#Steven Levitsky

[imkeepinit]

[garyconkling]

Defending Democracy Under Assault

U.S. elections are under assault. The Russians circulate fake videos. Elon Musk stokes conspiracy theories on X. Donald Trump hurls insults and lies in rallies and interviews. Right-wing groups file legal actions to challenge election results before votes are counted. According to Trumpian logic – the only way there isn’t election fraud is if I win. Eventually, the smoke will disappear,…

[thatstormygeek]

This is a thought-provoking interview and definitely worth the read, but the whole piece - and especially this part - made me feel like I was watching the conversation from the other side of a soundproof window, just banging away with my fists.

I don’t understand how you approach a conversation about encroaching fascism in the US in 2024 (or 2023 or 2022) without even mentioning the LGBT community given that every one of those years has seen a record number of bills introduced in state legislatures to curtail the rights of queer - and especially trans - people.

It’s not even ahistorical - queer and trans people were also specifically targeted by the Nazis.

We really are that invisible.

[davidpotash]

Tune-up or Rebuild the Machinery of Government

A few years into the Trump presidency, two Harvard University professors of government, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote How Democracies Die. The book was a best-seller, calling out the decline in tolerance and respect across political party divides. The pair followed that effort in 2023 with Tyranny of the Minority. Equally popular, this volume highlights historical crises to make…

[filosofablogger]

A Republic -- If You Can Keep It

Legend has it a woman asked Benjamin Franklin a question as he exited Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention in 1787. “Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?” Franklin supposedly replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” As I’ve expressed before, I keep looking around at what’s happening in this country, both in our government and among our society, and I’m not liking…

[calicojack1718]

The 6 January Congressional Committee Report: Democracy Discarded

The 6 January Committee has released its summary of a report. It should alarm us all. It should light a new fire of urgency to hold Trump et al. accountable before the 2024 elections. Will it?

The 6 January Committee, Trump, and the Risk to Our Democracy that White People Perceive Now that the 6 January Congressional Committee’s introduction to its final report is out and being dissected by all the punditing pundits and head talking talking heads — it will soon be a double header with the actual report being published tomorrow (if I publish in time, big if, right?) — we should…

[gusty-wind]

NEW TALKING POINT

THAT THE CONSTITUTION IS "OUTDATED" BY "TRAITORS"

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Mike Damiano and Hilary Burns at Boston Globe:

Throughout the presidential campaign, Donald Trump and his allies have lambasted universities as “woke” indoctrination mills that radicalize youths against America and rip off students with inflated tuition.

Trump has said that, if elected, he will “reclaim” universities from the “Marxist maniacs and lunatics” who currently control them. His running mate, JD Vance, who once exhorted supporters to “attack the universities,” has praised the authoritarian leader of Hungary for seizing control of that country’s institutions of higher education. Such remarks could be dismissed as Trumpian bombast. But a Globe review of a year’s worth of campaign videos, policy statements, and recent remarks by top Republicans suggests something else: that behind his incendiary words lies a set of specific policies that a second Trump administration could pursue to exert wide-ranging influence over American universities. “There’s a lot of levers and tools that will get their attention day one,” Steve Scalise, the second-highest-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, said at a meeting with a lobbying group early this month while discussing ways to punish universities for alleged civil rights violations.

Trump and his allies have said a second Trump administration would replace universities’ existing oversight agencies —which wield clout over funding and fair practices —with new ones that would defend “the American tradition and Western civilization.” Trump says he would ramp up civil rights investigations into antisemitism and racial discrimination, a term conservatives have inverted from familiar usage to refer to affirmative action and campus diversity initiatives. And, crucially, he would cut off federal funding to universities deemed to be in violation of federal rules.

The plans are aggressive but feasible, higher education experts said, because they call for using existing federal powers that are under the control of the president. If Trump wins the election, he could follow through on these and other proposals through regulation and executive actions even if the Republican Party does not control Congress. “You have a lot of jurisdiction as president with all of these different [executive branch] agencies,” Scalise said at the Washington meeting held by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The Guardian first published video of the remarks. To his campaign and its supporters, Trump’s promise to crack down on higher education represents an overdue reckoning for institutions that have become, in their view, excessively left-leaning and have strayed from their founding missions.

[...] But some critics hear Trump’s pronouncements about higher education as the rhetoric of a man who revels in executive power and wants to move against his political enemies and quash dissent. “This is what authoritarians do,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard government professor who studies democracy and authoritarianism. “Authoritarians of the left, of the center, of the right go after universities.” Trump himself has praised the authoritarian leaders of China, Russia, and Hungary. Vance said in a CBS interview reflecting on Viktor Orbán’s takeover of his country’s universities that the Hungarian president “has made some smart decisions there that we could learn from.”

In some ways, the Trump plans for federal higher education policy are an extension of Republican ideas that have already been implemented in some states. In recent years, Republican governors and state legislatures have banned diversity and inclusion offices, replaced public university leaders with ideological allies, and cut back on courses viewed as having a liberal slant. So far, those efforts have mostly been confined to red states, but higher education insiders fear that Trump could implement similar policies nationally. “We already see the way that state governments have been politicizing higher education, and to do that at a federal level would be devastating,” said Natasha Warikoo, a Tufts University sociology professor.

[...] The plan’s primary target is the federal funding — in the form of student financial aid and research grants — that most colleges and universities depend on to stay in business. In total, it amounts to tens of billions of dollars a year. To receive that crucial funding, institutions must be in compliance with federal rules, including civil rights laws. And to benefit from student financial aid they must have the stamp of approval of an accrediting agency recognized by the federal government.

[...] Another lever Trump and allies say they plan to use is federal civil rights law. “I will direct the Department of Justice to pursue federal civil rights cases against schools that continue to engage in racial discrimination and schools that persist in explicit unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity,” Trump said in the campaign video. [...]

In practice, the more typical outcome has been an agreement with the federal government in which the university promises to change its behavior or policies.

In addition to using the Justice Department, a second Trump administration could investigate alleged civil rights violations through the Department of Education. In the last year, the department has fielded dozens of official complaints alleging that universities are violating civil rights laws by allowing antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate to fester. Republican congressional leaders have summoned university presidents to Washington for hearings on campus antisemitism, which contributed to the resignations of three Ivy League presidents, including Harvard’s Claudine Gay. “We’ve had the hearings. We’ve got it teed up,” Scalise said at the meeting held by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. If Trump wins, it may be possible to withhold billions of dollars of federal funding from schools that the federal government decides are violating students’ civil rights, he said.

Coward, the free speech advocate, said there was nothing inherently concerning about vows to enforce civil rights laws. In the past year, since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, there have been assaults on Jewish students and instances of protesters blocking students from accessing parts of college campuses, which could amount to civil rights violations, he said. But he also warned that civil rights enforcement can go too far, imperiling free expression. Even under the Biden administration, he said, the Department of Education has urged universities to clamp down on pro-Palestinian speech protected by the First Amendment. Some of the policies proposed by Trump and his allies could further increase the pressure on universities and lead to more suppression of speech, he said. “When the institutions are choosing between their students’ First Amendment rights or losing their federal funding, almost all of them are going to choose censorship over loss of federal funding,” Coward said.

Wood, the former Boston University administrator who is now the president of the right-leaning National Association of Scholars, said some of Trump’s plans struck him as reasonable, including the prospect of accreditation reform. He and other conservative critics of higher education say the accreditors have strayed from their original mission of merely ensuring that schools are financially sound and providing an adequate education. Now, Wood says, they are overtly political and push DEI priorities. But critics of Trump’s plans see a power grab that could undermine universities’ independence.

If Donald Trump gets re-elected, he will follow the Viktor Orbán model of suppressing higher education and remaking it in his image to a tool of fascism.

Vote for Kamala Harris to keep academic freedom in universities.

[abigailspinach]

Quote Of The Day

Chris Geidner: “[T]his election isn’t about alliances in the way that we normally think about them in politics. This isn’t about who you want in your boat. It’s about if you want the boat to stay afloat.”

‘Sleepwalking Toward a Crisis’

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt on Donald Trump and the response from America’s elite to the threat he poses:

We have been studying democratic crisis and authoritarianism for 30 years. Between the two of us, we have written five books on those subjects. We can think of few major national candidates for office in any democracy since World War II who have been this openly authoritarian…. The U.S. establishment is sleepwalking toward a crisis. An openly antidemocratic figure stands at least a 50-50 chance of winning the presidency. The Supreme Court and the Republican Party have abdicated their gatekeeping responsibilities, and too many of America’s most influential political, business and religious leaders remain on the sidelines. Unable to rise above fear or narrow ambition, they hedge their bets. But time is running out.

‘In Dangerous Times, Honest People Need To Stand Up’

The LA Times editorials editor has resigned in protest after the newspaper’s owner – South African-born billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong – blocked the editorial board’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris for president.

[rorygilmorecore]

2024 Reading List 📚

Here is my reading list for 2024 and all the books I plan to get to that are not for school. Sorry for how non aesthetic the pictures look.

Dis United Nations by Peter Zeihan.

Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky.

How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.

The Rise of ISIS by Joby Warrick.

Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum.

Soft Power by Joesph S Nye Jr (eBook).

I'd like to try to read more novels this year, but I don't currently have any in mind right now. However, I used to be really into Ernest Hemingway and Jane Austen, so maybe I will reread some favorites of mine.

These are also the books I plan to use for the LSAT.

Not pictured:

Lawhub tests | Khan Academy Prep | 7Sage LSAT Prep

I'm also trying to expand my vocabulary with GRE prep. Moreover, I also want to start doing word puzzles and sudoku regularly.

[feministdragon]

— When the 2000 election recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court was halted by five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court — handing the White House to George W. Bush by a disputed 537 votes — nobody knew at the time that Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, had commissioned a huge purge of voters, using a list of Texas felons that was 68% Black and Hispanic.

Harris did this because the national pool of Black and Hispanic names is relatively small: Black felons in Texas with names like Jim Washington or Jose Gonzalez are extremely likely to have similarly named counterparts in any other state with large Black and Hispanic populations like Florida. 

Thus, when those Texas names were compared via a “loose match” (didn’t require a birthday or middle name match) with Florida voters’ names, disproportionate numbers of Black and Hispanic Florida voters were deemed to be possible felons who’d somehow recently moved to Florida from Texas, and tens of thousands were removed from the voter rolls. As the US Commission on Civil Rights noted:

“14.4 percent of Florida’s black voters cast ballots that were rejected. This compares with approximately 1.6 percent of nonblack Florida voters who did not have their presidential votes counted. … [I]n the state's largest county, Miami-Dade, more than 65 percent of the names on the purge list were African Americans, who represented only 20.4 percent of the population.”

— When Donald Trump was certified the winner of the 2016 election, nobody knew at the time that Russia had illegally poured millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man-hours into targeting swing state voters identified by the RNC, whose names were handed off to Russian Intelligence by Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.

When Robert Mueller’s FBI team determined this crime had helped put Trump in the White House, and that Trump had personally intervened in investigations ten separate times in ways that could be prosecuted as criminal obstruction of justice, Bill Barr kept the news from America until the story had largely faded from the headlines.

What will it be this November? We have some clues.

— With the blessing of five Republicans on the 2018 Supreme Court, Republican-controlled states with large Black and Hispanic populations are purging voter rolls like there’s no tomorrow. Just between 2020 and 2022, fully 19,260,000 Americans — 8.5% of all registered voters — were purged. The purge rate in Red states was 40% higher than the rest of the country. We won’t know this year’s purge numbers until well after the election is over.

— The GOP is trying to organize an “army” of 100,000 rightwing warriors to show up at polling places to “oversee” elections and challenge voters they think look suspicious. They’ll also be challenging signature matches on mail-in ballots, particularly in Blue cities in Red states.

— Republican elected officials from the state level all the way up to the US Senate are refusing to say that they’ll accept or certify the result of the election this fall if Donald Trump doesn’t win. Multiple Republican members of Congress have asserted that only the House of Representatives should decide the presidential election this year (which would throw the election to Trump regardless of who the voters or electoral college choose).

— In multiple states, Republicans have passed laws allowing them to manipulate and change the location of polling places, criminalize voter registration drives, replace Democratic and nonpartisan election officials with partisan GOP hacks, and in Georgia and Arizona throw out ballots from entire precincts. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt noted for The Atlantic: “Throwing out thousands of ballots in rival strongholds may be profoundly antidemocratic, but it is technically legal, and Republicans in several states now have a powerful stick with which to enforce such practices.”

— Typically, when politicians engage in nakedly deceptive politicking or election theft they’re outed in the press and punished at the polls. Since 2020, however, Republicans have rewarded their politicians who tell lies and engage in underhanded tactics, suggesting there will be no limits to what the Trump campaign might do or say in the weeks leading up to the election, including the use of deepfakes and AI.

— Saudi Arabia and Russia — both allies of Trump — have cut oil production by over 1.4 million barrels a day to drive up gasoline prices leading up to this November, just like they did in a dress rehearsal during the fall of 2022. History shows that gas prices spiking over $5 or even $6 a gallon will have a measurable impact on inflation and thus the election.

— Russia fielded a small army of online trolls to assist Trump’s electoral efforts in 2016 and 2020. Expect the same in November, except this time, according to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, China is also getting into the act on the GOP’s behalf. 

— Benjamin Netanyahu defied President Obama when he was engaged in delicate negotiations with Iran, visiting the US and addressing Congress at the invitation of Republicans. He’s expected to do the same slap-in-the-face gesture this fall to Biden, along with defying the president’s wish that Israel minimize civilian casualties in Gaza. Netanyahu will do everything he can to ensure Trump comes back into office if for no other reason than keeping himself out of prison; demoralizing young progressive voters will almost certainly be at the top of his list.

But these are all things we know about right now, even if there’s little we can do about most of them.

Given the Nixon/Reagan/Bush examples, our biggest concern should be to find the things we’d otherwise look back on after the inauguration and say about them, “Nobody knew at the time…”

[husbandhannie]

do you have any book recs? i’m trying to find ways to fill my free time that isn’t scrolling around on my phone 😭

i'm not sure if i'm the best person to ask for book recs, anon. my tastes are not wide by any means and i'm not really a critical reader, but i tried to list some books i enjoyed here (there are many more but i went with the ones i can remember at the top of my head):

FICTION

(organized by author)

Agatha Christie: If you're looking for comfort murder mysteries, there is no better author. My favorite is the Miss Marple series, where a gossip-loving and extremely sharp old woman solves murder mysteries.

Richard Castle: Yes, these are the Nikki Heat books from the show Castle. They're quite well written, and even more fun to read if you're familiar with the characters of the show.

Tess Gerritsen: These are more intense murder mysteries than the ones listed above, and slightly more forensic. My favorite series is the Rizzoli and Isles series, which is the inspiration for the TV show of the same name.

Nora Roberts: Still some of the best romance I've read, honestly. After reading about 50 of her books, I can confidently say that her characters fall in fixed molds and the storylines are very predictable. It's still very good. It's comforting. You can read a bunch of them in a day to destress. Some series I like are: Inn Boonsboro, The Calhouns.

NON-FICTION

(organised by theme)

Threats to Democracy: How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky, Fascism by Madeline Albright, Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum

Autobiographies: James Herriot (I cannot recommend this enough), Trevor Noah

Historical: The Great Influenza by John M. Barry, To Start a War by Robert Draper (this made me angrier than I thought was possible by a book)

Government Institutions: The Premonition by Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

Feminism: Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall, We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Government Intelligence Agencies: Mossad by Michael Bar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal

[jron]

Political scientist Karen Stenner explains it this way: As liberal democracy expands and includes more people, it becomes more diverse and complicated. The growing diversity and complexity trigger authoritarian reactions in people who are averse to diversity and cannot tolerate complexity.

This is particularly true when an increasingly diverse electorate threatens the power and status of the ethnic majority. Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky, Harvard political scientists, put it this way:

“It is difficult to find examples of societies in which shrinking ethnic majorities gave up their dominant status without a fight.” (How Democracies Die, p. 207.)

Members of the Republican Party who reject democracy are part of a movement that has been springing up worldwide, which we can call the “New Radical Right.” This movement has much in common with the fascist regimes of the 1930s. Hitler’s regime, recall, was partly a reaction to the growing diversity in cities like Berlin.

[sloth-hallo-hier-bin-ich]

TOP-Titel

The Apprentice, v. Ali Abbasi (Regie) und Gabriel Sherman (Drehbuch) ANORA, v. Sean Baker (Regie, Drehbuch) Die Achse der Autokraten, v. Anne Applebaum. The Tech Coup, v. Marietje Schaake. Burn Book, v. Kara Swisher. Limitarismus – Die Resozialisierung der Reichen (und Christian Lindner) v. Ingrid Robeyns. Wie Demokratien sterben, v. Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt.