Plain English with Derek Thompson - The Bad Guys Are Winning

Episode Date: December 3, 2021

Derek talks to The Atlantic's Anne Applebaum on the decline of democracy and the rise of a new form of authoritarianism in Russia, China, Europe, and the U.S. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Anne Applebaum Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today we're going to talk about the state of democracy. First, some quick housekeeping. I have already had so much fun making this podcast. Thank you to all of you who are listening and writing to me and tweeting, the nice tweets. It really means a lot. And if you're enjoying this pod, please take 15 seconds and follow us on Spotify, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. It all goes a long way.

So many of the episodes that I've done so far unpack stuff that I know a little something about, like the economy or COVID or Facebook's metaverse thingy. This episode is about something I do not know very much about, or at least I didn't know much about before I started researching for this episode. It's about the decline of democracy around the world and the rise of a new kind of authoritarianism. Our guide today is Anne Applebaum. Anne is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where I am also a staff writer, and she is the author of our latest cover story titled The Bad Guys Are Winning,

how a new league of autocrats is outsmarting the West. A lot of times, when I see headlines about the state of democracy, the state of democracy around the world, the article itself is kind of unbelievably boring. You get stuff like, oh, last year, Italy's democracy was a 9.6 on a 10 point scale, but now it's a 7.8 on a 10 point. Like, what the hell does that mean? Anne's piece is nothing like that.

It is kind of a banger. It is clarifying. It's fascinating, and it's terrifying. It opened my eyes to a really interesting idea. History is not one unbending line of progress. History contains progress, but it moves in something that from the ground level looks a little bit more like cycles.

In the late 20th century, you saw the rise of liberal democracy all over the world, the defeat of communism, defeat of fascism, but the 21st century has been a story in reverse. You have rising authoritarianism in Turkey, in Hungary, in Brazil, and those are just our allies. In Russia and China, the situation is even darker. And right here, in the U.S., you have a Republican president who rejected the results of a fair election. You have a violent assault on the capital. You have polarization that's so deep that some people are predicting a Civil War 2.0. It really does.

sometimes feel like the entire world is slipping backward at the same time. So what the hell is happening here and what can be done about it? I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. And Applebaum, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. And your Atlantic cover story, the autocrats are winning, is extremely interesting and extremely scary, too. You write that a new species of authoritarianism is sweeping the world. Can you compare the image you think most people have of what an authoritarian leader is to the movement that we're actually seeing now? I think most people have in their heads a kind of cartoon image of what a dictatorship looks like.

There's one really bad guy at the top and he controls the police. Maybe he controls the army. you know, there are some bad collaborators who work alongside him, and there are maybe some brave dissidents who oppose him. In reality, most dictators in the modern world are not operating by themselves. Most of them work in conjunction with others. Really, what we're talking about now are networks of autocracy. And to be clear, these are not ideological networks. We're talking about so-called communists in Venezuela or Cuba or China, working with theocrats in Iran, working with nationalists in Russia or Burma or Saudi Arabia.

So we're talking about very different kinds of regimes that work together and nevertheless help to prop one another up. Essentially, they now all see a single enemy, and the enemy is democracy and democratic movements, in particular the democratic movements inside their own countries, whom they fear and whose influence they're seeking to repress. And so towards that end, they work with one another. You know, the state companies of one country invest in the state companies of another. the surveillance teams in one country help train the surveillance teams in another. They learn from one another how to use social media, how to use bots in order to put out disinformation.

Sometimes they use very similar themes, the kind of anti-Americanism you can hear in Russia, you can hear it in Belarus, you can hear it in Venezuela. It's all amazingly similar, even though, again, these are really, really different places with different histories and different geographies. and supposedly different ideologies, but really in each one of these countries, we're talking about very small, usually very wealthy elites

who have learned how to make money and hide it and who are interested in maintaining that system indefinitely. So you call this new network of dictators Autocracy, Inc., like a distributed corporation of dictators with shared resources and shared strategy, shared messaging, shared crackdown tactics. Your cover story begins with what's happening in Belarus, which for listeners who like me could have used a refresher on Eastern European geography, is a nation roughly the size and shape of Missouri that's directly between Russia and Poland. Like if you drew a straight line from Moscow, capital of Russia to Warsaw, Poland, you would just about pass through Minsk in Belarus.

Belarus looms very large in your analysis of Autocracy, Inc. in your article in the Atlantic. Tell us what happened in the last election there and why it sort of. important? Bieler is the reason you don't know much about it is that it wasn't a country before 1991 and it had no history as an independent state. It became a state following the breakup of the Soviet Union. And it's been run, it was initially had democratic elections and it was run more or less without much bloodshed or repression by a man called Alexander Lukashenko, who you have to think

of as a kind of large-scale collective farm boss. I mean, he's a very kind of aggressively provincial, but in a way that's designed to, that was originally designed to be appealing. He has successfully repressed his opposition, though, and managed to swindle the amount of elections in the past. But last summer in 2020, he was faced for the first time by a really genuinely large and popular democratic movement. It was led by a woman. She's called Svetlana Sikanovska. She became the leader of the movement by accident. She was married to a man called Sergei Sikonovsky, who had begun, who had gained a lot of popularity and attention in Belarus by making videos that lampooned the regime and lampooned, in particular, its corruption, and particularly focused on the difficulties in ordinary life that many people face because of corrupt bureaucrats. And he went around the country.

He made these videos. He became well known. He announced he was running for president and he was arrested. She ran in his place. The regime let her run because they thought, who is this housewife? She can't possibly be attractive or interesting to people. What difference does it make? And then she was astoundingly popular.

And her campaign became a campaign about ordinary people pushing back against the regime. She got huge demonstrations, people supporting her all over the country in all kinds of places that had never even been political war before in the countryside and small towns in factories. At the time, when the, on the day of the election, Lukashenko brushed aside all results. He didn't really even pretend to take them seriously. He announced that he had won by 80 percent, and then he shut down the internet. She was substantively spelled from the country, and many of her supporters and colleagues were arrested. She now lives outside the country in Vilnius in Lithuania, where I met her last spring. Billers is interesting as an example of what we were talking about before, because this is, in fact, a very weak.

state with a very unpopular dictator and actually quite a well-organized democratic opposition. In the normal course of things, you would expect Lukashenko not to survive very long. And indeed, it looked last summer like he wasn't going to. There was a moment when he seemed very close to leaving the country. However, he was rescued. He was rescued by his immediate neighbor, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who sent in a team from the Russian FSP from the Russian security services to beef up the Belarusian security services to lend them journalists, actually, who could replace their state TV journalists, most of whom by that point

were on strike. And he essentially backed up Lukashenko, helped him repress his dissidents, and began offering home all kinds of other things, markets for his products, because Belarus was sanctioned. But he wasn't the only one. Belarus also has one of the biggest investments in Europe, if not the biggest, from China. It has support from the Cubans who have stood up for Belarus at the UN and in other human rights fora. The Belarusians are now talking to the Iranians, which really is this is not a historical link that ever existed before. If you think about Iran and Belarus, these are not places that had much in common. And essentially, he's being propped up and floated by the autocratic world.

Very similar situation to Venezuela, which is another country. again, totally different geographically, historically, everything else, but also very weak regime, very unpopular, has impoverished the country to an extraordinary extent. Venezuela went from being the wealthiest country in South America to probably the poorest. Millions of refugees, malnutrition, and yet Maduro, who's the leader of Venezuela now,

also stays in power thanks to Russian and Chinese and Iranian investment, thanks to trade with Turkey, thanks to deals with Cuba and its security service. So Belarus is a really good example of the phenomenon that I'm talking about. This is a dictator who stays afloat thanks not just to his internal power, which is quite weak, but thanks to his contacts around the world. So Belarus's leader, Lukashenko, he loses an election, basically cancels the results, expels the opposition, and receives as a gift from Russia and China.

what I read in your piece is almost like autocracy in a box. It's like, here's autocracy in a box. Here's a market for your products. Here's some fake journalists. They worked well for us to prop up our autocracy. They'll work well for you. Here's investments. Here's deals with members within this autocratic block.

I want to hold on Russia first before we go into China. What is Russia specifically trying to accomplish here? Well, Russia has very clear interests in Belarus. What Russia is trying to prevent is, a victory for democracy in a country on its borders. That's what happened a few years ago in Ukraine when there was exactly this kind of democratic revolution that overthrew a dictatorial, increasingly dictatorial president. People went out on the streets. They waved European Union flags. They had they chanted anti-corruption slogans. This is exactly what

Putin is most afraid of. What he's afraid of is his own non-popularity. He's afraid of exposures of the amount of money that he's stolen. And he doesn't want to see another democratic election or democratic revolution succeeding anywhere else, but particularly not near him. His interest, remember, is mostly about himself and his own security and his own power. I don't think he likes Lukashenko or cares one way or the other about Lukashenko. It's not about, you know, friendship or, you know, some kind of ideological thing. it's because he doesn't want any democratic success anywhere, really, but certainly not near him because of the example that that was set for Russians.

Yeah, and just to close this loop for me, I can see clearly how Russia's strategy to prop up Lukashenko and Belarus connects with their strategy to disrupt the electoral process in the United States or in Australia or around the world. But what is he, what is Putin so afraid of how? happening. How would the perceived success of democracy in Australia, in the U.S., affect him at home? So there's several explanations for it. I mean, number one, the thing he's most afraid of, rightly or wrongly, actually, because it may be very unlikely, but the thing he's most afraid of is a democratic revolution in his own country, of the kind that he himself witnessed as a young

KGB officer in East Germany in 1989. He's afraid of 1989 happening again, and he's afraid of deposing him and robbing him of his power and of his immense wealth and of the immense wealth of the people around him. So that's the primary reason. And kind of disqualifying democracy, undermining democracy, showing democracy to be a sham, showing democracy to be a corrupt, overthrowing democracies. All of this helps him make that argument at home. What he wants to say to the Russians is don't want that because it's bad. Or anyway, it's, you know, it's no better than what you have now. And the more often he can show that, the better. I mean, he has an additional interest, which is in undermining democratic institutions, in particular the

European Union, but also NATO. Because when democracies act together, when certainly when the European democracies act together, they are stronger than Russia, much stronger. A Europe as a whole is, you know, standing next to it, Russia is puny and insignificant. But one-on-one, when Russia stands next to Spain or Poland or Sweden or even Germany, Russia is as strong or else much stronger than those countries. And so he also has an interest in undermining these group institutions because they're capable of acting in a way that frustrates him. So that's his additional goal. One of the reasons for his fondness for Trump was Trump's longstanding antipathy to NATO and his longstanding antipathy to American allies because it's precisely those.

alliances that are the biggest problem for Putin and for Putinism. So just as Belarus is a kind of skeleton key to help us understand Russia's foreign policy and their involvement in Autocracy, Inc. I think what's happening in Turkey is similarly useful for helping us see China's role in this distributed corporation for authoritarianism. Tell us what's happening with Turkey and China right now. So Turkey's a very interesting story. I got into the story of Turkey by meeting some of the Uyghur community in Turkey and Istanbul also a couple of months ago. And this was this was deliberate.

The Uyghurs are, as you know, a repressed, mostly Muslim minority in China. In recent years, they've been put in re-education camps, concentration camps. They're liable to be arrested at any minute. Their language is being repressed. Their culture is being repressed. And until recently, the Uyghurs found in Turkey a kind of safe haven because the Uyghurs are a Turkic people. They speak a language that's similar to modern Turkish.

They say it's about 60% the same. They almost understand one another. A lot of Uyghurs have gone to Turkey to study. And Erdogan, the current president of Turkey, has made a big deal out of this fact in the past. You know, he likes to see himself as a kind of greater Turkish nationalist. He likes to promote the idea of Turkish cultures around Asia and their relationship to modern Turkey. And in the past, he's been to Xinjiang, which is the home of the Uyghurs. He has spoken on behalf of their culture. He even talked about the repression of the Uyghurs being a genocide.

All of that in the last two or three years has disappeared completely. Erdogan's Turkey is now becoming more and more dangerous for Uyghurs. Those who are loud and those who protest against China, there have been there's some who protest against the Chinese embassy. They've had their relatives have been locked up. They've created a small but but well-heard kind of activist group there. They now have, you know, some of them have been arrested, some have been deported. Some seem to be under just quiet pressure to be quiet or else just to leave. And what's interesting is that the, it's because of the economic debt, which Turkey now feels it owes to China. or the weakness that it feels vis-a-vis China and its desire for Chinese investment and the

Chinese do invest in their media and their infrastructure and other things. All of that has led Erdogan to reverse his previous friendship towards the Uyghurs and to change his language quite dramatically. It became quite, there was a high point for this a few months ago when it seemed as if in exchange for Chinese vaccines that Erdogan had actually promised to alter a Turkish law so that it was easier to deport Uyghurs directly back to China. There was a big public outcry against this, and that was reversed. But his very willingness to do this shows the degree to which even a country as large and powerful and influential as Turkey now feels that it has to kowtow to China, to use a very old word, in order to ensure that it gets that investment. And similar kinds of

of behavior we can now see elsewhere in Asia. We can see it all over Africa. We can see it in much of the rest of the world. That Chinese economic influence is now so important that it's begun to influence the politics and certainly the debate about China in quite a number of countries. Yeah, I want to stick with China because I'm so interested in and mildly horrified by its hard autocratic turn in the last few years. So China seems to me to be something like the chief executive CEO of Autocracy Inc. Or maybe just its chief financial officer. It is the largest country by population in this group that you're describing.

It is the richest country in this rough network of anti-democratic forces. And it has very explicit policies to extend Chinese influence around the world, as you are describing. Like listeners may be familiar with China's Belt and Road Initiative. If not, this is one of the centerpieces of China's foreign policy. They make infrastructure deals with various countries around the world in Africa, in Europe, throughout Western Asia, ports, skyscrapers dams. They make deals. They give loans. They enable local leaders with kickbacks. And then they sort of try to guarantee China positive media coverage in

return. What is the big picture here? In addition to just trying to kneecap the case for global democracy, what do you think China is trying to do? So at least until recently, the Chinese were less interested than the Russians are in actually disrupting democracies. They weren't meddling in U.S. elections directly, at least not in the same way, not involving themselves in social media. I don't think they're quite as good at it, among other things. They don't have that sense of how Western politics works. But increasingly, we see that although they don't do that, they do care a lot about how China is discussed, and they care a lot about how debates about China are framed. And they become increasingly interested in investing in education, sometimes in media.

They're very interested in their own exile communities inside various countries, including the United States. And they're interested partly because they feel that it could ultimately affect investment and economic relations, but also because I think they can. care a lot about how it bounces back into China. And so they don't want any discussion of the Uyghurs anywhere or any discussion of Hong Kong anywhere. And they will put enormous economic pressure on people and countries and politicians who do it because they don't want any of that going, you know, essentially filtering back into China. So in that sense, it's similar to Russia

in that their primary interest is domestic and it's preserving the, you know, it's preserving the, you know, the contours of their domestic arguments. I mean, they repressed a very large and hugely impressive democracy movement in Hong Kong and have bragged about it. I mean, they count this as a triumph and the line on that inside mainland China is what a great success this was. And we, you know, we we staved off, you know, chaos and disruption in the form of democracy. And we've saved China for, you know, for the Chinese. And they don't want any alternate version of this story getting through the airwaves back into their own country, and they really don't want it described that way anywhere else in the world. So although I think they start from a slightly

different position, they end up in some of the same place as Russia, where what they really want to push back against our democracy movements, or democracy language. But they're much more interested in the ones that affect them directly. Yeah. And as long as we're talking about the long shadow of Chinese influence. I think it's only fair to bring in the U.S. for a bit of criticism here as well. Last year, speaking of Chinese influence, America's largest trading partner was China. In 2018, America's largest trading partner was China. In 2017, China, 2016, China. And the economic relationship that we have with China bleeds into our culture. And it makes me wonder whether we have the fortitude to stand up to the kind of influence that is, you know, relatively

that China is essentially demanding of other countries. So, for example, when Daryl Morey, who is the general manager of the Houston Rockets, publicized on Twitter last year his support for Hong Kong protesters, he had to delete the tweet. And the NBA, which has been extremely progressive on a range of domestic issues in the U.S., condemned the tweet, discouraged players from commenting on Chinese policy, and said that pro-Hong Kong signs needed to be confiscated at exhibition games in D.C. We also saw an actor John Sina called Taiwan a country during a fast and furious 9 interview. He had to apologize in Chinese. I mean, it makes me wonder, like, as we move toward thinking about what the U.S. can do to counter the rise of autocracy, Inc., like, forget countering Chinese influence in Belarus or Venezuela.

We don't have a solution for countering Chinese influence in Hollywood. We don't have a solution for countering it at the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C. I mean, are we the baddies too here? So this is one of the arguments in the article. I mentioned that Houston Rockets incident and several others. There have been several connected both to big sports and to Hollywood and also to pop culture and music that are similar. The Chinese do increasingly put pressure on people who do business there trying to shape what they say and how they talk about China. And yes, I do think that the influence of autocracy or the autocracies inside the United States, as well as inside the rest of Europe, has gone very far and is much deeper and much more widespread than normally we give it credit for being.

And some of this Hollywood stuff is essentially trivial, but a much deeper and more profound problem is the problem of, you know, the way in which, you know, the U.S. and European and other developing world financial systems facilitate. kleptocracy, essentially, facilitate money laundering, hiding of money, theft of money, you know, and that has, you know, we've already seen the degree to which that actually affects U.S. politics. It affects, you know, the economy of the city of New York and the city of London, for example, are deeply shaped by the number of people who use property in those cities as a form of money laundering. So you can buy property, you can buy apartments in London or New York. Anonymously, that means that they serve as a kind of physical Swiss bank account. You can buy an anonymous building, or you can, sorry, you can use an anonymous company to buy a building.

You can keep it there and you can just sit on the money and nobody has to know that it's yours unless it's, you know, revealed periodically there are these, you know, investigative reports that do sometimes reveal these things. But for the most part, it's been a very successful way to hide money. And of course, it has affected the way London and New York look, because if people build whole buildings that are mostly intended for absent autocrats, or if you have whole neighborhoods in London, you know, famous neighborhoods Kensington-Nightsbridge are now empty at night because all the houses are owned by people who live in Dubai or Moscow or Beijing. And we've allowed that to happen. We've allowed, you know, those forces to shape our cities and to shape our property markets.

and there are numerous other ways in which that's in which that's true as well. And becoming more conscious of this and becoming aware that this is happening, I think is an essential step to making it stop, which is one of the reasons I've been writing about it. But the difficulty is that it really requires some difficult choices on our parts. I mean, some people are making a lot of money out of selling new apartments to anonymous shell companies. You know, Donald Trump famously sells a lot of apartments to anonymous shell companies. And people have made fortunes and careers out of it. And some of those people have a lot of money and power.

And so rolling this back is a big project, and it may be a generational project. But it's something that we need to start talking about now. There are periods in history when it feels like liberalism is ascendant, like maybe at the end of the Cold War. And there's also periods of history when it feels like the opposite, illiberalism, fascism, autocracy is ascendant, like the 1930s. What do you think in the biggest picture makes this time different? Is there some global force, social media, a new kind of economic system that's pouring gasoline on the fire of authoritarianhip? I think there's two or three things. Yes, I do think that the transition of all conversation and politics from real life to the internet, including social media, not only, has been incredibly destabilizing.

I mean, actually, it's been destabilizing for everybody, including autocracies, which is one of the reasons they've put so much investment into figuring out how to control it. You know, actually, China and Russia understood the destabilizing impact of the impact of the Internet long before we did. The Chinese created the so-called Great Firewall, which allows them to censor almost all conversation. The Russians created something different, which was their disinformation.

machine that promotes the, not just the views of the regime, but also seeks to undermine alternate narratives and alternate information. And they've both been working on this for a decade. And we seem to have only just noticed how destabilizing these forces are. They've, you know, unseated both for better and worse, traditional media. Traditional media has been forced to adapt to the internet, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. You know, it's the, the change. has led to deeper polarization, a lower quality of political debate inside democracies, as the rules of conversation online are not necessarily conducive to democracy or to even just rational conversation.

You know, Facebook is set up to promote anger and emotion and division. It's not set up to promote consensus and rational conversation and good ideas. And that's just a part of how the internet works. So I think that's a big part of it. I mean, I think the second part of it is simply the growth of China itself and the success of China. And that both means that China simply has more influence. It has real money. That's, you know, one of the reasons it's influential in Hollywood is because, you know,

Hollywood sells so many movies in China. And so just the growth and size of China. over the last couple of decades is part of the story. But also the example of China, the idea that there is another path to success has been very important, particularly in the developing world, as leaders of African and South American and Asian states, look around and say, well, what country can we model ourselves after? and some of them now increasingly look at China as a model rather than at the United States, which they would have done 20 or 30 years ago.

Of course, this is a self-serving way of looking at it because the Chinese model is also a model that says you, the leaders, get to stay in power indefinitely and make a lot of money. And maybe or maybe not your country gets to grow at the same time. And some of them, you know, think it will and some of them don't care. But it's a, in any case, it's an alternate model. And, you know, in the 1990s, there really wasn't an alternate. There was the Soviet Union that had collapsed. There was China that was still relatively poor.

There wasn't another model in the world that was appealing. And now there is. And I think that's had a huge impact on the shape of things as well. And then I would add to that as a third factor. The financial crisis, not necessarily in just its economic impact, but in undermining the idea that these Western money people know what they're doing. You know, there had been a kind of faith in Western economists and Western, even Western banks. I mean, people maybe didn't like them, but they seemed to be competent.

And the idea that the West is competent or that the democracies are competent has been pretty heavily undermined by that and obviously other things as well. I would say those are the three most important things, of course, although there are others. And I want to underline all three of those before I ask the next question. Social media, I think, to borrow from Steve Bannon, is often a tool for flooding the zone with shit. And what I think a lot of these countries have learned is or tried to understand is how to control that flood, how to flood your enemies' zone with shit while controlling the flood within your own country, with firewalls and other rules and direct attempts to intimidate people who speak out against the government. So I think social media and the chaos it can introduce is really important. Second, like you said, go ahead if you wanted to jump in on that.

No, I was going to agree with that. And this was really a Russian discovery because what the Russians understood was that what really matters is not that people believe Russia is great or Putin is great. What really matters is that people don't believe anything. And that once people believe nothing, once they are nihilistic and once they think everybody lies, then it becomes much more easy to convince them that, well, if everyone lies and everything is terrible and our country is in chaos and disaster, then it becomes much easier to convince them to support some radical alternative.

So extremism is really born out of nihilism. And the Russians understood this early on, and Steve Bannon understood it, and Trump intuitively understood it. And the use of that kind of disinformation, the constant lies, actually has a political goal. And, you know, again, the Russians started it. but man, they've got many imitators. Right, yeah, the rise of a Russian form of nihilism. The second point that I just wanted to underline and just put a pin in, actually, because we're

going to get back to it in just a second. This idea of China as another beacon on the hill, as another model for leaders to emulate around the world, I think this is a really, really important point. Diplomacy is a kind of role modeling. But I wanted first here to expand on your third answer, which is the financial crisis. Here is a story that I can imagine some people telling. During the Cold War, the U.S. backed a lot of democracies in Europe, and that was in part to directly oppose the Soviet Union. We also backed a lot of dictators in other parts of the world, especially if we felt like they supported our interests. Then the Cold War ends, and there is a flourishing of democracy around the world. The same surveys that find democracy is receding today found that they were rising in the early 1990s. But the 21st century has basically been a three-act tragedy for America as a role model. Act 1, Iraq War. disaster. Act two, Great Recession. As you said, disaster. Act three, Donald Trump, enough said.

So it's not just that the U.S. has failed to support democracy abroad in the last 20 years, it's that we failed to demonstrate the success of an American model of liberal democracy here. Do you buy that story? I think that's exactly right. I mean, yes, I do think that the failings of American democracy and some of the failings of American foreign policy, and, as I said, the failings of the American financial community, all of those added together have been pretty powerful. They, they, the countries and the people who looked up to America, which isn't everybody, but even the ones who respected and admired America, even though they missed, didn't like us

that much or feared America, a lot of that is gone as America seems much and much less competent. Our political system by itself doesn't inspire. much admiration. I mean, the divided Congress, the constant inability to pass legislation, the January 6th catastrophe, which was watched live all over the world by millions of people. All of these things have also had a huge effect, both on America's image, but also on the image of democracy. I mean, like it for better or for worse, America is seen as the leading democracy, the leader of the Democratic camp. We can have a separate argument someday about just how Democratic America is and just how successful our democracy promotion program ever was. But the point

is that is how the United States is perceived. And that was one of the great disasters of January the 6th, on top of what it did for American domestic policy was what terrible damage it did for the image of democracy around the world. You introduced a phrase that I had never heard of before called autocratic learning. Dictators or copycats, you said. They imitate one another's use of surveillance tech or crowd control or social media manipulation or economic investment strategy. But democracies are copycats too. Like in many ways, diplomacy is one big copycat game. And we're seeing the dark side of that right now. Like right after Trump questioned the results of a U.S. election famously, loudly, we saw other leaders do the same in democracies. Like Benjamin Netanyahu,

former Israeli prime minister, loses an election and claims it's a fraud. A Peruvian politician, Keiko Fujimori loses an election and then immediately promises their followers that the results are going to be flipped. This seems totally outside the norm of modern democracies. Like politicians just turning their supporters against the voting system itself in case they lose. But it's an idea that seems to me, and maybe this is naive, to have clearly, if not been invented by Donald Trump, been popularized by Donald Trump. People look to the U.S. say, oh, that's a good idea. I should borrow that, except the idea that were a lot. lobbying other countries to borrow is illiberal rather than liberal.

That's absolutely right. And in fact, I think I root that article a couple of months ago. Yes, I got Fujimori and then Yahoo from your article. Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. And the one you've left out is a really interesting one is Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, who I believe has already said that if he loses the election, it's because it was rigged, which is a direct imitation of Donald Trump. And, you know, you have the example of the Belarusian leader who did exactly that. He simply shut down the election when he lost it. I mean, so he did what I think Trump was trying to do on January the 6th, but just more successfully. So yes, you're completely right. The language and tactics of Trump and the illiberalism Trump have been copied everywhere and by

many different kinds of people. The attack on the way in which Trump attacked his media, the use of the expression fake news, has been repeated and amplified and echoed in you know, every continent on the globe and many countries. And so, yes, you're right. I mean, the the failings of American democracy and the disastrous example set by, particularly by President Trump, but also by others inside the U.S. political system, are absolutely having their echo and their impact around the world. It's kind of scary. The thought that just occurred to me is that in the 1930s, I remember Adolf Hitler was a sneaky fan of Mickey Mouse, but also wanted, I believe, to ban Mickey Mouse from consumption among the Germans because he didn't want American influence

to be widespread among the population. In a weird way, Donald Trump is like the new authoritarian Mickey Mouse. He is like our new cultural export in a very dark and depressing way. And it suggests something that seems at least somewhat profound here, which is, that there's an idea that to spread democracy, what you need above all is excellent diplomacy, alliances and presidents flying overseas to give big speeches. And I am sure that is important. But as we're out there trying to sell democracy to the world, it seems like we should probably begin by making some major updates to the homegrown product. Like ingenious democracy on behalf of a failing, excuse me, ingenious diplomacy on behalf of a failing democracy is kind of like ingenious

advertising on behalf of a failed brand. What changes do we need to make to the American product, to the American brand to make it naturally more appealing to the world, given that China and Russia and Turkey are going to keep up this information marketing campaign for the next few years no matter what? So before I answer that, I think to be fair, I do think the Biden administration and certainly Biden himself do understand this. I mean, they don't, he doesn't, Biden doesn't talk about it all the time, but he, he does frequently mention this idea that America needs to heal its democracy in order to, you know,

in order, in order to continue, you know, being an example for the world. But he, he talks frequently about democracy in the U.S.'s role in the, in the world as well. And his administration is holding next month a, a kind of, it's going to be an online summit. It's very hard to say exactly what significance it will have, but it is certainly a democracy summit in which some of these very issues will be discussed. So I think they understand, they understand this problem. I mean, what America needs to do to heal itself? I mean, I would say three things to start with. Number one is to end kleptocracy and the influence of offshore money, of money laundering, of anonymous companies. I mean, there's some legislation has moved forward on this recently,

but it still needs to be fleshed out. We still need the regulations for it. We still need enforcement mechanisms. But also, we need to do it not just in the U.S., but we need to convince Europeans to do the same. Quite a lot of autocracies, autocratic leaders, stay in power because they are so able to efficiently steal and then hide their wealth abroad and then use it for both political and economic purposes. So I think that's number one. Number two is that we need a serious conversation about social media and the internet more broadly. There are ways to talk intelligently about internet regulation that don't necessarily imply censorship. We can talk about regulating algorithms.

We can also talk about creating alternatives to the current forms of social media, a kind of public interest social media that would benefit, that would place a value on consensus. and rational debate rather than anger and emotion. Some of those conversations have begun also a little bit in Washington, but they just haven't got very far yet. And then finally, I mean, there's clearly there's some things that we need to do to fix our own Constitution. I mean, there's a long and elaborate article about voting argument going on right now in Washington about voting laws.

We also need to look at our Constitution to make sure that January 6th and the ideas behind it can't repeat themselves. so that, you know, the constitutional flaws that suddenly made Pence's role in recognizing the results of the election so important in 2020, or 2021, rather, we need to fix that too. So I think we need some constitutional work. I think we need some work on voting rights in the states. I'm hoping that's what the Congress is going to focus on next. And then finally, I would say, and this is something that Biden, has already said and has made some progress in that direction is that democracy needs to be seen

to work. Americans need to be seen to be invested in their own economy. They need to, you know, we need to heal some of the, you know, deep gaps, some of the inequality inside the country. We need for the economy to appear and to feel more fair to more Americans. And I think that will also help solve some of the problems. You're talking about fixing the Constitution, fixing America's voting laws, restoring faith in U.S. democracy, do you think that today's Republican Party is capable of being a co-partner in that effort? So I really do not want to write off the Republican Party because it's half of our political system. It may well win Congress next year. It may well win the presidency in 2024.

and I do believe there are good people in the Republican Party and there are people who understand the current problem. But as the tenor of your question implies, there is a real question about the current leadership. Do they really want America to remain a democracy or do they want to entrench minority rule? And the appeal of entrenching minority rule is that then they would never have to give up power again. And that, of course, is the same reason why, you you know, Victor Orban in Hungary or Bolsonaro and Brazil or Erdogan in Turkey have altered their own democratic systems in order to remain in power indefinitely. And I do worry that there is a part of the Republican Party and certainly a part of the leadership that envisions a future in which they

can never lose. And they can't lose because the system one way or another is genuinely rigged in their favor. I mean, we already have a strange situation whereby our Senate is way, out of whack with the, you know, numbers of voters in the country because of the, you know, the way, numbers of people who live in cities versus people who live in this countryside. You know, we have Wyoming has two senators with a few hundred thousand people and Wyoming and California has two senators with millions of people. You know, we already have this imbalance that was created in the Constitution at a time when the differences in population between states just weren't that big. So we already have this imbalance. And I do worry that a part of the Republican

party wants to make minority rule permanent. I, like you, root for a sane Republican Party. I also feel like it's just a matter of reasonableness to predict that a Trumpist GOP is going to push against the limits of legality if they lose an election in 2024. Those walls held in 2020, the election was certified and the actual winner became president. What is a law? What is a rule that we can pass either at the federal level or at critical state levels to ensure that the walls hold again in 2024? I am not an expert in the U.S. Constitution, so I might not be the best person to provide this answer.

But it seems to me that at the very least, a rule that says that states elect a president based on who wins the election in that state would be useful. and so that it's not state legislatures who then decide who wins, regardless of what the popular vote is. Right. That intermediary step presents an opportunity for a bit of nonsense. It seems that what Trump intended was to have state legislatures overrule the popular vote in several states. Right. Yes, to use that intermediary in order to overturn the election. Exactly. Very last question for you, of the four examples that you gave for what America can do to start, to turn around this darkness, this rise of autocracy, Inc. That is number one, end cliptocracy, number two,

a conversation around social media, number three, fixing the Constitution, and number four, improving the way that America works and democracy works so that we can be that shining city on a hill that's a model to people around the world. Which of those four categories are you most optimistic about in terms of our ability to solve a tractable problem here? So I am aware of several projects,

that would fix the constitutional and electoral problems that are being kicked around on the hill right now and may well be discussed in the next few months. So I think it's very reasonable to think that could happen. I'm also aware of several further laws that would enable us to push back harder against kleptocracy, although that's going to require more international partnership. So it may take longer than we would like. The social media conversation is so difficult. and our political leaders seem to be so ignorant of the nature of the problem that I fear it will not be solved swiftly. But that's my verdict more or less. I would agree certainly with the social media part.

When you hear these conversations between elected leaders and the social media CEOs, they're basically SNL skits. They're just laughable events that happen and then no further regulation or law is acted on in the intervening six weeks. And then six weeks later, we called them back to have the exact same laughable conversation. It's absolutely pathetic. I hope to be more optimistic. I'm trying to be more optimistic on the constitutional fixes and the element of end-inclectocracy.

I feel like there at least you have laws that politicians, elected representatives, actually understand the nature of how these things work. They understand the electoral college. They at least have advisors that understand the way international finance works and we might be able to see something there.

But you paint, I think, a scary picture of the world that's important to confront and be honest with. And I'm really thankful that you were here to talk about it with us. Anne Appelbaum. Thank you very much. Thank you. Plain English with Derek Thompson is produced by Devin Manzi. We will be back to our regular schedule next Tuesday, but look out this weekend for a special bonus pod. I won't tell you who it's with, but you will find out in 24 or 48 hours anyway. Talk to you soon. You know,