Evan Vucci/AP Photo
President Donald Trump after a campaign rally at Harrisburg International Airport, September 2020, Middletown, Pennsylvania.
The Open Mind explores the world of ideas across politics, media, science, technology, and the arts. The American Prospect is republishing this edited excerpt.
Alexander Heffner: Masha, if the United States became an autocracy in recent years, when precisely do you think it happened?
Masha Gessen: Well, I don't think it did. In my book I use I use a taxonomy proposed by a Hungarian political scientist named Bálint Magyar, who has worked a lot on what has happened in Eastern Central Europe and developed an entire sort of set of terms and signs for understanding these autocratic transformations.
He proposes that there are three stages of an autocratic transformation: autocratic attempt, autocratic breakthrough, and autocratic consolidation. They're pretty self-explanatory, but the defining characteristic of an autocratic attempt, what distinguishes it from the later stages is that it's still possible to reverse it through electoral means. According to that model, which I think is extremely useful for understanding what's going on here, we're in the autocratic attempt stage, right? At least until November, at least theoretically.
Heffner: You do believe that should Trump be reelected it could be irreversibly in an autocratic condition.
Gessen: Irreversibly depends on the amount of time you're talking about, but yes, it would do extreme damage to our system of governance and the fabric of our society.
If you look at the amount of damage that he has been able to do in the first 3-1/2 years, while having the threat, at least the potential threat of not being reelected, hanging over him, you can imagine how much, how to what extent he would be emboldened by reelection.
Even if he kept going at the same pace, consider the amount of damage that has been done to both our institutions, the packing of the courts, which is done perfectly legally. But the contrast with norms and culture of the courts [is] the things that were not done legally, such as, the blatant corruption; the blatant use of the office of the president for profiting and the systematic destruction of the system of checks and balances. From forbidding White House staff to speak during impeachment hearings to which they were subpoenaed to the consecutive firings of a number of inspectors general, Congress’ representatives in the executive branch, who do the day to day work of oversight—all of that has been coming crumbling down.
I haven't even mentioned the amount of damage that is being done to the electoral mechanisms from the census to voter suppression, to just undermining the credibility of the vote. All of those things are already extremely difficult to repair—just imagine if we had as much or more of the same.
In some ways our institutions have crumbled faster.
Heffner: Is it important that we do not further deescalate or devolve into that next stage because there are risks desensitization to the corruption? So we see it now, even though it's some of it's plain in sight, if we are in that next stage, there is the acceptance that we can't go back, it is the way it is.
Gessen: We have already normalized an extraordinary amount of what has happened. Part of it is that as you say, we're desensitized and we're desensitized by the way that Trump floods the information's sphere with just nonsense, hateful nonsense, ridiculous nonsense and lies, and lots of shiny objects and lots of not terribly shiny objects.
But part of it is we do get used to things, right? It's kind of part of human nature. You wake up in the morning, you realize you were still around, the sun still came up. Maybe this is not the apocalypse yet. Maybe the apocalypse isn't coming until tomorrow, right?
I'll give you a quick example. During the impeachment hearings the Sanford Law professor Pam Karlan gave this example to explain why Ukraine was an example of abusive power. She said, imagine if, I'm paraphrasing, imagine if the president threatened to withhold federal disaster funding from a state, if they didn't do a political favor for him, she was using it as an obvious hypothetical to, because it was obvious to her in, I think it was November of last year, that we would all realize that that is untenable and grounds for impeachment.
Fast forward half a year. We see the president systematically withholding or threatening to withhold this federal disaster funding connected to the coronavirus pandemic from states that don't do according to his liking.
Heffner: Well, that's peak autocracy, peak criminality, peak immorality. You almost wonder if that is at a level of malice that is even more than some of the Eastern European autocracies, the denial of services to the blue states or the blue cities.
Gessen: It's actually not dissimilar from the way other autocrats work.
Heffner: It’s no worse?
Gessen: I wouldn't say it's not worse. It's not better. It falls right in line with the way they consolidate power.
Heffner: How have we been surviving autocracy compared to some of the Eastern European countries that have undergone those metamorphoses in recent decades?
Gessen: Again, try to think back to four years ago, the 2016 campaign, when Trump was already the nominee and everybody was convinced that he couldn't possibly win because, of course, it couldn't possibly happen here. He was a buffoon and he was clearly an aspiring autocrat and that couldn't be. And the United States believed itself to be exempt from the global wave of populism.
That there were lots of arguments for why we should be exempt in addition to the almost religious belief in American exceptionalism. But there was the argument that American institutions are extremely strong, that we have this very strong democratic culture and look how well that has held up under Trump.
Yes, we have done better than perhaps Russia, which had extremely weak democratic institutions. But actually, if you look at the timeline, I'm not convinced, right? There are certain things that that Putin did super fast. He took over the entire television universe of Russia in, within a year, he was controlling it.
But I would argue that Trump is controlling the information sphere, right? This is also a term that's proposed by Bálint Magyar. But you know, it's more useful to look at Central Europe, which does have, on the European level, very strong and recently designed democratic institutions and democratic norms, which Viktor Orban has been able to use to his great benefit. He has had the European Union basically finance his autocracy. In that comparison, the United States doesn’t fare very well, right?
In some ways our institutions have crumbled faster. While we can certainly see many, many examples of the judiciary and civil society standing up to Trump, I would argue that that's not actually where should we should be shining the spotlight necessarily.
