Bonus
Code Switch
GENE DEMBY, HOST:
What's good, family? You are listening to a special bonus episode of CODE SWITCH. This week, we've been talking about voting because there are some big elections coming up all around the country next month with some really important ballot initiatives. And you've probably heard a lot of chatter about how we vote - from new voter maps, to mail-in ballots to a Supreme Court case that could effectively shred what's left of the Voting Rights Act. And if you're behind on any of that, you can just holler at our episode from earlier this week. But today, we're talking to a guest who has been trying to sound the alarm and beating the drum - to mix metaphors - on the dangers of this push to weaken the vote or take it away from folks altogether because she says it's one of the most consistent moves in the modern authoritarians playbook.
STACEY ABRAMS: My name is Stacey Abrams, and I serve as the founder of American Pride Rises Network and the 10 Steps Campaign. The 10 Steps Campaign is really about naming the patterns of autocracy and making sure that we can recognize it, because if we can recognize it, we can fight it. But if we presume it's inevitability, that's when we lose.
DEMBY: Stacey Abrams is a lawyer. She's one of the most high-profile voting rights activists in the United States. And she made a little bit of history. Back in 2018, she was the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia, which made her the first Black woman nominee of one of the two major parties for a state governorship. We wanted to get Stacey on the horn to walk us through why she thinks we need to be paying more attention to this erosion of voting rights because she says whether we have an actual functioning democracy in the future might literally depend on shoring up voting rights in the next election cycle or two. Here's our conversation with Stacey.
Gerrymandering has always been this sort of tool in the tool kit of politicians, you know, since the beginning of the Republic, really. Why is this happening so much more aggressively now?
ABRAMS: In elections, race is the strongest predictor of political leanings - more than gender, more than geography. Race is the strongest predictor. And therefore, we have in this country since 1965 been very intentional about saying that politicians cannot use your race against you. They cannot weaponize race as a means of denying you access to democracy. This has become an extraordinary issue because in 17 years, our country becomes majority minority. And every election cycle, every cycle that we face, every map that we draw between now and then is going to shift the bounce of power to more and more people who do not hold to a singular political vision. And so if you believe that your only pathway to victory is uniformity of race in the population that votes for you, then you're going to do everything in your power to disconnect certain voters - namely voters of color - from any opportunity to be represented. And gerrymandering is one way to do that.
The other means is what we saw play out in Georgia, which is the purge of nearly 480,000 voters who were largely people of color - mainly African American. And I think it's important that we connect these dots together that it's - gerrymandering is the method of drawing the maps. The people who get to actually cast the ballot are the ones who have to register. And then, quietly, we also heard this administration, supported by the Republican Party, make - you know, feints towards eliminating or dramatically and radically altering the census count.
And so what I want us to think about is that these aren't isolated moments. These are connected. And they are intending a long-term strategy to deny communities of color, to deny disabled communities, to deny marginalized communities the ability to actually have a voice in our government. Gerrymandering is just the one we recognize because it's been happening so long.
DEMBY: How seriously do you think the Democratic Party leadership has been taking this winnowing of voting rights and this winnowing of voter power, given that so many of these new constraints that you're talking about on the right to vote reduce, you know, the access to the ballot to people who are traditionally Democratic voters?
ABRAMS: In 2021, Democrats tried to use the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to stave off many of these harms by renewing Section 5, saying that any state that has voting right laws, those states have to abide by a national standard of protection, as opposed to a local standard of discrimination. It would have allowed for absentee balloting to be a national tradition, as opposed to having to fight every two, four, you know, six years over who gets to cast their ballots in that way. So it was a very broad-based law that would have protected voting rights and for the first time really made voting rights a universal, you know - universal system in our country, because right now we have 50 different democracies operating at various levels of efficacy and access.
Let's be clear. This is not a partisan issue. This is a patriotism issue. Either we as a nation believe that democracy is our means of determining who's in power or we don't. And so, irrespective of who wins the race, race should never be used to rig the system. And both parties have an obligation to defend the right to vote. And I worry about ascribing only to Democrats the responsibility of protecting voting rights because authoritarianism doesn't really care about partisanship. It cares about power. And if you allow the democracy to be decimated, it doesn't simply come back for those you like. It's gone. And that means every person who believes in democracy - irrespective of party - has a responsibility to defend voting rights.
DEMBY: To that point, you've been really vocal about the fact that authoritarian leaders don't just outright ban elections - right? - that those leaders render voting functionally meaningless. Like, they predetermine the outcomes. Can you walk us through how that happens?
ABRAMS: Certainly. So, as you said, you know, democracies don't die, and it's not this one dramatic moment. It's - in the 21st century, it is structural. It is informational. It is administrative. So I mentioned the 480,000 voters who were purged in Georgia. That wasn't housekeeping. That was part of the power grab. Voter purges sit alongside restrictive voter ID laws. Every single state requires that you have to prove who you are. It is not a question of do you have ID laws? It's how restrictive are those ID laws? How hard is it to prove who you are? But it's also polling place closures. It's the attacks on absentee voting. All of these are part of the strategy to tilt elections and to consolidate power. And the thing to think about is this - voter suppression has three forms. Can you register and stay on the rolls? Can you cast a ballot? And does that ballot get counted?
And so you don't have to cancel elections. Putin has elections. Maduro calls elections in Venezuela. The elections happen, but the question is, who gets to vote? Can you actually physically get to your polling place? Will they allow your absentee ballot to be counted? Will they allow the counting to take effect? Autocracy works best when people believe that democracy has failed. And when you can cut people off from the sense that their votes matter, democracy loses power. And so we have to think about this, not in terms of the gamesmanship of who wins an election or who loses. We've got to think about it in terms of who believes that they have the right to participate or not.
DEMBY: You said that there are 10 steps on the road to autocracy. Can you name those steps, and how far down that path of those 10 steps do you think we are right now?
ABRAMS: So we're already in. And let's be clear. The 10 steps are less a ladder and more a pattern, but here's what they are. Number one, you win the last fair election. The autocrat comes to power and begins to build their authoritarian regime. But it's the last free and fair election. You know that because immediately, the executive starts to expand power. They push it beyond legal boundaries. They issue executive orders that aren't worth the paper they're written on unless you do step three, which is that you capture the other branches of government and you weaken competing powers.
So you co-opt Congress so they allow you to assume the power of the purse that is actually in the Constitution granted to Congress, and you neutralize the judiciary. And the, you know, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court says, well, it doesn't really matter what we do because we can't enforce any of our rulings. You eliminate checks and balances. Then you break government so it doesn't work for anyone by gutting the civil service. You fire civil servants. You basically gut and hollow out agencies like the CDC. You shut down the government.
Step 5 - you install loyalists. You put people in charge who were not loyal to the Constitution. They are loyal to the autocrat. They're loyal to the regime. Then you attack the media. That's Step 6. You discredit independent journalism. You gut public broadcasting. You do everything in your power to eliminate access to free speech, and you replace it with state propaganda.
Step 7 - you scapegoat vulnerable communities. You demonize DEI, not because DEI has failed. It's because it's working. It's because communities like minorities, immigrants, marginalized groups actually have full participation in American democracy, and you have to blame someone for how you are breaking government. So you scapegoat the vulnerable, you kidnap immigrants, you raid communities and you do your best to blame minorities for every flaw and failure of the government that is now in power. Step 8 - you make certain those vulnerable communities can't, you know, can't come back. And so you dismantle the institutions that protect our rights, you go after law firms, you sue universities, you declare advocacy groups to be anti-American.
Step 9 is one of the most pernicious, and it's the one we are watching play out so aggressively that it should be chilling to us all, and that is you normalize violence, you militarize law enforcement, you kidnap people off of the streets. But you also have masked police roaming the streets - ICE agents - you have the National Guard occupying American cities, you have the president of the United States calling American citizens the enemy from within and commanding troops to invade American cities. But you also do this because you want to silence dissent. When people are afraid for their lives, they will pre-comply, and they will be obedient because they want to survive.
And that leads to the tenth step, which is the end of democracy itself. You disrupt election systems - what we were just talking about - you gerrymander in the middle of the decade because you want to game the system, you restrict who can vote. But you also do everything in your power to make people believe that voting isn't worth the effort. You put so many hurdles in place that people start to think it's just easier to get along than it is to believe that more is possible.
DEMBY: There are a lot of people who think that voting does not actually matter and that the choices available to the American public are often, you know, bad choices between candidates that don't care about the things that voters care about. And I'm curious about how you think that kind of disillusionment has shaped this moment.
ABRAMS: People lose hope when democracy doesn't work, and they think it doesn't work when their needs aren't met. And so, one of our responsibilities is to prove that democracy can deliver. That's why I focus so aggressively on local government because people actually do want government to work. They do want to be able to send their kids to school and make sure that they are getting what they need. They do want to be able to go to the doctor when they need to. They want their hospitals to be available. They want their roads and bridges to work. They want good things to happen for their communities.
And what has happened is that we have broken not just the trust, but the link between what government should deliver and what people should expect and how we get there. And so knowing that that's the problem, I chafe against the idea that the answer is to not vote. When I have paid my money, I want my service. Every American has paid their taxes. If you've bought a stick of gum, you've paid your taxes. So you should be demanding the government you deserve. And that's why, while this moment is fraught and treacherous and terrible, it's also an opportunity for us to renew what democracy should actually mean to demand the government that we deserve.
There are many ways we can get the government we deserve, but voting is the way we do it. In a democracy, you got to show up. And if you don't show up, the people who want you to be silent are going to use your silence as consent. And so what I tell folks is, you may not be into politics, but politics is into you. And it is a stalker. And so you can either let your stalker win or you can get the restraining order, which is going to vote and getting them out of office. You can show up at their jobs and tell them you see them, and we can demand the democracy and the country we deserve.
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DEMBY: Stacey Abrams is a former state lawmaker from Georgia. She was the first Black woman to be the nominee of a major party for a state governorship in the United States. She's the founder of American Pride Rises network and 10stepscampaign.org. Thank you so much, Stacey.
ABRAMS: Thank you so much for having me.
DEMBY: And that is our show. You can follow us on Instagram - @nprcodeswitch. That's all one word. If email's more how you get down, ours is [email protected]. And subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app or, you know, wherever it is you get your podcasts. You can also subscribe to the CODE SWITCH newsletter by going to npr.org/codeswitchnewsletter. Just a reminder that signing up for CODE SWITCH+ is a great way to support our show and public media. I don't know if you've been paying attention, but we need your support right now. And - and - you get to listen to every episode sponsor-free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org/codeswitch.
This episode you're listening to was produced by Christina Cala. It was edited by Leah Donnella. And I would be remiss if I did not shout out the rest of the CODE SWITCH massive - Xavier Lopez, Jess Kung, Veralyn Williams, Dalia Mortada and B.A. Parker.
As for me, I'm Gene Demby. Be easy.
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