Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

by Stacey Abrams

If you or someone you know has been a victim of voter suppression, do not keep it to yourself or assume that it’s a one-off problem. Or worse, do not blame yourself. Know that voter suppression is designed to look like user error. Despite the complicated rules and the arcane provisions, voters who are denied their rights often believe they did something wrong. As the mantra goes, if you see something, say something.

Not every problem can be solved by lawsuits, but laws rarely improve if they are never challenged. By collecting stories, demanding access, and pushing for more, we not only can help you or your friends, we can build a legal record to potentially force change at the local, state, or federal level.

In order to install President Rutherford B. Hayes, Republicans defending black citizenship withdrew their protections in the Compromise of 1877. Then the laws referred to as Jim Crow allowed for gruesome lynchings, mob riots that burned out black towns, and rigid segregation in education, in economics, and across all aspects of social life.

Identity politics, a term originally used by black women in the 1970s, became a shorthand for combining the two most critical facets of achieving full inclusion in the United States—who you are and how you gain power. Black feminists in the Combahee River Collective used the term to describe how difference had made them the targets of oppression. But, more optimistically, they recognized that using the common experiences of that identity could allow a new political organizing strategy to end that oppression. Over time, more and more groups recognized the resonance of the term, and they used their own common experiences to build coalitions, define the inherent challenges of their struggles, and leverage their new collectivism to press for change. Arguments continue over what constitutes true “identity politics” as a philosophical construct, a public policy imperative, or a flawed means of picking candidates based solely on external characteristics rather than the candidate’s own merit. Rather than engaging in a false choice, I opt to short-circuit the debate with a more simplistic view: identity is real and necessary and intertwined in our politics in such a way that there is no going back.

To own the power that voting provides, we must be positioned to select and elect leaders who will support our ambitions and clear barriers to our inclusion in opportunity.

Single-strand identities do not exist in a household, let alone in a nation. When America is at its best, we acknowledge the complexity of our societies and the complicating reality of how we experience this country—and its obstacles. Yet we never lose sight of the fact that we all want the same thing.

Across the country, there is a notable correlation that shows that when sharp increases in people of color occur in GOP-led states, those same states have seen voting become harder. I needed to focus on voting, yes; but I knew I had to address the foundational tools for how power is allocated. That was the bottom line. Thus, our Fair Fight operation was joined by a separate organization called Fair Count, dedicated to ensuring that hard-to-count populations were seen in the 2020 census—because the census was the core of it all.

Swing states like Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin have seen their statewide elections become more competitive, but legislative lines disproportionately favor the GOP. In almost every state in the country, a perverse version of this mismatch between the population and voting power occurs when the incarcerated are counted in a process known as prison gerrymandering. In all but six states, the incarcerated residents are counted not in their home neighborhoods but in the penal institution. This means their communities have no access to the fiscal windfalls that could come from including them in the area count and no resources return to their hometowns. From the inception of the census, this has been the practice. As the argument goes, prisoners should be counted in the prison beds where they sleep, not in the houses where they lived before imprisonment. The consequence of that decision, however, is that the often struggling, under-resourced, and desperate communities where many of these men and women start never benefit from the investments that could help deter crime and poverty. Moreover, because only Maine and Vermont allow the incarcerated to vote, prisoners in every other state have no political voice. To put a finer point on it, America’s mass incarceration has led to thousands of black and Latino bodies from Democratic-leaning areas being counted in rural white communities that are typically Republican, where most of the penal facilities are located.

I abhor the Electoral College, and I am not alone. Democratic candidates for the presidential nomination have called for its abolition.15 Editorials from the Washington Post and articles in the Atlantic decry its origins16 and its current purpose.17 The process is an antiquated, racist, and classist gerrymandering of the nation’s elections. Proposed as a compromise between the slaveholding South and the classist North, the Electoral College has long skewed elections away from active engagement of the nation. At the time of its conception in 1787, the North and South had roughly equal populations, but in the North, more of the nation’s inhabitants had the right to vote. Southern legislators wanted to count the bodies of slaves for political power but refused to recognize their humanity or grant them suffrage. In the North, leaders fretted about whether immigrants and the uneducated should have a voice in selecting the nation’s chief executive. Mimicking what had become the three-fifths compromise for the treatment of blacks held as slaves, the Electoral College offered the South a version of what had been delivered for congressional seats: the benefit of a population count without the need to grant freedom to the enslaved. Today, the use of the Electoral College continues to dramatically undermine the outcomes of elections. In the past twenty years, two presidents have been elected despite losing the popular vote: George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump.

For blacks in the South, the terrible twisting of voter intent continues, and in areas where blacks comprise 25 percent of the population, five of the six states have voted against the will of Democratic-leaning black voters in the recent elections. Those voters have no chance of aggregating their will with like-minded voters across the fifty states because votes only count for the state where they live. Thus, although 80 to 90 percent of black voters tend to vote Democratic, until they all move to the same state, their votes will be drowned out in Republican states and amplified in Democratic ones.

Populism challenges and pushes into relief the tensions that exist in a democracy; taken to extremes, it tends to presage a slide into flawed democracy and then into authoritarianism. Despite our sanguine belief in the permanence of the U.S. system of governance, according to the annual Democracy Index, we have fallen to number 25 on the list of functional democracies, below Canada, Mauritius, and Uruguay, to name a few. The international scale rates us as a flawed democracy in the twenty-first century, a terrible slide from our preeminence as a world leader. And less than twenty years ago, Turkey had a thriving democracy that now struggles to hold on to the claim.

My deepest fear is that it will take too long to restore our position in the world because our moral credibility has been diminished. It is difficult to articulate ideals of who we should be and who we expect the world to be when we are not living those ideals at home.

By succumbing to the lure of populism made real by a combination of the Electoral College and voter suppression, we now have the most reckless foreign policy that we’ve had in modern history. I may have disagreed with George W. Bush and George H. W. Bush and Clinton and Obama on things, but I never disagreed fundamentally with the position the United States held in the international order. I do now. The persistence of Trump’s style of populism has an effect on how safe we are as Americans, both physically and economically.

Once he leaves office—regardless of when—the actions carried out under Trump’s banner of “America First” will affect any international interventions we attempt. Thus, we have to recognize that the iteration of populist-driven policy is not going to simply be tied off with a new leader. We are going to have to rebuild and restore our credibility, and that means that we’re going to have to confront the very real harm that’s been done to our foreign policy by our current administration.

Winning in 2020 and beyond depends on candidates who recognize that they are not running against Donald Trump or the darker impulses he represents; they are running for America. And there is a difference. If a campaign is waged solely against the current occupant of the White House, then his behavior becomes the fulcrum against which decisions are made—pettiness to match pettiness; incivility for incivility.

The strains of populism that have bolstered class identity in American politics too often become entangled with racism, misogyny, and a hatred for others that leads to sustained hostility and violence—but this is nothing new. The original populists, the Know-Nothing Party of the early 1800s, turned their cries for equity for poor whites into vitriolic attacks on minorities. Trawl social media today and the same animosity wrapped in righteousness has resurfaced. Whether fully embraced by a majority political party or not, in the United States, both parties have welcomed the sleight of hand used to engage populism’s promises of relief to the underdog—often by victimizing another group instead. What has kept the threat of unchecked populism in the United States at bay is democracy itself. Democracy protects the expression of minority needs while supporting majority gains. Trump may win the presidency, but the women’s marches can fill the streets of dozens of cities. The urgency of fighting the corrosive version of populism the Trump administration has heightened (but not created) in America cannot be reduced to simply defeating him in an election. Under his government, our moral standing has weakened, our rule of law has fractured, and our checks and balances have failed. But we must accept this truth. He is not a singularity, and what he represents will continue even after his defeat, so our ambition must be larger than fighting him.

Democracies rarely fall today because of military coups or foreign invasion. Instead, their death is gradual, coming slowly and over time with an erosion of rights and an accumulation of attacks on the institutions that form their backbone.

And what is so pernicious about populism is that it arrives in disguise. While it comes to fruition through democratic electoral politics, it simultaneously has an utter disregard for liberal institutions or norms. The authoritarian populist succeeds at the ballot box but, once in power, chips away at the very architecture of democracy.

The first steps to restoring our nation’s standing are electing a new president, protecting the processes that can deliver a representative and active Congress, and removing the barriers that hinder an engaged citizenry. We must also anticipate the next populist leader’s emergence, which means we must strengthen our democratic institutions, we must fortify our voting rights with permanent fixes in law and the constitution, and we have to live our values and hold leaders accountable when they fail to behave.

By January 2020, Trump has appointed 185 judges to the federal bench, and his confirmations include two Supreme Court justices, dozens of circuit court judges, and more than 100 district court judges. In the populism playbook, reshaping the judiciary is a key metric, and Trump’s alliance with the GOP-controlled Senate has confirmed a slate of judges that are 76 percent male and more than 85 percent white. These appointments are not at all reflective of the composition of our country. And when people are checking us for our values, they can see that our representation in the domestic and international order does not reflect who we are, which negates our ability to criticize their own discrimination.

Survey when autocracies and authoritarian regimes come into power, and their first act is to eliminate minority rights. Populists succeed by treating the other as the enemy, which makes it much easier to do the work of strongman leadership.

We cannot demand that others value minority rights elsewhere when we fail to demand it of ourselves.

An increase in minority participation halts the advance of populism, and minority voices often lead to progress because typically they are upset that they were left out of previous transformations.

Our institutions and our voting rights feed into the most visible example of our decency. How we treat our people is a beacon for how we intend to lead.

Nations watch what we do, and they emulate our behavior, even now. America’s authority to question Russian president Vladimir Putin’s treatment of dissidents weakened when President Trump refused to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for the murder of an American resident and journalist.

One of the ways to reclaim our moral center is for America to show that we want something better. An absolute good happens when we change our national leadership, when we reject the current order. That restores, at least, an intentionality on our part.

America, like much of the democratized world, stands at a crucial moment in history. Concepts of justice and fairness have become more fragile, and now the core elements of our democratic system of government are under siege. While the United States has always fumbled in its pursuit of social equality, what we accepted as basic principles have been eroded, and truths about who we are as free people have shifted—and not for the better.

But as long as we make winning the only thing, when we make crossing that finish line and getting the crown the only metric, we are going to continue to lose our democracy. When winning is all that matters, how you win has less and less relevance. My mission is to remind us that it is not about getting a job. It is about helping the voices of our people be heard. And that’s what democracy is. The power and the purpose of our system is to enable the people with the ability to have their values represented and to select their leaders. Any time we erode that capacity, we are eroding the very republic we seek to protect.

As a nation, we organized ourselves to delegate authority over both the most profound and the most mundane policy matters to the people. In reaction to the tyranny of a monarchy, we established an inclusive, independent process that, in theory, assigned equality to all citizens by virtue of the vote—not by race, class, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, or physical ability. The only hurdle was supposed to be gaining citizenship. Yet, as history and current-day behavior show, we continue to struggle to believe that full citizenship belongs to all who are entitled to hold it. Instead, for more than two hundred years, we’ve seen the act of voting thwarted based on identity. And we’ve witnessed the very identities thrust upon communities by the majority used as a justification for suppression and oppression.

I recently saw a YouTube video by a hip-hop artist named YelloPain. The opening sequence broke my heart as he tours his neighborhood and bitterly describes how useless voting seems. He invokes the promise of the Obama presidency, then laments all the ways life failed to improve. His damning indictment of the act of voting seems at once logical and tragic. But with his next verse, he rips into the fiction of voter apathy, and in his rapid-fire poetry, you come to understand that his reaction is more aptly treated as despair and disillusionment. Like him, eligible, silent voters tend to come from communities that have traditionally been ignored by politicians and by policies. He details the travesties of a system that fails to connect the dots between voting and change.

Whether the result is Occupy or the Tea Party or Black Lives Matter, our current age has seen what happens when people don’t feel represented.

Whether the choice presented is to elect an official or to defeat legislation, the act of casting a vote remains the key. It is a key that unlocks access to opportunity, to change, to the interconnected webs of commerce, politics, and social justice we know we want, and they want us to keep that door closed. But there is absolutely no change if we let the door stay locked. Only if people vote will their voices be heard and their lives change. Our time is now. We have the numbers, the mission, and the opportunity to start constructing the next best version of America. Each of us has the obligation to defend our democracy.

With our collective commitment, the best version of America is within our grasp: one where we guarantee a fair chance to shape the discourse, knowing that victory is not a given; where we understand that sometimes, the fight is the thing. But unless we are committed to the battle for the soul of America, we will forever be held back by our weakest moments. I believe in more. Because I believe in us.

Our arrival at this critical moment is not a surprise. For forty years, a conservative juggernaut of ideology and special interests has eroded trust in government, defunded the capacity of our institutions, and undermined people’s belief in science as an independent, reliable tool for fact-finding. What began during the Reagan Revolution found true believers in the Bush years and flourished when the GOP took power in 2010.

Where Richard Nixon strengthened the role of the United States in environmental action, Republicans who have followed have systematically destroyed our faith in facts. The weakening of our public administration infrastructure has reached its pinnacle in the Trump presidency.

Trump’s actions have built on the GOP’s intentional destruction of institutions, and have left America weakened in a time of international crisis. This erosion of public confidence has clear consequences. Our leaders need our trust in order to compel swift action in a crisis.

Across America, the disdain for evidence is the result of trained cynicism that has affected young and old alike. Without the ability to share a common narrative, government has little chance of producing a successful solution.

In 2018, Trump effectively dismantled the Obama-era global health security system that had been recommended by Ron Klain, Vice President Joe Biden’s chief of staff. The objective—to understand how viruses move beyond borders and to prepare a communications and response strategy for transnational health crises—had its genesis in the nation’s multilateral engagement on the Ebola virus. Swift, worldwide action had not only accelerated treatments to countries facing infection, it slowed transmission to other nations, including the United States. Trump’s shortsighted decision, while devastating in this current crisis, should galvanize a restoration of the global health security system and prompt a deeper rethinking of what constitutes genuine national security threats.

The friction in our nation is not simply between right and left. What we face is a more fundamental shift of changing norms and wholly upended ambitions that can no longer coexist. Our current political moment reflects existential challenges coming to a head. And it is the progeny of twentieth-and twenty-first-century assaults on the role of government, the legitimacy of elections, and the intent of those elected to lead. But no matter who we elect as president, one person alone cannot fix what ails us or forestall what is to come. We will have to grapple with liberal ideals in real time, and we will have to marry our promise of freedom with the reality of what that means in a society strained by the speed of change. What will hold us together, though, is the stability of our institutions—if we can restore them.

Our Time Is Now is equal parts synthesis and prognostication. I don’t know who will be the Democratic nominee for president in 2020; and though I think Democrats will win, I honestly can’t know. Foreign interference, disinformation campaigns, the fractured communications network and a soul-deep fatigue will work against our highest goals. But what is also true, though, is that the recipe for victory is neither secret nor out of reach. What I have attempted in these pages is to create a sense of urgency, buffered by ways to ensure we make the most of what is coming at us. We cannot stop the future, but if we are wise, we will prepare for the variations in outcomes. And if we are smart and nimble, we will shape the future as we can—because our time is now.