Nǐ hǎo, jiāzhōu!

Hello, California!

We are the Golden State’s two giant pandas, the first to enter the United States in two decades. And while it’s only been a few months since we departed southwest China for the San Diego Zoo, we’ve already met the governor, celebrities, TV broadcasters who love puns (“Panda-monium”), and thousands of everyday people, some of whom pay $115 to enter the zoo in the early morning and walk around with us for an hour. We now feel so at home in California that we’re wondering how we might take on the responsibilities of citizenship. For example, we hear so many of the people visiting us talking about your November elections.

So, why don’t you let us vote in them, too?

In asking this, we want to reassure you that we are reluctant to get political. Why take sides when we’re more popular than the Padres? (We never strike out, and we’re cuter than Jackson Merrill). The two of us are laidback types; zookeepers describe Yun, a 5-year-old male, as “mild-mannered, gentle and lovable,” and Xin, a 4-year-old female, as a “gentle and witty introvert with a sweet round face and big ears.”

And like so many of our fellow Californians, we ignore the news. We prefer to spend our time sunbathing, sleeping, and consuming as much grass as we can get our paws on. To clarify, our grass of choice is bamboo—the zoo grows eight species of it because we are picky.

We also must walk a fine line as “envoys of friendship,” in the words of the Chinese government, which loans us out to overseas zoos for $1 million a year. That means we and our fellow panda migrants—including old Sichuan friends who will soon head to the National Zoo in D.C. and perhaps the San Francisco Zoo—are really diplomats. And we represent a difficult client state that bullies its neighbors and inspires retaliatory tariffs and hateful rhetoric from a former-and-perhaps-future American president whose team uses the term “panda hugger” as a pejorative. (Pro tip: even if you love China, it’s best not to hug us—we are real animals, not stuffed bears.)

There are other reasons we might be wise to stay out of the political arena. For one thing, we are non-humans now living in a country that ranks low in the global Animal Protection Index. For another, we are newcomers to an America so deeply infected by xenophobia that a majority of voters support mass deportation of immigrants and their families. (Before JD Vance starts spreading lies about what we eat, let’s be clear—we are herbivores.)

Yet, despite all the ways in which we count as outsiders, we pandas, by our very presence, offer Americans a chance to understand your real challenges.

Try looking at things from our perspective. After all, we, like you, are a vulnerable species trying to survive on an increasingly inhospitable planet (there are fewer than 3,000 giant pandas in the world). We are also living proof that—in this age of moral relativism and lie-based politics—some very important things remain black and white.

Like the fact that true democracy requires the representation and participation of all living things.

Including us.

Sure, your human media is full of phony accusations that foreigners are voting in this year’s elections. They aren’t, but why shouldn’t they be able to? It’s increasingly common around the world for jurisdictions to open up local elections to non-citizens. San Francisco has done so for school board contests, for instance.

If we could vote in San Diego elections, we might cast a ballot for anyone who could stop the constant noise of jets flying low over us here in Balboa Park, as they prepare to land at the airport. Our participation also might raise the question of why we live rent-free in the expanded Panda Ridge complex while the city tears down encampments of the unhoused and allows the loss of hundreds of shelter beds.

Your national constitution has no prohibition against non-citizens voting—states, like yours decide. Unfortunately, California, while claiming to be a democracy defender, has decided to disenfranchise one in six of its adults based on citizenship, even though such people pay taxes, abide by the laws, serve in the military, and raise children who are citizens. California could enfranchise 6 million people by letting non-citizen residents vote.

It also could bring people together across national boundaries and create a framework for global political solutions if it reached agreements of “reciprocal voting” to allow Californians and residents of other states and countries to vote in each other’s elections.

Such a reciprocal system would demonstrate human interdependence. But interdependence on this planet encompasses all living things. Humans are less than 1% of the world’s biomass but have 100% of the world’s democratic rights. Plants are more than 80% of the biomass and are unrepresented, even though humans couldn’t live without them.

Providing representation to us animals and plants is not a new idea. There are efforts around the world to imagine democratic systems for various beings, including the Multispecies Constitution Project at the L.A.-based Berggruen Institute, where this column’s usual author is a fellow.

That project asks questions like: “What sorts of institutions could speak with—rather than for—the trees, the birds, the microbes, and the diverse humans of this planet?” The idea is that by incorporating the intelligence, experiences, values, and interests of other living things into governance, you humans will save ecosystems—and maybe yourselves. Intriguingly, some non-human creatures, like whales, are beginning to converse with you.

If the two of us could talk with you directly, instead of through the imagination of a human journalist, we might chat about the struggles of starting a family in California. We are a couple facing expectations to breed. And yes, San Diego is a great place to mate, and not just for all the sun-kissed humans in the beach-themed bars.

In fact, Yun’s grandparents lived at the zoo in the 2000s and had five cubs together here, including his mother Zhen Zhen. It seems unlikely that we’ll be that fertile. And we can’t know how long we’ll get to stay here, given the conflict between our birth country and our new home country.

But for now, we are Californians. Shouldn’t we have the same rights and responsibilities as all of you?

The post Why California Should Let Pandas Vote appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This year we celebrate the milestone of 30 years as a democratic state and the seventh general election in which all South Africans regardless of race are allowed to vote.

Our history is long, bloody, and racist. South Africa’s apartheid system lasted nearly half a century, from 1948 to the early 1990s. It was a system that suppressed Black South Africans and where the minority white population controlled political decisions, the economy, and society. The majority of the South African population faced systematic discrimination in all facets of life, including housing, land, jobs, and public facility use.

After 1994, and the election of President Nelson Mandela, voting became a form of power for Black South Africans. Elections serve as a reminder that our ancestors fought for our freedom and won.

This election I prepare to vote for the first time with no frontrunner political party championing the radical change my generation wishes to see.

I grew up in Cape Town, the second-largest city in South Africa, located in the southernmost part of the country. It is the second largest urban destination in South Africa, with more than a million international tourists annually. To the world, Cape Town is this picturesque city known for its natural beauty. To me, the mountain is just a backdrop from my yard. From my vantage point, I see disadvantage: young kids not being able to go to school because their parents aren’t able to care for them, becoming what they grew up believing they should be—gangsters. To me, Cape Town is potholes and small shacks that fuel wildfires in summer.

And when I look at South Africa as a whole country, I do not see freedom. I see Black children in poverty and rampant unemployment, especially for young people. I see unpunished gender-based violence and rising economic inequality. I don’t see freedom in a country where the working class isn’t able to afford basic needs because of inflation and rising food prices.

So, are we really free, or have we wasted our hard-won freedom?

In the sixth grade, my school dedicated a whole term to learning about Nelson Mandela. We read about his fight for Black South Africa and how he helped end apartheid, his 1990 release from prison after 27 years, his years as head of the African National Congress (ANC) Party, and his 1994 inauguration as South Africa’s first Black president. After one term he resigned from the ANC, stepped down as president, and transferred leadership to his successor. Even after his death in 2013, his legacy lives on with Mandela Day. That’s a public holiday, celebrated on Mandela’s birthday, July 18, when people do at least 67 minutes of community service—one for each of his 67 years in public life.

The ANC has been in power for the last 30 years, with five different leaders. The party once represented unity and freedom for all South Africans and a promise of foundational change. Instead, it delivered elite corruption that sent the country into a steady decline. The ANC has crippled the country’s economy, loadshedding leaves households without electricity for up to six hours a day, and unemployment is at all-time highs. Even with free healthcare and medication, the country is still battling to contain the spread of HIV and tuberculosis.

For older generations, the ANC has always been a beacon of hope. They had a front-row seat to all the bloodshed and inequality of the apartheid system. Their emotional ties to the party are rooted in experiencing freedom after years of being oppressed.

As young people, we have seen the ANC steal the very resources we are supposed to use to build a future. Many young South Africans believe if the ANC wins the 2024 elections the country will burn, and we will be left with nothing but ashes.

When I look beyond the ANC to the other opposition parties, there isn’t much to consider voting for them.

This election, former President Jacob Zuma surprised South Africans when he announced he would helm a new political party, uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MK Party). Zuma was charged with corruption in 2005, when he and a close colleague, businessman Schabir Shaik, took bribes from a French arms company. He stole billions from South African taxpayers and was accused of fraud, corruption, racketeering, money laundering, and rape. He was released after two months of a 15-month term on medical parole.

The Democratic Alliance (DA)—founded in 2000 through the merging of multiple parties—is a centrist, majority-white party, and the second largest. It has been ruling the Western Cape province since 2009. Its leadership is comprised of mostly white politicians. The DA’s main goal is to bring down the ANC they see South Africa as a place they need to “rescue” from the ANC and their corruption. They’ve shown blatant disrespect to the people they want to “rescue” by paying for an advert that shows the burning of the national flag—a flag that represents unity and the “rainbow nation,” a representation of all the cultures and nations in South Africa.

The DA is also openly supporting Israel, a matter that weighs heavily on many South Africans’ hearts and minds, who, like me, think Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. DA leaders have made high-profile trips to Israel, including a 2017 journey when Mmusi Maimane (former DA leader), Geordin Hill-Lewis (now mayor of Cape Town), John Steenhuisen (current DA leader), and Michael Baigram (DA parliament member) met Israeli president Isaac Herzog. The DA also suppresses pro-Palestine speech: In January 2024 law enforcement painted over a mural of the Palestinian flag, including the words “we stand with Palestine,” in the Lavender Hill neighborhood of Cape Town, citing permit issues. Though it has issued a statement in support of a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine, the DA has made no mention of genocide in Gaza, even after South Africa took Israel to the International Court of Justice. Many South Africans see this—genocide, oppressive laws, policies, and practices that segregate Palestinians from Israelis—as a reflection of what our parents, grandparents, and ancestors went through during apartheid and the Boer War. It is also a clear indication that the world is still so unequal, and that human rights only matter to those who have powerful influence.

Other smaller parties like Action SA, BOSA, SNP, ISANCO, UIM, VF PLUS, RISE Mzansi, and IFP also stand with the DA and their policies. They believe that South Africa doesn’t need fundamental change but only improvement. This type of incrementalism is unacceptable to my generation. We see it as just another way of maintaining the status quo.

So, who is fighting for my generation’s future?

The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) is the third-largest political party in South Africa. The party was formed in 2013 by former ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema and the former ANC Youth League spokesperson Floyd Shivambu. In 2015, the EFF was one of the biggest supporters against the #feesmustfall movement, which was the largest student protest in South Africa, fighting for free education for students who can’t afford higher education. Its 2024 political manifesto was the best by any political party. With clear goals for job creation, the energy crisis, and bold ideas like establishing a state-owned housing and infrastructure company, it seeks to create about 4 million jobs. The party also wants to open borders, a position many South Africans unfortunately think will create a rise in xenophobia and strain an already unstable economy.

I only have one semester left at the University of the Western Cape. I’ve seen the struggles of my fellow students; I’ve seen the struggles of the people in my neighborhood; I’ve seen the struggles of people who have the same skin color as mine all over South Africa. We all have witnessed how incompetent our leaders are and how ordinary people suffer.

So this is what I face in this election: balancing the fact that so many major parties are only fueling their own agendas with the need to keep some faith in an already-broken government.

The post Young South Africans Are Sick of the Status Quo appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Twenty years ago, I published Taking Back the Vote: Getting American Youth Involved in Our Democracy. The book grew out of a personal passion: Once my oldest child was able to cast a ballot, I became fascinated with the potential and obstacles facing our youngest voters.

I delved into the lengthy and messy midcentury struggle to pass the 26th Amendment, extending the franchise to 18-year-olds. The first bill to lower the voting age was introduced in Congress during World War II—why should young people be old enough to be drafted but not old enough to vote? It had to be introduced 10 more times before it finally was enacted, in 1971.

The bill’s proponents expected the hard-won victory to bring a surge in youth civic participation. Historically, when disenfranchised groups such as women and Black people got the right to vote, participation levels increased. But the 55.4% turnout in the 1972 presidential race remains the highest ever achieved for voters age 18 to 29.

Why?

In my book, I identified several causes and short-term solutions, including ending gerrymandering districts (which disincentivizes voting), strengthening civic education, and making registering and voting processes easier. But I noted that enduring solutions would require voting to become a habit—a civic ritual, embedded in the American ethos. Every young person’s first vote should be a communal celebration, I wrote. If we memorialize proms and graduations, why not this rite of civic passage?

We’ve seen cataclysmic changes to the nation’s politics and civic behavior in the years since. Campaigns have moved online, and social media and misinformation have transformed the voting ecosystem. The youth electorate is far more diverse, and the nation far more polarized.

Still, the central message—now borne out by decades’ more research, analysis, and experience—has not changed. Accessibility and peer encouragement drive younger Americans to vote. A galvanizing candidate (Barack Obama, especially in 2008) or a hot-button issue (abortion in 2022) might help. But it is having the opportunity to vote that seems most impactful—and that varies greatly state by state, thanks to the U.S.’s highly decentralized election system. To get more young people to vote and make it a habit, we must dismantle barriers and disincentives.

Positive trends over the last two decades show the way.

The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, known as CIRCLE, is a nonpartisan, independent research organization based at Tufts University. CIRCLE has compiled youth turnout rates for midterm and presidential election years since 2014. When the group looked at midterm data, all but one of the 40 states tracked had higher turnout in 2022 than in 2014, though the path wasn’t all positive. In 2014, only 13% of 18- to 29-year-old voters went to the polls; turnout climbed to 28.2% in 2018, then slipped to 23% in 2022.

The uptick over the two presidential campaigns CIRCLE followed was more dramatic: 39% in 2016, 50% in 2020. But there were discrepancies among states. The lowest 2016 youth turnout rate, in Texas, was 28%; the highest, in Minnesota, was 57%. The gap between lowest (32% in South Dakota) and highest (67% in New Jersey) only widened in 2020.

Why? CIRCLE’s analyses suggest that election laws may play a central role. Consider: First-time voters must register, while established voters don’t have to. If potential voters move from jurisdiction to jurisdiction—and many young people are very mobile—they must register again.

States with easier, more inviting registration policies often have higher youth voter turnout. CIRCLE found that turnout over the years studied was 9% higher in counties that allow young people to preregister to vote before they turn 18. In 2020, youth voter registration was 10% higher in states with online voter registration.

Conversely, in many states with onerous registration requirements, young people simply don’t vote. Tennessee, Alabama, and Oklahoma do not have same-day, automatic, or pre-registration, and their youth voting rates in the 2022 midterm were abysmal—13% in Tennessee, and not much higher in the other states.

Voting rules vary dramatically across America. Many states loosened rules during the COVID pandemic allowing voting at home, and easier absentee balloting. Some never turned back. Eight states automatically sent mail-in ballots to all registered voters in 2022, and many of these boasted high youth turnout as a result. Data from the National Vote at Home Institute indicates that states with the most generous policies in 2022 had youth voter turnout at or above the national average. States with the most restrictive policies fell far below that average.

Another trend expressly targets younger voters—the growing number of states which require voter identification but won’t accept student ID cards. Permits to carry concealed weapons are often acceptable. Proof of attendance, even at a public university, is not.

This particularly rankles, because college campuses are easy and effective targets for mobilization. In a 2006 study, Elizabeth Bennion of Indiana University and David Nickerson of Temple University found that classroom-based registration drives increased registration by 6%, and voting by 2.6%. Face-to-face presentations worked. Remote outreach such as email, the researchers found, did not.

“The most effective way to mobilize new voters is to catch their attention and to personalize the invitation,” Bennion and colleague Melissa Michelson of Menlo College wrote last year, asserting that voting “is strongly shaped by one’s social environment.”

One might think that more and better civic education would enhance that social environment—I certainly thought so when I wrote my book—but research since then suggests that the results are mixed at best. Knowledge does not necessarily promote action.

Even the most creative and intensive voter mobilization efforts do not confront the underlying structural reasons why so many Americans, especially so many younger Americans, find no purchase in voting. Elections have become increasingly non-competitive in the last 20 years, often decided by a sliver of primary voters who represent the extremes and alienate the rest of us. The Electoral College sweepstakes anoints a few states as essential, and the others as throwaways. Even the fact that Election Day is not a federal holiday suppresses turnout. (Here’s an easy fix: Combine it with Veterans Day. What better way to celebrate freedom?)

The upswing of youth voting over the last few electoral cycles is a hopeful sign. Continuing the trend demands persistence, passion, and patience. The strategies to encourage more young people to vote are sensible, well-documented, and well-known. But 20 years on, I remain haunted: Do we, as a nation, genuinely want to welcome new voters?

The post Will Young Americans Finally Rock the Vote? 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.

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.

It’s election season in Bangladesh—the roads are closed, vehicles are burning, and the threat of violence is close.

As I write these sentences, the country’s chief opposition party—the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP)—is observing the 10th round of blockades protesting the ruling Awami League’s insistence on running the next election itself.

The idea of a continuous blockade may invoke images of a medieval warlord hoping to lay siege to an opponent’s fortress. Bangladesh’s modern blockades are often described in international media as shutdowns of passenger and freight transportation routes that bring inter-city movement to a crawl, especially in and out of Chattogram and Dhaka. In reality, rarely do you see large objects like poles or vehicles blocking roads and highways. Instead, the blockades more often take the form of assailants attacking, damaging, or setting fire to the vehicles that dare to traverse the routes whose closures have been announced.

When the Awami government announced a new election schedule, with balloting concluding on January 8, the BNP opposition declared that these blockades would be increased to four days a week, with only weekends and Tuesdays off. The blockades will continue, the opposition says, until the ruling party agrees to install a neutral “caretaker government” to administer the upcoming election.

I am a resident of Dhaka and worked in the media industry for half a decade. While handling news for some of the leading media outlets of the country, I saw the BNP and its allies enact its blockade strategy regularly. It does have an impact. Meetings and most outdoor activities have been shifted to only Tuesdays and weekends, adjusting to the blockade schedule.

Ordinary citizens of Bangladesh are rarely attacked, and don’t participate in the blockades. So the primary feeling about the blockades is not fear but annoyance, with the uncertainty and schedule juggling that blockades require. As a precaution, the public and private agencies often move activities to minimize the risk of violence or arson on the roads. People might suddenly find they have to work from home or rearrange their routine.

The blockades rarely penetrate the city in Dhaka. Long-distance travelers and merchants are much more affected by the threats. The blockades also produce a feeling that the opposition, by relying on these threats, are missing opportunities to build solidarity.

What’s perhaps most frustrating is the BNP’s choice of demands. The party has only been vocal about two: a neutral national election, and the release from prison of its chairperson, former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia. But there are many other issues that the BNP could capitalize on that feel more urgent to voters.

For example, the prices of basic commodities in Bangladesh have been skyrocketing for almost two years. The BNP and other opposition parties could have gone to the streets to gain larger public support or released detailed plans for stopping the price spikes. Instead, they offer more blockades and put out statements bashing the government.

As the election approaches, little has changed. The BNP is focused on security, so that no more of its officials or allies are “snatched away” for contesting elections. The party also wants to continue agitating and seeking international support for non-electoral challenges to the government, optimistic that international pressure will force the ruling party to give in on its demand for a caretaker government and a neutral election. So far, it’s not working.

Additionally, there is no indication that the BNP will even bother to compete in the election. They are vehement about not running any candidates and even expelling those party members who dared to stand as independent candidates in defiance of central orders.

This lack of competitive zeal is splitting the opposition. Some of those who were initially involved in the BNP’s anti-government opposition have withdrawn from the alliance and opted to participate in the election by running candidates. That could help the government claim its election is legitimate.

To be fair, the BNP has no reason to trust the current government to set up a fair election. Reports of mass arrests and police raids of opposition party members’ homes have raised serious concerns about violence and intimidation. The BNP claims that since October 2023, over 9,000 activists have been arrested countrywide in an effort to keep the BNP out of power. This is where their outcry for a caretaker government stems from.

But, at the same time, the BNP also faces criticism from the government and public for its blockades, which have also raised concerns about political violence. To enforce the blockade, assailants have set ablaze at least 20 buses in the past two months. Recently, even a train coach in the capital has been set on fire, killing four.

Political violence is deeply rooted in the election culture of Bangladesh as a means to seize power.

In 2006, when the BNP was in power—and was adamant about arranging the year’s national election—the Awami-led opposition started a nationwide protest called the Logi Boitha Movement (or Boat Hook and Oar Movement, because many rally participants waved boats hooks and oars). They alleged that pro-BNP advisors planned to rig the results in favor of the BNP. Clashes erupted across the country among the supporters of the two factions, killing 40 people in a single month.  The violence and political stalemate led to a military-backed “caretaker government” seizing power on January 11, 2007. They remained in power until the 2009 general elections.

Every election since has been violent. According to media reports, more than 500 people died in 2013 due to political violence. In 2018, at least 15 people died across the country on election day alone in clashes. According to estimations by human rights groups, at least 38 people died in political violence in the first six months of 2023.

When I look back to the elections of 2013 and 2018, the thing I vividly remember, more than any candidate or campaign, is the risk of attack on public transport. 2023’s campaign season has felt like a return to those days. At least two lives have already been lost to bus fires in the past two months and there are risks of further escalation.

The Awami League government and the BNP opposition are blaming each other for the fires, each claiming the other is using arson to destabilize the political situation. The Awami League government claims that the opposition wants to wage terror and thwart a free election; the BNP denies any affiliation with the attacks and claims the government has staged them in a bid to hurt the BNP’s image.

Irrespective of which party is responsible, I fear that the level of such violence will increase manifold in the upcoming elections. The government is not committed to holding fair elections. And the absence of the BNP will undermine the legitimacy of the vote.

The only way out of this stalemate, and the only way to temper the fear of violence, is a meaningful dialogue between the major political parties that will allow for the emergence of political common sense. The government must gain the trust of other political groups and hold a truly fair election. And the opposition—BNP and like-minded parties—should keep in mind that they cannot simply reject elections. They, too, need the support of the public, or their movement will fail.

One way to start would be to stop the blockades.

The post In Dhaka, the Roadblocks to Democracy Are Roadblocks appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Why is this the first you’re hearing of this election? Because the only Californians who can vote in the election are Sikhs. The proposed independent country would be in Punjab, a state in northern India.

But that’s no reason to overlook what might be the most important election in the Golden State next year.

Indeed, the Khalistan referendum, as this ballot measure is known, is worthy of your attention for two reasons.

First, the referendum raises the questions of whether democracy is more likely to quell, or inflame, violence, and how well it might resolve deep divisions over nationhood. Second, the vote is part of an ongoing experiment in how ballot measures, like those commonplace in California, might shape a new global system of democracy.

The Khalistan referendum was proposed by Sikhs for Justice, a U.S.-based group that connects the Sikh diaspora. Sikhism is a 500-plus-year-old religion, fusing elements of Hinduism, Islam and other faiths, and founded by a mystic who believed God transcends religious differences. There are an estimated 25 million Sikhs worldwide, approximately 80 percent of whom reside in India, primarily in the state of Punjab. California is home to more than 250,000 Sikhs, most of whom live in the Central Valley or the Bay Area.

The referendum’s supporters argue that Sikhs, as targets of discrimination and violence in India and elsewhere, need the protection of an independent Sikh-majority nation, which they would call Khalistan.

But India has opposed the referendum, banning Sikhs for Justice in 2019 for “espousing secessionism” and labeling some referendum supporters as terrorists.

These claims are grounded in a longstanding violent conflict between the government and pro-independence armed insurgents. In June 1984, in pursuit of Khalistani separatists, the Indian Army seized Sikhism’s holiest shrine. The number of people killed in the operation is disputed—the government says hundreds, while Sikh groups say thousands.

In October of that year, two of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s bodyguards, who were Sikh, assassinated her. Her death inspired anti-Sikh riots that killed thousands of Sikhs and Sikh leaders, which in turn triggered violence by the Khalistan insurgency, including the bombing of an Air India jet taking off from Montreal in 1985. Over the next decade, some 30,000 people lost their lives in India’s worst religious violence since the 1947 partition. The violence mostly faded away, but the Punjab was never resolved. More recent disputes between the Indian government and Sikh farmers over agricultural policy have revived interest in Khalistan independence, in the Punjab and among the Sikh diaspora.

The Indian government says the referendum could inflame violence. But its Sikh backers say that, to the contrary, the referendum is a democratic tool designed to find a peaceful resolution of longstanding conflict in Punjab, as provided for in the United Nations Charter, which grants all peoples the right to self-determination through referendum.

Referenda on independence have become more common since World War II, though they rarely produce new countries. Perhaps the best-known examples are the multiple referenda in Puerto Rico in and the Scottish independence referendum in 2014.

Scholar of referenda Matt Qvortrup in his book I Want to Break Free: A Practical Guide to Making a New Country wrote that “From a purely rational perspective, many of these referendums seem pointless, as they unlikely result in the formation of a new State. However, from a symbolic perspective, the very vote itself helps to create unity and is a part of a mental state formation process.”

The Khalistan referendum is a global election, held on different dates and in different world cities that are home to many Sikhs. The January 28 balloting, which will take place in San Francisco, follows votes in London (2021); in Geneva, Switzerland (2021); in Brescia and Aprilia, Italy (2022); in Melbourne, Australia (2023); in two cities near Toronto, Brampton (2022) and Mississauga (2023); and in the Vancouver area (twice this fall).  They may also hold referenda in Malaysia and East Africa, which also have large Sikh diaspora communities.

The referendum itself is non-binding—even if the majority of voters favor independence, it won’t guarantee a new nation. But if the results show widespread support for independence among the diaspora, organizers plan to hold a Khalistan referendum in Punjab itself in 2025. They hope that a vote for independence there could bring international pressure on India to recognize Khalistan.

To convince the world of the referendum’s legitimacy, Sikhs for Justice does not oversee the balloting. Instead, an independent international committee, including some of the world’s leading scholars and practitioners of direct democracy, sets referendum rules and observes and administers the voting.

The Khalistan referendum ballot. Courtesy of author.

The committee is neutral on the referendum question of an independent Khalistan. But many members have a longstanding interest in trying to devise truly worldwide elections so that people in every country can jointly decide policies on global issues, like climate change. Some members are advising an effort to develop a “World Citizens” ballot initiative, to be administered by the U.N.

I know several committee members, through a global direct democracy forum I ran for the last 15 years. The committee’s chair is Dane Waters, a U.S.-born, Beirut-based democracy practitioner and animal rights activist, who is the founder and chair of the Initiative & Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California. I embedded with Waters at the most recent Khalistan referendum vote, in the Vancouver suburb of Surrey, British Columbia on October 29.

The atmosphere was tense. The Surrey-based Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen who was an organizer of the referendum, had been assassinated in June. The killing created high-level conflict between India and Canada, whose government says it has credible evidence tying the assassination to India’s government.

More recently, U.S. prosecutors filed charges against a man hired by an Indian government employee to assassinate a referendum organizer, who is an American citizen, in New York this year.

Nijjar’s death had a direct impact on the referendum. Waters and the international committee prefer to hold votes at neutral sites and had rented space at a Surrey public school. But after the Canadian government’s announcement that India was behind the Nijjar assassination, the school and others refused to host, citing security concerns.

The vote was instead conducted in the campus around Surrey’s gurudwara or Sikh temple, steps from where Nijjar was shot and killed. A large detail of Surrey local police and Royal Canadian Mounted Police provided security.

I attended the second day of referendum voting in Surrey; on the first, September 10, lines were so long that some voters had been turned away. Turnout was also strong for this second vote. At 6 a.m., more than 100 people had lined up, in 30-degree weather, for an election that wouldn’t begin until 9. Outside the voting hall, Khalistan supporters played Punjabi music so loudly that it was hard for me to interview voters waiting in lines that stretched 100 yards out onto a sidewalk.

Inside, however, the event was a quiet and business-like operation, familiar to anyone who has voted in Western elections. Poll workers from British Columbia elections— all non-Sikhs—had been hired through a third party to conduct the referendum. At each check-in table, one of the paid poll workers was paired with a Punjabi-speaking Sikh volunteer, almost all women, who could translate for voters less comfortable in English.

Any Sikh, or anyone married to a Sikh, could register and vote with a photo ID. Poll workers checked names against previous voting rolls to avoid double-voting. People moved through registration, and private voting booths, before exiting into a small festival with tables of Punjabi food, and coffee and donuts from Tim Horton’s, a Canadian institution.

Tens of thousands of people cast ballots. In my conversations about their reasons for voting, older voters recalled violence they or loved ones had suffered in Punjab. Younger, Canadian-born Sikh voters often were more likely to say they were participating because of the discriminatory treatment of Sikh farmers under 2020 agricultural laws (which sparked a farmers’ strike and a retreat by the Indian government). Some mentioned the Gaza war; far better, voters said, to resolve disputes over nationhood through a democratic referendum than through violence.

Could the Khalistan referendum become a model for deciding whether breakaway provinces or secession-minded states can leave and form their own nation? That remains to be seen. But it seems fitting that California, which sometimes dreams of secession, is the next site for this glimpse into the democratic future.

The post Why A Vote on Establishing an Independent Sikh State in Punjab Is Coming to California appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Former president Jimmy Carter, who will be 99 this Sunday, October 1, was only 46 when he first popped up on the national political radar. After declaring in his 1971 inaugural address as governor of Georgia that “the time for racial discrimination is over,” Carter followed through by increasing the number of Black people on state boards and commissions from three to 53, boosting Black employment in state jobs by 25%, and hanging a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. in the state capitol.

Media-wise, such moves secured Carter’s place within an emerging cohort of racially enlightened “New South” governors, including South Carolina’s John C. West and Florida’s Reubin Askew, who were also elected in 1970. Liberal optimists hailed their victories as the undoing of the Republican “Southern strategy” of relying on racially coded appeals to win over once-reliably Democratic white voters angered by their old party’s pro-civil rights stance. By the time Carter won the presidency in 1976, he personified a vision of a risen, racially redeemed South that captured the American imagination in the final decades of the 20th century.

Yet this sunny perception of Carter’s journey to the presidency obscured the reality of how he had managed to take the all-important first step.

Regardless of his actions after becoming Georgia’s governor, Jimmy Carter had captured that office in 1970 not by thwarting the Southern strategy but by following it very nearly to the letter in repeated campaign appeals to racial and class prejudice. Once they got him where he wanted to be, he quickly disavowed such tactics, which, in his mind, amounted to nothing more than purely pragmatic nods to political reality necessary to achieving his more idealistic aims.

The apparent incongruity between the method Carter employed to become governor and the measures he implemented in office can be traced in part to the way he reacted to the contrasting racial attitudes of his parents. Despite having myriad interactions with Black people as a landlord, grocer, and financier, Carter’s father Earl was no less adamant about their inferiority to whites than any but a tiny handful of his white contemporaries. Ironically, one of these rare exceptions was his wife Lillian, whose sympathy for Black neighbors and readiness to invite them into her home might have prompted more than quiet disapproval, had her husband been a less prominent figure in the community.

Young Jimmy’s awareness of the peculiarity of his mother’s racial views—and the near-ubiquity of his father’s—shaped the distinct blend of realism and idealism that defined his early political career. When his father died in 1953, he resigned his post as a naval engineer, to assume control of the family’s agribusiness enterprises. His budding political aspirations surfaced when he assumed his father’s old seat on the county school board in 1955, only a year after the Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in the public schools in Brown v. Board of Education. With thousands of white Southerners scurrying to join the defiantly segregationist White Citizens’ Councils, Carter stood out as the only white man in Plains to decline membership in the Sumter County chapter. Later, when the congregation of the Plains Baptist Church, where Carter was a deacon, overwhelmingly rejected the idea of allowing Black people to worship there, his family cast three of only six dissenting votes.

Still, despite his efforts to improve Sumter County schools, Carter made no overt effort to encourage compliance with Brown. In his 1992 book, Turning Point, the best he could say for himself as a candidate for state senate 30 years earlier was that he had been “at least moderate” on segregation.

Carter’s first run for statewide office began with his belated entry into the 1966 Democratic gubernatorial primary against former governor Ellis Arnall, a racial moderate of longer standing, and the unrepentant segregationist Lester Maddox. Maddox won, courtesy of his strong appeal with blue collar whites, and with Arnall capturing the bulk of the Black and more affluent white vote, Carter came in a disappointing third. Still, the stinging defeat educated him to a stark reality: Racial moderation was not yet a winning strategy in Georgia politics. Nor would it be in the 1968 presidential race, when race-baiting virtuoso George Wallace easily outdistanced both Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon in Georgia.

Carter took the lessons of both these campaigns to heart when he again sought the Democratic nomination for governor in 1970. This time, his chief opponent was former governor Carl Sanders, who had once declared himself “a segregationist but not a damn fool” and generally lived up to his own billing by presiding over Georgia’s grudging but relatively orderly retreat from segregation between 1963 and 1966. Sanders was a senior partner in a high-powered Atlanta law firm, with a smooth, urbane persona. Dubbing him “Cufflinks Carl,” and playing to both racial and class resentments, Carter’s ads portrayed Sanders hobnobbing in air-conditioned comfort with his closet liberal country club pals while the good working folk of Georgia, including a certain peanut farmer from Plains, sweated and strived to make ends meet.

In a naked appeal to Wallace supporters, Carter opposed bussing and defended the rights of white Georgians to preserve racial homogeneity in their neighborhoods. His campaign circulated photos of Black members of the Atlanta Hawks basketball team showering Sanders with champagne, and spread word that he had furtively attended the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. While Carter’s racial machinations won him the endorsement of outspoken segregationist politico Roy V. Harris, more than eight in 10 Black voters opted for Sanders, who barely made it into a runoff election, where Carter bested him by 20% before trouncing his Republican opponent in the general election.

As governor, Carter melded his idealism with a more practical-minded engineer’s approach to problem-solving in an ambitious plan to rid state government of corruption, mismanagement, and waste, although when he announced his presidential candidacy near the end of 1974, he was still better known and appreciated for his efforts to do right by Black Georgians.

His carefully cultivated personal ties to influential ministers and civil rights leaders only bolstered Carter’s standing among Black voters. Yet he knew that his success depended on winning substantial support from Southern whites as well.  To this end, he revamped his old Southern strategy, playing this time to regional rather than racial antagonisms. One of his campaign ads noted that after suffering years of ostracism and indiscriminate stereotyping as rednecks and hillbillies, “only a Southerner can understand what Jimmy Carter as President can mean.” Boasting an improbable duo of advocates in George Wallace and Martin Luther King Sr., Carter picked up more than half the electoral votes he needed to defeat Gerald Ford by carrying all of the old Confederate and border states except Virginia.

Still, despite his earnest courtship, Carter failed to win over a majority of white voters in the South, leaving him all the more indebted to the close to 90% support he enjoyed among Black voters in the region. As the ultimate political realists, they seemed to accept Carter’s pandering to Wallace voters in 1970 as merely a situational concession to political reality necessary to achieving the racially equitable and humane ends he secured upon taking office. Ironically enough, historically high Black participation in a presidential election had been critical to putting a white Southerner in the White House. Meanwhile, reeling from the military failure in Vietnam and the moral failures of the Watergate affair, white voters above the Mason-Dixon line also proved surprisingly receptive to the drawling Carter’s disarming smile, downhome folksiness, and earnest assurances that he would bring honesty and humility back to the White House.

Though he had not been above a bit of political charade along the way, once in office Carter appeared to revert to the somber, moralizing Southern Baptist he had always been at heart. With the economy faltering in the face of soaring inflation, he sermonized from his bully pulpit about Americans’ addictive consumerism and their habit of defining themselves not “by what one does, but what one has.” To hardly anyone’s surprise, his gospel of restraint seemed downright heretical to a generation who saw instant gratification and unbridled acquisitiveness as their birthright. Carter’s habit of foregrounding “pain” over “gain” in laying out the ramifications of his decisions led his vice president, Walter Mondale, to observe that “the worst thing you could say to Carter if you wanted him to do something was that it was politically the best thing to do.” Somewhat akin to Henry Clay, once in office Carter seemed to signal that he would “rather be right than [continue to] be president.”

Beyond the substantial economic challenges he faced, the crowning blow to his prospects of retaining that office was his failed—and now, reportedly, sabotaged—effort to resolve the Iranian hostage crisis; the abortive desert rescue mission with its abandoned, sand-clogged helicopters became for many a metaphor for his failed and inept presidency. He was easily out- distanced in 1980 by Republican Ronald Reagan, whose vows of a military buildup and gospel of permanent plenty played far better than Carter’s calls for sacrifice and self-denial. So much for securing the Camp David Accords, bailing out Social Security, deregulating the airlines, preserving the Alaskan wilds, and a number of other stellar accomplishments.

Yet, despite his overwhelming rejection at the hands of American voters, Carter left Washington in 1981 at age 56 with his idealism not only intact but less encumbered by political constraints. His boundless energy also demanded an outlet. By 2002, he had already gained such a reputation as a global peacemaker, humanitarian, and champion of human rights, that awarding him the Nobel Prize for Peace was less a question of “if” than “when.”  With his moral certitude now reaffirmed, he seemed even less concerned with the political consequences of his forthright manner, as he indicated in 2007 by likening Israeli practices in the West Bank to a form of apartheid. Unmoved by the ensuing outcry, Carter soldiered on in his one-man war on human suffering and injustice, even inquiring about his ongoing Guinea worm eradication project after entering hospice care in February 2023.

As the longest-lived of all U.S. presidents, Jimmy Carter hardly stands out as the only one of them who ever sacrificed principle to political expediency. He has no rival among them, however, in dedicating himself upon leaving that office to a higher, more transcendent ideal of human service and remaining faithful to it even as the end of his days draws nigh.

The post Jimmy Carter’s Pragmatic Path to Power appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

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.

With so many big issues looming—from the homelessness crisis to racial and economic inequality to climate-related disaster preparedness—the panelists agreed that this mayoral election will be pivotal for Los Angeles.

But what are we talking about when we say Los Angeles? KCRW’s Janaya Williams, who moderated the conversation began by getting a sense of which Los Angeles the panelists know. She began, sharing her journey, which began north of the city in Santa Clarita. She came of age in Santa Monica during the L.A. uprisings, and just returned back to Los Angeles after logging more than two decades on the East Coast. That history, she said, informs what she wants from the next mayor.

USC political scientist Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro, came to L.A. after her sister moved out here, and then the rest of her family followed.

“The sense of Los Angeles that I’ve had is that it is a town of neighborhoods,” said Hancock Alfaro, “and a place where there are a lot of people who are committed to Los Angeles but committed to a lot of other things.” The need to balance the local with a sense of global issues is paramount for any leader of L.A.

Fellow panelist Rafael De La Rosa, who is from Ventura—“the 805”—has spent the last five years at California State University, Northridge, where he is the government and community relations assistant vice president. De La Rosa agreed that L.A. is made up of distinct communities, but he also insisted on its cohesion: “All the issues in the Valley are the same issues in Los Angeles. There is no longer this ‘over-the-hill,’ Valley-centric view.”

Taylor Bazley is CEO and co-founder of Green Qween, a cannabis retail space that prides itself as an incubator for ideas of social justice. Bazley said he followed the 405 North to L.A., coming up originally from San Diego. “I’m really steeped in the LGBT political world of Los Angeles, and that perspective is something that has really colored my relationship with L.A.”

Williams then turned to the issues, asking Bazley as a business owner what he’s looking for in the next mayor when it comes to balancing budget priorities alongside social justice. They shouldn’t be separate, said Bazley, pointing out that “a budget is a statement of your values as a city.” Take one of the biggest stories in Los Angeles and across the country: police funding. “That will be a litmus test” for the next budget, said Bazley—it will tell the story of how the city’s thinking around policing has or has not changed.

By Soobin Kim.

What issues have been overlooked in the mayoral campaign so far? Williams asked the panelists.

Their responses ranged from transportation—De La Rosa citing the mayor’s power to appoint seats to LA Metro’s board, whose Sepulveda Transit Corridor Project is the largest infrastructure project since the Hoover Dam—to issues that don’t have large and active stakeholder groups, like aging water pipes.

All the panelists agreed that Los Angeles hosting the 2028 Summer Olympics poses an opportunity to get things done under the spotlight. Hancock Alfaro pointed to a project she is working on with different neighborhood councils to alleviate some of the biggest racial equity issues around housing, education, transit access, and public safety. She said she would like to see the candidates address how they would approach these issues so that “we’re not just sweeping it under the rug like we did at the Super Bowl … that we’re actually making a difference.”

Prompted by an online audience question on mayoral power, Hancock Alfaro described L.A.’s weak mayoral system relative to the City Council, and said that a stronger mayor could have more leverage when it comes to issues from homelessness to transportation. They could say “not on my watch,” she said. However, the risk with a stronger mayor is that one person from one part of L.A. can “lose sight” of issues impacting parts of L.A. that they’re less beholden to.

The conversation, then, turned to the voters. When it comes to voter registration and turnout, everyone agreed that universal vote-by-mail, 11-day vote centers, and newer voting machines have all made a difference. When it comes to making a change outside of voting itself, De La Rosa called attention to community town halls and council meetings to give voters a more direct forum to participate and effect change on the issues they care most about.

The penultimate question of the night came from a student participant of Creating Our Next LA:

What is one piece of advice you’d give to someone voting for the first time to help them choose the right candidate?

The panelists agreed that it comes down to values. “Decide which candidate speaks to your particular values and inspires you,” said De La Rosa.

The post Not Your Average L.A. Mayor Voter Guide appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.