Anne Applebaum: Twilight of Democracy - The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

so good evening and welcome everybody to our transatlantic tuesday um please make sure that you leave your microphones turned off to ensure the best sound quality possible if you'd like to leave your cameras on you can do so my name is federico schulte and i'm the director of the kyle schwartz house and i have the pleasure of welcoming our distinguished guests tonight at our transatlantic tuesday series we started online in january and pretty much continued every tuesday since then um welcome and applebaum delighted to be here thank you and you're not i thought you would join us from poland but you are in washington dc so this is a transatlantic connection tonight um that's that's great we've been hoping to invite you for a long time for a program to fry book and thought maybe poland and the french border it is far but it's not as far as dc but i'm glad it's happening now because we get to discuss this really elegant and thought-provoking book you've written i'd like to introduce you briefly uh to our guests and applebaum is a staff writer for the atlantic previously she's written for over 17 years a column for the washington post she's written for many other major american magazines as well and in the 90s she worked in the uk starting at the economist and then working at the spectator for a number of years she's published three critically acclaimed and award-winning books on eastern european and soviet history red famine iron curtain and gulag which she received the pulitzer prize for she lives in poland and is married to the polish politician and former polish foreign minister radislav shikorsky i was now part of the european parliament and tonight we get to discuss our really quite extraordinary book twilight of american democracy the seductive lure of authoritarianism which was published by double day last summer in the us and in britain by penguin with a slightly different title um and just a couple of days ago it came out in the german translation by jurg neui bauer in ziedla falak and looks a bit harsh fun and uh i do think this is the german premiere for for a book talk you're doing i think your book has been featured i mean i've seen it in draisa deutschland funk and everywhere but um i think we get the pleasure to be the first ones that right i think it's i think this is definitely one of the first ones yes i have i have talked to some other german audiences in the last few months but this probably the first one following the german publication yes that's great so no pressure um i'd like to make sure that we cover a bit of ground together and then i'll see how much time we have and try to include some of your questions that you can pose in the chat if you'd like to and that i will moderate to an apple baum applebaum we have um a little less than 60 minutes so i'd like to get started and lead us straight into the book uh the book is filled with personal stories of people and applebaum once knew well um and might have considered friends or considered friends and who've left the central right conservative playing field to start out and uh what seems like almost different or a detached leak of the far right conspiracy theorists building autocratic systems or being part of existing autocratic systems um i was going to say the novel it's not a novel it's very good writing it's very strong storytelling as well starts with a very remarkable and memorable scene that keeps the whole book together new year's eve a new year's eve party and applebaum and her husband were hosting in rural poland in 99 going into the new millennium celebrating with friends from london moscow the us and from the polish countryside as well and many of the friends there were journalists some were politicians or diplomats and all as she said lumped together under the loose term of anti-communists and conservatives and now 20 years later as an applebaum continues and says i would now cross the street to avoid some of the people who were at my new year's eve party they in turn would not only refuse to enter my house they would be embarrassed to admit they'd even been there in fact about half the people who were at the party would no longer speak to the other half and in the course of of this book a selection of the guests from that party and a few other characters are revisited by an applebaum either in person or in reflection from afar and while musing about or maybe more sharply analyzing the people who have wandered off to the far right the readers learned about the countries parties or systems these people are now functioning and maybe in the media think tanks or in-state institutions it's on the one hand a very personal and thus i think without making the claims to it but a very universal book more so than a straight political essay would be and maybe we'll get the chance to talk about this pretty unique format in the end as well thank you again for giving us the opportunity to speak with you today um you cover countries in this book that you either lived in like england or you live in poland or you stem from the us or that you've visited and done research in like spain and hungary um and you know this is i think you have such an interesting international cv that is not often obtained by many intellectuals like there are more people in the corporate world that travel around that much maybe there are diplomats that do so but they stay in their bubble so you've lived in poland for how long more than 25 years um so so it depends what you mean by lived in um i i've i've i've you know i first moved to poland in the winter of 1988 which was right before the collapse of communism um and the first story that i wrote about from there was um it was it was actually a sort of remarkable moment she arrived in furs and you know kind of cossack boots and you know um went went shopping in a what was then you know a unique free market a sort of open shopping you know um farmers market in central warsaw and generally said things are changing and actually very soon after that things did begin to change um i haven't lived there the whole time since then i've gone back and forth mostly between poland and britain and then later on between poland and the u.s but i've really been attached to the country one way or another since then so um so that's actually more than 30 years um that i've either either lived there or had property there or you know of course my husband's polish um and so i i you know somehow feel connected to it for a very long time and i'm wondering about that that polish perspective that you can uh can uh can bring to to the table here i mean you've written a lot about uh poland for for mainly a u.s audience or eastern europe as well but i'm wondering about that you saw the rise of the law and justice party um before trump was elected as well and did you maybe did your polish experience inform your way of looking us looking at u.s politics maybe in 2015 as well before the us election and uh were you imagining that something similar would be possible in the u.s so yes i should say that um i you know i i became aware of the rise of a new kind of disinformation and of um you know a more powerful form of far-right and and extreme politics because of being in poland and i was aware of it both because i understood the changes there that i think really begin as i explained in the book a few years earlier in about 2010 following this plane crash of the president which had a big shattering effect on on polish politics um i then watched very close i was very somehow very closely involved in because i was at the time writing a book about ukraine um the experience of watching the russian invasion of ukraine then trying to understand the western reaction to it understanding how russian disinformation worked and trying to shape views of that reaction even actually as a as a participant i was you know i was involved in a lot of television and other debates at that time about what was going on there and that was one of my first clues about the power of new forms of disinformation um to confuse people um and and it was really with that background and with an understanding of what could happen and and how that i started watching with really a lot of horror what was going on in the us because so much of it was familiar and so much of it seemed like patterns i knew from other places and so many of the tactics um that were used by the trump campaign were ones that i knew you know from from from other places and times that i um you know i i felt obligated to write about it and actually all through 2016 um you know i i know that i was one of the first people to start talking about the links between trump and russia not in any conspiratorial way but just in the way that the trump campaign was using russian-style propaganda and russian-style um tactics uh in order to beat um in order to beat hillary clinton and of course at that time it seemed a little obscure and i you know i i now wish i'd written it rather more definitively you know i was very tentative about how i wrote about this because i didn't want to seem insane um but i do think that there was a turning point and um it did happen sometime you know sometime in the first part of the of the second decade of the 21st century when um extremist movements learned how to use new social media tools this is part of the story of course not all the toy story um and you could see that pattern repeating itself in lots of places um so i do think that having lived through it in poland made me made it easier for me to recognize and to even predict some of the things happening in the u.s i mean just for another example um the way in which the russian hack of the democratic national committee if you remember this this release of lots of emails most of which were completely innocuous you know people making appointments with one another and so on um and had some frank conversations between people and the way the those emails were then released to wikileaks and then they were published online and then there was a kind of feeding frenzy where people tried to interpret all kinds of things about them and they were somehow used to scar the candidate even though she had very little to do with them was exactly the tactic that i'd seen used in poland a few years earlier um and since it was directed at my husband and directed his body i knew it very well um in that case it was it was tapes were equally innocuous equally equally i mean there was no there was no corruption involved it was just the sound of people speaking privately and i understood from that how the public the public use of private speech can be used to discredit people even when there's no crime committed or there's nothing you know nothing nothing bad has happened and so what having having watched it in poland and then seeing it repeat itself in the us was very you know yeah it was very it was very informative so yeah i do i do think it helped me see things and maybe also just the longer you know the years i spent writing books about the soviet union made me more hyper aware of the rhetoric of authoritarianism the use of phrases like enemies of the people the way in which um political parties that attack you know the system as opposed to competing with their enemies over ideas can be used to subvert democracy um this is something i knew from other from from history as well um you name one of these tactics and i think it's uh with timothy snyder you call them uh the middle-sized lies that the authoritarian systems are working with can you give an example or explain what the medium or middle-sized lie is so i was trying to think of a way to describe how the use of a certain kind of big falsehood functions um and what i meant was when i say the medium-sized lie these aren't normal lies if you will have you know these aren't politicians promising something they can't deliver for example nor are they big lies this isn't a huge ideology with you know predictions of the past and a whole economic theory attached to it this isn't fascism it's not communism um these are these are stories that are used to undermine public trust the one that i talk about in the book was the one i just referred to which is the um there was a plane crash in poland in 2010 killed the president um the president was then he was a different political party from the government um and he was a member of the law and justice party which is now the ruling party um all of the evidence that's ever been collected about the acts about the plane crash has shown that it was an accident um nevertheless it became very useful for the law and justice party and particularly its leader who happened to be the brother of the president um it it was useful for them to turn this into a conspiracy theory about how unnamed forces whether it's sometimes it was russians sometimes it was other polls sometimes it was the polish government of the of the time had been conspiring to make the plane crash they never had any proof of it even since they've been running the government for however many years it's been now six years they've never come up with an alternate theory um they don't have any evidence nevertheless this crash story and the implication that there was something that had been what you know was was used by them as a way of gaining power and and what's interesting of course is how this worked so the story if you if you believe that you know the president was murdered and he was murdered possibly with the connivance of of the polish government that's it that's a very um that's a very powerful story um because what it means is that everyone is lying to you the polish government the parliament the the the the police the secret services the you know the the all of the media the scientists you know the the the aerospace in this accident it it suddenly implies that all these people are lying um and once you believe that all these people are lying then you have to ask yourself well you know what is the what's the value of this system how can i believe anything if they've lied about something so important as who murdered the president and so although it appeared like a conspiracy theory something crazy something like a third of polls eventually came to believe in it and i think that was the first step in moving people away from reality politics and towards and into something quite different for those of you who know u.s politics birtherism and naming this was the conspiracy theory that barack obama was born somewhere else he was born in kenya and therefore he was an illegitimate president had a very very similar function and so what you know again what was birtherism it meant that the president is illegitimate and everyone is covering it up so the president white house congress police cia you know the courts everyone is covering up this fact that he shouldn't really be our president um and again it's something 20 to 30 percent of americans believe that to do if you believed that then you were much more likely to follow a political leader who told you that the whole system was corrupt because you know evidently you know we'd had one illegitimate president then therefore the system you know must you know it must be all fake um and these kinds of me these kinds of lies these major conspiracy theories that are used to um use to unmore people and to convince them that that the political system is is is dysfunctional um you know have been used in a number of ways i mean a similar one in hungary is the soros conspiracy theory that george soros is secretly trying to un overthrow the hungarian state he's trying to destroy hungary by importing muslims into the country so that he can uh so that so that hungarians will disappear eventually so so each one of these kinds of theories um has the effect of making people distrust the political system and they work um and it's always a it's always a you know it's a bad idea to underestimate them i know that in germany they're one or two um i mean you know you know they're they're conspiracy theorists there too and i know it's right now it's a much smaller percentage of the population but it's a force that really should never be underestimated because again if you believe that the whole system is corrupt if you believe that the president is illegitimate if you believe the president was murdered if you believe that um you know angela merkel is locking down the economy because she has a secret plan to i don't know to to undermine germany you know if you believe one of those things then you are much likely to follow a auto you know an authoritarian or an anti-democratic leader at some point in the future we had a we had a talk here by two specialists on conspiracy theorists talking about kuwanon and they said it's not necessarily the number that the number of people has increased that believes in conspiracy theories but the people who do believe in them believe in them more strongly so there's a deeper rift although i do believe that more people believe in it i think it start like birtherism is a really important point breaking point also for a like starting brittle breaking point for parts of the republican party and then if we look at what's happening now it's stop the steel is um of course another another lie that is yes i mean if you think about them they're they're both very similar in that they are attacks on the democratic system so the president obama was illegitimate not that he's wrong or i disagree with him or i think his healthcare policy is bad he's actually illegitimate the system is has failed because we have an illegitimate president that leads you quite naturally into a belief that the electoral system is a lie it doesn't work it can be manipulated um and then once again joe biden is not really the president he's a legitimate so these are these are linked ideas yeah let's talk about who is helping to spread the the middle sized lies you uh that's another uh theme that runs through the book the theme of the of the clerk or the clerks the enablers of the autocratic systems or movements the writers thinkers intellectuals that maybe started out with i don't know purest intentions but nonetheless feed the autocratic uh regimes um can you explain the term with all its connotations and maybe uh we can move into some of the motivations uh behind this kind of writing or enabling that the clerks do like you mentioned different forms of nostalgia for for the restoring of a former world or maybe even personal or national disappointment that comes into play so yes um the i i used the word clerks which i which i borrowed from a french writer julian bender who was writing the first half of the 20th century and he was trying to describe you know slightly different related phenomenon of intellectuals who had become spokespeople for extremist political parties um and he was writing about france at this time and and and some other europeans um and he was talking about them being both attracted to far left and the far right and he made a famous prediction namely that you know this was all going to end badly and and probably in a war and of course you know that that's what happened um and his and his book well you know while it's about a different period was helpful to me to understand um reasons why intellectuals critics you know people whose job is to be skeptical might become attracted to extremist politics um and it you know it also helped me understand some of the people around me who i you know who who i saw had had had felt that kind of attraction um and then you're right and then the the book doesn't have there's no single explanation i'm i don't give you one theory that will explain everything um which i think has frustrated some of the readers of the book and some of the reviewers um instead i i give a range of explanations and a few and i examine a few people's life stories just to just to just to give an illustration um and as you and you're right i mean the the probably the thing that unites everybody who i write about is this as you say a sense of disappointment um and sometimes it's personal some people felt that um you know there are people who felt that the uh you know the you know post-communist democratic poland hadn't rewarded them enough they were you know they'd been activists in the opposition in the 1980s and somehow they didn't get to be what they wanted to be in the 20 years following that um and they you know they and they you know and they found radical niches to attach themselves um in order to in order to change that calculus some people were were it was more philosophical some people were disappointed with their countries um and i i write a little bit about for example um a philosopher who i really admired for a lot of reasons um roger scrutin who i who i knew quite well who died about a year ago who was a um who was a someone who had become very disappointed and dismayed by modern england and he felt that it no longer lived up to the wasn't the same kind of country that it had been a certain kind of english way of life english values had been lost um and and and you know and when you believe when you come to believe that your country is you know is dead or dying which which roger did believe that's another thing that pushes you in the direction of radicalism because if it's dead or dying then all that you know anything that you can do however radical or extreme might be a way to save it you know if you if you if you you know if the system is that bad then the only thing you can do is wreck it um and start again with something else um and and actually roger was really one of the philosophers who inspired um a lot of the brexiteers although a lot of the brexiteers had different motives too as i as i also explained in the book um so i think those are you know and you know people who people who were disappointed people who were profoundly distressed either by the state of their country um or in some cases by their own lives i think those those are the people who who who begin to find very radical politics attractive i think you um you mentioned the word that people were looking for the rupture and i think that's what all these movements have in common and they have that i mean that's a term from the christian evangelical movement that they're looking isn't that the word they're looking for the rupture or that's uh the the moment where everything turns around the kind of apocalypse that that's a little different i mean that's the rapture that's the rapture ends and the messiah comes so i think that's i think we're not i'm not quite talking about that but it perfectly fits but but there is a there is a there is a there is an idea i mean and you know this is not new i mean the bolsheviks had the same idea which is that if we smash up everything um the society that we build following that will be better and so the idea that you know what washington really needs is for someone to come in and wreck it and that that will then make everything better um yeah this is this this is where that idea came from and there was a i mean i don't think um you know trump himself was never you know was it was a you know was a cynic and a con man and so he didn't think that wakes up but there were certainly intellectuals around trump who thought that way you know we know he's you know we know he's a con man we know he doesn't know what he's doing we know he has no experience but that's why we want him in charge because he's going to smash it all up and once it's all smashed up then that will be the moment when we can somehow come in and take over um and that was the um and that was the um you know that was their rationale for supporting them and even many very clever people supported him on those grounds yeah if we if we go back to the brexit for a moment and maybe rose johnson who is of course a very unique character and you know him personally and you can say that he used to be one of the clerks writing up um the the struggle of the european union in in in britain and finding these uh these witty titles and uh you also use the word tall tales instead of lies which i think is very uh finely chosen because it seems like it's um you know a privileged person tells a tall tale instead of a lie and it's and it's fine and i and i feel like where is is there disappointment in in the character of boris johnson or is this kind of like a bit of a sick joke in which the need for witty banter turns it to brexit eventually so boris i would not call a cler i would put him in a slightly different category so i don't think he's an intellectual who um you know who who was who was attracted to you know radical destruction um i think he he is somebody who is you know just supremely self-interested and what he saw was a moment when he could use this radical movement which had you know uh you know um you know which had you know a lot of grassroots support that he could use it to become head of his party um i don't think he particularly believed in brexit or thought that it had reasons to think it would be a success in fact i know he didn't think that because as i say in the book i i heard him say exactly the opposite a few years just before um he was he was he was always he used criticism of the eu as a you know as a tool to become pillar and to and to and to become you know a figure you know in part of the in part of the tory party was deeply committed to it in any way um i think he was surprised when the referendum went the way that he whether it did um and i think that ever since then he realized that his whole career and you know the way he's remembered by history and you know and everything else then depended on him x somehow executing brexit so he then was stuck with um with doing it but was he some i don't think he was a true believer um of any kind um tall tales is interesting i mean so the boris is just just to say i think i do say in the book a couple of times that he did lie um but and he's certainly been lying a lot recently um but what he did regarding the eu is a little bit different um if you look at his you know if you look at the kind of journalism that he wrote in the in the 90s when he was the he was the daily telegraphs correspondent in brussels he very often took a story that had a grain of truth so there would be some eu decision or there would be some um something would have you know there would be some some law passed and he would then elaborate on it so that it you know so that it turned it into you know brussels is banning you know british buses or something you know he would he would turn the story into something that was more crowd-pleasing um and actually that method of writing um in which you you know in which you take a story and manipulate it um is something that is now so common that we've all lost um you know we've all lost our ability to detect it but but but he but he was very good at not at kind of dissembling without lying for a long time um i think since he's been prime minister he's he now is very often just simply untruthful but anyway just just to just to just to conclude what you said yeah well if we uh if we continue on that train of thought about like a truthfulness in today's politics and in media i'd like to revisit like you know the reagan era for germany is of course vastly important because it is uh part of reunification and we know uh reagan saying mr gorbachev tear down this wall uh which john corbloom wrote for him who's still important for us here in germany the the former ambassador um but and and the reagan era in your book is the departure departure point as well for for the sake of structure of the book it really works well and i guess because of real conviction as well that it was uh a better time back then but if we look at like if you look back in hindsight now didn't the reagan era pave the way for of course some of the rhetoric we know that for the trump administration with the slogans that are that are um referring to reagan or simply borrowed and but also uh with the giving up of the fairness doctor doctrine under reagan when it comes to broadcasting and um you know isn't isn't that are aren't we harvesting some of the decisions from back then today yeah so this is a complicated i mean this is a question that historians run into all the time i mean which from what era led to led to which um i mean look the reagan-era conservative party i mean republican party sorry um just like the reigning red democratic party was a big coalition and there were a lot of people in it for different reasons and in fact the let me make it a broader statement the the anti-communist um cold war um coalition in america was a very broad coalition and people were in it for different reasons and some people were reaganites or cold warriors because they worried about raison d'etat and soviet nuclear weapons and um and the division of germany and therefore um you know therefore they were inside that camp some people were cold warriors because they were very religious and they believed that marxism was atheist and you know that's why we have to fight against it because it's you know we need to make the world you know a more religious place um some people were in it because they believed in human rights and democracy and you know organizations like amnesty international grow out of that time you know in that and that and that era as well um what happened after the end of communism after 1989 and especially after the soviet union broke up in 1991 is that that coalition began to discover that actually not all of us had that much in common you know actually the human rights people and the religious people didn't really agree about much else or the the raison d'etat people then split into different camps you know um because they then you know they then saw the us's and western foreign policy in different ways and so the big group that was that that was sort of together no longer made sense and if you look back at the reagan era of course you can find um seeds of things that have gone wrong in the present so you can find um some of the you know the so-called southern strategy of the republican party which was to without saying so to try and reach whites in the south in the southern states you know this was a you know feature of the reagan ear and also of other other republican presidents you can find as you say the destruction of the the of the fairness doctrine which was one of the things that kept media more centrist in america um but you know you can also find other things and so some of the things that you know we like about the president also find in the past so i i don't think you can um i don't think you can you can draw straight lines i mean you know george w bush became president um and as somebody who was very much committed to um racial equality he had a special program you know he has special you know spent a lot of time thinking about africa which no president really has since even even obama um he had a big you know he was very keen on eradicating aids in africa he spent a lot of money on that that was some of that came from his evangelical background um and so you can find um see different kinds of policies in the past so yes of course you're right that you can find you know stories of the reagan era that that that echo into the present but you can also find you know the origins of a lot of human rights organizations in that same era and in some of the same ways of thinking um so i'm i'm reluctant to blame reagan for everything although of course i wouldn't excuse reagan either i mean of course he's um there were a lot of bad things that happened during his presidency and just as there were a lot of as i said many of the people who were part of that reaganite coalition have gone in very radically different directions um i'm i'm wondering about like that i think around the time of your or i think fox news was started in 1996 i think by rupert murdoch and roger ailes came in and i think it it must have been an interesting talking point for you at that new year's eve party as well in 99 what do you remember how you were watching the growth of fox news back then what you were you were not talking about fox news at my new year's eve 1999 um no i mean i i don't i don't think fox news was big on my radar in 1999. i mean you know fox news for a long time um it was conservative without seeming insane i mean maybe i you know and this i would have to you're asking me a question that i haven't thought about very deeply i mean i would not have to go back and watch broadcasts from the late 90s and early 2000s but um but i didn't i didn't initially perceive it as a as an authoritarian news station which i do perceive it as now and even if you look at somebody like laura ingram who i do write about in the book if you look at the kinds of things she was saying and writing about 10 years ago she's now a fox leading fox news host for those for those who don't know her um she wasn't that far away from the mainstream or whatever you want to call it she wasn't you know she had she would have been able to talk to democrats in a civilized way and there would have been a you know her views on foreign policy weren't off the cliff crazy um and but there there is something that's happened to fox news i think you know in the last five to maybe even ten years um which has led it in a radically different direction and you can even see i mean you know i've i used to be on fox news occasionally i mean they would invite me as a commentator and i would never be invited now um um so there's a and that's true of lots of um you know there are lots of moderates and centrists and even you know democrats who would regularly have appeared on fox news who've been you know who've been who've been banished so it's become something you know under the influence of trump frankly and under the influence of the of the modern republican party um and because they've worked out that this kind of hyper emotional um you know you know super bias broadcasting wins them a lot of viewers because you know and so for commercial reasons obviously um i think it's become something much more extreme than it was um but again i mean i've i've not i've not thought about it and i haven't gone to look at what fox news was saying in 2001. um i would i would have to do that before being able to fully answer the question but that that already is an answer so it's not that it wasn't that relevant at the time but i think we i'm i just uh someone forwarded something in my uh in my social media feed to me about media literacy today can i tell an opinion piece apart from news reporting and if we apply uh such a standard to place like fox news where were lost of course and at the same time we're living in a time where lindsay graham can give absolutely like a lunatic appearances in interviews and talk about dark magic that's uh that the former president has maybe over him and still keep his seat and uh i i am wondering like where where we are concerning truthfulness and liability position like liable positions that politicians take on uh reliable positions that the public can rely on as well it's not a real i mean it's it's hard it's not even a real question it's just a frustration well it's not a real question i mean it's the it's the central problem of our age um what do we do about the huge overwhelming quantity of information how do we find our way through it um who are the authorities that we should trust you know whose views should you believe um and yeah you know and there isn't a again there isn't a there isn't a single satisfying answer i mean i've i've been working recently i've i've just written something that appeared in the atlantic um a few couple weeks ago about how we might think about regulating the internet by which i don't mean censoring the internet i mean regulating it um so that um you know it's you know so so that it was in it was a it was a positive contribution to democracy rather than something that undermined democracy and that's one of the things we might um think about doing but but i mean ultimately you know a lot of this is a question of trust i mean you have to if you care about um you know if you you know if you if you care about finding the truth you know you need to you know you know you should you know you need to look at what is it that you're reading is what you're reading self-correcting you know because everybody writes everybody makes mistakes especially now with the speed at which news is produced and um you know you you know are you are you reading publications that correct themselves are you reading publications that present you know broad range of views or or give you different perspectives on a current problem um you know are you reading a publication that where they're editors and where they do fact checking and where they at least seek to make sure that something is true even though again as i said everybody makes mistakes um and and i mean i think nowadays one of the one of the qualities of being a citizen is being able is reading like that um seeking out you know better edited and better um and better researched writing which um you know which is you know but but i i concede it's one of the most it's one of the most difficult problems that we have i think i really want to recommend that article in the atlantic it's called how to put out democracy's dumpster fire and it's going to appear in the april issue and and it's going to be in our library right behind me as soon as it's april um and i think the book has a certain certain gloom about it but i think that article doesn't and it's really offering a lot of perspectives on how algorithms could be regulated how online initiatives could help form a better discourse that i found really uplifting to read i have to say well it was it was actually i mean one of the things that happened after the election was over and we got through january the 6th and all that one of the things i wanted to do was write something positive and and write something that threw many of these arguments forward okay we have this you know we have these enormous problems how can we start to think about fixing them um but of course it's a it's a complicated conversation do you think do you think there's a there's a way back for some people that you write about like that you used to have your party with um is there a way back for them into the more democratic system or back to your dinner table at some point sort of depends who i mean i have plenty of brexiteer friends who i'm still friends with so i mean there you know there were different kinds of breaks in different countries i mean some there's some there's some you know there some trumpists who may eventually conclude that following the president was a mistake there were some um you know some brexiteers who might eventually conclude that was wrong maybe some of the polish far right will come over although i mean there's there's a difference here between these the kinds of people i'm writing about in the book who are usually intellectuals or journalists or kind of political strategists and ordinary voters this is to be clear this is not a book about voters it's not about why people voted for trump some reviewers have wished that it was about that but that's not what it was about um and there's a difference between voters who i think are very good at seeing when that mistakes have been made and and and and seeking to correct them and people who've devoted their lives to a particular political cause i think that gets much harder to walk back from um and whether they will all be able to do it i don't know i mean they may we may wind up with them sticking to it to the bitter end just because as i said boris johnson once he discovered that brexit was his destiny um and that he was attached to it forever more he was you know he was he was gonna he was gonna carry it through i and as i said i have no idea what he thinks about it now or whether he how he thinks about it in his head but um he will he you know he he now has it's almost as if he has no choice i mean one of the things that just is an aside that i'm now starting to worry about is that brexit will never end in that the need for the tory party to continually show that uk is good and europe is bad in whatever whether it's in vaccines or in trade or you know may continue to drive the relationship between britain and europe for a long time um which is unfortunate because of course there should be cooperation and of course there should be a joint foreign policy and of course there should be a rational conversation about trade and so on and you know it should consulting but i'm one of the things i'm concerned about is the number of people whose political careers and whose whatever journalistic careers now depend on keeping that struggle going um and for that reason it might last for an unfortunately long time i have i'm gonna include one question from the chat that includes how people are feeling and is related to maybe this um this whole idea also about nostalgia or disappointment how important for understanding the alienation many people feel towards the establishment is the psychological problem that some successful susceptible people feel that they don't receive enough acknowledgement or respect from society at large for one reason or another oh that's i mean that's that's a problem that afflicts people at all levels of society i mean not i mean one of the things one it may even be the only thing about donald trump that was truly authentic you know that was not fake and was not a con and wasn't was not cynical was his sense of personal grievance you know they're talking down to me they don't respect me you know whatever it was the new york elite didn't you know or the you know the journalists uh you know the new york times you know aren't respecting me enough and his sense of grievance that i have been unfairly treated um you know i really won the election but they've stolen it from me or i really you know i'm not being given credit you know this sense was one of the things that i think you know again this is not not not the subject of my book but it's one of the things that did attract a lot of people um both at the high level and and and all the way down through you know through society um that you know people who felt unfairly you know what i'm doing isn't being respected my my achievements aren't acknowledged the kind of job i do isn't favored by whoever by hollywood or by harvard um you know or the kind of person i am isn't favored i mean all these things were all these kinds of people i think found something to be attracted to in trump because it was really this serious grievance that he that he transmitted more than anything else if you listen to his speeches um they're very rambling and and hard to listen to but if you do that theme comes up again and again and again yeah i uh i i also want to we have just a couple of minutes but talk about the form of the book i i really love the american publication and the size of it it's really elegant like it fits into a clutch uh but has kind of the power of a little hand grenade i i find that um i have to say if someone's watching from the german publisher they really should have done the same and uh it has a really uh literary quality to it as well it's a really great read yashar mung said it's like a bee treat i wouldn't necessarily say that but it did remind me of my first lockdown read and i just grabbed about a year ago the book and the brotherhood by iris murdoch and it starts off with a very similar situation it's a reunion of oxford former oxford students they get together at the new york times um ty wrote a reviews about that book lefties in love this is not lefties and love i guess but um but it's a very similar scenario and it's about forces at work where a group of friends is drawn apart by different i think also political ideas basically and um and that was uh that was a nice side note for me while reading it how and i i want to ask you how did it feel daring to write it like this or did you always know that your stories that you can share would have to be told in such a fashion so i mean first of all the book is an essay it's not a big book it's not as i said there's no big thesis that i've proven with lots of data it's just some it's just reflections on people i know and i think the decision to write it which first of all part of it appeared earlier as an article also in the atlantic um but the the original decision to write it was based on the fact that i realized i had lived through something that was important this big intellectual shift you know that and that i had sort of seen it firsthand and i'd seen it happen to people around me um and i felt that it needed an explanation and this isn't the explanation that some 10 years from now historian will write some there will be a historian who writes i know the intellectual history of the second decade of the 21st century and that will be a different book and there will be different points of view and maybe they'll you know my view will be one among many but i felt that i had this ringside seat i had this you know special view of something and i had it in these three in particular in these three countries um in you know in the us and the uk and poland as well as hungary and and spain and and actually even even germany and france where i didn't wind up writing about them but i i saw this something similar happening in all these countries and i felt that because i'd seen this change i could write about it in the first person which i don't normally do i didn't used to do um and that was the that was the reason for it um you know just because there was no honest way for me to write this book as an objective journalist or as a historian you know i'm in the story you know i'm part of it i know the people um you know some of it some of it has affected me in various different ways which i also i also describe in the book um and to pretend that i was some kind of you know unattached outsider would have just been dishonest so i felt that this was the this was i'd seen this thing it was important and i thought the way i could explain it was by talking about things that i remember and reflecting on it reflecting on them and trying to relate them to other stories from other from other eras it's a i think it's a great read and it's a wonderful perspective and i hope you don't mind me saying that you and david frum are the closest we can get on stage closest to a republican we can get on stage because we don't get republicans on stage at this german american institute we've been trying we have around 250 events a year and are always looking for a conservative perspective and it's very very hard to find and so i think this is very important um to hear your point of view and it's been uh very fruitful for everyone and i promise you that we would start five off and i'm doing pretty good i think right right thank you very much next time i hope to be there i i i miss meeting readers and and would love to be in freiburg i will definitely invite you and i want to thank the audience for taking part next time we'll take more questions again and next tuesday please join us tori taussig from harvard university will talk about china and the us and in april we'll talk about george soros and jewish america hari kunzu red pill will be a great reading um thank you very much and applebaum i hope you is it cherry blossom time just about the early the first cherry blossoms are just about coming out yes okay well all the best to you in dc and to your family and um thanks so much best wishes and i hope this terrible pandemic ends quickly so thank you thank you thank you bye-bye

Channel: Carl-Schurz-Haus Freiburg

Views: 795

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Id: 6-nCMllVJ5s

Length: 51min 56sec (3116 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2021