When they tell you they want to create an autocracy, believe them
This is not a drill
Most Americans have forgotten this, but in 2016, after Donald Trump's election, many of us were convinced that American democracy was on the skids. Sales of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale went through the roof. The fear of a creeping dictatorship was raw and honest. No one knew what was coming or what to expect.
Then, on November 10, 2016, the New York Review of Books published an article by Masha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist who’s long been an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Gessen, who is non-binary, transgender, and uses they/them pronouns, has written extensively on LGBTQ rights. Gessen has said that in Russia, they were “probably the only publicly out gay person in the whole country.” They now live in New York with their wife and children.
Gessen’s article, “Autocracy: Rules for Survival,” drew from their considerable experience, having spent most of their life living under an autocracy. If America was heading in that direction, they wanted to offer some pointers on how to adapt.
Fortunately, Gessen’s rules weren’t needed during Donald Trump’s first Reign of Error ©. But that doesn’t mean they might not be useful this time. If Trump wins in November, it’s a virtual certainty that autocracy will be on the agenda. And the 2024 Presidential election may well be America’s last.
All one needs to do is listen to today’s GOP. They have no governing agenda. They’re not offering alternatives; they’re creating chaos because they want to fundamentally change our system of government. Republicans aren’t trying to improve our democracy. They’re trying to replace it.
The mistake Democrats have made is to assume that the loyal opposition shares the values that have driven American democracy throughout history. They’ve always believed Republicans were just their counterparts with different ideas when what they’ve wanted is to dismantle democracy and install the GOP as the permanent majority.
That way, they’d never have to worry about doing the hard work of wooing voters or winning elections. When the natives inevitably become restless, they’d only have to bust a few heads to pacify (or terrify) the unhappy.
“Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.”
That, or something like that, is what Hillary Clinton should have said…. Instead, she said, resignedly,
We must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead. Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power. We don’t just respect that. We cherish it. It also enshrines the rule of law; the principle [that] we are all equal in rights and dignity; freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values, too, and we must defend them.
Democrats have always assumed the best and neglected to understand that the worst lurked just below the surface and was soon to be revealed. This time around, Republicans aren’t even bothering to hide their intentions.
So, Masha Gessen’s rules are once again relevant:
Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. Human beings have a distressing tendency to overlook a person’s worst impulses, but when an autocrat tells you what they’re going to do, they’re not joking. Proceed at your peril.
Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. Financial markets may calm when the autocrats or their surrogates offer reassurance over time. Panic can be assuaged by soothing, if dishonest, words that don’t mask intent but only delay the inevitable.
Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. Vladimir Putin took over the Russian media within a year, and the country’s electoral system had been dismantled within four. Russia’s judicial system dissolved virtually unnoticed. Institutions are only as good as the people who staff them. History shows they will eventually and inevitably crumble before an autocrat.
Rule #4: Be outraged. If you follow Rule #1, you won’t be surprised. It’s no fun to be the only outraged person in the room, but it’s essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. Once you lose that, the autocrat can do as he wishes without generating pushback.
Rule #5: Don’t make compromises. Don’t be a Ted Cruz or Mitch McConnell. Both men allowed Donald Trump to grievously insult their wives…yet both enthusiastically endorsed him for President. What sort of coward doesn’t stand up for his wife? A compromised man with no moral center.
Rule #6: Remember the future. There will be a time after Donald Trump; he can’t live forever. Be ready for the transition process, and prepare for the moment when the autocracy is weakest. Have a vision for the future.
And Rule #6 may be the most important. As Gessen says,
Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats [the 2016] election. They offered no vision of the future to counterbalance Trump’s all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past. They had also long ignored the strange and outdated institutions of American democracy that call out for reform—like the electoral college, which has now cost the Democratic Party two elections in which Republicans won with the minority of the popular vote. That should not be normal. But resistance—stubborn, uncompromising, outraged—should be.
We also should not ignore the importance of language in the run-up to autocracy. For the past three-plus years, America has been bombarded by Donald Trump and his surrogates hammering the Big Lie that Trump was robbed of his “rightful” victory in the 2024 election.
As discussed in
by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, it’s essential to resist the perversion of language and the destruction of meaning.Among the most infamous and consequential of those associations involves the language of antisemitism, which proposes the following linkages: Jew=degenerate, Jew=rootless cosmopolitan, Jew=shady deceitful operator, Jew=globalist puppet master. And then there is Jew=subhuman, which gets us to the chilling Nazi designation of Jews as "lives unworthy of life."
That Big Lie depended on public belief in thousands of small lies about Jews, and on associations instilled by dogged Fascist propagandists that led people to believe those lies. Key to the success of this propaganda campaign was that most Germans had never met a Jew, so the Jew could become a monster, a fantastical creature.
Propagandists know that it is best to target a group that is tiny, so that few people will have a personal relation with a member of that group: few will be able to have evidence to refute the lie, as in: "but no! A Jew helped me! My best friend in school was a Jew! What you say is not always true!" The same logic holds for trans people today, who are a tiny part of the larger LGBTQ population and come in for disproportionate vitriol, attention, and demonization.
What do Jews and transgender people have in common? Both are peaceful groups, and neither is well-organized enough to pose a threat of serious resistance. In other words, they’re perfect targets for bullying.
So, authoritarians turn language into a weapon, as well as emptying key words in the political life of a nation such as patriotism, honor, and freedom of meaning. We are well on our way in America to what I call the "upside-down world of authoritarianism", where the rule of law gives way to rule by the lawless; where those who take our rights away and jail us pose as protectors of freedom; where the thugs who assaulted the Capitol on Jan. 6 are turned into patriots; and where "leadership means killing people," as Tucker Carlson put it recently, justifying Vladimir Putin's killing of Alexei Navalny.
Some who have the misfortune to witness criminals taking over their countries have reflected about the sad fate of language in such situations. The Language of the Third Reich, by Viktor Klemperer, a Jewish linguist living in Nazi Germany, is a notable example. As Klemperer knew, authoritarians are nihilists who aim to extinguish not just their critics, but hope and meaning and ideals and possibility, and this nihilism also affects language.
The verbiage authoritarians spew at rallies and elsewhere is deadly serious, in that it incites physical violence. And yet this verbiage also means nothing: it is just a show, a display of egotistical ranting, and a distraction from corruption and crime.
Ben-Ghiat uses Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as an example of a particularly dangerous autocrat. While his Presidential aspirations may have flamed out, DeSantis has succeeded in turning the Sunshine State into his own private autocracy.
"There are no second chances. It's well known you can't go against him. If you cross him once, you're dead." This might be a description of a Mafia boss or former President Donald Trump. Instead, it's how a former Florida state legislator, speaking anonymously, describes the bullying leadership style of current Governor Ron DeSantis, who is busy turning his state into an illiberal stronghold.
As the Republican party adopts an authoritarian political culture and rejects democratic norms and ideals, the embrace of extremist ideologies has become a way for ambitious GOP politicians to stand out and capture media attention. Florida, Texas, and other Republican-governed states are becoming laboratories of American autocracy, passing legislation that institutionalizes homophobia, and racism.
An autocrat is a political bully, a description which accurately describes Gov. DeSantis’ rule in Florida. To say that he’s turned his state into “an illiberal stronghold” would be something of an understatement.
I could write an entire newsletter on what Gov. DeSantis has done to turn Florida into an American pariah state, but that’s probably already been done. Allies of DeSantis, like
, have taken perverse pleasure in claiming being “persecuted” by the ACLU and “giving DEI the ‘pink slip.’”Yeah, that’s very White of you….
If you look at Florida, it was clear the idea was to create a system geared to the convenience of good, God-fearing White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexuals.
And, if Donald Trump wins in November, what’s happening in Florida will be spread nationwide.
This is not a drill.
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