democracy - Arabica Robusta on Diigo

A Shortage of Democracy, Not Food

Tags: democracy, shortage, food on 2008-07-17 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

Hyde to Bush: Support Pro-democratic Coalition in Venezuela

An archive from 2002 showing the fear of U.S. neocon elite about authentic democracy in Latin America. This kind of letter has likely never been sent regarding the brutal thugs in Guatemala, Haiti's Duvalier, or the generals of Argentina's 'dirty war.'

Tags: latin, america, hyde, bush, us, intervention, venezuela, axis, of, evil, neoconservatism, democracy on 2008-05-27 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Inverted Totalitarianism: A New Way of Understanding How the U.S. Is Controlled | Democracy and Elections | AlterNet

To reduce a complex argument to its bare bones, since the Depression, the twin forces of managed democracy and Superpower have opened the way for something new under the sun: "inverted totalitarianism," a form every bit as totalistic as the classical version but one based on internalized co-optation, the appearance of freedom, political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, and relying more on "private media" than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda that reinforces the official version of events.

Tags: repression, us, political, democracy, wolin, totalitarianism, governmentality, hegemony, culture, media on 2008-05-25 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (2) -About

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Given this historical backdrop, Wolin introduces three new concepts to help analyze what we have lost as a nation. His master idea is "inverted totalitarianism," which is reinforced by two subordinate notions that accompany and promote it -- "managed democracy" and "Superpower," the latter always capitalized and used without a direct article. Until the reader gets used to this particular literary tic, the term Superpower can be confusing. The author uses it as if it were an independent agent, comparable to Superman or Spiderman, and one that is inherently incompatible with constitutional government and democracy.
Wolin writes, "Our thesis is this: it is possible for a form of totalitarianism, different from the classical one, to evolve from a putatively 'strong democracy' instead of a 'failed' one." His understanding of democracy is classical but also populist, anti-elitist and only slightly represented in the Constitution of the United States. "Democracy," he writes, "is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs." It depends on the existence of a demos -- "a politically engaged and empowered citizenry, one that voted, deliberated, and occupied all branches of public office."
Wolin argues that to the extent the United States on occasion came close to genuine democracy, it was because its citizens struggled against and momentarily defeated the elitism that was written into the Constitution.
To reduce a complex argument to its bare bones, since the Depression, the twin forces of managed democracy and Superpower have opened the way for something new under the sun: "inverted totalitarianism," a form every bit as totalistic as the classical version but one based on internalized co-optation, the appearance of freedom, political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, and relying more on "private media" than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda that reinforces the official version of events. It is inverted because it does not require the use of coercion, police power and a messianic ideology as in the Nazi, Fascist and Stalinist versions (although note that the United States has the highest percentage of its citizens in prison -- 751 per 100,000 people -- of any nation on Earth). According to Wolin, inverted totalitarianism has "emerged imperceptibly, unpremeditatedly, and in seeming unbroken continuity with the nation's political traditions."
Among the factors that have promoted inverted totalitarianism are the practice and psychology of advertising and the rule of "market forces" in many other contexts than markets, continuous technological advances that encourage elaborate fantasies (computer games, virtual avatars, space travel), the penetration of mass media communication and propaganda into every household in the country, and the total co-optation of the universities. Among the commonplace fables of our society are hero worship and tales of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, action measured in nanoseconds, and a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose adepts are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge. Masters of this world are masters of images and their manipulation.
On inverted totalitarianism's "self-pacifying" university campuses compared with the usual intellectual turmoil surrounding independent centers of learning, Wolin writes, "Through a combination of governmental contracts, corporate and foundation funds, joint projects involving university and corporate researchers, and wealthy individual donors, universities (especially so-called research universities), intellectuals, scholars, and researchers have been seamlessly integrated into the system. No books burned, no refugee Einsteins. For the first time in the history of American higher education top professors are made wealthy by the system, commanding salaries and perks that a budding CEO might envy."
One other subordinate task of managed democracy is to keep the citizenry preoccupied with peripheral and/or private conditions of human life so that they fail to focus on the widespread corruption and betrayal of the public trust. In Wolin's words, "The point about disputes on such topics as the value of sexual abstinence, the role of religious charities in state-funded activities, the question of gay marriage, and the like, is that they are not framed to be resolved. Their political function is to divide the citizenry while obscuring class differences and diverting the voters' attention from the social and economic concerns of the general populace." Prominent examples of the elite use of such incidents to divide and inflame the public are the Terri Schiavo case of 2005, in which a brain-dead woman was kept artificially alive, and the 2008 case of women and children living in a polygamous commune in Texas who were allegedly sexually mistreated.
Superpower is the sponsor, defender and manager of American imperialism and militarism, aspects of American government that have always been dominated by elites, enveloped in executive-branch secrecy, and allegedly beyond the ken of ordinary citizens to understand or oversee. Superpower is preoccupied with weapons of mass destruction, clandestine manipulation of foreign policy (sometimes domestic policy, too), military operations, and the fantastic sums of money demanded from the public by the military-industrial complex. (The U.S. military spends more than all other militaries on Earth combined. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion; the next closest national military budget is China's at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.)
Many analysts, myself included, would conclude that Wolin has made a close to airtight case that the American republic's days are numbered, but Wolin himself does not agree. Toward the end of his study he produces a wish list of things that should be done to ward off the disaster of inverted totalitarianism: "rolling back the empire, rolling back the practices of managed democracy; returning to the idea and practices of international cooperation rather than the dogmas of globalization and preemptive strikes; restoring and strengthening environmental protections; reinvigorating populist politics; undoing the damage to our system of individual rights; restoring the institutions of an independent judiciary, separation of powers, and checks and balances; reinstating the integrity of the independent regulatory agencies and of scientific advisory processes; reviving representative systems responsive to popular needs for health care, education, guaranteed pensions, and an honorable minimum wage; restoring governmental regulatory authority over the economy; and rolling back the distortions of a tax code that toadies to the wealthy and corporate power."
Add Sticky Note
- What does Wolin mean by "populist"? Certainly not the populism of Dornbusch and National Endowment for Democracy theorists. See, for example, http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/7418.ctl.
  
  Certainly not the populism of an Obama or Lula, attempting to simultaneously echo the 'voice of the dispossessed' and Wall Street.
  posted by pickinjava on 2008-05-25 12:01:32
Unfortunately, this is more a guide to what has gone wrong than a statement of how to fix it, particularly since Wolin believes that our political system is "shot through with corruption and awash in contributions primarily from wealthy and corporate donors." It is extremely unlikely that our party apparatus will work to bring the military-industrial complex and the 16 secret intelligence agencies under democratic control. Nonetheless, once the United States has followed the classical totalitarianisms into the dustbin of history, Wolin's analysis will stand as one of the best discourses on where we went wrong.

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Wennerhag - The politics of the global movement

Large−scale social movements often behave provocatively but with the aim to make more space for democracy. The latest of these is the global justice movement born in Seattle in 1999. Magnus Wennerhag's new book is the first major Swedish study on the impact of this movement. In the extract Arena publishes here, he shows how it differs from the movements of 1968, being more political and more directedtowards international institutions and globalized democracy.

Tags: wennerhag, social, movement, globalization, seattle, justice, democracy on 2008-05-06 -All Annotations (3) -About

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Social movements are
seen alternately as actors creating and extending democracy, and as actors
obstructing and destabilizing it. The notion of politics as liberation is
confronted by the notion of politics as order.
But in order to understand the full impact of social movements on politics and
social developments, we must take both of these aspects into account. Social
movements may challenge, change or sustain the institutions and norms of the
society of their time. It is on the borderline between ideals of autonomous
freedom and the upholding of order that politics is created and social changes
are initiated.
post by pickinjava on 2008-05-06 00:01:15
The common good as well as a will to democratize global power is used to stem the wave of privatization. There is more to globalization, however, than de−politicization, privatization, and the spread of market forces. Alongside these we have seen the emergence of what might be called new forms of citizenship. The global norms that have guided the supranational bodies have created new political opportunities. In parallel with these bodies, new transnational public bodies have been created
with the aim of bringing pressure to bear on the denationalized order. The
social forums, particularly the World Social Forum, are clear examples. The
forums are helping to develop a global grass−roots identity, to formulate political demands for global rights, and to establish a transnational public body for political interaction.
post by pickinjava on 2008-05-06 00:14:25
The new social movements were critical of the idea of political representation
and the division between public and private, as they considered that a state−centred nderstanding of politics merely concealed the inequalities that existed outside the state and put them beyond reach of change. The activists in
the global justice movement have a different critical emphasis. They prefer to
defend the public and the political institutions, and other forms of political
autonomy that have been undermined by globalization. They express a will to
restore a sense of the public in an age that is perceived as far too focused on the private. One
post by pickinjava on 2008-05-06 00:17:02

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Can democracy save the planet? | openDemocracy

a Consultation on Democracy and Sustainability was held at the Science Museum in London on 18 March 2008. It was convened by the Environment Foundation, the 21st Century Trust and SustainAbility, and supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. The questions addressed included: can a world of 9-10 billion people vote its way to a sustainable future - or are new forms of leadership (even forms of authoritarian rule) going to be necessary? Are the rising global powers (China, India and Brazil among them) best placed to move towards more sustainable forms of development? Democracy has a central role to play in any discussion of the future of the planet. But democracy is in trouble in many parts of the world, and must - if it is to deliver, remain relevant and meet people's needs and aspirations - mutate and evolve (see Larry Diamond, "The Democratic Rollback", Foreign Affairs [March-April 2008]).

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The questions addressed included: can a world of 9-10 billion people
vote its way to a sustainable future - or are new forms of leadership (even
forms of authoritarian rule) going to be necessary? Are the rising global
powers (China, India and Brazil among them) best placed to move towards more
sustainable forms of development?
What of the link between democracy and
sustainable development? Most respondents held that voter pressure meant that
democracy was of benefit to sustainable development. Yet consultation with
a more specialised group of experts found that only 28% believed that
capitalism (often paired with democracy in its liberal variant) aided
sustainable development, against 36% who said that capitalism inhibited it.
Overall, Doug Miller saw in the figures an activation of people's survival
instinct: as the planet "speaks" through extreme weather events, citizens are
starting to listen.
Many of the issues the roundtable addressed had been
highlighted in a keynote paper commissioned ahead of the meeting from Ian
Christie. This made four basic propositions about democracy, ecologically
sustainable development, and environmental/sustainability campaign
organisations (SD-NGOs). He argued that together, these phenomena offer a
paradox about the relationship between democracy, civil society and
sustainability; and that resolving it is now an urgent and complex task - for
the west, for newly industrialised democracies, and for emergent democratic civil
society in the global south.
Democracy poses huge problems
for sustainable development. In the advanced liberal capitalist states, democracy
is tightly coupled to the promise of economic growth, ever-rising consumption
and individual freedom. Democracy in such states now entrenches the interests
of the affluent majority and well-funded lobbies in the political system (a
point analysed by, among others, JK Galbraith and Mancur Olson).
Environmental/sustainability
campaign organisations (SD-NGOs) are a massive success for civil society
worldwide. Without them, we would not have anything like the progress we have
seen in the past half-century in protecting the environment, cutting pollution,
raising resource efficiency, highlighting linked issues of environmental and
social injustice, and saving wildlife and habitats from destruction. Without
them, the discourse and practice of sustainable development would not have
become established in governments worldwide, and huge issues such as climate
disruption would not have been acknowledged or tackled sufficiently by
governments and businesses.
SD-NGOs are a massive failure by their own
standards. For nearly fifty years they have campaigned and educated citizens
and governments and businesses worldwide; yet ecological damage continues on a
vast scale, environmental injustices abound, and dangerous climate disruption
seems to be unavoidable. SD-NGOs have achieved limited gains in specific areas
of policy but have failed to mobilise and energise citizens on a large enough
scale to put real pressure on politicians and businesses in the west and
beyond. Moreover, they lack clear answers to challenges to their own legitimacy
and accountability, and have sometimes spoken as though they were representative
voices of "civil society", when in fact they constitute a small and highly
unrepresentative section of it in many countries.

The Post Online (Cameroon): Local Traditions Can Create Democratic Governance - Fon Chafah

Tags: ethnicity, traditional, rulers, cameroon, democracy, postcolonial, colonialism, governance on 2008-05-05 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Philanthropy on the commons | openDemocracy

The future of philanthropy lies in joining the wave of open source peer-production that is enriching public assets, says Mark Surman.

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IDASA - Institute for Democracy in South Africa

Idasa is an independent public interest organisation committed to promoting sustainable democracy based on active citizenship, democratic institutions, and social justice.

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Zimbabwe's political watershed

Paul T Zeleza looks at the long road that might yet see Mugabe's downfall and calls for a democracy that ultimately serves the Zimbabwean people through political and economic enfranchisement

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Conversation with Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, cover page

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GSDRC: Transparency and Accountability In Africa's Extractive Industries: The Role of The Legislature

While current efforts to increase transparency and accountability in the management of natural resources emphasise the roles and responsibilities of a broad range of actors, relatively little attention has been paid to...elected legislators.

Tags: extractive, industry, democracy, neoinstitutional, government, oil, petroleum on 2008-04-05 -All Annotations (0) -About

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IRIN Africa | West Africa | Nigeria | NIGERIA: After River State’s flawed elections, violence expected | Governance Human Rights Conflict Aid Policy Urban Risk | Breaking News

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Tariq Ali considers the legacy of the 1968 uprising, 40 years after the Vietnam war | Politics | The Guardian

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"Ecuador's politics of expectation: Rafael Correa's second year will test his ability to meet the aspiration to social justice he has aroused, says Guy Hedgecoe." [openDemocracy]

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"Africa's democratic pains" [openDemocracy]

Tags: alancordova, democracy, democratization, kenya, southafrica, congokinshasa, congo, nigeria on 2008-03-30 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Eurozine - What makes a biopolitical space? - Toni Negri, Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Anne Querrien A discussion with Toni Negri

Toni Negri discusses the significance of urban space for new forms of opposition. The city, he says, is where the "political diagonal" intersects the "biopolitical diagram" – where people's relation to power is most pronounced.

Tags: activism, class, democracy, identity, management, politics, power, revolution, urban, social, movements, via:bfunk, for:mbauwens, space, theory, negri, biopolitics on 2008-03-08 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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openDemocracy

Tags: academic, activism, articles, blog, collaboration, commentary, culture, africa, democracy, social, movements on 2008-03-02 and saved by30 people -All Annotations (1) -About

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Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of Web 2.0 democracy. - By Chris Wilson - Slate Magazine

Social-media sites like Wikipedia and Digg are celebrated as shining examples of Web democracy, places built by millions of Web users who all act as writers, editors, and voters. In reality, a small number of people are running the show.

Tags: web2.0, wikipedia, digg, blog, community, culture, internet, journalism, media, democracy on 2008-02-28 and saved by12 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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"Inside the CIA's notorious 'black sites'" [Salon]

A Yemeni man never charged by the U.S. details 19 months of brutality and psychological torture -- the first in-depth, first-person account from inside the secret U.S. prisons. A Salon exclusive.

Tags: democracy, guantanamo, war, terror, us, intervention, human, rights, cia, terrorism on 2007-12-16 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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AlterNet: Democracy Still Alive and Well in Venezuela

Tags: venezuela, democracy, hugo, chavez, us, intervention, law, latin, america on 2007-11-29 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Arabica Robusta's Bookmarks tagged democracy → View Popular

A Shortage of Democracy, Not Food

Hyde to Bush: Support Pro-democratic Coalition in Venezuela

Inverted Totalitarianism: A New Way of Understanding How the U.S. Is Controlled | Democracy and Elections | AlterNet

Wennerhag - The politics of the global movement

Can democracy save the planet? | openDemocracy

The Post Online (Cameroon): Local Traditions Can Create Democratic Governance - Fon Chafah

Philanthropy on the commons | openDemocracy

IDASA - Institute for Democracy in South Africa

Zimbabwe's political watershed

Conversation with Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, cover page

GSDRC: Transparency and Accountability In Africa's Extractive Industries: The Role of The Legislature

IRIN Africa | West Africa | Nigeria | NIGERIA: After River State’s flawed elections, violence expected | Governance Human Rights Conflict Aid Policy Urban Risk | Breaking News

Tariq Ali considers the legacy of the 1968 uprising, 40 years after the Vietnam war | Politics | The Guardian

"Ecuador's politics of expectation: Rafael Correa's second year will test his ability to meet the aspiration to social justice he has aroused, says Guy Hedgecoe." [openDemocracy]

"Africa's democratic pains" [openDemocracy]

Eurozine - What makes a biopolitical space? - Toni Negri, Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Anne Querrien A discussion with Toni Negri

openDemocracy

Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of Web 2.0 democracy. - By Chris Wilson - Slate Magazine

"Inside the CIA's notorious 'black sites'" [Salon]

AlterNet: Democracy Still Alive and Well in Venezuela

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