The Daily Beast Podcast - Masha Gessen: The Problem Is Not Russian Interference. It’s That We Let It In.

Episode Date: November 15, 2020

President Donald Trump may be following Vladimir Putin’s Autocratic playbook closer than we all realize—and the Russian interference was just the tip of the iceberg. In this bonus members-only episode of The New Abnormal, the New Yorker staff writer and Surviving Autocracy author Masha Gessen joins co-host Molly Jong-Fast to talk about this phenomenon. They explain that leaders like Trump and Putin put a system in place to hold power, and if you’re wondering how a man like Trump could do something so seemingly elaborate, it makes sense. “The destruction they wreak is all the more effective because of the incompetence,” Gessen explains. “They thrive on instability. The more anxious people are the less likely they are to opt for change ” Biden, they say, will have to dismantle this system (though they wish the president-elect would ditch the “Build Back Better” campaign). Why? For the same reason they dislike when people solely focus on Russian interference. “We've been very stupid to focus on it as much as we have,” Gessen explains. “The problem is not Russian interference, the problem is we sank so low to where Russian interference sank in.” Plus! Hear why they compare Trump to a ‘witch afraid of water’ when it comes to lawmakers of color like AOC and the late John Lewis. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to another of the new abnormal special bonus episodes. We're so excited to have you here today. Today we have a very special guest with Masha Gessen, who's an author and journalist who writes brilliantly on authoritarian. So today we're going to have her teach us why we all should care about this subject. We're so thrilled to have you today. Thank you. First I want to talk to you. You wrote this piece in the New Yorker last week or this week or today.

Who even knows? In the Forever Tuesday, yeah. Right, exactly. And it was. And I know you've written about this in your books and you've written about this before, but it was so struck by it. And I wanted to talk to you about this idea that we kind of got off easy this time. The piece I published right after the election was right after the election.

We're still in the election. It's like we're always in March and always in the election. It's about the concept of an autocratic breakthrough. I borrowed that idea from a Hungarian sociologist, Ballant Majer, whose work I've used a lot. He's brilliant and has developed this very detailed model based on studying the central and eastern European democratic backsliding. And he divides autocracies into three stages.

Autocratic attempt, autocratic breakthrough, and autocratic consolidation. Now, what distinguishes the autocratic attempt is that it is reversible by electoral means. And the thing is, like, we don't know or we don't necessarily always know when the autocratic attempt is over. when it has passed into autocratic breakthrough.

But he suggests that there are structural changes and institutional changes that aspiring autocrats put in place that create the process of autocratic breakthrough and after we pass through their autocratic breakthrough, it is no longer possible to dislodge their autocrat by peaceful means. So what he looks at is what he calls

the vertical of vassalage, which I think is a beautiful term, weirdly Putin uses a similar term and has used a similar term ever since he came to power 20 years ago. He was talking about vertical of power or the power vertical. And by this he meant that he thinks that the whole sort of system of checks and balances is really unwieldy. You just should have a single command center.

And you know, like you figure that you decide what needs to happen at the top and then it gets passed down to the bottom, and that's much more efficient. But the concept of vertical vassalage is more evocative and more accurate, because it's really, it's like this vertical loyalty network. There are these people who are put in place by the aspiring autocrat who are bound to him because he gave them the power. He often gives them the money or the access to accumulating wealth through power, and they owe him loyalty.

And this is a very important thing to modern autocracies, right? They're all like mafia states, basically. So Donald Trump, what I'm arguing in this piece is that Donald Trump, not only is he refusing to admit electoral defeat, but he's actually trying to activate a vertical of vassalage that he's put in place. And so far, you know, it's not a terribly impressive one, but it's not an unimpressive one. What he has done is he's created these verticals that you can trace, you know, from Trump, to Mitch McConnell, to all the judges and three Supreme Court justices that Mitch McConnell got through the Senate. Or you can trace it through from Trump down to Bill Barr and the Justice Department that he's turned into his personal law firm,

where personal law enforcement agency and private law firm. We're seeing this vertical reacting in ways that Trump expects it to. you know, we're seeing Bill Barr sort of issue this weird memo, basically saying, okay, re-examine the votes before they've even been finally tallied up. We're seeing Mitch McConnell go along with refusing to admit electoral defeat. I think at this point, this vertical will probably not hold up Trump to the desired end of staying in power. But we can see the outlines. Right. For the next time.

For the next time, exactly. And this is something, you know, Zainab Tufiqi wrote about. about it in the Atlantic, she suggested that the next autocrat will be more competent. I don't know that it's necessarily a question of competence. I actually think incompetence is something that autocrats weaponize really well. It's like the destruction they reek is all the more effective and total because of their incompetence. But what I do know is that the incoming Biden administration will have to dismantle this

vertical. And to dismantle the vertical, it will really have. to examine what allowed it to be constructed. Yes, and that's where your piece from today comes in. Will you talk a little bit about that? Because we just had Ellie on the podcast, too. Uh-huh, great. Yeah, I agree with this idea, too.

So the piece I published today on the day that we're recording is a piece in favor of reckoning. And I'm arguing against a fairly longstanding American tradition of sort of staying the hand of vengeance. ever since Ford pardoned Nixon, there's been this idea that presidential magnanimity has to extend to his predecessor. And then the right thing to do politically is to move on. So there's a direct line from Ford to Barack Obama who decides not to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate illegal detention and torture under President George W. Bush or to even take a closer look at. the Iraq war. I think that Biden is poised. He and Kamala Harris signaled in their victory speeches

that unity and healing are their goals. And these are goals that I share, right? But I think that the way that American politics have generally pursued unity and healing is by kind of putting a band-aid on the thing and pretending it never happened. And I don't think that's what you do with a festering wound. I think you have to clean it out and then you stitch it up and that's no guarantee of healing, but it's the best chance you have. You definitely can't let it fester. I try to take the argument a little bit away from this argument about whether we should have truth and reconciliation commissions or whether it should be sort of the regular institutions, regular trials, regularly investigations, congressional hearings. I'm not sure that that's

that important. Like that's not the question. Yeah. The question is, is there a national commitment to reckoning? And we may not need Truth and Reconciliation Commission's. Jill Lapoor has argued, I think, very forcefully, that we don't need them because we have regular institutions. And Ellie has argued back, you can't use those regular institutions. They failed. I think they're both right.

We may not need to invent brand new rituals of storytelling, but we either need to use existing rituals of storytelling, right? And that's a weird way to refer to courts, but that's what courts are, right? They are ritualized story factories, and so are congressional hearings, and so are special counsel investigations, and so can be town hall meetings, so are certainly journalistic investigations. All of those are possibilities for a recognition. right, but there has to be, it can't be like some heroic prosecutor somewhere.

It can't be the Southern District of New York pounding Trump into the ground. That's not the point. The point is not to pound him into the ground. The point is to actually have a conversation about what happened to us. Right. How we did it to ourselves and how we can recover. Right. And how we can prevent it the next.

It almost feels like you're making a case for more narrative nonfiction. I am perhaps making a case for more narrative nonfiction. problem with narrative nonfiction. Again, you know, it's like if we leave it to, and of course, you know, I say this a couple of hours after Twitter went aflame because there are rumors that Trump negotiating a hundred million dollars worth of book deals, right? Yeah. Like, it's just disgusting. That's not the kind of narrative that I mean. But it also points up the problem. You can't leave it to profit-oriented publishing houses.

Right. Whether it's, you know, long-form magazine articles or books, that's not where it happens. it has to be a public-oriented commitment. Yeah, like Nuremberg, but without the punishment, right? Exactly, yeah. You know, Nuremberg, again, it created a story. Like after Nuremberg, there was a story to tell about the Nazi regime. It had been written down.

It had been documented. People had been heard. And a lot of the time where truth and reconciliation commissions have functioned, it's where people who have suffered the trauma are voiceless. That's not always true in this country. We have longer legacies where people have been systematically deprived of their public voice, right? You know, the legacy of racism, the legacy of colonization. The story of the last four years is not necessarily primarily a story of the voiceless being suffering trauma, right?

I mean, we're very voiceful here on the left. Yeah. It almost feels like, and correct me if I'm wrong, but this is my own. experience of the last four years. What we've seen the most trauma inflicted on besides the ICE situation and the children being separated from their parents and, you know, all of that really tragic, serious dictatorship stuff. The other thing I've seen, it almost feels like he's, you know, inflicted a lot of this trauma on federal government employees. Yeah, I think that's a really good point that, you know, there's been a whole set of debasement of government. We have seen people,

who have tried to, who actually, you know, who haven't lied about trying to stay in the system to stay in the house on fire, but actually, you know, people like Colonel Vindman or Fiona Hill, who I think truly try to put out the fire while staying inside the house, right? And lots of people whose names we don't know in the State Department, in the National Security establishment.

I think that sort of the major national trauma, there's several nexus. one is, as you mentioned, ice, and we have all suffered moral injury by being complicit in the creation of concentration camps and putting children in cages. It's not like too grand a pronouncement to say that. It's just a fact.

We have all been victimized and traumatized by the handling of the pandemic. To have a government that basically communicates that people's lives are disposable, that they're worthless, your family's lives, your friend's lives, your own life, I mean, that's a huge psychic. And again, to all of us, to people who suffered physically and financially, you know, got sick and God forbid died,

but also to all of us who are watching this and feeling helpless to do anything about it. And, of course, his reaction to Black Lives Matter, the fanning of more racism, the use of troops against protesters, that's also moral injury inflicted on all of us. And I think just like watching this debasement of government, right? It was like for four years. Do you remember when he first replaced Obama on television? And it was like that sense of like, oh, my God, this is just embarrassing to watch. Yeah.

And then we live with it for four years. You have to look and you have to listen, but it makes you ashamed to be looking and listening. A lot of my friends who've lived in Russia and in Eastern Europe have, especially today, actually, but also previously have really had a visceral horror. I was shocked by Trump's inauguration speech because I was like, the government isn't supposed to work against me. Like, you know, I didn't know that happened. But my friends who grew up in Eastern Europe and Russia were all like,

they were, I think, ultimately more used to it, but also more terrified by it. I think that's exactly right. But it's more familiar. I think it was more legible to people who lived on autocracies that maybe Eastern Europe or Russia. in the Burles-Cogne's Italy, Erdogan's Turkey, Netanyahu's Israel. There are lots and lots of examples around the world that prepare you to recognize what he's actually saying. And so, yeah, so you read it better and you get more scared faster. You talk in this piece, and you've talked about this before, this idea of accountability.

Everyone has been talking about this today because of this. You know, how, like, people are saying, well, you shouldn't hire anyone from the Trump administration. I'm hearing a lot of people looking for jobs and different businesses. And I have a friend who is someone they called. I wasn't working for da-da-da, even if I was in the administration. So I'm curious to know what your feeling is on this. My feeling in that is that the most important part is to have that be the subject of public conversation. That's part of the reckoning.

What happens to these people? Right now, what happens is that, you know, their, career paths and there have been so many people who have gone through the revolving door of that administration that we know quite well what happens. They find work in think tanks. They find they get prestigious fellowships like Sean Spicer at Harvard Kennedy School. They get lucrative jobs in private business like Miles Taylor, the so-called anonymous. The high-level administration official who got a high-level job at Google, right? And my personal influence. feeling is that it should be embarrassing. It shouldn't happen. But I don't know, right? There has to be

some way in which we think about this collectively. Do you think that if there's sort of sunlight brought in that we are less likely? Because my whole anxiety is that this is going to be 24 and we're going to have a Tucker Carlson presidency. And, you know, I am no fan of Tucker Carlson by any stretch of the imagination, nor is he of mine. But he is, he is, much smarter than Donald Trump. Right. And so I feel like we have four years to sort of make sure this doesn't happen again. Exactly. That's exactly right. We have, we probably have less, right? The next election campaign is going to start in two years. Your wish list to prevent this is why? My wish list is that Joe Biden stopped saying build back better and says, we have to

reinvent American democracy. What made this possible? And then all sorts of answers are for themselves, like the role of money in government, the role of money in politics, the gerontocratic duopoly that we call the two-party system, like the unregulated, profit-driven media with no alternative, like a system that has devolved to the point where the only way things to get done politically is for one party to have a monopoly on power. This is something that when we look at other countries, we get very leery of countries that have where one-party,

party has a monopoly on political power, meaning the executive branch and both chambers of a parliament. But in our country, it has come to the point where governing is almost impossible, unless there's the trifecta. So these are things that we have to talk about, and that's just institution. And then what do we talk about culturally? What is it in us that made this possible? Why do you think a place like the UK, they had Boris. Boris is basically, I mean, he's slightly smarter version of Trump, but a lot of the same sort of base instincts got him elected. Are European government safer? Are we too dependent on a president? I mean, is this because of executive orders and, you know, Congress giving away its power? You know, people have argued about

this for a long, long time. And there are lots of people who will tell you that a parliamentary system, a multi-party system, and usually parliamentary systems are multi-party systems, right, is much safer against this sort of demagogue. But, you know, there are lots of European countries where that doesn't seem to have exactly held up. There's the counter argument that, and this is actually an argument that Hannah Arndt subscribed to, which is that, no, a two-party system is safer because in a two-party system, one party assumes the grave responsibility of government, right? And so, and that and the possibility of being in power, like always being a hair's breath from power, keeps parties from going over the ideological edge and sort of keeps things sane and keeps things responsible.

Yeah, that may hold up until somebody like Trump shows up and goes over the ideological edge without even realizing what he's doing. I think the answer is that there's no system that is foolproof. And democracy is not the building of systems. Democracy is a process. It's a process of negotiation. We create systems in order to facilitate the negotiation that is actually democracy. We create systems in order to have a conversation about how we live together as a country. And we have to keep recreating those systems and reinventing them.

Because otherwise they just get shaky and vulnerable. And like you can't just like put a little spackle on them and keep living in them when they've had an infestation. Do you think that this is also in some way a call for like a larger conversation about morality? And I don't mean morality in the sort of traditional morality. I mean, more of like, it feels, again, like our politics have gotten very removed from, like, you know, the sort of questions of doing the right thing because it's right, which was sort of the larger, you know, that sort of ended with Nixon. And I wonder if there's any way to sort of unring that bell. Yeah, I think that's a great leading question. And I, you know, in my book, I talk about how moral aspiration is actually the only way.

to really oppose autocracy. Like where we've seen successful dissident movements, movements that actually mobilize people around them, is where those movements have been based on moral aspiration. And what we see with Donald Trump, look at the people who scare him. People like John Lewis, like Elijah Cummings, like AOC, and the squad.

Yes, not coincidentally all people of color, but I think perhaps more centrally, all people who place moral aspiration at the center of their politics. And he's like, you know, a witch afraid of water with them. I think a lot about Ukraine because it ended up being such a central part of the Trump presidency, but it is also, I feel like that's an example of a country where they sort of took their power back. Even after the revolution of dignity? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, you know, it's a country that's still in transition. It's like forever in transition. But I find the example of Ukraine in some ways incredibly inspiring, right? It's like a country that just keeps trying to get it right. And every time somebody comes along and they have lots of people coming along who try to usurp power and the system is very, is very fragile, it's very new. And so they succeed in usurping power for a little bit. And then the people say, no, no, got to go. Let's try again. And they keep trying. And it's, you know, it's a really beautiful thing. It's so interesting. Are you optimistic? Please tell me your optimistic. No, don't tell me. What do you think, are you? I'm hopeful. Okay. I think it's distinct from optimistic, right? I'm hopeful because I think that

times of crisis are also times of great political opportunity. We know this, right? This is like empirically shown. And even in the last year, we've seen it at least twice. You know, we see incredibly inspiring things and huge shifts in the way that people think politically that happen in the middle of like some dire crisis. So there's great possibility. And I'm, you know, I'm of course disheartened with 70 million Americans with probably no benefit of Russian interference or aliens from outer space, cast their votes for Donald Trump. But I'm also like, I love these people that we've elected in the end. It's true. Like if you look at Bolson, Bolsonaro, I always say it wrong, Bolsonaro. The secret for these populists to stay in power is they give people money, right?

I mean, or at least that's what happened there. And so I'm sort of amazed that it never occurred to Trump to do that, and people still voted for him. I would push back against that a little bit. I think autocrats actually thrive on scarcity and instability. What they do is they dangle the carrot of stability and imperative prosperity, but it never comes. But it's like the harder, the more anxious people are, the less likely they're to opt for change. Are you surprised that Putin didn't interfere more in this election? I mean, I don't know to what extent he interfered. But look, I think that Russian trolls got incredibly lucky four years ago.

And we've been very stupid to focus on it as much as we have. And I've tried to say that over the last four years over and over. It's not like they had some huge, brilliant operation. They're agents of chaos, right? We know what they do. Agents of chaos, apparently, and it shouldn't come as a surprise, can have amazing success and outsized influence in conditions of chaos. But they didn't create it. They just stumbled into it.

It's like their ideas of America actually happened to meet America where it was. And that's the problem. Like the problem is not Russian interference. The problem is that we sunk so low, or we sank so low four years ago that like we met Russian interference where it came in. Right. That makes a lot of sense. Oh, this is so interesting. Thank you so much for this.

Thank you for the conversation. On that note, we'll wrap up this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking with smart folks from The Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics, and science who will help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. We're just getting started and don't want you to make you. an episode. If you'd like to follow us on Twitter, I'm Molly JongFast and he's the Rick Wilson.

Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studed The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash podcast and sign up today.