Anne Applebaum on the "Twilight of Democracy"

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the SNF Agora Institute.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
You're listening to the United to Preserve Democracy and the Rule of Law Speaker Series,

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presented by Democracy First.
Join us for a special conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling
author Anne Appelbaum.
Anne is a staff writer at The Atlantic, and her latest book, Autocracy Inc., the dictators
who want to run the world, chronicles the trends in modern autocracies from communist

(00:25):
China, theocratic Iran, and Bolivarian Socialist Venezuela.
This conversation was recorded at the Chester County Pennsylvania Historical Society in
November 2024.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
It's a real pleasure to be here.
Thank you so much for the invitation.

(00:45):
We'll jump right into it.
So we're four days away from the election.
In the last few months, we've seen an alarming rise in political violence, including one
of the major party presidential candidates, suggesting that former Representative Liz Cheney
be shot just in the past 24 hours.
We've had a sitting president drop out of the race, a historic nominee take his place,

(01:11):
two assassination attempts, elected officials refusing to certify election results.
I could go on.
As a historian and a scholar of democracy, can you help us make sense of this moment
that we're living through in the U.S.?
Well thanks for that easy question to start out with.

(01:34):
I feel that making sense of this moment requires a lot more than me offering you a glib answer.
So I won't try to give you one.
I think what I'll do instead is begin by stepping back a little bit.
If any of you know a little bit about me and my work, I actually spent the first part of
my career writing history books.

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I wrote about the history of the Soviet Union and of Eastern Europe.
I live part of the time in Eastern Europe.
I have a home in Poland.
My husband's Polish.
I go back and forth between Poland and the U.S.
Of course, I grew up here and I'm American.
But for me, I spent the 90s, the 2000s, doing research on a political system that I thought

(02:22):
would never come back.
So I wrote a history of the Gulag.
This is of the Soviet concentration camp system.
I wrote a history of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe and I sketched out how
it had happened.
What kinds of institutions had to be destroyed one by one by the Soviet, by the Red Army

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and by the NKVD, which was there, what the KGB was called at that time, in order for
autocracy, for totalitarianism to take hold.
And all the time when I was doing that, I thought I was writing about the distant past.
So recently, starting in about 2014, starting with the Russian invasion of Crimea, I began

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to understand that I wasn't writing about the past.
I was writing about things that are coming back.
And so there's, I know it's always, you know, somehow awkward and uncomfortable to see one's
country as part of something bigger.
And Americans in particular, we like to think that we're exceptional and unique.
But we are living through an era of really extraordinary democratic breakdown in many

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countries and the rise of a network of autocracies who are pushing very hard against democracy
in many places.
I've seen it in Europe.
We've experienced it in Poland.
We see the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a part of it.
The Russian disinformation that's in our political system that maybe some of you know about or

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have run into on social media, that's another piece of it.
There are now, unlike the 1990s, there are now dedicated people both inside our country
and around the world who are focused on undermining democracy, on empowering and promoting extremism
of different kinds, actually.

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And we are a part of that system.
And some of the chaos that we feel isn't unique to us.
I mean, maybe it makes you feel better to know that other people feel the same way.
You know, in Germany, where I was a couple of weeks ago, or in France, or in the Netherlands,

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we're living through a moment when a lot of norms are being questioned and when particularly
it's true that the form of communication that we use, the way in which we get and process
information, the little clips that we see on our phones, the short bursts of information
that we get sometimes we don't know where they come from.

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This is meeting people in a direction where politics become more emotional, more angry.
There's less time for reflection.
There's less time for conversation or for compromise, you know, for looking for people
to come together.
And that's something that's happening not just here, but everywhere.

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And so before we go into the details of our particular election, I thought I would step
back and say that.
That's a really helpful starting point.
Looking at Tuesday, how consequential and important do you think this election is?
We are a country that has heard for multiple presidential elections and it's the most important

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of our lifetime.
This one does truly feel that way.
But give us a perspective as someone who's observed elections in other countries.
What's the moment we have on coming up here in the U.S.?
What's really profoundly, what's consequential about this election is the profound difference
in the vision of the country that's on offer on both sides and the language that's being

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used on both sides.
I don't think we've ever had maybe since, maybe 1860, I don't remember it.
I don't think even you guys do.
Maybe that felt just as divisive.
But I can't think of another election in modern American history that does where we have,
on the one hand, Kamala Harris's final, her final major rally was held in Washington.

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She's surrounded by American flags against with the White House in the background and
she spoke about writing another chapter in the American story.
She spoke about the traditions of the country bringing them into the future.
Former President Trump's final, his major final rally was in Madison Square Garden

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where he had a series of speakers over six hours who were from all kinds of different
places.
They were comedians.
There was a Scientologist.
There were a couple of billionaire friends of his who described, I won't actually repeat
all the vulgar language that was used.

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They described their political opponents as garbage or as idiots or stupid or, Harris
was described by Tucker Carlson as Samoan Malaysian, which I think was an illusion to
her mixed race heritage.

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You had a vision of America in crisis, in chaos, America as a catastrophe, America
as a disaster, America as unrecognizable.
Then I think is the vision that not half the country, maybe not even 30% of the country,
but the people around Donald Trump have.

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Sometimes you have those two different visions, you have very different language being used
and you have a very different kind of campaigns are being run.
What's at stake?
A German politician said to me a few months ago, he said, we might wake up one morning

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and discover that we, and he meant Germany, but he also meant all of Europe, are facing
three dictatorships or three autocracies was the word he used, Russia, China and the United
States.
They're afraid that the direction that we could head in would be so hostile to our traditional

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allies and to our traditional values as to be unrecognizable.
I'm repeating to you what outside observers see when they look at the election.
We have this choice between a continuation of the political system flawed though it is,
but with the values that we know at its heart and something that we don't know but could

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be radically different.
Your latest book, Autocracy Inc, really focuses on this new class of dictators, autocrats
around the world and the unlikely teaming up alliances that they've made.
How do you think they are thinking about this election?

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One of the things that I describe in the book is the way in which a very different group
of autocracies, we're talking about communist China and nationalist Russia and theocratic
Iran and whatever North Korea is and Bolivarian socialist Venezuela, these are very, very
different political systems with different ideologies.

(10:13):
They do have one thing in common, which is that all of them are led by whether individuals
or political parties or elites who would like to rule without political opposition, without
the rule of law, without independent judges, without independent media.
They don't want any checks and balances.

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They want to be absolute rulers.
They are different kinds and they have different goals.
More recently, and this is one of the themes of the book, they've come to understand that
in order to do that, they need to push back against their political opponents and the
language that their opponents use.
The language that their opponents use is about not just democracy but the rule of law, transparency,

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accountability, rights, human rights.
In order to maintain power, they need to undermine those things wherever they are.
They undermine them at home.
They undermine them around the world.
They will rescue one another when they see they're in trouble or under challenge from

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those ideas.
They will also seek to undermine democratic countries and democratic alliances where they
can.
For them, the success in the United States of a political leader who has already once
sought to overturn the result of an election, who uses violent and dehumanizing language

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about his opponents, who expresses scorn for the rule of law, for judges, for the media,
whatever their views of Trump or Harris or their particular policies, the success of
someone like that is good for them, for all of them, because it contributes to the appearance

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and feeling of democratic decline, which is something that they need to maintain their
own power.
They need to defeat their own opposition internally, whether it's the women's movement in Iran
or whether it's the anti-corruption movement in Russia or whether it was the Hong Kong
Democrats in China.
They need to undermine them, and so for them, any failure of democracy or any evidence that

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democracy doesn't work is good for them.
These are all countries who, to one degree or another, have sought in their own countries
to build a kind of autocratic narrative.
That means to argue that autocracy and dictatorship are stable and safe, and democracy is divided
and weakened and unsuccessful.

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That's part of how they stay in power, but they promote this narrative everywhere, including
in our country.
I mean, we see it in our social media, including in Europe.
You can see it there, and including through their actions.
One of the purposes of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, aside from Putin's imperial ambitions,

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and so on, one of the purposes was to demonstrate to the Russians that Ukrainian democracy would
fail, because if you remember, there was a democratic revolution there in 2014.
They replaced an autocratic leader with a popularly elected one.
In the wake of that happening, the Russian leadership became afraid that this model,

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this change might become appealing to Russians, and so they needed to show that democracy
fails, and that was one of the reasons for that invasion.
Anything that looks to them like a failure here, they see as positive.
Whether they like or dislike a particular leader or his or her particular policies,

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I think is less important.
One transition over to one of the...
This is a core part of the mission at Democracy First, which is building a cross-partisan
pro-democracy movement, and then it is essential in a democracy to have multiple parties that

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believe in these core tenants.
When we were just talking before this, I was reminded that earlier in your career, you
would have...
Some would call you a conservative or an anti-communist.
What talked to us about the historic role and the necessity, if you believe it, is necessary,
of having that cross-partisan coalition of people of different political ideologies that

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are united into preserving the rules of democracy that it can continue.
We've had that in this country at least since the Civil War.
We can agree that the Civil War was a moment of disagreement when we didn't agree about
what the rules would be.
Although there's been transformation, and the country is very different now than it

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was before, and there have been huge upheavals, the Civil Rights Movement and so on, that
there has been an agreement about what some of the core values of the country are.
Not just the Constitution, but the rule of law, the belief that there is a set of rules,
and you are elected by those rules.

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Of course, there's a way in which democracy requires something that's almost superhuman.
It means that when you win office, you have to preserve the system, keep everything in
place so that your political enemies can beat you four years from now.
If you lose, you have to say, okay, I'm going to let my political enemies rule, but four

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years from now, I'm going to get the chance to win again.
That's actually a, that's harder to maintain.
I mean, I've seen countries where it's broken down, and of course it could break down here.
But it was maintained here by our reverence for our Constitution, which flawed those aspects

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of it may be, by our reverence for our history, for the ideas of the founding fathers.
Again, even at some of the most difficult and divisive moments of history, think about
the language of the Civil Rights Movement, think about the language of Martin Luther
King.
Martin Luther King used the, he used the language of the Constitution to make his argument for

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civil rights.
So he was someone who was acting within the American tradition.
We've always been able to do that by having this cross-party consensus about what the
rules are.
If you think about other places, I live, as I've said, part of the time in Poland where

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we had eight years of an autocratic populist government from 2015 until last October, who
won an election legitimately, and as has happened in many other places, nevertheless, when they
took power, began to try to undermine those institutions of democracy, rather than preserving

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them.
They politicized the courts, they're equivalent of the Supreme Court, they changed its membership
illegally, it's as if somebody abolished the Supreme Court and put in nine new judges
overnight, which let's admit, agree wouldn't be popular if it happened here.
And the way they were ultimately defeated last October was through a coalition of political

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groups who previously hadn't been on the same side.
So a center-left party, a center-right party, and a liberal party came together, agreed
that one of the central issues was restoring democratic values, was restoring the rule
of law, and they won the election that way.

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So you can see that in, not just the need to maintain that coalition, the need to maintain
that, those very difficult rules, does sometimes require a pretty broad group.
So yeah, I think in this country, Republicans and Democrats and conservatives and liberals

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and progressives, whatever name you give yourself, we can find some unity in agreeing on what
the rules are, and agreeing on the spirit of, abiding by the spirit of our constitution.
And thinking outside of political leaders exclusively, what in civil society, business

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leaders, corporate leaders, religious leaders, what role do they play, and are they, are
you seeing them step up here in the U.S. in a way that's meaningful or in need of more?
Well, business leaders, religious leaders, they're all citizens, just like people who

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work in grocery stores and drive taxis.
One of the mistakes that I think was made in our society, and not only ours over the
last several decades, was the growth of a kind of professional political class, and
a feeling that politics was somehow distant, was some, politics happened over there and

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real life happened over there, and ordinary people don't have anything to do with it.
I mean, this was also linked to a sense that we all had that democracy was inevitable.
We won World War II, and we won the Cold War, and therefore, democracy triumphed, and there's
nothing in particular that anybody has to do in order to maintain it.

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I mean, democracy was something like, we assumed it was something like tap water.
You turn on the water, you don't think about where it came from, you don't worry about
it, it's just there, and democracy had that function.
So ordinary people, business leaders or taxi drivers, didn't really have to involve themselves
in it or care about it.

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I think one of the things that we've learned in the last several years is that without
civic engagement, without ordinary people being involved in their communities, whether
they're poll workers or whether they work for a political party or whether they are
just involved in community projects, if you don't have that, if people aren't engaged

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politically, then democracy can decline.
It's a political system that functions best when more people have some engagement.
And of course it matters that religious leaders and business leaders were involved, but I
would go farther than that.
I think having, all of us are, aside from whatever else we do, whether we're school

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teachers or we work in banks, all of us are citizens, and so all of us have an obligation
to the greater community to play some part in understanding how our political system
works and being part of it.
Good segue into one of the themes I wanted to connect on, and I think it's in the Twilight

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Democracy, your book that came out in 2020, is that right?
Right in the middle of the pandemic, July 2020, that book came out.
And it's on the promise of inevitability.
At Democracy First, we do pretty extensive polling and research and focus groups into

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how the public and electorate are thinking about democracy, the threats that it's under.
And one thing that we've realized is it's hard for Americans to think about America
without democracy.
It is a synonymous idea to them.
I had one time a woman said in a focus group that she could pretty clearly see the United

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States in a violent civil war again, but she couldn't imagine America without democracy.
Can you sort of expand on that?
What do you mean by the promise of inevitability and the role that it plays in declining democracies?

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So let me answer that firstly by saying one of the problems that we all have is we've
seen too many movies with Nazis in them.
So we have an image in our minds of what a dictatorship looks like, and it looks like
men on the street goose-stepping.

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Actually in the modern world, most democracies don't decline because of a coup d'état, and
most autocracies don't look like Nazi Germany.
Instead, what's much more common now is for a leader to be elected, legitimately, and
for that leader to then come into office and then begin to take apart the institutions

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of government.
So political scientists call it capturing the state.
So for example, in our country, taking over the Department of Justice and instead of using
the Department of Justice to prosecute people who have broken laws, using it for the personal
benefit of the president or the president's party or the president's friends.

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That would be a break with our tradition.
That would be a capturing of that institution.
Or for example, taking the Federal Communications Committee, the FCC, using it not to regulate
the use of bandwidths and television licenses in this country for the good of most Americans,

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but doing it in such a way that journalists or others who bothered the president or the
ruling party lost their licenses.
So in other words, to begin to use the institutions of the state in a partisan political way.
To some degree, this happens in any administration, but we haven't had, at least in modern history,

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we haven't had an extreme version of that.
I mean, I lived through, as I said, a version of that in Poland.
We saw what happened when the state, instead of civil servants being people who are qualified
for their particular jobs because they, I don't know, they know about water pollution

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or they know about automobile regulation, whatever it is that they're meant to be doing, instead
of that the party hired people who were loyal to the party.
Or in Poland, this is a specific thing, people's cousins.
So it was cousins and relatives and brothers-in-law, and that's who was given jobs in the state

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administration rather than people who were there to fulfill the law and to make sure
that the air is clean and the streets are clean and roads get built and are crooked.
That's actually the purpose of state administration.
So the fear is that if too many Americans, like too many Europeans and too many others

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who live in democracy, assume that democracy is inevitable, as long as we've elected people
democratically, then they'll fulfill their job and do what they want.
But I think they haven't taken into consideration the possibility that it's not Nazi dictatorship,
that a form, a much less democratic system, a much more corrupt system, and a much more

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partisan and biased system could be, we could elect that as well.
We could choose that whether or not we know that we're choosing it.
So there's nothing inevitable about the system that we have now.
And remember, most democracies in all of history have not succeeded.
Sooner or later, they've all collapsed.

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And I should say the people who knew that the best were once again our founding fathers.
When you read what they were talking about when they were writing the Constitution, what
most worried them was the rise to power of what Alexander Hamilton called a demagogue,
somebody who would undermine the system.
And our weird Constitution, including the weirdest thing, which is the Electoral College, was

(27:07):
actually created not so that the people of Pennsylvania get to decide who's president.
Sorry.
But actually, the purpose of it was to be a kind of break between the popular vote that
they worried might be, go to a demagogue and the White House.

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I mean, actually, I spent some time looking at this earlier this year.
The Electoral College never worked the way it was supposed to.
It never functioned, as it was meant to.
And I think that at least the first or one of the first presidents who was elected without
the popular vote, this is John Quincy Adams, even at the time, this is John Adams' son,

(27:49):
even at the time of his election, he was chosen.
The Electoral College was tied, I believe, and then he was selected by the House to be
president.
And he was considered all through his presidency to be an illegitimate president, because people
had this sense that if you won the popular vote, and in that year actually it was Andrew
Jackson who won it, if you won the popular vote, you should win.
And that's 150 years ago.

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So it's been a problem from the beginning.
But the reason for it, the reason for it originally was the founding father's fear of someone taking
power and changing the system.
And you mentioned this, which is the role of the independent judiciary and the role
that it plays in preserving democracy.

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And I think there have been some alarming indicators from the court's decisions around
partisan politics.
What role does the judiciary play in maintaining its independence in order to preserve democracy?

(28:52):
So this is something I wrote about actually in the Atlantic a month or two ago.
I wrote about where I got interested in, where does the idea of an independent judiciary
come from?
And how old is it?
And what did we think it was?
And one of the interesting things I found was that during the period of the American
Revolution, one of the grievances that the colonists had against the British, well, they

(29:19):
were all British then, but against the colonial rule from England was that it was an edict
by the king that judges in the colonies were to serve at the pleasure of the king.
In other words, they could be dismissed.
And this created at the time a kind of riots and outrage and anger because judges should

(29:47):
be independent.
And they had this sense even then that the purpose of an independent judge is to be someone
who stands for not the ruler, who's not there to enforce the will of a particular person,
but who's there to enforce the rule of law.
And it has to be said that at almost every juncture in American history where there's

(30:07):
turbulence or change, people start becoming anxious about judges.
I mean, actually, it happens pretty early on in American history.
It happens again at the time of the New Deal.
Any time of momentous change, you have it.
What worries me now, we could go off and have another hour-long conversation about the Supreme

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Court, maybe we don't want to do that.
But what worries me now is the phenomena that's arising of judges who are not merely partisan
in that they are right-wing or left-wing or they are originalists or they are progressives.
It's not just their ideological views, which we can argue about what views a judge should

(30:54):
have.
But there are now, we've had the emergence of a few judges who appear to be personally
and politically loyal to the person who appointed them.
And this, I'm thinking of Judge Cannon in Florida who has made several decisions that
are clearly, that are way out of line with what other judges have decided, which don't

(31:17):
go along with precedent, which have been criticized by other members of the judiciary, and she
seems to be doing it in order to, which she was doing in order to help Donald Trump escape
a legal case.
That's different from being a conservative judge, or having a view about abortion one
way or the other, or Roe v. Wade.
That's a different phenomenon.

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And the spread and growth of that kind of judge, who despite the fact, by the way, our
judiciary is actually very well protected from political influence.
Judges are appointed for long periods of time, for life actually to the federal bench.
They are paid independently.
Their pay is not, can't be changed by political whim.

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There's sort of layers built around them.
And this was also, by the way, debated in Philadelphia at the time of the Constitutional
Convention.
So they are protected.
They should be protected from political influence.
But the fact that we now have a few judges who you can see in the system who despite that
are acting politically is another new and worrying sign.

(32:27):
How do people that have been on the spot, or would have intervened in the Supreme Court
decision to take forward this immune?
Well the decision was to make all presidents immune.
So that was, and that, I mean look, George Washington.

(32:47):
Washington was offered a monarchy.
He was, many people wanted him to be king.
Many people, in fact, when he finally left office, mourned the fact that he was leaving.
They thought nobody's going to be able to replace him.
It was actually one of the problems that John Adams had.
You can see I've been spending a lot of time with the Adams family.

(33:12):
One of the, it was kind of shadow over John Adams, who was our second president.
The fact that George, you know, he wasn't George Washington.
But they were, but Washington and most of the other authors of the Constitution were
very clear that they did not want an imperial presidency.
They wanted the president also to be subject to the rule of law.

(33:34):
That the president was a citizen, was not, in that sense, privileged, was not somebody
who was somehow above the law or beyond the law.
Only the president was not, you know, somebody who was represented the will of the people
or was some kind of mystic embodiment of the American soul.

(33:57):
That's an idea that we got later.
That is closer to a, you know, more 1930s concept of what a leader is.
It wasn't somebody who's, by his very existence, has some significance.
The president is important because he's elected, because he has, he's been elected by a set
of rules.
He then governs according to a set of rules.

(34:20):
And then, you know, after four years, he's meant to hand back the institutions as he
found them, you know, in the same good condition as before, which as we've already discussed,
is, can be a pretty tough thing to have to do.
So I thought the immunity decision was out of line with, despite the fact that, as I

(34:41):
said, it's meant to apply to all presidents.
That one wasn't written for a particular president.
You recently wrote in The Atlantic about Donald Trump's increasing use of rhetoric about
his opponents that correlates with other authoritarians and dictators from the past.

(35:05):
And the other, the reference, the enemy from within.
Can you explain to us what are those historical parallels and why, and how autocrats use that
violent rhetoric?
So actually the word that caught my attention was the word vermin.
Vermin.
Okay.

(35:26):
And this is why.
So again, I wrote books about Soviet history.
And I have in my, I have a whole section on my computer called old notes, right?
And I heard the word vermin and I put in a search term in my thousands of old notes from
working in Soviet and East German archives.

(35:47):
And I put in the word vermin.
And of course I got lots of responses because vermin was the word that Stalin liked to use,
the East German Stasi liked to use.
They had a project in the 40s called Operation Vermin, which was meant to clear the area
of the border, the border between East and West Germany was meant to be cleared of people

(36:10):
who were politically suspect and those were the vermin.
Hitler liked also this kind of language.
He talked a lot about parasites.
He also talked a lot about poisoning the blood, the Jews are poisoning the blood of our nation.
And so when Donald Trump began to talk about immigrants poisoning the blood and when he

(36:34):
talked about, I think it was left-wing radicals who are vermin that need to be, this rang
alarm bells in my head.
Again, not because I think Donald Trump is Hitler, I don't just to make that clear,
but because this is, first of all, this kind of language is a real break from anything
that I could find in previous American history.

(36:56):
I actually went back and read George Wallace's speeches.
George Wallace was, he'll remember, was a presidential candidate in the 1960s.
He was a segregationist.
He was the governor of Alabama.
Then he ran for president.
He made one very famous racist speech in which he says segregation now, today's segregation,
tomorrow's segregation forever.

(37:18):
And I read the speech and in that speech he doesn't use dehumanizing language about anybody.
He just, actually the segregationists often sought to present themselves.
It was separate, but equal and so on.
It hid an uglier ideology, but the language of vermin and parasites and poison blood,

(37:39):
this is not something we've ever had.
I mean, not in mainstream presidential American politics.
And that set off alarm bells because to me, again, I don't think Trump is Hitler, but
he's clearly preparing people.
He's preparing his followers for something uglier, something they're not used to.

(38:01):
If you speak about your political enemies or about immigrants or about anybody as vermin
or parasites, that means not just that they have no rights, they're not even human.
It's a way of dehumanizing people.
And it's also the extremity of the language I think is preparing the population for something.

(38:25):
I mean, either if he loses the election, it's a preparation for perhaps another assault
on the political system.
If he wins the election, it's preparing people for a more extreme form of government than
we've known before.
I don't think you use language like that by accident.

(38:45):
And of course, you can find examples of Democrats saying ugly things, and we could argue for
a long time about the use of the word garbage and who means what by it.
But Trump did start, as I said, it was this specific thing of comparing people to insects
that I just don't know of any precedent for it.

(39:06):
And because he's continued it, because he, as recently as 24 hours ago, because he imagined
Liz Cheney in front of his, it was a very specific number of guns, because he keeps
doing it, it makes me think that it's something that matters to him and that it's part of
his policy.

(39:28):
Looking ahead, it can feel like we've been living through one 10-year long presidential
campaign.
But looking to the future, if the pro-democracy forces here are elected next week, how do

(39:49):
they use that leadership to reconcile the country, to move forward?
What have you seen in other countries that can give us some direction in how we come
back together after this?
I would return to this idea of coalitions.
It's very important that whoever wins or loses, that we continue to try to find unifying language

(40:18):
and that we find it in our history and in our traditions, that we find it in our constitution,
that we find it in practices of the past.
Those are the ways that we rebuild the country.
I would hope that if Harris were to win, that she would have, I can't expect her to have

(40:43):
a bipartisan administration, but that she would make gestures to the Republican Party,
that she would work with Republicans in Congress if it's possible at all.
I would hope that she would do that.
I would hope that Donald Trump would do that, were he to win.
Right now, he's preparing us for something different, so I don't have a lot of expectation,

(41:04):
but maybe there would be people around him who would see the need for that.
Also were he to win, it's very important that a coalition of people who care about our ideas
and our ideals also remain together and also remain together and remain vocal about what

(41:28):
matters, about maintaining the independence of our courts, about maintaining the rule
of law, about maintaining an idea of government, which is government for everybody.
It's not just government for the people who are in charge and the laws aren't just made
and the rules aren't just made to benefit financially or otherwise the people who are

(41:51):
in charge, but they're made to benefit all of us.
It will then be all of our responsibility to make sure that that remains true.
We're going to open up here, we've got a little bit of time for some questions from
the audience, but wanted to close my final question to you.
Looking at the prospect of, and I get this is beyond one candidate, there is a movement

(42:18):
that includes many politicians who openly reject the core principles of democracy.
It's easy to feel despair and hopelessness after that, but you come, I mean your husband
is the foreign minister of Poland now and your family has been involved in the reemergence

(42:39):
of democracy in Poland and the success of that coalition after a dark period.
You could just leave us with how that was possible.
And again, if the election goes a certain way on Tuesday, there's still a future.
No, there's always a future.

(42:59):
Never fear.
There's always a future.
This book is dedicated to the optimist.
It's actually a pretty gloomy book and almost everybody who interviews me about it says,
who are these optimists like me?
As Madeline Albright used to say, I'm not a pessimist, I'm an optimist who worries a

(43:20):
lot.
So I'll take that.
No, look, there's democratic renewal, which as I said, I'll say it again, involves the
engagement of everybody.
It means it might mean you have to take time off from work to do, to think more about your
community, it might mean that you have to donate some money, it might mean that you

(43:45):
need to follow politics more closely than you used to.
It might need you need to talk to people around you or in your family or at your workplace
to remind them of why these things are important.
I mean, there's always something that can be done and there is always a possibility of

(44:07):
revival.
But remember, there is no such thing as historical inevitability.
There's no historical determinism.
So there is no rule.
I said democracies often fail, but there's no reason why ours has to.
There isn't a law of history that says that.

(44:27):
Everything that happens tomorrow depends on what we all do today.
The future is determined by decisions that are made right now.
There isn't someone up there pushing it one way or the other.
So everybody has some power to influence how things go.
And that includes everyone in this room.

(44:48):
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
What a great audience.
Thank you.
Thank you.