The Assault on Democracy Goes Global

BECAUSE DEMOCRACY IS 'PROGRESSIVE'

Basav Sen

 October 10, 2024
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Much of the world looks bleak in the fall of 2024.

Israel’s assault on Gaza, the world’s first livestreamed genocide, goes on unchecked, with  material and diplomaticsupport from powerful countries. Emboldened by this support, Israel is now attacking Lebanon as well.

Large numbers of people in countries abetting the genocide are appalled at their own governments’ position, and are using a multitude of tactics to demand their governments stop supporting genocide, but their governments are stubbornly sticking to their position.

This is also likely to be the hottest year ever recorded, with life-threatening heat waves in Mexico and South Asia, devastating hurricanes hitting the Caribbean and the U.S. South, and unprecedented wildfires in Canada.

Governments of powerful countries are on the wrong side of this issue as well. They continue recklessly issuing permitsfor expanding fossil fuel infrastructure. Confronting fossil fuel barons is politically popular, but governments of self-proclaimed democracies ignore public opinion.

As with the Gaza genocide, people in these countries — and worldwide — are using creative protests to challenge the fossil fuel industry and its government and financial backers.

When governments ignore popular demands, people protest. In a democracy, they have a right to do so. Even when these protests break laws (for example, by blocking access to government offices), evolving norms of democratic rights recognize civil disobedience as a form of free speech that can lead to legal consequences but that should not be criminalized.

But the same Western democracies who claim to represent the “free world” have seen dangerous backsliding on the right to protest.

Erasing Palestine

Governments in Western democracies violate core protections for free expression when it comes to solidarity with Palestine. In Germany, this has included blanket bans on Palestine solidarity demonstrations (subsequently lifted after political pressure and legal challenges), and censorship and retaliation directed at critical voices.

Germany is not unique in this regard. Amnesty International notes a concerning trend of restrictions on Palestine solidarity activism across Europe.

In the U.S., Palestine solidarity encampments on college campuses in the spring of 2024 were met with a heavy-handed response from university officials and law enforcement. Students faced suspension, evictions from university housing, violence from police and vigilantes, arrests, and serious criminal charges for actions such as sit-ins and building occupations, which have a long history in U.S. student protests.

Many U.S. colleges adopted highly restrictive policies to prevent protests before reopening for the fall semester, raising serious concerns about their respect for their students’  free speech rights.

Criminalizing Climate Protection

Even as the world heads towards climate catastrophe, governments of wealthy nations most responsible for the crisis are criminalizing resistance against fossil fuels.

Few examples are as egregious (and blatantly racist) as the Canadian states’ response to Indigenous Wet’suwet’en peoplesprotecting their traditional territories from a polluting gas pipeline they didn’t consent to. Protesters have faced harassment, surveillance, and militarized raids by law enforcement and the pipeline company’s private security force.

Amnesty International has declared Dsta’hyl, a Clan Chief of the Wet’suwet’en, to be the first prisoner of conscience in Canada because of his house arrest for resisting the pipeline. Canada attacks Indigenous peoples fighting for their futures (and all of our collective futures) even as it increases production of polluting tar sands oil.

South of the border in the United States, the world’s largest oil and gas producing country, environmental defenders have been targeted by laws criminalizing protest against fossil fuel infrastructure, now on the books in nearly half the states,

My former colleague Gabrielle Colchete and I found in a 2020 study that these laws were systematically pushed by fossil fuel industry interests, and introduced by legislators who were plied with campaign cash by the industry. We looked at case studies of three communities targeted by polluting infrastructure projects that benefited from these laws. They were Black, Indigenous, or poor white communities, with more widespread poverty than the national average. Clearly, these laws were intended to further restrict the ability of already marginalized communities to resist projects that would sacrifice their health and livelihoods yet again for corporate profit.

Meanwhile, in Australia, a major coal and oil producer, both the national and state governments are targeting peaceful climate activists with punitive laws. A recent study by Climate Rights International has documented this trend in eight countries (including the U.S. and Australia) in great detail.

What emerges is a chilling pattern of powerful, wealthy countries who have no intention of stopping their expansion of fossil fuel production, but are instead resorting to draconian crackdowns on growing public opposition. This bodes ill for the likely state response to popular desperation and anger in the not so distant future when heatwaves, wildfires, hurricanes, and food scarcity reach catastrophic levels, which they inevitably will if these countries don’t reverse course on fossil fuels.

Framing Dissent as Conspiracy

In the U.S. in particular, in addition to solidarity with Palestine and resistance to fossil fuels, the abolitionist movement against racist, militarized policing also faces extraordinary repression. The state response to the fight against a militarized police training facility in Atlanta best exemplifies this.

Authorities have killed a movement activist, Manuel Paez Terán (also known as Tortuguita), in what looks suspiciously like a targeted assassination, or at best a “friendly fire” accident, followed by an official cover-up. They have used overbroad conspiracy charges to target operators of a community bail fund, and about 60 other activists. The evidence cited for conspiracy and intent to commit  crimes includes distributing flyers, social media posts, recording the police, writing legal support numbers on their arms, and using encrypted messaging apps such as Signal.

More recently, the conspiracy charges against the community bail fund collective have been dropped. It’s likely the state knew all along that the charges were baseless, but prosecuted them anyway, with the goal of intimidating activists.

The police training center, dubbed “Cop City” by activists, is broadly unpopular in Atlanta. City Council hearings on the subject have generated hours of  public testimony, overwhelmingly in opposition to the project. Opponents of the training center have collected twice as many signatures as required for a ballot initiative to stop public funding for the center, only to be stymied by bad-faith legal maneuvers by the city to keep the measure off the ballot.

This is the real criminal conspiracy: the State of Georgia and the City of Atlanta are conspiring to thwart expression of the popular will through official channels, and to criminalize protests, effectively closing off all avenues for the public to have a say in a project that impacts them.

Creeping Authoritarianism

Authoritarian governments are on the rise worldwide, in Russia, India, Hungary, and elsewhere.

But increasingly, authoritarianism isn’t a feature of overtly authoritarian governments alone. Nominally liberal democracies are turning to authoritarian methods to crush popular dissent against the status quo favored by the elite. This status quo includes support for a belligerent, lawless Israel to uphold Western geopolitical interests in the Middle East, and unwavering loyalty to the powerful, politically connected fossil fuel industry.

This is highly relevant to our organizing today. Keeping overtly far-right political parties out of power (as French voters did recently) is essential, but insufficient. Recent events in France, where President Macron is refusing to honor the election results, confirm the ongoing threats to democracy even when the far right is not in power.

Movements for democracy need to understand, name, and confront creeping authoritarianism in so-called free countries, regardless of who is in power.

Basav Sen directs the Climate Justice Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

How a Newspaper Revolution Sparked Protesters and Influencers, Disinformation and the Civil War  

BEFORE 'WOKE' THERE WERE THE 'WIDE AWAKE' OPPOSITION TO THE 'KNOW NOTHINGS'

Jon Grinspan

  October 10, 2024
FacebookTwitter

RedditEmail

An image from Harper’s Weekly depicts the ‘Grand procession of Wide-Awakes at New York on the evening of October 3, 1860.’ Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

There’s one question I get every time I give a talk. I’m a curator of political history at the Smithsonian Institution, and when I discuss the deep history of political division in our country, someone in the audience always asserts that we can’t possibly compare past divisions to the present, because our media landscape is doing unprecedented harm, unlike anything seen in the past.

I’m always struck by people’s belief in a placid media landscape in the past, a time of calm before the internet blew everything up.

In fact, the most divided period in the history of U.S. democracy – the mid-1800s – coincided with a sudden boom in new communications technologies, confrontational political influencers, widespread disinformation and nasty fights over free speech. This media landscape helped bring the Civil War.

The point is not that 21st century media is like the 19th century’s, but that the past was hardly full of the upstanding, rational, nonpartisan journalists many like to believe it was.

And at this era’s center, in the campaign that actually led to the war, was a huge, strange, forgotten movement – the Wide Awakes – born from this media landscape and fought out in the newspapers, polling places and, ultimately, battlefields of the nation.

A Wide Awake membership form from 1860, printed in New York and showing crowds and troops before the U.S. Capitol. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

From snark to high-minded abolitionism

Newspapers had been around for centuries, but as American rates of literacy rose, millions of ordinary citizens became daily news junkies.

The number of papers jumped from a few publications in 1800 to 4,000 brawling rags by 1860, printing hundreds of millions of pages each year. They ranged from the snarky, immensely popular New York Herald and the blood-drenched true crime reports in the National Police Gazette to the high-minded abolitionism of The Liberator.

A clipping from an article in the Worcester Daily Spy in Massachusetts, Nov. 5, 1860, reprinted from a New York newspaper, about the work of the Wide Awakes. Boston Public Library Collection

Nearly everyone devoured them – from wealthy elites to schoolgirls to enslaved people technically banned from reading. Newspapers published scandals and rumors, riling mobs and sparking frequent attacks on editors – often by other editors.

Well into the 20th century, communities were still pulling newspaper presses out of local rivers, hurled there by angry mobs.

Ninety-five percent of newspapers had explicit political affiliations. Many were bankrolled by the parties directly. There was no concept of journalistic independence and nonpartisanship until the turn of the 20th century.

These partisan presses, not the government, even printed the election ballots. Readers voted by cutting ballots from their pages and bringing them to the polls. Imagine if TikTok influencers or podcasters were responsible for administering elections.

The telegraph may seem old-timey today, but after its introduction in the 1840s, Americans could disseminate breaking news across huge territories along electrical wires. It allowed people to argue the issues nationwide – before the internet, television or radio.

Digesting slavery’s evils daily

Americans became a people by arguing politics in the press.

When politics was local, the major parties had avoided discussing slavery, taking what Abraham Lincoln mocked as a “don’t care” attitude. But now that Maine could debate with Texas, the topic shot to the forefront. By the 1850s, Northerners digested its evils daily.

The National Era – an abolitionist press in Washington – first printed Harriet Beecher Stowe’s hair-raising “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” by far the most influential antislavery novel in history.

Meanwhile, the radical pro-slavery magazine “De Bow’s Review” spread a maximalist vision of expanding slavery far and wide. Americans living thousands of miles from each other could argue the issue, and the only gatekeepers were editors who profited from spreading often legitimate outrage.

It’s fitting, then, that the Northern pushback to expanding slavery came from the 19th century equivalent of “very online” young newspaper readers. Early in the 1860 election, a core of young clerks in Connecticut formed a club to help campaign for the antislavery Republican Party. They happened to live in the state with the highest literacy rates and huge newspaper circulations. So when a local editor wrote that the Republicans seemed “Wide Awake” in the campaign, the boys named their club “the Wide Awakes.”

Adding militaristic uniforms, torch-lit midnight rallies and an open eye as their all-seeing symbol, a new movement was born, which I chronicle in my recent book, “Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force that Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War.” Often, their chief issue was not the knotty specifics of what to do about slavery, but the fight for a “Free Press” – unsuppressed by supporters of slavery, South or North.

The Wide Awakes exploded across the national newspaper network. Within months of their founding, young Republicans were forming clubs from Connecticut to California.

An article about the Wide Awakes from the Cleveland Morning Leader of Nov. 6, 1860. Library of Congress.

Most learned how to organize their companies through the papers. They built a reciprocal relationship with America’s press: cheering friendly newspaper offices and harassing pro-slavery Democratic papers’ headquarters. Friendly editors returned the favor, marching with the Wide Awakes and pushing their readers to form more clubs, like the Indiana newspaperman who nudged: “Cannot such an organization be gotten up in this town?”

None of this could be admired as independent journalism, but it sure spread a movement. It only took a few months to turn the Wide Awakes into one of the largest partisan movements America had ever seen, believed to have 500,000 members – proportionally the equivalent of 5 million today.

‘From Maine to Oregon let the earth shake’

The same newspaper network spread fear as well. Readers in much of the South saw the clubs as a partisan paramilitary organization. Wild accounts shared accidental misinformation and deliberate disinformation, pushing the false notion that the Wide Awakes were preparing for a war, not an election.

The presence of a few hundred African American Wide Awakes in Boston morphed into claims in Mississippi that “the Wide Awakes are composed mainly of Negroes,” who were plotting a race war. A dispersed, partisan media exaggerated such falsehoods like a national game of telephone.

By the time Lincoln won election in November 1860, hysterical editors predicted a Wide Awake attack on the South. Secessionist newspapers used fears of Wide Awakes to help push states out of the Union. The Weekly Mississippian reported “WIDE-AWAKE INVASION ANTICIPATED,” the very day that state seceded.

Meanwhile, Wide Awake editors began to push back against the widening secession conspiracy. German newspapermen in St. Louis helped arm Wide Awake clubs for combat.

In Pennsylvania, the editor James Sanks Brisbin ordered Republicans to “organize yourselves into military companies. … Take muskets in your hands, and from Maine to Oregon let the earth shake to the tread of three millions of armed Wide-Awakes.”

What began in ink was spiraling into lead and steel. It took 16 years to develop from the introduction of the telegraph to the Civil War. Undoubtedly, the fight over slavery caused that conflict, but the newspapers fed it, amplified it, exaggerated it.

Mid-19th century Americans lived with an odd combination: an unprecedented ability to spread information, but also a siloed and partisan system of interpreting it. It helped the nation finally reckon with the crimes of slavery, but also spread bad faith, irrational panic and outright lies.

This history can add a needed perspective to today’s political conflicts, so often magnified by social media. In both eras, new technologies supercharged existing political tensions.

Yet we can see from this heated history that political media is less like an unstoppable, unreformable force that will consume democracy, and more like another in a succession of breathtaking, catastrophic, wild new landscapes that must be tamed.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Jon Grinspan is Political History Curator at the Smithsonian Institution