It’s December 2024. No one is entirely sure who will be sworn in as president of the United States in January.

In this hypothetical scenario, the Democrat appears to have won the national popular vote, and has narrow leads in several key battleground states. But the Republican candidate learned from former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. This time that branch of the party is ready.

Newly installed election officials in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin have refused to certify some county votes due to what they claim is evidence of massive fraud in mail-in ballots. GOP-controlled legislatures in the three states have voted to support the fraud allegations. Slates of replacement Electoral College electors are waiting in the wings.

Local Democrats hotly dispute the fraud claims, as do the Democratic governors of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But neither the governors nor state courts have a say in the matter. Under a 2023 Supreme Court decision dealing with the “independent state legislature” theory, only state lawmakers have the power to set election rules.

Democrats have sued in federal courts, which are overwhelmed with election cases. But the conservative Supreme Court – at the top of the federal court pinnacle – has indicated it has little interest in interfering in states’ election decisions.

An update to the Electoral Count Act – the rickety 1887 law that governs Electoral College vote counting and the naming of the president-elect – could have clarified things and eliminated some loopholes. The update looked set to pass in late 2022, but it stalled after Republicans swept the House in a midterm red wave.

A bang or a whimper?

What does it look like in the real world when democracy breaks down?

Many voters undoubtedly believe it would be a dramatic, perhaps traumatic, event. There would be soldiers in the streets, propaganda on the airwaves, even fighter jets attacking the presidential palace, as they did in Chile when the armed forces ousted President Salvador Allende in 1973.

This vision may have received some promotion by Hollywood, but it does have roots in the recent past. During the Cold War, armed coups accounted for 3 of every 4 democratic breakdowns, from Chile to Argentina and Greece to Turkey, and beyond.

Rebecca Blackwell/AP

A man wears an "I voted" sticker on his shirt, printed with the American flag and the U.S. Constitution, after voting at Wa-Ke Hatchee Recreation Center in Fort Myers, Florida, Nov. 8, 2022.

Political violence has become a real concern in the U.S., of course. Threats to politicians and election officials and actual attacks driven by partisan beliefs have increased in recent years, from the 2017 shooting at a GOP practice for the Congressional Baseball Game that wounded House Republican Whip Steve Scalise, to the recent hammer assault on Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband.

The Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by rioters was violence on a different level, aimed at disrupting the basic democratic process of counting electoral votes.

But today the force behind democratic backsliding is more likely to be ballots than bullets.

Over the past 20 years, elected leaders in Venezuela, Georgia, Peru, Hungary, and other countries have subverted democracy a step at a time with “legal” means. Courts and federal agencies are packed with partisans and turned into weapons; the media and private business are bought off or cowed; the rules of politics are subtly skewed in the ruling party’s favor.

For much of the population, everyday life remains the same. Consider Malaysia, a country that Thomas Pepinsky, a professor of government and public policy at Cornell University, knows well.

Malaysia is an emerging market economy. Many people live comfortably. The military is in the barracks, and the police mostly pursue crime. There is quiet dissent. There are even elections.

It is not, however, a democracy. The nonprofit group Freedom House rates it “partly free,” with limited political rights. The reason is that the country’s elections don’t change its leadership. The same political groups have ruled the country for all but a few years since independence in 1957. Among the tools they use to stay in power, according to Freedom House, are restrictive speech laws and politicized prosecutions of opponents.

That is what democratic breakdown could look like, says Professor Pepinsky. Its erosion would be gradual, piecemeal, not cataclysmic. Life would be tolerable for most groups, though not everyone. But elections would change nothing.

The significance of the ritual of voting at the center of American government – that no matter the electoral heat, it is devoted to common purpose, and that one side agrees to accept losing, while the winner agrees to a vote again in a few years – might be stripped away, leaving the tradition hollow.

“Democracy has many meanings,” says Professor Pepinsky. “Surely one of them must be your vote is free, it is counted, and the government cannot prevent a vote that doesn’t turn out its way.”

Blame and distrust

On the brink of the crucial 2022 midterm elections, many voters are pessimistic about the state of U.S. democracy. Just 9% of Americans think democracy is working “extremely” or “very well,” according to a recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs poll; 52% say it’s not working well at all.

Both Republicans and Democrats say democracy’s problems are an important issue. More than 70% of voters from both parties say it is currently “under threat,” according to a New York Times-Siena College survey.

Ricardo Arduengo/Reuters

Former President Donald Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, step outside a polling station in Palm Beach, Florida, Nov. 8, 2022.

But their lack of trust in democracy’s solidity is rooted in profound and fundamentally incompatible reasons for a lack of trust in each other.

A majority of Republicans say dangers to democracy include President Joe Biden, the mainstream media, the federal government, and voting by mail, according to the Times-Siena poll. Democrats lay blame on Mr. Trump, and to a lesser extent the Supreme Court and Electoral College.

For GOP voters the essence of the problem is allegations of fraud. The Republican Party has long made claims of voter malfeasance a central issue in its push for voter ID and other vote restriction measures, despite small numbers of documented fraud cases.

President Trump’s false or exaggerated claims of fraud in the 2020 vote have turbocharged this preexisting belief, drawing on Republican suspicion of Democratic city machines and elite organizations to entrench the existence of fraud as an article of faith among the rank and file.

More than 60 court rulings held that the 2020 election was free and fair. A string of bipartisan officials, including Mr. Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, stated that no fraud was found at a level that would have changed the outcome of the vote.

Yet fully 61% of Republicans continue to believe that President Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election, according to a Monmouth University poll released in September.

The legacy of 2020

Many Democrats see the GOP’s stated belief in fraud claims as evidence that the party thinks only elections in which Republicans win are legitimate.

If that is true, then we are already in trouble, says Susan D. Hyde, professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Democracy depends on all teams accepting the rules of the game.

“Once you have one of our two political parties that is unwilling to accept that they lose, you’re violating democracy’s definition,” she says.

Republicans who reject the 2020 results and are running for office in 2022 exemplify this partisan split. To varying degrees, these candidates embrace Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

According to the data journalism site FiveThirtyEight, there are 260 GOP candidates for Senate, House, state secretaries of state, or state attorneys general who have said they fully reject or question President Biden’s victory, despite the court findings and bipartisan election officials’ statements.

Some election deniers are lagging in the polls. In Pennsylvania, the latest surveys show state Sen. Doug Mastriano, who participated in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential vote, well behind Democrat Josh Shapiro in the state’s gubernatorial race.

But most election-denying candidates – about 65%, according to FiveThirtyEight – are poised to win.

President Biden, in a Nov. 2 speech on democracy, noted that some of these candidates have not committed to accepting the results of the races they are running in.

That is a path to chaos, he said, unprecedented and un-American.

“You can’t love your country only when you win,” he said.

Tasos Katopodis/Reuters

President Joe Biden prepares to cast his vote during early voting for the 2022 U.S. midterm elections with his granddaughter Natalie, a first-time voter, at a polling station in Wilmington, Delaware, Oct. 29, 2022.

The forest metaphor

What is democracy, anyway? Is it something like a switch? A cliff? A forest?

Those comparisons may sound puzzling, but thinking of democracy via metaphors could be a way to understand its role in America and the seriousness of the problems it faces.

If democracy is an on/off switch, it is either working or not. The equivalent of “off” might be a full-blown coup or governmental collapse. If it is a cliff, it is solid but subject to erosion. The political stresses and strains of recent years could be ocean waves undercutting its face.

If it is a forest, it can regrow after a storm.

Berkeley’s Professor Hyde says the forest metaphor is a useful one.

“The thing I like about the ‘forest’ analogy is we’re not stuck on a slide with nowhere to go but down. ... It leaves us with the ability to rebuild and replenish democratic institutions,” she says.

Democracy’s flexibility, its ability to renew itself, is a strength, for instance. Authoritarian states often have no mechanism for getting rid of bad leaders. Think of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who remains in power though his invasion of Ukraine appears to have been a massive strategic mistake. Democracies can suffer under poor executives, but at least theoretically they have scheduled means for replacing them via meaningful elections.

But recently the forest has been enduring storms, in the form of election denialism. In 2020 it seemed to hold up well enough to recover, as officials of both parties across the country and the courts resisted efforts to overturn the vote via the false allegations of fraud.

The question now is whether the storm of denialism that appears likely to follow the midterms and build prior to 2024 will be powerful enough to damage the ability of the political system to renew itself with fair elections.

A big problem is that the ways people access political information in the U.S. continue to erode. Voters live in partisan news bubbles that are becoming so impenetrable that exploitative politicians can directly lie to supporters with few consequences.

“The ability to consume accurate information about politics is pretty important for democracy to work well,” says Professor Hyde.

Who counts the votes?

Election administration could be another weak point for American democracy. In key states such as Georgia and Nevada, experienced poll workers and other officials are quitting in the face of verbal abuse and threats of violence from voters convinced of Mr. Trump’s fraud charges.

Newly elected or appointed Trump supporters could replace some of these workers and be more amenable to pressure to tilt things his way. Some state laws passed since 2020 might also make election subversion easier. In Georgia, for instance, a new law that allows the state to take over county election boards and install new administrators has some Democrats worried about the possibility of subversion in Democratic-majority locales.

Carolyn Kaster/AP

Loretta Myers fills out her ballot at her polling place, the New LIFE Worship Center Church of God, in Fayetteville, Pennsylvania, Nov. 8, 2022.

Then there is the independent state legislature theory, which holds that a literal reading of the U.S. Constitution gives state legislatures the final say in regulating votes for federal office, unchecked by governors, state courts, or provisions in state constitutions.

The Supreme Court is hearing a case this term, Moore v. Harper, that could make this theory the law of the land.

The most extreme reading of the independent state legislature doctrine would upend U.S. elections, allowing state lawmakers plenary power to draw districts, set voting rules, and even locate polling places and design ballots.

There would still be legal limits – Eliza Sweren-Becker, counsel in the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, says, “It’s not a license to coup.” But some legal experts worry it could be a smokescreen under which some state legislators could try to insert themselves into the vote counting and certification process.

Taken together, these weak points mean that a more successful version of the 2020 attempt to overthrow election results can’t be ruled out.

There is another possibility too, writes political scientist Jonathan Bernstein this week in Bloomberg News: democratic erosion that does not result in full authoritarianism. There could be more barriers to voting, more outbursts of political violence, more threats to election workers, and more gerrymandering.

Republicans would not have anything close to an absolute grip on power, but “they might acquire substantial, enduring advantages not at all compatible with a robust republic,” writes Mr. Bernstein.

U.S. history, unvarnished

One way to get an idea of what backsliding in America’s democracy might look like is to peer into its past. In some ways we have already been there.

The mythic vision of the U.S. is that it was founded in freedom and has steadily expanded democracy ever since. That’s not what really happened, says Manisha Sinha, professor of American history at the University of Connecticut who studies slavery and Reconstruction.

“If you study U.S. history you realize that it has never been linear, it has always been challenged, and we have backslid at many points,” she says.

The U.S. was founded as a democratic republic, of course – but with limits on who could vote. It varied by state, but the franchise was generally limited to property-owning white men. That meant only about 6% of the population chose the nation’s leaders.

Morry Gash/AP

"I voted" stickers are seen at a polling place during the midterm elections, Nov. 8, 2022, in Milwaukee.

After the cataclysm of the Civil War, the 15th Amendment to the Constitution extended the vote to formerly enslaved Black males, theoretically. But Southern white people fought back fiercely against something they saw as a direct challenge to their social and political status.

Armed vigilantes watched polling places, something that is echoed today by right-wing activists guarding ballot drop boxes in what they say are efforts to prevent fraud. Political violence to prevent Black citizens from voting exploded across the former Confederacy.

After federal troops were withdrawn from the South in 1877, Reconstruction ended. Despite the Constitution, the U.S. became a semi-democratic nation, with Southern one-party authoritarian enclaves where much of the population was excluded from voting or intimidated into staying home on Election Day.

Seen through this lens, it was not until the civil rights era, with the end of Jim Crow separate-but-equal laws and the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that the U.S. began to approach its democratic promise.

“I think it’s really important for us to know that history, to understand that American democracy is not necessarily something that progresses on its own unimpeded,” says Professor Sinha. “It requires work to move forward.”

A procedure for disagreeing civilly

Malaysia is not alone. There are regimes all around the world that tilt the playing field toward themselves when holding elections. Prior to Russian parliamentary elections in September 2021, President Putin dispelled the notion of competition by imprisoning opposition leader Alexei Navalny and branding his followers as extremists, notes the latest report from Freedom House on freedoms around the world.

The authoritarian government of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega took similar steps to quash competition prior to a November 2021 presidential vote, arresting seven potential opposition candidates and pulling the legal status of 50 civil society organizations.

Why do such regimes hold elections at all? Perhaps because the ritual itself has meaning, says Professor Pepinsky of Cornell. Without elections in the U.S., citizens would feel unmoored.

“Dictators are very aware of this as well,” he says.

While U.S. voters may be unhappy about the state of their democracy, elections per se remain popular, and a bit more than 60% of Americans disagree with the idea that the country should have a strong leader who does not bother with a legislature and elections, according to World Value Survey data.

That said, the number of citizens who might accept such a strongman is perhaps surprisingly large for a country founded on the words “all men are created equal” – and it appears to be growing. It has risen from about 25% of respondents to 38% since the late 1990s, according to the same World Value Survey data series.

Too many Americans may judge democracy and elections on the outcome of whether preferred candidates win or not, says Professor Pepinsky. Their real value is as a procedure we use to disagree on politics without having a fight.

The agreement we have is the losers accept their loss, knowing they will have a chance to try again within a few years, and the cycle will repeat over and over.

“What is missing is the broader conception of adopting this convention – this miracle,” Professor Pepinsky says.

Editor's note: In a paragraph referencing the end of Reconstruction, a sentence mentioning the Know-Nothing party has been removed, for chronological accuracy.

Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor

First time Republican poll observers and workers speak to the Monitor at the Pima County GOP office in Tucson, Arizona, on Nov. 5, 2022. From left to right: Janet Neustedter, Kerry Torgerson, Jack Kennedy, Miriam Kennedy, Susan Kelly, Annie Szalay, Joseph Griggs, and Sarah Ramsey.

Over the weekend, the Monitor sat down with a group of Republicans in Arizona’s Pima County who, for the first time, were volunteering to work at the polls in Tuesday’s midterms. All decided to get involved after what they believed was a problematic election in 2020 – with some becoming poll workers and others poll observers.

Poll workers are short-term employees paid a small stipend by the county to work at voting locations. In Pima, where they must go through multiple hours of training, their tasks on Election Day could be anything from showing voters where to go to checking their identification. 

Poll observers, by contrast, are partisan appointees put in place to watch for things like improper influence on voters or tampering with equipment. They are not permitted to handle election materials or speak with voters. Sarah Ramsey, who runs the Pima County Republican Party’s Election Integrity Program, has led two-hour training sessions for 360 new observers this year. 

In an almost two-hour discussion inside the Pima County GOP office next to a laundromat in a Tucson strip mall, these new election workers talked about why they still don’t accept the 2020 results, what they’ve learned so far – and what, if anything, might give them confidence in future elections.

This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. 

How has your involvement in politics changed over the past few years?

Janet Neustedter, a poll worker and health coach: I’ve always been a Republican, I’ve always voted, I’ve always been aware of the issues.

In Arizona, when they called the [2020] vote at 10 at night, I was on the couch like, “What is happening?” And I saw the newscaster look shocked on his face too. ... I started doing a lot of research and listening to a lot of podcasters and digging down rabbit holes. A lot of the people that I listened to said, it’s not enough to just hear this stuff – you got to get in. It’s not up to President Trump, it’s not up to the military, it’s up to us. So here I am. 

Annie Szalay, a poll worker and former human resources employee: I’m a “walkaway” Democrat. I walked away [from voting for Democrats] in 2012, but I hung onto the Democrat title until 2015, when Donald Trump came on. I loved the way he spoke to the people. ... I really believed he was going to do what he said he was going to do, so I voted for him.

I’ve watched the movie “2000 Mules,” I’ve watched the Rudy Giuliani interviews in Phoenix, and I just didn’t know how [the 2020 election] was put together. And now that I’m working the polls, like, there’s so many ballots. There are some things that are really scaring me that are out there and not tied down. 

[Editor’s note: The film “2000 Mules” used “geotracking” data to allege that “mules” had been depositing large numbers of ballots into drop boxes. Experts have widely dismissed it, noting that drop boxes tend to be in highly trafficked areas where many people are likely to pass by repeatedly.] 

Susan Kelly, a poll observer who’s retired from a defense company: I found Dr. Frank, with his statistics that he was collecting on COVID and on the election, and being an engineer I totally understand. I believe he has some truth to his data. 

We don’t have any proof, and that’s the hard part. So all we can do is what we can do from where we are. If we can fix Pima County, make sure we feel confident that what Pima County is doing is right, we at least have that. 

[Editor’s note: Ohio high school math teacher Douglas Frank’s presentations claiming to show fraud based on an algorithm have been debunked in numerous outlets; Ohio’s GOP secretary of state called it a “conspiracy theory.”]

Kerry Torgerson, a poll worker and retired engineer: I got involved because of the so-called election. We were watching, I’ll call it “better” news services, and hearing the real story of what’s going on. And we’re like, OK, well then who is going to do something about this?

We heard all these false flags about how Trump’s going to come back in three months and stuff, and we’re waiting and waiting, and nothing ever happens. And then the phrase started becoming on various news outlets, “The cavalry is not coming to save us. We have to do it.”

Why do you believe the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump?

Joseph Griggs, a poll observer who’s retired from a manufacturing company: At 2 in the morning, they wheel out all these votes. And guess what? There are no poll watchers or observers there. I’m retired, so I have spent about eight hours a day for the last three years doing nothing but going down rabbit holes.

Jack Kennedy, a poll observer and retired engineer: You’re watching television at night, and you say, ‘Look! Trump’s ahead!’ And then suddenly in the middle of the night, boom. Biden was getting tons of votes. And they were saying that votes were coming in a package and 90% of them were for Biden. That’s improbable. So you go, ‘Well I don’t know how to prove it, but this doesn’t look right.’

[Editor’s note: Overnight vote “spikes” for Joe Biden in certain states were largely the effect of heavily Democratic urban counties reporting their totals.]

Ms. Kelly: I was listening to the Ben Shapiro podcast, and he has divided the people who don’t believe the last election was true into two categories. One [believes] there was some conspiracy, and somebody took it over. In my gut I feel like that happened – but I have no proof. I’m an engineer, so I need facts and data. So there is nothing you can do with that. You have to inaugurate Joe Biden and let it go.

The second category though, [believes] that Big Tech controlled what our population knew about the candidates. And they totally did. I couldn’t post anything on Facebook. 

So you see it as an indirect theft?

Ms. Kelly: Totally. But on purpose. The younger generation, my kids, they don’t watch CNN or Fox News. Where do they get their news? From the internet.

Where do you get your news from?

Ms. Kelly: Newsmax. I don’t even really trust Fox News, [Others around the table nod in agreement.] You just can’t trust ’em. Even at the local level. If they say it, I almost instinctively say, ‘That’s not true.’

What have you learned so far from being a poll worker or observer?

Mr. Kennedy: I didn’t really accomplish anything [as a poll observer] sitting through the primary. I just sat there and listened to everybody. And I decided, they are doing a good job at the poll centers. The people are honest, and they try to do what they are supposed to do, and they are helpful to the voters who come in.

I applied to be a poll worker myself, but they responded: ‘We’ll get back to you’ and never did. I think I may apply again. I’ll do the 18 hours [of training] or whatever it takes, you know, because I think I’d learn more being on the inside than I am just being an observer. 

Mr. Torgerson: [Anyone] can be a poll observer and that’s great. You need to be there.

But if you’re a poll observer, you can’t do anything about [fraud] right then. You have to deal with it after the fact. If you’re a poll worker, you’re the judge. Here comes a person, they don’t have the right ID. Someone else might have let them go through, but you can stop it. You stop the fraud.

Ms. Kelly: On the primary day, I literally just observed. I watched what was going on. In the voting center I was at, they were all trying their absolute best to be doing right. Even the Democrats. They were all really trying to figure it out.

The observer’s role is strategic. Because anything I learn or I observe, I’m going to try to use to change the process or the laws as necessary.

Mr. Torgerson: There is another aspect. Having poll observers there is like a cop on the freeway. ... If you have a poll observer in the room, that’s not where the fraud is going to happen. That’s a good thing, because then you can isolate it. If there’s fraud in all these different places, it’s really hard to figure out how they stole the election. But if this is the only [place] left not being observed, maybe we should spend time figuring it out.

Even if this one gets stolen again, we’re going to have a lot better idea of where to focus all of our time now to do an audit and not waste it.

Do you believe Tuesday’s election will be free and fair?

Mr. Torgerson: It’s too late. There were too many early [vote by mail] ballots. There’s no chain of custody on them. There’s no chance that you could make sure it was an honest election.

But if the Republican candidates win, would you think then that the election was fair?

Mr. Griggs: There is no way to know. 

Mr. Kennedy: We are just hoping that they get such a large majority that even the cheating won’t help [Democrats].

So what would make you trust the results of elections again?

[Several people start speaking at once.]

Ms. Szalay: We got to fix this early ballot problem. 

Mr. Kennedy: Voting on one day.

Mr. Torgerson: Hand count ballots only.

Ms. Kelly: We have to stay involved.

Do you have hope for the future of our country?

Ms. Kelly: I do, because –

[Several people at the table finish the sentence together]: They have awoken a sleeping giant. 

Mr. Torgerson: And the head of the giant they awoke is retired people. We have the time.

Josh Edelson/Reuters

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken (center left) stands for a photo with Applied Materials leadership and employees at the company's state-of-the art semiconductor lab in Santa Clara, California, Oct. 17, 2022. These chips are essential components of modern electronics, from video games to high-tech drones.

Semiconductor chips are likened to the “steel” of the modern digital economy – tiny circuits vital to powering the processing of huge quantities of data. They’re essential components of many electronics – from mobile phones and video games to supercomputers and high-tech drones. As such, the cutting-edge chips are at the center of the technological decoupling underway between China and the United States, with each country seeking greater security for their supply chains.

In October, the U.S. broadly expanded restrictions on the export to China of advanced semiconductors and manufacturing equipment. It also stepped up restrictions on U.S. personnel and firms supporting Chinese chip making, while tightening export controls on Chinese entities involved with supercomputing.

The wide scope of the latest measures – aimed at cutting China off from high-end chips and preventing civilian-to-military transfers – means the impact will be far greater than previous, narrower controls targeting specific firms, experts say. 

What do the recent U.S. export controls aim to achieve?

U.S. officials say the sweeping new controls are needed to curb China’s access to the high-end chips used in supercomputing and artificial intelligence that are vital to modernizing its military, weaponry, and surveillance networks – deemed threats to U.S. national security. 

Curbing China’s access to the powerful chips and hampering its efforts to produce them will also hit Chinese industries ranging from electronic vehicles and advanced robotics to aircraft and drones.

“The Chinese themselves say this puts them back at least a decade,” says James Lewis, senior vice president and director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The controls are expected to impede some aspects of China’s military advance, experts say, even as Chinese leader Xi Jinping has called on the People’s Liberation Army to accelerate its transformation to a “world-class military.”

“The key differentiating factor between how military systems work today versus prior decades ... is they have more and more computing power applied,” says Chris Miller, associate professor of international history at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

“Will limits to China’s abilities to produce advanced computing power at home feed into military power? The track record of the last 50 years suggests almost certainly,” says Dr. Miller, who is also a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology.” 

Patrick Semansky/AP

President Joe Biden walks onto a stage in Carlsbad, California, Nov. 4, 2022, to speak about the CHIPS and Science Act, a sweeping measure intended to boost the semiconductor industry within the United States and limit China's access to such technology.

How is China expected to respond?

China is expected to redouble its longstanding effort to attain self-sufficiency in semiconductors – part of its overarching goal of dominating key emerging technologies and using innovation to boost slowing economic growth.

In his report to the Communist Party’s 20th National Congress Oct. 16, Mr. Xi called on China to “speed up efforts to achieve greater self-reliance and strength in science and technology.”

Under Mr. Xi, China poured billions of dollars into a state-led industrial policy – launched in 2015 and initially called Made in China 2025 – that uses subsidies to try to gain a leading position in high-technology manufacturing, including artificial intelligence. Semiconductors have been a major focus of the policy.

Yet China’s push toward independence in semiconductors has had mixed results. The country’s state-run chip industry investment fund, known in China as “Big Fund,” has funneled more than $30 billion into the effort since its creation in 2014. But one major chip maker it backed went bankrupt, and last summer three former senior fund executives were placed under investigation for legal violations, reportedly linked to corruption.

“Something goes wrong in China, it probably has to do with the government,”  says Dr. Lewis, “because they’ve spent a lot of money, they have a lot of good people, they’re a big market, but they just can’t make it work.”

As of 2019, China accounted for about 60% of global demand for semiconductors, but produced only about 13% of the supply. U.S. firms have the lead in making the most advanced chip designs as well as chip-production equipment.

Anticipating growing U.S. restrictions, China has been stockpiling chips, and could still buy some on the gray market, although not enough to meet the need, says Dr. Lewis.

Still, China won’t give up on its semiconductor industry, experts say, and some predict the U.S. controls could backfire. “In the medium to long term, U.S. pressure is set to ‘force’ China’s high-tech industry to develop a more solid industrial base,” said a recent report on the semiconductor policy by a think tank at Fudan University in Shanghai. “This will lead to a more challenging, comprehensive, and thus more-difficult-to-contain, powerful adversary.”

How will the U.S. controls impact the global semiconductor supply chain?

The production of semiconductors requires such high levels of investment that the world’s main supply chain includes several other countries specialized in different parts of the production: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Netherlands. 

Fortunately for the U.S., these countries are all allies, and they and their semiconductor firms so far appear generally willing to support the new U.S. policies.

“For all key countries, there is a fair amount of incentive to comply broadly,” says Dr. Miller. “I don’t see an easy way for China to break apart the informal alliance the U.S. has put together.”

Under this scenario, what is likely to emerge is a multilateral semiconductor supply chain with a reduced China presence, experts say.

The goal “is not to just shut down China, it’s to move China out of the global supply chain, and that is the big task,” says Dr. Lewis.

Solomon K. Russell walks down a narrow dirt path, surrounded by teak trees that block out the sunlight and cool the afternoon air. He leaps over a column of fat black ants running across the trail, and the forest suddenly, unnaturally, ends. A denuded strip of beige earth stretches over an area the size of several football fields, pockmarked by pits full of wastewater. 

Machinery belonging to the Afro-Asia Mining Corp., a Chinese firm, rumbles in the distance. The remnant of a stream, polluted and diverted by the industrial operations, idles underneath a small wooden bridge. 

“This river really sustained the life of the people,” says Mr. Russell, who remembers, as a boy, jumping off the bridge into the water just a few feet below. Now, it’s barely ankle-deep. 

“If you had seen this river before – and how we used to get fish out of this river,” he recalls.

Mr. Russell and his fellow villagers had no say in Afro-Asia’s arrival, nor in its operations. The company signed its lease with the local “paramount chief” who was empowered by a century-old colonial law.

But a sweeping package of land-rights bills, which went into effect in September, is set to change all that, giving local people who own and live off the land the authority to decide how it is used.

“Those laws will help,” says Mary Tommy, a farmer living in this 500-strong farming community made up of brightly painted concrete houses and mud brick homes with traditional high-pitched thatch roofs. “For us, the destruction has already been caused, but for other areas that have not witnessed this kind of destruction, I think it will be good.”

Wealth slow to trickle down

Many parts of Sierra Leone have been ravaged by foreign mining firms seeking gold, diamonds, and bauxite, among other minerals, and by palm oil plantations. Such natural resources accounted for over 75% of Sierra Leone’s exports in 2020, reaping around $400 million in income, according to official figures.

Yet the wealth has been slow to trickle down. The latest figures on poverty in the country, from 2018, showed that 60% of the rural population was living on less than $1.90 a day.

Nick Roll

Forest has been cleared for rutile mining in Largo, Sierra Leone. The mine has also diverted and polluted a stream that served as the community's primary water source, Largo residents say.

“People say ‘our land is our bank, our land is our future,’” says Eleanor Thompson, deputy director of programs at the Freetown office of Namati, a legal advocacy and land-rights organization. “Oftentimes what we’ve seen is that development has been pitted against people – one has to sacrifice for the other. And that doesn’t have to be the case, and that shouldn’t be the case.”

Until last month, only local chiefs and the national government could strike land use and leasing deals with foreign investors. The people whose land was taken could do little about it, and often had to accept rents amounting to only $5 an acre.

Mr. Russell, for example, says his rent is “too meager” to be able to buy from the market the fish he can no longer catch in the village stream.

But under the new laws, firms wishing to mine or establish industrial agriculture operations must henceforth strike deals with the ordinary Sierra Leoneans who depend on the land for their survival – and who, for the first time, will have the right to negotiate, or reject, their proposals.

September’s Customary Land Rights Act and the National Land Commission Act transfer the power to make decisions about land to those actually owning or using it. Companies seeking a lease must win the consent of 60% of a family’s male and female adults.

Where land is communally held, firms must persuade 60% of the adults in the community to agree to a lease. In the newly created land committees that are supposed to help negotiate those leases, made of local community members, 30% of members are to be women.

The new laws are not popular with foreign investors, many of whom are especially wary of a provision setting aside shares in international projects for Sierra Leoneans.

Foreign investors unhappy

“Nobody will invest in Sierra Leone anymore,” says Gerben Haringsma, country director for the Luxembourg-based palm oil company Socfin.

Although the law stipulates that local landowners should be given priority access to such shares, it does not limit sales to them only. That, says Mr. Haringsma, will enable “some minister, the president, the elite” to take advantage of the law.

“Who will benefit?” he wonders. “The landowners? Forget it.”

Nor are land ownership records in Sierra Leone always clear, making it hard for investors to know with whom they should negotiate land leases.

“Everybody is shouting ‘this is my land, this is my land,’ which not true,” Mr. Haringsma says.

Nick Roll

A woman washes her laundry in a stream that residents say has been polluted by a nearby rutile mine in Largo, Sierra Leone. Rutile is used in the manufacture of titanium.

Ms. Thompson, the land rights activist, says the laws might, however, help investors more than they realize.

“It’s in the investors’ interest to have the consent of people,” she says. Otherwise, “when problems arise, when there are abuses of power, there really isn’t a relationship to be able to mend or address those issues. And if the communities don’t feel as though they’re benefiting, they … could take matters into their own hands.”

Acts of sabotage and deadly protests against agribusiness and mining companies have erupted in the past.

Next time they want more

“If people had a say in negotiations they would sell their land for a … value that will enrich them and change their lives, maybe,” says Emmanuel Saffa Abdulai, executive director of the Freetown-based Society for Democratic Initiatives.

In Largo, villagers say that Afro-Asia promised to build them a health clinic, a school, and paved roads. Four years after mining operations started, none of that has come to pass, and the locals who have found jobs at the mine earn little more than $50 a month.

Afro-Asia did not respond to a request for comment. But the company’s lease in Largo is in its final year. To keep operating, it will have to renegotiate – this time with the local community under the new laws. 

Despite the environmental damage, many residents say they want mining to continue, but on their terms: better paying jobs, better rents and compensation for farmers whose crops have been displaced, the promised health clinic, and the eventual restoration of the surrounding environment. 

Largo has already paid the price. Its stream is “totally destroyed,” says Betty Sandy, a villager. “That was the water we used to drink, launder our clothes, bathe … but now it is no more,” she laments.

That makes the stakes of getting things right next time round even higher, says Ms. Tommy, the farmer, standing next to wetlands that haven’t been taken over by the mine, where villagers grow rice.

“Water is life,” she says.

When a hazy gray blanket of the year’s worst air pollution settled over the Indian capital last week, government measures to try to reduce the fog’s toxic levels were largely taken in stride.

With air quality stuck at a rating of “severe-plus” under the city’s Graded Response Action Plan, trucks carrying nonessential goods were banned until further notice. Most other diesel vehicles were also prohibited. Construction projects have been halted.

Primary schools were ordered closed, with classes shifting to online – the idea being not just to keep smog-belching school buses idle but also to keep vulnerable schoolkids indoors.

Then on Sunday, pollution conditions improved slightly to “very poor” on the city’s air quality scale. That was enough to prompt Delhi’s Pollution Control Board to rescind the toughest of the measures ordered Friday. Primary schools are set to reopen Wednesday, despite a return this morning of the dark gray haze that first blanketed the city last week.

The roller coaster of government actions and reversals has Delhiites from schoolchildren’s parents to office workers and business owners seeking not just stopgap measures when air quality deteriorates, but solutions.

With the toxic stew becoming as regular a feature of Delhi’s fall months as leaf-turning is to New England, residents are calling for less reaction and more problem-solving. And to the relief of many, this year officials are showing signs of doing less finger-pointing and more cooperating on finding viable remedies to the recurring harmful haze.

Ajit Solanki/AP

A woman covers her nose as she walks with others amid smoke of firecrackers during celebration of Diwali, the festival of lights, in Ahmedabad, India, Oct. 24, 2022. Over the past few years, Diwali celebrations have been tinged with worries over air pollution.

Getting to the source

When it comes to the toughest of the air quality measures, such as the blanket truck ban, one sector of the economy is pushing back: India’s powerful wedding industry. Calling the trucks provisioning Delhi’s vaunted wedding markets “nonessential” is apparently fightin’ words. 

With the fall months the kickoff of the country’s high wedding season, industry advocates are sounding the alarm: The truck ban will soon mean bare shelves in Delhi’s wedding markets, they say, which in turn will discourage Delhi’s brides-to-be, their entourages, and other wedding-goers from even visiting the markets.

“The impact is already visible. Many people are avoiding visits to the markets” even though the wedding season is in full swing, said Brijesh Goyal, chairman of Delhi’s Chamber of Trade and Industry, in a letter to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The number of daily visitors to the wedding markets is down more than two-thirds, Mr. Goyal said. 

The chamber is demanding Mr. Modi call an emergency meeting of the governments of Delhi and the adjacent states of Haryana, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh to come up with a long-term response to the air quality crisis.

Calls for a regional approach to urban air pollution that is considered the worst – and deadliest – in the world hint at one of the major contributors to the soup Delhi bathes in: the annual burning of field “stubble” after crops are harvested.

Farmers in the states around Delhi set tens of thousands of fires beginning in late October to prepare fields for the next crop. The burning might make good agricultural sense, but every year the resulting smoke ends up in the atmosphere over Delhi’s 32 million people, where it mixes with the exhaust fumes and various particulates spewed by the city’s 13 million registered trucks, cars, and auto-rickshaws.

Not to mention what heavy industry mostly on the city’s fringes throws into the mix.

Studies show that while about half of Delhi’s air pollution comes from vehicles, another nearly 40% is the result of the field burning.

The city’s Hindustan Times carried a lead-story graphic Sunday that showed air quality improving slightly from Friday – but also indicating a substantial overnight rise in the number of farm field fires captured by satellite Saturday in Punjab and Haryana states. 

Moreover, the newspaper reported that officials expect air quality indexes to deteriorate again this month as temperatures fall and field burns continue.

Seeking solutions amid the blame

The choking, visibility-hampering atmospheric conditions set off what has become an annual blame game pitting city officials against their neighboring-state counterparts.

AP/FILE

A couple walk past crop stubble set on fire by farmers on the outskirts of Jalandhar, in the northern Indian state of Punjab, Nov. 17, 2021. Air quality in New Delhi often hits hazardous levels when the burning of crop residue in neighboring states coincides with lower temperatures that trap smoke.

“It’s your farmers!” one side harangues, while the other side counters, “No, actually it’s your cars and trucks!”

To which suffering residents respond, “Stop, you’re both right. But what we need are solutions.”

The states have tried to end the burning. Two years ago Punjab tried prohibiting the practice – only to have a court order the state to pay farmers not to burn fields.

As a result many farmers refrained from setting stubble fires. But when the compensation never materialized – the state said it simply couldn’t afford it – the burning resumed.

Another idea is to offer special machinery to gather the stubble and bury it, but so far that project has had limited success.

What has some residents taking notice is what appeared to be a new cooperative approach among regional leaders to solving the annual pollution crisis.

At a press conference Friday, Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann promised to devise a solution to the burning problem by November 2023.

And in a comforting show of regional cooperation, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said as he stood next to his Punjabi counterpart that no one wins by blaming farmers for the Delhi region’s toxic air.

Saying this was no time for “a blame game,” Minister Kejriwal said officials would come together to find equitable answers to a challenge affecting everyone. Then he added, “The farmers need a solution; they will stop burning parali [stubble] the day they have a solution.”

When light floods into its cage, the young kestrel hops from side to side, spunky despite its invalid status, and stares expectantly with sharp, bright eyes. It wants food and has learned – in two months – that breakfast follows closely after the black cloth over its cage is lifted.

“This one has imprinted,” says Suzanne Shoemaker, rueful because it can’t be released after bonding with a human.

Ms. Shoemaker’s work revolves around a contradiction of sorts: She loves birds of prey and has dedicated her career to them, but the fewer birds she cares for – and the shorter they stay with her – the better. She founded Owl Moon Raptor Center 20 years ago and, with a growing number of volunteers, rehabilitates birds of prey – 408 stewarded just this year.

The kestrel lives in a cage in a room jokingly referred to as “the ICU,” the first temporary home for raptors that come to the center with injuries that make flying unsafe. This kestrel will stay in a cage big enough for it to spread its wings and walk about, but too small for it to fly. Once its shoulder fracture heals enough to be more mobile, it will be moved into a mew – a space resembling a stall with walls extending up to a vaulted ceiling. Soon after, it will be exercised on a line, and when able to fly freely, it will be released where it was found.

To discourage bonding, Ms. Shoemaker wears a camouflage ghillie suit when she gives hands-on care. While mature raptors rarely imprint on humans, it’s harder to avoid with adolescents like the kestrel.

Michael Bonfigli/Special to the Christian Science Monitor

At Owl Moon Raptor Center, a barred owl in rehabilitation from an injury gets flying practice on a line.

The land around Owl Moon Raptor Center offers a stark illustration of human effects on birds of prey. The center is in an agricultural reserve, and the roads leading there wind through fields dotted with ranch-style homes and farmhouses. But abruptly, the roads widen, stop signs turn to traffic lights, and open spaces become sprawling developments. Ms. Shoemaker has warily eyed the encroaching development for two decades, knowing that raptor injuries can almost always be traced back to humans.

The battle between localities and conservationists with other interest groups to limit development is constant, says Jensen Montambault, director of the Nature Conservancy’s Science for Nature and People Partnership. The answer, she says, is often in national conversations that include hyperlocal organizations like Owl Moon because “human behavior change is the key to conservation.”

The most significant piece of legislation protecting birds of prey, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, was created when hunting was the biggest threat to birds of prey, Dr. Montambault says, so it doesn’t address development. Groups like Owl Moon see firsthand the threats human activities can pose. “I just want to do the best job I can for the birds,” says Ms. Shoemaker. “That’s always been my goal: to try to minimize the human impact on them.”

“They’re characters”  

“Animals were always my passion,” says Ms. Shoemaker, sitting at her kitchen table with owl mugs lining a shelf, bird feeders hanging outside the window, and bees buzzing around an apiary on the driveway.

A calm, slight woman, she’s integrated family life with her passion. Along with teaching her own environmental education classes, she volunteered in preservation efforts alongside her children. While volunteering for a wildlife rehabilitation center, she realized it did good work for a broad range of wildlife, but she wanted to have a narrower focus: “You could do a better job if you specialized.”

Michael Bonfigli/Special to the Christian Science Monitor

A barred owl rests in Suzanne Shoemaker’s gloved hands at the Owl Moon Raptor Center in Boyds, Maryland.

She’d always been intrigued by raptors, so they were a natural choice for her own center. “They’re wild. They’re characters.”

And each species has its own characteristics, she says. Barred owls, for example, “are spunky and fight hard” but have a mischievous streak and like to shred newspapers.

She founded Owl Moon Raptor Center with two mews in her backyard and several cages in her basement. Now, the center has nine mews, a room full of caging, and a barn with caging for larger raptors, and it serves Maryland and parts of Virginia and Pennsylvania. These days, the average number of raptors here is around 35 or 40. When Ms. Shoemaker started the center, she worked alone rehabilitating one or two birds at a time. Now, she works alongside one paid employee and 35 volunteers – plus a network
of more than 100 people who transport raptors. And Owl Moon is now a registered nonprofit, funded by grants from wildlife rescue groups and an annual fundraiser.

Ms. Shoemaker has licenses in falconry and rehab, as well as a master’s degree in falconry. She has picked up veterinary skills, although raptors are sent to practicing vets for major surgeries. 

The ideal, always, is to rehabilitate raptors and set them free, says Ms. Shoemaker. If they imprint on caretakers or their injuries are too extensive to heal fully, the next best option is to train the birds for an educational center. If that isn’t possible or the injuries are too severe, they must be euthanized.

Windows a common threat  

Common threats to raptors are windows, fishing line, power lines, lead ammunition, and cars, says Ms. Shoemaker: “I want to mitigate some of the problems that we’re creating out there, because we’re just
creating so many hazards.”

Michael Bonfigli/Special to the Christian Science Monitor

Suzanne Shoemaker (left), the founder of the Owl Moon Raptor Center, performs a health check of a barred owl with Jen Mosser.

But, she adds, sometimes it feels like an uphill battle, and “it’s harder and harder to believe that I can make a difference.”

Some threats that leave traces that raptors may ingest through prey should be highly regulated, she says, like rodenticide. Others, like lead ammunition, should be banned.

She notes that power companies are starting to respond to concerns and in some places are building platforms where ospreys can nest safely above power lines.

Although she has periodic speaking engagements as a conservationist, Ms. Shoemaker spends her day to day with the raptors. Recently, she implanted new feathers into the wings of an osprey that had broken some. It took three sittings and five hours total to trim down the broken feathers and implant new feathers into the old shafts. 

“But it’s worth it,” she says, “because then the bird looks like new and it can fly a whole lot better.”

Ms. Shoemaker says the real joy of working with raptors is releasing them: “It’s what we do this for. These are wild birds and they want to be flying free.”

Reuters

Protesters march in Asuncion, Paraguay, Oct. 12., demanding an end to evictions of indigenous people from ancestral lands, often done through corruption.

Over the past four years, voters have tossed out governments in Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Honduras, Colombia, and, most recently, Brazil. In each, a shift occurred from right to left. But the more meaningful trend was rising frustration with corruption.

More than 3 in 5 voters in Latin America and the Caribbean believe graft is widespread among elected officials, according to the Americas Barometer poll, and they are impatient for change. Protesters in Peru, for example, have clashed with police in recent days demanding that President Pedro Castillo resign. Elected a little over a year ago, he already faces six criminal investigations.

The next battleground is Paraguay – the second-most corrupt country in South America after Venezuela, as measured by Transparency International. Although the next presidential election there won’t take place until April, Paraguay is already becoming a testing ground for two different approaches to establishing norms of honest government.

One is based on an expectation of top-down reform. The other involves building public expectation of accountability rather than offering consent to impunity.

“Civil society must mobilize the grassroots so that citizens in general understand the importance and complete meaning of transparency,” David Riveros García, founder of ReAcción Paraguay, a youth-led anti-corruption organization, told the blog site One Young World. That includes, he says, holding corrupt officials accountable for corruption.

For Paraguay, that will be a big chore. It ranks 128 out of 180 countries in perceptions of corruption. That reflects entrenched governing habits. The country has been ruled by one party for all but a short interval during the past six decades. The advent of democracy 30 years ago did little to change that. Nor have international efforts. The Biden administration, for example, imposed sanctions in July against current and former Paraguayan officials it suspects of corruption. One of those officials is Vice President Hugo Velázquez, who remains in office.

Civil society organizations like Mr. García’s can’t rely on strictly punitive approaches. It is training the next generation to demand accountability. Students, for example, are taught how to hold school administrators and government officials accountable for the use of public education funding. His organization aims to redefine the Paraguayan identity with inspiring messages, “separating it from the current erroneous perception.”

That kind of citizen oversight requires a social contract, argues Shaazka Beyerle, a senior fellow at the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University in Washington. Civil society groups can only encourage citizen engagement if they “model the norms, principles, practices, and behaviors they seek to foster in society,” she told the Global Standard for CSO Accountability.

That approach may shift the anti-corruption paradigm in Latin America, setting an example of honest governance for leaders to come.