Twilight of Democracy with Anne Applebaum

[Laughter] welcome to the ottawa international writers festival our 2020 virtual season is broadcasting from the unseated and unsurrendered territory of the algonquin anishnabe [Music] hello and welcome to the ottawa writers festival my name is paul wells and i'm very pleased today to have as my guest ann applebaum who is the author of twilight of democracy the seductive lure of authoritarianism uh and applebaum is one of uh the most distinguished uh um historians and politicians uh writing uh in american and other media today she started this year uh as a staff writer for the atlantic monthly after having written for the washington post for 17 years she's been an editor at spectator magazine in the uk and she's a senior fellow of the agora institute at johns hopkins university her uh previous books have included uh iron curtain winner of the cundill prize and a finalist for the national book award and gulag which was a winner of the pulitzer prize for non-fiction and a finalist for three other major prizes she lives in poland with her husband radek sikorsky a polish politician and their two children and she joins me uh now from her country home in poland and applebaum welcome thank you this is a different kind of book for you i mean the the other books that i mentioned about the gulag and the um the soviet sphere of influence in central europe these those were you know deeply reported essentially popular histories uh this is much more personal and and and much more in the form of an essay what inspired you to write it well i mean you you put your figure on it exactly so my previous books were my history books were books about you know big moments in history and one of the um one of the things i tried to do in all of them actually was to show those events from different perspectives you know from the perspective of whether it was the gulag from the perspective of prisoners of guards of people in moscow of people in the kremlin um you know i i use a huge range of sources you know memoirs and archives and all kinds of different things in order to to try and see the event from as objective and as honest to perspective as possible um when i was writing this book i did almost the opposite um it is an incredibly subjective book it is written from my point of view that's partly because i'm a kind of actor in some of the events and my husband is an actor in some of the events um and i felt that it was more of a personal exploration of things that have happened to me and people i know over the last two decades and that it was more useful to try not to pretend that i have some kind of objectivity about it i mean it is not a history of the last 20 years it's not a political science text it doesn't come up with a single thesis or an explanation it's just a collection of stories and descriptions of people i know interspersed with you know my reading [Music] things i've read and people i've met and and and things that i've thought about you know while while contemplating this subject um and so it is a completely you're right it's a it's a it doesn't aim to have that kind of you know magisterial objectivity that my history books have tried to have so um in a lot of ways i assume that makes your life a lot easier right you don't have stacks of files that you have to refer to and and and and you know write end notes for um was it harder in other ways is it more do you feel more exposed sure i mean anytime you write about yourself i mean it's not so much about me personally but it is about people i know and um you know friends i've had and so so on so yeah in some ways it was more difficult i mean um it's hard to compare actually i mean it you know how do you compare putting together hundreds of sources in order to write a terrible story like the story of ukrainian famine that was one of my book another book which i found really difficult and how do you compare kind of lying on your sofa staring at the ceiling and trying to think what do i really think about this you know there's a sort of different kind of thought process um but i mean they're difficult in different ways um and i mean this one i have you know it's a book that i'm aware people some people aren't gonna like um and i it's not really intended to be everybody's cup of tea and so i'm actually quite a little bit more distance from it in a way it makes it easier i mean i you know when when my when a big history book comes out that i spent a decade working on you know i read every single review and i worry about them and so on i mean this time it's kind of well okay some people are going to like it some people aren't going to like it and that's it you know there's nothing i can do about it so in a way i found it i found it easier okay for people who are just learning about the book through this uh conversation let's discuss the the thesis it is essentially that something has gone wrong in um uh the western world or in the sort of north atlantic world over the last decade or so and and and its manifestation is a kind of a creeping de-democratization or authoritarianism um that manifests itself in different ways in different places but uh is is becoming alarming is that a pretty good capsule summary yeah that's a capsule i mean i mean to be clear a lot of the book is about what used to be the center right and the radicalization of a part of the center right into into and the the transformation including of some people i know from i don't know anti-communists or reaganites or thatcherites into something a little bit more extreme and radical and the book traces tries to explain that um and in the course of that also tries to explain why it is that people have become disillusioned with mainstream politics and therefore with democracy itself and um why some of the you know the the institutions as they as they were from the 1990s onward have become either boring or insufficient or um you know or or insufficiently inspiring to some people um and why people are beginning to toy some people who as i say used to be in the in the absolutely mainstream center right why some of them have begun toying with other ideas you know could you know do we really need this two-party system do we really need um you know once we come to power do we really need to to preserve this level playing field you know why should we do that given that we are the patriots and our opponents are traitors um and there's a there's a there's a change in the way people have begun to talk about politics i mean actually one of the characters in the book who's a spanish kind of eminence grease says it the best and he's somebody who has who became very disillusioned with the spanish center right and is now one of the founders of a of a more radical nationalist movement in spain called vox and he said to me you know politics now feels to me like it's winner take all and you know we just want to stay alive we don't want to be eliminated um and and he said that and i think i think a lot of people feel that in different ways and there there's this sense that you know either you take all the power um or someone else will take all the power um and of course once you have that attitude and what that's how you understand the political system then um you know that then your behavior changes quite dramatically um i mean that's an interesting phenomenon that radicalization begets polarization and and people um uh stop playing by the rules because they don't feel they have the luxury of doing that i mean that actually describes a lot of recent political events and even as gentile a precinct as canada but your book begins in a place where it's it's the process has been stark which is where you live in poland um you uh have lived there off and on for many years your husband was foreign minister you know not that long ago in poland and a lot of the um people who used to be in your social circle the the sort of um uh center right which is the political center of gravity in poland i think um have have moved to a much more extreme almost cartoonish right which which governs and uh and actually just just just won a presidential election there um yeah i mean so i mean in in a way i mean certainly in in in this what happened in poland is the most dramatic um of of the of the countries that i describe so this is you know and i begin the party in poland in 1999 um at a party in this house the one that i'm at now and and then i reflect on the fact that some of the people at the party no longer speak to other people who are at the party and in fact you know would cross the street to avoid them um and that these are these divisions are not personal they're political and they're quite profound and there's been this deep split in society um which is poland is i think one of the most polarized societies in europe um in terms of what people read and see and how they interpret the world and some people that i know have become part of what you can only call an extreme nationalist right that feels no qualms about using anti-semitism and homophobia in its election campaigns this isn't the kind of shadowy you know dog whistly version that we sometimes get in north america this is very open you know if you you know vote for us or the jews will come back from america and take your money kind of thing um and people i know who who were at my house um you know 20 years ago are part of that those you know that kind of propaganda some of them work for polish state television is now um you know it's no longer you know it was founded to be something like or intended to be something like the bbc or cbc uh some kind of centrist mushy institution in which you know all voices were heard and it has now become really quite extreme um one party propaganda ruling party propaganda it's hard to describe to outsiders but i mean you have to imagine if cbc were taken over by a tiny group of i don't know far left or far right wing fanatics um and began broadcasting in that tone um through all of its channels um all over the country you know you would really feel it and it would it it would it would bother you and the same thing has happened in poland where you have this i mean the whole tone of national discourse has been changed um by that just by that one move and that's of course not the only thing they've done and there are people who we know who are now who work for that now work for polar state television and are part of that kind of propaganda machine you know in which they they they run series of they'll do they'll do kind of item after item about particular politicians attacking them smearing them accusing them of things that aren't proven um they've attacked me i mean which i explained in the book um they they were in in the in the early days when this this party called law and justice took power um one of the things that happened was that poland had actually had incredibly good press for 20 years i mean since 1989 the story of poland has been one of economic growth and political stability um and so everybody kind of got used to the idea that everyone abroad writes nice things about us and when they took over and especially when they began to attack the judiciary and attack the state media and you know and and and you know undermine some of the system they began to get bad press um and they needed to somehow explain this to their constituents and the way they chose to explain it was that it must be my fault me you know because because i'm a journalist and i'm married to the former foreign minister and therefore i control what's written in you know the ap reuters le monde su deutsche zaitung um you know the globe and mail the new york times and the wall street journal you know and that was and anytime anything about poland appeared there it even became a kind of joke oh and apple bao must have you know must have been talking to them and i mean it was ridiculous but it was um it was weird to see myself described that way you know more than once actually on national state television as well as on the cover of some of these far-right magazines um so they're you know and and that's done by again the the milieu that has created that kind of propaganda um is includes people who we used to know and uh part of the sort of pleasure of having you as our social um convener going through these corridors is that you you can point out some of these relationships the two brothers yaaczyk and yaroslav kersky one of whom uh yachak the younger one runs the the the state broadcaster and essentially the government's propaganda arm yeruslav is an editor at uh the leading he's the editor he's the editor of yeah the editor-in-chief of the main liberal newspaper which is called because out of gorgeous so this shows you how this political divide runs through families i mean those are there i talk about the brothers in my book because they're they're very interesting example they're they both come from gdansk they were both kind of teenage solidarity activists in the 1980s they both marched in demonstrations um jarek went to prison once um you know was was in when he was in his i don't remember his late teens or early twenties um and they are and they were both people who in the 1990s immediately threw themselves into the project of rebuilding poland in the post-communist era and you know of course if you'd asked anyone if you you know in in 1993 you know are are the two korsky brothers on the same side of course they were you know i mean they were interchangeable um and now they're so far apart um you know that they run these completely different institutions and of course they no longer speak to each other um and they don't have anything to do with one another and that's but that that that division now runs through a lot of poland i mean we have close friends who are neighbors who live near us in the country and they you know the one of them the the wife doesn't speak to her parents for exactly the same reason you know it's kind of conversation has become impossible because of the political differences um and it's very typical you know around poland but of course you know i don't have to tell you you know that's very difficult in the united states now you know for people to to be in completely different political space from their parents um it happened i saw it happen in britain during the brexit campaign you know again brexit absolutely sliced through social circles i mean people who were um you know for you know best of friends or or or acquaintances you know suddenly found themselves on absolutely opposite sides so it was very similar it had a very similar impact um and one of the things that as i saw this kind of polarization happening you know in in the countries that i know best um one of the things i did was i went back and looked up other moments in history when this had happened you know i thought well you know how did people have behaved then and i talk in the book a little bit about the dreyfus trial um and the dreyfus case in france which is an exactly the same kind of moment so again this is for those who know i mean or don't know this is a the uh alfred dreyfus was a was a jewish officer in the in the french army this is the very end of the 19th century um who was accused of treason and actually convicted and sent away um you know to to prison um even though he was innocent and uh french society you know including people who had one hitherto been on the same side you know people who were affiliated with the army or with you know with the aristocracy absolutely split down the middle into people who felt that dreyfus was guilty and those who felt that he wasn't guilty and the split reflected you know some people believed that you know they were in a sort of mythical mystical idea of the french state in which someone like dreyfus would never fit in and in which if the army accused him it could never be said to be wrong and therefore we owe it loyalty and therefore dreyfus is guilty and on the other side were people who believed in a more abstract idea of the state that there was such a thing as justice and equal treatment of citizens and dreyfus was a citizen and therefore deserve to be treated equally and these two camps you know these kind of two visions of the french state um persist actually um you know all the way through the 20th century um and you can follow them um and the and the more or less i mean i i don't want to generalize too much but the the the so-called anti-dry facades evolve eventually into vichy i mean they're the people who collaborated with the germans because they believed in preserving some idea of frenchness during the nazi occupation and then um you know and then after the war the sort of anti-dry facades i mean sorry the dreyfussarts come back and re-establish the republic which is a you know a secular um you know a modern secular vision of france um but the but the battle goes on um and the french far right you know the marine le pen's political party which has gone by different names than it used to be called the national front um is advocating that sort of mystical sense of frenchness um to this day and the and the different ideas of what france means and what it is have gone on battling one another for the last hundred years um and when i when i read through those histories um i realized this is you know this kind of polarization and this this deep difference in society over you know who we are and what kind of country we live in is normal i mean this is what happens in most countries and it was just that the moment i think of the 19 of the 1990s gave all of us i think you know but particularly in eastern europe you know this false sense that now we have agreed on who we are and now we're going to move forward and we're going to you know build democracy and build capitalism and we're going to join the european union and nato and and we are defined you know we've escaped from communism and moved into something else but actually this was just a temporary hiatus and people who want to reverse that or pick it apart um are still around and i mean i think americans in particular have been complacent about the degree to which there can be radically different interpretations of what america is you know if you look back in history i mean maybe you have to be older in order to see this but i mean our civil war wasn't that long ago you know i mean the 1860s in the grand scheme of things um even in the 2020s isn't that long ago i mean it was you know 100 century and a half ago something like that um and that was a moment when the bitter differences and you know different arguments about what is the united states were so bitter that we split apart um and it could happen again and we've just kind of come to assume that that won't happen again but of course there's no reason why it wouldn't happen again that's an interesting inversion which which sort of comes out in the last several pages really of your book the idea not that something novel and terrible is happening now but that we um people who believe in nato and the european union and things like that kind of got lucky for several years around the turn of the century and that the the lucky streak has run out and that we return more to a kind of status quo ante than to something uh novel or unprecedented um the book darts around a bit um it's got essentially four large uh sections the second one is in is in the uk um look obviously the uk is is uh going through a strange moment but it's also not particularly authoritarian uh or monolithic i mean you can you can make fun of boris johnson all you want and and it's actually kind of trendy to do so um uh without running into the sort of career danger that you do in poland or in some circles in the united states um but obviously uh as someone who believes in the in the european project brexit is uh wounding to you and and and and and indicative of some broader trends i take it well it's i mean it's funny i mean i expected brexit to succeed i mean i i was unsurprised by the result um partly because i as you mentioned in your introduction i i worked for a magazine called the spectator in england um in in the 1990s which has always been the sort of in-house magazine of the tory party in some way or concert you know the intellectual bit of the tory party anyway or the the part that writes articles and publishes them um and you know and so i i i saw this mood coming for a long time for two you know two decades um and i was not surprised um that brexit won i mean the you know and you can also argue and i think fairly that the you know the brexit vote is a little bit different it's a little bit of a different circumstance from the from the one i described in poland um you know we it's it's it's it's you know it's not as directly linked to you know you know the authoritarianism as the polish ruling party is um but there is you know but the the point of my book is that there are sort of four or five stories that are told and they don't all say the same thing but there are these echoes from one to the next and i think that one of the things that you see along with brexit is this kind of revolutionary spirit and this desire to just you know kind of break up or smash institutions um and you also see this you know a lot of some a part of the brexit vote came from um people who were really disappointed with their own country and they really didn't like the modern version of britain um and they disliked it for demographic reasons they disliked it for economic reasons they'd like it sort of mirror kind of moral and spiritual reasons um and they wanted some kind of profound change and they saw brexit as the vehicle for that you know and so um as a kind of vehicle for radical change you know whether it actually turns out to be that or not i can't say um but certainly in the you know we've all kind of forgotten this now because of the the pandemic but certainly in the run-up um to the last election there were some ugly moments you know there was a moment when um boris johnson's government suspended parliament um in a very unprecedented and um you know unsettling way um there have been attacks on the courts and on the house of lords um attacks on the bbc not unlike the kind that you hear in poland you know we don't like this you know our state media is to you know we you know we need to re remake it we need to make it more ideological um and so on so there is some of the some of the instincts some of the animus against institutions even democratic institutions that you can hear in other countries you can also hear in britain right now um again that doesn't mean that you know you see anything like yet you know the kinds of abuses of power that you have right now in the white house um or in warsaw um but i think there's an echo of that mood and as i said the brexit vote in the brexit referendum certainly split um british society in the same way as some of these other movements have um you know people who'd been previously friends suddenly found themselves on absolutely opposite sides of of the divide i mean in you know for me it's a little odd i mean i actually had friends on both sides um and i think i've met in that case i've managed to keep some of the friends on both sides but i know other people who didn't i mean there were people who felt really strongly about it one way or the other um and wound up being quite angry so so it's it's had that radicalizing and divisive impact in britain as well and whenever a phenomenon like this pops up it is tremendously attractive to other people in the movement like it tends to bring other people along in its wake uh the canadian conservative party is extraordinarily uh gentile and centrist and bland by by uh almost any international standard yet uh i know several conservative staffers who went to london to campaign for the brexit side in the referendum i know none who went to campaign for remain daniel hannah who has a cameo role in your book a sort of a stridently uh pro-brexit euro deputy is a kind of a household god among canadian conservatives because he's flamboyant and and and eloquent and loquacious and and says outrageous things and and um it it it's awfully hard to combat those sorts of arguments with well you know the european union is an institutionalized compromise and you win some and you lose some meanwhile the other side seems to be having all the fun no it's true that the you know the right um the radical right has um i mean for their you know their number of things that it's done well recently i mean i talk a lot in the book about its use of social media and it's sort of deep understanding of the ways in which you can you know bend the truth and promote ideas and make yourself seem more popular and so on than you are online and they kind of some of them understood that before i think others understood it um you know and i don't certainly not in the canadian case but in in a number of instances in europe it's because they were watching what was going on in russia and it was the russians who were really the great path path breakers and in learning how to manipulate social media and manipulate algorithms in order to spread ideas or give the impression that extreme ideas were normal i mean that was that's really what we're talking about um so they've been good at that and also i think um you know they've had the they've had the radical edge you know it's always more interesting to be you know cutting edge and different than it is to be the establishment um and they managed to characterize themselves as being some kind of avant-garde and whereas everybody else not just the left but the center and the center-right um and the whatever the remainers and the and the um and the and the and people who have experience running the country you know in the united states that all those people are you know somehow corrupt or they're the establishment or the deep state and that then gives them this special role in this yeah they've been very good rhetorically um at setting that up i mean quite a lot of them once in power have proved to be you know mostly quite incompetent i mean and for a reason because they are um you know they you know they were the people who were and often the people who were overlooked by previous governments and you can see this absolutely in boris johnson's government it's kind of government of people who failed in the past or were never considered good enough to be promoted and we see some of the effects of that right now i mean i don't know how closely your readership follows british politics but kind of one mistake after the next made by incompetent ministers and you know this is absolutely the story of um donald trump's white house you know which is now full of second-rate people who would never have got a job in a in a normal more republican administration that wasn't true in the first two years but it's it's true now um um so so it's not as if these are you know this this is a this is a better or more effective or more caring or more um committed elite or an elite that really cares at all in fact about the people who voted for it um but they have been good at you know at winning votes at dividing people at polarizing and it you know therefore making themselves into the avant-garde i mean there's no question that they've won the um they've won the propaganda war in recent years um as i said that has not proved they've not almost anywhere that i can think of actually um they've not proven themselves to be good administrators once they take power but but they but they talk a good game um if i have a big question about all this i guess it would be when did this start i mean sometime between 1999 and 2015 uh the trends that you're describing developed a kind of a terrible momentum how did it begin do you think i mean i think it begins right away actually i mean i think it begins um you know after the cold war i mean look who were the coal warriors and what was the you know the anti-communist coalition you know this was a pretty broad grouping of people so some people were cold warriors because they were interested in realpolitik and they were worried about nuclear weapons and they worried about i don't know russian influence in europe um some people were cold warriors because they were interested in democracy and human rights and they were upset about the soviet suppression of you know religious minorities or other kinds of minorities or they were worried about abuse of you know abuse of power um some people were cold warriors because they were christians and the soviet union was atheist and they felt that it was you know moral to push back against the soviet union for that reason well one of the things that happens i think already in the 1990s is the members of those coalitions start realizing they don't have that much to do with one another and they you know immediately there's some kind of scratchiness inside the republican party in america um inside the tory party in britain um and and and elsewhere um probably the thing was kept together artificially by 9 11 because that felt like once again a unifying moment um when you know we all need to bend together for the sake of national security against this new challenge from radical islam um but you know that hasn't lasted um partly because radical islam is a weird kind of challenge and it it's periodic and it's you know comes and goes and it's you know the the it's not it's not it's not unifying in the way that the cold war once was um but but so i i think it you know in fact began in the 90s and you can begin to see it gaining strength um through the 2000s and um and then became particularly notable i mean as i think you know frankly i think under the influence of russian propaganda and the the you know the the way the russians learned to use um social media and that you know and they have a huge influence on the far right and europe and the far right in europe in turn had a huge influence on the the right of the republican party as well um and that really begins to pick up in 20 20 especially 2014 following the invasion of ukraine and 2015. um and so i think that's the i think 2013-14 is a real turning point um is there an extent to which if a lot of countries have handed over their leadership or or have allowed their leadership to be seized by second raiders as you call them is it also partly because the the first raiders when they were in charge weren't delivering great results whether it's on uh advancing opportunity or or abolishing cronyism or what have you sure i mean yes of course there's another aspect of this which is that the our democracies have grown weaker for a lot of reasons and some of that is to do with um elites and it's to do with the way i mean in particular to do with i think money in politics both lobbyists and also the circulation of dirty money i mean the growth of kleptocracy not just in the us but around the world and its ill effect on on power um obviously there's an element of it that's due with the financial crisis although then you also have to explain why the financial crisis is in 2008 and it's not for you know another eight years before there's there's an impact um so but then but the financial crisis was a moment when a lot of people lost faith in the at least in the economic competence um of their governments and so so that's an important change i mean the the big wave of immigration from the middle east in 2015 is an important part of the story because for a lot of people you know that was a moment that the rights seized on as a you know um and played into people's fears of islamic again islamic terrorism or being overwhelmed by foreigners or you know whether it's you know fear you know whether you can legitimate fear of demographic change or whether it's racism you know we can argue about that um but that that you know those were those were other elements um that played into it but you also have to be um you have to be careful with the economic arguments because really poland um is an example of a country that has you know for 20 years had constant growth i mean even after the financial crisis there was i mean there was a kind of a small dip in the level of growth but there was no recession um and you had continuous growth and you had a continuous expansion and you had ever larger investment in infrastructure and in schools and so on um and you know there is really and this is by the way and this is affects all sectors of society you know not just the rich but also the the poor and the middle classes um and you also have poll in poland you also have a country in which inequality was shrinking you know so it was kind of getting less and becoming more equal partly thing to do with the way eu money is spent in poland and so on so you need you need something more sophisticated than just an economic explanation you know you can't just say this is about people who are left behind um and the other point is my book is really not about voters so it's not about why did voters lose you know lose their faith in whatever the democratic party in the u.s or um or or the or the or the labor party in britain or the tory indeed the tory party in britain my book is really about the the insiders you know the the political strategists and the journalists and the conservative intellectuals and the people whose whose discontent and whose dislike of the way politics were going have been so important for you know in changing you know and changing the nature of of politics i mean people like the one we're the man we were just talking about yasukorsky who's the head of state television in poland um and these as a group these are not deprived people or marginalized people i mean these are part of the elite you know they are educated they went to good schools some of them speak foreign languages they travel this is not some kind of with some exceptions you know this is not some kind of provincial sec segment of any of these countries i mean these are you know this is a part of the elite that was dissatisfied with the rest of the elite and wanted to push it out of the way um and that's a very crude way to put it but um but that's essentially what we're talking about so i mean why you know there is this almost i mean i almost think it comes from you know the kind of influence of marxism on all of our thinking you know there is a desire um that i one hears all the time in western countries to explain everything in terms of economics um but this phenomenon i think doesn't it doesn't fit neatly into economic explanations particularly given the fact that a lot of these kinds of radical right parties when they come to power you know aren't particularly good for the poorest in their societies i mean they don't they don't then turn around these aren't this isn't latin american populism you know which was about redistribution of wealth or anyway throwing throwing goods and money at at the very poor which is what happened in a number of latin american countries um you know this is not happening in you know anywhere in europe or or um certainly not in the us i mean there is an element of it in poland in which there is a there has been a there was a big um there was a big sort of social program that was created by the by the law and justice party um you know sort of a very very generous form of child benefit um which is you know which was very popular um but most of the time that's not the case um that concentration on this sort of courier class the the the people who would be in the corners of the painting of this were some sort of rich tableau um produces a book that's full of fascinating characters uh i was uh um struck to come across john o'sullivan who is uh a british journalist of a certain age who's a uh very evocular and and um charming guy and for two years at the end of the 90s he was helping to run the editorial pages at conrad black's canadian paper the national post where i worked so i used to see uh sullivan every once in a while i was astonished to learn that he's now working for sort of an emanation of the regime in hungary uh a think tank that doesn't bother itself with too much thinking and uh uh it's it's it's surprising where a lot of these people turn up so i mean that's a you know i didn't i've never really got to the bottom of why john is doing that but he he yes he is working for uh it's a government funded think tank i mean it the money goes through another institution but essentially it's a think tank funded by the hungarian government and the point of it is to sort of broadcast and and explain victor orban to the world and john runs it and he's his specialty is inviting people you know right-wing intellectuals to come to budapest for events um and um you know and and and and do things there and you know when he first started doing it which was it goes back a few years i mean it was kind of an eccentric thing to do but you know i don't know maybe a nice a nice you know final job he's had a lot of different jobs in his life um it's now really an odd i think i mean given given the nature of the orban government given the openness of its anti-semitism given the um the the degree to which it's destroyed um the media in hungary i mean this is not in hungary the question isn't just the state media it's private media which has been through a variety of tactics whether it's tax pressure or undercutting advertising or spooking advertisers so that they don't they don't support independent media um they they've managed to take over quite a bit of it so quite a lot of the hungarian media is now literally owned by the government it's like 95 um and then a part of it is if it's not directly owned by the government then it's owned by sort of oligarchs who are close to the government and there are few little exceptions left but i mean even recently one of those fell as well um and so this attack on the on the media this attack on um on business um you know orban has kind of created sort of forced a lot of independent businessmen out of the country and created a kind of oligarchic class around himself of people who are have got rich because of their relationships to him um you know you know the attack on the undermining of the courts and the constant pushing against court independence and as well as actually frankly open cheating in elections i mean using various kinds of tricks to bump up his his support um artificially probably including some actual manipulation of results um and and you know all that is has gone on without john being especially bothered by it on the contrary he defends orban and has done so to me and does so in public and isn't all that embarrassed about it and to me this is a is a really extraordinary change i mean he is somebody who was a um he was a thatcherite he was a reaganite he was a cold warrior he wrote a good book actually about sort of john paul ii thatcher and reagan um he's somebody who who very much sees himself as descended from that tradition um and now he's working in the service of somebody who seems to me to be absolutely the opposite of that tradition i mean there's nothing about you know there's nothing about what urban does that's about encouraging freedom or um you know either political freedom or economic freedom or any other kind of freedom so um you know so for him there's been a big transformation and you know i i didn't entire i interviewed him for the book i didn't get an entirely satisfactory set of answers but um but he you know he's one of a whole group of people who now have been so um what's the word they're so um they're so angry at what they see as the the the left in in their countries they're so angry at the cultural left they're so angry at mass immigration as they see it um they're so angry at you know the ways in which they see their societies have changed that they really are willing now to sit on exactly the opposite side and they and think that's better um in your in your conversation with him in the book uh you go at him with the the sort of mass concentration of state-owned media in hungary that you described and his answer is on the level of well cnn loves the democratic party so what do you want uh it's it it's hard to have a conversation with someone whose terms of reference have become so estranged from yours it was kind of what about ism it's like oh well that's bad but what about all these other bad things and um so it was it was a bit pointless okay um i i think i'm going to uh begin to wrap this up you've been very generous with your time in the last pages of the book i sense that you're trying to end on a relatively optimistic note and that the current circumstance a global public health crisis that's been worse handled worse by some of the governments that you describe make that difficult but is there something that individuals that more democratic governments can do to advance a more pluralist vision of yes society the point about the ending of the book was that just as it was a major mistake for us to be complacent and to think that our societies would go on being democracies and the world would go on improving and things were always going to get better and none of us really had to do that much about it we would just sit back and i don't know go to work for goldman sachs or you know run a grocery store and everything would just tick on and politics was a kind of something for professionals and they would work it out i mean just as that was a mistake um i also think it's a mistake this kind of really deep gloom that some people are in is also a mistake you know there's nothing we can do everything's ending you know it's all a disaster um i mean look the the you know politics and history have always been radically open i mean that you know big changes do happen all the time um unpredictable things happen um and i think it's really irresponsible actually for people from my people my age to be pessimistic i mean it's it's unfair to people who are younger than us to tell them that you know forget it you know the west is finished and it's all over um and i um you know i wanted to leave open the possibility that their generation will will will do great things and and and make things and make things better i mean and you know people have asked me a lot you know what can ordinary people do i mean i think the main point is that i think we've all forgotten how important it is in democracy for people to be engaged and doing things by which i don't mean that you have to be in a political party if you can't stand the idea of that um but at least you know participate in some civic organization or you know run for the local school board or interest yourself and how your neighborhood works or you know you know join a committee that thinks about how you know garbage disposal works i mean i don't want to i don't want to that's that's a little a little farcical but but the the you know if we don't have people engaged and we don't have people paying attention we don't have people thinking about politics and trying to make things happen on both local and national levels then you know then democracy does become very stale and empty and pro-forma and kind of over-professionalized and it seems to me that more it's you know it's not just about voting although of course voting is very important it's also about finding some way in which you can be engaged with you know your your your society and your community and your neighborhood on that note uh and applebound thank you for spending some time with us today i appreciate it uh thank you and applebaum is the author of the twilight of democracy the seductive lure of authoritarianism she spoke to us today from her polish country home i'm paul wells thanks for joining us [Music] you

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Length: 46min 1sec (2761 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2020