Live from the LBJ Library with Mark Updegrove

- [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided by Panonica Foundation, Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Ascension Seton, BP America, Laura and John Beckworth, St.

Davids HealthCare, and by, and also by... A complete list of funders is available at aptonline.org and livefromlbj.org.

- Which part do you oppose?

Do you oppose diversity, which means you want only uniformity?

Are you angry about equity, which means you want unfairness?

Or are you reviled by inclusion, which means you think that you should be able to exclude and disrespect?

That's the conversation we should be having.

(uplifting music) (uplifting music continues) (lively music) - Welcome to the LBJ Presidential Library.

I'm Mark Updegrove.

Since the library was dedicated over a half a century ago by our 36th president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, it has hosted some of the biggest names and best minds of our day to discuss our nation's rich history and the issues of our times.

Now we bring those conversations straight to you.

Stacey Abrams spent 11 years in the Georgia House of Representatives, where she rose to become the first African American to serve as minority leader.

In 2018, she ran a historic campaign for the Georgia governorship and has remained a prominent voice in national politics, especially on the issue of voting rights.

Tonight, we discuss the decades-long effort to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the danger signs of authoritarianism, and the work we can all do to protect our institutions and bolster our fragile democracy.

Stacey Abrams, welcome.

- Thank you for having me.

- So, you served in the Georgia state legislature for 11 very eventful years, left in 2017.

What lesson did you derive from that experience?

- When you serve in the legislature, you learned that the federal government is the guarantor of a uniformity, at least in theory, of your rights as a citizen.

And I worked at this local level actually early on in my career.

In college, I worked for the city of Atlanta, and then before I ran for office, I was actually deputy city attorney for the city of Atlanta.

And at the local level, you understand that you have this amazing responsibility for the micro of delivery of services to communities.

The state level is the intercessor.

That's the place where the federal intention and the local capacity have to get determined.

And so it was an extraordinary job to have as a state legislator to be the person who had to think about the needs of a major urban center like Atlanta measured against a more rural community.

And that for me was a very important training ground.

And so as a practical matter as a LBJ grad, the mechanics of government were really revelatory in that space.

And then in terms of practical, how do you do this work, part of my job as leader, I became the minority leader after four years in the legislature, so I served as minority leader for seven years, I like to joke that they call you leader to make you feel good.

They put minority in front of it so you never forget the math.

(Mark laughs) And part of my job there was that I could never succeed in terms of actually passing or stopping legislation unless I convinced people from the other side to join me.

And that really led to my recognition that we spend a lot of time trying to change people's beliefs, and my focus had to be on behavior.

I wasn't going to convince you, someone who'd been elected to office on a set of beliefs, to change your core value system.

My job was to figure out how could I align your value system with my vision for what needed to happen.

And that changes a lot when you realize you're not trying to convert.

You're trying to convince.

Convincing is still hard, but it meant that I had more grace and more patience with those who did not agree with me.

It sometimes gets lost, I think, in the sort of fisticuffs of politics that for many years my job was to work very closely with Republicans.

I worked with the speaker of the house.

I worked with the governor.

And we did good things together.

My responsibility, then, as someone who spent time in the state house is to carry with me that dual responsibility, one, remembering the citizen needs that the state is always responsible for, and two, remembering that partisanship is not an excuse for failure to do your job.

- You are the face of voting rights for many in this country in the same manner that John Lewis was in the 20th century to a large extent.

How did that come about?

- I think you're overstating it, but I appreciate the accolade.

(Mark laughs) So, part of my time in the state legislature was really understanding why so many people weren't involved.

In 2013, when the Affordable Care Act was really taking hold, Georgia was one of the states that put impediments through the decision of the administration, of the state administration.

There were impediments for signups.

There was an intention across the South to not participate in the ACA.

There were partisan differences.

But for me, as someone who grew up without health insurance, it was important to me that communities that needed this opportunity would get it.

And one project that I created as minority leader was to get all of my colleagues in the House who were Democrats to sign people up for the ACA.

We didn't have access to the full panoply of opportunities through navigators, and so I organized my cohort of 60 members, and we signed people up.

But that wasn't enough because we were only in the districts we were in.

And in South Georgia, which is the poorest part of the state, we had thousands and thousands of people who'd never had health insurance who were losing hospitals and did not know that there was relief available.

And so I started a program that I called the New Georgia Project, and we went around signing people up for the ACA.

But as part of that, what we discovered was that there was a significant population that fell into the gap, meaning they made too much money to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to qualify for the ACA.

And when we would try to explain it, they would blame President Obama, or they would blame the system, but they didn't understand it was a state decision.

And in response, I realized we had so many people who simply did not understand their opportunities.

And Georgia at the time had 800,000 unregistered Black and brown voters, people who were disproportionately affected by this Medicaid gap.

And for me, while I've always been involved in voting rights, my parents were civil rights activists.

My dad got arrested when he was 14 for registering Black people in Mississippi.

We tease, and my mom did the same work, she just managed not to get caught.

But, you know, I'd registered voters as a student in college.

I'd been very intentional about voting as a mechanism, but this was the first time I thought, "This isn't not just a problem.

This is an epidemic."

And so the New Georgia Project, which began as an opportunity to sign people up for the Affordable Care Act, converted into the mission to sign up as many of those 800,000 people as possible to become active participants in our democracy.

I ran, although in the beginning, I actually worked very closely with the secretary of state, Brian Kemp, had told him about the program, got his blessing.

Actually got training.

Later, they decided they didn't mean it, and we ended up in a pitched battle.

What I uncovered from that process was how aggressively as secretary of state Kemp had been about disenfranchising voters, purging voters, not processing voting applications.

And that all came to a head when he and I battled it out in 2018 for the governor's race.

Voting rights for me are the point of entry to democracy.

A democracy depends on people being heard, and in the United States, that ability to be heard is premised on your ability to cast a ballot.

And so my work for the last 20 years has really been centered around how do we ensure that the greatest number of people, irrespective of who they're going to vote for, as Americans have the right to actually be heard, and what work can we do to make that manifest?

And so that started with the voting rights, started with voter registration.

It morphed into the work that I do with Fair Fight, which is about protecting the infrastructure of democracy, and Fair Count, which is about the census, which, as you and I both know, is one of the least understood mechanisms of democracy.

But if you don't get counted, you don't count.

And so my work has really been about how do we attack each of the component pieces that make voting rights work, not just do you have the keys to the kingdom, but do you know where the door is, and can you get inside, and can you be heard, and can you stay inside?

- So I talked about John Lewis a moment ago, who valiantly stood at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge to fight for voting rights.

Bloody Sunday resulted, Alabama State Troopers bloodily thwarting this march from Selma to Montgomery.

And it resulted in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which Lyndon Johnson signed into law.

But since then, we've seen a steady erosion in voting rights.

How did that happen?

- We have this halcyon memory of 1965 of when America decided that its ultimate corrective action for African Americans was to expand the franchise and say, not only were the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments promises, but it was going to take the Civil Rights Act of '64 and the Voting Rights Act of '65 to make them manifest.

There are those who have always opposed that expansion because it was not just an expansion of franchise.

It was an erosion of concentrated power.

There are those who lost the ability to control outcomes because more people got to be heard.

And so while the visible attacks on the Voting Rights Act have only been recently acknowledged, we have to remember that the Voting Rights Act when it was reauthorized in '75 had to include for the first time Hispanic voters, in part because of William Rehnquist, who later became a chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.

He was one of the architects of putting in place what essentially were barriers to Spanish speakers being able to register to vote and stay on the roles in Arizona.

And so it's important to also understand that his protege was Chief Justice John Roberts.

- Right.

- And that as a lawyer, John Roberts was very involved in attacking and eroding the perquisites of the Voting Rights Act.

We are in a moment where we would like to believe that democracy is the goal for everyone.

They may believe in democracy.

That does not mean they believe in pluralism.

- Right.

- And the Voting Rights Act is a pluralistic device.

It says that "we invite all of you in."

If you are here, and you are a citizen, we want your voice to be heard.

And I think there are those who are absolutely on a path of authoritarianism, but I think we have to also be wary of those who are on the side of democracy but a constrained democracy that does not include voices they don't want to hear.

And we see that in the restrictions on young people being able to use certain IDs.

In Texas, in Georgia, in Florida, you can use certain IDs, but you can't use student IDs.

We know that in North Dakota, there were constraints placed on Native American voters who had to have a certain address that only the state could give them, and the state refused to give them the address.

And the Supreme Court said, "Well, you're a de minimus population, so we're not gonna make them change the rule."

The attack is not on democracy alone.

It is on pluralism.

It is on the expansive nature of allowing everyone who is here the right to be heard here.

And my worry is that we think that if we solve one problem that we have solved them all.

And what I've learned from my studies and my experience, and I think you certainly know this, what President Johnson saw and understood at a visceral level was that the power of the vote was the power to predict the future.

And if you do not care for those who would have a hand in predicting the future, the best mechanism, the best weapon, is to erode their right to vote.

- So you have enumerated 10 steps toward autocracy that fit a pattern that we're seeing in our country today.

What are those 10 steps?

- So I wanna give great credit to Dr.

Kim Scheppele, who is a professor at Princeton.

And she and I were on a panel together, and I heard her list out, and I've remixed them a little bit and editorialized, but with her, or at least with her retrospective permission.

But step one, you have a free and fair election, but it's the last one.

Step two, you see an expansion of executive power.

And let's understand that this is what happens in every country that has gone from democracy to autocracy.

So, free and fair election, expansion of executive authority.

Step three, you see a weakening of competing powers.

You have a Congress that seems complicit and refuses to exert its co-equal power in government.

You have a judiciary that also suborns the behavior of this expansive executive and abdicates responsibility, or in the case of a recent Supreme Court decision, says, "We can't make him do it, so why bother trying?"

I'm paraphrasing poorly, but it's essentially what was said.

Step four, you break government so it doesn't work.

Democracy is a construct that relies on people getting stuff.

We share power, we share resources, because we think if we do, we'll benefit from it.

Well, if you break government, then democracy seems to be a bit of a gamble, and it's not worth fighting for.

And so they always go and start breaking the mechanisms.

And that's why you see the gutting of civil service, the firing of people, but also the closure of national parks, the attacks on food security benefits and healthcare benefits because you want people to believe democracy isn't worth the effort.

Step five, you install loyalists, people who are not trained in the areas they lead and who are not committed to the needs of the people they're committed to, and they are serving the needs of power, often the executive power.

Step six, you attack the truth.

That means attacking the media.

It means banning books and denying information.

It means the rise of propaganda.

It means attacking comedians, attacking anyone who would tell the truth of what's happening because propaganda can't work if it has to combat actual reality.

Step seven, you scapegoat communities, minority communities, disadvantaged communities, dispossessed communities.

And that goes back to the Voting Rights Act.

The goal is to diminish the ability of the minority to have a voice but also to engender a sense of necessary inclusion.

And that's why we saw the raft of anti-DEI executive orders under the current administration, but we've seen attacks on DEI for the last 10 years.

You attack diversity, equity, and inclusion 'cause that's a central pillar of a pluralistic democracy.

Diversity means all people.

Equity means fair access to opportunity.

And inclusion means respect for belonging.

And you've gotta blame someone for everything that's going wrong, and so step seven says you blame those who have the least amount of power to fight back.

You scapegoat these communities.

Step eight, you have to destroy the support systems.

So you sue law firms.

You go after universities.

You threaten philanthropies.

You quash dissent among protestors.

You do what you can to break the civil society that helps reinforce the notion of democracy.

Step nine, you normalize violence.

And while the horrific murders that have unfortunately populated the press and are zeitgeist in recent months will always be jarring.

It also means, is there military occupation of your cities and towns?

Is there a secret police that can operate without due process?

Are there masked, armed people who can kidnap and hold Americans and non-Americans with impunity?

That's the normalization of violence because what it tells you is that no one is safe.

When the Supreme Court says that your due process can be suspended by an agency of the government based on your race, your language, or your accent, that is normalizing violence because that is state violence against the people.

It is not in service of the people.

It is against the people.

And that leads you to step 10, and step 10 is you end democracy for everyone.

It doesn't mean you don't have elections.

- Right.

- I like to point out that Putin holds elections.

- Yes.

- Maduro holds elections.

But those elections have no meaning because they've already manufactured the outcome.

And we're watching that happen in the United States through the mid-decade redistricting, redrawing of the lines, not with the intention of responding to population changes, but to orchestrate outcomes.

You see it in the erosion of voting rights.

I like to tell people voter suppression has three parts.

Can you register and stay on the rolls, can you cast a ballot, and does that ballot get counted?

And across the country, when you see states taking steps to eviscerate your ability to register and stay on the rolls, when you see rules being put in place that eradicate your ability to cast a ballot, and when you see the executive power being used to ensure those ballots don't get counted, that is how you break democracy in America.

That is how you say that, yes, we have elections, but we no longer have democracy.

And those are the 10 steps to autocracy and authoritarianism.

- So as you look at this formula as it applies to other countries who have fallen to autocracy, is there a point of no return?

As you look at those 10 steps, where is the point of no return?

- I don't think there's a point of no return.

I believe our responsibility is to first recognize that we are already in this, that we have as a nation hit all 10 steps.

The question is, how deep can they dig, and how much do we have to excavate to restore our full democracy?

By most accounts, the United States is now a competitive authoritarian state, which means that democracy can still compete.

And that's why despite the 10 steps to autocracy and authoritarianism, which we need to recognize, we also have to activate around the 10 steps to freedom and power, which is the phrase I've coined, because I don't believe there's a point of no return.

We've watched Hungary fall to authoritarianism.

It took a decade.

We saw Brazil fall under the will of an authoritarian leader, but they were able to rebound.

The United States can do so, but we have to first recognize that we are already facing all of the tenets of authoritarianism.

And there's a litany of what has been done and what will continue to be done, and this is not dependent on who is the head of state.

It is a question of the regime that holds power, and it's a dangerous thing to focus so exclusively on the face that we forget the power structure behind it.

And so one of the ways we avoid a point of no return is that we don't become so myopically focused on one person that we ignore the infrastructure that is cementing its hold.

The second, then, is that we have to recognize that, again, there are 10 steps to freedom and power.

We have to commit to knowing what we face.

We have to share what we know because that's how you counteract the antithetical nature of propaganda.

You have to share the truth.

You have to organize, bring people together.

You have to mobilize, do something about it.

But that's why John Lewis, why LBJ was a disruptor in his own way.

Given his responsibilities and given his history, his behavior from the seats of power was so disruptive in an extraordinary way.

We've gotta be disruptors.

We also have to deny them the ability to change and manufacture who we are and what we know.

That's why I fight so aggressively for DEI.

The attack on the language of DEI, they don't care about the letters because think about it in the reverse.

Which part do you oppose?

Do you oppose diversity, which means you want only uniformity?

Are you angry about equity, which means you want unfairness?

Or are you reviled by inclusion, which means you think that you should be able to exclude and disrespect?

That's the conversation we should be having.

And so part of our job is when we see something fail, it is insufficient to be outraged without engagement.

You have to tell people who hold power on your behalf to do the right thing, and if they don't, step nine is that you go and elect someone new and replace them.

- Right.

- And then step 10, and this is my favorite step, you demand the nation we've always deserved.

You as a presidential historian understand that every president comes into that office with the intent of expanding the American dream.

And the American dream is comprised of three things: education, what you know, the economy, what you do, and elections, who's in charge.

We should be judging and demanding based on who is willing to expand those three ambits.

That's how we get to freedom and power.

We are not bound by what is happening today if we refuse to accept that this is the end game.

And so I don't think we are too far gone.

I think we are further along than people recognize, and it's going to take longer than we would hope to get to what we need, but I don't want us to think about this in terms of going back to the before times.

We should be looking forward to what should we have had that would've not permitted the 10 steps to authoritarianism and autocracy to take hold in America in the 21st century.

- As you look at a country in peril, where democracy is in the balance, what is your greatest hope for the future of America?

- That we recognize the threat we face, that we activate ourselves to do something about it, and that we build the nation that we know we are entitled to.

You and I are both very strong students of LBJ.

And what I find so fascinating about him is that despite environmental truths that would tell him to be silent, he spoke up.

Despite cultural beliefs that would tell him to cling to racism, he fought back.

Despite terrible mistakes, he did good.

That's America in a nutshell, our nation that has made terrible mistakes, but we have always taken corrective action.

We are a country that has not done right by our people, but we refused to be constrained by those mistakes.

But we also imagined so much more is possible, and part of our journey is who do we bring with us to make that possible, you know, real?

- Stacey Adams, thank you for being with us, and thank you for what you do.

- Mark, thanks for having me.

(uplifting music) (uplifting music continues) - [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided by Panonica Foundation, Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Ascension Seton, BP America, Laura and John Beckworth, St.

David's Healthcare, and by, and also by... A complete list of funders is available at aptonline.org and livefromlbj.org.

(light flute music) (upbeat music)