The insurrection was not the coup itself. It was staged as the coup was failing. The insurrection and the coup were distinct, but the insurrection emerged from the coup. It has been a common conceptual error to consider the insurrection alone to be the coup. The coup, however, was an elaborate plot developed over months...
Tag: democracy
Post
Post
12 Steps to Controlling the U.S. Surveillance State
(Image Credit; Just Security) A team of writers at the Just Security blog, have a 12-step program for reining in the U.S. surveillance system that has expanded relentlessly beyond the control of Congress and the people. Whether President-elect Biden and his national security team will be interested is another question. The Biden intelligence transition team...
Post
Bernie Sanders: End Disastrous Wars
On The Campaign Trail: The gruff socialist from Vermont is the quintessential Washington outsider a radical reformer. Along with his foreign policy adviser Matt Duss, he says the 2020 election is an opportunity to “reconceptualize” the global order. In his 2016 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sanders avoided issues of war and peace. Now...
Post
A CIA Analyst on How to Survive a Subversive President
In LobeLog, a highly credible anti-interventionist world news blog, Paul Pillar, a 28-year veteran analyst of the CIA, asks a key question: The security services that are supposed to guard against such subversion must answer to elected political leaders, lest such services become threats to democracy themselves. But what happens when elected leaders are the...
Post
What drives ‘deep state’ fears: the global democratic recession
Over the last decade, there has been a gradual decline in the quality of democracy in the world. In 2017, according to Freedom House, 71 countries suffered net declines in political rights and civil liberties, with only 35 registering gains. The world has become more authoritarian every year since 2006, and the pace of democratic...