♪♪ -The choreography of democracy runs deep -- a constant dance between two major parties and three branches of government, between citizens and their leadership, between individual rights and equal rights for all.

-A democratic government, at its core, is communication between people with power and people who've given them that power, the American public.

-245 years since the beginnings of the American experiment in democracy, through the recurrent ebbs and flows over those centuries, one year ago, on January 6, 2021, this delicate balance teetered on the brink.

Americans witnessed a crisis of confidence in democracy, a rejection of its most basic principles -- the rule of law, and the sanctity of elections, shaking the nation to its core.

-The fact that January 6th took place surprised a lot of people, but I think if you know the history of the United States and the history of our democracy, maybe you weren't quite as surprised.

-This was not the first revolt against a fairly elected president, not the first mob to storm the streets of the nation's capital.

It was not the first time the American democratic process was nearly overcome by violence.

-The best way to look at January 6th is as an attack against democracy, attack against our institutions, and it is not helpful to divide the people who were attacked that day as only Democrats or Republicans.

All Americans were attacked.

-January 6th reminded me that when we think about democracy, we're talking about something that is fragile and precarious and sometimes deeply symbolic.

-While most Americans were appalled at the insurrection... -The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect a true America.

-...stark divisions remain about how to restore civil society and preserve democracy.

-I don't think there's one magic bullet that will bring us to having a more perfect American union.

What we want to avoid now is going down the opposite road.

-We're in the crucible right now, and we're in the midst of that conflict -- the conflict over basic democracy.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -In the midst of a global pandemic, January 6th marked the pinnacle of voter disenchantment -- a desperate act of violence by citizens who claimed their government -- and democracy itself -- had failed them.

January 6th provokes us to consider democracies, past and present, to explore how they survive and how they fail, and reminds us that America is not alone in facing these fundamental questions about what makes democracy work.

-We have had periods like this in the past.

It's not necessarily new in our history.

But those periods often lead to very unfortunate consequences, so, you know, we do need to step back and say, "How can we all, as Americans, try to make our politics a little more cooperative and constructive?"

-If we believe that democracy is real, then democracy should always be on the chopping block -- not in terms of its complete invalidation, but its scrutiny, its questioning, and tests of its own durability and resilience for the world we live in.

-There have always been political controversies throughout U.S. history on the shape and the contours of U.S. democracy.

Who should be allowed to vote?

How responsive should our government be to changes in popular sentiment?

-And it is true there have been ebbs and flows, times when there has been more partisanship and less partisanship.

But it is also true that we are in a time now where we are experiencing some of the most severe hyper-partisanship that we have experienced in our country's history.

-In November 2021, for the first time, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance -- a multi-national think tank -- added the United States to its list of "backsliding democracies," which also included Hungary, India, and the Philippines.

The U.S. has fallen "victim to authoritarian tendencies," the report noted.

It cited former president Trump's "baseless allegations" of electoral fraud and the storming of the U.S. Capitol building in January 2021 as a "historic turning point" for American democracy.

-This is the most crucial period in American political history, since the era of the Civil War -- before the Civil War and after the Civil War.

And if we don't -- if we don't understand that, and if everyone -- Republican or Democrat, independent or what -- realizes just what the stakes are, the United States we all imagine, and the one we love, because we think it promises equality, will be over.

♪♪ -To build their new nation, America's founding fathers studied philosophy and ideas of government in world history.

From Ancient Greece, they took the written constitution, and from Ancient Rome, the notion of "an empire of liberty."

They drew from the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers -- from the Baron de Montesquieu, who saw the dangers of a government ruled by one man, and from Englishman John Locke's idea of individual rights.

♪♪ In "A More or Less Perfect Union," a PBS series from 2020, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison prepare for the first Constitutional Convention.

♪♪ -Madison used to write to Jefferson, really begging him to send more books on government.

-Book shops were rare in Colonial America and books on government, even more rare.

-And Jefferson would ship them back.

Now, imagine shipping books from Paris to the United States.

-Thomas Jefferson sent him an entire chest full of books.

And so he went up to his second-floor study and read all these books and tried to figure out the causes of republics failing.

-And that learning is what's embodied in our Constitution.

What he was doing was creating a nuanced, and really quite novel, mix -- something that could guarantee the fairness of a democracy while trying to achieve part of the stability of a monarchy.

-Many of these ideas are still embraced by governments today, all over the world.

-There's more democracies in the world today than any point in human history, really.

-We can see around the globe, some of our fellow Western countries, they're actually, their democracies are performing pretty well.

Canada comes to mind, Australia, New Zealand... [ Bell clanging ] ...many of the Scandinavian countries.

-So what's striking is that, on the one hand, you have that kind of good-news story that we have to weigh against some very serious threats to democracy around the world.

-Countries like Turkey, like Hungary, like Poland and Venezuela, are countries where we've seen democratic backsliding.

I think the most extraordinary, though, and the most surprising has been the democratic backsliding in the United States.

-Part of the problem with democracy is it moves slowly, it moves messily.

And people can get very disgusted with it.

And people can say, "This is nothing but squabbling, corrupt politicians.

We want something better than that.

We want the army.

We want the dictator.

We want the charismatic guy.

We want the -- we want the organized political party.

We want the trains to run on time."

-Often people living today feel like they're facing a set of challenges that are unprecedented and difficult.

In fact, you know, you can look back in the past and see that other politicians and citizens have faced very similar dilemmas, and actually, there's a lot to learn from these experiences.

We have no choice but to learn from history.

♪♪ -It's called "Liberty Leading the People."

It's painted in 1831 by Delacroix.

It's a real masterpiece.

-This iconic painting in France's Louvre museum shows us how -- dating back to the French Revolution -- democracy was volatile.

-Delacroix gives a very critical point of view on the Revolution.

You have dead bodies, and you see some very young people -- they are almost kids -- are holding weapons.

You see the violence, the ugliness of public disorder.

-And while Liberty is seen leading the people, it was not along a direct road to democracy.

-Sharing the political power with the people this time was not an ideal for many people.

Absolutely not.

-French Revolution, it's not as if the goal was necessarily to establish a mass democracy.

-In the 18th century, in most of the Western world, democracy was a dirty word.

Democracy meant chaos, it meant mob rule.

It wasn't something that people wanted.

It took a very long time to stabilize democracy in France.

You had the revolution of 1789, but 10 years later, the First Republic was overthrown by Napoleon Bonaparte.

When he fell in 1814-15, he was replaced by the monarchy coming back.

Then there was another revolution in 1830, another revolution in 1848, and then yet another regime change in 1870.

And it's only really in the 1870s that you have, for the first time, a stable republic really being established in France and a stable democratic form of government.

-Maintaining the ideals of democracy has always been challenging, and not always long-lasting.

-The greatest war the world had known exploded in Europe.

-Germany after World War I is a great example of just how difficult it can be to establish a democracy and how unstable the democracies could be.

-On the balcony proclaims the new republic, known as the Weimar Republic.

-The Weimar Republic, as it was called, was established in 1919.

-Germany was a democracy.

But there were also stresses and strains.

Germany had lost the First World War.

There was a sense of not just alienation from some of the surrounding countries after the loss of the war but also a deprivation and desperation because the German economy took a hit.

-There was great feelings of sort of national shame, of national defeat.

-And all of these grievances were festering.

-And along came Adolf Hitler... [ Crowd cheering ] ...who promised a kind of national renewal, who promised national unity, who promised economic rebirth and economic growth again.

Now, Hitler himself never got a majority of the votes in Germany.

But he got enough of the votes to establish himself as a key political player.

Other politicians tried to make use of him -- they made him chancellor and thought they could control him.

[ Crowd cheering ] That was a terrible mistake because he outmaneuvered them.

He was able to pass what was called an enabling law by the Reichstag, which was the German parliament, which gave him a very great range of powers, which he used, essentially, to decimate the opposition.

So by mid-1933, Germany was already a dictatorship, a Nazi dictatorship.

-Germany's Weimar Republic had lasted less than 15 years.

"It will always remain one of democracy's best jokes," said Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, "that it provided its deadly enemies with the means by which it was destroyed."

-When Goebbels said that democracy provides its enemies with the means of destroying it, I think, in one sense, he was quite right.

[ Hitler shouting in German ] Democracy allows for political movements, including extreme political movements, to take shape.

It allows for freedom of speech, it allows for these movements to find supporters.

It allows them to tell lies... -[ Speaking German ] -...to spread disinformation.

So there's always a very difficult line that democratic regimes are treading.

♪♪ -Surrender!

The great... -Hitler was eventually defeated on the battlefield, the end of World War II, also marking the beginning of a new challenge -- communist versus democratic superpowers, the Cold War.

-Focal point of the Cold War is the European continent, where, in the east, the Soviets have engulfed nine nations and imposed the rigors of the police state.

In the west, the strength of democracy is being tested.

-During the Cold War, our democracies, I think, were held together, in many respects, because you had an example of what it was like to be not a democratic country, in the form of the Soviet Union or the Eastern Bloc.

-It was also the age when democracy died by brute force in countries like Nigeria and Chile.

-During the Cold War, most democracies died via military coups.

And according to our own calculations for our book, "How Democracies Die," we discovered that three-quarters of democratic breakdowns during the period of the Cold War took the form of military coups.

-The gates have been thrown open, and thousands of people are pouring over to take a look at the West -- in some cases, their first look -- and the elation is enormous.

[ Cheers and applause ] -After 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, I think we all felt this incredible sense of relief.

This was described, in many respects, as the next great wave of democracy.

-The collapse of communism and the fall of the Wall was a moment, suddenly, where democracy seemed possible everywhere -- from East Germany and Czechoslovakia to Tajikistan and Kazakhstan.

And there was a moment in the early 1990s where people began to think that democracy is the only game in town, that this is the best match for the human condition and human nature are free political systems.

And so I think, in many ways, in retrospect, this was unrealistic -- that there are, in fact, certain preconditions in societies that make stable democracy more or less likely.

-The question of whether established democracies are at risk of backsliding is a relatively new one, because I think social scientists believed that once democracies achieved certain things -- GDP per capita, number of elections, peaceful transfers of power -- over a period of time that democracy had become institutionalized.

It had become consolidated.

And I think events more recently would suggest that that's not necessarily true, and that social scientists need to revisit their theories and their data on the consolidation of democracy.

-In Asia, the Korean peninsula provides the starkest contrast between extreme authoritarianism and a tenuous or thriving democracy.

♪♪ South Korea's fledgling democracy following the Korean War fell to a military coup, but the nation reverted to democracy after free elections in 1987 and has been thriving ever since.

Meanwhile, North Korea, has been under authoritarian rule for three generations.

More recently, democracies in Thailand and Egypt were overthrown by violent coups.

[ Crowd chanting ] -So while there continue to be some coups, most democracies now die at the ballot box.

-These days, in the 21st century, most of the cases we've seen of democracy failing, it has failed slowly.

It has failed with autocrats moving in slowly, taking advantage of the weakness of the democratic system to manipulate it.

If you control certain levers of the government, if you control certain institutions, you can start basically taking over the Supreme Court, you can start passing laws that allow you to take over the most important media outlets, and you can slowly move towards authoritarianism while still maintaining at least the appearance of democracy.

-Hungary's a particularly striking case.

Through the 1990s, looked to be a thriving case of democratic success.

Viktor Orbán, who was prime minister, eventually lost and, from all accounts, decided he wasn't going to lose again.

And so when he came back into office the second time, he was a transformed figure, and he became increasingly conservative, nationalistic, immediately redrew electoral boundaries to tilt the electoral playing field.

Second of all, he imposed a retirement age for judges to, essentially, to allow him to appoint judges to the judiciary.

And then, third's to regulate the media in a way to guarantee positive media coverage for him.

And so, Orbán locked himself into power.

And so now, although he doesn't win the same overwhelming majority in elections, he's rigged the system to a degree that he's able to continue to have enormous influence and control of the political system.

-There are more case studies -- President Erdogan in Turkey, President Duterte in the Philippines, Prime Minister Modi in India.

Elected politicians, Calling their countries democracies, but ruling as authoritarians.

-People talk about an "authoritarian playbook."

And I think there's something to that.

Electoral authoritarians do learn from each other.

But what's also striking is the degree to which many of these figures act out of instinct.

They can sniff out the weaknesses in political systems.

And they sniff out those weaknesses of political systems, they learn about those weaknesses, and then they grasp power.

We're disarming ourselves, in a way, unilaterally disarming ourselves, if we don't learn from history, because electoral authoritarians learn from history.

So we also need to learn from history to learn how to combat this.

-The history of democracy in most countries is a history of instability.

It's a history of kind of back and forth between democratic regimes, which can often collapse and are followed by some sort of authoritarian regime, and then back to democracy again.

The pattern we've had in the United States, where you at least have had the continuation of a constitution since 1789, that is itself actually rather exceptional but something we shouldn't take for granted here in the United States.

[ Crowd cheering ] -I remember when the Wall was built, and I see people just jumping from the eastern side to the western side, and they were killed in this time.

And now changes, they come to us without danger, and free.

-How do the experiences of other nations inform the American version of democracy?

♪♪ What lessons can we learn?

♪♪ Where are the fault lines in our own unique democracy?

♪♪ -No more Nancy!

-Kill that bill!

-What economic weaknesses might be exploited to divide us?

♪♪ Can a free press be controlled?

Does social media destroy all hope for consensus?

Does American democracy contain the seeds of its own downfall?

Just how vulnerable is it?

How robust is it?

American history has plenty to say.

U.S. out of Vietnam!

♪♪ ♪♪ [ Crowd shouting ] -January 6th revealed that democracy is a lot more fragile than I thought it was.

I knew that intellectually as a historian and as a scholar, but watching that on TV and watching it transpire drove that home for me in a way that it hadn't before.

-We're in the crucible right now.

We're in the midst of that conflict - that ongoing, seemingly redundant conflict in American history -- the conflict over voter access, the conflict over basic democracy.

All that's going on right now.

And if we wanted to understand anything about this particular moment, history is our guide.

-American democracy was a new invention, an evolving experiment.

The founding documents of the United States made no reference to establishing a democratic government in the new, breakaway republic.

Though the signers of the Declaration of Independence and framers of the Constitution sought to reject the tyranny of monarchs, they had grave concerns about losing control to the masses.

-Most of the founding generation were not particularly comfortable with democracy.

They were in a world of monarchies, and here they were trying this more democratic mode of government.

There's a story about how, right after the Constitutional Convention, a woman came up to Benjamin Franklin and asked him what kind of government had just been created, and Franklin responded, "A republic, if you can keep it."

So right from the get-go, right from literally the closing of the Constitutional Convention, there is Franklin saying this is a new kind of a government.

This is a more fragile government than a monarchy seems to be.

Are you, the American people, going to be able to keep it?

-Just before the writing of the Constitution, you had had Shay's Rebellion in Massachusetts, where farmers who were suffering from debt tried to close the courthouses, so their land wouldn't be taken away by creditors, et cetera.

And many sort of well-to-do founding fathers saw this as an example of the excesses of democracy, and you needed a stronger national government to keep a lid on popular enthusiasms and popular chaos.

-As the founders sought to unify the nation, it was a delicate balance between respecting the will of the people and protecting their fledgling democratic system.

-Free speech exists because the founders wanted us to question things openly, to press for answers, to expect better from the people who we elected.

And if they did not deliver, we could assemble peacefully to protest.

Encouraging that from the very beginning encourages a certain amount of dissension, and that is a good thing.

At the same time, there were limits, and when people threatened the sanctity of the union, of the democracy, of the republic, the founders reacted and often overreacted.

-During George Washington's inaugural presidency, whiskey distillers in Western Pennsylvania would highlight the central tension after refusing to pay taxes to the newly formed federal government, and then turning to violence.

This was the Whiskey Rebellion.

-Hundreds of people assembled.

And when that didn't work, they started to tar and feather tax collectors.

Some were hurt, someone had their house burned down.

Washington felt as though this was the first show of defiance towards his government.

He sidestepped the Constitution, raised an army, and rode out with them.

But he turned around at the last moment, thinking, "Oh, maybe this isn't such a good look."

-In the early years of the government, because the government was experimental -- and they used that word a lot, that it was an experiment -- they were constantly afraid that everything would collapse, that the next crisis or the next bad decision would bring it all tumbling down.

They weren't naive, so they did assume there would be conflict, that, in a sense, there would be factions of people banging up against each other.

What they were worried about was organized factions.

They were not excited about the idea of organized political parties.

There's a lot of debate over how much democracy -- and by that, I mean mass protest in the street -- how much of that is safe?

How much of that isn't?

-It wasn't just that the founding of American democracy was a contested experiment.

From the beginning, it had left many American people excluded altogether.

-So, there's a fairly deceptive mythology about American democracy, and it requires that people overlook that very many of the founders owned slaves.

The American Revolution, which was fought around the cause of no taxation without representation, immediately yielded a circumstance in which there were millions of people who could not vote, who could not be represented, but who were nonetheless part of the American economy as noncitizen labor.

Immediate contradictions.

So the mythology has to gloss over all of that.

-We start the country's narrative with this set of radical promises about equality, about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and we often forget that, at the outset, those promises were not meant for most people.

They were meant for white, free, property-owning men.

Full stop.

-The fundamental problem of the founding era, in my view, is the problem of compromises that were reached to protect slavery, to extend slavery, to push back against efforts to bring slavery in the early United States to an end.

And it just got worse.

As the new nation began to expand westward, those who sought to establish new slave states in the West ran up against those who sought to establish new spaces for freedom in the West.

The question came up time and again as the new nation expanded.

-In Kansas, in 1854, a state-level civil war broke out over the issue, with competing factions pouring across state lines to enforce their positions.

Abolitionist John Brown and his sons famously resisted the effort to extend slavery into Kansas.

♪♪ -These tensions created flashpoints that ultimately, in some cases, became outright physical violence.

And blood was shed.

As the press picked up the reports, the headline became "Bleeding Kansas."

-Even inside the U.S. congress, violence became commonplace as a political tactic.

Congressmen commonly carried pistols or Bowie knives, and in this time of rising tensions, there were more than 70 violent incidents on the congressional floor.

-Democratic government, at its core, is communication between people with power and the people who've given them that power, the American public.

They're partly playing for an audience.

In the 1840s and the 1850s, increasingly, the American politics was centered around the issue of slavery.

In 1856, a lightning-rod incident involved Massachusetts abolitionist senator Charles Sumner.

-Sumner gave an anti-slavery speech on the floor in Congress, and it characterized a representative out of South Carolina as, essentially, a handmaiden to pro-slavery interests.

Several days later, he was attacked by one of his colleagues, Preston Brooks, and caned to within an inch of his life.

-In the end, he collapsed, bloody, from this intense beating, which many all over the nation took as the South beating the North into submission.

-The 10 years before the Civil War is a period of mounting violence in the United States, both in Washington itself and out in many parts of the country.

I'm not saying that that caused the Civil War, but it did make violence seem more acceptable.

♪♪ -In 1860, with the presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, who opposed the expansion of slavery to new states, the experiment in American democracy was shaken to its core.

Refusing to accept the results of the presidential election, Southerners moved to secede from the republic in defiance, and a catastrophic civil war broke out.

-It seems that there are some issues which democracy is simply incapable of handling, and slavery in the United States was one of them.

It wasn't democratic processes, it wasn't arguments, speeches -- the fate of slavery was determined on the battlefield.

It's a melancholy reflection on the fact that political democracy cannot, it seems, solve every problem.

Our history is not just a straight line of greater and greater democratic progress.

But it has also survived many traumatic moments in our history.

♪♪ -After the Civil War, the South was defeated, and millions of enslaved Africans were freed.

But after the traumatic disruption of a nation mortally divided against itself, the path forward for democracy was anything but clear.

-Something that we have to keep in mind is the fact that people were not quite sure what an anti-slavery future would look like.

Would it mean total equality of Black and white people?

Would it mean a segmented society where Blacks have some rights but not all the rights of their white counterparts?

So all of these different visions about what the nation would look like after this terrible war were really on the table.

-After the war, the federal government set out to transform Southern society.

This included passing legislation that granted formerly enslaved people the right to vote.

-This is the period we talk about as Reconstruction in the South, and it included enormous reactionary violence by people in the South.

The first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan became very violent and carried out a campaign of terror -- of torture and chasing, night-riding and sexual assaults -- against African-Americans and other racial enemies in the South.

-From the 2019 PBS series, "Reconstruction: America After the Civil War," African-American leaders protested the growing antagonism they faced, and the direction that democracy was taking -- a century and a half before the events of January 6th.

-I was amazed when I began to read the speeches of Black congressmen in that period.

I mean, here are people who are arguing about what the laws of the nation will provide in terms of human rights, and have sophisticated understanding of the underlying principles that make these freedoms necessary in a democratic society.

The level of discourse was so far above the level of discourse in Congress today.

It was shocking.

♪♪ -In state houses across the South, Black men and white men were attempting to govern together for the first time.

In South Carolina, where African Americans made up almost 60% of the population, voters elected a Black-majority House of Representatives.

-The election of Black representatives from the South in this period of time after the end of slavery was monumental, because rarely were there opportunities for people who had been denied so much, so many rights, to actually see their rights translate into some ability to obtain power.

-Reconstruction lasted for, depending on the state, 8-10 years, and there were many accomplishments.

But the problem is that the expansion of rights led to a violent counterrevolution -- a violent reaction, or what we'd call backlash today.

-The pullback from Reconstruction and its values means permitting Southern states to impose a new regime of white supremacy that we oftentimes refer to as Jim Crow.

It is American apartheid.

So we have the rise of literacy tests, of grandfather clauses, of poll taxes, as well as intimidation and violence that go unchecked.

By the time we get to the 1940s and the advent of the modern civil rights movement, now we are going to see how Black Americans by the thousands, by the tens and hundreds of thousands, become foot soldiers in the struggle for voting rights.

-Voting rights has been the lodestar of American experience in terms of political equality -- equality in the political community.

We are not equal financially.

We're not equal educationally.

But when you go into that voting booth, you are as equal as the richest woman in America or the richest man in America or the smartest person there is.

That was the genius of the voting rights movement -- "Don't give us favors.

Don't give us charity.

Give us justice!"

And justice is the right to be equal in the voting booth.

-Voting is a communal act.

Voting is something that you do to determine your future, along with every other person in your community.

It is a collective action.

And when you deny the vote to any individual or to groups of individuals or communities, you are saying, "You don't matter.

We don't want to hear your voice.

We don't intend to represent you."

-95 years ago, our Constitution was amended to require that no American be denied the right to vote because of race or color.

Almost a century later, many Americans are kept from voting, simply because they are Negro.

Therefore, this Monday, I will send to the Congress a request for legislation to carry out the amendment of the Constitution.

Wherever there is discrimination, this law will strike down all restrictions used to deny the people the right to vote.

-I worked for Lyndon Johnson in shaping the civil rights, the voting rights, legislation.

They were great strides forward.

They really proved that democracy could still do justice by the people who'd been denied freedom and justice.

♪♪ -I think that the moment in which democracy began to blossom in earnest was after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, when people could start to imagine a system in which participation had fewer barriers, and that participation actually meant the possibility of raising one's voice.

-It said that voting rights were protected.

And it gave a fair chance, it made sure that states couldn't write and draw lines that would intentionally block minorities, block African Americans, undermine their voting power.

-Latino Americans also took part in the struggle for voting rights, especially in Texas, where there was a large Latino population and a growing push for political representation.

While the 1965 Voting Rights Act outlawed most blatant forms of voter suppression, in Texas, the mostly Anglo political establishment continued to control state elections, and discriminatory tactics remained in place.

-And there was just layer upon layer upon layer for people in poverty to be able to dismiss them from the ability to vote.

In Texas, there had been a lot of discrimination and intimidation by law enforcement, particularly the Texas Rangers, that would come to a poll and stand there.

They made you understand that your employer knew how you were voting.

-I think the Mexican American and the [bleep] have civil rights.

They always have had it.

And I think it's -- it is my personal opinion -- I just don't believe in that civil rights situation.

-Civil rights attorney George Korbel, activist Rosie Castro, and a coalition of voting-rights groups set out to make political representation fairer and more inclusive for voters of Latino and Mexican descent in Texas.

Their strategy was to break down at-large election districts into smaller ones that included some where people of color were in the majority.

-It used to be that all elections in Texas were held at-large, so that if you had to run for office, you had to get votes from all segments of the community.

And with racially polarized voting, that was difficult for Blacks and Hispanics.

-The fight eventually made its way to the supreme court, which, in 1973, ruled that at-large elections discriminated against African Americans and Mexican Americans.

-We were able to bring in single-member districts and get rid of at-large districts.

We get single-member districts and boom.

Suddenly we have a council that is majority minority -- majority people of color.

-So, all of a sudden, people began to say, "My vote does matter.

And I'm hearing voices on the council that I never heard before, and I'm hearing articulation of my concerns that I never heard before."

-And it isn't till 1981 that we get the first Latino mayor in modern history, which is Henry Cisneros.

-This is not my victory.

This is a victory that belongs to you.

-We had finally elected one of our own to be a mayor.

-You know, the best expression of voting that I've ever heard is from the former founder of the Southwest Voter Registration Project, Willie Velasquez.

And Willie had the expression, "Su voto es su voz" -- "Your vote is your voice."

And in the Latino community, that was a very powerful idea because people do want to have voice, and they do want to have their priorities considered.

And we repeated time and again -- your vote is the way you exercise your voice.

-You know, without my mom's work, without the work of her generation, I don't think that I would have become a state representative.

I don't think that I would have become a member of Congress.

And so, there's a great gratitude that I feel because I know that things have changed a lot.

I know that there are a lot more Latinos, a lot more African Americans, Asian Americans that have been elected to public office.

But then I look at what's going on in places like my home state of Texas and Georgia and Arizona, and this severe gerrymandering and this gross unfairness in trampling on people's voting rights and putting up every obstacle that you can to keep people from voting.

And then I wonder how much has actually changed.

And so, in many ways, that fight continues that my mom's generation waged.

-The election of minorities to congress took a huge leap forward after the passing of the Voting Rights Act and, 40 years later, played a significant role in the election of Barack Obama, from Illinois, in 2004.

During his brief tenure in the senate, Obama worked on bipartisan bills, including an effort to improve transparency in government, alongside republican John McCain, who would later run against him in his first presidential campaign.

-"We the people, in order to form a more perfect union."

221 years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America's improbable experiment in democracy.

[ Knock on door ] ♪♪ -There had only been two Black people in the Senate since Reconstruction, before Barack Obama was elected to the Senate.

But, there were, you know, these conditions that he took advantage of masterfully -- the alienation of people about the Iraq War, the ambition and hope for racial reconciliation.

And you had this person who was reassuring, competent, blazingly intelligent.

-But In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

[ Cheers and applause ] -In 2008, everything felt like it was going wrong to many people in the country.

The economy was in a moment of great instability.

The stock market is crashing, and major institutions are falling apart.

We're in a war overseas, in Iraq, that seemed unending.

And you have a departing incumbent president that was so deeply unpopular, it created space for a new kind of voice in the political system.

-Yes we can heal this nation.

Yes we can repair this world.

Yes, we can.

-Yes, we can!

Yes, we can!

Yes, we can!

-His message was one of what we have in common -- not blue states, red states -- the United States.

He inspired people to feel as though they could each make a difference and they could make things better.

And I'll never forget the night of the election, standing out in Grant Park in Chicago -- it was a total peaceful, joyful rally, and I think that happened all around the world.

-We can report history.

Barack Obama is projected to be the next president of the United States of America.

-Obama!

-None of us anticipated seeing something like this happen, and here it was.

It also represented the culmination of a centuries-long effort for Black people to have their humanity recognized.

-This is your victory.

[ Crowd cheering ] -And here you have this person who is of African descent, who is elected disproportionately on the strength of black votes.

It was a validation.

[ Cheers and applause ] -Many people, on both the left and the right, had a very dearly-held feeling that we as a nation were somehow beyond race.

♪♪ -No presidential honeymoon lasts long.

Even a comfortable victory has a narrow margin.

46% of the voters had voted for John McCain, and conservatives opposed to Obama's policies on the economic crisis, on healthcare, on foreign policy, on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- presented fierce opposition inside Congress... -Very controversial, unacceptable... -...and across America.

This was politics as usual in the 21st century.

-Certainly, there were Republicans who appreciated the historic nature of his election but had sincere and serious policy disagreements with him, and also stylistic critiques that weren't that positive about his leadership in office, whether it came from foreign policy or his ability to work with Congress and to effect legislation and to get legislation passed.

-Mr. Cruz?

-No.

-I also think it would be insincere to say that President Obama's race didn't play into some of his negative critiques, particularly from the right.

-At first, race wasn't an easy answer to explain what was happening.

People in the media, in politics, at times, avoided saying this was racial in its motivation.

But it's hard to come up with another explanation for the level of hate and the level of outrage about the first Black president.

-Right away, visits to sites like Stormfront, and all these really extreme kind of neo-Nazi and white supremacist web sites, started going through the roof.

But, suddenly, there was this moment of people all around the country saying, "I never really thought that a non-white person could be the most powerful person in this country."

And it awakened a lot of feelings of white racial grievance that I think a lot of people didn't even know they had until that moment.

-Preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

-So help you God?

-So help me God.

-Congratulations, Mr. President.

[ Cheers and applause ] -After his election, remember what the cries became?

"Voter fraud!

We need voter I.D.!

Something's wrong.

This can't be true."

It scared so many people and I think more that were extremists.

See, this is a piece people miss -- What did Obama win?

He won Virginia.

He won North Carolina.

He won Florida.

In the primaries, he won South Carolina.

Uh-oh.

That's the Southern Strategy.

Those are the states that, no way that was supposed to happen.

That's the last stronghold of extremism.

♪♪ -We started seeing the Tea Party arising, which was very related to racial attitudes.

And then we started seeing this racialization kind of trickle into the rest of the electorate.

-This is Little Hussein.

[ Laughs ] -40 years before the events of January 6th, a far-right conservative movement was on the rise.

-Since the 1980s, Newt Gingrich starts to push for a much more radical vision of partisanship, where you can do absolutely anything that's necessary to win.

Gingrich even releases a memo back in 1990, where he sends this to Republican candidates.

It's all about language.

They had to be willing to go on television and say anything, didn't have to be true -- language that, today, sounds kind of normal.

He was saying, "Say these things.

Go for the gut."

-We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English, so people learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto.

-I have two words that sit above my desk as a reporter -- "Assume nothing."

There is always an assumption that white nationalism and white supremacism would remain on the fringes of American life.

But it did not.

We should have been tracking it more, and that includes both at the federal level and on the reporting level.

-The moment that sticks out to me is the 2009 Department of Homeland Security report that wanted to simply articulate that because there were a large number of returning veterans coming back from the global War on Terror, there was a likelihood that some of them would join some of these white-power and militant-right groups.

-I was very concerned about the fact that we labelled our returning veterans as possible recruiting persons for terrorism in this country in this report that I have right here with me.

-It caused a stir because there was some language in it that indicated that our military and military veterans were particularly susceptible to recruitment into right-wing extremist organizations, and the veterans community in particular took great issue with that.

Politics being politics, we had to withdraw the report, redo it, and I actually had to apologize for that.

I also met with the leadership of the American Legion.

I have apologized for that report.

And so, I do not want to see a replication of that.

-Part of what Obama wanted to do was policy.

-The plan I am announcing tonight will slow the growth of healthcare costs for our families, our businesses, and our government.

-And so, when he's pushing his healthcare bill, and in August of 2009, members do these town halls, and it's either on the border of a violent response from some constituents -- and that becomes a way for the Tea Party to really mobilize.

And by 2010, this is a full-blown renaissance of conservatism.

-Two-year waits to get hip surgery in Canada.

Is that what we want in this country?

-No!

-For Obama, it wasn't disconnected to deal with healthcare from dealing with racial issues, because by providing more healthcare coverage, that is actually dealing with some of the racial divisions in this country and injustices.

-We love Obamacare.

-Polling revealed a significant number of white people who would tell you the most disadvantaged group of people in the United States is white people.

Now, there is no data, there's no set of social-science knowledge, that confirms that suspicion.

That was an emotional reality -- that people had decided that the mere vision of this Black person, operating in the context of the presidential seal of the United States, meant that something about their status as white people had been devalued.

-The story was always incomplete in terms of the coverage of the Tea Party and extremist movements at the time.

Looking back, more attention to race was necessary then, and it's necessary now.

A decade later, there is a coherence to everything that was happening -- that this was an outsider, the first Black president, grappling with a Congress and a Republican party that were trying to block his agenda but, at a deeper level, dealing with a country that was undergoing a racial reckoning.

-While every president fights for their political agenda and seeks solutions to crises, it is the crises that are unforeseeable and unwelcome challenges.

And for Obama, a series of violent incidents brought race squarely into the political frame.

-When Trayvon Martin is killed in Florida by George Zimmerman, that's when you start to see Obama almost talk more explicitly about the way race worked in the country.

At that moment, he's connecting himself to what will be a burgeoning civil-rights movement with Black Lives Matter, but he's doing that right at the start.

-You know, if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon.

And all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and that we're gonna get to the bottom of exactly what happened.

-Even the comparatively innocuous statement that his son would look like Trayvon was thought of as almost treasonous by people on the right who weren't prepared to hear anything from him as it related to race.

-Who are we?!

-Mike Brown!

-Who are we?

-Mike Brown!

-Mike who?

-Mike Brown!

-Mike who?!

-Mike Brown!

-2014 is another key year.

-You need to disperse immediately!

-In Ferguson, you have Michael Brown, who is killed by the police.

-Eric Holder, who was the attorney general at the time, flew down to Ferguson, and the investigation revealed a pattern and practice of discriminatory behavior.

-In my conversations with dozens of people in Ferguson yesterday, it was clear that this shooting incident has brought to the surface underlying tensions that have existed for many years.

There is a history to these tensions, and that history simmers in more communities than just Ferguson.

-The racist!

-Police!

-In response to the drumbeat of killings and civic fury, President Obama began to address racism more directly.

-And then, 2015 becomes a really big year.

You have several incidents, Freddie Gray is killed in Baltimore.

And Obama makes a statement.

-I can tell you that justice needs to be served.

-What are you gonna do?!

You ain't gonna do -- -When we think about the intersection of the white power movement and Black Lives Matter, certainly, seeing Black people in the streets demanding their rights is disconcerting to some of these white-power groups.

-Fringe white-power groups had been growing more emboldened for a quarter of a century before the events of January 6, 2021.

-White power!

White power!

-The threat environment against the United States constantly changes.

-Then you have organized white nationalism that starts to expand in the '90s.

Bill Clinton as president deals with that with the Oklahoma City bombing, which is conducted by individuals connected to those groups.

-Go!

-The Oklahoma City bombing represents the largest deliberate mass casualty event on American soil between Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

Most people don't really know that the Oklahoma City bombing was the work of a movement, that it represented an ideological strike, and that that movement is still with us.

Timothy McVeigh was a Gulf War veteran who became disaffected when he didn't qualify for Special Forces, and he had sort of deepening white-power ideology over his lifetime.

In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, white-power activity increased.

-White power!

-That violent action was a call to arms for people who came into this movement.

They found additional places to organize online, and then they found their way to a reemergence.

-McVeigh wanted to start a race war -- not a civil war based on region but one based on race.

Once a broad base of white people feels the threat urgently, they will rise up and say, "This is our country, and we're taking it back.

We're taking it back from the people of color and the Jews and the immigrants."

-There were millions of people that came out for the inauguration, and then they said, "Brother, you have it."

And it was the worst mistake people made.

We have to remember, whether it's Obama or anybody, the public has to stay engaged.

We cannot ever leave this democracy to itself, because there are always forces waiting in the wings who want to take it over for their own reasons.

-On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof killed nine Black people in the basement of Emanuel AME Church, Charleston, South Carolina.

In the course of this murder spree, he shoots a young man by the name of Tywanza Sanders.

Mr. Sanders, who had not yet succumbed to his injuries, asked the logical question, "Why are you doing this?"

He said, "You don't have to do this.

We mean you no harm."

And Dylann Roof responded, "You all are raping our women and taking over the world."

Shot Mr. Sanders several more times.

He died.

-Obama is really disheartened, becoming more openly frustrated with the limits of what he could do about this.

-For too long, we've been blind to the way past injustices continue to shape the present.

Maybe we now realize the way racial bias can infect us, even when we don't realize it.

-He's almost embracing at least the concerns of Black Lives Matter and the message they were sending, although many thought he fell short, then, on trying to do enough, in terms of policy.

-♪ Amazing grace ♪ [ Cheers and applause ] ♪ How sweet the sound ♪ -Dylann Roof killed those people in an attempt to wake white people up, to say that they needed to reassert their dominance in American society.

That was June 17th.

June 16, 2015, Donald Trump took a ride down the escalator in Trump Tower and announced his presidential candidacy.

And citing as the rationale the presence of Mexican rapists in the United States posing a threat to white women in America.

So we saw the same sort of incendiary racial rhetoric being used twice in a roughly 24-hour period.

They were responding to the same zeitgeist, to the same idea that white people were somehow or another under siege, and that they needed a champion who was going to speak on their behalf.

[ Cheers and applause ] -By the end of President Obama's second term, Donald Trump was becoming that champion, and the American experiment in democracy was facing another test.

-There is the sense in which President Trump did advance Democratic goals.

And he certainly increased participation in our democracy, both by inspiring a lot of passion for him and also by turning out the vote of his opponents, who felt a degree of engagement that we don't usually see in American politics.

But through all of this time, there was also this dark side of his view of democracy.

So he was always talking about representing the people and being on the side of the people, and that can sound very democratic, but what he means by it is that, if you're not with him, you're not really part of the people.

-That is the anomaly.

That -- That is the -- That is the dark side of democracy, is that if you give -- if people have the right to vote, they may vote for somebody who undermines democracy.

They may do it.

That has always been the threat -- unspoken largely -- but it's always been possible.

-Trump!

-Donald Trump represented a lot of things to a lot of people.

What was so clear is that Donald Trump was able to put together a new coalition of voters who voted for Republicans.

And a lot of those voters included people who had been voting for Democrats, including who had voted for Barack Obama, in just the last presidential cycle.

And so the reasons people supported Donald Trump are vast and wide and varied.

But the people who voted for Donald Trump, particularly in 2016 and in 2020, I'm willing to say they're just as much patriots and care as much about this country as people who didn't vote for Donald Trump.

It's impossible to say that 74 million people who voted for Donald Trump don't care about America and aren't patriots.

[ The O'Jays' "For the Love of Money" plays ] -♪ Money, money, money ♪ -I first met Donald Trump in 2011 at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

-I'm also well-acquainted with winning, and that's what this country needs now -- winning.

-He had an emotional connection to that right-wing audience.

-This last eight years hasn't been much of a -- of a hallmark for me, but I like what Mr. Trump said.

I believe in a strong America.

-Yeah, I think he's honest.

You know, he's not a politician.

-Straightforward.

-People would say to me, "Why are you covering Donald Trump?

He's a reality TV show star.

He's a clown."

-You're fired.

-And I would say to them, "Have you been to a Trump event?

This might be the future of the GOP.

How can you not cover it?"

♪♪ -U.S.A.!

U.S.A.!

U.S.A.!

-The social and economic issues that basically propelled President Trump into office in 2016 go back to the '70s and '80s as we moved away from mass manufacturing.

People lost their small businesses.

People lost their homes.

No one seemed to care.

-Sadly... the American Dream is dead.

-We're talking about people in desperate psychological straits, who are looking at their kids and knowing that they can't help them, they can't guide them, that they're going to be economically worse off than their parents and their grandparents.

That's a desperate existential situation.

-He certainly lets a segment of the American population that had felt unrepresented, feel represented, feel that its voice was being listened to and that it had a say in how we were governed.

-I'm just angry that the Republicans, you know, it's like, they're just milquetoast.

-What Trump was promising was that feeling of victory -- "Yeah, you feel like a loser, but I'm going to make you a winner again."

His rallies were just sort of love fests.

-He'll stop illegal immigration by building a wall on our southern border that Mexico will pay for.

-Build that wall!

Build that wall!

-He understood why people were so angry, and he encouraged their anger.

He helped them identify scapegoats.

Those scapegoats were immigrants who were coming in and taking their jobs.

-President Trump really played to agitating the extreme part of his base, and he was very good at it.

-Donald Trump appealed to conservative voters on economic issues, on immigration, on trade and foreign policy -- the stuff of conventional electoral politics.

-He's right about everything -- about fake news, he's right about protecting our borders, he's right about our country.

-These ideas resonated with many.

But years before, he had also chosen to exploit a very different theme.

-Why doesn't he show his birth certificate?

Why has he spent over $2 million in legal fees to keep this quiet?

-He saw in the Republican base an appetite for racially charged conservatism.

And as a marketing person, he seized on that and said, "That's now my political brand."

-I mean, I think it's fair to say that he would not have become president had he not been the leading exponent of this totally baseless allegation.

He was the only leading political figure who was willing to say it.

So for a lot of people, this not only meant, "He's our leader, he speaks for us," but also, "He's brave."

-He has shown himself to be tough.

-Donald Trump is able to reconcile with those with whom he had had some differences.

-One by one, all the members of the Republican Party started caving.

At first, it was Newt Gingrich, or Mike Huckabee came on board.

But then, everyone who was resistant, one by one, came on board.

-Donald Trump averaged 41% approval rating throughout the course of his presidency, which is the lowest average approval rating of any president since Gallup started polling presidents.

What the real question, I think, is, "Why was President Trump so enormously popular with the base of the Republican Party and with the Republican Party despite the fact that he was so unpopular nationally and amongst the broadest sweep of Americans?"

And that's, I think, the question that goes to the why, or helps -- helps add color to the increasing hyper-partisanship that we've seen over these last decades.

What Donald Trump was able to achieve, in terms of capturing and solidifying political control within the Republican Party, is really quite unusual.

-Conservatives have always wondered whether political engagement is an unalloyed good.

Republican conservatives -- small-R republicans, those of us who believe in the American republic -- certainly believe it's important to have a strong and robust civic culture.

But we've also always been alive to the possibility that there could be a political fever or political fevers.

And I think that social media has been better for political fever than it has been for robust and healthy political engagement.

-If you look at Trump's campaign, it was really unusual in its political rhetoric.

-So, crooked Hillary -- Wait.

Crooked -- Yeah, you should lock her up, I'll tell you.

-Twitter allowed him to communicate with voters -- the people who loved him, the people who hated him -- without a single filter.

-He could capture everyone's attention with a few words.

He didn't have to follow any rules.

He loved it.

-Did Hillary Clinton give 20% of the United States supply of uranium to Russia for donations to the Clinton Foundation?

-He could say whatever comment it was for the day, and it would shape the news cycle.

And, boy, could he shape the news cycle unlike almost any other president we've seen.

-I think all politicians lie.

That said, not all politicians lie the way Trump did -- voluminously, prodigiously, prolifically, with self-interest, and then with kind of weirdly things that don't appear to conform to any reason or rationale.

-And it took a right turn.

[ Cheers and applause ] -In 2016, Donald Trump won 46% of the popular vote -- the same share as John McCain eight years earlier.

Despite losing the popular vote, it was enough to win the presidency.

His election ushered in an era of "alternative facts," starting with assertions about the size of the inauguration crowds.

-We had a massive field of people.

You saw that.

Packed.

It went all the way back to the Washington Monument.

-Despite winning, Trump revived rumors and allegations of historic voting malpractice.

-He says, after 2016, that there are millions of people who voted illegally, particularly in Democratic states like California -- and, even in victory, is attempting to say that the system is rife with fraud.

-In many places, like California, the same person votes many times.

You probably heard about that.

They always like to say, "Oh, that's a conspiracy theory."

Not a conspiracy theory, folks.

Millions and millions of people.

-Dead people generally vote for Democrats rather than Republicans.

-There are always allegations.

Sometimes, on a modest scale, they're proven.

But it's never been shown that a national election was decided by widespread voter fraud or even significant voter fraud.

There is corruption on the margins of some elections but not enough to cause the kind of concern and alarm that would overturn an election.

And all the charges that were made about the fraud last year have been subjected to inquiry and investigation, and they haven't been proven.

-I don't actually believe that voter fraud is rampant.

We had this election in 2020, in unprecedented conditions, in the middle of a pandemic, with all kinds of changes being made to voting systems because of the pandemic.

And yet we have extremely high voter turnout and we have almost no voter fraud that anybody has verified.

The system of casting and counting votes actually performed quite well in 2020.

And that's truth that neither party has quite been willing to say -- the Republicans, because they've been so wedded to this narrative of voter fraud, especially after President Trump embraced it as an excuse for his defeat, and because Democrats are so concerned about what they see as the flaws of the system that keep it from being democratic.

But the system did work well.

There can be improvements.

-False claims that voting could be rigged, and an election stolen, became far more consequential when Trump lost narrowly to Joe Biden.

It took several days for the election result to be announced, on November 7, 2020, eight weeks before the climactic "Stop the Steal" onslaught on January 6, 2021.

-The presumption within this was that every single Republican voter was valid -- Democratic voters were highly suspect.

-What that implies is that if you don't count urban areas -- right?

-- where most of our sort of diverse electorate is, then it's a more legitimate election.

-There was a willingness to use extreme partisanship to win.

The Trump administration had people like Stephen Bannon early in the administration who were very eager to associate themselves with extremist groups and willing to cause chaos as a method of winning.

-The administration calling out to these activists over and over and over again.

This was a loud and organized contingent that could be mobilized for the purposes of the Trump administration.

-Sieg!

-Heil!

-Sieg!

-Heil!

-This is a first step towards something that Trump alluded to earlier in the campaign, which is taking America back.

-In 2017, when Donald Trump witnessed the bedlam and chaos in Charlottesville... [ Woman screaming ] -...that was really, I think, a harbinger of the future.

[ Engine revving ] -You had some very bad people in that group.

But you also had people that were very fine people -- on both sides.

-To even cross that Rubicon and say, you know, "There's probably fine people in there" -- that's not a traditional way of talking about Nazis in American society.

-He emboldened people as a result of it, and that's what communication from the highest office in the land tends to do.

When your values are endorsed on that level, you really don't have any reason to suspect that there will be consequences for your actions.

-Jews will not replace us!

You will not replace us!

-What do you want to call them?

Give me a name, give me a name.

-White supremacists and -- -Go ahead.

Who would you like me to condemn?

-White supremacists.

-The Proud Boys.

-Proud Boys -- stand back and stand by.

But I'll tell you what... -It's possible that he just said a bunch of words in a weird order, and that it wasn't some premeditated secret dog whistle.

But the Proud Boys and other paramilitary groups clearly heard this as an endorsement of their views.

All the Nazi blogs were lighting up with excitement.

-We now know that if you just followed Donald Trump, Melania Trump, a local news source, that eventually the Facebook feed would have recommended far-right groups.

From an algorithmic perspective, you are only seeing other people that have those same biases circulating the same messages around you.

So it becomes the truth.

-These platforms are actively amplifying and sorting reality so that what people see and what people experience is the most twitchy, the most brittle, the most activating, the most enraging.

-Social-media companies are private companies, which means that their primary job on Earth is to increase shareholder value.

And their business model is built on how many people they can show advertising content.

-In order to do that, you have to go to fear, racial grievance, xenophobia, disgust, shock.

There were internal Facebook researchers saying, "If we don't change our settings, we are going to be pouring gasoline on these fires."

The evidence shows they were unwilling to do what it took to stop it.

[ Pounding on windows ] -Tonight, President Trump's latest claim -- that Dominion Voting Systems deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide.

-Attorney General William Barr publicly broke from the President on Tuesday, saying there has been no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.

-Naysayers, whether it was Hope Hicks or Attorney General Bill Barr, were cast aside.

-We will never give up, we will never concede.

It doesn't happen.

You don't concede when there's theft involved.

-Giuliani and Trump have failed in the courts.

They fail in November.

They fail in December.

But they had one last option in their eyes -- somehow force the Vice President to say, "I can't certify this election."

December 30th, Bannon tells Trump, "Get back to Washington.

January 6 needs to be a reckoning.

That's the moment where you take the presidency back.

That's the moment when you kill the Biden presidency in the crib."

The Constitution is clear.

The vice president's role is to count the votes -- period.

But Trump, conservative lawyer John Eastman, and others said, "Actually, Pence has power to throw out electors, to throw out millions of votes of people who voted in the election and say, 'We're not going to count those votes.

We're going to let the House of Representatives decide instead.'

That means Trump could win."

This was a plan for a coup.

And it was memorialized in a document authored by John Eastman.

Two pages, six steps.

It was a Hail Mary pass, and Trump did everything he could to score.

-Our country has had enough.

We will not take it any more.

We will stop the steal.

-Take the House!

-When you rile people up, make them desperate, tell them that the election has been stolen from them, it's kind of inevitable, in retrospect, that a lot of that frustration will boil over.

-But I do think it's fair to say there are plenty of people who continue to believe that the election was stolen, which is not true, and continue to believe what Donald Trump is saying, which is that the election is stolen, which is not true.

And will continue to support and listen to calls for violence and violent action if Donald Trump tells them that that's what they should do.

And that's quite dangerous.

-And this was their one moment of political enfranchisement.

And it felt great to them.

-U.S.A.!

U.S.A.!

-We should really spend a moment thinking about how understandable the desire to re-create that moment is.

-Let me be very clear -- the scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect a true America, do not represent who we are.

-Madam Speaker, let me be clear -- last week's violent attack on the Capitol was un-democratic, un-American, and criminal.

-Right on cue, Joe Biden and a number of other politicians gave speeches, essentially trying to write this moment out of the dominant narrative of American history, even as it was happening.

I think that's, at best, wishful thinking.

♪♪ -The response from Kevin McCarthy that day was -- and in the immediacy of the January 6th event -- was exactly what you would think it would be.

It was a man who was rattled and who was correct in being very clear-eyed about the fact that the House of Representatives had been attacked in a way that was unacceptable, illegal, dangerous, and had to be stopped.

His response several weeks later, when he went down to Mar-a-Lago and apparently made up with President Trump, was disappointing to many, many Republicans.

-The first thing that stands out to me is how embarrassed and disgusted I am that the United States Capitol could be taken over by domestic terrorists while we're in session, transferring power from one president to the other.

-Lindsey Graham was also quite clear-eyed in the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol.

In fact, he went to the Senate chambers and famously said he was finished with supporting Donald Trump and he wouldn't support him again, that that was the last straw.

[ Chuckles ] Um, Lindsey Graham has a lot of last straws.

It seems that he's forgiven the President or has found some willingness to, uh -- His stand has softened since then.

-When you get to a situation where people feel that they have to commit violence against someone else in their society, somebody who might have been their friend or relative or somebody who they might have at one point respected, then you are in a really very dangerous place.

-January 6th is now a fact of our history.

If it was possible to have a failed coup on January 6th, it is also possible to have a successful coup.

It sounds very simple, but it's a huge change.

-Democracy, if it is anything at all, it is losers' consent.

People who lose leave, and they try again next time.

Trump still hasn't really conceded the 2020 election.

-What the 2020 election revealed was that the rules that govern this are very loose and very -- and rely on norms of self-restraint and forbearance.

Once you discover how to steal an election, it's hard to unlearn that lesson.

And so that's why I think, looking forward, this is one of the greatest risks facing our democracy.

-Trump and his allies are not going to be caught flat-footed again.

Republicans are already moving fast in so many states to change election laws, actively encouraging people to run for election positions to hold power over the elections.

-We have a lethal breakdown of politics.

Immediately following the violent coup attempt, there were 120 Republicans in the House who voted not to certify the election.

-I rise up, both for myself and 60 of my colleagues, to object to the counting of the electoral ballots from Arizona.

-It's easy to imagine that what we think of as democracy ends with that.

It ends with a vote in Congress.

And... the will of the people or -- which is a phrase that we use so lightly -- becomes just a -- you know, a memory.

-On July 1, 2021, the U.S. House of Representatives voted, largely along party lines, to establish a select committee to investigate the January 6th attack.

-The resolution is adopted.

-Ten House Republicans voted to impeach President Trump for incitement of insurrection.

Representative Adam Kinzinger is one of them.

Along with Representative Liz Cheney, Kinzinger is also one of two Republicans on the House select committee investigating January 6th.

Congressman Kinzinger, this is the desk that you sat behind on January 6th.

Take me back to that day.

-So imagine, you know -- I had been on the floor for kind of the start of the proceedings, came back and decided I'd go back down when I had to speak or we were voting.

And obviously in that transit back to my office is when everything kind of started hitting the fan.

And I had predicted this, you know, days prior, so it wasn't a surprise to me.

[ Indistinct shouting ] -You sat here for six hours... -Yeah.

-...with a gun on the desk.

-Mm-hmm.

-Why did you bring it that day?

-So, that's an interesting question, because I've never -- You know, we're allowed to carry here, except for on the House floor, and I have my concealed carry for D.C.

But I never brought it to work, ever, because we have so many police officers and stuff.

But I was getting death threats.

I remember a specific tweet that was just a noose hanging as a response to one of mine.

People saying, 'We're gonna come get you."

So I brought it in here, not really expecting the Capitol -- I wasn't that clairvoyant to think they would breach the Capitol, but I thought for sure there would be massive violence in the area and I thought they may target me.

-You felt personally targeted?

-Oh, I was personally targeted.

When I'm one of only a handful of people that are Republicans, you know, committing the cardinal sin of congratulating the president-elect and then saying that the election wasn't stolen, you know, all that focus and anger and hate comes to people like me.

[ Indistinct shouting ] -You had told your staff not to come in.

-Yeah, staff didn't come in.

I asked my wife to stay at the apartment.

You're really under the thought that maybe, you know, they're going to breach the door, because when you find out the whole Capitol complex is breached, there's nothing you can do at that point.

-Heave, ho!

Heave, ho!

-You know, you see a whole line, basically, of Capitol police officers that have been breached.

And all of a sudden, you realize the whole thing is over.

[ Indistinct shouting ] You see all the rioters come in and really are kind of standing outside of the House floor at that point.

And that's when I realized this whole place is breached.

-I had been targeted on Twitter, people saying, "We're gonna come get you.

We're gonna find out where you are."

And so the only thing that can go through your head is they're gonna know where my office is and I may have to defend myself.

-From your office here, this window looks out... -Yeah.

-...on part of the Mall.

What could you see?

-I could see people all through there.

I opened this window, and when you open it, you can hear nothing but screams, shouts.

[ Indistinct shouting, faint explosion ] And the thing that stood out the most is, like, explosions.

And it was the non-lethal munition that was being used.

This has only happened to me probably twice in my whole life, but I had a real sense.

Like, there's just a sense of darkness over the place, like, a sense of evil that descended over the place.

And I just remember looking out the window and like -- "This is one of the worst things I've ever been part of."

-As a veteran with your training in the Iraq and Afghan wars, did any of your training click in?

-So, in flying, we say, "Maintain aircraft control, analyze the situation, take appropriate action, and land as soon as conditions permit," when something bad happens to the airplane, so you don't panic and freak out.

And I think that comes into play, where you stop and you're like, "Okay.

This is happening."

And that's when I went through the logical steps of -- It's not illogical to think when the Capitol had just been breached, there's tens of thousands of people, that they aren't going to get into the hallways and come to the office buildings and target the people that they frankly know are not on their side, and I was one of those.

You know, I fully expected that at some point there would be pounding on the door like we ended up seeing.

That's a frightening feeling.

[ Indistinct conversations ] So, I compare -- Obviously, January 6th and 9/11 aren't comparable, but they are in terms of how they're going to probably live in my memory -- days that are very significant.

And that chaos of September 11th, when you don't know what's next and all the rumors coming out, you have that same feeling here, which is they breached the Capitol.

Nothing is off limits.

And so I'd say for a good 45 minutes of that day, I was under a real assumption that I would have to... -Defend yourself right here.

-Yeah, I'd have to defend myself.

--Whose house?!

-Our house!

-Whose house?!

-Our house!

-You're ready to sense anything like that happening.

In fact, my good friend Jaime Herrera Beutler, her office is literally right above mine.

-Right upstairs.

-Yeah.

We were all making sure you can move in the hallways, because the last thing you want to do is go out in the hallways and -- -And then you're -- And then you're sitting ducks.

Speaking of Jaime... -Yeah.

Yeah!

-Here you are giving her a high five.

What were you high-fiving?

-So, that was actually on the walk to vote for impeachment.

I saw her as I got off the train there, and there was a photographer that got that moment, and it was just -- We knew that we were doing something that was really difficult but something that we were going to be proud of looking back.

-The ayes are 232.

The nays are 197.

The resolution is adopted without objection.

The motion to reconsider is laid upon the table.

-You were, of course, 2 of the 10 Republicans... -Yeah.

-...who voted for impeachment.

-Yeah, and you can think about the conversations that lead up to that point and how difficult of a decision that is.

For me, it was a really easy decision, quite honestly.

But for a lot of people, you know, they were -- they were wrecked over it.

And it was a sense of relief, like, "Let's go do this.

Let's be courageous."

-How often, now that you walk the halls of Congress, do you think back to January 6th?

-It does happen a lot.

It's not like in a -- in a sense of fear.

It's not in a s-- I think, for me, when I do think back to January 6th, it's a lot of disappointment.

I think a lot about what has happened to the institution here.

[ Applause ] -Madam Speaker, members of Congress, the Senate and House of Representatives are meeting in joint session to verify the certificates and count the votes of the electors of the several states for President and Vice President of the United States.

-I think a lot about the trajectory we're on with democracy and how this is not sustainable.

This is not survivable.

And so to that context, January 6th comes up a lot.

-Like most Americans, I'm frustrated that six months after a deadly insurrection breached the United States Capitol for several hours on live television, we still don't know exactly what happened.

Why?

Because many in my party have treated this as just another partisan fight.

I'm a Republican.

I'm a conservative.

But in order to heal from the damage caused that day, we need to call out the facts.

Of course, being on the January 6th Committee and seeing the denialism in so many people, leaders.

-In the weeks following the attacks, there were Democrats who accused House Republicans of leading groups on reconnaissance missions throughout the Capitol.

And you and I spoke back in April, and you were emphatic that this is something that had to be looked into.

What have you learned?

-There's still more to come on that.

We're going through a process right now, and there's going to be areas that we maybe either haven't explored or haven't talked about.

We will.

-From what you know now, based on any of your colleagues who were involved in that day, do you think it's a possibility?

-I certainly think it's a possibility.

I certainly believe -- and, again, this is not based on anything I know through the committee yet -- but I certainly believe members of Congress knew what was going to happen.

Some members knew.

I certainly believe some members instigated this.

And when you have tweets in the morning like, "Today is 1776," as Lauren Boebert did, for instance, I don't know how else to see that.

Because 1776 is a great American day where we threw off oppression.

If you're tweeting, "Today is the day where we great Americans are going to violently throw off oppression," I don't know how that can be metaphorical or mean anything different than a revolutionary action.

-And we fight.

We fight like hell.

And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.

My fellow Americans, for our movement, for our children, and for our beloved country -- and I say this despite all that's happened -- the best is yet to come.

[ Cheers and applause ] -You know, somebody that's following Donald Trump, that believes the election was stolen on January 6th, okay, they're wrong.

You're responsible for your own decisions.

But to an extent, the only people they trust are saying the same thing, so I get it a little bit.

When leaders know better and they don't say it, that's a huge -- that actually cuts me right to the heart because it's like, "Why are you here?"

Like, what's the reason to even be in a leadership position if you're unwilling to tell the people that need you to tell them the truth, the truth?

They may not like it.

Your doctor doesn't want to come in and -- and tell you good news just because you don't want to hear the bad news, but it's his or her job to do that.

-While the commission's investigation is ongoing, some groups are organizing to ensure that what happened on January 6th never happens again.

Some propose practical political solutions.

-Get active.

Voter registration.

Participate.

Vote.

There's only one way, and it's political engagement.

You really have to work at it.

You can't read just the paper that supports your position.

You have to really work at trying to understand what's happening.

-Others are bringing divided Americans together.

-We have a lot of work to do, and when I say "we," I mean everybody because this begins around our kitchen tables talking to our family members.

It begins having some uncomfortable conversations with people with whom you disagree, but you do not have to be disagreeable.

-And in classrooms, the foundation of civics education is being reinforced, turning to more innovative ways to engage with communities... and also drawing on the techniques of grassroots organizations formed decades before.

-♪ We won't, we won't ever let go ♪ ♪ Of that hard-won freedom, freedom to vote ♪ -♪ We the people ♪ -After a year of political turmoil, the question of voting rights has again become a frontline issue for Americans.

In October, protesters demanded federal action for what they see as eroding freedoms.

-All across the nation, states are making it harder for veterans with disabilities to receive an absentee ballot.

-The Freedom to Vote Act will mean that all those dark-money groups and pass-through corporations will have to tell us where the money is coming from so that we can fight back.

-You have come to stand up!

-Helen Butler's home state of Georgia made significant changes to its election laws following a politically charged vote audit and the Secretary of State's unwillingness to illegitimately certify the results for Donald Trump.

-Our legislature is going to draw unfair maps that will let one party have more political influence than the other and not necessarily listen to the will of the people.

We won't have Medicaid expansion.

We won't have affordable education for our students, college students.

We won't be able to have representation that looks like us and will care about our issues.

-Voting rights is not just some other issue alongside other issues.

It gets to the heart of who we are in the first place -- a democracy!

-Two new bills proposed by Democrats in Congress would set national standards for voter ID requirements, restrict partisan gerrymandering, expand early and absentee voting, and bring back federal oversight of discrimination in state laws in the Voting Rights Act.

But Republicans say that the Democrats are over-reaching.

-Republicans believe -- and I think they're right -- that states should be allowed to require photo identification for voters and that a lot of the other features of this legislation that the Democrats are pushing, like taxpayer funding for campaigns, really are not good ideas and shouldn't be packaged together with more basic voting reforms.

-I don't quite understand how you call it democracy when you can't even bring a bill to the floor to be discussed!

-Yes!

-The filibuster has got to go!

[ Cheers and applause ] -A century-old Senate rule called the filibuster is allowing Republicans to keep the bills from a simple majority vote, which would increase the chances that these bills pass.

Democrats remain split on whether to take the historic but controversial step of reforming or eliminating the filibuster.

The stakes are high.

-What I'm particularly worried about now is the possibility of a stolen election in 2024.

We're now in a situation where polarization is so high that Republicans vote against any kind of reform to our voting system to make it easier for people to vote.

And it's just -- it's just frankly shocking to me.

-People are raising these basic questions about whose interests our system serves and whether it needs to be radically changed.

But I think that any reforms that we pursue should be coupled with a strong public message that we should have confidence in the system.

It's really come through for us, even under adversity.

-Across the country in the wake of January 6th, there are signs of hope and some possible paths forward for a nation still looking to preserve its democracy.

[ Congregation singing ] ♪♪ -Our congregation has people from all across the spectrum, from the most conservative of fundamentalists to the most progressive, socially, theologically, as well as politically.

-Reverend Shawn Blackwelder and his North Carolina congregation are living the pressures of America's political climate.

-One of the things that our church did very well for years was manage to establish and maintain a sense of unity in spite of any ideological differences we might have had.

Over the last two years, that has proven to be a greater struggle for us.

-Republicans think Democrats are actually evil, and Democrats think Republicans are truly a threat to the United States and to democracy itself.

And that's a very different kind of politics, and it creates a, you know, sort of -- the lack of a place in the middle where people can actually have a conversation.

-Democracy thrives when we feel like we're in it together, despite our differences, when our shared American identity ranks higher than our competing tribal identities.

We're in real trouble.

And lose that identity, and the American experiment ultimately fails.

-Pearce Godwin worked on Capitol Hill for Republican politicians, but he became concerned about increasing partisan divisions.

In 2017, he created the Listen First Coalition, and today more than 350 local and national member organizations are hosting so-called "bridging" dialogue sessions, allowing Americans to just talk to each other.

-A lot of people are concerned about the reaction they'll get if they share their sincerely held beliefs.

And I think therefore it's incumbent on all of us to suspend judgment and extend grace as much as possible so that everyone is willing to come and share their perspective.

-People are meeting in barbershops, where Tru Pettigrew hosts discussions between law enforcement and the Black community, a mission he started following the killing of Michael Brown.

-I'm all the way over, as far left as you can get.

-People are meeting virtually, like these residents of Western Massachusetts who were brought together in a series of red-blue workshops by a national organization called Braver Angels.

-The other common ground we found is that both -- both sides recognize climate change.

It's just different methods of addressing it.

-So why engage with people with whom we disagree?

Anybody want to jump in?

Why?

-And people are sitting together in churches, including Reverend Blackwelder's congregation in North Carolina.

-If I know somebody thinks different than I do, I can say I want to understand, but really what's happening is I'm already like, "I don't understand!"

-They are using a do-it-yourself kit from a group called Resetting the Table.

They watch a film called "Purple" that raises questions for debate.

-I don't think the government has any voice in this.

Nobody owes me a living.

Nobody owes them a living.

Earn it!

-One scene raised the question of whether someone can succeed in life completely on their own.

-I think there's a lot of people that say, "Well, you were privileged, and I deserve more because I didn't have that privilege."

I don't agree with that.

-We might get better at listening or whatever if we could get more of the backstory of a person.

-I feel like the church has an obligation to provide a model for the community and for the world around us, that, of all people, we should be able to show people how to disagree and love.

So my hope is that it can also have a ripple effect on the discourse throughout our community.

-Nashua, New Hampshire, is an early stop for most presidential candidates.

John F. Kennedy launched his 1960 campaign here.

On the outskirts of town sits the Gate City Charter School, where middle-school students are showing that it's never too early to create better American citizens.

-How do you learn about who you are going to vote for, is what we're kind of thinking about, so, Lei?

-You could do some research on their background history and see if they've done something in the past that might not have been the smartest idea or if they've done something that has made a greater impact in a positive way.

-Yeah!

Great!

It's really important that they know about how our government works, how to become active in it, what are appropriate channels for, you know, trying to change things.

And hopefully that will -- I hope -- help avoid things like, you know, January 6th.

-The surveys on Americans' understanding of their democracy are grim.

56% of them know the three branches of government.

Only one in four could pass the national citizenship test.

So Miss Wessels has turned to an educational non-profit called iCivics.

-iCivics is the brainchild of Sandra Day O'Connor.

She stepped down from the court in 2006 and really felt quite compelled to do something to ensure that every generation knew how our systems of government worked and finally was convinced, by a child of one of her former clerks, that games were the way to reach students.

-iCivics is bringing free, non-partisan educational tools to 9 million American students a year.

There are hundreds of lesson plans for teachers to choose from and 14 games that put students at the center of the action, like "Cast Your Vote," which helps them explore candidates' platforms... -You could raise your hand if you wanted to say something and ask them a question about it.

Like, there were choices you got to pick.

Me and Kat chose health because we think that's very important, for you to have good doctors.

-...and brings them into the voting booth... -It feels like a holiday!

Like, you're voting for someone that's going to take care of the city or that takes care of you.

-...and "Do I Have a Right?"

About our Constitutional protections.

-While It's still a silly cartoon game, it does teach you a lot about how the justice and court systems work.

-Now a bipartisan alliance in Congress is supporting the Civics Secures Democracy Act to invest $5 billion in American civics and history education.

-This feels completely different now.

There is a great deal of momentum.

Civic education is the bedrock for a strong economy.

Civic education is a national imperative because it's so deeply related to national security issues.

There are serious consequences to our nation, and we need to change that right now.

-For Reverend Blackwelder, there is hope that despite the divisions, there can also be unity.

-One of the things that always makes me realize that there's hope is a hurricane.

Not necessarily the storm itself, but what comes after.

Because it doesn't fall down upon ideological lines.

Neighbors just help their neighbors.

They don't ask who they voted for.

-Thank you very much.

-It's that kind of heart, that kind of experience that gives me hope.

♪♪ ♪♪ -I think that our era allows us to bear witness to incredible things.

♪♪ But what it also has done is allow us to be part of moments of great fear and of great terror.

[ Indistinct shouting ] [ Police radio chatter ] -After centuries of progress and backlash, of generations demanding that they be heard, what will it take to preserve democracy, to keep it alive for the future?

♪♪ -I have a kind of practical optimism that's informed by history, that people of goodwill, people who are acting in good faith... -Congratulations, Senator.

[ Applause ] -...and concerned with democracy in this country enduring have a chance.

Not saying that, you know, that's the kind of optimism that says we will win.

I have a kind of practical optimism that says we could win if we do the right things and if we work hard enough at it.

-For America to progress, its people need to participate.

Participate in its elections, its voting, its democracy, but also participate in its training, education, human capital, and also in their -- in its workforce and economic development.

-There are a lot of things we need to do to preserve our democracy.

And there are also many stresses that we're undergoing in our democracy, from the way the Internet and communications communicate ideas to voters, to the way we vote, to how easy we make it to vote, to how secure we make our voting, to the processes that we're going to deploy next time we have an opportunity to vote widely.

-You have to love... the idea of democracy... to make it work.

I love the idea of all of us participating, Black, white, male, female, old, young.

All of us are doing something extraordinary in the world.

We're governing ourselves, with a principle of fairness at the center of our democracy.

[ Crowd cheering ] ♪♪ But if we don't love it enough to make sacrifices, if we don't love it enough to say "stop" to people who are abusing it, the result is apathy, and the result of apathy is -- is death, a kind of soul death.

-Sir, are you registered to vote?

-Nope.

-Put your signature here, phone number underneath, -The act of voting is not fundamentally a practical decision about who is going to win, particularly for the presidency, because the fact is your vote is vanishingly unlikely to affect the overall outcome.

It's an expressive act, and what it's expressing is a kind of public spiritedness, a commitment to our country and our form of government and the principles that underlie it.

-We have to be that more perfect nation.

Giving up on this democracy is not an option.

Relenting and releasing and saying that -- that "one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" is far-fetched... is not something we can afford to do.

And so in our time, we're going to declare that the battle for the soul of this democracy begins afresh.

♪♪ [ Indistinct conversations ] ♪♪ -But it's we the people who decide the election!

♪♪ -Thank you!

God bless... [ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪