Surviving Autocracy

by Masha Gessen

The Reichstag Fire was used to create a “state of exception,” as Carl Schmitt, Hitler’s favorite legal scholar, called it. In Schmitt’s terms, a state of exception arises when an emergency, a singular event, shakes up the accepted order of things. This is when the sovereign steps forward and institutes new, extralegal rules. The emergency enables a quantum leap: Having amassed enough power to declare a state of exception, the sovereign then, by that declaration, acquires far greater, unchecked power. That is what makes the change irreversible, and the state of exception permanent.

Every galvanizing event of the past eighty years has been compared to the Reichstag Fire. On December 1, 1934, Sergei Kirov, the head of the Communist Party in Leningrad, was murdered by a lone gunman. The assassination is remembered as the pretext for creating a state of exception in the Soviet Union. Show trials and mass arrests followed, swelling the Gulag with people accused of being traitors, spies, and terrorist plotters. To handle the volume, the Kremlin created troikas—three-person panels that doled out a sentence without reviewing the case, much less hearing from the defense. More recently, Vladimir Putin has relied on a succession of catastrophic events to create irreversible exceptions. In 1999, a series of apartment bombings in Moscow and cities in southern Russia killed hundreds. This allowed Putin to proclaim that he could summarily execute those deemed “terrorists”; it also became a pretext for a new war in Chechnya. In 2002, the three-day siege of a Moscow theater served as a demonstration of the principle of summary execution: Russian law enforcement pumped the theater full of sleeping gas, entered the building, and shot the hostage-takers as they lay unconscious. The Kremlin also used the theater siege as a pretext to ban the already cowed media from covering antiterrorist operations. Two years later, more than three hundred people, most of them children, died following an attack on a school in Beslan, in southern Russia. Putin used this catastrophic even...

As tempting as it was to imagine that Trump would do us the favor of announcing the point of no return with a sweeping, unequivocal gesture (and even that upon this announcement we would all justifiably give up hope or, alternatively, become desperately heroic), his autocratic attempt, too, has been not one but a series of actions that change the nature of American government and politics step by step. Magyar has described aspiring post-Communist leaders as building their autocracies by gradually undermining the divisions among branches of government, especially by packing the courts and taking over prosecutorial authority. Of course, his model cannot be simply transposed onto United States reality—not least because some of the formal divisions between branches of government have been weak here for some time. The Justice Department, for example—the wielder of ultimate prosecutorial authority—is a part of the executive branch, and its independent functioning is determined by tradition. A monopoly on political power, which Magyar identifies as a major risk factor, is not unusual in the United States: Trump enjoyed it for his first two years in office, when both houses of Congress were controlled by Republicans, but a number of his predecessors had benefited from the same condition. Still, it is clear that this presidency is different from ones that preceded it.

the presumption of good faith.

A long enough and generous enough view of American history affirms the narrative of continuous progress toward justice. The thoughtful design of our institutions is only one reason for this history of progress. The other is that American citizens and public officials have largely acted in good faith.

No powerful political actor had set out to destroy the American political system itself—until, that is, Trump won the Republican nomination. He was probably the first major party nominee who ran not for president but for autocrat. And he won.

Contempt for the government and its work is a component of the disdain for elites, and a rhetorical trope shared by the current crop of the world’s antipolitical leaders, from Vladimir Putin to Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. They campaign on voters’ resentment of elites for ruining their lives, and they continue to traffic in this resentment even after they take office—as though someone else, someone sinister and apparently all-powerful, were still in charge, as though they were still insurgents. The very institutions of government—their own government now—are the enemy. As president, Trump went on to denigrate the intelligence services, rage against the Justice Department, and issue humiliating tweets about officials in his own administration.

Lying to Congress is a criminal offense. It would also, in other historical periods, be a disgrace. Why would the nominees to some of the nation’s highest offices lie, and lie in ways that were easy enough to catch and document? Why wouldn’t they? They weren’t merely parroting the behaviors of their patron, who lied loudly, insistently, incessantly; they were demonstrating that they shared his contempt for government. They were lying to the swamp. They couldn’t be bothered with the conventions of government because they found government itself contemptible.

A study of modern autocrats may show us that a Reichstag Fire is never quite the singular and signal event that changes the course of history, but it will also expose a truth behind the single-event narrative: autocrats declare their intentions early on.

We imagine the villains of history as masterminds of horror. This happens because we learn about them from history books, which weave narratives that retrospectively imbue events with logic, making them seem predetermined. Historians and their readers bring an unavoidable perception bias to the story: if a historical event caused shocking destruction, then the person behind this event must have been a correspondingly giant monster. Terrifying as it is to contemplate the catastrophes of the twentieth century, it would be even more frightening to imagine that humanity had stumbled unthinkingly into its darkest moments. But a reading of contemporaneous accounts will show that both Hitler and Stalin struck many of their countrymen as men of limited ability, education, and imagination—and, indeed, as being incompetent in government and military leadership. Contrary to popular wisdom, they were not political savants, possessed of one extraordinary talent that brought them to power. It was, rather, the blunt instrument of reassuring ignorance that propelled their rise in a frighteningly complex world.

Just as the full absurdity of Trump was sinking in, crushing any hope that he would turn “presidential,” Putin, in the American imagination, was turning into a brilliant strategist, a skilled secret agent who was plotting the end of the Western world. In fact, Putin was and remains a poorly educated, underinformed, incurious man whose ambition is vastly out of proportion to his understanding of the world. To the extent that he has any interest in the business of governing, it is solely his own role—on the world stage or on Russian television—that concerns him. Whether he is attending a summit, piloting a plane, or hang gliding with Siberian cranes, it is the spectacle of power that interests him. In this, he and Trump are alike: to them, power is the beginning and the end of government, the presidency, politics—and public politics is only the performance of power.

Corruption would not be the right word to apply to the Trump administration. The term implies deception—it assumes that the public official understands that they should not benefit from the public trust, but, duplicitously, they do it anyway. The opposite of corruption in political discourse is transparency—indeed, the global anticorruption organization calls itself Transparency International. Trump, his family, and his officials are not duplicitous: they appear to act in accordance with the belief that political power should produce personal wealth, and in this, if not in the specifics of their business arrangements, they are transparent.

opportunities inherent in the logic of the system. The American system of government has never separated money from political power, and in the two decades before Trump’s election, the role of money in American politics had grown manifold. Elections are decided by money: unlike in many other democracies, where electoral campaigns last from several weeks to a few months, are financed by government grants and/or subjected to strict spending limits—in the United States, it is contributions from the private sector that allow campaigns to exist in the first place. National and state party machines reinforce this system by apportioning access to public debates on the basis of the amount of money a candidate has secured. Access to media, which is to say, access to voters, also costs money: where in many democracies media are bound by obligations to provide airtime to candidates, in America the primary vehicle for addressing voters is through paid advertisements. No one in the political mainstream seemed to think anything was wrong with the marriage of money and politics. Former elected officials went to work as lobbyists. Using campaign contributions and lobbying to create (or kill) laws was normal. Power begat more money, and money begat more power. We could call the system that preceded and precipitated Trump’s rise an oligarchy, and we would be right.

One might say that Trump grasped the essence of the system, which turned money into power and power into money but, until Trump came along, did it politely, tastefully, and by group agreement. Or one might say that Trump acted at once the emperor and the boy who said that the emperor has no clothes, ripping the illusory cover of decency off the system, forcing everyone to stare at its obscene nature. Unlike the emperor in the fairy tale, though, Trump felt no shame and so was not transformed by the exposure—rather, he transformed the system, once again stripping away the moral aspiration of politics.

These systems served as the foundations for the mafia states of Hungary and Russia, where the party was replaced with a political clan centered on a patron who distributes money and power. Western analysts use the word corruption to describe these systems, but this can be misleading: here corruption does not describe bureaucrats soliciting bribes for small acts of civil service (though this happens too); it describes the people in charge using the instruments of government in order to amass wealth, but also using their wealth to perpetuate power. This corruption is integral to the system. The system cannot exist without corruption because corruption is its fuel, its social glue, and its instrument of control. Anyone who enters the system becomes complicit in the corruption, which means everyone is always in some way or another outside the law—and therefore punishable. Autocracies love to smear their opponents with accusations of corruption, jail them on corruption charges, and even execute them, as does China.

Trump’s flaunting of the expectations of decency on the one hand and his denial of his blatant self-dealing on the other moved the American government a giant step closer to the mafia states. Like those autocracies, Trumpism smears everyone: its friends because they become complicit in the corruption, and its enemies because they are accused of corruption.

In the first year of his presidency, Trump had effected a remarkable shift in American politics—a shift of political audiences. In a representative democracy, a politician’s primary audience is their voters, the residents of their district, state, or country who will decide whether to bring them back to office in the next election cycle. In an autocracy, the politician’s primary audience is the autocrat himself, because he is the patron who apportions power and influence. In Trump’s America, Republican politicians perform for Trump—he is their primary audience—but his audience is his base, the people who come to his rallies and absorb his tweets. He distributes power by mobilizing these voters. As long as the Democrats are performing for the audience of their voters rather than for Trump, there is hope of reversing the autocratic attempt—but even now half of the country in which we are living is functioning, in the public space, like an autocracy.

Washington split into two camps, one that inhabited a representative democracy and one that lived in an autocracy.

Unusually for the Trump era, the argument in the hearings was not about the facts—the facts were known and uncontested—but about the nature of political power in America. One side was arguing that political power was provisionally granted by voters and limited by law, rules, norms, expectations, policy legacy, and the system of checks and balances. The other side was arguing that power wants to be absolute and is limited only by what the president can get away with.

In plain view, Trump was flaunting, ignoring, and destroying all institutions of accountability. In plain view, he was degrading political speech. In plain view, he was using his office to enrich himself. In plain view, he was courting dictator after dictator. In plain view, he was promoting xenophobic conspiracy theories, now claiming that millions of immigrants voting illegally had cost him the popular vote; now insisting, repeatedly, that Obama had had him wiretapped.

his was the first administration focused on destruction. Trump appointees started deregulating by reversing or suspending Obama-era rules, from protecting transgender students’ rights to public-school accountability metrics, protecting streams from mining, and restricting the sale of firearms to people with mental disabilities. Trump appointees attacked government institutions themselves. In the winter of 2017, for example, most of the senior staff in the State Department either left or were fired. The State Department building in Washington became a ghost town. Where there had once been long lines to go through security on the way in, guards now waited around, idling between visitors. Inside, remaining staff struggled to understand what was going on: the programs they worked on were still funded—many of them, they assumed, only until a new budget went into effect—but they no longer had a line of communication to the top of the agency or, in some cases, to country specialists. Daily State Department briefings were suspended (occasional briefings were reinstituted when Mike Pompeo replaced Tillerson as secretary of state)—as were the Pentagon’s briefings; eventually, the White House effectively discontinued briefings too.

But his nomination hearing was the spectacle of the death of dignity in politics. There are at least two ways in which the concept of dignity is key to our understanding of politics. There is the dignity that participation in the political process affords each citizen. Having a voice, being heard, and exercising political agency are component parts of this form of dignity. There is also the dignity of political performance, with its reliance on honorifics, procedure, particular modes of dress, and a codified use of language. People have long understood that this performance can signal and even precede the content of politics. Of course, the public spectacle of politics can and has been used to exclude those who don’t look or speak the right way. That underscores the interplay of the two kinds of political dignity: the dignity of participation and the dignity of performance. The challenge of democracy is to create procedures that sustain the dignity of performance while they continuously expand the range of inclusion. Trumpism attacks both sorts of dignity, by degrading the performance of politics and by restricting participation in it.

This act of whistleblowing was not like other acts of whistleblowing. Historically, whistleblowers reveal abuse of power that is surprising and shocking to the public. The Trump-Ukraine story was shocking but in no way surprising: it was in character, and in keeping with a pattern of actions. The incident that the whistleblower chose to report was not the worst thing that Trump had done. Installing his daughter and her husband in the White House was worse. Inciting violence was worse. Unleashing war on immigrants was worse. Enabling murderous dictators the world over was worse. The two realities of Trump’s America—democratic and autocratic—collided daily in the impeachment hearings. In one reality, Congress was following due process to investigate and potentially remove from office a president who had abused power. In the other reality, the proceedings were a challenge to Trump’s legitimate autocratic power. The realities clashed but still did not overlap: to any participant or viewer on one side of the divide, anything the other side said only reaffirmed their reality. The realities were also asymmetrical: an autocratic attempt is a crisis, but the logic and language of impeachment proceedings is the logic and language of normal politics, of vote counting and procedure. If it had succeeded in removing Trump from office, it would have constituted a triumph of institutions over the autocratic attempt. It did not. The impeachment proceedings became merely a part of the histo...

the first three years have shown that an autocratic attempt in the United States has a credible chance of succeeding. Worse than that, they have shown that an autocratic attempt builds logically on the structures and norms of American government: on the concentration of power in the executive branch, and on the marriage of money and politics. Recovery from Trumpism—a process that will be necessary whenever Trumpism ends—will not be a process of returning to government as it used to be, a fictional state of pre-Trump normalcy. Recovery will be possible only as reinvention: of institutions, of what politics means to us, and of what it means to be a democracy, if that is indeed what we choose to be.

Totalitarian regimes use words to mean their opposite. In 1984, George Orwell imagined the Party dictating its slogans: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” Real-life totalitarian regimes do not grant their subjects the clarity of juxtaposing a word with its antonym—they enforce order by applying words in ways that invert meaning. The Soviet Union, for example, had something that it called “elections,” usually referred to, as though more descriptively, as the “free expression of citizen will.” The process, which was mandatory, involved showing up at the so-called polling place, receiving a pre-filled ballot—each office had one name matched to it—and depositing it in the ballot box, out in the open. The “free expression of citizen will” was not at all free, it did not constitute expression, and it had no relationship to citizenship or will. Calling this ritual either an “election” or the “free expression of citizen will” had a dual effect: it eviscerated the words “election,” “free,” “expression,” “citizen,” and “will,” and it also left the thing itself undescribed. When something cannot be described, it does not become a fact of shared reality. Hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens had an experience of the thing that could not be described, but they did not consciously share that experience, because they had no language for doing so. At the same time, an experience that could be accurately described as, say, an “election,” or “free,” had been preemp...

When Putin rose to power in 1999, a new kind of damage to language commenced. Putin declared a “dictatorship of the law.” His main ideologue, Vladislav Surkov, advanced the idea of “managed democracy.” Dmitry Medvedev, who kept Putin’s chair warm between Putin’s second and third terms, declared, “Freedom is better than unfreedom.” These were no longer words used to mean their opposite. These were words used simply to mean nothing. The phrase “dictatorship of the law” is so incoherent as to render both “dictatorship” and “law” meaningless.

The tweets summed up Trump’s understanding of power. His election victory entitled him—and, by extension, those whom he saw as his people—to adulation. Criticism, confrontation, and even the simple acknowledgment of political difference amount, in his view, to disrespect. Being disrespected makes him feel victimized—and he claims his imagined victimhood with glee. This claim turns the reality of power upside down, enabling Trump to come out on top by placing himself at the bottom.

Trump seized and flipped the term “fake news” in much the same way. Until roughly late fall 2016, “fake news” referred to false stories proffered by the likes of Breitbart, Russian internet trolls, or Macedonian teenagers who made a killing off gullible Americans by posting made-up tales on social networks. The term was unfortunate—something is either “fake” or “news,” not both—but briefly it was widely understood. Then Trump began applying it to news outlets he felt were too critical of him, especially The New York Times and CNN. The flip served a dual function: the classic one of a liar, caught red-handed, screaming “Liar!” at his accusers, and of positioning Trump as the victim. The president complains about “fake news” as though the legacy media outlets were more powerful than he is—powerful enough to treat him unfairly.

The assault on language may be harder to define and describe than his attacks on institutions, but it is essential to his autocratic attempt, the ultimate objective of which is to obliterate politics.

“Alternative facts” was not a phrase concocted to justify or whitewash a lie—it was a declaration that the new administration reserved the right to lie. Conway spoke to Todd from the position of power, threatening him from the first with the prospect of losing access. The two of them were having two different conversations: Todd was trying to cover a major news story, which was that the new White House press secretary had lied to the public; Conway was setting the new terms of the conversation between the administration and the media.

“Your job is not to call things ridiculous that are said by our press secretary and our president,” Conway responded. “That’s not your job. You’re supposed to be a news person. You’re not an opinion columnist.”

Todd was trying to engage Conway in a conversation about trust. His show, the work he had done as a journalist in the past, and, more broadly, mainstream American media were built on the premise that people value trust. Politicians and journalists need the public to trust them; both can earn public trust, and each can lose it easily. Everybody lies, but no one wants to be caught lying—or so Todd thought. Conway was defending a liar’s right to lie. There were no facts in her universe, and no issue of trust. There was power. Power demanded respect. Power conferred the right to speak and not be challenged. Being right was a question of power, not evidence. Conway was outraged that Todd would violate this compact by calling the president’s statements ridiculous. Alternatively, perhaps she was not so much outraged as performing outrage as a way of putting the media on notice. That her outrage may or may not have been heartfelt was a message too: nothing could be taken at face value anymore.

These lies can be annoying or amusing, but they are surmountable. They collapse in the face of facts. Truth is an effective defense against these lies because they exist along the same set of coordinates as the truth. The Trumpian lie is different. It is the power lie, or the bully lie. It is the lie of the bigger kid who took your hat and is wearing it—while denying that he took it. There is no defense against this lie because the point of the lie is to assert power, to show “I can say what I want when I want to.” The power lie conjures a different reality and demands that you choose between your experience and the bully’s demands: Are you going to insist that you are wet from the rain or give in and say that the sun is shining?

When he insisted that the Obama administration had had him wiretapped, and continued to insist on this even after FBI Director James Comey said that it wasn’t true, Trump was splitting the country into those who agreed to live in his reality and those who resisted and became his enemies by insisting on facts.

he was claiming the power to lie to people about their own experience. His right to make such claims was the substance of Conway’s conflict with Todd: Todd was arguing that the president had a responsibility to the public to tell the truth; she was asserting that the president can say whatever he wants because he is president.

Unmoored from lived reality, the autocrat has no need to be consistent. In fact, the ability to change his story at will is a demonstration of power. Putin, for example, claimed that there were no Russian troops in newly annexed Crimea, then a month later affirmed that Russians had been on the ground, then spent more than a year denying that Russian troops were in Eastern Ukraine, then breezily acknowledged that they were there. His shifts from lies to truthful statements were not admissions: they were proud, even boastful affirmatives delivered at his convenience. He communicated that his power enables him to say what he wants, when he wants, regardless of the facts. He is president of his country and king of reality.

Are you going to believe your own eyes or the headlines? This is the dilemma of people who live in totalitarian societies. Trusting one’s own perceptions is a lonely lot; believing one’s own eyes and being vocal about it is dangerous. Believing the propaganda—or, rather, accepting the propaganda as one’s reality—carries the promise of a less anxious existence, in harmony with the majority of one’s fellow citizens. The path to peace of mind lies in giving one’s mind over to the regime. Bizarrely, the experience of living in the United States during the Trump presidency reproduces this dilemma. Being an engaged citizen of Trump’s America means living in a constant state of cognitive tension. One cannot put the president and his lies out of one’s mind, because he is the president. Accepting that the president continuously tweets or says things that are not true, are known not to be true, are intended to be heard or read as power lies, and will continue to be broadcast—on Twitter and by the media—after they have been repeatedly disproven means accepting a constant challenge to fact-based reality. In effect, it means that the two realities—Trumpian and fact-based—come to exist side by side, on equal ground. The tension is draining. The need to pay constant attention to the lies is exhausting, and it is compounded by the feeling of helplessness in the face of the ridiculous and repeated lies. Most Americans in the age of Trump are not, like the subjects of a totalitarian regime,...

The lying president is an existential threat to journalism. In New York University media scholar Jay Rosen’s definition, journalism is a report on “what’s going on” in the community with which one identifies but outside the scope of individual experience: what happens in a place where you are not, at a time when you are doing something else. Journalists report on people who are unlike the people you know personally but whom you still consider your countrymen; on the proceedings and decisions of your government; on plays, movies, books, and music that you have not necessarily experienced firsthand but that form the culture in which you live. Journalism is essential to democracy because it creates a sense of shared reality across a city, a state, a nation. Without this shared reality, a public sphere—the term philosopher Jürgen Habermas uses to describe the space where public opinion takes shape—cannot exist.

In other words, a slight majority of Americans inhabit a fairly healthy public sphere without realizing it. Equating this space with the Trumpian media universe is not merely factually wrong, it is also giving Trump exactly what he wants: the erasure of distinction between truth and lies.

Several years before the 2016 election, fact-checking had advanced from back-office operation to journalistic genre. For a minute, it seemed like a brilliant invention because it gave journalists the option of covering the statements of public figures as statements rather than as statements of fact. But then the election itself precipitated a crisis of faith within the profession. It wasn’t just that so much of the legacy media had failed to imagine the possibility of a Trump victory—this, after all, was a mistake, and mistakes can be corrected. Much more damning was the fact that many media outlets had delivered sterling fact-based reporting on Trump—the malfeasance of his businesses and charities, the credible allegations that he had assaulted women, his racist statements and racist behavior in the past, as a New York real estate developer, and in the present, on the campaign trail, his habitual dishonesty—and it seemed to matter not at all. One might say that Trump voters were not the audience for this reporting by The Washington Post, The New York Times, ProPublica, BuzzFeed, and others, but this could hardly be a comfort to the journalists who felt that the very meaning of their profession had been thrown into question.

The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” column tracked Trump’s lies at the rate of nearly thirteen for every day of his presidency.

The lie dominates in the public sphere.

that, Trump clearly believes that he can govern by tweet—and he is not wrong.

All the back-and-forth validated the premise that Trump’s desire to order companies out of China was a legitimate topic of political discussion.

Deploying laws and institutions designed for liberal democracy to restrict media freedom is essential to autocratic attempts.

Less than three months into the presidency, his being unhinged and uninformed had become normalized because it was, in fact, now the norm, the everyday reality of American life.

Both ways of framing the policy—whether by stressing that calling something a lie goes beyond fact and becomes opinion, or by focusing on internal, unknowable intent—place artificial limits on a journalist’s ability to observe reality. In order to assume that Trump was not aware that he was lying when he said that millions of immigrants had voted illegally, or that Obama had him wiretapped, or that his tax cut was the biggest in history, or that the economy was better than ever, or that he was building a wall and this wall would keep out drugs and crime, one had to ignore the very act of repetition. Trump repeats his false statements after they have been fact-checked by the media and, in many cases, contradicted by officials in his own administration—and it is this repetition that gives Trumpian lies much of their power. A journalist who assumes that Trump’s intention is unknowable, that repeated false statements—when the truth is indeed knowable—do not, factually, constitute lying, is abdicating the responsibility to tell the story, to provide the context of what happened a year ago, yesterday, or even in parallel with the lying. The journalist becomes complicit in creating the bizarre sense of ahistoricism of the Trump era, which seems to exist only, ever, in the current moment. NPR and many other media outlets practice the same self-enforced amnesia in a recurrent argument about whether to call Trump a racist—or even whether to call his statements racist. It took NPR un...

The White House then issued a press release titled “What You Need To Know About The President’s Victory For The World By Freeing Three Brave Americans.”

The tone of the letter was a mix of a first-grader taking his toys and going home and a forlorn seventh-grader hoping that his love interest will come running after him.

If observing Trump’s schoolboy act in relationship to North Korea felt like watching a disaster movie, then witnessing his Greenland bid and subsequent tantrum was more like seeing a guest at a fancy dinner party blow his nose in an embroidered napkin and proceed to use a silver fork to scratch his foot under the table. But not only did most journalists cover the debacle with restraint—many also provided historical and political context. Explanations of the strategic and economic importance of the Arctic proliferated; many media outlets noted that President Harry S Truman had also wanted to buy Greenland. Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, a consistent Trump critic, tried the opposite approach and wrote a piece explaining why the United States needs a tiny country like Denmark to be its ally. The media were doing what media should do—providing context, organizing relevant information, creating narrative—and this too had a normalizing effect, simply by helping media consumers to absorb the unabsorbable. It was as though the other dinner guests had carried on with their polite conversation and even handed the disruptive, deranged visitor a clean fork so that he wouldn’t have to eat dessert with the utensil he had stuck in his shoe.