And programs in the coming days and weeks, adding more every day ahead of the fall, Pay Attention to our website or sign up for our newsletter for who is coming soon. We are glad to host this event this way and it is for usa have been for us during this difficult and confusing time. Copies of Anne Appelbaums book twilight of democracy are out today from doubleday on our website, listen to the link to buy it from us as a chat. As we change phases, opening for curbside pickup, for in the bookstores like ours, to post more of them, able to order a copy of Anne Appelbaums book would be greatly appreciative. At the end of the conversation, use the zoom chat function for any questions you have, i will come back and relay them to Anne Appelbaum. We are honored to present this virtual event, United Nations association of new york we have with us today, ann nicol. Thanks for the introduction. We are delighted to collaborate in bringing to our membership and others. Twilight of democracy is of interest to the United Nations association because its subject matter is relevant and timely. It provides tools of analysis that can be applied to many in the world today. With authoritarian forms of government, long intertwined with the work of the United Nations with a stimulating conversation ahead of us. With the social movement, to focus for us on the glowing global trend toward nationalism. A great pleasure to have you address it today, and give it back. Thank you very much. We are thrilled to have Anne Appelbaum in conversation with jacob weisberg, cofounder and ceo, dedicated to putting artists and creators, editor in chief, the author of today, the seductive lure of authoritarianism and Anne Appelbaum, the atlantic article, a warning from europe inspired the new book and was a finalist of a National Magazine award. And and and the history of the soviet union. And they had this to say about Anne Appelbaums new book. Anne appelbaum is a leading historian of communism and penetrated investigator of contemporary politics. One with which she herself has been deeply engaged in europe and america. And intelligence understanding is the answer. Friendships, torn, ideals, betrayed, alliances broken. In this, a great historian explains to so many of those who won the battle for democracy, proclaiming its values, liars, thugs and crooks. Analysis and memoir, twilight of democracy tells the shameful story of a political generation gone bad. We passed things off to jacob. Hello everybody, thank you for sponsoring the event and to john for posting it, good to be in a bookstore again even if it is a virtual bookstore but this is one of my favorites. I want to make sure you see this book which was very elegant. Very brief and to this point, very efficient. I recommend Anne Appelbaum a little bit who is not only an old friend but for me the person who first founded the alarm about what we are dealing with now in the United States and she had special insights as a journalist but orientation toward around Eastern Europe. Started to see manifestation of authoritarianism in american politics a lot of us had the reaction that it cant happen here, that it would remain permanently a Fringe Movement that we didnt have to take seriously and that turned out to be wrong. I think Anne Appelbaum because of the experience she writes about in Eastern Europe particularly knew what was coming and started to talk about it with a clear warning voice in 2015 at the least. But a lot of people asking the same comments. I read the book with that in mind and first thing i want to ask you is with that perspective on the global perspective on authoritarianism why you have focused the way you have on the role of the people who are accessories to authoritarianism. You might call them the intellectuals but many of them arent intellectuals and either dont get that inappropriate description, people who are publicists, commentators, some of them are intellectuals but why are you looking at these people rather than authoritarian leaders. Im delighted to be in a virtual bookstore even though it is across the atlantic. A nice feeling to speak to people around me and great to be with jacob who ive known for many years, my book on iron curtain, some weird parallels. The book grew out of the reason i wrote it the way i did, the book grew out of my reflections about people that i know and it started with me talking about people i have known for 20 years, in the us and elsewhere, a political journey in the center right, maybe part of anticommunist movement in hungary, instrumental in arguing for and helping bring about communism and over 20 or 30 years changed dramatically becomes something closer to a new form of radical right, some became nationalist, some became part of or a spokesman for authoritarian leaning political parties. I decided the best way to do it was the perspective of people i know. To some extent i am in the story. In the United States, been there for a long time in the 1990s but have deep ties to poland, for many years, somehow i felt i couldnt tell this story without being in it because that would be cheating. I couldnt do what i did for the occupation of Eastern Europe, tell the story in a balanced way from our perspective, but a story that i could best tell in my own voice without people i know. People in politics, political entrepreneurs. Higher connotations, people who are interested in ideas, to make ideas into politics, people who hang around think tanks, and political parties, newspapers, they sought to bring about political change, a group of people i know well and am familiar with. They also we underrate their roles. What people have written about voters, why do voters vote for trump, they vote for choose authoritarians, that is a legitimate pursuit in a lot of reasons why. Not many people, not voters being presented with. Not just a question for an authoritarian leader. And designs to create enthusiasm. Somebody creates social media. They go right to speeches, somebody prepares them. This is a missing piece of the story. Prehistory here particularly of the Twentieth Century, people who share the practices of liberal society. They went to the darkside if it werent ended up supporting stalinism or fascism. And putting it in that tradition, talk a lot about developing this idea, the treason of the clerks. There are some intellectuals, intellectual class who traffic. In some crucial movement make a terrible decision to ally themselves, against liberal democracy. The question for you is why does this keep happening. The most obvious answer is they want power. Is there more to it than that . Something that will annoy people is it doesnt have a single answer. And overarching theme that it is overarching. I look at several, in different circumstances. People, intellectuals, journalists who feel they were excluded, they have been left out by another group of intellectuals or by another group of journalists and a common phenomenon. A look at some resentment to attach themselves to political movements. Sometimes there are true believers, people who talk themselves, that societies that fail. This is a particular theme you see over and over from the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth Century to the present that modernization can be very rapid social changes. For some people, our society is losing something, we are losing our folkways the way we used to do things. There is a cultural pessimism and cultural despair. When i listen to the language of presenters on fox news. And we are missing something. Money is a reason. Ambition is a reason. Almost sometimes nihilism is the reason, the desire to make fun of pompous authorities, that they doctored so well, you make fun of these and democracy, having time doing it, playing video games. Usually the primary vote is usually this sense, since somebody else has power, it is enough motivation. You take it further and say there is a sense of disposition, people who had power dont have it, there is a common theme of a country that has been taken away, take america back again. And and foreigner immigrants, and the communists. Is it fundamentally is it significantly different . It is the thought pattern, one of the oddities, it is about tribalism. Where is the real transmittal real americans as opposed to them, whatever, the elites, the foreigners who dont believe in our country, you create that kind of climate and that kind of polarization even in a totally homogenous country. Poland is a good example, 99. 9 , everybody is polish. Everybody speaks polish. There are tiny fringe minority groups but it is an overwhelmingly yet it is a country where you have created, where they managed to create two deeply polarized tribes who hate each other as much as if they were speaking different languages and had differences in colors. We have a phenomenon like that in the United States where blue america and red america. We still have a large group in between but there are tribes on both sides who identify one another in a profound way. The mechanism that someone has stolen our country from us, the foreigners, immigrants, communists, whoever it is, you can say that but also create the same instinct, the usurpers, the unpatriotic citizens are in charge. You can create that division and to do that kind of politics even in a country where there isnt any. I want to talk about Eastern Europe before i get back to Laura Ingraham. It was so useful the way you bring us uptodate on what has happened in poland and hungary by picking out a few of the exemplary individual stories. Even if you follow that part of the world you lose track of elections and liberal protection being defriended, how much of it is left in one country versus one of its neighbors. But the people you talk about i wonder if you could talk about the hershey brothers who to me were helpful in understanding what happened in poland. It is a very famous example. There are two brothers, twins that are a few years apart in age. How can you between the two years apart in age. They are not twins. I am listening. In polish politics, they are not, they both grew up, if you remember the city which was the heartland of the anticommunist opposition, children of the kind of opposition, even when they were in high school they were very active anticommunist activists, marched in protest in 1718, they ran, one ran the schools, Solidarity Committee and went on to work on trade union newspaper. They were active in the anticommunist movement and over the years they began to take different paths and one of them now has ended up as the editor of the main polish liberal newspaper in the New York Times as a paper of record in poland. One of them is now the head of state television which has been taken over by the ruling party and it is the most crude form of party propaganda, the last president ial election took place a few days ago. Constant stories about lgbt which is an acronym that sounds weird in polish, the opposition candidate won, forced to gay marriages, the National Independence day parade, extraordinarily, virulent nonstop homophobic propaganda and this is on state television which is watched by 30 of the country that doesnt get any other television. They cant afford table. One is running an independent paper and the other is quite extreme far right homophobic antisemitic sort of propaganda. What happened to them . The book goes into detail about their lives and part of the answer is the younger brother who run state television developed he felt with solidarity he threw rocks at the police and somehow in subsequent years he didnt become what he expected and great recognition, become an editor like his brother or have any Great Success and he became ever more reason full, running the country, journalists doing well and he began to affiliate with extreme parties and look for another way out. Resentment, interested in power and ambition led him down this particular road and now to deal with his power is head of state television, people who were mean to him or insufficiently impressed with him, includes his brother so very toxic and dont speak to each other. They rarely see each other when their mother died but other than that totally separate lives. The development of ones likes, how you evil as a person can affect you. With political decisions over the years, under rate how much one personal experience, one is ones context can push you in one direction or another. Watched polish state television and how crude it is and then you see fox news. It is a version of the same phenomena in, moving in this direction . Or are there limits in terms of how bad it will get or how much influence it could have . It already devolved enormously. I used to get asked to be on fox news. And other people who are on the left or center right used to be but also fox news is much more of sophisticated, there are some programs that are fairly neutral and then there are mostly these hosted programs, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham which are truly virulent now and dont pretend anymore. They are opinion programs that dont pretend to cover anything neutraly but even if you watch how that evolved, what is the word . Much more aggressively partisan. Laura ingraham says things that she used to be careful about not saying, but legal immigrants. Not just protecting our borders, protecting the country we are used to be in Tucker Carlson is even more aggressive. They become clearer in their messaging to their audience about what they are talking about is preserving White America or hierarchical america, both of them are very much using these tactics to transmit, to unify together against the foreigners, the dems, the libs, immigrants that are trying to destroy us. In that sense they are similar. The staging of it is more sophisticated. Here too, you write you are part of the story. We shared a meal you when we were living in washington in the 1980 numplaps1990s we would write for the same magazine, would write for the same magazines we would but the idea publish an article in the American Spectator or National Review is common practice, they write for a magazine like the new republics, it is a mystifying experience that none of those people were friends of mine but most of the people you talk about, you might have known some of them better and they share certain values with us. I would say we still have you on. Just a little glitch. Absolutely. I wrote for the National Review, the Weekly Standard and the criteria and conservative magazines. But i think the only thing that existed in the 90s this was still the tail end of the cold war and a lot of coalitions had been created, bipartisan coalitions created to fight the cold war, decade in, decade out policy, but if you think about who was part of the cold war coalition, we had different components. There was for example people who were cold warriors because they worried about russian influence, strategy and nuclear weapons. Lots of democrats, people who were cold warriors, care about human rights and democracy and that is why. There were people who were cold warriors because they were christians and the soviet union was atheists. Something that happened in the 1990s, maybe artificially held together by 9 11 is the coalition began to come apart and those people began to find themselves in different groups. The sort of it was no longer at a medically automatically the case the people who were christians were on the same side as people who believed in human rights and democracy. That is the beginning of the change. But still the events of the last three or four years have to be explained in a deeper way. This is explained in the book, people who are journalists, they worked for the Republican Party, young conservative staffers, some of them have gone off in a direction which is much more clearly not interested in democracy but kind of scornful of democracy, not interested in promoting it abroad, not mindful of it at home, seeing themselves more and more as at war with people like you and me even though we used to be more or less on the same side. Host even beyond that, the premise for example that the Mainstream Press makes up stories, something anybody a journalist in any way knows are fundamentally not true. Journalists make mistakes but there are no stories in the New York Times that are intentionally false. That has become a standard claim of everyone in the group you are talking about. People who are sympathetic to the authoritarian right and they dismiss information they dont like by calling it fake news or propaganda. When does that become an acceptable position for an american conservative . Something you never would have heard in the 1990s or the 2000s accept from extreme Fringe Groups out there . Guest it starts during the Obama Administration, the Obama Administration for a lot of them, it was an experience, a charismatic black president who seemed at least initially able to create a permanent majority for his youth. The consequent need to prove him illegitimate and undermine him at every stage which was the tactic of the Republican Party, the tactic of the republican media. I think that was the beginning. One of the really really important phenomenon, which i ignored. The idea the president isnt really the president , is an illegitimate president born in kenya, not really american, there is a hint that he is muslim,