Gessen, a Russian-American writer and National Book Award winner, has lived in autocracies most of her life. As an outspoken critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin, she was one of the first to point out that Trump would, based on all evidence at the time, essentially govern in Putin’s shadow, slowly and inexorably transforming the American Republic by imposing a corrupt, autocratic system on so-called American “institutions.” As it turned out, Gessen’s assessment of the looming danger posed by Trump and his collaborators in the Republican Party, and her pithy but sound advice on what to expect from a regime that considered itself unbound by such institutions, resounds even more prophetically today as we watch another supposedly hallowed institution, the United States Senate, crumble into dust and irrelevancy, right before our eyes.
The purpose of this is not to revisit the entirety of Gessen’s essay. Most here have already read it (if not you should read it now). Briefly, she sets down a list of six immutable rules of autocratic behavior and explains how ordinary citizens must react, cope, and counter this type of tyranny; and she predicts how the Trump administration would fulfill each of those rules in its efforts to transform our government into something as near a dictatorship as possible. Those rules are: 1) Believe the autocrat—do not for a minute believe anything he says is intended simply to shock or exaggerate; 2) Do not be taken in by small signs of normality; 3) Institutions will not save you; 4) Be outraged; 5) Don’t make compromises; and 6) Remember the future. Each one of these principles is followed by a prediction of how Trump would turn them into reality for our nation. And each one, more or less, turned out to be accurate. Continue reading.