Opinion: Democracy is inherently messy

A New York Times opinion piece makes some interesting assertions about the nature of democracy:

We may think that these clashes over the Mar-a-Lago search and over the state of our democracy are an aberration, a Trump thing. But they are actually the latest example — increased in intensity by the internet — of something that has been a permanent part of our politics, what we call the paradox of democracy.

Far more than a bundle of laws, norms and institutions, democracy is an open culture of communication that affords people the right to think, speak and act and allows every possible means of persuasion. That makes every democratic society uniquely vulnerable to the consequences of communication. We may not like it, but something like Jan. 6 is always potentially in the offing.

We ought to avoid the naïveté of liberal fantasy, which imagines we can impose reliable guardrails against dangerous or deceptive speech. Indeed, there’s a whole genre of articles and books arguing that social media is destroying democracy. Because of changes to online platforms around a decade ago, wrote Jonathan Haidt recently, “People could spread rumors and half-truths more quickly, and they could more readily sort themselves into homogeneous tribes.”

But this is precisely what an unwieldy democratic culture looks like. Depending on the communications environment, a democracy can foster reliable, respectful norms, or it can devolve into outrageous propaganda, widespread cynicism and vitriolic partisanship.

And when communications devolve into propaganda and partisanship, a democracy can either end with breathtaking speed, as it did in Myanmar last year, when the military overthrew the democratically elected government, or descend more gradually into chaos and authoritarianism, as Russia did under Vladimir Putin.

Nothing forbids voters in a democracy to support an authoritarian or vote itself out of existence (as the ancient Athenian assembly famously did). The history of democracy is full of demagogues exploiting the openness of democratic cultures to turn people against the very system on which their freedom depends. In France, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte leveraged a celebrity name to run for president on a campaign of restoring order in 1848, only to end the Second Republic with a self-coup to become emperor when his term was up.

According to one poll, only 21 percent of Republicans think the investigations into Mr. Trump should continue. However they arrived at that opinion, that they hold it at all matters. It gives conservatives not just the political cover to subvert the rule of law but also the power to create their own alternative reality.

Since Mr. Trump’s defeat in 2020, Republicans have embraced the “big lie” and tried to restructure state laws to control future elections. You could say this is a brazen attack on democracy itself, but it’s really a glimpse of democracy shorn of liberal restraints.

It would be much better, of course, if democratic politics yielded to the preferences of measurable public opinion and reflected the will of the people. It would be better still if we were guaranteed protection by our civic and legal institutions, binding the rule of law to society with accountability and fairness.

“Yet the truth is,” as the political communication scholar Zizi Papacharissi has written, “we have always lived in imperfect democracies, and we still do. Democracy is not static. It is not a given, it is not guaranteed, and it is not stable.”

Qs: Would it be much better if (1) democratic politics yielded to the preferences of measurable public opinion and reflected the will of the people, and/or (2) we were guaranteed protection of democracy by our civic and legal institutions, binding the rule of law to society with accountability and fairness?

Is it a liberal fantasy that imagines we can impose reliable guardrails against dangerous or deceptive speech, or do some conservatives also want to limit free speech, particularly free speech that is critical of what conservatives want or that conveys inconvenient facts, truths and/or sound reasoning?

“Thoughts and prayers,” MAGAs

I know the following is two years old, but man oh man, does the author ever nail it!

 To Trump diehards still defiantly clinging to their nasty sore loser historic disaster shipwreck of the worst president ever, like the crusty barnacles on the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, I feel sorry for you.

I mean that with all due respect, in a sarcastically caustic way, speaking Trumper language. I feel for you. My heart goes out. You are who you are.

You can’t help that as a Trump barnacle, you’re akin to an arthropod in the infraclass Cirripedia in the subphylum Crustacea. Be you. Be best. HuffPo says be whatever you want to be, damn the haters.

But like the barnacle-related crab and lobster that happen upon my dinner plate, roasted or boiled with plenty of butter and lemon with a snip of parsley, I feel tragically for the hardcore, hapless Trumpers:

1.I’m sorry you can’t handle Trump’s overwhelming, humiliating defeat and inability to handle it like the big man he told you he is.

2.I’m sorry you love a sore loser. It makes you sound like a sore loser. Nobody likes a sore loser. (Google “sore losers in sports.” Tragic.)

America especially hates a sore loser when he is the President of the United States and inspires the Senate Majority and the Republican Party to join in the sore losing, to the abject shame of decent Republicans.

3.I’m sorry that as a MAGA you take Trump’s loss personally when it’s really not personal at all.

You think Trump gives a f**k about you? If so, you poor dear. Funny how you never see a MAGA at Mar-a-Lago. Perhaps, hmmm, he might just be “leveraging” you for power and money? Sorry for the reveal.

4.I’m sorry you hate the majority of your fellow Americans who voted against Trump and feel the need to attack them. Just because of their temerity to vote against him because he made America much worse.

5.On a related note, I’m sorry you hatefully refer to Democrats as “DemoRats,” which confirms when you post that on Facebook that you’re slack-jawed stupid and lack the best words we learned in grade school English.

6.I’m sorry you’re ruining America by acting out whatever hates and resentments you harbor about your particular situation. It’s fun and easy to blame the libs, but like Trump you’re making America about you, personal, like the identity politics you hate on HuffPo.

7.I’m sorry you’re so suckered by Fox and the right-wing media and its bottom-feeding internet that is pandering to you for money, just like you think the professional mainstream media is doing to the libs.

8.Relatedly, I’m sorry you still prove P.T. Barnum was right that there’s a sucker born every minute to be taken for money.

9.I’m sorry you don’t know or care about our Constitutional rule of law and checks and balances and systems and processes and democratic norms. Or like your media does, you twist high-school civics into a greasy, sugary Auntie Anne’s pretzel to defend whatever Trump says and does.

10.I’m sorry you agree with, defend and/or salute whatever Trump says or does and his media salutes, like he’s your Fuhrer. Of course he’s not!

11.I’m sorry if you need to spread the smear that the duly-elected president-elect is disabled, demented, corrupt, a socialist tool and whatever other nonsense that pathetic loser hateful Trumpers spread on Trumpy social media. It makes you sound like a desperate loser.

12.I’m sorry that when it comes down to it, you seem to hate democracy unless it elects Trump and Republicans.

13.I’m sorry that I cannot send you real thoughts and prayers. I really tried to understand your mean, nasty, ugly behavior. That was stupid of me.

I don’t respect you anymore. I do not like you in your box. I do not like you with your Fox. I do not like you in a house or with a mouse. I do not like you here or there. I do not like you anywhere. So stay away from Washington.

14.I’m sorry: You are not really patriots. You are the opposite of patriots.

By loving Trump until his bitter end and bowing to whatever he says and does, you not only sound like a Russian troll, you also seem to hate America.

15.I’m sorry that as you wave the American flag in our faces, you spit on it every time you wave your Confederate flags, or accept those who do. I’m sorry you don’t care who you offend — you think it’s fun or funny. I’m sorry you lack basic decency and respect.

Sorry/not sorry if this piece sounds condescending.

But anyone still backing this duly defeated president — who might well stage a military coup to stay in office — deserves much worse than this attempt at bitter humor.

To be honest, I try to use humor to deal with my fear of MAGAs and what their goose-stepping to Trump is doing to the country I love.

https://jeffreydenny77.medium.com/thoughts-and-prayers-sweet-magas-25779a339f12 

 

Taiwan: A short history and the potential for American war with China

This 9 minute video by Al Jazeera (November 2021) explains some history about how Taiwan became the Republic of China. It mentions the possibility of the US getting into a war with China over a critically strategic interest the US has in Taiwan, namely production of critical microchips. At the time of the video, one expert said the possibility of US-China war was low but increasing. 

The video also points out how the Taiwanese people see the situation and what they want to do about it. Most want to leave things just as they are.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for bringing this video to my attention.

The growing threat from China

To understand the threat that China poses, one really does need to get some feel for what it is, why it is, and how deep and broad it is. Former director of operations and intelligence at Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, Nigel Inkster, writes in a New York Times opinion piece:

China Is Running Covert Operations That Could Seriously Overwhelm Us

The culture of the Chinese Communist Party has always had a clandestine nature. But as the party has become an even more dominant force in China since President Xi Jinping took power a decade ago, this has metastasized in state institutions. China can best be described as an intelligence state. The party views the business of acquiring and protecting secrets as an all-of-nation undertaking, to the point that rewards are offered to citizens for identifying possible spies and even schoolchildren are taught to recognize threats.

The West cannot fight fire with fire. Mobilizing government, society and economic and academic systems around competition with foreign foes the way China does would betray Western values. But leaders of democracies need to internalize the sea change that has taken place in China and ensure that engagement with Beijing is tempered by a hardheaded sense of reality.

The last state intelligence threat of comparable magnitude was posed by the Soviets. But the Soviet Union was isolated and impoverished. China’s successful economy, on the other hand, is a key engine of global growth, vastly increasing Beijing’s reach.

Barely visible on the world stage 30 years ago, China’s intelligence agencies are now powerful and well resourced. They are adept at exploiting the vulnerabilities of open societies and growing dependence on China’s economy to collect vast volumes of intelligence and data. Much of this takes place in the cyber domain, such as the 2015 hack of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, in which sensitive data on millions of federal employees was stolen. Chinese intelligence operatives also are present in state-owned enterprises, state media organizations and embassies and consulates. China’s consulate in Houston was closed by the Trump administration in 2020 after it served as a national hub for collecting high-tech intelligence.

But Chinese covert operations don’t stop there.

China’s Intelligence Law, which was enacted in 2017, required its citizens to assist intelligence agencies. But this legislation simply formalized a situation that had already been the norm. The wider China challenge comes from organizations and actors engaged in activities that may not conform to normal concepts of espionage. 

Much of this is organized by the United Front Work Department, a party organization that seeks to co-opt well-placed members of Chinese diaspora communities — and whose scope has been expanded under Mr. Xi. China also endeavors to entice other Western citizens. A textbook case, exposed this year, involved a British politician whose office received substantial funding from an ethnic Chinese lawyer who thereby gained access to the British political establishment. One Chinese approach is to patiently cultivate relationships with politicians at the city or community level who show potential to rise to even higher office. Another is known as elite capture, in which influential Western corporate or government figures are offered lucrative sinecures or business opportunities in return for advocating policies that jibe with Chinese interests.

For China, this work is about survival. Technology and business intelligence must be acquired to keep China’s economy growing fast enough to prevent social instability. Mr. Xi has stressed the need to adopt “asymmetrical” means to catch up to the West technologically.

China may be ahead of the game now, but there are tools that Western intelligence and security agencies can bring into play, including providing staff members with the requisite language skills and an awareness of China and the workings of the Chinese Communist Party. But they need help.

Liberal democracies cannot just play defense; political leaders must champion greater investment in offensive intelligence collection capabilities and outreach programs that educate businesses, political organizations and other potential targets about their vulnerabilities. Systems also are needed to assess the national security implications of what otherwise might just seem normal commercial activities by Chinese companies or non-Chinese entities acting as fronts for Beijing.

Western policymakers and intelligence services must innovate and adapt. But they also must ensure that strategies they employ honor the ideals of freedom, openness and lawfulness that pose the greatest threat to the Chinese party-state.

Inkster’s arguments that China needs to (1) steal Western technology to keep up, and (2) subvert democracy to maintain the dictatorship, feel spot on. Western democracies and technology really do pose threats to China’s economy and dictatorship.

Given America’s broken political system and the blatant anti-democratic autocracy that dominates the Republican Party, it does not seem that the US can deal competently with the threat. American radical right multi-millionaires and billionaires fund the GOP. In return for their funding, they demand and are getting weakened civil liberties and governments less able and/or willing to defend democracy. The ex-president was completely serious when he said this in 2018 about Xi Jinping after he became dictator for life in China:

“He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day.”

There you have it. The current leader of the Republican Party publicly wishing the US president had power for life. The GOP did not repudiate that, so they support it by silent complicity. That is similar to the GOP openly supporting and justifying the 1/6 coup attempt by still calling it “legitimate political discourse.”

Anyone who still believes that the Republican Party is a defender of democracy, the rule of law or civil liberties, is dead wrong on all three points. So dead wrong that their ludicrous false beliefs could kill a whole lot of us and put most of us in cruel Christian fundamentalist-capitalist authoritarian misery for the rest of our miserable lives.

It's official: Viktor Orban, the darling of the GOP and tyrants everywhere, killed democracy in Hungary

The AP writes:

European Union lawmakers on Thursday declared that Hungary has become “a hybrid regime of electoral autocracy” under the leadership of its nationalist government, and that its undermining of the bloc’s democratic values had taken Hungary out of the community of democracies.

In a resolution that passed 433-to-123 with 28 abstentions, the parliamentarians raised concerns about Hungary’s constitutional and electoral systems, judicial independence, possible corruption, public procurement irregularities, LGBTQ+ rights, as well as media, academic and religious freedoms.

Meanwhile, there are these interesting observations about democracy and what radical right autocrat billionaires want:

Today, a handful of billionaires fund far-right, anti-Islamic, anti-immigrant, and/or ultra-nationalist political figures, movements, and alternative media personalities. Their aim is to push mainstream politics further to the right, as mainstream politicians fear losing voters to the new extreme parties. But how can elites get working people to support policies that are against their own interests? The answer is to divert them from the real causes of their misery—austerity, privatization, economic deregulation, and disinvestment, i.e., the very policies supported by billionaires—and, instead, play on their anger over immigrants and Islam.

In the US, concerns have been raised about President Trump’s affiliations with far-right hate groups and the political support he receives from those groups. Robert Mercer is a billionaire hedge fund manager and CEO of Renaissance Technologies. A Trump donor, Mercer worked with Trump’s short-lived strategist, Steve Bannon, to make Breitbart News a platform for the so-called alternative right, or “alt-right.”

Using Facebook, Cambridge Analytica also worked with employees of Palantir, a data-mapping company set up with CIA money and owned by a billionaire tech entrepreneur, the PayPal co-founder, Peter Thiel. Thiel has openly stated that democracy is incompatible with capitalism. Thiel was a big investor in Facebook and Reddit, the latter being a message board that worked “meme magic” to help boost Trump’s profile on social media.

Fascism and capitalism have an incestuous history. Capitalists want “strongmen” politicians who aren’t afraid to use violence to crush unions and make economies more appealing to international investors. US Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler (Ret.) testified that in 1933, following the Wall Street Crash of ’29, leaders of banking and industry plotted to install a fascist regime in the US rather than allow the New Deal social investment program. 

We don’t have fascism yet, but who knows where a heavily-funded, international far-right might end up?

Radical right billionaire Peter Thiel wrote this in 2009:

The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

In the face of these realities, one would despair if one limited one’s horizon to the world of politics. I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.”

Those pesky libertarians. They want to completely do away with politics and government. As we all know, that would free up a lot of power. That power would not simply disappear. Where would it flow? Certainly not to regular people. Power would flow to ruthless, arrogant billionaire capitalist autocrats like Thiel and the elites who run the Republican Party and its Christian nationalism political movement. Those infallible people know what is best for us, even if it kills us.

Sounds to me like Thiel is, more or less, another totalitarian (or at least authoritarian), fundamentalist catastrophe just itching to get the power needed to fix what ails all of us, especially our civil liberties.

Q: Is it time to tax the hell out of billionaires, including ones who preserve their vast wealth in the form of tax exempt or privileged charities or foundations that last forever?[1] 

Is it time to get rid of all tax breaks for all charities and to eliminate non-profit status in tax law, i.e., what does the cost-benefit analysis look like (I suspect the costs far outweigh the benefits)?

Footnote: 

1. For example, the authoritarian, radical right Koch brothers foundation injects a lot of mischief into American politics. It will continue to do so for generations to come. American taxpayers heavily subsidize the very organization that wants to reduce them to serfs. Wikipedia comments:

The brothers have made significant financial contributions to both libertarian and conservative think tanks and, despite being ideologically libertarian,[6][7] they have donated primarily to Republican Party candidates running for office.[8] According to writer Eric Black, this funding doesn't stem from "a change of heart, but one of tactics" since libertarianism "was costly and could be bad for the family business long term.[8] David Koch who has described himself as a social liberal, had stated in 2012 that" I think the Republican Party has a great chance of being successful and that’s why I support it [...] The Libertarian Party is a great concept. I love the ideals, but it got too far off the deep end, and so I dropped out".[8] A network of like-minded donors organized by the Kochs pledged to spend $889 million from 2009–2016 and its infrastructure has been said by Politico to rival "that of the Republican National Committee."[9] They actively fund and support organizations that contribute significantly to Republican candidates, and in particular that lobby against efforts to expand government's role in health care and climate change mitigation[10] or promote climate change denial.[11][12][13][14][15] By 2010, they had donated more than $100 million to dozens of free-market and advocacy organizations.

Extremely disappointed Germaine keeps referring to bias news outlets like WAPO and NYTIMES

 No, not really 😏

But that is the world we live in now, where all media outlets are considered biased or promoting "fake news" when really a lot of us prefer sites that will confirm our already intrenched confirmation bias.

There is still a big diff between biased news, or biased opinion, and simply awful wackadoodle sources. 

I have seen Righties continually refer to Breitbart, Washington Examiner, or Newsmax for their sources. If you THINK that is bad, what about ZeroHedge, Epoch Times or fake medical sites like Mercola?

My take always has been: be critical, use more than one source, and don't be afraid of using factchecking sites.

Mind you, Rightwingers believe factchecking sites are themselves Left leaning.

On another political site I read this commentary and agree with it:

So, in a nutshell, I can understand not trusting CNN, or MSNBC, or some sources that are even to the Left of those two. THEY ARE BIASED. On occasion they get caught with their pants down, as happens to NYTimes and WAPO. BUT not nearly as often as Fox gets caught with their pants down. Yet neither CNN or FOX are among the worst "news and information" sites.

I did find a site that gives a more detailed account of how to recognize fake and biased news:

https://library.nwacc.edu/fakenews/what

Meanwhile I DO use Mediabiasfactcheck to check the sagacity of media sources, and Mediabiasfactcheck checks both Right and Left bias:

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/

However, there is within Mediabiasfactcheck two categories that I pay particular attention to because the outlets listed on those two categories ARE typically Rightwing wacko outlets:

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/conspiracy/

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/fake-news/

Now, WHAT ABOUT Germaine's tendency to use Leftist news sources?? 😁