“An Information War”

Gessen v Applebaum, the Woman in the High Castle.

Happy February. 

The Authoritarianism Project has three parts today, including finances and followers of the Jan. 6 coup, Masha Gessen’s ideas for healing society, and a deeper look at Twilight of Democracy, by Anne Applebaum, a book I mentioned previously. 

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Is the Jan. 6 coup attempt disappearing, or getting all the more clear in retrospect? Whatever happened on the Capitol steps, Trump’s motivation is now plain: money. Literally up to the minute of the attack, Trump was sending out emails pleading for cash to overthrow the Satanic Islamist Socialist Joe Biden victory. He raised about $76 million this way, mostly in small donations. But Trump kept five times as much for himself as he spent on his national election challenge, and didn’t spend one penny of this “Leadership PAC” money on helping his Georgia allies. Another $45 million in GOP accounts will be transferred to the same personal slush fund, which he can spend on almost anything, including his own salary. And in total, during this election cycle, $700 million in donations from his supporters were routed through a secretive limited liability company that was, until just recently, controlled by members of the Trump and Pence families. It’s always about money: Jared and Ivanka reported earning about $200 million in the last two years, while holding down full time jobs on the public payroll.  

I hate podcasts—I’m going to keep saying that, in hopes of infuriating enough people to go viral online. But I truly hate podcasts, and “The Rabbit Hole” by the New York Times commits all the usual sins. Dragging out news questions for dramatic effect. Pretending not to know answers in order to keep listeners hooked. Wasting our time with chatty cross talk and “personality” bits that remind me of 1970s television anchors passing it to the sports or weather guy. That said, the podcast’s last episode surfaced a recovering #QAnon follower, who explains how she was seduced into believing all the lies. A former Democrat, she saw the party abandon working class people, and reached for a conspiracy theory that she now sees was false. Yet she ends up right where she started: while denouncing Q as a fraud, she still believes that world is actually controlled by a master conspiracy of elite traitors who work together to direct the economy and politics. “That’s a proven fact,” she says. Congratulations, lady, you keep announcing how smart you are for having seen through Q, while modeling exactly why shallow and unrealistic ideas attract the foolish.

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Masha Gessen of the New Yorker recently gave the Oregon Humanities Lecture. Gessen is a Russian-American journalist who has focussed on Vladimir Putin and the international trend toward authoritarian governments. Speaking about their (the preferred pronoun of this “non-binary” intellectual) new book, Surviving Autocracy, Gessen described some of the main features of authoritarian leaders and followers. 

First, Gessen situated our moment in the work of early philosophers like Hanna Arrendt and Theodore Adorno, who argued that the totalitarian movements of the 1930s were not extinguished by the war, but continue today as an inherent weakness in liberal democracies.

Democracy requires “living in an integrated reality, with trust,” Gessen said. Citizens need to know that what they are hearing and seeing is true and widely understood, creating a shared reality for belief and decisions. The democratic project is thus “expansive” and depends on building a larger sense of “us.” 

But Gessen warned that Americans are now divided into “two universes” or “two realities” that must not be falsely equated. 

One side—a “slight majority” in Gessen’s analysis—is the open side, consuming legacy media and “routinely exposed to ideas they don’t share, people who don’t agree with them. The range of opinion if fairly broad. You learn new information.” That is a fundamentally democratic position, about enlarging the sense of “us” to include other people, the security of our neighbors, and the good government that supports us all. 

By contrast, “That’s not the experience of people on the other side,” Gessen continued. A strong minority of Americans are moving into a closed information system. “People who consume Fox and Friends…are exposed pretty much to ideas they already share.” Whether it is Fox or NewsMax, building a border wall or a creating a special housing development in Texas just for conservatives, this is the about living in a closed, shrunken environment, purified of doubt and challenge. Loyalty and conformity are the tests for membership. 

Think how often we hear people say, “I don’t trust the Main Stream Media.” That is a self-blinding mechanism, the dismissal of a larger world, for convenience. Adorno and Arrendt both argued that there are a mixture of systematic and psychological reasons for this. Adorno’s Freudian theories don’t hold up, but his raw evidence does. Karen Stenner of Australia is one of many who have documented how today, across many societies, about one third of people have a “predisposition” to authoritarian beliefs. They dislike complexity and contradiction, and take refuge in tribal loyalties, and fantasies of swift, violent redemption against outsiders and traitors. 

Facing actual problems like mass displacement, economic anxiety, and a world on fire, such people are vulnerable to simplistic slogans, and demagogues who promise stability while actually thriving on instability and division. Pluralism is the enemy. “Autocracy shrinks the sense of self,” Gessen warned, leaving a world of fear and distrust, where social ties are disintegrated

Gessen has solutions, like a “national ambition” to close this gap and foster a shared sense of reality. Such a change can be signaled from Washington, but must take place at local, individualized levels, citizen to citizen.  “This is just an information war,” the author said. “Whoever wins this wins.” 

 “Democracy is a dream, an impossible dream,” Gessen acknowledged at the start. “But is is not meaningless. We are moving either toward or away from that dream.” 

Let’s move toward. 

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And lastly, Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. I’ve mentioned this book twice in recent newsletters but wanted to unpack some of her critical ideas about authoritarianism, and give a single but broad criticism.  

First, the good parts. Her diagnosis of authoritarianism is spot on—corrupt and egotistical leaders, selling fake populism to fearful, angry people who hate pluralism and modern diversity. While taking over courts, broadcasters, large businesses, universities and even museums, authoritarians seek “existential enemies” to justify everything. “Resentment, revenge, and envy” are the motivating emotions of leaders and followers, who feel they deserve to rule, and therefore dismiss the legitimacy of opponents. They “are bothered by complexity” and want a simplistic set of ideas, and a superficial unity that doesn’t challenge them. They want, in a phrase that sums up her book, “to forcibly silence the rest.” 

Yet this is literally a book about dinner parties: she frames the narrative around two of them, a 1999 end-of-millennium party at her shabby Polish country estate, and a 2019 party in the same house, now a lavish affair with guests flying in from Istanbul and New York. Applebaum spends much of the book tracing how her 1999 guests turned to the hard right, joining the authoritarian parties of Europe, embracing English nationalism, Polish conspiracies, and the minor trappings of Hungarian power. 

These weren’t exactly leftists to begin with, but Applebaum is making the case for a reasoned, evidence-based conservative movement—free market, rights-based classical liberalism, in the European context. After 1999 her guests abandoned these ideas to such an extent that in 2019 she cannot speak to most of them; those who do agree to be interviewed for the book arrive with hostile questions and tape recorders running, openly disgusted by her George Soros-style “globalism” and dropping hints of anti-semitism or other equally poisonous bigotries. (The Hungarians are obsessed with Islamic immigration, even though zero Muslims move to Hungary). They are more Bolshevik than Burke, willing to rip apart societies rather than compromise.

Where Applebaum loses me is when she looks in the mirror. A graduate of Sidwell Friends in Washington DC, she moved in elite circles, from hanging with Boris Johnson in London to marrying a leading political figure in Poland. She argues that authoritarians cannot succeed without capturing her own class of “writers, intellectuals, pamphleteers, bloggers, spin doctors, producers of television programs, and creators of memes”.

Really? This is special pleading. I’ve been told by lawyers that the first thing authoritarians do is take over the courts. Journalists say it is taking over journalism. Professors say co-opting the universities is the top goal of bad guys everywhere. European intellectuals have always argued that European intellectuals are the real players in the world. 

Get out of the castle, lady. Politics comes from below. Some smart intellectuals see and preconceive of these trends; most are followers, cautiously claiming to invent what already exists around them. Mass movements continually surprise Europe and America with their fervor—did someone really anticipate the Yellow Vests in France, with their ideological mishmash of right-left beliefs? Who in high institutions foresaw Occupy Wall Street, or the strength of Donald Trump, and the size of his support? I’m one of those intellectuals who wrote, vaguely, about the problems with Trump and rightist politics in America beforehand. But none of us anticipated what happened, at all. And we certainly did not shape it or birth it from our keyboards. She thinks nostalgic intellectuals drive these movements; I think 4Chan does. 

Most of these authoritarian and hyper nationalist movements aren’t even in Europe anyway—Turkey, Venezuela, India, and the Philippines reveal more about our world than Poland and Brexit. Twilight of Democracy is a great book on the psychology of elite collaborators, but someone should write one based more on first-person reporting from the failing countries where violent populism and authoritarian leaders have corrupted democracies. Somebody needs to show the view from below, from the slum shanties and bread lines, the assassination scenes and militia rallies.

Oh yeah. Me. 

I’m at 61,000 words right now. Back to the keyboard I go.