Anne Applebaum

And so I'm not, you know, but in the absence of it happening, I don't know how you reach enough people, how you shake the foundation of politics.

I've just been, I've just started to read Jill Lepore's new book, which is, it's about the American Constitution.

And one of the points she makes is that often our Constitution has been amended, at least in the most serious ways, after a war.

So firstly...

After the Revolution and then after the Civil War, that's when we got the amendments that allowed Black people to vote and change the nature of American citizenship.

Then after World War I, there were a number of important amendments, women's suffrage being one of them.

And it's almost as if you need some big moment of change to convince people that the foundations of the system are rotten.

And I don't right now see how we get to that.

And the scenarios that would lead us to that aren't good, and so I don't wish for them.

I mean, one would really have to have a...

The only other alternative I can think of is that there needs to be just a lot more awareness among ordinary people of how, you know, how bad it's gotten.

You know, I know that a lot of, for a lot of Americans, this doesn't feel like something new.

A lot of Americans, partly because of the way they've been reading and thinking and learning about politics in the last decade,

several years, think that Washington is corrupt anyway, and everything has always been corrupt, and this is just an extension of past corruption, and explaining to them that this is something qualitatively different, that this is a different kind of behavior, that American foreign policy has never been for sale at this level with these kinds of stakes before.

I think the best I can do is write about it and talk about it

I know you're doing that, too, in order to convince enough people, you know, to to to take this moment seriously and to have it change their their behavior, make them vote, make them get involved in politics, make them make them participate, because it's really without that.

It's hard to see.

It's really hard to see how you change.

I mean, interesting comparison.

I haven't written this yet, although I hope to do it in the next year.