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Masha Gessen is editor of New Yorker and 11 e-books, adding the winner of the National Book Award “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Claimed Russia” and the recently published e-book about Trump’s presidency, “Surviving Autocracy.” “
Born in the Soviet Union, Gessen’s circle of relatives emigrated to the United States in 1981. As an adult, Gessen returned to Russia in the early 1990s, where she became a scientific journalist and revolutionary LGBTQ rights activist.
In 2013, the Russian government put the decline of LGBTQ rights on its nationalist agenda, banning what they called “homosexual propaganda” and even threatening to take their children. It was at this time that Gessen moved with his circle of relatives to the United States.
Gessen, one of Vladimir Putin’s most prominent chroniclers in the world and Russia’s shift toward autocracy, won a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Scholarship, a Nieman Scholarship and the Hitchens Award for demonstrating “a commitment to freedom of expression and research, and the intensity of the intellect, and the willingness to seek the fact regardless of the non-public or pro consequences.”
Gessen spoke to Business Insider columnist Anthony L.Fisher via Skype for a broad verbal exchange of Trump’s similarities and differences with Putin, how he drew american audiences to his rude racism, why Russiagate conspiracy theories were not helpful, and why American myth sets might not save us.
This interview has been modified for clarity and extension.
Fisher: You’ve written books about Vladimir Putin, how would you say his autocracy versus Trump’s?
Gessen: It’s hard to compare because they come in so many other political contexts, very other cultural contexts, very other ancient contexts.
Differences are the unforeseen and striking maxims. The consolidation of Putin’s strength has been more of an autocratic advance than Trump’s, I think partly because Trump has a less systematic way of thinking. He assumed with emotion that once elected president, he had the right to be an autocrat.
Perhaps the ultimate difference is that, fundamentally, Putin is an authoritarian leader.
In “The Future Is History,” I wrote a lot about the difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Authoritarianism is a regime in which a user or organization of others needs everyone to go home. They just need everyone to leave them alone, collect cash and strength and take care of their own privacy. So the public space disappears under authoritarianism, politics disappears, nothing is political. Everything is private.
Totalitarianism is, in this sense, precisely the opposite. Everything is political, the personal area disappears. The totalitarian leader needs the public to faint in the public square, with his support appearing. By temperament, Trump is much more of a totalitarian leader. It needs it to be a big rally. That’s his conception of strength. While the conception of Putin’s strength is being ignored and no one notices.
Fisher: You wrote that Trumpian news has a way of being shocking without surprise, and described it as “an attack on the senses and intellectual faculties.” Do you think it’s through design?
Gessen: I don’t think anything in the Trump universe is intentional. That component of what I talked about earlier, which is that it turns out that he thinks that once elected, he may simply be the autocrat he sought to be.
Many of his statements and movements seem to be absolutely separate from what we assume as our political reality. There’s also the volume of things, outrageous things that happen, so we get a culture very quickly. But I think it’s instinctive.
Fisher: Do you think Trump’s incompetence can just suppress some of his autocratic tendencies?
Gessen: I don’t know. For two fundamental reasons. The first is that I believe his incompetence is militant. That’s a component of his political personality. Not that he’d like to be smarter and better at it, but he fails. It’s just that he’s determined to destroy.
His cross message was totally in line with that of other populists: things don’t have to be so complicated. I can do it. Anyone can do that. It’s all very simple. But his way of being president has been to create destruction, dismantle agencies, challenge agencies, deregulate. Part of that is the policy of deregulation, but he thinks no one deserves to be smart about it, because it has no value. It’s your contempt for the government and yours for expertise.
And, of course, we’ve noticed the demonstration and the consequences of that with COVID. This is a vital explanation of why I think its incompetence is not a mitigating factor, it is the nature of the beast.
The other explanation why I don’t think it’s mitigating is that, to the extent that our establishments and our culture are designed to deal with an autocratic attempt, the team we have requires a measure of intelligent religion and competence. It is very difficult for these teams (for legal teams, for institutional teams, for checks and counterweights, for checks and counterweights) to be implemented for someone or an incompetent administration.
Let me give you a little example, this general. Look at Portland right now.
It’s partly a kind of strategic opportunism. But we will soon realize that it will be very difficult to hold any interested party to account, because it is not even transparent that the heads of the DHS [Department of Homeland Security] and CBP [Border Patrol] are legally holding office. Either they’re acting bosses, and for either, the maximum allowed time has expired, which would or possibly not be a big problem. No one understands the law. But the line of succession has been violated as written in the law.
This is a correct example of how incompetence creates the impossibility of holding those other people accountable. They have not been shown through the Senate and the only user who can shoot them is Trump. They are therefore as unrelated to any supervisory framework as they are to the effective appointment procedure. What are you going to do about it?
Fisher: With respect to Portland, one argument advocated by Trump and his supporters is that they protect federal buildings, that the Border Patrol has authority in the 160 km border area, which includes the ocean, and that the local government has failed. to save you from violence. What do you think of that argument?
Gessen: I’m still investigating violence in Portland, so I don’t feel qualified to give you a full answer about that argument.
Some of what they say is true. These agencies that were created in their current form after 9/11 and are doing precisely what they were designed to do. That’s where we get into everything I discussed in the book, which I think is thinking of Trump as an anomaly. It doesn’t look like any president we’ve ever had, but Trump’s foundations, Trump’s possibility, were created long before he became president.
The greatest tension in this story would move to 9/11, the creation of the internal police state, the creation of the internal surveillance state, the concentration of force in the executive branch, and the creation of an American identity as a besieged. Nation.
Fisher: In the e-book he wrote, “Conspiracy thought focuses attention on the occult, the worried and the imagined, and moves away from the truth in plain sight.” It seemed to me that you were saying that there was so much corruption, especially corruption related to Trump and Russia, that focusing on the concept that he is a literal Russian puppet of power and detrimental to holding Trump accountable.
Gessen: That’s exactly what I’m saying. I don’t even know if I would necessarily call it corruption because I think when we use the word corruption, we regularly hear anything that is abnormal or deviant from the state. We assume that the State, as it has been established lately, acts in the public interest, and then there are tactics in which it has been corrupted. So, if you eliminate corruption, it will work as expected.
Under Trump, that’s not the case. The total thing acts in your self-interest, all because your goal is the accumulation of power. So you can’t eliminate corruption and leave a smart Trump presidency.
There are so many features of a corrupt state that they are visible.
As a society and as individuals, we have no unlimited energy, unlimited attention span and an unlimited number of columns or words in our media, focusing on what we cannot see, focusing on the desire to notice anything else – it catches the eye. what’s right in view of what it’s about now.
But it also strangely normalizes the visible. It’s like I’m not serious enough, what we’re looking for. But once we know he’s a genuine Kremlin agent, it will be when things become clear, resilient and capable of being prosecuted. I think it’s destructive.
Fisher: As he wrote in the book, many major media outlets pointed to that moment in 2017 when Trump bombed Syria and declared “he presidential” that day. Do you think it’s a harmful standardization?
Gessen: Look, normalization is inevitable. Partly because that’s right, it’s our normality. Four years ago, President Trump was unthinkable. He is now president for three and a half years. So that’s the norm. But of course, it’s dangerous. It’s not something we want to get used to and we want to be aware when our criteria come down.
Fisher: How would you compare Trump to other U.S. presidents, who might not have been so rude to the media, but who have done things like the espionage law to prosecute journalists? Do you think Trump is exceptionally worse than other media presidents?
Gessen: I’m thinking of both of you, and that’s a very smart question. It is possible that Trump will never do what he does, adding his interactions with the media, if the previous presidents and society had not created the situations for that.
Obama’s management was not a smart management for hounds. It was opaque, peacefully hostile to the investigation. And, of course, he was not so peacefully hostile to media clashes. It would come with the remedy of Chelsea Manning, who was pardoned at 11th time, but the prosecution of hounds and whistleblowers in the Obama administration and [his] predecessors created the situations for Trump.
But Trump has damaged the culture by abandoning the functionality of responsibility. Under Obama, press conferences would probably have been mostly empty rituals, but they created functionality, the symbol of responsibility. And that’s what Trump has damaged from the beginning.
Fisher: Has a bankruptcy over “white male supremacy,” reports Trump’s racism opposed to “squad” members [four progressive members of Congress who are of color], and writes that countries that have become less democratic in recent times years have pushed back LGBT rights. Is this all a component of the Trump project?
Gessen: Yes, it’s Trump’s job. Trump’s assignment takes American identity into an imaginary past. In this imaginary past, the imaginary voter of Trump or Trump himself, we did not confront and irritate through other people who demanded to be identified in their differences. I didn’t have to do a percentage of strength or public area with people other than you.
There is a concerted effort in the Decomposer of Justice component to oppose the achievements of the LGBT rights motion, I think, the day after Jeff Sessions became Attorney General. And, of course, your war against immigrants. It’s all in one piece, it’s about reducing American identity and diseating the rights of others who have gradually emancipated themselves in the American project.
Fisher: When Trump said the Squadron “returns” to where they came here, it seemed like a time when even the most cautious editors were willing to say it was racist. Period. Shut-off completely. Do you think it was the right time to do it?
Gessen: I think there’s something very special about setting such high criteria for qualifying something as racist. It is similar with the use of the word “lying”. The editors of The New York Times and National Public Radio have adopted a kind of hardline through the appreciation of those words. NPR said we can’t tell if it’s a lie because we know we can’t take a look at its center and see its intentions, which I think is simply an absolute abdication of journalistic responsibility.
The Times has a more attractive policy, it simply uses it as an exception. So most of the time they prefer to use that euphemism, or what they might think is a synonym, but [that] I’m short. That is, “Trump back makes an unsubstantiated statement” or “Trump’s wrong statements.” Sometimes, when it’s really outrageous, they use the word lie. The challenge with that is that it creates a scenario where everything Trump does regularly, that is, lying, is called only on exceptional occasions. This maxim creates a scenario in which you are allowed to rest on an ever-changing concept of reason. And that can only continue to diminish the popularity of what we expect from the Director General.
We have a president who is naturally racist, who makes racist comments all the time. It’s not like we suspect he’s racist and suddenly exposed his true ideals by telling the team to go back to where they came here. I mean, he constantly exposes us to his true ideals about race. And yet we are waiting for a very large bomb to use the word racist. This means that a certain amount of racism, like an incredibly higher amount of racism, is tolerable and is not slapped with that etiquette. But, of course, we expect a certain amount of rude racism in its component on a daily basis.
Fisher: If Trump lost in November, what would you have to do to repair some of the damage done to U.S. institutions?
Gessen: Americans have a religion in establishments. And by that I mean that we give the establishments two magical qualities. One is the quality of self-healing. And the other is the quality of independent operation.
It’s as if they were the best thing to work in a vacuum, as the establishments are there and are better designed to do their job. One thing we want to perceive is that this is not true for any institution and, in fact, it is not true for American establishments. Institutions paintings in society. They are empowered and encouraged through society.
Sometimes we see this expressed wonderfully, as in the initial reaction to the ban. It was an uncommon moment to see in a very obvious way how the reaction of society allows the courts to make their paintings quickly, successfully and decisively.
But the most important thing is that we have to abandon this concept of better design. We will have to perceive that democracy is an aspiration. It’s nothing you can build, then move in and live there. It’s a consistent negotiation. Democracy is the verbal exchange about how we should live in a combination today and tomorrow, and then we have verbal exchange again, and then we have it again.
So, if there’s one thing we want to do is abandon this concept that the founding fathers gave us the best home to live in. And we just have to make sure no one tears down the walls. The founding fathers gave us some concepts on how to build what we continue to live in.