Surviving Autocracy

by Masha Gessen

This happens because we learn about them from history books, which weave narratives that retrospectively imbue events with logic, making them seem predetermined.

Still, physical distance makes villains seem bigger than they are in real life. 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.

the actual existence of a conspiracy barely makes conspiracy thinking less damaging. Conspiracy thinking focuses attention on the hidden, the implied, and the imagined, and draws it away from reality in plain view.

That Gorsuch could now be nominated and confirmed was an affront to politics.

the measures of judicial philosophy and political opinion, Kavanaugh was not more extreme than Gorsuch. In his first session on the court he voted with the majority more often than any other judge (Gorsuch was one of two judges least likely to vote with the majority). But his nomination hearing was the spectacle of the death of dignity in politics.

Having a voice, being heard, and exercising political agency are component parts of this form of dignity.

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.