Democratic Forbearance, Italy in Turmoil, Rise of the Bot

Whither resistance?

In their of-the-moment take on Trump and the state of American democracy, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s ‘How Democracies Die’, the Harvard political scientists posit that while the US constitution has been flexible and robust enough to have survived the trauma of civil war, it may have hit the buffers. They argue that their country’s exceptionalism isn’t that exceptional at all. By looking at the coming to power of authoritarians around the world, past and present, they show some startling similarities to the path Trump is on, namely, stacking of courts, attacking a free press, and ballot rigging. They don’t believe America has fallen yet, but warn of the dangers if there if the current trends continue. The authors make a strong case for saying that the primary system in the States has got rid of the old gatekeeper protections; smoke-filled rooms served to weed out candidates that would not serve the country well. Levitsky and Ziblatt state that one of the key ways a democracy functions is from the practice of not going outside the spirit of the law, namely forbearance.

Forbearance means not doing something just because you a can. The most recent high-profile example of this is the GOP refusal to confirm Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination, in effect stealing the seat for Neil Gorsuch. While the Republicans were within the law to do this, they were breaking decades of senate tradition and unspoken courses of dealings. They were outside the spirit of the law. The authors ask if the resistance to authoritarianism should go down the same route. They don’t see impeachment as a priority. This is a mistake. A president is not above the law and should be held accountable just as every other citizen should be. They argue that political and civil opposition could suffice. Unfortunately, the barbarians are beyond the gate by now. Trump must be impeached for both his emoluments and his collusion with Russia. A failure to do so will allow future despotically inclined individuals to be nominated, and possibly to win. The Trumpian Right laughs at forbearance; the credo of ‘they go low, we go high’ has its limits. Democracy is at stake in America; the Democrats must impeach the President if they are returned with a majority in November in, what remains to be seen, free and fair elections.

Italian Crisis

Italy is undergoing a constitutional crisis following the recent Five Star/Liga proposed coalition. The president Sergio Mattarella vetoed the appointment of a Euro-hostile finance minister, fearing market turmoil. He was within his rights to do so. Mattarella appointed a former IMF technocrat, Carlo Cottarelli, to the position of acting prime minister. Five Star is a populist anti-politics party, while Liga is a far-right heir to the neo-fascists. In short, Italy is in a bind of the electorate’s making, an electorate who have shown little inclination to return to a moderate fold. If the two parties increase their seat numbers at the next election, then there is a real threat to the heart of the European project, and yet another country will be governed by aspirant authoritarians. The Italian president could have practiced forbearance, but made a call on an impossible decision. Hopefully, the next few months will prove the wisdom of that choice. There were and are real risks to the Italian economy no matter who is in charge. It is to be hoped that cool heads will prevail, but Italy has seismic cultural and political divisions that will need leaders willing to unite, rather than divide. It is yet another first world crisis that highlights the possibly fatal fault lines in Italian political system.

Information Warfare

The rise of the bot is not quite how we saw the future of the internet from those distant days twenty years ago. If you’d been told an army of fake accounts could swing an election in the US and change the course of a momentous referendum to leave the European Union, you’d have been surprised by how mundane it all sounded. There would be no need for a Room 101, for the most part, no robot overlords would be required. Instead, it would appeal to prejudices which just needed to be brought to the surface. Russia under Putin, and other bad actors, recognized not just the importance of fake news, but the importance of fake people. Propaganda has existed since the Greeks, but social media allows for such instant amplification of malicious information so that the fire-fighting to dampen it down is a huge demand on resources. People like Trump may or may not end up disgraced or behind bars, but the information warfare that brought him to the White House will continue. It can be challenged by democrats, and education is the key. It is here to stay, though, and that is one of the many tests faced by constitutionalists in the coming years.