Anne Applebaum: How Democracies Fail
With the world on the brink of another war, there’s no one more essential to hear from than Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author of Gulag, Iron Curtain, Red Famine (which cites Andrea’s grandfather, a Holodomor survivor), Twilight of Democracy, and Autocracy Inc.
In this urgent conversation, we go to the frontlines of authoritarianism, from MAGA’s playbook at home to Putin’s alliances abroad, from Orban’s Hungary to the rising threat of war with Iran.
We begin in Poland. In 2023, a broad democratic coalition ousted the far-right, anti-LGBTQ+ Law and Justice party, which had spent years eroding democratic institutions. But in a razor-thin presidential race this year, that same authoritarian force clawed its way back. The takeaway? Democracy isn’t a destination. It’s a constant, high-stakes battle.
“Everybody always wants to write the story of populism and say that it's over, or it's here for good, or we're finished, or we've won. And that's not what the story is going to look like,” says Applebaum. “This is the ongoing struggle that all of us will be in, probably for the next few decades, maybe into the foreseeable future. The argument about the nature of the state is now here with us. And neither one side nor the other has achieved a definitive victory, I would say, either in Europe or in the United States.”
Then, Iran. Trump launched airstrikes without congressional approval or public debate, risking another U.S. war. Many in the Iranian opposition welcome blows to the brutal regime, but without strategy or legality, this is more of Trump’s lawless chaos.
Meanwhile, Putin watches. His alliance with Iran is not ideological, but tactical, with one shared mission: destabilize democracies and sow chaos worldwide.
Applebaum discusses how Hungary became the MAGA model, what Poland’s resistance can teach the U.S., and why the fight for democracy is far from over.
This isn’t a time for hope alone. It’s a time to act. Because autocracy isn’t resting. And neither can we.
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Andrea Chalupa (00:10):
Welcome to Gaslit Nation. I am your host, Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, directed by Polish Queen of Cinema, the Polish director, Agneshka Holland. Mr. Jones tells the story of how western corruption and western complacency helped Stalin get away with one of the worst genocides of the 20th century, the odor, his terror famine that killed around 4 million in Ukraine. It is a film the Kremlin does not want you to see, so be sure to watch it. Today we're joined by a powerhouse of insight and clarity and Applebaum Pulitzer Prize winning historian, journalist, an unflinching critic of strongman and wannabe strongman. She's the author of Essential Works like Gulag Iron Curtain Red Famine, which cites my grandfather's testimony to the US Congress on being a survivor of the Halor and twilight of democracy, as well as Autocracy, Inc.
(01:21):
Each tracing the threads of tyranny and resistance. In this conversation, we're of course going to talk about Trump, Iran, and Israel, as well as the recent Polish elections and what we can learn from them here in the US, and also looking to Hungary Victor Orin's Hungary, which has one of the worst quality of life's standards in all of the European Union. Hungary, of course, is a model for the MAGA Fox News Republican Party. Hungary is where they want to take us here in America. They want to recreate the web of deeply embedded corruption that plagues Hungary. That's the end game for us here in the States if we do not stop MAGA. So we're going to get into all of that in this very important conversation today.
(02:13):
So when Trump comes back to power in November, 2024, there's a video that goes viral from a young Polish man saying, don't worry, America, we here in Poland, we overcame our own Trumpian government, and you can too. And here's what we learned in Poland, and now in the recent Polish elections, we have the Polish MAGA making a comeback in the presidential election. And how do we think of that now? How do we think of Poland is Poland backsliding and what should we know about this most recent election and what's next for Poland?
Anne Applebaum (02:54):
So first, let me take a step back and say that the president in Poland does not control the government. Poland has an odd constitution where there is a popular election for the president, but then the president doesn't control appointments, he doesn't control money, he doesn't control budgets, he doesn't even control foreign policy. He can block ambassadors and he can veto legislation and that he has negative power. Almost every person who's been president of Poland sooner or later becomes frustrated by this fact that they have a grand sounding title and they live in a spectacular house, but they don't have real executive power. And so the election of any president actually in Poland isn't life and death. Secondly, it is true that in the autumn of 2023, the Polish opposition, which was a broad coalition of really three parties center left, center right, and a kind of centrist liberal party did ban together to block a third term for the law and justice party, which was an autocratic populous party, which did indeed do its best to skew elections and to a variety of tricks and strategies to give themselves an advantage in the election, and they were blocked by this coalition.
(04:10):
So it is true that Poland did block the rise of autocratic populism. Yes, in the most recent election, a candidate put forward by the autocratic populous Law and Justice Party did win the presidency by a very, very small margin, a few hundred thousand votes, and actually it looks like the number was even smaller than we originally thought because there were some problems with some of the vote counting. Nawrocki who's the candidate. I think he'll still win, but it was very, very, very close. So those three things put together lead me to another conclusion, which is that all of us now live in an era where our populations are profoundly polarized, where every election feels existential and is existential, and tiny numbers of people swinging one direction or another do seem to be able to push the needle a little bit. I don't even want to say left and right, because it's not really about left and right anymore.
(05:04):
It's about more autocratic or more open, more closed or more liberal. And what just happened in Poland was evidence that although a coalition was able to win in 2023 in the autumn of 2023, that same coalition didn't hold together in another election 18 months later. And I think that's the lesson for all of us. Everybody always wants to write the story of populism and say that it's over or it's here for good or we're finished or we've won. And that's not what the story is going to look like. This is now an argument that goes on inside every country. Maybe it's some point, one side or another will take the lead, but at the moment, because the remaining election went well for Democrats, that doesn't mean that democracy is now saved or because the Polish election went badly for Democrats, that doesn't mean democracy is destroyed. This is now this argument. This is the ongoing struggle that all of us will be in probably for the next few decades, maybe into the foreseeable future. This is the argument about the nature of the state is now here with us, and neither one side nor the other has achieved a definitive victory, I would say, either in Europe or in the United States. And I think that's the lesson from both Polish elections from October, 2023 and also from the recent Polish election last month.
Andrea Chalupa (06:30):
So we have now a threat of war that Trump and Netanyahu might be dragging America into another war in the Middle East with Iran, this major attack on Iran. What are you hearing about that? What are your thoughts on the impact of this?
Anne Applebaum (06:48):
So it's too early for me to, again, to offer you a grand geopolitical theory about what's happening because there's still too many unknowns. Let me just say a few things that I do know about. I am in touch, actually spoke today with a friend who's part of the Iranian opposition. She lives outside the country, but she talks a lot to people who are inside Tehran. I've also been trying to read and listen to other people who are speaking from Tehran or who are connected there. It's pretty clear to me that the regime is now waging two wars, the Iranian regime. One is against the United States and Israel, which is actually a war it's been waging for more than four decades, and the other is against its own people. There's been a kind of crackdown on the Iranian opposition in the last few days. Many people in the opposition are celebrating.
(07:37):
I mean, they're not exactly celebrating the bombs because it's horrible to have your country be attacked. They are not unhappy. In fact, they're very happy that some of the leaders of the Revolutionary Guard, these are people who attacked the Women's March, who gouged out women's eyes, who have imprisoned people without cause, who have carried out extrajudicial murders inside Iran who have sponsored terrorism around the world, who've spent billions of dollars on a nuclear weapon that Iran doesn't need. Some of these people have died in the strikes in the last few days. I can't give you numbers, but there is a significant part of the Iranian population that's delighted. That's one complication to keep in mind. The second complication to keep in mind is that Trump does not have the, not only does he not have congressional approval for entering this war, he has made no effort to explain or to convince the public of why he needs to fight it.
(08:31):
There's no groundswell of opinion, there's no involvement of, there's no debate of any kind. He hasn't told us why he's there, all that we know. We don't even know that Iran had nuclear weapons in the sites that were bombed. It may be that the enriched Iranian was moved. His own intelligence services said a few days before the war that they did not assess that Iran was close to being able to build a bomb. So the reasoning why he's engaged in this war, his failure to build any support for it, that's a kind of big red flag. The idea that he's engaging in war for war's sake or because he liked the way the bombs looked on Fox News or because he thinks it'll make him look strong if he joins Netanyahu. This is what it feels to me like his real reasoning is. I don't hear from him or from anyone else in the administration, any real strategy that's designed to create a better Middle East or a better Iran or a better world, or even necessarily to do anything good for America.
(09:30):
So I have grave doubts about his motivations in entering this. I mean, the third thing to say is that it's also pretty clear that the Israelis have been preparing this for a long time. They have so far, and I stress so far because we're recording this on June 23rd, and who knows what will happen three hours from now or three days from now. So far, the campaign has been very targeted. It's been focused on military installations as we're speaking. A few hours ago, a bomb did explode at the gates of Evin Prison. This is the prison where Iranian dissidents and not just dissidents, I mean innocent people picked up by the regime for the purposes of mass terror are kept. That looks like a more political gesture. It didn't, seems not to have killed prisoners, although again, we don't know yet and we'll see. But for the most part, the bombing has been very targeted and very careful and seems to have been based on a lot of intelligence, some of which may have been coming from inside Iran.
(10:30):
So at the moment, it doesn't look like they have sought to create mass terror or mass casualties or anything like that. What happens now? I mean, in a way, the next step belongs to Iran. If Iran decides to retaliate, then absolutely there's a path towards a wider war. If Iran attacks Israel in a way that Israel's unable to defend itself, that could easily drag the United States into defensive Israel, there are multiple negative paths that you can see. I mean, there is maybe a slim positive exit in that it could be that this is the moment when finally, I don't want to use the expression regime change, because that's not what I mean in the sense that it's used, but there could be a tiny opening for some kind of different political leadership in Iran. Maybe that could be the outcome, but it doesn't look to me like either the US or Israel has any clear idea of how to bring that out or is even very interested in it. So that's my assessment so far. I mean, I'm really not a fan of the Iranian regime. They've been in partnership with Russia killing Ukrainians for the last three years. They and their proxies have sowed, as I said, terror and extremism all over the Middle East and indeed all over the world, including famous bombing in as far away as Argentina for the last several decades. And I'm not sorry to see that they're in trouble, but the possibility for negative consequences, the possibility that the United States is dragged into something larger do exist as well.
Andrea Chalupa (11:59):
And what would this mean for Russia? Russia has depended on Iranian drones. The Shahed, which are terrifying. Terrell Starr who's based in Kiev has talked about the horrifying noise that they make at night. What would a weakened Iran or political changes in Iran mean ultimately for Russia and Russia's ability to wage an existential war against Ukraine?
Anne Applebaum (12:23):
So I'm afraid that the Shaheds are already being built in Russia. As far as I know, this bombing may not necessarily end Russia's ability to use them. I mean, of course, again, we don't know. It's this moment of fog of war. We don't really know what's been hit or how much of the Iranian arms industry has been hit and how much that would affect Russia. I mean, I will say that Russia does have a partnership with Iran just as Russia has a partnership with China, with Venezuela, with other autocratic states around the world is the subject of my last book. And for the Iranian regime to look weak or to be in trouble or to be on the verge of collapse, if that's where we're going, and we don't know that yet, this would be interpreted in Moscow as a blow to them. Putin thinks a lot about other autocracies, and he's concerned about the survival of other autocracies because he thinks of himself as being part of a global war of ideas against liberal ideas, against democratic ideas, but also against the rule of law, against accountability and a win for the other side.
(13:26):
In other words, the fall of a sister regime would be interpreted in Moscow is bad for them. So it's also not impossible. While speaking about ways this could go into the future, it's not impossible that Russia somehow enters the war or that Russia comes to the aid of Iran. And I believe Medvedev -- the former Russian president who periodically posts drunken statements on social media -- I think he said today or yesterday, he said he made some kind of threat about other regimes providing Iran with nuclear weapons. And I wouldn't discount that altogether. I mean, I don't think the Russians are interested in escalation either, but they may also decide that propping up this regime is in their interests. So it's a complicated situation for Russia. I mean, remembering of course that Russia and Iran are not ideological allies. They don't share values, but they share interests and one of their interests is in weakening and undermining the democratic world.
(14:22):
And so Russia will be looking for ways to continue to do that and ways to protect and defend the autocratic narrative and the autocratic argument, I mean, there was one, I mean amusing in a kind of dark way. There was an amusing moment, which is that the Russian foreign ministry also made a kind of blustery statement about how the US and Israeli involvement in Iran violates international law and civilians have been harmed. I mean, this is from a country that's been violating international law for the last three years and regularly every single night aims weapons directly at civilian targets, including residential housing. For them to appeal to international law at this point, as I said, it would be almost funny if it wasn't tragic.
Andrea Chalupa (15:06):
So we do have a weakend, Iran, they lost Soleimani entered Trump's first term, and that sort of set off this domino effect that weakened Iran in Syria because Soleimani has such a powerful network across Syria and Lebanon and losing him and Turkey rising up to help the Syrians that now we have a free Syria and Russia kicked out of Syria. So we have a weakened Iran and a weakened Russia because it's bogged down in its unwinnable war. So how much do you really think that Russia could help Iran if it were to get pulled into a war with Israel and the US? Also with net inya and Russia being aligned, Netanyahu ran for office with giant billboards of shaking hands with Putin, and obviously there's a lot of Russians who have Israeli passports, especially including among the oligarchs around Putin. So is Russia sort of stuck here, Iran's on its own?
Anne Applebaum (16:06):
Let me try and pick that question apart. I mean, first of all, and I think the fall of Syria is also to do with the fact that Iran was weakened through its war, proxy war with Israel, and Russia was weakened through its war with Ukraine, and neither one of them was really able to come to the aid of the Syrian dictator who was of course now in Moscow. It's also important to remember, just if we're looking back into history, that one of the reasons this is all happening is because the first Trump administration also pulled out of the JCPOA, the nuclear agreement that Obama signed with Iran. So the inspections, the knowledge of Iran's nuclear abilities has also disappeared in the last few years. So in a way, this is what's happening is also a consequence of that decision some years ago. As for Russia, I mean, yes, Russia's plans for the rest of the world, its plans for Africa and its plans for the Middle East have been altered by the fact that it's war with Ukraine has sucked up so much national treasure, so many soldiers, so much blood, they've lost so much diplomatic credibility.
(17:10):
Their ability to function as any kind of honest broker in any situation is gone really. I mean, imagine Russia trying to broker some agreement or even be involved in some discussion about how to end this war. It's hard to see why anybody would take them seriously. You do see them losing power in the region. You do see them not able to project power the way they once could. I wouldn't however cut them out or I mean, I wouldn't count them out completely. Again, Russia's theory of the case is that Russia is stronger when there are more autocracies in the world, and Russia has these relationships with other dictatorships, including some very far flung ones. As I said, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba of course, as well as Iran and China and North Korea. It has these relationships. It sees that that group of countries, it thinks that their power is somehow related to its power. The Russians have gone out of their way to help the Venezuelan regime stay in power. They care a lot about seeing those regimes hold. And so I wouldn't rule out the idea that they find some way to help Iran in the next few days or weeks.
Andrea Chalupa (18:18):
Let's talk about our own regime. So we have Trump calling in the National Guard against Governor Gavin Newsom's wishes. There's horrible reports of immigrants across the US reports of feeling that they've been kidnapped, right? There was this one horrible story that went viral of a high school soccer star in Ohio who showed up for a routine immigration meeting and was being taken from his family and friends who had escorted him there basically for his own, not protection, but just for solidarity. Heartbreaking story after story. You're following all this. You're writing about all this from Autocracy Inc. Are we there? Is it fair to say that America is now a budding autocracy? Are we gone?
Anne Applebaum (19:06):
No. So first of all, you're never gone. I mean, if anything, the story of Syria. Syria was run by the same dictatorial family for 50 years and then the regime collapsed. No nation is ever determined to be anything that's not how history works. History might look in retrospect like it was inevitable, but actually nothing is inevitable. And everything that happens tomorrow happens because of things that we decide today. There's no law of history that says we're going in one direction or that it's irreversible.
(19:36):
America has also been through all kinds of different swings and autocratic moments in its history before. I mean, if you look at the rise of the Klan, not only after the Civil War, but again, it had another period of flower again in the 1920s. If you look at the history of some specific southern states, you look at the history of Louisiana, had a kind of dictatorial government, Huey Long, in the 1930s, who really ran Louisiana in the way that an autocrat runs a country.
(20:06):
He politicized all the institutions, he made them responsible to him personally. He used the government to make himself wealthy. I mean, all those traits that we know from the autocratic world, I mean we've seen them unfold in America in the past before. Obviously, what's different this time is that we have never had in Washington running the federal government corruption of this kind or on this scale. And so two kinds of corruption really. One is the financial corruption that I think is really not talked about enough. Trump has set up a cryptocurrency company that people can pay into effectively in order to bribe him. You can buy Trump coins which have no value. They can't be traded or sold. The only reason to buy them is to pay money to the president and to his family. And hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into people doing precisely that, one or two cases in which we know we're from people who are hoping to influence the decisions of the US government.
(21:07):
And that scale of corruption isn't something that we've had before, and that seems to me really genuinely new. Secondly, the capture of the state, the taking over of government institutions and personalizing them and making them their leaders and their civil servants loyal to Donald Trump rather than to the constitution of the United States. And this is, again, there are milder versions of this before in American history, but we've never seen anyone attempt to do it on such a grand scale, whether it's taking over the custom service, which as far as I can remember, didn't have masked armed men who were told to break into buildings or schools or Home Depot stores in the past, whether it's taking over the Department of Justice, so that rather than seeking to defend the Constitution and the rule of law, the employees, the Department of Justice are there to prosecute Trump's enemies, whether it's taking over the FBI or the, not even just law enforcement pieces of the government, but the health departments and health and education and all those things, and twisting them to be, as I said, to serve Trump and his family and his ideas and his people rather than to serve Americans and rather to fulfill the mission set for them by Congress, which is actually the body in our political system that determines how money is spent.
(22:31):
This is a pretty spectacularly new thing, and the scale of it is very new. And I think that's probably why your listeners and people who are worried about America heading in an autocratic direction are so disturbed because in these two areas, we're talking about something happening on a scale that is new. I mean, some of it, we saw elements in the previous Trump administration, the beginnings of this. I mean, you could have predicted that this would happen, but the speed and the scale are new. That of course doesn't mean that this is over or America's finished, or you should move to Canada or you should move anywhere else. My experience in Poland where we did block the rise of an autocratic government, my experience of watching not just activists, activists, politicians, thinkers, ordinary people and other countries work together to block the rise of autocratic regimes or even to overthrow them.
(23:23):
I mean, it is possible and it can be done. I mean, I think for Americans, the difficulty is going to be shifting the way they think about politics. So rather than understanding politics as a policy argument that it's a contest between whose ideas are better, we want a bigger welfare state. They want a smaller welfare state. Whatever's the argument or whether it's about taxes or about budgets, that's not what politics is about at the moment. Right now, the politics is about the Trump and the people around him, as I said, seeking to take over and politicize the institutions of the state, both for their political use and also in some cases for order to make money and beginning to think differently about how to organize to stop that. That's what we have to begin to do. And I see people out there beginning to think that way.
(24:13):
To be strategic about which issues you choose, you have to be strategic about how you choose to participate. I mean, I do think that there's a role for, there's a big role for ordinary people to become more involved in local politics, to make sure that from the ground up, from the level of state senators and state legislatures, local sheriffs, local judges, making sure that all of those races are contested and that people are involved at that level and that people begin to organize at the local level. All that remains very important. But the confusing thing for people is this, as I say, it's this shift. We aren't used to having politics in America be about the nature of the state. We're used to making just base assumptions about the nature of the state and then moving on to argue about policy. And I think we need to roll it back a little bit and think more structurally.
Andrea Chalupa (25:04):
Absolutely. It's not just about a personality contest anymore. It's about do you believe in democracy or not? Do you want to have government functioning and not harming you? And with that, and in terms of history, nothing being inevitable. The Soviet Union, the Iron Curtain, I want to bring it to your book, an oldie, but a goodie, the iron curtain that you wrote. A friend of mine was talking about how Trump's methods are so much like the Soviet's salami method. Could you speak about that? Are you seeing that as well?
Anne Applebaum (25:38):
Actually, salami tactics was the Hungarian communists. The Soviet Union used a lot more violence. So one of the features of the imposition of communism, especially in Hungary, but actually in the region in central Europe after 1945, was that although in some places, especially in Poland, there was a lot of violence in other places. Communist parties sought to take over without much violence. And the way they did that was by taking, it was salami, meaning you slice the salami in little pieces. So they would make one little change and then they would make another change, and they would very, very slowly alter the system until the opposition or the liberals or the anti-communist were squeezed out. That was this tactic, which is known as salami tactics. Interestingly, and probably not, coincidentally, it's not unlike what Victor Orban has done in Democratic Hungary over the last decade.
(26:35):
He also has moved very slowly. He went institution by institution. He didn't attack everything all at once. He actually, he's gone out of a way to try not to use violence. I mean, he uses a lot of threats and intimidation, but he tries to keep violence out of it, partly because Hungary is in the European Union and he tries to keep up facade, but also because he doesn't want to scare Hungarians. That's a well-known way of taking over the state. And by the way, it's also the most common way that democracies fail. Normally, we tend to think about democracies failing in some kind of some big violent event that ends the system, but actually most of the time democracies fail because an autocratic leader is elected to power, and then he begins to carry out this kind of salami tactic plan. But to slowly take over the institutions of the state, I would actually say that what Trump has done initially with the help of Elon Musk since taking over in January, I would say is a little bit different.
(27:38):
I mean, they've tried instead of salami tactics instead of very slowly boiling the frog, they did a lot of things all at once. And this again is why your readers and listeners are feeling overwhelmed. I mean, so the Doge attack on the civil service and on the federal government, the ramping very fast, ramping up of ice to suddenly it looked like a militarized secret police force, the appointment of very radical conspiracy theorists to important jobs in the government. Putting an anti-vax conspiracy theorists in charge of HHS, RFK Jr, is really a shocking and stunning thing to do to the medical establishment and to science in this country. The attacks on universities, Harvard is the one we talk about the most, but actually the attack on universities has also has other forms as well. There have been cuts to scientific research funding strange rules about the use even of the word diversity.
(28:38):
So if you were studying plant diversity or climate diversity, you could suddenly find your research project was stopped by some kind of computer algorithm if you had any federal funding attached to it. And so there have been lots of ways in which, oh, the student visas as well, I should say. And so there are lots of ways in which universities have been attacked and undermined. So there's an assault on a whole series of institutions that began several months ago and has actually moved very fast. So rather than salami tactics, which would have us not really noticing change happening from one day to the next, I feel like we have all noticed it. And in fact, it's pretty hard to miss. Although I should also take a step back and say in some ways the book you're referring to, iron Curtain was an attempt to explain how you take over a state, what are the patterns?
(29:26):
Because the Soviet Union did have a pattern, and the pattern was, you could see it more clearly actually in central Europe than in the history of the Soviet Union itself because they did it all at once and in several different countries, and by that time they had a playbook. And there are elements of that playbook that you can see at work in America today. So one of them is the Soviet Union was always intensely interested in education and in culture, and in not just taking over the economy or politics, but seeking to hijack the way that people think media, of course. And so one of the first things they do when they arrive at Berlin in May, 1945 is they immediately take over the radio station and they do it right away, and they find the radio station move people in. They have a team already ready to go of Germans who've been living in Moscow, German communists, and they bring them in to run it.
(30:15):
Same thing in Poland. One of the first things they do is try to find, and Poland, it's even harder because the radio stations are mostly wrecked and there isn't much communication at all inside the country in the latter part of the war. But again, one of the first things they do is to try to set up that they also get very interested right from the beginning in things like kindergartens and who's running schools and who's running universities. So there are a lot of details that are, when you read about the Soviet occupation of Germany in particular, some of the things they're interested in can seem very surprising. As I say, kindergarten teachers, where are they going to come from? And they immediately become interested in molding and shaping the way people think. And you can see elements of that. I don't think Trump himself is terribly interested in any of this, but there are certainly people around him who understand this and are, and they very much think of themselves as carrying out and fighting a kind of culture war against existing American culture and existing American institutions, American science and American research to agree to which it's pretty mystifying to outsiders.
(31:21):
I live in Europe, I'm talking to you from Poland now, and this is the one thing people just can't understand because the one thing people admire about America around the world, whether you hate or love America, people admire the research and the science, and they understand that it's something that's far ahead of anyone else and how America could be attacking scientific institutions and research institutions. Nobody can understand it. And as I say, my view is that they're doing it for the same reasons the Communists did it in 1945. It's to hijack the way people think and try to mold the culture in their own image.
Andrea Chalupa (31:56):
That's project 2025, the 900 page blueprint to do exactly that. Do you think with a culture as a country, as diverse as America, do you think such a thing is possible with us?
Anne Applebaum (32:11):
No. I mean, actually it wasn't possible in the Soviet Union either, nor was it possible in Soviet occupied Poland or Hungary. So they did try to do it, and they had looked on the outside like initial success. I mean, if you had walked through Warsaw in 1960 or Budapest or Prague, you would've seen these huge communist posters and slogans and so on. I remember seeing them myself, but that didn't mean that they'd won over people's minds. And in fact, the opposite happened. I mean, people began to assume that whatever the government said was a lie, and they began looking for real information in other places. And so if they try a version of that, I mean, it won't be exactly, I'm using the Soviet experience a metaphor rather than saying that's exactly what they're going to do. But I mean, they may try to damage and destroy institutions, but it's actually harder than you think to get people to conform to your ideas.
(33:10):
And they will eventually discover that. I mean, having said that, they could do quite a lot of damage along the way. They could damage America's ability to do biomedical research. They could damage the reputation of American universities. They could harm. I mean, American education I think is in pretty bad shape anyway, and they could do more damage to it. Well, I mean, we could simply become a stupider and less educated, less sophisticated country, and then maybe that's part of their goal. They can do damage, but they won't win. They won't be able to take over everything and make us into a totalitarian dictatorship because that's just not how people's brains work.
Andrea Chalupa (33:47):
And the Soviet Union, the resistance behind the Iron Curtain showed that it was relentless. We had the 1956 uprising, most famously in Hungary, but it was also happening in Poland at Czechoslovakia. And even though it was crushed with a thousand tanks, we did have 30 years or so later the final blow of the people rising up in Poland and elsewhere, and now it's gone. The Soviet Empire is gone.
Anne Applebaum (34:12):
So there were in the Soviet system, in occupied central Europe, there were periodic uprisings. They came in waves. There was a kind of cycle. The regime was never able to do what it said it could do. So they were promising everybody will be richer and we'll outpace the West and we're going to build communism here on Earth, and it's going to be like heaven and it's going to be fantastic. And it never was like that. So they were never able to do what they said. So they would try to explain it to themselves, why aren't we able to? Because they believe their ideology. So they thought that Marxism was a scientific theory. It explained reality, and it should work. So why doesn't it work? Why aren't people producing more food? Why do we have shortages? Why doesn't it succeed? Usually the first conclusion was it's because there are spies and traitors and saboteurs who are undermining our system.
(35:03):
The first wave of when they would try to make things work is they would do a wave of repression. And there were waves in Soviet history in the 1930s and so on. And in central Europe, it came at the end of the 1940s. So just a few years after the communist takeovers, there were these waves of very harsh repression. There were show trials, and of course that was also a failure. That was also a failure. Those didn't succeed. Then Stalin died. Many of the regimes said, right, the problem is the reason why we're failing, the reason why we're not succeeding is that this regime is too, and what we need to do is liberalize it a little bit. And so then they would liberalize, they would pull back, and then there would be a kind of popular explosion. And that was the first version of this was 1956.
(35:47):
There were other versions in 1968, both famously in Prague, but also in Warsaw. There was another version in Poland and the 1970s, there were periodic strikes led by shipyard workers and others. It was a cycle. Every few years, either there were students or there were workers, or there was somebody who began to see that the value of obeying the law and the value of doing what the regime said wasn't worth it because the returns were so low and there would be protests. What was important about Poland in particular was that over the course of organizing protests, Poland evolved a kind of alternative elite. So there was actually, I first went to Poland in the 1980s, and by that time there was already a very large group. I mean, it would've been thousands of people who were opposed to the regime, who were well organized, some of whom had already ideas about how to reform the economy or how to reform the society.
(36:46):
And so when the regime finally did fall in 1989, in Poland's case, it was a negotiated end, and there was an election that led to a non-communist government. There were already people in place who were ready to take over as a very particular example. This was less true in some of the other countries, but generally speaking, the regimes were never successful. They were never able to do what they wanted. They tried alternatively repression and liberalization, and they essentially had one failure after another. And by the 1980s, they had really very little legitimacy. Very few people accepted them. Very few people believed in the ideology. A few, some people did it actually. It's important to remember that they existed, but it was by the end, it was a very small number of very dedicated party members, and most of the society didn't believe it.
Andrea Chalupa (37:34):
And I want to ask is that basically where Orban is headed, he's facing what is believed to be his greatest challenge, yet Hungary has one of the worst quality of life across the EU. It's I think the poorest country in the eu. Now, he's just
Anne Applebaum (37:49):
Depends how you count, depends, but it worst. It's either the poorest or the second poorest, maybe the third, depending on how you measure GDP.
Andrea Chalupa (37:57):
It's down there.
Anne Applebaum (37:58):
It's down. No, no, it's at the bottom.
Andrea Chalupa (38:00):
And that is, that's the hero of the American, right? CPAC has been in Hungary, Tucker Carlson has gone to Hungary and they look to or Ben's Hungary as a model for the us. And quality of life has just plummeted under him. Do you believe that he might be on his way out? What are you seeing?
Anne Applebaum (38:18):
So it's certainly true that there is now for the first time an opposition leader in Hungary who he's called Peter Magyar, which it's like being called Charles de Gaulle. I mean, Magyar means Hungary. So it's kind of, I'm not sure how he was lucky enough to have that name. But there's an opposition leader in Hungary who at least according to opinion polls is outranking Orban. I think now by quite a bit, by 10% or 15%, something like that. Of course, we don't know how good the polls are, but that's what I've seen. There's beginning to be a feeling that it's time for Orban to go. It's a hard regime to describe because it's not a harsh repressive regime. And as I said, Orban himself has avoided violence. And what he's tried to do instead is some of the things we've described hijack the culture, take over the media, take over the courts manipulate. He periodically rewrites the constitution looks to give himself small electoral advantages in different ways.
(39:14):
So he's tried to kind of massage the system rather than to smash it. And so the question now in Hungary is if he is finally defeated electorally or he could be defeated electorally, will he allow that to happen? Or will he do what Erdogan has done in Turkey and arrest his main political opponent on some trumped up charge? Will he do that? Will he allow himself to lose? What would happen if he lost? What happens to the huge network of companies connected to his family and to his friends, who are the dominant companies in Hungary? This is one of the features of Orban, is that it's profoundly corrupt just in that sense. Similar to Russia, we don't know yet. So far, one of the things he's been very successful at doing was keeping the opposition divided and fragmented.
(40:02):
And some of it was the fault of the opposition. And some of this was just he was good at undermining them. He was good at mocking them. He was good at making sure they didn't have outlets so that people couldn't hear them. And now for the first time, he seems to be confronted by somebody who is being heard and who is being listened to. And we'll see, as I said, if he loses and he allows himself to lose, then we would have a very serious and very difficult reckoning. As I said, there are layers of corruption. The ruling Party Fidesz is infiltrated into all kinds of business deals, all kinds, all different parts of the government. And it would be almost like what happened in Central Europe after 1989. You'd have to rethink. You'd have to look at all those institutions to try to figure out how to make them neutral again and how to make them belong to the nation rather than to the ruling party.
Andrea Chalupa (40:55):
And you'd have to talk about lustration, which I feel like we should be talking about as well in the United States. Keeping a list of names. Do you have any thoughts on that? For the US lustration in the US.
Anne Applebaum (41:08):
I mean, that's not going to be hard to do. I mean, there are people in the US government now who are breaking the law. Many of these issues are still going through the court system, and we'll see how they come out in the end, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's some time in the future they were held to account. It's one of the things that worries me actually a lot about this administration is they are not acting like people who ever will be held to account. And that makes me a little worried about how they're going to run elections. I mean, our system is so decentralized and elections are held from state to state. I spend so much time talking to people who were in charge of election security, and I know that it's almost impossible to fix them or to change them. I mean, I would worry about more about something like what we saw in Los Angeles a few weeks ago, some kind of mass event where elections are postponed some emergency. But I don't even really want to speculate it because I just don't have any proof that anybody's thinking about that. I'm disturbed by the fact that they are acting like people who will lose.
Andrea Chalupa (42:17):
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(43:24):
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