Citizen Cartwright

A hopeful look at democracy

“Democracy is not facing a global extinction event” headlines a New York Times opinion article by longtime Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs reporter Serge Schmemann, who currently is a member of the Times editorial board.

“The election of Donald Trump and news of political turmoil in many other democracies has created the impression that liberal democracy is everywhere in retreat in the face of authoritarians feeding on discontent over economic woes, rapid social change, mass migration, disinformation and general malaise,” Schmemann says.

“But as The Times’s Berlin bureau chief Jim Tankersley suggested in a recent analysis of Germany’s plight, 'not all malaise is the same.' Popular discontent in Western democracies may have broadly similar sources, but the political consequences are as different as the leaders and systems in each country.” 

“Scanning the global political storms separately reveals their unique characteristics and challenges, and the way many are rooted more in a backlash against incumbent leaders than in a new embrace of the far right,” Schmemann says. 

And “the history of the United States — the lodestar of modern democracies — is hardly one of unity and harmony until the rise of Trumpism,” he says.

“That the threats to democracy are diverse may not be a great consolation to those worried about where it is headed, and there’s every reason to remain vigilant,” Schmemann says. “But it should be reassuring that democracy is not facing a global extinction event but more a patchwork of storms, and that democracies have usually found a way to weather them.”

Good news in 2024

Fix the News’ year-end roundup has 86 examples of good news in global health, conservation, living standards, energy, human rights, and science and tech.

 

No matter how busy you may be, I hope you’ll at least have time to scroll through this issue to experience the abundance of good will and good work that’s improving the lives of our human family in so many ways.

Thank you, Jimmy Carter

Today is the national day of mourning for the former president.

 

It’s been very touching for me to work on this blog in the middle of the night while watching BBC News’ live coverage of people filing past Carter’s casket as he lies in state at the U.S. Capitol.

 

In the BBC audio that’s looping are comments by Carter’s grandson, Jason, who talks about Carter’s “foundational respect for human beings” and his value of democracy and common humanity in pursuit of shared goals. 

 

The lying in state ends at 7 a.m., and the national funeral service at the Washington National Cathedral is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. 

 

President Biden is to delivery the eulogy. All of the living presidents are expected to attend.

 

“President Jimmy Carter had no idea what he was going to do next when he delivered his farewell address to the nation in January 1981,” says The New York Times. "Defeated after a single term by Ronald Reagan, he simply told Americans that he would leave the White House and 'take up once more the only title in our democracy superior to that of president — the title of citizen.’”

 

“There is little question among historians that Citizen Carter carved a new mold for life after the Oval Office and that his post-presidency was the most consequential in modern history,” the Times says.

 

A Times editorial published when Carter died on Dec. 29 is headlined, “America needs more Jimmy Carters.”

 

“Up to now, Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday at age 100 in Plains, Ga., has been judged to be a middle-of-the-pack president, his one term in office remembered for circumstances and events that simply overwhelmed him: the seizure in Iran of 52 American hostages, the bungled attempt to rescue them, the gasoline lines, inflation, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

 

“Yet he is also considered one of America’s greatest ex-presidents, for using the residual star power of his office to help his successors and his country as a peacemaker, backstage diplomat, human rights champion, monitor of free elections and advocate for the homeless while finding time to write poetry and, by his own example, providing the best possible case for traditional religious values.

 

“In 2002, having been nominated many times for the Nobel Peace Prize, Mr. Carter finally won it for his 'vital contribution' to the Camp David agreement, which set the stage for peace between Israel and Egypt, as well as for his commitment to human rights, his work fighting tropical diseases and for furthering democracy everywhere.

“His life offers countless lessons for leaders everywhere.”

 

“Compared with Mr. Carter, most former presidents struggled to use their stature for the common weal. Most wrote memoirs. Some disappeared into private life; some set up foundations; some went around collecting large sums for speaking. Mr. Carter took risks and played crucial roles as an honest broker in nuclear talks with North Korea and in civil conflicts on the continent of Africa and in the Middle East.

“He described his second career as 'waging peace.' That work remains far from finished, and it remains for those who admired Mr. Carter to continue.”

 

Here is how to watch and stream the funeral, from USA Today. 

Beginning 2025 with gladness

Blogger Maria Popova has put together “a little reservoir of gladness” to start the year.

 

Among her “gladnesses”:

 

“Bless chance for how, across the billions upon billions of tiny and terrific events stretching all the way back to the first particle collisions in the first stars, events each one of which could have gone differently, it sang the bright clear note of you over the din of otherwise.”

 

And “Bless knowledge, all the species of it — how the small black seed knows to break into the Fibonacci spiral of a sunflower, how we know that when the house burns down and the tyrant takes office and the toe pokes through the last good sock, we still have each other.”

Hope

Researchers, nonprofit leaders and other experts shared what keeps them optimistic about a better future for American society in an article published after the election by The Greater Good Science Center at the University of California at Berkeley.

 

The article isn’t password protected, so I won't try to summarize it for you.

Paul Krugman’s final NYTimes column, on ‘finding hope in an age of resentment’

The Nobel-prize-winning economist and author of 27 books, who’s retiring from The New York Times, reflects on what's changed since he began writing his opinion column in 2000. 

 

“What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. And I’m not just talking about members of the working class who feel betrayed by elites; some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now — people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the incoming Trump administration — are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired.”

 

“Why did this optimism curdle? As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest.”

 

For example, “the financial crisis of 2008 undermined any faith the public had that governments knew how to manage economies.”

 

“And it wasn’t that long ago that technology billionaires were widely admired across the political spectrum, some achieving folk-hero status. But now they and some of their products face disillusionment and worse; Australia has even banned social media use by children under 16.”

 

“These days there has been a lot of discussion of the hard right turn of some tech billionaires, from Elon Musk on down. I’d argue that we shouldn’t overthink it, and we especially shouldn’t try to say that this is somehow the fault of politically correct liberals. Basically it comes down to the pettiness of plutocrats who used to bask in public approval and are now discovering that all the money in the world can’t buy you love.

 

“So is there a way out of the grim place we’re in? What I believe is that while resentment can put bad people in power, in the long run it can’t keep them there. At some point the public will realize that most politicians railing against elites actually are elites in every sense that matters and start to hold them accountable for their failure to deliver on their promises. And at that point the public may be willing to listen to people who don’t try to argue from authority, don’t make false promises, but do try to tell the truth as best they can.

 

“We may never recover the kind of faith in our leaders — belief that people in power generally tell the truth and know what they’re doing — that we used to have. Nor should we. But if we stand up to the kakistocracy — rule by the worst — that’s emerging as we speak, we may eventually find our way back to a better world.”

Grateful

This Thanksgiving, as always, I’m grateful for you, dear readers.

 

And, as I’ve said before, I’m specifically grateful to the reader who alerted us to the good news aggregators at Australia’s Fix the News.

 

Fix the News founder Angus Hervey, who grew up in apartheid South Africa, wrote in a long essay in response to our U.S. election results, which I ran on Nov. 15:

 

"For the first time since I can remember, I'm not sure the good guys are going to win.

 

"I find myself returning to the lessons of South Africa. That change happened, not because it was inevitable, but because people made it inevitable. Each step forward mattered and people kept on believing in the right thing, even when that belief seemed foolish. In the end the impossible happened not because history ordained it, but because ordinary people kept pushing against the darkness until finally, impossibly, the light broke through.”

 

He said Fix the News will be writing “stories about how progress happens not through some invisible hand of history, but through the visible hands of people who refuse to give up on it.”

 

I emailed Hervey to let him know how much his work means to us here, while, as he put it in his essay, "every media outlet in the world” is "shrieking about Trump,” one way or the other.

 

He emailed back saying he appreciates the encouragement he’s gotten in response to his essay and that he’s feeling "more resolute than ever about the mission of Fix the News.”

 

As Stephen Hawking said, “We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star.” And blogger Maria Popova pointed out that we’re early in our evolution, so it’s to be expected that we mess things up a lot.

 

I’m grateful for the feeling of belonging and empowerment I get from our global connection to Hervey and others as we all stumble forward as best we can.

Applebaum on what citizens who care about U.S. democracy can do

Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum, whose new book is titled “Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World,” discusses ways to think about autocracy and authoritarianism in a second Trump term with Ezra Klein on his New York Times podcast.

 

In response to Klein’s question on what members of the public can do, Applebaum says:

 

"The worst result or the worst consequence of this kind of government, if that’s what we’re going to have, and of course we still don’t know yet, is that people become apathetic. They say: This is all so overwhelming, it’s so huge. I don’t even know what’s true and what’s not true anymore, and I’m just going to stay home.

"Try to overcome that. And it almost doesn’t matter what it is that you do. Involve yourself in a local group, a discussion group. Join a political party. Run for local office. Try to be present in your community in some way. Do something that makes you active. And that makes you feel that you’re taking part in the governance of your country.

"Democracies were always meant to be political systems that involved ordinary people in all kinds of ways. And I think one of the other reasons our system has declined as far as it has, is that that has atrophied. Along with all kinds of other institutions. There’s the famous thing about Americans not being in bowling clubs anymore and not joining the Rotary Club and not participating in real-life institutions because they’re at home watching TV or playing video games. But there’s also been a decline in civic activity and civic engagement.

"And even if it’s just for your mental health, Even if it’s just to make sure that you don’t feel that you are isolated and alone and unable to affect anything, try to join some group or work with some group that is making change in your community, either politically or even apolitically. And that seems to me to be the best antidote."

Klein always asks his guests to recommend three books, and Applebum says she’s chosen books that describe "the secret world of money laundering and kleptocracy”:

— “Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World,” by Oliver Bullough
— “Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism,” by Brooke Harrington

— “American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History,” by Casey Michel

Starting forward

Amid all the blame going around for Kamala Harris’ loss, there are some useful articles.

For example, the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis played a role in the appeal of Trumpism, according to articles by Robert Reich, Labor secretary under President Clinton, and Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser under President Obama.  

But we also know that the roots of the appeal of a strongman who will “fix it” go back much further.

As I’ve written here before, I was born in western Pennsylvania, in a declining industrial boomtown. I remember sitting on my grandmother’s front porch as a small child, listening to the adults in my father’s large family trying to decide what to do.
  
My dad moved my part of the family to a San Francisco suburb, a future boom area. The little three-bedroom house he moved us into isn’t for sale, but its estimated value on Zillow this morning is $2.7 million.

By contrast, a 40-room mansion in the town we left is for sale. The asking price is $735,000.

My relatives who stayed in that Pennsylvania town were frightened and very angry about its ongoing decline. Their anger could be so venomous that it was hard to be around them.

I knew the essential goodness of my relatives, despite their aggressive behavior. I could love their essential selves at the same time that I didn’t like the emotional survival skills their life circumstances had created. They and their children who are there were and are smart but for decades have sought answers that didn’t come.

So I understand why so many of our fellow humans are attracted to Trump.

Going forward, I’ll be reminding myself that hurt people hurt people.

In Donald Trump’s case, his mother was very sick and was unavailable to him during a crucial developmental time when he was a toddler, his niece Mary Trump told us in her 2020 book, "Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man."

And she says Trump’s father liked Donald’s “killer” attitude, “even if it manifested as bad behavior.”

It is my goal to love the essential goodness in every member of our human family, even when their behavior makes it difficult. Even when their behavior is so harmful to the family as a whole that it must be stopped.

Here is an approach to our common humanity that I’ll be trying to keep in mind as you and I seek to limit harm to America’s democracy (don’t miss the backstory at the bottom).

What now

As I write this, Donald Trump has just gotten the electoral votes to win the election.

 

Here is what AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 115,000 voters nationwide, says has happened.

 

“The fate of democracy appeared to be a primary driver for Vice President Harris’ supporters. 

 

"By contrast, Trump’s supporters were largely focused on immigration and inflation.”

 

This blog is about being a citizen in a democracy, so let’s focus at this moment on the feelings that these election results bring up for democracy voters.

 

Here is a 6-minute self-compassion exercise from Chris Germer, a psychologist, co-founder of the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion, and a lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

 

In this video, Chris Germer reminds us to notice that when we're feeling stressed, we're not alone. 

 

And when it comes to caring about democracy and facing what’s happening now, we're among millions of Americans. And among millions more people around the world.

 

So let’s process what’s happening now and together do what’s next.