Democracy is not in decline. The nation-state is.

Making that distinction—between democracy and the nation—is crucial to understanding what’s really going on when it comes to self-government on this planet.

It’s a distinction we rarely make. When people around the world talk about how democracy is doing, we talk about democracy almost exclusively at the national level.

We see this every year, when think tanks and NGOs issue reports and rankings on the state of democracy—that consider the national governments only.

Take International IDEA, a Sweden-based intergovernmental organization that supports elections and democracy worldwide. In its September 2024 Global State of Democracy Report, IDEA declared that democracy remained in decline because only 1 in 4 nations were becoming more democratic, while 4 in 9 nations were becoming less so. IDEA also noted that 1 in 5 national elections is now contested by the loser, and that the global average for electoral turnout declined by 10 percentage points (65.2 % to 55.5 %) in the last 15 years.

Similarly, Freedom House, based in Washington D.C., points to growing numbers of nation-states with problematic elections and armed conflict to declare that this is the 18th consecutive year of decline. And, in its 2024 report, Varieties of Democracy, a global think tank in Sweden, says that democracy has been in decline for 15 years in a row because the share of the population living in nations that are becoming more autocratic is higher than the share living in democratizing countries.

To be sure, these national-level trends are not good news. But they paint an incomplete and misleading picture of the state of democracy on this planet, for three big reasons.

The first is rather obvious. Democracy is self-government, the business of everyday people governing themselves. And most democracy on this planet takes place where most people experience the ins and outs of day-to-day existence—in local communities, rather than at the national level.

Second, these global rankings of democracy rest heavily on elections, which are only one democratic process. Yes, trust and participation in elections are declining. But other forms of democracy—in which people themselves make decisions, rather than delegating power to elected representatives—are growing.

Consider four of these forms.

Direct democracy, in which people vote to enact laws or amend constitutions through referenda, is now a part of governance in more than half of countries. But such procedures are mostly used at the local and sub-national levels, according to the new Global State of Direct Democracy report.

Participatory democracy, involving tools that allow residents of a neighborhood or other jurisdiction to formulate budgets or development plans themselves, has been expanding rapidly since the launch of one such tool in 1990 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. People Powered, a global hub for democracy and participation, reports that more than 7,000 budgets—mostly in cities and local schools—have been made through the participatory budgeting process.

Deliberative democracy has become so popular in recent years that practitioners speak of a “deliberative wave.”  The most popular forms of such democracy are citizens’ assemblies—bodies of everyday people, assembled using “sortition” or lotteries rather than through elections. At a recent global conference for the network Democracy R&D, panelists estimated that about 1,000 such assemblies have been held to deliberate on and find solutions to difficult challenges, most at the local level.

Digital democracy is being used worldwide, often locally, to allow ordinary citizens to make proposals, develop policies, and govern their own communities. Among the best-known digital democratic tools is Decidim, an open digital platform developed by the city of Barcelona and now used in hundreds of localities and institutions worldwide.

But beyond all this growth in local democratic practice, there’s a bigger reason why we are misunderstanding the state of democracy: Nation-states are in retreat, regardless of their systems of government. The signals so often interpreted as democratic decline are actually evidence of something larger and more fundamental.

Nation-states everywhere—be they more democratic or more authoritarian—are in crisis, with their rulers losing the ability to govern their own countries. The United States, as a nation, is in danger of breaking apart. So too is Russia, which is caught up in a war in Ukraine, and suffering long-term declines in the health and life spans of its people. Germany is losing its dynamism and cohesion, for sure, but so is China—struggling with a debt crisis, an aging population, profound corruption, and an increasingly isolated dictator in Xi Jinping.

Why is this happening?

“The most momentous development of our era, precisely, is the waning of the nation-state: its inability to withstand countervailing 21st-century forces, and its calamitous loss of influence over human circumstance,” the British novelist and scholar Rana Dasgupta writes in his book After Nations. “National political authority is in decline, and, since we do not know any other sort, it feels like the end of the world.”

Nation-states simply can’t manage up or manage down in the 21st-century world. Looking up, nation-states have proven incapable of handling planetary forces and threats—climate change, finance and capital flows, technological advances, disease, religious-oriented terrorism. If anything, nation-states have made such problems worse, while ceding more and more power (and formerly national functions like surveillance) to multinational institutions like big tech companies from my home state of California.

Looking down, nation-states can no longer unify their peoples. Instead, national leaders routinely exploit divides to maintain power. Almost all wars are between groups of people inside nation-states that are breaking down. Many of these civil wars have been internationalized by other nation-states, seeking short-term advantage. The most awful example is the current civil war in Sudan, fueled by Russia and the United Arab Emirates, which has displaced millions, killed hundreds of thousands by starvation, and reduced the city of Khartoum to a ruin.

War is not the only tool that nation-states use to cling to their diminishing power. Leaders of nation-state democracies and autocracies alike have taken to scapegoating outsiders, especially migrants, and pledging to exert dictatorial power. But such authoritarian performances are really signs of desperation and weakness.

The void left by the decline of the nation-state is frightening, because of the potential for violence as our world’s governance infrastructure falls apart. But that same void is also an enormous opportunity for democracy and for those forms of democracy being practiced more often on the local level.

Tellingly, democracy is finding ways to grow even inside hostile and authoritarian nation-states. Turkey, with a religious autocrat as prime minister, has seen a wave of democratic participation in its cities, particularly Ankara and Izmir. Syria, ruled by a ruthless dictator, is the site of democratic cantons along its border with Turkey. Myanmar, in the midst of a crackdown by its military rulers, is sprouting new forms of local self-government.

Attacks on democracy also are redounding, to democracy’s favor. Ukraine, in the midst of Vladimir Putin’s invasion, is awash in ambitious local plans for rebuilding cities in more democratic and sustainable ways.

Around the world, alliances of cities are working together to address climate change, poverty, and other problems that the failing nation-states can’t solve and in fact are making worse. These alliances, which often combine democratic processes with technocratic expertise, point the way to a brighter future, in which stronger and more democratic local governments handle more of their own problems, together.

Visions of a local planetary replacement for the nation-state system might be dismissed as implausible, but the nation-state idea dates only to 1648, and the modern nation-state is less than a century old. It is obviously vulnerable.

And democracy—and particularly the people-driven forms of democracy now on the rise at the local level—is our best bet to replace that system.

The post Let the Nation-State Die So That Democracy May Thrive appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If democracy is going to flourish on this planet, its practitioners must come to see themselves as members of the same team.

Unfortunately, global democracy is a field divided. And not primarily by country or language—the biggest divide is by type. Democratic activists, experts, and reformers often are fierce partisans of just one of several competing sub-fields: electoral democracy, deliberative democracy (focusing on randomly selected citizens studying tough issues), participatory democracy (where people might set a local budget or make a plan, at official invitation), direct democracy (initiative and referendum), or digital democracy (using online environments like Decidim or vTaiwan).

I routinely experience this dynamic firsthand. I’ve been a convener of global forums on direct democracy since 2008, and have been excluded or dismissed from gatherings looking at participatory or deliberative forms of democracy. After I took a fellowship at an institute that encourages new thinking on deliberative democracy, two supporters of my direct democracy work accused me of betrayal; one stopped talking to me.

This democratic divide, and how to bridge it, is the subject of a smart and urgent new white paper, “From Waves to Ecosystems: The Next Stage of Democratic Innovation,” authored by a leading democracy practitioner and thinker. Josh Lerner is co-executive director of People Powered, a global hub for communities, organizations, researchers, and funders seeking to improve democracy. His paper was commissioned by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Ithaca Initiative, a new civil discourse program at the University of Delaware.

“Most pro-democracy movements focus on defending elections. Others call for innovations in direct, deliberative, or participatory democracy. Champions of each approach have claimed that their solution alone will deliver real democracy,” writes Lerner, before adding:

“There is, however, no one way to fix democracy.”

One problem is that most of the money spent on developing democracy is swallowed up by elections, even though elections, he writes, “have generally not resulted in equal political power or government by the people.”

In our era, he adds, elected governments increasingly exploit elections to establish minority rule, with economic elites maintaining outsized influence. Elections also “attract and put in power people who rate as more narcissistic and psychopathic than average, people who too often exploit their position for personal gain.” As a result, majorities of people in electoral democracies around the world tell pollsters that “their political system needs major changes or needs to be completely reformed.”

Instead of system reform, however, democracies double down on elections. Lerner writes: “We are pouring so much money and time into elections that other democratic practices are pushed to the sidelines, marginal and disconnected.”

That disconnection leaves them competing for small amounts of attention and funding. Different types of democracy have enjoyed waves of popularity. Direct democracy grew rapidly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and participatory democracy became fashionable amid the turmoil of the 1960s and again in the 1990s with the creation of participatory budgeting in Brazil. Today, many democratic practitioners are riding a “deliberative wave” that focuses on using lotteries to create assemblies of everyday citizens to make decisions.

But the waves have retarded broader democratic development. Lerner writes: “Each wave’s advocates become so focused on their goals that they often dismiss other approaches…. Waves lead to groupthink. Each wave becomes top-heavy with big expectations that it will change everything and be the one solution we’ve been waiting for.

“No single kind of democracy works well for all our decisions… What if all of these democratic approaches are limited individually but more effective together? What if we could balance the weaknesses of one model with the strengths of another?”

Lerner, striking an optimistic note, sees an “emerging next stage” that involves “weaving different democratic practices into balanced democratic ecosystems.”

Why ecosystems? Because successful ecosystems are diverse, interconnected, and dynamic, with lots of species. “Healthy ecosystems change over time to remain resilient as conditions and needs fluctuate,” Lerner writes.

For example, assemblies and direct democracy don’t work well for tricky budget decisions in a fiscal crisis, but the participatory budgeting process does. Deliberative democracy’s citizens’ assemblies work well for producing proposals on difficult issues (like abortion in Ireland). But for legitimacy, all voters—not just the small assembly—should decide whether to adopt such a proposal as the actual law, via a direct democracy referendum.

What would a healthy democratic ecosystem look like? Lerner points to Paris, which has experimented with different combinations of democratic practice. There, an elected city council is working together with a deliberative, and permanent, citizens’ assembly of randomly selected Parisians on big topics like homelessness. And the deliberative assembly, chosen by sortition, works with a participatory budgeting process on how to spend 100 million Euros annually on city improvements.

Lerner says that, instead of competing with one another, advocates of different democratic processes should build bridges, and share a common infrastructure of support (translation, staff, technology). Then they can focus on their “common enemy”—authoritarian regimes and funders of anti-democratic work.

But it’s not enough to defend the current system against such forces, writes Lerner. Democracy needs a “just transition”—a phrase he deliberately borrows from the climate movement—to this much more robust and varied ecosystem.

“What if instead of solely defending elections, we also offered something better—a broader system of democracy that gave people a more meaningful voice?” Lerner writes. “This transition will not be easy. Like for climate change, it will require changing mindsets, jobs, skills, and everyday practices.”

It also requires more urgency. Democratic practitioners love experiments and pilots, but those are too slow. “We have toyed with alternatives while the ice caps and our trust in democracy melt away…. Authoritarian regimes are wreaking havoc faster than our efforts to counterattack them.”

In other words, we need not just new systems of democracy but new ecosystems. And we need them now.

The post Democracy Advocates Should Stop Fighting About Democracy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What makes a country great?

Great cities.

That is a lesson the United Kingdom once knew well. Britain reached its imperial heights in the late 19th century in part because its municipalities were growing into some of the world’s most productive cities.

None better symbolized British greatness than Birmingham, a manufacturing powerhouse in the West Midlands. In 1890, Harper’s Magazine called it the “best-governed city in the world,” and with good reason. Birmingham provided novel services for its people, including free libraries and museums, free education for all children, modern sanitation and affordable housing, street lighting, a municipal bank, and support for the poor.

The spirit of Birmingham was often expressed by the popular nonconformist preacher George Dawson, and two of his parishioners who became mayor—Joseph Chamberlain and his son Neville, who is better remembered for his later failures as a prime minister. The preacher and the Chamberlains evangelized for urban reform, advancing a philosophy called “The Civic Gospel,” the idea that great municipalities offer the best chance for human flourishing.

“A town,” Dawson once said, “is a solemn organism through which shall flow, and in which shall be shaped, all the highest, loftiest and truest ends of man’s moral nature.”

Today, the Civic Gospel is preached by city leaders worldwide, especially in the globally ambitious metros of Vienna, Mexico City, Seoul, and Tokyo, where governments pride themselves on pursuing cutting-edge, humanity-advancing improvements in democratic participation, environmentalism, the arts, and social policy.

But these days you won’t hear the Civic Gospel in its home city—or home country. When you ask municipal experts what the world’s best governed cities are today, you’ll get an earful about Barcelona and Bogota, but you’ll hear nothing about Britain. U.K. cities are too busy struggling just to survive.

Birmingham, still the second most populous U.K. city, with more than 1.1 million people, now draws notice as a cautionary tale. In September 2023, it became yet another British city to declare fiscal insolvency—one of eight in the past six years. Birmingham’s bankruptcy is blamed on cuts in national budgets, economic struggles, and two massive governance mistakes: an IT project that went £80 million over budget, and a failure to respond to equal pay claims by female city workers now totaling more than £700m. Unable to pay its bills, Birmingham has suspended spending on arts, youth services, and assistance to families in crisis.

The sorry state of local self-governance is not often mentioned in reports about the upcoming July 4 elections in the U.K., which are widely expected to see the current Tory government replaced by Labour. But local stagnation is at the heart of the sense of frustration and crisis that prevails in Britain.

In the face of national failures—declining life expectancy, dropping real wages, and fiscal austerity—Britons are unable to turn to their local governments for solutions, because those local governments are too weak.

After the Second World War, Whitehall (the nickname for U.K.’s national government) stripped local governments of responsibilities, in areas from utilities to hospitals, and nationalized services in new ministries and institutions. Whitehall also repeatedly reorganized local governments and their jurisdiction, thus fragmenting local power and reducing local control in fiscal matters. The resulting centralization made London a global goliath, but diminished the wealth, influence, and public services of the country’s small and mid-size cities.

The imbalance has not gone unnoticed. Over the past 15 years, British governments have sought to boost regions and localities via various strategies—like “rebalancing the economy” and “Northern Powerhouse.” In 2019, the Tories running Britain announced a plan for “Levelling Up” weaker cities and regions and their people with greater aid, and even established a ministry to pursue it.

But these efforts have failed, because the approaches are top-down, directed by the national government. Indeed, the national “Levelling Up” department has dispensed cash for projects through a slow bidding process, orchestrated by consultants who charge local governments large fees for their assistance. The Economist, in calling the process “scattershot,” noted that 60 of the first 71 projects funded through Levelling Up were behind schedule.

Since “Levelling Up” became policy five years ago, economic disparities between rich and poor regions have actually widened. British cities and counties, have become beggars, asking for bailouts for in-demand services like homeless programs, child care, and adult care that they no longer can afford.

The challenge will get worse for the new government post-election. Of the 300-plus local governments in England alone, more than half say they will be in severe financial distress by next year. It’s not clear that any help is on the way. Labour has made vague promises to “Level Up” better than the Tories.

For now, Birmingham and other insolvent cities feel stuck.

The most promising path forward is for the national government to restore the local autonomy that once made Birmingham and other U.K. cities great. There have been small moves in this direction, with so-called “trailblazer” deals that allow some metro regions to establish their own elected chief executives.

But such devolution deals are full of limits on local control that are nutty as anything in the classic British government comedy, “Yes, Minister.” Among the ludicrous documents of so-called devolution are a “scrutiny protocol” listing all the ways the national government will watch over cities, and a 2022 Levelling Up White Paper laying out a complex four-tier regime for devolving power to cities.

What’s really needed, but so far not on offer, is a restoration of the fiscal autonomy and local freedom that allowed Birmingham to build a city so great it had its own gospel.

The post Why the U.K. Can’t ‘Level Up’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 1995, Barcelona, Spain, announced the creation of a new, 11th district of the city.

This District 11 wasn’t carved out of Barcelona’s 10 existing districts. In fact, it wasn’t within or anywhere near city limits. It was 1,000 miles away. District 11 was the Bosnian capital city of Sarajevo, then under siege by Serb forces, who shelled the city for nearly four years, killing thousands of civilians.

Three decades later, the wartime Barcelona-Sarajevo partnership endures as a model of the mutual aid and close connections cities will need to forge if they are to survive a 21st century of climate change, pandemic, and nation-state violence.

Barcelona and Sarajevo together demonstrated that the best way for cities to help each other in times of conflict is to eschew the bitter political arguments of the moment—and instead focus on what cities do best: emergency response, aid to neighborhoods, planning, and building.

Today, cities around the world are debating about how, and whether, to respond to global conflicts, especially the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Some localities have chosen to stay out of faraway wars, on the theory that it is not cities’ job to conduct foreign policy. Other localities have jumped in, declaring their support for a cease-fire, often on terms preferred by pro-Palestinian groups.

Both approaches have proved counterproductive, fueling conflict instead of solidarity.

Cities that tried to duck the debate over declarations have faced disruptive protests and boycotts for perceived callousness. In my own small Southern California town of 26,000, a so-called “progressive” group, angry that our council decided not to entertain a cease-fire motion, launched social media campaigns accusing council members of supporting genocide.

Meanwhile, those cities that consider cease-fire declarations have become bitterly divided, especially since declaration debates are often accompanied by antisemitism and harassment. And even when localities manage to adopt cease-fire declarations, they find that the statements have little real-world impact on the faraway people and places suffering from war.

That’s why the story of Barcelona’s 11th district deserves more attention now. Rather than just debating or issuing a declaration, Barcelona activated its people, its governments, and its resources to assist Sarajevo as if it were a Barcelona neighborhood, with Barcelona’s own people suffering under attack. Through the years of the war, Barcelona’s District 11 intervention provided humanitarian aid, including money, food, and medical supplies, to Sarajevo.

Why did District 11 come about? Barcelonans felt a close connection to Sarajevo, for several reasons. For one, Barcelona was preparing to host the Summer Olympics in 1992, and some local officials maintained working relationships with counterparts in Sarajevo, which had hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics. For another, residents of Barcelona, a diverse and freewheeling city, felt a cultural affinity for Sarajevo, a melting pot with no majority ethnic group and a tradition of tolerance. And Sarajevo, like Barcelona, was part of a province that had sought to achieve greater autonomy and independence from its central government.

Then, on May 17, 1992, the young photojournalist Jordi Pujol Puente—who came from Catalonia, the autonomous region of which Barcelona is capital—was killed in Sarajevo while covering the fighting.

The tragedy inspired a public outpouring in Barcelona. In 1994, Barcelona reinforced its support for Sarajevo with a written agreement pledging to reconstruct the war-damaged city and establish a Local Democracy Agency in the Bosnian capital.

After the war and siege ended in 1995, Barcelona and its provincial government expanded its support, by coordinating the rehabilitation of the Mojmilo neighborhood and rebuilt Olympic installations and a school.

In 1998, Barcelona and Sarajevo extended their agreement to include support for culture and sports, expand programs for youth, and promote business cooperation between the two cities. In 2000, Barcelona and Sarajevo signed a “twinning protocol” that made them, effectively, sister cities.

The Barcelona-Sarajevo partnership has ebbed at times, but never ended. In 2022, city leaders reinvigorated it, with 30th anniversary events and new bilateral agreements to work on university collaborations, sustainable development, gender policies, social policies, cultural policies, the green economy, youth programs, and peace initiatives.

I learned the story of District 11 during a recent visit to Barcelona to attend the first-ever local democracy festival, organized by ALDA, which was founded in the Balkans during the 1990s. ALDA has grown into the leading creator of collaborations between local governments and civil societies in Europe, Central Asia, and North Africa. It is expanding its work further into Africa, and into South America. A Barcelona official attending the festival told me that the city is working to assist Ukrainian municipalities damaged or occupied by Russia and has been increasing its spending on humanitarian aid for Gaza.

Back in Los Angeles, where I work, the city council is engaged in a divisive debate about a cease-fire resolution in Gaza. I find myself wishing that L.A., and other cities, would stop arguing about Israel and Hamas, and instead provide more direct support to municipalities suffering from war.

Los Angeles and its leaders might even follow Barcelona’s example. Adopt a couple cities (say, Rafah in Gaza and Kharkiv in Ukraine) as L.A. neighborhoods, and rededicate some of the money budgeted for L.A.’s 2028 Olympics for current aid and future reconstruction.

The post How Cities Can Help Other Cities in Wartime appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.” —James Joyce, “The Dead,” Dubliners

Dear Bono,

Now that U2’s residency at the Sphere in Vegas has successfully concluded, it’s time for you to get really creative—by returning home to Dublin to prepare to run for mayor.

I know, I know—Dubliners don’t actually elect their mayors, so you can’t run. At least not yet. Which is precisely why they need you there.

You’re the best candidate to bring real local democracy to your home island, famous for its fierce nationalism. If you championed local democracy there, the world might well take notice—and build the strong local governments that humanity will need to survive.

You know as well as anyone, from your globe-trotting to fight poverty and HIV/AIDS in the Global South, that the world’s national governments aren’t up to protecting us from our planetary problems—climate catastrophe, pandemic, war, poverty, economic crises. National governments are too busy making things worse. Meanwhile, our international institutions remain too weak and fractious to accomplish much of anything.

That has dumped all the world’s problems in the laps of local communities and their governments. But they lack the authority and resources to tackle big challenges.

Ireland, sadly, is a poster child for poor local government. While many people think of the Emerald Isle as a place of charming well-governed communities, the reality is that your home country is governed almost entirely from the center. On the Local Autonomy Index, Ireland ranks at the bottom of Europe, ahead of only authoritarian Hungary, Putin’s Russia, and Moldova, which is partially occupied by Russia. A Council of Europe report on Irish governance found that your national authorities determine all kinds of fundamentally local decisions—down to the location of bus stops.

To borrow from your best songs, in those Irish municipalities where the streets have no name, or where residents might want to tear down the walls that hold them inside, a local government can’t do much without asking the national government’s permission.

Dublin, as a result, has perhaps the weakest government of the world’s great cities. Like other Irish municipalities, the city does elect councilors, but they can’t do much. The city can’t hire staff without the national government’s support (which is why Helsinki, a European capital of similar size, has 38,000 staffers compared to Dublin’s 6,000). Dublin also lacks the money and authority to handle governmental basics like road planning, building adequate flood defenses, or even enforcing laws on illegal parking and “dog fouling.”

The good news is that cracks are opening in this wall of centralized power.  During the pandemic, Dublin managed to convene a citizens’ assembly—made up of a representative group of Dubliners selected by lottery—that recommended structural changes to strengthen the city government. Their recommendations included establishing a full-time city council and a directly elected mayor who could serve up to two five-year terms.

Under the plan, Dublin’s government would gain control immediately over 15 policy areas—including housing, homelessness, transportation, the environment, and emergency response—and add further local authority over policing, water, and education in the next decade. Crucially, the assembly proposed giving the mayor’s office the power to borrow and to levy local taxes.

Advocates say that such a mayor would need a strong personality that could unify Dubliners, and have such a compelling voice that the national government would have to listen to demands for local autonomy.

You’ve got a pretty good voice—Billie Joe Armstrong described your singing as “50 percent Guinness, 10 percent cigarettes, and the rest is religion”—which is why you’d be the best choice.

Unsurprisingly, the national government has blocked the citizens’ assembly’s proposals. But the fight is not over. It’s just moved southwest to Limerick, population 102,000.

Limerick, via a local referendum, managed to secure permission for a pilot program to elect its mayor directly. The election is June 7, the same day the Irish vote for councilors in all 31 local authorities, and for their representatives in the European Parliament.

The Limerick mayor’s race has been a closely watched campaign, with 13 candidates representing every color in the political spectrum, and every significant party. The power of Limerick’s mayor won’t come anywhere close to what the citizens’ assembly proposed for Dublin, but candidates are promising to advocate for greater local control over housing, health care, and various quality-of-life issues.

If you returned to Dublin, you could lead a campaign to adopt the citizens’ assembly recommendations. For leverage, you could push a local referendum for a mayoral pilot like Limerick’s. If you won, it’d be hard to see how the national government could withstand your calls for more local authority.

Remember, if you succeed, you won’t just get to be mayor. You’ll get to build a new city government. You could draw experts and ideas from every corner of the globe. You could give the earth a model for 21st-century local governance.

You’d also be the perfect person to bring together local governments around the world—and the still relatively weak networks of cities that now exist—into planetary institutions that could solve those big problems.

Yes, it would mean a lifestyle change. But locals in Killiney, your seaside community south of Dublin, say you were home quite a bit during the pandemic. And yes, as mayor you couldn’t tour as much as you do now, but at 63, it’s time for more rest anyway. You wouldn’t have to break up the band. The Edge would make an aggressive housing director.

Sure, you’ll face criticism and have bad days as mayor. But as Joyce wrote in Ulysses, “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”

Come home and run. You might finally find what you’re looking for.

Le meas,

Joe Mathews

The post Bono for Mayor appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I emailed Dracula’s people because I was heading to Romania, for a global democracy forum that I help lead.

While I’m in Bucharest, I asked, could I take the train up to Transylvania and spend a day chopping it up with the Count? After all, he’s been around for 600 years and has seen many, many dark times for governance and democracy.

In reply, I got a cryptic text telling me to arrive by midnight at an address in Beachwood Canyon, high in the Hollywood Hills above L.A. The place was invisible from the street, and so dark I had to turn on my iPhone flashlight to find the door.

But then, at my knock, the world’s most famous vampire opened the door. He ushered me to a chair in a room lit only by fireplace.

Dracula: Welcome to my castle in the air. Now, can my servant Renfield get you something to drink? Want to join me for a pint of O-negative?

Me: Thanks, but I’m fine, Count.

Dracula: Please, call me Vlad. And suit yourself (pouring blood into a glass). I need a drink from a stiff before discussing democracy these days.

Me: I hoped we’d be meeting in Eastern Europe and talking about June’s European elections and rising authoritarianism there. What are you doing in L.A.?

Dracula: Romania will always be home, but many decades ago, I realized that Hollywood would never stop calling. I used to stay with my friend Bela Lugosi, right down the street, but he got tired of the LAPD knocking on the door asking for me every time some teenage girl got a hickey. So, I had this place built. It’s small for a castle, but I never went and had a family like Gomez Addams.

It’s more than paid for itself. To date, more than 80 films have been made about me. Yes, those Netflix execs—who suck more blood in a half-hour pitch meeting than I have in my whole existence—don’t pay well. But it’s amazing how much work my fellow vampires at CAA can get me for uncredited script doctoring and story consulting.

I advised the cast during the New Orleans shoot of Renfield, a 2023 comedy with Nicholas Cage playing me. Nick and I hit it off. I’m not saying he’s a vampire—I respect his privacy—but I will say he didn’t have to do much to get into character.

Me: Do you see the story of Dracula having an impact on how the world runs?

D: Sometimes I worry I have too much impact. Porphyria—which they call the vampire disease, because you have trouble with sunlight and sometimes must retreat into darkness—used to be considered rare. Now, with everyone up half the night on their screens, people are becoming more like me.

Despair has its own calms, I suppose. And I enjoy a long night. But the fact that we’re so atomized makes democracy and self-government quite difficult.

Me: Vlad, you’ve been around longer than anyone living. In human form, you lived as the ruthless ruler of Wallachia in the 1400s, famous for your cruelty toward your enemies. Then, vampires became an obsession in the 1700s, and you emerged publicly in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula, and have been famous ever since. In all that time, what has changed the most in how humans govern themselves?

D: What’s changing the most is the very nature of what it means to be human. And that’s changed self-government and everything else.

We not only live longer, but we never go away. I died in 1476, yet I’m still around, sort of human. AI means that humans can stay alive digitally long after our human bodies are dust. We are all vampires now.

Which means that humans need to take a much longer view and build more flexible institutions. Because humans and vampires alike are changing so fast. Look at me. I started as this figure of fear—of violence, of disease. I was the bad, undead guy. But now in popular culture, I’m the cool Gothic mainstay, an outsider. Just look at how I’m portrayed by younger, better-looking actors.

The secret of my success is flexibility: I don’t fit into categories or labels. I’m good and I’m bad, real and unreal, dead and alive. And this makes me emblematic of what the British literary historian Nick Groom, in The Vampire: A New History, calls our “vampirocene era… in which the human race has the transformed the world, but in doing so has also lost its primacy.”

Me: Vampirocene? So, you’re saying the world is getting better?

D: It’s definitely more open, inclusive and democratic. I know that sounds strange—Dracula, optimist. But that’s only because so many people are still thinking too short-term.

Look at Romania. Just two generations ago, we were ruled by a far crueler villain than I ever was, Nicolae Ceaușescu, a communist dictator who built a society nearly as totalitarian as North Korea. But we learn from failure, not from success. Now Romania is in the European Union and the eurozone, and we have a real democracy, despite the pressures coming from that other Vlad, who impaled far more people than I ever did, running Russia.

Me: Aren’t you worried about potential right-wing gains in June’s European elections?

D: Sure. The world seems full of good men—but there are monsters in it.

There are always people trying to scapegoat democracy for our problems. There are always tyrants trying to kill off democracy.

Just like there are always people who hate vampires. Some hate us so much that, like that Buffy chick, they seek to slay us.

But no matter how hard they try to kill us, we vampires keep coming back, because people want us. Take Interview with the Vampire—it was a book, then a movie, and now it’s a TV show, all huge hits!  The same thing is true of democracy. Look at Turkey—its national government goes theocratic and authoritarian, and yet its cities respond by becoming more democratic.

Democracy and vampires have a lot in common.

Me: Do you really think that vampires can inspire a more democratic world?

D:  If an undead guy with a story as ugly and bloody as mine can still bring magic into the universe, then I’m quite sure that the living can collectively recognize that knowledge is stronger than memory, and conquer Earth’s scariest problems together.

The post In Midnight Interview, Dracula Sees Bright Future for Democracy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Californians vote on many ballot measures, but we almost never participate in significant public debates and discussions about the measures’ contents and impacts.

This isn’t simply a result of apathy or poor civic education. Rather, it’s an example of “rational ignorance,” a term coined by the late Stanford-educated economist Anthony Downs in his 1957 book, An Economic Theory of Democracy. The term defines this democratic reality: since you have just one vote out of millions, your individual vote doesn’t really matter. So, it’s rational to remain ignorant about the details of measures on the ballot.

In California, this means that we have little reason to devote our precious time to acquiring information or coming to a considered judgment about all the complex measures on our ballots. The problem is that when too many of us remain rationally ignorant, our election results may not match our preferences or the public interest.

This year, however, political and computer scientists at Stanford, in collaboration with think tanks and civic groups, are seeking to counter our rational ignorance with an advanced tool: a digital Deliberative Poll.

The poll would give a random sample of hundreds of Californians the time and opportunity to do serious deliberation on certain ballot measures. The specific ballot measures to be used in the process have not been determined, but one set of likely candidates for deliberation are three competing constitutional amendments involving the voting requirements for taxes. One of the amendments was proposed by business and anti-tax groups, one by the legislature, and the last by local governments.

The amendments are the kind of complicated measures that can confuse voters and encourage our rational ignorance, even when they have real effects on our communities and pocketbooks.

Here’s how digital Deliberative Polls work. Stanford’s Deliberative Democracy Lab assembles a representative sample of the California electorate. Participants are paid for their time (which is expected to be about a day and a half) and reimbursed for any child- or elder-care obligations. Their internet speeds are increased, if necessary.

First, the platform, which was developed in collaboration with Stanford’s Crowdsourced Democracy Team, polls participants on the ballot measures to establish a baseline. Then, some members of the group deliberate. (The rest are in a control group that doesn’t participate at all in the deliberation, to help measure the impact of the deliberation on results.) The platform is AI-assisted—there is no human operator—and it speaks in English in the voice of Alice Siu, associate director of Stanford’s Deliberative Democracy Lab.

Next, the platform randomly divides the sample into small groups of 10 to engage in video-based dialogue to consider the pros and cons of the ballot measures and decide on key questions to ask panels of experts representing different points of view. The participants ask their questions in plenary sessions by video. The small group deliberations and the sessions with all the groups present alternate throughout the process.

The AI tries to facilitate a discussion that is equal. Speakers are limited to 45 seconds at a time, and the tool nudges reluctant participants to speak up. The platform can also intervene if people become uncivil.

At the end of the deliberations, participants (and the control group) are polled again on the measures. The difference between the before and after survey results are shared with the public, to demonstrate the impact of deliberation on views of the measures.

“It is a social science experiment and a form of public education,” said Stanford’s James Fishkin, who leads the polls and the Deliberative Democracy Lab. “It overcomes ‘rational ignorance’ because each person, instead of one voice in millions, has one voice in a small group of 10 engaging in meaningful dialogue.”

Fishkin originated the concept of the Deliberative Poll as an in-person event, back in 1988, and has deployed it on issues ranging from Korean reunification to civil service reform in Brazil.

Recently, Fishkin and his team conducted a series of Deliberative Polls known as “America in One Room” that aimed to address partisan divides and deadlock by getting Americans of different views to deliberate with one another on topics ranging from energy to immigration to democratic reform. Those Deliberative Polls showed that such conversations can still produce common ground, even amid nationwide polarization.

Fishkin and Siu, both California voters, say that we badly need to combat rational ignorance in our ballot proposition system through deliberation. Some get little or no public notice. Campaign donations from special interests determine which measures get on the ballot and often, which win. Measures have grown increasingly long and complex, defying voters’ attempts to understand them.

The momentum to use Deliberative Polling in California dates back to the attempted 2021 recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom, which increased public concern about flaws in California’s direct democracy.

In response, Secretary of State Shirley Weber asked the bipartisan team of former Gov. Jerry Brown and former Chief Justice Ronald George to make recommendations for reform of initiative, referendum, and recall. They were assisted by Nathan Gardels of the nonpartisan Think Long Committee for California and the Berggruen Institute.

The Think Long report lamented the absence of a public, institutional platform for informed deliberation on ballot measures. A 2022 Public Policy Institute of California survey also found 77 percent support among likely voters for an independent citizens commission to study ballot initiatives and make recommendations to the public.

Today, Think Long, Berggruen, the Stanford team, and civic groups are circulating a proposal to funders to apply Deliberative Polling to the three competing taxation measures that could be headed to this November’s ballot. (Full disclosure: I’m a fellow in Berggruen’s Renovating Democracy program this year, and have participated in discussions of the Deliberative Poll.)

Fishkin and Siu say Deliberate Polling can be especially effective when multiple measures address similar issues—as with the competing taxation amendments. They recently held a well-received Deliberative Poll around four different proposals to the Finnish parliament (which showed that the AI platform produced similar results to deliberations with human moderators).

Fishkin said that campaigns and stakeholder groups on opposing sides of measures participate in the deliberations because they want to have their best case heard. Research shows that participants stand to gain because being part of processes like a Deliberative Poll makes them more engaged and better informed.

The rest of us can become less ignorant about ballot measures by seeing the deliberations and their conclusions, which will be publicly reported.

The post Could This New Democratic Tool Make Californians Vote Smarter? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Last year, while organizing a global democracy forum in Mexico, a member of that country’s national electoral court requested I add a speaker to our program: an American judge who was an expert in how elections work.

First, I contacted election lawyers, who told me they knew of no judges with such expertise. Then I called judges, eight leading U.S. jurists in all. Among this diverse group of judges were Republicans and Democrats, those who work at the state level and the federal level, in district courts and appellate courts.

Seven of the eight judges said they didn’t know of any U.S. judge who was an expert in elections either. They suggested that I instead invite a leading scholar of American election law—Richard Hasen of UCLA School of Law.

The eighth judge suggested I try a friend and judge on the East Coast who had handled some election cases. When I called up this jurist, he replied: “I’m no election expert. But hey, aren’t you in L.A.? Don’t you know Rick Hasen?”

My search turned out to be an endorsement of the brilliant Professor Hasen, whose new book A Real Right to Vote is well worth your time. But it was more than that, too. It was a lesson in just how clueless American judges are about politics and elections.

To redress that problem, California and the U.S. should follow the lead of other countries in the Western hemisphere and establish a separate, specialized court system for handling all election-related cases.

A dedicated election tribunal would produce judges with the deep knowledge that is increasingly essential as politically polarized Americans contest elections more frequently in the courts. Indeed, one prominent law scholar—yep, Hasen—has documented that election litigation nearly tripled since the 1990s.

But, as my search showed, election law expertise is hard to come by. That’s partly because most judges went to law school when the issue was not such a big concern, and partly because judges, seeking to avoid politics, rarely come to understand it on the job.

This means, unfortunately, that American elections are shaped by a judiciary with little knowledge of, or feel for, electoral politics. And it is precisely why the 2024 election season is a mess.

You can see judicial cluelessness about elections at work in all four ongoing criminal cases against Donald Trump. The former president and his savvy team have made mincemeat of judges, attacking them to score points with the Republican base and outmaneuvering them to create so many delays that it’s unlikely any case will go to trial before the November election.

A specialized court for elections also could save the U.S. Supreme Court from itself. The court’s justices are losing credibility because of perceived political bias in their decisions and public appearances. Most recently, the court’s conservative majority all but endorsed Trump’s delay strategy by agreeing to hear the former president’s plainly phony claim that former presidents are “absolutely” immune from this country’s laws.

But the Supreme Court’s bigger problem is that it is a citadel of election ignorance. Not one justice has ever been elected to political office, much less administered an election. No justice has a strong scholarly background in election law. Unsurprisingly, then, in their decisions, the Court consistently misunderstands the basics of our political and electoral systems.

Take its recent decision overturning Colorado’s move to ban Trump from the ballot because of his actions to overturn the 2020 election by corruption and violence. The decision was unanimous but also egregious. The justices both misread the plain text of the 14th Amendment, which bars insurrectionists from office and failed to understand basic democratic principles.

They took the bizarre, up-is-down position that states should not get to determine who gets to be on the ballot and serve as president—even though our entire electoral system is state-based. There are no national elections in this country; our presidential contests are really just 50 separate state elections.

It should frighten us that these nine democracy dimwits may well decide the outcome of a presidential election that promises to be close.

Many countries around the world have moved to redress this problem of judges’ lack of expertise and sophistication in contentious elections. Latin America, which has a long history of bitterly contested elections like the one we in the U.S. are experiencing now, has led the charge in trying to develop more judicial expertise and independence on election cases.

More than half of Latin American countries have established specialized electoral courts to handle election disputes. By now only three countries in the Americas—Argentina, Venezuela, and the U.S.—still give the decision-making power to their regular Supreme Court.

The electoral courts are not a panacea. Mexico’s has been dogged recently by internal conflict between its justices. But as Victor Hernández-Huerta, a Wake Forest University scholar of comparative and Latin American politics, writes in Election Law Journal, specialized courts develop expertise over time. And they have numerous benefits. Separate election courts can protect the reputation and independence of the regular court system by shielding it from the stains and strains of tackling controversial electoral questions.

Dedicated election judges also are accustomed to ruling quickly and efficiently under election time pressure, unlike the American judges in Trump’s cases, who keep delaying things to deal with unfamiliar questions.

Specialized electoral courts have produced particularly important successes when candidates or parties sought to overturn election results.

In Guatemala, in the face of threats of retaliation and prosecution, the country’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal intervened to keep Bernardo Arévalo, of the anti-corruption party Movimiento Semilla, on the 2023 presidential ballot when the ruling powers sought to disqualify him on dubious grounds. As a result, Arévalo won the election and managed to take office in January despite attempts at sabotage.

The Brazilian Electoral Court—a system that includes the national Tribunal Superior Eleitoral, along with regional electoral courts and boards—is widely considered the world’s best, because of its structural independence and its record. The court proved its mettle in 2022 when President Jair Bolsonaro made unfounded allegations of election fraud and sought to overturn the result. The electoral judges not only upheld the election but also held Bolsonaro accountable for “abuse of authority” by banning him from running for public office for eight years.

Last spring, I ended up taking all that judicial advice about Hasen and having him speak at the Mexico conference about how courts handle tricky questions of democracy. When I caught up with him recently, I asked whether he agreed with me that the U.S. needs its own separate electoral court. He said that I was “putting the cart before the horse.”

He pointed out that the countries with such courts also have national elections (unlike our state-based system) and national election administrative bodies. When I noted that the U.S. judicial branch does have special judges and courts on bankruptcy and immigration, Hasen pointed out that each of those areas has a federal body of law associated with it. That’s not yet true of elections.

“You’re asking me a graduate-level question,” he said of the idea of a specialized electoral court, “when we’re not even in kindergarten yet.”

The post America’s Judges Are Bungling the 2024 Election appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Please don’t save democracy.

If you’re a politician—stop promising to save it.

Please! Stop even trying.

Because you can’t. Democracy isn’t something you save. The sooner we stop talking about saving democracy, the better off democracy will be.

Our mindless recitation of “saving democracy”—everyone from President Biden to Sacha Baron Cohen has pledged to come to its rescue—demonstrates how little we understand about the governing systems that organize our lives.

To start, the words “democracy” and “save” don’t fit together.

Democracy is not a penalty shot that can be saved by a goalkeeper. Democracy is not a dollar that can be saved by putting it in the bank. Democracy is not a file that you can save in Microsoft Word.

Democracy is not even the migrant whom you save from drowning in the Mediterranean or the Rio Grande.

It’s easy to get confused about democracy’s meaning because we use the word “democracy” promiscuously. We use the word to refer to things we see in politics or government with which we agree. We use it to describe the status quo in countries that think of themselves as democracies.

We also use “democracy” to refer to our post-World War II liberal order, supposedly superior to all other systems, even though that order often protects military and corporate powers that undermine democracy. We use “democracy” to mean elections, even though many countries with autocracies stage elections. In the United States, we use “democracy” to refer to our 18th-century constitutional system—even though that system is profoundly anti-democratic, especially when it comes to the unbalanced representation in the Senate and our peculiar Electoral College.

After 18 years of reporting on and convening events about democracy around the world, I have found a better, more useful definition of democracy. Democracy is best understood as four words: Everyday people governing themselves.

When you think about democracy this way, you quickly realize that democracy isn’t something you save. It’s something you do—on your own and with other people. When people in your neighborhood or your city or your nation are doing the work of governing—deliberating, making decisions, implementing policies—you are in a democracy.

Thus, democracy is, quite literally, work—and very much a do-it-yourself enterprise. The Christian philosopher G.K. Chesterton famously observed in his book Orthodoxy that democracy is like writing love letters or blowing one’s nose—one of those things that “we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly.”

So when you judge whether a particular place or institution counts as democratic, consider democracy to be a spectrum, with “everyday people governing themselves” as its most democratic pole.

Soon, you’ll recognize that most democracy exists at the local level, in the smaller entities where it’s easier for everyday people to get together and govern. As Mahatma Gandhi wrote days before his assassination: “True democracy cannot be worked by 20 men sitting at the center. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village.”

Unfortunately, when asked whether they live in a democracy, people today don’t think of their village, precinct, or city, but of their nation-state. They usually answer the question based on whether their national leaders are fairly elected, and whether they seem respectful of the country’s constitutional norms.

The word “democracy” has become a synonym for a safe destination, the political-economic equivalent of a comfortable sofa where we can lie down, relax, and breathe. From this sofa conception flows the idea that democracy can be “saved”—from authoritarians or foreign powers or misinformation or anything else that might tear us from our sofas.

This sofa perspective is also why relatively peaceful and rich nation-states can call themselves democracies even though they are governed by small numbers of officials, technocrats, interest group leaders, or super-rich businesspeople. In our planet’s largest so-called democracies, everyday people don’t get to decide much. They can only vote, occasionally, in elections dominated by the same power entities running the country.

But real democracy is not a sofa. It is not cushy. Democracy, at least democracy on the spectrum of “everyday people governing themselves,” is not about voting for one powerful person. It’s about decentralizing decision-making power and handing it to regular people.

For this reason, President Biden’s pledges to preserve and protect democracy—coming from an officeholder with the power to govern by executive order and take military action around the world, without public notice or deliberation—will never be broadly credible.

The task of democracy requires us to get up off our couches. This is the sort of work that involves faith and competition, and thus resembles a religion or a sport as much as a system of government. Democracy is maintained through practice; you lose it when you stop showing up. If people stop going to Mass, saying the rosary, and listening to the Pope, Catholicism dies. If people stop throwing balls at rounded bats, there is no baseball.

So, if you value democracy, practice it—wherever you can. Let the kids in your local Little League vote to choose the all-stars, instead of the coaches or parents. Let workers and customers make the big decisions at your company. Create assemblies of everyday ls that write the local ordinances in your city or school district.

And please don’t waste another moment hoping your leaders will save democracy. Get out there and do it yourself.

The post Stop Trying to ‘Save’ Democracy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I was in favor of keeping Donald Trump’s name on the presidential ballot in California.

Until I went to Berlin this fall.

At a Saturday conference on German election law—if you haven’t noticed, your columnist is a democracy nerd—I met an entrepreneur named Gregor Hackmack. He’s so committed to democracy and participation that he launched a non-partisan online platform last year to enable dialogue between everyday people and elected representatives.

But now he’s organizing a petition to ban Germany’s second most popular political party—the far-right AfD, or Alternative for Democracy—from participating in elections.

Hackmack is wrestling with one of the hardest questions in democracy: When, if ever, can a democracy exclude anti-democratic politicians and parties from democratic elections?

The question is urgent because around the world democracy is threatened by authoritarian leaders who won office through democratic elections. Some of the world’s most oppressive governments—including those in Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Egypt, Turkey, and Tunisia—are led by men who came to power through voting.

It’s also a question now forced upon Americans by Trump’s return bid for the White House.

Blocking candidates or parties from elections doesn’t come naturally to democratically minded people. Nor should it—it’s a despot move. Autocracies and dictatorships routinely maintain and extend their power by blocking opposition figures from standing for office, such as when the Chinese government banned pro-democracy candidates in Hong Kong’s 2020 vote.

So why and how could we justify blocking candidates? One answer to that question, now getting attention in declining democracies, might be called the Democratic Self-Defense Exception: You should bar parties and politicians only when they threaten democracy itself.

The self-defense exception is the logic behind current legal efforts by pro-democracy nonprofits and some to remove Trump from 2024 ballots in most states.

It is also why it makes sense for people around the world to examine how Germany, where the Nazi party took power through elections, reckons with those who threaten its democracy.

In Germany, AfD is the political party that poses a danger to democracy—and society. AfD partisans and officials make threats against democratically elected officials. One party leader has expressed pride in Germany’s “World War II accomplishments.” The party embraces racist policies towards migrants, and pledges mass deportation and cancelation of citizenship for minority groups.

Yet since its founding in 2013, AfD has secured support from one-third of voters in economically-marginalized eastern parts of the country, and from 21% of respondents in national polls, the second-highest of any party.

Germans like Hackmack are arguing for banning the party because such racism and anti-migrant policies violate the German Basic Law, the country’s governing document, which was developed after World War II with the assistance of American political scientists. Specifically, AfD’s critics say the party aims to undermine the democratic order as expressed in Article 1 of the Basic Law, which calls human rights and human dignity “inviolable.”

They also point to Article 21, which specifically provides for banning parties determined to be “unconstitutional” because they do not “conform to democratic principles,” “seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order” or “endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany.” Germany’s federal constitutional court gets the final say on banning a party.

To those who suggest that banning AfD would only make it more violent and dangerous to democracy, supporters of the ban respond emphatically. They state that Germans’ expectation of heightened violence is itself reason to keep the party off the ballot: “The democratic process is undermined if it takes place permanently under the sword of Damocles, that a group with real power options wants to torpedo precisely this process,” wrote the constitutional law expert Klaus Ferdinand Gärditz in support of the ban.

To those who suggest that banning the party is a political question best left to voters in future elections, German Institute of Human Rights director Beate Rudolf, a ban supporter, writes: “German history in particular has shown that the free democratic basic order of a state can be destroyed if positions of contempt for humanity do not meet with energetic opposition in good time and are thus able to spread and gain acceptance.”

Hackmack and other supporters—including members of the country’s center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union—have gathered more than 400,000 signatures on a petition demanding the parties and national parliament ask the constitutional court to ban the party. A TV comedy show has joined the drive. Still, it’s unclear whether the petition will succeed; it’s been decades since the court banned a party.

Here in the U.S., Trump represents one pressing threat to democracy. The former president led an insurrection after losing the 2020 election, and has announced plans for a second presidency that sounds like dictatorship, including mass firings of civil service workers and prosecutions and even executions of Trump’s political opponents (whom he calls “vermin”).

Seeing how Germans are re-examining the Basic Law because of AfD’s threat to their democracy, I understood better why Americans are rereading the U.S. Constitution because of Trump’s threat here. Various interest groups and voters have filed suits in 28 states seeking to bar the former president from primary ballots. Trump’s conservative critics, including law professors and judges, are pushing hardest to boot him from the ballot.

“A president who tried to use force and fraud to stay in power after losing an election should not be allowed to wield the power of office ever again,” writes George Mason law professor Ilya Somin. “And we need not and should not rely on the democratic process alone to combat such dangers.”

The legal grounds for the ban efforts come from Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which excludes from future office any person who has taken an oath to support the constitution and then rebelled against it, either through insurrection or by giving “aid and comfort” to the constitution’s enemies. Trump’s actions—his efforts to overturn the election, the January 6 insurrection, and his ongoing promises to violate the Constitution if he returns to office—all satisfy this criteria for ineligibility.

But these efforts have not been treated with the same seriousness that Germany gives its anti-democratic threats. The litigation hasn’t gotten much traction in the courts, or political support, even from Trump critics. As a practical matter, Trump’s eligibility will likely be decided by the courts; so far, no judge has been willing to bar him (with one jurist ducking the question with a dubious technical ruling).

In California, state officials—Secretary of State Shirley Weber, Attorney General Rob Bonta, and Gov. Gavin Newsom—have also taken no visible steps to block him from the March 2024 ballot before a December 28 deadline. That’s especially maddening because Trump has attacked California democracy, ever since his 2016 defeat in the state, with lies that our elections are “rigged.”

Trump has claimed that efforts to remove him are themselves an attack on democracy. In this gaslighting, he embodies the definition of “hypocrite” given by the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln: “The man who murdered his parents, and then pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan.”

Trump also argues, falsely, that taking him off the ballot violates his rights of voting or free speech. But democracy grants no inherent right to be president. What citizens of democracies instead have—as I was reminded in Berlin—is a responsibility to protect democracy, even when it means excluding those who won’t abide by its rules.

The post The Case for Taking Trump Off the Ballot appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.