Weakening democracy lol

[lpetrich]

DM then defends figurehead monarchies. *Gag*

His argument is that parliamentary-system presidents may be meddlesome. But so can monarchs.

 

[lpetrich]

Behind Manchin’s Opposition, a Long History of Fighting Climate Measures - The New York Times - "Senator Joe Manchin III noted climate policy when he said he would vote against the Build Back Better Act. In his life and career, West Virginia coal has loomed large."

The version of the bill that passed the House last month devoted $555 billion to shifting the nation to renewable sources of energy, such as wind and solar power, and away from fossil fuels like West Virginia coal. Mr. Manchin, who defied gale-force political headwinds in 2010 by running for the Senate on his opposition to President Barack Obama’s climate change legislation, killed a provision in Build Back Better that would have imposed stiff penalties on electric utilities that continued to burn coal and natural gas.

But even with the stick dropped from the House’s bill, West Virginia’s coal interests were working hard to kill off the measure’s carrot, a package of tax credits to make clean energy more financially competitive, and, by extension, struggling coal even less so. Their lobbyists talked frequently to Mr. Manchin.

Tara Dublin (Taylor's Version) on Twitter: "I love this woman so so much. This is just another reason why I named one of my cats after Auntie Maxine Waters #MAGAManchin @RepMaxineWaters" / Twitter
noting
I Us on Twitter: "Congressperson Maxine Waters at a church in Los Angeles, spoke on Manchin’s obstruction of the BBB bill. (vid link)" / Twitter

She challenged Sen. Manchin to go on TV and explain why he is against each bit of BBB.

She can be fierce. Like this: Maxine Waters Says She Told Jim Jordan to ‘Shut Your Mouth’ for ‘Bullying’ Dr. Fauci | MSNBC - YouTube

 

[lpetrich]

Juan Williams: American democracy is in peril | TheHill
Noting Trump's claim that the election was stolen from him and that many Republicans continue to believe that.

The deepest wound is to America’s founding identity as a nation of laws.

The U.S. is “closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe,” Barbara Walter, a member of a CIA advisory panel called the Political Instability Task Force, writes in a forthcoming book.

Walter, a professor at the University of California at San Diego, predicts that such a war, if it comes, will feature “insurgency, guerrilla warfare, terrorism."

Walter’s book “How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them” says two factors point to a possible future civil war in America:

• the erosion of democratic norms -- something associated with the rise of autocratic leaders
• the rise of power-seekers “using racial, religious or ethnic divisions to try to gain political power.” -- like white supremacists

Poll: A majority of Americans believe U.S. democracy is in crisis : NPR

A new NPR/Ipsos poll finds that 64% of Americans believe U.S. democracy is "in crisis and at risk of failing." That sentiment is felt most acutely by Republicans: Two-thirds of GOP respondents agree with the verifiably false claim that "voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election" — a key pillar of the "Big Lie" that the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.

...
The country can't even decide what to call the assault on the Capitol. Only 6% of poll respondents say it was "a reasonable protest" — but there is little agreement on a better description. More than half of Democrats say the Jan. 6 assault was an "attempted coup or insurrection," while Republicans are more likely to describe it as a "riot that got out of control."

...
"I think the Democrats rigged the election," said Stephen Weber, a Republican from Woonsocket, R.I. "And who the hell would vote for Biden?"

A Republican may not be a very good judge of that. Fox News caricatures are far from the real thing.

Democrats also expressed dismay about the state of democracy — but for very different reasons. In follow-up interviews, they voiced concern about voting restrictions passed by Republican-controlled state legislatures in the wake of the 2020 election. And they struggled to make sense of the persistent belief in the fiction that Trump won.

"When Trump first came out with his 'big lie,' it just never occurred to me that so many Republicans would jump on board," said Susan Leonard of Lyme, N.H.

"It's like a group mental illness has hit these people," said Leonard. "I cannot believe this is happening in our country. I'm scared, I really am."

 

[lpetrich]

US could be under rightwing dictator by 2030, Canadian professor warns | US politics | The Guardian

By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.

We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine. In 2014, the suggestion that Donald Trump would become president would also have struck nearly everyone as absurd. But today we live in a world where the absurd regularly becomes real and the horrible commonplace.

...
I’m a scholar of violent conflict. For more than 40 years, I’ve studied and published on the causes of war, social breakdown, revolution, ethnic violence and genocide, and for nearly two decades I led a centre on peace and conflict studies at the University of Toronto.

Today, as I watch the unfolding crisis in the United States, I see a political and social landscape flashing with warning signals.

Then mentioning Rush Limbaugh: "I remarked to friends at the time that, with each broadcast, it was if Mr. Limbaugh were wedging the sharp end of a chisel into a faint crack in the moral authority of U.S. political institutions, and then slamming the other end of that chisel with a hammer."

Then the likes of Fox News and Newsmax.

What seems to have pushed the United States to the brink of losing its democracy today is a multiplication effect between its underlying flaws and recent shifts in the society’s “material” characteristics. These shifts include stagnating middle-class incomes, chronic economic insecurity, and rising inequality as the country’s economy – transformed by technological change and globalization – has transitioned from muscle power, heavy industry, and manufacturing as the main sources of its wealth to idea power, information technology, symbolic production and finance. As returns to labour have stagnated and returns to capital have soared, much of the U.S. population has fallen behind. Inflation-adjusted wages for the median male worker in the fourth quarter of 2019 (prior to the infusion of economic support owing to the COVID-19 pandemic) were lower than in 1979; meanwhile, between 1978 and 2016, CEO incomes in the biggest companies rose from 30 times that of the average worker to 271 times. Economic insecurity is widespread in broad swaths of the country’s interior, while growth is increasingly concentrated in a dozen or so metropolitan centres.

Two other material factors are key. The first is demographic: as immigration, aging, intermarriage and a decline in church-going have reduced the percentage of non-Hispanic white Christians in America, right-wing ideologues have inflamed fears that traditional U.S. culture is being erased and whites are being “replaced.” The second is pervasive elite selfishness: The wealthy and powerful in America are broadly unwilling to pay the taxes, invest in the public services, or create the avenues for vertical mobility that would lessen their country’s economic, educational, racial and geographic gaps. The more an under-resourced government can’t solve everyday problems, the more people give up on it, and the more they turn to their own resources and their narrow identity groups for safety.

Are the two sides alike? "While both wings of U.S. politics have fanned polarization’s flames, blame lies disproportionately on the political right."

As Dr. Theda Skocpol notes, the Republican Party is “marriage of convenience between anti-government free-market plutocrats and racially anxious ethno-nationalist activists and voters.”

About Fascism,

And it’s not inaccurate to use the F word. As conservative commentator David Frum argues, Trumpism increasingly resembles European fascism in its contempt for the rule of law and glorification of violence. Evidence is as close as the latest right-wing Twitter meme: widely circulated holiday photos show Republican politicians and their family members, including young children, sitting in front of their Christmas trees, all smiling gleefully while cradling pistols, shotguns and assault rifles.

Those guns are more than symbols. The Trump cult presents itself as the only truly patriotic party able to defend U.S. values and history against traitorous Democrats beholden to cosmopolitan elites and minorities who neither understand nor support “true” American values. The Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. capitol must be understood in these terms. The people involved didn’t think they were attacking U.S. democracy – although they unquestionably were. Instead, they believed their “patriotic” actions were needed to save it.

Sort of like Adolf Hitler portraying himself as a great German patriot at his trial for leading the Beer Hall Putsch.

 

[lpetrich]

Jack Goldstone, a political sociologist at George Mason University in Washington, D.C., and a leading authority on the causes of state breakdown and revolution, told me that since 2016 we’ve learned that early optimism about the resilience of U.S. democracy was based on two false assumptions: “First, that American institutions would be strong enough to easily withstand efforts to subvert them; and second, that the vast majority of people will act rationally and be drawn to the political centre, so that it’s impossible for extremist groups to take over.”

But especially after the 2020 election, Dr. Goldstone said, we’ve seen that core institutions – from the Justice Department to county election boards – are susceptible to pressure. They’ve barely held firm. “We’ve also learned that the reasonable majority can be frightened and silenced if caught between extremes, while many others can be captured by mass delusions.” And to his surprise “moderate GOP leaders have either been forced out of the party or acquiesced to a party leadership that embraces lies and anti-democratic actions.”

JG has worked with Peter Turchin.

Once Republicans control Congress, Democrats will lose control of the national political agenda, giving Mr. Trump a clear shot at recapturing the presidency in 2024. And once in office, he will have only two objectives: vindication and vengeance.

A U.S. civil-military expert and senior federal appointee I consulted noted that a re-elected president Trump could be totally unconstrained, nationally and internationally.

A crucial factor determining how much constraint he faces will be the response of the U.S. military, a bulwark institution ardently committed to defending the Constitution.

But Trump is likely to appoint Trump loyalists to the top leadership of the armed forces.

The experts I consulted described a range of possible outcomes if Mr. Trump returns to power, none benign. They cited particular countries and political regimes to illustrate where he might take the U.S.: Viktor Orban’s Hungary, with its coercive legal apparatus of “illiberal democracy”; Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, with its chronic social distemper and administrative dysfunction; or Vladimir Putin’s Russia, with its harsh one-man hyper-nationalist autocracy. All agreed that under a second Trump administration, liberalism will be marginalized and right-wing Christian groups super-empowered, while violence by vigilante, paramilitary groups will rise sharply.

 

[lpetrich]

Jack Goldstone and Peter Turchin wrote Welcome To The ‘Turbulent Twenties’ - NOEMA in late 2020, before the elections.

Back to The Globe And Mail.

Perhaps Democrats squeak out a victory, and Republican states refuse to recognize the result. Or conversely, perhaps Republicans win, but only because Republican state legislatures override voting results; then Democratic protestors attack those legislatures. In either circumstance, much will depend on whether the country’s military splits along partisan lines.

Then discussing the Weimar Republic.

First, in both cases, a charismatic leader was able to unify right-wing extremists around a political program to seize the state. Second, a bald falsehood about how enemies inside the polity had betrayed the country – for the Nazis, the “stab in the back,” and for Trumpists, the Big Lie – was a vital psychological tool for radicalizing and mobilizing followers. Third, conventional conservatives believed they could control and channel the charismatic leader and rising extremism but were ultimately routed by the forces they helped unleash. Fourth, ideological opponents of this rising extremism squabbled among themselves; they didn’t take the threat seriously enough, even though it was growing in plain sight; and they focused on marginal issues that were too often red meat for the extremists. (Today, think toppling statues.)

Mitch McConnell is a good example of the third one. He cooperated with Trump and bailed him out twice.

To my mind, though, the fifth parallel is the most disconcerting: the propagation of a “hardline security doctrine.” Here I’ve been influenced by the research of Jonathan Leader Maynard, a young English scholar who is emerging as one of the world’s most brilliant thinkers on the links between ideology, extremism and violence. In a forthcoming book, Ideology and Mass Killing, Dr. Leader Maynard argues that extremist right-wing ideologies generally don’t arise from explicit efforts to forge an authoritarian society, but from the radicalization of a society’s existing understandings of how it can stay safe and secure in the face of alleged threats.

...
The rapid propagation of hardline security doctrines through a society, Dr. Leader Maynard says, typically occurs in times of political and economic crisis. Even in the Weimar Republic, the vote for the National Socialists was closely correlated with the unemployment rate.

The Nazis didn't get many votes when the economy was doing well, in the mid to late 1920's, but during the Great Depression, the Nazis started doing *very* well.

 

[lpetrich]

"Beyond a certain threshold, other new research shows, political extremism feeds on itself, pushing polarization toward an irreversible tipping point."

The nonlinear feedback dynamics of asymmetric political polarization | PNAS

Political polarization threatens democracy in America. ... Our analysis suggests that subtle differences in the frequency and amplitude with which public opinion shifts left and right over time may have a differential effect on the self-reinforcing processes of elites, causing Republicans to polarize more quickly than Democrats. We find that as self-reinforcement approaches a critical threshold, polarization speeds up. Republicans appear to have crossed that threshold while Democrats are currently approaching it.

Polarization and tipping points | PNAS

We used a computational model to search for an answer in the phase transitions of political polarization. The model reveals asymmetric hysteresis trajectories with tipping points that are hard to predict and that make polarization extremely difficult to reverse once the level exceeds a critical value.

Back to TGAM.

This suggests a sixth potential parallel with Weimar: democratic collapse followed by the consolidation of dictatorship. Mr. Trump may be just a warm-up act – someone ideal to bring about the first stage, but not the second. Returning to office, he’ll be the wrecking ball that demolishes democracy, but the process will produce a political and social shambles. Still, through targeted harassment and dismissal, he’ll be able to thin the ranks of his movement’s opponents within the state – the bureaucrats, officials and technocrats who oversee the non-partisan functioning of core institutions and abide by the rule of law. Then the stage will be set for a more managerially competent ruler, after Mr. Trump, to bring order to the chaos he’s created.

Someone like Ron DeSantis.

Under the less-optimistic scenarios, the risks to our country in their cumulative effect could easily be existential, far greater than any in our federation’s history. What happens, for instance, if high-profile political refugees fleeing persecution arrive in our country, and the U.S. regime demands them back. Do we comply?

 

[DrZoidberg]

3 reasons why New Zealand has the best-designed government in the world - Vox - Jan 16, 2015

Noting
The Perils of Presidentialism
Linz, Juan J. (Juan José), 1926-
Journal of Democracy, Volume 1, Number 1, Winter 1990, pp. 51-69 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/jod.1990.0011

Back to Vox.

We in the US tend to assume that — however awful we might think our politicians are — our political system is excellent. The Constitution is held in high esteem across the political spectrum, and Democrats and Republicans alike pay lip service to the "genius" of the Founders. But our system, combining two powerful legislative bodies with a strong executive, is pretty rare internationally. Indeed, it appears to be a weaker model than most; the US is the just about the only country to sustain a presidential system for a long period without descending into dictatorship.

We can learn a lot from other countries' models, which are often more streamlined and democratically representative than our own. The best of the bunch, in my judgment: New Zealand.

The article then discussed a downside of single-member districts: inadequate representation. A Democrat in rural Texas and a Republican in Manhattan are never likely to get well-represented. That is especially bad for when a candidate wins by a narrow margin - there is a big unrepresented population.

Author Dylan Matthews then discussed proportional representation, settling on mixed-member PR (MMP) as the best system. That is what's used in Germany, New Zealand, Lesotho, Bolivia, Scotland, and Wales.

Pure party list?

Party-list systems make it hard for a single party to get a majority, which means that if, say, a party has 45 seats out of 100, it still needs to win over a party with 6 seats to govern. The 6 seat party then has significant power to demand stuff, out of proportion to its actual level of support. So ironically, this form of proportional representation can have patently undemocratic consequences. Stuff like this has happened frequently in Israel, with fairly deleterious results.

DM says that nations with MMP avoid that kind of problem, but then again, there aren't many nations that use it.

Unlike party list representation, people still have representatives with at least some ties to their area, for whatever that's worth.

But more importantly, it means parties have to be organized enough to compete in a decent number of districts in order to have a shot. That discourages the kind of excessive party formation that happens under pure party-list representation, while still ensuring that smaller parties get some say.

It's not a fair fight. It's inherently easier to tweak an electoral system in a small country. The bigger the country the more complicated it is to balance it correctly

 

[southernhybrid]

Jimmy Carter believes that Democracy is at risk. I'm gifting his editorial that was published in the NYTimes last week, if anyone is interested in reading it.

nytimes.com/2022/01/05/opinion/jan-6-jimmy-carter.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhkSVUbBibSRdkhrxqAwvrGxvliw33_KS2EDD1L1fgYGc6A50LJL-JFVucE4g66FpVHIaN9A7t71PNeNEhgDAX285DdlclaZng88Iv2Azxu09fHBeExtGa6NmXpcbtxm7bk51jOKjW_ANyp2nchJA

 

[DrZoidberg]

Jimmy Carter believes that Democracy is at risk. I'm gifting his editorial that was published in the NYTimes last week, if anyone is interested in reading it.

nytimes.com/2022/01/05/opinion/jan-6-jimmy-carter.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhkSVUbBibSRdkhrxqAwvrGxvliw33_KS2EDD1L1fgYGc6A50LJL-JFVucE4g66FpVHIaN9A7t71PNeNEhgDAX285DdlclaZng88Iv2Azxu09fHBeExtGa6NmXpcbtxm7bk51jOKjW_ANyp2nchJA

It is regrettably clear that Europeans are prepared one bit to sacrifice anything to protect Ukraine against Putin's advances. Which is the same thing as not being willing to fight for democracy. It's a problem.

 

[lpetrich]

I couldn't help but return to that Vox article.
3 reasons why New Zealand has the best-designed government in the world - Vox
Then saying that constitutional monarchies are great. Most such monarchies, like the UK one, strike me as monarchies in name only, monarchies that are mostly indistinguishable from republics. Their monarchs are monarques fainéants, do-nothing monarchs.

The article quotes this table:

Type	ERLY	RESH	REGL
Constitutional monarchy	28	17	55
Indirectly elected president	21	37	42
Directly elected president	14	49	37

• ERLY - early elections
• RESH - Cabinet refhuffling/replacement
• REGL - regular elections/other

Source: Shut up, royal baby haters. Monarchy is awesome. - The Washington Post

I am NOT impressed. It strikes me as  Survivorship bias - the surviving monarchies are those whose nations have not had political upheavals over the last few centuries and/or those whose monarchs stay out of political fights. That's why Prince Charles seems so reckless.

There is also the problem that parliamentary-system presidents may be people accustomed to political action, so they may deciding to meddle in politics.

 

[lpetrich]

Are constitutional monarchies better than presidential republics? Correlation ≠ causation! | Suffragio -- looks at some different issues.


Trump endorses Hungary’s Orbán for reelection - POLITICO - "It’s not the first time the former president has backed a populist foreign leader with authoritarian tendencies."
noting
Endorsement of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán

Viktor Orbán of Hungary truly loves his Country and wants safety for his people. He has done a powerful and wonderful job in protecting Hungary, stopping illegal immigration, creating jobs, trade, and should be allowed to continue to do so in the upcoming Election. He is a strong leader and respected by all. He has my Complete support and Endorsement for reelection as Prime Minister!

Donald Trump on Vladimir Putin: In his own words | CNN Politics - 2016 July 28

• October 2007: Trump said Putin’s doing a great job
• December 2011: Trump praised Putin’s “intelligence” and “no-nonsense way” in his book “Time to Get Tough.”
• June 2013: Trump wonders if Putin will be his “new best friend”
• October 2013: Trump says Putin is outsmarting the US
• July 31, 2015: Trump says they’d get along
• Oct. 11, 2015: Trump says they had good ratings together
• Nov. 10, 2015: Trump reiterates that he and Putin “were stablemates”
• Dec. 17, 2015: Trump returns Putin’s praise
• Dec. 18, 2015: Trump defends against allegations Putin has ordered the killings of journalists
• Feb. 17, 2016: Trump says he’d be “crazy” to disavow Putin’s praise
• April 28, 2016: Trump says maybe they’ll get along
• July 28: Trump says he’d be firm with Putin

 

[lpetrich]

America’s Self-Obsession Is Killing Its Democracy - The Atlantic - "The U.S. still has a chance to fix itself before 2024. But when democracies start dying—as ours already has—they usually don’t recover."

Author Brian Klass, a contributing editor to The Atlantic and a global-politics professor at University College London, started with

In 2009, a violent mob stormed the presidential palace in Madagascar, a deeply impoverished red-earthed island off the coast of East Africa. They had been incited to violence by opportunistic politicians and media personalities, successfully triggering a coup. A few years later, I traveled to the island, to meet the new government's ringleaders, the same men who had unleashed the mob.

As we sipped our coffees and I asked them questions, one of the generals I was interviewing interrupted me.

“How can you Americans lecture us on democracy?” he asked. “Sometimes, the president who ends up in your White House isn’t even the person who got the most votes.”

“Our election system isn’t perfect,” I replied then. “But, with all due respect, our politicians don’t incite violent mobs to take over the government when they haven’t won an election.

A decade later, one of them did: Donald Trump.

During the Donald Trump presidency, the news covered a relentless barrage of “unprecedented” attacks on the norms and institutions of American democracy. But they weren’t unprecedented. Similar authoritarian attacks had happened plenty of times before. They were only unprecedented to us.

After noting some quick deaths of democracy in the past,

But in the 21st century, most democracies die like a chronic but terminal patient. The system weakens as the disease spreads. The agony persists over years. Early intervention increases the rate of survival, but the longer the disease festers, the more that miracles become the only hope.

American democracy is dying. There are plenty of medicines that would cure it. Unfortunately, our political dysfunction means we’re choosing not to use them, and as time passes, fewer treatments become available to us, even though the disease is becoming terminal. No major prodemocracy reforms have passed Congress. No key political figures who tried to overturn an American election have faced real accountability. The president who orchestrated the greatest threat to our democracy in modern times is free to run for reelection, and may well return to office.

Our current situation started with a botched diagnosis. When Trump first rose to political prominence, much of the American political class reacted with amusement, seeing him as a sideshow. Even if he won, they thought, he’d tweet like a populist firebrand while governing like a Romney Republican, constrained by the system. But for those who had watched Trump-like authoritarian strongmen rise in Turkey, India, Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Venezuela, Trump was never entertaining. He was ominously familiar.

Why does BK seem to know much more than many Americans?

At issue was a classic frame-of-reference problem. America’s political culture is astonishingly insular. Turn on cable news and it’s all America, all the time. Other countries occasionally make cameos, but the story is still about us.

Related to this is the remarkable ignorance that many Americans have about other nations' political systems, even those that one might expect to be knowledgable. How many people understand how a parliamentary government works? Proportional representation?

 

[lpetrich]

That’s why most American pundits and journalists used an “outsider comes to Washington” framework to process Trump’s campaign and his presidency, when they should have been fitting every fresh fact into an “authoritarian populist” framework or a “democratic death spiral” framework.

Ignoring that the system itself is at risk.

Even today, too many think of Trump more as Sarah Palin in 2012 rather than Viktor Orbán in 2022. They wrongly believe that the authoritarian threat is over and that January 6 was an isolated event from our past, rather than a mild preview of our future. That misreading is provoking an underreaction from the political establishment. And the worst may be yet to come.

The basic problem is that one of the two major parties in the U.S.—the Trumpified Republican Party—has become authoritarian to its core.

One must either reform the Republican Party or else win *every* election.

Erica Frantz, a political scientist and expert on authoritarianism at Michigan State University, told me she shares that concern: With Republicans out of the White House and in the congressional minority, “democratic deterioration in the U.S. has simply been put on pause.”

...
When democracies start to die, they usually don’t recover. Instead, they end up as authoritarian states with zombified democratic institutions: rigged elections in place of legitimate ones, corrupt courts rather than independent judges, and propagandists replacing the press.

There are exceptions. Frantz pointed to Ecuador, Slovenia, and South Korea as recent examples. In all three cases, a political shock acted as a wake-up call, in which the would-be autocrat was removed and their political movement either destroyed or reformed.

A big problem is that Republicans have been reluctant to do what was done in South Korea -- purge their party of Trumpies and suchlike authoritarians. So 6 out of 10 voters consider the January 6 insurrection "legitimate protest", and only 1 out of 10 an insurrection. Whatever happened to Antifa? The FBI?

And rather than cleaning house, the Republicans who dared to condemn Trump are now the party’s biggest pariahs, while the January 6 apologists are rising stars.

Frantz concurred: “What did surprise me and change my assessment was the Republican Party’s decision to continue to embrace Trump and stand by him. The period following the Capitol riots was a critical one, and the party’s response was a turning point.”

That leaves American democracy with a bleak prognosis. Barring an electoral wipeout of Republicans in 2022 (which looks extremely unlikely), the idea that the party will suddenly abandon its anti-democracy positioning is a delusion.

Then a long list of possible reforms, like:

• Establishing a constitutional right to vote -- the US Constitution is hard to amend, though state constitutions are easier.
• Establishing a nonpartisan election-management body.
• Electing the President by popular vote.
  [*}Reducing the gap in representation between high-population and low-population states. Currently, ever state has 2 Senators. One could make the Senate more proportional, or else weaken or abolish the Senate.
• Introducing multimember districts with proportional representation. How happy it is to see someone suggest that for the US in a major publication.
• Aggressively regulating campaign spending.
• Establishing age limits for Supreme Court Justices.

The American system isn’t just dysfunctional. It’s dying. Nyhan believes there is now a “significant risk” that the 2024 election outcome will be illegitimate. Even Frantz, who has been more optimistic about America’s democratic resilience in the past, doesn’t have a particularly reassuring retort to the doom-mongers: “I don’t think U.S. democracy will collapse, but just hover in a flawed manner for a while, as in Poland.”

 

[lpetrich]

Over in the RvW thread, I noted MSNBC commentator Ben Rhodes:
Ben Rhodes on Twitter: "Alito is so extremist far right that his idea of owning the libs is taking shots at Boris Johnson." / Twitter

But he is also the author of "After the Fall: the Rise of Authoritarianism in the World We've Made"
Ben Rhodes on Twitter: "1. The paperback of my book on the rise of authoritarianism, After the Fall, is out. ..." / Twitter

1. The paperback of my book on the rise of authoritarianism, After the Fall, is out. It's the backstory of a world unravelling, extraordinary people fighting back, and my personal journey through the rough currents of politics and identity today.

2. After the Fall tells the story of Viktor Orban’s rise in Hungary, Vladimir Putin’s transformation of Russia into a belligerent kleptocracy, the emergence of China’s techno-totalitarian alternative model, and the unravelling of American democracy.

3. One comment I heard when the book came out: "this is kind of dark." Over the last year, events in Hungary, Russia, China and the US have reinforced that an honest view of what’s happening demands that we face darkness head on - indeed, that's a prerequisite for holding to hope

4. In Hungary, Orban recently won another mandate that was largely pre-ordained bc of the authoritarian playbook he has pursued - a playbook that draws on Putin’s example and is being copied by the Republican Party.

5. The ties between Orban and Republicans that I wrote about have become much less subtle, with Orban recently hosting CPAC – America’s pageant of right-wing extremism as a showcase of illiberalism.

6. One of the Russians I spoke with, @navalny, has been sentenced to a long prison term. Above for telling the truth about Putin’s Russia at a time when a conscience is not welcome in Russian politics.

7. The invasion of Ukraine, foreshadowed by some of the Russian voices in this excerpt from After the Fall, showcases both the extreme violence where ethno-nationalist authoritarianism inevitably leads and the limitations of the model that Putin has built.

8. The Hong Kong movement I profiled has been crushed by the weight of China’s national security laws even as many of its young people have taken their struggle for identity and democracy global (reinforcing Taiwan’s drift from China).

9. The dystopia of the CCP’s techno-totalitarian model is on display not just in Xinjiang province but in Shanghai, which I wrote about as a manifestation of China’s model to the world.

10. In the United States, January 6 was not a wake-up call but rather just one more chapter in the Republican Party’s transformation into a party that pursues power not through democracy, but rather by dismantling it.

11. Of course this same nationalist authoritarian trend is playing out from Israel to Brazil to India to the Philippines and beyond. Only active citizenship can reverse it and it will take at least a generation to swing the pendulum back.

12. Among the reasons to be hopeful? In the U.S. and around the world, people are far more aware of the dangers to democracy today than they were in past years. In Ukraine, people are showing that a democratic national identity is literally stronger than autocracy.

13. What gives me the greatest hope, though, are the stories of people like those who I profile in After the Fall. Because I still believe that more people would rather live in systems that value the freedom and dignity of individuals, even though nothing about that is given.

14. I hope you read this book and others wrestling with these issues. Amidst social media discourse where everything seems to have the biggest stakes and smallest impact, I still believe that spending real time with a subject is most valuable to me as a reader and writer. Thanks!

 

[lpetrich]

From his book:

... I asked him to walk me through how his country's prime minister, Viktor Orbán, had transformed Hungary from an open democracy to a largely authoritarian system in the span of a decade. It took him only a few minutes. Win elections through right-wing populism that taps into people's outrage over the corruption and inequities wrought by unbridled globalization. Enrich corrupt oligarchs who in turn fund your politics. Create a vast partisan propaganda machine. Redraw parliamentary districts to entrench your party in power. Pack the courts with right-wing judges and erode the independence of the rule of law. Keep big business on your side with low taxes and favorable treatment. Demonize your political opponents through social media disinformation. Attack civil society as a tool of George Soros. Cast yourself as the sole legitimate defender of national security. Wrap the whole project in a Christian nationalist message that taps into the longing for a great past. Offer a sense of belonging for the disaffected masses. Relentlessly attack the Other: immigrants, Muslims, liberal elites.

Just like the US Republican Party.

Then about Russian dissident Viktor Navalny,

As usual, the thing that grated most on Navalny about Putin's Hhetorical broadsides against the West was how they elided the extent to which everything Putin did was in service of power and profit. "What is the best response to Putin?" Navalny asked, clearly prepared to answer his own question. "Look, if the West is so mean and bad and ugly and there are gays everywhere and the gay marriages and morality is dying - which they are talking about all the time - my response is: I'm showing that these guys who are blaming the West have a palace somewhere in France. Showing people they are using their families, and their nostalgia to live in a great country - Make Russia Great Again - they're using it for their own personal good and personal profit." Navalny paused for effect. "'We can have a great country, who can be a leader of Europe, and one of the best countries in the world, without that stuff."

Then about how Russian leaders liked to build empires rather than improve conditions at home. The Tsars did it, the Soviet Union's leaders did it, and now VP wants to do it.

It's like how the Soviet leaders liked to buy lots of goodies from the Western evil empires.

Ben Rhodes: We Have Reached a Hinge of History - The Atlantic

 

[lpetrich]

Home | Democracy Matrix hosted by the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, Germany

On top were the countries that turn up on top in other indices of democracy and social development: northern and central European countries, and scattered countries elsewhere. The US is at #36 with score 0.811 - "Deficient Democracy", though it is one of the highest with that label. The best ones have label "Working Democracy".

All those that scored better than the US:

• Northern Europe: Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Iceland
• Central Europe: Germany, Switzerland, Austria
• Ex British Empire: New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, UK, Canada, Barbados
• Latin America: Costa Rica, Uruguay, Chile
• Western and Southern Europe: Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus
• Eastern Europe: Estonia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Czechia, Latvia
• Eastern Asia: South Korea, Japan, Taiwan
• Middle East: Israel

The site also has graphs over time. They are interesting.

The US is at about 0.65 in 1900, then jumps up to 0.7 in 1920, when women got the vote. Then slowly rises to 0.8 in the early 1960's, then increases more rapidly, reaching 0.9 in the early 1970's. It then very slowly rises, then drops to about 0.85 after 2016, when Donald Trump was elected.

Looking at Germany, the late 19th cy. German Empire was at 0.5, then the Weimar Republic was at 0.65, then the Third Reich at close to 0, and then West Germany and unified Germany at close to 0.95. East Germany was at 0.15 for nearly all of its existence.

Russia was 0.05 - 0.1 in the Tsarist and Soviet years, was at 0.6 in the Yeltsin years, and gradually declined to 0.3 in the Putin years.

Lots of other interesting trajectories: Country Graph | Democracy Matrix (I'd selected the US in it) - like much of Latin America jumping around a lot.

 

[lpetrich]

Assesses democracies with a matrix of combined factors:

• Procedures of Decision
• Regulation of the Intermediate Sphere
• Public Communication
• Guarantee of Rights
• Rules Settlement and Implementation
• Dimension (total)

and

• Freedom
• Equality
• Control
• Institution (total)

Combined as

• Procedures of Decision (PD): Freedom -- Are political offices filled by free and competitive elections?
• Procedures of Decision (PD): Equality -- Do all citizens have equal voting rights?
• Procedures of Decision (PD): Control -- Are elections supervised by an autonomous election management body and/or civic election observers?
• Regulation of the intermediate Sphere (RI): Freedom -- Can parties and civil society organizations form and act freely?
• Regulation of the intermediate Sphere (RI): Equality -- Do all relevant interests of the society have the same chance to organize and influence political decisions?
• Regulation of the intermediate Sphere (RI): Control -- Do political parties and civic organizations control the government and political representatives?
• Public/Communication (PC): Freedom -- Are the freedom of expression and press freedom in place?
• Public/Communication (PC): Equality -- Do all relevant interests and citizens have the same chance of access to media and information?
• Public/Communication (PC): Control -- Does the media control the political representatives and government activity?
• Guarantee of Rights (GR): Freedom -- Is there an independent judiciary and the rule of law?
• Guarantee of Rights (GR): Equality -- Do all citizens have the same access to justice and enjoy equality before the law?
• Guarantee of Rights (GR): Control -- Do governmental organizations respect legal norms and comply with judicial decisions?
• Rules settlement/implementation (RS): Freedom -- Is the rules settlement and implementation realized by an effective and independent government?
• Rules settlement and implementation (RS): Equality -- Do legislature, executive as well as the administration treat all citizens equal?
• Rules settlement and implementation (RS): Control -- Is the government controlled by the legislature (or opposition) and administration?

Totals over dimension:

• Institution Index: Procedures of Decision (PD) -- Are political offices filled by free and fair elections? Are elections supervised by independent election observers?
• Institution Index: Regulation of Intermediate Sphere (RI) -- Are intermediate organizations (political parties, associations, civil society) able to represent freely and fairly all relevant interests in the society, and control political officials and governmental action effectively?
• Institution Index: Public/Communication (PC) -- Is a free and fair representation of all interests ensured? Does the media control the government?
• Institution Index: Guarantee of Rights (GR) -- Are political rights and civil liberties for all citizens guaranteed by procedures corresponding to the principles of the rule of law (independent judiciary, equality before the law, effective jurisdiction)?
• Institution Index: Rules settlement and implementation (RS) -- Is the government independent from the influence of non-democratic legitimized veto players, and is it controlled by the legislature (or opposition) and administration? Do the executive and legislature treat all citizens equally?

Totals over institution:

• Dimension Index: Freedom -- Is the principle of the citizens' self-determination rooted in the political community and pervades all institutions of the political system?
• Dimension Index: Equality -- Do citizens have equal and fair chances to participate in relevant democratic procedures, and are citizens treated equally by governmental institutions?
• Dimension Index: Control -- Are political officials and governmental action effectively controlled by vertical and horizontal accountability?

Grand total:

• Overall Index -- Are freedom, equality, and control in all institutions realized?

Seems like it would be interesting to download all of the site's data and then do a principal component analysis on it. What is correlated with what?

 

[lpetrich]

Opinion | There’s a Reason Trump Could Try to Overturn the Results of the 2020 Election - The New York Times

Sometimes, it seems, the Senate isn’t entirely useless.

On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of 16 senators, led by Susan Collins of Maine and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, released the text of a new bill intended to make it harder to overturn the results of a presidential election. A direct response to Donald Trump’s multipronged attempt to stay in power, the bill is meant to keep a future candidate for president, including a losing incumbent, from following the same playbook.

...
The bill would address each part of the scheme. It would require states to choose electors according to the laws that existed before Election Day and prevent state legislatures from overriding the popular vote by declaring a “failed election.”

The bill would make it clear that each state can send only one slate of electors to Congress. It would require the governor (or other designated official) to certify the winning candidate’s electors before a specified deadline, to try to prevent postelection manipulation. If a state tries to subvert this process, the bill sends the dispute to a panel of federal judges. Candidates can then appeal the judges’ decision to the Supreme Court on an expedited basis.

As for Congress, the bill makes clear that the vice president has only a “ministerial” role in the counting of electors and raises the bar for objections, from only one member in each chamber of Congress, to one-fifth of all members in both the House and Senate.

Author Jamelle Bouie called it a "good bill".

There’s also the effect of the Electoral College on how Americans conceptualize democracy. It “frames elections more as complex puzzles or logic games than as singularly important moments in self-governance,” the legal scholar Katherine Shaw notes in an article for the Michigan Law Review.

...
Despite the good things about this bill, the single most important reform we could make for our presidential elections is to end the Electoral College in its current form, whether that means a national popular vote or the proportional allocation of electors (which already exists in both Maine and Nebraska) or some hybrid of the two.

The Maine-Nebraska system is two electors elected by winner-take-all for the state, and the rest of the electors elected by each Congressional district. That is not true proportionality, and it is vulnerable to gerrymandering.

JB concludes with

With that said, the most important safeguard for our electoral system isn’t a particular set of rules and arrangements, but political actors who accept defeat, honor the results of an election and allow the winner to take and exercise the power to which they’re entitled. And it is a serious, possibly existential problem for American democracy that a large part of one of our two major parties just doesn’t want to play ball.

 

[lpetrich]

Opinion | There Are 100 People in America With Way Too Much Power - The New York Times
Senators.

Toward the end of my Tuesday column on the Senate, I gestured toward the idea of making it into something like the British House of Lords, which has limited power to veto legislation or make policy. Most democracies with bicameral national legislatures have done something similar, empowering their lower, popular chambers and weakening their upper chambers.

The Canadian Senate, for example, acts mainly as a council of revision, amending legislation that comes out of the House of Commons. It can reject legislation, but it rarely exercises that power. The Australian Senate has much more power to block legislation from the House, but the chamber is more democratic than its American counterpoint in that it is apportioned by proportional representation.

That's when they have upper houses. Of top scorers,

• Yes: Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Ireland, Canada, Australia, UK, Japan, Uruguay
• No: Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, S Korea, Taiwan, Costa Rica

I recall someone claiming that Germany's states are all unicameral, and I fact-checked that by checking on all the  States of Germany. That is indeed the case. I also checked on  Countries of the United Kingdom, and I found that all but England have their own legislatures, all unicameral. England, however, has none. US states, however, are all bicameral except for Nebraska, which is unicameral.

The United States stands alone with a Senate that is powerful enough to grind the entire legislature to a halt. You could end the filibuster, of course, and that would improve things, but it would take a constitutional amendment to do any root and branch reform of the Senate.