January 28, 2025 • 32 mins
The United to Preserve to Democracy and the Rule of Law speaker series event is a conversation with Harvard Professor Daniel Ziblatt and former Pennsylvania Congressman Conor Lamb. The event is co-sponsored by DemocracyFIRST and was recorded in Harrisburg, PA.
Daniel Ziblatt is a historian, expert on democracy, and the author of four books, including How Democracies Die (2018), co-authored with Steven Levitsky, a New York Times best-seller and described by The Economist magazine as “the most important book of the Trump era.” In 2023, he published Tyranny of the Minority, also with Steve Levitsky. The book is an analysis of American democracy in comparative perspective, also a New York Times bestseller.
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You're listening to the United to Preserve Democracy and the Rule of Law
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Speaker Series presented by Democracy First. Join us for a conversation with
the director of Harvard University's Menda de Goonsburg Center for European
Studies, Daniel Ziblatt. Ziblatt is the author of four books including How
Democracies Die co-authored with Stephen Levitsky, a New York Times bestseller,
and described by The Economist magazine as the most important book of the Trump
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era. This conversation was recorded at the Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania in August 2024 and was moderated by former Congressman Conor
Lamb. Professor Ziblatt, your expert independent analysis on the historic
tests we face in safeguarding the future of democracy and upholding the rule of
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law. So that's an easy one to start off with, right? Go ahead.
Yeah, thank you everybody for coming out tonight. I haven't been in Harrisburg
before. It's wonderful to be here. I love the humidity. It's great to be here also.
Thank you Conor for doing this as well and thanks to the organizers for
organizing this great event. Yeah, so this, you know, we hope this is a
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conversation about democracy. I mean, we're in a particular moment where there's
good reason that people are thinking about this. It's, you know, on the eve of an
election and there's a lot of attention to the horse race, but I think it's
really important to keep in mind the stakes of any election, in particular
this election. And so I wrote these two books in a way, you know, as a political
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scientist, as a professor of political science, I teach at Harvard. I have the
luxury of stepping back and trying to think about the big picture. And I think
that is useful to do because it does alert us to the stakes of things to look
at other historical periods in our own history, look at the history of
democracy in other places, to try to understand both the threats, the peril
that democracies face, but also to emphasize that there are lots of sources
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of resilience in American democracy and to think about those as well. Because if
we think about those, then I think we can reinforce those sources of resilience
to deal with these challenges. So anyway, wonderful to be here. Perfect. I think
the best place to start off, I noticed when I was in office and I was sharing
with the professor before we came back, particularly on January 6th, you realize
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how the word democracy means so many different things to so many different
people in these countries these days. I don't know if it used to be that way or
not. But sadly, you know, people on both sides of the issue on January 6th believe
that they were doing what they were doing in order to uphold or protect our
democracy. And so I thought maybe we could start by having you tell everyone
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here how you sort of define democracy or what you mean by that term. And I also
think it would be interesting if you could say whether that has changed for
you at all as you've studied the threats to democracy and looked at it in a
global perspective, sort of what you mean when you use that term today. Yeah,
that's a great place to start to make sure people are all sort of on common
ground. You know, democracy, of course, at some basic level is just ruled by the
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people. But that doesn't tell you that much because, you know, which people,
everybody claims to speak on behalf of the people. And so, you know, I really
subscribe to a pretty simple definition, I would say, of sort of how political
scientists generally think about what democracy is in this kind of system that
exists in different parts of the world. It's really premised on three pillars.
One key pillar is competition, competition for power. There has to be a
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mechanism for people to compete for powerful, for meaningful offices. You
know, a monarch is not a democracy because people just inherit the
positions. People are competing for power and they have to have free and fair
competition. That's one pillar. Second important pillar is the pillar of
participation. You have to have a broad segment of the electorate, all adult
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citizens who have a say, who can both vote and choosing who runs for office and
also being able to run for office themselves. And then, and so the broader
the electorate, the more people who have the right to vote who actually can
vote, the more democratic a political system is. And then the third big pillar,
I would say, is this kind of key pillar of civil liberty, civil rights, protection
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of civil rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, all sorts of
these kinds of basic civil liberties, the basic freedoms that all of us value so
much. So each of these three things, I think, are key and if you constrict them,
then you're weakening democracy. If you expand them, then you're reinforcing
democracy. So yeah, so in terms of how my ideas have changed, I mean, I would say
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one thing that I've grown more alert to is the nature of the importance of
majority rule as well as minority protections. So democracy, of course, is
about majority rule, but it's not only about majority rule. It's also about
protections of my political minorities, people who have an opposing view, or
maybe on the losing side of a particular issue, they have rights as well. And so
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democracy has to figure out how to balance these and every democracy does
this in different ways. And I think what I've become more aware of is in the US,
we have a system, because it was designed in a pre-democratic era, that gives more
protection to political minorities than any other democracy. And in some ways,
that's a strength, but it also, when we see certain structures of our
institutions where, you know, losers of votes can actually become office holders,
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you know, this happens with the Electoral College, then we kind of have a
weird system in some ways that gives a lot of protections to minorities and not
as many protections to majorities, but it's a balancing act when it needs both
of these things. As you've studied it, do you feel that there's the time when
American democracy was in a stronger position than it is today? Are things
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getting worse or changing, or how do you look at that at that issue of sort of
how we're moving through time as a democracy? Yeah, that's a great question,
you know, because I do really think that we're actually much more democratic
today than we were, who we've been for most of our history. I mean, even, you know,
through the 1960s, until the 1964, 65, the passage of the Voting Rights Act, you
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know, the African Americans didn't have protections to the right to vote in large
segments of the United States. So we were not, in my view, a full-blown democracy
until the mid-1960s. So we are more democratic today than we were in 1960.
There's no question, but despite all of the threats, I think, you know, if you
believe the international indices, there's an organization, Freedom House,
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that ranks democracies all around the world and gives them scores zero to a
hundred. About 10 years ago, the U.S. had a score of 93 out of 100, which put us
on par with Great Britain, Canada, Germany. Today, we have a score of 84. So in the
last 10, which puts us, that's the same score that I think they give to Romania
and two points lower than Argentina. So, you know, and the reason they give the
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U.S. those scores is when you have a really difficult transition of
presidential power, an attempt to block a transition of power, when you have
violent threats against election workers, if you have efforts to make it more
difficult to vote, which we've had in some states, then Freedom House gives you a
score lower than Argentina. So I think in the last 10 years, we have experienced
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what political scientists call democratic backsliding, not major democratic
backsliding, but some kind of democratic backsliding that leaves us better off
than we were 50 years ago, but, you know, we face these real challenges today.
And since you mentioned sort of the global picture, before we get into the
American specific questions about voting rights and the different
institutions that we have, there is sort of a perception that some of this
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democratic backsliding is happening in a lot of different, at least Western
countries all at once. Can you kind of give us a sense of what people think is
going on at the global scale and why some of this is happening?
Yeah, so, you know, we lived, you know, I was 18 years old when the Berlin Wall fell
down, fell, and I spent the year as a high school senior, or the year after high
school in Germany, and so I experienced this moment, and, you know, living through
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the 1990s was this period where democracy really seemed to be on the march, and the
number of new democracies in the world was expanding dramatically. And then it
reached a kind of high point in around 2010, if you count the organizations that
count the number of democracies, the number of democracies in the world that
kind of reached this high point around 2010, and since about 2010, there has been
this general slide. But like my other point, and there are actually more
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democracies today than there were in 1991 in the world. And so as bad as the
current moment seems, we have to kind of keep this in perspective. So, but there
have been, since 2010, these kinds of general assaults on democracy. What's
changed, I think, really, is the way that democracies get into trouble, or the
way democracies die is the title of my book is. I mean, what, during the Cold War,
usually democracies die. Three quarters of democratic breakdowns happened at the
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hands of military generals, military coups. Since the end of the Cold War, most
democracies get into trouble at the hands of elected leaders. Politicians who
are elected on a basis of democracy come into power and then assault democratic
institutions once they're in power. And so places like Hungary, Victor Orban in
Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, Chavez in Venezuela, these attacks come from the
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right, come from the left. But in all of these cases, people get elected to
office and then once in office attack democratic institutions. And so, you know,
what I think has happened in the US, I mean, the way I think about what's
happened in the US, and the reason we wrote this book back in 2018, that the
first book, as my co-author, I'm a co-author Steve Levitsky, works on
Latin American politics. Most of my crisp and studying European politics, we
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sort of saw, we, you know, we taught courses together, we'd studied these other
countries, and we thought, you know, there's signs that something like this, you
know, could happen, they're dangerous at least in the US. And so I think a similar
process has unfolded in the US over the last 10 years, where politicians
elected attack democratic institutions. What is important though, again, to, I
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think, to think about is the US is unusual compared to these other countries
I've listed, because it's a very rich democracy, high GDP per capita, and it's
a pretty old democracy. And the evidence is really clear that no democracy in the
20th century over the age of 50 has ever broken down. The US is certainly older
than 50, and no democracy, if you put a per capita income of $17,000, has ever
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broken down. A word four times richer than that. So the US should be immune from
these trends, and I think what worries me and has continued to motivate me to work
on this topic is that the US, unlike West European or peer nations, other rich
democracies, has experienced democratic backsliding, like these other countries
that tend to be much poorer and have much less democratic experience. And so that
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leaves us in a pretty unique situation. Yeah, it's having gone through, you know,
to me, January 6th is this crystallizing moment where it's sort of the easiest
point to think about, you know, a really low moment for American democracy, where I
guess Freedom House docked us some points for that one. So that must be how we
know that it was really bad. But on that day and say for the month afterward,
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you know, even in a congressional district like mine, where there were a lot
of people that probably voted for Trump and it was a little more conservative,
you could tell how disgusted people were by January 6th at a broad level, like not
just, you know, sort of blue jersey wearing partisan Democrats. I'll never
forget this guy. He lived a couple towns over for me and he was on the local news
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because when that all happened, he made some kind of marble sculpture of
the Capitol or something in his backyard and he drove all the way down to where
the security fences outside the Capitol had been erected after January 6th.
This was right before Biden's inauguration and he just put it there and he took
some pictures of himself next to it and it sort of got viral on our local
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social media and people held it up as an example of this, you know, just this
really ordinary American who felt such a strong connection to the national
Capitol and the ideals that it represented. And I think a lot of us at that
time felt like it was going to be a moment of maybe a little bit of a culture
shift or a swing back in favor of broad, all-American support for democracy.
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And instead, it just sort of seemed like interest in January 6th really waned,
like as the committee got underway and whenever, you know, Biden would sort of
give a speech about democracy or something, it just felt like the interest
of the public in the abstract idea of our democracy and what needs to be done
to defend it was not sustained. Is that something you see in these other
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countries where you look at the problem that it's hard to keep people focused in
almost a nonpartisan way on the system itself? Yeah, it's really, it's
interesting because I do think that defending democracy is long-grinding
work and it can get to be kind of boring to keep talking about threats to
democracy, threats to democracy, people sort of get tired of hearing and I think
in some ways the Harris presidential campaign has discovered that to some
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degree and talks about threats to freedom and you have to make the threat to
democracy is not an abstraction, affects people's lives and one needs to make those
connections clear. So that's really important to do that because the, you
know, what happens in, you know, take a country like Hungary, you know, where
Viktor Orban was a prime minister, center-right prime minister back in the
late 1990s, was voted out of office and basically decided when he was in the
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opposition he never wanted to lose again, ran again, 2010 got elected and has never
lost again. And, you know, for 14 years and that's been done at the stake at the
price of Hungarian democracy. I mean, you don't, you don't have, you know, military
in the streets and so on but the rules have been changed in such a way to make
it really, really difficult to vote out the incumbent. And as this has happened,
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the opposition, you know, each time election comes around people mobilize,
they say they're defending democracy but it's tiring work and if you keep losing,
especially, it's especially tiring. So that's why it's so critical, I think, to
continue to be aware of, first of all, that it is hard, long-grinding. You have to
play the long game and it requires continued attention to it. And the second
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thing is just to understand that it's connected to that democracy is not an
abstraction, not just defending abstract principles. You know, the democracies
do two things that no other system in the world do. Number one, they protect our
basic rights better than any other political system in the world. All the
rights that we take for granted without a democracy, they simply can't be
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protected. And so we have to understand that connection. That's the first thing.
And also what democracies do is in a democracy is the only political system
in the world where you can get rid of a leader if you don't like him in a
peaceful way. And that's an incredible power and, you know, people kind of
forget that. And if you remember these kind of really concrete ways in which
being in a democracy matters, then I think it helps to make that make the point.
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I think another factor in the, in this January 6th case that was particularly
upsetting to me as well, because I'd seen instances of this in other historical
periods. You know, there's often assaults on parliament buildings. In the book we
tell the story in France in 1934, there was an attack on the French parliament
building as they were trying to decide who the new prime minister would be.
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Those veterans groups, right wing militia groups, attacked the building with
long poles and flags and very similar kind of stuff. It turned out a lot of the
right wing members of parliament knew this was going to happen, allowed it to
happen, then after the fact excused it and said the real criminals were the
police who were beating up on the protesters. And so you had this kind of
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split reaction of French society. The Republicans who are kind of centrist and
left-leaning said this is an attack on French democracy. The right wingers said
this was not. And you had two parallel histories and it left France incredibly
vulnerable. This is 1934. By 1940, when Germany invaded, you had large segments
of the French public who embraced Hitler. You know, the French were nationalists.
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They hated the Germans. But there was a very famous slogan at the time, the leader
of the French socialist was a guy named Leon Blum. They said, better Hitler than
Blum. And so they really, this kind of fear and animosity towards the other side.
And the reaction to the event, I think, played a really important role. So the
lesson I draw from that is that you have to have a cross-partisan response to
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these kind of events where political elites of the left and the right
understand that democracy matters more than party. And if you had you had, I mean,
kind of think of an alternative world in which you had politicians from the left
and the right, Republicans and Democrats uniformly condemning this is
unacceptable. I think public opinion would look different today. I'll give you an
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example of where that has happened. Spain in 1981, shortly after Spain's
transition to democracy, there was an attack on the Spanish parliament. These
these kind of low ranking military guys attacked the parliament, came in with guns,
shot bullets into the ceiling, all the members of the Spanish parliament ducked
on their desks. And very quickly, the police came in, they rounded these guys up
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and then within days from the fascist, post-bastionist right all the way to the
Communist left, these guys marched in the streets, tens of thousands of protesters
in the streets saying, we're going to defend Spanish democracy. So it'll never
happen again. And Spanish democracy has been pretty stable since. So I think these
cross partisan responses saying that violence is unacceptable and democracy
are really critical. That's that's an excellent point. And I feel professionally
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obligated to state for the record that actually what in the immediate aftermath
of January 6 was exactly that where you even had Mitch McConnell condemning what
had happened that day. The difference was that that one side sort of lost their
will to criticize their own leader. And in fact, the the institutional response
in Congress was to write and then pass a bill designing a 9 11 style commission
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to investigate the capital, meaning there would have been politicians on it. So if
you remember the January 6 committee as being filled with Democratic politicians
plus Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the reason for that is because after we pass
the 9 11 no politician bill in the House, Republicans decided to defeat it in the
Senate and they didn't want a commission of any type. So we ended up with this
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sort of political commission response as a result, even though technically
bipartisan, but that was because we couldn't get one party to cooperate with
it, which I think naturally leads into where we should go next, which is your
work on tyranny of the minority. And I don't know if that was a it's a very
accurate title. I don't know if it was a pun at all on the idea that originally
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my understanding of the founders is that they were also very concerned about
tyranny of the majority. And so they designed a system where sort of popular
majorities would not be able to quickly seize all the levers of power and impose
their will on everyone in sort of a chaotic and ever-changing manner. And
that one of the things I talked to my students about is that debate really
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continued a lot and you can see it echoed in the Lincoln-Douglas debates in
the run-up to the Civil War, which I think is that's the sort of conceptual
problem I throw at my law students every semester, which is you know here were
Lincoln's arguments and here were Douglas's arguments, which side are you on?
Without telling them whose arguments they were, most of them are on Douglas's
side because Douglas was saying let's let local majorities decide these really
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important moral issues for themselves. Who are we to tell people where they
should stand on the important moral issues of our time? And Lincoln was more in
the path of saying there are some things you just never do and God tells us we
shouldn't do, you know, being very explicitly religious and sort of
spiritual about it. But the issue was slavery and so we know in history Lincoln
was right and Douglas was wrong, but the way they made the arguments it almost is
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very different today. So I'm just kind of curious with that background I take from
your book that tyranny of the minority has become a bigger threat to our
democracy in some ways today than the tyranny of the majority is and if you
could talk about that dynamic a little bit. Yeah I'm gonna assign those debates to
my students that's a great idea thank you. So yeah so tyranny the majority is
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exactly right. I mean it continues to be a concern and I think in a place like
Hungary it is a concern. Majorities can have too many too many powers where it's
too easy to change the Constitution. A majority can pass laws that essentially
prohibit the opposition, trench itself in power. That's a problem in many parts
of the world and it continues to be a problem anywhere. I mean potentially a
problem in the US as well. But we you know we have a constitution that a
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pre-democratic constitution, the oldest constitution in the world that was
designed to combat that fear and I think it has done so very well. But over time
in some ways exactly right that the problem of minority rule has become a
bigger problem and so I'll just give you a couple of examples. So you know we're
the only democracy in the world within electoral college. Other countries used
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to have electoral colleges to elect their presidents. They gradually got rid
of them. Argentina was the last 1994 and so what this means that we're the only
presidential democracy in the world where it's possible to lose an election and
become president. I mean it's kind of an unusual thing. Then you combine that with
the Senate you know and you know this is an institution that has lots of virtues
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to it but with two representatives per state. This was designed originally as a
compromise between big states and small states and that serves that purpose. But
the population difference between big states and small states has grown so
dramatically. You know that now Wyoming with half a million people versus
California 30 million people very very large discrepancy each with two
senators. You then add to that the Supreme Court with you know what's
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important to have judicial review and independent judiciary without term limits
what this means is that a majority may a temporary majority may select some
justices and they may exist in power for a whole generation and to work the will
of the majority of contemporary majorities. And so you add all of these
institutions up and we're the only democracy in the world I should say
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with lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices. And our Senate's the second
most unequal in terms of population with the exceptions of Brazil and Argentina.
So in each of these domains we're an outlier and you add them all up and we
live in a system in which it's a democracy which it's the hardest
democracy in the world for a majority to win power and once they win power to
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actually govern. And so again we need to have carbots we need to have protections
for for minorities it's certain that my favorite phrase phrase and this is you
know certain not everything should be up for grabs in an election not everything
should be up for grabs to majorities we need to have carbots and I think but
there's certain things where majorities should govern and I guess I would say two
domains in particular elections the person who wins the most votes should be
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able to hold office and legislation legislators you should majority should
pass laws and legislatures. So these are two domains certainly where majorities
ought to rule but there's other areas where majorities ought not rules basic
civil rights basics of liberties and so I think we can we need to kind of
readjust the balance is essentially the point that I make and make ourselves
some ways like more like other democracies that have worked out this
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balance a little bit more effectively. Yeah we're gonna talk a little bit about
voting rights but before we get to voting rights is there is there any
evidence in the studies that you've done that that the dynamics that you just
talked about sort of wear down people's willingness to participate or the way
that they feel about their vote if they feel that you know it doesn't even
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matter if I vote for this party because they're gonna get in there and the
court's gonna strike it down or the Senate's gonna refuse to take up the
issue. I would always hear this a lot after mass shootings I think every
member of Congress has probably different experiences on different issues but
particularly after mass shootings you know you would get these people just
enraged about the fact that if you believe public opinion polls you may
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have more than 90% of people that agree on some very basic common-sense measures
when it comes to guns and yet you know we really cannot pass significant
firearm legislation. Does that does that take a toll in America compared to
other societies that don't have these same things or? Yeah I think so and I
think we're really beginning to see evidence of it now I mean we're on a
whole series of issues gun control being maybe the most prominent I would say
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abortion rights where there's a kind of difference between the court and where
public opinion is even efforts to combat poverty and inequality if you believe
opinion polls you know Americans generally support this and often or raise
them in a way that's another example you know where there's where majority
opinion is not being on very reasonable basic public policy questions not taking
away the rights rights of free speech from anybody where majorities don't get
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their way and so voters become disaffected and I think that in part fuels
a lot of the kind of populist rage that we see in the US that's one thing another
thing though I would say another impact of this is on the Republican Party I
mean this is from my view part of the way the reason the Republican Party has
radicalized to the way that it has is that it's possible to win the
presidency without appealing to a majority of Americans you know so Trump
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won the election in 2016 with 46% of the vote could this could happen again
2024 and so when you have your base pushing you in one direction normally
in a democracy when you lose you kind of regroup like a baseball team or a firm
you hire a new manager you hire new players new new employees but in the
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case of the Republican Party because they haven't needed to win a majority to
sort of breaks the key link and a democrat the self-correcting mechanism of
the of a democracy and so this allows for the base to radicalize the party and
and you know the pushback of our institutions are not really working so
has that second effect as well absolutely okay we're gonna we're gonna move to
questions in about five to ten minutes whenever we finish up this next topic so
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if you have questions out there or you'd like to think of one you might want to
start putting that on the back burner now I want to talk about the issue of
voting rights specifically I mean we've talked about how democracy really means
this idea that the broadest possible group of people are able to participate
and able to have some feeling that their participation is meaningful and so
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apart from the whole issue of you know all these different veto points and
tyranny of the minority can you talk just a little bit about the situation of
voting rights in the United States what's that issue and some of these big
pieces of legislation like the Freedom to Vote Act that have been proposed but
not passed what they might do and sort of how urgent of a priority all this
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should be for people that care about democracy compared to sort of all the
other things we talked about tonight yeah so you know we have an interesting
system in the US where again partly because of our old Constitution we
don't have an affirmative right to vote in our in the US Constitution most
democracies have that and you may you know we have obviously protections you
know you can't restrict the right to vote on the basis of gender on the basis of
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race and so on but there's no positive statement and if we did have that I
think it would be a lot easier to defend voting rights but because we don't have
that the way that we protect voting rights in the US is through legislation
through the through the Congress and the Voting Rights Act in particular in the
mid-60s provided a whole series of protections for voting rights of
federal regulation of voting rights so that states can't just simply change
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the rules in a way to disenfranchise voters they have to get approval to do
this and this was a system that's you know been in place since the 1960s and
it's worked remarkably well this is why we are more democratic today so this
you know the laws make a difference in people's lives this is not just some
legislation that passes in Washington DC so recently though the kind of key
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premise of that some key elements of the of that law have been undermined through
a Supreme Court decision and the critics of that on the court there was one of my
favorite quotes with some Ruth Bader Ginsburg who the argument was well we
don't need this these protections anymore because you know systems working
pretty well people's voting rights seem to be protected and Ruth Bader
Ginsburg said this is kind of like going out in a rainstorm with an umbrella and
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saying I don't need the umbrella anymore because I'm staying dry you know so
that's you know you need the umbrella still you need the protections so what
these voting these these bits of these two main house resolution one and house
resolution four I think in 2022 that came up or in part an effort to kind of
re-protect voting rights make it easier to vote same-day voter registration
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which exists in lots of states but not everywhere but also including this are
some measures to deal with campaign finance to deal with money in politics
so all the things that people get pissed off about in our elections money in
politics gerrymandering these bills are intended to deal with this to reduce
partisan gerrymandering to have independent commissions and so on so I
(28:25):
encourage all of you to go look at the HR one HR for John Lewis voting rights
act freedom of vote act and so these past the house you were there at the time
said and then they stalled in the Senate due to the filibuster and you actually
had a majority of senators because the Democrats had a majority willing to pass
it Joe Biden was really to sign it this would have made a major difference and
(28:47):
again you can kind of become disaffected and think well laws you know what
come you know just change the laws that really gonna change things as evidence by
the voting rights act it really does change things I mean you know voter
participation of African-Americans in the US South before the passage of the
voting rights act voter turnout was like 2% people just didn't couldn't vote
and now you know incredibly high rates of voter turnout so these laws do make a
(29:08):
difference and you know none of this will change before the November election
but I guess if things turn around in January 2025 these are gonna be the
first items I think on the on the on the agenda yeah we sort of got this
interesting natural experiment in 2022 which is that you know for for a while
and I first went into Congress in 2018 so I had the chance to see if you remember
(29:31):
the the 2018 general election there was a lot of controversy coming out of
Georgia in particular and the Stacey Abrams run for governor and that so the
issue of voter suppression was very much kind of in the firmament after that
and the the argument against some of the bills that we wanted to do as
Democrats was you know this is sort of overblown anyone that wants to vote can
(29:53):
vote you know people stand in long lines but they're allowed to vote if they
want you know the people that want to vote or voting was sort of the claim and
then we didn't pass those bills but what happened in 2020 was and a bunch of
states because of the pandemic changed the way their elections were run they
either increased mail-in voting increased early voting they did a lot of
(30:13):
things to just make it easier for people to get their ballot into where it needed
to be and you saw increases in participation in a lot of different
types of places you know states in the South that where historically voter
suppression was an issue but also here in Pennsylvania where we were this
interesting outlier where we happened to pass a mail-in voting bill at the state
(30:34):
level almost by accident that had nothing to do with the pandemic and it
was it was driven and supported mostly by Republicans here in Harrisburg
actually I think they believe that it would advantage their voters who tend
to be older homeowners that sort of thing and but then the the mail-in voting
right that it created came in very useful to people in the pandemic when
they didn't necessarily want to stand in long lines and go into closed spaces but
(30:58):
the point being that when you liberalize the rules about sort of when you could
go and cast your ballot all of a sudden a lot of people were participating that
weren't before and it suggested that while that you might not call that
outright suppression clearly there was an unmet demand before that the rules
could affect is that yeah you know and if you think about other democracies most
(31:19):
democracies do everything they can to make it easy to vote and historically in
the US that's not been the case so you have election day on a Sunday or make it
a holiday you know you have automatic voter to turn 18 you get sent an ID and
you can go vote these are all efforts to make it as easy as possible to vote and
for too long I think in the US that's not been the case and so you know these
(31:39):
these are efforts to do it and you know and I should say that there's you know
it's not for a long time I think Democrats thought and Republicans thought
as well that higher voter turnout benefits Democrats and for a period that
seemed to be the case but you know my sense of the evidence is that's coming
out is increasing it's not automatically clear that obviously the case
it's not a partisan issue and so really the defense of this is two things one
(32:00):
that's just inherently more democratic if people can vote and that's a good in
itself but I think there's this other sort of less appreciated good which is
the people who tend not to vote are the people who are not as partisan aligned
in partisan fashion they are you know there's been efforts to kind of figure
out who are the people who are not voting what would happen if they did vote
and these are often a kind of great reservoir of potentially under less
(32:24):
polarized voters and it may actually depolarize our politics to have more
people vote so in the end I think it helps address this issue.
You're listening to the United to Preserve Democracy and the Rule of Law
(00:04):
Speaker Series presented by Democracy First. Join us for a conversation with
the director of Harvard University's Menda de Goonsburg Center for European
Studies, Daniel Ziblatt. Ziblatt is the author of four books including How
Democracies Die co-authored with Stephen Levitsky, a New York Times bestseller,
and described by The Economist magazine as the most important book of the Trump
(00:28):
era. This conversation was recorded at the Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania in August 2024 and was moderated by former Congressman Conor
Lamb. Professor Ziblatt, your expert independent analysis on the historic
tests we face in safeguarding the future of democracy and upholding the rule of
(00:49):
law. So that's an easy one to start off with, right? Go ahead.
Yeah, thank you everybody for coming out tonight. I haven't been in Harrisburg
before. It's wonderful to be here. I love the humidity. It's great to be here also.
Thank you Conor for doing this as well and thanks to the organizers for
organizing this great event. Yeah, so this, you know, we hope this is a
(01:12):
conversation about democracy. I mean, we're in a particular moment where there's
good reason that people are thinking about this. It's, you know, on the eve of an
election and there's a lot of attention to the horse race, but I think it's
really important to keep in mind the stakes of any election, in particular
this election. And so I wrote these two books in a way, you know, as a political
(01:36):
scientist, as a professor of political science, I teach at Harvard. I have the
luxury of stepping back and trying to think about the big picture. And I think
that is useful to do because it does alert us to the stakes of things to look
at other historical periods in our own history, look at the history of
democracy in other places, to try to understand both the threats, the peril
that democracies face, but also to emphasize that there are lots of sources
(02:00):
of resilience in American democracy and to think about those as well. Because if
we think about those, then I think we can reinforce those sources of resilience
to deal with these challenges. So anyway, wonderful to be here. Perfect. I think
the best place to start off, I noticed when I was in office and I was sharing
with the professor before we came back, particularly on January 6th, you realize
(02:22):
how the word democracy means so many different things to so many different
people in these countries these days. I don't know if it used to be that way or
not. But sadly, you know, people on both sides of the issue on January 6th believe
that they were doing what they were doing in order to uphold or protect our
democracy. And so I thought maybe we could start by having you tell everyone
(02:43):
here how you sort of define democracy or what you mean by that term. And I also
think it would be interesting if you could say whether that has changed for
you at all as you've studied the threats to democracy and looked at it in a
global perspective, sort of what you mean when you use that term today. Yeah,
that's a great place to start to make sure people are all sort of on common
ground. You know, democracy, of course, at some basic level is just ruled by the
(03:04):
people. But that doesn't tell you that much because, you know, which people,
everybody claims to speak on behalf of the people. And so, you know, I really
subscribe to a pretty simple definition, I would say, of sort of how political
scientists generally think about what democracy is in this kind of system that
exists in different parts of the world. It's really premised on three pillars.
One key pillar is competition, competition for power. There has to be a
(03:29):
mechanism for people to compete for powerful, for meaningful offices. You
know, a monarch is not a democracy because people just inherit the
positions. People are competing for power and they have to have free and fair
competition. That's one pillar. Second important pillar is the pillar of
participation. You have to have a broad segment of the electorate, all adult
(03:51):
citizens who have a say, who can both vote and choosing who runs for office and
also being able to run for office themselves. And then, and so the broader
the electorate, the more people who have the right to vote who actually can
vote, the more democratic a political system is. And then the third big pillar,
I would say, is this kind of key pillar of civil liberty, civil rights, protection
(04:14):
of civil rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, all sorts of
these kinds of basic civil liberties, the basic freedoms that all of us value so
much. So each of these three things, I think, are key and if you constrict them,
then you're weakening democracy. If you expand them, then you're reinforcing
democracy. So yeah, so in terms of how my ideas have changed, I mean, I would say
(04:35):
one thing that I've grown more alert to is the nature of the importance of
majority rule as well as minority protections. So democracy, of course, is
about majority rule, but it's not only about majority rule. It's also about
protections of my political minorities, people who have an opposing view, or
maybe on the losing side of a particular issue, they have rights as well. And so
(04:57):
democracy has to figure out how to balance these and every democracy does
this in different ways. And I think what I've become more aware of is in the US,
we have a system, because it was designed in a pre-democratic era, that gives more
protection to political minorities than any other democracy. And in some ways,
that's a strength, but it also, when we see certain structures of our
institutions where, you know, losers of votes can actually become office holders,
(05:21):
you know, this happens with the Electoral College, then we kind of have a
weird system in some ways that gives a lot of protections to minorities and not
as many protections to majorities, but it's a balancing act when it needs both
of these things. As you've studied it, do you feel that there's the time when
American democracy was in a stronger position than it is today? Are things
(05:41):
getting worse or changing, or how do you look at that at that issue of sort of
how we're moving through time as a democracy? Yeah, that's a great question,
you know, because I do really think that we're actually much more democratic
today than we were, who we've been for most of our history. I mean, even, you know,
through the 1960s, until the 1964, 65, the passage of the Voting Rights Act, you
(06:03):
know, the African Americans didn't have protections to the right to vote in large
segments of the United States. So we were not, in my view, a full-blown democracy
until the mid-1960s. So we are more democratic today than we were in 1960.
There's no question, but despite all of the threats, I think, you know, if you
believe the international indices, there's an organization, Freedom House,
(06:24):
that ranks democracies all around the world and gives them scores zero to a
hundred. About 10 years ago, the U.S. had a score of 93 out of 100, which put us
on par with Great Britain, Canada, Germany. Today, we have a score of 84. So in the
last 10, which puts us, that's the same score that I think they give to Romania
and two points lower than Argentina. So, you know, and the reason they give the
(06:49):
U.S. those scores is when you have a really difficult transition of
presidential power, an attempt to block a transition of power, when you have
violent threats against election workers, if you have efforts to make it more
difficult to vote, which we've had in some states, then Freedom House gives you a
score lower than Argentina. So I think in the last 10 years, we have experienced
(07:09):
what political scientists call democratic backsliding, not major democratic
backsliding, but some kind of democratic backsliding that leaves us better off
than we were 50 years ago, but, you know, we face these real challenges today.
And since you mentioned sort of the global picture, before we get into the
American specific questions about voting rights and the different
institutions that we have, there is sort of a perception that some of this
(07:33):
democratic backsliding is happening in a lot of different, at least Western
countries all at once. Can you kind of give us a sense of what people think is
going on at the global scale and why some of this is happening?
Yeah, so, you know, we lived, you know, I was 18 years old when the Berlin Wall fell
down, fell, and I spent the year as a high school senior, or the year after high
school in Germany, and so I experienced this moment, and, you know, living through
(07:56):
the 1990s was this period where democracy really seemed to be on the march, and the
number of new democracies in the world was expanding dramatically. And then it
reached a kind of high point in around 2010, if you count the organizations that
count the number of democracies, the number of democracies in the world that
kind of reached this high point around 2010, and since about 2010, there has been
this general slide. But like my other point, and there are actually more
(08:18):
democracies today than there were in 1991 in the world. And so as bad as the
current moment seems, we have to kind of keep this in perspective. So, but there
have been, since 2010, these kinds of general assaults on democracy. What's
changed, I think, really, is the way that democracies get into trouble, or the
way democracies die is the title of my book is. I mean, what, during the Cold War,
usually democracies die. Three quarters of democratic breakdowns happened at the
(08:42):
hands of military generals, military coups. Since the end of the Cold War, most
democracies get into trouble at the hands of elected leaders. Politicians who
are elected on a basis of democracy come into power and then assault democratic
institutions once they're in power. And so places like Hungary, Victor Orban in
Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, Chavez in Venezuela, these attacks come from the
(09:04):
right, come from the left. But in all of these cases, people get elected to
office and then once in office attack democratic institutions. And so, you know,
what I think has happened in the US, I mean, the way I think about what's
happened in the US, and the reason we wrote this book back in 2018, that the
first book, as my co-author, I'm a co-author Steve Levitsky, works on
Latin American politics. Most of my crisp and studying European politics, we
(09:26):
sort of saw, we, you know, we taught courses together, we'd studied these other
countries, and we thought, you know, there's signs that something like this, you
know, could happen, they're dangerous at least in the US. And so I think a similar
process has unfolded in the US over the last 10 years, where politicians
elected attack democratic institutions. What is important though, again, to, I
(09:49):
think, to think about is the US is unusual compared to these other countries
I've listed, because it's a very rich democracy, high GDP per capita, and it's
a pretty old democracy. And the evidence is really clear that no democracy in the
20th century over the age of 50 has ever broken down. The US is certainly older
than 50, and no democracy, if you put a per capita income of $17,000, has ever
(10:11):
broken down. A word four times richer than that. So the US should be immune from
these trends, and I think what worries me and has continued to motivate me to work
on this topic is that the US, unlike West European or peer nations, other rich
democracies, has experienced democratic backsliding, like these other countries
that tend to be much poorer and have much less democratic experience. And so that
(10:32):
leaves us in a pretty unique situation. Yeah, it's having gone through, you know,
to me, January 6th is this crystallizing moment where it's sort of the easiest
point to think about, you know, a really low moment for American democracy, where I
guess Freedom House docked us some points for that one. So that must be how we
know that it was really bad. But on that day and say for the month afterward,
(10:56):
you know, even in a congressional district like mine, where there were a lot
of people that probably voted for Trump and it was a little more conservative,
you could tell how disgusted people were by January 6th at a broad level, like not
just, you know, sort of blue jersey wearing partisan Democrats. I'll never
forget this guy. He lived a couple towns over for me and he was on the local news
(11:18):
because when that all happened, he made some kind of marble sculpture of
the Capitol or something in his backyard and he drove all the way down to where
the security fences outside the Capitol had been erected after January 6th.
This was right before Biden's inauguration and he just put it there and he took
some pictures of himself next to it and it sort of got viral on our local
(11:41):
social media and people held it up as an example of this, you know, just this
really ordinary American who felt such a strong connection to the national
Capitol and the ideals that it represented. And I think a lot of us at that
time felt like it was going to be a moment of maybe a little bit of a culture
shift or a swing back in favor of broad, all-American support for democracy.
(12:02):
And instead, it just sort of seemed like interest in January 6th really waned,
like as the committee got underway and whenever, you know, Biden would sort of
give a speech about democracy or something, it just felt like the interest
of the public in the abstract idea of our democracy and what needs to be done
to defend it was not sustained. Is that something you see in these other
(12:27):
countries where you look at the problem that it's hard to keep people focused in
almost a nonpartisan way on the system itself? Yeah, it's really, it's
interesting because I do think that defending democracy is long-grinding
work and it can get to be kind of boring to keep talking about threats to
democracy, threats to democracy, people sort of get tired of hearing and I think
in some ways the Harris presidential campaign has discovered that to some
(12:51):
degree and talks about threats to freedom and you have to make the threat to
democracy is not an abstraction, affects people's lives and one needs to make those
connections clear. So that's really important to do that because the, you
know, what happens in, you know, take a country like Hungary, you know, where
Viktor Orban was a prime minister, center-right prime minister back in the
late 1990s, was voted out of office and basically decided when he was in the
(13:14):
opposition he never wanted to lose again, ran again, 2010 got elected and has never
lost again. And, you know, for 14 years and that's been done at the stake at the
price of Hungarian democracy. I mean, you don't, you don't have, you know, military
in the streets and so on but the rules have been changed in such a way to make
it really, really difficult to vote out the incumbent. And as this has happened,
(13:37):
the opposition, you know, each time election comes around people mobilize,
they say they're defending democracy but it's tiring work and if you keep losing,
especially, it's especially tiring. So that's why it's so critical, I think, to
continue to be aware of, first of all, that it is hard, long-grinding. You have to
play the long game and it requires continued attention to it. And the second
(13:57):
thing is just to understand that it's connected to that democracy is not an
abstraction, not just defending abstract principles. You know, the democracies
do two things that no other system in the world do. Number one, they protect our
basic rights better than any other political system in the world. All the
rights that we take for granted without a democracy, they simply can't be
(14:18):
protected. And so we have to understand that connection. That's the first thing.
And also what democracies do is in a democracy is the only political system
in the world where you can get rid of a leader if you don't like him in a
peaceful way. And that's an incredible power and, you know, people kind of
forget that. And if you remember these kind of really concrete ways in which
being in a democracy matters, then I think it helps to make that make the point.
(14:40):
I think another factor in the, in this January 6th case that was particularly
upsetting to me as well, because I'd seen instances of this in other historical
periods. You know, there's often assaults on parliament buildings. In the book we
tell the story in France in 1934, there was an attack on the French parliament
building as they were trying to decide who the new prime minister would be.
(15:00):
Those veterans groups, right wing militia groups, attacked the building with
long poles and flags and very similar kind of stuff. It turned out a lot of the
right wing members of parliament knew this was going to happen, allowed it to
happen, then after the fact excused it and said the real criminals were the
police who were beating up on the protesters. And so you had this kind of
(15:22):
split reaction of French society. The Republicans who are kind of centrist and
left-leaning said this is an attack on French democracy. The right wingers said
this was not. And you had two parallel histories and it left France incredibly
vulnerable. This is 1934. By 1940, when Germany invaded, you had large segments
of the French public who embraced Hitler. You know, the French were nationalists.
(15:45):
They hated the Germans. But there was a very famous slogan at the time, the leader
of the French socialist was a guy named Leon Blum. They said, better Hitler than
Blum. And so they really, this kind of fear and animosity towards the other side.
And the reaction to the event, I think, played a really important role. So the
lesson I draw from that is that you have to have a cross-partisan response to
(16:05):
these kind of events where political elites of the left and the right
understand that democracy matters more than party. And if you had you had, I mean,
kind of think of an alternative world in which you had politicians from the left
and the right, Republicans and Democrats uniformly condemning this is
unacceptable. I think public opinion would look different today. I'll give you an
(16:26):
example of where that has happened. Spain in 1981, shortly after Spain's
transition to democracy, there was an attack on the Spanish parliament. These
these kind of low ranking military guys attacked the parliament, came in with guns,
shot bullets into the ceiling, all the members of the Spanish parliament ducked
on their desks. And very quickly, the police came in, they rounded these guys up
(16:49):
and then within days from the fascist, post-bastionist right all the way to the
Communist left, these guys marched in the streets, tens of thousands of protesters
in the streets saying, we're going to defend Spanish democracy. So it'll never
happen again. And Spanish democracy has been pretty stable since. So I think these
cross partisan responses saying that violence is unacceptable and democracy
are really critical. That's that's an excellent point. And I feel professionally
(17:13):
obligated to state for the record that actually what in the immediate aftermath
of January 6 was exactly that where you even had Mitch McConnell condemning what
had happened that day. The difference was that that one side sort of lost their
will to criticize their own leader. And in fact, the the institutional response
in Congress was to write and then pass a bill designing a 9 11 style commission
(17:38):
to investigate the capital, meaning there would have been politicians on it. So if
you remember the January 6 committee as being filled with Democratic politicians
plus Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the reason for that is because after we pass
the 9 11 no politician bill in the House, Republicans decided to defeat it in the
Senate and they didn't want a commission of any type. So we ended up with this
(18:01):
sort of political commission response as a result, even though technically
bipartisan, but that was because we couldn't get one party to cooperate with
it, which I think naturally leads into where we should go next, which is your
work on tyranny of the minority. And I don't know if that was a it's a very
accurate title. I don't know if it was a pun at all on the idea that originally
(18:23):
my understanding of the founders is that they were also very concerned about
tyranny of the majority. And so they designed a system where sort of popular
majorities would not be able to quickly seize all the levers of power and impose
their will on everyone in sort of a chaotic and ever-changing manner. And
that one of the things I talked to my students about is that debate really
(18:45):
continued a lot and you can see it echoed in the Lincoln-Douglas debates in
the run-up to the Civil War, which I think is that's the sort of conceptual
problem I throw at my law students every semester, which is you know here were
Lincoln's arguments and here were Douglas's arguments, which side are you on?
Without telling them whose arguments they were, most of them are on Douglas's
side because Douglas was saying let's let local majorities decide these really
(19:06):
important moral issues for themselves. Who are we to tell people where they
should stand on the important moral issues of our time? And Lincoln was more in
the path of saying there are some things you just never do and God tells us we
shouldn't do, you know, being very explicitly religious and sort of
spiritual about it. But the issue was slavery and so we know in history Lincoln
was right and Douglas was wrong, but the way they made the arguments it almost is
(19:28):
very different today. So I'm just kind of curious with that background I take from
your book that tyranny of the minority has become a bigger threat to our
democracy in some ways today than the tyranny of the majority is and if you
could talk about that dynamic a little bit. Yeah I'm gonna assign those debates to
my students that's a great idea thank you. So yeah so tyranny the majority is
(19:50):
exactly right. I mean it continues to be a concern and I think in a place like
Hungary it is a concern. Majorities can have too many too many powers where it's
too easy to change the Constitution. A majority can pass laws that essentially
prohibit the opposition, trench itself in power. That's a problem in many parts
of the world and it continues to be a problem anywhere. I mean potentially a
problem in the US as well. But we you know we have a constitution that a
(20:14):
pre-democratic constitution, the oldest constitution in the world that was
designed to combat that fear and I think it has done so very well. But over time
in some ways exactly right that the problem of minority rule has become a
bigger problem and so I'll just give you a couple of examples. So you know we're
the only democracy in the world within electoral college. Other countries used
(20:36):
to have electoral colleges to elect their presidents. They gradually got rid
of them. Argentina was the last 1994 and so what this means that we're the only
presidential democracy in the world where it's possible to lose an election and
become president. I mean it's kind of an unusual thing. Then you combine that with
the Senate you know and you know this is an institution that has lots of virtues
(20:57):
to it but with two representatives per state. This was designed originally as a
compromise between big states and small states and that serves that purpose. But
the population difference between big states and small states has grown so
dramatically. You know that now Wyoming with half a million people versus
California 30 million people very very large discrepancy each with two
senators. You then add to that the Supreme Court with you know what's
(21:21):
important to have judicial review and independent judiciary without term limits
what this means is that a majority may a temporary majority may select some
justices and they may exist in power for a whole generation and to work the will
of the majority of contemporary majorities. And so you add all of these
institutions up and we're the only democracy in the world I should say
(21:45):
with lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices. And our Senate's the second
most unequal in terms of population with the exceptions of Brazil and Argentina.
So in each of these domains we're an outlier and you add them all up and we
live in a system in which it's a democracy which it's the hardest
democracy in the world for a majority to win power and once they win power to
(22:05):
actually govern. And so again we need to have carbots we need to have protections
for for minorities it's certain that my favorite phrase phrase and this is you
know certain not everything should be up for grabs in an election not everything
should be up for grabs to majorities we need to have carbots and I think but
there's certain things where majorities should govern and I guess I would say two
domains in particular elections the person who wins the most votes should be
(22:29):
able to hold office and legislation legislators you should majority should
pass laws and legislatures. So these are two domains certainly where majorities
ought to rule but there's other areas where majorities ought not rules basic
civil rights basics of liberties and so I think we can we need to kind of
readjust the balance is essentially the point that I make and make ourselves
some ways like more like other democracies that have worked out this
(22:51):
balance a little bit more effectively. Yeah we're gonna talk a little bit about
voting rights but before we get to voting rights is there is there any
evidence in the studies that you've done that that the dynamics that you just
talked about sort of wear down people's willingness to participate or the way
that they feel about their vote if they feel that you know it doesn't even
(23:12):
matter if I vote for this party because they're gonna get in there and the
court's gonna strike it down or the Senate's gonna refuse to take up the
issue. I would always hear this a lot after mass shootings I think every
member of Congress has probably different experiences on different issues but
particularly after mass shootings you know you would get these people just
enraged about the fact that if you believe public opinion polls you may
(23:33):
have more than 90% of people that agree on some very basic common-sense measures
when it comes to guns and yet you know we really cannot pass significant
firearm legislation. Does that does that take a toll in America compared to
other societies that don't have these same things or? Yeah I think so and I
think we're really beginning to see evidence of it now I mean we're on a
whole series of issues gun control being maybe the most prominent I would say
(23:57):
abortion rights where there's a kind of difference between the court and where
public opinion is even efforts to combat poverty and inequality if you believe
opinion polls you know Americans generally support this and often or raise
them in a way that's another example you know where there's where majority
opinion is not being on very reasonable basic public policy questions not taking
away the rights rights of free speech from anybody where majorities don't get
(24:21):
their way and so voters become disaffected and I think that in part fuels
a lot of the kind of populist rage that we see in the US that's one thing another
thing though I would say another impact of this is on the Republican Party I
mean this is from my view part of the way the reason the Republican Party has
radicalized to the way that it has is that it's possible to win the
presidency without appealing to a majority of Americans you know so Trump
(24:44):
won the election in 2016 with 46% of the vote could this could happen again
2024 and so when you have your base pushing you in one direction normally
in a democracy when you lose you kind of regroup like a baseball team or a firm
you hire a new manager you hire new players new new employees but in the
(25:06):
case of the Republican Party because they haven't needed to win a majority to
sort of breaks the key link and a democrat the self-correcting mechanism of
the of a democracy and so this allows for the base to radicalize the party and
and you know the pushback of our institutions are not really working so
has that second effect as well absolutely okay we're gonna we're gonna move to
questions in about five to ten minutes whenever we finish up this next topic so
(25:31):
if you have questions out there or you'd like to think of one you might want to
start putting that on the back burner now I want to talk about the issue of
voting rights specifically I mean we've talked about how democracy really means
this idea that the broadest possible group of people are able to participate
and able to have some feeling that their participation is meaningful and so
(25:51):
apart from the whole issue of you know all these different veto points and
tyranny of the minority can you talk just a little bit about the situation of
voting rights in the United States what's that issue and some of these big
pieces of legislation like the Freedom to Vote Act that have been proposed but
not passed what they might do and sort of how urgent of a priority all this
(26:11):
should be for people that care about democracy compared to sort of all the
other things we talked about tonight yeah so you know we have an interesting
system in the US where again partly because of our old Constitution we
don't have an affirmative right to vote in our in the US Constitution most
democracies have that and you may you know we have obviously protections you
know you can't restrict the right to vote on the basis of gender on the basis of
(26:33):
race and so on but there's no positive statement and if we did have that I
think it would be a lot easier to defend voting rights but because we don't have
that the way that we protect voting rights in the US is through legislation
through the through the Congress and the Voting Rights Act in particular in the
mid-60s provided a whole series of protections for voting rights of
federal regulation of voting rights so that states can't just simply change
(26:57):
the rules in a way to disenfranchise voters they have to get approval to do
this and this was a system that's you know been in place since the 1960s and
it's worked remarkably well this is why we are more democratic today so this
you know the laws make a difference in people's lives this is not just some
legislation that passes in Washington DC so recently though the kind of key
(27:17):
premise of that some key elements of the of that law have been undermined through
a Supreme Court decision and the critics of that on the court there was one of my
favorite quotes with some Ruth Bader Ginsburg who the argument was well we
don't need this these protections anymore because you know systems working
pretty well people's voting rights seem to be protected and Ruth Bader
Ginsburg said this is kind of like going out in a rainstorm with an umbrella and
(27:40):
saying I don't need the umbrella anymore because I'm staying dry you know so
that's you know you need the umbrella still you need the protections so what
these voting these these bits of these two main house resolution one and house
resolution four I think in 2022 that came up or in part an effort to kind of
re-protect voting rights make it easier to vote same-day voter registration
(28:04):
which exists in lots of states but not everywhere but also including this are
some measures to deal with campaign finance to deal with money in politics
so all the things that people get pissed off about in our elections money in
politics gerrymandering these bills are intended to deal with this to reduce
partisan gerrymandering to have independent commissions and so on so I
(28:25):
encourage all of you to go look at the HR one HR for John Lewis voting rights
act freedom of vote act and so these past the house you were there at the time
said and then they stalled in the Senate due to the filibuster and you actually
had a majority of senators because the Democrats had a majority willing to pass
it Joe Biden was really to sign it this would have made a major difference and
(28:47):
again you can kind of become disaffected and think well laws you know what
come you know just change the laws that really gonna change things as evidence by
the voting rights act it really does change things I mean you know voter
participation of African-Americans in the US South before the passage of the
voting rights act voter turnout was like 2% people just didn't couldn't vote
and now you know incredibly high rates of voter turnout so these laws do make a
(29:08):
difference and you know none of this will change before the November election
but I guess if things turn around in January 2025 these are gonna be the
first items I think on the on the on the agenda yeah we sort of got this
interesting natural experiment in 2022 which is that you know for for a while
and I first went into Congress in 2018 so I had the chance to see if you remember
(29:31):
the the 2018 general election there was a lot of controversy coming out of
Georgia in particular and the Stacey Abrams run for governor and that so the
issue of voter suppression was very much kind of in the firmament after that
and the the argument against some of the bills that we wanted to do as
Democrats was you know this is sort of overblown anyone that wants to vote can
(29:53):
vote you know people stand in long lines but they're allowed to vote if they
want you know the people that want to vote or voting was sort of the claim and
then we didn't pass those bills but what happened in 2020 was and a bunch of
states because of the pandemic changed the way their elections were run they
either increased mail-in voting increased early voting they did a lot of
(30:13):
things to just make it easier for people to get their ballot into where it needed
to be and you saw increases in participation in a lot of different
types of places you know states in the South that where historically voter
suppression was an issue but also here in Pennsylvania where we were this
interesting outlier where we happened to pass a mail-in voting bill at the state
(30:34):
level almost by accident that had nothing to do with the pandemic and it
was it was driven and supported mostly by Republicans here in Harrisburg
actually I think they believe that it would advantage their voters who tend
to be older homeowners that sort of thing and but then the the mail-in voting
right that it created came in very useful to people in the pandemic when
they didn't necessarily want to stand in long lines and go into closed spaces but
(30:58):
the point being that when you liberalize the rules about sort of when you could
go and cast your ballot all of a sudden a lot of people were participating that
weren't before and it suggested that while that you might not call that
outright suppression clearly there was an unmet demand before that the rules
could affect is that yeah you know and if you think about other democracies most
(31:19):
democracies do everything they can to make it easy to vote and historically in
the US that's not been the case so you have election day on a Sunday or make it
a holiday you know you have automatic voter to turn 18 you get sent an ID and
you can go vote these are all efforts to make it as easy as possible to vote and
for too long I think in the US that's not been the case and so you know these
(31:39):
these are efforts to do it and you know and I should say that there's you know
it's not for a long time I think Democrats thought and Republicans thought
as well that higher voter turnout benefits Democrats and for a period that
seemed to be the case but you know my sense of the evidence is that's coming
out is increasing it's not automatically clear that obviously the case
it's not a partisan issue and so really the defense of this is two things one
(32:00):
that's just inherently more democratic if people can vote and that's a good in
itself but I think there's this other sort of less appreciated good which is
the people who tend not to vote are the people who are not as partisan aligned
in partisan fashion they are you know there's been efforts to kind of figure
out who are the people who are not voting what would happen if they did vote
and these are often a kind of great reservoir of potentially under less
(32:24):
polarized voters and it may actually depolarize our politics to have more
people vote so in the end I think it helps address this issue.
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