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

I got together here last year with the brilliant journalist and historian Ann Applebaum of the Atlantic

to talk about the challenges that democracy faces in the United States where she was born and raised, and in Europe where she lives in Poland, and on which she's an unparalleled expert.

Well, we sat down again yesterday amid the catastrophe in Ukraine this time before an audience at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics as part of a conference on disinformation in the erosion of democracy we're sponsoring in partnership with the Atlantic. Here's that conversation.

Wow, I feel like a slice of lunch meat on a Nobel Prize sandwich here. And thank God that I have Ann Applebaum with me.

We're the sore Bay course, you know, in between the important dishes.

Well, well, well, well played. Like I said, I'm glad I have you with me. But for those who don't know, and I think many of you do, and is a one of the most incisive writers on global politics, particularly the politics of, but not limited to Eastern Europe, and has become over the years a important voice on this on this issue.

I want to, I've been reading all your wonderful pieces lately, scary exhortations at times about where we are right now. You live in Poland right across the border from Ukraine and we'll get to that.

But you just wrote a piece called why we should read Hannah Arendt now. And I raised that not just because she taught here, and we're very parochial.

But because you wrote your first line of that very good piece was so much of what we imagined to be new is old.

So many of the seemingly novel illnesses that a flick modern society are really just resurgent cancers diagnosed and described long ago.

We heard Maria speak about what is part of what is new, but I'd love you to sort out in the struggle between autocracy and democracy. What is old and what is new?

So first of all, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here, not actually the first time I've spoken at an Institute of Politics event, but, and so glad to be back, I should say.

When the founders of the United States of America were writing our constitution, one of the things that they were worried about was demagogues who might come to power by abusing the trust of the mob.

And so that was more than 200, two centuries ago. And when they were having that conversation and having those discussions, most of what they were reading was about the Roman Republic, which was a subject of widespread knowledge and curiosity in colonial America, including the subject of some popular plays and poetry.

So they were, so what we're talking about when we speak about autocrats and the appeal of autocrats is extremely old. I mean, it is maybe the oldest, the oldest political idea in humanity.

It was addressed in Federalist one, actually. Federalist one, and Alexander Hamilton was reading about Caesar, Julius Caesar. So many of these questions have been discussed and discussed over and over again. And it's important, I think, also to keep remembering that because some of what is new is, in fact, the technology's ability to draw out and amplify some of those human emotions and desires.

So what seems to me to be new is the ability, is the way that we communicate and the ways in which that communication now amplify, you know, create and play into and use the desire for autocracy or create it or the fear and anger that lead people to demand autocracy.

So, so the, so nothing is new about the emotions. What is new is the ability of internet platforms to evoke them and amplify them.

What about the deployment of these technologies by autocrats, not just in their own countries, but as an offensive weapon? That seems, we've always had those efforts, but they've, they've served in turbocharged now.

So it's very interesting to look at in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union wanted to create a piece of disinformation, a conspiracy theory. And this is a true story.

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