Archive for the ‘Democracy’ Category
‘The January 6 insurrection was a wake-up call’ – Roanoke Times
Given certain events in recent years, Jim Bohland is worried about the fate of American democracy.
The professor emeritus at Virginia Tech founding director of its School of Public and International Affairs is focused on Novembers election and the unprecedented upheaval that followed the disputed presidential contest of 2020.
Hes gravely concerned the Jan. 6 insurrection and all the political scheming that preceded it were merely a warm-up for the mayhem that could occur after a Joe Biden-Donald Trump electoral rematch later this year.
Virginia Tech Professor Emeritus James R. Bohland is organizing a covocation on defending democracy Thursday afternoon at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Blacksburg.
We werent prepared then, Bohland told me in a Zoom interview with some others Thursday. I think we waited too long in 2020.
Bohland contacted me last week after the second of two columns about a little book by Yale history Professor Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.
Bohland suggested some additional reads. (A shortened list is attached to this column.)
He also dropped news about an event Thursday in Blacksburg. It hews to many concerns Snyder outlines in On Tyranny. The focus is preparing now to support democracy, whatever happens at the end of this year.
Bohland, who began at Tech in 1980 and is now retired, is still teaching courses through the universitys Lifelong Learning Institute. He recently wrapped up a four-week seminar that garnered about 50 students. The title was: Threats to Democracy Populism and Authoritarianism.
The event Thursday at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Blacksburg is kind of a next step. Its title is Defending Democracy: Convocation & Empowering Grassroots Action.
Its open to the public and begins at 1 p.m. at the church, 1301 Gladewood Drive in Blacksburg. Bohland and his co-organizers are hoping for a big turnout, with people from other churches, civic organizations, institutions, governments and any interested individuals.
Three books about defending democracy recommended by Virginia Tech Professor James R. Bohland. Through the university's Lifelong Learning Institute, he recently taught a four-week course:Threats to Democracy - Populism and Authoritarianism.
The assault on democracy in the United States by a political faction embracing authoritarianism necessitates urgent action to safeguard democratic principles, the invitation-flyer states.
We are inviting all concerned organizations and individuals to collaborate in devising strategies to fortify and extend our democratic ideals.
Co-organizer Bob Stimson, a retired public schoolteacher and principal, said Thursdays meeting is a logical follow-up to the Lifelong Learning Institute course Bohland just concluded.
My view is, a lot of people dont understand that democracy is threatened, and a lot of other people dont care that democracy is being threatened, Stimson said. The people that dont understand dont necessarily support the undermining of democracy. They just need to be educated on what the future might be.
Our goal is to widen the circle, get a lot of people involved . . . to engage the community, politicians, people, and churches, in defending democracy, Stimson said.
We want to leave that meeting with a plan, he added. We want to be able to go out and do something, not just meet and say, Isnt this bad?
Also involved in organizing Defending Democracy are Sara Dalton, a retired social worker, and the Rev. Pam Philips, pastor of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Blacksburg.
Every mature democracy possesses anti-democratic elements, Bohland told me.
Basically, a little under roughly 30% of the populace has authoritarian tendencies, Bohland said, citing The Authoritarian Dynamic, by political scientist Karen Stenner. Democracies always have that kind of latent tendency.
President Joe Biden says the threat to democracy has to be defended. He says you can't bury the truth about January 6. He speaks during the State of the Union address.
Though current anti-democratic pressures originate from Trump and other so-called conservatives, authoritarianism can also spring from the left. Its mirror image is populism. As examples, Bohland cited American politicians Huey Long, a governor and senator from Louisiana, and William Jennings Bryan, a congressman from Nebraska.
Both led left-populist mass movements and waged and lost campaigns for the White House. (Long was assassinated; Jennings ran twice as a Democrat and once for the Populist Party and lost each time.)
The strategy employed by both sides is divide and conquer, Bohland said. On the left, populists tend to see the world as a struggle between the rich and poor. On the right, authoritarians often frame it as a battle to preserve national culture from unchecked immigration.
Either way is us against them, he said.
That tactic isnt new; it dates at least to the Russian Revolution and probably before. From either side, the object is division.
Both push an Im right youre wrong kind of argument, Bohland said. Weve taken a kind of flamethrower approach to this thing, and that hurts unity. The goal of each side is to exploit the masses and take down democracy.
Objectives of the convocation include collaborative networking; supporting and safeguarding voting rights; advocating for elected officials committed to democratic governance; and empowering citizens to articulate democratic values.
The Jan. 6 insurrection was a wake-up call, said Dalton, a team leader for voting rights and reproductive freedom at the Blacksburg Unitarian church.
Im hoping well find people in the community who are interested in defending democracy and come up with actions we can take, she said. Were not going in with a set idea, this is what people should do. Were more interested in finding out what people are thinking in the community, and what theyd like to do.
Philips, whos led the Unitarian congregation since 2017, told me shes heard from pastoring peers whove related theyre reluctant to sermonize about supporting democracy.
Some of them feel like they cant speak from the pulpit about their concerns, she said. Part of it is, its just too political. They get a lot of grief from people in the pews for speaking out.
Philips told me that recently, shes been looking back on history when people didnt say something when they could or should have. Some of the parallel to 20th century Europe are hard to ignore.
During the rise of Nazism in Germany, some of the churches that did speak out were shut down. There were churches that aided and abetted when they should have spoken out about what was happening, she said.
But: If we dont address whats going on in the world on Sunday morning, were kind of burying our heads in the sand, Philips added.
Many good reasons to attend Thursday afternoons convocation in Blacksburg, if you can.
Former D.C. police officer Michael Fanone, who was at the Capitol on January 6, is is interviewed by Times-Dispatch columnist Michael Paul Williams.
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'The January 6 insurrection was a wake-up call' - Roanoke Times
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Democracy Report: Wave of democratic backsliding is a global threat – The Washington Post
Youre reading an excerpt from the Todays WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest free, including news from around the globe and interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday.
Three days of voting, staggered across 11 time zones and a vast stretch of the Earth, could only lead to one outcome: An emphatic reelection victory for Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was always clear that the Kremlin would exult in the landslide mandate accorded to Putin, who contested the vote against a handful of ciphers allowed to be presidential candidates. By Sunday evening, election officials announced a preliminary tally of that preordained result, reporting that Putin had won more than 87 percent of the vote, with three-fourths of the vote counted. State figures suggested a greater turnout than the previous presidential vote in 2018.
Even then, exiled watchdog groups reported episodes of ballot-stuffing, voter intimidation at some polling stations and other attempts at manipulation, including the alleged busing of Putin supporters to vote multiple times at different locations. In areas of Ukraine occupied and illegally annexed by Russia, observers recounted how local authorities coerced people to participate in the election at gunpoint.
Election officials were walking around the occupied town of Novomykolaivka, a local official, who has since fled to other areas of Ukraine, told my colleagues, in a brigade accompanied by an armed soldier. He was carrying a weapon, so it was a threat, not verbal, but in fact it was a threat of violence.
Voters in Russia held Noon Against Putin protests outside polling stations on March 17, the final day of the presidential election. (Video: Naomi Schanen/The Washington Post)
Thousands of Russians in big cities attempted to make their displeasure known at both the nature of Putins regime and the ongoing war in Ukraine by going to vote at noon Sunday a symbolic act of solidarity with the late pro-democracy activist Alexei Navalny, who had long called for fairer and freer elections in Russia before dying in captivity. Many spoiled their ballots. Russian authorities clamped down on other forms of dissent and tried to encourage voters to go to the polls ahead of the designated protest time.
I came here today to express my position and do my part to show that there is still a political life in the country and that there are different opinions, a man named Nikolai told my colleagues. Its important to show that people are not alone and that there is still support for this kind of action.
That need to cling to hope is profound and meaningful for anybody struggling under an authoritarian regime. And, on a global scale, the need to locate such hope is becoming more necessary. As already outlined in Todays WorldView, the bumper year of elections worldwide in 2024 comes at a moment of democratic recession, with the health of democracies around the world in notable decline.
A new study this month from the V-Dem Institute, a leading center for the analysis of comparative politics at Swedens University of Gothenburg, laid out some of the worrying macro-indicators. The institutes annual Democracy Report measures a democracy using a multidimensional data set based on a number of factors, including the civil liberties and freedoms afforded to all citizens, and their ability to participate in fair elections.
This years report found 35 countries witnessing a decline in free and fair elections. In 2019, the number was only 16. An election in Putins Russia is a foregone conclusion a regime going through the motions of democracy without any of its actual convictions. But other more genuine democracies are trending in Putins direction: V-Dem found that governments in 24 countries are increasingly encroaching upon the autonomy of election management bodies, undermining integrity in elections and casting doubt over the independence of the commissions that conduct them.
The erosion of election quality is particularly alarming as elections can either reinforce or counteract the autocratization trend, the institute noted. Of over 60 countries holding national elections this year, 31 are worsening on their democracy levels, while only three are improving.
In V-Dems analysis, the greatest source of concern is India, where the ruling Hindu nationalists under Prime Minister Narendra Modi look set to tighten an already outsize grip on power in upcoming elections. Some 42 countries are autocratizing, according to V-Dem, and 71 percent of the worlds population now lives in autocracies up from 48 percent just a decade ago.
These findings dovetail with a gloomy Pew survey published last month. In polls put to respondents in a spread of 24 countries, researchers found that enthusiasm for representative democracy has slipped since 2017, when the organization conducted a similar survey. It found that a median 59 percent respondents were dissatisfied with how their democracy is functioning, and that close to three-quarters of those polled in countries as disparate as Argentina, Germany and Kenya felt that elected officials dont care what they think. More than 40 percent said no political party in their country adequately reflects their views.
The survey found growing interest in alternatives to rule by elected officials, including an embrace of technocracy or even an autocratic strongman. In 13 countries, a quarter or more of those surveyed think a system in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts is a good form of government, noted Pew. In four of the eight middle-income nations in the study, at least half of respondents express this view.
Dictatorship or military rule, though, is not popular. And in its open-ended questions to respondents in two dozen countries, Pew found that people want more responsive politicians in power, term limits and liberalizing government forms. Putins Russia is hardly anyones ideal.
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Democracy Report: Wave of democratic backsliding is a global threat - The Washington Post
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The Disinformation Age: The Collapse Of Liberal Democracy In The United States Book Review – Eurasia Review
I owe it to a wonderful teacher of Translation Studies, Prof. DR, for having introduced the class to The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan (1991) by Eric Cheyfitz. I recollect an American student who said that his life changed after reading this book. Perhaps, he is not the only one.
I have read the book more than once and taught it to different groups of students. Its one of those books I almost by default recommend to research students as a model on how to conduct research along with Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985) by James Scott. Cheyfitz writes with a certain kind of passion; its impossible not to see how deeply he feels with the oppressed of the world. He belongs to the category of academics for whom teaching and research is not only about interpreting but also changing the world.
The reason I wanted to respond to this book is because I could see the importance of the concept of disinformation for an analysis of Indian media and politics. Cheyfitz book, although in a distinctly American context, throws light on quite a few things that are of global relevance. The premise is simple: an author might write a book keeping a specific situation in mind. It does not mean that what he or she says will not apply to other places and other situations. The part where Cheyfitz deals with disinformation in relation to the history of the United States needs an entirely different response, which I intend to undertake separately. Here, I am looking at disinformation in the Indian context.
Disinformation as a concept is of tremendous importance. By the time I finished reading the book I found the term for what the ruling party and the media are doing in India: theyre disinforming the masses. Disinformation and information exist side by sideBut whereas information is something we must consciously process through research of one kind or another (reading, listening, observing, and comparing what we gather), Disinformation processes us like a dream in the classic Freudian sense, where the dream is a structure of contradictions in which the dreamer never recognizes the contradictory structure. Information requires dialogue. Disinformation is a mesmerizing monologue, often masquerading as dialogue (22). Thats what Indian politics has gradually been reduced to since its independence from British rule: a mesmerizing monologue. There is nobody listening to the masses. There is nothing that reflects Indian reality except in a vague manner. The movies, the news, television, social media, discussions related to religion, politics, tradition, popular culture all have been reduced to a caricature. The Indian reality is that people are to a great extent poor, unemployed or underemployed, socially and emotionally repressed, along with bone crushing income inequality.
Cheyfitz makes important distinctions between misinformation, ideology and disinformation although sometimes we tend to use them as if they shared the same properties.
Whereas misinformation is merely a mistake in reportage that is typically retracted in the next days news or a distortion of the truth, conscious (spin) or unconscious, for particular ends, such as the Bush administrations fiction of weapons of mass destruction, Disinformation is a deep, historical process of erasing history itself, culminating in a disruption or blockage of critical thinking in which particular fictions, through repeated and widespread use in our major institutions (schools, media, government, and political parties), substitute reflexively for facts. But, and here is the crux of the matter, Disinformation is not ideology. It is, rather, ideologys mirror image. Disinformation appears as ideologys double and like the double is the reverse of ideology. Whereas ideology is a narrative that retains certain ties to reality, Disinformation is rhetoric utterly detached from, while substituting for, reality. That is, ideology bears a relation to reality even as it displaces reality. I am using reality here in its most material sense: who eats; who starves; who has health care; who sickens and dies without it; who is tortured; who for reasons of privilege (a matter of location, whether material or geographical or ideological) escapes torture; who works at a living wage; who cannot find work or works for wages at or below the poverty line; who receives an education that helps propel him or her into or secures them in the materially advantaged classes; who is denied such an education, etc. (23) (my emphasis)
In India we dont see any discussion of real issues on public platforms. Political parties have a single-point agenda: how to divide the masses, how to win elections, how to stay in power after winning elections, how to loot the country. Lying, cheating, deception and broad daylight robbery in the form of corruption are the order of the Indian day. In fact, corruption is so normal that for an Indian its like drinking water to quench thirst. A country where dishonesty is normalized is a country on a suicide mission. The suicide is not for the rich and the powerful. The suicide is for the diminishing middle classes, the expanding ranks of the poor and the powerless. Political parties talk of religion or caste in an abstract, disconnected way; no one talks about the poor and the unemployed as poor and unemployed. By reducing every other equation to religion and caste, they make it impossible for any honest debate on what needs to be done in order to bring the poor out of their misery. Both the ruling BJP and the main opposition the INC have nothing substantial to offer the masses.
Cheyfitz offers an example for disinformation when he says, The war on terror is a prime example of a fiction of Disinformation. The war on terror has no particular object or end; it is everywhere and can be anythingto the extent that misinformation is grounded in Disinformation, as the misinformation of weapons of mass destruction was grounded in the Disinformation of the war on terror, it can remain exceptionally resistant to information (24). When we analyze the information produced as news on a daily basis what we see is the barely disguised blatant use of force: I have the power to crush you and I will because it suits me to do so. Thats the message that comes out loud and clear. On one fundamental issue the political parties are in complete agreement; whatever be our differences, keep the masses backward and let them be without means to challenge the government except through elections. Rhetoric and reality have no connection to one another.
In the early 1980s I remember as a boy waiting for a bus one late night. No bus turned up for more than a couple of hours. Eventually I walked home. Those days the bus was the cheapest form of public transport. I remember telling myself that this situation should not continue and people should have better means of life. Maybe there are other means of transport now and the roads are slightly better. That does not change the fact that we are not on the path to change. There is no trace of real transformation except in a superficial sense. Everyone with a professional degree has one aim in mind: how fast to get out of this country. I blame them and I dont blame them. With the kind of income inequality that we see in India it is impossible for any normal person or family to have a life of basic dignity. Dignity comes from material independence. When that is absent people become insecure and treacherous, the insecurity justifying the treachery.
The British MP George Galloway, following his recent victory at Rochdale, said that, Keir Starmer (Labor) and Rishi Sunak (conservative) are two cheeks of the same backside. This is true of the Republicans and the Democrats in the United States and the ruling party and the opposition in India; both represent the same backside; both speak in a language that has no connection with material reality. They are not addressing the basic issues: the almost unbridgeable chasm between the ones who have and the ones who do not, the reinforcement of the status quo inversely proportional to the disempowerment of the masses, pollution that defies the imagination, absence of decent healthcare, lack of security for children and the old, especially from socially weak backgrounds and lack of a decent meal for everyone living in this country. Unfortunately, these things are outside of the nations imagination (36), which is also capitalisms imagination (14) or the neoliberal imagination. Why is it that an average Indian does not think that he or she deserves better? Why do we put up with corrupt politicians who cheat and oppress people? Why do we bear with a police that does not serve common people? Why do we have to endure backwardness as if it is our karmic destiny? Why is the corporate lobby so powerful that they control the pulse of the nation? Disinformation makes it possible for this to happen. As Cheyfitz observes in the American context:
Disinformation, then, is the dead end of ideology. It is the place where ideology no longer serves as a unifying national force, but reality does not intrude or only intrudes in fragments like pieces of a puzzle the polity cannot solvevirtually every U.S. citizen learns in school, from the mass media, and the two major political parties (or the one corporate party if you prefer), we live in a classless society where individual effort (not historical access to wealth tied to race, gender, and class) is the sole engine of success. Thus disinformed, we are taught implicitly to blame ourselves individually if we fail to succeed. Critical perspectives on the violent and unequal ways wealth has been distributed historically in the U.S. (beginning with the Constitution itself, Native American genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, the subversion of the union movement beginning in the 1980s, globalization, etc.) are substantially erased from mainstream public discourse as ongoing issues and thus from public policy decisions that might otherwise focus on the central issue of economic inequality substantially rather than rhetorically. (39-40)
The preamble of the Indian constitution begins rhetorically with the promise of a socialist republic (thats the only time that the word socialist is used in the constitution); there is no mention of class that is at the heart of justice, equality and liberty. Freedom of expression is freedom from repression; but repression is about economic inequality. You cannot prioritize political and social equality and put economic equality on the back burner. If people have to be politically and socially equal, they must also be economically equal. The writers of the Indian constitution ensured that class equality remains outside the purview of the constitution. Instead, in principle, we are all supposedly equal before law. What does it mean to be equal before law? How is an illiterate man from the slums equal to the owner of an apartment complex?
Reservations, which are largely based on social parameters, are no guarantee that we are heading towards an equal society. On the contrary, reservations create a section within oppressed groups who are only too happy to do the job of suppressing their own people in order to strengthen the arms of a repressive state. This is apart from the social envy that is created dividing people along the lines of caste and religion. Economic equality is not merely about preserving the constitution. The constitution has to be rewritten in local dialects in a way that the poor understand what is at stake for them. It cannot be too long either because the poor must be able to both read and interpret it. The current Indian constitution written in 17th century English prose, which, with my PhD in English from an American university I cannot sometimes figure out, is not really the recipe for an egalitarian society. Constitutionality in essence must be about economic equality. Thats how we empower the poor: with information that helps them fight injustice through knowledge. Ignorance never helped anyone! Never!, protests the young Marx in Raoul Pecks beautifully made historical drama film, The Young Karl Marx (2017). To condemn people to live in ignorance of a law that they are subjected to on a daily basis is sinful to say the least.
The absence of economic equality creates a form of subservience among the masses who are ready to support a status quo led by a strong leader who is forceful and assertive, in short, a dictator. What we are witnessing in India is the politics of brute power a police state. From the Nehruvian mixed economy-based state in the 1950s which favored the rich industrialists and land owners, we evolved to a state corporatized to the extent where elections seem more like a charade than anything else. What does the political party at the helm of affairs have to do? Use the instruments of state power, especially the executive and the judiciary, to harass people who are critical of the government. The state does not need an ideology any longer because it doesnt need to connect to reality. What it needs is how best it can disinform the masses.
As Cheyfitz puts it:
Whereas ideology, however imaginary, retains a certain relation to reality, Disinformation severs that relation, precisely because it is constructed outside the realm of referential speech. It is, in fact, a species of hallucination. It is this airless invisible dome of Disinformation that currently marks the limits of the United States. Outside the dome reality is happening in various forms of production and destruction. Hallucinations of course produce shock waves in reality, fields of deadly force at home and abroad. The question remains: when will reality shatter the dome and what form will it take? (45)
People need to be injected with hallucinations on a daily basis. Disinformation drugs them with a false sense of reality. Indias limits as a nation-state are the limits of the corporate imagination. The limits to our thinking are prescribed by the corporate-based imagination. We dont have to think about others. We only have to think of ourselves. We have to blindly obey without asking questions. This is the time-honored recipe for a fascism rooted in disinformation: Repress people physically and emotionally, incite them to hate others who are perceived as weaker than them. Indoctrinate the majority on a daily basis that those others are responsible for all our problems and that without those others, we would be living in a golden era. In this era of disinformation, the most successful since Indias independence, the political party heading the government is using every means available in a majoritarian democracy to crush opposition of any kind.
The amorality of the average Indian is the amorality of Indias politics and society. One party the BJP projects itself as the savior of the majority community; another the INC projects itself as the savior of lower castes and minorities. Both do nothing to uplift the poor within the groups that they claim to represent. Instead they indulge in the language of disinformation by engaging with the masses in discussions about virtually nothing that matters; by making sure that there is no discussion of anything related to redistributive justice. What can be better for the ruling classes than a nation-state where the masses are disinformed enough to be speaking about everything except income inequality!
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The Disinformation Age: The Collapse Of Liberal Democracy In The United States Book Review - Eurasia Review
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