Music

And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Ax Files, with your host David Axelrod.

In 1989, Ann Applebaum then a young reporter for the Economist, sat atop the Berlin Wall and watched history unfold,

as a boisterous crowd chipped away at the iconic barrier that separated East from West.

But if it seemed on that hitty day that democracy was on an inexorable rise, it feels much different today.

Now, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian and staff writer for the Atlantic, Applebaum has written an incisive book based on her decades of reporting from Europe and the US called Twilight of Democracy, the seductive lure of authoritarianism.

As Americans confront new challenges to a democracy we once took for granted, I sat down with her this week to talk about the book

and the personal journey that helped inform it. Here's that conversation.

And Applebaum, welcome. Good to see you. As I told you before we started rolling, I approached this conversation with some trepidation because six years ago I wrote a book called Boliver,

and it was really about my faith in democracy, and you just wrote a book last year called Twilight of Democracy. So we'll try and reconcile those things down the line here.

But I yours your own journey in some ways and forms your perspective on these issues. And there are some things about it that interested me.

One is the Applebaum's themselves, a Jewish family in Alabama. And I'm wondering how the Applebaum's got to Alabama and where they must have come from somewhere in Europe at some point.

Yes. So yes, thank you for starting with the blank spot in my family's history, which is how the Applebaum's got to Alabama.

Funny enough, nobody in my family, particularly on my father's side, was particularly interested in where they came from. These were Jews who got to the United States and assimilated as fast as possible and didn't talk about where they came from and weren't interested.

And the person who later got interested in where they came from was me. And I tracked the family down or that part of my family down because the rest other part is quite different, but I tracked that part of my family down to a town called Kubrick.

And we were in a town called Kubrin in Belarus. And we reckon they left Kubrin. Well, my great, great grandfather left Kubrin sometime in the 1890s, 1880s, 1890s, legendarily because he was trying to escape the ZARS army.

He was trying to escape being conscripted. And then he went to New York and then there used to be these Jewish organizations that would send people out of New York other places because there were.

So many poor Jews arriving in New York and so there were these charities that would do that. And we assume that that was how they got to Alabama. And then later it's emerged that there are a bunch of people in Alabama from Kubrin specifically in Birmingham, Bessimer and a few other towns.

There was actually an American congressman Ben Erdrich for a while. He was a congressman from Birmingham, whose family is also from Kubrin. So it's probably the case that a bunch of them one of them went there and then the others followed, which is often how immigration works.

And how are they received you think, do you know in Alabama? So I imagine with some hostility, I actually have an uncle or he's not really an uncle, he's a cousin, he's married to a cousin of mine. And again, in my father's generation, who was one of the victims or was one of the people who was assaulted in.

Before the Pittsburgh synagogue attack in the last couple of years ago, there was one previous attack on a synagogue and it was in Alabama in the 60s and it was a Ku Klux Klan assault and one of the people who was shot was a cousin of mine.

A story that I was not told until the Pittsburgh shooting happened in many decades later. And my cousin was interviewed on a television program and no one had talked about it. So I assume that although on the other hand, I also think there were so few of them.

...