Latest news with #StevenLevitsky
Asahi Shimbun
21-07-2025
- Politics
- Asahi Shimbun
VOX POPULI: Xenophobia gains ground in Upper House election
Some in the audience at a Tokyo rally of a party advocating tougher regulations against foreigners express opposition to racism on July 19. (Asahi Shimbun file photo) Front-page headlines in Japanese newspapers come in various forms. The more important or surprising the news, the more the headline shifts from the traditional vertical format (top to bottom, commonly used in most articles) to a bold horizontal layout (left to right). Major news stories also tend to use what is known as the 'beta-kuro shiro-nuki' format--white lettering set against a solid black background--stretching dramatically across the width of the page. In the latest Upper House election--where the ruling coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party and its junior partner, Komeito, suffered a stinging setback--the largest headline now looms high above this daily column, which appears regularly at the bottom of The Asahi Shimbun's front page. When Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba appeared on television on election day, July 20, his expression was more tense and rigid than ever. This seismic shift in Japan's political landscape may well go down as a moment of lasting historical significance. At the same time, I can't shake the feeling that another, more troubling shift has taken place, one quite different from the 'political upheaval' captured by the headline. It is the rise of xenophobia. I have never witnessed an election in which fear of foreigners was so openly inflamed, nor one where discriminatory rhetoric was voiced with such blatant ease. Democracy is governance through speech. For elections--the very foundation of democracy--to function properly, it is essential that policy debates be grounded in facts. Yet, despite repeated media fact-checks exposing falsehoods in the xenophobic statements made by a certain party's candidates and its leader, that very party has garnered a significant number of votes. What, then, lies ahead? If the party continues to take the same stance on issues concerning foreign nationals during Diet deliberations, I fear that its rhetoric--used to legitimize prejudice--will gain broader acceptance in society, bolstered by its growing political influence. In 'How Democracies Die,' Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt warn that the erosion of democracy often begins with language. 'The process often begins with words,' they write. Am I reading too much into this? I can only hope that someday people will look back and say with a laugh, 'You were worrying for nothing.' --The Asahi Shimbun, July 21 * * * Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.
Telegraph
10-07-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Europe is lurching towards tyranny
America, we are repeatedly warned, teeters on the edge of tyranny under Donald Trump. Commentators point to the 47th president's populist rhetoric, plans to purge the civil service, reliance on executive orders, and supposed defiance of judicial authority as existential threats to the American Republic. Scholars like Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority, argue that US democracy is sliding into authoritarianism. Academic David Driesen recently told The Guardian that Trump is attempting to turn the US into a dictatorship. The Left would like us to believe that Trump's attacks on 'fake news', and his particular disdain for the progressive media, signal the unravelling of free speech. The truth is that the American system is functioning well and as the Founders intended. Federal judges have challenged Trump at every turn, issuing countless rulings to block executive actions on immigration, federal funding, and workforce reductions. Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed, subjecting his policies to unprecedented scrutiny. Only recently has the Supreme Court, after careful deliberation, limited the use of universal injunctions. Far from presiding over a dictatorship, it's unlikely that any other US president has faced such a relentless judicial onslaught. Yes, Trump is using the executive powers of the presidency to push through change, but the separation of powers is also proving remarkably effective. Trump may have secured his 'Big, Beautiful Bill' through Congress, delivering extended tax cuts, increased defence spending, and immigration reforms. But these victories came at a cost: compromises on Social Security and healthcare funding. This is not tyranny – it's the messy process of American democracy at work. It is particularly galling to hear hysterical warnings about Trump's threat to democracy from Europeans. Many of them like to believe that their societies are uniquely civilised, champions of universal values in a world lurching towards authoritarianism. Have they not noticed what is happening within their own borders? Almost 40 years ago, when the Berlin Wall came down, it was a victory for the free world. America and western Europe – the West – had prevailed against the Soviet system. What is 'the West' today? It increasingly looks as if the freedoms that Europeans enjoyed since the end of the Second World War were really an aberration, a consequence of the victory of Anglo-American arms in 1945. Europe has begun to revert to a much more authoritarian tradition. Over the past decade, restrictive laws have tightened their grip on free expression. Germany's NetzDG has turned social media companies into an internet police force, adding to an existing culture of intolerance towards free speech. One journalist recently received a seven-month suspended sentence for a satirical meme. In France, platforms must remove 'hate speech' within 24 hours or face severe fines. The European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA) leans on online platforms to remove 'disinformation' – a term so vague it risks abuse. Claims about Covid-19's origins, once dismissed as misinformation, are now widely accepted. Yet the DSA empowers regulators to police speech with little real accountability. Having started to proscribe dissident opinions online, Europe may soon begin to take action against dissenting political parties. In Germany, there have been calls to ban the opposition party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), making perverse use of a law designed to defend democracy. But it is in Britain – which produced the original Bill of Rights – where the clampdown of free speech has perhaps been most alarming. The British police arrested an estimated 12,183 people in 2023 under laws that, among other things, target 'grossly offensive' messages. That is about 33 arrests each day in the land of Magna Carta. Perhaps the most infamous case of someone being locked up for what they said online is Lucy Connolly, an ordinary mother, sentenced to more than two years in prison for one horrible social media post. Nobody can credibly claim that she poses any threat to the public. Connolly presumably pleaded guilty on the understanding that she would be treated more leniently. Leniency is the last thing she received. Instead, the authorities seem to have made an example of her, to quell rising anti-immigration sentiment amid fears of public unrest. This is not justice – it's punishment for dissent. A society that tolerates such verdicts cannot call itself free. Progressives like to decry Donald Trump's supposed threat to judicial independence, yet US federal judges have repeatedly checked his decisions. In Britain, however, the judiciary increasingly appears to be an arm of the state, not a restraint upon it. For years, defenders of judicial oversight in Britain argued that courts reviewing executive actions would protect individual rights. Incorporating the European Convention on Human Rights into British law was hailed as a bulwark for liberty. Yet these safeguards have failed to prevent citizens like Lucy Connolly from being imprisoned for an inflammatory online post. Far from defending freedom, Britain's courts seem complicit in eroding it. If progressives really want to stop a free society that is descending into tyranny, forget about Donald Trump. The Supreme Court, Congress and the Constitution have him covered. No, the real story of emerging tyranny is happening on the other side of the Atlantic.
Los Angeles Times
25-06-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
How conflict with Iran could supercharge Trump's domestic agenda
A tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Iran has slightly dampened the threat that the United States could be further dragged into an international conflict. But many Americans are approaching the Fourth of July with a sense of trepidation if not outright fear — that such a war could still be on the horizon and that there is currently an increased risk of a terrorist attack in America because of it. For so many reasons, we are a nation on edge. Which is why we have to be careful to not allow our fears to overtake our commitment to civil rights. 'Autocrats almost always use emergencies, sometimes real ones, sometimes exaggerated ones, and sometimes invented ones ... to accumulate power,' said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University and author of 'How Democracies Die.' None of the political experts I spoke with in past days said they thought President Trump planned the Iran bombing for his domestic agenda — that would be really extreme. But most shared Levitsky's concern that it is in moments of anxiety, when society is apprehensive of external threats, that authoritarians find the most fertile ground for increasing their domestic power — because too often, people willingly give up freedoms in exchange for perceived safety. Hiroshi Motomura, a UCLA law professor who advised the Obama-Biden transition team on immigration policy, said that trade-off means 'the situation with Iran and Trump's immigration policy are very closely intertwined.' No place is more likely to see that intersection of international and domestic policy more bluntly than California, and Los Angeles in particular. Los Angeles is a 'test case,' Brad Jones told me, where the Trump administration is already pushing to see how far it can go. He's a political science professor at UC Davis. 'This is a very opportunistic presidency, and any opportunity that they can use to forward their immigration agenda, I think they'll take full advantage of it,' Jones said. We already have the Marines and National Guard on the streets, and under federal control, supposedly because Los Angeles is in the grip of violent chaos. Although Angelenos know this is ridiculous, the courts have, for now, sided with Trump that this deployment of troops on U.S. soil is within his power. And much of America, inundated with right-wing versions of current immigration protests, is seeing on a daily basis a narrative of lawlessness that seems to justify Trump's crackdowns — including the arrest or detention of Democratic lawmakers. Benjamin Radd is a professor at UCLA, an expert on Iran and a senior fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations. He was featured in the documentary 'War Game' last year about how a military insurgency could play out in the United States. Not long ago — before the National Guard was deployed in L.A. against the will of Gov. Gavin Newsom — Radd was hired by a veterans group, which he declined to identify, to game out what would happen if Trump federalized the National Guard against the will of governors and turned them on the American public. 'And lo and behold, here we are now,' Radd said. In his simulation, the pretend Trump didn't invoke the Insurrection Act, a law that could further a president's ability to deploy the military within the United States. But in the real world, it's a concern that Trump would — either because of a genuine threat, or a Trumped-up one. Rudd said that would be a 'big red line.' 'I'm waiting to see if this Donald Trump will actually do that, because invoking the act will be able to give him more of those emergency powers that right now are being stymied at the courts,' he said. Los Angeles, Rudd points out, is home to a large community of Iranian Americans, of which he is a member. It's not a huge stretch of the imagination to dream up a scenario in which the government sees this community as a potential threat if the conflict in the Middle East continues, as Japanese Americans were once viewed as a threat during World War II. Rudd said he didn't see the likelihood of a mass internment, but pointed out that the government has already detained and deported students speaking out on the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza. 'Who gets swept up in that when you're dealing with ethically diverse metropolises like Los Angeles that have a complex background and mix of people?' he asks. Already, the administration has announced the arrests of 11 undocumented Iranians across the U.S. in the last few days. 'We have been saying we are getting the worst of the worst out — and we are,' Homeland Security Department Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. 'We don't wait until a military operation to execute; we proactively deliver on President Trump's mandate to secure the homeland.' Trump's 'entire playbook on immigration has been to characterize immigration as invasion and immigrants as invaders,' Motomura said. 'Having a military conflict with Iran allows Trump to link any actions by Iran or its proxies as further evidence of invasion ... and as even further proof that he must take drastic emergency measures against foes both domestic and foreign.' Levitsky said that the 'Trump administration is clearly learning how useful it is' to portray immigration as a national security emergency. He points out that the deportations of Venezuelans to El Salvador this year was supposedly necessary because it was depicted as an attack on America by members of the Tren de Aragua gang, although there was little evidence of such a planned incursion. But the narrative of immigration as a foreign offensive has stuck — remember when 'shithole countries' were supposedly purposefully emptying prisons and mental hospitals to send murderers and rapists to the U.S.? And so many people accepted whatever erosion of rights these deportations meant in exchange for the perception of living in safer communities — never mind that the reality is that most of those now trapped in that Salvadoran prison are not violent criminals. Success with that tactic has left the administration increasingly eager to capitalize on fearmongering and 'looking for ways to use language like insurgency or emergency that frees it from from legal constraints,' Levitsky said. 'And war is a great way to do it.' Jones warned that even just stoking concerns that 'there's cells or there's people on the inside' wishing to do us harm could be justification enough for more disintegration of rights. Although all of that sounds dire, it's important to remember that it hasn't happened yet, and it may never happen. And if it does, it does not mean there's no recourse to protect our civil rights — the people still have power. 'There isn't a single strategy, a single slogan, a single movement, a single group, a single leader, a single protest,' Levitsky said. 'There are literally 1,000 different ways for people to express their opposition to what's going on, and what's important is that Americans engage.' Part of that engagement is accepting that democracy is not a given, and that American democracy holds no special powers to survive, he said. 'Frankly, that's why we're losing our democracy,' Levitsky said. 'Brazilians don't have this problem. South Koreans do not have this problem. ... Germans don't have this problem. People in Spain don't have this problem. Chileans, Argentinians do not have this problem. 'All those societies have a collective memory of authoritarianism. All those societies know what it means to lose a democracy,' he said. 'Americans don't have an idea.' Our greatest threat right now isn't Trump or what he may or may not do. It's our inability to believe that authoritarianism really is creeping up on us, that it could happen here. And that all it might take is denial with a chaser of fear to topple a democracy that once felt unbreakable.
The Guardian
19-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘He's moving at a truly alarming speed': Trump propels US into authoritarianism
It reads like a checklist of milestones on the road to autocracy. A succession of opposition politicians, including Alex Padilla, a US senator, are handcuffed and arrested by heavy-handed law enforcement for little more than questioning authority or voicing dissent. A judge is arrested in her own courthouse and charged with helping a defendant evade arrest. Masked snatch squads arrest and spirit people away in public in what seem to be consciously intimidating scenes. The president deploys the military on a dubious legal premise to confront protesters contesting his mass roundups of undocumented migrants. A senior presidential aide announces that habeas corpus – a vital legal defence for detainees – could be suspended. The sobering catalogue reflects the actions not of an entrenched dictatorship, but of Donald Trump's administration as the president's sternest critics struggle to process what they say has been a much swifter descent into authoritarianism than they imagined even a few weeks ago. 'Trump is throwing authoritarian punches at a much greater rate than any of these other cases in their first year in power,' said Steven Levitsky, Harvard political scientist and author, with Daniel Ziblatt, of How Democracies Die. 'But we don't yet know how many of those punches will land or how society will respond.' Five months after Trump's inauguration, seasoned analysts with years of studying one-time stable democracies degenerating into autocracies are voicing alarm at the speed of the Trump administration's authoritarian assault on institutions and constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of expression. They are unnerved by the deployment of masked Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (Ice) agents – dressed in plain clothes and without identifying official insignia – to arrest people on the streets for deportation, a tactic critics say is evocative of dictatorships and designed to provoke fear among the general population. Some voice doubts about the judiciary's capacity to act as a democratic safeguard, despite a wave of legal challenges to the president's executive orders. They cite the 6-3 conservative majority of the US supreme court, which has a history of issuing rulings friendly to the president, who appointed three of its justices to the bench during his first administration. Trump has tried to propel the US in an authoritarian direction with greater intensity than noted autocrats like the late Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, or Viktor Orbán, Hungary's prime minister, according to Levitsky. Eric Rubin, a former US ambassador to Bulgaria and acting ambassador to Moscow, said Trump was outpacing Vladimir Putin, the Russia president for whom he had often voiced admiration. 'This is going faster than Putin even came close to going in terms of gradually eliminating democratic institutions and democratic freedoms,' said Rubin, who witnessed Putin's early years in power at close quarters. 'It took him years. We're not even looking at six months here.' Bright Line Watch, a survey of political scientists, recently gave the US a score of 53 – the lowest since it started collecting data in 2017 – on a spectrum ranging from 0 for total dictatorship to 100, denoting a perfect democracy, according to Brendan Nyhan, a professor at Dartmouth College, one of the institutions conducting the study. Academics commissioned said they expected the country to fall further, forecasting a score of 48 by 2027. 'We're in the range of countries like Brazil and Israel, but well above countries like Russia,' said Nyhan. 'I do expect things to get worse. The potential for further democratic erosion is very real.' Key to whether Trump can tilt America decisively into authoritarianism will be his efforts to assert control over the armed forces, argued Levitsky. 'Trump's ramping up of the effort to politicize the military can still go in multiple directions,' he said. 'It could be really ugly and bad, because the only way that you can get from where we are to real authoritarianism like Nicaragua or Venezuela or Russia is if Trump has the military and security forces on his side, and he's taken steps in that direction.' Padilla's manhandling – after he tried to question homeland security secretary Kristi Noem at a news conference – drew fierce scrutiny. It took place against a backdrop of Trump's deployment of 4,000 national guard troops on to the streets of Los Angeles, later augmented by 700 active marines, against demonstrators protesting against the administration's anti-migrant crackdown, who did not appear to be present an undue challenge to local law enforcement authorities. The decisions took place against the opposition of California's governor, Gavin Newsom, who would normally be empowered to deploy the national guard in the state but whose role Trump usurped as he sought to make an example of a state with a large immigrant population and whose Democratic stranglehold he wishes to break. The deployments, denounced by opponents as an attempt to foment violent confrontation, took place in the run-up to a military parade staged in Washington last Saturday. Ostensibly held to honor the US army's 250th anniversary, the event was held – perhaps not coincidentally – on the president's 79th birthday. Opponents said it was redolent of autocracies like China, North Korea and Russia and reflected a desire by Trump to turn the military into his personal tool. Amid speculation that the parade might be disrupted by an anti-Trump No Kings protest on the same day, the president threatened to use 'very big force' against demonstrators, in apparent contradiction of the US's tradition of tolerance of peaceful dissent. In the event, no clashes between government forces and protesters were reported at the Washington parade on a day when an estimated 5 million demonstrators turned out at 2,100 locations across the US, according to organizers. However, there were sporadic reports of violence elsewhere; in northern Virginia, a man drove his car through a crowd of No Kings protesters, striking one, in what police said was an intentional act. But in a much worse portent for democracy on the same day, Melissa Hortman, a Democratic state legislator in Minnesota, was shot dead at her home along with her husband Mark in what was called a targeted political assassination allegedly carried out by 57-year-old Vance Boelter, whose friends say was a Christian nationalist Trump supporter. Boelter, who is now in police custody, is suspected of then shooting and wounding another politician, John Hoffman – a Democratic member of the Minnesota senate – and his wife, Yvette. He is said to have had a list with more than 45 targets, all of them Democrats, at the time of his arrest. Rubin said the shootings created a climate of fear comparable to that of Weimar Germany before the rise of Hitler. 'Fear is powerful and pernicious,' he said. 'People won't be willing to to be candidates for these positions because they're afraid. The general public is intimidated. I'm somewhat intimidated. 'You can say passivity is immoral in the face of evil, that it is complicity, all the things that were said about Nazi Germany. Well, it's easy to say that. In Nazi Germany, there were some courageous people, but not very many, because they were afraid.' Equally significant, analysts say, is the Trump administration's efforts to expand the legal boundaries of the president's powers – the fate of which will be decided by the supreme court, which issued a ruling last year that effectively granted Trump vast prosecutorial immunity for acts committed in office. 'Has Trump solidified his power? Have we reached a point where we have an out-of-control president who controls all the institutions? No, but we're at the 11th hour,' said Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociology and international affairs professor at Princeton University. 'He's moving at a truly alarming speed and pressing all the authoritarian buttons. We're a few supreme court decisions away from having a president we can't get rid of.' Trump's national guard deployments in Los Angeles may have been aimed at establishing a legal precedent enabling him to deploy troops at will when state authorities tried to defy him. 'He wants to establish that he can disable the governors from fighting back against him [by using] military force,' Scheppele said. 'The Los Angeles deployment was perceived as an escalation but in reality, the military haven't done that much. However, there's a legal infrastructure underneath it all that's scarier.' Levitsky, said the administration – spearheaded by Stephen Miler, the powerful White House deputy chief of staff – had adopted a practice of declaring emergencies to acquire potentially dictatorial powers. 'In the US constitution, almost every existing constraint on executive power can be circumvented in a state of emergency,' he said. 'And it's becoming clear that the administration is learning that emergencies are the easiest route to circumvent the law and not be blocked by the courts. The supreme court is very reluctant to say, 'No, that's not an emergency, Trump, you lied. You made that up.' It's sort of a free pass for circumventing the rule of law.' The White House used economic emergency legislation to impose sweeping trade tariffs, while invoking the 1798 Alien and Sedition Act, passed in anticipation of a war with France, to justify summarily deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members. Miller repeatedly called last week's protests in Los Angeles an 'insurrection', implicitly justifying the invocation of the Insurrection Act, which enables a president to use military forces to quash a rebellion on US soil. Writing in the Atlantic, David Frum, an anti-Trump conservative commentator, warned that the penchant for emergencies could be applied to next year's congressional elections, when the Democrats hope to regain control of the House of Representatives, an outcome that could curtail his authoritarian power grab. 'Trump knows full well that the midterms are coming. He is worried,' Frum wrote. 'He might already be testing ways to protect himself that could end in subverting those elections' integrity. So far, the results must be gratifying to him – and deeply ominous to anyone who hopes to preserve free and fair elections in the United States under this corrupt, authoritarian, and lawless presidency.' Even if Trump were to suffer an election reverse, his ability to wreak further havoc will remain, Nyhan warned, simply because Senate Republicans are unlikely to vote in sufficient numbers to remove him from office in the event of him being impeached by a Democratic-controlled House. 'The Founding Fathers anticipated Trump precisely,' he said, referring to the constitutional provision to try and remove a president and other officials for 'high crimes and misdemeanors'. 'It was just assumed that Congress will jealously guard its prerogatives and impeach and remove any president who exceeded the boundaries of the constitution. But in our current political system, that is a seemingly impossible task. 'So we face the prospect of a lawless authoritarian continuing to act for the next three and a half years, and there's a great deal of damage he can do in that time.'
CNN
31-05-2025
- General
- CNN
Unpacking Trump's Targeting of Universities & Foreign Students - Amanpour - Podcast on CNN Audio
Unpacking Trump's Targeting of Universities & Foreign Students Amanpour 42 mins As President Trump and his allies escalate the administration's battle on colleges, and on Harvard specifically, Steven Levitsky, Harvard professor and author of 'How Democracies Die,' joins Christiane to discuss the reshaping of knowledge in America. Then, best-selling German author Daniel Kehlmann speaks with Christiane about his new book 'The Director," exploring what it was like for artists like G.W. Pabst who made films for Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis. Marking 600 days of war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, Christiane highlights both Jeremy Diamond's report on Israel's fight to get back the 58 remaining hostages in Hamas captivity and Oren Lieberman's story on the chaotic aid delivery to starving Palestinians this week. Christiane also talks to Wilfred Frost, son of the legendary TV host David Frost, about his father's iconic interviews with the likes of Richard Nixon, Yasser Arafat and Elton John, and a new documentary series following his storied career. From her archive, Christiane pays tribute to award-winning Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. Finally, marking 45 years since CNN's founding, Christiane revisits her conversation with company founder Ted Turner about how he changed the news business forever.
