Stacey Abrams talks about how to create lasting social change, her thoughts on 2020, and her plans for the future.
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Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman and I am pretty excited about today's guest. Hi, this is Stacy Abrams. Hi, Stacey, it's no Affeldman. How are you? I am well, How are you? I'm great? Thank you so much for joining us. If it's okay with you, we'll just dive right down. Sounds good, Yep. It's attorney, politician, activist, romance novelist, and most likely twenty twenty Democratic vice presidential candidate, Stacy Abrams. You know all about Stacy. In twenty eighteen, she ran for governor of Georgia. She turned out an extraordinary number of voters, especially African American voters, and very very narrowly lost to Brian Kemp, a Republican who was the Secretary of State of Georgia at the time, which meant that his job was to oversee the election. Stacy never conceded the race. She said that Kemp suppressed votes and that she believed she had sufficient reason to question the outcome. She still considers Kemp not to be the legitimate governor of Georgia. The whole election and its aftermath catapulted Stacy onto the national stage. In twenty nineteen, Stacy Abrams became the first African American woman to deliver an official response to the State of the Union address. Now she runs two organizations, Fair Fight and Fair Count. She has appeared on Everyone's short list as the most like the vice presidential pick, no matter who is the Democratic nominee for the presidency in twenty twenty. She also recently told the blog five thirty eight that she plans to be president herself by twenty forty. I reached Stacy Abrams by phone, understandably enough, she was too busy to get to a studio, and we talked about how to create change, whether that's easier to do as an insider or as an outsider. So I want to begin by asking you about two organizations that you've founded, Fair Fight, which is devoted to fighting voter suppression, and fair Count, which is devoted to making sure the census is fair. The fairness theme emerges very powerfully here, and I just want to begin by asking you, given your long career in public service and as a lawyer, as an entrepreneur, what makes you think that fairness is achievable. I'd like to begin by a thinking about the fact I grew up in the Deep South. I am the daughter of two people who are civil rights activist as teenagers, and my grandparents and all of those who preceded me either live through Jim Crow or the Black Codes, or slavery, and so I think of fairness as a continuum. Our responsibility is to constantly move towards the promise of equality, and in each generation of my family's life, progress has been made. It has been slow and plotting and painful and violent, but it has been achievable. And so my responsibility is not simply to see the difficulties that we face, but to remember that in each generation and the opportunity to fight back against these difficulties has been a critical responsibility. And the ultimate goal is not that we will have everything we desire. The goal is that we will have fairness, and that is my core belief. That's a moving and it's actually even an inspiring answer. You're a lawyer, and I don't say that as a bad word. I'm a lawyer too. You know I went to this same bows school and that you did. Other people may hold that against us, but I don't. But I want to ask about the balance between law and more direct social activism because I sometimes worry. I mean, I even teach law students for a living, and I sometimes worry that I fall too far into the category of telling them, look, this social movement generated legal change, and so that's how you know that it's a success full social movement in real time. And then they sort of look at me, at least when they start law school a little skeptically and say, isn't it the other way around? I mean, shouldn't the measure of a law be whether it produced social change rather than the measure of a social movement being whether it generated some some legal outcomes. And I'm wondering how you see the balance. Obviously we need both, but when you think about which comes first, or which needs to be more powerful, or where the emphasis should be, where do you come down. I think they're inherently intertwined. And I think your students are asking smart questions. But it wouldn't say unfair, but it's a more complicated question. If you look at my election, for example, my decision on November sixteenth to acknowledge the legal sufficiency of the outcome. Recognize that there are a laws in place that have created the very process that was used to thwart voters, that those laws have been deemed appropriate by lawmakers. But my refusal to concede the election was that I take exception to the actual laws themselves, that the very presence of those rules that permitted that behavior raises the need to question and in our case, overturn those laws and reconstruct those laws. Social movements give voice and power and faith to what needs to change. The law gives structure and to the extent possible permanence to the existence of that change. And for me, I've never seen I understand there's attention, but I've never seen a dichotomy or an order of priority to my participation. My responsibility is to be engaged in the social action that we are pursuing through fair fight and fair account. But I am also someone who believes that I need to be part of the lawmaking process because social movements without a voice in the law do not have the longstanding and deep, deeply needed effects. If there isn't something implicated into laws that makes it harder to undo or to thwart the intention, I'm really glad you brought up your non concession after the twenty eighteen Georgia governor's race, and I want to use that as you just raised it, to try to ask you about a sort of a skeptical question that someone from the outside might ask, and they might say, you know, it comes down to can the system be trusted to change enough to make a difference. So as you say, you recognize the legal sufficiency of the outcome in the sense that you didn't walk into the governor's office and say I'm the governor and ask the Georgia State Police to put you in office. But you didn't conceive because you didn't want to say I lost in a fair fight, because it wasn't a fair fight. And so in that sense, you didn't want to say the words I lost because you didn't lose in some fairness sense. And I guess what I'm wondering is, couldn't someone say, look, that suggests the system is just rigged in a way where it's not going to change. And if that's the case, we need to go outside the system and engage in civil disobedience or other more radical forms of efforts to not just tweak the system through laws and improvements and social activism, but something more fundamental. I would say they're absolutely right. But for me, I have always internalized that it cannot be one or the other, that it must always be this collaboration of challenging the laws of they stand, creating better laws and fighting bad laws, and also engaging people to press the system for the change that needs to happen. Let me ask you about your own personal version of this fight. I mean, you wrote a fantastic autobiography which huge numbers of people all over read. You did a very public response to the state of the union, which is ordinarily something that a senior or legislative figure would have done at the national level. If the New York Times quoted you correctly, they said you were open to serving as vice president if asked for any Democratic nominee. These are big national within the system undertakings. What do you think is the probability that that's where you're going to end up going in the next phase of your pretty extraordinary story. Thank you again. I do not see these as conflicting spaces to operate in. I've always seen them as collaboratives. When I was a state legislator, when I became Democratic leader in the House minority leader of our party. One of the challenges we faced was that we had eight hundred thousand people of color who were not registered to vote in Georgia who were eligible. Those who have been in the legislature long before I got there, had been bemoaning these massive numbers for years. My approach was to start the New Georgia Project. So, while as sitting legislator and while the leader of my caucus, I was also an outside agitator who started an organization that's registered more than four hundred thousand people of color in the state of George. As Democratic leader, I did not see an what's between those two responsibilities. There were legal issues that I had to be very cognizant of and ways that had to manage my responsibilities. But I do not see being in elected office as a deterrent to being part of a public space. Well it shouldn't be a deterrent, but as a pragmatic matter, just to be we don't have to be super realistic, but we can be mildly realistic. You know, if you listen to all the Democratic presidential candidates now, even those who self conceive as critics of the existing system, their criticism, though in many cases sharp still comes with a strong aspiration to be at the center of power, you know, to be sitting in the White House and leading crucial national decisions. It's I think it's just the nature running for president. You end up talking like you're in the system, that you're committed to the system, and then although you want to change it, the system basically doesn't need to be fundamentally restructured. I think that that is not inaccurate, but I think it ignores, or can't ignore, or the multiple ways you can affect the system before you have that job. And so my approach has been this, I attempt to leverage whichever, you know, sort of the commentary about Outlas, you know, give me a place to stand, and I'm going to try my best to shift the world a little bit. That's a terrible reduction of it, but that's how I operate. And so for me, the issue has always been you have to create external pathways to making change, because systems are not going to change themselves without external pressure, and so I attempt to create those external pressures. The New Georgia Project did so by Rich Strain, thousands of voters who had a very dramatic impact on the outcome of elections. Fair Fight and Fair Count will do so by affecting voter protection agencies and attempts to make certain that votes cannot be stolen or forwarded. And in each of those instances, I've set up organizations where I'm not in charge. I am the chair of the board, I am the chief fundraiser. I participate in strategy, but I'm not the person who does the daily work. Because I am inside the system and there is a conflict that happens, It's very difficult to dismantle a system that you are deeply embedded in, and so part of my responsibility is to use my inside knowledge to create outside forces and then to populate those forces so that if I move back inside, they can still operate without me. The New Georgia project is entirely independent. Now. Fair Fight and Fair Account, should I stand for another public office, will also quickly erase me from their boards. And that's my job. My job is to be aware enough to know that when you are inside the system, it is disingenuous to say that you are going to wholly deconstructed, but it is also an opportunity to use what you learn from inside the system, to arm the populace, to challenge and improve a system from the outside. It's a little daunting to imagine the huge number of different jobs that you actually have created for yourself. We haven't even gotten to author of romance novels, which I promise will come to before the end of our conversation. But when you wake up in the morning, how do you know what you're literally? I mean, I mean that's the most prosaic level, like, how do you know what you're going to do next? Do you? You know, look at your calendar? Do you How do you know which of these many responsibilities is the one that you should start working on that morning? It's border of urgency. Typically, again, I do my best to make certain that there are teams of people who can help me determine where my best value add is. And so my wife is basically at the mercy of a bunch of millennials and a hugen xers who organize my day. So, just to get a picture of this, you're kind of the chairman and CEO of Stacy Abram's Social Justice, Inc. And you you know you've got it's a conglomerate with lots of little subparts. And in there are your your millennials, in your your a handful of gen xers, and they're they're each running their own effectively startups which you started. In each case it's your socialist orical seed capital, and you're weighing in to try to make sure they're all keeping it in order or something like that. That am I getting the picture. That's exactly it. And I think it's important because often in social justice movements, cultive personality tends to organize around the founder, and the founder serves not only as the creator but also the full crom around which everything circulates, and that, to me is a dangerous position. I am in politics, I am also incredibly human and thus flawed. And anytime a social movement has to adopt or rely on the personality or the foibles of their founder, you're setting yourself up for trouble. So part of my responsibility is to work as assiduously as possible to make myself irrelevant to the long term success of the organization. But can I just say, I mean, you want to run for national office, you want to be have your maximal impact. Cultive personality is what it's all about. I mean, what I'm wondering, is when you go out there, as you're doing now, building your I don't want to call it a brand, because I detest that terminology for public servants, but building the message connected to you and the things that you want to be known for and known for doing. What's your brief description of how you want to be seen by the broader world, Not by your constituents in Georgia who know you well, but by the country. I'm an architect of social justice and that means standing in the spaces where I can be most effective and doing the work that is most needed, or I'm the right person to do the work and it's the right time for that work to be done. So architect of social justice. And is that, you know, not a political consultant. But is that a teeny bit abstract for a factory worker who's lost his job or a mother who's working several jobs and trying to go to night school at the same time. Is architect of social justice? Concrete enough? The way you have a conversation with a potential constituent begins with meeting them where they are. And so I wouldn't start by saying who I am. I would start by asking what they need and talk then about how my skills, how my architecture skills, how my management skills help me deliver that. But to your point, one of the most difficult parts of running for office is trying to come up with something reductive enough to be a sound bite, but meaningful enough to actually convey your intention, and that's really hard. I don't try. I was slightly a conoclastic in my campaign in part because I do not look like or operate in the way that most traditional politicians do, and that of itself became my brand, which is that I'm much more like you than like them, do things different. Yeah, I did, but I also have experienced many of these things. I can talk about criminal justice reform because I have a younger brother who is in and out of jail. I can talk about mental health issues because one of the since he finds himself in an outjail is that he had an undiagnosed mental health disorder and he cannot receive healthcare for it because of his ex offender status and because of the challenges with Southern healthcare delivery. I can talk about debt because I've been in it and I know what it means, and so part of my part of what I think resonates is that I don't attempt to create this reductive line that makes me palatable and acceptable to all people, because the minute you've done that, it is so benign that it has no meaning at all. So I think what I hear you're saying is that it helps to be a real person, and you're not ashamed of actually being a real person, not at all, and one of my whole life. Yeah, and you've been able to speak directly and honestly to people about that, and that is really that has really resonated. And I do think that's hugely important because the approach you described, where you start by meeting the voter, that can work incredibly well at a smaller scale when you can actually meet the voters, but when the scale becomes national, that just becomes extra really difficult. And I think here of someone who's our rough contemporary, a friend of mine and probably a friend of yours too, Corey Booker, who's an extremely successful politician at the one on one or one on small group level. You know, when one meets Corey, one is blown away by his enthusiasm and his charisma and his capacity to connect and on the national scale, he's had a hard time translating that. I think, really, you know, one in a million kind of personality into something that resonates on the broader level. And it's not for any lack of sincerity. It's just that the medium of trying to reach people all over the country via a television set or a social media account is just really different than being a human being looking somebody in the eyes and interacting with them. I would say that this is a very specific moment in our political history, and were this a normative election where we were simply arguing about the margins and the shift from one leader on the margins to the next, I would say that Corey would his resonance would be much sharper because we are in this moment of panic and existential fear. I think there's a retrenchment that is happening that doesn't allow for newness and for his brand of personal engagement in this moment. I do not think it's just positive of his long term capacity to demonstrate himself. I think it's less than medium than that moment. That's quite interesting. It is. Yeah, if you watch how people react, how they say they want to react and how they are telling posters they will react, which are often very different. In this moment, It's what I kept hearing, Oh, I like you a lot, I think you're wonderful, but I'm not sure you can be the one to do it. And so there's a lot of I'm not sure happening. And when that is the case, people tend to return to what is the most familiar and most comfortable, and in America, ninety nine point nine percent of the time, that's a white man. I was about to ask you if you think there's some implicit or maybe not so implicit racism in that formulation. And I wonder if what you're describing really is essentially somebody saying, well, sure Barack Obama got elected, but right now the only way to beat the white man in the White House is with another white person. I think there's a degree of that. I think there's also just a degree of familiarity. If you have two weapons available to fight back against the beast attacking you, are you going to go with the one that you've tried one so, the one that you've tried forty four times? So can I then ask you somewhat undiplomatically, and because sometimes you're willing to be on diplomatic too. What is the answer for the Democratic Party in twenty twenty if it's not to go with the tools that we are familiar with. I mean, what would work the best? And I'm not asking you to name a particular candidate, but I'm asking as a general approach matter, what's the message that you think will work beyond you know, the current president has terrible views on nearly every topic, which is going to be part of any Democrats message. I do not subscribe to the notion that we need to talk about Trump that often he's going to talk about himself enough, and typically his performance is much stronger than any characterization we could offer to those who are willing to listen. There is a group of people for whom he is. He cannot be defeated. And let's acknowledge that we lost because we did not turn out the people who could have elected our person. And the solution is that we have to have a candidate who is clear about their values. You don't have to agree with all of them, but we need to know what they are, who is willing to invest in the actual work of winning elections. And that's the place where I think we have the weakest performance historically but the greatest opportunity when we invest in hard to reach communities, When we invest early and broadly in kansassing, in the mechanics of winning an election, not the ease of television and not the wizardry of digital, but in the hardcore effort of turning out voters, we win and we have to broaden our field. So that's a good argument for Stacey Abrams for vice president, right, because whoever the presidential candidate is, none of them, I will say, is super great at that. You are great at that. So that's an argument that this is an election that can be won in the trenches by turnout. And here you are. You are you know you are the the social justice architect of turnout. I've been practicing a lot. I don't want I want to be respectful of your time, but I also don't want to let you go without asking you about Selena Montgomery, your alter ego and pen name. How do you I mean, how do you decide you're going to change the mood, walk away from social justice and start writing romance? And I will say, just from a quick glance, not romance that is without some spice. Well, it's it's part and parcel of who I am. I love writing, I love storytelling, and you know, all of my novels sit into the romance genre. But I kill a lot of people. I write about ethnobotanists and cognitive scientists and chemical physicists, so I get to explore all the other things I would have been had I not followed whatever pastageys I'm on. But I also enjoy just creating universes in worlds where people can lose themselves and learn something and emerge a little happy because two people found each other and tell I love Well. I hope that Selena Montgomery becomes the fictional vice president and that Stacey Abrams becomes the actual real world social does as an architect of vice presidential candidate. I'm super grateful to you for your time and thank you so much for such a thoughtful and deep conversation. Well, no, I will say this has been delightful. You were one of the three else who's really nice to me as a one l and you have no reason to remember this, but you were very kind to me one day at at Yale, and I remember that as fondly and was happy to do this. That's super nice of you to say, I really I appreciate that tremendously. From our conversation, I think you'll really be able to see why so many Democrats are enthusiastic about the idea of Stacy Abrams as a vice presidential pick for twenty twenty. She has a proven ability to inspire voters and to get out the vote. She can reach across different lines within the Democratic Party and beyond. She's also a remarkable and unusual person with an amazing life story. We're going to be hearing a lot more from Stacy, and I'm really glad that we had a chance to talk to her here and now for this week's playback. Last Thursday on ABC News, Attorney General William Barr told Donald Trump enough with the tweets. I cannot do my job here at the Department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me. Barr was referring to Trump's tweets, but the way the Justice Department handled the sentencing of Roger Stone. Roger Stone is a form adviser to the President, who was convicted of seven crimes, including obstruction of justice, lying to Congress and witness tampering. When the prosecutors recommended that he served seven to nine years in prison, Trump responded with a tweet. This is a horrible and very unfair situation, is what he said. Again, he said that about a recommendation for sentencing from his own Department of Justice. The very next day, the Justice Department announced that it was overruling its own recommendation from its own prosecutors for being too harsh. Critics myself included, said that the Justice Department was rather obviously influenced by the President, who was defending not only someone he knew and liked, but someone who was lying on behalf of his campaign two investigators who were investigating Donald Trump for collusion with Russia. Barr responded by saying that his decision to overrule the sentencing recommendation from his own prosecutors had nothing to do with Trump's tweets, and then he basically begged Trump to tweet less. So those are the facts, But what's really going on here? The answer is that we're in the midst of a historic conflict over the independence the Department of Justice. In the years after Richard Nixon's disastrous presidency, slowly but surely, presidents of both parties and attorney generals of both parties began to recreate a set of values and norms that were supposed to govern what the Department of Justice would do. Above all, it was supposed to make decisions about investigation and prosecution on an independent, nonpartisan basis. No targeting the president's enemies, no special favors for the president's friends. To be sure, nothing written down explicitly in the law or the regulations to the Department of Justice says this. Instead, it came to be the common sense of the Department, broadly shared by prosecutors at the line level and all the way up to the highest level of the Attorney General. Everyone in the Department of Justice and the FBI came to believe that the right way to do justice in the United States was without reference to the president's party, to the president's political friends, ordered the president's political and Donald Trump has been systematically eroding that independence at the Department of Justice since even before he took office, when he encouraged people to chant lock her Up about Hillary Clinton, thereby signaling that as president he would want to use criminal prosecution as a tool in the political game. William Barr took office promising to do what his predecessor, Jeff Sessions, had not been able to do, namely, push back against the president and insist on the traditional independence of the Department of Justice. Until now, it's been a little unclear whether Barr was successful in that or not. On the one hand, Barr repeatedly enabled Trump, most famously in announcing his own version of the Muller investigation before Muller could announce it. On the other hand, Barrs supporters claimed that he was successfully standing up to the President by pushing him away from the relentless criticism of his own Department of Justice, which had characterized the previous two years under Attorney General Jeff Session. What's so striking about the current conflict is, for the first time in Barr's tenure, Trump deliberately undercut a Department of Justice decision, and he did it before Barr could act on his own. Possibly Barr wouldn't have objected at all to Trump's tweeting if he had given Barr a chance to reverse the sentencing recommendation on his own first. And I personally believe Bar when he says he probably would have done so anyway, not so much because the sentencing request was so outrageously high as because Barr would have been trying to please Donald Trump. For Barr, however, there's a fundamental question of his long term reputation. In his best case scenario, he leaves the Department of Justice with people saying he served the president. He served the president well. Democrats will continue to say that they hate Bar, but they might still be able to say that Bar did something to shore up the legitimacy of the Department of Justice. In his worst case scenario, people come to see Barr as just another Trump patsy, someone put in a job who aims to be able to exercise independence, tries to stand up to the president and gets steamrolled. What remains to be seen is whether Trump will actually fire Bar. Bar supporters say he can't do it. Barr is unfireable. Skeptics myself included, say nobody is unfireable by Donald Trump, especially in the aftermath of his survival of the impeachment process. So what we're watching is an attempt by Bar to get some space for the Department of Justice while giving Trump everything that Donald Trump wants. And on the other hand, Donald Trump's constant desire and need to be seen to be in charge, to be seen to push around his employees, and to be seen to disrespect the independence of the Department of Justice for the first time in Barr's tenure. This is an actual zero sum conflict between the Attorney General and the president. Barr wants to give Trump what he thinks Trump wants. But if what Trump wants is to be seen to push around Bar, that's the one thing Bar isn't prepared to give. Let's keep watching this space. I expect the story to continue to develop more. But when you watch it, keep in mind this is about one man's reputation and one man's desire to show that he's the boss. Deep background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Genecott, with studio recording by Joseph Friedman and mastering by Jason Gambrell and Jason Roskowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbn. Our theme music is composed by Luis Gara. Special thanks to the Pushkin Brass Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is deep background