The Spirit of Democracy, page 45
LIBERATION TECHNOLOGY
The growth of technologies that empower individuals and nonstate actors is among the most hopeful dimensions in the struggle for human freedom and political participation. Cell phones, e-mail, and the Internet magnify the speed with which individuals can organize for social change, as well as the scale on which they can do so, creating what Thomas L. Friedman called “super-empowered individuals.”78 Unfortunately, what can empower civic activists for human rights can also empower terrorists. And authoritarian states are finding ways to control and obstruct the independent use of technology by citizens seeking greater freedom and democracy. Yet there is reason to believe that the net contribution of technology is and will be powerfully positive, and there are things that can be done to accelerate the spread of it.
The combination of mobile communication devices and “pervasive computing” (through inexpensive microprocessors embedded in everyday objects and environments) is enabling ordinary people to cooperate for social change and expand reformist networks as never before.79 Cell phones with text messaging have been instrumental in facilitating protests against authoritarian rule and abuses of democracy, generating what technology guru Howard Rheingold calls “smart mobs,” vast networks of individuals communicating rapidly and with little hierarchy or central direction to assemble or “swarm” into a certain location in order to protest. “On January 20, 2001, President Joseph Estrada of the Philippines became the first head of state in history to lose power to a smart mob,” when first tens of thousands and then, within four days, more than a million Filipinos assembled at a historic protest site in Manila in response to messages reading “Go 2EDSA, Wear blck.”80 Text messaging along with e-mail helped to rapidly mobilize public support for the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon (which drew more than a million demonstrators to demand the withdrawal of Syrian troops), the 2005 protests in Kuwait (demanding the right to vote for women), the 2007 student protests in Venezuela (against the closure of a major independent television station), and numerous student protests in Iran.81 In Nigeria, the Network of Mobile Election Monitors used text messaging to gather reports of vote fraud in the 2007 elections that helped international observers gain a more convincing national picture of the rigging.82
In China, pervasive text messaging has been a key factor in the mushrooming of grassroots protests. “Now, one can use SMS [short message service, or text messaging] to organize a large-scale protest without asking governmental permission,” says Xiao Qiang, a leading human rights advocate who directs the Chinese Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley. “Today’s Chinese youth have much more powerful communication tools in their hands.”83 In one recent case, an eruption of hundreds of thousands of cell phone text messages in Xiamen generated so much public protest over the construction of an environmentally hazardous chemical plant that the authorities suspended the project.84 The technology is even seeping into the world’s most brutally closed society, North Korea. An activist who works with North Korean refugees observes: “With radios, it takes many hours of airtime to convince North Koreans that there’s something else out there. But with a cell phone, it can take one call to change someone’s mind.”85 In the oil-rich Gulf states, text messaging allows civic activists and political opposition “to build unofficial membership lists, spread news about detained activists, encourage voter turnout, schedule meetings and rallies, and develop new issue campaigns—all while avoiding government-censored newspapers, television stations, and Web sites.”86
Text messaging is often complemented, or preceded and then reinforced, by Internet blogging, which has become a revolutionary fourth dimension of the fourth estate. Virtually any citizen can become, in a sense, a columnist, journalist, or even television broadcaster. As protests against the construction of the chemical plant mounted in Xiamen, “citizen journalists carrying cell phones sent text messages to bloggers in . . . other cities, who then posted real-time reports for the entire country to see,” thus magnifying the impact.87 In Bahrain, bloggers used Google Earth during the 2006 parliamentary elections to expose the vast swaths of land held by the Sunni minority monarchy for its palaces, in contrast to the slums of the Shiite majority. Where authoritarianism is entrenched but contested, bloggers are now at the cutting edge of the challenge. Nowhere is this more the case than in Iran, which has an estimated seventy thousand to a hundred thousand bloggers, making Farsi one of the ten most popular languages on the Internet.88 Globally, the blogosphere is growing at an exponential rate, increasing ninetyfold between 2003 and 2006—by which time, a hundred thousand new Web logs were being created every day.89
The speed of posting in relation to news, the lack of editorial filters and censorship, and the openness of access to any citizen makes blogging the most intrinsically democratic form of media ever established. Blogging embodies the democratic principles of open access and freedom of speech, but also the potential to raise political awareness and transform political values. As one Egyptian blogger told Time magazine in 2006—shortly before his arrest at a Cairo protest—he knew the risks but he had “developed a taste for freedom of speech and would not give [it] up so easily.”90 The dispersion of blogging to thousands or even tens of thousands in some countries makes the medium more difficult to monitor, censor, and suppress than newspapers or other traditional media. It is not only opening up traditionally closed societies but also deepening and invigorating democracy, widening the public discourse, and bringing new participants into the public sphere in established democracies like the United States and consolidating democracies like South Korea (one of the most Internet-intensive countries in the world).
Digital cameras combined with Internet sites like YouTube create new possibilities for exposing and challenging authoritarian abuse. Incidents of police brutality have been filmed on cell phone cameras and posted to YouTube and other sites, after which bloggers have called outraged public attention to them. In one famous incident, Malaysia’s prime minister was pressured to call for an independent inquiry after it was publicly documented that a young woman had been forced by the police to do squats while naked.91 When Radio Caracas Television was taken off the air by Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in May 2007, it continued its broadcasts on YouTube.92 It is precisely because of the revolutionary implications of this medium that authoritarian states like Iran and Saudi Arabia completely block access to the site.
Older communication technologies also retain great potential. In Serbia, independent radio was crucial in exposing the egregious blunders and abuses of Slobodan Miloševi’s rule, and then in reporting the vote fraud of 2000 and stimulating mass protests.93 In Africa, radio is still the most important means of spreading information through nongovernmental channels. Community radio stations are educating people about politics and democracy, informing them about local issues, organizing them for change, and promoting peace and reconciliation.94 Satellite television has also opened up possibilities for communication outside of government control. The impact has been especially powerful in the Arab world, where al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya not only increase the pluralism of news and information but also enable “ordinary Arabs [to] call in and voice their unedited grievances live before 30 million viewers.”95
International actors can do a number of things to promote this “liberation technology.” First, the established democracies must stand up for freedom of expression online and protest vigorously when citizens are arrested for stating their opinions and exposing government abuses, so long as their postings do not condone or incite violence. Increasingly, the blogosphere will be an arena where democratic dissidents must be defended and protected. The established democracies should condemn all laws that restrict Internet access and punish free expression.
Second, poor countries should be given assistance to expand their mobile phone networks. For the first time in history, millions of poor people in rural villages and urban slums, who may have little in the way of electricity or pipe-borne water, are gaining telephone access via mobile phones.96 Whereas land lines have been prohibitively expensive, corruptly administered, and monopolized by the elite, now the less fortunate can skip a whole generation of technology and get a phone that not only helps them organize for politics and social change but also enables them to make appointments, receive orders, learn crop prices, and survey market conditions. The cell phone’s potential as a tool for generating broad-based local democracy, development, and social capital is only beginning to be explored. Given how much cheaper cell phones (including those with a capacity to connect to the Internet) are than computers, the possibilities for leveling inequality are striking. Writes Google CEO Eric Schmitt: “Mobile phones are cheaper than PCs [personal computers], there are three times more of them, growing at twice the speed, and they increasingly have Internet access.”97
Third, the established countries should put a higher priority on providing financial assistance, training, and technical support to community radio stations. As with NGOs, it is not realistic to expect that such endeavors will be financially sustainable (or in this case commercially profitable) on their own for some time to come. Where these radio stations and other alternative media perform a worthy and cost-effective service for democratic development, they should be supported financially for the long run.
Fourth, the technologically advanced countries, beginning with the United States, need to fight for freedom in this brave new world. A race is now under way between the technological advance of instruments of liberation and the technological advance of tools to control and suppress them. We need to ensure that liberation wins—even to the point of legally forbidding companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Cisco Systems from selling to China and other authoritarian states the tools to censor the Internet and to routinely monitor what people say to one another on it. The established democracies need to push the development and diffusion of technology that can outmaneuver authoritarian states’ efforts to block democratic Web sites and disrupt civil society communications.
There is also a race within democracies, between technology to deepen democracy and technology to fight crime and terrorism. Efforts to surveil digital communications and record every move of the public through a profusion of cameras must be carefully monitored and assessed. The controversy over warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international phone calls and digital communications by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is one case in point. As Rheingold notes, the digital revolution is enabling people to gain new powers at the same time that they risk losing established freedoms, as both governments and companies relentlessly strip people of their privacy.98 There are over 4 million public surveillance cameras in Britain (one for every fourteen people), and the government’s information commissioner has validated fears that the country could “sleep-walk into a surveillance society.”99 It does little good to promote freedom abroad while it gradually slips away at home.
This of course underscores a broader theme. The United States and its fellow established democracies cannot be credible in promoting democracy abroad if it is deteriorating within their own borders. An imperative for promoting democracy effectively is to present a model of democratic quality, freedom, and vigilance that inspires respect and is worthy of emulation.
PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF
During 2006, the Kettering Foundation, which specializes in strategies to strengthen democracy, gathered more than nine hundred “typical Americans” into a series of forums to discuss the state of politics in America.1 The deliberations painted a picture of distress, disenchantment, and alienation among U.S. citizens. The participants were not simply saying the country was “on the wrong track,” as happens when times become difficult, wars go badly, and presidential administrations deliver disappointing policy performance. More than this, they expressed low levels of confidence in the leaders of both political parties, anger at the disproportionate power of the special interests that dominate campaign giving, impatience with the polarization of political life, and a feeling that they were powerless to change things. Overwhelmingly, the participants said that elected officials “are more responsive to special interests and lobbyists” than to the public interest.2
Similarly, the forums exposed a decline in civil society and sense of civic responsibility, particularly in the willingness of ordinary citizens to join organizations, do volunteer work, and give to the community. Once the defining spirit of American democracy, which so struck Alexis de Tocqueville in the early nineteenth century, the inclination to associate and participate continues to wane, perhaps because alienation leads to detachment, perhaps because people are more politically passive when they have more diversions in consumption and entertainment. “Money talks,” the foundation’s report noted, and Americans believe “the average citizen has no voice and is unrepresented.”3 As the forums concluded, some of the participants became more hopeful about the possibilities for invigorating democracy in local communities but others “left feeling as cynical and dispirited as when they came in.”4
The perspectives raised in the focus groups conform with the broad contours of public opinion data. Save for the blip of patriotic rallying after September 11, 2001, overall public trust in government has been declining since 2000, and only about a third of Americans in recent years “trust government in Washington to do what is right.” This matches the prevailing level of trust during the Watergate period, down from three-quarters in the late 1950s and early 1960s and even from more than half of the public at the peak of the Vietnam War protests in the early 1970s.5 Similar sharp declines in trust in government and in politicians have been evident in Europe as well.6 Moreover, “fully 74 percent of [U.S.] voters in the 2006 exit polls single[d] out corruption and ethics issues as either ‘very’ (33 percent) or ‘extremely’ (41 percent) important”—more than did so for the Iraq war.7 The Kettering Foundation concluded that “a national dialogue focused on public involvement about this deeply troubling issue might be the key to reducing the alienation, mistrust, and cynicism that are so widespread.”8 But while invigoration of democratic life through public dialogues is intrinsically good for democracy, it is hardly an end in itself. The participants in the forums were responding to deep-seated problems in the structure and performance of American democracy, problems that will not be repaired with talk alone. Yet many were also reluctant to sacrifice or change the system in any way. While some welcomed public financing of election campaigns as “a step in the right direction,” others were adamantly opposed, especially if it were to involve higher taxes.9
Increasingly, Americans feel that there is something wrong with the way their democracy works—and with good reason. Although the United States remains one of the most liberal, institutionalized, and vigorous democracies in the world, it is also a democracy with serious and even growing problems of political corruption, influence peddling, abuse of liberties, decline of constitutionalism, and polarization of partisan politics. For the United States to be effective in promoting and inspiring democratic progress elsewhere in the world, it must be credible in its own practice of democracy. No country is a perfect democracy, but the United States must become a better democracy, and a reforming democracy, if its appeal to advance democracy is to resonate. It cannot continue to say, “Do as we say, not as we do.”
CONTAINING CORRUPTION
I have argued in this book that controlling corruption is a key element in the struggle to build free and prosperous societies throughout the world. Without a reasonably honest government dedicated to generating public goods rather than private ones, development lags. If corruption and abuse of power are rampant in a democracy, citizens lose faith in it. Most political and economic development assistance programs work from the unstated assumption that these are problems of the developing and postcommunist countries, not of the advanced industrial democracies. Indeed, most of the top-rated countries in controlling corruption are the wealthy democracies of North America, Europe, and Australia. Yet these countries vary in the extent to which they control (or at least are perceived to control) corruption, and some rank well behind others. American disenchantment with political corruption is far from groundless: in Transparency International’s 2006 annual “Corruption Perceptions Index,” the United States was tied (with Belgium and Chile) for twentieth place, ranking behind Hong Kong, Japan, and France, in controlling corruption.10
Many Americans (and most of those who promote democracy abroad) tend to think of overt corruption—criminal abuse of office for personal gain—as something rare in the United States. Certainly, it is not the norm; most public officials do not accept bribes or steal from the public trust. But every year, federal prosecutors charge more than a thousand individuals with corruption-related crimes.11 Since 1986, the U.S. Justice Department has convicted an average of about 485 federal officials of corruption each year.12 Most of these are not elected officials, but some have been prominent members of the U.S. Congress. In 2002, Representative Jim Traficant Jr., a Democrat from Ohio, was convicted of ten corruption-related felonies, including bribery, tax evasion, and racketeering.13 Sentenced to eight years in prison, Traficant was subsequently expelled from the House of Representatives, the first member to be expelled since 1980; in November 2002, he ran—from his jail cell—for his old seat in Congress and received 15 percent of the vote as an unaffiliated independent.14 Also in 2002, Democratic senator Robert Torricelli of New Jersey decided not to run for reelection after being implicated in a bribery and campaign finance scandal (though he was never formally charged with a crime).15 In August 2005, the FBI videotaped Democratic representative William Jefferson of Louisiana accepting $100,000 in cash from an undercover operative as part of an ongoing corruption investigation. The cash was later found stuffed in frozen food containers in a freezer in Jefferson’s home in Washington, D.C.16 Despite the fact that two of Jefferson’s associates pleaded guilty to corruption charges and implicated Jefferson in the scheme, Jefferson won reelection to the House in November 2006 and served in Congress as he prepared his legal defense. In November 2005, another representative, Randy “Duke” Cunningham, a seven-term Republican from California, and a former navy fighter pilot, resigned after pleading guilty to accepting $2.4 million in bribes and underreporting his income.17 He was sentenced to more than eight years in prison and ordered to pay $1.8 million in restitution.18 In January 2006, Republican businessman and lawyer Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to three felonies connected to defrauding lobbying clients and corrupting public officials. In June 2006, fallout from the scandal led to the resignation of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas after two former aides pleaded guilty to related corruption charges; and, in October 2006, fellow Republican representative Bob Ney of Ohio pleaded guilty to similar charges.19
