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Mo News: Why American Democracy Is On The Brink

Mo News: Why American Democracy Is On The Brink

Mosheh Oinounou
October 12, 2022

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Hi everyone,

We are officially in the final stretch heading into November's midterm elections -- now less than 4 weeks away. It is our first national election since 2020's highly contentious, bitter election was tarnished by claims of voter fraud, election denial, and the unprecedented attack on the Capitol.

The 2022 midterms and upcoming 2024 presidential elections have a lot at stake. And they come as the election denial claims persist and there are growing fears about the future of American democracy and the potential of civil unrest.

With all that in mind, CBS Chief Washington Correspondent Major Garrett and elections expert David Becker joined me for a conversation about their new book, 'The Big Truth.'

Garrett and I were colleagues at both Fox News and CBS News, where we covered hundred of political events and multiple national elections. He has covered Washington for several decades, including stints at the White House and Capitol Hill.
Garrett told me recently he didn't want to write this book, but felt obligated to take on the project to address what he feels is at risk in the next couple years: American Democracy.
The authors delve into the dangers of the escalating rhetoric, the persistent 2020 election fraud claims and how they have warped views of the validity of elections in this country. Becker and Garrett lay out the dire consequences it could have on next month's midterm elections and beyond.
Key excerpt: "When Americans regard each other as enemies, lots of psychic space is open to them. Dangerous psychic space, because if you're an enemy, you don't have to be argued to a different conclusion. You have to be defeated, summarily defeated, vanquished. That's what you do to enemies. And those psychic energies we can see in lots of different parts of American politics right now."
In our conversation, we also compare this time period to the 1960s and 70s--the last time it felt like this country was coming apart, and they explain why this time is more dangerous. And by the end, we talk about the solutions. Garrett has one simple one, "Believe in your neighbors."

This Week's Mo News Conversation

Now, to our interview with Major Garrett and David Becker, and their powerful assessment on the fracturing of this nation.

We discuss their new book, The Big Truth, and their assessment of how 'at risk' American democracy as the country hopes to make it to a 250th birthday in 2026. Their big question, can we make it to 300 years in 2076, and what could tear us apart? We talk about the state of the nation and also what might help bring us back together.

Mo News: Why American Democracy Is On The Brink

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The full conversation will be available later this week via the Mo News Podcast. Apple | Spotify | More Platforms

MOSH: Major, we have covered multiple elections together. We saw growing signs this country was more divided than ever before in 2008 and 2016. Then we had 2020. I want to begin there. Where are we today, after what you have watched over these last two decades or so?

MAJOR GARRETT: We're a very stressed country. And our politics have moved from parties and ideology, and much closer to identity, to our own sense of self and our own place in the American story. And that sense of identity is very personal. It feels primal. People in the therapeutic world might say it feels existential. And what does that mean? It means that for people who are deeply involved in politics, the risks feel greater, the stakes feel greater. Whether they are or not is not really important, because these feelings run deep. And the depth of these feelings is manifesting itself in dramatically different reactions to political outcomes.

January 6 is the most vivid, horrible manifestation of reactions to political outcomes, violence, to thwart a peaceful transfer of power. This identity exists on both sides of the political spectrum. And it leads us to think about fellow Americans in ways I'm not familiar with, in my experience covering national politics since 1990. It is easier now, and more rapidly assumed, that someone with whom you disagree is not someone with whom you disagree, or even a disagreeable fellow citizen, but an enemy. And when Americans regard each other as enemies, lots of psychic space is open to them. Dangerous psychic space, because if you're an enemy, you don't have to be argued to a different conclusion. You have to be defeated, summarily defeated, vanquished. That's what you do to enemies. And those psychic energies we can see in lots of different parts of American politics right now.

We wrote the book in order to offer a warning about the dangers of this psychic energy, the psychic forces. They played themselves out and are beginning to play themselves out more conspicuously in the election space. And as we argue in the book, that's the last place they should be. Our elections have never been better, more verified, more verifiable, more transparent, and more trustworthy. Never. It's not even close. This is the good news. But in that good news, is wrapped in this aura of doubt, cynicism, denialism and rage.

MOSH: David, you waste no time in this book. Literally the first line, "America's second civil war could start with a bang or with a whimper." You lay out a scenario to begin this book. David, I'd like you to explain that scenario, why you chose it, and what it could say about what we might expect over these next couple of years.

DAVID BECKER: We've got an election coming up in 2022, where a lot of the combustible material is already there. And it's just waiting for a spark. Major and I had an internal discussion about what that spark could be.

And that's where the bang and whimper come. It could come from an incident, a violent incident, in a polling place, which causes outrage and causes people to doubt an election in a very large state. And what might come of that over time? As both sides start escalating and determining what they might do?

It could also come just from the slow erosion of norms and guardrails of democracy, where the doubt festers outcomes that people don't like. And we get to the point, if you start seeing your fellow citizens as your enemies, and you believe that if they take power, they will do lasting damage to the country. And then you also get to the point where you will not allow yourself to believe that a secure election had integrity, if the other side won, you can start justifying some pretty reprehensible behavior, and you could start operating in such a way if you're in government, to dissolve the ties that bind us.

One of the things that strikes me working in elections for 25 years, we talk often about the principles of democracy. But democracy, as wonderful as the Constitution is, as wonderful as the principles in there are - and we all adhere to them or choose to adhere to them - it's fundamentally an agreement between citizens that we're going to bind ourselves to a common set of principles. And if some citizens choose to separate themselves from that agreement, as we're seeing right now. If they start saying that the rule of law no longer is the way we exhaust our remedies....that we can go to political violence, that we in one state don't feel ourselves bound to this other state. And we can talk of boycotts, we can talk of sending migrants to other states and letting them be their problem. All of these things are happening around us now. And to some degree, it's evidence of the dissolution of the bonds between us as citizens and as states.

And if we get to the point where we can say, ‘Oh, we cannot let this other party rule,’ and we're not going to allow ourselves to believe that they won legitimately, where are we as a democracy? And the answer is we're in a very, very dangerous place. Whether it's just that we slowly dissolve our bonds between us as states or we kind of have incendiary incidents of political violence all over the country. Those are both possibilities. They're not predictions. We think we can avoid this - the reason we wrote the book, but we have to look at the possibilities here with open eyes.

MOSH: So what is your response to people who read the book, see the word “Civil War” and say, “Guys, stop it. You are fear mongering.”

GARRETT: In the introduction to the book, we make it clear that we're going to engage in something that Margaret Atwood called speculative fiction. Margaret Atwood said that about 'The Handmaid's Tale.' And what she said about that, at the time, was what she wrote about in that book contained nothing that hadn't happened, wasn't happening, or wasn't being contemplated at some place in the world.

Our first line is to describe something that is talked about already in America. The polling data is clear, people have an anxiety about political violence. Those who participated in the most violent contours of the January 6th riot on the Capitol, spoke openly in their chat rooms before January 6th, about a coming Civil War. It is visible in chat rooms all across the internet. It is not the dark web anymore, as it was four or five years ago. It's there.

We are not toying with this. We're not playing with it. We're not saying 'well, we wonder what would happen.' We're saying, 'no, we are encroaching on this very dangerous space. And we need not encroach a step farther.'

But if we do, we warn you, this will take on an accelerating velocity of self-righteous rage. And if those dimensions of self-righteous rage on both sides, or just one side, are loosed, we will be in a very dangerous place. That is not a prediction, it is a warning. I felt, and David felt, compelled to issue that warning.

BECKER: And I should also add, we did product test some of this a little bit with some of our harshest critics, meaning our friends and family and colleagues, and we floated some of these ideas with people.

And I said, are we going too far? Are these unrealistic? Is this alarmist? I was begging them to tell us that we were out of our minds. It would have been very comforting to be told that we were out of our minds. But every single one said, 'No, this, this could happen.'

GARRETT: I lay awake at night thinking about this. I'm fearful of this. These are not direct quotes. But there are composite quotes from people in this space, who have these legitimate fears, and actually kind of urged us to give voice to them in a cautionary way, in a careful way. And that's what we tried to do.

BECKER: We talked about that agreement between citizens in a democracy. That agreement nearly broke down in January of 2021 and in the weeks preceding that. We now know that January 6 wasn't some riot that got out of hand.

It was the planned, natural, coordinated outcome of weeks of machinations by people with the highest level of government. And, but for heroic efforts by people in the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security, and even the Vice President himself....only because they were human beings who stepped up and said, 'We are not going to allow this to continue and go this far,' did we avoid what could have been something far, far worse.

MOSH: As we approach our 250th birthday in the next few years, you talk about what things were like as we approached our 200th birthday in the 60s. The assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, Vietnam. And then of course, what took place with Watergate - that things didn't seem assured as we entered our 200th birthday.

But you're even more concerned as we enter our 250th birthday in 2026. Critics will say we got through World War II. We got through the Great Depression. We got through the tumultuous 60s. Why is today different?

GARRETT: I did a lot of reading about this, for that very reason. To try to have a sense of confidence describing where we are, as compared to other times of our history that were deeply, deeply traumatic.

I'm a reporter of a certain age. I was born in 1962. My blinking eyes aware of the outside world started in about 1967, which also culminates with the most traumatic five years of the Vietnam era and the civil rights era. I had two cousins who were fighting in Vietnam. I remember with my mother, putting care packages together for them. Their fate was part of the evening news. Every night, I was riveted to every headline about the war. Even as a five year old, a six year old. I cared about this intensely. I remember those traumas. And I remember hearing my parents talk over dinner, about their fear that this country was coming apart at the seams. I remember that phrase that they used over the dinner table. That was a traumatic time.

But at no point in that time did that sense of trauma or uncertainty visit itself upon the process of electing people. Never, not even for those who were beginning to participate in that process for the first time after being denied their entire natural lives, did they doubt it. So this idea that the structures, the scaffolding, is rickety when it isn't – that's different. And it's deeply destabilizing in ways that don't allow any of the other things to be debated because authority is conferred by consent. If you deny consent, there is no legitimacy or authority conferred. And then it all falls apart. You want to talk about inflation, crime, immigration? They're all non-discussable if there's no authority conferred by the process of electing people. It's so fundamental. And that's why this feels different.

MOSH: You drill down on the Big Lie and all the various conspiracy theories--many of them literally at odds with one another. Was the vote already electronically rigged or was it ballot stuffing? Etc. Etc. There are reasonable explanations for the theories. So, why does it feel at times that not only has ‘the big lie’ persisted, but it's grown in some ways?

BECKER: I remember in the days after January 6, thinking 'this is a moment.' And both parties could come together and seize that moment to find these areas of consensus. What they could have done – I often imagined in my fantasy world looking back on it – they could have come together with some really basic consensus ideas around elections, including electoral contract reform, and made it the first bill that they delivered to President Biden when he came into office. It wouldn't have to have been the 935 page 'for the people; act. You know, it could have been a 20-page, 30-page bill that Democrats and Republicans could have come together on. I think it's fair to say there were actors across the political spectrum who squandered that opportunity, and it's too bad.

Meanwhile, you know, the day after January 6, Grifters working for then President Trump were down in Coffee County, Georgia, even after Biden had been formally elected in the joint session by the Electoral College and Congress. They were still working on the grift, literally the morning after, less than 12 hours after the final vote. And we know now that that that conspiracy has just been ongoing, and it is largely driven by the money there. These sincerely disappointed supporters of the former president who wanted President Trump to win, they're not bad Americans. They just have different political philosophies. And their disappointment in the election, which all of us can empathize with, is being exploited, for profit, and for temporary power. And I have to admit, I get a little bit angry when I think about the small dollar donors, maybe living off a pension or Social Security, who are sending $25 to line the pockets of people who are lying to them.

GARRETT: Every explanation comes with a price tag. I would think if you really had evidence, if you really could prove this thing---a presidential election was hijacked, criminally, fraudulently---and you were a deeply patriotic, altruistic American, you wouldn't sell that information you provided! You would say the whole country needs to see it. Because it's so important. It's so vital to our whole future. I give this to the country, because I believe in its future.

BECKER: There's two great examples of this that I want to raise. One is the idea that the voting machines miscounted the ballots. That ignores the fact that 95% of all ballots, the highest number ever, were paper ballots that we can go back to and recount and audit many times. In fact, the cyber ninjas in Arizona got a hold of all of the ballots in Maricopa County. And you know what they found? They actually looked at the paper ballots by hand, and it confirmed the results. The technology did not change that.

Similarly, when we talk about this quote unquote, documentary about supposed ballot harvesting, which is alleging theoretically that there were operatives getting a ton of ballots and delivering them. The operatives, the people behind the documentary themselves, when they've been under oath, have said we don't have evidence of a single invalid ballot, not one. And two jurisdictions asked for the evidence. So both Arizona and Georgia Republicans, in both those areas, said, 'Okay, you have evidence, it's your duty to bring it to us. And we will investigate it.' One even subpoenaed them for that evidence. That evidence was never produced. They don't have any evidence. They want to keep promising all the evidence is coming, “we're going to drop a bombshell lawsuit, we've got this great piece of evidence,” and it never comes. But the pleas for more funding always come. Those are always there.

MOSH: I want to talk about the roles and responsibilities of the parties here.

Let's start with the state of the Republican Party and the responsibility they have. Why is it that 18 months after January 6th, the Republican Party seemingly still feels like they need to follow whatever the former president has in mind?

GARRETT: So one of the trend lines that I've observed in covering national politics since 1990, is the hollowing out of national parties as an institution. They're much weaker than they used to be. They don't have the convening authority. They certainly don't have the disciplinary authority that they used to have. And they don't have the ability to sort of say, as a party, which it used to be able to do, 'This nominee is not running in this particular race at this particular time. We will choose it, because we are on high running this national party and we have lots of interests, and we manage those interests, in jurisdictions large and small.' That was very common in both parties in the 50s and 60s and the 70s.

Parties don't have that authority anymore. And I'm not saying that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it is an unmistakable trend. What does that mean? It means at the grassroots level, at the activist level, there is much more energy, and that energy percolates up and radiates up. The denialism started with then-candidate Trump before the 2016 election was held and decided. He said at a debate, quite famously, he was uncertain if he would accept the results. From that point forward, those in the Trump orbit were willing to place their doubts about election outcomes on a scale, and that scale is their satisfaction with the results. So the more satisfied they are with the results, the more belief they have in the election results. And quite obviously, the counter is true. If they're dissatisfied, then the election results are invalid. And that is a percolating energy that now flows up. I can't tell you how many Republicans I've talked to who said, 'my people believe this, therefore, I must believe it. I cannot argue my people out of this. If I do, I will lose my job.'

Well, I would say, 'I'm sorry. You accepted a position of leadership and part of the burdens of leadership on some matters.' And I would say the preservation of the Constitution, the furtherance of our democratic experiment is one of them. You have to say, 'No, I'm sorry. You're wrong. And if you defeat me, because you're wrong, and I'm telling you the truth, so be it.' I keep waiting for that to happen. It happened in a few cases, but not nearly as many as I expected.

BECKER: It's also fair to say that Nixon had lines he would not cross. And we have not seen evidence of that yet from former President Trump. I think one of the other things that's been lost in the narrative, and we talk about it in the book to some degree, is, we often talk about the Republican Party as a monolithic entity. It's obviously not, but there were many, many Republicans who did stand up at the DOJ, DOD, DHS, at the FBI, within the White House, with a White House Counsel's Office and election administrators around the country.

MOSH: Where is the party, when you talk to your sources, senior Republicans....how do they feel about where things are headed, and how much control they potentially could wrestle back? Is Trump the issue here? Or is he the symptom of a larger issue that was manifesting itself within the party?

GARRETT: So anger about Democrats and deep suspicions about Democrats predated candidate, president, and former president Trump. That's true. But they have been amplified to such a greater extent by him and by his participation in politics, by a factor of about 10.

That was running through the Tea Party. There were expressions of anti-democratic, or hostility towards Democrats in the Obamacare debate that were pretty nasty. But, not nearly as nasty as this.

It has been amplified and intensified by Trump and Donald Trump only, and that energy is at the grassroots level. And again, it radiates up. And plenty of Republicans feel that they simply cannot confront it until it subsides. And they tell themselves something that I think is kind of a fairy tale, which is this, oh, someday he'll go away. And this will subside, and we'll get back to normal. That is a fairy tale, and a dangerous, deeply, deeply dangerous fairy tale. Because in that intervening period, things that are untrue, will be allowed to be believed as true, and they will be unforgettable. So if you spend two years or four years doubting election results, guess what? You're gonna spend the next six years doubting election results. You're not going to suddenly say, 'oh, no, they're all good now.' Once you're trained in this mindset, it will continue.

And this fairy tale of, when Trump goes away, we'll all go back to normal, the normal won't be there. That's why it has to be confronted. And I don't care if you're going to lose your house position. Do you want to hold your position in the House of Representatives for a country that's falling apart around you?

MOSH: Elections are a choice. We have a two party system. What's been remarkable to me is the rhetoric here from Democrats, which is, “oh my god our democracy is falling apart and these election deniers are terrible."

At the same time, we sit here with a few weeks ago in midterm elections, and Democrats have been propping up election deniers in Republican primaries, with tens of millions of dollars. Some of those candidates have won. The strategy here is that by propping up ‘the big lie’ advocates, they're going to make their general election of Democrats easier .

GARRETT: Fundamentally, I don't believe we need the Democratic Party to save democracy. Every American can save democracy. It's very simple. Every American can save democracy. And I often tell people, I know you're dissatisfied. I just ask you this question: Can you focus just a little bit less on your satisfaction index and a little bit more on the quality of your participation? One of the points of the book is this idea of tactical denialism.

Democrats didn't start the process of Republicans nominating people who deny the election. Republicans started that in this current phase. But Democrats said, we will tactically try to manipulate that to our benefit, to torture that party. That is to say... playing footsie with the furtherance of democracy in order to have that person be nominated, so we can win the next election. That's tactical. We argue that that's bad for the process, because it is a tactical approach to something that should be beyond tactics. The believability, the verifiability, the soundness of our elections should be by both parties’ consent, off limits. Now, Democrats say 'we didn't start the fire...but we're going to manipulate it to our benefit.' That's what every tactical political party does. I hear you, but it blurs lines that ought not to be blurred.

BECKER: It's a dangerous game. I mean, that's what Democrats thought they were doing with Trump in 2016, because Trump couldn't possibly win. Of course, the possibility exists that some of these election deniers can win.

We already have a warped incentive structure right now, where people are incentivized to lie about elections so they can get rich and hold temporary power. We don't need to warp that even further.

The Democratic Party and the Republican Party both have responsibility, and people within them, of active citizenship. Of saying, we will not delve those depths.

It is not 50/50 responsibility right now by any means. It is almost all coming from the extreme right wing of the Republican party. But it's also not 100/0. It might be 99/1, it might be 99.9/0.1. But it's not 100/0. That kernel, that seed, can exist in the extremes of the Democratic Party as well. And that could grow if it seems like the incentive structure continues to be out of whack. That worries us because at that point, if you have both sides, or all sides, not believing the outcome of elections, I mean, we're lost. I don't know where we are.

MOSH: I want to end here. You write at the end, “if we're not careful, we will find it is easier to kill American democracy than it is to sustain it.”

That is the big question that many people will ask. What can I do to ensure America makes it safely and healthily to his 250th birthday, to its 300th birthday?

For the American who cares about their democracy, who cares about the future of this country - what can they do starting today?

BECKER: There's a couple of things. I do understand how people feel helpless right now. It's one of the reasons we wrote the book. We really call on an active citizenship here, which is kind of a humble citizenship as well. It is not about power, but about democratic process.

I think there are a couple of things that that go into that. One, I enjoy a healthy skepticism about all of the information I get, particularly when it validates my own preexisting views. I don't think we come to it that way. I tried to teach my son that, that we have to stop looking for validation. And maybe because I'm a lawyer, I've always been comfortable with a certain level of disagreement and conflict, and I think we have to be ready for that. I try not to share things that validate my view, especially when they come from anger.

One very specific thing that I'd like to add, is volunteer to be a poll worker. If you have any doubts about the election process, being a poll worker will assuage those doubts. You will learn why poll workers have to show up a couple of hours before the polls open and stay for several after hours after the polls closed. It is because there are so many elements of a transparent process to check and double check and make sure there are redundancies with multiple observers all the time. It is a wonderful antidote to election denial. And it doesn't matter what your political party or your philosophy is. Go and volunteer to be a poll worker. Get the training be a part of active democracy.

GARRETT: I'll be even simpler than that. Believe in your neighbors. Why do I say that? Elections in our country are one of the most decentralized things we still do as a country. There's a great deal of concern. When you go to cast your ballot, your neighbors are running your elections. Believe in your neighbors and stand up for something that has never been better in terms of its verifiability and its transparency.

Stay tuned for our full conversation on the Mo News Podcast this week. Apple | Spotify | More Platforms

And, be sure to get a copy of Major and David's book, "The Big Truth."

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