Surviving Autocracy

by Masha Gessen

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt identified a paradoxical pair of qualities that characterizes the audiences of totalitarian leaders: gullibility and cynicism. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Another quality of totalitarian leaders and their followers alike is the belief that the ends justify the means; this makes it easier to accept the lie as a tactical move, even to support it—and to accept the next lie, and the one after that, and the one after that.

A conviction would have required a two-thirds majority in the Senate. But forty-three out of the fifty Republicans in the chamber voted to acquit the former president. Whether they did so out of fear of a backlash (all Republican senators and representatives who voted in favor of impeachment faced censure from their state party organizations), out of a commitment to party discipline (minority leader Mitch McConnell voted to acquit), or out of sincere belief, the tally showed yet again—and for the first time since Trump left office—that he had turned the Republican Party into an autocrat’s party, committed to his counterfactual story even when they themselves had been the witnesses to and the victims of violence.

The grave term “domestic terrorist,” which gathered much traction in the days after January 6, paved the way for just such a response. But the insurrectionists were not terrorists. Their primary purpose was not to inspire terror in the general population; their purpose was to prevent the elected president from taking office.

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.

even when we could find the words to describe the exceptional, barely imaginable nature of Trumpian stories, that approach could not scale. How could we talk about a series of nearly inconceivable events that had become routine?

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.

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

Every president is a storyteller-in-chief. The Obama story, which drew and built on the stories told by his predecessors, was that American society was on an inexorable march toward a better, freer, fairer world. It may stumble, the story goes, but it always rights itself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of Trump’s three rallying cries on the campaign trail—one of the three apparent components of making America great again—was “Drain the swamp” (the other two were “Lock her up” and “Build that wall”).

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.

For his cabinet, 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.

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.

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 close cousin of contempt for government is disdain for excellence, also shared by a number of contemporary leaders—whose antipolitical politic...

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.

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 disbelieve or ignore them at our peril.

He defiled the inauguration with a speech that was mean and meaningless and also badly written, pitched to the basest level of emotion and intelligence. “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.

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.

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.

coronavirus,

Trump maintained his disdain for government and his contempt for expertise. He ignored intelligence briefings in which he was warned about the threat of mass deaths. He ignored the public pleas of epidemiologists, including his own former top officials writing in The Wall Street Journal. On television and on Twitter, he dismissed fears about the coronavirus as a “hoax” and promised, “It’s going to be just fine.”

Trump’s disdain for excellence is neither a personal quirk nor an anomaly among autocrats present and past. It is logical: they see the work of government as worthy only of mockery, and so they continue to mock it when they have power. It is also integral to their overall stance: these are men who intentionally, openly call out to the worst that humans have to offer.

Trump’s project is the government of the worst: a kakistocracy.

On the day Trump assumed office, less than half of his cabinet had been confirmed; his predecessors had started the job with most or, in the case of Bill Clinton, all of the cabinet posts filled. Four weeks after the inauguration, only thirty-four out of seven hundred jobs that needed Senate confirmation even had a candidate.

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.

In public, he chanted single-phrase solutions, and in private he reportedly asked a foreign policy adviser repeatedly why the United States couldn’t use nuclear weapons “if we have them.” In the third month of his presidency, he authorized a bombing in Syria. Buoyed by positive television coverage of the event, he ordered a giant explosive device known as the “mother of all bombs” to be used in Afghanistan, and then bragged of giving the military “total authorization”—because why complicate things by restraining the generals? The following month, Trump announced that the United States would pull out of the complex, sprawling, painstakingly negotiated Paris climate accord, which he apparently had made no effort to understand: the complexity of the agreement was itself an offense, and the simplicity of pulling out was itself the solution.

Trump’s incompetence is militant. It is not a factor that might mitigate the threat he poses: it is the threat itself. The mechanics of the war of militant incompetence against expertise were laid bare during the impeachment hearings in 2019 and again a few months later, during the COVID-19 pandemic. In one instance, the government’s own public health experts worked to contain the pandemic and educate the public while the president denigrated such efforts and repeatedly dismissed the risks in the smug manner of a man proud of his ignorance.

Sondland spent several months trying to broker an arrangement whereby the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, would publicly state that he was pursuing an investigation into alleged corruption on the part of Hunter Biden, son of former vice president and Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden, and in exchange would receive a meeting with Trump at the White House—and the release of nearly four hundred million dollars in military aid.

In July 2017, one day short of the six-month anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, the head of the Office of Government Ethics, Walter Shaub, stepped down in subdued indignation. In an interview on MSNBC, he called the ethics program of the Trump White House “a very serious disappointment.” The administration, he said, claimed to have negotiated ethics agreements with staff, but the office was cut out of the process. “We’ve received very little information about what the individuals in the White House do on a day-to-day basis for a living,” he said. The institution Shaub had headed since 2013 had proved helpless against a president acting in bad faith. Compliance with ethics rules was optional because Trump said it was optional. Then he opted not to comply.

Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, both of the George Bushes, and Bill Clinton had placed their assets in blind trusts, voluntarily. Obama did not, because he had no direct business investments. Trump did not, because he didn’t think he should.

The best description of Trump’s relationship to autocrats belongs to historian Timothy Snyder, who observed, in April 2016, “It is not hard to see why Trump might choose Putin as his fantasy friend. Putin is the real world version of the person Trump pretends to be on television.”

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.

For decades, Washington was the last-resort option for dissidents from around the world: if peaceful protest was no longer possible in their own countries, or if they had been forced into exile, they could at least protest at their embassy in the United States. But the regime in America had, evidently, changed. Now, in November 2019, a smiling Trump stood next to Erdoğan, who had jailed several thousand dissidents and more than a hundred journalists, and said he was “a big fan” of the Turkish president. A month earlier, Trump had pulled almost all U.S. troops out of Syria, opening the way for a Turkish invasion and the massacre of thousands of Kurds.

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.

During a hearing in May 2019, when Representative Katie Porter, a law professor and former California bank-oversight official, asked Ben Carson about REOs—a common abbreviation for “real estate owned,” meaning foreclosed properties—Carson thought Porter was talking about Oreo cookies. He had been HUD secretary for more than two years.

by 2019, only Commerce, with a 7 percent increase, remained). Each of the proposed budgets would have cut State Department funding by between 24 and 33 percent, EPA funding by between 25 and 31 percent, and HUD funding by between 13 and 19 percent. The heads of the agencies did not object, leaving it up to Congress to continue funding an administration that wished to disinvest in itself.

The Kavanaugh hearing was the first congressional hearing in which people inhabiting the two non-overlapping American realities—one an autocracy, the other a representative democracy—were addressing two different audiences while speaking in the same room. Blasey Ford was addressing the Senate Judiciary Committee and a broader public. Kavanaugh, who deployed Trump’s favorite tone—aggrieved and aggressive—and one of his favorite tropes—a Clintonian plot—was speaking to Trump.

June 2018 he wrote an apparently unsolicited memo to the Justice Department, with the subject line “Mueller’s ‘Obstruction’ Theory.” The memo argued, in essence, that the president had all the legal authority to do whatever he wanted—the same grounds on which he had defended the travel ban. Barr was laying the legal case for autocratic power.

Here was the biggest institutional crisis, to date, of the Trump presidency, contained in the contradiction between Mueller’s conclusion, which called on Congress to step in and act on the evidence collected, and Barr’s reinterpretation of the report, which told Congress that there was nothing more for it to do. Mueller wrote to Barr to object: The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon on March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions. . . . There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.

Mueller testified before Congress. He restated the conclusions of his report. Somehow, in person his reserve became blandness. The story of the United States president ordering a White House lawyer to lie to Congress—the story of the president’s obstruction of justice—sounded ordinary. In fact, it was ordinary. The president had been lying to the public daily for two and a half years. It no longer sounded like an emergency, a high crime. Hopes for impeachment were deflated. The following day, Trump got on the phone with the Ukrainian president and asked him to dig up dirt on the Bidens in exchange for continued American military support.

The event that finally got Pelosi to draw the line was a proverbial straw: an incident that resembled a succession of other incidents when Trump had used his office for personal gain and sabotaged the system of checks and balances. His attempt to use four hundred million dollars of congressionally approved military aid for his own benefit fell in the same category as his and his children’s foreign business deals, brokered on the back of American diplomacy; his use of the presidency to attract lobbyists, dignitaries, and perhaps entire summits as paying guests to his properties; and his use of taxpayer funds for incessant leisure travel.

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 historical record, a record of only a small part of the abuse that is Trumpism.

Trump has an instinct, perhaps even a talent, for mangling language in both ways: using words to mean their opposite and stripping them of meaning.

Vice President–elect Pence went to see Hamilton, the immensely popular Broadway hip-hop musical about the Founding Fathers. Part of the audience booed Pence when he walked in. At curtain call, actor Brandon Victor Dixon, who played Aaron Burr, stepped forward to read a statement from the cast apparently drafted in the course of the show. You know, we have a guest in the audience this evening. And Vice President–elect Pence, I see you walking out, but I hope you will hear us just a few more moments. There’s nothing to boo here, ladies and gentlemen. There’s nothing to boo here. We’re all here sharing a story of love. We have a message for you, sir. We hope that you will hear us out. And I encourage everybody to pull out your phones and tweet and post, because this message needs to be spread far and wide, okay? Vice President–elect Pence, we welcome you and we truly thank you for joining us at Hamilton: An American Musical. We really do. We, sir, are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents—or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and work on behalf of all of us. All of us. We truly thank you for sharing this show—this wonderful American story told by a diverse group of men, women of different colors, creeds, and orientations. Dixon was addressing Pence in the standard language of American p...