Tumay Berkin/Reuters

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses members of parliament from his ruling AK Party during an October meeting in Ankara.

What’s the difference between the United States and, say, Russia? Or Turkey, Venezuela, or the Philippines?

Spoiler alert: It’s not hot dogs or apple pie. It’s not even just the fact no American president has muzzled, jailed, or, in some cases, killed, real or perceived rivals, as have leaders of those and other authoritarian regimes.

The fundamental dividing line, which is becoming increasingly stark worldwide, and spotlighted by the controversy around President Trump’s post-election shakeup of his Justice Department, is the existence of the rule of law, underpinned by an independent judiciary.

Even in settled democracies, that arrangement carries an inherent tension, by allowing often-unelected jurists to set legal limits on elected governments. Not just in the US, but other countries with judicial oversight, politicians have bristled not just at specific court challenges, but at the fact judges are in a position to make them in the first place.

Yet in countries where the roots of democracy are more fragile, there is a widening trend to do away with such oversight altogether. Especially with the rise of assertively nationalist, populist politics in many countries, human-rights monitors have highlighted judicial oversight as critical to protecting the status of minority communities, as well as voices critical of those in power. 

In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan fired thousands of judges in the wake of a failed 2016 coup. Under a new Constitution, he has ensured political control over all judicial appointments. Since his reelection this year, he has undertaken a further wholesale reshuffle of the judiciary.

In Poland and Hungary, which joined the European Union after the fall of the Soviet Union, right-wing governments have been doing much the same. The Polish government last month overrode EU objections and named 27 new judges to the Supreme Court, in effect preempting future challenges from that quarter, a move since challenged by a ruling by the EU’s own Court of Justice. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has been called out by a panel of the country’s senior judges, accusing the government of meddling in the process of judicial appointments and promotions.

In Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro used a pliant Supreme Court to neuter the effect of his party’s parliamentary election defeat in 2015 and, since then, to cement his hold on power. In the Philippines, one of the few checks on President Rodrigo Duterte’s campaign of extrajudicial killings has been Supreme Court Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, whom he publicly called his “enemy.” In May of this year, just ahead of a vote by his parliamentary supporters to impeach her, her high-court colleagues voted her out.

The idea of an independent judiciary isn’t an academic matter. When I was covering the USSR in the 1980s, I remember trudging through the snow one morning to a Moscow courtroom to witness an almost Kafkaesque example of the real-world implications.

It involved a man named Viktor Tomachinsky, a small-bore dissident subject to small-bore harassment by the KGB, but who had finally been told by the secret police that he’d be allowed to emigrate to the West. When the authorities reneged, Tomachinsky decided to sue the KGB, for “lost earnings” abroad. The case was duly heard: by a visibly bemused and palpably not independent judge in Chamber No. 31 of Moscow City Court. At the end of Tomachinsky’s presentation, she withdrew to a back room and emerged 15 minutes later to announce: “We do not have jurisdiction.” That very night, I was later told, Tomachinsky was arrested. Two years later, he died in prison. 

A cautionary note has come from Hong Kong, the former British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997 and still enjoying a measure of autonomy under the principle of “one country, two systems.” Last month, a retiring justice from the Court of Final Appeal voiced confidence that “the rule of law is going strong.” But he warned that its future could not be taken for granted. Urging citizens to use their voices and their votes, he said: “If we as a community insist on the rule of law, it cannot be taken from us.” Echoing a phrase championed by, among others, Thomas Jefferson, he added: “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”

Zahedullah Sumarkhil had every reason to flee Afghanistan in 2014, in the vanguard of a wave of migrants that would soon flood into Europe.

He was a policeman. Taliban assassins on a motorcycle in his hometown of Jalalabad had staged an ambush that left his brother and a cousin dead. He knew he would be next. 

“My mother said ‘Just go,’ ” recalls Mr. Sumarkhil, a compact man with a well-trimmed beard. “I fled to Germany to save myself.” 

He traveled across Iran on foot for a month, suffered an attack by Bulgarian police dogs, and skulked in train toilets to avoid detection by officials. All the while he dreamed of a safe promised land.

But his saga – like that of a growing number of Afghans – ended back where it began. Sumarkhil was forcibly deported to his homeland last July, the victim of a controversial repatriation agreement between Kabul and the European Union.

Afghan and EU officials say the 2016 deal has dampened Europe’s appeal for would-be migrants, prompting them to think twice about taking the clandestine and often dangerous road west. Returnees are telling discouraging tales of the hardships they have suffered. One apparent result: European asylum requests by Afghans were down 75 percent last year.

But Sumarkhil is not deterred. He is still hunted by his brother’s killers and he is unemployed. All the men who were deported with him are already on their way back to Europe, he says. Unless he finds a job soon, he will follow them. 

“Even my mother asked ‘Why did you come back?’ ” he says.

Dissuading departures 

The Afghan government would like to stop its citizens leaving the country in the first place. But that is a tough ask. Refugees have been fleeing Afghanistan since the Soviet invasion 40 years ago, when the most recent cycle of civil war and foreign intervention there began. Currently about 2.5 million Afghans – 7 percent of the population – live outside their country, almost all of them in Pakistan and Iran.

And there are a lot of forces still pushing people out, from a poverty rate of 55 percent and 24 percent unemployment to a deteriorating security situation.

Afghan government control or influence over its territory is shrinking, according to a US military report at the end of October, and now extends over little more than half the country. Casualties among the security forces over the past six months were the highest ever recorded for a similar period.

A survey last year by the Asia Foundation found that 39 percent of Afghans would leave their country if they had a chance, with insecurity and unemployment the main motivations.

“Asking or encouraging people to come back, or asking people not to leave, is proving to be more difficult than ever before,” says Khyber Farahi, a senior adviser to the Afghan president on migration issues.

The Afghans who left en masse in 2015 and 2016, heading to Europe, believed the blandishments of smugglers who painted a rosy picture of life in the West and charged an average of $5,000 to $7,000 each.

“Nobody knew what was actually waiting for them. Everybody said, ‘Let’s move now, the doors are open and tomorrow they will close,’ ” recalls Masood Ahmadi, the national manager for returns and reintegration for the UN’s International Organization for Migration.

Friends and relatives who had already reached Europe hardly ever told them how dangerous the journey could be, or how difficult life there often proved, says Mr. Ahmadi. Afghan pride would not let them admit failure.

Even if the situation is dire, “I am not going to communicate the right picture … back to my friends, to my family,” Ahmadi explains.

“Instead I will be sending false information, saying that I have a very good job, I have a very good house, I have a very good car. And this will unfortunately encourage more and more people to migrate,” he says.

Showing 'the ground reality'

So the European Union has started to disseminate a bleaker picture of migrant reality.

An EU-funded media campaign is highlighting the risks that migrants run en route and their low chances of getting asylum in Europe; only 33 percent of Afghan applicants in the second half of last year were successful.  

In radio programs and TV spots that began airing early this year, Afghans testify to the dangers and uncertainty of migrating. They highlight the risk of impoverishing yourself and your family, and even of dying, compared with the virtue of staying to rebuild the country.

A theater group was dispatched to villages, acting out worst-case scenarios in easy-to-understand playlets, and a telephone hotline – which has so far received 460,000 calls – was set up to answer questions and give information about asylum with realistic and generally discouraging advice.

The campaign is designed to carry the message that “the Europe they imagine in their mind is not true, that a plane will pick them up and they will live well,” says Anwar Jamili, country director for Equal Access Afghanistan, the organization that runs the program. Clearly noted, he points out, is the fact that migrants risk being deported from Europe or any point along the way.

“It is difficult to measure the impact” of such publicity, says Pierre Mayaudon, the EU Ambassador to Afghanistan, but “the conclusion was that … it touches the minds of people that may have wanted to go.” The campaigns have raised awareness of “exactly the ground reality,” he adds.

That reality struck hard for Hosay Aryoubi, a headscarved art student with maroon lipstick, who decided to leave Afghanistan with her brother in 2014 out of fear that the situation in Kabul was just going to get worse.

They ended up paying $17,000 for transport and German visas, Hosay spent six months in a Russian jail, and both their asylum applications were eventually rejected. But Ms. Aryoubi chose not to appeal the decision. By then she was disgusted by what she calls “the bad conditions” in which most Afghans lived in Germany and preferred to come home.

“When people ask my advice I tell them all my story,” she says now. “I will never leave, even if the situation gets worse and worse. I have experience.”

Involuntary return

Aryoubi came back of her own volition. If she hadn’t, she would have been liable to deportation as a rejected asylum-seeker.

Not many Afghans have suffered that fate. Only 1,017 were forcibly returned from Europe between 2015 and 2017 while more than 10 times that number came home voluntarily, according to IOM figures.

But the mandatory repatriation scheme is controversial because critics say that it returns migrants to war zones, even if the program is meant to apply only to people from areas of the country that are deemed safe.

“The situation is not appropriate” to bring people home anywhere in Afghanistan, says Thomas Ruttig, co-director of the well-respected Afghanistan Analysts Network in Kabul, an independent think tank. He cites the latest assessment by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees that even the capital is not safe for returnees. The German government’s security assessment, he charges, is “deeply flawed … tailoring facts to justify its policy” of deportations.

When they happen, forced repatriations are widely reported in the Afghan media, and although relatively few people are affected by them, they send a powerful signal, says presidential adviser Mr. Farahi.

They have “the largest impact” on would-be migrants, he believes. “The thing is not how many … you send back, but how many you can prevent from making the decision to go,” Farahi says.

The deportations are “a message,” says Mr. Mayaudon, the EU ambassador: “Don’t try in vain.”

Whether because that message is getting through, or because grim reports by Afghan returnees of dangerous journeys and a cool reception are sinking in, the number of migrants heading to Europe has dropped enormously.

Some 180,000 Afghans applied for asylum in an EU member state in 2016. Last year that figure fell by 75 percent to 45,000.

Dream of escape

You might expect Mariam, whose ill-starred effort to resettle her family in Sweden cost her the lives of two sons, to understand why fewer people are making the kind of trip she risked.

When her husband died, Mariam’s brother-in-law demanded she marry him. When she refused he chopped off the fingers and thumb of her right hand with a hatchet. Mariam (not her real name) decided to flee. She sold property and paid a smuggler $25,000 to get her and her four young children to Sweden.

In Turkey a smuggler gave her a counterfeit Japanese passport with a Swedish visa, but her children had no documents. The smuggler convinced her to fly to Stockholm, promising that he would send her sons overland. In fact, they disappeared.

It turned out that the children had been caught at the Greek border, thrown into a Turkish camp for migrants, and eventually deported to Kabul.

When Mariam heard that news she abandoned her Swedish asylum request, received $4,500 in resettlement money, and flew home. Her two older children died shortly afterwards from tuberculosis.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

An Afghan widow, mother, and would-be migrant who gave the name Mariam stands for a portrait in her shop, set up with the help of resettlement funds from the UN's International Organization for Migration (IOM), on Nov. 3, 2018 in Kabul, Afghanistan. Mariam's husband died, and when she refused a demand from her brother-in-law to marry him, he cut off her fingers and thumb with a hatchet, prompting her to attempt to flee to Sweden with her four children. Two of them died during the ordeal.

But even this tragic failure has not killed her dream of moving abroad to escape the Taliban, whom her former brother-in-law has enlisted to kill her on the false accusation that she converted to Christianity in Sweden.

Though she would only take a legal path to exile next time, “I have too many problems,” says Mariam, her disfigured right hand covered by the tail of her headscarf.

“If someone found me a visa … I would leave immediately with just the clothes on my back.”

The appeal of television characters is often their flaws. But in contrast to morally challenged protagonists like Don Draper of “Mad Men” and Walter White of “Breaking Bad,” the denizens of NBC’s comedy “The Good Place” are working to fix theirs. And people are fascinated by how.

Now in its third season, the Emmy-nominated sitcom charts the afterlife journey of its main characters by name-dropping philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Aristotle – atypical fodder for programs that usually deal in one-liners and laugh tracks. Often called TV’s best comedy by critics, the show’s tenacity in an industry known for rapid cancellations speaks to its fanbase, and its unusual approach.

“I don’t think there has ever been a network sitcom that talks about philosophers in this way,” writes Errol Lord, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, in an e-mail. “Plenty of great comedy shows have grappled with philosophical issues (“The Simpsons,” “Seinfeld,” “M*A*S*H*,” “Daria,” and, more recently, “High Maintenance”). But ‘TGP’ is unique in the way it talks about actual philosophers and their views.”

“The Good Place” is the brainchild of Michael Schur, a sitcom veteran who co-created both “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and “Parks and Recreation,” and who wrote for the US version of “The Office.” His own musings on philosophical matters informed this solo project – which he has said he pitched to executives as a show about what it means to be a good person – and have translated to viewers.   

“Ultimately, it’s a show about ethics and about people who make each other better,” says RaeLee Puckett-Sharpless, a 20-something fan from Kokomo, Ind. 

From the moment Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) arrives in a heaven-like afterlife run by Michael (Ted Danson), she thinks it is a mistake. She is joined in “the good place” by ethics professor Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper), socialite Tahani Al-Jamil (Jameela Jamil), and aspiring DJ Jason Mendoza (Manny Jacinto). 

Early in the first season, Eleanor asks Chidi to help her learn to be better (in flashbacks viewers learn that she was often selfish and dishonest) and various philosophers are soon part of her lessons. In season two, which picks up after a twist at the end of the previous season, an entire episode revolves around and is named after “the trolley problem,” in which a person must choose between allowing a train to run over five people or diverting it so it only runs over one. Season three finds Chidi exploring nihilism in an episode that also involves good-deed-doing. 

“I think that the second and third seasons display more philosophical depth than much of the first season, but the reason for this may well be that the first season had to do a lot of setup,” explains Todd May, professor of philosophy at Clemson University in Clemson, S.C., and a consultant to the show. “As far as their approach to philosophy, we do see the emergence of the idea of the little voice of conscience, one that Eleanor brings up as a general moral guide. This guide isn’t grounded in any particular theory, but in the unfolding relationships she has with those around her.” 

One of Professor May’s books led Mr. Schur to him, and now May meets with the show’s writing staff via Skype. “They are very keen on getting the philosophy right,” he says, noting he was tapped by the show for what was a first in his 30-some years in philosophy: “an emergency philosophical consult.”

Professor Lord, who is working his way through the seasons, notes that early on the plot brought out philosophical ideas, including, “Does expertise in moral philosophy translate into expertise about how to act well?... Can you learn to be a better person?... Does motive matter to whether actions with good consequences have moral worth?”

Colleen Hayes/NBC

Tahani (Jameela Jamil) (far l.), Janet (D'Arcy Carden), Chidi (William Jackson Harper), and Jason (Manny Jacinto) visit an art installation in 'The Good Place' Season 3 episode, 'A Fractured Inheritance.'

Lord also noticed changes in the philosophical approach in the second season. “It becomes murkier what the show’s view is about the relationship between being an expert about moral philosophy and being a good person. It still seems to me that it is skeptical about that.” And, he notes, “the layer of hope seems to be strengthened and deepened by Michael’s transformation into something much more like an ordinary human agent.”

In addition to winning the approval of philosophy experts, “The Good Place,” rated TV-14, also boasts an enthusiastic fan base. Ms. Puckett-Sharpless says she wasn’t sure about the show after seeing the first episode but eventually sat down and watched more of it on a friend’s recommendation. “Each season the story has some kind of reboot,” she adds. “There’s a new story that ropes you in. If the show is a puzzle, each season is a newer weirder piece. It’s fresh and a different take on the afterlife that no one has ever seen before.”

Bridget Heos watches it in Kansas City, Mo., with her husband and three teenage sons. 

“It’s funny,” she says, but notes that “there’s a deeper thread that really makes you think about the show.” The struggle by the characters to become better people reminds her of another famous story about improving one’s life. “To me it’s kind of like another version of ‘A Christmas Carol,’ where it’s about people who ... have opted out of being human beings,” she says. Watching them learn how to be loving and “not be superficial like Tahani,” offers a deeper meaning, she says. 

“But what brings us back, I think, is the characters,” she adds. “I love spending time with these characters.”

Lord notes that the show taps into “the longing to connect with others and the longing to be recognized as valuable.”

He argues Eleanor’s connection with others is what makes the difference in her journey. “Her meaningful interactions with the other characters ([especially] Chidi) is what really gets her to see the value of these things,” he writes. “These themes are very often explored by TV shows and art more generally.... But TGP executes this agenda in an interesting way.”

AP

Deer walk in the ruins of a fire-destroyed home in Paradise, Calif.

Last year, when wildfires in California were already breaking records, Gov. Jerry Brown advised the state to accept it as “the new normal.” This November, as the state saw its most destructive fires in history with dozens of people killed, the governor said the fires are instead “the new abnormal.”

He did not explain his change of terms. Yet the switch nicely wraps up a decades-long debate over whether wildfires are part of a natural order or something to quickly suppress, as Smoky Bear told generations of Americans.

It also hints at the question of whether humans are disrupting that order – such as with climate change – even as they struggle to find a harmonious place in it. Ancient humans may have “discovered” fire. But we moderns have yet to learn to live with it or deal with how we cause it.

Compared with other states, California has done well in dealing with an increase in wildfires and in trying to find a balance between human structures and the grasslands, brush, and trees that are tinder for wildfires. The state, which is the world’s fifth-largest economy, has been a leader in reducing carbon emissions. It requires nonflammable materials in many new houses and a “defensible space” around homes to keep fires at bay. It has tried to use prescribed or “controlled” burns to get rid of dead vegetation, although not as well as in many Southeast states.

Like most states, it has not done as well in preventing the sprawl of homes onto the edges of forest and scrub, or what is called the wildlife-urban interface. The rising proximity of people to combustible lands may be the new normal. Yet isn’t it normal for humans to fit into the natural order of wildfires, which have long been necessary to maintain a resilient and balanced ecosystem?

In wilderness, constant change is the natural order yet humans somehow insist on defining what is good in nature, often demanding wild lands remain the same. As more people build homes near natural settings, the desire for aggressive fire suppression also rises. More government money still goes into fighting forest fires than other aspects of dealing with wildfires, such as zoning or green energy. Nationwide an estimated 46 million homes are in fire-prone areas.

At many levels of governance, there is still no universal consensus on how to deal with wildfires. “All fire strategies suffer failures and at roughly the same rate,” says fire historian Stephen Pyne, a professor at Arizona State University. About 2 to 3 percent of wildfires escape an initial attack by firefighters. A similar number of prescribed fires escape or fail to do the ecological work expected, he adds.

California’s battle with wildfires represents a mix of different strategies designed to both contain fire and live with it. What is normal or abnormal is not yet clear. But somewhere in the struggle lies the ideal of a natural order, with humans as part of it.