Harris Brings Hope; Remarks for Today's Anti-Autocracy Conference at NYU
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Many of you know I was upset about how President Joe Biden was being treated. As necessary as him stepping aside may have been for our chances of beating Trump, I felt that the way it unfolded and the methods used were not good for our democracy.
The relentless public and media focus on Biden’s debate performance and the question of his age and mental fitness —while Trump’s age and mental fitness went unexamined—played into MAGA’s work of delegitimizing the sitting head of a democracy. Above all, it treated Biden, who has served this nation honorably and cleaned up myriad Trump messes, with a total lack of respect.
Now, many will say that Biden brought this on himself by not passing the baton far earlier, and by refusing to listen to advisors and politicians who were giving him the message to step aside. In the end, it was reportedly not the drumbeat of elites that moved him, but grim polls that told him his popular mandate for office had lessened and his path to victory had narrowed too much to continue on.
Not only could this only happen in a democracy, but it is in stark contrast to Trump losing an election and trying to remain in office.
I know I am not alone to have felt the climate immediately shift when the announcement came and Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. It was as though a lid had been lifted and blocked energies could pour out —and pour out they did, in the form of massive donations to the Harris campaign.
I will be writing more about this transition and what it means for our democracy, but this new situation brings new possibilities and a sense of hope that we have long needed.
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It’s the week of events about the dangers of autocracy. I had a great conversation last night with Anne Applebaum at 92nd St. Y about her new book, Autocracy, Inc. It’s about partnerships among autocrats, kleptocracy, and more. You can read my Washington Post review of the book here.
And today is the Anti-Autocracy conference I am co-chairing at NYU. You can follow the livestream here and I will post the video of it when it is available. This morning I chaired an amazing panel with George Conway, Maya Wiley, former Congressman Charlie Dent, and Asha Rangappa.
I wanted to let you read my opening remarks, so here they are:
This bipartisan conference is designed to inform the public about the grave threat to our freedoms and what we can do about it. We have brought together people from quite different political backgrounds who are united in their dedication to doing whatever we can to save our democracy. This is an anti-autocracy conference because autocracy is what we are looking at if Donald Trump is re-elected.
I know many Americans feel this is hyperbole, even after MAGA attemped to overthrow the government to keep Trump in office illegally. In my line of work, we call this a coup attempt. Even now, Trump is continuing to use his rallies to market strongman rule to Americans. Just a few days ago he praised Xi Jinping, a Communist dictator, as “brilliant” because he rules with an “iron fist.”
I am here as a scholar of authoritarianism because I know the stakes of this election: MAGA dictatorship or American democracy. Repression or freedom. I have seen what happens to societies when corrupt leaders and their allies gain power based on division and hate.
Project 2025 is a recipe for mass chaos, abuses of power, and dysfunction in government. It aligns not only with the agendas of present foreign autocracies, especially the Hungary of Viktor Orban, which was just ranked as the EU’s most corrupt country, but also with the policies of past dictatorships.
Project 2025 includes measures similar to Mussolini’s “Laws for the Defense of the State” that turned Italy into a police state after a series of assassination attempts on him in the mid=1920s. Among other things, it justified the firing of non-loyal civil servants and the dismissal of judges on grounds of “political incompatibility.”
We don’t have to succumb to the horrors of authoritarianism. We can stop this before it starts, if we are informed of the stakes and best strategies for democracy protection. That’s why we are here today.
Thinking about our relatively short history as a nation, one can easily focus on those transformative moments of great danger and division when it seemed that the one person (sometimes maybe the only one) who had the ability to bring us through was suddenly there on the stage.
The Virginia planter who’d dreamed of a martial sword, was turned down by the British Army he wished so much to be a part of, and then went on to face that army down with a courage and perseverance that made him a hero, gave us the chance to become a nation, then went on to further enhance that heroism when he returned that sword to Congress and still went on to bring us through our raucous and uncertain infancy with a steady hand and an example we still revere.
The backwoods lawyer and homespun president, at first disdained as a hick by members of his own cabinet whose courage, political expertise, and extraordinary understanding of who we were meant to be brought us as whole as he could through our terrible adolescence, and gave us, in just over two minutes as an afterthought speaker, a goal for the ages.
The aristocratic cripple who through imaginative and daring policies brought us out of the worst financial disaster in our history, and then led us through the worst catastrophe the world had ever known as the arsenal of the armies that beat that darkness back.
We now face another crisis, this one of our own making, and perhaps one inevitable in any democracy. One man has already taken that stage and begun to bring us out of it. Now, unable to continue, he has handed that responsibility off to another, and we come to the second part of that transformative moment. Facing a dark malevolence whose mastery of illusion has seduced half a nation, a woman has stepped onto the stage, accepting the awesome responsibility of being the second half of that transformation. We hold our breath and move to stand behind her, hoping that she can now take on that crucial role played by those other Americans who, when the moment came, met and won it. You will have to bear much, Ms Harris. The forces arrayed against us are dark, deep, and desperate. Our job as those who understand and love the country we were meant to be is to stand behind you. Game on!
Ruth, I've always been impressed by the excellent work you do and how you use your expertise to teach the rest of us. I too have been appalled at how Biden has been treated; they even turned on Dr. Jill Biden and the rest of the family. I do want to add, though, that the amazing results we've witnessed in the last day and a half were not luck. Biden pulled off a master class on political strategy and planning. I'm a political nobody but it's obvious that Biden made his decision a few days ago, or even a week ago. He then kept Trump, the Republicans, the media and the pundits focussed on the shiny object - senile old man won't step aside - while he put the plan together. Biden knew that making his announcement early on a Sunday gave Democrats an advantage. Biden knew that once he made the announcement he would step aside and leave the spotlight to Harris. Biden knew we could not have an open convention and he knew why some people wanted one. The chaos would've been divisive and ugly. I did enjoy seeing the sleazy opportunistic Manchin get caught in the whiplash. Even I know that the logistics that had to be in place to pull off what happened had to have been in place and ready to go. Harris was able to get more than enough delegates in record time and, no doubt, had help on the phones. Harris also got all of her potential Democratic rivals to support her as the candidate and got the majority of Congressional Democrats to support her. Who is the most talented at whipping Democrats and who knows how they think and act? I suspect Nancy Pelosi also spent a lot of time on the phone this past day and a half. The record fundraising was due to Harris and probably represents stored up demand (people who wanted to donate but maybe not to Biden). And, as is typical Biden, he isn't looking for praise for a major job well done. He's content letting everyone praise him for stepping aside and ignoring how he orchestrated everything. Bravo!!