Yesterday, Lona put up a comment on the video thread for the 18th which included a video she hopes everyone hare will look at and read. I can’t link directly to the comment, as I used to be able to do in the old system, but I can link to the thread, so that you only need to scroll down and expand the comment. Between this and the short takes – I’m sorry I had to put up such a downer on a weekend. But it’s important – and it’s important to address this stuff right away before too many people get sucked in to the information silo.
Cartoon – 21 Nelson
Short Takes –
Protect Democracy – Poland just showed the world how democracy wins
Quote – At a gathering of pro-democracy organizations in 2017, a Polish opposition member of parliament named Agnieszka Pomaska was asked: “What’s your number one piece of advice for democracy advocates in the United States?” Poland has been at the front lines between democracy and authoritarianism, between freedom and repression — not just in the current era, but arguably throughout modern history. Pomaska’s response was simple: “Don’t let the pro-democracy coalition fracture.” On Sunday, Polish voters showed the world just how effective that strategy can be. Click through for details. Look, I would never say that, for instance, Hamas would never attack Israel or anything else Jewish for no reason at all. Nor would I ever say that Bibi’s government is desirable, or anything otjher than authoritarian and inhumane. But the timing of this war in the Midddle East looks to me designed to fracture the coalition. Just as attacks on Hillary, mostly made up and even the small errors far less important than Republican crime, were designed to fracture the coalition – and they succeeded. And, yes, there are people who are willing to kill for political theater if it strengthens their position or their base.
The 19th – What it takes to defend diversity
Quote – Just three years after the racial reckoning that made much of society examine the ongoing legacy and harm of systemic inequality, a parallel reckoning has also unfolded. It’s one driven by a sense of grievance from White American men, a movement that often co-opts women and even people of color, making them out to be victims of current efforts that are designed to right historic wrongs. Such efforts, Abrams told me, are part of a larger strategy to roll back attempts to make our country more free and fair for women and people of color. It’s the same playbook that dismantled voting and abortion rights, aimed at rolling back racial progress in institutions across the country. “The through line is that our progress as a nation, our economic uplift, our continued dominance, is predicated on full participation, and diversity, equity and inclusion is the roadmap to get us there,” Abrams said. “The threat of lawsuits, the threat of public castigation, the threat of being called out for doing right, is compelling some to retrench. That is dangerous.” Click through for article. We’ve seen this before. We’re seeing it again. And then things will get better for a while, and then we’ll see it again – those of us who are still around. I don’t know what it will take to make it go away forever, and maybe that’s not possible. I’m pretty sure it’s not possible to eliminate misogyny. It doesn’t appear to be hereditary (Exhibits A, B, and C Stephen Miller, Paul Gosar, RFK Jr), so selective breeding wouldn’t do it, even if that were feasible.
Glenn Kirschner – Trump is indicted in Georgia for RICO conspiracy for trying to steal the 2020 presidential election
Thom Hartmann – God Wants Immigrants To Suffer & Die Says GOP
Robert Reich – 5 Facts About Trump’s Indictments
[There’s more after the VPN commercial]
Liberal Redneck – Ohio and the Future of Democracy
Wild Child Kitten Grows Up Looking After Rescue Puppies
[I chose this basically for one sentence – near the end – you’ll recognie it – it’s the one that ends “and it’s never failed me yet.”
Beau – Let’s talk about Texas, Paxton, the feds, and assumptions….
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
Originalism. It’s become associated with people like Scalia, and Alito, and the Federalist Society – and, accordingly, with racism, misogyny, and plutocratic capitalism. Not that all the Founders thought that way – and even fewer would have thought that way had it occurred to them to examine that thinking. Just as they didn’t live in ancient Athens, or pre-conquest Anglo-Saxon England – or the Aztec Empire – or the Ottoman Empire – you get the point, I’m sure – they also did not live in the 21st century. What might they have done differently if they had, or if they could have foreseeen it? Might we benefit from the thought experiment of trying to design a more perfect union as if we had no constitution in place and no precedents of any kind, just us and our principles (and technology)? That’s the question the author of this article and his colleagues continue to address.
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Re-imagining democracy for the 21st century, possibly without the trappings of the 18th century
Imagine that we’ve all – all of us, all of society – landed on some alien planet, and we have to form a government: clean slate. We don’t have any legacy systems from the U.S. or any other country. We don’t have any special or unique interests to perturb our thinking.
How would we govern ourselves?
It’s unlikely that we would use the systems we have today. The modern representative democracy was the best form of government that mid-18th-century technology could conceive of. The 21st century is a different place scientifically, technically and socially.
For example, the mid-18th-century democracies were designed under the assumption that both travel and communications were hard. Does it still make sense for all of us living in the same place to organize every few years and choose one of us to go to a big room far away and create laws in our name?
Representative districts are organized around geography, because that’s the only way that made sense 200-plus years ago. But we don’t have to do it that way. We can organize representation by age: one representative for the 31-year-olds, another for the 32-year-olds, and so on. We can organize representation randomly: by birthday, perhaps. We can organize any way we want.
U.S. citizens currently elect people for terms ranging from two to six years. Is 10 years better? Is 10 days better? Again, we have more technology and therefor more options.
Indeed, as a technologist who studies complex systems and their security, I believe the very idea of representative government is a hack to get around the technological limitations of the past. Voting at scale is easier now than it was 200 year ago. Certainly we don’t want to all have to vote on every amendment to every bill, but what’s the optimal balance between votes made in our name and ballot measures that we all vote on?
Rethinking the options
In December 2022, I organized a workshop to discuss these and other questions. I brought together 50 people from around the world: political scientists, economists, law professors, AI experts, activists, government officials, historians, science fiction writers and more. We spent two days talking about these ideas. Several themes emerged from the event.
Misinformation and propaganda were themes, of course – and the inability to engage in rational policy discussions when people can’t agree on the facts.
Another theme was the harms of creating a political system whose primary goals are economic. Given the ability to start over, would anyone create a system of government that optimizes the near-term financial interest of the wealthiest few? Or whose laws benefit corporations at the expense of people?
Another theme was capitalism, and how it is or isn’t intertwined with democracy. And while the modern market economy made a lot of sense in the industrial age, it’s starting to fray in the information age. What comes after capitalism, and how does it affect how we govern ourselves?
Many participants examined the effects of technology, especially artificial intelligence. We looked at whether – and when – we might be comfortable ceding power to an AI. Sometimes it’s easy. I’m happy for an AI to figure out the optimal timing of traffic lights to ensure the smoothest flow of cars through the city. When will we be able to say the same thing about setting interest rates? Or designing tax policies?
How would we feel about an AI device in our pocket that voted in our name, thousands of times per day, based on preferences that it inferred from our actions? If an AI system could determine optimal policy solutions that balanced every voter’s preferences, would it still make sense to have representatives? Maybe we should vote directly for ideas and goals instead, and leave the details to the computers. On the other hand, technological solutionism regularly fails.
Choosing representatives
Scale was another theme. The size of modern governments reflects the technology at the time of their founding. European countries and the early American states are a particular size because that’s what was governable in the 18th and 19th centuries. Larger governments – the U.S. as a whole, the European Union – reflect a world in which travel and communications are easier. The problems we have today are primarily either local, at the scale of cities and towns, or global – even if they are currently regulated at state, regional or national levels. This mismatch is especially acute when we try to tackle global problems. In the future, do we really have a need for political units the size of France or Virginia? Or is it a mixture of scales that we really need, one that moves effectively between the local and the global?
As to other forms of democracy, we discussed one from history and another made possible by today’s technology.
Sortition is a system of choosing political officials randomly to deliberate on a particular issue. We use it today when we pick juries, but both the ancient Greeks and some cities in Renaissance Italy used it to select major political officials. Today, several countries – largely in Europe – are using sortition for some policy decisions. We might randomly choose a few hundred people, representative of the population, to spend a few weeks being briefed by experts and debating the problem – and then decide on environmental regulations, or a budget, or pretty much anything.
Liquid democracy does away with elections altogether. Everyone has a vote, and they can keep the power to cast it themselves or assign it to another person as a proxy. There are no set elections; anyone can reassign their proxy at any time. And there’s no reason to make this assignment all or nothing. Perhaps proxies could specialize: one set of people focused on economic issues, another group on health and a third bunch on national defense. Then regular people could assign their votes to whichever of the proxies most closely matched their views on each individual matter – or step forward with their own views and begin collecting proxy support from other people.
This all brings up another question: Who gets to participate? And, more generally, whose interests are taken into account? Early democracies were really nothing of the sort: They limited participation by gender, race and land ownership.
We should debate lowering the voting age, but even without voting we recognize that children too young to vote have rights – and, in some cases, so do other species. Should future generations get a “voice,” whatever that means? What about nonhumans or whole ecosystems?
Should everyone get the same voice? Right now in the U.S., the outsize effect of money in politics gives the wealthy disproportionate influence. Should we encode that explicitly? Maybe younger people should get a more powerful vote than everyone else. Or maybe older people should.
Those questions lead to ones about the limits of democracy. All democracies have boundaries limiting what the majority can decide. We all have rights: the things that cannot be taken away from us. We cannot vote to put someone in jail, for example.
But while we can’t vote a particular publication out of existence, we can to some degree regulate speech. In this hypothetical community, what are our rights as individuals? What are the rights of society that supersede those of individuals?
Reducing the risk of failure
Personally, I was most interested in how these systems fail. As a security technologist, I study how complex systems are subverted – hacked, in my parlance – for the benefit of a few at the expense of the many. Think tax loopholes, or tricks to avoid government regulation. I want any government system to be resilient in the face of that kind of trickery.
Or, to put it another way, I want the interests of each individual to align with the interests of the group at every level. We’ve never had a system of government with that property before – even equal protection guarantees and First Amendment rights exist in a competitive framework that puts individuals’ interests in opposition to one another. But – in the age of such existential risks as climate and biotechnology and maybe AI – aligning interests is more important than ever.
Our workshop didn’t produce any answers; that wasn’t the point. Our current discourse is filled with suggestions on how to patch our political system. People regularly debate changes to the Electoral College, or the process of creating voting districts, or term limits. But those are incremental changes.
It’s hard to find people who are thinking more radically: looking beyond the horizon for what’s possible eventually. And while true innovation in politics is a lot harder than innovation in technology, especially without a violent revolution forcing change, it’s something that we as a species are going to have to get good at – one way or another.
+============================================================== Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, this is really radical – radical in the best, the original, sense – go all the way to the root because everything stems from it. I invite y’all to try it – empty your minds of present politics – how would you design the system? For instance, I know I would not want one suggestion – AI voting for me on a minute-by-minute basis, based on analysis of my actions. Because, for one thing, my actions are not always my best self. If it were going to vote on my behalf based on my principles, I might consider it. But then I’d hve to figure out how I wanted my principles to be determined by the AI. And then there’s the fact that I change my mind when I learn I am wrong. Not everyone does. And there are a number of radical thoughts here – for example, haveing representation, but having it be on a different basis than geography – for example, by birth year. Maybe you have ideas that are completely different from anything mentioned.
Yesterday, it had snowed and there was plenty of cloud cover, but a little after 2 pm there was already a clear path to the mailbox. BUT it was NOT a dry path. Wet concrete is darker than dry concrete and this was quite dark. So no trip to the mailbox. A couple of packages came, but neither would fit in the mailbox, so they were left on my porch, and I got them in anyway. It had snowed more by then, also. I am sharing a non-weather story from Colorado, because even if I believed in coincidence, this one is way too big to believe in – and apparently it has happened elsewhere, and could happen anywhere. I don’t quite know how to prepare for it, other than to be able to recognize it if it comes.
Cartoon –
Short Takes –
Washington Post (no paywall) – Opinion – Biden’s Kyiv visit shows Putin seriously misjudged his courage
Quote – What many people fail to understand about Biden, the oldest president in our history, is the extent to which he is guided by a sense of mission. He came out of retirement and ran for the White House only because he believed he had the unique ability, and thus the obligation, to save the nation from another four years of Donald Trump. And he has faced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with the same burden of duty imposed by history. Click through for full opinion. I don’t often get to see Eugene Robinson, but I always learn something, even if it’s just a new way of saying something I knew, or a position I hadn’t considered looking from. There’s a lot in here – I picked what I quoted because it made me think of “Rule 303,” which is the way Beau expresses duty. “If you have the means at hand, you have the responsibility to act.”
The New Yorker – Russia, One Year After the Invasion of Ukraine
Quote – I had immigrated to the U.S. as a child, in the early eighties. Since the mid-nineties, I’d been coming back to Moscow about once a year. During that time, the city kept getting nicer, and the political situation kept getting worse. It was as if, in Russia, more prosperity meant less freedom…. I asked [my friend Alexander] Baunov how long he thought it would be before he returned to Russia. He said that he didn’t know, but it was possible that he would never return. There was no going back to February 23rd [2022]—not for him, not for Russia, and especially not for the Putin regime. “The country has undergone a moral catastrophe,” Baunov said. “Going back, in the future, would mean living with people who supported this catastrophe; who think they had taken part in a great project; who are proud of their participation in it.” Click through for full article. Every week in Everday Erinyes I quuote Masha Gessen on autocracy and autocrats. Keith, who wrote this, is her brother.
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
I’ve been saying that democracy requires trust. That doesn’t just mean that citizens should (and should confidently be able to) trust the government – it also means that we need to ba able to trust each other, and the government needs to trust us. There are governments which can function without all of this mutual trust (Hungary, Turkey), but they canot keep it up forever (Russia), and in any case, a government which can function without trust is not worth having. That’s no way to live. I realize there are people who think those governments are worth having, and I don’t trust them. Do you?
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Healthy democracy requires trust – these 3 things could start to restore voters’ declining faith in US elections
Election workers sort ballots at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center on Nov. 9, 2022, in Phoenix. John Moore/Getty Images
The 2022 U.S. midterm elections ran relatively smoothly and faced few consequential accusations of fraud or mismanagement. Yet many Americans don’t trust this essential element of a democracy.
Study after study – in both the U.S. and around the world – make clear that trust in elections predicts whether a person votes and decides to participate in politics in other ways, like attending peaceful demonstrations or even discussing politics. If people don’t think that elections are fair, then they don’t see the point in taking the steps that maintain democracy.
Healthy democracies are countries where regular elections lead to peaceful transfers of power. Citizens are essential to this process, especially as their votes and peaceful protests hold politicians accountable. Their beliefs about election credibility determine whether they are willing and able to play this role.
Voters cast their ballots at the Madison Senior Center on Nov. 8, 2022, in Madison, Wisconsin. Jim Vondruska/Getty Images
Winners trust elections – losers don’t
The consequences of the Capitol riot continue to loom large. The congressional hearings investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection have revealed the extent of then-President Trump’s desire to challenge the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory. In behind-the-scenes footage from his address on Jan. 7, 2021, to the nation, Trump said, “I don’t want to say the election is over.”
Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021, were hardly the first time he sowed distrust in American elections. While campaigning in 2016, he warned the election could be “rigged” and called on his supporters to be “Trump Election Observers.” Trump built on the claims of earlier Republican politicians who for years stoked fears about what they called “voter fraud,” even though nonpartisan experts demonstrate such fraud is rare in American elections.
Waning trust in elections not only turns off voters, but it also leads to other problems. Trump supporters deliberately overwhelmed local election officials before the midterms with information requests related to 2020 voting records. Other voters were “angry and confused,” uncertain about how to vote by mail and voting machines.
Polarization widens the gap in trust between election winners and losers because partisans rely on different news sources, and some of them may even start to care more about their party winning than about democracy.
In 2016, for example, our surveys of Americans showed that Hillary Clinton’s supporters went into the presidential election thinking it would be significantly more credible than Trump’s supporters thought it would be. Prior to the election, Clinton’s supporters gave the election an average of 7.5 on a 10-point scale of credibility; Trump supporters gave the election an average of 5.4 on a 10-point scale of credibility.
After the election, Trump supporters were much more confident than Clinton supporters in the credibility of the election. Trump supporters gave an average 8.4 vs. Clinton supporters’ 5.4 on the same 10-point scale.
There was an even larger partisan gap after the 2020 presidential election, with Biden’s supporters expressing twice as much confidence in the election than Trump supporters. And the aftermath of that election is well known – the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Fostering faith
Can Americans’ trust in elections be rebuilt?
Answering that question is complicated by the country’s decentralized system of election management. Researchers have found that trust can be enhanced when whole countries reform their electoral systems to make them fairer and more transparent. Although American elections are democratic, it is difficult to highlight specific qualities – or implement reforms that would make elections even better – because election administration varies from state to state.
Another way that countries help the public understand election quality is through positive reports from trusted election observers, both domestic and international. More than 80% of national elections in the world have international monitors present. But, according to a study by the Carter Center and the National Conference of State Legislatures, 15 American states do not allow nonpartisan election observers to monitor polling stations. These states generally do allow partisan election observers, so that means citizens will be able to rely only on party-aligned reports – which citizens may not trust.
Giving monitors access to more state elections and publicizing their work is a step toward rebuilding Americans’ trust in elections. We know this from national surveys of the American public we conducted around the 2016, 2018 and 2020 elections. We consistently found that telling Americans that monitors reported the elections were fair increased citizens’ trust.
What happens when people don’t trust elections? They can get violent, as they did on Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol. Shay Horse/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Politicizing election administration
Steps like allowing nonpartisan monitors and publicizing their positive assessments can only go so far toward reversing Americans’ declining trust in elections.
If politicians continue to express doubt about the fairness and legitimacy of American elections, whether warranted or unwarranted, the damaging effect of their messages will be difficult to correct.
And some elected officials are taking steps to actively undermine not just perceptions of election credibility, but election integrity itself. For example, the nonpartisan organizations States United Democracy Center and Protect Democracy in August 2022 identified 24 bills that have been enacted across 17 states that politicize and interfere with professional election administration.
The politicization of election administration threatens to further erode public trust in election integrity. Democracy depends on the public’s active participation in elections and acceptance of their results.
============================================================== Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, this article is an excellent start. It addresses trust in the government and its institutions,and that is necessary – but ot suffivient. And, of course, the other two legs of mutual trust are much harder to establish and strengthen. How does one go about buiding, from outside, trust in people who apparently don’t even trust themselves?
Yesterday, I managed to get in a grocery order. It came within the first ten minutes of the two-hour window, and I had it all put away before that window was half over. No substitutions, and only two things missing – one I had ordered as an afterthought just because the website had it (they so often don’t), and the other was one flavor of something I had ordered nine flavors of. Eight out of nine is even better than two out of three. So that’s all good. I think I’ll throw in Robert Reich’s latest caption contest above the TC cartoon, because the winner, Harry Sanderford, must have worked so hard to get it just right.
Cartoon –
Short Takes –
The New Yorker – Donald Trump, January 6th, and the Elusive Search for Accountability
Quote – So did any of the committee’s work matter? When the January 6th hearings began, on June 9th, Trump’s average approval rating in the polls was 41.9 per cent, and his average disapproval rating was 53.5 per cent, according to FiveThirtyEight. As the hearings ended, Trump’s average approval rating stood at 40.4 per cent. All that damning evidence, and the polls were basically unchanged. The straight line in the former President’s approval rating is the literal representation of the crisis in American democracy. There is an essentially immovable forty per cent of the country whose loyalty to Donald Trump cannot be shaken by anything. Click through for article. Not for the Committee, but for our Deomcratic Republic – vote like your life depends on it.
ProPublica – A User’s Guide to Democracy
Quote – Sign up for a series of personalized emails in which our journalists will help you answer questions like:
What are my current representatives doing about the issues I care about?
Who’s running for office in my district?
How can I hold my representatives accountable?
How does Congress even work, exactly?
How can I safely vote during this pandemic? Click through for details. This is less an article than a signup for a newsletter. And you likely do not need it. But you may know someone who does. I was unable to put in my address (I tried two browsers), but of course, I know my district.
