This isn't a, "I read Surviving Autocracy so you don't have to" post. You should absolutely read this book. But things are shaky right now, and even if you don't have time to read the whole book right this second, there are a few things from which I think we can collectively benefit...right this second. Here we go:

Being an absolute clown car and being dangerous aren't mutually exclusive. In studying the history of the worst authoritarians the world has offered up over the centuries, I personally have always been struck by the breadth of their destruction and all the "machinery"--personnel, propaganda, and technology--that made it work. The Holocaust and Nazi Germany's highly systemized mechanisms for genocide is the obvious example, though there are others.

I think many of us find a false comfort in that--comparing our current ketamine-fueled cornucopia of errors to the well-developed systems of fascists past and think, "well, these knuckleheads couldn't possibly pull off anything like that." But Gessen is quick to point out that when we study the past, we not only have the benefit of hindsight (seeing the results), but also that the very act of recording and reading history means things have been organized into a comprehensible narrative for our consumption.

Germans of the 1930s obviously did not physically see a complex network of death camps, but most people couldn't envision them, either. Many of people thought Hitler and co. were outlandish and inept, that their hateful ideologies were only talk, that they were, "just throwing things at the wall, and seeing what would stick," as it were. Even in our exceptionalism we are not exceptional. History shows us that it is a mistake to underestimate those in power simply because we think they are disorganized, weird, or unintelligent. These things may be true, and yet, they still hold the power. Which brings me to--

Believe them.
Sort of. Gessen spends a lot of time examining the first months of Trump 1.0 and the lead-up to the pandemic, and the ways in which Trumpism upended traditional political rhetoric--not only lying brazenly and without consequence, but also by emptying values-based words of their previously agreed upon meanings. (Gessen's examples are from the early days, but an easy current touchstone is "DEI" here.) This language gap makes it even more difficult to debunk the administration's lies, since the words literally no longer have the same meaning for everyone.

As a result, some might no longer be able to effectively "decode" the GOP's plans (except by just assuming they mean the opposite of what they say). However, symbolic gestures--things like "renaming" the Gulf of Mexico, or even Executive Orders we know should be struck down in court--can provide important context in speaking to the values they do maintain. On the Left, we often see these things spoken of as a "distraction," and I see why--these more ridiculous-sounding proposals are frequently the only thing to break into the mainstream news and/or social media.

While I don't think these things are where we should necessarily focus resistance efforts, they shouldn't be ignored either. These moments are where the Right is perhaps at their most truthful. They're showing us what's important to them, and we should believe them.

Back to Analog? What happens when we are literally unable to reach one another via a language hollowed out? Gessen spends the majority of this book fastidiously recording examples of how the press failed at covering Trump-- their confusing both sidesism with “neutrality”, their fawning over even tiny gestures at normalcy or "being presidential," and the general journalistic shortcoming of fact-checking the lie only once, though the lie is repeated hundreds of times, and many other errors.

Gessen writes that, "when something cannot be described, it does not become a fact of shared reality." When we lose language, we lose both our line of communication with one another, and ultimately our ability to keep hold of what is factual at all.

So, what do we do? Gessen has their own rules for survival in this NYTRB article from Trump 1.0, all of which still apply, and which accurately predict the collapse of the free press and other institutions we are now witnessing.

When I was a kid, our teacher read us this picture book which was essentially about the end of the world via climate disaster. The world of the book had been high-tech--hoverboards, rockets--and then suddenly everything was on fire. I don't actually remember anything that happened in this story, but I do remember that on the last page after everything had collapsed and been rebuilt all that fancy stuff was gone, and it was just a painting of a guy mowing his grass with one of those manual reel lawnmowers.

If abstract values and ideals like "diversity" and "equity" are more susceptible to being scraped out and co-opted for evil, if the Washington Post, and X, and Meta can become tentacles of the State, maybe the answer is to go low-tech. Stickers, flyers, zines, buttons, organizing together in-person with those near. Simple, concrete nouns that paint an picture of what, after all, is our shared reality--whether we like it or not.