Democracy is messy and inefficient…
Ah…the benefits of working with a fab team and having brainy friends- the free flow of ideas as we duke out the BIG ISSUES. It’s a real trip but it means my cognitive and emotional biases are embarrassingly unearthed, forcing me to face the intellectual demons as they crop up. More research…more caffè…and then some more caffè.
This week was equally challenging and worrying…
Heading over to Belarus and Russia, the protests might be for naught if the leaders there don’t adopt a clear strategy going forward, and the West doesn’t hit Putin and Lukashenko and their cronies hard where it definitively hurts-in their financial balls. As I’m sitting writing all these thoughts, Alexei Nalvalny’s sham trial is underway, and we’re all pretty sure about the outcome.
In carefree Italy, we’re living yet another parliamentary crisis (yes…ANOTHER ONE…come join the party) because our Prime Minister is absolutely inept and must be replaced. At the time of this writing, it seems that person may be Mario Draghi, who was the ex-Pres of the European Central Bank and navigated the 2008 crash for Europe. He’s very well-respected in the mainstream party factions and abroad: cross-fingers.
In the theatre of the absurd across the pond, the Republican Party seems to be eating their own, AND if that wasn’t enough, there was a coup in Myanmar at the hands of the military. They didn’t agree with the election results, so they’ve decided to detain Aung San Suu Kyi and other politicians for a year, so they say. Given the news of Chinese investments in Myanmar announced yesterday, there’s more to look into here. I’ll stop now since I think I’ve depressed you enough.
You get it: the world seems to be falling apart, and democracy is suffering and in desperate need of a face-lift.
After a light volley of ping pong messages between Davide and I on this sorry state of affairs, he hit me with a simple question, getting to the heart of the issue: how can we make democracy more efficient?
Efficient? Democracy is anything but efficient: it’s messy with all those dissenting voices, hard work and slow and sluggish going. “It's democracy’s biggest flaw,” Davide said, “It leads people to extremism, because things take forever to get done. The slower the impact on voters lives, the weaker democracy is.” In other words, democracy is a 2-door Fiat Panda to authoritarianism’s Tesla Long Range AWD- fast, sleek, efficient. This said, neither Davide nor I are in any way saying that it’s time to pack up and move to St Petersburg: what we’re really asking ourselves is how can we improve the way democracy works? How can we get to where we need to be to face the great challenges that lie ahead?
How many times have you heard that? The ‘challenges that lie ahead’? We almost don’t pay attention anymore when politicians or experts say it because as things stand in our pandemic existence, something simple, like getting to the supermarket, is cause for spreadsheets, planning and strategizing. Luckily, there are experts out there who are paying attention to those issues, and if I were to lump them together, I would say they focus on security.
In the last podcast, MP Alyn Smith brought up the climate chaos that will befall us if we don’t take those important steps in transitioning to cleaner energy sources. With a rise in global temperatures, we’ve witnessed desertification in areas like the sub-Sahara, leading to lower crop yields. The world’s poorest areas would be forced to migrate to find food if the trend continues to worsen. What would happen if those numbers increased exponentially due to food shortages? How many countries would be willing to take in these migrants and asylum-seekers? How many populist politicians would use this pretext to increase their own power at home?
I’m not proud of how Europe has been handling this issue. Migrants suffer two fates simultaneously: some fall into the trap of clandestine labour, living in inhumane conditions, and then, they get used by xenophobic populist policians looking for easy scapegoats for their poor governance and lack of feasible proposals. Without the appropriate tools for integration in states like Italy, for example, in all likelihood, we could see an increase in more xenophobic, populist political expressions.
Another area of concern when it comes to security issues is the growing strength and predominance of authoritarian regimes like China. While we sit and bicker about the vaccine rollout and how best to do it, China is forging ahead in research and development in AI, tech development and bio-med weapons of warfare, and from what we know, they seem to be developing them based on the biometric data gathered from the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in the concentration camps. Not only are they violating a whole range of human rights in their concentration camps, but if confirmed by observers, these are bio-weapons that could be used against adversaries. This is a security issue a tout court. How long can the West afford to close its eyes to these unethical practices and potential security threat?
Most foreign policy analysts are paying close attention to China now, and I’ll be getting into greater detail on this particular issue with Claire Berlinski and Vivek Kelkar, of The Cosmopolitan Globalists- a growing group of international experts from various fields of study and experience. I’ll put China on the back burner just for now, and turn back towards what we’re doing here at home.
My overarching fear is that we’re currently fighting the virus and we’re not fairing very well at all. It’s a real threat to our security: health, economies, intellectual endeavour, and social relationships. In a fascinating article by Michele Gelfand on ‘loose’ and ‘tight’ societies and how they dealt with the pandemic, she reveals that
[r]elative to the US, the UK, Isreal, Spain and Italy, countries like Singapore, Japan, China and Austria have been shown to be much tighter. These differences aren’t random. Research in both nation-states and small-scale societies has shown that communities with histories of chronic threat- whether natural disasters, infectious diseases, famines or invasions- develop stricter rules that ensure order and cohesion. It makes good evolutionary sense: following rules helps us survive chaos and crisis. On the flipside, looser groups that have faced fewer threats can afford to be more permissive.
When it came to the pandemic, in those ‘loose societies’ like those noted above
reality never bit in these populations in part because people in cultures that are adapted to low levels of danger didn’t respond as swiftly to the ‘threat signal’ embodied by the pandemic when it came.
If we’re botching up our response to the pandemic, how can we face other more serious threats in the future? What will happen when our societies are overwhelmed by climate chaos or any of the other disasters that our governments are going to have to manage? The way I see it, we haven’t even started with the serious stuff yet. The pandemic was merely a dress rehearsal, and our governments failed miserably: it’s time to get our houses in order. We really need to hone in on what will impact us in the future, and shore up precious intellectual and social resources. It may also entail going back to the basics in politics, which is what I did.
Not long ago, I participated in a ‘democracy challenge’, organised and promoted by the Renew Democracy Initiative group in the States. I answered the question: what does democracy mean to me? Along with RDI’s president Garry Kasparov, there is an impressive number of experts, scholars, politicians and people from all walks of life, bringing RDI’s mission to the public awareness: promoting liberal democracy across the world and that’s the focus of my chat with Uriel Epshtein.
The challenge forced me to think about my role as a citizen and that of our representatives. It also served as an inspiration for what I wanted to talk about this week: what does democracy mean to us? It’s a simple question, but when you sit and ponder it, all sorts of issues come to mind. What are the principles I believe in? What are the tools of democracy at my disposal and for our representatives? If there’s a cause I feel strongly about and impacts our collective life, how can I play a more active role in supporting it? Getting back to Davide’s original question: how can we improve on our democratic system?
I mentioned some threats that come from beyond our borders, but maybe we should be paying more attention to the ones that are closer to home. Going back to the discussion I had with Dr Emma Briant, we talked about the role the global influence industry was playing in our domestic politics to change our perception of events or threats and manipulate public consensus. I then need to ask: is our press truly free?
The most infuriating discussion I’ve read lately was on whether social media platforms should have banned Trump. What I learned from Dr Briant was that when you get to the de-platforming stage, it’s already too late: de-platforming is like applying a plaster to an amputated limb. Our governments need to establish standards in terms of data procurement and management.
There is no question of how much the information environment is impacting the processes of our democracies: the Jan 6th Coup is evidential of how extremism can be nurtured through influence campaigns. Besides the steps that can be taken through standardisation and compliance, what do we do on the ground once people have been radicalised? How do we stem the expressions of populism and extremism in our cultures and try to get back to a constructive dialogue between such polarised factions?
To answer some these questions, I’ll be chatting with Marco Cappato, director of the Luca Coscioni Association, Uriel Epshtein, spokesman for the pod, from the Renew Democracy Initiative and Samantha Kutner, ethno-graphic researcher on radicalisation vectors of extremist groups and expert on the Proud Boys at the University of Nevada.
I’d been following Samantha’s work for some time, so I didn’t ask her for a chat because the Proud Boys were front and centre in the shocking coup attempt on the Capitol. For those of you that have been listeners since the beginning, I was following a disturbing trend in our societies and dedicated two episodes entitled Blind Rage to it- the growth of far-right extremist groups.
While we’re curious about the details of their operations, and on the processes involved in their recruitment and training, I would like to widen the scope of our discussion to include an issue that encompasses not only the Proud Boys, but goes to the heart of extremism: the process of radicalisation. Samantha is an expert in this field, and if we’re to curb this disturbing trend in our society, we need to know what we should be looking for in the behaviour of our younger members, and not only.
Another area I’d like to dive into with Samantha is the increasingly international nature of far-right extremist groups. Canada banned four “ideologically motivated violent extremist” groups on Feb 3rd: Atomwaffen Division, Russian Imperial Movement, Proud Boys and The Base. Other scholars and activists like Julia Ebner, Christian Picciolini and Bjorn Ihler have written about these transnational relationships, so I’m looking forward to asking Samantha about them.
Samantha is the author of:
“Swiping Right: The Allure of Hyper Masculinity and Cryptofascism for Men Who Join the Proud Boys,” International Centre for Counter Terrorism, The Hague, May 2020
Samantha’s work has been published by Georgetown University’s Journal of International Affairs, and referenced in articles in Rolling Stone Magazine, the New York Times, the Daily Beast and about a dozen other publications.
She is also research fellow at the Khalifa Ihler Institute.
Marco Cappato: “Good Trouble” by Davide Cortese
Marco Cappato is a former member of both the Italian and the European parliaments, and participated in the Foreign Affairs, the Civil Liberties and Human Rights Committees. After graduating from La Bocconi in economics, he became an active member of the Radical Party, and has since dedicated all his expertise to civil rights movements.
His battles against generalized digital surveillance for data and privacy protection earned him the "European of the Year" award from the "European Voice" weekly, and the "Politician of the Year" Award from "Wired."
Cappato has often used non-violent activism to promote change- what Rep John Lewis used to call "good trouble.” Through civil disobedience, hunger strikes and peaceful protests, Cappato always worked on the frontline to help bring change where change was needed, often incurring personal risks himself. For example, he fought for LGBTI rights in Russia, against light drugs criminalization or bans in Italy, the UK and Netherlands, against censorship in Belgium, for the Rule of Law in Poland and, last but not least, to legalize euthanasia in Italy.
Cappato joined the Luca Coscioni Association back in 2004. The Luca Coscioni Association (LCA) is a non-profit civil liberties association founded in 2002 by Luca Coscioni, an economist and politician affected by Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (AKA Lou Gehrig's disease). The association is active in the context of laws and policies related to science (i.e. research on embryonic stem cells and in vitro fertilization) and self-determination, like the right to die. In unison with LCA, Cappato has been fighting a battle to legalize euthanasia in Italy for over 15 years now. He was able to bring this issue to the forefront of Italian politics in September 2006 when he helped Radical activist Piergiorgio Welby to bring his request for the constitutional right to self-determination to the President of the Italian Republic: Welby wanted to suspend the vital treatment keeping him artificially alive.
Along with civil liberties battles, Cappato has also tried to sensitize the public on the issue of the climate crisis by launching the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), "Stop Global Warming" in 2002. I’ll be asking Cappato to expand on the proposals to disincentivize the use of fossil fuels in the EU and EU trading partners in our chat.
Marco Cappato is the author of:
“Scientific Freedom” (co-author S. Giordano, J Coggan) Bloomsbury, 2012
“Credere, disobbedire, combattere: Come liberarci dalle proibizioni per migliorare la nostra vita,” (Rizzoli) 2017
“Fra scienza e politica: il difficile cammino della libertà di ricerca,” (Carocci) 2015
Red Square, Moscow 18:30 GMT Feb 2, 2021
What I’m reading…
Elsa B Kania, Wilson Vorndick, “Weaponizing Biotech: How China's Military Is Preparing for a 'New Domain of Warfare,' Defense One, Aug 14, 2019
A Cosmopolitan Symposium, “What happens when the United States is Number Two?” The Cosmopolitan Globalists on Substack, Feb 2, 2021
Edward Lucas, “Lonely at the Top,” CEPA, Feb 1, 2021
The Tools of Democracy Series
Up-coming CTP pods
Feb 5: Marco Cappato
Feb 10: Uriel Epshtein
Feb 15: Samantha Kutner
Feel free to comment or DM me on Twitter @MoniqueCamarra or email: coffeetalkpolitics@gmail.com
Many thanks to Davide for the morning run-down and analysis.
And to everyone out there who manages to get through Notes, many warm thanks!
Cheers, Mo