Monthly Archives: July 2021

When Jair Bolsonaro won Brazils presidential election in October to the consternation of the countrys traditional political elite, commentators were sharply divided about the implications. Some warned that Bolsonaro, a far-right populist who has openly expressed admiration for the brutal military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, presented a clear and present threat to democracy. Others argued that Brazils strong institutions, including its aggressive press and fiercely independent judiciary, would rein in his authoritarian tendencies.

The fight over Bolsonaro echoes the academic debate over so-called populist figures around the world. Some scholars have warned that populists tend to be phenomenally corrupt, perpetuate their hold on power by delegitimizing the opposition, and inflict lasting damage on their countries democratic institutions. Others, including the historian Niall Ferguson, have suggested that populist governments are usually so incompetent that they prove short-lived. Yet others, including the political theorist Chantal Mouffe, have emphasized the positive potential of populism, and insinuated that critics of these movements are simply defenders of the failed status quo.

Right now, the four most populous democracies in the world are ruled by populists: Narendra Modi in India, Donald Trump in the United States, Joko Widodo in Indonesia, and Bolsonaro in Brazil. That makes it rather important to know which scholars are correct: Either democracy is in the midst of an unprecedented global retreat, or were witnessing a salutary course correction in which citizens are finally holding global elites to account for their failures. (Or, if Ferguson is right, nothing much will change.)

Read: What is a populist?

The most obvious way to settle this urgent matter is to look at the impact that populist governments have actually had on democracies in the past. To that end, we constructed a comprehensive database of populist governments. Doing so was an inherently fraught exercise: If you ask three scholars about the nature of populism, you are liable to get five different answers. Besides, populism is not like a light switch that is either on or off; some leaders exhibit certain (but not all) classic characteristics of populism.

Heres how we formed our list: We selected 66 leading peer-reviewed journals in political science, sociology, and regional studies; identified all articles published in these journals on the subject of populism, as well as political leaders linked with populism; then vetted each potential case study, consulting with country and regional experts. Populist governments, in our working definition, are united by two fundamental claims: (1) Elites and outsiders work against the interests of the true people, and (2) since populists are the voice of the true people, nothing should stand in their way.

Ultimately, we identified 46 populist leaders or political parties that have been in power across 33 democratic countries between 1990 and today, giving us the ability to settle the theoretical debate about the tension between populism and democracy in a rigorous, empirical way, on a global scale, for the first time. The results were alarming: Populists are highly skilled at staying in power and pose an acute danger to democratic institutions.

On average, ordinary democratic governments remain in office for a brief span of time: three years. Six years from their first election, four in five non-populist governments have already been booted from power. Populist governments, by contrast, manage to sustain their hold on power for a significantly longer stretch; on average, they hold on for about six and a half years, or more than twice as long as their non-populist rivals.

Ben Judah: Bibi was right

Populists arent just more likely to win reelection once or twice; they are also much more likely to remain in power for well over a decade. Six years after they are first elected, populist leaders are twice as likely as non-populist leaders to still be in power; twelve years after they are first elected, they are more than five times as likely.

Arguably, these findings are not, in themselves, all that concerning: The longer survival rate for populists may simply reflect their efficiency or popularity. But among populist leaders who entered office between 1990 and 2015, only a small minority left office as a result of the normal democratic process.

In fact, only 17 percent of populists stepped down after they lost free and fair elections. Another 17 percent vacated high office after they reached their term limits. But 23 percent left office under more dramatic circumstancesthey were impeached or forced to resign. Another 30 percent of all populist leaders in our database remain in power to this day. This is partially a function of the recent rise of populism: Thirty-six percent of those populist rulers who still remain in power were elected over the past five years. But even more of them have been in office long enough to raise serious concerns: About half have led their country for at least nine years.

The most important issue, however, is neither how long populists stay in office nor even how they ultimately leave, but what they do with their powerand, in particular, whether their tenure causes what political scientists call democratic backsliding, a significant deterioration in the extent to which the citizens enjoy basic rights.

Here, too, our findings were sobering, to say the least: In many countries, populists rewrote the rules of the game to permanently tilt the electoral playing field in their favor. Indeed, an astounding 50 percent of populists either rewrote or amended their countrys constitution when they gained power, frequently with the aim of eliminating presidential term limits and reducing checks and balances on executive power.

To participate in politics in a meaningful way, a country must have freedom of the press, so that citizens can make informed choices; protect civil liberties, so that citizens are free to voice their preferences and organize around their interests; and maintain political rights, so that most adults have the right to participate in free and fair elections. On all of these counts, populist governments fall short. Controlling for the many ways in which countries that elect populists may be different from countries that do notincluding per capita income, recent economic performance, a countrys history with democratic institutions, and civil conflictwe found that populist rule is associated with a 7 percent decline in freedom of the press, an 8 percent decline in civil liberties, and a 13 percent decline in political rights.

Read: The next populist revolution will be Latino

Overall, 23 percent of populist governments initiate democratic backsliding, defined as at least a one-point drop in a countrys democracy score as defined by the Polity IV project. By comparison, only 6 percent of non-populist governments are responsible for this kind of deterioration. In all, a populist government is four times more likely than a non-populist one to damage democratic institutions. (And it is likely that were under-counting actual cases of democratic erosion because of status-quo bias in organizations that measure the robustness of democracies. Despite ample evidence of the erosion of rule of law and media freedoms in Hungary and Poland, for example, Polity IV had not yet registered democratic backsliding in these countries as of 2017.)

But are all populists equally dangerous? According to thinkers like Mouffe, scholars need to draw a sharp distinction between left-wing and right-wing populists. While right-wing populists victimize unpopular minorities and weaponize public anger for illicit goals, left-wing populists are supposedly far more likely to correct elite failures on behalf of the poor and downtrodden. The best response to right-wing populists, according to this camp, is not a preference for parties and candidates that respect long-standing democratic rules and normsbut rather the election of left-wing populists.

The data do not bear out this argument. Since 1990, 13 right-wing populist governments have been elected; of these, five brought about significant democratic backsliding. Over the same time period, 15 left-wing populist governments were elected; of these, the same number, five, brought about significant democratic backsliding. This suggests that left-wing populists are not likely to be a cure for right-wing populism; they are, on the contrary, likely to accelerate the speed with which democracy burns out.

In any case, traditional ideological measures may not do a particularly good job of capturing the nature of these movements. Also since 1990, 17 populist governments have come to power that cannot be easily classified as either left- or right-wing. Once again, five of these governments initiated democratic backsliding, suggesting that ideological hue is less important a predictor of the damage a government is likely to inflict on democratic institutions than the extent to which it is populist.

Populists often get elected on a promise to root out corruption. In Brazil, Bolsonaro soared in popularity by riding public anger against the Carwash scandal, a giant scheme of kickbacks from construction contracts that implicated much of the countrys political class, including the ex-president Luiz Incio da Silva. In Italy, the populist Northern League has long railed against corrupt politicians in thieving Rome. In the United States, President Trump famously vowed to drain the swamp.

Read: How Democrats killed their populist soul

But far from draining the swamp, most populists have, as the economist Barry Eichengreen put it, simply replaced the mainstreams alligators with even more deadly ones of their own. In fact, we found that 40 percent of populist heads of government are ultimately indicted for corruption. Since many populists amass sufficient power to hamper independent investigations into their conduct, it is likely that this figure actually underestimates the full extent of their malfeasance.

This suspicion is corroborated by a second piece of information: Our data show that populist governments have led their countries to drop by an average of five places on Transparency Internationals Corruption Perceptions Index. Some cases are far more extreme than that: Venezuela, for example, dropped by an astounding 83 places under the leadership of Hugo Chvez.

Since populists often thrive on anger about all-too-real shortcomingselites who really are too remote, political systems that really are shockingly corruptit is tempting to hope that they can help rejuvenate imperfect democracies around the world. Alas, the best evidence available suggests that, so far at least, they have done the opposite. On average, populist governments have deepened corruption, eroded individual rights, and inflicted serious damage on democratic institutions.

But it is also crucial to note what our results do not show. First, as advertisements for financial products so often put it, past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. It is possible that changing circumstances, like the ideological evolution of populist movements or the growing influence of social media, make it either more or less likely that populist governments will undermine democratic institutions in the future.

Second, it is as yet unclear how easily the experience of past populist governments, which have mostly been concentrated in middle-income countries with some recent experience of authoritarian rule, will translate to rich countries with long democratic traditions. Thanks to the strength of its civil society and the widespread commitment to constitutional order, the United States, for example, may prove better able to withstand a populist president.

Finally, averages say little about individual cases. Citizens of countries that are governed by authoritarian populists should certainly be concerned that similar governments have eroded checks and balances in a large number of cases. But that is a reason to fight rather than a reason to grow fatalistic.

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What 46 Populist Leaders Did to Democracy - The Atlantic

President Joe Biden slammed the Republican Party and former President Donald Trumps phony populism during a press conference Monday, but declared he still believes the situation will pass.

The Republican Party is vastly diminished in numbers, Biden told reporters. The leadership of the Republican Party is fractured, and the Trump wing of the party is the bulk of the party but it makes up a significant minority of the American people.

Biden noted that other leaders attending the NATO and G-7 summit have seen things happen that shocked them and surprised them but agreed with his view of believing the American people are not going to sustain that kind of behavior.

This comment appeared to be a reference to the Jan. 6 riot mentioned just prior by a reporter, where Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. (RELATED:Biden Takes Swipe At Two Democratic Senators For Voting More With My Republican Friends During Speech)

Biden expressed shock and surprise at events that have occurred because of Trumps phony populism. He called out some Senate Republicans, though not by name, for being reluctant to take on a Jan. 6 investigation, saying its because theyre worried about being primaried.

But at the end of the day we been through periods like this in American history before, Biden added, going back to his overall theme that things will come together. Where there has been this reluctance to take a chance on your reelection because of the nature of your partys politics at the moment.

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I think this is passing. I dont mean easily passing, he continued. Thats why its so important that I succeed in my agenda. The agenda, whethers its dealing with the vaccine, the economy, infrastructure. Its important that we demonstrate we can make progress and continue to make progress.

Despite Bidens harsh words for what he called a large wing of the allegedly diminishing Republican party, the president ended by reiterating his believe that things will change.

I think youre gonna see that theres a that God-willing, were gonna be making progress and theres gonna be a coalescing of a lot of Republicans, particularly younger Republicans, who are coming up in the party, he said.

Biden has pressed for unity throughout his presidency. Hes also been pushing for bipartisan solutions, although there are lines in the sand from both his administration and Republicans that may prove too difficult to overcome.

Most recently, Biden has been speaking with Republicans in an attempt to come to a bipartisan agreement on an infrastructure plans. The talks have so far proven futile and the president began looking to a new bipartisan group to negate with just before leaving for his first foreign trip since taking office.

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Biden Suggests Greatly Diminished GOP Will Eventually ...

President Biden on Monday took aim at former President Trump during the first NATO summit of his presidency by accusing his predecessor of phony populism when pressed on Trumps influence on the Republican Party.

Asked to weigh in on foreign leaders response to Republicans embrace of Trumps false claims of election fraud, Biden told reporters that he believes this is passing.

I dont mean easily passing, Biden said. Thats why its so important that I succeed in my agenda.

Biden also called out Republican senators who be believes know better about opposing a Jan. 6 commission investigating the deadly Capitol insurrection that Trump helped incite. The President argued that many Republicans are opposed to an investigation into the Capitol attack due to concerns about facing re-election challenges against candidates considered more conservative during next years primaries.

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Biden said that did not feel that it was necessary to bring up Trumps stronghold on the GOP with foreign leaders because the former presidents influence wont stand in the way of his global commitments.

The Republican Party is vastly diminished in numbers, Biden said. The leadership of the Republican Party is fractured and the Trump wing of the party is the bulk of the party, but it makes up a significant minority of the American people.

The President claimed that he is not sweating the possibility of a return of Trumpism in Congress after next years midterm election or the White House in 2024.

Im not making any promises to anyone that I dont believe are overwhelmingly likely to be kept, Biden said.

Biden believes that Trumps influence is not the end all be all for the GOP.

I think youre going to see that, God willing, were going to be making progress, Biden said. And theres going to be a coalescing of a lot of Republicans, particularly younger Republicans, who are coming up in the party.

Bidens remarks mark an unusual move for the President, who has rarely criticized Trump since entering office.

The Presidents comments on Trump also come two two days before his scheduled meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is known as an ally of the former president. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence reported in March that Putin authorized influence operations to help Trump and denigrate Biden in the November presidential election.

Watch Bidens remarks below:

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Biden Blasts Trumps Phony Populism At NATO Summit ...

Over Memorial Day weekend, Michael Flynn, who briefly served as Donald Trumps first national security adviser, appeared at a QAnon-affiliated conference in Dallas. During a Q&A session, an audience member asked, I want to know why what happened in Myanmar cant happen here.

What happened in Myanmar was an old-fashioned military coup.

Flynn replied, No reason. I mean, it should happen here.

The crowd cheered both the question and the answer.

I bring this up not to dwell on the fact that this is disgraceful and dangerous stuff. Flynn, a retired general, has been saying loony things for quite a while. No, I bring this up to ask a different question: Why arent more conservatives and elected Republicans more horrified by this and stuff like it?

The timing of Flynns remarks was darkly fortuitous and not just because he offered his comments on the eve of Memorial Day, when we honor the men and women who gave their lives defending our Constitution. Flynns comments also coincided with a spirited debate about the nature of conservatism, and whether the rights descent into such conspiracy-mongering paranoia and nationalism is a betrayal of conservatism or the inevitable result of conservative ideas. Some even argue that this is what conservatism was always about.

Its certainly true that the Trump era has revealed a lot about how serious or, rather, unserious some prominent Republicans and conservatives really were about their reverence for the Constitution. But instead of going down various intellectual and historical rabbit holes, Ill just say that trying to lay this at the feet of conservative ideas is a distraction.

The core problem afflicting the right and to a great degree, the country is that the elite surrender to populism.

Definitions of populism vary, but for our purposes its best understood as the politics of the mob. The defining emotion of populism and mobs alike is passion, fueled by the invincible twin convictions that we are right and that we have been wronged by them. Its a bit like Charles de Gaulles line about the difference between patriotism and nationalism. Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.

Conservatives deserve special criticism for fomenting populism because conservatism is supposed to be temperamentally skeptical of excessive political passion. But that decision has less to do with conservative ideas than with the corruption of prioritizing political power over principle an error that is inherent to politics and human nature, as the founders understood well. Certainly, on paper, intellectual progressivism provides as much permission for indulging populism as conservatism does.

Thanks to a generation of polarizing culture-war politics, mass self-sorting of voters into rival camps and misguided reforms that gave populists outsize power to dominate primaries, Congress no longer serves its proper function as the place where political disagreements are worked out. Its now a giant stage for political theatrics and popular-front policing.

The media has become balkanized. When most Americans got their news from a handful of outlets, extremism was filtered out of the national conversation. Such gatekeeping is gone, because the walls that made the gatekeepers powerful have been demolished, and many of the erstwhile gatekeepers would rather lead the mob than tell its members to lay down their pitchforks.

The new business model, fueled by social media, is to grab a relative handful of sticky customers seeking to have their passions ratified, not rebutted. The former hierarchies of credibility have been flattened. Anyone with a web browser can find the facts the mob needs.

In short, the right changed with the times. Its problem now is that it rode the tiger so long, it doesnt know how to get off and its not even sure it wants to.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch

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Jonah Goldberg: Populism at root of right wing's ...

Brexit, Donald Trumps US presidential election,the ascent of Frances Marine Le Pen, Italys Five Star Movement: The whole Western world appears to be in the thrallof populists. For many, this seems like a bit of adej vu, evoking the1920s and 1930s, withtheir looming threat of fascism.

There are, indeed, similarities between todays political landscape and what Europe experienced in the buildup to World War II, as well as with other times when populism eventually turned into fascismsuch as Francoist Spain, or Peronist Argentina. But while fascism usually is rooted in populism, starting with populismdoesnt inevitably mean youll wind up with fascism.

Federico Finchelstein, a professor of history at the New School in New York City,pointed out to Quartz that the two political doctrines share some core traits.

Heres what makes a figure like Trump a text-book populist:

Butwhile Americas democracy may befacing some trying times, there is still a key difference between populism and actual fascism:the use of violence.

The adoption of violence to impose fascist authority is a key element of fascism both as a movement and as a regime, says Finchelstein. It expresses itself as street violence first, and then through the militarization of government. Fascist leaders take power not just through popular support, but thanks to the action of squads that violently attack opponents, and that are then incorporated into the running of the state as paramilitary formations.

On the other hand,Finchelstein explains, populism combines low level actual violence with high level rhetorical violence, applying it to an authoritarian way of understanding democracy. In that is another important distinction between fascism and populism: fascism is never a democracy, while populism undermines democracy, but doesnt remove it.

While fascism and populismboth use democratic ideals to legitimize a non-democratic style of leadership, fascism is typically upfront about its outright rejection of democracy. When Benito Mussolini rose to powerand seized it through the coup-like March on Rome,for instance, he openly spoke about his intention to crush the power of the parliament. Similarly, Adolf Hitler attempted a coup years before his party became the biggest in parliament.

Of course, theres no assurance that Americas democracy will prevent violence by the state. The fact that a movement is populist doesnt mean that it wont turn fascist, says Finchelstein. But, he adds, things usuallydont go that wayand there are even examples of former fascist movements that turned populist. In Italy, for instance, former fascistsdecided to abide bydemocratic laws, founding parties (Movimento Sociale Italiano, then turned into Alleanza Nazionale) whose members are still in parliament, and the political sphere, today.

Theres no question that we live in a kind of neo-authoritarian moment, Aviel Roshwald, a professor of history at Georgetown University, told Quartz. Its almost impossible, he said, not to think of analogies with proto-fascist Europe. But, he added, hopefully its just a moment, and not an era in world history.

However, as novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco argues in his 1995 essay titled Ur-Fascism,distinguishing between populism and fascism may noteven be necessaryits enough for a political doctrine to sharethe archetypal elements and values of fascism to be part of what he callseternal fascism. These elements and values include:

We do have one safeguard against fascism now, Roshwald said. Most countries facing todays populist wave have traditions and institutions of liberal pluralism that are much older and deeply established and rooted in society than they were in Italy in 1922s and Germany in 1933.

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The key difference between populism and fascism Quartz

As the Populists of the late nineteenth century would remind us, thats not really how any of this works. They envisioned a republic founded on the just reward of productive laborindeed, the central plank of their socioeconomic program was the invention of a new currency system, based on workers and farmers contributions to the common good. The idea was not to reregulate the corrupt and moneyed party system of Gilded Age Americait was, rather, to galvanize a mass movement of producers to remake the American political economy into a truly equitable network of bottom-up democratic inclusion and participation. This was the vital, direct outcome of an aroused public seeing itself experiment in democratic formsand it came about via concerted pressure from outside the intermediating institutions of party and press, not within them.

Indeed, it was the embrace of the party system that proved the death knell of the Populist movement. When the Populists ran on a fusion ticket with the Democratic Party in the 1896 election, the grassroots network of Farmers Alliance and labor reformers fell to pieces amid the wreckage of William Jennings Bryans failed presidential candidacy. In other words, the Populist insurgencys move into electoral major party politics entailed the sacrifice of movement lifebloodand its erstwhile leaders descended into the ugly, bigoted politics of racial and nationalist division that now serves as the byword for populism across the political science academy.

And just as the original Populists helped pioneer movement reform grounded in their own experience of how industrial capitalism was besieging their livelihoods and hollowing out the bulwarks of democratic life, the labor movement today holds the best hope for achieving far-reaching democratic and grass roots in our own rampaging Gilded Age. Like the Populist movement, labor can accrue the power to directly intervene in, and remake, unjust economic arrangements at their roots, rather than awaiting a Goldilocks-style arrangement of surrounding institutions. And like the cooperative commonwealth of the nineteenth century, self-organized workers in todays desperately precarious political economy can prod a sclerotic political order into new and ambitious registers of social-democratic expansion, from worker ownership plans to Medicare for All.

But in Mllers institutionalist scheme of analysis, unions and workers are another AWOL constituency in the vast phantom public: While he acknowledges the salience of inequality as a defining issue, organized laborthe chief mass-democratic institution designed to address the issue head-ondoesnt rate any discussion here. (The closest he comes to any such mention, not surprisingly, is a discussion of the recent fortunes of left-European party formations, such as the British Labour Party, Spains Podemos, and Frances La France Insoumise.)

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Review: Democracy Rules Dissects the Collapse of the System - The New Republic

Effective delivery of family planning services,strong incentives and disincentives led to decline in fertility rates

Over-population concerns in India have a very long history and continue to persist. The second half of the last century experienced a faster population growth of over two per cent per annum with legitimate population concerns.

Even in the late 19th century, when the population was growing merely at 0.5 per cent or less per annum and its total size was a little over 200 million, the British considered India overpopulated.

However, visible changes were noticed in bringing down fertility level towards the end of last century and in the two decades of the 21st century. India reached a near replacement level fertility of 2.2 per cent by 2018.

At the same time, the population momentum (children born in the past coming to marriageable age) will result in continued population growth for the next few more decades before the population growth rates achieves zero level.

The important question, therefore, is: What led to the faster decline in fertility in recent decades? There are three broad routes of fertility transition and all the three, have been to some extent, experimented in India.

Fertility transition through social development and womens empowerment was the success story of Kerala and is the example from most of the western world.

The other route was effective service delivery, particularly of family planning services. Several states in India achieved success under this category. Tamil Nadu was the fore-runner.

Another route was imposing strong incentives and disincentives. A few states in India tried electoral disincentives for some period in the past, but their success was not very evident as compared to other states.

Although population concerns in India are not completely misplaced, the effect of any serious measures at this time on bringing down the actual population size will be minimal due topopulation momentum. Moreover, the most important route to bring down fertility rate is most likely to be efficient delivery of services.

This is the fifth in a series of stories on Uttar Pradesh and Assam's draft population bill. Read the fourth parthere

Views expressed are the authors own and dont necessarily reflect those ofDown To Earth

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Population populism: What led to the faster decline in fertility in recent decades? - Down To Earth Magazine

Tennessee Lt. Gov. Randy McNally and House Speaker Cameron Sexton voted against relocating Nathan Bedford Forrest's bust. Here's what they're missing.

Anighya H.D. Crocker| Guest Columnist

Workers remove bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest from State Capitol

The bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, was removed from the State Capitol

Jeremiah O. Rhodes, Nashville Tennessean

On July 22, the long battle over the fate of Nathan Bedford Forrests bust at the Capitol seemed to end.

The State Building Commission voted 5-2 to move the bust to the Tennessee State Museum. The only no votes came from Speaker of the House Cameron Sexton and Lt. Gov.Randy McNally.

Following their votes, the Speaker and Lieutenant Governor released statements defending their decisions.

I would ask that at this time you please pause in your reading of this article and go carefully review those statements (find them on their Twitter accounts:@ltgovmcnally and@CSexton25).

Communism? The woke mob?

What are these people talking about? What of the Republicans who have spoken in support of the busts removal? Governor Lee, Governor Haslam, Senator Corker? Are these career Republican politicians actually clandestine leftist Communists, seeking the exaction of some larger plot to erase history? Certainly not.

Editorial: Nathan Bedford Forrest's bust exits Capitol. Finally. Activists deserve credit. So does Bill Lee

The lieutenant governors statement admits that General Forrest is a problematic figure but advocates that the bust should remain, accompanied with context, adding that without such context we would have no state heroes.

Does the lieutenant governor mean to suggest that General Forrests character would be positively illuminated by a more comprehensive historical presentation? Well, lets put that to the test.

General Forrest was a known war criminal.

At the Battle of Fort Pillow in Henning, Tennessee, the General ordered his men to fire upon surrendering Black Union soldiers, murdering over 250.

This is supported by the findings of a federal investigation of the massacre, survivors reports, and accounts from men under General Forrests command.

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Confederate Sgt.Achilles V. Clark wrote to his sisters, The slaughter was awful. Words cannot describe the scene. The poor deluded negros would run up to our men fall on their knees and with uplifted hands scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down… Blood, human blood stood about in pools and brains could have been gathered up in any quantity. I with several others tried to stop the butchery and at one time had partially succeeded but Gen. Forrest ordered them shot down like dogs and the carnage continued.

More: We commend Gov. Bill Lee for pushing for Nathan Bedford Forrest bust relocation | Opinion

After the war, General Forrest served as the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and established the Klans state infrastructures which then carried out various assassinations of Republican politicians.

Additionally, the KKK under Forrests leadership committed countless night raids, during which Black citizens and white Republicans were dragged from their homes, whipped, and hanged. It is a historical fact that General Forrest organized and was perhaps even present for some of these raids.

Is this seditious, anti-American, anti-Republican, murderous, war criminal the imperfect person the Speaker suggests helped create a country that stands for hope, opportunity, and liberty?

Both the speaker and the lieutenant governor attempt to legitimize their heinous assertions by linking them with the same old admonition that conservatives have clung to for time immemorial: we must learn from our past or we are doomed to repeat it.

So, why then not erect a monument in our Capitol dedicated to those Americans who were savagely murdered by General Forrest?

Even the lieutenant governors insinuation that General Forrest is a Southern symbol is historically inaccurate.

In addition to being the last state to secede, Tennessee sent more soldiers to join the Union than any other Confederate state.

In his own time, General Forrest did not represent the interest of thousands of Tennesseans. And yet, through some remarkable lens of craven revisionist populism, the lieutenant governor asserts that he now occupies a place in our social milieu as a Southern symbol?

It is bewildering to consider that these two stewards of the self-proclaimed Party of Lincoln," now call Nathan Bedford Forrest (an avowed enemy of Lincoln) an American Hero.

In truth, I doubt that either of them have given much consideration to the historical underpinnings of Nathan Bedford Forrests legacy or the implications of their statements.

Instead, these men have traded in on the cheap luxury of populism. They extend an open hand, filled with a poisonous revisionist lie and urge the public to eat it up. Well, I say to the lieutenant governor and the speaker of the House that the good people of this state are beyond their shameful attempts to mislead and frighten them into going along with this loathsome lie.

The people of this state deserve better leadership.

Anighya H.D. Crocker is a graduate of Vanderbilt University, with a major in law, history, and society and a current Student at Duke Law School. He serves as the minister of music at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Greenbrier, Tennessee.

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Randy McNally and Cameron Sexton choose populism in opposing Nathan Bedford Forrest bust removal | Opinion - The Tennessean

EFF leader Julius Malema gives the party's virtual eighth anniversary speech on 26 July 2021 in Ekurhuleni, Gauteng. (Photo: Gallo Images / OJ Koloti)

Eight years since its founding, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) has grown into a political party able to conduct a virtual anniversary rally on a zero-rated data stream from its website on Monday.

Party leader Julius Malema used the occasion to challenge President Cyril Ramaphosa to withdraw his army from the looting hotspots and visit those areas himself to turn the toxic tide. We want to challenge Ramaphosa to remove the soldiers from the streets and confront the people of South Africa, he said.

He must stop hiding behind the uniform of the soldiers and confront the reality that our people are confronted with on a daily basis. If you are a man, Ramaphosa, and you know you have been elected legitimately by the people of South Africa who love you, and that you did not buy the presidency through the money of the white monopoly capital, then go and speak to the masses on the ground, he said.

That is, incidentally, exactly what Ramaphosa did as the worst of the looting subsided, when he visited the eThekwini Metro to address patriotic clean-up teams. Fortunately for Malema, he didnt have to conduct this birthday rally next to some wreck of a looted mall or address edgy residents, because the EFF miraculously complied with Covid-19 lockdown regulations again after hosting a few super-spreader rallies and marches which epidemiologists said could have contributed to the high numbers of infections and deaths during the surge of the pandemics third wave.

In 2013, for example, the party held its founding rally in Marikana where it had real street-cred among the mining community, and when the area was a no-go zone for ANC leaders after the fatal shooting of striking mineworkers the year before.

There are also Malemas mind-altering half-truths and contradictions which he delivers like a seer:

Some of you even call us prophets, Malema told his virtual audience. We are not prophets, we use proper tools of analysis.

He produced a snippet from the EFFs founding manifesto:

Any form of generalised uprising will be harshly suppressed by the state machinery in order to prevent it from escalating to a level where a sitting government can be toppled, he read.

While it could still happen in future, what has happened at many malls in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng was not a generalised uprising and state machinery didnt harshly suppress it.

Instead, vigilante citizen groups defended themselves while police (state machinery, according to Malema) were overrun and/or looked on. Soldiers were eventually sent in with orders not to shoot. More than 300 deaths resulted from the violence, but analysis on this grim figure is still lacking and theres no clear evidence yet that a significant number of these died at the hands of state machinery. If this was the case, more information on it would have surfaced by now.

Perhaps the man who calls himself the commander-in-chief of an army of economic freedom fighters is just offended by the sight of soldiers he cant order around.

Soldiers were set on the streets of South Africa to threaten [those who tried to protest against this government] from exercising their democratic right, just as the EFF had predicted, Malema went on. While he condemned the looting and the destruction of property (he implied leaders should have used their power of persuasion to make this stop), he said the EFF sided with the people who were engaged in the activities of looting and fighting to provide food for their children.

Its unclear where the EFF stands in relation to the people who were engaged in the activities of looting a million rounds of live ammunition; those of the people who were engaged in the activities of looting appliances loaded into luxury cars; or those whose Twitter accounts carried messages of encouragement to the looters from the comfort of Nkandla, such as Duduzile Sambudla-Zuma, who also happened to tweet a video on Monday of herself delivering a birthday message to the EFF.

While he said what happened two weeks ago was not an insurrection or attempted coup, he warned that the state will intensify their attack on defenceless people who are not toppling government through any undemocratic method but through protest and showing their dissatisfaction against this kleptocratic government of the ANC.

Presumably, elections fit in here somewhere too.

Malema also addressed possible misunderstandings on whether he wanted to incite further looting at the height of the unrest:

No soldiers on our streets! Otherwise, we are joining. All fighters must be ready they wont kill us all, read his tweet on Monday, 12 July. It amounted to nothing, and thats exactly the way he intended it, Malema said.

Whatever was supposed to have happened, there is still a greater likelihood of Malema successfully fomenting a generalised uprising than winning a majority of the votes in the upcoming local government elections, even if these are postponed to February 2022.

Even though the 1.8 million votes in the 2019 general election was an impressive feat for this young upstart party, the 10.7% of the electorate that this represents is still a lot smaller than the big dreams of its leader.

Eight EFF years later, Malemas a pleaser and a populist, and the contradictions in his statements represent a desire to be all things to all people, and so to become a kingmaker ready to exploit the gap available for strongmen in South Africas immature coalition politics. Only time will prove if the people of South Africa will take his bait in greater numbers. DM

Continued here:

Eight years later, Julius Malemas path to relevance is still characterised by peddling populism and violence - Daily Maverick