What Did You Expect?: On Masha Gessen's "Surviving Autocracy"
Masha Gessen | Surviving Autocracy | Riverhead Books | June 2020 | 288 Pages
As we suffer through the last hundred days of Donald Trump’s first (and, if the polls are to be believed, only) term in office, with tens of thousands dying from a relentless plague, unemployment rampant, and peaceful protests ruthlessly suppressed by fascistic methods, there is almost something masochistic about reading a book about the current, flailing, dangerous occupant of the White House. But there is still much to be said and much to be learned. Masha Gessen, perhaps the premier journalist of the age, has written a book that should be required reading for every American over the age of 15.
It is not merely that she accurately, clearly, and simply describes the pathologies of the Trump presidency, from its rampant corruption to its obliteration of dignity; it is that she sees Trump not as an aberration but as a logical outgrowth of deeply ingrained pathologies of the existing economic and political system. One can almost hear her ask in the background, chapter after chapter, “What did you expect?”
Gessen does not call Trump a fascist, although the book was published before heavily armed, unidentified federal agents arrived in Portland to throw peaceful protesters into unmarked cars and lob tear gas at the local mayor. She sees Trump as attempting, and, in some ways, succeeding in establishing autocracy, which the dictionary defines as “a system of government by one person with absolute power.” Every aspect of Trump’s behavior, and his appeal to his supporters, fits the autocratic template: His racism and misogyny, the conviction he shares with his children that political power should produce personal wealth, his scapegoating of immigrants, his aggrieved aggressiveness.
Anyone who has been paying attention since November, 2016 will recognize these descriptions. What is particularly useful about Gessen’s analysis is that she does not stop there; she sees in Trump a particularly virulent and in some ways exaggerated expression of characteristics of American politics that have very deep roots: our racism, our blithe tolerance of radical economic disparities and the disdain for elites on the part of those left behind, which Trump brilliantly exploits, our decades-long concentration of political power in the national executive, and the marriage of money and politics that both parties have tolerated and encouraged.
Trump, for Gessen, is not an atypical monstrosity; she sees him as grasping the essence of the system and building on its weaknesses, albeit taking things to an extreme.
He does so, in part, by attacking language and the press, controlling the news cycle, spreading chaos, and thereby, according to Gessen, splitting the country, with half, or close to half the country already living in the autocratic alternative reality he has constructed. He behaves, Gessen accurately says, like a New York real estate developer, pushing stubbornly and looking for loopholes, and he finds them, enough of them to set up concentration camps on the border with Mexico, cancel climate treaties, insult the allies, further enshrine white supremacy, and control the bureaucracy with sycophants who are forced to praise him at every turn.
What Gessen teaches us as she vividly described all of this is that we should not be shocked by any of this, nor at the surge in hate crimes, the tax cuts that will destroy future prosperity, nor the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Institutions have not saved us, she says; impeachment failed, and Nancy Pelosi refused to let the impeachment process include the obstruction of justice outlined in the Mueller report. In a useful aside, Gessen reminds us of the criticisms of Mueller’s tenure as head of the FBI, during which the FBI transformed “from a criminal-police organization into a domestic spy agency.”
Trump’s attacks on decency are deeper than any single horror, such as his attempt to manipulate Ukraine or his fateful withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord. We should pay attention to Trump’s words and his attacks on the press, Gessen argues, for his repetitive invocation of “witch hunts” and “fake news” is not merely an attempt to protect himself and project a certain image, although it is certainly that, but is in essence an attempt to obliterate normal politics, which cannot function without basic agreement about reality, about facts. When Trump lies about everything, from hurricanes to COVID, he is asserting power, the power to control reality. When reality is controlled and manipulated, normal politics and normal institutions cannot function. Politics then occupies a “hollow space,” a space Trump fills “with crudeness, cruelty, lies.”
What’s needed, then, according to Gessen, is not a simple return to our pre-Trump existence, but reinvention. Gessen makes clear that the system that produced Trump is deeply flawed, and that we are kidding ourselves if we think we can return to “an imaginary pre-Trump normalcy.”
As for an alternative, Gessen points to minority figures such as Elijah Cummings, John Lewis, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, people she sees as embodying moral aspiration, politicians who present “not only. . .policy proposals but with a vision of a different politics, a different life, and a different society.” Such politicians “focus on dignity rather than power, equality rather than wealth, and solidarity rather than competition.”
That is, no doubt, an admirable perception. Gessen is certainly accurate when she argues that since JFK, “the role of ideals in American political rhetoric has been decreasing,” that we have been defining leadership as mere competence, a trend reaching a logical conclusion in the nomination and campaign of Hillary Clinton. But the question Gessen does not ask or answer is a simple one: Does any moral alternative have a real chance?
If there is a flaw in Gessen’s book, is that she spends relatively little time delineating the steps that would be needed to bring an alternative politics to life.
Although she does not discuss him at any length, the national politician who has come closest to embodying an alternative like the one for which Gessen yearns was Bernie Sanders, who was opposed at every turn by a Democratic party establishment that moved decisively to eliminate him in his race against Clinton in 2016 and in the current round of primaries. That establishment is nominating Joe Biden, a 77-year-old politician of the old school. After winning the South Carolina primary, thanks in part to a single endorsement from Congressman Jim Clyburn, Biden and the establishment were able to force Sanders out of the current race, and with him any chance of moving beyond the normal system, a system that nominated Clinton, a system Gessen describes, in so many words, as rotten.
No doubt the country will heave a sigh of relief if Trump loses (and concedes) and Biden is inaugurated. But Gessen’s book forces us to ask questions few are asking at the current moment: Is that sufficient? And if it isn’t, what then? If Trump is a symptom, what is the cure, and how does anyone convince the American public that a cure is needed?
Perhaps Gessen, a brilliant writer and thinker, will tell us in her next book.