Making Sense of it All - Part 2 with Anne Applebaum (in absentia)

This week on #ForWhatitsWorthwithBlakeMelnick,  Part 2 of #MakingSenseofitAll #AnneApplebaum and her essay #HistorywillJudgetheComplicit, explores the moral complexities of political complicity in times of crisis, examining individuals’ rationalizations for inaction. Through historical examples, we reflect on the quiet compromises made by leaders and their resulting implications for democracy and society.

• The dangers of collaboration with immoral leadership 
• Historical parallels and lessons from past regimes 
• The role of fear and power in shaping political behavior 
• Moral justifications and the complexities of loyalty 
• The courage to speak out against wrongdoings 
• Understanding the cost of complicity in our democracy

Making Sense of it All Blog Post Parts 1 & 2

The music for this episode, We Rise We Fall, is performed by our current artist in residence, #TracyJones from his album #LuckyTime

You can find out more about Tracy by visiting the Blog Post for his episode

Transcript

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Making Sense of it All - Part 2

[00:00:00] Blake Melnick: I'm your host, Blake Melnick, and welcome to this week's episode of For What It's Worth, part two of Making Sense of It All, with my guest Pulitzer Prize winning historian and author Anne Applebaum and her thought provoking essay, History Will Judge the Complicit. People are no doubt familiar with the famous quote, Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

[00:00:59] Blake Melnick: These words were [00:01:00] uttered by Sir Winston Churchill to the British House of Commons in 1948, following the conclusion of the Second World War. Churchill was attempting to make sure the lessons learned from the war were never forgotten. In Part 1 of this episode, Anne Applebaum lays out her thesis.

[00:01:19] Blake Melnick: Republican leaders have abandoned their principles, their values, and the tenets of the American Constitution in support of, and in collaboration with, an immoral and dangerous president, who puts his interests ahead of those of the American people. In Part 2, the most compelling section of her essay, in my opinion, Applebaum uses concrete historical examples to list the possible reasons why.

[00:01:47] Blake Melnick: Much like the writing of William Shakespeare, Applebaum's justifications reflect our humanness, our inherent potential, and our weaknesses. They resonate precisely [00:02:00] because we recognize them. We have all fallen victim to these kinds of justifications in some form or another. And therefore, they provide a lens for us to judge the actions and motivations of our leaders in times of crisis.

[00:02:16] Blake Melnick: For what it's worth.

[00:02:18] Blake Melnick: We can use this moment to achieve great things. In the spring of 2019, a Trump supporting friend put me in touch with an administration official I will call Mark, whom I eventually met for a drink. I won't give details because we spoke informally, but in any case, Mark did not leak information or criticize the White House.

[00:02:41] Blake Melnick: On the contrary, he described himself as a patriot and a true believer. He supported the language of America First and was confident that it could be made real. Several months later, I met Mark a second time. The impeachment hearings had begun, and the story of the firing of American [00:03:00] ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, was then in the news. The true nature of the administration's ideology, Trump first, not America first, was becoming more obvious. The president's abuse of military aid to Ukraine, and his attacks on civil servants suggested not a patriotic White House, but a president focused on his own interests.

[00:03:21] Blake Melnick: Mark did not apologize for the President, though. Instead, he changed the subject. It was all worth it, he told me, because of the Uyghurs

[00:03:30] Blake Melnick: I thought I had misheard the Uyghurs why the Uyghurs? I was unaware of anything that the administration had done to aid the oppressed Muslim minority in Xingjiang China. Mark assured me that letters had been written, statements had been made. The president himself had been persuaded to say something at the United Nations.

[00:03:53] Blake Melnick: I doubted very much that the Uygurs had benefited from these empty words. China hadn't altered its behavior, and the [00:04:00] concentration camps built for the Uyghurs were still standing. Nonetheless, Mark's conscience was clear. Yes, Trump was destroying America's reputation in the world.

[00:04:10] Blake Melnick: And yes, Trump was ruining American alliances. But Mark was so important to the cause of the Uyghurs that people like him could, in good conscience, keep working for the administration. Mark made me think of the story of Wanda Talakowska, a Polish cultural activist who in 1945 felt much the same as he did.

[00:04:33] Blake Melnick: Talakowska had collected and promoted folk art before the war. After the war, she made the momentous decision to join the Polish Ministry of Culture. The communist leadership was arresting and murdering its opponents. The nature of the regime was becoming clear. Talakowska, nevertheless, thought she could use her position inside the communist establishment to help Polish artists and designers to promote [00:05:00] their work and get Polish companies to mass produce their designs.

[00:05:05] Blake Melnick: But Polish factories, newly nationalized, were not interested in the design she commissioned. Communist politicians, skeptical of her loyalty, made Talakowska write articles filled with Marxist gibberish. Eventually, she resigned, having achieved nothing she set out to do. A later generation of artists condemned her as a Stalinist and forgot about her.

[00:05:30] Blake Melnick: We Can Protect the Country from the President That, of course, was the argument used by Anonymous, the unsigned New York Times op ed published in September 2018. For those who have forgotten, a lot has happened since then, that article described the president's erratic behavior, his inability to concentrate, his ignorance, and above all, his lack of affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives.

[00:05:59] Blake Melnick: Free [00:06:00] minds, free markets, and free people. The root of the problem, Anonymous concluded, was the president's immorality. In essence, the article described the true nature of the alternative value system brought into the White House by Trump at a moment when not everybody in Washington understood it. But even as they came to understand that the Trump presidency was guided by the president's narcissism.

[00:06:24] Blake Melnick: Anonymous did not quit, protest, make noise, or campaign against the President and his party. Instead, Anonymous concluded that remaining inside the system where they could cleverly distract and restrain the president was the right course for public servants like them. Anonymous was not alone. Gary Cohn at the time, the White House economic advisor, told Bob Woodward that he'd remove papers from the president's desk to prevent him from pulling out of a trade agreement with South Korea.

[00:06:57] Blake Melnick: James Mattis, Trump's original [00:07:00] Secretary of Defense, stayed in office because he thought he could educate the president about the value of America's alliances, or at least protect some of them from destruction.

[00:07:11] Blake Melnick: This kind of behavior has echoes in other countries and other times. A few months ago in Venezuela, I spoke with Victor Alvarez, a minister in one of Hugo Chávez's governments and a high ranking official before that. Alvarez explained to me the arguments he had made in favor of protecting some private industry and his opposition to mass nationalization.

[00:07:35] Blake Melnick: Alvarez was in government from the late 1990s through 2006, a time when Chávez was stepping up the use of police against peaceful demonstrators and undermining democratic institutions. Still Alvarez remained, hoping to curb Chávez's worst economic instincts. Ultimately he did quit. After concluding, the Chavez [00:08:00] had created a loyalty cult around himself.

[00:08:03] Blake Melnick: Alvarez called it sub-climate of Obedience and was no longer listing to anyone who disagreed. 

[00:08:10] Blake Melnick: In authoritarian regimes, many insiders eventually conclude that their presence simply does not matter. Cohn, after publicly agonizing when the president said there had been some fine people on both sides at the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, finally quit when the president made the ruinous decision to put tariffs on steel and aluminum, a decision that harmed American businesses.

[00:08:36] Blake Melnick: Mattis reached his breaking point when the president abandoned the Kurds, America's long time allies in the war against the Islamic State. But although both resigned, neither Cohn nor Mattis has spoken out in any notable way. On June 3rd, after this article went to press, Mattis denounced Trump in an article on TheAtlantic.

[00:08:59] Blake Melnick: com. [00:09:00] Their presence inside the White House helped build Trump's credibility among traditional Republican voters. Their silence now continues to serve the President's purposes. As for Anonymous, we don't know whether he or she remains inside the administration.

[00:09:17] Blake Melnick: For the record, I note that Alvarez lives in Venezuela, an actual police state, and yet is willing to speak out against the system he helped create. Cohn, Mattis, and Anonymous, all living freely in the United States of America, have not been nearly so brave. 

[00:09:33] Blake Melnick: I, personally, will benefit. 

[00:09:38] Blake Melnick: These, of course, are words that few people ever say out loud. Perhaps some do quietly acknowledge to themselves that they have not resigned or protested because it would cost them money or status, but no one wants a reputation as a careerist or a turncoat. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, even Marcus Wolf sought to portray himself as an idealist.[00:10:00] 

[00:10:00] Blake Melnick: He had truly believed in the Marxist Leninist ideals. This infamously cynical man told an interviewer in 1996, and I still believe in them. Many people in and around the Trump administration are seeking personal benefits. Many of them are doing so with a degree of openness that is startling and unusual in contemporary American politics, at least at this level.

[00:10:26] Blake Melnick: As an ideology, Trump First suits these people because it gives them license to put themselves first. To pick a random example, Sonny Perdue, the Secretary of Agriculture, is a former Georgia governor and a businessman who, like Trump, famously refused to put his agricultural companies into a blind trust when he entered the governor's office.

[00:10:50] Blake Melnick: Perdue has never even pretended to separate his political and personal interests. Since joining the cabinet, he has, with almost no oversight, [00:11:00] distributed billions of dollars of compensation to farms damaged by Trump's trade policies. He has stuffed his department with former lobbyists, who are now in charge of regulating their own industries.

[00:11:13] Blake Melnick: Deputy Secretary Steven Censky was, for 21 years, the CEO of the American Soybean Association. Brooke Appleton was a lobbyist for the National Corn Growers Association before becoming Censky's Chief of Staff, and has since returned to that group Kailee Tkacz a member of the Nutritional Advisory Panel, is a former lobbyist for the Snack Food Association.

[00:11:39] Blake Melnick: The list goes on and on, as would lists of similarly compromised people in the Department of Energy, the envirormental Protectionn Agency, and elsewhere. 

[00:11:48] Blake Melnick: Purdue's department also employs an extraordinary range of people with no experience in agriculture whatsoever. These modern members of the Republican Party hired for their [00:12:00] loyalty rather than their competence include a long haul truck driver, a country club cabana attendant, the owner of a scented candle company, and an intern at the Republican National Committee.

[00:12:13] Blake Melnick: The long haul truck driver was paid 80, 000 a year to expand markets for American agriculture abroad. Why was he qualified? He had a background in hauling and shipping agricultural commodities. 

[00:12:28] Blake Melnick: I must remain close to power. 

[00:12:31] Blake Melnick: Another sort of benefit harder to measure has kept many people who object to Trump's policies or behavior from speaking out.

[00:12:38] Blake Melnick: The intoxicating experience of power, and the belief that proximity to a powerful person bestows higher status. This, too, is nothing new. In a 1968 article for The Atlantic, James Thompson, an American East Asia specialist, brilliantly explained how power functioned inside the U. S. [00:13:00] bureaucracy in the Vietnam era.

[00:13:03] Blake Melnick: When the war in Vietnam was going badly, many people did not resign or speak out in public. because preserving their effectiveness, a mysterious combination of training, style, and connections as Thompson defined it, was an all consuming concern. He called this the effectiveness trap. In any organization, private or public, the boss will of course sometimes make decisions that his underlings dislike.

[00:13:31] Blake Melnick: But when basic principles are constantly violated, And people constantly defer resignation with, I can always follow my sword next time. then these misguided policies go fatally unchallenged. 

[00:13:44] Blake Melnick: In other countries, the effectiveness trap has other names. In his recent book on Putinism, Between Two Fires, Joshua Yaffa describes the Russian version of this syndrome. The Russian language, he notes, has a word, Prisposoblenet, which means a [00:14:00] person skilled in the act of compromise and adaptation, who intuitively understands what is expected of him and adjusts his belief and conduct accordingly.

[00:14:11] Blake Melnick: In Putin's Russia, anyone who wants to stay in the game, to remain close to power, to retain influence, to inspire respect, knows the necessity of making constant small changes to one's language and behavior, of being careful about what one says and to whom one says it, and of understanding what criticism is acceptable and what constitutes a violation of the unwritten rules.

[00:14:37] Blake Melnick: Those who violate these rules will not, for the most part, suffer prison. Putin's Russia is not Stalin's Russia, but they will experience a painful ejection from the inner circle for those who have never experienced it. The mystical pull of that connection to power, that feeling of being an.

[00:14:55] Blake Melnick: Insider is difficult to explain. Nonetheless, it is real, [00:15:00] and strong enough to affect even the highest ranking, best known, most influential people in America. John Bolton, Trump's former National Security Advisor, named his still unpublished book, The Room Where It Happened. Because of course, that's where he has always wanted to be.

[00:15:18] Blake Melnick: A friend who regularly runs into Lindsey Graham in Washington told me that each time they meet, He brags about just having met with Trump while exhibiting high school levels of excitement. As if a popular quarterback had just bestowed some attention on the nerdy debate club leader.

[00:15:34] Blake Melnick: The powerful kid likes me. That kind of intense pleasure is hard to relinquish and even harder to live without.

[00:15:42] Blake Melnick: LOL. Nothing matters. , cynicism, nihilism, relativism, amorality, irony, sarcasm, boredom, amusement. These are all reasons to collaborate, and always have been. Marco Martin, a novelist and travel [00:16:00] writer who grew up in East Germany, told me that in the 1980s, some of the East German bohemia, influenced by the then fashionable French intellectuals, Argued that there was no such thing as morality or immorality, no such thing as good or evil, no such thing as right or wrong, so you might as well collaborate.

[00:16:19] Blake Melnick: This instinct has an American variation. Politicians here who have spent their lives following rules, watching their words, calibrating their language, giving pious speeches about morality and governance may feel a sneaking admiration for someone like Trump, who breaks all the rules and gets away with it.

[00:16:38] Blake Melnick: He lies. He cheats. He extorts. He refuses to show compassion, sympathy, or empathy. He does not pretend to believe in anything or to abide by any moral code. He simulates patriotism with flags and gestures, but he does not behave like a patriot. His campaign scrambled to get help from Russia in [00:17:00] 2016. If it's what you say, I love it, replied Donald Trump Jr.

[00:17:04] Blake Melnick: when offered Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton. And Trump himself called on Russia to hack his opponent. For some of those at the top of his administration and of his party, these character traits might have a deep unacknowledged appeal if there's no such thing as moral and immoral, then everyone is implicitly released from the need to obey any rules. If the President doesn't respect the Constitution, then why should I? If the President can cheat in elections, then why can't I? If the President can sleep with porn stars, then why shouldn't I? This, of course, was the inside of the alt right which understood the dark allure of amorality, open racism, anti Semitism, and misogyny long before many others in the Republican Party.

[00:17:55] Blake Melnick: Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian philosopher and literary critic, recognized the [00:18:00] lure of the forbidden a century ago, writing about the deep appeal of the carnival, a space where everything banned is suddenly allowed, where eccentricity is permitted, where profanity defeats piety. The Trump administration is like that.

[00:18:14] Blake Melnick: Nothing means anything, rules don't matter, and the president is the carnival king.  

[00:18:21] Blake Melnick: My side might be flawed, but the political opposition is much worse. 

[00:18:27] Blake Melnick: When Marshal Philippe Pétain, the leader of France, took over the Vichy government, he did so in the name of restoration of a France that he believed had been lost. Pétain had been a fierce critic of the French Republic, and once he was in control, he replaced its famous creed, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, with a different slogan, Work, Family, Fatherland.

[00:18:50] Blake Melnick: Instead of the false idea of natural equality of man, he proposed bringing back social hierarchy, order, tradition, and religion. Instead of [00:19:00] accepting the future, Pétain sought to turn back the clock. By Pétain's reckoning, collaboration with Germans was not merely an embarrassing necessity, it was crucial.

[00:19:11] Blake Melnick: Because it gave patriots the ability to fight the real enemy. The French parliamentarians, socialists, anarchists, Jews, and other assorted leftists and democrats who, he believed, were undermining the nation, robbing it of its vitality, destroying its essence. Rather Hitler than Blum, the saying went. Blum having been France's socialist and Jewish prime minister in the late 1930s.

[00:19:37] Blake Melnick: One Vichy minister, Pierre Laval, famously declared that he hoped Germany would conquer all of Europe. Otherwise, he asserted Bolshevism would tomorrow establish itself everywhere. To Americans, this kind of justification should sound very familiar. We've been hearing versions of it since 2016. The [00:20:00] existential nature of the threat from the left has been spelled out many times. Our liberal left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature, wrote Michael Anton in the Flight 93 election.

[00:20:14] Blake Melnick: The Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham has warned that massive demographic changes threatens us too. In some parts of the country, it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn't exist anymore. This is the Vichy logic. The nation is dead or dying, so anything you can do to restore it is justified.

[00:20:36] Blake Melnick: Whatever criticisms might be made of Trump, whatever harm he has done to democracy and the rule of law, whatever corrupt deals he might make while in the White House, All of these shrink in comparison to the horrific alternative, the liberalism, socialism, moral decadence, demographic change, cultural degradation that would have been the [00:21:00] inevitable result of Hillary Clinton's presidency.

[00:21:03] Blake Melnick: The Republican senators who are willing to express their disgust with Trump off the record, but voted in February for him to remain in office. All indulge a variation of this sentiment. Trump enables them to get the judges they want, and those judges will help create the America they want. So do the evangelical pastors, who ought to be disgusted by Trump's personal behavior, but argue instead that the current situation has scriptural precedents

[00:21:33] Blake Melnick: like King David in the Bible, the president is a sinner, a flawed vessel, but he nevertheless offers a path to salvation for a fallen nation. 

[00:21:44] Blake Melnick: The three most important members of Trump's cabinet, Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William Barr, are all profoundly shaped by this Vichyite apocalyptic thinking. [00:22:00] All three are clever enough to understand what Trumpism really means, that it has nothing to do with God or faith, that it is self serving, greedy, and unpatriotic.

[00:22:10] Blake Melnick: Nevertheless, a former member of the administration, one of the few who did decide to resign, told me that both Pence and Pompeo have convinced themselves that they are in a biblical moment. All the things they care about, outlawing abortion and same sex marriage, and, though this is never said out loud, maintaining a white majority in America, are under threat.

[00:22:34] Blake Melnick: Time is growing short. They believe that we are approaching the rapture and this is a moment of deep religious significance. Barr in a speech at Notre Dame has also described his belief that militant secularists are destroying America. That irreligion and secular values are being forced on people of faith.

[00:22:58] Blake Melnick: Whatever evil Trump [00:23:00] does, he damages or destroys, at least he enables Barr, Pence, and Pompeo to save America from a far worse fate. If you're convinced we're living in the end times, then anything the President does can be forgiven. 

[00:23:16] Blake Melnick: I am afraid to speak out. 

[00:23:19] Blake Melnick: Fear, of course, is the most important reason any inhabitant of an authoritarian or totalitarian society does not protest or resign, even when the leader commits crimes, violates his official ideology, or forces people to do things that they know to be wrong. In extreme dictatorships, like Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia, people fear for their lives.

[00:23:43] Blake Melnick: In softer dictatorships, like East Germany after 1950, and Putin's Russia today, people fear losing their jobs or their apartments. Fear works as a motivation, even when violence is a memory rather than a reality. When I [00:24:00] was a student in Leningrad in the 1980s, some people still stepped back in horror when I asked for directions on the street in my accented Russian.

[00:24:09] Blake Melnick: No one was going to be arrested for speaking to a foreigner in 1984, but 30 years earlier, they might have been, and the cultural memory remained. In the United States of America, it's hard to imagine how fear could be a motivation for anybody. There are no mass murders of the regime's political enemies, and there never have been.

[00:24:30] Blake Melnick: Political opposition is legal. Free press and free speech are guaranteed in the Constitution. And yet, even in one of the world's oldest and most stable democracies, fear is a motive. The same former administration official who observed the importance of apocalyptic Christianity in Trump's Washington also told me, with grim disgust, that they are all scared.

[00:24:56] Blake Melnick: They are scared not of prison, the official said, but of being attacked [00:25:00] by Trump on Twitter. They are scared he will make up a nickname for them. They are scared that they will be mocked or embarrassed, like Mitt Romney has been. They are scared of losing their social circles, of being disinvited to parties.

[00:25:15] Blake Melnick: They are scared that their friends and supporters, and especially their donors, will desert them. John Bolton has his own super PAC, and a lot of plans on how he wants to use it. No wonder he resisted testifying against Trump. Former Speaker Paul Ryan is among the dozens , of House Republicans who have left Congress since the beginning of this administration in one of the most striking personnel turnovers in congressional history.

[00:25:44] Blake Melnick: They left because they hated what Trump was doing to their party and the country. Yet even after they left, they did not speak out. They're scared and yet they don't seem to know that this fear has precedence or that it could have [00:26:00] consequences. They don't know that similar waves of fear have helped transform other democracies into dictatorships. They don't seem to realize that the American Senate really could become the Russian Duma or the Hungarian parliament.

[00:26:16] Blake Melnick: A group of exalted men and women who sit in an elegant building with no influence and no power. Indeed, we are already much closer to that reality than many could ever have imagined. In February, many members of the Republican Party leadership, Republican senators, and people inside the administration used various versions of these rationales to justify their opposition to impeachment.

[00:26:43] Blake Melnick: All of them had seen the evidence that Trump had stepped over the line in his dealings with the president of the Ukraine. Just a month later, in March, the consequences of that decision became suddenly clear. After the U. S. and the world were plunged into crisis by a [00:27:00] coronavirus that had no cure, the damage done by the president's self focused, self dealing narcissism, his one true ideology, was finally visible. He led a federal response to the virus that was historically chaotic.

[00:27:15] Blake Melnick: The disappearance of the federal government was not a carefully planned transfer of power to the states, as some have tried to claim, or a thoughtful decision to use the talents of private companies. This was the inevitable result of a three year assault on professionalism, loyalty, competence, and patriotism.

[00:27:35] Blake Melnick: Tens of thousands of people have died, and the economy has been ruined. 

[00:27:40] Blake Melnick: This utter disaster was avoidable. If the Senate had removed the president by impeachment a month earlier, if the cabinet had evoked the 25th amendment as soon as Trump's unfitness became clear, if the anonymous off the record officials who knew of Trump's incompetence had [00:28:00] jointly warned the public, if they had not instead been so concerned about maintaining their proximity to power, if senators had not been scared of their donors, If Pence and Pompeo and Barr had not believed that God had chosen them to play special roles in this biblical moment, if any of these things had gone differently, then thousands of deaths and historic economic collapse might have been avoided.

[00:28:29] Blake Melnick: The price of collaboration in America has already turned out to be extraordinarily high. And yet, the movement down the slippery slope continues. Just as it did in so many occupied countries in the past. First, Trump's enablers accepted lies about the inauguration.

[00:28:49] Blake Melnick: Now they accept terrible tragedy and the loss of American leadership in the world. worse could follow. Come November, will they tolerate even [00:29:00] abet an assault on the electoral system? Open efforts to prevent postal voting, to shut polling stations, to scare people away from voting? Will they countenance violence as the president's social media fans incite demonstrators to launch physical attacks on State and City officials? Each violation of our Constitution and our civic peace gets absorbed, rationalized, and accepted by people who once upon a time knew better. If, following what is almost certain to be one of the ugliest elections in American history, Trump wins a second term, these people may well accept even worse.

[00:29:42] Blake Melnick: Unless, of course, they decide not to. When I visited Mary Ann Bertheler, She didn't think it was interesting to talk about collaboration in East Germany because everybody collaborated in East Germany. So I asked her about dissidents instead. [00:30:00] When all your friends, all your teachers, and all of your employers are firmly behind the system, how do you find the courage to oppose it?

[00:30:11] Blake Melnick: In her answer, Berthler resisted the use of the word courage. Just as people can adapt to corruption or immorality, she told me, they can slowly learn to object as well. The choice to become a dissident can easily be the result of a number of small decisions that you take.

[00:30:32] Blake Melnick: To absent yourself from the May Day Parade, for example, or not sing the words of the party hymn. And then, one day, you find yourself irrevocably on the other side. Often this process involves role models. You see people whom you admire, and you want to be like them.

[00:30:54] Blake Melnick: It can even be selfish. You want to do something for yourself, Berthler said, [00:31:00] to respect yourself. For some people, the struggle is made easier by their upbringing. Marco Martin's parents hated the East German regime. And so did he. His father was a conscientious objector. And so was he. As far back as the Weimar Republic, his great grandparents had been part of the anti communist left. And he had access to their books.

[00:31:26] Blake Melnick: In the 1980s, he refused to join the Free German Youth, the communist youth organization. And as a result, he could not go to university. He instead embarked on a vocational course to train to be an electrician after refusing to become a butcher. In his election training classes, one of the other students pulled him aside and warned him subtly that the Stasi was collecting information on him and said, it's not necessary that you tell me all the things you have in mind.

[00:31:55] Blake Melnick: He was eventually allowed to emigrate. In May 1989, just a few months before the [00:32:00] fall of the Berlin Wall.

[00:32:01] Blake Melnick: In America, we also have our Marianne Berthlers, our Marco Martins, people whose families taught them respect for the Constitution, who have faith in the rule of law, who believe in the importance of disinterested public service, who have values and role models from outside the world of the Trump administration.

[00:32:22] Blake Melnick: Over the past year, many such people have found the courage to stand up for what they believe. A few have been thrust into the limelight. Fiona Hill, an immigrant success story and a true believer in the American Constitution, was not afraid to testify at the House impeachment hearings. Nor was she afraid to speak out against Republicans who were pushing a false narrative of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.

[00:32:50] Blake Melnick: This is a fictional narrative. that has been perpetuated and propagated by Russian security services themselves, she said in her [00:33:00] congressional testimony. The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, another immigrant success story and another true believer of the American Constitution, also found the courage, first, to report on the President's improper telephone call with his Ukrainian counterpart, which Vindman had heard as a member of the National Security Council, and then to speak publicly about it.

[00:33:33] Blake Melnick: In his testimony, he made explicit reference to the values of the American political system. So different from those in the place where he was born. In Russia, he said, offering public testimony involving the president would surely cost me my life. But as an American citizen and public servant, I can live free of fear for mine and my family's safety.

[00:33:56] Blake Melnick: A few days after the Senate impeachment vote, [00:34:00] Vindman was physically escorted out of the White House by representatives of a vengeful president who did not appreciate. Vindman's hymn to American patriotism. Although retired Military Corps General John Kelly, the President's former Chief of Staff, apparently did.

[00:34:19] Blake Melnick: Vindman's behavior, Kelly said in a speech a few days later, was exactly what we teach them to do from cradle to grave. He went and told his boss what he had just heard. 

[00:34:30] Blake Melnick: But both Hill and Vindman had some important advantages. Neither had to answer to voters or to donors. Neither had prominent status in the Republican party. What would it take, by contrast, for Pence or Pompeo to conclude that the president bears responsibility for a catastrophic health and economic crisis?

[00:34:52] Blake Melnick: What would it take for Republican senators to admit to themselves that Trump's loyalty cult is destroying the country they claim to love? [00:35:00] What would it take for their aides and subordinates to come to the same conclusion? To resign and to campaign against the president? What would it take, in other words, for someone like Lindsey Graham to behave like Wolfgang Leonard? 

[00:35:16] Blake Melnick: If, as Stanley Hoffman wrote, the honest historian would have to speak of collaborationisms, because the phenomena comes in so many variations. The same is true of dissidents, which probably should be described as dissidences. People can suddenly change their minds because of spontaneous intellectual revelations like the one Wolfgang Leonhard had when walking into his fancy dining room with its white tablecloths and three course meals.

[00:35:47] Blake Melnick: They can also be persuaded by outside events, rapid political changes. For example, awareness that the regime has lost its legitimacy is part of what made Harold [00:36:00] Yeager an obscure. And until that moment, completely loyal East German border guard. Decide on the night of November 9th, 1989 to lift the gates and let his fellow citizens walk through the Berlin Wall.

[00:36:13] Blake Melnick: A decision that led over the next days and months to the end of East Germany itself. Yeager's decision was not planned. It was a spontaneous response to the fearlessness of the crowd. Their will was so great. He said years later of those demanding to cross into West Berlin. There was no other alternative than to open the border.

[00:36:35] Blake Melnick: But these things are all intertwined and not easy to disentangle. The personal, the political, the intellectual, and the historical combine differently within every human brain. And the outcomes can be unpredictable.Leonhard's sudden n revelation may have been building for years, perhaps since his mother's arrest.

[00:36:56] Blake Melnick: Jaeger was moved by the grandeur of the historical moment [00:37:00] on that night in November. But he also had more petty concerns. He was annoyed at his boss who had not given him clear instructions about what to do.could some similar combination of the petty and the political ever convince Lindsey Graham that he has helped lead his country down a blind alley?

[00:37:19] Blake Melnick: Perhaps a personal experience could move him. A prod from someone who represents his former value system. An old Air Force buddy say, whose life has been damaged by Trump's reckless behavior or a friend from his hometown? Perhaps it requires a mass political event.

[00:37:38] Blake Melnick: When voters begin to turn, maybe Graham will turn with them arguing as Yeager did that their will was so great. There was no other alternative. At some point, after all, the calculus of conformism will begin to shift. It will become awkward and uncomfortable to continue supporting Trump first, [00:38:00] especially as Americans suffer from the worst recession in living memory and die from the coronavirus in numbers higher than much of the rest of the world. Or perhaps the only anecdote is time. In due course, historians will write the story of our era and draw lessons from it, just as we write the history of the 1930s or the 1940s. The Milosz's and the Hoffmans of the future will make their judgments with the clarity of hindsight. They will see more clearly than we can the path that led the U.

[00:38:31] Blake Melnick: S.in to a Historic c loss of international influence, into economic catastrophe, into political chaos of a kind we haven't experienced since the years leading up to the Civil War. Then maybe Graham, along with Pence and Pompeo, McConnell, and a whole host of lesser figures will understand what he has enabled.

[00:38:54] Blake Melnick: In the meantime, I leave anyone who has the bad luck to be in public life at this moment [00:39:00] with a final thought from Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, who was a member of the wartime Polish underground, a prisoner of both the Nazis and the Stalinists, and then finally the Foreign Minister in two Polish democratic governments.

[00:39:14] Blake Melnick: Late in life, he lived to be 93, he summed up the philosophy that had guided him through all of these tumultuous political changes. It was not idealism that him, or big ideas. It was this. It's worth being decent. Just try to be decent. Whether you were decent, that's what will be remembered, for what it's worth.  

[00:39:43] Blake Melnick: This concludes our two part episode, Making Sense of It All, with Anne Applebaum and her essay, History Will Judge the Complicit. Good art, like good conversation and lively debate, encourages change, even subtly, in the minds of the audience, the reader, and the [00:40:00] participants.

[00:40:01] Blake Melnick: It causes us to reflect, alter our perspective, and to think differently. Applebaum's essay certainly did that for me in terms of how I view what's going on in the U. S. and Canada. Cause and effect. I've always believed that leadership emerges in context. For example, Winston Churchill was less than a stellar leader during peacetime.

[00:40:21] Blake Melnick: But during the Second World War, we couldn't have asked for a better leader to rally the troops and keep citizens hopes alive. Mr. Trudeau's tenure as Prime Minister of Canada is one characterized by social reform. Did he take it too far? Well, I guess history will be the judge, but Canadians by and large thought so.

[00:40:42] Blake Melnick: Many felt that he focused too much on social reform at the expense of everything else. Canada's identity, our economy, foreign relations, etc. Much like his father, Mr. Trudeau consolidated power at the federal level at the expense of provincial autonomy. And if I had one [00:41:00] complaint about Mr. Trudeau, it was his overzealous attempts to whitewash elements of Canadian history.

[00:41:06] Blake Melnick: His statement to the New York Times that Canada has no core identity and is becoming a new kind of country not defined by our history or European national origins, but by a pan cultural heritage really bothered me because it's revisionist and simply untrue. In the almost five years since I started this podcast, I've had many conversations with frustrated Canadians.

[00:41:29] Blake Melnick: And more often than not, they express their frustrations with the following comments. I used to be really proud of my country. I believed we stood for something. We had respect on the world stage as peacekeepers and guardians of democratic ideals. We were skilled negotiators, often called upon to settle disputes.

[00:41:50] Blake Melnick: We helped found the United Nations. Yes, we embraced being a mosaic rather than a melting pot, but not at the expense of our distinct cultural heritage and [00:42:00] our pioneer spirit. However, since Mr. Trump has taken power, literally, in America, we are seeing an amazing revival of Canadian patriotism and an articulation of the ideals that led to the formation of the Dominion of Canada.

[00:42:16] Blake Melnick: I even saw an article recently about the Empire Loyalists and their contributions to the Canadian identity. And Mr. Trudeau, he has risen to the challenge and become the leader we need at this time. And I really want to thank him for this. He's demonstrating good leadership, distinctly Canadian, fair, balanced, and yet tough.

[00:42:38] Blake Melnick: He is remembering our history. and shouting it from the rooftops, metaphorically speaking. And the provincial leaders, for the most part, are waking up as well, and are laying aside their partisan politics to focus on Canada and the interests of all Canadians. The pride is palatable. As Anne Applebaum says in her essay, sometimes it [00:43:00] takes an event to get people to remember who they are and what they stand for.

[00:43:06] Blake Melnick: Make no mistake, we are facing a potential crisis the likes of which I haven't seen in my lifetime. There will inevitably be some tough times ahead. We need to focus on our economy to become more independent and autonomous. We need to eliminate our provincial trade barriers, both for financial reasons and for the sake of unity.

[00:43:27] Blake Melnick: We need to immediately expand our alliances while attempting to maintain good relationships with our American neighbors. And we need to help them weather the attack on their democracy and the man who would be king. We need to regain our pride in being Canadian and continue to promote peace and prosperity to nations around the world.

[00:43:49] Blake Melnick: This is what it means to be Canadian. For what it's worth. [00:44:00]