The political leader and author Stacey Abrams rarely uttered the president's name, at the Thinking Forward Lecture Series at Guild Hall in East Hampton on Tuesday, because he is but "the tool," and not the architect, of the rapid transformation of the American government and culture, she said during a 90-minute discussion with Ken Miller, a financial executive and activist.
As for the architect, "I'm concerned about Russell Vought," she said of the director of the federal Office of Management and Budget and a primary author of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's blueprint to consolidate executive power and redirect the government sharply to the right. "I'm concerned about Stephen Miller," the White House deputy chief of staff for policy. "I'm concerned about people, not the ones we see, but the ones who do, because they will be there after Trump is gone, after the others are gone."
Ms. Abrams, a two-time Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia, served as minority leader of that state's House of Representatives from 2011 to 2017 and has founded numerous organizations focused on voting rights and economic empowerment. Along with Guild Hall, the talk was sponsored by the Bridgehampton Child Care and Recreational Center, where Mr. Miller is a longtime member of the advisory board, and served to highlight its educational, recreational, and support services.
Ms. Abrams, Mr. Miller said, "changed completely and singlehandedly Georgia politics and the South." He asked how her perception of race had changed since her 2007 election to the Georgia House of Representatives.
Race "absolutely was part of the conversation," Ms. Abrams answered, "but it wasn't the only facet, and often we move into this reductive space where if you talk about race, you can't possibly be talking about anything else."
She thinks about it in reverse, she said: "When you talk about race, you necessarily have to talk about everything else. So my legislative experience was about, how do we use race as a point of entry, but never as the stopping point. When I ran for governor in 2018, it was not because I was Black, but because I was Black I knew why I needed to run. I think the inversion of that paradigm was really terrifying to people, and I still think people are scared because whenever identity is raised, it is either dismissed as an excuse or it is so lauded that we miss the rest of the story."
The country has made strides toward equality, she said, "mainly because demography has changed the complexion of this country. But we've also seen a vicious backlash, which has also led to the current leadership of this country."
Mr. Miller noted that in 1990, non-Hispanic whites comprised about 75 percent of the population, a figure that had fallen to 58 percent by 2020. Ms. Abrams answered that in the wake of the Supreme Court's 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ruled that race-conscious college admissions programs violated the equal protections clause of the 14th Amendment, "you can still use religion, you can still use gender, you can still use sexual orientation and gender identity. The only thing you cannot use is race."
Before that, the court's 2022 Dobbs decision eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion because "women started going to school, getting jobs, making money, not marrying people they don't like," she said. "That was an anti-D.E.I. decision," she said of diversity, equity, and inclusion, "because if you want to put women back in their place, strip them of the ability to control their reproductive health."
And before that, in 2013, came the court's Shelby County v. Holder decision, which struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, "because too many Black and brown people were not only growing in population," Ms. Abrams said, "they were voting and changing the complexion of the country, namely voting for Barack Obama. In that, you had another anti-D.E.I. decision."
By 2046, Ms. Abrams said, America will be majority-minority. "The vicious, visceral backlash, the attacks on D.E.I., are not simply because of racial demography. It is about the pluralism that is making America better than we've ever been, which is why they want to pretend that it has never been as good as it is."
The fury directed toward D.E.I. programs, she said, "is not just about Black and brown people. It is about anyone that they consider 'other' having the ability to compete, the ability to succeed, and the ability to demand full citizenship in this country."
Demagogues, she said, "always lean into racial resentment and xenophobia to win elections." She dismissed the president as "a used-car salesman with really good stuff on the lot. . . . He is just like every other flimflam artist ever. He's just really, really good at selling snake oil. But he's also good at weaponizing the things that we are afraid of," in particular, "difference."
Mr. Trump is lionized as a mastermind, she said. "He is not. He is an inheritor of the system that was looking for someone to push the button."
Under the present administration, "the federal government is now basically what the South has been for 200-plus years," which she described as "soft competitive authoritarianism." Today, the quality of one's citizenship "is determined by your ZIP code. It is the antithesis of what America should be. That's why, if we cannot hold the federal government . . . what you're left with is trying to make the states and local government as strong as they can be."
Unlike the "shared belief that we were all heading toward the same end" that endured for almost 250 years, "authoritarianism said no, we've got a new destination in mind," Ms. Abrams said. "And that destination is white Christian nationalism. It is pronatalism, basically putting women back in the place they think they belong, and it is a fascist ideology that is grounded in hatred of anything that is not what they're used to. Racism is the fuel for how you get there."
Mr. Miller suggested that "the 'Again' in 'Make America Great Again' is the key to the racism in this administration."
Most authoritarians want power for a purpose, Ms. Abrams said, and "the purpose that is embedded right now in this iteration in the United States is grounded in racism. . . . If you are trying to go back to 'again,' what was 'again'? 'Again' was pre-19th Amendment, because apparently they don't women voting anymore. It was pre 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendment because you don't want Black people doing stuff anymore. It was pre-Immigration and Nationality Act, because you don't want people of color coming here anymore. And it's grounded in this false narrative of Christian ideology because you haven't read the Bible before."
As an activist, she focuses on voting rights, Ms. Abrams said, "because you cannot get anything else done unless voting rights are held sacrosanct and voting rights are utilized by the people who need things the most." She founded American Pride Rises, which works to expand diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and the 10 Steps Campaign, which outlines a 10-part counterstrategy for citizens to mobilize against authoritarians.
"There are 10 steps to authoritarianism," Ms. Abrams said. "There are 10 steps to freedom and power. And in this moment, marches are good; consistent, sustained action is better. You can defeat authoritarianism, but not if you don't know that you're in it, and not if you don't know that you can get out of it. So I'm spending a lot of my time and my money and my effort to fight against authoritarianism and make certain that democracy wins."
