We just talked live with scholar of fascism Ruth Ben-Ghiat about the strange position Americans find themselves in right now. On the one hand, the degree of change the United States has gone through since January is more like what you’d expect after a coup or revolution than what other elected autocrats have been able to accomplish. But on the other hand, most Americans have been unwilling to join in, the press — threatened as it is — has managed to keep the pressure on Donald Trump, and protests and resistance keep growing. Ben-Ghiat talked to us about:
Trump’s personalist foreign policy, and why the attacks on Venezuelan boats, the negotiations for “peace” in Ukraine and Gaza, and meddling in Argentina are part of a holistic attempt to discredit any form of democratic justice, domestic or international
How Trump has set out to reduce America to a regional power in a multipolar world — a strategy designed to benefit leaders like presidents Xi and Putin and transform international relations into an exchange between strongmen rather than between peoples
How bipartisan failure to participate in the ICC set us on the path to Trump’s overturning of the international order, and why this needs to change if the U.S. is ever going to regain moral authority
Why what we’re experiencing may be the final grasp for power of a generation of autocrats — and how Americans have remained so surprisingly resilient
And why the Epstein files and the degree of overreach by Trump’s inner sanctum may doom the MAGA coalition by revealing him as having been one of the hated elites all along
You won’t want to miss any of this conversation. Just click on the video player above to watch now.
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Join us for more Live conversations this week!
Tomorrow, Tuesday, December 2, at noon Eastern, join us for a conversation with Representative Ro Khanna. Then on Wednesday, December 3, at 12:30 p.m., author and filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat will visit again with The Ink Book Club. And on Thursday, December 4, at 12:30 p.m., we’ll talk to advocate and author Patrick Markee about his new book on homelessness.
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