As we end 2020, we have much to be grateful for, but also much work to do.
Driving an autocrat from office is rare and a testament to every American who spent the last four years fighting to protect democracy.
But we always knew Trump was symptom not cause of what ails us, and the threats to our democracy manifesting in his wake only prove that point.
In the mere six weeks since he lost the election, we’ve seen:
More than 18 state Attorneys General ask the Supreme Court to overturn the result;
More than 125 members of Congress join in that effort;
The Chair of the Texas GOP suggest that a consortium of states consider seceding from the Union; and
The Chair of the Arizona GOP call on Trump to “Cross the Rubicon” and deploy the military to stay in power.
And while we have approached this work by bringing together a coalition from the left and the right of liberals and conservatives who share a common commitment to the foundational aspects of our representative democracy, we cannot ignore that at present, all of the above attacks on our democracy have come from Trump’s Republican Party. Indeed an international research institute recently issued a report finding that today’s Republican Party has more in common with the authoritarian parties that control Hungary and Poland than with major parties from the left or right in most advanced democracies.
The Authoritarian Warning Survey, a tracking poll of hundreds of political scientists that we’ve supported in partnership with professors at George Washington University and which measures the current level of threat to American democracy, ticked up to its highest threat level in four years in the weeks after the election.
Surviving Trump’s term in office without the ceiling of our democracy caving in was always just the first phase in our work to protect democracy. And while we will continue to protect against the threat posed by Trumpism moving from inside the Oval Office to outside of it, we’ve spent the past three years preparing for what comes next: a second phase focused on repairing the damage and strengthening the guardrails of our democracy that have been exposed as weak and a third phase focused on addressing the root causes that led to a Trump rising in the first place.
That work will include:
Ensuring Accountability for Trump-era Transgressions to deter recurrence of the abuses we’ve seen. We’ve spent the past several months consulting experts on how countries avoid the recurrence of autocratic governance and other extreme abuses of power. The lessons of history and international experience strongly suggest that seeking to simply move on out of some noble desire for healing or unity is a dangerous mistake that often results in repeat abuses, frequently far worse the second time than the first. In ways that seek to mitigate the risks always attendant in these efforts, we will work to nevertheless ensure our country engages in an appropriate reckoning with what went wrong in order to prevent it from happening again.
Passing immediate reforms like the Protecting our Democracy Act to better guard our system from future would-be autocrats. We’ve spent much of 2020 working with leadership in the House of Representatives to assemble this post-Watergate style legislation that would fix many of the problems Trump exposed. In short, it would restore checks on the presidency, re-empower Congress to do the job the founders envisioned it doing, and further secure our elections from foreign threats. We will work to enact it into law. And we’ll work with Executive Branch agencies to harden their own policies and practices against some of the abuses we’ve seen, while also working to make sure they don’t repeat them.
Fixing our election systems to eliminate barriers to participation and make them more resistant to partisan, foreign, or authoritarian manipulation. We have a far too long history of voter suppression and intimidation in this country, particularly directed at communities of color. That must be stopped once and for all. And we’ve also now seen just how susceptible our system of administering elections and counting votes can be to a determined autocrat. Reflecting on the President’s current crusade to block the peaceful transfer of power and the too warm reception it has gotten from members of his own party, one of our staff recently observed that, the way things are going, if the current version of the Republican Party controls both houses of Congress in 2024 and a Democrat wins the presidential election, there’s no way that Congress certifies those results on January 6, 2025. We have four years to avert the possibility of such a disaster.
Addressing the structural deficiencies in our system that caused people to lose faith in democracy to begin with, and the socio-cultural challenges that are pulling us further apart as a nation. This is the hardest and most long-term of the work ahead, but we must invest in it if we’re ever going to get to a point where our democracy is on stable footing again.
These are massive challenges for sure. And we’ll have more to say about some of the specific projects we’re developing to address them in the months ahead. But I’m confident we can tackle them. That confidence comes from what we’ve been able to do together already.
Just consider some of the accomplishments of recent months, to say nothing of the entire past four years:
We organized the National Task Force on Electoral Crises, a group of experts from the left and right that played a key role in pushing stakeholders across the government and media to prepare for and mitigate electoral crises, including preparing the U.S. public to expect and therefore be inoculated against the exact efforts the President has deployed to try to overturn the election results.
VoteShield, our voter protection software that monitors voter files for foreign or domestic interference, expanded its coverage to 19 states and 120 million voters in total. It has been used by both Republican and Democratic election officials and by more than 100 county- and state-level election administrators in 10 states.
With our partners at Forward Justice, we won a ruling striking down part of a racist North Carolina law and re-enfranchised thousands of citizens in time for them to register to vote in the general election.
We played a key role in preventing the President from being able to induce the Department of Justice to interfere in the election. Cognizant of the way James Comey’s public statements about Hillary Clinton in the latter days of the 2016 election likely helped Trump to victory, the President began to pressure DOJ to interfere in this election early on. Building on public statements we organized from DOJ alumni in defense of the rule of law that dominated numerous news cycles over the past four years, we organized a letter from DOJ alumni condemning Attorney General Barr’s early efforts to use the department to sway the election in Trump’s favor. That letter landed on the front page of USA Today and helped successfully pressure Bill Barr to back off from issuing a report on the Obama-Biden Administration’s handling of the Russia investigation prior to the election, which would have been a highly improper naked effort to interfere in the election.
Through our lawsuit on behalf of the Movement for Black Lives group Don’t Shoot Portland, protesters, and Wall of Moms organizers, and through negotiations with the DOJ, we helped force the Trump administration to withdraw the federal troops that it had deployed to Portland to quash protests and created a deterrent against further federal deployments of militarized forces around the election.
We helped assemble a coalition effort that successfully pressured key state executive and legislative leaders in multiple battleground states to uphold the law and resist Trump’s dangerous efforts to overturn the popular vote in those states.
And this was only a sampling of what we’ve been able to do together in service of our ultimate mission of preventing American democracy from declining into a more authoritarian form of government.
But as is evident now to all of us, we have so much more to do to achieve that goal. So have a safe, healthy, and happy-as-can-be New Year under the circumstances, and let’s make sure we not only protect, but strengthen our democracy in 2021.
Happy Holidays,
Ian and the whole Protect Democracy team
PS: If you or others you know are looking for places to contribute before the end of the year, we'd be honored to have your additional support. Or if you're not in a position to offer financial support, please encourage others to sign up to join our movement here so we grow the number of Americans willing to take a stand for our democracy.
