The Threats To Democracy
Hugo Chavez, Moqtada Al-Sadr, Sen. Joe McCarthy, George W. Bush: charismatic mass leaders, and democracy's most dangerous enemies? This week at Cafe, we have a Book Club discussion on Michael Signer's Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies. In it, he explores the history of the rise of popular leaders and the threats they pose to the democracies that produce them.
Signer was Foreign Policy Advisor on Sen. John Edwards presidential campaign and he is Senior Policy Advisor at the Center for American Progress and Senior National Security Policy Fellow at Third Way.
Joining him are Rachel Kleinfeld, co-founder and Executive Director of the Truman National Security Project; Heather Hurlburt, speechwriter and policy advisor in the Clinton Administration; Michael Lind, Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation; Brian Katulis, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress; and Matt Dallek, professor at the University of California Washington Programme. See you there!
Hmmm... not so sure Hugo Chavez's name belongs there.
But I'm more concerned with the lack of a real progressive foreign policy thinker in this discussion. You really need a more hardcore liberal institutionalist or a more radical liberal thinker to balance this out...
February 23, 2009 4:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
This sort of nonsense should not be promoted on a supposedly progressive web site. Signer is lumping together altogether dissimilar politicians. Basically, he's saying, a demagogue is a popular leader whom he doesn't like.
To call Chavez one of "democracy's most dangerous enemies" is utterly ridiculous, if one manages to get past the biased American media's reporting. The only notable thing Chavez is guilty of is attacking the U.S. government for continually interfering in the political process of Latin American nations for the past 100 years. He has been elected and affirmed by free and fair ballots multiple times over the past ten years or so, using electronic voting with a paper confirmation. The Venezuelan democracy is actually more transparent than the U.S. patchwork quilt of voting rules and procedures with no paper trail, most of the time.
Regarding Chavez' recent success in abolishing term limits. If that's so horrible, why is no one calling NYC mayor Bloomberg a tyrant and democracy's most dangerous enemy? Unlike Chavez, Bloomberg didn't even bother to put it to a plebiscite.
February 25, 2009 9:36 AM | Reply | Permalink