>> that all start tonight at 7:20 p.m. eastern here on c-span2's booktv. >> good evening, everybody and welcome to politics and prose to our line new live streaming service. i'm lissa muscatine what of the co-owners a politics and prose along with my husband brad graham, and on behalf of our entire staff we welcome you to tonight speaketh which we all have been so excited about amateur all of you are as well. let me just say a few housekeeping things at the beginning. the volumes at the bottom of

your screen purchase button. we really hope you will purchase this book tonight from her website. you can get to by clicking on that button and we are we are very excited these books have signed books so to order from a website you a signed book plate and a of the book. i also probably don't need to tell you this, you probably already probably already know this but we like all retail businesses are really doing our best to stay above water and keeping able to bring you the programs and books and things that you're accustomed to getting to politics and prose. these are rushed times. it takes a lot of resources events so if you feel so inclined and are able to there's also donate button at the bottom of the page and we would be so grateful, eternally grateful for anything that you can spare to up us out. every penny counts and we thank you so much for your willingness to be generous in that way.

the other thing i want to mention is that there is an question but at the bottom of your screen. you can type your question by clicking on the button. you can also vote on the questions that others have asked you to see a question you mow want to answer. i know masha and value will try to get to as many as possible. we you a firm cut off. masha is going on -- some going to get going and you will be able to hear from her in a moment. i just would like to say masha is a burdett politics and prose number of times for quite a few of her books. we are always delighted to have them at the store. we're glad to have them online, and for many reasons but i think right now he can't think of a time when we have needed the more than we do at this truly terrifying moment in american history. my hope is will be discussing

the latest book called "surviving autocracy." it was written just, just finished as this coronavirus receiving hating and before event of the last week but masha was able to not only sneak in a new epilogue, she is able to go back and rework quite a bit of the work. i know that was probably an a nr impossible task but she pulled it off and so tonight you be able to hear our most up-to-date ideas, but many of which are already in the book as well. having masha gessen talk about the subject, there's the best way to think about is what a "new york times" reporter or book reviewer said a few days ago, which was when it comes to autocracy you need to hear and listen to masha gessen, and that's the way we feel about this new book. so we're really looking forward to the conversation. i would just tell you a little bit back about a her back vacan don't know. having grown up in the soviet

union having immigrated as a teen nude, masha look back to russia to report on the rise of vladimir putin. she moved to new york permanently in 2013. obviously targeted by putin being here. she has been a contributor to the new yorker, has written ten previous books, has won more awards than i could possibly lives for, including the national book award for 2017 and continues to be an extraordinarily important voice explaining to us about how fascism takes root, what it looks like and feels like an edible prepare for an prevented. we are also incredibly fortunate to have dahlia lithwick with us today, a senior editor at slate she writes two collins. she writes -- columns, one is

called patient what is it called? the supreme court -- anyway, she also has a podcast that is biweekly that is on the law and the supreme court called amicus. she's also written books and as tons of the warts are, to her in journalism hope you're better column a few years a few days ago which was a wonderful examination and exploration of why the purchase of the past week are different and so many ways from the protest of the past few years and maybe that's a hopeful sign. i hope so. we're so happy to have these incredible mines, incredible speakers come people such humanity and passion and just raw intelligence help guide us through this moment. so please join me in welcoming masha gessen and dahlia lithwick. >> thank you. >> thank you so much. this is a treat.

masha, i've been telling masha figures even before we met, i felt like i could hear you right in my ear buds all the time. i felt like your voice with the voice in my head, while that can be true, then after 2016, the day after the election i was like yes, everything that you said. you have been in my head and this book is fantastic. congratulations. >> thank you. i may be in your head and your imagination but you are in my head every two weeks for the podcast. >> thank you. i want to stop asking you one of the things i've always, your writing to this idea don't normalize, don't normalize. there's not going to be a rice bag firelight right in the book. i know you massively updated the book for the covid era i don't

know you but the chance update in the last week for the protest era. i wonder if we could start from this really thorny question of i feel like you are a plan invoice like people it's happening, it's happening and you are not seeing it. does anything that's happened in the sort of time since folks have taken to the street and since we've seen a militarized policing and a real resistance to militarized policing make you think that kind of slow, inexorable normalization you are so afraid of mighty been arrested in the last week or two? >> i don't know. i'm actually -- no. why -- i think the protests are amazing and i think you have written about them beautifully,

but the rhetorical reaction in cities and states and the actual police reaction makes me think that things are really, really horrible. a couple things. one is the way the mayors of minneapolis and new york, and an not mentioning all the other people, the mayors of minneapolis and new york, two politicians who who are not only democrats but when on his progressive democrats, as far to the left of the democratic party, immediately went to the outside agitator trope when talking about the protests. now, the reason that is so dangerous is that, it's this idea and it is very, very strong in american political culture and is gotten stronger with covid where we see outsiders of these vectors of disease, but

this idea that certain bodies don't have to be a right in certain place, that you don't have to act politically in the place where your currently located, which is on the face of it an insane idea. you act politically where you are. that is the essence of politics. the fact that this is a matter of bipartisan consensus that you can unite -- deny the people to act politically, or talking about whether you agree with the way their acting politically or just disagree with the. budget cut off at the source. that is terrifying. the other thing is just actual policing, the disproportion brutal response on the part of the police the lethal flaunting

of the health guidelines joining the pandemic. in the gratuitous curfews, it's now a matter of degree, the disagreement between the progressive mayor of new york and the president of this country who is i don't know, performing fascism. they disagree on the extent to which they stage a military response to these protest. finally the last thing that terrifies me is the "new york times" position to publish the op-ed on the op-ed pages. which marks it as, , for those f you don't know, the republican senator tom cotton wrote an op-ed which the "new york times" to publish this op-ed marks it as part of the fear of legitimate political conversation.

there are a lot of things that "new york times" thinks are not part of the legitimate political conversation. for example, the essay that gave birth to this book. that was deemed alarmist by the "new york times." was not part of the covid conversation. jason stanley just tweeted he has been trying, who wrote a book called how fascism works, he has been trying to submit op-ed to the op-ed page of fascism and they've been turned down. they are seen as marginal to the conversation but this idea that you should sing in the military to respond to protest was judged to be mainstream in the conversation. >> i'm glad you're talking about language and i think it's too the word fascism, comparisons to

nazism, the word even authoritarian, tyranny, all those words that have forced a meeting. we know what they mean. those are words were not meant to use and at the same time and again this is something you've been saying for a long time, fanciful silly words have come to be in common parlance which makes no sense and what of things you're been worried about and you talk about in the book is this sort of destabilization so that they can use goza from being, lies and breitbart two things all trump doesn't like him seeing cnn. i wanted to talk to you, obviously this is been such a concern to me as a legal writer because if words have no meaning, then law has no meaning and certainly one of the things i've been trying to understand is how you a fixed meaning to a president who so slippery with his language. i wanted to talk about some of the words even at the last

weeks, masha, the notion of opening up the city's. where going to open up. we all grasp that so it means something because donald trump used it and member for weeks, let's not use that opening up. doesn't mean what you think it means. it means what trump wants it to be. even more pernicious the last couple of days, antifa is getting tormented in something that antifa is emphatically not. looters is come to me protesters. i wonder if there's a way in which we can't use words like fascism or tyranny, that's to load and troubling for mainstream media, but we can happily appropriate and start using these words that mean nothing and we're very comfortable with that. i don't know if the ease with which we all just started talking at and keeping the last

couple of weeks as of that means what donald trump thinks it means is part of this trend you are seeing right now you say there is this dualism where he turns words into gibberish or every opposite but i'm thinking we're in a quite honestly our rule of law crisis. we are appropriating all this language. >> he has been incredibly talented at dominating, in other words, as he is really taken a liking to as dominating the conversation. we saw this in quieter times. we saw how much he managed to shift the conversation on immigration and that's something i write about in the book, but again a matter of degree. terms like deterrence became part of our mainstream language while concentration camps couldn't be a part of language.

it was marked as extreme when, in fact, it was based on reality. he has been winning the language war and he has certain talents here he is certain talents as a performer in the way he uses language as one of his talents. he has a real sort of instinct for inverting language that has to do with relationships of power. for example, when he uses words like witch hunt or conspiracy and he positions himself as the victim. the most powerful man in the world cannot be the victim of witch hunt, he just can't. but he completely owns that. he also uses words to mean nothing. that is a real problem for us as citizens and for us as a journalist because when the

president uses words that mean nothing, it still means something because it has consequences. so we have to cover it but we can't cover it at face value. and we lose. there is no right answer, there's no way to solve this conundrum. i think of journalism in the time of trump as -- it feels awful little less awful if were incredibly functional and thoughtful in the way that we handle language. >> one of the things i given you been saying this for three years and it's a through line in the book is, and this is crushing corn institutionalist like me who relies way too much on the courts, but your institutions are not coming to save you. you say again and again

americans are so almost childlike in their belief that there were guardrails and it will help us and we have courts and we have the senate and we are public education and with our free press and all these things will kick into high gear and don't get us out of this. again, it's very, very distressing for some like me who once believed that courts and journalism were going to get us through this. you have been pretty consistently correct those things can be corroded. i wonder if one of my concerns when i wrote them down in urban at 3 a.m. in the morning, one of things i worry about is utter childlike -- that intellectual say was i different cimino today that as long as the registering voters and ten in line it's all going to work out and i thought even that there's a certain

amount of really magical thinking about how to extract ourselves from this. i'm not nearly as confident as it was six months ago that they going to be a free and for election. i guess i would add, this thisa three-part question but i would just add how are we going to know it wasn't a free offer him the people in court voted? you describe come you can have a lot of elections that are not election and i don't know that we are sophisticated enough to distinguish. >> that's a a huge question. first of all let's start with the institutions. actually listening to podcasts and reading but especially listen to your podcast has helped me think through the conditions a lot of institutions -- [inaudible] i remember your podcast about the travel ban. the first travel ban, and the

ways in which the mobilization of civil society really spurred courts to action. this is something we don't think about often or don't think about enough. it's that institution that are not fixed in a backing. they do not work on their own. they are entirely dependent on all these enabling conditions and they are also dependent on the actors that the come up against. or that act through them. donald trump is an actor and the way he treats the court, the way he treats the law is way a real estate developer in new york treat city hall and its regulation. he sees it as an obstacle and something to get around. correct me if i'm wrong, because you know much about this than i do, but i think the american court system is not actually -- i'm not sure you can make a

system that doesn't, that takes into account the possibility of bad faith and still continues to function. when he comes up with travel ban 2.0 when the first travel ban is in the court and then 3.0, and they're all are all written in way a new york state will developer would try to get around here you want us to call this alley a road so that we have the illusion? all right, we'll call it a road, whatever. that's that have courts were designed to function. the faith that america that institutions, i call it childlike. i would call it religious. it's faith. it's not believe. it's not reliance. it's not a meaningful relationship. it's a relationship that doesn't

take into account that we all in this country create the conditions in which these institutions auction, or fail to function. as to the question on the election, i tried to thread a needle in the book because i had a problem with the idea that donald trump is an anomaly or solely an anomaly in american politics. and yet i also have real trouble with any kind of determinist narrative. my argument he was predetermined and anomalous. he is a a quantum leap from a running start. the electoral system has been eroding for a very, very long time. the money in politics which has

grown in significant and the sheer amount of money over the last couple of decades is what allowed donald trump to happen. so when you ask how are going to know whether we have a free and fair election, well, when did we have free and fair elections? what are free and fair elections? so i'm just avoiding that whole question altogether. what i would rather as is their sole chance we could get rid of donald trump to electoral means? i'm using this terminology in the book and we can come back to this later of the autocratic attempt which is the state in establishing autocracy where it is still reversible through electoral means. so i'm assuming for the purposes of this discussion we're still in the attempt stage of autocracy so november in that sense is incredibly meaningful. what i most worried about is

that he is very clearly laid the groundwork for disregarding the results of the election if he loses. >> that's the one. that's the thing that worries me. both the language, the increasingly prevalent language about voter fraud and millions of illegals voting, and now i think this campaign, and it's really starting to be well-funded and a lot of dark money, and bill barnett talking about the vote by mail option, which as we know as function perfectly well in many states in many jurisdictions. that might be the only way people are going to vote if there's a second weight in november. and i think this absolutely devastating preemptive effort that bill barr has just picked up this week to discredit voting

by mail which for many, many americans might be the only way, part of which are describing come at a don't want us to wake up and october and realize that we kind of didn't protect the franchise. i love what you're saying because i think what you're saying is this is not an institution of voting. this is us creating and constructing voting in the pandemic which is something where to pay attention to. we all have to tend that garden. i wanted my folks were going to take questions in just a minute -- remind folks. put them in the box and no read them for masha but before i let you go, i want to ask how i think what to ask one quick question and one heart a question that i will stop. my quick question is i love you catch this tendency.

again, at credulous tendency to think that donald trump is playing chess. he changed the subject from covid to race again. he is the liberally tweeting in order to take our attention off. i really struggle with that. i don't think he is playing three-dimensional chess. i think he can barely play hungry hungry hippo. i don't know that he is the svengali we all believe he is. you made the same point about putin in the book, that we all think putin is this devilish, devious puppetmaster who's controlling everything. he's just a kind of a lot closer to trump than we think, and to think you brought that out in the book to say without about robert mueller in this way. we really want to believe that some is in charge of all the things. and i think certainly one of my

takeaways from this book is nobody is in charge of all the things. we are in charge of all the things. but i wonder if you have a working theory, masha, for why there is of this tendency to assume that just because somebody has power or his wealthy is famous they must be an absolute mastermind? >> well, because it is too serious to contemplate the alternative. the only thing that is more scary than being in a bus that is driven by a deranged lunatic as a bus that is being driven by nobody. that's -- we're on that bus. we have a deranged lunatic in the driver's seat really it is a bus driven by nobody. i had one sad and one somewhat happy moment for november 8 of 2016.

11 was that donald trump one, and i had been convinced he is going to win since july. the other was that i i had wrin this book in 2012 about the rise of vladimir putin, and it was pretty well reviewed but the one criticism a lot of you said was i portrayed as being an educated, i'm curious, just basically incompetent and not very smart. a lot of people wrote you don't get to be president of russia -- now you know. you can get to be president if you're an idiot and she can continue to be present if you are an idiot. i think we like to believe that the worst, or it's not that we like to believe. we basically believe the worst moments in human history were created by evil geniuses. because to think that we just

stumbled into them, that we gave agency over to the most emotionally appealing clown, i mean, that's so demoralizing and awful, but that's what happened. >> before i take ideas questions, and folks i will implore you to put them in a little box of your screen that says ask a question and not in the chat box because it is way beyond my capacity to look at two boxes. i want as to this journalistic question that is plagued me. i have probably written some version of, but, and you talk so much about how we are doing journalism wrong and how we are paying attention in the wrong ways another tweets, we're racing around to follow the tweets. i don't dispute any of that.

after charlottesville as you know we lived in charlottesville when the nazis marched in 2017. my then i guess like 11-year-old son said here's the thing went nazis marched through your town. if you pay attention to them they win. if you ignore them, also they win. and and i kind of come to thinkf that as my mantra for the entire trump era. which is as journalists we just don't have the option to tune him out. we don't have an option to say the tweets are distracting, i'm going to pretend he's not tweeting, that we're going to shoot at looters. so how do we navigate, and another you thought about this more than i think anyone, how do you navigate someone who seems to come out and you said that the very beginning, he has commandeered the english language and we have all fallen in line. how do we as a journalist do this kind of split screen above review and paying attention and

watching the slow denigration and deterioration of democracy democratic institutions without centering this person who is -- >> i do think of it has harm reduction. it's going to be awful, the matter what we do. .. i think publishing the op-ed is contributing. that's an easy one. but i also think that

covering trump in the ways that are traditional for american journalism and i should probably say it's easy for me to say. i'm a columnist. i'm a columnist at the new yorker which hasn't really taken a very clear stance from the very beginning of the trump presidency and i would argue is in a position to take up a behemoth like the new york times which is a difficult large ship to steer and forwhich there would be institutional losses in giving up some of the foundational values like neutrality . and what jay rosen in the media called the view from nowhere. so those are, but when you cover trump in the view from nowhere. when you cover trump

statements or when you cover trumps lies in a neutral manner . for example testing the larger problem was of whether governors disagree which is when you allow for that kind of call for civil institution to appear in your pages when you're contributing tothe harm . how do you not contribute to the harm is locating yourself in politics, it's giving up neutrality and the pretense of the view from nowhere . and then you try to figure it out and you make mistakes and you write stuff that you will regret but maybe some stuff that will mean things and

bring things into focus in a way that political neutral coveragedoesn't . >> is a good answer. thank you, that helps. i want to ask some of our audience questions and there's a bunch so i want to start with john. asks this very good question that i probably should have opened with witches how do you define fascism? >> i don't actually use the word fascism in the book. i did use it in the column that i published i guess yesterday. so the reason that i didn't use the word fascism in the book is cause i don't think it's a very tight word. fascism if you look up the dictionary definition is an autocratic system that upholds the supremacy of one race over others and brutally suppresses dissent.

that actually describes a lot of places in the world right now . so i tried to avoid using it. the reason i felt it was important to use it yesterday was because trump's performance was very pointed. what he's performing right now is fascism, if nothing else. it's exactly that but i don't know if he is capable of conflict probably not but he's chosen all the symbols. visual and linguistic fascism. >> interesting question, do you think the left in the us has blind spots about its own role in contributing to the rise of autocracy in its own turn to its own form of authoritarian thinking . >> i don't really know what the left in the us is exactly area are we sometimes when we

talk about the left we talk about the democratic party, sometimes we talk about an actual leftist centrism and activists who are very much marginalized in american politics. people that we call leftin this country we would not call left anywhere else in the world . but some think that is a question about the democratic party and i think the democratic party failed to see what it was dealing with. i think that the democratic party in general is wedded to the idea of politics and the idea of what makes a good candidate, the idea that getting votes is a matter of sort of adding up all the columns in your excel table of which states the vp comes from or appeals to.

which states the presidential nominee can deliver. but mostly it's central appeal is we know how to do politics andwe been at this a long time and we got a good resume . that is not enough and we've known is not enough for a long time . we certainly have known since 2008. but even it hints at a vision of the future work magic. although i must message of hope, so it's not really articulate . there was no vision that was really offered. it was just the possibility of vision and that was enough to mobilize voters in the way that was completely benefited for the democraticparty among

others . and that lesson was completely lost and then we get somebody like trump who is the exact oppositekind of politician, he's a politician who appeals to the imaginary past . he addresses people's fears by saying i'm going to transport you back to a time when these things felt safer which is a kind of picture of a white racist united states that isn't going to change. and the democratic party completely misses the point of that emotional appeal. and basically just supposes that a good resume to that deeply emotional allure i think that's a mistake at the party continues to make. the only way to beat trump about box and anywhere else is to offer a vision of a

glorious future to counter his vision of theimaginary past . >> you have some sense that joe biden's speech yesterday was some version of that, was him version of trying to force a narrative about empathy and compassion and repair that was doing what you just described in mark. >> i think he is headed in that direction. i don't think this is unnatural for him, he's the kind of politician who has that kind of possibility, that potential in him but the entire machinery is geared for something entirely different. so does he have the imagination to actually had in direction and embrace it fully west and mark i really hope so. >> i would also maybe if i could interpose the view from dahlia land, one of the other failures of the left,

whatever that means, accept your definition is just an unwillingness to acknowledge that part of what contributes to authoritarianism is what sandy levinson at the university of texas called a constitutional hardball so so many of the cost to the arguments i'm hearing are if we take back the senate, let's reinstate a filibuster, let's go back to all of the norms of blue slips and everything and i think it's almost maps right on to where you started where there's an unwillingness to say we want to be fair and there's this virtue in sort of going back to old norms even though those norms themselves are part of what has rightly or wrongly dumped us into this land. in other words i think it's a myopic view that we can just get back to something that is not necessarily helping.

>> yes, i think that the democratic party has or the left as their own version of the imaginary past as those things that were fine before trump came along and i hope it helps defraud that illusion a little bit but i think that's part of what you're talking about is a fundamental misunderstanding of what politics is. politics is not policy, not the blue slip, politics is not the procedure of getting nominees through the defense, all those things are instruments of politics but that's not politics. politics is how we live together in a city, a state, a country. politics is what'shappening in the streets right now . donald tripp is trump is not policy. >> here's a question that i've seen in the chat twice and not i'm seeing in the

questions . and i know you write about this so powerfully. i'm just going to read it and let you go. could you comment on or discuss the role of enablers in helping an autocrat to maintain power in our present situation, that would be the entire establishment of the gop who have sold their souls just to hang onto power how is that going to be countered when nothing moves them and maybe a good example today is lisa murkowski saying it was really that trump was threatening to bring the military police into the park but i have to think about whether i could support him. just this constant performance and you describe it in the book as it's an audience of one, this was brett kavanaugh but what do you do to dissuade that

notion? >> let me get another example, there's no many but i was really struck by the defense secretary's comments that he didn't know that trump was going to lafayette square when he followed him and i thought really? this is going to be the secretary of defense is the fence that he followed the president blindly into with no idea where he was going? but it's the casualness with which they give the responsibility, accountability, agency is the casualness with which yes, they performed for trump and what in the book is this problem audience where i think the country has been split into 2 different realities, into two different audiences and in a democracy politicians perform for the electorate .

and i don't mean perform any kind of purge or in a sense, their statements are just to the electorate. their actions are just to the electorate . they are accountable to it, that's their audience. in an autocracy they perform for the autocrats. it's an audience of one. and that's what we've seen the republican party do over and over again. to me the most memorable example is the party following the passage of the tax cuts. trumps signal legislative achievement where orrin hatch who has been in congress for 250 years says you are the best president i have ever seen. and another senator said thank you for letting us have the best president and it was this adulation and it was

shocking to me not just because they were performing for him but because of this language and this kind of posture that i thought just took decades to cultivate in autocracy and it had been a year. trump had been in office for 11 months at that point and it turns out these people who used to have a public were so malleable and so willing to just fall over completely. so yes, i don't know what to do about that. i think the only thing that can movethem at this point is fear . so they're obviously driven by the fear of being on the wrong side of trump. trump will, being on the long side of trump or republican

politicians being thrown out of office. so is there a possibility that anyone of them would fear that being on the right side of trump will cost them their office? i don't think that's very likely . >> here's another apocalyptic question, there are a lot of apocalyptic questions and this one says imagine it's november, trump has been reelected and looking backward, what is the thing we didn't do that we should have done. i think that i don't know if you have insights into how to reverse engineer a victory that may or may not happen do you have some sense of what we should be doing and maybei would marry that to there are a couple questions about that institution . what can we do if we sort of given up on institutions? where are we left to work? where is the work?

>> i don't think i would marry that question to that other level of speculation. i usually try not to engage in the speculative questions because i think the work of journalists is to describe what we actually can see now and not forget the future but it's so intelligently asked that it's almost about to present. i think that if we lose, if trump is reelected, it's because we were imaginative enough and it's because we didn't, because the democrats didn't nominate a person or people who could carry a vision of the future. who could seek the language of ideals and language of aspiration. or maybe they could but didn't. if there's a way to reverse

the autocratic attempt, i'm convinced that the only way. >> now i'm going to ask you the institutions question. which is something that i think about myself. my version of this question is at what point do you give up on the court but this is a broader question which i think we've seen in all these institutions including the press, given this historic fate that we have in american institutions, the thinking is always work within the system , effectuate change institutions are being, are being guided bybad-faith actors . what's the best way for citizens to actually make a difference. >> i don't know. i am, i think we, there's so many things that we need to do and we need to stop depending on institutions

quite so much that we need to stop depending on other people. we need to get involved in politics. or that to happen, we need to have local media and one of the things that just concerned me the most and break my heart the most is that we work in a crisis of local media which means a crisis of local policy. you can't have politics without actual living breathing journalists who are right there to witness of politics. you can have journalism without politics but youcan't have politics without journalism . and so we're in a crisis of local media before the coronavirus. and now this economic disaster has hit local media in ways that we are, we still have to take in but it's just

a catastrophe. and we are not able to reconstituteourselves politically . so until we figure out new ways of having journalism. and that, i concur down that rabbit hole for a very long time but briefly we have to stop leaving the public sphere to profit-making corporations. that have no incentive to actually facilitate our politics. >> here's a couple of questions about social media and where. and about media bubbles . and i'm going to try and kind of an interesting time must in all into maybe two questions.and i know you write really pointedly about the use of twitter but the easy version of the question is should his twitter account just besuspended ?

>> i don't know that his twitter account should be suspended . i'm really happy that twitter finally did something but i think it's a fault line in a disaster situation that we have now which is that we, with some exceptions notably with the exception of elizabeth warren, we haven't seen allocations really thought meaningfully about regulating social media. and i am afraid that the way this round of war between trump and twitter has set us back in terms of that conversation that had barely been started . what i mean is that in a

social media, the social media have to be regulated but they've been able to convince everybody and it's very easy to convince the american public that they should self regulate. because we actually think that everything is a self operating operation in the public sphere and the social networks which are owned by shareholders and in some cases not even by shareholders but whose only incentive is to make money that somehow they will self regulate in the public interest without any accountability . and for them, when we see a little of self regulation and trump responds by essentially making a call and the promise to finally have the federal government regulate the social networks which naturally will call forth a counter reaction though we will end up withouthaving any kind of , not only not having but not even being able to possibly have meaningful conversations about relating

social networks which is so necessary. >> so this is the ontological question of this, ontological version of this question which is what do we do about the fact that the bubbles, the media bubbles are so complete now. this sort of self reinforcing regaling me, the idea that what is true on the other side is de facto false and i can read all day and know nothing that is true. what do we do as a policy polity about the fact that we have two utterly different realities and not even i think the language to find our way back to something that looks like what you describe is true.

>> we treat it as a political problem. to make up newrules and we like really new rules. we figure out how we have media , figure out how we fund it publicly and figure out how journalists can report on local politics and can position themselves in local politics. and those of us who are actually journalists, keep taking stock of how we use and how we can return meeting to our profession. >> here's the question that i sort of contest that i wondered myself. what is the symbol of the red line, of the red stripe and at the front of the book? >> i think that different people have seen different things and cover . the designer said that he sees it as a radical break, as a kind of, i think you can

read it as a break in time or also read it as a break between two audiences, two realities. for me as a seeker it has the connotation of a russian expression that the red thread runs through something means that something is so ominous in the conversation in reality and it's the most important thing that needs to be centered. and i was in conversation with snyder who reminded me that particularly sensitive documents in soviet archives are usually covered, they usually have a red line through them like that so these are also the thingsthat are possible . >> i think there's a whole bunch of just very anxious questions . that are a variation on the theme of what happens if trump loses and refuses to step down.

what happens if the election ends with violence and rioting on the street and armed militias. i guess that there's just, it seems to me a lot of listeners are just wanting to hear what your view is if we get there. have we tipped over into the autocracy that your warning about? >> i modern and making predictionsand what i can say is i'm scared . i think that we are finally darting to realize that this is not a perfect design system that will withstand all attempts on its beautiful conceptions of self.

if we fail to maintain it, if we fail to look after it a deeply imperfect system. that is the closest thing that we have known to democracy and if we fail to look after it it will crumble and fail and someone can come in with a sledgehammer. and smash it to pieces. >> and yet the word is called surviving autocracy. i think that there some part of you that thinks or number it's an openquestion . >> i think any crisis and not everyone thinks that, we know any crisis is a moment of opportunity. i think we have certainly seen that during the trump presidency and we've seen it during the coronavirus pandemic and we've seen it in the last few days, this these ideas that seemed marginal income very quickly

assimilated and spread and that's a huge political policy possibility. will we be able to ride that political possibility intothe future ? it's possible but that's not a question to you, that's a question to all of us. and it's not just a question for november, it's a question about right now. what are we doing to make sure that we come out of this in january 2021? >> okay. done, are you back yet? i think we lost dahlia, she may be reconnecting but we know marcia has to run off so

youcan go from this to msnbc and hear more from marcia this evening . i want to you to know i have lost the names of dahlias supreme court dispatches in jurisprudence. also he has a book coming out eventually, weighing justice. we youplease come and do an event with us and masha, thank you . you are, we turn to you. we now have turned to you for many years . you are a dose of reality and a dose of insight that we just count on so much. i know you've got many more books and you and i hope you will do events with us for years to come. thank you all for joining us tonight. we had a huge audience area purchased masha's book. you will get a fine booklet with it and you can do that on the link at the bottom of the screen. it's an important book and you need to read it and get it for other people and we

need to get it out there. and for now, we just thank you all for joining. after the event at your next event, you've been going all daylong all of you be well be well read . >> thank you. good night. >> here's a look at books being published this week, historian john meacham offers a collection of thomas jefferson's writings on how to be a good citizen in the hands of the people . incharter schools and their enemies , economist thomas sold counters arguments against the use of charter school area and guardian foreign correspondent luke harding reports that russia is waging a covert war against the west in shadow state. also being published this week in red david sharma provided a history of russian interference in foreign elections. university of chicago law professor eric pozner offers his thoughts on how america can deal with demagogues in the demagogues playbook. and in a bear and balance

heather lundy recounts her election to the state assembly in haines alaska and provides an inside look at local politics. by these titles this coming week wherever books are sold and watch for many of the authors in the near future on book tv on c-span2. >> i'm jim and welcome to my aei conversation with avidly. that is the award-winning and best-selling author of numerous books , many of which are on my bookshelf at home by the way including the evolution of everything and the rational object. there is new book the primary focus of our conversation is howinnovation works . and why it flourishes in freedom. he's also been a member of the house of lords, well done red it's good to chat with you today. >> thanks jim it's greatto be with you . >> i've noticed doing events inma