Democracy On The Ropes

In Canada, democracy is on the ropes. Michael Harris writes:

Judging from the public’s view of politicians, especially incumbents, there is more than a little evidence that democracy is more than just running a fever.

The most unpopular provincial leaders in Canada are the premiers of the country’s two biggest provinces. Ontario’s Ford has an approval rating of 34 per cent. His counterpart in Quebec, François Legault, sits at just 31 per cent.

At the federal level, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has an approval rating of 25 per cent, while a whopping 58 per cent disapprove of his performance. That adds up to a net -33 rating for the prime minister—a political death warrant in most circumstances.

But federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre isn’t exactly setting records for personal popularity. Although the Conservative Party is a cab-ride ahead of the Liberals in popularity, just 37 per cent of Canadians had a favourable view of the leader of the opposition, against 33 per cent who held a negative view, according to recent polling.

So that means a modest plus-four favourability rating for Poilievre, but with a large block of Canadians still undecided. In other words, a lot could change between now and election day.

But at this moment, it appears as though voters are prepared to punish incumbents, particularly the ones in power during the COVID-19 pandemic, without being crazy about the alternative. The candidate they dislike the least is the one they will apparently be voting for. It is hardly what could be called robust democracy in action.

People are in a very foul mood:

It is actually anger bordering on rage with a touch of despair. Canadians are angry and despairing about the cost of groceries, heating their homes, getting a house, and running their cars. Poll after poll shows Poilievre with a huge lead over Trudeau in all but two files: climate change and affordable childcare.

With very little policy detail, Poilievre is the resounding choice to lead the way on bringing down the cost of living and reducing the tax burden. Poilievre is betting the farm that Canadians are willing to give up the fight against climate change in exchange for cancelling the Trudeau government’s carbon tax.

It's the same mood in the United States:

As in Canada, Americans are not overly enamoured with either of their presumptive presidential candidates in 2024. They are showing every sign of being tired of democracy, angry, and electorally vengeful.

U.S. President Joe Biden is caught between the same rock and hard place that is squeezing Trudeau towards the exit.

Faced with widespread anger over inflation, interest rates, immigration, and the sense that his country is somehow headed in the wrong direction, Biden faces a disapproval number even worse than Trudeau’s—a crushing 63 per cent. A mere 37 per cent approve of his performance as president. The only number that is going up for Biden is his age—and at 81 years old, that is a problem for his campaign.

But here is the burning issue. The question that will be answered next November is how much are Americans prepared to give up to have their grievances dealt with and their prayers answered?

How voters answer that question will make all the difference.

Image: CNN

Democracy Under Siege

Michael Den Tandt writes in the Globe and Mail that democracy is in trouble:

Simply put, democracy is losing. The reason: Western governments, led by the United States, have not come to terms with the reality that liberal and free societies worldwide are under attack from within – using the very tools developed by their brightest innovators to express that freedom.

Digitization and the world wide web, those promethean sparks of the late 20th century, are the principal vehicles for populist disruption. Yet even as Europe and the U.S. ponderously turn, like a pair of moribund wildebeest facing a pack of jackals, to impose governance on the 30-year-old internet, Web3 and artificial intelligence are set to whisk deliverance away. How can regulators, already neutered by transnational data flows, cope with a digital universe in which fake video and audio are indistinguishable from real clips, while being infinitely scalable and producible on a laptop?

“On the internet,” the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen said in a prescient jeremiad to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in 2019, “everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart resembles the BBC. The fictitious Protocols of the Elders of Zion look as valid as an ADL report. And the rantings of a lunatic seem as credible as the findings of a Nobel Prize winner. We have lost, it seems, a shared sense of the basic facts upon which democracy depends.”

The technology that many thought would democratize the world has been weaponized against democracy:

In April, 2021, the European External Action Service (EEAS), the foreign affairs department of the European Union, issued a report called Short Assessment of Narratives and Disinformation Around the COVID-19 Pandemic. The report, produced by the EEAS unit charged with countering disinformation, found that from December, 2020, through April, 2021 – with much of the world in lockdown and vaccines just beginning to emerge – Russian and Chinese information operations were in high gear.

Even as the two autocracies undertook an international campaign to promote their own COVID-19 vaccines – Sputnik V and Sinovac, respectively – they sought to “undermine trust in Western-made vaccines, EU institutions and Western/European vaccination strategies,” the EEAS report found. “Both Russia and China are using state-controlled media, networks of proxy media outlets and social media, including official diplomatic social media accounts, to achieve these goals.”

Further, it highlighted the ties between the far-right factions of the Russian Orthodox Christian Church, and far-right Christian Americans. In a 2019 paper for the Alliance for Securing Democracy, Laura Rosenberger and Thomas Morley explored how Russian links to global populist movements extend into France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands. “Russian military strategists see cyberwarfare not as a distinct, separate form of military operation but rather one that is integrated into other means of asymmetric warfare, such as disinformation,” they wrote.

This isn’t to say that every keyboard warrior who shares an anti-vaccine meme is a Russian agent. But it is to say that authoritarian regimes have a clear interest in seeing that meme shared – just as Vladimir Putin’s regime had a clear interest in seeing Donald Trump become leader of the free world in 2016.

The old saw -- caveat emptor -- still applies. Approach the internet carefully.

Image: AZ Quotes