Surviving Autocracy

by Masha Gessen

Some people compared the Trumpian response to COVID-19 to the Soviet government’s response to the catastrophic accident at the Chernobyl power plant in 1986. For once, such a comparison was not far-fetched. The people most at risk were denied necessary, potentially lifesaving information, and this was the government’s failure; there was rumor and fear on the one hand and dangerous oblivion on the other. And, of course, there was unconscionable, preventable tragedy. To be sure, Americans in 2020 had vastly more access to information than did Soviet citizens in 1986. 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.

Trumpian news has a way of being shocking without being surprising.

After the Eastern Bloc collapsed in 1989, both local and Western commentators adopted the language of liberal democracy to describe what was happening in the region. They talked about elections and legitimacy, rule of law and public opinion. Their language reflected their assumptions and their limitations: they assumed that their countries would become liberal democracies—this seemed the inevitable outcome of the Cold War; and they had no other language at their disposal anyway. But if we use the wrong language, we cannot describe what we are seeing. If we use the language developed for describing fish, we cannot very well describe an elephant: words like “gills,” “scales,” and “fins” will not get us very far. When some of the post-Soviet societies developed in unexpected ways, language impaired our ability to understand the process.

We talked about whether they had a free press, for example, or free and fair elections. But noting that they did not, as Magyar has said, is akin to saying that the elephant cannot swim or fly: it doesn’t tell us much about what the elephant is. Now the same thing was happening in the United States; we were using the language of political disagreement, judicial procedure, or partisan discussion to describe something that was crushing the system that such terminology was invented to describe.

He coined the term “mafia state,” and described it as a specific, clan-like system in which one man distributes money and power to all other members.

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

2. WAITING FOR THE REICHSTAG FIRE

Barack Obama, whose goal, in the days after the vote, seemed to be to reassure Americans that life would go on. On November 9, he gave a short, dignified talk in which he made three points—most memorably, that the sun had risen that morning. Yesterday, before votes were tallied, I shot a video that some of you may have seen in which I said to the American people, regardless of which side you were on in the election, regardless of whether your candidate won or lost, the sun would come up in the morning. And that is one bit of prognosticating that actually came true. The sun is up.

We all want what’s best for this country. That’s what I heard in Mr. Trump’s remarks last night. That’s what I heard when I spoke to him directly. And I was heartened by that. That’s what the country needs—a sense of unity, a sense of inclusion, a respect for our institutions, our way of life, rule of law, and respect for each other. Obama finished on an optimistic note. The point, though, is that we all go forward, with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens, because that presumption of good faith is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy. That’s how this country has moved forward for two hundred forty years. It’s how we’ve pushed boundaries and promoted freedom around the world. That’s how we’ve expanded the rights of our founding to reach all of our citizens. It’s how we have come this far. And that’s why I’m confident that this incredible journey that we’re on, as Americans, will go on.

American society was on an inexorable march toward a better, freer, fairer world. It may stumble, the story goes, but it always rights itself. This was the meaning to which Obama adapted his favorite Martin Luther King, Jr., quote: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” This is also the premise on which the belief in American exceptionalism, or what the legal scholar Sanford Levinson has called the “American civil religion,” is based: that the United States Constitution provides an all-but-perfect blueprint for politics, in perpetuity. In 2016, as Trump emerged the frontrunner in the race for the Republican nomination, many of us reassured ourselves and each other that American institutions were stronger than any one candidate or even any one president.

Something which continues to be true.

I warned readers, “Institutions will not save you.” I was drawing on my experience reporting on Russia, Hungary, and Israel—three countries that were very different from the United States, to be sure, but also different from one another. Their institutions had folded in remarkably similar ways. I couldn’t know that American institutions would fail similarly, but I knew enough to say that absolute faith in institutions was misplaced.

They were the more panicked camp. A common expectation took hold among them: the expectation of the Reichstag Fire.

Pretty sure we had at least one of those in the last four years. It’s worrying.

The actual fire in the Reichstag—the German parliament building—burned on the evening of February 27, 1933. Adolf Hitler had been appointed chancellor four weeks earlier, and already he had begun placing restrictions on the press and expanding the powers of the police. But it is the fire, rather than Hitler’s toxic first steps, that is remembered as the event after which things were never the same, in Germany or in the world. The day after the fire, the government issued a decree allowing the police to detain people without charges, on the grounds of prevention.

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.

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.

Our dope would-be autocrat isn’t good at analyzing his power. He just assumes he has a lot of it.

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.

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.

State actors have been found to have committed this terrorism.

The thinking that transforms tragedy into crackdown is not foreign to the United States. During the crisis that followed the Alien and Sedition Acts at the end of the eighteenth century, the ruling Federalists and the opposition Republicans accused each other of treason and a fatal lack of vigilance, of being Jacobin puppets. The courts, stacked with Federalist appointees, wasted no time shutting down opposition newspapers. Half a century later, President Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, the right not to be imprisoned without civilian judicial review. He did this to be able to indefinitely hold rebels whom he judged a danger to the Union—but whom, he said, “the courts, acting on ordinary rules, would discharge.” It wasn’t until 1866 that the Supreme Court ruled the practice unconstitutional.

This is important.

During the Great Depression, state courts, legislatures, and law enforcement acted in concert—and with the tacit agreement of the federal government—to denaturalize and deport hundreds of thousands of Mexican Americans, a majority of whom were birthright citizens.

😔

The Second World War brought another presidential assault on the Constitution: the internment of more than a hundred thousand Americans of Japanese descent.

Then came the McCarthy era, when the government took up spying on the enemy within, and accusations of treason, whether or not they were supported by evidence, ruined life after life. The next generation of Americans lived through the secrecy, deceit, and paranoia of the Vietnam War years, wh...

Obama’s administration continued to concentrate power in the executive branch, using executive orders and pushing the limits of policy-making by federal agencies on the one hand and suppressing whistleblowing and keeping the media at arm’s length on the other. In other words, every generation of Americans has seen the government claim exceptional powers to repressive, unjust ends. These intermittent states of exception rested on the fundamental structural state of exception that asserts the power of white men over all others. Trump emerged not as an exception to this history but as its logical consequence.

A future historian of the twenty-first century might point to September 11, 2001, as the Reichstag Fire of the United States.

Damn. 🤞🤞🤞 it’s a better future than that.

For that matter, even the original Reichstag Fire was not the Reichstag Fire of our imagination—a singular event that changed the course of history once and for all. The Reichstag burned five years before the Anschluss, six years before the start of the Second World War. Those years were filled with events big and small, each a step that made the darkest future possible.

Americans tend to talk about institutions much more than we talk about another factor Obama mentioned in his reassuring postelection speech: the presumption of good faith. It is true that, despite a consistent history of injustice, an ever-increasing number of Americans, different kinds of Americans, have gained access to the rights and protections of citizenship. 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. Some of them have lied, many have cheated, many have bent the system to their ends, but they generally did so in accordance with sincerely held beliefs and a coherent system of values. Their abuses of power have usually been limited to discrete ideologically defined areas—and this meant that even when the system of checks and balances failed, a successive administration could address the damage (though it’s worth noting that Obama did not succeed in closing the detention camp in Guantánamo Bay). 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.

This. ☝️

The Trump campaign ran on disdain: for immigrants, for women, for disabled people, for people of color, for Muslims—for anyone, in other words, who isn’t an able-bodied white straight American-born male—and for the elites who have coddled the Other. 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.

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.

Trump chose people who were opposed to the work, and sometimes to the very existence, of the agencies they were appointed to lead. His pick for the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, had, as attorney general of Oklahoma, sued the EPA fourteen times for what the state alleged was regulatory overreach. In his opening remarks at his Senate confirmation hearing on January 18, 2016, Pruitt claimed that the extent of the human impact on climate change—and our very ability to measure it—were still subject to debate. For Health and Human Services, Trump nominated Georgia congressman Tom Price, who said that he wanted to get rid of the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid. For attorney general, Trump’s choice was Jeff Sessions, an Alabama senator who was once denied a judgeship and was an outspoken opponent of civil rights law. For labor secretary, Trump picked Andrew Puzder, a fast-food executive who was opposed to labor rights; when, in February 2017, Puzder withdrew his nomination because even Republican senators’ support could not be assured (this, however, was because Puzder favored immigration reform with a focus on labor legalization), Trump nominated Alexander Acosta, a law school dean and former U.S. attorney for southern Florida. In that capacity, Acosta had overseen a sweetheart deal with billionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. But by the already established standards of the Trump era, in March 2017 the media generally covered Acosta as a “conventional candid...

This excerpt might get cut off but it is a staggering list of incompetence and toxic entitlement.

Trump’s cabinet picks lied and plagiarized their way through their confirmation hearings. Six weeks after Trump took office, the investigative-journalism foundation ProPublica compiled a list of lies told to the Senate by five of Trump’s nominees: Pruitt, DeVos, Treasury pick Steve Mnuchin, Price, and Sessions. DeVos also appeared to have cribbed some of her written questionnaire responses from documents authored by other officials and available online. 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.

Spoiled dolts with more money than sense. They have done unimaginable harm to our country.

As president-elect, Trump opted to take intelligence briefings just once a week—rather than daily or almost daily, as had been the custom. He explained why: “I’m, like, a smart person.” Like a pouty eighth-grader, he added, “I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years.” If something should change in the world, he said, the intelligence chiefs could find their president and inform him. Trump was perhaps the first American president who seemed not at all impressed by the burden of responsibility of his office: he had no regard for his predecessors, or for the job, and its demands annoyed him.

🤦‍♀️🤬

Much was said following the election about the probability of Trump—the buffoon, the vulgarian, the racist—becoming “presidential.” The word certainly meant different things to different speakers, but the shared underlying assumption was that as president, Trump should develop some reverence for the office he would now hold, and for the system at the pinnacle of which the electoral college had placed him. This assumption—this misplaced hope—ran counter to the essence of the Trumpian project.

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.

Putin, for example, had made his plans apparent by the end of his first day in office: a series of spare statements and legislative initiatives, along with a police raid, showed that he was going to focus on remilitarizing Russia, that he would dismantle its electoral institutions, and that he would crack down on the media. His autocratic attempt—the buildup to actually wielding autocratic power, throwing opponents into jail, controlling media, and eviscerating any political power outside his office—took three or four years, but he had made his objectives clear from the start.*

Glad we had a 🤡. And not a 👨‍💼 — dead eyed, Cold War fish.

“We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon” was how he summed up the American foreign policy legacy: a zero-sum game in which a penny spent—whether on an ill-conceived war or on the Marshall Plan—is a penny lost. “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost” is how he summed up the work of all the men and women who had come before him, in effect the entire political history of the country, which he now declared to be over: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” Having dismissed the political past, he offered, by way of a vision for the future, a fortress under siege: a walled country that puts itself first, convention and consideration for others be damned.

This dummy has lost more money in his life than any other American in history. A man who doesn’t know his privilege is a man doomed to bad judgement, bad character, and bad manners.

Trump marked his first moments in office by wielding power vengefully: the head of the D.C. National Guard lost his job at noon, as did all U.S. ambassadors around the world—just because they all serve at the pleasure of the president, and the incoming president liked firing people. Between festivities, Trump signed an executive order to begin undoing his predecessor’s singular achievement, the Affordable Care Act. He had the White House website swept clean of substantive content on climate policy, civil rights, health care, and LGBT rights, took down the Spanish-language site, and added a biography of his wife that advertised her mail-order jewelry line.

American political pageantry is aspirational. The extended ritual of the inauguration conveys an understanding of the importance of the office of president and awe and pride in the miracle of the repeated peaceful transfer of power. The ceremony, the concert, the lunch, the parade, the balls, and more—all of this serves to create a nationwide mood of celebration and self-congratulation. It is like a giant wedding designed to make even the most curmudgeonly of relations tear up.

Trump had no use for any of it: the magnanimity, the glow, the awe (unless inspired by him personally), the pride (except his own), the aspiration. Indeed, the single quality he displayed repeatedly was his lack of aspiration. Take his speech. Better yet, take the cake. At one of the inaugural balls, Trump and Vice President Mike Pence cut a great white cake with a sword. The cake, as it turned out, was a knockoff of President Obama’s 2013 inaugural-ball cake. Obama’s was created by celebrity chef Duff Goldman. Trump’s was commissioned from a decidedly more modest Washington bakery than Goldman’s, and the transition-team representative who put in the order explicitly asked for an exact copy of Goldman’s design—even when the baker suggested creating a variation on the theme. Only a small portion of Trump’s cake was edible; the rest was Styrofoam (Obama’s was cake all the way through). The cake may have been the best symbol yet of the incoming administration: much of what little it brought was plagiarized, and most of it was unusable for the purpose for which presidential administrations are usually intended. Not only did it not achieve excellence: it rejected the idea that excellence is desirable.

🥶🤯 🤦‍♀️

As if to underscore the point, DeVos tweeted that she was “honored to witness this historical inauguration”—using the word “historical” where “historic” should have been. She later deleted the tweet and blamed her staff for the mistake. Three years to the day after the inauguration, the first person in the United States, a man in Washington state, was diagnosed with the novel coronavirus, starting the symbolic clock on the Trump administration’s inaction in the face of a deadly pandemic.

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. Contemporary strongmen, because we watch their ascent in real time, retain their more human outlines.

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.

This.

The lessons of post-Communist states can help us to think through some of the difficulty of describing the corruption—or whatever it ought to be called—of the Trump administration. Soviet Bloc countries, with their one-party systems and command economies, fostered a symbiotic relationship between power and wealth (though wealth was not measured in money). In fact, the only way to accumulate wealth was to become a part of the party hierarchy—and at the top of the party pyramid, people could achieve fantastic wealth. 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.

It was Trump’s attempt to smear, with the accusation of corruption, former Vice President Joe Biden, who he feared would be his Democratic opponent in the 2020 election, that ultimately led to the impeachment inquiry. (And it was the very normal American system of marrying money and political power that made this move possible, when Biden’s son Hunter was hired as a highly paid consultant to a Ukrainian energy company.) Perhaps Trump intuited the potential of corruption-as-cudgel, or perhaps his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s Soviet-émigré associates suggested it. Either way, Trump was deploying both edges of the corruption sword: he was using the power of his office to his personal political ends, and he was wielding the accusation of corruption in the way an autocrat wields it.

Magyar talks about capturing the institutions of the state, obliterating distinctions among branches of government, and packing the courts. In Trump’s case, the takeover of state institutions has consisted of two parts: using them for personal gain and handicapping their service to the public. Obliterating divisions among branches of government has taken the shape of subjugating the Republican Party. And packing the courts is packing the courts. By November 2019, Trump had set a record for the number of judges appointed. His appointees made up a quarter of all judges in the courts of appeal. He had flipped courts that could make key decisions connected to the impeachment process. And he had appointed two Supreme Court justices. Trump’s appointments are not just ideologically far right: antichoice, dismissive of civil rights protections, opposed to LGBT rights, and in favor of deregulation. Several are also notably inexperienced. Like only one other recent president, George W. Bush, Trump has chosen to bypass the American Bar Association’s vetting process. With time, his picks have become more ideologically extreme and less qualified—more and more reflective of the administration itself. Some of the confirmation hearings have constituted an attack on politics not dissimilar to a Trump rally or press conference: they make one ashamed to see and hear.

After twenty-two long months, Mueller’s 448-page report dropped. Under a single cover, it provided the most comprehensive portrait of Trumpism to date. The first half of the report attempted to tell the story of Russian interference and the relationship the Trump campaign had had to it. The opposition’s great hope had been that the investigation would connect the dots evident in earlier indictments and subpoenas, and lay out the story of a conspiracy that would fatally discredit the Trump presidency. But the Mueller report didn’t tie anything together in the end. Rather than tell the story of a single crime masterminded by a single actor or entity, it detailed many hustles, most of them unsuccessful. If anything, the lack of coordination among them was striking, as was the scrappy, almost petty nature of many. The hustlers were Russians and Americans and Russian-Americans, shady lawyers, shadier entrepreneurs, and the shadiest political consultants, and each was out to swindle everyone else. Everyone exaggerated what they knew and could deliver. Everyone lied, and almost no one got what they wanted.

This isn’t a great summation ... but it reads well!

Volume II, which was just a few pages shorter than the Russia part of the Mueller report, detailed the president’s behavior during the investigation. Here, in addition to events and actions that could be surmised from the president’s public outbursts—such as his attempts to force Attorney General Sessions to quash the Russia probe—there were new facts. The most important revelation was that Trump had instructed White House Counsel Don McGahn to get Mueller removed (McGahn ignored the request) and then tried to get McGahn to write a statement denying that this had ever happened.

Mueller believed that an indictment by him would have paralyzed the presidency—a risk he was unwilling to take. But he was signaling that he had collected the evidence that would enable Congress to take the next step. The Mueller report was a manifesto of institutional restraint, consistent with the Mueller persona conjured by the media over the nearly two years of anticipation. Unlike the Mueller FBI, the Mueller investigation stayed pointedly inside the borders of its authority, as drawn on the most conservative possible map. Mueller opted not to question Trump in the course of the investigation. Most important, he opted not to make a determination on the matter of obstruction of justice. But in the dry language of his report, he was exhorting Congress to act, to pick up where he left off.

This is important.

In September, Pelosi declared that Trump had finally gone too far. “The President must be held accountable,” she said. “No one is above the law.” But, of course, Trump had placed himself above the law. He fully believed that he was above the law and for nearly three years he had been getting away with acting as though he was above the law.

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.

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 preemptively discredited because those words had been used to denote something entirely different.

This whole section is important, but right here is the most valuable premise of the power of language (or its absence) to allow horrors.