A Republic, If You Can Keep It: Masha Gessen Talks Autocracy with Timothy Snyder

[Music] since we have both gotten into making listicles in this dark time I thought we could just throw numbers like a net old joke about Jews in a prison cell and then checkol every time you know I say rule number one or lesson number thirteen but anyway we thought better of it and I think I'm going to start by just telling this the story of how I got into making listicles about autocracy and what happened was that on election night I was on standby for the New York Times I was supposed to write a piece there were a bunch of writers internationally who were supposed to write a piece on the reaction in a particular country to the election of Hillary Clinton and wait which seemed a little optimistic to me not because I mean I've sometimes taken credit for for having predicted Trump's victory but basically I think that if something really awful is staring you in the face it's going to happen and that was sort of them that the mastery that allowed me to make that prediction but the New York Times was as you know quite confident that she was going to win to the extent that actually there wasn't really continued to plan for what the newspaper would do if she didn't win so around 1:30 in the morning I wrote to the editor on duty saying I think maybe I shouldn't be writing a reaction piece and maybe I should write a piece on surviving autocracy and the reason that I one of the reasons that I suggested that and that that idea came to me was that around 1:00 in the morning I had started getting letters email letters from from from friends and acquaintances asking what do we do now like I would know because because I'd already run away from from an autocratic country couple of times so so the editor the New York Times said maybe we should wait for the final result and I said well I can make a provisional but it doesn't really doesn't look the result is going to change and then he said man and so I sent it to the New York Review of Books weird crashed the website a few times and my my Smart Watch actually got fried by the number of notifications that I got in the first hour after the article was posted it overheated and went blank so that's the story of that of that particular list of lessons for surviving autocracy okay so there's there's already so much in Marcia's story to unpack that I'm tempted to start analyzing Masha and her story rather than just telling my story but I think I think I'll try to do both at the same time one of the things that's in Marcia's story which is very interesting is a suggestion of who expected Trump to win so in my world and my world overlaps some with Marcia's world but not completely in my world there were a few groups of people who expected Trump to win or at least thought that it was plausible and likely and it was a contingency worth preparing for one of them one of those groups were fellow Midwesterners you know Michael Moore for example like that that small subset of Midwesterners who somehow managed to go back and forth and had a sense of maybe what was coming in Michigan and Ohio and and Wisconsin in retrospect the fact the fact that Bernie Sanders took Michigan has a different resonance now than maybe it did at the time the second group of people who were warning about this all year long in my world were students of totalitarianism so again that that shrinking group of people who consider both fascism and communism know the history of political theory and perhaps above all were aware of the kind of appeal a figure like this could have whose own sense of political psychology was such that they understood how these debate performances for example could work how this could make someone actually popular how breaking the rules is itself following a different set of rules a set of rules which which they remembered and then the third set of people in my world who were concerned or who in fact sometimes we're sure that Trump would win were the Ukrainians and the Russians so I I went to Ohio which is where I'm where I'm from I went to Ohio in the fall to canvas because I was trying to hold something back like I felt I had done everything else I can do in the world I've written about this you know I have talked on the radio I've you know published these articles about Trump etc it's now you know the Comey writes his letter I just got on the next plane I went to Ohio to talk to people but in Ohio as well we're a bunch of Ukrainian Russian journalists some of whom I had sent and there's one Ukrainian war reporter a young woman who I really admire it was in Syria who was in Libya during the revolution covered covers the Russia Ukrainian war I got her to Ohio 45 minutes after she lands she sends me a text which is you know three words he's gonna win right he's gonna win she'd been she was she went to know she was at a rally she could feel something that she recognized and so there's this interesting question which I think I know for the answer but it's gonna positive the question why is it that people who are coming from that part of the world could pattern recognize things here so much faster right I obviously include Masha in that group and that's going to be one of the questions I want to talk to her about so um and part of what Masha did when she wrote those lessons right and this could be this is so beautifully revealed and how quickly she could tell the story she did it right away she got out ahead right so the thought of like so the whole business of oh let's have trauma or let's like be emotional or we've got a whole lot of time to like see ourselves and our favorite counselors about this right no no no like it's like hi a tree is a form of prison we don't have time for that now write what you have to do is get out ahead which is an instinct that I had the - but Masha helped me get to it because where was I I mean I was somewhere in between I was in Scandinavia when this silly like when this election happened and I mean and just to feel the contrast with the US I was I was talking about black earth my last book and my companion for the day was a young Swedish woman called Cohen and she was not only the publicist for my book it turned out that she was a culture coach for a soccer team which is a general phenomenon know like young men they need culture coaches whether they're playing soccer or not but if they're playing soccer they'll get a culture coach the closer coach helps them integrate and like learn the language and like learn how you know learned how to get along well not when you're 20 it's hard to get along and if you're 20 in a multi-millionaire and you're from Turkey living in northern Sweden it's even harder so what what so what Cohen did was she took this group of young men she spent a year with them and have them perform an all-male ensemble of Swan Lake so I'm thinking okay here is Sweden we're like these amazing young women are getting you know men to perform all-male ensembles of Swan Lake and I got to fly back to that I got to go back to that so that's that's the mood that I was in you know and the way that I felt I mean the way that I felt that night was there's a bus on my chest and it was on the plane or on the plane I looked at Marcia's thing I honestly didn't read it then I just looked at it and thought okay that's what that's it that's the thing right and so I glanced that ah okay all right I'm going to go - oh no - and then I replayed Marcia the store in a smaller scale which was I also send it to New York Times they also said I was crazy right I sent it's a New York Review they said well we have Marcia's thing right and so and so I had to crash the internet in a very in a very amateur where I put it on Facebook which then yeah which I didn't know how to use really at the time because people were like you know there's a public setting that you should be using okay alright fight it ended but then it got then it got millions of views and then that led that led to the book but so in a way like the whole thing the whole thing I owe to Masha without like without that sort of reminder of how you have to get out ahead I wouldn't have gotten out ahead myself Wow well thank you Jim well you know it's true [Music] so there's but there's obviously a problem right the problem is that lessons from us are actually not entirely applicable to what what happens here and and you face the same problem in arguing that lessons from history can teach us something so can you talk more about that what you skipping over the the caveats that no historical analogy is perfect what actually makes it useful so I think his history is useful you can think about it psychologically so the present is actually much harder than it seems I mean this is the way I come at this as a historian we we live in the present and so we like to think we understand the present because it's unbearable to think that we don't understand the present but actually we generally have a very very wispy and usually totally misleading idea of what's going on in our daily lives let alone in like the wider society right whereas with history and like this is one of the reasons why even early months in 1933 feature so strongly in the book it's not oh it's not just that I'm obsessed with Hitler and just wrote a couple books about him it's also that colleagues have so thoroughly researched those days weeks and months that we do actually understand a lot of things that happened so much better than we can understand the early weeks and months of 2017 and that's one way that like you can actually get a pretty solid picture that you can then you know use as a basis for for your own so rather than being so it compared oxic Li rather than just being buffeted by the present you can find a more stable point even if it's a terrifying point in in the past and the second thing I mean it's not this is it I guess I should say this mission of enforcement this is not really a history book right it's a book which says there have been moments which were in some way similar and there have been people smarter than us who lived through those moments and here is how they processed it and through the miracle of this thing we call the printing press we can actually get access to all of their thoughts not all of them some of their thoughts in an hour or a couple of hours which is important because of getting out ahead precisely right so it's not that I would say like you can read a history book and that is immediately useful this was something special where I was trying to say there they're here moments where there's an element that's similar and here are observers who saw how people reacted the wrong way and here's what they recommended and then the reader can say aha like that feels familiar or not right so lesson one which is don't obey in advance that comes right out of the historiography of NASA of the National Socialism but it's the cut is something which tends to resonate with people now well there is a problem there too right which is that you know what we use to study history's text text makes things look coherent it makes them look like they had a beginning a middle and an end and in particular what worries me actually is that the villains of the past always looked more coherent yeah than they're in the present which i think is one way in which historical analyses are actually a lot of the dangers because because in our imagination someone like Hitler was strategic and if not billion perhaps even perhaps smart right and knew exactly what he was doing and had a plan right and so we look at this bumbling idiot and we get pieces like and there was a whole spate of them around a hundred a mark that said oh he's not a fascist he's just incompetent as though those things were opposed but I think that one of the reasons that we think they're they're opposed is because we read stories about history right yeah no I think that's completely right so when when we read history books history books are written by an enlightened tribe the tribe of historians and so when you read them it's very hard I mean a okay so maybe if some of you are doing like PhDs in history and you're like what are you talking about but but people who believe that you can make sense of events and so what is very hard to get out of history books is the attraction of the propaganda or the way that things that don't make sense do make sense right like the locker up and the build the wall and like that the shame monistic stuff that worked in Germany and worked in Italy and worked in Romania and works here it's hard to get that out of a history book right because the history is always going to be trying to make things narrate into it into a kind of shape which is why I have so many like long quotations in in the book and so it is what Masha just said goes towards the I mean the first couple lessons in the book the don't obey in advance and support institutions because the out that we often choose I'm going to reformulate your point a little bit the out we often choose is Hitler and Stalin are super coherent they have plans they have logic they have like superpowers almost right and therefore you can't do anything you know just instantly there's the gulag or in so neither the concentration camps and and then what Americans do which makes me crazy is they say well is it Hitler or not and what that is is an attempt to evade historical responsibility because if it is Hitler we can't do anything and if it's not Hitler we don't have to do anything right and that's why Americans love to say that right like that's the cool that's why that's the question that trips off our tongues because that would make it very easy whereas in fact even if they do have some kind of a plan even if you have some kind of talent set it it depends on us at the beginning at least it depends on us at the beginning and so I see what you have to do is take responsibility even though it's in co-ed and Matt right and this point about how it like the way that people write about Trump now is so much like the way people wrote about Hitler in the first weeks and months that he's confused he's crazy there's no plan the institution's will stop him just go read the New York Times from early 1933 if you don't believe me right it's very very very similar and so he only pretends to be an anti-semite I love that he is not in his heart of hearts he's not anti just something he does to play to the crowd yeah and what like anything is like yeah the Trump is what he is he's not going to change what he's going to do is he's going to push against the institutional constraints the institution's might change we might change he's not going to change right the story of Hitler is not like a plan the rise that had to happen it's of somebody who figured out how to push institutions around and transmute them and transform them with a lot of consent some yeah okay I feel like I should ask you something because yeah I don't so I want to I want to own a shift back a little bit to your your first story and the point you made is a kind of aside that not everything from Russia applies although I feel like the things from Russia that apply is a set that's only getting bigger as time goes by I wanted to ask you about your position in all of this because as I as I go through this I don't feel like I'm either in Russia or America like I feel like I'm somewhere in between I don't mean that sort of like in some vague Spacey way I mean I read Russian median I read American media and I see how things circulate and I see patterns and I see attempts to influence and I what's happening in the u.s. now is that people are beginning to see okay maybe there's a Russia thing that's you know and I don't feel like there's a Russia thing so much as I feel like there's a process that there are these various circuits and so I wanted to ask you as not not it's just as someone who's goes back and forth but as someone who is in both of these cultures do you also experience that in this in this kind of transnational way that's really interesting they're there at least three things there that I want to respond to so wonder one is the simple thing of how how sort of Russia is applicable and the thing is that I don't actually think that there's a Russia thing right and I'll talk about that in a minute but I think that the experience of living in Russia and particularly the experience of reporting on important and putinism for nearly twenty years now has given me a particular set of optics and so when I look at Trump I see things and they're they're visible you know you see them to is just you don't have the kind of optics that focus on them and I like oh that thing you know like on his right shoulder that's exactly it and I can point it out and it makes sense and Russia is not unique in in terms of giving somebody that could those kinds of objects and I think people who reporter in Berlusconi like Alex Tilley has been terrific in his commentary for the exact same reason he's got a special set of glasses but that he can look at a Trump through so I think that that's a really tricky distinction to make because of course part of what gives me a little bit of authority is this idea that the Trump's that Russia somehow gave us Trump and so then I can I can unpack him because I'm from there but that idea is actually something that I don't subscribe to read and then I think that the investigation should proceed and I think will probably learn interesting things from the investigation I probably don't think I think that we will probably will not learn anything but interesting things from the investigation I think will produce a lot of sort of distasteful stories and loose ends but there's not going to be a coherent story of of Russian interference in the election and in fact the theory advanced by the intelligence agencies at this point is that Russia interfere in the election by influencing American public opinion which gets us back to the issue that Americans elected from Russia didn't but talking about Russia is a way of avoiding the fact that Americans elected Trump and it's also a way of avoiding the fact that he is now president because if you focus on the Russia thing strongly enough then maybe he will just magically disappear because because something will come to light and this nightmare will be over so in a way it's it's it's it's like there is he Hitler is he not Hitler thing you know did he did the Russians bring us Trump button and and and if you can find a way to answer yes then he somehow disappears he doesn't so and then this then the third point which is I think probably what you're really asking about is he has this very strange sense that yeah the that Russia and the United States are getting closer in some way right there is a conversation and some of it is not new and when I was reporting my book on the Boston bombers I was really struck with how I would find the same phrases and the same and in the same conspiracy theories but like the exact same sentences word for word would be repeated to me by people in Las Vegas and in Pocomoke and Kyrgyzstan and obviously there's we understand that there's technology but there's also something else which is which is much more than technology it's it's that these conspiracy theories were tapping into the same kind of need right and the same kind of process in both countries it says something like like that is happening right and in there these two countries have vastly different historical legacies and vastly different political cultures and what is actually going to happen here is vastly different from what happened in Russia and yet there's there is something that unites these countries and also unites the many countries of Europe that are going through their own struggles with wood whether they're they're continuing the demo a project which has to do I think with what Hana and called homelessness on unprecedented scale ruthlessness to an unprecedented depth a global sense of lostness so I want to pick up on a few points there that might lead us to two hopefully fruitful disagreement or lead some of your points together in different combinations because it seems to me that with the loneliness which is at the center of I think Haaretz completely correct diagnosis of the modern condition can also help us to understand a bit the the Russian influence on the election and and how it all sorted itself out so one of the things that I I experienced for the first time and I'm sure there many of you have done much more of this than me that I experienced the first time in 2016 talking to people about politics was the the feeling that I was tearing people away from their Facebook feeds so that when I appeared as a 3-dimensional flesh-and-blood person at someone's doorstep to talk about politics which I mean I'm not bad at that kind of thing you know actually and I don't think I'm being any worse but what I noticed was that there was a kind of irritation I mean also literally sometimes a pupil dilation because people were coming out of a dark room where they were staring at a computer right and were their political views whatever they were were being affirmed over and over and over again and that was a loneliness which they kind of like and I was violating that loneliness which they kind of liked and the question of whether you know it's of course true that like we had this is our problem and we have to deal with it and Penza maybe tens of millions of people voted for him and their deep reasons for it but it's as though the peep the people who are trying to manipulate our elections understood the technology of loneliness a little bit better than Hillary Clinton right so everyone thought that Hillary Clinton had an edge in tech which turns out completely not to have been the case they got their clocks completely cleaned by Trump not by Trump and not by his team by other folks who are helping right and those other folks understood that it's like making the loneliness worse has political consequences derive getting people to believe things that aren't true and they're forced so you know I understood finally like when I went to Ohio I understood why people thought that Hillary Clinton was a murderer I mean literally that's a widespread belief that she is actually a murderer and the reason why they think this is that they read it over and over again from what seemed to be independent sources over a long period of time right and the people who are organizing that whether it doesn't matter whether they're Russian or whether someone else they have understood something about the production of of loneliness and the practical consequences of loneliness and how loneliness generates authoritarianism so like there's something deep in here about about technology and separation which that doesn't just have to do with the election of Trump although I think it does directly because you know a few thousand votes over a few states but also has to do with where politics in general is is maybe going and the second the second response I had about has to do with a slightly different sense that I have about the proximity of Russia and the US and in here I developed this habit I think you may just be more even-handed than I am but I've developed this habit of looking at America through Russia which like and I think sometimes I don't turn it around often enough but that's my problem but what I'm struck by is that when mr. Trump looks at mr. Putin I think in a way will be the pace that the Russians have something on him but I think he sincerely admires the model like he there's a there's a gut level at which he understands it you know when I see those pictures of him with Lavrov you know in the Oval Office I think he actually is comfortable you know I think when mr. Trump says mr. Cohen when he says mr. Comey is a nut job you know what he means is mr. Comey lives in a world of rules and people like you and me you know backslap know that there are no real know that it's all about you know power and money and like fooling people as much as possible I think he's comfortable in what he feels to be a Russian environment and I think you know the Russian model of managed inequality is something that he he is pushing forward right the Russian model of just as much right-wing ideology as you need to get to managed radical inequality is something that they like so I feel that gravitation as well I agree although I think you're giving them a little bit too much credit I think it's actually I think it's simpler and it's primitive right it's he understands Trump understands politics to be the exercise of raw power so and Putin understands politics in exactly the same way and in that sense they live in the same world they live in the same reality and I agree with you precisely on the on his interpretation of his understanding of Chloe that yet clearly lives in a different reality so he's crazy because somebody has a different reality is a mud job internet sense he had he lives in the same reality is not just Putin but any other strongman with who he actually has an easy time talking and you know bombing Syria over chocolate cake because all of that makes sense including served the satisfaction that you that you derive from both good dessert and and a good missile launch and that's another reason why I think it's so dangerous to sort of dismiss camp as ignorant because that view of politics as you know that sort of aggressive ignorant that militant oversimplification lies actually at the heart of these kinds of movements right they're constant messages you have been lied to the elites have have grabbed all the power by misleading you into believing that things are complicated that we need expertise that we need excellence that that we need deep pot and discussion actually all ideas can be communicated in 140 characters forty characters people who have no qualifications are the best people to lead any federal agency also to destroy it which is really the business of government because government should not be doing anything about exercising raw power right and that is inseparable from ignorance it's inseparable from the competence its incompetence as a program which is very much you know what what Putin has wrought and actually in a subtler way in a way but but the basic sort of understanding of the world as well as fundamentally corrupt as simple in that in that very base way that's that's an understanding that they share and the amazing thing to me is that you know for years Russians would encounter Americans in any sort of setting when journalists are talking to each other or politician they're talking to each other a business we're not talking to each other and there inevitably comes a point when the Russians will say oh come on just stop it like I mean you we know everything is for sale we know everything is rotten to the core you just insist on pretending that it's not the insist on pretending that you have beliefs and values and and principles just stop I think that's a beautiful beautiful explanation of a process which is ongoing and I mean a gloss I would put on it would be the question of truth right so even in addition to there or not you know there aren't really any virtues and there aren't any rules and if people tell you their rules those people are just trying to deceive you or in the hard version of this the fascist and Nazi version those things which people tell you our rules are in fact you know protocols right like those things that you'll say our rules are dreamed up by some international elite to keep you down to keep you down so don't believe in the rule of law don't but don't believe in in any in any kind of universalism because anything which appears to be a rule that we should all follow is in fact invented by some group behind the scenes who's trying to keep the real people down I mean that's what fascism says that's what other says very very precisely but one of these things one of these Universal things is truth I mean here again I see in a kind of rough-and-ready way Trump repeating a pattern that one does one didn't see in Russia it's now done you know we're first you fill up the public sphere just completely you know without any conscience you fill up the public sphere with stuff which isn't true then you say that it's the it's the journalists who are responsible for all of this and at the end of it you win by by people being cynical about truth and that's you know that d mobilizes to use a good Russian word like that D that D mobilizes it cake makes it hard for people to mobilize because if you don't think there's truth and how you trust anyone if you can't trust anyone how can you organize and formulate this is the big difference between the 21st century I mean Marcia's book next book I think is going to be low about that's like the 21st century versions of these ideas in the 20th century the 20th century versions of these ideas all had futures the 21st of 21st century versions say and you know just stay on your couch well it's not really worth it you know change the channel you know at most right why get up why do anything you can't really believe in anything there's not there's nothing there and here's the thing just saying that's not true is not enough because we can see in politics how even if it isn't strictly speaking true it can work right I mean the thing that I said earlier which I that a politician who thinks that there's nothing but power maybe he's wrong I mean maybe like we're full of virtues but if that's what you really think and you keep pushing and pushing and pushing you can push the other stuff out there's a set of Soviet records which I read in that early 90s which stays with me really profoundly and you'll have to trust me a little bit on the details here but when at the end of the Second World War when the end cavada when that when the Soviet secret state police was following the Red Army and Eastern Europe they sent reports back to Moscow about what they were finding and the reports would describe all kinds of different underground groups with different philosophies some of which were in opposition to each other some of which were actually killing each other at the time but the nkvd had a very simple way of cataloging these people they were against us right and they were part of an international capitalist conspiracy and it does it it's not true right it wasn't true but it was effective like that way of seeing the world combined with total ruthlessness and and you know kind of kind of atheism about any others you know any other value that meant again Kavita won right and in the end those other values for it says other groups were fighting stop making sense I mean things that people are willing to die for in 1945 by 1948 just seemed like nonsense because the unbelief right where the simple belief had had overcome them like that like that I mean I'm not saying that you know this is just like that but that's a moment in the history of the 20th century which I don't talk about in the book but it's an example of how this kind of politics works we can be right that there are all kinds of virtues and rules but that doesn't mean that they will automatically persist they can go away well you said something really important which is which I think goes to the root of why why newsrooms around the city and probably other cities felt like morgues in the days after the election because in American journalism there has never been a distinction between fact and truth and so journalists thought that they were doing this great job by fact-checking Trump and then there was the sense but at the New York Times and other places I was in the days after the election there was a sense that not only had people failed in the very simple not not a simple task but a very simple measure of having not been able to predict the election um with any accuracy but they had failed on a much larger level by not being able to affect what people thought and what people saw that no matter of fact checking could influence people's perceptions and that no amount of of reporting scoring the debate could influence people's perceptions and that's that's a huge problem because because American journalists in general in the conversation server the American media is not really suitable for digging much deeper than that and in trying to understand the difference between facts and truth and in trying to understand how you write a story without pretending that you are nobody from without a point of view right but you can't write a larger story than just report the facts without situating yourself and without assuming your voice consciously so many voices and without being very intentional about using language yeah it's these are these are the great 20th century debates about like about about epidemics and literature which you're returning to us as politics because what you know what one sees in Russia and then here again in a minor key is that if you understand the conventions of journalism and have just a tiny bit of intelligence and foresight you can undo them from within so if the American pose or the anglo-saxon proposed because the British do this to is to say little truth always has two sides so I'm going to pretend I'm in the middle and then on the one hand on the other hand well what if on the other hand is there's no truth or what if on the other hand is what if on the other hand is something which is completely outrageously false or what if on the other hand is a mixture of five totally false stories produced by very intelligent people right that's then you're stuck because like here then this person who's telling his or her normal boring factual story it's completely outgunned by this person and if you're a neutral was saying on the one hand on the other hand like this hand is a hand and this hand is like a giant robot out octopus from outer space with like holding laser guns in all eight arms right and so now all of a sudden it's not only not one hand other hand it's not a story anymore it's not it you you've been taken in you've been you've been done in the genre has been done in and you know their various ways to do this I've just described one and like the Russians are much better at it than we are but you see not I mean not all Russian like but then but but but like but with skunk you see the same kind of thing you know you don't you don't you know what the convention is and you just out gun it you just overwhelm it and until reporters realize that they have to take more responsibility then you know then we then we we end up losing well in that in that picture you just painted there's also the problem of locating the middle right I mean that's where it begins and to meet one of the one of the vivid painful moments of the last how long has it been 110 days or whatever it was when remember that night when Trump was actually able to read from a teleprompter for the first time and and everybody breathes a sigh of relief and just kind of the sighs of relief that we have breathe in these four months but Van Jones remember that the presidential comment what was really interesting to me about that comment was not just that he he found a way to praise Trump was actually was it was really interesting that was the way he set it up he said for the last you know how long it had been a couple of months some people have wanted Trump to continue to be the insane clown and some people have wanted him to become president of all of the of all Americans and now he's become presidential uh but by doing that Van Jones was placing himself he was creating a conceptual center right where he was placing himself at that Center is trunk and so then they'll never had on the one hand on the other hand is on the 100 other head of Trump yeah right and the Center has shifted completely yeah and no that's just a beautiful illustration and I I just dress one more aspect of that story so if it goes it goes with normalization right which is a great word from from Czechoslovakia in the 1970s normal is upset the idea that after he's accused the cool thing about it or the interesting thing about it after the Warsaw Pact invade Czechoslovakia in 1968 the the Czech communists are asked to normalize themselves right and that very word normalization this kind of the imagination of the center point this think this place where things are going to be normal right which raises you know which does away with the question of what is actually normal or what would be good what's normal is the fact that you got undated for trying to reform what's going to be normal is that you're going to just adjust for the rest of your lives to everything you know that's and that's what vaclav havel then rights against and I use Hubble a lot in in the book now the reason I'm thinking of normalization is that this is this is a normalization story where the only alternatives you can see are okay more pressure from the Red Army less pressure from the Red Army but you're not thinking what is America what is actually happening and therefore you don't see so like the real story that evening in my humble opinion was that Trump invited these family members of people who had been victims of crimes by supposedly by undocumented migrants that's the real story because that's a form of politics where you say some criminals are worse than other criminals because of where they come from and then that invites people to that invites Americans to think of themselves not as citizens but as members of some group where there's where there's a little minority which has connections to the outside world and and we're going to and then our politics are going to devolve into a kind of denunciation which of course is then followed a couple of weeks later by an actual denunciation office in Department of Homeland Security which you're now supposed to call if you think an undocumented migrant committed a crime against you right that was the real story that night that was the meaningful thing that happened that night but in by getting drawn into this particular geometry by accepting you know someone else's notion of the two possibilities of normal you then don't see what's actually happening then you don't do your job the senior of normalization actually was reminded yesterday of this wonderful experience I had several years ago of I I was I had the papers from the file of the founder of sort of the protest part of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union Alexandra's hidden weapon and I had the pleasure of giving him the documents the that contained the medical conclusion in his case he was deemed insane because he thought that he could actually create change through individual action in the Soviet Union and he was he was in his 80s he'd been living in this country for about thirty years and he was so delighted to get that to actually have a down on paper that he was considered insane because he believed in creating change through individual action but that paper was also true it was insane to think that in the Civic Union in the sense that it wasn't formal right that's the sort of thing that can be taken away from you when it becomes normal to believe that you can't actually create change you actually don't have agency to believe an agency becomes a form of insanity and that's actually that's one of the things that switching topics entirely it's one of the scenes that I flashed back to when I whenever somebody argues for removing Trump fall from office for for psychiatric reasons or for mobilizing the psychiatric profession to to publicize his insanity that just really gives me the creeps and I don't know whether it's because because I can't promotion but that that I have such a deep distrust of that kind of that kind of proposition okay it's tough that every to me yeah I I think it is because for me from Russia and it's not just the Soviet thing it's happening now I mean in in Crimea Crimean Tatars are being put in psychiatric prisons because they believe that Crimean Tatar society is a real thing or they can today insist on talking about the deportation of Crimean Tatars in London in the Soviet Union in 1943 they're being put in psychiatric hospitals are getting involuntary psychiatric treatment so this is this is something which is which is which is still which is still with us um but are we reaching the point maybe where you would hopefully sort of walk over and yeah we are okay so we can take about 15 minutes of questions from the audience and I can bring the mic to you start in the back so Trump wouldn't be president without the support of the Republican Party and he can't stay in office without the support of the Republican Party and I was wondering if you could speak in your experience or knowledge of history how much party politics plays in the support of these kind of totalitarian strongmen okay I think a couple cracks at that and get mascha time to to come up with something better so parties are interesting institutions you're not foreseeing in our constitution for example we've gotten used to parties as being essential elements of what I would call the constitutional pluralism of our country we are in a strange situation now I think an unhealthy situation where one of the parties is doing too well and I don't mean this because I disagree with the policies of the Republican Party I mean in a structural sense that they've gotten themselves into a situation that according to the popularity of their party and its policies they should never be in they shouldn't control the presidency both houses of Congress and more than 60% of the state houses and the Supreme Court given the popularity of them as people and given the popular policies and this is unhealthy because if you get into a situation which you shouldn't democratically be in then you start to think of undemocratic ways of staying there right then this is lesson I think for of the book you know to be where the one-party state so even if the Republicans aren't don't have some kind of you know malign plan to create a one-party state when you get to a situation undemocratically the temptation is always to make the system us one step more undemocratic rather than to get your hats handed to you in the next election right and we all mean the system you know with the money in politics with the gerrymandering with the voter suppression laws with the electoral college we're we have a quasi democratic system right and what I worry about is attempting that will be moving towards a one-party state even with that ideology just because of the self-interest of people of the people other people involved now second thing I wanted to say was I think inside your question is that is is is the is is implicitly was when the Republicans abandoned Trump and Here I am not particularly optimistic I mean the I don't think that this party abandons Trump until things and I think the party never abandons drunk but I think I think you only get if you'll get a few people splitting away at the moment where things are unprecedented ly awful in the United States of America but not before then when there's some kind of utter crash then a few enough Republicans might split off that's about as far as I can imagine I agree actually well I mean I would just add that this this very simple idea idea of American exceptionalism that this is a more perfect union and and therefore I nothing none of what's been happening in the world up until the American election seem to make most people here consider even the possibility that the processes in this country had anything to do what the process is going on in other countries and and I think that the sort of the realization that that's not the case lasted it made the less than 24 hours before sort of most people did a complete 360 degree turn and arrived at a place where what has what happened here was the most tragic tragedy that had ever happened anywhere and therefore was in no way connected to the product two things that have happened elsewhere in the world but most countries not a more perfect union this country like other countries is a country that has groped its way toward democracy for some of its history and rope to sway away from democracy for another point of its history democracy is not a thing that is definable and achieved countries are they becoming more democratic or less democratic in this country I would argue has been becoming less democratic for a number of years hi I was going to ask a question about you know us in this area in in Brooklyn and New York living in a bubble and just recollecting that there was a joke when Nixon won where somebody from Manhattan said I don't know anybody who voted for Nixon and it just reminds me of like during the election talking to people in upstate New York and in Pennsylvania who just talked about sign after sign for Trump and people's front yards and I'm wondering if you have a comment about not just the credulity of people who voted for Trump but also our credulity at not realizing the possibility that that might happen you know I I think everything you said is true but I also think that it's important to consider it from a different spective as well which is that I think that this sort of beating ourselves in the chest thing and saying everybody lives in a bubble there's a right-wing bubble and relaxing bubble is actually false equivalence a larger number of people in this country actually live and something that resembles a healthy public sphere right in the sense that people who you do as little as read the New York Times on listen to NPR are actually routinely exposed to opinions that they don't share and routinely get answers to questions that they didn't ask and people who live in the briber bubble don't and there's a significant difference and then if you look and they're they're pretty good studies of how information travels you will see again a larger number of people in this country who live in a universe in which information travels and it bubbles up and it trickles down and and and there's cross-pollination among different segments of the web and if you look at the bright board universe that doesn't happen it's it's it's static which is not to say that everything on this side of the divide is is just perfect but it is to say that we have something very important to protect here right there is a public spirit that has functioned imperfectly but it has functioned and it's actually I think now enjoying a period of reintegration and that's also something to appreciate and also protect we had some added a word to that like I've had that question posed to me from the other side too because I know you know lots of people voted for Trump and I've kind of tried to make it a point of going to places or people voted for Trump and I agree with what Masha is saying but the way that I answer it to them is to I ort you know to you assuming you don't make any assumptions about Brooklyn Heights I'm a long way from home here I mean I don't know that is is to say is do the people do your authorities tell you to ignore facts or not so before you know before we get into I have one set of facts and you have another my authorities don't tell me to ignore facts do your authorities tell you to ignore facts and of course miss Conway does and mr. Trump does and mr. panic Bannon does and that's a difference they are working towards this world of total cynicism whereas whereas the people in this other you know bubble which is really a bubble because you can penetrate it or not and that strikes me as a qualitative difference and I also want to echo again putting in a slightly different way a point that Marsha made the silos exist online which means that getting people offline is part of the answer and when you talk to people who are in let's call it the Breitbart world they never agree with you right so you don't get the instant gratification I mean I like I not like I knocked on a whole lot of doors in southwestern Ohio I didn't convince a single person I think I got one person not to vote right but I learned a lot and I also planted some seeds so that now I'm actually hearing from some of those people and they're saying things like okay that thing you said back in September like all right I'm kind of seeing what you mean and so you like when you go out of when you talk to people in real world you don't get the instant gratification but you do help the world to be more like a spectrum rather than just a couple of holes in the ground and you know we can we can do that it actually makes a difference when we try hi I have a question about the going back to the election and you did mention the conspiracy theories do you think that in addition to the media sort of getting it wrong that the candidate Clinton of course got it wrong but does she should she have pushed back against and taken the conspiracy theories and taken them to task or was she sort of in a bubble of like Obama with birther and that we just don't have to pay attention to those accusations and I realized that it may be very difficult to push it back against them but should she take responsibility and get out there or have done that um you know I have I have a lot of issues with the with the Clinton campaign that's not one of them my big two are probably and they're not a equal so a small one that has to do with the conspiracy theories was that she did what people often do which is try to counter his conspiracy theories with hers and which is not to say that there was no not saying that there were no facts were pointing to Russian interference with the camp would the election campaign and the Clintons have been was aware of some of those facts at the same time the wait at the Clinton campaign peddled it was a conspiracy theory right and I think that that's peddling conspiracy theories was basically a bad thing and also not a great way of countering conspiracy theories but I think the bigger problem was that he ran on a I mean that she she didn't know what she was dealing with right uh she was a cat the campaign was calculating votes according to an outdated algorithm as though you can create an algorithm for something that that is always a singularity that happens every four years right the he was running on a campaign of an imaginary past and she kept saying things are just fine the way they are that's not a way to counter the imaginary past in order to counter the imaginary in past you have to propose a glorious future there was nothing in the Clinton campaign that addressed the future her slogan was were great because we're good and if you don't feel included in that sense that we're great because we're good then you're obviously not somebody that the Clinton campaign is addressing so let me take the opportunity to say something broader about what I think is happening in the politics of the West I think what we had in 2016 was an example of a general genre where it's not so much right versus left because it's hard to say that Hillary Clinton is left it's hard to say Donald Trump is right exactly either what we tend to have these big like presidential level campaigns now is fact versus non fact and I think that's okay I like the threat of fiction is out there I understand it like it's poor you know it's terrible it's part of history we can't wish it away I'm going to be on the fact side if you're going to be on the fact side and this is what Hillary Clinton was I mean yeah it's true there were some moments but she is basically a factual candidate if you're on the fact side you got to be interesting you can't be boring like the burden if you're on be factual is to be interesting because the fictional people are always interesting so if you're going to be facts like you can't you can't I mean this is like the constant liberal problem since the 19th century you can't just give people the facts and then the onion sort of recapitulating Nash's point watch this point now if you what you can't do is take an average so like on average you know GDP per capita whatever going up but you can't do that you've got to get down there and like and be sort of irrationally personal even as you believe in the facts and Obama was a little bit better than that then and then she was and that that's one of the reasons why a lot of guys that I talk to in Ohio I mean I think one of the reasons who knows voted for him but not for for her right he was a little bit better at getting into their minds and making him think making them think that like at least he was thinking about them the main knock against Hillary Clinton in Ohio was that she didn't come to us and talk about the economic problems that we feel were facing that was true she didn't I mean she came with the celebrities and she came with the love story yeah I mean she lost with LeBron James in Ohio hello I'm from Ohio I'm from Appalachian Ohio and I've worked in campaigns out there I would say listening to this discussion I really depressed me because I live in my own bubble I guess here in Brooklyn but what I see is tremendous pushback I see a resistance movement that is growing the day after the inauguration millions of people all over the globe including in DC and in New York went out into the streets and it's mobilized a lot of people who were never political before that's the first thing he is helping to politicize in a new way a lot of people who are just like I'll go long things are ok and so forth so I think also in the black lives matter movement white racism and white supremacy is being confronted in a way that at least younger people are listening to and the concern for the treatment of document undocumented immigrants is another very hopeful sign to me so I heard much say you know she doesn't believe in American exceptionalism and of course that's one of the myths that every country has we're somehow special we're different but it is we do have a very different history than many many countries around the world and I have a lot of faith in the American people this is a setback we're discouraged but I think Trump is organizing for us you know I mean including my relatives devoted forum in Ohio so I don't want people to leave you're discouraged what I feel no that's not the point I mean washing-up they are I record like analyzing and discussing but the book is an activist book I mean the whole point of the book is that we can take the history which we chose to forget remember it and learn from it and have a daily program that will actually change things I mean when I say lesson number one is don't obey in advance I don't just mean that to be a dark shadow of the 1930s I mean it to be a positive instruction which makes all the other recommendations possible and of course it's right that many Americans are now politicizing themselves in ways they hadn't before of course it's right that lots of lawyers unlike Germany 1930s are on the right side of things not all of them you know I think people who perjure themselves and their confirmation hearings to the Attorney General should be at least disbarred right but you know I think it's good I mean the Washington Post the New York Times have taken a much more hard-headed attitude towards journalism there are indivisible chapters all over the country and lots of other individual organizations I talk to all the time at the level of neighborhoods that's true whether that's American exceptionalism no right because that's also true in all kinds of other countries and the thing that I thing that I think we really have to watch out for is the notion that like we have any kind of comparative advantage I you know we're both from Ohio but like Missouri show me you know if it's true that America has all the exceptional stuff now would really be the time to show it right so I think we have time for one more question go over here I think it's very helpful to look at the current political situation into the lens of Nazi Germany and Soviet Union and Putin's Russia when one way is in your research at was an example where a liberal democracy started to veer toward understanding to totalitarianism but somehow pull yourself out of it has ever been done before you go I'm trying to think the the question is are there moments where democracies descendeth or eteri right descend toward authoritarianism and rescue themselves yeah I mean I'm going to make a I'm going to make a boring methodological remark and then I'll give you some examples the porn methodological remark is that I'm kind of with the framers the Constitution on this I think we're veering towards authoritarianism all the time and we check ourselves at various points and when you check yourself you don't know that you've checked yourself right because the bad outcome never never happened so they're going to be all kinds of invisible counterfactuals out there because you know if we get out of this one it's going to be an example but then if we do people are going to say in retro Trump really wasn't that bad he was just a buffoon right just like people would have said just like people did say about Hitler I mean if Hitler had been assassinated in 1935 what would they surrey books say about him right now right so if we had this off it's going to be it's going to be that but yet there are other examples including in the history of this country right what was the Confederacy exactly it was a racial authoritarian state in the making um it kind of got stopped it cut made a comeback kind of got stopped now it's making a comeback again right so you know we'll we'll see we'll see but yeah there there are there certainly are examples like that in the early 1920s in the 1920s communist coos were held off in were held off in Germany in Czechoslovakia there was extreme opposition from both the far right in the far left it held off as a democracy it does it does it does happen right it does happen but here's the fundamental point I want to make the way that it looks is not dramatic right so when if a system like if a system like this sustains itself it's going to be because millions of people do little things which may not seem immediately consequential and then when you win at the end there aren't going to be the f-16s flying overhead right it's going to feel like okay now there's a whole lot more we have to do right because we're we know we're we can't be thinking is ah let's just get back to and 16 you know because they're the country how do I mean this is kind of where mojo started we had a lot of problems in 2016 and some of them are why we are we are where we now are now in 2017 and to the point of all the activism at least I think right and this goes to also to come washes initial questions about history like what does it matter whether the historical examples line up perfectly or not a lot of the point of the activism is that you can't in your question as a deep one for this reason you can't know in what bad way it's going to go like I'm comfortable that unopposed this would go in some very bad way right my personal my personal intuition is kleptocracy with just as much vaster ism as necessary to maintain kleptocracy but we you can't know for sure that but nevertheless you have to act but if you do act you're not just acting against you're acting for because you're making yourself and the people around you slightly different kinds of citizens and then if you do get out to the other end you don't know what you've prevented but you've maybe created some of the conditions to make a better civil society at the end of it that's how I see that problem there was a beautiful answer I'll give a much simpler one which is there's the example of Italy which which is recovering after a 20-year slide into darkness and and it wasn't over until the until rose could he had run the Italian economy into the ground until life and this is something that Tim said until life became so bad so unprecedented Lieb ad for a majority of Italians that that that cycle was broken well thank you both very much for being the bestest evening [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Center for Brooklyn History

Views: 64,504

Keywords: brooklyn historical society, masha gessen, timothy snyder, autocracy, democracy, russia, listicles, american government

Id: EvW3rLd45Dw

Length: 67min 14sec (4034 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 12 2017