Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is

econtalk.org where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and

find links and other information related to today's conversation. Our email address is

mailadicontalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.

Today is August 21st, 2020, and my guest is journalist and author and apple bomb. She's

a staff writer for the Atlantic. Among her many books is the Pulitzer Prize winning Goulog

a History, which I strongly recommend. Her latest book and the subject of today's conversation

is Twilight of Democracy, the seductive lure of authoritarianism, and welcome to econtalk.

Thanks for having me. Your book is part memoir, part cultural, political, and historical

analysis of the current moment. I'd like you to start with a brief sketch of the history

of the conservative movement since the 1980s that you've lived through when market

thatcher and Ronald Reagan were the faces of the conservative movement, a movement that

was anti-communist that emphasized the rule of law, free markets, and democracy. What changed?

So that movement, as you describe it, which by the way had chapters and members outside

of the US and the UK and Germany and France and Italy and above all in Eastern Europe,

that movement was always really a coalition, and there were people who were part of it for

different reasons. And one of the things that held it together was anti-communism. So the

idea that the West stood for a particular kind of civilization, which was the opposite

of communist civilization, the opposite of totalitarianism. There was a set of ideas centered

around freedom, but some people interpreted this as free markets, some people as political

freedoms, some people as religious freedom, as opposed to the heavily regulated state-dominated

...