Authoritarianism Versus Democratic Values

This is the Guardian. Hello, Jonathan Friedland here. Today we're bringing you something different, the launch episode of our brand new show out of the Guardian's New York office. It's called States ide with Kai and Carter. They'll be releasing episodes on their feed every Monday, Wednesday and Friday wherever you get this podcast, and in video on YouTube and Apple Pod casts. I hope you enjoy it. This is evil. But it's also so pedestrian. They can't win on their ideas, and so their solution is to silence the other side. But this time what they have done is misread the moment. And that's the part that gives me not optimism but determination. Optimism says I'm sure we'll win. Determination says I'm going to win. I'm Ky Wright. I'm Carter Sherman. And from The Guardian, this is stateside. Carter, here we are. It is the first episode of Stateside. I know. I'm so excited. I feel like over the last few years, I have just felt so overwhelmed by the news. Yeah. I something happens and I have all these questions. Why is this happening? Who's responsible for it? Generally, I want to know how we can make it stop. And one of the things I've been doing to try to get those answers is I go to my colleagues at the Guardian and I ask them these questions, and they've been able to tell me what they think. But I see the show as an opportunity to bring their expertise to a broader audience to help other people get these answers. And frankly, for you and I to also go to some of the world's biggest thinkers and put questions to them. So that's what we're doing here. And you know, I really want to start today with a story that I have so many questions about because it has moved really, really quickly, and that is the Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act. In Louisiana, V. Calais. And over the past in particular week or so watching Tennessee, you know, I know you're watching it too, it's just been really dramatic to see this, you know, the state legislature immediately move into gear to erase the last remaining there's one black and majority black ticket district where was, and now it's gone. It was wild to just like see them do exactly the thing that people have been worried about them doing. Just immediately no pretense of even saying, oh no, we're not gonna hold we're not gonna do this. Overnight. And I have to say on a personal level, um you know, I was born in nineteen seventy-three. So I am the first generation of black people to grow up in democracy. Right? Like I'm the f it's and all of these laws that were passed in the nineteen sixties as the culmination of the civil rights movement, it is not an overstatement to say they have shaped almost everything about my life, where I went to school, my ability to be here hosting this show with you, uh, and certainly my participation in democracy. And it just feels like um it feels like those things are not going to be around for the next generation of black people, which means the next generation of the United States as well. It's so stark to hear you say that because I think Americans love to think that we have always been a democracy that we have started this grand product 300 years ago and we've lived up to those promises that were made by the founders. And the truth is we have just not, and in fact, in many ways, we're moving backwards from fulfilling those promises. So just to cat make sure everybody's on the same page about this ruling we're talking about, the Supreme Court cuts the Voting Rights Act, the way it did that. Uh it's really been two rulings. The Voting Rights Act had this sort of prevention and treatment model of enforcement and the prevention was that you know if you were a place that was established to have racist voting laws, uh that that was established, whether it was a local jurisdiction or a state, you had to get clearance from the federal government before you changed your voting rights. You had to basically go to them and say, is this okay or are we being racist again? Correct. They got rid of the Supreme Court overruled that in back in 2013 through that part of the law out. And then now a couple of weeks ago, they turned to the treatment part of the Voting Rights Act, which was to say: if you or I, a citizen, says I have been disenfranchised uh illegally, I feel like that this law, this rule has a racist outcome uh and so I'm gonna sue uh to get a remedy. They have also now gotten rid of that by saying that in order to sue, I have to prove that there was an explicit intentional racism involved in writing the law, that the purpose of it was to disenfranchise me, not just that the outcome of it was to disappear. Oh, right. Because famously when people are being racist, they usually say out loud, hey, I'm being racist right now, and I want the world to know. You know, and so as a consequence of that, with these two rulings, the voting rights act is a dead letter law at this point. Aaron Powell You brought up Tennessee earlier, but I just want to say, like, this ruling has thrown the midterm elections across the South into total chaos. In Louisiana, which was the home of this lawsuit, this Louisiana governor has actually paused the state's congressional primary elections, which was actually already in progress, which means that tens of thousands of ballots have now been thrown into legal limbo. And incredibly, the Supreme Court has actually waded into this issue again, ruling that Alabama can use an old map in this year's midterms, even though this exact same map they used to say violated the Voting Rights Act. You know, you can't make this up. You can't make this stuff up. And it's useful to think about history as we watch this unfold because it's not just a question of partisanship. This is not aboutocrat Dems versus Republicans. I mean, we have to remember that there was no democracy. We didn't even try to be a democracy until 1865, until the out, you know, out in the wake of the Civil War. Uh and it it is also worth remembering just like how successful we were right at first in that effort. Um during Reconstruction. During Reconstruction. And it just to give an example, like if you look at Mississippi, in 1867 , something like sixty six percent of black men, because women couldn't vote, but of of black men were registered to vote in the state of Mississippi in eighteen sixty seven. People would love to have that number of people voting today. Today, right? You know, hundred years of Jim Crow unfold following that. And by nineteen fifty-five, fewer than five percent of black people in the state of Mississippi were registered to vote. Five percent. So you went you so you have this massive collapse. Voting rights act is passed in 1965. Within a couple of years, black voter registration in Mississippi back up into the 60-something percentiles. That's what that law did. It was so remark ably successful. It's like one of the most successful laws of the history of laws. Uh, but it is dead and gone now . So, Carter, I wanted to talk to somebody who knows all this history we're talking about, but also who has been really engaged in the fight for voting rights in the South, really her whole life and my whole life. And so I called up Stacy Abrams,, uh who folks will remember rose to national prominence in 2018 when she ran for governor of Georgia and almost won. I covered her race a lot at the time. And she had she won, she would have been the first female black governor anywhere But of course she didn't. She lost to Brian Kemp, who remains the governor of Georgia today. Right. But she'd lost that ways narrowly, I will say, by like 1.7 percentage points. And there is she argued at the time and made a credible case that voter suppression was part of why. Um and so she spent her time ever since then, and really before that, but certainly since then, advocating for voting rights in the So uth, trying to figure out how you can build more black political power in the South and therefore change America's politics. And I wanted to ask her, does she feel now like me? You know, that like in spite of all that , kind of back to the 1860s, um and uh what we're facing, and is it gonna take another hundred years of activism to get democracy just to the place it was when I was born . Stacey Abrams, welcome to Stateside. I feel like you are exactly who I need to be talking to this week. Thank you for having me. So you probably will remember this because you had many, many people chasing you around uh on the campaign trail. But back in 2018, uh I I followed you uh on your campaign trail when you're running for governor in Georgia. Um, and um I have this really stark emotional memory um of uh it was an afternoon we were sitting in a car. Um, I was interviewing you about your uh your your theory of change, you know, of uh engaged voters in every single county. Uh and I remember I was paying attention, but I remember my mind kept wandering to um thinking , this is the voting rights act at work. This is what this is. If um if she wins this campaign. Uh this is the triumph of the civil rights movement. And it's not Barack Obama winning presidency to me. It's a black woman being able to win statewide office in Georgia. And I say all that to say um that uh that feeling of optimism about black political power in particular in the South that I had in that moment feels so incredibly distant to me now . And I just I wonder, you know, uh, when you're telling the whole truth, whether whether it feels distant to you as well. I I I approach it differently. And Kai, I do appreciate that. I remember that conversation and I remember I think saying to you and I and I say it to everyone as much as that campaign was about proof of concept, it was never going to be the end game . When you're pushing against power, when you're pushing against entrenched interest, when you are trying your best to make manifest a promise that is 250 years old, it's lovely and cinematic if it happens in a moment, but it's unusual. And as excited as I was about that campaign, as bullish as I remain, I'm never going to be buffeted by how hard it feels because I know where we started. And that feels like a very long way around saying that yes, there is a current at tack that is visceral and vicious, but it is not unprecedented. It's just different. And this is a long fight. It's a fight over power. It's a fight over presence. It's a fight over who gets to be heard. And that's the work that we have to keep doing. uh being arrested registering voters in Mississippi as a teenager. Did I did I get that right? Yeah he was fourteen. How did your family talk about that history? Birmingham a couple of weeks ago. And I mentioned um my my dad is very sick right now. And the day that the Supreme Court decision came down, I went to visit my parents in the hospital. My dad and my mom had been there. My mom, you know, stays by his side and he had been in for about twelve days at that time. And I go in to check on him. Uh he had been, you know, he doesn't like being in the hospital, of course. And my mom had not left his side, but they didn't want to talk about his pain. They wanted to talk about voting rights. Uh, they wanted to talk about how angry they were, but also they wanted to remind me and my siblings that you know we still had work to do. And I and I tell that story because for my parents , even their personal hardship pales in comparison to the larger enterprise that we face. My dad was arrested at 14 for a right that his father, his mother, could not exercise. He understood at such a visceral level that democracy demanded participation that he was willing to risk going to jail at 14 . And even today at 77, he was telling me, he said, you know, you do what you gotta do because we have to keep fighting. We don't have the right to stop. Uh and my mom, who we like to tease my dad, my mom was doing the same work on the other side of town at 14, she just managed not to get caught. Off to the kiss Yeah. Both of my parents understood as children, basically, that what was happening in the country was wrong, but they also believed so fundamentally in the American promise that they were willing to test it and to force it to be better. And that's our call right now. That is our enterprise right now. I'm not going to lie to you. I'm struggling with that belief. Um you know as a child of the civil rights movement as well. We're both children of this movement. Um my life was made possible by these laws, and I'm just not sure that they're gonna exist for people after me. Aaron Powell Well, here's the thing. I one of the things I talk about these days is that my nieces and nephews, they range in age from 10 to 20. They are the first generation to lose civil rights during their lifetime since Reconstruction. So let's be clear. This is bad. This is horrible . This is e vil. Uh, when evil is about what you strip from another in pursuit of power, this is evil. This is evil incarnate. But it's also so pedestrian. They can't win on their ideas. And so their solution is to silence the other side. But this time, what they have done is misread the moment. And that's the part that gives me not optimism, but determination. Optimism says I'm sure we'll win. Determination says I'm going to win. And and I I always sit in determination. Optimism can ebb and flow. Determination is internal . And I I need us all to harness our determination because determination is all we've got. And the minute they can strip us of that determination, what they've gotten is the complacency and the compliance that they've been after for four hundred years. And I refuse to give them that. Uh you last week you testified uh in Tennessee. Uh this has been one of the first places to see an outcome of the vote of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act being stripped away. You testified against the legislature's intent to get rid of the last resolu They went ahead and did so uh following your testimony. Uh put us on this what did the determination look like there in Tennessee? Um what what what what did that's where are folks at? Okay. So you you were s if you were watching what we were doing, I was in the Tennessee Senate Judiciary Committee. If you looked at the phalanx of senators sitting there, you could tell from the very beginning what the outcome was going to be. So again, I you know, a product of the Georgia State legislature, I can count. I'm really good at counting. And so the victory wasn't supposed to be them not voting for those maps. There was nothing that was gonna change their minds. There was nothing that was going to alter the outcome. And it was made very clear when the Senate minority leader said to the author of the bill, where is the actual text? And he said that a picture was enough. He didn't even bother to bring the bill. They were moving so fast that he said with sincerity, well, you have the map. And she said, So we're supposed to vote on a picture. That's just how little regard they have for the citizens of Tennessee, how little regard they have for the law. But what she was able to do, what we were able to do in our testimony, is build a record. And I want to do this one thing, Kai. I think it's important for us to res ituate where we are in this conversation. This is no longer a battle of Democrats versus Republicans. This isn't red versus blue. We're in a competitive authoritarian state. And in competitive authoritarianism, Democratic institutions, small D democratic, those institutions become the weapons of authoritarianism because you hollow out what they mean, you compromise their accountability, you erase their legitimacy by using the very laws that people have come to accept as the tools for governance. And the reason this matters is that winning in Tennessee was never going to be about stopping the maps. They are going to do this. We have got to accept that. The answer, though, is what do we do in response? We have to respond using the courts. Even if the courts do not rule in our favor, we still have to fight in the courts. Long before we got Brown v. Board of Education, we had Plessy versus Ferguson. We had Dred Scott. Fighting in the courts is how we build the record, but it's also how we build the muscle memory for why we fight and how we sharpen and refine our arguments. We do it at the ballot box because in Tennessee, because they have fractured these districts, they are likely to win, absolutely. But they now have created three new opportunities where they have fractured communities and said, we're gonna scatter these seeds. Our job is to grow. Our job is to use the scattering and say, okay, fine, you took the one we had. Well, now you've given us three opportunities to come back so what do we need to do then meaning to build in those districts exactly we cannot discredit the harm that they will do to themselves with their overreach and so part of our job is the patience of building the electorates that we need. And then third, we've got to hold them accountable when they get these jobs. Even if you were elected under a different ideological banner, when you are a representative , you are literally responsible for everyone under your ambit. And our job is to now start holding them accountable and telling the truth. And so I want us to, yes, be very grounded in the harm that was done, but we cannot get mired there. Yeah. I want to talk about though, like there were this was a radical, radical decision, as you have said. Right. Like and and just so folks don't lose sight of it. Like even down to the point of Congress had already addressed the question that the Supreme Court just ruled upon. Congress had decided way back in 1982 when they reauthorized the Voting Rights Act that, you know, they did not want you to have to prove racist intent in order to show that racial discrimination had happened. This has been decades of trying to reverse that choice. So this was a really, really radical decision by the Supreme Court. And I wonder about equ ally radical respons es. Like , could we what what are the sh-what are the chances of just rewriting an entirely new voting rights act at this point in history? So let's be clear. And I appreciate you ground ing us in what happened. This is bad law. This is intentionally bad law. This is Plessy versus Ferguson level bad law. This is Dred Scott bad law. This is saying in the United States of America , we are once again relegating entire communities to second-class citizenship because we fear their power. And what we have to remember from Jim Crow was that when the 15th Amendment gave black men the right to vote, because black women weren't given the right to vote for a while. Indeed. When black men were given the right to vote under the fifteenth amendment, what the Jim Crow laws did when it comes to voting rights , it used race, it could not use race explicitly. Now, they could use race explicitly in physical segregation, they could use race explicitly in who had access to jobs, because there was nothing in the Constitution that said you couldn't be racist in every other way. But because the 15th Amendment said you could not use race in voting rights, in voting laws, what Jim Crow did, which was so cruel and brilliant, was that what it said was race neutrality was going to be the law of the land. So poll taxes applied to everyone. Literacy tests applied to everyone. But here's how they did it: the literacy test. Well, you had a literacy test because most of the newly you know freed blacks had been prohibited from learning to read. So you needed a literacy test because it was a race neutral marker that in the context of post-slavery, most black people couldn't pass that test. We've got to see that the same dynamic is at play here. Race neutrality is the most dangerous phrase in America today because it gives a pass for what are intended targeted anody ne attempts to steal democracy. So the question you asked was how do you fix it? How do you fix it? Is there a version today. The Voting Rights Act mitigated all that. Fair the fact that we had to have the 1970 renewal, the 1975 renewal, the 1982 renewal. The reason we have to keep coming back to it is that those who do not want our voices are never going to stop. So yes, the John Lewis Freedom to Vote Act is absolutely essential, but so is a constitutional amendment that further embeds how we see the right to vote. Because what the 15th Amendment said was that you could not prohibit the right to vote based on race. We've never in this country had an actual explicit right to vote. People don't know that. Every time I say that to somebody, people are shocked. We do not have an affirmative right to vote in the United States. And that's why we have to have so many laws to stop people from blocking it, because there isn't a basic right to vote. And so any solutions have to be at the ballot box in the courts and among citizens themselves. So we so we could in fact have the the grandest solution is a new constitutional amendment that gives us an affirmative right to vote. Short of that, a new voting rights act. Um I want to zoom in a little bit in it, you know, in some of the actual districts. So those are the big the big ideas. Um but right now in the the immediate elec tions, absent the voting rights act, what are the strategies uh that worked in the past to get engagement in every county that are no longer gonna work? The answer is more democ So in 2026, it starts with harnessing the anger, the outrage, and the fear of the Cali decision. People are now paying attention. When you are an American, you get used to believing that you have these rights until they are, you know, soundly stripped away from you. And it's what we saw happen with the Dobbs decision. When the Dobbs decision happened, you suddenly saw a bunch of folks in states you didn't expect realize, oh wait, you meant me too. And they started participating. It's why Kansas has been one of the lead states in pushing back against anti-abortion legislation. We've got to do the same thing with anti-voting behavior. These districts now require that we show up. So let's look at Tennessee. Tennessee has one of the lowest voter registration rates in the country. So you got to increase voter registration. Shelby County, where Memphis sits, was wildly under performing in the last few election cycles. That means you've got fertile ground. Yes, they crack they crack those districts. So they're 33, 33, 33 in terms of black participation. But that's 33%. You just got to add 22%. And so the next job is to figure out how do you maximize your capacity for the 33. And then how do you find folks who now have common cause with you? That's the work that we did. And we, even though I lost, we came really close in the state of 11 million. Yeah. In the state of 11 million people we're talking a suburb made the decision and so across the country this can happen if we look at Louisiana the last governor's race was decided by 36 percent of the population . The winner of that contest got 5 70,000 votes. So you can close those gaps by going to the people who did not believe their voices mattered. And and if you're going to be practical , the number of people who have the possibility of voting is less relevant than the number of people who believe that voting matters. And so our job is the hard, assiduous work of actually talking to people and reminding them why democracy exists and showing that democracy can deliver . I want to back up to something you said. I mean when we talk about turnout, even in a place like Tennessee, um, you know, part of the argument for the Supreme Court was in this case was that we have seen elections in which black turnout was greater than white turnout, and as a consequence, we don't need the votinghts Rig Act anymore. That was a part of the argument for why there's not racism anymore. I just to say that three the Guardian, three of our reporters have gone through some previous data and pointed out the fact that that's only if you look at when Barack Obama was on the ballot. Um and if you game the numbers a little bit, then it looks like that. But in reality, there's actually been a dropping in Black turnout since 2012, since Barack Ob ama left the ballot, which is to say we're already in a bit of a crisis with Black voter registration. And that was while we had the Voting Rights Act. So what I so I hear you saying like it's coalition building, you know, it's like telling people why democracy matters. Um but um I mean are you concerned that like the the the key tool we had, you know, to make sure that people could in fact get registered and get to the voting booth is gone. Oh absolutely. I mean look, we've been grappling with voter suppression in Georgia for as long as I've been involved in politics. I was a high s a college student registering people to vote on Spellman's campus. So I've been at this for about 30 years. Uh at first it was just trying to convince young black people that their votes matter because they had lived through. I mean, my freshman year was the Rodney King decision. So we we've got to remember context. It's insufficient to simply look at do you have the piece of paper that says you should vote? It is does that piece of paper translate into actual change in your lived experience? And when it does not, or when you don't believe it can, people will not vote. So that's full stop. However, voter suppression is about changing the psychic belief that it's even worth the effort. Voter suppression is: can you register and stay on the rolls? Can you cast a ballot? And does that ballot get counted? And Georgia has perfected suppression of all three of those opportunities. And yet, every time they do so, we have to work a little bit harder to circumvent their behavior. The Voting Rights Act was never a perfect solution, but it was a cheat code to overwhelm voter suppression. And what they have done is say, okay, we're just gonna rewrite the game. So our job is to accept that they've done so , but not that it was right for them to do so. So we have to have these conversations. We got to talk about the fact that they are cheating. That's what this is about. And this is not just cheating so Republicans can beat Democrats. This is cheating so that authoritarians can dismantle our systems so they don't have to compete ever again. And the urgency you hear in my voice is that as someone who has lived under soft authoritarianism in the South for most of my life . I know what it means when they can dilute your vote. What it means is that you don't have health care. What it means is that you don't have housing. What it means is that your lived experience is dismal , except for what you can put into it. Because the government that's supposed to protect you doesn't just ignore you. It actively harms you by suppressing your wages, by making it nearly impossible for you to lift your children to the next best place. So this isn't for me a a game of politics. This is what lives are we expected to live? And so I I need us to understand that yes, the voting rights act being gutted and hollowed out is egregious, but it cannot be a barrier to us fighting anyway. And it can sound Quixotic, but it's not because I've been a part of proving it so. We may not have gotten as far as I wanted, but look at Senator John Ossoff and Senator Raphael Warno ck. We we got things done, and our responsibility is to not allow their intended psychic intent . They want us to be so dismayed and so disheartened that we think there's no solution. That's the part that I'm the most terrified of. That we start to believe that because they have done what they've done, we no longer have the ability to fight back. We do. It's just harder. It is more expensive. It will take longer. But the numbers are on our side. And that's the last thing I'll say about this. We got to remember the reason for the urgency, the reason for the speed, the reason it took less than a week for Tennessee to take advantage of the Calais decision is that they can look at demographic numbers across this country. And in 2046, this is a country that becomes majority minority. Yeah. They can count and so should we So I am gonna ask you to say one more thing on this. Um you have you you've made a few references in this conversation to the shift in thinking from a partisan framework about this to something different, understanding that we're talking about authoritarianism versus democracy. I uh am relieved to hear that framework. I have always found it very frustrating that questions about my citizenship as a black person are so tied to a partisan conversation. And and I just I want to wrestle with this for a minute because one, I mean, you are a partisan, right? Like you are a Democrat. You have fought for the Democratic Party. You have built the Democratic Party in the South. That has been the tool for black people uh to gain political participation unquestionably, certainly in the South, uh, for generations. And so it's a reality. At the same time, it is the thing that stands in the way of full equality as well. And I, you know, it's this framing these as part isan conversations has been made it impossible or difficult more difficult to build the kind of coalitions uh that you're describing. And how do we shift that in particular in the South? So So for most of our lifetimes, ostensibly we all had the same destination. We all believed in this democracy that was enshrined in our documents. We just differed by party over the route we were gonna take. You know, Democrats were using Apple Maps, Republicans were using, you know, Google Maps, uh all the third parties were using Waze. And but we were all heading in the same direction. We all wanted the same thing. We're in a very different moment now. They want authoritarianism. There is a community of power that has the destination of authoritarianism. That is what they want. And let's be clear about authoritarianism means. They want to strip people of their civil liberties and their freedoms. They want to concentrate power. That's economic power, uh, political power. They want to concentrate power in the hands of a few. And they don't want to be held accountable for the fallout. That's what authoritarianism seeks. Democracy says we're going to expand access to those freedoms. Democracy says we want more people to share in power. And democracy says there has to be accountability for the misuse of that power. And so I had credit before I ran for governor. I was well known in the Georgia General Assembly for being someone who could work across the aisle. I was the Democratic leader. And yet Republicans would bring their bills to my desk before they dropped them in the hopper. They would say, Can you look at this for me, leader? Not because they thought I was going to change my ideological frame, but because they knew that I believed that ideological diversity could make us a stronger state. And more importantly, because I didn't like bad law. Because bad law hurt real people. And so they would bring their bills to me to look at. And my Democratic colleagues and some of their Republican colleagues would be like, why would you let her see it? And the reality was as a partisan , that is my secondary identity. My first identity is a patriot. I want to win. Let's be clear. I want to win. I want my value system to win. I want my team to win. But I am never going to rig the game in order to make it so. And that's what we're facing right now. And we've got to point out that they are not just rigging the game, they are not just cheating, they're kneecapping the players, they are taking out the opposition. That's not fair, that is not right, that is not American. And when we finally all come to the understanding of the destination this community intends for us, then I think we'll have more people fighting on the side of democracy. And I just say look at what happened in Hungary. Hungary pulled it off, but we don't have 16 years to wait. We sure do not. Stacy Abrams is, among many other things, host of the podcast, Assembly Required. Thank you so much for this. time Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. This is State Side, and we want to hear from you. If you've got follow-ups, questions, thoughts, whatever it is, send us an email or a voice memo to statesidepod at theguardian.com . And follow us on all the platforms at Stateside Podcast. Look out for new episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. This episode was produced by Annabelle Bacon and Monica Espitia, and it was edited by Jonathan Minhivar. Our engineer is Ivan Karayev. Our social media producer is Russell Kogan, and I am Kai Wright. Thanks for spending time with us