February 10, 2025 • 46 mins
What drives individuals to align with or resist oppressive regimes? #AnneApplebaum's compelling essay originally published in the #Atlantic in 2020 #HistoryWillJudgetheComplicit, digs into the complex motivations that underpin political behaviours, through the telling of stories from real people and real experiences.
Through her writing we can begin to understand #DonaldTrump and untangle the enigma of Republican responses to his presidency. Applebaum's essay delves into the contrasting political paths of #MittRomney and #LindseyGraham, whose decisions during Trump's era raise thought-provoking questions about loyalty, ideology, and personal conviction. How do their stories reflect broader patterns of complicity and resistance in the face of authoritarianism? We take a critical look at the Trump administration's impact on American politics, drawing connections to historical instances of political resistance and the enduring struggle between personal values and public pressure and the darker side of human nature.
Finally, Applebaum's helps us reflect on the themes of collaboration and complicity within the Republican Party, as we ponder the upcoming Canadian election, and think deeply about who will best serve our collective interests during this critical time in our history. Tune in again on Friday February 7th for Part 2 of #MakingSenseofitAll. And please share this episode with anyone concerned about the state of democracy in the U.S. , Canada and around the world ...for what it's worth
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Blake Melnick (00:20):
Well, welcome to this week's episode of For what
it's Worth called Making Senseof it All.
I'm your host, blake Melnick,and this is the next installment
in our series in the company ofreaders and writers.
Well, talk about change.
I was away in New Zealand for amonth over the holidays, during
which time I untethered myselffrom news and my social media
(00:41):
feeds in order to spend timewith the three people I love
most in the world my wife andtwo daughters.
This was really a gift tomyself.
New Zealand was a beautiful anduncomplicated place, ideal for
spending quality time withfamily.
I had the opportunity to listento all their collective
concerns, opinions, aspirationsand fears.
(01:03):
We discuss deeply and debate itoften, as is common in our
family, and something wecollectively value.
Just prior to leaving on ourtrip, I was invited to speak at
the Growing your Workforceconference in Windsor, ontario.
My presentation was focused onaddressing concerns I've had for
the past 20 years aboutCanada's declining capacity and
(01:25):
capability for innovation thesubject of a soon-to-be-released
episode of the show, by the wayand it was while I was at this
conference, looking out over theDetroit River, that the
soon-to-be president, donaldTrump, began talking about
imposing tariffs on Canada.
When I returned from New Zealandand plugged back in just prior
(01:46):
to Trump's inauguration, so muchhad changed.
Justin Trudeau announced hisresignation and made the
decision to prorogue Parliamentuntil a new Liberal Party leader
could be found.
Much to the chagrin of PierreBollievre, mark Carney and
Chrystia Freeland had throwntheir hats in the ring to run
for the Liberal Party andreplace Trudeau as Prime
(02:07):
Minister prior to the nextfederal election, and Donald
Trump repeated his desire toannex Canada and have us become
the 51st state, and that hewould use tariffs as a means of
economic coercion.
In addition, trump wanted tobuy Greenland, take back control
(02:27):
of the Panama Canal, and so on.
While this was going on,mysteriously, an article from
the Atlantic actually a reallylong essay titled History Will
Judge the Complicit, by AnnApplebaum, popped up at the top
of my news feed and, beingsomewhat of a history buff, I
(02:48):
began to read the essay.
It had a profound impact.
There's an old proverb thereare three truths my truth, your
truth and the truth.
In this social media-influencedworld in which we live, we are
bombarded with conflictingopinions my truth and your truth
(03:09):
and with all of this noise, thetruth is often obscured.
The reason Applebaum's essayresonated with me was because I
instinctively knew it was true.
Instinctively knew it was true.
(03:29):
Why?
Well, not just because itpresented irrefutable historical
evidence, but also because itpresented human emotions,
reactions and justificationsthat I recognized immediately in
myself, in others and in thecontext of my lived experience
in others and in the context ofmy lived experience.
But perhaps the main reason Irecognize the ring of truth in
(03:50):
this essay that mysteriouslyappeared in my feed was it was
written in 2020.
So we can judge its veracitybecause we've witnessed it
unfold.
There has been a barrage of newsreports and articles with
countless opinions as to whyDonald Trump is behaving the way
he is during his very shortterm in office, opinions
(04:15):
attempting to both understandand, in many cases, rationalize
Trump's motivation and his endgoals.
Why would he attack Canada withpunishing tariffs, our closest
ally and friend?
Doesn't he realize that massdeportation of immigrants, both
legal and illegal, will cause adecline in America's GDP and
(04:36):
potentially, a brain drain?
Doesn't he understand the costof tariffs will ultimately be
borne by the average Americancitizen, stoking inflation and
making it harder formiddle-class Americans to make
ends meet?
Why is he dismantling thepublic service?
He is creating countless joblosses and economic insecurity
(04:59):
amongst the people he stated hewas trying to help.
These are the wrong questions.
What's more interesting and themore important questions are
why are people supporting andenabling Trump?
Why are they remaining silentin the face of these apparent
contradictions and in the faceof actions that are seemingly
(05:20):
inconsistent with theirlong-held values and democratic
principles, as defined in theAmerican Constitution and
supported by the rule of law?
Applebaum's thought-provokingessay helps make sense of it all
for what it's worth.
(05:40):
On a cold March afternoon in1949, wolfgang Lillard slipped
out of the East German CommunistParty secretariat, hurried home
, packed what few warm clotheshe could fit into a small
briefcase, and then walked to atelephone box to call his mother
my article will be finishedthis evening, he told her.
That was the code they hadagreed on in advance.
(06:02):
It meant that he was escapingthe country at great risk to his
life.
Though only 28 years old at thetime, leonhard stood at the
pinnacle of the New East Germanelite.
The son of German communists,he had been educated in the
Soviet Union, trained in specialschools during the war, and
brought back to Berlin fromMoscow in May 1945 on the same
(06:26):
airplane that carried WalterAlbrecht, the leader of what
would soon become the EastGerman Communist Party.
Leonhard was put on a teamcharged with recreating Berlin's
city government.
He had one central task toensure that any local leaders
who emerged from the post-warchaos were assigned deputies
(06:48):
loyal to the party.
It's got to look democratic,ulbricht told him.
But we must have everything inour control.
Leonhard had lived through agreat deal by that time.
While he was a teenager inMoscow, his mother had been
arrested as an enemy of thepeople and sent to Vorkuta, a
labor camp in the far north.
He had witnessed the terriblepoverty and inequality of the
(07:11):
Soviet Union.
He had despaired of the Sovietalliance with Nazi Germany
between 1939 and 1941, and heknew about the Red Army's mass
rapes of women following theoccupation.
Yet he and his ideologicallycommitted friends instinctively
recalled from the thought thatany of these events were in
(07:33):
diametrical opposition to oursocialist ideals.
Steadfastly he clung to thebelief system he had grown up
with.
The turning point when it camewas trivial.
While walking down the hall ofthe Central Committee building,
he was stopped by apleasant-looking middle-aged man
a comrade recently arrived fromthe West, who asked where to
(07:57):
find the dining room.
Leonard told him the answerdepended on what sort of meal
ticket he had.
Different ranks of officialshad access to different dining
rooms.
The comrade was astonished.
But aren't they all members ofthe party?
Vyadat walked away and enteredhis own top category dining room
, where white cloths covered thetables and high-ranking
(08:20):
functionaries receivedthree-course meals.
He felt ashamed, curious.
I thought that this had neverstruck me before.
That was when he began to havethe doubts that eventually led
him to plot his escape.
At exactly the same moment, inexactly the same city, another
(08:42):
high ranking East German wascoming to precisely the opposite
set of conclusions.
Marcus Wolff was also the son ofa prominent German communist
family.
He also spent his childhood inthe Soviet Union, attending the
same elite schools for childrenof foreign communists as
Leonhard did, as well as thesame wartime training camp.
(09:04):
The two had shared a bedroomthere, solemnly calling each
other by their aliases.
These were the rules ofdeconspiracy, although they knew
each other's names perfectlywell.
Wolf also witnessed the massarrests, the purges and the
poverty of the Soviet Union, andhe also kept faith with the
cause of the Soviet Union.
(09:27):
And he also kept faith with thecause.
He arrived in Berlin just a fewdays after Lerat on another
plane, full of trusted comradesand immediately began hosting a
program on the new Soviet-backedradio station.
For many months he ran thepopular you Ask, we Answer.
He gave online answers tolisteners' letters, often
concluding with some form ofthese difficulties are being
overcome with the help of theRed Army.
(09:50):
In August 1947, the two men metat Wolfe's luxurious five-roomed
apartment not far from what wasthen the headquarters of the
radio station.
They drove to Wolfe's house, afine villa in the neighborhood
of Lake Glenaca.
They took a walk around thelake and Wolf warned Leonard
that changes were coming.
He told him to give up hopingthat German communism would be
(10:12):
allowed to develop differentlyfrom the Soviet version.
That idea long ago, the goal ofmany German party members, was
about to be dropped.
When Leonard argued that thiscould not be true, he was
personally in charge of ideologyand no one had told him
anything about a change indirection Wolf laughed at him.
(10:34):
There are higher authoritiesthan your central secretariat,
he said.
Wolf made clear that he hadbetter contacts and more
important friends.
At the age of 24, he was aninsider and Lelad understood
finally that he was afunctionary in an occupied
country where the SovietCommunist Party, not the German
(10:55):
Communist Party had the lastword.
Famously, or perhaps infamously,marcus Wolff's career continued
to flourish after that.
Not only did he stay in EastGermany, he rose through the
ranks of its nomenclature tobecome the country's top spy.
He was the second rankedofficial at the Ministry of
(11:19):
State Security, better known asthe Stasi.
He was often described as themodel for the Carla character in
John le Carré's spy novels.
In the course of his career,his Directorate for
Reconnaissance recruited agentsin the offices of the West
German Chancellor and just aboutevery other department of
(11:40):
government, as well as at NATO.
Lidhad meanwhile became aprominent critic of the regime.
He wrote and lectured in WestBerlin, at Oxford, at Columbia,
and eventually he wound up atYale, where his lecture course
left an impression on severalgenerations of students.
Among them, it was a future USpresident, george W Bush, who
(12:06):
described Leonhard's course asan introduction to the struggle
between tyranny and freedom.
When I was at Yale in the 1980s, leonhard's course on Soviet
history was the most popularcourse on campus.
Separately, each man's storymakes sense, but when examined
together they require somedeeper explanation.
(12:27):
Until March 1949, leonard's andWolf's biographies were
strikingly similar.
Both grew up inside the Sovietsystem, both were educated in
communist ideology and both hadthe same values.
Both knew that the party wasundermining those values.
(12:50):
Both knew that the systemallegedly built to values, both
knew that the system allegedlybuilt to promote equality was
deeply unequal, profoundlyunfair and very cruel.
Like their counterparts in somany other times and places,
both men could plainly see thegap between propaganda and
reality.
Yet one remained anenthusiastic collaborator, while
(13:15):
the other could not bear thebetrayal of his ideals.
Why In English the wordcollaborator has a double
meaning.
A colleague can be described asa collaborator in a neutral or
positive sense.
But the other definition ofcollaborator relevant here is
(13:36):
different Someone who works withthe enemy, with the occupying
power, with the dictatorialregime.
In this negative sense,collaborator is closely related
to another set of wordscollusion, complicity,
connivance.
This negative meaning gainedcurrency during the Second World
(14:01):
War, when it was widely used todescribe Europeans who
cooperated with Nazi occupiersAt base.
The ugly meaning ofcollaborator carries an
implication of treason betrayalof one's nation, of one's
ideology, of one's morality, ofone's values.
Since the Second World War,historians and political
(14:22):
scientists have tried to explainwhy some people, in extreme
circumstances, becomecollaborators and others do not.
The late Harvard scholarStanley Hoffman had first-hand
knowledge of the subject as achild.
He and his mother hid from theNazis in La Manouelle-et-Bain, a
village in the south of France.
(14:43):
But he was modest about his ownconclusions, noting that a
careful historian would havealmost to write a huge series of
case histories, for thereseemed to have been almost as
many collaborationalisms asthere were proponents or
practitioners of collaboration.
Still, hoffman made a stab atclassification, beginning with a
(15:05):
division of collaborators intovoluntary and involuntary.
Many people in the latter grouphad no choice, forced into
reluctant recognition ofnecessity that they could not
avoid dealing with the Nazioccupiers who were running their
country.
Hoffman further sorted the moreenthusiastic voluntary
(15:25):
collaborators into twoadditional categories.
The first were those who workedwith the enemy in the name of
national interest, rationalizingcollaboration as something
necessary for the preservationof the French economy or the
French culture, though of coursemany people who made these
arguments had other professionalor economic motives too.
(15:48):
In the second there were thetruly active ideological
collaborators, people whobelieved that pre-war Republican
France had been weak or corruptand hoped that the Nazis would
straighten it, people whoadmired fascism and people who
admired Hitler.
Hoffman observed that many ofthose who became ideological
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collaborators were landownersand aristocrats, the cream of
the top of the civil service, ofthe armed forces, of the
business community, people whoperceived themselves as part of
a natural ruling class that hadbeen unfairly deprived of power
under the left-wing governmentsof France in the 1930s.
(16:34):
Equally motivated tocollaborate were their polar
opposites, the social misfitsand political deviants who, in
the normal course of events,never would have made successful
careers of any kind.
What brought these peopletogether was a common conclusion
that whatever they had thoughtabout Germany before 1940, their
political and personal futureswould now be improved by
(16:58):
aligning themselves with theoccupiers.
Unlike Hoffman, czeslaw Milosz,a Nobel Prize-winning Polish
poet, wrote about collaborationfrom personal experience.
An active member of theanti-Nazi resistance during the
war, he nevertheless wound upafter the war as a cultural
attaché at the Polish embassy inWashington, serving his
(17:21):
country's communist government.
Only in 1951 did he defect,denounce the regime and dissect
his experience.
In the famous essay the CaptiveMind, he sketched several
lightly disguised portraits ofreal people, all writers and
intellectuals, each of whom hadcome up with different ways of
(17:43):
justifying collaboration withthe party.
Many were careerists, but Milosunderstood that careerism could
not provide a completeexplanation.
To be part of a mass movementwas for many a chance to end
their alienation, to feel closeto the masses, to be united in a
(18:07):
single community with workersand shopkeepers.
For tormented intellectuals,collaboration was also a kind of
relief, almost a sense of peace.
It meant that they were nolonger consistently at war with
the state, no longer in turmoil.
Once the intellectual hadaccepted that there is no other
way, milos wrote.
He eats with relish, hismovements take on vigor, his
(18:27):
color returns, he sits down andwrites a positive article,
marveling at the ease with whichhe writes it.
And Milos is one of the fewwriters to acknowledge the
pleasure of conformity, thelightness of heart that it
grants, the way it solves somany personal and professional
dilemmas.
We all feel the urge to conform.
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It is the most normal of humandesires to conform.
It is the most normal of humandesires.
And I was reminded of thisrecently when I visited Miriam
Berthler in her light-filledapartment in Berlin During the
1980s.
Berthler was one of a very smallnumber of active dissidents in
East Germany.
Later, in reunified Germany,she spent more than a decade
(19:10):
running the Stasi archive, thecollection of former East German
secret police files.
I asked her whether she couldidentify among her cohort a set
of circumstances that hadinclined some people to
collaborate with the Stasi.
She was put off by the question.
Collaboration wasn'tinteresting, bertha told me.
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Almost everyone was acollaborator.
99% of East Germanscollaborated.
If they weren't working withthe Stasi, then they were
working with the party or withthe system more generally.
Much more interesting and farharder to explain Much more
interesting and far harder toexplain, was the genuinely
mysterious question of whypeople went against the regime.
(19:58):
The puzzle is not why MarkusWolf remained in East Germany,
in other words, but why WolfgangLeonhard did not.
Here is another pair of stories,one that will be more familiar
to American readers.
Let's begin this one in the1980s, when a young Lindsey
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Graham first served with theJudge Advocate General's Corps,
the military legal service inthe US Air Force.
During some of that time,graham was based in what was
then East Germany, on thecutting edge of America's Cold
War efforts.
Graham, born and raised in asmall town in South Carolina,
was devoted to the militaryAfter both his parents died when
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he was in his 20s.
He got himself and his youngersister through college with the
help of an ROTC stipend and thenan Air Force salary.
He stayed in the reserves fortwo decades, even while in the
Senate, sometimes journeying toIraq or Afghanistan to serve as
a short-term reserve officer.
(21:02):
The Air Force has been one ofthe best things that's ever
happened to me, he said in 2025.
It gave me purpose bigger thanmyself.
It put me in the company ofpatriots.
Through most of his years inthe Senate, graham, alongside
his close friend John McCain,was a spokesperson for a strong
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military and for a vision ofAmerica as a democratic leader.
Abroad, he also supported avigorous notion of democracy at
home.
Abroad, he also supported avigorous notion of democracy at
home.
In his 2014 re-electioncampaign, he ran as a maverick
and a centrist, telling theAtlantic that jousting with the
Tea Party was more fun than anytime I've been in politics.
(21:45):
When Graham was doing his tourin West Germany, mitt Romney
became a co-founder and thenpresident of Bain Capital, a
private equity investment firm.
Born in Michigan, romney workedin Massachusetts during his
years at Bain, but he also kept,thanks to his Mormon faith,
close ties to Utah.
While Graham was a militarylawyer drawing military pay,
(22:09):
romney was acquiring companies,restructuring them and then
selling them.
In 1990, he was asked to runthe parent company, bain Company
, and, in the course of doing so, he became very rich.
Still, romney dreamed of apolitical career and in 1994, he
(22:30):
ran for the Senate inMassachusetts, after changing
his political affiliation fromindependent to Republican.
He lost, but in 2002, he ranfor the governor of
Massachusetts as a nonpartisanmoderate and won.
In 2007, after a gubernationalterm during which he
successfully brought in a formof near-univers universal health
(22:52):
care that became a model forBarack Obama's Affordable Care
Act, he staged his first run forpresident After losing the 2008
Republican primary.
He won the party's nominationin 2012 and then lost the
general election.
Both Graham and Romney hadpresidential ambitions.
(23:13):
Graham staged his ownshort-lived presidential
campaign in 2015, justified onthe grounds that the world is
falling apart.
Both men were loyal members ofthe Republican Party, skeptical
of the party's radical andspiritual fringe.
Both men reacted to thepresidential candidacy of Donald
(23:34):
Trump with real anger, and nowonder.
In different ways, trump'svalues undermined their own.
Graham had dedicated his careerto an idea of US leadership
around the world, whereas Trumpwas offering an American first
doctrine that would turn out tomean me and my friends.
(23:57):
Romney was an excellentbusinessman with a strong record
as a public servant, whereasTrump inherited wealth, went
bankrupt more than once, creatednothing of value and had no
governing record at all.
Both Graham and Romney weredevoted to America's democratic
traditions and to the ideals ofhonesty, accountability and
(24:22):
transparency in public life, allof which Trump scorned.
Both were vocal in theirdisapproval of Trump Before the
election.
Graham called him a jackass, anutjob and a race-baiting,
xenophobic, religious bigot.
He seemed unhappy, evendepressed, by the election.
(24:42):
Romney went further.
Let me put this very plainly.
He said in March 2016 in aspeech criticizing Trump if we
Republicans choose Donald Trumpas our nominee, the prospects
for a safe and prosperous futureare greatly diminished.
Romney spoke of the bullying,the greed, the showing off, the
(25:04):
misogyny, third-grade theatrics.
He called Trump a conman and afraud.
Even after Trump won thenomination, romney refused to
endorse him On his presidentialballot.
Romney said he wrote in hiswife and Graham said he voted
for the independent candidate,evan McMullin.
(25:25):
Trump did become president, andso the two men's convictions
were put to the test.
A glance at their biographieswould not have led many to
predict what happened next.
On paper, graham would haveseemed in 2016, like the man
with the deeper ties to themilitary, to the rule of law and
(25:46):
to an old, established idea ofAmerican patriotism and American
responsibility in the world.
Romney, by contrast, with hisshifts between center and the
right, with his multiple careersin business and politics, would
have seemed less deeplyattached to those same
old-fashioned patriotic ideals.
Most of us register soldiers asloyal patriots and management
(26:11):
consultants as self-interested.
We assume people from smalltowns in South Carolina are more
likely to resist politicalpressure than people who have
lived in many places.
Intuitively, we think thatloyalty to a particular place
implies loyalty to a set ofvalues, but in this case the
(26:33):
cliches were wrong.
It was Graham who made excusesfor Trump's abuse of power.
It was Graham, a JAG Corpslawyer, who downplayed the
evidence that the president hadattempted to manipulate foreign
courts and blackmail a foreignleader into launching a phony
investigation into a politicalrival.
It was Graham who abandoned hisown stated support for
(26:56):
bipartisanship and insteadpushed for a hyper-partisan
Senate Judiciary Committeeinvestigation into former Vice
President Joe Biden's son.
It was Graham who played golfwith Trump, who made excuses for
him on television, whosupported the president even as
he slowly destroyed the Americanalliances with the Europeans,
(27:19):
with the Kurds, that Graham haddefended all his life.
By contrast, it was Romney who,in February, became the only
Republican senator to break rankwith his colleagues voting to
impeach the president.
Corrupting an election to keeponeself in office, he said, is
perhaps the most abusive anddestructive violation of one's
(27:40):
oath of office that I canimagine.
One man had proved willing tobetray his ideas and ideals that
he had once stood for, theother refused why.
To the American reader,references to Vichy, france,
each Germany, fascists andcommunists may seem over the top
, even ludicrous, but dig alittle deeper and the analogy
(28:02):
makes sense.
The point is not to compareTrump to Hitler or Stalin.
The point is to compare theexperiences of high-ranking
members of the AmericanRepublican Party, especially
those who work closely with theWhite House, to the experience
of Frenchmen in 1940, or EastGermans in 1945, or Czeslaw
(28:24):
Miosz in 1947.
These are experiences of peoplewho are forced to accept an
alien ideology or set of valuesthat are in sharp contrast with
their own.
Not even Trump's supporters cancontest this analogy, because
the imposition of an alienideology is precisely what he
(28:46):
was calling for all along.
Trump's first statement aspresident, his inaugural address
, was an unprecedented assaulton American democracy and
American values.
Remember, he describedAmerica's capital city,
america's government, america'scongressmen and senators, all
democratically elected andchosen by Americans according to
(29:09):
America's 227-year-oldconstitution.
No-transcript.
Their victories have not beenyour victories, he said.
Their triumphs have not beenyour triumphs.
Trump was stating as clearly ashe possibly could that a new
set of values was now replacingthe old, though, of course, the
(29:33):
nature of those new values wasnot yet clear.
Almost as soon as he stoppedspeaking, trump launched his
first assault on fact-basedreality, a long undervalued
component of the Americanpolitical system.
America is not a theocracy or amonarchy that accepts the word
of the leader or the priesthoodas law.
(29:54):
We are a democracy that debatesfacts, seeks to understand
problems and then legislatessolutions, all in accordance
with a set of rules.
Trump's insistence, against theevidence of the photographs,
television footage and the livedexperience of thousands of
people that the attendance athis inauguration was higher than
(30:15):
that at Barack Obama's firstinauguration represented a sharp
break with that Americanpolitical tradition.
Like the authoritarian leadersof other times and places, trump
effectively ordered not justhis supporters but also
apolitical members of thegovernment bureaucracy to adhere
(30:35):
to a blatantly false,manipulated reality.
American politicians, likepoliticians everywhere, have
always covered up mistakes, heldback information and made
promises they could not keep.
But until Trump was president.
None of them induced theNational Park Service to produce
doctored photographs, orcompelled the White House press
(30:58):
secretary to lie about the sizeof a crowd, or encouraged him to
do so in front of the presscorps that knew he was lying.
The lie was petty, evenridiculous, and that is part of
why it was so dangerous.
In the 1950s, when an insectknown as the Colorado potato
(31:20):
beetle appeared in easternEuropean potato fields,
soviet-backed governments in theregion triumphantly claimed
that it had been dropped fromthe sky by American pilots as a
deliberate form of biologicalsabotage.
Posters featuring vicious red,white and blue beetles went up
all across Poland, east Germanyand Czechoslovakia.
(31:40):
No one really believed thecharge, including the people
making it, as archives havesubsequently shown.
But that didn't matter.
The point of the posters wasnot to convince people of a
falsehood.
The point was to demonstratethe party's power to proclaim
and promulgate a falsehood.
(32:02):
Sometimes the point isn't tomake people believe a lie, it's
to make people fear the lie.
These kinds of lies also have away of building on one another.
It takes time to persuadepeople to abandon their existing
values.
The process usually beginsslowly, with small changes,
(32:39):
no-transcript Social Psychology.
This happens in part becausemost people have a built-in
vision of themselves as moraland honest, and that self-image
is resistant to change.
Once certain behaviors becomenormal, then people stop seeing
(33:00):
them as wrong.
This process happens inpolitics too.
In 1947, the Soviet militaryadministrators in East Germany
passed a regulation governingthe activity of publishing
houses and printers.
The decree did not nationalizethe printing presses.
It merely demanded that theirowners apply for licenses and
(33:22):
that they confine their work tobooks and pamphlets ordered by
central planners.
Imagine how a law like this,which did not speak of arrests,
let alone torture or the gulag,affected the owner of a printing
press in Dresden, a responsiblefamily man with two teenage
children and a sickly wife.
(33:43):
Resident a responsible familyman with two teenage children
and a sickly wife.
Following its passage, he hadto make a series of seemingly
insignificant choices.
Would he apply for a license?
Of course he needed it to earnmoney for his family.
Would he agree to confine hisbusiness to material ordered by
the central planners?
Yes to that too.
(34:03):
What else was there to printAfter that?
Other compromises follow.
Though he dislikes thecommunist, he just wants to stay
out of politics he agrees toprint the collected works of
Stalin because if he doesn't,others will.
When he is asked by somedisaffected friends to print a
pamphlet critical of the regime,however, he refuses, though he
(34:27):
wouldn't go to jail for printingit.
His children might not beadmitted to university and his
wife might not get hermedication.
He has to think about theirwelfare.
Meanwhile, all across EastGermany, other owners of other
printing presses are makingsimilar decisions, and after a
while, without anyone being shotor arrested, without anyone
(34:50):
feeling any particular pangs ofconscience, the only books left
to read are the ones approved bythe regime.
The built-in vision ofthemselves as American patriots
or as competent administratorsor as loyal party members also
created a cognitive distortionthat blinded many Republicans
(35:11):
and Trump administrationofficials to the precise nature
of the president's alternativevalue system.
After all, the early incidentswere so trivial.
They overlooked the lie aboutthe inauguration, because it was
silly.
They ignored Trump'sappointment of the wealthiest
cabinet in history and hisdecision to stuff his
(35:31):
administration with formerlobbyists because that was
business as usual.
They made excuses for IvankaTrump's use of a private email
account and for Jared Kushner'sconflicts of interest, because
that's just family stuff.
One step at a time, trumpismfooled many of its most
(35:52):
enthusiastic adherents.
Recall that some of theoriginal intellectual supporters
of Trump, people like SteveBannon, michael Anton and the
advocates of nationalconservatism an ideology
invented post-Hawke torationalize the president's
behavior advertised theirmovement as a recognizable form
(36:12):
of populism, an anti-Wall Street, anti-foreign wars,
anti-immigration alternative tothe small government
libertarianism of theestablishment Republican Party,
to the small governmentlibertarianism of the
establishment Republican Party.
Their drain-the-swamp sloganimplied that Trump would clean
up the rotten world of lobbyistsand campaign finance that
(36:33):
distorts American politics, thathe would make public debate
more honest and legislation morefair.
Had this actually been Trump'sruling philosophy, it might well
have posed difficulties for theRepublican Party leadership in
2016, given that most of themhad quite different values, but
it would not necessarily havedamaged the Constitution and it
(36:55):
would not necessarily have posedfundamental moral challenges to
people in public life to peoplein public life.
In practice, trump has governedaccording to a set of principles
very different from thosearticulated by his original
intellectual supporters,although some of his speeches
have continued to use thepopulist language.
He has built a cabinet and anadministration that serve
(37:18):
neither the public nor hisvoters, but rather his own
psychological needs and theinterests of his own friends on
Wall Street and in business and,of course, his own family.
His tax cuts disproportionatelybenefited the wealthy, not the
working class.
His shallow economic boom,engineered to ensure his
(37:39):
re-election, was made possibleby a vast budget deficit on a
scale Republicans once claimedto abhor an enormous burden for
future generations.
He worked to dismantle theexisting health care system
without offering anything better, as he'd promised to do, so
that the number of uninsuredpeople rose, and all the while
(38:01):
while he fanned and encouragedxenophobia and racism, both
because he found thempolitically useful and because
they are part of his personalworldview.
More important, he has governedin defiance and in ignorance of
the American Constitution,notably declaring, well into his
third year in office, that hehad total authority over the
(38:23):
states.
His administration is not merelycorrupt, it is also hostile to
checks and balances and the ruleof law.
He built a proto-authoritarianpersonal cult, firing or
sidelining officials who havecontradicted him with facts and
evidence, with tragicconsequences for public health
and the economy.
With tragic consequences forpublic health and the economy,
(38:47):
he threatened to fire a topCenters for Disease Control and
Prevention official, nancyMessonnier, in late February
after her two blunt warningsabout the coronavirus.
Rick Wright, a top health andhuman service official, says he
was demoted after refusing todirect money to promote the
unproven drug hydroxychloroquine.
Trump has attacked Americans'military, calling his generals a
(39:09):
bunch of dopes and babies, andAmerica's intelligence services
and law enforcement officers,with whom he has denigrated as
the deep state and whose advicehe has ignored.
He has appointed weak andinexperienced acting officials
to run America's most importantsecurity institution.
He has systematically wreckedAmerican alliances.
(39:31):
His foreign policy has neverserved any US interests of any
kind.
Although some of Trump's cabinetministers and media followers
have tried to betray him as ananti-Chinese nationalist, and
although foreign policycommentators from all points on
the political spectrum haveaccepted this fiction without
questioning it, trump's trueinstinct always has been to side
(39:54):
with foreign dictators,including Chinese President Xi
Jinping.
One former administrationofficial who had seen Trump
interact with Xi, as well aswith Russian President Vladimir
Putin, told me that it was likewatching a lesser celebrity
encountering a more famous one.
Trump did not speak to them asthe representative of the
(40:16):
American people.
He simply wanted their aura ofabsolute power, of cruelty, of
fame, to rub off on him andenhance his own image.
This, too, has fatalconsequences.
In January, trump took Xi'sword when he said that COVID-19
was under control, just as hehad believed North Korea's Jim
(40:38):
Jong-un when he signed a deal onnuclear weapons.
Trump's fawning attitude towardsdictators is his ideology at
its purest.
He meets his own psychologicalneeds first.
He thinks about the countrylast.
The true nature of the ideologythat Trump brought to
Washington was not America first, but rather Trump first.
(41:01):
Maybe it isn't surprising thatthe implications of Trump first
were not immediately understood.
After all, the communistparties of Eastern Europe or, if
you want a more recent example,the Chavistas in Venezuela, all
advertised themselves asadvocates of equality and
prosperity, even though inpractice they created inequality
(41:22):
and poverty.
And prosperity, even though inpractice they created inequality
and poverty.
But just as the truth aboutHugo Chavez's Bolivarian
revolution slowly dawned onpeople, it also became clear
eventually that Trump did nothave the interests of the
American public at heart.
And as they came to realizethat the president was not a
patriot, republican politiciansand senior civil servants began
(41:45):
to equivocate, just like peopleliving under an alien regime.
In retrospect, this dauntingrealization explains why the
funeral of John McCain inSeptember 2018 looked, and, by
all accounts, felt, so strange.
Two previous presidents, oneRepublican and one Democrat,
(42:06):
representatives of the oldpatriotic political class, made
speeches.
The sitting president's namewas never mentioned.
The songs and symbols of theold order were visible too the
battle hymn of the Republic,american flags, two of McCain's
sons in their officers' uniformsso very different from the sons
(42:27):
of Trump.
Writing in the New Yorker,susan Glasser described the
funeral as a meeting of theresistance under vaulted
ceilings and stained glasswindows.
In truth, it bore an uncannyresemblance to the 1956 funeral
of Laszlo Rak, a Hungariancommunist and secret police boss
(42:47):
, who had been purged andmurdered by his comrades in 1949
.
Rak's wife had become anoutspoken critic of the regime,
and the funeral turned into a defacto political rally helping
to set off Hungary'santi-communist revolution a
couple of weeks later.
Nothing quite so dramatichappened after McCain's funeral,
(43:07):
but it did clarify thesituation.
A year and a half into the Trumpadministration.
It marked a turning point, themoment at which many Americans
in public life began to adoptthe strategies, tactics and
self-justifications that theinhabitants of occupied
countries have used in the past,doing so even though the
(43:31):
personal stakes were, relativelyspeaking, so low.
Poles like Milosz wound up inexile in the 1950s.
Dissidents in East Germany lostthe right to work and study.
In harsher regimes like that ofStalin's Russia, public
protests could lead to manyyears in a concentration camp.
Disobedient Wehrmacht officerswere executed by slow
(43:55):
strangulation.
By contrast, a Republicansenator who dares to question
whether Trump is acting in theinterests of the country is in
danger of what exactly?
Losing his seat and winding upwith a seven-figure lobbying job
or a fellowship at HarvardKennedy School.
He might even meet the terriblefate of Jeff Flake, the former
(44:15):
Arizona senator, who has beenhired as a contributor by CBS
News.
He might suffer like Romney,who was tragically not invited
to the Conservative PoliticalAction Conference, which this
year turned out to be areservoir of COVID-19.
Nonetheless, 20 months into theTrump administration, senators
and other serious-mindedRepublicans in public life who
(44:37):
should have known better beganto tell themselves stories that
sound very much like those inMiloš's the Captive Mind.
Some of these stories overlapwith one another.
Some of them are just thincloaks to cover self-interest,
but all of them are familiarjustifications of collaboration
(44:58):
recognizable from the past, andhere are the most popular.
This concludes part one ofMaking Sense of it All in the
company of readers and writers.
With my guest in absentia, anneApplebaum, pulitzer
Prize-winning historian andauthor of History, will Judge
the Complicit.
We'll be releasing part two ofthe episode this coming Friday
(45:22):
at 9 am Eastern Daylight Timeand I hope you'll hang in for
that and take time in theintervening days to reflect on
Applebaum's essay.
In the context of our country.
At this critical juncture inour history as a nation and with
the up-and-coming election, whowill best serve the collective
needs and interests of allCanadians, or what it's worth?
Best serve the collective needsand interests of all Canadians
(45:43):
For what it's worth.
Well, welcome to this week's episode of For what
it's Worth called Making Senseof it All.
I'm your host, blake Melnick,and this is the next installment
in our series in the company ofreaders and writers.
Well, talk about change.
I was away in New Zealand for amonth over the holidays, during
which time I untethered myselffrom news and my social media
(00:41):
feeds in order to spend timewith the three people I love
most in the world my wife andtwo daughters.
This was really a gift tomyself.
New Zealand was a beautiful anduncomplicated place, ideal for
spending quality time withfamily.
I had the opportunity to listento all their collective
concerns, opinions, aspirationsand fears.
(01:03):
We discuss deeply and debate itoften, as is common in our
family, and something wecollectively value.
Just prior to leaving on ourtrip, I was invited to speak at
the Growing your Workforceconference in Windsor, ontario.
My presentation was focused onaddressing concerns I've had for
the past 20 years aboutCanada's declining capacity and
(01:25):
capability for innovation thesubject of a soon-to-be-released
episode of the show, by the wayand it was while I was at this
conference, looking out over theDetroit River, that the
soon-to-be president, donaldTrump, began talking about
imposing tariffs on Canada.
When I returned from New Zealandand plugged back in just prior
(01:46):
to Trump's inauguration, so muchhad changed.
Justin Trudeau announced hisresignation and made the
decision to prorogue Parliamentuntil a new Liberal Party leader
could be found.
Much to the chagrin of PierreBollievre, mark Carney and
Chrystia Freeland had throwntheir hats in the ring to run
for the Liberal Party andreplace Trudeau as Prime
(02:07):
Minister prior to the nextfederal election, and Donald
Trump repeated his desire toannex Canada and have us become
the 51st state, and that hewould use tariffs as a means of
economic coercion.
In addition, trump wanted tobuy Greenland, take back control
(02:27):
of the Panama Canal, and so on.
While this was going on,mysteriously, an article from
the Atlantic actually a reallylong essay titled History Will
Judge the Complicit, by AnnApplebaum, popped up at the top
of my news feed and, beingsomewhat of a history buff, I
(02:48):
began to read the essay.
It had a profound impact.
There's an old proverb thereare three truths my truth, your
truth and the truth.
In this social media-influencedworld in which we live, we are
bombarded with conflictingopinions my truth and your truth
(03:09):
and with all of this noise, thetruth is often obscured.
The reason Applebaum's essayresonated with me was because I
instinctively knew it was true.
Instinctively knew it was true.
(03:29):
Why?
Well, not just because itpresented irrefutable historical
evidence, but also because itpresented human emotions,
reactions and justificationsthat I recognized immediately in
myself, in others and in thecontext of my lived experience
in others and in the context ofmy lived experience.
But perhaps the main reason Irecognize the ring of truth in
(03:50):
this essay that mysteriouslyappeared in my feed was it was
written in 2020.
So we can judge its veracitybecause we've witnessed it
unfold.
There has been a barrage of newsreports and articles with
countless opinions as to whyDonald Trump is behaving the way
he is during his very shortterm in office, opinions
(04:15):
attempting to both understandand, in many cases, rationalize
Trump's motivation and his endgoals.
Why would he attack Canada withpunishing tariffs, our closest
ally and friend?
Doesn't he realize that massdeportation of immigrants, both
legal and illegal, will cause adecline in America's GDP and
(04:36):
potentially, a brain drain?
Doesn't he understand the costof tariffs will ultimately be
borne by the average Americancitizen, stoking inflation and
making it harder formiddle-class Americans to make
ends meet?
Why is he dismantling thepublic service?
He is creating countless joblosses and economic insecurity
(04:59):
amongst the people he stated hewas trying to help.
These are the wrong questions.
What's more interesting and themore important questions are
why are people supporting andenabling Trump?
Why are they remaining silentin the face of these apparent
contradictions and in the faceof actions that are seemingly
(05:20):
inconsistent with theirlong-held values and democratic
principles, as defined in theAmerican Constitution and
supported by the rule of law?
Applebaum's thought-provokingessay helps make sense of it all
for what it's worth.
(05:40):
On a cold March afternoon in1949, wolfgang Lillard slipped
out of the East German CommunistParty secretariat, hurried home
, packed what few warm clotheshe could fit into a small
briefcase, and then walked to atelephone box to call his mother
my article will be finishedthis evening, he told her.
That was the code they hadagreed on in advance.
(06:02):
It meant that he was escapingthe country at great risk to his
life.
Though only 28 years old at thetime, leonhard stood at the
pinnacle of the New East Germanelite.
The son of German communists,he had been educated in the
Soviet Union, trained in specialschools during the war, and
brought back to Berlin fromMoscow in May 1945 on the same
(06:26):
airplane that carried WalterAlbrecht, the leader of what
would soon become the EastGerman Communist Party.
Leonhard was put on a teamcharged with recreating Berlin's
city government.
He had one central task toensure that any local leaders
who emerged from the post-warchaos were assigned deputies
(06:48):
loyal to the party.
It's got to look democratic,ulbricht told him.
But we must have everything inour control.
Leonhard had lived through agreat deal by that time.
While he was a teenager inMoscow, his mother had been
arrested as an enemy of thepeople and sent to Vorkuta, a
labor camp in the far north.
He had witnessed the terriblepoverty and inequality of the
(07:11):
Soviet Union.
He had despaired of the Sovietalliance with Nazi Germany
between 1939 and 1941, and heknew about the Red Army's mass
rapes of women following theoccupation.
Yet he and his ideologicallycommitted friends instinctively
recalled from the thought thatany of these events were in
(07:33):
diametrical opposition to oursocialist ideals.
Steadfastly he clung to thebelief system he had grown up
with.
The turning point when it camewas trivial.
While walking down the hall ofthe Central Committee building,
he was stopped by apleasant-looking middle-aged man
a comrade recently arrived fromthe West, who asked where to
(07:57):
find the dining room.
Leonard told him the answerdepended on what sort of meal
ticket he had.
Different ranks of officialshad access to different dining
rooms.
The comrade was astonished.
But aren't they all members ofthe party?
Vyadat walked away and enteredhis own top category dining room
, where white cloths covered thetables and high-ranking
(08:20):
functionaries receivedthree-course meals.
He felt ashamed, curious.
I thought that this had neverstruck me before.
That was when he began to havethe doubts that eventually led
him to plot his escape.
At exactly the same moment, inexactly the same city, another
(08:42):
high ranking East German wascoming to precisely the opposite
set of conclusions.
Marcus Wolff was also the son ofa prominent German communist
family.
He also spent his childhood inthe Soviet Union, attending the
same elite schools for childrenof foreign communists as
Leonhard did, as well as thesame wartime training camp.
(09:04):
The two had shared a bedroomthere, solemnly calling each
other by their aliases.
These were the rules ofdeconspiracy, although they knew
each other's names perfectlywell.
Wolf also witnessed the massarrests, the purges and the
poverty of the Soviet Union, andhe also kept faith with the
cause of the Soviet Union.
(09:27):
And he also kept faith with thecause.
He arrived in Berlin just a fewdays after Lerat on another
plane, full of trusted comradesand immediately began hosting a
program on the new Soviet-backedradio station.
For many months he ran thepopular you Ask, we Answer.
He gave online answers tolisteners' letters, often
concluding with some form ofthese difficulties are being
overcome with the help of theRed Army.
(09:50):
In August 1947, the two men metat Wolfe's luxurious five-roomed
apartment not far from what wasthen the headquarters of the
radio station.
They drove to Wolfe's house, afine villa in the neighborhood
of Lake Glenaca.
They took a walk around thelake and Wolf warned Leonard
that changes were coming.
He told him to give up hopingthat German communism would be
(10:12):
allowed to develop differentlyfrom the Soviet version.
That idea long ago, the goal ofmany German party members, was
about to be dropped.
When Leonard argued that thiscould not be true, he was
personally in charge of ideologyand no one had told him
anything about a change indirection Wolf laughed at him.
(10:34):
There are higher authoritiesthan your central secretariat,
he said.
Wolf made clear that he hadbetter contacts and more
important friends.
At the age of 24, he was aninsider and Lelad understood
finally that he was afunctionary in an occupied
country where the SovietCommunist Party, not the German
(10:55):
Communist Party had the lastword.
Famously, or perhaps infamously,marcus Wolff's career continued
to flourish after that.
Not only did he stay in EastGermany, he rose through the
ranks of its nomenclature tobecome the country's top spy.
He was the second rankedofficial at the Ministry of
(11:19):
State Security, better known asthe Stasi.
He was often described as themodel for the Carla character in
John le Carré's spy novels.
In the course of his career,his Directorate for
Reconnaissance recruited agentsin the offices of the West
German Chancellor and just aboutevery other department of
(11:40):
government, as well as at NATO.
Lidhad meanwhile became aprominent critic of the regime.
He wrote and lectured in WestBerlin, at Oxford, at Columbia,
and eventually he wound up atYale, where his lecture course
left an impression on severalgenerations of students.
Among them, it was a future USpresident, george W Bush, who
(12:06):
described Leonhard's course asan introduction to the struggle
between tyranny and freedom.
When I was at Yale in the 1980s, leonhard's course on Soviet
history was the most popularcourse on campus.
Separately, each man's storymakes sense, but when examined
together they require somedeeper explanation.
(12:27):
Until March 1949, leonard's andWolf's biographies were
strikingly similar.
Both grew up inside the Sovietsystem, both were educated in
communist ideology and both hadthe same values.
Both knew that the party wasundermining those values.
(12:50):
Both knew that the systemallegedly built to values, both
knew that the system allegedlybuilt to promote equality was
deeply unequal, profoundlyunfair and very cruel.
Like their counterparts in somany other times and places,
both men could plainly see thegap between propaganda and
reality.
Yet one remained anenthusiastic collaborator, while
(13:15):
the other could not bear thebetrayal of his ideals.
Why In English the wordcollaborator has a double
meaning.
A colleague can be described asa collaborator in a neutral or
positive sense.
But the other definition ofcollaborator relevant here is
(13:36):
different Someone who works withthe enemy, with the occupying
power, with the dictatorialregime.
In this negative sense,collaborator is closely related
to another set of wordscollusion, complicity,
connivance.
This negative meaning gainedcurrency during the Second World
(14:01):
War, when it was widely used todescribe Europeans who
cooperated with Nazi occupiersAt base.
The ugly meaning ofcollaborator carries an
implication of treason betrayalof one's nation, of one's
ideology, of one's morality, ofone's values.
Since the Second World War,historians and political
(14:22):
scientists have tried to explainwhy some people, in extreme
circumstances, becomecollaborators and others do not.
The late Harvard scholarStanley Hoffman had first-hand
knowledge of the subject as achild.
He and his mother hid from theNazis in La Manouelle-et-Bain, a
village in the south of France.
(14:43):
But he was modest about his ownconclusions, noting that a
careful historian would havealmost to write a huge series of
case histories, for thereseemed to have been almost as
many collaborationalisms asthere were proponents or
practitioners of collaboration.
Still, hoffman made a stab atclassification, beginning with a
(15:05):
division of collaborators intovoluntary and involuntary.
Many people in the latter grouphad no choice, forced into
reluctant recognition ofnecessity that they could not
avoid dealing with the Nazioccupiers who were running their
country.
Hoffman further sorted the moreenthusiastic voluntary
(15:25):
collaborators into twoadditional categories.
The first were those who workedwith the enemy in the name of
national interest, rationalizingcollaboration as something
necessary for the preservationof the French economy or the
French culture, though of coursemany people who made these
arguments had other professionalor economic motives too.
(15:48):
In the second there were thetruly active ideological
collaborators, people whobelieved that pre-war Republican
France had been weak or corruptand hoped that the Nazis would
straighten it, people whoadmired fascism and people who
admired Hitler.
Hoffman observed that many ofthose who became ideological
(16:12):
collaborators were landownersand aristocrats, the cream of
the top of the civil service, ofthe armed forces, of the
business community, people whoperceived themselves as part of
a natural ruling class that hadbeen unfairly deprived of power
under the left-wing governmentsof France in the 1930s.
(16:34):
Equally motivated tocollaborate were their polar
opposites, the social misfitsand political deviants who, in
the normal course of events,never would have made successful
careers of any kind.
What brought these peopletogether was a common conclusion
that whatever they had thoughtabout Germany before 1940, their
political and personal futureswould now be improved by
(16:58):
aligning themselves with theoccupiers.
Unlike Hoffman, czeslaw Milosz,a Nobel Prize-winning Polish
poet, wrote about collaborationfrom personal experience.
An active member of theanti-Nazi resistance during the
war, he nevertheless wound upafter the war as a cultural
attaché at the Polish embassy inWashington, serving his
(17:21):
country's communist government.
Only in 1951 did he defect,denounce the regime and dissect
his experience.
In the famous essay the CaptiveMind, he sketched several
lightly disguised portraits ofreal people, all writers and
intellectuals, each of whom hadcome up with different ways of
(17:43):
justifying collaboration withthe party.
Many were careerists, but Milosunderstood that careerism could
not provide a completeexplanation.
To be part of a mass movementwas for many a chance to end
their alienation, to feel closeto the masses, to be united in a
(18:07):
single community with workersand shopkeepers.
For tormented intellectuals,collaboration was also a kind of
relief, almost a sense of peace.
It meant that they were nolonger consistently at war with
the state, no longer in turmoil.
Once the intellectual hadaccepted that there is no other
way, milos wrote.
He eats with relish, hismovements take on vigor, his
(18:27):
color returns, he sits down andwrites a positive article,
marveling at the ease with whichhe writes it.
And Milos is one of the fewwriters to acknowledge the
pleasure of conformity, thelightness of heart that it
grants, the way it solves somany personal and professional
dilemmas.
We all feel the urge to conform.
(18:48):
It is the most normal of humandesires to conform.
It is the most normal of humandesires.
And I was reminded of thisrecently when I visited Miriam
Berthler in her light-filledapartment in Berlin During the
1980s.
Berthler was one of a very smallnumber of active dissidents in
East Germany.
Later, in reunified Germany,she spent more than a decade
(19:10):
running the Stasi archive, thecollection of former East German
secret police files.
I asked her whether she couldidentify among her cohort a set
of circumstances that hadinclined some people to
collaborate with the Stasi.
She was put off by the question.
Collaboration wasn'tinteresting, bertha told me.
(19:34):
Almost everyone was acollaborator.
99% of East Germanscollaborated.
If they weren't working withthe Stasi, then they were
working with the party or withthe system more generally.
Much more interesting and farharder to explain Much more
interesting and far harder toexplain, was the genuinely
mysterious question of whypeople went against the regime.
(19:58):
The puzzle is not why MarkusWolf remained in East Germany,
in other words, but why WolfgangLeonhard did not.
Here is another pair of stories,one that will be more familiar
to American readers.
Let's begin this one in the1980s, when a young Lindsey
(20:18):
Graham first served with theJudge Advocate General's Corps,
the military legal service inthe US Air Force.
During some of that time,graham was based in what was
then East Germany, on thecutting edge of America's Cold
War efforts.
Graham, born and raised in asmall town in South Carolina,
was devoted to the militaryAfter both his parents died when
(20:42):
he was in his 20s.
He got himself and his youngersister through college with the
help of an ROTC stipend and thenan Air Force salary.
He stayed in the reserves fortwo decades, even while in the
Senate, sometimes journeying toIraq or Afghanistan to serve as
a short-term reserve officer.
(21:02):
The Air Force has been one ofthe best things that's ever
happened to me, he said in 2025.
It gave me purpose bigger thanmyself.
It put me in the company ofpatriots.
Through most of his years inthe Senate, graham, alongside
his close friend John McCain,was a spokesperson for a strong
(21:23):
military and for a vision ofAmerica as a democratic leader.
Abroad, he also supported avigorous notion of democracy at
home.
Abroad, he also supported avigorous notion of democracy at
home.
In his 2014 re-electioncampaign, he ran as a maverick
and a centrist, telling theAtlantic that jousting with the
Tea Party was more fun than anytime I've been in politics.
(21:45):
When Graham was doing his tourin West Germany, mitt Romney
became a co-founder and thenpresident of Bain Capital, a
private equity investment firm.
Born in Michigan, romney workedin Massachusetts during his
years at Bain, but he also kept,thanks to his Mormon faith,
close ties to Utah.
While Graham was a militarylawyer drawing military pay,
(22:09):
romney was acquiring companies,restructuring them and then
selling them.
In 1990, he was asked to runthe parent company, bain Company
, and, in the course of doing so, he became very rich.
Still, romney dreamed of apolitical career and in 1994, he
(22:30):
ran for the Senate inMassachusetts, after changing
his political affiliation fromindependent to Republican.
He lost, but in 2002, he ranfor the governor of
Massachusetts as a nonpartisanmoderate and won.
In 2007, after a gubernationalterm during which he
successfully brought in a formof near-univers universal health
(22:52):
care that became a model forBarack Obama's Affordable Care
Act, he staged his first run forpresident After losing the 2008
Republican primary.
He won the party's nominationin 2012 and then lost the
general election.
Both Graham and Romney hadpresidential ambitions.
(23:13):
Graham staged his ownshort-lived presidential
campaign in 2015, justified onthe grounds that the world is
falling apart.
Both men were loyal members ofthe Republican Party, skeptical
of the party's radical andspiritual fringe.
Both men reacted to thepresidential candidacy of Donald
(23:34):
Trump with real anger, and nowonder.
In different ways, trump'svalues undermined their own.
Graham had dedicated his careerto an idea of US leadership
around the world, whereas Trumpwas offering an American first
doctrine that would turn out tomean me and my friends.
(23:57):
Romney was an excellentbusinessman with a strong record
as a public servant, whereasTrump inherited wealth, went
bankrupt more than once, creatednothing of value and had no
governing record at all.
Both Graham and Romney weredevoted to America's democratic
traditions and to the ideals ofhonesty, accountability and
(24:22):
transparency in public life, allof which Trump scorned.
Both were vocal in theirdisapproval of Trump Before the
election.
Graham called him a jackass, anutjob and a race-baiting,
xenophobic, religious bigot.
He seemed unhappy, evendepressed, by the election.
(24:42):
Romney went further.
Let me put this very plainly.
He said in March 2016 in aspeech criticizing Trump if we
Republicans choose Donald Trumpas our nominee, the prospects
for a safe and prosperous futureare greatly diminished.
Romney spoke of the bullying,the greed, the showing off, the
(25:04):
misogyny, third-grade theatrics.
He called Trump a conman and afraud.
Even after Trump won thenomination, romney refused to
endorse him On his presidentialballot.
Romney said he wrote in hiswife and Graham said he voted
for the independent candidate,evan McMullin.
(25:25):
Trump did become president, andso the two men's convictions
were put to the test.
A glance at their biographieswould not have led many to
predict what happened next.
On paper, graham would haveseemed in 2016, like the man
with the deeper ties to themilitary, to the rule of law and
(25:46):
to an old, established idea ofAmerican patriotism and American
responsibility in the world.
Romney, by contrast, with hisshifts between center and the
right, with his multiple careersin business and politics, would
have seemed less deeplyattached to those same
old-fashioned patriotic ideals.
Most of us register soldiers asloyal patriots and management
(26:11):
consultants as self-interested.
We assume people from smalltowns in South Carolina are more
likely to resist politicalpressure than people who have
lived in many places.
Intuitively, we think thatloyalty to a particular place
implies loyalty to a set ofvalues, but in this case the
(26:33):
cliches were wrong.
It was Graham who made excusesfor Trump's abuse of power.
It was Graham, a JAG Corpslawyer, who downplayed the
evidence that the president hadattempted to manipulate foreign
courts and blackmail a foreignleader into launching a phony
investigation into a politicalrival.
It was Graham who abandoned hisown stated support for
(26:56):
bipartisanship and insteadpushed for a hyper-partisan
Senate Judiciary Committeeinvestigation into former Vice
President Joe Biden's son.
It was Graham who played golfwith Trump, who made excuses for
him on television, whosupported the president even as
he slowly destroyed the Americanalliances with the Europeans,
(27:19):
with the Kurds, that Graham haddefended all his life.
By contrast, it was Romney who,in February, became the only
Republican senator to break rankwith his colleagues voting to
impeach the president.
Corrupting an election to keeponeself in office, he said, is
perhaps the most abusive anddestructive violation of one's
(27:40):
oath of office that I canimagine.
One man had proved willing tobetray his ideas and ideals that
he had once stood for, theother refused why.
To the American reader,references to Vichy, france,
each Germany, fascists andcommunists may seem over the top
, even ludicrous, but dig alittle deeper and the analogy
(28:02):
makes sense.
The point is not to compareTrump to Hitler or Stalin.
The point is to compare theexperiences of high-ranking
members of the AmericanRepublican Party, especially
those who work closely with theWhite House, to the experience
of Frenchmen in 1940, or EastGermans in 1945, or Czeslaw
(28:24):
Miosz in 1947.
These are experiences of peoplewho are forced to accept an
alien ideology or set of valuesthat are in sharp contrast with
their own.
Not even Trump's supporters cancontest this analogy, because
the imposition of an alienideology is precisely what he
(28:46):
was calling for all along.
Trump's first statement aspresident, his inaugural address
, was an unprecedented assaulton American democracy and
American values.
Remember, he describedAmerica's capital city,
america's government, america'scongressmen and senators, all
democratically elected andchosen by Americans according to
(29:09):
America's 227-year-oldconstitution.
No-transcript.
Their victories have not beenyour victories, he said.
Their triumphs have not beenyour triumphs.
Trump was stating as clearly ashe possibly could that a new
set of values was now replacingthe old, though, of course, the
(29:33):
nature of those new values wasnot yet clear.
Almost as soon as he stoppedspeaking, trump launched his
first assault on fact-basedreality, a long undervalued
component of the Americanpolitical system.
America is not a theocracy or amonarchy that accepts the word
of the leader or the priesthoodas law.
(29:54):
We are a democracy that debatesfacts, seeks to understand
problems and then legislatessolutions, all in accordance
with a set of rules.
Trump's insistence, against theevidence of the photographs,
television footage and the livedexperience of thousands of
people that the attendance athis inauguration was higher than
(30:15):
that at Barack Obama's firstinauguration represented a sharp
break with that Americanpolitical tradition.
Like the authoritarian leadersof other times and places, trump
effectively ordered not justhis supporters but also
apolitical members of thegovernment bureaucracy to adhere
(30:35):
to a blatantly false,manipulated reality.
American politicians, likepoliticians everywhere, have
always covered up mistakes, heldback information and made
promises they could not keep.
But until Trump was president.
None of them induced theNational Park Service to produce
doctored photographs, orcompelled the White House press
(30:58):
secretary to lie about the sizeof a crowd, or encouraged him to
do so in front of the presscorps that knew he was lying.
The lie was petty, evenridiculous, and that is part of
why it was so dangerous.
In the 1950s, when an insectknown as the Colorado potato
(31:20):
beetle appeared in easternEuropean potato fields,
soviet-backed governments in theregion triumphantly claimed
that it had been dropped fromthe sky by American pilots as a
deliberate form of biologicalsabotage.
Posters featuring vicious red,white and blue beetles went up
all across Poland, east Germanyand Czechoslovakia.
(31:40):
No one really believed thecharge, including the people
making it, as archives havesubsequently shown.
But that didn't matter.
The point of the posters wasnot to convince people of a
falsehood.
The point was to demonstratethe party's power to proclaim
and promulgate a falsehood.
(32:02):
Sometimes the point isn't tomake people believe a lie, it's
to make people fear the lie.
These kinds of lies also have away of building on one another.
It takes time to persuadepeople to abandon their existing
values.
The process usually beginsslowly, with small changes,
(32:39):
no-transcript Social Psychology.
This happens in part becausemost people have a built-in
vision of themselves as moraland honest, and that self-image
is resistant to change.
Once certain behaviors becomenormal, then people stop seeing
(33:00):
them as wrong.
This process happens inpolitics too.
In 1947, the Soviet militaryadministrators in East Germany
passed a regulation governingthe activity of publishing
houses and printers.
The decree did not nationalizethe printing presses.
It merely demanded that theirowners apply for licenses and
(33:22):
that they confine their work tobooks and pamphlets ordered by
central planners.
Imagine how a law like this,which did not speak of arrests,
let alone torture or the gulag,affected the owner of a printing
press in Dresden, a responsiblefamily man with two teenage
children and a sickly wife.
(33:43):
Resident a responsible familyman with two teenage children
and a sickly wife.
Following its passage, he hadto make a series of seemingly
insignificant choices.
Would he apply for a license?
Of course he needed it to earnmoney for his family.
Would he agree to confine hisbusiness to material ordered by
the central planners?
Yes to that too.
(34:03):
What else was there to printAfter that?
Other compromises follow.
Though he dislikes thecommunist, he just wants to stay
out of politics he agrees toprint the collected works of
Stalin because if he doesn't,others will.
When he is asked by somedisaffected friends to print a
pamphlet critical of the regime,however, he refuses, though he
(34:27):
wouldn't go to jail for printingit.
His children might not beadmitted to university and his
wife might not get hermedication.
He has to think about theirwelfare.
Meanwhile, all across EastGermany, other owners of other
printing presses are makingsimilar decisions, and after a
while, without anyone being shotor arrested, without anyone
(34:50):
feeling any particular pangs ofconscience, the only books left
to read are the ones approved bythe regime.
The built-in vision ofthemselves as American patriots
or as competent administratorsor as loyal party members also
created a cognitive distortionthat blinded many Republicans
(35:11):
and Trump administrationofficials to the precise nature
of the president's alternativevalue system.
After all, the early incidentswere so trivial.
They overlooked the lie aboutthe inauguration, because it was
silly.
They ignored Trump'sappointment of the wealthiest
cabinet in history and hisdecision to stuff his
(35:31):
administration with formerlobbyists because that was
business as usual.
They made excuses for IvankaTrump's use of a private email
account and for Jared Kushner'sconflicts of interest, because
that's just family stuff.
One step at a time, trumpismfooled many of its most
(35:52):
enthusiastic adherents.
Recall that some of theoriginal intellectual supporters
of Trump, people like SteveBannon, michael Anton and the
advocates of nationalconservatism an ideology
invented post-Hawke torationalize the president's
behavior advertised theirmovement as a recognizable form
(36:12):
of populism, an anti-Wall Street, anti-foreign wars,
anti-immigration alternative tothe small government
libertarianism of theestablishment Republican Party,
to the small governmentlibertarianism of the
establishment Republican Party.
Their drain-the-swamp sloganimplied that Trump would clean
up the rotten world of lobbyistsand campaign finance that
(36:33):
distorts American politics, thathe would make public debate
more honest and legislation morefair.
Had this actually been Trump'sruling philosophy, it might well
have posed difficulties for theRepublican Party leadership in
2016, given that most of themhad quite different values, but
it would not necessarily havedamaged the Constitution and it
(36:55):
would not necessarily have posedfundamental moral challenges to
people in public life to peoplein public life.
In practice, trump has governedaccording to a set of principles
very different from thosearticulated by his original
intellectual supporters,although some of his speeches
have continued to use thepopulist language.
He has built a cabinet and anadministration that serve
(37:18):
neither the public nor hisvoters, but rather his own
psychological needs and theinterests of his own friends on
Wall Street and in business and,of course, his own family.
His tax cuts disproportionatelybenefited the wealthy, not the
working class.
His shallow economic boom,engineered to ensure his
(37:39):
re-election, was made possibleby a vast budget deficit on a
scale Republicans once claimedto abhor an enormous burden for
future generations.
He worked to dismantle theexisting health care system
without offering anything better, as he'd promised to do, so
that the number of uninsuredpeople rose, and all the while
(38:01):
while he fanned and encouragedxenophobia and racism, both
because he found thempolitically useful and because
they are part of his personalworldview.
More important, he has governedin defiance and in ignorance of
the American Constitution,notably declaring, well into his
third year in office, that hehad total authority over the
(38:23):
states.
His administration is not merelycorrupt, it is also hostile to
checks and balances and the ruleof law.
He built a proto-authoritarianpersonal cult, firing or
sidelining officials who havecontradicted him with facts and
evidence, with tragicconsequences for public health
and the economy.
With tragic consequences forpublic health and the economy,
(38:47):
he threatened to fire a topCenters for Disease Control and
Prevention official, nancyMessonnier, in late February
after her two blunt warningsabout the coronavirus.
Rick Wright, a top health andhuman service official, says he
was demoted after refusing todirect money to promote the
unproven drug hydroxychloroquine.
Trump has attacked Americans'military, calling his generals a
(39:09):
bunch of dopes and babies, andAmerica's intelligence services
and law enforcement officers,with whom he has denigrated as
the deep state and whose advicehe has ignored.
He has appointed weak andinexperienced acting officials
to run America's most importantsecurity institution.
He has systematically wreckedAmerican alliances.
(39:31):
His foreign policy has neverserved any US interests of any
kind.
Although some of Trump's cabinetministers and media followers
have tried to betray him as ananti-Chinese nationalist, and
although foreign policycommentators from all points on
the political spectrum haveaccepted this fiction without
questioning it, trump's trueinstinct always has been to side
(39:54):
with foreign dictators,including Chinese President Xi
Jinping.
One former administrationofficial who had seen Trump
interact with Xi, as well aswith Russian President Vladimir
Putin, told me that it was likewatching a lesser celebrity
encountering a more famous one.
Trump did not speak to them asthe representative of the
(40:16):
American people.
He simply wanted their aura ofabsolute power, of cruelty, of
fame, to rub off on him andenhance his own image.
This, too, has fatalconsequences.
In January, trump took Xi'sword when he said that COVID-19
was under control, just as hehad believed North Korea's Jim
(40:38):
Jong-un when he signed a deal onnuclear weapons.
Trump's fawning attitude towardsdictators is his ideology at
its purest.
He meets his own psychologicalneeds first.
He thinks about the countrylast.
The true nature of the ideologythat Trump brought to
Washington was not America first, but rather Trump first.
(41:01):
Maybe it isn't surprising thatthe implications of Trump first
were not immediately understood.
After all, the communistparties of Eastern Europe or, if
you want a more recent example,the Chavistas in Venezuela, all
advertised themselves asadvocates of equality and
prosperity, even though inpractice they created inequality
(41:22):
and poverty.
And prosperity, even though inpractice they created inequality
and poverty.
But just as the truth aboutHugo Chavez's Bolivarian
revolution slowly dawned onpeople, it also became clear
eventually that Trump did nothave the interests of the
American public at heart.
And as they came to realizethat the president was not a
patriot, republican politiciansand senior civil servants began
(41:45):
to equivocate, just like peopleliving under an alien regime.
In retrospect, this dauntingrealization explains why the
funeral of John McCain inSeptember 2018 looked, and, by
all accounts, felt, so strange.
Two previous presidents, oneRepublican and one Democrat,
(42:06):
representatives of the oldpatriotic political class, made
speeches.
The sitting president's namewas never mentioned.
The songs and symbols of theold order were visible too the
battle hymn of the Republic,american flags, two of McCain's
sons in their officers' uniformsso very different from the sons
(42:27):
of Trump.
Writing in the New Yorker,susan Glasser described the
funeral as a meeting of theresistance under vaulted
ceilings and stained glasswindows.
In truth, it bore an uncannyresemblance to the 1956 funeral
of Laszlo Rak, a Hungariancommunist and secret police boss
(42:47):
, who had been purged andmurdered by his comrades in 1949
.
Rak's wife had become anoutspoken critic of the regime,
and the funeral turned into a defacto political rally helping
to set off Hungary'santi-communist revolution a
couple of weeks later.
Nothing quite so dramatichappened after McCain's funeral,
(43:07):
but it did clarify thesituation.
A year and a half into the Trumpadministration.
It marked a turning point, themoment at which many Americans
in public life began to adoptthe strategies, tactics and
self-justifications that theinhabitants of occupied
countries have used in the past,doing so even though the
(43:31):
personal stakes were, relativelyspeaking, so low.
Poles like Milosz wound up inexile in the 1950s.
Dissidents in East Germany lostthe right to work and study.
In harsher regimes like that ofStalin's Russia, public
protests could lead to manyyears in a concentration camp.
Disobedient Wehrmacht officerswere executed by slow
(43:55):
strangulation.
By contrast, a Republicansenator who dares to question
whether Trump is acting in theinterests of the country is in
danger of what exactly?
Losing his seat and winding upwith a seven-figure lobbying job
or a fellowship at HarvardKennedy School.
He might even meet the terriblefate of Jeff Flake, the former
(44:15):
Arizona senator, who has beenhired as a contributor by CBS
News.
He might suffer like Romney,who was tragically not invited
to the Conservative PoliticalAction Conference, which this
year turned out to be areservoir of COVID-19.
Nonetheless, 20 months into theTrump administration, senators
and other serious-mindedRepublicans in public life who
(44:37):
should have known better beganto tell themselves stories that
sound very much like those inMiloš's the Captive Mind.
Some of these stories overlapwith one another.
Some of them are just thincloaks to cover self-interest,
but all of them are familiarjustifications of collaboration
(44:58):
recognizable from the past, andhere are the most popular.
This concludes part one ofMaking Sense of it All in the
company of readers and writers.
With my guest in absentia, anneApplebaum, pulitzer
Prize-winning historian andauthor of History, will Judge
the Complicit.
We'll be releasing part two ofthe episode this coming Friday
(45:22):
at 9 am Eastern Daylight Timeand I hope you'll hang in for
that and take time in theintervening days to reflect on
Applebaum's essay.
In the context of our country.
At this critical juncture inour history as a nation and with
the up-and-coming election, whowill best serve the collective
needs and interests of allCanadians, or what it's worth?
Best serve the collective needsand interests of all Canadians
(45:43):
For what it's worth.
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