Tag Archives: democracy

Egypt’s Sisi selflessly offers to be leader forever

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fake-time-magazine-egypt-200In the least convincing denial yet that he is building a cult of personality and permanent personal dictatorship, Egypt’s General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi has told voters there that they should vote for his new constitution in this week’s referendum if they want him to run for president:

“If I run, then it must be at the request of the people and with a mandate from my army,” General Sisi said at a military seminar, according to the website of the state newspaper, Al Ahram. “I can’t turn my back on Egypt.”

 

Sisi added that it would be embarrassing for him if they didn’t vote for it, and you don’t want to disappoint the Dear Father.

“Don’t embarrass me in front of the world,” he said, “not me personally but the military, because in the military we are as united as one man’s heart, and we adhere to democracy.” He noted that the new charter authorizes the military to “protect the will of the people” and he vowed, “We will protect it in any circumstances.”

 

Fortunately for Sisi, campaigning against the proposed constitution is not allowed. Seems like a pretty fair way to check on public opinion before you run for something, right? And just to be sure, the state propaganda engines are grinding away toward victory:

The state news media and Egyptian private television networks, all supportive of the military takeover, are effusive in their endorsements of the new charter and contain scarcely a word of criticism. A group of Egyptian movie stars has recorded a television commercial singing a song in praise of the new charter, ending with a call for a thousand yeses to the new Constitution. And the military itself has produced a television advertisement in which a group of children sing their own endorsement to a martial theme.

“It’s to be or not to be,” the children sing, warning listeners that they will be judged by God for their vote and urging them not to “leave my country for destruction.”

 

So, to recap: If you vote against this, you’ll embarrass the national armed forces and its leader and then God will smite you. This seems compelling.

Democratic competition in South Africa at last?

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anc-logoSouth Africa’s biggest union has announced it will not be endorsing the ANC in upcoming elections for the first time in the post-apartheid era. It plans to remain neutral.

This is actually really important and (hopefully) positive news for South Africa. Their biggest obstacle to achieving full democracy in the post-apartheid period has been that the ANC party has always held complete control, through a permanent election coalition with the trade-unions and the Communist Party.

This is not because they are autocratic, but rather because they have just mathematically absorbed everyone who might otherwise be running against them. In the first several elections, a unity government coalition led by the ANC even included many of the whites from the apartheid-era ruling party and its successor party.

Today, South Africa’s largest opposition party (Democratic Alliance, mostly former anti-apartheid White activists) is a distant and uncompetitive second, with about 16% of the seats at the national level, compared to the ANC’s nearly two-thirds control. So there’s never really been much pressure outside the ANC to be responsive and accountable.

Introducing genuine competition in South African elections — by ending de facto single-party rule through the splitting of coalitions and perhaps the ANC itself — would be a big step forward toward cleaning up corruption and making South Africa a fully functioning democracy.

Single-party rule, even if popularly elected repeatedly in free elections, is never healthy in the long term for any country.

Is Thailand facing tea party-style obstruction?

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To expand further upon my much longer essay on recent protests in Thailand and Ukraine, Thailand needs to get itself together. This is such a mess. In sum: One party coalition (TRT or PPP) has won every democratic election since 2001, the first after its creation. The main opposition party has lost every election since 1992. Instead of figuring out how to broaden their appeal and campaign in new areas of the country, that party is throwing yet another tantrum in the streets and literally demanding the ruling party leadership leave the country (to join the members they have already forced out previously).

Instead of changing their electoral approach to try to win for a change, they are simply saying that voters have been duped. And now that early elections have been called, they are still protesting because of course they realize they’re going to lose yet another election. Sore-loserism like this is not a good look and it’s bad for democracy.

Because of the deep affection that the governing party has in the north and northeast of the country, scholars say, it would be very difficult for the Democrat Party to reverse its two-decade losing streak in national elections. In the last elections, held in July 2011, the governing party received 15.7 million votes, compared with 11.4 million for the Democrats.

Mr. Suthep, the protest leader, said that low-income Thais, many of whom support Mr. Thaksin, “had been completely fooled for 10 years.”

Although the opposition has repeatedly said that Mr. Thaksin has maintained his power by buying votes, two of Thailand’s leading political researchers wrote in an article last week that the allegation was “dangerous nonsense” because it was policies, not vote buying, that had cemented the loyalty of many voters in the provinces to Mr. Thaksin. Mr. Thaksin instituted universal health care and microloans to farmers that were very popular among rural voters.

Yes, it’s quite shocking that voters might vote with a party that speaks to their needs and provides key programs to support them in their hour of need … and against a party that serves much narrower interests from a different region and which has supported a military coup against their preferred party (after boycotting an election no less). Voters “must” be sheep simply because they have a different ideological position!

Of course whenever the Thai opposition has been brought to power by non-electoral means, such as the military coup or the banning of the first iteration of the ruling party, they have been driven out again by voters at the very next election. Why? Because even when given the opportunity to enact policy on which to campaign, they have failed to sway the majority.

It brings to mind the recent attitude of U.S. Republicans (particularly those aligned with the tea party types) who are increasingly restricted to a single geographic region and find themselves unable to win back full control of the government. Their response has been to try to shut down the government and block any policymaking whatsoever. The Republican base consistently also expresses aloud the same view as Thai opposition leaders — that the voters are only voting for the majority party because they’ve been hoodwinked and paid for.

Listen to the echoes from Thailand:

“I understand that democracy means being governed by a majority,” said Chaiwat Chairoongrueng, a 36-year-old civil servant protesting last week. “But you cannot use the majority to rule over everything.”

Protesters did little to hide their sense of superiority, echoing the leaders of the demonstration who repeatedly described the demonstrators as “good people” fighting evil.

“We are the middle class, we are educated and we know best,” said Saowanee Usanakornkul, 43, from southern Thailand who took part in the protest. “We know what is right and wrong,” she said. “But the poor don’t know anything. They elect the people who give them money.”

Rather than developing an alternative policy program that will achieve similar goals — which they may not in fact be interested in achieving anyway — upon which they could campaign, they have chosen to blame the voters, throw a tantrum, and bring everything to a screeching halt.

That’s not how a functioning democracy works. If you lose repeatedly at the ballot box (in free elections!), you’re doing something wrong. So you change course and find new ways to appeal to voters and target new groups of voters. You don’t boycott, you don’t throw tantrums, you don’t take to the streets, you don’t shut the government down, and you don’t overthrow the government.

The Right to Resist

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revolution-of-1830Another excellent article by Ta-Nehisi Coates (aren’t his always?):
Mandela and the Question of Violence

Funny how Americans reserve the right to resist tyranny through violence — it’s one of the core premises of hardline Second Amendment fans — but they also want to reserve the right to declare when it is acceptable for others to do the same. By arming some groups and opposing the arming of others. By calling some “freedom fighters” and some “terrorists” who must renounce violence. And so on.

Who made us the arbiters anyway?

I’m not going to say I’m not sometimes guilty of some of the same double standards, but I’m also a lot more open than most to considering the legitimacy (or at least understandability) of armed resistances, even if I think it’s inadvisable in many cases.

Related Reading – The Globalist: Slavery and Guns: America’s “Peculiar Institutions” | How U.S. “gun rights” today are an extension of a right created to preserve slavery.

Deja vu in Thailand and Ukraine

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I think there are some pretty interesting parallels between the current wave of protests in Thailand and in Ukraine, as barricades are thrown up yet again in the capitals.

The central theme in both is a recurring cycling back and forth of two major political and economic factions under the same sets of leaders, reversed more by political upheaval than constitutionally-approved changes in government, without any sign of a permanent resolution.

In Thailand

After the 2006 military coup against the rural-backed, Red-led government, there was an uprising in 2008 by the Yellow faction and then another uprising in 2010 by the Red faction, which leads us to the current uprising (Yellow).

Commitment to democracy in Thailand is pretty low, in both the military and the urban middle class/business elites. (The latter are both generally aligned with the Yellow faction, against the Shinawatra family’s Red faction. The military and riot police tend to side with the Yellow faction but sometimes intervene against both sides.)

Then again, the Redshirt protestors in the capital’s downtown area in 2010 were basically attempting to lead an armed popular overthrow of the government and were only suppressed when the military decided to remain aligned with the Yellow-led government and cracked down. So, they’re no winners on the democratic values front either.

Now, it’s certainly not unheard of for political parties in developed democracies to have overt, semi-official, or informal party alignments based on class (middle class vs. populist poor) or geography (urban vs. rural and/or suburban), if not both. In fact, it’s probably the norm, if you look at the UK, Japan, France, the United States, etc.

But Thailand, which is still (clearly) not an established democracy, is probably taking the alignments a bit literally. That is despite the low likelihood that either side achieving total political control would result in any kind of social revolution of any serious depth.

But until they solve their political geography and class warfare problem — and until they get the military to stop intervening — Thailand isn’t going to break the endless cycle of totally unproductive but headline-grabbing popular uprisings. And for a country whose economy is heavily centered on tourism, the political situation for the last seven years has not been helpful to anyone.

Meanwhile in Ukraine…

I’m not going to comment on why Ukraine seems to capture more U.S. attention than Thailand, but it seems to. Anyway: Russian-aligned Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych recently ended efforts — initiated by his political opposition years ago and already on the skids anyway — to join the European Union, and announced plans to seek closer economic ties with Russia instead.

This triggered huge protests in the capital because the rival faction’s distaste for a foreign policy decision means it’s time to overthrow the government, again, it would seem. They are the largest protests seen since the late 2004 October Revolution.

I could well be wrong — and there are indeed a lot of dominoes falling inside his own government right now — but I suspect Yanukovych is secure in power, contrary to the excited Western reporting.

Ukraine has long been split between the pro-Russian side and the pro-European side (with high levels of animosity on both sides) and there have been plenty of protests on both sides with varying degrees of success since the USSR broke up in 1991. The pro-Russian side, largely concentrated toward the eastern end of the country, which borders the Russian Federation, is largely composed of ethnically Russian citizens, including President Yanukovych. They weren’t happy about the USSR’s collapse and fear(ed) reprisals.

The ethnic Russians fear reprisals because of the many terrible things the Russian Empire and especially the Russian-dominated Soviet central government perpetrated against the ethnic Ukrainian population, such as the Holodomor planned-starvation genocide under Stalin. The ethnic Ukrainian population is concentrated toward the western side of the country and has aligned itself with Europe, like many of the former Soviet satellites and postwar Soviet Republics (Ukraine is an interwar Soviet Republic).

So why is Yanukovych probably not going anywhere (or at least not anywhere far)? For one thing, it’s worth recalling right off the bat that while it’s true the last time we saw protests this big, in 2004, he was the one pushed to the side, the current protests exist because that uprising didn’t actually permanently get him out of the picture. If it had, he wouldn’t be in office now getting protested.

Much like the Thailand cycles discussed above, such is the rota fortunae of ex-Soviet Republic politics outside Russia: the same set of people cycling up and and down, facing Russia then Europe then back again. Lately we’ve seen the pro-Western/anti-Russian president of Georgia, who arrived in a parallel uprising in 2004, similarly finds his political fortunes fading as an opposing pro-Russian coalition rose to power. Other examples are strewn across the Central Asian ex-Soviet republics.

In Ukraine, it’s especially pronounced and more rapid. Current President (and target of protests) Viktor Yanukovych, as prime minister running for president, literally poisoned his opponent with dioxin in 2004 (see this 2006 photo of then-President Yushchenko’s face post-poison attempt), was kept out of the presidency by popular uprising, and then became prime minister again less than two years later. By early 2010 Yanukovych was elected president anyway, barely five years after the “Orange Revolution.”

But the second reason I don’t see him being flung from office is more specific to this situation: the Russians can do all sorts of things to bolster the Yanukovych government and blackmail the rest of the country into certain foreign and economic policy directions, while the EU can’t.

In contrast to the Russians, the European Union has offered very little and continues to be pretty powerless in helping the opposition. I have no idea what big plan they could suddenly float here, particularly given that Yanukovych is the democratically elected leader of Ukraine and, although repressive, isn’t just some guy who seized power and can be pressured from office. Unlike in 2004 when he tried to steal the election, he’s already in office, because he won. A lot of people don’t want him in office, but a lot of people definitely do. That’s the reality of the East/West split in Ukrainian politics and the citizenry.

Most of the EU’s offers to Ukraine are predicated upon Yanukovych first releasing political prisoners from his opposition, which isn’t going to happen by magic. Unfortunately, it’s not like they have much of a carrot or a stick to back that demand up, particularly since he never wanted a European alliance in the first place. Such demands only work when you have something the other person a) wants and b) can’t get elsewhere.

Now, as I said, I could be proven totally wrong here on the outcome of this latest round of protests, but the excitement of first-person POV camera phone shots doesn’t always translate to political reality.

And, even if Yanukovych falls from power again, he’ll probably be right back on top within 5 years. Ukraine won’t solve any of this for real until they solve their East/West Russia/Ukraine divide. The EU would probably me more useful to Ukraine if it made an effort to bridge this divide and bring everyone together so they can compete democratically and constitutionally for power, without endless recriminations and fear of sudden, repressive policy shifts one way or the other.

Op-Ed: The Problem With Billionaires

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My latest op-ed from The Globalist:

In the 1980s, the supply-siders became ascendant in Washington D.C., preaching voodoo economics as “the way, the truth and the life.” Their central claim was that rich people create jobs, while high taxes on the rich leave them with less money to create jobs. Therefore tax cuts for the rich equal job growth.

In reality, this hasn’t borne out. Neither the macroeconomic data nor academic studies have shown much evidence of a direct correlation between rich people having more money and using it to create jobs.

Instead, they mostly just use it to speculate, because it’s essentially extra wealth well above and beyond any other spending or genuine investments they could possibly conceive of.

Read the full op-ed here.

Syria vote a game-changer for UK?

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The British media is very worked up (Slate) over the failed vote for Syria military action in the British parliament, because it could alter the domestic balance of power permanently.

When your country doesn’t have a formal constitution and governance operates entirely on precedents and norms, any big reversals for the government are game-changing for the country. Unlike the US security state, the trend in Britain is often to take power away. For example, it will now be a matter of expectation that all future military action be authorized by parliament (except perhaps in emergency self-defense).