(jaunty music) (jaunty music) - As Americans we aren't just polarized, we're also traumatized by the turmoil that has tarnished Ronald Reagan's shining city on the hill and spawned a collective anxiety that's eclipsed our sense of a common good.

Still, there are those who inspire us with their moral clarity, who transcend the darkness, and summon our better angels, who give us hope that America can still have better days ahead.

We're honored to have three of those distinguished thought leaders with us today.

David Brooks, New York Times columnist and bestselling author of "How to Know a Person "The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen."

Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and professor at Harvard Law School.

And Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale University whose updated audio edition of "On Tyranny" includes 20 new lessons about Ukraine.

Let's get started.

In an era where people don't feel like they're seen or heard David Brooks is on a one-man mission to help heal America's spiritual crisis, to help us feel less lonely, less anxious, and more optimistic about the troubled world in which we live.

Whether he's quoting fictional TV character coach Ted Lasso, or philosopher John Stewart Mill in his bestselling book, "How To Know a Person," his goal is to reconnect us all by rebuilding our lost sense of community.

And David Brooks, welcome.

You have a very big job, obviously, ahead of you but you got obsessed with this question, actually two questions, why are people so mean and why are people so sad, and basically the short answer is that we're really bad at moral formation.

What is moral formation?

- Yeah, it's a fancy word for three things.

First, finding ways to restrain our natural selfishness.

Second, finding an ideal, a purpose you can live for.

There's a famous Nietzsche phrase, "he who has a why to live for can endure any how."

And if you don't know what your purpose is when you get hit by the setbacks you really get blown off course.

But if you have a purpose, you have an ideal, then you can keep going.

And then the final thing in moral formation is learning how to treat people with consideration in the concrete circumstances of life.

So that's the skill of being a great conversationalist, knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness, knowing how to break up with somebody without crushing their heart, knowing how to host a dinner party where everybody feels included.

And these are just basic skills and in my view I'm not sure we ever taught them.

I think we did but we certainly are not teaching them now and so I think that one of the reasons American social fabric is in such tatters is 'cause we just don't treat each other with consideration.

- Well, it's very clear that by lots of metrics, I mean, the mental health epidemic in this country, people lonelier, more addicted, I mean, there are just a laundry list of problems that people are suffering from, and I know you say we don't teach it or we're not focused on it but what has exacerbated in terms of what's going on in the culture, do you think?

- Well, I would tell a couple stories.

One is the social media story.

That's clearly a large piece of the thing.

If you look at when a lot of these social indicators went bad it was around 2013, the smartphone.

Another is a culture of individualism.

That we have a culture that we're autonomous lone creatures and that makes us neglect the bonds between us.

But then the part I focus really is this basic skill building, the basic idea that I know how to build a friendship.

I saw a study recently of a number of young men who have never asked anybody out on a date and they tried to figure out why aren't these guys asking people out on dates and A, they're afraid, but B, they just don't how, they stink at flirting.

- Well, we're going to get to some of the counsel you provide in the book which is absolutely compelling.

We were out with a friend at dinner and she said that she had just read your book and it changed her life, I mean, and you hear people telling these stories and yet the information you're giving, you may use phrases like, we're living in a culture of dehumanization, but basically what you're talking about is just so simple in its way, the dehumanization has to do with tribalism, and as you mentioned, social media and racism.

But you say one of the antidotes to that, and this is really fascinating, is the humanist gospel of really respecting people and really seeing them and the example you give is to see them the way Rembrandt saw.

What does that mean?

- Yeah, so if you go to a museum and you see a Rembrandt painting, all the faces in Rembrandt paintings are not remarkable.

But they're remarkable because of the way Rembrandt saw them and he saw his characters with such depth and empathy and so often the characters he paints are old and kind of beaten up and they're weathered and yet they have a dignity to them 'cause you sort of see right into them and you see how they've worn their suffering and persevered.

And so his characters are great because of the generous eyes that Rembrandt cast upon them.

In the book I argue that there are two types of people, there are diminishers and there are illuminators.

And diminishers are people who are not curious about you.

They make you feel small, they stereotype, they label and I've come to believe that only about 30% of Americans are question askers.

I'll sometimes leave a party and I'll think, "That whole time nobody asks me a question," and so people that don't ask you questions, they might be nice but they're just not curious about you and so I call them the diminishers.

The illuminators are people who make you feel lit up, they're curious about you, they just want to know about you and they make you feel respected and seen.

And so a little story I tell is about a woman named Jennie Jerome who would later become Winston Churchill's mom.

But in the late 19th century, she was a young woman and she was invited to have dinner with William Gladstone, the Prime Minister of England and she left that dinner thinking that Gladstone was the cleverest person in England and then a few weeks later, by coincidence, she happens to have dinner with Benjamin Disraeli, Gladstone's great rival, and she leaves that dinner thinking that she's the cleverest person in England.

And so you want to be Disraeli.

Disraeli made the people around him feel clever, smart, lit up.

- Let me ask you how you came to that 'cause this is one of my pet peeves about these folks who never, you're with them all night long and they literally never ask a single thing about you.

How did you come to the figure of 30% or we have 30% of people?

I mean, is that based on some research or something, who can ask good questions?

- Well, it's sort of research, but it's just my life.

- Oh, I see.

That's anecdotal.

- So it could be, so I've just been paying attention to this over the last four years 'cause I've been working on the book and that's my rough estimate and it could be, I'm from Washington, DC, the most emotionally avoidant and possibly socially incurious spot on the face of the Earth, and so maybe my number's low 'cause I live in Washington.

- Well, I was going to say, we're sitting here in the other, Washington, Washington, Connecticut, and it happens here too, just FYI, so I don't know what the answer is.

Have you ever said to somebody, "You realize we've gone through the whole evening "and you haven't asked me a single question?"

No, you've never said that.

- I've never done that.

I had a call with a White House source several years ago and we're talking and I'm on my cell phone and the call drops and I wait three or four minutes thinking he'll call me back and then four minutes pass, five minutes pass, seven minutes pass, finally I call his office and his assistant said, "He can't talk, he's on the phone," and I said to her, "He's on the phone with me.

"He does not realize the call has dropped.

"He's just been bloviating at me for 10 minutes."

So you run into these people, they just like the sound of their own voice and they're not curious.

- You grew up in a Jewish family where you say that the cultural upbringing could be described as think Yiddish, act British, that there was love in the home, although it wasn't really maybe expressed openly a lot, it was a stimulating intellectual environment, but you all were standoffish and it wasn't like a walking Hallmark card scenario, basically, and that part of this mission that you've been on to write this book has been to try and improve or change your own behavior.

How is that going?

- I think it's going okay.

It's halting progress.

So I was aloof and there's an episode that symbolizes to me sort of the way of being I've tried to reject now, which is I'm a big baseball fan and I was at a game and I've never caught a foul ball in all the thousands of games I've gone to and I'm at a game in Baltimore with my youngest son and the batter loses control of the bat and it lands at my feet and any normal human being is high fiving everybody and hugging the crowd and waving his trophy and getting on the jumbotron, I just put the bat on the ground and stare straight ahead, I had the emotional reaction of a turtle.

And there's a favorite novelist of mine, Frederick Buechner, who argues if you cut yourself off from the pain of living you've cut yourself off from the sources of life itself.

And so I'm not an extraordinary person, but I am a grower and so I've just tried to learn how to be more emotionally open, learn how to sit with people who are in trouble, learn how to express vulnerability and receive vulnerability, and I think I've made progress.

I was at a conference a year and a half ago and one of the things we had to do, we were part of a big group, they handed us over sheets of love song lyrics and they said, you have to pick someone standing near you, a stranger and sing this love song into their eyes.

And if you had asked the old me to do this I would've spontaneously combusted, but I did it.

I could do it now and I looked at some strange guy's eyes, I didn't know him, but I sang a love song into his eyes.

- Do we have that on tape?

No.

- I hope not.

I hope not.

(both laughing) - I'm sorry, I mean, that makes me, that's a really hard concept that you've come so far to be able to do that because I'm Presbyterian and we're not exactly what you call demonstrative people either but the thought of that just sends chills through me.

Has all of this sort of behavior modification, of thinking about how you can be more present and be a better listener, has it made you feel better as a person?

- I have more fun.

- Yeah?

- Yeah, I mean, so one of the nice things that you can do is you can take what had been a shallow conversation and have deeper conversations and I think the way you do that is just you ask big questions.

- We are living in a post-truth era.

We don't have a collective spirit.

We don't have a sense of national community for sure, like we did after World War II, and this is another part of this mission, another part of this project is if you can obviously connect people then you have a better chance at building and resurrecting community.

But aren't there a lot of headway?

I mean, aren't there gale forces trying to slow that down?

I mean, how do you transcend those forces?

- Well, like you say, we live in an extremely brutalizing time and so there's an instinct to put your walls up and to try to be safe and people often say, "Well, if I'm vulnerable to people, "won't that be dangerous?"

and I say, "Yeah, it'll be dangerous.

"Sometimes somebody will betray you.

"You'll lead with a little bit of vulnerability "and they'll attack you, but it's also dangerous "to go through life with your walls up."

It's dangerous to callus over your heart, to callus over yourself.

It's dangerous for you to isolate yourself from others and so to me it is worth it to lead with trust and sometimes you'll be betrayed, but most of the time you'll bring out the best in other people and they'll show up for you.

It's not woo woo to lead with curiosity and respect.

And so to me, that's really the only effective way to combat the forces of brutalism that surround us, which is to say, "No, I'm not going to play this game.

"I'm going to lead with respect.

"I'm going to be curious about you.

"I'm going to ask you about your childhood."

And I find when you ask people about their childhood, like who were you in high school and how has that changed?

People love talking about their childhood.

And I will tell you, as somebody who's been doing journalism for decades now, if I ask somebody respectfully about their life and tell me your life story, how many times does somebody say, none of your damn business?

Zero, zero.

People love to tell you their life story if you ask respectfully.

- Well, the other issue we have going on is people, and this is part of something you talk about, people make assumptions about other people all the time just based on knowing political party, whatever, socioeconomic, job, race.

So how do you strip away that and go into something and try and be open-hearted and open-minded?

- Yeah, well, like one bad thing people do is called stacking, which is, I learn one fact about you and then I make a whole series of assumptions based on that one fact.

You support Donald Trump therefore you must also be like this, this, this, and this.

And if you ask people their life story you'll find that's never true.

I heard about a woman recently who was a big Trump supporter at a Trump rally and she was a lesbian biker who'd converted to Sufi Islam after surviving a plane crash and so what stereotype does she fit into?

And I find if you can get your conversations into storytelling conversations, then suddenly you're operating on a humane level.

And so even as a journalist I no longer ask people, what do you think about this?

I ask people, how did you come to believe this?

And that way I'm asking 'em to tell me a story about some experience they had or some person who shaped their values and suddenly I'm not just talking to a political point of view, I'm talking to a human being who's had life experiences that caused them to see the world the way it is and I will tell you, it's just a lot more fun.

I'm one of these people who used to ride in trains and buses and planes with headphones in, looking at my screens, and I now am more likely to talk to strangers on a plane or at a bar or a coffee shop and that goes against my natural grain.

But I will tell you, there are so many conversations I've had that are way better than anything I would've been reading on my phone and way more memorable.

And so we underestimate how much we'll enjoy talking to strangers.

We underestimate how deep people want to go.

And once you open a door, sometimes it gets slammed in your face, but most of the time you leave thinking, well, that person was surprising.

- Do people come up to you and think that you're a mental health professional?

- Not so far.

- No?

I'm surprised.

- By now, working on this for four years you'd think I'd be like Dr. Freud, be able to peer into people's souls and I think I'm better but I still go to a party and I walk in thinking I'm really going to be curious about everybody out there, then I have a couple glasses of wine and I start blabbing about myself.

- We talk all the time about the toxic divide and the lack of trust and communication and all these things that are going on in our culture, how ready are people, people may be exhausted and they may want it to go away but what you're talking about actually requires real work.

I mean, this is not just, this is something you really have to think about every day.

How, from your experience, in terms of feedback about the book, how ready have people been to hear this message?

- Desperately ready, in the brutalizing times I think everybody understands that and I've been selling this book or touring this book and talking about it, it's been unlike any other book I've received and that it's like rolling a boulder down a hill.

The momentum's already there and I think people are just looking for practical tips from when they first meet someone to maybe someone, a friend of theirs is suffering from depression, maybe they're super pro-Trump and their family member is super anti-Trump, or vice versa.

People know they need these skills to get better at really making people feel respected and seen.

- Are you carrying on with this?

Are you planning some sort of, because you're prolific, so are you planning another book in this genre?

- You know, one of my favorite sayings about writers is, we writers are beggars who tell other beggars where we found bread and so I'm working out my stuff in public and so the last three books have been a process of spiritual and personal transformation and this book is me trying to help myself get better at skills of being a good friend, at being a good neighbor, and democracy itself is not just about voting, it's about the human encounter.

It's about conversation, it's about argument, it's about disagreeing well, it's about compromising and so these skills are built into our democracy and you can't have a healthy democracy on top of a rotting society.

So I'm basically working on my own problems, but my problems unfortunately are common problems and so I think social repair and personal repair happen together.

- Last question.

You do seem incredibly well adjusted and you're clearly very happy with how you're changing personally, and you have to stay optimistic because I think that's part of why people are finding this so appealing because it's working for you, is there anything that makes, I mean, what keeps you up at night?

I mean, do you ever backslide, do you ever find yourself plummeting into the depths of despair?

- Oh yeah, all the time.

I do.

I mean the thing that makes me most upset or worried about for our society is the loss of trust.

And so there are two kinds of trust.

There's institutional trust, which is, do you trust your institutions, the government, the press, and that's been in the toilet for a long time, but interpersonal trust, do you trust your neighbors?

And a generation ago, 60% of Americans said, yeah, I trust my neighbors.

Now it's down to 30% and 19% of millennial and Gen Z.

So the younger you go the more distrusting you are and so that's a source of great worry to me 'cause social trust is needed for democracy, for capitalism, you need social trust for community and we have precious little of it.

- And I'm afraid that we're out of time.

I've been so looking forward to talking with you for all the reasons you've just demonstrated and I want to thank you for what you're doing in just such a basic important way for our country, for people in this country and we'll have you back when you bring out the next book, maybe you should do the trust thing, maybe that, right?

- Okay, that's a big topic.

I will come on and do what we're doing right here, having a conversation.

- Okay, well thank you so much for joining us today, David.

We really appreciate it.

- Thank you so much.

Thanks for your invitation.

- She was just six years old and in the first grade, but Annette Gordon-Reed made history when she integrated her elementary school in Conroe, Texas.

That early activism set her on a lifelong pursuit of truth telling based on the premise that without the truth people cannot fully understand why our society is the way it is.

Annette, even though Texas was deeply divided about school desegregation, your gutsy parents were on a mission to become part of the Civil Rights Movement and they sent you to the white school.

It was the first interplay of race in history that went on to inform much of your work.

How did it impact, as a child, how you saw the world?

- Well, it made me think about things that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise.

I mean, why was it a big deal that I was going to school with white kids?

Why was it that when we went to the doctor's office there was a separate waiting room and when we went to the movies we had to sit in the balcony, Black people had to sit in the balcony.

So it made me think about race and it made me think about the origins of the attitude about race in a way that I wouldn't have without this.

So it just brought these things home to me very, very closely, obviously, because I was right in the middle of it.

- Your grandmother, it's my understanding, took you to Houston to buy a fancy dress for your first day or something, was that about the fact that you had to look extra special or was that just about a first day at school?

- Well, it was actually my great aunt, but any event, my family member, very extravagant woman who lived in Houston and she took me to Sakowitz which was the big department store there.

I mean, I had clothes, but this was going to be her contribution and she just kind of went overboard with all kinds of things and that too gave me an indication of how important it was.

- Now when you made one of your many lectures, I'm sure, at Harvard back in 2016, you talked about how your parents, your mother was a teacher, I believe, and your father was a business owner, really sort of harped on the fact that you were privileged.

Now that word's kind of loaded, what context were they talking about in terms of privilege for you?

- Well, I think they meant that I had the two of them and we had a relatively comfortable home in a relatively comfortable neighborhood.

We had people who loved us and so forth.

It was not privileged in the sense of having a lot because we weren't a wealthy family or anything like that.

But my parents liked to read, they read to us, they talked about things that were going on in the world and so I think they saw us as different, in a different situation than people who had to struggle more maybe and didn't have the leisure or the time to do those kinds of things.

My mother is a teacher, her day ended when ours ended and so she was around.

I think that's what they meant.

- And when you were, I think, 14 you joined the Book of the Month Club and you read a biography of Thomas Jefferson and it was this sort of connection.

What was the connection about with Thomas Jefferson?

- Well, the connection, I'd read some things about him before but this was the first time that I'd read a full length biography of his life.

I had been interested in him as someone who owned slaves but wrote the Declaration of Independence and I thought, what was that about?

How do you get that kind of contradiction, that kind of clash in one particular person?

Fawn Brodie's book, which is the one that I read, talked about him in more human terms.

It wasn't Jefferson the idol, the icon.

She was really trying to get at what kind of person he was, the strengths and the weaknesses and talking about the institution of slavery and it sort of brought home to me that slavery wasn't just about making people work for no pay, slavery also involved mixed bloodlines, people owned members of their family and that isn't something that I, I knew it because I grew up in the South and I kind of understood the history, but it forced me to think about that in a serious way.

- And then as an adult, you catapulted to national prominence when you won, as the first African American, the Pulitzer Prize in history because you really set the record straight in terms of the 38 year relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings and their children and in doing that you also shook up historical circles because there were people who weren't too crazy about this sort of revised idea of what Thomas Jefferson had been and when I was reading about that, I was thinking, this is so evocative of what's happening now with today's culture war over how history is taught or not taught.

Why is this so important right now?

Why is this poll so important?

- Well, I think America's changing as it's more inclusive, different types of people have voices, we had a Black president, Blacks and other people of color are part of the national story in ways that they were not before and I think that makes a lot of people uncomfortable.

And so there's sort of a push to say, let's go back to the America that we knew and using the founding generation and using the past as sort of evidence about what we're supposed to be like and in the past it was largely white males who ruled and white males' interests predominated and so I think people are looking nostalgically back at that time and want to use history as a vehicle for doing that.

And plus, trying to write the story, rewrite the story of American history, and leaving out the bad parts, leaving out things that account for some of the negative legacies that exist in the country today.

So the racism, the sexism, things like that, that are part of every country's story, really, in one way or another.

There's always some parallel stories like this in other countries, but I think that people are uncomfortable with a full story of history because it makes, I think, they feel that it means that you don't love the country if you talk about its flaws, which I think is exactly the opposite of the truth.

- Doesn't it just exacerbate systemic racism and other things if people are getting this sanitized version of what history was?

I mean, doesn't that just get us in even deeper?

- Oh yes, I think so because we know what happened, we understand what happened to our families and it's right there in the history and when people don't talk about it it makes you mistrustful of them.

It makes it seem as though our story doesn't really matter when we know that this history was made together, good and bad, and it doesn't make any sense to leave all of that out.

So I do think it leaves a sort of a sense of distaste or distrust in the minds of people who understand the real story and see other people try to X that out.

- Well, you've heard parents, I mean, I've watched parents being interviewed and they seem legitimately concerned about having some sort of negative effect on their kids and they're like, "We want to be the ones who decide "what material our children are learning," and what the goal seems to be to not make these children feel guilty or sad or bad in any way.

Now you work with children, you're a professor, you've been a teacher for a long time, what's your sense of how children feel about that.

Now different ages, we're talking about different- - Yeah, different ages.

- Go ahead, yeah.

- A, I think there's a way to talk about these things for every age in an age appropriate way and I think that part of the truth is that history sometimes makes us feel bad and when we feel bad, that's the impetus for doing better.

It's not to say just because people in my great-great grandfather's time did things this way we have to keep doing it, though you look back at that and say, "Wow, that was a different time.

"They did not understand this.

"They didn't get it and we can do better."

I mean, that's the purpose of learning about these kinds of things.

I don't think it's designed, or it's certainly not designed in no way that I would ever teach it, would be to make people today feel that they are personally responsible for things that happened 300 years ago.

But we do have to understand how we got here.

And kids are pretty smart, kids are very smart actually.

They understand a lot more than I think maybe their parents give them credit for.

I think the parents sometimes feel uncomfortable and aren't sure what their kid's going to make of it but they're pretty savvy about things and they see so much more than we saw, or I saw, as a kid growing up and I think they can handle it if it's done the right way and it can be done the right way in an age appropriate way.

- Along the same lines, you used to talk about libraries, public libraries were a sanctuary, an oasis for you and you see that they're also under attack.

There was a story about a librarian quitting because she can't handle the fact that books are being summarily taken out of the shelves, and again, going back to what's appropriate and what's not appropriate, who should make that decision?

- Well, I think it should be parents who make that decision but they should make the decision for their children.

The problem is saying that I don't want my children to read something and I don't want anybody else's children to read it as well.

I mean, I trust librarians.

Librarians care about kids.

They do.

That's why they're in that profession, largely.

That's a big part of it, for them to make contact with the public and to do things responsibly and I trust them to do that.

But it's really heartbreaking for me to see what has happened to libraries and how people are hostile towards them.

It is definitely the parents' right to say, I don't want my children reading that particular book and when I was growing up, there were certain books that you had to get your parents' permission to check out and your parents would say yes or no.

But my parents, or nobody, at that time ever thought, or not that I ever heard of to say, we get to decide for our children and everybody else's child.

That's just a bridge too far.

- Your point, and Thomas Jefferson's point, is that people have to help fulfill the ideals or the founding ideals of this country and yet there are people who say, "I have no, what can I, "I have no idea how to do that."

How do they do that?

- They do it by being a good citizen, by paying attention to the things that are going on around you, by voting, by participating in your local school boards, by helping neighbors, by being a charitable person, being open to others' ideas.

You don't have to agree with all of them, but to engage in civil discussion.

I mean, that's the kind of stuff of a republic that's required there, if it's citizens engaging with one another in an active way, but in a way that doesn't cause hatred and rancor and to speak respectfully to other individuals, to be a good example to children, I think that's what it is.

- Your last book, I think, was "On Juneteenth," you wrote that, I think it was released in 2021, and as you said, it was your family's story, it was the story of slavery in the South and how it ended on June 19th, 1865.

How significant to you, I mean, it's clearly a big deal that Juneteenth was finally named a federal holiday, a national holiday.

Is that something that gives you hope that we're really starting to tackle some of the really, really tough issues as far as racism's concerned?

- Well, it is hopeful in the sense that we can begin to do that because I think it's a day of reflection and a day to talk about the history and to talk about the legacies of slavery.

Having the holiday doesn't solve the problem.

- No, clearly.

- But it begins, I think you're right, it begins a conversation that I think is important for us to have and it's not just a day for Black people, it's a day to celebrate an advance in human rights and people of all races and creeds and colors should be able to get behind that and from what I've seen so far, I think a number of people are doing that.

The kinds of programming that they're doing, the kinds of get togethers, the events and so forth.

It's a day to reflect and I think that's always important for Americans to do.

- Well, I was going to ask you what makes you optimistic?

I know you have two children.

But I will now ask another question, you were honored by the fact that they renamed that elementary school that you integrated at the age of six, I think last year, the Annette Gordon-Reed Elementary School.

- Actually, it's a new school.

- Oh it's not the same school?

- No, no, no.

It's a brand new school.

- Well, it's symbolic.

Okay?

- That was the reason, I mean, because of what happened when I integrated the schools.

- And what does that mean to you in terms of your...

I mean, here you are, this amazing person, won the Pulitzer Prize, you've done all these things.

What does that mean to you personally?

- Oh, it's the best honor that I've gotten.

It was something that I didn't expect and they talked to me about it for a few years and I resisted because I don't think you should name things for people who were still living, not that I plan to do anything crazy, but my husband convinced me that, neither of my parents are living but some of their friends are still alive and he thought that it would mean a lot to them if I would go ahead and let them do it and so I did and I went down for the opening and some of my parents' friends were there, came out for it and it meant a lot.

It was just deeply, deeply moving to me.

- Well, having you talk with us during this time has meant a lot to us and we want to thank you for everything you've done in the name of this country and the legacy that has become part of this country's fabric, so thank you so much for joining us today.

- Thank you for inviting me.

- Ever since his book "On Tyranny" catapulted him to the global stage in 2017, Tim Snyder has been called the leading interpreter of our dark times.

Tim, "On Tyranny" was an urgent warning that if we didn't act fascism could be on our doorstep.

So six years later, the question is, where are we now?

- Well, I would say fascism is knocking on the door and sticking its nose up against the window and breathing hard.

If we look at the last six years, pretty much overall around the world, the situation has gotten worse.

There are fewer democracies, the democracies we have are generally struggling more.

There's been some good news here and there, some good news for a while in Slovakia, though that's turned back around, good news recently in Poland, but in general, the trend is still away from democracy and in the last six years a very striking thing has happened, which is that, an armed dictatorship, Russia, has tried to destroy a neighboring democracy, Ukraine.

That's actually a very rare thing and it's something that we're facing.

If the people against democracy are comfortable enough to start using weapons then we're unfortunately in a different world.

- I just want to set the record straight on one thing because I heard you say something that I think would surprise people.

You kind of, early on, got this bum rap as the sort of purveyor of doom and people thought, what is he trying to do?

Drive us out onto the ledge?

Is he trying to depress us?

When in reality, I've heard you say you really were trying to have people understand that they had the power theoretically and the freedom to change what could happen.

So it was really about motivation?

- Well, it's about giving people a chance to do things.

So specifically, with "On Tyranny," after Trump's election, I was expecting that people were going to say, "Oh, the institutions are going to save us."

I was expecting that Americans would fall back onto their exceptionalism, nothing really bad can happen here, and of course, once you do that, you are de-motivating yourself.

You are preventing yourself from taking responsibility for what comes next.

So the reason why the first two lessons of "On Tyranny" were don't obey in advance and take care of institutions is because I was trying to alert people to what I thought was going to happen next and that is what happened next.

I mean, I had hundreds or thousands of conversations with people who said, "No, no, "nothing really bad can happen in America," or, "The institutions will protect us," but if you think nothing bad can happen you're inviting it to happen and if you think the institutions are going to protect you, you're weakening those very institutions because those institutions need you.

And it's been my experience that people who understood the message that way, who actually got out and did something, they not only helped the country but they felt better during the following four years.

- So do you think the complacency, because there's still people who say it can happen here, have you seen a discernible change or shift in terms of people's attitude about that?

- I'd say there's probably more people who are open in America about wanting it to happen here than there were in 2017 or in 2020.

I think, in 2016, 2017, we were still in a world where the people who wanted a regime change in the United States, the people who would like for someone, for example, to stay in power after they lose an election or would like for someone to carry out a coup, I think they were generally pretty quiet about those views and that's changed, there's a lot more open support in this country for the idea that it's okay to carry out a coup or it's okay for someone who tried to carry out a coup to run for president.

I think if we had been back in 2017 and someone had said, "Well look, in a few years "we're going to have someone try to carry out a coup, "fail, run for president "and do very well in the opinion polls," I think everyone would've said, "Oh, well that's really doom saying.

"That's crazy.

That could never happen here," and that's where we are.

So that's the change.

I think that people have come out and are much more open about the fact that they're happy to see democracy in America come to an end and I think the problem is really on the other side, and I think it's an odd feature of our public conversation, our public life, that the people who want America to be a democracy, the people who believe in the rule of law and pluralism and human rights, those people are very quiet.

Those people are talking about how maybe our candidate isn't perfect or maybe we're not sure how much is our fault and let's find an internal issue to kind of pinch each other about the people who are on the other side who actually want America to remain a constitutional republic are discouragingly quiet at this point.

So, that's how I see things.

- You do because it seems that there's a lot of beating of the drum that democracy's in danger and the norms have been destroyed and the institutions have been degraded and the loss of faith in institutions and so I guess I'm surprised to hear you say that you think that the folks who are really on the side of preserving democracy as opposed to burning the house down aren't being vocal enough?

- Let me put it this way, a lot of the energy of activists in the United States right now is elsewhere than on the question of, will we be a democracy in January of 2025.

Second point, a lot of the people in the media, who I think if they behave more responsibly, would be writing now about what would happen, for example, were the Insurrection Act to be invoked in January, 2025.

A lot of those folks are writing instead about how Joe Biden is old and maybe nobody remembers the good things that this administration did and so on.

I think there's a weird kind of both-sides-ism that dominates a lot of the mainstream media where, on the one hand, this guy might be about to destroy the republic, but on the other hand, this other guy tripped and fell or whatever.

and I think that is taking up a lot of the space that one would need.

But I mean, part of the problem is that everybody is kind of addicted to the thrill of what's going to come next.

- I want to ask you one more question on the domestic front and then we're going to turn to Ukraine for a minute.

I mean, you're unlike other historians in many ways, but one of the ways is that you predicted that Mr. Trump would incite a coup or something like January 6th and you were unfortunately right.

So the question is, do you think that Trumpism survives without Trump?

- I think that the worst thing about Trump, and of course it's a long list and there are other reasonable views, but the worst thing about Trump right now is the big lie about the 2020 election.

You're kind to remember the things that I predicted correctly, but one of the things that I believe I predicted correctly at that time, November, December '20, was that the big lie would take on a force in American politics, that once Trump said it and people didn't resist it right away, it would affect legislation and it would affect the very way people approach politics.

Because if you truly believe, if millions or tens of millions of people truly believe, that your guy, your candidate was cheated, then naturally your attitude about politics is one of retribution.

It's one of, to use Mr. Trump's word, it's one of revenge.

You're no longer thinking about policy, you're thinking about getting your own back and I think unfortunately that prediction was also correct, that it's not so much that Trump is running this campaign, it's that Trump is inside this larger framework of the big lie where the resentment that was always on his side now has a kind of specific name.

And the big lie has also unfortunately been the rationalization for a lot more legislation at the state level to make it harder for people to vote and so in those ways already, even if Trump were to somehow leave the political scene now, our politics would already have been transformed.

- You are also heralded as one of the most eloquent chroniclers of the war in Ukraine.

You met with President Zelenskyy for a private audience of two hours and he apparently told you he had read "On Tyranny."

Is that true, that he?

- Oh, he said that it was on his nightstand, which is not exactly the same thing.

- Okay, to be precise.

And that you had a conversation that included talking about something that you're writing a book about right now, which is freedom.

Now as we witness the worst European War since World War II, how has it changed if it has your definition of freedom?

- That's a wonderful question and I really like that question because I like it when we in the U.S. who tend to start from the supposition that we know everything about freedom stop and maybe listen to what other people say.

I've been trying to write this book about freedom, as you kindly mentioned, and I paused it and grabbed the manuscript and went to Ukraine three times because I thought this is a situation in which people are actually taking personal risks for many things, but high on the list, whether you listen to people or listen to the opinion polls, high on the list is freedom and democracy and I think the talk about freedom becomes much less hollow, much more solid, when people are actually taking risks for it.

And so I tried to listen to what people were saying and I was struck by a couple of things.

One is that the Ukrainians were really talking about the future.

When they talk about freedom they meant something like things were getting better, we had our own plans and projects, we were on our way to something, and the Russians have gotten in the way.

So it's not that just freedom means getting rid of the Russians, they have every reason to want to get rid of the Russians, the death pits, the torture chambers, the murders of civilian leaders, the rockets, the drones, the rapes, all of that, but they don't mean just that.

They mean we get them out of the way so we can become who we are, so we can do the things we want to do, that freedom is a kind of positive project.

It's not just about, 'cause often for us freedom is resentment.

You're getting on my nerves, you're annoying me, that you said something I don't agree with, I just want you out of the picture and we think that's freedom.

But then here you have the Ukrainians who are facing something which is not annoying or irritating, but which is existential and their view about freedom is not that it's negative, it's not about just getting something out of the way, it's about creating something, it's about color and novelty, it's about ingenuity, it's about the future and I feel like that sense of the future is something that we have really lacked in our politics and I feel like democracy doesn't really have oxygen if it doesn't have the future.

If we're just talking about what's just happening right now, if we don't have a future and we also don't have a past it's hard to keep democracy going, so that's a big part of it.

And I think another part of freedom, which this is a little more obvious point, but another part of freedom, which was brought home to me in Ukraine, was the importance of taking risks.

So before we talk about freedom, we should be thinking, okay, but who am I challenging?

What am I challenging?

What little risk am I taking?

And of course, the Ukrainians are taking tremendous risk.

They're risking their limbs, they're risking their lives.

But we don't have to, generally, most of us, take those kinds of risks but sometimes we have to take the risk of disagreeing with somebody in public, or talking about something where maybe we're not sure of ourselves, or stepping out of line of our particular bubble or silo, or whatever it might be.

And I worry that our own definition of freedom is something like, I'm free not to do that, I'm free to just be comfortable all the time, I'm free to agree with myself, and I think that way of thinking about freedom, it gets you down and it gets you depressed, but also it moves you away from public life and from the sort of necessary tensions and clashes which we're going to have to have if we're going to be a democracy going into the future.

So all of those things and also the sense that freedom is an ethical commitment.

It's not something that is just going to come to you out of a clear blue sky.

It's not something which you're born to.

It's not something you have because your nation's exceptional.

You don't get it from history.

You don't get it from capitalism.

Nothing brings it to you.

If you want it you have to be able to say, I want it.

You have to be willing to say, I sound a little naive, I believe it's better to be free than unfree.

You have to be willing to say that.

You have to be willing to say some things are better than others and freedom is better than unfreedom.

So all of those things and much more.

- Has watching this war changed you in significant ways, in some way?

- Well, it's touched me, of course.

The people I know and admire in Ukraine now are the same people I knew and admired in Ukraine before but I admire them more for what they're doing and of course it changes you to see, and this goes back to your first question, it's humbling in a good way to see people doing things better than you are, whether it's Ukrainian soldiers improvising better ways to use U.S. weapons, or whether it's Ukrainian non-governmental organizations finding better ways to document wars, or whether it's Ukrainian journalists finding better ways to cover the frontline, it's useful to be in situations where you see people doing things better than you do them and it's helpful for me to be in situations where I can listen and where I can learn.

In that sense, sure.

In another sense that it's confirmed something which matters a lot to me, which is that you can't really do public affairs, you can't really do foreign policy without history and it's made me really happy to be a historian because so many of the things that people said and so many people's first reactions about this war were wrong just for the simple reason that they weren't taking into account some pretty basic things about the region in itself.

They were making judgments from an American armchair or they were making judgements based on some notion of Russia as a superpower or whatever it might be.

And so it's made me, this isn't a change, but it's made me really glad to be a historian and it's made me wish that we had more military historians, it's made me happy that my classes are big, it's made me wish that we had more Americans who are actually studying history.

- I was going to say, because you do make the point that America's also in a moment of inflection point and as is Ukraine and the fact that we don't know enough history is certainly a drawback.

- Well, first of all, it's one big inflection point.

If we let the Ukrainians go down that makes it much more likely that we will go down.

The Ukrainians are doing a lot of the heavy lifting for us right now, whether the question is democracy, whether the question is the international rule of law, whether the question is defending Europe and the NATO members, whether the question is deterring China, the Ukrainians right now for a tiny amount of our budget, less than a nickel on our defense budget dollar, are doing an extraordinary amount of work for us.

In a lot of ways, they're keeping us afloat and it's part of our national conceit and arrogance that we have trouble recognizing that something like that is possible, but it is the case.

So if we let them go, then a lot of forces are going to be pushing at us in the wrong way.

We're going to feel like the people who say democracy is a joke and there's no ethical commitment and how could we possibly resist a power like Russia and maybe the Chinese have a point and the rules don't matter, all those people will get a big boost in the U.S. and everywhere if you let the Ukrainians go and that's why it's the people who say things like that who are against the Ukrainians right now in the Congress and elsewhere.

So it's one big inflection point and in the U.S. it's an inflection point because the people who are studying history are the ones who are studying the wrong parts.

They're the ones who are trying to figure out how to rig the elections more.

They're the ones who are trying to figure out the things in history that American kids shouldn't know and get them out of the pedagogy.

They're the ones who are trying to figure out which books we should censor and get out of the libraries.

The people who are paying attention to the past, unfortunately, are the ones who are trying to whitewash it and the people who are trying hard to make sure there's some sort of a future, a lot of them care about history, a lot of them know history, but I think, going back to your question about 2016, 2017, I think in general we still have the problem that we don't recognize how quickly things can turn for the worst and that is one of these things which history does tell you.

I mean, it does tell you there are moments like 1914 or 1930 or 1939 when things can drastically change and whether or not they drastically change kind of depends on whether you're ready and it's sort of both my hope and my despair that the one advantage that we have over people, in say 1914, 1930, 1939, is that we know about those events or we can know about those events.

But whether we do know about those events- - Is something else.

Yeah.

- That still depends on us.

- Okay, I didn't even get to half of what I wanted to ask you and this has been the fastest interview I can remember, but we are unfortunately out of time.

I do want to ask you, do you have any predictions about what you think is going to happen in Ukraine?

- It's hard, it's easy to have a prediction when people tell you what they are going to do and they have control of it.

So I was, I think, the only person to predict that Russia was going to invade Ukraine in 2014, but that was, in a way, an easy call because the Russians were signaling it and they had the power to do it.

I think I was one of the few people to predict that Trump was going to try to carry out a coup, but you just had to listen to the guy and it was one guy, and he was saying all throughout 2020 that this election's going to be rigged and we have to make preparations.

It was very clear you just had to listen to the person.

When it comes to predicting Ukraine, it's harder because unfortunately, we are the variable.

It's not clear what we are going to do.

It's clear to me what the Ukrainians are going to do.

The Ukrainians are quite realistic about us.

They're quite realistic about the Russians.

They will keep fighting one way or another, but how well they do, how well equipped they are, is going to depend, to a great extent, on decisions inside the United States so it's hard for me to predict, I'm sorry to dodge the question, but it's like that thing where the wise man asks you whether the bird in his hand is alive or not and the correct answer is, that, my son, depends on you.

It really does depend on us.

- Depend on us.

I rarely am at a loss for words but I don't even know what to say as we close this out.

I just want to thank you for being the thoughtful voice of moral clarity in this world and the fact that you are so incredibly inspiring, and you really are to a lot of people, we're so honored that you joined us today and keep doing what you're doing, thank you so much.

- Going back to your first question, I just want to repeat, I think that good things are still possible.

I think that good things are still possible and that's why I do what I do, but thanks for taking the time.

- We usually wrap up our show with a silver lining moment, a human interest story that reminds us all we have the power to make the world a better place.

Well today there's no need to look beyond the exceptional thought leaders you've just met, they personify the silver lining of our time.

Through their moral clarity and their humanity, they illuminate the dark public square.

They remind us that truth and decency matter, that character and integrity count more than ever.

We're grateful to them for using their gifts on behalf of forging that more perfect union that we all seek and by their example, they inspire us to join them in that quest.

We're grateful to our extraordinary guests for their insights and inspiration and to you for joining us today.

Until we see you back here next time, from the Frederick Gunn School in the other Washington, Washington, Connecticut, for "Common Ground," I'm Jane Whitney, take care.

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