Suchergebnisse

Democracy in Europe, edited by Larry Siedenstop, is reviewed.

"A disturbing in-depth exposé of the antidemocratic practices of despotic governments now sweeping the world. One day they'll be like us. That was once the West's complacent and self-regarding assumption about countries emerging from poverty, imperial rule, or communism. But many have hardened into something very different from liberal democracy: what the eminent political thinker John Keane describes as a new form of despotism. And one day, he warns, we may be more like them. Drawing on extensive travels, interviews, and a lifetime of thinking about democracy and its enemies, Keane shows how governments from Russia and China through Central Asia to the Middle East and Europe have mastered a formidable combination of political tools that threaten the established ideals and practices of power-sharing democracy. These governments mobilize the rhetoric of democracy and win public support for workable forms of administration based on patronage, dark money, steady economic growth, sophisticated media controls, strangled judiciaries, dragnet surveillance, and selective violence against their opponents. Casting doubt on such fashionable terms as dictatorship, autocracy, fascism, and authoritarianism, Keane makes a case for retrieving and refurbishing the older "despotism" to make sense of how these regimes function and endure. He shows how they cooperate regionally and globally and draw strength from each other's resources while breeding worldwide anxiety and threatening the values and institutions of democracy. Like Montesquieu in the eighteenth century, Keane stresses the willing complicity of comfortable citizens in all these trends. And, like Montesquieu, he worries that the practices of despotism are closer to home than we care to admit"--

pp. 1-2 ; column 1 ; 30 col. in. ; The voting system does not work in Utah because Brigham Young can find out whom everyone voted for and can use this knowledge to manipulate those who fear his power. Some have suggested that allowing women to vote in Utah might help eradicate polygamy, but women there are controlled by their husbands, making such policy ineffective. A discussion of the numbers of legal and illegal Mormon and Gentile voters in the territory. Unfortunately, one man in Utah may hold several political offices at once and may also be a leader in the Church at the same time, blurring the distinction between church and state. The Mormons are opposed to governments of men. The Mormon people themselves are good, but their social system is corrupted.

DELEGATED LEGISLATION IS LAW MADE NOT IN PARLIAMENT BUT BY THE EXECUTIVE UNDER POWERS DELEGATED TO IT BY PARLIAMENT. IT IS A PRACTICE IN ALL THE LARGE COUNTRIES OF THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH AND IN MANY OF THE SMALLER ONES. THE PRACTICE HAS RAISED CONCERN ABOUT THE IMPACT OF DELEGATED LEGISLATION ON THE BALANCE OF POWER BETWEEN PARLIAMENT AND THE STATE AND ON THE POSITION OF THE CITIZEN BEFORE THE LAW.