Surviving Autocracy

part by habit and in part out of a sense of necessity, we continued to report the news and consume the news-this presidency produced more headlines per unit of time than any other-but at the end of each of his thousand days of presidency we seemed hardly closer to understanding what was happening to us.

 

The difficulty with absorbing the news lies, in part, in the words we use, which have a way of rendering the outrageous ordinary. The secretary of education was held in contempt, and this astounding event was narrated in normalizing newspaper prose: probably the strongest description called it an "exceedingly rare judicial rebuke of a Cabinet secretary." This could not begin to describe the drama of a cabinet member remaining unrepentant for her agency's seizure of assets from people whom it had been ordered by the courts to leave in peace-sixteen thousand people. And 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? How do we describe the confrontation of existing government institutions with a presidential apparatus that wants to destroy them?

 

I found some possible answers in the work of Hungarian sociologist B lint Magyar. In struggling to define and describe what had happened in his country, Magyar had realized that the language of both the media and the academy was not up to the task. 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 anyw

call; to those who are looking for what happens now, Gessen s notes on how we need to rebuild the concept of a we in our time are warm and moving, a light of hope that these years can be survived. Lit Hub
  
A blistering appraisal. . . . Surviving Autocracy isn t merely important reading for anyone who plans to cast a vote in that election, it s essential. Shelf Awareness

A brisk, trenchant account . . . . Gessen s meticulous research and familiarity with the political and cultural history of post-Soviet Russia lend her arguments an authority lacking in other takedowns of Trump. Liberals looking to make sense of what they re up against in the 2020 elections should consider this a must-read.   Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A handbook for an age in which egomania is morphing into autocracy at warp speed. . . . Belongs on the shelf alongside Timothy Snyder s On Tyranny and Amy Siskind s The List as a record of how far we have fallen. Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration.   Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Gessen s is a clarion voice in the darkness, offering a sobering but sharp-witted analysis of how American society has changed under Trump. . . . [their] rallying cry is a vital and pressing reminder of what's at stake.   Booklist (starred review)