Hello friends. I'm Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National

Constitution Center and welcome to We The People, a weekly show of

constitutional debate. The National Constitution Centers is a nonpartisan nonprofit chartered by Congress to increase

awareness and understanding of the Constitution among the American people.

My guest this week is Ann Applebaum, staff writer for the Atlantic and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian.

Her new book, Autocracy Inc. The Dictators who Want to Rule the World,

explains how autocratic elites around the world collaborate to

remain in power and undermine the Democratic order. She's a long-time friend. I've

learned so much from her over the years about threats to the liberal order at home and around the world,

and I'm thrilled to welcome her to this show, to discuss the importance of liberal democracy,

and to teach us about the global landscape of autocratic illiberalism.

And it is wonderful to welcome you to We The People.

Thank you so much, very happy to be here.

Let's begin with the obvious question. What is autocracy? My book describes

a network of autocracies. It is not an alliance. It's not even really an axis. It's a group of countries who are not linked

ideologically, so we're talking about communist China, nationalist Russia,

Theocratic Iran, Bolivarian socialist Venezuela, and a host of a dozen or so others.

Countries who, some of them are one party states, some of them are run by a single person, some of them are an oligarchy, all of them

are states whose regime seeks to rule with absolute power, meaning without checks and balances, without transparency, without

independent courts, without a media, they seek to control all the media space. increasingly they have begun to cooperate together

opportunistically where it suits them transactionally to push back against us essentially. They see the liberal world, the

ideas coming from the liberal world, again the rule of law, independent judiciary, transparency, accountability, rights, human rights,

...