Anne Applebaum on Autocracy’s Seductive Lure

[Music] well hello everyone thanks for joining us this afternoon i'm evo dahler the president of the chicago council on global affairs uh thank you especially our members for joining us today for a conversation with ann applebaum as a reminder the council is an independent and nonpartisan organization and the views expressed here are those of the participants and not necessarily of the council today's program is on the record recording of the conversation will also be available on our website and will be sent out on social media channels shortly after we conclude our conversation uh we'll also of course as usual take your questions and if you want to ask a question or vote on a question that has already been asked go to your browser and type in ccga.live and we'll take it there in about 20 25 minutes or so now i'm delighted to welcome back to uh the chicago council ann applebaum and currently writes for the atlantic but also wrote for the washington post for nearly 17 years she also is a senior fellow at the agora institute at johns hopkins university and obama is a pulitzer prize-winning historian with particular expertise in the histories of communist and post-communist europe she's written a new book called twilight of democracy the seductive lure of authoritarianism if you haven't already i encourage you to purchase a copy of this fascinating read through our local chicago book partner the bookseller a direct link for purchasing the book with the bookseller is shared in the chat function here on zoom and can also be found on our webpage and thanks so much for joining us it's wonderful to have you back uh to uh the council last time in person now unfortunately we'll have to do it from zoom but the other good news is you don't have to fly from from chicago to chicago to get here wonderful to have you you still have your uh you're still muted and um thank you i have i was gonna say thank you i i have fond memories of being at the chicago council when my last book came out which was a completely different kind of book i'm glad to be here virtually and you know maybe next time in person well we'll look forward to if you keep on writing books we'll keep on asking you to come back let's start let's start with this book you start uh and in fact end uh uh with a party in fact there are a lot of parties in in this book in some ways but this is a unique party the millennium the change from 1999 to 2000 you have a party in uh in in poland where you are living at the time uh you have many guests from all around the world and some of those remain your best and and most wonderful friends and some of them don't talk a little bit about the party and why and why you're using this really as a metaphor i think uh for the larger theme of your book so yes the book does begin with a party and yes to be clear this is not because i'm some kind of hostess or i give a lot of parties that's you know it's that really wasn't the purpose of the of the of the of the anecdote um it was just that this party was given in 1999 which was a moment of really huge optimism in poland um and at the party were a lot of people who were i mean it was nobody famous at the time or you know but a lot of junior journalists a lot of people involved at a very low level in polish politics some foreigners some people from britain some from from the us um but they all shared a kind of optimism about the direction that poland was then going the um the integration of poland to the rest of europe um the feeling and the joining of nato which happened soon after that around around the same time and my reflection some years later was that some of the people who were there had chosen since then a very different path um and not only that they were bitterly at odds not just with me i should say but with other guests who were at the party and that there had been a really profound political change that had polarized the country in a very deep way and because this experience of polarization is now one that other countries know as well the us uk um really almost every you know you know many modern democracies um this struck me as important and i began to think about well so who were the people and why was it that they um chose a different path why do they that you know so whereas most of the you know many you know we would all have been considered part of one kind of political group at the time some you could call it center right you could call it liberal you could call it thatcherite maybe at that in that era um and that group had then broken up um and some of the people who were at my party then became much more radical um and they are now some of them very prominent and senior journalists and spin doctors and um uh kind of propagandists for the polish ruling party which is really a radical right party that seeks to create a kind of catholic nationalist state um and has um in the in in recent years made real attempts to undermine some democratic institutions in poland so the independent courts um the media um and now maybe maybe more and again i i came up with not a single answer or a single explanation but rather with a series of explanations as to why this change had happened and some of them were to do with people's disappointments either personal or political with with the with the um you know with the liberal democracy that was created in the 1990s and afterwards um and and some were some were personal some were somewhere to do with their own personal careers but that was the the attempt the question was okay so there was a group of people who were all on one side and now they're not what happened and that was the that was the starting thought that led me to write the book and so you you you then you sort of you you tell in many ways through five different stories which are also connected you tell the story about what happens in poland you talk about hungary you talk about britain and brexit then go on to spain and the vox movement and of course to the united states and and and and not only not just trump but what happened to uh to the republican party and the right and each of those vignettes which are really wonderfully told for those who've not had an opportunity to read the book it's incredibly readable easily accessible uh and well uh well uh well written uh each of those you use for different purposes and one of the the polish stories really about the big lie uh talk a little bit about about the importance the central importance of sort of what you call at some points uh the big liar or the medium big lie actually the expression that i use is the medium-sized lie um and so this you know the the so one of the one of the things that happened in poland that was a really important political moment and moment of political change was following a really tragic um plane crash uh a decade ago which killed the then president of poland and also many other prominent people including many people who i knew and my husband do um following that plane crash um some um some you know journalists um propagandists politicians associated with now the ruling party began to spin a very um compelling um conspiracy theory about why the plane had crashed i mean sometimes the conspiracy involved russia sometimes it involved the then polish government um but it was it was powerful enough to convince a lot of people in poland that something had happened and something was being covered up um and this for americans the parallel story is the one of birtherism in the united states so we also had a conspiracy theory like this um in which and by the way i think it's not accidental that donald trump was one of the people pushing it you know which which trans um kind of transmitted the idea to a lot of people about a quarter of the population that something is illegitimate about the entire state so in the case of poland you know the implication of the theory was that everyone the government the parliament the media the bureaucracy the diplomatic service are all covering up a terrible story about the murder of a polish president and that's a very deep and profound charge um and it was used um not in the way that old fashioned kind of big lie totalitarian ideologies were used you know it wasn't a complete description of the world you know with an explanation for everything and economic theory and so on but it was a really effective tool to undermine faith in the political system um again the same you know the situation in the u.s is similar you know if it's true that the president of the united states is illegitimate you know he's a fake president and he is nevertheless being kept in place again by everybody the bureaucracy the you know the media the um you know then that means that the whole system is profoundly corrupt and needs to be changed i mean this message was um very cleverly um and very consistently propagated and spread by the law and justice party and including by some people i know including one or two who had been at my new year's eve party in 1999. um and so again the book tries to show what were the techniques what were the methods what was the what was the um you know how was change effective and it was you know in in poland and then there's an echo of this in other countries um the use of conspiracy theory um to undermine faith in the political system to undermine faith in in in institutions um is one of the consistent themes i think of the last decade um in western politics so stay staying a minute with poland because of course we just had an election there a presidential election which split the country right down the middle and really painted two very different pictures of the future of poland uh and and the the ruling party uh came out uh on the other side in victory once once again talk a little bit about where uh what this really means for uh for poland on the one hand the deep polarization the deep division uh between a more liberal more open uh uh view of where poland needs to go and the other hand uh uh the fact that the other side the party in power once again won uh where where does this go what does that give you in terms of thinking about the future is to say uh [Music] how how worried are you about the future of democracy in poland and uh put a straight point to it um but where do you think this is uh this is heading so just so that people understand it's a it's hard to describe the unpleasantness and virulence of polish politics right now but just as an example one of the central issues in the campaign was a series of statements made by the current president the sitting president who was re-elected by a slight margin who said during the campaign that lgbt is not people it's an ideology and by the way lgbt in polish sounds very strange and foreign you know it doesn't unclear even really what it means it's an english language acronym um and there was a and this statement was echoed and kind of repeated by polish state television which is now controlled by the ruling party and is used by the ruling party to um you know as part of its electoral propaganda and there were repetitive shows and discussions about you know if the opposition wins does that mean we won't have national independence day anymore we'll only have gay pride parades you know does it mean the sexualization of children in schools will that people children be forced um to have some kind of foreign imposed sex education so this theme was used it must have been something that they'd pulled and it must have been something that they understood would be would have a pickup or a would be taken up by you know their sort of their half of the political spectrum because they repeated it um quite a lot um and this was echoed there were some other you know there was also anti-semitic themes were used you know anti-foreigner themes were used um you know the opposition was portrayed as not really polish um they're you know they're german or they're foreign or their elites or they're somehow not polish and the language that was used about them was of people who are not patriotic um and that that that is that is of course a classic i mean we call it populist but really it's also a kind of nationalist authoritarian way of doing politics to define your part of the nation as the true nation and your opponents as illegitimate so it's not as if you're both you know you're equally competing political parties on some kind of imaginary equal landscape or equal playing field um in a democracy instead you're the only true party you're the only ones who deserve to have power um and the opposition is illegitimate and that is the that is the kind of language um that were used and of course once you have come to power using that kind of language and by the way this doesn't have to be a right-wing way of winning an election i'm you know if you look at the kind of language chavez used in venezuela in the past it's it's remarkably you know although it's attached to a lot of marxist economics it's remarkably similar set of tactics you know we're the real venezuelans they're the they're the you know the the imposters but once you've come to power that way um then you also have you know you feel yourself empowered to alter the political system so that um your true party your patriotic party can't lose again because you know you you know if the opposition are illegitimate then you know you know it would be it would be you know so bad if they win that you are then authorized um to do all kinds of you know to change the system so that you don't lose and and this is one of the things that polish ruling party has done so they have sought to pack the courts so that there's no independent judiciary in poland they have as i said taken over state media which is very important in poland it's still the main media for about 30 of the country um they have now announced their intentions to go after independent media to force owners to sell it's not clear yet how they're going to do that but that's how they're talking um and there's now some hint that they may have used the security services during the election as well so um so those are the kinds of tactics that um that that they that they have used to undermine um you know the the legitimacy and the the equality really of the of the electoral field so uh i mean the interesting thing of course is that in all of the cases that you could describe including the one we just talked about in terms of poland it is an electoral system uh that is that is used to get uh to get to power and different instruments are being used one of those instruments you just talked about and also plays a prominent role in in the discussion not only in hungary but particularly in spain is the media and the new media environment uh and in spain the the trolling uh what's happening in in terms of websites and everything else that's happening in social media how is media being used uh and if you want to talk about spain or or the united states was another piece where you talk about the importance of the media how is the media environment changing the discrediting on the one hand of of sort of the traditional media or its nationalization uh party or political control or in the other hand uh the emergence of of a very diffuse and fragmented media environment that enables uh people to get their message to the right folks in order to win or at least to to get power uh or become stronger in elections so just to be clear um you know i acknowledge you know for better for worse um there has been an information revolution um the the whatever you want to call it the mainstream media the legacy media the you know the old institutions of the press um have lost power and will not regain it and you know my i don't have a i'm not i'm not you know the purpose of me writing about that isn't to isn't you know to whine about it or hope for them to come back um i think on the contrary we're living through a really profound information revolution that affects us on all kinds of levels um you know both it's both to do with the way we now get political news you know for a lot of us it sort of appears on our phone in little you know in little bits sort of in between i don't know advertisements for hairspray and you know messages from our cousin you know it's a it or or it appears on our facebook page transmitted from you know our friends or friends of our friends and so the way in which we're getting and seeing information has changed quite a lot and i also think there is now a a profound you know loss of trust and a sense of uncertainty about what is true and what isn't true um that you know it you know it may be a long time before that can be rebuilt somehow um and at the same time we've lost a kind of sense of there being a public square in other words a um you know a shared space where people are arguing about the same facts where you know people might have different opinions but at least we're all focused on the same problems at the same time i mean that is really gone in most democracies there are some exceptions i should say but in a lot of democracies it's gone and people now you know they exist within their own bubbles or their own echo chambers um they see you know the the material that they trust is things that come from other people that they trust and and they don't have a there isn't a you know there isn't any central space and there i should say there are many good things about the new media environment um it's it's it's created fantastic opportunities for people who wouldn't have had a chance otherwise um but one of the worrying things about it is that it has um it has you know it's made it very it's made it much easier for example to conduct the kind of conspiratorial disinformation campaigns that we were just talking about um and it also means that we've lost a you know we've lost a sense of public space and therefore you have you know the society fragmented and people um divided much more deeply than they ever were in the past um you know so in the book i talk i do talk a little bit about how a modern disinformation campaign is run um how you can set up completely fake i should say news news websites or news looking websites that look like newspapers but aren't and this has been done in spain it's been done in brazil it's been done in the united states and then you can use those headlines from the fake news websites and push them using using the techniques and tactics of social media so you can use trolls and you can use fake accounts and so on so it is possible to spread and push and propagate ideas um using false um sort of you know false mechanisms or mechanisms anyway they're where you're disguising you know who's really behind different kinds of bits of information who's not and this is now you know we all associate this i think in the us with the russians because that was what the russians were doing during the u.s election campaign in 2016. but i mean this is not russians i mean this is now done by everybody um so you know in the us right now i mean there's i'm no doubt still plenty of russian involvement um in in american social media space but you know you hardly need them now because there are so many other actors and groups seeking to do exactly the same thing and operating the same way um some of the platforms have made some attempts at at least eliminating you know egregiously false accounts but i mean it they're they're constantly trying to catch up with the way these tactics with the way these tactics change so um you know that this is uh this to my mind by the way is something for you know i don't think a future trump administration would deal with it but a future biden administration or or whoever comes after that um this is a to my my real priority is to think about how we uh as a nation begin to rethink what the public sphere is going to look like what do we want our democratic internet to look like how are we going to make it easier to speak to one another again but that's a that's a conversation for another day well hopefully we can get to that conversation that is there's still a a a a debate and everything else that's going on within um uh within what we're uh what we're talking about uh and we're we haven't gotten all the way to the other side of uh of the discussion where control is completely in in one particular hand uh so we we hope that's the case but there there are worries uh uh clearly in your book the warning signs uh and the where uh hungary of course is the is the the most important case of where that happens um um uh covet 19 the coronavirus has has affected uh a lot of the countries although we were talking just before we went online that it hasn't really affected uh yet or and hopefully won't uh in in eastern europe but it did allow people to to uh to take political uh to take political measures and how worried should we be about the virus uh as a excuse for uh for illiberal leaders to take a liberal actions as we saw for example in hungary uh or are we looking at populist leaders not really being very effective in dealing with this and therefore opening up political space how do you how do you see the uh the political outcome of where it's really hard to generalize um i mean the list of um authoritarian leaders who've taken advantage of the virus in order to carry out um you know in order to tighten the news you know on their country it's actually quite long it's not just hungary it includes um some central asian countries it includes um uh you know you know turkey it includes you know many others um but you know the virus is very strange i mean you know we're still in the middle of the you know of of beginning to understand it and and understand what it's going to do um so clearly for example for at the beginning of the you know of the outbreak um it did look like a lot of people were putting their faith in the state and people were willing to give up and sacrifice quite a lot of liberty and independence you know in exchange for safety because they were scared and there were all these lockdowns and you know in many european countries where people accepted quite draconian um measures from the government and you know lots of people commented that historically sometimes once these kinds of measures are imposed you know they're never lifted um but it's interesting i mean i almost see i almost feel like as it has gone on there's been a kind of counter reaction whereby having been locked up and locked down there's now almost a libertarian push in the opposite direction which you see um in a lot of countries um but the second part of your observation is also true um and and here i think the the story returns to this question of trust um and the politicians who've come to power by undermining trust um because they seem to be the ones who have done the worst or who who've managed the virus the worst in their countries and so that includes donald trump that includes bolsonaro and brazil um you know to some extent it might include putin in russia you know in the countries where people don't trust the authorities where faith in the bureaucracy is very low where faith in science is very low where um where the bureaucracy doesn't function well which is which is another um problem in the united states um you know in countries like that and this is this is invariably countries run by populists who who've run um campaigns against their own states against their own systems um it's been very hard to convince people to make the behavioral changes that are needed in order to keep the virus under control so you know i i agree with your question you know it's not a it's not an accident that both trump and bolsonaro have have had a lot of trouble controlling the virus because they're both people who don't like to listen to experts who don't want to hear you know bad news from scientists um and who don't like you know who's whose whole modus operandi is about undermining legitimate trustworthy sources of information um which they need to do in order to peddle the conspiracy theories that have brought them to power so you know that was a that you know there there are a lot of different answers to this i think as the as we go on in the system i think we'll find you know a lot of variation in what happens in different countries let me remind our listeners and those watching uh that they too can you can be part of this conversation go to ccga.life.ccga dot live uh type in your question and i'll get to it in just a few moments um are we in an era in which we are seeing a real competition between uh liberal democracy and authoritarianism and a more global scale if you go back to 1989 so take take 10 years before your party uh the the wave of democratization i think it was the third uh democratic wave sam samuel huntington uh talked about uh was was sweeping the globe since then we've seen a counter reaction both within our democracies and among authoritarian states russia china saudi arabia turkey becoming more and more uh authoritarian and offering themselves as a as a more effective more capable model to uh to democracy should we think about what is happening inside the societies that you're that you're been talking about is something that's happening globally that we have a real competition between uh democracy and authoritarianism and it isn't very clear yet who's going to come out on top so certainly there is a real competition and some of the authoritarians have been dedicating themselves to pursuing this competition for some years now even before we noticed that that's what they were doing i mean i do think that the um you know the russian state has set itself up or i should say the kremlin not because this is not true of all russians the kremlin has constructed a sort of world view whereby um its main goal is to show its people constantly how democracy has failed and how authoritarianism has succeeded and also has set itself as a set of foreign policy goals the undermining of the democratic and western clubs and institutions you know the european union nato um you know the democratic systems in in in particular european countries um the russians have supported through disinformation campaigns or sometimes through money and other kinds of support um anti-western anti-european you know anti-nato anti-american political parties all over europe um and so they have been pursuing a strategy that's designed to undermine democracy for you know for i would say at least a decade um it's only recently that we noticed that they were doing this but it is it is certainly the way that they think um and then i think increasingly yes i think increasingly the chinese also see us as not just kind of economic competitors but really ideological competitors and vice versa um and so i do think we are moving into a world where there are different kinds of authoritarianism that are posing themselves as seeking to gain allies seeking to put you know present themselves as an alternative to liberal democracy as more efficient than liberal democracy or or is you know in other ways better or appealing to leaders of authoritarian states and china is offering its um its um some of its internet control technology to other countries um some of its ai capabilities to other countries to help other authoritarian leaders um stay in power so i mean there's absolutely a competition going on even if americans don't always want to know that i mean having said that you know returning to your previous question about the virus one of the interesting things about the way the world is divided in terms of so far at least who's done well and who's done badly over the virus is that it's had very little to do with who is a democracy and who is a dictatorship and everything to do with who had as i say who had an efficient bureaucracy and whose political system created feelings of trust so who did well you know it was germany south korea taiwan you know who did badly the united states and brazil i mean those are all democracies um so you know so the you know what the success of states may you know may have may be related to other things but but you know agreed there isn't there is an ideological competition going on and i think it's going to grow will grow more intense in the coming years let me go to some of the questions on online and uh first one i have is here how will the rise of and you you hinted at that in a minute ago already how will the rise of the liberal democracies in the west impact the relevance and effectiveness of international organizations like nato and the european union so very often um in sort of so-called liberal democracies are very often led by authoritarian nationalists who by definition don't like international institutions because those institutions can can curb their power can question some of the things that they're doing um particularly the democratic clubs that like the european union that have rules about um you know about you know how the independence of the dictionary for example or free press um so yes i do think they will increasingly come into into they will clash with those institutions i mean it's happening all the time um how that will come out is unclear there there are beginning to be voices inside europe saying we should throw out countries that aren't democracies from europe um and then there are others who are pragmatic who say no we should keep people inside the tent and continue the arguments i don't you know i can't i can't give you a prediction right now of how it will turn out but yes i do think um that you know the nationalists will clash with international organizations because by definition um they have different interests uh and just pushing a little further i mean we do this this issue became a big issue in the uh negotiations for the new budget uh that the european union just after four and a half days concluded in which the question of adherence to the rule of law specifically uh hungary and poland being uh seen as the as the key targets of that was a key issue on whether or not the european union would use the political muscle that it had or its economic muscle uh to try to get these countries to align and yet that didn't quite seem to come out in the way it's a little it's a little uh unclear how it how it came out but but do you think these organizations can fight back and can become effective tools to deal with countries that are taking in a liberal authoritarian nationalism away from uh where the organization uh is and has been so certainly so the what the european union essentially did was it kicked the question down the road a little bit there are now some conditionality mechanisms inside the inside the agreements that say they can you know i don't know not distribute some kinds of money if they believe it's going to be abused but but it's not it's not entirely clear yet how that will work um you know the problem is i think that most of these organizations weren't really set up to do this um certainly nato was not you know nato has had non-democracies as its members in the past um and will probably go on doing so in the future i mean nato faces i think some deeper challenges down the road about if it's not a democratic you know it's no longer a club of democracies or would-be democracies then what is it um and that's a that's a separate question but even the european union which does require its members to be democratic doesn't have a mechanism in its treaty to kick people out or it doesn't you know when the when the when it was founded it you know it wasn't it was assumed that everybody inside the club would remain democratic and the idea that some states would cease to be didn't come out i mean i i think um you know i think down the road this will grow as an issue and in particular it will grow because because the european union shares um you know you know these nations share so much because they share a single market i mean if for example in poland people no longer feel that the judiciary is independent that will cause trouble not just for polls but for european companies and businesses and people who are working in poland and who need you know who need to rely on the court system as well um and it may be that it will be the clash will come you know when there's an irresolvable case or when um when um you know when you know when when the the market itself falls apart i mean i i think we're still the the real clashers are still to come and they um they may be quite unpleasant um uh some opinion polls have suggested that the younger generations in our democracies are less uh supportive of uh democracy or less worried uh about its disappearance than others or is that something you do you see a generational issue here uh that may be emerging or you think that is over uh overblown in fact that the future you in fact you end your your book with another party in 2019 when you uh where the younger generation is part of it you you have a slightly you know it's a more positive view in the sense that things uh seem from that generational perspective to move in the right direction how do you see the generations play out so i'll answer that question in two ways first of all i think it's very irresponsible to be a pessimist even though i kind of i naturally am one i sort of instinctively pessimistic i've spent a lot of my life writing books about awful things i mean it's just you know it's part of the sort of par for the course but it's irresponsible because it's unfair to younger people whose lives are still ahead of them and who want to create something and who want to feel optimistic about the future um and there are a lot of really you know i i know in my children's generation in students that i've taught and you know other younger people that i run across now and you know professionally um there are so many talented um younger people out there who i you know who could very well um you know improve the world and i want them to do it i don't want to cast a paul over their efforts i mean i do think that there is a generational change in that i mean um you know we are now you know the people who are now coming up into adulthood are now people who not only don't remember the second world war which you know you and i don't remember but don't remember the cold war um and so don't remember what were the themes and unifying causes that once held the west together that once made democracy seem like the obvious political system um and you know it may be that those because they don't remember that themselves that um they they don't find the shattering of it or the breaking a part of it as traumatic as we do um and it may be that they need they will have to you know you know if there is going to be another confrontation or another kind of competition between democracy and autocracy it may be that they have to discover rediscover some of those values for themselves um so so i would say that um yeah i would say i would say that they there is a generational change and i hope that it doesn't mean um you know that it's not going to be bad for our system but that it will rejuvenate it well i mean clearly the this is the people in their 20s and uh their experience very different from ours they went through 9 11 two failed wars and uh and now two economic crises uh and an endemic that in some places haven't been held well so it's not that surprising if they were to say i'm not sure whether this system is really working for me uh that way but you're right we should all be optimistic and and i'll ask my pessimistic question at the very end uh to together one one of the questions uh that is being asked as regards a a op-ed by gary hart uh in the new york times today where he says there are newly discovered documents that authorize extraordinary presidential powers in the case of a national emergency um the question is is whether we should hold hearings uh but i i actually want to push it in slightly different direction though more than happy for you to answer that how worried should we be than in a democracy uh executives have extraordinary power and if they if the norms get shattered about how that power is used that in fact you very quickly can mis abuse power we see it in certain ways what's happening in federal policing um but a whole variety of other ways how worried should we be about those kinds of issues in the united states or frankly in other parts of the countries that you've uh yet you've looked at uh the the misuse of power and uh and in fact the the walking away from democratic norms so our constitution was set up by men who were worried that the president would abuse his power i mean that was one of the prime concerns of the people who wrote it um and although it's a little creaky now and there are some elements from the 18th century that maybe we should think about um looking at again it is you know one of the one of the you know central advantages of the u.s constitution as opposed to some others is that it does put in place these um checks and balances that are supposed to restrain executive power for exactly that reason so that the president is not a king the president is not exempt from investigation the president is meant to be blocked and checked by congress and by the courts um and actually we've seen even in recent days that the courts do check the president and can check the president um and you know that's been a so in that sense not all norms have been broken um i think the unexpected element of the last couple of years has been the degree to which congress um and in particular the republican senate have refused to check the president even when he has indulged in or engaged in some very obvious abuses of power um you know you know if you just look if you turn um turn back and remember what the impeachment hearings were about um that was about the president abusing the tools of american foreign policy so american military aid to a foreign country in order to blackmail a foreign government to launch a fake investigation of his political opponent um it's kind of unprecedented way for an american president to treat you know taxpayers money and again money that was meant to be used for a foreign policy cause um for personal gain or personal use um and yet you know the the the senate the republicans in the senate did not see fit um even to hold hearings um about about whether that was um whether that was illegal or improper or immoral or or unconstitutional um and so in that sense we you know if there has been a failure um in the constitutional system it the failure lies somewhere um in the republican party and you know i speak as you know i voted republican for many years you can call me an ex-conservative i haven't been a conservative recently it's true um but but i think the um you know what's happened to the republican party and what's happened to the it's it's leadership and i mean i mean at the very highest level i'm not talking about all republicans or all voters or all conservatives um i still think there's a absolutely legitimate and important role for conservative thinkers and and voters in in american politics absolutely but there is something that has happened at the very highest end of the republican party that is that is worrying um and that is what i think has allowed this abusive executive power um to take place and i'm i'm hoping that voters will notice this and react to it in the in the fall um a question that that absolutely leads me to to observe uh something that you wrote in the book you met with a uh a greek uh historian who uh i believe and uh don't quote me on it correct uh exactly but i think said something like the exception was the liberalism and a period rather than the the authoritarianism that we're seeing now so a question uh it being asked here is is do you think that it's possible that authoritarianism will always be with us in a tug of war with liberalism or is there a historic history historical teleology of progress that you see is the end of history still a possibility uh if put it in frank fukuyama's terms or do you think this struggle will always go on and in fact more times than not liberalism may be on the losing end of that struggle so i think that one of the great mistakes we've all made over the last several decades and i say this in the book is to imagine that american history is a story of constant progress because if it's a story of constant progress and everything is always going to you know get better or at least you know be fine more or less then we don't have to worry about it right and we don't have to put any effort into making sure that our democracy is healthy and making sure that it it's still functional um i mean look history is circular it is not a story of progress um you know the human race has gone forwards and backwards um um many democracies have fallen apart and become dictatorships in fact most of them have um throughout history um and they have done so in recent memory um so uh you know venezuela is is a recent one um but you don't have to go back to the 1930s as many people do to to talk about it um so um you know so i would urge people not to think like that and to always keep in the front of your brain the the possibility that we could lose our democracy and that therefore um we all need to remain engaged in it and concerned about it and um aware that you know it's in some ways it hasn't met the challenges of the present um and i that's part of the purpose of writing this book was to remind people of that you know america is in that sense not an exception you know you know democracy has ended in other places authoritarian political movements have succeeded in other places they could succeed here too you're muted with that sobering uh statement uh and thank you so much for joining us uh we've been talking about an apple bomb's uh latest great book twilight of democracy the seductive lure of authoritarianism you can buy it at our local books seller by uh either clicking on the link in the chat function or going to our website and thanks so much for being with us it's wonderful to have you i hope that we will continue to come have you back in chicago next time in person on your next book which uh will lay out how liberalism triumphed over uh over delivered the seductive lure of authoritarianism and thanks so much for joining us thank you thank you and everybody you support your local bookstores thanks well appreciate it take care bye

Channel: Chicago Council on Global Affairs

Views: 3,389

Rating: 4.4444447 out of 5

Keywords: chicago council, chicago council on global affairs, foreign affairs, think tank, Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum, Authoritarianism, polarization, democracy, social media, government, liberal, europe, Pulitzer Prize, The Atlantic, Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Washington Post, Economist, Foreign Affairs, Wall Street Journal, historian, geopolitical, economic change, world history, poland, hungary, spain, Donald Trump, Republicans, Democrats, political, propaganda, politicians

Id: eYbr2MZu72U

Length: 45min 9sec (2709 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 27 2020