Surviving Autocracy

by Masha Gessen

But the Trump administration shared two key features with the Soviet government: utter disregard for human life and a monomaniacal focus on pleasing the leader, to make him appear unerring and all-powerful. These are the features of autocratic leadership.

concept of autocratic transformation, which proceeds in three stages: autocratic attempt, autocratic breakthrough, and autocratic consolidation.

Obama adapted his favorite Martin Luther King, Jr., quote: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

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.

Trump emerged not as an exception to this history but as its logical consequence. He was building on a four-hundred-year history of white supremacy, and he was building on a fifteen-year-long mobilization of American society against Muslims, immigrants, and the Other. A future historian of the twenty-first century might point to September 11, 2001, as the Reichstag Fire of the United States.

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.

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.

autocrats declare their intentions early on. We disbelieve or ignore them at our peril.

Trump curiously resembled Putin, though the origins of the two men’s stubborn mediocrity could not be more different. Aspiration should not be confused with ambition—both men want to be ever more powerful and wealthy, but neither wants to be, or even to appear to be, better.

Trump had campaigned on insulting the government, and he himself was an insult to the presidency.

Trump’s incompetence is militant. It is not a factor that might mitigate the threat he poses: it is the threat itself.

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?

One way out of that anxiety is to relieve the mind of stress by accepting Trumpian reality. Another—and this too is an option often exercised by people living under totalitarianism—is to stop paying attention, disengage, and retreat to one’s private sphere. Both approaches are victories for Trump in his attack on politics.

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.