Democracy Versus Authoritarianism

This is the Guardian Former politics reporter Jane Cooston is now hosting Crooked Media's daily news podcast, What A Day fiveive Days A Week. With stories constantly flooding your for you page It's hard to separate what matters from All the noise That's why every weekday, Jane and the Water Day team scour the biggest headlines and bring you the stories that matter most to your life All in just twenty minutes Listen to W a Day wherever you get your podcast or subscribe to W a Day on YouTube for the video version My nieces and nephews, they are the first generation to lose civil rights since Reonstruction 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 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 Kywright. 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. 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 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. K. In Louisiana V. KA 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 bllack and majority Back 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 Immediately no pretense of even saying, Ohh, no, we're not goingold we're not going to do this. overnight. And I have to say on a personal level I was born in nineteen seventy three. so I am the first generation of black people to grow up in democracy Right? Like its and all of these laws that were passed in the nineteen sixties as the culmination of the civil rightights movement, it is N 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, and certainly my participation in democracy. and it just feels like It feels like those things are not going to be around for the next generation of bllack 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 three hundred 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. And so just to 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 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 if you were a place that was established to have racist voting laws, 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 we being racist again, correct They got rid. The Supreme Court over ruled that back in twenty thirteen threw 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 illegally, I feel like that this law, this rule, has a racist outcome U and so I'm going to sue 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 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. 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 lego 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 about Democrats versus Republicans. I mean, we have to remember that there was no democracy. We didn't even try to be a democracy until eighteen sixty five until the out you know in the wake of the Civil War It is also worth remembering just like how successful we were right at first in that effort. During reconstruction. During reconstruction. And just to give an example, like if you look at Mississippi, eighteen sixty seven Something like sixty six percent of black men because women couldn't vote, but 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? H hundred years of Jim Crow unfold following that. and by nineteen fifty five, fewer than five percent. people in the state of Mississippi were registered to vote. Five percent. So So you have this massive collapse, Voting rightights Act is passed in nineteen sixty five within a couple of years. Black voter registration in Mississipp back up into the sixty something percentiles. That's what that law did. It was so remarkably successful. It's like one of the most successful laws of the history of laws. U 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 Who folks will remember rose to national prominence in twenty eighteen 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 in the United States. Of course she didn't, she lost to Brian Kemp, who remains the governor of Georgia today. Right. But she lost that wasist narrowly, I will say, by like one point seven percentage points. and there is She argued at the time and made a credible case that voter suppression was part of Y. And so she spent her time ever since then, and really before that, but certainly since then advocating for voting rights in the South, 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 ot of back to the eighteen sixties and what we're facing and is it gonna to take another hundred years? of activism to get democracy Just to the place it was when I was born Stacy 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 won't remember this because you had many, many people chasing you around on the campaign trail. But back in twenty eighteen, I followed you on your campaign trail when you're running for governor in Georgia Um, and, um this really stark emotional memory of it was an afternoon. we were sitting in a car. I was interviewing you about your your your theory of change, you know, of engage voters in every single county And I remember I was paying attention, but I remember my mind kept wandering to thinking This is the Voting rightights Act at work. This is what this is. If if she wins this campaign This is the triumph of the civil rightights 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, u 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, when you're telling the whole truth whether whether it feels distant to you as well I approach it differently and K I do appreciate that. I remember that conversation and I rememember I think, saying to you 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 two hundred and fifty 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. becausecause I know where we started and That feels like a very long way around and saying that yes, there is a current attack 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 I think I've heard you talk about your father spe of where we started being arrested registering voters in Mississippi as a teenager. Did I get that right? Yeah, he was fourteen How did your family talk about that history I was actually giving a speech in Birmingham a couple of weeks ago I mentioned 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 stays by his side and he had been in for about twelve days at that time And I go in to check on him. he had been, you know, He doesn't like being in the hospital, of course. My mom had not left aside But they didn't want to talk about his pain They wanted to talk about voting rights They wanted to talk about how Angry they were alsoso they wanted to remind me and my siblings that you know, we still had work to do. and I tell that story because for my parents evenven their personal hardship pales in comparison to the larger enterprise that we face My dad was arrested at fourteen for a right that his father, his mother, could not exercise He understood at such a visceral level democracy demanded participation that he was willing to risk going to jail at fourteen and Even today at seventy seven, he was telling me. He said, you know, you do what you got to do because We have to keep fighting. We don't have the right to stop And my mom, who we like to tease my dad, my mom was doing the same work on the other side of town at fourteen. She just managed not to get caught off. 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 gonna to lie to you, I'm struggling with that belief. You know as a child of the civil rightights movevement as well, we're both children of this movement My life was made possible by these laws and I'm just not sure that they're going to exist for e after me Well, here's the thing. onene of the things I talk about these days is that my nieces and nephews, they range in age from ten to twenty 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 evil 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 I always sit in determination. Optimism can ebb and flow Determination is internal And 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 refuseed to give them that. U you last week you testified in Tennessee. This has been One of the first places to see u of Section two of the Vvoiding Rights Act being stripped away. You testified against the the legislature's intent to get rid of the last remaining Black majority district. they went ahead and did so Fllowing your testimony. put us on this. what did the determination look like there in Tennessee? What did that's? Where are folks at Okay, so you were if you were watching what we were doing, I was in the Tennessee Senate Judiciary Committee If you looked at the phalanx of senator sitting there, you could tell from the very beginning what the outcome was going to be So again,, you know, product of the Georia State legislature, I can count. I'm really good at count. And so the victory wasn't supposed to be them not voting for those maps. there was nothing that was going to 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 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, K. I think it's important for us to re situate 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 And in competitive authoritarianism Democratic institutions, small de deemocratic 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 vers. Ferguson. We had Dred Scott. Fighting 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 going to 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? to boild in those districts. Exactly cannot discredit 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 are elected under a different ideological banner, when you are a representative, you are literally responsible for everyone under your ambit 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 cannot get mired there I want to talk about though, like there this was a radical, radical decision, as you have said, right. And just so folks don't lose sight of it. L 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 nineteen eighty two, when they reauthorized the Voting Rights Act that you 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 equally radical responses. like Could we what are the chances of just rewriting an entirely new voting rights actct at this point in history? So let's be clear, and I appreciate you grounding us in what happened. This is bad law This is intentionally bad law. This is Pessy 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 fifteenth Amendment gave black men the right to vote because bllack women weren't given the right to vote for a while 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 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 fifteenth Amendment said, you could not use race and voting rights and voting laws Jim Crow did, which was so cruel and Brilliant 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 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 for what are intended targeted anodine attempts to steal democracy. So the question you asked was, how do you fix it How do you fix Voting Rightsct fixed all that back then, Is there a version today? The Voting Rights Act mitigated all of that. The fact that we had to have the nineteen seventy renewal, the nineteen seventy five renewal, the nineteen eighty two 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 So is a constitutional amendment that further embeds how we see the right to vote because what the fifteenth Amendment said was that you could not prohibit the right to vote based on race. We have 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 affirmative right to vote in the count We not 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 So we could in fact have the grandest solution is a new constitutional amendment that gives us an affirmative right to vote, short of that, a new voting rights act I want to zoom in a little bit in, you know, in some of the actual districts. So those are the big Big ideas. But right now, in the immediate elections Absent the Voting Rights Act, what are the strategies that worked in the past to get enngagement in every county that are no longer going to work. the answer is more democracy, how do we get it like in the next comoming election cycles So in twenty twenty six, it starts with harnessing the anger, the outrage and the fear of the Cali decision People are now paying attention when you an American, you get used to believing that you have these rights until they are 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 met me too? and they started participating. It's why Kansas has been one of the lead states and 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 Memphisits was wildly underperforming in the last few election cycles. That means you've got fertile ground. Yes, they they cracked those districts. so they're thirty three, thirty, three, thirty three in terms of black participation That's thirty three percent. You just got to add twenty two percent And so the next job is to figure out how do you maximize your capacity for the thirty three? And then how do you find folks who now have common cause with you That's the work that we did. And Even though I lost, we came really close in eleven million Yeah In a state of eleven million people, we're talking a suburb made the decision. across the country, this can happen. if we look at Louisiana The last governor's race was decided by thirty six percent of the population The winner The contest got five hundred seventy thousand votes. You can close those gaps by going to the people who did not believe their voices mattered. And if you're going to be practical, The number of people who have the possibility of voting less relevant than the number of people who believe that voting matters. Our job is the hard assiduous work actually talking to people and reminding them why democracy exists and showing that democracy can deliver There are one million news podcasts out there these days vying for your ears Pod Save America isn't just any news podcast posted by former aides to President Obama with decades of experience in the political trenches PodSave America gives you the news you need to know without the noise You get approachable, in depth conversations with major voices in politics, media and culture Alexandria Occasio Cortz. Govin Newsom Mark Cuban and Bernie Sunders, that you won't find anywhere else New episodes drop every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday Listen wherever you get your podcasts, watch on YouTube or subscribe on Apple podcasts for ad free episodes. I want to back up to something you said. when we talk about turnout even in a place like Tennessee. You know Part of the argument for the Supreme Court was in this case was that we have seen elections in which Turnout was greater than white turnout. And as a consequence, we don't need the Voting Rights Act anymore. That was part of the argument for why there's not racism anymore. just to say that 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. And if you game the numbers a little bit, then it looks like that. But in reality There's actually been Dropping in black turnout since twenty twelve, since Barack Obama left the ballot, which is to say we're already in a bit of a crisis with bllack voter registration and That was why we had the Voting Rights Act So what 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 Every 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 I've been grappling with voter suppression in Georgia for as long as I've been involved in politics I was a a college student registering people to vote on Speelman's campus. So I've been at this for about thirty years At first, it was just trying to convince young black people that their votes mattered because they had lived through I mean, my freshman year was the Rodney King decision. So 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 deression 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 going to 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 urgency you hear 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 carere What it means is that you don't have housing What it means is that your lived experience is ismal except for what you can put into it because the government that's supposed to protect you 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 game of politics This is what lives are we expected to live And so I need us to understand that, yes, the Voting Rights Act being gutted and hollowed out is egregious. cannot be barrier to us fighting anyway. and it can sound uick sa it But it's not because part of proving it so, we may not have gotten as far as I wanted But look at Senator John Ossoff and Senator Rafael Warno We got things done our responsibility is to not allow their intended psychic ab 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 the numbers are on our side, and that's the last thing I'll say about this. We have 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 CalA decision, is that they can look at demographic numbers across this country And in twenty forty six, this is a country that becomes majority minority Yeah They can count, and so should we. So I am going to ask you to say one more thing on this.. 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 am relieved to hear that framework. I have always found it very frustrating that questions about my citizenship as a Back person are so tied to a partisan conversation uh, and And I just I w to wrestle with this for a minute because one, I mean you are a partisan, right? 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 Back people to gain political participation unquestionably, certainly in the South for generations Uh 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 partisan conversations has been made it impossible or difficult, more difficult to build the kind of coalitions that you're describing. And how do we shift that particularly in the South? So for most of our lifetimes Oststensibly, we all had the same destination We all believed in this place democracy that was enshrined in our documents. We just differed by party over the route we were going to take You know, Democrats were using Apple Maps, Republicans were using, you know, Google Maps, all the third parties were using Ways. 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 And let's be clear about what authoritarianism means. They want to strip people of their civil liberties and their freedoms They want to concentrate power. That's economic power. Pitical power, they want to concentrate power in the hands of a few 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 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 notot because they thought I was going to change my ideological frame 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 bad law hurt real people And so they were bringing their bills to me to look at and my Democratic colleagues and some of their Republican colleagues were like, why would you let her see it The reality was as a partartisan. That is my secondary. Idity. 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