How to Fix Democracy | Larry Diamond

[Music] [Music] Larry Diamond you're one of the world's leading experts on democracy you dedicated your life your professional life at least to studying democracy why well I have made the study of democracy the centerpiece of my academic life and the engagement but Democrats around the world the centerpiece of maybe my activist side of my life because I agree with Winston Churchill that democracy may be the worst form of government ever invented by man except for all the others that have been tried from time to time but more to the point I think we who believe that democracy is a worthy goal and indeed a moral imperative have to have a better answer then the fact that it's simply not as bad as any authoritarian alternative that has ever been attempted and I think you know at bottom it comes down to this if you believe in freedom if you believe that there is such a thing as universal human rights that people have the right to live their lives free of terror imposition and intimidation that people have the right to freedom a person human dignity freedom of religion freedom of thought freedom of expression freedom of movement freedom to organize to try and express and defend their interests and improve whatever reality they feel is imposing upon them only democracy does a good job of providing those freedoms its freedom and democracy are they the same things only democracies can do a good job of providing freedom there's no authoritarian regime in the world that is you know above average in assuring people of political rights and civil liberties but there are a number of democracies that are very liberal and that increasingly this is part of the problem we're living in now are impinging upon freedom of religion freedom of expression freedom of the internet freedom of movement and so really what I stress is that the goal has to be liberal democracy liberal not an in the economic sense but in terms of strong protections for rights and the rule of law before we get to distinguishing between liberal and illiberal democracy how would you define democracy itself well I would define democracy as a political system in which people can choose their leaders and replace their leaders in free and fair elections it's a system of political accountability to have real political accountability where people can really choose and replace their leaders you have to have free and fair elections and that already implies some significant minimal foundation of freedom of expression freedom of the press freedom of movement of freedom of organization so when you're telling of the contemporary history of democracy you seem to have noticed some ill winds what's going on then well it is a gathering challenge to what looked like in the 1990s in the early 2000s a very hopeful picture not just for democracy but even for the future of Liberty in the world and liberal democracy we were very optimistic in the early 2000s that democracy was going to continue to expand that freedom would continue to deepen that the rule of law would settle in and penetrate much more substantially into the real lived experience of people in democracies around the world and I'd say since around 2006 we have been in a period of democratic recession more and more countries have been losing ground in terms of freedom and democracy then have been improving in their levels of freedom and political rights and the quality of democracy and that's been the pattern from about 2007 to maybe around 2015 or 16 I think a number of things have happened in the recent last few years that have transformed the situation from democratic recession to a gathering crisis of liberal democracy a convergence of the wins so rather than a democratic recession it's a democratic depression I think we are on a perilous edge of democratic depression or what Samuel Huntington would call a reverse wave of democratic breakdowns that if you look not only at the failure of democracy in a wide range of emerging market countries every place from Turkey to Kenya in some ways to Bangladesh and now the crisis of democracy increasingly in the Philippines the election of an extremely illiberal president in Brazil you see a very very worrisome picture but still more worrisome is the fact that this has now come home to the heart of liberal democracy which is Europe and the United States and we now have a member state of the European Union hungry that no longer meets the minimum conditions for electoral democracy Viktor Orban the Prime Minister claims that he has just a different model of democracy what he calls a liberal democracy but in fact he is so degraded freedom and rights of opposition the pluralism and the Independence of the media and the independence of the courts and the rule of law that's what what is left is precisely that hollowed-out shell of a fake democracy a pseudo democracy in illiberal non democracy we're in a democratic depression or at least a very bad recession what needs to change Larry so first I want to say I don't think it is a depression of democracy yet but I think we are creeping toward the edge of a depression with a bad recession which potentially could become yes it's a bad deepening accelerating recession that is creeping us toward the edge makes bad manners yeah and the point is we want to act before it becomes a repression okay it's much harder to pull out of the depths of decay if you wind up in a depression so what do we do first thing we do is repair our own democracies and our own culture of democracy in the United States in Europe in the advanced industrial democracies of the world and every country has its own story every country has its own institutions and culture and history and challenges I will say I say in my book that the institutional mix in the United States of the first past the post electoral system with this extremely dysfunctional party primary system in the United States isn't working it's generating incentives for deepening political polarization and driving each of the political parties further and further to the extremes the first thing we could do the most powerful political reform we could adopt that would give us the greatest leverage in repairing and reversing our democratic tailspin in the United States is to adopt rank-choice voting preferential voting and take away that first-past-the-post l now understand how this works right now there are only two candidates that matter in almost in the election in the United States above a nonpartisan municipal level one has a D after his or her name the other in R and those are the only two candidates democrat or republican that have any chance of winning each of these two nominees increasingly is being produced by very low turnout party primary elections where the people who turnout are the most ideologically committed this is why you've had the Congress of the United States moving further and further to the right because the people who are nominated in the Republican parties are increasingly of the Tea Party or very conservative variety some people who don't get the message are defeated in party primaries others see the writing on the wall and move their voting behavior further and further to the right now we see in the current period the Democratic Party manifesting some of this same logic with their party primaries if you get to a general election and those are the only two candidates who have a chance of winning because anybody else is going to involve a voter wasting his or her vote on a spoiler because it's first-past-the-post and whoever gets the most votes wins even if it's 36% of the vote then only a Democrat and Republican are going to run as serious candidates if you adopt the system that's been used for over a century to elect the lower house of parliament in Australia rank-choice voting or the preferential vote the system is going to open up voters are going to have more choice if the two parties are going to go off in very far left and right directions you'll see independent candidates running and offering different alternatives and the Green Party can run the Libertarian Party whoever wants to surface voters will have more choice voters will have more control in their hands which they say they want elections will be more interesting more people will come out to vote in the general election and necessary Mandarin on the coming to gerrymandering but I want to finish about rank-choice voting if people have multiple candidates and they're not wasting their vote and they've only been offered very far left and far right choices they can vote for someone in the center and not be wasting their vote if their first choice doesn't make it their vote is transferred to their second choice until someone wins a majority of the vote a growing number of political scientists and civic leaders think this is the most promising reform to unlock our politics at the same time of course there are many other things we need to do and the monster of gerrymandering the shameless practice of having state legislatures draw their own district boundaries and the district boundaries for Congress as well in order to advantage their party and their own incumbency there's nothing in the Constitution that gives them that privilege it's all been done by law and can be taken away by law so this power to draw district boundaries needs to be transferred to independent nonpartisan Commission's or professional nonpartisan officials so what about just taking money out of American politics I know you have some very strong feelings on that there's a strong and growing sentiment in the United States to not take money out of politics but to take big money and especially dark money and unaccountable money out of politics but the Supreme Court gutted the ability of political reformers in the United States to do that when they said political in an extremely dubious and I think wrongheaded interpretation of the First Amendment that political campaign spending is free speech and that corporations are just like people and they have rights of free speech and of course there are a lot of us political scientists and reformers who think that is a very implausible interpretation of the First Amendment to the American Constitution but as long as it stands were confined in what we can do but there's still other things we can do first of all we can eliminate dark money in our politics there's no reason why a political action committee that is spending money in an election campaign should be able to hide the true identities of their donors and you know what else there's no reason for that's incredibly perverse there's no reason why wealthy individuals should be able to contribute massive amounts of money to what we call 501 C 4 's foundations nonprofit foundations or social welfare organizations that can spend forty nine point nine nine percent of their money on election campaigns and have the contributions be this is crazy tax deductible so there are things we can do that are very straightforward that would enjoy a lot of public support to make our political campaign spending system more transparent and at least somewhat more level of the playing field you talk a lot about we we the people so what are the moral responsibilities of being a citizen in a contemporary democracy all those responsibilities today in crisis there is a crisis of democratic citizenship in the United States I'd say to some extent in the West more broadly but it's got both normative and behavioral components the behavioral component is we just don't get a very high voter turnout in the United States behavior than moment I don't know the different well norms are what people believe feel and think behavior is what people do oh I think they don't always match although they're obviously closely related at the level of behavior we need to get more active citizenship again we need people caring enough to bother to show up at the polls but we also need policies this comes back to your question about what should we do we should make it easy to vote in the United States not hard and not make it prejudicially hard for african-american and Hispanic American voters to vote so we can stop voter suppression we can make it easy for people to vote by allowing them to vote on multiple days by giving them ready access to polling places by expanding mail by voting as an option by automatically registering everybody to vote through what we call motor voter laws every time they get a driver's license or have any other contact with the state that registered to vote we can then encourage people train people educate people inspire people to care about democracy to know their rights to defend their rights to be active in giving voice to their concerns and not only to vote and demonstrate and petition through the old means and the modern means of the internet but as we were saying before to listen and to engage in the democratic process with a certain level of open-mindedness and respect for the other side not necessarily buying their arguments or deciding to compromise half way in the middle but developing a certain open-mindedness and empathy with other P who feel at risk disrespected insecure or whatever it might be so it seems as if you're saying that democracy is really about being human it defines us as a species I would say I would put it slightly differently freedom is about realizing our humaneness and protecting that freedom is inseparable from human dignity and that if you read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or any other international or regional instrument of human rights you see that the right of free expression of organization of mobilization of assembly of religion of conscience of belief that all of this all of these are intrinsic to our distinctive properties as human beings and democracy is the only political system in the world that can secure freedom [Music]

Channel: Bertelsmann Foundation

Views: 6,353

Rating: 4.661972 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: RtYRn1oiJ6U

Length: 20min 7sec (1207 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 19 2019