Group items tagged

Kasparov’s latest gambit is promoting what he views as two essential, connected ideas: that Putin’s war in Ukraine is a war for democracy itself, and that Western democracies are in peril unless their citizens fight for democratic values at home.

“I grew up in the Soviet Union, so I experienced undemocratic rule,” Kasparov said. “And while I never thought America was even close to this kind of desperation, when you look at history, the real threat in democracy comes when you have polarization.”

With Russia’s war effort flagging in Ukraine, Kasparov senses “panic” among authoritarian leaders from North Korea to Venezuela, because, he said, they view Putin as a man with “almost mystical powers.”

Putin is preparing to invade Ukraine again—or pretending he will invade Ukraine again—for the same reason. He wants to destabilize Ukraine, frighten Ukraine. He wants Ukrainian democracy to fail. He wants the Ukrainian economy to collapse. He wants foreign investors to flee. He wants his neighbors—in Belarus, Kazakhstan, even Poland and Hungary—to doubt whether democracy will ever be viable, in the longer term, in their countries too.

Farther abroad, he wants to put so much strain on Western and democratic institutions, especially the European Union and NATO, that they break up.

Putin will also fail, but he too can do a lot of damage while trying. And not only in Ukraine.

Donald Trump, it turns out, may have been the best thing that could have happened to American democracy.

since the threat to democracy is much broader and deeper than one man, we’re actually fortunate that the forces menacing America have such a ludicrous person as their public face.

“How Democracies Die,” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. As the authors — professors of government at Harvard — point out, in recent decades a number of nominally democratic nations have become de facto authoritarian, one-party states. Yet none of them have had classic military coups, with tanks in the street.

it’s clear that the internet and social media have succeeded in doing what many feared and some hoped they would. They have disrupted and destroyed institutional constraints on what can be said, when and where it can be said and who can say it.

They are contributing — perhaps irreversibly — to the decay of traditional moral and ethical constraints in American politics.

“if you took the label off, someone looking at the United States would have to be worried about democratic failure or transitioning toward a hybrid regime.”

This notion of a national culture, rooted in, if not defined by, a common ethnicity, is even more powerful in European nations, which is why Brexit is so closely allied to Trumpism.

Is Britain changing so fast that it could lose any meaningful continuity with its history and culture? That is the question now occupying the British neo-reactionaries. Prime Minister Theresa May has not said many memorable things in office, except this: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”

Anton took issue with an article I wrote for this magazine in which I described Trump as reminiscent of Plato’s description of a tyrant emerging out of a decadent democracy and argued that we should do what we could to stop him.

When Joe Biden announced he was running for president two years ago, he couched his quest as a "battle for the soul of this nation." In those pre-pandemic days, he said he decided to run after watching neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville and hearing then-President Donald Trump declare there were "very fine people on both sides." America's "very democracy," Biden said, was at stake.

The message was clear in Biden's first address to Congress on Wednesday, when he restated what has become a common theme: "We have to prove that democracy still works."

"Democracy is in retreat." Its subsequent research found that the retreat continued -- with 2020 as the 15th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. During the pandemic, Freedom House further wrote, "democracy's defenders sustained heavy losses ... shifting the international balance in favor of tyranny."

The tale of the lotus-eating elites destroying the honest and authentic life of the hardworking commoners is a hell of a story, and it is rooted in the reality of actual human suffering. But as a criticism of liberal democracy, it is not new and it is not true.

When was this fortunate time when people back in our respective hometowns felt that the system was fair, or that times were good, or that the “elites”—back in the ’60s and ’70s, old Protestant white males who were practically selected before birth to attend fine universities—were somehow invested in the success of the lower classes?

Not many Americans want to think very much about what it would actually mean in social or economic terms to go back and live in those Kodachrome moments in their minds.

Trust in U.S. institutions has been declining for years, thanks to government scandals, economic dislocation, increased inequality and social media. Now, evidence is growing that the coronavirus pandemic is making the phenomenon much worse.

As Jonathan Haidt recently wrote in the Atlantic: “The right has been so committed to minimizing the risks of covid that it has turned the disease into one that preferentially kills Republicans. The progressive left is so committed to maximizing the dangers of covid that it often embraces an equally maximalist, one-size-fits-all strategy for vaccines, masks, and social distancing — even as they pertain to children.” The latter doesn’t kill people, but it has worsened isolation, polarization and Americans’ suspicion of the government.

The data strongly suggest that we are emerging from the crisis with lower levels of trust than before. This might account for why Americans seem excessively grouchy and unwilling to credit government for the recovery thus far. And it almost certainly is connected to higher levels of depression and anxiety in our daily lives.

Perhaps his most provocative claim is this: History will not necessarily favor the secular, liberal democracies of the West. Hamid does not believe all countries will inevitably follow a path from revolution to rational Enlightenment and non-theocratic government, nor should they

Hamid also thinks there’s something lacking in Western democracies, that there’s a sense of overarching meaninglessness in political and cultural life in these countries that can help explain why a young Muslim who grew up in the U.K. might feel drawn to martyrdom, for example.

it’s a note of skepticism about the promise of secular democracy—and the wisdom of pushing that model on other cultures and regions. 

at a time when the AfD seeks to informally push the limits of acceptable political speech, where and how should the state draw the legal line between what’s allowed and what’s not, particularly when it comes to a party that sits in Parliament?

“It shows you how difficult it is in a democracy … to define very clearly what is beyond the border of what’s acceptable,”

It brings up the question, to what extent can an open society actually defend itself against its enemies?”

I supervised this dissertation and knew it was something terrific, but I doubted it could be published because it was so terse and so far from the mainstream. It had received the Leo Strauss Award from the American Political Science Association as the best dissertation in political philosophy in 1974, but this was a citation of contested value for those who disagreed with Leo Strauss. Nonetheless, I tried to get her to revise it for publication during her lifetime, and she always refused, saying she needed to know more Aristotle (an infinite task). Then, 10 years after she died and at the urging of friends, I put it up at Chicago (my publisher for the most part), and to my great surprise, it sailed through, praised to the skies. It would have been more Harvard if this Harvard dissertation were being published by Harvard University Press, but it’s an honor that the Harvard government department will appreciate.  And it ought to cause a commotion among Aristotle scholars, as well as start waves that ought to reach the wider circles of thoughtful citizens in democracies. These are two “oughts” of the kind that in our age of haste sometimes takes time to be fulfilled.What does Delba Winthrop find and propose?

She punctures the complacency with which we defend democracy as the best or even the only legitimate form of government, and turns to Aristotle for justification of democracy. In Aristotle’s day and in ours, democrats want inclusiveness; they want above all to include everyone as part of a whole. But what is a whole?

The assertive quality of political speech, the argumentative character of argument, is shown to have a crucial role in philosophy itself, where human reason must claim its due as a contribution to the whole of the universe. Political science has the double task of teaching citizens how to include everyone and of teaching those who want to understand the thought that sustains democracy.

To undercut Russian and Nigerian kleptocrats, he would abolish anonymous shell companies and end nameless real-estate sales.

He wants nonpartisan commissions, not gerrymandering politicos, to draw electoral districts.

Like many election experts, he advocates ranked-choice voting. When voters pick not just their first choice but their second, third or fourth choices too, politicians can win not by pandering to their partisan base, but by appealing broadly for second- or third-choice votes.

Not only are the values that the left takes for granted heatedly disputed in many sections of the country, the way many Democratic partisans assert that their values supplant or transcend traditional beliefs serves to mobilize the right.

liberal democracy’s allowance of these things inevitably creates conditions of “normative threat,” arousing the classic authoritarian fears about threats to oneness and sameness, which activate those predispositions — about a third of most western populations lean toward authoritarianism — and cause the increased manifestation of racial, moral and political intolerance.

“Libertarians and/non-authoritarians,” Stenner writes,are likewise aroused and activated under these conditions, and move toward positions of greater racial, moral and political tolerance as a result. Which increases political polarization of the two camps, which further increases normative threat, and so it goes on. This is what I mean by the core elements of liberal democracy creating conditions that inevitably undermine it.

The correct response is the dispassionate application of the law. Not political persecution, but nor politically motivated leniency, either. We don't have to choose between unity and justice.

History teaches us the cost of well-meaning but shortsighted attempts to sacrifice justice for unity.

Russians learned this in the hardest possible way after the fall of the Soviet Union. As I discussed at length in my book, Winter Is Coming, they declined to root out the KGB security state in the interest of national harmony. It would be too traumatic, our leaders said, to expose the countless atrocities the Soviet security forces committed and to punish their authors.

President Donald Trump is trying to steal a free and fair election that he lost by a wide margin to President-elect Joe Biden by tearing at the most basic principle of American democracy: He's trying to throw out hundreds of thousands of votes.

He asked state Republican leaders in Michigan to visit him Friday, hinting at a possible attempt to convince them to ignore Biden's big win in the state and send a slate of electors to the Electoral College that backs him and not the President-elect.

Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who rampaged through an unhinged news conference Thursday, is in effect baselessly arguing that troves of Democratic mail-in ballots, many of them cast by Black voters, are illegal and that Trump has therefore won the election with room to spare.

I want to—God forgive me—defend Mike Lee.Lee sent out a bunch of not-especially-nuanced tweets about America not being a democracy and about democracy being less important than liberty, peace, and prosperity.

Lee is right.

Let’s start at the 30,000 foot view: Why democracy? As regular readers know I am . . . clear-eyed . . . about the collective wisdom of the great and good American people. I mean, just take a look around.

Over the past year, though, it has become evident that there are key weaknesses at the core of these strong states.

The weaknesses are of two sorts. First, the concentration of power in the hands of a single leader at the top all but guarantees low-quality decision making, and over time will produce truly catastrophic consequences

Second, the absence of public discussion and debate in “strong” states, and of any mechanism of accountability, means that the leader’s support is shallow, and can erode at a moment’s notice.

On this grim anniversary, I will leave the political and strategic retrospectives to others; instead, I want to share a more personal grief about the passing of the hopes so many of us had for a better world at the end of the 20th century.

I grieve for the young men who have been used as “cannon meat,” for children whose fathers have been dragooned into the service of a dictator, for the people who once again are afraid to speak and who once again are being incarcerated as political prisoners.

And then, within a few years, it was over. If you did not live through this time, it is difficult to explain the amazement and sense of optimism that came with the raspad, as Russians call the Soviet collapse,

In 1990, Fred Romero, an N.R.A. field representative, put the case as clearly as possible: “The Second Amendment is not there to protect the interests of hunters, sport shooters and casual plinkers.” Rather, the “Second Amendment is … literally a loaded gun in the hands of the people held to the heads of government.”

how can the people’s enemy be the representatives elected by the people?

It follows from this distinction that a government elected by the majority can begin to think it can do anything it wants to, can begin to act as if we lived in a democracy rather than in a republic, and when that happens, or is in danger of happening, there is what the former Senate candidate Sharron Angle called a “Second Amendment remedy.”

The failure of democracy to provide a coherent ranking of political hopefuls is a central insight of the sub-field of economics and political science known as social choice theory.

The issue is neatly illustrated by Condorcet’s paradox, which shows that a shifting set of coalitions can make a collective body appear that it has no idea what it wants.

The first possible defect is the problem the marquis illustrated — the problem of preference cycles.