The Daily Beast Podcast - Will Liz Cheney or Mitch McConnell Save America from Russia?

Episode Date: December 31, 2021

Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic writer and author Twilight of Democracy makes the case for Liz Cheney or Mitch McConnell being the white knights of democracy, Siva Vaidhyanathan, host of the Democracy in Danger podcast, tries to help Molly Jong-Fast figure out why the right thinks other countries’ questionable governing style is the golden standard for the U.S., and finally, Frank Vogl, author of The Enablers How the West Supports Kleptocrats and Corruption, leaves us with two big questions: Is Putin hiding his dirty money in art or real estate? And will congress’ new kleptocrat caucus stop corruption in its tracks?  If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes it's just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Happy holidays. We're off for the holiday, but before we left our respective podcast studios, we recorded some amazing interviews with some of the best thinkers on democracy and peril, autocracy, and all the dystopian things we love to discuss here. We talk to Siva Vianatha, who does one of my favorite podcasts, Democracy and Danger. Then we'll talk to Frank Vogel about his new book, The Enablers, How the West Supports Clecticruits and Corruption, endangering our democracy. But first, we have writer at the Atlantic and author of Twilight of Democracy. Anne Applebaum.

Welcome to the new abnormal Ann Applebaum. Great to be here again. I read your piece in the Atlantic, and I just, I felt like I had to talk to you, even though it's not a revelation. We all know where we are. But I don't know why, but it felt like we had to talk about it right away. Which piece of it? I mean, what I really want to talk to you about always is democracy and peril,

but you sort of have a front seat to it. So that piece was a looked at it from a, different angle. It's not about specifically, it wasn't particularly about American democracy, although American democracy is implicated. It was more of an argument about autocracies, which they now cooperate together and collaborate in sometimes surprising circumstances. So you would think that the communist Chinese and the nationalist Russians and the theocratic Iranians would have nothing in common. And yet they do now have something in common. And what they have in common, is the common need to push back against democracies and against democracy movements inside their

own countries. And they now cooperate to make that happen. So their corrupt state companies cooperate with one another. Their police forces cooperate. They share surveillance technology. They learn how to do disinformation from one another. You can see this happening now. You can watch it happening in different places around the world. And of course, that has an effect on us because they look for people to corrupt. They look for ways to have influence also inside the democracies. That has an effect on our politics, too. Like Victor Orban and Tucker Carlson. People Orban is so unimportant in the grand scheme of thing, an uninfluential, you know, it's a central European country of 10 million people. So it's, you know, but China, yeah, China's

influence is important. And so, you know, the Chinese attempt to shape American conversations about China, whether it's through influencing students or influencing education, or whether it's through buying business people or buying lobbyists, you know, and former politicians, that's more important. You know, the Russian use of kleptocracy and money to corrupt people, which they do in the U.S., they do in the U.K., they do everywhere they can, actually, is also quite important. I mean, you know, there's a story that hasn't gotten a lot of, as much attention as it maybe should have done, which was the Russian attempt to infiltrate the National Rifle Association, if you remember that?

Yeah. Was in the news bubbled up sort of three or four years ago. Maria Bettina. That's right, exactly. And that's the classic kind of thing that they do. They look to have influence by funding. I mean, in Europe, it's usually the far right. In the U.S., it's unfortunately the Republican Party.

And so they look to fund organizations that are close to the party. They look to buy. people, they look to influence people, and they've had some success. Yeah. Seems like they've had a lot success. But China still is a much bigger economy. China is a much bigger economy, and of course, much more important in the long term. Russia is important because Russia is so focused for, I mean, Russia, I shouldn't say Russia, I should say the Putin regime, because what the Russians themselves think is something is rather different. But the Putin regime is very focused on the U.S. in ways that I think we don't usually realize.

I mean, they, you know, the kind of narrative about American democracy and how terrible is and how violent it is is on Russian television all the time. Also stories about how awful Europe is and how degenerate and declining. And for Putin, it's very, very important to show that democracy is unattractive because he wants to discourage the democracy movement inside his own country, which has identified him as profoundly corrupt, and that's actually a view that's probably shared by Russians. And so he needs to discredit it. He needs to undermine it. He's very interested in picking apart NATO and undermining America, you know, sort of American European links, the transatlantic alliance. He's, you know, most of Russian foreign policy now is focused on disorienting and disorganizing Europe and America. And the Chinese are not focused on our internal politics in the same way. And so while there are plenty of other things to worry about, that's not, that's right now, I mean, they certainly could begin doing that in future. Right now, that's not what they do. And so Rush, even though, of course, it's a declining economic power and all that, has a lot of interest and puts a lot of effort and time and money into campaigns and, you know,

the support for extremism in America and Europe. And so we should worry about it. I'm sure you saw that where Tucker Carlson was saying that NETO's job is just antagonized Putin. Yes, I mean, that's a classic. I mean, Tucker Carlson's motives are opaque to me. I don't fully understand why he's doing it. May he may well be getting some form of funding or kickbacks. I have no idea, so I can't accuse him of that. But he certainly has agreed, you know, some time ago has begun following along with Russian narratives. And I mean, sometimes you can hear him say things that I know come originally from Russian propaganda. Trump did that actually during the 2016 campaign, which that whole thing about Hillary Clinton being a warmonger

and World War III coming, if you remember that element of 20. That all started at, oh, and Obama founding ISIS. Many of those themes and narratives started in Russia, and then they were picked up on the right in the United States. And Tucker Carlson has apparently decided to do that too. I mean, it may be that he has so now identified with the anti-democratic ideology of Putin and Putinism, you know, the idea of pushing back against Democrats,

whether they're big D-D Democrats or small D-D Democrats, you know, whether it's people who want, want the right to vote in Russia or whether it's people who want independence in Ukraine or whether it's Americans who want, you know, the choice, you know, to be able to vote for the president and not have the president come to power through a coup. You know, he's against all those things now. And so that may, that may be the simple explanation for why he's doing what he's doing. Did you ever think you would see in America like this? You know, every day brings a new surprise. Of course, I'm less surprised now than I was four or five years ago because it's been

going this way for a while. But I mean, I suppose at some level I'm surprised that Fox News's viewers don't object or don't see what's happening, that the genuinely anti-democratic and in some deep ways anti-American language that's now used on that television station, that that doesn't somehow bother anybody. That maybe continues to surprise me. There have been countries in Europe that have come back from fascism. All of them. Right, right. But more recently, that have sort of cycled through it. Yes, Spain, Greece, those are countries that were not democracies in the immediate post-war period and then eventually became democracies.

I mean, Spain is a really interesting story. In Spain, it was ultimately, it was the attraction of the prosperity and stability of the European Union that pulled Spain, you know, towards the rest of Europe. And it was a wise decision by the Spanish king who decided that he wanted his legacy to be the presiding over democratic transformation in Spain. I mean, he later behaved badly and so on. But at that moment, his role was really important. So it's a combination of personal, you know, some leadership, really, from particular people

who are inside the conservative camp. I mean, actually, I think the leadership has to come from within the conservative movement, and it has to do with broader trends. I mean, you know, right now, leadership inside the conservative movement that's pushing back against the anti-democratic movement. language and ideology that you can hear now in a part of the Republican Party is mostly coming from Liz Cheney and Adam Kinsinger. And both are behaving very bravely. I mean, you know, people can not like them for other reasons, but you have to really admire, in particular, Liz Cheney,

who's taken a huge amount of flack, given who her family is and where she comes from and so on. And yet she now sees it as, you know, her mission is to reverse this trend inside the party. Whether she can succeed, I don't know. But you will need people like that, maybe a leaders, maybe business leaders, but certainly other political leaders, you know, a huge, enormous difference would be made if we had some leadership in the Senate, for example, you know, five Republican senators or 10 Republican senators who also believed it was important to restore, maintain democracy in America, and acted like it. And yet we don't seem to have that right now. I do hope that changes.

Theoretically, again, I'm not saying that this, you know, is imminent, but you could see a world where Mitch McConnell, who is a very old guy, decides this is enough. You could, and I sort of thought he might do that at a couple of moments. I mean, he doesn't seem to like Trump too much personally. Right. And Trump has been very nasty about him in the last few months. I had expected more of Mitt Romney, though, who's also pretty old and isn't going to have another job after this.

And so I thought he might be a spokesman, and he has not wanted to do that or be that. But you're right. I mean, there are a number of others who don't have that much to lose. I mean, even though I've myself written about this extensively, you know, the phenomenon of collaboration and what brings people to believe they need to collaborate and so on. I mean, even so, I'm surprised that there hasn't been, you know, at least two or three people in the Senate who are willing to play the role that Cheney is playing in the House. The thing that I'm always true plays, it feels like a lot of these American conservatives don't realize where this goes. I guess so. I mean, but it's to me, it's so obvious where it goes. And we have the examples all around us. I mean, you can look at it. what did happen in Russia, you know, what did happen in Hungary, you know, what has happened in

other countries where democracy has declined, what happened in Turkey, what happened in Venezuela, I mean, it doesn't have to be a right-wing process, although in our country it is. But, you know, the slow, you know, nowadays, if you look around the world, you know, I guess we have this idea that democracy always ends with some kind of coup d'etat, you know, there's sort of tanks on the street and there's some colonels shooting off weapons in the presidential palace or something. Actually, most democracies don't end that way. They end three. through the slow attrition, the slow decline of institutions, you know, the judiciary, the media, you know, the civil service,

you know, all kinds of guardrails that are put around democracy and the destruction of the kind of level playing field that makes voting possible and makes fair voting possible. And that's what destroys democracy. As I said, there's so many contemporary examples and recent ones, including ones that Republicans know about like Venezuela, that I find it hard to really understand what they imagine is happening in the United States. Yeah. I mean, I remember a few months ago when Republican far right media was celebrating the coup in Myanmar.

And I thought, you guys, when the military takes over, you don't get to like say, no, I'm not going to get my vaccine, right? I mean, so many of these freedoms that the right is so obsessed with are things that things that, a military coup takes away. Yeah, I mean, the very idea that anybody would imagine that a military coup was some kind of route to freedom is really very strange and has to be understood. I mean, you know, as some kind of either profound misunderstanding or some kind of deeply evil form of propaganda. I mean, it's really odd. And as I said, particularly because countries like Myanmar are very much part of this autocratic network that I described. I mean, you know, Myanmar has be closed business links to China, the leadership there is going to stay in power through that

kind of network, or we'll try to, just like the Venezuelans stay in power thanks to the Russians and the Russians and the Belarusians, thanks to the Russians, mostly, but also the Chinese who have a big investment there. And does someone seriously want America to be part of that world where kleptocrats who steal their country's money, you know, run everything, and Chinese-style surveillance is permanent, and the government does disinformation as a common and ordinary form of politics. I mean, it's very hard for you to imagine anybody wants the United States to go in that direction. Yeah, it seems completely insane, but we're definitely hearing it from the far right as some kind of like weird Trumpian fantasy. Are you seeing

anything positive out of Europe? There are some positive things. Yes. There's a new German government that has come about through a very sensible coalition set of compromises that seems, you know, really dedicated to democracy and to integration into the European Union and to NATO. And that's kind of, it's nice to see that, you know, because we had a big change of power there. We had Angela Merkel who'd been running the country for, you know, 16 years leaving. And that's nice. In Poland, which is where I am now and even more so in Hungary, which are two countries that have been, that are now run by these anti-democratic parties or parties that would be autocratic

parties. You know, there's evidence of the Hungarian opposition has united. They have a very decent leader. I mean, I think if there was a fair election in Hungary, he would win it. Whether there will be a fair election, I don't know. They have an election next spring. So you see people beginning to mobilize and push back against populism and against extremism in a lot of places.

And you see, you know, the resurgence of the, you know, the center right in France, the center right in Spain. I mean, you see, you know, there's plenty of good news. I mean, there isn't a kind of slam dunk moment. But, you know, we have a lot of important elections coming up that'll be worth watching. And the French election is coming up. The Hungarian election, as I said, if those go against the extremists and against the far right, that'll be good news, even for the United States. Is there an international body that can put some limits on the way these countries influence each other in elections?

I mean, there isn't really. I mean, the EU, the European Union does have, you know, there are some ways in which the EU can, you know, monitor the court system for the independence of courts and so on. And the EU has ways of kind of monitoring and influencing its members. They aren't very efficient and they don't necessarily work that well. But that exists. But no, I mean, influence in in terms of elections and democracy mostly happens more kind of in the ether. You know, I mean, unfortunately, the United States has been a really bad influence over the last several years. I mean, Trump's example has been followed and copied by a lot of other kind of would-be autocratic

in lots of countries. I mean, the president of Brazil has already said more or less the same thing. You know, he said, if I lose the election, it's because it was unfair. You know, so you have, you can hear people parroting things that Trump has said. And you can hear, you can hear the admiration for that kind of politics and in other, as I said, autocratic political parties or states. You know, on the other hand, democratic movements also spread and they also play off of one another. And, you know, as I said, the, you know, a few good European elections where I don't even care anymore if it's the center left or the center right where kind of decent people who respect democracy win and then take power. You know, that would be, that's always good news.

I said we just had it in Germany. You know, a few more would help and I think would have perversely some influence on the United States because, you know, people who run the Democratic Party, people who run the Republican Party watch politics in other countries. Oh, God. I mean, I guess the fact that there's any good news is good, right? And we should just take that. important also, I mean, this is apart from whether there really is any good news or not, it's very important not to feel that decline is inevitable or that something, you know, that's very important because actually one of the things that somebody like Putin is trying to achieve is he's trying to achieve apathy. You know, he wants people to say, oh my God, it's all so awful.

I can't do anything. You know, I can't watch, you know, I actually had two people here in Morse that tell me that I don't watch TV anymore. I hate politics. I can't follow it. Right. But that's what you can understand, you know, if you were watching U.S. politics for last year, you might show the same way. But actually, it's that apathy that's good for them. I mean, it's good for the extremists. And it's really important that people remember that everything that happens tomorrow depends on the choices that we make today.

And it is never the case that the story is over. And there are always things you can do. You know, you can always join a political party, or you can run for office, or you can work on a campaign, or you can join or work with or give money to one of the really, many good organizations like protect democracy, you know, who are working hard to, you know, file lawsuits when lawsuits need to be filed. You know, there are a lot of good organizations out there are working to protect American democracy and you can be part of them. You can help them. So there's no, there's never any, you know, you may feel like despair or feel despairing or

pessimistic, but there's no use to it. You know, you might as well, you know, work for some kind of change. Thank you so much. This was great. I really appreciate you making the time for us. Well, I'm happy, as you know, always to talk. So thanks a lot. Thank you. Hey, folks. If you haven't heard, every single week we do a special bonus episode for Beast Inside,

the Daily Beast membership program. Sometimes we interview senators like Corey Booker or the folks who explain what's happening behind the scenes in media like Jim Acosta or Soladadad O'Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner. And sometimes we just have friends around to analyze what's happening. happening in the news. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a beast inside member where you'll support the beast fearless journalism, as well as

getting full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member, head to new abnormal. That's new abnormal.thedailybeast.com. Siva Vadianatha hosts the Democracy of Danger podcast. Welcome to the new abnormal, Siva. Well, thank you, Molly. It's really good to be here. We're very excited to have you. Myanmar. or bad? Oh my gosh. For a moment, it was on the verge of getting good or at least being inspiring. Right. That moment was about 10 years ago. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, it's bad. It's bad and it could get much worse really soon. How could it get worse? Well, so what's happening right now and since February is in addition to there being massive protests regularly opposing the military junta that has now,

pushed out any semblance of democracy. There's also, you know, paramilitary resistance. There's their guerrilla movement, you know, different ethnic enclaves around Burma launching attacks on the government and, you know, on the military junta. When that happens, you never know what kind of blowback there's going to be. And even if the resistance ends up triumphing, are they going to be able to, like, hit the brakes on the violence? Are they going to be able to heal people, treat injuries?

deal with illness, deal with the economic dislocation that comes from all that. You know, a country like that, which is already, you know, sort of flimsy economically after years of bad governance, you just never know what's going to happen. It's interesting because Myanmar is the fantasy of many Trump supporters. Does anyone see military coup not good? I mean, this seems like a no-brainer but now. Yeah, it's really strong. strange. You know, like, between that and Hungary and the idea of like, you know, this virulent anti-Semite who is so openly against democracy, who's running Hungary, which really had great hope, right? I mean, 20 years ago, everyone would look at Hungary and go, this is a country on its way up with like a nice, multi-ethnic democracy and a real, you know, taking all the lessons they could from their struggling against communism and, and, and,

You know, and centuries of being invaded. And then all of a sudden, you know, the extreme right and basic old Republicans are now celebrating Hungary as some sort of model because it has such, you know, deep religious conservatism, which, of course, you know, has its anti-Semitism attached to it. Yeah, anti-Semitism. I mean, as a Jew, I always am like my friends who are conservative Jews, I'm like, you guys. the guy who's the racist, he's never good for the Jews. Like, this never ends up with good for the Jews. Even if he says he is this week, just wait until next week. The people who burn the crosses are not your friends.

Right. And, you know, look, I mean, that's a thing. So much of the anti-democratic and anti-human rights and anti-cosmopolitan nationalism that we see everywhere from Brazil to the Philippines has the echo of. early 20th century anti-Semitism, like thematic coherence with it. It's just that in some parts of the world, there aren't enough Jews to hate to make them the enemy. And so they attach it to some other group that may be playing the same role in society or the imaginary role, right?

More often, it's not actually the real role, but like the imaginary role, a secret cabal, the secret intelligentsia, the rootless cosmopolitan, the disloyal, minority, the anti-Christian, whatever that is. But the themes are the same and the paranoia is the same. And this virulent nativism and nationalism and often religious conservatism really works that way. You can see it in Myanmar. Myanmar, they are treating ethnic minorities like the Rohingya in ways that sort of, you know, with the same sort of rumors. Like there's this secret cabal trying to destroy Buddhism in this Asian. 80% Buddhist country.

You know what I mean? Right. Oh, get grip. One of the things I think you guys discussed really well is like some of the media's role in how we're going down a bad place for democracy. Can you talk to us about what you see there? Yeah, look, you know, when you think about what news media can do for us, we often think of it as a delivery mechanism. You know, that's like the classic model. That's kind of what we learn in high school civics, that it's the news media, responsible news media,

delivers responsible and dependable information, trustworthy information to citizens who will then digest it and decide for whom they will vote as we select our leaders, right? That's the theory. But news media actually can and does do more than that. News media often serve as a site of deliberation or a potential site for guiding deliberation, for framing deliberation. You know, you can see it through something as awkward. it as comments threads or letters to the editor where there might be some back and forth.

You can see it through, you know, when news organizations sponsor events, community events, or even national events, you know, like conferences and whatnot. And they bring people together to really talk through the issues with some depth. And I think we've forgotten how important deliberation is to democracy. You know, we're very attuned to motivation, how important motivation is. of democracy, get your side fired up, get your side informed, get your side to the polls. And that's what the parties are supposed to do. But the rest of us are actually supposed to be able to convene and discuss. And I think what we really need, what we're lacking, is a media

ecosystem that values deliberation and understands that in the absence of deliberation, democracy doesn't actually work as anything but a clash of power. Interesting. Explain that a little more. Let's say if we had a structured digital environment where people could convene even about city issues, right? So let's take like New York City. If there were some site where citizens of New York could gather and accept certain rules of conversation and deliberate about choices, you know, what should schools be doing? in terms of discipline policy?

Or what should the New York City schools be doing in terms of, you know, safety and security? What should New York City schools be doing in terms of transportation? And you could have these little discussions where motivated citizens come. They have a set of information that's been vetted, that they can all agree is trustworthy, and they can talk about pros and cons, and that can inform the ways in which civic leaders, school board members, city council members, are going to think about these issues, you know, and they're back and forth that way,

that would be a much richer democracy. It would be one in which citizens would feel like our opinion matters more than simply a vote every two years for somebody, you know? But we don't have that. Instead, we have a media ecosystem that is entirely based on sorting people and motivating people, mostly motivating you to buy something,

but also sorting people because you know, every commercial media outlet knows its niche, knows its audience, and knows that that's, it's not that broad. You know, there are very few of our media businesses that even think of themselves as having a broad audience. And I'm not sure they ever really did, but they imagined that they did. Yeah, I think that's right. Dana Milbank wasn't the first person to talk about it, but I feel like there's been a new kind of thinking I'm seeing in media, world of maybe we should be neutral but pro-democracy. Yeah.

So I don't know what neutral would mean necessarily, but being pro-democracy makes total sense, right? If you are a reporter, like a straight-up news reporter, and I've done this job, right, a straight-up news reporter, I had to put on that hat and not tell people who I voted for and not try to explicitly express my political opinions in the news report. I wrote, it's a worthy and noble practice. I waited a number of years to tell people what I thought, and so what, right? So if you're going to do that, though, you can still be for something. You can still be for certain values. You don't have to be for one party or the other, but you can be for

transparency, you can be for fairness, you can be for equality, you can be for democracy. And it's actually healthy to talk about what it means to be for democracy. Does being for democracy encompass all of those other values I mentioned? Maybe, maybe not. But, you know, being for democracy means being able to call out when someone is abrogating the norms of democratic interaction, when someone is rigging a system, when someone is denigrating a whole group of people to try to dehumanize them or take them out of the public sphere. You know, that's a anti-democratic move, and it's okay for a news reporter who isn't necessarily going to say Democrat or Republican is my people, you know, but is going to say this is bad for democracy,

you know, because there's a settled group of values, or maybe not settled, but a pretty stable set of value that we should agree upon are necessary for a working democracy. Yeah, I agree. I think you're right. Right now, Biden is doing this democracy summit, which I think is like a great idea, but also very ironic. Discuss. Ironic, yeah. Look, I mean, it's pretty clear that that meeting about democracy doesn't really have democracy as its endgame. Right.

It's more of an umbrella for very mushy diplomatic conversations. And it would be interesting if it were focused, if we're focused on some. certain questions, like, are these nations going to sign a document supporting certain values, the kind of document that generated the, you know, universal declaration of human rights? Is that going to come? Is that the goal here? That would be interesting. That would require a lot of meetings and scholarship and experts, really working on creating

a nice set of principles that everyone could sign on to, and it might have diplomatic force in it. you know, it might have a way of working through and becoming principles of international law. That doesn't seem to be what they're after. I think they're after some hugs. Yeah. There's nothing wrong with hugs, right? There's nothing wrong with like...

Listen, I like it. Yeah. But I don't think it's something that's going to strike a blow for democracy at the very moment when democracy is under direct attack. Like, we need a much more firm and declared defense of democracy. than even the president of the United States seems willing to be making right now. So, Siva, you've been doing these really interesting to me, dives into what is happening in other countries.

I feel like it's so hard to get people to talk about, like, movements in other countries and find media on this. I particularly, I really loved the episode on Cuba. Could you tell our audience a little bit about what's happening there? Yeah. So, you know, Cuba is one of those places where the prospect of real democracy has not been, you know, in anyone's dreams for decades. You know, like the notion of the Castro brothers ever giving up control was just fantasy.

There were obviously fantasies of like overthrowing or assassinating the Castro brothers. And there were certainly many Cuban exiles who thought that and some of them tried to act on it. But the notion among Cuban people that there would be democracy just seemed out of reach. But a very interesting thing is happening now. And that is that there are people. who have very specific complaints, very specific quality of life issues that they are finally willing to take a chance on and to rally in the streets for. And of course, a lot of them are economic, right? It's a lot about economic opportunity. It's a lot about the ability to actually get

decent services from the government. But they're asking for a response. They're basically saying, we are citizens and we need our government to work for us in some way at some basic level. And that's never happened in Cuba before. So, I mean, this might be the most optimistic time in Cuban history since 1959. That's not to say that the government is likely to fall, but something is happening there. And it's happening internally domestically. It's not happening with the CIA pulling strings. not happening with, you know, Cuban exiles and expats, you know, sending secret forces back

or, or any of that. It's the people of Cuba saying, we need to live a little bit better. And so given that and given the fact that the U.S. has gone so back and forth on its own relationship with Cuba over the past, you know, six years or so, it's going to be really interesting to see what this next group of potential Cuban leaders do because they didn't remember the revolution of 1959. and they might actually be willing to make some compromises and open up Cuban society a little bit more than their previous leaders were able to. So one of the things we keep getting to, that's the darker thing that we'll probably end on, is your podcast is a really good student of all these movements and when democracy gets in danger. Is there any happy ending that ever happens for this?

Yeah, you know what's really interesting. We started the podcast, gloomy, right? Because it was called democracy in danger. And as Americans who were talking about the prospect of democracy in 2019 and then 2020, danger was everywhere. Remember, we're doing this from Charlottesville, Virginia, where in August of 2017, we looked in the eyes of the worst people in this country. And they marched in our streets and they beat up our neighbors and they killed one of them.

And that, you know, so we, we were entering this conversation about democracy being in danger with that haunting us. And what we found is not that much in the United States to really be optimistic about, you know, the election of 2020 was something of a restoration to normality. But, but, you know, the real deep ugliness only got bolder in the aftermath of that, right? At January 6th being the best example, like that was a bigger, bolder move. And even the invasion of Charlottesville in 2017. And we're still dealing with that, right? There were like three weeks when it looked like the Republicans were going to go, whoa, what have we let happen? And then they've all reverted to, oh, it was no big deal.

Or it was a great thing, right? So now we're looking at January 6th. And we're actually putting together a January 6th retrospective show over the next week, in which we really want to ask, like, is there a glimmer of hope for America right now? are we better off, even if we've changed administrations, are we actually better off when it comes to the health of democracy and American trust and belief in democracy? And I'm not sure we are, but when I look at places like Cuba, of all places, when I look at what's really going on in Eastern Europe right now, which is fascinating, places like Poland, places like Hungary, you're starting to see kind of what you saw in Israel, which is a coalition of parties, center right and center left,

and far left, putting their differences aside to stand up to the authoritarian leader and say, let's at least get back to normal, right? And that's really interesting. You're seeing that kind of awareness in Eastern Europe right now that you don't see in the United States where there are only like 10 reasonable Republicans left in this country who, you know, who are willing to make a stand. And they don't have any power in the party. So there's no other party to form a coalition with, you know, center-left or moderate Democrats on this sort of thing. And so one of the weird things we're seeing is that when you look for optimism about democracy, we're looking at Brazil.

We're saying, you know, like the elections in Brazil could go really well for democracy. We could see people in Brazil stand up and say, whoa, that was a bad experiment with Bolsonaro. And so that's what's really fascinating. I did not expect that. I did not expect that my own country, which, you know, frankly, we take democracy for granted. We have never had to live under real dictators. You know, we have dabbled with them, and vast swaths of the United States have had to live under oppression that felt like it. But, you know, we've never thought of ourselves as living under oppression.

I think we're just too soft. Like, the people of Hungary remember what it was like to live under communist rule. And the people of Hungary and Czech Republic and Poland, they understand what it's like to see Nazi tanks go through. You know, those are memories that people still have, living people still have. And so that's the sort of thing that we being so protected in the United States just take for granted. Not for long. Yeah. Oh, boy.

Well, Siva, I encourage the audience to tune into your podcast. You're really doing great work. And I hope you'll come back in the future. Oh, yeah. What a pleasure. So nice to talk to everybody about this. And hopefully next time we talk, we'll be a little bit less gloomy about democracy in America. Let's hope.

Frank Vogel is the author of The Ennebler's How the West Supports Cleptocrats and Corruption Endangering Our Democracy. Welcome to the new abnormal, Frank Vogel. Thank you. It's great to be with you. So I want to talk to you about autocrats. They all steal from their people. What more do you want to know?

Talk to me about what you saw with kleptocrats that was the most surprising thing while you were working on this book. I've been dealing with this issue for, well, literally 50 years. And what I have come to understand, which is so galling, really, is that so much of their wealth depends on the aiding and abetting of dirty money by people on Wall Street in the city of London and in other Western financial centers. In other words, there is a sort of parallel universe of dirty money that is global and not just confined to the authoritarian regimes.

That is definitely clear. Anyone who goes to London and goes past all those empty townhouses knows that something's a foot here, right? Is that what you're talking about, you know, people laundering money? You can see it in Vancouver and in Miami and in the center of Manhattan. And it's not just real estate. In fact, real estate is just the tip of the iceberg of dirty money, absolutely staggering amounts of it, that flood into the US capital markets, into stocks and bonds, into fine art, jewelry, yachts, and of course, the most expensive condos. And how does it get here? And why are we letting this happen? And if we don't answer those questions, we will find it very, very difficult to preserve our democracy in the face of rising authoritarianism in the world.

Art is really a good way to move money for these people. It's one way. It's definitely very easy to do because the art trade by and large, including the auction houses, is not required under law to do any due diligence on where the people who sell the art and the people who buy the art got their money. So they're not required to really investigate whether it's stolen cash in the market or not. And so, of course, it's easy for the kleptocrats to use the art market. The much bigger than the art market is the real estate market. There too, you don't have to ask big questions. And in fact, most of those empty mansions in London that you've seen are not owned by,

officially by individuals, but they're owned by shell companies. And it's very hard to discover who really is behind those shell companies. And we don't have enforcement regulations that force the real estate brokers to tell us who really has been buying this stuff. Right. So there's real estate, there's art, then there's cryptocurrency, right? Well, only to a modest extent. It gets a lot of publicity. But I don't think that the Vladimir Putin's of this world, the Xi Jinping's of China, and their cronies and their associates who have amassed enormous personal wealth, I actually don't think they're investing in cryptocurrencies because they're very volatile. And what is so important to understand is that these very wealthy authoritarian are concerned that

should they ever lose power, their successes will not only go after them, but they'll go after their money. And that's why they want to invest it very safely and securely and solidly in the US, in the UK, in Switzerland, and in places where they know their successes won't be able to get hold of it. One of the things that I read about in the Panama Papers is this kind of thing. And one of the things I've read more recently, which I thought was interesting, was that the state that is kind of the most, I want to say, primed for money laundering is a state you would never think. Well, South Dakota and Wyoming and Alaska and of course Delaware. Delaware makes sense, though, because that's, I would always think of Delaware as a place with a lot of incorporations. But for South Dakota, that is shocking me.

In some respects, it's easier to register a company in some of these places and the Cayman Islands and the British Verdic Islands and other places like that. In some cases, it's easier to register a company than get a library card. Right. When you go to the local library and you want a card, they ask you who you are. You have to identify yourself. But if you want to register one of these companies in one of these strange places, there's no questions asked about your actual. identity. And that's why this is so convenient for the lawyers who represent the kleptocrats, who wish to remain secret and anonymous. And that's why in my brand new book called The Enablers,

I talk about the lawyers and the bankers and the real estate brokers and the art dealers because they are the ones in the center of a system that our Congress allows, that I our regulatory authorities allow and that are adding to the wealth and therefore the power of governments who mean us harm, our security, our democracy. How do we stop this? The conventional thinking is, let's go after the kleptocrats, let's impose more and more sanctions on them and their oligarchic friends and their cronies. That can be effective to some degree.

But these people need the enablers and Wall Street of the same. city of London, otherwise they couldn't basically get their money into safe places in our country. So we also need to really clamp down on these very powerful financial institutions and the real estate brokers and the lawyers. And you know how difficult that is because money and politics in this country are bedfellows. And so much of the money comes precisely from the financial institutions who do not want regulation, who do not want enforcement of the kind that I'm advocating, and I think is long overdue. Yeah, I mean, good example is even today, Nancy Pelosi said that, and she's a Democrat,

right? She's one of the good guys, so to speak, said that she doesn't want to limit members of Congress from having stocks, which, again, I mean, if we're trying to go for a world of transparency, here are elected. And democracy certainly shouldn't be involved in public markets. The whole of our political system, when you think about it in terms of the context of the enables, these bankers and lawyers, real estate people, stockbrokers, so on, is riven with conflicts of interest. When these people and their institutions give enormous amounts of money to campaigns, political campaigns. Why? Because they want those elected politicians to ensure that

enforcement of the kind that I'm talking about, and I think our democracy is at stake here now, and our security. This kind of enforcement is something that these financial institutions are dead set against. This has to change. We have to open this all up. We need investigative reporting. we need active civil society to say it's time for accountability and transparency here at home if we're also going to address the absolute kleptocracies that now run over 100 countries in the world and are stealing huge amounts from their own citizens resulting, of course, in humanitarian crises, enormous poverty and so on. That's to a certain extent what we're seeing in action.

Afghanistan now, right? Well, Afghanistan is, if you will, the worst case. It's probably the most, along with Somalia and one of South Sudan, probably the most corrupt country today in the world, as perceived by its own citizens and perceived outside. But in the 20 years, we were involved in Afghanistan, failed to actually address the corruption in that country. And staggering amounts of U.S. aid, U.S. taxpayer money was stolen in Afghanistan and shipped out to Dubai and shipped out, of course, into the art market and the real estate market and all the things we've just been talking about. Afghanistan's an extreme. You could also talk about Nigeria and Turkey, Egypt, and other countries with whom we have very close political and diplomatic relationships

and where, as a result, we are not directly addressing those governments and saying, stop stealing, and we're going to do something about it. In an ideal world, what could America do? One year ago, Goldman Sachs, a very prominent international banking firm on Wall Street, paid more than $4 billion in fines to British, Malaysian, US, and other authorities for two prime charges. One, it paid huge bribes to the former government of Malaysia to get business deals. And then it floated on behalf of the government of Malaysia. It issued over $6 billion of bonds supported by international investors.

And executives Goldman Sachs helped cronies of the former Prime Minister of Malaysia to steal $4.5 billion of that $6 billion. So they did money laundering and they did bribery. Their defense is that they didn't know. No, no, no, no. They agreed and settled. And then the board of directors of Goldman Sachs came out and said, we're very sorry. These actions were taken by executives at the firm.

We're not consistent with our values. And as a result, we are going to claw back $100 million in pay from the current top executives of the firm and the immediate... former top executives. Because when you do a $6 billion bond issue, everybody firm knows about it. So they did that. And then what happened? Well, of course, the chairman and the top executives still kept their jobs because nobody is ever fired when these cases come up, and there are lots of these cases. And second of all, there was no criminal prosecution of the top executives because the Justice Department says, well, we can't trace exactly

who did it. Information to say that the top guys knew, even if middle level guys can be prosecuted. So there's never criminal prosecution of the top guys. They are never fired from their jobs. And if you look at Goldman Sachs, they are about to pay out absolute record bonuses because of terrific earnings over the last year. So that clawback is really minimal in the compensation terms in which these guys live. So there's no real punishment.

There's no real disincentia. And doing the bribery, aiding, abetting the money laundering becomes a cost of doing business. And this is at a time when Russians are using their cash to try to undermine our elections here at home and the German elections, when the Chinese are using their cash to try and steal our technology. And we are just saying, well, it's difficult. That's not an answer. It's also right that America doesn't really have the jurisdiction. We have the jurisdiction as far as Goldman Sachs is concerned.

Right, that is true. We have the jurisdiction as far as the lawyers and the real estate brokers and the art dealers are concerned. When somebody aids and abets a crime, they should be held to account just like the criminals themselves. And somehow or other, we have got a system that has allowed over $600 billion of dirty cash from the Klepenter. to come into the U.S. market every year. That's more than the total annual sales of Walmart, which is the biggest retailer in America. So we're talking huge amounts of money

that undermine our economy, that threaten our democracy, and threaten security. And so all I'm saying really in this book is, if we are really concerned about the rise of authoritarianism, we have to look at the money as well as all of the politics. I mean, a good example is the oligarchs selling each other, the painting at double the price, or Trump selling a property at twice the price.

It was a month ago. I mean, you would need to sort of prove that things were market value. I mean, how would you do that? You're jumping a little bit too far ahead, if I may say so. Let me tell you why. Yeah, please. People in Vancouver, Canada, British Columbia, people in London, people in Munich, Germany are furious about what. going on because they are getting priced out of the real estate market in which they live.

So they really want to see a full transparency about for everybody who buys property in their town. They want to see restrictions on foreign ownership unless that foreign ownership can be demonstrated to be totally legal and legit in terms of where the money comes from. Because they're concerned, as you would be concerned, that real estate prices get to a point which become out of reach for ordinary people. Yeah, that's already happened in London. That's happened in London. It's happened in Vancouver. It's happened in many other places. And so going right down to that level, which is so important because this is where the public gets angry. We can talk about how this threatens our democracy. And in fact, that's the major reason why

I've just written my book. But when it really comes down to it, people are more angry about what's happens to their real estate prices. What happens in the top end of the fine art market, frankly, doesn't affect very many people. What happens in the real estate market, it trickles down and affects everybody. Similarly, when you find that incredibly large amounts of money are being invested through hedge funds of private equity firms into our stock market, and you suspect that a lot of that money has actually come from, is dirty money, is loot. Then you start to worry again about what happens to the economic system and the safeguards in our financial system for pension funds, for insurance companies, for ordinary investors. These are threats that we should not take likely, I think.

But how would you, if you were trying to regulate this? I mean, you have this money here already. you can't make these people sell their properties. You would have to sort of make them prove that they were going to live in their properties. Not just that. You'd have to make them prove that the sources of funds they used to buy the property were legitimate. So for example, just to give you one example, a Ukrainian banker called Mr. Kolomoisky, whose bank in Ukraine somehow went bankrupt and $5 billion went missing.

He invested in real estate in Houston, Texas, in Cleveland, Ohio, and various other places. The U.S. Justice Department caught up with him. They said that the money used for these acquisitions was stolen, and they froze the assets. And they will proceed in court. and if it turns out that indeed it was stolen money used to buy this real estate, they will confiscate the real estate and put it back on the market. But they keep the money? This is very interesting.

The answer, simple answer is yes. It goes to our government. But it really ought to go to the people of Ukraine where the money is stolen from. But I could give you exactly the same example of Nigerians who were in league with the oil minister of Nigeria and who bought an incredibly expensive condo in the middle of Manhattan, that too was frozen by the U.S. justice authorities, along with an $80 million yacht, and they, believe it or not, isn't that amazing?

And that too, if the money, if it turns out on an investigation that this was the proceeds of stolen money, then it will be sold off and the money will go to the U.S. Treasury. And there are many other cases like this, but unfortunately, not enough. Do you think there are American politicians who are interested in this? As the problems have increased, so the sensitivity in Congress has increased. And there is now, and hopefully lots of people will follow up this conversation and contact the right congressman, there is now a counter-cleptocracy caucus in the Congress.

And it consists of Republicans and Democrats. And I really want to make that last point clear. Why is it bipartisan? It's bipartisan for two reasons. First, many people on the political right are horrified that corruption is undermining fair trade, undermining free markets, and in that sense, threatening the capitalism that they believe in so strongly. Second of all, there is an increasing sensitivity on the right and on the left that these issues are now so large that they affect our national security and they affect our democracy. And just to be very concrete, last year, this caucus managed to convince the rest of Congress to pass what was called the Corporate Transparency Act.

and the new regulations for that act will go into effect in 2022, and what are they? They will demand that every piece of real estate bought in this country be required to explain who is the true owner. The game of the shell companies should be over if this new regulation is enforced, but it will add transparency to the real estate market. And that is the result of bipartisan action in Congress. Yeah, that's very interesting. Thank you so much for joining us.

This was fascinating. Well, thank you. And read my book. Yes, we will. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the New Abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science. We'll help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast.

app and share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the daily beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a daily beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts

as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the dailybeast.com slash membership slash podcast. and sign up today.