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Constructive Conflict Guide >
Civic Knowledge and Skills That We All Need to Constructively Handle Intractable Conflict >
Defending Democracy from the Bad-Faith Actors Who Seek to Undermine It
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Opposing Information Warfare
Successful democracies must be able to protect themselves from unscrupulous information warfare tactics that use high-tech propaganda techniques to attack enemies, inflame tensions, and undermine the social cohesion that democratic societies depend upon.
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Opposing Fear and Hatemongering
This section focuses on strategies for resisting efforts to inflame tensions and persuade people that the concerns of the other side are illegitimate and not worthy of consideration.
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Opposing Economic Exploitation and Corruption
This section examines ways of assuring that democrcy's leaders act in ways that pursue the common good (and not the advancement of their narrow selfish interests).
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Supporting Tolerance and Co-existence with People Who Hold Different Values
Democracy is not a system for determining which groups get to impose their views on others. It is a system that allows people with different views to coexist in a spirit of mutual respect and tolerance.
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Opposing Efforts to Disenfranchise Those Who Favor Moderate, Compromise-Oriented Governance
This section focuses on the many ways in which democracies tend to disenfranchise those with centrist political beliefs and shares strategies for overcoming this problem.
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Preventing Threats and Intimidation
Democracy cannot succeed if citizens do not feel free to express their views (and advocate policies based on those views) because of intimidation and threats of violence,
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Preventing Small Scale Violence
One job of government is to assure the sense of security among its citizens. That means the government needs to do as much as it can to prevent violence that undermines its citizens' sense of security, although it cannot do so in a heavy-handed way that violates other people's rights.
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Preventing and Defending Against Large-Scale Violence
In extreme cases, political tensions can escalate to the point where you have large-scale violence (such as the troubles in Northern Ireland or the United States in the 1960s. Still worse is violence that escalates into civil war.
News and Opinion
The Founders' antidote to demagoguery is a lesson for today
A timely review of what the founders thought about how the new democracy they were creating could protect itself from future demagogues.