Original subtitles

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MORGAN: Don't tell me you haven't imagined doing this.

Sitting behind this desk, occupying the most powerful seat in the world.

I've done it.

-Cut.

-And even when you're playing the role of the President of the United States,

you get a sense of the awesome power we entrust to one person.

The fate of our nation, sometimes that of the entire world,

rests on that person's shoulders.

-Amen!

-But sometimes we disagree with the person at the top.

-If we had real democracy we wouldn't have to protest!

-We want more control of our own destinies.

Does society work best when organized around a strong leader

or is there another, better way?

What makes a good leader?

-Now he's the Chief of the community.

-You had to convince people who may disagree to go along with you.

MORGAN: How do we escape from bad leaders?

MORGAN: Or the tyranny of the mob?

DIMITRIY: I was beaten on the street.

OLEG: It was like first time I completely understood who you really are if you're

a gay in Russia.

MORGAN: And is democracy really the best way to run society?

JACK: Washington doesn't like to say this, lobbying its bribery.

EVAN: Everyone's biased so everybody actually having a vote to make laws

would be pretty crazy.

(explosion)

(theme music plays)

MORGAN: This is my journey.

To discover the ties that bind us and the common humanity inside us.

This is The Story of Us.

Society is made up of individuals like you and me.

Each one of us living our lives, chasing our own hopes and dreams,

but it's not everyone for themselves.

We turn to leaders to help us work together, enforce the rule of law

and protect us from harm.

We give up some of our individual freedom for the sake of the common good.

It's a social contract we've been making for thousands of years.

I'm heading into the jungle to Panama to witness this social contract in the making.

Today an indigenous people known as the Embera will hold their traditional ceremony to

select a new chief.

-You can see they like to play soccer or football, yes.

-Football.

MORGAN: Nelson, who learned English at a school in Panama City,

is taking me to the Embera's equivalent of Capitol Hill.

-This is the local house.

We use this for meeting or for dance.

-What we would call a lodge. -Yes. -Yeah.

Once every four years, dozens of villagers gather in this lodge to choose

their new leader.

(thunder)

-Today we are looking for another person to be, what we call, El Noco.

-El Noco?

-El Noco is the Chief of the community, okay.

-Uh-huh, uh-huh.

-So right now we have two people in front.

Those two persons are the candidates.

-It's like the nominee?

-Yes.

MORGAN: The only requirements to run for office are that you have to be

over 30 and have a calm demeanor.

-You see?

All the people are gonna make a line.

The longer lines is the winner.

-Ah okay.

-So we're gonna see right now who's gonna be El Noco.

-That's pretty straightforward.

There's no secrecy.

-No, no secrets.

-Who votes for who and who you want.

-Yeah.

(speaking in native language).

-The winner is him.

Now he's the Chief of the community, El Noco.

(applause).

-Okay.

The election is simple and transparent.

There's no mud slinging, no hard feelings on the losing side.

In fact, the runner up serves as a kind of Vice President.

MORGAN: And everyone joins the victory celebration.

Now, what do you have to do as Chief?

(speaking native language).

-The person that's gonna be the Chief has to be very responsible and,

I don't know how to say it, paciencia?

Patience.

-Oh si.

Patience.

The feeling for the village?

-Yes.

They vote for him.

They can see that he's a smart man and of course he's my...

-Got it. -Yeah.

-This is incredible to see something like this, true democracy in action.

Of course the Embera need to work together to survive.

So it's necessary for one person to coordinate the group to get things done.

That's why they entrust power to the Chief.

This kind of cooperation has helped human societies flourish all around the world.

It's a reminder of what's at the core of our own political system,

just how simple it could be.

Most modern societies are exponentially larger than the Embera village.

Leaders are now expected to protect millions of people in the nation state.

PRESIDENT KENNEDY: Now it is time to take longer strides.

CHURCHILL: Let us then move forward together.

MORGAN: I want to know what the weight of that much responsibility feels like.

I've come to New York City to meet someone who was leader of the Free World

for eight years, President Bill Clinton.

We, as a society, have this amazing rule of law and democracy.

Why do you think it came out so strong?

-Well I think it came as a reaction to popular

dissatisfaction with monarchies.

The idea that everybody could have their say, that people ought to be, in effect,

self-governing, they ought to pick representatives, it really caught hold.

MORGAN: It was this idea that sparked the American Revolution,

but representation doesn't mean slavishly following the will of the majority.

-Wait, wait, wait, they've had their say.

MORGAN: The pact between elected officials and the people they represent

is much more complex.

-There's 330 million plus people in this country, you can't have a referendum

on every decision.

You can represent the will of your voters by trying to carry out what you pledged

to do in the election,

but even there you had to convince other people who may disagree to go

along with you.

Then you had to deal with things that were never discussed in the election.

Both emergencies and things that you know about that are gonna have a huge effect five,

ten, 15, 20 years down the road and so a lot of this will of the people involved

having the people believe that you're at least keeping them informed.

You're telling them what the deal is and if you do something that seems today to

be unpopular, you explain why.

-Give me an example of two of the really roughest decisions as our leader you had to make.

-I remember when Mexico was about to go under in 1995

and my Economic Advisor said,

"They've got 24 hours to live," and then their currency will come crashing down and

you'll be flooded with...

-Immigrants.

-Immigrants and it was gonna be a disaster if we don't help them,

but the American people were like 80% against doing anything 'cause they said,

"Oh they got themselves in trouble."

So I had the executive authority to do it

and I did it and everybody said, "Oh this is terrible.

They'll never pay the money back.

We're gonna be ripped off.

We're being taken advantage of" all this stuff.

Mexico paid the loan back three years early with more than $500 million in interest.

MORGAN: Economic decisions may impact hundreds of millions of lives,

but no choice is harder for a leader to make than sending their own citizens off to war.

-If you have to use force, you put the lives of young Americans at risk.

So you need to be darn sure you're doing the right thing before you go round killing

people because there are consequences of that.

People didn't want me to send soldiers in to throw a military dictator

out in Haiti.

Turned out no one was killed.

The majority of the people were against my trying to end the slaughter in Bosnia,

but there were 250,000 dead people and two and a half million refugees.

The risks from inaction from the world would be far greater than action.

People didn't want me to go into Kosovo,

but I didn't want it to turn into Bosnia and they're still holding on

to their democracy.

None of those places worked out what you call perfectly, but we gave 'em a chance.

The only thing that really matters is whether you leave things better

than you started.

-"Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown."

What Shakespeare wrote of Kings still applies to our elected leaders today.

President Clinton decided to make a risky loan to Mexico.

He put the lives of American soldiers at risk to prevent genocide in Kosovo.

These decisions were not driven by a desire to be popular,

but for the long-range common good.

That's what good leaders do.

But around the globe a wave of populist leaders is coming to power.

Their quest for popularity may unleash mob mentality and persecution of the minority.

-You kill us, we kill your kind.

-In the late 1960's, the Castro in San Francisco

became a Mecca for the gay community.

People came here to enjoy the social contract

that heterosexuals took for granted.

Contribute to society, harm no one and the government will stay our of

your private affairs.

Well since then, attitudes and laws have changed, at least here in America,

but there are still places around the world where simply being the person you are,

harming no one, is a crime.

In 2013, Russia passed a law banning so called gay propaganda.

Activists say it triggered a jump in discrimination

and violence against the LGBT community.

I'm on my way to meet a Russian immigrant couple,

Oleg Dusaev and Dmitriy Stepanov.

In Russia, Oleg was a television host and Dmitriy was a successful Psychologist.

I want to know why they left behind their careers to come to the U.S.

So now you're a high profile person.

You got a TV show going on.

-Yeah.

-When did you publicly come out?

-It was in 2013, yeah.

I came out on Facebook.

I can show you the post.

"Today for me it's a time to be brave.

Openly and honestly I want to tell you that I am gay.

Orientation is not a determining factor in my attitude to life and people."

-Well said.

-World changed because I was on my work, I posted on Facebook and I just went to

the hallway and you know, people just you know was like...

-Stepped away.

-Yeah and people didn't say hello to me, didn't smile to me.

I was like invisible person and so after that it was like two weeks.

My contract just was not renewed.

-Not renewed?

-Yeah and I felt how dangerous is it.

-We have threats.

-It was nightmare you know.

Many messages, Facebook, texts with that story, this story.

-We were overwhelmed.

It was dangerous.

I know we cannot hide our body language and maybe sometimes my body expressed who

am I and I was beaten on the street.

-It was terrible experience because police did nothing.

So I went to the hospital because you know my love in the hospital and they just

asked me, "Who are you?

You can't be here."

-"What are you doing here?"

-"Are you family or what?"

And I just needed to lie, something like I am his boss or something.

It was like first time I completely understood who you really are if you are

a gay in Russia.

MORGAN: Oleg and Dmitriy didn't feel safe at home anymore.

(speaking in native language).

So they went to New York to let the storm from Oleg's post blow over.

-Actually we seated for seven days just in the apartment in New York.

-Yeah we just need some time to get away from everything.

-Yeah.

MORGAN: Oleg and Dmitriy eventually went out and explored the city.

The openness and tolerance they discovered inspired them.

Seeing how life could be, they refused to accept their loss of rights in Russian society;

instead they asserted them by getting married in the U.S.

-After our marriage, after our ceremony somebody stole our pictures from Facebook and

published these pictures in the newspaper.

-The article say, "To be gay is a shame.

He's abnormal.

We need to kill them," so they need to kill us.

-It was really terrifying.

That was the reason why we stayed here.

-Yeah.

-You only have each other to hold on to here.

-It was a difficult choice.

-We had a careers in Russia.

We had all our friends and families there.

-Yeah but here we can you know, to go...

-Walking.

-To walk yeah.

-And hold hands.

-It's okay, it's normal.

I can tell people, yeah he's my husband.

-So now you're happy and you feel safe.

-Yes.

-Here in the U.S, once the shift started, change came rapidly.

What do you think it would take for Russia to be more relaxed?

-About 100 years, 200 years?

Unfortunately the situation is getting worse.

-There is a lot of stereotypes in Russia.

Russia has a different history and different human rights movement.

They need more strength to overcome these barriers towards tolerance.

-Well I wish you both long life, happiness.

-Thank you.

-More than two centuries ago, the United States constitution gave it's people certain

rights and among them was freedom of expression.

America would be a new type of society, one where people would be free to be

who they really are.

The LGBT community had to fight for those same freedoms until recently.

Now, Oleg and Dmitriy have engaged in a struggle to move Russian society forward.

I hope they succeed because in the end,

any society that stops people from being who they truly are,

is bound to fall.

There will always be divisions in a society.

Disagreements between political, religious and cultural groups.

When leaders exploit these divisions, they can steal power from the people and

keep it all for themselves.

In 1971, General Idi Amin took control of Uganda with a military coup

-I must make sure that every Ugandan gets the fruit of independence.

MORGAN: He inherited a country hungry for a strong native born leader after

decades of subjugation under British rule.

Amin was initially greeted with cheers, but his regime soon became one of

torture and murder.

He earned the nickname, "The Butcher of Uganda."

To try to understand how power can descend into tyranny,

I have come to Africa to meet with someone who spent years in

Amin's inner circle.

Uganda's former Minister of Health, Henry Kyemba.

Idi Amin had eight years.

In those eight years of murders, killings, eliminations,

how many people?

HENRY: It was a difficult figure to come by.

150,000?

Half a million?

We'll never know.

-Do you know why Amin did these things?

-As time went on, power was getting sweeter and sweeter by the day.

-It always will won't it?

-And he thought he could carry on.

-It seems that the longer he was in power, the more violent he got.

-Amin knew that he came into power by the gun and he used to tell his soldiers

"That the gun is your sister,

is your mother, use it to get whatever you want."

Many innocent people were killed.

We are thrown in the lake.

In the Lake Victoria and they ended up going up onto the River Nile and

you'd find dead bodies floating on the river.

-Well it sounds like there was just no law.

-They were using prisoners to beat their fellow prisoners to death not knowing

that the others would come and do the same to them, which is the kind of

brutality you can't explain.

-They used detainees to commit these atrocities?

-Yes.

I was advised in fact that my own brother was also killed in that way.

-What was your reaction to your brother's death?

-It's not something nice to talk about.

MORGAN: The social contract between a country's leader and its citizens

is based on trust.

MANDELA: The solution must be determined by the people themselves.

MORGAN: The leader protects the citizens in exchange for the power to make decisions

that affect everyone; but a dictator betrays this trust

and is only out for himself.

Idi Amin robbed hundreds of thousands of Ugandans of their lives in his mad quest

to hold on to power.

-The government of Africa is strengthening.

Thank you very much.

MORGAN: When Amin began targeting members of his own government,

Henry Kyemba started to fear for his life.

-What will you do to them?

-You will see.

-After the murder of two Cabinet Ministers who were friends of mine,

someone sent me a note.

-UVS three, three, five slash six.

What is that?

-Those are the numbers of security cars used by Idi Amin

in his execution missions.

Someone left a note saying that he had heard some security boys in that car

talking about me being the next victim for execution.

I felt it was time to go.

MORGAN: Kyemba managed to resist the temptation to flee immediately.

He waited for an official government trip to the UN in Geneva and from there,

found asylum in London.

You went to work after that to spread the word about him.

-I decided to fight Amin in the way that he could never fight me with a gun.

I said I would use a pen.

I gave interviews to senior journalists about what Amin was doing to the country.

I also worked on the book, A State of Blood for them to know what was

happening in our country.

MORGAN: Henry's writing was crucial in spreading word of Idi Amin's tyranny

around the world.

Amin's ever increasing lust for power led him to invade neighboring Tanzania.

Foreign powers began to take action.

Amin's iron clad grip began to loosen.

-What is actually happening in Uganda now?

-Troops are deserting the army and Amin is in hiding.

MORGAN: On April 11, 1979 Idi Amin was overthrown by Ugandan rebels and Tanzanian forces.

-We have won, we have won, we have won!

-What do you think kept him in power for so long?

-Amin was very unpredictable.

He would do things that you'd think were absolutely normal and yet the next minute,

he's doing the exact opposite and that kept him in power beyond what one

would have expected.

Brutality and unpredictability go together.

-The English Historian, Lord Acton famously said,

"Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Few leaders have lived out that phrase more vividly than Idi Amin.

Once he seized power, there was no moral line he wouldn't cross to keep power.

The specter of Amin is still with us.

Around the globe, strong men still covet power; will do anything to get it and

anything to keep it.

We must be ever vigilant against leaders who want power for themselves,

not for us, the people.

When people are robbed of their power, when they lack a voice in their own fate,

they face a choice, accept it or fight back.

But in the rural lowlands of Northern Kenya, one group has found a third way.

They are walking away and building a new society.

Political Science Professor, Faith Ogeto Orwa is traveling from the capital

Nairobi to learn more.

(singing in native language).

-Welcome. -Thank you very much.

It's a pleasure to be here.

(singing in native language).

MORGAN: The village is called Umoja and its founder is Rebecca Lolosoli.

She and the other women here have created a society without men.

-Hi Rebecca.

Tell me a little bit about the village and about the women that live here.

-Yeah, we have 48 women in this village.

We have new women coming.

The women, you see, the women are making the houses.

MORGAN: The women who have come here belong to Kenya's Samburu tribe,

a society where men hold all the power.

In Samburu culture, most women can't own property.

They themselves are considered the property of men.

-In our community, women have no right.

We are not educated, they don't go to school, they don't have jobs,

they don't own livestock so they have nothing to live on.

You know, the Samburu people, we are polygamist and maybe you start disliking the first

wife and start beating you until you start kicking you out of that home.

If you don't also give children, then you are useless.

You will be isolated.

Nobody wants you.

-So all the women that have come here really have very difficult stories.

-They have been beaten, they have been threatened to be killed, they've been raped.

MORGAN: Rebecca herself was abused and evicted from her home.

That's when she left to found Umoja.

-We started Umoja in 1990.

Decided to build the village so that we can stay together and live together.

When the men started seeing our success, now they wanted to kill me.

They said if we kill her, then everything will go down.

The men come and beat the women.

They robbed the women.

They wanted to kick us out of this land.

Even my own mum told me stop and I was telling her I'm not going to stop.

-How did you protect yourselves?

-We didn't have any protection.

At night when we see them, we wake up, we start running, but we refuse to go out

of this land completely.

Once we have already built and we stayed here,

we live here; it was hard for them to get us out of this land.

MORGAN: The women of Umoja endured the attacks and the raids on their

village finally stopped.

Umoja has now become a thriving community.

The women generate income by making bead jewelry and selling them to tourists.

They raise livestock and are experimenting with growing their own crops,

but Umoja's crown jewel is its school.

-One, two, three.

-One, two, three.

MORGAN: This is where the women are creating a new society.

Different from the one in which they were raised.

They hope the boys growing up here will learn to treat women as equals and take that

attitude with them when they leave the village as adults.

-E for egg. -E for egg.

-We have seen education is the key for everything.

-C cat. -C cat.

-This village is like a training center.

We teach our boys to respect the rights of women.

We are proud of our sons.

MORGAN: If Rebecca has her way, Umoja is just the beginning of a new broader

culture where women have a say.

-You always move forward.

-I'm always moving forward.

Whether they say they are killing me, I'm not scared.

I'm always going forward.

So our life is always improving.

-Women of Umoja were born into a society where they had absolutely no power,

where the men treated them like cattle.

So they built a new society.

They are re-writing the social contract, giving women a voice in the new order and

imbuing their sons with the belief in gender equality.

Theirs is a young culture, but the future looks bright.

New societies begin with the hope of solving old problems.

-Ethics and corruption concerns at the center of a Federal bribery investigation.

MORGAN: But human nature means that certain challenges arise again and again like the

influence of money.

Can it be stopped from eroding the very foundation of democracy?

-Today's hearing is about more than greed.

It's simply a tale of betrayal.

MORGAN: In a democracy,

power is ultimately supposed to rest in the hands of the people,

but it doesn't always work that way.

Lobbying, greed and corruption strip voters of their power,

selling influence to the highest bidder.

No one knows this better than former lobbyist, Jack Abramoff.

Morning.

-Great to see you.

Thank you so much.

-And you, thank you. -We got a table back here. -Okay.

-From our first hearing, Mr. Abramoff's insatiable greed came to the fore.

MORGAN: One of K Street's most successful lobbyists, Jack became infamous when

he was convicted of taking illegal kickbacks, wire fraud, tax evasion and bribery.

He spent nearly four years in jail for his crimes.

-Some races were impacted by lawmakers connections to disgraced lobbyist,

Jack Abramoff, part of what Democrats labeled a culture of corruption.

-Okay.

People go to Washington and the first thing they start saying when they are

campaigning is I can't be bought.

I'm there to represent you.

-Right.

-And it doesn't last that long?

-No.

I think almost everyone shows up like that, but over time and sometimes

it's only a few hours and sometimes it takes a few years,

eventually the lure of the political money which

they need to get re-elected, becomes so strong that in fact they get affected.

-So what happened with you?

You were obviously very good at it.

-Well I was deep in the game.

I opened up a couple of restaurants where I let them eat like it was a cafeteria.

When they wanted to go play golf, I would put 'em on my airplane and fly them to

St. Andrews to play the Old Course and ultimately what happened was an article

got written in The Washington Post about

my lobbying practice on the front page and I became the great

villain of Washington.

I at first didn't think I did anything wrong, but I decided to go back and

re-read the million emails that I had sent in the course

of being lobbyist and I started re-thinking myself

and started thinking, you know what, I cooperated,

I pled guilty and away I went.

At the end of it I realized it was wrong, this system where people paid

to play in Washington.

MORGAN: Paying to influence government is all too common for the powerful

cooperation's that can afford it.

It's estimated that they spend over $9 billion lobbying our

elected officials every year.

So you have about 535 people between House and the senate.

How many of 'em are clean?

-Well clean in the sense of not allowing people to give them money, very few.

Maybe a dozen from both House...

-Maybe a dozen.

-Maybe, maybe, but most of them unfortunately do and they excuse it by saying this is

the system we live in and this is how things are done.

-This is not the way a democracy should work.

-No and it wasn't the way this country was supposed to work.

-What should we be doing to make things a little easier, a little better?

-If the money were removed, it would have an immense effect, not only in the system in

terms of our political system, but on the individual congressmen.

There are other things also.

For example, term limits.

I was against term limits.

When I was a lobbyist I wanted every congressman to die in office when they're

150 years old.

It's the same way when you have a car right.

You have a car, you run out of gas, you don't go get a new car.

You go to the gas station to put some gas in right?

-Yeah.

-So if you bought a congressman and you're a lobbyist,

you don't wanna have to go buy a new congressman.

You just wanna put a little more gas in the tank and people when they get there at

the beginning, they're not really corrupt, they're not part of the system.

Get 'em out of there before they become corrupt.

-And I'm gonna tell you something.

I'm glad you went to prison because you had time to think and now you're

on a great crusade.

You're on the high road.

-Thank you.

MORGAN: Money is power.

So many people in this country feel they don't have a voice, that the government isn't

listening to them, that their vote doesn't count and that's the truth.

As Jack knows all too well, you have to pay to play in our American political system.

I believe if we're going to make our democracy work, if we're going to make

it truly representational, we're gonna have to take money out of the equation and

put people back in.

But a seismic shift in the balance of power is already underway.

The explosion of social media means everyone can express their will, 24/7.

Will technology make leaders more accountable or will it make leaders obsolete?

MORGAN: Corruption, repression and tyranny all rob people of their rights in society,

but the Internet has given them a new way to be heard.

When leaders monopolize power, can technology help people take it back?

To find out I'm headed to San Francisco.

I'm here to meet one of the founders of Twitter, Evan Williams.

He's moved on from Twitter now and created a new Internet start up, Medium.

I'm always curious about, if you'll pardon the expression, people like you.

Where do you come from?

Who are you?

How did you get into this?

EVAN: I grew up on a farm in Nebraska,

rural Nebraska literally in the middle of the cornfields.

I was pretty isolated growing up and this was pre-internet.

I had a computer,

I learned programming when I was in high school and when the Internet started

emerging in the late 90s, what I believed at the time was once everybody

had a voice, we would all be smarter because good ideas would rise to the top and

truth would rise to the top and we'd be able to say well that's wrong, this is good,

let's talk about it.

-I'm thinking about my father was a barber and the barber's shop was town hall.

So everybody even heard it on the radio or they read the paper and they came

to the barber's shop and discussed it.

Is Twitter the extension of that?

-Yeah, we've used that analogy before of the global town hall.

Turned out it was more complicated than that.

So when we built Twitter it was with the ethos of we want to connect as many people as

possible and let information flow as freely as possible and with an assumption of most

people are gonna use that in a good way, which is true, but the degree to which people who

are the bad actors can spoil it for other people, we didn't really design in well enough.

And so I compare it to the real world and saying even if you believe most people are

good people, you still may lock your door when you leave your house.

-So the Internet is a good thing.

We can all know more about each other and perhaps be smarter.

-That's the hope.

-On the other hand, we have the dark side.

Which side's winning?

-It's really a pretty equal match right now.

I think what we've found is that what gets rewarded on the Internet is attention.

It doesn't reward quality of attention.

It doesn't reward accuracy of facts and people have figured out oh what's the

cheapest way to drive attention, have a car crash.

And it gets the self reinforcing cycle, so if you look at a car crash,

then the Internet thinks oh you like car crashes, here's more car crashes.

MORGAN: Even sees these digital car crashes, click bait,

trolls and fake news as threats to the Internet's promise of giving

power back to the people.

Have you come up with any idea about how to go about this, I'm gonna call it, clean up?

-The way that I now think about the Internet is it's neither good nor bad.

It's a technology that makes it easier for people to get what they want.

It's not that dissimilar from other technologies.

If you think about agricultural technology help people get what they want and

need, nourishment and food with less effort, but then the technology kept going and

it feels like it's probably gone to far.

The fact that we have access to the cheap calories at all times and that feels

good in the moment, but it's way beyond nourishment.

-What are you doing with your new company to change what people get from the Internet?

-With Medium, we're definitely trying to move things in the right direction.

We're trying to create a space for nuance and depth.

I think that's the nourishment that may not be there in the junk food and we're trying to

make that really work.

MORGAN: If we can get to the point where Internet forums and social media truly reward

thoughtful engagement, a new form of democracy could emerge.

We could all vote all the time on every log.

Representatives could become obsolete, but Evan believes direct democracy

is fraught with danger.

-What we're seeing today is the ability for everybody to at least have a say and

it's in many instances been phenomenally powerful.

Online activism has been incredible, but it goes both ways.

The alt right movement which was really powered by people getting together online who

may have fringe ideas in their local community but they find someone who agrees with them

and collectively they get critical mass...

-Jews will not replace us!

-Has been pretty scary as well.

So the idea of direct democracy today, ten years ago I would have said

well that's gonna be awesome because the right things will happen.

And now, I don't know.

-So is there hope for direct democracy in the future?

-I think today's information environment underscores the importance

of representative democracy.

Things are so complex today much more than they were 200 years ago,

that the idea let's all vote on the health-care bill and like the complexity of that,

to understand it we need to elect people who we trust to make those decisions for us.

-But if everyone can vote on the laws themselves, you can't stop me from voting just by

gerrymandering my district.

-I think what we're unhappy with is the representatives, not necessarily the

representative of democracy, but what I think the Internet will drive us toward is

demanding more transparency from the representatives and being actually responsive to

their constituents needs and I think it's more possible to make that happen now.

MORGAN: Evan Williams believes that the Internet, like the printing press,

the radio and television before it, is fundamentally changing the relationship

between we the people and our leaders.

It gives us direct and instant contact with government.

It has the potential to wrest back power from leaders who have gone off course,

but it could also take democracy in a frightening direction,

steered by hateful hackers, vengeful trolls.

The task ahead of us now is learning how

to use our new power wisely.

Since the dawn of civilization, there's been a tug of war between

society and its leaders.

Now we need leaders to get things done, but if we give up too much power,

tyranny ensues.

People lose their right to choose their own destinies.

Today, we stand at a crossroads.

Technology has given billions of us the power to make our voices heard

louder and clearer than ever.

Today, we have the power to shape society and be accountable for

the world we make.

Now I'm hopeful in spite of the dangers that lie ahead because I believe

that ultimately there is one power that is greater than any despot.

The power of the human spirit.

I believe that.

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