0:02

I'm Hannah

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Rosen. This

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is Radio Atlantic. There's something

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new unfolding in this election, something

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we haven't seen in this country on such

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a grand scale. Kamala Harris

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said it bluntly at her acceptance speech at

0:22

the DNC when she talked about how tyrants

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like Kim Jong Un side with Donald Trump.

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They know he is easy

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to manipulate with flattery and

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favors. They

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know Trump won't hold autocrats

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accountable because he wants to

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be an autocrat himself. An

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autocrat. How do you know

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if a leader is vying to be an autocrat? It's

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an abstract title, hard to picture playing out

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in the US. But

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as I picked up in a New Atlantic

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podcast, Autocracy in America, if you

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know what you're looking for, you can see it

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pretty clearly. People

1:02

who have seen it play out in

1:04

other countries can tick through the list

1:06

of autocratic tactics at work right now

1:08

in the United States. That

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was really the organizing idea of

1:12

the show, was to tell people that

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stuff is already happening now. This

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is staff writer Anne Applebaum. She

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is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian and

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co-host of Autocracy in America. Her

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co-host is Peter Pomerancev, a senior

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fellow at the SNF Agora Institute

1:28

at Johns Hopkins University and a

1:30

scholar of propaganda and misinformation.

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After I started listening to their show, I realized

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I was missing some very basic things, patterns

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that were easy to spot if someone pointed

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them out to you. So I wanted to

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get them to help me understand the moment

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we're in, both in this election and in

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American history. Here's my conversation

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with Anne and Peter. patterns

2:01

happening in the news and the

2:03

election that the rest of us

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either don't notice or don't quite

2:07

put together as patterns. So

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I want to, through your eyes,

2:12

look at the current election.

2:15

Have you detected any patterns or signs

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of the kind of current

2:20

autocracy in America bubble up

2:22

in the dialogue of this

2:24

election? So I

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was very struck by the famous

2:29

eating cats and dogs phrase. In

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Springfield, they're eating the

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dogs, the people that came in,

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they're eating the cats, they're eating

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the pets. And

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everybody laughed at it and they said, ha ha ha, that's

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very funny. And this struck me

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as an example of people lying in

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a way, even though everybody knows they're

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lying. And the purpose of

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the lie was to demonstrate their power. We

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can lie, we can do whatever we want,

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we can say whatever we want about these

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people and it doesn't affect us.

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And the fact that they never retracted it,

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despite the fact that people in Springfield were

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up in arms and everybody who's

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done any reporting, journalists have been to Springfield,

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have asked people, are there any dogs or

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cats being eaten? And people say no, it's

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a way of showing power. So we can lie

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and everybody else is going to go along with

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our lie when we win the election. Something

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that's been much remarked upon

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in autocratic systems, sort of

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truth and power sort of switch

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roles. We think of

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truth challenging power and holding the powerful by

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account with the truth. When

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I lived in Russia and my first book, Nothing Is

3:39

True and Everything Is Possible was all about this, how

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truth didn't play that role anymore. Truth

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was about showing your loyalty, showing

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whose side you're on, and

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it was subservient to power. And

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creating around themselves a kind of alternative

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community where if you're inside our world,

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we say whatever we want the truth

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to be and everybody joins in. So,

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it's also rubbish in the idea of truth. What comes

4:02

with that is truth stops being about information and analysis.

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It's about making a point, saying whose side

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you're on, even the more absurd the lie

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that you say shows even more, look at

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my team, look at my team, look whose

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side I'm on. And Vance was fascinating. He's

4:16

a very fascinating character, something right out of

4:18

some of the darkest Russian novels because

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he kind of intellectualizes this because he's also

4:22

a writer and someone who thinks about language

4:25

a lot clearly. And he

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went on air and said, oh yeah, I made this up and I'll

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keep on making things up because truth

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doesn't matter. Something else matters. If

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I have to create

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stories so that the American media actually

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pays attention to the suffering of the

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American people, then that's what I'm going

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to do, Dan. And

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is it just because I'm A, an

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American and B, a journalist that I

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can't catch up? Like, you both have

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so much foreign experience living in foreign

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countries watching autocracy. So you've digested this.

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Is it because it's new to me

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that everything, like every time Trump does

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it, I keep wishing for the facts

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to stop the momentum and they never do

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and somehow I can't catch up? It's

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just because we're new, right? Because Americans just don't have

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seen this before. It's not that new. I mean, it's

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been going on since 2016. And

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in fact, I would say almost the opposite is true. I

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think most people, I mean, you made me an exception. I

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think most people... Yes, it's

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because you're a journalist, not because you're an American. I'm

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slow. No, I think most people have got used

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to it. And I mean, I think that's one of the

5:31

normalization of the lying and

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the normalization of the gibberish

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that Trump comes up with. And

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all of that has become part

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of the background of politics

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in America and isn't shocking the

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way it would have been. Imagine an election

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20 years ago. I don't know. Imagine Bill

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Clinton going up on the stage and talking

5:51

about sharks and electrocution and Hannibal Lecter. He

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would have been outraged and he would have been thrown

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off the stage. And who is this crazy person talking

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to us?