Sarmishta: Last week Harper’s magazine published an open letter. It was called A Letter on Justice and Open Debate, and it was signed by 150 notable figures, including Salman Rushdie, Garry Kasparov, JK Rowling, and Margaret Atwood. Spearheaded by the Black American writer, Thomas Chatterton Williams, it critiqued what its signatories see as a narrowing of debate in the cultural world, particularly on campuses, and in the media, it’s authors wrote, there’s a growing intolerance of opposing views and a penchant for public shaming. I’ll quote from the letter: “The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion. Not by trying to silence or wish them away,” the letter said. It went on: “We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other.” The response to that letter in the tiny teacup where these things matter intensely was heated. Two people withdrew their names when they saw who else had signed. There was soon a counter letter with 160 signatures. That was titled A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate. It argued that marginalized voices have been silenced for generations, and that the original letter had missed the point. The past few days have seen high profile resignations from the New York Times and New York Magazine. Undoubtedly, we haven’t heard the last of this yet. I’m Sarmishta Subramanian, sitting in for Jordan Heath Rawlings. And this is The Big Story. Joining us today from Poland, where she lives, is Anne Applebaum. She’s one of the signatories of the original Harper’s letter. She’s also the Pulitzer Prize winning author of a new book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. In it she tracks the rise of illiberal parties and governments in Europe, Britain, America, and across the globe. She also knows personally, the consequences of lost common ground. Thanks for joining us, Anne. Your book starts with a party you hosted at the turn of the millennium. It was at your farmhouse in Poland, a hundred guests, writers, diplomats, celebrating into lunch the next day. What happened to some of those friendships over the next 20 years?
Anne: So yes, the book starts with a party and the party is a kind of metaphor. I mean, it’s not really a book about parties. It’s a book about who your political allies are. And one of the things that happened to me about 20 years after that party, is I started thinking about who had been there. And you know, it was at the time, a fairly consistent group of people. They were mostly Polish, although there were a few other Europeans and a couple of Americans. And it was mostly people who had been anticommunists, who probably would have described themselves as centre-right, or maybe as classical liberals. They were people who believed in liberal democracy, and in a Poland that was part of Europe and part of the NATO, the Transatlantic-Alliance, they might have identified as Thatcherites, or free market economists, though I don’t think– economics wasn’t really the main thing that held people together. But 20 years later, that group had really split in half. And half had become– were part of centre-right, or sometimes centre-left parties in Poland, in Europe. And another part of the group who’d been, there were part of a different grouping, which was a Nativist Polish nationalist party. It’s a party called law and justice. Which, when it won an election in 2015, began to try to dismantle democracy in Poland, to take apart the institutions of the state. And some of the people that I knew from earlier were part of that effort, and they were part of it as propagandists, as journalists, as spin doctors, as people who worked on behalf of this effort. It was seeking to install a kind of one party state or a sort of soft authoritarianism in Poland.
Sarmishta: You talk about the question of political allies and who your allies are, and those people who had a similar vision of the world suddenly over the last– well, I’d say 20 years, but really it’s the last five years, isn’t it? Since law and justice won a majority. You’ve now, there are people, you write in the book, who would not enter your house, and you would cross the street to avoid speaking to them. Can you tell me just a little bit about a couple of those friendships? People with whom you had lots of common ground and now have none?
Anne: One of the stories that I tell in the book is about two brothers. And this is a way of illustrating how, not only has this, you know, this division in Poland, which is a division we can recognize from a lot of other countries, not only has it divided friendships, it’s also divided families. And so I tell the story of two brothers, and one of the brothers is the editor of probably the most important liberal newspaper, centrist newspaper in Poland. And the other one is the chief propagandist for state television. State television used to be public television, it’s now been taken over by the ruling party. And by the way, their anti democratic attitudes go back a lot farther than five years. More like 10 years. You know, the brother who is now in charge of state television, I mean, for example, in a recent presidential election in Poland, they only showed the election meetings of one candidate. So the, the government’s candidate, not the opposition candidate. They ran a very explicit, they called it an anti LGBT campaign, LGBT being a word that means nothing in Polish. It kind of sounds foreign. But showing, you know, this– the president described it as an LGP, it’s an ideology, it’s not about people, and it’s an ideology that threatens Polish families. And Polish television, state television, public television, paid for taxpayers’ money, did program after program and discussion after discussion about how, you know, if the opposition wins, then gay pride parades will replace National Independence Day parades. Children in schools will be sexualized. Families will be damaged if we allow this opposition to win. So, we have two brothers, one of whom ran this television station and the other one of whom opposed it. And you know, I tried to analyze the career of Yitzhak Korski, he’s the one who runs state television, and, you know, you can look at his different kinds of motivations. In particular, he’s somebody who felt very– you know, he felt that the Polish political transition was unfair in the 1990s, and first decade of two thousands, largely because he had not attained the prominent position that he thought he deserved. He was somebody who felt like he had been in the anti-communist opposition, he’d been a student leader, you know, he deserved more. He hadn’t attained a prominent political position. And he was resentful of the sort of so-called mainstream and became determined to destroy it.
Sarmishta: That politics of resentment is something that you explore in a number of different contexts. And I guess it’s understandable why the politicians have made up conspiracies and so on, because there’s a tangible benefit to them from it. Why have educated people with options and prospects– these are not the left behinds, they’re not the deplorables– why have these people, in high places, really people with options and prospects and educations– helped them get there?
Anne: So this is a book about– you know, your question points towards something important about the book. This is not a book about what, why people vote for nationalists, or why people vote for Donald Trump. This is a book about elites, essentially, and intellectuals and journalists, who support extremist ideas. And again, the book gives several different kinds of explanations. I mean, in some cases the explanations are personal. I mean, people feel resentment, and they see these new parties as a kind of political opportunity, you know, a way for themselves to advance, and if they weren’t able to advance in existing politics. There’s another element, too, which I describe and show from various different angles, which is, I would describe as something like cultural despair. So there are people who become convinced their societies are losing something. They’ve lost out. And whether it’s they’ve personally lost out, or their countries are changing in ways that they don’t like, and they feel that democracy is producing mediocre leaders, that politics lacks some kind of grand narrative, that the moment of the Cold War, when we were fighting against something that was truly evil and we were all on one side, has been lost, and the clarity of politics has disappeared, and they seek some new kind of crusade and they seek a kind of regeneration.
Sarmishta: You talk a good deal about authoritarianism, and authoritarian often becomes code for far right. But there’s research showing that there’s nothing intrinsically right wing about an authoritarian outlook. Can you talk a little bit about the authoritarian predisposition that you discuss in the book?
Anne: Yes, in the book I use– I rely on the work of a kind of behavioural economist, behavioural psychologist really, called Karen Stenner, who’s identified something she calls an authoritarian predisposition, which as you say, doesn’t have to be right wing or left wing at all. I mean, it’s more a sensibility in that there are some people who dislike complexity, who dislike clashing points of view, who prefer unity, who prefer there to be one leader, with one message, and for society to agree, and who are triggered, really, by certain kinds of threats. By, you know, as I say, by very active public disagreement, by a feeling that they may lose safety and security, by a fear of cultural clash or political clash. And who, again, would like to kind of see all the arguments, you know, come to an end. And she identifies this, and I explore some of this by looking at how there are some politicians and some political– whatever expression you want to use– propagandists, spin doctors, journalists, intellectuals– who seek to play to this sensibility, you know, who seek to find and encourage this authoritarian sensibility, and to promote it, deepen it, and bring those people who have that feeling into a single political party.
Sarmishta: Can we talk a little bit about that letter that was published in Harper’s magazine last week? You were one of the signatories. Can you tell us a bit about it and why you signed it?
Anne: I mean, the funny thing about that letter was, I signed a very similar letter a couple of years ago when the then-editor of the New York Review of Books was fired. And there was a similar list of kind of, you know, literary figures and university professors who also signed it.
Sarmishta: Right. This was Ian Buruma after he published a piece by Jian Ghomeshi.
Anne: That’s correct. And you know, the letter attracted as far as I can tell, no attention whatsoever and had no impact on anybody. And so it’s pretty clear that this Harper’s letter has attracted attention because we’re at a political moment when people are having these kinds of arguments. You know, I signed the letter because of the number of stories I’ve heard– you know, I’m not– I live in Europe, I’m not part of US institutions, you know, this is not my personal experience, but the number of stories I’ve heard mostly about non-famous, ordinary people who do lose their jobs or who are shamed, or lose their status at their universities, or in their publications, because they have violated a code of conduct, sometimes in what seems to be quite trivial ways. So there was a case recently of a guy who tweeted a political science study by a respected political scientist, that it was to do with why violent protest doesn’t work, so something along those lines, and for doing so he lost his job, because that wasn’t the line of his institution at that particular moment. And so these– you know, I began to feel that people who were losing their jobs or being threatened, you know, in that way, deserve some kind of, you know, some kind of public support. I should be clear that, you know, when I signed the letter, I didn’t know who else was signing it. I mean, I wasn’t given a full list of people. I don’t think anybody was. So there wasn’t a– you know, I signed it because I was shown the language, I was asked to sign by people who I know, other journalists, and the language seemed acceptable to me. And so I didn’t sign it imagining that I was part of some particular group or that it was going to have a– you know, the group was going to have a particular political character. In fact, it turned out to be much more diverse than I expected. I mean, there were people who I would have called far left on the list, Noam Chomsky. And there were people who I didn’t think were political at all on the list, like Malcolm Gladwell, who doesn’t usually sign political letters. You know, and I think that’s probably why it had the impact that it did, because it was this broad range of people. But again, my purpose wasn’t defence of my own position, or my own views. My purpose was this feeling that people were being penalized for crossing brand new invisible lines about what you are and aren’t allowed to say inside– as I said, it’s particularly academic and media institutions.
Sarmishta: Right. I mean, I think it was a common experience for people who signed the letter to not know who else was on it. And in fact, after the letter came out, two people withdrew their support, and a common criticism was, “How could so-and-so sign a letter that was also signed by JK Rowling or Laura Kipnis or whoever.”
Anne: I thought that was silly. I mean, you know, the text of the letter didn’t have anything in it that I disagreed with. So why should it bother me who signs it?
Sarmishta: Right. I mean, there’s the possibility of common ground with people that you may disagree with on some things, on significant things, is that part of the problem? I mean, that seemed to be some of the response to the letter.
Anne: We have to find common ground with people that we disagree with. I mean, that’s kind of the definition of living in a democracy. We have to be able to find– we have to be able to– you know, we’ve lost quite a lot of, you know, what used to be a kind of common public sphere because of the changes in the media. I described this also in the book, and the way in which we now get and process political information, which is so different from what it once was. And recreating that common sphere, finding common ground on which we can discuss things and debate things, I think is absolutely critical. I mean, once you lose that, then it does indeed become very hard to maintain democracy. I mean, look, democracy in a way is very antithetical to human nature. You know, because what is the fundamental promise of democracy? If you lose an election, you know, what you’re supposed to to do is say, okay, I’m going to allow my political enemies to rule the country now, because I know that four years from now, or five years from now, I’m going to have the chance to contest them again. And when you win the election, you’re supposed to say, okay, we’ve won, but we’re going to maintain a system that will allow our political enemies to take our power away in four years from now. And that’s a very difficult thing to do. And that’s why we now see in a number of places, parties coming to power, who, once they attained power, do try to change the system, to alter it, whether it’s through gerrymandering or voter suppression, as in the United States, or whether it’s through the actual destruction of the media, as it is in Hungary, the elimination of an independent press. There are people who seek to change the rules to make sure that nobody can meet them again. And in a way, I think we’ve underestimate how fragile democracy is. I mean, we’ve all assumed because our national stories in recent decades are ones of success, we’ve assumed that that success will always continue, but there’s nothing written in blood that says that democracy always has to exist, or the United States of America or Canada have to go on being democracies. We could lose it if we don’t pay attention to the damage that’s being done by these new political divisions.
Sarmishta: In fact, you talk in the book about how any society, every society has some risk of losing its democracy. That in the right conditions, that that’s something that could simply go.
Anne: I mean, look, every democracy that’s ever previously existed in history has failed. You know, all of them failed. I mean, Greece, Rome, you know, most of Europe in the 1930s, I mean, the United States failed in the 19th century, I mean, that’s what the Civil War was. It was, among other things, it was a democratic failure. Part of the American, you know, some American States decided they couldn’t accept rules created by the other half, and they seceded, and that was the failure of democracy. And so, of course they can fail again and it’s our job as citizens and as thinking people to try and make sure that doesn’t happen.
Sarmishta: The past as context is both depressing and reassuring because none of where we’re at is as new as we’d like to think. Is there hope that we can take from the past, from history?
Anne: You know, I mean, history offers both optimism and pessimism, just like the present. You can read the past and look for lessons. You can look for ways not to do things. You can try and understand how democracies fell apart before, for example, and you can seek to avoid that. You can also look at the past at moments of success. I mean, look, for example, there have been moments of crisis in American history before, when people thought the nation was finished, or democracy was finished, you know, you look at the Civil War, you can look at the Great Depression in the 1930s, which is a moment when people really did think the US this might fail as a society. And you can see, see that those eventually became moments of renewal and change, when people adjusted, when rules were changed, when the economic rules, as well as political rules, were altered, when new kinds of people and leaders emerged, who were able to take the nation in a different direction. So, I mean, I think you can find– in history you can find stories of failure and stories of success. It’s absolutely worth reading history. And we’re thinking about, you know, what we can learn to make sure that our societies continue to be open, and democratic, and prosperous.
Sarmishta: Anne Applebaum, author of Twilight of Democracy. And that Twas he Big Story. For more from us. You can visit our website, thebigstorypodcast.ca. You can also follow us on Twitter at @thebigstoryFPN. And now you can write to us to let us know what you think, or even suggest an episode topic. The email address is thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com. I’m Sarmishta Subramanian, have a good weekend.
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