(gentle upbeat music) - What is democracy?

- Oh, is that all?

Okay.

All right.

- Democracy is not a thing.

- It's a system where people have a vote.

- Well, people use democracy a lot of different ways.

- The word is contested because once you call something a democracy, it sounds perfect.

- Probably the best way to think about democracy is to use the words of Abraham Lincoln, that our government is of the people by the people and for the people.

And I think that's a pretty good encapsulation of what democracy could be or should be.

(gentle upbeat music) - Democracy is the idea that we should govern ourselves.

It's the idea that we, the people should ultimately exercise power.

- It's about participation, it's about the consent of those who are governed.

It's about people having the ability, the power even, to be involved in the decisions that affect their lives and to have as much as possible mastery of themselves rather than being mastered.

- Which means that we have a voice in our governance, that that voice is exercised through a vote for elected officials and that those elected officials will represent our best interest.

- If people have an obstructed path to the vote or they can't vote, then it does beg the question, how democratic a society are we?

And I think that's a very relevant question to today.

- If we're talking about this ideal vision of democracy that is inclusion, acknowledgment of diversity of voices.

critical engagement in debates, no, we are not living in a democracy.

Puerto Rico is defined as a territory of the United States.

In Puerto Rico, we don't have the right to vote for the president, we don't have real representation in the US government, we only have a representative that has a voice but doesn't have a vote.

- Voting is not the only way that people express political voice but it is an important one in a system where we have elected representatives who then determined policy.

- So if a society has regular, fair and free elections and if there's kind of a peaceful transfer of power, then odds are good that that's a democracy.

- Constitution of the United States.

- So help you God?

- So help me God.

- Congratulations-- - But that alone is not enough to provide for democracy, you also need some civil rights or political rights.

(drums beating) Primary among them are the rights to associate freely and express yourself freely.

- Our political democracy, our electoral system goes hand in hand with other movements for social justice.

I don't think that one happens without the other.

I think that they are both most effective when they both are engaged.

- We're gonna stand together, we're gonna sing together, we're gonna stay together, we gonna moan together, we gonna groan together and after a while we will have freedom, freedom, freedom.

(crowd cheering) - The civil rights movement becomes a very clear and concrete example of the corrective function that social movements can play and do play in a given society.

It occurs through lobbying and petitioning government, appealing to moral sensibilities and a sense of fairness and working to negotiate certain kinds of reforms through gradual change and negotiation.

But there's also a whole threat of mass direct action, nonviolent resistance, actively disrupting the status quo by very explicitly and self-consciously breaking unjust laws that excluded black people from the full advantages of their citizenship.

- I think in the abstract, people probably embrace the idea of democracy and it's a beautiful idea and a simple idea, but I think in practice, it gets a lot more complicated.

So I think starting to kind of parse out the practice from the idea of democracy is where the challenges come in.

- It's more a set of processes and ongoing practices on a practical daily basis democracy can be realized.

- Things like being an informed citizen, things like jury duty, we don't always think about as part of that process, but are really essential to it.

- The defendant, John A- - Serving on juries actually changes people, for many people, it inspires them to vote at a higher rate than they would have otherwise.

Jurors showed all kinds of interesting ways that this powerful experience of exercising democratic power can change how they think about themselves as citizens and how they think about their responsibilities beyond voting.

That's what the jury can do and we have other democratic institutions that we have in place or could put in place that give people these opportunities to deliberate with their fellow citizens and kind of rediscover what it means to live in a democracy, it doesn't just mean the protection of your rights and the exercise of a freedom, it means also a shared responsibility to take seriously the task we have of governing ourselves.

- When Lincoln was talking about government of the people by the people, for the people, that really meant the ability of Americans, of all stripes, to have unfettered access to pursuing happiness, to living better lives and that meant breaking down barriers that gave others an unfair advantage, it meant giving people the opportunity to participate in government and participate in bettering themselves in their lives.

So that's what democracy is all about.

(crowd chanting) - Democracy really does have to come back to that principle of self government and universal suffrage and that's not just about freedom, it's about the exercise of that freedom.

- I'm tellin' ya, for your own benefit, you had better turn around and get out of this area.

You're not going to the courthouse in a group on a condition that you've come here.

- And that means that you have to start having things like empathy and reason and reflection and consideration as well as the ability to understand and articulate your own point of view.

That's the challenge of democracy, whether we're in a small group or in a large nation, so it's partly about freedom, but it's also about responsibility and it's also really about empathy - Sir, can we pray together, you and I?

- You do your praying, I do mine, big boy.

You don't pray for me, I don't want you to pray.

- Well, will you pray for us?

- Because I don't think your prayers get above your head.

- Well will you pray for us?

- No, I'm not gon' pray for ya.

- Without that aspirational dimension, you miss out on why democracy is the way it is, it's not simply a matter of procedures, it's an idea of what human beings are and how we live up to what they are.

(crowd chanting) - I think that a lot of American history is a history of struggle toward those aspirations.

People push to access greater democracy for their own people, their own movements, their own group as part of a larger inclusion in American society and other people push back.

So I think that much of American history is a push and pull toward greater and lesser democracy.

I really don't think it's gone all in one direction toward greater inclusiveness and openness and sharing of resources.

- Democracies are always very fluid because I think part of what makes democracies dynamic is that you do have those contending forces that can either take us in more progressive directions or can take us into very reactionary, not so progressive directions.

- Struggle is endemic to democracy.

You are accepting the idea that if we are free, we are going to disagree.

We're going to disagree very strongly about some things that we are extremely committed to.

(people shouting) Society has to figure out a way where we can work through those disagreements and not kill each other.

And that's what democracy is for.

(solemn music) - The foundation on which rests the government of the United States is the constitution.

Like most important political documents, the constitution is subject to interpretation.

That is one of its great strengths, the constitution is not a legal straight jacket, it is firm and yet flexible enough to meet the needs of an ever growing, ever changing nation.

- If you look at our country and its founding, you have very undemocratic practices that grow up alongside of and intertwined with democracy.

- The founders created a nation out of whole cloth, it was an incredible feat.

They did this with lots of problems, there were many things in the new constitution that we have since seen are extremely problematic or downright racist, the three-fifths clause in particular being one of those.

And the fact that women and African-Americans were prevented from participating wholly in the democratic experiment from the perspective of citizenship.

- We do have founding documents that declare our commitment to greater inclusiveness and democracy and equality but we don't all mean those in the same way, nor do I think we want to share access in the same way.

But every social movement in the society that I can think of, certainly movements to end slavery, movements to expand the rights of women, movements to expand the rights of labor, of immigrants, of various ethnic and religious groups have all used the founding statements of this society as a way to defend their aspirations to greatest inclusion, belonging, democracy.

(dramatic music) - Slavery was absolutely critical to the creation of the United States.

Americans at the time of the founding were overwhelmingly in favor of slavery.

Several of the Northern States had eliminated slavery but the American population did not go into the constitutional convention thinking that slavery was something that they were going to eliminate.

- You have a really challenging and painful example of who counts.

If you look at the constitution, I think probably the most famous example is the three-fifths clause of the constitution in which it was decided that free people would count as a whole person, but not free people would count as three fifths of a person.

And so what does that mean when you have that as integral to the founding documents of this democracy?

Are these undemocratic practices really marginal from the American democracy or are they intertwined within the American democracy?

- That's the tension at the heart of American history, is this tension between the ideals about Liberty, equality that are built into our founding documents and then the fact that slavery is also built into those same founding documents.

(dramatic music) - In Angela Davis' words, "Freedom is a constant struggle."

And so I don't know that we've gotten more or less undemocratic, I think that there have been real breakthrough moments when we have exercised commitment to recognizing democratic ideals and principles, I think the reconstruction era is one of those moments.

- The Civil War, which we could sort of think about as the second American revolution, produces this incredible moment that I think really should be called the second framing or the second constitutional era, in which we get the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments that provide this freedom, citizenship and the protection of the vote.

And when they are granted the ability to vote, African-Americans come out in enormous numbers, they register right away, they get involved in the voting process, they go to the voting places and participate as much as they possibly can and they also run for office.

(upbeat music) So there are quite a few who make it to Congress and to high state offices, but in large numbers, African-Americans are coming out and running for small offices from sheriff all the way up to state and local representatives.

- So really a flourishing of both African-American voter participation and office holding.

- The nation really was pushing towards the idea of equality.

- And so there's this moment, you have black political power, you have blacks who are serving in Congress in the Senate, you have this brief window of opportunity that happens and then it just slammed shut.

- Reconstruction ends in 1876 when the Union Army is pulled out of the former Confederate States And these States are allowed to run their own elections.

(dramatic music) - When the federal government pulls troops out of the South and is no longer there to ensure that elections are fair to keep white southerners from using extra legal violence to intimidate African-Americans and I should say white southerners who were voting Republican or participating in Republican politics, both of those groups were targeted by the White Leagues and by the first Ku Klux Klan.

And once the Republicans and those African-American voters lose that political power, Southern States that are now majority white governments began to pass laws very explicitly disenfranchising people.

- So poll taxes, so that you had to pay a fee to cast a ballot, literacy tests that require all kinds of knowledge of the state constitutions in order to participate in the vote and grandfather clauses, which were intended to save whites from the problems of literacy tests and poll taxes, so that you could vote if your grandfather voted, or if you were eligible to vote before 1867.

- But in 1896, you have Plessy versus Ferguson.

(dramatic music) It's almost like the door shuts, you know, it's like it had been closing, it had been closing and in 1896, you have Plessy versus Ferguson that says we are gonna separate the two races.

And this is in some way such a pessimistic moment in American history, the decision that we will have two societies.

The ideas of the abolitionists movement and the anti-slavery movements were very much tied up in addressing unjust institutions and addressing the oppression of others and addressing the ways in which this undermined the professed principles of the country.

And so I think as they were engaging in those activities, they could see how that translated, you know, not just to looking at the role of slavery, but looking at other injustices as they existed across different groups.

- The first organized effort to gain more rights for women happened within the anti-slavery movement.

(solemn music) The people who became identified with the women's rights movement learned how to be activists in what some of them referred to as the school of anti-slavery.

I mean, very much came out of that constituency and out of that sense, that dramatic moral changes were required.

- Before the Civil War, the idea of freeing slaves and the idea of women voting are both pretty radical suggestions.

- The reaction to the women's suffrage movement was really negative and it was not at all inevitable that this should happen.

- The press that did pick up on the existence of this mostly responded with ridicule.

(dramatic music) - I mean, editors, this is a strategy that happens then and has certainly not gone away, spent a great deal more energy talking about the women's appearance and marriage ability than their actual demands.

- People who were advocating for the abolition of slavery, people who were advocating for women's suffrage were seen as radical crackpots.

They would dehumanize or belittle them, they would feminize the men, they would masculitize the women and so it was really negative.

- Before the Civil War, people who supported women's rights and abolitionists were largely overlapping groups and it's only after the Civil War when dramatic, moral and political choices were made that there was some separation in the groups.

- The 19th century white Americans, North and South were very racist and there were a lot of ideas about racial hierarchies and a number of white suffragists were educated middle and upper class women and felt very frustrated that they didn't have the right to vote when recently enslaved African-American men did.

So the movement really splits over this question.

Many African-American women saw black men's votes as really a community vote and that black women could sort of engage with black men and that their concerns would be heard in politics.

White women were really more frustrated that black men would get the right to vote before they did.

- What happens is you have some white women who are saying, "Look what you've done.

You've given power over white women to black men, to ignorant, degraded black men."

And you heard those two words be used over and over again, ignorant, integrated black men have now gotten the vote and will now have power over white women and even that idea that they would have power over white women was kind of leaning into one of the most damaging kind of stereotypes of the era, which was that black men were a threat to white women's purity.

And so that kind of thing gets exposed through the passage of the 15th amendment and that makes it very difficult for those movements to kind of move forward together in the way that they maybe had previously.

- And some number of women, most notably Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, objected to the exclusion or apparent exclusion of women from that, they declared themselves the true radicals who wanted totally universal suffrage but instead of sticking to what might be considered the moral high ground and demanding universal suffrage, they especially sent and resorted to rather ugly, racist stereotypes and attacks to indicate that they thought they were more worthy of the vote than recently emancipated black men.

- So you saw the splintering of the women's rights movement in terms of what they were tactically trying to seek and also ideologically in terms of the support for African-Americans.

You do see white women's suffrage activists really taking a racist turn as they recognize that to get a national amendment, you need to get a certain number of States.

- So they're pragmatically and strategically thinking about who their audience is, which is white male voters and how to get them to pass women's suffrage, but in doing so, they really mean white women's suffrage and they abandoned their African-American allies.

- Compromises are always gonna be made in order to win things and then you decide what compromises are too much for you to swallow and there were many suffrage activists who found that too much to swallow, including African-American ones, this was not worth it.

♪ She's good enough to warm your heart with kisses ♪ ♪ When you are lonesome and blue ♪ ♪ She's good enough to be your baby's mother ♪ ♪ And she's good enough to vote with you ♪ - The 19th amendment for black women is in some ways of paper victory but it only gives them what they need to go forward to continue fighting to have that right realized.

- So it really was a relatively limited number of women that were enfranchised.

Mexican-American women largely were not enfranchised by the 19th amendment, Native American women were not, Chinese women were not in franchise by the 19th amendment.

- I think that the passage of the 19th amendment is worth commemorating if we notice that it didn't accomplish all the goals of the women's movement and that it didn't end the struggle, the next month, Alice Paul was out there proposing an equal rights amendment.

Black women were out there demanding that their right to vote be respected.

- You know, lots of other people participated in struggles that were ongoing, but I think we prefer to tell stories and this, you know, as I say, a problem with commemoration in some ways, we prefer to tell stories that have neat endings, which look like victories.

(solemn music) - The struggles never really end, new generations or new strategies come into play and really push for the promises to become more real.

- I think of American history as a long struggle of resistance, struggle and then backlash and things get better and get worse for different groups.

(crowd protesting) (crowd cheering) - I feel that this pilgrimage will show congress that we are tired of being second class citizens.

Our people have come from all parts of the nation to impress congress that we want the civil rights legislation to pass in accession.

- The civil rights movement becomes something that not only draws people of color into his vortex, but also in the process of raising these concerns, these grievances, other groups drawn to the moral appeals of the movement and see it as legitimate but then who also began to think about the gaps in their own citizenship.

And so the civil rights movement becomes a force that advances a set of claims for expanding the meanings of freedom, democracy and participation.

♪ I've been abused ♪ - It changes the individuals who are involved, who through their efforts around such things as segregated lunch counters began to dream about, imagine and mobilize for more extensive reforms but then it also helps to prepare those individuals and others for other struggles that began to take shape around anti-war activity, free speech on campuses, the rights of women in society, queer communities.

- Give us the ballot and we will transform the salient misdeeds of blood thirsty mobs into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens.

Give us the ballot and we will quietly and non-violently, without record of bitterness, implement the Supreme court decision of May 17th, 1954.

- Certainly the vote was an extremely important goal demand of the civil rights movement but it existed alongside a number of other kinds of demands and interests and this is not to trivialize the vote.

People risked their lives to be able to register to vote but I think if we leave the discussion there, we miss the fact that people were also mobilizing around housing, they were mobilizing around schools, they were mobilizing around fair and full employment, the ability to bargain collectively with their employers.

And even if we think about the importance of the vote, the goal was not just simply to vote, as important as that was, but to be able to exercise the vote meaningfully.

And I guess the point becomes that our society is more democratic as a result of that.

- As long as some among us are oppressed and we are part of that oppression, it must blunt our faith and sap the strength of our high purpose.

Thus this is a victory for the freedom of the American Negro, but it is also a victory for the freedom of the American nation.

- Not until the Voting Rights Act in the 1960s did African-Americans really have the ability to go out in large numbers and even since the Voting Rights Act, there have been massive efforts to try to disenfranchise African-Americans in all sorts of ways.

- And so it is not true that we can always assume that a gain that was made is going to stay in place and that's one of the concerns or issues with democracies, If we're gonna maintain our democracy, we have to, I would argue, really be vigilant on all aspects of it.

Are we being inclusive?

Do we have rules that allow citizens voices to be heard?

And those are things that we need to always keep an eye on.

(gentle upbeat music) - It is early morning of the first Tuesday in November.

This classroom is one of the 130,000 places the country over, in which American citizens are going to cast their votes today.

Here it is in the privacy of this curtain space, that the American voters every four years, on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, choose their national government.

- Some great abstract level we probably all agree that America is a democracy and we take pride in our institutions and the constitution and so on but when it comes right down to it, not everyone really believes in inclusion in the political realm.

- I think it's really important for every US citizen to have an interest and care about the various democratic institutions that they live with.

If we don't think about those institutions, if we don't keep an eye on them, then there is the possibility that people will manipulate them.

(gentle upbeat music) - This man is casting his vote for a government of his own choosing under the constitution of the United States.

- There was until maybe 20 years ago, a kind of steady of slow march toward more inclusion.

I would say in the last 20 years, we've seen moves in the other direction to limit the right to vote.

- When Bill Johnson has finished, he has elected an entire government from top to bottom.

That is if a majority of the voters think the way he does about it.

- And don't forget folks, when ya goes to the polls today, a vote for Popeye means free ice cream for all the kiddies!

(crowd cheering) - All right men, step right over here and get your free cigars.

- The vote has changed a lot over the course of the last 200 years, but really in the early 19th century and continuing up all the way until the 1880s and 1890s, the most popular way that you would vote was that you would have a party ticket and you could get this ticket through a couple of different avenues.

One was by cutting out a ticket from the newspaper and bring it to the polling place and deliver it to the window in which you were supposed to vote.

You could also do this by getting a party ticket from artisans who hung out at the polling places.

(upbeat music) The experience of voting was also very different in the 19th century.

Generally, the places that you would vote were not places we would think of today as a great place to go and cast your ballot.

A lot of saloons were the site of voting places and while you are waiting, you might be drinking a bit, you might receive a dollar or two from a partisan hoping for you to cast your ballot, you might also get pushed out of line by somebody called a shoulder hitter, was basically a party thug who would try to remove folks who are not going to vote for the people that they wanted them to vote for.

So there was a lot of influence in voting.

And this happened all the way until the 1890s when we had the onset of the Australian ballot and this was the more official ballot that we think of today.

- I'll never, never, never, never, ever vote for you!

- Get in there babe and vote for, Popeye?

- Yeah!

(upbeat music) - As I say to my students who think voting doesn't matter or it takes too much of their time, you can take the time to vote because first of all, people died for this and struggled long and hard for it.

And second of all, because it makes you part of this process and it's not a perfect process, you don't get to be your most moral, pure self when you have to choose between two imperfect, inadequate, often annoying candidates, so it's a compromise.

I think what abolitionists felt, what Quakers felt, what radicals of all stripes have long felt is true, that the electoral system involves compromise.

But since it does have an impact on people's lives, often people with less privilege than those people who don't want to make compromises, we make them.

I think the decision not to vote or the decision to say it doesn't matter if I vote or who wins doesn't matter, I think that's a highly privileged position because I know that it matters in terms of the distribution of power and resources, even at a local level.

- Could Marylanders lose their right to vote simply because they skipped voting for a few years?

The sixth US Court of Appeals blocked Ohio from removing a man from the roles because he had not voted in five years.

While lawyers for Ohio argued that the law should be reinstated, voting rights advocates charge that this is another effort to suppress votes.

- If we have systems where people cannot easily vote, are not able to vote or are kept from voting, then we really are moving away from that democratic ideal that it's important to hear the will of all people and you end up with certain segments of the population who have then less of a voice than others.

And that moves away from the fundamental idea that we have that democracy allows everybody to express their voice equally.

- Democracy is about inclusion, is about acknowledgment of our diversity of voices and it also is about critical engagement in debates while having a profound respect for disagreement.

(solemn music) Puerto Rico is under the US Congress control, even though Puerto Rico has its own constitution and its own government, local government, it is bind to Congress.

Puerto Ricans are US citizens, they have had the American citizenship since 1917.

Puerto Ricans feel very proud of American citizenship but we don't feel included.

Most Puerto Ricans feel that all power is in the other side, all power is in United States hands and that we have to wait for what the United States is going to decide.

- In many parts of the United States, political parties are still allowed to draw the district boundaries by which people are elected to state legislatures, congress and so on.

Gerrymandering is deliberately drawing those districts lines so that your party has an advantage.

It has an advantage by having districts that are just safe enough, that you know you can win them and then packing all the voters from the other party in to other districts that they will win easily with a tremendous waste of their political power.

(dramatic music) - The term was developed very early in our history, in 1812, where Elbridge Gerry, not Jerry but Gerry, drew a map for the legislative districts in Massachusetts that were convoluted and one of them look like a salamander.

So critics attached, Elbridge Gerry's name to the salamander and it became a gerrymander.

- Gerrymandering is a way that also affects people's voice, not so much in terms of being able to place that ballot but in terms of making my vote equal to your vote.

- A partisan gerrymander would be limiting the power of a majority in a state to elect a majority of representatives because of the way districts are drawn.

- In the state of Pennsylvania, that's what the Republican party did is created a safe set of districts so they would have a majority of the Pennsylvania delegation, when in fact they had a minority of the voting public.

Its purpose is to suppress the voice of the opposition but that's not the only purpose of gerrymandering.

It works quite well when you already have a safe majority and you can make it even larger.

So gerrymandering is just a way of distorting political districts to exaggerate your level of political influence.

- Usually we think of districts as being fair when they are compact and when they don't divide up municipalities or other governmental units.

So Pennsylvania seven in 2011 was drawn to look like Goofy kicking Donald Duck.

It's a district that clearly is drawn in one case with just a single road connecting these two chunks together.

- Partisan gerrymandering became more prevalent in the last 20 years say with geographic information system technology that now allows people to see how voting preferences go right down to the block level and can strategically then figure out the optimum lines that would benefit their side.

In other words, elected representatives choose the voters as opposed to the reverse.

- And gerrymandering has a really strong impact on the ability of people to express their voice in politics and the effect of that is that their interests as a community are no longer really considered important to the representatives who represent them.

It really takes power away from individuals.

We assume that every time you go into the voting booth, you're equal to everyone across the state or across the nation, if that's not true, then that is problematic.

- There has been a backlash against it, it seems so unfair to many people that some States already have systems where a more nonpartisan group draws the district lines and in other States that legislation to support that change is working its way through.

There is I think a little trend toward moving away from this extreme gerrymandering in some States.

- Fortunately many States in the United States and most countries around the world have realized this is absurd letting the political parties draw the boundaries to advantage themselves.

We live in a society that aspires to distribute the power of governing equally among the population and does make strides towards that over the long term, even if there have been setbacks recently.

- On my mother's dying bed at 92 years old, former sharecropper.

Her last words were, "Do not let them take our votes away from us."

They had fought, she had fought and seen people harmed, beaten, tryin' to vote.

Talk about inalienable rights.

Voting is crucial and I don't give a damn how you look at it, there are efforts to stop people from voting.

That's not right!

- We sometimes think of government as this body that exists outside the populace but it's actually us, right?

We're ruled by people who are representative of us as opposed to say nobility or a monarchy.

And so it's really important for us to have the ability to choose the people who are going to represent us in government and that is the only way that we can make sure that the institutions that are core to democracy actually function, that they represent us as a people.

- Within kind of the system of democracy, it's very important to be able to express that voice also in voting because that's where a lot of decisions are made and where a lot of the political power is and so unless you can vote, you are excluded from that important voice.

- Any political system that aspires to fulfill the principles of democracy must always be trying to become more democratic, always experimenting with new reforms, new ideas.

There is no living democracy that has solved the problem of self-governance.

There are only systems that try harder or frankly give less effort to improving their political system.

There are really encouraging reforms happening in the United States and around the world that are trying to make democracies more deliberative, more participatory.

In Oregon, here in the United States, where they created in 2009, the citizens Initiative Review, this process is not quite unique in the world, it's being tried out in places in Europe and the idea is to take a random sample of the public, just a couple dozen people and have them deliberate for a week on a ballot measure, something that's going to be appearing on the ballot for every person in the state of Oregon.

They get about four or five days to look at the issue hear from advocates, for and against hear from expert witnesses and then write a one page analysis that goes in the official voter's guide mailed to every Oregon voter and it's working, Oregon voters are actually reading it and learning about the issue and making more informed choices during the election.

So that's a great example of a piece of a democratic process that really has been missing this more deliberative element where voters help voters when they have to make a direct decision on legislation.

- Speak up, speak out.

- Speak up, speak out.

- Speak up, speak out.

- A democracy is not easy and if we don't feel like there's some good reason for us to commit to it, I don't think it continues.

- The greatest barrier is the conceit that you've accomplished everything.

The second where you think you've attained that particular goal is a sure sign that you are retreating further and farther from it.

(people screaming) - Progress is never always upward, there's always the chance of regression in democracies.

I believe, even as an optimist, I believe are fragile and easily, easily changed and we see that in other countries that have tried to institute democracies, have done well for a while and then find them shifting back.

- Leaders must be tough enough to fight, tender enough to cry, human enough to make mistakes, humble enough to admit them, strong enough to absolve the pain and resilient enough to bounce back and keep on moving.

(crowd cheering) - It comes down to a question of trust in a democracy, who do you trust?

In every representative democracy, you have to make trust judgements.

You have to ask yourself whether you trust a person you're going to elect to represent you and that's a difficult question, you're giving your trust to that person for two, four or six years.

People are so cynical now that they don't trust government, they don't trust anyone.

Well, the truth is, people do tend to put a fair bit of faith in regular people like themselves if they're put in a situation where they get the chance to deliberate.

Democracy is itself going to be an never ending work in progress.

The question is, how can we continually empower the public?

How can we continually educate the public to make ever better decisions, but will constantly be refining the institutions, the rules and the practices that we use to realize the values of democracy?

- If we look upon those with whom we disagree as enemies, then it may just be that we're not going to be able to sustain our democracy.

So, we need to accept conflict and we need to fight through these conflicts, but we should not understand those conflicts to be all or nothing.

- And disperse immediately.

- We have to understand those with whom we disagree as opponents, not enemies.

And we have to have this overriding sense that we are all in this together and that we all share a love of country and a desire to make ourselves a more perfect union.

- This is what democracy looks like.

- Show me what democracy looks like.

- This is what democracy looks like.

- Show me what democracy looks like.

- This is what democracy looks like.

(gentle upbeat music)