Here is the full transcript of lawyer and writer Ian Bassin’s talk titled “How To Spot Authoritarianism — And Choose Democracy” at TED 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
A Mysterious Package on Inauguration Eve
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. 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.
The Importance of White House Norms
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.
The Rise of Authoritarian Movements
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 what 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.
The Modern Authoritarian Playbook
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.
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.
The Appeal of Authoritarianism
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.
The Dark Side of Authoritarianism
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.
The Power of Choice in Democracy
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?
The Impact of Everyday Choices
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.
Standing Up for Democracy
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.
The Power of Legal Action
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.
Historical Lessons on Authoritarianism
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 their 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.
The Dangers of Political Calculation
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.
The Power of Individual Choices
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, we’re 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.
A Verse of Hope
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.
The Path to a Fuller Democracy
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.
The Choice Is Ours
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.