Garry Kasparov's Blog, page 37

The people who let Putin get away with persecuting Navalny | CNN Op-Ed | Feb 4, 2021

(CNN)The Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny was sentenced in Moscow on Tuesday to two and a half years of prison. His supposed crime was a probation violation committed while he was in a coma in Berlin after being poisoned by the same state security forces that have locked him up again.

by Garry Kasparov

READ THE ORIGINAL AT CNN.COM

It’s pointless to talk about the details of the case. Not when Vladimir Putin is the only real judge, jury and, from time to time, executioner (which he denies). The dictator Putin has up till now avoided imprisoning Navalny for very long, although he has targeted Navalny’s family, as any mafia boss would.
A spurious embezzlement conviction that led to Navalny’s house arrest and his brother’s jailing in 2014 was declared illegitimate and politically motivated by the European Court of Human Rights. Russia simply paid the fine, tried to kill Navalny, and now has imprisoned him again, highlighting how useless it is to allow dictatorships to participate in these international organizations. They lend legitimacy to Putin’s regime without changing its behavior, while seeing their own credibility destroyed.
The only positive to come from Tuesday’s mockery of justice was Navalny’s impressive final statement to the court.
“The main thing in this whole trial isn’t what happens to me,” he said. “Locking me up isn’t difficult. What matters most is why this is happening. This is happening to intimidate large numbers of people. They’re imprisoning one person to frighten millions.”
Putin also knows what is at stake. Thousands of riot police filled the streets of Russian cities in advance of the sentencing. (In case it wasn’t clear that the result was known in advance.) This domestic invading army has arrested thousands of Russians in the past days of protest, with countless incidents of police violence against peaceful protesters.
Looking at the rows and rows of armored vehicles and even more heavily armored police ready to attack Russian citizens, you appreciate the dark joke going around: “The Nazis failed to reach Moscow in 1941, but they succeeded in 2021.”
The point of this unprecedented crackdown is to reassure Putin’s investors at home and abroad that everything is fine, that he is willing to crush the entire country under his KGB boot in order to keep the oil, gas and cash flowing. He’s not afraid of scaring off his cronies and foreign partners or outraging his adversaries, because they have always come running back to him after each invasion, each assassination, each rigged election.
Now with Navalny, the free world’s political and business leaders have another chance to show newfound resolve — or continued cowardice. The initial condemnations of Navalny’s sentencing from the United States, Canada and many European nations would be heartening if they did not sound nearly identical to those issued when he was poisoned last August. (There was, unsurprisingly, a sharp contrast between the rapid condemnation issued by President Joe Biden’s Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and the Trump State Department’s belated and feeble acknowledgment.)
Putin has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to beef up internal security forces during his 20 years in power, and most of that money came from rich western nations, especially before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 finally led to scattered sanctions — too little, too late. Such deals with the devil inevitably backfire. As I warned in 2007, with every act of appeasement Putin has gone from a local problem to a regional menace to a global threat.
Germany thinks it can criticize Russia on human rights while going ahead with the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline that will fill Putin’s pockets with cash and his military’s guns with bullets. Those bullets are used against Europeans in Ukraine and, God forbid, against Russians in the streets. Europe thinks it can separate business and politics, but to Putin it’s all the same: business.
President Biden spoke with Putin on the phone on January 26, a call described as confrontational over Russian cyberattacks and Navalny. But phone calls aren’t the test, action is. Putin’s impunity will only grow unless there are rapid repercussions for his criminal acts, beginning with targeted sanctions on the Russians named by Navalny’s organization.
Navalny knew what awaited him in Russia before he left Berlin, and yet he chose to return. He knows he can be killed at any time, but felt he had no choice but to make a stand with the only weapons he has left, his body and his spirit. After his sentence was read, he drew a heart to his wife, Yulia, on the glass of his cage and shouted, “Don’t worry. Everything will be OK.”
Like our literature, Russian history is not known for happy endings. Time is running out to change the course of this story.

The GOP Hit Rock Bottom. Can Conservatives Recover? | WSJ Op-Ed | Jan 21, 2021

by Garry Kasparov

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

If reasonable Republicans want to hold off the far left, they will have to stop the rise of the far right.

We have a new year and a new administration, but America’s crisis hasn’t yet passed. The dangerous forces unleashed over the past five years are still dominant in one major party and are increasingly potent in the other. Reining these dark elements in will take courage and honesty, two characteristics that have been in short supply in Washington. If we fail, the radicals will succeed in using fear and violence to empower each other, crushing the moderates between them.

Americans have always been good at pushing ahead without dwelling on the past. This has advantages, such as the risk-taking and tradition-breaking that made the last 100 years the American century. Sometimes, however, unpleasant facts must be confronted.

If a reckoning is postponed, American conservatism will continue to regress. To many, the total disintegration of the Republican Party may sound like good news, but they’re wrong. A bloody victory is unlikely to help. If the left refuses to work with moderate conservatives, those remaining moderates will soon be replaced by radicals with whom there can be no compromise.

Another renowned American quality, blunt honesty, has been replaced by brash dishonesty. The consensus that most Americans ultimately want the same things—prosperity, freedom, justice—has been broken. The opposition is now routinely treated not as a political rival, but as an enemy of the state. Social media is pushing aside traditional media. The threat of political violence may become normal. The barbarians have overrun both the gatekeepers and the gates.

PRESS TO READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE AT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Garry Kasparov: What happens next | CNN Op-Ed | January 12, 2021

by Garry Kasparov

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT CNN.COM

As terrible as the events of Jan. 6 were — and I’m on the record warning of “the unimaginable” — I’m going to repeat what I said after Election Day: It’s not over.

This battle against anti-democratic extremism didn’t end when a right-wing mob invaded the United States Capitol and five people died, including one police officer. It didn’t end when Twitter and other social media platforms finally muzzled President Donald Trump — although that was a heavier blow in this fight than most. And it won’t end when Joe Biden is inaugurated on January 20.

Beating Trump was an essential step, of course. Four years of his thuggery and demagoguery were enough to bring American democracy to its knees. Four more might have finished it off. Had fewer than 45,000 votes across three key states gone the other way on Election Day, we’d be plunging toward authoritarian rule, and discussing which of Trump’s children would take over in 2024.

Narrowly dodging that metaphorical bullet was no protection against the threat of real bullets, as the attack on the Capitol proved. And there will be more violence, especially if the Capitol perpetrators and those who incited them — starting with the President — are not held accountable.
The correct response is the dispassionate application of the law. Not political persecution, but nor politically motivated leniency, either. We don’t have to choose between unity and justice. Avoiding doing the right thing will only prolong the crisis and give aid and comfort to enemies of the state and of the peace. Our Founding Fathers failed to resolve the historical challenge of slavery, passing a bloody Civil War on to future generations. Despite Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Reconstruction allowed the South a “defeat with honor,” decades of Jim Crow, and the pernicious Lost Cause mythology that persists today.

Consider the repugnant image of a Trumpist Capitol invader carrying a Confederate flag in a building that Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson only dreamed of conquering. No new mythology should be allowed to sprout from this vile transgression. The worst result would be letting the mutineers off the hook — and this includes the elected officials who encouraged them, like Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and especially President Trump. That they, and scores of other Republicans, continued to attack the integrity of the election even now is beyond the pale. The perpetrators won’t become heroes or martyrs if the process of justice is not unduly politicized. It would be a blunder for the left to turn a clear case of criminal justice into a battleground for racial justice, which would help the Trumpist Republicans twist their illegal insurrection into the culture war they crave. White supremacy is a terrible evil of American history, and Trump and his followers’ traffic in it is repugnant, but we should not overburden a clear-cut criminal proceeding with the cleansing of sins.

History teaches us the cost of well-meaning but shortsighted attempts to sacrifice justice for unity. Russians learned this in the hardest possible way after the fall of the Soviet Union. As I discussed at length in my book, Winter Is Coming, they declined to root out the KGB security state in the interest of national harmony. It would be too traumatic, our leaders said, to expose the countless atrocities the Soviet security forces committed and to punish their authors.

A feeble truth commission was quickly abandoned by President Boris Yeltsin, and soon even the Soviet archives were closed, although not before researchers like Vladimir Bukovsky revealed some of the KGB’s atrocities. The KGB’s name was changed to the FSB and its members quietly stayed in touch and intact. The result? A mere nine years after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia elected a former KGB lieutenant colonel, Vladimir Putin, to the presidency. It was the last meaningful election we ever had. We chose unity and we got a dictatorship.

America should not make a similar mistake. The truth may hurt, but lies will do far greater damage in the end. Americans should be prepared for a long fight against these anti-democratic forces. The attack on the Capitol has opened every eye; there can be no more feigned ignorance of the crisis.
Many Americans were shocked by how many of their compatriots, including nearly all GOP officials, have been willing to go along with Trump’s open assault on the pillars of their open society, from the free press to fair elections. As I warned early on, demagogues don’t find radicals to lead, they steadily radicalize their followers one outrage at a time. The culmination, so far, was January 6.

Hemingway wrote in “For Whom the Bell Tolls”: “There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.” The time has come, and we are finding them out. Fortuitously, they are inclined to boast of their transgressions on Instagram and from the Senate floor, which makes them easy to find.
The question is if the will exists to apply the justice they deserve. Failing to do so will not mollify them. They are living in an alternate universe, where 70% of Republican voters say that Republican lawmakers who tried to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential election were “protecting democracy,” according to a Quinnipiac poll taken AFTER the assault on the Capitol Trump incited. Seventy-three percent told pollsters they thought Trump, too, was “protecting” democracy.

Perhaps the most ominous number is the 24% of Republican voters who don’t accept the results of the election, according to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey last month, leaving the question of whether they will accept the results of any election ever again.
Coups aside, this was always the greatest threat of Trump’s rhetoric and a result that will delight dictators like Putin, who are always eager to denigrate democracy and its champions. At its core, democracy is an act of faith, a shared belief that the people can fairly act in the common good by choosing their leaders. Destroying faith in the system will destroy the American experiment.

This is precisely what we are trying to counter at the Renew Democracy Initiative. We are launching a campaign dedicated to the simple phrase, “what democracy means to me,” in the hopes of reminding everyone what a luxury it is for every citizen to have a say in the course of their lives and of their nation.
Democracy isn’t liberal or conservative, not left or right — at least it isn’t supposed to be. Millions of Americans currently believe that democracy isn’t working, or even that it isn’t worth saving. The battle to prove them wrong isn’t over, it’s just begun.

Kasparov: Impeachment Now Is The Best Protection Against A Future Trump | Morning Joe | MSNBC | Jan 8, 2021

A Short Tribute to My Mother

My mother died in Moscow on December 25, at the age of 83. She meant everything to me, of course, but she was a remarkable woman in her own right, and I wanted to share a little about her and her life.

Klara Shagenovna Kasparova was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, in the Soviet Union, on March 19, 1937. Both of her parents were Armenians from Karabakh and she was the eldest of three sisters. She married my father, Kim Weinstein, at 23, not long after a memorable date at the Van Cliburn concert in Baku. They both loved classical music. They couldn’t afford to have children right away, and I came along in 1963. I wasn’t sure, but my cousin confirmed that they got married on December 25, 1960. Exactly 60 years after they married, they were reunited forever.

It was an unusual marriage at the time, a Jew and an Armenian, even in mixed Baku, which still had its unofficial ethnic partitions. You could say my mother’s family broke down barriers, as her youngest sister later married an Azeri, which was even more unusual. For my mother, personal qualities were everything, not ideology or ethnicity. She was totally indifferent to traditions of upbringing of any kind. Ironically, what helped bring my parents together was that both had die-hard Communist fathers. My paternal grandfather named his son Kim after the Cyrillic acronym for the Young Communist International, КИМ. My mother’s father named her after German Communist leader Clara Zetkin.

Her mother, however, stuck to her own original suggestion, Aida, which was always used in the family and by close friends. In fact, until she was 14, my mother didn’t even know that her legal name was Klara! My father was influenced by his staunchly anti-Communist uncle, so needless to say, he never called my mother Klara. I recall the stories of his younger brother, Leonid, about the many heated family arguments over Stalin and the Party. Meanwhile, my younger daughter Aida, who is 14 herself now, reclaims a family heritage.

My mother graduated with a silver medal in 1954. That she always remembered making that single mistake on her final exam tells you much about her, and probably about me. She was one of the very few female students at the newly opened engineering school in Baku. By the mid-1960s, she had her own lab with ten men working under her, despite her dual challenges of being both a woman and an Armenian, neither very appreciated in the Azeri-Soviet circles that dominated the Baku establishment. Her group designed oil-drilling equipment, and through this work she met my father, who was a chemical engineer. She had talent and drive and likely could have had an impressive career, but promotion would have meant joining the Soviet Communist party, which would have fatally split the family. As always, my mother chose family over herself.

That resolve faced a stern test when my father died of leukemia when I was seven. My mother could have tried to find a quick replacement to better guarantee our financial future, but that kind of compromise was unthinkable to her. We had modest life, but she fully believed that she and our extended family could provide me with everything I needed, and they did. Like single mothers everywhere throughout history, she simply worked twice as hard.

I was soon showing promise as a chessplayer, and my mother was always my greatest supporter. When she told me that I could become world champion, it wasn’t just because I was winning so much, but because she wanted me to know that she believed I could do anything. And so I believed it, too. Not only that I could do great things, but that I had a responsibility to try to achieve them. Above my childhood bed there was a sign in her beautiful handwriting with a mantra of the Soviet dissidents: “If not you, who else?”

My mother’s greatest strength was to provide strength to others, especially her family. At first, she could seem severe to outsiders, but she took great joy in the successes and happiness of those she loved. One of the reasons I kept playing in the occasional chess event during my retirement was because seeing me back at the board reminded her of the great old days, when we traveled the world together, conquering the chess Olympus.

She was a fixture on the professional chess circuit, watching my games and watching out for me in every regard. As fearsome a reputation as I may have had as “the Beast of Baku,” at the chessboard, my mother’s fierceness in defending my interests even as an accomplished world champion was even more formidable. But that fierceness was always in defense, not offense. She rarely spoke on the record to anyone about me or anything else. “I cannot lie, and I do not want to tell all the truth, because it could hurt people.”

Even after my exile from Russia in 2013, she kept our home in Moscow like a nest, ready for my return at any time. She couldn’t travel frequently anymore, and, due to the pandemic, we could not have our traditional summer family reunion here in Croatia. The last time we were able to meet was November 2019, in Vilnius at the Free Russia Forum.

My life has been turbulent, with many conflicts and dramatic twists, and my mother supported me at every turn. As I did all my life, I still spoke to her every day, at all hours from every corner of the globe, until she was unable to speak.

For someone who gave everything for her family her entire life, it was cruel to have her final days spent in the company of strangers, a situation all too familiar to many others during this terrible pandemic. But I know she would never have wanted anyone else to be at risk; even the thought of it would have made her furious. We believed in her recovery to the last, but 2020 is not a year for miracles.

I am bereft. She was my role model, my greatest champion, my wise counsel, and the strongest person I will ever know. She taught me not what to think, but to question everything. She raised me not to follow a particular path, but to work until the correct path became clear, and to trust my instincts when it wasn’t. Her example shows me, and all of us, that giving of yourself to others can be the greatest achievement of all.

My thanks to the many friends, acquaintances and complete strangers who have sent me personal notes and acknowledgments of condolence. It means a great deal to me and my family.

Garry Kasparov

Split, Croatia

26 December 2020

Using new tools to solve the challenges that we face today | Avast Blog Post | Dec 10, 2020

by Garry Kasparov

READ ORIGINAL POST AT AVAST

When The Economist asked me to contribute an article on how technology can help save democracy, I jumped at the chance. Tech and politics have been my twin passions for most of my life, although I was rarely able to indulge them since they were relegated by my overriding concern: chess.

But once I retired from professional chess in 2005, I was able to treat them as more than hobbies, aided by many expert friends who were kind enough to bring me into their worlds. From artificial intelligence to media and news, to polling and elections, I’ve had hundreds of conversations about using new tools—or making new ones—to solve the challenges we face today. The trick is that many of these challenges are the result of the same new technologies we’re hoping will save us!

You’re probably familiar with Moore’s Law, the observation by legendary technologist and cofounder of Intel Gordon Moore, that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years. The popularly understood practical consequence is simple enough, that computers double in speed every two years. Moore’s estimation turned out to be quite accurate, becoming a “law” that has held since 1975.

The power of having such a stable improvement curve is tremendous, allowing for strategic planning across the countless industries that depend on computing power and computer prices.

The impact of this frequent doubling on other aspects of our lives has been far less predictable. The evolution of human society is terribly slow in comparison, although it, too, is accelerating. We are struggling to keep up with digital speed, advances that can happen in the blink of an eye, the execution of a piece of code that affects billions of lives across the globe, unimpeded by geographic and national borders.

Laws and rules for freedom and democracy

In contrast, our political systems are built into sprawling bureaucracies that follow Parkinson’s Law far more than Moore’s. Instead of adding more, smaller transistors to a chip that gets faster and cheaper, bureaucracies expand constantly and yet get slower and more expensive. Functionaries tend to create work for each other, and work expands to fill the time available.

Simply adding digital tech to a few government processes like document publishing and budget tracking has not solved this fundamental problem. Nor would speed ever resolve the core issue of a lack of government responsiveness because our democratic systems are based on elections that only take place every few years. You can’t ask people to hold their tongues for that long — not when the immediate gratification of Twitter and Facebook are in their pockets 24/7.

Temptations for democracy on social media

Communication could fairly be called instantaneous since the advent of the telephone, and ubiquitous with the proliferation of the internet thirty years ago. Unlike earlier electronic mass media — radio and television — the internet is a two-way channel. Instead of being merely a receiver, it was also a microphone — and then it became a megaphone.

The shift wasn’t truly meaningful until something appeared that could tie the millions of megaphones together: social media. I distinguish social media from the original and superior form, the social network, which connected individuals with each other. In just a few years, more people got their news, or, considering how distorted much of it is, their “news” from quick scrolls through Facebook.

This isn’t to say that fake news doesn’t also proliferate on cable TV and talk radio, it obviously does, but the feedback loop of social media polarizes like nothing else. Your friends and family are there; it feels personal because it is. It also encourages and rewards individual participation in a way television, radio, and regular websites cannot. Conspiracy theories proliferate best when people feel like they are part of it, not merely observing.

The ability of everyone to share their opinion about every burning national issue highlights partisan divides, forcing everyone to take a side publicly. When it comes to local and personal issues — schools, crime, healthcare — many studies show that there is far greater willingness to compromise to find solutions. This is the “skin the game” theory in practice. Many of us have strong opinions about nearly every national or international issue, but have to admit they don’t directly affect us very much. This doesn’t mean they aren’t important, or that we shouldn’t be active on these big issues. It shows that local issues are a good place to build consensus and community, and to break through the partisan bubbles to share our humanity. The goal is to then transfer that empathy and problem-solving mindset to those big issues as well.

Stay tuned — the democracy update is on its way

As I’ve often written about here at Avast, threats and weapons usually arrive early in the lifecycle of a new technology. Destruction and exploitation are easier than the layers of evolving standards and security that take a long time to develop — and that are never truly finished. It shouldn’t surprise us that social media was weaponized much the way email was, or that it’s hard to find a balance between the public good and private companies needing to make a profit.

Patching up our old institutions is necessary but insufficient. Unless we launch ambitious new plans to modernize our political systems to deal with the technology-fed demand for immediacy and responsiveness, this vicious cycle of extremism and collapse will continue.

We must emulate the good aspects of social media, with its instant and granular ability to identify and respond to what people are thinking, what they care about, and what they need. We must emphasize local issues to encourage compromises that produce results. We must move beyond the obsolete parties that represent so many things that they barely represent anyone.

Understanding and incorporating new technology into any system or society is a never-ending process of trial and error. There are countless flaws and weaknesses to exploit, and no shortage of people eager to exploit them. That the dangers of new tech are often more readily apparent than the benefits can make us risk-averse, especially when the subject is as important as education, say, or politics.

The exact opposite is true. As I implored in my Economist article, these things are too important not to change, not to take risks when they are failing us so badly. Our caution has allowed our needs to far outstrip our capabilities, leaving our remarkable new tech and its benefits unevenly distributed, leading to dangerous imbalances.

A cure for the digital divide

I’m not pretending to have the cure, only a diagnosis, which is the first step. There is no magic wand, technological or not. But we have to start trying not just something, but everything, in order to find ways to bring the people safely back into the public tent instead of throwing bricks at it from outside the tent.

Getting back to our high-tech metaphor, we need upgrades. They won’t be as fast or predictable as computer hardware, but that’s all right. The good news is that we don’t need much hardware to improve our democratic responsiveness; what we need is better software. That is, the processes we use to translate the will of the people into government action. The infrastructure already exists, including the fast chips, broadband, smartphones, and social media platforms that we all use regularly.

(With the caveat that we do not want to increase the “digital divide,” but to bridge it. If the tools required to make these advances don’t exist for your citizens, that must be addressed. The government builds roads, not cars, and providing the technological infrastructure for everyone to participate in a healthy democracy is at least as important as driving!)

Real profit from public choice

I gave some more specific suggestions in my Economist piece. The clearest example of the principles I’m talking about is advisory voting, a public online platform where people can express their interests and opinions. And by “public,” I don’t mean just that it’s open to the public, but that it’s at least partly funded with public money and run not-for-profit. IDs are unique and there’s no trolling or spamming or hijacking. If you wonder why such things haven’t been built before, there are two answers. One, they have, although limited in scope and scale. Two, since they aren’t profitable by design, there’s no appetite for big companies or startups to create such a thing, even though they wouldn’t really be a competitor.

Using such a digital public square isn’t only for real-time polling. After more development and after trust in the system increases, it can be expanded to local voting, and on up. There are also mixed version, where instead of going directly to voting for candidates, you choose elements of a platform issue by issue, which can then be endorsed by candidates instead of parties simply applying the same broad platform to everyone.

The Russian opposition tried out some simple versions of online issue voting eight years ago because the authorities denied us the ability to hold real conventions or elections. Voters could add items to the platform by majority, and select their candidates based on issue alignment instead of party alignment. Upgraded versions of these tools could be used to light a fire under the stagnant parties in democracies like the United Kingdom and the United States. Instead of being bombarded by opinions on social media from the outside, the system can absorb and represent them in a measured way, and politicians can respond to them — or not. The public sphere can regain some of the authority it has abdicated to Silicon Valley tech companies and remove the thumb of the social media giants from the scales of the public good.

Facetime generation arrives to polls

The good news is that the digital natives have come of age. Kids born in the 80s and 90s are no longer kids, they’re increasingly running the show and we should encourage this transition. Elders who may have once feared technology are embracing it more than ever as the essential services and conveniences accumulate. From ordering food and shopping online to Facetiming kids and grandkids, to using digital assistants and calling an Uber, the tide has become a flood, partly due to a pandemic that has accelerated many digital behaviors.

Trading security for transparency

Security will be paramount. All of the common activities I listed still have major security and privacy concerns, if not enough to scare people away from using them. Our democracy is more important than a credit card, so we must treat it with care. Public-private cooperation will be essential because the top security professionals are in the private sector and we don’t need or want the government to build something from scratch anyway. Good verification systems aren’t enough; people have to believe in them. This requires not just security, but transparency and a degree of faith in the public sector that has been declining for decades.

With the American president spreading false information about election integrity, it might seem like a bad time to ask for a leap of faith into digital politics. But I contend that it makes it more important than ever to build clean, transparent systems. Everyone deserves to have their voice heard, but trusting our elections, the most basic building block of democracy, should never be a matter of opinion.

Garry Kasparov talks to US Chess girls group about The Queen’s Gambit

My talk with Jen Shahade and her US Chess girls group about The Queen’s Gambit, joined by show creator and director Scott Frank. It has been amazing to see a show about chess, realistic chess, become the #1 Netflix show in the US and world.

The damage Donald’s done: | NY Daily News Op-ed | Nov 7, 2020

by Garry Kasparov

How Trump’s ongoing tantrum against democracy hurts America

NOV 07, 2020 AT 1:46 PM

The election is over at last, called decisively for Joe Biden after four days of extreme care and caution in the democratic process. Unsurprisingly, the sitting president’s response is to attack that process with baseless accusations. For someone who talks so much about law and order, Donald Trump never wants it to apply to him. He cares little for what is legal and not at all about what is right.

I have spent much of my life at the chessboard taking the measure of people under tremendous stress while trying to manage my own. When we’re under pressure, we show our true colors. Sometimes we rise to the challenge to find character and resources we didn’t know we had. Or we collapse, unable to deal with the rush of emotions as the clock ticks down.

With time ticking away on his presidency on Thursday night, Trump cracked under the pressure. He’d managed to keep quiet for two days as the returns slowly came in, but as the results in key states tipped toward a Biden victory, he could control himself no longer and took to the podium.

What followed was Trump reduced to his purest self, a lying, self-centered bully who has finally been punched in the nose. The result was called “the most dishonest speech of his presidency” by CNN expert Daniel Dale, no small achievement.

Trump accused his unnamed opponents of stealing the election, claimed he’d won states he hadn’t, and attacked the legitimacy of the entire election process, saying with no evidence at all that he was only losing because of “illegal votes.”

Some observers referred to it as the sort of rant a dictator would give, but here I have some expertise and I must disagree. Trump’s rhetoric is often that of a strongman, full of boasting and self-reverence. On Thursday, he was just pathetic, a hot-air balloon punctured by the sharp point of reality. It was the speech not of a dictator or a president, but of a weak man trying to pull himself out of self-pity by seeing how much damage he can do so that he doesn’t suffer alone.

It was, however, the sort of speech that any real dictator would love. The president of the United States, attacking the foundation of the greatest democracy in the world from behind the presidential seal. Vladimir Putin couldn’t have scripted it better.

Leaders like Putin whose power depends on depriving their citizens of a voice are always keen to portray democracy as little more than chaos — something their subjects don’t have to worry about. They go to bed every night knowing exactly who is going to be in charge in the morning, and every morning, no matter how they feel about it.

Fair and unpredictable elections are a blessing, even if they cause you to lose sleep sometimes. That uncertainty is democracy working, the power of the people to choose their leaders. It’s only a dream for many, like the people of Belarus, who have been protesting in the streets every day for over five months after the dictator Alexander Lukashenko’s latest sham of an election.

Treasure your doubt and fears, America, safe in the knowledge that even if things don’t go your way in this election, you know exactly when the next one will be, and that it will matter.

Putin supported Trump in 2016 not because he thought he would win, but because Trump was the ideal agent of chaos. He was like an icebreaker ship, cutting deeply into the layers of trust in the American government. After all, Trump still hasn’t accepted the results of the 2016 election that he won, insisting that he only lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton because of millions of fictitious illegal votes.

His latest conspiracy-mongering is as foolish as it is damaging. Are we supposed to believe that insidious forces capable of the greatest voter fraud imaginable against Trump, somehow coordinating across states, couldn’t manage to also tip a few key Senate races? Republican Congressional and state candidates consistently outperformed the incumbent president across the country; was that part of the fix?

The wait for the official results has been long, and we’ll have to wait even longer for a Trump concession speech, since I’m not sure Hell freezes over any more thanks to climate change. Whatever the projections, whatever the recount results, he’ll use his two months to myth-make about vote-rigging and a slew of other conspiracy theories. We can only hope none of it inspires violence, something Trump clearly has no qualms about.

The rats aren’t all deserting the sinking ship. Once-respected elected officials and presidential pretenders like Ted Cruz and Nikki Haley continue to genuflect to Trump — or at least to the Trump voters they hope to collect in the future.

If their cynical calculations are correct, it’s a bad sign for the health of the republic. Trump’s fans liked him personally, and it’s not clear if they will rally as a bloc to anyone else waving the same America First flag. It’s hard to believe anyone looking at Trump or his record in the White House would want to emulate any aspect of it, but there is no denying that he received over 70 million votes.

Part of the secret Trump’s imitators will surely copy is that Trumpism isn’t really for anything, only against. It’s a creed based on fear and resentment, on the litany of grievances Trump is so fond of reciting at his super-spreader rallies. Attacks on the media, on immigrants, on the dreaded “liberal elites,” whose crime is feeling superior to people who wear red hats and worship a morally and financially bankrupt reality-TV host.

Trump and his acolytes also rant against something that does exist, if not how they imagine it, socialism. Unable to find a clear line of attack on Joe Biden, the Republicans went with the classics, despite the fact that the actual socialist, Bernie Sanders, lost to Biden in the Democratic primary.

That result was a sign of the ineffable wisdom of the electorate. Biden may not have been the favorite candidate of many, but he was acceptable to nearly all. Biden failed in his previous runs partly because he was just too normal, too boring to stand out in a crowd. This time, he won for exactly the same reasons. In a time of crisis, and against a president who demands constant attention, Biden — steady, predictable Biden — saw his political vulnerabilities turned into strengths.

Biden was the only Democratic candidate who could have resisted both Trump’s trolling and the attempts by his own party’s far left wing to use the election to promote a radical agenda. Trump has derailed American politics and Biden, a man known for his love of Amtrak, is the right person at the right time to put it back on the tracks instead of veering wildly off in the other direction.

He was also the only one who could significantly attract disaffected Republicans, the infamous never-Trumpers who either stayed home this time or switched to Biden.

Still, a second term of Trump was far closer to reality than it ever should have been. The country is facing economic collapse due to an unchecked pandemic that has been mishandled to the point of criminal negligence by the Trump administration. How could the election still be close, Biden’s huge popular-vote advantage notwithstanding? Many progressives insisted on pushing controversial local and social issues onto the national stage, where Republicans were delighted to have a distraction from COVID-19 and record unemployment.

Party discipline is impossible to maintain in the age of social media. Savvy newcomers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can sit in the safety of their bluer-than-blue districts and call for defunding the police, banning fracking and packing the Supreme Court, while their colleagues in the purple states bear the brunt of the blowback.

This dynamic isn’t a drawback in the eyes of the far left, of course. They don’t mind when moderate Democrats lose, even if they lose to Republicans, because their fight is for control of the Democratic Party, not Congress. Extremism on one side usually begets extremism on the other, and they are allied in spirit against the moderates who could relegate them all to the fringes.

If the political system does not become more responsive, social media will continue to dominate debate and power the radicalization engine.

But for now, America has pulled through once again. Control of the Senate is still in doubt, perhaps another sign of the electorate’s subtle prudence, not merely its polarization. I’m on record hoping for the ouster of every Republican who aided Trump’s assault on American laws and values, but maybe a divided government is part of the cooling-off process the country needs.

This was not going to be a period of great transformation regardless. Biden’s narrow mandate isn’t ideological, it’s curative. The bipartisan task ahead, much like that after Watergate, is to restore the rule of law and the people’s faith in the government that applies that law. Americans are badly divided, but they seem to agree that the unchecked and unbalanced powers of the executive must be brought to heel.

The foundations of American democracy have been shaken, its honor system shredded by a president with no honor. An unfit man who wishes he could be a dictator is being replaced by a decent man who has always wanted to be a president. Joe Biden believes in government and believes in America’s capacity to be better — not perfect, but better. His mission is to unite the country around that humble principle. Before America can chart a new course, it must get back on the map.

Kasparov is the chairman of the  Renew Democracy Initiative .

Win or lose, with Trump, prepare for the unimaginable after the election | CNN Op-Ed | October 31, 2020

by Garry Kasparov

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT CNN.COM

(CNN)After four long years of chaos and lies from the Trump administration, it’s time to prepare for the worst, even as we hope for the best. Every time we thought he could stoop no lower, that there were no boundaries of legality or decency left for him to violate, he has outdone himself.

After praising dictators, attacking veterans, demeaning women, discrediting our democracy, and surrendering to a raging pandemic, we can only hope that Trump has also undone himself.
We cannot know exactly what Trump will do in these final days, only that whatever it is, he will be thinking only of himself. If he declares victory on election night, regardless of the uncounted ballots, what then? What if he calls the entire election a fraud, a hoax, and demands that the counting stop? Or if armed Trump supporters heed his call to intimidate voters at the polls? What if he takes to Twitter with “LIBERATE AMERICA!” and his MAGA zealots respond?








You may roll your eyes, but such things are not unimaginable, or even unrealistic. Normal people don’t like to imagine terrible events, which is why autocrats consistently surprise them. (As when I wrote here back in April that it would seem logical to someone like Trump to try to sabotage the US Postal Service if he thought it could help his electoral chances. Unimaginable, until it happened.)
You could make a very long list of things pundits insisted autocrats would never do that they eventually did. I made such a list myself, about Vladimir Putin. In my 2015 book, “Winter Is Coming,” I called it the “Putin would never” list. It included things like taking over private media companies, arresting Russia’s richest man for dabbling in politics and invading Georgia and Ukraine.






“Doesn’t Putin realize how bad this looks?” became the experts’ refrain after he crossed line after uncrossable line. As if he cared how things looked. Why should he? Dictators don’t ask “Why?” They only ask, “Why not?” They don’t stop unless someone stops them. No one stopped Putin.
For years, my colleagues and I in the Russian democracy movement warned that Putin was building a dictatorship. Even when it was crystal-clear that Russian democracy and civil society had been gutted, the free world fiercely resisted acknowledging that truth.
Putin laid bare the huge disconnect between autocrats and normal people — the autocrats’ ability to do things that simply don’t occur to people with a sense of decency and a respect for norms and traditions. Autocrats are aware of the consequences they might face for the damage they do, but they believe they can avoid those consequences by staying in power, forever if necessary. Trump might have been indicted several times over were he not protected by his office, and a sense of impunity tends to make one sloppy.
Trump no doubt believes that he has more to lose by leaving office than by fighting — lawlessly or not — to stay. The oligarchs and thugs he so admires surely agree. They won’t easily let go of such a lucrative investment — one of their own kind in the Oval Office.
Putin and Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, to name two, have surely reaped many benefits from Trump, beyond political ones. It will take years to untangle the web of his financial dealings and how the treasure and might of the United States was exploited to serve the President’s personal interests and those of his cronies. If defeated, Trump will likely spend his last months in a flurry of self-dealing, tossing out pardons and trying to discredit his opponents and the system itself.
But what if he wins? Even the dire scenarios I just outlined are predicated on avoiding the worst outcome of all. Let’s say Trump stays in office, either by a shocking electoral upset or by his hand-picked Supreme Court justices doing what he chose them to do.

 

Rolling your eyes again? Do you really think Trump cares about limiting abortion rights or Constitutional originalism or anything else he cannot fit into his pockets? Or that Mitch McConnell and the GOP rushed Amy Barrett’s appointment for any reason other than having her seated before the election? She and Brett Kavanaugh were political appointments to achieve political ends, which is always how autocrats view the judiciary.
A Trump victory would legitimize his politics and policies the way his election in 2016 normalized his rhetoric. Then, after four more years of Trumpism, the only question would likely be: Who is the next Trump in line? The autocrat’s heirs could be expected to carry on the assault on the remaining pillars of American democracy. When one side fights for power at all costs against those defending the rule of law, time is not on the side of the law.
Defeating Trump overwhelmingly at the polls is the most important step, but it’s only the first step. Americans who want to see the rule of law restored and strengthened must be ready to fight for it — in the courts and in the streets if necessary, peacefully but persistently –because there is little doubt that Trump and his supporters will not go quietly.
Trump has spent five years dehumanizing his opponents and painting them as America’s mortal enemies while conditioning his followers to see things as he does. They will not leave the field easily, but leave they must, or American democracy will not outlast them.

Garry Kasparov on Stay Tuned with Preet Bharara | Podcast | October 29, 2020

Listen to our Chairman, @Kasparov63 talking about the country’s next move on @PreetBharara‘s podcast! https://t.co/fYfl7jt9yE

— Renew Democracy Initiative (@Renew_Democracy) October 29, 2020