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Larry Diamond, Special to CalMatters
Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, ldiamond@stanford.edu.
It’s game on for the recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom. The gubernatorial recall in 2003 that struck California like an earthquake seems like ancient history, so here is a quick recap in a bid to help California do it better than the last time.
In that wildest of Wild West elections, there were 135 candidates running to replace Gov. Gray Davis, including movie stars, a porn star, a pornographer, recovering politicians and wannabes. The winning candidate, movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, had less than 50% of the vote, which means that more voters preferred someone else. Davis was thrown off the Survivor Island in a rather bizarre episode of reality TV.
On True Democracy
IN DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACY-On January 5, 2021, one day before Trump sparked his fascist Attack on the Capitol, the liberal
New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg called for Americans “to defend democracy” by “investigating” Trump and wrote these words:
“
True democracy in America is quite new; you can date it to the civil rights era.
If
Trump’s Republican Party isn’t checked, we could easily devolve into what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism, in which elections still take place but the system is skewed to entrench autocrats.”
That was a remarkable two sentences.
One must be an abject ignoramus to think that the United States became a “true democracy” in the 1960s and 1970s (“the civil rights era”).