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

by Stacey Abrams

Victory must begin to mean more than winning a single election. Our obligation, in Georgia and across the nation, is to seize the high road by changing how we campaign and to whom. Demography is not destiny; it’s opportunity. We have to expand our vision of who belongs in the big tent of progress, invest in their inclusion, and talk to them about what’s at stake. This formula is no guarantee of triumph—but I can promise that without it, we don’t stand a chance of conquering the future.

Will Dobson

The rise of populism is a direct threat to our political, social, and cultural fates, whether it occurs in the White House or in Poland. 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 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.

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. From Hungary to India, from the Philippines to Venezuela, the corrosive power of populism wielded by authoritarians—an illiberal political current that tramples on democratic institutions while claiming to speak in the name of the people—has made deep inroads across the globe. And what is so pernicious about populism is that it arrives in disguise.

To the populist, his aim isn’t an argument between competing political visions—the authoritarian populist was never truly motivated by ideas in the first place. Instead, to captivate and hold his audience, he casts his fight in moral terms: good versus evil, light versus dark. Embedded in his rhetoric are plaudits that give his supporters a rationale for their anger. Those who stand with him are patriots; and his opponents are enemies, traitors, or terrorists.

For the authoritarian-in-training, the next target will likely be courts. In democracies, a judiciary willing to uphold the rule of law is the most potent direct constraint on his power. In response, he will politicize their work, question their agenda, and fill their ranks with cronies or sympathizers. Having silenced critiques and manipulated the law, the final act is dismantling the machinery of democracy through undermining the institutions and laws that act as guardrails against the personalistic accumulation of power.

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.

His judicial appointments are record-breaking. 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.

Our greatest weakness in our democracy stems from our treatment of minorities, which serves as a cornerstone of democracy’s utility.

Political power evolves when new people come into the process. 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.

During the Cold War, the USSR very effectively used the propaganda of America’s presence in Latin America, in Asia, and in Africa. They told those nascent democracies emerging from colonialism, “This is a country that tells you to trust them, but they are purveyors of inequality and racism. Why believe them?” Our credibility was deeply damaged in the 1980s, having a president who supported apartheid as an acceptable political and economic system.

believed Jordan when he told me about his passion for early childhood education as a protective shield for our youngest citizens, when Isabella and Kenneth claimed our common values in Spanish, when Kristy and Amy gave me my name sign in ASL. I believed we had a fair shot at winning.

I decided to skip over acceptance and go straight to a new stage that I like to call plotting.

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. Whether it’s the stories of police brutality against blacks, migrant children dying for lack of care in American detention centers, attacks on food stamps for the poor, or the emergence of authoritarian regimes where proud democracies once stood, a disconnect is spreading between who we say we are and how our systems behave. The cause is clear: a massive and inevitable change in the demographic makeup both in the United States and abroad.

Rumblings about this multiracial, multiethnic, youth-driven majority’s clout have grown over the past twenty years. Yet prognostications of a sea change toward a progressive movement have been met with skepticism about whether such a coalition could actually be realized.

But the threat is also coming from inside the coalition itself: citizens grappling with racism, sexism, homophobia, and poverty are the least likely to trust in or utilize their votes. Worse, they are told that it’s wrong to seek out candidates who look like them, share their experiences, or speak aloud about solutions for them. Underlying it all is shortsighted planning that responds to the problem at hand rather than constructing long-term solutions.

For too long, politicians have treated elections as a single night of results. 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.

Recent elections now routinely include the mention of a first: first Muslim mayor, first Native American congresswoman, first transgender state representative. This effective use of identity—either to pick a candidate or to rally a voter—has upended the traditions of American politics, and with that transformation has come a resentment from those who do not see themselves in the description.

More frequently, critics use a revulsion of identity politics—ones based on marginalization or disadvantage—to scare voters into believing their particular choices cost them victories in elections. However logical the argument may sound, though, the reality is that as those outside the norms of politics rise, so too do various rationales for their level of success or defeat. Candidates do not win or lose because they express concern or solidarity for otherness. They win or lose because they ignore it or because some voters are afraid of it.

YelloPain.

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.

This month, we should identify and contact our city councilmember, our county commissioner, and our state representative. Yes, all three, because each manages a distinct set of laws that govern our lives. If all you do is send a quick note to introduce yourself, or leave a voicemail about an issue you care about, then that’s good enough. Elected officials work for us, and they do their best when they know we are paying attention.

The United States, a nation always called upon to lead such efforts in decades past, has fumbled its own defense to COVID-19. Although President Trump was warned by his own experts for months, he responded to the crisis with half-truths coupled with a blasé attitude about what was to come. Health officials went unheeded or were silenced, while political action focused almost exclusively on the virus’s toll on the stock market.

What will hold us together, though, is the stability of our institutions—if we can restore them. Writers like Ari Berman, Jon Ward, and Spencer Overton and attorneys like Marc Elias have waved red flags of warning about voter suppression. Historians Carol Anderson, Kevin Kruse, and Heather Cox Richardson remind us that we’ve been here before. Hansi Lo Wang has doggedly educated America about what’s at stake in the 2020 census, and Nikole Hannah-Jones has educated America about the consequences of 1619 and the arrival of slavery on American shores.

duo of Roxane Gay and Tressie McMillan Cottom,

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.