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autocracy
Autocrats Worse Than Trump? Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid
Here's the question to be asking, both in the U.S. and around the world: at what point will the far right achieve a critical mass of support such that it can kick away the ladder that it used to climb to power?
Jun 23, 2024
Poland is supposed to be one of the politically sane places in Europe right now. The far-right Law and Justice Party lost national elections last year to a centrist coalition and exited power after eight long years of democratic repression. Donald Tusk, who’d previously been the president of the European Council, once again became the Polish prime minister. His government immediately set about restoring the rule of law that the Law and Justice Party had been so determined to dismantle.
Sounds good, right?
Yes, but then there’s Grzegorz Braun.
Braun is a member of a party called Konfederacja that stands just to the left of the Nazis. Think that’s an overstatement? Back in December, Braun used a fire extinguisher to put out the candles on a menorah in the Polish parliament, which had been set up to celebrate Hanukah. Just in case anyone might misinterpret the gesture—perhaps he though it was a fire risk?—Braun denounced the Jewish holiday as “satanic” and insisted that “those who take part in acts of satanic worship should be ashamed.” He also favors the criminalization of homosexuality. And he was the only Polish parliamentarian to oppose a resolution in 2022 denouncing the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Is there nothing that far-right politicians can say or do these days that disqualifies them in the minds of voters from holding public office?
And yet, despite these toxic positions, Braun was just elected to represent Poland in the European parliament. And so were five other members of his Konfederacja party, who have equally toxic views. That’s a gain of six seats over their previous showing in the 2019 elections, which had been zero. An astonishing 12 percent of Polish voters endorsed the positions of Braun and his colleagues.
Sure, in those same EU elections, Tusk’s centrist party managed to squeak by Law and Justice, which lost seven of their seats. But it was the party even further to the right that seemed to benefit.
Trump, a crowd surfer without parallel, is riding a wave. Will it crest before November?
Swing to the Right
The big takeaway from the recent European Parliament elections was the success of far-right parties. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally won over 31 percent of the vote in France, prompting French President Emmanuel Macron to make the counter-intuitive decision to dissolve parliament and call new elections. Giorgia Meloni, the far-right leader in Italy, also managed to increase her party’s share of support.
And the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) came in second in Germany with a big boost from the under-30 crowd, who didn’t seem to care about the various scandals involving the far-right party’s leadership. Because of the statements of party member Maximilian Krahl—he said that not all Nazi SS members were war criminals—the AfD was actually kicked out of the Identity and Democracy bloc. And then the AfD kicked Krahl out of the party, not only because of those statements but also because his close ties to Russia and China were attracting unwanted scrutiny. German voters elected him to the European parliament anyway.
Is there nothing that far-right politicians can say or do these days that disqualifies them in the minds of voters from holding public office? Each month, it seems that a new red line is crossed: anti-Semitism, extraordinary corruption, a felony conviction. What’s next, the use of germ warfare?
In the European parliament elections, the far right also took first place in Austria, Hungary, and Slovakia and tied for first in the Netherlands. Indeed, the only places that the far right didn’t do better than their last outing were Sweden, Finland, and Portugal, but even here the results weren’t exactly reassuring. The far-right Sweden Democrats remained steady at 3 seats (as did the Danish People’s Party at one seat). The Portuguese far right Chega party actually made it into the European Parliament for the first time with two seats. Only the True Finns party lost representatives and it was a drop of only one seat.
The good news is that the far-right electoral coalitions—the European Conservatives and Reformists Party (ECR), the Identity and Democracy bloc (ID), and the unaffiliated bloc that includes Fidesz and now the AfD—didn’t win enough votes to take over the leadership of the parliament. The ECR gained 14 seats (thanks largely to Meloni in Italy), the ID gained 9 seats (thanks largely to Le Pen in France), and the now-unaffiliated AfD increased their delegation by six seats. That puts the far right at nearly one-quarter of the total number of seats.
But the center right also did well in the election, increasing their total number of seats to 190. The ECR will not be forced to form a governing coalition with the far right, and that means that the European consensus on the green energy transition will remain more-or-less intact.
The Not-So-Long March
Let’s face it: the European parliament is not the most powerful institution around. What’s important about the far right’s victories is their apparent abandonment of any desire to destroy the EU or, at least, withdraw from it. The new far-right strategy is borrowed from the left (just like some of its economic program): a “long march through the institutions” in order to control them. Bye-bye Brexit and its heir apparents: Nexit, Grexit, Frexit. The far right wants to conquer Brussels.
Meanwhile, it is continuing its long march through national institutions. In Belgium, in federal elections earlier this month, the far-right, Euroskeptical, Flemish nationalist party Vlaams Belang came in second, behind a right-wing, Euroskeptical, Flemish nationalist party New Flemish Alliance. Traditionally, Belgian parties have agreed not to partner with Vlaams Belang to form governments. But with the New Flemish Alliance moving ever further to the right, the Belgians might be on the verge of breaking with this informal pact. Don’t expect a new government any time soon though: it took 18 months to forge a ruling coalition five years ago.
In Austria, the far-right Freedom Party is on track to win elections in September. Its coalition government with the Christian Democratic People’s Party collapsed in 2019 because of the Ibiza affair, which linked Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache of the Freedom Party to a corrupt deal involving a woman he thought was a well-connected Russian. The Freedom Party’s adulterously close relationship to Russia has not seemed to diminish its popularity. Another recent spy scandal broke, involving a top intelligence official passing information to Russia in exchange for money, which took place when the Freedom Party was in charge of the Interior Ministry. And yet Austrian voters concluded that this was just the type of party to send to the European parliament.
And then there’s France. Who knows, perhaps the French far right, too, will take over after the snap elections that Macron has called. The French, it seems, now hate Paris as much as they hate Brussels (the seat of the EU). Marine Le Pen is taking advantage of an anti-elitist, anti-globalist, anti-technocrat spirit that is rebranding reactionary as merely rebellious (sound familiar?). That’s bad news for Macron, whose every gesture and remark scream “Paris elite.” Fortunately, a more genuine challenge to the French orthodoxy has emerged on the left, as the Socialist, Communist, France Unbowed, and Ecologists parties have formed a new coalition. It is currently running neck and neck with Le Pen’s National Rally.
In The Netherlands, meanwhile, the far right has finally managed to put together a coalition government after their surprise victory in elections last year. Firebrand Geert Wilders had to give up on his desire to become prime minister, but in exchange his Party for Freedom (PVV) will control five ministries.
The new head of the migration and asylum ministry, Marjolein Faber of the PVV, is perhaps the last person you’d want in charge of a sensitive issue like immigration. She favors the abolition of Islam. She has called migration “repopulation,” a popular word in the far-right lexicon that has roots in the German word umvolkung, which was used by the Nazis and which today has much the same connotation as the “replacement” of majority white populations with non-white immigrants. And she has been guilty of the worst kind of racial profiling when she said that a stabbing suspect looked like a “North African” when witnesses reported otherwise.
Be Afraid, Very Afraid
Faber, Krahl, Braun: these far-right politicians make Donald Trump look like a conservative Democrat (which he used to be before opportunism beckoned). Of course, the Eurocrazies don’t have as much power as Trump might once again have. But the really scary part is how routine it has become for such people—who, a generation ago, would have been just kooks making long-winded speeches from the audience at public forums—to now be in positions of real responsibility.
It’s also frightening because it’s not just Europe that has been affected by this peculiar political disease. Narendra Modi, despite a drop in his party’s support in the latest elections, will continue on as prime minister of India. Nayib Bukele, the telegenic autocrat in El Salvador, won a supermajority in parliament earlier this year for his New Ideas party. And Vladimir Putin, no surprise here, won his election in Russia.
Trump was blocked from doing his worst by the institutions of a democratic society (Congress, state governments, courts, conscientious objectors at all levels). The EU, after this near miss with near fascism, will also be able to prevent the far right from unraveling the rule of law.
But at what point will the far right achieve a critical mass of support such that it can kick away the ladder that it used to climb to power? The far right’s long march through the institutions has only one ultimate destination: autocracy.
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If Democracy Dies, So What?
Whether we like it or not, the 2024 election is a referendum on Joe Biden only insofar as he represents the alternative to authoritarian rule.
May 23, 2024
The Biden campaign has made the 2024 general election into a referendum on democracy. So far, however, the electoral choice between authoritarianism and democracy has not registered among voters as a determining factor. The Times/Siena poll in May indicates that only 2% of registered voters identify the state of democracy as a main factor in their choice of a candidate for the presidency, and only 5% list it as their most important issue. That’s bleak, whichever way you look at it.
Maybe the situation is not quite so bad? The March Reuters/Ipsos poll indicates, for instance, that 23% of the American public consider political extremism or threats to democracy the most important problem facing the US (36% of Democrats, 25% of independents, and 11% of Republicans). Of course, incompatible definitions of democracy, extremism, and threats held by voters of different political persuasions would reduce even further these relatively small numbers of voters who might support Biden to defend democracy from autocracy.
If the candidate for democracy wins, the politics of persuasion in a pluralistic polity and governance by checks and balances continue; if he loses, rule by demagoguery and coercion begins.
Let’s say the number of voters sufficiently troubled by the threat to democracy stands now somewhere between 2% and 23%. Maybe even as many as a third of Democrats plus half of Independents (together amounting to about 25% of voters) currently agree that the Republican Party’s presumptive candidate is a grave enough threat to democracy to vote for Biden despite concerns related to his age, inflation, interest rates, immigration, police reform, the Israel-Gaza war, and more. That is not enough to win the election, unless something changes between now and November to increase the number of voters seriously worried about an authoritarian victory and/or convinced on economic or other grounds to support Biden.
At least among Democratic voters and the subset of independents who tend to vote for Democratic candidates, it should be obvious that Donald Trump’s intentions for a second term are decidedly antidemocratic, that there is good reason to worry his authoritarian rule would not be restrained by democratic norms or institutions, and that a peaceful return to democracy would be unlikely after he takes power. Reminders regularly appear in the news.
Time magazine’s Eric Cortellessa, for instance, recently interviewed Trump to find out what he would do in a second term. The answer, in broad outline, is an imperial presidency that would reshape the country. He would deport millions of people, build migrant detention camps, and deploy the US military both at the border and in the country’s interior. He would allow red states to monitor and prosecute women who seek abortions. He would dictate to the Department of Justice and fire any US Attorney who defies his orders. He would pardon his supporters who attacked the US Capitol and punish his enemies. He would replace existing federal civil servants with political supporters. In short, Cortellessa reports, the 2024 election could amount to a revolution that brings about, in the words of historian Douglas Brinkley, “the end of our democracy.”
Unfortunately, Trump’s MAGA-dominated Republican Party has abandoned democracy to become the party of authoritarian rule. Election 2024 is their final battle to “demolish the deep state,” to “drive out the globalists,” to “cast out the communists … and radical-left thugs that live like vermin,” to “rout the fake-news media,” to “throw off the sick political class that hates our country.” The real threat, Trump proclaims, “is from within,” from the “radical left.” Joe Biden, in Trump’s upside-down rhetoric, is “the true threat to democracy.” As political historian Federico Finchelstein notes, “This is how fascists campaign.” Indeed, Robert Reich observes, Trump has begun to “signal his embrace of fascism.”
Criticism of Joe Biden’s policies, or even concern for his age, is not the problem. Indeed, a healthy democracy engages in spirited debate and is marked by the serious contestation of divergent viewpoints. The problem instead is that translating such concerns and serious differences into a decision not to vote, or even to vote for a third candidate, amounts to a vote against democracy. The 2024 election is a referendum on Joe Biden only insofar as he represents the alternative to authoritarian rule. This election is not a choice between candidates of the two major parties both of whom affirm democratic values. The choice is between constitutional democracy and autocracy. If the candidate for democracy wins, the politics of persuasion in a pluralistic polity and governance by checks and balances continue; if he loses, rule by demagoguery and coercion begins.
This is a stark reality that prompts Bernie Sanders to work for Biden’s re-election, even though he strongly disagrees with Biden’s Israel policy. His announcement to stump for Biden focused primarily on the need to stop Trump and what a Trump administration would do to the country and the world. “If you believe in democracy,” Sanders said, “The next several months will be the most important in modern American history.”
Believing in democracy—in the present case, constitutional democracy—means recognizing the implications of pluralism and engaging politics accordingly. The choice of democracy over the rule of coercion is to practice a politics of inclusion, tolerance, dialogue, dissent, deliberation, and compromise. The democratic quest of a diverse people requires nothing less. Pluralism is a demographic fact but also is a principle of political discourse to address competing expectations that reflect diverging perspectives and conflicting interests. Engaging differences expands overly narrow perspectives on complex issues, which helps to build political community amidst an array of differences and to exercise good judgment on matters of public policy.
Democracy in this sense is a politics of contestation in a world of uncertainties, divided opinions, competing interests, different priorities, and divergent perspectives. It operates on a principle of persuasion, if it is true to itself, and it is guided by a set of values, including liberty, equality, and fairness, among others. At best, these aspirational values are partially and tenuously realized at any given time or place. They are also subject to interpretation—even prevarication, perversion, and subversion—but, absent democratic values, politics is aimless, authority is arbitrary, and power is oppressive.
The difficulty of sustaining a robust democratic practice is rooted in the complexity of political relations. Competing interests and divergent perspectives, beliefs, and priorities are endemic to a large and diverse public. This condition of pluralism is a social reality that tests the limits of tolerance. It requires an ongoing search for common ground and an openness to compromise. As such, pluralism is also a democratic principle of good governance.
The outcome of this prophetic struggle between authoritarian demagoguery and democratic persuasion hinges on this year’s general election.
That said, democracy is a demanding exercise in collective self-rule, especially for a large and diverse people. Deliberating knotty issues tries public patience and creates an opening for authoritarianism and the demagoguery of intolerance. The prospect of collective self-rule is darkened when discord alienates citizens from one another enough to prevent a strong majority from voting against tyranny. As historian Heather Cox Richardson frankly observes, we have entered a time of testing, a time in which America is teetering on the brink of authoritarianism, a time to reclaim democratic principles, a time for a democratic reawakening and to reclaim democratic principles because “democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint” (Democracy Awakening, 2023, pp. xi, 253).
These are apocalyptic times that test the country’s democratic will. The conceit of white dominion that festers at the base of Trump’s candidacy is at war with the aspirations of a diverse people. The outcome of this prophetic struggle between authoritarian demagoguery and democratic persuasion hinges on this year’s general election. Whether democracy dies slowly or is dispatched quickly should it suffer electoral defeat in November, its demise will impact Americans adversely, more grievously than they expect. Life under authoritarian rule is stifling and harsh. It subdues aspirations, demolishes the freedoms and rights we prize, rescinds the material benefits we take for granted, defaults to coercion, and crushes morale. Alternatively, a coalition opposed to tyranny can still disagree with one another and advocate for competing policies while working together to reawaken the people’s stake in a democratic future and to turn out a decisive majority in November.
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Living Under a Trump Dictatorship
If you're not gaming out this scenario in your head, you are doing it wrong.
Mar 22, 2024
We should already be talking about what it would be like, if Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, to live under a developing autocracy. Beyond the publicized plans of those around him to gut the federal civil service system and consolidate power in the hands of You Know Who, under Trump 2.0, so much else would change for the worse.
All too many of us who now argue about the Ukraine and Gaza wars and their ensuing humanitarian crises, about police violence and extremism in the military here at home, about all sorts of things, would no longer share a common language. Basics that once might have meant the same thing to you and me, like claiming someone won an election, might become unsafe to mention. In a Trump 2.0 world, more of our journalists would undoubtedly face repercussions and need to find roundabout ways to allude to all too many topics. A moving opinion column by the New York Times’s David French, who faced threats for his writing about Donald Trump, highlighted how some who voiced their views on him already need round-the-clock police protection to ensure their safety and that of their family.
We are entering a new and perilous American world and it’s important to grasp that fact.
I often think about the slippery slope we Americans could soon find ourselves on. After all, from the time Vladimir Putin became Russia’s president in 1999, I spent 20 years traveling to his country and back, working there first as an anthropology doctoral student and later as a human rights researcher. I’ve followed Russian politics closely, including as a therapist specializing in war-affected populations, asylum seekers, and refugees. Friends and colleagues of mine there have faced threats to their safety and their careers amid a Kremlin crackdown on public discussion after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and several fled the country with their families in search of safety and a better life.
To be sure, there are many differences between the United States, with its robust democratic tradition, and Russia, which only briefly had competitive elections and a free press. Nonetheless, my experiences there offer a warning about how a Trumpian version of top-down rule could someday stifle any possibility of calling out state-sponsored violence for what it is, and what it might feel like if that’s our situation here someday.
Tucker Carlson’s Moscow
On first look, far-right journalist Tucker Carlson’s recent visit to Moscow, covered exuberantly by Russia’s state media, might seem like an example of an American tourist’s naïve glorification of another country’s luxuries. Carlson marveled at the fancy tilework of the city’s subway system, visited the national ballet, and noted that you can buy caviar cheaply at the local grocery store. He also pointed out that Moscow’s pristine streets had no homeless people and no apparent poverty.
In the gilded halls of the Kremlin palace, he interviewed President Putin for more than two hours. Despite his guileless expression, Carlson occasionally appeared flummoxed as Putin lectured him endlessly on Russian history and the centuries-old claim he insisted Moscow has on Kyiv as its protector from aggressors near and far. Of course, he never challenged Putin on his rationale for invading that country (nor did he refer to it as an invasion) or any of the Russian leader’s other outrageous claims.
I’m of the school of thought that considers Putin’s Russia exactly the sort of anti-woke paradise the MAGA crowd craves. Anyone of Carlson’s age who grew up during the Cold War and turned on his or her television in that pivotal period when the Berlin Wall fell should certainly know that all of Russia doesn’t look anything like what he was shown. He should also have known about the recent history of economic “shock therapy” that drained Russian public services of funding and human resources, not to speak of the decades of corruption and unfair economic policies that enriched a choice few in Putin’s circle at the expense of so many.
Of course, something had to happen to turn the Moscow that Carlson saw into a sanitized moonscape. If you haven’t been following developments in Russia under Putin, let me summarize what I’ve noticed.
Protesters — even many going to opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s recent memorial service — have been arrested or at least intimidated when appearing to sympathize with anything that’s not part of the Kremlin’s official pro-Putin ideology. Many groups, from Asian migrants to the homeless, have either been rounded up by the police or at least relocated far out of the view of tourists of any sort. In fact, the imprisoned American journalist whom Carlson briefly gestured toward emancipating, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, had written on the practice of zachistki, or mop-up operations by the Russian authorities that, for instance, relocated homeless services to the outskirts of Moscow, far from public view. Of course, Gershkovich is now imprisoned indefinitely in Russia on charges of espionage for simply reporting on the war in Ukraine, proving the very point Carlson so studiously avoided, that an endless string of lies underscore Putin’s latest war.
What’s more, amid sub-subsistence wages, housing shortages, and the thin walls of so many city apartments, ordinary Russians are not always able to engage in the “hard conversations” that conservatives like Alabama Senator Katie Britt boast of having in their well-furbished kitchens. After all, neighbors are now encouraged to denounce each other for decrying Russia’s war. (You could, it seems, even end up in prison if your child writes “no to war” on a drawing she did for school.)
There are very personal ramifications to living in an autocracy with which Tucker Carlson and, of course, the Orange Jesus himself are signaling their agreement when they entertain the views of leaders like Vladimir Putin or call Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán “fantastic.” They’re signaling what their end goal is to Americans and, sadly enough, it’s not particularly far-fetched anymore to suggest that, someday, we won’t even have the freedom to talk about all of this with each other.
The Thing That Cannot Be Named
Tucker Carlson at least did his homework. He clearly knew that you couldn’t describe the war in Ukraine as an unprovoked Russian invasion, given that country’s carefully crafted censorship laws.
Since his February 2022 invasion, Putin has referred to it as a “special military operation” focused on the defense of Russia from NATO and the “denazification” of Ukraine. During that first spring, the Russian president signed a law forbidding journalists from even calling the invasion a “war,” choosing instead to frame the killing, displacement, abduction, torture, and rape of Ukrainian citizens as a surgical rescue operation provoked by the victims themselves. Broader, vaguer censorship laws were then passed, further limiting what Russians of all stripes could say, including one against “discrediting the army,” which imposed stiff fines and prison sentences, and more recently, property confiscations on anyone deemed to have said anything negative about Russia’s armed forces. While the thousands of arrests made may seem modest, given Russia’s 146 million people, it’s still, in my opinion, thousands too many.
The Russian leader’s perverse framing of his unprovoked war is undoubtedly what also allows him to admit that hundreds of thousands of Russians have been killed or wounded so far, something he couldn’t otherwise say. In a country suffused with right-wing Christian nationalism, it also certainly helps his cause that most of Russia’s war dead come from remote, poor, and predominantly minority regions.
This is the sort of muddling of meaning and motives that autocratic leaders engage in to justify deaths of all kinds. American equivalents might be what the MAGA crowds do when they blame the January 6th far-right assault at the Capitol, aimed at police and lawmakers, on the “Antifa,” or extreme leftists, without disputing that people were hurt. Or consider then-President Donald Trump’s comment that far-right white supremacist Charlottesville rioters and counter-protesters included “very fine people on both sides” — no matter that one such fine person plowed down a counter-protester in his car, murdering her, or that certain of those “fine” white supremacists espoused anti-Semitic conspiracy theories considered by some an incitement to violence.
For their part, Russians of various political stripes enjoy an ancient tradition of using dark humor and irony to engage in the kinds of conversations they really want to have. Take as an example the way progressive journalists like those at the news stations TV Rain and Novaya Gazeta (since banned from operating) began discussing the war in Ukraine as “the thing that cannot be named.” Eventually, however, sweeping censorship laws prevented even workarounds like those.
It’s not a small thing to live in a place where you can’t say what you want to for fear of political persecution, especially when you’ve grown up in other circumstances. A good friend of mine who came of age after the fall of the Berlin Wall and led a prosperous, happy life in St. Petersburg, fled the country on the last train out of that city to Helsinki, Finland, her young child in tow. Her goal: to start life over from scratch and avoid having to raise her child in a place where he would be brainwashed into thinking Russia’s armed forces and police were infallible and beyond critique. I suspect that many of the hundreds of thousands of Russians who joined her in fleeing the country weren’t that different.
Imagine raising a child whose unquestioning mind you can’t recognize. (That goes for you, too, Trump supporters, because — count on it! — once in office again, he would undoubtedly move toward ending elections as we know them, not to speak of shutting down whatever institutions protect our speech!)
America and the Lie that Begot Other Lies
Events in recent years indicate that Americans — particularly those in the MAGA camp — have grown inured to the public mention of armed violence. Who could forget the moment in 2016 when candidate Trump boasted at a campaign rally before winning the presidency that “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters”? As racially and politically motivated violence and threats have proliferated, so many of us seemed to grow ever less bothered by both the incidents themselves and the rationales of those who seek to encourage and justify them.
My own adult life began as Vladimir Putin consolidated power in Russia, while former President George W. Bush launched his — really, our — disastrous Global War on Terror, based on lies like that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately, we’ve spilled all too little ink here on the nearly one million people who died across our Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African war zones since 2001 (and the many millions more who lost their lives, even if less directly, or were turned into refugees thanks to those wars of ours). And don’t forget the more than 7,000 American troops (and more than 8,000 contractors!) who died in the process, essentially baptizing our national lies in pools of blood. And how could that not have helped normalize other lies to come like Trump’s giant one about the 2020 election?
Thankfully, in this country we can still say what we want (more or less). We can still, for instance, call out the Pentagon for underreporting the deaths its forces have caused. In other words, something like the Costs of War Project that I helped to found to put our lies in context can still exist. But how long before such things could become punishable, if not by law, then through vigilantism?
Yes, President Biden is arming Israel in its gruesome fight against Hamas while providing only the most modest aid to Gaza’s war-devastated population, but we can still hold him to account for that. If the 2024 election goes to Donald Trump, how long will that be true? If we don’t get to the point right now where all of us are calling out lies all the time, then every Trumpian lie about violence — from Republican members of Congress calling the January 6th rioters “peaceful patriots” to The Donald’s claim that he would only be a dictator on “day one” of his next presidency (a desire supported by a significant majority of Republicans) — will amount to lies as consequential as the 1933 burning of the Reichstag parliament building in Germany, which Hitler’s ascendant Nazi party attributed to communists, setting the stage for him to claim sweeping powers.
We are entering a new and perilous American world and it’s important to grasp that fact. In that context, let me mention a Russian moment when I did no such thing. I still feel guilty about a dinner I had with human-rights colleagues in 2014, including a Russian activist who had dedicated his career to documenting political violence and war crimes committed under successive Russian leaders from Joseph Stalin to Vladimir Putin. I was sitting at the far end of the table where I couldn’t catch much of the conversation and I joked that I was “out in Siberia.” Yes, my dinner companions graciously laughed, but with an undercurrent of discomfort and tension — and for good reason. They knew the dangerous world they were in and, in fact, that very activist has since been sent to a penal colony for his work discrediting the actions of the Russian armed forces. My joke is anything but a joke now and consider that a reminder of how quickly things can change — and not just in Russia, either.
In fact, oppression feels closer than ever in America today and verbal massaging, joking, or willful ignorance can only mask what another Trump presidency could mean for us all.
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