Chautauqua Institution and the Carter Center have more in common than one might think, Paige Alexander said; after all, “Chautauqua Institution was founded for Sunday School teachers, and the Carter Center was founded by Sunday School teachers.”
Alexander, chief executive officer of the Carter Center, spoke at 10:45 a.m. Thursday in the Amphitheater for the Chautauqua Lecture Series’ Week Six theme “The Global Rise of Authoritarianism.” Alexander outlined Chautauqua’s influence on former President Jimmy Carter’s teacher, Julia Coleman; her own experience abroad with the U.S. Agency for International Development; her reaction to election denial after the 2020 U.S. presidential election; and how she continues to find inspiration to keep fighting for democracy.
While Alexander said she does not view herself as an academic, her lifetime of experience working internationally, from post-conflict reconstruction in the Balkans to serving in the Middle East and North Africa during the Arab Spring, and in the United States with the Carter Center working to create increased confidence in election results in Fulton County, speak of her expertise.
Beginning with the history of the Carter Center, Alexander couldn’t neglect one of Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter’s chief influences: their high school teacher and Plains High School superintendent Miss Julia Coleman. Miss Julia would visit Chautauqua Institution all the way from Plains, Georgia in the early to mid-1900s and even brought mini-Chautauqua programs to Plains, strongly believing in democracy, justice, citizenship and the rule of law.
“Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, steeped in the spirit of Chautauqua, and — as they used to say — after an involuntary retirement from the White House, they decided to establish what they felt was a mini Camp David, so they established the Carter Center,” Alexander said.
The Carters created it as a place dedicated “to follow basic human rights and be a place where you could resolve conflict without having the U.S. government moniker on it,” Alexander said.
Alexander said she found it quite surreal to be talking about the rise of authoritarianism, as Miss Julia discussed that same issue five decades ago in Plains, Georgia. It Can’t Happen Here, a dystopian political novel by Sinclair Lewis, informed the conversations they had in Miss Julia’s classroom — and now, the Carter Center believes that, yes, authoritarianism can happen in the United States.
“For President Carter, justice and democracy weren’t just ideals. They were daily acts of courage and daily acts of faith,” Alexander said. “However daunting some of it seemed, he never allowed himself to get lost in despair because he knew that his faith was stronger than his doubt and his faith in the American people was actually even stronger. That’s a faith I think we all share.”
Through Alexander’s work at USAID in Czechoslovakia, before it split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia; the Balkans; the Middle East; and North Africa, she has seen governments transition from authoritarianism into democracy.
“I think it’s easy to forget exactly how rare democracy is. It is not the norm. It’s a relatively recent and fragile achievement,” Alexander said. “Of the thousands of societies that have existed throughout human history, authoritarianism and its more sinister cousins fascism, communism, totalitarianism, military dictatorship — those have actually been the standards.”
Because of the rarity of democracy, Alexander was astounded by the Freedom House index released in 2000 that said 120 democracies existed throughout the world.
“That, to me, was an amazing time,” she said. “It was the greatest percentage we had ever had in the world.”
Although Alexander prefers to tell stories rather than cite statistics, she believed some numbers tell stories in and of themselves. Currently, 72% of the world lives under a full-authoritarian rule or a hybrid rule. While Americans might say that that is just happening in other countries, Alexander waded in to see the American landscape, and the Democracy Index currently ranks the United States as a “flawed democracy.”
“It’s a little wonder that 80% of Americans report either being very or somewhat concerned about the state of our democracy, with half of fellow citizens worrying that we face the real danger of becoming a non-democratic, authoritarian country,” she said. “Just sit on that. Half of Americans believe this.”
When Alexander’s son had the opportunity to play soccer in Amsterdam, her family moved to the Netherlands, or as they called it “the Neverneverlands.” While there, she worked at an NGO and basked in the corporate social responsibility she saw.
But when she returned to the United States to begin her role as CEO of the Carter Center, she was jerked into a different reality. Landing in the United States on June 1, 2020, she traveled to her childhood home of Atlanta. While places were opening up in the Netherlands because of successful masking and social distancing campaigns, Georgia was a “viral soup.”
“My brother picked me up at the airport, and we drove down Peachtree Street. I saw the aftermath of the protests from that weekend for the murder of George Floyd,” she said. “I got to my parents house, and they were popping champagne because the prodigal daughter was finally home, and I could see on the TV what was happening, that Lafayette Square was being tear gassed for a photo op.”
Her parents’ home was filled with tears that night.
“My parents were crying tears of joy, and I was crying because I was bringing my son and my husband back to this country, and I didn’t know what to expect,” Alexander said.
Because of her time away from the United States, the political climate felt dystopian to her, and when she saw people lined up in five-hour long lines in Fulton County, Georgia for the presidential primary, she knew she and the Carter Center needed to do something.
Alexander made the trip to Plains, Georgia, to the modest ranch house of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter in the hopes of allocating funds for her plan.
Jimmy Carter, a frugal man, said he was saving his money for a rainy day.
“It’s pouring outside,” Alexander told him.
Armed with some endowment earnings, she returned to Atlanta to do a risk-limiting audit for the presidential election.
“But what we came up with at the end was the fact that the variance was within human error,” Alexander said. “It was .0099% between the QR code and the paper ballot. You would’ve thought, as independent, neutral, nonpartisan observers, with partisan observers allowed to also watch it — and it was livestreamed — that there would be no question. Our report said it was by the book, the safest election Georgia had ever run, and yet the president of the United States contested the vote.”
In a call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, President Donald Trump asked him to find 11,780 votes.
“The bedrock of our democracy has always been a peaceful transfer of power,” Alexander said. “Without that, everything begins to unravel.”
Alexander identified seven tactics authoritarians use to seize power: One, delegitimize the press; two, politicize the elite and independence of institutions; three, co-opt the military and the police; four, quash dissent; five, scapegoat the “other;” six, undermine elections; and seven, rewrite the laws so the rules don’t apply to you.
“Take a moment and just imagine that there’s a country with a heavily armed militia wearing homemade blindfolds and no badges. They pull people out of homes and workplaces in the middle of the day without any evidence or due process. They send them to makeshift detention centers or ship them to other countries where they might disappear forever,” she said. “Then, imagine reading that this government is so pleased with what they’ve done that they’ve passed a massive, new budget bill to make the militia the largest enforcement body in the country, offering young men five-figure salaries and six-figure bonuses when they can only get a fraction of that in the workforce.
“You know what I’m talking about,” Alexander said. “It’s the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.”
Alexander acknowledged that her description was quite dark.
“But I’m not suggesting that America is there and that we’re going down that road,” she said. “But none of these countries thought they were there either, until they were.”
During times of uncertainty, Alexander said, a powerful leader who is able to take action appeals to people. Instead of having to deal with compromise within a democratic system, an authoritarian leader can take charge and pass legislation and make change happen.
But “authoritarian regimes rot from the inside out,” Alexander said. They quell creativity and dissent and rob people of choice.
With democratic backsliding threatening Alexander’s hope, she turns to the man who inspired her, who taught her “that every generation faces a choice between fear and freedom, between law and power.” Her father, Miles J. Alexander, was that inspiration.
“It’s in his name that I’ve rededicated myself to … fighting for the most important cause of our time, the fight for the future of democracy in the United States,” she said. “At Chautauqua, I feel this fight is worth fighting for. It’s a fight we are going to win, and I look forward to fighting it with you.”
