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- [00:00]
Stacey Abrams
Foreign.
- [00:07]
Harry Littman
Welcome to Talking Feds One on One. Deep dive discussions with national figures about the most fascinating and consequential issues defining our culture and shaping our lives. I'm your host, Harry Littman. Welcome to another Talking Feds One on One. And we have a really great discussion for you today. As Donald Trump and his cronies threatened to nationalize elections, line polling places with federal agents or worse, I'm really excited to talk to someone who knows what it takes to mobilize voters in the face of tactics meant to keep them away from the polls. Stacey Abrams served 11 years in the Georgia House of Representatives, including seven as minority leader. She was the first African American woman to become the gubernatorial nominee for a major party in U.S. history. Since leaving office, she's become an entrepreneur found in nonprofits and if that, if her political and activist work isn't enough, has just authored her mind blowing 17th book, of which 11 are novels, including the latest that just came out last July, coded Justice. She also hosts the podcast Assembly Required. And of course, she remains a prominent national leader for political change, which is why I was so eager to speak with her today. Stacey Abrams, so good to see you again and thank you very much for joining Talking Feds One on one.
- [01:41]
Stacey Abrams
Harry, thanks for having me back.
- [01:43]
Harry Littman
It seems to be a very pivotal time in the totalitarian agenda. I don't think that's a wrong word of the administration. On the one hand, we, we may be seeing a sort of standing down of some of the more militaristic and aggressive immigration efforts. On the other, the administration seems very much to be vigorously turning its attention to elections, including in your own Fulton county and a warrant that was recently greenlighted. Where do you think we are? And if you could talk specifically about Fulton county and the concerns about what the administration can do with that material. But generally, are we in a new phase focused on election control and potential reversals?
- [02:35]
Stacey Abrams
So I start by reminding people that there are 10 steps to authoritarianism, totalitarianism. And one of the hallmarks of this administration, of this regime, because it is larger than just a single political figure, is that it's wash, rinse, repeat. You're going to do all of the above and you're going to hone in on the places where you can do the most damage for the most amount of time. And part of the trick is to show to toggle back and forth. So if you push too hard in one place, you redirect focus, but it doesn't mean you've stopped. It just means you want people to focus somewhere else. And so that's why I think it's important to understand what happened in Fulton County. Fulton county was absolutely about trying to re up the angst and the anger and the confusion around the 2020 election. No one was confused about how it turned out, but there's been a lot of lawsuits about it. Yeah. And because of the number of lawsuits in Fulton county in Georgia, materials that would have been destroyed years ago in other states had to be maintained. And those materials have proven again and again and again that the election was fair. In Georgia, however, the judge who signed the warrant for the FBI was a judge out of Missouri who was relying almost entirely on affidavits from election deniers. And so here I think what's important to understand is on one level, this was about relitigating 2020, because that riles up the base. On the next level, this was about creating a pretext for nationalization of elections. Because Georgia state stands out as the most egregious example of failed totalitarianism in its infancy. When they first tried to game the system and it didn't work, this is their Waterloo. But the third is that as you think about their immigration enforcement efforts, Fulton county is one of the most diverse counties in the state of Georgia. It has a heavy population of mixed status families, meaning if you have the voting rolls that they now have, when they seize those boxes, they got not only ballots, but voter data that they have been told they cannot have. And they can use that to target immigrants, to target naturalized citizens who voted, but also target their families. And this is data that they also tried to extort from Minnesota. They have 20 other states that are suing them, saying, we're not going to give you our voter data. And all of this comes together because if you want to gain the election and end democracy for everyone in November, the way you do it is not martial law, is that you transform the voting system so that people can't show up. And if they do show up, you have a pretext for removing them from the lines, from canceling their votes, and from stopping their participation in national elections.
- [05:23]
Harry Littman
And, you know, that is not apocryphal, though it sounds like it. It certainly sounds terrifying. But your own movement, 10 steps, which you mentioned, really tries to get our hands around what we're looking at, and in part by way of examples from other countries, and this is a really critical first point that most totalitarian leaders in countries that have devolved from democracy come to power in a more or less free and fair election. And Then they begin to make all the trouble. So this Fulton county, as in, for them, kind. Kind of lunchbox, can really create a lot of problems. I wanted to ask you sort of more generally because you mentioned 10 steps, and I think that has to do with a lot of learning you've done. Others like Kim Shepley have done about, you know, how. How we know what we are tangibly looking at, what the fears are. Tell us a little bit about this movement that I believe you launched back last year and what it aims to do by way of education, what it aims to do by way of mobilization of citizens.
- [06:39]
Stacey Abrams
And so I want to begin by giving credit to Kim, who was on a. We were doing a panel together. And when she laid out her 10 steps, it resonated for me in the work that I'd been doing. And with her permission, I adapted and remixed some of her 10 steps. But they're all basically the same. And if you look at the. The story of authoritarianism, autocracy, totalitarianism, especially when democracies devolve, as you pointed out, it always is the same 10 things. You have an election relatively free and fair, but it's the last one. Then you have an expansion of executive power. You have a weakening of competing powers, the checks and balances. So you have a Congress that becomes complicit and a judiciary that suborns the misbehavior of the executive and the congressional. You gut government, so you break it, so it doesn't work. And that's one of the reasons people stop believing that democracy can save them, because the democracy they understand is no longer working. You install loyalists because those people are answerable to power and not to the people. And we saw that with Pam Bondi's testimony, where she refused to acknowledge and take any accountability for what has happened to the Epstein victims through her own egregious behaviors. And then you go from there to you attack the truth. So you go after journalists. We saw journalists arrested. We saw journalists having their homes raided. We have seen the attacks on just any media personality who dared to speak the truth. Step seven, you scapegoat vulnerable communities. You attack DEI because that's the catch all phrase in the United States for every community that is vulnerable, marginalized, and that could seek to be blamed for the perfidies of this administration and this regime. Step eight, you weaken support systems. You go after universities. You go after philanthropies. You go after law firms. Anyone who could actually support and protect democracy has to be weakened and removed from positions of Power number nine is the normalization of state violence. And that is what we've seen, you know, with the military occupation of nine American cities, the murders of two American citizens, three actually, if you include three this year. Keith Porter, Alex Preddy and Renee Good. Over and over again we are seeing this state violence being used as a suppressive force. Why fight back if you have to risk your life to do so? And all of that leads into step 10. And step 10 is the step where you end democracy for everyone. But as you and I both know, and as Kim points out, Hungary has elections, Russia has elections, Venezuela has elections. You don't eliminate elections. You rig the system so the outcome is determined before the election ever starts. And that's what we're watching happen in real time in the United States, or
- [09:26]
Harry Littman
at least the effort. Yeah, we spoke with Kim a couple days ago when I was in Princeton and I found it like you, Stacy, very illuminating because you everything that seems to be going on is on the one hand bewildering and seems often feckless. And then when you see that there's a game plan and ways to sort of measure things. So you just mentioned Hungary. Orban is 15 points down from his challenger. But it doesn't matter now. We're at a point where, as you say, the system is essentially rigged and it's no longer having first come to power in the wake of a lot of unrest and discontent, he's been able to engineer things. So we really are looking at a, at a different kind of dynamic, notwithstanding the being able to say, oh look, we have elections here, we have elections in Russia. All right, I spoke with Kim about this, but I wonder your view. You really are on the ground. And I think in some ways, as you suggest, we can think of Georgia and Fulton county as a kind of ground zero. This was, I just need 11,980 votes. And the calls to nationalize have been very focused on Democratic strongholds that nevertheless could go one way or another. You've laid out this sort of 10 point possible model that you, I really should say have adjusted somewhat for America. Where do you think we are? And a large part of what you're doing is basically empowering or just giving some inspiration to people about what they can do. What are the steps that are somewhat vulnerable to popular pushback? So a big question, I know, but what do you earn given this sort of 10 point program that we all fear? What do you tangibly recommend to people that they can do to grow gum up these well known works as it were so there.
- [11:33]
Stacey Abrams
The 10 Steps campaign really looks at two pieces. So first you have to recognize what we face, and that's why we list and really go into detail about the 10 steps to authoritarianism and autocracy. And we've hit all 10 steps, and that was my point at the top of the conversation. We've got to recognize that this isn't sequential. It is wash, rinse, repeat. They're going to deepen. In some places, they're going to go really hard. They might seem to pull back briefly if it looks like they're losing favor, but that doesn't mean they're done. So we cannot presume that now that they've hit all 10 steps, they're. They're finished. They're going to keep doing it because that's how you sustain authoritarianism. But if there are 10 steps to authoritarianism and autocracy, there are 10 steps to freedom and power. The work that Erica Chenoweth has done, the work that Tim Snyder has done, the work that civil rights leaders have done, shows us that there are 10 things that you do to defeat authoritarianism, but also to rebuild and regain power. You have to commit to understanding what's happening. You have to share what you know, especially when propaganda is filling the vacuum. You have to organize, you have to mobilize, but you also have to litigate. We've seen that happen with skypariman and the work being done by Democracy Forward by Mark Elias, by the aclu. We've got to fight. You got to. Even if we don't win, you got to fight because you've got to build a record, Joseph, to signal to the people that it's possible to find victory. Then you have to be disruptive. It's what we're seeing happen in Minneapolis, in Charlotte, more quietly in New Orleans, in Memphis, places where we have seen this attempt to steal power. We have seen people be disruptive and push back. We have to deny them agency over our language. It's why I spend a lot of time talking about dei. They don't want us to talk about it because it's the cornerstone and the central pillar of a pluralistic democracy. If you don't have dei, you end up with a white supremacist, Christian nationalist, protonatalist country. So we need DEI to save democracy in America. Then you do the work of making sure that we are engaging on these issues, that we are electing leaders who will defend us, and that we are actually demanding the democracy we deserve. So the 10 Steps campaign is both recognize what's happening and then activate around it. And if you go to our website, 10stepscampaign.org, or what we do there is give you a toolkit. You pick one, you don't have to do all of it. What I say is look Everything Everywhere all at Once is a great title for a movie. It is a terrible mission statement, but we can all do something somewhere soon. And so the 10 Steps campaign is about how do we knit together an American contingent of resistors who are all doing things in different ways, but for the same common purpose of defending and rebuilding democracy.
- [14:12]
Harry Littman
Really big job, but really big challenge. I want to pause for a second on a point you made that I've been sort of obsessed with, which is the transformation of the truth. In so many ways, especially the 2020 election, there's been this obvious concerted campaign literally to change the facts, the American mission of just knowledge and history and how it fits into our democracy. And you see this in so many sort of different ways.
- [14:50]
Michael Waldman
I'm Michael Waldman, host of the Briefing Podcast. I'm a former White House speechwriter, a lawyer and a constitutional scholar. And I'm president of the Brennan center for Justice. We work to repair and strengthen American democracy, from gerrymandering to abuse of presidential power, from Supreme Court reform to congressional corruption and more. What fun. You're going to hear new ideas in this podcast, and you're going to hear about the strategies and the legal and political fights that will shape the next phase of American politics. If you care about our democracy, the Briefing is a podcast for you.
- [15:24]
Harry Littman
I wanted to go back to what you said about so many prongs here, but I think there's another aspect in which the everything all at once architecture. And we know that Trump didn't create that, but he tries to implement it, is meant to. One reason for it is we saw in 2020 what he was hoping to do was have when elections came, a kind of smorgasbord of different, well, Fulton county there I'll try to browbeat Brad Raffensperger for 11,700 votes, Maricopa county, whatever they want, the levers to 20 try to pull at the time. Now, the antidote to that is an election that has enough of a a difference, a sort of, you know, democratic gain that you really can't try to pull that sort of thing now. So I just wanted to turn your attention because I know you focus on these a lot, to the recent special elections. You know, even one in Texas at the Dems lost there does really seem to be a pretty dramatic changing of the tide. And I just wonder what you think about the snapshots that we are acquiring and whether they buoy you in thinking about, you know, especially 2026.
- [16:52]
Stacey Abrams
I would say that we should be emboldened by what's happening in these states, by the victory in Texas, by the near win in Tennessee, by the flipping of seats in Mississippi and in Georgia, by the margins of victory that we're seeing. However, my caveat is not that it can't be true, but that we can't presume it's going to happen simply because it's happening. And that's one of the reasons it's so important that in the 10 steps to freedom and Power, we have to be engaged right now, but also working on elections up and down the ballot. Winning the House of Representatives is not going to destabilize, stabilize this regime. It is going to give us another tool to use. But they will still be embedded in every facet of our lives. And we've got to recognize that they are deepening their power at the state and local level. And so we have to recognize that what was so important in the Texas flip that just happened, this was a state Senate seat. And that means that in the state of Texas, even though they still have super majorities, they've got to worry now. They've got to work harder now. If you want legislators to be responsive, they've got to know that you can see them. When I was in the state legislature, I would tell folks, look, politicians are like 15 year olds. We respond to money, peer pressure and attention. And right now there's a lot of attention on the federal government. We've got to have the same amount of attention on state and local governments. The calling up of National Guardsmen and deploying them to other states happened because governors said that you can take people from our state and deploy them to militarily occupy other American cities. That means you got to talk about who gets to be governor. State legislators who did not fight for the ACA subsidies and said it's okay for you to give billions of dollars to ICE but strip our constituents of health care. They've got to know you're paying attention. And so one of the ways you fight back against authoritarianism is that we've got to make it hyperlocal. Yes, we have to fight for Congress, and I absolutely believe we should. But we also have to take these signs that people need to fight locally too. We may not win everything the first time out, but they didn't win this overnight. This didn't start in 2025. This came to fruition in 25. It started 40 years ago. And we don't have that kind of time for fighting back. And so my belief is that in this moment, as we watch them try to pass the SAVE act, which would cement through legislation what they're trying to do through what's happening in Georgia as they push forward the MEGA Bill, both of those bills are designed to strip Americans of their Democratic right to participate in elections. But we've got to use that right over and over again because we will fight harder for something we use than for something we don't. And that means not just voting for primaries for Congress, it means voting in those local elections, voting for those seats when you have no idea who's on the ballot. Look it up now. But we've got to show up, up and down the ballot all across the country if we want to make these gains real.
- [19:50]
Harry Littman
You know, again, the comprehensiveness of your movement, Stacey, is really sort of dazzling. But I wanted to give one more minute. Even though you're. You're focusing on state and localities to the SAVE act, the Republicans are really very focused on it, a high priority. Why? What would it do? And what would it. What would it do that it doesn't. That they don't say it would do? Because there's always the more kind of COVID part of the agenda where voting legislation is concerned.
- [20:22]
Stacey Abrams
So my book, Our Time is Now, I published it in 2020. It was actually a book about voting rights and voter suppression that got banned briefly by the US Naval Academy.
- [20:35]
Harry Littman
Congratulations.
- [20:36]
Stacey Abrams
Yeah. So in that book, and Our Time Is Now, I talk about the three components to voter suppression. Can you register and stay on the rolls? Can you cast a ballot? And does that ballot get counted? Well, the SAVE act attacks voting rights on all three of those points. They try to make it hard for you to register. How? Because they say in order to register, you have to have proof of citizenship. That sounds innocuous until you realize that in America, the way you prove your citizenship is either an original birth certificate or a passport. Half of the American population does not have a passport. And that means you have to be able to find your birth certificate. And Most Americans, about 20 million Americans, don't have ready access to that information. And when people say, oh, well, of course you do. Well, maybe not. Maybe you're a student, maybe it got burned in a fire. Maybe you were born before Jim Crow ended and you weren't permitted to have an original birth certificate, there are lots of conditions that stop people from having that paperwork. Then you've got women. Millions of American women would have to go and prove that their name change was legitimate. And in the interregnum while they're proving it, they don't have the right to vote. And if you've ever tried to get something done through the dmv, imagine how long it's going to take to get all of the paperwork from the federal government and the state government aligned with your county elections office. Millions of Americans will be disenfranchised. And then you add the mega bill that would actually stop vote by mail. If you were disabled, if you were elderly, if you are in the military, this would make it nearly impossible for you to actively participate. And Harry, this goes to a point you raised earlier. In authoritarian regimes, it's not enough to win. You got to win by an indisputable margin. And even then, it's hard. Well, if you can shave points in America, in Georgia, it was 11,000. It was nearly 12,000 votes. That's all they needed to change the outcome. If you can shave off enough voters, you don't have to do what was done during Jim Crow and wholesale ban entire races. You just need to make it hard for millions of people to be pushed out of elections. 2024 was decided by 1.5 million people. This bill would disenfranchise on its face up to 20 million people, automatically more than 60 million over time. And that means you now control the outcome of elections across the country in perpetuity.
- [23:00]
Harry Littman
Such a huge point. I have nightmares to this day about the Trump argument. To the doj, just say there's fraud in Georgia and my Republican congressman will do the rest. In other words, fomenting chaos and then letting him play sort of bully boy tactics is really what so much of this is about. Gosh, Stacy, you combine sort of legal chops with real knowledge and sophistication on the ground, maybe as no one else I know. And I want to talk to you for hours. You did just mention Jim Crow. And that leads me to an interesting article you wrote. Interesting, provocative, and important in the Guardian last year, speaking about Trump's effort to rip the achievements of African Americans out of the history books. Because besides the rank unfairness there, I think you see it as part and parcel of the overall authoritarian effort. Why is it so pernicious in broad strokes?
- [24:04]
Stacey Abrams
So there's a commentator, Joshua Doss, who said something that has stuck with me. He said that used to be in America, we all had the Same destination of democracy. But our political parties were arguing over which. Which route to take. Were we going to use Waze, Were we going to use Apple Maps, Google Maps? But we're all heading in the same direction. Well, in an authoritarian regime, we no longer have the same destination. This administration, this regime, and I add any Republican who is suborning their practices, they have a stated goal of ethno fascism. The replacement theory metric is the idea that white supremacy matters. And we've heard Senator Eric Schmidt say it, we've heard allusions to it by JD Vance, the vice president, we've heard the president allude to it. And they also have this Christian nationalist notion of who we should be. And they've got this protonatalist. Women should be having babies and tending the home and not out taking their jobs. So that's their destination, that the authoritarian regime is pursuing a fascist ideology. Well, what's the counterweight? What's the counterpoint? Well, a democracy as the methodology, the route. But what is our destination? It's the pluralism that we have in this country today. A pluralism that celebrates African American heritage in the month of February and doesn't demean it with horrific memes trying to vilify a former president and his wife. It's not stripping the stone, the pride flag from Stonewall National Monument. It's not castigating bad bunny for telling the story of Latino heritage. They do not believe that what America has achieved is actually good. The pluralism that we have is because of how diverse we are. It's about the equity we have forced through the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, through the 19th Amendment, through the Fair Labor Standards act, through the Respect for Marriage act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. They do not want in an authoritarian regime. The very communities that are comprised of the pluralism that makes up America. I think that they don't want a multiracial, multi ethnic, multi religious, intergenerational democracy that looks and feels and believes that we all should have the right to thrive. That's what they oppose. And if you think that they're correct, then you should be celebrating what they're doing. But if you think that's wrong, and if you think the nation we have built is heading in the right, not doing everything right, but that we are heading in the right direction with what we look like and how we add more and more people to the promise of America, then democracy is the only way we get there. And that's what they're terrified of. And that's why they will demonize us. That's why they will go after us and that is why they are terrified every day when folks like us have conversations about how we make this nation look like DEI says, because DEI is in our DNA.
- [27:02]
Harry Littman
And you know, I sort of at its most elementary level, that is the crisis I think that has spawned what is the in essence minority rule of harnessing, you know, fewer than 50% to sort of hang on as against the obvious move in not just ideas, but population, etc. Of the country. Stacey, I'm so great talking to you and I hope we can do it more. I want to end sort of. We began with the notion that this is a day on which you can mark some achievements but really look ahead to risks on the horizon. And you more than anyone, I think in your burgeoning movement and so many people have joined the national organization the Ten Steps Point. I almost hate to do this to you because I always draw on myself, but I'm sure you do also when just ordinary citizens and they're the focus of your movement come up to to you now and say what is to be done? How can I, you know, I'm not going to change the world myself, but what should I be doing now? Just that's my little part. Or kind of gives a some scintilla of hope, etc. What do you tell them? And could you share it with the talking fed listeners who are on the on this tape?
- [28:22]
Stacey Abrams
So I'm going to encourage you to go to 10stepscampaign.org and here's why. So sign up. Because what we do are three things. We help you recognize what's going on. One of the most important ways to fight authoritarianism is to understand it. It's an ignorance that they can create fear. And it's when we're afraid that we are frozen. So first we got to recognize. But then the second is, yes, we can do things. The way I describe it is we've got a major in the minors. We are so used to these big cinematic moments in American stories about what happens, we forget. It took a lot of small things. It took someone sitting at a lunch counter. It took someone, it took an insurgent in Boston to say, we will not pay these taxes if you will not do right by us. It took a Native American refusing to be sent off to a school that was going to strip him of his identity. And so we've got to remember small things add up. It is the nature of America that we are e pluribus unum. For many, we are one. And so Our small activities actually add together. And so that's the activation piece. Go to the Ten Steps campaign. Pick the thing you want to do. Pick the word that matters to you. If you like disrupt, go for it. That means learn how to use your cell phone to record what's happening. If you want to organize, that means find three friends and you decide that you're going to be the truth tellers about what's happening in your neighborhood and that you're not going to let the propaganda supplant the truth. You become your own Walter Cronkite, because apparently everything else is falling apart. But all of us can pick one thing to do and then commit to doing that thing over and over again. Because when 340 million people live in the space, if 12 million of us do something consistently, we send the very strong signal that what they are trying to do will not work. But here's. Here's the thing. It is more than marches. The marches matter. We need them for both. The psychic effect of seeing us together. But in between those marches, we've got to move. And that means solving the problems, providing mutual aid, making sure that immigrant children can get to school safely, making sure that hungry families have access to food. All of these are parts of how you break democracy. You make people think that they're in it alone, that the game is so rigged it can't be fixed, and that it's someone else's fault. We've got to shift that mindset. And that means we've got to show people that we may be individuals, but we are knitted together, that it is not broken beyond repair and that we are others. But we are coming together because we believe that that's our strength and our superpower, not the weapon of our destruction.
- [30:56]
Harry Littman
Stacey Abrams, thanks so much for being with us as we navigate these troubled waters over the next several months. I hope we'll have a chance to get more of your thoughts, but really appreciate your being here today.
- [31:09]
Stacey Abrams
Thank you so much for having me. Harry.
- [31:13]
Harry Littman
Thank you for tuning in to One on One, a weekly conversation series from Talking Feds. If you like what you've heard, please tell a friend to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts or wherever they get their podcasts. And please take a moment to rate and review the show. You can also subscribe to us on YouTube or where we are posting full episodes and daily updates on Top Legal Stories. Check us out on substack harry litman.substack.com where we're posting two or three bulletins a week breaking down the various threats to constitutional norms and the rule of law, and Talking Fez has joined forces with the Contrarian. I'm a founding contributor to this new media venture committed to reviving the diversity of opinion that feels increasingly rare in today's news landscape, where legacy media seems to be tacking toward Trump for business reasons rather than editorial ones. Rest assured, we're still the same scrappy independent podcast you've come to know and trust just now, linked up with an ambitious and vital project designed for this pivotal moment in our nation's legal and political political discourse. Find out more@contrarian.substack.com thanks for tuning in, and don't worry, as long as you need answers, the Feds will keep talking. Talking Feds is produced by Lou Cregan and Katie Upshaw, associate producer Becca Haveian, sound Engineering by Matt McArdle, Rosie, Don Griffin, David Lieberman, Hansum Hadrenathan, Emma Maynard and Hallie Necker are our contributing writers and production assistants by Akshaj Turbailu. Our music, as ever, is by the amazing Philip Glass. Talking Feds is a production of Deledo llc. I'm Harry Littman. Talk to you later.