DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN RIGHTS
DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN RIGHTS
Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives and the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures. Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
A UNIVERSALLY RECOGNIZED IDEAL
“Democracy is a universally recognized ideal based on common values shared by people across the world, irrespective of cultural, political, social and economic differences. As recognized in the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, democracy is based on the freely expressed will of the people to determine their own political, economic, social and cultural systems and their full participation in all aspects of their lives. Democracy, development, rule of law and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. Democracy aims to: preserve and promote the dignity and fundamental rights of the individual; achieve social justice; foster the economic and social development of the community; strengthen the cohesion of society; enhance national tranquility; and create a climate that is favorable for international peace. Democracy as a form of government is a universal benchmark for human rights protection; it provides an environment for the protection and effective realization of human rights. Today, after a period of increased democratization around the world, many democracies appear to be backsliding. Some Governments seem to be deliberately weakening independent checks on their powers, suffocating criticism, dismantling democratic oversight and ensuring their long-term rule, with negative impact on people’s rights. The elements of democracy: For several years, the UN General Assembly and the former Commission on Human Rights endeavored to draw on international human rights instruments to promote a common understanding of the principles and values of democracy. In 2002, the Commission declared in resolution 2002/46 that essential elements of democracy include: Respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of opinion and expression, and freedom of association; Access to power and its exercise in accordance with the rule of law; The holding of periodic free and fair elections by universal suffrage and by secret ballot as the expression of the will of the people; A pluralistic system of political parties and organizations; The separation of powers; The independence of the judiciary; Transparency and accountability in public administration; Free, independent and pluralistic media.” Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, About democracy and human rights.NOT A CURE-ALL
“Autocratic governments have violated human rights. But so have democracies. The U. S., for example, tortured individuals it termed non-enemy combatants after the 9/11/2001 World Trade Center attack even though Article 5 of the UDHR states no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. What is the reason democracies fail to ensure everyone is treated humanely and well? Scholars have addressed that question since ancient times. Plato, for instance, did not think the “will of the people” should “be the basis of the authority of government.” Rather, he thought the common people (or demos) should be ruled by Philosopher Kings. And more recently, in his book Against Jason Brennan, following Plato’s lead, claimed a political system that distributes political power in proportion to knowledge or competence, would be preferred to a democracy in which everyone’s vote carries equal weight regardless of her or his knowledge or competence. Other stress that the heart of the problem has to do with the failure of democracies to ensure everyone ends up with the ability to realize rights guaranteed by Article 25 of the UDHR to “food, clothing, housing and medical care … and security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, old age.” In On Democracy, for instance, Robert A. Dahl wrote that “historically, the development of democratic beliefs and a democratic culture has been closely associated with what might loosely be called a market economy…Yet…a market-capitalist economy inevitably generates inequalities in the political resources to which different citizens have access. Thus, a market economy seriously impairs political equality: citizens who are economically unequal are unlikely to be politically equal.” (See also The Price of Inequality by Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, The Tyranny of Merit by Michael J. Sandel, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World by Samuel Moyn, and A Brief History of Equality by Thomas Piketty in which he writes “the free, uncontrolled circulating of capital, without any taxation or common regulation, radially biases national choices in favor of the most mobile and most powerful actors and thus constitutes de facto a form of censitary power to the benefit of the richest.” Others might add, in order to maximize the likelihood that everyone’s human rights will be recognized and respected in addition to knowledge and competence we must find a way to ensure the people who make the rules we live by are empathetic and bent on promoting the welfare of society as a whole as opposed to the welfare of any individual or subset of individuals. And as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton noted in The Federalist Papers, democracies need to be concerned with how a tyranny of the majority might undermine the rights of minorities. Finally, students bent on designing rules to ensure everyone’s human rights are realized should be aware of social choice theory and Nobel Prize winner Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem which, as Chrisopher Achen and Larry Bartels point out in their book Democracy for Realists, demonstrates “with mathematical rigor that …a reliable democratic procedure for aggregating coherent individual preferences to arrive at a coherent collective choice” is unattainable. Libertarian scholars, furthermore, emphasize the importance of incentives in motivating people to behave in ways that promote the welfare of others as well as their own welfare. Hence, they are prone to quote Adam Smith’s observation that: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”EPISMOCRACY
Democracy refers to a government in which people rule directly or through their elected representatives. It is, in other words, what President Lincoln referred to in his Gettysburg address as a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” but which Plato warned is a chimera. Indeed, the ancient Greek philosopher thought a government elected by the people would end up being ruled by populists who, in the words of the Encyclopedia Britannica, “claim to embody the will of the people in order to consolidate their own power.” Therefore, he called for governments of the people and for the people but by individuals termed philosopher kings who would be singled out at a young age for their curiosity, intelligence, and desire to promote everyone’s wellbeing and then given an education that would provide them with the skills to do just that. Lincoln, however, thought everyone should receive a high-quality education. That is the reason in his first political announcement he called education the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in and then as President signed the Morill Act of 1862 to assure that education would be available to all social classes. Indeed, throughout his career Lincoln echoed the view of Horace Mann that the purpose of education:is to inspire the love of truth as the supremist good, and to clarify the vision of the intellect to discern it. We want a generation … above deciding great and eternal principles upon narrow and selfish grounds. Our advanced state of civilization has evolved many complicated questions respecting social duties. We want a generation…capable taking up these complex questions, and of turning all sides of them towards the sun.
We too share that view. Clearly the more highly educated voters are the more likely they are to elect officials (including most importantly a President) that have the ability and desire to make decisions in their best interest. Hence, it is not surprising that, given the highly unequal way wealth and income are distributed in our country today, we tend to end up with a government of the people, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy. Why? Because as Emmanuel Saez and other economists pointed out, children of high-income earners and the wealthy are “77 times more likely to attend an elite school than those with parents in the bottom 20 quintile.” How do we deal with that problem? The answer Saez along with the Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty and many others give is “by imposing higher taxes on wealth and income.” But inequality in the distribution of wealth and income leading to educational differences and other inequities is not the only reason our democracy fails. Another reason is it has yet to devise a method of providing voters with reliable information about the qualifications of those running for office, in particular and most importantly, the highest office in the land. Hence, to deal with the latter problem we propose that to have their names placed on the ballot for President, candidates be required to take a four-part written exam crafted by academics from left to right across the political spectrum and then have their results on the exam made public. The first part of the exam would test candidates’ ability to acquire, retain, and process information or what is referred to as their cognitive ability. The second part would test their knowledge of history, economics, natural science, statistics, and other subjects. The third part would test their stance on major issues of concern to voters such as climate change, Israel’s incursion into Gaza, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, abortion, immigration, health care, and LGBTQ and women’s rights. Finally, the fourth part would address ethical issues. A question on the ethical portion of the exam, for example, might ask: “Is it fair to give more weight to the views of individuals who contribute financially to your campaign than to others?” And another might ask: “can you describe an ethical dilemma you faced in the past and how you dealt with it? What questions might the results of the exam help voters answer today? A recent justice department report claimed President Joe Biden’s memory was “extremely limited.” In response, Biden asserted that his memory “is fine.” How much weight should voters give to each of these points of view. Biden’s answers to the questions posed in the first part of the exam would help them determine the answer. Furthermore, after it was pointed out that his statements about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” were reminiscent of Adoloph Hitler’s view that “all great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning” Donald Trump claimed he knew nothing about Hitler. Results from the second part of the exam would indicate just how knowledgeable he and other candidates are of important historical events and hence how capable they would be to use lessons from those events to guide their decisions. Additionally, Trump claims he is “a very stable genius,” while Niki Haley has characterized him as anything but. Whose point of view deserves more credence? The results of the Presidential Aptitude Examination would help voters determine the answer. And as a last example, both Biden and Trump have promised to reduce government malfeasance. How likely is it that they would do so? Their answers to the ethical questions on the exam would help provide voters with an answer to that question too. In conclusion, for governments of the people to end up promoting the peoples’ welfare they need to be headed by educated, conscientious, and skillful individuals bent on doing just that. In such governments political power would be distributed in proportion to knowledge and competence. Hence, they would be what Jason Brennan refers to in his book Against Democracy as an epistocracy. But to get from a democracy to an epistocracy requires two steps. First, as the Harvard scholar E.O. Wilson suggested in his book titled Consilience, we need to provide all voters with a first-class education that addresses ethical issues as well as issues in the hard sciences, social sciences, history, mathematics, and humanities. Then to end up with a government of, by, and for a well-educated socially conscious people or what might be termed an epismocracy, we need to make information about the views and abilities of candidates for President and other elective offices (such as the information that might be provided by the Presidential Aptitude exam we propose) readily available.” Paul Cantor and Roger Sparks, Democracy or Epismocracy?HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE
“We have spent years researching new forms of authoritarianism emerging around the globe. For us, how and why democracies die has been an occupational obsession. But now we find ourselves turning to our own country. Over the past two years, we have watched politicians say and do things that are unprecedented in the United States—but that we recognize as having been the precursors of democratic crisis in other places. We feel dread, as do so many other Americans, even as we try to reassure ourselves that things can’t really be that bad here. After all, even though we know democracies are always fragile, the one in which we live has somehow managed to defy gravity. Our Constitution, our national creed of freedom and equality, our historically robust middle class, our high levels of wealth and education, and our large, diversified private sector—all these should inoculate us from the kind of democratic breakdown that has occurred elsewhere. Yet we worry. American politicians now treat their rivals as enemies, intimidate the free press, and threaten to reject the results of elections. They try to weaken the institutional buffers of our democracy, including the courts, intelligence services, and ethics offices. American states, which were once praised by the great jurist Louis Brandeis as “laboratories of democracy,” are in danger of becoming laboratories of authoritarianism as those in power rewrite electoral rules, redraw constituencies, and even rescind voting rights to ensure that they do not lose. And in 2016, for the first time in US history, a man with no experience in public office, little observable commitment to constitutional rights, and clear authoritarian tendencies was elected president. American politicians now treat their rivals as enemies, intimidate the free press, and threaten to reject the results of elections. They try to weaken the institutional buffers of our democracy, including the courts, intelligence services, and ethics offices. What does all this mean? Are we living through the decline and fall of one of the world’s oldest and most successful democracies? At midday on September 11, 1973, after months of mounting tensions in the streets of Santiago, Chile, British-made Hawker Hunter jets swooped overhead, dropping bombs on La Moneda, the neoclassical presidential palace in the center of the city. As the bombs continued to fall, La Moneda burned. President Salvador Allende, elected three years earlier at the head of a leftist coalition, was barricaded inside. During his term, Chile had been wracked by social unrest, economic crisis, and political paralysis. Allende had said he would not leave his post until he had finished his job—but now the moment of truth had arrived. Under the command of General Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s armed forces were seizing control of the country. Early in the morning on that fateful day, Allende offered defiant words on a national radio broadcast, hoping that his many supporters would take to the streets in defense of democracy. But the resistance never materialized. The military police who guarded the palace had abandoned him; his broadcast was met with silence. Within hours, President Allende was dead. So, too, was Chilean democracy. This is how we tend to think of democracies dying: at the hands of men with guns. During the Cold War, coups d’état accounted for nearly three out of every four democratic break¬downs. Democracies in Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Re¬public, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Thailand, Turkey, and Uruguay all died this way. More re-cently, military coups toppled Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in 2013 and Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra in 2014. In all these cases, democracy dissolved in spectacular fashion, through military power and coercion. But there is another way to break a democracy. It is less dramatic but equally destructive. Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany. More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps. In Venezuela, for example, Hugo Chávez was a political outsider who railed against what he cast as a corrupt govern¬ing elite, promising to build a more “authentic” democracy that used the country’s vast oil wealth to improve the lives of the poor. Skillfully tapping into the anger of ordinary Venezuelans, many of whom felt ignored or mistreated by the established political parties, Chávez was elected president in 1998. As a woman in Chávez’s home state of Barinas put it on election night, “Democracy is infected. And Chávez is the only antibiotic we have.” When Chávez launched his promised revolution, he did so democratically. In 1999, he held free elections for a new con¬stituent assembly, in which his allies won an overwhelming majority. This allowed the Chavistas to single-handedly write a new constitution. It was a democratic constitution, though, and to reinforce its legitimacy, new presidential and legislative elections were held in 2000. Chávez and his allies won those, too. Chávez’s populism triggered intense opposition, and in April 2002 he was briefly toppled by the military. But the coup failed, allowing a triumphant Chávez to claim for himself even more democratic legitimacy. It wasn’t until 2003 that Chávez took his first clear steps toward authoritarianism. With public support fading, he stalled an opposition-led referendum that would have recalled him from office—until a year later, when soaring oil prices had boosted his standing enough for him to win. In 2004, the gov¬ernment blacklisted those who had signed the recall petition and packed the Supreme Court, but Chávez’s landslide reelec¬tion in 2006 allowed him to maintain a democratic veneer. The Chavista regime grew more repressive after 2006, closing a major television station, arresting or exiling opposition politicians, judges, and media figures on dubious charges, and eliminating presidential term limits so that Chávez could remain in power indefinitely. When Chávez, now dying of cancer, was reelected in 2012, the contest was free but not fair: Chavismo controlled much of the media and deployed the vast machinery of the gov¬ernment in its favor. After Chávez’s death, a year later, his suc¬cessor, Nicolás Maduro, won another questionable reelection, and, in 2014, his government imprisoned a major opposition leader. Still, the opposition’s landslide victory in the 2015 leg¬islative elections seemed to belie critics’ claims that Venezuela was no longer democratic. It was only when a new single-party constituent assembly usurped the power of Congress in 2017, nearly two decades after Chávez first won the presidency, that Venezuela was widely recognized as an autocracy. This is how democracies now die. Blatant dictatorship—in the form of fascism, communism, or military rule—has dis¬appeared across much of the world. Military coups and other violent seizures of power are rare. Most countries hold regular elections. Democracies still die, but by different means. Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected gov¬ernments themselves. Like Chávez in Venezuela, elected leaders have subverted democratic institutions in Georgia, Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Ukraine. Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box. Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected gov-ernments themselves. The electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive. With a classic coup d’état, as in Pinochet’s Chile, the death of a democracy is immediate and evident to all. The presidential palace burns. The president is killed, imprisoned, or shipped off into exile. The constitution is suspended or scrapped. On the electoral road, none of these things happen. There are no tanks in the streets. Constitutions and other nominally dem¬ocratic institutions remain in place. People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are “legal,” in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or ac¬cepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy—making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process. Newspapers still publish but are bought off or bullied into self-censorship. Citizens continue to criticize the government but often find themselves facing tax or other legal troubles. This sows public confusion. People do not immediately realize what is happening. Many continue to believe they are living under a democracy. In 2011, when a Latinobarómetro survey asked Venezuelans to rate their own country from 1 (“not at all demo-cratic”) to 10 (“completely democratic”), 51 percent of respon¬dents gave their country a score of 8 or higher. Because there is no single moment—no coup, declaration of martial law, or suspension of the constitution—in which the regime obviously “crosses the line” into dictatorship, nothing may set off society’s alarm bells. Those who denounce govern¬ment abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. Democracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible…Answering such a question requires stepping back from daily headlines and breaking news alerts to widen our view, drawing lessons from the experiences of other democracies around the world and throughout history. For the sake of clarity, we are defining a democracy as a system of government with regular, free, and fair elections, in which all adult citizens have the right to vote and possess basic civil liberties such as freedom of speech and association. Studying other democracies in crisis allows us to better understand the challenges facing our own. For ex¬ample, based on the historical experiences of other nations, we have developed a litmus test to help identify would be autocrats before they come to power. We can learn from the mistakes that past democratic leaders have made in opening the door to would be authoritarians—and, conversely, from the ways that other democracies have kept extremists out of power. A com¬parative approach also reveals how elected autocrats in different parts of the world employ remarkably similar strategies to sub¬vert democratic institutions. As these patterns become visible, the steps toward breakdown grow less ambiguous—and easier to combat. Knowing how citizens in other democracies have successfully resisted elected autocrats, or why they tragically failed to do so, is essential to those seeking to defend American democracy today. We know that extremist demagogues emerge from time to time in all societies, even in healthy democracies. The United States has had its share of them, including Henry Ford, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace. An essential test for democracies is not whether such figures emerge but whether political leaders, and especially political parties, work to prevent them from gaining power in the first place—by keeping them off mainstream party tickets, refusing to endorse or align with them, and, when necessary, making common cause with rivals in support of democratic candidates. Isolating popular extrem¬ists requires political courage. But when fear, opportunism, or miscalculation leads established parties to bring extremists into the mainstream, democracy is imperiled. Once a would be authoritarian makes it to power, democra¬cies face a second critical test: Will the autocratic leader subvert democratic institutions or be constrained by them? Institutions alone are not enough to rein in elected autocrats. Constitutions must be defended—by political parties and organized citizens, but also by democratic norms. Without robust norms, consti-tutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Institutions become po¬litical weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die: Assessing the Patterns of Declining Republics, 2018.kemperhumanrights@gmail.com, 184 Fillow Street, Norwalk, CT 06850, 646-400-2406
© Copyright 2012 The Kemper Human Rights Education Foundation. All rights reserved.
© Copyright 2012 The Kemper Human Rights Education Foundation. All rights reserved.