Surviving Autocracy

by Masha Gessen

Before routine White House briefings vanished, their tone had changed. While many previous administrations—including Obama’s—had been criticized, fairly, for being less transparent than they ought to have been, all had at least acknowledged that the media served as an essential bridge between the American people and the government they had put into office. Trump’s official stand was that the media were an enemy, and his people had to demonstratively treat them as such. Spicer, during his six-month tenure as press secretary, was belligerent and openly hostile; he lied often. His successor, Sarah Sanders, lied too, but she delivered her lies in an even, bored tone that seemed to indicate that she resented having to answer anything, or to anyone. Sanders’s tenure was just short of two years. Grisham gave her first media interview—to America This Week on the conservative Sinclair network—a month and a half after starting the job.

The exercise had established that the White House press pool consisted primarily of straight, pious white men. The press secretary had enlisted the reporters’ help in mocking the purpose of the briefing; no information was conveyed from the White House to the public. She had shown who was boss: she could hold journalists to an arbitrary rule by making them offer thanks before asking a question, which diminished the journalists’ ability to hold her to the task of answering their questions. She reaffirmed that both the president and she herself lied easily and blatantly—as he did when he issued a “rhetorical response” on the UCLA students, and as she did at the beginning of the briefing, when she claimed to be thankful for the reporters in the room. By making them laugh when she said that, and when she mocked April Ryan, and when she called the forced ritual a “fun exercise,” she gave them a role in debasing the job of reporting on the White House and their profession as a whole. Few media outlets reported on this small episode in the diminishment of journalism. It was just one of many minor steps in the rapid deterioration of the media’s ability to hold American power to account, but a striking example of the ways in which old assumptions no longer obtained. The journalists in the room had conflicting motivations: they were there to act as representatives of the public, but they also wanted to get to ask a question, get their question answered, avoid burning bridges so they...

In other words, the Times has a policy of not calling every racist remark “racist” and every lie a “lie” but reserving these words for only the biggest lies and the most racist of statements. This, of course, has the effect of establishing a new and fairly consistent standard for both lies and racist comments: one now has to work hard to sink that low.

Here were two possibilities of viewing the relationship between the nation’s leading newspaper and the president: as adversaries; or as, explicitly, not adversaries. By choosing to act as though in the war on reality it was possible not to choose sides, the Times—and with it, the American media mainstream—became, reluctantly though not unwittingly, the president’s accomplices.

The approach is not only a strikingly effective method of crowdsourcing—Fahrenthold won a Pulitzer for his reporting on Trump’s charities—but it also revolutionizes the relationship between a journalist and his readers. Fahrenthold positions himself on the side of the readers: together, they are digging into Trump’s business. The relationship between the journalist and the president is explicitly adversarial, and the relationship between the journalist and the readers is one of actual, observable cooperation. Most American journalists and editors would agree that this is as it should be—the journalists are working on behalf of the public, and their relationship with power should not be overly cozy—but in reality, the tone of neutrality, authority, and restraint that legacy publications adopt has a way of shifting the journalist away from the public and toward the person in power, making them act more like go-betweens than representatives of one side and one side only. That makes the media ill-equipped to resist the autocrat’s project of coming to dominate the communications sphere.

The July Fourth celebration, inspired in part by Trump’s visit to France during Bastille Day festivities in 2017 and informed by his affinity for the saber-rattling tyrants of the world, was a high point in the president’s battle to command reality. With the possible exception of rain streaks, the pictures from the rally were his image of himself and the country. Following his speech, Trump kept retweeting photographs of his own limo leaving the White House, of fighter jets flying, of the red stage and a strange cross-like formation of red elevated platforms, and of himself speaking. In these pictures, Trump was the supreme ruler of the mightiest military empire in the history of the world, and his people were with him in the public square. Nothing else existed.

In less than three years, the crudeness of the tweets, the speed of the news cycle, the blatant quality of the lies, and the brutality of official rhetoric had dulled American senses so much that Trump has successfully reframed America, stripping it of its ideals, dumbing it down, and reducing it to a nation at war against people who want to join it. That is what was passing for “inoffensive,” “tame,” and “standard.”

The leader or leaders who will help American politics heal after Trump will need to re-embrace the language of ideals—and hope. The longer Trumpism lasts, however, the harder that path will be, because of the damage Trump is inflicting on political language. When the time for recovery comes, as it inevitably will, we will need to do the work of rebuilding a sense of shared reality. For journalists, the task is much bigger than returning to an imagined state of normalcy before Trump, or even than deciding to retire some words and rehabilitate others. A new focus on using words intentionally will not be a matter for usage manuals but rather will require that journalists accept a responsibility that anodyne headlines, equivocal statements, and the style of extreme restraint have helped avoid. To state directly what they are seeing, journalists will have to reveal where they stand. To tell stories that situate the current moment in history, journalists will have to acknowledge that the media is inherently a political actor and decisions journalists make—which words to use and which stories to tell—are political decisions. And to make these decisions, journalists, too, will need to abandon the idea that politics is the province of technocrats—and accept their responsibility for shaping and facilitating the political conversation citizens must have in a democracy. In their relationship to the next president, journalists will have to reassert their position as representatives of ...

Political speech—that is, speech intended to find common ground across difference, to negotiate the rules of living together in society—is speech that, on the one hand, brings reality into focus and, on the other, activates the imagination. The job of revitalizing the language of politics will fall primarily to political leaders. It will be the job of journalists to embody and enforce the expectation of meaning. It will also be the job of journalists to create a communications sphere in which people feel not like spectators to a disaster that defies understanding but like participants in creating a common future with their fellow citizens. This is the fundamental project of democracy, and the reason it requires media.

Every political project requires a definition of “us,” the community of people it aims to unite and protect. This is true of both democratic and antidemocratic projects, it is true of nationalist and imperialist projects, and it is true, too, of autocratic attempts, though they are fundamentally antipolitical. Precisely because an autocratic attempt is the opposite of politics, it demands a narrowing definition of “us,” in opposition to an ever greater and more frightening “them.” Where Obama’s rhetoric was expansive—an ongoing effort to create a narrative that included all Americans—Trump’s rhetoric is exclusionary. Trump never tires of reminding us that not everyone can be an American or deserves to be seen as an American, and that even people who have thought of themselves as Americans—culturally, socially, politically, and legally—can be declared not-American, un-American, or anti-American. Trump’s America is like Trump: white, male, straight, besieged, aggressive. His campaign had promised to return his constituents to an imaginary past in which their jobs and daughters were safe from brown-skinned immigrants, in which the threat of what Trump called “radical Islamic terrorism” was vanquished or had never existed, in which white people did not have to treat African Americans as equals, women didn’t meddle in politics, gay people didn’t advertise their sexual orientation, and transgender people didn’t exist.

But Trump promised more than that: He promised that as a country we would no longer have to pretend to be better than we are—and that those who resisted this new call to ugliness would be marginalized. In February 2018, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency that handles visas, green cards, and naturalization, revised its mission statement. It had begun, “USCIS secures America’s promise as a nation of immigrants.” The phrase “nation of immigrants,” which generations of Americans had learned as children, was, like most national myths and more than some, a lie: the United States was a settler colonialist nation whose economy was rooted in the enslavement of Africans forcibly brought to its shores. The new statement dropped the phrase altogether. This had nothing to do with correcting the record—it was part of the Trumpian project to redefine America in nationalist, nativist terms. The old mission statement put forth the agency’s function as “granting immigration and citizenship benefits, promoting an awareness and understanding of citizenship, and ensuring the integrity of our immigration system.” The new statement defined it as “administer[ing] the nation’s lawful immigration system . . . while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values.” The new statement, in other words, made it clear that immigrants and Americans are two distinct groups that exist in opposition to each other. Immigrants, it indicated, are not Americans...

It fit his concept of America. In it, a part of the population—native-born straight men of white European descent, like Trump himself—were the nation. Everyone else was an interloper.

the Trump administration has no moral ambition. Indeed, Trump’s appeal to his voters lay in large part in the implicit call to “throw off the mask of hypocrisy,” as Hannah Arendt once described part of the appeal of fascism.

send the message that “they” will never become “us”—that Trump had reversed history and shrunk the circle of “us.” In September 2017, he delivered his first speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations. He announced, “In foreign affairs, we are renewing [the] founding principle of sovereignty. . . . As president of the United States, I will always put America first. . . . As long as I hold this office, I will defend America’s interests above all else.” For the leader of the world’s most powerful country, the sovereignty of which was by no stretch of the imagination questioned, challenged, or undermined, these were strange words. These were strange things to say, too, on the floor of an organization created to foster cooperation among nations. But Trump was saying that he viewed cooperation as a fundamentally suspect proposition. “We can no longer be taken advantage of, or enter into a one-sided deal where the United States gets nothing in return,” he said. Trump used the word “sovereign” or “sovereignty” twenty-one times in the speech. The following year, when he addressed the assembly again, he said the word ten times. In 2019, he was down to five utterances of “sovereign,” but his message had been honed. “The future does not belong to globalists,” he said, using a term the alt-right had turned into an anti-Semitic slur. “The future belongs to patriots. The future belongs to sovereign and independent nations.” No longer a nation of immigrants, Trump’s America was ...

Trump’s “hunches and instincts” were more like grunts and rages that reflected the full extent of his perception of the world: it is us against the other, everyone is out to get us, and the only expression of power is aggression. Trump’s speech was destructive in affect and intent. Saying that his utterances had reignited a theoretical debate was like saying that someone who has carpet-bombed your city has turned your fellow citizens into builders again: technically it’s true, but morally and intellectually it is a lie.

Trump’s deep instinctual understanding of the world as a strange and hostile place where one needed to live in a fortress. The Wall and the Muslim ban would also serve as tests of civil society’s ability to resist Trump. If Trump was to be successful in his autocratic attempt, he would need to trample civil society—from grassroots activist organizations to professional civil society groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union: the activists who would march for the rights of immigrants, the aid workers who would provide direct services to them, and the lawyers who would fight for their legal rights. A confrontation like this had never occurred before. No American president had staged an autocratic attempt—and no other country’s civil society was as vast and varied, as well funded, and as separate from the state as American civil society. In post-Communist countries such as Hungary or Russia, civil society was weak, quite new, and dependent on foreign donors for much of its funding—and this made it relatively easy to crush or co-opt. In Western-style liberal democracies such as Italy or Israel, civil society was intertwined with political parties and dependent on the state for some of its funding—and this made it relatively easy to intimidate and marginalize. In the United States, civil society appeared uniquely well equipped to resist a bully like Trump.

But the system is not designed to deal with a president like Trump—a bad-faith actor, one who rejects the possibility that his power should be limited by institution or tradition.

A logical fallacy becomes inevitable. If this can’t happen, then the thing that is happening is not it. What we see in real life, or at least on television, can’t possibly be the same monstrous phenomenon that we have collectively decided is unimaginable. In Russia, people who know Vladimir Putin and his inner circle will insist that they are not monsters. Yes, they have overseen assassinations, imprisonments, and wars, but they are not thoroughly terrible, these people will claim—they are not like Stalin and his henchmen. In other words, they are not the monsters of our collective historical imagination. They are today’s flesh-and-blood monsters, and this makes them seem somehow less monstrous. Every time a commentator calls Trump “presidential,” every time a politician accepts his terms of debate, or every time a journalist simply covers Trump’s actions and statements as one would normally cover politics, the message is the same: Trump does not live up—or down—to the stature of a history-book monster. Time itself is complicit. Anything that happens here and now is normalized, not solely through the moral failure of contemporaries but simply by virtue of actually existing.

Autocratic power requires the degradation of moral authority—not the capture of moral high ground, not the assertion of the right to judge good and evil, but the defeat of moral principles as such. Once cynicism triumphs, wrote the dissident Václav Havel in a 1975 letter to the Communist leader of Czechoslovakia, “Everyone who still tries to resist by, for instance, refusing to adopt the principle of dissimulation as the key to survival, doubting the value of any self-fulfillment purchased at the cost of self-alienation—such a person appears to his ever more indifferent neighbors as an eccentric, a fool, a Don Quixote, and in the end is regarded inevitably with some aversion, like everyone who behaves differently from the rest and in a way which, moreover, threatens to hold up a critical mirror before their eyes.” The majority then stands to applaud his humiliation.

That higher note is a necessary condition of vision. Havel, who conceptualized the “power of the powerless” as an entirely novel form of resistance, lived to lead his country. So did Mandela. Raw power can overtake moral authority, and perhaps today it is easier than ever before, but a determined effort to preserve ideals when they are under attack can serve as a bridge to the future.

Trump hosted Gallagher at his residence in Mar-a-Lago, continued to praise him as a hero, and floated the possibility of having him speak at the 2020 Republican convention. Gallagher embodied the essence of the presidency: raw, unchecked power, contempt for rules, laws, and norms, and an unbridled desire to act out of hatred.

As Trump’s policies have created a moat around the shrunken circle of “us,” his speech has invited—though a better word may be “incited”—his supporters to patrol the borders of this new, smaller American society. Trump’s campaign promise of a return to the imaginary past was largely a promise to transport Americans to a time when racism, misogyny, and xenophobia were mainstream attitudes. More than that: it was the promise of a new history in which a greater inclusivity not only had not happened but would never happen. In this story, Archie Bunker, the comically racist, sexist, and xenophobic protagonist of the 1970s sitcom All in the Family, is not the clueless old man who will have to cede his house and his country to new times and new, different people—in the Trump script, he owns the place, and he is not going anywhere. He is Edward Gallagher, who has had his status upgraded from criminal to hero and who posts a picture of himself wearing a wife-beater emblazoned with an American flag and holding a coffee mug inscribed with the words “I love it when I wake up in the morning and Donald Trump is president.” From his bully pulpit in the White House and at rallies, Trump calls out to the worst in his people. He models and molds the language of the time. Speaking on immigration, he referred to members of the gang MS-13 as “animals.” When he was criticized, he said it again and again. “I called them ‘animals’ the other day and I was met with rebuke,” he said. “They said, ‘th...

Many people have advocated using the term “domestic terrorism” to describe the acts of people like the Pittsburgh and El Paso shooters, or the man who stabbed five people during a December 2019 Hanukkah celebration in Monsey, New York, but this term is misleading: it implies that the violence exists in opposition to the rule of law imposed by the state. In fact, these crimes are violence delegated by the American president in much the same way that Putin delegates attacks on his political opponents, Duterte delegates the killing of drug users, and Netanyahu delegates to Israeli settlers violence against Palestinians. Trump delegates by incitement and reward. In August 2017, for example, he pardoned Joe Arpaio, an Arizona sheriff who faced charges over his practice of hunting down immigrants in order to turn them over to the immigration authorities. Trump pardoned him before he could face trial, and announced the decision in a tweet: “I am pleased to inform you that I have just granted a full Pardon to 85 year old American patriot Sheriff Joe Arpaio. He kept Arizona safe!” Two years later, he not only pardoned Gallagher but celebrated him as a hero.

In Bálint Magyar’s terminology, we are at the stage of an autocratic attempt—an attempt that may still be rebuffed and reversed by institutional means. The impeachment process in Congress was an attempt at such a reversal. Its failure demonstrated that, just as Magyar has written, a monopoly on political power—having both the executive branch and the Senate in Republican hands—can enable autocracy.

To succeed at reversing the autocratic attempt—and to hold on to that victory in the face of what is certain to be massive and possibly violent backlash—we will have to do more than vote, and more than campaign. We will have to engage both formal and informal political institutions, and we will have to understand anew why these institutions exist.

To reverse Trump’s autocratic attempt, we will have to abandon the idea of returning to an imaginary pre-Trump normalcy when American institutions functioned as they should. Instead, we have to recall that what undergirds the Congress and the courts, the media and civil society, is the belief that this can be a country of all its people. Moral aspiration forms the foundation of these institutions. Yes, moral aspiration has been used as a cover for hypocrisy and a justification for violence, but it is moral aspiration nonetheless. It will now need to be reinvented. That reinvention is likely a job for the people who are the opposites of Trump in every way: political figures of powerful moral authority that comes in part from lives lived outside Trump’s circle of “us,” like the late Elijah Cummings or the ailing John Lewis, but also the women of the Squad. Most media and political experts have described the new generation of insurgent politicians—of whom the Squad are the most visible representatives—in terms of leftist politics, and have discussed the need for the Democratic Party to move left to attract more and younger voters. But the key distinction of this new crop of politicians is not that they hold left-of-center policy positions—though many of them do. What makes them different from the last couple of generations of American politicians is that they come to the public not only with policy proposals but with a vision of a different politics, a different life, and a d...