Steve Sachoff: Maria Popova, welcome. We're very happy to have you here on Weight of the World. I wanted to start with some basic things just to give an idea of who you are. You have a very interesting background. You were born in Bulgaria and grew up there through your teenage years. So was I wondering if you could tell us a bit about that period of time, what life was like and also in that time, whether you were thinking at all about the U.S. and how you may have thought about it.

Maria Popova: Hi, thanks for having me here. Thinking back to, I mean, I was born in the mid 1970s, so my childhood ended up being historically very interesting because I was 14 when the Berlin Wall came down. Until then, one of the interesting things about growing up in Bulgaria in that time was that there was quite a bit, I mean, things were calm, but the early 1980s were the period, the so-called revival process when the Bulgarian government changed forcibly the names of the Turkish minority population of Bulgaria to Bulgarian names. They were forced to choose Bulgarian names as adults, change their names, even change the names on their ancestors' tombstones to replace them with Bulgarian names. And I do remember at that point thinking, this doesn't look right. It doesn't seem right to have people who are already famous, known, cultural figures, sports figures, suddenly appear with different names. And I remember at that point, this is a turning point in which I realized that this is not, that this is an authoritarian regime that can humiliate you in the deepest, most personal way, which is taking away your, the name that your parents gave you. 

And I actually know this because I saved my diaries from my teenage years and it's something that I wrote about in the diary and it's something that I think sparked sort of my interest in social issues and in political issues. And this was kind of the precursor of what turned out to be my career later on. 

In terms of how I thought about America, one interesting thing is my mother was an English teacher in the English language high school. So she taught me English fairly early, way before high school. I think she probably started teaching me when I was five. And so I could read, I could listen to music in English and sort of draw the lyrics out to practice. And so I had some background, I guess, in British culture, more than American. But the main memory that I have is my mother had a bunch of [posters] for class, that she used in class. She had a collection of scenes like posters from the 50 U.S. states. So I remember going through those and having the impression that there aren't that many cities in the U.S. because I think only New York and Washington maybe were cities, but a lot of the other places were scenes from nature. And I thought, man, this must be a really big but really empty country. So this is very, very superficial. I did not think very much about the U.S. I think growing up in the communist regime.

This changing of the names and this issue of identity, this was one of the things that put you on this track towards political science. Do you remember how you decided this is something I want to study? And then this idea of going to study in the United States, you attended Harvard and lived obviously in the U.S., So when did that come onto your radar and how did that develop?

So this happened because when the Berlin Wall came down and all the changes happened in 1989, 1990. One of my mother's students at the English Language High School, a very enterprising guy, sort of found out how one applies to American universities. And he found out that you need to take the SATs and the TOEFL. They were not offered in Bulgaria in 1990, but he went to Greece somehow and took those exams and he ended up at Columbia University. He came back in the summer of 1991 or 1992 to visit his English teacher and to tell her about America. And that's the moment when I was entering the last year of high school and he said, why don't you apply to Columbia as well? It's amazing, you know, and New York City is amazing. And, and of course, I thought that's just terribly exciting. And of course I'm going to do it. And I did apply. I applied, of course, more widely than just Columbia. I applied to maybe 50 or 60 universities because they were giving application waivers to people applying from the post-communist states.

So I hand-wrote a whole bunch of applications and I applied to all these universities in a completely random way. There was one book in Bulgaria that was like collection of colleges and I was going through it and applying to every college that was listed as most competitive and had a certain percentage of international students because I thought they must, if they have all these international students, it must mean that they have financial aid available because obviously I needed that. At that point, my parents’ combined income for the entire year - my mother as an English teacher in high school, my father as a structural engineer - was a thousand dollars. So obviously I needed a full ride. 

So I applied to all of these universities. And then I had financial aid-backed offers from Columbia, actually, funny enough, and from Dartmouth. And when it came time to choose where to go, there was this one American on a Fulbright in Sofia in 1992 and my mother asked him for advice. He was teaching at the English Language High School and she asked him for advice how to choose between Dartmouth and Columbia because we didn't really know much. And he told her, you know, they're both great universities. You can't go wrong, but one is in a small town and the other one is in New York and in Harlem. Because he had in fact gone to Columbia for grad school. And he said, “when I was in grad school at Columbia, you could hear gunshots from my window.” And you know, that sealed it for my mother. So I went to Dartmouth as a result.

Yeah, little quieter, no gunshots. So you were a political science major there, is that correct?

Yeah. I actually started the political science major with the idea that I wanted to work for the UN. I think that's another sort of remnant of the communist era upbringing where I had grown up, I think, with the understanding that the UN is a really powerful institution that really decides how things happen in the world with real decision-making power and working for peace. 

And when I started taking courses at Dartmouth, I thought, but wait a second, it seems that the UN is not so effective at achieving a lot of things. And it's the first time when I heard people talking about, I remember it was such a shock. When I realized that in the United States, some people think that the UN is useless. I mean, I was really shocked by that, but you know, I read widely, I took some international relations classes and I realized I'm really actually more interested in domestic politics. I'm more interested in democracy and how you build it and the transition away from authoritarianism than in world peace.

At the time, that's the calculation I made. And so within the political science major, I shifted from my original interest in international relations in the UN to domestic politics. 

I ended up really working much more on comparative politics, taking more courses in comparative politics and making that the focus of my major. And then I went to work for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

You have done a lot of research into this, the judiciary, comparative studies and the weaponization or politicization of the judiciary. This obviously happens in many countries around the world and former Central and Eastern European countries, former communist countries, but the somewhat or surprising to me anyway, as an American thing that we're seeing today is this very thing happening very much in the United States to a degree that it's almost, watching from abroad, it's almost unbelievable. And I think for Americans in this environment day to day, it's so much, so fast, that they can't even process it. But we see a justice department which is now, because things aren't codified into law - they were norms that people were observing. These are being broken left, right, and center, and we're in a real crisis. So I wanted to get your opinion or your take on what you see happening in America and the extent, how far down the road are we on this path and also in the comparative sense, to countries you've studied in Central and Eastern Europe where this similar process is taking place.

Absolutely. It's one of the biggest sort of shocks of my academic career really that suddenly, what I observed in the post-communist countries in the new, emergingly competitive regimes would become relevant and would start happening in the U.S. which I thought of as a paragon for judicial independence, for strong rule of law, for an assertive and powerful judiciary. When I was in grad school, my interest in how to build strong judiciaries came directly from doing part of my degree on American politics and reading about how the U.S. Supreme Court developed into this powerful institution.

So, I think even in the first Trump campaign, right before his first term, when he started saying at rallies that Hillary Clinton should be locked up, there were immediately sort of alarm bells going off for me. My thinking at the time, and actually in 2017, I wrote a paper for a conference on comparative judicial politics, where I was arguing that the weaponization of law for political competition purposes, sort of when you try to harness the law in order to achieve short-term political gains in your competition against your opponents, that phenomenon is not a purely autocratic phenomenon. It's something that can happen in all sorts of regimes, in consolidated democracies, if the political actors actually choose to take these steps. Because you can do that even rhetorically. You don't even have to be able to use the courts if you start talking about it, if you start making these appeals where you start threatening the use of the law against your political opponents.

And at the time, I got a lot of pushback for that. I had people who were saying, you're just trying too hard to generalize what is essentially a post-communist, young democracy phenomenon. So at the time, you know, fair enough, maybe that's what I see. And that's why I'm kind of too, you know, suspicious that this is where things are going in the U.S., but I think over time, obviously we've seen more and more of it. And we have seen that in some really striking ways. The Eastern European countries have been the canary in the coal mine for rule of law backsliding, for the abuse of the legal process by political actors who harness it to achieve their own opportunistic political goals. 

And so we've of course seen a lot more than that in the last 10 years. And in the last year or so, the research that I wrote then has been now used in amicus briefs to try to point out to the judges in the Comey case or in the Letitia Brown case that the U.S. is going in a dangerous direction that ends with weak rule of law if these prosecutions continue. 

Now, luckily, both of these prosecutions have been dropped, essentially, or stalled in the legal process. They're not going forward effectively. So I think there are some differences between the U.S. and the post-communist democracies. It is true that the US institutions are deeper, stronger, and the really long track record helps because what we see is that the Justice Department has been compromised and more or less dismantled in terms of political independence and is now used as an instrument, as a baseball bat, if you will, against opponents. But the courts are not so easily controlled. Basically, we see that even Trump-appointed judges are acting in somewhat independent ways and sort of are more interested in upholding the law as they see it and as they interpret it. The law is always political by definition, but they're not following simple instructions and commands by the Trump administration in a way in which the Justice Department obviously is, which, you know, when we think about the institutional setup, it's normal, of course, for a Justice Department that's part of the executive to be a political institution. But obviously it is not in line with the rule of law for that institution to be used for political gains in a blatantly illegal way in order to achieve political goals for the administration.

So I think the picture overall is somewhat mixed. There are a lot of dangerous paths that have been taken, but there's also some meaningful pushback and some meaningful resistance within the rule of law system in the U.S. that hasn't allowed a very quick progression towards what is the end point in that process where the legal process, the legal institutions become simply a tool for the executive, the way they are in Russia, for example, where there is absolutely no possibility for a Russian court to actually rule against the wishes of the Putin regime. I mean, that's not in the realm of possibility. They are simply an instrument for the regime through which the regime sends messages. There's no competition there. There's no uncertainty about how the legal process is going to turn out. You know, when Navalny was being prosecuted, there was no way, no point in thinking, are the judges going to accept these arguments by the prosecution? I mean, it's all theater. It's all political theater in Russia. And the US is very far from that.

But it is in dangerous territory. The more politicized cases we see that are even started by the Department of Justice, the more dangerous it is. I mean, so far, the cases have been against people that are sort of personal opponents to Trump or like thorns in his side, but in a personal way, rather than in a meaningful political way. Because, you know, James Comey was not going to be Democratic party nominee in the next election, right? He's not really a political figure and opposition figure. He's someone who Trump is angry at. It's bad enough that he was prosecuted for that. But I think the next level of danger is if we see prosecutions against potential rivals in the next election. If we see prosecutions of people like Mark Kelly, which we saw some legal harassment there, which thankfully has been nipped in the bud as well. But stronger cases against people who are potentially in a position to be major political competitors to the current administration would be entering the U.S. into new, dangerous rule of law backsliding territory. And it's something that we absolutely need to be watching for.

Right. OK. And I was wondering if you could also just say a few words - I'm curious in the comparative sense, what we've seen from Trump and the administration is to attack judges on an individual level. So they've captured the Department of Justice, but as they seem to be poking and pushing always at the judiciary, which, as you pointed out accurately, has been able to push back even in some cases with judges appointed by Trump. But you see these comments that are trying to attack and erode the public sense that the judiciary is independent, or everyone's described as an activist judge who doesn't agree with them or even, you know, personal comments about the judges themselves or their families. Is this something that is unique to this sort of American backsliding? Or do you see this as something that's maybe being taken from somewhere else? This sort of very personal level of undermining?

That has definitely happened all over the Eastern European cases. Sort of rhetorical attacks on judges in order to pressure them into sort of breaking their sense of independence, to break their sense of personal security so that they can be more malleable. These are things we have definitely seen all across the backsliding post-communist democracies. We've seen this happen in Ukraine. We've seen it in Bulgaria, in Romania, in Poland. During the backsliding episodes. For sure, this is dangerous territory to be in because of course judges are, not all of them are going to choose to be heroes. If you create enough pressure, people are going to start prioritizing their safety and their family's safety over the integrity of the legal process. If those attacks are persistent, consistent, and we know of course that 

judges do get attacked occasionally, and that is a very dangerous path to go down on. 

I think one of the, what the comparative view tells us is that the next step in this is some sort of legal, some sort of legislative changes that are aimed at making it easier to apply pressure on judges, to make it easier to fire them, to make it easier to discipline them, to basically erode their institutional insulation from the executive. Now, the U.S., I think, is protected here in part by the federal system, by the fact that there are multiple layers and the judiciary is in fact not one hierarchical structure and bureaucratized structure the way in which European judiciaries are, where it's much easier if you just simply pass a new law to completely rearrange the incentives within the judiciary as a branch. The U.S. being a common law country rather than a civil law country and a federal state on top of it makes this judicial reform package in order to kill judicial independence, makes that route more difficult for Trump.

I wanted to turn to another area, which I know you have done some research in and you've studied, and that is the question of conspiracies, conspiracy theories and the erosion of democracies and the way it fits in with an authoritarian regime. So I was wondering if you could give us a brief explanation of what role these conspiracies play, how they actually work to undermine an open society or democracy to begin with.

So this is a paper that I wrote with my colleague Nicolai Marinov, who is now at Gothenburg University. And we basically noticed that in the post-communist context, it's quite easy to push in a campaign, a conspiracy theory, regardless of how crazy and implausible it sounds, and have it gain traction, surprisingly quickly. And we thought that that has something to do with the fact that in the transition away from authoritarianism to, to multi-party democracy in those democracies, there were in fact, a lot of cases of actual conspiracies. Not all conspiracies are just theories, right? There are actual conspiracies in the post-communist countries, mostly to do with essentially stealing the state, various forms of corruption that, you know, the media wrote about, nobody was ever really prosecuted for those. So it's kind of still at the conspiracy theory level because it wasn't fully exposed, but sort of everybody thought that that is the case, that that is true, that that has happened. And our argument is that when we have these polities in which conspiracies do take place, it really sort of unmoors voters from the truth. Voters become much more susceptible to conspiracy theories because how are they to know which conspiracy is correct and true and which one is only a theory and made up? And so when that happens, I think really, and what we showed in that paper is, indeed, people who believe conspiracies become much more open to all kinds of conspiracies. And that becomes a really dangerous situation for political debate because essentially it becomes breeding ground for all sorts of misinformation campaigns. It's just much easier to launch one of those. And I think unfortunately in the last few years, the US is also going down that road. 

Again, it might turn out that the post-communist democracies were the canary in the coal mine because we see more and more evidence that the Epstein files, that this conspiracy, what we thought of as a fairly unhinged conspiracy theory about a network of pedophiles ruling the country, is kind of coming into contour in a very real way.

And voters are probably going to start wondering, you know, how could this go on for all of these years? And we thought we had the rule of law and we thought we had all these processes in place and it seemed that they didn't work to protect the vulnerable from these powerful pedophiles. And so this really can have a very dangerous effect downstream and long-term effect on Americans' trust in the political process and the possibility of bringing up all sorts of conspiracies and then you don't even have to prove them anymore, right? Because they're going to do their work politically and at some point it becomes irrelevant whether they're true or not.

Right. I mean, part of their work is to sort of make people become apathetic or believe that everything is right and to disengage. And then this leaves the field to authoritarians. I know it's a very complicated question, but are there any concrete things that you've seen work successfully to counter this kind of information - is it better to acknowledge and admit when there is a kernel of truth or something that is then blown into a bigger conspiracy? How do you push back against that?

It's very, very hard. And I think different ways have been tried. I think in Ukraine, there was a fairly successful campaign fact-checking sites that are not state run, but run by NGOs that are simply tirelessly pointing out what is true and what is not true. And it helps some. It does have effects. Ukrainian voters became much more informed over time and became able to recognize Russia pushed fake, you know, disinformation and conspiracies and sort of became kind of inoculated to them over time through this fact checking. 

But I think one of the difficulties of generalizing the Ukrainian experience is that Ukrainians were targeted in a very real way by Russia. You know, the war started in 2014 and so they were learning how to recognize Russian disinformation while people were already dying at the front fighting Russia. So it's a much more existential situation. I think in our democracies, it's harder because we're still privileged by the fact that we still have security. So if Russia is spreading, for example, misinformation in Canada or in the US, it's easier to say things like, don't overblow the Russian danger because Russia is not bombing Ukrainians. I mean, not bombing American cities yet. So I think when the threat is not so immediate and not so existential, it's a harder thing to pull off, to actually really inoculate people against these malicious information campaigns. And now in Moldova, I think that's another example where it has worked quite effectively to basically inform people that Russia spreads a lot of misinformation and the Moldovan government was able to educate widely and eventually to withstand all the interference that was coming from Russia.

And winning the referendum, the parliamentary, the presidential campaigns, of the pro-European, pro democracy candidates, that's another example, which I think should give us some optimism that these campaigns can work. But again, I think when the danger is closer, it might be slightly easier to make it work.

Speaking of Ukraine, I know you do a lot of work in this area as well, and I did want to touch on this a bit. Just give us your insight. How do you explain this erratic behavior of the Trump administration in dealing with Russia and Putin and his general inability to come out and criticize Putin? What do you think is behind this? 

It's really hard to say what's behind it with any certainty, whether it's “kompromat,” whether it's simply admiring a dictator, because I think we've seen that Trump has authoritarian tendencies himself. So maybe it's admiration, maybe it's something concrete. I think that's really hard to adjudicate at this point. But I think what we know now a full year in for sure is that it's very clear that he does not want to pressure Russia. He is really reluctant. He talks about peace through strength, but he doesn't want to apply this to the Russian case. And back in March of last year, my co-author and friend Oksana Shevil and I wrote this short piece for The National Interest. It seemed to us that what Trump is trying to do is he's trying to end the war by pressuring Ukraine. He doesn't care how the war ends. He just wants it to end. And he thinks it's much easier to achieve that end by pressuring Ukraine because it's the weaker side. But as we explained in that piece, this is not a viable strategy for him because Ukraine did not fight at that point for 10 years in order to just surrender to Russia because Trump told them.

Before we run out of time, I did want to turn a little bit to where you're living now in Canada and this issue of having studied and lived in the U.S. and now being a professor and working and living in Montreal. First of all, I know it's broad brushes and difficult to avoid stereotypes, but just generally, what are your impressions of Americans versus Canadians?

That's a really good question. You know, the stereotype of course is that Canadians are just Americans without guns and with healthcare. And that's kind of true. But I think one of the differences that I see is that Canadians are a bit humbler and I think a bit more inward looking. You know, Canadians really care about the health of their own communities and about believing in Canada and being proud of Canada in a more inward looking way than the US. I think the US is simply, you know, aware of its position as the world hegemon and therefore Americans are more outward looking overall is my impression. 

Also, I for a very long time, I always associated America with a real commitment to freedom and sort of a real visceral recognition of when freedom is trampled and dislike for trampling freedom and rejection of anyone who tramples freedom. That's how I understood being American for the 10 years or more that I lived in the U.S. And I always admired that because I always thought that that's a really important top value to hold. It's something that is really important to always keep close to you and sort of use it as a lens to interpret events around you. I'm a little concerned that that might be eroding a little bit as some people sort of lose sight of what freedom means and want to commit more to things like having what they perceive as the pure American nation without newcomers. I mean, what's going on with that? That seems so un-American to me to be so concerned about newcomers and about immigrants and about them sort of undermining the American dream when it's kind of the opposite. The American dream has always been about immigrants and newcomers. So I see some erosion of that, which is very unfortunate, but I do deep down, I think I have some faith in Americans' commitment to freedom. I think that's why Americans overwhelmingly recognize that Ukraine is fighting for its freedom and support it. I think that's where that comes from. So hopefully there can be more recognition that freedom is threatened at home and they need to be really pushing back against that.

As an observer, an outsider there in Canada, with these recent unprecedented provocations by an American president towards Canada, what is your sense of how people took that initially? Today, a year into this administration and these things are maybe not on the headlines at the moment, but you never know when they'll be back. What are Canadians talking about right now in that sense?

Yeah, I think Canadians are taking these threats very, very seriously. I think from the, you know, maybe very early on when Trudeau was still the prime minister, there might have been some people who thought, well, Trump is just joking because he doesn't like Trudeau. But afterwards, when he kept repeating that, and now the American ambassador to Canada is definitely continually insulting Canadians with that same rhetoric and saying, you know, I don't really understand why you don't want to be the 51st state. Canadians take these insults very seriously. And so it has resulted, I think, in very concrete steps by Canadians to protect our sovereignty. It has resulted, first of all, in the election of Mark Carney because the Liberal Party was seen as headed for an electoral defeat last spring, which people thought was for sure after, you know, just fatigue of 10 years having a Liberal government in place for 10 years, there was a lot of fatigue around it. But it is, I think, specifically the U.S. threats that helped the Liberal Party gain another mandate because they were seen as the party that very quickly stood up to those threats and sort of used the “elbows up” hockey analogy to say, you know, let's prepare to fight this. Let's prepare to push back against this. And we've seen Carney in power taking very concrete steps, you know, moving Canada closer to the EU as a natural ally, sharing democratic values and rule of law values and free trade values. We've seen him really stand up repeatedly to this type of rhetoric from Trump. So I think the mood in Canada is very much, you know, we cannot, we have to take this seriously and we have to prepare to be able to withstand interference, pressure. We need to diversify and reduce our dependence on the U.S. because the U.S. is no longer the reliable ally that we thought it was. It's a very widespread sense of disappointment, because this was a very long, very close relationship.

You've lived in the United States, you have experience in Central and Eastern Europe. What is some advice for Americans who are struggling today to understand what's going on. They know something is not right, but there's also a lot of confusion about what they can do. What, from your point of view, are some concrete things that you would tell Americans interested in taking a more active role to push back against this authoritarianism?

My main advice here I think comes from my field work in Ukraine and from observing Ukrainians for the last almost 20 years. And it's to join an organization that you believe in, to join a group of like-minded people, devote yourself to one issue that you really, really care about, that you think is going to provide effective resistance or push back against some processes that you dislike or fill a gap, something that doesn't exist yet but you think is necessary. To join like-minded people and join an actual organization that is trying to do things because that really gives a sense of personal efficacy. It gives a sense that you are achieving something concrete because organizations can achieve things better than individual efforts.

And Ukrainians were really amazing in doing that, in starting up organizations that filled in the gaps where a weak state was not providing certain services or started organizations that pushed back against sort of authoritarian overreach. There was in Ukraine, for example, the Auto Maidan, it was called, they organized groups of basically people driving together to the residences of members of the Yanukovich government to protest in front of those residences. So they organized, you know, a way to drive protesters to the protest. I mean, you need an organization to make this as efficient as possible and to bring as many people as possible. Joining an organization to further your favorite cause, I think is the way to go and the way to push back.

Well that's great advice, I fully agree. yeah, Ukraine has just been an amazing example of that kind of inspiring civil society that is there even in this horrible time of, or even more so, in this horrible time of war. So I think people can draw a lot of inspiration from that. Well, it's been so fascinating, great conversation Maria.

Thank you.