(bright stirring music) (bright stirring music) - The twin pillars of democracy, trust and truth, are crumbling, leaving us on knife's edge.

Here to talk about how to navigate this historic tipping point is our distinguished bipartisan panel, Mandana Dayani, co-founder of the nonpartisan initiative I am a voter., Jason Stanley, philosophy professor at Yale and author of "How Fascism Works," and Miles Taylor, former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration and author of the bestselling book "Blowback."

We'll get to our panel in a few minutes, but first, we're thrilled to welcome the legendary journalist who built the iconic brand "Hardball."

His bestselling books and 20-year run as host of a bare-knuckled topical television show helped define American politics for a generation.

Chris Matthews, politics is in your DNA, and so is your love of country.

You thrived in a gentler, kinder version of democracy that valued truth and the rule of law.

You made a career of respecting norms and standards that have been ignored, subverted, or kicked to the curb.

I want to ask you, first question, what's your top line on the state of our democracy right now?

- Well, it's in surprising trouble because of something I never took deadly serious before, which is the concession speech.

My first real political inkling was watching Averell Harriman concede the election for governor of New York to Nelson Rockefeller.

And I sat there with my father in our basement rec room, and my dad was feeling very sad for Averell Harriman, a man of enormous inherited wealth, and yet he could identify with him because he was being humiliated, he was being beaten, and he had to accept defeat.

And every one of our elections for president, since the beginning of television, really, the loser has gone on television and said so: "I lost.

I just sent a telegram to the winner.

The winner knows I lost."

The world knows, everyone in the world knows we had an honest election in America.

And the reason we knew it was an honest election is because the loser said so.

Even Nixon in 1960 had to say so.

In fact, Jack Kennedy was determined to sit down with Nixon in Key Biscayne, Florida so that he could see Nixon with him so Nixon could give him his victory in person.

And then, of course, was Al Gore's challenge in 2000 and Hillary Clinton's in a shocking defeat in 2016.

She had to go into the Pennsylvania Hotel, right across from Union Station, or Penn Station, and acknowledge defeat to her donors.

I was there in that room.

It's something that every democratic politician has to accept.

If you're going to lose, and you could probably lose at some point in your career, you have to walk up, go to the television cameras, and tell the world that you lost, and we didn't get that result in 2020.

I never thought it would be this important.

I always thought the concession speech was one of the real honest moments of an election night, when that loser would tell you what really happened, not the TV ads, not the PR, not the speeches, but what really happened and why it happened, and thank their voters for trying their best, because they lost.

And now I realize it's not only a ritual, it's an essential part of our process.

The loser, until we come up with a better message or better message-carrier, has to say he or she lost, otherwise the world will wonder, and in this country right now, maybe a third of the voters wonder who really won the election.

- Well, as a- - And that's the problem with democracy.

- As a result, our democracy was downgraded, because we did not have a peaceful transfer of power for the first time in history.

And I have a poll from the "New York Times"/Siena College, which says that 71% of Americans think that democracy's in trouble, but they are so upset about how broken government is that only, wait for this, 7% think that it's worth saving.

Now, you were in a different time in politics.

I mean, those numbers have to be shocking to you.

- Well, they certainly are, because without democracy, we have no protection of our rights.

If you don't actually get to go into the voting booth and vote against the things that are being done in government, how do you protect your rights, minority or majority?

You have to enforce your rights through the voting process.

I don't know how you separate democracy from human rights, because only if you can vote against the people in power, can you ensure those rights.

- But let's go back to that time, because, you know, you served in the Peace Corps.

You were actually, and I didn't know this, a US Capitol police officer back in the '70s, and you were President Jimmy Carter's speech writer.

You were the head aid to Tip O'Neill, who was the Speaker of the House at that point.

You wrote a piece called, is it "Tip and the Gipper", yeah, I think it's "Tip and the Gipper," talking about how Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan actually managed to hammer out deals in a time which was far less contentious than what we're seeing now.

How did they do it?

- Well, I think they had one advantage.

They were patriotic people, both of them in different ways, but I think they recognized there were certain things you have to do.

There's such a word as must.

For example, Social Security was getting into trouble in terms of its solvency.

And they got together, and it's almost like a kidnapping case.

The baby was delivered with the money the same time.

They actually had to agree that Reagan would announce that Tip O'Neill was on board.

So Reagan went on television and said, "Tip O'Neill's on board with this deal.

We're going to slow down the cost-of-living adjustment.

We're going to put some taxes on social security benefits for wealthier people.'

And they put it all together, and Alan Greenspan really worked it out, and they really did it, and they did it in a way that they knew it had to be done.

- Let me ask you, because the difference, another difference between then and now is the vitriol.

People don't just see each other as political opponents.

They see each other literally as the enemy.

That's the word that's being used.

And even if they would agree on issues, complex issues like immigration, reproductive freedom, gun safety, even if they would agree in some measure, they've lost the will to compromise.

- Look, I must tell people about the time that Robert Reagan was shot, in the spring of 1981, and Nancy Reagan, who was very smart, very much in charge of many things with the White House, and Jim Baker, the chief of staff, decided that Tip O'Neill should be the first person in to see Reagan when he was convalescing, just a couple days after he was shot and almost killed.

The bullet went right near his heart.

And Tip went in to see him and they prayed the 23rd Psalm together, "The Lord is my shepherd," and Tip kissed him on his forehead and did all the right things in terms of human beings together.

They were two human beings together, even if they disagreed politically, and I think that's not the way it is today.

There's hateful language being used in both directions that's really beyond what we think of as America.

- If you could wave the proverbial magic wand, and I know this is a silly question, but people want to know, it seems so overwhelming, what can we do to even begin to try and bring the country together?

What would you say?

What's the one thing people could start to do?

- All we have, really, in the end is our vote in the primaries and the general election, and I just think that we, people have to make a very serious decision.

I see all the weaknesses, certainly, in the Democratic side, the Republican side.

Both candidates have tremendous weaknesses.

I think you have to make the vote very seriously and vote for one of the two.

- We are out of time with you, but I have one final question, and that's about the fact that you not only have three children, and your children have followed in your legacy of public service.

I think your son worked with kids in Rwanda on an AIDS project, and I know your daughter, Caroline, worked with poor kids in the Bronx, and now you have two grandchildren, Julia and Brendan.

I mean, a lot of people are really pessimistic.

How do you feel about the future for your children and your grandchildren?

- Well, fortunately, I had a life in politics, not just outside looking at it, and as I was growing up, I looked at it, but after I began covering it for "Hardball," I watched it.

But when I was working in politics, I knew how good people are.

You know, it isn't the deep state.

Washington is not the deep state of a bunch of underground people.

It's people you'd recognize, relatively likable, if that matters to you.

They actually take their jobs seriously.

Tip O'Neill did really care about poor people, about working people.

He cared about saving their social security and Medicare.

This is what he cared about.

He cared about dwarfs and used to pronounce it a funny way too, "dwarfs," people that were born very short, and the government would give them money to get them to grow taller, up to about four feet, and he took this very seriously.

I mean, you can laugh at his liberalism, but he really was for the little guy, and I think there's a lot of people like that in politics.

They're not just big shots or famous people.

There are real concerned people of both parties.

I wish we didn't have the problem we had on that one side, that one partisan side where people feel they have to just cover for this guy.

I really do think that people would like to get out and vote on the things that they used to care about, fiscal responsibility, lower deficits, free trade.

These issues used to matter to people more than personality, and I think, unfortunately, personality's come to be more important.

- Well, I want to tell you, we're just delighted that you've been able to join us, and we know you're still out there talking, and we'll be listening.

And we also want to thank you for your service to our country.

Thank you so much.

- Thank you for having me on.

Thank you so much.

(audience applauding) - And now we're going to turn to our panelists who all have a very personal take on the state of our democracy, and Miles, I'm going to start with you.

You catapulted to nameless fame as Anonymous five years ago when you called out presidential misconduct in the Trump administration in the interest of protecting democracy, and it's been five years.

How do you think it's going?

(audience members chuckling) - (chuckles) A lot of mornings I wake up and wish I was still Anonymous, given how things are going in the public sphere right now.

It was actually really poignant for me that we opened with Chris, because when I first went to Washington more than 20 years ago, it was on the heels of just having interviewed Chris Matthews, as a little, tiny, small-town news reporter.

I'd interviewed him and he basically said something to me that echoed advice I'd gotten from someone else.

Basically, don't meet your heroes in Washington, it'll disappoint you.

And I went to Washington and I thought Chris Matthews and this boss of mine who'd said that, I said, "They're wrong," because I got to Washington post 9/11 and there was a spirit of unity throughout the town, and my heroes were getting things done, meeting literally across the aisle, and I worked on the floor of the House of Representatives, and I talk about this desk I had on the floor.

I had the best view in Washington.

The page desk has the best view in Washington.

Fast-forward 20 years, that desk where I was inspired to be in public service, where I saw members of Congress cutting deals, I looked on January 6, 2021 at that picture we've all seen on television of Capitol police officers holding guns, safeguarding the chamber from people who were trying to storm it.

Do you know what barricaded that chamber?

- [Jane] No.

- The desk that I sat in.

That page desk where I started my career was pushed by the officers to barricade the door and became the last line of defense to protect the citadel of democracy.

That, to me, says how our politics are going in this country.

- To give people a sense who don't know of what you went through when you did come out and you went public, you were alternately vilified and deified.

You also suffered anxiety attacks.

You started to abuse alcohol and drugs.

Your marriage broke up.

You lost your job.

You lost your house.

In your book you say that the greatest threat to democracy is anonymity.

Why do you say that?

- Well, Jane, it's certainly ironic coming from me, but my experience reaching that conclusion was long and fraught and painful, and I didn't go to that level of detail in the book to garner any sympathy.

In fact, I don't need it.

I went there because I think my experience is a cautionary tale and one that's now we've seen many, many times across this country, of public servants from both sides of the aisle being attacked and villainized for just doing their jobs, death threats, and all the things that I lost, there's other people in spades, losing those for simply doing their jobs.

But I say that anonymity is a threat to our democracy, because the thing that I realized when I came forward and unmasked myself is not only was it morally freeing for me, but I found out it created air cover for other people to come forward.

All of a sudden, so many of my colleagues who hadn't planned on speaking out, came and joined me in shining a light on misconduct, and to me, this collective anonymity that was within my party, the Republican Party, this refusal to be honest about what we were seeing, was allowing the situation to persist.

And all of these mentors that I'd worked under in Washington had in private said one thing about what they thought about the leader of the Republican Party, very, very dire things in some cases.

Some said they thought he was the threat to the fabric of our republic.

And then, in sometimes the same day, they would go on cable news and wax poetic about the person.

I'm from a small town in Indiana.

That's just dishonest.

And, again, I realized by taking the mask off and attaching my name to it, it made it easier for other people to do the same, and I think that affliction is endangering the country.

A lot of people are scared to speak out, and if they continue to stay silent, it makes it harder for the next person to come forward.

So that's how we lower the price of dissent, is we increase the supply.

- I see Mandana over here, who is never going to be quiet because you're an activist, (Mandana laughs) and you are nodding over here.

You came as a child with your family from Iran to escape religious persecution, as they did with Jewish people in Iran, and you came to America, and now you see what this country, the travails that we're going through.

How concerned are you about the state of democracy?

- I'm really concerned.

You know, we fled a brutal authoritarian regime to come here to live under a democracy, and I've seen what happens when we lose those privileges.

I've seen what happens when minorities are persecuted for their beliefs and women are stripped of their rights.

And right now it feels like we are seeing these extreme views and a really loyal base that will stop at nothing to help impose those views on everybody else.

And I think what happens is that it is really gradual and people are just kind of changing the channel.

They're like, "This is awkward.

I know this is uncomfortable, but I'm going to look the other way," or, "I'm really busy," or, "I'm going to swipe to the next thing on my feed."

We can't do that.

We have to call out what we are seeing, because that's how we end up there.

I mean, that statistic you opened with, blew my mind.

Democracy is absolutely worth fighting for, and as, you know, the country that has championed this experiment around the world, we have to get it right, because all we do is create a vacuum for other dictators like the ones that we fled.

- But people, you mentioned people's frustration.

I mean, we're also living in a country where the minority has an outsized, disproportionate voice, so they're able to block legislation that people would like to see, and that frustrates people, and then people say, "Why should I vote?"

And, you know, it's a domino effect.

You did start this initiative, I am a voter.

I mean, you're aware of the frustration that's out there.

How do you counteract that?

- I mean, there's so many things that are required for this to function.

It requires participation for it to actually function, so we need greater participation.

I think that what we are working on is what we know how to do, which is voter enthusiasm.

So many of us have been left out of this process for so long.

You know, the DC insiders, or whoever works on these political campaigns for so long, have not really communicated with young voters.

They don't reach them in the channels that they are.

We don't do a great job of teaching civic education, so people don't even know how to hold our government accountable.

- Jason, we've seen very clearly, I never thought I'd see it in my lifetime, how lies really undermine the democracy and how trust really is central to its strength.

And you've written a roadmap on the warning signs of fascism, and people say, "Can't happen here.

Absolutely can't happen here.

This is America, shining city on the hill."

Can it happen here?

- It did happen here.

Jim Crow was fascism.

We're a very young democracy.

We've only been a democracy since 1965, since the Voting Rights Act.

Hitler in "Mein Kampf," the country that he says that he wants to model Nazi Germany after, is the United States, a racial state using eugenics and race.

The Nuremberg laws that disenfranchised, removed my father's citizenship in Berlin when he was three, were modeled on the Jim Crow laws.

So we incarcerate 25% of the world's prisoners.

Our formerly enslaved population of 38 million Black Americans was 10% of the world's prison population.

So I think, yes.

(chuckles) - It can happen here.

- It did happen here.

- It did happen here.

I want to mention the personal stake that you have in this, is that I learned that your grandmother, Ilse Stanley, rescued 412 people out of concentration camps, and you also are the great-grandson of a cantor, so that informs, clearly, your study of fascism.

And I guess what I want to talk about for a minute is, what struck me was this us-versus-them mentality, pitting people against each other, which we're seeing throughout this culture right now.

That's a hallmark that separates fascism from other types of authoritarianism, right?

- Yes, particularly sort of racial us-versus-them, religious us-versus-them.

And no political philosopher ever would say, looking at the United States today, that it could support democracy.

The warning signs from figures from Plato to Rousseau were that if you have massive economic inequality of the sort that started under Reagan when he slashed taxes, massive inequality creates resentments that clever politicians can use to split people into teams.

The only way democracy can work is with some kind of equality.

Looking at America today, you would think and expect, as a philosopher, that any smart politician would split people in the way that we're seeing.

- Okay, now this is all getting, we're going through the top lines of this, (chuckles) and I'm getting a little depressed myself right now, with all due respect, listening to you, but the point is, we want to look at now sort of some of the variables that have factored into this, and, you know, mistrust in the government has always been, cynicism, and during the Vietnam War, during the '70s and Watergate, certainly was spiking, and then during 9/11, during the terrorist attacks, it abated for a while, which is when, it's my understanding, you decided to go into public service even though you hate politics.

- (laughs) Yeah, well, I do.

I went into government to be in public policy, to be in the national security realm, and after 9/11, I wanted to prevent a day like that from ever happening again.

And I thought my whole career would be focused on overseas threats to democracy, and I spent most of it focused on combating foreign terrorist groups, like Al-Qaeda, like ISIS, and trying to protect our country against our foreign adversaries in Russia and China and North Korea and the Iranian regime.

And what I found in the past couple of years, that, in my judgment, the biggest national security threats to the stability of our democracy were not coming from the outside.

They were coming internally, and the data, and that's not from any one person, the data showed that we were seeing an explosion in political violence and political intimidation that makes this moment look very, very unique and very worrisome in history.

But I want to key in on one thing you said just there, Jane, which is the disaffection of the public towards the system.

When people get really frustrated and they think the system's not working, it tends towards extremism.

And I want to give you two numbers really quick.

And one of them is, I want to know what people in this room and people who are listening live or on television, think that the approval rating is of the United States Congress.

Someone throw a number out there and I'll repeat it.

What do you think the approval rating is of Congress?

- [Audience Member] 15%.

- 15%, okay, that's close.

That's about right.

15 to 20% on average is the approval rating of Congress.

Abysmal.

Now I want to know, what's your guess on the reelection rate of the average member of Congress?

- [Audience Members] 90%.

- That's about right.

Actually, it's 95%.

In what marketplace in the world (audience members laughing) do the majority of consumers say, "I hate every product on the shelves," and then they all buy the product?

A broken marketplace.

And the reason for that is, and we can go into the details, our democracy right now has gotten increasingly into a place where we favor extremist candidates early in the primary process.

So about 10% of the country is voting on the people that the other 90% of us get there for the general election ballot and have to decide.

Of course that's going to result in people saying, "The system's broken, it doesn't represent me," and that's where you go from a period where the vitriol jumps the tracks to violence, and I think long-term democracy reform is the only way to lower the temperature.

- All right, you're nodding ferociously down there.

What are you thinking?

- I'm thinking this is just what...

The resentment generated from massive inequality and money in politics, the very clear domination of business elites and control of candidates creates this kind of mistrust and anger and extremism, indeed.

So we have to, Citizens United, these factors that have undermined our democracy, need to be addressed structurally.

- But there are other things that happen that we look at in this country and we say, "I don't recognize my country."

And you were watching television, I think, one day during the family separation policy, and you saw what was happening at the border with children, with families, with migrants, and you actually got on a plane and went down to visit the first tent camp of migrants.

- Yeah.

- Because you didn't recognize the country that had saved your family.

- No, at all.

But yes, I had just had my second daughter, Miller.

I was home on parental leave and I was in this, like, very sacred space and I turned on the television and I saw children being separated from their families in tents under aluminum blankets.

We treat luggage better than we treated these children in our country.

And, you know, when we came to America, it was terrifying, and I remember coming to New York, and it's this scary place, and I didn't speak the language, and there's all these bright lights and cars, and I just held my mom's hand and I knew that I was going to be okay.

And to think that the most vulnerable populations in the world came to America, because we told them to, and they show up and we remove their children, forcibly many times, from them.

Immigrants, to me, are the most patriotic people in this country.

Like, we had American flags all over our house the entire time we grew up.

We grew up with this tremendous sense of patriotism.

This country saved our lives.

And I'm like, "How can this be the same place?"

And I got on a plane.

I went Tornillo, Texas.

I called a couple of my friends that were in Congress and I said, "Get me in," and I stood there and I was like, "Something is broken."

Like, we can't be the same nation that can't recognize that we have gone too far.

And this partisan politics, this idea that someone's trying to win at the expense of anything, is the most unpatriotic thing I've ever seen.

And yeah, I mean, I quit my job and really started working on this, 'cause everyone, I didn't know anything about politics and I kept meeting with different members of Senate and Congress, and everyone said, "If you really want to create long-term systemic change, we need more people to vote," and I really didn't think it was going to be that hard.

(chuckles) - Jane, can I just for a second jump in?

- She loves politics, by the way, now.

Don't you?

Mandana loves politics.

- I still think of myself as an outsider, which I think really helps, but yes, tell me.

- Well, no, I was going to say, I mean, what's interesting about this, and I didn't know this until we were sitting up here, is I had been in the Department of Homeland Security advising the secretary as this policy, the family separation policy, went into effect.

Now, as it was developed, immigration isn't what I was working on.

I was working on counter-terrorism and intelligence, but I had a front row seat to this happening.

What was shocking to me is that this wasn't a surprise.

For many, many months, as this conversation happened inside the federal government, people sounded the alarm and said, "This is a policy that will end in humanitarian catastrophe."

Now, to be clear, I'm a conservative.

I believe in tough security at the border.

I believe in immigration reform.

But this wasn't tough security at the border.

This was an egregious, misguided policy that was so obviously going to result in a train wreck, and yet the federal government in that time period did it anyway.

- Jason.

- I just want to flag immigration as really, and the panic about immigration, as really central to the worry about fascism.

It is central.

The British fascist party's motto was "Britain for the British."

Immigration is central to fascist movements.

Great replacement theory is the central way you get people scared, and you say, "Our population's going to be replaced, they're going to be replaced at the border."

Madison Grant's book, "The Passing of the Great Race" was Hitler's Bible, and this is what we're seeing.

We're seeing this.

And then the cruelty towards immigrants, the cruelty being the point, as Adam Serwer said in his famous article, you get people used to this kind of cruelty to outsiders, and then you get people used to a kind of cruel force that deals with outsiders and then political opponents.

- I want to ask you, 'cause I've heard you use the term performative fascism, what does that mean?

- Performative fascism is what we saw in the early years of the last administration, where we had a lot of rhetorical fascism.

We had very clear and explicit, you know, the viciousness towards immigrants, the explicit, you know, "Mexicans are rapists" kind of comments, the sort of fascist, the hearkening back to a great America in the past.

That's why I've been pushing back a little bit against this conversation, because I think it's very dangerous to talk about, "Oh, it was once great, and now, you know, we don't want to do that, we want to..." What's great about America is that the civil rights movement, you know, we challenged fascism and won.

So performative fascism is a kind of politics that appeals to people's resentments.

It appeals to people's cultural, religious identities.

It represents democracy as a threat, the freedoms of democracy, women's rights, LGBT rights as a threat to people's way of life, and then the strongman says, "I will protect you from that."

- A savior has to be involved, - [Jason] Exactly.

- somebody's who's going to fix it.

I want to do mention this thing, though, the glorification of the past when it was not that great all the time, right?

And basically, that's part of this whole picture, because then you say liberalism killed it, globalization killed it, and again, there's always somebody to blame, always somebody to blame.

- I'm going to take the optimist view on this about parts of the past where we can learn lessons.

I mean, and let me back up.

There's a quote, a Martin Luther King Jr. quote that Barack Obama often uses in speeches, something along the lines of the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice.

Beautiful quote.

Here's the part that I disagree with.

I don't think there's any inevitability to the moral arc of the universe.

We decide what direction we are going to bend it, and I'll give you two examples of what direction we're going to bend it, and you mentioned the civil rights movement.

I can't imagine what the experience was like as a Black American either in the 1960s, let alone the 1860s.

But what I can tell you is that Black Americans did not storm the United States Capitol and ransack it and try to overturn our democracy because they were being deprived their fundamental human rights.

When that happened on January 6, 2021, and I saw a bunch of fellow Republicans, I'm sorry, most of them, fat, white dudes upset about the election, going in there to ransack the Capitol, I thought they have not shaped the arc of the moral universe towards justice with this action, by doing that in that sacred place.

But I give those two examples, because we have a choice, and right now our democracy is in peril, and if you're on the right, you probably feel that way, and the polls show it, - [Mandana] That's right.

- and if you're on the left, you feel that way, and the polls show it, but we can choose to do that peacefully or we can choose to do that violently as a country, and if we choose the latter, we won't have this republic for very long.

- What's your betting on going forward?

I mean, that is the greatest threat to this country, is domestic violent extremism, certainly.

It's calmed down, and yet you think the potential's there, clearly, in the future.

- I actually don't think it's calmed down, and I hate to sound now a pessimistic note on this.

I spend a lot of my time looking at the data from a national security and public safety perspective, and right now I think we are in the biggest period of threat when it comes to political violence that we've been in, at least since the 1960s.

The data supports it.

We are seeing death threats explode against members of Congress, and it goes down to the state and local level.

So I am worried that right now all this moment needs is a spark for it to become a lot worse.

So it's, you know, a matter of time, at this point, unfortunately, before we see a devastating incident, and hopefully we as a country can prepare for that and, again, lower the temperature to keep it from getting worse.

- All right, well, that's why Mandana's here, because she's going to help lower the temperature, (Mandana laughs) and I want- - [Miles] I scare and she fixes.

- She fixes, yeah.

That's why you're here.

Yeah, good cop, bad cop.

But I do want to talk to you about this whole initiative, because you're dealing with people, I mean, we've talked about it here, who feel hostility, they don't want to participate, but the question is, how do you actually go in and try and get people to vote?

What is the actual, 'cause you've done it very differently.

You have a model that's really predicated on your experience in branding and in consumerism.

Talk about it.

- I mean, when I found out, you know, 100 million people who could vote in that 2016 election, didn't, I think my brain exploded.

I think about how many people show up just to see "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer," and I'm like, "Where was that marketing team?"

(panelists chuckling) - [Jane] Let's use them!

- And, like, that's what we became.

- [Jane] Right.

- You know, I mean, again, I didn't really know the first thing about how to get people out to vote, but I knew that it needed some version of a rebrand.

We needed to understand this as something that was a privilege and something that was a core part of identity.

And so obviously we took a very non-partisan approach, because we were targeting young voters, and young voters don't want you to tell them what to do, right?

They don't want, like, this idea of, like, mom coming down on them and being, like, "You should vote and do," you know?

They want the information, and so we focused on getting them fact-based, objective information.

We really doubled down on our digital platforms and our tools.

- Well, I mean, I think there are some hopeful notes.

The fact is that the midterms in 2022 went without incident.

- Yes!

- They were conducted successfully.

You've seen record turnout in special elections in Ohio and Kentucky and Wisconsin and Kansas.

- [Mandana] Kansas.

- I mean, there are signs that people are motivated, but Jason.

- No, I was going to, I think it's just very important to see that the struggles we're having with democracy are normal.

Like, you look all across the world, democracy's tough.

Democracy has always been tough.

There haven't been many democracies.

Democracy is an ideal.

It's always going to be flawed.

Miles and Mandana have been talking about voting.

The Black struggle for freedom was about voting.

You know, Mandana has done work on trying to restore voting, you know, get people voting again, because voting is the core of where the fight is going to be.

And we can look at our past and see, as we face the same fascist tactics of voter suppression, of targeting groups that register people to vote, of poll taxes, this is how this kind of fascist structure works.

People go back to the past and they look at what worked in the past, voter suppression, poll taxes, the attacks on education, and they repeat that, and that's what we're seeing again.

And when you clearly see what's happening and you have vividly in your mind the heroism of, say, the civil rights movement, which actually took place in Alabama, I would've done it in Vermont, (audience laughing) but, (chuckles) you know, it was tough.

- You could still, (chuckles) never mind.

- You can see, you know, it shouldn't be surprising that democracy is hard.

- No, I mean, around the world, we're seeing that, and there's been a lot of countries involved, but I want to make a point that you talk about.

You wrote a piece in "The Guardian" recently about how people don't always call it fascism, but what we're seeing in the whole world of banning books and ideas and authors, and we're doing it under the guise of we're giving parents more say in what the kids should be, you know, taught, and no critical race theory and nothing about transsexuals and nothing about this, you're saying that's fascism.

- The first large Nazi book burning was of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, which had the largest collection of LGBT literature in the world, and the largest collection of photographs of gender fluidity, showing that.

So to eliminate perspectives, the LGBT perspective, that's what the Nazis focused on, May 10, 1933, making it so that the LGBT perspective was invisible, minority perspectives invisible.

Here our national minority is Black Americans and Indigenous people.

We have two national minorities, more, but Black Americans are sort of our structuring one.

So the attacks on education are trying to make those perspectives invisible so that when people see a Black political protest, they don't know what's going on, and then they want law and order.

So that is the goal of attacking the education systems, to erase LGBT perspectives, to erase minority perspectives, so people don't understand social reality, and that is not a culture war.

We've got to drop the expression "culture war" entirely.

It's an attack on the mechanics required, the very basis for democracy.

- I want to ask you, because, again, people are not always that concerned when they see certain things happening and the systematic, I don't know, I don't always use the word weaponization, it's just so overused, but, you know, people talking about the Justice Department and law enforcement, and running it down and running it down and running it down, and people are sort of like, "Well, you know, maybe there's a reason they're running it down."

You watch that, I mean, but it's a strategic thing that's being done.

- Well, I mean, kind of to what Jason was saying, we've seen this for 2,000 years, since antiquity.

If you have a population that thinks the system is no longer working, they're much more amenable to selecting a leader who says, "Democracy's guardrails aren't guardrails, they're barriers.

Let me knock a few down and help get you a shorter path to what you want," and they offer to deliver, and we see this time and time again throughout history.

And one of the leading indicators of democratic corrosion is the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories.

And if you look at my side of the political spectrum, again, as a conservative, one of the things that's been frustrating me about my side of the political spectrum has been seeing conspiracy theories taking hold, and you can quantify it.

Just a few years ago, it was absolutely fringe to believe in the great replacement theory, that there's a secret plan to replace whites in America.

Now, unfortunately, the majority of people in the base of my part of the political spectrum believe that to be true.

The core tenets of the QAnon conspiracy theory are observably crazy, that there's a secret group of people pulling the levers of government and a secret deep state.

Well, guess what?

Now, just north of 50% of the base on my side of the political spectrum believes in the core tenets of QAnon.

These are Pew surveys and NPR surveys.

- Correct.

- And the last one, that the 2020 election was stolen and it was illegitimate, I can tell you, as one of the guys who put the election security procedures in place for Donald Trump, it was one of the most secure elections in modern history, and yet 3/4 of that side of the political spectrum believe it was stolen.

The mainstreaming of conspiracy theories doesn't make those people bad people.

They've been fooled into thinking something's true.

They've been fraudulently fooled into it.

The problem, though, is it creates then a base of people who could be further radicalized, and a small segment, again, that goes and engages in violence.

That's what I worry about, and that's how you get to a place where people say, "Look, if the system doesn't work, I'm not going to advocate for change through that system.

I'm going to burn the system down and put in someone who's willing to do that for us."

- Have you been surprised at the legs that this has all had in the last five years, that it's in some ways gotten worse?

- Yeah, because people like me were completely, completely wrong about it.

I thought that hyper-populist figures in my party were an aberration.

I came into a Republican Party that I thought was predicated on free minds, free markets, free people.

I'm a hardcore libertarian that probably disagrees with some of my panelists on lots and lots of things.

But the party took a very, very different direction.

And again, I popularized this notion, first in that "New York Times" op-ed, anonymously, that Trump's an aberration, some of these autocratic tendencies, we just need to wait it out, the pendulum's going to swing back to rational Republicans.

I was wrong about that, because what happened is a wider movement was built around some of those principles, and we've seen some of those principles, again, I think it's the fastest political coalition in America are folks who embrace some of those philosophies of the ex-president, and it's going to take a long time to get that out of our political system.

- But, okay, Jason, and then I want to go to Mandana.

Go ahead.

- I just want to quickly emphasize the conspiracy theory aspect.

The structure of the conspiracy we're looking at is historically familiar: "The globalists are trying to undermine the dominant group.

They're really protecting terrible, decadent things."

This was the kind of... And there was something, a stab-in-the-back myth that we have to get revenge for.

Now, Hitler said that was the Jews.

(chuckles) That's not mentioned now, but it's the same structure.

QAnon looks like blood libel, "They're targeting children."

That's how they always create panic: "They're targeting children."

It's a very familiar set of tropes that we're seeing, and we know it has a very grim path.

- Aside from the confluence of circumstances we've been talking about, Mandana, we've also had the Surgeon General recently talking about, Vivek Murthy, talk about how the epidemic of loneliness and mental health issues, and people, he really came out and said, "It's not just a threat to the health, it's a threat to the democracy," because what you see happening is people become more isolated, they're angry, they become more vulnerable, they don't want to go out, communities suffer because of that, there isn't the cohesion.

And, you know, you, again, this is part of what you're trying to fight.

- I mean, so much of what you both said plays such a big part in this, when you think about these authoritarian-type leaders and all the hatred that they're trying to instill in the public and all the false information that is being disseminated so widely.

Then you think about social media and how much that plays into everyone's mental health.

And then you think about how the algorithms are continuing to push people into further extremes, and this sense of rage culture, and, you know, the news constantly presenting one side versus the other side.

Everything is so combative, right?

And then obviously you have the backdrop of racial and, you know, economic inequalities.

It's a lot for everyone.

And, you know, when people do show up, you know, we've had these conversations with young voters all the time because that's, you know, a big part of our focus, but they're like, "You told us to vote, we voted, and then you did nothing about the guns.

Every single politician ran on gun safety, all the Moms Demand Actions and all the red shirts showed up, and we did this, we did what you asked us to, and they're not holding up their end of the bargain."

And this sense of, you know, ineffectiveness of the grownups not doing their jobs, right, this idea that you turn on the TV and everyone's just fighting, is continuing to make people feel really isolated and really alone and just like there isn't as much hope as there should be.

I think what we tried very hard to do is work against that and constantly try to inform people, and change is happening, but it's gradual, and it doesn't happen overnight.

- Well, now we're going to spend the next 10 minutes fixing it.

(Mandana laughs) (audience chuckling) You're laughing, but I'm going to start with you, because, I mean, what we were talking about, again, a population more vulnerable toward accepting somebody's going to fix it and somebody's going to save us.

Seriously, I asked Chris Matthews, what would you recommend to people who really are anxious about what's going on, about what they can do to make any kind of difference in this picture?

- So one thing I noticed that surprised me in my research on fascism was the confluence in agreement between different theorists who were talking about fascism, Hannah Arendt, who was talking about European fascism, Du Bois in Black Reconstruction, all of them emphasized making politics material.

Instead of getting people all sort of hot and bothered about, you know, losing their status as men, losing their status as white, make it about the weekend.

Everybody loves the weekend, everybody loves time off.

- What?

Is he kidding?

- (chuckles) The labor movement, so the labor movement.

Unions are key.

Arendt talks about that.

You know, remember Martin Niemöller's proverb, "First they came for the communists, and I wasn't a communist so I didn't speak up, then they came for the trade unionists..." Making politics material, making politics about people's material lives, health insurance, that is, I think, where we're going to get the solution.

- What do you think, Miles?

- I've got three answers for you.

- [Jane] Whoa, three!

- Platforms, the political system, and people.

What do I mean by those?

Platforms.

I'm going to give you a hopeful view on technology.

I spent a period of time as the head of advanced technology and security strategy at Google, and we talked about this a lot behind the scenes with our technology teams.

Why is this tech so divisive?

Why do people hate each other because of these tools we're giving them online?

And a very simplified answer, evolutionary biologists have studied this, it's kind of what we know, is you'll say to someone in a tweet what you wouldn't say in the street.

Why is that?

Because if you tweet at them, you don't have to see the other person.

But we know from evolutionary biology, as much as you might not like another person, when you're face to face with a human, there's an impulse to protect fellow members of the species.

You see it in other species in the natural world.

As technology is improving in what I call the new roaring '20s right now and into the 2030s, we are going to see more augmented reality and virtual reality on these platforms.

You are going to have to see me to engage with me, and that will lower the temperature.

We've seen seen studies where it does.

So that's the platform side of it.

The political system side of it, I hinted at earlier.

We've got to make the system more competitive again.

If there's more competition and choice in our democracy, from the far right to the far left to the center, you name it, it actually allows people who represent our views to win.

And right now, statistically, blue zip codes are getting bluer, red zip codes are getting redder.

It's the worst it's ever been.

We have to make those long-term democracy reforms to make it more competitive.

And then finally, when it comes to people, yes, everyday Americans can have an impact on this.

And I also hinted at this too earlier, which is right now the price of dissent in this country is very high.

Dissenting cost me literally everything but my life.

We need more dissent.

We need more truth in this country.

We need more cooperation.

And that starts with everyday Americans being unafraid at that barbecue or that dinner of talking to the person of the other political persuasion.

We can do that in mass.

- Have you thought of running?

- I'm running from office, not running for office.

- You're running... (laughs) (audience laughing and applauding) I'm not sure that's a good idea.

You might have some people who would, like, be on your side.

Just saying.

- We'll wait a beat.

- Okay, you want to wait a bit.

Mandana, we all know that there's this bright promise of young people voting.

Every year, we go, "The young people are going to finally turn out!

The young people are going to..." And in fact, I was really distressed to see that in terms of the list of youth turnout, we rank below Moldova, and Sweden is actually the top country in terms of youth turnout.

- Sweden's a great place though, so a lot of fun.

Great place to visit.

(audience chuckling) (Mandana chuckles) - Okay.

So the question becomes, why would, you know, the next time be different, do you think?

- Well, I mean, when you think about young voters, Gen Z and millennial, they're going to be the largest voting block America's ever had.

They're the most diverse.

They're incredibly engaged and they deeply care, and I think that's always what's frustrating, is you hear that they're apathetic, they don't care.

They deeply care.

I mean, 87% of young voters won't purchase from a brand, to go back to your commerce example, if that brand doesn't align with their values.

They will show up.

We have to do a better job of bringing them into the system and meeting them where they are.

And I think, I have tremendous hope that we're going to be able to continue to do that.

You know, there's so much sense about, like, "I'm voting about myself," and voting has never been about the individual.

It's always been about the collective.

It's interesting to hear you say that, because, like, we were meant to live in villages.

And so if your rights aren't infringed upon, you still have to vote for the rights of someone else's whose rights must be infringed upon.

And I think this idea that, like, "Hey, I voted and now I'm done with democracy," right, like, it's a practice and democracy is something we do all the time.

We show up, we're activists, we speak up, we dissent, you know, we vote in primaries so that we actually have better options when it comes to the elections.

And, you know, I think there's this expectation that democracy is going to be perfect, and it's not.

It was never expected to be perfect.

I don't think my family expected perfection when we came here.

We just wanted a chance at freedom and self-actualization, and, like, look where I'm sitting today, and it's pretty cool.

And so I think that we have to lead with at least the promise of that opportunity.

- I now understand why you said your mother and your grandmother were such enormous influences on you and that you really took that animating spirit of participation, and wherever they are, they deserve a lot of credit.

(Mandana laughs) - Hear, hear!

(audience applauding) - Jason, I know you have children as well.

I mean, we talk about this, but, and it is, the reality is very dark and it's tough to take a lot of times, but where do you net out in terms of optimism?

There's that word.

- I'm extremely optimistic because I live in a country, maybe the only country, that fought off fascism without a war.

(chuckles) And so, you know, we have a history of the labor movement, of women's rights.

We have a history of LGBT.

In my lifetime, LGBT equality arose.

So, you know, we have very serious problems, but many of these problems, you know, plagues and slavery, have been around a long time, (chuckles) and so, you know, democracy is an ideal.

It's an ideal that you fight for, as both of my co-panelists have been emphasizing, and in America, we fought hard for it.

And, you know, I think that organizations such as labor unions, community school boards, community groups, these democratic organizations are a source of our help, of our hope, and I think, you know, we've always faced these problems in the past.

Will we win now?

I don't know.

Well, it depends on us.

- I'm going to give you the last word, because you did allude to it, so I'm going to ask you about it, and that is that on election night, 2020, you were alone with a gun and you nearly took your own life, and you use that now, in the book "Blowback," as a metaphor for where we are in this country.

Why?

- I was really unsure if I was going to talk about that in the book, and I mentioned losing a really serious relationship earlier, and I'm very lucky, I've now since met and married the love of my life.

Her name is Hannah, and she saved my life.

And we talked a lot about that, and she felt like it was important for me to go there in the book.

Why?

Because when I ignored my own personal guardrails over and over and over, there were blinking warning signs as I was trying to go out and shine a light on corruption that I wasn't taking care of myself.

Ignoring those guardrails almost cost me my life, and I do think there's a parallel to what's happening with our democracy, that if we ignore those built-in protections again and again and again, it will be what I call civic suicidal ideation.

I think, right now, as a country, if we don't wake up to the fact that these institutions are corroding, we risk throwing it all away.

But I'll end on a note of optimism, because I think when faced with the prospect of losing our republic, if it gets that bad, Americans will fight for it.

You know, Winston Churchill once famously said something along the lines of, "Americans will always do the right thing after they've tried everything else."

- [Jane] After they've tried... (audience laughs) - And not long ago, Jane, I was on the beaches of Normandy for a visit in France, and you can't visit that place without leaving with the greatest sense of reverence that the American people, when freedom is in danger, they will give it all up to protect it.

And I do think we are in a difficult moment as a country, and I think, like in that moment, we will rise to the occasion and we'll protect the American experiment.

- Unfortunately- (audience applauding) Please, go ahead.

(audience applauding) The show's gone like lightning because of the three of you, and we're at our final moment, which is our silver lining moment, and Mandana, I know that your two daughters, Anderson and Miller, also give you hope for the future and that you teach them the importance of using their voices and that you vote on everything, like what flavor ice cream and what to have for dinner and all that stuff.

(audience chuckling) And here's what happened when Mandana's daughter, Anderson, who's also known as Andie, went to a Hanukkah party at the White House and met President Biden.

- Anderson has a question for me.

She said, "I want to be president."

- [Attendees] Woo!

(attendees cheering) - But here's the question, "How did you become president?"

(attendees laughing) - It's a good question.

No one better to ask.

- No, it's a good question.

No one better to ask.

You know what I did?

When you decide you want to be a president, and you decide, first of all, you got to know why you want to be president, not just to be here, but who are you're going to help?

What do you care most about?

♪ You, you, you, you ♪ You, you, you, you (attendees laughing) (attendees applauding) - She is her mother's daughter.

We are grateful to our extraordinary guests for their insights and inspiration and to you for joining us today.

Until we see you back here next time, from the Frederick Gunn School in the other Washington, Washington, Connecticut, for "Common Ground," I'm Jane Whitney.

Take care.

(bright stirring music) (bright string music) (bright music)