INTERVIEWMASHA
GESSEN
Masha Gessen compares
Trump to Putin: 'Unrest and riots are useful for autocrats'
Masha Gessen has experience with two autocratic regimes,
that of Vladimir Putin and that of Donald
Trump..
With his overt influence on the judiciary, Donald
Trump is showing himself to be a true
autocrat, says Masha Gessen, author of How to Survive an Autocracy.
And so there are more parallels with his great opponent Vladimir Putin.
Michael Persson25
june 2020, 16:47
Masha Gessen was
one of those people who warned about what could happen four years ago, shortly
after the election of Donald Trump as President of America.
And a lot has
happened over the years, months, weeks and days.
Especially the
last few days it went hard. It was the week Trump fired a New York prosecutor who was
investigating his friends and confidantes. It was the week that a Trump-appointed judge, formerly of the White
House, wrote that Mike Flynn, a trump confidant, Trumpshouldwalk free, as Trump Trump
wanted. It was the week a justice official testified to Congress that
Attorney General Bill Barr exerted "great pressure" to give another
of Trump'sconfidantes - Roger Stone - alighter sentence. It was the week that a
Republican congressman sat on the table during that testimony to make him
impossible to talk.
"There are
no rules that stipulate that you can't make a fuss," said this
representative, Louie Gohmert of Texas.
With which he beautifully described what is characteristic of the era-Trump:
the realization that the political system of the United States is not held
togetherby rules, but by standards. And standards only exist until someone does
something abnormal.
"I'm not
surprised that the American institutions are broken," Gessen, author of
the book How to Survive an Autocracy, said in a Zoom interview on Tuesday. 'I'm
surprised at the ease with which they've been broken. I thought it would take
longer.'
Gessen, who was
born in the Soviet Union in 1967, knows autocratic regimes up close. A Jewish
great-grandfather was murdered by the Nazis. As a teenager, Gessen moved to the
United States, returning to Russia as a journalist in 1991 and experiencing and
describing the rise of Vladimir Putin up close. Gessen, openly gay, was beaten
up in front of the Russian parliament in 2013 and always realised he was
walking 'with a pink triangle'. As the threat grew that the authorities would
take away the children of gay parents, Gessen took the plane to New York at the
end of that year with two sons and a daughter. "There was no risk so small
that it was acceptable," Gessen told Canadian radio station CBC. "We
had to get out of there."
And since then,
the emigrated immigrant in her new homeland has once again experienced the rise
of an unusual leader. " Trump,"Gessen wrote two days after the new
president's election in The New York Review of Books, "is the first
candidate in time who did not want to be president, but a dictator." Then,
based on her experiences in Russia, Gessen wrote a few rules that she believes
should help her survive in the upcoming dictatorship.
They are still
worth mentioning.
One, believe the
autocrat, he means what he says. Two: Don't be seduced by weak signals of
normalcy. Three, the institutions won't save you. Four: Be furious. Five: Don't
compromise. Six: Remember there's a future.
Now, nearly four
years later, the country is in a triple crisis, and in the book that emerged
from that article, Gessen wonders whether Trump
may not have inadvertently created the perfect conditions for
consolidating his power. Gessen cites philosopher Hannah Arendt, who describes in The Origins of Totalitarianism how instability for autocratic regimes is always a useful
tool, by shielding promises of stability. "It's not for nothing that Trump is now insisting on law and
order," Gessen said.
Do you think your
warnings were justified?
'I didn't expect
the quick collaboration of the Republican party. At least, I didn't think I
expected that when I wrote the book. But then I was reminded that I'd already
written a column at the end of 2016 in which I said that the Republican party
would become a party of henchmen. Apparently, my foresight is better than my
memory. But it also says something: in 2016, it obviously made perfect sense to
argue how conservatives would surrender to Trump, but then it's always very difficult to
believe that emotionally.'
What explains
that logical accomplice??
"The entire
American political system is hung up on election cycles. Delegates must be
re-elected every two years. And because Trump
has so much power over the electorate, a tweet from him is enough to
destroy a politician's political career. So it was almost impossible to imagine a Republican
congressman saying, "I'm going to keep my back straight, even if I lose my
seat." And that's what came out, there were only a few who kept the honor
to themselves. Most of them have chosen the plush. And with that, their
audience has changed. They no longer have their constituents in mind, but TrumpTrump. Because they control their constituents."
And that's still
emotionally hard to believe?
'You do believe
that people choose the right thing, rather than opportunism.'
You wrote in
2016: don't count on the institutions – from the courts to the media. However,
you are noting that they have made it even faster than you expected.
"Americans
have a religious belief in their institutions. They love that whole mythology
of the founding fathers- the wise men
who invented the system at the end of the eighteenth century. They think the
system is so perfectly designed that it can repair itself, that it can function
independently, without outside help, or adjustments to time. Magical qualities.
Too good to be true. Take the
Electoral College, which is leading
to a vote from the countryside becoming more and more valuable. Americans have
not properly maintained their institutions, and thus made them ineffective.'
Why did Trump, in
particular, see those weaknesses?
'A system that
depends on standards and customs is easier to break by people who never stick
to agreements anyway.'
Since the corona
crisis, and certainly since the outbreak of the riots following the death of
George Floyd, Trump seems to be acting even more authoritarian. Is there a plan
behind that, or is he just losing control?
'The Hungarian
sociologist Bálint Magyar distinguishes three phases in the development of an
autocracy. One, the autocratic pursuit. That's what we're in now. Two, the
breakthrough. That would be Trump's re-election. Three: autocratic
consolidation. That's trump's Trump post-election pick. Look, I'm not trying to
say that Trump has some kind of master
plan, or that he's capable of planning at all. But he instinctively sees power
as total dominance, as something that jettisons the whole system of control and
balance, as something that rests heavily on the military. And he's really been
ranting lately. Before Berman's resignation
Berman- the New York prosecutor -
Trump fired a sn fumble inspector general. And yes, the president has
the power to do that. But we never really realized that he has the power to do
that. It was unthinkable."
What about the
army's deployment?
'Military display
is very important to Trump. Dominating
the streets. In that, he looks a lot like Putin. Total military control, that
creates power. Putin and Trump see
themselves as the centers of a clan in which they can distribute money and
power. Like in the mafia. To do that, they need people who can use force. They
are very afraid of protests, because they question that power and therefore
threaten that power – more than the institutions do. Here in the U.S., that
collision could be very big. In this country, protests are national myths.
Children are taught in school about the American revolution, the women's
struggle, the civil rights struggle, all democratic progress is linked to
protest. So if a leader sees protest as something he has to knock down, then
that's... unusual."
You avoided the
word fascism for three and a half years when you wrote about Trump. Why did you use it for the first time two weeks
ago?
'I don't think it
would have been incorrect if I'd used the word earlier. But the costs and
benefits of the word are not in proportion. The benefits are not great, because
usually the word does not add much to the conversation – because the concept is
not really strictly defined. The risks are big, because then you end up in a
discussion about whether Trump is as bad
as Hitler. But then, what are you going to do when he walks across that
clean-swept Lafayette Square and actually performs a fascist act? I mean, that
whole aesthetic, with those guys in uniform, him with that Bible... that's the
time to name it. It's not like he became a fascist then, it was just his most
obvious display.'
There have been
signs of resistance in recent weeks. Military personnel distanced themselves
from Trump's action in Lafayette Square.
Do you think the military is drawing boundaries?
"Maybe,
maybe not. Those soldiers were a little late. They did indeed collaborate, and
only distanced themselves when it became clear that they had done something
that received a lot of criticism. Do they still do that when they don't get any
more criticism? Look, I use the word autocracy to describe something that we
know Trump is after: a government in
which all power comes together with the leader, with no checks and
balances- leaning heavily on the military and the police. He has already
achieved that to a certain extent. We don't know what else to do, but it will
look different from the totalitarian regimes of the last century.'
Also a kind of
backlash: the Supreme Court issued a ruling in which the conservative judge
said that gays should not be dismissed. The government didn't expect that. What
did that mean to you?
'It was a
wonderful statement, of course, if you look at how many lives are affected by
it. I also liked the wording. But should you be happy if the Supreme Court puts its heels in the sand once? They
should do that every day."
What does the
street protest of the last few weeks mean in your eyes?
'That protest is
the most hopeful I've seen in a long time. The protests themselves, the scale
of it, the diversity, the duration. And the shift in public opinion, the rapid
embrace of ideas that were recently totally marginal, such as limiting the
police budget. These are the counterforces that we can also expect from a
crisis. The big question is: will we keep that up until November?
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