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      States Push for New Voting Laws With an Eye Toward 2024

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      Republicans are focused on voter ID rules and making it harder to cast mail ballots, while Democrats are seeking to expand access through automatic voter registration.The tug of war over voting rights and rules is playing out with fresh urgency at the state level, as Republicans and Democrats fight to get new laws on the books before the 2024 presidential election.Republicans have pushed to tighten voting laws with renewed vigor since former President Donald J. Trump made baseless claims of fraud after losing the 2020 election, while Democrats coming off midterm successes are trying to channel their momentum to expand voting access and thwart efforts to undermine elections.States like Florida, Texas and Georgia, where Republicans control the levers of state government, have already passed sweeping voting restrictions that include criminal oversight initiatives, limits on drop boxes, new identification requirements and more.While President Biden and Democrats in Congress were unable to pass federal legislation last year that would protect voting access and restore elements of the landmark Voting Rights Act stripped away by the Supreme Court in 2013, not all reform efforts have floundered.In December, Congress updated the Electoral Count Act, closing a loophole that Mr. Trump’s supporters had sought to exploit to try to get Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 election results on the day of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.Now the focus has returned to the state level. Here are some of the key voting measures in play this year:Ohio Republicans approve new restrictions.Ohioans must now present a driver’s license, passport or other official photo ID to vote in person under a G.O.P. measure that was signed into law on Jan. 6 by Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican.The law also set tighter deadlines for voters to return mail-in ballots and provide missing information on them. Absentee ballot requests must be received earlier as well.Republicans, who control the Legislature in Ohio, contend that the new rules will bolster election integrity, yet they have acknowledged that the issue has not presented a problem in the state. Overall, voter fraud is exceedingly rare.Several voting rights groups were quick to file a federal lawsuit challenging the changes, which they said would disenfranchise Black people, younger and older voters, as well as those serving in the military and living abroad.Texas G.O.P. targets election crimes and ballot initiatives.Despite enacting sweeping restrictions on voting in 2021 that were condemned by civil rights groups and the Justice Department in several lawsuits, Republican lawmakers in Texas are seeking to push the envelope further.Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.2023 Races: Governors’ contests in Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi and mayoral elections in Chicago and Philadelphia are among the races to watch this year.Democrats’ New Power: After winning trifectas in four state governments in the midterms, Democrats have a level of control in statehouses not seen since 2009.G.O.P. Debates: The Republican National Committee has asked several major TV networks to consider sponsoring debates, an intriguing show of détente toward the mainstream media and an early sign that the party is making plans for a contested 2024 presidential primary.An Important Election: The winner of a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in April will determine who holds a 4-to-3 majority in a critical presidential battleground state.Dozens of bills related to voting rules and election administration were filed for the legislative session that began this month. While many are from Democrats seeking to ease barriers to voting, Republicans control both chambers of the Texas Legislature and the governor’s office. It is not clear which bills will gain the necessary support to become laws.Some G.O.P. proposals focus on election crimes, including one that would authorize the secretary of state to designate an election marshal responsible for investigating potential election violations.“Similar bills have passed in Florida and in Georgia,” said Jasleen Singh, a counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “We should be concerned about whether this will happen in Texas as well.”Under another bill, a voter could request that the secretary of state review local election orders and language on ballot propositions and reject any that are found to be “misleading, inaccurate or prejudicial,” part of a push by Republicans in several states to make it harder to pass ballot measures after years of progressive victories.One proposal appears to target heavily populated, Democratic-controlled counties, giving the state attorney general the power to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate voter fraud allegations if local officials decline to do so. Another bill goes further, allowing the attorney general to seek an injunction against local prosecutors who don’t investigate claims of voter fraud and pursue civil penalties against them.A 19-year-old registering to vote in Minnesota, where Democrats introduced a bill that would allow applicants who are at least 16 years old to preregister to vote. Tim Gruber for The New York TimesDemocrats in Minnesota and Michigan go on offense.Democrats are seeking to harness their momentum from the midterm elections to expand voting access in Minnesota and Michigan, where they swept the governors’ races and legislative control.In Minnesota, the party introduced legislation in early January that would create an automatic voter registration system and allow applicants who are at least 16 years old to preregister to vote. The measure would also automatically restore the voting rights of convicted felons upon their release from prison and for those who do not receive prison time as part of a sentence.In Michigan, voters approved a constitutional amendment in November that creates a nine-day early voting period and requires the state to fund absentee ballot drop boxes. Top Democrats in the state are also weighing automatic voter registration and have discussed criminalizing election misinformation.Pennsylvania Republicans want to expand a voter ID law.Because of the veto power of the governor, an office the Democrats held in the November election, Republicans in Pennsylvania have resorted to trying to amend the state constitution in order to pass a voter ID bill.The complex amendment process, which ultimately requires putting the question to voters, is the subject of pending litigation.Both chambers of the Legislature need to pass the bill this session in order to place it on the ballot, but Democrats narrowly flipped control of the House in the midterms — and they will seek to bolster their majority with three special elections next month.“If the chips fall in a certain way, it is unlikely that this will move forward and it might quite possibly be dead,” said Susan Gobreski, a board member of the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania. “But it ain’t dead yet.”Gov. Josh Shapiro has indicated an openness to compromise with Republicans on some voting rules.“I’m certainly willing to have an honest conversation about voter I.D., as long as that is something that is not used as a hindrance to voting,” Mr. Shapiro said in an interview in December.First-time voters and those applying for absentee ballots are currently required to present identification in Pennsylvania, but Republicans want to expand the requirement to all voters in every election and have proposed issuing voter ID cards. Critics say the proposal would make it harder to vote and could compromise privacy.Mr. Shapiro has separately said he hoped that Republicans in the legislature would agree to change the state’s law that forbids the processing of absentee ballots and early votes before Election Day. The ballot procedures, which can drag out the counting, have been a flash point in a series of election lawsuits filed by Republicans.Georgia’s top election official, a Republican, calls to end runoff system.Early voting fell precipitously in Georgia’s nationally watched Senate runoff in December after Republicans, who control of state government, cut in half the number of days for casting ballots before Election Day.Long lines at some early-voting sites, especially in the Atlanta area, during the runoff led to complaints of voter suppression.But the G.O.P. lost the contest, after a set of runoff defeats a year earlier that gave Democrats control of the Senate.Now Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who is Georgia’s secretary of state and its top election official, wants to abandon the runoff system altogether, saying that the condensed timeline had put added strain on poll workers.Critics of ranked-choice voting cited the system as being instrumental to the re-election last year of Senator Lisa Murkowski, a centrist Republican.Ash Adams for The New York TimesRepublicans in Alaska want to undo some voting changes approved in 2020.After a special election last year and the midterms, when Alaska employed a novel election system for the first time, some conservatives reeling from losses at the polls have directed their ire at a common target: ranked-choice voting.At least three Republican lawmakers have introduced bills seeking to repeal some of the electoral changes that were narrowly approved by voters in 2020, which introduced a “top-four” open primary and ranked-choice voting in general elections. In addition to deciding winners based on the candidate who receives the most votes, the bills also seek to return to a closed primary system, in which only registered party members can participate.Supporters of the new system contend that it sets a higher bar to get elected than to simply earn a plurality of votes.But critics have called the format confusing. Some have blamed it for the defeat of Sarah Palin, the Republican former governor and 2008 vice-presidential nominee, in a special House election in August and again in November for the same office.They also cited the system as being instrumental to the re-election last year of Senator Lisa Murkowski, a centrist Republican who angered some members of her party when she voted to convict Mr. Trump at his impeachment trial after the Jan. 6 attack.Still, Republican foes of ranked-choice elections could face hurdles within their own party. According to The Anchorage Daily News, the incoming Senate president, a Republican, favors keeping the system in place.Nebraska Republicans aim to sharply curb mail voting.Nebraska does not require voters to provide a reason to vote early by mail, but two Republican state senators want to make wholesale changes that would mostly require in-person voting on Election Day.Under a bill proposed by Steve Halloran and Steve Erdman, G.O.P. senators in the unicameral legislature, only members of the U.S. military and residents of nursing homes and assisted living facilities could vote by mail.The measure would further require all ballots to be counted on Election Day, which would become a state holiday in Nebraska, along with the day of the statewide primary.The League of Women Voters of Nebraska opposes the bill and noted that 11 of the state’s 93 counties vote entirely by mail under a provision that gives officials in counties with under 10,000 people the option to do so.“This is an extreme bill and would be very unpopular,” MaryLee Mouton, the league’s president, said in an email. “When most states are moving to expand voting by mail, a bill to restrict vote by mail would negatively impact both our rural and urban communities.”In the November election, Nebraskans overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative that created a statewide photo ID requirement for voting.A Republican bill in Missouri would hunt for election fraud.In Missouri, where Republicans control the governor’s office and Legislature, one G.O.P. bill would create an Office of Election Crimes and Security. The office would report to the secretary of state and would be responsible for reviewing election fraud complaints and conducting investigations.Its investigators would also be authorized to enter poling places or offices of any election authority on Election Day, during absentee voting or the canvass of votes. More

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      When American History Turns Into American Mythology

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      In the realm of folklore and ancient traditions, myths are tales forever retold for their wisdom and underlying truths. Their impossibility is part of their appeal; few would pause to debunk the physics of Icarus’s wings before warning against flying too close to the sun.In the worlds of journalism and history, however, myths are viewed as pernicious creatures that obscure more than they illuminate. They must be hunted and destroyed so that the real story can assume its proper perch. Puncturing these myths is a matter of duty and an assertion of expertise. “Actually” becomes an honored adverb.I can claim some experience in this effort, not as a debunker of myths but as a clearinghouse for them. When I served as the editor of The Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook section several years ago, I assigned and edited dozens of “5 Myths” articles in which experts tackled the most common fallacies surrounding subjects in the news. This regular exercise forced me to wrestle with the form’s basic challenges: How entrenched and widespread must a misconception be to count as an honest-to-badness myth? What is the difference between a conclusive debunking and a conflicting interpretation? And who is qualified to upend a myth or disqualified from doing so?These questions came up frequently as I read “Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past,” a collection published this month and edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, historians at Princeton. The book, which the editors describe as an “intervention” in long-running public discussions on American politics, economics and culture, is an authoritative and fitting contribution to the myth-busting genre — authoritative for the quality of the contributions and the scope of its enterprise, fitting because it captures in one volume the possibilities and pitfalls of the form. When you face down so many myths in quick succession, the values that underpin the effort grow sharper, even if the value of myths themselves grows murkier. All of our national delusions should be exposed, but I’m not sure all should be excised. Do not some myths serve a valid purpose?Several contributors to “Myth America” successfully eviscerate tired assumptions about their subjects. Carol Anderson of Emory University discredits the persistent notion of extensive voter fraud in U.S. elections, showing how the politicians and activists who claim to defend “election integrity” are often seeking to exclude some voters from the democratic process. Daniel Immerwahr of Northwestern University puts the lie to the idea that the United States historically has lacked imperial ambitions; with its territories and tribal nations and foreign bases, he contends, the country is very much an empire today and has been so from the start. And after reading Lawrence B. Glickman’s essay on “White Backlash,” I will be careful of writing that a civil-rights protest or movement “sparked” or “fomented” or “provoked” a white backlash, as if such a response is instinctive and unavoidable. “Backlashers are rarely treated as agents of history, the people who participate in them seen as bit players rather than catalysts of the story, reactors rather than actors,” Glickman, a historian at Cornell, writes. Sometimes the best myth-busting is the kind that makes you want to rewrite old sentences.The collection raises worthy arguments about the use of history in the nation’s political discourse, foremost among them that the term “revisionist history” should not be a slur. “All good historical work is at heart ‘revisionist’ in that it uses new findings from the archives or new perspectives from historians to improve, to perfect — and yes, to revise — our understanding of the past,” Kruse and Zelizer write. Yet, this revisionist impulse at times makes the myths framework feel somewhat forced, an excuse to cover topics of interest to the authors.Sarah Churchwell’s enlightening chapter on the evolution of “America First” as a slogan and worldview, for instance, builds on her 2018 book on the subject. But to address the topic as a myth, Churchwell, a historian at the University of London, asserts that Donald Trump’s invocation of “America First” in the 2016 presidential race was “widely defended as a reasonable foreign policy doctrine.” (Her evidence is a pair of pieces by the conservative commentators Michael Barone and Michael Anton.)In his essay defending the accomplishments of the New Deal, Eric Rauchway of the University of California, Davis, admits that the policy program’s alleged failure “is not a tale tightly woven into the national story” and that “perhaps myth seems an inappropriate term.” He does believe the New Deal’s failure is a myth worth exploding, of course, but acknowledges that there are “many analytical categories of falsehood.” The admission deserves some kudos, but it also might just be right.In Kruse’s chapter on the history of the “Southern Strategy” — the Republican Party’s deliberate effort to bring white Southerners to its side as the Democratic Party grew more active in support of civil rights — the author allows that “only recently have conservative partisans challenged this well-established history.” This singling out of conservatives is not accidental. In their introduction, Kruse and Zelizer argue that the growth of right-wing media platforms and the Republican Party’s declining “commitment to truth” have fostered a boom in mythmaking. “Efforts to reshape narratives about the U.S. past thus became a central theme of the conservative movement in general and the Trump administration in particular,” they write.The editors note the existence of some “bipartisan” myths that transcend party or ideology, but overwhelmingly, the myths covered in “Myth America” originate or live on the right. In an analysis that spans 20 chapters, more than 300 pages and centuries of American history and public discourse, this emphasis is striking. Do left-wing activists and politicians in the United States never construct and propagate their own self-affirming versions of the American story? If such liberal innocence is real, let’s hear more about it. If not, it might require its own debunking.One of those bipartisan myths, typically upheld by politicians of both major parties, is the ur-myth of the nation: American exceptionalism. In his essay on the subject, David A. Bell, another Princeton historian, can be dismissive of the term. “Most nations can be considered exceptional in one sense or another,” he writes. Today, the phrase is typically deployed as a “cudgel” in the country’s culture wars, Bell contends, a practice popularized by politicians like Newt Gingrich, who has long hailed the United States as “the most unique civilization in history” and assails anyone who does not bow before the concept. “For Gingrich, demonstrating America’s exceptionality has always mattered less than denouncing the Left for not believing in it,” Bell writes.When exploring earlier arguments about America’s unique nature, Bell touches on John Winthrop’s 17th-century sermon “Model of Christian Charity,” in which the future governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared that the Puritan community would be “as a city on a hill” (a line that President Ronald Reagan expanded centuries later to a “shining city upon a hill”). The reference is obligatory in any discussion of American exceptionalism, though Bell minimizes the relevance of the lay sermon to the exceptionalism debates, both because the text “breathed with agonized doubt” about whether the colonists could meet the challenge and because the sermon “remained virtually unknown until the 19th century.”It is an intriguing assumption, at least to this non-historian, that the initial obscurity of a speech (or a book or an argument or a work of any kind) would render it irrelevant, no matter how significant it became to later generations. It is the same attitude that Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale and the author of a chapter on myths surrounding the Constitution, takes toward Federalist No. 10. James Madison’s essay “foreshadowed much of post-Civil War American history,” Amar writes, in part for its argument that the federal government would protect minority rights more effectively than the states, “but in 1787-1788, almost no one paid attention to Madison’s masterpiece.” Unlike other Federalist essays that resonated widely during the debates over constitutional ratification, Amar writes, No. 10 “failed to make a deep impression in American coffeehouses and taverns where patrons read aloud and discussed both local and out-of-town newspapers.” Alas, Mr. Madison, your piece was not trending, so we’re taking it off history’s home page.To his credit, Amar is consistent in privileging immediate popular reactions in his historical assessments. He criticizes the argument of Charles Beard’s 1913 book, “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution,” that the Constitution was an antidemocratic document. “If the document was truly antidemocratic, why did the People vote for it?” Amar asks. “Why did tens of thousands of ordinary working men enthusiastically join massive pro-constitutional rallies in Philadelphia and Manhattan?” Even just in the aftermath of the 2020 election and the Capitol assault of Jan. 6, however, it seems clear that people in a free society can be rallied to democratic and anti-democratic causes, with great enthusiasm, if they come to believe such causes are righteous.Other contributors to “Myth America” are more willing to squint at the first impressions of the past. In a chapter minimizing the transformational impact of the Reagan presidency, Zelizer laments how “the trope that a ‘Reagan Revolution’ remade American politics has remained central to the national discourse,” even though it “has been more of a political talking point than a description of reality.” (Reminder: Calling them “tropes” or “talking points” is an effective shorthand way to dismiss opposing views.) When Zelizer looks back on a collection of historians’ essays published in 1989, just months after Reagan left office, and which argued that Reagan’s 1980 victory was “the end of the New Deal era,” he does not hesitate to pass judgment on his professional colleagues. “Even a group of historians was swept up by the moment,” he writes.Here, proximity to an earlier historical era renders observers susceptible to transient passions, not possessors of superior insights. If so, perhaps an essay collection of American myths that is published shortly after the Trump presidency also risks being swept up by its own moment. (Incidentally, that 1989 book, edited by the historians Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle and titled “The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980,” shares one contributor with “Myth America.” Michael Kazin, take a bow.)Zelizer writes that the notion of a revolutionary Reagan era did not emerge spontaneously but was “born out of an explicit political strategy” aimed at exaggerating both conservative strength and liberal weakness. This is another recurring conclusion of “Myth America” — that many of our national mythologies are not the product of good-faith misunderstandings or organically divergent viewpoints that become entrenched over time, but rather of deliberate efforts at mythmaking. The notions that free enterprise is inseparable from broader American freedoms, that voting fraud is ubiquitous, that the feminist movement is anti-family — in this telling, they are myths peddled or exaggerated, for nefarious purposes, by the right.But in his essay on American exceptionalism, Bell adds in passing an idea somewhat subversive to the project of “Myth America,” and it separates this book from standard myth-quashing practices. After writing that narratives about America’s exceptional character were long deployed to justify U.S. aggression abroad and at home, Bell posits that notions of exceptionalism “also highlighted what Americans saw as their best qualities and moral duties, giving them a standard to live up to.”Bell does not suggest that the belief in American exceptionalism fulfills this latter role today; to the contrary, its politicization has rendered the term vacuous and meaningless. “The mere notion of being exceptional can do very little to inspire Americans actually to be exceptional,” he writes. Still, Bell has opened a door here, even if just a crack. National myths can be more than conspiratorial, self-serving lies spread for low, partisan aims. They can also be aspirational.American aspiration, idealism and mythology have mingled together from the start. In her 2018 one-volume American history, “These Truths,” Jill Lepore wrote eloquently of those self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence — political equality, natural rights, popular sovereignty — that the country never ceases to claim yet always struggles to uphold. It is the argument, often made by former President Barack Obama, that America becomes a more perfect union when it attempts to live up to its ideals and mythologies, even if it often fails. The tension between myth and reality does not undermine America. It defines it.In his best book, “American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony,” published in 1981, the political scientist Samuel Huntington distills the tension in his final lines: “Critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so short of its ideals. They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.” The authors and editors of “Myth America” do plenty to discredit the lies and reveal the disappointments, as they well should. Reimagining myth as aspiration can be a task for historians, but it is not theirs alone.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      In New Law, Indonesia Criminalizes Sex Outside of Marriage

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      Parliament also approved a law that criminalizes criticism of the government, delivering a blow to the country’s progressive reputation.Indonesia has long been known as a widely tolerant nation at the forefront of establishing democratic reforms throughout Southeast Asia. That progressive reputation took a hit on Tuesday when Parliament cleared a sweeping overhaul of the country’s criminal code.According to the new rules, sex outside of marriage is now illegal in Indonesia, as is defamation of the president. The overhaul also sharply expanded laws against blasphemy in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. Opponents said the rules posed significant risks to religious minorities by outlawing extramarital sex and tacitly targeting critics of Islam. Extramarital sex criminalization also targets the L.G.B.T. community, as gay marriage is illegal in Indonesia. The new laws could also curtail freedom of expression and assembly.The new laws are almost certain to revive a debate around democratic backsliding in the nation of 276 million. After the fall of the Indonesian dictator Suharto in 1998, the country had prided itself as a thriving democracy. Most Indonesians held fairly relaxed views about homosexuality, which was never officially banned.But in recent years, conservative Islam has gained ground in the country, and now some fear its influence is growing, even as its ranks remain a minority in Parliament. In the lead-up to the next presidential election in 2024, few officials appear willing to upset the religious right, which helped paved the way for Tuesday’s overhaul of the criminal code.“It is a very significant encroachment on rights and liberties in Indonesia,” said Tim Lindsey, director of the Center for Indonesian Law, Islam and Society at the University of Melbourne. Critics warned that the new rules, which also apply to foreigners, will make Indonesia less appealing to investors, tourists and students.Muhamad Isnur, chairman of the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation, said the laws run “contrary to international human rights norms. We are in a new paradigm,” he said.The bill was approved unanimously in Parliament on Tuesday. The government has tried for decades to overhaul the law but has never succeeded. In 2019, it tried to pass a similar draft law, but President Joko Widodo shelved it after tens of thousands of young people protested in the streets, arguing that the law threatened their civil liberties. This time, activists said they were blindsided when lawmakers suddenly announced on Nov. 30 that they were handing a draft to Parliament to ratify, giving the activists very little time to organize demonstrations.Indonesia officials said they had engaged in monthslong conversations with several human rights groups before submitting the new draft. The lawmakers said they added revisions based on feedback, such as stating that blasphemy does not only apply to religion but all belief systems. Edward Omar Sharif Hiariej, Indonesia’s deputy minister of law and human rights, said that the government tried to accommodate as many parties as possible, but acknowledged that the overhaul “won’t satisfy everyone.”“If there are citizens who feel that their constitutional rights have been violated, the door of the constitutional court is wide open for that,” Mr. Edward told reporters last month. The laws, which are set to take effect after three years, will likely be challenged in the country’s Constitutional Court. On Tuesday, there were calls for protests outside Parliament. (The new rules state that people who demonstrate without a permit can also be penalized.)Officials say upgrading the existing criminal code, which dates back to 1918 when Indonesia was a Dutch colony, was long overdue. Among the raft of new laws, penalties around consensual sex outside marriage have drawn the most criticism. According to the revisions, unmarried couples who live together could be jailed for six months or face a maximum fine of 10 million rupiah ($710)..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.Learn more about our process.Though the penalties apply to foreigners, the new law states that the police can only make an arrest after a report is filed by a close family member, such as a parent, spouse or child, making it extremely unlikely that foreigners would be prosecuted, Mr. Lindsey said. “But gay and lesbian Indonesians, who, of course, are couples and they can’t be married, they are completely exposed.”Police have previously arrested dozens of gay men for violating an anti-pornography law, but now, all gay couples who live together are subject to possible arrest.The push for the overhaul was backed by Vice President Ma’ruf Amin, an Islamic cleric and the former chair of the Indonesian Ulema Council, the country’s top body for Islamic scholars, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the details of private conversations. Mr. Ma’ruf had previously called for “stern regulations” on the sexual activities of homosexuals.In a reversal, lawmakers on Tuesday reinstated a provision making it illegal to attack “the honor or dignity” of both Indonesia’s president and vice president, a rule that was struck down by the Constitutional Court in 2006. In recent years, however, tolerance for such criticism has waned. Last year, the authorities arrested an artist who created a mural criticizing Mr. Joko, and activists say they have been harassed and charged with defamation for speaking up on rights abuses.Mr. Joko — known as a moderate, secular leader — has spoken out repeatedly against intolerant views in his country. In an interview with The New York Times last month, he said Indonesia has a vibrant democracy with frequent peaceful protests outside the presidential palace. “Even today, everyone can criticize the president and the government,” Mr. Joko said, speaking before the Group of 20 summit in Bali last month. “I believe that Indonesia’s democracy is moving on the right track.”Andreas Harsono, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, said that the laws would give the police greater opportunities to extort bribes, and lead to more corruption. Politicians would also have more excuses to target political opponents, he added. “The danger of oppressive laws is not that they will be broadly applied — no, they won’t be — it is that they provide an avenue for selective enforcement,” Mr. Harsono said.The new penal code expands the country’s blasphemy law from one to six provisions, stating for the first time that apostasy — anyone who “persuades someone to be a nonbeliever” — can be charged as a criminal offense.Religious minorities are most at risk of running afoul of this law. Roughly 87 percent of Indonesians are Muslim, while the rest are Christian, Catholic, Hindu and Buddhist. According to Mr. Harsono, the use of the blasphemy law has been most commonly used against people who have criticized Islam.In 2017, former Jakarta governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, a Christian and an ally of Mr. Joko, was sentenced to two years in prison on blasphemy charges after he was accused of insulting Islam by jokingly referring to a verse in the Quran in a campaign speech.Willy Aditya, a lawmaker from the left-leaning NasDem party, rejected claims that Indonesia was “turning into an Islamic country” but said that the new law was written based on emotion, not research. The law shows that the officials have failed to distinguish the difference between public and private affairs, he said, “which is the most elementary thing in democracy.”Muktita Suhartono More

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      He Pointed Out a Judge’s Goof. Now, He Faces Jail Time in Fiji.

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      A lawyer who made light of a legal document’s error was convicted of contempt of court, in a sign of the island nation’s eroding civil liberties.MELBOURNE, Australia — It was an error that could have happened to anyone, especially two years into a pandemic: In a court document, a judge in Fiji twice wrote “injection” when he meant “injunction.”And so, in a gently mocking Facebook post back in February, Richard Naidu, one of the most senior lawyers in the Pacific nation, pointed out the mistake, concluding with a “thinking face” emoji. He now faces up to six months in prison.With Fiji facing a pivotal election on Dec. 14, the case is the latest example of government criticism being met with the strong arm of the law, over seemingly trivial issues.Outside of the region, Fiji is perceived as a Pacific haven: the palm-fringed paradise emblazoned on high-end bottled water, with golden beaches and endless azure waters. Yet to its smaller neighbors, it is a powerhouse to be reckoned with — and one that often portends their own shifts toward or away from human rights and democratic freedoms.Fiji is one of the largest Pacific island nations, with a population of around a million people, a powerful military and a G.D.P. many multiples those of Samoa, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. But its image of picture-perfect vistas and dreamy vacation homes belies a turbulent electoral history and what analysts describe as a growing disregard for civil liberties, which have together elevated tensions ahead of a critical election next month that many fear may devolve into unrest.Peaceful transitions of power have not always come easily to Fiji, which has experienced four coups d’état since 1987, and which is often described as a “conditional democracy.” Its Pacific neighbors have also struggled to reconcile traditional power structures with respecting the voice of the people.This year’s election comes as divisions deepen between those Pacific nations that have allied with China and those that retain close ties to Australia, New Zealand and the United States.An official drawing of ballot numbers in Suva last week ahead of the coming election.Pita Simpson/Getty ImagesFiji’s relationship to China has been evolving. After an initial burst of investment from Beijing after Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, 68, took power in a coup in 2006, Fiji’s government has become more selective in its partnerships with the Chinese government and Chinese companies. But it’s not clear how Beijing would respond to a change in government, or unrest after a disputed result.“An unstable Fiji is bad for the region, because it creates an opportunity for China to exert its influence,” said Dominic O’Sullivan, a professor of political science at Charles Sturt University in Australia. He added: “It makes it difficult for Australia and New Zealand to remain on friendly terms, because they’ll — at least to some degree — try to defend democracy.”Fiji, a British colony from 1874 until its independence in 1970, was once seen as a standard-bearer for human rights in the Pacific. But over the past two decades or so, protections around civil liberties and freedom of speech have gradually eroded. Rights advocates now warn that the judiciary is far from independent, and that freedom of the press is at a worrying low.“If you criticize government, the implicit message out there is, you could still get prosecuted under several different laws,” said Kate Schuetze, a researcher on the Pacific for Amnesty International.In 2014, eight years after he came to power, Mr. Bainimarama reintroduced democratic elections, which he and his party, FijiFirst, won with around 60 percent of the vote. Four years later, in 2018, the party barely achieved an absolute majority. This year, as Fiji contends with rising inflation as well as the shock of the pandemic to its tourism industry, coffers and health system, polling suggests his victory is far from assured.So clear is the call for a fresh face that even the incumbent government is running on a platform of reform, with the slogan “We are the change.”The ruling party’s increasingly repressive moves to retain power and its gradual constriction of liberties have together created an environment where speaking out against the government comes with significant risks, sometimes months down the line.Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama of Fiji, left, with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, center, at the Pacific Islands Forum in Suva in July. New Zealand and Australia have resisted criticizing Fiji’s increasing repression out of fear of pushing it closer to Beijing.Pool photo by William WestFor Mr. Naidu, a partner at a leading law firm, there was no immediate official response to his Facebook post, which garnered a few dozen likes and featured a screen shot of examples of the injunction/injection error in two consecutive instances, along with the comment “Maybe our judges need to be shielded from all this vaccination campaigning.”As the months passed, Mr. Naidu appeared at rallies for the opposition, fueling speculation that he planned to run for office himself. In July, around five months after publishing his post, he was suddenly charged with contempt of court, after Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, the country’s powerful attorney general and a government cabinet minister, said the post aimed to “ridicule the presiding judicial officer and the Fijian judiciary as a whole.”Mr. Naidu was found guilty of contempt of court on Wednesday. His sentencing will be in January, when he faces the prospect of a heavy fine, or three to six months in prison. He declined to comment.Other opposition figures have experienced similar clampdowns. Biman Prasad, the leader of an opposition party, was charged last month with two counts of “insulting the modesty” of a person after he greeted the wife of a former political colleague with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. (The charges were subsequently dropped.)The use of the courts to restrict criticism has become more common in Fiji, which passed legislation making it easier to prosecute people for what they post online.“We’re seeing that spread across many countries in the Pacific,” said Josef Benedict, a researcher covering the Asia Pacific region for the civic-action nonprofit Civicus.The United States and other democracies in the region, especially New Zealand and Australia, have been reluctant to criticize the assaults on freedoms in Fiji, for fear of pushing the country toward China.Now, with three weeks to the election, many analysts fear a disputed result that could lead the military to intervene either for Mr. Bainimarama or his main opponent, Sitiveni Rabuka, 74, who led Fiji’s first coup in 1987.“The challenge is going to be, in terms of ensuring political stability and peace and security for individuals, in making sure that the military’s role is clearly defined, and that it doesn’t have a role in terms of interfering, overturning, or having a say in the government’s politics of the day,” said Ms. Schuetze, of Amnesty International. “That’s going to be the biggest test of this election.” More

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      To Understand the F.B.I., You Have to Understand J. Edgar Hoover

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      In recent years, as I finished writing a biography of J. Edgar Hoover, director of the F.B.I. for nearly half a century, liberal-minded friends often came to me with a confession. They were, they whispered, cheering for the F.B.I. During the Trump era, they began to see the bureau as the last best hope of the Republic, after a lifetime of viewing it as a bastion of political repression.Public opinion polls bear out this shift in opinion. In 2003, Republicans liked the F.B.I. far better than Democrats did, by a margin of 19 points, at 63 percent to 44 percent. Today, nearly 20 years later, that equation has flipped and then some. According to a recent Rasmussen survey, 75 percent of Democrats now have a favorable view of the F.B.I., in contrast to 30 percent of Republicans. Gallup puts the numbers further apart, with 79 percent of Democrats expressing approval and 29 percent of Republicans disapproval.From James Comey’s firing in May 2017 through the Mueller report, the Jan. 6 investigation and the Mar-a-Lago raid, the F.B.I. has not always delivered on Democratic hopes. But its showdowns with Donald Trump have fundamentally changed its public image.To some degree this switch simply reflects our hyperpartisan times. But the F.B.I.’s surge in popularity among Democrats also reflects a forgotten political tradition.Since the 1960s, liberals have tended to associate the bureau with its misdeeds against the left, including its outrageous efforts to discredit the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and other civil rights activists. Before those activities were exposed, though, liberals often admired and embraced the F.B.I., especially when it seemed to be a hedge against demagogy and abuses of power elsewhere in government.They pointed to the bureau’s role as an objective, nonpartisan investigative force seeking to ferret out the truth amid an often complicated and depressing political morass. And they viewed Hoover as one the greatest embodiments of that ethic: a long-serving and long-suffering federal civil servant who managed to win the respect of both Republicans and Democrats.The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. leaving the office of J. Edgar Hoover in 1964. The F.B.I. conducted extensive surveillance of Dr. King’s private life.Bettmann/Getty ImagesWe now know that much of that admiration rested on wishful thinking — and today’s liberals would be wise to remember Hoover’s cautionary example. But for all his failings, all his abuses of power, he also promoted a vision of F.B.I. integrity and professionalism that still has resonance.J. Edgar Hoover was a lifelong conservative, outspoken on matters ranging from crime to Communism to the urgent need for all Americans to attend church. He also knew how to get along with liberals. Indeed, he could not have survived in government as long as he did without this essential skill. First appointed bureau director in 1924, Hoover stayed in that job until his death in 1972, an astonishing 48 years. He served under eight presidents, four Republicans and four Democrats.It has often been said that Hoover remained in power for so many decades because politicians feared him — and there is much truth to that view, especially in his later years. But Hoover’s late-in-life strong-arm tactics do not explain much about how he rose so fast through the government ranks, or why so many presidents — including Franklin Roosevelt, the great liberal titan of the 20th century — thought it was a good idea to give him so much power.Hoover spent his first decade as director establishing his good-government bona fides; he championed professionalism, efficiency, high standards and scientific methods. So in the 1930s, Roosevelt saw Hoover not as a far-right reactionary but as an up-and-coming administrator thoroughly steeped in the values of the modern state — a bureaucrat par excellence.Roosevelt did more than any other president to expand the F.B.I.’s power: first, by inviting Hoover to take a more active role in crime fighting, then by licensing him to become the nation’s domestic intelligence chief. Hoover’s agents became known as G-men, or government men, the avenging angels of the New Deal state.Hoover, center, taking aim while giving the Broadway actors flanking him, William Gaxton and Vincent Moore, a tour of F.B.I. headquarters in 1935.Underwood and UnderwoodToday’s F.B.I. still bears the stamp of the decisions Roosevelt made nearly a century ago. A hybrid institution, the F.B.I. remains one part law-enforcement agency, one part domestic-intelligence force — an awkward combination, if one that we now take for granted.It also retains Hoover’s dual political identity, with a conservative internal culture but also a powerful commitment to professional nonpartisan government service. This combination of attributes has helped to produce the F.B.I.’s inconsistent and sometimes contradictory reputation, as different groups pick and choose which aspects to embrace and which to condemn.Hoover went on to do outrageous things with the power granted him during the Roosevelt years, emerging as the 20th century’s single most effective foe of the American left. But many Washington liberals and civil libertarians did not see those abuses coming, because Hoover continued to reflect some of their values as well. During World War II, he distinguished himself as one of the few federal officials opposed to mass Japanese internment, labeling the policy “extremely unfortunate” and unnecessary for national security.After the war, despite his deep-seated racism, he stepped up the F.B.I.’s campaign against lynching in the South. “The great American crime is toleration of conditions which permit and promote prejudice, bigotry, injustice, terror and hate,” he told a civil rights committee convened by President Harry Truman in 1947. He framed white supremacist violence not only as a moral wrong but also as an acute challenge to federal authority.By contrast, he promoted himself as the embodiment of professional law enforcement, the polar opposite of the Ku Klux Klan’s vigilantes or the conspiracists of the John Birch Society. Many liberals embraced that message, despite Hoover’s well-known conservatism. “If a liberal came in, the liberal would leave thinking that, ‘My God, Hoover is a real liberal!” William Sullivan, an F.B.I. official, recalled. “If a John Bircher came in an hour later, he’d go out saying, ‘I’m convinced that Hoover is a member of the John Birch Society at heart.’ ”The height of Hoover’s popularity came during the Red Scare of the 1950s, when he emerged as both a hero of the anti-Communist right and the thinking man’s alternative to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Today, we tend to view Hoover and McCarthy as interchangeable figures, zealots who ran roughshod over civil liberties. At the time, though, many liberals viewed them as very different men.Truman feared the F.B.I.’s “Gestapo” tendencies, but far preferred Hoover to a partisan brawler and obvious fabricator like McCarthy. President Dwight Eisenhower heaped lavish praise on Hoover as the nation’s responsible, respectable anti-Communist, in contrast to McCarthy the demagogue. Both presidents cast the story in terms that might be familiar to any 21st-century liberal, with Hoover as the protector of truth, objectivity and the law, and McCarthy as those principles’ most potent enemy.One irony of the liberals’ stance is that it was actually Hoover, not McCarthy, who did the most to promote and sustain the Red Scare. Long before McCarthy burst on the scene, Hoover had been collaborating with congressional committees to target Communists and their sympathizers, conducting elaborate campaigns of infiltration and surveillance. And he long outlasted McCarthy, who was censured by his fellow senators in 1954. Hoover’s popularity grew as McCarthy’s fell. A Gallup poll in late 1953, the peak of the Red Scare, noted that a mere 2 percent of Americans expressed an unfavorable view of Hoover, a result “phenomenal in surveys that have dealt with men in public life.”Hoover with President Richard Nixon in 1969.Bettmann Archive, via Getty ImagesAnd with President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965.Associated PressThat consensus finally began to crack in the 1960s. Hoover’s current reputation stems largely from this late-career period, when the F.B.I.’s shocking campaigns against the civil rights, antiwar and New Left movements began to erode earlier conceptions of Hoover as a man of restraint.Its most notorious initiative, the bureau’s COINTELPRO (short for Counterintelligence Program), deployed manipulative news coverage, anonymous mailings and police harassment to disrupt these movements. In 1964, in one of the lowest points of Hoover’s regime, the F.B.I. faked a degrading anonymous letter implicitly urging Dr. King to commit suicide. Agents mailed it to him along with recordings of his extramarital sexual activities, captured on F.B.I. microphones planted in his hotel rooms.Even then, though, key liberal figures continued to champion Hoover and the F.B.I. President Lyndon Johnson, a friend and neighbor of Hoover’s, proved second only to Roosevelt in his enthusiasm for the director. And he urged his successor, Richard Nixon, to follow suit. “Dick, you will come to depend on Edgar,” he told Nixon in the Oval Office in late 1968. “He’s the only one you can put your complete trust in.”Despite such official support, by the early 1970s polls were starting to note that Hoover’s reputation among liberals and Democrats seemed to be in swift decline, thanks to his advancing age, aggressive tactics and conservative social views. “Now the case of J. Edgar Hoover has been added to the list of issues — ranging from the war in Vietnam, to race relations, welfare and the plight of the cities — which are the source of deep division across America today,” the pollster Louis Harris wrote in 1971.While conservatives still expressed widespread admiration for the F.B.I. director, liberals increasingly described him as a danger to the nation. The decline was especially precipitous among coastal elites and university-educated young people. By contrast, working-class white Americans in the Midwest and South expressed support.Today, those sentiments are reversed. According to Rasmussen, the F.B.I. is now most popular among Americans making more than $200,000 per year. Young voters like the F.B.I. better than older voters do. This division is being driven by national politics: When Mr. Trump attacks the F.B.I. as part of an overweening “deep state,” his supporters follow while his critics run the other way.But it also reflects a larger clash of values. Mr. Trump has long scored political points by attacking the administrative state and its legions of career government servants, whether at the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the State Department or, improbably, the National Archives. In response, Democrats have been forced to reaffirm what once seemed to be settled notions: that expertise and professionalism matter in government, that the rule of law applies to every American, that it’s worth employing skilled, nonpartisan investigators who can determine the facts.Hoover failed to live up to those principles — often spectacularly so. And today’s F.B.I. has made its own questionable choices, from surveillance of Black Lives Matter protesters to mismanagement of delicate political inquiries. But its history of professional federal service, of loyalty to the facts and the law, is still worth championing, especially in an era when suspicion of government, rather than faith in its possibilities, so often dominates our discourse. Whatever else we may think of Hoover’s legacy, that tradition is the best part of the institution he built.Beverly Gage (@beverlygage) is a professor of American history at Yale and the author of “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Elon Musk Takes a Page Out of Mark Zuckerberg’s Social Media Playbook

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      As Mr. Musk takes over Twitter, he is emulating some of the actions of Mr. Zuckerberg, who leads Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.Elon Musk has positioned himself as an unconventional businessman. When he agreed to buy Twitter this year, he declared he would make the social media service a place for unfettered free speech, reversing many of its rules and allowing banned users like former President Donald J. Trump to return.But since closing his $44 billion buyout of Twitter last week, Mr. Musk has followed a surprisingly conventional social media playbook.The world’s richest man met with more than six civil rights groups — including the N.A.A.C.P. and the Anti-Defamation League — on Tuesday to assure them that he will not make changes to Twitter’s content rules before the results of next week’s midterm elections are certified. He also met with advertising executives to discuss their concerns about their brands appearing alongside toxic online content. Last week, Mr. Musk said he would form a council to advise Twitter on what kinds of content to remove from the platform and would not immediately reinstate banned accounts.If these decisions and outreach seem familiar, that’s because they are. Other leaders of social media companies have taken similar steps. After Facebook was criticized for being misused in the 2016 presidential election, Mark Zuckerberg, the social network’s chief executive, also met with civil rights groups to calm them and worked to mollify irate advertisers. He later said he would establish an independent board to advise his company on content decisions.Mr. Musk is in his early days of owning Twitter and is expected to make big changes to the service and business, including laying off some of the company’s 7,500 employees. But for now, he is engaging with many of the same constituents that Mr. Zuckerberg has had to over many years, social media experts and heads of civil society groups said.Mr. Musk “has discovered what Mark Zuckerberg discovered several years ago: Being the face of controversial big calls isn’t fun,” said Evelyn Douek, an assistant professor at Stanford Law School. Social media companies “all face the same pressures of users, advertisers and governments, and there’s always this convergence around this common set of norms and processes that you’re forced toward.”Mr. Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and a Twitter spokeswoman declined to comment. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, declined to comment.Elon Musk’s Acquisition of TwitterCard 1 of 8A blockbuster deal. More

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      Why I Keep Coming Back to Reconstruction

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      I write frequently about the Reconstruction period after the Civil War not to make predictions or analogies but to show how a previous generation of Americans grappled with their own set of questions about the scope and reach of our Constitution, our government and our democracy.The scholarship on Reconstruction is vast and comprehensive. But my touchstone for thinking about the period continues to be W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Black Reconstruction,” published in 1935 after years of painstaking research, often inhibited by segregation and the racism of Southern institutions of higher education.I return to Du Bois, even as I read more recent work, because he offers a framework that is useful, I think, for analyzing the struggle for democracy in our own time.The central conceit of Du Bois’s landmark study — whose full title is “Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880” — is that the period was a grand struggle between “two theories of the future of America,” rooted in the relationship of American labor to American democracy.“What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States?” Du Bois asks. “Was the rule of the mass of Americans to be unlimited, and the right to rule extended to all men regardless of race and color?” And if not, he continues, “How would property and privilege be protected?”On one side in the conflict over these questions was “an autocracy determined at any price to amass wealth and power”; on the other was an “abolition-democracy based on freedom, intelligence and power for all men.”The term “abolition-democracy” began with Du Bois and is worth further exploration.Abolition-democracy, Du Bois writes, was the “liberal movement among both laborers and small capitalists” who saw “the danger of slavery to both capital and labor.” Its standard-bearers were abolitionists like Wendell Phillips and radical antislavery politicians like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stephens, and in its eyes, “the only real object” of the Civil War was the abolition of slavery and “it was convinced that this could be thoroughly accomplished only if the emancipated Negroes became free citizens and voters.”It was also clear, to some within abolition-democracy, that “freedom in order to be free required a minimum of capital in addition to political rights.” In this way, abolition-democracy was an anticipation of social democratic ideology, although few of its proponents, in Du Bois’s view, grasped the full significance of their analysis of the relationship between political freedom, civil rights and economic security.Opposing abolition-democracy, in Du Bois’s telling, were the reactionaries of the former Confederate South who sought to “reestablish slavery by force.” The South, he writes, “opposed Negro education, opposed land and capital for Negroes, and violently and bitterly opposed any political power. It fought every conception inch by inch: no real emancipation, limited civil rights, no Negro schools, no votes for Negroes.”Between these two sides lay Northern industry and capital. It wanted profits and it would join whichever force enabled it to expand its power and reach. Initially, this meant abolition-democracy, as Northern industry feared the return of a South that might threaten its political and economic dominance. It “swung inevitably toward democracy” rather than allow the “continuation of Southern oligarchy,” Du Bois writes.It’s here that we see the contradiction inherent in the alliance between Northern industry and abolition-democracy. The machinery of democracy in the South “put such power in the hands of Southern labor that, with intelligent and unselfish leadership and a clarifying ideal, it could have rebuilt the economic foundations of Southern society, confiscated and redistributed wealth, and built a real democracy of industry for the masses of men.”This — the extent to which democracy in the South threatened to undermine the imperatives of capital — was simply too much for Northern industry to bear. And so it turned against the abolition-democracy, already faltering as it was in the face of Southern reaction. “Brute force was allowed to use its unchecked power,” Du Bois writes, “to destroy the possibility of democracy in the South, and thereby make the transition from democracy to plutocracy all the easier and more inevitable.”In the end, “it was not race and culture calling out of the South in 1876; it was property and privilege, shrieking to its kind, and privilege and property heard and recognized the voice of its own.” What killed Reconstruction — beyond the ideological limitations of its champions and the vehemence of its opponents — was a “counterrevolution of property,” North and South.Why is this still a useful framework for understanding the United States, close to a century after Du Bois conceived and developed this argument? As a concept, abolition-democracy captures something vital and important: that democratic life cannot flourish as long as it is bound by and shaped around hierarchies of status. The fight for political equality cannot be separated from the fight for equality more broadly.In other words, the reason I keep coming back to “Black Reconstruction” is that Du Bois’s mode of analysis can help us (or, at least, me) look past so much of the ephemera of our politics to focus on what matters most: the roles of power, privilege and, most important, capital in shaping our political order and structuring our conflicts with one another.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      There Is a Way to Make America Safe for Democracy

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      Many Americans believe there’s something not quite right about majority rule — something threatening, something dangerous. It just feels wrong.We might be comfortable with decision-making by majorities at our P.T.A. meetings or when deciding on the theme for the next vacation Bible school, but we’re uneasy with the prospect when it comes to our politics. And our political lexicon is stocked with phrases and aphorisms that highlight the danger of majoritarian systems and even rebuke the concept outright.There are the usual warnings about the “tyranny of the majority”; there is the quip, commonly misattributed to Benjamin Franklin, that democracy is “two wolves and a lamb, voting on what to have for lunch”; and there is the oft-heard assertion — and I’ll admit a personal bête noire — that the United States is a “republic, not a democracy” and that democracy would be the ruin of American liberty. We are taught to imagine ourselves as potentially being at the awful mercy of most of our fellow citizens.Our collective suspicion of majority rule rests on the legitimate observation that a majority can be as tyrannical as any despot. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “When I see the right and the ability to do everything granted to any power whatsoever, whether it is called people or king, democracy or aristocracy, where it is exercised in a monarchy or in a republic, I say: there is the seed of tyranny, and I seek to go live under other laws.”Americans take for granted the idea that our counter-majoritarian Constitution — deliberately written to constrain majorities and keep them from acting outright — has, in fact, preserved the rights and liberties of the people against the tyranny of majority rule, and that any greater majoritarianism would threaten that freedom.Well, what if that’s not true? Yes, majorities acting through our representative institutions have been overbearing and yes, the Supreme Court has occasionally protected the rights of vulnerable minorities, as well as those of the people at large. But there have been just as many, if not more, examples of the reverse: of majorities safeguarding the rights of vulnerable minorities and of our counter-majoritarian institutions freeing assorted bullies and bosses to violate them.I’ve written about some of these episodes before (and I’m hardly the only person to have drawn attention to them): how the court gutted both the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution and the laws written to secure the lives of Black Americans, free and freed, from discrimination, violence and exploitation.If allowed to stand in full, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 — passed by only the third U.S. Congress to have Black members, who were elected in some of the first truly free elections in the South — would have outlawed discrimination in public accommodations like railroads, steamboats, hotels and theaters and prohibited jury exclusion on the basis of race. But the court, in an 1883 opinion, decided that neither the 13th nor the 14th Amendment gave Congress the power to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals.The advent of Jim Crow, similarly, had less to do in the beginning with a nefarious majority of voters rushing to the polls to subjugate their Black neighbors than with a long campaign of violence meant to neutralize Black voters and intimidate their white allies. The men who pioneered Jim Crow in Mississippi, for example, were by no means a majority, nor did they represent one in a state where a large part of the public was Black. As the historian C. Vann Woodward summarized it in “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” “In spite of the ultimate success of disfranchisement, the movement met with stout resistance and succeeded in some states by narrow margins or the use of fraud.”There was, however, a majority vote to protect the rights of voters in the South. But that vote — the vote to pass the 1890 Federal Elections Bill, which would have empowered the national government to supervise elections in the former Confederate states — failed to overcome a Senate filibuster.We cannot know how American history would have unfolded in the absence of our counter-majoritarian institutions. But the example of Reconstruction and its aftermath suggests that if majorities had been able to act, unimpeded, to protect the rights of Black Americans, it might have been a little less tragic than what we experienced instead.It is an insight we can apply to the present. It’s not the national majority that threatens the right to vote or the right to bodily autonomy or that wants to strip transgender Americans of their right to exist in civil society (on that last point, 64 percent of Americans, according to the Pew Research Center, support laws or policies that would “protect transgender people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces”). If it were up to majorities of Americans — and if, more important, the American political system more easily allowed majorities to express their will — then Congress would have already strengthened the Voting Rights Act, codified abortion rights into law and protected the civil rights of L.G.B.T.Q. Americans. Even the legislative victories most Americans rightfully admire — like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — were possible only with a supermajority of lawmakers assembled in the wake of a presidential assassination.If it were up to the national majority, American democracy would most likely be in a stronger place, not the least because Donald Trump might not have become president. Our folk beliefs about American government notwithstanding, the much-vaunted guardrails and endlessly invoked norms of our political system have not secured our democracy as much as they’ve facilitated the efforts of those who would degrade and undermine it.Majority rule is not perfect but rule by a narrow, reactionary minority — what we face in the absence of serious political reform — is far worse. And much of our fear of majorities, the legacy of a founding generation that sought to restrain the power of ordinary people, is unfounded. It is not just that rule of the majority is, as Abraham Lincoln said, “the only true sovereign of a free people”; it is also the only sovereign that has reliably worked to protect those people from the deprivations of hierarchy and exploitation.If majoritarian democracy, even at its most shackled, is a better safeguard against tyranny and abuse than our minoritarian institutions, then imagine how we might fare if we let majoritarian democracy actually take root in this country. The liberty of would-be masters might suffer. The liberty of ordinary people, on the other hand, might flourish.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More