The Twilight of Democracy? with Anne Applebaum and Elif Shafak

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hello i'm diana reich the artistic director of the charleston charleston literary festival join the conversation and i'd like to welcome you from wherever you may be watching transforming the way that the festival is delivered from live appearances to an online version and offering an even stronger more diverse and plentiful series of events is a reflection of our belief that literature in the arts provide a catalyst for dialogue creativity empathy laughter and tears binding communities together we're enormously grateful to all our speakers who've dedicated their time and talents to the festival please buy their books as a way of enhancing the festival experience it's my pleasure to invite you on behalf of my colleagues and board as well as myself to join the conversation we hope that you'll do so in person next november if at all possible charleston in south carolina is a beautiful historic and hospitable town and the charleston to charleston literary festival will definitely be going from strength to strength i'm suzanne director of development for the charleston to charleston literary festival this year more than ever we are so grateful to our generous donors returning and new who've made it possible to offer free sessions to everyone everywhere building a truly international audience there's still time for you to become a donor we're taking donations throughout the month of november so if you would like to become a sponsor and we urge you to do so please contact me using my email on the website thank you hi i'm suzanne director of development for the charleston de charleston literary festival i'm sitting in the beautiful library on the 4th floor of 20 south battery inn in downtown charleston ann applebaum and elise shafak are expert commentators on historic and current social divisions and conflicting interpretations of democracy hot topics all over the world and applebaum's books include the pulitzer prize-winning gulag history iron curtain the crushing of eastern europe 1944-1956 and red famine stalin's war on ukraine anne is a columnist for the atlantic and a senior fellow of the agora institute of the johns hopkins university she lives in britain poland and america elise shafak is an award-winning british turkish writer storyteller academic public speaker and activist her most recent novel is 10 minutes 38 seconds in this strange world she is a passionate advocate for the freedom of speech a twice global ted speaker who received a standing ovation and her current book is how to stay sane in the age of division welcome to an apple bomb and alicia fox session to charleston literary festival based in south carolina uh i know we have a very international digital audience right now and we're also looking forward to receiving questions from you towards the end of our session it gives me immense pleasure to talk to a historian a pluto winning historian a journalist i've been following for a very long time and a public intellectual and applebaum uh and it's very nice to see you we will be talking about anne's recent book which couldn't be more timely which couldn't be more universal twilight of democracy there's so much in this book that i feel that resonates deeply with me as as a writer as a novelist coming from a country like turkey and if i may and i want to start with that feeling i remember in 2017 there was a freedom house report published and it said all across the world 35 countries had been making progress which sounded like good news but the very next paragraph within the same report underlined that 72 countries across the world had been sliding backwards going backwards in a surprising way so shall we start with that with what's happening the rise of this tribalism this populism nativism there are of course differences as you move from one country to another but there are also patterns that you have been decoding so eloquently for such a long time shall we start with that and and also maybe underline the fact that unlike what people assumed especially in late 1990s early 2000s history doesn't always necessarily go forward in a linear progressive way and sometimes people do go backwards countries can make the same mistakes that their great grandparents have made shall we talk about this circular notion of time and history as well sure so thank you elif um i've been a reader of yours for many years and i hope that we'll get around to saying a few words about your book how to stay sane in an age of division which is so parallel to mine i mean it's written in your style and with a different sensibility but um we really hit some of the same issues so um so it was it was it was a pleasure to read you know really the reason i wrote my book was because so many things have been happening over the last four and five years that gave me a sense of deja vu you know things that i'd read about in history books i you know as as as you know and as some of the audience know i spent um a couple of decades writing his books about the history of communism about stalinism about the stalinization of eastern europe after the war and in the course of that one of the things that i had to confront was what is the appeal of the authoritarian state um not just you know we're all we all all of us who are brought up in democracies think automatically that you know dictatorship is bad and so on but we've we forgot that there is also an appeal or a draw of a of one-man rule um of of a of a public sphere with no noise in it and no conflict um and i'd written about that appeal or that draw in my historical work and in about 2014 and 2015 um i began to see it re-emerging in well in in several places in several democracies um as as you know and as some of some of the readers know i'm i'm writing right now i'm in poland um but i am american i spent a lot of time in britain um i travel a lot in europe um i've even been to turkey and watching the you know the return of certain kinds of language and certain kinds of ideas you know in in poland in the united states in turkey in the philippines um in russia in many parts of the world um you know reminded me that you know history as you say history doesn't go in a straight line um it's it's very often circular um one of the ironies i think and this is particularly important for americans to understand is that actually our political system our constitution was created by people who knew that in other words it's a political system created for imperfect people one of the reasons it has so many checks and balances and so many um oddities and and and you know one of the reasons designed to prevent um anyone from having too much power is that the the people who designed it were reading the history of greece and rome um they were thinking about cicero um they were thinking about cato um and they were and they were trying to create a system which would somehow push back against the the the inevitable rise of of a demagogue um there's a you know alexander hamilton you know has a has a famous quote in which he says you know one of these days a demagogue will arise promising people things and and they'll believe him so how do we create a a system that pushes back that pushes back against us but i think because we were all so lucky over the last several decades particularly since the end of the cold war we forgot especially americans forgot that that urge to vote for a demagogue and the desire for simple answers and the and the you know this appeal of a of a one-party state um it's you know has has always been with us it's just that now in the current circumstances um it's really returned absolutely and and one of the many strengths of your book is the way you bring the east and the west together and i and i want to emphasize this because there was until this until recently a perception that these things happened only elsewhere only in the east but in those lands over there people have to worry about women's rights and rule of law and freedom of speech i think for a long time this perception of the world as if it was divided into solid lands versus liquid lands i remember an american scholar actually telling me years ago when i used to live in istanbul with good intentions that it was very understandable for me to be a feminist because after all i was living in turkey and i never understood why she wasn't a feminist she was living in america you know because patriarchy is universal but people tended to think that they didn't have to worry about the future of democracy in the western world and as you put it out so strongly in the book especially after 2016 we now know that we're all living in a in a very liquid world what you do on top of that is however you bring personal stories anecdotes the art of storytelling together with political analysis sociological analysis and i love that element in the book it means a lot i think at this stage because politics is affecting friendships it's affecting our family dinners family unions it is creating fractures emotional fractures in the midst of our daily lives so shall we talk about that and this amazing party that you had at a very historic moment in poland when poland was on the cusp of joining the west what happened the people who came to that party and the party afterwards i want to talk a little bit about friendships and families and the role of politics so this is really the starting point of my book the starting point was me in around the year 2018 trying to make sense of what had happened in the last couple of decades and i was a and i had a conversation with a friend in which i described a new year's eve party that i'd given in 1999 on the millennium um the party was actually in this house where i'm where i am today this is a this is a house that my husband and i bought when it was a ruin i mean the roof had caved in there was no um you know it was uninhabitable and it we rebuilt it over about 15 years um and in 1999 it was just about finished actually there wasn't much furniture in it the furniture you see behind me a lot of it wasn't there it was much more primitive but we gave the party as a way of kind of celebrating the rebuilding of the house and really the rebuilding of the country this was a very very optimistic moment you know the early 90s were confusing in eastern europe wasn't clear which way things were going to go but really by the end of the decade it really felt like poland was going to join the west poland was on the really clear path to democracy um and most of the people who came to the party shared that feeling and they were mostly polish there were some friends who came from the us and germany and england um but everybody it felt like we were all on one team and we all agreed about the way that things were going and poland would be integrated and it would be a liberal democracy um and it would be part of the transatlantic alliance um and that and that was the way it was going and people felt happy you know about that or or i assumed that they did um a couple of decades later uh that same group of people including some of the people who were at the party are now find themselves on opposite sides of a really profound polarizing political division um so so if you could have described my party guess in 1999 as kind of center-right which is what they were kind of in polish there's the word pravitza that group has now split into you know a group that is still you would still call them center right or sometimes now you might call them center left and another group which is now much more radical a really a really radical right group which is now and some of the people who are there are now spokesmen for and journalists affiliated with and sort of thinkers affiliated with the current polish ruling party which is has a very different vision of the world it's one that is nationalist it's one that is um anti-integrationist um because the european union is so popular here they haven't openly come out against it but that that's that's what some of their language suggests um it's a it's a political party that is traditionalist and catholic in a way that even most polls weren't 10 years ago so very fundamentalist um and very judgmental about you know you know about the country and above all it's a party that is populist in the sense of um it's a party that defines itself as patriotic so we are the true patriots and everybody else are foreigners elites outsiders undeserving traitors you know so this is a the political division in the country is now between the this party that thinks of itself as the only righteous patriotic party you know and and the sort of still liberal you know there's still there's still a kind of center right center left and even a a kind of even somewhat further left groupings on the other side um and the question in my the the starting point for the book was how did that happen and what was the journey of some of the people who i knew not all of them were close friends but they were they were people i knew well enough to invite to my house for a new year's eve party what was their journey what what changed them how did they change directions and the book is an extended answer to that question um and there isn't one answer there isn't a kind of pat you know kind of one explanation so i i go through the biographies of different kinds of people one or two in poland one or two in hungary um one or two in britain and one or two in the united states um and i look at the the the impulses and that that in that sort of propelled them away from an intimate kind of internationalist integrationist and democratic vision of the world and towards the idea that what you know of of a of an undemocratic one-party state and you know we can we can talk in some detail if you want about some of the people but the overwhelmingly the thing that links them and this is across countries and maybe at least you know turks who you could you could talk about in the same in the same vein overwhelmingly what links them is a sense of disappointment sometimes it's a kind of social disappointment they don't like the societies that they live in they find them degenerate or insufficiently patriotic or insufficiently ideological and they feel some sense of disappointment in in the case of the us the person who i i write about is the fox news presenter laura ingram who i also knew slightly in the past who also who feels disappointed with the diversity of modern america which is an and demographic change that she feels nobody ever approved of um and this sense of disappointment has become very radical so it's not just you know i wish some things would change it's a sense that the society is is has gone wrong it's degenerate it must be smashed up it must be changed completely um and that inspuls that's of course the impulse towards radicalism either left-wing radicalism or right-wing radicalism in my case i'm writing about about the right but of course i you know i'm a historian of communism i know it can exist on the left as well um but there's an impulse to smash things up to destroy them um and to then replace them with something else and the you know very often one of the one of the ideas i tried to get across was that sometimes the disappointment with society is also personal so people are disappointed with their careers or they in you know in the case of one of the the polls who i who i profile you know they feel they should have they should have got more out of the chain you know out of the out of the transformation of poland that they should have been you know he you know i should have been prime minister by now or i should have i should be appreciated more by this society but in some cases there's this personal element as well um but this this change did rupture a lot of you know friendships and relationships and contacts um that i that i had had and in some ways it's still happening um you know there was the the the election in the united states was also a very emotional period um and there are people who who had you know radically you know different reactions to what was what's been happening there too and there are you know and i think it i mean almost everybody i know has a friend or a relative who they now find to be on the other side of some kind of deep chasm um who's cr you know who's crossed into some into some some other version of reality in which you know in which you know society is terrible it needs to be crushed it needs to be destroyed and something different often something older needs to be put in its place indeed and and oftentimes this perception that the present moment is so terrible is accompanied by a romanticized version of history one of the strongest chapters in your book is actually dedicated to nostalgia and again that to me was a big big interest i come from a country that has a very long and rich history but that doesn't mean we have a strong memory and i think in turkey we're a society of collective amnesia there are so many ruptures in terms of our connection with the past and those voids those gaps are usually filled in with ultra nationalists or islamist interpretations of the past so what we learned at school is we were a mighty empire wherever we went we brought justice and civilization this top down you know interpretation of history single narrative and it's i think every nation state has its own single narrative but in a democracy you can find other versions other stories and and the authors of those books are not incarcerated but what we see more and more is the single narratives becoming dominant and this nostalgia over past that never was and in the book you mentioned the russian art system essays swetlana boyne and and based on on that analysis you make a distinction between reflective nostalgia and restorative nostalgia can you talk a little bit about nostalgia because i think it's so important and says so much about what's happening in so many countries today yes you know elite it was your novels and and and other things i've heard you say that that really explained a lot about turkey for me and this as you said this missing history um and i know that you often try and put nuance back into turkish history through the characters you choose um and so on so i know i know exactly what you're talking about but yes in in the book i try and i i talk about this nostalgia for the past and i i use a a famous russian essay um to to explain it and the argument is that there are different kinds of nostalgia and there can be a kind of reflective nostalgia meaning you know and this is something i have actually which you know which is meaning you like old things and old buildings um and old churches um and you're interested in looking at the past and thinking and trying to understand what it was and you like old photo albums and you like reading history and you're attracted to thinking about the past and trying to imagine what it would be like i mean i um i've lived on and off in london for many years and um you know one of the one of the one of the charms of london is that you there are so many wonderful books about london you know not just dickens but so many more and there's so many you know it's such a pleasure to come to a site in the city of london and say wait i know where i am because i read it described in a novel um and that feeling of of being connected to the past um is so powerful but there is also another kind of nostalgia which as you say is the basis for a lot of nationalist projects and this is the this is a restorative nostalgia so in other words not just i think about the past i miss elements of the past um i admire things about the past but rather i want the past back as it was exactly as i think it was um you know i want it you know i want the rules of the past and the and the you know to be reimposed on the present um and this is you know this is the vision that for example the polish ruling party has here today which is that we should um you know polls should abide by um a form of religiosity that actually hasn't really existed in this country for many many decades um or it's of course it's what lies behind the make america great slogan in the united states which was again really about some kind of vision of america in the 1950s that leaves out you know the discrimination against black americans and um the secondary role of women and imagines that we can somehow rebuild things as they were in that imaginary suburban landscape um and and somehow do away with you know by ignoring or through violence or through something just simply vanish the things that we don't like about the present um and this element this restorative nostalgia you'll find in almost any um any dictatorship that you look at today i mean you can you can you've just described it in turkey um you can see it in russia um one of the things that was a really important turning point in in putinism and in sort of modern russia's change from you know sort of abandonment of any aspirations to being you know a liberal or a liberal democratic society was the moment when putin resurrected the the soviet-style military parades um mayday these are the the anniversary of the end of the war parades bringing back people you know people wearing soviet era uniforms with you know guns and tanks and so in other words trying to recreate this victory of 1945 for a modern audience and the the implication is that i will bring back this victory i'll bring back this feeling of of of nostalgia and you know we will once again be an empire and that's that that impulse really does lie behind almost every autocratic project um you know that that you want to name also if we believe in this romanticized version of the past we have to find who is culpable who is what is the reason for where we are right now it opens the path it paves the way for conspiracy theories for a very divisive language um to me it was it was very interesting to observe that changes the political in the language of politics here in the uk when i first moved here about 12 years ago i used to think you know british people are so calm when they talk politics it's amazing and i no longer feel that way because uh the language has changed and somehow now opponents are treated as if they're enemies uh we have been you know we have a prime minister who uses words like siranza so i'm very interested in how words are being used how conspiracy theories can also find the ground misinformation can circulate how we point fingers at each other it was unthinkable for me to see newspapers tabloids in the uk with front page with the pictures of judges saying enemies of the people that turn itself enemy of the people you know pointing fingers at the media or the judiciary and calling them enemies of the people all of that we've seen in other countries case after case so i would love you to tell us more about how do we deal with misinformation the changes the deterioration in in the language of politics and where do you think is the threshold at what moment do you think okay this is when things start getting more dangerous so you're absolutely right that there's a connection between this these extreme forms of restorative nostalgia and conspiracy theories because you know if the nation has degenerated and if we are not what we used to be you know if we have experienced some kind of loss then there has to be an explanation so who is responsible for this um and you know invariably you know one after the next after the next uh would be dictators but also just would be politicians come up with you know ex you know with with explanations that are very often um based on this kind of conspiratorial um thinking i mean one of the things that has changed in the 21st century that's different from the 20th is that in the 20th century we had these kinds of conspiracy theories attached to these huge ideologies you know whether it was national socialism or soviet communism you know you had to believe in this whole you know in elaborate you know elaborate forms of philosophy and and comp you know whole entire depictions of society um in order to to go along with this authoritarian narrative um nowadays you don't have to believe in all that i mean it turns out that simply one element of a conspiracy theory by itself is very is often enough of a description of the world to change people's minds about about about their societies and so so there are two examples i talk about in the book i mean one is the one that will be most familiar to americans which was the way that donald trump used birtherism as his entry into u.s politics and if you think about what birtherism was you know it was this argument that barack obama was really born outside the united states he was born in kenya and therefore he was an illegitimate president if you think about what that entailed that meant that if you mean if he was illegitimate that means that you know congress and the white house and the judiciary and the fbi and the cia and the media are all lying you know they're covering up the fact that we have an illegitimate president who shouldn't really be president um and an amazingly large number of americans believe that it's something like depending on what kind of polling you're looking at it was between 25 and 30 percent and so that meant that 30 of the country was prepared to believe that all of the institutions were lying and that everything was was you know was should be doubted um and this wasn't a unique um this wasn't unique in world politics at that moment the other the other story i tell in the book is what happened in this country in poland after a uh hor terrible plane crash that took place in 2010 that killed the president of poland um and it's a i explained in the book the crash was uh was a pilot error it was caused by also by the fact that president was very anxious to land and you know the the he put pressure on the pilots to make them land in a in a in an area with dense fog um uh he was going to launch his presidential campaign at a at a at a war memorial and it was a strange airport and so on but the point is that afterwards um his twin brother who was the leader of his political party turned this event also into one of these conspiracies there had been a cover-up that the maybe the opposition what's now the opposition party was responsible maybe the russians were responsible and he spun this narrative repeating it over and over again and once again if you think that the president of your country has been murdered you know and it's covered up by all the institutions um then that means your sense of trust and faith in the system and in the institutions um is is profoundly weakened i mean the uk is a special case so it's a little bit different because brexit wasn't a theory of everything it really was about the european union but there was an element of this as well in the in the language that was used about the eu you know that what's wrong with our country why have we fallen behind you know why aren't we why isn't england as important and great as it once was it's because of the european union and a lot of you know all kinds of you know things that had nothing to do with the european union were very often blamed on it um and and it became this and the structure of thinking about it really was quite similar again you know all these you know the main institutions of the country as you say the judges the the courts the media they're all supporting this evil set of institutions which are undermining our vitality and our strength um and therefore you know we we lose faith in them and this use of this um conspiratorial language you know based on conspiracy theory and based on um disinformation it turns out to be extremely powerful um and um you know the question then is why you know there are a number of answers some of which i talk about in the book and there are some economic answers and there's some political answers and there's one part of the answer that i know you agree with because it's in it's in your book as well which is that one of the ways in which all of our societies have changed and this by the way explains why this is happening everywhere simultaneously is that we now all get our information in different ways um we get it from um 24-hour news we get it from the internet we get it from social media and in this world of information here where we all we all each one of us looks at our telephone and sees i don't know an advertisement for hairspray a message from our uncle news about a war in nagorno-karabakh information about the us election then the hierarchies of value and of truthfulness have begun to disappear and people simply doubt much more of what they're hurt with what they used to hear than than than they did before um and also the ease with which you can now construct alternative realities and then live in them um you know is is is just incomparably easier than it was probably ever before in history and so the the you know i it's just not an accident that the the the language of friends and enemies and the language of um you know good patriots versus evil conspirators it's not an accident that this kind of language is appearing in so many different countries um at the same time you know right now absolutely i i want to come back to what you said it's um you will remember of course the the moment of the party this new year's eve party that you're describing uh is also the moment of optimism extreme optimism in the world and back then the biggest optimists were actually take optimists and there was this faith that thanks to digital technologies every part of the world was going to become a democracy those countries that were lagging behind were going to catch up sooner or later because how come how could they not if history moved in one direction so they would catch up with the rest of the civilized world and there was so much emphasis on information sharing information if you give people the right enough information they're going to make the right choices it didn't happen that way we have way too much information very little knowledge and even less wisdom and that's why i find your work so important because we need to change that ratio we definitely need less information less time on social media we need more investigative journalism we need in-depth analysis like yours we need books and also i believe for wisdom for emotional intelligence for empathy we need stories we need to bring the mind and the heart together but i really want you to tell us more about social media how you see it and digital technologies and take monopolies in particular because they play such a huge role and these epistemological tribes that we have been divided into as you said people get their information from different sources when that happens when truth disappears when you have to convince people that climate change is real you know let alone taking action together you have to convince them first how do we move forward with this much digital technology in our political lives so i think we all know to some extent now how social media works in other words that the the algorithms that govern it in other words what determines what comes up in your facebook feed or your twitter feed or depending or or even your google searches um that what determines what you see are algorithms that are that are trained to show you what what they think you already want to see in other words um if you're interested in a certain kind of you know pop music you know you will see more and more of that you know if you're interested in a certain kind of you know lipstick you know i don't know you'll see more and more of that um if you're interested in a certain kind of politics you will also see more and more of that um and so you will hear over and over and over again messages from your party you will be you will be directed to other messages um you know you will be you will be immediately put into a world where you are hearing constantly repeated um you know themes over and over and over again that convince you you know designed to convince you that that you belong in one political category not in another um and what gets lost of course in this division of people into silos or or filter bubbles or echo chambers what gets lost is any sense of public space and public discourse and you know it's very very hard to see how democracy can be maintained if people literally are living in alternate realities where they you know where it's not just their opinions that are different it's their facts that are completely different i mean you know look we're watching this happen in real time right now as you and i are speaking um in the united states where joe biden has just won the election um there is no question that he's wanted um he you know and the media reporting the fact that he's won it are not making it up it's not their bias they're they're they're getting their information from state um election officials who are telling them how many votes have been counted and so on um at the same time the president is seeking to create an alternate reality whereby he is one and doing so through carrying out frivolous lawsuits through tweeting through trying to get others to back up this idea and there is some percentage of american society that will go on believing that that he won or if he doesn't remain in the presidency that it's you know it was somehow stolen from him because really he won um and without some some kind of trusted intermediate space of some kind of public sphere where a few facts are shared in common it gets to be very hard to see how do we have a normal democratic conversation i mean this is about the you know the very fundamental question of who's who won the presidential election um in november um let alone even you know the climate change is a is a slightly more difficult question because it's something that some people can see i think if you live in california um you now know following this summer's fires you know you now know that something very dramatic is happening but not everybody who lives in i don't know in northern england or or southern france necessarily sees or feels the change in in the same way and so convincing people that something is happening and therefore something must be done about it becomes ever more difficult um i mean it seems to me there is a there is a there is a theoretical solution to this problem um it's not an easy one um and it will require um a level of you know kind of government creativity and thinking of a kind that we just haven't seen yet regarding um the internet and social media namely you know is there a way to regulate social media and the internet so as to produce at least some kind of public space and usually when people talk about regulating the internet they talk about censoring things so whatever facebook taking things down or twitter putting a little comment under the president's tweets um really we need to take a step back and think actually more fundamentally which is what do we want a democratic internet to look like so not just how do we censor or fix or shape what we have you know because we already know what an autocratic internet looks like because china has invented that so it exists and um and you know and other autocratic leaders have you know have learned to control and use the internet in ways that suit them but we haven't really had the national conversation you know either inside the united states or frankly in among among other democracies about what are the what what fundamental changes do we want to so that the debt so that the internet remains it supports our democracies instead of undermining them i mean are there you know should there be other kinds of public forum a little bit like you know in britain you have the bbc which was created for very similar reasons actually um as a as a public forum that would you know that would bring all different parts of the country together you know different different social classes but also different regions um is there a form of social media that could do that is there a way to use the internet to have public discussion and debate online that's productive and not negative um you know are there limits to anonymity i mean should there be you know in in fora where people are discussing politics you know should there be you know should you have to say who you are because when people you know when someone with a mask over their face and someone who's speaking you know with under their own name you know that produces very different kinds of speech um you know should there be you know what if there were algorithms that favored instead of favoring anger and emotion and excitement and the things that they that they favor now what if they favored productive speech and better conversation you know more uh you know so so those are all you know we're just at the really beginning of this kind of conversation um and it is something that i hope to work on over the next year or so and it's one of the real conclusions that i you know as i did this thinking through of what had gone wrong in poland and in america and elsewhere one of the conclusions i came to was that you know this the the conspiratorial thinking and these profound divisions had really destroyed something that that we need in order to to maintain democracy and i i hope that the next administration at least in the u.s but also you know working together with europe and others begins to think through some of these problems before um we have little time left before we go open up for audience questions i want to ask you about things that give us hope you know i want to talk about pessimism and optimism and one of the things that give me a lot of hope is women's movement in poland i follow both the lgbtq rights movement and the women's rights women's strike in poland and i find it so important because we started this debate by underlining that history doesn't always necessarily go forward countries can slide backwards if and when that happens i think when countries tumble internationalism some kind of religious fundamentalism populist authoritarianism the very first rights that will be curved taken away will be women's rights and minority rights history gives us plenty of examples to show that so i think women need to become more concerned women need to be more active and engage citizens defending democracy and i always follow poland and women's movement in poland will you tell us a bit about what is happening in poland both in terms of women's movement but also lgbt currents you're absolutely right you know one of the conclusions that i came to as i was as i was again as i was writing the book um was that it was really unfair to be pessimistic in other words a lot of what i write is dark and a lot of things that i've worked on in my life have been negative stories you know the story history of the gulag or of or of the ukrainian famine um and i probably am naturally a pessimist i mean that's just how i was born and some you know i suspect you might be too um but one of the but one of the conclusions i came to was and this is this is something i get in particular from spending time with younger people is that pessimism is so unfair to them you know because it's you know they they will inherit our world and telling them that i don't know democracy is finished and everything is over and you can't change anything is is you know is just immoral um and so i i do spend also again at the time at the end of the book looking for positive things to say and you are absolutely right that the women's movement in poland that has evolved over the last several years is so interesting for many reasons one is that it involves very young women um we were and and also very provincial women um so i'm again i'm in my i'm in a provincial part of poland right now and um a couple of weeks ago we went to a women's march in a very small town called shubin which is about a 20-minute drive from here and it's a town of about 10 or 12 000 people and there were you know on an on an ordinary evening there were there were about 500 women men and women actually mostly quite young who met in the town's small square and then for about 40 minutes marched around with signs um chanting things and and playing music and we were with um we we i know slightly the mayor of the town and we asked him um whether there had been anything like this before and he said no never i mean not in living memory you know that there had been a political demonstration in this small town and he said maybe in the you know in the 1940s when the communists had these forced mayday parades you know maybe something like that um but this was of course spontaneous it didn't come from the government um and i think what you're seeing in poland in a way is um you know i hope will be the answer to the to some of the difficulties we've had here in the last few years which is that um you know democracy here arrived i won't say it's an elite project because i hate the word elite now it's become so meaningless but it did it did almost get handed to people from above you know it was the result of the end of the soviet union it was um you know there were people at the top of the country you know wrote a constitution there was a vote on the constitution's on but there wasn't any democratic education um there wasn't uh there wasn't a mass movement in which people talked about or argued about what kind of democracy poland would have and in a way it may be that that's what's happening now i mean as a reaction to very harsh legal changes that will affect women's lives here that you see people suddenly being radicalized and realizing that actually government isn't just a thing that happens somewhere else you know and it's some something that experts do and politicians you know are specialists and you know we just don't really know it we don't worry about them maybe we vote every four years but we don't have to be engaged suddenly you're seeing people realize wait this stuff affects me and it will affect my life and you see a lot of women a lot of younger women um in poland who suddenly realized that um and there there have been a series of demonstrations there's a you know the beginnings of um of a real political movement and i agree with you absolutely this is a really it's a hopeful sign for that something better will emerge indeed indeed so i want to share some of the questions that came from our audience one of them goes like this which of the two extremes is a bigger threat to freedom and democracy upper left revolutionary zeal political correctness etc or the casual relation to the truth on the lower right trumpism i mean i would that's a i would phrase the question differently because i think trumpism is also an elite project um and and and was conceived at a very high level um so calling it somehow some kind of lower class project i think misses something essential about it but it's true that i i have often been asked this question because there there are many who fear rightly this wave of liberal thinking on the in cultural institutions and in some cases in the media on the left in america trying to make everybody speak about you know racial problems or um or or problems of you know discrimination in in the same way using the same language and then seeking to kind of cancel or eliminate people who violate those rules so there is a um there you know that is that is a deeply liberal tendency and it's um you know it's an it's a it's a very ugly one um you know i do think you know i do think that you know one of the reasons why joe biden was successful one of the reasons why the majority of his party chose him and one of the reasons why he won the election was that i think most americans including those on the left you know don't want that impulse that that kind of cancelling or um illiberal impulse running the country um and you know you know whereas unfortunately the you know the illiberal impulse on the right you know was you know had a political voice in the form of donald trump um and trumpism um and we're seeing it play out right now as i say as he refuses to leave office so you know it seems to me that if if you know if you're asking me to balance them out right now and i speak again i'm a historian of soviet communism um but right now i am more afraid of the illiberal impulses on the right because they have political power because they have the commanding voice in one of our political parties um because they have actual government influence and control and by the way that's true in europe as well where we have two political parties one in poland and one in hungary that fit the same profile and a number of other parties that are out of power but sometimes share power influence politics and other european countries france austria um germany spain um and elsewhere so i because it because it takes a political form that worries me more i mean does that mean there are no problems on the far left no of course not um and i'm hoping one of the things i'm looking forward to if trump leaves um is that it will become easier and more and and more um you know easier to talk about that once again and those kinds of problems once again i should also say though that the it's often i also think that it's a mistake to talk about these two phenomena as if they were separate i mean they do interact with one another and they do encourage one another and leave i know you agree with this because we were talking about it right before we started this this conversation um which is that you know namely for the left trump really embodied everything that they had always said was true of america but most people never believed namely that you know he used racist language he was a you know a plutocrat he was a nepotis he was corrupt and he really he gave some on the left this feeling that you know that they were right in disliking and feeling the same kind of radical disappointment with the united states i mean and in the same way um the more extreme examples of the left the you know the the the the people who topple over abraham lincoln statues um in portland have also inspired those on the right to feel that they're correct in their sweeping you know extreme views of the united states i mean it really is um it's my it's although i am now i still remain more afraid of the right because it has such a strong political foothold i am hopeful that actually the extremism on both sides will reduce itself um under abide in presidency simply because we have a moderate voice it you know at the top of the of the of the of the our political structure once again the the next question actually follows on that because it's about whether authoritarianism is becoming more acceptable to voters in the u.s so rather than what happened in these last four years with trump and have broken out institutions that's how i i interpret the the question the future of authoritarianism or authorities in itself becoming more normal acceptable uh routine in a way but now in a way maybe not i think that in essence is what trumpism is i mean and there there's a real question as to whether there's going to be trumpism without trump i'm you know i i'm not i'm not really sure i know what that means yet i have to to think about it more but um he he took something that already existed which was a um which was an authoritarian tendency inside the republican party which had you know manifested itself through gerrymandering through um you know through a retreat from uh you know from you know instead of trying to win the votes of everybody seeking to play political games in order to stay in power as a even as a minority party um and he took that impulse that was there and he made it manifest and he spoke about it proudly and he and he you know and he and he encouraged it and so i think one of the effects of the trump presidency unfortunately is that and again you can see this right now in the number of people who you know are ready to believe that um that he actually won an election that he lost um and that he should use some extra legal some court means you know to to you know to changing the electoral college in order to overthrow the vote i mean this is you know unthinkable in american history i mean the only only moment you can compare it to is 1860 um you know this i can somehow overthrow the system you know using some extra legal means um and so yes i'm afraid that the the impact he's made on the country is to encourage this illiberal authoritarian thinking especially on the right um and and dealing with that legacy is going to be our most important political problem for a long time so as we bring it to a close i uh i want to talk a little bit about the pandemic we have not spoken about it it is so important and i don't know if you'd agree with me but i think it's the moment when the existing inequalities are now exposed have become much more visible i find inequality inequality is plural very important another side issue another footnote but i think it should be at the center of all of our debates including racial inequalities gender inequalities regional inequalities and i wonder how do you see this moment in time the pandemic do you think from this crossroads onwards we're going to see a rise of more of this more nationalism whether of course trump is has lost the elections but i'm not talking about individuals um the the phenomena that brought him here are we going to see a strengthening of this nativism tribalism or do you think this is this is actually a chance for the world to realize we have massive global challenges ahead which we can't deal with the forces of nationalism which way are we going to go as as we arrive at this crossroads so i did think at the beginning of the pandemic that this would be as it has has happened so many times before in history that this medical crisis and the need for isolation and closed borders and so on would be an advantage for for authoritarians and nationalists of all kinds one of the things that we see though as it's gone on um it's you know and as it reached what are we now nine months or depending on how you count almost a year um uh one of the things that we've seen is that the solutions to the pandemic are going to be international they're going to involve science and rational thinking i mean it is i mean it's almost funny the fact that the the first vaccine that seems that that we know works is the product of a you know is the brainchild of a german turkish couple who emigrated from turkey to germany um and it's of course a joint you know a joint project between that german company and an american big american company um it's been tested in countries all over the world it has buy-in and cooperation in that that means from medical establishments in multiple countries um you know this is a truly international project you know one that wouldn't have been possible without international trade without immigration without the you know without the ability to exchange ideas as we do so it may be that as coming out of the pandemic you know as people realize how interconnected we all are and how all of the solutions are going to involve you know the the you know the exchange of ideas rather than the construction of borders it may be and i i hope this is the case and this is where my you know my my feeling that it's yours you know responsibility requires being optimistic um it's my hope that one of the things that comes out of the pandemic is a you know is that people become more skeptical of this you know the kind of nationalism and that an authoritarianism that really leads nowhere yeah sometimes i jokingly think if you open a map of europe and you follow the blue danube the river danube with your finger as you move from german it's worth the black sea i think the level of optimism drops so by the time you reach romania bulgaria the black sea turkey pessimism is easier optimism is much more difficult but understandably we have very complicated histories but we need this faith we need this hope we need this optimism or we need maybe the pessimism of the intellect but optimism of the heart as or the will as crime she used to talk about this has been a fascinating fascinating conversation i enjoyed it so much and i want to thank charleston for charleston literary festival for making it possible for bringing us together i want to thank our digital audience from all across the world very different backgrounds and countries but i want to thank you especially annapolis for bringing knowledge for bringing wisdom for bringing sanity into our public spaces for giving us nuanced conversations and helping us to think forward thank you so much anne thank you so much alif i'm such an admirer of yours and i really appreciated the chance to talk to you you

Channel: Charleston Literary Festival

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Id: 8FsQON8oLmQ

Length: 58min 39sec (3519 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2020