Transcript: ‘It’s a very short path’

Transcript

Rachel Maddow Presents: Déjà News

Episode 4: ‘It’s a very short path’

A new president with authoritarian tendencies packs the nation’s highest court, which then outlaws abortion – sparking not just a backlash, but a new coalition for democracy and the rule of the law. Rachel Maddow and Isaac-Davy Aronson explore how events abroad in just the last few years might help us understand what is happening now in the United States.

(CHANTING)

Rachel Maddow: The crowd is ecstatic. They’ve been bussed in from across the country for this giant rally. And they’re waiting excitedly for a speech from the still relatively new President of the United States. And this is very much a Donald Trump rally.

Like at all Trump rallies, there’s a sort of weird choice of music. Today it’s the same two John Mayer songs on loop over and over again. Pro-Trump conservative lawmakers and activists are hanging around, trying to get themselves in front of the TV cameras.

Out in the crowd, somebody raises a giant Confederate flag. Also Rudy Giuliani is there in the front row because he always seems to be around these days. And when President Trump finally walks onto the stage to the accompaniment of a military band, the crowd just goes wild.

Crowd: Donald Trump! Donald Trump!

Donald Trump: Thank you so much, such a great honor.

Maddow: That is thousands of people, all chanting “Donald Trump, Donald Trump.” The White House has arranged this big speech with his adoring crowd bussed in from all over because President Trump needs a bit of a boost. He needs a pick me up.

Trump: Thank you very much, that’s so nice.

Maddow: It has been a rough first few months for America’s new president. His inauguration, supposed to be his big day, was not that big.

(CHANTING)

Maddow: But his inauguration was met with really big protests all over the world. One of his big campaign promises was repealing Obamacare. He was absolutely sure he could do that.

He tried to do it and he blew it. He failed really dramatically when he tried.

NBC News Reporter Kasie Hunt: After seven years of fighting, the Republican promise to repeal Obamacare is broken.

Maddow: That was a big embarrassment. And now there’s a special counsel who’s investigating ties between his campaign and Russia.

NBC Nightly News Anchor Lester Holt: Breaking news tonight, the Justice Department is appointing a special counsel to take over the Trump campaign Russia investigation.

Maddow: It was a lot. It was kind of a drag. Where were the adoring crowds and the energizing rallies of the campaign days?

Trump’s advisers decided he needed a rejuvenating event, a guaranteed pro-Trump crowd where he could just bask a little bit in their adulation. 

That’s why on this day, in July 2017, Donald Trump is about to give a speech in Warsaw, in Poland.

Trump: We have come to your nation to deliver a very important message. America loves Poland and America loves the Polish people. Thank you. 

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Maddow: America loves Poland. America loves the Polish people. And the Polish people tend to love American presidents. But what’s happening on this day, in 2017, this is different.

This crowd has been assembled by the Polish government, specifically for Donald Trump, not because he is some sort of paragon of longstanding American values and U.S. global commitments, but because he’s been calling those things into question. Poland has recently gotten its own new president who is a populist-sounding leader with authoritarian tendencies. He has been hard at work undoing decades of democratic progress in his country.

Crackdowns on journalists, government attacks on LGBTQ people, demonizing immigrants while shutting the country’s borders to refugees. His government is gearing up for a takeover of the judiciary, taking over the courts, turning them into an extension of the president’s power.

Now this trip to Poland had not been on Trump’s original travel schedule. What he was scheduled to do was go to France and Germany to have the requisite new U.S. President meetings with our major European partners. But with all the big protests against him everywhere, with reporters asking him hostile questions at every turn, the White House knew that this trip to France and Germany was not going to be fun for Donald Trump. But then they got this lifeline, this great new idea for an addition to Trump’s travel schedule, when the new right-wing government of Poland got in touch and said, hey we hear you’re coming to the neighborhood, why don’t you stop here first?

We can guarantee you an adoring crowd. We will bus in our supporters from conservative suburbs and from the countryside. Why don’t you come to Poland?

When the Trump White House said yes, this was not only something they knew would buoy the spirits of President Trump, this was a coup for the country that had extended the invitation. Poland was going to get a visit from the President of the United States even before Germany got one, even before France. Not only is that unusual, given our historic relationship with some of our strongest allies, it’s kind of a kick in the pants to Germany and France specifically.

At that point, they had been criticizing Poland aggressively for backsliding on democracy. And now here was the United States rewarding the backsliding country and snubbing our allies to do it. That dynamic was why a lot of people did not want President Trump to make this trip to Warsaw.

People who were fighting for democracy in Poland particularly didn’t want it. It was only going to boost the authoritarians they were fighting against. Lots of people in the U.S. didn’t want him to go either, or at least they hoped that if he did, he would pressure the Polish President to do better, or at least he would voice America’s commitment to democratic principles while he was there. Trump gets there and, of course, he does the exact opposite.

The Polish President who has been cracking down on press freedom, Trump immediately makes a big show out of joking with him about how terrible the media are.

Trump: They have been fake news for a long time. They have been covering me in a very — very dishonest way. Do you have that also, by the way, Mr. President?

Maddow: It was a weird moment. This country in Europe with a new leader who’s taking a hard-right authoritarian turn; our allies in Europe are horrified; they’re very critical of what’s happening in Poland; they’re trying to sound the alarm about it.

And here’s the U.S. President, palling around with the new right-wing leader of Poland, showing a kinship of spirit and mission with him instead of our closest allies. But it works. It works for the new government of Poland. Just days after Trump’s speech, with this big boost of momentum and confidence from his big visit, the Polish government forces through the first part of its takeover of the country’s courts, the country’s judiciary.

And soon enough, having taken over the courts, this new Polish government is able to achieve something that Poland’s right-wing has been after for decades, something the American right has been after for decades as well. Poland bans abortion.

(MUSIC PLAYING) 

Maddow: I am Rachel Maddow. And I’m here with Isaac-Davy Aronson. Hi, Isaac.

Isaac-Davy Aronson: Hi, Rachel.

Maddow: Today, Isaac has a story from Poland. And it is a story from history but it’s very, very recent history. It’s a story with uncanny parallels to our own moment here. It’s just that Poland got there a couple of years ahead of us.

Aronson: It’s the story of a populist, authoritarian leader who rode to power on a wave of nativism, nationalism, and conspiracy theories, quickly remade his country’s top court and got abortion banned against the will of the vast majority of the country. And it’s the story of how the backlash to the ban is now remaking the country’s politics.

Maddow: If our country is now hurtling along a similar road, their experience going ahead of us may help us to see the twist and turns that we’re coming up on here. So, let’s do this. This is “Rachel Maddow Presents: Déjà News.”

(MUSIC PLAYING)

(BREAK)

MSNBC Anchor Brian Williams: NBC News is projecting that Donald Trump has indeed been elected President of these United States.

Maddow: Our story starts a few years ago, with a presidential election that shook the country. It’s a little bit like what happened here in 2016, but this was one year earlier.

Unknown: (Speaking Foreign Language)

(CHEERING)

Maddow: In the run-up to the election that year, the right-wing populist candidate had been trailing in the polls. But in the end he eked out a win and became President of Poland in 2015. And with that election result, suddenly everything about politics in that country looked different.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Maddow: That is where Isaac picks up the story, and I will be back with you on the other side.

Aronson: The man who became president in 2015 is named Andrzej Duda.

Crowd: Andrzej Duda! Andrzej Duda, President!

Aronson: And as soon as this new right-wing president took office, he was very clear about one thing: the parliament, which was still controlled by the other party, would not be allowed to appoint any more judges. It was a little bit like what happened here in 2016, when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died. President Obama did what you do when you’re President and a Supreme Court Justice dies or retires.

Barack Obama: Today I am nominating Chief Judge Merrick Brian Garland to join the Supreme Court.

(APPLAUSE)

Aronson: But the Republican Senate refused to even consider the nomination. They wouldn’t even meet with the nominee, just pretended like it hadn’t happened. Poland had pretty much the exact same experience, except that in Poland, the parliament appoints judges and the president ceremonially swears them in. In 2015, when the parliament appointed new justices to Poland’s highest court, Andrzej Duda, this new right-wing president, basically stuck his fingers in his ears and was like, la la la, I can’t hear you. I don’t see any judges. And he never swore them in.

He was hoping that if he held out for a few months, his party would take over the parliament, too. And they did. They got less than 40 percent of the vote, but in Poland’s multiparty system, that was enough to gain control. And that’s when they set about appointing their own judges.

Anne Applebaum: Yes, their first priority was to alter the judicial system. They gave themselves the right to appoint new judges. One of the results of that is that there are judges who are thought to be illegitimate on the court.

Aronson: Journalist and historian Anne Applebaum has lived in Poland on and off for the last 30 years, and she has a unique perspective on what’s happened there over the last decade or so. Her husband is a Polish politician. He was a top cabinet official in the government that was ousted when the far-right party took over in 2015.

Applebaum: It’s very odd for me, given that I am American, I’ve lived for many years in Poland. My husband is Polish. He was in Polish politics. And for years and years, I imagined that these were really two different realities. They were hardly comparable.

And yet, I have to say, in the last several years, the stunning parallels between what happens in Polish politics and what happens in American politics continue to amaze me.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Aronson: Applebaum says the project of the new conservative ruling party that took over in 2015 was not just to remake the courts but to undermine the entire concept of the judiciary, to degrade people’s respect for judges and the whole court system.

Applebaum: There was an online campaign with very vulgar attacks, sometimes letters written directly to the judges themselves, smear campaigns against them that seemed to be coming from nowhere. And it was proven, thanks to a whistleblower, that it was actually being coordinated by the justice ministry.

In addition to that, a public advertising campaign showing judges as drunk or law breaking, there was an attempt to downgrade judges and to show that they’re not figures of respect. They all need to be changed. They all need to be replaced.

Aronson: That was just step one for Poland’s new ruling party. They also moved to take over the country’s media. They started disregarding certain rules and treaties they were supposed to abide by as a member of the European Union on things like human rights and rule of law and treatment of migrants.

Polish citizens came out to protest, especially in big cities. But with this hard-right party controlling the presidency and parliament, and rapidly replacing all the judges in the country, these popular protests apparently didn’t mean much to them. They could do whatever they wanted.

It wasn’t until about a year into the new regime, the fall of 2016, that Poland’s new government triggered a backlash they could not ignore, when they moved to finally do something that the right-wing had wanted to do for years. They finally decided to do it. They moved to ban abortion.

(CROWD NOISE)

Aronson: Poland is heavily Catholic. It already had some of the strictest abortion laws in Europe. But now the government was proposing an outright ban, with punishment of years in prison for women and doctors.

The response to that proposed ban was swift and loud and massive. Protests broke out in 150 cities, large and small. Protesters called a national strike on the first Monday in October. They dubbed it “Black Monday” and women across the country didn’t show up for work or school, and instead poured into the streets, wearing all black.

Crowd: (Speaking Foreign Language)

Aronson: What they are saying here is, “You will not take our dignity from us.”

Crowd: (Speaking Foreign Language)

Aronson: “This government will be abolished by women.”

Crowd: (Speaking Foreign Language)

Aronson: “Poland has not yet perished,” which is the opening phrase in the Polish National Anthem.

Aronson: That Monday, Black Monday, it happened to be raining, so many protesters had umbrellas. The streets and avenues became a sea of umbrellas, and those umbrellas became a symbol of the protests.

As the marches continued for days and then weeks, demonstrators would hold their umbrellas aloft, even in good weather, shouting defiantly that they refused to put them away. And the protesters, Polish women, they were very clear about what they wanted.

Unknown (translated): I want to live in a free country and I want to make a choice. I’m a mother and I would like to be a grandmother. I would like my daughter, who is next to me, to be able also to decide about their own lives.

Bozena Przyluska (translated): Abortion is the tip of the iceberg. The contempt and violence we’re facing in Poland everyday is unbearable.

Ewa Trojanowska (translated): I am tired of the arrogance of power, the violation of the constitution and the civil rights of women, and not only women. I am sick of the ignoring of the voice of people like ours today. I’m sick of how the parliament works today, how there are guided discussions. Generally, I have had enough of what is happening in Poland.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Aronson: The result of this massive, passionate protest campaign in Poland was that it worked. The government backed down. The opposition to the abortion ban was so intense, so widespread, so overwhelming, the government dropped the proposal.

Marta Lempart is the founder and leader of the Polish Women’s Strike, the group that formed out of those initial protests. She says if that had been the end of it, the protesters would probably have just gone home and been satisfied.

Marta Lempart: That was the first time that the government stopped. And if they stayed silent, if the right wing stayed silent, if the church stayed silent, people would just go home. Many of those people who did the spontaneous protest would just say, okay, we won.

Aronson: But that’s not what happened. Lempart says the women who came out in those initial protests, especially in smaller cities and towns, many of them were shamed and attacked by their communities and by politicians, and by the church.

Anne Applebaum describes the concerted effort to demonize the women who took part in the Black Monday Protests.

Applebaum: It’s become possible to use social media or state media or, far right media to characterize the protests for the rest of the country as some kind of elite sport, you know, far left women wearing fur coats, waving their dollar bills in the air, they don’t really represent you. They’ve been infected by the LGBT virus, you know, and that’s by the way, a phrase that is used in Poland.

They’re not really us. They don’t represent we, the nation. They’re not part of who we define ourselves as. They’re some kind of other outer different group.

Aronson: The women who took to the streets on Black Monday weren’t necessarily planning on making these protests a regular thing, but the women were targeted by the right for having protested. And then the government kept reintroducing the abortion ban. Here’s Marta Lempart.

Lempart: Then, there were many attempts to ban abortion. So, each year basically we had to protest. Each time, it became like this routine thing that they would just put it on the table at some point and test the public. If they can do this kind of ban or maybe different kind of ban, maybe they can do this.

Aronson: The government spent a few years trying this ban and that ban, always coming up against this solid wall of national protest and backing down.

But in 2020, they finally decided to make use of that nice new judiciary they had been stacking ever since taking power. And rather than having the parliament or the president do it, they had the country’s highest court issue the abortion ban instead.

(CHANTING)

Aronson: The protests that erupted in response in 2020 were literally like nothing the country had seen in over 30 years, since the demonstrations that brought down communism in Poland in 1989. Anne Applebaum was in Poland when the abortion ruling was handed down.

Applebaum: There were mass protests all over the country. I actually attended one of them in a relatively small town in the country. A very small town, I should say. It was about 10,000 people. And there were hundreds of women marching around the small square in the in the center of this little town.

And we talked to the mayor who said to us he couldn’t remember in his lifetime anything like that. So it had a kind of galvanizing effect on quite a lot of women.

Aronson: And with good reason. The new abortion ban was about to have devastating consequences for women in Poland.

BBC Anchor: Thousands of people have marched in Poland in memory of a mother whose death has been blamed on the country’s near-total ban on abortion.

Aronson: This is the BBC covering the first death known to have resulted from the ban, which was major news across Europe. Her name was Izabela, and she was 30-years-old.

BBC Warsaw Correspondent Adam Easton: The mother of Izabela released text messages that Izabela sent from the hospital where she knew what was happening to her. And she said, “There’s nothing we can do because the abortion law. I just have to lie here in bed,” as she was 22 weeks pregnant at the time. Her water had broke. They were waiting, she said, until the baby died, until they could do anything. In the meantime, she developed a high fever, she was shivering. There were even reports of her vomiting. And they did wait until the scan showed that the fetus heart had stopped.

And when they did that, they decided to perform an emergency cesarean section, but unfortunately, Izabela died on the way to that from septic shock. Many people marching in cities across the country this evening, demanding that the law be liberalized. The march went under the banner of “not one more victim.”

Aronson: The march was under the banner of “not one more victim.” But there was one more victim and another and another. Marta Lempart says a big part of her activism now is making women aware of how dangerous it is to be pregnant in Poland.

Lempart: If you’re pregnant and you go to a Polish hospital, you have to be prepared to talk to the media, to alert the media. You have to be prepared to fight for your life, to shout and scream and fight them and not believe a word they say. And your family has to also be prepared for that because you might not get out alive. That’s the situation now.

Aronson: For people like Marta Lempart, who continue to protest, the right-wing Law and Justice Party taking over the courts, the elimination of an independent judiciary, has given the government more tools to crack down on dissent and activism.

Lempart says she, herself, is currently named in a 114 different court cases for protesting, but also for littering or putting up a poster without a property owner’s consent, or even being loud in public.

(CROWD NOISE)

Aronson: It’s election season again in Poland right now. Voters will cast their ballots in the fall. This June 4, the anniversary of the end of communist rule in Poland in 1989, half a million people gathered in downtown Warsaw for a rally against the Law and Justice party.

But public polling suggests the election this poll will be close. And of course, any election disputes will be adjudicated by Poland’s top court, which is now firmly controlled by the ruling right-wing party.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Maddow: Once those really big abortion rights protests started in Poland in 2020, they kept going in hundreds of cities across Poland. A month into those rolling demonstrations, there was a dispatch in “The New Yorker” about it, and the title on that piece was “The Abortion Protests in Poland are Starting to Feel Like a Revolution.”

What started three years ago as demonstrations about abortion rights, it really has become a movement that’s not just abortion anymore. It’s about democracy and the rule of law, the independence of the courts, the free press. It’s about protecting LGBT rights and wanting to be a full member of the European Union. It’s about ousting the authoritarian ruling party.

The growth of that movement, its expansion from one right to many, that’s an important change, and a radical one. And that’s ahead when “Déjà News” continues.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

(BREAK)

Nancy Northup: We knew after the oral argument that it did not look good. I mean we knew when the Supreme Court took the case that it did not look good.

Maddow: This is Nancy Northup, President and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights. Last year, the Center for Reproductive Rights argued and lost the U.S. Supreme Court case in which the court overturned Roe versus Wade. That abolished federal protections for the right to have an abortion in this country, which means individual states can now ban abortion.

Northup: It was a devastating, devastating day. We were prepared, but nevertheless, I was sitting at my desk, I was on a different conference call and boom. The opinion came in and it was, whoa.

I remember texting my kids to say, this is it, you know, they did it. But then immediately got to work. We were in court right away suing to try to maintain access in states for as long as possible.

Maddow: We have just passed the one-year mark since the right to abortion was taken away in this country. U.S. states can now ban abortion if they want to. And in just about every state where Republicans control state government, they have now instituted either an outright ban or very severe restrictions.

Now that there is no federal protection for the right to have an abortion, the Center for Reproductive Rights is in court all the time, all over the country, trying to protect abortion rights at the state level.

In Texas, they’re representing 13 women who were denied medical care they needed during their pregnancies because the care they needed could have put their doctors at risk for being criminally prosecuted under Texas’s abortion ban. And that is a criminal law violation that carries a 99-year prison sentence.

Amanda Zurawski: My name is Amanda Zurawski, and I’m here to tell you a little bit about my experience with the Texas abortion bans.

Maddow: Amanda Zurawski is the lead plaintiff in that Texas case brought by the Center for Reproductive Rights. This is her testifying to congress earlier this year.

Zurawski: About eight months ago, I was thrilled to be cruising through the second trimester of my first pregnancy. I was carrying our daughter, Willow. My husband, Josh, and I were beyond thrilled. Then on a sunny August day, everything changed. Some unexpected symptoms arrived and I contacted my obstetrician to be safe and was surprised when I was told to come in as soon as possible.

After a brief examination, my husband and I received the harrowing news that I had dilated prematurely due to a condition known as cervical insufficiency. Soon after my membranes ruptured and we were told by multiple doctors that the loss of our daughter was inevitable. It was clear that this was not a question of if we would lose our baby, it was a question of when.

I asked what could be done to ensure the respectful passing of our baby and to protect me now that my body was unprotected and vulnerable. I needed an abortion. My healthcare team was anguished as they explained there was nothing they could do because of Texas’s anti-abortion laws. It meant that even though we would, with complete certainty, lose Willow, my doctors didn’t feel safe enough to intervene as long as her heart was beating or until I was sick enough for the ethics board at the hospital to consider my life at risk.

People have asked why we didn’t travel to a state where the laws aren’t so restrictive, but we live in the middle of Texas and the nearest sanctuary state is at least an eight-hour drive. Developing sepsis, a condition that can kill in under an hour, in a car in the middle of the west Texas desert or on an airplane is a death sentence. And it’s not a choice we should have even had to consider in the first place. So, all we could do was wait

Maddow: Under the new abortion ban in Texas, Amanda Zurawski nearly died.

Zurawski: For days, I was locked in this bizarre and avoidable hell. Would Willow’s heart stop or would I deteriorate to the brink of death? The answer arrived three long days later. In a matter of minutes, I went from being physically healthy to developing a raging fever and dangerously low blood pressure.

My husband rushed me to the hospital where we soon learned I was in septic shock, made evident by my violent teeth chattering and incapacity to even respond to questions. Several hours later, after stabilizing just enough to deliver our stillborn daughter, my vitals crashed again. In the middle of the night, I was rapidly transferred to the ICU where I would stay for three days as medical professionals battled to save my life.

Maddow: Amanda Zurawski says she’s now terrified to ever again be pregnant in Texas. Nancy Northup says she fears the worst is yet to come.

Northup: In Poland, seven women have died because they were denied lifesaving obstetrics care, including just last month. And you know, thank God all the women in our lawsuit survived, but it’s only a matter of time before someone’s going to die here in the United States, tragically.

Maddow: So, the way Poland’s far right government did it is very much the way our Republican party did it. The Republicans refused to allow Democrats to fill a Supreme Court seat and then they took over the court. Their three Trump-appointed Justices gave them the majority they needed to overturn Roe and institute bans on abortion despite the country, as a whole, being very much opposed to that idea.

Since then, the reason for these ongoing legal fights in the states is to try to save American women from the next chapter in this shared story that we’ve already seen happen in Poland. It’s to try to keep women from dying because of these laws, these bans on abortion.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Maddow: And there is also the other kind of fight, for the hearts and minds of the voters. And there, again, what has happened in Poland might help us know what to expect here. Here’s Isaac with that part of the story.

Aronson: When the Law and Justice party first tried to ban abortion, the people protesting against it were just trying to preserve the status quo in Poland, where abortion laws were already very restrictive and public support for abortion rights stood at about 37 percent. But Marta Lempart of the Polish Women’s Strike says the attack on abortion rights caused people to reconsider how they felt about the issue.

Lempart: People who were protesting in 2016 were people who were protesting just to protect the status quo. And they changed their minds. It’s just a great story that people basically reflected and changed their minds on abortion. They changed their stance. They got engaged into fight for legal abortion. Support for legal abortion in Poland now is 70 percent.

Aronson: Support for abortion rights used to be at 37 percent, now it’s 70 percent. We may be seeing signs of something similar here. A USA Today-Suffolk University poll last month found that one in four Americans say new restrictions on abortion have made them more supportive of abortion rights. And that tracks with several polls in recent months that have all found the same thing: new restrictions on abortion have made Americans as a whole more supportive of abortion rights.

Lempart says the same thing happened when the government started going after the LGBTQ community in Poland. All kinds of unexpected allies started showing up for Pride events.

Lempart: What we see is people who would never go to Pride, people who would never march for LGBT rights, who just weren’t involved at all, and they were forced to take the stance. Because you cannot just stay out of this when this government is running this horrible, hateful campaign against LGBT people.

So, you are forced to make a decision and people made the decision, yeah, maybe I’m conservative, maybe I’m even a religious person, but I just don’t agree for people to be treated like this now. So, okay, so you ask me, I’m standing with LGBT people now. So that’s the thing. That’s the thing that happened in Poland. And, of course, it comes with such a cost, but that’s the change.

Aronson: Nancy Northup says she sees a similar phenomenon among the American women who have become clients of the Center for Reproductive Rights, plaintiffs in their cases. They weren’t abortion rights activists. They were just people who were forced into an unconscionable situation by their government.

Northup: These were women in Texas who were just wanting to live their lives and in some cases have a first pregnancy, in some cases, you know, build their families more. None of them had a sense of wanting to do what they did, which is put their names on a complaint; some of them stood up in front of the Texas State Capitol at a lawsuit; gone on television; they’ve gone on radio; they’ve gone to testify in Congress.

It’s not what they wanted to do. They wanted to live their lives as we all do, but they have become vocal spokespeople about what’s happening to them, as people do when they stand up in any country against fundamental rights violations.

Aronson: Nancy Northup and Marta Lempart also say remarkably similar things about how the attack on abortion rights has changed the conversation and the politics around abortion in their respective countries. Here they both are, starting with Marta Lempart. When she uses the word “democrats” here, she’s talking about advocates for democracy.

Lempart: The democrats would say, this is abortion. This is about abortion. We cannot pronounce abortion in public. We cannot say that word in public. They failed fully, the democrats, democratic organizations, but democratic politicians, the opposition politicians, they failed fully because what prevented them from speaking, alarming, saying, this is real, this is serious, this is actually going to happen, and organizing and mobilizing their electorates around that, was that the fact that they would have to use the word abortion in public. Now they do.

Northup: Many years ago because abortion was so stigmatized, people didn’t want to talk about it and euphemisms were used. I mean, my gosh, in Congress they would just say pro-choice. They couldn’t say abortion.

And I was like, you can’t protect rights that you don’t talk about, right? You can’t have like a secret protection of rights. You have to be able to talk about it. And people are now talking about it. This is actually a kitchen table issue that people understand and support and are talking about.

In the states that just last fall protected abortion rights in their state constitutions, the voters had the ability to put an issue on the ballot, amend their state constitutions. They did it in Michigan, in Vermont and California.

Now for the first time, the words reproductive freedom and reproductive liberty are in the actual state constitutions. And like Michigan spells it out, it’s not just abortion rights, it’s about access to contraception and safe maternity care and assisted reproduction and all that.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Aronson: So, that’s one potential lesson to take from Poland’s experience. When people are forced to really think about it or forced to consider how their own lives might be put at risk, most people don’t like the government taking rights away. So, coming after abortion rights can galvanize support for protecting them.

Another takeaway from Poland’s experience of the last few years is that fights like this don’t exist in a vacuum. It was the takeover of Poland’s top court that allowed the government to ban abortion. And the abortion ban was also the government’s test case to see what else they could get away with, without setting off a revolt by the public.

Marta Lempart says it’s not just that Poland has a government that happens to want to take away reproductive rights; the abortion ban is part and parcel of their broad authoritarian project. She says if you care about protecting any right or any group of people, you need to care about democracy and the rule of law, because authoritarians eventually come for everybody.

Lempart: When you have an anti-democratic party, it’s always a party that hates people. They hate basically all the people. They hate people who don’t vote for them. They hate LGBT people. They hate women. They hate teachers. They hate even persons with disabilities.

So that’s the thing, like if you have an anti-democratic party that doesn’t care about the people, from not caring about the people, because that’s what anti-democratic parties are about, not caring about the people, towards hating people or to hate particular groups of people and to target them, it’s a very short path.

Aronson: Democracy in Poland has been in place for only a few decades, and it’s been robust and vibrant. Anne Applebaum says that’s why the rapid shift away from democracy has been not only surprising, but frightening.

Applebaum: This is a warning to us. It’s showing just how far people will go. All of the people who are leading the Polish ruling party were part of a democratic system for the past two decades. Some of them were even leaders of the anti-communist opposition 30 years ago or they were certainly present in it.

So, these are people who were theoretically pro-democracy and some of them were people who helped build and construct the current free Poland that we have today. And yet, they began to see the advantage of returning Poland on an autocratic path. And if that can happen there, then I think it can happen anywhere.

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Maddow: If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere. And yet! Anne Applebaum’s astute and unnerving warning notwithstanding, Isaac, one of the things that’s really striking about some of the interviews you did for this episode is that they do sound a little bit optimistic. At least for Marta Lempart in Poland and Nancy Northup here in the U.S., they seem to be saying that things are maybe moving in a direction that gives them hope. Is that fair to say?

Aronson: Yeah, it is, and it was not at all what I was expecting, to be honest. Now, to be clear, both of them are acutely aware of how very bad the situation is right now. Again, women in Poland have died. And a lot of what Marta Lempart and Nancy Northup are trying to do right now is just prevent suffering where they can.

But both of them see the current political moment on abortion catalyzing a new movement toward broader reproductive rights, particularly among people who were never involved in politics, were never activists, regular folks who are stepping up because they feel like they have to.

Maddow: Yeah, so much of history it really is the story of what normal, average people, you know, just minding their own business, what they feel like they have to do when they are confronted with an unforeseen, challenging, scary situation that they did not ask for, that they haven’t prepared for. But here it is, it nevertheless happened in their country, in their lifetime, in their life. And so they find themselves unexpectedly in the fight.

Aronson: To that point, I want share one more thing Marta Lempart told me. It’s about Poland’s unexpected resistance fighters, judges.

Lempart: This is the best story in this horrible thing. The resistance of Polish judges is something that nobody expected. You’ve had hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people protesting to protect the judges from being removed. These are hero stories about judges in Poland. Nobody would expect that to happen ever, them to be these fighters and to oppose the government.

Aronson: The key thing here, according to Marta Lempart, is that just like the average citizens who found themselves on the streets, most of these judges never asked for this. They suddenly find themselves under pressure, under attack from this authoritarian government; you remember what Anne Applebaum was telling us about the smear campaigns against judges, threatening letters, and all of that.

And judges, the ones who haven’t been replaced, have to decide what to do. And Lempart has seen these judges face hard choices on the bench when she has been brought up on charges for protesting. And with dozens and dozens of cases pending against her, you know, she has had the opportunity to observe a lot of them. And she has seen them do brave things and stand up for democracy, for the rule of law.

Lempart: I have this judge who is basically shaking. He’s pale. You can see he’s sweating, and he’s terrified. He’s absolutely terrified. He didn’t sign up for this, and he still is doing the right thing. So you can see this guy who knows that his career is on the line, that they can destroy his life. They can also do this press campaign against him, and he’s just not prepared for that. He never signed for this, and he is still doing the right thing.

This is something that you cannot forget. When you see something like that, you start believing in the system. You start believing in the judges. You start belief into— in the judiciary and you know that judicial independence is like what you’re looking at: this, this guy that is terrified, that’s judicial independence.

Maddow: That’s judicial independence. Wow. We talk about this a lot in this country in terms of thinking about that sort of newly galvanized defense, even here, for the rule of law. Part of that is when the rule of law is not an abstraction, when it is a very, very concrete thing.

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Maddow: All right, that’s going to do it for this episode of “Déjà News.” Well done, Isaac. What do you got for us next week?

Aronson: Well, you know those southern governors who have been putting undocumented immigrants on buses and dropping them off unannounced in northern cities, or sometimes outside the vice president’s house? We’re going to look back at southern conservatives who did exactly the same thing decades ago, but with their own citizens.

Maddow: All right, well that’s next time on “Rachel Maddow Presents: Déjà News.”

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Aronson: “Déjà News” is a production of MSNBC and NBC News.

Maddow: It is executive produced and written by Isaac and me.

Aronson: Our associate producer is Janmaris Perez.

Maddow: Our audio producer is Tim Einenkel.

Aronson: Additional mixing by Bob Mallory.

Maddow: Our technical director is Bryson Barnes.

Aronson: Our senior executive producers are Cory Gnazzo and Laura Conaway.

Maddow: Our web producer is Will Femia.

Aronson: Our booking producer is Valerie Champagne.

Maddow: Archival tape wrangling by Holly Klopchin and Johanna Cerutti.

Aronson: Our thanks to Marta Lempart, leader of the Polish Women’s Strike.

Maddow: Nancy Northup, President and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Aronson: And Anne Applebaum, whose latest book is “Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.”

Maddow: For more about this series and if you want to see some incredible photos of the Polish protest movement, go to our website: msnbc.com/deja-news.

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Lempart: The Trump thing with the Twitter thing. Augh! I observed him on Twitter and I, believe me, when we had, like, we have of course difficult times and many bad things are happening here. And I had this, sometimes I would just read his tweets to just feel that, okay, we’re not the only crazy place in the world with crazy people in power.

I’m sorry I know that we’re talking about horrible things happening to democracy, horrible things happening to people, you know, fighting for democracy. But still, it was like this, okay, we have this clown thing outside. I had this clown thing, I’m sorry to say that, but I had this clown guy outside to look at and say, okay, okay, this is not just us, okay. It can happen anywhere. Like, augh!

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