Democracy Under Fire

How did democracy become so vulnerable in America? Donald Trump is a shrill warning of the political system's fragility, but he alone is not the problem. The vulnerability is broader and deeper - and looms still. Even before Trump ran for president, his disdain for the rules and norms of democracy and the US Constitution was well-known by many prominent Republicans who were unable to stop his nomination. Trump's presidency is the culmination of a series of political decisions since the late 18th century that ceded party nominations to small cliques of ideologues. 'Democracy Under Fire' provides a readable, if disturbing, history of American democracy and proposes recommendations to restore it.

How did democracy become so vulnerable in America? Donald Trump is a shrill warning of the political system's fragility, but he alone is not the problem. The vulnerability is broader and deeper - and looms still. Even before Trump ran for president, his disdain for the rules and norms of democracy and the US Constitution was well-known by many prominent Republicans who were unable to stop his nomination. Trump's presidency is the culmination of a series of political decisions since the late 18th century that ceded party nominations to small cliques of ideologues. 'Democracy Under Fire' provides a readable, if disturbing, history of American democracy and proposes recommendations to restore it.

The fact that the politicians brought to power by the Ukrainian Maidan revolutions turned out to be clearly anti-democratic, fully reliant on advantages of the moment stolen from opponents on the square, and not ready to compromise or stick to agreements made with opponents, is both the fault and a generic trait of the Maidan revolutions. It is this fact that eventually became the key factor in the collapse of the Ukrainian state. Indeed, if we imagine that the February 21 agreements between the opposition and Yanukovich had been implemented, there would not have been the referendum in Crimea, nor the Odessa massacre, nor the referendum in the Donbass, nor the bloody civil war, and most likely somebody other than Yanukovich would have become President of Ukraine. However, given the logic of ochlocracy, it is just as clear that this was impossible. For the leaders of opposition are through and through square-dwelling provocateurs, pushed from behind by a similar, though far more radical, breed. While elections tend to have a low turnout, with the procedures usually well defined, the turnout at referendums tends to be high, although there are often procedural questions. These are the realities one has to learn to evaluate correctly. The institution of representative democracy attracts less and less the attention of the citizens of different countries. If there is still some interest in elections for the head of state (although fatigue builds up because all politicians are the same), people rarely understand who to vote for and why, when it comes to parliamentary elections. The shows put on, or the intensified controversies between politicians before elections, only show that national leadership does everything possible to attract people's attention to a voting procedure that has become uninteresting or meaningless for them. On the other hand, the instruments of direct democracy, such as referendums that decide truly life-changing questions for a country or a region, draw more and more people. The answer to the question of why this is happening is obvious - people show their civic-mindedness when something is vital, when their voice defines the fate of their country, but they do not want to take part in meaningless games imposed on them. On the other hand, this suggests the more profound conclusion that the public conscience, the proverbial civil society is a real, sizeable phenomenon, rather than a "Frondesque" narrow circle of party activists. And the position of the true civil society, i.e. people who perceive themselves as citizens of their country who care about its future, has long since outgrown the meaningless formalism of liberal democracy.

Citizenship under Fire examines the relationship among civic education, the culture of war, and the quest for peace. Drawing on examples from Israel and the United States, Sigal Ben-Porath seeks to understand how ideas about citizenship change when a country is at war, and what educators can do to prevent some of the most harmful of these changes. Perhaps the most worrisome one, Ben-Porath contends, is a growing emphasis in schools and elsewhere on social conformity, on tendentious teaching of history, and on drawing stark distinctions between them and us. As she writes, "The varying characteristics of citizenship in times of war and peace add up to a distinction between belligerent citizenship, which is typical of democracies in wartime, and the liberal democratic citizenship that is characteristic of more peaceful democracies." Ben-Porath examines how various theories of education--principally peace education, feminist education, and multicultural education--speak to the distinctive challenges of wartime. She argues that none of these theories are satisfactory on their own theoretical terms or would translate easily into practice. In the final chapter, she lays out her own alternative theory--"expansive education"--which she believes holds out more promise of widening the circles of participation in schools, extending the scope of permissible debate, and diversifying the questions asked about the opinions voiced.

The reigning consensus holds that the combination of free markets and democracy would transform the third world and sweep away the ethnic hatred and religious zealotry associated with underdevelopment. In this revelatory investigation of the true impact of globalization, Yale Law School professor Amy Chua explains why many developing countries are in fact consumed by ethnic violence after adopting free market democracy. Chua shows how in non-Western countries around the globe, free markets have concentrated starkly disproportionate wealth in the hands of a resented ethnic minority. These “market-dominant minorities” – Chinese in Southeast Asia, Croatians in the former Yugoslavia, whites in Latin America and South Africa, Indians in East Africa, Lebanese in West Africa, Jews in post-communist Russia – become objects of violent hatred. At the same time, democracy empowers the impoverished majority, unleashing ethnic demagoguery, confiscation, and sometimes genocidal revenge. She also argues that the United States has become the world’s most visible market-dominant minority, a fact that helps explain the rising tide of anti-Americanism around the world. Chua is a friend of globalization, but she urges us to find ways to spread its benefits and curb its most destructive aspects.

The Capitol Riots maps out the events of the January 6, 2021 insurrectionary riots at the United States Capitol building, providing context for understanding the contributing factors and ongoing implications of the uprising. This definitive text explores the rise of populism, disinformation, conspiracy theories, the alt-right, and white supremacy during the lead-up to and planning of the Stop the Steal campaign, as well as the complex interplay during the riots of political performances, costumes, objectives, communications, digital media, datafication, race, gender, and—ultimately—power. Assembling raw data from social media, selfie photos and videos, and mainstream journalism, the authors develop a timeline and data visualizations representing the events. They delve into the complex, openly shared narratives, motivations, and actions of people on the ground that day who violated the symbolic center of U.S. democracy. An analysis of visual data reveals an affective outpouring of mutually amplifying expressions of frustration, fear, hate, anger, and anomie that correspond to similar logics and counter-logics in the polarized and chaotic contemporary media environment that have only been intensified by COVID-19 lockdowns, conspiracy theories, and a call to action at the Capitol from the outgoing POTUS and his inner circle. The book will appeal to both a general audience of those curious about how and why the Capitol riots unfolded and to students and scholars of communications, political science, media studies, sociology, education, surveillance studies, digital humanities, gender studies, critical whiteness studies, and datafication studies. It will also find an audience within computer science and technology studies through its approach to big data, data visualization, AI, algorithms, data tracking, and other data sciences.

A healthy democracy requires vigorous, uncompromising investigative journalism. But today the free press faces a daunting set of challenges: in the face of harsh criticism from powerful politicians and the threat of lawsuits from wealthy individuals, media institutions are confronted by an uncertain financial future and stymied by a judicial philosophy that takes a narrow view of the protections that the Constitution affords reporters. In Journalism Under Fire, Stephen Gillers proposes a bold set of legal and policy changes that can overcome these obstacles to protect and support the work of journalists. Gillers argues that law and public policy must strengthen the freedom of the press, including protection for news gathering and confidential sources. He analyzes the First Amendment’s Press Clause, drawing on older Supreme Court cases and recent dissenting opinions to argue for greater press freedom than the Supreme Court is today willing to recognize. Beyond the First Amendment, Journalism Under Fire advocates policies that facilitate and support the free press as a public good. Gillers proposes legislation to create a publicly funded National Endowment for Investigative Reporting, modeled on the national endowments for the arts and for the humanities; improvements to the Freedom of Information Act; and a national anti-SLAPP law, a statute to protect media organizations from frivolous lawsuits, to help journalists and the press defend themselves in court. Gillers weaves together questions of journalistic practice, law, and policy into a program that can ensure a future for investigative reporting and its role in our democracy.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Comprehensive, enlightening, and terrifyingly timely.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITH BOOK PRIZE • SHORTLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • Time • Foreign Affairs • WBUR • Paste Donald Trump’s presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang—in a revolution or military coup—but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one. Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die—and how ours can be saved. Praise for How Democracies Die “What we desperately need is a sober, dispassionate look at the current state of affairs. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two of the most respected scholars in the field of democracy studies, offer just that.”—The Washington Post “Where Levitsky and Ziblatt make their mark is in weaving together political science and historical analysis of both domestic and international democratic crises; in doing so, they expand the conversation beyond Trump and before him, to other countries and to the deep structure of American democracy and politics.”—Ezra Klein, Vox “If you only read one book for the rest of the year, read How Democracies Die. . . .This is not a book for just Democrats or Republicans. It is a book for all Americans. It is nonpartisan. It is fact based. It is deeply rooted in history. . . . The best commentary on our politics, no contest.”—Michael Morrell, former Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (via Twitter) “A smart and deeply informed book about the ways in which democracy is being undermined in dozens of countries around the world, and in ways that are perfectly legal.”—Fareed Zakaria, CNN