Karen Norris/Staff

The great machine of American democracy has chugged along steadily since the US Constitution was ratified and took effect in 1788. It has been modified many times and faced monumental stresses, up to and including a terrible civil war. But today, after 230 years, the mechanism seems to many to be leaking oil and shedding important nuts and bolts.

A wave of books and articles have been sounding alarms of late about the state of US governance – from Harvard scholar Yascha Mounk’s “The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save It,” to Yale Law Professor Amy Chua’s “Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations,” to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s “Fascism: A Warning,” and more. All proffer stark warnings that the nation’s political system is under significant strain and could be heading for a disastrous derailment. 

Is US democracy in decline – or outright danger? 

On the national level, toxic tribalism has made the mere act of governing incredibly difficult. If the phrase that used to rule Capitol Hill was “go along to get along,” now it might be “tit-for-tat.” For voters, partisanship has become mixed with racial and religious identity, increasing animosity toward the other side. Big money pours into politics, further complicating the situation, while partisan media means shared truths are no longer a baseline.

Voters still say they strongly support the core ideals of democracy. But polls show they worry the US no longer lives up to them, if it ever did. That’s led to increasing cynicism about the results of the electoral apparatus. Only about half of American adults think elections are fair and open, according to a new poll from Ipsos and the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.

Many Americans blame President Trump for this corrosive environment. His critics say his divisive rhetoric, repeated insistence on untruths, and apparent enthusiasm for authoritarians is undermining US democracy. Mr. Trump’s supporters beg to differ. They say Democrats just can’t accept the fact that they aren’t winning, and are claiming the system must be “broken” as an explanation for their own electoral failures.

In truth, America’s political problems of today have been a long time coming. Many political scientists see Trump as a symptom, not a cause, of glitches in democracy; at times the president’s behavior may even distract us from the real faults in the machine. Remember that the United States is now in unexplored territory. There has never been a successful, stable, multi-ethnic liberal democracy.

“That is our challenge. It is also our opportunity. If we meet it, America will truly be exceptional,” write Harvard Professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in their bestselling book “How Democracies Die.”

Minority rule?

Democracy is complicated. Or at least, democracy as practiced in the United States, under the mechanism established by the Constitution, is complicated. It is not simply the majority rules, everything now runs the way most people want it.

Consider this: Quite soon, a president elected by a minority of US voters, and supported by a congressional ruling party whose lawmakers collectively represent a minority of the population, could place a conservative majority on the Supreme Court for a generation to come.

That’s all within the rules, thanks to the Electoral College and the equality of representation in the Senate for states – which get two senators each, regardless of their size or population.

This is partly rooted in the way the Founding Fathers thought about future conflicts. They were very concerned about a possible tyranny of the majority, among other things. The issue of equal representation for states in the Senate was perhaps the most difficult problem the framers had to resolve.

James Madison, the Constitution’s principal designer, bitterly opposed equal representation regardless of population. On this, he lost. And over the centuries, the politics of this have evolved in complicated ways. It’s not just that the original 13 colonies have grown and changed beyond recognition. It’s that a vast continent has been added to the US of 1788 and divided into states and partisan alignments of which the Founding Fathers never dreamed. (Many of them adamantly opposed political parties as well, but that’s another story.)

Joshua Roberts/Reuters

A supporter awaits the arrival of President Trump during a Make America Great Again rally in Great Falls, Mont., July 5, 2018.

Currently, the Republican Party is strong in rural-dominated, thinly populated states, while Democrats are strong in urban areas with large populations. One way of looking at how that might affect the confirmation prospects of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is to use a measure devised by journalist Ron Brownstein – and assign half of each state’s population to each of its senators.

By that accounting, the 51 Republican senators – a narrow majority in the chamber – collectively represent about 143 million people. The 47 Democratic senators, plus Democratic-leaning independents Bernie Sanders and Angus King, collectively represent 182 million people – almost 40 million more.

On a per-senator basis, each Republican represents 2.8 million people, while each Democrat/independent represents 3.7 million.

Given that it’s enshrined in the Constitution, this structural imbalance seems pretty permanent – unless and until the partisan leanings of urban and rural areas change. That, in turn, might require a realignment of racial and ethnic partisanship, given that minorities live disproportionately in urban areas and are disproportionately Democratic, while whites lean Republican and are disproportionately residents of rural areas.

“It’s not an aspect of the system that’s going to change,” says Frances Lee, a professor of government at the University of Maryland and co-author of the book “Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation.”

In fact, all signs point to it getting worse. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Norm Ornstein recently tweeted: “By 2040 or so, 70 percent of Americans will live in 15 states. Meaning 30 percent will choose 70 senators. And the 30 percent will be older, whiter, more rural, more male than the 70 percent.”

It’s easy to see how this might put increasing stress on the US system. What if one party repeatedly wins the White House over a period of time without winning the popular vote? Already, two of the past three presidents – both Republicans – were elected despite coming up short in the popular vote, something that’s only happened five times in US history.

In the House, the rural/urban divide means Democrats have to win the overall House vote by five to 10 percentage points in order to secure a simple majority. Part of that is due to the advantage gained by gerrymandering of House district lines – but much more of it is rooted in a herding syndrome, a self-directed partisan clustering that journalist Bill Bishop famously dubbed “The Big Sort.” Democrats are often crowded into big cities in districts that become almost solidly blue. GOP voters tend to live in areas that are more geographically spread out, a pattern that is more efficient for winning congressional seats.

This was not a part of any Founder’s design. It’s an accident of history. But it could increase frustration and anger if Democratic voters perceive that it has hardened into a permanent disadvantage.

“I worry about it, yes,” says Professor Lee. “It is a potential threat to the long-term legitimacy of the system.”

‘How Democracies Die’

She’s not the only one worrying. Indeed, we’re currently living in a golden age of books telling Americans that they no longer live in a golden age – as Dan Drezner, a columnist and professor of international politics at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, recently put it.

Among the most prominent of these is “How Democracies Die,” a sober examination by two Harvard government professors of how liberal democracies have decayed in Europe and Latin America in modern times, from Venezuela to Hungary. Their bottom line: Democracies do not die in blazing coups or dramatic stand-offs. They erode, bit by bit, with the steady weakening of key institutions. Leaders who are elected can hasten the erosion. Often those moves are represented as enhancements to the system, not attacks on it.

The ultimate guarantors of democracy are people, according to Professors Levitsky and Ziblatt. Paper does not suffice.

“Even well-designed constitutions cannot, by themselves, guarantee democracy,” they write. “No operating manual, no matter how detailed, can anticipate all possible contingencies or prescribe how to behave under all possible circumstances.”

But unwritten rules – norms for how politicians should behave in certain circumstances – can be key. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, two such norms stand out as fundamental to functional democracies: mutual toleration, and institutional forbearance.

Mutual toleration means recognizing one’s adversaries as decent, patriotic, law-abiding citizens. Losers may shed tears on election night, but feel that the event is not apocalyptic. The system will remain in place; losers will win again another day.

“As commonsensical as this idea may sound, the belief that political opponents are not enemies is a remarkable and sophisticated invention,” they write.

At the beginning of the US republic, John Adams’s Federalists and Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans regarded each other as threats to the nation’s existence. They fought bitterly, to the point where some contemporaries thought the system would not hold. It was only over subsequent decades that the opposing parties realized they could circulate in power rather than destroy each other.

That didn’t happen in Spain in the 1930s. The left-leaning Republican government and right-wing Catholics and monarchists, representing a highly polarized society, saw each other as traitors. They spiraled into a terrible civil war.

The second key norm, institutional forbearance, is in essence the avoidance of actions that may respect the letter of the law, but violate its spirit. To play constitutional hardball, to use one’s power to the utmost – in an all-out attempt to defeat one’s rivals – is to risk the system.

In the 1940s, for example, Argentine President Juan Peron used vaguely defined powers to impeach three of five Supreme Court judges, in essence seizing control of that branch of government. In the 1990s, the Ecuadorean legislature voted to remove populist president Abdala Bucaram on grounds of “mental incapacity,” without debating whether Bucaram was, in fact, mentally impaired.

In the United States, political hardball has been used to deny African Americans the right to vote, among other political rights, from the end of the Civil War onwards.

When losing ceases to be part of the normal political process and is seen as a full-blown catastrophe, democracy begins to fray. The result is democracy without guardrails, escalating into brinkmanship.

In America today, the realignment of partisan coalitions has made the political situation particularly unstable, according to Levitsky and Ziblatt. In the 1950s, married white Christians represented nearly 80 percent of US voters. Today they are barely 40 percent of the electorate, and are concentrated in one party, the GOP.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have increasingly become the party of ethnic minorities.

“The two parties are now divided over race and religion – two deeply polarizing issues that tend to generate greater intolerance and hostility than traditional policy issues such as taxes and government spending,” the Harvard professors conclude.

A new aristocracy

In another notable new book about democracy’s stresses, journalist and entrepreneur Steven Brill finds that the greatest of US divides is not the one between the two major parties – but rather, the protected versus the unprotected.

Mr. Brill’s “Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America’s Fifty-Year Fall – and Those Fighting to Reverse It” perhaps suffers from an overly dramatic cover of an eagle trailing a corkscrew of red smoke as it spirals into the ground. But inside is an account that draws on Brill’s long experience in reporting complicated governmental and legal processes to detail what he asserts are the unrecognized forces that have broken the country.

To him, these include a meritocracy that has become a new aristocracy, as the winners in today’s economy use their money and power to ensure their children will be the winners of the next generation. The financial sector’s dominance of the economy has given excess power to Wall Street and infused corporations with a short-term outlook. Big business has hijacked First Amendment arguments to allow money to take over Washington. In the nation’s capital, Brill writes, “polarization, entrenched incompetence, and cronyism” have soured outsiders on the prospect of getting anything done.

This is a populist argument. Ex-Trump adviser Steve Bannon might agree with large parts of it. But it is far from a pro-Trump book.

The jeremiad aspects of the book are leavened by Brill’s identification of people and forces working to try to overcome these problems.

He praises certain colleges for their efforts to recruit less-wealthy students who can still meet admissions standards. He highlights the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington non-profit that collects and publishes political donation data, and the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank that tries to come up with plans both parties can live with. He interviews Max Stier, the head of the Partnership for Public Service, a group that tries to lure talented students from top colleges into the unglamorous task of making government bureaucracies work.

“This will not be a revolution of those on the left against those on the right,” Brill says. “It will be a revolution that demands that everyone be personally accountable for what they do and share in their responsibility for the common good.”

A delicate balancing act

At the top of her Twitter account page, political scientist Jennifer Victor has pinned this tweet: “Remember, democracy doesn’t mean majority rules. It means we all agree on the rules.”

Dr. Victor, an associate professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, posted that message shortly after Trump’s inauguration in January 2017. The point, she says, was to remind people that Trump did win by the rules, despite the fact that he did not win a majority of votes.

“Also, it was to remind people that what unifies us, and is characteristic of America, is the reliance on democracy and participation – and the idea that all people have some say or input in what goes on,” says Victor.

The Founding Fathers were very concerned about the nature of minority rights, and the possibility of a majority overruling those. “The institutions of the American government are set up very much with that in mind,” she says.

At the same time, the Founding Fathers made two significant blunders that undermined this balancing act, according to Victor.

The first was slavery. They essentially punted on slavery, never engaging with its moral or economic dimensions. They may have had to do that to get the Constitution ratified, but the strain and stain of slavery nearly destroyed the nation some 80 years later. 

The second blunder they made, in her eyes, was their handling of political parties. They feared and disliked them. They thought they could essentially design a system to make them unnecessary, via competing presidential and legislative branches that would channel ideological and political differences.

But parties were inevitable. The original construction may have worked when voting was limited to white male property owners. But as the definition of citizen and voter expanded, ideas, needs, and identities clashed. Liberal, conservative, white, black, educated, urban, rural – the list of the attributes that add up to today’s voters is, if not endless, very long. “Today people hold many different identities,” Victor says.

Perhaps that is one of democracy’s foundational problems today: devising norms and processes for an electorate that is vastly more complicated than it was when the machine first sprang to life, in 1788.

Such a problem is not beyond solving. While Harvard's Levitsky and Ziblatt lay out in bracing detail how it is possible for democracies to die, Brill insists that their revitalization is possible. 

As the Trump presidency has sparked widespread resistance from critics, the long decline of the relationship between the US government and its voters has produced its own counter-revolution, says Brill. Donations and volunteers are flooding into non-profits and other organizations working to reconnect the broken pieces of America. A new activism is afoot in the land.

“They are doing what they do despite developments in America that seem to be galloping in the opposite direction, not because they are gluttons for frustration, but because they believe that America can be put back on the right course,” he concludes.

Check out other installments of the Democracy Under Strain series.

Taylor Luck

Hag Ali (far l.) from Sudan and Amar Asfour (second l.) from Syria discuss upcoming events with colleagues at the Nuzha Community Support Center in Amman, Jordan, on July 25, 2018. The center is a pilot project by the UN and JOHUD to help Jordan’s diverse refugee groups forge a community and empower them to teach and learn from each other.

A newcomer to this city, Hag Ali was drowning in a sea of people.

A refugee from Darfur, Sudan, he initially landed in the Jordanian capital after a whirlwind 24 hours in which he was told he could flee his homeland and was placed on a plane to Amman.

Without family or friends for the very first time, the city consumed him. Despite being in the heart of a capital of 4 million, Mr. Ali says he had never felt more alone.

His neighbors were Jordanians and – from what he could tell from their accents – Syrians and Iraqis. Their eyes would meet while browsing the aisle at the corner grocery store, and they would nod to each other at the bus stop. But Ali could never strike up a conversation.

“Your entire human interactions were ‘hi’ and ‘bye,’ ” Ali says. “We never mixed, we never met, we were all separated behind closed doors.”

Four years later, Ali’s friends resemble the Arab League: Yemenis, Iraqis, Syrians, Jordanians. They laugh at inside jokes and share slang and special handshakes from their cultures.

“We got to know each other,” Ali says as he places his arm around Amar Asfour, a Syrian friend at a United Nations-run community center. “Once we knew each other, fear was replaced with friendship.”

The friendships were forged at the Nuzha Community Support Center, a pilot project in the Jordanian capital by the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR) and the Jordanian Hashemite Fund for Human Development (JOHUD) to break down barriers between refugees and forge a sense of community for those who have lost their own.

It is a basic human need often overlooked in refugee crises. Aid agencies, NGOs, and governments focus their efforts on providing shelter, medical assistance, food, clothing, and protection for those uprooted by conflict. If the resources are available, subsequent assistance ideally includes education and jobs.

Yet for most refugees who have passed the initial phase of fleeing and are secure, organizations offer little to combat what they call the “silent killers”: waiting, boredom, hopelessness, frustration.

Not defined by 'refugee'

There is little to help them regain their dignity, and, many say, their identity.

“We all had full lives with hopes and dreams before becoming refugees,” says Mohammed Qassem, who fled Sanaa, Yemen, to Jordan three years ago and has been appointed a volunteer at the Amman support center – his first full-time position since leaving Yemen. “‘Refugee’ does not define who we are, not 100 percent or even 50 percent, and this center helps us remember that.”

The initiative is timely for Jordan, a calm oasis at the geographical center of the crises raging in the Middle East that has become home to more than 1 million Syrian refugees as well as tens of thousands of Iraqis, Yemenis, Sudanese, and Somalis.

The support center, officially opened in June, was born out of UN and JOHUD-led community support committees, informal networks in designated towns and neighborhoods across Jordan with significant refugee populations. Comprising the committees are UN staff, members of partner organizations, and Jordanian and refugee community representatives.

The community committees’ original purpose was to ease outreach to dispersed refugee populations, and familiarize aid agencies with the needs of refugees and host communities alike. But there was hunger for much more.

“We started asking refugees directly: you are at home, not practicing social skills, you are under stress, you are reliving trauma – how can we help you?” says Mohammed Khuran, a UNHCR community-based protection associate and a UN point person at the center.

The answer, the refugees said, was activities and a space to meet, to learn, and to share. A place to feel part of a community again. After providing monthly activities for Jordanians and Syrians, the UN, JOHUD and partners decided to open a permanent community center open to Jordanians and refugees of all backgrounds.

Self-empowerment

The center arranges each month of activities based on refugees’ requests and needs. One of the most common requests is education. With many refugees having had their education cut short, many see completing their degree as the path to rebuilding their lives.

The center offers courses in English, mathematics, and Arabic. It also helps refugees apply for scholarships and enroll in online organizations, and links them with international organizations and governments that offer grants and scholarships to refugees.

The Nuzha Center, in the working-class Amman neighborhood of Al Nuzha, hosts an average of three activities each day with an average of 50 participants per activity, including movie nights, poetry slams, jobs-skills training, and workshops on positive thinking.

The center also caters to people with disabilities and senior citizens, organizing field trips for two groups who are among the most vulnerable refugees and least likely to ever leave their homes.

Perhaps the most important service is self-empowerment. The center hires refugees as volunteers to organize events, invite members of their community, staff events, and teach courses. Volunteers receive a stipend and benefits. The Nuzha Center has appointed 17 refugee volunteers, with plans to add three more this year.

Refugees such as Amitab Alysha, from Baghdad, who has a chance to share his expertise in software programming and IT to provide technical courses to fellow refugees.

“We all have experience and expertise to share,” Mr. Alysha says after teaching a course on opening and synchronizing Gmail accounts for 25 refugee women. “If we can’t share it professionally through licensed work, at least we can share it with each other. For the first time in a long while, we feel like we are worth something.”

But the biggest achievement has been breaking barriers.

'True community'

In the run-up to Eid al-Fitr, the center had refugees and Jordanians bake traditional sweets to mark the Islamic holiday, with the refugees sharing recipes and introducing each other to their traditional dishes.

“When I first came to Jordan, people told me to be cautious of Jordanians, and I stayed to myself,” says Amar Asfour, who fled his hometown of Damascus to Jordan at the height of the Syrian war six years ago. “But after time, I learned Jordanians are warm and caring people, I have learned patience from the Sudanese, I have learned that Yemenis are very kind, Iraqis are loud and generous, and Somalis forge friendships for life.”

After the overwhelming response to the pilot project, the UN and its partners are looking to open up two additional community centers outside Amman and are exploring exporting it as a model elsewhere in the region.

All agree that the true success is not in turnout, but when the activities end, when refugees and Jordanians stick around to meet and talk, and the times when scars show through the smiles and memories resurface.

As Ali discusses academic opportunities, his thoughts suddenly drift back to Darfur and to his uncle, who pushed for his nephew’s education and was brutally killed and mutilated by militias seven years ago. Tears mist in his eyes. His friends do not miss a beat and give him space to talk. It is a lingering pain they know all too well.

“When you see that your neighbors and friends have all experienced difficulties and trauma, it makes it easier for you to accept yours,” Ali says as he dabs his eyes. “That is a true community.”

Henry Gass/The Christian Science Monitor

An old movie theater stands on Hidalgo Avenue in downtown Raymondville, Texas. The small south Texas town, about an hour from the US-Mexico border, is hoping the reopening of a controversial immigrant detention center there will bolster its stagnant economy.

When you take the Raymondville exit off I-69 East, you’re greeted almost immediately by a stand of palm trees and a ‘For Sale’ sign. 

One of the first sights on the edge of Raymondville are the crumbling brick walls and disintegrating roofs of packing sheds that used to employ hundreds of people helping store and ship the region’s agricultural produce. Farther in, the present-day economy comes into clearer focus. Taquerias and snow-cone stands are flanked like missing teeth by boarded up homes and shops. Decades-old local stores face down chain stores and converted restaurants across the hot, cactus-lined sidewalks.

What is hidden off the main roads is what has really been keeping this small south Texas town of 11,000 people afloat in recent years: prisons.

Small towns across the Rio Grande Valley have struggled economically since America’s farm belt moved further north in the late 1960s, and prisons – immigrant detention centers in particular – have helped fill the void for the near-border towns. Raymondville, about 100 miles southeast, is home to both a state prison and soon, for the second time, a privately-run immigrant detention center.

The eyes of the world have been fixed on the Valley since the Trump administration began implementing its “zero-tolerance” immigration policy on the southern border two months ago, leading to the now-ended controversial separation of families.

But that is not the context Willacy County Judge Aurelio Guerra thinks about when asked about the new immigrant detention center opening in a county that is full of descendants of people who crossed the Rio Grande. He thinks about how Willacy is the fifth-poorest county in the United States, about how the county’s population stopped growing last year for the first time in decades, and about how 38 percent of his constituents live below the poverty line.

“Because of us needing any type of [economic] opportunity, any type of value to add to our tax base, we certainly welcome a facility such as that,” says Judge Guerra earlier this week, hanging up his black robe in his office after a morning hearing cases in the county court.

Most county judges in Texas are chief executives for the county, not actual judges. Willacy County is small enough that Guerra does both jobs, and it is small enough that the 200-to-250 jobs he has been told the detention center will bring could be a fiscal boon.

“We’ll take the 250. We’ll take 30, we’ll take 20, we’ll take five. We need the jobs,” he says.

‘Ritmo’

Thirty minutes from the Gulf of Mexico and about an hour from the Mexico border, Raymondville – which brands itself as “the city with a smile” – is the county seat of Willacy County. The town is in a similar position, economically and geographically, to the towns along I-35 between San Antonio and Laredo, Texas – a stretch of I-35 nicknamed “detention alley.” Not quite close enough to be either a bustling border town or a coastal tourist town, these town rely on prisons as an integral part of the economy.

That has brought its own controversy, however. When the detention center first opened in 2006, some residents voiced opposition, Guerra recalls. Nine years later the US Bureau of Prisons shut it down after a riot in which prisoners set fire to 10 Kevlar tents and controlled the prison for two days – an outburst resulting from long-simmering anger at poor medical care, filthy bathrooms, and maggot-infested food. The center had been nicknamed “Ritmo.”

Henry Gass/The Christian Science Monitor

The family-owned Armando's Boot Company in downtown Raymondville, Texas, has maintained a healthy trade in selling high-quality boots across the state and the country.

But by then, Guerra says, “Ritmo” had become a local economic cornerstone. Four hundred employees were instantly laid off, and the county government lost a third of its $8.1 million budget, requiring 23 layoffs of its own. Within a year, the local Walmart closed as well. Last year, county officials sold the facility to Management & Training Corp., the private prison company that originally opened the detention center in 2006. The company announced in May that it would be reopening the facility as a 1,000-bed detention center.

“I have not had a single constituent from Willacy County come to me and say, ‘Don’t re-open,’ ” says Guerra.

“What has happened at the federal level and is happening here in the Valley with the children being separated from their parents, [the county] is not for that,” he adds. “And I would think the local community is not for that.”

‘We do what’s best for the whole community’

Sitting in his office, Eleazar Garcia Jr., the Raymondville city manager, is punching numbers into a print calculator on his desk, talking through the potential revenue from the detention center. He types: $280,000 worth of new property taxes, plus $20,000 a month – times 12 months – selling the facility water and sewer service.

“That’s a half a million dollars, man,” he says. “That one thing is worth 17 percent of my total budget.”

Those may be best-case numbers, but he insists that’s all he can focus on, even with his close ties to Mexico. His father-in-law, a bootmaker, swam the river into the US. His brothers-in-law were born in Mexico and fought for the US in Vietnam.

“All of us have family members who came across at one time or another, everybody down here,” he says.

“There’s good people there, man. I don’t want to see them locked up either, but it’s not my call,” he adds. “I have my own thoughts on immigration. I can’t use that in our decision factor. We do what’s best for the whole community.”

Hope the inmates are treated fairly

Few locals are likely to have as intimate a knowledge of immigrant detention centers as Barrington Morgan. He spent about 18 months in them between 2007 and 2009.

A permanent resident since 1984, he now works at an insurance company on Hidalgo Ave., the main road through Raymondville. While his overall experience “really wasn’t that bad” – he gained about 60 pounds while he was there – he does have some issues.

“Having to be in there for an undisclosed amount of time, it’s just not – you go crazy in there, really you do,” he says. “You don’t have a sense of time when you’re in there.”

Born on a small island in Nicaragua, Mr. Morgan came to the US when he was 8. After serving two months for drug possession he got put into removal proceedings, and says he was surprised to find so many other long-time US residents in the detention centers he stayed in.

“I remember being in the same cell with them and they find out they’re being deported … after being [here] for 30 years of their lives,” he adds. “It was ridiculous, so sad.”

He chose to return to Nicaragua while he fought his case, spending two years there before an immigration judge pardoned him in 2011. He lives in Harlingen now, commuting every day to work in Raymondville. He is skeptical the new detention center will be a significant economic boost for the town.

“A lot of people that are going to be employed there aren’t going to be locals,” he says. “I just hope that the inmates are treated fairly and humanely.”

He isn't the only Raymondville resident to express concern about the welfare of detained immigrants. Martin Cantu, co-manager of Earl’s Agri-Business, a feed store, remembers local schools going on lockdown during the 2015 riot, and he says he’s “mixed” on the detention center reopening again. “Hopefully the conditions are fine,” he says. “They have to have rioted for a reason.”

A changing Main Street

About half of the 400 employees at the old detention center lived in Raymondville, Mr. Garcia says. Armando Duarte remembers how the town would fill with workers during their lunch break. There were more restaurants, a “western” store, and multiple stores that, like his, sold cowboy boots.

“There are no mom and pop stores anymore,” he says.

Mr. Duarte learned bootmaking from his father, who learned it from his uncle in Mexico and opened Armando’s Boot Company in 1982. The cowboy boot towering over the front door is, along with a water tower painted with a smiley face, a landmark of the Raymondville skyline. Since the store ships boots to customers all over the country, Duarte says they have been relatively insulated from the recent economic struggles.

Joe Alexandre has not been. Elected three times as the town’s mayor, he also owned a jewelry store on Hidalgo Ave. He closed it after the detention center shut down. It sits vacant with the Alexandre’s Jewelry sign in the window and his cell number written on a piece of paper taped to the door.

“We need all the employment we can get,” he says.

He lives in Harlingen now, but spent most of his life in Raymondville. He remembers the 1970s and ’80s, when the packing sheds were operating 24 hours a day, full of local produce. He also remembers being a volunteer fireman, and fighting in vain as they burned down.

“It was hard to see them go down, because it was a major source of income,” he says. “Back then, whoever would have thought we’d have an economy with detention centers.”

Reuters

A man walks past a campaign image of cricket star-turned-politici­an Imran Khan, chairman of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) at a market in Islamabad, Pakistan.

In three elections so far this year – first Malaysia, then Mexico, and now Pakistan – voters have elected new leaders who not only overturned entrenched parties but whose main campaign pitch was against corruption. If there was a big difference among the three, it was in Pakistan. There the winner of a July 25 election, Imran Khan, an Oxford-educated former cricket star-turned-politician, also promised the opposite of corruption: accountable governance.

“Our state institutions will be stronger. Everyone will be held accountable. First I will be subjected to accountability, then my ministers and so on,” Mr. Khan said in a victory speech. He also announced a symbolic action in promising not to live in the palatial prime minister’s residence in Islamabad.

Corruption fighters often lament that fighting bribery and other forms of graft head-on with tough controls and punishment is often the wrong approach. Citizens also want leaders who affirm moral values as an escape from widespread lawlessness. “In a thoroughly corrupt setting,” states Swedish political scientist Bo Rothstein, “even people who think corruption is morally wrong are likely to take part because they see no point in doing otherwise.”

Pakistan, with a population of 207 million, is certainly ripe for moral governance. Among the countries in Asia, according to the watchdog group Transparency International, it scores the lowest in the percentage of people who say ordinary citizens can make a difference in the fight against corruption (33 percent). Among Pakistanis forced to pay bribes, nearly two-thirds are poor. And those public institutions in which demands for bribes are most rampant – utilities, police, and courts – are also closest to the poor.

Khan’s victory itself has been tainted by charges from losing parties that the powerful military favored his election. Yet there is little doubt that his popularity and apparent incorruptibility gave him a big edge. His party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, has earned a comfortable margin in the National Assembly to effectively improve the country’s governance.

Pakistan needs impartial, clean, and efficient government to tackle its economic problems, such as a huge debt and shrinking exports. Khan’s election could herald a new social contract between citizens and the state, although he will soon need to assert the supremacy of civilian authority over the military to really keep the people’s trust. “We’re going to run Pakistan in a way it’s never been run before,” he claims. 

To do that, Khan will need to tap into the integrity of the very people who elected him. They may be trapped by a corrupt system, but they also bought into his promise of honesty in governance. Such values are a powerful impetus for change.