The separation of governing powers, often referred to as the principle of separation of powers, is a foundational concept in democratic governance that aims to prevent the concentration of power in any one branch or individual within a government. This principle is typically attributed to political philosophers such as Montesquieu, who argued that dividing governmental authority among different branches helps to safeguard individual liberty and prevent tyranny. Here are several key reasons why the separation of powers is important:
1 - Checks and Balances: By dividing governmental powers among separate branches (typically legislative, executive, and judicial), each branch serves as a check on the others. This system ensures that no single branch can dominate the others or exercise unchecked authority. For example, legislative bodies can pass laws, but the executive branch can veto them (subject to override), and the judiciary can interpret laws and declare them unconstitutional.
2 - Prevention of Tyranny: Separation of powers reduces the risk of authoritarianism or tyranny by dispersing authority and creating institutional barriers to the accumulation of excessive power by any one individual or group. This helps to protect individual rights and freedoms by limiting the ability of government to infringe upon them arbitrarily.
3 - Specialization and Efficiency: Each branch of government can focus on its specific functions and responsibilities, leading to greater specialization, expertise, and efficiency in policymaking, law enforcement, and judicial decision-making. This specialization allows each branch to develop expertise in its area and perform its role more effectively.
4 - Accountability: Separation of powers enhances accountability in government. Each branch is accountable to different constituencies (e.g., voters for legislators, the public and media for executives, legal principles for judges), which helps ensure transparency, responsiveness, and integrity in decision-making processes.
5 - Promotion of Rule of Law: The separation of powers supports the rule of law by ensuring that laws are enacted, enforced, and interpreted through established procedures and institutions, rather than through arbitrary or unchecked exercises of authority.
6 - Political Stability: By providing a framework for resolving disputes and balancing competing interests through established processes and institutions, the separation of powers contributes to political stability and orderly governance.
Overall, the separation of powers is a fundamental principle of democratic governance that aims to prevent abuse of power, promote accountability and transparency, safeguard individual rights, and maintain the rule of law within a society. Its implementation varies across different countries and political systems but remains essential for maintaining democratic principles and protecting civil liberties.
Over the past few months, 42 activists have been charged with “domestic terrorism” under Georgia state law. Their acts of “terrorism”? Alleged property damage and trespassing while protesting. These prosecutions exemplify a highly problematic trend of both the federal and state government: using domestic terrorism powers to punish dissent.
In Georgia, the arrested activists are part of a movement seeking to stop the construction of a $90 million police training facility located in a forest in Southeast Atlanta. Since late 2021, protesters under the banners of “Stop Cop City” and “Protect the Weelaunee Forest” have raised concerns over climate justice, displacement of Black communities, and increasing militarization of police forces. Protesters have camped out in the forest, staged marches, and hosted community events. At times, a small minority of protesters have allegedly damaged property.
Georgia police have responded with overwhelming and disproportionate force. Police killed one protester in January. They have arrested dozens more, including a legal observer associated with the Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Lawyers Guild. And prosecutors have levied severe charges under Georgia’s rarely-used domestic terrorism statute.
Until 2017, Georgia’s domestic terrorism statute criminalized acts intended to or reasonably likely to kill or injure at least 10 people. In the wake of the massacre of nine Black parishioners by a white supremacist gunman in Charleston, South Carolina, the Georgia legislature amended the statute to vastly expand its reach. The new law broadened the state’s definition of “domestic terrorism” to include certain property crimes committed with the intent to “alter, change, or coerce the policy of the government” by “intimidation or coercion.”
The Dish flags a blog, which flags a UNC study about what types of information people best respond to.
We might be told how many calories are contained in a meal, but that information can be abstract, so we don't really respond to it. But we do if we are told how much exercise might be needed to work that meal off. Here's their example about how this information might be best communicated:
A study by researchers at UNC’s medical school, published in the journal Appetite, showed the kind of choices people make when randomly presented with different types of menus with differing levels of nutritional information: one with no nutritional info, one with calorie info, one with calories plus the minutes of walking required to burn the calories, and a fourth with calories plus the distance required to burn off the calories.
"People who viewed the menu without nutritional information ordered a meal totaling 1,020 calories, on average, significantly more than the average 826 calories ordered by those who viewed menus that included information about walking-distance," writes Scientific American. People who saw the menu with walking-distance info also ordered less than people who just saw calorie info.
Such a finding goes along with what researchers at Johns Hopkins have found. Signs posted on beverage cases in a convenience store about how much exercise it would take to burn off a bottle of soda (about 50 minutes of running) were much better at dissuading adolescents from buying sugary drinks than signs with just the calorie content. The researchers at UNC say they’re interested in bringing their study into the real-world as well--starting with the university cafeteria.
I always think information like this call to question the degree of free will and autonomous decision making power we have. Our decisions seem easily influenced.
Manipulating public opinion turns democracy over on its head. Instead of leaders following the general population due to the opinions they hold, leaders convince the population to think certain ways. They can then create the opinions they choose to follow. This is a tactic commonly used in elections and by the political branches. Its what press conferences and media consultants are all about.
And its also what the public relations industry does. Click here for background on Edward Bernays, who is considered to be the father of public relations, and the subtle use of propaganda to entice the general public to arrive at preferred conclusions to public policy options. If successful, elected leaders can get the public to consent to things they might not otherwise consent to.
Here's a definition of public relations: the practice of managing the flow of information between an individual or an organization and the public.
Maybe the most famous current commentator who argues about the manipulation of public opinion - what he calls manufactured consent - is Noam Chomsky, but its a point made by many others.
The Dish has been kicking this around, and since we'll begin talking about the media soon enough, it's worth a look. Click here, here, here, here and here for their coverage and commentary.
Coverage of the more grisly aspects of war puts government in a bind. On one hand we are committed to a free press - or at least saddled by it due to the First Amendment if that is your preferred take. We are also a democracy, which is defined as rule by the people. People are better able to rule effectively (the story goes) if they have full information about public matters. Presumably this includes understanding the actual consequences of the military endeavors we get involved in from time to time.
But on the other hand governing institutions like to have enough secrecy - at least in the short term - to effectively accomplish stated goals. We are not simply a democracy, but a democratic republic, and in such a system limits are placed on all sources of power in the nation, including that of public opinion. Founding documents are full of references to the need to ensure that the opinions of the general population not have an immediate impact on public policy.
So does that justify placing limits on the gory aspects of war? Or is this an unjustifiable restriction on self government?
And given the decentralized nature of technology - and the fact that images fly at us from many sources - are these limitations possible?
The Dish highlights the following photograph that helped turn public opinion against the Vietnam War:
The argument that Hitler confiscated guns does not seem to be supported by history, at least according to a law review article from 2004.
The author walks through the effort to try to develop the idea that he did however. Its a good look at how history can be spun for political purposes. It would useful to investigate how much political ignorance is the result of a conscious decision to not become educated about something because ti doe not benefit us to do so, and how much because of exposure to disinformation.
Even though we may practice rational ignorance, we rarely fess up to it.
The death of North Korea's leader at the beginning of 2301 is actually fortunate since it allows us put to put a few items on this week's agenda in context. (For background click on Kim Jong-Il and North Korea.)
First, North Korea is organized as an autocratic - totalitarian state, meaning that one person possesses sovereign authority (and that it is by definition a tyrannical system - there is no limit on the power of the leader), and there is no individual freedom allowed - the lives of the people are organized according to the whims of the state. As you should figure out from the class material, autocratic systems are noteworthy for their arbitrary nature, and Kim Jong-Il was famously unpredictable - and apparently clever at negotiating.
Being a totalitarian state of the first order, North Korea has one of the worst human rights records in the world (these two tend to go hand in hand). As is common in such states, it is very poor and the per capita GDP is among the lowest in the world. The CIA Factbook places it 160th about of 193 countries, while it places South Korea 31st. the fact that these two nations are essentially the same except for their political systems has allowed for comparisons of the two systems. This illustrates a point made in the class material that free societies tend to be wealthier then repressive ones. Keeping the population poor is actually a good idea if one want to stay in power. Countries become wealthy because they allow their people to develop their talents and apply their ingenuity to problem solving. While this may lead to greater wealth, it also tend to incubate political opponents, not a good thing is one wishes to stay in charge.
We might want to consider what makes a society repressive. How can a population be effectively controlled? North Korea does so externally and internally. External controls are imposed when anyone who seems likely to be a dissident is punished. The nation (which is very secretive) has a system of prisons where political prisoners (itself an interesting species of criminal) and their families are sent. This is old fashioned coercion. But the more effective way to control people seems to be by doing so internally, controlling how they think (Orwell's thought control). Korea has an extensive apparatus designed to create support for their leader (of course, in a sense, we do too, but more on this later). One of the words used to describe this process is propaganda, but it can be deeper and more pernicious. The people of North Korea were born and raised thinking that all that they have is due to the beneficence of Kim Jong-Il. They may not be able to formulate thoughts that his rule was unjust and they should not be forced to live under coercive rule. This leads to an additional point worth pondering as we continue.
I spend a good amount of time in the introductory material detailing the idea that American government rests on the consent of the governed. This is the alternative to rule by coercion, and it is based on the idea that rational people are not willing to consent to be ruled by an autocratic dictator, but is this really true? One of the news items that came out when the death was announced was the public weeping and wailing that occurred across the nation when people learned he had died. We in the west tend to think these were faked, or perhaps coerced. It may very well be that these are genuine however, and the nation's attempt to control how people think and feel has been successful to the point that they willingly consent to a governing that system that we can hardly imagine accepting.
We cover some of this material in 2301 when we discuss the formation of public opinion and how people process media information, so there's nothing new in this story pointing out that we can be made to believe propaganda except additional evidence about how it can happen:
In recent years, dozens of psychological studies have shown that we shape incoming information as much as it shapes us. We sift and sort, choosing what we like and discarding what we don't. Much of this happens unconsciously in what I call the hidden brain. We see the effects of these mental gymnastics all the time: Few people change their minds on hot-button issues, even when new information is provided to them. Political commentators generate lots of heat, but when was the last time you heard about a liberal who was persuaded by Rush Limbaugh? Or a conservative who switched parties after watching a Michael Moore movie? The partisan divide in the country has barely budged for over a decade—hardly what you'd expect if the hyper-partisan information we see all around us was having much effect.
