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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. A new article by Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic called The New Propaganda War has an old Bill Clinton quote near the top. It's from March of 2000 when Clinton was president and giving a speech about why he supported much more trade with China, despite China still being a cruel authoritarian regime. Wasn't that long after the Tiananmen Square massacre? It was 11 years later, but it was still very much on people's minds. One reason Clinton was for more opening to China was this shiny new thing called the Internet.

Bill Clinton: Now there's no question China has been trying to crack down on the Internet. Good luck.

[laughter]

That's like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.

[luaghter]

Brian Lehrer: Well, China has been nailing a lot of Jell-O to a lot of walls ever since, and also making a mockery of the serious premise behind Clinton's laugh line, this thought that came next.

Bill Clinton: In the knowledge economy, economic innovation and political empowerment, whether anyone likes it or not, will inevitably go hand in hand.

Brian Lehrer: That was March of 2000. Where are we now? Ann Applebaum is with us, staff writer for The Atlantic, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where she co-directs a program on disinformation and 21st-century propaganda. She has a forthcoming book called Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, and that related Atlantic Magazine cover story now is called The New Propaganda War about how the autocrats in China, Russia, and elsewhere are making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world. One of the scariest things to me before we bring Ann on, after reading the article, is her take that in the past autocrats usually had to pretend to be for democracy in order to maintain their power. These days, they can just be anti-democracy and a lot of people seem to like it. Ann, thanks very much for making time for us today. Welcome back to WNYC.

Anne Applebaum: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Why did you put that Bill Clinton quote near the top of your article?

Anne Applebaum: To be clear, the article is actually an excerpt from book. In fact, I think in the book, the Bill Clinton quote is in a slightly different place. I wouldn't put too much on that. Although one of the thesis of the book and as of the article is that we made a mistake 20 years ago. Not just we, not just Americans, but Europeans and others believing that trade and open conversation and a more open, more transparent world would inevitably lead countries like China and Russia in the direction of democracy. As their populations became more prosperous, as they became more educated, as they had access to more information, that that would lead on a trajectory in the direction of democracy. To be fair to the people who thought that, that was the experience of that generation.

People who had lived through the evolution of Europe after 1945 had seen how economic integration can create prosperity and can lead to stable democracies and can lead to stable international institutions. That was their life experience. They thought that after 1989, 1990, that something similar could happen in the rest of the world. It didn't work out that way, as the very fact that you were laughing at the Clinton quote illustrates in that, instead what happened, particularly in the case of the Internet, certainly very early on the Chinese saw the Internet as a mortal danger to them, to the Chinese Communist Party rather, and they sought to control it. From the beginning, they thought about how to control it. They created what's known somewhat euphemistically as the Great Firewall of China.

It's not obviously a physical wall, but it's a series of protocols that help the state control what people are able to see or monitor what people are able to see on the internet. They thought a great deal about how to shape the information environment that people were living in so that they wouldn't encounter dangerous ideas like free speech or freedom of the press or anything like that. Xi Jinping, who's the leader of China now, explicitly has said in 2013, there was a document that was issued just as he was coming, rising into power in which they explicitly said that the threats to the Chinese Communist Party include Western constitutional democracy, free press, free speech, civil society, et cetera, et cetera. They've explicitly saw those things as dangerous and they tried to push back on them. I'll just finish by saying the only thing that's new now is they now see that they need to push back on it, not only inside China, but everywhere.

Brian Lehrer: Right. In fact, I was just about to ask you about that document, which to me was one of the most eye-popping things in your article. Again, listeners, what Ann was just referring to, this Chinese government list from 2013 called the Seven Perils. What were these perils? Number one was Western constitutional democracy. Well, the number two peril was universal human rights. Okay, we see where this is going. Number three, media independence. Number four, judicial independence. Number five, civic participation. The document I see from your piece instructed Chinese leaders to push back against these ideas wherever they found them inside China, on the internet, and around the world. That was just as Xi Jinping was becoming the top leader. Was that something new in 2013 or an acknowledgment that anything that we consider the just the basic building blocks of freedom or democracy were threats to them?

Anne Applebaum: I think an earlier generation of Chinese leaders didn't think that categorically. Certainly, there have been a couple of interesting books recently about the after 1979, when China began to open up in the world, there were people inside Beijing who also thought that it was possible that China and the United States or China and the Democratic world rather could converge. There were certainly Chinese leaders who had a less combative set of feelings about the outside world. I've met Chinese people who said they themselves had hoped that their country would evolve in a different direction. There was an earlier era in which it was more of an open question. There may have been people all along who saw these things as threat, but I think the rise of Xi Jinping was connected with the sense that these things are a threat to the power of the Chinese Communist Party and to its leaders, and therefore we need to push back against it.

I think Xi Jinping also very early on saw in particular this universalist language that gets used at the UN and used in international institutions, your human rights, you know, universal right to speech, to freedom, to dignity, that's the language you can find that in international documents, that this needed to be pushed back on because this would limit the power of the Chinese Communist Party to essentially do what it wanted, so that China doesn't want rule of law, it wants rule by law. In other words, the Chinese Communist Party gets to decide what the law is, and it doesn't want that to be contested. They've made that a diplomatic project to push back against that language wherever they find it inside UN institutions, international institutions, and around the world.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get to how China and Russia do that. That's so much of what's new that you document in this piece, how they're trying to push against liberal democracy within the United States and Western Europe and other places, not just promote their own systems. I was in China as a journalist, the one time I was there, so I claim no expertise, just an experience. Just before that 2013 document, it was December 2012. The people who I spoke to, I was speaking to people of various politics there with this group that I was with. Those who I spoke to who were supportive of China's system of government argued that it was better than US-style democracy for providing for the people. We were already in this country entering the politics that we still have.

It was the rise of the Tea Party in opposition to Obamacare and President Obama's stimulus to help get us out of the Great Recession. There was a lot of gridlock in Congress. The Chinese government supporters over there were saying China's government is not a dictatorship in the old-fashioned sense of like a strong man who wants power for himself and it's all about him. It was not a democracy, but it was a government-controlled system that succeeded better in providing a decent quality of life to a larger percentage of the citizens than Western democracy. That was their argument. Is that part of this global push, or is that too much based on making an actual argument rather than just shutting down opposition?

Anne Applebaum: No, they, there's some subtle differences between China, and Russia and Iran. I mean, yes, the Chinese do make an argument for their model. They have a model of government, and they say that their autocracy plus economic growth is something that they don't sell it in an aggressive way, but they soft sell it certainly in Africa, and where they have a lot of business interests and around the world. Yes, they do make that argument. Of course, the argument glosses over all kinds of economic problems that China has, and the unfair distribution of wealth that exists in China and the differences between rural China and urban China, and so on.

Brian Lehrer: Not to mention genocide against the Uyghurs and little things like that.

Anne Applebaum: Exactly. It does leave out a lot of the story. It's certainly the case that China's economic progress is something that's seen and admired in a lot of places. That's a part of the argument in their favor. Yes, the Chinese do have a more positive way of presenting this. Autocracy is part of the solution. It's part of how you'll get wealthy. The Russian version of this is a little bit more chaotic. No, sorry. A lot more chaotic and almost entirely negative. The Russian idea about doing disinformation is almost you throw spaghetti at the wall and you see what sticks. You just simply try every divisive and every chaotic tactic, every metaphor, every narrative that you can use to make people divided and angry, and that's what you do. The Chinese are beginning to do that a little bit, and you can see a version of that now in Taiwan, that they've sought to manipulate conversation inside the Taiwanese politics. They're not quite doing that in the rest of the world, but the Russians do.

Up until now, they've had this more positive version of their propaganda. It's beginning now, though, that they're beginning to work together with the Russians on some joint narratives. That's one of the arguments of the article, which is one of the arguments of the book, is that they now, at least in some narrow ways, work together.

Brian Lehrer: Right. It gets to the part of the hub of your argument. Listeners, if you're just joining us, my guest is historian and journalist Anne Applebaum, who's new article in The Atlantic is The New Propaganda War. It's an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. Yes, we can take phone calls for her at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

That scary hub of your argument, at least as I read it, is if China, for example, was trying to convince people when I was there over a decade ago that their system is just better than Western democracy, you write that in the 20th century, Communist Party propaganda was meant to be inspiring, portraying an idealized society for the massive. I feel like that's what I heard in China in 2012. Now they cultivate power more by trying to make people cynical and passive, make them nihilists. Can you talk about the reason for the change of tactic and an example of how we see it in the world?

Anne Applebaum: Yes. Again, I was speaking generally, and you still have an element of that positive propaganda inside China. The Russian version of this is entirely nihilist. The point of Russian state propaganda is to make people feel, first of all, confused because there's a constant flow of constantly changing lives. They tell one story one day, one story the next day, or sometimes different stories within an hour. The force of that is to make people withdraw and say, "Right, we have no idea what's happening. We can't understand anything. We're just going to stay away from politics." There's a version of that in China as well. The idea is that people should stay out of politics, and propaganda is designed to encourage that. Very often, for example, the idea of poisoning, the idea of democracy is also to say, "Look, you might not like all aspects of our system. You might think our leaders are corrupt. You might think they have too much money." However, it's so much worse everywhere else.

In democracy, you get chaos, division, strife, degeneracy, sexual degeneracy. There's a big emphasis on that in Russia, too, that you can't possibly want it. In Russian media, you will often hear more about what's going on in Europe, cherry-picked stories about catastrophe and disaster and migrant crisis and crime, than you will hear about what's going on in your Russian city or town. There's almost very, very little local media, and instead, there's a lot of geopolitical messaging about how terrible things are in Sweden or Poland or or England. That's also part of a deliberate tactic to poison these ideas and poison the impression of the outside world.

Brian Lehrer: When we come back from a break, I'm going to ask you the follow-up question, is this where Trump and the MAGA movement come in in this country? Stay with us with Anne Applebaum, 212-433, WNYC, Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC with journalist and historian Anne Applebaum, her new Atlantic article, The New Propaganda War. It's an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. Anne, without resummarizing what you were saying before the break, I'm not going to waste the listeners' time by doing that, is this where Trump and the MAGA movement come in?

Anne Applebaum: [laughs] To be clear, I don't believe in a deep conspiracy. There's no coordinated room where Russia and China and MAGA Republicans meet and plan things together. Yes, they have all learned a lot from one another. I think there's a mutual learning process. I think there is a part of the American Republican Party that also seeks to use the same kinds of authoritarian narrative. Whether it's the narrative that autocracy is stable, strong man rule is better, democracy is divided in chaotic, the language about what we need is traditional families. We need to push back against LGBT ideology. These are narratives that you find in Russia and in other authoritarian states, and you have a clear echo of them in the US, so much so that as you can imagine, I'm sometimes attacked by people who disagree with what I've written, and I am no longer able to tell whether the person is Russian or American. The language that would be used is the same. The posts or the style of the Twitter post or the Facebook post is exactly the same.

They're very, very similar, and they use almost the same language. Yes, I think- and I should say that's another reason why certain kinds of Russian narratives do so well in the Republican Party. There's a story about President Zelenskyy of Ukraine buying yachts with his aid money that was circulating on the Internet. It was a fake, as you can imagine. That story made it onto the Senate floor. Actually, it was a Republican Senator Tom Tillis who described how he heard his Senate colleagues repeating this fake in their arguments, in their debates about aid for Ukraine.

One of the reasons why that language flows so easily and has become so prevalent among Republicans is that they're in the same information network. They're simply not that different. They rely on the same language. The system is terrible, it's degenerate, it's declining, it needs to be overthrown. We need a different kind of politics. All that is exactly what you would hear from an authoritarian country as well.

Brian Lehrer: Matt in Newberg, you're on WNYC with Anne Applebaum. Hi, Matt.

Matt: Hi. How are you guys doing? I'm curious what the guest seems to think about the reality that since [unintelligible 00:19:15] really emerged, it was originally thought of being a left-wing construct, the questioning of truth, but it's entirely been embraced by the right wing. Then, secondly, the reality that, possibly, democracy, as we consider it, is actually also a subjective reality, and is the fight for democracy just falling into the hands of the goals of militarism, which is ultimately an authoritarian purpose, is the

[unintelligible 00:19:44]

Brian Lehrer: Well, do you have three hours for an answer to that question about postmodernism and truth. What's the short version?

Anne Applebaum: I didn't hea, something blinked out while the caller was speaking. I couldn't hear the whole question. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: It was the word postmodernism that blinked out, but he's saying--

Anne Applebaum: Maybe useful. Yes.

Brian Lehrer: The idea--

Anne Applebaum: Yes, okay. Then I understand the idea that truth is always in question was a left-wing idea. Now it's a rightwing idea. I think the questioning of truth is actually older than that. I'm not sure that our generation or even our civilization invented that and the question of what is reality has been investigated by philosophers for a long time. I've always been a little skeptical that that was somehow, I don't know that [unintelligible 00:20:35] invented it, or something like that. It is certainly true that there are thinkers if that's the right word for it.

There are people on the right who've explicitly said they're interested in remaking institutions in the way that [unintelligible 00:20:50] people on the left spoke about remaking institutions and who have looked at how you could use the questioning of truth and the questioning of everything that's central about society, which was even earlier Bolshevik idea, and that they could use that as a way of taking power in the United States. There's a way to my mind in which there's, the very far left and the very far right have always had these things in common.

They've always been interested in taking down liberal democracy, and they've always been interested in finding ways to undermine it for their own. They may have different aesthetics and different end games and different motives, but they have sometimes used those same tactics. It's actually not that surprising.

Brian Lehrer: Well, as a follow-up, your article is in the Atlantic. There's another recent article in the Atlantic now by George Packer. I don't have it in front of me, but I think it's fair to say it argues that the authoritarian impulse is alive and well on the left in the free world today, as well as the right. He puts this in the context of the post-October 7th world with the cancellation for this year of the Pen America World Voices Festival, which was supposed to be this week, which exists explicitly to elevate writers from around the world whose freedom of expression is stifled by their governments.

The pressure to boycott it came from supporters of Palestinian rights, who saw Pen as I don't want to mischaracterize, but I think too soft on Israel or not condemning enough of the killing of Palestinian writers and the war in Gaza early enough. I'm curious if you have a take on pressure to conform to left-of-center thinking that you might even tend to agree with George Packer, or if you don't, in academia or the arts, let's say in this country.

Anne Applebaum: I have also written about that. I wrote a piece a couple of years ago called The New Puritans, which dealt with exactly this, and it was a little bit different time and had different kinds of examples. I think that the authoritarian impulse can be either left-wing or right-wing. I don't think it's a-- You have the Maduro, the leadership of Venezuela described themselves as being on the left. Yet the means by which Maduro-- Well, before him, Chavez took power in Venezuela by undermining institutions, by attacking the press, by undermining the independence of the courts was exactly the same way that Viktor Orbán took power in Hungary, almost the same tactic.

I have no doubt that you can find authoritarianism on others. It's funny, I've even talked to George Packer about this exact issue. It almost depends on where you sit. I spent part of my time in Europe, I'm part of my time in the United States, and I see more and worry more about the rise of the far right because I see its connections geopolitically. I'm more worried about how a far-right government would change the United States, and I'm more worried about that actually happening. If you're somebody who is involved with Pen, or if you are in an institution that's plagued by this problem, I can well imagine that you would find the left-wing version equally difficult.

As I said, to my mind, it's not the same challenge, but the human impulse to shut up other people and silence them and create psychological, put people into psychological contortions is pretty universal. You can find it in all societies and all institutions.

Brian Lehrer: Actually, when I came back from that China trip in 2012 and was talking about it, somebody called in, unless they were making it up, from China to say that they had been listening to the show on live streaming before that, but suddenly it was blocked after my journalistic trip over there. Just a little tiny point of history. Your article is mostly about Russia and China, a little bit Iran and North Korea, and the effects on the democratic world. You don't get into Israel and its enemies at all. I'm curious if you see the conflict there as related or wholly separate. I know you've written in the past about Netanyahu's attacks on the judiciary there as a threat to Israel's long-term existence. If democratic society breaks down, but its enemies are also autocratic. There's nothing democratic about Hamas or Iran, and its various proxies. Is that another separate system of conflict and political questions, or does it fit into your paradigm at all?

Anne Applebaum: It's related. My paradigm, as you put it, is not Black and White. I don't think we're fighting a new Cold War. I don't think there's good guys on one side and bad guys on the other. I don't think the entire world can be divided by whatever the equivalent of the Berlin Wall is, and we know who's on which side. There are a lot of other countries that have affiliations on both sides. Think about India, think about the Arab monarchies.There are conflicts that don't fit neatly into some kind of Cold War-style prism of right versus left or communist autocracy versus democracy. I do think the current conflict in the Middle East does not neatly fit into that prism.

Yes,I mean, Hamas, which is backed by Iran, it's a mini totalitarian party. It ran a very ugly system in Gaza. It demonstrated its disdain for any ideas about human rights or the laws of war on October the 7th. I don't think we need to have any illusions about that. On the other hand, Netanyahu's governments in Israel before October the 7th, mostly notable for the attacks he had made on Israeli institutions including the judiciary, which was the focus of an enormous, many months-long struggle in Israel that was ongoing last summer and last autumn, right up until that moment. I don't think it's a very nuanced and complicated conflict and doesn't fit into some neat geopolitical, I don't know, rubric.

Brian Lehrer: I know we're at the end of our schedule of time. Do you have time to take one more caller who has a Putin question, or if you have to go, I totally understand.

Anne Applebaum: No, I can take a Putin question.

Brian Lehrer: John in Riverdale, you're on WNYC with Anne Applebaum. Hi, John.

John: Hi, Brian. I have a question. I lived in Russia from 1993 to 2012 off and on, and so I witnessed some of the crackdowns there. Then I remember a very open society prior to Putin's rise to power despite being chaotic. What I remember reading about and [unintelligible 00:28:15] reading people describe at least Putin's early crackdown on media, was that he did it in a very different way than in the old Soviet Union, which was essentially had total control over media, [unintelligible 00:28:25] that the media that existed was part of the state apparatus.

What he did was essentially threatened to shut down anybody who voiced the dissenting opinions and then created this sense of fear so that people towed the line. Now I think he's gotten even more authoritary since. I'm describing a period that I think is like the early 2000s. I'm wondering, have you commented on that and how his tactics have evolved, and so on? Thank you very much.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, John. Anne?

Anne Applebaum: Yes, it's funny, I wrote about that at the time. What Putin did in Russia to media, which was essentially using pressure and commercial tactics to take over the media is what's happened in numerous other countries. It happened in Hungary. The previous government, Poland tried to do it in Poland. If you can make the independent media go bankrupt through threats, through depriving them of advertising, through threatening advertisers. If you can force them to sell to your friends and you can create a system whereby your oligarchs control all the media, then you don't need to mess around with censorship or some bureau of control. You simply have the media controlled through your friends.

Actually, in small countries, this is not that difficult a thing to do. You're absolutely right that that method of taking over the media became almost a template that others have around the world actually, Turkey elsewhere have since followed. Now Russia has become indeed a much more repressive place. Now it's illegal, for example, to criticize the war in Ukraine, and tens of thousands of people actually have been arrested, or tried, or threatened through repressive legislation or administrative legislation for doing so. There were some famous stories people overheard in a restaurant saying something negative about the war, heard by someone at the next table, they call the police and people have come in. There is now a repressive atmosphere of a kind that has not existed in Russia, I would say since the 1960s or '70s. It was even the 1980s were looser than what we have now.

Now, it's not merely the media that's controlled, it's the society that's controlled. The ability that people have to be critical in any way is now very limited. Yes, Putin's Russia has evolved pretty remarkably, actually, from that time. It was pretty clear to a lot of observers, and was clear to me actually from very early on that this was the direction it was going, and it's been going that way. A lot of people didn't want to see that for a long time, but we are now at a stage where we are approaching something that looks a lot more like classic totalitarianism than anything we've seen in Russia for 30 years.

Brian Lehrer: Last question, and then I'll let you go, why? What does Putin want, ultimately?

Anne Applebaum: He wants to stay in power.

Brian Lehrer: That's it, it's about him?

Anne Applebaum: I think it's about staying in power. It's about fearing that the language of democratic revolution could remove him from power as it removed Viktor Yanukovych, his Ukrainian counterpart. It's about preserving his money and his colleagues' money, which is held in very untransparent ways, is another theme in my book actually a little bit different one, which is about kleptocracy, and the ways in which are, the Western financial system has enabled that as well. It's about staying in power. I think he now has in his head also and some idea about glory and world history and being Peter the Great or being Stalin, something like that. He said things like that to people in the last few years.

I think it's mostly about him. It's certainly not about the prosperity of ordinary Russians because they have not benefited from his grandiose plans. It's important to understand that we instinctively believe that the leader of every nation presumably wants the people in his nation to be wealthier and more better off and for this society to be better run. That is not always the goal of leaders of autocracies, that is not Putin's most important goal, his most important goal is grandeur, glory, and the recreation of a Russian Empire.

Brian Lehrer: Anne Applebaum's new cover story in the Atlantic is called The New Propaganda War. It's an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. Thank you so much for sharing this with us.

Anne Applebaum: Thank you.

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