Ah, but where might that be? Amos Miller (using tools from the good folks at Mapbox) shares a handy site with the answers…
The Civic Atlas is a project which marries leading civic data sets with information on governance types and physical capitals.
This project is an exploration of physical governance. As international relations enter another era of rocky uncertainty, it’s important to have the opportunity to look at a world which is not flat or equal. Many countries are on the march away from freedom and democracy towards autocracy. Many are already there. Explore this project by selecting various freedom and democracy indices in the dropdown menu. Click a state to see where its legislative authority is housed, more information about the country, its governance system, and its governance scores. To learn more about each index, click on its link in the nav bar while selected.
This is our globe. We all live here.
A visualization of governance around the globe: “The Civic Atlas.”
As we compare and contrast, we might spare a thought for Alexis de Tocqueville; he died on this date in 1859. A French diplomat, political philosopher, and historian, he is best known for his works Democracy in America (appearing in two volumes, 1835 and 1840) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). In both, he analyzed the living standards and social conditions of individuals as well as their relationship to the market and state in Western societies. Democracy in America was published after Tocqueville’s travels in the United States (on a mission to examine prisons and penitentiaries here) and is today considered an immensely important early work of sociology and political science.
“The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democracy, from beneath which the old aristocratic colors sometimes peep” – from Democracy in America
Every week, Sam Circle reads the New Yorker— closely– and publishes a wonderful review of the contents of each issue in two parts: the primary editorial and the poetry and cartoons. In their most recent missive, the “Random Pick” (an article from the archive) was “This Year’s Model” by Michael Kelly. (June 17, 1996)…
Who’d have guessed that the most blistering take I’ve read on the Democrats’ current travails would be something a centrist wrote in the ‘90s? I have a general sense of Clinton’s deal, but given that I was four when he left office (I know, I know) the details aren’t visceral for me, and it’s hard to know how literally to take leftists when they call him a social conservative. But [while] I wouldn’t exactly call [Kelly] trustworthy in general (here’s Tom Scocca with a blistering and definitive posthumous takedown), I at least grant the trust of contemporaneousness when he says Clinton is, “on social issues,” running “to the left of Pat Buchanan but to the right of, say, George Bush”. It’s sick that Kelly’s issue with Clinton claiming he’s going to gut welfare and put far more cops on the streets is that he maybe can’t be trusted to actually do so; it doesn’t matter, though, because Kelly’s analysis is still sharp, and in many ways Clinton can be seen as a predecessor of Trump: “You vote for Clinton, and who knows what you’ll get? Maybe he’ll turn again – back your way.” There are no principles, there are only deals; it’s a politics of nihilism loosely cloaked in a politics of populism. And centrists still push this “we’re just following the polls” message. This is an uneasy glimpse of the past, clarified by the horrors of the present…
The legacy of the “centrist urge” and faux populism in the 90s…
* “I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.” – Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail“
Your correspondent is off again– back on March 13… and then (for all your sins) around for a while…
The Media Power Collaborative (a project of Free Press) compares local news to public goods like safe roads and public education and argues that it needs– and deserves– public funding. But those funds need to support authentic local journalism, not the zombiefiedprivate equity-mined operations currently passing for “local news.” Sarah Scire reports…
What would a local media system that prioritizes working and middle classes over corporate profits and the interests of billionaires look like? A new public policy agenda released this week has some ideas.
The Media Power Collaborative, which released its policy framework on Tuesday, describes itself as an organizing space for media workers and their allies in research, activism, and education. The collaborative grew out of a peer networking group — now known as the News Futures collective — and is part of the media reform group Free Press. If you remember the much-discussedRoadmap for Local News that argued that the future of local news is “civic information,” this is the same crowd.
The local news industry, as Nieman Lab readers well know, has been devastated by ad revenue losses, layoffs, and profit-driven corporate ownership over the past couple of decades. Over that time, local newspapers have shrunk faster than a new crop of local news sites and nonprofit newsrooms have been able to grow. Through the policy agenda, policy tracker, and a new network of regional coalitions, the Media Power Collaborative wants to push the public policy conversation toward support for some of the more community-minded local media that’s emerged to fill that gap…
… The Media Power Collaborative agenda highlights local news and information as a public good that deserves “robust public funding” whether it comes from a legacy newsroom or not. From the report:
Just like safe roads and strong public-education systems, public-service journalism and civic information are public goods that benefit entire communities. Unfortunately, the market is critically underproducing these public goods: Estimates of what it would cost annually to bridge current community-information gaps range from $1 billion to $10 billion or more. Even with promising new philanthropic investments in local news and civic media, public funding is essential to addressing a deficit of this magnitude and building toward a community-centered local-news system.
“Corporate media and hedge funds and broadcasters — these are folks who have the ears of lawmakers. They have resources to lobby. And so every starting place in the conversations about media policy is something that protects their interests,” Rispoli said. “A bit of it is saying this [civic media] part of the field deserves a seat at the table. But a bit of it is saying we should be the ones setting the table.”…
… The agenda attempts to address some of the biggest questions in local news policy, including how to protect editorial independence; which local news orgs should qualify for assistance; and, given finite public funding, which communities should be prioritized. Limiting public funds to legacy news organizations does not address their history of underserving communities of color as well as rural and low-income groups. It seems more likely to reinforce existing news deserts and information gaps. Candice Fortman, a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford and former executive director of Outlier Media, was one of the 10 members that met over the course of 2024 to craft the public policy agenda.
“Many minds are working to build the agenda for the future of local news and how we will protect and fund reporting,” Fortman said. “This initiative, however, is about more than just saving local news; it’s about rebuilding it in a way that is equitable, sustainable, and deeply rooted in community needs.”…
[Scire recounts the elements of the Media Power Collaborative’s agenda (which is resonant with the thinking that led to the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967)…
… No one is saying any of this will be easy. Those estimates for closing the local news gap are enormous and it’s unlikely public funding alone is the answer. There are also important and fair questions about editorial independence and giving anyone — never mind the government — the power to decide which journalists and news organizations will receive taxpayer dollars.
I noted one other ominous sign. The Media Power Collaborative’s policy agenda mentions that research tells us low-income communities, communities of color, immigrant communities, and rural communities are the most underserved by our current local media system. The report includes a link to research published by the FCC. The report, which was live in late December, now shows a “page not found” error message…
As we pay attention, we might recall that it was on this date in 1954 Edward R. Murrow and his CBS news program, See It Now, examined Senator Joseph McCarthy’s record and anti-communist methods, now widely understood to have been a witch-hunt.
The program is often remembered for these words:
“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.
This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully. Cassius was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’
It is often referred to as “television’s finest hour.”
(One notes that McCarthy’s right-hand man, Roy Cohn, went on to become a Mafia lawyer (before being disbarred), a political fixer, and Donald Trump’s mentor.)
Around half the world’s population live in places that held elections in 2024. Some 1.65bn ballots were cast across more than 70 countries. But while the number of democratic elections in a single year has never been higher, 2024 also brought big challenges. According to the latest democracy index published by EIU, our sister company, on February 27th, global democracy is in worse shape than at any point in the nearly two-decade history of the index.
Since 2006 EIU has scored 167 countries and territories on a scale of zero to ten based on five criteria: electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties. The countries are then grouped into four categories: full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes and authoritarian regimes.
For the 16th consecutive year, Norway was named the most democratic country in the world, with a score of 9.81. New Zealand and Sweden followed. Afghanistan has been the lowest-ranked country since 2021, scoring just 0.25 points. The biggest change came from Bangladesh, which dropped 25 places. Rebuilding democracy there will be an enormous task after the ouster of Sheikh Hasina, the country’s longtime autocratic ruler. But there is cause for optimism. A temporary technocratic government, led by Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel peace prizewinner, has restored order and stabilised the economy. For those reasons, we named Bangladesh our country of the year in 2024.
The global average dropped to a new record low of 5.17, down from a high of 5.55 in 2015. Just 6.6% of the world’s population now lives in a full democracy, down from 12.5% ten years ago. And a large share of the world’s population—currently two in five people—lives under authoritarian rule.
Despite the promise of a global election extravaganza, some of the ballots were a farce. Polling day in Pakistan, for example, was marred by violence. The most popular politician, Imran Khan, whose own democratic credentials are questionable, was jailed shortly before the election took place. The country’s score dropped from 3.25 in 2023 to 2.84. In Russia another sham election gave Vladimir Putin a fifth term as president—it scored just two points on the index. In other countries—including Burkina Faso, Mali and Qatar—elections were cancelled altogether.
Even Europe—home to nine of the top ten countries in the index—saw some notable declines. France was downgraded from a full democracy to a flawed one. This mostly reflects a deterioration in its confidence-in-government score after president Emmanuel Macron’s snap election in June failed to secure a legislative majority for any single party or bloc. (Four different prime ministers during the course of the year did little to instil confidence either.) Romania was also downgraded after allegations of Russian interference, illegal social-media tactics and campaign-finance violations prompted the constitutional court to annul the presidential election and call for a new vote. In Asia, South Korea dropped out of the full-democracy category after President Yoon Suk Yeol declared—then hastily revoked—martial law, plunging the country into crisis.
America remained a flawed democracy, shifting only slightly from its position in 2023. But it could face bigger problems this year: the first month of President Donald Trump’s second term has already challenged the political independence of the civil service and seen a flurry of executive orders of questionable legal authority.
Mr Trump’s victory in 2024 was part of a broader global backlash against incumbents. The next test for global democracy in 2025 will be how these newly elected leaders choose to govern…
* John Adams, whose own handiwork as a Founding Father has been nicked, but so far evaded the fate he predicted (in an 1814 letter to John Taylor)
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As we batten the hatches, we might recall that it was on this date in 1933 that RKO‘s King Kong premeired. Directed and produced by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, with special effects by Willis H. O’Brien and music by Max Steiner, it received rave reviews, with praise for its stop-motion animation and score… and has only grown in esteem: in 1991, it was deemed “culturally, historically and aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. In 2010 it was ranked by Rotten Tomatoes as the greatest horror film of all time and the fifty-sixth greatest film of all time.
“Some years it is hard to identify the main event, much less sum it up in a word. This is not the problem in 2024; the return of Donald Trump to the White House after a four-year absence is consequential not only for the world’s most powerful country but also for its neighbours and everywhere else. Which word can capture the mix of surprise, excitement and trepidation people feel as the MAGA movement returns to power?…
… For the year’s defining word, it helps to look back—a long way. English has a host of political terms derived from Greek, because it got a lot of its political thinking from the likes of Plato and Aristotle. So if you go through the lexicon (itself Greek), a few roots abound. Arche (ruler), for example, is found in monarchy, oligarchy and anarchy (the rule of one, the few and none, respectively).
Greek has another root for “rule”, kratia, which is even more common. It features in democracy, aristocracy, gerontocracy, theocracy and plutocracy, as well as meritocracy (a modern coinage for which Alan Fox, a British sociologist, married a Latin root with a Greek one in 1956). The Oxford English Dictionary is also full of rarer species such as ochlocracy (rule by the mob), gynaecocracy (rule by women) and thalassocracy (mastery of the seas).
Two other “-cracy” words seem appropriate in this election year. One is theatrocracy, or rule by theatre-goers. This sounds as if it might refer to dominance by the media elites writing for the culture sections of newspapers. But the word has its origins in Plato, who described people skilled in fanning the emotions of the crowd at a theatre into a powerful political force. This might, in hindsight, have been a good word of the year for 2016, when a former reality-TV star with a talent for working the crowd was first elected president.
After Mr Trump was re-elected on November 5th, the world watched anxiously as he began filling top jobs. Some picks, such as the sensible Susie Wiles for chief of staff and Marco Rubio, a long-serving senator, for secretary of state, were qualified and competent. But a flurry of nominations in the week ending November 15th led to a spike in people looking up another “-cracy” word on Google.
Matt Gaetz, accused of sex and drug crimes and the subject of a congressional ethics investigation, was nominated to be the country’s highest law-enforcement officer. Robert F. Kennedy junior, a man with crackpot views on vaccines, was to be secretary of health. Tulsi Gabbard, a conspiracy theorist with nice things to say about the despots of Syria and Russia, was to run America’s intelligence services. And Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host sporting tattoos associated with the far right (and who had been accused of sexual assault) was tapped as defence secretary. [For more on these picks– with an update on the AG selection– see here.]
So the word everyone was Googling was kakistocracy: the rule of the worst. The first root, kakos, is found in few others in English. “Kakistocracy” is not found in ancient sources; it seems to have been coined in English as an intentional antonym to aristocracy, originally “rule by the best”. Having spiked on Google Trends the day after Mr Trump’s election, kakistocracy jumped a second time in the wake of these nominations. Searches surged a third time on November 21st, when Mr Gaetz announced that he would withdraw from consideration for attorney-general, suggesting that he was seen as the worst of the worst. The term was particularly popular in Democratic strongholds such as Oregon, Massachusetts and Minnesota.
Much remains to be seen about Mr Trump’s new kratia. Last time round he seemed to fire more officials than most presidents have trips on Air Force One. (Many then became outspoken critics.) This time, though, he has chosen his people for their loyalty above all. And many of his supporters are delighted, seeing in his appointments a wrecking crew to pull down a deep state they loathe.
Kakistocracy has the crisp, hard sounds of glass breaking. Whether that is a good or bad thing depends on whether you think the glass had it coming. But kakistocracy’s snappy encapsulation of the fears of half of America and much of the world makes it our word of the year…
As we batten down the hatches, we might recall that it was on this date in 1949 that the film All the King’s Men premiered. Based on Robert Penn Warren‘s Pulitzer Prize- winning novel of the same name, centered on the rise and fall of a populist demagogue in the American South (based on Louisiana Governor Huey Long).
At the 22nd Academy Awards the film was nominated for seven Oscars and won three; Best Picture, Best Actor for Broderick Crawford, and Best Supporting Actress for Mercedes McCambridge (in her film debut). The film also won five Golden Globes and was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
In 2001, All the King’s Men was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
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