Is Authoritarianism Here To Stay?

 

[Host] You know, I found both of you in this story that was in the Washington Post this week with the headline “As Trump hints at 2024 comeback, democracy advocates fear a worst-case scenario for the country.” And, Daniel, I’m going to read the quote you had in this story back to you and talk further about it; and this is what got me to do this segment.
[Daniel’s quote] ‘We often think that what we should be waiting for is fascists and communists marching in the streets. But nowadays, the ways democracies often die is through legal things at the ballot box. So things that can be both legal and anti-democratic at the same time. Politicians use the letter of the law.’
[Host] This, to me, is the key thing. No matter who, Daniel, no matter who runs for president on the republican side in 2024, that’s the thing that we should be paying attention to.
[Daniel] Absolutely. I mean one of the things, because we focus on our history in the 1930s, that’s often the kind of model in our mind, or military coups in Latin America in the 60s and 70s. We tend to think that that’s how democracies die. But what’s become apparent when you look around the world today since the 1990s is that democracies now often die at the ballot box. And so politicians use the very instruments of democracy both
to come into office, sometimes illicitly, but then once in office, consolidate power through legal means. Packing the courts, manipulating election administration, tilting the playing field in elections. And so it becomes harder and harder for them to lose and essentially, at the end of the day, if you can’t vote out an incumbent, then you don’t have a democracy. And so, although our elections worked, just barely I should say, in November 2020, we have to look forward to 2024 and look at the legal means through which a non-democratic outcome could be achieved.
[Host ] And Tammy, let me have you take a listen to the democratic Secretary of State for Colorado, what she had to say.
[Colorado SoS] ‘We’re at code red for democracy. The very people who have been lying to the American public about 2020 are now preparing to run for secretary of state. In fact, in every swing state where there’s a 2022 race, we have a republican running who was either at the insurrection, a drafter of voter suppression, or lying about the 2020 election results.’
[Host] And the danger of this cannot be understated. We need people who will oversee elections that believe in democracy and fact and the will of the voters. And you know, Tammy, that to me is one of the super big dangers of a lot of these bills that are bills and laws that are going into effect. It’s not only that they’re trying to block the vote or uncount votes, but now folks are running for office seemingly for the sole purpose of changing votes and election results that they don’t like.
[Tammy] Thank you so much for having me this morning. I think it’s really critical that we take one step back and recognize that the 2020 election was in fact the most secure, the most transparent, the most observed, the most litigated—there were hundreds of lawsuits around the election—and it was the most audited election that we’ve ever seen. In a global pandemic, election officials found no voter fraud, the FBI found no voter fraud, and the courts found no voter fraud after the election. Yet, as you mentioned, there are hundreds and even more than 400 bills—the national conference of state legislatures has it at more than 3,100 bills around election administration as the foundation for perpetuating this narrative that the election system lacks integrity. And they’re being used not only to pass legislation, but also to further efforts like what we saw in Arizona with these extra legal reviews of election policies and procedures. And we are truly at a point in our history where we have to all pay very close attention to what’s happening around us.
[Host] You know Daniel, Tucker Carlson was over in Hungary—I just want to play a little bit about that and then ask you about it on the other side.
[T. Carlson] ‘Hungary is a serious and modern country that cares about its own citizens. Hungary has no desire to destroy itself, no desire to encourage crime and misery and unemployment in its cities, or for that matter, no desire to contribute to the human trafficking of people fleeing from Syria. Why can’t we have this in America? The answer is because our leaders don’t want to that happen. They benefit from the chaos and the pain of illegal immigration. When the rule of law collapses, they become more powerful.’
[Host] Daniel, can you just sort of explain to viewers why Tucker Carlson touting Hungary as an example for America is really bad news?
[Daniel] In all global rankings of the varieties of democracy, Freedom House International rankings of democracy, Hungary is no longer a democracy. It was a democracy. It was a great case of democratic success after the collapse of communism, but Victor Orban came into office in the 2000s, democratically elected, and had a big majority his first time around but immediately went after firing all the judges in the country and replacing them with his supporters. Redrawing election boundaries, changing electorals to make sure that his party wouldn’t lose, rewriting media regulation laws, and getting his friends to buy up all the national media. And as a result of this, the next time an election came around, although he didn’t win an outright majority of the vote, he actually won office again because the election field had been so tilted in his favor. And so, increasingly, it’s harder and harder for Victor Orban to even be voted out of office. The European Union has begun to condemn this. All international actors condemned this. So, to have the United States model itself after a country that is a democracy in free fall, is absolutely outrageous. And just, I would add, I mean Tucker Carlson’s point there, a majority of Americans are in fact in favor of immigration. So that’s a myth. That’s a myth, the majority of Americans are actually very democratic and I think that it’s a minority—a kind of angry minority—that wants to establish itself and rule.
[Host] And you know Tammy, I hear what you’re saying Daniel, you know a majority of Americans favor immigration, put that to the side, but there’s this poll from PRRI that is just breathtaking to me. And you see it there.
“Believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump: 71% of republicans polled said that they believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.”
How on earth, Tammy, can we—Well, let me rephrase the question—Will we get through the 2024 presidential election when we’ve got more than an overwhelming majority of the opposing party that is going to go into that election thinking that the previous one was stolen and that the one that they’re participating in 2024 is already stolen?
[Tammy] This is absolutely setting the playbook for the future and it didn’t begin in 2020. I would actually argue that it began in 2016 with then-candidate Trump saying that the elections were rigged. And then even after he won, calling into question the legitimacy of his win. So this is something that we’re going to be dealing with for the next few years unless and until people start telling the truth. We have a situation where these lies and these falsehoods and the misinformation is metastasizing across the country. These extra-legal efforts are cropping up in new states outside of Arizona. We’ve got Pennsylvania. We’ve got Texas. We’ve got Michigan, Wisconsin, all of these places where they’re taking this narrative of a stolen election and using it to further their political gains in order to drive up donations and funding of their political party. And we know that, for many individuals, they’re claiming that they’re doing this because it all has to do with voter confidence. But let’s think about that for a moment. The only thing that will truly give that somewhat rabid minority of the population confidence in the election is if we overturn a free and fair election that every level of our government has validated and said was true and accurate. And yet, we have all of these activities going forward and we now have a major political party that is articulating that the only way they could lose is if there is fraud. So it takes away any kind of responsibility, any kind of accountability for their actions, and it’s truly undermining of all of our democratic norms and institutions. And what we have is a situation—whether it’s Tucker Carlson or the former president—where facts don’t matter. If people want to glom on, for lack of a better term, to what they want to hear and what they want to hear is that their candidate didn’t lose—no one ever wants to hear that their candidate lost—but we found ourselves in a situation where it’s being leveraged to truly crack away at the fissure of our democracy. And I think the last few years have demonstrated the fragility of the democracy that we have often, and I think many have taken, for granted, and it’s really kind of a clarion call for all of us to remember to make sure we’re registered to vote in those local elections like the mayoral election in Boston and your city council races and your state legislatures. Because that’s where some of these decisions are taking place and we need to make sure that those who are currently elected are held accountable and asked why they are continuing to perpetuate this mis- and dis-information. And one last piece on that is that our foreign adversaries are sitting back all around the globe, the anti-democratic forces, we’ve made their work very easy for them. And we need to stand up and stand together and make sure that we move forward in a way that reinforces the things we’ve laid bare and that we make things better rather than continuing to feed this beast and give oxygen to the lies and misinformation.
[Host] And, Daniel, last word to you. In 30 seconds or less, you wrote the book How Democracies Die. Is it too late for us? Is it too late to stop the slide into authoritarianism?
[Daniel] Absolutely not. I do think 2024 is the biggest threat. The stolen election of 2024 is the biggest threat facing American democracy today. But, you know, one thing that I’d encourage all your viewers to do is look up the Electoral Count Act. I think we can reform our institutions. That’s a particular thing that governs how our presidents get selected, if we reform that, and there’s bills in congress to do this, then we can save ourselves. I think there’s still time, but it’s getting very desperate.