This week journalist and Russian LGBT activist Masha Gessen returned to Full Frontal with Samantha Bee to make dire prognostications about the future of the United States under a Donald Trump presidential administration.
Gessen left for the United States in December 2013 (she’s a dual citizen) when the Putin government considered plans to strip homosexuals of their adopted children. She founded the Pink Triangle Campaign in response to government attacks on civil rights, particularly anti-"gay propaganda” laws. Since moving to the United States she’s been a vociferous critic of Trump, particularly in comparing his abuse of fact and attacks on a free press to Putin administration tactics (she remains skeptical of intelligence community claims of a direct link, however). Her perspective clarifies not just the political mechanics of oppression, but the psychological mechanisms that allow us to excuse our own capitulations to autocracy.
Gessen’s New York Review of Books article, “Autocracy: Rules for Survival” is essential:
“Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization…”
There are five more rules, each as important as the last.
But what’s the worst that could happen? A lot, actually. Gessen describes some of the dire possibilities to Samantha Bee in this Full Frontal segment:
Sure, there were jokes, but it’s hard to remember a bleaker segment of television (other than most of the rest of the news, most of the time).
Bee frames much of the segment as a desperate search for a silver lining. Gessen does not oblige her, instead opening on the discouraging track record of protest movements in Russia: “most efforts to successfully resist, that I know of, failed.”
“My biggest worry is a nuclear holocaust,” Gessen says, to presumably petrified laughter from the Full Frontal audience. But even if it doesn’t come to that, environmental policy alone (a combination of global warming wrongness and outright gutting of protections like the Endangered Species Act) is “certain to do irreparable damage to the environment that will make the survival of the human species impossible.”
From there Gessen lists the foreign policy quagmires and ever-escalating violations of fundamental democratic precepts that are likely to come packaged with a Trump administration:
- “He’s going to lift the sanctions against Russia.”
- “He’s going to start banning one newspaper after another from the White House.”
- “He is going to start thinking about wars.”
- “He is going to go to the Putin model of holding one press conference a year.”
Yep. Yes. Oh god no, please (yes). Yes. We’re sliding into all of her predictions. None are outlandish. And even her most conjectural sounds entirely plausible:
“So suppose some cities refuse to cooperate with deportations. So he calls on the American people to start reporting immigrants. And that’s when we start getting into really disgusting territories.”
That conflict — between the federal government and sanctuary cities — is already brewing. Does anyone really think Trump won’t be ready with a tweet exactly in the mode Gessen describes? And this time with a national policy apparatus to give it trusses and endow it with violence.
Gessen sees in this moment the death of any possibility of return to normal democracy. “That’s not rock bottom,” she told Bee, “but that will be the beginning of a culture of citizen against citizen.”
But this is a dark-hearted moment with a purpose. Gessen doesn’t believe the individual is capable of much, but she exhorts everyone to refuse to conform in every instance.
“The thing, I think, to do — and this is my recipe — is to actually to continue panicking. To continue to be sort of the hysteric in the room and to say, ‘this is not normal,’” Gessen says. “And just remember why you’re panicking.”
She writes in “Why We Must Protest,”
“Protest is a powerful antidote to helplessness and confusion. Autocracies work by plunging citizens into a state of low-level dread. Most of the powers commandeered by the autocrat are ceded without a fight, and the power of imagination, the claim to a past and a future are the first to go. A person in a state of dread lives in a miserable forever present. A person in a state of dread is imminently controllable. The choice to protest, on the other hand, is the choice to take control of one’s body, one’s time, and one’s words, and in doing so to reclaim the ability to see a future.”
Television political comedy shows are not going to save liberals, the Left or Americans. Jon Stewart would not have won the election for Hillary Clinton. But so long as they can foment dissent, bring light to injustice and promote journalists exercising their appropriate adversarial role, we’ll at least have periodic reminders of just how much we stand to lose. Continue panicking.
