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Transcript excerpt · English
250 years ago,
just under a mile from here,
Thomas Jefferson wrote
one of the most consequential documents
in American history.
Now, the Declaration of Independence wasn't perfect,
just like the guy who wrote it,
and the country it created weren't perfect either.
But it set us on this path, right?
This beautiful, audacious, complicated path that's still evolving.
And the Declaration of Independence still gives me chills.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all are created equal,
that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights,
and that among these are life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
It's good, right?
(Laughter)
Did you get chills?
(Laughter)
I mean, yeah, I changed it a little, OK, from --
(Laughter)
"All men are created equal"
to "all are created equal"
because it makes it better, right?
Thank you.
(Applause)
And that's the point I want to talk with you about today,
that to live up to its promise,
we have evolved democracy in the past
and it needs to evolve again,
not only so that we can feel our votes count,
but so we can count democracy's real benefits
in our lives,
including in our wallets.
So a couple of years ago,
a philanthropic foundation in the United States
asked me to do some research
to find out why authoritarianism was gaining ground around the globe.
So I interviewed
civic leaders in West Africa and scholars in Eastern Europe
and democracy leaders in Latin America.
And I asked them,
What's authoritarianism getting so right?
These leaders that are pushing people and places away from democracy,
what are these authoritarians doing that's so effective?
And pretty much everyone I talked to said I was asking the wrong question --
that authoritarianism wasn’t surging because of anything it was doing right,
but because of what democracy was getting wrong.
That stopped me in my tracks.
The way they put it,
authoritarianism was like an opportunistic disease
that could only take root when democracy was weak.
And in case you haven't been paying attention --
(Laughter)
Democracy is kind of on life support.
So according to Freedom House,
only about 20 percent of the world's population
lives in a country currently that can be considered free.
And dissatisfaction with democracy is rising worldwide.
In the US, for instance,
about three out of five Americans say they are currently dissatisfied
with how democracy is working.
Why?
The answer came from a conversation I had with Kwasi Prempeh.
So Kwasi runs the Ghana Center for Democratic Development.
Now Ghana only won independence from colonial rule in 1957,
so not that long ago,
but long enough that most people in Ghana today
don't remember a time before democracy.
But what they do know
is that they're struggling economically right now under democracy.
And so, as Kwasi put it, they very understandably ask,
"What has democracy done for me lately?"
His point
is that democracies that do not deliver broad-based opportunity
are vulnerable to autocratic capture.
And research backs this up.
So Susan Stokes is a political science professor at the University of Chicago.
She has looked at variables for why democracy erodes in some countries,
but not others.
Income inequality
is the overwhelming variable in democratic backsliding,
so much so that Stokes said short of unplugging their computers,
they couldn't make it go away.
Now I want to be really clear about something.
In the richest country in the world,
a country that boasts about being a land of opportunity for all,
ensuring meaningful economic opportunity for all
is the right thing to do.
It is the moral thing to do,
and that is enough of a reason to do it.
And it's practical.
Economic justice is how we save democracy.
(Applause)
So I'm feeling like this might be as much of a revelation to you
as it was to me,
or at least it was maybe more of a revelation to me
than it was to you,
because we were used to, we have, for our 250 years,
thought of democracy and economic opportunity
as distinct and separate.
I mean, obviously interrelated,
and for many of us equally important,
but separate.
They're not.
They're two sides of the same coin.
Because if democracy doesn't deliver
meaningful economic opportunity,
democracy starts to feel meaningless.
And that makes authoritarianism and other forms of government more attractive,
not in and of themselves,
but by default,
because democracy is defaulting on its promise.
So I said before that we've evolved democracy in the past,
and it needs to evolve again.
I want us to think about democracy in phases.
Democracy 1.0 is that initial idea
that the people
should have the power in a political system,