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Christophe Bouton, a philosophy professor at Montaigne University in Bordeaux, who wrote The Time of Urgency, says that democracy is threatened by a contemporary preoccupation with speed.

Here he answers AFPs questions about his theory:

Time as succession Q: What is time? Would a scientist, a philosopher, a pupil or a pensioner have the same definition?

A: The many philosophical and scientific approaches to the concept of time all agree on at least one point: he who speaks of time, speaks of succession.

The subjective experience of time which varies from one person to another, according to their mood, their age, their generation, the society and the era in which they live, etc does not challenge this idea of succession.

As the science fiction writer Ray Cummings said: Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.

Age-old problem, speeding up Q: Did the tyranny of speed, such as we see today, also affect the ancient world ?

A: Even if we find descriptions of urgent lifestyles in antiquity, by (Roman philosopher) Seneca for example, relating to certain members of the elite overwhelmed by responsibility (merchants, lawyers), this phenomenon took on a hitherto unseen scope in the western world starting in the late 18th century and above all in the industrial revolution in the 19th century, where the notion that history itself is speeding up emerges.

This feeling is due in part to quicker modes of transport, following improved means of communication.

Economic problem Q: At what point can we criticise speed ?

A: The problem in my view is not so much speed, as it is unbridled capitalism, which adopts ever more efficient methods of production and job organisation.

(This) has led to a prevailing ideology today of the advantages of speed, acceleration, and hyperactivity, which has resulted in the phenomena of hyperconnection and burn-out.

Another consequence is that the lack of time can result in citizens becoming less able physically and psychologically to deal with politics, which demands more and more time to be understood.

In this way, democracy, which requires spare time or what the ancients called skhole, is threatened by urgency.

Finding lost time Q: Who can escape this danger?

A: I do not believe much in individual solutions of withdrawal, which are a luxury that not everyone can afford.

The problem is systemic, so the solution must be collective and political. It is especially a matter of restoring political control over the economy.

To take just just one concrete case, recent, timid advances of the right to deconnection in France (the right not to answer work-related texts, emails, or phone calls outside working hours) show it is possible to pass laws that limit urgency at work.

Read more from the original source:
Philosopher says speed threatens democracy - Vanguard

One of the gravest structural problems in American democracy is gerrymandering, the practice of drawing voting districts in a way that creates unfair advantages to whoever happens to be drawing the line, says John Oliver.

The British comedian was referring specifically to partisan gerrymandering, which, unlike racial gerrymandering, is not illegal according to US laws. It is partly responsible for giving Republicans such an edge in the House of Representatives, says Oliver in yesterdays (April 9) episode of Last Week Tonight.

He notes, for example, that the number of Republicans elected in the states of Pennsylvania and Ohio are way out of proportion to popular-vote percentages. You wouldnt expect Neapolitan ice cream thats 70% strawberry. Thats not okay, he says.

In most US states, the drawing of congressional districts is essentially controlled by the legislators themselves. It means, as Oliver explains, a majority party can either cram as many as opposition voters as possible into just few districts, or spread them out thinly over a bunch of districts to dilute their impact. The so-called cracking and packing technique is more or less the same as table assignments at a wedding, Oliver says.

You can either break up your eight awful relatives and spread them out over different tables, or you can pack them all together in one insuperable table of the damned.

Congressional gerrymandering is a not-so-secret weapon for both Republicans and Democrats. As Oliver notes, when Republicans won the majority of state houses in 2010, they redrew the map in those states to ensure they could send more members to the House in 2012; in 2001 Democrats did the same after taking control of the states of Maryland and Illinois.

In a democracy, the question of who gets to draw the map should not have as much significance as it currently does, Oliver says. He notes that the US Supreme Court may limit for the first time (paywall) partisan gerrymandering in an upcoming ruling this year, and that there are calls for the establishment of independent commissions to draw legislative maps.

The foundation of democracy is built on the idea that everybodys vote should count equally whoever we are, however poor our decisions, says Oliver in an inspiring speech toward the end of his show, while inviting people including a Quidditch player, a Scientologist, a unicyclist, a baker of erotic pastries, and everyones racist grandma onto the stage.

Election results should not be the results of politicians crazy lines, he says. They should be the result of our own crazy decisions.

Continue reading here:
John Oliver explains how gerrymandering, or politicians' crazy lines, hurts democracy - Quartz

Going nuclear to confirm Neil Gorsuch is the latest example of how Republicans are thwarting the will of the people.

Supreme Court justice nominee Neil Gorsuch testifies on the second day of his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation on March 21, 2017. (AP Images / Tom Williams)

Many in the media are portraying the Republicans move to invoke the nuclear option to confirm Neil Gorsuch as a mere squabble over Senate rules, the latest example of hyper-partisanship in Washington that both parties are equally responsible for.

The both sides do it narrative is the worst kind of false equivalence. In fact, the GOPs use of the nuclear option highlights in stark terms the Republican Partys unique hostility to democracy, which has come to define the party in recent years through efforts like voter suppression, gerrymandering, and a stolen Supreme Court seat.(Not to mention Donald Trumps attacks on the core pillars of democracylike fair elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary.)

Following President Obamas election, when Republicans took control of many state legislative chambers after the 2010 election, 22states passed new restrictions on voting. Through challenging the Voting Rights Act, voter-ID laws, cutbacks to early voting, limits on voter registration drives, closing down polling places, purging the voting rolls, and disenfranchising ex-offenders, Republicans attempted to manufacture an electorate that was more advantageous to their party. So far this year, 87 bills to restrict access to voting have been introduced in 29 states.

In addition, Republicans controlled the redistricting process in 20states after the 2010 election, compared to only 11for Democrats, and aggressively gerrymandered state legislative seats and US House districts to retain power for the next decade. In 2012, for example, Democratic candidates for the US House of Representatives won 1.4 million more votes, but Republicans won 33 more seats. Courts have found that Republican-drafted redistricting maps in states like North Carolina and Texas intentionally discriminated against minority voters.

Republicans in North Carolina took their hostility to the democratic process to the extreme degree after the 2016 election when Democrat Roy Cooper was elected governor, passing a series of bills in the lame-duck state legislative session to reduce or eliminate the governors essential powers. The bills prevented the governor from appointing a majority of members to the state Board of Elections or 100 county boards of elections; reduced the number of public employees the governor could appoint from 1,500 to 425 and prevented the governor from appointing members to boards of state universities; and made it harder for the state Supreme Court, which has a 43 Democratic majority, to review future challenges to election-law changes. It was nothing less than a legislative coup. The courts blocked the changes to the boards of elections, but Republicans are still trying to change the rules.

THE STAKES ARE HIGHER NOW THAN EVER. GET THE NATION IN YOUR INBOX.

When Republicans didnt like the fact that President Obama would get to fill Antonin Scalias Supreme Court seat in 2016, they simply invented a new argumentthat a president in the last year of his term or during an election year couldnt make a new appointmentto avoid giving Merrick Garland a hearing, let alone a vote. In fact, on seven different occasions since 1912, a president in the last year of his term or during an election year was able to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. All vacancies in an election year in the last 116 years were filled, reports Factcheck.org.

Im no great fan of the filibuster, but its stunningly hypocritical for Republicans to deny Garland a hearing and a vote and then change the Senate rules to confirm Gorsuch. The very things they demanded for Gorsuch, they denied to Garland. Yes, Democrats did invoke the nuclear option for lower-court nominees in 2013, but Republicans have been far more obstructionist toward judicial nominations than Democrats have, as David Leonhardt of The New York Times wrote recently.

The pattern is clearwhen Republicans dont like the legislative rules or an outcome of an election, they change the rules or try to nullify the election. The story isnt that both sides are to blame for hyper-partisanship in Washington. Its that one party believes in democracy and the other does not.

The rest is here:
The GOP Has Declared War on Democracy - The Nation.

There was no immediate comment from the government. Leaders in the ruling socialist party had accused Mr Capriles in recent days of stoking violence through his leadership of a week of near-daily protests, many of which have ended in tear gas and rubber bullets.

President Nicolas Maduro called out Mr Capriles on his television show on Thursday night, after tens of thousands of Venezuelans shut down Caracas with a march against the socialist administration. He said followers of "little Capriles" were seeking a bloodbath.

Mr Capriles responded to the ban on Thursday, saying, "The only one who is disqualified here is you, Nicolas Maduro. You and your circle of corrupt drug traffickers."

The move against Mr Capriles is part of a broader government crackdown this week that included detentions at marches and threats against party leaders.

"They are trying to raise the costs of protest, plain and simple," said Michael McCarthy, a research fellow focused on Venezuela at American University.

"But this move may well backfire, as Capriles is likely to harness this smear campaign to place himself front and center in the push to hold transition elections."

Authorities have been investigating Mr Capriles since the beginning of the year for what they say are a half dozen administrative irregularities, including taking suspicious donations from abroad.

See the original post here:
Venezuelan government further stifles democracy as Henrique Capriles banned from running for office - Telegraph.co.uk

Quora Questions are part of a partnership between NewsweekandQuora, through which we'll be posting relevant and interesting answers from Quora contributors throughout the week. Read more about the partnershiphere.

Answer from Francis Fukuyama, author & professor of Political Science at Stanford:

I have been involved in the discussion about whether our current president is a threat to democracybecause many people on the left believe he is an incipient dictator or tyrant, and I understand where that view comes from. If you look at his career, he really doesn't like being constrained by rules. When he was running his real estate business, he didn't pay his contractors like he was supposed to, forcing them to sue him. When he hit a law he didn't like, he tried to get it changed or would work around it. I think he's brought that mentality to the White House; he would like to do everything by executive order. He'd like to use his democratic mandateI realize he didn't get the majority of the popular votebut he sees it's important to use the mandate to enact his agenda.

The U.S. Capitol Building is lit at sunset in Washington, U.S., December 20, 2016. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

I think he sees a lot of the checks and balances in our political system as inconveniences which, if he had his way, he'd get rid of. It's my opinion that those checks and balances are pretty deeply rooted in this country and he's not going to be able to do this. The failure of the Republican party to get rid of Obamacare is a good example of how limited he is. Donald Trump said during the campaign that on the first day in office he was going to get rid of Obamacare, replace it with something wonderful and cheaper and nobody was going to lose coverage. Another few weeks go by, and he says No one knew how complicated healthcare is, and you can translate that to I didn't understand how complicated it is. And sure enough, he wasn't able to do what he had been promising since day one. I think this is going to continue to happen with things like tax reform; you've got even bigger interest groups involved there, and in legislation on infrastructure, and he's going to run up against the same Tea Party block that doesn't want to spend on government. He's going to be constantly testing the limits of the system, but he's not going to fundamentally alter it.

The thing that really worries me is not that he's really going to do something that violates the Constitution, but that we'll see a gradual erosion of norms. You see this in all of the conflicts of interest that he faces. We've never had a president who continues to run a big business, or the situation we had with the Kushner family closing a deal with a Chinese company, ahead of an official visit. As far as I know, it's unprecedented for a president or his family to have all of these conflicts of interest. This wipes away civil society's precedents and you get more people who don't care about what happened before and don't see corruption as a potential problem in American government.

What is the biggest threat to the American democracy? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions:

Originally posted here:
Quora: Trump Erodes Norms But is No Threat to Democracy - Newsweek