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|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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I felt like we were being left behind. | |
| Everybody around us seemed to have internet, but we did not. | ||
| When I found out that Comcast was coming, I ran down the road and I said, welcome. | ||
| High-speed internet is one of those good things that we needed to help us move our farming, our small businesses, our recreation forward. | ||
| And now future generations will thrive here in Sussex County. | ||
| Comcast supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy. | ||
| Up next, a discussion about the challenges facing democracy with the co-editors of the Democracy Playbook 2025 report, Norm Eisen and Jonathan Katz. | ||
| American University hosted the event. | ||
| Thank you very much, President Alger, and thank you, Dean Jack Newitz, for your words and for joining us, of course, this evening. | ||
| And can you hear me all? | ||
| Yes, good. | ||
| Super. | ||
| President Alger, I'd like to express special thanks to you for your Democracy Civic Initiative. | ||
| I think it is such, so important, not just for American University, but for the country as a whole. | ||
| And it is welcome, and we're very proud to be part of it. | ||
| As mentioned, our special guests this evening, Jonathan and Norm, they're old friends of mine, and they are also the co-authors of a very special book called the Democracy Playbook 2025, Seven Pillars to Defend Democracy in 2025 and Beyond. | ||
| Jonathan is the CEO of the Democracy Project. | ||
| He's a former official at USAID where he led initiatives to support democratic governance worldwide. | ||
| And Norm, as already stated, he is a former ambassador to Czechoslovakia when there was a Czechoslovakia before the Czech Republic and is now a senior fellow at Brookings and a leading expert on ethics, rule of law, and government accountability. | ||
| So their playbook offers a clear-eyed roadmap for how nations around the globe, including in the United States, can strengthen democracies when they face unprecedented challenges. | ||
| These threats include authoritarian leaders, polarization, disinformation, corruption, declining trust in institutions. | ||
| And from drawing lessons from around the world, they explain that democracy and defending democracy is not just the job of politicians or lawyers, it's a shared responsibility that includes all of civic society. | ||
| Yes, including students. | ||
| As the old saying goes, democracy is not a spectator sport. | ||
| We will explore those seven pillars today in their playbook and discuss how we can turn those ideas into action. | ||
| Gentlemen, again, thank you so much for joining us. | ||
| Norm, your playbook argues that democracy is facing an inflection point in 2025. | ||
| What makes this moment so critical? | ||
| And when is the last time in history we have seen such a similar inflection point? | ||
| Thank you, Tom. | ||
| Jonathan, it's so nice to be here with you, my co-author. | ||
| An ambassador, even an ex-ambassador, can never simply answer a question without at least 15 minutes of acknowledgments, but I'll try to keep it tight so I can get to the seven pillars. | ||
| Tom, you've been such a wonderful friend to me and to Jonathan, but also such a fantastic pillar of so many civil society organizations. | ||
| And AUSPA is very fortunate to have you. | ||
| Mr. President, he practices the week of kindness all year long. | ||
| I may have exhausted the supply with my travel challenges to be here. | ||
| You were so wonderful. | ||
| And President Alger and Dean Jankowitz, this institution that my friend, Professor Jim Thurber, synonymous with these issues for so many years, and Claudia herself, a wonderful public servant. | ||
| We're going to talk about the state of the state of U.S. and global government and governance tonight. | ||
| You're living up to the best tradition of the Thurbers. | ||
| So very honored to be here at AUSPA. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So the moment we find ourselves in is one of those peculiar eras, the zeitgeist, where trends seem to sweep around the globe. | ||
| I think of the revolutions of 1848 or the events that triggered World War I or World War II, the end of the Cold War. | ||
| For whatever reason, we are seeing the democratic structures that flourished with such promise in that post-1989 period now being assailed by a combination of globalization backlash, | ||
| a wave of populism, the response to migration, flows of migration around the world, and perhaps just too much peace and prosperity. | ||
| It seems that the Zeitgeist found that dull. | ||
| So we're now living the apocryphal ancient curse of may you live in interesting times. | ||
| They're particularly interesting for democracy scholars like Professor Thurber, like Jonathan and myself. | ||
| We analyze that there is a global democracy crisis. | ||
| We don't only do that with that most ancient of political science tools, our Kishkas, our gut feelings. | ||
| We analyze through the prism of these seven pillars, which both are a rubric, a heuristic device that we write about in the third edition of the democracy playbook. | ||
| And we're now working on the fourth edition. | ||
| We're hard at work. | ||
| Actually, we have a complete outline, but our standards and practices at Brookings prohibit me from sharing that until it's baked. | ||
| No half-baked outlines are allowed. | ||
| So we view assaults on elections globally. | ||
| That's the first pillar. | ||
| Attacks on the rule of law. | ||
| The prevalence of corruption. | ||
| Does this have a familiar sound to you? | ||
| The shrinking civic and media space, including assaults on civil society and on media institutions. | ||
| The disintegration of pluralistic governance in favor of highly partisan, polarized politics, the explosion of disinformation, and a pervasive sense that democracy may not be able to deliver. | ||
| We view those seven dimensions as indicating that democracy is in crisis, but those same seven areas also offer a blueprint for democracy's recovery. | ||
| And we're going to talk about that in the U.S. and globally tonight. | ||
| Thank you very much, Norm. | ||
| A question for you, Jonathan. | ||
| Talk more about the conditions in the United States, the threats to democracy, the polarization, presidential power. | ||
| How seriously do you see these trends? | ||
| What kinds of steps do you think would be helpful to address them? | ||
| And especially for students, what steps do you think they can take? | ||
| Yeah, and we've been lucky to have some great students from AU intern as part of our project. | ||
| So true. | ||
| And so we're so excited to be here today. | ||
| Treasure of the Washington area, truly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I want to join Norman in thanking you as well. | ||
| And Tom, as normally too, we were, I think, quite early on sort of tracking and monitoring sort of what the changes would be, laying out these seven pillars. | ||
| And I think the playbook was published three days before inauguration, laying out what we were concerned about here. | ||
| Pure coincidence. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And of course, early on, what we saw were these enormous cracks in these pillars, cracks in rule of law or threats to rule of law, corruption. | ||
| We won't go into too much detail into that because that could take up the entire time that I'm up here. | ||
| But also looking at elections. | ||
| And I think even over the last couple of days, we just had an election. | ||
| And I think most of us would say they were fare-free, transparent, accountable. | ||
| And it's something that we're thinking a lot about as we look to 2026 as well. | ||
| So the goal was to present this playbook, really trying to provide a roadmap for democracy actors in the United States to follow based on what we've seen globally. | ||
| And I spent many years at USAID overseeing democracy programs in a number of countries that I'm sure we're going to talk about today, including countries like Hungary, Poland, working on countries like Ukraine. | ||
| And so we had a roadmap of what might happen. | ||
| And so those pillars have cracked. | ||
| We've written a lot about these changes, including the impact on higher education, universities, impacts on arts and culture across the country, the issues of political violence. | ||
| And within each one of our pillars and our response, we're providing not only a roadmap for the federal level of work, but looking at what state and local leaders, we call them democracy actors. | ||
| These are the communities that include civil society, independent media, looking at what the private sector can do to support that, what higher education can do as well. | ||
| So important right now to have AU and others doing what they're doing, building the next generation, but also supporting beyond just students, the community. | ||
| And so that's so important. | ||
| So, Tom, we've laid out these strategies over the past several months, working directly and engaging with civil society, working with these groups, both at the state and national level. | ||
| And what we're seeing is a groundswell, a change. | ||
| We see mass protests, no kings. | ||
| We see a buildup of response to challenges that we see now from the federal government as an ex-Hill staffer as well. | ||
| I'd like to see a little bit more coming from Congress in response as a check and balance to the administration. | ||
| But we're optimistic. | ||
| Despite all the challenges, we can see there's a response. | ||
| And I think the election was a great moment to show you what happens in a democracy when people are standing up and speaking and blue states, red states, purple states. | ||
| But I think even a week after, you realize that elections are not enough alone to reverse what we see as autocracy. | ||
| And we may get into this, and I'm not going to blow our cover for the fourth playbook, but we're beyond the point where we're just monitoring and tracking or protect, or at the point where we're worried about the backsliding. | ||
| It's happened. | ||
| So now we're in the mode of how do we respond to the backsliding. | ||
| And I think we're going to talk a little bit about this: about democracy U-turns. | ||
| How do we address those challenges in the United States globally? | ||
| And there's a lot of examples globally that we point to, including in the playbook. | ||
| And we'll be talking a lot more about those strategies in the fourth edition. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Let me probe a little bit further. | ||
| Let's assume you were to write a playbook for college students about democracy. | ||
| This was just a playbook for students about how to address it and how to confront their challenges. | ||
| What would you put in such a playbook? | ||
| For college students here at AU who want to contribute to their democracy or anywhere in the world, I would start that playbook by talking about the resilience of democracy and telling stories about how, in many of the darkest days of American democracy, | ||
| I'm reading a history of the American Revolution now. | ||
| Let me tell you, it was not a linear success story. | ||
| The Civil War, Reconstruction, World War I, World War II, Jim Crow, the Cold War. | ||
| American democracy has faced tremendous challenges. | ||
| And I would say to them, you college students, generations just like you, met those challenges. | ||
| Greater challenges. | ||
| We can meet our challenges too. | ||
| Okay, Jonathan, I'll give away the contents of the fourth edition. | ||
| I can't resist. | ||
| I would point them to the. | ||
| Nobody tell anyone in here. | ||
|
unidentified
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They're just too quiet. | |
| The data that we're seeing, we're studying these U-turns in places like Nepal. | ||
| By the way, where Gen Z led the protests that resulted in the democracy U-turn. | ||
| Moldova, Georgia, Brazil, Poland. | ||
| We're seeing six factors that lead to, and I would tell them, this is what you should attend to. | ||
| Number one, public protest, very, very powerful factor, uniform, the ultimate guardrail of democracy. | ||
| Number two, look at proceedings in court and how you can contribute to those because strengthening the rule of law, very important. | ||
| Often students have been, for example, in the university litigation. | ||
| Students have been very important, as some of the immigration litigation, important plaintiffs. | ||
| Number three, I'd say encourage political leadership. | ||
| We've had some strong unity, unified political leadership on the government shutdown, then a fragmentation of that. | ||
| We can discuss that. | ||
| Strengthen political leadership. | ||
| Press. | ||
| And student reporting. | ||
| We've seen wonderful award-winning student reporting in places where in universities that have come under stress. | ||
| And then ultimately, I would say policy ideas we have to demonstrate. | ||
| It's one of the seven pillars also that democracy can deliver. | ||
| And then finally, the ultimate criterion is performance in and at the polls, the popularity of an autocratic leader and how autocracy fares at the polls. | ||
| I would love to see 100% student voting. | ||
| I'd like to see 100% of everybody vote, particularly our students. | ||
| So I would tell them that's a very powerful tool. | ||
| I'm from Chicago where we believe in 110% turnout. | ||
| Well, we don't allow that. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| That's why Tom had to leave Chicago because he doesn't follow such practices. | ||
| Can I just add one thing on students? | ||
| And I think this is really important because we've looked at and been looking at Gen Z in the U.S. and sort of tracking that. | ||
| And they've written about youth and democracy. | ||
| And I think one of the things that I would put on my list first would be to listen to you, to listen to students, which has been, I think when you look at polling, you ask Gen Z, they say we're not listened to. | ||
| Democracy is definitely not delivering. | ||
| You're true. | ||
| That's right, Norm. | ||
| And this engagement factor, but it is particularly important for engagement, but also to certainly to listen. | ||
| And I think we have to do a better job generationally of being inclusive in this conversation because the Gen Z generation has certainly faced enormous challenges, both COVID, political changes that are akin to other really tumultuous periods. | ||
| And so I think there's a lot to learn, but finding that voice is important. | ||
| It's wonderful to look around this room and see so many members of Gen Z and the other generations. | ||
| Jim, I don't know what generation we are, Gen A, perhaps, but it's great to see that diversity of representation. | ||
| Jonathan, thank you for that message about listening, because it is very powerful. | ||
| As some professor of mine once said, one learns a lot more by listening than by speaking. | ||
| And I think listening is a very important quality. | ||
| You know, for a lot of people, they haven't felt that politics and democracy have delivered for them. | ||
| And I think that's part of the reason why we are facing the challenges. | ||
| We are a reason for the election results that we have seen. | ||
| Populism didn't come out of nowhere. | ||
| How do we respond to that? | ||
| What has caused this challenge of this threat to democracy? | ||
| And how do we make democracy deliver for people so that they feel vested in it? | ||
| And I put that to either of you. | ||
| Well, I don't think that In our well-intentioned decision-making. | ||
| And you know, I'll find fault with the Democratic leaders who I admired of the Clinton administration, for example. | ||
| And Tom, you were on the Hill, you had that 20-year tenure, the longest tenure of anyone for the Joint Budget Committee. | ||
| We lifted countless hundreds of millions, billions around the world out of the most abject poverty, disease, lack of education. | ||
| And we certainly lifted the 1% in our country and the coastal elites, but we were not attentive enough to the effects that it would have to, you know, making decisions like admitting China to the WTO or global free trade, which I support, but it needs to be done with an eye towards the impact on the U.S. manufacturing base. | ||
| So there are legitimate grievances that people have that democracy has not delivered for them. | ||
| This is something that Europe is struggling with. | ||
| I go to Europe once a month to maintain the Transatlantic Bridge. | ||
| We actually have a project at Brookings, the Transatlantic Bridge Project. | ||
| And the risk is that you lose your public if you, however well-intentioned the Clinton administration thought, oh, we'll admit China to the WTO and the magic hand of capitalism. | ||
| It was like if Adam Smith was Gen A, then this was the Gen Z of the magic hand. | ||
| And that capitalist tide will lift those Chinese democratic practices. | ||
| Well, the opposite has happened. | ||
| We've seen a kind of monstrous authoritarian capitalism that's taken hold. | ||
| So I don't, I think, however well-intentioned there were grievous mistakes. | ||
| And then to fast forward to the present day, I thought the prior administration did quite a capable job on policy, but one of the most abysmal jobs of communicating that policy to the people they helped to the point where those individuals, average Americans, had the exact opposite idea and were susceptible to disinformation. | ||
| So it's not just a question of good policy that considers the heartland and others in our country, but also of communicating that democracy delivers. | ||
| Yeah, and I just add, when you're looking at polling data on distrust and governance, democracy, elections, government officials, it is the most challenging information environment to try to even advance messaging. | ||
| So I agree with Norman on the previous administration in many ways. | ||
| It is the most challenging environment. | ||
| And I think that is also, that's why we included as pillar number six was, or seven, disinformation. | ||
| Seven. | ||
| Disinformation was because this is even Jonathan can't keep track of them all and he helped write them of this pernicious challenge. | ||
| And so thinking through how we think through this and how we respond is particularly important. | ||
| And I think this is, you know, there's a reason why the governor of Utah after the horrific murder of Charlie Kirk said, hey, we've got to put down these phones, we've got to talk to each other. | ||
| The discourse has been really has made it more difficult. | ||
| And so I'm looking at Gen Z to help us out and think through how we're going to best communicate and raise the trust in governance. | ||
| And that's one of our jobs and responsibilities is to do that. | ||
| No pressure. | ||
| Thank you for that. | ||
| Jonathan, you anticipated my next question, and then I'm going to open it up because I'd love to hear questions, especially from students. | ||
| So if you have any good questions, please raise your hand or indicate to Julie. | ||
| But the issue of disinformation and social media is a really important one because we all know how much non-information, bad information is on social media. | ||
| And I think we all understand the value of safeguards. | ||
| But at the same time, I think we all have to acknowledge the importance of free speech. | ||
| How do we draw that line, that barrier between, on the one hand, protecting speech and at the same time drawing these safeguards? | ||
| And where does that pendulum get drawn? | ||
| And I put that to either of you. | ||
| Yeah, this is, you know, obviously this is sort of the $1 billion challenge for those that are thinking through what we're going to do in terms of policy. | ||
| In the playbook, we talk a lot about the responsibility of the tech companies in particular. | ||
| And in many ways, I think one might look at backsliding as looking at the response of tech companies even since the beginning of this administration. | ||
| But during the previous administration, you really did see tech companies trying to come in and address these challenges. | ||
| And one area that we're particularly concerned about when we think about political violence in particular, oftentimes we think of sort of physical acts. | ||
| But really, the most significant form of violence is psychological violence, which is harassment. | ||
| We recently wrote a piece on addressing these challenges. | ||
| And one of the things that we suggested was that the tech companies, you know, really to pick up their game. | ||
| The algorithms don't happen by themselves, and we know that. | ||
| And that's why you're starting to see states respond to this. | ||
| When the federal government is absent, states are stepping in to respond. | ||
| We see the EU responding as well with a different approach. | ||
| Obviously, that has an impact on U.S. companies, U.S. tech companies. | ||
| But it's really critically important that we not only have responsible policymakers, but we also have responsible private sector working together with civil society, as we saw before the 2024 election, where there were a number of initiatives with leading tech companies, civil society, and government officials to work together, including with our states. | ||
| Arizona is a good example that work together. | ||
| The Secretary of State work together with the tech community, work together with the think tank community and civil society to set up a red team to respond to AI deep fake threats, disinformation, responding immediately to it with information, educating citizens at the local level and the state level. | ||
| And that's the kind of response that you need. | ||
| It's not that you necessarily want social media to go away. | ||
| Some people may actually want it to go away. | ||
| Sometimes when my 15-year-old is on her cell phone, I want that phone to go away. | ||
| But the responsible approach is working together within communities. | ||
| And there's so much that we can do. | ||
| And communities, and there's also many global examples that we see, including in Europe, that is responding in the right way. | ||
| Do they always get it right in Europe? | ||
| No. | ||
| But I think they're really aiming at that sweet spot of governance and private sector coming together. | ||
| And that's something that we're aiming for. | ||
| When we talk about these best practices, in our next iteration of the 4.0 playbook, we'll be providing some of these latest examples of on-the-ground, what we call break-the-glass strategies to approach these issues. | ||
| Great. | ||
| You're building up the suspense for the next book. | ||
| Questions from the audience. | ||
| We take from students. | ||
| Yes, a young man there in the second row there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| I think we've got to get you a microphone, though. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Why don't you say your name and tell us your name? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| My name is Joshua. | ||
| I'm a first-year political science student, or political science major. | ||
| And I guess my question is that when it comes to defending democracy, we see Republicans in Congress and in the White House use a lot of strategies such as impounding funds and threatening programs and Russell Vaught and unilaterally firing a lot of people and taking a lot more control under the executive branch. | ||
| And so my question is, if Democrats are ever able to regain power, should they use the same tools that the Trump administration has used to go after the people who enacted these authoritarian policies under the Trump administration? | ||
| That is a good question. | ||
| Are you sure you're just a freshman? | ||
| Boy, that's... | ||
| Imagine what it'll be like when he's a senior. | ||
| That's... | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
| And of course, I think after, you know, first of all, we have to get to the 2026 elections first, and then 2028, 2028. | ||
| And of course, this year, I think all of us are really focused on ensuring that these are free, fair, and transparent elections across the country. | ||
| That's number one, too. | ||
| So there may be a change in Congress next year. | ||
| As a former congressional staffer, I always felt everything ran through Congress. | ||
| I didn't know why we needed the executive branch, but we had the executive branch. | ||
| That was a joke. | ||
| That was just a joke, not a good one. | ||
| But it's a good question, too. | ||
| You know, what a new Congress would do and a new executive branch would do. | ||
| And let's not forget the judiciary as well. | ||
| I think many would argue in sort of the democracy space that there's a need for reform when the checks and balances aren't working, when there's executive overreach, when you have courts that I think in many cases have held, and this is a piece of rule of law that's critical, but it can't be the only safeguard in a democracy. | ||
| This calls into question whether the system is working. | ||
| And I think we have really a historic opportunity to go in and get back under the hood, not to quote Ross Perot, which many of you might not know who Ross Perot is, to actually take a look at the mechanics of government and how it looks. | ||
| What you don't want is an abuse of governance. | ||
| One, to go after political enemies, for example, or to abuse it for corrupt gains, or to use it to advance policies that run contrary to the rule of law, to have a Department of Justice and a public service that maybe is more loyal to the President rather to the Constitution and to the country. | ||
| So there is going to be a moment in time, and I think a lot of people are proposing and still trying to engage, including with this administration and this Congress, to try to ensure that they do the right thing and play the role that they're supposed to play. | ||
| So this is one of the biggest questions, too. | ||
| And you certainly could have an administration that may use the exact same powers that have been created now to achieve certain goals. | ||
| What happens if you have a Congress that is Republican and a Democratic president? | ||
| This is sort of in the abstract. | ||
| And you're not able to change the systems. | ||
| And we've looked globally at countries where we've seen U-turns from autocracies to democracies. | ||
| Poland is a good example. | ||
| It's really difficult. | ||
| The longer an autocracy is in place, the deeper that they've rooted themselves and changed democratic institutions. | ||
| We know the more difficult it is to reverse that U-turn. | ||
| Poland is a good example. | ||
| Even in Brazil, the challenges of reversing those changes that have occurred are extraordinarily difficult. | ||
| We can get into that too. | ||
| But we also have seen, I'll end here, in countries like Georgia, where you've had changes in government and these changes lead to basically a pendulum of retribution. | ||
| That's not good for the public. | ||
| That's not good for democracies. | ||
| It's not good for economies. | ||
| So it's something you really want to avoid. | ||
| I would just add very briefly that the solution to autocracy and authoritarianism is not more autocracy and authoritarianism. | ||
| It's more democracy. | ||
| So to take the Brazilian example, they doubled down on the rule of law. | ||
| They had very vigorous judicial proceedings and achieved accountability for their authoritarian. | ||
| And the lesson, as you look across the globe, the places that have achieved successful U-turns, and while this proposition is not without controversy among the political scientists that Jonathan and I work with, I believe this scholarship shows that over 70% of the backsliding democracies since the end of the Cold War have achieved U-turns. | ||
| What they've done is they have met authoritarianism with democracy and the rule of law, but they've been innovative, they've been creative, they've been energetic, they've been determined. | ||
| They build big multi-partisan tents within that framework in order to innovate to meet the threat. | ||
| And I think that's the lesson of the literature. | ||
| There's a debate, there's a minority camp that does not believe the prevalence of the U-turns has been quite as sanguine as I think. | ||
| I don't know, Jonathan, do you agree with me on that 70% number? | ||
| More students. | ||
| Let's not neglect Frank Vogel. | ||
| He's a lifelong learner. | ||
| Does that count? | ||
| But we will include the student. | ||
| There's a student. | ||
| Are you a student? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Please. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| My name is Erica, and I'm a government major. | ||
| So my question goes back to your playbook on democracy for Gen Z and college students. | ||
| And a lot of the methods you mentioned, they were used during Arab Spring. | ||
| They're being used right now during the student protests in Serbia that have been going on for a year. | ||
| So how can you still convince college students and Gen Z that these methods still work rather than having them resort to more extreme measures? | ||
| Well, we don't want the extreme measures, and I think we would tell them the share the stories, and maybe even we need to have more exchanges. | ||
| I'd like to bring those Gen Z students from Nepal, for example, who use those same and similar methods to great success. | ||
| The students in Poland or Brazil or Moldova or Georgia who were part of the transformation there, Bangladesh. | ||
| I don't think that we, I understand the frustration. | ||
| I think the way, part of the way to communicate that is by having, look, I'm a globalist. | ||
| I think part of the way to communicate that is by talking to the fellow peers from around the world who have had success with those methods. | ||
| You know, it does take some time. | ||
| That's hard to, it's hard to convey. | ||
| Tom, I love the story of Henry Kissinger and Joe Enlai. | ||
| It's probably apocryphal story. | ||
| Joe and Kissinger were having dinner on a Kissinger's trip to China, and Kissinger was making small talk and said, Well, what do you think of the French Revolution? | ||
| And the Chinese premier said, Too soon to tell. | ||
| So, you know, it does take some time, and we have to convey that as well. | ||
| Yeah, and I think you can look in the U.S., too, for the civil rights movement, how long it took for them to succeed. | ||
| And I was talking, I won't name names, to some different Hill staffers who sort of, you know, sort of said, you know, this is such a challenging moment to move things forward. | ||
| You know, how do you move forward when there's no hope? | ||
| And I said, you just have to look at U.S. history. | ||
| There's a number of great examples. | ||
| Serbia is an example of a challenge because the current leadership has been in place for a long time. | ||
| And this is what we talk about: this entrenchment of power, how difficult it is to remove, even when you win an election in Venezuela, the opposition. | ||
| And it was great that the Venezuelan opposition leader was given the Nobel Peace Prize because they did something extraordinary. | ||
| They brought together a big tank coalition. | ||
| There were Gen Z involved. | ||
| They fought disinformation and they won an election. | ||
| But they had someone who was entrenched, entrenched power-controlled state apparatus. | ||
| Turkey, they arrested the mayor, who's the leading opposition character, and they threw him in jail to remove him from the electoral. | ||
| Erdogan has been there so long. | ||
| And in all these spaces, that civil society, those groups do not give up. | ||
| That's why, you know, one of the, you know, one of the things that we talk about is courage, is the courage to step out and do the, you know, to do the right thing. | ||
| And it's littered. | ||
| You know, history and in democracies are litter with those that have stepped up. | ||
| Mayor Ekrem Imamolu is the Turkish opposition leader who's been jailed, and we should say his name. | ||
| But we count on the students for that renewed energy and vitality and optimism, even if we get down sometimes. | ||
| And I might add, by the way, there are a lot of things that students can do. | ||
| They can volunteer. | ||
| They can canvas. | ||
| They can make phone calls. | ||
| They can run for office. | ||
| They can intern. | ||
| And they can vote. | ||
| And they can absolutely vote. | ||
| Yes, I see a lifetime learner there right there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you very much. | |
| I'm going to be asked this question by my students tomorrow, so I'm representing students. | ||
| My name is Frank Vogel. | ||
| To both of you, thank you so much for the great work that you're doing. | ||
| This weekend, an organization I'm involved with had its annual meeting. | ||
| We have 110 national chapters engaged in civil society against corruption. | ||
| The one theme that came through so strongly was never before have so many of our chapters felt the pressure of shrinking civil space. | ||
| Even in Brazil, where our chapter is now under attack by a Supreme Court justice. | ||
| Our chapter in Venezuela has been forced into exile, our first exile chapter. | ||
| My friends in Tbilisi, Georgia, may very well be arrested tonight or maybe tomorrow. | ||
| In Madagascar, our leader is facing enormous pressures but still hopes that there can be a beneficial turn from the new government. | ||
| So what's, you said one of your pillars is shrinking space. | ||
| All these people are saying, and we've been around for 30 odd years, and these are young people who have courage leading these organizations. | ||
| What's the answer? | ||
| What are you advocating that can be done by Western countries in order to turn the corner, to push back, to have a U-turn on shrinking civic space? | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you, Frank. | ||
| For those who don't know, our friend Frank Vogel is one of the co-founders of Transparency International, really a jewel of the global pro-democracy movement. | ||
| And democracy can oscillate, and there was a time when we would have expected the U.S. government to be a leader in every one of those places. | ||
| Part of our thought, Jonathan, myself, our colleagues, Renee, so wonderful, she somehow got me here, the logistics. | ||
| If she could get me here from New York City today, then certainly she can solve the crisis in Madagascar, Frank. | ||
| The colleagues in our anti-corruption democracy and security program at Brookings ACDS have advocated that with not being able to look to the U.S. for that leadership, that the Europeans need to absorb much more responsibility. | ||
| So I do think we need to demand both the individual nations, but also Brussels step up. | ||
| That needs to be a focus. | ||
| That's point one. | ||
| Point two: I think we need to challenge American media. | ||
| That fifth pillar is civic and media space, both building it, the danger if it shrinks and the value if you can reinforce it and expand it. | ||
| And I think we need to challenge American media to be a little less parochial and to cover these issues, and not just on page A27 and not just as isolated points. | ||
| Third, let's call on business to step up and do their share as well. | ||
| Business has a lot of influence if they can be brought off the sidelines. |