(Note: these are my thoughts and comments, not the paper author’s words)
Parties in the European Parliament that support backsliding on democracy – those who don’t support democracy, in other words – don’t talk about it. In fact, they rarely refer to their own illiberalism. They point at others, they complain about unfair treatment, and they don’t even mention their own illiberalism.
There are two risks. The first is that the illiberal parties drive a ‘plague on both your houses’ nihilism, that helps them and discourages citizens from taking action to defend liberal values. The second is that if parties are staying quiet about their own illiberal plans, politics within the EU may not allow for sanctions aimed at supporting the rule of law (as applied to Hungary) – or if they are applied, they will arrive too late or not at all.
The flip side is that the parties themselves seem to realise that an outright claim of illberalism (as in Orbán’s illiberal democracy) is a bad strategy for them – though the author points out this may be more about maximising their chances
What can citizens do? Watch for what these parties do not what they say; stay aware of how illiberal actions can be cloaked under accusations
How should we change the state? A clear and independent protection mechanism for rights and the rule of law is essential – ideally one that can operate more quickly than the ECJ. Something like an OLAF for the Rule of Law, an independent office specifically designed to identify early breaches of rule of law and European values.
Listening to a presentation on synthethic publics*, something we’re increasingly seeing discussed in the participation and democracy space.
Reassuringly, the research suggests that while synthetic publics are good at matching public opinion survey results on existing situations, they are not good at addressing new situations.
On one level, this is what you’d expect – the training data exists for the past, not the future. The AI is guessing what a group of people in the past might think, it’s difficult for it to take new situations into account.
I say it’s reassuring, though, because for me democracy is about defining the future, not commentary on the past. I don’t think an aggregate of past public opinion could ever be a reliable source for synthetic democratic participation, because the nature of being citizen is having a vision of the future, and working out in society how to deliver it.
That doesn’t mean we should ignore AI in our field, of course, there are plenty of organisations thinking hard about how to use it, and Democratic Society is one of them (I’m about to speak on a panel on this very topic). But this is further evidence that it should be used to enhance participation and deliberation, not to replace it.
* (where existing public opinion research is aggregated and the data is queried using AI to get a synthetic public opinion on an issue, or AI personas are created who can be interacted with as if in an interview).
A striking proposal highlighted by Le Monde today is a Citizen Convention on Immigration. This would be a design challenge (to say the least) but, given how toxic and deadlocked the immigration issue is in France and elsewhere in Europe, it might be a way to change the conversation.
It’s the sort of issue for which citizen assemblies/conventions are well-suited – big picture, politically deadlocked, with a strategic or moral question at their heart.
It’s not simple, though. Given how immigration is used as *the* core issue by anti-system parties, it would be a challenge to disentangle the actual question from side-questions about rural depopulation, economic changes, demographic shifts, and people’s sense of the past.
But European mainstream politicians seem to have no solution to the immigration issue other than “copy the far right” and “hope it goes away” – this at least might move the conversation forward.
A brief braindump prompted by hearing talk of an AI minister. Better argued thoughts might follow later.
Thinking about “AI ministers” (as in, ministers who are AIs, not ministers for AIs) and citizen assemblies and increasingly convinced that a lot of democracy innovation at the moment is forgetting the perspective of any-given-citizen.
Not the theoretical citizen, averaged out across a thousand assemblies, but without real power in any of them, and with no choice about the issues he or she is asked to deliberate upon.
Not the citizen as policy consumer who can be as well served by a digital minister as by a human one.
But any-given-citizen, a real person who has a certain vision of the world, a certain set of things she or he is annoyed about, and wants to be able to do something – to have some agency.
They have a vote, which we can make more effective. They have a voice, which we can make more powerful. They are a customer of government, which we can make more responsive and more open.
But alongside those already huge challenges, we have to recreate the connection that they used to have through mass parties, unions or churches, from the life that they are living to the decision making level of politics.
I once thought that social media and digital platforms could be that route. I don’t think that any more – or at least, not ones that look like the places where people live online today.
But we need to empower any-given-citizen, not the theoretical citizen. We have to empower them across whatever issues they care about. And when they express themselves we have to have humans listening to humans taking decisions about humans.
FAZ is reporting on a campaign by the Left party for green energy that uses far-right-themed AI imagery and language to make its case.
Like the example above, slogans include “German energy from German sun”, and “German power from German wind” – but most strikingly, the art work uses a visual language strongly associated with fascism and the 1930s.
The argument that renewables are local and independent is a good one – though of course, “German” energy is as much European energy, given the interconnected nature of the grid.
However, making it in this way is a reminder that we are moving – as Alec Ryrie says – beyond the Hitler age. It’s not enough now to consider fascist language and imagery automatically disqualifying. Fascism is not yet used with pride, but adjacent concepts are, in some quarters.
As someone who grew up with older parents who had direct memory of the war, it is hard to think yourself into this position, but if you imagine something like the Boer War, perhaps you approach it.
Hitler has a resonance in history that Redvers Buller and Henning Pretorius will never have, but still, the issues at stake in the war are fuzzy for most, if they know about it at all. What was so high-stakes five generations ago is now a specialist history subject.
We aren’t there yet with WW2 and Hitler, and maybe it will be another hundred years before we are, but the Left’s campaign idea shows that even for those on the opposite end of the political spectrum, the imaginary language of the far right is a little marketing trick, not a taboo.
It challenges us on the democratic side of the spectrum – what are our images? What is the visual shorthand for democracy, inclusion and rights? We’ve relied for so long on just not being the other side, that we have nothing clear or identifiable to work with. It’s not that “the Left can’t meme”, as FAZ says, but that democracy as a process and set of institutional guarantees is hard to picture.
EU stars, the Portcullis of the UK Parliament, hands raised in voting, ballot boxes, post-it notes on a whiteboard – all of them are process or institutional images, and we need to find a way of showing the impact that they have, and the way they enable people to have a voice.
I would love to be corrected on this by someone who understands the US constitution better than I do, but as I read the 25th amendment, it has – with small differences – the same problem as impeachment. There aren’t the votes to make it stick.
Quick summary for those who are less on Bluesky than I am.
The US Constitution allows a President (or any office holder) to be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanours. The House prepares articles of impeachment – the charge sheet, if you like – and the Senate has to vote by a two thirds majority to remove the person from office.
The key point there is the two-thirds majority – sixty-six Senators, in other words, when the current split in the Senate is 53 Republicans, 47 Democrats, and 2 others – both of whom vote with the Democrats most of the time.
Because this bar is high – more than 20% of the elected Republicans would need to switch sides – it is unlikely to succeed, at least until the election in November chooses another House and 33 new Senators to take office in January.
Because of this high bar, a lot of people, not just online politics-heads, have been calling for the 25th amendment to be used. This was brought in for periods of temporary disability (for instance, if the President has had an accident, or is under anaesthetic for an operation).
Section 4 of this amendment allows the President to be temporarily stripped of his powers (while remaining President). However, it’s not as simple as people think, there are two big stumbling blocks.
The first is in the first line of the section:
Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
It is the Vice President AND, not the Vice President OR – so JD Vance has a veto. Without his consent you can’t use Article 25.
Maybe that’s not too bad – I mean, he’d get to exercise the powers of the President, maybe being dragged for disloyalty on Trump’s Truth Social account would be worth it.
However, the real problem is the second section. If the Vice President has done the dirty (with half the Cabinet) and sent the declaration to the Senate, the President is temporarily powerless. However, in this situation we have to assume that Donald Trump is still there, Truthing away and 100% conscious.
Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office
So two minutes after the 25th Amendment is in force, Trump sends a competing declaration to the Senate to say he’s fine, and he takes back his old powers (and presumably fires half his Cabinet).
There is a way around that – the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet can delay things, but only for four days … and then …
Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.
There’s that two-thirds majority again – of both Houses. Not only do you need to get twelve or thirteen Senators to switch sides, you also need to get about seventy Representatives to switch as well.
So the 25th might hold Trump back for a few days – but in the end, he’s back in office and angrier than ever unless you have the same majority you need for impeachment. Impeachment removes him from office completely (though you do then get President Vance).
So – and this is where the Constitution has clearly completely failed – if there is no way to impeach, there is no way to enforce the 25th Amendment.
Brussels is more of a startup city than you might have thought – certainly than I would have thought, even though with Demsoc I have been quite close to it for ten years now (three years at BetaCowork, the rest of the time at BeCentral, both named in the article).
Of course the challenge, like for all of Europe, is why the business that start here don’t grow here.
This dynamic website shows the different connections in what Francesca Bria calls the “Authoritarian Stack” – the connected network of ultra-rich, corporations and politicians that is driving the international
I am less concerned about the existence of this than I am about the absence of something on the anti-authoritarian/democratic side of the debate.
There are a few funders and ultra-rich individuals who are funding organisations, there are organisations like Philea who are trying to connect up the different European foundations, and of course there are also European and national government funds for research.
However, the picture on our side of the divide seems far more disconnected, far more hesitant, and reluctant to put private egos and interests aside to defend the very foundations of our democratic system.
It looks, in fact, a lot like the division of mainstream parties trying to face up to the populist right.
The lessons of success against the populists in politics are to keep the focus on living standards and not on culture wars; to reinforce norms around anti-racism and split the pro-business right from the far right; and to ensure that the foundations of the rule of law and fair elections are preserved.
To this might be added the work on epistemic security that my own organisation is starting to do with the support of one of those pro-democracy funders, looking at policy and at hyperlocal levels.
But much of this is done on tiny budgets, without the ability to invest in research, in network building, and in design. Unless we can start to build collective and collaborative work on anti-authoritarianism, and create the network of people at local level that can make the difference in one-to-one interactions.
It’s unlikely that we can compete toe-to-toe with authoritarian billionaires. But we can recruit real people and work in real communities to stand up to their influence.
Fascinating to read this 1997 Time article on Slacker and Gen X culture, 29 years later (as a Gen X-er). Prompted by a colleague from Gen-Z complaining about stereotypes of her generation – and who was surprised to hear from me what the origins of Gen X were.
