American media covers only two types of the 7 million-plus immigrants who have left Venezuela in the past decade.

The first consists of the refugees and asylum seekers who walked across the border after perilous journeys through South and Central America, pressing their luck in a country with ever-increasing immigration restrictions. Last fall, Governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott turned the plight of nearly 50 of these Venezuelan immigrants into a cruel political theater when they loaded them in buses and planes to move them outside of their states. Neither worried about the political cost of using Venezuelan migrants as political props—and that’s in part because of the second group of immigrants from my country.

These Venezuelans got to America because they had the money and resources to hire a lawyer to cut through the red tape, validate their college degrees, and find a good enough job after some hardships and effort. In the U.S., many of them have quickly become part of a bloc of older, wealthier, more established, voting Venezuelans. This group seems to find the desperation of the first group to be alien and hard to empathize with.

Why has such a chasm opened up in the Venezuelan diaspora? And what does it mean for the country they left behind, and the country where they are building new lives? On one hand, it’s tempting to argue that class, privilege, and assimilation play bigger factors in defining migration than we have traditionally been led to believe. On the other hand, there’s the risk of jumping from one false dichotomy to another, falling into generalizations, and robbing different diasporas all over the world of their own individual stories and realities.

I can only speak from my own experience as a Venezuelan.

How, rather than empathizing with the masses fleeing from the same social, financial, and political crises that forced them to also leave their native home, many of the generally wealthier, more established Venezuelans are applauding and supporting punitive actions against their fellow countrymen.

How more than a few obsess over what private university you went to, or which gated community you lived in back in Caracas. In many cases, they would rather see similarities with those in power—perhaps as they once were or aspired to be back home—than with other immigrants trying to rebuild their lives in a new, foreign land. Indeed, the experience of being forced to move to a new country reinforced the mindset of mourning a lost country instead of encouraging reflection on past mistakes.

I’ve heard U.S.-based colleagues describe how there’s a subset of Venezuelans abroad that find support and justification for their views in right-wing populism and almost seem to take glee when bad things happen to average Venezuelans back home. They talk as if living under Chavismo—with rampant inflation, crumbling infrastructure, and authoritarian government—was divine punishment. They share, too, a generalized hopelessness about Venezuela’s future, blaming the bipartisan liberal democracy that ruled the country from 1958 to 1999 for populism, clientelism, and the rise of the Bolivarian Revolution. Taken together, it all begs the question: What do they miss about Venezuela, exactly? The country that was, or who they were back home?

Many of these Venezuelans push a sort of personal mythology that seems to be common in many assimilated minority groups: I’m here because I earned it, because I worked hard, I studied, and nobody helped me. Those coming behind me? They want a shortcut, or even to walk the same path I walked? They don’t deserve it.

Never mind that in many situations there was help, privilege, and luck involved. Burning bridges seems the preferred choice over building them.

Venezuela’s mass exodus has been going on for almost a decade now with virtually no sign that things will improve. Nations across Central and North America are enacting new policies that attempt to slow down the influx of migrants from my country, which means those with fewer resources are facing even more closed doors than ever before. It’s only exacerbating the gap between the refugees on foot, and those with money and resources.

I wish I could offer solutions or alternatives to this current situation, but I don’t have any. Like many of my fellow citizens, I’m tired and trying to make a semblance of a life in a foreign country (in my case, Spain), hopelessly feeling like I’m lagging behind locals of my age while trying to do my best to take care of my loved ones back home.

A few months ago, I went to a screening of a recent documentary on Rómulo Betancourt, the two-time Venezuelan president who some regard as “the father of Venezuelan democracy.” He spearheaded Venezuela’s first free elections in the 1940s, fought a military dictatorship in the 1950s, attempted an agrarian reform in the 1960s, and was part of the party that nationalized oil in the 1970s. However, he was also a sectarian with a spotty human rights record. The collapse of the inflexible two-party system he established brought about the rise of Hugo Chávez.

My maternal grandparents credit Betancourt for helping them leave behind the impoverished countryside for a life of middle-class comfort and opportunity in Maracay, Venezuela’s fifth largest city, and my hometown. To me, the question of whether Betancourt was a deeply principled reformer forced to make concessions or a pragmatic opportunist consolidating his power is key to understanding today’s Venezuela. So I had high hopes for the documentary.

But to my dismay, its scant analysis felt superficial. Instead, the documentary spent what felt like a disproportionate amount of time focused on the filmmaker’s childhood. I saw the movie here in Madrid, which has become a hub of Venezuelans abroad, along with Miami and Lima. What resonated most for my fellow audience members seemed to be references to some preppy private Catholic school I’d never heard of. To add insult to injury, one of the speakers after the screening praised the documentary for reflecting a childhood anyone in Venezuela could relate to. I felt so lonely in the middle of a crowd that day.

As the Venezuelan diaspora grows around the globe, the gaps among us—of geography, time, class—will deepen. I can’t help but wonder if the meanings of what our country is, was, or could be will continue to move further away from one another as well, until one day we’ll no longer recognize ourselves as coming from the same land.

The post A Tale of Two Venezuelan Diasporas appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But soon Luigi started following the news a little too avidly. Then he started going to meetings on the sly. Suddenly the De Michelis’ good boy was more interested in the man the newspapers called “Comandante” than in the approval of family and teachers. Before his parents realized what was happening, Luigi ran away from home, without finishing high school, to join the movement that had won his heart and mind.

Late in 1920, Luigi sent a letter home to prepare his parents for the imminent reckoning, an armed clash between Italian nationalists (of which Luigi was one) and the Kingdom of Italy’s army, a battle which would come to be called “The Christmas of Blood.” Luigi warned: “Soon there will be battle, maybe soon I shall be no more. Console yourselves in thinking that I died for the purest of Causes …”

How does populist, political charisma change the world and how can we hold it in check? The story of how the De Michelis family lost hold of a child—the history surrounding “the Christmas of Blood”—offers enduring answers to those questions.

Charismatic, populist politicians can have the pull of a cult. The Comandante to whom Luigi was in thrall was not Mussolini, but his precursor, Gabriele D’Annunzio, who was the most famous living Italian in 1920. By the end of World War I, D’Annunzio had created a craze around his own personality in ways only a much-loved celebrity can.

Before World War I, D’Annunzio had been Italy’s most revered decadent poet and womanizer. During the war, at 52 years of age, he enlisted as Italy’s oldest officer volunteer. He flew airplanes, manned ships, and screamed from the trenches, everywhere using his prominence to campaign for Italy’s military cause. After the war, he was the most vocal proponent of Italian territorial expansion.

Mussolini would echo D’Annunzio’s calls, though the two did not get along, agreeing about little beside Italy’s greatness and the feebleness of its government. While Mussolini busily recruited thugs to build his fascist party, D’Annunzio used his far greater fame to stage huge rallies and flood the media with his audacious and emotionally manipulative snubbing of traditional state authority.

D’Annunzio created stirs by combining shock and empathy. He could quote Dante and then call Italy’s prime minister a “shithead.” An elegant dandy, he nevertheless presented himself as “one of the guys,” determined to vindicate those who felt cheated by the state and the world at large. Nice middle-class boys like Luigi hadn’t been cheated, of course, but they responded to the daring of saying what one shouldn’t and to a cause that promised to prevent corrupt bureaucracy from keeping Italy from its destined greatness.

How would Italy achieve that greatness? What was the cause that Luigi was prepared to die for? The last line of Luigi’s letter to his parents makes this clear: “Stay safe, your son salutes you, declaring himself above all ashamed of being Italian, that he no longer wants to be Italian, and from now on is Fiumian. Goodbye, Luigi.”

The reference to “Fiumian” is now obscure, but then was a rallying cry for Italian territorial expansion. Fiume, today known by its Croatian name Rijeka, was a multiethnic port town located in the northeastern Adriatic. Before 1918, it was a semi-independent city-state within the Hungarian half of the Habsburg monarchy. Most Fiumians (unlike Luigi) did not identify as mother-tongue Italians and most were multi-lingual. Significant swathes of Fiumians declared their mother-tongue as something other than Italian—26 percent Croatian, 13 percent Hungarian, 5 percent Slovene, 5 percent German.

This diversity did not interest D’Annunzio and his followers. Instead, they saw Fiume as filled with Italians and as a target—a place they could usurp to make Italy great again.

Fiume seemed ripe for usurpation because of the political fallout at the end of World War I. Before the war, almost 300 million Europeans (including Fiumians) lived within a continental empire, whether German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, or Ottoman. When all these empires were dissolved in 1918, new countries were created out of their territories, with others expanding to absorb any lands they could get. Under the leadership of the victorious Entente powers, the 1919 Paris Peace talks became a squabbling ground over which states would get what.

Little Fiume turned into one of the biggest headaches that Paris diplomats tried to solve because the town’s Italian-nationalist leadership declared itself diplomatically and legally independent now that its empire was gone (citing their long-standing city-state semi-independence). This wasn’t the only problem. They also insisted that their new independence gave them the right to annex themselves to Italy.

Paris Peace diplomats, with the American president Woodrow Wilson in the forefront, repeatedly rebuffed attempts to annex Fiume to Italy; they made free-trade arguments against giving Italy a full monopoly over the Adriatic and pointed out that at least half the town didn’t consider itself Italian.

D’Annunzio soon became the most prominent critic of this stance, proclaiming that Wilson was trying to “mutilate” Italy’s WWI victory by denying its rightly earned dominance over the Adriatic. For months, D’Annunzio staged call-and-response rallies filled with lies to push for Italy’s control of the Adriatic and with xenophobic images against “Slavs.” In September 1919, D’Annunzio and his crew stopped just talking and decided to take Fiume.

D’Annunzio and his followers chose Fiume over other Adriatic hotspots because Fiume’s leadership invited them in. So, to the sound of church bells and without a shot fired, they entered Fiume and proclaimed it part of Italy, regardless of what the stuffed shirts in Paris, Rome, Belgrade, or Washington, D.C., said. This unsanctioned seizure of the town was titillating, and newspapers the world over covered it. Luigi was among those desperate to be part of this spectacular Fiume story.

D’Annunzio and his crew expected their de facto annexation of Fiume to Italy to be authorized within a few weeks’ time. They guessed wrong. Month after month, they marched around town proclaiming their endless motto of annexation to “Italy or death!” but no heads of state were willing to recognize their fait accompli.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Fiumians suffered the realities of what it meant to be a state gone rogue from the global order. Counterfeiting went into overdrive, with 60 percent of Fiume’s money supply falsified and no big state infrastructure available to crack down and stabilize. Law codes written in imperial times were patched over to make them look and sound Italian, but everyone was confused about what the real rules were.

Unsure where Fiume would eventually land on the geopolitical map, city policemen refused to follow orders to register their own nationality, even though they all spoke Italian. Croatian- and Hungarian-speaking schoolteachers were ordered to take Italian courses in their free time to make sure the proclamations of Fiume’s Italianness rang truer. Translators were hired to hide the fact that many bureaucrats and businesses still functioned more within a multilingual Central European mindset than a monolingual Italian one. And every day, everyone got poorer and hungrier as D’Annunzio’s Fiume grew more diplomatically isolated.

The Fiume fiasco lasted 15 months before the Kingdom of Italy and the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (soon to be known as Yugoslavia) agreed that the only way to end this destabilizing interregnum was to make Fiume an independent city-state. That meant that neither nation-state would get it. D’Annunzio refused to recognize the treaty; he still demanded annexation to “Italy or death!” Italy threatened military action. D’Annunzio’s reply: Bring it.

Eventually, Italy decided to attack, but—to avoid attention—waited until Christmas 1920, when newspaper readership was at its lowest. (Italian politicians had learned the hard way that D’Annunzio was catnip to the media).

Before the first shots were fired, D’Annunzio proved again why the press could never get enough of him. He dubbed Italy’s attack a fratricidal “Christmas of Blood,” a name that has stuck. He might have won the media war, but there was no way the Italian army would lose the real one. The town was bombed; Italian soldiers invaded. D’Annunzio’s followers blew things up and shot at the arriving soldiers. Fortunately, hardly any soldiers died, though D’Annunzio often lied about this, inflating the numbers of casualties on both sides. Even fewer civilians perished, mostly because they hid in their homes waiting for the madness to end.

By New Year’s Eve, Fiumian statesmen had convinced D’Annunzio to surrender and recognize the treaty. Italy had won, but all sides felt they had lost. Italy was regularly demonized for perpetrating a fratricidal attack in a holy season. D’Annunzio was ridiculed for not surrendering in the first place.

Like most of his comrades, Luigi survived and returned home hungover (literally and figuratively) from the entire experience. He spent the next years working to catch up on the middle-class plans his parents had always had for him. With his “Fiumian” identity shed, he finished university, joined the Fascist party (like millions of others), and became a respected pharmacist in a seaside town north of Rome.

The future for real Fiumians was less easy to rehabilitate, however. They were left living in the material and political rubble of a “Christmas of Blood” most had hid from and few had supported.

None of this should have happened. That it did still produces important questions. Why would Italian nationalists go to war against their own Italian nation-state? Why would nice boys like Luigi drop everything to join them? And how and why did a town filled with so many non-Italians put up with all these D’Annunzio converts in their desperate mission to make Fiume part of “Italy or death”?

Historians of charismatic politics have written hundreds of books trying to answer the first two questions; most ignore the last one. Many of their answers are psychological at their core; they investigate how people got brainwashed into thinking that “justice” for Italy would come from taking over a town few Italians had ever heard of. These histories are frightening because they make it seem that the right combination of charisma, anger, and a tendentious media will convince people to do things they would never have thought acceptable before.

It’s easy to see how this lesson relates to Mussolini’s rise, but it’s also frighteningly relevant right now, in the United States and around the world.

For me, the scariest part of the power of charismatic populism is different, though. I’m most afraid of the very last line of Luigi’s letter, where he identifies himself as “Fiumian.”

Nothing could have been further from the truth. In his diary and letters, Luigi admitted often how foreign Fiume was. But he and the rest of D’Annunzio’s entourage successfully convinced themselves, much of the newspaper-reading world, and most historians that they—aggressive outsiders—were everything and everyone, that they were Fiume. As this entire “Christmas of Blood” narrative shows, charismatic populist politics don’t merely convince us to run away from home or leave behind our family and country. They have the power to erase everything outside those politics, including reality itself.

That’s why, in confronting populism and charismatic leaders, we must focus more on the world erased than the world they hoped to impose. We need more study of how wrong the brainwashed thinking was, instead of focusing on its appeal to people. Otherwise, we risk replicating precisely this nefarious vision: that the leader and his followers are all the world worth knowing about.

That’s also why history matters. It’s important to replace prepackaged “extraordinary” stories like the “Christmas of Blood” with the realities that produced a “Christmas of Rubble.” And it’s important to recognize that defeating charisma politics requires taking away its stage or balcony, so that people can see all the drama, troubles, hope, and failures of the big multiethnic world that the D’Annunzios, Mussolinis, and Trumps have worked so hard to overshadow.

The post How a Charismatic Populist Destroyed Christmas appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Few people would find the ascendancy of nationalism more surprising, and more depressing, than the man who coined the term. Johann Gottfried Herder is one of the eighteenth century’s most original yet overlooked thinkers: a deeply influential philosopher who left a mark on fields ranging from the study of language and aesthetics to literature and history. He not only invented the term nationalism (Nationalismus), but is also widely seen as its greatest champion.

A student of the irrationalist philosopher Johann Georg Hamann (who advised him to “think less and live more”) and friend of the great Goethe (who credited Herder with having saved him from dry-as-dust classicism), Herder was born in East Prussia in 1744. The son of devout Lutherans, he never lost his faith in God or Germany. Or, at least, the idea of Germany: Rather than a nation, “Germany” in the 18th century was a dizzying hodgepodge of small states and independent cities which shared little more than a common language. 
 
Language, to Herder, is the very essence of a people. “The very first words we stammer,” he declared, “are the foundation stones of our knowing.” For this reason, he called upon his fellow Germans to resist what he called the “cancer” of French. The vehicle of European diplomacy and Enlightenment values, French had quickly become the unofficial language of 18th century Europe. But for Herder, the adoption of French was a reaction caused by shame at speaking one’s language. This, in turn, reflected shame of one’s own country and very own self. Spilling across the continent, bleeding into the work and thought of European elites, the domination of French risked turning Europe into a vast graveyard of other languages and cultures.

Appalled by this state of affairs, Herder hurried to the defense of both the German language and the yet-to-be-born “nation” it defined. “Whoever wants to drive out my language,” Herder declared, “also wants to rob me of my reason and my way of life, the honor and laws of my people.” Yet here’s the rub: Herder wrote these words in an essay lambasting Joseph II’s forcing of the German language on Hungarians and other linguistic minorities living under his rule. While Herder was most definitely a nationalist, he was one who marched to a drum very different from the one now deafening us. This proudly parochial German believed, as Berlin noted, “every activity, situation, historical period and civilization possessed a unique character of its own.” For this reason, to subject a particular Volk, or people, to foreign language and set of ideas—especially those that, like French, pretended to be universally applicable—was, in effect, an act of cultural genocide.

The sweeping line that opens Herder’s great work, Ideas About the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, underscores the inclusive nature of his nationalism: “Our earth is a star among stars.” Just as there is no hierarchy of planets, there is no ranking of peoples. No single measure—even one dictated in French—exists by which cultures and peoples can be judged. More so than any other element of the Enlightenment, Herder rebelled against the belief that a single and universal set of laws applied to the world of men no less than the world of things. Instead, he wrote, a nation’s ways and wisdom, language and lore can be measured only against its own standard. Yet with his elusive notion of Humanität—the conviction that all nations are ultimately drawn to certain universal ideals—Herder also suggested there exists a basis for comparison. Nevertheless, while the German and French people are comparable, they are not and can never be commensurable.

Two or three timeless insights follow from the claim of incommensurability. First, it is worse than pointless to parade the greatness of one’s nation, for this implies that there is a single standard. “To brag of one’s country is the stupidest form of boastfulness,” Herder warned. “What is a nation? A great wild garden full of bad plants and good.” Since each and every nation has what he called “its own center of gravity,” each and every one is utterly unique. As a result, no one nation can serve as a standard for another nation—much less have that same nation dismiss it as, say, “a shithole.” 

Second, there is no single form of nationalism, or for that matter, populism. To the contrary, they come in different flavors. Clearly, Herder’s nationalism was yoked to his deep and abiding concerns over the flourishing of his own language and culture. Though it strikes our ears as paradoxical, Herder was both a nationalist and a pluralist. He saw no contradiction between the claims of one’s own culture and those of other cultures. Just as the “creator of all things knows no classes; each only resembles itself,” so too must we strive to see and value other peoples not as they fail to resemble us, but as they succeed to resemble themselves. In fact, Herder’s cultural nationalism made him even especially alive to his own culture’s faults. “Our part of the earth should be called not the wisest, but the most arrogant, aggressive, and money-minded,” he wrote.
 
To see one people ranged against another in bloody battle, Herder announced, is “the worst barbarism in the human vocabulary.” Here we might ask ourselves whether Herder’s outrage is credible. Would he be justified in expressing outrage over the words and actions of today’s populist demagogues? As some critics have argued, Herder’s kinder and gentler nationalism—one that invoked the thousand points of lights illuminating our world—is different not in kind, but only in degree from political nationalism. Like a grasshopper transmogrified into a locust, cultural nationalism can transform into the twinned plagues of political nationalism and violent populism. Just as a sudden change in the environment of grasshoppers can trigger their terrifying alteration, so too is this the case for peoples. A sudden crisis, whether genuine or manufactured, can unleash the darker nature of nationalism.

This year marks the 275th anniversary of Herder’s birth. By its end, we may be in a better position to decide if Herder’s humane vision of humankind turns out to be as fantastic and fictitious as the German folk tales he loved.

The post The Philosopher Who Coined the Term ‘Nationalism’ Also Preached Inclusivity appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Plato believed it was more than a threat: He thought it characterized democracies, and would lead them inevitably into anarchy and ultimately tyranny. But the liberal democracies of the modern era, grudgingly extending suffrage, have extended public education in parallel, in the hope of cultivating an informed citizenry. Yet today, given the persistence and severity of public ignorance, the ideal of an enlightened electorate seems a fading wish at best, a cruel folly at worst.

Unfortunately, our current civic problem cuts even deeper: We are witnessing the rise of a culture of ignorance. It is particularly insidious because it hijacks certain democratic values. To begin to understand this culture and its effects, it is helpful to identify the ways it differs from simple ignorance.

Perhaps the most noticeable aspect of a culture of ignorance is the extent of willful ignorance. Ignorance that is willful may involve resistance to learning, denial of relevant facts, the ignoring of relevant evidence, and suppression of information. Such ignorance is usually maintained in order to protect a prior belief or value—a sense of self, an ideology, a religious doctrine, or some other cherished cognitive commitment. False knowledge often bolsters one’s will in maintaining a closed mind; but of course, it is only ignorance in elaborate disguise.

When the willfully ignorant are cornered by mounting evidence, they assert their individual right to believe whatever they choose to believe. This is a hollow and silly claim. Beliefs are factive; they aspire to truth. Moreover, beliefs affect attitudes, decisions, and actions. As the Victorian mathematical philosopher William K. Clifford remarked, “No one man’s belief is in any case a private matter which concerns him alone.” He proposed “an ethic of belief” and championed our responsibility to respect evidence for and against our beliefs. Though his standard of evidence may have been too stringent, we can agree that claiming the right to believe “whatever” exploits the democratic respect for individual rights by foregoing individual responsibilities.

A related characteristic is the rejection of expertise. Liberal democratic theory and practice have always elevated individual autonomy and independence, rejecting authority and dependency. They therefore have had difficulties with any relationship that yields individual autonomy—which seems to be involved in consulting an expert. It is true that the place of expertise in a democracy remains contested: We may yield to the expertise of the physician, pilot, or engineer (albeit uneasily); but we may be skeptical of the expertise of the economist, climate scientist, or critic.

Are we heading toward a culture of ignorance? Photo courtesy of pxhere.

Our ambivalence regarding expertise has increasingly come to be a rejection. The rise of social media has certainly contributed to this trend. Who needs a qualified film or restaurant critic when one can find websites that provide thousands of audience or diner ratings? But the implications go far beyond aesthetics: As a senior minister famously said during the recent Brexit campaign, “Britain has had enough of experts.” Among at least a significant portion of the population, this attitude has led to a rejection of the traditional sources and certifiers of knowledge—universities, science, established journalism. As this attitude engulfs public life, it undermines the fragile but vital distinction between knowledge and belief, between informed judgment and unreflective opinion.

This epistemic populism seems radically democratic, but that image is an illusion. Democracy is, as John Dewey described, a moral climate in which each person may contribute to the construction of knowledge; but it doesn’t imply that each person possesses the truth. Moreover, one need not yield political authority to experts; it is epistemic authority—the authority of knowledge, skill, experience, and judgment—that is carried by experts.

At some point, the “wisdom of crowds” becomes the celebration of ignorance. Conspiracy theories, wild speculations and accusations, nutty claims, “alternate facts,” and pronouncements that are far afield from one’s knowledge—all these claim time or space on a par with accurate and important information. The politician who is ignorant of politics, the law, and history is seen as the person who will “get things done.” Some public figures wear their ignorance as a badge of honor. Let’s be clear: Ignorance is not stupidity, though I admit it is sometimes difficult to tell them apart in practice. And stupidity is likely to produce ignorance across a broad front. But one can be ignorant without being stupid.

Underlying all of these factors is the loss of respect for the truth. No doubt, many things have contributed: the venality of some experts, the public disagreement among experts, the continual revising of expert advice, and the often-unwarranted movement by social scientists from the descriptive to the normative, from facts to pronouncements. Religious fundamentalism, which stretches credibility, is another precipitating factor. The postmodernist deconstruction of ideals like truth, rationality, and objectivity, also contributed to this loss—though I doubt that postmodernist treatises were widely read among conspiracy theorists, religious fundamentalists, or climate change deniers.

The irony is that these folks believe they are holding the truth. Indeed, I am not suggesting that we need to claim we possess the Truth, firmly and finally; in fact, I believe those who make that claim actually disrespect the truth. Rather, we need to keep the ideal of truth to guide our inquiries, to aspire to greater truth. Not all opinions or interpretations are equally worthy. The concept of truth is required to separate knowledge from opinion; those who give up on truth, those for whom truth doesn’t matter, are—as the contemporary philosopher Harry Frankfurt said—left with bullshit.

There are signs of hope. Many young people have a naturally skeptical, even cynical, attitude regarding information sources. There is a surge of interest in investigative journalism in various forms. The teaching of critical thinking has broadened to include information literacy: Many colleges now provide ways to learn the skills of evaluating informational sources and content, including statistical integrity. Scholars are giving new attention to epistemic virtues, capacities and traits that enhance the acquisition of knowledge. There is excited talk among feminist and educational philosophers of “an epistemology and pedagogy of resistance” that confronts willful ignorance and the “epistemic injustice” of systematically discrediting certain voices.

The danger, and by the same token, the hope lies in this truth: In the end, ignorance will lead to error. Serious mistakes and their consequences may be required before there is momentum sufficient to roll back this culture.

The post American Populism Shouldn’t Have to Embrace Ignorance appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In particular, the notable victory of Emmanuel Macron in France led many to conclude that the populist tide had turned. Exceeding all expectations, the young centrist not only claimed the French presidency, but also managed to secure a parliamentary majority in the legislative elections on June 18.

While his success is remarkable by any measure, there is little reason for anti-populists to celebrate, as it is possible that Macron’s triumph may end up fuelling more populism.

For starters, it’s important not to exaggerate popular enthusiasm for a Macron presidency. His support base during the presidential elections grew primarily out of opposition to Le Pen. According to an Ipsos poll, more than 40 percent of the people who voted for Macron in the second round did so in opposition to the far-right leader.

Second, Macron’s triumph during the parliamentary elections, which was widely described as a “landslide victory,” was tempered by low voter turnout. In the second round of the two-round legislative elections, fewer than 45 percent of registered voters showed up at the polls—a record low in the history of the Fifth Republic. While there are different ways of interpreting dwindling participation, the high rates of abstention (coupled with spoiled ballots and unregistered voters) suggest that popular support for Macron’s movement may be less strong than it seems.

Third, it is easy to forget that Marine Le Pen secured 10.6 million votes for her right-wing populist Front National (FN) party, thereby nearly doubling the number of votes her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, won in 2002. This means that even though she was defeated in the decisive round of the elections, about one in three French voters backed Le Pen.

As Harvard’s Yascha Mounk has pointed out, populist candidates fared particularly well among the young; in the first round of the Présidentielle, half of the voters between the ages of 18 to 24 supported either Marine Le Pen or the far-leftist candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, while just one in five of the voters over age 70 did. These young voters are not going to go away anytime soon.

All of this is to say that Macron has not flushed away populism; his victory has merely served to keep it at bay. Populism is a very complex phenomenon, and the idea of a “populist wave” flooding Europe, is misleading at best. The political scientist Larry Bartels has written that the “wave” of populist sentiment is better understood “as a reservoir—and its political potential is still largely submerged.”

On the one hand, the fate of French populism depends on whether the Front National can re-mobilize lingering populist sentiment. To do so, the party will need to overcome internal turmoil and reinvent itself. On the other hand, it hinges on the success of Emmanuel Macron. Unless the French President manages to address the underlying causes that fueled populism, these tendencies are likely to resurface.

It’s also doubtful that Macron’s brand of centrism can present a lasting antidote to populism. Similar to Barack Obama in 2008, the newly-elected French President ran on a platform of optimism that promised hope and progress in the guise of political reform. In the United States, Obama’s hopeful vision was followed by popular disillusionment that helped pave the way for Donald Trump.

Macron’s strand of centrism is perhaps best described by what the American critical theorist Nancy Fraser has dubbed “progressive neoliberalism” in that it conflates “truncated forms of emancipation and lethal forms of financialization.” In other words, his agenda combines a socially progressive vision and economically neoliberal policies. Indeed, Macron has sought to appeal to voters from both sides of the political spectrum by proposing a combination of liberal and social reforms, and—perhaps more importantly—by insisting that he is both right and left (“et droite, et gauche”). This “middle of the road” strategy comes with the risk of pleasing neither and upsetting both camps.

It could even further stoke populism. In Western Europe, some of the strongest populist movements emerged in countries with centrist coalition governments. In the Netherlands for instance, the anti-Muslim populist Pim Fortuyn rose to fame in the early 2000s after eight years of “purple” coalition governments between social democrats and liberals. In general, when parties from different ideological traditions converge at the center to govern together, it frees up space at the political extremities. It also forces parties to agree on a lowest common denominator, which often disillusions voters who feel that they are not being offered a real choice.

Of course, the French political context is different in that it operates under a majoritarian voting system, which generally favors bigger parties, rather than a parliamentary one, which produces smaller parties and thus makes coalition governments more likely. But these systemic differences haven’t spared France from the consequences of centrism.

For evidence, look no further than Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, who was able to advance to the second round in the 2002 presidential elections after half a decade of cohabitation featuring a conservative president and a socialist prime minister. The mushy coalition policies that grew out of this time played their part in generating a political backlash. Macron’s centrism could have a similarly galvanizing effect in that he may end up stoking populism by alienating the hard left as well as the far right, who, after all, represent a sizeable portion of the electorate.

The hopes and expectations for Macron’s presidency are sky high. Macron’s success depends on whether he can implement his ambitious agenda. This will prove challenging—not in the least because he is backed by an inexperienced parliament composed of many political novices. And even if he pushes through legislation, it’s possible his reforms will simply end up reinforcing the status quo. Although he managed to present himself as an outsider, it’s worth remembering that he served as economy minister under his predecessor, François Hollande, for two years.

But if he finds a way to succeed, it wouldn’t be the first time that Macron has surprised. Indeed, if there is anything we can conclude from these past years, it is that electoral politics in Western democracies have become more volatile and less predictable.

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As a social anthropologist who studies both “influence elites” and the workings of bureaucracy, I can help explain why this “rigging” resonates with so many regular people. I began my career in 1980s Poland studying how communist systems actually worked, as opposed to how they purported to work. In the past decade or so, I’ve experienced a nagging sense of déjà vu as people in the United States perceive a widening gap between how they expect the system to operate and how it really does.

I’ve seen this most clearly among the Trump supporters I encounter in rural Kansas, where I grew up, and rural upstate New York, where I’m a partner in a family business. They all say they are against the system because it’s rigged against the little guy at the bottom, even if they have little idea what to replace it with. They may not find him especially appealing, but Trump would at least “shake things up.”

The “system” is usually taken to be a synonym for Washington but, in fact, the institutions failing the little guy go well beyond the government. Whether it’s your bank, your doctor, public school, news sources, unions, or even your place of worship, all have posted staggering declines in confidence in recent decades. Gallup’s most recent Confidence in Institutions survey shows that trust has decreased by double-digit percentages since the 1970s for 12 out of 17 institutions, including the presidency, Congress, banks, and the press.

I would argue that a majority of the institutions themselves are fundamentally different than they were at the time when public trust was first measured. A bank of today is not the bank of the 1970s, when you could get a mortgage by talking to the local lending officer with whom you could meet face-to-face. He might not meet your needs, but at least he had the authority to take into account your own circumstances and history in his decision. Today, this all goes by algorithm in some unseen office. The local bank branch looks the same, but it’s now a powerless extension of a financial giant.

Ditto when I have a sinus infection and need to see a specialist. While I used to be able to call the doctor’s office directly, and perhaps speak to someone I knew who could tell me if I needed to be seen or not, now I have to call a number that routes me through an incomprehensible phone tree and eventually connects me with people who themselves have little authority. While this is now bureaucracy as usual, in reality these changes have proliferated throughout our lives with lightning speed. This is the new normal, which explains why United initially barely apologized when one of its paying customers was dragged off a flight.

An Occupy Wall Street protester is arrested by police in New York City, Jan. 1, 2012. Photo by Stephanie Keith/Associated Press.

You don’t have to spend much time punching through a phone menu to realize that no one, besides you, is incentivized to care whether you get a mortgage, heal your sinus infection, or make your flight to Louisville. And while you know you’re interacting with machines, the frustration, impersonality, and disaffection you feel feels like something I have experienced before: the daily disaffection that eventually led people under communism to revolt. Americans have recently lost a lot of power and become disconnected from community in ways that can’t entirely be explained by money or inequality.

This system shows little mercy to any regular person—it’s rigged against us. And so nearly three-quarters of Americans say they think the economy is “rigged in favor of certain groups,” according to a recent poll. They are not wrong. In my research I’ve found that nearly every policy venue affecting our lives—from foreign policy to health care to the economy—has indeed been rigged to varying extents by elites shaping decisions to fit their own self-interested agendas.

This trend started in the United States with the end of the Cold War, as our world was transformed by privatization and deregulation, and the ascent of digital communication. Old barriers have toppled, allowing creative elites to exercise power and influence in new and insidious ways by moving between the private and public sectors.

For instance, the banking giant Goldman Sachs favored some of its powerful clients against others (including pension funds) in the notorious Abacus Deal of 2007. When the deal was discovered, only one lower-level executive was punished and the company paid a fine that paled alongside its profits. Meanwhile, so many former executives from the company have taken positions in various administrations since the Bill Clinton era that the company is jokingly called “Government Sachs.” And while that seems to be a joke about the company, in the heartland it stings because it’s also about a government that—like so much else—doesn’t work as it should for ordinary people.

Consider, too, the modern U.S. general: A generation ago, many of them retired to teach, golf, or paint watercolors. Now some go to work for consulting companies that do business with defense contractors. Many additionally take on roles at think tanks and universities and appear on TV as supposedly impartial experts. In a telling statement, one such general, who had gone back and forth between government and consulting, said to The New York Times that his work as a consultant “has allowed me to stay focused on national security and intelligence communities as a strategist and as a consultant. Therefore, in many respects, I never left [government].”

For those of us watching these generals on TV, the question of where public interest stops and private interest picks up looks dangerously blurry. The public has no way to know whether a general’s analysis is driven by genuine national security concerns or by a desire to build his brand and expand business for a powerful contractor. In these transactions, the public not only foots the bill, but also loses perhaps the most crucial resource a democracy has: trust.

I call this the “new corruption”—corruption that is systemic and legal, and yet violates public trust. This is not the old corruption of simple fraud, or a bribe taker stuffing cash in the freezer. Practitioners of the new corruption assume a tangle of roles that fuse state and private interests. They hone their political influencing through means that are several steps removed from direct power and difficult to detect.  Many are “shadow lobbyists,” such as, say, an economist from a prestigious university who testifies before Congressional bodies and the media using his professor label while he really is shilling for the investment bank for which he consults.

The number of registered lobbyists declined by 24.5 percent from 2007 to 2016, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. It is unlikely that this drop means a decline in lobbying per se. Rather, it appears that influencers are eschewing registration, swelling the ranks of shadow lobbyists.

The sense of pervasive rigging explains the groundswell of distrust that helped bring President Trump to power last fall. His constant references to Hillary Clinton’s private email server and problematic family foundation resonated with many voters. Unlike Clinton and most of his Republican opponents in the primary, candidate Trump was not a member of any policy-shaping elite of consequence. Rather, he built a brand—with a canny combination of TV and Twitter—as an authentic anti-establishment figure who acknowledged his listeners’ disaffection and granted them a sense of power through his performances.

With an ever-broadening gap between the myth and the lived realty, it was no surprise that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street—at two opposite ends of the political spectrum—sprang up in the years after the 2008 financial crisis, when it became undeniable that the system was working for a select few and not the rest of us. An enraged populace has been knocking on the door of the system, trying to get in, and can’t.

Ironically, while so many looked to him as a system-busting “outsider,” the Trump administration is poised to further widen the gulf between lived experience and people’s expectations for democracy. Having named the problem—“rigging”—Trump now finds himself tangled and trapped in it. In a mere 100-plus days, he has brought the very rigging he has railed against to a new level of blatancy: from Ivanka Trump using her position to promote her fashion line, to packing his cabinet with bankers and billionaires with financial conflicts—all while starving parts of the bureaucracy through unfilled positions and budget cuts.

After a decade or two of this informal system of influence and rule-bending in the shadows, with the new administration it now has come out into the open.

In dismantling and reorganizing governance, Trump is borrowing from the communist playbook: power and personality frequently trump process, formal position, bureaucracy, and elected bodies. He has tried, so far with incomplete success, to enfeeble pillars of democracy: civil liberties, a free press, an independent judiciary.

When your democracy doesn’t feel like a democracy, the system demands overhaul. Starving it or busting it entirely will only lead to more distrust. Public institutions need remaking; they need to re-deliver. That may be the only true way to narrow the gap between what should be and what now is. And those elite influencers? They must be brought to account, and then made to rebuild the system they’ve helped break.

The post Trump Is Right That the System Is “Rigged”—and He’s Stacking It More appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The short answer is yes. The harder, unanswered question is: How, exactly?

A body of research including our own papers shows overwhelming evidence that, over the last 20 years or so, trade integration with low-wage manufacturing countries like China has had dramatic effects on the manufacturing landscape in rich countries like the United States and Germany.

It also appears this growing trade exposure is to blame, at least in part, for growing political polarization and increasing support for parties that advocate for populist and protectionist agendas. In our own work, we documented that in Germany during the last three decades, growing import competition from Eastern Europe and China has increased voting for extreme far-right parties, while export access to the same countries appears to have reduced it.

But that leaves a question. For all the research showing that trade shocks that have impacted regional manufacturing employment also had regional effects on political behavior, it is not yet clear what mechanism causes this link.

This represents a larger challenge for economic research. While applied economic research has made huge advances in estimating causal effects of variables of interest on outcomes (for example, the causal effects of import competition on either labor market outcomes or voting), causal mechanisms—the causal links among the different outcomes—are often still a “black box.”

Mexican farmers protesting the removal of import tariffs on U.S. and Canada agricultural goods—as agreed to under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)—gather around a tractor set on fire by demonstrators during a protest in Mexico City, Jan. 31, 2008. Photo by Eduardo Verdugo/Associated Press.

One fundamental problem: We have far more potential outcomes that we would like to explain than we have natural experiments or variables that cause the outcomes. As a result, research often generates a large number of stand-alone causal effects on many outcomes with relatively little to say about possible causal links between these. To illustrate, the same types of regional trade shocks have been used to estimate the effect of import competition on manufacturing employment, social transfers, wages, legislators, voting, crime, marriage markets, and patenting. But we have not gotten a clear view of possible causal mechanisms, e.g. whether trade’s effect on one outcome might be explained by its effect on another.

In some contexts, our lack of a fuller explanation is not a huge problem. For example, import competition may increase crime and reduce patenting, but the additional crimes are probably not being committed by laid-off inventors, and crime is not preventing researchers from inventing. In other words, there is probably no causal mechanism linking these two outcomes.

But in other contexts, as with studying trade’s effect on labor markets and on voting, the lack of causal links between these two outcomes is a problem. If import competition has negative labor market consequences and makes voters turn to extreme or populist parties, then it is likely that there is a causal mechanism linking these two outcomes and it is important for policy-makers to know to what extent the populist backlash against globalization is explained by trade’s effect on labor markets.

The search for causal mechanisms is called causal mediation analysis. Existing methods falling under this umbrella allow for the identification of causal effects only under restrictive assumptions. The most important restriction is that the explanatory variable is assumed to vary exogenously—in plain English, this means that you are effectively assuming the conditions of a randomized control trial. A second important restriction is that existing frameworks do not allow the explanatory variable to have any unobserved effects that also affect the observed mechanism.

What does that mean? As an example, suppose we had a dataset of college seniors and in it we could observe, first, whether students attended a job interview training workshop; second, students’ dress code at a subsequent job fair; and, third, whether they secured a job offer. Suppose we wanted to ask to what extent the workshop helped with getting a job because it advised students to dress more professionally. To answer this question, existing causal mediation frameworks would have to assume that workshop attendance was totally random and additionally assume away any unobserved effect of the workshop—such as a more serious attitude by student job-seekers—that might influence students’ dress code and also directly affect their chances of securing a job through better interview skills.

Under those assumptions we could estimate what percentage of the training’s effect on securing a job was explained by dressing more professionally—but this estimate may be totally wrong because the statistical assumptions are.

For example, students most likely attend job interview training workshops deliberately and not randomly. The most common solution to this problem is to find some other source of exogenous variation that partly drives the variation one is really interested in. For example, perhaps the student union accidentally advertised the workshop in some dormitories and not others. This exogenous/accidental variation can serve as an instrumental variable for workshop participation. A large portion of all applied economics research in non-experimental data—including the entire agenda on regional trade shocks—relies on such instrumental variables.

We developed a method that allows us to statistically estimate causal mechanisms in data where a shock (e.g. trade exposure) is not random but where we have an instrumental variable for it. Importantly, our method allows for trade to have unobserved effects (perhaps anxiety about globalization) that in turn influence both labor market outcomes and voting.

As with any statistical framework, we do need to make some assumptions that will not always be appealing. Fortunately, in our research question—trade exposure’s effects on labor markets and voting—these statistical assumptions are very reasonable.

So we applied this method—identifying the assumption on causal relations and estimating instrumental variables—and reached a surprising finding. We found that 170 percent of the total effect of trade exposure on populist voting is explained by labor markets.

This is an important finding in the current policy debate. First, it implies that the negative labor market consequences of import competition from low-wage manufacturing countries have been even more consequential at the ballot booth than one might have thought. Second, it implies that trade integration can be a force for political moderation if we can cushion its negative labor market effects.

Why would trade exposure’s other effects on voting be politically moderating? We are not sure yet. But a plausible hypothesis is that with increasingly fractionalized global supply chains, trading increasingly means working in international teams to bring all the different intermediate products and production steps together into final products.

The post Are Trade Shocks to Blame for Our Extremist Politics? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Populist anger is shaking the world, epitomized by the U.K.’s vote to “Brexit” the EU and even the election of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. In the U.S., Donald Trump’s election has transformed populist anger into political power. Is a worldwide populist wave inevitable?

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has spent decades studying how democracies succeed and fail, in the West and elsewhere. He has also been a leading voice for the unity of Canada and the distinctive identity of Quebec, which forced him to grapple with the causes of populist rage and anti-immigrant sentiment.

Here he explains what can be done to address populist anger and the stereotyping of immigrants.

UCLA sociologist Jeff Guhin spends time hanging out in evangelical Christian, Muslim, and secular high schools in the U.S. In this essay, he explains how Taylor’s ways of understanding both faith and secularity make it possible to understand and study ways of thinking that are different from our own.

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What’s that got to do with Brexit? More than you’d think. When Britain voted early this summer to leave the European Union and go it alone, a large number of those who voted to leave did so explicitly because of concerns over immigration. Tensions ran high in the days surrounding the vote. Immediately following the result of the referendum, police all over the country noted a rise in racial hate crimes. Reports flooded in of foreigners being spat at and snarled at on Britain’s streets, and told to go back to where they came from. This hatred of other people, of those viewed as non-Britons, escalated on the night in late August when a gang of English youths murdered 40-year old Polish immigrant Arkadiusz Jóźwik as he was eating pizza in Harlow, just south of London, in what is widely suspected to be a hate crime. Perhaps most notoriously, on 16 June, a week shy of the vote, a man shouting “Britain first” shot and stabbed Jo Cox, a young Labour Member of Parliament. When he was asked in court a few days later to state his name, he replied: “My name is death to traitors. Freedom for Britain.”

Back on this side of the Atlantic, it’s been reported that supporters at Trump rallies have sometimes cried not just for jailing Hillary Clinton, but also for killing her. Trump’s own veiled threat of “Second Amendment” action at a rally in North Carolina in early August had many wondering whether he was inciting potential armed violence. Last year after a campaign rally in Alabama where several white Trump supporters assaulted a Black Lives Matter protester who interrupted the candidate’s speech, Trump responded on Fox News, “Maybe [the activist] should have been roughed up.” In March in St. Louis, Trump claimed “Part of the problem and part of the reason it takes so long [to kick protestors out of campaign stops] is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore.” And the list goes on. And on.

In both campaigns—the U.S. presidential bid and the U.K.’s European referendum—the movement of people from nation to nation, and the economic consequences of that movement, has played an outsized role. Whether it’s Trump complaining about Latinos or Syrian refugees, or the Leave campaign’s poster showing a seemingly unending line of dark-skinned migrants under the headline “Breaking Point” (a poster ironically released the same day Jo Cox lost her life), it’s once more acceptable to speak openly and disparagingly of immigrants, refugees, and of others who don’t “belong”–those who don’t look, or sound, or seem like a particular conception of what makes “us” as nations.

Trump visited Scotland (which voted overwhelmingly in favor of remaining in the European Union) the day after the U.K.’s June referendum. He said there were “great similarities” between the vote and his campaign, including that “people want to take their country back” and “they don’t necessarily want people pouring into their country.” His words echo not only those of the haters, but also of the woman who is now Britain’s Prime Minister, Theresa May. Just a year ago when she was Home Secretary and in charge of immigration policy, she declared at the annual Conservative Party conference that “millions” of people wanted to come to Britain, and that their presence would doom the economy, drive wages down, expand the criminal classes, and make it impossible to build a cohesive society. The speech was pure Trump (albeit delivered in complete sentences), though it was given at a time when few in the U.S. believed Trump could be a serious contender. In both countries, interestingly, the foreign-born residents—41 million in the U.S. and 8 million in Britain—amount to some 13 percent of the total population.

In both countries, this type of rhetoric reveals a regression in recent years that has brought open statements of intolerance and bigotry back into mainstream discussion, often in the name of freedom of expression. Hatred of difference has a long and always ugly history. It was only after 1945, with the horrors of Nazism fresh in people’s minds that derogatory commentary—whether about people of different backgrounds or religions, women, those with disabilities, or migrants—began to retreat from open conversation. Slowly but surely, it became less and less acceptable to make casual anti-Semitic, racist, or sexist comments in public. Instead, such expressions moved to the periphery, the province of fringe organizations and privately expressed antipathy.

But the pushback against migration in much of the industrialized world, fanned by manipulative politicians scapegoating outsiders for all societal woes, has allowed this bigoted talk to return to our political landscape in recent years. Trump and his counterparts around the world couch their blunt rhetoric, which often involves the denigration of difference, in the message that freedom lies in the ability to speak the unspeakable, and that political correctness has made us skirt around real problems and real frustrations that we ignore at our peril. For Brexit supporters, for those who stump for Trump, and for white supremacists and the Alt-Right, diversity has become the favored whipping post. And it’s not just speechifying. The murders of Jóźwik and Cox in the U.K. and the violence at Trump rallies are a painful testament to the dangers of this new manifestation of discontent. Just last week a Conservative MP asked his Parliamentary colleagues how Britain could be made great again, echoing not only Trump’s campaign slogan but a speech delivered in 1950 by a young Margaret Thatcher.

The night before the referendum last June, Nigel Farage, leader of the ultranationalist U.K. Independent Party (UKIP) and a major architect of the Leave campaign, stated in a speech that his opponents had “lost faith in their country.” When Trump, as he will surely do, invokes his “Make America Great Again” slogan the night before our own election, we can only hope that his strikingly similar sentiments don’t seal this country’s fate for the coming years too. Brexit and Trump share values that have ignited a new era of hatred and intolerance—which neither side of the Atlantic can afford.

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As Europe and the United States are grappling with the rise of bombastic populism, the region that’s long excelled in the genre above all others—Trump may be trying, but he is no Hugo Chávez or Juan Perón—appears to be moving away from it. And if Latin America can shake the virus, there may be hope for all.

After more than a decade of populism creep, the region has been fighting back. Latin America has a new crop of political leaders—and, perhaps more importantly, a new generation of activists and government technocrats—setting checks and balances and elevating the moral tone in politics. Over time, the demagogic populist regimes of the 2000s have given way to practical, even boring economic leaders, most notably in Brazil and Argentina. They are not without fault—Mauricio Macri’s family comes with baggage, and Michel Temer’s gender attitudes are somewhat Trumpian—but their administrations are working on strengthening institutions, injecting orthodoxy into the economy, and leaving ideology behind.

Elections will make 2018 a key year for democracy in the hemisphere, as Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and (fingers crossed) Venezuela will decide whether they want to continue to embrace rational governance or take a U-turn into the past. Interestingly, the choice in the region is no longer between democracy and outright dictatorship. It’s between meaningful democracy and authoritarian populism. Even under the latter (as exemplified by the Chavistas in Venezuela and their acolytes in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nicaragua) lip service is paid to the ideal of democracy, and to the observance of its essential trappings. Take the authoritarians’ widespread reliance on referenda—a self-serving populist means of manipulating the public will.

Across the region, the Organization of American States (OAS) is invited to observe national elections to ascertain whether or not they are free and fair. Often considered a dysfunctional multilateral institution, its electoral observation team is one of its saving graces. After over 20 years, they’ve moved past rubber-stamping election outcomes to analyzing the quality of representation. They look at gender, hoping to pinpoint not only how many women run for and win elected positions, but also how many women volunteer in elections (many), and how many have full-time jobs in the electoral institutions (few). The OAS also assesses media activity before, during, and after elections, answering questions such as: “Are the local media independent institutions or beholden to economic or political elites?” “How balanced is news coverage?” and “Do media outlets respect electoral law and regulations”?

Electoral observation missions have not succeeded entirely in ridding the continent of demogogic populism, but they have helped show Latin Americans that quality of representation and strength of institutions are important factors in a democracy. This will be important in years to come to ensure that populism does not trickle back in to the countries that have managed to kick it out.

Checks and balances are also being set up by idealists working from within. Hidden behind the curtains in governments throughout Latin America are 40-somethings that grew up under hyperinflation and the democratic opening. Some studied abroad, and all are dedicated to serving their country. These technocrats are principally responsible for the economic reforms in Mexico—in telecommunications, energy, fiscal services, and education; anti-corruption pushes in Brazil; freedom of information efforts in Argentina; and human rights advances in Colombia.

Take Aristóteles Nuñez, the 47-year-old Mexican technocrat who until recently oversaw the SAT, Mexico’s equivalent of the IRS. He grew up in Tepito, a poor neighborhood known as a black market hotbed. The 1985 earthquake left Nuñez homeless for a while. He went on to one of the top public universities in the country. For the first three years of the Peña Nieto administration, Nuñez worked tirelessly to solve a decades-old problem in Mexico—how to get people to pay their taxes. He established a partnership with the IRS, so that Mexicans could no longer hide their savings on the other side of the border. He hired big data firms to comb through digital financial transactions and flag potentially worrisome amounts. He implemented systems that automatically deposited tax returns in citizens’ bank accounts—if you know the government will give you money back, it’s easy to get in the habit of declaring annually. He took out three-page advertisements in the most popular daily newspapers and listed the names of people and firms who were the most egregious tax-evaders. Naming and shaming gets the work done really quickly.

And what do you do when you are an architect, and your beautiful touristy colonial town hasn’t had a mayor for four years because the last one got caught red-handed in a corruption scandal? You run for office and open the door to newcomers who might want to live in your town and improve it. Susana Asensio, mayor of Antigua Guatemala (pop. 45,000), has welcomed digital nomads from around the world to live in Antigua and run their entrepreneurial initiatives out of ImpactHub and other shared workspaces. Asensio
is also working with the U.S. embassy on women’s entrepreneurship initiatives.

On a larger scale there’s Sérgio Moro the 44-year-old judge who upended the political system in Brazil. Based in a relatively small town in the southern part of that vast country, Moro has investigated corruption allegations within the national oil company and uncovered a vast network of kickbacks involving the three main political parties. Politicans have had to step down, with some going to prison. Beyond that, there has also been a moral reawakening in the country. On one hand, the Brazilian people are disillusioned with the political system; on the other, they’re hopeful that this will change Brazil for the better. It has been a transformative three years for Brazil.

Anti-corruption initiatives pushed by civil society groups are also making gains. The most obvious example is #Ley3de3, an initiative promoted by Juan Pardinas, 45. Pardinas is director of the IMCO think tank in Mexico, which is committed to advocating for the removal of structural obstacles to a more economically competitive and affluent Mexico. #Ley3de3 promoted transparency and open government, and sought to make public servants more accountable to the public by releasing their tax forms and financial disclosures. Proposed by the citizenry, the bill received over 600,000 signatures and was widely popular among businessmen and industry associations. The final version of the law, watered down as it will, was signed by President Peña Nieto over the summer. The challenge now is its implementation, and civil society is on the administration’s heels to get it done quickly.

Other NGOS like IMCO are cropping up throughout Latin America, helping strengthen institutions. Brazil has the Congresso em Foco monitoring congress and Agência Lupa, a fact-checking institution. Colombia has Bogota Cómo Vamos, a data-driven citizen initiative keeping the federal and state governments accountable.

This not your grandfather’s Latin America anymore. The region is bucking populism and strengthening democratic institutions and the quality of representation at all levels. The U.S. and Europe could benefit from some of the pro-democracy practices developed in Latin America. Indeed, this U.S. election is the first that the Organization of American States will observe. Media conglomerates, electoral officials, and pregnant chads beware.

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