Friends,

The year is coming to a close amidst a historic political crisis in our nation and continued democratic decline across the globe. 

At home, a decidedly illiberal President and his allies have continued their all-out assault on the fundamental norms and institutions of our democracy. Abroad, the global march of authoritarianism shows no signs of slowing down as leaders who reject the basic tenets of democracy — emboldened by their counterparts' victories around the world — act more brazenly and with impunity. Indeed, autocrats now run three of the world’s four largest democracies, with systems in the US and India teetering as we speak.

Protect Democracy Advisor Yascha Mounk's 2016 warning that democracies are not as secure as people may think and that “the warning signs are flashing red” now rings truer than ever as support for illiberal alternatives to democracy increases across the globe. 

Many have asked why is this happening? There are a host of theories, but let me share two.

The first can be seen in what is known as "the elephant graph." This graph, put forward by the economist Branko Milanovic, shows that between 1988 and the financial crisis, as globalization scrambled labor markets, the vast majority of income growth went to the bottom 70% of global earners and the top 1%. Whereas those whose incomes are in the top third — mostly the middle class in Europe and the United States (the elephant's trunk in the graph below) — saw their incomes stagnate. 

But this alone can't be the entire story. After all, the global poor (largely in places like China and India) have done very well in that graph and neither of those countries is heading in more democratic directions. 

After reading Ed Luce's excellent book The Retreat of Western Liberalism, the following image came to mind that has helped me understand how the elephant graph may be interacting with a range of other dynamics to bring about the current strains on democratic systems.

I call this the Volcano chart. What it aims to capture and convey is that we are experiencing shifts at the most foundational level that are the social, economic, and geopolitical analogs to tectonic plates shifting below the earth's surface. These are represented in the bottom third of the chart as "Underlying Conditions." As those plates shift, they draw hot lava up to the surface and into the base of the volcano.

And if those changes — to labor markets, to migration patterns, to climate — were all that were happening, the lava might sit in that bottom third of the volcano and stay there.

But that's not all that's happening. Because as is represented by the middle layer, there are a bunch of "Accelerants" further heating and boiling the lava — those range from Fox News style media to social media to Russian interference to democratic distortions like partisan gerrymandering. These bring the lava further to the top of the volcano.

And there it would stay, kept in place by a set of checks and balances represented by the top third of the volcano. Except that those checks are failing — Congress is abdicating its role, oversight is being stonewalled by the executive, the Department of Justice is being weaponized and politicized by the Attorney General. And when those checks fail, the volcano explodes. 

A journalist for Time Magazine asked me earlier this year if there were other examples in history when this volcano exploded. Sadly, I reflected, yes: World War II in Europe. 

But one helpful aspect of the volcano visual is it also helps organize one's thoughts about what is needed to address each of the contributing factors to the explosion.

To address the problems driving each layer of the volcano, we need an effort about as big as the width of that layer. So for example, an organization with a relatively narrow footprint like Protect Democracy can have success remedying the checks and balances problems we're seeing at the top of the volcano. Indeed, below in this email are countless ways in which we're having impact checking these erosions.

To redress the accelerants — Russian disinformation, the downsides of social media, etc. — one needs an operation with a significantly larger footprint (which is the reason we continue to rapidly scale). And to address the underlying conditions, well, one needs a movement of massive breadth.

The good news is: that movement is stirring. From Hong Kong to Delhi, Bolivia to Iran, people across the globe are rising up against autocracy.

Here in the United States, we're racking up wins in defense of our checks and balances, laying the foundation to renew and strengthen our democracy, and building a movement. 

Just this week, we impeached an autocratic president. While that is an unfortunate event for a Republic, in these circumstances it is a huge win for the rule of law and it's the one on which we end the year, which is worth appreciating. Because to have failed to have done so in these circumstances would have been even worse.

At Protect Democracy we worked hard to advance the impeachment process to ensure that the President is held accountable for his constitutional transgressions in a number of ways: 

• We helped shape the national conversation around impeachment by authoring original legal research explaining why what President Trump did with respect to Ukraine constitutes bribery under the impeachment clause. That piece was quoted heavily in the Atlantic, in several pieces in the Washington Post, and on MSNBC; and the position was publicly embraced by Speaker Pelosi. Our work was convincing enough that both the Republican National Committee and Wall Street Journal editorial page felt compelled to respond; 
• We then organized a statement from more than 850 legal scholars asserting that the President committed impeachable offenses and helped put out a statement from more than 2,000 historians calling on the House to impeach the President. Both statements were promoted by Speaker Pelosi here, here, and here and were entered into the congressional record by the Speaker for future "students to study"; 
• We helped to fund legal representation and security expenses for the Ukraine whistleblower;
• We filed civil litigation to get more facts in front of the American people and have a number of continuing efforts ongoing to ensure more facts are known and seen by the public; and
• We have served and will continue to serve as a resource to Congress on the legal processes in the House and Senate.

This was the culmination of a year's worth of work across countless areas where our democracy is under threat. In 2019, we scaled our voter protection software so that we're now protecting more than 100 million voter registrations from improper manipulation; we filed a multitude of legal actions that have already led to resounding court victories such as our nationwide injunctions blocking Trump's use of emergency powers to build a border wall and his Administration's attempt to whiten the country by making it harder for low income green card holders to become citizens; we succeeded in getting multiple states to replace their aging and vulnerable voting machines in time for 2020; and we've worked with Members of Congress and all of the leading presidential contenders to advance our policy agenda for restoring democratic guardrails, even working with The New York Times to get candidates from Warren to Walsh to commit to signing much of it into law. 

But the above is only a very small fraction of the work that we've undertaken this year. 

At the start of 2019, we set out three strategic priorities for the year:

1. Protect a Free and Fair 2020 Election
2. Ensure That the President Cannot Use His Office to Place Himself Above the Law
3. Put in Place Everything That Will Be Needed to Sign Key Reforms into Law if a Window Opens in 2021

Summaries of our progress on each is detailed below.  

In our lawsuit against one of the leaders of the voter suppression movement, we obtained a favorable decision establishing a new precedent that federal statutes are actionable against online forms of voter intimidation and forced a great settlement for our clients. We also filed a lawsuit to re-enfranchise citizens who are denied the right to vote during probation or parole under North Carolina’s felon disenfranchisement law. And while we lost lawsuits in the lower courts to block a NY county from sending to ICE the personal information of its residents who register to vote at the DMV, and another to challenge the decision of the South Carolina Republican Party to cancel their primary election, we are considering next moves in those cases and believe we are right on the law in both.

We built on the precedents we set in our lawsuit which forced Brian Kemp to resign as Secretary of State in Georgia in 2018 and a similar lawsuit we filed against Rick Scott in Florida by releasing a legal memo which maps out how the President could abuse the powers of his office to try to give himself unfair advantages in the 2020 election and what the states and Congress should do to prevent that from happening. We then worked with reporters to tell that story, such as here.

As part of this multi-pronged effort to stop office-holders from using their official power to interfere in elections, we also wrote an op-ed in a local Mississippi paper calling on their Attorney General to recuse himself from an investigation of one of his rivals for the gubernatorial race. That op-ed got picked up by a local Mississippi editorial board who endorsed it in full and called on the AG to comply and then it was covered again in The Hill, further elevating attention to this problem and prompting several state lawmakers to reach out to us about crafting legislation to prevent these kinds of issues in the future.

In the appeal of the lawsuit by former Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos against President Trump for defaming her, we again defeated President Trump’s legal team in a New York State court where they claimed that the President is above the law and immune from civil suits in state court while in office. We were the only amicus filer in the case and the court confirmed, in line with our brief, that the President is not above the law. We also filed an amicus brief in a pending court battle between the House Committee on the Judiciary and former White House counsel Don McGahn over McGahn’s refusal to comply with the Committee’s subpoena. We filed the brief on behalf of 20 legal experts, former officials, and former members of Congress — all Republicans — arguing that the founders did not intend for presidents and their advisers to wield the power of rejecting congressional oversight.

Two projects we undertook in 2018 also bore fruit this year. In 2018, we successfully petitioned the federal court in Washington to unseal the “Watergate Roadmap” — a document that laid out the evidence of criminal activity by Richard Nixon to the House Judiciary Committee. This year, as we had planned, that release served as precedent for the House Judiciary Committee’s recent victory in their petition to unseal grand jury evidence from Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation.

And a white paper we issued in 2018 laying out the legal and constitutional reasons why the President's assertion that he could "do whatever he wanted" with the Department of Justice was incorrect played a role this year in the final version of the Mueller Report. We had elevated the white paper's arguments in legal filings on behalf of a bipartisan group of former Department of Justice officials and in the media for more than a year, driving a national discussion on the issue. When Special Counsel Mueller ultimately issued his report, the last section of it analyzed the President's lawyers' claims that the President could not legally obstruct justice based on the President's "do whatever he wanted" theory and rejected it, relying in large measure on the arguments we'd been making leading up to the report's issuance.

Earlier this month, we invalidated Trump’s declaration of a national emergency along the Southern border as a way to circumvent Congress to fund his border wall, and secured a nationwide injunction blocking the Administration from using military funds to build the wall. We also secured a nationwide injunction blocking the Trump Administration from implementing a rule designed to make it harder for lower-income green card holders –– disproportionately people of color –– to become citizens.

Earlier this year, our lawsuit forced the Justice Department to admit that its report linking immigrants to terrorism –– used to justify the Travel Ban –– was based on erroneous statistics, prompting congressional oversight and setting up an ongoing court battle to force the Administration to rescind the report. We also filed a lawsuit challenging a DHS operation that surveils those who speak out against the President’s immigration policies to prevent a reemergence of some modern-day COINTELPRO.

To ensure we seize a potential post-Trump window for reform, our Roadmap for Renewal lays out a forward-looking policy agenda for restoring democratic guardrails. Our strategy for enacting it has been to get its major elements introduced during the current Congress and simultaneously obtain commitments from the leading presidential contenders that, if elected, they would push these reforms into law. And we're making progress on both fronts. 

In Congress, we worked with members of the Senate and the House to introduce the Security from Political Interference in Justice Act to protect the Department of Justice from White House interference; the No President Is Above the Law Act to ensure that presidents can be held accountable after leaving office for criminal conduct; and built a coalition that passed a major reform to the National Emergencies Act through the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee on an 11-2 bipartisan vote.

On the presidential side, we engaged with 18 of the 19 presidential candidates from both major parties on these policy proposals, with over a dozen leading candidates already seeking written briefings from us on democracy issues. And as mentioned earlier, we worked with The New York Times to get the candidates on the record on these reforms so that if any of them are elected, it's harder for them to become enamored of the powers of the office and deviate from those commitments. 

But even with all of this progress, it's clearly not enough. When we formed Protect Democracy three years ago, we assembled a group of the world's leading experts on authoritarianism and democratic decline to advise us. In early 2017, they warned us that 21st Century autocrats all follow a similar playbook. Whether the autocrat executing the playbook is doing so deliberately and strategically or instinctively and accidentally, the playbook looks the same. And it involves these six things:

And indeed they were correct as Donald Trump has engaged in all six. And he's done them all from the very start of his term.

That's faster than Recep Erdoğan deployed them in Turkey or even Vladimir Putin did in Russia. Recall in those cases those leaders were seen as potential reformers when they first took office. Erdoğan was expected to lead Turkey into the European Union and Putin was going to carry on Yeltsin's democratic reforms. In both cases, it took several years before their dictatorial characters became clear. Trump has shown us his true colors from day one.  

And with an impeachment trial in the Senate looming in which Republican senators have all but declared their intent to write Trump a blank check, the challenge facing our republic in 2020 is daunting.

But numerous generations before ours have faced odds even longer and still prevailed. The founding generation overthrew an empire to turn a scrappy bunch of colonies into the world's greatest experiment in self-governance. The Civil War generation fought our deadliest battle and overthrew slavery while restoring the union. The Greatest Generation reversed a depression and saved the world from Hitler's tyranny. And the Civil Rights generation braved dogs, water hoses, billy clubs, lynchings and the assassinations of some of its greatest leaders to further perfect our democracy.

So today it falls to us.

In the three years since we launched, no statement has proved truer than the famous adage that "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and women to do nothing." While far too many today have come up with all number of excuses to do nothing, those of us who have engaged this fight, those of us reading this right now, those of us who refuse to let our children grow up in unfreedom are choosing a different path.

And that is what gives me hope. While no single lawsuit or piece of legislation from a small start-up can comprehensively stop all of the threats emanating from an authoritarian administration, these are the actions of active citizenship that when aggregated and scaled have felled far more powerful foes than the ones we face today.

If we stand together and build a movement, if we share this story with others and encourage them to step up and join us as well, if we commit to spending this next year talking to neighbors, volunteering in our communities, speaking out for democracy and our children's future, and we continue to grow efforts like those we've begun (we're hiring!), we can turn the tide. 

So as 2019 turns over into 2020, here's to a brighter, freer, and more just future,

Ian and the entire Protect Democracy team