Our picksHumanity’s Short-Term thinking | Cyberattack the Best form of Defense? | China’s ZTE Is a Security Threat, and more
· Democracy Contains the Seeds of Its Own Recovery
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· How South Korea’s Flu Vaccine Scare Offers Lessons for Other Nations
· Cyber Warfare - Is Attack the Best form of Defense?
· U.S. Telecoms Regulator Affirms China’s ZTE Is a Security Threat
· U.K. Telecom Companies Face Big Fines under New Security Law
· Far Right a Bigger Threat to West than Islamic State: Terrorism Index
· Humanity Is Stuck in Short-Term thinking. Here’s how we escape.
· Fox News Settles Years-Long Lawsuit over Seth Rich Murder Conspiracy Theories
Democracy Contains the Seeds of Its Own Recovery (Economist)
For all Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn this month’s election, American democracy never looked likely to buckle after polling day. Mr. Trump has still done harm, given that four in every five Republican voters say the vote was “stolen”, trust in the fairness of elections has been shaken and Mr. Biden unjustly undermined from the very start.
Mr. Trump’s effort to subvert to will of the voters is not a threat to the republic’s existence, but it does mark a further partisan deterioration in American democracy. It is also part of a global democratic recession.
Mr. Trump’s continuing efforts to discredit the American electoral system show that the threat to democracy is not from military coups but from governments in power. Given time, unscrupulous leaders can hollow out democracy completely.
Whether you support them or not, Mr. Trump and his fellow populists came to power as a response to the failings of democratic governments. Enterprising politicians responded to these feelings by elevating identity far above policy so as to show voters that their grievances matter.
In the last twenty years, many anti-establishment populists came to power, among them: Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela; Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines; Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil; Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico; Viktor Orban in Hungry; Narendra Modi in India; Miloš Zeman in the Czech Republic; Evo Morales in Bolivia; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey; and Joko Widodo in Indonesia.
America’s institutions are protected by the professionalism of its judges and officials. Many of them feel bound by standards laid down by those who came before them. When Mr. Trump tried to subvert the election, he failed abjectly because countless people did their duty.
The resilience of democracy gives us plenty of reasons to hope. One of democracy’s strengths is that it promises lots of chances to start again. So long as elections take place, there is always the possibility of kicking the rascals out even in places where governments stack the vote. In the cities of Hungary and Poland voters have begun to reject repression and cronyism. In EU elections last year populists did worse than expected. Perhaps the pendulum has already begun to swing.
