SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Is the United States headed toward autocracy? That is a question prompted by a steady stream of executive orders seeking to consolidate power in the White House and upend long-held policies and norms. New York Times opinion writer M Gessen lived through much of Russia’s slide into autocracy and wrote a book about it. They argue that one of the ways that Vladimir Putin consolidated power was by making a series of arguments that seemed outrageous at the time, like the idea that the LGBT population was a threat to Russian sovereignty.
M GESSEN: You know, I thought it was silly. I completely failed to take it seriously. And I certainly didn’t realize that it was a personal threat and that, within a couple of years, I’d have to flee the country.
DETROW: M Gessen joins me now.
GESSEN: Good to be here.
DETROW: So I want to start with a recent column you wrote, and you argued that the, quote, “barrage of unthinkable ideas” that Trump has put out there in the last month may seem chaotic, may not seem to be connected, but in your mind, they are. Walk us through that.
GESSEN: Well, I think bad ideas as such actually do a lot of the work of building autocracy. And, you know, we imagine autocracy as extreme repression, as the usurpation of power, and all of that is true. And for some people, living under autocracy is terrifying because they’re direct political targets. But for most people, from my experience, or most of the time, living under autocracy is just dumb.
We are engaged now with things like, should the United States buy Greenland? Did DEI cause the plane and helicopter collision? These are absurd propositions, and yet, intelligent people start asking stupid questions like, can the United States take over Gaza and redevelop it as a seaside resort? The idea that people have obligations to one another, that there’s a law-based world order - at least we aspire to having one - all of this is being delegitimized with these bad ideas.
DETROW: I want to do the radio host thing here of pushing back on the idea I’ve invited you onto this program to talk about. But I’m very curious about how you think about this because Americans voted to return Trump to power, and there’s a lot of anecdotal and broader evidence that a lot of voters hear conversations like the one that we’re having right now as white noise. This is alarmist worries from elites and magazines and national news outlets, and they either don’t believe these warnings or they don’t care. How have you thought about this since the election? And what do you think about that dynamic that seems to really be playing out?
GESSEN: You know, a couple of things. One is that I think that Americans voted for Donald Trump because there are some really major problems with the system of government as it’s constituted. And I think that, basically, the Democratic Party, for at least three election cycles, has now insisted that things are fine just the way they are, that we just have to live in some sort of imaginary normal, really refusing to hear that the normal - whatever that is - isn’t working for a lot of people, that they are anxious and miserable. And they would rather throw a grenade at the way things are in the form of Donald Trump than continue living the way they’ve been living.
And the reason it’s important to think about that now is that it’s still the same sort of dynamic where Trump is taking a sledgehammer to the world as we’ve known it, and the Democrats are saying, well, you can’t do that. That’s not how the rules are written. Americans have said that the way that the rules are written and the way that the system functions doesn’t work for them. So there has to be a bigger idea. The rules were written for a reason. They were there to perform certain functions. They were there to make sure that our obligations to one another are, in fact, fulfilled, and they haven’t been.
DETROW: I think a theme across all of the close analysis of what has happened to countries that have slid into authoritarianism in the past is that a lot of the times, the power is willingly given over. And when you look across the country right now - whether it’s large corporate-owned media settling lawsuits or big corporations suddenly changing their policies and their political actions or nonprofits stripping words from their websites right now - what do you think is so different from the first time Trump was in office to right now? - that statements he made the first time around kind of went in and out of a lot of these actors’ ears, and this time, they are stopping what they are doing. They are recalculating. They are making changes to be on the right side of Donald Trump policies.
GESSEN: You know, I think that these decisions are rational - each one of them taken separately. And they are rational even if you contrast them to Trump’s first term. The threat wasn’t as real. I think that whoever makes these decisions at businesses or at nonprofits or at universities, eight years ago, thought quite reasonably that Trump was an anomalous political event in this country’s history. With Trump’s second election, we can no longer claim that. This is what this country is.
And I think that, rationally, people are settling in for the long haul and making decisions about their organizations that will benefit them or at least keep them safer in the short term. And that’s really the problem with this kind of abeyance is that it is reasonable, it is well thought through and it is sometimes even values based. People are thinking, I’m protecting my employees. I’m protecting my organization. The problem is that when everyone does that, that is exactly how autocracy is built. It cannot be built without people’s cooperation.
DETROW: M Gessen is an opinion columnist at The New York Times and the author of “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia.” Thanks so much for talking to us.
GESSEN: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
