Heather Cox Richardson & Joanne Freeman on the Future of Democracy

Join us for the United to Preserve Democracy and the Rule of Law event, co-sponsored by DemocracyFIRST, with historians Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
You're listening to the United to Preserve Democracy and the Rule of Law Speaker Series,

(00:04):
presented by Democracy First.
Join us for a special conversation with two of America's leading historians,
Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman.
Heather and Joanne were interviewed in Philadelphia by Democracy First Executive Director Jordan Wood.
To start, I'll go to you, Heather.

(00:25):
We're just six days from the election.
Just in the last few months, we've had a sitting president drop out of the race.
A historic nominee take that place, running against a former president
who has been convicted of felonies and is facing more criminal charges.
We've had two assassination attempts.

(00:46):
As scholars, what do you make of this?
Help us understand the moment that we're living in as we're six days from a big day.
Well, first of all, thanks for having me.
And I think I'll speak for both of us.
Thanks for having us.
We love to work together and we are seldom on the same stage,

(01:09):
although we often do zooms and stuff together.
So this can be quite a ride tonight, folks.
So I think what you're identifying is one of the reasons we're all so freaking tired,
you know, because one of the things that I find very difficult to write about is that
many of the things that happen in the United States these days on a daily or even hourly basis

(01:36):
are things that would have been administration game changers
that defined an entire administration in a previous era.
And we're all exhausted.
And sometimes, you know, I think I wrote about this at one point and I said,
you know, it was only a week ago that President Joe Biden decided that he would not accept
the Democratic nomination for president.
So I think we are in an unprecedented time.

(01:58):
It makes it difficult to take stock of what's happening.
But I think that one of the reasons that things are so unsettled and there's so much going
on is because we're seeing an era change, not simply a presidential change or policy
changes, but an era change.
And when that happens, you get all this sort of flotsam and jetsam that is running around

(02:21):
and you're trying to make sense of it all.
But for all that there is the frightening stuff, there's also enormous creativity and
new ways of thinking about things and new art and new music and new ways of thinking
about the world.
And that's one of the things that I think we need to hold on to in this moment is the
recognition that for all the craziness, there is also this incredibly creative thing going

(02:44):
on.
And that's something in the late 19th century as well.
What do you think?
Well, that's something I say all the time.
What you said about this is a moment of remarkable instability.
I say contingency so often that my students are like, oh no, not contingency again.
But at times like this, and there have been a number, and I think maybe we can go back

(03:06):
to the idea of this being an era change and other ones that sort of were like this.
But at moments like this, there are a number of different things that can happen.
And one is things feel really unstable, like you were just suggesting at any second something
happens and we don't know what to make of it and we haven't seen it happen before and
we haven't seen the response to it and it's destabilizing.

(03:30):
But there is also that contingency and the fact that there's the possibility of anything
happening that leaves room for good things to happen.
That leaves room for creativity.
That leaves room for positive change.
And I think it's easy to forget that and I'm not just saying that to make everybody feel
better.
I sincerely believe that.

(03:52):
It's important to realize that because we in this moment need to be aware of that.
This is a moment where you can make positive change or you can support positive change.
It's not a sort of doomsday that's it kind of moment.
It's a moment that matters, but it matters because we can do good.
Boy, have we not convinced Jordan.

(04:12):
He's over there like, I don't know.
Every morning I wake up and think that wasn't on my bingo card.
Joanne, I want to go to you thinking about threats to democracy.
Democracy first, we just have four principles that we are trying to get our elected officials
to support.
One of which is denouncing political violence against election workers and your opponents.

(04:37):
That is an area of which you are the leading expert really in the country.
Thinking about the early American Republic and reconstruction, how has political violence
been used in the past?
What parallels are you seeing today?
I have to say at the outset that when you become identified as an expert on political

(05:02):
violence, anytime anything anywhere in the world happens as political and violent, my
inbox becomes a really, really scary place.
As a historian, when I started out on doing what I do, I thought I would be in rooms reading
dead people's mail a lot and drawing conclusions and didn't anticipate that the sort of things

(05:24):
that I would work on and in particular violence and politics and American history that it
would have this kind of timeliness.
Now, there are a lot of things you can say about violence.
I would say in my work, and it was one of the things I guess that sort of surprised me
when I began my most recent book, which is about physical violence in the U.S. Congress.

(05:49):
On the House floor, on the Senate floor, I discovered like 60 or 70 physically violent
incidents between the 1830s and the Civil War, and a lot of them were censored out of
the congressional record.
The congressional record says something like, the conversation became unpleasantly personal
at one point.

(06:09):
Someone pulls a gun on somebody else, it's like, well, that's unpleasantly personal.
But what was striking and interesting about that to me was a lot of that violence was
slave holding Southerners who knew that the practice of slavery was in jeopardy, who knew
that they did not necessarily have the kind of power that they had once had, and they

(06:30):
were using threats of violence, not even violence, but just threats of violence to get people
who opposed slavery to sit down and shut up.
Because if someone stood up, they could be humiliated, they could get challenged to a
duel, someone could pull a buoy knife on them, someone could punch them.
I mean, these are all things that happened in the House and Senate.
So one of the important things to realize about violence is that sometimes the violent

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act itself isn't the point.
The point is for you to feel intimidated and just step away.
It's for compliance or silence.
And that's a way particularly when people know that they have a demographic disadvantage,
that's a very easy way to get people who are in the majority to step down, to walk away.

(07:19):
Can you say what happens after the caning of Charles Sumner with Anson Berlingame?
That's a great story, how they push back against the image of violence.
Yeah.
So I mean, I'm guessing a lot of people here know about the caning of Charles Sumner in
1856, is very famous abolitionist senator.
When I took me 17 years to write my book, and in all of those years when I said I'm working

(07:41):
on violence in Congress, everyone was like, there's that guy.
It's like, yeah, Charles Sumner, there's that guy.
And he was a famous, very aggressive abolitionist senator and gave a very aggressive abolitionist
speech in the Senate.
And he was camed by a representative from South Carolina, Preston Brooks, like beaten
to the floor and really incapacitated.

(08:04):
And it instantly had an impact to place in the Senate chamber.
And so literally it was the South beating the North to the ground in the Senate.
Had a big impact.
But what's fascinating about that period, I'm going to let you go on at Anson Berlingame.
I'm going to set you up for Anson Berlingame.
But what's fascinating about that period is that you began to get people elected to Congress.

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And Anson Berlingame is one of them, who were Northerners and who normally would have been
the people sort of making nice.
And instead they announced there are different kind of congressmen.
There are different kind of Northerner that they actually were going to stand up and that
they were going to push back and that hadn't happened before.

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And they were elected to Congress for that reason.
Anson Berlingame is someone who in the aftermath of the caning of Sumner, sort of steps forward
and goes to Preston Brooks, the cane her, and says, okay, fine, fine, I'll meet you.
I'll meet you for an affair of honor.

(09:06):
Go ahead.
I'll go to the next one.
He's the first guy to say, we'll fight back.
But then the reason I was setting you up for that is because he does, he challenges him
to a duel, but it's a different kind of duel.
I'm not sure what you're referring to.
Well he makes him, he puts it, it's true.

(09:27):
He challenges it to a duel.
I think I know it.
I hope it's true.
You taught it to me.
Not scripted, folks.
So no, well he basically says, okay, I'll fight you.
We're going to go up to Niagara Falls.
We're going to go far into the north and fight this duel.
And of course, Preston Brooks is not traveling into the north, having just gained Sumner to
the ground, right?

(09:48):
So yeah, he deliberately mocks him for that reason.
And in that sense, sort of makes him look powerfully.
But there's a lot of pushback from these Norliners in a way that never happened before.
And in a way that mattered because these people who had been bullying, all of a sudden they
were people, and they literally, like when you're writing about it, they stand up.
You could see in the record, they stand up and say, we're a different kind of Norliner

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now.
So now what are you going to do about it?
And Anson Burlingame, so he does this, he becomes famous for this.
And he then goes campaigning for his seat in Congress and he says, writes a letter to
his wife and the letter says, everybody likes your husband, the bully, Anson Burlingame.
Like they think I'm a great, important guy.

(10:34):
But yeah, that's an example of responding to the threat in a way that has an impact and
isn't violent.
Well, standing up and also making fun of him because he forces him to admit that he doesn't
dare to go to the North.
And then he challenges him to pistols.
And Anson Burlingame is a sharpshooter.

(10:56):
And Preston Burks is so bad at shooting a gun that he's actually already got a bullet
in his body from the last time he pulled this.
So he...
Why he had a cane?
It is why he had a cane.
Are you serious?
Yes.
So he gets a lot of attention because he has made fun of the bully.

(11:20):
And one of the points you always make is that making fun of political bullies is really
an important way to undercut them.
And one of the things that I think you really saw in this particular political moment after
that, Vice President Kamala Harris got the nomination for the Democratic presidential

(11:40):
nod that she and her rapid response team have gone out of their way to make fun of the bullies.
And the thing is bullies rely on fear.
If you're laughing at them, you diffuse that.
Well, we're in Philadelphia.
And that debate was here.

(12:03):
And I got up that morning and all the cabs had those signs that were all making fun of
people and then I'm making fun of the Republican candidate.
And then there were the pretzels.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Actually, I'm from my manager is here and I actually wrote to her and I was like, oh

(12:24):
my, I've never seen anything like this.
You can't just say, and then there were the pretzels.
They know what I'm talking about.
It's not my fault you don't read the Philadelphia Inquirer.
You have to explain what that means.
There were Philadelphia themed ads throughout the city, right, for the day, which is fascinating

(12:48):
for the whole day of that debate, about different pieces of the city.
And there was one that was a full-sized Philadelphia pretzel next to a piece of the Philadelphia
pretzel and it said, yes, size matters.

(13:11):
And I had never, I mean, speaking of your era, I mean, I was like, oh my, this is going
to be really different than I thought it was going to be.
How many more would you like that?
Can you let him ask a question?
Move off the pretzels for a second.

(13:31):
Throughout both of your work, you've highlighted how sectional tensions, economic divides,
and political crisis has contributed to the erosion of democratic governance, particularly
during the periods living up to the Civil War and in reconstruction.
Heather, can you outline the stages that marked this breakdown and how similar dynamics can

(13:58):
be recognized today?
Do you want to shape that a little bit more?
You're looking at the democratic breakdown during reconstruction?
Let's go leading up to the Civil War.
And one thing I would be helpful for us to hear, I think, is one of the really driving
motivations behind our work at Democracy First is that we believe these principles must be

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embraced in a cross-partisan way, that we will not be successful as a democracy if only
one political party embraces democracy.
And I'm curious, were there examples, pre-Civil War, of cross-partisan coalitions forming

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the way that we have Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and others stepping up to help protect those
norms when they're under threat?
Heavens, yes.
This is the beginning of the Republican Party.
And this is one of the things that I find so fascinating about this moment is it looks
in so many ways like the birth of the Republican Party, because what happens is Joanne's people

(15:04):
take over the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court.
That is the elite Southern enslavers take over those mechanics of American government.
Sorry, I had to give them to you, because they're the ones beating everybody up, which
is her field.

(15:24):
They take over these key mechanics of the American government, and they start to use
the government to protect their property interests in human beings.
And they actually say, we don't care if 99% of Americans want something, they can't have
it, because what the Constitution does is it protects property alone, and we must keep

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the government small to protect that property and stay out of our business.
And what happens is that if you're living in 1953, in 1853, you think they've got it
all, because they have the White House, they have the Senate, and they have the Supreme
Court.
And then in 1854, they push through the House of Representatives, the Kansas-Nebraska Act,

(16:09):
and the Kansas-Nebraska Act overrides the Missouri Compromise.
And that means that enslavement is going to be able to move into those northern lands
that have been protected for freedom since 1820, since, you know, that our state became
part of the Union in a compromise over with the Compromise of 1820, and the Missouri Compromise.
And when that happened, with the idea of moving enslaved people into those plain states, what

(16:34):
you would have ended up with was slave states in the American West to work with the slave
states in the American South to overall the northern free states.
And when that happened, the day after it became clear that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was going
to pass through Congress, 30 members of Congress meet in Washington, D.C., actually in the

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rooms of Edward Dickinson of Massachusetts, he's in the House of Representatives.
He is the father of Emily Dickinson.
I was joked that they only have six people in the 19th century, and they do the rest
with mirrors.
But they go into this room, and this is the moment that I think is so important for this
moment that we are living in, is that they go in as wigs.

(17:19):
It's actually a wig.
It's Israel Washburn of Maine who calls the meeting.
They go in as, he's a wig, they go in as wigs and Democrats and know-nothings, they're anti-immigrants,
that's the anti-immigrant party, and free soillers who are completely in favor of abolition
and independence.
And they go into that meeting from all these different parties.
They sit in different parts of the halls where they work.

(17:41):
They have different messes where they eat in messes from each other that tend to be partisan.
And they go into those rooms as all these different parties, and they sit there and
they say, listen, we disagree about immigration.
We disagree about finances.
We disagree about education.
We disagree about internal improvements.

(18:03):
But by God, we can agree that we need the guardrails of democracy to be able to have
these conversations, and we are not going to turn our democracy over to an oligarchy
that has said they're going to take away our right to have a say on our government.
And they leave that room, and they go back, it's May, so they go back for the break of

(18:25):
Congress.
They go back to their states, and they start to spread this idea, we don't have a party,
but what we do agree is we disagree with them.
And they become the anti-Nebraska people, and in the elections of 1855 and 1856, they
sweep the North.
They toss the Democrats out by more than a two to one margin of people who voted for

(18:47):
the Kansas-Nebraska Act are out in 55 and 56.
And by 59, they have Abraham Lincoln, part of their coalition.
He's a former Whig, and he begins to articulate a new way of looking at the American government
and saying that what it really should do is protect ordinary Americans, protect their

(19:07):
right to be treated equally before the law, and have an equal right to access to resources,
including education.
And that becomes the ideology of the Republican Party.
And all these people who sort of came in in 54 looking at each other like, I don't even
like you, by 59, they are looking at the world in an entirely new way.

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And by 1860, they have elected Abraham Lincoln to the White House.
By 63, he has signed the Emancipation Proclamation, ending human enslavement in the areas that
are controlled by the Confederacy.
And by November of 63, he has given the Gettysburg Address, which calls for the protection of

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a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and for a new birth of
freedom.
So in less than 10 years, the country goes from the elite enslavers get it all to we
are taking back our democracy for the American people.
And out of that moment, out of this extraordinary coalition in the 1850s and the 1860s, you

(20:13):
get two new political parties.
And I hear this all the time from my friends who are saying, I'm a Republican.
I'm still a Republican.
I'm voting a different way than normally this year, but I'm still a Republican.
In my head, I always sort of think, because I live in the 19th century, because I don't
really get the modern party stuff that well.
But I always chuckle a little bit, because I promise you, and you can write this down,

(20:37):
that in six years, what is a Republican and what is a Democrat is going to be completely
unrecognizable to us today.
Because if we get through this moment, the issues are going to be different.
And people like, like Sam and Pete Chase goes into the Republican Party.
He's in Ohio.
He becomes Secretary of the Treasury, and later he's going to go on the Supreme Court.

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He goes into the party, the Republican Party, thinking, this is it.
I am going to be a Republican for the rest of my life.
I am Mr. Republican.
And by the 1870s, he is a fervent Democrat, and in 1860, Gideon Wells is a Democrat from
Connecticut, goes into the cabinet, as does Sam and Pete Chase.

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He goes in and he's like, I'm a Democrat, and I'm always going to be a Democrat, but
I'm a war Democrat.
I just don't like those guys.
And by the end of the war, he was the one standing by Lincoln, who watched him die and
said, now he belongs to the ages.
And he was so crushed at Lincoln's death that he wandered the streets of Washington sobbing

(21:42):
for so many days, his friends thought he was having a mental breakdown.
So I don't think we know what the future is going to hold, but I think what we see right
now is that extraordinary, nonpartisan effort to defend the rules of law and our democracy
against those who would destroy it.

(22:02):
And people who are part of this coalition, it is not a statement about your future or
your past, it's a statement of American history and who we are.
And you and I have talked about this before.

(22:23):
You and I have talked about this before in the sense that we get used to things, the
way that we know things being the way that things are and have always been.
And we've talked about the fluidity, the remarkable fluidity of this moment, number
one.
But number two, more often than not in American history, parties have been fluid, parties

(22:45):
have shifted, parties have changed depending on the moment, depending on the concerns,
depending often along the lines of what you just said on how Americans are understanding
the values and the priorities of other Americans.
There's been a lot of, and I want to say for just a moment how that felt on a ground level.

(23:08):
There's a talking about an ordinary American.
There's just a guy, he's a clerk from New Hampshire and he's a real sort of die hard
Democrat.
And when are we talking?
We're talking beginning in the 1830s, Benjamin Brown French.
1830s, he goes to Washington and he's a Democrat.
He wants to not talk about slavery because it's going to get everything messed up and

(23:30):
we just need to sort of go forward.
Kansas- Nebraska Act, when suddenly things that seemingly were decided and now have been
undecided and people are going to vote on slavery in the West and what?
That's an issue again.
This guy, Benjamin Brown French, begins to look around at people who he knew and trusted
and they're going in a different direction than he would go.

(23:54):
And he left behind this amazing diary and in the diary he talks about how confused he
was, that these people he liked and he trusted were doing something he thought was fundamentally
wrong and he felt that somehow he needed to rethink where he was going to fall.
He actually tests out a couple of different parties figuring out where he fits and he
ends up being a Republican, doesn't agree with them on most of what they're saying.

(24:20):
But on this issue, which he feels is a key issue, he does.
And so you can see very much in just his figure and just his diary entries, someone who is
feeling his way through that moment, understanding the fluidity of that moment and then making
a choice based on what he believes.
George is over there lying.

(24:41):
I love this.
Thinking about the divisions in society, tell us about what the economic separation looked
like in the north and the south.
In a place where there is a tremendous amount of economic change happening in the country

(25:02):
and a feeling of jobs that have been lost because of the global economy and because
of tech.
Is that a similar situation to before the Civil War, Heather?
So you're asking about the present and the economic situation in the present.
And I'm going to make it a little bit broader to start and say that at a number of crucial

(25:25):
moments in our history, we have had to take on something new.
And every time we do that, we have a crisis.
The 1850s is the movement west.
The 1890s is industrialization.
The 1930s is the Great Depression.
The 1960s, 1950s and 1960s is the reality that we live in a nuclear world.
Now we are dealing, I think, in many ways with globalization and with the ideology that

(25:51):
the United States fell into really in the 1980s, this attempt to move away from the
ideas of the liberal consensus from 1933 to 1981, which said that the government had
a role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure
and protecting civil rights.

(26:12):
And when you got the rise of neoliberalism and supply side economics in the 1980s, there
was a much stronger focus on markets.
And one of the things that comes from that, the idea that you should let markets drive
society, one of the things that comes with that is when you get the collapse of the Soviet
Union in the 1990s, I think we made the terrible mistake of thinking that democracy and capitalism

(26:33):
went hand in hand.
And so long as you spread capitalism, you would also spread democracy.
And what we got instead was about $50 trillion moving from the bottom 90% to the top 10%
in America, I'm sorry, the top 1% in America.
And we got the rise of authoritarian governments, especially in the former Soviet states.

(26:56):
And we are now watching this crisis play out as those authoritarian governments are destabilizing
the United States.
They're focusing on those people who were dispossessed in those 40 years.
And that then backs us into the whole concept of the rise of authoritarianism and the recognition,
as people like Eisenhower saw, that people who have been dispossessed economically or

(27:20):
culturally or religiously are very susceptible to the idea of a populist dictator or a populist
authoritarian coming in and saying, I know you're hurting.
And the reason you're hurting is because of them and who them is does not matter.

(27:41):
What you were doing is you're building a movement by creating a coherence against another people.
And anti-them us.
And anti-them us.
That's right.
That's right.
And you can take it from there.
Well, that's actually a great transition because I want to go to you, Joanne, to ask you a

(28:05):
question about January 6.
That was not just political violence.
And you've called it an attack on us.
What do you see as different about that day that makes it so relevant four years later?
I mean, I know people sitting here felt like I did on that day.

(28:29):
And I'll never forget what that felt like.
And part of the reason why it was so stunning to see is because the capital is ours.
Capital is us.
There's a symbolic importance to it.
There's a political importance to it.
It's the people's house.
And so to see that happen on that symbolic institution, on that actual institution, to

(28:55):
see an assault on it, the deeper meaning of that above and beyond trying to overturn an
election, it was an attack on us.
It was an assault on us.
We voted.
And we decided, you know, on what we wanted to happen in an election, and people attacked

(29:16):
that building and the process.
That's what was going on, was attacking the process.
So it was an attack on us.
And by being an attack on the process, that too was an attack kind of on fundamentally
who we are.
You know, I teach a lot about the founders and the founding and the constitutional convention,
the creation of the Constitution.

(29:37):
And the people who were writing the Constitution believed that more than anything else, what
they were doing was finding a process that they could set in motion that could go, people
could go back to that process when things got bad, when things were, when there was
trouble, there would be a cohesive political process that would be in place that people

(29:58):
could go to.
More than anything else, what they wanted was a process put down on paper for how our
politics should run.
And you can see, I'm going to mention Thomas Jefferson.
There's a lot of stuff about him around here.
There is, you know?
So you know, Jefferson's handily for historians says this outright, right?

(30:21):
Jefferson, so the presidential election of 1800 is a really fraught election.
There were actually people stockpiling arms in two states in case the government, they
needed to take the government for Jefferson.
If the election didn't go the way they wanted, it actually is pretty extreme.
And after the election is done, Jefferson becomes president, horrible things don't

(30:42):
happen, although they almost happen.
Someone says to Jefferson, what would you have done if something horrible had happened?
What would you have done?
And he says, well, we'd have some kind of a convention.
We would tweak the process and we would go back to what we were doing before.
The process will carry us through.

(31:02):
So as speaking as a political historian, a lot of what I see and respond to in January
6th was an example of that.
Is the process that holds us together, the actual functioning of democracy that we all
take part in.
That's the core of who we are as a nation.
When that is under attack, when that is being assaulted, when that is being eroded, when

(31:26):
our belief in that is under attack, that is an attack on us.
That is an attack on who we are and how we express what we want in government.
So January 6th was a dramatic example of that.
But we're watching that in a lot of ways and we should feel that personally because it's

(31:48):
ours.
The government is ours.
The thing that the founding generation thought that they were doing different from what was
in the world at the time.
So they created the constitution in a world of monarchies.
And what they thought was different about what they were doing is that unlike in a monarchy,
the public, public opinion, was going to be crucially important.

(32:10):
The public was going to matter more than in any other country.
They didn't quite know how that worked.
They didn't know who they counted in the public.
There were a lot of questions.
But they knew that the public was vital.
The public was the key to the process.
We, the people, we are the people who are at the center of our government.
We may not think about that.
I think often we have in the past taken it for granted that it just goes and we enjoy

(32:34):
it.
But the fact of the matter is the government is grounded on the fact that the people and
what they think and what they want matters more than anything else.
And the process is how they put that in motion.
So an attack on that process is very much an attack on all of us.

(32:55):
Thank you.
I want to ask a follow-up for both of you, which is what do we do wrong?
I think generations from now they could look back and say, how on earth did this democracy

(33:16):
four years after that event possibly restore that person to the White House?
What do we do wrong if you had a magic wand?
What should we have done?
Because we might be considering this again for both of you.
What can we do differently?

(33:39):
So I think that the real problem in this country and one that we must grapple with, and there
are many that we must grapple with, is disinformation.
I'm from a purple town and our town might even be kind of pink.
And people always say, what's wrong with rural America?

(34:03):
They always ask me, what's wrong with rural America?
And I say, we're not zoo animals, first of all.
And second of all, there's nothing wrong with rural America.
But what we do have is information deserts where people live, they are fed media that
permits them to live in a fantasy world that does not reflect reality.

(34:24):
And so when I think of where we are in this moment, if you take off the R and the D and
put policies in front of people, they are overwhelmingly fond of what the Democrats
are proposing.
The numbers are huge.
Consensus on safety legislation, more than 80% of Americans.
Those sorts of numbers are unheard of, but we are so tribal because of that us versus

(34:47):
them.
And that is deliberately reinforced, I think, by politicians who recognize that that's the
way that they can garner power.
And one of the things that we simply must do is somebody said, well, there's always been
disinformation, which is true in Joanne's period.
My favorite is, you were telling me this when they were trying to swing an election, and

(35:10):
one guy simply, because there's not any really very good information, simply went to the
press and said his opponent had died.
How do you refute that?
Right?
Everyone was like, tragedy.
The candidate has died.
And the candidate is like, I'm alive.
But nobody's got photographs or anything, so he couldn't really prove he was alive.

(35:32):
We've always had disinformation, but what we have now is the ability to amplify that
at an extraordinary scale.
And at the very least, we've got to get rid of the algorithms that we know, for example,
are completely perverting the information that is going across X.
We know that new study out just this week, I think, although I've lost track of what
day we're on.
It might have been last week.

(35:53):
We need to identify the bots and the trolls.
We need to identify where information is coming from.
We know that this election is being flooded with disinformation, as it has been for ages
with, by Russia, China, and Iran in that order.
And you can't have a democracy when people cannot make decisions based on reality.

(36:18):
But certainly you can't have a democracy.
And the thing, part of the answer to that question too, and part of what involves a
lot of what you just said there, is if you think about the process of a democratic politics
as a conversation between the people who have power and the people who give them that power,

(36:38):
and in one way or another, it's a back and forth of sorts.
Any technology that shapes that conversation shapes democracy.
So what we're seeing now, and particularly with social media, I don't know what the
heck AI is going to do about all of this.
But what you're seeing now is social media and a variety of other sort of technologies,

(37:00):
not brand new, but new enough, that they're spreading information all over the place.
We don't fully know how to deal with it, what belongs where.
It's kind of a vast unknown.
All of us, I'm sure, I certainly spend a lot of time reading things and then checking
up to see if the thing I'm reading is actually true, and what's a good source.
And before I say something about it, I'm going to check again.

(37:23):
Not everyone is spending all that time digging around and trying to figure out what's valid.
So technology is helping to make this kind of moment where misinformation and disinformation
are everywhere.
And yet, if democracy is about people judging facts and making decisions and voting on them,

(37:46):
if we don't have facts, how do we go through that process?
How do we share in that process?
Well, this is very deliberate.
This is a political theory.
It's called virtual politics or political technology.
It was theorized out of Russia, although I've always had my suspicions there was at least
one American political operative involved in it.
And it is a system by which you can destabilize a democracy and get people to vote away their

(38:12):
democracies as they have done in places like Hungary.
There's five different things that are theorized that go into the idea of creating this
false world, but one of them is disinformation, which is not misinformation, saying something
that is wrong and then correcting yourself.
It is disinformation where you deliberately spew lies so that people, not just that they

(38:34):
don't believe you, but they cease to believe in anything because they can't tell what's
real and what's false.
And so they start to back away and cease to participate any longer.
That's part of it, the disinformation.
But also simply the flooding of the zone with so much prep as Steve Bannon puts it, that

(38:58):
people just simply can't figure out what's going on.
And that technique of destabilizing democracy through disinformation and flooding the zone,
we are suffering from that.
And one of the things you see often on people talking about on social media is the degree
to which we are really under attack from people who are trying to destroy our democracy for

(39:20):
their own reasons.
And Russia is a big player in this because, of course, they want NATO to go away so that
they will have more of a free hand in Europe.
And we just keep saying it's not happening at the same time our intelligence agencies
are literally in front of the cameras saying, folks, we have a real problem here, which they
did again this week.

(39:40):
I've got to keep us moving here.
I want to, you know, one of, if you didn't know, Joanne and Heather had a podcast together,
which is in a break here now and then.
Yeah.
One of the first episodes of that I heard was the story about the founding of the Department
of Justice.

(40:02):
And we now have a major party presidential candidate who is pretty openly saying he is
going to make that a partisan part of our government for the first time.
But can you tell us about the founding of the DOJ?
Why do we have a DOJ?

(40:26):
So I'll start with the founding of the DOJ and she will say why it's important it's
nonpartisan, right?
Okay.
We should have warned you we did this together for years.
We should have warned you that we'd done this together for years.
It had a really good time.
Pardon?
And it had a really good time.

(40:47):
Always.
So what happens is that after the Civil War, the assumption on the part of the Republicans
who were in control of Congress was that the American South would be thrilled by the destruction
of those elite enslavers because that system had never served the majority of the white
Americans as well as the black Americans in the American South.
And they expected, as happened in South Carolina by the way, that when they wrote new state

(41:12):
constitutions that people would be thrilled to get rid of human enslavement because it
would make opportunity and resources and education more accessible to poor white people as well
as black people but also poor white people.
And they were shocked to discover that in fact when the states wrote their new state
constitutions in the summer of 1865, they agreed to the things that the Republicans wanted

(41:34):
in the U.S. government but they also put in place the black codes which were a system
of laws, state laws that essentially remanded the newly freed black Americans to a form
of subservience that was akin to enslavement.
And I won't go through all the pieces of that.
But the Republicans are looking at this and this is summer of 1865 and the war is like

(41:57):
literally just over.
Like the Confederates have been shooting at the northern Republicans constituents a matter
of almost weeks before.
And they look at the fact that their former colleagues, their former black soldier colleagues
in the American South are supposed to be living under this new system in which they're essentially

(42:18):
serfs and they say, oh boy, this is not happening.
And from that we get the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867 and then we get the 14th Amendment
to the Constitution which is written in 66 but it's put in the Constitution in 68.
And the 14th Amendment says that the federal government is going to make sure that the

(42:40):
states do not discriminate amongst the citizens who live within their states.
That is the role of the U.S. government to protect people within the states.
My favorite amendment.
I know you all have your own but that's my favorite.
And it seems like a great idea but then how are you going to put teeth into it?
And so in 1870 we get the 15th Amendment to the Constitution which protects black male

(43:03):
voting and we also get the establishment of the Department of Justice because you have
the rise in 1870, 1868, 1869, 70 of the Ku Klux Klan.
And that's the kind of violence that Joanne writes about where there's terror, I would
call it terrorism.
There are isolated instances, there are many instances in 68 but by the 70s there are isolated

(43:27):
incidents of terrorism against black Americans and their white allies but enough that everybody
has heard of them.
And you get the Department of Justice in 1870 to go to the south and to prosecute the KKK
and they do so extraordinarily successfully.
The reason that we don't have any really good heavy duty studies of the KKK from 68 through

(43:50):
71 is that people destroyed their records because they did not want to be caught by
the federal government and end up in prison.
And that idea that the Department of Justice is there to enforce the laws impartially
even if it meant going down to the south and saying to white KKK members come along, you're

(44:10):
going to prison is the heart of the DOJ.
And to take that and expand that to talk about what democracy is, right?
If you, we can be academics and sit up here and democracy, let us discuss what democracy
is.
But I think when you boil it down there are three major key components to democracy, right?

(44:33):
And one of them is free and fair elections and one of them is that the people we give
power to are accountable for how they use that power to us.
And one of them is the rule of law and the assumption that there is a system of law that
as best as it can be, we all are equal underneath it and obviously it does not always function

(44:55):
perfectly, but that's the ideal, that's how it's supposed to work.
Those three things are essential to the working of democracy.
So the Department of Justice in a way represents the rule of law as a standard of democracy.
It isn't a partisan tool.
It's really bigger than that, it's more important than that.

(45:15):
It is a pillar of what a functioning democratic form of government is.
It is the rule of law kind of in an institution.
Well, and as a subset of that, you've asked a number of times about economics and I've
danced around it a little bit because there's so much else going on.
One of the reasons it's so important for there to be people treated equally before the law
was very apparent in the 1860s and the 1870s because black Americans could not enter the

(45:40):
economy if they were not treated equally, being able to, for example, sue somebody if
they were cheated or be able to own property or to be able to do all the things that is
required to participate in a society through the rule of law.
You need those guardrails.
And the reason that I'm going there is that one of the things we don't talk about in this
moment when we're talking about the economy right now and what might happen going forward

(46:02):
in the economy is without the rule of law to protect freedom of the seas, which I suspect
many of you did not wake up this morning thinking about, think of how all our goods get to America.
They come in container ships and they come in container ships that are able to make it
here because the United States government and the rule of law as it was put together

(46:24):
between the United States and Europe protects the rule of law on the seas.
And somebody said, you know, if you think that you did not like the supply chain disruptions
during COVID, when we had that, think of how you're going to feel about them if we get
rid of that.
And it is China and Russia who get to decide what ships get delivered and when and how

(46:48):
much it's going to cost.
And maybe we just feel like stopping those shipments for a while because we don't feel
like you are getting those container ships today.
And I wish this were headline news everywhere because we don't think about things like the
delivery of container ships or making it through straits.
Go look at a globe and look at how many places are pinch points around the globe that are

(47:10):
protected because of the rule of law.
So when people say, well, you know, the economy might be better if we get rid of the rules
that we're operating under.
I always literally I sit there and I imagine container ships unable to make it across the
seas and think, oh boy, you know, you think this is going to be a good idea.
Virtually everything that comes to us from other countries comes in container ships and

(47:32):
think of everything you're wearing right now that comes in a container ship, all the pieces,
all the gadgets you have, the cars, everything else that we simply must have the freedom
of the seas, which is protected by the rule of law.
We were actually, I think, together the day or the day after this decision came down over
the summer granting immunity to former presidents.

(47:59):
It's an alarming decision, which with potentially devastating consequences, give us both your
interpretation of that.
What worries you?
How worried should the public be about that decision?
That's a, to say that that is an enormous decision with possibly enormous consequences

(48:23):
is an understatement.
And I, you know, I'm speaking as an early American historian.
So I am someone who is immersed in the writings and thoughts and politics and debate over the
Constitution, all kinds of things about the power of the executive.

(48:45):
And I was actually, I signed on to an amicus brief to the Supreme Court on this issue,
and it was all historians.
It was about, I don't know, eight or 10 of us who were historians, all early American
historians, and all of us were like, immunity?
Like, if you were going to look at the founding generation and ask about this, that's the

(49:06):
number one thing they would not have wanted.
They had just broken away from a king.
They were creating an anti-king government.
They did not want immunity.
They all, if you go, I know you always do this all the time, we do this all the time.
If you read the debates of people in the Constitutional Convention talking about the presidency,

(49:29):
what they're worried about is power.
The Constitution is about assigning power.
And the President, there was a time for a while in the Constitutional Convention that
they debated having not one executive, but a presidential counsel, because it was too
scary to think of giving that much power to one person.
So they thought, okay, well, what if we have a counsel of maybe three people, and that's

(49:50):
the executive?
And someone piped up and said, that won't work, because if there's three of them, if
someone does something wrong, then he can hide behind the other two.
So if there's one person who's president and they do something bad, they'll be responsible
for it.
So that's 1787, you guys.
But still, the fact is that that was the number one fear, was an executive, a president with

(50:16):
too much power.
And they talked all the time about how easy it would be to overturn this government with
that kind of person.
The number one fear when they talked about things that might overturn the Republic, they
looked back to ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and what they saw was that in Republics,
demagogues come to power by pandering to the public, get power, and then with that power,

(50:40):
do whatever the heck they want to do, because once they have that power, in essence, they
now have a form of immunity.
So I can't even describe to you, after that decision was reached, the Brennan centers
who created the amicus brief that I signed on to, and we all got together right after
the decision was made public to talk to each other in a Zoom call.

(51:02):
And the look of death on the face of every historian on that Zoom call, I've never seen
facial expressions like that.
We all were just like, how did that happen?
It's so fundamentally against the founding of the country and how we understood at that
time and how our system was baked to be, how things should work.

(51:25):
I think about George Washington's copy of the Constitution is actually at Mount Vernon
and I've seen it before.
And he was someone who very much first president and he knew his job was to not be a king,
whatever that meant.
And that's a big empty space.
Well, I guess I better not act like a king.
I don't know what that means, but I won't act like a king.
And one of the things he did to not be a king was he took his copy of the Constitution and

(51:50):
he went through it and every time there was something that the president did, he wrote
in the margin, president.
And he was figuring out his job, the bounds of his job, exactly what it was he had to
do, exactly what he was supposed to do and then what he wasn't supposed to do.
That's how the country was created.

(52:11):
That's what we all learned about in school, checks and balances.
That's about checking and balancing power.
So immunity, even just the idea of it makes me bonkers because it's so not grounded in
our constitutional system and it's so inherently fundamentally dangerous regardless of who has

(52:33):
power.
It is not in the spirit of a functioning democracy.
I would just like to add to that people write to me every day and say, well, now President
Biden has power to do whatever he wants.
He should just do it.

(52:53):
I want to be really clear that what that decision says, and I concur with Joanne that it is,
I think it overturned our entire form of government by getting rid of the concept that everybody
is responsible to the law.
But it doesn't say the president has immunity.
It says we expect that the president has immunity for official acts and the presumption of immunity

(53:16):
for other acts.
But because we've never thought about this before, it's the courts that get to decide
what are official acts.
And this I think is something we need to pay a lot of attention to because in many ways
it is, we are watching a judicial coup because if you think about the way the government
has operated really since 2007 when Mitch McConnell, the senator from Kentucky, became

(53:40):
Senate Minority Leader, is he really weaponized the filibuster to make it extraordinarily difficult
for Congress actually to Congress, right, to be able to pass any laws.
And instead he focused on packing the federal courts with judicial thinkers who agreed with
what the extremist Republicans wanted to do.

(54:02):
With the idea that rather than having to deal with congressional laws, you could essentially
make laws by going to courts and challenging things and having the courts hand down the
decisions that a certain faction would want.
So for example, now we have a court in Texas that people are judge shopping for.
This is Matthew Kazmaric who is handing down decisions that will affect the entire country,

(54:26):
although he is an appointed judge who is making the decisions there from the bench.
And when the court said the president has immunity, but we get to decide for which acts,
I was really concerned.
And just today the court has done something else that I found quite surprising as well

(54:50):
on why are you looking at me like that?
You know what this is, right?
Well, it's just a surprisingly bad way.
You know the court, the Virginia ballots where they had, the Voting Rights Act says you can't
change ballot rules within 90 days of an election and Virginia did and all the lower courts

(55:12):
said you're not allowed to do this.
And the Supreme Court today said yes, you can.
And the division was six to three and there was not a reason given.
And people that I am not a lawyer, people I read who study the law are like this is such
a naked partisan decision.
We are very concerned going forward.

(55:33):
Well, that fits into the category of trying to keep up with the news.
It comes at us so fast.
Related to this, I want to get your thoughts on the power, the power of the pardon.
You know, the previous president abused this, I don't know any other way to say it, before

(55:57):
leaving office, pardoning Steve Bannon and Roger Stone and a number of political operatives,
I think all of them that had committed crimes for him.
And he seems to be entertaining the idea of pardoning himself around January 6.

(56:17):
He is entertaining, pardoning all of the convicted insurrectionists.
There was an effort to pre-pardon members of Congress before they voted to...
Connecting the immunity decision with that constitutional power, what's your reaction
to that?

(56:37):
How would the founders have felt about the idea that the president can pardon himself?
What a concept.
I'm going to pardon myself.
So that gets at one of the three things I mentioned as being at the core of democracy,
which is accountability, right?
That really you are, if you are handed power, you're supposed to be accountable for the

(56:58):
way in which you use that power.
And if you can do something and then pardon yourself for the way that you have, I assume,
misused power, once again, that's striking at one of the fundamental things that just
makes our government responsible.
So pardoning yourself, there are all kinds of ways to talk about pardoning beyond that,

(57:19):
beyond the idea of pardoning yourself or pre-pardon all by itself is a little scary.
But still, that strikes at, in the same way that immunity does, the fact that people who
we give power to are accountable to us for how they use that power in a concrete way,
in a rule of law way, in a way that matters.

(57:40):
And these are all things, a lot of the things we're talking about here tonight, these are
all things that we're not used to necessarily pondering on a daily basis, right?
We live at a time where suddenly we're thinking about things like this that for a time at
least felt abstract, not like things that on a daily basis, on an hour by hour basis,
we have to think about.

(58:01):
We've taken a lot, or certainly I feel, I have taken a lot for granted about the functioning
of democracy, about the survival of democracy, about all of these things that we're talking
about just sort of going and working and they sort of move ahead and that's our government.
And we're living in a time that is proving that in essence we were lucky for a number

(58:25):
of years.
But that's not how it's supposed to work, that's not how really ever it was assumed
to be supposed to work.
It was always assumed that the citizens would be an active, active part of our process of
government.
And my favorite person to quote on this is John Adams, who, you know, he survived till

(58:46):
extreme old age.
He and Thomas Jefferson lived to be quite old and they had a wonderful correspondence
with each other.
And if you were a founder and you lived to be old, then you've got scores of strangers,
full strangers writing to you and saying, tell us about the writing of the Declaration.
Tell us about, you know, whatever.
People wanted the people who were in the history to tell them the story.

(59:09):
So John Adams got reams of these letters.
Tell us, tell us.
And Adams again and again and again said a version of this.
He would say, thank you very much.
I very much appreciate that you are revering your founders, that I'm included among the
revered people.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
The fact of the matter is, we didn't know what we were doing.

(59:32):
We didn't.
We were making it up as we went and we made mistakes.
There's a letter in which he says, we made mistakes.
1774, 75, 76, 77.
He just like marches his way through.
He says, I watched people sign the Declaration of Independence and there were people who signed
that document who visibly were not happy about signing that document.

(59:56):
And what he says to people is, we're not any better than you.
We didn't know what we were doing.
The assumption is, take it away.
This is up to you guys.
We didn't live in a golden time where we were better than everybody and we somehow did things
and set things in motion.
There have a founder capital F. And what he was saying in his last years was a version

(01:00:20):
of what we're talking about here.
This isn't autopilot.
This is yours.
And if you think we were perfect and we set everything in motion and you think you can
just walk away and let it go, you're wrong.
And I think if John Adams tells you that, that's got some credibility.
That's got some authority.
And that's not the way we think about the founding and it's not the way we think about
our government and we should.

(01:00:43):
We're getting close to time so I want to look forward.
What do we, when you think about what we need to do to improve our democracy to fix that?

(01:01:03):
I don't think anyone would say it's perfect.
What do you think next year?
As the president, if it is a democracy president, what reforms do we need to pass and how much
of a priority is it in the year ahead?
Let's get me interesting to see if we come up with the same ones.

(01:01:27):
I am firmly in favor of laws protecting the right to vote, getting rid of partisan gerrymandering
and getting big money out of politics.
Those laws are drafted and they would make such a huge difference starting right there.

(01:01:54):
But once we've gotten that done, as long as we're making the Empress of the Universe here,
and I don't mean this in a partisan way, we go through periods in America where we ignore
the Constitution and then we have a flurry of amendments to it and we are so overdue
for that flurry of amendments in the 21st century now.

(01:02:19):
But the Electoral College is a problem.
And it's a problem that we have had since 1800 when Thomas Jefferson decided, I'm sorry,
I just had to.
It's been a problem since 1800 when we started having the Winner Take All system, which was
Thomas Jefferson's idea.

(01:02:40):
And then we also got the capping of the House of Representatives in 1929, which badly skewed
who is the numbers in the Electoral College.
We could fix those things.
We could also get rid of the Electoral College.
That would be a start.
And then we have the problem of the Supreme Court.
And when I say that these are problems, they are certainly partisan problems, but they

(01:03:04):
are problems for democracy.
And the reason I'm picking on the Electoral College second in this, first of all, we are
one of the few constitutions in the world that does not protect the right to vote, is
not written in the Constitution, except in a limited way.
And then the problem with the Electoral College was actually identified by Andrew Jackson,

(01:03:27):
who said in the 1830s, we're going to have a problem if we have people who end up in
the White House who are not elected by the popular vote, because it destroys the concept
of legitimacy.
That's so true.
And then we also have, and regardless, by the way, that partisan advantage looks like

(01:03:49):
it might be flipping.
It does not matter who gets that partisan advantage, that inability to believe in the
legitimacy of a president, because that person does not get the popular vote, is a problem
no matter who ends up in the White House.
And then there's the Supreme Court.
And the Supreme Court, I would start with the fact that it needs to be adjusted in size.
Remember that it's not in the Constitution, that it's established by statute, and we have

(01:04:11):
not expanded it since 1869 under US grant.
And we've grown a little bit since then.
And then we also have the problem of making sure that, we have a problem now that when
the founders are coming up with the idea of this government, we don't have modern transportation.

(01:04:33):
So riding the circuit for somebody who's on the court, you literally had to get on a horse.
And I'm sorry, but I don't see Clarence Thomas out there riding his horse around saying,
it was a young man's game.
And it was a young man's game, and people voluntarily stepped down because they didn't
want to ride the circuit.

(01:04:54):
And this idea that you hang on for grim death is not, I think, I don't think it has fealty
to the original ideas of what that was supposed to be.
So I'm going to start with the little stuff, voting rights, money, the electoral college
and the Supreme Court.
But I'm sure you have some ideas about some big things.

(01:05:14):
Well, OK, so there is actually a big thing that I want to say, and it's going to sound
really sort of Susie Sunshine-ish, but I've been thinking about it since I've been doing
these events with Democracy First.
And I came to think about this when I was in Michigan too.
So the fact of the matter is, there are a lot of people here.
And there's an overflow room, and there are apparently thousands of people live streaming

(01:05:38):
and watching this.
It's a big group of people.
And to me, here's the thing, we don't know what we all think in this room.
I'm sure we don't all agree in this room.
We have come here in this room to think about things, to talk about things, to ask questions,
to evaluate things.
We are a community, a democratic community in that sense, small D. We are a community

(01:06:02):
of people trying to figure out what we think and what we should do.
And that is democracy at its absolute core.
So what I would love, we, the we part of we the people, I have a historian friend and
whenever we talk, he's like, you're going to talk about we again.
It's like, well, yeah, I'm going to talk about we again, because we forget that we're

(01:06:23):
a we.
We're not really good at we right now, but we can be better at it.
And we doesn't mean we agree.
It never has been.
There's no assumption, it never has been that we all have to agree about a lot of things,
right?
I know we don't all agree and are here together in this room.
That makes a difference.
So it's not a concrete thing that we can do, but I would say remembering that by coming

(01:06:48):
together here in this room, by caring about the things you care about, by watching people
spending, I voted early in Connecticut and I waited early voting for an hour.
Never have I seen that.
We're seeing that in state after state.
These are people.
You are people who care about democracy.
That's a we.

(01:07:09):
And that matters tremendously.
And we need to hang on to that and own that and remember that and take that moving forward.
To close things, we're living through dark times.

(01:07:33):
Last weekend, to have a major party nominee host the event that they did at Madison Square
Garden and the rhetoric that was used is dark.
But we've got to hold on to hope that we can be a better country, be a better democracy.

(01:07:53):
What gives each of you hope and can help give us hope for the next six days and whatever
breaking news we'll inevitably have, I'm sure?
Well, didn't Joanne just say it?
The reason that I have hope is because of us.
Because over the last five, 10 years, we have seen people who thought that they didn't care

(01:08:15):
about our democracy or that it was always going to be there step up to the plate and
say, no, I really care about defending our institutions.
I care about defending democracy and I care about ushering the United States into a new
era in which we honor the rule of law.
We honor the idea that everybody is treated equally before the law and we honor our role

(01:08:35):
in the world, on the global stage.
And so what keeps me up at night, sorry, it's been a really long year.
What gets me up and keeps me writing at night is the recognition that there are tens of
millions and hundreds of millions of us who are paying attention to democracy.

(01:08:59):
We care about democracy and we want to usher this country forward in a healthy way.
We're stressed because we care.
Right?
We're stressed, we're stressed out and tired because we care.
So absolutely.
I mean, I said, I feel sort of like a hokey saying like, wee.

(01:09:22):
But it's true.
This is what gives me hope.
I think about, oh, what, you're laughing at me already.
No, no, no, no.
And I guess I'm watching you and Joanne and I got to know each other over all this.
And I'm watching her and she's so great.
And thinking, it's not just that we care about democracy, it's that we have made so many

(01:09:46):
connections over so far and made so many friends and made this country feel just a little bit
smaller so that we all care about each other.
And it's not just about democracy.
It's about community too.
And so, right, I mean, you have a community, right?
I have a weekly webcast.
People come and have been coming for hundreds of weeks together as a community to talk about

(01:10:07):
democracy.
That's, I mean, that's partly technology.
But that really matters.
I was just going to, what I was laughing about and thinking about was the period when we
were, you were writing your letters and I was lying awake in the middle of the night worrying
about whatever my evening thing to worry about was.
And I would say like, here I am again, not sleeping on whatever, so probably on Twitter.

(01:10:29):
And you would say, Joanne, go to sleep because you were awake writing your letter, right?
So I mean, technology links us together in some ways too.
But I agree.
I think that what gives me hope is community and people and the fact that we are people
who care about democracy and that's out, that encompasses a lot of people.

(01:10:51):
And that really, really matters.
Thank you.
I just want to thank you both, both for being here tonight and for giving us hope together.

(01:11:12):
But also for your courage, you know, to what you were saying, Joanne, about intimidation
and threats is that there, we've got to look past that fear.
And I think that citizens who are having the courage to come participate in their democracy
continue to support it.
And I think you probably all saw the pamphlet on your chair today.

(01:11:33):
And that is an initiative we have called the Citizen Promise, which is that demanding of
your elected officials that they publicly embrace democracy and they support these nonpartisan
principles of right to vote for eligible citizens, denouncing political violence, refusing to
spread misinformation knowingly about our elections, accepting the outcome and supporting

(01:11:57):
the peaceful transfer of power.
It should be a baseline and expectation of our elected officials.
I've never met a voter that did not agree with those things.
I could go on about the number of politicians who don't have the courage in this moment
to defend democracy.
So thank you all for coming.
Thank you, Joanne and Heather.

(01:12:17):
Thank you for being here and doing the work that you do.
Thank you for coming.