I was in Greece last week attending the Athens Democracy Forum — a gathering of democracy experts and activists from around the world — so I have been thinking a lot about the privilege and the responsibility that go with living in a democracy. Every morning I ate breakfast at my hotel’s rooftop restaurant, which had a view of the Parthenon — the iconic Greek temple built in the fifth century B.C.E., at the height of Athenian democracy. And every morning the waitress would ask me: “Do you have any allergies?”
Every morning I would bite my tongue to keep from saying: “Well, since you asked, I have two allergies — but they’re political, not biological. I have an allergy to lazy, performative online activism, like ‘Hey, I tweeted about that,’ or ‘Hey, I posted my favorite pop star’s denunciation of Israel on my Facebook page, so get off my back.’ But I also have an allergy to no activism when your own democracy is on the line, like ‘Hey, my law firm does a lot of business with the federal government — we had to cut a deal with Trump.’”
What got me thinking hard about my political allergies was talking to two old friends from the Middle East. Both have taken huge personal risks to tell hard truths and fight for the right to vote in a free and fair election. So they are vexed that so many Americans would sit on their hands in the face of the greatest threat to our democracy in my lifetime — President Trump’s willingness to break rules to hold power. One of these courageous democracy activists is Tawakkol Karman, the first Yemeni and the first Arab woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize. She won it for her nonviolent leadership of Yemen’s Arab Spring protests demanding democracy, women’s rights and freedom of speech. Karman played a leading role in the peaceful uprising in 2011 that led to the ouster of Ali Abdullah Saleh, the strongman who ruled North Yemen from 1978 and a unified Yemen from 1990 until 2012.
Karman told me over coffee at the Democracy Forum (which is held in association with The New York Times) that she was shocked to see how easily American law firms, universities and even some media companies bent to Trump’s political demands without a fight. “For me,” Karman said, “as someone who opposed dictatorship, who knows how dictatorship works and knows what we needed to free our country from the dictatorship, it all starts when the head of state controls the media, accuses the media of lies and discredits the media — and then does not play by the rule of law, and the institutions work only for the benefit of him and his family.” The trigger for the democratic revolution in Yemen was when President Saleh “put his son and his family in the most important institutions,” Karman added. “He attacked the judiciary and emptied it of its work. He escaped all accountability through immunity and interfered in the work of Parliament and the legitimate institutions. And now all of this I am seeing in the United States. What is that?” The most dangerous thing in a democracy, she said, is when you start to ask yourself: “‘If I do this, what will happen to me? What will the leader do to me?’ Whether you are a journalist, a student or a teacher, you question yourself.” That is what the dictator wants — “to spread fear,” she said. “And when the lawyers don’t do their work, when the journalists don’t do their work, when the scholars don’t do their work, when they all watch themselves before doing or saying something, that is the dictator’s way to control the narrative.” Karman hasn’t given up hope on America, though. “I gave a speech in North Dakota,” she told me. “There were a lot of conservative people there. They were so welcoming. I told them: ‘Don’t think you are divided because you have the soul of division. It is because someone wants to divide you through hate speech.’ People got very emotional.” Karman and I first met in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital, in 2013, when I went to observe Yemen’s broad-based national dialogue. New parties, young people, women took part.
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing