Putin Direct Russian Hacking? And Other Big Questions

In that case, 19 suicidal terrorists armed with box cutters gained control of three commercial jetliners and used them to strike some of the most sensitive and symbolic targets of the most powerful and technologically advanced nation in the world. Al-Qaeda spent an estimated $500,000 on the attacks, which killed almost 3,000 people and cost hundreds of billions of dollars in material losses. The reactions that followed were even larger and more consequential than the attacks themselves: The United States launched what is to date its longest war ever (in Afghanistan), and its third-longest (in Iraq), at the estimated combined cost of $3 trillion to $5 trillion. Moreover, the geopolitical disruptions from all these events are still shaping todays world.

If Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda taught a new generation of Americans about kinetic asymmetric war, WikiLeaks and the Kremlin have taught them about cyber asymmetric war. While the first relies on physical violence to kill people, destroy buildings, and disable critical infrastructure, the second uses the internet and other cyber tools, which can cause not only physical damage but also weaken the institutions that are critical for the functioning of a democratic government.

When Leon Panetta, then the U.S. secretary of defense, warned in 2012 about the possibility of a cyber-Pearl Harbor, he envisioned physical calamity like hackers causing train derailments or contaminating the water supply. Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, involving what U.S. intelligence believes were Kremlin-directed hacks and leaks of emails damaging to the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, differed from this vision. It represented a political cyber-Pearl Harbor.

And that cyber confrontation was asymmetrical, not because America was at a technological disadvantage (the U.S. is among the worlds leaders in the technologies needed to wage cyberwars), but because Russia was able to exploit the weak points of America as a democracy.

What made America uniquely susceptible to the attack from an authoritarian Russia is emblematic of what makes other democracies particularly vulnerable, relative to their authoritarian counterparts, to political cyberattack. For one thing, the 2016 election attack targeted the democratic process itself. In the words of the intelligence communitys January 2017 report on the incident, the hacks and leaks worked to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. They aimed to take advantage of the free flow of information in a democratic society, the affect of that information on public opinion, and the electoral mechanisms through which public opinion determines a countrys leadership. (The assessment did not allege cyberattacks on voting machines, nor asses the actual impact Russian meddling might have had on the final outcome.)

If, on the other hand, a hacker leaked damaging information about Vladimir Putin, there are various obstacles in the way of its having an electoral effect. Restrictions on the media in Russia could prevent the information from circulating widely. Even if it did manage to attract publicity and sway public opinion, what then? Putin has tight control over the countrys electoral apparatus, meaning that a voting citizenry inclined to punish him for leaked evidence of misdeeds has no real mechanism to do so. The Panama Papers leaks of spring 2016, which resulted from the alleged hack of a law firm specializing in offshore banking, help illustrate the point. Though they exposed shady financial dealings within Putins inner circle, the Russian media covered them in a way favorable to Putin. The leaks made virtually no dent in his popularity.

And if democratic politicians are more vulnerable to the effects of leaks, democracies are also more likely to produce leakers to begin with. The legal protections individuals enjoy in the democratic states make it hard to deter this type of behaviorthough as illustrated by the case of Chelsea Manning, who provided classified U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, leakers can be prosecuted and jailed. (Edward Snowden, who leaked classified details of government surveillance programs to journalists, fled the U.S. before he could face prosecution.) But the cost of leaking in an autocratic society like Russia, where political opponents of Putin have been known to wind up dead, could be far higher, obviously posing a major disincentive.

Democracies, too, have used cyberattacks against non-democratic states. Perhaps the best known example is the use of StuxNet, the successful attack, most likely by the United States and Israel, involving a malicious computer worm that sabotaged an element of Irans nuclear program. Other countries with similar capabilities could be stealthily using them against their rivals. As a member of former President Barack Obamas council of advisers on science and technology told me: The internet is now fully weaponized.

But, so far, the main political victims of cyberattackers have been leaders and public figures in democratic countriesespecially the United States. And the United States is not the only democracy vulnerable to political cyberattacks. One of the conclusions of the intelligence communitys report on the 2016 election hacks points to a much broader implication: We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the U.S. presidential election to future influence efforts worldwide, including against U.S. allies and their election processes.

With elections coming up in several European countries, the Kremlin might turn its attention to influencing outcomes that would benefit its national interests. From bolstering populist candidates who have vowed to leave the EU, to encouraging skepticism of NATO by global leaders (most notable, so far, being President Trump), to supporting candidates who would ease the economic sanctions imposed on Russia for its actions in Crimea, there are numerous incentives for Putin to interfere, and numerous ways in which he could do so. Indeed, Russian cyber meddling was longstanding practice in Europe before 2016, and France, Germany, and the Netherlands are facing cyberattacks ahead of their elections this year.

The question is: Why havent Western democracies made the necessary reforms to adapt to the threat? Why have they let countries like Russia get the upper hand, not in capabilities, but in practice? One answer is that democracies, by their very nature, hinge on checks and balances that limit the concentration of power and slow down governmental decisionmaking. While all bureaucracies, including those of authoritarian regimes, are slow-moving, Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping surely are less encumbered by their laws and institutional constrains than their democratic counterparts.

Japans attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 unleashed a massive American reaction. It remains to be seen what the reaction to Americas political cyber-Pearl Harbor will beif any.

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How Democracies Lose in Cyberwar - The Atlantic

President Trump met with law enforcement leaders twice this week, saw Jeff Sessions confirmed as top cop, and signed three tough-on-crime executive orders, which were then condemned by an organization composed of some of the nations top law enforcement officers.

Heres how Trumps tough-on-crime week went down:

Trump met with law enforcement brass from major cities on Wednesday and said there would be a "zero-tolerance policy for acts of violence against law enforcement," adding that we need national action to deal with crime in Chicago and declaring that since drugs are "afflicting our nation like never, ever before," we need to be ruthless in the fight against them. "We're going to stop these drugs from poisoning our people," he said.

At the swearing-in of Sessions, he signed three tough on crime executive orders declaring a new era of justice.

"The murder rate in our country is the highest its been in forty-seven years, right?" Trump told a group of county sheriffs he met with on Tuesday, the day before the police chiefs. "Did you know that? Forty-seven years. I used to use that, Id say that in a speech and everybody was surprised, because the press doesnt tell it like it is. It wasnt to their advantage to say that. But the murder rate is the highest its been in, I guess, from forty-five to forty-seven years."

In reality, the murder rate is historically low, despite a sharp spike in cities like Baltimore and Chicago over the last two years.

This confab with top cops was taking place at the same time that anti-drug crusader and racist pettifogger Sessions was being confirmed as the chief law enforcement officer in the country.

Law enforcement has already taken on much of the language and tactics of the War on Terror, which in some ways borrowed from the War on Drugs. But Trump further confuses them, complaining to the police chiefs, for instance, about the judicial branch questioning his Muslim ban. "They're taking away our weapons one by one," Trump said, as if the unfettered power of the president is synonymous with effective law enforcement. "This is a weapon that you need, and they're trying to take it away from you.

An executive order signed Thursday morning announced that the administration would begin developing policies that comprehensively address illegal immigration, drug trafficking, and violent crime.

Talking to the chiefs, Trump declared that the country supports law enforcement, while the dishonest media tries to convince you it's different," presumably referring to coverage of widespread protests over the past few years in the wake of police killings of unarmed African Americans.

The country may support law enforcement, but law enforcement might not necessarily support Trump. In what should be seen as a stinging rebuke on Friday, a report written by Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration, a group comprising nearly two hundred current and former police chiefs, sheriffs, federal and state prosecutors, and attorneys general from all fifty states, rejected Trumps tough-on-crime approach.

In early February, the President signed an executive order creating this Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety at the Justice Department, and signed another order to curb gang and drug activity. The proposal and these orders, however, do not target their language and efforts on fighting violent crimethe most serious threat to our public safety. Instead, they encourage law enforcement to focus on crime more generally. Federal resources are imperative to combat crime across the country, but failing to direct these resources toward our most immediate and dangerous threats risks wasting taxpayer dollars, the report, called Fighting Crime and Strengthening Criminal Justice: An Agenda for the New Administration, reads.

We need not use arrest, conviction, and prison as the default response for every broken law. For many nonviolent and first-time offenders, prison is not only unnecessary from a public safety standpoint, it also endangers our communities, it continues.

The paper was co-authored by David Brown, who was the widely praised police chief in Dallas when five law enforcement officers were shot at a protest there last summer.

Well have to wait and see how the regime responds to these recommendations. But it is likely the administration will push back against a more measured approach to policing because a comprehensive war on crime is a great way to scare the populace and eliminate political enemies, as Nixon aide John Ehrlichman made clear in a conversation with Harpers last year.

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," Ehrlichman said. "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

If anything, Trump is more paranoid and vindictive than Nixon. And it will be hard for police departments to refuse federal money. Because tons of cops are empowered by the election of Trump, and because policing is one of the few professions where the union is often as powerful as the boss, chiefs who dont support Trumps policies may fall.

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Democracy in Crisis: Trump's Tough-on-Crime Week - The Independent Weekly