Surviving Autocracy: Masha Gessen with Anand Giridharadas

uh it's a pleasure to have you here with us tonight for a conversation uh that i am excited to have for survival reasons uh if nothing else uh it's my distinct pleasure to introduce masha gessen one of the foremost writers witnesses and public thinkers of our age an age that doesn't deserve masha but needs them masha spent the first part of their career in russia writing about science democracy autocracy and disease then thankfully for us masha made a home in america where it turned out that some understanding of science democracy autocracy and disease would prove very handy mash and i both work in the realm of narrative non-fiction although that is sort of like noting that babe ruth and i both grew up playing baseball between masha and me we have won the national book award guggenheim carnegie demon fellowships the hitchen prize and the overseas press club award for best commentary and many of those things most most of those things actually all of those things were won by by masha um and in this work of narrative non-fiction that we that we both do there are three different engines in my opinion that make the work really sore and very few practitioners um are firing on all three you can be you can be great on just one of those engines it's it's truly rare when people are firing on all three first uh the most basic and crucial is the reporting it's it's easy to be tom friedman it's hard to do reporting uh to talk to people get out there bear witness to human beings and all their particularity and complexity masha always does the recording second is the language the style even if you do the reporting uh it's got to be interesting to people to read it's got to be stylish it's got to be more compelling than watching emily in paris on netflix uh and masha writes with style and then there's the third perhaps the most elusive even a lot of people who have the first two engines they're missing that third engine on the tail the truly optional engine um is working on the level of ideas uh drawing from the intellectual realm uh and contributing back to it we reporters in particular tend to avoid that territory we don't want to be academics if we wanted a an insecure low-paying job we already have one but a small handful of narrative non-fiction writers are very attentive as masha is to being aware of what the latest thinking is on in the scholarship on the fields that they're writing about they don't become scholars but they know what that thinking is they make sure that they are bringing it to bear on their reporting and then they do reporting in a way that allows them to pay back the debt to scholarship with some interest to actually add to what the world knows that's something that masha did with with special force in their book the future is history um but also in in all their books and also in new yorker columns and essays and even occasionally on twitter all of which to say masha was made for this moment and to be clear given their interests you actually never want to be living in a time and place that masha was made for um but here we are living under a fascist whose only merit is that he's too stupid to make the trains run on time on the precipice of a dangerous election that threatens to be the first that the incumbent president might endeavor to steal i would rather live in a time in which we didn't need masha gessen but given the time we're in i couldn't be happier to have them in our midst and to call them a colleague and a friend masha welcome thank you anna that was the most incredible introduction ever um thank you sorry before you start i have two programming notes okay all right that i forgot uh first of all thank you to our hosts uh lennon foundation and haymarket books um and second and i know masha is with me on this one uh all private parts whether you are muted or not must remain uh ensconced in clothing during this uh during this live stream um masha i'm so happy to have this conversation with you you take it away for a little while and then i'll be back to chat with you thank you um and thank you you know on that note for promising today on twitter that this would be the best zoom i've had this week i'm actually relieved we're on skype right um but um thank you for that introduction and you know i'm sorry ptzd um i uh i could i could i could listen to you forever and not just because you're praising me but because you are such an extraordinary analyst and reader and i say that you're an extraordinary reader very selfishly because as you know um we met for the first time i guess was it about six or seven years ago yeah um in conversation about a book of mine about riot and you had read the book and identified in it ideas that i was not quite aware of yet i was i thought i was starting to think them and and you recognize them and you know this this actually often happens in writing that idea is that um that we become consciously aware of are actually you know thematically present years earlier but those are the ideas that became the future's history so i am forever in your debt and um you know i'm i'm hoping to emerge from this conversation with my next book half written um but in addition to his prior to inspiring my work i you know as you know i'm also a huge fan of of your work and especially your last book um winner takes all or was it winners take all right when i say call i never remember where the s goes yeah uh there are definitely a few of them um it's really the best analysis of how this country is made and i never stopped delighting in watching you deliver that message um every so often to the very people who who are the protagonists of your book um so let me talk a little bit about surviving autocracy um the book began actually as an essay and it begins and asks as an essay on election night 2016 so almost exactly four years ago i was biking home to harlem from queens where i had attended an election watching party which like all the election watching parties in our midst ended sort of raggedly and with much embarrassment and without saying goodbye to the hosts and um as i was biking i started getting phone calls from friends and acquaintances and and text messages they're asking what do we do now and i thought well that's a ridiculous thing to ask me because you know obviously i'm living in political exile from russia i would be the last person i would ask what do we do now whatever it is we did was wrong but then i started thinking that perhaps there was something that i could share that i had learned over [Music] more than 20 years of living and reporting in russia but particularly the dozen years that i lived there 13 years that i lived there under vladimir putin watching and thinking about the establishment of autocracy and so when i got home i emailed my editor at the new york times who was expecting a column from me about russian reaction to hillary clinton's victory i emailed him asking if um if it would be okay if i wrote an essay about surviving autocracy instead i have a cat drinking loudly out of a water bowl next to me i would like to explain that sound effect um so um so um the editor was flustered and kind of said that no maybe you know maybe we don't know the final results yet um or or wait or maybe not anyway i got mad and i wrote um a piece that i ended up submitting to the new york review of books which ended up i think crashing the website of the new york review book several times over um it is by far the most red thing i have ever written and in it i tried to it was called um autocracy rules for survival uh and in it i tried to think about how we survive autocracy so much politically as psychically because as we have now learned um it is so crushing it is it is traumatic it is it is living even before the pandemic um it was living in a state of low level dread at all times um it was gradually losing our ability to think clearly it was you know it is living in a state of kind of constant haze um and of the six rules that um that were in the essay i would cite i'll say four although i stand by all of them but these are the four most important ones to me the first one was believe the autocrat he means what he says and by that i mean if you recall four years ago people were talking about donald trump suddenly becoming presidential after he took office which was wishful thinking i mean we've never actually known a presidential candidate to be transformed by the office in any meaningful way presidential candidates in this country have an extraordinary record of doing exactly what they say they're going to do on the campaign trail but particularly somebody as outrageous as donald trump and somebody who is an aspiring autocrat he was telling us exactly what he was going to do and if you recall again you know we were not taking it seriously that he was saying build the wall we were not taking it seriously that he said he was going to institute a muslim ban we're not taking it seriously um that he said he would drain the swamp i wish it very clearly meant waging just a frontal attack on the entire system of government but that is exactly what he has done and we have to continue listening to him including listening to what he's saying now about how there will be no transfer of power the second rule was institutions will not save you and that was an important rule because again if you recall um at the time there was this very strong opinion in the air that well our institutions are so strong that a buffoon like donald trump can um you know can can act like an elephant in a bowling in a china shop all he wants nothing is going to happen to our institutions a lot of our institutions again as we have now fully realized are norms culture sets of cultural expectations but even those of them that are fully codified can be destroyed or corrupted by a bad faith actor the third one was do not be taken in by small signs of normality and by that i mean and i think this is actually not quite as relevant as i thought it would be because donald trump has moved so much faster than i expected because you know there but there are always these periods when you wake up in the morning and you think well you know i've got friends i've got wine i've got a job the sun came up the sun will go down life goes on it can't possibly be a the permanent catastrophe that my conscious mind is telling me it is actually things are probably kind of sort of normal again that's i think this is a feeling we have fully lost since the pandemic began but it was a feeling that was the that was flickering in the first three years of the presidency and finally and i think this is the most important rule is remember the future and by that i mean don't do we shouldn't do anything now that we are not willing to live with after um and you know that's um at the time again what i was in particular responding to was there was already an idea float being floated that we should call on electors to to break ranks um but any um any any violation of our expectations that will ha that we're not willing to live with after the trump era is over is something that we should not commit to right and for example you know i think it would be a terrible idea to create an extra judicial extra elected extra constitutional body to evaluate what their president is fit to be to be serving in office as tempting and as almost obvious a solution as that might be so um that essay came out and um and you know that many things happened and then um i decided to go back to it about i guess a year and a half ago now and tried to turn into a book partly by taking stock of what had happened and um and sort of expanding some of the ideas uh that were in that essay into a very very small book um and for this book i went to the work of my intellectual idol uh balan majira who is a hungarian social scientist a hungarian sociologist whom i i mean i aspire to be balanced majira when i grow up because the effect i invariably have or the sense that i invariably have from reading his work is the sense that suddenly things are coming into focus like i never have the reaction that what a brilliant insight how did how did he ever think of that the the reaction i always have is of course of course right that's exactly it um so my ambition was to write a book that would have that effect like yes that's exactly it that's the thing that we've been looking at without being able to name it or without being able to quite bring it into focus but more specifically i went to majira's work to to try to think about autocracy because that's what he's been working on for the last few years um and his starting point is i think fascinating and and super important he starts with language he says that in 1989 when eastern european countries you know when when when the soviet empire collapsed we started using the word of liber the language of liberal democracy to talk about what was happening in eastern central europe and we started doing that for two reasons one is because we just assumed that there were going to be liberal democracies because what else would they be right it was the end of history the other was that that's the language of political science those are the measures and the terms that we use we talk about free and open elections we talk about freedom of the media we talk about individual individual liberties those are the measures that we apply to countries to try to understand what goes on there he said what what if those measures are tangential what if they're almost irrelevant and as he said to me in a conversation once you know what if you say the elephant cannot fly the elephant cannot swim you still have not described the elephant i have since received letters from people who point out that elephants can indeed swim not my point what if i said that the elephant cannot swim or what if that particular elephant cannot swim so what he proposed is a is a language and a way of thinking about emerging autocracies and so he had this um thousand page book uh that actually just came out um and i was reading it in manuscript that is incredibly detailed and lays out sort of all the steps that we can we can think through autocracies um and um the most important steps the the overarching steps are autocratic attempt autocratic breakthrough and autocratic consolidation and which sound fairly self-evident right and what distinguishes autocratic attempt from the subsequent stages is that while an autocratic attempt is underway it is still possible to reverse it through electoral means after an autocratic breakthrough happens and this is usually when we're talking about the second term of the autocrat is when structural changes occur that make it impossible to reverse it through electoral means so that's you know that's when we see rigged elections or we see constitutions that have been changed beyond recognition so that elections lose all meaning or they lose all power and so on so my first idea was just that um there's a kind of poetic justice to borrowing vocabulary from eastern europe to try to apply to the united states and the second here was well you know we'll i'll see how well this model fits um probably not terribly well because the histories are so different the cultures actually are different but at least it will be a starting point um it was shocking to me how useful it was not just the the broad strokes the autocratic example autocratic breakthrough autocratic consolidation but the specifics including things that we don't usually think about as potentially problematic in this country but that he flags and flags very usefully for example monopoly and political power right meaning when the one party controls all branches of government something that's not an extraordinary situation in the united states he flags it as extremely risky well we have certainly seen how risky a monopoly or neo-monopoly and political power can be and we're continuing to watch it but it also it also identified areas that um we should look at as we understand whether what we're observing is an autocratic attempt for example packing the judiciary it's something that this administration has been extraordinarily efficient at um in fact it's probably the only thing other than siphoning money that this administration has been truly efficient in doing in fact it's probably the only the only aspect of governing that this administration has actually taken on and performed and that's packing the judiciary another is dominating the information space and that's an incredibly useful idea because you know when we think about autocracies and certainly when i think about russia i think about controlling the information space at this point there's no publication or other media outlet in russia that is not controlled by the kremlin major points out that it is actually enough to dominate donald trump to a large extent the extent succeeds in dominating without controlling so that's that's a very useful idea so i've just more or less summarized the first section of the book and the other two sections of surviving autocracy are on language and media and who is us now language and media is probably my favorite topic and my favorite section my favorite thing to think about as depressing as it is because it's where i work and um and also in part because it's so interestingly disheartening right uh it's it's an amazing no-win situation i think this is something that um that i i hope i succeed in showing in the book that you can have convictions and compassion for um for the profession of journalism and realize fully that there's no way to win we are going to lose as journalists in trump's united states there's no way to cover donald trump without amplifying donald trump and there's no way to amplify donald trump without contributing to the damage that he does once you think that thought i think things start to look a little bit different because you start thinking about the job of journalists as a sort of harm reduction or at least framing it in in terms of harm reduction um he's going to he's doing extraordinary damage to this country we are all unwitting participants in the damage how do we make this damage less and i think there are ways right um they include foregoing a tone of extreme restraint that is characteristic of american journalism that leads to things like false equivalencies and you know the the objective style and um and both sideism it also involves i think new ways of posing questions like one of my favorite examples and i think really possibly the most successful media undertaking in the age of trump is the wonderful wnyc podcast trump inc which which is great on several cans it's it's an unprecedented collaboration for journalism it's uh it's propublica and nwnyc and at various points various print outlets we rarely see journalists cooperating and collaborating across platforms um on an ongoing basis like that but a more interesting thing about it is the way that they frame the project they call it an open investigation so they're asking questions without expecting or even having a hypothesis about answers they started by saying we're going to look at trump's businesses we're in particular going to look at his real estate because we think that might lead somewhere come with us on this journey send us tips help us ask questions help us find answers those things the um the openness the involvement of of listeners and and readers in the project make it radically more transparent and also you know clearly contribute to having more confidence in the media at a time when it's really necessary but it also contributes to understanding that what we're trying to do is define this this moving target to understand it fully to not come up with one story that's going to prove it once and for all you know whatever it is and then and then sit back in satisfaction and then become instantly despondent because it hasn't made a difference right i think the the sort of the ongoing investigative chronicle is is a better way of looking at trump and it's and it's the project of defining the elephant it's like now let's look at this part of the elephant now let's look at that part of the elephant oh it's starting to come into focus at least a little bit at least for a second which may be all we can hope for at this moment um so the and the final section of the book is is called who is us and it's it's thinking about the redefinition of this country that is very much a project of this administration and i think with with the with the haze of that that the trump in news cycle creates we forget to think about this incredible transformation it's happening but we really need to think about it and we particularly need to think about it if we remember the future right because we need to redefine us again the the hokie by biden slogan you know build back better is actually not so bad as a description of the project that that i hope faces us and certainly trump picks up on tendencies that have been evident for at least the last 19 years since 9 11 it's it's this idea that that america is a nation under siege that we're surrounded by enemies that that we have to be paranoid and defensive at all times but he has really succeeded in um you know in in narrowing the circle of us which is which is uh um [Music] a concept that i borrowed from the philosopher moshe halberstad um the circle of us are the people to whom solidarity extends they're the people whom we consider to be part of our political community and for the people that trump talks to for um for his country that circle is shrinking and contracting at all times and that's a real change in the american project which was always expansionist it is now a contracting project it is a defensive project it is a xenophobic um project in every way and i think we have to understand the scale of that project when we begin the work of recovery which i hope is soon and i'll stop there um well thank you so much for that it's such a pleasure to listen to you so i want to start um so we're gonna i'm gonna ask you some questions now and then you in the audience will be able um to to send in your questions and and i will ask some of those um so i want to start you've talked about this kind of arc of the attempt at authoritarianism the breakthrough and consolidation uh asking for a friend where are we right now on that arc um okay so first of all i use the word autocracy intentionally instead of authoritarianism for two reasons one is because i've spent so much of my life writing about totalitarianism that in that context authoritarianism is something distinct from totalitarianism right authoritarianism is a kind of regime in which basically the authoritarian ruler wants people to go home and tend to their private lives while they run the country so nothing is political under authoritarianism everything becomes private politics as such disappears under totalitarianism it's the opposite the totalitarian leader wants people out in the public square at all times demonstrating their support for him under totalitarianism nothing is private everything is political it's the private that disappears so that's the distinction and if you think about it you know donald trump is a much more totalitarian leader right he is a builder of a totalitarian movement he's certainly not a builder of a totalitarian regime where you know by by no stretch of the imagination there or even head in that direction but we're certainly witnessing the building of a totalitarian movement led by a totalitarian reader leader so that's why i'm reluctant to use the word authoritarian and also just because we're used to that word i think autocracy has been useful because it is at le at least at the time i i started using it was a little bit novel uh and it make you know i think words that have been out of use for at least a while make you think more so let's let's stick with autocracy and uh uh where are we in the autocratic arc i hope we're at the stage of the autocratic attempt if if there's a spectacular failure of this election not a failure as in donald trump wins but a failure as in he he doesn't leave office for um because he can abuse the courts uh abuse the power of the courts and secured being able not to leave office that way because he is able to create enough chaos to throw election results into enough doubt that he doesn't leave office right if there is an actual engineered failure of the election then we have already passed the point of of no return right the point of of autocratic breakthrough so i don't actually know the answer i very much hope that we're at the point of an autocratic attempt and that attempt will be reversed um because we voted him out of office um so when you wrote those rules you know one of the reasons that poor little website crashed uh not used to crashing uh the new york review books website um one of the reasons to crash was you know a lot of people wanted to do a good job at surviving autopsy people wanted to do their best those of us in the media earnestly wanted to you know felt like this is our moment as journalists to hold these people to account um i think a lot of people in in all walks of civic life wanted to do a good job and so i want you to tell us masha how we did four years on which people and institutions have surprised you in holding up to trump uh following some of the the kinds of rules you laid out which people institutions have have surprised you in their failure right um so ana i think you know me well enough to know that my favorite answer to every question is i don't know so this is how it's going to go right look um so you know where are we in the autocratic attempt autocratic breakthrough framework so it makes you a good joker oh right i uh um so how will have we done well i don't know and there's a reason i don't know right um but you of course you specified uh your question but um i don't know because i feel like i'm i'm i live in a in in a kind of bubble now i don't subscribe to the the sort of they're two different and equal information bubbles in this country that is not true but i am sometimes amazed by how well we have done what an extraordinary amount of thinking and writing and investigative journalism and analytic journalism we have produced that um i mean that is certainly more than any autocracy any attempted autocracy in in history just you know the the number of trump books and good trump books great trump books um is is absolutely staggering and then i get something like um a final paper from a really great student last semester who wrote that after studying with me for a semester and uh and the course was called trump and the media wrote in his final paper um there is no threat to democracy in the united states because we have seen that after three years trump hasn't managed to do any damage to any institutions and i thought well you know maybe i just don't know um what people are thinking how i can be heard even by you know the 35 people that i'm talking to more or less personally um so so i'm not i'm not i'm not sure but um i have been really devastated by how much damage he's been able to do in the courts i think we have to understand that this is um there's a radical rethinking of of of the role of the judiciary in the structure of the judiciary that will be necessary as part of reinvention of american democracy and that's going to be really painful right because we we tend to think that um that there's a kind of perfect democratic building that the founders build and we just have to make sure that that we live in it well and that we repair it regularly and the things that stay exactly as they were intended to um that's a crazy way of thinking about democracy but it can be also a really dangerous way at the stage that we're in now um i think there's been a fair amount of damage done to the media but there's also been some incredibly inspiring stuff in the media um right so um so it's it's it's a mixed verdict um if you you know if you look at the the pre-history of um the russian turn to putinism that you covered and the pre-history of trump they're actually quite different i mean a lot of what you wrote about in the future is history is the scarring of the soviet period that that allowed that consolidation to be possible here it's a different set of factors can you describe a lot of people have different theories of what made our body politics so weak that this could happen and if the kind of all the devils are here answer but i wonder as you look at those potential explanations 40 years of neoliberal economic policy demographic change the loss of kind of white power male power um other explanations what do you think are the kind of principle factors that weakened us as a society made us vulnerable to the trumpian turn right so um yeah it's it's it's a very tricky question it reminds me of um i was interviewing this wonderful political scientist in israel a few years ago and and he had spent many years studying russian voters in israel and he had all these great theories like really beautiful theories about why they always voted for um the the sort of autocratic far right and then the rest of israel started voting the same way and he said you know i had all these beautiful theories and um and then i thought well why you know if if if it applies to the entire country then what uh uh you know how is this going to what does this mean for all my theories he said and now that you americans have voted for trump i'm just thinking it's the human condition so um i don't think it's the human condition but i think that we actually have witnessed it not infrequently in history and the best explanation is i think offered by eric from the great uh german later american psychoanalyst social psychologist who suggested in his lovely book escape from freedom that there are times of extreme anxiety when people who cannot envision future because the future is just too terrifying because they don't know who they're going to be or how they're going to be um and that is so frightening that they want to give their agency over to somebody who will just tell them what to do take control and in return to their handing over their agency will give them predictability now i think that uh and this is not the sort of the the poor disenfranchised white working class theory of of trump it's a much more generalized anxiety theory of trump it's a um you know well-founded sense of economic and social instability theory of trump um it's also i think 9 11. again it's that sense that we're we're in constant danger and i think it's the um it's the unaddressed um unacknowledged psychic trauma of the financial crisis of 2008. um i want to ask you switching gears a little bit about this kind of question of russian interference in american politics that has consumed this country consumed investigative organs given the left a few years of like nightly rachel maddow hope um only to be dashed by by bob mueller um i wonder how you now view given everything we know what was the russian project what was not the russian project and how serious was it um in in kind of sober retrospect yeah you know i don't know what i would rather less what i would less like to talk about the russian russian interference or last week's zoom call it's like it's really um it's really my least favorite topic so let me try to dispense with it quickly um i think that um for for americans and for american journalists and very politicized americans in particular the story of russian interference was a really damaging sort of crutch for the imagination it was something that allowed us to think about trump as somebody from outer space uh or at least from russia as a kind of alien body but also an alien body from which we're somehow miraculously going to be liberated and i think to a large extent and certainly you know uh i mean dean baker uh the executive editor of the new york times said as much right that um a lot of resources were wasted were committed to the story of russian interference when they could have been committed to something else and i hate also the story of russian interference because i hate all stories about secrets i hate old stories about conspiracies not because they don't exist right secrets exist and conspiracies exist but i think it's so much more important at all times everywhere to talk about what's out in the open when we can all see what is an actual felt and experienced part of our shared reality than it is to look for answers that are hidden from us it is ultimately politically always more productive to talk about what's out in the open and there's so much trump out of the in the open and there has always been right um and so ignoring any part of that in favor of russian difference i think has been extremely damaging that said i think the russian project was is continues to be um just wreaking havoc in that sense uh putin and trump are working in concert not because they have agreed to the agents of chaos but because they are right um that's you know the kremlin has tried to undermine faith in american democratic institutions since the since the soviet state came into existence and it finally struck gold in 2016. but that tells us more about us than it does about the kremlin um there has been some talk now about if joe biden wins and we're a post-trump era um what do we do with slash about various types of people who are involved complicit in the trump nightmare you know so there's one conversation about high officials um and there's the obvious temptation to banish them from society which i sort of favor um you know there is the issue that you know devotification in iraq did not actually turn to make that society more stable and so there's questions about what happens when you banish very large numbers of people from a power structure but there's also the question about what you do with regular trump voters what do you do about people who've been kind of addicted to misinformation on fox news 10 hours a day um how do you think about those questions of truth and reconciliation deprogramming a lot of these words that are thrown around about what we do after trump about the trump era oh my god we could we could talk for hours about this so let me just throw a couple of ideas out um jill lapore had a wonderful piece in the washington post over the weekend that i agree with wholeheartedly which was an argument against truth and reconciliation commissions because there are laws there are courts in this country right the problem with nazi germany the problem with the soviet union the problem with apartheid south africa was that the crimes committed uh under the the auspices of those regimes or in those countries were legal the actions that we're taking were lawful they could not be prosecuted in the course because you cannot reactively apply laws right so you had to find other ways of addre of redressing those crimes i think that the bulk of crimes committed by or in the name of or you know in favor of the trump administration are just crimes they're just illegal acts in this country that can be prosecuted by regular courts what i think is essential is to pursue every possible case of that right i really hope and and i'm and i fear that this will not be the case but i really hope that the hypothetical biden administration will be tempted to sort of let sleeping dogs lie and be um and be very restrained in seeking legal recourse i think that would be a mistake but i also think that truth and reconciliation commissions would be a mistake now i think the question of sort of how do we bridge realities is a different question and requires thinking about it from an entirely different angle right i think that as long as we think about it um sort of in the in the framework of the existing media universe we're not going to get anywhere we're just going to um to feel more and more despairing about this and rightly so um i think that we have to face the the problem of a lack of shared reality head on and sort of think about its its actual roots which is that we have lost the sense of political communities everywhere that there's uh that local media have disappeared that the whole idea that we were part of a a political community connected through media has vanished right um less than a generation ago there were local papers in every town the you know the unspoken goal of which was to make sure that every person in the town was eventually in the paper right that's what a local paper is for uh less than a generation ago everybody knew a local journalist personally less than a generation ago people actually learned about what was going going on in their communities when they weren't looking and i think we forget about that because you know people like you and i exist in the in a vast political community where things that are going on in that community can be communicated to us by twitter because we're you know um because that sense of community is so expansive but what we really need is not to try to get everybody to join that vast community it's to think of ways to recreate the little communities um that you know would sort of exist organically and that i think means rethinking the entire media model in this country and to to finally stop thinking about ways to reinvent this crazy um you know profit-driven media and you know and and hope that at some point miraculously we're once again going to to happen on an accident where advertisers need space that can also coincidentally be used for news and create political community so let's play the bad news good news game so the bad news is donald trump wins slash steals a second term and remains in office the good news is the new york times realizes that it's old mode of editing is not going to work for the times that are coming and they hire you as the new editor of the new york times to build a new kind of new york times for you know uh what you kind of referred to as the breakthrough moment of autocracy how would you start to cover if you had that kind of organ at your disposal how would you start to cover this administration differently from what the new york times is doing right now okay for the record if asked will not serve but uh um but you know i think that i understand why the new york times does what the new york times does all the new york times has ultimately is being the new york times giving up its institutional culture giving up its uh its basic sort of ways of doing things would be giving up being the new york times that's a huge loss right it's um it's it's easier for a comparatively much much smaller operation like the new yorker to sort of change course and act like we're living through a national emergency which we are it's much harder for the new york times that said i think that they don't have to be quite so married to it i think there can be more urgency i think there can be explicit policies such as you know um we will not we will use the word lie and will not you know continue raising the bar for just how blatant the lie has to be in order for us to not catch it in euphemisms we will uh i had an example at the tip of my tongue and i have just lost it but um you know we will not use the uh normalizing political vocabulary when describing this administration we're not going to talk about its strategies it doesn't have any strategies we're not going to talk about his policy priorities because it doesn't have any policy priorities we're actually going to have um you know one vast editorial retreat at which we invent new language and create a new glossary for um for words that we're never going to use to describe this administration for fear of normalizing it uh so in this uh epically famous zoom call that you don't want to talk about understandably uh you all were doing an election simulation about what would happen uh so setting aside the you know the uh actually quite fitting outcome of the courts not doing their job what was the result of the election simulation that you ran you know mis weren't too secrecy about the results of the election stimulation is a question uh that probably comes to mind last when thinking about that um that zoom call but considering that it is likely never to see the light of day these days um i mean it was supposed to be the radio hour that would come out this friday but it probably won't happen um for all the public attention to it um so we we actually ended up with a biden victory um it was we began sort of our starting scenario was that uh pennsylvania was still counting ballots and other states broke down exactly 251 to 251 electors so it was um all up to pennsylvania uh where you know this was before the supreme court terrifyingly tied in its decision about whether pennsylvania would be able to count as it is currently expected to through november 6th so um our other assumption was that more people voted for biden but those were mail-in ballots so at a certain point trump was actually ahead in pennsylvania um by the time he shut down the post office uh and prevented the counting of more of further ballots they had actually biden had actually uh gotten ahead of trump and so at that point he was flailing but biden had won what became very clear to me in this game i mean i'm obviously summarizing something we were at it for three and a half hours um but what i'm um what became clear to me though was that there was a built-in bias in playing this game because at any point uh first of all i don't think that any of our imaginations is catastrophic enough and i include myself in that and second of all the uh the motivation is to continue playing right not to make a catastrophic move that would bring the whole thing tumbling down which is distinct from trump's motivation his motivation is going to be to make a catastrophic move that will bring the whole thing troubling down um and do you think there is there has been you know some suggestion for those trying to read a deeper meaning into the whole incident that there is this kind of two-tier system in journalism where there's a you know a kind of class of folks on top who are kind of able to literally phone it in in this case but have a impunity and have you know um and just kind of live while you've got a bunch of 25 year olds grinding out you know articles for very little money in much of the digital media do you think there are those kind of larger issues of power and privilege and impunity here um here i mean you mean in general or here i mean we don't know um let me say two things one is we don't actually know what the ultimate sort of disciplinary outcome of this is going to be second of all it was so clearly a completely idiotic accident it was not a pleasant accident but it was an idiotic accident it was not you know an abuse of power by any measure that said of course of course there's a there's a ridiculously ridiculous hierarchy in in journalism there are people who you know have to luxury there and media outlets that have the luxury of a funding great journalism right or doing great journalism great journalism requires time more than anything else uh if you have to yeah go ahead i want to ask you to you you've kind of one way or another graded different institutions performance in this time how do you think about the left uh very broadly defined the left half of the country um uh and the and and but in particular some of the debates that you know very well about you know do you fight trumpism by creating in the kind of biden mold the broadest in a way most anodyne possible pitch where you don't really necessarily stand for anything substantive but you know build back better we're all in this we're gonna have some republicans in the cabinet versus the theory of bernie sanders elizabeth warren that we actually need to address some of these bigger structural economic issues and that the best way to prosecute trump is to kind of actually offer something um more fulsome in that department how have you watched that argument um well i certainly fall on the on the much farther left side of the spectrum than biden and and i i find the idea of sort of aiming for the middle of the road in order to to confront the extreme of the road to be fundamentally suspect but you know a few ones i'll be proven wrong the question is what happens next if he got willing wins i think that in some ways biden can be a transformative president because i think that you know there's a kind of there's there's there's a grand ambition there uh that that's that's become very clear right to um to invest in infrastructure to create a new a welfare state to um to kind of you know to bring the country together in some really i think beautiful ways um what i don't expect a biden presidency to do uh is is a really essential job of reinventing actual democracy right uh i don't think biden who prides himself on being integrated into the political system i don't think he's capable uh and i'd love to be surprised of of of asking whether this is such a great system and whether this is the only way to think about democracy and whether we need to question things like the two-party system right um it's very interesting that there's there's been a lot of discussion about you know just in in this in the close of this campaign the democrats have clearly decided like healthcare is the best thing to focus on in communicating with voters and it can seem very strange sometimes if we are indeed living in the moment that you describe which i concur with if we're living in a national emergency this guy's an authoritarian chasing a breakthrough you know it's very rare if at all to hear someone like nancy pelosi or chuck schumer or even joe biden or kamala harris use words like autocrat use words like fashion there's a real desire to stay away from that stuff and i understand the political calculation and just focus on he doesn't care about your health care do you understand that and think that's the prudent course for people in their position or is it dangerous for people in their position not to name the national emergency as it is um you know you're asking me a strategy question which i don't think i'm qualified to answer uh i don't know if it's dangerous uh to uh i don't know if it's ineffective i think it's wrong uh i i generally think that it is important to name things as they are right uh and um and i think that every time uh trump's critics fail to name what it is they're fighting they participate in normalizing it well said um we're gonna go to crowd questions in a second last thing i want to ask you before i do that i think one of the difficulties in in processing trump as an autocrat in this period for a lot of people that i talk to um is is what you refer to a little bit in terms of the signs of normalcy but it's also just the level of sophistication and development of a country like the united states um in the year 2020 is such and and the institutional quality um is such that a president who is kind of an imbecile and an idiot and an autocrat doesn't make the driver's license department stop doesn't make the subways grind to a hall doesn't you know result in everyday chaos in the street the way someone like him in many other countries in the world would shut life down simply through their incompetence there's a way in which life goes on in many many walks of american life do we need to change our picture of what autocracy looks like in a very high functioning society so that we're not waiting for something to happen that we've seen in movies that is actually never going to be what it looks like here that's a great question you know i don't know that you actually need to um to adjust for the united states i think it makes it more pronounced right uh because life can indeed be so normal for so long but i've since i was a kid literally i've been obsessed with a sort of um with how we collapse time when we think about history it's like we think that hitler came to power and then the holocaust happened and world war ii happened and then it was over um but there were years years when normal life uh and a sense of of politics and a sense of of um society was destroyed and eroded it is always a process and along the way this process grows familiar and a lot of things stay normal until they don't um i think that's going to be true anywhere um yes the subways well the subways never particularly work well anyway and certainly we've seen an extraordinary dysfunction with the pandemic um so i don't even know that that you know the sort of the the the first world adjustment is so necessary for donald trump what i think is really necessary is is a broader adjustment of just how we how fast we think things happen and how we always think of history as a series of events rather than processes so we're going to go to the audience questions now and i have them right here on my phone i'm not texting i swear so this is a question from chris flores uh masha can you discuss how trump is being enabled and where we can look for the power behind the scenes he isn't doing this by himself and it isn't just the people who vote for him i am so not interested in that i am interested in what is out in the open and i really hope that i can get the questioner interested in that too um because you know that thinking that like um there's there's a wonderful bulgarian um political scientist ivanka karstev who writes for the new york times and it had a column um a few years ago about secrets and truth uh in which he pointed out that truth can be known secrets have to be revealed don't wait for the things that should be revealed truth can be known it's right out here and it's there's plenty of information right there can i i mean since i have a good record on this can i say i think in this whole thing you've said a couple times i think there's a seed for a future book thank you what's it gonna be about i think you're your uh aversion to frankly an age of conspiratorial thinking and searching for the things behind things and the notion that it distracts us from the fact that the problem are you know the things in front of things um i think there's something there i think that's a title actually the thing in front of the things in front of things you can have it you can have it um can you talk about uh any alternatives that you see to liberal democracy as we practice it in the united states there are lots of alternatives to liberal democracy as we practice in the united states you know um we're pretty unusual liberal democracy i mean even as liberal democracies go right the two-party system only exists in a couple of places most liberal democracies are parliamentary democracies hannah arendt used to think that two-party systems were actually better protected against totalitarian tendencies because each party was always within reach of of of real power so it had the uh it it had the sort of the awesome responsibility right there and couldn't go off the deep and ideologically um but of course what we've ended up with is one party that's that does go off the deep end ideologically and is pulling the other party along toward an imaginary center as the other party sort of tries to maintain the awesome responsibility of governing which may be a sign that it's time to rethink the whole two-party structure it's certainly high time to rethink the marriage of of money and power in which the united states is fully unique among uh more or less functioning democracies in the way that it allows corporate and private interests to control our politics but you know a lot more about that than i did the next question actually goes in that direction from zz packer i think the writer masha declares that trump is instigating a totalitarian movement anand writes about the plutocracy what is the intersection between totalitarianism and plutocracy you want to take that one out no okay what is the intersection of between between totalitarianism and plutocracy um let me think about this i mean i don't know that there has to be one there certainly is one in in this country right um i think we have legitimized the power of the political power of money we have legitimized the idea that um that money accrues that that political power accrues to money and money accrues to political power and that is a kind of um you know that can be a kind of precondition to uh to totalitarianism because it is so blatantly anti-democratic that's right i have an eight-year-old off screen just in case i'm like making weird eyes and gestures i'm i'm doing a little bit of parenting so eight-year-olds are welcome on-screen off-screen we love we love kids here um mine are too young to be part of the scene right now based on your research of other countries what do you think will happen if trump loses but refuses to transfer power to light so you know when we talk about other countries we talk about usually in this in these situations we talk about whose side the military is going to be on right uh it's a little bit more complicated in the united states because the military is not the only factor right we have we have sort of the weird um entity that is the national guard that is uh that belongs to the states but can be federalized we have the largest law enforcement uh force in uh in the united states is actually customs and border patrol um so whose side are the uniformed services the armed uniformed services going to be on and the answer to that question in sort of traditional analysis is it depends on perceived legitimacy which basically means if biden wins by an absolute landslide if trump fails to tie up results in in recounts and court battles then the uniformed armed services are going to be on on the side of biden the winner but if trump succeeds in creating enough chaos if legitimacy is in question then i think there is a real danger that he'll remain the commander-in-chief i gotta say i mean you know that answer just it like it made me start picturing it in a way that is that is terrifying um this is a good one um if the failure of the election will make us slide from autocratic the autocratic attempt to the point of no return how can a mobilized public organize to prevent such a failure and an autographic paragraph what works in terms of public pressure um well the answer is then it gets so much more complicated right if it's if it's not an electoral mechanism um the whole problem with autocratic breakthrough is that it's it is the point of no return right so the question is kind of what's the return from the point of no return uh at at some point an autocratic regime can destroy itself only from the inside right we're seeing the absolute nightmare scenario in belarus right now where there has been sustained mass protest for more than two months tens of thousands of people in the streets every weekend people protesting all over you know residential neighborhoods small towns the capital single day and nothing happens right because there's no connection between what the people do and and what the dictator does um you would think that by you know by creating a large-scale strike there's not a general pervasive general strike but there have been large large-scale strikes in in belarus and by creating this kind of protest they would paralyzed the economy and forced him to leave no nothing happens right so so that's sort of the the the nightmare we're going to be years and years from that even if trump manages uh to to maintain power and even if he manages to maintain power illegitimately but so i guess i'm i'm i'm not i'm avoiding being prescriptive but i'm issuing a dire warning we have to like not wait 26 years to have amazing you know mass protests and general strikes um this is my own question interjecting i wonder how you view the black lives matter protests this summer and the the incredibly persuasive effect it had on public opinion um even compared to recent years where does that fit in to this autocratic attempt and and moment we're in you know where i think it fits in is it it reminds us that times of political crisis are also times of incredible political opportunity right and political opportunity is something you know when i say it i mean something very very specific which is that uh political opportunity is when ideas that are marginal can become mainstream and take hold and become central to legitimate political debate in a very short time right so we saw that actually happened twice this year we saw that happen uh when the pandemic hit the united states we saw ideas like universal health care and universal basic income travel from the margins to the center of political debate almost instantly in the in the course of a couple weeks and then we started andrew yang the redemption of andre yang uh i've i've been on his side on that one all along um and this the second time we saw it was even more profoundly i think with the black lives matter movement when in the course of a couple of weeks black lives matter became a an almost universally supported idea and defunding or abolishing the police became part of the legion of legitimate political debate uh you know when it had been a completely sort of esoteric um idea so uh is that going to have consequences after the election i have no idea right uh is it going to be sort of something that will have reverberations years from now but not not this year and next year i i don't know it's too early to tell it's like the timing was devastating to me at the time because i thought we're never we're never going to be able to to sustain this through november um in some ways i'm wrong and in some ways it's our fault uh as journalists right because the protests have been sustained but the coverage of purchase and sort of the conversation about protests hasn't been sustained in the media um i want to ask you in the in the new yorker you wrote a russian writer who blogs under the name alexander ivanov petrov writing of a different time and place has called this state of living provincial time is a time in which people continue to think and create but in some fundamental way lack agency or the ability to be fully aware of themselves there's this two different stories that are told about art and creation and writing of the kind you do in times like this and one story is that this is kind of a bad time for that stuff because you're you know perpetually chasing your phone alerts and you're in the state of panic and that's not no good for the creative process um but there's also this kind of contrary notion that art is really good under authoritarianism because it has this greater significance and it is so important i have these south african friends who say the art got terrible as soon as people were free because there was this great overriding purpose and movement that gave art its focus how do you think about the role of art in a time like this how do you think about your own creation and your ability to create in the kind of mental frame that we're all in um i don't think that this kind of time is good for for thinking uh and creating it's you know i have no attention span like every other person in this country um i you know i wrote a short book and it was like feat but there's a book that i've been working on for years that just keeps sort of stuck in um in one place uh svetlana alexis the the bell russian writer and nobel laureate said once that the barricades are a dangerous place for an artist because you see things in black and white because you can't differentiate people you see them as people on that side or on this side and i think that's completely true right uh i think that doubt uh uncertainty and time are all productive i think the certainty and and purposefulness are actually in the long term incredibly unproductive it's really interesting i mean i i that that i find that line a little bit haunting because i feel i feel sometimes drafted by these times into a you know a conflict mode with reality um with the reality being what it is that is that you're right is is in a way i think fundamentally different from the mode that we all pursued when we were becoming um writers um a lot of a lot of folks i'm hearing are asking about want to expand a little bit on your conversation your in a way your dismissal of truth and reconciliation a question that's coming up for people is how do we heal and resolve our relationship between each other of course there's multiple ways of of doing that um how do you how would you think about that problem which i think would become a focal problem of a biden era if there was one right so that's yeah that's um it's a very different way of thinking about truth and reconciliation if i understand the question correctly so it's not you know not not how do we think about crimes but how do we actually reconcile and i think that is when art can become [Music] extraordinarily important and um and interesting and like great right um because that's when we will be called upon to give up some of our certainties but by no means all of our certainties right um everything is not nuanced everything is not subtle some things are clear some things are morally abhorrent and have no justification and then other things are things that call for empathy and then some things are morally abhorrent but require strategic empathy because we still need to understand where they came from that's where stories come in right i don't know whether the best way to tell those stories is in some sort of formal way of commissions or if we're going to see you know a flowering of of um uh netflix series about the trump era or you know some great documentaries or some great narrative non-fiction again um maybe it's it's a time to think about whether uh whether leaving it to profit making corporations entirely is a good way to um to to come together you know we don't have stories in this country unless the their stories being told in the courts that are not told in the public space for profit and um and that probably has to change what gives you hope um well what gives me hope is distinct from the question of uh of whether i'm optimistic right i can be incredibly pessimistic but you know hope is um is a necessity of survival and a moral imperative uh i hope because that's you know because i have to because a better future is possible and the first the foundational requirement for it is hope uh i want to thank you so much masha guessing for your writing your witnessing your thinking the book that that came up uh so much again and again in this conversation has the same title as this event surviving autocracy please check it out if you want to survive autocracy if you don't then don't don't buy the book and make sure if you do not have a plan to vote if you take anything away from this conversation make a plan to vote go to iwillvote.com please vote thank you so much to our hosts and thank you so much masha for everything you do thank you so much you

Channel: Lannan Foundation

Views: 6,773

Rating: 4.8293839 out of 5

Keywords: socialjustice, lannanfoundation, mashagessen, anandgiridharadas, readings&conversations, autocracy

Id: 5g_IY26OsNs

Length: 79min 37sec (4777 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021