Look at our Events Calendar to see the amazing writers and programs we are hosting in the coming days and weeks and adding more every day into the fall so Pay Attention to our website and sign up for our newsletter. We hope they are as palliative for you as they have for us during this confusing time. And then from doubleday and to get it from us in the chat at least change faces to admitting customers and then they enjoy the events like today and to be greatly appreciative there is time at the end of todays conversation if you have any and then to come back and relay them. With United Nations association and we will speak briefly about who they are. Thank you for that introduction so looking at our membership and others twilight of democracy is the reason the subject matter is relevant and appropriate and timely and then to be applied to many situations in the world today. So with liberal democracy and then to be intertwined and then to have a stimulating conversation. And today on the growing Global Trends and its a great pleasure to talk to you today. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. We are thrilled to have a conversation today with the cofounder and ceo of Christian Industries a Podcast Company and previously the editorinchief of the slate group and the author todays book twilight of democracy. Her 2018 atlantic article inspired her new book and a finalist for a National Magazine award. After 17 years as a columnist at the Washington Post she became a staff writer at the atlantic and is the author of critically it came the claimed histories winner of the pulitzer prize. A leading historian of a penetrating investigator of contemporary politics she sets her sights on the big question one with which she herself has been deeply engaged in europe and in america. This extraordinary document is the answer ideals betrayed and alliances broken in the most personal book the great historian explains those who one the battles for democracy to spend their lives proclaiming the valid on the values to be called liars and thugs and crooks the twilight of democracy circe tells the story of a political generation gone bad. So with that i will pass it off to jacob. Hello everybody thank you for sponsoring the event and to john for hosting it is great to be in the bookstore again even if its virtual. We want to make sure you see this book and just very brief and to the point this book is among other things very quick at engaging want to start by recommending it. And and who is not only an old friend but the person who first sounded the alarm with what we are dealing now in the United States. Not only as a journalist but Eastern Europe. And when we start to see manifestation in american politics, a lot of us did have the reaction that it cant have been here and would remain permanently a Fringe Movement not to take seriously and that turned out to be wrong. And and because of the experience that she writes about in Eastern Europe in particular knew it was coming and started to talk about it with a clear voice love 2015 at the very least before a lot of other people were making the same comments. So the first thing i want to ask you with that perspective on the global perspective, why you have focus the book on the way you have on the role of the people that were authoritarians. You may call them intellectuals but in a lot of ways they are not they dont get that as the appropriate description and people who were a publicist propaganda some of them are intellectuals but why are you looking at these people rather than the authoritarian leaders themselves . First of all thank you i am delighted to be in a virtual bookstore even im joining from across the atlantic. And of course to be with jacob who i have known for many years. And the iron curtain of the soviet occupation of europe there is some weird parallels. So the reason i wrote it the way that i did is that it grew out of mind reflection and it started with me thinking about people who i had known 20 or 30 years first in britain and then in the us and elsewhere and who i felt made a political journey on the center right and had been part of the communist movement in poland and hungary and rents for mental to argue for her to bring about the end of communism and over the next 20 and 30 years change dramatically in my view to become something closer to a new form of radical right to become part of a spokesman for the authoritarian leaning party. So how to write about this phenomenon the best way to do it is from the perspective of the people that i know. The one issue to some extent i grew up in the United States and england for a long time in the 19 nineties and have deep ties to poland i married to a polish politician who is defense minister. And i felt i couldnt tell the story without him in it because that would be cheating and i cannot do what i did for the of cessation of Eastern Europe in 1945 to tell the story and a balanced way. I felt its what i could best tell in my own voice with the people that i know. Who was that . Journalist, politics and people that i would call political entrepreneurs you dont want to use the word intellectual is that has higher connotations but they are interested in ideas and how to make ideas into politics so people who hang around think tanks some hang around universities or Political Parties or newspapers and then they bring about political change. This is just a group of people that i know well and am familiar with we underrate the roles there are lots of people who have written about voters and why did they vote for trump or putin or authoritarians. And that is a legitimate pursuit and a question to ask but not that many people have looked at what are the voters being presented with . Is not just the authoritarian leader but its a package somebody writes the means to create enthusiasm or the social media descriptions or the rights to speeches or somebody prepares for somebody is writing speeches thinking about how to sell to the public and this is a piece to the story that i felt that i was uniquely able to tell. There is a history here in the 20th century of people who were presumed to share the premises of democratic or liberal society who then went over to the dark side and ended up supporting stalin or fascism. With europe but also in the United States but you put in that tradition and talk about it who developed the idea of the treason of the clerks which is his term of what we are talking about the intellectuals the people who traffic in ideas and at some crucial moment make a terrible decision to align themselves with authoritarianism against liberal democracy. The question for you is, why does this keep happening and in the broadest sense the most obvious answer is they are empowered by the authoritarian leaders that they support. Is it more than that . One of the things that will annoy people about this book it doesnt have a single answer. I do not give you one overarching theme that explains everything. I do look at several specific people and those circumstances and looking at a range of motives. Some of those are to do with power and in particular from intellectuals or journalists to feel they were excluded. They were left out by another group of intellectuals or another group of journalist or thinkers not including their ideas. Thats a very common phenomenon with that resentment that leads people to attach themselves to these political movements. Sometimes there are true believers who talk themselves into believing society has failed you have seen this over and over in the 20th century through present that modernization in the rapid social changes for some people presents a crisis that the society is losing something. Tradition, he rose come in the ways we used to do things with the cultural pessimism or despair. If you listen to the language that what is presented on fox news like laura ingra ingram, sometimes language is designed as precisely that we are missing something so talent so sometimes there is that emotion as well money or motivation or the desire to mock and make fun of those authorities this is the mood of the alts right to make fun of liberals and mark democracy and have a good time doing it to play video games and that can be part of it. But usually the primary motive is the sense of somebody else has power. They dont deserve it and we do. That is a motivation. Take that further to say it is dispossession for those who have power dont have it and there is a common theme the country has been stolen or taken away and we have to take america back again but there is a version in some country that you talk about that implicitly raises the question who is we and they . It comes back again and again to foreigners and immigrants and jews in the Eastern European context the communist, is that fundamentally thinking the same or different . May be the thought pattern is the same although one of the oddities is about tribalism for where the real americans with the elites and foreigners that dont believe in our country you can create that climate and polarization so poland is a good example 99. 9 percent. Everybody is polish and everybody speaks polish but yet to create these two deeply polarized tribes as much as they were speaking different languages belonging to that different ethnic groups. Of course we have a phenomenon like that in the states with blue america and red america but there are tribes on both sides to identify one another so to think someone has stolen our country from us the foreigners or the immigrants or the communist or the fascist or whatever it is, you can say that but also the surfers are the unpatriotic citizens who are in charge so to create that division and that politics even in a country where there isnt any ethnic division. Going back to Eastern Europe it is so useful the way you bring us up to date on what has happened in poland and hungary by picking out a few of thes exemplarys individual stories but not in a positive sense if you follow that part of the world you lose track and liberal protection is funded and the rule of law in one country versus one of the neighbors but the people that you talk about talk about the kirstie brothers who were so helpful to understand what actually happened in poland in recent years. Yes. Its a very famous example. They are two brothers who are twins. I have to stop you right there how can you be twins two years apart. No i said they are not twins. [laughter] they are thought to be twins because theres other famous twins in polish politics. They both grew up in the city of the heartland of the anticommunist opposition in poland and was children of an opposition family and even in high school they were very active and they marched in protest one of them ran the schools to work on the trade union a newspaper and to be active in the anticommunist movement and over the years nevertheless they would take different paths and now one has ended up as the editor of many polish liberal newspapers of the polish New York Times and the paper of record. And it has been made into propaganda and over the last president ial election what they call lgbt which is the acronym that sounds weird in polish if the opposition candidate one your children will always be forced into a gay marriage the National Independence day parade would be replaced and extraordinarily virulent homophobic propaganda on the state television 30 percent doesnt get television because they cant afford it. And then to put up extreme by any standard. So what happened to them . So the book goes into some detail about their lives and part of the answer the younger brother who run state television developed a deep sense of resentment after 89 he felt as a hero and solidarity throwing rocks at the police and somehow in subsequent years he did it become what he expected like Prime Minister he didnt become an editor like his brother or have great success. He became ever more resentful of the people running the country and other journalist doing well and he began to look for another way up and put himself with these extreme parties and this resentment with power and ambition led him down this particular road so now what is he do with his power at the head of state television . People who were mean to him. And they dont speak to each other. And they barely see each other. Maybe when their mother died. But they live totally separate lives. But this is an illustration of how you evolve as a person because i have watched different people make these decisions over the years and you have personal experience to push you in one direction or another. Watching polish state television talking about how crude it is and then look at fox news is it a version of that phenomenon are moving in that direction . Or do you think there are limits even in terms of how bad things will get or how much influence . Fox news is already involved enormously i went i have been on fox news in the past and other people now on the left door centerright used to be featured also it is more sophisticated there are some programs that are fairly neutral then mostly the hosted programs like Tucker Carlson or laura ingram which are truly virulent now they are opinion programs and they dont pretend to cover neutrally. But if you watch even how those two have evolved they are more directly the partisan laura ingram used to be very careful from legal immigrants to Illegal Immigrants from protecting the borders to our country and Tucker Carlson, it just becomes a clearer message to their audience what they are talking about to preserve the hierarchical america so both are using thes kinds of tactics to be against the foreigners or the democrats and those that are trying to destroy yes so in that way they are similar. But then with some of those people when we were both living in washington in the eighties or nineties we would write for the same magazines but the idea to publish an article of the National Review it is a mystifying experience i know most of the people you talk about slightly and to share those basic values with us. Yes. Absolutely. I will for the National Review and the Weekly Standard and all of these conservative magazines but this is still the tail end of the cold war and these big coalitions that were created that were created to fight the cold war of foreignpolicy at that time was still together so think of was part of the cold War Coalition it had different components people who were warriors worried about russian influence and grand strategy and called lawyers because then there were people called warriors because they were christians and the soviet union was atheist so then may be artificially held together by 9 11 so then a coalition comes apart so people will begin to find themselves in different groupings so that is no longer the case so to be on the same side of human rights and democracy. And that was that the beginning of the change. But over the last three or four years have to be explained as you were alluding to it people who were journalist working for the Republican Party young conservative staffers its true some have gone off in a direction not only not interested in democracy and not mindful of it at home to see themselves more and more at war with people like you and me even though we think of ourselves on the same side in the Mainstream Press makes up stories so anybody who worked as a journalist in any way knows it is fundamentally not true there are no stories in the New York Times that are intentionally false that now that is a standard claim of people sympathetic to the authoritarian right like the propaganda so when did that become an acceptable position for an american conservative you not wouldve ever heard in the 19 nineties or two thousands. It starts during the Obama Administration and for a lot of them it was the rise of the charismatic black president to create a permanent majority for his views and then i need to and legitimate to undermine the tactic of the Republican Party i think that was the beginning of this. So one of these really important events or phenomenon in American Public life is what i ignored and underrated the president really isnt the president not really american but hes foreign and Something Like 25 percent of americans believe that. That means 25 percent believe we have an illegitimate president who was mysteriously or secretly forced by the cobol and once enough people began to believe that and the talkshow host understood they could get huge enormous amounts of attention and create all types of energy talking about it, then that was the beginning that we could use the growing distrust in our favor. The game was to create distrust how do you delegitimize the democrats or the media to write about them or these institutions and by doing it to say they are why are they are fake and making stuff up so i make the Obama Presidency and the Birther Movement absolutely not an accident that donald trump was one of the leaders of the movement and people identify with that even then brave enough to tell america to have an illegitimate president that was an important attribute. People who looked at the story said it is ridiculous. We failed to understand the power of it in like a talkshow host to understand as soon as they begin to allude to that they immediately got a boost and a lift in the ratings went up in the audience became engaged. And it goes to the point you are making earlier about resentment and those with a strong component because its hard to imagine visiting a white president in the same way but your book is called the twilight of democracy so the whole to see you are writing about his getting any worse in the United States are going in the direction of hungary or poland . Or do you think this is something we could come out of with this years election . Will this be a strange episode . Somebody recently asked me what i thought would happen in 2021 and i said it depends what happens next. [laughter] so for a long time we have this inept ability of american democracy that we are the greatest in history and the constitution the greatest ever written and the story of progress with a little blip in the middle for the civil war but other than that everything gets better. And that was misleading and with some other kind of politics one of the things i wanted the book to do is remind people the future is radically open so i do think it is possible we could overcome donald trump and people will say what was that about . I think its also possible to battle him and his shadow for a long time and how the Republican Party behaves afterwards. So if trump wins and he will solidify the damage he has done and it will be much worse and then in the trump element and to have a lot of legitimacy and that the next president ial candidate and perhaps if anke or maybe like mike pence. And many things that are fundamental . And the democrats take control and at least there is a chance for an argument to be had and there are multiple candidates and larry hogan to compete for leadership in the party. Perhaps then we can have a big argument. Even the farthest left democrats but that conservativism. And to be radical change and in order to have democracy. Internet scenario and to be honorable and Tucker Carlson and laura ingram and to run into parties someday in the future with the average joe schmoe runofthemill republican congressman who capitulated to trump the position of the people will be we have no choice. We are put in a terrible position. The question is if we do get back to a healthy twoparty system, what has to happen for the people on the right to the authoritarianism . And its a long one with different moving parts. With organizations and communities and so on. So i wonder that the only real answer is that we have them on the panel. And then we attempt to bring them back in. And after civil wars and what you do with promises from the other side. And then to jointly host a podcast and one of the people a few months ago was the former president of columbia had to reintegrate and similar problem how we reintegrate the conversation with fox news and cnn and that culture together. We would be lucky to have that problem. And what other people like to ask you. So are you optimistic about the future of the European Union that poland and hungary can do anything about it makes me and italians about it. You are asking me this on the data European Union just had an extraordinary step forward and to help countries recover from the virus and the economic impact. And it is a moment when the eu is cooperating so this issue of poland and hungary came up as part of negotiation so in theory how it has been resolved. The eu has put conditionality on money calling for proof by rule of law and the discomfort is shared by people have bigger countries that poland and hungary are members, there is no procedure for shutting people out. And so there isnt a procedure yet and so with more conditionality on those in the future. Another person asks what should we do if trump loses and refuses to give up power by reclaiming fraud . But if he claims fraud and revitalizes the movement that way . It will happen. Im expecting it to happen im expecting him to try to cheat. There will be different ways he will try to cheat. By preventing to get access from mail and ballots which people will want because the virus will be with us in november. They will cheat by the normal means of Voter Suppression and democratic neighborhoods. And its perfectly possible if the election is lost then trump will say there is fraud and he cheated and then claim victory. A lot will depend on how the party reacts. And at this point to enable trump would border critical behavior. A lot will depend on how fox news reacts. Ultimately, if he loses joe biden will be president and at that point he can tell the secret service to evict him from the white house. So that movement will have the and so it is something all americans should be aware of to think about. What will you do . Because im 100 percent sure he will try it. Another question from the chat can it be found in Early Education with no child could do wrong regardless of how the child performed and if he or she cannot obtain a position for which they believe should have equal qualification . Do you see the roots of what you describe of Early Education . Ic of what i describe in human nature and longing for a dictatorship and the frustration created by a democracy and the unevenness in the unfairness has always been a problem. And with the Education System and to get a hold on it to investigate the idea and there is a recent psychologist to come up with a description and then to deal with people who prefer simplicity and dislike change and there seem to be a personality type and that are bothered by that rapid change. So the answer is no. Its not in education and with those early origins and deep in human nature its no accident most civilizations have dictatorships. We have time for two more questions. Do you think the recent unrest occurring with Police Brutality and systemic racism holds any significance for the vitality of american democracy . There was something unusual. Others will speak better than me over the protest watching on social media and the news. But it does seem to me that there has been a turning point with a deep understanding for those that was black and white and Everything Else with the across cultural multiethnic that something is wrong with the police force in the background with a virus disproportionately killing people who are hispanic so somehow they wanted to show the recognition and may be that is a good sign for the energy after the election in november but is now seeking to instrumental lies and use in a very different way but what i have already described to portray all of the protesters of anti american with the policeman forcefully putting down protesters and again this is designed to appeal to people who dislike change protest. One last question for all of the learning from each other is it made worse with social media can social media be a tool to combat those tendencies in the book or is it more likely a weapon . So the authoritarian parties the hard nationalist party and there is a chapter in my book where there is a new far right which has been created from other far right parties using those tactics including the creation of fake websites with the most exciting or terrifying headlines and with those echo chambers of people who are upset about changes in those that play into it as well there is a playbook and they learn from one another there are people who are intuitively good at understanding and trump is one of them and has an intuitive way to reach people who were angered of political and social change and to identify with his father i cannot explain it psychologically but on top of that there are tactics and techniques that goes back to the very first question why am i writing about those enablers of trump . For those who are using and learning those tactics. This has been really wonderful thank you for joining us thank you for moderating and for buying your copy of the book you can come pick it up for me at city point this is great. Thank you again everybody. Great to talk to you. Thank you for doing this. Everybody support independent bookstores. We look forward to your next book. [laughter]. Good evening. Im the director of the wisconsin book festival. Thank you so much for being here tonight. We are absolutely delighted to be hosting larry tye for his book demagogue alongside john nichols that we know from the Capital Times editor, the nation magazine. We couldnt be more
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