Who Are the American Tyrants?

LVIV, UKRAINE — Preparing to mark my absentee ballot for the U.S. election, I sat at the Armenian Café, which has long been a place for dissident truth-talk. During the decades of Soviet occupation, when the KGB speech police were thought to be approaching, the staff here placed baklava on the counter: This signaled it was time to shut up. In our current American discourse, we see metaphorical baklava everywhere, warning us lest the Twitter mob, Big Tech, or an ideological editor choose to silence us.

We live amid a swirl of madness: the unasked questions, the accusations, the conspiracies, the theories, the unseen debunkings, the 180 degree turns in the press when suddenly some idea previously forbidden becomes an accepted notion. And yet we have so little opportunity for the only way out of this mess: real, genuine conversation and exchanges of ideas. I purposely came to this cafe hoping that the courageous ghost-voices of dissidents would compel me to be honest.

We all have so many questions, so many things to discuss, on many levels. Yet there is a fearful class of nonthinkers that shuts down dissent, humor, and question-asking. I used to know such people well. When I was working for Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, editing a couple weekly newspapers he and I co-owned, I uncovered dirt on one of the most powerful politicians in New York State, a Republican. Ailes encouraged me in this investigation because he hated the guy, but as soon as I began to reveal how masterfully connected the politician was — who that guy had dirt on — the baklava appeared on the counter. Ailes ordered me to stop. In the end, I quit and fled, rather than submit.

I kept quiet, traveling America, learning to listen. Two years after I escaped, Edward Snowden revealed something that shook the system: how the government was spying on U.S. citizens. Congress in 2015 acknowledged this was bad and passed legislation ostensibly to protect Americans from such spying. Yet the same government still considers him a traitor, because they say he endangered national security, even though he was pursuing the higher, constitutional value of liberty. Those two words — “national security” — are so often a bludgeon to shut up discourse, deep down a chilling echo of those KGB footfalls on the Lviv cobblestones.

I began my career with the national security people. After graduating Notre Dame in 2005, I went to work at The Weekly Standard, founded by Bill Kristol, a leader of the war-for-democracy movement. Hearing this news, my thesis advisor said I had sold my soul to evil people. “F*** you!” he bellowed. “They are vile, they start wars!” Undeterred by such screaming, I enjoyed my time at the Standard, and Kristol was one of the most genuine people I met in DC. He was one of the few people who stood up for me when Roger Ailes was seeking vengeance upon me.

In my young career, loyalty mattered foremost. But later, I started to embrace the radical enterprise of conversation. In my travels, I visited a friend who had worked in the George W. Bush White House. Disgusted by the callous political-partying-people, who were creating war policy, he had quit. He, still believing in the cause, joined the special forces and went to the front lines.

Now, his service complete, he realized he no longer agreed with the idea of the Middle East wars.

“My old self would have hated my current self for questioning the war,” he said.

“Me too,” I said, in what was probably my first real conversation about whether the wars made sense. I was safe at a friend’s house; there was no need for warning baklava.

But at some point in a democracy we need honest public discussion. Now, Kristol is the leading Republican Never Trumpers, a faction of pro-war people, many alumni of the second Bush White, who have made an alliance with those politicos who used to call them war criminals. What is it that has brought these two divergent camps together against Trump? National security? The Lincoln Project, which Kristol co-founded, released a haunting ad suggesting Trump might seize dictatorial control after a second term and run for a third. The president, they say, is a threat to our national security.

This is a strange parallel to something I knew before. When Barack Obama was president, I sat variously alongside Roger Ailes, Rush Limbaugh, Chris Christie, Karl Rove, Chuck Norris, John Bolton, Glen Beck, generals, etc., over sumptuous meals (except at Mr. Norris’s ranch, where we did not eat) discussing what to do when President Obama surely would refuse to leave office. Yet despite our “great intel” and “gut instincts” he did indeed leave the White House.

We all had so many great investigative resources on hand and all the money in the world, yet we babbled about wild theories, without ever making an attempt to examine details. We were playing the American national parlor game: scaring ourselves into panic or stupor. Harvard’s Richard Hofstedter identified this habit as the “paranoid style in American politics” — the paranoia born of isolation in great ol’ American silos. What if people with intelligence and agency — most Americans, really — expend our energy on trying to know — or listen: What could we find out? We could be free, not waiting for the baclava to go away before we can speak in hushed whispers. I think this is happening. to embark on the radical enterprise of conversation.

I got stuck here in Ukraine in this time of pandemic. In one sense this has amplified the madness, because this country has been in so many of the strange American and global stories this past year, and Burisma is just a piece of it. But on the ground in this city of Lviv, still haunted by dissidents, I’ve got to know a team of journalists and citizens who have opened up the public square for the conversation that we need for democracy to work. I stay here to see if we can amplify and expand this model.

These past weeks, every time I pass that Armenian cafe, I feel an urge to get into the battle of American politics. But even with the experiences I’ve had, I don’t quite know what’s up. I do know that the oath all American politicians take is to protect and defend the Constitution, not the physical borders, and that I side with those who take this oath seriously. I do know that many at the top, many who run things, are not geniuses, are driven by a variety of impulses. Which means: we all needs must be skeptical, keep asking, keep searching — together, in conversation.