Autocracy: Rules for Survival

Repost: I first posted this in November 2017. Unfortunately, it bears reposting as the US lurches into autocracy if not fascism in the wake of President Trump’s impeachment trial. I have not changed a single word:

“Autocracy: Rules for Survival” (2016) was written by Masha Gessen a day after Donald Trump was elected US president. Her friends wanted her advice as someone who had lived under Putin in Russia and wrote about his rise to power, from democrat to autocrat. A year later she revisited those rules. She amended one and stands by the others.

Gessen’s rules:

Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. In the 1930s the New York Times assured us that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was just talk, that he would never carry through on it. He did. In a big way. As Maya Angelou said (Gessen did not quote her, but I am), “When someone shows you who they are believe them; the first time.” So with Trump. For example, as we now know a year later, he was perfectly serious about the Muslim ban. It was not just some wild thing he said to get elected. He meant it.

Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. Catastrophes like Hitler take time to unfold. People will try to reassure themselves that their little pocket of the universe, like Latvia, still seem all right. “One adjusts, until the next shocking event.” With Trump, though, there has not even been time to adjust.

Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. Institutions in the US in the 2010s are much stronger than in Germany in the 1930s or Russia in the 2000s. But much of their support is not written into law but depend on norms of behaviour and acting in good faith. For example, the president cannot shut down newspapers by law, but he can limit their access and frame issues. So far the press has stood up to him, but he is undermining government agencies, quietly filling the courts with like-minded judges, and has surrounded himself with generals.

Rule #4: Be outraged. People will tell you that you are overreacting, that you are being hysterical. Remain shocked. It is a good sign. The huge danger is that, as with Putin, people will grow numb and give up hope.

Rule #5: Don’t make compromises. It is fruitless. In 2017, though, Gessen amended this one:

“A commitment to purity is antithetical to political engagement. Yet political engagement risks or even demands a measure of normalization.

“The tension is irresolvable. This rule should be amended to read: Pay attention to the ways in which the Trump Presidency breaks the moral compass.“

Rule #6: Remember the future. Trump will not last forever. There is the post-Trump US to think about. Gessen in 2017:

“We will enter the post-Trump future with decimated federal agencies and a frayed judiciary stacked with Trump appointees. Much of the opposition, however, has been concerned less with preserving or revitalizing institutions than with devising novel means of removing Trump from office.”

That Russiagate will stop Trump is as much a fantasy as the Hamilton electors were. It is magical thinking.

Democrats have failed to present a vision for the future – a mistake they made in 2016 and continue to make.

– Abagond, 2017.

Sources: New York Review of Books (Gessen in 2016); New Yorker (Gessen in 2017); Spectacle (image).

See also:

• Donald Trump
  • Muslim ban
  • Russiagate
  • Hamilton electors
  • Trump Derangement Syndrome
• Hitler’s rise to power
  • Learning from Vienna in the 1930s – agrees with #1 and #4 and adds another:

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