Tag: Democracy

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Politics

The Struggle on Historical past Is a Struggle on Democracy

The War on History Is a War on Democracy

In March 1932, the cover of Fortune magazine featured a painting of Diego Rivera’s Red Square. A multitude of faceless men marched with red banners and encircled a locomotive with a hammer and sickle. This was the image of communist modernization that the Soviets wanted to convey during Stalin’s first five-year plan: the achievement was impersonal, technical, undeniable. The Soviet Union transformed itself from an agricultural hinterland into an industrial power through a mere disciplined understanding of the objective realities of history. Its citizens celebrated the revolution, as Rivera’s painting suggested, while shaping them into a new breed of people.

But by March 1932 hundreds of thousands were starving to death in Soviet Ukraine, the country’s breadbasket. Rapid industrialization was financed by the destruction of traditional agricultural life. The five-year plan had brought about “deculakization”, the deportation of peasants who were considered more affluent than others, and “collectivization”, the appropriation of agricultural land by the state. The result was a mass hunger attack: first in Kazakhstan, then in southern Russia and above all in Soviet Ukraine. The Soviet leaders were aware of this in 1932, but still insisted on requisitions in Ukraine. Grain that humans needed to survive was forcibly confiscated and exported. Writer Arthur Koestler, who was living in Soviet Ukraine at the time, recalled propaganda depicting the starving as provocateurs who preferred to see their own bellies puff out rather than accept Soviet gains.

After Russia, Ukraine was the most important Soviet republic, and Stalin saw it as headstrong and disloyal. When the collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine did not produce the yields Stalin expected, he blamed local party authorities, the Ukrainian people and foreign spies. Since food was mined during the famine, Ukrainians in particular suffered and died – around 3.9 million people in the republic, according to best estimates, well over 10 percent of the total population. In communicating with trusted comrades, Stalin did not hide the fact that he was pursuing a specific policy against Ukraine. Residents of the republic were forbidden to leave it; Farmers were prevented from going into the cities to beg; Communities that failed to meet grain targets were cut off from the rest of the economy; Families were robbed of their cattle. In particular, grain from Ukraine was ruthlessly confiscated, far beyond common sense. Even the seeds were confiscated.

The Soviet Union took drastic measures to ensure that these events went unnoticed. Foreign journalists were banned from Ukraine. The only person reporting the famine in English under his own byline, Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, was later murdered. Moscow correspondent for the New York Times, Walter Duranty, declared famine to be the price of progress away. Tens of thousands of hunger refugees made it across the border to Poland, but the Polish authorities refrained from making their plight public: a treaty with the USSR is being negotiated. In Moscow, the disaster was portrayed at the 1934 party congress as a triumphant second revolution. The deaths have been rearranged from “hunger” to “exhaustion”. When the next census counted millions fewer people than expected, the statisticians were executed. Residents of other republics, mostly Russians, moved into the abandoned houses of the Ukrainians. As beneficiaries of the calamity, they were not interested in its sources.

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World News

Biden laid the foundations for an alliance to protect democracy

Biden laid the foundations for an alliance to preserve democracy

To understand the bold ambition behind President Joe Biden’s Europe trip this week, consider him less as the US commander in chief and more as the doctor in charge of the democratic (little “d”) world.

80 years ago, when far fewer democracies were besieged by rising authoritarian forces, Franklin Roosevelt declared himself Dr. Win-the-war. Now that the democratic world is under attack again, it is Biden’s turn to get Dr. To be Save Democracy.

After repeatedly diagnosing the cancers that threaten global democracies, Biden sped up the course of treatment last week. Like any good doctor, he understands that after so many years of invasive and metastatic disease, healing and recovery remain uncertain.

Waiting longer would have ensured the patient’s failure in what Biden diagnosed as a “turning point” in the historical and systemic struggle against authoritarianism. As he said this week at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, setting out a leitmotif for his entire presidency: “We must prove to the world and to our own people that democracy can still meet the challenges of our time and the needs of our people.”

While the 78-year-old president’s message and remarkable perseverance during the trip’s five whistle stops were impressive, any US leader can organize a similar series of meetings. This included his bilateral collaboration with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, followed by the G-7 meeting of the world’s leading industrial democracies, then the meeting of NATO leaders, a US-European Union summit and the conclusion in Geneva with the Russian President Vladimir Putin, the embodiment that Biden fights for.

More remarkable is what Biden did to them. Through careful planning and negotiation, his team and partners created dozens of pages of agreements, communiques, and future commitments. All of this should provide a narrative thread and provoke a common cause among the world’s leading democracies.

Behind all of this, there is an overarching focus of the Biden government on China as the challenge of our time. In contrast to the Trump administration, which has brought itself into conflict with Europe and China at the same time, the Biden administration has made every effort to win the Europeans on its side in the competition with China, even if compromises from individual countries and a whole European Union are calling for China to be its leading trading partner.

Agreements reached last week included a communique from the Carbis Bay G-7 Summit, which included a commitment to provide the world with another billion doses of Covid vaccines this year, a plan to revitalize it of member countries and a commitment to a global minimum VAT.

This included a statement from the US-EU summit, perhaps the least reported and underestimated of the week’s agreements, which established a series of dialogues that encouraged closer cooperation on everything from Covid aid and climate change to technological cooperation and China could enable.

“We intend to continue coordinating our common concerns, including ongoing human rights violations in Xinjiang and Tibet,” the statement said, “the erosion of Hong Kong’s autonomy and democratic processes, economic coercion, disinformation campaigns and regional security issues.”

The end of a 17-year-old trade and customs dispute between Boeing and Airbus has the increasing competition with China as a motivating factor. Even the joint declaration by the US President and Russia on strategic stability contained in three paragraphs had China in its sights, with the aim of initiating a bilateral dialogue on strategic stability, the aim of which was to create a more predictable environment with Moscow Washington’s energies are more direct to Beijing.

However, beneath the surface of all President Biden’s meetings lingered lingering doubts about the durability of this renewed American commitment to alliances, democratic partners, and a common cause – which led to an understandable whiplash among leaders attending meetings of a. had participated in a completely different tone with President Trump.

Europeans have every reason to wonder what the next US election might bring as Trump and his allies still refuse to accept his election defeat and claim fraud. They also have their own electoral uncertainties as the German elections in September are set to end Chancellor Angela Merkel’s nearly 16-year term and French President Macron faces the local elections on Sunday, which preview his next year’s showdown with Marine Le Pen could offer.

Thanks in no small part to these uncertainties, Biden’s great success with his partners over the past week, who were just too eager to embrace the change. What the Trump administration demonstrated, as did the first few months of Biden’s presidency, is the continued dependence of global democracies on US leadership. So why not use the present to implement as many agreements and habits as possible in the hope that they could last.

With that in mind, the week began appropriately with the New Atlantic Charter signed with British Prime Minister Johnson, a useful reminder of the historic difference the internationally active United States can make on the 80th anniversary of the original Atlantic Charter, which was adopted by the US President Franklin Roosevelt was agreed and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

“Our revitalized Atlantic Charter”, says the new document, “builds on the commitments and aspirations formulated 80 years ago and reaffirms our ongoing commitment to preserve our enduring values ​​and to defend them against new and old challenges. We pledge to work closely with all partners who share our democratic values ​​and to counter the efforts of those who seek to undermine our alliances and institutions. “

It is worth remembering that nearly four full months before the US formally entered World War II, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to the original charter outlining their ambitious common goals for the postwar world and clear US support for the British war effort expressed on 08/14/1941.

It is also worth thinking about what kind of world would have been created if the US had not stepped forward.

Given the threatened liberal order of the post-war era, the New Atlantic Charter could serve as a call for a renewed international commitment to the revival of democracy.

As early as December last year, I wrote at this point: “Joe Biden has the rarest opportunity in history: the chance to be a transformative president.”

Biden’s trip to Europe recognizes and builds on this opportunity. Perhaps just as motivating, however, are the known but unspoken costs of failure at a time when the question of the global forces that will shape the future is at stake.

Frederick Kempe is a best-selling author, award-winning journalist, and President and CEO of the Atlantic Council, one of the United States’ most influential think tanks on global affairs. He worked for the Wall Street Journal for more than 25 years as a foreign correspondent, assistant editor-in-chief and senior editor for the European edition of the newspaper. His latest book – “Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth” – was a New York Times bestseller and has been published in more than a dozen languages. Follow him on Twitter @FredKempe and subscribe here to Inflection Points, his view every Saturday of the top stories and trends of the past week.

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Politics

Republicans Transfer to Restrict a Grass-Roots Custom of Direct Democracy

Republicans Move to Limit a Grass-Roots Tradition of Direct Democracy

In 2008, deep blue California banned same-sex marriage. In 2018, staunchly conservative Arkansas and Missouri raised their minimum wages. And last year, Republican-controlled Arizona and Montana legalized recreational marijuana.

These moves were all the result of electoral initiatives, a centuries-old body of American democracy that allowed voters to bypass their legislation to pass new laws, often with results that contradict the wishes of the elected officials of the state. While in the past they have been a bilateral instrument, in recent years Democrats have been particularly successful in using electoral initiatives to advance their agenda in conservative states where they have few other options.

But this year Republican lawmakers in Florida, Idaho, South Dakota, and other states passed laws restricting the use of the practice. This is part of a broader GOP attempt to secure political control for years to come, along with new legislation restricting electoral access and the party-political redesign of congressional districts that will take place in the coming months.

According to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a liberal group that tracks and supports community-based referendums, Republicans passed 144 bills in 2021 to restrict voting initiatives in 32 states. Of these bills, 19 were signed into law by nine Republican governors. In three states, Republican lawmakers have asked voters to approve electoral initiatives that limit their own right to initiate and pass future electoral initiatives.

“They have implemented web after web of technical details and hurdles that make it really difficult for community-based groups to qualify for the vote and to counter why electoral initiatives were launched in the first place,” said Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, the managing director of the strategy center of the election initiative. “This is directly related to every attack we have seen on our democracy.”

In recent years, Democrats have used electoral initiatives to bypass Republican-controlled legislation, pass laws in red states that raised the minimum wage, legalized marijuana, expanded Medicaid, introduced impartial redistribution and apologetic absentee voting, and restored voting rights for people with it Convictions for criminal offenses.

Republicans seek to block this path in a variety of ways, including blunt measures that target the process directly and others that are more subtle.

“Petitioners have been very resourceful,” said Senator Al Novstrup, a 66-year-old Republican with glasses who sponsored the bill because the text of electoral initiatives is often too small for him to read. “There is no limit to the size of the paper.”

In Mississippi last week, the state’s Conservative Supreme Court, which ruled on a Republican lawsuit, technically invalidated the entire state initiative process, held a 2020 referendum legalizing medical marijuana, and the effort To collect signatures to bring Medicaid’s expansion into the state, suspended 2022 ballot. The constitutional amendment that created the state’s initiative law was passed in 1992 when the state had five congressional districts, each requiring signatures from voters. Mississippi has only four counties as of the 2000 census.

In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that imposed a limit of $ 3,000 on campaign contributions to electoral initiatives. This cuts off an important source of income to subsidize the collection of signatures for petitions.

The Republican efforts, which are now gaining traction, have been in full swing for years.

In South Dakota in recent years, Republicans have limited the window of time for collecting petition signatures to the cold winter months, encouraging all recruiters to register with the state and wear state-issued IDs while collecting signatures. These are hurdles that according to the few Democrats in the state have increased the difficulty of qualifying for the vote.

“Republicans have every national office, 85 percent of the legislature and every constitutional office,” said Reynold F. Nesiba, one of three Democrats in the 35-member Senate. “The only place Democrats can make progress is in the action process in place, and Republicans want to take that away, too.”

Now the state’s Republican legislature will propose a constitutional amendment to voters in South Dakota to raise the threshold for passing referenda – and raise it to 60 percent by simple majority. (The threshold to raise the threshold? Still only 50 percent.)

The question will appear on the state’s main ballot for June 2022, which is expected to be dominated by Republican competitions. The new threshold could apply to the November 2022 general election, if a referendum on the expansion of Medicaid is expected before voters.

Republican Senator Lee Schoenbeck said in March that he specifically intended to block Medicaid’s expansion.

“It is fair protection for the citizens of our state,” he said on Thursday.

The proposals to limit electoral initiatives are part of an ongoing campaign by Conservatives to stifle progressive political efforts. To get a referendum on the vote, petitioners have to collect tens of thousands of signatures. The numbers vary depending on the state. The process can cost millions, so initiative campaigns are often signed by large donors.

In Arizona, Republicans have been smart since 2018 when Tom Steyer, the billionaire Democrat who later ran for president, helped fund an ultimately unsuccessful effort to pass a constitutional amendment that would put half of the state’s energy from renewables Sources.

In February, Tim Dunn, a representative of the Republican state, tabled a resolution to raise the threshold for an electoral initiative from a majority to 55 percent.

“If you look at the actual people actually voting on an electoral initiative, the number of people is quite small compared to the citizens of Arizona, and outside money could affect that pretty easily,” Dunn said.

Florida Republicans gave similar rationale for a new law signed by Governor Ron DeSantis that limits contributions to a citizen-led election initiative to $ 3,000 per person. Republicans were frustrated with some donors who supported electoral initiatives, including John Morgan, a wealthy Orlando attorney who spent millions of dollars on efforts to legalize medical marijuana Raise the minimum wage to $ 15 an hour.

However, civil rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have said the new law will effectively stamp out community-based electoral initiatives, which often require substantial funding to collect signatures.

Campaigns like this are so expensive, proponents say, because of a cascade of restrictions Florida law has placed on the initiative. Recently, lawmakers cut the time it takes for signatures to expire in half. banned the practice of paying signature collectors per signature; urged those collecting signatures to use a separate piece of paper for each signature; and required that every signature be verified, which forbade a much cheaper “random sample” process.

“With every successful initiative or major effort that lawmakers don’t approve, there is a new law that makes it more expensive and burdensome to propose an initiative,” said Nicholas Warren, attorney at the Florida ACLU.

Republican sponsors of the new Florida law agree that constitutional amendments will be harder to pass. That is their goal.

“I’m not denying that holding a referendum on voting under the law will be more difficult, but that’s the point,” said Senator Ray Rodrigues, a Republican who sponsored the bill.

In Missouri, 22 Republican-sponsored bills this year attempted to restrict the state’s electoral initiative process, including a bill that would double the number of signatures required to qualify for the ballot and the threshold for passing one Measure increased from a simple majority to two thirds, that would be the highest in the country.

“These were really just politicians trying to dramatically restrict Missourians’ constitutional rights to use the process while telling us it was for our own good,” said Richard von Glahn, Missouri Jobs With political director Justice, a progressive organization.

In Idaho, Republican Governor Brad Little signed law last month that makes it significantly more difficult to meet the signature requirements for an initiative to be added to the ballot. Previously, an initiative required signatures from 6 percent of the population of 18 different legislative districts. The new law, signed by Mr. Little, now requires signatures from 6 percent of residents in each of Idaho’s 35 legislative districts.

And in Mississippi, the state Supreme Court ruled last week that the initiative process was “impractical and non-functional” because the number of statutory Congressional districts and the number of districts the state currently has differ.

Mayor Mary Hawkins Butler of Madison, Miss., A Republican who filed the lawsuit that led to the invalidation of the state initiative process, said the legal action was designed to protect her city’s ability to deter marijuana retailers through zoning.

“There were government officials who knew it needed to be corrected,” Ms. Butler said of the voting process. “If we want to move forward in the state and protect the initiative process, this must be corrected. If it’s buggy, the only option is to start over. “

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Business

In Myanmar Coup, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi Ends as Neither Democracy Hero nor Navy Foil

In Myanmar Coup, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi Ends as Neither Democracy Hero nor Military Foil

During the years when Myanmar was intimidated by a military junta, people hid secret photos of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, talismans of the heroine of democracy who would save their country from a fearsome army despite being under house arrest.

But after she and her party won historic elections in 2015 and last year through a landslide that cemented civilian government and her own popularity in Myanmar, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi was seen by the outside world as something entirely different: as a fallen patron saint, the had made a Faust pact with the generals and no longer deserved their Nobel Peace Prize.

In the end, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, 75, was unable to protect her people or appease the generals. On Monday, the military, which had ruled the country for nearly five decades, took power again in a coup d’état and disrupted the governance of their National League for Democracy after just five years.

Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, along with her top ministers and a number of pro-democracy figures, were arrested in a raid before dawn. The round-up of the military’s critics continued until Monday evening, and the country’s telecommunications networks were constantly disrupted.

Government billboards across the country still carried their image and that of their party’s struggling peacock. But the army, under Major General Min Aung Hlaing, was again responsible.

The disappearance of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, who represented two completely different archetypes in front of two different audiences at home and abroad, proved that she was unable to do what so many expected: a political balance with the military with whom she shared power.

Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi lost the military’s ear when she halted negotiations with General Min Aung Hlaing. And by defending the generals in their ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims, she lost the trust of an international community that had campaigned for them for decades.

“Aung San Suu Kyi dismissed international critics, claiming that she was not a human rights activist but a politician. But the sad part is, she wasn’t very good at it either, ”said Phil Robertson, assistant Asia director for Human Rights Watch. “It failed a major moral test by covering up the military’s atrocities against the Rohingya. But detente with the military never materialized, and their landslide election victory is now being undone by a coup. “

President Biden made a strongly worded statement in the first test of his response to a coup designed to turn a democratic election upside down, which appeared to be different from the way his predecessor handled human rights issues.

“In a democracy, violence should never attempt to override the will of the people or attempt to obliterate the outcome of a credible election,” he said, using language similar to his own after the January 6 siege of the US Capitol Choice to overthrow. He called on the nations to “come together with one voice” to urge the military in Myanmar to give up power immediately.

“The United States takes note of those standing together with the people of Burma at this difficult hour,” he added, using the former name for Myanmar as it is still used by the US government.

The speed at which Myanmar’s democratic era was disintegrating was staggering, even for a country that had been under direct military rule for almost half a century and spun with coup rumors for days.

In November, its National League for Democracy put pressure on the military’s proxy party as many voters once again selected Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s political force as the best and only weapon to contain the generals. Her army placement for the past five years has been viewed by some as political jujitsu rather than appeasement.

The military, which retained significant power in the “discipline of flourishing democracy” that it had designed, complained of mass fraud. On January 28th, representatives of General Min Aung Hlaing sent a letter to Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi ordering a recount and a delay in the opening of parliament.

The military’s takeover of full power on Monday went hand in hand with a year-long state of emergency declaration that shattered any illusions that Myanmar was providing the world with an example of democracy on the rise, however flawed it may be.

“She’s the only person who can stand up to the military,” said U Aung Kyaw, a 73-year-old retired teacher. “We would all have voted for her forever, but today is the saddest day of my life because she’s gone again.”

Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi had close ties with the best of the military from the start, and her National League for Democracy was formed in alliance with senior military officials. After emerging from house arrest in 2010, she often dined with a former junta member who had imprisoned her.

Her followers said the coziness was more than Buddhist equanimity or political tactics. The daughter of the founder of the modern Myanmar army, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, has publicly said that she has a great affection for the military.

When the military stepped up its attack on Rohingya Muslims in 2017, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi appeared to display a synchronicity of emotions with the generals that exceeded mere political benefit.

According to United Nations investigators, the slaughter and village burnings, in which three quarters of a million members of the Muslim minority fled to neighboring Bangladesh, were carried out with genocidal intent. At the International Court of Justice in 2019, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, who served as Myanmar Foreign Minister and State Advisor, dismissed the violence as an “internal conflict” in which the army may have used disproportionate force.

Her tone towards the Rohingya seemed almost scornful, and she followed the example of the military in not mentioning her name so that her identity would not become human.

“Some will be tempted to believe that she has unsuccessfully enlisted in the military, that she has defended and still lost genocide for political favor,” said Matthew Smith, founder of Fortify Rights, a human rights watchdog. “Aung San Suu Kyi did not defend the military in court to maintain the balance of power. She defended the military as well as her own role in the atrocities. She was part of the problem. “

Even when Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi apologized to the military for decades of persecution, her relationship with General Min Aung Hlaing was frayed, according to her advisors and retired military officials. Her increasing popularity with Myanmar’s Buddhist majority has been increasingly viewed as a threat by the generals, and she has not spoken to the army chief in at least a year – a dangerous silence in a country where politics is deeply personal.

The normal precedent was that General Min Aung Hlaing, whose family and acolytes benefited from his decade in power, should relinquish his position as army chief in 2016. He extended his term and vowed to retire for good this summer.

Due to the poor communication between the commander in chief and Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, it became increasingly difficult for him to secure an outcome in which his patronage network would survive, military and political analysts said. General Min Aung Hlaing announced through his proxy that he may also have political ambitions. Some even announced his name as president, a position Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi is constitutionally prohibited from holding.

After the coup on Monday, the army chief will have ultimate authority in his hands for at least a year after the coup on Monday. You have put yourself back into full relevance, no matter how many voters chose Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi. By Monday evening, the army had announced the outline of a new cabinet staffed with active and retired military officers.

The brazen return of the military is a reminder that despite all of the abuses Myanmar’s general coupling committed during its decades-long takeover – systematic repression of ethnic minorities, massacres of pro-democracy demonstrators, dismantling of a once promising economy – not a single high-ranking military officer came before Court fully accountable.

Barbara Woodward, the United Nations Ambassador to Britain, who holds the presidency of the Security Council in February, said the council would meet on Tuesday on the crisis in Myanmar. “We want to have as constructive a discussion as possible and examine a number of measures,” she said, and she would not rule out possible sanctions against the putschists.

“We want to respect the democratic will of the people again,” the ambassador told reporters.

In Washington, Mr Biden’s testimony clearly indicated that the US government would also consider reimposing sanctions if the coup was not reversed. The United States had “lifted sanctions against Burma over the past decade as a result of progress made towards democracy.”

However, some officials, who spoke in the background because they were not authorized to speak to the press, noted that the effects of Western sanctions could be cushioned by China, even if they were restored. Chinese telecom giant Huawei is building Myanmar’s 5G telecom networks over US objections, and China has dominated dam, pipeline and energy project construction.

On Monday, as dusk fell on a nation still in shock from the military takeover, the old fears and survival tactics resurfaced, untrained but still in muscle memory. Individuals took their flags from the National League for Democracy. You spoke in code.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, the Minister of Health, appointed by the National League for Democracy, submitted his resignation “according to the evolving situation”. In the evening, the military began rounding up the National League for Democracy legislators from their homes in the capital, Naypyidaw.

“We are concerned that the military will cast a wider web of their arrests,” said Smith of Fortify Rights. “I’m afraid we’re only just seeing the first stage.”

Late on Monday afternoon, U Ko Ko Gyi, a former student democracy activist who had spent more than 17 years in prison, posted on Facebook that he had so far evaded the magnet that had captured high-ranking politicians.

But he took a family photo as a precaution, he wrote. He said goodbye. His children didn’t know what was going on.

“I have to do what I have to do,” wrote Ko Ko Gyi. “Let’s face it tomorrow.”

David E. Sanger contributed to coverage from Washington.

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Politics

Biden inaugural tackle used phrase ‘democracy’ greater than some other president’s

Biden inaugural address used word 'democracy' more than any other president's

President Joe Biden speaks after being sworn in as the 46th President of the United States during the 59th inauguration of the President at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on January 20, 2021.

Patrick Semansky | AFP | Getty Images

Standing on the spot where there had been a deadly riot at the US Capitol two weeks earlier, President Joe Biden delivered an inaugural address that uses the word “democracy” more than any other inaugural address in US history.

“This is America’s day. This is democracy day,” said Biden at the beginning of the speech. “The will of the people was heard and the will of the people was heeded. We have learned again that democracy is precious. Democracy is fragile. And at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.”

Biden used the word 11 times in his address. This precedes the addresses of Harry Truman, who said “democracy” nine times in his 1949 address, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who also did so at his third swearing-in ceremony in 1941, according to a CNBC analysis of speeches by the American Presidential Project . The project is an archive of public documents maintained by the University of California at Santa Barbara.

“What fascinated me about it was that it started and ended with democracy,” said Bill Antholis, director and CEO of the Miller Center, a non-partisan subsidiary of the University of Virginia that specializes in presidential scholarships.

Antholis, former executive director of the Brookings Institution and a member of the Clinton administration, traced the subject of Biden’s speech back to the Capitol uprising and the events that preceded it.

“I think this was a very different speech than the one that would have been written if Trump had admitted on the morning of November 4th,” said Antholis. “And since the insurrection attacked both the physical symbol and a key process in our democracy, Biden spoke at a very timely moment.”

Most common use of the word “democracy” in the President’s inaugural speeches

  • Joe Biden (2021): 11
  • Harry Truman (1949): 9
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt’s third address (1941): 9
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt’s second address (1937): 7
  • George HW Bush (1989): 5
  • Bill Clinton’s second address (1997): 4
  • Bill Clinton’s first address (1993): 4
  • Warren G. Harding (1921): 4
  • William Henry Harrison (1841): 4

Antholis noted that the term “democracy” was used more widely in political speech in the 20th century, during the time of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, which began in 1913. Wilson, a former political science professor, adopted the term. Antholis said that Truman and Roosevelt saw themselves as “Wilsonians,” which may explain their use of the term.

Wednesday’s speech was also in stark contrast to President Donald Trump’s inaugural address four years ago when Trump spoke of “American slaughter”.

“One of the things that stood out was the normality of a very moving ceremony and the way he talked about democracy as permanent,” said Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law and former director for Speechwriting for President Bill Clinton.

“The images that the word carnage convey are terrible,” said Kathleen Kendall, a research professor of communications at the University of Maryland. “Biden did the opposite. I would say his main point is that America has been tested and has risen to the challenge.”

Words like “America,” “democracy,” and “unity,” all used by Biden are words that most Americans see and respond positively to, Kendall added.

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Politics

Trump’s Legacy: Voters Who Reject Democracy and Any Politics however Their Personal

Trump’s Legacy: Voters Who Reject Democracy and Any Politics but Their Own

Mr Hanna, 19, was an election worker in his rural community not far from Mr Biden’s native Scranton, and he cannot accept that Mr Biden won honestly.

“We were crowded, we had over 250 people in line,” he said, confidently adding that there were few Biden supporters. “It’s mind-boggling to believe that we go to bed and wake up 800,000 votes ahead, and after those magical ballots are dumped overnight, we kind of lose.”

This disinformation, which has spread widely online, has been exposed by election analysts who explain that mail-in ballots were counted more slowly over several days, greatly benefiting Mr Biden after the president made their use toxic to his supporters.

Robert Fuller of Georgia was so furious with the election that he foresaw an America would push off its deepest berths. “We’ll be lucky if we have another country after that,” he said, citing false allegations of electoral fraud that the president teased over the weekend during a taped call to Georgia’s top electoral officer, a Republican.

“I foresee a civil war, Republicans versus Democrats,” said Fuller. “You know as well as I do that you put the ballots in the states of Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, and Michigan.”

In Tuesday’s Georgia Senate runoff election, 65-year-old Fuller supported Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who both lost. The winners – Rev. Raphael Warnock, who will be the first black Senator from Georgia, and Jon Ossoff, who will be the youngest member of the Senate – secured control of the Democratic Chamber.

Mr. Fuller believes none of the winners are legitimate. Not because they didn’t win the most votes, but because of their political views, which were caricatured far left of the center during the race.

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Politics

‘An Indelible Stain’: How the G.O.P. Tried to Topple a Pillar of Democracy

‘An Indelible Stain’: How the G.O.P. Tried to Topple a Pillar of Democracy

On Saturday, Mr. Trump lost another court case as a Wisconsin federal judge, Judge Brett H. Ludwig, who was appointed to court by Mr. Trump this year, said his allegations “fail on legal and factual grounds.” The case has been dismissed with prejudice, which means that Mr Trump is prohibited from bringing cases for similar reasons in this district.

But civil rights lawyers saw the potential for permanent harm outside of the legal realm, where Republican efforts – and the lie that Mr Biden’s victory was the result of widespread fraud – definitely failed.

Republican lawmakers across the country are already considering new laws to make voting harder as they continue to falsely portray the expansion and ease of postal voting as shameful during the pandemic. Many of them see this year’s expanded voting ranks as bad for their party, despite the Republican successes further down the vote. Your consideration of new voting restrictions is an ongoing assault on the integrity of the voting system, with more false and debunked allegations.

“There is an anti-democratic virus that has spread in mainstream Republicanism among mainstream Republican elected officials,” said Dale Ho, director of the Voting Rights Project at ACLU. “And this loss of confidence in the machinery of democracy is much greater.” Problem than any single lawsuit. “

Indeed, following the Supreme Court ruling, the Texas Republican Party has called for secession by red states, whose attorneys general joined the Texas lawsuit.

“Perhaps law-abiding states should unite and form a union of states that adhere to the constitution,” said a statement by its chairman, Allen West. What followed was an observation Rush Limbaugh made earlier this week when he said, “I actually think we are leaning towards secession.”

Talk of secession came during a week when electoral officials from both political parties across the country said they had been threatened with threatening violence, including family members, for confessing to Mr Biden’s victory.