Is democracy in its death throes? Sydney Morning Herald
By Peter Hartcher24 April 2018
Ask the global head of Human Rights Watch, Ken Roth, what his organisation's top priority is, expecting to hear that it's Syria's civil war or Myanmar's genocide, perhaps, and you get a surprising answer. Roth cites no single humanitarian crisis: "Our top concerns are two, and they're interrelated. One is the rise of autocratic populism. "The other is the proliferation of mass atrocities facilitated by the leadership void that's created by the first."
Roth explains: "Autocratic populists gain power by demonising unpopular minorities, and once they've gained power they claim to have special insight into the desires of the majority sufficient to undermine the checks and balances on their power. They attack independent judges, critical journalists and civil society."
He lists Turkey's Recep Erdogan, Egypt's Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, the Philippines' Rodrigo Duterte, India's Narendra Modi, Myanmar's generals, America's Donald Trump, Poland's Jarosław Kaczyński and Hungary's Viktor Orban in this category.
Can democratic rights and freedoms prevail against these powerful twin forces? "There's a strong sense that dark times are upon us again, that democracy is in crisis, that the West is imploding," says Sydney University political scientist John Keane...The outcome is not predetermined, in other words. The leaders in the democratic world and, indeed, their followers, need to improve the objective living conditions of their people. And our responses to our times will matter. Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch describes it as "a battle and it's one worth engaging in – we shouldn't submit to despair and say the rise of authoritarian populism is inevitable. There's a counter-trend too."
https://www.smh.com.au/national/is-democracy-in-its-death-throes-20180423-p4zb8m.html
A battle worth engaging in! Isn’t that why we are here and why we work to elect Democrats? We believe in liberty, equality and democratic liberalism. And I never thought I would see a POTUS mentioned in the company of autocrats. That must change in 2020.
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