SURVIVING AUTOCRACY
By Masha Gessen
THE DEMAGOGUE’S PLAYBOOK
The Battle for American Democracy From the Founders to Trump
By Eric A. Posner
It is now difficult to remember how outlandish it seemed, back in 2016, to suggest that the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States might endanger American democracy. Though many were shaken by Trump’s racism, his foul attacks on his political opponents and his disdain for longstanding political norms, the prevailing consensus suggested that the Republic’s institutions would easily withstand a challenge from a man who came to national prominence on reality television.
Trump, some said, would grow into the job. Others thought that Republicans like Paul Ryan would be able to mold him in their image. And if the newly elected president did try to do something truly outlandish — like, say, firing the head of the F.B.I. or protecting collaborators who had admitted to lying about their connections to foreign government officials — the other branches of government would stop him.
Back in those days, Masha Gessen was one of the most bracing and insightful voices sounding the alarm about the seriousness of the test that awaited the country. Too many politicians and commentators, she wrote on the day after the election, are insisting on treating Trump as a “normal” politician. Drawing on her years covering Vladimir Putin’s attacks on Russian democracy, she instead portrayed him as an aspiring autocrat. Take Trump at his word when he expresses disdain for democratic institutions, she implored her many readers: “He means what he says.”
Now Gessen has drawn on nearly four years of writing about the president to produce a righteously furious account of the damage that Trump has inflicted on the country. Over the first years of his presidency, lies, conspiracy theories and attacks on the press that once seemed shocking have become just another day at the Oval Office. Institutions that long operated independently from the White House have been turned into partisan tools. Perhaps most worryingly of all, Gessen says, our view of who gets to count as an American may have started to shift as courts have upheld travel bans and as a partial wall on the southern border may slowly be taking shape.
“Surviving Autocracy” rightly indicts Trump as an aspiring autocrat who has deeply weakened the institutions of the Republic. But the most valuable parts of the book consist of the crisp observations Gessen offers along the way. “We imagine the villains of history as masterminds of horror,” she cautions. And yet, history’s most destructive dictators “struck many of their countrymen as men of limited ability, education and imagination.”
Much of the coverage of the past years, Gessen points out, has been taken up with a focus on the “excruciatingly slow, tantalizingly complicated, deliciously dirty story of Russian interference in the 2016 election.” But though she agrees that the Kremlin tried to help Trump, she worries that many of his opponents have themselves fallen into a dangerous form of “conspiracy thinking.” The outcome, she laments, is that we concentrate on all the terrible things that might be going on in secret while ignoring the equally terrible things that are happening “in plain view.”
Despite these important insights, the book suffers from a tendency to shoot in a very target-rich environment without bothering to take careful aim. Again and again, Gessen attacks Trump for such trivial crimes as hanging golden drapes in the Oval Office or ordering the wrong kind of cake. Trump’s Inaugural Address, Gessen implausibly asserts, was not just meanspirited or poorly written; it “rejected the idea that excellence is desirable” in a conscious effort to diminish the presidency.
The same tendency to skew the narrative to fit a conclusion that would be wholly plausible without such misfires is also evident when Gessen turns toward more recent events. Though Trump is continuing to encroach on the independence of key institutions at an alarming pace, for example, it seems plain that the devastation wrought by Covid-19 and the changes in public opinion in the wake of the nationwide demonstrations have weakened his political standing. Gessen acknowledges that a booming economy would have been Trump’s “ultimate argument and best campaign asset,” but she insists that the bungled response to the pandemic will strengthen his grip over the country: By crashing the economy, she warns, Trump has “inadvertently created perfect conditions for autocratic consolidation.”
Whereas “Surviving Autocracy” places Trump in the context of contemporary attacks on democracy in other countries, another recent book assesses his danger to the Republic in the light of American history. In “The Demagogue’s Playbook” Eric A. Posner argues that Trump should, like Andrew Jackson, be understood as a populist demagogue: someone who is hostile to expertise and existing institutions, and who seeks to further his own power by “appealing to negative emotions like fear and hatred.”
A great virtue of Posner’s conceptual scheme is that it allows him to focus on those aspects of Trump’s presidency that are of lasting significance. Instead of condemning demagogues for any phrase or policy he happens to dislike, he zeros in on their dangerous habit of positing a conflict between the people and the very institutions that have historically enabled them to exert their power.
Still, a distinct drawback of the book is that it becomes a repetitive hunt for populists and demagogues. And while Posner’s sketches of major political figures from Thomas Jefferson to Franklin Roosevelt are often interesting, they do not add to the vast stock of knowledge we owe to their many biographers.
This could be more easily forgiven if Posner gave us a fresh perspective on our contemporary predicament. But when he finally reaches the present, his view of the Trump presidency turns out to be disappointingly conventional. Trump, he concludes, should not be seen “merely as a poor choice for the presidency, like Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan or Warren Harding.” Rather, he is “a political monstrosity who should be repudiated by the body politic, so that politicians who eye the presidency in the future will be deterred from using Trump’s ascendance as a model.“ It is difficult to argue with Posner’s conclusion. But it’s one that has long been shared by a vast swath of the American public.
Taken together, these two books offer an instructive view on what, after four years of his dominating the national conversation, we do — and don’t — know about Donald J. Trump. The instinct to normalize Trump has, mostly, gone out the window; it is now amply evident that he is not just another Republican president, and that he was never destined to grow into his august office.
And yet, it remains devilishly difficult to assess how much lasting damage he will inflict on our political institutions. At times, I found myself swayed by Gessen’s fear that everything is breaking his way, that even the things that appear to constrain his power — like his persistent incompetence — will somehow serve to deepen his hold on the American Republic and the American mind. But at other times, I felt a growing sense of hope that American voters could (as they so often have in the past) soon sour on the demagogue who once beguiled them. After all, as Masha Gessen wrote back in 2016, “nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump’s persona, will not either.”
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June 19, 2020 at 05:04AM
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Is Donald Trump a Danger to Democracy? - The New York Times
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