“The Real Culture Wars” Between Democracy and Autocracy

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: From Haiti to Gaza to Ukraine, the world, of course, is wracked with conflict and instability. Whilst political leaders wrangle with military and economic solutions, our next guest argues it is the arts that could make the biggest difference. Suzanne Nossel is CEO of PEN America, an organization aiming to protect freedom of expression. And she now joins Walter Isaacson to discuss her latest essay that explores the power of culture to shape the world order.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Christiane. And Suzanne Nossel, welcome to the show.

SUZANNE NOSSEL, CEO, PEN AMERICAN CENTER: Thanks for having me.

ISAACSON: You wrote this great piece in the “Foreign Affairs” magazine. Will you talk about how culture and art are going to be crucial to how we see the world, especially at a time of conflict now. Tell me why you wrote the piece now, what were you trying to say?

NOSSEL: Sure. It’s something that has occurred to me for a long time, which is that we see authoritarian governments and rulers putting so much emphasis on controlling narrative and culture. Xi Jinping propounding his principles, publishing a little red book that — and investing in a big publishing conference here in the United States to spread those ideas around the world, in Russia, elevating, and trying to rehabilitate Stalin and retell the story of his rule, digging up graves to try to contradict the prevailing narrative, jailing historians who expose the truth, shutting down organizations that are focused on historical memory. And so, witnessing the degree to which authoritarians have zeroed in on culture as a centerpiece of how they’re advancing their own agenda, how they’re sustaining control, how they are projecting a global image, I wanted to focus on the role of democracies and what democracies could do to engage culture. I feel like culture is a tool that has, to some degree, been left on this sideline.

ISAACSON: You’ve mentioned history as being one of the battlefields of culture, whether it be in China trying to do the history, and, of course, you just said in the United States, this notion that we’re fighting over how to do our history. But why is it right now that recapturing history has become such a flashpoint, whether it be China or the United States?

NOSSEL: Well, I mean, I think here in the U S. we’re at this, you know, inflection point, in some ways, as a pluralistic society where we are on the cusp of having no one single racial majority in our population, and that is a significant change. And we wrestling with what that means. We see this in our work on college campuses and the sort of tension between the effort to make the campus a more diverse, equal, and inclusive place, if you will, and robust protection of free speech and academic freedom. I think the changes in our population and move toward a pluralistic society are testing some of these core principles, including how we think about our history and how we integrate different perspectives. I also think there’s some hopeful signs in how institutions, you know, a place like Monticello has come Jefferson’s home. You know, how they’ve come to integrate the history of his role as a slave owner and the slaves on the plantation there, you know, alongside his accomplishments as statesman and a visionary, they don’t erase anything, they add to the story. And I think sort of as a society, we’re wrestling with, you know, what that looks like for us kind of writ large and in our curriculum. And I think in a place like China, you know, because we’re living in a smaller world, there’s a recognition that — and people are better informed. I mean, suddenly, you have a highly literate population. And so, you know, these battles of ideas, I think, matter not just among elites, as they always did, you know, but in a much more popular sense. And it’s become a central kind of frontier of contestation, both internally within China to hold up together a narrative that keeps people, you know, more or less by essence and accepting of the way that things are, and internationally, to burnish and reinforce the image that they’re trying to project.

ISAACSON: But you go around the world, everybody’s watching American movies, wearing Nike shoes, TV shows, music, the internet. Isn’t it better to let it happen naturally through, you know, the way we do our culture and entertainment around the world?

NOSSEL: I think that’s right when it comes to the promotion of American culture, which really is not the centerpiece of my argument. My argument is about local cultures and the role of local cultural figures, culture makers, cultural icons, and the power and the potency they can have as counterweights to authoritarians. I’ve seen it very vividly in Ukraine. We’ve done a lot of work with PEN Ukraine over the last sort of seven or eight years building up that organization of writers. And Ukraine is a place with a very strong literary and scholarly tradition. And witnessing the pride that they are taking in their own culture now. I went to Ukraine in December of 2022. So, really a dark moment, you know, six or seven months into the war. And when we got there, we were stunned to see in a cultural hall in the center of Kyiv, they were mounting a brand- new exhibition devoted to a venerated philosopher. And it was beautiful. And it had, you know, all kinds of explications of his work and interactive elements, and they had brought there a statue from a museum dedicated to his life. And the statue had been damaged in the war. They had attacked the statue, it was kind of pockmarked, but still standing. So, kind of an icon to the resilience of the Ukrainian people. And just the pride that they had in that exhibition at that moment really spoke to me. I saw to myself that this — you know, they are deriving strength and spirit and nurture from their own culture to help them get through this moment. And it was just so powerful. And they’ve continued with that, you know, over the ensuing now, you know, 14 months. They travel all around the country doing events, bringing books to the front lines. They teach the Ukrainian language to Russian speakers who now want the Ukrainians to be their lingua franca. And so, it’s extraordinary to see sort of what role culture is playing in their effort to fight off — fight this war and win this war and sustain the morale of the Ukrainian people. And so, you know, that for me was an important spark for this piece.

ISAACSON: Yes, I mean, I can go back in history, especially in the Soviet Union when it was such — whether it be Solzhenitsyn or Rybakov and others who were great writers there that expressed an idea of freedom and democracy and helped push the narrative forward. Do you think, though, that we, either as NGOs like PEN, or the U S. government, should be supporting writers like that?

NOSSEL: I think organizations like PEN, absolutely. And you know, that’s the work that we do, standing with dissident writers, people who take a risk to express themselves, who are targeted for what they publish, standing with them, advocating on their behalf when they’re persecuted, when they’re jailed. And that — you know, it’s important not just for them, but for all other writers who might be sitting in front of their computer thinking about, you know, whether it’s worth taking the risk. Should they say what they really think? What’s going to happen to them? Who’s going to defend them if that knock comes on the door and they get hauled away? And so, we try to send the message, look, there is this international community of writers. There is an organization like PEN that will have your back. And I think that’s extremely important because those voices, I mean, you remember them because they were so salient to the way that that struggle was waged and won. They had authenticity. They told stories that laid bare, you know, what a news report could never do, what a foreign politician could never get across. You know, there is a profound resonance and a kind of depth of connection that people feel to, you know, their own writers, their own filmmakers, their own artists, their own musicians that are in a tradition that they’ve engaged with their entire lives. And so, the power of that I think is quite unique. And, you know, it’s not something — I don’t think it’s about the West harnessing it per se, but it’s about finding appropriate ways to support and defend those individuals so that they can authentically have their voice and their influence in a manner of their own design. It’s not something — you know, by its nature, it can’t be controlled from the outside.

ISAACSON: Let me read a sentence from your piece and have you unpack it for me. It’s, “Democracies and autocracies are waging a global battle, principally through military, political, economic, and diplomatic means. Yet the outcome of the contest will hinge significantly on culture.” Is that because there’s just an innate clash of cultures between totalitarian regimes and democracies?

NOSSEL: I think it’s part of it, but I also think that cultural control and who shapes the cultural narrative ends up being, you know, sometimes dispositive in how these contests unfold. And, you know, the fact that the narrative of the Soviet Union, you know, eventually it was punctured, it was pop marked, it was called into question, you know, by those legendary writers, by Sami Stott (ph), by — you know, partially by Western efforts to cast it in a particular light through films and books. And, you know, all of that over time made it impossible to sustain the story of this powerful nation. Of course, it coincided with economic decline that, you know, overtook them. But I think the cultural piece, the fact that authoritarians pay so much attention to shaping this. And you know, now it’s a very different arena. So much of our cultural engagement happens in the digital realm. There are all kinds of efforts through social media, through propaganda and disinformation, now enabled by A.I., where governments can tell whatever story they choose, and they’re investing very significantly. You know, the Chinese government in trying to shape the political attitudes of their diaspora communities around the world, through online channels, through news outlets that are controlled in Beijing, that are read by Chinese communities here in the United States, by trying to rein in what Chinese people here in the United States publish or say or what dance performances get done. And so, you know, to me, the amount of effort and attention that the authoritarians are paying to this ought to be a signal to us of how it matters and how central they see it to the continuity of their regimes.

ISAACSON: Well, let’s take China as an example, because it’s a country where we felt with cultural influence, it would move them a bit to more openness, more freedom, and democracy. We felt that way about trading with China, but we also had, as you said, a cultural impact on China. It was Hollywood movies that went over there. It was the NBA basketball over there. All of our cultural product, you know, had a great outlet in China. And, yet now, everything’s moving in the other direction. Xi Jinping, it’s much more controlled. It didn’t happen. Why?

NOSSEL: Well, I think there was a sort of naive notion that with enough engagement, enough ties, that kind of natural appeal of the western order, of openness, of democracy would kind of automatically take hold. And obviously, we’ve learned that’s not true. The appeal of capitalism in many respects did take hold. But the Chinese government was very strict and, let’s face it, quite effective in preventing what many in the West anticipated would be this kind of inexorable, unavoidable political opening that would accompany a transition toward greater capitalism. And, you know, when you look at the Chinese government’s approach to this, it’s really shifted. We did a report at PEN America some years, about five years ago, called “Made in Hollywood, Censored in Beijing” about how Hollywood filmmaking was being shaped by government censors out of the Chinese government because China had become — at the time, it was the second largest global film market. It’s now the largest. And in order to get onto a short list of Western films that were approved for release into China, you had to please the censor. So, if you have a Chinese villain or you had an American military victory over China, that was not going to pass muster. If you even had a Taiwanese flag, as they did in “Top Gun,” that was considered unacceptable. And Hollywood filmmakers played ball because it was a financial incentive for them to do so. And I think some of them were uncomfortable with it, but it — you know, they made the argument to themselves, look, we’re getting into this important market. We’re having some influence. Maybe that will lead to openness. I think what happened over the last few years is the Beijing authorities really sort of turned around on this and decided they were better off really doubling down on their own domestic film industry. And they have not expanded the number of foreign films that come in. Increasingly, they’re investing in local blockbusters that, you know, they have influence over, that reinforce their narratives. You’re not going to see, you know, anything like the kind of independent filmmaking that we have here, where there are challenges to authority and alternative storylines that come to the floor. That’s not going to happen in China.

ISAACSON: Well, let’s take a place that you mentioned where it actually has worked some, which is Poland and the struggle for democracy versus authoritarianism there. Culture played a big role. Explain that.

NOSSEL: Yes. I mean, I focus on a particular film that was released shortly before the election this fall, which had a kind of surprising and positive result with the elevation of Donald Tusk and a new government that is much more classically liberal and open. And the film looked at how Poland was handling the crisis at its border with Belarus and the very harsh approaches of the Duda government and just the mistreatment of migrants. And it was a very kind of bold-faced unvarnished look by Agnieszka Holland, who’s a well-regarded filmmaker. And the government got very upset by this film. They wanted to suppress it. They delayed it. They tagged kind a warning screen on it, saying that they disagreed with it. But within a matter of weeks, it became the second most watched film of the year, even though it was released at the end of the year. And, you know, having that voice out there, that independent voice, a Pol, telling a Polish story, holding up a mirror against the government to show Pols what was really going on and help shape how they thought as they went to the Pols, you know, that just has extraordinary power. It’s different than, you know, any exhortation from behind a podium. It’s something that speaks to people viscerally and emotionally.

ISAACSON: You know, culture shapes politics. Even here at home, we’re seeing everything in the history wars to a popular culture. I think a lot of conservatives would say that the entertainment industry, the popular cultural industry skews very much to the left and leaves them out. Do you think that’s a problem here?

NOSSEL: Look, I think it’s crucial that we hear all voices in our culture. At PEN America, you know, we fight against efforts to cancel books. You know, people want to cancel the memoirs from members of the Trump administration or the book contract signed by Amy Coney Barrett. I think those voices need to be out there. I think people of all kinds need to see themselves somewhere in the larger culture. And I — you know, I think that exists, whether it’s in country music, you know, in the kind of way of just about everything that you can find on television these days. You know that said, there is a left-leaning skew in Hollywood, and you know, that probably is not wrong, but, you know, you cannot control that centrally. I think people can invest. And, you know, we can make sure, as an organization like PEN, where we try to bring together different voices, we’re cognizant that we want people from across the ideological spectrum to feel like they can be part of that conversation.

ISAACSON: Suzanne Nasser, thank you so much for joining us.

NOSSEL: Thanks for having me.