Surviving Autocracy

Starred review from April 1, 2020
The National Book Award winner delivers a handbook for an age in which egomania is morphing into autocracy at warp speed. New Yorker contributor Gessen, an immigrant from what was then the Soviet Union, understands totalitarian systems, especially the ways in which, under totalitarian rule, language is degraded into meaninglessness. Today, writes the author, we are "using the language of political disagreement, judicial procedure, or partisan discussion to describe something that was crushing the system that such terminology was invented to describe." Against that, Gessen suggests, we now have an administration for which words hold no reality, advancing the idea that "alternative facts" are fine but professing dismay when one calls them lies. The step-by-step degradation of democratic institutions that follows is a modern-day rejoinder to the fact that more than half a dozen years separated the Reichstag fire from World War II. That's a big buffer of time in which to admit all manner of corruption, and all manner of corruption is what we've been seeing: Gessen reminds us about Mick Mulvaney's accepting handsome gifts from the payday-loan industry he was supposed to regulate and Ben Carson's attempt to stock his office with a $31,000 dining-room set. Yet corruption's not the right word, writes the author, since Trump and company are quite open and even boastful about what used to be a matter of shame and duplicity. The real tragedy, it seems, is that they have been so successful in creating what the author calls a "new, smaller American society," one that willfully excludes the Other. Many writers have chronicled the Trump administration's missteps and crimes, but few as concisely as Gessen, and her book belongs on the shelf alongside Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny and Amy Siskind's The List as a record of how far we have fallen. Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration.

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Starred review from April 27, 2020
National Book Award–winner Gessen (The Future Is History) delivers a scathing indictment of the Trump administration’s impact on “the American system of government.” Drawing on Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar’s concept of “autocratic transformation,” Gessen links Trump’s dominance over the Republican Party; “disdain for excellence,” particularly in the workings of government; manipulation of state institutions for personal gain; and packing of the federal courts with ultra-conservative judges to developments in “post-Communist countries” following the collapse of the Soviet Union. She also dissects Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric and castigates the U.S. media for normalizing the behavior of education secretary Betsy DeVos and other Trump appointees by “privileg neutrality above all else, including substance” and “plac artificial limits on a journalist’s ability to observe reality.” Gessen ends her brisk, trenchant account with a call for “political figures of powerful moral authority” (she nominates the four freshman congresswomen known as “the Squad”) to combat Trumpism with a more inclusive and dignified vision of “America as it could be.” Gessen’s meticulous research and familiarity with the political and cultural history of post-Soviet Russia lend her arguments an authority lacking in other takedowns of Trump. Liberals looking to make sense of what they’re up against in the 2020 elections should consider this a must-read. Agent: Elyse Cheney, the Cheney Agency.

Starred review from April 1, 2020
With each passing day of the Trump presidency, the term autocracy becomes more deeply entrenched in the national lexicon. Journalist and best-selling author Gessen, who won the National Book Award for The Future Is History (2017), has firsthand knowledge of life under an autocratic ruler: she was born in the Soviet Union and has covered Russian geopolitics for more than two decades, most notably in a scorching profile of Vladimir Putin. Thus, when the rhetoric of candidate, then president, Trump became increasingly despotic, Gessen recognized an autocrat in the making. As Trump continues to undermine the constitutional rule of law that protects judicial process, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and other bedrock democratic concepts, the ability of the populace to protest the degradation of civil liberties and protect against further legal, ethical, and cultural erosion becomes more tenuous, but ever more critical. Gessen's is a clarion voice in the darkness, offering a sobering but sharp-witted analysis of how American society has changed under Trump and how democratic values and practices might yet survive. With the 2020 presidential election on the horizon, Gessen's rallying cry is a vital and pressing reminder of what is at stake.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)