New Yorker: on Government Reform
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
Attacks on right to vote puts our democracy at risk
Q: You've used a phrase "if we have a democracy ten years from now." Do you think we won't?AOC: I think there's a very real risk that we will not. What we risk is having a government that perhaps postures as a democracy, and may try to pretend
that it is, but isn't. We've already seen the opening salvos of this, where you have a very targeted, specific attack on the right to vote, particularly in areas where Republican power is threatened by changing electorates and demographics.
Source: New Yorker on NY-14 2021 House incumbent, "An Insider?"
Feb 14, 2022
Doug Mastriano:
Supported lawsuits, alternate electors after 2020 election
In Pennsylvania, Mastriano supported a barrage of lawsuits and a bid to appoint special electors. On November 25th, he hosted a theatrical hearing in Gettysburg, featuring Rudy Giuliani as a faux prosecutor.
That afternoon, Mastriano and his son drove from Gettysburg to the White House at the President's invitation. (Mastriano tested positive for COVID-19 and was reportedly ushered out of the meeting with Trump.)
Source: The New Yorker on 2022 Pennsylvania Gubernatorial race
May 9, 2021
Pete Buttigieg:
Get rid of the Electoral College
Buttigieg said, "We can't nibble around the edges of a system that no longer works." [One reporter] asked, "What is your idea that is so big that nobody would mistake it for nibbling around the edges?" Buttigieg answered, " Well, first of all, we've
got to repair our democracy. The Electoral College needs to go, because it's made our society less and less democratic." He went on in this vein, suggesting that electoral reform was essential.
Source: The New Yorker on 2020 Democratic primary
Feb 9, 2019
Xi Jinping:
Ended presidential term limits, consolidating power
China moved to end a two-term limit on the Presidency, clearing the way for Xi to rule the country for as long as he, and his peers, can abide. The decision marks the clearest expression of Xi's core beliefs--his impatience with affectations of
liberalism, his belief in the Communist Party's moral superiority, and his unromantic conception of politics as a contest between force and the forced. Decades after Deng Xiaoping warned against "the leadership of a single person,"
China is re-entering a period in which the fortunes of a fifth of humanity hinge on the visions, impulses, and insecurities of a solitary figure. The end of Presidential term limits risks closing a period in
Chinese history, from 2004 to today, when the orderly, institutionalized transfer of power set it apart from other authoritarian states.
Source: Evan Osnos, "President for Life" in The New Yorker
Feb 26, 2018
Xi Jinping:
Most serious challenge since the end of the Cold War
Some observers have likened [Xi's unbridled power after ending term limits] to the imperial rule of Vladimir Putin, but the similarities are limited. In matters of diplomacy and war, Putin wields mostly the weapons of the weak: hackers in American
politics, militias in Ukraine, obstructionism in the United Nations. It is the arsenal of a declining power. Xi, by contrast, is ascendant. On the current trajectory, Xi's economy and military will pose a far greater challenge to American leadership
than Putin's. Xi, in his first five years in power, dismantled what are known in China as the qian guize (the "unwritten rules"), which allowed people to bribe their way to higher office or to skirt the edges of censorship. Now he is throwing
out the written rules, and to the degree that he applies that approach to the international system--including rules on trade, arms, and access to international waters--America faces its most serious challenge since the end of the Cold War.
Source: Evan Osnos, "President for Life" in The New Yorker
Feb 26, 2018
Page last updated: Oct 14, 2023