So at a different time of day,
late on the night before the American
presidential inauguration 2009,
I received an urgent message
to go pick up a package
at a random address in Washington, DC.
I was wearing a tuxedo.
I was at the inaugural ball.
The next day, I was supposed
to enter the White House
as a lawyer for the new president,
but I slipped out of the ball
and I ran in the rain
to the designated address
where the doorman of the building
handed me a plastic grocery bag
bursting at the seams
with three thick binders.
My name was written
on a Post-it note stuck to the back.
"Jason Bourne," it said.
(Laughter)
No.
But I was supposed to bring the binders
with me into the White House the next day.
For the next three years in my service
in the White House counsel's office,
those binders would become my Bible.
They had been left for me by a lawyer
from a previous White House,
and they contained in them memos
dating to the Eisenhower era
that White House
chiefs of staff and counsel had sent
to executive branch officials,
explaining what they could do
and what they were not allowed to do
in the performance of their duties.
And if White House staff
had questions about those things,
I'd just consult the binders,
and if they didn't contain the answer,
I'd call the lawyer
who did my job for President Bush,
and if he didn't know,
we'd call the lawyer
who did it for President Clinton.
It didn't matter whether you were working
for a Democrat or a Republican.
The rules were consistent
from administration to administration.
And you learn quickly in doing this work
that most of those rules
are not legally binding.
They're just traditions, customs,
what we've all come to call norms.
Which meant they were a choice.
You can choose to follow them,
or you could choose not to follow them.
And they contain things
like rules prohibiting White House staff
from calling the Department of Justice
and telling them who to prosecute,
who to investigate,
because in a liberal democracy,
those decisions are supposed
to be made independently of politics.
So after the 2016
American presidential election,
my fellow council alumni and I
began to grow concerned.
What would happen if a leader chose
not to follow those rules?
What would happen if a leader
organized a political movement
in opposition to them?
Well, we didn't really need
to wonder about that
because leaders and movements like that
have been rising across the world
in the 21st century.
These movements
seek to replace liberal democracy
with more authoritarian
forms of government.
And so my fellow council alumni and I
decided to launch
which was a modest effort at first
to try to apply what we'd learned
from those binders
to prevent that from happening
in the United States.
We called our organization
Protect Democracy,
but as the threat has grown,
so have our efforts.
And so I want to take some time today
to describe the specific
nature of the threat
and some choices
we all can make to defeat it.
So the first thing to understand is how
these modern authoritarian movements
dismantle democracies.
Because it's not like it was in the past.
These days, typically, democracy
doesn't die with a loud explosion
and tanks rolling through the town square.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine
is the exception.
More often in the 21st century,
these authoritarian movements
work like Trojan horses.
Typically, their leader
comes to power through an election,
and once inside,
dismantles the system from within.
And they have a playbook for doing so.
The authoritarian playbook.
And it's pretty consistent from Venezuela
to Hungary, Turkey to Brazil.
It contains seven steps. OK?
So first, they politicize
independent institutions,
like the civil service, law enforcement
and eventually the military.
Second, they spread disinformation,
including from the government.
Third, they aggrandize executive power
and undermine checks and balances.
Fourth, they quash dissent,
from limiting what can be said
and taught and read
to using the regulatory state
to punish critics.
Fifth, they scapegoat
and delegitimize vulnerable groups.
This has been the tyrants'
favorite tool since antiquity,
because if you can pit people
against each other on the basis of race,
religion or sexual orientation,
it's easier to pick their pockets
of money and power.
Six, they corrupt elections.
And finally, they incite violence.
And we have seen all of these play out
in the United States in recent years.
And there's a reason
why this playbook can succeed.
It's not that people
openly support authoritarianism,
or even secretly favor it.
But in a time of rapid change
and uncertainty,
the time when so many of us
feel anxiety about the future,
at a time when our democracy
and our politics seem so broken
and so unable to solve our problems,
it can be tempting to think
the solution is just to give someone
a little bit more power.
"I alone can fix it,"
we're told in times like these.
And the truth is, an all-powerful leader
can cut through the morass.
They don't need to negotiate legislation
or overcome filibusters,
or defend their policies in court.
They can just do it.
Mandate that more housing be built.
That we train enough doctors.
That we make our system
ruthlessly efficient.
Maybe discard people who are unproductive.
Or who have disabilities.
Or who are just old.
That we confiscate people's property
to enrich and empower
the leader and his allies.
That we imprison anyone
who stands in the way.
Or who speaks out.
Or questions the leader at all.
Because that is how it always goes.
Just ask the young person in Nicaragua
whose father was disappeared
for saying the wrong thing.
Or the student in Turkey who was arrested
for attending a banned art exhibit,
or the businessman in Russia
whose company was seized
to buy loyalty from an oligarch.
Or the gentleman I met last night
who spent time
in a maximum security prison
merely for calling out for freedom
and democracy in Zimbabwe.
Yeah, I know, there are
some Americans who say,
"But that can't happen here."
That's what all those people thought.
The truth is the only way
it can happen here
is if we think that it can't.
All right. That's pretty dark.
Don't worry, it's OK,
because we still have
the time and the power
to prevent that playbook from succeeding.
How?
By exercising the one thing
that democracies guarantee
that autocracies take away:
the power to choose.
Because underneath it all,
democracy lives or dies
based on choices, right?
In big moments like elections, sure,
but also the countless choices
that citizens make every day
as participants in a democracy.
That's what I learned
from those binders, right?
Choices made in the spotlight,
choices made when no one is looking,
they add up, and they either fortify
democracy or they chip it away.
So how are we doing on this front?
Well, we have made some good choices
that are cause for hope,
and some not so good ones
that are reasons for real concern.
And so I want to give an example
of a democracy-saving choice,
an example of a
democracy-destroying choice,
and we'll end on choices
we all can make to be the difference.
So first, the democracy-saving choice.
Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss
stepped up to serve as election workers
during the pandemic
to help their fellow citizens
in the state of Georgia vote in 2020,
and they did their jobs
with honor and integrity,
never imagining
what was going to happen next.
An autocrat and his allies,
desperate to hold on to power,
falsely accused them
of stealing the election from him.
Their lives were turned upside down.
They became the subjects
of vile, unrelenting,
unthinkable intimidation and harassment.
They received racist death threats.
Ruby was forced to flee her home
on the advice of the FBI
for her own safety.
After what happened to them,
it would have been entirely understandable
if they had decided to slink off
into their private, quiet lives.
And had they chosen to do that,
we would have moved that much
further away from protecting democracy.
But they made a different choice.
They chose to stand up.
Represented by our organization,
they brought multiple lawsuits
against the people
and organizations who defamed them,
depriving them of their reputations
and their safety.
They testified before Congress
about how the former president
and his allies,
rather than protecting them
as public servants and citizens,
targeted them,
putting their lives in danger.
And because they chose
to invoke our laws and our courts
and our institutions
in democracy's defense,
they are establishing a deterrent
against anyone doing to others
what has been done to them.
But not everyone
is making such good choices.
And most worryingly, people with far more
institutional power than Ruby and Shaye
are making choices
that are as bad for democracy
as Ruby's and Shaye's were good.
So, a brief lesson from history.
Between World War I and World War II,
far right authoritarian parties
were rising across Europe.
In Belgium, in Finland,
the mainstream center right parties
saw those on the right flank
for what they were,
threats to the very foundations
of their democratic systems.
And so they did the hard thing.
They chose to unite
with their traditional
opponents on the left
to block the autocrats from power.
In Italy and Germany,
the mainstream center right parties
made a different choice.
They calculated
that they could ride the energy
of those on their far right to power,
and then, once there,
sideline the extremist leaders.
And we know how tragically
that turned out.
Well, in recent years,
too many on America's center right
have made a similar calculation,
that they, too, can ride the energy
on the extremist right to power,
and then sideline the extremist leader.
They still have time
to make a different choice,
because protecting democracy
requires people who disagree
about politics and policy
to put those differences aside
when the very foundations
of self-government itself are at risk.
Now, the choice that Ruby and Shaye made,
and the choice too many
center right electives have made,
are representative of thousands
of similar choices that are being made
on each side of the pro-
and anti-democracy ledger.
Add it all up, you basically get a draw
in which our democracy
is teetering on the edge.
But therein lies our opportunity
to tip the balance.
Because we all have choices
to make as well.
Yes, to vote. And we must do that.
But just as importantly,
choices about how we relate
to one another as citizens.
I know it may seem like a quaint notion,
but how we act towards one another
is fundamental to democracy.
These are the habits of the heart
that Alexis de Tocqueville credited
as being responsible for the maintenance
of a democratic republic
in the United States.
Because how our elected officials behave
and how our government functions
is almost always downstream
of how we act as citizens.
If we meet our neighbors' differences
with suspicion and fear and hostility,
our elected officials
are likely to do the same,
and authoritarians thrive
on that sort of division and hatred.
Autocrats want to feed our fears
because when we're afraid,
we're more likely to see a strong man
as a necessary means of protection.
But if we make a different choice,
we choose to meet our neighbors'
differences as opportunities
for curiosity and for connection,
our elected officials
will eventually follow suit as well.
And then we put democracy
on home court advantage
against authoritarianism.
Right now, kind of acting
too much out of fear, right?
Fear our democracy is dying,
and that's causing us
to be hostile to one another.
And I will admit,
I am guilty of this, too, right?
So I want to share
something I've been reflecting on
that is helping me reorient
how I think about
and approach this moment.
It's a verse from a Leonard Cohen song,
appropriately titled "Democracy,"
and it goes like this.
"It's coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It's here we got the range
and the machinery for change.
It's here we got the spiritual thirst.
It's here the family's broken
and it's here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
democracy is coming to the USA."
You know,
we tend to think of the moment
we're in in negative terms,
as a dark and scary time,
pretending the end of democracy.
But in our long journey
as a nation in the world,
in our long quest to achieve the thing
we’ve aspired to but never had --
a truly inclusive, multiracial,
multiethnic, multireligious democracy --
each major advance towards that goal
has been preceded by a crucible
of crises and conflict.
When brave Black Americans marched
across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma
to secure the right to vote,
there's no downplaying
the pain and suffering,
cracked skulls that they endured,
but they led our nation
to the fuller democracy on the other side.
I think we're living
through a similar moment.
The last gasp of an old order,
making its final stand against the future.
And if we do as the lyrics suggest,
if we open our hearts
in a fundamental way to each other,
on the other side of this crisis,
democracy, true democracy,
I am confident is coming
to the USA.
Those binders that I inherited
that night in 2009,
they never made it
past that administration.
When the new administration
came into office,
there was no one for me to give them to
who would honor them
like so many had before.
So I'm giving them to you.
To all of us.
If our experiment
in self-government is to continue,
we are the ones who are going
to choose to protect it.
We.
The people.
We have this choice
because that's what democracy protects.
Democracy is about having choices.
Authoritarianism is about not having them.
Make the wrong one and we can
absolutely lose that freedom.
But ultimately
the final choice will be ours.
Thank you.
(Applause)